Malala Yousafzai is an icon of female empowerment. The youngest Nobel Laureate in history, the 20-year-old Pakistani activist has inspired people with her tenacious belief in the power of education. It’s a conviction so strong that she risked her life to attend school in a Taliban-dominated region of Pakistan, blogging about her experiences and granting interviews. In response, she was shot in a 2012 assassination attempt. Emily Blunt says beneath Yousafzai’s steely persona beats the heart of a teenage girl. “People are intimidated to meet her,” says Blunt. “They feel not worthy. Yet there’s a normalcy to her. She’s sweet and subversive and bright,…
Author: Loknath Das
Company raised $16 million in Benchmark-led funding round Chainalysis Inc., a maker of anti-money-laundering software, is widening the reach of its products that monitor cryptocurrency trading amid heightened demand for secure transactions. The startup, which spent months refining Bitcoin-tracing software, today can begin detecting criminal activity and money laundering in Bitcoin Cash, co-founder Jonathan Levin said in a phone interview. The company plans to support investigations and monitoring of 10 cryptocurrencies by year-end. Customers are interested in tracing Ether, Litecoin, Ripple and Ethereum Classic, among others, he said. “We think about our brand as being the trust provider between the…
Think your company has what it takes to make our Top Company Cultures list? Apply now. Apply now » Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. I just sat through my 11,569th software demo. It was all I could do to not flee out the window. You’ve been there, right? As a business owner or a manager, you’ve gone through the agony of selecting an accounting, customer relationship, management, order entry or some other type of software for your company. My company sells software and helps our clients find applications for their business, so I’ve been on both sides of the screen.…
Dame Maggie Smith and other actors from Warner Bros.’ Harry Potter films will be giving voice to characters in the new “Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery” role-playing game, which is officially slated to launch April 25. In the game, players create a personalized student avatar to experience life as a student at the famed Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. It’s set in the 1980s, before Harry Potter’s birth. Smith, who played Prof. McGonagall in WB’s big-screen adaptations of J.K. Rowling’s best-selling books, said, “If I could attend Hogwarts as a student, I would be most excited to attend the potions class taught by…
The history: Over the past decade, 150 researchers from the US and around the world painstakingly analyzed DNA, RNA, and proteins from tumor samples of more than 11,000 patients with 33 different types of cancer. The findings: From that data, scientists have identified about 300 genes that drive tumor growth. They also found that just over half the tumors samples analyzed carry genetic mutations that could be targeted by therapies that are already on the market. These findings and others appear in 29 different papers today in the journal Cell. Why it matters: Researchers say the insights gleaned can be used to tailor more personalized treatments for cancer…
Like many of her peers, 17-year-old Julie Abramson is rarely without her phone. “I try not to look during class, but sometimes I do,” admitted the senior at West Bloomfield High School. “I check it a good amount so I can keep up with what is going on. I want to be in loop. It’s nice to feel updated and not left behind, and you will be if you’re not checking social media.” Abramson is hardly alone. According to a 2015 study by the Pew Research Center, 92 percent of teens report going online daily — including 20 percent who…
To the Editor: Re “Its Ideals Tainted, Can Social Media Shine Again?,” by Kevin Roose (The Shift column, Business Day, March 29): The appropriate frustration and disappointment resulting from the recent Facebook and Cambridge Analytica disclosures are making it easy to forget the personal and economic benefits of social media. For example, let’s not forget that we choose to integrate these services into our daily lives because they allow us to deepen social connections and enable us to exercise our individual agency in a fashion that was impossible before their emergence. Or that these services have created millions of jobs,…
Climate change and disaster risk management are issues of high priority to the Solomon Islands Government, given the current and future impacts expected, and the associated risks posed to natural ecosystems such as coastal and marine environments, fisheries, agriculture, water resources, health, biodiversity, infrastructure and industry. Solomon Islands, as a Small Island Developing State (SIDS) and Least Developed Country (LDC), requires up-scaled and targeted financial resources to be able to effectively respond to the adverse effects of climate change and disasters. In recognition of this, the Solomon Islands Government requested for this Climate Change and Disaster Risk Finance Assessment to…
News stories on international large-scale education assessments (ILSAs) tend to highlight the performance of the media outlet’s home country in comparison with the highest-scoring nations (in recent years, typically located in East Asia). Low (or declining) rankings can be so alarming that policy-makers leap to remedies—often ill-founded—on the basis of what they conclude is the “secret sauce” behind the top performers’ scores. As statisticians studying the methods and policy uses of ILSAs (1), we believe the obsession with rankings—and the inevitable attempts to mimic specific features of the top performing systems—not only misleads, it diverts attention from more constructive uses…
This report brings data from the newly-released 2016 National Survey of Children’s Health (NSCH) to the robust policy and research debate over the extent to which differences in aggregate special education participation rates over racial and ethnic groups represent differences in underlying needs for special education. The NSCH allows me to compare not only how student characteristics are related to participation in special education, but also how they relate to children’s access to speech therapy, occupational therapy, and physical therapy—services that may be delivered as part of a child’s special education plan. Like the existing literature, these analyses cannot control…