Hasta La Gadget!

America consistently hails the iconic entrepreneur: we perpetuate a lofty, myopic, unrealistic standard of entrepreneurial success defined by trendy inventions, fast-paced growth and billion dollar profits. But by painting this whitewashed picture of entrepreneurism, we delude ourselves about the reality of American business ownership. Tiny, lower-revenue businesses are the norm for most entrepreneurs. Eighty percent of all firms and 79% of white-owned firms have no paid employees at all; a whopping 96% of Black-owned businesses have no paid employees. The truth is: most entrepreneurs’ firms don’t grow quickly, employ people or earn much money. And, more importantly, entrepreneurial success has far less to do with exceptional skill than with one’s ability to weather repeated failure and financial loss. It starts with the cards you’re dealt–and the deck looks very different for African-American entrepreneurs.

For many African-American entrepreneurs, the deck is stacked against them long before they even begin. Most entrepreneurs rely on personal savings and net worth to launch their enterprises. But the 2016 Assets & Opportunity Scorecard reveals that the median net worth of white households in the U.S. ($110,637) is more than 15 times that of African-American households ($7,113). This severe imbalance means that African-American entrepreneurs are much more likely to start out drastically undercapitalized and less equipped to absorb the losses that most businesses experience in their earliest days.

When their businesses survive beyond startup, African-American entrepreneurs remain more exposed to financial risk than their white counterparts should they run into routine business problems down the road. Take cash flow difficulties, for instance: the inability to cover one’s business expenses with cash on hand. Difficulty managing cash flow was the most frequently reported challenge facing low- and moderate-income entrepreneurs in CFED’s 2014 In Search of Solid Ground study. All entrepreneurs experience cash flow problems at some point, caused by drivers like low or inconsistent sales, emergencies or unexpected expenses, mismatched payment and receipt cycles and difficulty making informed financial decisions. Taken alone, these challenges aren’t unusual or even inherently problematic. They become dangerous, though, when an entrepreneur can’t draw on their resources or abilities–whether on their own or within their wider social networks and systems–to prevent or address them.

On top of lacking sufficient wealth to draw on in case of a cash flow gap, African-American entrepreneurs have a harder time getting loans that might help them weather such challenges. African-American entrepreneurs have relatively fewer illiquid assets like homes, land, equipment or vehicles, which makes it harder to collateralize traditional loans, and many face further constraints due to damaged or nonexistent credit histories. Discrimination in lending forces many to face higher loan denial rates and pay higher interest rates than white-owned businesses. Further, the disappearance of retail banks and long history of exploitation and exclusion by mainstream financial institutions has driven many African-American entrepreneurs to regard financial institutions in general with hesitation and distrust. These challenges and many others are results of a long history of racial discrimination affecting interpersonal relationships, institutions and constraining social networks.

As a result, the slightest volatility in cash flow might put a sizeable dent in a business’s potential revenues and threaten their household’s financial well-being. And Black-owned businesses don’t earn as much in average revenues as white-owned firms to begin with. Nationwide, the average revenues of white-owned firms ($641,742) are over eight times those of Black-owned firms ($73,226). It’s even worse in the South: in states like Mississippi and Georgia, white-owned firms’ average sales outpace those of Black-owned firms by 16 times and 13 times, respectively.

An entrepreneur’s revenues directly affect their ability to build equity–the value of their investments and retained earnings–in their business. This is what separates businesses that purely generate income from those that become valuable, transferrable assets for their owners. Any attempt to resolve the vast Black-white wealth divide requires that we examine the underlying drivers of African-American entrepreneurs’ financial vulnerabilities–like cash flow difficulty–and explore ways to address them. To this end, CFED’s latest research, Unstacking the Deck: Toward Financial Resilience for African-American Entrepreneurs in the South, begins to dig deeper by telling the story from the perspective of practitioners who work closely with African-American entrepreneurs in the South. Next, we’ll head to the field to talk with African-American entrepreneurs themselves in Georgia, Mississippi and North Carolina. By helping us articulate why and how they experience cash flow difficulties and what would help weather them, we’ll move closer to solutions that unlock African-American entrepreneurs’ ability to build wealth through business ownership.

written by

Dedrick Asante-Muhammad and Lauren Williams of CFED

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LAUSANNE, Switzerland — Any competitor from Russia wishing to take part in the Rio de Janeiro Olympics will need to be individually evaluated against doping and declared eligible by their sport’s international federation, Olympic chief Thomas Bach said on Tuesday.

The special measure is being introduced because of the unsatisfactory state of anti-doping bodies in the two countries, which Bach said put “very serious doubts on the presumption of innocence”.

Russian track and field athletes remain suspended from Rio after the IOC offered “respect, approval and support” for a blanket ban on them – extended on Friday by world athletics’ governing body – for systemic doping.

But Bach, speaking at the end of a doping summit, gave a limited number of the Russian athletes a chance to race for their country in Brazil despite a ban.

He said any Russian athlete cleared by the world athletics body IAAF or the Court of Arbitration for Sport as clean and eligible would compete under the Russian flag.

Russian Olympic Committee (ROC) chief Aleksander Zhukov, meanwhile, said clean Russian athletes would appeal the “legally indefensible” ban at the Court of Arbitration for Sport.

Any athletes who succeed in their appeal would compete under the Russian flag, Bach said, not an Olympic or neutral one.

Kenyan athletes will also be evaluated for doping on an individual basis and would have to be cleared by their sports’ international governing body, Bach said. (However, unlike Russia, Kenya avoided a ban.)

“The position is very clear: we respect this (IAAF) decision. We advised today that athletes and/or the ROC may appeal,” Bach said. “This is the good right of everybody. We expect the results of these potential court cases.”

“If there are (Russian) athletes qualified then they will compete as members of the Russian Olympic Committee team,” Bach told reporters at the end of an extraordinary summit.

The decision is expected to somewhat appease the Russians, who were unhappy with the ban of their track and field athletes by the IAAF from the world’s biggest multi-sport event.

Bach also said the summit, including sports federations and Olympic committees, had decided to fully review the anti-doping system, calling on World Anti-doping Agency to hold a global conference next year.

The IAAF suspended Russia last year over concerns its athletes were guilty of systematic doping and upheld the ban last week.

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— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

by Sarah Laskow, originally posted on Atlas Obscura

In Tasmania, where it’s winter and storms have been flooding the north of the island, the severe weather has also exposed 19th century shipwrecks usually buried beneath sand and water.

One, the Zephyr, is a well-documented wreck in Bream Creek that re-emerges every so often. The other is a mystery.

This second shipwreck, seen above, appeared on Friendly Beaches, on the island’s east coast. Mike Nash, a historian for Tasmania’s Parks and Wildlife department, believes it may be the Viola, a ship wrecked in 1857.

A sample of wood from the ship’s timbers would help confirm that, ABC News writes, since the Viola came from Canada and its wood would bear evidence of that origin. But with sand quickly piling up around the wreck, its identity will probably remain unconfirmed.

The Zephyr crashed in 1852, in a spot south of the mystery wreck. When conditions are right, its bone-like timbers show themselves.

The skeleton-like frame of the shipwreck Zephyr emerging from the sands of Marion Bay in Southern Tassie. Every few years, wild weather scours these shores near Bream Creek to reveal the historic beams of this 1852 wreck. The locally built schooner weighed in at over 63 tons and was an impressive 62 feet in length. It was carrying general cargo and about 14 passengers when it was wrecked in treacherous weather along the coast, resulting in the loss of eight lives. It is one of more than 1,000 ships that have been lost to Tassie’s wild waters, of which only about 70-80 of the wrecks have been located. Thanks for sharing this special piece of Tassie history, @Nick_monk_photography! #DiscoverTasmania #Tasmania #SeeAustralia #Hobartandbeyond

A photo posted by Discover Tasmania (@tasmania) on Jun 16, 2016 at 5:15am PDT

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Sleep like a baby. It’s what we all strive for, now that we know how important sleep is. It’s that feeling that you have just come out of the deepest, most pleasant, and refreshing moments of your life, and not a sound, a light, or care in the world could have disturbed you. One natural way to get that feeling is through the build-up of sleep pressure, or slow waves (brain rhythms), which involves maximal use of your brain when you are awake. This is something babies “learn” to do over the first year of life.

Newborns sleep about 16 hours a day, but as they age they develop a homeostatic mechanism that balances their increasing ability to stay awake and their ongoing need for sleep. The circadian rhythm of sunlight and darkness helps to drive one part of this mechanism. There are specific neurons located in our eyes that uses the presence of blue light to inhibit the production of melatonin, a hormone, which helps to induce sleepiness. This fairly recent discovery, and supporting research, likely motivated Apple to implement the “Night Shift” feature on our devices, which filters blue light after sunset. The developing circadian rhythm is highly influenced by environment, and balanced by an internal system of neuronal activity. This involves a group of brain rhythms known as slow waves, or delta and theta (in infants) frequency waves, which are the other part of the mechanism, and are a measure of sleep pressure.

Slow waves have gained much attention in our understanding of the role of sleep in our everyday lives. They may be a key component to understanding the development of brain-based disorders including schizophrenia, depression, ADHD, autism, and even some chronic pain disorders like fibromyalgia. In 1982, a link between schizophrenia and slow waves during developmental sleep, was made by Irwin Feinberg at UC Davis. This was related to his 1967 report that the magnitude of slow waves measured from the scalp using EEG, increases, peaks, and then decreases across development (an inverted U shape), which he proposed as a measure of synapse pruning in the developing brain. More recently (2003), this suggestion has been advanced into the Synaptic Homeostasis Hypothesis (SHY), by researchers Giulio Tononi and Chiara Cirelli (review article, Scientific American article). In support of this theory, researchers have been able to demonstrate that slow waves act at a local level in different parts of the brain, by recording them from the scalp using a high resolution technology (dense EEG).

This new sensor technology is actually much easier and more efficient to apply than the standard electrodes. It’s a stretchy cap, with wet sponges, that slips onto your head. Thanks to this new technology and clever research study design, there is now evidence in humans that slow waves during sleep occur at different locations in the brain and at different magnitudes, depending on how much you have used that part of the brain while awake prior to the sleep recording. In babies, and children, we can now use this harmless, noninvasive and high-resolution technology to understand how sleep slow waves relate to both brain and skill development, and how it is different in kids who have a brain-based disorder, or who may be at risk for developing such a disorder. For more information on this research, see my current crowdfunding campaign: http://experiment.com/sleep-development.

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So, how does one enhance these slow waves, in order to increase sleep pressure and “sleep like a baby”? There seem to be several methods out there, some as simple as meditation, exercise, and temperature modulation (i.e. creating a contrast of warm skin and cool sleep environment). There are other slightly more complex noninvasive methods that may soon be available to consumers, which include the use of sounds that are time-locked to the activity of your brain (slow wave) through a closed-loop system. (image credit)

Maybe the easiest way is to use all of your brain with occasional challenging tasks, including your various sensory systems (interactive video, audiobooks, playing music, aromatic cooking), your motor system (exercise, sports), and your cognitive brain (playing chess, studying), so that the active use of your many neurons across your cortical brain leads to a deeper and more efficient sleep.

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