damn i actually had a pretty good streak there of not having bad insomnia days. that's pretty impressive for me like i haven't really had one since early January

Boy meets girl

I often pressed V for information on how she earned income but she would give conflicting answers about grants and scholarships until one day.... About 6 months after our first meeting, she finally tells me and IT. IS. NOT. GOOD. I was interviewing at a professional school when I receive the call, she's in trouble, BIG TROUBLE, and needs my help. She tells me she earns money by doing others' assignments for them. $200 to write a paper and $800 to complete an online class, usually a 100 level introductory course. She describes the method she uses to circumvent the ITs detection of others completing others assignment and how her client wasn't doing his part to copy/paste and submit from his own computer. He is failing the course and blames her. He threatens to turn her in. Her plan is to refund his money and wants me to 'follow him to see if he goes somewhere alone and take his phone' because that has all the evidence of their communications. HOLY SHIT! SHE WANTS ME TO COMMIT STRONG ARMED ROBBERY, a FELONY for her! I'm not going down for this or with her and I know nobody would believe me. ENTER: military experience - if there's no record, it didn't happen. So, I agree to help her, somehow, as soon as I return to town. I go to V's dorm the next night and she shows me EVERYTHING. Her list of clients, their blackboard passwords, how she meets them, how she defends them during honor code violations, etc. So I tell her not to worry, I'll handle everything on the day she refunds his money. Relieved, she goes to bed but before she lays down I ask to use her computer for on assignment and she says "sure do whatever you want". In my state, if you let someone use your electronics, its called "having privilege" and anything you do with their computer which may harm them is legal as if it your own computer. So, I took screenshots of her conversations with her clients, I open google settings and screenshot all the blackboard users and passwords stored on her computer. I go to her messenger and screenshot their conversations. Back home, I compiled our recordings and saved our facebook conversations. A week later, I made up an argument about an upcoming New Years Party and broke up with her. Then sat on the information I had on hand for 2 more weeks thinking about what I should do.

I remembered how she has a history of arrests from high school to freshman year for stealing from outlet malls and selling their loot online. Never formally charged. She, of course, omitted this from her application into professional school. How she admitted "finding a mark" and using them to pass her courses. How she denigrated others who were completing courses through hard work. How she used her position as honor council to get her friends out of trouble while helping to expel others for doing exactly what she was doing. How she cheated on me multiple times, used me, manipulated me, tried to make me commit a felony and ruin my life. SHE HAD TO BE STOPPED.

Knowing she was friends with the faculty on the honor council, they often bought each other gifts, I had to go above their heads. I gave names and descriptions of the events to my program director. He then goes to the honor council, anyway. I was called into the honor council's head office of "Corrupt Administrator" CA. CA tells me I should delete the information I have because it could become a civil matter and I should consider my "self preservation." She schedules another meeting with me a week later. I return and she asks if I want to make a statement about V. Guess what I said, I tell her "no, I deleted everything and I don't remember" because I was in the military and I know how to 'play ball' when superiors tell you to shut your mouth. But the most important reason I decided to not file against V directly was due to the fact I was applying for a military scholarship to pay for professional school. Since I did not follow through, the program director filed an honor code violation complaint against V on a date [suggested by CA]. A month later they tell me their investigation was inconclusive and they will close the case due to the director waiting 1 day too long to file according to the school's academic policy. CA set us up! However, since the director used my name as a source, they must notify V because students have rights to know their accusers. FUCK.MY.LIFE. CA fucked me and ruined any chance for a case against V based on a technicality. Now I fear for my safety because V tried to get me to strong arm rob someone now I just implicated a dozen cheaters who have as much as her to lose. CA schedules a meeting with V and tell her about an ongoing investigation and tells her she will be kept up-to-date. I know the investigation is over and now they are just doing formalities. V requests the information of the investigation and they promise to email it to her. V calls me for support even though we aren't together. She is crying and talking about killing herself. She tells me her dad had been paying for her college this whole time and starts coming clean with other lies. I feel bad and almost regret everything. Maybe she is not a sociopath, maybe she is really sorry. She stays at my house the next few days, I'm watching her trying to keep it together. THEN HER FUCKING CLIENTS START COMING TO MY HOUSE. She is still doing their assignments! She NEVER LEARNS!

Finally she gets the investigation info and there's my name. She calls me 130 times in 3 days, sends her friends to my classes to tell me to come to her house, finally I do. But I don't go into her room because she will trap me. She takes my phone so I can't record. She tries to get me to sign a paper saying I fabricated everything and its all false. I tell V, "They already closed the investigation, you wont get in any trouble why should I implicate myself and get in trouble? It wont solve anything!" And she pleads, "Do you still love me?" I shake my head and walk out. Two days later, police are waiting at my house to serve a 72 hour emergency protective order (EPO) commanding me to stay away from V. I know what she is up to. She is trying to get me to violate the protective order, discredit me, and send me to jail. Its very easy to lie to create one and lie to say it was violated.

NOW ITS NOT JUST REVENGE TIME, ITS WAR

Here's the plot twist: I never really deleted the files as I told CA. TYVM, Google drive.

After the 72 hours EPO expired, another EPO arrives which lasts two years but requires a court appearance. This is a huge problem because I am in the US Army reserves and it requires the handling of firearms which is illegal under an EPO. Her lawyer calls me and threatens me not to "participate in anymore investigations against her" and sends a paper tiger. I get a lawyer, lets name him "Folds like a lawn chair". He tells me "who will they believe: a pretty girl or you?" I fire him. Get a better lawyer, a trial lawyer, called "Miss Badass Esq." and prepare for war. Miss Badass requests a copy of V's EPO from the court. It essentially says I was blackmailing her, threatening to beat her up, and I broke into her room to steal incriminating information against her. All lies. I provide my lawyer the entire history of our relationship: 600 pages of facebook and text messages showing she is the aggressor, the abuser, in the relationship, phone call history, all the recordings and screenshots of her cheating ring. I make a poster sized chart of her room and the events that transpire there the day in question when she tried to trap me into signing a statement taking responsibility for her actions.

Courtdate: We made V and her lawyer look REALLY stupid. They were going with the 'pretty girl' strategy. But the dorm gave us records showing she was signing me in and out of her room, so it discredits the need to break in. The call logs: 130 times in 3 days and aggressive texts showed she wasn't actually afraid of me adn it was her, not me, being aggressive. And when he asked what I had to use to blackmail her, her lawyer said "just some tutoring papers" for which the judge said, "that doesn't sound like anything wrong. What power did that give him over you?" They had no response. My turn to speak, I explain how she tried to get me to rob a guy, how she wanted me to write a letter to take the blame, how she used her position as honor council chair to break state law and violate academic policy. And summarized we were only there because she wanted revenge on me. I watched V and her lawyer stutter and squirm uncomfortably under the judges questioning, case dismissed.

All that information I gathered to defend myself was not going to go to waste. I took it to a newly hired honor council investigator called "Meg" who had no affiliation with V. I told her what CA had done to defend V. A week later, I was told the by Meg there had been a meeting with the school police, the provost, their legal team, then the provost himself decided filed a complaint against V. I had to meet with the police to file a statement about V trying to recruit me to rob someone but other than that I was out of the loop. I later learned the results: V lost her her slot at that school's professional program, her program director yelled at her at the top of his lungs, "YOU WILL NEVER GO TO ********* SCHOOL, I KNOW ADMISSIONS AND I WILL SEE TO IT", she got expelled, her TWO degrees (biomedical engineering and biology with a minor in chemistry) were withheld for 6 years and her transcripts would carry a permanent mention of an honor code violation, her clients who graduated had their degrees retracted with similar mentions on their transcripts, and current clients were also expelled. The school changed its policy on reporting date requirements to like 60 or 90 days. Me? I am in professional school. V had her chance to get away with all of this until she tried to get revenge on me. I reduced this super villain from owning a fleet of beta male minions, being the most connected person in the university, and having a lucrative future in ripping people off in the medical industry to the last time I saw her: riding a fucking scooter.

(source) story by (/u/Apophis1942)

How AI can be used effectively in health care industry and what ways it helps the industry?

Summary 

With Covid-19 pandemic raging all around the world causing harm to public health and livelihoods, this is a good time to strategize how AI can be used effectively to help the health care industry to fight this pandemic in particular and overall preparedness in general. The 3 main areas that we believe AI can help are,

·         Automated monitoring of mask and other Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) compliance to prevent the spread of infections.

·         Data aggregation and building predictive models to identify potential hot spots for the spread of infection.

·         Building AI based tools to act as a physician’s aid in diagnosis and treatment of Covid-19 positive patients.

Each of these three use-cases are described in detail below

1.    Automated monitoring of mask and other Personal Protective Equipment (PPE)

Computer-vision based AI models can be trained to detect if humans are wearing PPE like masks and if health care workers are wearing PPE suits, gloves, face-shield etc., Experts all over the world concur that wearing face masks is a simple yet important way to prevent spread of infection. However, monitoring the PPE usage among general population is a vexing problem. Lack of monitoring will lead to lack of PPE compliance and will risk an emergence of the disease spread that the world has worked hard to contain so far. Optisol Datalabs team are experts in building such AI models for PPE monitoring and compliance in industrial space even before this pandemic took over the world. In fact, we are one of the only AI service providers who have successfully implemented PPE compliance monitoring and tracking in industries to improve health and safety. We are re-training such models currently to detect health-care related PPE like masks, gloves, safety suits and face shields.

The model we train are optimized to run in edge devices like cellphone enabling rapid deployment of such models without investing in expensive hardware. Such cellphone turned AI devices can be programmed to send safety violations to the concerned authorities to quickly take preventive actions. The detailed process flow on how to train and deploy such AI models is described in the diagram below. A demo of our Computer Vision based AI model trained to detect mask, safety suit, face shield and gloves is published at this link in our youtube channel

https://youtu.be/lawRwyaMVOY

  2.    Predictive models to identify potential infection hot spots

 Daily data on current Covid-19 positive cases are published in various news outlets. It is possible to collate all these data and build a model that can predict the likely hotspot of the infection to warn the residents in those areas to exercise caution. Google and Apple are about to publish updates to their platforms that allows monitoring of the movement of the smart phone users in a way that does not violate the privacy of the users. This will allow more granular collection of real-time data to build such predictive models with increased accuracy and granularity. Such models are effective tools for public health organizations and individuals to get access to accurate data and to prescribe the least intrusive policies that allows resumption of economic activity at the same time reduce the risk of infection spread. We have extensive experience in building such time-based predictive models. We are currently working on build a model from the publicly available data right now.

3.    Models to act as physician’s aid in diagnosis and treatment

Another important use of AI in health care industry is to build models that act as physician’s aid in disease diagnosis and treatment. There was a famous experiment conducted in the US where the AI can predict heart attack and stroke better than trained physicians (https://time.com/5784090/ai-heart-attack-stroke/). AI models can operate on large number of parameters that even trained physicians cannot always reliably compute to make their decisions. In such situations, AI becomes a valuable tool at the physician’s disposal for to increase accuracy of the diagnosis and effectiveness of the care. There has been lot of interest in just using chest x-rays to predict Covid-19 and there are a lot of service providers who claims to build an accurate diagnosis tool to detect Covid-19 from a chest x-ray. Such claims are not scientifically validated, hence cannot be relied up as effective diagnostic tools. Such hype in fact causes skepticism in using AI in health care amongst health care providers. This is quite unfortunate. Because AI is proven to be an effected diagnostic aid if used correctly. Chest x-rays are but one data point in the diagnosis of the disease. There are other effective data points like travel history, place of residency, potential contacts (neighbors, family members, colleagues) with a positive diagnosis, other symptoms being experienced like fever, cough etc., staying in a nuclear family with mixed age group members, past health history of pulmonary diseases etc., When all these data points are combined and fed to a AI model, we will greatly increase the predictive accuracy of the tool. In fact, these data can be collected from the patient at their homes and they do not even have to visit a hospital and potentially risk spreading the infection.

Summary

These 3 use cases span infection control, monitoring the spread of infection for effective public policies and diagnosis and treatment of the disease. In our opinion, AI is somewhat under-utilized in how it can be effectively used to help mankind traverse the current pandemic successfully with the minimum loss of life and property. We are in the fore front of developing and deploying these AI models.

Gunman in Dayton Had History of Threatening Women, Former Friends Say https://nyti.ms/2T7A0DV

Gunman in Dayton Had History of Threatening Women, Former Friends Say

By Campbell Robertson, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs and Timothy Williams | Published Aug. 5, 2019 | New York Times | Posted August 6, 2019 |

DAYTON, Ohio — The police on Monday were still trying to determine what motivated a gunman in Dayton to kill his sister and eight others, but people who grew up with him were conducting a different kind of investigation, looking back for any signs that might have foreshadowed his explosion of violence.

For more than a few, and for women in particular, these signs were not hard to find.

“I don’t want to say I saw it coming,” said Mika Carpenter, 24, who met the gunman, Connor Betts, 24, at a summer camp when they were both 13. “But if it was going to be anybody it was going to be him.”

Like others who knew Mr. Betts as a teenager, Ms. Carpenter recalled his dark and often violent jokes, including riffs about “bodily harm” that led many to keep their distance.

“He was kind of hateful to women because they didn’t want to date him,” she said. Still, she became friends with him because, she said, she saw that he had a good side.

Mr. Betts often expressed concerns to her about having dark thoughts, she said.

“I remember specifically him talking about being scared of the thoughts that he had, being scared that he had violent thoughts,” said Ms. Carpenter, who cut off contact with him in 2013 after he lashed out at her during an online chat. “He knew it wasn’t normal.”

The police in Dayton were quick to caution on Monday that much about the shooting early Sunday morning was still unknown. There was still no clear motive, nor an understanding of how three people — Mr. Betts, his sister and a mutual friend — all went out together and one ended up shooting the other two. The friend, who has not been named by the police, was shot in his lower torso but survived; the sister, Megan Betts, 22, was killed.

“It seems to just defy believability that he would shoot his own sister,” said Dayton’s police chief, Richard Biehl, at a news briefing on Monday morning. “But it’s also hard to believe he didn’t recognize that was his sister, so we just don’t know.”

On Saturday night, the three drove together to the Oregon District, a stretch of bars and clubs that is usually crowded on weekends. They separated at one point but remained in touch, the chief said. The police have no indication that the sister or mutual friend knew about the weapons Mr. Betts would later use in the shooting.

Mr. Betts fatally shot one person in an alleyway before turning his fire on his sister and their friend, the police have said. Nine people were killed and at least 27 others were wounded, including 14 who were shot. Others had cuts and injuries from the stampede of fleeing people.

The police said on Monday that Mr. Betts had purchased an AR-style pistol online from Texas, but had modified the gun with a pistol brace to improve stability. He also had a drum magazine that could hold 100 rounds, the police said.

Mr. Betts had up to 250 rounds of ammunition and fired at least 41 shots, Chief Biehl said. Six officers fired a total of 65 rounds at the gunman, killing him as he tried to enter a bar, where many people had taken refuge when the shooting began.

“I ran, I got trampled, I lost my shoes,” said Jessica Westover, 23, who was among the hundreds of people who gathered on Sunday night at a crowded vigil in the Oregon District. They mourned the dead and cheered the actions of emergency medical workers, but some also expressed anger over inaction on gun control.

When Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, stepped to the microphone to say a few words, some shouted “Do something!” and drowned out his remarks. A chant soon broke out: “What do we want? Gun control! When do we want it? Now!”

Mr. DeWine planned to hold a news conference on Tuesday morning to announce proposals to address gun violence and mental illness.

For many who grew up alongside Mr. Betts in the quiet Dayton suburbs, the shooting had summoned uneasy memories.

“He wanted to scare people, he really enjoyed it,” said Hannah Shows, who became friends with Mr. Betts when they were in the seventh grade. She recalled his talk of guns and gore, but chalked it up at the time to his being a 13-year-old boy.

But in ninth grade, Ms. Shows discovered she was named on a list that Mr. Betts had made of people in the school. The list threatened violence or sexual violence toward those who were on it, most of them girls, said Ben Seitz, 25, whose girlfriend at the time was also included.

Ms. Shows said she was never told the details about the threats, but the principal had asked her, “Is there any reason he would want to hurt you?”

Ms. Shows said she had assumed she was on the list because Mr. Betts had expressed interest in her and she turned him down. “After that, it turned into cold hatred the way he stared at me,” she said.

“People knew he was this way,” she said. “A lot of people could have helped, but no one did anything about it.”

Asked about the list from high school, Chief Biehl said that, even if the reports were true, he would be wary about making any connections.

“I’m a little bit reluctant, even if there’s such evidence, to interpret it 10 years later as somehow this is indicative of what happened yesterday,” he said.

At a brief talk with reporters later on Monday, the chief said he expected the investigation to be lengthy. Detectives were continuing to look at phones, computers and videos to understand what happened and why, though he added that there was no evidence that the shooting was a hate crime.

“I think there will be some familiar themes that will emerge from this investigation, so it will not be a surprise in some regard,” Chief Biehl said. “I think there are some unique aspects of it that we perhaps have not seen in other shootings.”

He declined to say what those unique aspects might be.

Here Are the Nine People Killed in Seconds in Dayton

The gunman’s victims ranged from a graduate student to a grandfather, a young mother to longtime friends.

By Farah Stockman and Adeel Hassan |

Published Aug. 5, 2019 | New York Times | Posted August 6, 2019 |

Two were friends from work, enjoying a night on the town. One had recently given birth and was finally getting out of the house. Another had just gotten a new job at a place he loved.

The crowd outside the Ned Peppers bar in Dayton, Ohio, had much to celebrate on Saturday night and the small hours of Sunday morning. But in an instant, their festivities turned into deadly chaos as a gunman clad in black opened fire with a military-style rifle and a large-capacity magazine. Nine lives were cut down and 27 more people were injured in a matter of seconds before police officers shot and killed the gunman.

Those who died left behind at least eight children, and countless friends, co-workers, classmates and family members struggling to grasp how so much could be lost so senselessly. Here is what we have learned about each of them.

Megan Betts

Ms. Betts, 22, was the younger sister of the gunman, Connor Betts. She attended Wright State University, a commuter school in the Dayton area, where she studied earth sciences and was expected to graduate next year. The university posted a message on Facebook offering counseling services to students.

Ms. Betts was a graduate of Bellbrook High School, where she played in the marching band along with her brother. Another former member of the band, Alex Gerbic, recalled her as very outgoing and kind. “She was a very bubbly personality,” Mr. Gerbic said.

According to a résumé she posted on LinkedIn, Ms. Betts spent much of the summer in Montana working as a tour guide at the Missoula Smokejumper Visitor Center. Last summer, she supervised children’s water activities at an urban park, according to Trish Butler, director of marketing and community engagement for Five Rivers MetroParks in Dayton. She also worked at Bed Bath & Beyond and Pier One.

Monica Brickhouse

Local media outlets reported that Ms. Brickhouse, 39, grew up in Springfield, about 20 miles from Dayton. She lived in Virginia Beach for a time, where she worked for Anthem, the health insurance company, according to WAVY, a television station in Portsmouth, Va. The station reported that Ms. Brickhouse had recently transferred to Dayton to work for Anthem from home.

At the time of the shooting, Ms. Brickhouse was out with a friend and co-worker, Beatrice Warren-Curtis, who also was killed. Anthem’s chief executive, Gail Boudreaux, sent a memo to the company’s employees describing the two women as dear friends “known for their positive energy,” according to the TV station.

A Facebook user, Brittany Hart, posted on Sunday that she had been close with both women and was shocked at their loss. In her post, Ms. Hart remembered Ms. Brickhouse as “like another aunt to me” and someone “I always wanted to tag along with.”

Thomas J. McNichols

Mr. McNichols, also known as Teejay, was 25. He was the father of two girls and two boys, and was living with his aunt in the Westwood neighborhood of Dayton.

“He loved to have fun, and every time I seen him, he was either laughing or smiling,” said Jevin Lamar, a cousin of Mr. McNichols who grew up in Dayton and has since moved to Los Angeles. “At family events, he was playing kickball. He was a great father, a great brother. He was a protector. He protected his family. He protected his sisters. He just was just happy.”

Lois L. Oglesby

Ms. Oglesby, 27, was the mother of a 6-year-old daughter and a newborn girl, according to a message posted by the Miami Valley Community Action partnership, where Ms. Oglesby’s mother has worked for almost 23 years. The agency is collecting funds for funeral costs as well as the long-term care of Ms. Oglesby’s two children.

According to The Dayton Daily News, she worked at a day care center, and grew up attending church and going to drill team. She was a former student at Sinclair Community College.

Nicholas P. Cumer

Mr. Cumer, 25, had just five more days to go in his internship at Maple Tree Cancer Alliance in Dayton, the final requirement for his master’s degree in exercise physiology from St. Francis University in Pennsylvania. Then he planned to take a permanent position that Maple Tree had offered him.

“He really wanted to spend the rest of his life working with cancer patients,” said Karen Wonders, Maple Tree’s executive director. “Most 25-year-olds don’t think that way.”

Two colleagues had just bought a house and were celebrating on Saturday, and they took Mr. Cumer along to show him the best his new home city had to offer. “If you’re going to go out in Dayton, that’s where you’re going to go,” Ms. Wonders said of the Oregon district, where the shooting took place. The two colleagues were injured in the shooting.

The Maple Tree Cancer Alliance guides patients through exercise sessions during their treatment, and Mr. Cumer, who had worked full time since May, was responsible for 20 patients.

“One of the things that stands out about Nick is that for every single one of his patients, he made them feel that they were the most important person in the world,” Ms. Wonders said. “That’s not something you can teach.”

Working with cancer patients, “we’re accustomed to heartbreak,” Ms. Wonders said of her staff. “We’ve lost some very special people — patients — to us this year. What caught people off guard is, now it’s one of our own. We’re the ones who are strong for everybody else. Now the tables are turned.”

Derrick R. Fudge

Mr. Fudge, 57, spent the last day of his life with his entire family — all 100 of them — at a cookout by a reservoir in Springfield.

“It was a wonderful opportunity for all of us — now it’s the best memory,” said Twyla Southall, his younger sister. “He was sitting at the table, laughing, eating and drinking.”

Mr. Fudge was with his son and 10-year-old granddaughter, whose house was devastated by a recent tornado in the area, Ms. Southall said. They had just repaired the home, and Mr. Fudge was looking forward to painting the girl’s room.

“We were actually celebrating an aunt’s victory over cancer,” Ms. Southall said on Monday after visiting a funeral home to make arrangements for a service on Aug. 10. “She’s not sick anymore, but it wasn’t her that we would have to worry about.”

Mr. Fudge, who grew up in Springfield with two sisters and three brothers, worked as a cook at several restaurants, Ms. Southall said. When he was a child, she recalled, he was hit by a train while playing, and lost three toes.

On Saturday night, he had gone out in Dayton with his son to celebrate a friend’s birthday. His son escaped without injury. “He loved life and he loved his family,” Ms. Southall said of her brother.

Beatrice N. Warren-Curtis

Ms. Warren-Curtis, 36, grew up in Wilmington, Del., and had moved to Virginia, where she worked in the Virginia Beach office of Anthem, the health insurance company. She was in Dayton visiting a co-worker and close friend, Monica Brickhouse, who also was killed in the shooting.

“She loved her family, especially her mom; she enjoyed traveling to watch her nephew play basketball and hanging out with her niece,” recalled her friend Lakisha Jarrett. “She loved to go to the football games to see her favorite team play, the Philadelphia Eagles.”

Ms. Jarrett said that she met Ms. Warren-Curtis, or Nikki, as her friends called her, in 2000 when they both worked at Coleman & Associates in Norfolk, Va.

“We instantly clicked,” Ms. Jarrett said. “She touched many lives with her presence. You were guaranteed a laugh or two, and maybe even three, if she was around. She was just full of life.”

Friends mourned her on Facebook as someone of strong religious faith who loved traveling. She posted photos of herself walking a beach in Cancún. When the film “Black Panther” came out, she posted that she would take children to see the film if their mothers could not afford tickets.

“Living life as He has designed for me to do!” she wrote. “I am who I am! Confident never cocky!”

Saeed Saleh

Saeed Saleh, 38, grew up in Eritrea and emigrated to Ohio about three years ago, according to Yahya Khamis, a leader of the Sudanese community in Dayton, which assists Eritrean immigrants, most of whom are recent arrivals. “Most of the Eritreans have been in Sudan,” Mr. Khamis said. “We understand each other. We speak the same language.”

Mr. Saleh lived in Dayton with his wife and a young daughter, while two other children live in Eritrea with his mother, Mr. Khamis said. Like many African immigrants, he said, Mr. Saleh held down several jobs, working at a warehouse and driving for a car service.

The Oregon district of Dayton, where the shooting took place, is a magnet for drivers looking for fares, and Mr. Khamis said he believed that was probably what Mr. Saleh was doing there on Saturday night when the gunfire broke out.

“He was a very good guy, he was very quiet,” Mr. Khamis said, adding that on Sunday, he had spent time with the family. “His wife was crying all day, and they had a lot of pictures with him and his daughter.”

Logan Turner

Logan Turner, 30, worked as a machinist operating computer-controlled tools at the Thaler Machine Company in Springboro, about 12 miles south of Dayton. After three years on the job, he had already gained a reputation as one of Thaler’s top employees, according to Greg Donson, the president of the company.

Mr. Turner was earning an associate degree at a vocational school and working as server at the Whiskey Barrel Saloon when Mr. Donson met and recruited him. Mr. Donson said Mr. Turner soon distinguished himself as an intelligent, hard worker with a good attitude.

“He was quickly working his way to the top,” Mr. Donson said. “A very positive person, with a big smile. Just a great guy.”

The governor of Ohio pushed for a ‘red flag’ law after the Dayton shooting.

(THIS IS NOT ENOUGH, BAN WEAPONS OF WAR, LARGE CAPACITY MAGAZINES AND UNIVERSAL BACKGROUND CHECKS. ANYTHING LESS IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH)

Two days after being drowned out by shouts of “Do something!” at a vigil for mass shooting victims in Dayton, Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio announced proposals on Tuesday that he said could reduce such shootings and limit gun access for people with mental health problems.

Mr. DeWine proposed adopting a version of a “red flag” law, which would allow the authorities to take firearms from a person deemed by a court to be dangerous.

He also said he would ask the General Assembly to pass a law requiring background checks for all firearm sales in the state, with some exceptions, including gifts between family members.

Mr. DeWine, a Republican endorsed by the National Rifle Association, encountered an angry, grieving crowd Sunday evening in Dayton, where nine people were killed in an entertainment district by a gunman with a history of misogyny and violent threats. Mr. DeWine was delivering condolences when his speech was interrupted with chants of “Do something!” that made it impossible to hear the governor. Later, some in the crowd chanted “What do we want? Gun control! When do we want it? Now!”

Mr. DeWine, who took office in January, had previously spoken in support of red flag legislation, but the Republican-led Legislature never took up the proposal.

His latest ideas could face skepticism from both sides of the political divide: Democrats are unlikely to find the proposals sweeping enough, and Republicans lawmakers are often loath to consider any legislation that would curb gun rights.

The Maker Movement and its discontents

*Via nettime mailing list

James Wallbank:

Fascinating to hear about personal engagement in Making, Graham!

I, too, have been personally, hands-on involved in Making since Access Space's turn towards digital manufacture, and the interface of the physical and the digital, since around 2010.

(For those of you who aren't aware of Access Space, it started as a "DIY Media Lab" which I and various friends who had accreted around "Redundant Technology Initiative" (lowtech.org) in 2000. It re-interpreted donated digital debris as resource, rebuilding computers, installing free operating systems, making them available to participants, and encouraging and supporting creative, self-directed projects.)

Part of the motivation behind Access Space was our hope that digital engagement and skills had the potential to empower. This proved to be the case in the early 2000s, and numerous time-rich participants engaged with Access Space, taught themselves and each other technological skills, and became web designers, graphic designers, technicians or even better-known artists. (Though whether "art" is, in the context of networked global capital, a viable or empowering career for a statistically significant proportion of its participants is, I suggest, in question.)

By 2010 we'd seen far less business incubation, and proportionately fewer participants able to self-teach to a level that it made a real difference to their life prospects or creative leverage. We saw that hardware and software skills devalued as pre-installed devices became cheaper, and that the digital realm was becoming dominated by global digital services, including social media, that, while they didn't do a great job, diverted the vast majority of potential digital design clients away from bespoke, local service providers.

In short, the window of opportunity suggested by the first phase of the graphical internet was closing. While, in 2000, speed-reading an HTML primer, combined with a little design flair, a few copywriting skills, and some sales confidence could make you a web designer in a month, in 2010 this was no longer the case.

We concluded that when any new technology is introduced, there's a period of opportunity, before that technology has become fully adopted or systematised, in which the individual can get involved, and (in a short time, with a level of skill only one page ahead of their clients) can empower themselves, converting an interest into saleable skills, products or resources.

We've seen the same window open and close with blockchain (which I believe to be illusory, unproductive, and, in the end, simply gambling). A vanishingly few people made money though cryptocurrency trading, but now it's dominated by grinding Ponzi schemes, viral mining fiddles, or blockchain is being repurposed by multinationals. The moment of opportunity for the individual has passed.

At Access Space we saw Fab Lab or "Maker Technologies" as a more genuinely productive line of approach, and, even though many of the technologies had been around for a decade or more, saw that the window of opportunity had not yet closed. As technology requiring significant physical engagement and investment (you need to buy real-world machines and materials!) the timescale of its adoption and exploitation by capital would be far slower.

So at Access Space we raised money (thanks EU structural funds!) and bought a CNC, a Lasercutter, a 3D Printer, Arduinos, Raspberry Pis, a digital embroidery machine... and set about a research partnership to explore the potentials of these technologies for creating local jobs and enterprises.

In the end, for those not in the highfalutin' and disconnected academic realm (sorry, researchers - you're my friends really!) a key element of whether a technology is empowering or not is "Can you get paid for using it?"

And "using it to engage and educate" doesn't count - actually using it to create product or paid-for service is key. In Access Space's particular case, we took the position that we didn't care about "industrial transformation", nor "increasing supply-chain efficiencies". We cared most about actual, tangible jobs in Sheffield, not abstract (however numerically significant) jobs in San Fransisco or Shenzen.

The research engaged with local makers, both individuals and startup enterprises, and concluded that the technology we looked at with most potential to generate local jobs and enterprise was lasercutting, and the one with the least potential was 3D Print. Even seven years later, we still agree.

This failure, it seems to me, to engage with the economics of making is exactly what's thus far marginalised the "Maker Movement". It's also true of the Fab Lab - while it's a powerful context for education, the economics of fabbing just don't work.

To give a simple example: one of the Fab Lab founding principals its to engage with a wide range of materials and processes, on a wide range of scales. For a business to become profitable, the imperative is EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE. To optimise manufacture, it's necessary to reduce the number of processes, and minimise the variety of materials. In terms of marketing, the key is to focus on a particular product and market. It is supremely irrelevant to a person who wants to buy a new pair of shoes to know that you can also make customised wifi amplifiers, repair bicycles, design lamps or sell toy robots.

Shoe advertisers (physical or digital) sell shoes, not "Anything... uhh... including shoes".

The Maker Movement comes out of academia, where the core product is learning. To the business world, high skill is the enemy. Skilled processes are expensive - you want your highly skilled people to be doing as much as possible, over as wide an area as possible, so you can employ as few of them as possible.

So, with this context, my wife Lisa and I opened "Makers". It's a shop, where we make things. You can commission us to make things, or come and make things with us. We run educational workshops, too - but it's not the mainstay of our business. We did this with the intention of further exploring the opportunities afforded by digital manufacture, with a view to uncovering the sustainable business models that might emerge from it. Having just done two and a half years of research into the employment potentials of digital manufacture, I thought we might have a head-start.

Makers is now coming up to its fourth birthday, and we haven't gone bankrupt yet. (Not to show off, but that fact alone apparently puts us into the top 5% of UK retail!) We've discovered a whole load of stuff about digital and analogue making, the economics and sustainability of local manufacture, that we just didn't know, and we've not seen the wider Maker Movement really touch upon.

We've rejected whole categories of product lines, and focussed on particular processes and products to make our living. We still make a wide range of things, and we're constantly experimenting with new ideas, but bearing in mind that we need to create things that aren't characteristic of the typical maker-space product ("really fascinating, but I have no use for it!"). The objects we make must have the key characteristic that people are prepared to put their hands in their pockets and buy them - for a sensible price - and that means that they must be appealing.

We have a range of clients for our making services, including individuals and businesses. For individual clients, we're typically making home decor, but for micro-businesses we're at the cutting edge of business incubation - people come in with an idea (often its something crafty, with a very specialist market) and we help them design and produce their products.

But... get this... around 80% of clients who commission us to make things, or make things with us, are women. It's a completely different demographic from the typical "maker dude" who inhabits our friendly neighbourhood makerspace. Our repeat making clients are often making money out of making - we're helping to design and manufacture stuff that they sell. There's also an interesting line of products that helps people to sell - signage, packaging, point-of-sale displays.

We're also thinking about how making impacts on our locality. Traditional retail is in freefall - but we're finding that shops are being replaced by "makey" and "crafty" services. Our shop was (twenty five years ago) a greengrocer. Now it's "Makers". On our little block of 16 shops we see computer and phone repairs, a dressmaker, bicycle repairs, baking, and of course, a barber and takeaway food shops. Very nearby we find micro-brewers, woodworkers, picture framers, upholsterers, photographers...

These sorts of services seem, over time, to be replacing the once ubiquitous mini-marts and retail outlets that have been displaced by online shopping.

Recently, we've been a research partner in research into making (MakEY - Making in Early Years) which has been very interesting, but again does what academia is wont to do - assume that the product is learning. In my view, far from being over the hill, making may now be transforming from academic and hobbyist interest to actual economic models. I think it has huge potential to revitalise localities and communities, and I urge researchers to get involved. (Will lecture for food!)

But let's lose the glamour - and start thinking about real products, real places, and real business models. Want an example of "sustainable superlocal digital manufacture"? How about key cutting? Yeah, it's not so cool now, is it?

All the best,

James =====

On 11/06/2019 18:43, Graham Harwood wrote: I just want to interject a little into the Post-Maker universe.

I work a lot these days with the maritime, a technical culture of wooden boat repair that in Essex, I also worked a lot with people who restore old telephone exchanges and people who build steam engines - through having run a free media space in 00 ties were we hacked, pirated recycled at will. Among the many things that are interesting about these technical cultures is that they produce value for those engaged in the process - but this value has only a limited relation to the accumulation of capital. The maker phenomena could be seen in this context as a way to monetise the non-discursive technical cultures - a tinkering world that has an unbroken line back to at least the enlightenment but probably before. In 1799 the Royal Institution of Great Britain was established to put science to work for particular class and keep the theoretical away from a populace that presented a threat (the demon of the French revolution) - The Royal Institution was a place where an artisan class built technicals object but where not allowed in, or allowed to lecture. 

Faraday had to have elocution lessons, learn how to eat properly before being allowed to lecture and even then had to be deemed a genius to escape the his class background and address gentleman. What Im trying to suggest is that non-discursive technical tinkering exist within many technical cultures and long may it remain so.

I'll tag on a little introduction this I wrote.

“The science which compels the inanimate limbs of the machinery, by their construction, to act purposefully, as an automaton, does not exist in the worker’s consciousness, but rather acts upon him through the machine as an alien power.” Karl Marx(1858)

In 1958 the French philosopher Gilbert Simondon published On the Mode of Technical Objects to address just this form of cultural alienation implicit in the quote above. He writes, among other things, about two ways in which people come to know technical objects. He says technology viewed from a child's eye, which I imagine he is seeing as, naive and innocent we gain an implicit, non-reflective, habitual tendency. 

A baby strapped into a buggy, is given a parent's mobile phone and is happily learning to play a game but cannot yet utter the words to express these interactions. Simondon then imagines an inverse, a trained adult engineer, reflective, self-aware using rational knowledge that is elaborated through science. Something like an Apple engineer who creates closed technologies imagining its users still strapped in that buggy unable to articulate their critical needs. 

Simondon seeks out another form of relationship with technical objects which he finds in the Enlightened Encyclopaedism of Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert (Encyclopédie (1751–1777)) in which concrete knowhow is abstracted and assembled into a technical orchestra. Contemporarily, is it worth considering our networked technologies in this mode of encyclopaedism? An evolving off-grid, red-neck, student, coder, geek pedagogy producing technical information, hacks, howto’s, shakedowns, and open source code repositories, that respond to an evolving technical culture. This technical republic is nothing new, it’s genealogies can be traced to and beyond the amateur experimentalistsof the London Electrical Society and William Sturgeon (1783 - 1850) and the artisanal formation that knowledge can be contained in the object built and it’s functioning is its explanation.

Is a tinkering internet a critical technical republic? A social space that potentially can break down the state actors with encryption, corporations by opening up software and proprietary technics by hacking them open, making things public? Is the marginal technics on a teenagers dirty bedroom, the dank basement of a bored salaryman, the ham radio garden shed a strategy to unfold the clean room and its magic men in white coats? Or is this largely a white male space that has eradicated other forms of objectivity and subjectivity from view? How can we attempt to instate a devolved technics that refuses misogyny, racialisation and yet envisages technology outside of the paradigm of human slave or potential human enslaver.

Harwood

From: [email protected] <[email protected]> on behalf of John Preston <[email protected]> Sent: 11 June 2019 17:39:00 To: [email protected] Subject: Re: <nettime> The Maker Movement is abandoned by its corporate sponsors; throws in the towel On the mention of recycling I just wanted to mention the Precious Plastic (https://preciousplastic.com/) project, which is very much in this vein and currently active. Looks good, I'd like to build a recycling machine and melt down some plastic at some point.

On a more local and mainstream level, my town has a show that sells 'upcycled' furniture which has been done up (new handles, repainted with flower motifs etc). Recycling and maker culture is great but I'd like to see more projects which are local or community oriented: this is essential to truly address the problem of waste. We separate glass in my borough, maybe we could feed that into local double glazing firms, or something else.

*stopping here before I ramble on for 10KB*

John

On 2019-06-11 16:27, Jaromil wrote: > dear Bruce and nettimers, > > On Sat, 08 Jun 2019, Bruce Sterling wrote: > >> *Well, so much for the O’Reilly Web 2.0 version of popular >>  mechanics.  Fifteen years is not too bad a run by the standards of >>  an increasingly jittery California Ideology.  Now what? — Bruce S > > Felipe Fonseca has seen it coming years before and express it well: > https://medium.com/@felipefonseca/repair-culture-65133fdd37ef > > he wasn't alone: for those of us who were into the "recycling" and DIY > scene in the late nineties, the Make magazine circus was the sort of > poison to kill a movement by sugar coating and extraction aka > franchising. While doing that for 15 years, there are a three points > it missed to address IMHO: > > 1. the right to mod your hardware, esp. video-games which represent >    the vast majority of new hardware sold and thrown away around the >    globe > > 2. the "peripheries of the empire" aka South of the World (remember >    Bricolabs?) where DIY is *amazingly* developed in various forms. >    As usual, we have learned nothing from that, just advertised us >    westeners doing it better and with more bling. > > 3. the "shamanic" value that can be embedded in uses of technologies, >    as opposed to the sanitized and rational interpretation given by >    designers in the west. Techno-shamanism is something Fabi Borges, >    Vicky Sinclair and other good folks in Bricolabs have been busy for >    ages! > > so then, what now? I believe the functional need of aggregating places > for "hacker culture" is lowering: everything can exist virtually as > software, more or less. Machinery + franchising have a too high > production cost compared to their output, not sustainable at all. Also > moving hardware around is a *big* effort and the only ones lowering > overhead costs for new players are in China (...Aliexpress). > > Plus the acceleration of hardware production resulted in way less > sustainability especially in relation to obsolescence: buy a part now > then ask if it will be still available in 20 years! you'll be > presented an NDA to sign and then discover there is just a 3-4 years > plan behind it. Spare parts anyone? Meanwhile is almost 2020 and there > is no service to print and sell-on-demand USB sticks with stuff on: > what a contrast if you think of the CD/DVD on-demand industry of 15 > years ago! which partially resists only on garage music productions. > > So, software still offers possibilities, but will it produce a > cultural shift? I doubt it will do more than what it did already in > crypto, which is already highly controversial and poisoned of a sort > of unstable sugar coating mixed with toxic financial capitals. > > At last, looking at the new generations, the bling is what really > counts: I guess most "fablabs" could be converted to > "fashionlabs". Personally I'm planning to revamp dyne:bolic which > besides running on old computers and modded game consoles did one > thing which is still actual: it was a media production studio. The > best part of "maker culture" was its cultural expression, mined for > its value until exhaustion; but isn't it harder to express cultural > values using hardware? Much easier with music and videos etc. they > also travel easier. > > For more *practical examples* of projects who may inspire new > horizons: you are all invited to an event we (Dyne.org) are setting up > in Amsterdam on the 5th July. We will fill the stage with many new > faces: 16 projects we awarded with EU funding for their pro/vision of > "human-centric" solutions, purpose driven and socially useful. Hope to > see some of you, we will also have a new call end of year, its about > 200k EUR equity free so lets engage in new sustainable challenges > https://tazebao.dyne.org/venture-builder-eu.html > > ciao

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The Best Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) for 2019: Reviews by Wirecutter

An uninterruptible power supply, or UPS, is basically a surge protector, a battery, and a power inverter (which turns the battery’s stored energy into usable power) wrapped into one unit. The size of the battery dictates how long it can provide power, while the inverter dictates how much power it can output at any one time—often listed as volt-amps (VA) but more easily discussed as watts (W).

A small, inexpensive UPS is great for anyone that wants their home Wi-Fi and Internet to stay online during shorter power outages or brownouts. Unlike traditional phone service that works without power, Internet and digital phone service requires a broadband modem, which may have only a small battery backup—adding a UPS could provide hours of uptime in case you need to reach emergency services.

Larger UPS units with extra power and features can help keep home offices and workstations running during business hours, or for at least long enough to save work and safely shut down vulnerable equipment. If you have a lot of important data on hard drives in a desktop computer or network-attached storage, you may need a UPS so you can prevent your drives from losing data in the event of a sudden power outage. In some cases, a UPS can provide crucial backup power to home medical equipment like CPAP machines for a limited time.

But powering your home theater for a movie marathon during a storm is going to be less feasible and less affordable. If you need long-term power, the capacity to keep appliances like refrigerators plugged in, or to light up your whole house, off-grid solutions like backup generators or professionally installed battery packs are the way to go.

How we picked and tested

We started by considering 93 models from three leading companies: APC, CyberPower, and Tripp Lite. We’ve tested uninterruptible power supplies and surge protectors from these companies in the past, and all the power-product companies have long histories and reputations as reliable. Since a UPS is designed to be used in an emergency, choosing from a reliable brand is crucial to avoid buyer’s remorse at the worst possible time.

To whittle down such a massive list of candidates, we considered the most important factors that go into a great UPS:

Power management: We insisted that any UPS we tested use line-interactive topology, or automatic voltage regulation (AVR), a more advanced form of power management than that used by less expensive “standby” UPS models. AVR means that when power from a wall outlet briefly dips or surges outside of a specified range, a small transformer in the UPS acts like a buffer to compensate without relying on the battery; the UPS switches to battery power only when the transformer can’t handle the variation. This reduces wear and tear on the battery during frequent brownout conditions, prolonging its overall life and providing more-reliable power to sensitive gear like hard drives. Since AVR is available without a huge price premium, it’s a sensible feature to have to get the most from a UPS in the long term.

A UPS without some type of AVR is generally referred to as a “standby” UPS. That’s because the battery is always on standby, ready to jump in anytime the voltage from the wall outlet fluctuates outside a small predetermined range. A standby UPS is fine for many applications, but the battery inside may need to be replaced sooner, and it may not correct voltage fluctuations as quickly as an AVR model. We dismissed any standby models without testing them.

Battery capacity: Most UPS batteries are small, sealed, lead-acid batteries, not so different from a car battery. That makes them much cheaper than the lithium-based batteries in smartphones and laptops, but it’s also why they’re heavier and store less energy.

Manufacturers often publish run-time ratings that outline how long a UPS can keep various wattages running. Since most ratings are based on ideal conditions, we tested our top candidates at two different loads, 50 W and 300 W, to see how they managed in real-world use. Our 50 W load was meant to simulate powering a cable modem and Wi-Fi router. Our 300 W load is closer to a full workstation, as it adds a modern desktop (around 150 W), a 27-inch monitor (88 W maximum), and network-attached storage hard drives (60 W maximum).

Since the batteries will likely start to hold less energy at the three-year mark (and may hold noticeably less energy after the five years) most models we considered have replaceable batteries to extend the life of the UPS. Prices for name-brand replacements range from $30 to $60, and the process is simple enough for a novice to complete in just a couple minutes.

Power output: While battery capacity and runtime measure how long a UPS can supply power, the power output tells you how much it can power at any one time. Most models explicitly include their output in the name or model number in volt-amperes (VA). The smallest UPS models we found with the AVR feature we require output 650 VA, more than enough to run a modem and Wi-Fi router at home. For an upgrade pick, we looked for models with at least a 1,000 VA rating. VA ratings aren’t common in most people’s lives, but they’re power ratings along the same lines as the more-familiar watts (W). For a quick estimation when shopping, you can assume that a UPS’s wattage rating will be about 60 percent of its volt-amp rating. So a UPS rated for 685 VA can probably handle about 400 W. That’s plenty to keep a cable modem (25 W), Wi-Fi router (30 W), and laptop charger (65 W) up and running for a while.

Outlets: All outlets on a home UPS provide surge protection, limiting the amount of extra voltage that could reach and potentially damage anything plugged into them. But generally only half of the outlets will be connected to the battery backup in case of an outage—and are prominently marked as such. That’s why we focused on models that had at least eight outlets total, since you’ll have only four of them in a power outage. In most home offices, this shouldn’t cause a problem, but it does require some planning in terms of making sure the right things are plugged into the right outlets.

Power Quality: For each model we tested, we looked at the power output using a digital oscilloscope provided by Bitscope. This let us see how well the inverters in each UPS converted the DC energy stored into the battery into the AC power provided by the outlets. Specifically, the oscilloscope let us look at two aspects of power quality: which models introduced the least amount of electrical noise into the line, and how well the modified sine wave inverter in each model imitated the kind of power that comes out of a standard wall outlet. For our upgrade pick, we also required a pure sine wave inverter (see the next item).

Pure sine wave power: A modified sine wave (MSW) inverter turns the DC power stored in the battery into the AC power you need coming out of the outlets. Because MSW inverters are less expensive to make and work well for most devices, they’re the the most common type of inverter used in UPS units (including our top pick). But MSW inverters create only a close approximation of the kind of AC power that comes out of a wall outlet—it’s not quite the same. Most gadgets that charge with a power brick (including smartphones, tablets, and laptops) won’t care much, since the power brick does extra conversion anyway. But anything expecting AC power for moving parts like motors won’t work normally on an MSW inverter, and audio equipment can pick up buzzes of interference from them. And some home medical devices just won’t work with MSW power. In any of those cases, you need pure sine wave (PSW) inverters instead.

Pure sine wave inverters, and the UPS models that use them, replicate the smooth wave of power that comes from a wall outlet powered by a utility company. These inverters are more expensive to make and thus less common when it comes to inexpensive or occasional-use power sources. We’ve come across multiple online discussions discussing how to provide backup power for CPAP machines and whether MSW or PSW were better. We reached out to ResMed, makers of a variety of home respiratory care devices, to find out what they recommend. Amy Cook, the company’s marketing director, told us that many of the company’s newer products have power converters or even lithium-ion battery backups available. But if you plan on using a different power source, “older-generation PAPs (S8 and earlier) that are using modified sine wave inverters cannot power their respective humidifiers.” Given the importance, not to mention cost, of equipment like CPAP machines, we’d recommend you opt for a battery backup made by the same manufacturer, if available. If not, we prefer to stick to PSW inverters—like the one included in our upgrade pick—to avoid any problems.

Extra features: A basic UPS doesn’t need a lot of features to do its job, but other features we considered include status displays that show battery charge and remaining runtime right on the unit and power-management software that lets you monitor and manage a UPS (over USB) from your computer. Neither feature is crucial for a UPS in most homes—the power goes out and you know you have limited network or computer time to do what you need to do. But a status display is a nice-to-have feature that can help calm power anxiety, and power management software that works on any operating system future-proofs changes in your setup so that your UPS can be just as useful years down the line as it is the first day you plug it in.

Every UPS from a reputable brand comes with some basic surge protection built in, which is good because you can’t plug your UPS into a surge protector or plug a surge protector into a UPS. Unfortunately, most affordable UPS units don’t offer much protection compared with a dedicated surge protector. In previous tests, electrical engineer Lee Johnson took apart our UPS samples to examine their guts. Based on his assessment, we found that our picks should protect your equipment about as well, if not for as long, as basic surge protectors we’ve tested before.

Our pick: CyberPower CP685AVR

Our pick

The CyberPower CP685AVR is our first choice for anyone who wants a UPS to keep their home network and modem online during short blackouts. Unlike competitors at similar prices, the CP685AVR can compensate for quick voltage sags and surges without switching to battery, which helps prolong the life of the battery and provide more-reliable power. The four battery-backed outlets can keep basic home networking gear running for about an hour, and all eight outlets have basic surge protection to fit plenty of equipment day to day. No setup is required for the UPS to do its job, but anyone who wants to monitor power consumption or manage shutdown settings can do so over USB with a Windows, Mac, or Linux computer—the closest competitors offer software only for Windows.

Most people are looking for a UPS to solve one of three problems in a blackout: powering a digital-phone modem for contacting emergency services and loved ones, preventing damage to something that needs to be properly shut down, or passing the time until the electricity comes back. The CP685AVR can keep a combination of a common broadband modem and Wi-Fi router (about 50 W) on for about an hour. The runtime decreases if you add devices to the other two battery-backed outlets. Even though power outages have increased in some parts of the US in recent years, they tend not to last too long (PDF), so a basic UPS should get you by in even the most unreliable regions.

When a UPS battery kicks in during a power outage, it offers better value the longer it can last.

The “AVR” in the model name CP685AVR stands for Automatic Voltage Regulation, one of the power-management features we required. Many inexpensive UPS models don’t include this option, leaving out the transformer and instead functioning as “standby” backups that can only switch to battery. Even APC, a leading competitor, doesn’t offer AVR in any models available for a similar price. The closest competitor that does is the Tripp Lite AVR650UM, which we tested our top pick against.

When a UPS battery does kick in during a power outage, it offers better value the longer it can last. When we tested the CP685AVR with a 50 W load meant to mimic the power requirements of a broadband modem and home Wi-Fi router, it lasted 57 minutes before shutting down. The Tripp Lite AVR 650UM managed only 38 minutes in the same test. Given the similar prices, that’s a lot more value packed into the CyberPower model.

The CyberPower CP685AVR and competing Tripp Lite models have similar maximum outputs, 390 W and 325 W, respectively. There are other similarities, too. They’re nearly identical in size, each with eight outlets. Though all eight outlets offer surge protection, only four on either model are backed up by battery power during a blackout. That’s a common arrangement, and the outlets are clearly marked, so you just have to make sure that your most important gear gets plugged into the right outlets.

The pure sine wave from a residential wall outlet.

Modified sine wave inverters, like the one in the CP685AVR, provide power that mostly works the same as power from a wall outlet but looks very different when examined.

The modified sine wave of the Tripp Lite TLAVR650UM.

The pure sine wave from a residential wall outlet.

Modified sine wave inverters, like the one in the CP685AVR, provide power that mostly works the same as power from a wall outlet but looks very different when examined.

None of the keep-your-network-up models we tested, including our top pick, do a particularly great job of imitating pure sine waves with their MSW inverters, though the CyberPower waveform looked closer to what we’ve come to expect when examining many MSW inverters on an oscilloscope. If you think you might fall prey to the side effects of MSW, check out our upgrade pick below, which produces PSW power instead.

There’s no status display on the CP685AVR, but it’s rare to find a UPS in this price range that has one along with the other features we think are crucial, including AVR and a long runtime. The only feedback you’ll get when the power goes out is a double beep every 30 seconds, and a more-continuous alarm when you have less than five minutes of power remaining. But if your UPS is going to live near a computer, you can see more detail by connecting to it via USB and downloading the free CyberPower Power Panel application. You can use this software to see the battery’s charge and the UPS status, monitor power consumption, change the alarm settings, and even customize certain events like having your computer safely shut down automatically when the power goes out. CyberPower, TrippLite, and APC all offer this type of software for Windows computers, but only CyberPower offers a Mac version.

CyberPower’s AVR Series has user reviews dating back almost 10 years. Although we’ve become wary of user-review averages for some product categories, most users have found the CyberPower offering to be a solid UPS, which is about what you’d expect for a utilitarian device. All three companies we considered for this category—CyberPower, APC, and TrippLite—offer a three-year warranty on any UPS.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

The CyberPower CP685AVR is a simple UPS that focuses on providing power at a good price, but that means giving up some conveniences. In particular, it has only one button, which turns the unit on or off. That means there’s no way to mute the alarm that chirps when power goes off unless you attach it to a computer and use the free Power Panel application. Without a way to quiet it, the CP685AVR will chirp every 30 seconds when it’s providing power during an outage. It’s annoying, but a common design for basic UPS models like this one.

Runner-up: CyberPower CP800AVR

Runner-up

If our top pick is out of stock and you don’t need (or want to pay for) the extra output or pure sine wave power that sets our upgrade pick apart, get the CyberPower CP800AVR. It’s nearly identical to the CP685AVR, our top pick: It has the same automatic voltage regulation (AVR) power management we like, similar one-hour runtime when powering a modem and router during an outage, and even the same dimensions and design. The only difference is that the CP800AVR can deliver about 15 percent more power at any given moment during a blackout, which isn’t enough to make a huge difference in how you’d use it.

Since the CP800AVR uses the same size battery as our top pick, it’s no surprise that it lasted about as long in our testing. When fully charged, the UPS powered a 50 W load (similar to what you might need to power a broadband modem and Wi-Fi router) for an hour. As you plug in additional power-hungry equipment, that runtime will go down—all the way to just three minutes (PDF) when fully loaded.

For the CP800AVR, a full load is 450 W, compared to 390 W for our top pick. That’s a small difference, especially since ideal setups will only use half that maximum to help maintain battery life in the long run. That brings the 60 W difference down to a real-world difference of just 30 W—less than what most laptop chargers use. If you need more power during an outage, you’re better off with our upgrade pick, which is rated for 600 W and adds additional benefits like pure sine wave power, extra outlets, and a status display.

The CP800AVR shares the same design and outlets (eight, four with battery backup) as our top pick, the CP685AVR. It also similarly lacks a status display to monitor the battery level, but you can use the CyberPower Power Panel application on a Windows, Mac, or Linux PC connected via USB to monitor the UPS and make minor tweaks like silencing the alarm.

The pure sine wave from a residential wall outlet.

The CP800AVR uses a modified sine wave inverter to turn the DC power in the battery to a rough approximation of standard AC power.

The APC BR700G is a modified sine wave inverter as well, though it does a better job at smoothing out its peaks and valleys.

The pure sine wave from a residential wall outlet.

The CP800AVR uses a modified sine wave inverter to turn the DC power in the battery to a rough approximation of standard AC power.

As was the case with all of the more-affordable UPS models, our runner-up uses a modified sine wave inverter that will work fine for most electronics with a power brick—including phone chargers, laptops, routers, and modems—but may cause problems for sensitive electronics like audio gear or home medical equipment. When we showed the waveforms recorded from our two top picks to Lee Johnson, an electrical engineer with whom we frequently collaborate, he noted slight differences in the two and suggested that the CP800AVR may have some sort of extra filter before the outlet. But Johnson agreed that there’s no evidence that the slight difference would have an impact on most devices. If you’re concerned about that, you need a pure sine wave inverter like the one inside our upgrade pick.

Upgrade pick: CyberPower CP1000PFCLCD

Upgrade pick

If you need more power, more outlets, or to power sensitive electronics like audio or home medical equipment in a blackout, the CyberPower CP1000PFCLCD is the best choice. It costs around twice the price of our top pick, but it can keep a desktop computer setup running long enough to shut down safely, includes an upgrade to pure sine wave (PSW) power, adds an LCD status display to the front and two more outlets to the back, and has an output roughly 50 percent higher when the power goes out. The battery is roughly the same size as our top pick’s, though, so it won’t last much longer when powering the same devices.

Like our top pick, and any of the pure sine wave models we considered, the CP1000PFCLCD uses automatic voltage regulation (AVR). By putting less wear and tear on the battery, AVR should help to extend the overall life. And when it is time for a replacement, name-brand batteries cost around $35 and take a few minutes to swap in without any tools.

The CP1000PFCLCD is smaller than many workstation UPS units, which means that its battery is smaller than what you get with some competitors and won’t keep you running much longer than our top pick given the same load—a 50 W router and modem combo should last around an hour. And while it can handle a desktop computer, display, and a few accessories, in our tests, it could power a 300 W load for only about eight minutes. That’s enough time to shut down computers and hard drives safely, but definitely not enough to keep you working through a bad storm. (The APC BR1000MS, which sells for a similar price, has a larger battery inside and is rated to last around 50 percent longer than our pick, but an annoying flaw kept us from recommending it.) In contrast, the largest CyberPower UPS in this line is rated for nearly twice the runtime of our pick, but at over $200, we’re not convinced it’s a good value or a necessity for most people. With 300 W of gear plugged in, the larger unit is rated to last only 19 minutes, 10 minutes longer than our pick’s rating. My own survey of popular CPAP machines showed that most use between 30 W and 100 W, depending on the settings. That’s a big range, but a CPAP in the middle of it would likely last around 45 minutes connected to our upgrade pick.

The more gear you have plugged in, the less runtime the battery will provide. The CP1000PFCLCD is rated to put out 600 W at any one time, but we never recommend running a UPS at a full load. Not only do you risk overloading it—causing the UPS to shut down, trip its breaker, or in severe cases damage it—but larger loads will wear out the overall battery life faster. Besides, if you put 600 W of gear on this model, the battery would conk out after just three or four minutes.

How NFTs are fueling a digital art boom Written by Oscar Holland, CNN This article was updated following the auction of Beeple’s “Everydays: The First 5000 days,” which sold for $69.3 million. When graphic designer Mike Winkelmann started producing a drawing a day in 2007, he was simply looking for a way to improve his art skills. At best, the resulting “Everydays” project would help him promote his freelance work, which includes creating concert visuals for the likes of Justin Bieber and Katy Perry. But selling the digital images was not on his mind. This week, a compilation of over 13 years’ worth of the artworks, collectively titled “Everydays: The First 5000 days,” sold for $69.3 million via Christie’s, putting Winkelmann’s name among some of the art market’s most valuable living artists. A multi-million-dollar auction for Beeple’s “Everydays: The First 5000 days” closed this week at $69.3 million. Credit: Beeple/Christies “It’s a bit surreal, because (digital imagery) wasn’t really something that I pictured, in my lifetime, being able to sell,” said Winkelman, who goes by the name Beeple, in a video call from his home in South Carolina ahead of the sale. “So it (has) come out of nowhere. But at the same time, I also really feel like this is going to be the next chapter of art history.” Virtual art has been created, and talked about, for years. But now, thanks to endorsement from celebrities as diverse as Elon Musk, Lindsey Lohan and Steve Aoki, online buzz in art and cryptocurrency circles, and, perhaps most importantly, blockchain technology, it has not only entered the mainstream — it is generating huge sums of money for digital artists and online collectors. Beeple’s latest sale comes just weeks after his animated work “Crossroad,” which imagined Donald Trump’s naked, graffiti-strewn body slumped on the ground, was purchased online for $6.6 million. Elsewhere, a digital animation of the “Nyan Cat” meme — a flying cat with a Pop Tart for a body — earned its creator Christopher Torres almost $600,000 in a virtual auction. The musician Grimes meanwhile made $6.3 million in under 20 minutes selling a range of collectible digital artworks. At the center of this explosion in transactions are non-fungible tokens, or NFTs. Acting like virtual signatures, they address concerns that digital art’s value is diminished by the ease with which it can be copied or lost. While an oil painting can only be displayed in one place and has a definitive owner, a digital image, video or gif can be infinitely duplicated and enjoyed on screens around the world for free. This has often posed problems for prospective collectors, who don’t know how to price digital art and fear it will lose resale value. But now, NFTs are offering two things that the physical art market has always depended on: scarcity and authenticity. The rise of ‘non-fungible’ tokens NFTs are built on blockchain technology, which — just as it does with Bitcoin — offers a secure record of transactions. This digital ledger serves as incorruptible proof of ownership, meaning that “original” artworks and their owners can always be identified via the blockchain, even if an image or video is widely replicated. A “fungible” asset is one that is that can be replaced with another identical one of the same value, such as a dollar bill, while non-fungible ones, like NFTs, are tied to unique goods and are not mutually interchangeable. Like bitcoins, the tokens can be kept in a virtual wallet. They can then be sold or traded, often gaining value in the secondary market. This makes NFT artworks similar to physical ones — or any other real-world asset, according to Duncan Cock Foster, co-founder of Nifty Gateway, the platform behind Beeple’s and Grimes’ recent multi-million-dollar sales. “We have systems for collecting paintings, and we have systems for collecting sculptures. But until now, people hadn’t figured out a good way to collect digital art — and NFTs allow you to do that,” Cock Foster said on a video call, adding that buying tokens is easier and “a lot more accessible” than traditional art collecting. Related video: Just how much has the internet changed art? On Nifty Gateway, artists set the number of editions for any single artwork by deciding how many accompanying tokens will be made available. This can range from one-offs, where a piece is sold to a single collector, to open-edition “drops,” where tokens are made available for a limited period of time. The sale of Grimes’ “WarNymph” collection, for instance, allowed up to 9,999 purchases of various artworks within a seven-minute window. Several of the creations were listed for just $20 per token, some of which are now selling for thousands of dollars. By connecting artists directly to collectors, NFTs effectively cut out galleries and other traditional gatekeepers. While Cock Foster would not disclose the size of Nifty Gateway’s cut, he claims it is “far less” than what a gallery would usually take. For Beeple, this represents a “democratization” of the art market. “Now I have direct access to my audience,” he said. “I don’t have to go through an intermediary.” And there’s another benefit for digital artists: They can continue making money on their work, even after it has been sold. NFTs can allow creators to receive a cut on all future transactions — on Nifty Gateway, this is typically set at 10% — breaking with the centuries-old model whereby artists do not directly benefit when sold works grow in value over their lifetimes. (For instance, when a David Hockney painting sold for $90.3 million in 2018, setting an auction record for a living artist, the British artist didn’t receive a single cent from the sale. His dealer had sold it for just $18,000 in 1972.) One of digital images that Beeple produced daily from 2007. Credit: Beeple/Christies So, while Beeple made less than $67,000 when he originally sold his “Crossroad” animation, he pocketed a further $660,000 when the initial buyer sold it on. “The royalties are definitely something that make this much more sustainable and equitable for all parties,” the designer said. New breed of collector The collector behind the $6.6 million “Crossroad” sale, Pablo Rodriguez-Fraile, said that supporting creators is one of the unique benefits of investing in NFTs. While there is money to be made, and plenty of speculation happening in the crypto art market, the 32-year-old said that collecting digital works is about more than money. “I try to look into the life and career of the creators. I like to get in contact with them and meet them … for me, it’s important to see consistency and thoughtfulness about everything outside the art as well,” said Rodriguez-Fraile on the phone, adding that he is drawn to works that are “masterfully executed.” Beyond “Crossroad,” Rodriguez-Fraile said he has collected hundreds — perhaps thousands — of NFT artworks, selling only a handful so far. Beeple’s art often plays with pop culture icons in grotesque and unexpected ways. Credit: Beeple/Christies While the Miami-based collector was previously interested in blockchain and cryptocurrencies, were it not for NFTs, he said he would not be involved in buying art. His experience, like Beeple’s, suggests that the tokens are empowering a new breed of artists and collectors rather than taking a slice of the existing art market. “The analogy I like to make is Uber,” Cock Foster said. “When they were trying to make a forecast for Uber’s market size, they looked at the amount of money people spent on black cars (private car services). But because it’s so much easier to call an Uber than it is to call a black car, the actual market ended up being much larger than that. I really think we’re seeing something similar with NFTs. “They are lowering the barriers to collecting significantly,” added Cock Foster, whose platform operates under the ambitious tagline, “We will not rest until 1 billion people are collecting NFTs.” Future prospects Nifty Gateway may be a long way from its goal of 1 billion collectors, but the platform’s growth nonetheless reflects exploding interest in crypto art. In March 2020, the site recorded monthly transactions of $30,000; last month, this figure was up to $75 million, according to Cock Foster. This jump broadly coincides with another major force in the art world: Covid-19. With galleries and auction houses shuttered around the world — and people spending more time browsing the web or shopping online — NFTs have offered a new outlet for art enthusiasts. According to Beeple, this is why interest in the tokens has skyrocketed in recent months, even though the technology has been available since 2017. “You keep hearing that Covid has pushed things 10 years forward, and I think this honestly is a big part of it,” he said. “Everybody was sitting at home over the last year — so while I think this was inevitable, it really got accelerated.” The use of NFTs is now stretching far beyond the art world. DJ and musician Deadmau5 has used the tokens to sell digital merchandise, while the new Kings of Leon album is being released as an NFT. Nike is even reported to have registered a patent for tokenized shoes, branded “CryptoKicks.” This rapid growth has led to fears of an NFT bubble — one that may burst when the world emerges from pandemic-era restrictions. While collector Rodriguez-Fraile believes that “NFTs are here to stay,” he accepted that “we might be going through a period of hype … and I think the general ecosystem might slow down a bit when it comes to pricing.” For Cock Foster, however, the return to normality presents opportunities rather than threats — not least because galleries offer ways to experience digital art beyond a computer screen. “Digital art is very, very immersive,” he said, adding that displaying art is still important to online collectors. “So, I think we can build some really cool physical experiences.” This article was updated to reflect the final amount generated by Grimes’ NFT drop. Source link Orbem News #Art #boom #Digital #fueling #NFTs

Aging in place: Renovating with independence in mind https://ift.tt/2T61VpK

Getty Images/Mint Images RF

Most Americans settle in a home, envisioning a permanent life refuge. Achieving this vision of aging in place, though, means preparing the home now to anticipate future needs. Doing so successfully can allow older adults to remain independent, autonomous and in charge of their home security as they age.

As many as 94% of today’s older adults (defined as ages 65+) wish to stay in their own homes as long as possible. This group, as of 2010, accounted for 13% of the population (40 million people), and that number is projected to increase to 20% of the population by 2030.

Studies show there are numerous benefits to home-based aging, such as increased life satisfaction, quality of life and self-esteem. Maintaining familiar surroundings and connections is also a benefit, allowing older adults to remain close to friends and neighbors, keep the same doctors and visit favorite coffee shops and grocery stores.

The time is now to start planning for down-the-road needs, like modifying your home to accommodate future accessibility needs, home security and even live-in care. It is important to understand the appropriate renovations that may be required and to equip the home with modifications that are right for you and any caretakers providing attention as you age in place.

What you should know about designing a home while aging in place

Studies confirm there are benefits to keeping older adults in their homes longer, such as maintaining more independence and connection to friends and family, as well as avoiding the high costs of institutional care. Luckily, there are many options, services and helpful solutions available to help us stay independent as we age at home.

Basic home renovations

Improve lighting

Improving the lighting in the home is an inexpensive solution that can provide an increased sense of safety and security for older adults — safeguarding against stumbling and falling, as well as break-ins. Consider adding lighting strips to stairways and other dark areas inside the home, as well as installing exterior lights that can be programmed to turn on and off, creating a pattern to deter break-ins. Nightlights are also a recommended addition — great for hallways, bathrooms and on or near steps.

Add easy-use fixtures and safety considerations

These simple home modifications are easy to implement and can have a significant impact on improving security and comfort in the home as we age:

Install oversized light switches ($6 to $28)

Replace faucet knobs with levers ($22 to $400)

Use automated garage door openers ($128 to $250)

Purchase larger digital display options for remote controls, phones, and screens ($7 to $545)

Add grab bars or rails around the home to prevent falls and improve mobility ($14 to $100)

Consider chair and toilet lifts ($18 – $100)

Use cord covers to prevent tripping and falling ($10 to $50)

Update your flooring

Falls are prevalent as we age in what should be our safest environment: our home. And flooring is often the biggest culprit. Loose rugs, slip-inducing mats, and curly edges on carpets are among the most common dangers. Many preventive measures are easy, DIY and often relatively inexpensive. Here’s what you need to do:

Secure rugs throughout the home: Use double-faced, anti-slip rug tape to secure the edges of all area rugs firmly to the floor. Or consider using an underneath rug pad, with options adhering to vinyl, hardwood and other flooring. In the bathroom, use bathmats with a good, surface-gripping backing.

Install anti-slip flooring throughout the home: Ensuring the type of flooring installed in the home (and especially in the bathroom) isn’t slippery is an important consideration for older adults. Some anti-slip flooring options include vinyl, ceramic tiles, and even bamboo.

Contrast for visibility while moving throughout the home: Consider varying the colors and textures of the flooring used throughout the home to provide better visual guidance, especially in transitional areas in the home, such as a sunken living room.

Advanced home renovations

Sophisticated upgrades to help current and future home healthcare needs not only add protections, they often heighten future selling prices. Keep in mind for some of these more advanced home modification tips, outsourcing to a professional may be necessary.

Assistive renovations

Widen your doorways: Even just carrying packages can make doorways impassable, so imagine providing adequate space for assistive devices like wheelchairs. To meet Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) accessibility standards, doorways should be at least 36 inches wide.

Add a stairlift: Unless you’re enjoying single-story living (or unless you have a downstairs bedroom and bath), many people need to navigate stairs in the home. In these cases, stairlifts are a great tool.

Keeping the home secure

Home security systems are an essential tool for being alerted to dangers you may not sense, like fire, carbon monoxide and break-ins. And these tools become even more critical for older adults. According to the National Fire Protection Association, people ages 65+ are twice as likely to be injured or killed by house fires, compared to the rest of the population.

For outside the home, consider installing security cameras, which can allow loved ones to monitor fall-prone areas around the home. 

Assistive technology

There is a lot of assistive technology available today, including devices, software programs and equipment that’s specifically designed to help people work around their challenges — from arthritis-friendly light switches and easier-to-grip drawer pulls, to computer voice recognition programs, entryway ramps and more. Here are a few assistive devices for you to consider when updating your home for current or future assistive needs:

Clap-detection lights: Turning on lights with the clap of your hands makes turning lights on/off much easier. Plus, set the device in its “away” mode, and your lights will turn on with the detection of any sound, which can deter break-ins.

Smart entryway: Assistive tools like key finders, keyless doors and doorbell cameras make entering the home and monitoring activity at the front door easier. Learning who is at the front door from the safety of your couch reduces the need for unnecessary movement around the home, which can also prevent accidents and falls. 

Home hub automation: Smart home options are now available to provide a one-stop solution for controlling your digital life at home, from programmable temperature controls and sophisticated home security systems to playing music and helping you keep track of appointments. For example, Amazon’s Alexa allows users to easily keep track of daily activities, call their doctor and even order food. And home hub security systems can offer older adults a greater sense of control over the safety of their home and valuables, all from the leisure of their couch.

Why designing with in-home care in mind is a good idea

Considering the high costs of long term care options in the U.S., it’s not surprising people are turning to alternative solutions. Although costs vary by state, let’s take a look at the average monthly costs of some of the more common long-term care options available:

A private nursing home room: $8,364 per month

A semi-private nursing home room: $7,362 per month

Assisted living facility: $3,862 per month

Adult day health care: $1,562 per month

To avoid these costs, and if in-home care is your goal, it’s important to start making plans now — so you’re not managing last-minute renovations and home modifications to accommodate the needs of caretakers at the same time your health takes a turn. 

Some of the in-home care services you may need to consider planning for include health care aides, registered nurses, physical therapists, social workers and other specialists that make home visits. Your in-home caregiver might also be a companion or a loved one. Regardless of who is providing the care, it’s important to ensure your home is ready, so you can more easily adapt should the need arise.

Renovating your home for the future

When renovating your home, it’s important to keep future health challenges in mind, and the possibility of needing in-home care. Understanding your needs — and the needs of others potentially sharing your space — will create a more harmonious and comfortable environment while aging in place.

Creating a bedroom on the main floor of the home is ideal — allowing for easier accessibility throughout the home. In addition to reducing the use of stairs, main floors also provide faster exits to safety in case of emergencies — like injuries, break-ins or fires.

To accommodate live-in care, or for having loved ones stay, a separate bedroom is an essential consideration. Make sure the room has easy access to a bathroom, and even consider installing a small kitchen. 

You’ll also want to equip your home for caregiver accessibility, including:

Installing smart locks, so people who take care of you always have access to the home.

Ensuring caregivers have access to WiFi, so they’re connected in the event of an emergency, or to purchase necessary items online.

Providing caregivers access to security systems, so they can help monitor the home in an emergency.

Adding more electrical outlets in the home, in case there is medical equipment to set up in the future.

Creating wider doorways and entryways for wheelchairs, as well as ramps for wheelchair accessibility.

Financial assistance for home modifications

Paying for Senior Care outlines four sources of assistance available for those needing to make home modifications to accommodate the needs of older adults and of those with disabilities, including financial loans, grants, labor and equipment loans:

Four types of assistance for home modifications

Low-interest loans: Some organizations, mainly governmental, offer low-interest loans for home modifications or guarantee loans so banks are less restrictive with their lending requirements. Since these are loans, they do need to be paid back.

Home improvement grants: These (usually one-time) grants are available for a specific home modification purpose, and do not need to be repaid.

Free labor: Another form of assistance is free labor to make home improvements. This is commonly offered by non-profit organizations or charities. Materials are not covered. The building of a wheelchair ramp is a common example.

Equipment loans: Some organizations make free, long-term loans of home modification materials. As an example, a portable wheelchair ramp that does not need to be returned until the borrower moves from their home or no longer requires the use of it.

Options for financial planning

There are also several programs and other assistance programs available for qualified individuals to take advantage of to help with home modifications for the purpose of keeping older adults at home longer. Some of the most notable options are:

Medicare Advantage: Beginning in 2019, Medicare Advantage (MA) plans now include benefits for home modifications, such as assisting with the addition of grab bars, stairlifts, and wheelchair ramps in the home

Medicaid HCBS Waivers and Home Modifications: Most states have Home and Community-Based Services (HCBS) Waivers, which help qualified individuals stay at home and receive in-home care and assistance with home modifications. Each state offers different programs with different eligibility requirements and benefits. 

Veterans Programs for Home Modifications: The Veterans Administration (VA) offers grants, including Specially Adapted Housing (SAH) Grants, Special Housing Adaptation (SHA) Grants and Home Improvement and Structural Alteration (HISA) Grants, to help veterans remain in their homes longer.

Non-Medicaid Government Assistance for Home Modification: The Department of Housing and Urban Development offers HUD Home Improvement Loans, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture offers Rural Repair and Rehabilitation Grants. Additionally, quite a few states offer various assistance programs that are referred to as “nursing home diversion programs,” and some of these programs offer home modification as a benefit. Review this list of state assistance programs that offer home modification benefits to see if there’s a program available for you.

Non-Profit and Foundation Assistance for Home Modifications: Many non-profits and organizations (such as Rebuilding Together) offer financial aid and volunteer labor to help older adults remain in their homes. Another option is finding local, volunteer community resources and projects that may help assist with home modifications.

Set your sights on home sweet home…forever

People are living longer and the percentage of older adults in the U.S. is on the rise. This means there is an increased demand for long-term care solutions. The good news is remaining independent and autonomous in the home you know and love as you age is possible. With the right planning and assistance, older adults can easily make modifications to the home — such as updating the lighting in the home, taking advantage of assistive technologies and even renovating the home to accommodate live-in care. Make these changes now and create a comfortable and safe space that you can continue to call home…forever.

Bio

Wendy Meyeroff, a plain language expert in B2B and B2C health/tech communications, has helped clients across the U.S. for 20+ years with journalism and marketing materials. Wendy has a specialty: writing for and about boomers, and mentoring outreach to ages 50+.

         The post Aging in place: Renovating with independence in mind appeared first on Freshome.com.

The Freshome.com Team

Aging in place: Renovating with independence in mind

Getty Images/Mint Images RF

Most Americans settle in a home, envisioning a permanent life refuge. Achieving this vision of aging in place, though, means preparing the home now to anticipate future needs. Doing so successfully can allow older adults to remain independent, autonomous and in charge of their home security as they age.

As many as 94% of today’s older adults (defined as ages 65+) wish to stay in their own homes as long as possible. This group, as of 2010, accounted for 13% of the population (40 million people), and that number is projected to increase to 20% of the population by 2030.

Studies show there are numerous benefits to home-based aging, such as increased life satisfaction, quality of life and self-esteem. Maintaining familiar surroundings and connections is also a benefit, allowing older adults to remain close to friends and neighbors, keep the same doctors and visit favorite coffee shops and grocery stores.

The time is now to start planning for down-the-road needs, like modifying your home to accommodate future accessibility needs, home security and even live-in care. It is important to understand the appropriate renovations that may be required and to equip the home with modifications that are right for you and any caretakers providing attention as you age in place.

What you should know about designing a home while aging in place

Studies confirm there are benefits to keeping older adults in their homes longer, such as maintaining more independence and connection to friends and family, as well as avoiding the high costs of institutional care. Luckily, there are many options, services and helpful solutions available to help us stay independent as we age at home.

Basic home renovations

Improve lighting

Improving the lighting in the home is an inexpensive solution that can provide an increased sense of safety and security for older adults — safeguarding against stumbling and falling, as well as break-ins. Consider adding lighting strips to stairways and other dark areas inside the home, as well as installing exterior lights that can be programmed to turn on and off, creating a pattern to deter break-ins. Nightlights are also a recommended addition — great for hallways, bathrooms and on or near steps.

Add easy-use fixtures and safety considerations

These simple home modifications are easy to implement and can have a significant impact on improving security and comfort in the home as we age:

Install oversized light switches ($6 to $28)

Replace faucet knobs with levers ($22 to $400)

Use automated garage door openers ($128 to $250)

Purchase larger digital display options for remote controls, phones, and screens ($7 to $545)

Add grab bars or rails around the home to prevent falls and improve mobility ($14 to $100)

Consider chair and toilet lifts ($18 – $100)

Use cord covers to prevent tripping and falling ($10 to $50)

Update your flooring

Falls are prevalent as we age in what should be our safest environment: our home. And flooring is often the biggest culprit. Loose rugs, slip-inducing mats, and curly edges on carpets are among the most common dangers. Many preventive measures are easy, DIY and often relatively inexpensive. Here’s what you need to do:

Secure rugs throughout the home: Use double-faced, anti-slip rug tape to secure the edges of all area rugs firmly to the floor. Or consider using an underneath rug pad, with options adhering to vinyl, hardwood and other flooring. In the bathroom, use bathmats with a good, surface-gripping backing.

Install anti-slip flooring throughout the home: Ensuring the type of flooring installed in the home (and especially in the bathroom) isn’t slippery is an important consideration for older adults. Some anti-slip flooring options include vinyl, ceramic tiles, and even bamboo.

Contrast for visibility while moving throughout the home: Consider varying the colors and textures of the flooring used throughout the home to provide better visual guidance, especially in transitional areas in the home, such as a sunken living room.

Advanced home renovations

Sophisticated upgrades to help current and future home healthcare needs not only add protections, they often heighten future selling prices. Keep in mind for some of these more advanced home modification tips, outsourcing to a professional may be necessary.

Assistive renovations

Widen your doorways: Even just carrying packages can make doorways impassable, so imagine providing adequate space for assistive devices like wheelchairs. To meet Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) accessibility standards, doorways should be at least 36 inches wide.

Add a stairlift: Unless you’re enjoying single-story living (or unless you have a downstairs bedroom and bath), many people need to navigate stairs in the home. In these cases, stairlifts are a great tool.

Keeping the home secure

Home security systems are an essential tool for being alerted to dangers you may not sense, like fire, carbon monoxide and break-ins. And these tools become even more critical for older adults. According to the National Fire Protection Association, people ages 65+ are twice as likely to be injured or killed by house fires, compared to the rest of the population.

For outside the home, consider installing security cameras, which can allow loved ones to monitor fall-prone areas around the home. 

Assistive technology

There is a lot of assistive technology available today, including devices, software programs and equipment that’s specifically designed to help people work around their challenges — from arthritis-friendly light switches and easier-to-grip drawer pulls, to computer voice recognition programs, entryway ramps and more. Here are a few assistive devices for you to consider when updating your home for current or future assistive needs:

Clap-detection lights: Turning on lights with the clap of your hands makes turning lights on/off much easier. Plus, set the device in its “away” mode, and your lights will turn on with the detection of any sound, which can deter break-ins.

Smart entryway: Assistive tools like key finders, keyless doors and doorbell cameras make entering the home and monitoring activity at the front door easier. Learning who is at the front door from the safety of your couch reduces the need for unnecessary movement around the home, which can also prevent accidents and falls. 

Home hub automation: Smart home options are now available to provide a one-stop solution for controlling your digital life at home, from programmable temperature controls and sophisticated home security systems to playing music and helping you keep track of appointments. For example, Amazon’s Alexa allows users to easily keep track of daily activities, call their doctor and even order food. And home hub security systems can offer older adults a greater sense of control over the safety of their home and valuables, all from the leisure of their couch.

Why designing with in-home care in mind is a good idea

Considering the high costs of long term care options in the U.S., it’s not surprising people are turning to alternative solutions. Although costs vary by state, let’s take a look at the average monthly costs of some of the more common long-term care options available:

A private nursing home room: $8,364 per month

A semi-private nursing home room: $7,362 per month

Assisted living facility: $3,862 per month

Adult day health care: $1,562 per month

To avoid these costs, and if in-home care is your goal, it’s important to start making plans now — so you’re not managing last-minute renovations and home modifications to accommodate the needs of caretakers at the same time your health takes a turn. 

Some of the in-home care services you may need to consider planning for include health care aides, registered nurses, physical therapists, social workers and other specialists that make home visits. Your in-home caregiver might also be a companion or a loved one. Regardless of who is providing the care, it’s important to ensure your home is ready, so you can more easily adapt should the need arise.

Renovating your home for the future

When renovating your home, it’s important to keep future health challenges in mind, and the possibility of needing in-home care. Understanding your needs — and the needs of others potentially sharing your space — will create a more harmonious and comfortable environment while aging in place.

Creating a bedroom on the main floor of the home is ideal — allowing for easier accessibility throughout the home. In addition to reducing the use of stairs, main floors also provide faster exits to safety in case of emergencies — like injuries, break-ins or fires.

To accommodate live-in care, or for having loved ones stay, a separate bedroom is an essential consideration. Make sure the room has easy access to a bathroom, and even consider installing a small kitchen. 

You’ll also want to equip your home for caregiver accessibility, including:

Installing smart locks, so people who take care of you always have access to the home.

Ensuring caregivers have access to WiFi, so they’re connected in the event of an emergency, or to purchase necessary items online.

Providing caregivers access to security systems, so they can help monitor the home in an emergency.

Adding more electrical outlets in the home, in case there is medical equipment to set up in the future.

Creating wider doorways and entryways for wheelchairs, as well as ramps for wheelchair accessibility.

Financial assistance for home modifications

Paying for Senior Care outlines four sources of assistance available for those needing to make home modifications to accommodate the needs of older adults and of those with disabilities, including financial loans, grants, labor and equipment loans:

Four types of assistance for home modifications

Low-interest loans: Some organizations, mainly governmental, offer low-interest loans for home modifications or guarantee loans so banks are less restrictive with their lending requirements. Since these are loans, they do need to be paid back.

Home improvement grants: These (usually one-time) grants are available for a specific home modification purpose, and do not need to be repaid.

Free labor: Another form of assistance is free labor to make home improvements. This is commonly offered by non-profit organizations or charities. Materials are not covered. The building of a wheelchair ramp is a common example.

Equipment loans: Some organizations make free, long-term loans of home modification materials. As an example, a portable wheelchair ramp that does not need to be returned until the borrower moves from their home or no longer requires the use of it.

Options for financial planning

There are also several programs and other assistance programs available for qualified individuals to take advantage of to help with home modifications for the purpose of keeping older adults at home longer. Some of the most notable options are:

Medicare Advantage: Beginning in 2019, Medicare Advantage (MA) plans now include benefits for home modifications, such as assisting with the addition of grab bars, stairlifts, and wheelchair ramps in the home

Medicaid HCBS Waivers and Home Modifications: Most states have Home and Community-Based Services (HCBS) Waivers, which help qualified individuals stay at home and receive in-home care and assistance with home modifications. Each state offers different programs with different eligibility requirements and benefits. 

Veterans Programs for Home Modifications: The Veterans Administration (VA) offers grants, including Specially Adapted Housing (SAH) Grants, Special Housing Adaptation (SHA) Grants and Home Improvement and Structural Alteration (HISA) Grants, to help veterans remain in their homes longer.

Non-Medicaid Government Assistance for Home Modification: The Department of Housing and Urban Development offers HUD Home Improvement Loans, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture offers Rural Repair and Rehabilitation Grants. Additionally, quite a few states offer various assistance programs that are referred to as “nursing home diversion programs,” and some of these programs offer home modification as a benefit. Review this list of state assistance programs that offer home modification benefits to see if there’s a program available for you.

Non-Profit and Foundation Assistance for Home Modifications: Many non-profits and organizations (such as Rebuilding Together) offer financial aid and volunteer labor to help older adults remain in their homes. Another option is finding local, volunteer community resources and projects that may help assist with home modifications.

Set your sights on home sweet home…forever

People are living longer and the percentage of older adults in the U.S. is on the rise. This means there is an increased demand for long-term care solutions. The good news is remaining independent and autonomous in the home you know and love as you age is possible. With the right planning and assistance, older adults can easily make modifications to the home — such as updating the lighting in the home, taking advantage of assistive technologies and even renovating the home to accommodate live-in care. Make these changes now and create a comfortable and safe space that you can continue to call home…forever.

Bio

Wendy Meyeroff, a plain language expert in B2B and B2C health/tech communications, has helped clients across the U.S. for 20+ years with journalism and marketing materials. Wendy has a specialty: writing for and about boomers, and mentoring outreach to ages 50+.

          The post Aging in place: Renovating with independence in mind appeared first on Freshome.com.

Aging in place: Renovating with independence in mind

Getty Images/Mint Images RF

Most Americans settle in a home, envisioning a permanent life refuge. Achieving this vision of aging in place, though, means preparing the home now to anticipate future needs. Doing so successfully can allow older adults to remain independent, autonomous and in charge of their home security as they age.

As many as 94% of today’s older adults (defined as ages 65+) wish to stay in their own homes as long as possible. This group, as of 2010, accounted for 13% of the population (40 million people), and that number is projected to increase to 20% of the population by 2030.

Studies show there are numerous benefits to home-based aging, such as increased life satisfaction, quality of life and self-esteem. Maintaining familiar surroundings and connections is also a benefit, allowing older adults to remain close to friends and neighbors, keep the same doctors and visit favorite coffee shops and grocery stores.

The time is now to start planning for down-the-road needs, like modifying your home to accommodate future accessibility needs, home security and even live-in care. It is important to understand the appropriate renovations that may be required and to equip the home with modifications that are right for you and any caretakers providing attention as you age in place.

What you should know about designing a home while aging in place

Studies confirm there are benefits to keeping older adults in their homes longer, such as maintaining more independence and connection to friends and family, as well as avoiding the high costs of institutional care. Luckily, there are many options, services and helpful solutions available to help us stay independent as we age at home.

Basic home renovations

Improve lighting

Improving the lighting in the home is an inexpensive solution that can provide an increased sense of safety and security for older adults — safeguarding against stumbling and falling, as well as break-ins. Consider adding lighting strips to stairways and other dark areas inside the home, as well as installing exterior lights that can be programmed to turn on and off, creating a pattern to deter break-ins. Nightlights are also a recommended addition — great for hallways, bathrooms and on or near steps.

Add easy-use fixtures and safety considerations

These simple home modifications are easy to implement and can have a significant impact on improving security and comfort in the home as we age:

Install oversized light switches ($6 to $28)

Replace faucet knobs with levers ($22 to $400)

Use automated garage door openers ($128 to $250)

Purchase larger digital display options for remote controls, phones, and screens ($7 to $545)

Add grab bars or rails around the home to prevent falls and improve mobility ($14 to $100)

Consider chair and toilet lifts ($18 – $100)

Use cord covers to prevent tripping and falling ($10 to $50)

Update your flooring

Falls are prevalent as we age in what should be our safest environment: our home. And flooring is often the biggest culprit. Loose rugs, slip-inducing mats, and curly edges on carpets are among the most common dangers. Many preventive measures are easy, DIY and often relatively inexpensive. Here’s what you need to do:

Secure rugs throughout the home: Use double-faced, anti-slip rug tape to secure the edges of all area rugs firmly to the floor. Or consider using an underneath rug pad, with options adhering to vinyl, hardwood and other flooring. In the bathroom, use bathmats with a good, surface-gripping backing.

Install anti-slip flooring throughout the home: Ensuring the type of flooring installed in the home (and especially in the bathroom) isn’t slippery is an important consideration for older adults. Some anti-slip flooring options include vinyl, ceramic tiles, and even bamboo.

Contrast for visibility while moving throughout the home: Consider varying the colors and textures of the flooring used throughout the home to provide better visual guidance, especially in transitional areas in the home, such as a sunken living room.

Advanced home renovations

Sophisticated upgrades to help current and future home healthcare needs not only add protections, they often heighten future selling prices. Keep in mind for some of these more advanced home modification tips, outsourcing to a professional may be necessary.

Assistive renovations

Widen your doorways: Even just carrying packages can make doorways impassable, so imagine providing adequate space for assistive devices like wheelchairs. To meet Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) accessibility standards, doorways should be at least 36 inches wide.

Add a stairlift: Unless you’re enjoying single-story living (or unless you have a downstairs bedroom and bath), many people need to navigate stairs in the home. In these cases, stairlifts are a great tool.

Keeping the home secure

Home security systems are an essential tool for being alerted to dangers you may not sense, like fire, carbon monoxide and break-ins. And these tools become even more critical for older adults. According to the National Fire Protection Association, people ages 65+ are twice as likely to be injured or killed by house fires, compared to the rest of the population.

For outside the home, consider installing security cameras, which can allow loved ones to monitor fall-prone areas around the home. 

Assistive technology

There is a lot of assistive technology available today, including devices, software programs and equipment that’s specifically designed to help people work around their challenges — from arthritis-friendly light switches and easier-to-grip drawer pulls, to computer voice recognition programs, entryway ramps and more. Here are a few assistive devices for you to consider when updating your home for current or future assistive needs:

Clap-detection lights: Turning on lights with the clap of your hands makes turning lights on/off much easier. Plus, set the device in its “away” mode, and your lights will turn on with the detection of any sound, which can deter break-ins.

Smart entryway: Assistive tools like key finders, keyless doors and doorbell cameras make entering the home and monitoring activity at the front door easier. Learning who is at the front door from the safety of your couch reduces the need for unnecessary movement around the home, which can also prevent accidents and falls. 

Home hub automation: Smart home options are now available to provide a one-stop solution for controlling your digital life at home, from programmable temperature controls and sophisticated home security systems to playing music and helping you keep track of appointments. For example, Amazon’s Alexa allows users to easily keep track of daily activities, call their doctor and even order food. And home hub security systems can offer older adults a greater sense of control over the safety of their home and valuables, all from the leisure of their couch.

Why designing with in-home care in mind is a good idea

Considering the high costs of long term care options in the U.S., it’s not surprising people are turning to alternative solutions. Although costs vary by state, let’s take a look at the average monthly costs of some of the more common long-term care options available:

A private nursing home room: $8,364 per month

A semi-private nursing home room: $7,362 per month

Assisted living facility: $3,862 per month

Adult day health care: $1,562 per month

To avoid these costs, and if in-home care is your goal, it’s important to start making plans now — so you’re not managing last-minute renovations and home modifications to accommodate the needs of caretakers at the same time your health takes a turn. 

Some of the in-home care services you may need to consider planning for include health care aides, registered nurses, physical therapists, social workers and other specialists that make home visits. Your in-home caregiver might also be a companion or a loved one. Regardless of who is providing the care, it’s important to ensure your home is ready, so you can more easily adapt should the need arise.

Renovating your home for the future

When renovating your home, it’s important to keep future health challenges in mind, and the possibility of needing in-home care. Understanding your needs — and the needs of others potentially sharing your space — will create a more harmonious and comfortable environment while aging in place.

Creating a bedroom on the main floor of the home is ideal — allowing for easier accessibility throughout the home. In addition to reducing the use of stairs, main floors also provide faster exits to safety in case of emergencies — like injuries, break-ins or fires.

To accommodate live-in care, or for having loved ones stay, a separate bedroom is an essential consideration. Make sure the room has easy access to a bathroom, and even consider installing a small kitchen. 

You’ll also want to equip your home for caregiver accessibility, including:

Installing smart locks, so people who take care of you always have access to the home.

Ensuring caregivers have access to WiFi, so they’re connected in the event of an emergency, or to purchase necessary items online.

Providing caregivers access to security systems, so they can help monitor the home in an emergency.

Adding more electrical outlets in the home, in case there is medical equipment to set up in the future.

Creating wider doorways and entryways for wheelchairs, as well as ramps for wheelchair accessibility.

Financial assistance for home modifications

Paying for Senior Care outlines four sources of assistance available for those needing to make home modifications to accommodate the needs of older adults and of those with disabilities, including financial loans, grants, labor and equipment loans:

Four types of assistance for home modifications

Low-interest loans: Some organizations, mainly governmental, offer low-interest loans for home modifications or guarantee loans so banks are less restrictive with their lending requirements. Since these are loans, they do need to be paid back.

Home improvement grants: These (usually one-time) grants are available for a specific home modification purpose, and do not need to be repaid.

Free labor: Another form of assistance is free labor to make home improvements. This is commonly offered by non-profit organizations or charities. Materials are not covered. The building of a wheelchair ramp is a common example.

Equipment loans: Some organizations make free, long-term loans of home modification materials. As an example, a portable wheelchair ramp that does not need to be returned until the borrower moves from their home or no longer requires the use of it.

Options for financial planning

There are also several programs and other assistance programs available for qualified individuals to take advantage of to help with home modifications for the purpose of keeping older adults at home longer. Some of the most notable options are:

Medicare Advantage: Beginning in 2019, Medicare Advantage (MA) plans now include benefits for home modifications, such as assisting with the addition of grab bars, stairlifts, and wheelchair ramps in the home

Medicaid HCBS Waivers and Home Modifications: Most states have Home and Community-Based Services (HCBS) Waivers, which help qualified individuals stay at home and receive in-home care and assistance with home modifications. Each state offers different programs with different eligibility requirements and benefits. 

Veterans Programs for Home Modifications: The Veterans Administration (VA) offers grants, including Specially Adapted Housing (SAH) Grants, Special Housing Adaptation (SHA) Grants and Home Improvement and Structural Alteration (HISA) Grants, to help veterans remain in their homes longer.

Non-Medicaid Government Assistance for Home Modification: The Department of Housing and Urban Development offers HUD Home Improvement Loans, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture offers Rural Repair and Rehabilitation Grants. Additionally, quite a few states offer various assistance programs that are referred to as “nursing home diversion programs,” and some of these programs offer home modification as a benefit. Review this list of state assistance programs that offer home modification benefits to see if there’s a program available for you.

Non-Profit and Foundation Assistance for Home Modifications: Many non-profits and organizations (such as Rebuilding Together) offer financial aid and volunteer labor to help older adults remain in their homes. Another option is finding local, volunteer community resources and projects that may help assist with home modifications.

Set your sights on home sweet home…forever

People are living longer and the percentage of older adults in the U.S. is on the rise. This means there is an increased demand for long-term care solutions. The good news is remaining independent and autonomous in the home you know and love as you age is possible. With the right planning and assistance, older adults can easily make modifications to the home — such as updating the lighting in the home, taking advantage of assistive technologies and even renovating the home to accommodate live-in care. Make these changes now and create a comfortable and safe space that you can continue to call home…forever.

Bio

Wendy Meyeroff, a plain language expert in B2B and B2C health/tech communications, has helped clients across the U.S. for 20+ years with journalism and marketing materials. Wendy has a specialty: writing for and about boomers, and mentoring outreach to ages 50+.

         The post Aging in place: Renovating with independence in mind appeared first on Freshome.com.

from https://freshome.com/renovation/aging-renovating-with-independence-in-mind/ via Aging in place: Renovating with independence in mind

Morals/Matricide | Self-Para

Shrieks filled the air. Tragedy had struck, and there was no way around that. While the areas of Lanford that had once seen lush, lively and livid with bustling people and the sheer vibrancy of life in pseudo-metropolis weren’t entirely vacated, silence hung over them as a court of viewers spectating a public execution. The air was dead. It beckoned for the hawking of a crow, the drop of a pin, anything to break the lack of noise that seemed so brittle in the suburban streets that it could crack should anyone open a window; and yet, it didn’t.

But the world around Sam was not silent. White noise screamed around her, hisses and hazes screeching in her ears, unintelligible mumbles and yells from strangers not in her line of sight. There were bodies-- people, perhaps. At least, vague outlines of them. Faces and limbs blurred, smeared across her peripherals and melting into each other, a bizarre Dali or Ernst painting. None of them mattered. No one mattered.

Heels clacked along the sidewalk outside of the hospital, ankles wearing down. She’d ran from the park, from the tent, from the fire that grew exponentially like a cancer on the tarp, stands and apparent souls that it consumed. The park wasn’t too far from the hospital, nor from her own apartment; she could’ve very well run home instead, sat there like a coward in her shelter until whatever horrendous apocalypse outside had passed over and was nothing more than a news headline in the morning that would soon be forgotten about as more global politics consumed every outlet.

But she had to go. Had to. There was no other option but to.

She’d seen the firemen and paramedics arrive, seen what few straggler cops come by as if there was any other prime objective in the entire city to tend to (Perhaps a drug bust in North End seemed more important). And soon, a swarm of them had arrived, too late in time for her own comfort. She saw stretchers, people carried out, limping, crawling, emerging from smoke like a macabre rebirth. Perhaps that’s when they were taken, when they’d managed to get out. Someone was doing their job.

She’d made her way home, sat on the front stoop to the apartment for far too long, lost in the thought, perhaps in shock, of what would happen to all those back at the masquerade. She knew someone had died. Well, perhaps not knew-- but the likelihood of no one losing their life in the disaster seemed unlikely.

It was almost dawn when the phone call reached her. Details scarce, she was drawn to the hospital in concern of her “family”.

Automatic doors slid open, practically at her command even if it was merely a mundane electronic routine for them, and heels clicked on linoleum rather than cement.

The emergency room wasn’t anything unexpected.

Every seat occupied, standing room only. Some wept. Some were silent. Unintelligible noisiness from behind the scenes, the medical wards themselves, leaked out into the space, more white noise to cut through the bleak. Not all of them were there because of the fire; it hadn’t injured the entire town. Of course the world still turned and people still did stupid things or were shot or got into car crashes when fires broke out. These people still would come here. But yet again, they didn’t matter.

“Did Andrew Blackwood check in here today?” Manicured hands slammed down on the desk before her. The woman on the other side, some short, Lisa Loeb-looking type with uber-chapped lips stared up in near awe.

“Ma’am, what’s your name?”

“Samantha Blackwood, now answer the goddamn question.”

“Do you bear any relation to An--”

“Just answer the fucking question, you useless cunt.”

“Please don’t use that tone with me, miss, I’m trying to help you.” She rapidly tapped away on the computer, perhaps searching databases for something that should’ve been a simple yes or no question.

“A state senator checks into an emergency room in the wake of a town-wide disaster, and you’re telling me you can’t fucking remember if you saw him or not? Is he here, yes or fucking no?”

In the corner of her eye, she saw the door to the back swing open as an orderly called someone else to come in.

“There is indeed a Blackwood checked into the ICU right now, bu--”

“Thanks.”

She bolted through the open door, nearly knocking the orderly in her bizarrely Lisa Frank scrubs over. Squeaks on the tiles, the taffeta and tulle of her dress flying behind her in lieu of smoke or dust from wheels.

“MISS--!”

Whatever the receptionist had to say was gone behind her, lost to the sound of crying patients, beeping hospital equipment and the ringing in Sam’s head that grew, tinnitus off of its tracks, perhaps an oncoming migraine.

Andrew. Where was Andrew?

Fuck Eliza.

It really didn’t matter to her where her mother was. She knew they both were in the tent when the fire broke out. Far from the entrance, at that. Perhaps they had been trapped in for a while. Perhaps they both managed to escape. Both Eliza and Andrew were too paranoid and high-strung for their own good to brush off any remote injuries; Eliza had checked herself into the emergency room for being pricked with a thorn from a rose her husband had given her. But if she had gone up in flames like the saganaki she enjoyed once a month, it would all be for the better. As long as Andrew was alive. He mattered. At least a little bit.

White. Everywhere around her was white. White floors, white walls, white curtains, oppressive white fluorescent lighting. Perhaps she stood out in grey, but the dress itself may have been what stood out moreso than the color.

Eyes darted around, wildly, for any signs of him-- Eliza’s dress would stand out if she were to see it anywhere. A hideous, voluminous ensemble of deep yellow-orange would perhaps now be singed to black. But Andrew’s matching suit would stand out just as well.

Through cracks at the edges of curtains, nothing was to be seen.

“The ICU” the Loeb had said, and an elevator trip and another quarrel with a receptionist, Sam found herself outside the room wherever one of her parents rested.

“Please tell me it’s Andrew,” she grumbled to the accompanying nurse, who held her elbow gingerly; perhaps it was for comfort, perhaps it was for control. Sam knew she could burst into a tirade and a tantrum at any moment. Security could be called if she got out of control. But as she stood, fingers prying at each other as if begging to dig under her acrylics, she was still.

“Miss, we--”

“Save it.”

“But you--”

“Just stop fucking talking. Please.”

There was a beat. A pause.

She looked upwards, up at the lengthy lights that ran across the ceiling like highway lane stripes, bearing down on the hallway below like a judgmental god. Then down at her shoes again, tips scuffed from her journey, rhinestones still perfectly in place.

She should go in. She knew she should. And so, so she glanced-- a simple lean forward and glance to the left to peer into the room. The yellow was striking; yet, she couldn’t make out what it was, the suit or the dress, from behind the curtain. It was clear that the fabric wasn’t really on its wearer, so much as draped on some coat rack or chair right behind the curtain that obstructed her view of the sole resident of the room. The sound of a breathing machine and the beeping of a heartbeat were the only sounds inside.

She pulled back, turning to the nurse.

“Where’s the other one? Whoever it is?”

The nurse bit her lip, her own hands fidgeting near her waist in a way not unlike what Sam’s own were doing.

“Miss, that’s what I was trying to tell you.”

Sam’s eyebrow raised briefly, too shaky to be as intimidating as she would’ve preferred.

“Only one of them has made it this far.”

“‘This far’?” Her voice nearly cracked.

“They both were rushed in together, and... Perhaps we should sit down.”

“No.”

“Do you understand what I’m trying to tell you, miss?”

“Stop saying ‘Miss’ as if I’m some irrelevant. You know our goddamn name. Now call me Sam or Miss Blackwood or something.”

“Alright, well, Samantha, do you u--”

“I said Sam, you absolute twit. You’re so fucking incompetent.”

“Sam, do you understand what I’m trying to get across to you?”

“One of them is dead.”

“I...”

“Is that not what you’re saying?” She stared into the girl’s eyes, her own red and sore, yet tears did not well up quite yet. She was not about to cry in front of a stranger. Enough people cried in hospitals. It was too cliché. She would not allow it.

“It... is... Indeed.”

“Then thank you. I don’t think your useless services will be required much further here.”

“You’d like me to leave?” The girl bit her lip.

“Yes, you stupid bitch, go back to your post or changing bedpans or whatever it is you do.”

“Alright... I’ll... send the doctor in soon.”

“Don’t fucking bother. I don’t need to know about any prognosis or whatever. If a doctor was that important to the situation, he’d be the one here talking to me about a dead parent, not you and your fresh-out-of-med-school, doe-eyed ineptitude.”

She stood there for another moment, almost in awe, unable to move. Maybe out of fear, or uncertainty of what to do, but as Sam’s eyes widened, her lips pressed into a firm line, the girl finally turned on her slippered heels and bolted back to her station.

Fists gripping at handfuls of fabric at her thighs, it was a miracle it didn’t shred under the sharpness of her nails. Knuckles turned white, begging to shred the rice paper skin over top.

She had to go inside.

She had to know who it was.

Why wouldn’t you just fucking ask?

It was stupid. Stupid to need to see for herself, to have the knowledge be tangible rather than verbal, to see for herself which parent was remaining.

Perhaps then she would know whether to mourn or not.

Please be Andrew.

She would never say it out loud.

Her own relationship with him was well beyond “estranged”; as long as he still fed into her material desires and kept her connected to his bank account, she could say they were still on good terms. He was a man of morals. The black sheep in his family for the mere fact that he was democratic-- and made his way into the Senate as such-- when it was a miracle his family could stand upright considering how far they all leaned to the right. But she never was close to him. They never shared intimate moments. She had safely told that therapist whose name escaped her almost a year ago that both he and Eliza failed as parents in that regard. She would have no reason to feel upset at his passing.

And yet, the fact that he wasn’t an insufferable force of nature of condescension, patronizing, self-indulging, high-strung shrieking that Eliza was. Andrew not being a Passive Aggressive Queen of the Universe himself made him instantly worthy of a tear or two.

A sigh and a grunt later, she turned into the room, the view of its resident still hidden.

“What could be behind curtain number one...” she mumbled.

The air hung heavy with silence. The tap of her heel-- always at the back of her mind throughout the day-- nearly matched the rhythmic pulse of the heart monitor, and slower still, the breathing machine gasped in and out every couple seconds.

The heap of fabric visible under the curtain made itself more visible-- yellow faded into black and grey at parts that had been singed, burnt into nothingness. Which garment it was still wasn’t clear; only bits were seen sweeping the floor.

With one more step, she rounded the curtain, eyes still fixated on the clothes before the person in the bed, and her answer became obvious.

The dress was in shambles, rags, tattered and torn, almost all of it but what touched the ground wrinkled and burned into blackness. It’s volume depleted, shape nonexistent. Thousands of dollars wasted.

Her breath held.

The breathing machine continued, almost in lieu of her own inhalation.

Eliza laid in the bed, nearly unrecognizable. A thin film of what might as well have been saran wrap isolated all but her face from the rest of the world. She was covered in black; green-tinged darkness that crinkled and peeled at random places. But by far the most shocking bit were the cuts-- nearly gridlike slices in her flesh that left her seared flesh in pieces, giant planes with deep rivers of pink in between them. From Sam’s own view, it seemed as if nothing of her hadn’t been consumed by the flames. It seemed almost impossible that she wasn’t already dead. Wires and IVs branched off from each arm, from random places on her body, tracking her vitals.

And then her face. Obstructed by the tube shoved down her throat, it, too, had a majority of it covered in the swamp-green blackness of the burn that everything else was. It swelled, gigantic, her natural features, one Sam could identify as pretty and inherited by herself had they not been ruined by association with Eliza’s personality, were gone amidst the destruction. Only two locks of her bleached hair remained, the rest, shriveled to nothing or gone altogether.

Gone was Eliza’s outer armor of beauty. Her vanity had been one thing that she made clear in previous days as important to her, always pulling out her compact to recheck herself in the middle of conversations or rantings at Sam. The woman that laid on the bed, breathed in peace, was hideous. An ogre. The monstrosity of who she was was finally visible on the outside for the world to see, but for Sam, it was only a culmination that she’d been waiting every day of her life to see.

“Of course it’s you.”

Her hands relaxed, rested limp at her side.

She stood at the end of the bed, staring at the creature before her, its chest rising and lowering in sync with the machine to its left.

A knock at the door broke what could’ve been serenity.

“You’re not allowed to be in here.” The man at the door’s white coat and clipboard announced what he was before he even breathed it out the next words. “I’m Dr. Guthrie... And you would be?”

“This woman’s daughter.” Her body remained still, only her head turning to look at him with her watery eyes. Tears were forming, indeed, but not because of Eliza. Or, perhaps it was because of them-- because it was her who laid in the bed with a chance of survival and not her husband. “You should know. Aren’t you the clown that called me?”

“You still shouldn’t be in here, Ms. Blackwood.”

“Are you going to not allow me to see her? Am I in the way of someone’s work?”

“Well--”

“Because as far as I can see, you’ve left her here. ICU, my ass. Are there more critical patients that everyone’s run off to take care of? Is she just supposed to stay here like a victim of the Salem witch trials while you lot run around filming scenes for Grey’s Anatomy?”

“Ms. Blackwood, I--”

“I really don’t fucking care.”

“I just want you to know that we’ve done all we can at the moment.”

“I said I don’t fucking care, but where does that leave her?”

He paused, biting his lip. His eyes bounced, from daughter to mother and back again.

“She hasn’t been breathing on her own. She's scheduled to go into surgery again soon for debridement of the outer layers of skin in the morning.”

“It is the morning.”

“Around ten.”

“And you think she’ll survive?”

He paused again. And before he opened his mouth to speak, she spoke over him--

“You don’t have to worry about sparing my feelings. Bedside manner is bullshit. I just want to know what to expect.”

“Full recovery does not seem likely.”

“So, she’d be like this for the rest of her life?”

“Internally, she’s mostly in shape-- her breathing is the main concern; she hasn’t been conscious since she was brought in, and we’re not sure if that could change.”

“Were you also the one that treated my father?”

“I meant to extend my condolences on that part.”

“You could’ve called earlier, you know.”

“We--”

“Frankly, I don’t care. Was he dead on arrival?”

He silenced himself again.

“Listen, Dr. Quack, are you, like, Nell, or something? You have the communication skills of a recluse. What’s the matter with you?”

“Ms. Blackw--”

“Just leave me with her for a moment. Please.”

He nodded, before scurrying off, not unlike the nurse. He paused at the door:

“You should really be wearing a mask and a gown.”

He shut the door behind himself.

She turned her head again, facing the beast on the bed.

And after a moment, she walked, moving to the side to seat herself in the only other chair in the space not occupied by a destroyed piece of couture.

She leaned in, staring at the devastation on Eliza’s body even closer-- cracks, fissures, hints of muscle visible in the valleys between skin continents, surprisingly such little blood visible. Perhaps it wasn’t safe to be around her-- exposing her to external contamination and whatnot. But then again, the sheet that covered her seemed to have that part taken care of.

“You’re really fucking ugly, you know that, mom?”

She squinted her eyes, staring at the Halloween mask of a face that rested on the pillow. Her eyelashes were missing, yet her lids seemed like the only part of her face that remained intact.

“You used to tell me that. I know.”

Eliza’s lips seemed stretched, plastic surgery gone wrong.

“I was never good-looking enough for you. But we looked kinda the same before this, no? I have your cheekbones. Your nose. Your smile. Your lips. Dad’s eyes, I suppose, but your face was mine. Do you think that was part of it? That you thought you, yourself, were never as beautiful as dad said you were, or how you told yourself in every mirror that you were the most gorgeous woman in the world? Did you think that was a lie? And rather than tell it to your own face, you told it to mine, to try and watch me tumble into insecurity, huh?”

She smiled. The thought that Eliza’s current face could no longer do that was almost comforting.

“You failed. Like much of your parenting, you failed that. I never thought I was ugly. And until the day I’m as hideous of a person as you were-- or, are, if you could look yourself in the mirror right now-- I will never think that.”

She leaned forward again, scooting the chair even closer, practically breathing in the unconscious woman’s ear.

“But your personality was always the ugliest part. Shrill. Screaming. Demeaning. You set the standard for horrible mothers in the world. For bitches in every TV show. Set an example of whatever paths should not be followed. You know, you mocked Jodi for not vaccinating her kids-- and yet she still tries to love them. You couldn’t love me. Or at least, you refused to, and I suppose I’ll never get to understand that. At least not now, will I? You can’t wake up and answer me-- and even if you were awake, you wouldn’t tell me. Is that because there’s no reason? There’s no reason for you not to love and support me? No reason for you to treat me as if I was the bane of your existence and the source of every anxiety and struggle you faced?

“You didn’t face any struggles, you bitch. The rich do not face more issues than the poor just because you have too much cash to count. You can waste it all on valium and vodka, but that doesn’t mean you’ll ever have to need any of it. You grew up wealthy, you married wealthy, you’re straight and white, and your parents didn’t beat you like you always said I should be lucky you didn’t do to me. You slapped. You struck. You didn’t beat me unconscious or bruise me, but you laid one too many hands on me whenever you lost your temper because you don’t know how to handle a little bit of sass. 

“You don’t know how to handle anything, actually, when I think about it. You couldn’t handle being single, so you found the richest, handsomest available guy in New York to call your own. You couldn’t handle responsibility about birth control, apparently, or else I wouldn’t be here. And you couldn’t handle the idea of an abortion because you still went through with a child it’s clear you never wanted. You couldn’t handle a baby, you couldn’t handle a toddler, you couldn’t handle a pre-teen, you couldn’t handle a teen, you couldn’t handle an adult. You could never manage self-sufficiency, either; living off of your own parents’ money like you’ve given me so much fucking flack for my entire life, then soon found yourself clinging to your husband and claiming his networth for your own. The only thing I know you can handle is your drinks and drugs. At least that’s one thing we kinda have in common.

“You were the source of every issue I’ve had in my life. I was not good enough. I wasn’t worthy of your affection. I couldn’t have my birthdays about me, they had to be about you and your clique of cunt friends who just love to compare their husband’s dick sizes and whatever Ralph Lauren purchases you’ve made. Straight A’s still meant I wasn’t smart enough for you, even my taste in clothes wasn’t good enough for you-- newsflash, bitch, Balmain and Balenciaga will always trounce a Chanel suit when it’s all you wear, and your Gucci staples are the biggest fashion faux pas I’ve seen since the 2012 Met Gala.”

She laughed. Perhaps she was delving too much into joke territory. If only Eliza could hear this. A glance around-- there weren’t any cameras. No one could hear this. Or see this. It was almost unfortunate there wasn’t an audience. And almost unfortunate Eliza wasn’t awake to turn the scene into a full-on production.

“I know, I know-- I didn’t make it easy for you. I didn’t take orders. I didn’t take rudeness easily. Flippancy, facetiousness, bitching back and forth for hours, it all something I could’ve avoided. But what do you want from me? What did you want from me? To apologize for having a personality? To just let you steamroll me and for me to just lay there like a ragdoll on autopilot to make you satisfied when you were never going to really care if I did well?

“I did do well-- I’m doing well. I’ve done more than you ever have in your entire, insufferable life. No, I didn’t marry rich, but I could if I tried. No, I don’t have lunch with the Romneys and attend the 2017 inauguration-- neither of which I’d be proud of, anyway-- but I have things you don’t. I have a place I chose for myself without making someone else miserable in the process. I have a job that I’m happy with. Yes, your sister-in-law got it for me, but I still have it. I have a friend. You’ve met him, you know. His name is Jude. No, he’s not a cop. No, he’s not some other fashion maven. He’s a rocker. I think he’s broke. But no, he’s not leeching off of me like you would assume, either. But he’s one of the most amazing people I’ve ever met, and our times together are not spent comparing our superficial struggles and trying to outdo each other in the same field, because that’s not what it’s about. But I don’t expect you to understand that. I don’t know what you value. Money, maybe, but it flies out of your hand far more often than it does mine, so maybe you don’t value anything.

“And that’s totally fine, you know. It’s totally okay to not have standards, rules for yourself, things to have sacred. It’s fine. I just try not to make the world around me worse for it. No, I’m not a nice person a lot of the time, but I’m not actively trying to ruin people’s life. I don’t have someone that I brought into this world and have responsibility over and fuck them over at every chance I get because I like to see little children cry-- well, that’s a lie, I do, hence me stealing candy from a baby on the boardwalk last summer, so I guess that makes me a hypocrite, but you are a black hole, Eliza. You are the quintessence of virility, of the reason people think the upper class is out of control, you are the source of all evil in the household that I grew up in, and you have not suffered one day in your life because of a family of cunts bearing down on you.

“Well, you know what, that might be unfair of me to say. Maybe you did. Maybe you went through the same things I did. Maybe your mother really was an uber cunt-- you never let me see it. But if I was you, I wouldn’t bring that full circle. I would not choose to make my child miserable because the same was done to me. Like I said, I know I’m not a nice person a lot of the time. Maybe I’m net-evil at that because I say evil things all the time and get a kick out of being a casual villain, but I try to do good things at times. I try to be nice. I have friends for that-- especially Jude. You don’t. You may have experienced whatever hells the Rheiders put you through, but you just became one of their numbers in the process. The Blackwoods are not much better.

“And in fact, that’s why I wish dad was where you are right now. At least having some chance of survival. Not being wiped out of this world without a fighting shot. He was like me. He was a victim of at least some goodness in a family full of nothing but horror. His brothers are pigs. His parents are garbage. They’re your crowd. Maybe you thought he was like them; maybe that’s why you married him. But he was a good fucking man, you know? That’s why he kept taking care of me. That’s why he didn’t cut me off despite all your horrendous attempts at ruining my life even when I wasn’t in it anymore. You didn’t fucking care about the money I was spending. You wouldn’t have even known. Yeah, I know I spend as much money in a month as the average American household does in a year, but is that not what you do weekly? Context is the key here, and you wouldn’t have felt the impact I left on that bank account if you weren’t obsessively checking it to find reasons to do me in.”

She laughed again, finally leaning back in the chair.

“Funny, isn’t it? How you always called me a leech? A dependent. Yeah. I’m a dependent. I depended on you and-- fuck it, just Andrew’s money. And here you are, your life hanging on by a thread, dependent on machinery and the works of other people to keep you from slipping away.”

She glanced at the machine-- an series of thick tubes that somehow funneled to one that slipped into her mouth, keeping her lungs inflated. She stood up, moving over to it, eyes scanning whatever nonsense floated by on a screen about how many breaths she took in a minute. It didn’t mean anything to her. It just meant Eliza was alive.

All that stood between Sam and salvation was this machine.

She turned back to her mother.

“I think it’s also even funnier that you burned. You’ll burn again, you know. You were so concerned with God. A casual Christian, so perhaps not that concerned, but you did tell me I was going to hell once or twice. But I guarantee you, if I’m there, you’ll be several circles deeper than I am. Or did you not read Dante’s Inferno? Maybe you weren’t that interested. Or maybe you just weren’t that intellectual. I never saw you read anything.”

She bent down by the machine, tracing the wires, the tubes-- finding where it plugged itself into the wall. The source.

She glanced back up at Eliza-- restful, peaceful, far too content since she wasn’t being tormented by fire. It was all so undeserving.

She stayed down fingers resting on the plug at the socket.

Could she do this?

It felt too right. There wasn’t a shakiness in her hands. There wasn’t the nervousness that one would assume would come. The cable called to her, like the knife from months ago that she dragged across her wrist, told her this was the thing to do.

“I wished death upon you many nights, you know. Wished so many times you were just out of my life. And even when I was finally living alone-- four years ago, can you believe it?-- that wasn’t good enough, because I still had to see you from time to time. I wished you would get into a crash. Perhaps someone would try to assassinate dad, and hit you instead. Or that we lived in 18th century France and you were guillotined. That’d be entertaining. And it seems... I may have finally gotten my wish.”

She yanked the cord.

The hissing of the breathing machine stopped.

All that filled the room was the beep of Eliza’s heartbeat.

Slower.

And slower.

She rose, hand still clutching the cord, eyes wide.

It was happening.

Her chest didn’t move.

The monitor was practically sloping downward.

And finally...

A flatline.

The beep stayed ringing, consistent, long.

Any moment, she expected the door to burst open, medics running to attend. She needed to wait as long as possible. Let it be real.

She bent back down, rushed, shoved the plug back into the socket to let the breathing resume.

Standing up again, Eliza’s chest moved under the carnage of flesh and the clear sheet.

But the monitor did not fluctuate.

“I’ll be happy to see you in hell, mom.”

The door flew open.

Practically a mob of medics flooding in, rushing to the bedside with whatever horrendous array of revival tools they had to help revive her.

She stood back, at their command, their words gone not registering in her ears. Her eyes stayed on Eliza’s disfigured face, seeing her unmoving eyes, her chest still bouncing as if that movement meant life inside still occurred.

Their actions were not visible, a blur in her peripherals, chaos in the room trying to bring back something that had left and all that mattered to Sam was that it was gone.

Her mother was gone.

Her parents were dead.

With a twitch of an eyelid, she smiled, staring off at Eliza’s face, through her face, into nothingness as the medics realized the fruitfulness of their attempts.

And so she turned, moving for the door, the dress trailing after her once again as her heels tapped on the tile, leaving behind a corpse that no longer had its perfectly-manicured ironfist grip on her life.

She was free.

Will you be able to keep your IoT devices away from hackers?

While you’re thinking about a future dominated by robots and holograms, or at least “smarter” phones, studies show that these technological inventions are meant to enhance our entertainment and not actually improve our day-to-day tasks. The real potential of disruption is owned by the Internet of Things (IoT) industry.

Big companies, such as Samsung, Qualcomm, LG, Huawei, and Intel, have already seen this and are all filling patents with the hope of establishing product leadership in the future. How many patents you may ask? Just these five companies combined hold over 13,300 IoT patents to this date, which makes IoT one of today’s most-researched emerging markets.

Let’s look at the state of the IoT market at the beginning of 2019:

7 billion IoT devices

17 billion connected devices

$151 billion IoT market evaluation

$64 billion worth of Industry 4.0 products and services

90% of senior execs in technology, media, and telecommunications industries say IoT is critical to some or all lines of their business

If you can’t properly understand the significance of these numbers by themselves, let us explain this market growth like this: If the industry continues to evolve at the same speed, the number of IoT devices will exceed the number of smartphones in the next three years!

https://iot-analytics.com/state-of-the-iot-update-q1-q2-2018-number-of-iot-devices-now-7b/

With more than 18 billion IoT devices in consumers’ homes, industry experts and potential customers are questioning their security. And they are perfectly right to do so. Currently, 80% of existing IoT devices are not adequately secured.

Why is IoT device security so weak?

The security issues that befall IoT devices is not new. The IoT industry might seem new, but having smart appliances in our homes is definitely not new. Actually, the first Internet-connected appliance was invented as early as 1982: a Coke vending machine. From there, the industry has seen efforts from Microsoft and P&G in 1999, from Helsinki University of Technology in 2002 (when the term “Internet of Things” was first used), and finally, the concept we’re studying today being born in 2008. More than 10 years of innovation and yet, the security issues didn’t find closure.

The risks can be understood by looking back to 2016, when the biggest DDoS attack at the time occurred. A Denial-of-Service (DoS) attack is when a machine connected to the Internet is used to “flood” a targeted server with superfluous requests, making it unavailable for an extended period of time. Given the fact that most companies aren’t hosting their software on only one machine but on an entire warehouse’s worth of servers, a one-on-one attack seems useless. But let’s look at the extra “D” in DDoS: Distributed-Dos attack. That’s when the hacker uses multiple machines to perform their flooding attack.

The attacker can buy and install all these computers in their home, but that is highly unlikely. Even if they have the funds, it’ll be so easy to track the massive purchase or their physical location.

They can infect people’s computers or phones. But since most of the operating systems now come with pre-installed firewall and antivirus programs, this method is becoming less feasible.

Or the attacker can leverage a network of poorly-secured IoT devices sitting in people’s homes all over the world and direct their computational power towards a target server. That’s the easy solution right there?

That’s exactly what happened in 2016 when the attacker developed the Mirai malware that was searching for IoT devices that were still using the default password. The result was devastating. And the next attack happened in less than a month after the first, shutting down Amazon, SoundCloud, Reddit, Spotify, and many other websites all at once!

https://blog.cloudflare.com/inside-mirai-the-infamous-iot-botnet-a-retrospective-analysis/

A network of 18 billion unprotected IoT devices is not only dangerous for their actual owners, but it could put the entire open Internet in danger.

There’s any solution for secured IoT devices?

The problem is rooted from the development of IoT systems. The proposed architecture is centralized and ineffective: devices have to connect to a central cloud server to perform their operations. It can be Google Cloud IoT, Amazon’s AWS IoT, Apple’s HomeKit, you name it. Even with the proven years of experience in IT from these companies, having the iCloud and Gmail cloud-related hacks on their records makes you think twice before trusting their system security.

How can we solve their centralization issue? With the opposite approach: a decentralized system. The decentralized IoT ecosystem that we’re thinking about is based on blockchain technology. In this way:

Network protection — An attacker has to compromise the entire network, not only a single node for a successful attack.

Always up to date — The nodes stay synchronized by default.

No individual vulnerabilities — Each device becomes a node in a network, moving the point of failure from the individual device to the entire decentralized network.

In simple words: the blockchain enables IoT devices to protect themselves.

https://vecap.io/

So who is there to provide a solution to our grim future? We found interesting applications among blockchain IoT providers, such as IoT Chain developing an IoT operating system, The Watson IoT Platform, who’s proposing a solution that moves the data on a private blockchain, or Atonomi, whose infrastructure is based on the device’s identity and reputation within the network. Even the most popular blockchain-based IoT project at the moment, IOTA, can be counted, although its solution is focused on the transactional and data transfer aspect. That’s actually the common problem of these projects: they are focused more on solving other issues than actually solving the security problems that we have right now.

One blockchain-based project, though, comes as security-first: VeCap. Its solution is not an enhancement of the device’s built-in security functions. It is actually bypassing the device’s security altogether, moving the security to a unified decentralized network. That is exactly the blockchain solution that had been previously discussed. But their ambition goes even further. Instead of having a network for each individual, imagine having a global network formed out of all the active devices in the world! That’s pretty bold, right? In this case, a hacker will need to hack at least 51% of the devices in order to compromise the network. We’re speaking about millions of IoT devices in tens of thousands of homes and offices. It’s not too far-fetched to claim that this task sounds impossible.

The road to a global IoT network

A global network, in order to remain secure, needs a gatekeeper. However, if there’s a party in charge of keeping people in or out, the network is no longer decentralized anymore, right? VeCap found a workaround for this. The network can be joined by anyone at anytime under two conditions:

Use a VeCap certified device — There’s no centralization at the network level, but it still gives too much competitive power to VeCap as a company. That’s why there’s a second option…

Use the VeCap adapter to connect an uncertified device.

Basically, anyone with any type of device can join the network. There is a level of security, but it’s not in control of any one party.

That’s the security-first approach that IoT desperately needs right now. The focus on individual devices and single-purpose applications born from the greed of software companies and device manufacturers has distanced us from a unified standard. This problem of lack of interoperability was recognized by the European Commission when in 2017 they introduced The European Interoperability Framework (EIF), which gives specific guidance on how to set up interoperable digital public services.

This reluctance between companies is typical when it comes to new technologies. VHS fought for a long time until it became the standard of videotapes. Energy outlets are still not standardized around the world up to today. We have a long way to go, but with the VeCap solution already proposed for IoT, are you willing to wait for these vendors to agree with each other in such a competitive market or are you going to help it become a reality?

How close are we to Internet failure?

Since that initial attack on IoT devices in 2016, in only 3 years 20% of all companies faced at least one cyber attack on their IoT devices. One report shows that 97% of these attacks can be catastrophic for the organization, with potential losses up to 13% of its revenue. These are alarming numbers, given the fact that hackers need less than a minute to gain access to an unprotected device. Manufacturers alone can’t keep up with the attackers anymore. But that’s where projects like VeCap could take the security concerns off of their shoulders and bring confidence among adopters.

Will you be able to keep your IoT devices away from hackers? was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

[Telegram Channel | Original Article ]

IBM Is Finally Getting Serious About Cryptocurrency

It wasn’t long ago that your average enterprise wouldn’t even mention bitcoin, ethereum, or any number of cryptocurrencies in public.

Instead of using the cryptographically secure tokens to streamline workflows – or even talking about doing so – some of the most recognizable enterprises in blockchain have largely confined themselves to uses of blockchain as a new decentralized database, absent any digital assets.

Slowly however, over the past several years that has started to change. Executives at large corporations have shown themselves to be increasingly willing to take public stances both for (and against) what is now a $300 billion token market.

But if 2017 was the year that companies began talking about crypto, it wasn’t until recently that enterprises have been willing to publicly use cryptocurrencies in both early-stage prototypes and live applications.

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Now, it would seem the floodgates are prepared to open, with the $140 billion IBM revealing to BTC News Today that it has been meeting with executives from commodities trading platforms, large corporations, and perhaps most importantly, central banks, to explore how cryptocurrencies can help save them money and generate revenue.

“We’re seeing tons of demand for digital asset issuance across the board,” said IBM’s new head of blockchain development Jesse Lund, who was hired from Wells Fargo earlier this year to help develop the computer giant’s cryptocurrency strategy.

At the moment, that work is largely being pursued using the public Stellar platform, and its native cryptocurrency, the lumen (XLM), a partnership made public last October.

But in interview, Lund said IBM is interested in expanding the business applications of cryptocurrencies in a number of ways.

Lund told BTC News Today:

“What’s happening is there’s this emergence of a new segment that could actually be one of the biggest segments, that is a permissioned but public blockchain network typology.”

The central bank ‘big toe’

There’s perhaps no better symbol of this convergence than IBM’s early work with central banks.

Over the past year, Lund says he’s met with 20 central banks exploring the potential benefits of issuing their own fiat cryptocurrency on a blockchain.

Specifically, he described the “most durable digital asset” as one that is “issued by a central bank that represents a claim on fiat deposits in the real world,” but still maintains “some semblance of monetary policy.”

Though he wouldn’t reveal the names of most of the central banks with which he’s meeting, he described them as largely comprised of banks from the G20, an international forum with members including China, Russia, the U.S. and the EU.

Lund further described the central banks as “clients in some capacity.” Based on these conversations, he said he expects the first central banks to issue a fiat currency on a blockchain will be “the smaller ones” with a high concentration of interest in Asia and North America.

However, “the most inspiring of the visions of the central banks I’ve talked to has been Sweden’s Riksbank,” said Lund.

In December 2017, the Riksbank published a white paper detailing its interest in moving Sweden’s cash supply to a digital platform, though it didn’t mention blockchain specifically.

Still, Lund expects to see decentralized cryptocurrency converge with central banks some time soon.

“I expect that we’ll see — sometime this year — a central bank at least putting its big toe in the water to issue a digital denomination of their fiat currency into the wild,” said Lund. “Probably in a controlled format.”

Beyond currency

But IBM’s work with assets issued on a blockchain goes beyond central bank-sanctioned cryptocurrency.

By using the same technology that is allowing an increasing number of startups to raise capital on the Stellar platform, IBM is exploring a wide range of other tokens.

Lund breaks down the demand IBM is seeing into three main kinds of tokens: securities tokens that give owners a stake in the issuing company, utility tokens that give users access to a service such as phone minutes and commodities tokens that represent precious metals and other physical assets.

“We’re actually seeing a move toward the issuance of tokens that have a higher velocity that represent, for example, a claim on a portion of gold bullion sitting in a vault somewhere,” he said.

Beyond the obvious potential interest in this work from commodities exchanges, Lund said IBM is being approached by retail companies, beverage providers and energy companies looking to tokenize various aspects of their business offerings.

A fourth category of companies Lund said is approaching IBM are startups looking to raise capital, though he admits these opportunities have proved less enticing.

“We’re less inclined to do those, we like to see more maturity in the clients that we work with,” Lund added.

Beyond Stellar

So far, IBM’s work with cryptocurrencies has been largely confined to the Stellar network and its native lumen cryptocurrency, which it has used largely in cross-border payments trials.

The company itself is running nine Stellar nodes that help confirm those transactions based in locations around the world, such as Australia, Brazil, Hong Kong and the U.S. However, going forward, IBM is open to working with any number of blockchains.

The most serious of that work appears to be with the Sovrin Foundation that contributed the original codebase of Hyperledger Indy, and is now preparing to issue a crypto asset in an ICO.

While Lund didn’t reveal details about that work, he indicated there is an early-stage partnership forming with the non-profit organization. More news, he said, is expected shortly.

From there, IBM’s work with cryptocurrencies even further converges on its work with permissioned blockchains.

In January, IBM Research published a detailed white paper that described their work to apply a transaction model used by bitcoin into Hyperledger Fabric’s underlying chaincode.

Designed for purely experimental purposes to help compare transaction through-puts in the permissioned blockchain to those on public ledgers, the “Fabric Coin” effort resulted in improvements that were included in the Hyperledger Fabric 1.1 released earlier this month.

In this way, Lund expects to see further business opportunties between public and private blockchains continue to develop.

He concluded:

“We’re going to see a lot more convergence between those two ends of the spectrum. The bitcoin and cryptocurrency space that has been hands-off for enterprises and the private, country club blockchain space that is on the other side.”

IBM image via Shutterstock

The leader in blockchain news, BTC News Today is a media outlet that strives for the highest journalistic standards and abides by a strict set of editorial policies. BTC News Today is an independent operating subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which invests in cryptocurrencies and blockchain startups.

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Apple Inc., the American Tech Giant

Apple Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, that designs, develops, and sells consumer electronics, computer software and online services. The company was founded by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and  Ronald Wayne in 1976. In this blog post, we will talk about Apple’s market research and their marketing strategy. 

According to Rob Stokes, market research unpacks how to use the Internet to understand audiences and campaigns since the Internet was originally developed as an academic tool for sharing research. 

As part of the ongoing Apple-Samsung trial, there has been a furious flurry of court filings wherein both Apple and Samsung are looking to have all sorts of confidential data and trial exhibits sealed and safely stowed away from the prying eyes of the public. As it relates to Apple, the data in question pertains to all types of proprietary information, from iOS source code to sensitive financial data encapsulating items such as product-specific revenues, profit margins, and manufacturing capacity. According to Jack Joswiag, VIP of Apple’s Product Marketing, Apple surveys iPhone buyers on a monthly basis.The surveys reveal, country-by-country, what is driving Apple’s customers to buy Apple's iPhone products versus other products such as the Android products that Samsung sells, what features they most use, Apple’s customers' demographics and their level of satisfaction with different aspects of iPhone. And equally as important as the data, Joswiak explains, is the conclusions Apple deduces from said data. One chart lists responses from customers in seven different countries, asking them why they bought an iPhone after considering an Android device. “Trust Apple Brand” emerged as the first or second most popular reason in most regions, including in the U.S and China where 54% of respondents cited it as a factor.Some 67% of Chinese respondents said they bought the iPhone because they liked the physical appearance and design, the highest percentage across the group, which also included Japan, the U.K., France, Germany and South Korea. Least important, almost universally, was the ability to easily transfer music and other media across multiple devices. “Greater availability of apps I am interested in” was a significant factor in South Korea, where 47% cited it as a reason (Y. Heisler, 2012). 

Lastly, Apple says that it's not seeking to seal market research data conducted on its behalf that surveys customers outside of Apple's user base. 

Rob Stokes defines the marketing strategy’s purpose as a way to address a business or brand challenge or objective that has been revealed. An effective strategy involves making a series of well-informed decisions about how the brand, product or service should be promoted; the brand that attempts to be all things to all people risks becoming unfocused or losing the clarity of its value proposition.

Apple primarily focusses on three major segments, one is the music lovers who are targeted by the Apple iPod and Itunes. Another target is the professionals or even teenagers who are targeted for Apple iPhone, Tablets, Macbook and other such gadgets which can be used by anyone, irrespective of age. The third is the crowd which can use their other products and services like Apple TV and Apple Iwatch. They also use iBooks, Apple pay etc (H. Bhasin, 2018).

Apple being the world’s number 1 brand has the topmost mind positioning and there is no doubt that when someone talks about smartphones or laptop or tablets, Apple is the first brand that comes to mind maximum number of times (H. Bhasin, 2018).

Apple’s mission is to design the best personal computers in the world, the Mac, along with OS X, iLife, iWork and professional software. Apple leads the digital music revolution with its iPods and iTunes online store. Apple has reinvented the mobile phone with its revolutionary iPhone and App store and is defining the future of mobile media and computing devices with iPad. Their vision is that they are on the face of the earth to make great products and that’s not changing. They are constantly focusing on innovating. They believe in the simple, not the complex. They believe that they need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products that they make, and participate only in markets where they can make a significant contribution (H. Bhasin, 2018).

Apple has several competitive advantages over its competitors. They have superior technology products – Macbook and Iwatch are clearly leaders in their market space because of the OS and the technology used. Their brand equity, Apple has repeatedly taken the top spot for its brand equity and has a cult following since ages. Their revenue over time – Apple has deep pockets due to its high margins. R&D, a major competitive advantage of Apple is the amount it spends on R&D keeping its eyes on the future rather than on the present (H. Bhasin, 2018).

If we were to make a BCG Matrix of Apple, the Cash cows would be the products which are existing since ages and which cannot be challenged in the current market conditions and have a majority market share when the global data is referred, these are Macintosh, iPhone, Iwatch (50% market share in 2015) and Itunes (a solid support service to all Apple products). The stars would be Ipad and iBooks, where there is a lot of competition and Apple has to invest a lot to keep these businesses on top.The question mark would be Apple TV which has a low market share in an industry which is showing great potential and might grow at a rapid pace in the future.The dog would be the iPod because although it has a high market share, the industry itself is rapidly degrowing because Smartphones have replaced iPods (H. Bhasin, 2018). 

Apple’s distribution is remarkably one of the best out there. They have a very smart retailing setup. It has around 450 stores in the US. These retail outlets are designed such that they are more focused on helping the customer and making him comfortable with using Apple rather than selling the product and stuffing the product down customers throat. Apple has also introduced the Apple Genius Bar, which is a walk-in service centre and can help any customer in problems they are facing on MacBook or iPhone or Ipad. Overall, the company owned Retail and Service outlets are great. Along with company-owned stores, Apple has set trade partners like Ingram Micro and Redington which are responsible for the sales and distribution of the brands. These trade partners will buy in bulk from the brand and then distribute the product in the market. Thus, besides its own retail stores, Apple is found present in other modern and premium retail stores. These stores are covered by its retail partners.The Online E-commerce presence of Apple is fantastic. Most E-commerce portals promote the brand themselves because they know that the brand is in huge demand. Besides this, there is very less price penetration in Apple, and hence the channel partners and E-commerce portals are happy too as they don’t have to fight on price.  from the homepage itself. The combination of retail, distribution and E-commerce gives a complete market reach to Apple (H. Bhasin, 2018).

Apple has been one of the biggest companies due to them having the highest brand equity in the world as of 2016 and it is the topmost ranked brand in the world. The brand worth of Apple is 118.9 billion dollars. The brand has done a lot to reach this brand equity, but a major contributing factor was its ability to give hit products back to back and to reach across the globe with these excellent products. The combination of both of the excellent marketing communications of the brand help Apple reach the highest brand equity possible (H. Bhasin, 2018). 

Like any other company, Apple witnesses strong competition from companies such as Samsung. Although on a company level there is very less competition for Apple, on product levels, there is repetitive competition for each of its individual products. Ipad faces competition from Samsung tablets, iPhone faces major competition from Android-based phones, Macbook is facing stiff competition from Dell which also has superior products. The unique services offered by Apple such as Itunes also face competition from other online music players which are cropping up every day, like Spotify. Ibooks faces strong competition from Amazon and even Apple TV faces competition from Fire TV of Amazon. Samsung gear and other smartwatches are rising competitors to Iwatch although Iwatch still holds a majority market share (H. Bhasin, 2018)

To conclude Apple’s marketing strategy, I would like the address their promotions. Apple is one of the most elegant advertisers as can be seen from any of its print ads in newspapers. You will commonly find Apple ads to be clear and crisp in their message. Their background will be white and there will be a splash of colours in the print ad introducing the product or differentiating the product.And that is one major strength of the brand. Apple has so many differentiation points that it can have a slew of ads, all targeted towards differentiating the products that it is offering. Not only the print ads, even the video ads do the same. They tell you one point which highlights the product features.Here is a simple image made by Apple to differentiate between PC and Macintosh (H. Bhasin, 2018) 

Overall, the advertising and promotions of Apple are used tenfold when there is a new product launch. The hype created is so much that you just can’t ignore it. And this hype is continued until the product becomes a success. As the number of products with Apple is less, it is no doubt that it wants each one of its product to be a hit (H. Bhasin, 2018).

I hope you enjoyed reading the blog and have a more in-depth view on Apple’ as much as I did making it for you guys!s market research and their marketing strategy.

Martijn Brevé

Why an ACMA Registered Electrician is the right choice for your home in Sydney's Inner West.

In today’s connected homes, with lights, power, TV, Cable, Internet, Broadband, Intercoms, Wifi, Smoke Detection, Low Voltage Lighting, Safety Switches, Safe Wiring, Exhaust Fans both ducted ceilings and under floor & wall. engaging someone with the experience and knowledge of a qualified and experienced ACMA certified Electrician (Australian Communications & Media Authority) can benefit you greatly. For many reasons, such as if you are needing to relocate your home office from one room to the other you can simply engaged one contractor to install all electrical outlets, light fittings and appropriate RCD protection of course as well as install your new telephone sockets, LAN (Local Area Network) points, Broadband outlets and even a FTA (Free To Air) TV plug. How convenient would it be to engage one cable guy to do all the wiring for your next domestic electrical project? Less fuss calling multiple companies just to wait around for people who may or may not show up. Less need to spend time making arrangements with multiple arrival times and last but not least a more cost effective way to get the job done right, first time and be pleasantly pleased with the work done at the end of the day.. You will find that your invoice will be cheaper when you can get one professional to do the lot. All Electrical Single, Double & Quad Power Points – Telephone Lines – TV Points – Network Cabling – Internet Points from an ACMA Approved Electrician & Telephone Technician.

Did you know the benefits don’t stop there.. By using an experienced ACMA Technician who is also a certified & licensed Electrician, you will be able to discuss your cabling needs and potential future needs for new technologies. For more details on an ACMA registered Electrician services … Please note that the licensed electrician is a licensed telecommunications technician or a telecommunications wiring technician and is an electrician licensed by Austel or ACMA and an authorized data technician and a licensed electrical contractor . The technician can help improve broadband speeds and generally help with the same day bridging or connecting broadband services. They are authorized to install additional power points and additional telephone sockets as well as additional data outlets and television plates. The electrician can install sensor lights and spot lights and switchboard upgrades as well as install or test existing safety switch or individual safety switches on each circuit. While on site a good ACMA reg Electrician will carry all popular brands of smoke alarms such as PDL, Clipsal, PSA, HPM, Quell, First Alert and Brooks in a well-stocked van if your smoke detector has been outdated. You must consider replacing it. A good ACMA reg Electrician can also effectively replace the alarm on site or simply use a very reliable brand and update your existing smoke alarm system and even ensure that the locations are compatible with compliance and interconnected so that all of the alarms sound if smoke is detected in any particular alarm. Nowadays, this can be done efficiently with wireless interconnected alarms or if access is good, the use of cabling to connect. It is now recommended that photoelectric smoke detectors be used to replace old ionisation smoke detectors. So, now we carry these alarms as recommended by NSW Fire & Rescue http://www.fire.nsw.gov.au/page.php?id=441 Other switching panels Installations include, install or repair lightning conductors and also repair or install timer switch relocations and major upgrades. Replace the mains cables and reconnect the lighting circuits and reconnect the power circuits. “Also another common problem for the house is the halogen aging Down Light.These days the most effective option is a quick exchange of LED lights, a word of warning do not go with just the cheapest option. Us on options that now have up to 6 years warranty on parts. For a more detailed understanding of what is easily possible give me a call.

As you can see, having an ACMA Registered Electrician could save money and provide a satisfactory & helpful service

ACMA Registered Electricians such as Electrician Inner West, Sydney servicing Sydney’s Inner Western Suburbs have been providing this service for more than 15 years and can provide this service at affordable rates every day. Benefitting their clients with their wide range of skills, experience and advice.

So being able to have one Electrician / ACMA Technician to carry out the following services will save time in organising two trades and will save money in efficiency going from job to job once engaged.. Fast Response – For All Repairs No Job Too Small Prompt Reliable Professional Service Highly Experienced Owner Operator All Electrical Installations & Repairs Replace Light fittings Repair Down Lights Re-Wires Safety Inspections Renovations & Extensions Kitchen & Bathroom Renovations Power Points & Repairs Phone Points & Repairs Computer Network Points & Repairs Internet Points & Repairs Light Installations & Repairs Sensor Lighting Outdoor Lighting Power Installations & Repairs Safety Switches Installations, Faults & Testing Safety Switch Fault Finding. Switchboard Upgrades Plus L2 Service Provider Available MDF Telephone Jumpering MDF to Home Phone/ADSL Fault finding Strata Installations & Maintenance Smoke Detectors Installations & Maintenance Emergency Lighting Maintenance Plus many more challenges

So next time you think about engaging the services of an electrician. Consider the savings you can make by engaging an ACMA registered Electrician Inner West, Sydney

Is Your Home Electrically Healthy? Check Now!

Electricity is the main cause of accidental residential and commercial fires. Recent statistics revealed that each year about 70 people are killed and 350,000 people are seriously injured because of home-related electrical accidents. In today’s modern living world, we are using more and more electrical appliances to make our living more and more convenient. For instance, just 15 years ago, the average homeowners in Sydney had one TV or radio, where it is more likely that there are at least two TVs, games console, 2-3 air conditioning units, computer and the list goes on… So, significantly, the risk of electrical accidents is also much higher than before. It’s always recommended to frequently inspect your home to analyse whether your home is electrically healthy or not. How often do you have your electrical panel inspected? Twice in a year? Once in five year? No…. just like your car, your electrical panel too require regular maintenance. It’s always better to catch an issue at an early stage and fix it. When did you last check the condition and safety of your electrical outlets? Read on to know more… * Damaged plugs, sockets, flexible cables and out-dated wiring can cause unforeseen electrical shocks and damages to your property. So for you and your family’s safety, you need to look for the following: * Check the plug and socket for burn marks, sounds of buzzing or cracking, circuit breakers tripping etc. If you notice anything wrong, call your nearby electrician. * If the electrical cables experienced any wear & tear or any kind of damages, replace it immediately. Touching exposed live wires may give you an electric shock or you could even be killed. Who Should Carry Out Electrical Work? If you suspect, that your property is more prone to electrical shocks or any other electrical damages, you need to get help from a residential or commercial electrical contractor. It is important to make a note that any electrical inspection should be carried out only by people who are experienced, knowledgeable and competent. If you’re looking for an experienced residential or commercial electrician in Sydney for your electrical needs, continue reading… Ask More Questions: Start by checking that the individual is qualified, certified and registered by one of the Government approved schemes. Choosing a registered electrician means you will get additional protection when something goes wrong. Ask to See the Paperwork for References: Check the qualification of the electrician whom you are going to choose! If a tradesperson is unwilling to show you evidence of their qualification and registration status, this could be warning sign. Get a Reference: Ask them to provide references of previous happy customers. Ask these referees to explain the work they had done and how satisfied they were with the job done. The above mentioned are few of the important steps to consider when looking for experienced electrical contractors in Sydney. Don’t make a decision quickly. If an electrician makes you feel uncomfortable for any reason, then switch to the other one without hesitation. Working with the one whom you trust, will give a peace of mind! Hiring an experienced and qualified electrician will take the worries and the work off you! A Little about Better Electrical: Better Electrical is a fully licensed and insured electrical contractor company in Sydney offering a wide range of electrical services including residential electrical services, commercial electrical services, emergency electrical services, electrical repairs, phone line installation, switchboard electrical services, electrical safety inspections, strata & maintenance. To know more, visit http://www.betterelec.com.au/ or Follow https://plus.google.com/+BetterelecAu Location: Panania, 2213 - NSW