Welcome to New Precious Plastic Video. Today we're going to be talking about the business plan template, which is a tool to take the information that we outlined in the action plan and the workspace calculator and roll that into a full long form business plan. Which really has two purposes. One is to clarify the idea for yourself and for your team, as well as be able to communicate this idea to potential funders. It's especially useful for grant applications, which is what you should always think about before moving on to a bank loan or an investment. So this template is an easy to follow framework for writing your plan. What we do is that we give you the headers in the organization, ask you some questions in each section to get you thinking, and then you fill in the rest based on your business idea. If there's other things that you feel like should be included, feel free to add them, but for now let's get into it. So we start with the cover page, which is where you should name your business as well as provide your logo if you have one. If you don't have one, you can use the precious plastic logo. And then on the next page you list your contact information so the reader knows where you're located and how they can get in touch with you. The next section is the executive summary, which is where you should quickly and concisely make a pitch for why someone should be funding you. So you're going to want to quickly explain the problem and the solution you're providing. You can do this in just about one or two paragraphs. The next section is the mission section, which is where you want to do three main things. First, you want to talk about the problem in more depth. Next is talking about your solution. And then third, you want to include your mission statement to tie it all together.  So outlining why plastic waste is an issue globally and then as well locally. And then what your unique solution is to this problem. And then you want to kind of end with talking about your mission statement. For example, the problem could be that there simply is just no plastic waste of recycling infrastructure in your city. So your solution could be that you're setting up a collection in a sorting system along with a precious plastic shredder to more appropriately handle this material and keep it out of the built environment. Your mission could be then to clean up your local environment as well as provide quality waste management services for your town. The next section is the team section, which is where you should outline who's involved with the project, what their experience is, and then specifically what they're bringing to the table. If you have a picture, you should include that here. And it's really your chance to build some trust with the reader, showing that you have the right people and skills to successfully succeed with your business. If you're running this business alone, you can make this section just about you and your experience. The next big section is the market analysis section. And this comes from the right side of the action plan. It's where you're going to describe where the market is currently, how you're going to enter it, and then what differentiates you from your competitors. The first section is your products and services section. This is where you're going to talk about all the different offerings that you have in detail. If you have any pictures or sketches of your products and services, please include those here. That's going to help build some visual story for the reader. And it's important for you to talk about what similar products are out there and then what differentiates you. So this is building the story around your competitive advantage, which is at the core of any business. You should also include some information here about the total available market. Or if you were able to provide 100% of the products and services in this space, what the dollar value would be. The next section is our target groups. So we already outlined these in the action plan, but now's your chance to talk about them in more detail. How many potential customers are there in each one of these groups? You should also show what research you've done. So either out in the field, so talking to these people in person, or any online research that you've done as well. One important thing that you should talk about here is whether you're targeting customers directly or other businesses. You could be doing both, but I would say in general it's better to pick one or the other group. The next section is our engagement or our marketing section. So here's where you want to talk about what specific channels you're using and how many customers that you can reach with each one. For example, if you're using social media, which platforms are you using? You also want to include a rollout plan. So which mediums or channels are you starting with? And then how are you going to expand that over time? And what's your timeline? The next section is our sales channels or where you should describe what your sales channels are. So how are you selling your products and services through what mediums and why you chose each channel? And try to relate this back to your target groups. The next big section is the operations section. And this is the left side of the action plan. And it's where the reader should come away knowing how the business is actually functioning. So the next section is our key resources or the most important machines, tools, and people for us to successfully deliver on our mission. So here you can talk about, for example, why you chose the injection machine. Which advantages does this have for you? You should also talk about here which permits and licenses that you need to be able to successfully operate. Next up, key activities. So these are the key actions that you need to do really, really well to successfully succeed in your mission. So here's where you can talk about your production process or your service delivery process. So really describe this for the reader. How does this whole thing work about running your business? And how does your team's skills relate back to this process? Next is our running costs, which we already outlined in the action plan. But here's where we can list them again, talk about them in more detail. And then explain to the reader how we're going to make sure that we keep these costs down over time. Next up is our collaborator section. So here's where we're going to talk about the organizations and the people that are outside of your workspace that are going to be helping you. So talk about what it is exactly that they're bringing to the table and what the status of that relationship is. For example, you might have some letters of intent for a potential supplier or a customer that you want to include in your business plan. The next big section is the impact section. So here's where we're going to talk about the different outputs that we have from our business. And the first output that we have is the community output. So here's where we're talking about how we're going to be helping our global and local community. So is that going to be through jobs and economic development? Or is it going to be through cleaning up the local environment? You should describe this in detail what it is that you're bringing to your local area, as well as how you're going to contribute to the precious plastic community. You should really be thinking about also what your impact measures are or how you're going to know whether or not you succeeded in your community area. The next section is the planet. This is where we're going to talk about our environmental impact and how we're going to contribute to living in a more sustainable way. It's also important to think about our impact measures here or how we're going to know whether or not we succeeded in impacting the environment. One example of this would be to talk about the number of tons that we recycled on a monthly or yearly basis. The next section is our income stream section. So here's where we're going to describe in detail your revenue model. So think back to the action plan. We'll be right down there. Was it product sales, workshop ticket sales, or machine maintenance fees? How is it that we're going to price each one of these products? So you outline that in the Workspace Calculator. You can include that information here. Do you have any different models for pricing your products and services? If so, describe that here. The next section is our financial section. So here's where we're going to give a whole financial picture based on the information that we learned in the Workspace Calculator. First, talk about the investment costs that you will need to get started. You can find this on the cost sheet of the Workspace Calculator. You could copy that table over, add a total sum, so that the reader understands what it is that you're going to need to get started. Next, describe what type of money that it is that you're looking for. Is this grants, awards, a bank loan, or investments? Describe why you've chosen this different avenue and how you intend to achieve that. Next, you're going to copy over the profit and loss statement in the cash flow analysis from the Workspace Calculator. This is going to show a financial overview for the next one to three years. So the last section is the legal structure section. So this is where you're choosing what legal structure you're going to use for your organization and talk about why. So there's lots of different legal structures in every country. Choose the one that meets your needs the best. So this could be a traditional business, could also be a social enterprise, or a B Corporation, or a not-for-profit, or an association. It really depends on your local situation, your country's tax rules. But do some research into these different organizational structures. See which one meets your needs the most. At the end of your business plan, you have an appendix, and this is where you can attach any documents, pictures, or graphs that will help build your case for why someone should be contributing to your business. And you can refer to this appendix throughout the document if you need by just pointing to that specific item in the appendix. That's it for our video on the business plan template in our three-part series of how to get started with a precious plastic business. If you have any questions, please post them in our community platform. And for now, I'll see you in the next precious plastic video. Ah, young Chuck McGill-Pertra! Before you go, we just wanted to let you know that precious plastic runs by the support and fund of people just like you. Everything we develop is posted online, open source for free, so people from all around the world can help us tackling the plastic waste problem. If you are able and willing to help us, please visit support.preciousplastic.com and find a way to help us, or you can make a donation there.


Hi everyone, I'm Tiziano Piccardi, postdoc at Stanford University and I'm going to present you temporal rhythms of information consumption on Wikipedia, a work in collaboration with Martin Gerlach, a research scientist at the Wikimedia Foundation and Bob West, my PhD advisor at EPFL. We know that Wikipedia fulfills many different information needs. This is thanks to the large offer of content that the platform provides. For example, only in English, Wikipedia has more than 6 million articles. Given the importance of Wikipedia for the information ecosystem, many studies aim to characterize the information consumption on the website. However, it's important to take into account that the information needs are context-specific. Many factors can impact the information consumption. Some of them include, for example, the physical location of one person, like being at school or being at home, social demographic factors of one country, education level of the reader, personal preferences, the mental state. We know, for example, that we read the different content when we are bored. And time. In this work, we investigated this last feature, time, that in the case of readership on Wikipedia is an understudied dimension. Specifically for this presentation, I focus on one ourselves question, which factors influence the temporal rhythms of Wikipedia consumption. To understand and to answer this question, we investigate one month of anonymized server log from Wikipedia in English. The dataset includes the title of the page loaded, the country from where the request is originated, the device user, desktop or mobile, and the timestamp with the relative time zone. In this study, we convert the event time into local time using the time zone information. This transformation gives us, for the first time, a dataset time aligned that describes the interest by hour for each page, without the effect of the time zone. In total, we analyze more than three billion events across six million articles. With this data, we can investigate the daily rhythms. In this plot, you can see the normalized daily pattern affected by the circadian rhythm that, as expected, shows a low activity during the night, an increasing during the day, and a max activity in the evening. However, when we look at the pattern of individual articles, these patterns get more interesting. For example, in this plot, we see the daily pattern of one article about STEM with higher activity than average during the day, while an article about media, a movie in this case, with a reverse pattern peaking during the evening. To model this behavior and capture these differences, we define the concept of divergence, define the relation between the pattern of each article and the pattern of the global average. An article with a flat line as a divergence pattern means that it follows exactly the global average, and it doesn't have any specific attention fingerprint. Meanwhile, values greater or smaller than one represent more or less attention than average. For that specific hour, to understand what factors are associated with a different pattern, we investigate the three properties, the device used to access the page, the topic of the page represented as a vector of 38 dimension obtained from Ores, and the country of the request. We model the consumption then serious with a linear regression that predicts the expected fraction of attention for each hour of the day. To understand the relation with time, we included the hour and all the interaction terms between each factor and the 24 hours. In other words, given the properties of the page load, we predict the hourly deviation from the global average. And since we included the interaction term between each feature and the hour of the day, we can investigate these 24 interaction coefficients for each feature and represent them as a daily time series. So starting from the device feature, we can observe that access from desktop is more common during the day, with desktop being predictor of the working hour. Then investigating the topics of the articles, we found regularities that define what type of content we consume during the day. In this plot, we see on top the patterns of topics associated with STEM that tend to have a similar pattern with higher consumption than global average during the day. The bottom plot shows the average access time described as the circular mean from the time series of each plot. STEM topics tend to concentrate during the working hours, with an exception for space. A complementary picture emerges by investigating media, where most of them are accessed during the evening and night, with an exception for radio. Topics associated with culture show higher variability. It's interesting to notice that comics and internet culture are preferred during the night hours, and food and drinks follow the pattern of lunch and dinner. Similarly, to culture, topics associated with society show some variability, with business and education showing a clear daily pattern and military article preferred as night reads. Finally, investigating the country coefficients, we can notice similar consumption pattern, such as preference for morning reading, or a visible pattern that I liked, country where reader prefer to take a break from online consumption to have lunch. In summary, we learned that Wikipedia consumption follows daily rhythm, so device, country, and topic of the article are associated with different consumption patterns. Wikipedia can offer behavioral insights at global scale that are harder to obtain otherwise. Thank you for your attention, and I invite you to check out the paper to learn more.


a very good evening aspirants we have a small announcement for you tomorrow at 7 p.m. we are publishing a free orientation class with reference to upc civil services preliminary examination for the preparation of history of india modern india part one the session will be explained by mr ganesh sir our renowned faculty for history at shankarae's academy the orientation will be based on analysis of 25 years of previous year question papers in the area of history particularly in modern india part one the session will navigate the viewers and aspirants through each area that is to be focused which book or study material is a good source of information for each area etc the aspirants will also be guided for test two of pre storming 2021 prince test series of shankarae's academy interested aspirants may take the test after watching the orientation aspirants are advised to utilize the opportunity with this information let us move on to the hindu news analysis for the date 21st january 2021 these are the list of news articles chosen for today's analysis it has been provided along with the page numbers of different editions of hindu newspaper let us start the discussion with this first news article our first discussion is based on this news article which talks about the second edition of india innovation index which was recently released by the niti ayog so in this context let us discuss about this index in detail and also about the key findings of this index the syllabus relevant to this discussion is given here for your reference if you read the news article it mentions that karnataka has secured the top position and the states which followed karnataka in the first five positions are maharashtra tamalladu telangana and kerala and the most important point that you should note here is that except for maharashtra all the other states in the top five are from south india also as per the recent estimates the level of competitiveness among the states and unilateries have been found to be high in this index so now let us see about this india innovation index so first what is innovation innovation is the creation development and implementation of a new product process or service it is done with the aim of improving efficiency effectiveness or to have a competitive advantage thus innovation is an intrinsic path to harbor the spirit of competition so as to attain a healthy economy in the same lines this index aims to create an extensive framework for the continual evaluation of india's innovation environment this index is a result of an extensive research and analysis for evaluating india's innovation readiness at a sub-national level so it helps the states and unilateries in recognizing their opportunities and challenges and it also assists the states and unilateries in adapting government policies to encourage innovation now we saw that it is the second edition of india innovation index the first edition was launched in october 2019 now this india innovation index is released by nithya yog along with institute for competitiveness here just note that the institute for competitiveness india is an international initiative centered in india it is dedicated to enlarging and purposeful disseminating of the body of research and knowledge on competition and strategy this institute is the indian group in the global network of institute for strategy and competitiveness here you should note that the institute for strategy and competitiveness is a non-profit research and education organization based at the harvard business school in boston now coming back to the india innovation index from exam perspective we have to know about the key dimensions and the indicators of the index and this index has two key dimensions within which we have pillars now the two key dimensions are enabler and performance and we call the pillars under them as enabler pillars and performance pillars now the index measures innovation inputs through the enabler pillars and the innovation output is measured through the performance pillars here you should understand the difference between inputs and output in innovation in this the inputs are the variables that enable an economy to stimulate innovation while at the same time outputs are the outcomes of the innovative activities within the economy so that means the enabler pillars measure the degree to which a state has created an environment that is conducive to innovation now each of these pillars comprise relevant indicators and in total we have 36 indicators under these seven pillars these pillars are human capital investment safety and legal environment business environment knowledge workers knowledge output and knowledge diffusion these are the seven pillars and we have these indicators under them now you have to take note of these indicators because already we have many previous problems questions based on indicators of indices now here the point you should mainly notice that in the second edition of index three new indicators have been added the first indicator which has been added is the national achievement service course it has been added to the human capital pillar and then the second indicator added is the expenditure on research and development state government it has been added to the investment pillar and finally a new indicator has been added to the knowledge output pillar and this indicator is the new businesses registered now before moving on to the key findings of this index you should note that for ranking purposes the states have been bifurcated into three categories in this index they have been bifurcated into major states northeast and hill states and unit territories or city states or small states and here you can quickly see your state is under which category for example tamalladu is under the major states category and delhi is obviously under the unit territories and city states category now coming to the key findings of this report even though the report mainly focuses on the sub national level findings it also provides national level analysis this national level analysis offers a microscopic view of the indian innovation ecosystem this national level analysis presents an overview of the country's strengths and weaknesses on the innovation front so it helps the government to appraise policy strategies and related action plans at the national level so what is the overall score the indian states have achieved an overall average score of 23.4 in the india innovation index here you should note that the scale ranges from 0 to 100 and 0 is the worst case scenario and 100 means the best case scenario and as you can see on the whole indian states have scored only 23.4 which is closer to 0 that is which is closer to the worst case scenario that means the score shows that india has immense scope for improvement in the space of innovation but india also needs to put policies and strategies by analyzing the factors for improving these scores and among the pillars india has scored the highest in the safety and legal environment pillar it has scored 60.3 it has also scored better in human capital pillar but the lowest score can be seen in the investment pillar now the reason provided by the report for the high score in safety and legal environment pillar is the robust and agile cyber security ecosystem in india now to ensure secure cyberspace for businesses and innovators we have india's national cyber security policy 2013 we have indian computer emergency response team that is cert in and then we have the national critical information infrastructure protection center and we also have the national cyber security coordinator all these together provide a secure cyberspace for businesses and innovators which is the main reason for a high score in the safety and legal environment pillar now if we compare the performance and enablers the performance score is below the enabler score this indicates that the innovation capabilities of the country are not utilized to the optimum level for example our country has high number of engineering graduates but they have low employability so the report notes that because of their low employability in the knowledge economy it results in a level of knowledge output and knowledge diffusion that does not correspond with the level of human capital that is available to be leveraged for innovation in short it is saying that because of low employability less human capital is available for the innovation purposes and this is one of the reasons why the performance score is below the enablers so this is at the national level now coming to the state level as we saw the states have been bifurcated into three categories but if you see on a whole based on just the scores deli has scored the highest among the major states and union territories it has the score of 46.6 and thus it has also ranked the first among the utn city states so what is the reason for deli's highest scores it is because deli has recorded the highest number of trademark and patent applications in the last financial year and it has also established new startups and companies and the success is also attributed to the conducive business environment in deli especially in terms of internet penetration here you should note that the internet penetration in deli is the highest in the country because the national capital has 202.71 internet subscribers per hundred population and then coming to the major states category kanataka tops with the score of 42.5 as we saw already and this is due to its strong number of venture capital deals due to its highest number of registered geographical indications and also due to its highest information and communications technology exports that is ict exports along with this kanataka's high fda inflow has also enhanced the innovation capabilities of the state now coming to the third category which is the northeast and hill states among these states himachal pradesh is the best performer it has a score of 25 it is followed by manipur and sikkim respectively so what is the reason for himachal pradesh's best score among the northeast and hill states it is because according to the report almost 32 percentage of the total employment generated in himachal pradesh is knowledge intensive that is himachal pradesh benefits from a high number of knowledge workers and another characteristic that boosts the state's level of innovation is the industry friendly policies and incentives and this is one of the reasons why it has also scored a high rank in the ease of doing business index but however himachal pradesh still has a lot of untapped potential this is because there is a score gap between the enablers and performance and this shows that the innovation capabilities of himachal pradesh are not harnessed efficiently so on a whole the index allows the states to carefully study and analyze the performance of their peers and also to identify the best practices to foster innovation it encourages cooperative and competitive federalism amongst the states as well so if these states and uniteratories improve their performance in the innovation ecosystem then it will enable india to shift to a competitive good governance here you should note that already india has made to the top 15 nations of the global innovation index of 2020 now who releases this global innovation index and what is india's rank you can answer it in the comment section along with this you should note that the world intellectual property organization has declared india as one of the leading innovation achievers of 2019 to 20 in the central and southern asian region now all this together proves that india is working hard to be a innovation hub so these are some of the points that you should know with respect to the india innovation index and the key findings of this index now let's move on to the next discussion our next discussion is based on this editorial article which talks about the gender bias that is prevalent in household work so in this context let us discuss the article in detail the syllabus relevant to this discussion is given here for your reference first let us understand what is this gender bias which is prevalent in household works see we all know that the roles women play and the work they do which are usually valued less than the roles which men play and the work they do we can take the example of our mothers and sisters and also that of our brothers and fathers we can clearly see the disparity we also realize that societies make distinctions between boys and girls this begins from a very young age in most societies including our own societies the roles men and women play or the work they do are not valued equally it means men and women do not have the same status for example we all know that women do a lot of work that is domestic work like sweeping and cleaning washing clothes and dishes cooking looking after the young children or the elderly etc etc etc and the work that women do within the home is not recognized as work at all and most worryingly this work is also assumed as something that comes naturally to women so there is no need to pay for it if you take particularly the example of India we know that our country is a country where this phenomenon is at its worst the traditional Indian imagination of a household takes it for granted that certain jobs within the household are to be performed only by women additionally society devalues these jobs also most domestic workers are women and wages for them are also low because domestic work does not have much value in the society in this regard the author of this editorial mentions that till 1851 no country had recognized the earnings of any sort as a right of the wife even if a housewife or homemaker worked for pay inside home or outside the home it was the right of her husband to collect her wages it was not her own right and this was until 1851 so to explain the current scenario author takes the example of many reports from national to international levels which shows gender inequality in household works if you take the 2011 census of our country a huge number of women that is around 16 crore women stated household work as their main occupation but only a mere 5.79 million that is less than 1 crore men referred to the household work as their main occupation so this makes a clear distinction and it shows us how gender inequality still prevails in India on a high level now to prove this point author talks about the time use in India 2019 report which was released by the national statistical office of government of India this time use in India or ensure TUS provides a framework for measuring time dispositions by the population on different activities the primary objective of the time use survey is to measure participation of men and women in paid and unpaid activities this TUS is an important source of information on the time spent in unpaid caregiving activities volunteer work unpaid domestic service producing activities of the household members etc it also provides information on time spent on the learning socializing leisure activities self-care activities etc by the household members and here just remember that the first time use survey in India was conducted during january to december 2019 now here this table which was taken from the survey shows the percentage of persons who are of age six years and above participating in different activities in a day here you can see that in unpaid service for household members we can find a great difference between the percentage of men and women who do unpaid work in this regard the report also notes that on an average an Indian woman spends 299 minutes a day that is almost five hours of a day on unpaid domestic services for household members but men spend just 97 minutes on the same additionally women also spend 135 minutes in a day on unpaid caregiving services for household members we also have evidence from a report by the international labour organization which was published in 2018 it shows that globally women perform 76.2 percentage of total hours of unpaid care work and this is more than the three times as much as what men do and this figure even rises to 80 percentage in the asia and the pacific region moreover as per a world economic forum report the proportion of unpaid work per day is far higher for women than men globally and as per an international monetary fund report if women's participation in the economy was raised to that of men then india could grow its gdp by 27 percentage this was what noted by the imf report so in this regard a report titled the woman's economic contribution through their unpaid work a case study of india had estimated the economic value of services by women and it found that this economic value is in the tune of a huge 612.8 billion dollars annually now all these statistics and estimations show how much the unpaid domestic work of women goes unrecognized this issue is in limelight since recently a political party of tamil nadu as part of its electoral campaign has promised salaries to house five so in this context let us also see about some of the initiatives taken by the civil society and government in national as well as international levels to give recognition to the unpaid work especially the domestic work done by women first let us see the global initiatives firstly here author talks about the second woman's rights convention of 1851 of usa it is commonly known as the worcester convention in this convention it was said that since the economy of the household is generally as much as the source of the family wealth as that of labor and enterprise of man so during life the woman should also have the same control over the joint earnings as that of husband and she should have the right to dispose the same proportion of earning at her death like her husband and this campaign achieved recognition of equal rights of wives in the matrimonial property and the second initiative which we can point to is the third national woman's liberation conference which was held in england in 1972 and in this for the first time explicitly the payment of wages for the household work was demanded and the third initiative was the international wages for housework campaign it was started in italy in 1972 as a feminist movement it highlighted the role of gendered labor in the home and its connection to the production of surplus value under capitalism and this movement further spread to britain and america also the fourth initiative which we can point to is the united nations c-door that is the united nations committee on the elimination of discrimination against women in 1991 it had recommended the measurement and quantification of undributed domestic activities of women and the recognition in gdp this was in order to highlight the de facto economic contribution of women so these were the international initiative so far now what about the indian initiative in this regard author has highlighted some of the legislative initiatives and judicial responses in india in this regard first author talks about the recent supreme court judgment in the kirti and another versus oriental insurance company in this judgment supreme court referred to the time use survey 2019 to point at the gender inequality in occupation in india we have already discussed about this time use survey now the second one which the author talks about is a supreme court judgment in arun kumar agarwal versus national insurance company which was a 2010 case law it acknowledged the contribution of the housewives as invaluable in this regard supreme court also observed that the contribution of housewives cannot be computed in terms of money as a virtue which is services are rendered with true love and affection so it cannot be equated with services rendered by others in this case law supreme court also referred to censors 2001 which categorized those who perform household duties as non-workers and clubbed them together with beggars prostitutes and prisoners who are not engaged in economically unproductive work in this observation supreme court was pointing at the discrimination which was present in the census with respect to the domestic work and household duties carried out by women now what does the author prescribes here according to the author the need of the hour is to recognize the work which women perform for the family and that too recognizing it equally with that of men's work and in this regard he opines that marriage agreements should have a clause on wife's right in husband's earnings see recognition is one of the most central processes in empowerment of women in our nation this recognition contributes not only to the family but it also contributes to the welfare of the nation state as a whole it gives women a claim to equality within the patriarchal Indian household that only recognizes the work done by men this recognition also moves us towards a more holistic understanding of labor and which will make us understand that labor isn't purely tied to the exchange value of a service on the market that means it recognizes an extremely intimate form of labor that has proved essential to keeping the unit of family intact and functional at the same time and once the domestic work done by women is recognized as work then this arena of unpaid domestic labor that is dominated almost entirely by women can become one where women can demand some degree of equality in terms of the time in energy that is spent on that domestic work so these are some of the points that I should take note of from this editorial article this will help you in answering a mains question regarding women's empowerment in GS paper one or GS paper two or also in an essay paper now let's move on to the next discussion our next discussion is based on this news article which mentions that the state bank of India has executed two interbank short-term money market deals with pricing linked to the SOFR that is security overnight financing rate so in this discussion we'll see what is SOFR first note that it is a replacement for LIBOR LIBOR stands for London Interbank Offered Rate first let us see about LIBOR then we will see about SOFR LIBOR was the most widely used benchmark interest rate across the globe it is a benchmark interest rate at which major global banks lend to one another in the international interbank market for short-term loans this LIBOR serves as a globally accepted key benchmark interest rate that indicates borrowing costs between banks now this rate is calculated and will continue to be published each day by the intercontinental exchange but due to the recent scandals and questions around its validity as a benchmark rate LIBOR is being phased out here just know that LIBOR is administered by intercontinental exchange this intercontinental exchange is an american fortune 500 company that operates global exchanges and provides listing services among others the company owns exchanges for financial and commodity markets now under this LIBOR which is administered by intercontinental exchange it asks major global banks how much they would charge other banks for short-term loans this means LIBOR is based on estimations rather than on real transactions see the 2012 was a landmark here in the world of financial benchmarks because the most widely used financial benchmark which was the LIBOR it was found to have been manipulated by individuals at various financial institutions this event created shock waves in the financial system because the credibility of the financial reference that is used to price and determine the payoffs for trillions of dollars of loans bonds and derivatives that is they could not trust LIBOR anymore and this is the reason LIBOR is now being replaced by secured overnight financing rate or in short SOFR it will be replaced on June 30th 2023 but here note that the phase out of its use will be beginning after 2021 so now what is this SOFR that is secured overnight financing rate it is a benchmark interest rate for dollar denominator derivatives and loans that is replacing the London interbank offered rate that is LIBOR this transition is expected to increase long-term liquidity and it is also expected to result in substantial short-term trading volatility in the derivatives as you know derivatives are financial instrument now this SOFR is based on transactions in the treasury repurchase market that is the repo market and this SOFR is seen as preferable to LIBOR since SOFR is based on data from observable transactions rather than on the estimated borrowing rates like the LIBOR now we saw that SOFR is becoming the benchmark rate for dollar denominated derivatives and loans so other countries have also sought their own alternative rates such as Sonia and Eonia etc Sonia stands for sterling overnight index average it is administered by Bank of England and then we have the Eonia which is Euro overnight index average it is administered by European Central Bank and like that we have Swiss average rate overnight and also Tokyo overnight average rate and as you can see here SOFR is administered by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York so these are some of the information that you should know with respect to LIBOR and SOFR now let's move on to the next discussion our next discussion is based on this news article which talks about an Israeli NGO that has accused the Jewish state of Israel of apartheid in its treatment of Palestinians we all know about the ongoing conflicts between Israelis and Palestinians which began in the mid 20th century and as the news article mentions the Arab Israelis or Palestinians make up about 20 percentage of Israel's population and by law the Palestinians have been given rights equal to those of Jewish citizens but they say that in practice the Palestinians suffered discrimination in employment housing and other essentials so in this context let us first have a brief understanding about apartheid see apartheid means apartheid in the language of Africans it was a system of legislation that upheld segregationist policies against the non-white citizens of South Africa although the racial segregation had long been in practice there the apartheid name was first used around 1948 after the national party gained power in the South Africa this national party was a all-white government and it immediately began enforcing existing policies of racial segregation now this apartheid dictated many terms on the basis of the race of South Africans such as where they could live and work the type of education they could receive and where they could vote or not etc so under apartheid non-white South Africans who formed the majority of the population were forced to live in separate areas from whites and they had to use separate public facilities and under apartheid contact between these two groups that is non-white South Africans and white South Africans would be limited and it is to be noted that despite strong and consistent opposition to apartheid within and outside of South Africa the laws in South Africa remained in effect for around 50 years till early 1990s only the events of 1990s marked the end of legislated apartheid here I should note that it was under the administration of South African president F. W. D. Clark that the legislation that supported apartheid was repealed in the early 1990s and in this regard a new constitution was adopted in 1993 in South Africa this new constitution liberated blacks and other racial groups in South Africa and subsequently all race national elections were held in 1994 and this resulted in a black majority government in South Africa and this black majority government was held by prominent anti-apartheid activist Mr. Nelson Mandela who belonged to the African National Congress Party but it should be noted that although these developments marked the end of legislated apartheid the social and economic effects of apartheid remain deeply entrenched in South African society even now but based on this only that is based on the segregation that was put by apartheid between the blacks and non-blacks of South Africa now the Israeli NGO has accused Israel of treating Palestinians and Jewish citizens separately so let's wait and see how these events unfold further that is all about this discussion now let's move on to the next discussion our next discussion is based on this editorial article which is about providing a quality 24 into 7 power for all as you remember the union power ministry claimed that with the promulgation of the electricity rights of consumers rules of 2020 the electricity consumers truly got empowered we have already discussed about these rules on our January 5th in the news analysis but in today's editorial article the authors question whether the consumers really got empowered because of these rules firstly here you should understand that many states have not been able to provide quality supply of electricity especially to the rural and small electricity consumers so the enactment of consumer-centric rules have sparked public debate that brings the rights of consumers to the forefront in this context the rules lay an emphasis on the national minimum standards for the performance parameters of electricity distribution companies without any distinction between urban and rural and this is especially for the new connections metering and buildings these rules also reiterate the need for automatically compensating consumers but will these rules really lead to better supply quality of electricity for that we have to see the limitations of these rules first it needs to be recognized that providing quality supply is primarily the responsibility of the states and discoms that is the distribution companies but similar or even better provisions by various state electricity regulatory commissions already exist in the standard of performance regulations in different states so from this it is clear that it is not because of the lack of rules or regulations that the quality supply is not provided rather it is not provided due to the lack of accountability systems to enforce such existing rules or regulations and unfortunately neither these new rules nor the past efforts address these accountability concerns next the rules emphasize the guarantee of round the clock supply which is missing in these state regulations but there are doubts on the efficacy of automatic compensation payments towards such a guarantee this is because the availability of power supply is inadequately monitored so consumers are skeptical as how they will be compensated without proper monitoring moreover such compensation will require serious commitment for example rural areas received about 20 hours of supply in august 2020 now according to the existing regulations this would entail compensation of hundreds of crores to consumers but the actual amount that was paid adds up to just a few lakhs in each state for the entire year so this highlights the need for the implementation of existing provisions in letter and spirit but also amending those existing legislations with strong accountability provisions further the rules also dilute the progressive mechanisms in few cases that already exist in state regulations for example if you see the rules say that faulty meters should be tested within 30 days of receipt of a complaint but if you see the regulations published in andhra pradesh according to it such testing needs to be conducted within seven days so now this has been diluted to 30 days because of these regulations so these are some of the issues that have been brought to notice by the author and one of the main issues which we have pointed out is the accountability so what can the central government do to ensure accountability first it should revise regulations more frequently and the state electricity regulatory commissions should organize public processes to help the consumers for raising their concerns secondly the forum of regulators that is the central collective of state electricity regulatory commissions they can come up with updated model of standard operating procedures regulations and thirdly the central electricity authority of india could be directed to collect supply quality data from discoms and they can publicly host these datas on online portals and prepare analysis reports on the same thus with a focused one-time effort the electrification drives could provide connections across the country but ensuring around the clock supply will require continuous efforts and we also noted that without accountability consumer compensation is restricted and if the same is asked to the government they are responding to this question with many ifs and buts in the implementation of the regulation like if this happens then we will do that like that but the problem is the enactment of the new rules will not change this status quo that is the existing scenario so in this regard author suggests the government's discoms and regulators to jointly work for reducing these ifs and buts that delay or deny justice additionally the government's discoms and regulators should also demonstrate the commitment and the willpower to implement the existing regulations then only a quality 24 into 7 power will be available for all so these are some of the points that you should know with respect to this editorial article now let's move on to the next discussion practice questions discussion this question is based on india innovation index the question asks which of the following are the enablers used by nithi iyog to compute india innovation index one human capital two knowledge diffusion three business environment select the correct answer using the code given below now the correct answer to this question is option d one and three only because knowledge diffusion is not an enabler it comes under the two performance pillars that are used to depict the performance now this next question is based on secured overnight financing rate the question asks which of the following statements is incorrect with reference to s o f r first statement it is a benchmark interest rate for dollar denominated derivatives and loans this statement is correct second statement it is based on transactions in the treasury repurchase markets this statement is also correct third statement it has been replaced with libor after the sub prime crisis of 2008 this statement is incorrect because even though it will be used in place of libor it will be implemented in the year 2023 and it will replace libor because of the 2012 financial issue in which it was found that libor was manipulated by individuals at various financial institutions so this is the incorrect statement in this question so the correct answer is option c statement d is also correct because it is expected to increase the long-term liquidity and it will reduce the volatility in substantial trading derivatives now this next question is based on apartheid first statement it was a form of racial discrimination which prevailed till 1948 in South Africa this statement is incorrect because it was a form of racial discrimination but the name apartheid was first used around 1948 after the all-white national party gained power in South Africa and it was eradicated in the legislations only in the early 1990s not in 1948 so the statement is incorrect now the second statement is under it non-white South Africans were forced to live in separate areas from whites and use separate public facilities this statement is correct now here the question asks for the correct statements so the correct answer is option b 2 only now let us take two main questions now this question is based on gender justice and this next question is based on india innovation index you can answer these questions and post it in the comment section with this we come to the end of today's hindi news analysis if you like the video don't forget to like comment and share and to subscribe to shankara is academy youtube channel for more updates related to civil service examination preparation


What is going on? I literally woke up, finally got sleep. I haven't been sleeping well at all. Finally woke up from a good sleep and I woke up to like hundreds of DMs being like, did you see this news? Did you see this news? I literally thought it was fake. I saw someone snapchat to me and I literally thought they were just guessing that this ride was being removed. And then I went over to Kings Island social media and boy, it was confirmed. What is going on? What is with Cedar Fair and removing attractions? Like, I'm so confused. So according to Kings Island, the ride has simply just reached the end of its service life, which kind of says that they can't maintain it anymore. I don't really understand how that could be the case. Now, from what I understand, again, correct me down below. This is an arrow, not a Vakoma. An arrow doesn't exist anymore. Thus getting parts is a little harder. Correct me down below. I believe this is an arrow, not a Vakoma. If I'm wrong, I'm sorry. But that might be why that they can't maintain the coaster anymore. It is located in a very weird part of the park. This is not what I was expecting. When rumors started circulating that Kings Island was gonna announce a ride removal, I was expecting something near the front of the park like in Vertigo. I was honestly expecting a front gate coaster. People were talking about the possibility of a front gate renovation. So I was like, oh, perfect. A wing coaster is coming to Kings Island probably in the next three to four years. But nope, they were moving a ride at the back of the park. This makes things a little more difficult to figure out what's coming. Wing coaster isn't necessarily the most popular option or the option that they might choose because it's located at the back of the park. And I think that a wing coaster would just be perfect near the front of the park. So I'm a little skeptical of what's to come to Kings Island. I mean, there's lots of possibilities that could come now. So it's a little more difficult to figure out what's next. So I guess that's the big question that everyone wants to know. No one's here to learn that vortex is closing. We all already know that everyone's checked social media, so what's next? Well, again, as I said, it's extremely difficult. So there's only a couple of options that I can see fitting Kings Island to be honest. I had a recent opportunity to go to Roller Coasters at Canada's Wonderland, and park officials kind of talked about possibilities and such like that. And we learned that ground up RMCs aren't out of the option for Cedar Fair. So maybe Kings Island has a ground up RMC in the works. Maybe it's themed to, oh God, I don't want to say it. Santa Beast returns, something along those lines. It could be something along those lines. It could be any BNM option possible. Maybe they're gonna dethrone Yukon Stryker in the next two to three years at Kings Island. That could be a possibility as well. But another possibility you have to look at and all the enthusiasts that are wanting a coast in the next two to three years are gonna drag me for this is Forbidden Frontier at Cedar Point did well. And it was gorgeous and we know, and from what I'm hearing in the rumor mill at my home park as well, it is expanding out to other parks. Yes, there's land available, but if this ride really did reach the end of its service life, it doesn't necessarily mean a coaster is in the works. Now, whenever a park removes, especially Cedar Fair, a big coaster like Vortex, there is usually a coaster coming in the next couple of years. So I'm not saying that it's not gonna happen because we do know that when a Cedar Fair does remove a coaster, it is probably going to be replaced. We see that with Volcano. We saw that with Skyrider. And I'm sure we're gonna see that with Vortex as well. I mean, we saw it with Firehawk too at the same park. So I would expect a coaster in the next two to three years. The area is just interesting. Like it's really difficult. Comment down below. So if you guys have any idea of what it possibly could be coming to King's Island in the next two to four years, comment down below what you think that could be. I'm definitely going down the route of either a BNM or an RMC. They already got their GCI and it's absolutely amazing from what I heard. They have their BNM invert. They got their BNM giga. They got their BNM hyper.  Are they gonna go down the route of a RMC? Maybe it will be themed a Son of Beast Returns. Oh man, I know. I already know some people in the coaster community that we're friends with are probably gonna slide into my DMs and drag me for even bringing up that possibility. But there's not too many options, okay? Cedar Fair is very basic. We know who Cedar Fair works with. We know the options that Cedar Fair chooses from and they're very small. So you can almost guarantee that they're probably gonna get an RMC, GCI or BNM. And then there's a few other unique people that they might work with like Gertzlauer occasionally. So it's up in the air. I don't see a Gertzlauer coming to this park. So if I were to honestly pick what I think could be next for Kings Island, it's probably a ground up RMC. No, they're not gonna RMC the Beast. I can't see that. I know, watch me be wrong, but I just can't see it. It's too big of a project. And then if they don't do the whole coaster, it will upset a lot of people. And it's just one of those iconic attractions from what I've heard. So I just can't see them removing that for an RMC renovation. And then you gotta look down the possibility of a forbidden frontier attraction picking up the vortex area from what I understand. Again, if I ever make a mistake, feel free to drag me below in the comment section. This is a kind of like a frontier themed area. I'm not too sure, but from what I can tell from the map and Google Maps, it looks like a frontier themed area and forbidden frontier type attraction could fit really well there. But yeah, I honestly, I couldn't put my money on any specific attraction right now. It could be a flyer, it could be a wing coaster, it could be a ground up RMC, or it could be a dive coaster. Those are probably your four most likely options to be honest, but I can't put any money down on any one of those four right now. Again, I was expecting an attraction at the front of the park to be removed and replaced by a wing coaster in the next two to three years wasn't expecting the back of a park. So I'm a little taken back by this. This is extremely sad. It looks like this is the new era for Cedar Fair. They're gonna start removing older attractions and replace them with newer attractions down the road. This does not mean a coaster's coming in 2021. This does not mean a coaster's coming in 2022. You're probably gonna see a coaster the earliest 2023 for Kings Island at best, and then maybe 2024. Cedar Fair has said on the stockholders call they're not here to build coasters every other year, like they've done previously or every two years, they're trying to spread out coaster years. So this does not mean a coaster's coming in 2021 or 2022. Again, I would put my money down at 2023 that Kings Island's gonna replace Vortex. Again, we saw this at Canada's Wonderland. They removed Skyrider and they want seven years without building something in its Waterland. So who knows, who knows? But yes, nonetheless, super exciting. It does mean a coaster is coming. I'm not saying it's not. So super excited to see what Kings Island's getting. It looks like Ohio is just gonna be heavily invested in, period. Cedar Fair is looking to make Ohio something. Maybe they're gonna do some sort of thing where they have the two-park promotion always and they're trying to build up both parks. So guess, wanna go to Cedar Point but also Kings Island and it makes someone more likely to travel to Ohio to visit these two parks. Anyways, hopefully you enjoyed my analysis on what could be next for Kings Island. Again, I don't know the park that much, so feel free to drag me down below if I made any mistakes. And obviously comment your opinions on what could be next for Kings Island and what years or if you disagree with me on any of the things that I stated in this video. But honestly, thank you so much for watching. Don't forget to hit that like button, subscribe if you haven't, and share this video for others to enjoy. Have a great weekend, guys. Bye.


We live in times of profound transformation, marked by a crisis of sustainability. A century's old modern industrial world is coming to an end, and a new world is being born. Potential is everywhere, both bright and dark. This emerging world of the 21st century is complex, systemic, interconnected, ever-evolving. It requires new ways of thinking to take us from machines to ecosystems, from straight lines to circles, from hierarchies to networks, from competition to synergies, to see not just the parts, but to see the whole, not just analyze, but synthesize. Powered by systems thinking, the problem-solver of the 21st century is both a creative thinker and a critical thinker. Understands the potential of ideas and technology to remake our world. Think better. Think in systems.


fantastic meeting I was there a few years ago at the AHS meeting. And I think we're all finding how important this is, both with respect to COVID-19 and with respect to cognitive decline. So let's see here how we're going to be able to go to the next for some reason. This is not allowing me to advance the slides. There we go. Okay, so I wanted to mention the semantics because I think this is so important. We've all slept through the recent FDA approval of adicenamab. And I think it's important for people to understand that this is not something that makes you better. This is not something that stabilizes. But in the best case in one trial at one dose, there was a slowing of decline as you can see here by about 22%. So if you have MCI, which is pre Alzheimer's or Alzheimer's disease, you lose about 3.4 points on a 30-point scale per year as you can see here. If you take a drug to slow it, you slow this by about 22%. And in contrast, I'll show you a trial that was recently posted. You can see it on Med Archive where we see instead of a slowing of decline, we actually see improvement in patients cognition. We also see improvements, by the way, in their MRIs as well as a number of other parameters. So as everyone realizes, this is a pandemic without a vaccine, unfortunately. So for perspective, we now know, of course, COVID-19 has killed now over 600,000 Americans. But in comparison, Alzheimer's will lead to the death of nearly 100 times that many of the currently living Americans. So about 45 million, as Professor Christine Yafi from UCSF has pointed out, it's now the third leading cause of death in the United States. So it's a major problem, really dwarfs the COVID-19 pandemic. And the big problem, of course, is with COVID-19, we understand it's a virus. We have sequence, we have sequence of the variants. So this is a disease that's relatively well understood. We know what to do about it. Even though the vaccines aren't perfect, they help dramatically. There are antivirals being developed. There are antibodies that are effective as well. So there are lots of ways to go. On the other hand, Alzheimer's, the big problem has been that it is controversial what actually causes this. So people will go after one thing or another. But as you know, there are over 400 failed clinical trials. So it's the fundamental nature of Alzheimer's that is missing. And that's why things have been so unsuccessful. So we'll talk about that today. And that's what my laboratory has been interested in for 30 years, what actually drives the neurodegenerative process. So here's, to put all that into a short couple of slides, here's the issue. We've as physicians been trained to treat things like pneumococcal pneumonia to write a prescription for various diseases. And this works great when you have a simple disease. So if you've got someone with pneumococcal pneumonia, of course, there's an increased risk with alcohol on board, with diabetes, with your B cell function not being up to snuff and many other variables. But the pneumococcus itself is so much more important than everything else that we as physicians can get away with simply writing a prescription for amoxicillin or cephalosporins or penicillin or what have you. Unfortunately, the diseases we're all dealing with, the diseases that are limiting our lifespan today are not simple diseases. They are fundamentally different. And let's take Alzheimer's as a simple example of these complex chronic illnesses. Insulin resistance increases your risk, pathogens, NF-Kappa B, various things that give you inflammation, mercury exposure, mycotoxins, organic toxins, homocysteine increase, and there are multiple other things. But as you can see, none of these, unlike a pneumococcal pneumonia, none of these outstrips everything else. So you can just write a prescription for that one thing. So we have to evaluate and treat and prevent these illnesses in a completely different way. And of course, this is where everyone's finding ancestral health is so critical to avoiding these complex chronic illnesses. What that means is if we're going to develop the perfect Alzheimer's drug, and we worked on this in the laboratory for years, and in fact, it would have to do this. And this is the problem. We're asking too much of a simple, single drug. The drugs do very well at what they target. And I think in the long runs, as part of an overall precision medicine protocol, they will be very effective. But asking a single drug to do dozens and dozens of different things is asking an awful lot of a single drug. So here's the problem.  We don't know it. It's one disease. We call it Alzheimer's. We're going to give you a monotherapy and it's not going to work very well.  Unfortunately, the research findings show something completely different. There are many, many different contributors. We initially identified 36. There are a few more now. Good news. It's not thousands, but it's dozens. It's not one. Therefore, this is not just one disease. There are subtypes. There are more inflammatory patients with Alzheimer's. There are more atrophic, glyco toxic, toxic, vascular, traumatic. So therefore, no surprise, there are many personalized programs that you need to do to get the best outcomes. So let's dive now to the actually what's driving this problem. And a very interesting molecule, APP amyloid precursor protein that sits in your neurons, especially at synapses and to a lesser extent in other cells as well. This is a very interesting molecule because when things are good, it's a little bit like your CEO or a little bit like the president of your country, your country being my brain of stand. So okay, you're going to look at this. And now when things are good, then in fact, what happens is this is cleaved at a single site and it produces two peptides. So here's outside the cell, inside the cell, SAPP Alpha and Alpha CTF. These are signaling growth and maintenance. And by the way, this is very much analogous to what's happened to all of us in our country during COVID-19. What happened? We had an insult SARS-CoV-2. We were all told that we should shelter in place, social distance. We went into a protective downsizing mode. People lost their jobs, people didn't go to work, et cetera, et cetera. And what happened? Our country entered a recession. The same thing is happening to your brain and Alzheimer's. You had these various insults and you respond to those insults by in fact making a different outcome, a different signaling process where you now cleave APP at three sites, beta, gamma and caspase sites. And you could actually trace the molecular pathways from things like NF Kappa B associated with inflammation and various pathogens and reduction in estradiol and things like that to show that this is switching. You're switching your signaling from a growth mode to a protective downsizing mode. Again, the same sort of thing that happens when we interact with things like SARS-CoV-2. So this molecule APP is changing its signaling. And you can see here this A beta that's been vilified as the cause of Alzheimer's is really part of a protective downsizing response that your brain makes. It is an antimicrobial peptide and interestingly also has some antifungal effects and antiviral effects. So it's actually part of your innate immune system. And once again, there's a really interesting parallel with COVID-19. With COVID-19, you have the innate immune system running away. Your adaptive system hasn't managed to get rid of this.  With Alzheimer's, you also have a chronic activation of the innate immune system. That's where the A beta is coming from. And in fact, you're not the adaptive system is not getting rid of the various insults that are actually causing this. And so you don't have cytokine storm. You have cytokine drizzle and it occurs over years and years and years. You're making this chronic inflammatory process that includes A beta and your brain has entered a protective downsizing mode. So what this means is that you've got these two signaling pathways for APP. Your probability of getting Alzheimer's is proportional to an integral over time of all the synaptoclastic signaling pulling back versus the synaptoblastic signaling. Now that's fine, but it doesn't tell you what test to order or how to treat it. But the good news is that is essentially approximately pretty good to a pretty good approximation associated with four major groups of processes. So anything that is causing chronic inflammation, again, you're going to make more A beta. So it's going to increase your risk genetics as well, contribute to that. No surprise. And then anything that's causing toxic burden. And those come in three different groups. Typically, it's in organics, things like the California wildfires with poor air quality, secondly, organic and mercury, things like that, organics, things like formaldehyde and benzene and toluene and glyphosate and things like that. And then third, biotoxin, things like trichothesenes and ocarotoxin A and gliotoxin. And then in the denominator, so energetic. So if your energetics are low, that increases your risk. And that's your cerebral blood flow, oxygenation, mitochondrial function, and ketones, the ability to have substrates to burn. And then finally, trophic effects, growth factors like BDNF and NGF and things like that. And then hormones, estradiol, testosterone, progesterone, pregnenolone, thyroid, all those things that support brain function, including insulin, by the way. And then finally, nutrients, so vitamin D, critical, vitamin B12, things like that. So this gives us now a look at what's actually causing the problem. Alzheimer's disease is fundamentally an insufficiency. The demand is chronically exceeding the supply. And you're responding by going into a protective downsizing mode. So instead of just writing a single prescription, we need to identify all the things that are contributing to this response of your brain. And then we need to get you back into balance. And I'll show you, we've recently had a trial on that that worked very well. So again, we tell the patients, imagine we've got a roof with 36 holes, a drug is an excellent patch for one hole. But we need to do more. Therefore, of course, we need to train physicians. We know that the traditional Chinese physicians quite good at understanding the whole body, but they didn't know about DNA and RNA and things like that. Modern physicians, very good with DNA, RNA, informatics, things like that. But they tend to focus on one area, like the brain. And so we really need to bring this together and train a new kind of physician who really gets both, you know, the whole picture as well as understanding the molecular basis of these complex chronic illnesses. So when we want to go and treat the goals for treatment and prevention, and I will go through this in the trial, I'll talk a little bit about the trial in just a minute, we need to optimize your energetics. We need to typically get people into mild ketosis, make sure their cerebral blood flow is okay, make sure they don't have sleep apnea, make sure they're not dropping their oxygenation at night. We need to create insulin sensitivity. This is incredibly common. About 80 million Americans have insulin resistance, as you know, major problem. And again, comes right back to ancestral health, trophic support, growth factors, hormones and nutrients. As I mentioned, we need to resolve inflammation. And of course, Professor Charles Sirhan from Harvard has taught us all the importance of not just anti-inflammatories, but resolving inflammation. But beyond that, we need to understand what was causing it in the first place and remove that. We may need to treat specific pathogens. And of course, if you have neuropathologists looking into the brain, what they have described in patients with Alzheimer's, herpes simplex, P. gingivalis from poor dentition, various fungal species, HHV6A on and on. So in fact, this is a change in a microbiome in the brain. Again, you are responding in a protective downsizing way. Detoxification, as everyone knows, this is becoming a more and more critical issue. So many of us are exposed to various toxins. And then interestingly, the people who've done best have also included some form of stimulation, brain training, light stimulation, for example, things like violite, magnetic stimulation, like MIRT, things like that. And then again, we want to bring the adaptive system to improve that and reduce the inflammation associated with the innate immune system. And then after that, we'd love to remove the amyloid beta, but removing that first when it's actually part of a protective response really doesn't make biological sense. And then ultimately, regeneration, synaptogenesis, whether through stem cells, intranasal, trophic factors, there are a number of ways to do that. So I want to just then talk a little bit about the trial. I'm really honored to be working with three absolutely outstanding functional medicine physicians, Dr. Anne Hathaway, Dr. Cat Tubes and Dr. Deborah Gordon. And we've completed the first trial and now just in the planning stages for a larger trial. So this is the first trial in which instead of predetermining a treatment, which if you think about it, really doesn't make sense. For each person, we look at all the potential contributors and then we treat those. So you're targeting those. So this is a precision medicine type of approach. Interestingly, we were turned down by the IRB back in 2011. We tried to do the first comprehensive trial for Alzheimer's, turned down again in 2018 after we published many, many anecdotes. We published 100 anecdotes of people with documented improvement, finally got approved in 2019. We completed the trial in December 20. It's now on Med Archive. And so small proof of concept trial, 25 patients, very similar actually in terms of where they were in their dementia to the adecanumab trials. So these were people who had mocha scores of 19 and above. And then we compared personalized precision medicine approach to historical outcomes. And we look at the root cause, just the things that I just talked about. So look at the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, 0, 3, 6, and 9 months. We looked at CNS vital signs, which is a much more sensitive indicator. So it gives us a better overall dynamic range. We then looked at AQ 21, which is the partner's assessment of how they're doing. AQ 20 or AQ change score. Is the partner's assessment of did they get better? Then we also looked at MRI with volumetrics at the beginning and at the end of the trial. So here's just one of many pieces of data here. You can see here the improvement. And this turned out to be highly statistically significant. So people improved their neurocognitive indices over nine months. And to summarize all the things, first of all, 76% of their patients improved their mocha scores. 84% improved their neurocognitive indices on CNS vital signs. Cognitive subtests, so verbal memory, executive function, psychomotor speed, cognitive flexibility, and others, all were statistically significantly improved in these patients. And then interestingly, for some of the drug trials, the people may make a minimal improvement, but the families can't tell. So now we also asked the partners what happened here. And the partners showed that, yes, they noticed the improvement in these people.  And interestingly, their MRIs also improved. And so the gray matter volume, gray matter volume in people with Alzheimer's or MCI decreases over time. In people who are normal, it actually decreases slightly over time. With this group of people, even though they had diagnosis of MCI or early Alzheimer's, their gray matter actually increased in volume. And interestingly, their hippocampal volume, the same sort of story. Normally, there's a slight decline with people who are symptomatic. There's a rapid decline. These people had a minimal decline, but it was actually less of a decline than normal controls. So they did very, very well in all of these, by all of these different criteria, they improved. So we've published a number of papers on, initially on the anecdotes that I mentioned. As I mentioned, we also put on a Met Archive, the initial results of the trial, have a couple of books out there on this, and actually one called The First Survivors of Alzheimer's is coming out next Tuesday. Seven different patients talked about their own stories about how they were told that there was nothing that could help them and how they then went on to improve. And the most important thing is we have people now who are over nine years who have sustained their improvement. So the idea is when you actually get at what's causing the problem, people do much, much better. So the implications for the future. So cognitive decline is reversible. What we found is for most of these people, cognitive decline is reversible. Now, the likely contributors, interestingly, the few people who didn't get better, it was very striking. You could see why. And so, for example, we had one person who had a very high mycotoxin level in the home and in the urinary samples who just said, I'm not going to address that. I'm not going to deal with that. I'm not leaving the home. And so no surprise, this person did not get better. So the good news is we can seek the various things that are actually potentially causing the cognitive decline and address those. And we can understand what is missing. We can do troubleshooting to see. Now, it's important to point out, as I mentioned earlier, this is for people with mocha scores of 19 and above. What about the ones who have lower scores? These are people who have very significant Alzheimer's disease. We have anecdotes of people, even with mocha scores of zero, who improved, but they didn't come back to normal. They improved a little. They could dress themselves again. They could speak again. They could interact better, but they didn't get all the way better. So we're really interested ultimately in, can we now design a trial that will be for people, we would call this CERA. This is a severe Alzheimer's reversal attempt. We'd like to know, what does it take to make people who are farther along better? And we don't know if that can be done yet. So as I say, we've seen some anecdotes, but we need to do a trial in that. Then, of course, one of the things is the trial that we finished absolutely shows you can improve most of these people, but it doesn't show that it's feasible in everyday practice. This is a relatively complicated protocol. We're looking at a lot of different variables so that we can address them. So we're very interested to see whether we can make this easier and easier, simplify this. Perhaps we just look at the top couple of things with a computer-based algorithm, all these different things. Maybe there are just a few that we can identify and treat to get just as good outcomes. We don't know yet. So this does provide strong support for a larger randomized controlled trial, and that's what we're in the midst of planning at the moment. And then a similar approach, we're interested in, okay, there is a unique biochemistry and genetics for each of these diseases. So if we modify this for frontotemporal dementia or Lewy body disease or vascular dementia or macular degeneration, etc., can we get it just as good? Can we get just as good results? Because virtually all these diseases are either untreatable or poorly treatable. The good news is we've already seen improvement in people with Lewy body. We're in the midst now of a small trial for people who have macular degeneration. Again, it's a different chemistry, but it's the same general idea. There is a mismatch between the supply, the supply and the demand that is chronic. So the good news here is that if you combine the fact that you can make people better in the early stages with the fact that in fact most people wait too long, if we can just get people to come in earlier, really can make this disease optional. So today, if everybody comes in for prevention or early reversal, then this can be an optional disease. And let me just stay for one moment on that point. I think one of the things that's hurt our patients and that's hurt us as physicians looking and evaluating these patients is the concept that is called mild cognitive impairment, MCI. This is like telling someone they have mildly metastatic cancer. It's a late stage of the disease. So when you develop Alzheimer's, you basically have four stages. You have a pre-symptomatic stage where already PET scans are abnormal if you bother to do them and already CSF is abnormal, but you don't have symptoms. Then you have a period of SCI, subjective cognitive impairment, which lasts on average for 10 years where you're still scoring normally on your cognitive testing. You know there's something wrong. Often your spouse, your co-workers may know there's something wrong. That's subjective cognitive impairment. So we have a huge window to treat successfully. The third of four stages is called mild cognitive impairment. That should be called advanced stage Alzheimer's disease. It is a late stage of the underlying pathophysiological process. But doctors send these people home and say, that's just mild cognitive impairment. Come back next year. And in fact, we should be jumping on this earlier. And then of course, the fourth and final stage when you begin to lose activities of daily living is called Alzheimer's disease. So I think that there's much, much more that we can all be doing to prevent and reverse cognitive decline and make Alzheimer's disease a rare disease just as it should be. So let me end there. Certainly humankind has been through periods where leprosy was a big concern, was a scourge, when polio was a scourge. And most of us don't wake up in the morning worrying about leprosy or polio. But in fact, the biggest worry epidemiologically for aging Americans is loss of cognition. Alzheimer's shall become a former scourge. And I think it's up to all of us to hasten this. And of course, as we find a lot of these different pieces are pointing right back toward ancestral health. So I'll end there. I'm happy to take some questions. And let me stop the share here and turn it back over to Aaron. Again, thank you, Aaron. Apologies I couldn't be there because of the Delta variant. But it's certainly, certainly good to be getting a little bit of my normal after going through cardiac arrhythmia with this thing. It's good to be getting back to normal. It was great having you here, Dale. And so I'm really appreciate, we all really appreciate you coming to speak to us. And so you can hear me through this microphone? Absolutely. Okay, great. So we're set up for questions. Do you want to go ahead? Okay, for brain training, which do you think is better video games or erecting this on the screen or doing puzzles? Yeah, that's a great point. And you know, Mike Mersnick really started this whole field and started brain HQ, Posit Science. And I think he's made a good point, which is that for many of these games, there's no published information that suggests that they help they might, we just don't know. So they've really focused on getting information published. Some of the specific ones that they use like Hawkeye and double decision really have very good data that suggests that these help as you know, double decision really reduced even 10 years later was associated with a reduction in your likelihood of developing dementia. So that's the one we suggest only because yes, the other ones may help, but there's just not much data out there. I do worry about those people that just say, Oh, just do brain games. That doesn't, you know, we don't know they might work, they might not work. So I like brain HQ because of the published data. Say myself and my parents, possibly my grandparents are all patients of yours. So afflicted with Alzheimer's or, you know, pre cytokine drizzle. We have a preschool age children and we're worried about familial predisposition. What advice would you give the grandparents, great grandparents or parents of those preschool age children? Are there antecedents that might even be recognizable at that age and what should we be doing besides healthy eating and healthy activity and healthy sleep? This is a great point. And in fact, everybody I think should be on prevention or at the latest earliest reversal. So first thing, do you know, is this APOE4 related? Is this APP, PS1, PS2? What is the genetic cause of this predisposition? So maybe it's a combination or we don't know because not everyone is going to have access to their specific diagnosis, right? I mean, it takes a while and who's going to put the time into it. But there's cognitive decline. And we just want to generically do what's best for our preschool aged offspring. What if I'm a pediatric healthcare specialist, so I want to give this advice to parents if you have any. So yeah, again, if it really is running in the family very strongly, you certainly want to do that. And that's easy to do these days. I mean, there are all sorts of genetic tests you can start with 23 and me and just see if this is APOE related. And there's, you know, Athena diagnostics will look at APP, PS1 and PS2. If there's truly, if this is truly familiar, now, as you know, familial Alzheimer's only represents 5% of Alzheimer's. So for most people, it is just more risk just as you have cardiovascular risk. And so that's pretty straightforward. APOE4 is the common one. There are 75 million Americans who are APOE4 positive. Most of them don't know it. They have a 30% risk. If they have, if they're homozygous, they have well over 50% risk. So you're absolutely right. Everybody should be on prevention. Now, for the rare person with things like APP mutations, we recommend that they start at 25. But everybody else, 45. When you hit 45, just as when you hit 50, you want a colonoscopy. When you hit 45, or if you're older than 45, please get a cognoscopy. It's simple. It's some blood tests. It is a simple online cognitive assessment. And if you're symptomatic, you should have an MRI with volumetrics. But if you're not, don't worry about that. So what you should then tell them, yeah, don't worry about them when they're little. Yes, don't feed them a lot of sugar. Don't bring them up in moldy homes of the obvious, the ancestral. But when they get 45, they should get serious about getting on prevention, getting an initial report, just to see, do they have insulin resistance? It's all the things we talked about. It's well documented. It's in the books that I wrote. It's also in the articles we published, which are publicly available. Does that answer your question? Hi. In the slide that you showed the results of your pilot trial, it looked like the effect was plateauing around the nine month mark. And then at the 12 month mark, the variation was growing a lot. I was wondering if you could, do you agree with that? And if so, what do you make of it? It's a great point. And it's because of the pandemic. So we had people who were improving. You're absolutely right. And then the pandemic hit. So we were doing this in the middle of that. And then some of them started staying in. They weren't getting out. They weren't getting where they should. They weren't going to the gym anymore. And so we did have some more variability. And we addressed that in the paper as well. That final point was the nine month point. So it's zero, three, six and nine months. And so you're absolutely right. We lost a bit with that during the pandemic with changes. So that's the answer. Very interesting. Thanks. Yeah. Thank you so much for a great talk. I was wondering what you think about red light therapy for Alzheimer's and also what your opinion is about limiting Wi-Fi inside the home. Yeah, it's a great point. So we did find that people who had stimulation and some used violite, some have used MIRT, things like that, they do tend overall to do better. As far as what, you know, is it red light? Is it something else? That's a separate issue with red light because of macula, of course. You know, blue light, not so good for your macula. As you know, there's some nice work out of MIT from Lee-Wai Tsai and others looking at frequencies. And interestingly, people keep coming back to this 40 hertz. There seems to be something helpful about 40 hertz stimulation. And that's been interesting even with sound. And so there does seem to be something helpful there. Again, if you go back to the theory, you don't want to drive a brain when it's got tons of insults. But as you're now removing the insults and you're now improving the supply and reducing the demand, then just as you do for a weightlifter, you can now start doing more. So yes, I agree with you. I do think that stimulation, especially at appropriate frequencies, whether it be light, magnetic, sound, et cetera, does seem, you know, repeatedly, we're seeing better improvements when you include that. Cytokine storm, when typically does that precede cytokine drizzle? Like what age are you arranged that you might see that? Yeah, so all I was saying, yeah, I was just making the analogy with COVID-19. As you know, with COVID-19, you go through a period. Basically, you're not able to clear the virus. And so what happens is your cytokines just go crazy.  And so therefore, ironically, you're treating an infectious illness with things like dexamethasone to actually you're suppressing, even though it's not great, yes, you're going to allow the virus to survive more. On the other hand, it's life-saving. So my point is simply that by analogy, with Alzheimer's, you don't die of that cytokine storm because you don't have that massive, it's not an acute illness. However, you are dying over decades because you have a chronic inflammatory response. Your innate system is activated and stays activated for years. And in some people, you can actually see increases in IL-6 and IL-A, TNF-beta and things like that. But for many, basically what you're seeing is you're making more A-beta. It's part of the innate immune system. And interestingly, prion protein has been shown also to interact with A-beta and to be a part of this response of your body. So more and more, we see these neurodegeneration-associated proteins, alpha-synuclein, tau, prion protein, A-beta, all to have antimicrobial effects. So again, we have to change the way we think about this to say, instead of saying, oh, someone got an aggregated protein and that was the problem, no, they're responding to insults. And yes, there's this cytokine drizzle that's occurring that is killing you in the long run, but not the way cytokine storming. That's the idea. Okay. Well, let's give another round of applause to Dr. Bredesen. I want to thank you again, Dr. Bredesen, for sharing your time. I know you're busy, man. You have another meeting coming right up, but we hope to see you at Future Symposia. I hope to be there. Thanks again for the invitation, Aaron. Take care.


Two missions this year have given us a glimpse of truly uncharted worlds, and the science data we're getting back from them may end up rewriting our books. This is your space pod for December 11th, 2015. One could make a very good argument that for exploration, 2015 was the year of the dwarf planet. We had Ceres arrive at dawn and New Horizons fly by Pluto, and if there's one thing that we learned from the exploration of these two worlds, it's that to expect the unexpected. The first of the arrivals this year was dawn at Ceres. After exploring the largest asteroid in our solar system, Vesta, in 2011 and 2012, dawn spent three years traveling to Ceres. Our view of the only dwarf planet closer than Neptune was originally just a pixelated Hubble Space Telescope image, but on approach, every day, the detail got better and better. These look surprisingly active for something of its size. It has some features on its terrain, like Ahunamans, an interestingly shaped mountain five kilometers high. There's also the bright spots on Ceres' surface, the most prominent of which is found in the crater Ocater. It's currently called Bright Spot 5, and we found haze hanging over it, possibly from outgassing of materials. Just recently it was narrowed down to what the bright spot was composed of, Magnesiumulfate, extremely similar to what we call Epsom salts here on Earth, so you may have something with the same composition as the bright spots on Ceres in your bathroom right now. As to what this means about Ceres, well, we're going to have to find out in the future. Dawn is finally beginning to enter its lowest orbit, 375 kilometers above the surface, and it will eventually end its mission in 2016. Speaking of dwarf planets, in the middle of 2015, a piano sized probe called New Horizons culminated a nine and a half year journey across five billion kilometers, and found something unbelievable, Pluto and its vastly complex terrain. So complex, scientists working on the mission have called it Chaos Terrain, and some of the latest high resolution imagery of Pluto's surface showing pits, canyons, and tall mountains of water ice suggest extremely active geological processes on a world that we expected to be dead. To say that Pluto has surprised us would be an understatement, its surface is striking in just how varied the terrain seems to be, towering mountains set directly against vast smooth plains, nitrogen and carbon monoxide ices are present on the surface with methane in the atmosphere. But due to the distance New Horizons is away from the sun, the high quality scientific data is only just now coming in. That data downlink rate from New Horizons is at about one kilobyte per second. That means that it's going to take literally an entire year from now just to get all of that high quality data back. But what's a year of waiting for the best data on Pluto ever when it took you nine and a half years to get there in the first place? Thanks for watching this space pod, I'm Jared Head. What do you think is waiting for us and the data we haven't gotten yet from Dawn and New Horizons? Well let me know in the comments below and don't forget to like and subscribe to us. Also make sure to check out our Patreon campaign which we've now moved to being monthly. So until the next space pod, keep exploring.


A Chicago police officer was wounded in a shooting on the near north side early Monday morning, police said. The shooting occurred after 4 a.m. on the first block of West Walton Street, police said the officer was wounded in the leg and transported to Northwestern Memorial Hospital, police said one suspect who shot toward officers is in custody, officers were seen investigating a car on a sidewalk near Russian Oak Streets. Police said the vehicle is connected to the shooting, the civilian office of police accountability said it is investigating a police-involved shooting. Other details were not immediately available.