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Why was China's economy so important during the pandemic?

Other Sources of Data and Information Sizing up the U.S. government’s reliance on foreign goods faces similar challenges in data limitations.113 The U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) maintains a database, the Federal Procurement Data System-Next Generation (FPDS-NG, or FPDS), where federal agencies are required to report procurement contracts whose estimated value is $10,000 or more.114 The procurement data in FPDS-NG are not fully reliable. There are documented quality issues documented relating to accuracy, completeness, and timeliness of its data.115 These limitations have prompted many analysts to rely on FPDS-NG data primarily to identify broad trends and produce rough estimates, or to gather information about specific contracts. With these limitations in mind, FPDS-NG data may provide general information regarding the value, quantity, and types of domestic and foreign-made goods hat U.S. government agencies procure. Other information on domestic capacity, as well as changes resulting from increased production in the aftermath of the COVID-19 outbreak, generally comes from private research firms, news outlets, and trade associations. Many of the figures cited are often based on surveys, firms’ press releases, or firms/industries’ forecasts, which may differ significantly from actual production. China’s Economic Recovery: Prospects and Implications China’s leaders have focused on resuming manufacturing production to jumpstart economic growth.116 At an executive session of China’s cabinet, the State Council, on March 17, 2020, Chinese officials emphasized the importance of stabilizing employment and announced that the government would streamline business approvals and fast-track approvals for large infrastructure projects. They also offered government support to alleviate shortages of labor, raw materials, funds, and protective gear.117 To facilitate economic activity, the Chinese government also appears Congressional Research Service 38 to have liberalized company health requirements and lifted intra-provincial and intra-city travel and transportation restrictions. NDRC spokesperson Meng Wei said on March 17, 2020 that transportation was operating normally. Zhejiang, Jiangsu, and Shanghai were operating at close to 100% of normal capacity; and over 90% of large-scale industrial companies outside of Hubei had resumed production.118 Company reports of opening and resumption of operations did not necessarily mean that these facilities were fully online or operating at pre-crisis levels, however. Several economic analysts and news outlets, including the Financial Times, published alternative measures of business resumption rates using proxies for economic activity—such as data on traffic congestion, air pollution levels, and container freight movement. Overall, many of these measures suggested that businesses across China did not return to full capacity at the rates reported by local and provincial governments.119 In Wuhan, the center of the original outbreak, the Hubei provincial government issued a notice in March—that applies to Wuhan as Hubei’s capital—allowing certain companies to resume work ahead of other production. This included companies in the medical and health industry, as well as companies producing protective gear, disinfectant, daily necessities, agriculture, and products critical to national and global supply chains.120 China emerged in June 2020 as the first major country to announce a return to economic growth since the outbreak of COVID-19, but consumption lagged production recovery and the economic recovery has relied on government spending and exports to boost growth. The government reported 3.2% gross domestic product (GDP) growth in the second quarter and 4.9% GDP growth in the third quarter of 2020.121 The International Monetary Fund (IMF) projects China’s economy to grow by 1.9% in 2020. China since February 2020 has provided an estimated $506 billion in stimulus and increased the government’s budget deficit target to a record high of 3.6% of GDP, up from 2.8% in 2019. Shifting from efforts to reduce debt, the government announced the issuance of $142.9 billion of special treasury bonds for the first time since 2007; increased the quota for local government special bonds (a source of infrastructure funding); and fast-tracked issuance of corporate bonds to cover pandemic costs, but with potential broader uses. The IMF estimates that the fiscal measures and financing plans announced amounted to 4.1% of the China’s GDP, as of July 2020.122 China’s National Bureau of Statistics in November 2020 recorded a 5% year-on-year increase in retail sales, a 2.6% year-on-year increase in fixed asset investment, and a 7% year-on-year increase in value-added industrial output. COVID-19: China Medical Supply Chains and Broader Trade Issues Congressional Research Service 39 in investment in industrial output growth, however, was recorded in non-ferrous metals and real estate investment, not broader areas of domestic consumption.123 China Positioning to Export China’s economy depends on exports and the foreign exchange it earns through exports, as well as on the large productive role that foreign firms play in the domestic market and as exporters. Seeking to stabilize drops in foreign investment and trade, on March 12, Commerce Vice Minister Wang Shouwen held a call with 400 members of the American Chamber of Commerce in China, and on March 13, he held a similar webinar with the European Chamber of Commerce in China’s Advisory Council. Vice Minister Wang pressed companies to reopen operations and increase investments in China. Other Chinese agencies represented included NDRC, MIIT, the National Health Commission, the General Administration of Drug Supervision, the State Administration for Market Regulation, the General Administration of Customers, the Civil Aviation Administration of China, the Ministry of Transportation, and the State Taxation Administration.124 During past crises, such as the global financial crisis of 2008-09, China has pressed firms to idle facilities and keep them production-ready (instead of shuttering them) and retain workers (instead of laying them off) to maintain social stability and facilitate efforts to quickly ramp up production and exports later.125 These stimulus efforts are sometimes less visible than fiscal policies in other countries. Several market watchers have noted that, while a 17% drop in Chinese exports in January-February 2020 was significant, it was not as dramatic when considering China’s economy was shuttered for much of February. This indicates that Chinese industry may have had sufficient stock already at ports for export when the crisis hit. This also signals how China was able to resume an export push in the third quarter of 2020.126 China’s economic recovery has been important to the United States and the global economy, as it is an important center of demand and supply. At the same time, during this period of global economic downturn, the United States and other countries are now potentially vulnerable to a concerted PRC export push that has been expanding since summer 2020 and any effort China makes to take additional market share in strategic sectors. Congressional Research Service 40 Steel Overcapacity Chinese overcapacity in steel has been highly contentious for its global impacts, and China could potentially see exports as a quick way to reduce inventories and secure needed cash. Similar to what happened during the global financial crisis in 2008-09, China is poised to take additional global market share in 2020 because it did not dial back production during the COVID-19 outbreak. Chinese blast furnaces continued to run during the COVID-19 crisis, and China’s steel production for January-February 2020 was up 3% over the same period in 2019. Meanwhile, due to collapsing domestic demand and logistics constraints, China’s finished steel inventories rose by 45% in January-February 2020 over the same period in 2019.127 China’s steel production at the end of 2019 was already at an all-time high of almost 1 billion tons, with China producing over 50% of global supply, according to the World Steel Association and China’s State Statistical Bureau (Figure 8).128 China’s crude steel production recovered in July 2020, rising 9.1% year-on-year. China’s crude steel production during the January-September 2020 period is up 4.5% over the same period in 2019. In contrast, crude steel production over the same period is down 17.9% in the EU; down 18.2% in North America; down 16.5% in India; down 19.1% in Japan; and down 7.5% in South Korea.

[Other Sources of Data and Information Sizing up the U.S. government’s reliance on foreign goods faces similar challenges in data limitations.113 The U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) maintains a database, the Federal Procurement Data System-Next Generation (FPDS-NG, or FPDS), where federal agencies are required to report procurement contracts whose estimated value is $10,000 or more.114 The procurement data in FPDS-NG are not fully reliable. There are documented quality issues documented relating to accuracy, completeness, and timeliness of its data.115 These limitations have prompted many analysts to rely on FPDS-NG data primarily to identify broad trends and produce rough estimates, or to gather information about specific contracts. With these limitations in mind, FPDS-NG data may provide general information regarding the value, quantity, and types of domestic and foreign-made goods hat U.S. government agencies procure. Other information on domestic capacity, as well as changes resulting from increased production in the aftermath of the COVID-19 outbreak, generally comes from private research firms, news outlets, and trade associations. Many of the figures cited are often based on surveys, firms’ press releases, or firms/industries’ forecasts, which may differ significantly from actual production. China’s Economic Recovery: Prospects and Implications China’s leaders have focused on resuming manufacturing production to jumpstart economic growth.116 At an executive session of China’s cabinet, the State Council, on March 17, 2020, Chinese officials emphasized the importance of stabilizing employment and announced that the government would streamline business approvals and fast-track approvals for large infrastructure projects. They also offered government support to alleviate shortages of labor, raw materials, funds, and protective gear.117 To facilitate economic activity, the Chinese government also appears Congressional Research Service 38 to have liberalized company health requirements and lifted intra-provincial and intra-city travel and transportation restrictions. NDRC spokesperson Meng Wei said on March 17, 2020 that transportation was operating normally. Zhejiang, Jiangsu, and Shanghai were operating at close to 100% of normal capacity; and over 90% of large-scale industrial companies outside of Hubei had resumed production.118 Company reports of opening and resumption of operations did not necessarily mean that these facilities were fully online or operating at pre-crisis levels, however. Several economic analysts and news outlets, including the Financial Times, published alternative measures of business resumption rates using proxies for economic activity—such as data on traffic congestion, air pollution levels, and container freight movement. Overall, many of these measures suggested that businesses across China did not return to full capacity at the rates reported by local and provincial governments.119 In Wuhan, the center of the original outbreak, the Hubei provincial government issued a notice in March—that applies to Wuhan as Hubei’s capital—allowing certain companies to resume work ahead of other production. This included companies in the medical and health industry, as well as companies producing protective gear, disinfectant, daily necessities, agriculture, and products critical to national and global supply chains.120 China emerged in June 2020 as the first major country to announce a return to economic growth since the outbreak of COVID-19, but consumption lagged production recovery and the economic recovery has relied on government spending and exports to boost growth. The government reported 3.2% gross domestic product (GDP) growth in the second quarter and 4.9% GDP growth in the third quarter of 2020.121 The International Monetary Fund (IMF) projects China’s economy to grow by 1.9% in 2020. China since February 2020 has provided an estimated $506 billion in stimulus and increased the government’s budget deficit target to a record high of 3.6% of GDP, up from 2.8% in 2019. Shifting from efforts to reduce debt, the government announced the issuance of $142.9 billion of special treasury bonds for the first time since 2007; increased the quota for local government special bonds (a source of infrastructure funding); and fast-tracked issuance of corporate bonds to cover pandemic costs, but with potential broader uses. The IMF estimates that the fiscal measures and financing plans announced amounted to 4.1% of the China’s GDP, as of July 2020.122 China’s National Bureau of Statistics in November 2020 recorded a 5% year-on-year increase in retail sales, a 2.6% year-on-year increase in fixed asset investment, and a 7% year-on-year increase in value-added industrial output. COVID-19: China Medical Supply Chains and Broader Trade Issues Congressional Research Service 39 in investment in industrial output growth, however, was recorded in non-ferrous metals and real estate investment, not broader areas of domestic consumption.123 China Positioning to Export China’s economy depends on exports and the foreign exchange it earns through exports, as well as on the large productive role that foreign firms play in the domestic market and as exporters. Seeking to stabilize drops in foreign investment and trade, on March 12, Commerce Vice Minister Wang Shouwen held a call with 400 members of the American Chamber of Commerce in China, and on March 13, he held a similar webinar with the European Chamber of Commerce in China’s Advisory Council. Vice Minister Wang pressed companies to reopen operations and increase investments in China. Other Chinese agencies represented included NDRC, MIIT, the National Health Commission, the General Administration of Drug Supervision, the State Administration for Market Regulation, the General Administration of Customers, the Civil Aviation Administration of China, the Ministry of Transportation, and the State Taxation Administration.124 During past crises, such as the global financial crisis of 2008-09, China has pressed firms to idle facilities and keep them production-ready (instead of shuttering them) and retain workers (instead of laying them off) to maintain social stability and facilitate efforts to quickly ramp up production and exports later.125 These stimulus efforts are sometimes less visible than fiscal policies in other countries. Several market watchers have noted that, while a 17% drop in Chinese exports in January-February 2020 was significant, it was not as dramatic when considering China’s economy was shuttered for much of February. This indicates that Chinese industry may have had sufficient stock already at ports for export when the crisis hit. This also signals how China was able to resume an export push in the third quarter of 2020.126 China’s economic recovery has been important to the United States and the global economy, as it is an important center of demand and supply. At the same time, during this period of global economic downturn, the United States and other countries are now potentially vulnerable to a concerted PRC export push that has been expanding since summer 2020 and any effort China makes to take additional market share in strategic sectors. Congressional Research Service 40 Steel Overcapacity Chinese overcapacity in steel has been highly contentious for its global impacts, and China could potentially see exports as a quick way to reduce inventories and secure needed cash. Similar to what happened during the global financial crisis in 2008-09, China is poised to take additional global market share in 2020 because it did not dial back production during the COVID-19 outbreak. Chinese blast furnaces continued to run during the COVID-19 crisis, and China’s steel production for January-February 2020 was up 3% over the same period in 2019. Meanwhile, due to collapsing domestic demand and logistics constraints, China’s finished steel inventories rose by 45% in January-February 2020 over the same period in 2019.127 China’s steel production at the end of 2019 was already at an all-time high of almost 1 billion tons, with China producing over 50% of global supply, according to the World Steel Association and China’s State Statistical Bureau (Figure 8).128 China’s crude steel production recovered in July 2020, rising 9.1% year-on-year. China’s crude steel production during the January-September 2020 period is up 4.5% over the same period in 2019. In contrast, crude steel production over the same period is down 17.9% in the EU; down 18.2% in North America; down 16.5% in India; down 19.1% in Japan; and down 7.5% in South Korea.] [Why was China's economy so important during the pandemic?] [Only use information presented in the prompt itself. Do not use any external sources or prior knowledge. Please say "I don't have enough information to answer this question" if the necessary information isn't available.]

[question] [user request] ===================== [text] [context document] ===================== [instruction] Answer the question using only the information provided in the context. Do not rely on external knowledge or sources.

How does the role of mitochondria influence bone growth and osteoblasts. Please keep this between 200-300 words. Highlight specific cases/pathways of how this works and talk about the mechanism.

Bioenergetics and mitochondrial biogenesis: OXPHOS vs glycolysis The initial metabolic study performed on bone tissues of mice in the 1960s suggested that bones predominantly utilized glycolysis rather than oxidative phosphorylation (OXPHOS) for their metabolism.4 The study reported that compared to other tissues such as the liver, bones exhibited lower oxygen consumption and significantly higher glucose consumption, leading to the abundant production of lactate. Similar findings were observed in rat calvaria,5 emphasizing the importance of glycolysis in bone metabolism. The significance of glycolysis in the regulation of bone mass was further supported by recent data suggesting defective glucose metabolism as the major cause of diabetes-induced bone loss, which showed that elevating glycolysis through administration of metformin or osteoblast-specific overexpression of Hif1a (hypoxia inducible factor 1 subunit alpha) or Pfkfb3 (6-phosphofructo-2-kinase/fructose-2,6-biphosphatase 3) in mice improved bone mass in diabetic mice.6,7 In vivo tracing with a stable isotope also demonstrated that glucose was largely metabolized to lactate and minimally contributed to the tricarboxylic acid (TCA) cycle in mouse cortical bones.8 Although glycolysis is evidently critical in the maintenance and growth of bone, evaluation of metabolic activity in isolated osteoblasts has revealed more complex and time-dependent results. Specifically, Komarova et al. closely examined changes in metabolism in differentiating primary calvarial osteoblasts in vitro and showed that OXPHOS was the primary energetic pathway utilized during the early stages (before day 10) of differentiation, but a shift to glycolysis occurred during the later stages (after day 10) when mineralized nodules formed.9 Similarly, Guntur et al. utilized a Seahorse real-time metabolic analyzer to measure oxygen consumption rate (OCR), indicative of OXPHOS, and extracellular acidification rates, indicative of glycolysis in mouse calvarial osteoblast cell line MC3T3-E1 and demonstrated that both OXPHPOS and glycolysis were initially upregulated in differentiating osteoblasts, but glycolysis was favored during the later stages of differentiation.10,11 Using the same method, Lee et al. showed that the contribution of glycolysis in total adenosine triphosphate (ATP) generation increased from approximately 40% at day 0 to 80% at day 7 of differentiation in primary calvarial osteoblasts.8 Our group also recently reported that both OCR and glycolytic proton efflux rate were elevated during the early maturation steps, but only glycolysis remained upregulated, while mitochondrial respiration decreased during the later mineralizing periods in primary calvarial osteoblasts.2 Noteworthily, mitochondrial ATP production may be critical during the early osteoblast maturation period since treatment with oligomycin A (ATP synthase inhibitor), antimycin A (mitochondrial complex III inhibitor), or siRNA targeting Atp5a1 gene, which encodes the alpha subunit of the mitochondrial ATP synthase F1 complex, at the initiation of osteogenic induction significantly impaired osteoblast differentiation.2 A recent review of metabolic activities in osteoblasts has underscored that OXPHOS increases as osteoblast maturation advances, although there are ongoing debates regarding the extent of glycolysis levels during osteoblast differentiation.12 Although further investigation is needed, particularly considering the distinct origins of osteoblasts (calvaria vs long bones), current evidence suggests that differentiating osteoblasts actively utilize both OXPHOS and glycolysis during the initial phases but tend to favor glycolysis as maturation progresses. Because OXPHOS far more efficiently produces ATP than aerobic glycolysis, why mature osteoblasts preferentially utilize glycolysis has remained unclear. It has been suggested that aerobic glycolysis is upregulated to offset the increase in ROS generation by OXPHOS.13 Additionally, Guntur et al. demonstrated that the increase in glycolytic ATP production in mature osteoblasts was the result of a decrease in mitochondrial membrane potential and OXPHOS activity.10 Similarly, using calvarial osteoblasts in which mitochondria were endogenously labelled with GFP, our group showed that mitophagy dramatically increased after differentiation day 14. This was confirmed by the increase in GFP-positive mitochondria co-localized with autophagic-lysosomal markers, LAMP1 (lysosomal-associated membrane protein 1) or LC3 (microtubule-associated protein light chain 3), suggesting that the decreased number of mitochondria after massive mitophagy may be the direct cause of reduced OXPHOS during the late differentiation stages.2 Consistent with the early increase in OXPHOS, mitochondrial biogenesis was found to increase during the initial phases of osteoblast maturation. Protein expression levels of mitochondrial biogenesis markers peroxisome proliferator-activated γ receptor coactivator-1α (PGC-1α) and mitochondrial transcription factor A (mtTFA or TFAM) were upregulated and peaked at day 7 of differentiation in MC3T3-E1 osteoblasts.14 Our group also reported that the expression of Ppargc1a, encoding PGC-1α, peaked at day 3, while the expressions of Tfam, Cox4i1 (cytochrome c oxidase subunit 4I1), and mt-Cytb (cytochrome B) peaked at day 7 in primary calvarial osteoblasts.2 Mitochondrial DNA copy number and expressions of mitochondrial proteins, COX4, and translocase of outer mitochondrial membrane 20, also peaked at day 7, after which the levels gradually declined possibly due to the progressive increase in mitophagy.2 Furthermore, enhancing mitochondrial biogenesis appears to accelerate osteogenic differentiation. For instance, An et al. demonstrated that activation of Wnt signaling pathway in C3H10T1/2 mouse mesenchymal cells promoted their osteoblastic differentiation through stimulating mitochondrial biogenesis.15 Increasing mitochondrial biogenesis through overexpression of Tfam enhanced Wnt-induced osteogenesis, while suppressing mitochondrial biogenesis through treatment with Zidovudine significantly impaired the osteogenic activity of C3H10T1/2 cells.15 In addition, nicotinamide (NAM), a form of vitamin B3, was recently shown to promote the differentiation of MC3T3-E1 osteoblasts partly through increasing the expression of Ppargc1a and mitochondrial biogenesis.16 These results suggest that potential bone therapeutics may target mitochondrial biogenesis in osteoblasts. Controversies persist regarding the metabolic activities during osteogenic differentiation of BMSCs. Shum et al. reported that OXPHOS was significantly enhanced during osteogenic differentiation of human MSCs, while glycolysis was unchanged and more critical during the proliferation of undifferentiated MSCs.17 They described that calvarial osteoblasts and MSCs exhibit distinct metabolic characteristics due to their different embryonic origin.17 Contrastingly, Ma et al. demonstrated that activating glycolysis through treatment with rotenone (complex I inhibitor) significantly promoted the osteogenic differentiation of BMSCs in mice, while inhibiting glycolysis through treatment with dichloroacetate, sodium oxamate, or 2-deoxy-D-glucose significantly impaired their osteogenic differentiation, highlighting the significance of glycolysis in MSC-mediated osteogenesis.18 They also showed that extracellular vesicles delivered lactate dehydrogenase A into BMSCs and stimulated glycolysis, enhancing bone formation in vivo.18 Further investigations are needed to clarify whether metabolic characteristics in osteogenic cells are embryonic origin-specific (neural crest vs mesoderm-derived) and differ between intramembranous and endochondral bone formation. A deeper understanding of osteogenic metabolism will not only advance insights into the mechanisms of metabolic bone diseases but also accelerate the development of strategies that modulate mitochondrial metabolism to promote osteogenesis. Oxidative stress Mitochondria produce most of the cellular ROS through OXPHOS, during which oxygen is reduced to superoxide anions that are subsequently converted to additional ROS such as hydrogen peroxide (H2O2). Accumulation of ROS is normally counterbalanced by the endogenous antioxidant defense system involving both non-enzymatic antioxidants, including ascorbic acid, vitamin E, and glutathione, and enzymatic antioxidants, including superoxide dismutases (SODs), catalase, glutathione peroxidases, and peroxiredoxins. Endogenous ROS, when the levels are controlled, may behave as second messengers to activate signaling pathways related to proliferation, differentiation, and survival, but excessively high levels of ROS can cause multiple pathological conditions, including osteoporosis.19

[question] How does the role of mitochondria influence bone growth and osteoblasts. Please keep this between 200-300 words. Highlight specific cases/pathways of how this works and talk about the mechanism. ===================== [text] Bioenergetics and mitochondrial biogenesis: OXPHOS vs glycolysis The initial metabolic study performed on bone tissues of mice in the 1960s suggested that bones predominantly utilized glycolysis rather than oxidative phosphorylation (OXPHOS) for their metabolism.4 The study reported that compared to other tissues such as the liver, bones exhibited lower oxygen consumption and significantly higher glucose consumption, leading to the abundant production of lactate. Similar findings were observed in rat calvaria,5 emphasizing the importance of glycolysis in bone metabolism. The significance of glycolysis in the regulation of bone mass was further supported by recent data suggesting defective glucose metabolism as the major cause of diabetes-induced bone loss, which showed that elevating glycolysis through administration of metformin or osteoblast-specific overexpression of Hif1a (hypoxia inducible factor 1 subunit alpha) or Pfkfb3 (6-phosphofructo-2-kinase/fructose-2,6-biphosphatase 3) in mice improved bone mass in diabetic mice.6,7 In vivo tracing with a stable isotope also demonstrated that glucose was largely metabolized to lactate and minimally contributed to the tricarboxylic acid (TCA) cycle in mouse cortical bones.8 Although glycolysis is evidently critical in the maintenance and growth of bone, evaluation of metabolic activity in isolated osteoblasts has revealed more complex and time-dependent results. Specifically, Komarova et al. closely examined changes in metabolism in differentiating primary calvarial osteoblasts in vitro and showed that OXPHOS was the primary energetic pathway utilized during the early stages (before day 10) of differentiation, but a shift to glycolysis occurred during the later stages (after day 10) when mineralized nodules formed.9 Similarly, Guntur et al. utilized a Seahorse real-time metabolic analyzer to measure oxygen consumption rate (OCR), indicative of OXPHOS, and extracellular acidification rates, indicative of glycolysis in mouse calvarial osteoblast cell line MC3T3-E1 and demonstrated that both OXPHPOS and glycolysis were initially upregulated in differentiating osteoblasts, but glycolysis was favored during the later stages of differentiation.10,11 Using the same method, Lee et al. showed that the contribution of glycolysis in total adenosine triphosphate (ATP) generation increased from approximately 40% at day 0 to 80% at day 7 of differentiation in primary calvarial osteoblasts.8 Our group also recently reported that both OCR and glycolytic proton efflux rate were elevated during the early maturation steps, but only glycolysis remained upregulated, while mitochondrial respiration decreased during the later mineralizing periods in primary calvarial osteoblasts.2 Noteworthily, mitochondrial ATP production may be critical during the early osteoblast maturation period since treatment with oligomycin A (ATP synthase inhibitor), antimycin A (mitochondrial complex III inhibitor), or siRNA targeting Atp5a1 gene, which encodes the alpha subunit of the mitochondrial ATP synthase F1 complex, at the initiation of osteogenic induction significantly impaired osteoblast differentiation.2 A recent review of metabolic activities in osteoblasts has underscored that OXPHOS increases as osteoblast maturation advances, although there are ongoing debates regarding the extent of glycolysis levels during osteoblast differentiation.12 Although further investigation is needed, particularly considering the distinct origins of osteoblasts (calvaria vs long bones), current evidence suggests that differentiating osteoblasts actively utilize both OXPHOS and glycolysis during the initial phases but tend to favor glycolysis as maturation progresses. Because OXPHOS far more efficiently produces ATP than aerobic glycolysis, why mature osteoblasts preferentially utilize glycolysis has remained unclear. It has been suggested that aerobic glycolysis is upregulated to offset the increase in ROS generation by OXPHOS.13 Additionally, Guntur et al. demonstrated that the increase in glycolytic ATP production in mature osteoblasts was the result of a decrease in mitochondrial membrane potential and OXPHOS activity.10 Similarly, using calvarial osteoblasts in which mitochondria were endogenously labelled with GFP, our group showed that mitophagy dramatically increased after differentiation day 14. This was confirmed by the increase in GFP-positive mitochondria co-localized with autophagic-lysosomal markers, LAMP1 (lysosomal-associated membrane protein 1) or LC3 (microtubule-associated protein light chain 3), suggesting that the decreased number of mitochondria after massive mitophagy may be the direct cause of reduced OXPHOS during the late differentiation stages.2 Consistent with the early increase in OXPHOS, mitochondrial biogenesis was found to increase during the initial phases of osteoblast maturation. Protein expression levels of mitochondrial biogenesis markers peroxisome proliferator-activated γ receptor coactivator-1α (PGC-1α) and mitochondrial transcription factor A (mtTFA or TFAM) were upregulated and peaked at day 7 of differentiation in MC3T3-E1 osteoblasts.14 Our group also reported that the expression of Ppargc1a, encoding PGC-1α, peaked at day 3, while the expressions of Tfam, Cox4i1 (cytochrome c oxidase subunit 4I1), and mt-Cytb (cytochrome B) peaked at day 7 in primary calvarial osteoblasts.2 Mitochondrial DNA copy number and expressions of mitochondrial proteins, COX4, and translocase of outer mitochondrial membrane 20, also peaked at day 7, after which the levels gradually declined possibly due to the progressive increase in mitophagy.2 Furthermore, enhancing mitochondrial biogenesis appears to accelerate osteogenic differentiation. For instance, An et al. demonstrated that activation of Wnt signaling pathway in C3H10T1/2 mouse mesenchymal cells promoted their osteoblastic differentiation through stimulating mitochondrial biogenesis.15 Increasing mitochondrial biogenesis through overexpression of Tfam enhanced Wnt-induced osteogenesis, while suppressing mitochondrial biogenesis through treatment with Zidovudine significantly impaired the osteogenic activity of C3H10T1/2 cells.15 In addition, nicotinamide (NAM), a form of vitamin B3, was recently shown to promote the differentiation of MC3T3-E1 osteoblasts partly through increasing the expression of Ppargc1a and mitochondrial biogenesis.16 These results suggest that potential bone therapeutics may target mitochondrial biogenesis in osteoblasts. Controversies persist regarding the metabolic activities during osteogenic differentiation of BMSCs. Shum et al. reported that OXPHOS was significantly enhanced during osteogenic differentiation of human MSCs, while glycolysis was unchanged and more critical during the proliferation of undifferentiated MSCs.17 They described that calvarial osteoblasts and MSCs exhibit distinct metabolic characteristics due to their different embryonic origin.17 Contrastingly, Ma et al. demonstrated that activating glycolysis through treatment with rotenone (complex I inhibitor) significantly promoted the osteogenic differentiation of BMSCs in mice, while inhibiting glycolysis through treatment with dichloroacetate, sodium oxamate, or 2-deoxy-D-glucose significantly impaired their osteogenic differentiation, highlighting the significance of glycolysis in MSC-mediated osteogenesis.18 They also showed that extracellular vesicles delivered lactate dehydrogenase A into BMSCs and stimulated glycolysis, enhancing bone formation in vivo.18 Further investigations are needed to clarify whether metabolic characteristics in osteogenic cells are embryonic origin-specific (neural crest vs mesoderm-derived) and differ between intramembranous and endochondral bone formation. A deeper understanding of osteogenic metabolism will not only advance insights into the mechanisms of metabolic bone diseases but also accelerate the development of strategies that modulate mitochondrial metabolism to promote osteogenesis. Oxidative stress Mitochondria produce most of the cellular ROS through OXPHOS, during which oxygen is reduced to superoxide anions that are subsequently converted to additional ROS such as hydrogen peroxide (H2O2). Accumulation of ROS is normally counterbalanced by the endogenous antioxidant defense system involving both non-enzymatic antioxidants, including ascorbic acid, vitamin E, and glutathione, and enzymatic antioxidants, including superoxide dismutases (SODs), catalase, glutathione peroxidases, and peroxiredoxins. Endogenous ROS, when the levels are controlled, may behave as second messengers to activate signaling pathways related to proliferation, differentiation, and survival, but excessively high levels of ROS can cause multiple pathological conditions, including osteoporosis.19 https://academic.oup.com/jbmr/article/39/9/1205/7697194 ===================== [instruction] Answer the question using only the information provided in the context. Do not rely on external knowledge or sources.

- Refer only to the context document in your answer. Do not employ any outside knowledge. - Summarise this into one paragraph - Use less than 200 words.

According to the above document only, How does puppy socialization classes correlate with adult dog behavior?

**The Importance of Puppy Socialization** The current literature and common consensus among dog behavior experts is that lack of appropriate socialization during the sensitive period, along with lack of appropriate ongoing socialization during the dog’s life, plays a large role in whether or not the dog develops behavioral problems. Lack of appropriate early socialization to a range of people and other animals, as well as different environments, can result in adult dogs that exhibit problematic behaviors, such as undesirable aggression and fearfulness. Lack of exposure to animals that will be forming part of the puppy’s social group as an adult, which may include other dogs, different animal species, and people and children, can result in an individual that is unable to form strong social bonds with these groups. In one study, social and environmental exposure administered to puppies was found to be positively correlated with measures of sociability, and negatively correlated with measures of fear and aggression. Socialization with other animal species was negatively associated with inappropriate predatory behavior, and dogs that attended puppy preschool were found to be less fearful, less aggressive, and more social. Another study, however, highlights the importance of appropriate types of socialization: adult dogs with a fear of noises, such as thunder and fireworks, were more likely to have experienced thunder when they were younger than 4 months of age. This evidence indicates that early experiences play an important part in shaping behavior. If done in an appropriate manner, these experiences will help to reduce the likelihood of problematic behavior occurring in future. However, if this process is not well controlled, it could result in an increased likelihood of undesirable adult behavior. A 1999 study examined the effects of socialization on the ability to play search games with humans, an important element of search and rescue dog training. Dogs that had not been exposed to humans before they were 1 year of age could never learn how to play a searching game, while pet dogs with human exposure were able to learn how to play. However, one of the human-deprived dogs had lived with humans until it was 4 months old before being removed from the human environment, and it performed better than the other human-deprived dogs in this study. While the performance of a single dog should not lead to generalizations, this study demonstrates the positive long-term effects of early socialization to humans, possibly even if a dog is later removed from human environments for an extended period of time. A study conducted by Appleby et al investigated whether there was a relationship between the display of aggressive and avoidance behavior and dogs’ experiences during the first 6 months of their life. Their results indicated significant differences in aggression toward unfamiliar people and avoidance behavior between dogs who were raised in kennels, a barn, or a shed, compared with a domestic setting (ie, in the breeder’s home). This result points to the importance of environment in the socialization process. Breeders who raise a litter of puppies in a kennel, barn, or shed should be able to provide adequate socialization to the puppies; however, they may have to make a special effort to ensure that these experiences occur. The relationship between socialization practice and the prevalence of undesirable behaviors in adult dogs is important not just because these behaviors are annoying to owners. Undesirable behaviors may also signal the presence of other underlying issues that may impact negatively on the welfare of the dog. They may result from an underlying physical health problem, for example, or confusion about what behaviors are expected by the owner, and/or poor mental health in the dog. This can become a vicious cycle; a poorly socialized dog does not understand what its owner expects and may receive conflicting or confusing messages from the owner, which causes it to become stressed, resulting in more undesirable behavior. If the owner does not then make his/her expectations for the dog known in a very clear way or lower these expectations in accordance with the dog’s ability to meet them, then this stress continues, causing even further undesirable behavior. It is important that owners and veterinarians take behavioral problems seriously; regardless of whether or not they escalate to the point where the owner considers relinquishing the dog to a shelter, the dog’s welfare may be compromised if it is displaying problematic behaviors. There are breed differences in the development of stimulus response, according to Scott and Fuller’s seminal work in the 1960s. For example, a larger percentage of Fox terriers and Beagles had developed a startle response at 3 weeks of age than Cocker spaniels and Shetland Sheepdogs. However, by 4 weeks, all dogs of all breeds studied had developed the startle response. Furthermore, Coppinger and Coppinger state that different socialization experiences will have varying effects on certain dog breeds. They exposed a Labrador retriever puppy to livestock, in order to determine whether it would be possible to turn her into a livestock guarding dog. Unlike a dog that is bred specifically for that purpose, the Labrador never showed intense protective behaviors toward the livestock. Therefore, it is likely that breeding specifically for certain traits does influence ideal socialization practices and amounts. Perhaps there are sex differences in socialization practice needs, based on adult behavioral outcomes. Male dogs are more likely to be rated by authorities as expressing dominant and aggressive behaviors, and female dogs are more likely to be perceived as more obedient, easier to housetrain, and more demanding of affection. However, to our knowledge, sex differences in socialization have not been examined, even though Scott and Fuller did explain that, at any given moment in a dog’s development, males are likely to be physically larger than females, and size does affect behavior. They also state, however, that growth curve differences between the sexes do not necessarily correlate with differences in the rate of learning, so it is possible that there is no discernible sex difference in socialization needs. The results of available studies provide strong evidence of a link between inadequate socialization during puppy-hood and undesirable adult dog behaviors. What they do not explain, however, is how much socialization is optimal. Having no socialization has very clear negative impacts, so there must be a minimum amount required, but how much this actually consists of is not known. Also unknown is whether there is a maximum amount of socialization required, beyond which any extra socialization is unnecessary or even detrimental. These studies also do not explain why there is a link between puppy socialization and adult behavior. One possible reason is that the socialization periods during puppyhood are like biological windows that open and close at certain times, and an animal that does not have necessary experiences during those windows misses the opportunity forever. More likely is that there are periods where a puppy is developmentally more sensitive/receptive to certain experiences, and that learning plays a critical role in this process. Animals can only learn about things to which they are introduced, and they may do so more readily during a sensitive period. Therefore, a lack of exposure to a particular object or type of animal at the correct developmental time necessarily means that dogs do not have the chance to learn, or take longer to learn, whether that object or animal is harmless or dangerous. In addition, since mild stress seems to be an integral part of the socialization and exposure process, a lack of mild desensitization-related stress early in life may have negative neurological effects on the dog and make it incapable of handling any amount of stress later in life. Most likely, a combination of learning via desensitization and stress inoculation acts to prevent the behavioral problems noted in adult dogs without adequate socialization experiences. Despite the general agreement that puppy socialization practices are crucial in the development of normal social relationships and psychological health in adult dogs, the evidence is less clear on the benefit of puppy classes specifically. Many studies about the effects of puppy classes on adult dog behavior have been epidemiological in nature, meaning that they correlate the behavior of adult dogs with various demographic, owner, and environmental factors. This method is useful in establishing which factors have a stronger predictive value on the outcome, but there is some debate as to whether they can truly determine causal relationships. This can limit their utility in evaluating whether a single factor, such as attendance at a puppy class, has a clear effect on adult dog behavior. Nonetheless, because controlled experimental studies on specific populations of puppies are rare, epidemiological studies are probably the best available alternative in understanding whether there is any relationship between puppy classes and adult dog behavior. Another study showed that attendance at puppy classes reduced the risk of aggression toward unfamiliar people. As with the study by Duxbury et al, there were many other factors predicting less aggressive behavior, including being a desexed female, having a female owner, attending ring-craft classes, and positive reinforcement training methods. A further study showed a similar result: attendance at puppy socialization classes was associated with improved positive social behaviors, and fewer behavioral problems, as adults. Other factors that predicted these outcomes were being a male dog, a higher level of environmental and social interactions overall, and remaining in the litter longer. Taken together, the results of these studies suggest that socialization classes are one piece of the puzzle in developing adult dog behavior. Since these studies sometimes show contradictory results (eg, male dogs showed fewer behavioral problems in one study and desexed females showed less aggression in another), it is possible that the samples, or unaccounted for variables, have affected the results of these epidemiological studies. Another reason why puppy socialization classes do not always appear to singularly affect adult dog behavior could relate to the ways in which some classes are run. In most countries, there are no accreditation procedures in place and puppy classes may be run by people who lack the skills or experience necessary for this purpose. Perhaps many puppies simply find the experience too stressful to receive a noticeable benefit. Although mild stress is a component of socialization, it is important not to stress puppies too much, or else the benefits will not be conferred.

{QUERY} According to the above document only, How does puppy socialization classes correlate with adult dog behavior? {TASK DESCRIPTION} - Refer only to the context document in your answer. Do not employ any outside knowledge. - Summarise this into one paragraph - Use less than 200 words. {TEXT PASSAGE} **The Importance of Puppy Socialization** The current literature and common consensus among dog behavior experts is that lack of appropriate socialization during the sensitive period, along with lack of appropriate ongoing socialization during the dog’s life, plays a large role in whether or not the dog develops behavioral problems. Lack of appropriate early socialization to a range of people and other animals, as well as different environments, can result in adult dogs that exhibit problematic behaviors, such as undesirable aggression and fearfulness. Lack of exposure to animals that will be forming part of the puppy’s social group as an adult, which may include other dogs, different animal species, and people and children, can result in an individual that is unable to form strong social bonds with these groups. In one study, social and environmental exposure administered to puppies was found to be positively correlated with measures of sociability, and negatively correlated with measures of fear and aggression. Socialization with other animal species was negatively associated with inappropriate predatory behavior, and dogs that attended puppy preschool were found to be less fearful, less aggressive, and more social. Another study, however, highlights the importance of appropriate types of socialization: adult dogs with a fear of noises, such as thunder and fireworks, were more likely to have experienced thunder when they were younger than 4 months of age. This evidence indicates that early experiences play an important part in shaping behavior. If done in an appropriate manner, these experiences will help to reduce the likelihood of problematic behavior occurring in future. However, if this process is not well controlled, it could result in an increased likelihood of undesirable adult behavior. A 1999 study examined the effects of socialization on the ability to play search games with humans, an important element of search and rescue dog training. Dogs that had not been exposed to humans before they were 1 year of age could never learn how to play a searching game, while pet dogs with human exposure were able to learn how to play. However, one of the human-deprived dogs had lived with humans until it was 4 months old before being removed from the human environment, and it performed better than the other human-deprived dogs in this study. While the performance of a single dog should not lead to generalizations, this study demonstrates the positive long-term effects of early socialization to humans, possibly even if a dog is later removed from human environments for an extended period of time. A study conducted by Appleby et al investigated whether there was a relationship between the display of aggressive and avoidance behavior and dogs’ experiences during the first 6 months of their life. Their results indicated significant differences in aggression toward unfamiliar people and avoidance behavior between dogs who were raised in kennels, a barn, or a shed, compared with a domestic setting (ie, in the breeder’s home). This result points to the importance of environment in the socialization process. Breeders who raise a litter of puppies in a kennel, barn, or shed should be able to provide adequate socialization to the puppies; however, they may have to make a special effort to ensure that these experiences occur. The relationship between socialization practice and the prevalence of undesirable behaviors in adult dogs is important not just because these behaviors are annoying to owners. Undesirable behaviors may also signal the presence of other underlying issues that may impact negatively on the welfare of the dog. They may result from an underlying physical health problem, for example, or confusion about what behaviors are expected by the owner, and/or poor mental health in the dog. This can become a vicious cycle; a poorly socialized dog does not understand what its owner expects and may receive conflicting or confusing messages from the owner, which causes it to become stressed, resulting in more undesirable behavior. If the owner does not then make his/her expectations for the dog known in a very clear way or lower these expectations in accordance with the dog’s ability to meet them, then this stress continues, causing even further undesirable behavior. It is important that owners and veterinarians take behavioral problems seriously; regardless of whether or not they escalate to the point where the owner considers relinquishing the dog to a shelter, the dog’s welfare may be compromised if it is displaying problematic behaviors. There are breed differences in the development of stimulus response, according to Scott and Fuller’s seminal work in the 1960s. For example, a larger percentage of Fox terriers and Beagles had developed a startle response at 3 weeks of age than Cocker spaniels and Shetland Sheepdogs. However, by 4 weeks, all dogs of all breeds studied had developed the startle response. Furthermore, Coppinger and Coppinger state that different socialization experiences will have varying effects on certain dog breeds. They exposed a Labrador retriever puppy to livestock, in order to determine whether it would be possible to turn her into a livestock guarding dog. Unlike a dog that is bred specifically for that purpose, the Labrador never showed intense protective behaviors toward the livestock. Therefore, it is likely that breeding specifically for certain traits does influence ideal socialization practices and amounts. Perhaps there are sex differences in socialization practice needs, based on adult behavioral outcomes. Male dogs are more likely to be rated by authorities as expressing dominant and aggressive behaviors, and female dogs are more likely to be perceived as more obedient, easier to housetrain, and more demanding of affection. However, to our knowledge, sex differences in socialization have not been examined, even though Scott and Fuller did explain that, at any given moment in a dog’s development, males are likely to be physically larger than females, and size does affect behavior. They also state, however, that growth curve differences between the sexes do not necessarily correlate with differences in the rate of learning, so it is possible that there is no discernible sex difference in socialization needs. The results of available studies provide strong evidence of a link between inadequate socialization during puppy-hood and undesirable adult dog behaviors. What they do not explain, however, is how much socialization is optimal. Having no socialization has very clear negative impacts, so there must be a minimum amount required, but how much this actually consists of is not known. Also unknown is whether there is a maximum amount of socialization required, beyond which any extra socialization is unnecessary or even detrimental. These studies also do not explain why there is a link between puppy socialization and adult behavior. One possible reason is that the socialization periods during puppyhood are like biological windows that open and close at certain times, and an animal that does not have necessary experiences during those windows misses the opportunity forever. More likely is that there are periods where a puppy is developmentally more sensitive/receptive to certain experiences, and that learning plays a critical role in this process. Animals can only learn about things to which they are introduced, and they may do so more readily during a sensitive period. Therefore, a lack of exposure to a particular object or type of animal at the correct developmental time necessarily means that dogs do not have the chance to learn, or take longer to learn, whether that object or animal is harmless or dangerous. In addition, since mild stress seems to be an integral part of the socialization and exposure process, a lack of mild desensitization-related stress early in life may have negative neurological effects on the dog and make it incapable of handling any amount of stress later in life. Most likely, a combination of learning via desensitization and stress inoculation acts to prevent the behavioral problems noted in adult dogs without adequate socialization experiences. Despite the general agreement that puppy socialization practices are crucial in the development of normal social relationships and psychological health in adult dogs, the evidence is less clear on the benefit of puppy classes specifically. Many studies about the effects of puppy classes on adult dog behavior have been epidemiological in nature, meaning that they correlate the behavior of adult dogs with various demographic, owner, and environmental factors. This method is useful in establishing which factors have a stronger predictive value on the outcome, but there is some debate as to whether they can truly determine causal relationships. This can limit their utility in evaluating whether a single factor, such as attendance at a puppy class, has a clear effect on adult dog behavior. Nonetheless, because controlled experimental studies on specific populations of puppies are rare, epidemiological studies are probably the best available alternative in understanding whether there is any relationship between puppy classes and adult dog behavior. Another study showed that attendance at puppy classes reduced the risk of aggression toward unfamiliar people. As with the study by Duxbury et al, there were many other factors predicting less aggressive behavior, including being a desexed female, having a female owner, attending ring-craft classes, and positive reinforcement training methods. A further study showed a similar result: attendance at puppy socialization classes was associated with improved positive social behaviors, and fewer behavioral problems, as adults. Other factors that predicted these outcomes were being a male dog, a higher level of environmental and social interactions overall, and remaining in the litter longer. Taken together, the results of these studies suggest that socialization classes are one piece of the puzzle in developing adult dog behavior. Since these studies sometimes show contradictory results (eg, male dogs showed fewer behavioral problems in one study and desexed females showed less aggression in another), it is possible that the samples, or unaccounted for variables, have affected the results of these epidemiological studies. Another reason why puppy socialization classes do not always appear to singularly affect adult dog behavior could relate to the ways in which some classes are run. In most countries, there are no accreditation procedures in place and puppy classes may be run by people who lack the skills or experience necessary for this purpose. Perhaps many puppies simply find the experience too stressful to receive a noticeable benefit. Although mild stress is a component of socialization, it is important not to stress puppies too much, or else the benefits will not be conferred.

If you cannot answer using the context alone, say "I cannot determine the answer to that due to lack of context".

How many earned media impressions did Billie get with their product marketing campaign?

**Product Marketing Strategy** An effective product marketing strategy can be the key to growing your brand, boosting revenue, and unlocking new opportunities. Focused on demonstrating the specific values and benefits of a product to your customer, a product marketing campaign can be extremely valuable in both B2B and B2C environments, particularly as customer-centric advertising grows more popular. Unfortunately, there are still countless people who don’t understand what product marketing actually means. Only around 5% of product marketers are convinced their role is fully understood, even among business leaders. Today, we’re going to be defining product marketing, exploring what it can do for your business, and providing top tips on how to use product marketing more effectively. Product marketing is the art and science of bringing a product to market. It involves various strategic marketing and sales tactics, as well as long-term lead nurturing, up-selling, and cross-selling techniques. A product marketing strategy is the exact plan a company uses to bring their product to their audience. Your strategy will usually include things like figuring out the positioning and messaging you want to link to your product, launching the product, and ensuring customers and salespeople understand what it can do. Strategies can also cover insights into how various teams (production, marketing, sales, and customer support) will work together to drive demand and usage of a product. While this might sound the same as conventional marketing, product marketing is slightly more focused. Part of the “7 P’s of marketing”, product marketing focuses specifically on product, while your other marketing campaigns might focus on people, prices, promotion, place, packaging, and positioning. Product Marketing Strategy Example Product marketing is focused on the steps people take to purchase your products, and how you can support people in adopting and using that product. Let’s take a look at a classic example. Apple is a household name in a highly competitive technology market. To stand out from the crowd, Apple ensures its products are beautifully well-designed, easy to use, and convenient. Apple’s product marketing strategy focuses specifically on the benefits it can deliver to users, rather than just listing the features you can get from each item. Apple’s language in virtually every product page and marketing campaign concentrates on telling consumers what they can do, and what they’ll be able to accomplish. Apple tells a narrative with its marketing content which helps the customer imagine the challenges they can overcome. For another example, look at Billie, a woman’s razor brand well known for the #ProjectBodyHair campaign. This started with a TV campaign that actually showed body hair in women’s razor ads – something which hadn’t been done before. The idea for this campaign came from the product team, who researched the market to find out customers didn’t like seeing ads where customers didn’t have body hair. Combine this with the rising demand from women to be portrayed realistically in the media, and Billie had an excellent product marketing campaign. In fact, it generated 3.3 billion earned media impressions across 23 countries. Why You Need a Product Marketing Strategy Product marketing strategies are all about understanding your audience’s needs, and positioning your product in a way that grabs attention. Developing the right product for your market and ensuring you present it in a way that captures audience attention is essential for growth. With a product marketing strategy, you can: Improve your understanding of your customer: Implementing a product marketing strategy requires companies to conduct in-depth research into their target audience. You learn what your customers need to see in your product to determine whether it’s valuable to them, and their lives. Understanding why customers gravitate toward your products will help you to create better buyer personas and more relevant campaigns. In other words, you’ll speak your customer’s language. Understand your competitors While you’re building your product marketing strategy, you’ll need to look at your wider market and determine how your product or service is different from other existing options. You can compare your strategy to those of your competitors, and get a better insight into what you’re going up against. With in-depth competitor research, you’ll be able to differentiate yourself more clearly in your target market and ensure you’re positioned appropriately in your chosen industry. After you’ve assessed your competition, ask yourself: How is my product suitable for today’s market? How is this product different from competing products? Can we differentiate our product even further (with extra features, pricing changes, etc)? Ensure your teams are on the same page When you know exactly what makes your product stand out and why customers want it, it’s much easier to give your teams a consistent view of their purpose, and your brand’s mission. With a strong product marketing strategy, you can align your product, sales, marketing, and service teams around a shared understanding of your company’s purpose. When everyone in your team has a better understanding of the purpose of the product you’re selling and why it’s so beneficial, they’ll be more likely to communicate this information correctly. Boost revenue and sales Ultimately, customers have endless options when it comes to where they can spend their money these days. The only way to ensure they come to you instead of the competition, is to position your product as the best possible option for their needs. Building a product marketing strategy that gives you an in-depth understanding of your customers will help you to generate more sales, through more personalized marketing. Remember, around 72% of customers say they expect businesses they buy from to understand them as individuals. How to Develop Your Own Product Marketing Strategy A good product marketing strategy should guide the positioning, promotion, and pricing of your product. With this plan, you should be able to take your product from the “development” stage, all the way through to launch with a clear vision. Here’s how you can get started. Step 1: Get to Know Your Product’s Target Audience A strong product marketing strategy begins with a deep knowledge of your target audience. You’ll need to define a specific target audience and create a buyer persona to help you understand the pain points, expectations, and requirements of that client. The more information you can include in your personas, the better. You’ll need to know where your target customer comes from, what kind of issues they’re facing, why they might want your product, and even how much they earn on a regular basis. The more data you have, the more you’ll be able to ensure all the aspects of your product marketing strategy are targeted to the right person. Step 2: Conduct market research After you’re done with your customer research, the next step is figuring out where your product is positioned in the context of the wider market. Look at the other products similar to yours that exist in the current market. What exactly can these products offer? Perform a full analysis of each item, thinking about: What your product can do better What your competitor’s product does well Whether people are happy with the product, or what their overall response is Answering these questions will help you to choose a position for yourself in your chosen market. Step 3: Determine your positioning and messaging With this knowledge of your target audience and your competition, you’ll be able to start investing in positioning and messaging strategies. Positioning involves thinking about where your product exists in the market in the context of other brands and solutions. For instance, is your product one of the cheapest on the market, or one of the most expensive? Do you offer the widest selection of features, or a specific focus on customer service your customers love? The positioning you discover will help you to determine what you need to emphasize in your messaging (such as excellent service, or low prices). Some of the questions you’ll need to answer when developing your positioning and messaging include: What makes this product unique? Why is this product better than our competitors? Why is our product ideal for our target audience? What will our audience get out of this product they can’t get elsewhere? Why should customers trust and invest in our product? Once you’ve answered these questions, you should be able to create an elevator pitch that describes everything someone would need to know about your product in an exciting, compact way. Step 4: Create your go-to-market strategy Now it’s time to think about how you’re going to bring your product to customers. dentify which personas you’re going to be targeting with your product, and how you’re going to be capturing their attention with your messaging strategy. Think about how you’re going to price your product, and what kind of methods you’re going to be using for selling. For instance, do you want to sell through distributors or direct to customers? You can also use this stage to consider the kind of marketing methods you’re going to use, like social media marketing, or content campaigns. At this stage, you can utilize a graphic design maker for compelling visual content across your marketing campaigns. As you choose marketing automation and sales strategies, also select KPIs you’ll want to measure as you progress to see whether your product marketing strategy is successful. Brief your sales and marketing leaders on your go-to-market strategy and ensure they have all the resources they need to do their job, such as advertising tools, product samples, brand guidelines, and go-to market strategy templates. Step 5: Launch, monitor, and optimize Finally, you’ll be ready to launch your product. There are two aspects to the “launch” for most companies. Internal launches involve introducing everyone in your team to your product’s main benefits and features, which you’ll need to do before anything else.

<text passage> **Product Marketing Strategy** An effective product marketing strategy can be the key to growing your brand, boosting revenue, and unlocking new opportunities. Focused on demonstrating the specific values and benefits of a product to your customer, a product marketing campaign can be extremely valuable in both B2B and B2C environments, particularly as customer-centric advertising grows more popular. Unfortunately, there are still countless people who don’t understand what product marketing actually means. Only around 5% of product marketers are convinced their role is fully understood, even among business leaders. Today, we’re going to be defining product marketing, exploring what it can do for your business, and providing top tips on how to use product marketing more effectively. Product marketing is the art and science of bringing a product to market. It involves various strategic marketing and sales tactics, as well as long-term lead nurturing, up-selling, and cross-selling techniques. A product marketing strategy is the exact plan a company uses to bring their product to their audience. Your strategy will usually include things like figuring out the positioning and messaging you want to link to your product, launching the product, and ensuring customers and salespeople understand what it can do. Strategies can also cover insights into how various teams (production, marketing, sales, and customer support) will work together to drive demand and usage of a product. While this might sound the same as conventional marketing, product marketing is slightly more focused. Part of the “7 P’s of marketing”, product marketing focuses specifically on product, while your other marketing campaigns might focus on people, prices, promotion, place, packaging, and positioning. Product Marketing Strategy Example Product marketing is focused on the steps people take to purchase your products, and how you can support people in adopting and using that product. Let’s take a look at a classic example. Apple is a household name in a highly competitive technology market. To stand out from the crowd, Apple ensures its products are beautifully well-designed, easy to use, and convenient. Apple’s product marketing strategy focuses specifically on the benefits it can deliver to users, rather than just listing the features you can get from each item. Apple’s language in virtually every product page and marketing campaign concentrates on telling consumers what they can do, and what they’ll be able to accomplish. Apple tells a narrative with its marketing content which helps the customer imagine the challenges they can overcome. For another example, look at Billie, a woman’s razor brand well known for the #ProjectBodyHair campaign. This started with a TV campaign that actually showed body hair in women’s razor ads – something which hadn’t been done before. The idea for this campaign came from the product team, who researched the market to find out customers didn’t like seeing ads where customers didn’t have body hair. Combine this with the rising demand from women to be portrayed realistically in the media, and Billie had an excellent product marketing campaign. In fact, it generated 3.3 billion earned media impressions across 23 countries. Why You Need a Product Marketing Strategy Product marketing strategies are all about understanding your audience’s needs, and positioning your product in a way that grabs attention. Developing the right product for your market and ensuring you present it in a way that captures audience attention is essential for growth. With a product marketing strategy, you can: Improve your understanding of your customer: Implementing a product marketing strategy requires companies to conduct in-depth research into their target audience. You learn what your customers need to see in your product to determine whether it’s valuable to them, and their lives. Understanding why customers gravitate toward your products will help you to create better buyer personas and more relevant campaigns. In other words, you’ll speak your customer’s language. Understand your competitors While you’re building your product marketing strategy, you’ll need to look at your wider market and determine how your product or service is different from other existing options. You can compare your strategy to those of your competitors, and get a better insight into what you’re going up against. With in-depth competitor research, you’ll be able to differentiate yourself more clearly in your target market and ensure you’re positioned appropriately in your chosen industry. After you’ve assessed your competition, ask yourself: How is my product suitable for today’s market? How is this product different from competing products? Can we differentiate our product even further (with extra features, pricing changes, etc)? Ensure your teams are on the same page When you know exactly what makes your product stand out and why customers want it, it’s much easier to give your teams a consistent view of their purpose, and your brand’s mission. With a strong product marketing strategy, you can align your product, sales, marketing, and service teams around a shared understanding of your company’s purpose. When everyone in your team has a better understanding of the purpose of the product you’re selling and why it’s so beneficial, they’ll be more likely to communicate this information correctly. Boost revenue and sales Ultimately, customers have endless options when it comes to where they can spend their money these days. The only way to ensure they come to you instead of the competition, is to position your product as the best possible option for their needs. Building a product marketing strategy that gives you an in-depth understanding of your customers will help you to generate more sales, through more personalized marketing. Remember, around 72% of customers say they expect businesses they buy from to understand them as individuals. How to Develop Your Own Product Marketing Strategy A good product marketing strategy should guide the positioning, promotion, and pricing of your product. With this plan, you should be able to take your product from the “development” stage, all the way through to launch with a clear vision. Here’s how you can get started. Step 1: Get to Know Your Product’s Target Audience A strong product marketing strategy begins with a deep knowledge of your target audience. You’ll need to define a specific target audience and create a buyer persona to help you understand the pain points, expectations, and requirements of that client. The more information you can include in your personas, the better. You’ll need to know where your target customer comes from, what kind of issues they’re facing, why they might want your product, and even how much they earn on a regular basis. The more data you have, the more you’ll be able to ensure all the aspects of your product marketing strategy are targeted to the right person. Step 2: Conduct market research After you’re done with your customer research, the next step is figuring out where your product is positioned in the context of the wider market. Look at the other products similar to yours that exist in the current market. What exactly can these products offer? Perform a full analysis of each item, thinking about: What your product can do better What your competitor’s product does well Whether people are happy with the product, or what their overall response is Answering these questions will help you to choose a position for yourself in your chosen market. Step 3: Determine your positioning and messaging With this knowledge of your target audience and your competition, you’ll be able to start investing in positioning and messaging strategies. Positioning involves thinking about where your product exists in the market in the context of other brands and solutions. For instance, is your product one of the cheapest on the market, or one of the most expensive? Do you offer the widest selection of features, or a specific focus on customer service your customers love? The positioning you discover will help you to determine what you need to emphasize in your messaging (such as excellent service, or low prices). Some of the questions you’ll need to answer when developing your positioning and messaging include: What makes this product unique? Why is this product better than our competitors? Why is our product ideal for our target audience? What will our audience get out of this product they can’t get elsewhere? Why should customers trust and invest in our product? Once you’ve answered these questions, you should be able to create an elevator pitch that describes everything someone would need to know about your product in an exciting, compact way. Step 4: Create your go-to-market strategy Now it’s time to think about how you’re going to bring your product to customers. dentify which personas you’re going to be targeting with your product, and how you’re going to be capturing their attention with your messaging strategy. Think about how you’re going to price your product, and what kind of methods you’re going to be using for selling. For instance, do you want to sell through distributors or direct to customers? You can also use this stage to consider the kind of marketing methods you’re going to use, like social media marketing, or content campaigns. At this stage, you can utilize a graphic design maker for compelling visual content across your marketing campaigns. As you choose marketing automation and sales strategies, also select KPIs you’ll want to measure as you progress to see whether your product marketing strategy is successful. Brief your sales and marketing leaders on your go-to-market strategy and ensure they have all the resources they need to do their job, such as advertising tools, product samples, brand guidelines, and go-to market strategy templates. Step 5: Launch, monitor, and optimize Finally, you’ll be ready to launch your product. There are two aspects to the “launch” for most companies. Internal launches involve introducing everyone in your team to your product’s main benefits and features, which you’ll need to do before anything else. ================ <instructions> If you cannot answer using the context alone, say "I cannot determine the answer to that due to lack of context". ================ <question> How many earned media impressions did Billie get with their product marketing campaign?

"================ <TEXT PASSAGE> ======= [context document] ================ <QUESTION> ======= [user request] ================ <TASK> ======= You are an expert in question answering. Your task is to reply to a query or question, based only on the information provided by the user. It should only use information in the article provided."

My grandmother is buried in Occala, but she bought a burial plot in Orlando's city cemetery's Block B12. I am her sole heir, and I want to be buried in Orlando. Will I be entitled to it? I also want my daughter to be buried with me. Will it be possible? My daughter says that she will only accept it if her father is buried there as well. Is this feasible? If I change my mind, can I sell the plot to my friend? I have a vague memory that grandpa's ashes are interred there. Does it change the picture?

Sec. 16.02. - Greenwood Cemetery Declared Public Cemetery of City; Description; Map; Use. The tract of land, being the southwest quarter of the northwest quarter of Section 31, Township 22 South, Range 30 East, according to a plat recorded at the office of the Clerk of the Circuit Court of the County in Deed Book 87, page 227, is declared to be the public cemetery of the City, to be known as Greenwood Cemetery. An official map of the Greenwood Cemetery shall at all times be on file at the office of the supervisor of Greenwood Cemetery. The cemetery is set apart only for the burial, entombment or inurnment of human remains and shall only be used as such in perpetuity. (Ord. of 6-27-1977, § 1; Ord. of 3-30-1981, § 1) Sec. 16.03. - Greenwood Cemetery Not Perpetual Care Cemetery. Greenwood Cemetery is not one of perpetual care and the City shall be under no obligation to maintain any set standard for its care and upkeep. The City shall endeavor to provide general maintenance and care to the cemetery in keeping with the reminder that it is sacredly devoted to the interment, entombment or inurnment of the dead. (Ord. of 6-27-1977, § 1) Sec. 16.04. - Burials in City Restricted to Greenwood Cemetery and Washington Park Cemetery. No human body shall be buried within the City limits of the City of Orlando, except in Greenwood Cemetery or in Washington Park Cemetery if a privately owned cemetery, or in such other cemetery facilities and/or property as the City Council may from time to time designate, acquire or control. ... Sec. 16.10. - Spaces; Sale to Permanent Residents; Exceptions. The City shall only sell spaces in Greenwood Cemetery for prices fixed by the City Council to residents of the City of Orlando who have resided within the corporate limits of the City for a period of more than one year prior to the date of sale, and to persons who are not permanent residents of the City provided that such sales shall be only for the immediate burial of a permanent resident of the City who met the residency requirements hereunder at the time of the resident's death. The Sexton of the Greenwood Cemetery shall require satisfactory evidence of such prior residence within the City. In addition, the City may sell spaces in Blocks 12, 16, 17, 18, 19 and 20 of Greenwood Cemetery to non-City, as well as City residents. Provided, however, that a person who has not met the residency requirements set forth herein may be permitted to purchase spaces in Greenwood Cemetery at the price established by City Council for qualified non-residents if such person is related by blood or marriage to a deceased person buried in said cemetery, unless such deceased person is interred in a section of the cemetery reserved for members of the American Legion, Spanish-American War Veterans, Grand Army of the Republic, Independent Order of Odd Fellows, or United Confederate Veterans, and such deceased person, at the time of his or her death, did not meet City residency requirements. ... Sec. 16.13. - Sales to Non-Family Members; City's Right of First Refusal. A space owner may sell or transfer his or her space only to a relative by blood or marriage, provided however, a space owner may sell or transfer his or her space to a person not related by blood or marriage if the owner receives approval of said sale from City Council. In the event a space owner wishes to sell or transfer his or her space to a person other than a relative by blood or marriage in a sale or transfer not approved by City Council, the owner shall first offer in writing the space for sale to the City of Orlando. The City may repurchase the space for the original purchase price or one-half of the current sales price, whichever is greater, less a recording fee if the deed from the City to the owner is not recorded. If the City wishes to purchase the space, the City shall notify the owner thereof within five (5) days of receipt of notice, and the sale shall be closed within five (5) days after receipt by the City of evidence of title to the space satisfactory to the Office of Legal Affairs. ... Sec. 16.14. - Declaration; Rights If No Declaration. The owner of a space may present his or her deed to the Cemetery Supervisor designating in writing persons entitled to be buried in the space or spaces owned. This designation may be amended at any time by the owner(s) in the same manner as the original designation. Only relatives by blood or marriage may be designated under this section; provided however, persons other than relatives by blood or marriage may be designated if the owner receives approval of said designation from City Council. In the event the owner fails to designate burial rights for the space or spaces owned, and in the event the property is not transferred or conveyed as provided herein, the right of interment in the space or spaces shall be in the following order: (1)One space, niche or crypt shall be forever reserved for the owner and one for the owner's surviving spouse, if any.(2)The remaining spaces shall pass to the heirs or devisees of the owner in the same manner as real property passes under Florida Law: provided, however, that no person shall be interred in a space passing under this section unless such person would have been eligible under the provisions of this Chapter to be designated for burial in such space at the date of such person's death or the interment of said person is approved by City Council. Sec. 16.15. - Rights Upon Interment. Whenever an interment of the remains of any person is made in a space, the space thereby becomes inalienable and shall be held as the space of the interred person except in the case of cremated remains as set forth in Section 16.17. ... Sec. 16.17. - Interments in General. All earth interments shall be in a liner or vault of concrete or steel of a type approved by the cemetery Supervisor. No more than the remains of one body shall be interred in any one space, vault or crypt, except in the case of a mother and stillborn child(ren). However, if written permission is given by the owner of a space or, if the owner is deceased, by the owner's heirs, permitting more than the remains of one person to occupy a space, vault or crypt, an exception will be made to permit no more than one regular interment and one cremain or two cremains in any one space, vault or crypt. Installation of cremorial headstones may be permitted under the same number, size and material restrictions as set forth in Section 16.26; provided, however, that in cases where the use of a cremorial headstone causes the total number of allowable interments or inurnments in any one space to be exceeded, each additional inurnment shall be charged a fee as set forth by City Council for right of additional interment. ... Sec. 16.29. - Children; Pets. No child under fifteen (15) years of age shall be permitted in the cemetery unless accompanied by an adult. Pets shall be prohibited in the cemetery. ... Sec. 16.35. - Double Interment Permitted. Notwithstanding the provisions of Section 16.17 hereof, no more than the remains of two (2) bodies shall be interred in any one space in Block 12 of Greenwood Cemetery, provided that a mother and a stillborn child shall be considered one body. All interments in Block 12 shall be in a vault installed by the City of Orlando.

"================ <TEXT PASSAGE> ======= Sec. 16.02. - Greenwood Cemetery Declared Public Cemetery of City; Description; Map; Use. The tract of land, being the southwest quarter of the northwest quarter of Section 31, Township 22 South, Range 30 East, according to a plat recorded at the office of the Clerk of the Circuit Court of the County in Deed Book 87, page 227, is declared to be the public cemetery of the City, to be known as Greenwood Cemetery. An official map of the Greenwood Cemetery shall at all times be on file at the office of the supervisor of Greenwood Cemetery. The cemetery is set apart only for the burial, entombment or inurnment of human remains and shall only be used as such in perpetuity. (Ord. of 6-27-1977, § 1; Ord. of 3-30-1981, § 1) Sec. 16.03. - Greenwood Cemetery Not Perpetual Care Cemetery. Greenwood Cemetery is not one of perpetual care and the City shall be under no obligation to maintain any set standard for its care and upkeep. The City shall endeavor to provide general maintenance and care to the cemetery in keeping with the reminder that it is sacredly devoted to the interment, entombment or inurnment of the dead. (Ord. of 6-27-1977, § 1) Sec. 16.04. - Burials in City Restricted to Greenwood Cemetery and Washington Park Cemetery. No human body shall be buried within the City limits of the City of Orlando, except in Greenwood Cemetery or in Washington Park Cemetery if a privately owned cemetery, or in such other cemetery facilities and/or property as the City Council may from time to time designate, acquire or control. ... Sec. 16.10. - Spaces; Sale to Permanent Residents; Exceptions. The City shall only sell spaces in Greenwood Cemetery for prices fixed by the City Council to residents of the City of Orlando who have resided within the corporate limits of the City for a period of more than one year prior to the date of sale, and to persons who are not permanent residents of the City provided that such sales shall be only for the immediate burial of a permanent resident of the City who met the residency requirements hereunder at the time of the resident's death. The Sexton of the Greenwood Cemetery shall require satisfactory evidence of such prior residence within the City. In addition, the City may sell spaces in Blocks 12, 16, 17, 18, 19 and 20 of Greenwood Cemetery to non-City, as well as City residents. Provided, however, that a person who has not met the residency requirements set forth herein may be permitted to purchase spaces in Greenwood Cemetery at the price established by City Council for qualified non-residents if such person is related by blood or marriage to a deceased person buried in said cemetery, unless such deceased person is interred in a section of the cemetery reserved for members of the American Legion, Spanish-American War Veterans, Grand Army of the Republic, Independent Order of Odd Fellows, or United Confederate Veterans, and such deceased person, at the time of his or her death, did not meet City residency requirements. ... Sec. 16.13. - Sales to Non-Family Members; City's Right of First Refusal. A space owner may sell or transfer his or her space only to a relative by blood or marriage, provided however, a space owner may sell or transfer his or her space to a person not related by blood or marriage if the owner receives approval of said sale from City Council. In the event a space owner wishes to sell or transfer his or her space to a person other than a relative by blood or marriage in a sale or transfer not approved by City Council, the owner shall first offer in writing the space for sale to the City of Orlando. The City may repurchase the space for the original purchase price or one-half of the current sales price, whichever is greater, less a recording fee if the deed from the City to the owner is not recorded. If the City wishes to purchase the space, the City shall notify the owner thereof within five (5) days of receipt of notice, and the sale shall be closed within five (5) days after receipt by the City of evidence of title to the space satisfactory to the Office of Legal Affairs. ... Sec. 16.14. - Declaration; Rights If No Declaration. The owner of a space may present his or her deed to the Cemetery Supervisor designating in writing persons entitled to be buried in the space or spaces owned. This designation may be amended at any time by the owner(s) in the same manner as the original designation. Only relatives by blood or marriage may be designated under this section; provided however, persons other than relatives by blood or marriage may be designated if the owner receives approval of said designation from City Council. In the event the owner fails to designate burial rights for the space or spaces owned, and in the event the property is not transferred or conveyed as provided herein, the right of interment in the space or spaces shall be in the following order: (1)One space, niche or crypt shall be forever reserved for the owner and one for the owner's surviving spouse, if any.(2)The remaining spaces shall pass to the heirs or devisees of the owner in the same manner as real property passes under Florida Law: provided, however, that no person shall be interred in a space passing under this section unless such person would have been eligible under the provisions of this Chapter to be designated for burial in such space at the date of such person's death or the interment of said person is approved by City Council. Sec. 16.15. - Rights Upon Interment. Whenever an interment of the remains of any person is made in a space, the space thereby becomes inalienable and shall be held as the space of the interred person except in the case of cremated remains as set forth in Section 16.17. ... Sec. 16.17. - Interments in General. All earth interments shall be in a liner or vault of concrete or steel of a type approved by the cemetery Supervisor. No more than the remains of one body shall be interred in any one space, vault or crypt, except in the case of a mother and stillborn child(ren). However, if written permission is given by the owner of a space or, if the owner is deceased, by the owner's heirs, permitting more than the remains of one person to occupy a space, vault or crypt, an exception will be made to permit no more than one regular interment and one cremain or two cremains in any one space, vault or crypt. Installation of cremorial headstones may be permitted under the same number, size and material restrictions as set forth in Section 16.26; provided, however, that in cases where the use of a cremorial headstone causes the total number of allowable interments or inurnments in any one space to be exceeded, each additional inurnment shall be charged a fee as set forth by City Council for right of additional interment. ... Sec. 16.29. - Children; Pets. No child under fifteen (15) years of age shall be permitted in the cemetery unless accompanied by an adult. Pets shall be prohibited in the cemetery. ... Sec. 16.35. - Double Interment Permitted. Notwithstanding the provisions of Section 16.17 hereof, no more than the remains of two (2) bodies shall be interred in any one space in Block 12 of Greenwood Cemetery, provided that a mother and a stillborn child shall be considered one body. All interments in Block 12 shall be in a vault installed by the City of Orlando. https://library.municode.com/fl/orlando/codes/code_of_ordinances?nodeId=TITIICICO_CH16CEBU_ARTIGEPR_S16.04BUREGRCEWAPACE ================ <QUESTION> ======= My grandmother is buried in Occala, but she bought a burial plot in Orlando's city cemetery's Block B12. I am her sole heir, and I want to be buried in Orlando. Will I be entitled to it? I also want my daughter to be buried with me. Will it be possible? My daughter says that she will only accept it if her father is buried there as well. Is this feasible? If I change my mind, can I sell the plot to my friend? I have a vague memory that grandpa's ashes are interred there. Does it change the picture? ================ <TASK> ======= You are an expert in question answering. Your task is to reply to a query or question, based only on the information provided by the user. It should only use information in the article provided."

Please respond using only information provided in the context block. If the information needed to answer the question is not within the context block, state that you cannot answer.

I am interested in what context one would use the glGenFrameBuffers() function. What does this function do exactly? Please include any extra information to help understand the function.

Up to this point, all of our discussion regarding buffers has focused on the buffers provided by the windowing system, as you requested when you called glutCreateWindow() (and configured by your call to glutInitDisplayMode()). Although you can quite successfully use any technique with just those buffers, quite often various operations require moving data between buffers superfluously. This is where framebuffer objects enter the picture (as part of OpenGL Version 3.0). Using framebuffer objects, you can create our own framebuffers and use their attached renderbuffers to minimize data copies and optimize performance. Framebuffer objects are quite useful for performing off-screen-rendering, updating texture maps, and engaging in buffer ping-ponging (a data-transfer techniques used in GPGPU). The framebuffer that is provided by the windowing system is the only framebuffer that is available to the display system of your graphics server— that is, it is the only one you can see on your screen. It also places restrictions on the use of the buffers that were created when your window opened. By comparison, the framebuffers that your application creates cannot be displayed on your monitor; they support only off-screen rendering. Another difference between window-system-provided framebuffers and framebuffers you create is that those managed by the window system allocate their buffers—color, depth, stencil, and accumulation—when your window is created. When you create an application-managed framebuffer object, you need to create additional renderbuffers that you associate with the framebuffer objects you created. The buffers with the window-systemprovided buffers can never be associated with an application-created framebuffer object, and vice versa. To allocate an application-generated framebuffer object name, you need to call glGenFramebuffers() which will allocate an unused identifier for the framebuffer object. As compared to some other objects within OpenGL (e.g., texture objects and display lists), you always need to use an name returned from glGenFramebuffers(). Allocating a framebuffer object name doesn’t actually create the framebuffer object or allocate any storage for it. Those tasks are handled through a call to glBindFramebuffer(). glBindFramebuffer() operates in a similar manner to many of the other glBind*() routines you’ve seen in OpenGL. The first time it is called for a particular framebuffer, it causes void glGenFramebuffers(GLsize n, GLuint *ids); Allocate n unused framebuffer object names, and return those names in ids. storage for the object to be allocated and initialized. Any subsequent calls will bind the provided framebuffer object name as the active one. As with all of the other objects you have encountered in OpenGL, you can release an application-allocated framebuffer by calling glDeleteFramebuffers(). That function will mark the framebuffer object’s name as unallocated and release any resources associated with the framebuffer object. For completeness, you can determine whether a particular unsigned integer is an application-allocated framebuffer object by calling glIsFramebuffer():. void glBindFramebuffer(GLenum target, GLuint framebuffer); Specifies either a framebuffer for either reading or writing. When target is GL_DRAW_FRAMEBUFFER, framebuffer specifies the destination framebuffer for rendering. Similarly, when target is set to GL_READ_ FRAMEBUFFER, framebuffer specifies the source of read operations. Passing GL_FRAMEBUFFER for target sets both the read and write framebuffer bindings to framebuffer. framebuffer must either be zero, which binds target to the default; a window-system provided framebuffer; or a framebuffer object generated by a call to glGenFramebuffers(). A GL_INVALID_OPERATION error is generated if framebuffer is neither zero nor a valid framebuffer object previously generated by calling glGenFramebuffers(), but not deleted by calling glDeleteFramebuffers(). void glDeleteFramebuffers(GLsize n, const GLuint *ids); Deallocates the n framebuffer objects associated with the names provided in ids. If a framebuffer object is currently bound (i.e., its name was passed to the most recent call to glBindFramebuffer()), and is deleted, the framebuffer target is immediately bound to id zero (the window-system provided framebuffer), and the framebuffer object is released. No errors are generated by glDeleteFramebuffers(). Unused names or zero are simply ignored. GLboolean glIsFramebuffer(GLuint framebuffer); Framebuffer Objects 529 Once a framebuffer object is created, you still can’t do much with it. You need to provide a place for drawing to go and reading to come from; those places are called framebuffer attachments. We’ll discuss those in more detail after we examine renderbuffers, which are one type of buffer you can attach to a framebuffer object. Renderbuffers Renderbuffers are effectively memory managed by OpenGL that contains formatted image data. The data that a renderbuffer holds takes meaning once it is attached to a framebuffer object, assuming that the format of the image buffer matches what OpenGL is expecting to render into (e.g., you can’t render colors into the depth buffer). As with many other buffers in OpenGL, the process of allocating and deleting buffers is similar to what you’ve seen before. To create a new renderbuffer, you would call glGenRenderbuffers(). Likewise, a call to glDeleteRenderbuffers() will release the storage associated with a renderbuffer. Returns GL_TRUE if framebuffer is the name of a framebuffer returned from glGenFramebuffers(). Returns GL_FALSE if framebuffer is zero (the window-system default framebuffer) or a value that’s either unallocated or been deleted by a call to glDeleteFramebuffers(). void glGenRenderbuffers(GLsizei n, GLuint *ids); Allocate n unused renderbuffer object names, and return those names in ids. Names are unused until bound with a call to glBindRenderbuffer(). void glDeleteRenderbuffers(GLsizei n, const GLuint *ids); Deallocates the n renderbuffer objects associated with the names provided in ids. If one of the renderbuffers is currently bound and passed to glDeleteRenderbuffers(), a binding of zero replaces the binding at the current framebuffer attachment point, in addition to the renderbuffer being released. No errors are generated by glDeleteRenderbuffers(). Unused names or zero are simply ignored. Likewise, you can determine whether a name represents a valid renderbuffer by calling glIsRenderbuffer(). Similar to the process of binding a framebuffer object so that you can modify its state, you call glBindRenderbuffer() to affect a renderbuffer’s creation and to modify the state associated with it, which includes the format of the image data that it contains. Creating Renderbuffer Storage When you first call glBindRenderbuffer() with an unused renderbuffer name, the OpenGL server creates a renderbuffer with all its state information set to the default values. In this configuration, no storage has been allocated to store image data. Before you can attach a renderbuffer to a framebuffer and render into it, you need to allocate storage and specify its image format. This is done by calling either glRenderbufferStorage() or glRenderbufferStorageMultisample(). void glIsRenderbuffer(GLuint renderbuffer); Returns GL_TRUE if renderbuffer is the name of a renderbuffer returned from glGenRenderbuffers(). Returns GL_FALSE if renderbuffer is zero (the window-system default framebuffer) or a value that’s either unallocated or been deleted by a call to glDeleteRenderbuffers(). void glBindRenderbuffer(GLenum target, GLuint renderbuffer); Creates a renderbuffer and associates it with the name renderbuffer. target must be GL_RENDERBUFFER. renderbuffer must either be zero, which removes any renderbuffer binding, or a name that was generated by a call to glGenRenderbuffers(); otherwise, a GL_INVALID_OPERATION error will be generated. void glRenderbufferStorage(GLenum target, GLenum internalformat, GLsizei width, GLsizei height); void glRenderbufferStorageMultisample(GLenum target, GLsizei samples, GLenum internalformat, GLsizei width, GLsizei height); Framebuffer Objects 531 Allocates storage for image data for the bound renderbuffer. target must be GL_RENDERBUFFER. For a color-renderable buffer, internalformat must be one of: GL_RED, GL_R8, GL_R16, GL_RG, GL_RG8, GL_RG16, GL_RGB, GL_R3_G3_B2, GL_RGB4, GL_RGB5, GL_RGB8, GL_RGB10, GL_RGB12, GL_RGB16, GL_RGBA, GL_RGBA2, GL_RGBA4, GL_RGB5_A1, GL_RGBA8, GL_RGB10_A2, GL_RGBA12, GL_RGBA16, GL_SRGB, GL_SRGB8, GL_SRGB_ALPHA, GL_SRGB8_ALPHA8,GL_R16F, GL_R32F, GL_RG16F, GL_RG32F, GL_RGB16F, GL_RGB32F, GL_RGBA16F, GL_RGBA32F, GL_R11F_G11F_B10F, GL_RGB9_E5, GL_R8I, GL_R8UI, GL_R16I, GL_R16UI, GL_R32I, GL_R32UI, GL_RG8I, GL_RG8UI, GL_RG16I, GL_RG16UI, GL_RG32I, GL_RG32UI, GL_RGB8I, GL_RGB8UI, GL_RGB16I, GL_RGB16UI, GL_RGB32I, GL_RGB32UI, GL_RGBA8I, GL_RGBA8UI, GL_RGBA16I, GL_RGBA16UI, GL_RGBA32I. OpenGL version 3.1 adds the additional following formats: GL_R8_SNORM, GL_R16_SNORM, GL_RG8_SNORM, GL_RG16_SNORM, GL_RGB8_ SNORM, GL_RGB16_SNORM, GL_RGBA8_SNORM, GL_RGBA16_SNORM. To use a renderbuffer as a depth buffer, it must be depth-renderable, which is specified by setting internalformat to either GL_DEPTH_COMPONENT, GL_DEPTH_COMPONENT16, GL_DEPTH_COMPONENT32, GL_DEPTH_ COMPONENT32, or GL_DEPTH_COMPONENT32F. For use exclusively as a stencil buffer, internalformat should be specified as either GL_STENCIL_INDEX, GL_STENCIL_INDEX1, GL_STENCIL_ INDEX4, GL_STENCIL_INDEX8, or GL_STENCIL_INDEX16. For packed depth-stencil storage, internalformat must be GL_DEPTH_ STENCIL, which allows the renderbuffer to be attached as the depth buffer, stencil buffer, or at the combined depth-stencil attachment point. width and height specify the size of the renderbuffer in pixels, and samples specifies the number of multisample samples per pixel. Setting samples to zero in a call to glRenderbufferStorageMultisample() is identical to calling glRenderbufferStorage(). A GL_INVALID_VALUE is generated if width or height is greater than the value returned when querying GL_MAX_RENDERBUFFER_SIZE, or if samples is greater than the value returned when querying GL_MAX_ SAMPLES. A GL_INVALID_OPERATION is generated if internalformat is a signed- or unsigned-integer format (e.g., a format containing a “I”, or “UI” in its token), and samples is not zero, and the implementation doesn’t support multisampled integer buffers. Finally, if the renderbuffer size and format combined exceed the available memory able to be allocated, then a GL_OUT_OF_MEMORY error is generated. Example 10-6 Creating an RGBA Color Renderbuffer: fbo.c glGenRenderbuffers( 1, &color ); glBindRenderbuffer( GL_RENDERBUFFER, color ); glRenderbufferStorage( GL_RENDERBUFFER, GL_RGBA, 256, 256 ); Once you have created storage for your renderbuffer, you need to attach it to a framebuffer object before you can render into it. Framebuffer Attachments When you render, you can send the results of that rendering to a number of places: • The color buffer to create an image, or even multiple color buffers if you’re using multiple render targets (see “Special Output Values” in Chapter 15) • The depth buffer to store occlusion information • The stencil buffer for storing per-pixel masks to control rendering Each of those buffers represents a framebuffer attachment, to which you can attach suitable image buffers that you later render into, or read from. Currently, there are two types of rendering surfaces you can associate with one of those attachments: renderbuffers and a level of a texture image. Attachment Name Description GL_COLOR_ATTACHMENTi The ith color buffer. i can range from zero (the default color buffer) to GL_MAX_COLOR_ATTACHMENTS–1 GL_DEPTH_ATTACHMENT The depth buffer GL_STENCIL_ATTACHMENT The stencil buffer GL_DEPTH_STENCIL_ATTACHMENT A special attachment for packed depthstencil buffers (which require the renderbuffer to have been allocated as a GL_DEPTH_STENCIL pixel format) We’ll first discuss attaching a renderbuffer to a framebuffer object, which is done by calling glFramebufferRenderbuffer(). In Example 10-7, we create and attach two renderbuffers: one for color, and the other for depth. We then proceed to render, and finally copy the results back to the window-system-provided framebuffer to display the results. You might use this technique to generate frames for a movie rendering offscreen, where you don’t have to worry about the visible framebuffer being corrupted by overlapping windows or someone resizing the window and interrupting rendering. One important point to remember is that you might need to reset the viewport for each framebuffer before rendering, particularly if the size of your application-defined framebuffers differs from the window-system provided framebuffer. Another very common use for framebuffer objects is to update textures dynamically. You might do this to indicate changes in a surface’s appearance (such as bullet holes in a wall in a game) or to update values in a lookup table if you’re doing GPGPU-like computations. In these cases, you bind a level of a texture map as the framebuffer attachment, as compared to a renderbuffer. After rendering, the texture map can be detached from the framebuffer so that it can be used in subsequent rendering. Note: Nothing prevents you from reading from a texture that is simultaneously bound as a framebuffer attachment for writing. In this scenario, called a framebuffer rendering loop, the results are undefined for both operations. That is, the values returned from sampling the bound texture map, as well as the values written into the texture level while bound, will likely be incorrect. void glFramebufferTexture1D(GLenum target, GLenum attachment, GLenum texturetarget, GLuint texture, GLint level); void glFramebufferTexture2D(GLenum target, GLenum attachment, GLenum texturetarget, GLuint texture, GLint level); void glFramebufferTexture3D(GLenum target, GLenum attachment, GLenum texturetarget, GLuint texture, GLint level, GLint layer); Attaches a level of a texture objects as a rendering attachment to a framebuffer object. target must be either GL_READ_FRAMEBUFFER, GL_DRAW_FRAMEBUFFER, or GL_FRAMEBUFFER (which is equivalent to GL_DRAW_FRAMEBUFFER). attachment must be one of the framebuffer attachment points: GL_COLOR_ATTACHMENTi, GL_DEPTH_ ATTACHMENT, GL_STENCIL_ATTACHMENT, or GL_DEPTH_STENCIL_ ATTACHMENT (in which case, the internal format of the texture must be GL_DEPTH_STENCIL). For glFramebufferTexture1D(), texturetarget must be GL_TEXTURE_1D, if texture is not zero. For glFramebufferTexture2D(), texturetarget must be GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_RECTANGLE, GL_TEXTURE_CUBE_ MAP_POSITIVE_X, GL_TEXTURE_CUBE_MAP_POSITIVE_Y, GL_ TEXTURE_CUBE_MAP_POSITIVE_Z, GL_TEXTURE_CUBE_MAP_ NEGATIVE_X, GL_TEXTURE_CUBE_MAP_NEGATIVE_Y, GL_TEXTURE_ CUBE_MAP_NEGATIVE_Z, and for glFramebufferTexture3D() texturetarget must be GL_TEXTURE_3D. Similar to the previous example, Example 10-8 demonstrates the process of dynamically updating a texture, using the texture after its update is completed, and then rendering with it later. Framebuffer Completeness Given the myriad of combinations between texture and buffer formats, and between framebuffer attachments, various situations can arise that prevent the completion of rendering when you are using applicationdefined framebuffer objects. After modifying the attachments to a framebuffer object, it’s best to check the framebuffer’s status by calling glCheckFramebufferStatus(). The errors representing the various violations of framebuffer configurations are listed in Table 10-7. Of the listed errors, GL_FRAMEBUFFER_UNSUPPORTED is very implementation dependent, and may be the most complicated to debug. void glFramebufferTextureLayer(GLenum target, GLenum attachment, GLuint texture, GLint level, GLint layer); Attaches a layer of a three-dimensional texture, or a one- or twodimensional array texture as a framebuffer attachment, in a similar manner to glFramebufferTexture3D(). target must be one of GL_READ_FRAMEBUFFER, GL_DRAW_ FRAMEBUFFER, or GL_FRAMEBUFFER (which is equivalent to GL_DRAW_ FRAMEBUFFER). attachment must be one of GL_COLOR_ATTACHMENTi, GL_DEPTH_ATTACHMENT, GL_STENCIL_ATTACHMENT, or GL_DEPTH_ STENCIL_ATTACHMENT. texture must be either zero, indicating that the current binding for the attachment should be released, or a texture object name (as returned from glGenTextures()). level indicates the mipmap level of the texture object, and layer represents which layer of the texture (or array element) should be bound as an attachment. GLenum glCheckFramebufferStatus(GLenum target); Returns one of the framebuffer completeness status enums listed in Table 10-7. target must be one of GL_READ_FRAMEBUFFER, GL_DRAW_ FRAMEBUFFER, or GL_FRAMEBUFFER (which is equivalent to GL_DRAW_ FRAMEBUFFER). If glCheckFramebufferStatus() generates an error, zero is returned. Framebuffer Objects 539 Copying Pixel Rectangles While glCopyPixels() has been the default routine for replicating blocks of pixels since OpenGL Version 1.0, as OpenGL expanded its rendering facilities, a more substantial pixel-copying routine was required. glBlitFramebuffer(), described below, subsumes the operations of glCopyPixels() and glPixelZoom() in a single, enhanced call. glBlitFramebuffer() allows greater pixel filtering during the copy operation, much in the same manner as texture mapping (in fact, the same filtering operations, GL_NEAREST and GL_LINEAR are used during the copy). Additionally, this routine is aware of multisampled buffers, and supports copying between different framebuffers (as controlled by framebuffer objects). Framebuffer Completeness Status Enum Description GL_FRAMEBUFFER_COMPLETE The framebuffer and its attachments match the rendering or reading state required. GL_FRAMEBUFFER_UNDEFINED The bound framebuffer is specified to be the default framebuffer (i.e., glBindFramebuffer() with zero specified as the framebuffer), and the default framebuffer doesn’t exist. GL_FRAMEBUFFER_ INCOMPLETE_ATTACHMENT A necessary attachment to the bound framebuffer is uninitialized GL_FRAMEBUFFER_ INCOMPLETE_MISSING_ ATTACHMENT There are no images (e.g., texture layers or renderbuffers) attached to the framebuffer. GL_FRAMEBUFFER_ INCOMPLETE_DRAW_BUFFER Every drawing buffer (e.g., GL_DRAW_BUFFERi as specified by glDrawBuffers()) has an attachment. GL_FRAMEBUFFER_ INCOMPLETE_READ_BUFFER An attachment exists for the buffer specified for the buffer specified by glReadBuffer(). GL_FRAMEBUFFER_ UNSUPPORTED The combination of images attached to the framebuffer object is incompatible with the requirements of the OpenGL implementation. GL_FRAMEBUFFER_ INCOMPLETE_MULTISAMPLE The number of samples for all images across the framebuffer’s attachments do not match. void glBlitFramebuffer(GLint srcX0, GLint srcY0, GLint srcX1, GLint srcY1, GLint dstX0, GLint dstY0, GLint dstX1, GLint dstY1, GLbitfield buffers, GLenum filter); Copies a rectangle of pixel values from one region of the read framebuffer to another region of the draw framebuffer, potentially resizing, reversing, converting, and filtering the pixels in the process. srcX0, srcY0, srcX1, srcY1 represent the source region where pixels are sourced from, and written to the rectangular region specified by dstX0, dstY0, dstX1, dstY1. buffers is the bitwise-or of GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT, GL_DEPTH_BUFFER_ BIT, and GL_STENCIL_BUFFER_BIT, which represent the buffers in which the copy should occur. Finally, filter specifies the method of interpolation done if the two rectangular regions are different sizes, and must be one of GL_NEAREST or GL_LINEAR; no filtering is applied if the regions are the same size. If there are multiple color draw buffers (See “Rendering to Multiple Output Buffers” on page 729), each buffer receives a copy of the source region. If srcX1 < srcX0, or dstX1 < dstX0, the image is reversed in the horizontal direction. Likewise, if srcY1 < srcY0 or dstY1 < dstY0, the image is reverse in the vertical direction. However, If both the source and destination sizes are negative in the same direction, no reversal is done. If the source and destination buffers are of different formats, conversion of the pixel values is done in most situations. However, if the read color buffer is a floating-point format, and any of the write color buffers are not, or vice verse; and if the read color buffer is a signed (unsigned) integer format and not all of the draw buffers are signed (unsigned) integer values, the call will generate a GL_INVALID_OPERATION, and no pixels will be copied. Multisampled buffers also have an effect on the copying of pixels. If the source buffer is multisampled, and the destination is not, the samples are resolved to a single pixel value for the destination buffer. Conversely, if the source buffer is not multisampled, and the destination is, the source pixel’s data is replicated for each sample. Finally, if both buffers are multisampled and the number of samples for each buffer is the same, the samples are copied without modification. However, if the buffers have a different number of samples, no pixels are copied, and a GL_INVALID_ OPERATION error is generated. A GL_INVALID_VALUE error is generated if buffers has other bits set than those permitted, or if filter is other than GL_LINEAR or GL_NEAREST Chapter Objectives After reading this chapter, you’ll be able to do the following: • Render concave filled polygons by first tessellating them into convex polygons, which can be rendered using standard OpenGL routines • Use the OpenGL Utility Library to create quadrics objects to render and model the surfaces of spheres and cylinders, and to tessellate disks (circles) and partial disks (arcs) Note: In OpenGL Version 3.1, some of the techniques and functions described in this chapter—particularly those relating to quadric objects—were likely affected by deprecation. While many of these features can be found in the GLU library, they rely on OpenGL functions that were removed. The OpenGL Library (GL) is designed for low-level operations, both streamlined and accessible to hardware acceleration. The OpenGL Utility Library (GLU) complements the OpenGL library, supporting higher-level operations. Some of the GLU operations are covered in other chapters. Mipmapping (gluBuild*DMipmaps()) and image scaling (gluScaleImage()) are discussed along with other facets of texture mapping in Chapter 9. Several matrix transformation GLU routines (gluOrtho2D(), gluPerspective(), gluLookAt(), gluProject(), gluUnProject(), and gluUnProject4()) are described in Chapter 3. The use of gluPickMatrix() is explained in Chapter 13. The GLU NURBS facilities, which are built atop OpenGL evaluators, are covered in Chapter 12. Only two GLU topics remain: polygon tessellators and quadric surfaces; these topics are discussed in this chapter. To optimize performance, the basic OpenGL renders only convex polygons, but the GLU contains routines for tessellating concave polygons into convex ones, which the basic OpenGL can handle. Where the basic OpenGL operates on simple primitives, such as points, lines, and filled polygons, the GLU can create higher-level objects, such as the surfaces of spheres, cylinders, and cones. This chapter has the following major sections. • “Polygon Tessellation” explains how to tessellate concave polygons into easier-to-render convex polygons. • “Quadrics: Rendering Spheres, Cylinders, and Disks” describes how to generate spheres, cylinders, circles and arcs, including data such as surface normals and texture coordinates. Polygon Tessellation As discussed in “Describing Points, Lines, and Polygons” in Chapter 2, OpenGL can directly display only simple convex polygons. A polygon is simple if the edges intersect only at vertices, there are no duplicate vertices, and exactly two edges meet at any vertex. If your application requires the display of concave polygons, polygons containing holes, or polygons with intersecting edges, these polygons must first be subdivided into simple convex polygons before they can be displayed. Such subdivision is called tessellation, and the GLU provides a collection of routines that perform tessellation. These routines take as input arbitrary contours, which describe hard-to-render polygons, and they return some combination of triangles, triangle meshes, triangle fans, and lines. If you think a polygon may need tessellation, follow these typical steps: 1. Create a new tessellation object with gluNewTess(). 2. Use gluTessCallback() several times to register callback functions to perform operations during the tessellation. The trickiest case for a callback function is when the tessellation algorithm detects an intersection and must call the function registered for the GLU_TESS_ COMBINE callback. 3. Specify tessellation properties by calling gluTessProperty(). The most important property is the winding rule, which determines the regions that should be filled and those that should remain unshaded. 4. Create and render tessellated polygons by specifying the contours of one or more closed polygons. If the data for the object is static, encapsulate the tessellated polygons in a display list. (If you don’t have to recalculate the tessellation repeatedly, using display lists is more efficient.) 5. If you need to tessellate something else, you may reuse your tessellation object. If you are forever finished with your tessellation object, you may delete it with gluDeleteTess(). Note: The tessellator described here was introduced in Version 1.2 of the GLU. If you are using an older version of the GLU, you must use routines described in “Describing GLU Errors” on page 557. To query which version of GLU you have, use gluGetString(GLU_VERSION), which returns a string with your GLU version number. If you don’t seem to have gluGetString() in your GLU, then you have GLU 1.0, which did not yet have the gluGetString() routine. Creating a Tessellation Object As a complex polygon is being described and tessellated, it has associated data, such as the vertices, edges, and callback functions. All this data is tied to a single tessellation object. To perform tessellation, your program first has to create a tessellation object using the routine gluNewTess(). A single tessellation object can be reused for all your tessellations. This object is required only because library routines might need to do their own tessellations, and they should be able to do so without interfering with any tessellation that your program is doing. It might also be useful to have multiple tessellation objects if you want to use different sets of callbacks for different tessellations. A typical program, however, allocates a single tessellation object and uses it for all its tessellations. There’s no real need to free it, because it uses a small amount of memory. On the other hand, it never hurts to be tidy. Tessellation Callback Routines After you create a tessellation object, you must provide a series of callback routines to be called at appropriate times during the tessellation. After specifying the callbacks, you describe the contours of one or more polygons using GLU routines. When the description of the contours is complete, the tessellation facility invokes your callback routines as necessary. Any functions that are omitted are simply not called during the tessellation, and any information they might have returned to your program is lost. All are specified by the single routine gluTessCallback(). GLUtesselator* gluNewTess(void); Creates a new tessellation object and returns a pointer to it. A null pointer is returned if the creation fails. Polygon Tessellation 545 void gluTessCallback(GLUtesselator *tessobj, GLenum type, void (*fn)()); Associates the callback function fn with the tessellation object tessobj. The type of the callback is determined by the parameter type, which can be GLU_TESS_BEGIN, GLU_TESS_BEGIN_DATA, GLU_TESS_EDGE_FLAG, GLU_TESS_EDGE_FLAG_DATA, GLU_TESS_VERTEX, GLU_TESS_VERTEX_ DATA, GLU_TESS_END, GLU_TESS_END_DATA, GLU_TESS_COMBINE, GLU_TESS_COMBINE_DATA, GLU_TESS_ERROR, or GLU_TESS_ERROR_ DATA. The 12 possible callback functions have the following prototypes: GLU_TESS_BEGIN void begin(GLenum type); GLU_TESS_BEGIN_DATA void begin(GLenum type, void *user_data); GLU_TESS_EDGE_FLAG void edgeFlag(GLboolean flag); GLU_TESS_EDGE_FLAG_DATA void edgeFlag(GLboolean flag, void *user_data); GLU_TESS_VERTEX void vertex(void *vertex_data); GLU_TESS_VERTEX_DATA void vertex(void *vertex_data, void *user_data); GLU_TESS_END void end(void); GLU_TESS_END_DATA void end(void *user_data); GLU_TESS_COMBINE void combine( GLdouble coords[3], void*vertex_data[4], GLfloat weight[4], void **outData); GLU_TESS_COMBINE_DATA void combine( GLdouble coords[3], void*vertex_data[4], GLfloat weight[4], void **outData, void *user_data); GLU_TESS_ERROR void error(GLenum errno); GLU_TESS_ERROR_DATA void error(GLenum errno, void *user_data); To change a callback routine, simply call gluTessCallback() with the new routine. To eliminate a callback routine without replacing it with a new one, pass gluTessCallback() a null pointer for the appropriate function. As tessellation proceeds, the callback routines are called in a manner similar to how you use the OpenGL commands glBegin(), glEdgeFlag*(), glVertex*(), and glEnd(). (See “Marking Polygon Boundary Edges” in Chapter 2 for more information about glEdgeFlag*().) The combine callback is used to create new vertices where edges intersect. The error callback is invoked during the tessellation only if something goes wrong. For every tessellator object created, a GLU_TESS_BEGIN callback is invoked with one of four possible parameters: GL_TRIANGLE_FAN, GL_TRIANGLE_ STRIP, GL_TRIANGLES, or GL_LINE_LOOP. When the tessellator decomposes the polygons, the tessellation algorithm decides which type of triangle primitive is most efficient to use. (If the GLU_TESS_BOUNDARY_ONLY property is enabled, then GL_LINE_LOOP is used for rendering.) Since edge flags make no sense in a triangle fan or triangle strip, if there is a callback associated with GLU_TESS_EDGE_FLAG that enables edge flags, the GLU_TESS_BEGIN callback is called only with GL_TRIANGLES. The GLU_TESS_EDGE_FLAG callback works exactly analogously to the OpenGL glEdgeFlag*() call. After the GLU_TESS_BEGIN callback routine is called and before the callback associated with GLU_TESS_END is called, some combination of the GLU_TESS_EDGE_FLAG and GLU_TESS_VERTEX callbacks is invoked (usually by calls to gluTessVertex(), which is described on page 555). The associated edge flags and vertices are interpreted exactly as they are in OpenGL between glBegin() and the matching glEnd(). If something goes wrong, the error callback is passed a GLU error number. A character string describing the error is obtained using the routine gluErrorString(). (See “Describing GLU Errors” on page 557 for more information about this routine.) Example 11-1 shows a portion of tess.c, in which a tessellation object is created and several callbacks are registered. Example 11-1 Registering Tessellation Callbacks: tess.c #ifndef CALLBACK #define CALLBACK #endif Polygon Tessellation 547 /* a portion of init() */ tobj = gluNewTess(); gluTessCallback(tobj, GLU_TESS_VERTEX, glVertex3dv); gluTessCallback(tobj, GLU_TESS_BEGIN, beginCallback); gluTessCallback(tobj, GLU_TESS_END, endCallback); gluTessCallback(tobj, GLU_TESS_ERROR, errorCallback); /* the callback routines registered by gluTessCallback() */ void CALLBACK beginCallback(GLenum which) { glBegin(which); } void CALLBACK endCallback(void) { glEnd(); } void CALLBACK errorCallback(GLenum errorCode) { const GLubyte *estring; estring = gluErrorString(errorCode); fprintf(stderr, "Tessellation Error: %s\n", estring); exit(0); } Note: Type casting of callback functions is tricky, especially if you wish to make code that runs equally well on Microsoft Windows and UNIX. To run on Microsoft Windows, programs that declare callback functions, such as tess.c, need the symbol CALLBACK in the declarations of functions. The trick of using an empty definition for CALLBACK (as demonstrated below) allows the code to run well on both Microsoft Windows and UNIX: #ifndef CALLBACK #define CALLBACK #endif void CALLBACK callbackFunction(...) { .... } In Example 11-1, the registered GLU_TESS_VERTEX callback is simply glVertex3dv(), and only the coordinates at each vertex are passed along. However, if you want to specify more information at every vertex, such as a color value, a surface normal vector, or a texture coordinate, you’ll have to make a more complex callback routine. Example 11-2 shows the start of another tessellated object, further along in program tess.c. The registered function vertexCallback() expects to receive a parameter that is a pointer to six double-length floating-point values: the x-, y-, and z-coordinates and the red, green, and blue color values for that vertex. Example 11-2 Vertex and Combine Callbacks: tess.c /* a different portion of init() */ gluTessCallback(tobj, GLU_TESS_VERTEX, vertexCallback); gluTessCallback(tobj, GLU_TESS_BEGIN, beginCallback); gluTessCallback(tobj, GLU_TESS_END, endCallback); gluTessCallback(tobj, GLU_TESS_ERROR, errorCallback); gluTessCallback(tobj, GLU_TESS_COMBINE, combineCallback); /* new callback routines registered by these calls */ void CALLBACK vertexCallback(GLvoid *vertex) { const GLdouble *pointer; pointer = (GLdouble *) vertex; glColor3dv(pointer+3); glVertex3dv(vertex); } void CALLBACK combineCallback(GLdouble coords[3], GLdouble *vertex_data[4], GLfloat weight[4], GLdouble **dataOut ) { GLdouble *vertex; int i; vertex = (GLdouble *) malloc(6 * sizeof(GLdouble)); vertex[0] = coords[0]; vertex[1] = coords[1]; vertex[2] = coords[2]; for (i = 3; i < 6; i++) vertex[i] = weight[0] * vertex_data[0][i] + weight[1] * vertex_data[1][i] + weight[2] * vertex_data[2][i] + weight[3] * vertex_data[3][i]; *dataOut = vertex; } Polygon Tessellation 549 Example 11-2 also shows the use of the GLU_TESS_COMBINE callback. Whenever the tessellation algorithm examines the input contours, detects an intersection, and decides it must create a new vertex, the GLU_TESS_ COMBINE callback is invoked. The callback is also called when the tessellator decides to merge features of two vertices that are very close to one another. The newly created vertex is a linear combination of up to four existing vertices, referenced by vertex_data[0..3] in Example 11-2. The coefficients of the linear combination are given by weight[0..3]; these weights sum to 1.0. coords gives the location of the new vertex. The registered callback routine must allocate memory for another vertex, perform a weighted interpolation of data using vertex_data and weight, and return the new vertex pointer as dataOut. combineCallback() in Example 11-2 interpolates the RGB color value. The function allocates a six-element array, puts the x-, y-, and z-coordinates in the first three elements, and then puts the weighted average of the RGB color values in the last three elements. User-Specified Data Six kinds of callbacks can be registered. Since there are two versions of each kind of callback, there are 12 callbacks in all. For each kind of callback, there is one with user-specified data and one without. The user-specified data is given by the application to gluTessBeginPolygon() and is then passed, unaltered, to each *DATA callback routine. With GLU_TESS_BEGIN_DATA, the user-specified data may be used for “per-polygon” data. If you specify both versions of a particular callback, the callback with user_data is used, and the other is ignored. Therefore, although there are 12 callbacks, you can have a maximum of six callback functions active at any one time. For instance, Example 11-2 uses smooth shading, so vertexCallback() specifies an RGB color for every vertex. If you want to do lighting and smooth shading, the callback would specify a surface normal for every vertex. However, if you want lighting and flat shading, you might specify only one surface normal for every polygon, not for every vertex. In that case, you might choose to use the GLU_TESS_BEGIN_DATA callback and pass the vertex coordinates and surface normal in the user_data pointer. Tessellation Properties Prior to tessellation and rendering, you may use gluTessProperty() to set several properties to affect the tessellation algorithm. The most important and complicated of these properties is the winding rule, which determines what is considered “interior” and “exterior.” Winding Numbers and Winding Rules For a single contour, the winding number of a point is the signed number of revolutions we make around that point while traveling once around the contour (where a counterclockwise revolution is positive and a clockwise revolution is negative). When there are several contours, the individual winding numbers are summed. This procedure associates a signed integer value with each point in the plane. Note that the winding number is the same for all points in a single region. void gluTessProperty(GLUtesselator *tessobj, GLenum property, GLdouble value); For the tessellation object tessobj, the current value of property is set to value. property is GLU_TESS_BOUNDARY_ONLY, GLU_TESS_TOLERANCE, or GLU_TESS_WINDING_RULE. If property is GLU_TESS_BOUNDARY_ONLY, value is either GL_TRUE or GL_FALSE. When it is set to GL_TRUE, polygons are no longer tessellated into filled polygons; line loops are drawn to outline the contours that separate the polygon interior and exterior. The default value is GL_FALSE. (See gluTessNormal() to see how to control the winding direction of the contours.) If property is GLU_TESS_TOLERANCE, value is a distance used to calculate whether two vertices are close enough together to be merged by the GLU_TESS_COMBINE callback. The tolerance value is multiplied by the largest coordinate magnitude of an input vertex to determine the maximum distance any feature can move as a result of a single merge operation. Feature merging may not be supported by your implementation, and the tolerance value is only a hint. The default tolerance value is zero. The GLU_TESS_WINDING_RULE property determines which parts of the polygon are on the interior and which are on the exterior and should not be filled. value can be GLU_TESS_WINDING_ODD (the default), GLU_ TESS_WINDING_NONZERO, GLU_TESS_WINDING_POSITIVE, GLU_ TESS_WINDING_NEGATIVE, or GLU_TESS_WINDING_ABS_GEQ_TWO. In the set at the left, all three contours are counterclockwise, so each nested interior region adds 1 to the winding number. In the middle set, the two interior contours are drawn clockwise, so the winding number decreases and actually becomes negative. The winding rule classifies a region as inside if its winding number belongs to the chosen category (odd, nonzero, positive, negative, or “absolute value greater than or equal to 2”). The odd and nonzero rules are common ways to define the interior. The positive, negative, and “absolute value t 2” winding rules have some limited use for polygon CSG (computational solid geometry) operations. The program tesswind.c demonstrates the effects of winding rules. The four sets of contours shown in Figure 11-3 are rendered. The user can then cycle through the different winding rule properties to see their effects. For each winding rule, the dark areas represent interiors. Note the effects of clockwise and counterclockwise winding. CSG Uses for Winding Rules GLU_TESS_WINDING_ODD and GLU_TESS_WINDING_NONZERO are the most commonly used winding rules. They work for the most typical cases of shading. The winding rules are also designed for CSG operations, making it easy to find the union, difference, or intersection (Boolean operations) of several contours. 1 2 3 1 0 -1 1 1 1 1 1 2 First, assume that each contour is defined so that the winding number is 0 for each exterior region and 1 for each interior region. (Each contour must not intersect itself.) Under this model, counterclockwise contours define the outer boundary of the polygon, and clockwise contours define holes. Contours may be nested, but a nested contour must be oriented oppositely from the contour that contains it. 1 2 3 1 0 -1 1 2 321 4321 Contours and Winding Numbers Winding Rules Odd Nonzero Positive Negative ABS_GEQ_TWO Unfilled Unfilled Unfilled Unfilled If the original polygons do not satisfy this description, they can be converted to this form by first running the tessellator with the GLU_TESS_ BOUNDARY_ONLY property turned on. This returns a list of contours satisfying the restriction just described. By creating two tessellator objects, the callbacks from one tessellator can be fed directly as input to the other. Given two or more polygons of the preceding form, CSG operations can be implemented as follows: • UNION—To calculate the union of several contours, draw all input contours as a single polygon. The winding number of each resulting region is the number of original polygons that cover it. The union can be extracted by using the GLU_TESS_WINDING_NONZERO or GLU_TESS_WINDING_POSITIVE winding rule. Note that with the nonzero winding rule, we would get the same result if all contour orientations were reversed. • INTERSECTION—This works only for two contours at a time. Draw a single polygon using two contours. Extract the result using GLU_TESS_ WINDING_ABS_GEQ_TWO. • DIFFERENCE—Suppose you want to compute A diff (B union C union D). Draw a single polygon consisting of the unmodified contours from A, followed by the contours of B, C, and D, with their vertex order reversed. To extract the result, use the GLU_TESS_WINDING_POSITIVE winding rule. (If B, C, and D are the result of a GLU_TESS_BOUNDARY_ ONLY operation, an alternative to reversing the vertex order is to use gluTessNormal() to reverse the sign of the supplied normal.) Other Tessellation Property Routines There are also complementary routines, which work alongside gluTessProperty(). gluGetTessProperty() retrieves the current values of tessellator properties. If the tessellator is being used to generate wireframe outlines instead of filled polygons, gluTessNormal() can be used to determine the winding direction of the tessellated polygons. void gluGetTessProperty(GLUtesselator *tessobj, GLenum property, GLdouble *value); For the tessellation object tessobj, the current value of property is returned to value. Values for property and value are the same as for gluTessProperty(). If you have some knowledge about the location and orientation of the input data, then using gluTessNormal() can increase the speed of the tessellation. For example, if you know that all polygons lie on the xy-plane, call gluTessNormal(tessobj, 0, 0, 1). As stated above, the default normal is (0, 0, 0), and its effect is not immediately obvious. In this case, it is expected that the input data lies approximately in a plane, and a plane is fitted to the vertices, no matter how they are truly connected. The sign of the normal is chosen so that the sum of the signed areas of all input contours is non-negative (where a counterclockwise contour has a positive area). Note that if the input data does not lie approximately in a plane, then projection perpendicular to the computed normal may substantially change the geometry. After all the tessellation properties have been set and the callback actions have been registered, it is finally time to describe the vertices that comprise input contours and tessellate the polygons. Calls to gluTessBeginPolygon() and gluTessEndPolygon() surround the definition of one or more contours. When gluTessEndPolygon() is called, the tessellation algorithm is implemented, and the tessellated polygons are void gluTessNormal(GLUtesselator *tessobj, GLdouble x, GLdouble y, GLdouble z); For the tessellation object tessobj, gluTessNormal() defines a normal vector, which controls the winding direction of generated polygons. Before tessellation, all input data is projected into a plane perpendicular to the normal. Then, all output triangles are oriented counterclockwise, with respect to the normal. (Clockwise orientation can be obtained by reversing the sign of the supplied normal.) The default normal is (0, 0, 0). void gluTessBeginPolygon(GLUtesselator *tessobj, void *user_data); void gluTessEndPolygon(GLUtesselator *tessobj); Begins and ends the specification of a polygon to be tessellated and associates a tessellation object, tessobj, with it. user_data points to a userdefined data structure, which is passed along all the GLU_TESS_*_DATA callback functions that have been bound. generated and rendered. The callback functions and tessellation properties that were bound and set to the tessellation object using gluTessCallback() and gluTessProperty() are used. In practice, a minimum of three vertices is needed for a meaningful contour. In the program tess.c, a portion of which is shown in Example 11-3, two polygons are defined. One polygon is a rectangular contour with a triangular hole inside, and the other is a smooth-shaded, self-intersecting, five-pointed star. For efficiency, both polygons are stored in display lists. The first polygon consists of two contours; the outer one is wound counterclockwise, and the “hole” is wound clockwise. For the second polygon, the star array contains both the coordinate and color data, and its tessellation callback, vertexCallback(), uses both. It is important that each vertex is in a different memory location because the vertex data is not copied by gluTessVertex(); only the pointer (vertex_ data) is saved. A program that reuses the same memory for several vertices may not get the desired result. Note: In gluTessVertex(), it may seem redundant to specify the vertex coordinate data twice, for both the coords and vertex_data parameters; however, both are necessary. coords refers only to the vertex coordinates. vertex_data uses the coordinate data, but may also use other information for each vertex. void gluTessBeginContour(GLUtesselator *tessobj); void gluTessEndContour(GLUtesselator *tessobj); Begins and ends the specification of a closed contour, which is a portion of a polygon. A closed contour consists of zero or more calls to gluTessVertex(), which defines the vertices. The last vertex of each contour is automatically linked to the first. void gluTessVertex(GLUtesselator *tessobj, GLdouble coords[3], void *vertex_data); Specifies a vertex in the current contour for the tessellation object. coords contains the three-dimensional vertex coordinates, and vertex_data is a pointer that’s sent to the callback associated with GLU_TESS_VERTEX or GLU_TESS_VERTEX_DATA. Typically, vertex_data contains vertex coordinates, surface normals, texture coordinates, color information, or whatever else the application may find useful. Deleting a Tessellation Object If you no longer need a tessellation object, you can delete it and free all associated memory with gluDeleteTess(). Tessellation Performance Tips For best performance, remember these rules: • Cache the output of the tessellator in a display list or other user structure. To obtain the post-tessellation vertex coordinates, tessellate the polygons while in feedback mode. (See “Feedback” in Chapter 13.) • Use gluTessNormal() to supply the polygon normal. • Use the same tessellator object to render many polygons, rather than allocate a new tessellator for each one. (In a multithreaded, multiprocessor environment, you may get better performance using several tessellators.) Describing GLU Errors The GLU provides a routine for obtaining a descriptive string for an error code. This routine is not limited to tessellation but is also used for NURBS and quadrics errors, as well as for errors in the base GL. (See “Error void gluDeleteTess(GLUtesselator *tessobj); Deletes the specified tessellation object, tessobj, and frees all associated memory. Handling” in Chapter 14 for information about OpenGL’s error-handling facility.) Backward Compatibility If you are using the 1.0 or 1.1 version of GLU, you have a much less powerful tessellator. The 1.0/1.1 tessellator handles only simple nonconvex polygons or simple polygons containing holes. It does not properly tessellate intersecting contours (no COMBINE callback) or process per-polygon data. The 1.0/1.1 tessellator still works in either GLU 1.2 or 1.3, but its use is no longer recommended. The 1.0/1.1 tessellator has some similarities to the current tessellator. gluNewTess() and gluDeleteTess() are used for both tessellators. The main vertex specification routine remains gluTessVertex(). The callback mechanism is controlled by gluTessCallback(), although only five callback functions can be registered, a subset of the current 12. Here are the prototypes for the 1.0/1.1 tessellator: void gluBeginPolygon(GLUtriangulatorObj *tessobj); void gluNextContour(GLUtriangulatorObj *tessobj, GLenum type); void gluEndPolygon(GLUtriangulatorObj *tessobj); The outermost contour must be specified first, and it does not require an initial call to gluNextContour(). For polygons without holes, only one contour is defined, and gluNextContour() is not used. If a polygon has multiple contours (that is, holes or holes within holes), the contours are specified one after the other, each preceded by gluNextContour(). gluTessVertex() is called for each vertex of a contour. For gluNextContour(), type can be GLU_EXTERIOR, GLU_INTERIOR, GLU_CCW, GLU_CW, or GLU_UNKNOWN. These serve only as hints to the tessellation. If you get them right, the tessellation might go faster. If you get them wrong, they’re ignored, and the tessellation still works. For polygons with holes, one contour is the exterior contour and the other is the interior. The first contour is assumed to be of type GLU_EXTERIOR. Choosing clockwise or counterclockwise orientation is arbitrary in three dimensions; however, there are two different orientations in any plane, and the GLU_CCW and GLU_CW types should be used consistently. Use GLU_UNKNOWN if you don’t have a clue. Quadrics: Rendering Spheres, Cylinders, and Disks 559 It is highly recommended that you convert GLU 1.0/1.1 code to the new tessellation interface for GLU 1.2 by following these steps: 1. Change references to the major data structure type from GLUtriangulatorObj to GLUtesselator. In GLU 1.2, GLUtriangulatorObj and GLUtesselator are defined to be the same type. 2. Convert gluBeginPolygon() to two commands: gluTessBeginPolygon() and gluTessBeginContour(). All contours must be explicitly started, including the first one. 3. Convert gluNextContour() to both gluTessEndContour() and gluTessBeginContour(). You have to end the previous contour before starting the next one. 4. Convert gluEndPolygon() to both gluTessEndContour() and gluTessEndPolygon(). The final contour must be closed. 5. Change references to constants to gluTessCallback(). In GLU 1.2, GLU_BEGIN, GLU_VERTEX, GLU_END, GLU_ERROR, and GLU_EDGE_FLAG are defined as synonyms for GLU_TESS_BEGIN, GLU_TESS_VERTEX, GLU_TESS_END, GLU_TESS_ERROR, and GLU_TESS_EDGE_FLAG.

Up to this point, all of our discussion regarding buffers has focused on the buffers provided by the windowing system, as you requested when you called glutCreateWindow() (and configured by your call to glutInitDisplayMode()). Although you can quite successfully use any technique with just those buffers, quite often various operations require moving data between buffers superfluously. This is where framebuffer objects enter the picture (as part of OpenGL Version 3.0). Using framebuffer objects, you can create our own framebuffers and use their attached renderbuffers to minimize data copies and optimize performance. Framebuffer objects are quite useful for performing off-screen-rendering, updating texture maps, and engaging in buffer ping-ponging (a data-transfer techniques used in GPGPU). The framebuffer that is provided by the windowing system is the only framebuffer that is available to the display system of your graphics server— that is, it is the only one you can see on your screen. It also places restrictions on the use of the buffers that were created when your window opened. By comparison, the framebuffers that your application creates cannot be displayed on your monitor; they support only off-screen rendering. Another difference between window-system-provided framebuffers and framebuffers you create is that those managed by the window system allocate their buffers—color, depth, stencil, and accumulation—when your window is created. When you create an application-managed framebuffer object, you need to create additional renderbuffers that you associate with the framebuffer objects you created. The buffers with the window-systemprovided buffers can never be associated with an application-created framebuffer object, and vice versa. To allocate an application-generated framebuffer object name, you need to call glGenFramebuffers() which will allocate an unused identifier for the framebuffer object. As compared to some other objects within OpenGL (e.g., texture objects and display lists), you always need to use an name returned from glGenFramebuffers(). Allocating a framebuffer object name doesn’t actually create the framebuffer object or allocate any storage for it. Those tasks are handled through a call to glBindFramebuffer(). glBindFramebuffer() operates in a similar manner to many of the other glBind*() routines you’ve seen in OpenGL. The first time it is called for a particular framebuffer, it causes void glGenFramebuffers(GLsize n, GLuint *ids); Allocate n unused framebuffer object names, and return those names in ids. storage for the object to be allocated and initialized. Any subsequent calls will bind the provided framebuffer object name as the active one. As with all of the other objects you have encountered in OpenGL, you can release an application-allocated framebuffer by calling glDeleteFramebuffers(). That function will mark the framebuffer object’s name as unallocated and release any resources associated with the framebuffer object. For completeness, you can determine whether a particular unsigned integer is an application-allocated framebuffer object by calling glIsFramebuffer():. void glBindFramebuffer(GLenum target, GLuint framebuffer); Specifies either a framebuffer for either reading or writing. When target is GL_DRAW_FRAMEBUFFER, framebuffer specifies the destination framebuffer for rendering. Similarly, when target is set to GL_READ_ FRAMEBUFFER, framebuffer specifies the source of read operations. Passing GL_FRAMEBUFFER for target sets both the read and write framebuffer bindings to framebuffer. framebuffer must either be zero, which binds target to the default; a window-system provided framebuffer; or a framebuffer object generated by a call to glGenFramebuffers(). A GL_INVALID_OPERATION error is generated if framebuffer is neither zero nor a valid framebuffer object previously generated by calling glGenFramebuffers(), but not deleted by calling glDeleteFramebuffers(). void glDeleteFramebuffers(GLsize n, const GLuint *ids); Deallocates the n framebuffer objects associated with the names provided in ids. If a framebuffer object is currently bound (i.e., its name was passed to the most recent call to glBindFramebuffer()), and is deleted, the framebuffer target is immediately bound to id zero (the window-system provided framebuffer), and the framebuffer object is released. No errors are generated by glDeleteFramebuffers(). Unused names or zero are simply ignored. GLboolean glIsFramebuffer(GLuint framebuffer); Framebuffer Objects 529 Once a framebuffer object is created, you still can’t do much with it. You need to provide a place for drawing to go and reading to come from; those places are called framebuffer attachments. We’ll discuss those in more detail after we examine renderbuffers, which are one type of buffer you can attach to a framebuffer object. Renderbuffers Renderbuffers are effectively memory managed by OpenGL that contains formatted image data. The data that a renderbuffer holds takes meaning once it is attached to a framebuffer object, assuming that the format of the image buffer matches what OpenGL is expecting to render into (e.g., you can’t render colors into the depth buffer). As with many other buffers in OpenGL, the process of allocating and deleting buffers is similar to what you’ve seen before. To create a new renderbuffer, you would call glGenRenderbuffers(). Likewise, a call to glDeleteRenderbuffers() will release the storage associated with a renderbuffer. Returns GL_TRUE if framebuffer is the name of a framebuffer returned from glGenFramebuffers(). Returns GL_FALSE if framebuffer is zero (the window-system default framebuffer) or a value that’s either unallocated or been deleted by a call to glDeleteFramebuffers(). void glGenRenderbuffers(GLsizei n, GLuint *ids); Allocate n unused renderbuffer object names, and return those names in ids. Names are unused until bound with a call to glBindRenderbuffer(). void glDeleteRenderbuffers(GLsizei n, const GLuint *ids); Deallocates the n renderbuffer objects associated with the names provided in ids. If one of the renderbuffers is currently bound and passed to glDeleteRenderbuffers(), a binding of zero replaces the binding at the current framebuffer attachment point, in addition to the renderbuffer being released. No errors are generated by glDeleteRenderbuffers(). Unused names or zero are simply ignored. Likewise, you can determine whether a name represents a valid renderbuffer by calling glIsRenderbuffer(). Similar to the process of binding a framebuffer object so that you can modify its state, you call glBindRenderbuffer() to affect a renderbuffer’s creation and to modify the state associated with it, which includes the format of the image data that it contains. Creating Renderbuffer Storage When you first call glBindRenderbuffer() with an unused renderbuffer name, the OpenGL server creates a renderbuffer with all its state information set to the default values. In this configuration, no storage has been allocated to store image data. Before you can attach a renderbuffer to a framebuffer and render into it, you need to allocate storage and specify its image format. This is done by calling either glRenderbufferStorage() or glRenderbufferStorageMultisample(). void glIsRenderbuffer(GLuint renderbuffer); Returns GL_TRUE if renderbuffer is the name of a renderbuffer returned from glGenRenderbuffers(). Returns GL_FALSE if renderbuffer is zero (the window-system default framebuffer) or a value that’s either unallocated or been deleted by a call to glDeleteRenderbuffers(). void glBindRenderbuffer(GLenum target, GLuint renderbuffer); Creates a renderbuffer and associates it with the name renderbuffer. target must be GL_RENDERBUFFER. renderbuffer must either be zero, which removes any renderbuffer binding, or a name that was generated by a call to glGenRenderbuffers(); otherwise, a GL_INVALID_OPERATION error will be generated. void glRenderbufferStorage(GLenum target, GLenum internalformat, GLsizei width, GLsizei height); void glRenderbufferStorageMultisample(GLenum target, GLsizei samples, GLenum internalformat, GLsizei width, GLsizei height); Framebuffer Objects 531 Allocates storage for image data for the bound renderbuffer. target must be GL_RENDERBUFFER. For a color-renderable buffer, internalformat must be one of: GL_RED, GL_R8, GL_R16, GL_RG, GL_RG8, GL_RG16, GL_RGB, GL_R3_G3_B2, GL_RGB4, GL_RGB5, GL_RGB8, GL_RGB10, GL_RGB12, GL_RGB16, GL_RGBA, GL_RGBA2, GL_RGBA4, GL_RGB5_A1, GL_RGBA8, GL_RGB10_A2, GL_RGBA12, GL_RGBA16, GL_SRGB, GL_SRGB8, GL_SRGB_ALPHA, GL_SRGB8_ALPHA8,GL_R16F, GL_R32F, GL_RG16F, GL_RG32F, GL_RGB16F, GL_RGB32F, GL_RGBA16F, GL_RGBA32F, GL_R11F_G11F_B10F, GL_RGB9_E5, GL_R8I, GL_R8UI, GL_R16I, GL_R16UI, GL_R32I, GL_R32UI, GL_RG8I, GL_RG8UI, GL_RG16I, GL_RG16UI, GL_RG32I, GL_RG32UI, GL_RGB8I, GL_RGB8UI, GL_RGB16I, GL_RGB16UI, GL_RGB32I, GL_RGB32UI, GL_RGBA8I, GL_RGBA8UI, GL_RGBA16I, GL_RGBA16UI, GL_RGBA32I. OpenGL version 3.1 adds the additional following formats: GL_R8_SNORM, GL_R16_SNORM, GL_RG8_SNORM, GL_RG16_SNORM, GL_RGB8_ SNORM, GL_RGB16_SNORM, GL_RGBA8_SNORM, GL_RGBA16_SNORM. To use a renderbuffer as a depth buffer, it must be depth-renderable, which is specified by setting internalformat to either GL_DEPTH_COMPONENT, GL_DEPTH_COMPONENT16, GL_DEPTH_COMPONENT32, GL_DEPTH_ COMPONENT32, or GL_DEPTH_COMPONENT32F. For use exclusively as a stencil buffer, internalformat should be specified as either GL_STENCIL_INDEX, GL_STENCIL_INDEX1, GL_STENCIL_ INDEX4, GL_STENCIL_INDEX8, or GL_STENCIL_INDEX16. For packed depth-stencil storage, internalformat must be GL_DEPTH_ STENCIL, which allows the renderbuffer to be attached as the depth buffer, stencil buffer, or at the combined depth-stencil attachment point. width and height specify the size of the renderbuffer in pixels, and samples specifies the number of multisample samples per pixel. Setting samples to zero in a call to glRenderbufferStorageMultisample() is identical to calling glRenderbufferStorage(). A GL_INVALID_VALUE is generated if width or height is greater than the value returned when querying GL_MAX_RENDERBUFFER_SIZE, or if samples is greater than the value returned when querying GL_MAX_ SAMPLES. A GL_INVALID_OPERATION is generated if internalformat is a signed- or unsigned-integer format (e.g., a format containing a “I”, or “UI” in its token), and samples is not zero, and the implementation doesn’t support multisampled integer buffers. Finally, if the renderbuffer size and format combined exceed the available memory able to be allocated, then a GL_OUT_OF_MEMORY error is generated. Example 10-6 Creating an RGBA Color Renderbuffer: fbo.c glGenRenderbuffers( 1, &color ); glBindRenderbuffer( GL_RENDERBUFFER, color ); glRenderbufferStorage( GL_RENDERBUFFER, GL_RGBA, 256, 256 ); Once you have created storage for your renderbuffer, you need to attach it to a framebuffer object before you can render into it. Framebuffer Attachments When you render, you can send the results of that rendering to a number of places: • The color buffer to create an image, or even multiple color buffers if you’re using multiple render targets (see “Special Output Values” in Chapter 15) • The depth buffer to store occlusion information • The stencil buffer for storing per-pixel masks to control rendering Each of those buffers represents a framebuffer attachment, to which you can attach suitable image buffers that you later render into, or read from. Currently, there are two types of rendering surfaces you can associate with one of those attachments: renderbuffers and a level of a texture image. Attachment Name Description GL_COLOR_ATTACHMENTi The ith color buffer. i can range from zero (the default color buffer) to GL_MAX_COLOR_ATTACHMENTS–1 GL_DEPTH_ATTACHMENT The depth buffer GL_STENCIL_ATTACHMENT The stencil buffer GL_DEPTH_STENCIL_ATTACHMENT A special attachment for packed depthstencil buffers (which require the renderbuffer to have been allocated as a GL_DEPTH_STENCIL pixel format) We’ll first discuss attaching a renderbuffer to a framebuffer object, which is done by calling glFramebufferRenderbuffer(). In Example 10-7, we create and attach two renderbuffers: one for color, and the other for depth. We then proceed to render, and finally copy the results back to the window-system-provided framebuffer to display the results. You might use this technique to generate frames for a movie rendering offscreen, where you don’t have to worry about the visible framebuffer being corrupted by overlapping windows or someone resizing the window and interrupting rendering. One important point to remember is that you might need to reset the viewport for each framebuffer before rendering, particularly if the size of your application-defined framebuffers differs from the window-system provided framebuffer. Another very common use for framebuffer objects is to update textures dynamically. You might do this to indicate changes in a surface’s appearance (such as bullet holes in a wall in a game) or to update values in a lookup table if you’re doing GPGPU-like computations. In these cases, you bind a level of a texture map as the framebuffer attachment, as compared to a renderbuffer. After rendering, the texture map can be detached from the framebuffer so that it can be used in subsequent rendering. Note: Nothing prevents you from reading from a texture that is simultaneously bound as a framebuffer attachment for writing. In this scenario, called a framebuffer rendering loop, the results are undefined for both operations. That is, the values returned from sampling the bound texture map, as well as the values written into the texture level while bound, will likely be incorrect. void glFramebufferTexture1D(GLenum target, GLenum attachment, GLenum texturetarget, GLuint texture, GLint level); void glFramebufferTexture2D(GLenum target, GLenum attachment, GLenum texturetarget, GLuint texture, GLint level); void glFramebufferTexture3D(GLenum target, GLenum attachment, GLenum texturetarget, GLuint texture, GLint level, GLint layer); Attaches a level of a texture objects as a rendering attachment to a framebuffer object. target must be either GL_READ_FRAMEBUFFER, GL_DRAW_FRAMEBUFFER, or GL_FRAMEBUFFER (which is equivalent to GL_DRAW_FRAMEBUFFER). attachment must be one of the framebuffer attachment points: GL_COLOR_ATTACHMENTi, GL_DEPTH_ ATTACHMENT, GL_STENCIL_ATTACHMENT, or GL_DEPTH_STENCIL_ ATTACHMENT (in which case, the internal format of the texture must be GL_DEPTH_STENCIL). For glFramebufferTexture1D(), texturetarget must be GL_TEXTURE_1D, if texture is not zero. For glFramebufferTexture2D(), texturetarget must be GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_RECTANGLE, GL_TEXTURE_CUBE_ MAP_POSITIVE_X, GL_TEXTURE_CUBE_MAP_POSITIVE_Y, GL_ TEXTURE_CUBE_MAP_POSITIVE_Z, GL_TEXTURE_CUBE_MAP_ NEGATIVE_X, GL_TEXTURE_CUBE_MAP_NEGATIVE_Y, GL_TEXTURE_ CUBE_MAP_NEGATIVE_Z, and for glFramebufferTexture3D() texturetarget must be GL_TEXTURE_3D. Similar to the previous example, Example 10-8 demonstrates the process of dynamically updating a texture, using the texture after its update is completed, and then rendering with it later. Framebuffer Completeness Given the myriad of combinations between texture and buffer formats, and between framebuffer attachments, various situations can arise that prevent the completion of rendering when you are using applicationdefined framebuffer objects. After modifying the attachments to a framebuffer object, it’s best to check the framebuffer’s status by calling glCheckFramebufferStatus(). The errors representing the various violations of framebuffer configurations are listed in Table 10-7. Of the listed errors, GL_FRAMEBUFFER_UNSUPPORTED is very implementation dependent, and may be the most complicated to debug. void glFramebufferTextureLayer(GLenum target, GLenum attachment, GLuint texture, GLint level, GLint layer); Attaches a layer of a three-dimensional texture, or a one- or twodimensional array texture as a framebuffer attachment, in a similar manner to glFramebufferTexture3D(). target must be one of GL_READ_FRAMEBUFFER, GL_DRAW_ FRAMEBUFFER, or GL_FRAMEBUFFER (which is equivalent to GL_DRAW_ FRAMEBUFFER). attachment must be one of GL_COLOR_ATTACHMENTi, GL_DEPTH_ATTACHMENT, GL_STENCIL_ATTACHMENT, or GL_DEPTH_ STENCIL_ATTACHMENT. texture must be either zero, indicating that the current binding for the attachment should be released, or a texture object name (as returned from glGenTextures()). level indicates the mipmap level of the texture object, and layer represents which layer of the texture (or array element) should be bound as an attachment. GLenum glCheckFramebufferStatus(GLenum target); Returns one of the framebuffer completeness status enums listed in Table 10-7. target must be one of GL_READ_FRAMEBUFFER, GL_DRAW_ FRAMEBUFFER, or GL_FRAMEBUFFER (which is equivalent to GL_DRAW_ FRAMEBUFFER). If glCheckFramebufferStatus() generates an error, zero is returned. Framebuffer Objects 539 Copying Pixel Rectangles While glCopyPixels() has been the default routine for replicating blocks of pixels since OpenGL Version 1.0, as OpenGL expanded its rendering facilities, a more substantial pixel-copying routine was required. glBlitFramebuffer(), described below, subsumes the operations of glCopyPixels() and glPixelZoom() in a single, enhanced call. glBlitFramebuffer() allows greater pixel filtering during the copy operation, much in the same manner as texture mapping (in fact, the same filtering operations, GL_NEAREST and GL_LINEAR are used during the copy). Additionally, this routine is aware of multisampled buffers, and supports copying between different framebuffers (as controlled by framebuffer objects). Framebuffer Completeness Status Enum Description GL_FRAMEBUFFER_COMPLETE The framebuffer and its attachments match the rendering or reading state required. GL_FRAMEBUFFER_UNDEFINED The bound framebuffer is specified to be the default framebuffer (i.e., glBindFramebuffer() with zero specified as the framebuffer), and the default framebuffer doesn’t exist. GL_FRAMEBUFFER_ INCOMPLETE_ATTACHMENT A necessary attachment to the bound framebuffer is uninitialized GL_FRAMEBUFFER_ INCOMPLETE_MISSING_ ATTACHMENT There are no images (e.g., texture layers or renderbuffers) attached to the framebuffer. GL_FRAMEBUFFER_ INCOMPLETE_DRAW_BUFFER Every drawing buffer (e.g., GL_DRAW_BUFFERi as specified by glDrawBuffers()) has an attachment. GL_FRAMEBUFFER_ INCOMPLETE_READ_BUFFER An attachment exists for the buffer specified for the buffer specified by glReadBuffer(). GL_FRAMEBUFFER_ UNSUPPORTED The combination of images attached to the framebuffer object is incompatible with the requirements of the OpenGL implementation. GL_FRAMEBUFFER_ INCOMPLETE_MULTISAMPLE The number of samples for all images across the framebuffer’s attachments do not match. void glBlitFramebuffer(GLint srcX0, GLint srcY0, GLint srcX1, GLint srcY1, GLint dstX0, GLint dstY0, GLint dstX1, GLint dstY1, GLbitfield buffers, GLenum filter); Copies a rectangle of pixel values from one region of the read framebuffer to another region of the draw framebuffer, potentially resizing, reversing, converting, and filtering the pixels in the process. srcX0, srcY0, srcX1, srcY1 represent the source region where pixels are sourced from, and written to the rectangular region specified by dstX0, dstY0, dstX1, dstY1. buffers is the bitwise-or of GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT, GL_DEPTH_BUFFER_ BIT, and GL_STENCIL_BUFFER_BIT, which represent the buffers in which the copy should occur. Finally, filter specifies the method of interpolation done if the two rectangular regions are different sizes, and must be one of GL_NEAREST or GL_LINEAR; no filtering is applied if the regions are the same size. If there are multiple color draw buffers (See “Rendering to Multiple Output Buffers” on page 729), each buffer receives a copy of the source region. If srcX1 < srcX0, or dstX1 < dstX0, the image is reversed in the horizontal direction. Likewise, if srcY1 < srcY0 or dstY1 < dstY0, the image is reverse in the vertical direction. However, If both the source and destination sizes are negative in the same direction, no reversal is done. If the source and destination buffers are of different formats, conversion of the pixel values is done in most situations. However, if the read color buffer is a floating-point format, and any of the write color buffers are not, or vice verse; and if the read color buffer is a signed (unsigned) integer format and not all of the draw buffers are signed (unsigned) integer values, the call will generate a GL_INVALID_OPERATION, and no pixels will be copied. Multisampled buffers also have an effect on the copying of pixels. If the source buffer is multisampled, and the destination is not, the samples are resolved to a single pixel value for the destination buffer. Conversely, if the source buffer is not multisampled, and the destination is, the source pixel’s data is replicated for each sample. Finally, if both buffers are multisampled and the number of samples for each buffer is the same, the samples are copied without modification. However, if the buffers have a different number of samples, no pixels are copied, and a GL_INVALID_ OPERATION error is generated. A GL_INVALID_VALUE error is generated if buffers has other bits set than those permitted, or if filter is other than GL_LINEAR or GL_NEAREST Chapter Objectives After reading this chapter, you’ll be able to do the following: • Render concave filled polygons by first tessellating them into convex polygons, which can be rendered using standard OpenGL routines • Use the OpenGL Utility Library to create quadrics objects to render and model the surfaces of spheres and cylinders, and to tessellate disks (circles) and partial disks (arcs) Note: In OpenGL Version 3.1, some of the techniques and functions described in this chapter—particularly those relating to quadric objects—were likely affected by deprecation. While many of these features can be found in the GLU library, they rely on OpenGL functions that were removed. The OpenGL Library (GL) is designed for low-level operations, both streamlined and accessible to hardware acceleration. The OpenGL Utility Library (GLU) complements the OpenGL library, supporting higher-level operations. Some of the GLU operations are covered in other chapters. Mipmapping (gluBuild*DMipmaps()) and image scaling (gluScaleImage()) are discussed along with other facets of texture mapping in Chapter 9. Several matrix transformation GLU routines (gluOrtho2D(), gluPerspective(), gluLookAt(), gluProject(), gluUnProject(), and gluUnProject4()) are described in Chapter 3. The use of gluPickMatrix() is explained in Chapter 13. The GLU NURBS facilities, which are built atop OpenGL evaluators, are covered in Chapter 12. Only two GLU topics remain: polygon tessellators and quadric surfaces; these topics are discussed in this chapter. To optimize performance, the basic OpenGL renders only convex polygons, but the GLU contains routines for tessellating concave polygons into convex ones, which the basic OpenGL can handle. Where the basic OpenGL operates on simple primitives, such as points, lines, and filled polygons, the GLU can create higher-level objects, such as the surfaces of spheres, cylinders, and cones. This chapter has the following major sections. • “Polygon Tessellation” explains how to tessellate concave polygons into easier-to-render convex polygons. • “Quadrics: Rendering Spheres, Cylinders, and Disks” describes how to generate spheres, cylinders, circles and arcs, including data such as surface normals and texture coordinates. Polygon Tessellation As discussed in “Describing Points, Lines, and Polygons” in Chapter 2, OpenGL can directly display only simple convex polygons. A polygon is simple if the edges intersect only at vertices, there are no duplicate vertices, and exactly two edges meet at any vertex. If your application requires the display of concave polygons, polygons containing holes, or polygons with intersecting edges, these polygons must first be subdivided into simple convex polygons before they can be displayed. Such subdivision is called tessellation, and the GLU provides a collection of routines that perform tessellation. These routines take as input arbitrary contours, which describe hard-to-render polygons, and they return some combination of triangles, triangle meshes, triangle fans, and lines. If you think a polygon may need tessellation, follow these typical steps: 1. Create a new tessellation object with gluNewTess(). 2. Use gluTessCallback() several times to register callback functions to perform operations during the tessellation. The trickiest case for a callback function is when the tessellation algorithm detects an intersection and must call the function registered for the GLU_TESS_ COMBINE callback. 3. Specify tessellation properties by calling gluTessProperty(). The most important property is the winding rule, which determines the regions that should be filled and those that should remain unshaded. 4. Create and render tessellated polygons by specifying the contours of one or more closed polygons. If the data for the object is static, encapsulate the tessellated polygons in a display list. (If you don’t have to recalculate the tessellation repeatedly, using display lists is more efficient.) 5. If you need to tessellate something else, you may reuse your tessellation object. If you are forever finished with your tessellation object, you may delete it with gluDeleteTess(). Note: The tessellator described here was introduced in Version 1.2 of the GLU. If you are using an older version of the GLU, you must use routines described in “Describing GLU Errors” on page 557. To query which version of GLU you have, use gluGetString(GLU_VERSION), which returns a string with your GLU version number. If you don’t seem to have gluGetString() in your GLU, then you have GLU 1.0, which did not yet have the gluGetString() routine. Creating a Tessellation Object As a complex polygon is being described and tessellated, it has associated data, such as the vertices, edges, and callback functions. All this data is tied to a single tessellation object. To perform tessellation, your program first has to create a tessellation object using the routine gluNewTess(). A single tessellation object can be reused for all your tessellations. This object is required only because library routines might need to do their own tessellations, and they should be able to do so without interfering with any tessellation that your program is doing. It might also be useful to have multiple tessellation objects if you want to use different sets of callbacks for different tessellations. A typical program, however, allocates a single tessellation object and uses it for all its tessellations. There’s no real need to free it, because it uses a small amount of memory. On the other hand, it never hurts to be tidy. Tessellation Callback Routines After you create a tessellation object, you must provide a series of callback routines to be called at appropriate times during the tessellation. After specifying the callbacks, you describe the contours of one or more polygons using GLU routines. When the description of the contours is complete, the tessellation facility invokes your callback routines as necessary. Any functions that are omitted are simply not called during the tessellation, and any information they might have returned to your program is lost. All are specified by the single routine gluTessCallback(). GLUtesselator* gluNewTess(void); Creates a new tessellation object and returns a pointer to it. A null pointer is returned if the creation fails. Polygon Tessellation 545 void gluTessCallback(GLUtesselator *tessobj, GLenum type, void (*fn)()); Associates the callback function fn with the tessellation object tessobj. The type of the callback is determined by the parameter type, which can be GLU_TESS_BEGIN, GLU_TESS_BEGIN_DATA, GLU_TESS_EDGE_FLAG, GLU_TESS_EDGE_FLAG_DATA, GLU_TESS_VERTEX, GLU_TESS_VERTEX_ DATA, GLU_TESS_END, GLU_TESS_END_DATA, GLU_TESS_COMBINE, GLU_TESS_COMBINE_DATA, GLU_TESS_ERROR, or GLU_TESS_ERROR_ DATA. The 12 possible callback functions have the following prototypes: GLU_TESS_BEGIN void begin(GLenum type); GLU_TESS_BEGIN_DATA void begin(GLenum type, void *user_data); GLU_TESS_EDGE_FLAG void edgeFlag(GLboolean flag); GLU_TESS_EDGE_FLAG_DATA void edgeFlag(GLboolean flag, void *user_data); GLU_TESS_VERTEX void vertex(void *vertex_data); GLU_TESS_VERTEX_DATA void vertex(void *vertex_data, void *user_data); GLU_TESS_END void end(void); GLU_TESS_END_DATA void end(void *user_data); GLU_TESS_COMBINE void combine( GLdouble coords[3], void*vertex_data[4], GLfloat weight[4], void **outData); GLU_TESS_COMBINE_DATA void combine( GLdouble coords[3], void*vertex_data[4], GLfloat weight[4], void **outData, void *user_data); GLU_TESS_ERROR void error(GLenum errno); GLU_TESS_ERROR_DATA void error(GLenum errno, void *user_data); To change a callback routine, simply call gluTessCallback() with the new routine. To eliminate a callback routine without replacing it with a new one, pass gluTessCallback() a null pointer for the appropriate function. As tessellation proceeds, the callback routines are called in a manner similar to how you use the OpenGL commands glBegin(), glEdgeFlag*(), glVertex*(), and glEnd(). (See “Marking Polygon Boundary Edges” in Chapter 2 for more information about glEdgeFlag*().) The combine callback is used to create new vertices where edges intersect. The error callback is invoked during the tessellation only if something goes wrong. For every tessellator object created, a GLU_TESS_BEGIN callback is invoked with one of four possible parameters: GL_TRIANGLE_FAN, GL_TRIANGLE_ STRIP, GL_TRIANGLES, or GL_LINE_LOOP. When the tessellator decomposes the polygons, the tessellation algorithm decides which type of triangle primitive is most efficient to use. (If the GLU_TESS_BOUNDARY_ONLY property is enabled, then GL_LINE_LOOP is used for rendering.) Since edge flags make no sense in a triangle fan or triangle strip, if there is a callback associated with GLU_TESS_EDGE_FLAG that enables edge flags, the GLU_TESS_BEGIN callback is called only with GL_TRIANGLES. The GLU_TESS_EDGE_FLAG callback works exactly analogously to the OpenGL glEdgeFlag*() call. After the GLU_TESS_BEGIN callback routine is called and before the callback associated with GLU_TESS_END is called, some combination of the GLU_TESS_EDGE_FLAG and GLU_TESS_VERTEX callbacks is invoked (usually by calls to gluTessVertex(), which is described on page 555). The associated edge flags and vertices are interpreted exactly as they are in OpenGL between glBegin() and the matching glEnd(). If something goes wrong, the error callback is passed a GLU error number. A character string describing the error is obtained using the routine gluErrorString(). (See “Describing GLU Errors” on page 557 for more information about this routine.) Example 11-1 shows a portion of tess.c, in which a tessellation object is created and several callbacks are registered. Example 11-1 Registering Tessellation Callbacks: tess.c #ifndef CALLBACK #define CALLBACK #endif Polygon Tessellation 547 /* a portion of init() */ tobj = gluNewTess(); gluTessCallback(tobj, GLU_TESS_VERTEX, glVertex3dv); gluTessCallback(tobj, GLU_TESS_BEGIN, beginCallback); gluTessCallback(tobj, GLU_TESS_END, endCallback); gluTessCallback(tobj, GLU_TESS_ERROR, errorCallback); /* the callback routines registered by gluTessCallback() */ void CALLBACK beginCallback(GLenum which) { glBegin(which); } void CALLBACK endCallback(void) { glEnd(); } void CALLBACK errorCallback(GLenum errorCode) { const GLubyte *estring; estring = gluErrorString(errorCode); fprintf(stderr, "Tessellation Error: %s\n", estring); exit(0); } Note: Type casting of callback functions is tricky, especially if you wish to make code that runs equally well on Microsoft Windows and UNIX. To run on Microsoft Windows, programs that declare callback functions, such as tess.c, need the symbol CALLBACK in the declarations of functions. The trick of using an empty definition for CALLBACK (as demonstrated below) allows the code to run well on both Microsoft Windows and UNIX: #ifndef CALLBACK #define CALLBACK #endif void CALLBACK callbackFunction(...) { .... } In Example 11-1, the registered GLU_TESS_VERTEX callback is simply glVertex3dv(), and only the coordinates at each vertex are passed along. However, if you want to specify more information at every vertex, such as a color value, a surface normal vector, or a texture coordinate, you’ll have to make a more complex callback routine. Example 11-2 shows the start of another tessellated object, further along in program tess.c. The registered function vertexCallback() expects to receive a parameter that is a pointer to six double-length floating-point values: the x-, y-, and z-coordinates and the red, green, and blue color values for that vertex. Example 11-2 Vertex and Combine Callbacks: tess.c /* a different portion of init() */ gluTessCallback(tobj, GLU_TESS_VERTEX, vertexCallback); gluTessCallback(tobj, GLU_TESS_BEGIN, beginCallback); gluTessCallback(tobj, GLU_TESS_END, endCallback); gluTessCallback(tobj, GLU_TESS_ERROR, errorCallback); gluTessCallback(tobj, GLU_TESS_COMBINE, combineCallback); /* new callback routines registered by these calls */ void CALLBACK vertexCallback(GLvoid *vertex) { const GLdouble *pointer; pointer = (GLdouble *) vertex; glColor3dv(pointer+3); glVertex3dv(vertex); } void CALLBACK combineCallback(GLdouble coords[3], GLdouble *vertex_data[4], GLfloat weight[4], GLdouble **dataOut ) { GLdouble *vertex; int i; vertex = (GLdouble *) malloc(6 * sizeof(GLdouble)); vertex[0] = coords[0]; vertex[1] = coords[1]; vertex[2] = coords[2]; for (i = 3; i < 6; i++) vertex[i] = weight[0] * vertex_data[0][i] + weight[1] * vertex_data[1][i] + weight[2] * vertex_data[2][i] + weight[3] * vertex_data[3][i]; *dataOut = vertex; } Polygon Tessellation 549 Example 11-2 also shows the use of the GLU_TESS_COMBINE callback. Whenever the tessellation algorithm examines the input contours, detects an intersection, and decides it must create a new vertex, the GLU_TESS_ COMBINE callback is invoked. The callback is also called when the tessellator decides to merge features of two vertices that are very close to one another. The newly created vertex is a linear combination of up to four existing vertices, referenced by vertex_data[0..3] in Example 11-2. The coefficients of the linear combination are given by weight[0..3]; these weights sum to 1.0. coords gives the location of the new vertex. The registered callback routine must allocate memory for another vertex, perform a weighted interpolation of data using vertex_data and weight, and return the new vertex pointer as dataOut. combineCallback() in Example 11-2 interpolates the RGB color value. The function allocates a six-element array, puts the x-, y-, and z-coordinates in the first three elements, and then puts the weighted average of the RGB color values in the last three elements. User-Specified Data Six kinds of callbacks can be registered. Since there are two versions of each kind of callback, there are 12 callbacks in all. For each kind of callback, there is one with user-specified data and one without. The user-specified data is given by the application to gluTessBeginPolygon() and is then passed, unaltered, to each *DATA callback routine. With GLU_TESS_BEGIN_DATA, the user-specified data may be used for “per-polygon” data. If you specify both versions of a particular callback, the callback with user_data is used, and the other is ignored. Therefore, although there are 12 callbacks, you can have a maximum of six callback functions active at any one time. For instance, Example 11-2 uses smooth shading, so vertexCallback() specifies an RGB color for every vertex. If you want to do lighting and smooth shading, the callback would specify a surface normal for every vertex. However, if you want lighting and flat shading, you might specify only one surface normal for every polygon, not for every vertex. In that case, you might choose to use the GLU_TESS_BEGIN_DATA callback and pass the vertex coordinates and surface normal in the user_data pointer. Tessellation Properties Prior to tessellation and rendering, you may use gluTessProperty() to set several properties to affect the tessellation algorithm. The most important and complicated of these properties is the winding rule, which determines what is considered “interior” and “exterior.” Winding Numbers and Winding Rules For a single contour, the winding number of a point is the signed number of revolutions we make around that point while traveling once around the contour (where a counterclockwise revolution is positive and a clockwise revolution is negative). When there are several contours, the individual winding numbers are summed. This procedure associates a signed integer value with each point in the plane. Note that the winding number is the same for all points in a single region. void gluTessProperty(GLUtesselator *tessobj, GLenum property, GLdouble value); For the tessellation object tessobj, the current value of property is set to value. property is GLU_TESS_BOUNDARY_ONLY, GLU_TESS_TOLERANCE, or GLU_TESS_WINDING_RULE. If property is GLU_TESS_BOUNDARY_ONLY, value is either GL_TRUE or GL_FALSE. When it is set to GL_TRUE, polygons are no longer tessellated into filled polygons; line loops are drawn to outline the contours that separate the polygon interior and exterior. The default value is GL_FALSE. (See gluTessNormal() to see how to control the winding direction of the contours.) If property is GLU_TESS_TOLERANCE, value is a distance used to calculate whether two vertices are close enough together to be merged by the GLU_TESS_COMBINE callback. The tolerance value is multiplied by the largest coordinate magnitude of an input vertex to determine the maximum distance any feature can move as a result of a single merge operation. Feature merging may not be supported by your implementation, and the tolerance value is only a hint. The default tolerance value is zero. The GLU_TESS_WINDING_RULE property determines which parts of the polygon are on the interior and which are on the exterior and should not be filled. value can be GLU_TESS_WINDING_ODD (the default), GLU_ TESS_WINDING_NONZERO, GLU_TESS_WINDING_POSITIVE, GLU_ TESS_WINDING_NEGATIVE, or GLU_TESS_WINDING_ABS_GEQ_TWO. In the set at the left, all three contours are counterclockwise, so each nested interior region adds 1 to the winding number. In the middle set, the two interior contours are drawn clockwise, so the winding number decreases and actually becomes negative. The winding rule classifies a region as inside if its winding number belongs to the chosen category (odd, nonzero, positive, negative, or “absolute value greater than or equal to 2”). The odd and nonzero rules are common ways to define the interior. The positive, negative, and “absolute value t 2” winding rules have some limited use for polygon CSG (computational solid geometry) operations. The program tesswind.c demonstrates the effects of winding rules. The four sets of contours shown in Figure 11-3 are rendered. The user can then cycle through the different winding rule properties to see their effects. For each winding rule, the dark areas represent interiors. Note the effects of clockwise and counterclockwise winding. CSG Uses for Winding Rules GLU_TESS_WINDING_ODD and GLU_TESS_WINDING_NONZERO are the most commonly used winding rules. They work for the most typical cases of shading. The winding rules are also designed for CSG operations, making it easy to find the union, difference, or intersection (Boolean operations) of several contours. 1 2 3 1 0 -1 1 1 1 1 1 2 First, assume that each contour is defined so that the winding number is 0 for each exterior region and 1 for each interior region. (Each contour must not intersect itself.) Under this model, counterclockwise contours define the outer boundary of the polygon, and clockwise contours define holes. Contours may be nested, but a nested contour must be oriented oppositely from the contour that contains it. 1 2 3 1 0 -1 1 2 321 4321 Contours and Winding Numbers Winding Rules Odd Nonzero Positive Negative ABS_GEQ_TWO Unfilled Unfilled Unfilled Unfilled If the original polygons do not satisfy this description, they can be converted to this form by first running the tessellator with the GLU_TESS_ BOUNDARY_ONLY property turned on. This returns a list of contours satisfying the restriction just described. By creating two tessellator objects, the callbacks from one tessellator can be fed directly as input to the other. Given two or more polygons of the preceding form, CSG operations can be implemented as follows: • UNION—To calculate the union of several contours, draw all input contours as a single polygon. The winding number of each resulting region is the number of original polygons that cover it. The union can be extracted by using the GLU_TESS_WINDING_NONZERO or GLU_TESS_WINDING_POSITIVE winding rule. Note that with the nonzero winding rule, we would get the same result if all contour orientations were reversed. • INTERSECTION—This works only for two contours at a time. Draw a single polygon using two contours. Extract the result using GLU_TESS_ WINDING_ABS_GEQ_TWO. • DIFFERENCE—Suppose you want to compute A diff (B union C union D). Draw a single polygon consisting of the unmodified contours from A, followed by the contours of B, C, and D, with their vertex order reversed. To extract the result, use the GLU_TESS_WINDING_POSITIVE winding rule. (If B, C, and D are the result of a GLU_TESS_BOUNDARY_ ONLY operation, an alternative to reversing the vertex order is to use gluTessNormal() to reverse the sign of the supplied normal.) Other Tessellation Property Routines There are also complementary routines, which work alongside gluTessProperty(). gluGetTessProperty() retrieves the current values of tessellator properties. If the tessellator is being used to generate wireframe outlines instead of filled polygons, gluTessNormal() can be used to determine the winding direction of the tessellated polygons. void gluGetTessProperty(GLUtesselator *tessobj, GLenum property, GLdouble *value); For the tessellation object tessobj, the current value of property is returned to value. Values for property and value are the same as for gluTessProperty(). If you have some knowledge about the location and orientation of the input data, then using gluTessNormal() can increase the speed of the tessellation. For example, if you know that all polygons lie on the xy-plane, call gluTessNormal(tessobj, 0, 0, 1). As stated above, the default normal is (0, 0, 0), and its effect is not immediately obvious. In this case, it is expected that the input data lies approximately in a plane, and a plane is fitted to the vertices, no matter how they are truly connected. The sign of the normal is chosen so that the sum of the signed areas of all input contours is non-negative (where a counterclockwise contour has a positive area). Note that if the input data does not lie approximately in a plane, then projection perpendicular to the computed normal may substantially change the geometry. After all the tessellation properties have been set and the callback actions have been registered, it is finally time to describe the vertices that comprise input contours and tessellate the polygons. Calls to gluTessBeginPolygon() and gluTessEndPolygon() surround the definition of one or more contours. When gluTessEndPolygon() is called, the tessellation algorithm is implemented, and the tessellated polygons are void gluTessNormal(GLUtesselator *tessobj, GLdouble x, GLdouble y, GLdouble z); For the tessellation object tessobj, gluTessNormal() defines a normal vector, which controls the winding direction of generated polygons. Before tessellation, all input data is projected into a plane perpendicular to the normal. Then, all output triangles are oriented counterclockwise, with respect to the normal. (Clockwise orientation can be obtained by reversing the sign of the supplied normal.) The default normal is (0, 0, 0). void gluTessBeginPolygon(GLUtesselator *tessobj, void *user_data); void gluTessEndPolygon(GLUtesselator *tessobj); Begins and ends the specification of a polygon to be tessellated and associates a tessellation object, tessobj, with it. user_data points to a userdefined data structure, which is passed along all the GLU_TESS_*_DATA callback functions that have been bound. generated and rendered. The callback functions and tessellation properties that were bound and set to the tessellation object using gluTessCallback() and gluTessProperty() are used. In practice, a minimum of three vertices is needed for a meaningful contour. In the program tess.c, a portion of which is shown in Example 11-3, two polygons are defined. One polygon is a rectangular contour with a triangular hole inside, and the other is a smooth-shaded, self-intersecting, five-pointed star. For efficiency, both polygons are stored in display lists. The first polygon consists of two contours; the outer one is wound counterclockwise, and the “hole” is wound clockwise. For the second polygon, the star array contains both the coordinate and color data, and its tessellation callback, vertexCallback(), uses both. It is important that each vertex is in a different memory location because the vertex data is not copied by gluTessVertex(); only the pointer (vertex_ data) is saved. A program that reuses the same memory for several vertices may not get the desired result. Note: In gluTessVertex(), it may seem redundant to specify the vertex coordinate data twice, for both the coords and vertex_data parameters; however, both are necessary. coords refers only to the vertex coordinates. vertex_data uses the coordinate data, but may also use other information for each vertex. void gluTessBeginContour(GLUtesselator *tessobj); void gluTessEndContour(GLUtesselator *tessobj); Begins and ends the specification of a closed contour, which is a portion of a polygon. A closed contour consists of zero or more calls to gluTessVertex(), which defines the vertices. The last vertex of each contour is automatically linked to the first. void gluTessVertex(GLUtesselator *tessobj, GLdouble coords[3], void *vertex_data); Specifies a vertex in the current contour for the tessellation object. coords contains the three-dimensional vertex coordinates, and vertex_data is a pointer that’s sent to the callback associated with GLU_TESS_VERTEX or GLU_TESS_VERTEX_DATA. Typically, vertex_data contains vertex coordinates, surface normals, texture coordinates, color information, or whatever else the application may find useful. Deleting a Tessellation Object If you no longer need a tessellation object, you can delete it and free all associated memory with gluDeleteTess(). Tessellation Performance Tips For best performance, remember these rules: • Cache the output of the tessellator in a display list or other user structure. To obtain the post-tessellation vertex coordinates, tessellate the polygons while in feedback mode. (See “Feedback” in Chapter 13.) • Use gluTessNormal() to supply the polygon normal. • Use the same tessellator object to render many polygons, rather than allocate a new tessellator for each one. (In a multithreaded, multiprocessor environment, you may get better performance using several tessellators.) Describing GLU Errors The GLU provides a routine for obtaining a descriptive string for an error code. This routine is not limited to tessellation but is also used for NURBS and quadrics errors, as well as for errors in the base GL. (See “Error void gluDeleteTess(GLUtesselator *tessobj); Deletes the specified tessellation object, tessobj, and frees all associated memory. Handling” in Chapter 14 for information about OpenGL’s error-handling facility.) Backward Compatibility If you are using the 1.0 or 1.1 version of GLU, you have a much less powerful tessellator. The 1.0/1.1 tessellator handles only simple nonconvex polygons or simple polygons containing holes. It does not properly tessellate intersecting contours (no COMBINE callback) or process per-polygon data. The 1.0/1.1 tessellator still works in either GLU 1.2 or 1.3, but its use is no longer recommended. The 1.0/1.1 tessellator has some similarities to the current tessellator. gluNewTess() and gluDeleteTess() are used for both tessellators. The main vertex specification routine remains gluTessVertex(). The callback mechanism is controlled by gluTessCallback(), although only five callback functions can be registered, a subset of the current 12. Here are the prototypes for the 1.0/1.1 tessellator: void gluBeginPolygon(GLUtriangulatorObj *tessobj); void gluNextContour(GLUtriangulatorObj *tessobj, GLenum type); void gluEndPolygon(GLUtriangulatorObj *tessobj); The outermost contour must be specified first, and it does not require an initial call to gluNextContour(). For polygons without holes, only one contour is defined, and gluNextContour() is not used. If a polygon has multiple contours (that is, holes or holes within holes), the contours are specified one after the other, each preceded by gluNextContour(). gluTessVertex() is called for each vertex of a contour. For gluNextContour(), type can be GLU_EXTERIOR, GLU_INTERIOR, GLU_CCW, GLU_CW, or GLU_UNKNOWN. These serve only as hints to the tessellation. If you get them right, the tessellation might go faster. If you get them wrong, they’re ignored, and the tessellation still works. For polygons with holes, one contour is the exterior contour and the other is the interior. The first contour is assumed to be of type GLU_EXTERIOR. Choosing clockwise or counterclockwise orientation is arbitrary in three dimensions; however, there are two different orientations in any plane, and the GLU_CCW and GLU_CW types should be used consistently. Use GLU_UNKNOWN if you don’t have a clue. Quadrics: Rendering Spheres, Cylinders, and Disks 559 It is highly recommended that you convert GLU 1.0/1.1 code to the new tessellation interface for GLU 1.2 by following these steps: 1. Change references to the major data structure type from GLUtriangulatorObj to GLUtesselator. In GLU 1.2, GLUtriangulatorObj and GLUtesselator are defined to be the same type. 2. Convert gluBeginPolygon() to two commands: gluTessBeginPolygon() and gluTessBeginContour(). All contours must be explicitly started, including the first one. 3. Convert gluNextContour() to both gluTessEndContour() and gluTessBeginContour(). You have to end the previous contour before starting the next one. 4. Convert gluEndPolygon() to both gluTessEndContour() and gluTessEndPolygon(). The final contour must be closed. 5. Change references to constants to gluTessCallback(). In GLU 1.2, GLU_BEGIN, GLU_VERTEX, GLU_END, GLU_ERROR, and GLU_EDGE_FLAG are defined as synonyms for GLU_TESS_BEGIN, GLU_TESS_VERTEX, GLU_TESS_END, GLU_TESS_ERROR, and GLU_TESS_EDGE_FLAG. Please respond using only information provided in the context block. If the information needed to answer the question is not within the context block, state that you cannot answer. I am interested in what context one would use the glGenFrameBuffers() function. What does this function do exactly? Please include any extra information to help understand the function.

You can only respond to the prompt using the information in the context block and no other sources.

List the pros and cons for Nestle in regards to this deal.

Nestlé and Starbucks close deal for the perpetual global license of Starbucks Consumer Packaged Goods and Foodservice products Vevey and Seattle, 28 August 2018 – Nestlé and Starbucks Corporation today announced the closing of the deal granting Nestlé the perpetual rights to market Starbucks Consumer Packaged Goods and Foodservice products globally, outside of the company’s coffee shops. Through the alliance, the two companies will work closely together on the existing Starbucks range of roast and ground coffee, whole beans as well as instant and portioned coffee. The alliance will also capitalize on the experience and capabilities of both companies to work on innovation with the goal of enhancing its product offerings for coffee lovers globally. “This partnership demonstrates our growth agenda in action, giving Nestlé an unparalleled position in the coffee business with a full suite of innovative brands. With Starbucks, Nescafé and Nespresso we bring together the world’s most iconic coffee brands,” said Mark Schneider, Nestlé CEO. “The outstanding collaboration between the two teams resulted in a swift completion of this agreement, which will pave the way to capture further growth opportunities,” he added. The agreement significantly strengthens Nestlé’s coffee portfolio in the North American premium roast and ground and portioned coffee business. It also unlocks global expansion in grocery and food service for the Starbucks brand, utilizing the global reach of Nestlé. “This global coffee alliance with Nestlé is a significant strategic milestone for the growth of Starbucks,” said Kevin Johnson, president and ceo of Starbucks. “Bringing together the world’s leading coffee retailer, the world’s largest food and beverage company, and the world’s largest and fast-growing installed base of at-home and single-serve coffee machines helps us amplify the Starbucks brand around the world while delivering long-term value creation for our shareholders.” Approximately 500 Starbucks employees in the United States and Europe will join the Nestlé family, with the majority based in Seattle and London. The international expansion of the business will be led from Nestlé’s global headquarters in Vevey, Switzerland. The agreement covers Starbucks packaged coffee and tea brands, such as Starbucks®, Seattle’s Best Coffee®, TeavanaTM/MC, Starbucks VIA® Instant, Torrefazione Italia® coffee and Starbucks-branded

You can only respond to the prompt using the information in the context block and no other sources. Nestlé and Starbucks close deal for the perpetual global license of Starbucks Consumer Packaged Goods and Foodservice products Vevey and Seattle, 28 August 2018 – Nestlé and Starbucks Corporation today announced the closing of the deal granting Nestlé the perpetual rights to market Starbucks Consumer Packaged Goods and Foodservice products globally, outside of the company’s coffee shops. Through the alliance, the two companies will work closely together on the existing Starbucks range of roast and ground coffee, whole beans as well as instant and portioned coffee. The alliance will also capitalize on the experience and capabilities of both companies to work on innovation with the goal of enhancing its product offerings for coffee lovers globally. “This partnership demonstrates our growth agenda in action, giving Nestlé an unparalleled position in the coffee business with a full suite of innovative brands. With Starbucks, Nescafé and Nespresso we bring together the world’s most iconic coffee brands,” said Mark Schneider, Nestlé CEO. “The outstanding collaboration between the two teams resulted in a swift completion of this agreement, which will pave the way to capture further growth opportunities,” he added. The agreement significantly strengthens Nestlé’s coffee portfolio in the North American premium roast and ground and portioned coffee business. It also unlocks global expansion in grocery and food service for the Starbucks brand, utilizing the global reach of Nestlé. “This global coffee alliance with Nestlé is a significant strategic milestone for the growth of Starbucks,” said Kevin Johnson, president and ceo of Starbucks. “Bringing together the world’s leading coffee retailer, the world’s largest food and beverage company, and the world’s largest and fast-growing installed base of at-home and single-serve coffee machines helps us amplify the Starbucks brand around the world while delivering long-term value creation for our shareholders.” Approximately 500 Starbucks employees in the United States and Europe will join the Nestlé family, with the majority based in Seattle and London. The international expansion of the business will be led from Nestlé’s global headquarters in Vevey, Switzerland. The agreement covers Starbucks packaged coffee and tea brands, such as Starbucks®, Seattle’s Best Coffee®, TeavanaTM/MC, Starbucks VIA® Instant, Torrefazione Italia® coffee and Starbucks-branded List the pros and cons for Nestle in regards to this deal.

Answer the question based solely on the information provided in the passage. Do not use any external knowledge or resources. [user request] [context document]

Summarize this article so that a college-level student would be able to understand the important concepts using scientific language. You should write your summary in the format of a lecture on autonomic dysfunction. Do not mention orthostatic hypotension and focus more on the associated tachycardia. Emphasize the pathophysiology and the effect autonomic dysfunction has on various regions of the body.

Acquired Autoimmune: Guillain-Barre, Autoimmune autonomic ganglionopathy, Lambert-Eaton myasthenic syndrome, rheumatoid arthritis, Sjogren, systemic lupus erythematosus Abnormal reflex responses in carotid sinus hypersensitivity, vasovagal syncope, and other neuro-meditated syncopes; and probably in postural tachycardia syndrome (PoTS) Abnormal sweating responses, as in generalized or focal hyperhidrosis, are related to excessive activation. Metabolic/ Nutritional: Diabetes mellitus, vitamin B12 deficiency Degenerative neurologic diseases: Parkinson disease, multiple system atrophy/Shy-Drager syndrome, pure autonomic failure presenting or suffering from orthostatic hypotension, fixed heart rate responses Infections: Botulism, Chagas disease, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), leprosy, Lyme disease, tetanus Neoplasia: Brain tumors, paraneoplastic syndromes Pharmacologic effects of several drugs that interfere with normal autonomic function and provoke symptoms include alpha- and beta-blocker-triggered orthostatic hypotension Toxin/drug-induced: Alcohol, amiodarone, chemotherapy Traumatic or tumoral spinal cord injuries at different levels and presenting with the so-called autonomic dysreflexia Uremic neuropathy/chronic liver diseases Medications That Exacerbate Orthostatic Hypotension Diuretics: furosemide, torsemide, thiazide Nitric oxide-mediated vasodilators: nitroglycerine, hydralazine, sildenafil Adrenergic antagonists: Alpha-1-adrenergic blockers: alfuzosin, terazosin Beta-adrenergic blockers: propranolol Alpha -2-adrenergic agonists: tizanidine, clonidine Renin-angiotensin system inhibitors: lisinopril, valsartan Dopamine antagonists: Phenothiazines: chlorpromazine Atypical antipsychotics: olanzapine, risperidone, quetiapine Calcium channel blockers: verapamil, diltiazem Selective serotonin receptor reuptake inhibitors: paroxetine Antidepressants: trazodone, amitriptyline Go to: Epidemiology Autonomic dysfunction, taken as a whole, is not infrequent. The most common autonomic dysfunction occurs in the cardiovascular control sphere and consists of an abnormal vasovagal response that leads to syncope. Other common manifestations are related to postural tachycardia syndrome (POTS) or changes seen with Parkinson disease and other parkinsonisms. Compared to other areas of autonomic control, urinary incontinence, as observed in multiple sclerosis and other nervous system disorders, is unspecific but not rare. Some symptoms of autonomic disturbance, such as the facial vasomotor and ocular symptoms in trigeminal autonomic headaches, are of secondary significance but help in diagnosis.[14][15][16][17] Orthostatic hypotension occurs in patients with neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson disease, multiple system atrophy, pure autonomic failure, and in individuals with ganglionopathies that affect autonomic nerves and peripheral neuropathy. The prevalence of orthostatic hypotension is proportional to age, and it is more common in institutionalized than community-dwelling elderly[18]. POTS is more prevalent in women. Syncope is highly prevalent in the general population, and the majority of syncope is due to reflex syncope. The frequency of reflex syncope is higher during adolescence and in individuals over 55 years. Carotid sinus hypersensitivity, defecation, and cough syncope occur almost exclusively in the elderly population.[18] Go to: Pathophysiology Pathophysiology in ANS depends upon the affected area. Both anatomically related, as well as isolated regions, can be affected. In the cardiovascular system, three pathophysiological syndromes are typically associated with chronic dysfunction of the ANS. These are Postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), orthostatic hypotension with supine hypertension, and reflex cardiovascular syndromes. Hyperhidrosis and hypohidrosis are the main features of temperature control. Fixed mydriasis and myosis, also known as Adie's pupil and Horner syndrome in the eye, are also seen. Autonomic dysfunction may result from any disease that affects the peripheral or central components of ANS. Primary autonomic dysfunction involves primary (idiopathic) degeneration of autonomic postganglionic fibers without other neurologic abnormalities. Orthostatic hypotension is associated with autonomic dysfunction and motor and cerebellar abnormalities in diseases involving a central degenerative process, as described in the Shy–Drager syndrome. A central degenerative disease process involving preganglionic neuronal degeneration, presenting with orthostatic hypotension and typical parkinsonian symptoms, has been described.[19] Orthostatic hypotension is defined as a sustained reduction of systolic blood pressure of at least 20 mmHg or diastolic blood pressure of 10 mmHg within three minutes of standing or head-up tilt to at least 60 degrees on the tilt table. The magnitude of fall in blood pressure depends on baseline blood pressure. In patients with supine hypertension, a reduction of 30 mmHg in systolic blood pressure may be an appropriate criterion for orthostatic hypotension. Immediately upon standing, gravitationally mediated redistribution of the blood volume and pooling of 300 to 800 ml of blood in lower limbs and splanchnic venous capacitance system occurs, which leads to a reduction of venous return and cardiac filling pressure. During standing, contraction of skeletal muscles of the lower body prevents excessive pooling and increases venous return to the heart. Orthostatic hypotension is caused by an excessive fall of cardiac output or by inadequate or defective vasoconstrictor mechanisms. Neurally mediated (reflex) syncope includes vasovagal, carotid sinus, situational (cough, swallowing, micturition) syncope. It refers to a diverse group of conditions in which there is a relatively sudden change in ANS activity leading to a drop in blood pressure, heart rate, and cerebral perfusion. Neurally mediated syncope is best understood as a reflex with afferent, central, and efferent pathways, and the use of 'neurocardiogenic syncope' should be abandoned because the origin of the reflex is rarely in the heart. Postural tachycardia syndrome (POTS) is defined as a sustained heart rate increment of 30 beats per minute within 10 minutes of standing or head-up tilt in the absence of orthostatic hypotension. For individuals of ages 12 to 19 years, the requirement is at least 40 beats per minute. POTS may be accompanied by symptoms of autonomic overactivity and cerebral hypoperfusion that are relieved by recumbency. The pathophysiology and etiology of POTS are unknown but are likely heterogeneous. POTS is associated with recent viral illness, chronic fatigue syndrome, deconditioning, and limited or restricted autonomic neuropathy.[18] Diabetic neuropathy is a kind of nerve pathology that may occur for those with diabetes mellitus. Hyperglycemia interferes with a nerve's ability to send signals and weakens the walls of the vasa nervorum blood vessels that supply nerves with nutrients and oxygen. Diabetic neuropathy can affect the nerves of the ANS, especially general visceral afferent (GVA) fibers, resulting in gastroparesis and decreased blood pressure regulation.[20] GVA fibers affected by diabetic neuropathy reduce the response of their corresponding general visceral efferent (GVE). Parkinson disease is a progressive neurodegenerative disease characterized by bradykinesia and hypokinesia combined with rest tremor and rigidity. Constipation, dysphagia, sialorrhea, rhinorrhea, urinary difficulties, and sexual dysfunction are the common nonmotor problems related to autonomic dysfunction in Parkinson disease.[21][22] These signs and symptoms are also present in multiple system atrophy (MSA), making it hard to distinguish between the two disorders. However, the autonomic symptoms in MSA are generally more severe than in Parkinson disease. As the disease progresses, MSA tends to be less responsive to levodopa and is often associated with pyramidal and cerebellar findings.

Answer the question based solely on the information provided in the passage. Do not use any external knowledge or resources. Summarize this article so that a college-level student would be able to understand the important concepts using scientific language. You should write your summary in the format of a lecture on autonomic dysfunction. Do not mention orthostatic hypotension and focus more on the associated tachycardia. Emphasize the pathophysiology and the effect autonomic dysfunction has on various regions of the body. Acquired Autoimmune: Guillain-Barre, Autoimmune autonomic ganglionopathy, Lambert-Eaton myasthenic syndrome, rheumatoid arthritis, Sjogren, systemic lupus erythematosus Abnormal reflex responses in carotid sinus hypersensitivity, vasovagal syncope, and other neuro-meditated syncopes; and probably in postural tachycardia syndrome (PoTS) Abnormal sweating responses, as in generalized or focal hyperhidrosis, are related to excessive activation. Metabolic/ Nutritional: Diabetes mellitus, vitamin B12 deficiency Degenerative neurologic diseases: Parkinson disease, multiple system atrophy/Shy-Drager syndrome, pure autonomic failure presenting or suffering from orthostatic hypotension, fixed heart rate responses Infections: Botulism, Chagas disease, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), leprosy, Lyme disease, tetanus Neoplasia: Brain tumors, paraneoplastic syndromes Pharmacologic effects of several drugs that interfere with normal autonomic function and provoke symptoms include alpha- and beta-blocker-triggered orthostatic hypotension Toxin/drug-induced: Alcohol, amiodarone, chemotherapy Traumatic or tumoral spinal cord injuries at different levels and presenting with the so-called autonomic dysreflexia Uremic neuropathy/chronic liver diseases Medications That Exacerbate Orthostatic Hypotension Diuretics: furosemide, torsemide, thiazide Nitric oxide-mediated vasodilators: nitroglycerine, hydralazine, sildenafil Adrenergic antagonists: Alpha-1-adrenergic blockers: alfuzosin, terazosin Beta-adrenergic blockers: propranolol Alpha -2-adrenergic agonists: tizanidine, clonidine Renin-angiotensin system inhibitors: lisinopril, valsartan Dopamine antagonists: Phenothiazines: chlorpromazine Atypical antipsychotics: olanzapine, risperidone, quetiapine Calcium channel blockers: verapamil, diltiazem Selective serotonin receptor reuptake inhibitors: paroxetine Antidepressants: trazodone, amitriptyline Go to: Epidemiology Autonomic dysfunction, taken as a whole, is not infrequent. The most common autonomic dysfunction occurs in the cardiovascular control sphere and consists of an abnormal vasovagal response that leads to syncope. Other common manifestations are related to postural tachycardia syndrome (POTS) or changes seen with Parkinson disease and other parkinsonisms. Compared to other areas of autonomic control, urinary incontinence, as observed in multiple sclerosis and other nervous system disorders, is unspecific but not rare. Some symptoms of autonomic disturbance, such as the facial vasomotor and ocular symptoms in trigeminal autonomic headaches, are of secondary significance but help in diagnosis.[14][15][16][17] Orthostatic hypotension occurs in patients with neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson disease, multiple system atrophy, pure autonomic failure, and in individuals with ganglionopathies that affect autonomic nerves and peripheral neuropathy. The prevalence of orthostatic hypotension is proportional to age, and it is more common in institutionalized than community-dwelling elderly[18]. POTS is more prevalent in women. Syncope is highly prevalent in the general population, and the majority of syncope is due to reflex syncope. The frequency of reflex syncope is higher during adolescence and in individuals over 55 years. Carotid sinus hypersensitivity, defecation, and cough syncope occur almost exclusively in the elderly population.[18] Go to: Pathophysiology Pathophysiology in ANS depends upon the affected area. Both anatomically related, as well as isolated regions, can be affected. In the cardiovascular system, three pathophysiological syndromes are typically associated with chronic dysfunction of the ANS. These are Postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), orthostatic hypotension with supine hypertension, and reflex cardiovascular syndromes. Hyperhidrosis and hypohidrosis are the main features of temperature control. Fixed mydriasis and myosis, also known as Adie's pupil and Horner syndrome in the eye, are also seen. Autonomic dysfunction may result from any disease that affects the peripheral or central components of ANS. Primary autonomic dysfunction involves primary (idiopathic) degeneration of autonomic postganglionic fibers without other neurologic abnormalities. Orthostatic hypotension is associated with autonomic dysfunction and motor and cerebellar abnormalities in diseases involving a central degenerative process, as described in the Shy–Drager syndrome. A central degenerative disease process involving preganglionic neuronal degeneration, presenting with orthostatic hypotension and typical parkinsonian symptoms, has been described.[19] Orthostatic hypotension is defined as a sustained reduction of systolic blood pressure of at least 20 mmHg or diastolic blood pressure of 10 mmHg within three minutes of standing or head-up tilt to at least 60 degrees on the tilt table. The magnitude of fall in blood pressure depends on baseline blood pressure. In patients with supine hypertension, a reduction of 30 mmHg in systolic blood pressure may be an appropriate criterion for orthostatic hypotension. Immediately upon standing, gravitationally mediated redistribution of the blood volume and pooling of 300 to 800 ml of blood in lower limbs and splanchnic venous capacitance system occurs, which leads to a reduction of venous return and cardiac filling pressure. During standing, contraction of skeletal muscles of the lower body prevents excessive pooling and increases venous return to the heart. Orthostatic hypotension is caused by an excessive fall of cardiac output or by inadequate or defective vasoconstrictor mechanisms. Neurally mediated (reflex) syncope includes vasovagal, carotid sinus, situational (cough, swallowing, micturition) syncope. It refers to a diverse group of conditions in which there is a relatively sudden change in ANS activity leading to a drop in blood pressure, heart rate, and cerebral perfusion. Neurally mediated syncope is best understood as a reflex with afferent, central, and efferent pathways, and the use of 'neurocardiogenic syncope' should be abandoned because the origin of the reflex is rarely in the heart. Postural tachycardia syndrome (POTS) is defined as a sustained heart rate increment of 30 beats per minute within 10 minutes of standing or head-up tilt in the absence of orthostatic hypotension. For individuals of ages 12 to 19 years, the requirement is at least 40 beats per minute. POTS may be accompanied by symptoms of autonomic overactivity and cerebral hypoperfusion that are relieved by recumbency. The pathophysiology and etiology of POTS are unknown but are likely heterogeneous. POTS is associated with recent viral illness, chronic fatigue syndrome, deconditioning, and limited or restricted autonomic neuropathy.[18] Diabetic neuropathy is a kind of nerve pathology that may occur for those with diabetes mellitus. Hyperglycemia interferes with a nerve's ability to send signals and weakens the walls of the vasa nervorum blood vessels that supply nerves with nutrients and oxygen. Diabetic neuropathy can affect the nerves of the ANS, especially general visceral afferent (GVA) fibers, resulting in gastroparesis and decreased blood pressure regulation.[20] GVA fibers affected by diabetic neuropathy reduce the response of their corresponding general visceral efferent (GVE). Parkinson disease is a progressive neurodegenerative disease characterized by bradykinesia and hypokinesia combined with rest tremor and rigidity. Constipation, dysphagia, sialorrhea, rhinorrhea, urinary difficulties, and sexual dysfunction are the common nonmotor problems related to autonomic dysfunction in Parkinson disease.[21][22] These signs and symptoms are also present in multiple system atrophy (MSA), making it hard to distinguish between the two disorders. However, the autonomic symptoms in MSA are generally more severe than in Parkinson disease. As the disease progresses, MSA tends to be less responsive to levodopa and is often associated with pyramidal and cerebellar findings. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK430888/

System Instructions: * Use only information provided to you: do not rely on external sources or prior knowledge. * Respond with a bulleted list. * Do not include any filler or explanations. * If you are unable to find the information requested within the context provided, say so instead of trying to answer.

Question: Find and summarize the most common symptoms of narcolepsy, using two or three sentences each.

Context: Narcolepsy Symptoms Excessive Daytime Sleepiness Excessive daytime sleepiness, or EDS, is the inability to stay awake and alert during the day, resulting in unintended lapses into drowsiness or sleep. • Every patient with narcolepsy has EDS, and it is often the first symptom. • When describing this symptom, patients may say that they: – Have a hard time staying awake while doing everyday things – Are tired or fatigued – Have trouble concentrating or staying focused – Are forgetful or have poor memory – Have mood changes or get upset easily • EDS may be disabling because of the high risk of falling asleep—or having a “sleep attack”—while you are doing everyday things, such as: – Sitting and reading – Riding in a car – Stopped in traffic while driving a car – Talking to someone • You may take daytime naps, but these naps likely only help you feel refreshed for a short period of time. Cataplexy Cataplexy is a sudden, brief loss of muscle strength or control triggered by strong emotions. • Cataplexy may cause a sudden feeling of weakness. • Cataplectic attacks are not the same in everyone. – Usually, attacks affect only certain muscle groups, such as the arms, neck, or face. You may not even recognize these subtle attacks, but your friends or family may notice them. – Less commonly, you can have weakness in your whole body and fall to the ground. – The type of cataplexy attack experienced by one person is usually the same (eg, head dropping). • Attacks are often triggered by: – Sudden, strong emotions such as happiness, laughter, surprise, or anger – Hearing or telling a joke • These attacks usually last for only a short time—from a few seconds to several minutes. • All people with cataplexy do not have the same number of attacks. For some people, they are rare. Other people have many attacks each day. Sleep Paralysis Sleep paralysis is the brief inability to move or speak while falling asleep or waking up. This can be a distressing or terrifying experience. During sleep paralysis, you can experience: • Eye fluttering • Moaning • Limb numbness or tingling • Rapid or strong heartbeat • Sweating • Sensation of struggling to move • Chest pressure • Difficulty breathing Episodes usually last seconds to minutes and can end by themselves or from being touched, shaken, or spoken to, or after trying hard to move. Sleep paralysis sometimes accompanies hypnagogic or hypnopompic hallucinations, other symptoms of narcolepsy. Disrupted Nighttime Sleep It’s normal to wake up during the night once in a while. But when you have disrupted sleep associated with narcolepsy, it means you often fall asleep quickly but wake up frequently throughout the night. • With disrupted nighttime sleep, you may: – Fall asleep easily but have trouble staying asleep for long periods of time – Report poor-quality sleep Hypnagogic/Hypnopompic Hallucinations Hypnagogic hallucinations are vivid dreamlike experiences that occur while you are falling asleep. When they occur while waking up, they are called hypnopompic hallucinations. • These hallucinations may be mistaken for nightmares. • These hallucinations may also occur with “sleep paralysis.” • You may have experiences such as: – Hearing sounds or words when drifting off to sleep – Having a strong feeling that someone or something is in the room – Seeing people or creatures near you or even lying in your bed • These events are usually frightening or disturbing. • Anyone can have one of these hallucinations at some time in his or her life. However, if you have them regularly, it could be a sign of narcolepsy.

System Instructions: * Use only information provided to you: do not rely on external sources or prior knowledge. * Respond with a bulleted list. * Do not include any filler or explanations. * If you are unable to find the information requested within the context provided, say so instead of trying to answer. Context: Narcolepsy Symptoms Excessive Daytime Sleepiness Excessive daytime sleepiness, or EDS, is the inability to stay awake and alert during the day, resulting in unintended lapses into drowsiness or sleep. • Every patient with narcolepsy has EDS, and it is often the first symptom. • When describing this symptom, patients may say that they: – Have a hard time staying awake while doing everyday things – Are tired or fatigued – Have trouble concentrating or staying focused – Are forgetful or have poor memory – Have mood changes or get upset easily • EDS may be disabling because of the high risk of falling asleep—or having a “sleep attack”—while you are doing everyday things, such as: – Sitting and reading – Riding in a car – Stopped in traffic while driving a car – Talking to someone • You may take daytime naps, but these naps likely only help you feel refreshed for a short period of time. Cataplexy Cataplexy is a sudden, brief loss of muscle strength or control triggered by strong emotions. • Cataplexy may cause a sudden feeling of weakness. • Cataplectic attacks are not the same in everyone. – Usually, attacks affect only certain muscle groups, such as the arms, neck, or face. You may not even recognize these subtle attacks, but your friends or family may notice them. – Less commonly, you can have weakness in your whole body and fall to the ground. – The type of cataplexy attack experienced by one person is usually the same (eg, head dropping). • Attacks are often triggered by: – Sudden, strong emotions such as happiness, laughter, surprise, or anger – Hearing or telling a joke • These attacks usually last for only a short time—from a few seconds to several minutes. • All people with cataplexy do not have the same number of attacks. For some people, they are rare. Other people have many attacks each day. Sleep Paralysis Sleep paralysis is the brief inability to move or speak while falling asleep or waking up. This can be a distressing or terrifying experience. During sleep paralysis, you can experience: • Eye fluttering • Moaning • Limb numbness or tingling • Rapid or strong heartbeat • Sweating • Sensation of struggling to move • Chest pressure • Difficulty breathing Episodes usually last seconds to minutes and can end by themselves or from being touched, shaken, or spoken to, or after trying hard to move. Sleep paralysis sometimes accompanies hypnagogic or hypnopompic hallucinations, other symptoms of narcolepsy. Disrupted Nighttime Sleep It’s normal to wake up during the night once in a while. But when you have disrupted sleep associated with narcolepsy, it means you often fall asleep quickly but wake up frequently throughout the night. • With disrupted nighttime sleep, you may: – Fall asleep easily but have trouble staying asleep for long periods of time – Report poor-quality sleep Hypnagogic/Hypnopompic Hallucinations Hypnagogic hallucinations are vivid dreamlike experiences that occur while you are falling asleep. When they occur while waking up, they are called hypnopompic hallucinations. • These hallucinations may be mistaken for nightmares. • These hallucinations may also occur with “sleep paralysis.” • You may have experiences such as: – Hearing sounds or words when drifting off to sleep – Having a strong feeling that someone or something is in the room – Seeing people or creatures near you or even lying in your bed • These events are usually frightening or disturbing. • Anyone can have one of these hallucinations at some time in his or her life. However, if you have them regularly, it could be a sign of narcolepsy. Question: Find and summarize the most common symptoms of narcolepsy, using two or three sentences each.

"================ <TEXT PASSAGE> ======= [context document] ================ <QUESTION> ======= [user request] ================ <TASK> ======= You are an expert in question answering. Your task is to reply to a query or question, based only on the information provided by the user. It should only use information in the article provided."

What are the different minerals in seawater which affect performance, what is causing the decrease in performance and how can we prevent performance degradation from occurring.

INTRODUCTION Hydrogen (H2), with its high-energy density and zero-emission properties, holds great promise as a sustainable energy carrier (1–4). Seawater electrolysis, as a promising alternative for sustainable hydrogen production, faces challenges due to the expensive and scarce platinum catalyst, as well as the need for additional purification processes to address the complex nature of seawater, resulting in higher production costs (5–7). Compared to the widely adopted practice of hydrogen production through electrolysis of alkaline freshwater, the advancement of hydrogen production from seawater has been relatively sluggish (8). The pH of natural seawater is typically around 8.0 and reduced ionic mobility in seawater leads to a diminished pH dependence of the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) (9, 10), necessitating higher applied voltages to attain the desired efficiency in hydrogen production (11). Furthermore, the complex composition of seawater and the insoluble deposits formed by alkaline earth metal ions such as Ca2+, Mg2+ during electrolysis make seawater HER challenging (1, 12). More fatally, Cl- has a high affinity for the metal active sites of the catalysts as they have strong depassivation and penetrating properties (13, 14), leading to severe degradation of the catalyst and hindering direct seawater electrolysis for hydrogen production (15–17). Although certain catalysts demonstrated activity at low current densities but offer low hydrogen production rates (18, 19), far below the high-current hydrogen production conditions required for industrial water electrolysis. To address this bottleneck issue, various strategies have been developed, including selective active site engineering (20, 21), three-dimensional structure design (22, 23), and carbon layer protection (24, 25). Recently, Guo et al. (26) proposed an innovative strategy, wherein they enhanced the kinetic processes by generating an in situ localized alkaline environment, achieving excellent seawater catalytic performance at 60°C. Metal nitrides (MNs) have inherent chemical stability, electrical conductivity, and excellent catalytic activity, and their surfaces undergo in situ transformation to form highly catalytic active hydroxides, while the nitride core remains stable (27, 28). For example, NiMoN@NiFeN prepared by Yu et al. (29) required an overpotential of 160 mV to reach a current density of 500 mA cm-2 and stable operation for 48 hours, which is attributed to the amorphous NiFeOOH layer formed on the nitride surface. Regrettably, the performance of current MN-based electrocatalysts is still suboptimal and it is urgent to manipulate them for efficient seawater splitting. In this work, we present a protective strategy by introducing a V2O3 layer by in situ reduction into a catalyst with low loading of Pt and Ni3N. The V2O3 layer acts as an “armor” during electrolysis, markedly reducing the adsorption of Cl- and alkaline earth cations (Ca2+ and Mg2+) from seawater and preventing corrosion of the active sites on the electrode. Benefiting from the powerful protection mechanism, the assembled Pt-Ni3N@V2O3 catalyst exhibits remarkable HER activity in alkalized natural seawater and maintains its performance for at least 500 hours at industrial-grade current density, surpassing the performance of other reported electrocatalysts. RESULTS Synthesis and characterization The hydrothermal method was used to prepare hydroxide precursors in nanoflower-shaped structures, as illustrated in figs. S1 and S2. Subsequently, calcination in NH3 gas was used to obtain a composite of Ni3N and V2O3, resulting in the formation of numerous rough porous structures on the catalyst surface. Pt-Ni3N@V2O3/NF (nickel foam noted as NF) was constructed by placing the Ni3N@V2O3/NF precursor in an aqueous solution of H2PtCl6 at room temperature. On the basis of previous reports, we speculate on the reduction mechanism and route (30–32). Specifically, V2O3, as a strong reducing agent, first forms (V2O3)x(OH-)y(s) with H2O molecules (chemical eq. S1), and then Pt4+ ions in solution adsorb onto the surface of the (V2O3)x(OH-)y(s). In situ reduction then occurs with the assistance of H2O molecules to form Pt nanoparticles (chemical eq. S2). Theoretical calculations also confirm that Pt nanoparticles preferentially form on the V2O3 surface rather than the Ni3N surface (fig. S2). The powder x-ray diffraction (XRD) patterns, as illustrated in Fig. 1A and fig. S3, confirm the presence of a composite phase comprising Ni3N, V2O3, and Pt. These results demonstrate the successful preparation of Pt-Ni3N@V2O3/NF. The hydroxide precursors prepared by the hydrothermal method exhibited nanoflower-like structures with low crystallinity, as shown in figs. S4 and S5. After ammonolysis, scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM) show that Ni3N@V2O3/NF exhibit interconnected porous structures (fig. S6) with lattice stripes of 0.203 and 0.183 nm corresponding well to the (111) and (024) facets of Ni3N and V2O3 (fig. S7), respectively. After the incorporation of Pt, SEM and TEM analyses reveal that Pt-Ni3N@V2O3/NF exhibits a granular morphology, together with a rough surface (Fig. 1, B and C). Pt nanoparticles, formed in situ, have an average particle size of 4.41 nm. The high-resolution TEM (HRTEM) shows that amorphous/low crystallinity V2O3 covers the outer surface of Pt-Ni3N@V2O3/NF (Fig. 1D), with lattice stripes of 0.203 and 0.226 nm corresponding to the (111) facets of Ni3N and the (111) facets of Pt (Fig. 1, E to G), respectively. As demonstrated in fig. S8, the particle size of Pt-Ni3N@V2O3/NF increases with longer impregnation time, and this observation is also supported by the electrochemical properties. In Fig. 1 (H and I), high-angle annular dark-field scanning TEM (HAADF-STEM) images, energy-dispersive spectroscopy (EDS) elemental mapping, and EDS line scan collectively suggest that the internal larger nanoparticles comprise Ni3N, while V2O3 is distributed in the surrounding region. In addition, uniformly anchored, small-sized Pt nanoparticles are found on the surface of the structure, forming a dual-active site. The content of Pt is determined by energy dispersive x-ray spectroscopy to be approximately 6.61% (fig. S9 and table S1), which is consistent with the results of inductively coupled plasma–optical emission spectrometry (ICP-OES) analysis (6.94%). It is worth noting that the reduction of Pt also occurs on the Ni3N surface in the absence of the V2O3 in situ reduction layer (fig. S3C), but with considerable agglomeration (figs. S10 and S11), which is undoubtedly detrimental to catalytic performance. The V2O3 serves as both a potent in situ reducing agent and stabilizer. Its rough surface offers numerous anchor sites and exerts steric hindrance effects, influencing the nucleation and growth kinetics of Pt nanoparticles while impeding their migration and aggregation (30).To address this bottleneck issue, various strategies have been developed, including selective active site engineering (20, 21), three-dimensional structure design (22, 23), and carbon layer protection (24, 25). Recently, Guo et al. (26) proposed an innovative strategy, wherein they enhanced the kinetic processes by generating an in situ localized alkaline environment, achieving excellent seawater catalytic performance at 60°C. Metal nitrides (MNs) have inherent chemical stability, electrical conductivity, and excellent catalytic activity, and their surfaces undergo in situ transformation to form highly catalytic active hydroxides, while the nitride core remains stable (27, 28). For example, NiMoN@NiFeN prepared by Yu et al. (29) required an overpotential of 160 mV to reach a current density of 500 mA cm-2 and stable operation for 48 hours, which is attributed to the amorphous NiFeOOH layer formed on the nitride surface. Regrettably, the performance of current MN-based electrocatalysts is still suboptimal and it is urgent to manipulate them for efficient seawater splitting. In this work, we present a protective strategy by introducing a V2O3 layer by in situ reduction into a catalyst with low loading of Pt and Ni3N. The V2O3 layer acts as an “armor” during electrolysis, markedly reducing the adsorption of Cl- and alkaline earth cations (Ca2+ and Mg2+) from seawater and preventing corrosion of the active sites on the electrode. Benefiting from the powerful protection mechanism, the assembled Pt-Ni3N@V2O3 catalyst exhibits remarkable HER activity in alkalized natural seawater and maintains its performance for at least 500 hours at industrial-grade current density, surpassing the performance of other reported electrocatalysts

"================ <TEXT PASSAGE> ======= INTRODUCTION Hydrogen (H2), with its high-energy density and zero-emission properties, holds great promise as a sustainable energy carrier (1–4). Seawater electrolysis, as a promising alternative for sustainable hydrogen production, faces challenges due to the expensive and scarce platinum catalyst, as well as the need for additional purification processes to address the complex nature of seawater, resulting in higher production costs (5–7). Compared to the widely adopted practice of hydrogen production through electrolysis of alkaline freshwater, the advancement of hydrogen production from seawater has been relatively sluggish (8). The pH of natural seawater is typically around 8.0 and reduced ionic mobility in seawater leads to a diminished pH dependence of the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) (9, 10), necessitating higher applied voltages to attain the desired efficiency in hydrogen production (11). Furthermore, the complex composition of seawater and the insoluble deposits formed by alkaline earth metal ions such as Ca2+, Mg2+ during electrolysis make seawater HER challenging (1, 12). More fatally, Cl- has a high affinity for the metal active sites of the catalysts as they have strong depassivation and penetrating properties (13, 14), leading to severe degradation of the catalyst and hindering direct seawater electrolysis for hydrogen production (15–17). Although certain catalysts demonstrated activity at low current densities but offer low hydrogen production rates (18, 19), far below the high-current hydrogen production conditions required for industrial water electrolysis. To address this bottleneck issue, various strategies have been developed, including selective active site engineering (20, 21), three-dimensional structure design (22, 23), and carbon layer protection (24, 25). Recently, Guo et al. (26) proposed an innovative strategy, wherein they enhanced the kinetic processes by generating an in situ localized alkaline environment, achieving excellent seawater catalytic performance at 60°C. Metal nitrides (MNs) have inherent chemical stability, electrical conductivity, and excellent catalytic activity, and their surfaces undergo in situ transformation to form highly catalytic active hydroxides, while the nitride core remains stable (27, 28). For example, NiMoN@NiFeN prepared by Yu et al. (29) required an overpotential of 160 mV to reach a current density of 500 mA cm-2 and stable operation for 48 hours, which is attributed to the amorphous NiFeOOH layer formed on the nitride surface. Regrettably, the performance of current MN-based electrocatalysts is still suboptimal and it is urgent to manipulate them for efficient seawater splitting. In this work, we present a protective strategy by introducing a V2O3 layer by in situ reduction into a catalyst with low loading of Pt and Ni3N. The V2O3 layer acts as an “armor” during electrolysis, markedly reducing the adsorption of Cl- and alkaline earth cations (Ca2+ and Mg2+) from seawater and preventing corrosion of the active sites on the electrode. Benefiting from the powerful protection mechanism, the assembled Pt-Ni3N@V2O3 catalyst exhibits remarkable HER activity in alkalized natural seawater and maintains its performance for at least 500 hours at industrial-grade current density, surpassing the performance of other reported electrocatalysts. RESULTS Synthesis and characterization The hydrothermal method was used to prepare hydroxide precursors in nanoflower-shaped structures, as illustrated in figs. S1 and S2. Subsequently, calcination in NH3 gas was used to obtain a composite of Ni3N and V2O3, resulting in the formation of numerous rough porous structures on the catalyst surface. Pt-Ni3N@V2O3/NF (nickel foam noted as NF) was constructed by placing the Ni3N@V2O3/NF precursor in an aqueous solution of H2PtCl6 at room temperature. On the basis of previous reports, we speculate on the reduction mechanism and route (30–32). Specifically, V2O3, as a strong reducing agent, first forms (V2O3)x(OH-)y(s) with H2O molecules (chemical eq. S1), and then Pt4+ ions in solution adsorb onto the surface of the (V2O3)x(OH-)y(s). In situ reduction then occurs with the assistance of H2O molecules to form Pt nanoparticles (chemical eq. S2). Theoretical calculations also confirm that Pt nanoparticles preferentially form on the V2O3 surface rather than the Ni3N surface (fig. S2). The powder x-ray diffraction (XRD) patterns, as illustrated in Fig. 1A and fig. S3, confirm the presence of a composite phase comprising Ni3N, V2O3, and Pt. These results demonstrate the successful preparation of Pt-Ni3N@V2O3/NF. The hydroxide precursors prepared by the hydrothermal method exhibited nanoflower-like structures with low crystallinity, as shown in figs. S4 and S5. After ammonolysis, scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM) show that Ni3N@V2O3/NF exhibit interconnected porous structures (fig. S6) with lattice stripes of 0.203 and 0.183 nm corresponding well to the (111) and (024) facets of Ni3N and V2O3 (fig. S7), respectively. After the incorporation of Pt, SEM and TEM analyses reveal that Pt-Ni3N@V2O3/NF exhibits a granular morphology, together with a rough surface (Fig. 1, B and C). Pt nanoparticles, formed in situ, have an average particle size of 4.41 nm. The high-resolution TEM (HRTEM) shows that amorphous/low crystallinity V2O3 covers the outer surface of Pt-Ni3N@V2O3/NF (Fig. 1D), with lattice stripes of 0.203 and 0.226 nm corresponding to the (111) facets of Ni3N and the (111) facets of Pt (Fig. 1, E to G), respectively. As demonstrated in fig. S8, the particle size of Pt-Ni3N@V2O3/NF increases with longer impregnation time, and this observation is also supported by the electrochemical properties. In Fig. 1 (H and I), high-angle annular dark-field scanning TEM (HAADF-STEM) images, energy-dispersive spectroscopy (EDS) elemental mapping, and EDS line scan collectively suggest that the internal larger nanoparticles comprise Ni3N, while V2O3 is distributed in the surrounding region. In addition, uniformly anchored, small-sized Pt nanoparticles are found on the surface of the structure, forming a dual-active site. The content of Pt is determined by energy dispersive x-ray spectroscopy to be approximately 6.61% (fig. S9 and table S1), which is consistent with the results of inductively coupled plasma–optical emission spectrometry (ICP-OES) analysis (6.94%). It is worth noting that the reduction of Pt also occurs on the Ni3N surface in the absence of the V2O3 in situ reduction layer (fig. S3C), but with considerable agglomeration (figs. S10 and S11), which is undoubtedly detrimental to catalytic performance. The V2O3 serves as both a potent in situ reducing agent and stabilizer. Its rough surface offers numerous anchor sites and exerts steric hindrance effects, influencing the nucleation and growth kinetics of Pt nanoparticles while impeding their migration and aggregation (30).To address this bottleneck issue, various strategies have been developed, including selective active site engineering (20, 21), three-dimensional structure design (22, 23), and carbon layer protection (24, 25). Recently, Guo et al. (26) proposed an innovative strategy, wherein they enhanced the kinetic processes by generating an in situ localized alkaline environment, achieving excellent seawater catalytic performance at 60°C. Metal nitrides (MNs) have inherent chemical stability, electrical conductivity, and excellent catalytic activity, and their surfaces undergo in situ transformation to form highly catalytic active hydroxides, while the nitride core remains stable (27, 28). For example, NiMoN@NiFeN prepared by Yu et al. (29) required an overpotential of 160 mV to reach a current density of 500 mA cm-2 and stable operation for 48 hours, which is attributed to the amorphous NiFeOOH layer formed on the nitride surface. Regrettably, the performance of current MN-based electrocatalysts is still suboptimal and it is urgent to manipulate them for efficient seawater splitting. In this work, we present a protective strategy by introducing a V2O3 layer by in situ reduction into a catalyst with low loading of Pt and Ni3N. The V2O3 layer acts as an “armor” during electrolysis, markedly reducing the adsorption of Cl- and alkaline earth cations (Ca2+ and Mg2+) from seawater and preventing corrosion of the active sites on the electrode. Benefiting from the powerful protection mechanism, the assembled Pt-Ni3N@V2O3 catalyst exhibits remarkable HER activity in alkalized natural seawater and maintains its performance for at least 500 hours at industrial-grade current density, surpassing the performance of other reported electrocatalysts https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adn7012 ================ <QUESTION> ======= What are the different minerals in seawater which affect performance, what is causing the decrease in performance and how can we prevent performance degradation from occurring. ================ <TASK> ======= You are an expert in question answering. Your task is to reply to a query or question, based only on the information provided by the user. It should only use information in the article provided."

Do not use any information outside of the context.

According to the context, what are the pros and cons of using Motrin?

CLINICAL PHARMACOLOGY MOTRIN tablets contain ibuprofen which possesses analgesic and antipyretic activities. Its mode of action, like that of other NSAIDs, is not completely understood, but may be related to prostaglandin synthetase inhibition. In clinical studies in patients with rheumatoid arthritis and osteoarthritis, MOTRIN tablets have been shown to be comparable to aspirin in controlling pain and inflammation and to be associated with a statistically significant reduction in the milder gastrointestinal side effects. MOTRIN tablets may be well tolerated in some patients who have had gastrointestinal side effects with aspirin, but these patients when treated with MOTRIN tablets should be carefully followed for signs and symptoms of gastrointestinal ulceration and bleeding. Although it is not definitely known whether MOTRIN tablets causes less peptic ulceration than aspirin, in one study involving 885 patients with rheumatoid arthritis treated for up to one year, there were no reports of gastric ulceration with MOTRIN tablets whereas frank ulceration was reported in 13 patients in the aspirin group (statistically significant p<.001). Gastroscopic studies at varying doses show an increased tendency toward gastric irritation at higher doses. However, at comparable doses, gastric irritation is approximately half that seen with aspirin. In clinical studies in patients with rheumatoid arthritis, MOTRIN tablets have been shown to be comparable to indomethacin in controlling the signs and symptoms of disease activity and to be associated with a statistically significant reduction of the milder gastrointestinal and CNS side effects. Controlled studies have demonstrated that MOTRIN tablets are a more effective analgesic than propoxyphene for the relief of episiotomy pain, pain following dental extraction procedures, and for the relief of the symptoms of primary dysmenorrhea. In patients with primary dysmenorrhea, MOTRIN tablets have been shown to reduce elevated levels of prostaglandin activity in the menstrual fluid and to reduce resting and active intrauterine pressure, as well as the frequency of uterine contractions. The probable mechanism of action is to inhibit prostaglandin synthesis rather than simply to provide analgesia. INDICATIONS AND USAGE MOTRIN tablets are indicated for relief of the signs and symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis and osteoarthritis. MOTRIN tablets are indicated for relief of mild to moderate pain. MOTRIN tablets are also indicated for the treatment of primary dysmenorrhea. Controlled clinical trials to establish the safety and effectiveness of MOTRIN tablets in children have not been conducted. CONTRAINDICATIONS MOTRIN tablets are contraindicated in patients with known hypersensitivity to Ibuprofen. MOTRIN tablets should not be given to patients who have experienced asthma, urticaria, or allergictype reactions after taking aspirin or other NSAIDs. Severe, rarely fatal, anaphylactic-like reactions to NSAIDs have been reported in such patients. MOTRIN tablets are contraindicated for the treatment of peri-operative pain in the setting of coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgery (see WARNINGS). WARNINGS CARDIOVASCULAR EFFECTS Cardiovascular Thrombotic Events Clinical trials of several COX-2 selective and nonselective NSAIDs of up to three years duration have shown an increased risk of serious cardiovascular (CV) thrombotic events, myocardial infarction, and stroke, which can be fatal. All NSAIDs, both COX-2 selective and nonselective, may have a similar risk. Patients with known CV disease or risk factors for CV disease may be at greater risk. To minimize the potential risk for an adverse CV event in patients treated with an NSAID, the lowest effective dose should be used for the shortest duration possible. Physicians and patients should remain alert for the development of such events, even in the absence of previous CV symptoms. Patients should be informed about the signs and/or symptoms of serious CV events and the steps to take if they occur. There is no consistent evidence that concurrent use of aspirin mitigates the increased risk of serious CV thrombotic events associated with NSAID use. The concurrent use of aspirin and an NSAID does increase the risk of serious GI events (see GI WARNINGS). Two large, controlled clinical trials of a COX-2 selective NSAID for the treatment of pain in the first 10-14 days following CABG surgery found an increased incidence of myocardial infarction and stroke (see CONTRAINDICATIONS). Hypertension NSAIDs including MOTRIN tablets, can lead to onset of new hypertension or worsening of preexisting hypertension, either of which may contribute to the increased incidence of CV events. Patients taking thiazides or loop diuretics may have impaired response to these therapies when taking NSAIDs. NSAIDs, including MOTRIN tablets, should be used with caution in patients with hypertension. Blood pressure (BP) should be monitored closely during the initiation of NSAID treatment and throughout the course of therapy. Congestive Heart Failure and Edema Fluid retention and edema have been observed in some patients taking NSAIDs. MOTRIN tablets should be used with caution in patients with fluid retention or heart failure. Gastrointestinal Effects - Risk of Ulceration, Bleeding, and Perforation NSAIDs, including MOTRIN tablets, can cause serious gastrointestinal (GI) adverse events including inflammation, bleeding, ulceration, and perforation of the stomach, small intestine, or large intestine,which can be fatal. These serious adverse events can occur at any time, with or without warning symptoms, in patients treated with NSAIDs. Only one in five patients, who develop a serious upper GI adverse event on NSAID therapy, is symptomatic. Upper GI ulcers, gross bleeding, or perforation caused by NSAIDs occur in approximately 1% of patients treated for 3-6 months, and in about 2-4% of patients treated for one year. These trends continue with longer duration of use, increasing the likelihood of developing a serious GI event at some time during the course of therapy. However, even short-term therapy is not without risk. NSAIDs should be prescribed with extreme caution in those with a prior history of ulcer disease or gastrointestinal bleeding. Patients with a prior history of peptic ulcer disease and/or gastrointestinal bleeding who use NSAIDs have a greater than 10-fold increased risk for developing a GI bleed compared to patients treated with neither of these risk factors. Other factors that increase the risk of GI bleeding in patients treated with NSAIDs include concomitant use of oral corticosteroids or anticoagulants, longer duration of NSAID therapy, smoking, use of alcohol, older age, and poor general health status. Most spontaneous reports of fatal GI events are in elderly or debilitated patients and therefore, special care should be taken in treating this population. To minimize the potential risk for an adverse GI event in patients treated with an NSAID, the lowest effective dose should be used for the shortest possible duration. Patients and physicians should remain alert for signs and symptoms of GI ulcerations and bleeding during NSAID therapy and promptly initiate additional evaluation and treatment if a serious GI event is suspected. This should include discontinuation of the NSAID until a serious GI adverse event is ruled out. For high-risk patients, alternate therapies that do not involve NSAIDs should be considered. Renal Effects Long-term administration of NSAIDs has resulted in renal papillary necrosis and other renal injury. Renal toxicity has also been seen in patients in whom renal prostaglandins have a compensatory role in the maintenance of renal perfusion. In these patients, administration of a NSAID may cause a dosedependent reduction in prostaglandin formation and, secondarily, in renal blood flow, which may precipitate overt renal decompensation. Patients at greatest risk of this reaction are those with impaired renal function, heart failure, liver dysfunction, those taking diuretics and ACE inhibitors, and the elderly. Discontinuation of NSAID therapy is usually followed by recovery to the pretreatment state. Advanced Renal Disease No information is available from controlled clinical studies regarding the use of MOTRIN tablets in patients with advanced renal disease. Therefore, treatment with MOTRIN tablets is not recommended in these patients with advanced renal disease. If MOTRIN tablet therapy must be initiated, close monitoring of the patients renal function is advisable. Anaphylactoid Reactions As with other NSAIDs, anaphylactoid reactions may occur in patients without known prior exposure to MOTRIN tablets. MOTRIN tablets should not be given to patients with the aspirin triad. This symptom complex typically occurs in asthmatic patients who experience rhinitis with or without nasal polyps, or who exhibit severe, potentially fatal bronchospasm after taking aspirin or other NSAIDs (see CONTRAINDICATIONS and PRECAUTIONS, Preexisting Asthma). Emergency help should be sought in cases where an anaphylactoid reaction occurs. Skin Reactions NSAIDs, including MOTRIN tablets, can cause serious skin adverse events such as exfoliative dermatitis, Stevens-Johnson Syndrome (SJS), and toxic epidermal necrolysis (TEN), which can be fatal. These serious events may occur without warning. Patients should be informed about the signs and symptoms of serious skin manifestations and use of the drug should be discontinued at the first appearance of skin rash or any other sign of hypersensitivity. Pregnancy In late pregnancy, as with other NSAIDs, MOTRIN tablets should be avoided because it may cause premature closure of the ductus arteriosus.

Question: According to the context, what are the pros and cons of using Motrin? System Instructions: Do not use any information outside of the context. Context: CLINICAL PHARMACOLOGY MOTRIN tablets contain ibuprofen which possesses analgesic and antipyretic activities. Its mode of action, like that of other NSAIDs, is not completely understood, but may be related to prostaglandin synthetase inhibition. In clinical studies in patients with rheumatoid arthritis and osteoarthritis, MOTRIN tablets have been shown to be comparable to aspirin in controlling pain and inflammation and to be associated with a statistically significant reduction in the milder gastrointestinal side effects. MOTRIN tablets may be well tolerated in some patients who have had gastrointestinal side effects with aspirin, but these patients when treated with MOTRIN tablets should be carefully followed for signs and symptoms of gastrointestinal ulceration and bleeding. Although it is not definitely known whether MOTRIN tablets causes less peptic ulceration than aspirin, in one study involving 885 patients with rheumatoid arthritis treated for up to one year, there were no reports of gastric ulceration with MOTRIN tablets whereas frank ulceration was reported in 13 patients in the aspirin group (statistically significant p<.001). Gastroscopic studies at varying doses show an increased tendency toward gastric irritation at higher doses. However, at comparable doses, gastric irritation is approximately half that seen with aspirin. In clinical studies in patients with rheumatoid arthritis, MOTRIN tablets have been shown to be comparable to indomethacin in controlling the signs and symptoms of disease activity and to be associated with a statistically significant reduction of the milder gastrointestinal and CNS side effects. Controlled studies have demonstrated that MOTRIN tablets are a more effective analgesic than propoxyphene for the relief of episiotomy pain, pain following dental extraction procedures, and for the relief of the symptoms of primary dysmenorrhea. In patients with primary dysmenorrhea, MOTRIN tablets have been shown to reduce elevated levels of prostaglandin activity in the menstrual fluid and to reduce resting and active intrauterine pressure, as well as the frequency of uterine contractions. The probable mechanism of action is to inhibit prostaglandin synthesis rather than simply to provide analgesia. INDICATIONS AND USAGE MOTRIN tablets are indicated for relief of the signs and symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis and osteoarthritis. MOTRIN tablets are indicated for relief of mild to moderate pain. MOTRIN tablets are also indicated for the treatment of primary dysmenorrhea. Controlled clinical trials to establish the safety and effectiveness of MOTRIN tablets in children have not been conducted. CONTRAINDICATIONS MOTRIN tablets are contraindicated in patients with known hypersensitivity to Ibuprofen. MOTRIN tablets should not be given to patients who have experienced asthma, urticaria, or allergictype reactions after taking aspirin or other NSAIDs. Severe, rarely fatal, anaphylactic-like reactions to NSAIDs have been reported in such patients. MOTRIN tablets are contraindicated for the treatment of peri-operative pain in the setting of coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgery (see WARNINGS). WARNINGS CARDIOVASCULAR EFFECTS Cardiovascular Thrombotic Events Clinical trials of several COX-2 selective and nonselective NSAIDs of up to three years duration have shown an increased risk of serious cardiovascular (CV) thrombotic events, myocardial infarction, and stroke, which can be fatal. All NSAIDs, both COX-2 selective and nonselective, may have a similar risk. Patients with known CV disease or risk factors for CV disease may be at greater risk. To minimize the potential risk for an adverse CV event in patients treated with an NSAID, the lowest effective dose should be used for the shortest duration possible. Physicians and patients should remain alert for the development of such events, even in the absence of previous CV symptoms. Patients should be informed about the signs and/or symptoms of serious CV events and the steps to take if they occur. There is no consistent evidence that concurrent use of aspirin mitigates the increased risk of serious CV thrombotic events associated with NSAID use. The concurrent use of aspirin and an NSAID does increase the risk of serious GI events (see GI WARNINGS). Two large, controlled clinical trials of a COX-2 selective NSAID for the treatment of pain in the first 10-14 days following CABG surgery found an increased incidence of myocardial infarction and stroke (see CONTRAINDICATIONS). Hypertension NSAIDs including MOTRIN tablets, can lead to onset of new hypertension or worsening of preexisting hypertension, either of which may contribute to the increased incidence of CV events. Patients taking thiazides or loop diuretics may have impaired response to these therapies when taking NSAIDs. NSAIDs, including MOTRIN tablets, should be used with caution in patients with hypertension. Blood pressure (BP) should be monitored closely during the initiation of NSAID treatment and throughout the course of therapy. Congestive Heart Failure and Edema Fluid retention and edema have been observed in some patients taking NSAIDs. MOTRIN tablets should be used with caution in patients with fluid retention or heart failure. Gastrointestinal Effects - Risk of Ulceration, Bleeding, and Perforation NSAIDs, including MOTRIN tablets, can cause serious gastrointestinal (GI) adverse events including inflammation, bleeding, ulceration, and perforation of the stomach, small intestine, or large intestine,which can be fatal. These serious adverse events can occur at any time, with or without warning symptoms, in patients treated with NSAIDs. Only one in five patients, who develop a serious upper GI adverse event on NSAID therapy, is symptomatic. Upper GI ulcers, gross bleeding, or perforation caused by NSAIDs occur in approximately 1% of patients treated for 3-6 months, and in about 2-4% of patients treated for one year. These trends continue with longer duration of use, increasing the likelihood of developing a serious GI event at some time during the course of therapy. However, even short-term therapy is not without risk. NSAIDs should be prescribed with extreme caution in those with a prior history of ulcer disease or gastrointestinal bleeding. Patients with a prior history of peptic ulcer disease and/or gastrointestinal bleeding who use NSAIDs have a greater than 10-fold increased risk for developing a GI bleed compared to patients treated with neither of these risk factors. Other factors that increase the risk of GI bleeding in patients treated with NSAIDs include concomitant use of oral corticosteroids or anticoagulants, longer duration of NSAID therapy, smoking, use of alcohol, older age, and poor general health status. Most spontaneous reports of fatal GI events are in elderly or debilitated patients and therefore, special care should be taken in treating this population. To minimize the potential risk for an adverse GI event in patients treated with an NSAID, the lowest effective dose should be used for the shortest possible duration. Patients and physicians should remain alert for signs and symptoms of GI ulcerations and bleeding during NSAID therapy and promptly initiate additional evaluation and treatment if a serious GI event is suspected. This should include discontinuation of the NSAID until a serious GI adverse event is ruled out. For high-risk patients, alternate therapies that do not involve NSAIDs should be considered. Renal Effects Long-term administration of NSAIDs has resulted in renal papillary necrosis and other renal injury. Renal toxicity has also been seen in patients in whom renal prostaglandins have a compensatory role in the maintenance of renal perfusion. In these patients, administration of a NSAID may cause a dosedependent reduction in prostaglandin formation and, secondarily, in renal blood flow, which may precipitate overt renal decompensation. Patients at greatest risk of this reaction are those with impaired renal function, heart failure, liver dysfunction, those taking diuretics and ACE inhibitors, and the elderly. Discontinuation of NSAID therapy is usually followed by recovery to the pretreatment state. Advanced Renal Disease No information is available from controlled clinical studies regarding the use of MOTRIN tablets in patients with advanced renal disease. Therefore, treatment with MOTRIN tablets is not recommended in these patients with advanced renal disease. If MOTRIN tablet therapy must be initiated, close monitoring of the patients renal function is advisable. Anaphylactoid Reactions As with other NSAIDs, anaphylactoid reactions may occur in patients without known prior exposure to MOTRIN tablets. MOTRIN tablets should not be given to patients with the aspirin triad. This symptom complex typically occurs in asthmatic patients who experience rhinitis with or without nasal polyps, or who exhibit severe, potentially fatal bronchospasm after taking aspirin or other NSAIDs (see CONTRAINDICATIONS and PRECAUTIONS, Preexisting Asthma). Emergency help should be sought in cases where an anaphylactoid reaction occurs. Skin Reactions NSAIDs, including MOTRIN tablets, can cause serious skin adverse events such as exfoliative dermatitis, Stevens-Johnson Syndrome (SJS), and toxic epidermal necrolysis (TEN), which can be fatal. These serious events may occur without warning. Patients should be informed about the signs and symptoms of serious skin manifestations and use of the drug should be discontinued at the first appearance of skin rash or any other sign of hypersensitivity. Pregnancy In late pregnancy, as with other NSAIDs, MOTRIN tablets should be avoided because it may cause premature closure of the ductus arteriosus.

This task requires you to answer only using the information provided in the prompt. No other information or resources is allowed to be used to formulate your answer.

In what ways are smaller firms disadvantaged in the global market?

[1]—“Leveraging” Resources The primary business advantage of granting a license is “leveraging” business resources. By adding its licensees’ resources for particular business operations to its own, a licensor can address markets that it otherwise could not hope to serve. For example, small firms and start-up companies often do not have enough salespeople or offices to serve nationwide, let alone worldwide, markets. By granting others the right to market and distribute their products, they can penetrate geographic or products markets otherwise completely beyond their reach. This occurred, for example, when International Business Machines Corporation chose Microsoft Corporation’s “MS-DOS” operating system software as the platform upon which to build the “PC-DOS” operating system for IBM’s personal computer. Overnight, Microsoft obtained the benefit of IBM’s massive marketing and sales in forces distributing its products. Although the effect is seldom so dramatic as in this example, “leveraging” of resources is one of the primary advantages of granting licenses. The ability to leverage resources is restricted by limits on the patent rights. The patent exhaustion doctrine, in particular, restricts the ability of the patentee to control sales beyond the first sale of a patented product, or a product embodying a patented process.11 Because of this rule, a patent holder cannot exercise unlimited rights over an invention once embodiments of the invention have been sold.12 Rather, if he sells devices embodying the invention, or permits others to sell such devices, he will have limited control over what the buyers do with those devices because they take the items purchased free of the patent claims.13 In the sphere of copyright, a similar question is whether a rights holder can rely on digital rights management systems to protect against not just copyright infringement, but also other, non-infringing access to copyrighted works.14 Circumvention to permit use beyond the scope of a license may violate the protections for access controls (because it permits unauthorized access), even if it does not cause infringement of copyright (because the users had a license, even though the circumvention allows them to use the software beyond the scope of the license).15 Even while sensitive military or intelligence technology is subjected to secrecy orders by the United States government,16 it is important to seek licensees while patent applications are sequestered.17 If the patent applicant does not do so, it may have no basis for an otherwise valid claim for compensation from the United States government for the adverse effects of a secrecy order.18 [2]—Broadening Geographic Markets As the world becomes a “global village,” product markets that used to be regional or national are rapidly becoming worldwide. Few except the largest firms, however, have the personnel or resources to address worldwide markets successfully. One reason is that most products require some “translation” for foreign markets. Labels and instructions may need translation into foreign languages, goods may require physical modification to comply with local laws and regulations, and advertising and marketing programs may have to be adjusted to satisfy local customs and tastes. If a firm wishes to enter foreign markets but does not have ready marketing and distribution channels in foreign countries, it has only four alternatives. First, it can set up foreign branches, which may subject it to direct taxation abroad. Second, it may set up separate subsidiaries or affiliates in foreign countries. This may avoid direct foreign taxation of the parent company, although the foreign subsidiary will be subject to foreign income tax. Yet whether a branch or subsidiary, establishing of a foreign office requires time, energy, and money in order to complete the necessary legal work, put management and physical plant in place, and hire and train appropriate personnel. The third alternative for firms wishing to expand into foreign markets is a joint venture. If a joint venture is taxed as a separate entity, as is often the case,19 the tax consequences of this alternative are similar to those of establishing a foreign subsidiary. However, formation of a joint venture also involves resolving difficult questions of control, management, and communication that often consume considerable time and resources. If the joint venture is more than a shell—if it will have separate physical plant, employees, and a separate existence—its formation may be as complex as the establishment of a new business enterprise in the foreign country. The fourth alternative for expansion into foreign markets is, of course, licensing. By licensing a foreign entity to help exploit its intellectual property, a firm can take advantage of a preexisting organization, with personnel in place and established channels, resources, and procedures for production, marketing, and distribution. The firm need not establish any new entity because the licensee normally uses existing personnel and resources, or at least an existing management and business structure, to perform the delegated operations. By licensing a foreign concern to exploit its intellectual property in foreign markets, a firm also can use the foreign concern’s familiarity with foreign markets, customs, and needs. Because licensing takes advantage of these preexisting resources and capabilities, it is often the fastest route to the foreign marketplace. This advantage of licensing, however, is not limited to the international sphere. A firm in one state or region of the United States that wishes to expand its markets into another state or region has the same four alternatives as a firm wishing to expand abroad. 20 Very often the firm can achieve the most rapid penetration into new geographic markets simply by granting licenses to a firm already there. [3]—Broadening Product Markets Just as licensing can broaden geographic markets, it can broaden product markets. A firm may have the resources to exploit its intellectual property through one product, but its intellectual property may be applicable to other products or services. The video industry is an excellent example. There is now a tremendous market for entertainment programs for home use. Yet independent producers of movies and television shows often do not have the resources for mass production and distribution. To take advantage of this market, they license their intellectual property—namely, the copyrights in their movies and television shows—to firms that manufacture and distribute the videos. In the biotechnology industry, research firms have developed a number of monoclonal antibodies to be used outside the body as testing and diagnostic tools. Because the process of regulatory review is relatively simple for products used outside the body, these firms can take those products to market quickly. To exploit their technology fully, however, they may wish to develop drugs and biologicals for internal use. The approval process for these products takes much longer and requires much greater expense, as well as clinical expertise and familiarity with the regulatory process. Lacking the requisite resources, smaller biotechnology firms often license their technology to large drug companies for that purpose. 21 Licensing for the purpose of expanding product markets, however, has disadvantages. By granting others the right to use its intellectual property to develop new products, a firm may lose control over those new products. 22 Where a party authorizes another to sell the invention, buyers will be protected by first sale, even if the seller fails to pay the agreed royalties to the patent owner. 22.1 Any other rule would make the buyer of goods or services subject to disputes over which the buyer has neither control nor knowledge. That uncertainty would in turn add transaction costs to such sales. So the rule aids both patentees and ultimate buyers, by facilitating transactions. Unless it has access to improvements made by its licensees, it may quickly find itself left in a backwater of technology, at least insofar as the new product market is concerned. 23 It also may incur some risk of liability for damage caused by defects in its licensee’s products, 24 or even for breach of contract 25 or miscellaneous torts. 26 Nevertheless, for many firms, this sort of licensing is an important source of additional revenue. With appropriate provision for cooperation in the licensing agreement, a firm may stay in touch with the exploitation of its intellectual property and at the same time exploit that property in market areas that it could never hope to penetrate using only its own resources. The patent exhaustion doctrine may prevent a patentee from controlling patent markets beyond the first market which a patented product enters.

This task requires you to answer only using the information provided in the prompt. No other information or resources is allowed to be used to formulate your answer. In what ways are smaller firms disadvantaged in the global market? [1]—“Leveraging” Resources The primary business advantage of granting a license is “leveraging” business resources. By adding its licensees’ resources for particular business operations to its own, a licensor can address markets that it otherwise could not hope to serve. For example, small firms and start-up companies often do not have enough salespeople or offices to serve nationwide, let alone worldwide, markets. By granting others the right to market and distribute their products, they can penetrate geographic or products markets otherwise completely beyond their reach. This occurred, for example, when International Business Machines Corporation chose Microsoft Corporation’s “MS-DOS” operating system software as the platform upon which to build the “PC-DOS” operating system for IBM’s personal computer. Overnight, Microsoft obtained the benefit of IBM’s massive marketing and sales in forces distributing its products. Although the effect is seldom so dramatic as in this example, “leveraging” of resources is one of the primary advantages of granting licenses. The ability to leverage resources is restricted by limits on the patent rights. The patent exhaustion doctrine, in particular, restricts the ability of the patentee to control sales beyond the first sale of a patented product, or a product embodying a patented process.11 Because of this rule, a patent holder cannot exercise unlimited rights over an invention once embodiments of the invention have been sold.12 Rather, if he sells devices embodying the invention, or permits others to sell such devices, he will have limited control over what the buyers do with those devices because they take the items purchased free of the patent claims.13 In the sphere of copyright, a similar question is whether a rights holder can rely on digital rights management systems to protect against not just copyright infringement, but also other, non-infringing access to copyrighted works.14 Circumvention to permit use beyond the scope of a license may violate the protections for access controls (because it permits unauthorized access), even if it does not cause infringement of copyright (because the users had a license, even though the circumvention allows them to use the software beyond the scope of the license).15 Even while sensitive military or intelligence technology is subjected to secrecy orders by the United States government,16 it is important to seek licensees while patent applications are sequestered.17 If the patent applicant does not do so, it may have no basis for an otherwise valid claim for compensation from the United States government for the adverse effects of a secrecy order.18 [2]—Broadening Geographic Markets As the world becomes a “global village,” product markets that used to be regional or national are rapidly becoming worldwide. Few except the largest firms, however, have the personnel or resources to address worldwide markets successfully. One reason is that most products require some “translation” for foreign markets. Labels and instructions may need translation into foreign languages, goods may require physical modification to comply with local laws and regulations, and advertising and marketing programs may have to be adjusted to satisfy local customs and tastes. If a firm wishes to enter foreign markets but does not have ready marketing and distribution channels in foreign countries, it has only four alternatives. First, it can set up foreign branches, which may subject it to direct taxation abroad. Second, it may set up separate subsidiaries or affiliates in foreign countries. This may avoid direct foreign taxation of the parent company, although the foreign subsidiary will be subject to foreign income tax. Yet whether a branch or subsidiary, establishing of a foreign office requires time, energy, and money in order to complete the necessary legal work, put management and physical plant in place, and hire and train appropriate personnel. The third alternative for firms wishing to expand into foreign markets is a joint venture. If a joint venture is taxed as a separate entity, as is often the case,19 the tax consequences of this alternative are similar to those of establishing a foreign subsidiary. However, formation of a joint venture also involves resolving difficult questions of control, management, and communication that often consume considerable time and resources. If the joint venture is more than a shell—if it will have separate physical plant, employees, and a separate existence—its formation may be as complex as the establishment of a new business enterprise in the foreign country. The fourth alternative for expansion into foreign markets is, of course, licensing. By licensing a foreign entity to help exploit its intellectual property, a firm can take advantage of a preexisting organization, with personnel in place and established channels, resources, and procedures for production, marketing, and distribution. The firm need not establish any new entity because the licensee normally uses existing personnel and resources, or at least an existing management and business structure, to perform the delegated operations. By licensing a foreign concern to exploit its intellectual property in foreign markets, a firm also can use the foreign concern’s familiarity with foreign markets, customs, and needs. Because licensing takes advantage of these preexisting resources and capabilities, it is often the fastest route to the foreign marketplace. This advantage of licensing, however, is not limited to the international sphere. A firm in one state or region of the United States that wishes to expand its markets into another state or region has the same four alternatives as a firm wishing to expand abroad. 20 Very often the firm can achieve the most rapid penetration into new geographic markets simply by granting licenses to a firm already there. [3]—Broadening Product Markets Just as licensing can broaden geographic markets, it can broaden product markets. A firm may have the resources to exploit its intellectual property through one product, but its intellectual property may be applicable to other products or services. The video industry is an excellent example. There is now a tremendous market for entertainment programs for home use. Yet independent producers of movies and television shows often do not have the resources for mass production and distribution. To take advantage of this market, they license their intellectual property—namely, the copyrights in their movies and television shows—to firms that manufacture and distribute the videos. In the biotechnology industry, research firms have developed a number of monoclonal antibodies to be used outside the body as testing and diagnostic tools. Because the process of regulatory review is relatively simple for products used outside the body, these firms can take those products to market quickly. To exploit their technology fully, however, they may wish to develop drugs and biologicals for internal use. The approval process for these products takes much longer and requires much greater expense, as well as clinical expertise and familiarity with the regulatory process. Lacking the requisite resources, smaller biotechnology firms often license their technology to large drug companies for that purpose. 21 Licensing for the purpose of expanding product markets, however, has disadvantages. By granting others the right to use its intellectual property to develop new products, a firm may lose control over those new products. 22 Where a party authorizes another to sell the invention, buyers will be protected by first sale, even if the seller fails to pay the agreed royalties to the patent owner. 22.1 Any other rule would make the buyer of goods or services subject to disputes over which the buyer has neither control nor knowledge. That uncertainty would in turn add transaction costs to such sales. So the rule aids both patentees and ultimate buyers, by facilitating transactions. Unless it has access to improvements made by its licensees, it may quickly find itself left in a backwater of technology, at least insofar as the new product market is concerned. 23 It also may incur some risk of liability for damage caused by defects in its licensee’s products, 24 or even for breach of contract 25 or miscellaneous torts. 26 Nevertheless, for many firms, this sort of licensing is an important source of additional revenue. With appropriate provision for cooperation in the licensing agreement, a firm may stay in touch with the exploitation of its intellectual property and at the same time exploit that property in market areas that it could never hope to penetrate using only its own resources. The patent exhaustion doctrine may prevent a patentee from controlling patent markets beyond the first market which a patented product enters.

<TASK DESCRIPTION> Only use the provided text to answer the question, no outside sources. <QUESTION> [user request] <TEXT> [context document]

I found this alarming article about microplastics making their way into the human body. Using this article as a reference, please explain what the red flags are for humans in regards to microplastics. Use at least 400 words.

When Jaime Ross, PhD, a neuroscientist and assistant professor at the University of Rhode Island College of Pharmacy, decided to study how contaminating the drinking water of mice with tiny fragments of plastic might affect their cognitive function, she didn’t expect the experiment to yield much. But in just three weeks, Ross and her team found microplastics had made their way into the mice’s brains, passing the robust defenses of the blood-brain barrier. The researchers performed a variety of tests and found that the microplastic-exposed mice started exhibiting signs of cognitive decline similar to dementia. “I didn’t really think we were going to see anything,” Ross says. But when they examined the mice’s tissues, they were shocked. “Every one we looked at we found the microplastics. It was surprising, especially finding them in the brain. Things are not supposed to go there!” The research findings from Ross’ team, published in August 2023, add to a slew of recent studies pointing to an alarming trend: microplastics are everywhere. Minuscule plastic particles that come from degraded plastic products are found throughout the environment. Scientists estimate there are 8-10 million metric tons of plastics in the oceans, and some of that is consumed by fish and other wildlife. Microplastics have been detected in fruits and vegetables, plastic water bottles, the air, cosmetics, and household dust. Now, researchers are finding them in almost every part of the human body, including in breast milk, the placenta, testicles, hearts, livers, and kidneys. Despite these findings, experts say that little is known and understood about what impact these microplastics have on human health. A few studies have drawn associations between microplastics and poor health outcomes, including cardiovascular disease and low male fertility. And chemicals often found in plastics are known to cause a variety of health problems, including cancers, metabolic disorders, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and fertility issues. But most of the studies raising alarm have been in labs or in animal models that don’t give a complete picture of the effect on humans, says Mary Margaret Johnson, MD, PhD, a principal research scientist of environmental health at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston. “I do think there needs to be more funding devoted to researching how it really is impacting our organs and disease itself,” she says. What are microplastics? Though plastics have become ubiquitous in modern life, they weren’t invented until the mid-1800s and weren’t produced on a large scale until the 1950s. Over the past century, technology to create a huge variety of malleable polymers (chains of large, repeating molecules) has evolved into the umbrella term plastics, which are often derived from petroleum and other fossil fuels, according to the Science History Institute in Philadelphia. Plastics are used in most containers and packaging materials; in most of the fabrics that make clothing, bedding, carpeting, and towels; in the construction of buildings and motor vehicles; and in many of the materials used in health care settings to prevent the spread of infection, among many other uses. The production of plastics worldwide has doubled in the last two decades, according to Our World in Data. Plastic’s versatility, durability, and low weight-to-strength ratio have made it an efficient material for many of life’s modern conveniences. However, by their nature, plastics can break down and degrade into smaller pieces. At the same time, scientists have found that plastic materials can exist for decades, if not longer, without completely disintegrating. Scientists have studied the impact of plastic on the ecological environment for decades and have raised concerns about the health effects of some chemicals used in plastics. But it’s only within the last several years that researchers have discovered the extent to which microplastics (which range from 1 nanometer, 1/80,000 the width of a strand of hair, to 5 millimeters, the size of a pencil-top eraser) and nanoplastics (which are even smaller and invisible) have become embedded in the environment and in human bodies, explains Tracey Woodruff, PhD, MPH, a professor in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Sciences and director of the Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) School of Medicine. Woodruff, who has studied the effect of some chemicals found in plastics on human health, reproduction, and development for two decades, first started looking into microplastics in 2021. She and a group of scientists from across the University of California system reviewed hundreds of existing studies on microplastics and health and compiled a report for state lawmakers to consider during policymaking. Though mostly based on animal studies, Woodruff and her colleagues concluded that there was evidence that microplastics could harm fertility and increase cancer risk in humans. “Governments have not really fully figured out what they’re going to do about this,” Woodruff says. There have been some efforts to ban the use of plastic microbeads in cosmetics, but not much beyond that, she adds. Red flags for human health While there haven’t yet been any definitive studies showing that microplastics cause health problems in humans, researchers have identified several red flags that call for further investigation. In Ross’ research in mice, for example, the scientists used plastic particles that were “clean,” meaning that they did not have any of the known toxic chemicals found in many plastics and they were also free of bacteria and viruses that microplastics can pick up from environmental exposure. And yet, with the mere presence of the microplastics, the mice began to experience negative effects. This could be because the immune system recognizes the presence of a foreign invader and triggers inflammation, which can have a negative effect on a range of organs. “We just wanted to see the effect of plastic itself, but that’s not what is really in the environment,” Ross says. “Plastics in the environment are not this way; they’re not pristine.” Ross’ work has raised even more questions about microplastics in the body. “We’re trying to understand: How are they getting into the brain? What do they do? Where do they go? Do they get out?” she says. Sheela Sathyanarayana, MD, MPH, a professor in the University of Washington Department of Pediatrics and the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences, worries that the harm from microplastics in the body could be compounded by what are known as endocrine disrupting chemicals that are found in many plastics. Bisphenol A (BPA), phthalates, and per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are just a few of the chemicals known to imitate hormones and disrupt the body’s natural endocrine system, which is responsible for making the hormones that govern processes such as growth and development, metabolism, appetite, mood, and certain aspects of reproduction. Sathyanarayana has focused her research on studying the impact of exposure to endocrine disrupting chemicals on reproduction and has found that they can have a profound impact, especially during fetal development. “That’s when organ development is happening; that’s when programming for later life happens,” Sathyanarayana says. “Whatever happens during pregnancy will affect your later life and health for the whole continuum.” She gave the example of research that found some women who experience famine while pregnant later have babies who experience obesity, likely because of the effect their mothers’ starvation has on the development of the babies’ metabolism. Fetal exposure to endocrine disrupting chemicals has been associated with abnormal development of reproductive organs in male babies, with increased risk of metabolic disorders in childhood, and may be associated with the child developing attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Some of these chemicals have also been linked to lower sperm quality in men.

<TASK DESCRIPTION> Only use the provided text to answer the question, no outside sources. <QUESTION> I found this alarming article about microplastics making their way into the human body. Using this article as a reference, please explain what the red flags are for humans in regards to microplastics. Use at least 400 words. <TEXT> When Jaime Ross, PhD, a neuroscientist and assistant professor at the University of Rhode Island College of Pharmacy, decided to study how contaminating the drinking water of mice with tiny fragments of plastic might affect their cognitive function, she didn’t expect the experiment to yield much. But in just three weeks, Ross and her team found microplastics had made their way into the mice’s brains, passing the robust defenses of the blood-brain barrier. The researchers performed a variety of tests and found that the microplastic-exposed mice started exhibiting signs of cognitive decline similar to dementia. “I didn’t really think we were going to see anything,” Ross says. But when they examined the mice’s tissues, they were shocked. “Every one we looked at we found the microplastics. It was surprising, especially finding them in the brain. Things are not supposed to go there!” The research findings from Ross’ team, published in August 2023, add to a slew of recent studies pointing to an alarming trend: microplastics are everywhere. Minuscule plastic particles that come from degraded plastic products are found throughout the environment. Scientists estimate there are 8-10 million metric tons of plastics in the oceans, and some of that is consumed by fish and other wildlife. Microplastics have been detected in fruits and vegetables, plastic water bottles, the air, cosmetics, and household dust. Now, researchers are finding them in almost every part of the human body, including in breast milk, the placenta, testicles, hearts, livers, and kidneys. Despite these findings, experts say that little is known and understood about what impact these microplastics have on human health. A few studies have drawn associations between microplastics and poor health outcomes, including cardiovascular disease and low male fertility. And chemicals often found in plastics are known to cause a variety of health problems, including cancers, metabolic disorders, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and fertility issues. But most of the studies raising alarm have been in labs or in animal models that don’t give a complete picture of the effect on humans, says Mary Margaret Johnson, MD, PhD, a principal research scientist of environmental health at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston. “I do think there needs to be more funding devoted to researching how it really is impacting our organs and disease itself,” she says. What are microplastics? Though plastics have become ubiquitous in modern life, they weren’t invented until the mid-1800s and weren’t produced on a large scale until the 1950s. Over the past century, technology to create a huge variety of malleable polymers (chains of large, repeating molecules) has evolved into the umbrella term plastics, which are often derived from petroleum and other fossil fuels, according to the Science History Institute in Philadelphia. Plastics are used in most containers and packaging materials; in most of the fabrics that make clothing, bedding, carpeting, and towels; in the construction of buildings and motor vehicles; and in many of the materials used in health care settings to prevent the spread of infection, among many other uses. The production of plastics worldwide has doubled in the last two decades, according to Our World in Data. Plastic’s versatility, durability, and low weight-to-strength ratio have made it an efficient material for many of life’s modern conveniences. However, by their nature, plastics can break down and degrade into smaller pieces. At the same time, scientists have found that plastic materials can exist for decades, if not longer, without completely disintegrating. Scientists have studied the impact of plastic on the ecological environment for decades and have raised concerns about the health effects of some chemicals used in plastics. But it’s only within the last several years that researchers have discovered the extent to which microplastics (which range from 1 nanometer, 1/80,000 the width of a strand of hair, to 5 millimeters, the size of a pencil-top eraser) and nanoplastics (which are even smaller and invisible) have become embedded in the environment and in human bodies, explains Tracey Woodruff, PhD, MPH, a professor in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Sciences and director of the Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) School of Medicine. Woodruff, who has studied the effect of some chemicals found in plastics on human health, reproduction, and development for two decades, first started looking into microplastics in 2021. She and a group of scientists from across the University of California system reviewed hundreds of existing studies on microplastics and health and compiled a report for state lawmakers to consider during policymaking. Though mostly based on animal studies, Woodruff and her colleagues concluded that there was evidence that microplastics could harm fertility and increase cancer risk in humans. “Governments have not really fully figured out what they’re going to do about this,” Woodruff says. There have been some efforts to ban the use of plastic microbeads in cosmetics, but not much beyond that, she adds. Red flags for human health While there haven’t yet been any definitive studies showing that microplastics cause health problems in humans, researchers have identified several red flags that call for further investigation. In Ross’ research in mice, for example, the scientists used plastic particles that were “clean,” meaning that they did not have any of the known toxic chemicals found in many plastics and they were also free of bacteria and viruses that microplastics can pick up from environmental exposure. And yet, with the mere presence of the microplastics, the mice began to experience negative effects. This could be because the immune system recognizes the presence of a foreign invader and triggers inflammation, which can have a negative effect on a range of organs. “We just wanted to see the effect of plastic itself, but that’s not what is really in the environment,” Ross says. “Plastics in the environment are not this way; they’re not pristine.” Ross’ work has raised even more questions about microplastics in the body. “We’re trying to understand: How are they getting into the brain? What do they do? Where do they go? Do they get out?” she says. Sheela Sathyanarayana, MD, MPH, a professor in the University of Washington Department of Pediatrics and the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences, worries that the harm from microplastics in the body could be compounded by what are known as endocrine disrupting chemicals that are found in many plastics. Bisphenol A (BPA), phthalates, and per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are just a few of the chemicals known to imitate hormones and disrupt the body’s natural endocrine system, which is responsible for making the hormones that govern processes such as growth and development, metabolism, appetite, mood, and certain aspects of reproduction. Sathyanarayana has focused her research on studying the impact of exposure to endocrine disrupting chemicals on reproduction and has found that they can have a profound impact, especially during fetal development. “That’s when organ development is happening; that’s when programming for later life happens,” Sathyanarayana says. “Whatever happens during pregnancy will affect your later life and health for the whole continuum.” She gave the example of research that found some women who experience famine while pregnant later have babies who experience obesity, likely because of the effect their mothers’ starvation has on the development of the babies’ metabolism. Fetal exposure to endocrine disrupting chemicals has been associated with abnormal development of reproductive organs in male babies, with increased risk of metabolic disorders in childhood, and may be associated with the child developing attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Some of these chemicals have also been linked to lower sperm quality in men. https://www.aamc.org/news/microplastics-are-inside-us-all-what-does-mean-our-health

You must only use information from the context. Please provide the answer in bullet points. if you are providing information from a quote then reference the quote's organisation.

How do consumer's feel about sustainability issues?

A couple of experts suggests that some sustainability issues such as health, nutrition and safety are more pertinent to mainstream consumers because they are more likely to affect them personally. These could potentially act as triggers to sensitise consumers to a wider range of sustainability issues: There’s a hierarchy and it starts with the personal. They expect [retailers] to pay close attention to those aspects of sustainability that might affect their health or the quality of the product. A bit further down there are the sort of broader citizenship areas that might more broadly affect them CR Expert/SRI Nevertheless, some see the need for further encouragement and support to take consumers down this path, and reject the view that consumers will take the lead in pressurising retailers to be more sustainable: I don’t think there will be a consumer-led revolution. I think consumers will need to be persuaded and brought along to give their permission to companies and governments to take the action that needs taking, not the other way round CR Expert/SRI There is also a sense that consumers need carrots not sticks and that successful retailers will be those that are better at persuading consumers of the benefits of making sustainable choices: Ultimately I think it’s not going to be very successful if consumers have to feel they’re giving things up, that there are things they can’t do. Where it seems to have been successful is if it’s presented as an opportunity to make a difference NGO/Interest Group

Context: A couple of experts suggests that some sustainability issues such as health, nutrition and safety are more pertinent to mainstream consumers because they are more likely to affect them personally. These could potentially act as triggers to sensitise consumers to a wider range of sustainability issues: There’s a hierarchy and it starts with the personal. They expect [retailers] to pay close attention to those aspects of sustainability that might affect their health or the quality of the product. A bit further down there are the sort of broader citizenship areas that might more broadly affect them CR Expert/SRI Nevertheless, some see the need for further encouragement and support to take consumers down this path, and reject the view that consumers will take the lead in pressurising retailers to be more sustainable: I don’t think there will be a consumer-led revolution. I think consumers will need to be persuaded and brought along to give their permission to companies and governments to take the action that needs taking, not the other way round CR Expert/SRI There is also a sense that consumers need carrots not sticks and that successful retailers will be those that are better at persuading consumers of the benefits of making sustainable choices: Ultimately I think it’s not going to be very successful if consumers have to feel they’re giving things up, that there are things they can’t do. Where it seems to have been successful is if it’s presented as an opportunity to make a difference NGO/Interest Group System instructions: You must only use information from the context. Please provide the answer in bullet points. if you are providing information from a quote then reference the quote's organisation. User question: How do consumer's feel about sustainability issues?

Please use only the information provided in the text. If you cannot provide an answer from the text, please say, "I cannot assess due to lack of context."

For a pregnant person suspected to have placenta accreta spectrum, what type of doctors/consultants are needed in the operating room?

**"Caesarean Birth"** Care for women with placenta accreta spectrum in specialist centres 1.2.9 Consider an MRI scan to complement ultrasound findings when planning ongoing surgical management of placenta accreta spectrum. Discuss the following with the woman or pregnant person: • what to expect during an MRI procedure • that MRI can help clarify the degree of invasion, particularly with a posterior placenta • that current experience suggests that MRI is safe, but that there is a lack of evidence about any long-term risks to the baby. [2024] 1.2.10 Discuss birth options (for example, timing of birth, operative interventions including possibility of hysterectomy, need for blood transfusion) with a woman or pregnant person suspected to have placenta accreta spectrum. This discussion should be carried out by a senior obstetrician. [2011, amended 2024] When planning a caesarean birth for women or pregnant people suspected to have placenta accreta spectrum, the multidisciplinary team should: • agree which other healthcare professionals need to be consulted or present (for example, specialists in gynaecological surgery, interventional radiology, colorectal surgery, urology or vascular surgery, depending on the nature of the placenta accreta spectrum) and • the responsibilities of each team member. [2011, amended 2024] 1.2.12 When performing a planned caesarean birth for a woman or pregnant person suspected to have placenta accreta spectrum, ensure that: • a consultant obstetrician, a consultant gynaecologist and a consultant anaesthetist are present in the operating theatre • a paediatric or neonatal registrar or consultant is present to provide immediate care for the baby as soon as it is born • a haematology registrar or consultant is available to contact for advice • a critical care bed is available for the woman or pregnant person, and a critical care neonatal cot is available for the baby (although emergency surgery should not be delayed while waiting for a bed) • sufficient cross-matched blood and blood products are readily available (if blood transfusions are acceptable to the woman or pregnant person). See the NICE guideline on blood transfusion. [2011, amended 2024] 1.2.13 Specialist placenta accreta spectrum centres and the local maternity units they support should develop protocols covering how placenta accreta spectrum should be diagnosed, assessed and managed across their network. The protocol should include the care and management of placenta accreta spectrum identified late in pregnancy or in labour, including how specialist units can support emergency care in local maternity units. [2024] Predicting caesarean birth for cephalopelvic disproportion in labour 1.2.14 Do not use pelvimetry for decision making about mode of birth. [2004, amended 2021] 1.2.15 Do not use the following for decision making about mode of birth, as they do not accurately predict cephalopelvic disproportion: • maternal shoe size • maternal height • estimations of fetal size (ultrasound or clinical examination). [2004, amended 2021] Mother-to-child transmission of maternal infections HIV 1.2.16 Provide women with HIV information about the benefits and risks for them and their baby of the HIV treatment options and mode of birth as early as possible in their pregnancy, so that they can make an informed decision. Obtain specialist advice about HIV in pregnancy from a sexual health specialist if necessary. [2011, amended 2021] Hepatitis B virus 1.2.17 Do not offer pregnant women with hepatitis B a planned caesarean birth for this reason alone, as mother-to-baby transmission of hepatitis B can be reduced if the baby receives immunoglobulin and vaccination. [2004, amended 2021] Hepatitis C virus 1.2.18 Do not offer women who are infected with hepatitis C a planned caesarean birth for this reason alone. [2004, amended 2021] 1.2.19 Offer pregnant women who are co-infected with hepatitis C virus and HIV a planned caesarean birth to reduce mother-to-baby transmission of hepatitis C virus and HIV. [2004, amended 2021] Herpes simplex virus 1.2.20 Offer women with primary genital herpes simplex virus (HSV) infection occurring in the third trimester of pregnancy a planned caesarean birth to decrease the risk of neonatal HSV infection. [2004] 1.2.21 Do not routinely offer pregnant women with recurrent HSV infection a planned caesarean birth outside of the context of research. [2004, amended 2021] Body mass index 1.2.22 Do not use a BMI of over 50 kg/m2 alone as an indication for planned caesarean birth. [2011] Shared decision making 1.2.23 Ask for consent for caesarean birth only after providing pregnant women with evidence-based information. Ensure the woman's dignity, privacy, views and culture are respected, while taking the woman's clinical situation into account. [2004, amended 2021] 1.2.24 Advise women that they are entitled to decline the offer of treatment such as caesarean birth, even when it would benefit their or their baby's health. [2004, amended 2021] 1.2.25 When a woman decides on or declines a caesarean birth, document the factors that that are important to the woman when making her decision. [2004, amended 2021] Maternal choice for caesarean birth 1.2.26 When a woman or pregnant person with no medical indication for a caesarean birth requests a caesarean birth: • offer to discuss and explore the reasons for the request • ensure they have balanced and accurate information • offer to discuss alternative birth options (for example, place of birth, continuity of midwifery care where available, pain relief options), which may help address concerns they have about the birth • offer discussions with a consultant midwife or senior midwife, ideally in a birth options clinic or at a birth options appointment • offer discussions with a consultant or senior obstetrician and other members of the team (for example, an anaesthetist) if necessary or requested by the woman or pregnant person • record the discussions and decisions. [2011, amended 2023] 1.2.27 If a woman or pregnant person requests a caesarean birth, discuss the overall benefits and risks of caesarean birth compared with vaginal birth (see the section on planning mode of birth) and record that this discussion has taken place. [2011] 1.2.28 If a woman or pregnant person requests a caesarean birth because they have tokophobia or other severe anxiety about childbirth (for example, following abuse or a previous traumatic event), offer referral to a healthcare professional with expertise in providing perinatal mental health support to help with their anxiety. See the NICE guideline on antenatal and postnatal mental health for more detailed advice on providing mental health services during pregnancy. [2011, amended 2021] 1.2.29 Ensure healthcare professionals providing perinatal mental health support for women or pregnant people with tokophobia or other severe anxiety about childbirth are able to access the planned place of birth with the woman or pregnant person during the antenatal period, as part of the support offered to help them overcome fears and concerns about the labour and birth. [2011, amended 2023] 1.2.30 If, after an informed discussion about the options for birth (including the offer of perinatal mental health support if appropriate; see recommendation 1.2.27), the woman or pregnant person requests a caesarean birth, support their choice. [2011, amended 2023] 1.2.31 If a woman or pregnant person requests a caesarean birth this should be offered within their obstetric unit. [2011, amended 2023]

<Instructions> ========== Please use only the information provided in the text. If you cannot provide an answer from the text, please say, "I cannot assess due to lack of context." <Query> ========== For a pregnant person suspected to have placenta accreta spectrum, what type of doctors/consultants are needed in the operating room? <Passage> ========== **"Caesarean Birth"** Care for women with placenta accreta spectrum in specialist centres 1.2.9 Consider an MRI scan to complement ultrasound findings when planning ongoing surgical management of placenta accreta spectrum. Discuss the following with the woman or pregnant person: • what to expect during an MRI procedure • that MRI can help clarify the degree of invasion, particularly with a posterior placenta • that current experience suggests that MRI is safe, but that there is a lack of evidence about any long-term risks to the baby. [2024] 1.2.10 Discuss birth options (for example, timing of birth, operative interventions including possibility of hysterectomy, need for blood transfusion) with a woman or pregnant person suspected to have placenta accreta spectrum. This discussion should be carried out by a senior obstetrician. [2011, amended 2024] When planning a caesarean birth for women or pregnant people suspected to have placenta accreta spectrum, the multidisciplinary team should: • agree which other healthcare professionals need to be consulted or present (for example, specialists in gynaecological surgery, interventional radiology, colorectal surgery, urology or vascular surgery, depending on the nature of the placenta accreta spectrum) and • the responsibilities of each team member. [2011, amended 2024] 1.2.12 When performing a planned caesarean birth for a woman or pregnant person suspected to have placenta accreta spectrum, ensure that: • a consultant obstetrician, a consultant gynaecologist and a consultant anaesthetist are present in the operating theatre • a paediatric or neonatal registrar or consultant is present to provide immediate care for the baby as soon as it is born • a haematology registrar or consultant is available to contact for advice • a critical care bed is available for the woman or pregnant person, and a critical care neonatal cot is available for the baby (although emergency surgery should not be delayed while waiting for a bed) • sufficient cross-matched blood and blood products are readily available (if blood transfusions are acceptable to the woman or pregnant person). See the NICE guideline on blood transfusion. [2011, amended 2024] 1.2.13 Specialist placenta accreta spectrum centres and the local maternity units they support should develop protocols covering how placenta accreta spectrum should be diagnosed, assessed and managed across their network. The protocol should include the care and management of placenta accreta spectrum identified late in pregnancy or in labour, including how specialist units can support emergency care in local maternity units. [2024] Predicting caesarean birth for cephalopelvic disproportion in labour 1.2.14 Do not use pelvimetry for decision making about mode of birth. [2004, amended 2021] 1.2.15 Do not use the following for decision making about mode of birth, as they do not accurately predict cephalopelvic disproportion: • maternal shoe size • maternal height • estimations of fetal size (ultrasound or clinical examination). [2004, amended 2021] Mother-to-child transmission of maternal infections HIV 1.2.16 Provide women with HIV information about the benefits and risks for them and their baby of the HIV treatment options and mode of birth as early as possible in their pregnancy, so that they can make an informed decision. Obtain specialist advice about HIV in pregnancy from a sexual health specialist if necessary. [2011, amended 2021] Hepatitis B virus 1.2.17 Do not offer pregnant women with hepatitis B a planned caesarean birth for this reason alone, as mother-to-baby transmission of hepatitis B can be reduced if the baby receives immunoglobulin and vaccination. [2004, amended 2021] Hepatitis C virus 1.2.18 Do not offer women who are infected with hepatitis C a planned caesarean birth for this reason alone. [2004, amended 2021] 1.2.19 Offer pregnant women who are co-infected with hepatitis C virus and HIV a planned caesarean birth to reduce mother-to-baby transmission of hepatitis C virus and HIV. [2004, amended 2021] Herpes simplex virus 1.2.20 Offer women with primary genital herpes simplex virus (HSV) infection occurring in the third trimester of pregnancy a planned caesarean birth to decrease the risk of neonatal HSV infection. [2004] 1.2.21 Do not routinely offer pregnant women with recurrent HSV infection a planned caesarean birth outside of the context of research. [2004, amended 2021] Body mass index 1.2.22 Do not use a BMI of over 50 kg/m2 alone as an indication for planned caesarean birth. [2011] Shared decision making 1.2.23 Ask for consent for caesarean birth only after providing pregnant women with evidence-based information. Ensure the woman's dignity, privacy, views and culture are respected, while taking the woman's clinical situation into account. [2004, amended 2021] 1.2.24 Advise women that they are entitled to decline the offer of treatment such as caesarean birth, even when it would benefit their or their baby's health. [2004, amended 2021] 1.2.25 When a woman decides on or declines a caesarean birth, document the factors that that are important to the woman when making her decision. [2004, amended 2021] Maternal choice for caesarean birth 1.2.26 When a woman or pregnant person with no medical indication for a caesarean birth requests a caesarean birth: • offer to discuss and explore the reasons for the request • ensure they have balanced and accurate information • offer to discuss alternative birth options (for example, place of birth, continuity of midwifery care where available, pain relief options), which may help address concerns they have about the birth • offer discussions with a consultant midwife or senior midwife, ideally in a birth options clinic or at a birth options appointment • offer discussions with a consultant or senior obstetrician and other members of the team (for example, an anaesthetist) if necessary or requested by the woman or pregnant person • record the discussions and decisions. [2011, amended 2023] 1.2.27 If a woman or pregnant person requests a caesarean birth, discuss the overall benefits and risks of caesarean birth compared with vaginal birth (see the section on planning mode of birth) and record that this discussion has taken place. [2011] 1.2.28 If a woman or pregnant person requests a caesarean birth because they have tokophobia or other severe anxiety about childbirth (for example, following abuse or a previous traumatic event), offer referral to a healthcare professional with expertise in providing perinatal mental health support to help with their anxiety. See the NICE guideline on antenatal and postnatal mental health for more detailed advice on providing mental health services during pregnancy. [2011, amended 2021] 1.2.29 Ensure healthcare professionals providing perinatal mental health support for women or pregnant people with tokophobia or other severe anxiety about childbirth are able to access the planned place of birth with the woman or pregnant person during the antenatal period, as part of the support offered to help them overcome fears and concerns about the labour and birth. [2011, amended 2023] 1.2.30 If, after an informed discussion about the options for birth (including the offer of perinatal mental health support if appropriate; see recommendation 1.2.27), the woman or pregnant person requests a caesarean birth, support their choice. [2011, amended 2023] 1.2.31 If a woman or pregnant person requests a caesarean birth this should be offered within their obstetric unit. [2011, amended 2023]

This task requires you to answer questions based solely on the information provided in the prompt. You are not allowed to use any alternative sources of information.

Summarize how venous eczema affects the human body.

VENOUS ECZEMA What are the aims of this leaflet? This leaflet has been written to help you understand more about venous eczema. It tells you what it is, what causes it, what can be done about it, and where you can find out more about it. What is venous eczema? Venous eczema is also known as varicose or stasis eczema and is the name given to a type of eczema on the lower leg. The word eczema (or dermatitis) refers to a common inflammatory skin condition. Venous eczema is more common as people get older and occurs more often in women than in men. What causes it? Venous eczema occurs when valves in the leg veins do not work properly, reducing drainage of blood from the legs. This leads to an increase in the pressure inside the leg veins. This congestion then causes damage to the overlying skin. The exact reason why the resulting skin changes occur is unclear, but is likely to be due to the increase in pressure pushing blood and blood products from the veins into the surrounding tissue. This then triggers inflammation in the skin. Being overweight, immobility, leg swelling, varicose veins, previous clots in the leg (venous thrombosis) and previous cellulitis are possible contributory factors. Is it hereditary? No. What are the features? Venous eczema occurs on the lower legs. The features vary depending on the severity and range from changes in skin colouring and dryness of the skin to areas of inflamed eczema with red spots, scaling, weeping and/or crusting. The eczema is often very itchy and can sometimes be painful. Swelling of the legs and varicose veins may also be present. In severe cases, white patches of skin, thinning and scarring (atrophie blanche) may be seen. Sometimes thickening of large areas of skin on the lower leg (lipodermatosclerosis) can occur and may be painful. Leg ulcers can also develop. Sometimes, venous eczema can trigger the development of eczema elsewhere on the body; this is known as secondary eczema. How is venous eczema diagnosed? It is usually a clinical diagnosis, based on its typical appearance and associated features. There are some other causes of a rash on the lower leg, such as allergic contact dermatitis (when a person develops an allergy to substances or treatments used on the skin) and irritant contact dermatitis (when the skin becomes irritated by secretions, bacteria or certain treatments). Doctors and nurses who regularly look after patients with venous eczema are usually able to identify which of these rashes is the most likely. On some occasions it may be necessary to carry out further investigations when the diagnosis is not clear. Can it be cured? Unfortunately, the problem of the valves in the veins not working properly cannot be cured; this means that venous eczema does not clear up completely if left untreated. However, simple measures to improve the function of the valves and treatments for the active eczema can greatly improve the skin and associated symptoms, keep the eczema under control and help to prevent complications such as leg swelling, infection and lipodermatosclerosis. How is it treated? Simple measures are very important in helping to reduce pressure in the veins. These include ensuring your weight is within the normal range and keeping physically active. Due to the effect of gravity exerting additional pressure on the veins, venous eczema can be made worse by spending long periods of time standing still or sitting, for example by sleeping in a chair. For this reason, it is recommended that when possible you raise your legs for at least part of the day; ideally above the level of your heart by lying down. Elevating the foot of the bed overnight can also be helpful. Care also needs to be taken to avoid damaging the skin on the leg, for example it is important to avoid knocking or hitting the leg on hard objects (such as supermarket shelves, trolleys, doors of kitchen cupboards, etc.). Such relatively minor injuries often take months to heal and can significantly impair healing of the eczema. Bandaging and compression stockings are another simple measure that help to reduce the pressure in the leg veins. Bandaging may be used when leg swelling is severe; once this swelling is reduced and the eczema is improved, compression stockings are used to maintain this. Compression stockings are available on prescription and should be worn long-term at all times during the day in order to support the veins. Compression stockings should not be used in patients with arterial disease in the legs. Your dermatologist or doctor can advise you about this and a simple test measuring your leg circulation is often performed before using compression stockings. Topical emollients (moisturisers) should be used at least daily to all the skin on the lower leg, whether affected or not; these make the skin more supple and can help to prevent the skin breaking down. Emollients should also be used as a soap substitute. Steroid ointments are often recommended to treat itchy flares in venous eczema; these should be applied to the affected patches of skin only. CAUTION: This leaflet mentions ‘emollients’ (moisturisers). When paraffincontaining emollient products get in contact with dressings, clothing, bed linen or hair, there is a danger that a naked flame or cigarette smoking could cause these to catch fire. To reduce the fire risk, patients using paraffin-containing skincare or haircare products are advised to avoid naked flames completely, including smoking cigarettes and being near people who are smoking or using naked flames. It is also advisable to wash clothing and bed linen regularly, preferably daily. In some situations a varicose vein operation may be helpful. In general, the responses to the above measures are good if they are used every day on a long-term basis. If the response is poor despite doing these treatments every day, it may be necessary to seek advice from your GP or dermatologist in case there is another cause for the leg rash, for example, a fungal skin or toe nail infection, or the development of a contact allergy to different topical agents used. Where can I find out more about venous eczema? Web links to detailed leaflets: www.cks.nhs.uk/venous_eczema_and_lipodermatosclerosis www.patient.co.uk/doctor/Varicose-Eczema.htm www.dermnetnz.org/dermatitis/venous-eczema.html For details of source materials used please contact the Clinical Standards Unit ([email protected]). This leaflet aims to provide accurate information about the subject and is a consensus of the views held by representatives of the British Association of Dermatologists: individual patient circumstances may differ, which might alter both the advice and course of therapy given to you by your doctor.

System Instructions: This task requires you to answer questions based solely on the information provided in the prompt. You are not allowed to use any alternative sources of information. Question: Summarize how venous eczema affects the human body. Context Block: VENOUS ECZEMA What are the aims of this leaflet? This leaflet has been written to help you understand more about venous eczema. It tells you what it is, what causes it, what can be done about it, and where you can find out more about it. What is venous eczema? Venous eczema is also known as varicose or stasis eczema and is the name given to a type of eczema on the lower leg. The word eczema (or dermatitis) refers to a common inflammatory skin condition. Venous eczema is more common as people get older and occurs more often in women than in men. What causes it? Venous eczema occurs when valves in the leg veins do not work properly, reducing drainage of blood from the legs. This leads to an increase in the pressure inside the leg veins. This congestion then causes damage to the overlying skin. The exact reason why the resulting skin changes occur is unclear, but is likely to be due to the increase in pressure pushing blood and blood products from the veins into the surrounding tissue. This then triggers inflammation in the skin. Being overweight, immobility, leg swelling, varicose veins, previous clots in the leg (venous thrombosis) and previous cellulitis are possible contributory factors. Is it hereditary? No. What are the features? Venous eczema occurs on the lower legs. The features vary depending on the severity and range from changes in skin colouring and dryness of the skin to areas of inflamed eczema with red spots, scaling, weeping and/or crusting. The eczema is often very itchy and can sometimes be painful. Swelling of the legs and varicose veins may also be present. In severe cases, white patches of skin, thinning and scarring (atrophie blanche) may be seen. Sometimes thickening of large areas of skin on the lower leg (lipodermatosclerosis) can occur and may be painful. Leg ulcers can also develop. Sometimes, venous eczema can trigger the development of eczema elsewhere on the body; this is known as secondary eczema. How is venous eczema diagnosed? It is usually a clinical diagnosis, based on its typical appearance and associated features. There are some other causes of a rash on the lower leg, such as allergic contact dermatitis (when a person develops an allergy to substances or treatments used on the skin) and irritant contact dermatitis (when the skin becomes irritated by secretions, bacteria or certain treatments). Doctors and nurses who regularly look after patients with venous eczema are usually able to identify which of these rashes is the most likely. On some occasions it may be necessary to carry out further investigations when the diagnosis is not clear. Can it be cured? Unfortunately, the problem of the valves in the veins not working properly cannot be cured; this means that venous eczema does not clear up completely if left untreated. However, simple measures to improve the function of the valves and treatments for the active eczema can greatly improve the skin and associated symptoms, keep the eczema under control and help to prevent complications such as leg swelling, infection and lipodermatosclerosis. How is it treated? Simple measures are very important in helping to reduce pressure in the veins. These include ensuring your weight is within the normal range and keeping physically active. Due to the effect of gravity exerting additional pressure on the veins, venous eczema can be made worse by spending long periods of time standing still or sitting, for example by sleeping in a chair. For this reason, it is recommended that when possible you raise your legs for at least part of the day; ideally above the level of your heart by lying down. Elevating the foot of the bed overnight can also be helpful. Care also needs to be taken to avoid damaging the skin on the leg, for example it is important to avoid knocking or hitting the leg on hard objects (such as supermarket shelves, trolleys, doors of kitchen cupboards, etc.). Such relatively minor injuries often take months to heal and can significantly impair healing of the eczema. Bandaging and compression stockings are another simple measure that help to reduce the pressure in the leg veins. Bandaging may be used when leg swelling is severe; once this swelling is reduced and the eczema is improved, compression stockings are used to maintain this. Compression stockings are available on prescription and should be worn long-term at all times during the day in order to support the veins. Compression stockings should not be used in patients with arterial disease in the legs. Your dermatologist or doctor can advise you about this and a simple test measuring your leg circulation is often performed before using compression stockings. Topical emollients (moisturisers) should be used at least daily to all the skin on the lower leg, whether affected or not; these make the skin more supple and can help to prevent the skin breaking down. Emollients should also be used as a soap substitute. Steroid ointments are often recommended to treat itchy flares in venous eczema; these should be applied to the affected patches of skin only. CAUTION: This leaflet mentions ‘emollients’ (moisturisers). When paraffincontaining emollient products get in contact with dressings, clothing, bed linen or hair, there is a danger that a naked flame or cigarette smoking could cause these to catch fire. To reduce the fire risk, patients using paraffin-containing skincare or haircare products are advised to avoid naked flames completely, including smoking cigarettes and being near people who are smoking or using naked flames. It is also advisable to wash clothing and bed linen regularly, preferably daily. In some situations a varicose vein operation may be helpful. In general, the responses to the above measures are good if they are used every day on a long-term basis. If the response is poor despite doing these treatments every day, it may be necessary to seek advice from your GP or dermatologist in case there is another cause for the leg rash, for example, a fungal skin or toe nail infection, or the development of a contact allergy to different topical agents used. Where can I find out more about venous eczema? Web links to detailed leaflets: www.cks.nhs.uk/venous_eczema_and_lipodermatosclerosis www.patient.co.uk/doctor/Varicose-Eczema.htm www.dermnetnz.org/dermatitis/venous-eczema.html For details of source materials used please contact the Clinical Standards Unit ([email protected]). This leaflet aims to provide accurate information about the subject and is a consensus of the views held by representatives of the British Association of Dermatologists: individual patient circumstances may differ, which might alter both the advice and course of therapy given to you by your doctor.

<TASK DESCRIPTION> Only use the provided text to answer the question, no outside sources. <QUESTION> [user request] <TEXT> [context document]

My husband and I have three children and I have been a stay at home mom for 10 years. My oldest daughter is 11. My husband's 16 year old daughter from a previous marriage wants to babysit for us. If we pay her to babysit can be we qualify for the dependent care credit?

You may be able to claim the child and dependent care credit if you paid expenses for the care of a qualifying individual to enable you (and your spouse, if filing a joint return) to work or actively look for work. Generally, you may not take this credit if your filing status is married filing separately. However, see What's Your Filing Status? in Publication 503, Child and Dependent Care Expenses, which describes an exception for certain taxpayers living apart from their spouse and meeting other requirements. The amount of the credit is a percentage of the amount of work-related expenses you paid to a care provider for the care of a qualifying individual. The percentage depends on your adjusted gross income. Dollar limit The total expenses that you may use to calculate the credit may not be more than $3,000 (for one qualifying individual) or $6,000 (for two or more qualifying individuals). Expenses paid for the care of a qualifying individual are eligible expenses if the primary reason for paying the expense is to assure the individual's well-being and protection. If you received dependent care benefits that you exclude or deduct from your income, you must subtract the amount of those benefits from the dollar limit that applies to you. Qualifying individual A qualifying individual for the child and dependent care credit is: Your dependent qualifying child who was under age 13 when the care was provided, Your spouse who was physically or mentally incapable of self-care and lived with you for more than half of the year, or An individual who was physically or mentally incapable of self-care, lived with you for more than half of the year, and either: (a) was your dependent; or (b) could have been your dependent except that he or she received gross income of $4,700 or more, or filed a joint return, or you (or your spouse, if filing jointly) could have been claimed as a dependent on another taxpayer's 2023 return. Physically or mentally not able to care for oneself - An individual is physically or mentally incapable of self-care if, as a result of a physical or mental defect, the individual is incapable of caring for his or her hygiene or nutritional needs or requires the full-time attention of another person for the individual's own safety or the safety of others. Children of divorced or separated parents or parents living apart - A noncustodial parent who is claiming a child as a dependent should review the rules under the topic Child of divorced or separated parents or parents living apart in Publication 503, because a child may be treated as the qualifying individual of the custodial parent for the child and dependent care credit, even if the noncustodial parent is entitled to claim the child as a dependent. Individual qualifying for part of year - If an individual is a qualifying individual for only a part of the tax year, only those expenses paid for care of the individual during that part of the year are included in calculating the credit. Taxpayer identification number (TIN) - You must provide the TIN (usually the Social Security number) of each qualifying individual. Care of a qualifying individual The care may be provided in the household or outside the household; however, don't include any amounts that aren't primarily for the well-being of the individual. You should divide the expenses between amounts that are primarily for the care of the individual and amounts that aren't primarily for the care of the individual. You must reduce the expenses primarily for the care of the individual by the amount of any dependent care benefits provided by your employer that you exclude from gross income. In general, you can exclude up to $5,000 for dependent care benefits received from your employer. Additionally, in general, the expenses claimed may not exceed the smaller of your earned income or your spouse's earned income. If you or your spouse is a full-time student or incapable of self-care, then you or your spouse is treated as having earned income for each month that you or your spouse is a full-time student or incapable of self-care. Your or your spouse's earned income for each month is $250 if there is one qualifying person ($500 if two or more qualifying individuals). See the topic Earned Income Limit in Publication 503 PDF for further information. Care providers You must identify all persons or organizations that provide care for your child or dependent. You must report the name, address, and TIN (either the Social Security number or the employer identification number) of the care provider on your return. If the care provider is a tax-exempt organization, you need only report the name and address of the organization on your return. You can use Form W-10, Dependent Care Provider's Identification and Certification to request this information from the care provider. If you can't provide information regarding the care provider, you may still be eligible for the credit if you can show that you exercised due diligence in attempting to provide the required information. If you pay a provider to care for your dependent or spouse in your home, you may be a household employer. If you're a household employer, you may have to withhold and pay Social Security and Medicare taxes and pay federal unemployment tax. For more information, refer to Do You Have Household Employees? in Publication 503, Publication 926, Household Employer's Tax Guide, or Topic no. 756. Payments to relatives or dependents - The care provider can't be your spouse, the parent of your qualifying individual if your qualifying individual is your child and under age 13, your child who is under the age of 19, or a dependent whom you or your spouse may claim on your return. Reporting on your tax return If you qualify for the credit, complete Form 2441, Child and Dependent Care Expenses and attach to Form 1040, U.S Individual Income Tax Return, Form 1040-SR, U.S. Tax Return for Seniors or Form 1040-NR, U.S. Nonresident Alien Income Tax Return. If you received dependent care benefits from your employer (an amount is shown on your Form W-2, Wage and Tax Statement), you must complete Part III of Form 2441. Additional information For more information, refer to Am I eligible to claim the child and dependent care credit?

<TASK DESCRIPTION> Only use the provided text to answer the question, no outside sources. <QUESTION> My husband and I have three children and I have been a stay at home mom for 10 years. My oldest daughter is 11. My husband's 16 year old daughter from a previous marriage wants to babysit for us. If we pay her to babysit can be we qualify for the dependent care credit? <TEXT> You may be able to claim the child and dependent care credit if you paid expenses for the care of a qualifying individual to enable you (and your spouse, if filing a joint return) to work or actively look for work. Generally, you may not take this credit if your filing status is married filing separately. However, see What's Your Filing Status? in Publication 503, Child and Dependent Care Expenses, which describes an exception for certain taxpayers living apart from their spouse and meeting other requirements. The amount of the credit is a percentage of the amount of work-related expenses you paid to a care provider for the care of a qualifying individual. The percentage depends on your adjusted gross income. Dollar limit The total expenses that you may use to calculate the credit may not be more than $3,000 (for one qualifying individual) or $6,000 (for two or more qualifying individuals). Expenses paid for the care of a qualifying individual are eligible expenses if the primary reason for paying the expense is to assure the individual's well-being and protection. If you received dependent care benefits that you exclude or deduct from your income, you must subtract the amount of those benefits from the dollar limit that applies to you. Qualifying individual A qualifying individual for the child and dependent care credit is: Your dependent qualifying child who was under age 13 when the care was provided, Your spouse who was physically or mentally incapable of self-care and lived with you for more than half of the year, or An individual who was physically or mentally incapable of self-care, lived with you for more than half of the year, and either: (a) was your dependent; or (b) could have been your dependent except that he or she received gross income of $4,700 or more, or filed a joint return, or you (or your spouse, if filing jointly) could have been claimed as a dependent on another taxpayer's 2023 return. Physically or mentally not able to care for oneself - An individual is physically or mentally incapable of self-care if, as a result of a physical or mental defect, the individual is incapable of caring for his or her hygiene or nutritional needs or requires the full-time attention of another person for the individual's own safety or the safety of others. Children of divorced or separated parents or parents living apart - A noncustodial parent who is claiming a child as a dependent should review the rules under the topic Child of divorced or separated parents or parents living apart in Publication 503, because a child may be treated as the qualifying individual of the custodial parent for the child and dependent care credit, even if the noncustodial parent is entitled to claim the child as a dependent. Individual qualifying for part of year - If an individual is a qualifying individual for only a part of the tax year, only those expenses paid for care of the individual during that part of the year are included in calculating the credit. Taxpayer identification number (TIN) - You must provide the TIN (usually the Social Security number) of each qualifying individual. Care of a qualifying individual The care may be provided in the household or outside the household; however, don't include any amounts that aren't primarily for the well-being of the individual. You should divide the expenses between amounts that are primarily for the care of the individual and amounts that aren't primarily for the care of the individual. You must reduce the expenses primarily for the care of the individual by the amount of any dependent care benefits provided by your employer that you exclude from gross income. In general, you can exclude up to $5,000 for dependent care benefits received from your employer. Additionally, in general, the expenses claimed may not exceed the smaller of your earned income or your spouse's earned income. If you or your spouse is a full-time student or incapable of self-care, then you or your spouse is treated as having earned income for each month that you or your spouse is a full-time student or incapable of self-care. Your or your spouse's earned income for each month is $250 if there is one qualifying person ($500 if two or more qualifying individuals). See the topic Earned Income Limit in Publication 503 PDF for further information. Care providers You must identify all persons or organizations that provide care for your child or dependent. You must report the name, address, and TIN (either the Social Security number or the employer identification number) of the care provider on your return. If the care provider is a tax-exempt organization, you need only report the name and address of the organization on your return. You can use Form W-10, Dependent Care Provider's Identification and Certification to request this information from the care provider. If you can't provide information regarding the care provider, you may still be eligible for the credit if you can show that you exercised due diligence in attempting to provide the required information. If you pay a provider to care for your dependent or spouse in your home, you may be a household employer. If you're a household employer, you may have to withhold and pay Social Security and Medicare taxes and pay federal unemployment tax. For more information, refer to Do You Have Household Employees? in Publication 503, Publication 926, Household Employer's Tax Guide, or Topic no. 756. Payments to relatives or dependents - The care provider can't be your spouse, the parent of your qualifying individual if your qualifying individual is your child and under age 13, your child who is under the age of 19, or a dependent whom you or your spouse may claim on your return. Reporting on your tax return If you qualify for the credit, complete Form 2441, Child and Dependent Care Expenses and attach to Form 1040, U.S Individual Income Tax Return, Form 1040-SR, U.S. Tax Return for Seniors or Form 1040-NR, U.S. Nonresident Alien Income Tax Return. If you received dependent care benefits from your employer (an amount is shown on your Form W-2, Wage and Tax Statement), you must complete Part III of Form 2441. Additional information For more information, refer to Am I eligible to claim the child and dependent care credit? https://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc602

{instruction} ========== In your answer, refer only to the context document. Do not employ any outside knowledge {question} ========== [user request] {passage 0} ========== [context document]

My teen wants headphones for her birthday. She likes to listen to loud music and I'm worried about her hearing if she uses headphones. How can she safely use headphones?

Is anyone listening? Monitoring your teen's headphone volume can help avoid hearing loss As a parent, do you often find yourself asking your child to remove their headphones? You may want to consider doing it even more often. If you’re the parent of a teenager, you likely have concerns about the link between headphones and hearing loss. Today, 1 in 5 teens will experience some form of hearing loss—a rate about 30% higher than it was 20 years ago. Many experts believe the escalation is due, in part, to increased use of headphones. According to James E. Foy, DO, an osteopathic pediatrician from Vallejo, California, listening through headphones at a high volume for extended periods of time can result in lifelong hearing loss for children and teens. “Even a mild hearing loss due to excessive noise could lead to developmental delays in speech and language,” he cautions. Doctors of Osteopathic Medicine, or DOs, look beyond your symptoms to understand how lifestyle and environmental factors affect your wellbeing. They listen and partner with you to help prevent injury and encourage your body’s natural tendency toward self-healing. How loud is too loud? Most MP3 players today can produce sounds up to 120 decibels, equivalent to a sound level at a rock concert. At that level, hearing loss can occur after only about an hour and 15 minutes, warns Dr. Foy. “I stress to my patients and their parents that if you can’t hear anything going on around you when listening to headphones, the decibel level is too high,” he says. Dr. Foy advises that people should not exceed 60% of maximum volume when listening through headphones. How long is too long? Duration of exposure to noise is also a major factor when examining headphones and hearing loss. “As a rule of thumb, you should only use MP3 devices at levels up to 60% of maximum volume for a total of 60 minutes a day,” says Dr. Foy. “The louder the volume, the shorter your duration should be. At maximum volume, you should listen for only about five minutes a day.” What are the signs of hearing loss? “The type of hearing loss due to headphone use is typically gradual, cumulative and without obvious warning signs,” explains Dr. Foy. “A hearing test and a medical examination are the only way to truly diagnose hearing damage.” However, if you or your child experiences any of the following symptoms, Dr. Foy recommends a visit to a physician immediately: Ringing, roaring, hissing or buzzing in the ear. Difficulty understanding speech in noisy places or places with poor acoustics. Muffled sounds and a feeling that your ear is plugged. Listening to the TV or radio at a higher volume than in the past. What is the treatment for hearing loss? “Unfortunately, the type of hearing loss caused by over exposure to very loud noise is irreversible, making prevention paramount,” says Dr. Foy. “Hearing aids and implants can help in amplifying sounds and making it easier to hear, but they are merely compensating for the damaged or nonworking parts of the ear.” How can I prevent hearing loss? “First and foremost, follow the 60/60 rule in regards to percentage of maximum volume and duration of time,” says Dr. Foy. Additionally, he suggests using older style, larger headphones that rest over the ear opening instead of earphones that are placed directly in your ear. “Whether using headphones or earphones, moderation is key,” says Dr. Foy. “Avoiding excessive use of listening devices altogether will go a long way in preventing hearing loss.”

{instruction} ========== In your answer, refer only to the context document. Do not employ any outside knowledge {question} ========== My teen wants headphones for her birthday. She likes to listen to loud music and I'm worried about her hearing if she uses headphones. How can she safely use headphones? {passage 0} ========== Is anyone listening? Monitoring your teen's headphone volume can help avoid hearing loss As a parent, do you often find yourself asking your child to remove their headphones? You may want to consider doing it even more often. If you’re the parent of a teenager, you likely have concerns about the link between headphones and hearing loss. Today, 1 in 5 teens will experience some form of hearing loss—a rate about 30% higher than it was 20 years ago. Many experts believe the escalation is due, in part, to increased use of headphones. According to James E. Foy, DO, an osteopathic pediatrician from Vallejo, California, listening through headphones at a high volume for extended periods of time can result in lifelong hearing loss for children and teens. “Even a mild hearing loss due to excessive noise could lead to developmental delays in speech and language,” he cautions. Doctors of Osteopathic Medicine, or DOs, look beyond your symptoms to understand how lifestyle and environmental factors affect your wellbeing. They listen and partner with you to help prevent injury and encourage your body’s natural tendency toward self-healing. How loud is too loud? Most MP3 players today can produce sounds up to 120 decibels, equivalent to a sound level at a rock concert. At that level, hearing loss can occur after only about an hour and 15 minutes, warns Dr. Foy. “I stress to my patients and their parents that if you can’t hear anything going on around you when listening to headphones, the decibel level is too high,” he says. Dr. Foy advises that people should not exceed 60% of maximum volume when listening through headphones. How long is too long? Duration of exposure to noise is also a major factor when examining headphones and hearing loss. “As a rule of thumb, you should only use MP3 devices at levels up to 60% of maximum volume for a total of 60 minutes a day,” says Dr. Foy. “The louder the volume, the shorter your duration should be. At maximum volume, you should listen for only about five minutes a day.” What are the signs of hearing loss? “The type of hearing loss due to headphone use is typically gradual, cumulative and without obvious warning signs,” explains Dr. Foy. “A hearing test and a medical examination are the only way to truly diagnose hearing damage.” However, if you or your child experiences any of the following symptoms, Dr. Foy recommends a visit to a physician immediately: Ringing, roaring, hissing or buzzing in the ear. Difficulty understanding speech in noisy places or places with poor acoustics. Muffled sounds and a feeling that your ear is plugged. Listening to the TV or radio at a higher volume than in the past. What is the treatment for hearing loss? “Unfortunately, the type of hearing loss caused by over exposure to very loud noise is irreversible, making prevention paramount,” says Dr. Foy. “Hearing aids and implants can help in amplifying sounds and making it easier to hear, but they are merely compensating for the damaged or nonworking parts of the ear.” How can I prevent hearing loss? “First and foremost, follow the 60/60 rule in regards to percentage of maximum volume and duration of time,” says Dr. Foy. Additionally, he suggests using older style, larger headphones that rest over the ear opening instead of earphones that are placed directly in your ear. “Whether using headphones or earphones, moderation is key,” says Dr. Foy. “Avoiding excessive use of listening devices altogether will go a long way in preventing hearing loss.” https://osteopathic.org/what-is-osteopathic-medicine/headphones-hearing-loss/

Provide responses in clear, concise and simple manner. The target audience has no knowledge of the subject and are not experts. You response should only rely on the provided context.

What are some of the main topics addressed as having occurred in the last fiscal year based on the information shared in the letter?

Annual Letter to Shareholders Dear Shareholders, the Global McFamily and our Customers, At McDonald’s, we are privileged to be active participants in the local communities where we live, work and serve. That means we refect the values and understand the needs of the customers and people we strive to put frst every day. This was especially prudent as we navigated the COVID-19 pandemic and societal challenges within this past year. Through it all, and with the strength of our McFamily and a values-led mindset, we did the right thing from the start. We prioritized the safety of restaurant crew and customers; we took important steps to preserve our fnancial fexibility; we leveraged the power of our supply chain; and we stood by and supported our local communities. I believe frmly that our Brand will be defned by how we respond to such challenges, both as the world’s largest restaurant company—and as good neighbors. At the onset of the pandemic, I laid out fve principles that McDonald’s used to guide our approach to this historic challenge: Supported by these principles and energized by the incredible courage and efort from people across our three-legged stool, McDonald’s delivered a resilient performance in what was the most difcult year in our history. “We’re all in this together” “Think and act with a long-term mindset” “ Be transparent with each other and our stakeholders” “Lead by example” “Stay true to our purpose” Annual Letter to Shareholders Emerging from 2020 in a position of strength While conditions were challenging in most markets, we still achieved nearly $20 billion in full year revenue and over $90 billion in full year Systemwide sales. We were well-positioned to efectively navigate such challenging circumstances because of our operating model, our focus on running great restaurants and our many competitive strengths, including our formidable Drive Thru presence. We also were wellpositioned due to the signifcant investments we’ve made in recent years to develop our digital and delivery capabilities, which proved to be a boon throughout the pandemic. The US delivered its sixth consecutive year of positive comparable sales, and average US franchisee restaurant operating cash fow reached an all-time high in 2020, after a previous all-time high in 2019. Elsewhere, Japan and Australia posted fve and seven consecutive years of positive comparable sales growth, respectively. Markets that had to signifcantly reduce operations or face closures due to government restrictions did so with remarkable agility and care. Their ability to respond quickly to the external environment was a further demonstration of our System’s unmatched execution prowess. While 2020 was a historically demanding year, it has helped McDonald’s to do everything better. We engaged Mayo Clinic to provide ongoing expertise on emerging science in COVID-19 infection prevention, and we devised new ways to safely and reliably serve our customers. This, in turn, allowed us to continue gaining market share in most major markets. We also improved on our already unrivaled Drive Thru capabilities and continued to see the enormous benefts of contactless delivery, take-away, and curbside pick-up. Meanwhile, more customers used our app than ever before, as digital sales reached nearly 20 percent of Systemwide sales across our top six markets. At the outset of the pandemic, we committed to helping every operator and partner survive the crisis. We took prudent, quick action designed to prevent not a single Owner/Operator from failing due to the pandemic. We ofered franchisees nearly $1 billion in short-term fnancial liquidity support through rent and royalty deferrals, along with timely, targeted, and temporary assistance to individual franchisees in the most precarious situations. Thanks to our quick decision-making and our robust balance sheet, the fnancial health of the McDonald’s System remains strong. Just as important, we addressed our shortterm challenges without sacrifcing our long-term priorities. We continued to invest in our Brand, including an incremental $200 million in marketing support to widen our market share gains and accelerate our recovery. We also opened nearly 1,000 new restaurants globally, modernized another 900 restaurants in the US, and together with our franchisees, we invested more than $1 billion in technology and digital initiatives. I said several times through the year that we were confdent McDonald’s would be just as strong coming out of the pandemic as we were going into it, and we are proving that in so many ways. A new, holistic growth strategy to refect the changing environment Motivated by our resilience in the face of unprecedented challenges, we began writing the next chapter for McDonald’s as we shared our new growth strategy, Accelerating the Arches. Alongside bold business objectives, the strategy articulates a clear vision of where and how we intend to make a diference in the world, refecting the changing expectations that today’s customers have of modern corporations like McDonald’s. Annual Letter to Shareholders It is especially encouraging to see the power of the three pillars coming together already. The launch of Famous Orders in the US, for example, brought together the strength of our marketing, the popularity of our core menu items and enormous digital engagement to drive signifcant sales in the third and fourth quarters of 2020. The success of this initiative was just a glimpse of what is possible and we are excited for what is to come. We already knew customer habits and expectations were changing going into 2020. The pandemic accelerated some of those changes and brought other powerful truths into focus. First, our customers’ needs are diferent than they were prior to the pandemic, so the experience we ofer must adapt. A world with less dine-in and more takeout plays to our signifcant advantage in Drive Thru and our growing capabilities in delivery and curbside pick-up. More lunch and dinner visits are well-suited to our core menu, with iconic favorites that people love. Greater dependence on technology bodes well for McDonald’s fast-growing digital experience and our inherent scale advantages. This understanding was essential as we identifed three new growth pillars to deliver our next phase of sustainable growth under Accelerating the Arches. They are easy to remember… just think M-C-D: Leading with our purpose and refreshing our values to guide our strategy The second truth is that people expect more from corporations today and are seeking brands that refect their own values. Customers want to see that the McDonald’s they visit locally matches how we act globally. They want and expect us to be a force for good everywhere. The strength of McDonald’s business entering 2020 and our resilience through the pandemic allowed us to broaden our perspective to make Accelerating the Arches a strategy focused on more than just business performance. It is rooted in our belief that our next chapter of growth depends not just on what we do, but how we do it in more than 39,000 local restaurants around the world. Meeting the needs of our customers and communities requires us to embrace a bigger, more holistic vision. Just as our timeless commitment to Quality, Service, Cleanliness, and Value has been refned over the years to make them relevant for each era, the language we use to express our purpose, mission, and values must be reinvigorated to ensure it is responsive to today’s McDonald’s is one of the world’s most recognized brands, and we invest about $4 billion per year in marketing. Working with our agency partners, we will raise our creative ambition and capitalize on evolving digital behaviors to deepen the connection with our customers to drive growth. M - Maximize our Marketing McDonald’s menu is known around the globe, and customers love favorites like the Big Mac®, Chicken McNuggets®, and of course, our World Famous Fries®. During the pandemic, we focused on these classics and were reminded not only of customers’ enduring passion for these products, but also the signifcant growth opportunities that still exist within our core menu. C - Commit to the Core Digital, Delivery and Drive Thru. Customers have always loved McDonald’s for its convenience, and new technologies ofer us the opportunity to make the McDonald’s experience even faster and easier. We will innovate in these service channels to unlock even more growth. D - Double Down on the Three Ds Annual Letter to Shareholders Serve We put our customers and people frst Integrity We do the right thing Family We get better together Community We are good neighbors Inclusion We open our doors to everyone environment. That’s especially true in an era when customers and communities expect more of us. That is why one of our priorities over the past year was to ensure our purpose, mission, and values refect the role we play in society today— while embracing the vital place these timeless ideals and principles occupy as an essential part of this special Brand we all love. In speaking to franchisees, customers and crew around the world, it became clear that McDonald’s purpose is to feed and foster communities. It also became clear in those conversations that our ability to deliver on our purpose is rooted in a refreshed set of core values: Ray Kroc used to talk constantly about our values. He knew that in a System where every restaurant is unique and locally owned, our values would be the light that guides us through every decision. These refreshed values are a foundational component of Accelerating the Arches and will guide us in achieving our business objectives while providing a common compass for how we serve our communities, and one another. With its holistic view of what McDonald’s seeks to accomplish as an organization, Accelerating the Arches will strengthen our advantages and deliver value—not only to our business, but to our communities, customers, franchisees, crew, employees, farmers and suppliers. Looking forward to another year of progress We are a stronger Brand for the challenges we faced together in 2020. Our business performance and the trust we fostered throughout our communities reinforced our confdence in McDonald’s long-term success. As a result, we were pleased to continue the company’s more than 40-year tradition of annual dividend increases. While 2020 was a year beset with obstacles, it was also a year of progress for McDonald’s, and it has emboldened us to build on the platform we created to write our next great chapter together. Supported by a bold new strategy and our enduring foundation of running great restaurants, McDonald’s will continue to strive to be a force for good in our communities while strengthening and widening the competitive advantages that help us make delicious feel-good moments easy for everyone. Thank you to our shareholders for your continued investment in McDonald’s, to our customers for giving us the opportunity to serve you and your communities, and to the people in the McDonald’s System who make this business what it is and give us the spirit to succeed. Be well. Chris Kempczinski President and CEO McDonald’s Corporation

Provide responses in clear, concise and simple manner. The target audience has no knowledge of the subject and are not experts. You response should only rely on the provided context. What are some of the main topics addressed as having occurred in the last fiscal year based on the information shared in the letter? Annual Letter to Shareholders Dear Shareholders, the Global McFamily and our Customers, At McDonald’s, we are privileged to be active participants in the local communities where we live, work and serve. That means we refect the values and understand the needs of the customers and people we strive to put frst every day. This was especially prudent as we navigated the COVID-19 pandemic and societal challenges within this past year. Through it all, and with the strength of our McFamily and a values-led mindset, we did the right thing from the start. We prioritized the safety of restaurant crew and customers; we took important steps to preserve our fnancial fexibility; we leveraged the power of our supply chain; and we stood by and supported our local communities. I believe frmly that our Brand will be defned by how we respond to such challenges, both as the world’s largest restaurant company—and as good neighbors. At the onset of the pandemic, I laid out fve principles that McDonald’s used to guide our approach to this historic challenge: Supported by these principles and energized by the incredible courage and efort from people across our three-legged stool, McDonald’s delivered a resilient performance in what was the most difcult year in our history. “We’re all in this together” “Think and act with a long-term mindset” “ Be transparent with each other and our stakeholders” “Lead by example” “Stay true to our purpose” Annual Letter to Shareholders Emerging from 2020 in a position of strength While conditions were challenging in most markets, we still achieved nearly $20 billion in full year revenue and over $90 billion in full year Systemwide sales. We were well-positioned to efectively navigate such challenging circumstances because of our operating model, our focus on running great restaurants and our many competitive strengths, including our formidable Drive Thru presence. We also were wellpositioned due to the signifcant investments we’ve made in recent years to develop our digital and delivery capabilities, which proved to be a boon throughout the pandemic. The US delivered its sixth consecutive year of positive comparable sales, and average US franchisee restaurant operating cash fow reached an all-time high in 2020, after a previous all-time high in 2019. Elsewhere, Japan and Australia posted fve and seven consecutive years of positive comparable sales growth, respectively. Markets that had to signifcantly reduce operations or face closures due to government restrictions did so with remarkable agility and care. Their ability to respond quickly to the external environment was a further demonstration of our System’s unmatched execution prowess. While 2020 was a historically demanding year, it has helped McDonald’s to do everything better. We engaged Mayo Clinic to provide ongoing expertise on emerging science in COVID-19 infection prevention, and we devised new ways to safely and reliably serve our customers. This, in turn, allowed us to continue gaining market share in most major markets. We also improved on our already unrivaled Drive Thru capabilities and continued to see the enormous benefts of contactless delivery, take-away, and curbside pick-up. Meanwhile, more customers used our app than ever before, as digital sales reached nearly 20 percent of Systemwide sales across our top six markets. At the outset of the pandemic, we committed to helping every operator and partner survive the crisis. We took prudent, quick action designed to prevent not a single Owner/Operator from failing due to the pandemic. We ofered franchisees nearly $1 billion in short-term fnancial liquidity support through rent and royalty deferrals, along with timely, targeted, and temporary assistance to individual franchisees in the most precarious situations. Thanks to our quick decision-making and our robust balance sheet, the fnancial health of the McDonald’s System remains strong. Just as important, we addressed our shortterm challenges without sacrifcing our long-term priorities. We continued to invest in our Brand, including an incremental $200 million in marketing support to widen our market share gains and accelerate our recovery. We also opened nearly 1,000 new restaurants globally, modernized another 900 restaurants in the US, and together with our franchisees, we invested more than $1 billion in technology and digital initiatives. I said several times through the year that we were confdent McDonald’s would be just as strong coming out of the pandemic as we were going into it, and we are proving that in so many ways. A new, holistic growth strategy to refect the changing environment Motivated by our resilience in the face of unprecedented challenges, we began writing the next chapter for McDonald’s as we shared our new growth strategy, Accelerating the Arches. Alongside bold business objectives, the strategy articulates a clear vision of where and how we intend to make a diference in the world, refecting the changing expectations that today’s customers have of modern corporations like McDonald’s. Annual Letter to Shareholders It is especially encouraging to see the power of the three pillars coming together already. The launch of Famous Orders in the US, for example, brought together the strength of our marketing, the popularity of our core menu items and enormous digital engagement to drive signifcant sales in the third and fourth quarters of 2020. The success of this initiative was just a glimpse of what is possible and we are excited for what is to come. We already knew customer habits and expectations were changing going into 2020. The pandemic accelerated some of those changes and brought other powerful truths into focus. First, our customers’ needs are diferent than they were prior to the pandemic, so the experience we ofer must adapt. A world with less dine-in and more takeout plays to our signifcant advantage in Drive Thru and our growing capabilities in delivery and curbside pick-up. More lunch and dinner visits are well-suited to our core menu, with iconic favorites that people love. Greater dependence on technology bodes well for McDonald’s fast-growing digital experience and our inherent scale advantages. This understanding was essential as we identifed three new growth pillars to deliver our next phase of sustainable growth under Accelerating the Arches. They are easy to remember… just think M-C-D: Leading with our purpose and refreshing our values to guide our strategy The second truth is that people expect more from corporations today and are seeking brands that refect their own values. Customers want to see that the McDonald’s they visit locally matches how we act globally. They want and expect us to be a force for good everywhere. The strength of McDonald’s business entering 2020 and our resilience through the pandemic allowed us to broaden our perspective to make Accelerating the Arches a strategy focused on more than just business performance. It is rooted in our belief that our next chapter of growth depends not just on what we do, but how we do it in more than 39,000 local restaurants around the world. Meeting the needs of our customers and communities requires us to embrace a bigger, more holistic vision. Just as our timeless commitment to Quality, Service, Cleanliness, and Value has been refned over the years to make them relevant for each era, the language we use to express our purpose, mission, and values must be reinvigorated to ensure it is responsive to today’s McDonald’s is one of the world’s most recognized brands, and we invest about $4 billion per year in marketing. Working with our agency partners, we will raise our creative ambition and capitalize on evolving digital behaviors to deepen the connection with our customers to drive growth. M - Maximize our Marketing McDonald’s menu is known around the globe, and customers love favorites like the Big Mac®, Chicken McNuggets®, and of course, our World Famous Fries®. During the pandemic, we focused on these classics and were reminded not only of customers’ enduring passion for these products, but also the signifcant growth opportunities that still exist within our core menu. C - Commit to the Core Digital, Delivery and Drive Thru. Customers have always loved McDonald’s for its convenience, and new technologies ofer us the opportunity to make the McDonald’s experience even faster and easier. We will innovate in these service channels to unlock even more growth. D - Double Down on the Three Ds Annual Letter to Shareholders Serve We put our customers and people frst Integrity We do the right thing Family We get better together Community We are good neighbors Inclusion We open our doors to everyone environment. That’s especially true in an era when customers and communities expect more of us. That is why one of our priorities over the past year was to ensure our purpose, mission, and values refect the role we play in society today— while embracing the vital place these timeless ideals and principles occupy as an essential part of this special Brand we all love. In speaking to franchisees, customers and crew around the world, it became clear that McDonald’s purpose is to feed and foster communities. It also became clear in those conversations that our ability to deliver on our purpose is rooted in a refreshed set of core values: Ray Kroc used to talk constantly about our values. He knew that in a System where every restaurant is unique and locally owned, our values would be the light that guides us through every decision. These refreshed values are a foundational component of Accelerating the Arches and will guide us in achieving our business objectives while providing a common compass for how we serve our communities, and one another. With its holistic view of what McDonald’s seeks to accomplish as an organization, Accelerating the Arches will strengthen our advantages and deliver value—not only to our business, but to our communities, customers, franchisees, crew, employees, farmers and suppliers. Looking forward to another year of progress We are a stronger Brand for the challenges we faced together in 2020. Our business performance and the trust we fostered throughout our communities reinforced our confdence in McDonald’s long-term success. As a result, we were pleased to continue the company’s more than 40-year tradition of annual dividend increases. While 2020 was a year beset with obstacles, it was also a year of progress for McDonald’s, and it has emboldened us to build on the platform we created to write our next great chapter together. Supported by a bold new strategy and our enduring foundation of running great restaurants, McDonald’s will continue to strive to be a force for good in our communities while strengthening and widening the competitive advantages that help us make delicious feel-good moments easy for everyone. Thank you to our shareholders for your continued investment in McDonald’s, to our customers for giving us the opportunity to serve you and your communities, and to the people in the McDonald’s System who make this business what it is and give us the spirit to succeed. Be well. Chris Kempczinski President and CEO McDonald’s Corporation

Do not use external resources for your answer. Only use the provided context block.

What does the book include to help answer important questions about Bitcoin?

There’s a lot of excitement about Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. Optimists claim that Bitcoin will fundamentally alter payments, economics, and even politics around the world. Pessimists claim Bitcoin is inherently broken and will suffer an inevitable and spectacular collapse. Underlying these differing views is significant confusion about what Bitcoin is and how it works. We wrote this book to help cut through the hype and get to the core of what makes Bitcoin unique. To really understand what is special about Bitcoin, we need to understand how it works at a technical level. Bitcoin truly is a new technology and we can only get so far by explaining it through simple analogies to past technologies. We’ll assume that you have a basic understanding of computer science — how computers work, data structures and algorithms, and some programming experience. If you’re an undergraduate or graduate student of computer science, a software developer, an entrepreneur, or a technology hobbyist, this textbook is for you. In this book we’ll address the important questions about Bitcoin. How does Bitcoin work? What makes it different? How secure are your bitcoins? How anonymous are Bitcoin users? What applications can we build using Bitcoin as a platform? Can cryptocurrencies be regulated? If we were designing a new cryptocurrency today, what would we change? What might the future hold? Each chapter has a series of homework questions to help you understand these questions at a deeper level. In addition, there is a series of programming assignments in which you’ll implement various components of Bitcoin in simplified models. If you’re an auditory learner, most of the material of this book is available as a series of video lectures. You can find all these on our ​Coursera course.​ You should also supplement your learning with information you can find online including the Bitcoin wiki, forums, and research papers, and by interacting with your peers and the Bitcoin community. After reading this book, you’ll know everything you need to be able to separate fact from fiction when reading claims about Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. You’ll have the conceptual foundations you need to engineer secure software that interacts with the Bitcoin network. And you’ll be able to integrate ideas from Bitcoin into your own projects.

Do not use external resources for your answer. Only use the provided context block. What does the book include to help answer important questions about Bitcoin? [There’s a lot of excitement about Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. Optimists claim that Bitcoin will fundamentally alter payments, economics, and even politics around the world. Pessimists claim Bitcoin is inherently broken and will suffer an inevitable and spectacular collapse. Underlying these differing views is significant confusion about what Bitcoin is and how it works. We wrote this book to help cut through the hype and get to the core of what makes Bitcoin unique. To really understand what is special about Bitcoin, we need to understand how it works at a technical level. Bitcoin truly is a new technology and we can only get so far by explaining it through simple analogies to past technologies. We’ll assume that you have a basic understanding of computer science — how computers work, data structures and algorithms, and some programming experience. If you’re an undergraduate or graduate student of computer science, a software developer, an entrepreneur, or a technology hobbyist, this textbook is for you. In this book we’ll address the important questions about Bitcoin. How does Bitcoin work? What makes it different? How secure are your bitcoins? How anonymous are Bitcoin users? What applications can we build using Bitcoin as a platform? Can cryptocurrencies be regulated? If we were designing a new cryptocurrency today, what would we change? What might the future hold? Each chapter has a series of homework questions to help you understand these questions at a deeper level. In addition, there is a series of programming assignments in which you’ll implement various components of Bitcoin in simplified models. If you’re an auditory learner, most of the material of this book is available as a series of video lectures. You can find all these on our ​Coursera course.​ You should also supplement your learning with information you can find online including the Bitcoin wiki, forums, and research papers, and by interacting with your peers and the Bitcoin community. After reading this book, you’ll know everything you need to be able to separate fact from fiction when reading claims about Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. You’ll have the conceptual foundations you need to engineer secure software that interacts with the Bitcoin network. And you’ll be able to integrate ideas from Bitcoin into your own projects.]

Only rely on the provided text.

Which American made significant contributions to our understanding of the distribution of wealth?

In the theory of distribution interest must be aasigned a quite different and much more important r61e than economists thus far have given to it. In classical economics the nature of interest and its place in distribution were not clearly understood. Distribution has been erroneously defined as the division of the income of society into “interest, rent, wages, and profits.” Rent and interest are merely two ways of measuring the same income ; rent, aa the yield per acre or other physical unit, and interest aa the same yield expressed aa a per cent of capital value. The value of the capital is derived from the income which it yields by capitalizing it at the prevailing rate of interest. To reverse this process by multiplying the capitd vdue by the rate of interest gives the original income, aa long aa the capital value remains stationary. It is not really a complex product of two factors, but, on the contrary, is the single original factor, namely, income, from which we started. As explained in previous chapters, it is this income which affords the basis for the determination of the &e of interest, and through the rate of interest, of capital value. The hal enjoyable income of society is the ultimate and basic fact from which all values are derived and c3311 THE THEORY OF INTEREST toward which all economic action is bent. All of this income is derived from capital wealth, if land and man are included in that term, or if not, from capital and man, or capital, land, and man, according to the terminology adopted. This income may all be capitalized, and hence all income (excluding capital gain) may be viewed as interest upon the capital value thus found. Viewed as above outlined interest is not a part, but the whole, of income (except for capital gain). It includes what is called rent and profits and even wages, for the income of the workman may be capitalized quite as truly as the income of land or machinery. Thus, instead of having interest, rent, wages, and profits as mutually exclusive portions of social income, interest may be regarded as including all four. If we prefer to exclude profits, the reason is because of the element of risk and not because profits are not discountable just as truly as rent and wages. The error of the classical economists and of their modern followers in regarding interest, rent, wages and profits as separate but coijrdinate incomes is partly due to the failure to perceive thzlt, whereas all income is produced from capital wealth, capital vdue can emerge only from man’s psychic evaluation and capitalization of that income in advance of its occurrence. Another oversight closely ltssociated with the last stated fallacy is that in which rent and wages are conceived aa determined independently of the rate of interest, whereas we have just seen that the rate of interest enters aa a vital element into the determination of both. The great defect in the theories propounded by the classical economists lay in their inability to conceive of a general equilibrium and the mutual dependence of sacrifice and enjoyment. C 332 3 THE PLACE OF INTEREST IN ECONOMICS In discueeing the theory of distribution, we shall, there fore, abandon the classical point of view entirely. The claasical concepts of distribution are quite inappropriate to explain the every day facts of life and the economic structure. The phrase distribution of wealth, as understood by the ordinary man, implies the problem of the relative wealth of individuals, the problem of the rich and the poor. But the separation of the aggregate income into four abstract magnitudes, even if correctly done, has littIe to do with the question of how much income the different individuals in society receive. Only on condition that society WM composed of four independent and mutually exclusive groups, laborers, landlords, enterprisers, and capitalists, would the fourfold division of the classical economists be even partially dequate to explain the actual distribution of income. In fact, the four classes all overlap. The enterpriser is almost invariably a genuine capitalist and usually also performs labor; the capitalist is frequently a landlord and laborer, and even the typical laborer is today often a amall capitalist and sometimes a landlord. It is true that a century ago in England the lines of social classification corresponded roughly to the abstract divisions proposed at that time by the classical economists. But this fact is of little significance except as explaining historically the origin of the classical theory of distrib~tion.~ $5. Interest and Personal Distribution The main problem of distribution, as I see it, is concerned with the determination and explanation of the amounts and values of capitala and incomes possemed don, P. 8. King dc Son, 1903. '&e Cannan, Edwin, Thoties of production and Dt&ibuticm. hCWI THE THEORY OF INTEREST by Merent individuah in society. It is astonishing how little economistg have contributed to resolving the problem of distribution EO conceived. A statistid beginning w&s made by Professor Pareto in his present&ion of interesting “curves of distribution of income.” For the United States, Professor W. I. King and the National Bureau of Economic Research ?, and for England, Sir Josiah Stamp have made and analyzed important statistical compilations on the amount and distribution of income and capital wealth by income groups and social classes. On the theory of distribution, especially the rcile of interest in distribution, John Rae seems to have contributed more than any other writer O. He showed in a vivid way that persons who had naturally what we have called in this book a low rate of impatience or preference for present over future income tended to accumulate savings, whereas those who had t,he opposite trait tended to spend their incomes and even their capitals. In previous chapters it is shown that the rates of preference among different individurtls are equalized by borrowing and lending or, what amounts to the same thing, ‘Pareto, Cam 82-k Politipue, Vol. 11, Book III. ‘King, W. I., The Wealth and Income of the People of the United State, New York, The Macmillan Co., 1915. ‘Mitchell, W. C., King, W. I., Mseaulay, F. R., Knauth, 0. W., Income in the United States. New York, National Bureau of Economic Reeearch, Inc., 1922. Knauth, 0. W., Dietribution of I~~come byi3tat-a in 1919. New York, Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1822. Leven, Maurice, and King, w. I., Income in the Vuriou8 &utes; Its sovceS and DietribzLtion, 1910, f9#, and 19tl. New York, National Bureau of Economic Resesrch, Inc., 1925. ‘Stamp, Sir Josiah, WeaUh and Tdle Capacily. London, P. 9. King & hn, La., 1922. Also, Btitieh Incomes and Prqperty. London, P. 8. King & Son, 1916. ’ Rae, The Socidogid Thew o? Capitd, Chapter XIII. 1WI. THE PLACE OF INTEREST IN ECONOMICS by buying and selling. An individual whose rate of preference for present enjoyment is unduly high wil contrive to modify his income stream by increasing it in the pment at the expense of the future. The effects upon incomes may be traced to capital by applying the principles explained in The Nature of Caplltal and Income, Chapter XIV.

Which American made significant contributions to our understanding of the distribution of wealth? Only rely on the provided text. In the theory of distribution interest must be aasigned a quite different and much more important r61e than economists thus far have given to it. In classical economics the nature of interest and its place in distribution were not clearly understood. Distribution has been erroneously defined as the division of the income of society into “interest, rent, wages, and profits.” Rent and interest are merely two ways of measuring the same income ; rent, aa the yield per acre or other physical unit, and interest aa the same yield expressed aa a per cent of capital value. The value of the capital is derived from the income which it yields by capitalizing it at the prevailing rate of interest. To reverse this process by multiplying the capitd vdue by the rate of interest gives the original income, aa long aa the capital value remains stationary. It is not really a complex product of two factors, but, on the contrary, is the single original factor, namely, income, from which we started. As explained in previous chapters, it is this income which affords the basis for the determination of the &e of interest, and through the rate of interest, of capital value. The hal enjoyable income of society is the ultimate and basic fact from which all values are derived and c3311 THE THEORY OF INTEREST toward which all economic action is bent. All of this income is derived from capital wealth, if land and man are included in that term, or if not, from capital and man, or capital, land, and man, according to the terminology adopted. This income may all be capitalized, and hence all income (excluding capital gain) may be viewed as interest upon the capital value thus found. Viewed as above outlined interest is not a part, but the whole, of income (except for capital gain). It includes what is called rent and profits and even wages, for the income of the workman may be capitalized quite as truly as the income of land or machinery. Thus, instead of having interest, rent, wages, and profits as mutually exclusive portions of social income, interest may be regarded as including all four. If we prefer to exclude profits, the reason is because of the element of risk and not because profits are not discountable just as truly as rent and wages. The error of the classical economists and of their modern followers in regarding interest, rent, wages and profits as separate but coijrdinate incomes is partly due to the failure to perceive thzlt, whereas all income is produced from capital wealth, capital vdue can emerge only from man’s psychic evaluation and capitalization of that income in advance of its occurrence. Another oversight closely ltssociated with the last stated fallacy is that in which rent and wages are conceived aa determined independently of the rate of interest, whereas we have just seen that the rate of interest enters aa a vital element into the determination of both. The great defect in the theories propounded by the classical economists lay in their inability to conceive of a general equilibrium and the mutual dependence of sacrifice and enjoyment. C 332 3 THE PLACE OF INTEREST IN ECONOMICS In discueeing the theory of distribution, we shall, there fore, abandon the classical point of view entirely. The claasical concepts of distribution are quite inappropriate to explain the every day facts of life and the economic structure. The phrase distribution of wealth, as understood by the ordinary man, implies the problem of the relative wealth of individuals, the problem of the rich and the poor. But the separation of the aggregate income into four abstract magnitudes, even if correctly done, has littIe to do with the question of how much income the different individuals in society receive. Only on condition that society WM composed of four independent and mutually exclusive groups, laborers, landlords, enterprisers, and capitalists, would the fourfold division of the classical economists be even partially dequate to explain the actual distribution of income. In fact, the four classes all overlap. The enterpriser is almost invariably a genuine capitalist and usually also performs labor; the capitalist is frequently a landlord and laborer, and even the typical laborer is today often a amall capitalist and sometimes a landlord. It is true that a century ago in England the lines of social classification corresponded roughly to the abstract divisions proposed at that time by the classical economists. But this fact is of little significance except as explaining historically the origin of the classical theory of distrib~tion.~ $5. Interest and Personal Distribution The main problem of distribution, as I see it, is concerned with the determination and explanation of the amounts and values of capitala and incomes possemed don, P. 8. King dc Son, 1903. '&e Cannan, Edwin, Thoties of production and Dt&ibuticm. hCWI THE THEORY OF INTEREST by Merent individuah in society. It is astonishing how little economistg have contributed to resolving the problem of distribution EO conceived. A statistid beginning w&s made by Professor Pareto in his present&ion of interesting “curves of distribution of income.” For the United States, Professor W. I. King and the National Bureau of Economic Research ?, and for England, Sir Josiah Stamp have made and analyzed important statistical compilations on the amount and distribution of income and capital wealth by income groups and social classes. On the theory of distribution, especially the rcile of interest in distribution, John Rae seems to have contributed more than any other writer O. He showed in a vivid way that persons who had naturally what we have called in this book a low rate of impatience or preference for present over future income tended to accumulate savings, whereas those who had t,he opposite trait tended to spend their incomes and even their capitals. In previous chapters it is shown that the rates of preference among different individurtls are equalized by borrowing and lending or, what amounts to the same thing, ‘Pareto, Cam 82-k Politipue, Vol. 11, Book III. ‘King, W. I., The Wealth and Income of the People of the United State, New York, The Macmillan Co., 1915. ‘Mitchell, W. C., King, W. I., Mseaulay, F. R., Knauth, 0. W., Income in the United States. New York, National Bureau of Economic Reeearch, Inc., 1922. Knauth, 0. W., Dietribution of I~~come byi3tat-a in 1919. New York, Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1822. Leven, Maurice, and King, w. I., Income in the Vuriou8 &utes; Its sovceS and DietribzLtion, 1910, f9#, and 19tl. New York, National Bureau of Economic Resesrch, Inc., 1925. ‘Stamp, Sir Josiah, WeaUh and Tdle Capacily. London, P. 9. King & hn, La., 1922. Also, Btitieh Incomes and Prqperty. London, P. 8. King & Son, 1916. ’ Rae, The Socidogid Thew o? Capitd, Chapter XIII. 1WI. THE PLACE OF INTEREST IN ECONOMICS by buying and selling. An individual whose rate of preference for present enjoyment is unduly high wil contrive to modify his income stream by increasing it in the pment at the expense of the future. The effects upon incomes may be traced to capital by applying the principles explained in The Nature of Caplltal and Income, Chapter XIV.

<TASK DESCRIPTION> Only use the provided text to answer the question, no outside sources. <QUESTION> [user request] <TEXT> [context document]

My friend is trying to get me to start Ozempic, since it has helped her lose weight. I want to know more about what it is. Using this article, tell me how Ozempic works and what the risks are. Use at least 400 words.

Does Ozempic Have an Immediate Effect? Ozempic is a medication in the class of GLP-1 agonists, which mimic the action of a hormone called GLP-1 that your stomach naturally releases when you eat food. When blood sugar levels naturally start rising after you eat, these drugs stimulate the body to produce more insulin, which helps direct blood sugar into the body's cells to be used for energy. If you’re taking Ozempic for diabetes, “it doesn’t have the immediate effect that injecting actual insulin does,” she adds. Per the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), rapid-acting insulin can start working in as little as 30 minutes to accelerate the entry of glucose into cells for metabolism into glycogen—a main source of energy for the body. Ozempic doesn’t have an immediate effect on weight loss either. “Ozempic is started at the lowest dose and advanced every four weeks,” says Mir Ali, M.D., a bariatric surgeon and the medical director of MemorialCare Surgical Weight Loss Center at Orange Coast Medical Center in Fountain Valley, CA. “Each patient responds differently. Some feel the effects immediately, while others may need to be on higher dose levels to feel the effects. When the patients are at the appropriate dose, they feel much less hungry and feel full for a longer period of time.” The effects of a dose of Ozempic last for about one week—this is why it’s injected once-weekly. “Some people may see a tapering of the effects towards the end of the one-week period, while others don’t,” says Dr. Ali. It should be noted that the same holds true for Wegovy. The main difference between Wegovy and Ozempic is the amount of semaglutide in each injectable dose: Wegovy’s maximum maintenance dose is 2.4 milligrams (mg), while Ozempic’s is 2 mg. Lowering Blood Sugar How Long Does It Take Ozempic to Lower Blood Sugar? Every patient is different, but you can expect to notice lower levels of blood sugar as quickly as within the first week of taking Ozempic, says Dr. Lofton. “The effect will be more dramatic as the doses increase over a period of months,” she says. For instance, if the patient’s dose is increased monthly, they should reach the maximum dose of 2 mg on the fourth month. Sticking to lower doses for the first four weeks helps lower side effects, but higher doses are required to lower blood sugar in the long term, per the official dosing guidelines. “How long it takes to achieve a healthy blood sugar level depends on how well the glucose was controlled prior to initiating Ozempic as well as the patient’s diet, exercise, and other medications,” Dr. Lofton says. Your doctor will carry out the hemoglobin A1C test—a simple blood test that measures your average blood sugar levels over the past three months. “It takes three months for hemoglobin A1C to change, so I would expect some improvement in hemoglobin A1C three months after starting Ozempic,” Dr. Lofton explains. For those individuals with type 2 diabetes who take metformin, which is the first-line medication used to treat the condition, some may find that adding—or switching to—a GPL-1 agonist drug like Ozempic may improve outcomes; this is something your doctor will evaluate if this applies to your situation. Some people with type 2 diabetes may take insulin and Ozempic. “Often, a patient’s insulin requirement decreases as Ozempic doses increase so it is likely that type 2 diabetes may no longer require insulin when on a GLP-1 agonist,” says Dr. Lofton. “This is ideal because insulin can cause weight gain.” Weight Loss How Long Does It Take Ozempic to Lead to Weight Loss? The effect of Ozempic on weight really depends on the individual, says Dr. Ali. “Some patients will experience a loss of appetite with the initial dose,” he says. “However, most patients will likely not see significant weight loss until they reach higher dose levels at eight-to-12 weeks.” In Dr. Lofton's experience, there is usually some weight loss in the first month. “If weight goals are not met, then the dose can be increased,” she notes. Ozempic’s results are impressive when compared to other types of weight management drugs. Eric Williamson, Ph.D., a dietitian who specializes in sports and weight management and the founder of Toronto, Canada-based Unlocked Fitness and Nutrition, points out that the older obesity meds like Saxenda (liraglutide) yielded modest results: an average of 5% to 8% weight loss over the course of 68 weeks. “In contrast, the recent GLP-1 agonists like semaglutide stand out as the most effective drugs to date, with individuals experiencing a substantial 15% to 20% body weight reduction over a 68-week period when coupled with lifestyle interventions including nutrition and exercise,” says Williamson. That sort of weight loss can improve your body’s insulin sensitivity and help reverse insulin resistance—your essential weapons for winning the battle when you have type 2 diabetes. Williamson believes that the success of semaglutide lies in its ability to address the most common barrier to weight loss: increased appetite. “While a calorie deficit remains essential for weight loss, semaglutide makes achieving this deficit more manageable by reducing appetite,” he explains. What to Expect What to Expect After Your First Ozempic Injection It’s normal to experience some side effects from a new medication. According to Dr. Ali, the most common side effects reported from Ozempic are gastrointestinal, such as nausea, diarrhea or constipation, stomach cramping, and vomiting. “There are receptors for GLP-1 in the GI tract, which affects how it functions and leads to side effects,” explains Dr. Ali. “However, these side effects tend to subside with continued use of the medication.” According to clinical trials, the majority of reports of nausea, vomiting, and/or diarrhea occurred during dose escalation. Dr. Lofton warns that if you’re taking Ozempic and can’t tolerate the side effects, you should speak to your prescriber. “Lifestyle intervention is still the first-line approach to obesity treatment,” Williamson says. “In most cases, physicians will recommend lifestyle support with professionals like dietitians first. Even when drugs like semaglutide are prescribed, it is meant to complement lifestyle changes by mitigating the challenge of heightened appetite.” Williamson adds that there are three main risks if certain lifestyle adjustments are not considered: Inadequate nutrient intake. “Because appetite can be lowered quite drastically with semaglutide, it’s important that people are choosing nutrient dense foods to get adequate amounts of vitamins and minerals,” he says. Muscle loss. A subset of participants taking Ozempic in a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine lost 39% of their weight as lean mass (the largest portion of which will be muscle mass). “Exercise and obtaining adequate protein is important to prevent this so that one metabolic health issue isn’t presented (i.e., low muscle mass) as another one is solved (i.e., high fat mass),” Williamson explains. Not losing weight. According to research published in Drug Design, Development and Therapy, there is still a small proportion of people (around 7%) who do not lose weight on semaglutide. Williamson points out that more studies are required, but in his practice (and coming across people on the drug on a near-daily basis), he does see some people who eat a high enough caloric density diet (i.e. a high amount of calories for small amount of food) that they do not enter a calorie deficit even on weight loss drugs. “A diet made up of mostly nutritious low-calorie density whole filling foods is still required for many to lose weight on these drugs,” he says. It’s also a habit that can help those who drop out of using drugs like Ozempic from gaining the weight back.

<TASK DESCRIPTION> Only use the provided text to answer the question, no outside sources. <QUESTION> My friend is trying to get me to start Ozempic, since it has helped her lose weight. I want to know more about what it is. Using this article, tell me how Ozempic works and what the risks are. Use at least 400 words. <TEXT> Does Ozempic Have an Immediate Effect? Ozempic is a medication in the class of GLP-1 agonists, which mimic the action of a hormone called GLP-1 that your stomach naturally releases when you eat food. When blood sugar levels naturally start rising after you eat, these drugs stimulate the body to produce more insulin, which helps direct blood sugar into the body's cells to be used for energy. If you’re taking Ozempic for diabetes, “it doesn’t have the immediate effect that injecting actual insulin does,” she adds. Per the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), rapid-acting insulin can start working in as little as 30 minutes to accelerate the entry of glucose into cells for metabolism into glycogen—a main source of energy for the body. Ozempic doesn’t have an immediate effect on weight loss either. “Ozempic is started at the lowest dose and advanced every four weeks,” says Mir Ali, M.D., a bariatric surgeon and the medical director of MemorialCare Surgical Weight Loss Center at Orange Coast Medical Center in Fountain Valley, CA. “Each patient responds differently. Some feel the effects immediately, while others may need to be on higher dose levels to feel the effects. When the patients are at the appropriate dose, they feel much less hungry and feel full for a longer period of time.” The effects of a dose of Ozempic last for about one week—this is why it’s injected once-weekly. “Some people may see a tapering of the effects towards the end of the one-week period, while others don’t,” says Dr. Ali. It should be noted that the same holds true for Wegovy. The main difference between Wegovy and Ozempic is the amount of semaglutide in each injectable dose: Wegovy’s maximum maintenance dose is 2.4 milligrams (mg), while Ozempic’s is 2 mg. Lowering Blood Sugar How Long Does It Take Ozempic to Lower Blood Sugar? Every patient is different, but you can expect to notice lower levels of blood sugar as quickly as within the first week of taking Ozempic, says Dr. Lofton. “The effect will be more dramatic as the doses increase over a period of months,” she says. For instance, if the patient’s dose is increased monthly, they should reach the maximum dose of 2 mg on the fourth month. Sticking to lower doses for the first four weeks helps lower side effects, but higher doses are required to lower blood sugar in the long term, per the official dosing guidelines. “How long it takes to achieve a healthy blood sugar level depends on how well the glucose was controlled prior to initiating Ozempic as well as the patient’s diet, exercise, and other medications,” Dr. Lofton says. Your doctor will carry out the hemoglobin A1C test—a simple blood test that measures your average blood sugar levels over the past three months. “It takes three months for hemoglobin A1C to change, so I would expect some improvement in hemoglobin A1C three months after starting Ozempic,” Dr. Lofton explains. For those individuals with type 2 diabetes who take metformin, which is the first-line medication used to treat the condition, some may find that adding—or switching to—a GPL-1 agonist drug like Ozempic may improve outcomes; this is something your doctor will evaluate if this applies to your situation. Some people with type 2 diabetes may take insulin and Ozempic. “Often, a patient’s insulin requirement decreases as Ozempic doses increase so it is likely that type 2 diabetes may no longer require insulin when on a GLP-1 agonist,” says Dr. Lofton. “This is ideal because insulin can cause weight gain.” Weight Loss How Long Does It Take Ozempic to Lead to Weight Loss? The effect of Ozempic on weight really depends on the individual, says Dr. Ali. “Some patients will experience a loss of appetite with the initial dose,” he says. “However, most patients will likely not see significant weight loss until they reach higher dose levels at eight-to-12 weeks.” In Dr. Lofton's experience, there is usually some weight loss in the first month. “If weight goals are not met, then the dose can be increased,” she notes. Ozempic’s results are impressive when compared to other types of weight management drugs. Eric Williamson, Ph.D., a dietitian who specializes in sports and weight management and the founder of Toronto, Canada-based Unlocked Fitness and Nutrition, points out that the older obesity meds like Saxenda (liraglutide) yielded modest results: an average of 5% to 8% weight loss over the course of 68 weeks. “In contrast, the recent GLP-1 agonists like semaglutide stand out as the most effective drugs to date, with individuals experiencing a substantial 15% to 20% body weight reduction over a 68-week period when coupled with lifestyle interventions including nutrition and exercise,” says Williamson. That sort of weight loss can improve your body’s insulin sensitivity and help reverse insulin resistance—your essential weapons for winning the battle when you have type 2 diabetes. Williamson believes that the success of semaglutide lies in its ability to address the most common barrier to weight loss: increased appetite. “While a calorie deficit remains essential for weight loss, semaglutide makes achieving this deficit more manageable by reducing appetite,” he explains. What to Expect What to Expect After Your First Ozempic Injection It’s normal to experience some side effects from a new medication. According to Dr. Ali, the most common side effects reported from Ozempic are gastrointestinal, such as nausea, diarrhea or constipation, stomach cramping, and vomiting. “There are receptors for GLP-1 in the GI tract, which affects how it functions and leads to side effects,” explains Dr. Ali. “However, these side effects tend to subside with continued use of the medication.” According to clinical trials, the majority of reports of nausea, vomiting, and/or diarrhea occurred during dose escalation. Dr. Lofton warns that if you’re taking Ozempic and can’t tolerate the side effects, you should speak to your prescriber. “Lifestyle intervention is still the first-line approach to obesity treatment,” Williamson says. “In most cases, physicians will recommend lifestyle support with professionals like dietitians first. Even when drugs like semaglutide are prescribed, it is meant to complement lifestyle changes by mitigating the challenge of heightened appetite.” Williamson adds that there are three main risks if certain lifestyle adjustments are not considered: Inadequate nutrient intake. “Because appetite can be lowered quite drastically with semaglutide, it’s important that people are choosing nutrient dense foods to get adequate amounts of vitamins and minerals,” he says. Muscle loss. A subset of participants taking Ozempic in a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine lost 39% of their weight as lean mass (the largest portion of which will be muscle mass). “Exercise and obtaining adequate protein is important to prevent this so that one metabolic health issue isn’t presented (i.e., low muscle mass) as another one is solved (i.e., high fat mass),” Williamson explains. Not losing weight. According to research published in Drug Design, Development and Therapy, there is still a small proportion of people (around 7%) who do not lose weight on semaglutide. Williamson points out that more studies are required, but in his practice (and coming across people on the drug on a near-daily basis), he does see some people who eat a high enough caloric density diet (i.e. a high amount of calories for small amount of food) that they do not enter a calorie deficit even on weight loss drugs. “A diet made up of mostly nutritious low-calorie density whole filling foods is still required for many to lose weight on these drugs,” he says. It’s also a habit that can help those who drop out of using drugs like Ozempic from gaining the weight back. https://www.healthcentral.com/condition/type-2-diabetes/how-long-does-it-take-ozempic-to-work

Only use information from the context in your response.

In what ways can technology affect my child?

The Impact of Technology on Children Parenting children of today’s generation comes with a unique set of challenges due to the many recent advancements in technology. There is no denying the reach technology has in our lives, as well as the lives of our children. Technology is virtually in every home in one way or another: about 96% of Americans have a TV and 94% of children ages 3 to 18 have internet access either through a computer or smartphone. According to a national survey done by Common Sense Media in 2019, 53% of children have a smartphone by the time they turn 11. Therefore, it’s important for parents to be mindful of how their children use technology and the potential effects—both positive and negative. Negative Impacts Technology can negatively affect children’s developing social skills, relationships, health, and overall ability to focus. • Social skills: With the increased use of technology, children might not be adequately developing their social skills. This can lead to more children being socially awkward, withdrawn, shy, or intimidated by social situations. They might not know how to engage with other children or adults. Developing social skills takes practice, and if technology is often in the way, there are fewer opportunities for kids to develop these skills. • Relationships: Children might get used to being alone and lose the desire to engage with their parents or even friends, outside of the internet. Often the virtual reality of their devices is more appealing and entertaining than the physical reality. • Health problems: Technology can potentially influence the child’s developing brain and problem-solving skills. For instance, the child might be reliant on a device to solve problems for them rather than using brain connections to work through a problem and find a solution. There could also be a lack of exercise due to being inside, which can cause weight gain. If kids use their devices before bedtime, this could lead to reduced sleep quality, affecting their overall wellbeing and immune system. • Ability to focus: Children who spend a lot of time using devices might have a reduced attention span and ability to focus due to their reliance on technology to pay attention for them. This is evident in classrooms, where teachers are opting for shorter lesson plans to accommodate students becoming easily distracted. • Dangers of browsing: With so much information available on the internet, it’s difficult for parents to monitor what their children are exposed to, including inappropriate content or interactions with strangers. Positive Impacts There are also many ways in which technology can positively impact our lives and those of our children—it all depends on how the technology is being used. • Organization: Technology can be beneficial to organization and planning. For example, families can keep an online calendar to make it easier to stay updated on each other’s schedules. Group text messaging is also convenient for streamlining communication and keeping everyone in the loop. Lastly, technology also makes budgeting easier with different apps, which can help parents teach children about money management. • Research and critical thinking: The internet provides access to a great deal of information and resources to help children learn about different topics. This is helpful for school projects or for researching areas of interest. This can also be a teachable moment, by showing children how to sift through information to find reliable sources. • Bonding and community: Technology can foster connection by allowing kids to stay in touch with family members or friends who do not live close by. Also, kids can interact with others in their age group while playing games online and learn to play as a team. • Self-expression: Children can learn how to share their thoughts online, which is a powerful tool that can build confidence. They can learn how to connect with others and be exposed to other viewpoints or perspectives. • Creativity and exploring interests: In many ways, technology fosters creativity and learning new skills through various apps for all different ages. Children can explore different areas they have an interest in, such as learning to play an instrument, creative writing, or beginner programs related to various subjects.

Only use information from the context in your response. In what ways can technology affect my child? The Impact of Technology on Children Parenting children of today’s generation comes with a unique set of challenges due to the many recent advancements in technology. There is no denying the reach technology has in our lives, as well as the lives of our children. Technology is virtually in every home in one way or another: about 96% of Americans have a TV and 94% of children ages 3 to 18 have internet access either through a computer or smartphone. According to a national survey done by Common Sense Media in 2019, 53% of children have a smartphone by the time they turn 11. Therefore, it’s important for parents to be mindful of how their children use technology and the potential effects—both positive and negative. Negative Impacts Technology can negatively affect children’s developing social skills, relationships, health, and overall ability to focus. • Social skills: With the increased use of technology, children might not be adequately developing their social skills. This can lead to more children being socially awkward, withdrawn, shy, or intimidated by social situations. They might not know how to engage with other children or adults. Developing social skills takes practice, and if technology is often in the way, there are fewer opportunities for kids to develop these skills. • Relationships: Children might get used to being alone and lose the desire to engage with their parents or even friends, outside of the internet. Often the virtual reality of their devices is more appealing and entertaining than the physical reality. • Health problems: Technology can potentially influence the child’s developing brain and problem-solving skills. For instance, the child might be reliant on a device to solve problems for them rather than using brain connections to work through a problem and find a solution. There could also be a lack of exercise due to being inside, which can cause weight gain. If kids use their devices before bedtime, this could lead to reduced sleep quality, affecting their overall wellbeing and immune system. • Ability to focus: Children who spend a lot of time using devices might have a reduced attention span and ability to focus due to their reliance on technology to pay attention for them. This is evident in classrooms, where teachers are opting for shorter lesson plans to accommodate students becoming easily distracted. • Dangers of browsing: With so much information available on the internet, it’s difficult for parents to monitor what their children are exposed to, including inappropriate content or interactions with strangers. Positive Impacts There are also many ways in which technology can positively impact our lives and those of our children—it all depends on how the technology is being used. • Organization: Technology can be beneficial to organization and planning. For example, families can keep an online calendar to make it easier to stay updated on each other’s schedules. Group text messaging is also convenient for streamlining communication and keeping everyone in the loop. Lastly, technology also makes budgeting easier with different apps, which can help parents teach children about money management. • Research and critical thinking: The internet provides access to a great deal of information and resources to help children learn about different topics. This is helpful for school projects or for researching areas of interest. This can also be a teachable moment, by showing children how to sift through information to find reliable sources. • Bonding and community: Technology can foster connection by allowing kids to stay in touch with family members or friends who do not live close by. Also, kids can interact with others in their age group while playing games online and learn to play as a team. • Self-expression: Children can learn how to share their thoughts online, which is a powerful tool that can build confidence. They can learn how to connect with others and be exposed to other viewpoints or perspectives. • Creativity and exploring interests: In many ways, technology fosters creativity and learning new skills through various apps for all different ages. Children can explore different areas they have an interest in, such as learning to play an instrument, creative writing, or beginner programs related to various subjects.

Please limit your knowledge to the document. Avoid generalizations and ensure accuracy by directly referencing the document's arguments and examples.

How can graduate students receive financial support at the University of Cincinnati?

University of Cincinnati Graduate College Graduate Handbook Welcome from the Graduate College! We invite you to review the Graduate Handbook. This document is designed as a helpful guide to graduate education at UC. Here is where you will find policies, procedures, and important information for the graduate student lifecycle, from admissions to graduation. In addition, there may also be requirements that pertain to specific degree programs and colleges. Please visit program and college websites for these specific requirements. 1  The Graduate College Graduate College Leadership Rose Marie Ward Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate College Omotayo (Tayo) Banjo Associate Dean of the Graduate College Tai Collins Associate Dean of the Graduate College Laura Dell Graduate College Thought Leader Emily Kregor Software Applications Developer Lead Sarah Matthews Sr Data Reporting Analyst Angel Prewitt Assistant Director of Business Affairs Megan Tischner Carroll Program Director Graduate College Staff Kaitlin Bauer Academic Evaluator Virginia Dennis Program Manager, Student Services Shaymaa Minkara Program Manager, Graduation Caitie Norrie Program Manager, Professional Development Stephen Patrick Program Manager, Marketing and Communications Amy Wheeler Program Manager, Student Success & Retention Brandilyn Worrell Program Manager, Community and Belonging 2  Brady Wright Executive Staff Assistant and Office Manager Graduate College IT Staff Chris Amann Computer & Info Analyst, Management Specialist IT Dushan Aththidiyavidanalage Don Software Applications Developer Eric Rasnake Computer & Info Analyst I Coco Zhang Software Applications Developer Contact the Graduate College Location University of Cincinnati 110 Van Wormer Hall 2614 University Circle Cincinnati, OH Mailing Address P.O. Box 210627 Cincinnati, OH 45221-0627 Email: [email protected] or [email protected] Phone: (513) 556-4335 Fax: (513) 556-0128 3 Introduction This Graduate Handbook is intended to provide information about university policies that assist faculty, students, and program coordinators in supporting their individual programs of study. To which educational programs does this Handbook pertain? The Graduate College oversees all post-baccalaureate certificates and degrees (master’s and doctoral level) EXCEPT the Juris Doctor (in the College of Law), the Doctor of Medicine (in the College of Medicine), and the Doctor of Pharmacy (in the College of Pharmacy). The University of Cincinnati does not discriminate on the basis of disability, race, color, religion, national origin, ancestry, medical condition, genetic information, marital status, parental status (including status as a foster parent), sex, age, sexual orientation, veteran status, military status (past, present, or future), or gender identity and expression in its programs and activities. View UC’s complete Notice of Non-Discrimination. Published 11/28/2023. This version is an update to the 2022-23 AY handbook to reflect changes to the Graduate Scholarship structure and terminology. This version supersedes all previous versions. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS ADMISSION TO GRADUATE PROGRAMS ....................................... 9 ADMISSIONS POLICY .............................................................................................. 9 Faculty and Administrators' Eligibility for Graduate Degrees .................................. 9 ADMISSIONS CATEGORIES .................................................................................... 9 APPLICATION PROCESS FOR 4+1 AND AIM PROGRAMS .................................. 10 Application to 4+1 Degree Programs .................................................................... 10 Application to Accelerated Integrated Master’s (AIM) Programs .......................... 11 DUAL DEGREE PROGRAMS .................................................................................. 11 CHANGING DEGREE PROGRAMS AT UC ............................................................ 11 GRADUATE CERTIFICATE PROGRAMS ............................................................... 12 INTERNATIONAL STUDENT ADMISSION.............................................................. 12 English Proficiency Requirement .......................................................................... 13 FINANCIAL SUPPORT .................................................................... 14 UNIVERSITY MERIT-BASED GRADUATE AWARDS ............................................. 14 GRADUATE SCHOLARSHIPS (GS)........................................................................ 14 UNIVERSITY FELLOWSHIPS ................................................................................. 15 GRADUATE ASSISTANTSHIP STIPEND AWARDS ............................................... 16 Teaching Assistant Requirements and OEPT ...................................................... 17 Graduate Assistant/Fellow Health Insurance Awards ........................................... 17 Multiple Appointments/Employment ..................................................................... 18 Summer Employment Without Full-time Enrollment ............................................. 18 Graduate Assistants on Jury Duty ........................................................................ 18 Strike Policy for Graduate Assistants ................................................................... 19 Sick Leave/Family Leave for Graduate Assistants ............................................... 19 Holidays/UC Closing Policy for Graduate Assistants ............................................ 19 Military Duty .......................................................................................................... 19 Termination........................................................................................................... 19 Workers’ Compensation ....................................................................................... 19 Unemployment ..................................................................................................... 19 Social Security, Medicare Tax and Ohio Public Employees Retirement System (OPERS)............................................................................................................... 20 174 GRADUATE CREDIT RULE .............................................................................. 20 TAXATION OF CINCINNATI GRADUATE AWARDS .............................................. 21 EXEMPTION FROM OPERS FOR STUDENT EMPLOYEES.................................. 21 EXTERNAL SOURCES OF FUNDING .................................................................... 21 5  FEDERAL FINANCIAL AID ...................................................................................... 22 GRADUATE CREDIT AND GRADES............................................... 23 ELIGIBLE CREDITS ................................................................................................ 23 CREDITS REQUIRED TO EARN A GRADUATE DEGREE .................................... 23 Advanced Standing for Graduate Courses Taken Outside of UC ......................... 23 Transfer Credit for Graduate Courses Taken at UC ............................................. 24 Course Exemption for Prior Knowledge, Without Credit ....................................... 24 Multiple Degree Exemptions ................................................................................. 25 Enrolling in Non-UC Classes through the Greater Cincinnati Collegiate Connection ............................................................................................................................. 25 Graduate Credit for Undergraduate Students ....................................................... 25 Graduate Credit Earned in 6000-Level Courses ................................................... 25 GRADING ................................................................................................................ 25 Final Exams .......................................................................................................... 25 Make-up Final Exams ........................................................................................... 26 Grade Reports ...................................................................................................... 26 Grades Assigned to Research Courses That Are Repeated ................................ 27 Pass/Fail Grades .................................................................................................. 27 Grade Changes .................................................................................................... 27 No Grade Replacements for Graduate Students .................................................. 27 MAINTAINING GRADUATE STUDENT STATUS ............................ 29 MINIMUM CREDITS/REGISTRATION REQUIREMENTS ....................................... 29 Dual Degree Programs ......................................................................................... 29 FULL-TIME COURSE LOAD.................................................................................... 29 PART-TIME COURSE LOAD ................................................................................... 29 REDUCED COURSE LOAD (INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS) ................................ 30 MEETING PROGRAM REQUIREMENTS................................................................ 30 MINIMUM ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE ................................................................ 30 INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS, MAINTAINING IMMIGRATION STATUS............... 30 TIME TO DEGREE .................................................................................................. 30 Time to Degree and Extensions ........................................................................... 30 Reinstatements..................................................................................................... 31 Readmission ......................................................................................................... 32 Leaves of Absence ............................................................................................... 32 Withdrawal from Program ..................................................................................... 33 Dismissal from Program ....................................................................................... 33 MASTER’S DEGREE POLICIES AND PROCEDURES ................... 34 COURSE OF STUDY ............................................................................................... 34 6  CREDIT HOUR REQUIREMENTS .......................................................................... 34 CANDIDACY ............................................................................................................ 34 CULMINATING EXPERIENCE: THESES and CAPSTONES .................................. 34 Thesis Preparation, Evaluation and Submission Process..................................... 34 Capstone Process ................................................................................................ 35 GRADUATION ......................................................................................................... 35 Application to Graduate ........................................................................................ 36 Graduation from Dual Degree Programs .............................................................. 36 Certification for Graduation (Certify Online) .......................................................... 36 CONTINUING TO A DOCTORAL PROGRAM ......................................................... 37 DOCTORAL DEGREE POLICIES AND PROCEDURES ................. 38 COURSE OF STUDY ............................................................................................... 38 CREDIT HOUR REQUIREMENTS .......................................................................... 38 RESIDENCY AS FULL-TIME STUDENT ................................................................. 38 CANDIDACY, QUALIFYING EXAM ......................................................................... 38 UNIVERSITY GRADUATE FACULTY ROLE ........................................................... 39 DISSERTATION....................................................................................................... 39 Dissertation Advisor and Committee..................................................................... 39 Final Defense of Dissertation................................................................................ 40 Use of a Moderator ............................................................................................... 40 Submission of Dissertation ................................................................................... 40 GRADUATION ......................................................................................................... 41 Application to Graduate ........................................................................................ 41 Dual Degree Programs Graduation ...................................................................... 41 Graduation Requirements for Doctoral Degrees................................................... 41 Certification for Graduation (Certify Online) .......................................................... 41 GRADUATE CERTIFICATE VERIFICATION FOR UC TRANSCRIPT ENDORSEMENT ..................................................................................................... 42 DOCTORAL HOODING AND MASTER’S RECOGNITION CEREMONY ................ 42 INSTITUTIONAL RULES, POLICIES, AND PROCEDURES ............ 44 PROGRAM STANDARDS........................................................................................ 44 RECORDS PRIVACY, FERPA, AND THE RIGHT TO REVIEW .............................. 44 NOTICE OF NON-DISCRIMINATION ...................................................................... 44 ACADEMIC DISHONESTY ...................................................................................... 45 STUDENT CODE OF CONDUCT ............................................................................ 45 RESPONSIBLE CONDUCT OF RESEARCH .......................................................... 46 RESTRICTED RESEARCH ..................................................................................... 46 7  GRADUATE STUDENT GRIEVANCE PROCEDURES ........................................... 46 8 ADMISSION TO GRADUATE PROGRAMS ADMISSIONS POLICY The University of Cincinnati welcomes graduate applications from students who: • hold a baccalaureate degree from a college or university regarded as standard by a regional accrediting agency and; • have at least a B average (3.000/4.0 system) in undergraduate course work or otherwise give evidence of promise that is judged satisfactory by the admitting program and the Graduate College. Programs that wish to admit applicants who lack this 3.000 minimum GPA requirement must provide supporting evidence and rationale of how such students will be able to complete a graduate program that requires achievement of a 3.000 GPA, and indicate any support offered by the program to ensure the applicant’s success given the GPA deficiency. Decisions concerning admission to graduate programs rest with the programs, and criteria used for determining admission beyond these minimal requirements are established by the programs. All programs have established written criteria for judging the admissibility of applicants, which are published in each program’s graduate handbook. The program’s handbook for graduate study must be available to the student. Upon the student’s acceptance of the admission offer, the program and the student are bound by the terms and conditions set forth in the letter of appointment. Faculty and Administrators' Eligibility for Graduate Degrees No holder of an academic administrative title at the University of Cincinnati (equivalent to assistant dean or above) may matriculate or be granted a graduate certificate or degree from the University of Cincinnati. No graduate degree or certificate from the University of Cincinnati will be granted to any faculty member at the University of Cincinnati (full-time or part-time above rank of instructor) who teaches in the same department, division or school in which the degree is to be granted. This rule also applies to adjunct appointments at any faculty rank and to interdisciplinary degrees when the same college is one of the interdisciplinary colleges. College deans may petition the Associate Dean of the Graduate College for a waiver of this policy on an individual faculty member’s behalf. The written request should describe the teaching responsibilities of the faculty member, indicating whether they are teaching graduate students and a plan for managing potential conflicts of interest. ADMISSIONS CATEGORIES Matriculated graduate status is granted to an applicant who has been accepted into a graduate certificate or degree program and has met all admissions criteria. Note that applicants first receive a provisional acceptance, and conversion to matriculated graduate status is dependent upon receipt of an official transcript that confirms that the student holds a baccalaureate or higher degree from a college or university regarded as standard by a regional accrediting agency. Please note that additional official documentation may be required (e.g. if the transcript does not contain information about degree conferral or if a foreign degree needs confirmation as baccalaureate equivalent). Instructions and deadlines for meeting this requirement are included on the Transcript Submission Policy web page. 9 Provisional graduate status is granted to applicants who have been accepted into a graduate certificate or degree program, but who have NOT yet met all admissions criteria. As described above, one routine requirement for all students is the submission of an official transcript. However, some students must in addition take undergraduate courses or improve English language proficiency to satisfy prerequisites, and these students may be accepted by the program on a provisional basis that is contingent on satisfying those additional prerequisites. Letters of admission should be read carefully to make sure all requirements tied to provisional status are identified. Visiting student status allows students to take courses for graduate credit when they have not been admitted into a graduate degree program. These students were previously called “non- matriculated students”. Should this visiting student subsequently matriculate into a certificate or degree program, a maximum of 12 semester hours may be applied to the certificate or degree program. Students are not eligible for tuition or stipend awards allocated by the Graduate College while in visiting graduate status. This policy and other funding policies are further explained in the Financial Support chapter. APPLICATION PROCESS FOR 4+1 AND AIM PROGRAMS Application to 4+1 Degree Programs If an undergraduate student plans to matriculate into a master’s degree program upon completion of the bachelor's degree, they can consult with advisors to begin (A) taking graduate-level coursework as an advanced undergraduate student, and (B) focusing on thesis-related, independent research at an earlier date. This advising plan to achieve an articulated path to a master’s degree is called a 4+1 program. Students who enter these programs must complete all of the requirements of each respective degree and must apply separately for both degree programs at the appropriate time. To be eligible for entry to a 4+1 program, students must have junior standing (64 semester credits). In addition, students must meet all College and graduate program admission requirements for the particular program. 4+1 students should note the following: • 4+1 students who enroll in graduate-level coursework prior to formally matriculating as a graduate student are allowed to apply up to 12 semester graduate-level credits toward the requirements of the master’s degree. These credits cannot be used for the bachelor’s degree. Students in the 4+1 program will complete the rest of their graduate coursework after formal completion and certification of the bachelor's degree. Students should refer to the section of this handbook containing the general requirements of the master’s degree and speak to the directors of the graduate program about specific requirements. • 4+1 students wishing to matriculate into a master’s program must complete a formal graduate admission application online in their junior or senior year to be admitted to the graduate program and begin the master’s degree. Students should speak to the directors of the graduate program about specific admission and application requirements. 10 Application to Accelerated Integrated Master’s (AIM) Programs The university has a limited set of programs that allow for a single application and admission to obtain a bachelor’s plus master’s degree in a single course of study. These programs are tightly structured around co-op experiences and allow undergraduate students to accumulate more than 12 graduate credits prior to transitioning to a matriculated graduate student. Applicants apply to an AIM program at the time of application to UC as an undergraduate but are still required to formally apply to transition to the graduate portion of their program at a time defined by their AIM program. There is a free and abbreviated application for UC undergraduate students transitioning to the associated master’s degree that is part of their AIM program. DUAL DEGREE PROGRAMS The university offers the opportunity for students to pursue two complementary graduate degrees simultaneously through structured, official dual degree programs (see below for a complete listing). The advantage of these programs is that they may require fewer credits than completing each degree program separately. Each program’s entrance requirements must be met in addition to university requirements, and the applicant must be accepted by both programs. Below is a listing of the Dual Degree programs: • Accounting MBA/MS • Business Analytics MBA/MS • Business Administration/Arts Administration MBA/MA • Business Administration/Nursing MBA/MSN • Community Planning/Landscape Architecture MCP/MLA • Community Planning/Law MCP/JD • Finance MBA/MS • Human Resources MBA/MA • Information Systems MBA/MS • Marketing MBA/MS • Law/Women’s Studies JD/MA • Law/Business JD/MBA • Law/Political Science JD/MA • Law/Political Science JD/PhD Please see the Multiple Degree Exemptions section for information on the maximum amount of transfer credit that can be applied to the dual degree programs. CHANGING DEGREE PROGRAMS AT UC In order to change from one degree program to another within the university, a student must submit a complete application to the new program. If the degrees are housed in the same unit, and the change is made over consecutive term enrollments, the application fee is waived. If the new degree program is in a different administrative program, the student is responsible for paying the application fee. Students are always responsible for fulfilling the requirements of the given degree program in which they are matriculated. Please see the Transfer Credit for Graduate Courses Taken at UC 11 section for information on the amount of graduate credits that can be transferred if a student is changing from one graduate program to another within the university, or if a student is changing from visiting graduate status at the university. GRADUATE CERTIFICATE PROGRAMS The University of Cincinnati offers graduate certificate programs. Certificates vary in both credit hours and in how they are configured: for instance, some can be earned only in conjunction with a degree; some require a master’s degree as a prerequisite, and some can be earned outside of a degree program. Applicants must apply for admission to a certificate program. Graduate College general guidelines are as follows: • Students must hold a baccalaureate degree. • Certificate programs may enroll degree seeking and non-degree seeking students. • For students matriculated into a degree program, credit hours earned under a certificate program may count toward a degree in any program if approved by the program director, and if requirements for the certificate and degree are completed the student will be awarded both. Credits earned while matriculated in a certificate program will count as credits matriculated in a degree. • Students can apply a single course to multiple certificates but only to ONE master’s or doctoral degree. • Students can obtain more than one certificate within the same program prior to attaining their master’s degree. • Students apply for a certificate program just like applying for a degree program, and must pay any relevant application fee. • Students enrolled only in a graduate certificate program are not eligible for tuition or stipend support with university funds (University Graduate Assistantship/Graduate Scholarship funds). If a student is interested, the student should contact the appropriate program office to obtain the specific criteria and prerequisites for the desired certificate. INTERNATIONAL STUDENT ADMISSION UC International Services supports the needs of international students at the University of Cincinnati. The office assists international students in understanding the rules, regulations, and procedures that must be followed during their stay in the United States and provides support services and cultural information to students. UC International Services is located in Suite 7148, One Edwards Center (1-513-556-4278). Information about admission to the University of Cincinnati for international students is available on their website. International students with F-1 visas can only be granted admission as matriculated graduate status in a degree-seeking program. (Most international students with J-1 visas can be granted admission with matriculated graduate status only, with some exceptions.) Students with J-1 visas should inquire with UC International Services to determine the regulations that apply to them. Students with green cards (U.S. resident aliens/permanent residents) are not defined as international students and, therefore, are not governed by the university’s international student policies. However, the English proficiency requirement does apply to green card holders (see The English Proficiency Requirement, below). 12 In instances where an international student holds a degree for which the U.S. equivalent is not known, or if it is determined by the program or the Graduate College that the applicant does not have the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree, the program must submit a petition for admission without the bachelor’s degree, with supporting documentation and rationale, to the Associate Dean of the Graduate College. All international students are required to carry University of Cincinnati student health insurance unless they qualify for a waiver. Semester insurance fees are automatically assessed each registration period. Please visit the Graduate College website for more information on the Graduate Assistant/Fellow Health Insurance Award. English Proficiency Requirement English proficiency is required of all applicants whose native language is not English. Students can demonstrate proficiency in a number of ways at the graduate level. PLEASE NOTE, many colleges and programs have higher requirements than those listed below. Applicants should contact the programs to which they are applying for details. For more information, please refer to the English Proficiency Requirement web page. 13 FINANCIAL SUPPORT Graduate students may obtain financial support from several sources. • The University of Cincinnati provides merit-based graduate awards in the form of tuition scholarships (known as the Graduate Scholarships, which may be provided with or without an assistantship), as well as stipend awards (graduate assistantships including teaching and research assistantships), and program-specific scholarships and fellowships. • Scholarship and fellowship support is also available from a diverse collection of external sponsors at the local, state, national, and international levels. Programs and colleges may have additional sources of support through grants and endowed funds • Need-based support may be obtained from federal and state sources. Financial support from each of these sources is described below. UNIVERSITY MERIT-BASED GRADUATE AWARDS The University of Cincinnati offers several types of merit-based graduate awards. The most common types – Graduate Scholarships, fellowships, and University Graduate Assistantships – are described below. Most university graduate awards are underwritten by university funds allocated by the Graduate College (“general funds”) to each college, which are then awarded to students by the individual programs. Some awards are competitive and granted by the Graduate College upon recommendation of an individual graduate program. Not all graduate students are eligible for graduate awards. Graduate awards allocated by the Graduate College are not available to students: (1) taking classes as visiting students, (2) enrolled only in a graduate certificate program, (3) who have not maintained the minimum GPA of 3.000 in their program, (4) who are on academic probation, or (5) who have exceeded the 174 graduate credit rule. Awards can only be guaranteed for a maximum period of one academic year, and renewal of a university graduate award is not automatic. Awards that are appointed by individual programs are awarded to eligible students at the sole discretion of the program. Programs are not obligated to renew awards, even if previously awarded students met all eligibility requirements. GRADUATE SCHOLARSHIPS (GS) The Graduate College funds scholarships that cover all or part of a student’s tuition and fees. In most colleges, the scholarship awards supported by the Graduate College are the Graduate Scholarships (GS), with and without assistantships. The GS with assistantship is used to support graduate assistants who are additionally awarded a stipend that requires service in return for stipend support. The GS without assistantship is for graduate students who do not receive university stipend support and therefore no service is required in return for the GS award. The appointing program sends written offers of scholarship awards to students, including information about the amount and duration of the award and the terms of the offer. Students must maintain all of the required eligibility requirements in their offer letter to maintain their tuition scholarship. 14 Students receiving a tuition scholarship must register for a specified minimum number of graduate credit hours in each semester for which they are receiving support. If an international student is supported by a GS without assistantship, they must register for a minimum load of 10 graduate credit hours per semester during the time they receive the GS scholarship. If a domestic student is supported by a GS without assistantship, they must register for a minimum load of 1 graduate credit hour per semester during the time they receive the GS scholarship. Students supported by a GS with assistantship must register for a minimum of 12 graduate credit hours per semester during the time they receive the GS scholarship. These minimum enrollments in graded courses must be met prior to using scholarship support for any audited courses. If a student withdraws from a class funded by a tuition scholarship, with the remaining enrolled credit hours totaling less than the minimum required for the award, the award is cancelled immediately and the student is responsible for the tuition balance, based on the date of withdrawal. Full tuition scholarships cover a maximum of 18 credits per semester. Students registered for more than 18 credits in a semester will be billed tuition and general fees on a per-credit-hour rate for each credit over the 18. All rules that govern recipients of tuition support pertain to all students, including international students. Other rules and policies that apply specifically to international students are independent of GS regulations. Both sets of regulations must be met. Neither set of regulations negates or takes the place of the other. (See 174 Graduate Credit Rule.) Note: Financial awards that require no service may reduce eligibility for educational loans. Students should notify the Student Financial Aid Office of their tuition support if they apply for aid from that office. UNIVERSITY FELLOWSHIPS University of Cincinnati fellowships are financial awards that include tuition scholarships and stipends with no associated service requirements. The purpose of a fellowship award is to allow the recipient to concentrate exclusively on their studies; therefore, multiple appointments and/or employment by the University of Cincinnati are not permitted for students receiving fellowships. The appointing program sends written offers of fellowship awards, including information about the amount and duration of the award; a general description of the academic obligations accepted by the student as part of the award; a reference to sources of information about academic requirements for degree completion; a description of the conditions under which either the student or unit may terminate the award prior to its end-date; and criteria for reappointment. Students receiving fellowships should check with Student Financial Aid to be informed about the potential impact on their eligibility for aid. Income received that is not for services rendered (whether it be in the form of a fellowship, grant, or award) will be calculated in whether a student meets the Cost of Attendance for the University of Cincinnati. Fellowship awardees have an enrollment obligation identical to GS with assistantship/UGA (university graduate assistantship) awardees, and they lose eligibility for the fellowship award if they accumulate more than 174 graduate credit hours. (See 174 Graduate Credit Rule). 15 For information on university-sponsored fellowships, please see the Graduate College website. GRADUATE ASSISTANTSHIP STIPEND AWARDS A student awarded a graduate assistantship receives a financial stipend for services rendered in addition to a full or partial tuition scholarship. These stipend funds are called UGA (university graduate assistantship) awards. Graduate assistants are also entitled to a discount at the University Bookstore and may be eligible for the Graduate Assistant/Fellow Health Insurance Award. UGA awardees devote effort to a combined program of formal study and assigned duties of teaching, research or administrative service that is designed to enhance their university education. The stipend received by the graduate assistant is in recognition of these services. Those with teaching duties are teaching assistants (TAs) and those with research duties are research assistants (RAs). During the appointment, the goal is to help a graduate student become a more learned, creative, and professional individual through formal instruction, interaction with faculty, research, and administrative experience. Any such service assignments should be consistent with the student’s academic pursuits. UGA funds are awarded for designated periods of time by the graduate programs. Graduate Assistants are considered exempt from minimum wage and overtime requirements, and they are paid on a salaried basis. Minimum stipends are set by the Dean of the Graduate College. The minimum stipend for a graduate assistant, as set in July 2023, must be the equivalent of a minimum of $16.98 per hour for all master’s and doctoral students except those in PhD programs. Graduate assistants enrolled in PhD programs have a minimum of $22.28 per hour. The appointing academic program, college, or area of responsibility determines service requirements of students who hold assistantships. If awarded an assistantship outside their program, graduate assistants’ duties are governed by the academic program, college, or the area of responsibility that made the award. In all cases, the award obligates awardees to no more than 20 hours per week of services, and those services must make a substantive contribution to the student’s academic and professional development. Students must be appointed to a position that is consistent with their field of academic study. If the student determines that they cannot meet the requirements of the award, it is imperative that they notify the program to initiate renegotiation or reassignment of the award with correspondingly less support. A student’s hours are prorated for weeks with a holiday or school closure and students are not required to be available during break periods unless given additional compensation. UGA awardees must be registered for 12 graduate credit hours or more, exclusive of audit credits, for each semester they receive the assistantship. University assistantships will be cancelled if the awardee does not meet their enrollment obligation. The exception to this rule is summer semester. See Summer Employment without Full-time Enrollment section. Students lose eligibility for the UGA stipend funding if they accumulate more than 174 graduate credit hours. (See 174 Graduate Credit Rule.) Assistantship awards are contingent upon student status, satisfactory degree progress, and performance of service as assigned, and can be terminated at any time. Each year the assistantship is in effect, the appointing program, college, or area must notify the awardee in 16 writing of any significant change to the services or conditions of the appointment. Such changes include, but are not limited to: • the amount and duration of the award • any tuition and/or fee not paid by the program • the average expected time per week or per semester of required duties • description of the duties assigned to the student • description of the conditions under which either the student or unit may terminate the award prior to its end-date • criteria for reappointment of the award • criteria for determining variations in stipend levels where such variations exist • information on current IRS guidelines, Medicare, and the Public Employee Retirement System (PERS) • graduate appointment procedures if any of the documents have been modified since the student’s initial appointment. Teaching Assistant Requirements and OEPT All teaching assistants must be supervised by a faculty member who has the academic credentials and authorization (as defined by the Higher Learning Commission, Ohio Dept. of Higher Education, and the University of Cincinnati) to offer instruction to the students in the class. Supervising faculty must be listed (as supervisor or instructor) in any course/section overseen by a graduate teaching assistant. Non-native speakers of English who are awarded teaching assistantships at the University of Cincinnati are required to score at least a 3.0 on the Oral English Proficiency Test (OEPT). The OEPT evaluates the spoken language skills of non-native speakers of English. Students who pass are certified for oral English proficiency and may assume the full range of duties associated with their teaching assistantship. Students whose oral English proficiency has not been officially certified may not assume instructional responsibilities. However, students who score 26 or above on the speaking section of the TOEFL IBT or students with a score of 50 or above on the Test of Spoken English are exempt from the OEPT. Students are required to take the test at the beginning of their first term of study. If a score is less than 3.0, students are recommended to take ESL courses before retaking the test. A student is permitted to take the OEPT twice without charge during an academic year. Graduate Assistant/Fellow Health Insurance Awards Academic programs are required to notify eligible students with information on the Graduate Student Health Insurance (GSHI) award, which can subsidize the cost of UC Student Health Insurance for qualified students. Programs must provide graduate assistants/fellows with the GSHI Award application deadline and relevant details on GSHI Award criteria, and must keep records that they have provided this information to their students. Such information can be found at the Graduate Student Health Insurance Award web page. 17 Multiple Appointments/Employment Graduate assistantship awardees who are domestic students are limited to 24 total hours of combined service and student hourly work while school is in session. The following policies regarding multiple appointments must be followed: • Units are responsible for monitoring of hours worked by student employees assigned to their unit; this is especially important for students who hold multiple student appointments. • The program must closely monitor academic progress. • The additional appointment must be terminated if a student does not maintain academic progress deemed to be acceptable by the program. This limit applies only while school is in session. During scheduled breaks only, if students work more than 20 hours or they work more than the prorated salary hours required, they must be compensated at an hourly rate for the extra work. Students can be employed for a maximum of 40 hrs/week during scheduled breaks. International students are limited to working 20 hours per week while school is in session and are limited to 40 hours per week during scheduled breaks. All International Students must have onboarding conducted by the International Services Office. An international student on F-1 or J-1 immigration status contemplating employment should contact the International Student Services Office at 1-513-556-4278. Summer Employment Without Full-time Enrollment For summer semester only, students who are not registered for graduate credit hours or are registered for less than 12 credits hours are eligible to be employed by their respective program, usually by performing the duties of their assistantship such as teaching or lab work. In this case, the student will receive a stipend for the work performed. Retirement funds and taxes will be withheld from the student’s check. Questions about options with retirement funds once separated from the university should be directed to Human Resources and/or OPERS. Graduate Assistants on Jury Duty All graduate students are encouraged to participate when they are subpoenaed for jury duty. The student must seek their advisor’s and program director’s permission with the expectation that every effort will be made to accommodate the jury service. If the student’s absence from UC will create a hardship to the unit, they should seek a deferral or make arrangements to cover their responsibilities during the absence. Such arrangements must be approved by their program director. Students serving on jury duty will be paid their normal university stipend during the period of service, with the understanding that any compensation received for jury service must be returned to the university if their assistantship responsibilities remain uncovered. If the student makes arrangements to cover their assistantship commitment for the period in which they serve on jury duty, and if those arrangements are approved by their program director, they may keep the jury duty compensation in total. The student may also keep any travel reimbursement fees. 18 Strike Policy for Graduate Assistants In the event of a strike, graduate assistants are expected to fulfill commitments associated with their assistantships. Graduate assistants assigned to teach a course as part of their assistantship agreement are expected to teach the course during a strike. Graduate assistants who choose not to teach can lose their assistantship. If the student’s responsibilities are associated with a course taught by a faculty member and the strike results in the course not being taught, which makes it impossible for the student to fulfill their responsibilities, the student would not be held responsible. Sick Leave/Family Leave for Graduate Assistants Graduate assistants do not accrue vacation, sick leave or other paid time-off. In the event of illness, a graduate assistant shall notify the GA supervisor as soon as possible on each day of such absence. Holidays/UC Closing Policy for Graduate Assistants Graduate assistants are not hired as essential personnel, and thus cannot be required to work during holidays or official UC closings (such as emergency closings due to severe weather, public emergency, etc.). Required weekly hours will be prorated based on the official holidays or closings during that week. Military Duty A graduate assistant who is a member of any reserve component of the United States Armed Forces, who is voluntarily or involuntarily ordered to extended U.S. military service, shall be granted time-off without pay. The graduate assistant should provide to the appropriate program official advance written notice of the call for impending training or active duty. Upon completion of military service or if discharged under honorable conditions, and upon prompt re-registration as a student, the graduate assistant shall be returned to the former assistantship in a timely manner, based upon availability. Due to the temporary nature of graduate assistantships, if the assistantship is eliminated during the student’s absence, then no obligation exists. Termination A graduate assistantship may be terminated at any time with or without cause, unless there is an explicit written contract between the student and the university that provides otherwise. Workers’ Compensation The Ohio Workers’ Compensation Law covers graduate assistants, who are paid by payroll and provides medical, income and survivor benefits in the event of accidental injury, occupational disease or death occurring in the course of, and arising from, employment. Unemployment Graduate assistants are not entitled to unemployment compensation. 19 Social Security, Medicare Tax and Ohio Public Employees Retirement System (OPERS) Please see Exemption from OPERS/Medicare for Student Employees. 174 GRADUATE CREDIT RULE Students receiving any university award (e.g. UGA stipend, GS tuition scholarship) and students who receive funds from the State of Ohio are governed by the requirements and limitations described in the following paragraphs. Any student who becomes ineligible to receive state subsidy is not eligible to receive general funds financial aid (i.e., a university stipend and/or tuition). Since this policy is due to regulations governing state support of the university, exceptions to the policy are not considered. Graduate students who have attempted 174 graduate credit hours at the University of Cincinnati are not eligible for a university award for enrollment at or beyond the 174 hours. Hours attempted include hours for which credit has been awarded, as well as withdrawn courses, audited courses, and hours in progress or incomplete (these graduate credit hours include all courses with grades F, I, UW, SP, IP, UP, W, etc.). All graduate hours attempted at the University of Cincinnati, regardless of program or student status, count toward the 174 total. A student is not eligible for funding beginning with the semester in which said student will reach the 174 attempted hours. For example, if a student has earned 167 graduate credit hours at the University of Cincinnati by the close of summer sessions and registers for (i.e., attempts) 12 credit hours for fall semester, they are ineligible for a university graduate scholarship or fellowship in the fall semester. If a student earned master’s credits at the University of Cincinnati (for either a partial or a full degree), the exact number of these credits are deducted from the 174 credit hour total for which they can receive funding. This is true if the credits are earned at an earlier time and the student returns to the University of Cincinnati to continue graduate education, and it is true regardless of the discipline in which those credits were earned. For example, if a student has earned a master’s degree in engineering and then chooses to pursue a master’s and a doctoral degree in math, the credits earned to get the engineering degree are deducted from the 174 credit hours for which the student can receive state financial support (e.g., fellowships, assistantships, and scholarships). Graduate students who have earned a master’s degree or other equivalent or higher advanced degree at another institution are not eligible for a university scholarship or fellowship once they have attempted 140 graduate credit hours at the University of Cincinnati. If a student enters the University of Cincinnati with a master’s degree from any institution other than the University of Cincinnati, they are credited with 34 graduate credit hours toward the 174 credit hour limit for state funding eligibility. Per Ohio Department of Higher Education policy, Ohio can subsidize up to the remaining 140 credit hours. The 34 credit hours are deducted from the 174, regardless of the discipline and regardless of the graduate level at which the student enters the University of Cincinnati. For example, if a student has earned a master’s degree in engineering at The Ohio State University and then chooses to pursue a master’s and a doctoral degree in math at UC, the credits they earned to get their engineering degree are deducted from the 174 credit hours for which they can receive state financial support in the math program. Note that professional 20 degrees, like a juris doctorate or medical doctorate, do not count as a master’s or higher equivalent for the purpose of comparative funding. Students who enter graduate education at the University of Cincinnati with a professional degree and no other advanced degrees are still eligible to receive up to the 174 credit hours of funding. If a student enters the University of Cincinnati with only partial credit toward a degree from another institution, those credits are not deducted from the 174 total—even if the program they enter at the University of Cincinnati agrees to accept transfer of those credits toward the student’s degree requirements at the University of Cincinnati. The student can still receive state subsidy for up to 174 credit hours earned at the University of Cincinnati beyond those transferred in. Note: For the purposes of this policy, a master’s degree is one awarded by an American institution or a degree of equivalent value from a foreign institution. Students holding a master’s degree from a foreign institution that is the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree in the U.S. will have the higher limit (174). The higher limit will not be affected by a student’s completion of course work short of a master’s degree at another institution. TAXATION OF CINCINNATI GRADUATE AWARDS The university maintains a position that all income, from whatever source, is taxable and may be subject to withholding. The IRS maintains final authority on the taxability of all stipends, and in all cases, the university cannot guarantee that any stipend is tax-exempt. The Graduate College will not review an individual award nor provide legal advice to individual students. In addition, students (not the university) are responsible for the withholding information that they submit on their W-4 forms at the time of appointment. Those students who receive a stipend during any academic semester and are not enrolled for at least half time will have Medicare tax and Ohio Public Employee Retirement System (OPERS) payments deducted from their checks. If a student is enrolled half time or more, they may apply for an exemption from these fees in their program office. No taxes are withheld from fellowships, but students may still have a tax liability and should consult a tax advisor. EXEMPTION FROM OPERS FOR STUDENT EMPLOYEES Employees (including student employees) of Ohio public institutions do not contribute to the federal Social Security system. Student employees’ retirement contributions will be directed to the state retirement plan, the Ohio Public Employees Retirement System (OPERS). Student employees (including graduate assistants and hourly student workers) may be eligible to opt out of OPERS participation when first hired by UC as long as certain requirements are met. See the Student Employees web page on UC’s Human Resources site for the OPERS exemption form and for additional information. EXTERNAL SOURCES OF FUNDING Tuition scholarship and fellowship funding is provided to graduate students by a wide variety of governmental and private sponsors. UC’s Financial Aid website, the ScholarshipUniverse scholarship search application, the Office of Nationally Competitive Awards and local and university libraries are potential sources of information about these funding opportunities. The Office of Nationally Competitive Awards provides workshops, application writing assistance and university endorsement (for applicable awards). Students may also visit the Office of Research 21 for more information on upcoming grant opportunities, grant writing workshops, and searchable research opportunity databases. FEDERAL FINANCIAL AID See the Student Financial Aid website for more information on federal financial aid (including summer aid). The Graduate College does not regulate or audit any outside fellowships or other outside funding a student may receive. However, it is advised that students with outside funding consult with the Financial Aid Office to see if and how the outside funding may or may not affect other Financial Aid eligibility. 22 GRADUATE CREDIT AND GRADES ELIGIBLE CREDITS Credit towards a graduate degree or certificate can only be earned for those courses in this university that are listed as graduate in the Schedule of Classes or which have been approved in writing by appropriate program authority for inclusion in the curriculum. Graduate credit towards a degree will only be granted when a course is included in the graduate career category of the student record in Catalyst. CREDITS REQUIRED TO EARN A GRADUATE DEGREE Graduate degrees at UC each have a stated number of credit hours that must be completed satisfactorily to earn the degree. As described below, there are multiple opportunities where coursework taken prior to matriculation into a degree program may count towards that credit hour total. In all cases, to earn a degree at UC, at least 67% of the relevant coursework credit must be earned while a matriculated student at the University of Cincinnati. Students entering in Fall 2019 or later should make application to their program for such (advanced standing or transfer) credit during their first semester at UC to assure their course of study is optimized. For all students matriculating in Fall 2019 and later, such credit will only be granted if a complete and program-approved application for such credit is submitted to the Graduate College by the end of their first year in the program, or prior to their final semester of study, whichever comes first. This new policy (introduced in AY19-20) is in effect for all students matriculated in Fall 2019 and later. In prior policies, master’s degrees were granted when 50% of graduate credits were completed while matriculated in the graduate program granting the degree, therefore allowing up to 50% of credits to be via advanced standing. Advanced Standing for Graduate Courses Taken Outside of UC a. Programs are permitted to award up to one third of the credits of a UC graduate program through advanced standing (e.g., 10 credits are eligible in a 30 credit hour program or 13 credits in a 40 credit hour program). The relevant number of credits is based on the minimum credits required to earn the advanced degree starting from the minimum degree qualification (usually a baccalaureate degree). Note that for doctoral students the advanced standing credit total will include any use of the ODHE allowance of up to 30 credits for a prior master's degree. b. Any graduate course credits, including those earned from previously earned graduate or undergraduate degrees, are eligible as advanced standing credits. c. Advanced standing can only be offered for courses (including electives) entered in e- curriculum for the UC program. d. Program faculty must evaluate courses for equivalence or comparability prior to granting students Advanced Standing credit for courses taken at another institution, meeting all the following criteria; 1. Courses taken at a recognized University or College 2. Courses taken at the graduate level 3. Requested advanced standing credits must be the lower of the following two choices 23  i. Credits originally earned for the course ii. Credits available in the UC course listed in e-curriculum 4. For 1:1 course equivalency, one or more of the following criteria must be met when compared to the University of Cincinnati course for which Advanced Standing credit is sought: i. Course was taken in the same field with the same title ii. Course had similar topics iii. Course had similar learning outcomes iv. Course assignment and assessment requirements were similar v. Course readings requirements are similar 5. This evaluation process should be documented for each case in which it is applied e. The one third rule doesn’t apply to dual degrees, sequential master's to doctorate programs, or others with shared content that have received approval from the Graduate College. f. Advanced standing credit recommended by program faculty must first be approved by the graduate program director and then submitted for final review by the Graduate College to assure the request complies with the criteria above. Transfer Credit for Graduate Courses Taken at UC a. When leaving one graduate program to join another at UC, all UC graduate credits taken as part of the incomplete program are eligible to use to fulfill requirements in the new program, based on faculty evaluation of the equivalence to courses in the new curriculum and program approval. b. When a student enters a graduate program at UC, non-matriculated UC graduate credits are eligible to be used for the program, if the coursework is listed in e-curriculum as part of the curricular requirements. Subject to program approval, students may transfer up to one third of the credits required to earn their UC graduate degree Programs are permitted to award transfer credit from a prior UC graduate degree if (1) the sum of unique credits to earn both degrees is equal to or greater than the State minimums for each degree type, and (2) the transfer credit courses are part of the curriculum of the new degree program as defined in e-curriculum. Using credit that meets both criteria, up to one third of the credits of the new UC graduate program may be awarded through transfer credit. The relevant number of credits is based on the minimum credits required to earn the advanced degree starting from the minimum degree qualification (usually a baccalaureate degree). Note that for doctoral students the transfer credit total will include any use of the ODHE allowance of up to 30 credits for a prior master’s degree. Course Exemption for Prior Knowledge, Without Credit Faculty in a program have the option to provide students with an examination to determine if accumulated knowledge is sufficient to be exempted from specific courses in a graduate curriculum (e.g., continuing education courses in some professional fields may provide a background that eliminates the need to take introductory courses). The form and content of that examination is at the discretion of the program. When such exemptions are granted, the student does not earn graduate credit for such knowledge. The credits required to complete their UC graduate degree remain unchanged, and the student will take alternative coursework (approved by the graduate program director) to advance their knowledge. 24 Multiple Degree Exemptions a. If the graduate faculty from a UC program has participated in designing and/or presenting the curriculum at another institution, shared degree programs between the institutions can deviate from these rules with prior approval of the Graduate College and their college leadership. In no case will a UC degree be awarded if more than 50% of the curriculum is offered by non-UC faculty. b. Dual degree programs can combine two UC graduate degrees into a single curriculum if approved by the University. Approved dual degree programs can share up to one-third of the combined credits of the two degrees, but the total count of unique credits to earn both degrees must always be equal to or greater than the State minimums for each degree type. Enrolling in Non-UC Classes through the Greater Cincinnati Collegiate Connection The University of Cincinnati is a member of the Greater Cincinnati Collegiate Connection. GC3 classes are those not generally available at the University of Cincinnati but which can be used to satisfy degree requirements. The student must have met all tuition commitments at the University of Cincinnati and must observe all regulations of the host institution. For additional information, participating institutions, and registration instructions, consult the Greater Cincinnati Collegiate Connection page of the Registrar’s Office website. Approval is at the discretion of the program. Graduate Credit for Undergraduate Students Any program may allow juniors or seniors to register for graduate courses for graduate credit before those students have completed the baccalaureate degree. It is recommended, if the program permits such registration, to limit the privilege to students with senior status and a grade point average of at least 3.000 (higher in some programs). This is evidenced by a written request from the student that is signed by an authorized member of the graduate program. Upon approval by the graduate program and the course instructor, graduate credit will be given for the courses. A maximum of 12 semester graduate credits can be earned in this manner. Credit will not be given toward both graduate and undergraduate degrees for the same course. Graduate Credit Earned in 6000-Level Courses In fall 2016, all 6000-level courses became graduate only. In the past, 6000-level courses were available for either undergraduate or graduate credit (to earn graduate credit, students selected the graduate level designation (G) in these courses, indicating that additional work was required beyond that required of undergraduates in the course). PLEASE NOTE: with the transition to the new use of course numbers, there will be no change to the graduate (or undergraduate) credits earned previously in the pre-fall-2016 version of these courses. GRADING Final Exams Exams are held during the last week of the semester after classes have ended. For each term’s full final examination schedule, consult the Calendars page of the Registrar’s Office website. 25 Make-up Final Exams Special policies may govern the taking of missed final exams. Students and faculty members should check the college office or program office for specific details. Every student is responsible for the material presented in their class. Arrangements for make-up work and tests are determined by the instructor. Absences incurred by students officially representing the university will be excused, provided that official notification of such absence has been given in advance to the instructor. Grade Reports End-of-term final grades may be viewed in the Catalyst student portal immediately following submission of final grades by the instructor. Grade reports include total graduate hours and hours for the current semester. The student’s grade report differentiates between “units taken” (course credits the student enrolled in but did not complete successfully or which are still pending a final grade) and “credits passed” (course credits successfully completed with a final grade other than F). These values are posted on the student’s transcript as attempted hours and earned hours. A graduate grade point average (GPA) is calculated each semester. Approved transfer credits from other institutions are included in the sum of credits earned, but grades for those credits are not included in the GPA. All graduate work, regardless of the University of Cincinnati college in which the work was done, is accumulated in these tallies. For this reason, if a student record includes UC graduate courses that do not count towards the degree, this GPA may differ from the calculation of GPA in program coursework (a minimum 3.000 program GPA is essential to earn a graduate degree). The I incomplete grade is awarded as a course grade (without grade point assignment) at the end of a term when a significant portion of course work has been satisfactorily completed, but not all of the required course work has been completed. The incomplete grade is appropriate when the completed course work is of passing quality and the student has had such hardship that completion of the remaining course work within the term timeline would present an additional hardship. The instructor who assigns the incomplete grade should set a specific date by which the student must complete the remaining course work, recognizing that time must be available for any final evaluation and grade change to be made, prior to the deadline when the grade converts to an F. The deadline is one year to the last day of exams. (Please check the Office of the Registrar’s website for the specific date.) The student must work with the instructor to develop an agreement that indicates the date by which the remaining course work is to be completed and submitted to the instructor. The instructor is not obligated to provide the student with a full year to complete the remaining course work. If the remaining course work is completed within the time period agreed upon by the instructor and the student, and that completion occurs within the one year, then the instructor will submit a change of grade online (in Catalyst) based on the quality of the remaining work. If no specific time for completion is set by the instructor, the student has one year (from the end of the term in which the incomplete was assigned) to complete the remaining course work and submit it to the instructor in time for evaluation of the work and a final grade to be approved by the Registrar. If the coursework is not completed within the one-year period (i.e., one year from the end of the term in which the I grade was assigned), the I grade automatically converts to an I/F grade which affects the student’s GPA the same as the grade of F. For the complete graduate grading scale and a definition of all grades, consult the Grading Scales and Definitions page of the Registrar’s Office website. 26 Grades Assigned to Research Courses That Are Repeated If students are working on dissertation or thesis research, they should be registered in the appropriate research course (e.g., Individual Dissertation or Individual Master’s Thesis), and the course work should be given a final grade each semester. The use of P/F for such courses is strongly recommended to avoid undue influence on GPA due to individual grading practices and the large amount of research credit awarded, but it is recognized that some programs will want to use letter grades. “Placeholder” grades such as SP and NG should not be used. Regardless of the grading scheme selected, it must be consistently applied across an entire program. If a program faculty cannot agree on a single grading scheme, the program must use the P/F choice. Students should be graded for each semester based on their progress and achievements in that semester. Note: The definition of a “research course” is a course outside of formal class work or instruction that allows a student to be registered as a graduate student while they are working independently on their thesis or dissertation under the guidance of their advisor or dissertation committee. This policy also applies to internships and other multiple semester or series courses. Pass/Fail Grades An instructor may request approval for pass/fail grading for an individual student in their class prior to the first day of class. A graduate student can take a course on a pass/fail basis (P or U grade) when approved by their advisor and instructor. An instructor is not required to accept a student on such a basis. Grade Changes A change of grade is only appropriate for an I, an NG, an SP/UP, or an error made by the instructor. SP/UP grades must be converted to a final grade by the end of the following semester. Instructors may change an I or NG grade online in Catalyst for approximately one year (the interval extends from the initial grading semester to the last working day of the same term the following year). To request a change of grade for a non-research course for graduate credit after this period, or an F grade any time, the instructor must do an official, paper change of grade form and forward to the Registrar’s Office. Previously recorded grades may not be changed to W or I after the close of the term. Both I and W grades must be awarded while the course and semester are still in progress and cannot be awarded retroactively. W reflects an official withdrawal that took place by the deadline outlined in the academic calendar, and I indicates work remains to be completed and the student did not earn a final grade. Students cannot withdraw from a class retroactively or be given additional opportunities to seek a different final grade retroactively. If an F is in a non- required course or the required course has since been retaken for a passing grade, the Program Director at certification may request a waiver of the F grade from the Associate University Dean of the Graduate College. No Grade Replacements for Graduate Students Please note, if a graduate student re-registers and re-takes a course, both grades will be included in the student’s overall GPA. There are no grade replacements at the graduate level. The process to make a grade change cannot be initiated by a student. The course instructor of record must send the form. At no time should a student be in possession of a change of grade 27 form. Note: that an I/F grade is governed by the same policies that govern the F grade and is weighted into the student’s GPA in the same fashion. 28 MAINTAINING GRADUATE STUDENT STATUS Maintaining graduate student status signifies that the student is actively engaged in making progress towards their degree and meeting program requirements. Graduate status determines which students may use facilities of the university, may participate in the university governance process and student organizations, and are covered by the Student Code of Conduct and the grievance process. A University of Cincinnati graduate student must hold the equivalent of a baccalaureate or higher degree and must have been accepted for admission into graduate study by the appropriate graduate program. MINIMUM CREDITS/REGISTRATION REQUIREMENTS To maintain graduate status at the University of Cincinnati, students must register at UC for at least one graduate credit that contributes to degree requirements (as determined by the graduate program) in an academic year. If the student is registered for at least one graduate credit in the academic year (fall through summer), they will maintain graduate student status for the entire academic year. Credits that are audited or in which a student receives a W, UW or F do not count toward the minimum credit requirement. Any student that does not register in the fall of an academic year and has not registered for the previous two academic years will automatically be exited from their program. A student whose status has thus automatically terminated will no longer be considered a graduate student but may seek reinstatement (see Reinstatements). Also note that students wishing to use many UC resources, such as university housing, campus laboratories, office space, equipment, campus recreation center, computer labs, etc. may need to be registered. Students should check with specific facilities for their particular requirements. Dual Degree Programs In dual degree programs, students must be registered for at least one graduate credit that contributes to degree requirements in one of the two programs (as determined by the program) during the academic year in which they graduate with their dual degrees. FULL-TIME COURSE LOAD Students must be registered for 10 or more graduate credits each semester to be considered full- time students, 12 if holding a university sponsored graduate assistantship or fellowship. Audit or undergraduate credits do not count toward full-time status and cannot be supported by a University Graduate Award. PART-TIME COURSE LOAD Students who can devote less than full time to graduate study may register for the number of graduate credits judged by their program advisors to represent the appropriate fraction of a full- time load. However, doctoral students must satisfy the Board of Trustees residency requirement, which requires that they have one year of full-time study, which is defined as being enrolled for at least 10 graduate credits in their program in each of two semesters (including summer semester) during a span of three consecutive semesters. Full-time UC employees using their tuition remission benefit to complete a part-time doctoral program may request a waiver of this requirement from the Associate Dean of the Graduate College. (See Doctoral Degrees Policies and Procedures, Course of Study.) 29 REDUCED COURSE LOAD (INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS) Once an international student has finished all required course work and will no longer be enrolling full time, she/he may choose to enroll with a reduced course load. Visit the F-1 Students page on the UC International Services website, referring to the “Enrolling part-time as a graduate student who has finished all course requirements” section for the link to the form and more information. MEETING PROGRAM REQUIREMENTS Students who continue on active status in their program without interruption are responsible for meeting all current requirements, including requirements that are revised since the student first entered the program. Students readmitted into their program are responsible for meeting the program requirements applicable at the time of readmission. MINIMUM ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE The Graduate College requires that a student must have an aggregate grade point average (GPA) of at least 3.000 to obtain a graduate certificate or degree at the University of Cincinnati. The GPA used for this purpose should aggregate graduate-level coursework completed since the student’s matriculation into the particular degree program from which the student seeks graduation, and only courses taken that are applicable to the degree/certificate count towards this GPA. Transfer graduate credits may also be accepted at the discretion of the degree program (and within Graduate College limits), and any transfer credit coming from courses taken at the University of Cincinnati will contribute to the GPA certified for graduation. Please note that programs establish minimum academic standards that may exceed the overall university standards provided above, so students need to be aware of their program requirements. Note that there is no grade replacement for graduate students, so any failed graduate courses remain in the student record. However, if a student retakes a failed course and obtains a passing grade, and if the GPA calculated without that original failing grade is above 3.000, then the program can petition the Graduate College for a waiver of the GPA requirement for graduation. Multiple failing grades, or multiple attempts to pass a course, are examples of why a petition may be denied. INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS, MAINTAINING IMMIGRATION STATUS The student has responsibility for maintaining their immigration status. Key information on maintaining immigration status on the F-1 Students page on the UC International Services website. TIME TO DEGREE Time to Degree and Extensions The Board of Trustees stipulates that all degree requirements must be completed within a defined span of years starting from the date of matriculation into the degree program, regardless of whether students are full time or part time. This span is 5 years for the master's degree and 9 years for the doctoral degree. Under extenuating circumstances, a program may petition, on 30 behalf of the student, for extension of the time limit for attaining the degree. Prior to the program petitioning the Graduate College for an extension, the student must communicate with the student’s program advisor and/or director to review the student’s degree completion to date and form a plan for degree completion. All this information should be included in a petition submitted to the Graduate College, which will review this petition and make a final decision. Students who have not completed degree requirements by their time-to-degree limit are on inactive status regardless of course registration in each academic year. Such students are required to apply for an extension of their time-to-degree. Reinstatements Students who have not been registered for at least one graduate credit hour at UC that contributes to degree requirements (as determined by the graduate program) in an academic year (fall-summer) are considered inactive. Reinstatements are available to students who have been inactive for less than three academic years. Students who have not been enrolled for any credits in their graduate program for three or more consecutive academic years are not eligible for reinstatement and must apply for readmission to the university. (See Readmission.) Readmission is processed via the reinstatement petition in Gradtracker. Applications submitted by the student via the admissions system will not be accepted. To request reinstatement, a program must petition the Graduate College on behalf of the student. Prior to the program petitioning the Graduate College for a reinstatement, the student must communicate with the student’s program advisor and/or director to review the student’s degree completion to date and form a plan for degree completion. The program coordinator, director or advisor will begin the reinstatement process in Gradtracker. The originator of the petition in Gradtracker will upload documents in one pdf to include degree completion information to date and a written plan for degree completion. The Graduate College will review the packet and if approved the student will also need to approve the petition and fee. If a student wishes to be reinstated so they can register and take classes, reinstatement petitions must be submitted in Gradtracker prior to the start of the first day of the term to be eligible for reinstatement in that term. Petitions received before the census date (the 15th calendar day of the term), the term may be considered for the current term. Petitions received after the census date will be considered for the following term. If a student wishes to be reinstated so they can graduate without taking any further classes, petitions for reinstatement (and extensions) must be submitted in Gradtracker no later than 3 weeks prior to graduation for the student to be certified for graduation in that semester. Petitions received after this time will not be approved in time for graduation that same semester. Late petitions will be held through the next processing period and a decision will be granted in time for the next graduation. A reinstatement fee equal to the current tuition for one graduate credit for each of the unregistered years up to a maximum of 3 years is assessed. The reinstatement fee will be added to the student’s bursar account and will become part of the student bill. Reinstatement fees are due 30 days after formal approval unless a payment plan is agreed to with the bursar’s office. If the fee is not paid by the due date, service charges may accrue, a block may be placed on future registrations and/or on the release of UC diplomas and official transcripts, and the account may be sent to collections. 31 Readmission Graduate students who have been inactive (not enrolled in their program) for three or more academic years are not eligible for reinstatement and must apply for readmission to the university. Readmission does not change the student’s original entry date. Time to degree will be calculated from the student’s first entry date. The program may petition the Graduate College on behalf of the student for readmission. Additionally, if the student has exceeded time to degree limits, the program should also petition for an extension with the readmission to specify the term in which the student will graduate. The readmission process is an opportunity for the program to carefully consider the former student’s progress and length of time between the student’s inception into the program and completion of remaining requirements. This may result in readmission, readmission with conditions, or denial of readmission. Prior to the program petitioning for a readmission, the student must communicate with the student’s program advisor and/or director to review the student’s degree completion to date and form a written plan for completing remaining degree requirements and removing any standing impediments to graduation, including any I/F, F, NG grades and courses required for graduation. This plan should include a timeline that describes the student's progress toward degree completion to date. The program coordinator, director or advisor will begin the readmission process in Gradtracker and will upload documents in one pdf to include degree completion information to date and a written plan for degree completion. The Graduate College will review the packet and if approved, the student will need to approve the petition and fee as well. Upon approval, the student must pay a readmission fee equivalent to in-state tuition in effect at the time of readmission for three graduate credits. The student will also be asked to complete, sign, and return the supplemental form for residency requirements to the Registrar’s office. Leaves of Absence Under special circumstances, graduate students may apply for leave of absence from formal study at the university for a specific period up to one year. Assuming appropriate documentation is provided, the circumstances justifying a leave include but are not limited to personal or family medical conditions, call to active military duty, parental leave, or death in immediate family. The rationale must be documented by the applicant. An approved leave of absence preserves the student’s status in the degree program, and the time off will not be counted against the time limits for awarding degrees. Consequently, registration is not required during the leave period. A leave may be renewed past the first year, for up to a maximum of five years, depending on the individual circumstances. Renewal of a leave is subject to the approval of the program, college, and the Graduate College. While the Graduate College leave of absence is only necessary for students who will be unable to register for a full academic year, programs may have more strict and specific registration policies and leave of absence policies. Students should also consult their program handbook if there is a legitimate need not to register for any amount of time. 32 To apply for a leave of absence, a student must complete the Request for Leave of Absence Form and upload the appropriate documentation (e.g., doctor’s letter or military orders) through Gradtracker. The program will approve through Gradtracker as well. Once the program has approved the request, the Graduate College will review the petition and if approved, the student and program will receive an email notification through their UC email. Note: A student on a leave of absence is placed on inactive status and their Catalyst record is discontinued, to be reactivated upon their return. While on inactive status, they will not be eligible for student health insurance and may be unable to use many UC resources. Students with financial aid or student loans should confer with the Financial Aid Office prior to requesting a leave of absence to ascertain the consequences of a leave on their loan status. Students should also be aware that any scholarships or assistantships are not guaranteed to be available when a student returns from a leave of absence. Withdrawal from Program Students must notify their program in writing and copy the Graduate Admissions Program Manager regarding their intent to withdraw from their programs. Dismissal from Program Students must consult with individual programs concerning dismissal policies. If a program dismisses a student, the program must copy the Graduate Admissions Program Manager on the notification to the student. 33 MASTER’S DEGREE POLICIES AND PROCEDURES COURSE OF STUDY The course of study for the master’s degree is planned with the advisor and is subject to approval by the program graduate committee or its equivalent. It must show a reasonable degree of concentration on interrelated subjects. Programs will recommend students for degrees only after students have developed and demonstrated the necessary knowledge and skills and have fulfilled all other university requirements. At least once an academic year, the graduate program director or the graduate student’s advisor shall inform the student in writing of their academic progress in the master’s degree program. An annual Academic Progress Report or some other form of formal evaluation of progress is required throughout each student’s program. Students must take a minimum of one graduate credit that contributes to degree requirements (as determined by the graduate program) per academic year (fall-summer) to maintain active status. If a student does not maintain active status, they may apply for reinstatement within three years or apply for readmission to their program thereafter. There are fees associated with these steps. (See Maintaining Graduate Student Status, Reinstatements and Readmission.) CREDIT HOUR REQUIREMENTS The University of Cincinnati is on a semester system. Although qualification for the master’s degree is not based exclusively upon the completion of a definite number of hours of course work, the satisfactorily completed graduate work must consist of the equivalent of a minimum of one academic year of full-time graduate study consisting of at least 30 graduate semester credit hours, including any thesis or capstone project. Credits earned in professional law or medicine programs are not applicable to the 30-credit minimum. CANDIDACY There is no formal candidacy status for the master’s degree. However, some programs do have defense requirements, so each student should confer with their advisor or program director to ascertain the requirements of their specific program. CULMINATING EXPERIENCE: THESES and CAPSTONES Every degree requires a culminating experience that is designed to integrate and apply the knowledge and learning gained from the curriculum, and demonstrate mastery of the subject matter in the degree. A master’s thesis is required by some programs, and a master’s capstone project/experience is required in others. Each master’s degree student undergoes an individual evaluation process at the end of their program. Thesis Preparation, Evaluation and Submission Process Preparation of a thesis demonstrates the student’s ability to communicate and to evaluate critically. Information about preparing an electronic thesis is available on the Graduate College 34 website. The student should consult with their program office for additional forms required other than what appears on the graduation checklist. A student must note any relevant deadlines defined by their program, and work with their program leadership to form a thesis committee composed of at least two UC faculty members, at least one of whom must be a member of the university graduate faculty. The thesis committee can guide the student in their exploration of the topic of the master’s thesis, and is responsible for final evaluation of the thesis. The student must submit the completed thesis to the thesis committee for critical evaluation, by the deadline required by the program or their thesis committee. Students who have written a thesis are expected by the Graduate College per their program requirements to make a public announcement of their thesis defense, including time, date, and title of the public presentation. The format for thesis evaluation is decided by the academic unit offering the graduate degree. Faculty with emerit status may remain on the committee if they were members when the proposal was accepted and were full-time tenured, university graduate faculty. A faculty member originally on a student’s committee who leaves UC to take an academic position elsewhere may also continue to serve on the student’s committee if both the faculty member and the student agree to continue the relationship. However, neither an emerit professor nor a faculty member from another institution may serve as chair of the committee, since they are no longer eligible to be university graduate faculty. Once a thesis has been approved by their committee, the candidate for the master’s degree must submit an electronic thesis by following the current instructions online at the Graduate Collge's Graduation page. Be careful to adhere to any deadlines for submission, or graduation will be delayed. Capstone Process Master’s students who are not required to complete a thesis should consult their academic programs about the requirements and procedures for the capstone experience in their programs. In some programs, the final capstone event may be in the form of a comprehensive exam or research project; in others, the final evaluation may appropriately be a recital, performance, or exhibition. The specific nature of the final evaluation is determined by the academic unit offering the master’s degree program, but it must include evaluation by full-time faculty at the University of Cincinnati. If questioned, the appropriateness of a final evaluation will be decided by the University Graduate Council. GRADUATION One semester prior to the semester in which a student anticipates graduating, the student should: • confer with their program office staff; • consult the Graduate College’s website for deadlines, instructions on submitting their electronic thesis; • visit the Graduate Collge’s website to determine if they are defined as a thesis or non- thesis student, or consult with their program; and • talk to advisor about whether an embargo is needed. 35 Application to Graduate Students must: (1) complete academic requirements and (2) complete the official online Application to Graduate by the deadline for the semester in which they expect to graduate. NOTE: for all graduate students, the application for graduation is started at the Graduation page, and not within Catalyst. Start an application for graduation early in the semester you plan to graduate. Deadlines posted on the Graduation Deadlines page are firm and failure to meet them will delay students’ graduation until the following semester, when they must then submit a new application for their revised graduation date. A student graduating from a dual degree program must make a formal application for graduation for each program (see details in next section). All students applying to graduate will be assessed a non-refundable graduation application fee. The fee will be assessed each semester a student applies for graduation. Students who have applied for graduation and learn later they will not be graduating must be removed from the graduation list before they can apply again for any future semesters (programs must notify the Graduation Program Manager to remove a student). When the application for graduation is complete, the student receives an email receipt for payment of the graduation application from the registrar’s office. If this receipt is not received, promptly notify your program, as your graduation application may not be completed. Some PhD programs incorporate a master’s degree. Students should contact their program for help in adding this additional degree. Graduation from Dual Degree Programs The online Application to Graduate will allow a student to apply for graduation from both degree programs in an official dual degree program. Each of the two programs must follow and complete the certification processes and procedures necessary to facilitate a student’s graduation from their own program. In dual degree programs, students must be registered for at least one graduate credit that contributes to degree requirements in one of the two programs (as determined by the program) during the academic year in which they graduate with their dual degrees. Certification for Graduation (Certify Online) The finalization and submission of a student’s Application to Graduate will activate the process by which the student will be certified for graduation, and the following requirements must be met. The student should confer with their program office one-two weeks after the application period has ended to assure that any problems related to these requirements (reinstatements/ extensions, or grade changes) are resolved in a timely manner and avoid delay of graduation until a subsequent semester. Specifically, the student’s records will be reviewed to verify satisfaction of the following requirements: • finalization and submission of their online Graduation Application by the deadline; 36  • instructor’s submission of passing grades for their final semester credits; • removal of all I grades from their transcript; • removal of all UP/SP grades from unapproved courses and/or the final semester in the approved courses were taken; • assignment of letter grades rather than UP/SP grades for courses in the final semester of the student’s program; • removal of previously awarded NG grades and blank grade awards; • confirmation of satisfactory repetition or waiver of required courses in which an F was originally received; • confirmation of completion of work and changes of I grades within the one-year limit; • confirmation that the student was registered for at least one credit in their graduate program in each academic year, including the year of expected graduation; • confirmation that the student completed degree requirements within the prescribed time- to-degree; • satisfactory completion of at least 30 graduate credits completed to the satisfaction of the student’s program; • completion of all program requirements for the degree; • 3.000 GPA has been earned while a matriculated graduate student in the program; • if a thesis is required, upload the electronic thesis (ETD) with chair approval by the deadline date, which is posted on the Graduation Deadlines website. Note: The requirements explained here are university requirements. Students must contact their program’s office for any additional program-level requirements or deadlines that must be completed prior to graduation. Please see the Doctoral Hooding and Master’s Recognition Ceremony section for details on the event. CONTINUING TO A DOCTORAL PROGRAM For a UC master’s student continuing to a doctoral program in the same program area, the student will fill out the application in the graduate admissions application system, and the graduate application fee is waived. 37 DOCTORAL DEGREE POLICIES AND PROCEDURES COURSE OF STUDY The course of study for the doctoral degree is arranged with each student by their advisor and reviewed by the program’s graduate committee or its equivalent. The program should provide a concentration and breadth of study for the student to develop competence in research, scholarship, teaching, and professional performance in general, with knowledge of their chosen specialty in relation to allied branches of learning. A written assessment of performance for each doctoral student is required at the end of their first year; an annual Academic Progress Report or some other form of formal evaluation of progress is required throughout each student’s program. CREDIT HOUR REQUIREMENTS The doctoral degree will be granted for no less than the equivalent of three years of full-time graduate study. Individual program requirements vary, but eligibility for graduation typically requires a minimum of 90 graduate credits beyond the bachelor’s degree. Doctoral students with a prior master’s degree may petition their program to allow up to 30 transfer credits from the master’s degree towards their doctoral degree. Degree credits must include at least 7 hours in dissertation research. Some program credit requirements may be higher. The last 30 credits must be completed under the direction of University of Cincinnati graduate faculty. The degree will not be granted solely on the basis of the accumulation of the required number of credits. A program will recommend students for degrees only after they have developed the necessary intellectual maturity and have fulfilled all other requirements of the program and the university. RESIDENCY AS FULL-TIME STUDENT Prior to admission to doctoral candidacy, all doctoral students shall complete a residency requirement by enrolling in 10 graduate credit hours (12 if funded by a Graduate Assistantship) per semester for two out of three consecutive semesters of study (including summer). Part-time students are not exempt from enrollment requirements to achieve residency. However, full-time UC employees using their tuition remission benefit to complete a part-time doctoral program may request a waiver of this requirement from the Associate Dean of the Graduate College. CANDIDACY, QUALIFYING EXAM The Graduate College does not currently track time to candidacy, but encourages programs to implement candidacy exams early in their programs to allow the students optimal feedback on their aspirations and research. Doctoral students are required to complete a program certification process according to the program’s established standards. The student must have at least a 3.000 grade point average in doctoral coursework and fulfill all other pre-candidacy requirements specified by the doctoral program in which the student is enrolled. Upon completion of these requirements, the student will receive a formal letter from the Graduate College informing the student of admission to candidacy. 38 UNIVERSITY GRADUATE FACULTY ROLE In accordance with the university’s Board of Trustees’ rule (50-77-11) (B) (2), only university graduate faculty are permitted to chair thesis or dissertation committees. The Graduate College appropriately identifies members of the university graduate faculty. Faculty members are nominated for graduate-faculty status by the program most closely aligned with the academic unit holding their primary academic appointment, and with the approval of their college dean or associate dean in charge of graduate education (from whom the nomination should arrive to the Graduate College). Faculty members holding any type of faculty appointment may be eligible for college-initiated nomination to the graduate faculty, the decision to be made based on an evaluation of the individual curriculum vitae and research and creative profile of the nominee. Criteria for nomination are formulated by individual programs and used by the Graduate College in adjudication. DISSERTATION Each PhD and EdD student must produce and defend a dissertation showing high scholarly achievement based on their original research. The student is required to submit an electronic document as evidence of this research. Students in all other doctoral programs should consult their academic programs regarding requirements and procedures for the capstone experience required in their programs. Dissertation Advisor and Committee When the student has been admitted into doctoral candidacy and has selected a dissertation subject and dissertation advisor, a dissertation committee should be appointed as soon as possible. The dissertation advisor must be qualified to serve as the chair of the dissertation committee, meaning this faculty member must be a member of the university graduate faculty and all members of the committee will be appointed by the Graduate College upon recommendation of the program director or director of graduate studies (in consultation with the committee chair and student). Students have the right to request a change in the committee but must do so in consultation with the graduate program director and their program must make the change in GradTracker. Preferably, the dissertation committee will include at least one person from outside the program, who might be faculty from the University of Cincinnati or another institution. A dissertation committee must be composed of a minimum of three UC faculty members. Members of the university graduate faculty are eligible to serve on all thesis and dissertation committees. In addition, all tenured and tenure-track faculty members may serve on all thesis and dissertation committees (even if they are not members of the university graduate faculty, meaning they may not serve in the chair role and cannot act as primary advisors). Other types of UC faculty members may serve on committees if the appointing unit demonstrates that their expertise is beneficial for the dissertation project. Programs should make such requests to the Graduate College in advance, to be ascertained on a case-by-case basis. Neither an emerit faculty member nor a faculty member from another institution may serve as the chair of the committee. Emerit faculty may remain on the committee if they were members when the proposal was accepted. A faculty member originally on a student’s committee who leaves UC to take an academic position elsewhere may also continue to serve on the student’s committee if both the faculty member and the student agree to continue the relationship. If a non-UC faculty member or appropriate professional practitioner has special expertise in a dissertation topic, 39 such a person may be added to the dissertation committee if they are nominated by the candidate and approved by both the chairperson of the dissertation committee, the director of graduate studies for the academic unit involved and the Graduate College. All such individuals serve as a full voting member of the dissertation committee without compensation from either the university or the candidate and would serve in addition to the minimum number of three qualified full-time UC faculty. A copy of the completed dissertation must be submitted to each committee member for critical evaluation, with sufficient time for review as determined by the dissertation committee. If it is considered satisfactory with respect to form and content by the committee, a final defense of the dissertation can be scheduled. Final Defense of Dissertation Students should check with their program office for the final deadline for their dissertation defense. The student’s final defense of the dissertation will be open to the public and all members of the academic community. Students are required to enter details of their dissertation defense, such as time, date, and location, online at the Graduate College website through the Graduation checklist steps. Begin at the Graduation webpage. One can also browse scheduled dissertation defenses by visiting the Upcoming Dissertation Defenses page. The candidate answers questions posed by members of the committee and other members of the audience following an oral presentation of their dissertation. At the conclusion of the defense, the committee will withdraw, make a decision with regard to the acceptability of the dissertation and its defense, and report its decision to the candidate. At least ¾ of the voting members of the dissertation committee (including at least one representative of each major area involved, in the case of interdisciplinary programs) must approve the dissertation. When the student’s dissertation committee chair has approved a defense, the student should assure that they have met all requirements for graduation including those in the graduation information obtained online. Use of a Moderator Although an outside moderator is not required, a moderator may be assigned by the Graduate College dean upon the request of the candidate, the chairperson of the dissertation committee, or the person empowered to approve the composition of a dissertation committee (the director of graduate studies for the academic unit involved). Moderators should be members of the university graduate faculty from outside the academic unit involved. The duties of the moderator are limited to observing the oral defense of the dissertation and reporting in writing to the Graduate College dean on the academic propriety of the proceedings. Submission of Dissertation After a dissertation has been approved, the candidate for the doctoral degree must submit their electronic dissertation by following the current instructions found at the Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Information webpage. Students in all other doctoral programs should consult their academic programs for the capstone experience required in their programs. Deadlines are posted at the Graduation Deadlines page. • All thesis/dissertations must be electronically submitted by the student and approved by the advisor. Students log in via the link available on the Graduation webpage. 40  • Advisors are sent an email when the student submits for their approval, and the advisor then logs in to review/approve. • Once approved by the chair, the student is notified by email. • A Graduate College approval email is sent to the student once reviewed. • The program is copied on all email correspondence during the Electronic Thesis/Dissertation (ETD) approval process. GRADUATION One semester prior to the semester in which a student anticipates graduating, the student should: 1. Confer with their program office staff. 2. Consult the Graduation page on the Graduate College’s website for deadlines, instructions on submitting their electronic dissertation, and doctoral hooding ceremony information. 3. Talk to advisor about whether an embargo is needed. Application to Graduate Students must: (1) complete academic requirements and (2) complete the official online Application to Graduate by the deadline for the semester in which they expect to graduate. Deadlines are firm and failure to meet them will delay students’ graduation until the following semester, when they must then submit a new application for their revised graduation date. All students applying to graduate will be assessed a non-refundable graduation application fee. The fee will be assessed each semester a student applies for graduation. Dual Degree Programs Graduation The online Application to Graduate will allow a student to apply for graduation from both degree programs in a dual degree program. Each of the two programs must follow the certification processes and procedures necessary to facilitate the student’s graduation from their own program. In dual degree programs, students must be registered for at least one graduate credit that contributes to degree requirements in one of the two programs (as determined by the program) during the academic year in which they graduate with dual degrees. Graduation Requirements for Doctoral Degrees Students must be registered for at least one graduate credit that contributes to degree requirements (as determined by the graduate program) during the academic year in which they graduate from that program. Doctoral students must also complete degree requirements within a nine-year period unless they have an approved extension (see Maintaining Graduate Student Status, Time to Degree). They should contact their program offices for any additional program requirements or deadlines to be completed prior to graduation. Certification for Graduation (Certify Online) Finalization and submission of a student’s Application to Graduate will activate the process by which the student will be certified for graduation, and the following requirements have been met. 41 The student should confer with their program office one-two weeks after the application period has ended to assure that any problems related to these requirements are resolved in a timely manner and avoid delay of graduation until a subsequent semester. Specifically, the student’s records will be reviewed to verify satisfaction of the following requirements: • finalization and submission of their online Application to Graduate by the deadline; • instructor’s submission of passing grades for final semester credits; • removal of all I grades from transcript; • Removal of previously earned NG grades and blank grade awards - removal of all UP/SP grades from unapproved courses and/or the final semester in which the courses were taken; • assignment of letter grades rather than UP/SP grades for courses in the final semester of the student’s program; • confirmation of satisfactory repetition or waiver of required courses in which an F was originally received; • confirmation of completion of work and changes of I grades within the one-year limit; • confirmation that the student was registered for at least one credit in the graduate program in each academic year, including the year of expected graduation; • confirmation that the student reached candidacy and has a valid dissertation committee; • degree requirements completed within prescribed time-to-degree; • satisfactory completion of sufficient graduate credits. In general, doctoral degrees require at least 7 research credits (many programs have higher requirements), within a total of at least 90 graduate credits for students who do not have a prior master’s degree, or require a total of at least 60 credits for students beyond the master’s degree. Please note that individual program credit requirements can vary widely. • completion of all program requirements for the degree; • 3.000 GPA has been earned while matriculated in the graduate program; • if a dissertation is required, upload the electronic dissertation (ETD), following the instructions on the Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Information page, for chair approval by the deadline. Note: The requirements explained here are university requirements. Students must contact their program office for any additional program-level requirements or deadlines that must be completed prior to graduation. GRADUATE CERTIFICATE VERIFICATION FOR UC TRANSCRIPT ENDORSEMENT In order for students to have their UC transcript endorsed with an earned certificate, students must apply for graduation and the program must approve the record through certify online just like the master's or doctoral students. DOCTORAL HOODING AND MASTER’S RECOGNITION CEREMONY Doctoral and master’s students who are graduating or who have graduated during the academic year will receive an invitation from the Dean of the Graduate College to participate in the university’s prestigious Doctoral Hooding and Master’s Recognition Ceremony held each semester. Please visit the commencement ceremony’s website for up-to-date details or 42 the Graduate College’s Graduation webpage. This is a joyous occasion in which students celebrate their accomplishment with family and friends as they are recognized by faculty and university leadership. Doctoral participants will be adorned with their hoods during the ceremony, by either their faculty mentor or the dean of their college. Graduates must confirm their intent to participate by reserving a seat online for the celebratory event and providing current home and email addresses for notification purposes. If you wish to be hooded by your faculty mentor, discuss the date with them to make sure they can attend. 43 INSTITUTIONAL RULES, POLICIES, AND PROCEDURES PROGRAM STANDARDS This Graduate Handbook clarifies minimum university-level requirements and policies that apply to all graduate students throughout the University of Cincinnati. Beyond these, each student is also expected to adhere to requirements, policies, and procedures specific to their own degree program and college. All graduate programs must publish in writing in accessible format the minimum academic standards for each graduate program offered, including the following: • minimum grade point average, including grades earned in required courses; • acceptable grade distribution, including grades earned in required courses; • nature and number of programmatic examinations, such as preliminary or qualifying, and the consequences of failing all or part of each examination; • specified research requirements; • a time-related definition of normal progress for all full- and part-time students; • standards and procedures for the mandatory annual review of academic performance; • standards and procedures for probation, suspension, and dismissal from the program. RECORDS PRIVACY, FERPA, AND THE RIGHT TO REVIEW The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 (FERPA), is the federal law that governs the release of and access to student education records. FERPA affords students certain rights with respect to their education records. For the complete FERPA information, consult the FERPA and Records Privacy page of the Registrar’s Office website. NOTICE OF NON-DISCRIMINATION The University of Cincinnati does not discriminate on the basis of disability, race, color, religion, national origin, ancestry, medical condition, genetic information, marital status, parental status (including status as a foster parent), sex, age, sexual orientation, veteran status, military status (past, present, or future), or gender identity and expression in its programs and activities. The university does not tolerate discrimination, harassment, or retaliation on these bases and takes steps to ensure that students, employees, and third parties are not subject to a hostile environment in university programs or activities. The university responds promptly and effectively to allegations of discrimination, harassment, and retaliation. It promptly conducts investigations and takes appropriate action, including disciplinary action, against individuals found to have violated its policies, as well as provides appropriate remedies to complainants and the campus community. The university takes immediate action to end a hostile environment if one has been created, prevent its recurrence, and remedy the effects of any hostile environment on affected members of the campus community. UC is committed to the ideal of universal Web accessibility and strives to provide an accessible Web presence that enables all university community members and visitors full access to 44 information provided on its websites. Every effort has been made to make these pages as accessible as possible in accordance with the applicable guidelines. The University of Cincinnati provides free aids and services to people with disabilities to communicate effectively with us, such as qualified sign language interpreters and written information in other formats (large print, audio, accessible electronic formats, other formats). The University of Cincinnati also provides free language services to people whose primary language is not English, such as qualified interpreters (call 513-556-5503) and information written in other languages. If you need these services, please tell any employee of a University of Cincinnati health program or activity. If you believe that the University of Cincinnati has failed to provide these services or discriminated in another way, you can file a grievance with the Office of Equal Opportunity and Access and/or Office of Gender Equity & Inclusion. You can file a grievance in person, by mail or by email. If you need help filing a grievance, the Office of Equal Opportunity & Access and Office of Gender Equity & Inclusion staff are available to help you. ACADEMIC DISHONESTY Academic dishonesty in any form is a serious offense that cannot be tolerated in an academic community. Dishonesty—including cheating, plagiarism, deception of effort, and/or unauthorized assistance—may result in a failing grade in a course and/or suspension or dismissal from the university. Allegations of academic dishonesty will be processed pursuant to the university’s Student Code of Conduct. After graduation, alumni remain responsible for the academic integrity of the work they performed while a student at the University of Cincinnati. If evidence of academic dishonesty or research misconduct is revealed after the graduation of a student, the Office of Research, the Graduate College, and the university can examine whether such concerns impact the academic integrity of the degree that was conferred on the student, with consequences including but not limited to degree revocation. STUDENT CODE OF CONDUCT The Student Code of Conduct defines behavior expected of all University of Cincinnati students. It is each student’s responsibility to know and comply with the university’s Student Code of Conduct, and sanctions or penalties are outlined. Academic behavior considered to be misconduct is defined in the Student Code of Conduct. The code also addresses nonacademic misconduct (such as disturbing the peace, destruction of property, and theft). Disciplinary procedures are explained in a step-by-step manner, and the procedures for appeal of decisions are stated. In addition to this code, students must adhere to their college’s professional code of conduct and honor codes where applicable. Students should contact the office of the dean for their college to inquire about any applicable conduct and honor codes to ensure compliance. Students can be suspended or dismissed from the university for unprofessional behavior. 45 RESPONSIBLE CONDUCT OF RESEARCH Furthering of research is a major institutional goal of the University of Cincinnati. Research includes not only intellectual activity and exploration designed to expand knowledge and understanding, but also activities in the creative and performing arts designed to interpret and create. Such activities require responsibilities for the ethical and safe conduct of research. Individuals charged with supervision of research, as well as all individuals directly engaged in it, and collaborators of investigators outside their own units are responsible for the quality of the data generated in their own laboratories as well as the laboratories of their collaborators. Everyone shares responsibility for the physical safety and intellectual property of individuals in the responsible conduct of creative scholarship and research. RESTRICTED RESEARCH The right to open exchange of information and opinion in faculty relations with students carries the obligation to avoid comments or violations of confidentiality that would reduce free expression or inquiry by students. Student involvement in industrial proprietary projects should be permitted only when these projects in no way restrict the student’s ability to fulfill their degree requirements, which includes the obligation to publish dissertation results. Faculty members have the right to publish their research findings and the right to protection against retaliation because of displeasure over their conclusions by the public, administration, government, or others. They have the concomitant responsibility to refrain from conducting secret, non-publishable research as part of their university duties. GRADUATE STUDENT GRIEVANCE PROCEDURES The University of Cincinnati provides an opportunity for the resolution of disputes involving graduate students in a fair and collegial manner. The Graduate Student Grievance Procedures establish a formal academic process for graduate students to request review and redress of certain complaints arising out of their academic relationships with their programs, their colleges, or the university. The grievance begins with a mediation process and may proceed, if necessary, through the more formal review and decision or appeal processes. In general, however, it is expected that grievances will be resolved by the parties within their programs. Students are encouraged to seek assistance from the university Ombuds Office for possible resolution before initiating the formal grievance process. Students, faculty and staff should note that Grievance Procedures are not legal protocols. They are, however, effective means by which to resolve conflicts. The Graduate College endorses these procedures and expects all programs and students involved to follow them according to the established guidelines. No outside parties, such as lawyers, ministers, and family members, are allowed to participate in or impose upon the procedures. The Graduate Student Grievance Procedures cannot supplant final sanctions stemming from the University of Cincinnati Student Code of Conduct process. There is a time limit to filing a grievance: it must be filed within 60-90 business days of the alleged improper mistreatment. The procedures are applicable to the following types of grievances: • grievances alleging improper dismissal or suspension from a graduate program, not as a result of the Student Code of Conduct process; • grievances alleging the improper withholding or termination of financial support of any kind; 46  • grievances alleging any other improper treatment, either substantive or procedural, of a graduate student by a university employee or university affiliate except: o allegations of improper evaluation of the quality and/or quantity of academic work, which a student cannot grieve; o allegations of unfair recommendation for employment or further graduate study, which a student cannot grieve; o allegations of discrimination or harassment that are subject to review by the Office of Equal Opportunity and Access or the Office of Gender, Equity and Inclusion. Published November 28, 2023. This version is an update to the 2022-23 AY handbook to reflect changes to the Graduate Scholarship structure and terminology. This version supersedes all previous versions. 47 

Please limit your knowledge to the document. Avoid generalizations and ensure accuracy by directly referencing the document's arguments and examples. How can graduate students receive financial support at the University of Cincinnati? University of Cincinnati Graduate College Graduate Handbook Welcome from the Graduate College! We invite you to review the Graduate Handbook. This document is designed as a helpful guide to graduate education at UC. Here is where you will find policies, procedures, and important information for the graduate student lifecycle, from admissions to graduation. In addition, there may also be requirements that pertain to specific degree programs and colleges. Please visit program and college websites for these specific requirements. 1  The Graduate College Graduate College Leadership Rose Marie Ward Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate College Omotayo (Tayo) Banjo Associate Dean of the Graduate College Tai Collins Associate Dean of the Graduate College Laura Dell Graduate College Thought Leader Emily Kregor Software Applications Developer Lead Sarah Matthews Sr Data Reporting Analyst Angel Prewitt Assistant Director of Business Affairs Megan Tischner Carroll Program Director Graduate College Staff Kaitlin Bauer Academic Evaluator Virginia Dennis Program Manager, Student Services Shaymaa Minkara Program Manager, Graduation Caitie Norrie Program Manager, Professional Development Stephen Patrick Program Manager, Marketing and Communications Amy Wheeler Program Manager, Student Success & Retention Brandilyn Worrell Program Manager, Community and Belonging 2  Brady Wright Executive Staff Assistant and Office Manager Graduate College IT Staff Chris Amann Computer & Info Analyst, Management Specialist IT Dushan Aththidiyavidanalage Don Software Applications Developer Eric Rasnake Computer & Info Analyst I Coco Zhang Software Applications Developer Contact the Graduate College Location University of Cincinnati 110 Van Wormer Hall 2614 University Circle Cincinnati, OH Mailing Address P.O. Box 210627 Cincinnati, OH 45221-0627 Email: [email protected] or [email protected] Phone: (513) 556-4335 Fax: (513) 556-0128 3 Introduction This Graduate Handbook is intended to provide information about university policies that assist faculty, students, and program coordinators in supporting their individual programs of study. To which educational programs does this Handbook pertain? The Graduate College oversees all post-baccalaureate certificates and degrees (master’s and doctoral level) EXCEPT the Juris Doctor (in the College of Law), the Doctor of Medicine (in the College of Medicine), and the Doctor of Pharmacy (in the College of Pharmacy). The University of Cincinnati does not discriminate on the basis of disability, race, color, religion, national origin, ancestry, medical condition, genetic information, marital status, parental status (including status as a foster parent), sex, age, sexual orientation, veteran status, military status (past, present, or future), or gender identity and expression in its programs and activities. View UC’s complete Notice of Non-Discrimination. Published 11/28/2023. This version is an update to the 2022-23 AY handbook to reflect changes to the Graduate Scholarship structure and terminology. This version supersedes all previous versions. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS ADMISSION TO GRADUATE PROGRAMS ....................................... 9 ADMISSIONS POLICY .............................................................................................. 9 Faculty and Administrators' Eligibility for Graduate Degrees .................................. 9 ADMISSIONS CATEGORIES .................................................................................... 9 APPLICATION PROCESS FOR 4+1 AND AIM PROGRAMS .................................. 10 Application to 4+1 Degree Programs .................................................................... 10 Application to Accelerated Integrated Master’s (AIM) Programs .......................... 11 DUAL DEGREE PROGRAMS .................................................................................. 11 CHANGING DEGREE PROGRAMS AT UC ............................................................ 11 GRADUATE CERTIFICATE PROGRAMS ............................................................... 12 INTERNATIONAL STUDENT ADMISSION.............................................................. 12 English Proficiency Requirement .......................................................................... 13 FINANCIAL SUPPORT .................................................................... 14 UNIVERSITY MERIT-BASED GRADUATE AWARDS ............................................. 14 GRADUATE SCHOLARSHIPS (GS)........................................................................ 14 UNIVERSITY FELLOWSHIPS ................................................................................. 15 GRADUATE ASSISTANTSHIP STIPEND AWARDS ............................................... 16 Teaching Assistant Requirements and OEPT ...................................................... 17 Graduate Assistant/Fellow Health Insurance Awards ........................................... 17 Multiple Appointments/Employment ..................................................................... 18 Summer Employment Without Full-time Enrollment ............................................. 18 Graduate Assistants on Jury Duty ........................................................................ 18 Strike Policy for Graduate Assistants ................................................................... 19 Sick Leave/Family Leave for Graduate Assistants ............................................... 19 Holidays/UC Closing Policy for Graduate Assistants ............................................ 19 Military Duty .......................................................................................................... 19 Termination........................................................................................................... 19 Workers’ Compensation ....................................................................................... 19 Unemployment ..................................................................................................... 19 Social Security, Medicare Tax and Ohio Public Employees Retirement System (OPERS)............................................................................................................... 20 174 GRADUATE CREDIT RULE .............................................................................. 20 TAXATION OF CINCINNATI GRADUATE AWARDS .............................................. 21 EXEMPTION FROM OPERS FOR STUDENT EMPLOYEES.................................. 21 EXTERNAL SOURCES OF FUNDING .................................................................... 21 5  FEDERAL FINANCIAL AID ...................................................................................... 22 GRADUATE CREDIT AND GRADES............................................... 23 ELIGIBLE CREDITS ................................................................................................ 23 CREDITS REQUIRED TO EARN A GRADUATE DEGREE .................................... 23 Advanced Standing for Graduate Courses Taken Outside of UC ......................... 23 Transfer Credit for Graduate Courses Taken at UC ............................................. 24 Course Exemption for Prior Knowledge, Without Credit ....................................... 24 Multiple Degree Exemptions ................................................................................. 25 Enrolling in Non-UC Classes through the Greater Cincinnati Collegiate Connection ............................................................................................................................. 25 Graduate Credit for Undergraduate Students ....................................................... 25 Graduate Credit Earned in 6000-Level Courses ................................................... 25 GRADING ................................................................................................................ 25 Final Exams .......................................................................................................... 25 Make-up Final Exams ........................................................................................... 26 Grade Reports ...................................................................................................... 26 Grades Assigned to Research Courses That Are Repeated ................................ 27 Pass/Fail Grades .................................................................................................. 27 Grade Changes .................................................................................................... 27 No Grade Replacements for Graduate Students .................................................. 27 MAINTAINING GRADUATE STUDENT STATUS ............................ 29 MINIMUM CREDITS/REGISTRATION REQUIREMENTS ....................................... 29 Dual Degree Programs ......................................................................................... 29 FULL-TIME COURSE LOAD.................................................................................... 29 PART-TIME COURSE LOAD ................................................................................... 29 REDUCED COURSE LOAD (INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS) ................................ 30 MEETING PROGRAM REQUIREMENTS................................................................ 30 MINIMUM ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE ................................................................ 30 INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS, MAINTAINING IMMIGRATION STATUS............... 30 TIME TO DEGREE .................................................................................................. 30 Time to Degree and Extensions ........................................................................... 30 Reinstatements..................................................................................................... 31 Readmission ......................................................................................................... 32 Leaves of Absence ............................................................................................... 32 Withdrawal from Program ..................................................................................... 33 Dismissal from Program ....................................................................................... 33 MASTER’S DEGREE POLICIES AND PROCEDURES ................... 34 COURSE OF STUDY ............................................................................................... 34 6  CREDIT HOUR REQUIREMENTS .......................................................................... 34 CANDIDACY ............................................................................................................ 34 CULMINATING EXPERIENCE: THESES and CAPSTONES .................................. 34 Thesis Preparation, Evaluation and Submission Process..................................... 34 Capstone Process ................................................................................................ 35 GRADUATION ......................................................................................................... 35 Application to Graduate ........................................................................................ 36 Graduation from Dual Degree Programs .............................................................. 36 Certification for Graduation (Certify Online) .......................................................... 36 CONTINUING TO A DOCTORAL PROGRAM ......................................................... 37 DOCTORAL DEGREE POLICIES AND PROCEDURES ................. 38 COURSE OF STUDY ............................................................................................... 38 CREDIT HOUR REQUIREMENTS .......................................................................... 38 RESIDENCY AS FULL-TIME STUDENT ................................................................. 38 CANDIDACY, QUALIFYING EXAM ......................................................................... 38 UNIVERSITY GRADUATE FACULTY ROLE ........................................................... 39 DISSERTATION....................................................................................................... 39 Dissertation Advisor and Committee..................................................................... 39 Final Defense of Dissertation................................................................................ 40 Use of a Moderator ............................................................................................... 40 Submission of Dissertation ................................................................................... 40 GRADUATION ......................................................................................................... 41 Application to Graduate ........................................................................................ 41 Dual Degree Programs Graduation ...................................................................... 41 Graduation Requirements for Doctoral Degrees................................................... 41 Certification for Graduation (Certify Online) .......................................................... 41 GRADUATE CERTIFICATE VERIFICATION FOR UC TRANSCRIPT ENDORSEMENT ..................................................................................................... 42 DOCTORAL HOODING AND MASTER’S RECOGNITION CEREMONY ................ 42 INSTITUTIONAL RULES, POLICIES, AND PROCEDURES ............ 44 PROGRAM STANDARDS........................................................................................ 44 RECORDS PRIVACY, FERPA, AND THE RIGHT TO REVIEW .............................. 44 NOTICE OF NON-DISCRIMINATION ...................................................................... 44 ACADEMIC DISHONESTY ...................................................................................... 45 STUDENT CODE OF CONDUCT ............................................................................ 45 RESPONSIBLE CONDUCT OF RESEARCH .......................................................... 46 RESTRICTED RESEARCH ..................................................................................... 46 7  GRADUATE STUDENT GRIEVANCE PROCEDURES ........................................... 46 8 ADMISSION TO GRADUATE PROGRAMS ADMISSIONS POLICY The University of Cincinnati welcomes graduate applications from students who: • hold a baccalaureate degree from a college or university regarded as standard by a regional accrediting agency and; • have at least a B average (3.000/4.0 system) in undergraduate course work or otherwise give evidence of promise that is judged satisfactory by the admitting program and the Graduate College. Programs that wish to admit applicants who lack this 3.000 minimum GPA requirement must provide supporting evidence and rationale of how such students will be able to complete a graduate program that requires achievement of a 3.000 GPA, and indicate any support offered by the program to ensure the applicant’s success given the GPA deficiency. Decisions concerning admission to graduate programs rest with the programs, and criteria used for determining admission beyond these minimal requirements are established by the programs. All programs have established written criteria for judging the admissibility of applicants, which are published in each program’s graduate handbook. The program’s handbook for graduate study must be available to the student. Upon the student’s acceptance of the admission offer, the program and the student are bound by the terms and conditions set forth in the letter of appointment. Faculty and Administrators' Eligibility for Graduate Degrees No holder of an academic administrative title at the University of Cincinnati (equivalent to assistant dean or above) may matriculate or be granted a graduate certificate or degree from the University of Cincinnati. No graduate degree or certificate from the University of Cincinnati will be granted to any faculty member at the University of Cincinnati (full-time or part-time above rank of instructor) who teaches in the same department, division or school in which the degree is to be granted. This rule also applies to adjunct appointments at any faculty rank and to interdisciplinary degrees when the same college is one of the interdisciplinary colleges. College deans may petition the Associate Dean of the Graduate College for a waiver of this policy on an individual faculty member’s behalf. The written request should describe the teaching responsibilities of the faculty member, indicating whether they are teaching graduate students and a plan for managing potential conflicts of interest. ADMISSIONS CATEGORIES Matriculated graduate status is granted to an applicant who has been accepted into a graduate certificate or degree program and has met all admissions criteria. Note that applicants first receive a provisional acceptance, and conversion to matriculated graduate status is dependent upon receipt of an official transcript that confirms that the student holds a baccalaureate or higher degree from a college or university regarded as standard by a regional accrediting agency. Please note that additional official documentation may be required (e.g. if the transcript does not contain information about degree conferral or if a foreign degree needs confirmation as baccalaureate equivalent). Instructions and deadlines for meeting this requirement are included on the Transcript Submission Policy web page. 9 Provisional graduate status is granted to applicants who have been accepted into a graduate certificate or degree program, but who have NOT yet met all admissions criteria. As described above, one routine requirement for all students is the submission of an official transcript. However, some students must in addition take undergraduate courses or improve English language proficiency to satisfy prerequisites, and these students may be accepted by the program on a provisional basis that is contingent on satisfying those additional prerequisites. Letters of admission should be read carefully to make sure all requirements tied to provisional status are identified. Visiting student status allows students to take courses for graduate credit when they have not been admitted into a graduate degree program. These students were previously called “non- matriculated students”. Should this visiting student subsequently matriculate into a certificate or degree program, a maximum of 12 semester hours may be applied to the certificate or degree program. Students are not eligible for tuition or stipend awards allocated by the Graduate College while in visiting graduate status. This policy and other funding policies are further explained in the Financial Support chapter. APPLICATION PROCESS FOR 4+1 AND AIM PROGRAMS Application to 4+1 Degree Programs If an undergraduate student plans to matriculate into a master’s degree program upon completion of the bachelor's degree, they can consult with advisors to begin (A) taking graduate-level coursework as an advanced undergraduate student, and (B) focusing on thesis-related, independent research at an earlier date. This advising plan to achieve an articulated path to a master’s degree is called a 4+1 program. Students who enter these programs must complete all of the requirements of each respective degree and must apply separately for both degree programs at the appropriate time. To be eligible for entry to a 4+1 program, students must have junior standing (64 semester credits). In addition, students must meet all College and graduate program admission requirements for the particular program. 4+1 students should note the following: • 4+1 students who enroll in graduate-level coursework prior to formally matriculating as a graduate student are allowed to apply up to 12 semester graduate-level credits toward the requirements of the master’s degree. These credits cannot be used for the bachelor’s degree. Students in the 4+1 program will complete the rest of their graduate coursework after formal completion and certification of the bachelor's degree. Students should refer to the section of this handbook containing the general requirements of the master’s degree and speak to the directors of the graduate program about specific requirements. • 4+1 students wishing to matriculate into a master’s program must complete a formal graduate admission application online in their junior or senior year to be admitted to the graduate program and begin the master’s degree. Students should speak to the directors of the graduate program about specific admission and application requirements. 10 Application to Accelerated Integrated Master’s (AIM) Programs The university has a limited set of programs that allow for a single application and admission to obtain a bachelor’s plus master’s degree in a single course of study. These programs are tightly structured around co-op experiences and allow undergraduate students to accumulate more than 12 graduate credits prior to transitioning to a matriculated graduate student. Applicants apply to an AIM program at the time of application to UC as an undergraduate but are still required to formally apply to transition to the graduate portion of their program at a time defined by their AIM program. There is a free and abbreviated application for UC undergraduate students transitioning to the associated master’s degree that is part of their AIM program. DUAL DEGREE PROGRAMS The university offers the opportunity for students to pursue two complementary graduate degrees simultaneously through structured, official dual degree programs (see below for a complete listing). The advantage of these programs is that they may require fewer credits than completing each degree program separately. Each program’s entrance requirements must be met in addition to university requirements, and the applicant must be accepted by both programs. Below is a listing of the Dual Degree programs: • Accounting MBA/MS • Business Analytics MBA/MS • Business Administration/Arts Administration MBA/MA • Business Administration/Nursing MBA/MSN • Community Planning/Landscape Architecture MCP/MLA • Community Planning/Law MCP/JD • Finance MBA/MS • Human Resources MBA/MA • Information Systems MBA/MS • Marketing MBA/MS • Law/Women’s Studies JD/MA • Law/Business JD/MBA • Law/Political Science JD/MA • Law/Political Science JD/PhD Please see the Multiple Degree Exemptions section for information on the maximum amount of transfer credit that can be applied to the dual degree programs. CHANGING DEGREE PROGRAMS AT UC In order to change from one degree program to another within the university, a student must submit a complete application to the new program. If the degrees are housed in the same unit, and the change is made over consecutive term enrollments, the application fee is waived. If the new degree program is in a different administrative program, the student is responsible for paying the application fee. Students are always responsible for fulfilling the requirements of the given degree program in which they are matriculated. Please see the Transfer Credit for Graduate Courses Taken at UC 11 section for information on the amount of graduate credits that can be transferred if a student is changing from one graduate program to another within the university, or if a student is changing from visiting graduate status at the university. GRADUATE CERTIFICATE PROGRAMS The University of Cincinnati offers graduate certificate programs. Certificates vary in both credit hours and in how they are configured: for instance, some can be earned only in conjunction with a degree; some require a master’s degree as a prerequisite, and some can be earned outside of a degree program. Applicants must apply for admission to a certificate program. Graduate College general guidelines are as follows: • Students must hold a baccalaureate degree. • Certificate programs may enroll degree seeking and non-degree seeking students. • For students matriculated into a degree program, credit hours earned under a certificate program may count toward a degree in any program if approved by the program director, and if requirements for the certificate and degree are completed the student will be awarded both. Credits earned while matriculated in a certificate program will count as credits matriculated in a degree. • Students can apply a single course to multiple certificates but only to ONE master’s or doctoral degree. • Students can obtain more than one certificate within the same program prior to attaining their master’s degree. • Students apply for a certificate program just like applying for a degree program, and must pay any relevant application fee. • Students enrolled only in a graduate certificate program are not eligible for tuition or stipend support with university funds (University Graduate Assistantship/Graduate Scholarship funds). If a student is interested, the student should contact the appropriate program office to obtain the specific criteria and prerequisites for the desired certificate. INTERNATIONAL STUDENT ADMISSION UC International Services supports the needs of international students at the University of Cincinnati. The office assists international students in understanding the rules, regulations, and procedures that must be followed during their stay in the United States and provides support services and cultural information to students. UC International Services is located in Suite 7148, One Edwards Center (1-513-556-4278). Information about admission to the University of Cincinnati for international students is available on their website. International students with F-1 visas can only be granted admission as matriculated graduate status in a degree-seeking program. (Most international students with J-1 visas can be granted admission with matriculated graduate status only, with some exceptions.) Students with J-1 visas should inquire with UC International Services to determine the regulations that apply to them. Students with green cards (U.S. resident aliens/permanent residents) are not defined as international students and, therefore, are not governed by the university’s international student policies. However, the English proficiency requirement does apply to green card holders (see The English Proficiency Requirement, below). 12 In instances where an international student holds a degree for which the U.S. equivalent is not known, or if it is determined by the program or the Graduate College that the applicant does not have the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree, the program must submit a petition for admission without the bachelor’s degree, with supporting documentation and rationale, to the Associate Dean of the Graduate College. All international students are required to carry University of Cincinnati student health insurance unless they qualify for a waiver. Semester insurance fees are automatically assessed each registration period. Please visit the Graduate College website for more information on the Graduate Assistant/Fellow Health Insurance Award. English Proficiency Requirement English proficiency is required of all applicants whose native language is not English. Students can demonstrate proficiency in a number of ways at the graduate level. PLEASE NOTE, many colleges and programs have higher requirements than those listed below. Applicants should contact the programs to which they are applying for details. For more information, please refer to the English Proficiency Requirement web page. 13 FINANCIAL SUPPORT Graduate students may obtain financial support from several sources. • The University of Cincinnati provides merit-based graduate awards in the form of tuition scholarships (known as the Graduate Scholarships, which may be provided with or without an assistantship), as well as stipend awards (graduate assistantships including teaching and research assistantships), and program-specific scholarships and fellowships. • Scholarship and fellowship support is also available from a diverse collection of external sponsors at the local, state, national, and international levels. Programs and colleges may have additional sources of support through grants and endowed funds • Need-based support may be obtained from federal and state sources. Financial support from each of these sources is described below. UNIVERSITY MERIT-BASED GRADUATE AWARDS The University of Cincinnati offers several types of merit-based graduate awards. The most common types – Graduate Scholarships, fellowships, and University Graduate Assistantships – are described below. Most university graduate awards are underwritten by university funds allocated by the Graduate College (“general funds”) to each college, which are then awarded to students by the individual programs. Some awards are competitive and granted by the Graduate College upon recommendation of an individual graduate program. Not all graduate students are eligible for graduate awards. Graduate awards allocated by the Graduate College are not available to students: (1) taking classes as visiting students, (2) enrolled only in a graduate certificate program, (3) who have not maintained the minimum GPA of 3.000 in their program, (4) who are on academic probation, or (5) who have exceeded the 174 graduate credit rule. Awards can only be guaranteed for a maximum period of one academic year, and renewal of a university graduate award is not automatic. Awards that are appointed by individual programs are awarded to eligible students at the sole discretion of the program. Programs are not obligated to renew awards, even if previously awarded students met all eligibility requirements. GRADUATE SCHOLARSHIPS (GS) The Graduate College funds scholarships that cover all or part of a student’s tuition and fees. In most colleges, the scholarship awards supported by the Graduate College are the Graduate Scholarships (GS), with and without assistantships. The GS with assistantship is used to support graduate assistants who are additionally awarded a stipend that requires service in return for stipend support. The GS without assistantship is for graduate students who do not receive university stipend support and therefore no service is required in return for the GS award. The appointing program sends written offers of scholarship awards to students, including information about the amount and duration of the award and the terms of the offer. Students must maintain all of the required eligibility requirements in their offer letter to maintain their tuition scholarship. 14 Students receiving a tuition scholarship must register for a specified minimum number of graduate credit hours in each semester for which they are receiving support. If an international student is supported by a GS without assistantship, they must register for a minimum load of 10 graduate credit hours per semester during the time they receive the GS scholarship. If a domestic student is supported by a GS without assistantship, they must register for a minimum load of 1 graduate credit hour per semester during the time they receive the GS scholarship. Students supported by a GS with assistantship must register for a minimum of 12 graduate credit hours per semester during the time they receive the GS scholarship. These minimum enrollments in graded courses must be met prior to using scholarship support for any audited courses. If a student withdraws from a class funded by a tuition scholarship, with the remaining enrolled credit hours totaling less than the minimum required for the award, the award is cancelled immediately and the student is responsible for the tuition balance, based on the date of withdrawal. Full tuition scholarships cover a maximum of 18 credits per semester. Students registered for more than 18 credits in a semester will be billed tuition and general fees on a per-credit-hour rate for each credit over the 18. All rules that govern recipients of tuition support pertain to all students, including international students. Other rules and policies that apply specifically to international students are independent of GS regulations. Both sets of regulations must be met. Neither set of regulations negates or takes the place of the other. (See 174 Graduate Credit Rule.) Note: Financial awards that require no service may reduce eligibility for educational loans. Students should notify the Student Financial Aid Office of their tuition support if they apply for aid from that office. UNIVERSITY FELLOWSHIPS University of Cincinnati fellowships are financial awards that include tuition scholarships and stipends with no associated service requirements. The purpose of a fellowship award is to allow the recipient to concentrate exclusively on their studies; therefore, multiple appointments and/or employment by the University of Cincinnati are not permitted for students receiving fellowships. The appointing program sends written offers of fellowship awards, including information about the amount and duration of the award; a general description of the academic obligations accepted by the student as part of the award; a reference to sources of information about academic requirements for degree completion; a description of the conditions under which either the student or unit may terminate the award prior to its end-date; and criteria for reappointment. Students receiving fellowships should check with Student Financial Aid to be informed about the potential impact on their eligibility for aid. Income received that is not for services rendered (whether it be in the form of a fellowship, grant, or award) will be calculated in whether a student meets the Cost of Attendance for the University of Cincinnati. Fellowship awardees have an enrollment obligation identical to GS with assistantship/UGA (university graduate assistantship) awardees, and they lose eligibility for the fellowship award if they accumulate more than 174 graduate credit hours. (See 174 Graduate Credit Rule). 15 For information on university-sponsored fellowships, please see the Graduate College website. GRADUATE ASSISTANTSHIP STIPEND AWARDS A student awarded a graduate assistantship receives a financial stipend for services rendered in addition to a full or partial tuition scholarship. These stipend funds are called UGA (university graduate assistantship) awards. Graduate assistants are also entitled to a discount at the University Bookstore and may be eligible for the Graduate Assistant/Fellow Health Insurance Award. UGA awardees devote effort to a combined program of formal study and assigned duties of teaching, research or administrative service that is designed to enhance their university education. The stipend received by the graduate assistant is in recognition of these services. Those with teaching duties are teaching assistants (TAs) and those with research duties are research assistants (RAs). During the appointment, the goal is to help a graduate student become a more learned, creative, and professional individual through formal instruction, interaction with faculty, research, and administrative experience. Any such service assignments should be consistent with the student’s academic pursuits. UGA funds are awarded for designated periods of time by the graduate programs. Graduate Assistants are considered exempt from minimum wage and overtime requirements, and they are paid on a salaried basis. Minimum stipends are set by the Dean of the Graduate College. The minimum stipend for a graduate assistant, as set in July 2023, must be the equivalent of a minimum of $16.98 per hour for all master’s and doctoral students except those in PhD programs. Graduate assistants enrolled in PhD programs have a minimum of $22.28 per hour. The appointing academic program, college, or area of responsibility determines service requirements of students who hold assistantships. If awarded an assistantship outside their program, graduate assistants’ duties are governed by the academic program, college, or the area of responsibility that made the award. In all cases, the award obligates awardees to no more than 20 hours per week of services, and those services must make a substantive contribution to the student’s academic and professional development. Students must be appointed to a position that is consistent with their field of academic study. If the student determines that they cannot meet the requirements of the award, it is imperative that they notify the program to initiate renegotiation or reassignment of the award with correspondingly less support. A student’s hours are prorated for weeks with a holiday or school closure and students are not required to be available during break periods unless given additional compensation. UGA awardees must be registered for 12 graduate credit hours or more, exclusive of audit credits, for each semester they receive the assistantship. University assistantships will be cancelled if the awardee does not meet their enrollment obligation. The exception to this rule is summer semester. See Summer Employment without Full-time Enrollment section. Students lose eligibility for the UGA stipend funding if they accumulate more than 174 graduate credit hours. (See 174 Graduate Credit Rule.) Assistantship awards are contingent upon student status, satisfactory degree progress, and performance of service as assigned, and can be terminated at any time. Each year the assistantship is in effect, the appointing program, college, or area must notify the awardee in 16 writing of any significant change to the services or conditions of the appointment. Such changes include, but are not limited to: • the amount and duration of the award • any tuition and/or fee not paid by the program • the average expected time per week or per semester of required duties • description of the duties assigned to the student • description of the conditions under which either the student or unit may terminate the award prior to its end-date • criteria for reappointment of the award • criteria for determining variations in stipend levels where such variations exist • information on current IRS guidelines, Medicare, and the Public Employee Retirement System (PERS) • graduate appointment procedures if any of the documents have been modified since the student’s initial appointment. Teaching Assistant Requirements and OEPT All teaching assistants must be supervised by a faculty member who has the academic credentials and authorization (as defined by the Higher Learning Commission, Ohio Dept. of Higher Education, and the University of Cincinnati) to offer instruction to the students in the class. Supervising faculty must be listed (as supervisor or instructor) in any course/section overseen by a graduate teaching assistant. Non-native speakers of English who are awarded teaching assistantships at the University of Cincinnati are required to score at least a 3.0 on the Oral English Proficiency Test (OEPT). The OEPT evaluates the spoken language skills of non-native speakers of English. Students who pass are certified for oral English proficiency and may assume the full range of duties associated with their teaching assistantship. Students whose oral English proficiency has not been officially certified may not assume instructional responsibilities. However, students who score 26 or above on the speaking section of the TOEFL IBT or students with a score of 50 or above on the Test of Spoken English are exempt from the OEPT. Students are required to take the test at the beginning of their first term of study. If a score is less than 3.0, students are recommended to take ESL courses before retaking the test. A student is permitted to take the OEPT twice without charge during an academic year. Graduate Assistant/Fellow Health Insurance Awards Academic programs are required to notify eligible students with information on the Graduate Student Health Insurance (GSHI) award, which can subsidize the cost of UC Student Health Insurance for qualified students. Programs must provide graduate assistants/fellows with the GSHI Award application deadline and relevant details on GSHI Award criteria, and must keep records that they have provided this information to their students. Such information can be found at the Graduate Student Health Insurance Award web page. 17 Multiple Appointments/Employment Graduate assistantship awardees who are domestic students are limited to 24 total hours of combined service and student hourly work while school is in session. The following policies regarding multiple appointments must be followed: • Units are responsible for monitoring of hours worked by student employees assigned to their unit; this is especially important for students who hold multiple student appointments. • The program must closely monitor academic progress. • The additional appointment must be terminated if a student does not maintain academic progress deemed to be acceptable by the program. This limit applies only while school is in session. During scheduled breaks only, if students work more than 20 hours or they work more than the prorated salary hours required, they must be compensated at an hourly rate for the extra work. Students can be employed for a maximum of 40 hrs/week during scheduled breaks. International students are limited to working 20 hours per week while school is in session and are limited to 40 hours per week during scheduled breaks. All International Students must have onboarding conducted by the International Services Office. An international student on F-1 or J-1 immigration status contemplating employment should contact the International Student Services Office at 1-513-556-4278. Summer Employment Without Full-time Enrollment For summer semester only, students who are not registered for graduate credit hours or are registered for less than 12 credits hours are eligible to be employed by their respective program, usually by performing the duties of their assistantship such as teaching or lab work. In this case, the student will receive a stipend for the work performed. Retirement funds and taxes will be withheld from the student’s check. Questions about options with retirement funds once separated from the university should be directed to Human Resources and/or OPERS. Graduate Assistants on Jury Duty All graduate students are encouraged to participate when they are subpoenaed for jury duty. The student must seek their advisor’s and program director’s permission with the expectation that every effort will be made to accommodate the jury service. If the student’s absence from UC will create a hardship to the unit, they should seek a deferral or make arrangements to cover their responsibilities during the absence. Such arrangements must be approved by their program director. Students serving on jury duty will be paid their normal university stipend during the period of service, with the understanding that any compensation received for jury service must be returned to the university if their assistantship responsibilities remain uncovered. If the student makes arrangements to cover their assistantship commitment for the period in which they serve on jury duty, and if those arrangements are approved by their program director, they may keep the jury duty compensation in total. The student may also keep any travel reimbursement fees. 18 Strike Policy for Graduate Assistants In the event of a strike, graduate assistants are expected to fulfill commitments associated with their assistantships. Graduate assistants assigned to teach a course as part of their assistantship agreement are expected to teach the course during a strike. Graduate assistants who choose not to teach can lose their assistantship. If the student’s responsibilities are associated with a course taught by a faculty member and the strike results in the course not being taught, which makes it impossible for the student to fulfill their responsibilities, the student would not be held responsible. Sick Leave/Family Leave for Graduate Assistants Graduate assistants do not accrue vacation, sick leave or other paid time-off. In the event of illness, a graduate assistant shall notify the GA supervisor as soon as possible on each day of such absence. Holidays/UC Closing Policy for Graduate Assistants Graduate assistants are not hired as essential personnel, and thus cannot be required to work during holidays or official UC closings (such as emergency closings due to severe weather, public emergency, etc.). Required weekly hours will be prorated based on the official holidays or closings during that week. Military Duty A graduate assistant who is a member of any reserve component of the United States Armed Forces, who is voluntarily or involuntarily ordered to extended U.S. military service, shall be granted time-off without pay. The graduate assistant should provide to the appropriate program official advance written notice of the call for impending training or active duty. Upon completion of military service or if discharged under honorable conditions, and upon prompt re-registration as a student, the graduate assistant shall be returned to the former assistantship in a timely manner, based upon availability. Due to the temporary nature of graduate assistantships, if the assistantship is eliminated during the student’s absence, then no obligation exists. Termination A graduate assistantship may be terminated at any time with or without cause, unless there is an explicit written contract between the student and the university that provides otherwise. Workers’ Compensation The Ohio Workers’ Compensation Law covers graduate assistants, who are paid by payroll and provides medical, income and survivor benefits in the event of accidental injury, occupational disease or death occurring in the course of, and arising from, employment. Unemployment Graduate assistants are not entitled to unemployment compensation. 19 Social Security, Medicare Tax and Ohio Public Employees Retirement System (OPERS) Please see Exemption from OPERS/Medicare for Student Employees. 174 GRADUATE CREDIT RULE Students receiving any university award (e.g. UGA stipend, GS tuition scholarship) and students who receive funds from the State of Ohio are governed by the requirements and limitations described in the following paragraphs. Any student who becomes ineligible to receive state subsidy is not eligible to receive general funds financial aid (i.e., a university stipend and/or tuition). Since this policy is due to regulations governing state support of the university, exceptions to the policy are not considered. Graduate students who have attempted 174 graduate credit hours at the University of Cincinnati are not eligible for a university award for enrollment at or beyond the 174 hours. Hours attempted include hours for which credit has been awarded, as well as withdrawn courses, audited courses, and hours in progress or incomplete (these graduate credit hours include all courses with grades F, I, UW, SP, IP, UP, W, etc.). All graduate hours attempted at the University of Cincinnati, regardless of program or student status, count toward the 174 total. A student is not eligible for funding beginning with the semester in which said student will reach the 174 attempted hours. For example, if a student has earned 167 graduate credit hours at the University of Cincinnati by the close of summer sessions and registers for (i.e., attempts) 12 credit hours for fall semester, they are ineligible for a university graduate scholarship or fellowship in the fall semester. If a student earned master’s credits at the University of Cincinnati (for either a partial or a full degree), the exact number of these credits are deducted from the 174 credit hour total for which they can receive funding. This is true if the credits are earned at an earlier time and the student returns to the University of Cincinnati to continue graduate education, and it is true regardless of the discipline in which those credits were earned. For example, if a student has earned a master’s degree in engineering and then chooses to pursue a master’s and a doctoral degree in math, the credits earned to get the engineering degree are deducted from the 174 credit hours for which the student can receive state financial support (e.g., fellowships, assistantships, and scholarships). Graduate students who have earned a master’s degree or other equivalent or higher advanced degree at another institution are not eligible for a university scholarship or fellowship once they have attempted 140 graduate credit hours at the University of Cincinnati. If a student enters the University of Cincinnati with a master’s degree from any institution other than the University of Cincinnati, they are credited with 34 graduate credit hours toward the 174 credit hour limit for state funding eligibility. Per Ohio Department of Higher Education policy, Ohio can subsidize up to the remaining 140 credit hours. The 34 credit hours are deducted from the 174, regardless of the discipline and regardless of the graduate level at which the student enters the University of Cincinnati. For example, if a student has earned a master’s degree in engineering at The Ohio State University and then chooses to pursue a master’s and a doctoral degree in math at UC, the credits they earned to get their engineering degree are deducted from the 174 credit hours for which they can receive state financial support in the math program. Note that professional 20 degrees, like a juris doctorate or medical doctorate, do not count as a master’s or higher equivalent for the purpose of comparative funding. Students who enter graduate education at the University of Cincinnati with a professional degree and no other advanced degrees are still eligible to receive up to the 174 credit hours of funding. If a student enters the University of Cincinnati with only partial credit toward a degree from another institution, those credits are not deducted from the 174 total—even if the program they enter at the University of Cincinnati agrees to accept transfer of those credits toward the student’s degree requirements at the University of Cincinnati. The student can still receive state subsidy for up to 174 credit hours earned at the University of Cincinnati beyond those transferred in. Note: For the purposes of this policy, a master’s degree is one awarded by an American institution or a degree of equivalent value from a foreign institution. Students holding a master’s degree from a foreign institution that is the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree in the U.S. will have the higher limit (174). The higher limit will not be affected by a student’s completion of course work short of a master’s degree at another institution. TAXATION OF CINCINNATI GRADUATE AWARDS The university maintains a position that all income, from whatever source, is taxable and may be subject to withholding. The IRS maintains final authority on the taxability of all stipends, and in all cases, the university cannot guarantee that any stipend is tax-exempt. The Graduate College will not review an individual award nor provide legal advice to individual students. In addition, students (not the university) are responsible for the withholding information that they submit on their W-4 forms at the time of appointment. Those students who receive a stipend during any academic semester and are not enrolled for at least half time will have Medicare tax and Ohio Public Employee Retirement System (OPERS) payments deducted from their checks. If a student is enrolled half time or more, they may apply for an exemption from these fees in their program office. No taxes are withheld from fellowships, but students may still have a tax liability and should consult a tax advisor. EXEMPTION FROM OPERS FOR STUDENT EMPLOYEES Employees (including student employees) of Ohio public institutions do not contribute to the federal Social Security system. Student employees’ retirement contributions will be directed to the state retirement plan, the Ohio Public Employees Retirement System (OPERS). Student employees (including graduate assistants and hourly student workers) may be eligible to opt out of OPERS participation when first hired by UC as long as certain requirements are met. See the Student Employees web page on UC’s Human Resources site for the OPERS exemption form and for additional information. EXTERNAL SOURCES OF FUNDING Tuition scholarship and fellowship funding is provided to graduate students by a wide variety of governmental and private sponsors. UC’s Financial Aid website, the ScholarshipUniverse scholarship search application, the Office of Nationally Competitive Awards and local and university libraries are potential sources of information about these funding opportunities. The Office of Nationally Competitive Awards provides workshops, application writing assistance and university endorsement (for applicable awards). Students may also visit the Office of Research 21 for more information on upcoming grant opportunities, grant writing workshops, and searchable research opportunity databases. FEDERAL FINANCIAL AID See the Student Financial Aid website for more information on federal financial aid (including summer aid). The Graduate College does not regulate or audit any outside fellowships or other outside funding a student may receive. However, it is advised that students with outside funding consult with the Financial Aid Office to see if and how the outside funding may or may not affect other Financial Aid eligibility. 22 GRADUATE CREDIT AND GRADES ELIGIBLE CREDITS Credit towards a graduate degree or certificate can only be earned for those courses in this university that are listed as graduate in the Schedule of Classes or which have been approved in writing by appropriate program authority for inclusion in the curriculum. Graduate credit towards a degree will only be granted when a course is included in the graduate career category of the student record in Catalyst. CREDITS REQUIRED TO EARN A GRADUATE DEGREE Graduate degrees at UC each have a stated number of credit hours that must be completed satisfactorily to earn the degree. As described below, there are multiple opportunities where coursework taken prior to matriculation into a degree program may count towards that credit hour total. In all cases, to earn a degree at UC, at least 67% of the relevant coursework credit must be earned while a matriculated student at the University of Cincinnati. Students entering in Fall 2019 or later should make application to their program for such (advanced standing or transfer) credit during their first semester at UC to assure their course of study is optimized. For all students matriculating in Fall 2019 and later, such credit will only be granted if a complete and program-approved application for such credit is submitted to the Graduate College by the end of their first year in the program, or prior to their final semester of study, whichever comes first. This new policy (introduced in AY19-20) is in effect for all students matriculated in Fall 2019 and later. In prior policies, master’s degrees were granted when 50% of graduate credits were completed while matriculated in the graduate program granting the degree, therefore allowing up to 50% of credits to be via advanced standing. Advanced Standing for Graduate Courses Taken Outside of UC a. Programs are permitted to award up to one third of the credits of a UC graduate program through advanced standing (e.g., 10 credits are eligible in a 30 credit hour program or 13 credits in a 40 credit hour program). The relevant number of credits is based on the minimum credits required to earn the advanced degree starting from the minimum degree qualification (usually a baccalaureate degree). Note that for doctoral students the advanced standing credit total will include any use of the ODHE allowance of up to 30 credits for a prior master's degree. b. Any graduate course credits, including those earned from previously earned graduate or undergraduate degrees, are eligible as advanced standing credits. c. Advanced standing can only be offered for courses (including electives) entered in e- curriculum for the UC program. d. Program faculty must evaluate courses for equivalence or comparability prior to granting students Advanced Standing credit for courses taken at another institution, meeting all the following criteria; 1. Courses taken at a recognized University or College 2. Courses taken at the graduate level 3. Requested advanced standing credits must be the lower of the following two choices 23  i. Credits originally earned for the course ii. Credits available in the UC course listed in e-curriculum 4. For 1:1 course equivalency, one or more of the following criteria must be met when compared to the University of Cincinnati course for which Advanced Standing credit is sought: i. Course was taken in the same field with the same title ii. Course had similar topics iii. Course had similar learning outcomes iv. Course assignment and assessment requirements were similar v. Course readings requirements are similar 5. This evaluation process should be documented for each case in which it is applied e. The one third rule doesn’t apply to dual degrees, sequential master's to doctorate programs, or others with shared content that have received approval from the Graduate College. f. Advanced standing credit recommended by program faculty must first be approved by the graduate program director and then submitted for final review by the Graduate College to assure the request complies with the criteria above. Transfer Credit for Graduate Courses Taken at UC a. When leaving one graduate program to join another at UC, all UC graduate credits taken as part of the incomplete program are eligible to use to fulfill requirements in the new program, based on faculty evaluation of the equivalence to courses in the new curriculum and program approval. b. When a student enters a graduate program at UC, non-matriculated UC graduate credits are eligible to be used for the program, if the coursework is listed in e-curriculum as part of the curricular requirements. Subject to program approval, students may transfer up to one third of the credits required to earn their UC graduate degree Programs are permitted to award transfer credit from a prior UC graduate degree if (1) the sum of unique credits to earn both degrees is equal to or greater than the State minimums for each degree type, and (2) the transfer credit courses are part of the curriculum of the new degree program as defined in e-curriculum. Using credit that meets both criteria, up to one third of the credits of the new UC graduate program may be awarded through transfer credit. The relevant number of credits is based on the minimum credits required to earn the advanced degree starting from the minimum degree qualification (usually a baccalaureate degree). Note that for doctoral students the transfer credit total will include any use of the ODHE allowance of up to 30 credits for a prior master’s degree. Course Exemption for Prior Knowledge, Without Credit Faculty in a program have the option to provide students with an examination to determine if accumulated knowledge is sufficient to be exempted from specific courses in a graduate curriculum (e.g., continuing education courses in some professional fields may provide a background that eliminates the need to take introductory courses). The form and content of that examination is at the discretion of the program. When such exemptions are granted, the student does not earn graduate credit for such knowledge. The credits required to complete their UC graduate degree remain unchanged, and the student will take alternative coursework (approved by the graduate program director) to advance their knowledge. 24 Multiple Degree Exemptions a. If the graduate faculty from a UC program has participated in designing and/or presenting the curriculum at another institution, shared degree programs between the institutions can deviate from these rules with prior approval of the Graduate College and their college leadership. In no case will a UC degree be awarded if more than 50% of the curriculum is offered by non-UC faculty. b. Dual degree programs can combine two UC graduate degrees into a single curriculum if approved by the University. Approved dual degree programs can share up to one-third of the combined credits of the two degrees, but the total count of unique credits to earn both degrees must always be equal to or greater than the State minimums for each degree type. Enrolling in Non-UC Classes through the Greater Cincinnati Collegiate Connection The University of Cincinnati is a member of the Greater Cincinnati Collegiate Connection. GC3 classes are those not generally available at the University of Cincinnati but which can be used to satisfy degree requirements. The student must have met all tuition commitments at the University of Cincinnati and must observe all regulations of the host institution. For additional information, participating institutions, and registration instructions, consult the Greater Cincinnati Collegiate Connection page of the Registrar’s Office website. Approval is at the discretion of the program. Graduate Credit for Undergraduate Students Any program may allow juniors or seniors to register for graduate courses for graduate credit before those students have completed the baccalaureate degree. It is recommended, if the program permits such registration, to limit the privilege to students with senior status and a grade point average of at least 3.000 (higher in some programs). This is evidenced by a written request from the student that is signed by an authorized member of the graduate program. Upon approval by the graduate program and the course instructor, graduate credit will be given for the courses. A maximum of 12 semester graduate credits can be earned in this manner. Credit will not be given toward both graduate and undergraduate degrees for the same course. Graduate Credit Earned in 6000-Level Courses In fall 2016, all 6000-level courses became graduate only. In the past, 6000-level courses were available for either undergraduate or graduate credit (to earn graduate credit, students selected the graduate level designation (G) in these courses, indicating that additional work was required beyond that required of undergraduates in the course). PLEASE NOTE: with the transition to the new use of course numbers, there will be no change to the graduate (or undergraduate) credits earned previously in the pre-fall-2016 version of these courses. GRADING Final Exams Exams are held during the last week of the semester after classes have ended. For each term’s full final examination schedule, consult the Calendars page of the Registrar’s Office website. 25 Make-up Final Exams Special policies may govern the taking of missed final exams. Students and faculty members should check the college office or program office for specific details. Every student is responsible for the material presented in their class. Arrangements for make-up work and tests are determined by the instructor. Absences incurred by students officially representing the university will be excused, provided that official notification of such absence has been given in advance to the instructor. Grade Reports End-of-term final grades may be viewed in the Catalyst student portal immediately following submission of final grades by the instructor. Grade reports include total graduate hours and hours for the current semester. The student’s grade report differentiates between “units taken” (course credits the student enrolled in but did not complete successfully or which are still pending a final grade) and “credits passed” (course credits successfully completed with a final grade other than F). These values are posted on the student’s transcript as attempted hours and earned hours. A graduate grade point average (GPA) is calculated each semester. Approved transfer credits from other institutions are included in the sum of credits earned, but grades for those credits are not included in the GPA. All graduate work, regardless of the University of Cincinnati college in which the work was done, is accumulated in these tallies. For this reason, if a student record includes UC graduate courses that do not count towards the degree, this GPA may differ from the calculation of GPA in program coursework (a minimum 3.000 program GPA is essential to earn a graduate degree). The I incomplete grade is awarded as a course grade (without grade point assignment) at the end of a term when a significant portion of course work has been satisfactorily completed, but not all of the required course work has been completed. The incomplete grade is appropriate when the completed course work is of passing quality and the student has had such hardship that completion of the remaining course work within the term timeline would present an additional hardship. The instructor who assigns the incomplete grade should set a specific date by which the student must complete the remaining course work, recognizing that time must be available for any final evaluation and grade change to be made, prior to the deadline when the grade converts to an F. The deadline is one year to the last day of exams. (Please check the Office of the Registrar’s website for the specific date.) The student must work with the instructor to develop an agreement that indicates the date by which the remaining course work is to be completed and submitted to the instructor. The instructor is not obligated to provide the student with a full year to complete the remaining course work. If the remaining course work is completed within the time period agreed upon by the instructor and the student, and that completion occurs within the one year, then the instructor will submit a change of grade online (in Catalyst) based on the quality of the remaining work. If no specific time for completion is set by the instructor, the student has one year (from the end of the term in which the incomplete was assigned) to complete the remaining course work and submit it to the instructor in time for evaluation of the work and a final grade to be approved by the Registrar. If the coursework is not completed within the one-year period (i.e., one year from the end of the term in which the I grade was assigned), the I grade automatically converts to an I/F grade which affects the student’s GPA the same as the grade of F. For the complete graduate grading scale and a definition of all grades, consult the Grading Scales and Definitions page of the Registrar’s Office website. 26 Grades Assigned to Research Courses That Are Repeated If students are working on dissertation or thesis research, they should be registered in the appropriate research course (e.g., Individual Dissertation or Individual Master’s Thesis), and the course work should be given a final grade each semester. The use of P/F for such courses is strongly recommended to avoid undue influence on GPA due to individual grading practices and the large amount of research credit awarded, but it is recognized that some programs will want to use letter grades. “Placeholder” grades such as SP and NG should not be used. Regardless of the grading scheme selected, it must be consistently applied across an entire program. If a program faculty cannot agree on a single grading scheme, the program must use the P/F choice. Students should be graded for each semester based on their progress and achievements in that semester. Note: The definition of a “research course” is a course outside of formal class work or instruction that allows a student to be registered as a graduate student while they are working independently on their thesis or dissertation under the guidance of their advisor or dissertation committee. This policy also applies to internships and other multiple semester or series courses. Pass/Fail Grades An instructor may request approval for pass/fail grading for an individual student in their class prior to the first day of class. A graduate student can take a course on a pass/fail basis (P or U grade) when approved by their advisor and instructor. An instructor is not required to accept a student on such a basis. Grade Changes A change of grade is only appropriate for an I, an NG, an SP/UP, or an error made by the instructor. SP/UP grades must be converted to a final grade by the end of the following semester. Instructors may change an I or NG grade online in Catalyst for approximately one year (the interval extends from the initial grading semester to the last working day of the same term the following year). To request a change of grade for a non-research course for graduate credit after this period, or an F grade any time, the instructor must do an official, paper change of grade form and forward to the Registrar’s Office. Previously recorded grades may not be changed to W or I after the close of the term. Both I and W grades must be awarded while the course and semester are still in progress and cannot be awarded retroactively. W reflects an official withdrawal that took place by the deadline outlined in the academic calendar, and I indicates work remains to be completed and the student did not earn a final grade. Students cannot withdraw from a class retroactively or be given additional opportunities to seek a different final grade retroactively. If an F is in a non- required course or the required course has since been retaken for a passing grade, the Program Director at certification may request a waiver of the F grade from the Associate University Dean of the Graduate College. No Grade Replacements for Graduate Students Please note, if a graduate student re-registers and re-takes a course, both grades will be included in the student’s overall GPA. There are no grade replacements at the graduate level. The process to make a grade change cannot be initiated by a student. The course instructor of record must send the form. At no time should a student be in possession of a change of grade 27 form. Note: that an I/F grade is governed by the same policies that govern the F grade and is weighted into the student’s GPA in the same fashion. 28 MAINTAINING GRADUATE STUDENT STATUS Maintaining graduate student status signifies that the student is actively engaged in making progress towards their degree and meeting program requirements. Graduate status determines which students may use facilities of the university, may participate in the university governance process and student organizations, and are covered by the Student Code of Conduct and the grievance process. A University of Cincinnati graduate student must hold the equivalent of a baccalaureate or higher degree and must have been accepted for admission into graduate study by the appropriate graduate program. MINIMUM CREDITS/REGISTRATION REQUIREMENTS To maintain graduate status at the University of Cincinnati, students must register at UC for at least one graduate credit that contributes to degree requirements (as determined by the graduate program) in an academic year. If the student is registered for at least one graduate credit in the academic year (fall through summer), they will maintain graduate student status for the entire academic year. Credits that are audited or in which a student receives a W, UW or F do not count toward the minimum credit requirement. Any student that does not register in the fall of an academic year and has not registered for the previous two academic years will automatically be exited from their program. A student whose status has thus automatically terminated will no longer be considered a graduate student but may seek reinstatement (see Reinstatements). Also note that students wishing to use many UC resources, such as university housing, campus laboratories, office space, equipment, campus recreation center, computer labs, etc. may need to be registered. Students should check with specific facilities for their particular requirements. Dual Degree Programs In dual degree programs, students must be registered for at least one graduate credit that contributes to degree requirements in one of the two programs (as determined by the program) during the academic year in which they graduate with their dual degrees. FULL-TIME COURSE LOAD Students must be registered for 10 or more graduate credits each semester to be considered full- time students, 12 if holding a university sponsored graduate assistantship or fellowship. Audit or undergraduate credits do not count toward full-time status and cannot be supported by a University Graduate Award. PART-TIME COURSE LOAD Students who can devote less than full time to graduate study may register for the number of graduate credits judged by their program advisors to represent the appropriate fraction of a full- time load. However, doctoral students must satisfy the Board of Trustees residency requirement, which requires that they have one year of full-time study, which is defined as being enrolled for at least 10 graduate credits in their program in each of two semesters (including summer semester) during a span of three consecutive semesters. Full-time UC employees using their tuition remission benefit to complete a part-time doctoral program may request a waiver of this requirement from the Associate Dean of the Graduate College. (See Doctoral Degrees Policies and Procedures, Course of Study.) 29 REDUCED COURSE LOAD (INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS) Once an international student has finished all required course work and will no longer be enrolling full time, she/he may choose to enroll with a reduced course load. Visit the F-1 Students page on the UC International Services website, referring to the “Enrolling part-time as a graduate student who has finished all course requirements” section for the link to the form and more information. MEETING PROGRAM REQUIREMENTS Students who continue on active status in their program without interruption are responsible for meeting all current requirements, including requirements that are revised since the student first entered the program. Students readmitted into their program are responsible for meeting the program requirements applicable at the time of readmission. MINIMUM ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE The Graduate College requires that a student must have an aggregate grade point average (GPA) of at least 3.000 to obtain a graduate certificate or degree at the University of Cincinnati. The GPA used for this purpose should aggregate graduate-level coursework completed since the student’s matriculation into the particular degree program from which the student seeks graduation, and only courses taken that are applicable to the degree/certificate count towards this GPA. Transfer graduate credits may also be accepted at the discretion of the degree program (and within Graduate College limits), and any transfer credit coming from courses taken at the University of Cincinnati will contribute to the GPA certified for graduation. Please note that programs establish minimum academic standards that may exceed the overall university standards provided above, so students need to be aware of their program requirements. Note that there is no grade replacement for graduate students, so any failed graduate courses remain in the student record. However, if a student retakes a failed course and obtains a passing grade, and if the GPA calculated without that original failing grade is above 3.000, then the program can petition the Graduate College for a waiver of the GPA requirement for graduation. Multiple failing grades, or multiple attempts to pass a course, are examples of why a petition may be denied. INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS, MAINTAINING IMMIGRATION STATUS The student has responsibility for maintaining their immigration status. Key information on maintaining immigration status on the F-1 Students page on the UC International Services website. TIME TO DEGREE Time to Degree and Extensions The Board of Trustees stipulates that all degree requirements must be completed within a defined span of years starting from the date of matriculation into the degree program, regardless of whether students are full time or part time. This span is 5 years for the master's degree and 9 years for the doctoral degree. Under extenuating circumstances, a program may petition, on 30 behalf of the student, for extension of the time limit for attaining the degree. Prior to the program petitioning the Graduate College for an extension, the student must communicate with the student’s program advisor and/or director to review the student’s degree completion to date and form a plan for degree completion. All this information should be included in a petition submitted to the Graduate College, which will review this petition and make a final decision. Students who have not completed degree requirements by their time-to-degree limit are on inactive status regardless of course registration in each academic year. Such students are required to apply for an extension of their time-to-degree. Reinstatements Students who have not been registered for at least one graduate credit hour at UC that contributes to degree requirements (as determined by the graduate program) in an academic year (fall-summer) are considered inactive. Reinstatements are available to students who have been inactive for less than three academic years. Students who have not been enrolled for any credits in their graduate program for three or more consecutive academic years are not eligible for reinstatement and must apply for readmission to the university. (See Readmission.) Readmission is processed via the reinstatement petition in Gradtracker. Applications submitted by the student via the admissions system will not be accepted. To request reinstatement, a program must petition the Graduate College on behalf of the student. Prior to the program petitioning the Graduate College for a reinstatement, the student must communicate with the student’s program advisor and/or director to review the student’s degree completion to date and form a plan for degree completion. The program coordinator, director or advisor will begin the reinstatement process in Gradtracker. The originator of the petition in Gradtracker will upload documents in one pdf to include degree completion information to date and a written plan for degree completion. The Graduate College will review the packet and if approved the student will also need to approve the petition and fee. If a student wishes to be reinstated so they can register and take classes, reinstatement petitions must be submitted in Gradtracker prior to the start of the first day of the term to be eligible for reinstatement in that term. Petitions received before the census date (the 15th calendar day of the term), the term may be considered for the current term. Petitions received after the census date will be considered for the following term. If a student wishes to be reinstated so they can graduate without taking any further classes, petitions for reinstatement (and extensions) must be submitted in Gradtracker no later than 3 weeks prior to graduation for the student to be certified for graduation in that semester. Petitions received after this time will not be approved in time for graduation that same semester. Late petitions will be held through the next processing period and a decision will be granted in time for the next graduation. A reinstatement fee equal to the current tuition for one graduate credit for each of the unregistered years up to a maximum of 3 years is assessed. The reinstatement fee will be added to the student’s bursar account and will become part of the student bill. Reinstatement fees are due 30 days after formal approval unless a payment plan is agreed to with the bursar’s office. If the fee is not paid by the due date, service charges may accrue, a block may be placed on future registrations and/or on the release of UC diplomas and official transcripts, and the account may be sent to collections. 31 Readmission Graduate students who have been inactive (not enrolled in their program) for three or more academic years are not eligible for reinstatement and must apply for readmission to the university. Readmission does not change the student’s original entry date. Time to degree will be calculated from the student’s first entry date. The program may petition the Graduate College on behalf of the student for readmission. Additionally, if the student has exceeded time to degree limits, the program should also petition for an extension with the readmission to specify the term in which the student will graduate. The readmission process is an opportunity for the program to carefully consider the former student’s progress and length of time between the student’s inception into the program and completion of remaining requirements. This may result in readmission, readmission with conditions, or denial of readmission. Prior to the program petitioning for a readmission, the student must communicate with the student’s program advisor and/or director to review the student’s degree completion to date and form a written plan for completing remaining degree requirements and removing any standing impediments to graduation, including any I/F, F, NG grades and courses required for graduation. This plan should include a timeline that describes the student's progress toward degree completion to date. The program coordinator, director or advisor will begin the readmission process in Gradtracker and will upload documents in one pdf to include degree completion information to date and a written plan for degree completion. The Graduate College will review the packet and if approved, the student will need to approve the petition and fee as well. Upon approval, the student must pay a readmission fee equivalent to in-state tuition in effect at the time of readmission for three graduate credits. The student will also be asked to complete, sign, and return the supplemental form for residency requirements to the Registrar’s office. Leaves of Absence Under special circumstances, graduate students may apply for leave of absence from formal study at the university for a specific period up to one year. Assuming appropriate documentation is provided, the circumstances justifying a leave include but are not limited to personal or family medical conditions, call to active military duty, parental leave, or death in immediate family. The rationale must be documented by the applicant. An approved leave of absence preserves the student’s status in the degree program, and the time off will not be counted against the time limits for awarding degrees. Consequently, registration is not required during the leave period. A leave may be renewed past the first year, for up to a maximum of five years, depending on the individual circumstances. Renewal of a leave is subject to the approval of the program, college, and the Graduate College. While the Graduate College leave of absence is only necessary for students who will be unable to register for a full academic year, programs may have more strict and specific registration policies and leave of absence policies. Students should also consult their program handbook if there is a legitimate need not to register for any amount of time. 32 To apply for a leave of absence, a student must complete the Request for Leave of Absence Form and upload the appropriate documentation (e.g., doctor’s letter or military orders) through Gradtracker. The program will approve through Gradtracker as well. Once the program has approved the request, the Graduate College will review the petition and if approved, the student and program will receive an email notification through their UC email. Note: A student on a leave of absence is placed on inactive status and their Catalyst record is discontinued, to be reactivated upon their return. While on inactive status, they will not be eligible for student health insurance and may be unable to use many UC resources. Students with financial aid or student loans should confer with the Financial Aid Office prior to requesting a leave of absence to ascertain the consequences of a leave on their loan status. Students should also be aware that any scholarships or assistantships are not guaranteed to be available when a student returns from a leave of absence. Withdrawal from Program Students must notify their program in writing and copy the Graduate Admissions Program Manager regarding their intent to withdraw from their programs. Dismissal from Program Students must consult with individual programs concerning dismissal policies. If a program dismisses a student, the program must copy the Graduate Admissions Program Manager on the notification to the student. 33 MASTER’S DEGREE POLICIES AND PROCEDURES COURSE OF STUDY The course of study for the master’s degree is planned with the advisor and is subject to approval by the program graduate committee or its equivalent. It must show a reasonable degree of concentration on interrelated subjects. Programs will recommend students for degrees only after students have developed and demonstrated the necessary knowledge and skills and have fulfilled all other university requirements. At least once an academic year, the graduate program director or the graduate student’s advisor shall inform the student in writing of their academic progress in the master’s degree program. An annual Academic Progress Report or some other form of formal evaluation of progress is required throughout each student’s program. Students must take a minimum of one graduate credit that contributes to degree requirements (as determined by the graduate program) per academic year (fall-summer) to maintain active status. If a student does not maintain active status, they may apply for reinstatement within three years or apply for readmission to their program thereafter. There are fees associated with these steps. (See Maintaining Graduate Student Status, Reinstatements and Readmission.) CREDIT HOUR REQUIREMENTS The University of Cincinnati is on a semester system. Although qualification for the master’s degree is not based exclusively upon the completion of a definite number of hours of course work, the satisfactorily completed graduate work must consist of the equivalent of a minimum of one academic year of full-time graduate study consisting of at least 30 graduate semester credit hours, including any thesis or capstone project. Credits earned in professional law or medicine programs are not applicable to the 30-credit minimum. CANDIDACY There is no formal candidacy status for the master’s degree. However, some programs do have defense requirements, so each student should confer with their advisor or program director to ascertain the requirements of their specific program. CULMINATING EXPERIENCE: THESES and CAPSTONES Every degree requires a culminating experience that is designed to integrate and apply the knowledge and learning gained from the curriculum, and demonstrate mastery of the subject matter in the degree. A master’s thesis is required by some programs, and a master’s capstone project/experience is required in others. Each master’s degree student undergoes an individual evaluation process at the end of their program. Thesis Preparation, Evaluation and Submission Process Preparation of a thesis demonstrates the student’s ability to communicate and to evaluate critically. Information about preparing an electronic thesis is available on the Graduate College 34 website. The student should consult with their program office for additional forms required other than what appears on the graduation checklist. A student must note any relevant deadlines defined by their program, and work with their program leadership to form a thesis committee composed of at least two UC faculty members, at least one of whom must be a member of the university graduate faculty. The thesis committee can guide the student in their exploration of the topic of the master’s thesis, and is responsible for final evaluation of the thesis. The student must submit the completed thesis to the thesis committee for critical evaluation, by the deadline required by the program or their thesis committee. Students who have written a thesis are expected by the Graduate College per their program requirements to make a public announcement of their thesis defense, including time, date, and title of the public presentation. The format for thesis evaluation is decided by the academic unit offering the graduate degree. Faculty with emerit status may remain on the committee if they were members when the proposal was accepted and were full-time tenured, university graduate faculty. A faculty member originally on a student’s committee who leaves UC to take an academic position elsewhere may also continue to serve on the student’s committee if both the faculty member and the student agree to continue the relationship. However, neither an emerit professor nor a faculty member from another institution may serve as chair of the committee, since they are no longer eligible to be university graduate faculty. Once a thesis has been approved by their committee, the candidate for the master’s degree must submit an electronic thesis by following the current instructions online at the Graduate Collge's Graduation page. Be careful to adhere to any deadlines for submission, or graduation will be delayed. Capstone Process Master’s students who are not required to complete a thesis should consult their academic programs about the requirements and procedures for the capstone experience in their programs. In some programs, the final capstone event may be in the form of a comprehensive exam or research project; in others, the final evaluation may appropriately be a recital, performance, or exhibition. The specific nature of the final evaluation is determined by the academic unit offering the master’s degree program, but it must include evaluation by full-time faculty at the University of Cincinnati. If questioned, the appropriateness of a final evaluation will be decided by the University Graduate Council. GRADUATION One semester prior to the semester in which a student anticipates graduating, the student should: • confer with their program office staff; • consult the Graduate College’s website for deadlines, instructions on submitting their electronic thesis; • visit the Graduate Collge’s website to determine if they are defined as a thesis or non- thesis student, or consult with their program; and • talk to advisor about whether an embargo is needed. 35 Application to Graduate Students must: (1) complete academic requirements and (2) complete the official online Application to Graduate by the deadline for the semester in which they expect to graduate. NOTE: for all graduate students, the application for graduation is started at the Graduation page, and not within Catalyst. Start an application for graduation early in the semester you plan to graduate. Deadlines posted on the Graduation Deadlines page are firm and failure to meet them will delay students’ graduation until the following semester, when they must then submit a new application for their revised graduation date. A student graduating from a dual degree program must make a formal application for graduation for each program (see details in next section). All students applying to graduate will be assessed a non-refundable graduation application fee. The fee will be assessed each semester a student applies for graduation. Students who have applied for graduation and learn later they will not be graduating must be removed from the graduation list before they can apply again for any future semesters (programs must notify the Graduation Program Manager to remove a student). When the application for graduation is complete, the student receives an email receipt for payment of the graduation application from the registrar’s office. If this receipt is not received, promptly notify your program, as your graduation application may not be completed. Some PhD programs incorporate a master’s degree. Students should contact their program for help in adding this additional degree. Graduation from Dual Degree Programs The online Application to Graduate will allow a student to apply for graduation from both degree programs in an official dual degree program. Each of the two programs must follow and complete the certification processes and procedures necessary to facilitate a student’s graduation from their own program. In dual degree programs, students must be registered for at least one graduate credit that contributes to degree requirements in one of the two programs (as determined by the program) during the academic year in which they graduate with their dual degrees. Certification for Graduation (Certify Online) The finalization and submission of a student’s Application to Graduate will activate the process by which the student will be certified for graduation, and the following requirements must be met. The student should confer with their program office one-two weeks after the application period has ended to assure that any problems related to these requirements (reinstatements/ extensions, or grade changes) are resolved in a timely manner and avoid delay of graduation until a subsequent semester. Specifically, the student’s records will be reviewed to verify satisfaction of the following requirements: • finalization and submission of their online Graduation Application by the deadline; 36  • instructor’s submission of passing grades for their final semester credits; • removal of all I grades from their transcript; • removal of all UP/SP grades from unapproved courses and/or the final semester in the approved courses were taken; • assignment of letter grades rather than UP/SP grades for courses in the final semester of the student’s program; • removal of previously awarded NG grades and blank grade awards; • confirmation of satisfactory repetition or waiver of required courses in which an F was originally received; • confirmation of completion of work and changes of I grades within the one-year limit; • confirmation that the student was registered for at least one credit in their graduate program in each academic year, including the year of expected graduation; • confirmation that the student completed degree requirements within the prescribed time- to-degree; • satisfactory completion of at least 30 graduate credits completed to the satisfaction of the student’s program; • completion of all program requirements for the degree; • 3.000 GPA has been earned while a matriculated graduate student in the program; • if a thesis is required, upload the electronic thesis (ETD) with chair approval by the deadline date, which is posted on the Graduation Deadlines website. Note: The requirements explained here are university requirements. Students must contact their program’s office for any additional program-level requirements or deadlines that must be completed prior to graduation. Please see the Doctoral Hooding and Master’s Recognition Ceremony section for details on the event. CONTINUING TO A DOCTORAL PROGRAM For a UC master’s student continuing to a doctoral program in the same program area, the student will fill out the application in the graduate admissions application system, and the graduate application fee is waived. 37 DOCTORAL DEGREE POLICIES AND PROCEDURES COURSE OF STUDY The course of study for the doctoral degree is arranged with each student by their advisor and reviewed by the program’s graduate committee or its equivalent. The program should provide a concentration and breadth of study for the student to develop competence in research, scholarship, teaching, and professional performance in general, with knowledge of their chosen specialty in relation to allied branches of learning. A written assessment of performance for each doctoral student is required at the end of their first year; an annual Academic Progress Report or some other form of formal evaluation of progress is required throughout each student’s program. CREDIT HOUR REQUIREMENTS The doctoral degree will be granted for no less than the equivalent of three years of full-time graduate study. Individual program requirements vary, but eligibility for graduation typically requires a minimum of 90 graduate credits beyond the bachelor’s degree. Doctoral students with a prior master’s degree may petition their program to allow up to 30 transfer credits from the master’s degree towards their doctoral degree. Degree credits must include at least 7 hours in dissertation research. Some program credit requirements may be higher. The last 30 credits must be completed under the direction of University of Cincinnati graduate faculty. The degree will not be granted solely on the basis of the accumulation of the required number of credits. A program will recommend students for degrees only after they have developed the necessary intellectual maturity and have fulfilled all other requirements of the program and the university. RESIDENCY AS FULL-TIME STUDENT Prior to admission to doctoral candidacy, all doctoral students shall complete a residency requirement by enrolling in 10 graduate credit hours (12 if funded by a Graduate Assistantship) per semester for two out of three consecutive semesters of study (including summer). Part-time students are not exempt from enrollment requirements to achieve residency. However, full-time UC employees using their tuition remission benefit to complete a part-time doctoral program may request a waiver of this requirement from the Associate Dean of the Graduate College. CANDIDACY, QUALIFYING EXAM The Graduate College does not currently track time to candidacy, but encourages programs to implement candidacy exams early in their programs to allow the students optimal feedback on their aspirations and research. Doctoral students are required to complete a program certification process according to the program’s established standards. The student must have at least a 3.000 grade point average in doctoral coursework and fulfill all other pre-candidacy requirements specified by the doctoral program in which the student is enrolled. Upon completion of these requirements, the student will receive a formal letter from the Graduate College informing the student of admission to candidacy. 38 UNIVERSITY GRADUATE FACULTY ROLE In accordance with the university’s Board of Trustees’ rule (50-77-11) (B) (2), only university graduate faculty are permitted to chair thesis or dissertation committees. The Graduate College appropriately identifies members of the university graduate faculty. Faculty members are nominated for graduate-faculty status by the program most closely aligned with the academic unit holding their primary academic appointment, and with the approval of their college dean or associate dean in charge of graduate education (from whom the nomination should arrive to the Graduate College). Faculty members holding any type of faculty appointment may be eligible for college-initiated nomination to the graduate faculty, the decision to be made based on an evaluation of the individual curriculum vitae and research and creative profile of the nominee. Criteria for nomination are formulated by individual programs and used by the Graduate College in adjudication. DISSERTATION Each PhD and EdD student must produce and defend a dissertation showing high scholarly achievement based on their original research. The student is required to submit an electronic document as evidence of this research. Students in all other doctoral programs should consult their academic programs regarding requirements and procedures for the capstone experience required in their programs. Dissertation Advisor and Committee When the student has been admitted into doctoral candidacy and has selected a dissertation subject and dissertation advisor, a dissertation committee should be appointed as soon as possible. The dissertation advisor must be qualified to serve as the chair of the dissertation committee, meaning this faculty member must be a member of the university graduate faculty and all members of the committee will be appointed by the Graduate College upon recommendation of the program director or director of graduate studies (in consultation with the committee chair and student). Students have the right to request a change in the committee but must do so in consultation with the graduate program director and their program must make the change in GradTracker. Preferably, the dissertation committee will include at least one person from outside the program, who might be faculty from the University of Cincinnati or another institution. A dissertation committee must be composed of a minimum of three UC faculty members. Members of the university graduate faculty are eligible to serve on all thesis and dissertation committees. In addition, all tenured and tenure-track faculty members may serve on all thesis and dissertation committees (even if they are not members of the university graduate faculty, meaning they may not serve in the chair role and cannot act as primary advisors). Other types of UC faculty members may serve on committees if the appointing unit demonstrates that their expertise is beneficial for the dissertation project. Programs should make such requests to the Graduate College in advance, to be ascertained on a case-by-case basis. Neither an emerit faculty member nor a faculty member from another institution may serve as the chair of the committee. Emerit faculty may remain on the committee if they were members when the proposal was accepted. A faculty member originally on a student’s committee who leaves UC to take an academic position elsewhere may also continue to serve on the student’s committee if both the faculty member and the student agree to continue the relationship. If a non-UC faculty member or appropriate professional practitioner has special expertise in a dissertation topic, 39 such a person may be added to the dissertation committee if they are nominated by the candidate and approved by both the chairperson of the dissertation committee, the director of graduate studies for the academic unit involved and the Graduate College. All such individuals serve as a full voting member of the dissertation committee without compensation from either the university or the candidate and would serve in addition to the minimum number of three qualified full-time UC faculty. A copy of the completed dissertation must be submitted to each committee member for critical evaluation, with sufficient time for review as determined by the dissertation committee. If it is considered satisfactory with respect to form and content by the committee, a final defense of the dissertation can be scheduled. Final Defense of Dissertation Students should check with their program office for the final deadline for their dissertation defense. The student’s final defense of the dissertation will be open to the public and all members of the academic community. Students are required to enter details of their dissertation defense, such as time, date, and location, online at the Graduate College website through the Graduation checklist steps. Begin at the Graduation webpage. One can also browse scheduled dissertation defenses by visiting the Upcoming Dissertation Defenses page. The candidate answers questions posed by members of the committee and other members of the audience following an oral presentation of their dissertation. At the conclusion of the defense, the committee will withdraw, make a decision with regard to the acceptability of the dissertation and its defense, and report its decision to the candidate. At least ¾ of the voting members of the dissertation committee (including at least one representative of each major area involved, in the case of interdisciplinary programs) must approve the dissertation. When the student’s dissertation committee chair has approved a defense, the student should assure that they have met all requirements for graduation including those in the graduation information obtained online. Use of a Moderator Although an outside moderator is not required, a moderator may be assigned by the Graduate College dean upon the request of the candidate, the chairperson of the dissertation committee, or the person empowered to approve the composition of a dissertation committee (the director of graduate studies for the academic unit involved). Moderators should be members of the university graduate faculty from outside the academic unit involved. The duties of the moderator are limited to observing the oral defense of the dissertation and reporting in writing to the Graduate College dean on the academic propriety of the proceedings. Submission of Dissertation After a dissertation has been approved, the candidate for the doctoral degree must submit their electronic dissertation by following the current instructions found at the Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Information webpage. Students in all other doctoral programs should consult their academic programs for the capstone experience required in their programs. Deadlines are posted at the Graduation Deadlines page. • All thesis/dissertations must be electronically submitted by the student and approved by the advisor. Students log in via the link available on the Graduation webpage. 40  • Advisors are sent an email when the student submits for their approval, and the advisor then logs in to review/approve. • Once approved by the chair, the student is notified by email. • A Graduate College approval email is sent to the student once reviewed. • The program is copied on all email correspondence during the Electronic Thesis/Dissertation (ETD) approval process. GRADUATION One semester prior to the semester in which a student anticipates graduating, the student should: 1. Confer with their program office staff. 2. Consult the Graduation page on the Graduate College’s website for deadlines, instructions on submitting their electronic dissertation, and doctoral hooding ceremony information. 3. Talk to advisor about whether an embargo is needed. Application to Graduate Students must: (1) complete academic requirements and (2) complete the official online Application to Graduate by the deadline for the semester in which they expect to graduate. Deadlines are firm and failure to meet them will delay students’ graduation until the following semester, when they must then submit a new application for their revised graduation date. All students applying to graduate will be assessed a non-refundable graduation application fee. The fee will be assessed each semester a student applies for graduation. Dual Degree Programs Graduation The online Application to Graduate will allow a student to apply for graduation from both degree programs in a dual degree program. Each of the two programs must follow the certification processes and procedures necessary to facilitate the student’s graduation from their own program. In dual degree programs, students must be registered for at least one graduate credit that contributes to degree requirements in one of the two programs (as determined by the program) during the academic year in which they graduate with dual degrees. Graduation Requirements for Doctoral Degrees Students must be registered for at least one graduate credit that contributes to degree requirements (as determined by the graduate program) during the academic year in which they graduate from that program. Doctoral students must also complete degree requirements within a nine-year period unless they have an approved extension (see Maintaining Graduate Student Status, Time to Degree). They should contact their program offices for any additional program requirements or deadlines to be completed prior to graduation. Certification for Graduation (Certify Online) Finalization and submission of a student’s Application to Graduate will activate the process by which the student will be certified for graduation, and the following requirements have been met. 41 The student should confer with their program office one-two weeks after the application period has ended to assure that any problems related to these requirements are resolved in a timely manner and avoid delay of graduation until a subsequent semester. Specifically, the student’s records will be reviewed to verify satisfaction of the following requirements: • finalization and submission of their online Application to Graduate by the deadline; • instructor’s submission of passing grades for final semester credits; • removal of all I grades from transcript; • Removal of previously earned NG grades and blank grade awards - removal of all UP/SP grades from unapproved courses and/or the final semester in which the courses were taken; • assignment of letter grades rather than UP/SP grades for courses in the final semester of the student’s program; • confirmation of satisfactory repetition or waiver of required courses in which an F was originally received; • confirmation of completion of work and changes of I grades within the one-year limit; • confirmation that the student was registered for at least one credit in the graduate program in each academic year, including the year of expected graduation; • confirmation that the student reached candidacy and has a valid dissertation committee; • degree requirements completed within prescribed time-to-degree; • satisfactory completion of sufficient graduate credits. In general, doctoral degrees require at least 7 research credits (many programs have higher requirements), within a total of at least 90 graduate credits for students who do not have a prior master’s degree, or require a total of at least 60 credits for students beyond the master’s degree. Please note that individual program credit requirements can vary widely. • completion of all program requirements for the degree; • 3.000 GPA has been earned while matriculated in the graduate program; • if a dissertation is required, upload the electronic dissertation (ETD), following the instructions on the Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Information page, for chair approval by the deadline. Note: The requirements explained here are university requirements. Students must contact their program office for any additional program-level requirements or deadlines that must be completed prior to graduation. GRADUATE CERTIFICATE VERIFICATION FOR UC TRANSCRIPT ENDORSEMENT In order for students to have their UC transcript endorsed with an earned certificate, students must apply for graduation and the program must approve the record through certify online just like the master's or doctoral students. DOCTORAL HOODING AND MASTER’S RECOGNITION CEREMONY Doctoral and master’s students who are graduating or who have graduated during the academic year will receive an invitation from the Dean of the Graduate College to participate in the university’s prestigious Doctoral Hooding and Master’s Recognition Ceremony held each semester. Please visit the commencement ceremony’s website for up-to-date details or 42 the Graduate College’s Graduation webpage. This is a joyous occasion in which students celebrate their accomplishment with family and friends as they are recognized by faculty and university leadership. Doctoral participants will be adorned with their hoods during the ceremony, by either their faculty mentor or the dean of their college. Graduates must confirm their intent to participate by reserving a seat online for the celebratory event and providing current home and email addresses for notification purposes. If you wish to be hooded by your faculty mentor, discuss the date with them to make sure they can attend. 43 INSTITUTIONAL RULES, POLICIES, AND PROCEDURES PROGRAM STANDARDS This Graduate Handbook clarifies minimum university-level requirements and policies that apply to all graduate students throughout the University of Cincinnati. Beyond these, each student is also expected to adhere to requirements, policies, and procedures specific to their own degree program and college. All graduate programs must publish in writing in accessible format the minimum academic standards for each graduate program offered, including the following: • minimum grade point average, including grades earned in required courses; • acceptable grade distribution, including grades earned in required courses; • nature and number of programmatic examinations, such as preliminary or qualifying, and the consequences of failing all or part of each examination; • specified research requirements; • a time-related definition of normal progress for all full- and part-time students; • standards and procedures for the mandatory annual review of academic performance; • standards and procedures for probation, suspension, and dismissal from the program. RECORDS PRIVACY, FERPA, AND THE RIGHT TO REVIEW The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 (FERPA), is the federal law that governs the release of and access to student education records. FERPA affords students certain rights with respect to their education records. For the complete FERPA information, consult the FERPA and Records Privacy page of the Registrar’s Office website. NOTICE OF NON-DISCRIMINATION The University of Cincinnati does not discriminate on the basis of disability, race, color, religion, national origin, ancestry, medical condition, genetic information, marital status, parental status (including status as a foster parent), sex, age, sexual orientation, veteran status, military status (past, present, or future), or gender identity and expression in its programs and activities. The university does not tolerate discrimination, harassment, or retaliation on these bases and takes steps to ensure that students, employees, and third parties are not subject to a hostile environment in university programs or activities. The university responds promptly and effectively to allegations of discrimination, harassment, and retaliation. It promptly conducts investigations and takes appropriate action, including disciplinary action, against individuals found to have violated its policies, as well as provides appropriate remedies to complainants and the campus community. The university takes immediate action to end a hostile environment if one has been created, prevent its recurrence, and remedy the effects of any hostile environment on affected members of the campus community. UC is committed to the ideal of universal Web accessibility and strives to provide an accessible Web presence that enables all university community members and visitors full access to 44 information provided on its websites. Every effort has been made to make these pages as accessible as possible in accordance with the applicable guidelines. The University of Cincinnati provides free aids and services to people with disabilities to communicate effectively with us, such as qualified sign language interpreters and written information in other formats (large print, audio, accessible electronic formats, other formats). The University of Cincinnati also provides free language services to people whose primary language is not English, such as qualified interpreters (call 513-556-5503) and information written in other languages. If you need these services, please tell any employee of a University of Cincinnati health program or activity. If you believe that the University of Cincinnati has failed to provide these services or discriminated in another way, you can file a grievance with the Office of Equal Opportunity and Access and/or Office of Gender Equity & Inclusion. You can file a grievance in person, by mail or by email. If you need help filing a grievance, the Office of Equal Opportunity & Access and Office of Gender Equity & Inclusion staff are available to help you. ACADEMIC DISHONESTY Academic dishonesty in any form is a serious offense that cannot be tolerated in an academic community. Dishonesty—including cheating, plagiarism, deception of effort, and/or unauthorized assistance—may result in a failing grade in a course and/or suspension or dismissal from the university. Allegations of academic dishonesty will be processed pursuant to the university’s Student Code of Conduct. After graduation, alumni remain responsible for the academic integrity of the work they performed while a student at the University of Cincinnati. If evidence of academic dishonesty or research misconduct is revealed after the graduation of a student, the Office of Research, the Graduate College, and the university can examine whether such concerns impact the academic integrity of the degree that was conferred on the student, with consequences including but not limited to degree revocation. STUDENT CODE OF CONDUCT The Student Code of Conduct defines behavior expected of all University of Cincinnati students. It is each student’s responsibility to know and comply with the university’s Student Code of Conduct, and sanctions or penalties are outlined. Academic behavior considered to be misconduct is defined in the Student Code of Conduct. The code also addresses nonacademic misconduct (such as disturbing the peace, destruction of property, and theft). Disciplinary procedures are explained in a step-by-step manner, and the procedures for appeal of decisions are stated. In addition to this code, students must adhere to their college’s professional code of conduct and honor codes where applicable. Students should contact the office of the dean for their college to inquire about any applicable conduct and honor codes to ensure compliance. Students can be suspended or dismissed from the university for unprofessional behavior. 45 RESPONSIBLE CONDUCT OF RESEARCH Furthering of research is a major institutional goal of the University of Cincinnati. Research includes not only intellectual activity and exploration designed to expand knowledge and understanding, but also activities in the creative and performing arts designed to interpret and create. Such activities require responsibilities for the ethical and safe conduct of research. Individuals charged with supervision of research, as well as all individuals directly engaged in it, and collaborators of investigators outside their own units are responsible for the quality of the data generated in their own laboratories as well as the laboratories of their collaborators. Everyone shares responsibility for the physical safety and intellectual property of individuals in the responsible conduct of creative scholarship and research. RESTRICTED RESEARCH The right to open exchange of information and opinion in faculty relations with students carries the obligation to avoid comments or violations of confidentiality that would reduce free expression or inquiry by students. Student involvement in industrial proprietary projects should be permitted only when these projects in no way restrict the student’s ability to fulfill their degree requirements, which includes the obligation to publish dissertation results. Faculty members have the right to publish their research findings and the right to protection against retaliation because of displeasure over their conclusions by the public, administration, government, or others. They have the concomitant responsibility to refrain from conducting secret, non-publishable research as part of their university duties. GRADUATE STUDENT GRIEVANCE PROCEDURES The University of Cincinnati provides an opportunity for the resolution of disputes involving graduate students in a fair and collegial manner. The Graduate Student Grievance Procedures establish a formal academic process for graduate students to request review and redress of certain complaints arising out of their academic relationships with their programs, their colleges, or the university. The grievance begins with a mediation process and may proceed, if necessary, through the more formal review and decision or appeal processes. In general, however, it is expected that grievances will be resolved by the parties within their programs. Students are encouraged to seek assistance from the university Ombuds Office for possible resolution before initiating the formal grievance process. Students, faculty and staff should note that Grievance Procedures are not legal protocols. They are, however, effective means by which to resolve conflicts. The Graduate College endorses these procedures and expects all programs and students involved to follow them according to the established guidelines. No outside parties, such as lawyers, ministers, and family members, are allowed to participate in or impose upon the procedures. The Graduate Student Grievance Procedures cannot supplant final sanctions stemming from the University of Cincinnati Student Code of Conduct process. There is a time limit to filing a grievance: it must be filed within 60-90 business days of the alleged improper mistreatment. The procedures are applicable to the following types of grievances: • grievances alleging improper dismissal or suspension from a graduate program, not as a result of the Student Code of Conduct process; • grievances alleging the improper withholding or termination of financial support of any kind; 46  • grievances alleging any other improper treatment, either substantive or procedural, of a graduate student by a university employee or university affiliate except: o allegations of improper evaluation of the quality and/or quantity of academic work, which a student cannot grieve; o allegations of unfair recommendation for employment or further graduate study, which a student cannot grieve; o allegations of discrimination or harassment that are subject to review by the Office of Equal Opportunity and Access or the Office of Gender, Equity and Inclusion. Published November 28, 2023. This version is an update to the 2022-23 AY handbook to reflect changes to the Graduate Scholarship structure and terminology. This version supersedes all previous versions. 47 

Answer solely based on the provided text, do not give any additional information or analysis beyond that which is provided in the text. Give your answer in the form of two lists of bullet points.

What are the arguments for and against the Bill?

The new British Ambassador to the United States, prior to his departure for Washington, perhaps with the idea of propitiating Irish opinion in America, elected to speak on St. Patrick's Day. He wore a green Irish halo for the occasion. He said it had been a labor of love for him during last summer and autumn to assist in reducing to legislative form proposals for ending the Irish question. He said the new Bill for the government of Ireland was "a sincere attempt to place definitely and finally in the hands of the elected representatives of the Irish people the duty and responsibility of working out their own salvation and the salvation of their country." No doubt this statement has been cabled to America, and I propose to examine here how far this statement is justified and how Ireland is indebted to Sir Auckland Geddes for his interest in its welfare. I lay this down as a fundamental proposition, which I do not think will be denied, that whoever controls the taxation and trade policy of a country controls its destiny and the entire character of its civilization. The body with control over customs, excise, income tax, supertax, excess profits duty and external trade has it in its power to make that country predominantly industrial or agricultural or to make a balance between urban and rural interests. It can direct the external trade of the country, make it flow into this or that channel. These powers over Irish taxation and trade policy are expressly denied to Ireland. Ireland in fact has less power under this last Bill over its own economic development than it had under the Act of Union. Under that Act, Ireland had one hundred and two members in the Imperial Parliament who could at times hold the balance of power. It was not a very real power, because when the interests of Ireland and Great Britain conflicted, both parties in Great Britain united against Ireland, but still to the leaders of parties Irish votes were worth angling for, for British purposes, and had to be paid for by Land Acts or other measures. The new Bill provides that the Irish representation at Westminster shall be reduced to forty-two members, and so at Westminster Ireland is made practically powerless, while everything which really affects Irish economic interests is still legislated for by the British Parliament.

What are the arguments for and against the Bill? Answer solely based on the provided text, do not give any additional information or analysis beyond that which is provided in the text. Give your answer in the form of two lists of bullet points. "The new British Ambassador to the United States, prior to his departure for Washington, perhaps with the idea of propitiating Irish opinion in America, elected to speak on St. Patrick's Day. He wore a green Irish halo for the occasion. He said it had been a labor of love for him during last summer and autumn to assist in reducing to legislative form proposals for ending the Irish question. He said the new Bill for the government of Ireland was "a sincere attempt to place definitely and finally in the hands of the elected representatives of the Irish people the duty and responsibility of working out their own salvation and the salvation of their country." No doubt this statement has been cabled to America, and I propose to examine here how far this statement is justified and how Ireland is indebted to Sir Auckland Geddes for his interest in its welfare. I lay this down as a fundamental proposition, which I do not think will be denied, that whoever controls the taxation and trade policy of a country controls its destiny and the entire character of its civilization. The body with control over customs, excise, income tax, supertax, excess profits duty and external trade has it in its power to make that country predominantly industrial or agricultural or to make a balance between urban and rural interests. It can direct the external trade of the country, make it flow into this or that channel. These powers over Irish taxation and trade policy are expressly denied to Ireland. Ireland in fact has less power under this last Bill over its own economic development than it had under the Act of Union. Under that Act, Ireland had one hundred and two members in the Imperial Parliament who could at times hold the balance of power. It was not a very real power, because when the interests of Ireland and Great Britain conflicted, both parties in Great Britain united against Ireland, but still to the leaders of parties Irish votes were worth angling for, for British purposes, and had to be paid for by Land Acts or other measures. The new Bill provides that the Irish representation at Westminster shall be reduced to forty-two members, and so at Westminster Ireland is made practically powerless, while everything which really affects Irish economic interests is still legislated for by the British Parliament."

{instruction} ========== In your answer, refer only to the context document. Do not employ any outside knowledge {question} ========== [user request] {passage 0} ========== [context document]

Can you summarize in 6-8 sentences how this paper suggests how to properly price AI stocks and what is so different about it compared to current strategies? Do not use the word AI or any other phrase that refers to Artificial Intelligence.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is having a powerful impact in the domain of finance. Estimates of the 10-year revenue figure vary but could be as high as $3 trillion. Over a similar period, the market value of AI firms is expected to grow at a 37% rate. Although the opportunities seem boundless, valuations conducted in the financial markets are increasingly complex to carry out for AI/tech stocks. Artificial Intelligence in Finance: Valuations and Opportunities Yosef Bonaparte Finance Research Letters A version of this paper can be found here Want to read our summaries of academic finance papers? Check out our Academic Research Insight category. What are the research questions? While there is literature that describes the “domain” of artificial intelligence, there are very few, if any, that analyze the valuation and pricing of AI stocks. The authors attempt to fill the void with a two-part methodology. What are Academic Insights? The methodology combines behavioral and fundamental components. The fundamental model incorporates new AI innovation into the P/E ratio and R&D as a percentage of revenue. FUNDAMENTAL: The key is to estimate future revenue as a function of the exposure of the stock to AI technology. The author uses Nvidia as an example of an overpriced (yes, overpriced!) stock in June 2023 via fundamentals as follows: The results are hypothetical results and are NOT an indicator of future results and do NOT represent returns that any investor actually attained. Indexes are unmanaged and do not reflect management or trading fees, and one cannot invest directly in an index. 2. BEHAVIORAL: The behavioral component is based on a technology sentiment index, using the Google trend of key technological terms. The key issue is to determine how the stock relates to AI technology. In the Nvidia case, the correlation between the Google Trend Index and Nvidia’s price acts as an estimate of how embedded the stock is to AI tech. Terms include: artificial intelligence, neural network, large language model, machine learning, generative AI, and deep learning. See Tables 1 and 2 below for estimates of the correlation for Nvidia over 2 separate time -periods. The estimate of AI sensitivity is found in Table 3. For Nvidia, the sum of artificial intelligence searches is 17.5% (from Table 1: 683 divided by total searches at 3904) and 35.2% when weighted across search terms. Nvidia has substantial exposure to AI terms, however, the exposure is less than the exposure of MSFT and GOOG. The same methodology can be used on other stocks to determine sensitivity to the AI opportunity. Why does it matter? The authors identified three key areas of knowledge an investor or analyst should acquire to understand how AI is transforming the financial landscape. First, develop a thorough understanding of the AI concept in terms of innovation and relevance to finance. Second, develop the methodologies for assessing AI companies and tech investment funds. Third, focus on the industry leaders in AI to provide context and provoke an examination of the future of AI. How will it influence the capital markets, how and what will drive growth in sales, and ultimately, how will valuations be influenced? The most important chart from the paper The results are hypothetical results and are NOT an indicator of future results and do NOT represent returns that any investor actually attained. Indexes are unmanaged and do not reflect management or trading fees, and one cannot invest directly in an index.

{instruction} ========== In your answer, refer only to the context document. Do not employ any outside knowledge {question} ========== Can you summarize in 6-8 sentences how this paper suggests how to properly price AI stocks and what is so different about it compared to current strategies? Do not use the word AI or any other phrase that refers to Artificial Intelligence. {passage 0} ========== Artificial Intelligence (AI) is having a powerful impact in the domain of finance. Estimates of the 10-year revenue figure vary but could be as high as $3 trillion. Over a similar period, the market value of AI firms is expected to grow at a 37% rate. Although the opportunities seem boundless, valuations conducted in the financial markets are increasingly complex to carry out for AI/tech stocks. Artificial Intelligence in Finance: Valuations and Opportunities Yosef Bonaparte Finance Research Letters A version of this paper can be found here Want to read our summaries of academic finance papers? Check out our Academic Research Insight category. What are the research questions? While there is literature that describes the “domain” of artificial intelligence, there are very few, if any, that analyze the valuation and pricing of AI stocks. The authors attempt to fill the void with a two-part methodology. What are Academic Insights? The methodology combines behavioral and fundamental components. The fundamental model incorporates new AI innovation into the P/E ratio and R&D as a percentage of revenue. FUNDAMENTAL: The key is to estimate future revenue as a function of the exposure of the stock to AI technology. The author uses Nvidia as an example of an overpriced (yes, overpriced!) stock in June 2023 via fundamentals as follows: The results are hypothetical results and are NOT an indicator of future results and do NOT represent returns that any investor actually attained. Indexes are unmanaged and do not reflect management or trading fees, and one cannot invest directly in an index. 2. BEHAVIORAL: The behavioral component is based on a technology sentiment index, using the Google trend of key technological terms. The key issue is to determine how the stock relates to AI technology. In the Nvidia case, the correlation between the Google Trend Index and Nvidia’s price acts as an estimate of how embedded the stock is to AI tech. Terms include: artificial intelligence, neural network, large language model, machine learning, generative AI, and deep learning. See Tables 1 and 2 below for estimates of the correlation for Nvidia over 2 separate time -periods. The estimate of AI sensitivity is found in Table 3. For Nvidia, the sum of artificial intelligence searches is 17.5% (from Table 1: 683 divided by total searches at 3904) and 35.2% when weighted across search terms. Nvidia has substantial exposure to AI terms, however, the exposure is less than the exposure of MSFT and GOOG. The same methodology can be used on other stocks to determine sensitivity to the AI opportunity. Why does it matter? The authors identified three key areas of knowledge an investor or analyst should acquire to understand how AI is transforming the financial landscape. First, develop a thorough understanding of the AI concept in terms of innovation and relevance to finance. Second, develop the methodologies for assessing AI companies and tech investment funds. Third, focus on the industry leaders in AI to provide context and provoke an examination of the future of AI. How will it influence the capital markets, how and what will drive growth in sales, and ultimately, how will valuations be influenced? The most important chart from the paper The results are hypothetical results and are NOT an indicator of future results and do NOT represent returns that any investor actually attained. Indexes are unmanaged and do not reflect management or trading fees, and one cannot invest directly in an index. https://alphaarchitect.com/2024/04/valuing-artificial-intelligence-ai-stocks/

"================ <TEXT PASSAGE> ======= [context document] ================ <QUESTION> ======= [user request] ================ <TASK> ======= You are an expert in question answering. Your task is to reply to a query or question, based only on the information provided by the user. It should only use information in the article provided."

What are the most common ways to save money for the Halloween season? Make the response less than 500 words but more than 300 words.

Americans love Halloween. What other night can you dress like a hot dog and eat all your favorite sweets? But the problem is, we may love it a little too much. This year, Americans plan to spend around $10.6 billion—that’s billion with a B—on Halloween.1 That’s about $100 per person! If you’re tight on cash, spending that much might sound scary. But the good news is: You don’t have to spend a zombie arm and a leg to have a good time. Try these seven tricks to stick to your Halloween budget. 1. Costumes One of my favorite parts of Halloween is the costumes, hands down—from seeing adorable babies dressed as koalas to entire families decked out as the Addams Family. But when you start buying costumes for your own family, you realize just how pricey they can get! So, instead of buying a $40 Ninja Turtles costume for each of your four boys or sewing some DIY versions from scratch, turn hunting for costumes into a family game. Here’s how it works: Head to the consignment shop or thrift store with your family and give each of your kids an envelope with $5 or $10 inside. Split up into teams to pick out a costume or find materials to make a custom creation. When time’s up and purchases are made, head home and have the kids dig into their closets for the rest of their costumes. There’s nothing like a happy homemade Halloween! Don’t forget, just like kids grow out of clothes, they also grow out of Halloween costumes. Check with your friends and neighbors to see if they’ll let you borrow a costume this year. You don’t need to drop big money for a brand-new Hulk outfit when little Timmy down the street has one your kid can borrow for the night. 2. Decorations Halloween is a really big deal for some people—and a single pumpkin on the front porch just won’t cut it (especially if you’re easily inspired by fall décor on Instagram and Pinterest). But if you’re not careful, buying Halloween décor year after year can really take a bite out of your budget. Pro tip: If you need to stretch a dollar, hit up your local dollar store for decorations. And if you love going all out for Halloween, start saving and reusing your decorations. Since Halloween is almost as big of a deal as Christmas at your house, prep for it the same way. Instead of throwing away decorations at the end of the season, save some to reuse each year. Store your ghouls and goblins in a reusable tub once the season is over, and pull them out next year. 3. Candy It’s no secret that candy is pricey stuff. But living in a neighborhood that gets carloads of kids every year doesn’t mean you have to buy barrels of candy. If you know you’ll be visited by 50 to 100 princesses and superheroes, skip the fancy chocolate bars and grab a bulk bag of assorted candy instead. Be on the lookout for coupons and any two-for-one deals, but don’t feel like you need to get the brand-name stuff either. Just buy what you can afford, even if that means store brand. Trick-or-treaters get a lot of sugar, so don’t think you’re holding out on them if you buy generic. And when the candy’s gone, it’s gone. Early birds get the gummy worms, and when you’ve run out, you can turn the lights off and relax. And one more tip when it comes to candy—keep track of how many trick-or-treaters visit your house so you can plan for next year. There’s no need to overbuy and get stuck eating all the leftovers (unless that’s what you were hoping for). 4. Pumpkins For something that turns into a pile of moldy mush a few weeks after you buy it, pumpkins sure cost a pretty penny. And they’re kind of like potato chips: You can’t have just one. It can be super tempting to stage 20 pumpkins across our porches, decks and tables. Money Start budgeting with EveryDollar today! Don’t get me wrong—pumpkins are fun. But it’s way too easy to overspend on them. So give yourself a pumpkin budget. Seriously. Let the kids each pick one or cap yourself at $15. That way, you can keep the spending in check. And when you’re ready to buy pumpkins, going to the pumpkin patch is a blast, but not the best place to buy them if you’re on a budget. Instead, buy pumpkins from the grocery store, and look for two-for-one deals that pop up. Because when it all boils down to it, a pumpkin is a pumpkin. 5. Greeting Cards Do people really send out Halloween greeting cards? When was the last time you got a “Have a Batty Halloween” card in your mailbox? Well, nearly 45% of those surveyed by the National Retail Federation in 2021 said they planned to buy Halloween greeting cards, so somebody’s doing it.2 But you can make a spooky greeting card without dropping $6 on a glitter-bomb skeleton card for your favorite niece. Use some cardstock and get creative by drawing all kinds of creepy characters. Don’t forget to tape on a little something sweet too! However, if your heart is set on a store-bought card, look for the two-for-a-dollar kind. And remember, you don’t have to send a card. 6. Fall Activities There are plenty of harvest and Halloween festivals this time of year—and they’re usually free! Plus, there are plenty of other budget-friendly activities for the family. Spend the day walking around a farm or enjoying a hayride. Take a drive out of town to look at the leaves changing colors. Go apple picking or enjoy a fall festival. Take advantage of what’s already going on in your church or community, and budget a little extra for any special food or rides. Festive fall food can really add up if you’re not careful, so save some cash by packing a picnic and a comfy quilt. 7. Family Traditions Pick out a weekend or two for some quality time together with friends or your family this fall. If you’re tired of carving pumpkins or dressing up, why not start some new budget-friendly traditions? How about a fall-themed cooking or baking day? Try caramel apples, pumpkin pie and jack-o’-lantern pizzas (use pepperoni and veggies to make the face). Or have everyone vote for their favorite fall movies, then hunker down on the couch to get cozy and eat all those tasty treats you cooked up while you watch. If you’d rather be outside enjoying the leaves, head over to the park for a scavenger hunt and enjoy the scenery while you search. It’s 100% possible to have a memorable Halloween on a bite-size budget! Trust me, you’ll have more fun knowing you’re not wrecking your money goals to celebrate. Don’t let Halloween haunt your budget—so make sure you know exactly where each dollar is going this season with EveryDollar, our free budget tool.

"================ <TEXT PASSAGE> ======= Americans love Halloween. What other night can you dress like a hot dog and eat all your favorite sweets? But the problem is, we may love it a little too much. This year, Americans plan to spend around $10.6 billion—that’s billion with a B—on Halloween.1 That’s about $100 per person! If you’re tight on cash, spending that much might sound scary. But the good news is: You don’t have to spend a zombie arm and a leg to have a good time. Try these seven tricks to stick to your Halloween budget. 1. Costumes One of my favorite parts of Halloween is the costumes, hands down—from seeing adorable babies dressed as koalas to entire families decked out as the Addams Family. But when you start buying costumes for your own family, you realize just how pricey they can get! So, instead of buying a $40 Ninja Turtles costume for each of your four boys or sewing some DIY versions from scratch, turn hunting for costumes into a family game. Here’s how it works: Head to the consignment shop or thrift store with your family and give each of your kids an envelope with $5 or $10 inside. Split up into teams to pick out a costume or find materials to make a custom creation. When time’s up and purchases are made, head home and have the kids dig into their closets for the rest of their costumes. There’s nothing like a happy homemade Halloween! Don’t forget, just like kids grow out of clothes, they also grow out of Halloween costumes. Check with your friends and neighbors to see if they’ll let you borrow a costume this year. You don’t need to drop big money for a brand-new Hulk outfit when little Timmy down the street has one your kid can borrow for the night. 2. Decorations Halloween is a really big deal for some people—and a single pumpkin on the front porch just won’t cut it (especially if you’re easily inspired by fall décor on Instagram and Pinterest). But if you’re not careful, buying Halloween décor year after year can really take a bite out of your budget. Pro tip: If you need to stretch a dollar, hit up your local dollar store for decorations. And if you love going all out for Halloween, start saving and reusing your decorations. Since Halloween is almost as big of a deal as Christmas at your house, prep for it the same way. Instead of throwing away decorations at the end of the season, save some to reuse each year. Store your ghouls and goblins in a reusable tub once the season is over, and pull them out next year. 3. Candy It’s no secret that candy is pricey stuff. But living in a neighborhood that gets carloads of kids every year doesn’t mean you have to buy barrels of candy. If you know you’ll be visited by 50 to 100 princesses and superheroes, skip the fancy chocolate bars and grab a bulk bag of assorted candy instead. Be on the lookout for coupons and any two-for-one deals, but don’t feel like you need to get the brand-name stuff either. Just buy what you can afford, even if that means store brand. Trick-or-treaters get a lot of sugar, so don’t think you’re holding out on them if you buy generic. And when the candy’s gone, it’s gone. Early birds get the gummy worms, and when you’ve run out, you can turn the lights off and relax. And one more tip when it comes to candy—keep track of how many trick-or-treaters visit your house so you can plan for next year. There’s no need to overbuy and get stuck eating all the leftovers (unless that’s what you were hoping for). 4. Pumpkins For something that turns into a pile of moldy mush a few weeks after you buy it, pumpkins sure cost a pretty penny. And they’re kind of like potato chips: You can’t have just one. It can be super tempting to stage 20 pumpkins across our porches, decks and tables. Money Start budgeting with EveryDollar today! Don’t get me wrong—pumpkins are fun. But it’s way too easy to overspend on them. So give yourself a pumpkin budget. Seriously. Let the kids each pick one or cap yourself at $15. That way, you can keep the spending in check. And when you’re ready to buy pumpkins, going to the pumpkin patch is a blast, but not the best place to buy them if you’re on a budget. Instead, buy pumpkins from the grocery store, and look for two-for-one deals that pop up. Because when it all boils down to it, a pumpkin is a pumpkin. 5. Greeting Cards Do people really send out Halloween greeting cards? When was the last time you got a “Have a Batty Halloween” card in your mailbox? Well, nearly 45% of those surveyed by the National Retail Federation in 2021 said they planned to buy Halloween greeting cards, so somebody’s doing it.2 But you can make a spooky greeting card without dropping $6 on a glitter-bomb skeleton card for your favorite niece. Use some cardstock and get creative by drawing all kinds of creepy characters. Don’t forget to tape on a little something sweet too! However, if your heart is set on a store-bought card, look for the two-for-a-dollar kind. And remember, you don’t have to send a card. 6. Fall Activities There are plenty of harvest and Halloween festivals this time of year—and they’re usually free! Plus, there are plenty of other budget-friendly activities for the family. Spend the day walking around a farm or enjoying a hayride. Take a drive out of town to look at the leaves changing colors. Go apple picking or enjoy a fall festival. Take advantage of what’s already going on in your church or community, and budget a little extra for any special food or rides. Festive fall food can really add up if you’re not careful, so save some cash by packing a picnic and a comfy quilt. 7. Family Traditions Pick out a weekend or two for some quality time together with friends or your family this fall. If you’re tired of carving pumpkins or dressing up, why not start some new budget-friendly traditions? How about a fall-themed cooking or baking day? Try caramel apples, pumpkin pie and jack-o’-lantern pizzas (use pepperoni and veggies to make the face). Or have everyone vote for their favorite fall movies, then hunker down on the couch to get cozy and eat all those tasty treats you cooked up while you watch. If you’d rather be outside enjoying the leaves, head over to the park for a scavenger hunt and enjoy the scenery while you search. It’s 100% possible to have a memorable Halloween on a bite-size budget! Trust me, you’ll have more fun knowing you’re not wrecking your money goals to celebrate. Don’t let Halloween haunt your budget—so make sure you know exactly where each dollar is going this season with EveryDollar, our free budget tool. https://www.ramseysolutions.com/budgeting/5-money-saving-tricks-for-happier-halloween?srsltid=AfmBOoozsyg8q63H1t5yGvb12_1N6lX5_tAKP336LoR7LBOcS-2WYyjc ================ <QUESTION> ======= What are the most common ways to save money for the Halloween season? Make the response less than 500 words but more than 300 words. ================ <TASK> ======= You are an expert in question answering. Your task is to reply to a query or question, based only on the information provided by the user. It should only use information in the article provided."

{instruction} ========== In your answer, refer only to the context document. Do not employ any outside knowledge {question} ========== [user request] {passage 0} ========== [context document]

What are the reasons for why I would choose a cash secured put over a covered call? Compare their advantages and disadvantages assuming I don't have a capital requirement.

What Is a Cash Secured Put? A cash-secured put involves writing a put option on a particular stock and securing the position with enough cash reserves to cover the purchase of shares should the option be exercised. The amount of cash required is equal to 100 shares of the stock at the option’s strike price. If the stock’s price remains above the strike price, the option expires worthless, and the investor keeps the premium. If the stock price drops below the strike price, the investor buys the stock at the lower price. What Is a Covered Call? A covered call is a strategy where an investor owns the underlying stock and sells a call option on it. This involves buying 100 shares of a stock and selling a call option with a strike price at or above the purchase price. If the stock’s price remains flat or declines, the investor keeps the premium, and the option expires worthless. If the stock’s price rises above the strike price, the investor sells the shares at the strike price, securing the option premium plus any capital gains up to the strike price. Cash Secured Put vs Covered Call – The Differences You Should Know Primary Motives: An investor using a cash-secured put has a neutral outlook but is prepared to buy shares at a lower price. A covered call suits an investor who already owns the stock and seeks to earn extra income from the option premium. Market Outlook: Choosing a cash secured put vs covered call requires to consider your outlook on the market (or, at least, on a company). Both trades have definitely a bullish orientation. Possible Profits: Cash-secured put sellers profit only from the option premium. Covered call sellers can profit from both the option premiums and any stock dividends or appreciation if the stock price rises above the strike price. Dividends: When debating cash secured put vs covered call, dividends are an aspect you cannot ignore. Covered calls allow investors to collect dividends since they own the underlying stock. Cash-secured puts do not offer this benefit as the stock is not owned unless the option is exercised. Time Horizon: Usually, a covered call is better for longer term positions, while the cash secured put will work best for shorter term operations, especially considering what we said above about dividends. If you understand these dynamics, you can effectively use cash secured puts to enhance your portfolio, balancing risk and reward based on your market outlook and investment goals. We gave you a rather practical approach to open an options trade, just make sure you do your homework before by carefully researching the company. You can also use our “High probability naked puts (85% prob of worthless, good companies, good risk-return profile)” predefined scan (you’ll find a link to it at the end of the article) to speed up the process, but this does not mean you should skip doing your own analysis. Cash Secured Put vs Covered Call – Picking the Right Strategy in the Right Moment Having seen the two examples above, it is now easier to draw some conclusions on when to use a cash secured put vs covered call strategy. Market Conditions Choosing between covered calls vs cash secured puts often depends on the market conditions. Both strategies benefit from bullish conditions, but a cash-secured put will leave the door open for a potential share assignment at a lower price if the stock price moves below the strike price, while a covered call requires you to buy the shares at once and sell a call right away. By owning the underlying stock, you can capitalize on both the premium from selling the call option and any appreciation in the stock price. In low-volatility markets, both strategies (cash secured put vs covered call) can provide a steady income stream, but understanding the market’s direction can help you select the optimal strategy. Investor Goals Investor goals and risk tolerance are crucial in the decision-making process. If your goal is to invest for the longer term, maybe a covered call will be the wisest choice (think, for instance, about the fact that you can receive a dividend). However, if you’re thinking about a shorter term position, the cash secured put works best. When looking at choosing between covered calls vs cash secured puts, consider that, if you own shares and seek to generate extra income with a bullish outlook, covered calls are a suitable choice. This approach lets you benefit from premiums and potential stock gains. Understanding your investment goals, whether it is acquiring new stocks or maximizing returns on existing holdings, will guide you in choosing between covered calls and cash secured puts.

{instruction} ========== In your answer, refer only to the context document. Do not employ any outside knowledge {question} ========== What are the reasons for why I would choose a cash secured put over a covered call? Compare their advantages and disadvantages assuming I don't have a capital requirement. {passage 0} ========== What Is a Cash Secured Put? A cash-secured put involves writing a put option on a particular stock and securing the position with enough cash reserves to cover the purchase of shares should the option be exercised. The amount of cash required is equal to 100 shares of the stock at the option’s strike price. If the stock’s price remains above the strike price, the option expires worthless, and the investor keeps the premium. If the stock price drops below the strike price, the investor buys the stock at the lower price. What Is a Covered Call? A covered call is a strategy where an investor owns the underlying stock and sells a call option on it. This involves buying 100 shares of a stock and selling a call option with a strike price at or above the purchase price. If the stock’s price remains flat or declines, the investor keeps the premium, and the option expires worthless. If the stock’s price rises above the strike price, the investor sells the shares at the strike price, securing the option premium plus any capital gains up to the strike price. Cash Secured Put vs Covered Call – The Differences You Should Know Primary Motives: An investor using a cash-secured put has a neutral outlook but is prepared to buy shares at a lower price. A covered call suits an investor who already owns the stock and seeks to earn extra income from the option premium. Market Outlook: Choosing a cash secured put vs covered call requires to consider your outlook on the market (or, at least, on a company). Both trades have definitely a bullish orientation. Possible Profits: Cash-secured put sellers profit only from the option premium. Covered call sellers can profit from both the option premiums and any stock dividends or appreciation if the stock price rises above the strike price. Dividends: When debating cash secured put vs covered call, dividends are an aspect you cannot ignore. Covered calls allow investors to collect dividends since they own the underlying stock. Cash-secured puts do not offer this benefit as the stock is not owned unless the option is exercised. Time Horizon: Usually, a covered call is better for longer term positions, while the cash secured put will work best for shorter term operations, especially considering what we said above about dividends. If you understand these dynamics, you can effectively use cash secured puts to enhance your portfolio, balancing risk and reward based on your market outlook and investment goals. We gave you a rather practical approach to open an options trade, just make sure you do your homework before by carefully researching the company. You can also use our “High probability naked puts (85% prob of worthless, good companies, good risk-return profile)” predefined scan (you’ll find a link to it at the end of the article) to speed up the process, but this does not mean you should skip doing your own analysis. Cash Secured Put vs Covered Call – Picking the Right Strategy in the Right Moment Having seen the two examples above, it is now easier to draw some conclusions on when to use a cash secured put vs covered call strategy. Market Conditions Choosing between covered calls vs cash secured puts often depends on the market conditions. Both strategies benefit from bullish conditions, but a cash-secured put will leave the door open for a potential share assignment at a lower price if the stock price moves below the strike price, while a covered call requires you to buy the shares at once and sell a call right away. By owning the underlying stock, you can capitalize on both the premium from selling the call option and any appreciation in the stock price. In low-volatility markets, both strategies (cash secured put vs covered call) can provide a steady income stream, but understanding the market’s direction can help you select the optimal strategy. Investor Goals Investor goals and risk tolerance are crucial in the decision-making process. If your goal is to invest for the longer term, maybe a covered call will be the wisest choice (think, for instance, about the fact that you can receive a dividend). However, if you’re thinking about a shorter term position, the cash secured put works best. When looking at choosing between covered calls vs cash secured puts, consider that, if you own shares and seek to generate extra income with a bullish outlook, covered calls are a suitable choice. This approach lets you benefit from premiums and potential stock gains. Understanding your investment goals, whether it is acquiring new stocks or maximizing returns on existing holdings, will guide you in choosing between covered calls and cash secured puts. https://blog.optionsamurai.com/cash-secured-put-vs-covered-call/#:~:text=Both%20strategies%20benefit%20from%20bullish,sell%20a%20call%20right%20away.

Only respond using information from the context.

What factors are negatively affecting the housing market?

U.S. Economic, Housing and Mortgage Market Outlook Recent developments U.S. economy: U.S. economic growth moderated to start the year. According to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) “advance” estimate of Real Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the seasonally adjusted annual rate (SAAR) of growth in GDP in Q1 2024 was 1.6%, slowing from a 3.4% rate in Q4 2023. The deceleration in GDP growth was led by slower growth in consumption expenditures, net exports, and government consumption expenditures. Consumer spending was weaker due to a decline in spending on durable goods, primarily autos, and flatlining nondurable goods, primarily due to less spending on gasoline. Spending on services accelerated in the first quarter, led by higher spending on health care, financial services and insurance. Trade weighed on GDP growth with more modest exports and an increase in imports. Compared to most advanced economies, the U.S. economy continues to perform relatively well. The positive tailwinds to overall growth from government spending are waning. The contribution to GDP growth from government consumption expenditures and gross investment remains positive but was less than a third of what it was in Q4 2023. The latest report paints a picture of an economy that continues to perform well, but that is moderating as it settles into a growth pattern more consistent with long-run trends. Consistent with economic growth trends, the labor market moderated in April 2024 with nonfarm payroll employment increasing by 175,000, down from an increase of 315,000 in March, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The unemployment rate inched up from 3.8% in March to 3.9% in April. However, the unemployment rate has remained below 4% for the twenty-seventh consecutive month. Average hourly earnings for all employees on private nonfarm payrolls rose 0.2% month-over-month, and compared to a year ago, average hourly earnings increased 3.9%. Overall, the jobs report indicates a resilient but cooling labor market. The core Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) price index, the Federal Reserve’s preferred inflation gauge that strips out volatile food and energy prices, rose 0.3% month-over-month in March.1 While this increase in the core PCE was in line with expectations, the progress on inflation has slowed and has implications for future Federal Reserve monetary policy. The index increased 2.8% from a year ago and remains above the Federal Reserve target of 2.0%. The Consumer Price Index (CPI) increased by 0.4% in April, exceeding consensus expectations and triggering a negative market reaction. In another sign of persistent inflationary pressures, the employment cost index came in above expectations with a 1.2% quarter-over-quarter increase in Q1 2024 and a 4.2% increase in compensation costs over the year. The persistence of inflation has led market participants to conclude that the likelihood of multiple Federal Reserve rate cuts in 2024 is diminished and the next rate cut is also likely further away. In summary, U.S. economic growth moderated at the beginning of 2024, reflecting the impact of higher interest rates and declining consumer savings. The labor market also showed signs of cooling with softer-than expected job growth in April. U.S. housing and mortgage market: After benefitting from stable mortgage rates in the first couple of months of the year, the housing market witnessed a slowdown in March due to the rebound in rates. Total (existing + new) home sales for March fell by 2.7% from February and were down 2.1% from a year ago. This decline was led by existing home sales, which continued to reel under the impact of rising rates. Existing home sales were at an annual rate of 4.19 million in March, 4.3% below February sales and 3.7% lower than March 2023.2 However, new home sales for March grew 8.8% from February to an annualized rate of 693,000, accounting for about 14% of total home sales.3 As the supply of existing homes for sale remains low and home prices continue to rise, more buyers are choosing to purchase new homes than in previous years. According to the National Association of Homebuilders’ Housing Market Index, homebuilder confidence remained steady in March with the index coming in at 51. This is above the threshold of 50, indicating positive building conditions.4 However, the housing construction sector experienced some moderation. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, new residential construction fell in March with total starts decreasing 14.7%, the largest monthly decline since May 2022. The decline was led by multifamily starts which fell around 21% month-overmonth and single-family housing starts fell 12% month-over-month in March. The FHFA Purchase-Only Home Price Index for February increased by 1.2% month-over-month compared to a decrease of 0.1% in January. Year-over-year house price growth remained strong at 7.0% for February. The depleted inventory of homes available for sale, along with still high demand, continued to put upward pressure on house prices. Mortgage rates ticked up in April averaging 6.99% for the month, as measured by Freddie Mac’s Primary Mortgage Market Survey®, and ended the month at 7.17%. According to the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) Weekly Application Survey, mortgage activity declined over the month as rates exceeded 7% for the first time this year. Overall mortgage activity was down 1.8% month-over-month and 10.4% year-over-year at the end of April. Refinance activity for April was down 3.3% compared to March, and purchase applications were down 2.7% month-over-month.Tight inventory coupled with higher rates resulted in a stagnant start to the year in terms of homeownership. The homeownership rate in Q1 2024 ticked down to 65.6% from 65.7% in Q4 2023 and 66% in Q1 2023.5 The historical average homeownership rate over the period from Q1 1964 to Q1 2024 is 65.2%. Total housing stock was at 146.4 million units as of Q1 2024, an increase of around 1.6 million units compared to the same time last year. This reflected an increase of approximately 1.4 million in total occupied housing units and 0.2 million vacant units. A large share of the increase in occupied units came from renters compared to homeowners. Renter-occupied units increased approximately 1 million over the last year while owner-occupied units were up around 0.6 million. The homeowner vacancy rate in Q1 2024 was down to 0.8% from 0.9% in Q4 2023. The rental vacancy rate was unchanged over the quarter at 6.6%. Vacancy rates remain on balance very low. To bring the vacancy rate, both rental and homeowner, back in line with historical averages, the U.S. would need to add an additional 1.5 million vacant for-sale and for-rent homes (Exhibit 1).6 Without such units, the pressure on housing markets will persist. Additionally, the vacant housing undersupply metric is almost certainly a dramatic underestimate of the total housing shortage for the U.S. This is because this metric does not account for latent housing demand and vacant housing that is not for sale or for rent. Overall, tight inventory and “higher for longer” rates are still key barriers to home sale volumes. Mortgage rates above 7% continue to price out many prospective homebuyers and sellers have less incentive to sell. Outlook While the U.S. economy has shown resilience so far, we expect higher interest rates to weigh on future growth, with the economy settling into a lower rate of growth in 2024 and 2025. However, we do not expect a recession in our baseline scenario. In our baseline, slower growth and a weaker labor market help to rein in inflation while the economy throttles back but avoids stalling. Our baseline scenario has one Federal Reserve rate cut towards the end of the year. As a result, we expect mortgage rates to remain elevated through most of 2024. These high interest rates will prompt prospective buyers to readjust their housing expectations, but we anticipate housing demand to remain high due to favorable demographics, particularly in the starter home segment. Despite the strong housing demand, our housing market outlook is tempered by lack of inventory for sale. Under our baseline scenario, we anticipate improvement in home sales compared to 2023, albeit by a slim margin, as the rate lock-in effect will delay existing homes from entering the market. Our outlook on the mortgage origination market is also clouded by the expectation of low sale volumes. With our projection of mortgage interest rates remaining higher for longer, we anticipate modest growth in mortgage origination volumes, supported by high home prices. However, the combination of higher interest rates and limited inventory could limit purchase originations. Additionally, we expect refinance origination volumes to decline as homeowners have already secured low rates, posing potential challenge in the refinance market. While our outlook is positive, there are emerging risks, particularly from inflation. Over the last year, almost half of the overall gains in inflation came from housing inflation, and in an environment where home prices are growing, inflationary pressures might persist for longer. Under a high inflation scenario, interest rates will remain high, negatively impacting consumer spending behavior and credit performance, which can further slowdown economic growth.

Only respond using information from the context. What factors are negatively affecting the housing market? U.S. Economic, Housing and Mortgage Market Outlook Recent developments U.S. economy: U.S. economic growth moderated to start the year. According to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) “advance” estimate of Real Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the seasonally adjusted annual rate (SAAR) of growth in GDP in Q1 2024 was 1.6%, slowing from a 3.4% rate in Q4 2023. The deceleration in GDP growth was led by slower growth in consumption expenditures, net exports, and government consumption expenditures. Consumer spending was weaker due to a decline in spending on durable goods, primarily autos, and flatlining nondurable goods, primarily due to less spending on gasoline. Spending on services accelerated in the first quarter, led by higher spending on health care, financial services and insurance. Trade weighed on GDP growth with more modest exports and an increase in imports. Compared to most advanced economies, the U.S. economy continues to perform relatively well. The positive tailwinds to overall growth from government spending are waning. The contribution to GDP growth from government consumption expenditures and gross investment remains positive but was less than a third of what it was in Q4 2023. The latest report paints a picture of an economy that continues to perform well, but that is moderating as it settles into a growth pattern more consistent with long-run trends. Consistent with economic growth trends, the labor market moderated in April 2024 with nonfarm payroll employment increasing by 175,000, down from an increase of 315,000 in March, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The unemployment rate inched up from 3.8% in March to 3.9% in April. However, the unemployment rate has remained below 4% for the twenty-seventh consecutive month. Average hourly earnings for all employees on private nonfarm payrolls rose 0.2% month-over-month, and compared to a year ago, average hourly earnings increased 3.9%. Overall, the jobs report indicates a resilient but cooling labor market. The core Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) price index, the Federal Reserve’s preferred inflation gauge that strips out volatile food and energy prices, rose 0.3% month-over-month in March.1 While this increase in the core PCE was in line with expectations, the progress on inflation has slowed and has implications for future Federal Reserve monetary policy. The index increased 2.8% from a year ago and remains above the Federal Reserve target of 2.0%. The Consumer Price Index (CPI) increased by 0.4% in April, exceeding consensus expectations and triggering a negative market reaction. In another sign of persistent inflationary pressures, the employment cost index came in above expectations with a 1.2% quarter-over-quarter increase in Q1 2024 and a 4.2% increase in compensation costs over the year. The persistence of inflation has led market participants to conclude that the likelihood of multiple Federal Reserve rate cuts in 2024 is diminished and the next rate cut is also likely further away. In summary, U.S. economic growth moderated at the beginning of 2024, reflecting the impact of higher interest rates and declining consumer savings. The labor market also showed signs of cooling with softer-than expected job growth in April. U.S. housing and mortgage market: After benefitting from stable mortgage rates in the first couple of months of the year, the housing market witnessed a slowdown in March due to the rebound in rates. Total (existing + new) home sales for March fell by 2.7% from February and were down 2.1% from a year ago. This decline was led by existing home sales, which continued to reel under the impact of rising rates. Existing home sales were at an annual rate of 4.19 million in March, 4.3% below February sales and 3.7% lower than March 2023.2 However, new home sales for March grew 8.8% from February to an annualized rate of 693,000, accounting for about 14% of total home sales.3 As the supply of existing homes for sale remains low and home prices continue to rise, more buyers are choosing to purchase new homes than in previous years. According to the National Association of Homebuilders’ Housing Market Index, homebuilder confidence remained steady in March with the index coming in at 51. This is above the threshold of 50, indicating positive building conditions.4 However, the housing construction sector experienced some moderation. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, new residential construction fell in March with total starts decreasing 14.7%, the largest monthly decline since May 2022. The decline was led by multifamily starts which fell around 21% month-overmonth and single-family housing starts fell 12% month-over-month in March. The FHFA Purchase-Only Home Price Index for February increased by 1.2% month-over-month compared to a decrease of 0.1% in January. Year-over-year house price growth remained strong at 7.0% for February. The depleted inventory of homes available for sale, along with still high demand, continued to put upward pressure on house prices. Mortgage rates ticked up in April averaging 6.99% for the month, as measured by Freddie Mac’s Primary Mortgage Market Survey®, and ended the month at 7.17%. According to the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) Weekly Application Survey, mortgage activity declined over the month as rates exceeded 7% for the first time this year. Overall mortgage activity was down 1.8% month-over-month and 10.4% year-over-year at the end of April. Refinance activity for April was down 3.3% compared to March, and purchase applications were down 2.7% month-over-month.Tight inventory coupled with higher rates resulted in a stagnant start to the year in terms of homeownership. The homeownership rate in Q1 2024 ticked down to 65.6% from 65.7% in Q4 2023 and 66% in Q1 2023.5 The historical average homeownership rate over the period from Q1 1964 to Q1 2024 is 65.2%. Total housing stock was at 146.4 million units as of Q1 2024, an increase of around 1.6 million units compared to the same time last year. This reflected an increase of approximately 1.4 million in total occupied housing units and 0.2 million vacant units. A large share of the increase in occupied units came from renters compared to homeowners. Renter-occupied units increased approximately 1 million over the last year while owner-occupied units were up around 0.6 million. The homeowner vacancy rate in Q1 2024 was down to 0.8% from 0.9% in Q4 2023. The rental vacancy rate was unchanged over the quarter at 6.6%. Vacancy rates remain on balance very low. To bring the vacancy rate, both rental and homeowner, back in line with historical averages, the U.S. would need to add an additional 1.5 million vacant for-sale and for-rent homes (Exhibit 1).6 Without such units, the pressure on housing markets will persist. Additionally, the vacant housing undersupply metric is almost certainly a dramatic underestimate of the total housing shortage for the U.S. This is because this metric does not account for latent housing demand and vacant housing that is not for sale or for rent. Overall, tight inventory and “higher for longer” rates are still key barriers to home sale volumes. Mortgage rates above 7% continue to price out many prospective homebuyers and sellers have less incentive to sell. Outlook While the U.S. economy has shown resilience so far, we expect higher interest rates to weigh on future growth, with the economy settling into a lower rate of growth in 2024 and 2025. However, we do not expect a recession in our baseline scenario. In our baseline, slower growth and a weaker labor market help to rein in inflation while the economy throttles back but avoids stalling. Our baseline scenario has one Federal Reserve rate cut towards the end of the year. As a result, we expect mortgage rates to remain elevated through most of 2024. These high interest rates will prompt prospective buyers to readjust their housing expectations, but we anticipate housing demand to remain high due to favorable demographics, particularly in the starter home segment. Despite the strong housing demand, our housing market outlook is tempered by lack of inventory for sale. Under our baseline scenario, we anticipate improvement in home sales compared to 2023, albeit by a slim margin, as the rate lock-in effect will delay existing homes from entering the market. Our outlook on the mortgage origination market is also clouded by the expectation of low sale volumes. With our projection of mortgage interest rates remaining higher for longer, we anticipate modest growth in mortgage origination volumes, supported by high home prices. However, the combination of higher interest rates and limited inventory could limit purchase originations. Additionally, we expect refinance origination volumes to decline as homeowners have already secured low rates, posing potential challenge in the refinance market. While our outlook is positive, there are emerging risks, particularly from inflation. Over the last year, almost half of the overall gains in inflation came from housing inflation, and in an environment where home prices are growing, inflationary pressures might persist for longer. Under a high inflation scenario, interest rates will remain high, negatively impacting consumer spending behavior and credit performance, which can further slowdown economic growth.

Only use the information in the context document. If you cannot answer using the context alone, say "I cannot determine the answer to that due to lack of context".

According to the context document only, how can APs profit from a Bitcoin ETF?

**Spot Bitcoin ETFs: What Are They, And How Do They Work?** Bitcoin has been one of the best-performing assets over the last decade, rising from a relatively obscure peer-to-peer payment network to a global phenomenon. As the original cryptocurrency, bitcoin has spurred an entirely new asset class that now has over $1 trillion in market capitalization. With the approval of 11 spot bitcoin ETFs in January 2024, traditional investors have an even easier way to invest in bitcoin. What Is a Spot Bitcoin ETF? On January 10, 2024, the SEC approved 11 new spot bitcoin ETFs. ETFs, or exchange-traded funds, are a type of security that tracks the underlying performance of a collection of assets or commodities. A spot bitcoin ETF is an exchange-traded fund that tracks the spot, or current price of bitcoin. By holding an equivalent amount of bitcoin to back every share of the ETF that is sold, the fund is actually backed by bitcoin itself. Considering the hoops you have to jump through to own bitcoin—exchange accounts, digital wallets, private keys, network transfers, etc.—a spot bitcoin ETF is one of the easiest ways to add bitcoin exposure to your portfolio. Spot ETFs, such as the new spot bitcoin ETFs, allow for shares of the fund to be created or redeemed based on market demand. In this way, a spot bitcoin ETF allows investors to gain exposure to the current price of bitcoin without having to hold the asset itself. This is in contrast to bitcoin futures ETFs, which were approved for trading by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in October 2021 and can only trade bitcoin futures. Futures are complex derivatives instruments that track potential future prices of the underlying asset. How Do Spot Bitcoin ETFs Work? Spot bitcoin ETFs purchase a select amount of bitcoins that are held in a secure digital wallet by a custodian. These custodians offer bitcoin storage in a secure vault. Most of these vaults are—as crypto insiders call—air gapped in “cold storage,” which means the bitcoins’ keys are stored offline and cannot be accessed through the internet. The ETFs then issue shares that represent the bitcoins held by the fund. These shares are priced to reflect the current spot price of bitcoin and can be traded on traditional stock exchanges. Spot bitcoin ETFs make it easier for retail investors and traders to buy and sell an asset tied to the current value of bitcoin without needing to hold bitcoin itself. They also allow investors seeking exposure to bitcoin in retirement accounts to have a much simpler option than opening a self-directed IRA that could hold bitcoin directly. How Does a Spot ETF Maintain Its Price? The price of a spot ETF can depart from the actual value of the underlying asset. To bring the fund back in line with the asset’s actual value, authorized participants, otherwise known as APs, are allowed to create or redeem large blocks of shares. APs are typically large financial institutions that profit from the arbitrage opportunity presented when an ETF’s price is higher or lower than the underlying asset’s value. 11 Spot Bitcoin ETFs Here are the 11 SEC-approved Spot Bitcoin ETFs as of January 31, 2024: Spot Bitcoin ETF Expense Ratio Fee Waiver ARK 21Shares Bitcoin ETF (ARKB) 0.21% 0% fee for six months (or until $1 billion in assets) Bitwise Bitcoin ETF (BITB) 0.20% 0% fee for six months (or until $1 billion in assets) Fidelity Wise Origin Bitcoin Trust (FBTC) 0.25% Fees waived until July 31, 2024 Franklin Bitcoin ETF (EZBC) 0.19% 0% fee until August 2, 2024 (or until $10 billion in assets) Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) 1.50% No fee waiver Hashdex Bitcoin ETF (DEFI)* 0.90% No fee waiver Invesco Galaxy Bitcoin ETF (BTCO) 0.25% 0% fee for six months (or until $5 billion in assets) iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) 0.25% 0.12% fee for 12 months (or until $5 billion in assets) Valkyrie Bitcoin Fund (BRRR) 0.25% 0% fee for three months VanEck Bitcoin Trust (HODL) 0.25% No fee waiver See More * The Hashdex Bitcoin Futures ETF (DEFI) will convert to a spot bitcoin ETF at a later date. Now That They’re Here, What’s the Future of Spot Bitcoin ETFs? For years, the SEC had rejected all applications for a spot bitcoin ETF, with over 20 thumbs down between 2018 and 2023. The SEC’s approval of 11 spot bitcoin ETFs on January 10 marks a shift in how regulators treat cryptocurrencies. A flurry of new applications has been sent to the SEC for approval, suggesting even more spot bitcoin ETFs may be coming. It’s important to note that just because spot bitcoin ETFs have been approved, that does not mean the SEC is certain to approve additional crypto ETFs. Gary Gensler, chairman of the SEC, said in the SEC’s announcement of the approval of spot bitcoin ETFs, “Importantly, today’s Commission action is cabined to ETPs holding one non-security commodity, bitcoin. It should in no way signal the Commission’s willingness to approve listing standards for crypto asset securities.” Will Spot Bitcoin ETFs Affect the Price of Bitcoin? In the short term, more investors will find it easier to invest in bitcoin through these spot ETFs. This could mean more demand for bitcoin, as funds purchase from crypto exchanges to meet the demand of the spot ETFs. Bitcoin’s price was already rising in the weeks leading up to the spot bitcoin ETF announcement—and a “sell the news” moment happened in the wake of the approval. Many bitcoin holders became sellers, with the price of bitcoin dropping over 10% in just a few weeks. Over the long term, however, demand could increase for Bitcoin, as retirement plans, 401(k) plans and financial advisors start offering spot bitcoin ETFs as a way to diversify portfolios into “alternative assets.” “I personally believe that it will positively impact Bitcoin’s price because of increased adoption, easier access to ‘normies’ and increased liquidity in the marketplace,” says Marko Zlatic, founder of Whiteboard Finance. “Since the Bitcoin protocol dictates a finite supply of 21 million bitcoin ever, this should drive prices up over time, as long as there is adequate demand.” Risks of Investing in Spot Bitcoin ETFs Investors should understand the risk of investing in a spot bitcoin ETF before allocating any funds toward one. “Investors should approach cautiously and look at previous price movements of bitcoin to make sure they can stomach the volatility before they dive in,” says Christopher Johns, founder and wealth advisor at Spark Wealth Advisors, LLC. Gold had a similar trajectory when spot gold ETFs were introduced. The assets under management, or AUM, of spot gold ETFs quickly rose to about $1 billion. Since then, total holdings have grown to over $50 billion. This—along with other macroeconomic factors—has helped push the price of gold up to new highs. Spot Bitcoin ETFs: Pros And Cons Pros Bitcoin legitimacy. With the approval of spot bitcoin ETFs, the original cryptocurrency is now seen as a more legitimate asset class. Investors from all walks of life can gain exposure to bitcoin in almost any type of investment account they own, including individual retirement accounts, or IRAs, and 401(k)s. More liquidity. With ETFs buying and selling large blocks of bitcoin based on demand, this could increase liquidity and help stabilize prices over the long term. Increase prices. While a spot bitcoin ETF does not directly affect the price of bitcoin, the increased demand and purchasing of bitcoin by these ETFs could boost the price over time. Lower trading fees. With more adoption and ease of access through a spot ETF, investors may be able to access bitcoin with lower trading fees than some crypto exchanges. Cons More regulation. Spot bitcoin ETFs are highly-regulated securities that are now tied to the price of bitcoin. Any regulatory actions against bitcoin could affect the price of spot bitcoin ETFs—and bitcoin itself—as well. Investors don’t take custody of bitcoin. While investing in a spot bitcoin ETF gives you exposure to the price of bitcoin, you can’t take custody of the asset itself. “[You’re] trusting a third party custodian to ‘HODL’ your bitcoin. Not your keys, not your bitcoin,” Zlatic says. Annual fees. While trading spot bitcoin ETFs might cost less in the short term, the annual expense ratios may make it more expensive to own versus purchasing and storing bitcoin yourself. Volatility. While spot bitcoin ETFs will help increase bitcoin adoption, it is still a volatile asset that wildly fluctuates in price, which can hurt investors who aren’t prepared for the risk involved in owning bitcoin. Alternatives to Spot Bitcoin ETFs While investing in a spot bitcoin ETF can give you direct exposure to the price of bitcoin, it’s not the only way to invest in bitcoin. Here are a few alternatives to consider: Purchase bitcoin directly. If you want to own the actual asset yourself, you can purchase bitcoin from an online exchange. This gives you the ability to own bitcoin—or at least a portion of bitcoin—and take it into custody. There is a higher barrier to entry to owning bitcoin, as you’ll need to create a crypto exchange account, open a digital wallet and perhaps even transfer your bitcoin keys to a hardware wallet for safekeeping. Bitcoin futures ETF. Bitcoin futures ETFs have been around for a while, although they operate a bit differently than a spot ETF. These ETFs do not hold any bitcoin and only hold futures contracts based on the future price of bitcoin. This makes them potentially even more volatile than bitcoin itself. Bitcoin mining stocks. Bitcoin mining is a real business in which companies own and operate large data centers used for mining bitcoin. Some of these companies are publicly traded, allowing you to invest in the operation of mining bitcoin and the profit mining companies make in the process.

{Instruction} ========== Only use the information in the context document. If you cannot answer using the context alone, say "I cannot determine the answer to that due to lack of context". ---------------- {Passage} ========== **Spot Bitcoin ETFs: What Are They, And How Do They Work?** Bitcoin has been one of the best-performing assets over the last decade, rising from a relatively obscure peer-to-peer payment network to a global phenomenon. As the original cryptocurrency, bitcoin has spurred an entirely new asset class that now has over $1 trillion in market capitalization. With the approval of 11 spot bitcoin ETFs in January 2024, traditional investors have an even easier way to invest in bitcoin. What Is a Spot Bitcoin ETF? On January 10, 2024, the SEC approved 11 new spot bitcoin ETFs. ETFs, or exchange-traded funds, are a type of security that tracks the underlying performance of a collection of assets or commodities. A spot bitcoin ETF is an exchange-traded fund that tracks the spot, or current price of bitcoin. By holding an equivalent amount of bitcoin to back every share of the ETF that is sold, the fund is actually backed by bitcoin itself. Considering the hoops you have to jump through to own bitcoin—exchange accounts, digital wallets, private keys, network transfers, etc.—a spot bitcoin ETF is one of the easiest ways to add bitcoin exposure to your portfolio. Spot ETFs, such as the new spot bitcoin ETFs, allow for shares of the fund to be created or redeemed based on market demand. In this way, a spot bitcoin ETF allows investors to gain exposure to the current price of bitcoin without having to hold the asset itself. This is in contrast to bitcoin futures ETFs, which were approved for trading by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in October 2021 and can only trade bitcoin futures. Futures are complex derivatives instruments that track potential future prices of the underlying asset. How Do Spot Bitcoin ETFs Work? Spot bitcoin ETFs purchase a select amount of bitcoins that are held in a secure digital wallet by a custodian. These custodians offer bitcoin storage in a secure vault. Most of these vaults are—as crypto insiders call—air gapped in “cold storage,” which means the bitcoins’ keys are stored offline and cannot be accessed through the internet. The ETFs then issue shares that represent the bitcoins held by the fund. These shares are priced to reflect the current spot price of bitcoin and can be traded on traditional stock exchanges. Spot bitcoin ETFs make it easier for retail investors and traders to buy and sell an asset tied to the current value of bitcoin without needing to hold bitcoin itself. They also allow investors seeking exposure to bitcoin in retirement accounts to have a much simpler option than opening a self-directed IRA that could hold bitcoin directly. How Does a Spot ETF Maintain Its Price? The price of a spot ETF can depart from the actual value of the underlying asset. To bring the fund back in line with the asset’s actual value, authorized participants, otherwise known as APs, are allowed to create or redeem large blocks of shares. APs are typically large financial institutions that profit from the arbitrage opportunity presented when an ETF’s price is higher or lower than the underlying asset’s value. 11 Spot Bitcoin ETFs Here are the 11 SEC-approved Spot Bitcoin ETFs as of January 31, 2024: Spot Bitcoin ETF Expense Ratio Fee Waiver ARK 21Shares Bitcoin ETF (ARKB) 0.21% 0% fee for six months (or until $1 billion in assets) Bitwise Bitcoin ETF (BITB) 0.20% 0% fee for six months (or until $1 billion in assets) Fidelity Wise Origin Bitcoin Trust (FBTC) 0.25% Fees waived until July 31, 2024 Franklin Bitcoin ETF (EZBC) 0.19% 0% fee until August 2, 2024 (or until $10 billion in assets) Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) 1.50% No fee waiver Hashdex Bitcoin ETF (DEFI)* 0.90% No fee waiver Invesco Galaxy Bitcoin ETF (BTCO) 0.25% 0% fee for six months (or until $5 billion in assets) iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) 0.25% 0.12% fee for 12 months (or until $5 billion in assets) Valkyrie Bitcoin Fund (BRRR) 0.25% 0% fee for three months VanEck Bitcoin Trust (HODL) 0.25% No fee waiver See More * The Hashdex Bitcoin Futures ETF (DEFI) will convert to a spot bitcoin ETF at a later date. Now That They’re Here, What’s the Future of Spot Bitcoin ETFs? For years, the SEC had rejected all applications for a spot bitcoin ETF, with over 20 thumbs down between 2018 and 2023. The SEC’s approval of 11 spot bitcoin ETFs on January 10 marks a shift in how regulators treat cryptocurrencies. A flurry of new applications has been sent to the SEC for approval, suggesting even more spot bitcoin ETFs may be coming. It’s important to note that just because spot bitcoin ETFs have been approved, that does not mean the SEC is certain to approve additional crypto ETFs. Gary Gensler, chairman of the SEC, said in the SEC’s announcement of the approval of spot bitcoin ETFs, “Importantly, today’s Commission action is cabined to ETPs holding one non-security commodity, bitcoin. It should in no way signal the Commission’s willingness to approve listing standards for crypto asset securities.” Will Spot Bitcoin ETFs Affect the Price of Bitcoin? In the short term, more investors will find it easier to invest in bitcoin through these spot ETFs. This could mean more demand for bitcoin, as funds purchase from crypto exchanges to meet the demand of the spot ETFs. Bitcoin’s price was already rising in the weeks leading up to the spot bitcoin ETF announcement—and a “sell the news” moment happened in the wake of the approval. Many bitcoin holders became sellers, with the price of bitcoin dropping over 10% in just a few weeks. Over the long term, however, demand could increase for Bitcoin, as retirement plans, 401(k) plans and financial advisors start offering spot bitcoin ETFs as a way to diversify portfolios into “alternative assets.” “I personally believe that it will positively impact Bitcoin’s price because of increased adoption, easier access to ‘normies’ and increased liquidity in the marketplace,” says Marko Zlatic, founder of Whiteboard Finance. “Since the Bitcoin protocol dictates a finite supply of 21 million bitcoin ever, this should drive prices up over time, as long as there is adequate demand.” Risks of Investing in Spot Bitcoin ETFs Investors should understand the risk of investing in a spot bitcoin ETF before allocating any funds toward one. “Investors should approach cautiously and look at previous price movements of bitcoin to make sure they can stomach the volatility before they dive in,” says Christopher Johns, founder and wealth advisor at Spark Wealth Advisors, LLC. Gold had a similar trajectory when spot gold ETFs were introduced. The assets under management, or AUM, of spot gold ETFs quickly rose to about $1 billion. Since then, total holdings have grown to over $50 billion. This—along with other macroeconomic factors—has helped push the price of gold up to new highs. Spot Bitcoin ETFs: Pros And Cons Pros Bitcoin legitimacy. With the approval of spot bitcoin ETFs, the original cryptocurrency is now seen as a more legitimate asset class. Investors from all walks of life can gain exposure to bitcoin in almost any type of investment account they own, including individual retirement accounts, or IRAs, and 401(k)s. More liquidity. With ETFs buying and selling large blocks of bitcoin based on demand, this could increase liquidity and help stabilize prices over the long term. Increase prices. While a spot bitcoin ETF does not directly affect the price of bitcoin, the increased demand and purchasing of bitcoin by these ETFs could boost the price over time. Lower trading fees. With more adoption and ease of access through a spot ETF, investors may be able to access bitcoin with lower trading fees than some crypto exchanges. Cons More regulation. Spot bitcoin ETFs are highly-regulated securities that are now tied to the price of bitcoin. Any regulatory actions against bitcoin could affect the price of spot bitcoin ETFs—and bitcoin itself—as well. Investors don’t take custody of bitcoin. While investing in a spot bitcoin ETF gives you exposure to the price of bitcoin, you can’t take custody of the asset itself. “[You’re] trusting a third party custodian to ‘HODL’ your bitcoin. Not your keys, not your bitcoin,” Zlatic says. Annual fees. While trading spot bitcoin ETFs might cost less in the short term, the annual expense ratios may make it more expensive to own versus purchasing and storing bitcoin yourself. Volatility. While spot bitcoin ETFs will help increase bitcoin adoption, it is still a volatile asset that wildly fluctuates in price, which can hurt investors who aren’t prepared for the risk involved in owning bitcoin. Alternatives to Spot Bitcoin ETFs While investing in a spot bitcoin ETF can give you direct exposure to the price of bitcoin, it’s not the only way to invest in bitcoin. Here are a few alternatives to consider: Purchase bitcoin directly. If you want to own the actual asset yourself, you can purchase bitcoin from an online exchange. This gives you the ability to own bitcoin—or at least a portion of bitcoin—and take it into custody. There is a higher barrier to entry to owning bitcoin, as you’ll need to create a crypto exchange account, open a digital wallet and perhaps even transfer your bitcoin keys to a hardware wallet for safekeeping. Bitcoin futures ETF. Bitcoin futures ETFs have been around for a while, although they operate a bit differently than a spot ETF. These ETFs do not hold any bitcoin and only hold futures contracts based on the future price of bitcoin. This makes them potentially even more volatile than bitcoin itself. Bitcoin mining stocks. Bitcoin mining is a real business in which companies own and operate large data centers used for mining bitcoin. Some of these companies are publicly traded, allowing you to invest in the operation of mining bitcoin and the profit mining companies make in the process. ---------------- {Question} ========== According to the context document only, how can APs profit from a Bitcoin ETF?

You can only respond to the prompt using information in the context block and no other sources.

Explain how COLAs are considered in determining Medicaid eligibility.

Recipients of Social Security COLAs After April 1977 (“Pickle Amendment”) Section 503 of P.L. 94-566 generally requires states to provide Medicaid coverage for individuals who would continue to be eligible for SSI/SSP if not for increases in their Social Security benefits due to COLAs.64 Individuals qualify under this pathway it they • are receiving Social Security benefits, • lost SSI/SSP but would still be eligible for those benefits if Social Security COLAs received since losing SSI/SSP were deducted from their income, and • were eligible for and receiving SSI/SSP concurrently with Social Security for at least one month after April 1, 1977. 209(b) states may exclude all, some, or none of the Social Security benefit increases that caused ineligibility for SSI/SSP. This pathway is often known as the “Pickle Amendment” after the late Representative J.J. Pickle. Disabled Widow(er)s Receiving Benefit Increases Under P.L. 98-21 (“ARF Widow[er]s”) (This pathway is closed to new enrollment and applies to relatively few people.) Social Security provides widow(er)’s benefits starting at age 60, or at age 50 if the individual is disabled and meets certain other criteria. The amount of the aged or disabled widow(er)’s benefit is based on the deceased insured worker’s past earnings from covered employment, subject to a permanent reduction for each month of entitlement before the widow(er)’s full retirement age (65- 67, depending on year of birth). Under P.L. 98-21, lawmakers eliminated the additional reduction factor (ARF) for disabled widow(er)s aged 50-59, meaning their reduction penalty for claiming benefits before their full retirement age was capped at the percentage applicable to aged widow(er)s who first claim at age 60. All states (including 209[b] states) are required to provide Medicaid coverage for individuals who would continue to be eligible for SSI/SSP if not for increases in their widow(er)’s benefits due to the elimination of the ARF (known as “ARF Widow[er]s”).65 Individuals qualify under this pathway if they • were entitled to Social Security benefits in December 1983 and received disabled widow(er)’s benefits and SSI/SSP in January 1984, • lost SSI/SSP eligibility because of the elimination of the ARF, • have been continuously entitled to widow(er)’s benefits since January 1984, • filed for Medicaid continuation before July 1, 1988 (or a slightly later date in some cases), and • would continue to be eligible for SSI/SSP if the value of the increase in disabled widow(er)’s benefits under P.L. 98-21 and any subsequent COLAs were deducted from their countable income. Disabled Adult Children Disabled adult children of retired, disabled, or deceased insured workers typically qualify for Social Security disabled adult child’s (DAC) benefits if they are at least age 18 and became disabled before they attained age 22. States are generally required to provide Medicaid coverage for individuals who lose eligibility for SSI/SSP due to entitlement to or an increase in DAC benefits. 66 Individuals qualify under this pathway if they • lose eligibility for SSI/SSP due to receipt of DAC benefits on or after July 1, 1987, and • would continue to be eligible for SSI/SSP if not for their entitlement to or an increase in DAC benefits. 209(b) states may exclude all, some, or none of the DAC benefit or increases in that benefit that caused ineligibility for SSI/SSP. Widow(er)s Not Entitled to Medicare Part A (“Early Widow[er]s”) States are generally required to provide Medicaid coverage for individuals aged 50 to 64 who lose eligibility for SSI/SSP due to entitlement to Social Security widow(er)’s benefits but who are not yet entitled to Medicare Part A (Hospital Insurance).67 Individuals qualify under this pathway if they • are at least age 50 but have not yet attained age 65, • received SSI/SSP in the month before their widow(er)’s benefits began, • are not entitled to Medicare Part A,68 and • would continue to be eligible for SSI/SSP if not for their entitlement widow(er)’s benefits.69 Eligibility for Medicaid under this pathway continues until the individual becomes entitled to Medicare Part A. 209(b) states may exclude all, some, or none of the widow(er)’s benefit that caused ineligibility for SSP/SSI. Recipients of a 1972 Social Security COLA (This pathway is closed to new enrollment and applies to relatively few people.) Section 249E of P.L. 92-603 requires states to provide Medicaid coverage for individuals who would be eligible for SSI/SSP in the absence of a Social Security COLA enacted in 1972 under P.L. 92-336.70 Individuals qualify under this provision if they • were entitled to Social Security benefits in August 1972, • were receiving cash assistance under the former adult assistance programs in August 1972 (or would have been eligible for such assistance in certain instances), and • would be eligible for SSI/SSP had the COLA under P.L. 92-336 not been applied to their Social Security benefits.

You can only respond to the prompt using information in the context block and no other sources. Explain how COLAs are considered in determining Medicaid eligibility. Recipients of Social Security COLAs After April 1977 (“Pickle Amendment”) Section 503 of P.L. 94-566 generally requires states to provide Medicaid coverage for individuals who would continue to be eligible for SSI/SSP if not for increases in their Social Security benefits due to COLAs.64 Individuals qualify under this pathway it they • are receiving Social Security benefits, • lost SSI/SSP but would still be eligible for those benefits if Social Security COLAs received since losing SSI/SSP were deducted from their income, and • were eligible for and receiving SSI/SSP concurrently with Social Security for at least one month after April 1, 1977. 209(b) states may exclude all, some, or none of the Social Security benefit increases that caused ineligibility for SSI/SSP. This pathway is often known as the “Pickle Amendment” after the late Representative J.J. Pickle. Disabled Widow(er)s Receiving Benefit Increases Under P.L. 98-21 (“ARF Widow[er]s”) (This pathway is closed to new enrollment and applies to relatively few people.) Social Security provides widow(er)’s benefits starting at age 60, or at age 50 if the individual is disabled and meets certain other criteria. The amount of the aged or disabled widow(er)’s benefit is based on the deceased insured worker’s past earnings from covered employment, subject to a permanent reduction for each month of entitlement before the widow(er)’s full retirement age (65- 67, depending on year of birth). Under P.L. 98-21, lawmakers eliminated the additional reduction factor (ARF) for disabled widow(er)s aged 50-59, meaning their reduction penalty for claiming benefits before their full retirement age was capped at the percentage applicable to aged widow(er)s who first claim at age 60. All states (including 209[b] states) are required to provide Medicaid coverage for individuals who would continue to be eligible for SSI/SSP if not for increases in their widow(er)’s benefits due to the elimination of the ARF (known as “ARF Widow[er]s”).65 Individuals qualify under this pathway if they • were entitled to Social Security benefits in December 1983 and received disabled widow(er)’s benefits and SSI/SSP in January 1984, • lost SSI/SSP eligibility because of the elimination of the ARF, • have been continuously entitled to widow(er)’s benefits since January 1984, • filed for Medicaid continuation before July 1, 1988 (or a slightly later date in some cases), and • would continue to be eligible for SSI/SSP if the value of the increase in disabled widow(er)’s benefits under P.L. 98-21 and any subsequent COLAs were deducted from their countable income. Disabled Adult Children Disabled adult children of retired, disabled, or deceased insured workers typically qualify for Social Security disabled adult child’s (DAC) benefits if they are at least age 18 and became disabled before they attained age 22. States are generally required to provide Medicaid coverage for individuals who lose eligibility for SSI/SSP due to entitlement to or an increase in DAC benefits. 66 Individuals qualify under this pathway if they • lose eligibility for SSI/SSP due to receipt of DAC benefits on or after July 1, 1987, and • would continue to be eligible for SSI/SSP if not for their entitlement to or an increase in DAC benefits. 209(b) states may exclude all, some, or none of the DAC benefit or increases in that benefit that caused ineligibility for SSI/SSP. Widow(er)s Not Entitled to Medicare Part A (“Early Widow[er]s”) States are generally required to provide Medicaid coverage for individuals aged 50 to 64 who lose eligibility for SSI/SSP due to entitlement to Social Security widow(er)’s benefits but who are not yet entitled to Medicare Part A (Hospital Insurance).67 Individuals qualify under this pathway if they • are at least age 50 but have not yet attained age 65, • received SSI/SSP in the month before their widow(er)’s benefits began, • are not entitled to Medicare Part A,68 and • would continue to be eligible for SSI/SSP if not for their entitlement widow(er)’s benefits.69 Eligibility for Medicaid under this pathway continues until the individual becomes entitled to Medicare Part A. 209(b) states may exclude all, some, or none of the widow(er)’s benefit that caused ineligibility for SSP/SSI. Recipients of a 1972 Social Security COLA (This pathway is closed to new enrollment and applies to relatively few people.) Section 249E of P.L. 92-603 requires states to provide Medicaid coverage for individuals who would be eligible for SSI/SSP in the absence of a Social Security COLA enacted in 1972 under P.L. 92-336.70 Individuals qualify under this provision if they • were entitled to Social Security benefits in August 1972, • were receiving cash assistance under the former adult assistance programs in August 1972 (or would have been eligible for such assistance in certain instances), and • would be eligible for SSI/SSP had the COLA under P.L. 92-336 not been applied to their Social Security benefits.

"================ <TEXT PASSAGE> ======= [context document] ================ <QUESTION> ======= [user request] ================ <TASK> ======= You are an expert in question answering. Your task is to reply to a query or question, based only on the information provided by the user. It should only use information in the article provided."

Are there any benefits to using AI? Are there any dangers in using AI? If the answer is yes to either of these questions, create a list of answers for each question.

Potential threats posed by AI can entail malicious objectives, unintended circumstances, and circumvention of safety measures. There are currently AI tools where the objectives are not clear, making them usable in a vast array of contexts, but also susceptible to manipulation or use in detrimental ways. For example, while Large Language Models (LLMs) are optimized for the narrow task of text prediction, they do not have a single objective in their main end-to-end applications; thus, they can be utilized in content generation for marketing purposes, in translation, and to produce misinformation at scale. In other cases, the objective is known and the AI system is optimized for that objective but the outcome can result in unintended harm. For instance, while some AI systems might aim for higher clicks, they might inadvertently contribute to societal polarization. This is an example of unintended consequence of an AI tool optimized on a known objective. As AI has evolved, especially with the development of Foundation models, numerous strategies have been proposed to integrate safety precautions and protective guardrails during deployment. However, there is substantial evidence indicating that malicious entities can bypass these barriers, leading the Foundation models to breach the safety protocols that were put in place. As such, there is a continued need for research into these safety challenges. Malicious objectives: It is important to protect against the misuse of AI. This is true for both proprietary and open-source AI. Ensuring public access to technology through open-source supports efforts to democratize AI development. However, these open-source models can be utilized by bad actors for malicious objectives such as phishing and scamming. Similarly, close-source models also can pose similar risks if they are misused by bad actors. Circumvention of safety measures: As AI systems become increasingly sophisticated, there is a heightened risk that they may devise means to bypass the very protocols put in place to oversee or limit their actions. This is particularly worrisome because, while humans design these safety measures with specific intentions, an AI might interpret them differently or identify loopholes. As the wave of AI and automation continues its transformative journey across industries, it will have a disruptive impact on employment opportunities. This impact could make jobs better and more accessible to a broader proportion of the population, but also has the potential to increase inequality. On one hand, sectors reliant on routine tasks are confronted with potential impacts on jobs, while on the other hand, the rise of AI-driven enterprises might inadvertently magnify the chasm of economic inequality. However, it should be noted that these studies discuss exposure to AI. Exposure does not necessarily translate to loss of jobs as the market could expand. It is apparent that some jobs will be lost and others will be created, and in some instances lower-performing workers will be boosted by AI, supplementing their capabilities. The concern is that without proactively developing the ability to detect and address changes and disruptions, and without awareness of labor market trends, available educational upskilling programs, and policies such as wage insurance for workers preparing for new roles (especially in the rapidly changing environment), it is possible to witness stark increases in inequality even as productivity rises. But the challenges are not solely economic. Ethical and societal dilemmas are emerging at the forefront, with growing concerns about individual privacy, copyright infringement, and the increasing human dependence on these technologies. Content authenticity verification presents a significant challenge, heightening worries about deepfakes and misinformation, which could undermine democratic processes. As AI systems grow more powerful and potentially gain more sophisticated capabilities, concerns have been raised about the possibility that these technologies will cause significant disruptions. These can manifest in the form of threats to democracy, like meddling in the electoral process, national security threats such as bioweapons or cyberattacks, and societal disruptions via polarizing AI systems used in platforms like social media. It should be noted that there are differing opinions on the feasibility of superhuman capabilities of AI and whether the risks can be categorized as large-scale disruption and catastrophic. In addition, many of these risks are instances of AI used for malicious objectives, unintended consequences of AI systems, or economic and societal risks as mentioned in previous parts taken to their extreme. These risks include: Uncontrolled growth: As AI acquires more sophisticated capabilities, some have raised concerns that it could act unpredictably, making decisions or taking actions not fully understood by its developers. Destabilization of democracy: The improper and malevolent use of AI has the potential to critically destabilize democratic systems. For example, if AI is harnessed to meddle with electoral processes, this could undermine confidence in democratic processes. One of the most prominent concerns is the spread of misinformation and disinformation. Moreover, AI tools can also be employed for more direct manipulation of voter behavior. National security threats: Malicious inputs have the capacity to trick AI systems, leading to operational failures. Furthermore, when AI is integrated into realms like warfare, cyber-attacks, and bioweapons, it can both intensify conflicts and usher in unpredictable combat tactics. Manipulation and polarization: AI, such as those used in social media platforms, can manipulate information to increase user engagement, inadvertently leading to societal polarization and misinformation. As AI's potential grows, so do the complexities and concerns surrounding its assimilation into diverse societal sectors. Nonetheless, every hurdle also presents a chance to evolve and refine. This is especially true in the AI domain. Delving into potential resolutions and protective measures isn't merely scholarly; it's imperative to ensure AI is utilized ethically, responsibly, and safely for everyone's advantage in the future. It's essential to enforce transparency, ensuring users recognize when they are engaging with an AI rather than a human, especially in scenarios where trust and authenticity are paramount. Below are some of the mitigation strategies suggested by the experts. Adaptive regulation: There has been emphasis on the importance of regulating AI in a manner that's both agile and adaptive. Given that AI can evolve faster than legislative systems, regulations need to be flexible enough to address current and future risks. Regulations should also be designed based on input from multiple stakeholders: corporations, advocacy groups, academic leaders. It has been further suggested that risk should be associated with AI's uses, not the technology itself. Lastly, in light of the recent declaration about voluntary commitments, it has been suggested to make some of these commitments obligatory. Other possible suggestions include and possibly encompass third-party verification, registration, and licensing of certain AI systems. Research investment: It is paramount to invest in AI research. It has been suggested that the research should be segmented into public and classified. The public research involves conventional academic research that openly publishes findings on AI risk safety solutions. This research can further delve into the appropriate governance and regulation necessary to ensure public safety, providing valuable insights for policymakers aiming to regulate AI effectively. The classified research pertains to concentrating on counteractions against malevolent users of AI or inadvertent AI control losses with national security consequences. Furthermore, experts advocate for international research by fostering global collaborations among institutes. Research with humanity at its core: There's a dual need for both open academic research focusing on safety solutions and classified research that addresses potential threats from bad actors using AI or unintentional loss of control over AI. Multi-stakeholder approach: Experts highlight the significance of including various stakeholders like AI builders, users, and civil society in the process. Companies, in particular, should invest in AI governance and adopt internal ethics frameworks. International coordination: It's imperative to develop joint international collaboration, ensuring that potent AI tools are not misused. Collaborative efforts with various nations, including those beyond the traditional U.S. allies, will help ensure a cohesive global approach to AI usage and its associated risks.

"================ <TEXT PASSAGE> ======= Potential threats posed by AI can entail malicious objectives, unintended circumstances, and circumvention of safety measures. There are currently AI tools where the objectives are not clear, making them usable in a vast array of contexts, but also susceptible to manipulation or use in detrimental ways. For example, while Large Language Models (LLMs) are optimized for the narrow task of text prediction, they do not have a single objective in their main end-to-end applications; thus, they can be utilized in content generation for marketing purposes, in translation, and to produce misinformation at scale. In other cases, the objective is known and the AI system is optimized for that objective but the outcome can result in unintended harm. For instance, while some AI systems might aim for higher clicks, they might inadvertently contribute to societal polarization. This is an example of unintended consequence of an AI tool optimized on a known objective. As AI has evolved, especially with the development of Foundation models, numerous strategies have been proposed to integrate safety precautions and protective guardrails during deployment. However, there is substantial evidence indicating that malicious entities can bypass these barriers, leading the Foundation models to breach the safety protocols that were put in place. As such, there is a continued need for research into these safety challenges. Malicious objectives: It is important to protect against the misuse of AI. This is true for both proprietary and open-source AI. Ensuring public access to technology through open-source supports efforts to democratize AI development. However, these open-source models can be utilized by bad actors for malicious objectives such as phishing and scamming. Similarly, close-source models also can pose similar risks if they are misused by bad actors. Circumvention of safety measures: As AI systems become increasingly sophisticated, there is a heightened risk that they may devise means to bypass the very protocols put in place to oversee or limit their actions. This is particularly worrisome because, while humans design these safety measures with specific intentions, an AI might interpret them differently or identify loopholes. As the wave of AI and automation continues its transformative journey across industries, it will have a disruptive impact on employment opportunities. This impact could make jobs better and more accessible to a broader proportion of the population, but also has the potential to increase inequality. On one hand, sectors reliant on routine tasks are confronted with potential impacts on jobs, while on the other hand, the rise of AI-driven enterprises might inadvertently magnify the chasm of economic inequality. However, it should be noted that these studies discuss exposure to AI. Exposure does not necessarily translate to loss of jobs as the market could expand. It is apparent that some jobs will be lost and others will be created, and in some instances lower-performing workers will be boosted by AI, supplementing their capabilities. The concern is that without proactively developing the ability to detect and address changes and disruptions, and without awareness of labor market trends, available educational upskilling programs, and policies such as wage insurance for workers preparing for new roles (especially in the rapidly changing environment), it is possible to witness stark increases in inequality even as productivity rises. But the challenges are not solely economic. Ethical and societal dilemmas are emerging at the forefront, with growing concerns about individual privacy, copyright infringement, and the increasing human dependence on these technologies. Content authenticity verification presents a significant challenge, heightening worries about deepfakes and misinformation, which could undermine democratic processes. As AI systems grow more powerful and potentially gain more sophisticated capabilities, concerns have been raised about the possibility that these technologies will cause significant disruptions. These can manifest in the form of threats to democracy, like meddling in the electoral process, national security threats such as bioweapons or cyberattacks, and societal disruptions via polarizing AI systems used in platforms like social media. It should be noted that there are differing opinions on the feasibility of superhuman capabilities of AI and whether the risks can be categorized as large-scale disruption and catastrophic. In addition, many of these risks are instances of AI used for malicious objectives, unintended consequences of AI systems, or economic and societal risks as mentioned in previous parts taken to their extreme. These risks include: Uncontrolled growth: As AI acquires more sophisticated capabilities, some have raised concerns that it could act unpredictably, making decisions or taking actions not fully understood by its developers. Destabilization of democracy: The improper and malevolent use of AI has the potential to critically destabilize democratic systems. For example, if AI is harnessed to meddle with electoral processes, this could undermine confidence in democratic processes. One of the most prominent concerns is the spread of misinformation and disinformation. Moreover, AI tools can also be employed for more direct manipulation of voter behavior. National security threats: Malicious inputs have the capacity to trick AI systems, leading to operational failures. Furthermore, when AI is integrated into realms like warfare, cyber-attacks, and bioweapons, it can both intensify conflicts and usher in unpredictable combat tactics. Manipulation and polarization: AI, such as those used in social media platforms, can manipulate information to increase user engagement, inadvertently leading to societal polarization and misinformation. As AI's potential grows, so do the complexities and concerns surrounding its assimilation into diverse societal sectors. Nonetheless, every hurdle also presents a chance to evolve and refine. This is especially true in the AI domain. Delving into potential resolutions and protective measures isn't merely scholarly; it's imperative to ensure AI is utilized ethically, responsibly, and safely for everyone's advantage in the future. It's essential to enforce transparency, ensuring users recognize when they are engaging with an AI rather than a human, especially in scenarios where trust and authenticity are paramount. Below are some of the mitigation strategies suggested by the experts. Adaptive regulation: There has been emphasis on the importance of regulating AI in a manner that's both agile and adaptive. Given that AI can evolve faster than legislative systems, regulations need to be flexible enough to address current and future risks. Regulations should also be designed based on input from multiple stakeholders: corporations, advocacy groups, academic leaders. It has been further suggested that risk should be associated with AI's uses, not the technology itself. Lastly, in light of the recent declaration about voluntary commitments, it has been suggested to make some of these commitments obligatory. Other possible suggestions include and possibly encompass third-party verification, registration, and licensing of certain AI systems. Research investment: It is paramount to invest in AI research. It has been suggested that the research should be segmented into public and classified. The public research involves conventional academic research that openly publishes findings on AI risk safety solutions. This research can further delve into the appropriate governance and regulation necessary to ensure public safety, providing valuable insights for policymakers aiming to regulate AI effectively. The classified research pertains to concentrating on counteractions against malevolent users of AI or inadvertent AI control losses with national security consequences. Furthermore, experts advocate for international research by fostering global collaborations among institutes. Research with humanity at its core: There's a dual need for both open academic research focusing on safety solutions and classified research that addresses potential threats from bad actors using AI or unintentional loss of control over AI. Multi-stakeholder approach: Experts highlight the significance of including various stakeholders like AI builders, users, and civil society in the process. Companies, in particular, should invest in AI governance and adopt internal ethics frameworks. International coordination: It's imperative to develop joint international collaboration, ensuring that potent AI tools are not misused. Collaborative efforts with various nations, including those beyond the traditional U.S. allies, will help ensure a cohesive global approach to AI usage and its associated risks. https://ai.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Findings_The-Potential-Future-Risks-of-AI.pdf ================ <QUESTION> ======= Are there any benefits to using AI? Are there any dangers in using AI? If the answer is yes to either of these questions, create a list of answers for each question. ================ <TASK> ======= You are an expert in question answering. Your task is to reply to a query or question, based only on the information provided by the user. It should only use information in the article provided."

Only use information from the supplied context. Do not use outside information. Do not use extraneous text. Use bullets in at least some capacity to answer the questions. Your response should be under 100 words.

What are the five broad categories of business?

Defining a successful business EVERY ENTREPRENEUR ASPIRES to create a successful business, and investors certainly want management to run successful businesses. So what determines whether a business is being successful? Before answering this question, it is helpful to define what a business is and the various forms it can take. A business is a commercial operation that provides products or services with the aim of making a profit for the benefit of its owners. The significant point is “for the benefit of its owners”, which differentiates it from a government or not-for-profit organisation, such as a charity, where the activity is conducted for the benefit of the people it serves. A profit is an essential element of running a successful business. It is a trading surplus whereby the revenues earned exceed the costs. This surplus belongs to the owners of the business to use as they choose: to take for themselves, to reinvest back in the business, or a mixture of the two. For a government organisation or charity, any surplus is reinvested in the activities to further benefit the people it serves. Business structure A business can take many forms, ranging from a sole trader to a large multinational company. The principal aim of making a profit for its owners is still the same. A person starting out and setting up a business will take all the risk and reward as the venture gets under way. As the business grows it can be advantageous to share the risk with others and separate the business activities from those of the owner by establishing a company. A company is a legal entity in its own right that is separate from its 2017 Guide Financial Management.indd 1 22/01/2018 13:36 2 guide to financial management owners. An investor is risking only the money paid for buying some shares in the company. If the company ceases trading, the shareholders (owners) are not liable to make up any shortfall between the value of the company’s assets and its liabilities. There are five broad categories of business: ■ Sole trader. Someone who sets up a business alone and takes all the risk and reward of running it, and who may employ staff. ■ Partnership. Two or more people who set up a business together. The partners have joint ownership and share the risk and reward of running the business. Like a sole trader they may employ staff. ■ Limited liability partnership (LLP). A hybrid of a partnership and a company which provides the owners with the limited risk of a company and the shared ownership and tax status of a partnership. ■ Private company. Usually a small organisation raising its money from a few private investors. The shares may be difficult to trade as they are not listed on any stock market. Investors’ liability in private and public companies is limited to the amount of their investment. ■ Public company. Typically a large organisation that is usually listed on a stock exchange. Because of its size it may require significant investment, and hence it may need to draw investment from many investors. In this book the focus is mainly on companies, though the principles can be equally well applied to a sole trader, a partnership and indeed not-for-profit organisations. The role of the board The directors of a company are people hired (and at times fired) by the shareholders to be stewards of their investment. However, they need to balance this with their primary fiduciary duty as a director, which is to act in the best interests of the company. Collectively, a board of directors has overall responsibility for running a company successfully. This is achieved by setting and implementing its strategy. 2017 Guide Financial Management.indd 2 22/01/2018 13:36 Defining a successful business 3 In fulfilling the strategic aims of the company, the board will be responsible for making sure not only that the company has the necessary resources in terms of investment, assets and people, but also that there are appropriate operating controls and procedures for managing business risk and making sure that all monies that flow through the business are properly accounted for. What is a successful business? The media love to report on successful entrepreneurs and tell of how they beat the odds as they built their business and became household names. The media also enjoy revelling in the collapse of mighty organisations and unpicking the journey to their downfall. So what is it that defines business success or failure? Many descriptions are used to describe success, including “the business is profitable”, “revenue is growing” and “the share price is rising”. All these attributes are elements of success, though individually they do not embrace the totality. To be successful in business is to “create a sustainable superior return on investment”. The core element of this definition is “return on investment” (ROI). The business, having been built from money provided by investors, has a responsibility to reward those investors for risking their money in the venture. The ROI is a measure of the reward being generated. The concept is similar to a savings account, where an amount of money is placed on deposit with a bank and the investor earns interest on it. Despite the banking crisis of 2008 and its aftermath, the investment in a savings account is still seen as low risk and consequently the return that the investor will make is similarly low. Therefore, if a deposit of $1,000 is placed in a bank and the gross interest earned over a year is $30, the ROI can be expressed as being 3%. For a business to be successful it needs to reward investors by making them wealthier than they would have been by putting their money in a savings account. Why should they accept the greater risk of investing in a business, with all the uncertainty it faces, if they are 2017 Guide Financial Management.indd 3 22/01/2018 13:36 4 guide to financial management not going to be any better off? The return that investors would require might be double or more than a savings account, depending on the perceived risk, which will be related to factors such as the nature and maturity of the business. The return in a business is derived from the profit it generates compared with the money invested to achieve that profit. Therefore, if investors place $1,000 in a business and the operating profit over a year is $200, the ROI can be expressed as being 20%. Some examples of the returns achieved by companies in 2016 and stated in their annual reports are Walmart (a retailer) 15.5%, ExxonMobil (an oil company) 3.9% and Anglo American (an international mining company) 11.0%. Generating a “superior” return is to achieve a ROI that is greater than the rate achieved by businesses running similar activities in similar markets, and so to be successful is to generate a return that is at least as good as that achieved by your competitors, but ideally better than them. A “sustainable” superior return is perhaps the most difficult objective to achieve. It means generating a superior rate of return year in, year out. A business may be flying high when its products or services are in fashion. But the fall can be swift when its products or services are no longer in vogue and the business has gone from producing superior returns to producing inferior ones. To be sustainable is to continuously develop the business proposition in a way that keeps customers buying the company’s products or services in preference to those of its competitors. Innovation, technology and cost reduction are all activities that can help maintain a sustainable return. For example, the returns generated by the mobile phone company Nokia in 2006 were almost 46%. They resulted from a pre-eminence in a growing market coupled with an ability to continue to introduce new technology and ignite passion for the company’s latest products. Subsequently, Nokia failed to offer leading technology and was late in offering smartphones. As a result, it lost customers and the superior returns declined; in 2012 Nokia reported losses of €2.3 billion and was finally bought by Microsoft in April 2014. At the same time as Nokia was declining, Apple, its American rival, was rising. The two companies’ ROI between 2006 and 2012 is shown in Figure 1.1. On creating a superior ROI the directors of a company have two choices. They can either distribute the wealth to the investors or retain it in the business. The second option depends on whether the directors can identify further investment opportunities that will create even more wealth in the future. Profits can be retained in a company while investment opportunities are identified. However, this is only in the short term as investors (particularly in public companies) will demand the cash be “earning or returning”. Wealth is created for investors in a business in two ways: ■ annual income – a distribution of profit to the investor (by way of a dividend); ■ capital growth – a reinvestment back in the business to increase its value (share price). Shareholder value The term “shareholder value” is also used to describe success. Two definitions of shareholder value are: ■ a concept that focuses strategic and operational decision-making on steadily increasing a company’s value for shareholders; ■ maximising shareholder benefit by focusing on raising company earnings and the share price. These definitions focus more on increasing the value of a business in the long term rather than delivering a profit in the short term. An example would be Amazon, one of the best-known online retailers, where the initial strategy was to invest in building the distribution network and customer base as the foundation of the business. Once customer numbers grew the profits would emerge. Throughout its early years the company was creating long-term value while making large losses. During this period Amazon’s share price was volatile as it reflected changing views on the future benefits that would arise for investors. For a mature business, an example would be its investment in research and development to provide the products and revenue streams of the future. This investment can create shareholder value because of the potential it is judged to provide. However, the danger is that success is built on a future promise, and in a fast-changing world the future is always uncertain. For example, AstraZeneca, a pharmaceutical company, had taken years to develop a new lung cancer drug only to find in July 2017 that the trials had failed: its share price fell 16% in one day. For a company that is quoted on a stock market, there is the expectation to achieve a sufficient ROI every year while also investing to create future value. Once the business has started to make profits, any performance that is worse than the previous year is likely to meet with an adverse reaction from analysts and investors, which in many instances can lead to a forced change of management. In February 2017 Unilever, a food company, defended a hostile bid from Kraft Foods on the basis that it would complete a “comprehensive review of options available to accelerate delivery of value for the benefit of our shareholders”. Like all other global companies, it battles to produce the ever more superior results that stockmarket investors look for. The details of the measures used to monitor ROI and shareholder value creation are explained in Chapter 14.

Only use information from the supplied context. Do not use outside information. Do not use extraneous text. Use bullets in at least some capacity to answer the questions. Your response should be under 100 words. What are the five broad categories of business? Defining a successful business EVERY ENTREPRENEUR ASPIRES to create a successful business, and investors certainly want management to run successful businesses. So what determines whether a business is being successful? Before answering this question, it is helpful to define what a business is and the various forms it can take. A business is a commercial operation that provides products or services with the aim of making a profit for the benefit of its owners. The significant point is “for the benefit of its owners”, which differentiates it from a government or not-for-profit organisation, such as a charity, where the activity is conducted for the benefit of the people it serves. A profit is an essential element of running a successful business. It is a trading surplus whereby the revenues earned exceed the costs. This surplus belongs to the owners of the business to use as they choose: to take for themselves, to reinvest back in the business, or a mixture of the two. For a government organisation or charity, any surplus is reinvested in the activities to further benefit the people it serves. Business structure A business can take many forms, ranging from a sole trader to a large multinational company. The principal aim of making a profit for its owners is still the same. A person starting out and setting up a business will take all the risk and reward as the venture gets under way. As the business grows it can be advantageous to share the risk with others and separate the business activities from those of the owner by establishing a company. A company is a legal entity in its own right that is separate from its 2017 Guide Financial Management.indd 1 22/01/2018 13:36 2 guide to financial management owners. An investor is risking only the money paid for buying some shares in the company. If the company ceases trading, the shareholders (owners) are not liable to make up any shortfall between the value of the company’s assets and its liabilities. There are five broad categories of business: ■ Sole trader. Someone who sets up a business alone and takes all the risk and reward of running it, and who may employ staff. ■ Partnership. Two or more people who set up a business together. The partners have joint ownership and share the risk and reward of running the business. Like a sole trader they may employ staff. ■ Limited liability partnership (LLP). A hybrid of a partnership and a company which provides the owners with the limited risk of a company and the shared ownership and tax status of a partnership. ■ Private company. Usually a small organisation raising its money from a few private investors. The shares may be difficult to trade as they are not listed on any stock market. Investors’ liability in private and public companies is limited to the amount of their investment. ■ Public company. Typically a large organisation that is usually listed on a stock exchange. Because of its size it may require significant investment, and hence it may need to draw investment from many investors. In this book the focus is mainly on companies, though the principles can be equally well applied to a sole trader, a partnership and indeed not-for-profit organisations. The role of the board The directors of a company are people hired (and at times fired) by the shareholders to be stewards of their investment. However, they need to balance this with their primary fiduciary duty as a director, which is to act in the best interests of the company. Collectively, a board of directors has overall responsibility for running a company successfully. This is achieved by setting and implementing its strategy. 2017 Guide Financial Management.indd 2 22/01/2018 13:36 Defining a successful business 3 In fulfilling the strategic aims of the company, the board will be responsible for making sure not only that the company has the necessary resources in terms of investment, assets and people, but also that there are appropriate operating controls and procedures for managing business risk and making sure that all monies that flow through the business are properly accounted for. What is a successful business? The media love to report on successful entrepreneurs and tell of how they beat the odds as they built their business and became household names. The media also enjoy revelling in the collapse of mighty organisations and unpicking the journey to their downfall. So what is it that defines business success or failure? Many descriptions are used to describe success, including “the business is profitable”, “revenue is growing” and “the share price is rising”. All these attributes are elements of success, though individually they do not embrace the totality. To be successful in business is to “create a sustainable superior return on investment”. The core element of this definition is “return on investment” (ROI). The business, having been built from money provided by investors, has a responsibility to reward those investors for risking their money in the venture. The ROI is a measure of the reward being generated. The concept is similar to a savings account, where an amount of money is placed on deposit with a bank and the investor earns interest on it. Despite the banking crisis of 2008 and its aftermath, the investment in a savings account is still seen as low risk and consequently the return that the investor will make is similarly low. Therefore, if a deposit of $1,000 is placed in a bank and the gross interest earned over a year is $30, the ROI can be expressed as being 3%. For a business to be successful it needs to reward investors by making them wealthier than they would have been by putting their money in a savings account. Why should they accept the greater risk of investing in a business, with all the uncertainty it faces, if they are 2017 Guide Financial Management.indd 3 22/01/2018 13:36 4 guide to financial management not going to be any better off? The return that investors would require might be double or more than a savings account, depending on the perceived risk, which will be related to factors such as the nature and maturity of the business. The return in a business is derived from the profit it generates compared with the money invested to achieve that profit. Therefore, if investors place $1,000 in a business and the operating profit over a year is $200, the ROI can be expressed as being 20%. Some examples of the returns achieved by companies in 2016 and stated in their annual reports are Walmart (a retailer) 15.5%, ExxonMobil (an oil company) 3.9% and Anglo American (an international mining company) 11.0%. Generating a “superior” return is to achieve a ROI that is greater than the rate achieved by businesses running similar activities in similar markets, and so to be successful is to generate a return that is at least as good as that achieved by your competitors, but ideally better than them. A “sustainable” superior return is perhaps the most difficult objective to achieve. It means generating a superior rate of return year in, year out. A business may be flying high when its products or services are in fashion. But the fall can be swift when its products or services are no longer in vogue and the business has gone from producing superior returns to producing inferior ones. To be sustainable is to continuously develop the business proposition in a way that keeps customers buying the company’s products or services in preference to those of its competitors. Innovation, technology and cost reduction are all activities that can help maintain a sustainable return. For example, the returns generated by the mobile phone company Nokia in 2006 were almost 46%. They resulted from a pre-eminence in a growing market coupled with an ability to continue to introduce new technology and ignite passion for the company’s latest products. Subsequently, Nokia failed to offer leading technology and was late in offering smartphones. As a result, it lost customers and the superior returns declined; in 2012 Nokia reported losses of €2.3 billion and was finally bought by Microsoft in April 2014. At the same time as Nokia was declining, Apple, its American rival, was rising. The two companies’ ROI between 2006 and 2012 is shown in Figure 1.1. On creating a superior ROI the directors of a company have two choices. They can either distribute the wealth to the investors or retain it in the business. The second option depends on whether the directors can identify further investment opportunities that will create even more wealth in the future. Profits can be retained in a company while investment opportunities are identified. However, this is only in the short term as investors (particularly in public companies) will demand the cash be “earning or returning”. Wealth is created for investors in a business in two ways: ■ annual income – a distribution of profit to the investor (by way of a dividend); ■ capital growth – a reinvestment back in the business to increase its value (share price). Shareholder value The term “shareholder value” is also used to describe success. Two definitions of shareholder value are: ■ a concept that focuses strategic and operational decision-making on steadily increasing a company’s value for shareholders; ■ maximising shareholder benefit by focusing on raising company earnings and the share price. These definitions focus more on increasing the value of a business in the long term rather than delivering a profit in the short term. An example would be Amazon, one of the best-known online retailers, where the initial strategy was to invest in building the distribution network and customer base as the foundation of the business. Once customer numbers grew the profits would emerge. Throughout its early years the company was creating long-term value while making large losses. During this period Amazon’s share price was volatile as it reflected changing views on the future benefits that would arise for investors. For a mature business, an example would be its investment in research and development to provide the products and revenue streams of the future. This investment can create shareholder value because of the potential it is judged to provide. However, the danger is that success is built on a future promise, and in a fast-changing world the future is always uncertain. For example, AstraZeneca, a pharmaceutical company, had taken years to develop a new lung cancer drug only to find in July 2017 that the trials had failed: its share price fell 16% in one day. For a company that is quoted on a stock market, there is the expectation to achieve a sufficient ROI every year while also investing to create future value. Once the business has started to make profits, any performance that is worse than the previous year is likely to meet with an adverse reaction from analysts and investors, which in many instances can lead to a forced change of management. In February 2017 Unilever, a food company, defended a hostile bid from Kraft Foods on the basis that it would complete a “comprehensive review of options available to accelerate delivery of value for the benefit of our shareholders”. Like all other global companies, it battles to produce the ever more superior results that stockmarket investors look for. The details of the measures used to monitor ROI and shareholder value creation are explained in Chapter 14.

Answer the question based solely on the information provided in the passage. Do not use any external knowledge or resources. [user request] [context document]

I want my case thrown out. The man that is representing me comes to court drunk and has mishandled evidence needed to acquit me. How can I get the judge to throw it out and expunge my record in Texas?

Can the Judge Dismiss a Case in Texas? Written by The Law Office of David White PLLC: Austin Criminal Lawyer, reviewed by David D. White May 18, 2024 can the judge dismiss a case Yes, the decision to dismiss a criminal case can lie within the discretion of the judge overseeing the proceedings. So can the judge dismiss a case in Texas?, well a case dismissal occurs when the court ends legal proceedings prematurely, effectively terminating the case before reaching a verdict. This can happen at any stage of the legal process, from the initial filing of charges to the trial itself. A dismissal is the optimal outcome for the defendant, as it means the case is dropped and no further action is taken. However, it’s essential to note that a dismissal does not mean the charge or arrest or citation are expunged from your record. For the best chance of having charges dismissed in your criminal case or obtaining another favorable outcome, discuss your case with an Austin Criminal Defense Lawyer now. What is a Case Dismissal? A criminal case dismissal by a judge occurs when a judge determines that there is not enough evidence to proceed with the case or that the prosecution has failed to meet its burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. A dismissal does not necessarily mean that the defendant is innocent or that they did not commit the alleged offense. Instead, it reflects the judge’s determination that the evidence presented by the prosecution is not sufficient to proceed with the case. In some instances, a dismissal may also occur if there are procedural errors or violations of the defendant’s constitutional rights. If you are facing criminal charges, you need a skilled attorney who can aggressively advocate for your rights and work toward the best possible outcome for your case. An experienced criminal defense attorney can assess the strength of the evidence against you, identify potential weaknesses in the prosecution’s case, and present persuasive arguments to the judge in support of a dismissal. Remember, each case is different and will require its own strategic defense tailored to your specific circumstances. Part of your defense lawyer’s job is to determine whether there are grounds for dismissal and take appropriate action, so you want a skilled attorney working on your case as soon as possible. Seeking a Dismissal from the Judge in Criminal Court Judges have the authority to dismiss cases, but they only do so under certain circumstances. They consider the facts presented, evaluate legal arguments, and assess the overall fairness and integrity of the case. Ultimately, the judge’s primary responsibility is to administer justice and ensure the proper functioning of the legal system. However, a judge will not review a case for errors or deficiencies on their own. Instead, your criminal defense lawyer will need to petition the court to dismiss the case by filing a proper motion. This motion must set forth the facts and arguments supporting the dismissal. Motion practice in a criminal case involves complicated legal requirements and procedures. You need an experienced defense attorney on board in your case right away, so they can identify any grounds for a possible dismissal and file persuasive motions with the court. If My Case is Dismissed, Will it Still Be in my File? While a case dismissal can be a favorable outcome, it’s important to understand that it does not automatically erase the charges from your record. In Texas, dismissed cases are typically still part of your criminal record, but they may be eligible for expunction or nondisclosure in certain circumstances. Expunction completely removes the record of the case, as if it never happened, while nondisclosure limits access to the record by most employers and the public. To determine if your case is eligible for expunction or nondisclosure, it is advisable to consult with an experienced Austin criminal defense attorney who can guide you through the process. You Need a Tough, Skilled Criminal Defense Lawyer in Austin, Texas Navigating the legal system can be overwhelming, especially when you’re hoping for a case dismissal in Texas. That’s where The Law Office of David D. White: Austin Criminal Lawyer comes in. Our experienced Austin criminal defense attorneys are dedicated to helping individuals like you overcome legal challenges and achieve the best possible outcome. To get the answers you need and start building your defense, contact our offices today and schedule a free, no-pressure consultation. David D. White

Answer the question based solely on the information provided in the passage. Do not use any external knowledge or resources. I want my case thrown out. The man that is representing me comes to court drunk and has mishandled evidence needed to acquit me. How can I get the judge to throw it out and expunge my record in Texas? Can the Judge Dismiss a Case in Texas? Written by The Law Office of David White PLLC: Austin Criminal Lawyer, reviewed by David D. White May 18, 2024 can the judge dismiss a case Yes, the decision to dismiss a criminal case can lie within the discretion of the judge overseeing the proceedings. So can the judge dismiss a case in Texas?, well a case dismissal occurs when the court ends legal proceedings prematurely, effectively terminating the case before reaching a verdict. This can happen at any stage of the legal process, from the initial filing of charges to the trial itself. A dismissal is the optimal outcome for the defendant, as it means the case is dropped and no further action is taken. However, it’s essential to note that a dismissal does not mean the charge or arrest or citation are expunged from your record. For the best chance of having charges dismissed in your criminal case or obtaining another favorable outcome, discuss your case with an Austin Criminal Defense Lawyer now. What is a Case Dismissal? A criminal case dismissal by a judge occurs when a judge determines that there is not enough evidence to proceed with the case or that the prosecution has failed to meet its burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. A dismissal does not necessarily mean that the defendant is innocent or that they did not commit the alleged offense. Instead, it reflects the judge’s determination that the evidence presented by the prosecution is not sufficient to proceed with the case. In some instances, a dismissal may also occur if there are procedural errors or violations of the defendant’s constitutional rights. If you are facing criminal charges, you need a skilled attorney who can aggressively advocate for your rights and work toward the best possible outcome for your case. An experienced criminal defense attorney can assess the strength of the evidence against you, identify potential weaknesses in the prosecution’s case, and present persuasive arguments to the judge in support of a dismissal. Remember, each case is different and will require its own strategic defense tailored to your specific circumstances. Part of your defense lawyer’s job is to determine whether there are grounds for dismissal and take appropriate action, so you want a skilled attorney working on your case as soon as possible. Seeking a Dismissal from the Judge in Criminal Court Judges have the authority to dismiss cases, but they only do so under certain circumstances. They consider the facts presented, evaluate legal arguments, and assess the overall fairness and integrity of the case. Ultimately, the judge’s primary responsibility is to administer justice and ensure the proper functioning of the legal system. However, a judge will not review a case for errors or deficiencies on their own. Instead, your criminal defense lawyer will need to petition the court to dismiss the case by filing a proper motion. This motion must set forth the facts and arguments supporting the dismissal. Motion practice in a criminal case involves complicated legal requirements and procedures. You need an experienced defense attorney on board in your case right away, so they can identify any grounds for a possible dismissal and file persuasive motions with the court. If My Case is Dismissed, Will it Still Be in my File? While a case dismissal can be a favorable outcome, it’s important to understand that it does not automatically erase the charges from your record. In Texas, dismissed cases are typically still part of your criminal record, but they may be eligible for expunction or nondisclosure in certain circumstances. Expunction completely removes the record of the case, as if it never happened, while nondisclosure limits access to the record by most employers and the public. To determine if your case is eligible for expunction or nondisclosure, it is advisable to consult with an experienced Austin criminal defense attorney who can guide you through the process. You Need a Tough, Skilled Criminal Defense Lawyer in Austin, Texas Navigating the legal system can be overwhelming, especially when you’re hoping for a case dismissal in Texas. That’s where The Law Office of David D. White: Austin Criminal Lawyer comes in. Our experienced Austin criminal defense attorneys are dedicated to helping individuals like you overcome legal challenges and achieve the best possible outcome. To get the answers you need and start building your defense, contact our offices today and schedule a free, no-pressure consultation. David D. White https://www.wm-attorneys.com/can-the-judge-dismiss-a-case/#:~:text=A%20criminal%20case%20dismissal%20by,proof%20beyond%20a%20reasonable%20doubt.

Your response must solely be based on the prompt. External resources and prior knowledge must not be used.

Summarize this.

On March 18, 2022, the Department of Justice (DOJ), the agency mainly charged with enforcing the ADA, issued nonbinding web accessibility guidance for public accommodations (covered under ADA’sTitle III) and local governments (under ADA’s Title II). The guidance addresses, among other things, how public accommodations can make accessible the goods and services they offer online, although it does not provide detailed standards. The guidance offers a one-page summary of how to make a website accessible, emphasizing website providers’ “flexibility in how they comply.” WCAG and the federal government's Section 508 rules for its own websites are cited as “helpful guidance.” The limited 2022 guidance contrasts with the DOJ’s efforts in years past. In 2010, DOJ published an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking providing detailed standards for website accessibility. Then, in 2017, it withdrew its regulatory proposals for websites, stating that it was “evaluating whether promulgating regulations about the accessibility of Web information and services is necessary and appropriate.” Aside from referring to WCAG and Section 508 guidelines, the 2022 DOJ guidance lists specific accessibility features web providers must consider. These include color contrast in text; text alternatives(descriptions of visual features that a screen reader can announce); captions for visual access to audio content; labels and other formatting for online forms; keyboard navigation; and a way to report accessibility issues. The DOJ guidance emphasizes that its summary “is not a complete list of things to consider.” And especially when it comes to

Your response must solely be based on the prompt. External resources and prior knowledge must not be used. Summarize this. On March 18, 2022, the Department of Justice (DOJ), the agency mainly charged with enforcing the ADA, issued nonbinding web accessibility guidance for public accommodations (covered under ADA’sTitle III) and local governments (under ADA’s Title II). The guidance addresses, among other things, how public accommodations can make accessible the goods and services they offer online, although it does not provide detailed standards. The guidance offers a one-page summary of how to make a website accessible, emphasizing website providers’ “flexibility in how they comply.” WCAG and the federal government's Section 508 rules for its own websites are cited as “helpful guidance.” The limited 2022 guidance contrasts with the DOJ’s efforts in years past. In 2010, DOJ published an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking providing detailed standards for website accessibility. Then, in 2017, it withdrew its regulatory proposals for websites, stating that it was “evaluating whether promulgating regulations about the accessibility of Web information and services is necessary and appropriate.” Aside from referring to WCAG and Section 508 guidelines, the 2022 DOJ guidance lists specific accessibility features web providers must consider. These include color contrast in text; text alternatives(descriptions of visual features that a screen reader can announce); captions for visual access to audio content; labels and other formatting for online forms; keyboard navigation; and a way to report accessibility issues. The DOJ guidance emphasizes that its summary “is not a complete list of things to consider.” And especially when it comes to

In your answer, refer only to the context document. Do not employ any outside knowledge

Based on the provided context, what are some ways the City of Stronghold helps small businesses?

**Small Business Startup/Management Guide** The Strongsville Business Startup & Management Guide Section Page # Small Business Readiness Assessment Tool……1 Small Business Planning Resources………...….2 State & County Financing Programs..………….3 Opportunities Within the City of Strongsville….4 Northeast Ohio Technology Incubators………...5 Workforce Development & Export Assistance…6 Additional Resources…………………………...7 Contact Information…………………...………..8 Entrepreneurship and small business development are critical to the sustainability of any community and the City of Strongsville is committed to helping local business men and women succeed through the challenge of starting and maintaining a small business. This document is designed to be a start-up guide rich with resources to help you on your journey to business ownership. I hope you find the following information helpful and please do not hesitate to contact me if I can be of assistance. Brent Painter Director of Economic Development City of Strongsville (440) 580-3118 [email protected] i. Table of Contents Small Business Readiness Assessment Tool (SBAT) Developed by the Small Business Administration (SBA), the Small Business Readiness Assessment Tool (SBAT) is an interactive questionnaire developed to assess an entrepreneur’s readiness to start a business. Questions within the SBAT are designed to evaluate the user’s skills, personal characteristics, and experience in relation to their preparedness to start a business. After the questionnaire is completed the results are tallied and an assessment profile is provided. The user is also supplied a statement of “Suggested Next Steps” and links to free online courses and counseling. To complete the Small Business Readiness Assessment Tool please select the web address below: https://eweb1.sba.gov/cams/training/business_primer/assessment.htm *The SBAT is an automated self-assessment tool. None of the information provided is collected, tabulated, or utilized by the SBA or any other organization. 1 Starting a small business is a risk. Studies reveal that the common causes of business failure, in particular small business, are:  Poor Location  Lack of Research Regarding Market Potential  Over Optimistic Business Plans  Poor evaluation of Competition  Lack of Unique Selling Proposition (USP)  Lack of Marketing Expertise  Conflict with Partners  Failure to Put Forth Required Time and Effort  Insufficient Capital to Grow the Business  Inefficient Employees Careful planning and the utilization of available expertise are essential to the success of any new business. The first step within the planning process is to assess the entrepreneur’s readiness to expend the necessary resources to create and grow a prosperous small business. Small Business Readiness State of Ohio’s 1st Stop Business Connection (614) 466-4232 At the 1st Stop Business Connection website an entrepreneur will be guided through a six step process that will help them create a free business information kit containing state-level instructions regarding starting a business in Ohio. The business information kit includes:  A checklist detailing State of Ohio requirements & regulations for the specified industry  Instructions for applying for an Employer Identification Number (EIN)  Business name registration instructions  Workers Compensation information  And more One-on-One Small Business Counseling The Cleveland Small Business Administration (SBA) Office (216) 522-4180 The Small Business Administration is a federal government agency that was created to aid, counsel, assist, and protect the interests of small businesses, preserve free competitive enterprise, and maintain and strengthen the overall U.S. economy. The Cleveland SBA Office assists entrepreneurs through training, counseling, and business development programs including loan guaranties. For further detail on the Cleveland SBA please select the link listed below: www.sba.gov/localresources/district/oh/cleveland/index.html The Small Business Development Center (SBDC) of Cleveland (216) 987-2969 The Small Business Development Center of Cleveland is a division of the Ohio Department of Development whose mission is to contribute to the economic growth in the Greater Cleveland market by providing a one-stop business information portal and hands-on education throughout the entire lifecycle of a small business. To learn more about the Cleveland SBDC and schedule an appointment for free counseling please visit the link listed below: www.entrepreneurohio.org/center.aspx?center=17087&subloc=1 2 Small Business Planning Resources 3 JobsOhio (614) 224-6446 JobsOhio offers a wide range of financing options for companies looking to start, relocate, and expand within Ohio. To learn more about JobsOhio and State Incentive Programs please select the link listed below: https://www.jobsohio.com/ State of Ohio: Treasurer’s Office (614) 466-2160 The Treasurer’s GrowNOW interest rate reduction program is designed to help small businesses grow by providing them with critical cash flow. When a business is approved for a loan from one of the hundreds of eligible banks in Ohio, GrowNOW provides an additional three percent discount on the loan’s already negotiated interest rate, when the loan is linked to creating or saving jobs in Ohio. Select the link listed below to learn more regarding the Ohio Treasurer’s GrowNOW Program: tos.ohio.gov/grownow Cuyahoga County: Department of Development (216) 443-7260 The Cuyahoga County Department of Development offers various financing opportunities designed to create local business growth and enhanced employment opportunities within Cuyahoga County. Select the link listed below to learn more regarding the Cuyahoga County’s assistance programs: http://development.cuyahogacounty.us/en-US/Economic-Development-Programs.aspx State & County Financing Programs 4 Available Property Database The City of Strongsville, Department of Economic Development, maintains an available properties database to assist in the site selection process. Users can research available industrial & commercial land as well as retail, office, and industrial space within existing buildings. To view available properties within Strongsville please select the link listed below: www.strongsville.org/departments/economic-development/available-properties Tax Incentives The City of Strongsville has various tax incentive programs designed to benefit businesses who are relocating to Strongsville and expanding within the region. To review available tax incentives and eligibility requirements please select the link listed below: www.strongsville.org/departments/economic-development/tax-incentives The Strongsville Corporate Relocation Guide & Community Profile The Strongsville Corporate Relocation Guide & Community Profile describes the pro-business environment within the city and provides site selectors with the information most often requested. To download the Strongsville Corporate Relocation Guide select the link listed below: www.strongsville.org/departments/economic-development Demographics & Site Selector Resources Located on www.strongsville.org, the Demographics & Site Selectors Resources webpage provides information regarding demographic data, business & workforce reports, and specifics regarding the City of Strongsville, including distance to major markets, largest employers, and city traffic counts. To learn more select the link below: www.strongsville.org/departments/economic-development/community-profile *To relocate your business to Strongsville contact Brent Painter, Director of Economic Development, at (440) 580-3118 or at [email protected] www.strongsville.org The City of Strongsville 5 Manufacturing Advocacy & Growth Network (MAGNET) www.magnetwork.org 1768 East 25th Street Cleveland, Ohio 44114 (216) 432-4197 Great Lakes Incubator for Developing Enterprises (GLIDE) www.glideit.org 151 Innovation Drive, Suite 210 (Located at Lorain County Community College) Elyria, Ohio 44035 (440) 366-4310 Braintree Partners www.braintreepartners.org 201 East Fifth Street, Suite 100 Mansfield, Ohio 44901 (419) 525-1614 The Akron Global Business Accelerator www.akronaccelerator.com 526 South Main Street Akron, Ohio 44311 (330) 375-2173 Youngstown Business Incubator (YBI) www.ybi.org 241 Federal Plaza West Youngstown, Ohio 44503 (330) 746-5003 Jumpstart, Inc. www.jumpstartinc.org 737 Bolivar Road, Suite 3000 Cleveland, Ohio 44115 (216) 363-3400 The Northeast Ohio Edison Technology Incubator Program is designed to assist technology-oriented start-ups during their concept definition & development stages. A list of local incubators can be found below. Northeast Ohio’s Incubators 6 Export Assistance U.S. Export Assistance Cleveland Office The Cleveland U.S. Export Assistance Center (USEAC) is a division of the U.S. Depart of Commerce and provide comprehensive solutions to international trade challenges through expert counseling. To review the services and programs provided by the USEAC please visit the website listed below: www.export.gov/ohio/northernohio/ International Trade Assistance Center The International Trade Assistance Center (ITAC) provides export assistance services to small and medium sized businesses in order to promote growth through exports. To learn more about ITAC select the link listed below: www.csuohio.edu/business/global/international-trade-assistance-center Ohio Development Services Agency: Global Markets Division With 7 international offices, the Ohio Development Services Agency’s Global Markets Division’s goal is to develop new relationships in foreign countries that will benefit the export strategies of Ohio’s businesses. Select the link listed below to learn more about the Global Markets Division: http://development.ohio.gov/bs/bs_globalohio.htm Workforce Development OhioMeansJobs OhioMeansJobs is a collaborative workforce system within Cuyahoga County that helps local employers meet their human capital needs and assists job seekers in finding success. To learn more about OhioMeansJobs please select the link below: www.ohiomeansjobs.com Cuyahoga Community College Corporate College Cuyahoga Community College offers Northeast Ohio companies affordable, cutting-edge training programs that can be custom-designed to accommodate an employers workforce development needs through the Corporate College. To learn more about the Corporate College please select the link listed below: www.corporatecollege.com Polaris Career Center The Polaris Career Center Adult Education Department offers comprehensive education and training services. For more details please click the link listed below: www.polaris.edu/adult-education/ Workforce Development & Export Assistance

{question} ========== Based on the provided context, what are some ways the City of Stronghold helps small businesses? ---------- {task instructions} ========== In your answer, refer only to the context document. Do not employ any outside knowledge ---------- {passage} ========== **Small Business Startup/Management Guide** The Strongsville Business Startup & Management Guide Section Page # Small Business Readiness Assessment Tool……1 Small Business Planning Resources………...….2 State & County Financing Programs..………….3 Opportunities Within the City of Strongsville….4 Northeast Ohio Technology Incubators………...5 Workforce Development & Export Assistance…6 Additional Resources…………………………...7 Contact Information…………………...………..8 Entrepreneurship and small business development are critical to the sustainability of any community and the City of Strongsville is committed to helping local business men and women succeed through the challenge of starting and maintaining a small business. This document is designed to be a start-up guide rich with resources to help you on your journey to business ownership. I hope you find the following information helpful and please do not hesitate to contact me if I can be of assistance. Brent Painter Director of Economic Development City of Strongsville (440) 580-3118 [email protected] i. Table of Contents Small Business Readiness Assessment Tool (SBAT) Developed by the Small Business Administration (SBA), the Small Business Readiness Assessment Tool (SBAT) is an interactive questionnaire developed to assess an entrepreneur’s readiness to start a business. Questions within the SBAT are designed to evaluate the user’s skills, personal characteristics, and experience in relation to their preparedness to start a business. After the questionnaire is completed the results are tallied and an assessment profile is provided. The user is also supplied a statement of “Suggested Next Steps” and links to free online courses and counseling. To complete the Small Business Readiness Assessment Tool please select the web address below: https://eweb1.sba.gov/cams/training/business_primer/assessment.htm *The SBAT is an automated self-assessment tool. None of the information provided is collected, tabulated, or utilized by the SBA or any other organization. 1 Starting a small business is a risk. Studies reveal that the common causes of business failure, in particular small business, are:  Poor Location  Lack of Research Regarding Market Potential  Over Optimistic Business Plans  Poor evaluation of Competition  Lack of Unique Selling Proposition (USP)  Lack of Marketing Expertise  Conflict with Partners  Failure to Put Forth Required Time and Effort  Insufficient Capital to Grow the Business  Inefficient Employees Careful planning and the utilization of available expertise are essential to the success of any new business. The first step within the planning process is to assess the entrepreneur’s readiness to expend the necessary resources to create and grow a prosperous small business. Small Business Readiness State of Ohio’s 1st Stop Business Connection (614) 466-4232 At the 1st Stop Business Connection website an entrepreneur will be guided through a six step process that will help them create a free business information kit containing state-level instructions regarding starting a business in Ohio. The business information kit includes:  A checklist detailing State of Ohio requirements & regulations for the specified industry  Instructions for applying for an Employer Identification Number (EIN)  Business name registration instructions  Workers Compensation information  And more One-on-One Small Business Counseling The Cleveland Small Business Administration (SBA) Office (216) 522-4180 The Small Business Administration is a federal government agency that was created to aid, counsel, assist, and protect the interests of small businesses, preserve free competitive enterprise, and maintain and strengthen the overall U.S. economy. The Cleveland SBA Office assists entrepreneurs through training, counseling, and business development programs including loan guaranties. For further detail on the Cleveland SBA please select the link listed below: www.sba.gov/localresources/district/oh/cleveland/index.html The Small Business Development Center (SBDC) of Cleveland (216) 987-2969 The Small Business Development Center of Cleveland is a division of the Ohio Department of Development whose mission is to contribute to the economic growth in the Greater Cleveland market by providing a one-stop business information portal and hands-on education throughout the entire lifecycle of a small business. To learn more about the Cleveland SBDC and schedule an appointment for free counseling please visit the link listed below: www.entrepreneurohio.org/center.aspx?center=17087&subloc=1 2 Small Business Planning Resources 3 JobsOhio (614) 224-6446 JobsOhio offers a wide range of financing options for companies looking to start, relocate, and expand within Ohio. To learn more about JobsOhio and State Incentive Programs please select the link listed below: https://www.jobsohio.com/ State of Ohio: Treasurer’s Office (614) 466-2160 The Treasurer’s GrowNOW interest rate reduction program is designed to help small businesses grow by providing them with critical cash flow. When a business is approved for a loan from one of the hundreds of eligible banks in Ohio, GrowNOW provides an additional three percent discount on the loan’s already negotiated interest rate, when the loan is linked to creating or saving jobs in Ohio. Select the link listed below to learn more regarding the Ohio Treasurer’s GrowNOW Program: tos.ohio.gov/grownow Cuyahoga County: Department of Development (216) 443-7260 The Cuyahoga County Department of Development offers various financing opportunities designed to create local business growth and enhanced employment opportunities within Cuyahoga County. Select the link listed below to learn more regarding the Cuyahoga County’s assistance programs: http://development.cuyahogacounty.us/en-US/Economic-Development-Programs.aspx State & County Financing Programs 4 Available Property Database The City of Strongsville, Department of Economic Development, maintains an available properties database to assist in the site selection process. Users can research available industrial & commercial land as well as retail, office, and industrial space within existing buildings. To view available properties within Strongsville please select the link listed below: www.strongsville.org/departments/economic-development/available-properties Tax Incentives The City of Strongsville has various tax incentive programs designed to benefit businesses who are relocating to Strongsville and expanding within the region. To review available tax incentives and eligibility requirements please select the link listed below: www.strongsville.org/departments/economic-development/tax-incentives The Strongsville Corporate Relocation Guide & Community Profile The Strongsville Corporate Relocation Guide & Community Profile describes the pro-business environment within the city and provides site selectors with the information most often requested. To download the Strongsville Corporate Relocation Guide select the link listed below: www.strongsville.org/departments/economic-development Demographics & Site Selector Resources Located on www.strongsville.org, the Demographics & Site Selectors Resources webpage provides information regarding demographic data, business & workforce reports, and specifics regarding the City of Strongsville, including distance to major markets, largest employers, and city traffic counts. To learn more select the link below: www.strongsville.org/departments/economic-development/community-profile *To relocate your business to Strongsville contact Brent Painter, Director of Economic Development, at (440) 580-3118 or at [email protected] www.strongsville.org The City of Strongsville 5 Manufacturing Advocacy & Growth Network (MAGNET) www.magnetwork.org 1768 East 25th Street Cleveland, Ohio 44114 (216) 432-4197 Great Lakes Incubator for Developing Enterprises (GLIDE) www.glideit.org 151 Innovation Drive, Suite 210 (Located at Lorain County Community College) Elyria, Ohio 44035 (440) 366-4310 Braintree Partners www.braintreepartners.org 201 East Fifth Street, Suite 100 Mansfield, Ohio 44901 (419) 525-1614 The Akron Global Business Accelerator www.akronaccelerator.com 526 South Main Street Akron, Ohio 44311 (330) 375-2173 Youngstown Business Incubator (YBI) www.ybi.org 241 Federal Plaza West Youngstown, Ohio 44503 (330) 746-5003 Jumpstart, Inc. www.jumpstartinc.org 737 Bolivar Road, Suite 3000 Cleveland, Ohio 44115 (216) 363-3400 The Northeast Ohio Edison Technology Incubator Program is designed to assist technology-oriented start-ups during their concept definition & development stages. A list of local incubators can be found below. Northeast Ohio’s Incubators 6 Export Assistance U.S. Export Assistance Cleveland Office The Cleveland U.S. Export Assistance Center (USEAC) is a division of the U.S. Depart of Commerce and provide comprehensive solutions to international trade challenges through expert counseling. To review the services and programs provided by the USEAC please visit the website listed below: www.export.gov/ohio/northernohio/ International Trade Assistance Center The International Trade Assistance Center (ITAC) provides export assistance services to small and medium sized businesses in order to promote growth through exports. To learn more about ITAC select the link listed below: www.csuohio.edu/business/global/international-trade-assistance-center Ohio Development Services Agency: Global Markets Division With 7 international offices, the Ohio Development Services Agency’s Global Markets Division’s goal is to develop new relationships in foreign countries that will benefit the export strategies of Ohio’s businesses. Select the link listed below to learn more about the Global Markets Division: http://development.ohio.gov/bs/bs_globalohio.htm Workforce Development OhioMeansJobs OhioMeansJobs is a collaborative workforce system within Cuyahoga County that helps local employers meet their human capital needs and assists job seekers in finding success. To learn more about OhioMeansJobs please select the link below: www.ohiomeansjobs.com Cuyahoga Community College Corporate College Cuyahoga Community College offers Northeast Ohio companies affordable, cutting-edge training programs that can be custom-designed to accommodate an employers workforce development needs through the Corporate College. To learn more about the Corporate College please select the link listed below: www.corporatecollege.com Polaris Career Center The Polaris Career Center Adult Education Department offers comprehensive education and training services. For more details please click the link listed below: www.polaris.edu/adult-education/ Workforce Development & Export Assistance

Use information from the article only to explain your answer. Do not rely on outside knowledge.

What are three advantages of Trusts when planning your estate?

Raymond James & Associates, Inc. Tandy G. Lewis, CFP®, WMS Managing Director, Investments 333 Texas Street, Suite 175 Shreveport, LA 71101 318-677-5518 866-297-6576 [email protected] https://bowenlewis.com Estate Planning Basics April 26, 2016 Estate Planning--An Introduction By definition, estate planning is a process designed to help you manage and preserve your assets while you are alive, and to conserve and control their distribution after your death according to your goals and objectives. But what estate planning means to you specifically depends on who you are. Your age, health, wealth, lifestyle, life stage, goals, and many other factors determine your particular estate planning needs. For example, you may have a small estate and may be concerned only that certain people receive particular things. A simple will is probably all you'll need. Or, you may have a large estate, and minimizing any potential estate tax impact is your foremost goal. Here, you'll need to use more sophisticated techniques in your estate plan, such as a trust. To help you understand what estate planning means to you, the following sections address some estate planning needs that are common among some very broad groups of individuals. Think of these suggestions as simply a point in the right direction, and then seek professional advice to implement the right plan for you. Over 18 Since incapacity can strike anyone at anytime, all adults over 18 should consider having: • A durable power of attorney: This document lets you name someone to manage your property for you in case you become incapacitated and cannot do so. • An advanced medical directive: The three main types of advanced medical directives are (1) a living will, (2) a durable power of attorney for health care (also known as a health-care proxy), and (3) a Do Not Resuscitate order. Be aware that not all states allow each kind of medical directive, so make sure you execute one that will be effective for you. Young and single If you're young and single, you may not need much estate planning. But if you have some material possessions, you should at least write a will. If you don't, the wealth you leave behind if you die will likely go to your parents, and that might not be what you would want. A will lets you leave your possessions to anyone you choose (e.g., your significant other, siblings, other relatives, or favorite charity). Unmarried couples You've committed to a life partner but aren't legally married. For you, a will is essential if you want your property to pass to your partner at your death. Without a will, state law directs that only your closest relatives will inherit your property, and your partner may get nothing. If you share certain property, such as a house or car, you might consider owning the property as joint tenants with rights of survivorship. That way, when one of you dies, the jointly held property will pass to the surviving partner automatically. Married couples For many years, married couples had to do careful estate planning, such as the creation of a credit shelter trust, in order to take advantage of their combined federal estate tax exclusions. A new law passed in 2010 allows the executor of a deceased spouse's estate to transfer any unused estate tax exclusion amount to the surviving spouse without such planning. This provision is effective for estates of decedents dying in 2011 and later years. You may be inclined to rely on these portability rules for estate tax avoidance, using outright bequests to your spouse instead of traditional trust planning. However, portability should not be relied upon solely for utilization of the first to die's estate tax exemption, and a credit shelter trust created at the first spouse's death may still be advantageous for several reasons: • Portability may be lost if the surviving spouse remarries and is later widowed again • The trust can protect any appreciation of assets from estate tax at the second spouse's death • The trust can provide protection of assets from the reach of the surviving spouse's creditors • Portability does not apply to the generation-skipping transfer (GST) tax, so the trust may be needed to fully leverage the GST exemptions of both spouses Married couples where one spouse is not a U.S. citizen have special planning concerns. The marital deduction is not allowed if the recipient spouse is a non-citizen spouse, but a $148,000 (in 2016, $147,000 in 2015) annual exclusion is allowed. If certain requirements By definition, estate planning is a process designed to help you manage and preserve your assets while you are alive, and to conserve and control their distribution after your death according to your goals and objectives. Page 2 of 7, see disclaimer on final page are met, however, a transfer to a qualified domestic trust (QDOT) will qualify for the marital deduction. Married with children If you're married and have children, you and your spouse should each have your own will. For you, wills are vital because you can name a guardian for your minor children in case both of you die simultaneously. If you fail to name a guardian in your will, a court may appoint someone you might not have chosen. Furthermore, without a will, some states dictate that at your death some of your property goes to your children and not to your spouse. If minor children inherit directly, the surviving parent will need court permission to manage the money for them. You may also want to consult an attorney about establishing a trust to manage your children's assets. You may also need life insurance. Your surviving spouse may not be able to support the family on his or her own and may need to replace your earnings to maintain the family. Comfortable and looking forward to retirement You've accumulated some wealth and you're thinking about retirement. Here's where estate planning overlaps with retirement planning. It's just as important to plan to care for yourself during your retirement as it is to plan to provide for your beneficiaries after your death. You should keep in mind that even though Social Security may be around when you retire, those benefits alone may not provide enough income for your retirement years. Wealthy and worried Depending on the size of your estate, you may need to be concerned about estate taxes. Estates of $5,450,000 (in 2016, $5,430,000 in 2015) are effectively exempt from the federal gift and estate tax. Estates over that amount may be subject to the tax at a top rate of 40 percent. Similarly, there is another tax, called the generation-skipping transfer (GST) tax, that is imposed on transfers of wealth that are made to grandchildren (and lower generations). The GST tax exemption is $5,450,000 (in 2016, $5,430,000 in 2015) and the GST tax rate is 40 percent. Whether your estate will be subject to state death taxes depends on the size of your estate and the tax laws in effect in the state in which you are domiciled. Elderly or ill If you're elderly or ill, you'll want to write a will or update your existing one, consider a revocable living trust, and make sure you have a durable power of attorney and a health-care directive. Talk with your family about your wishes, and make sure they have copies of your important papers or know where to locate them. Consider saving some of your accumulated wealth using other retirement and deferred vehicles, such as an individual retirement account (IRA). Page 3 of 7, see disclaimer on final page Steps to Estate Planning Success Estate Planning Pyramid Page 4 of 7, see disclaimer on final page Advantages of Trusts Why you might consider discussing trusts with your attorney • Trusts may be used to minimize estate taxes for married individuals with substantial assets. • Trusts provide management assistance for your heirs.* • Contingent trusts for minors (which take effect in the event that both parents die) may be used to avoid the costs of having a court-appointed guardian to manage your children's assets. • Properly funded trusts avoid many of the administrative costs of probate (e.g., attorney fees, document filing fees). • Generally, revocable living trusts will keep the distribution of your estate private. • Trusts can be used to dispense income to • Trusts can ensure that assets go to your intended beneficiaries. For example, if you have children from a prior marriage you can make sure that they, as well as a current spouse, are provided for. • Trusts can minimize income taxes by allowing the shifting of income among beneficiaries. • Properly structured irrevocable life insurance trusts can provide liquidity for estate settlement needs while removing the policy proceeds from estate taxation at the death of the insured. *This is particularly important for minors and incapacitated adults who may need support, maintenance, and/or education over a long period of time, or for adults who have difficulty managing money. intermediate beneficiaries (e.g., children, elderly parents) before final property distribution. Conducting a Periodic Review of Your Estate Plan With your estate plan successfully implemented, one final but critical step remains: carrying out a periodic review and update. Imagine this: since you implemented your estate plan five years ago, you got divorced and remarried, sold your house and bought a boat to live on, sold your legal practice and invested the money that provides you with enough income so you no longer have to work, and reconciled with your estranged daughter. This scenario may look more like fantasy than reality, but imagine how these major changes over a five-year period may affect your estate. And that's without considering changes in tax laws, the stock market, the economic climate, or other external factors. After all, if the only constant is change, it isn't unreasonable to speculate that your wishes have changed, the advantages you sought have eroded or vanished, or even that new opportunities now exist that could offer a better value for your estate. A periodic review can give you peace of mind. When should you conduct a review of your estate plan? Every year for large estates Those of you with large estates (i.e., more than the federal or your state's exemption amount, whichever is smaller) should review your plan annually or at certain life events that are suggested in the following paragraphs. Not a year goes by without significant changes in the tax laws. You need to stay on top of these to get the best results. Every five years for small estates Those of you with smaller estates (under the applicable exclusion amount) need only review every five years or following changes in your life events. Your estate will not be as affected by economic factors and changes in the tax laws as a larger estate might be. However, your personal situation is bound to change, and reviewing every five years will bring your plan up to date with your current situation. Upon changes in estate valuation If the value of your estate has changed more than 20 percent over the last two years, you may need to update your estate plan. Upon economic changes You need to review your estate plan if there has been a change in the value of your assets or your income level or requirements, or if you are retiring. What is a trust? A trust is a legal entity that is created for the purpose of transferring property to a trustee for the benefit of a third person (beneficiary). The trustee manages the property for the beneficiary according to the terms specified in the trust With your estate plan successfully implemented, one final but critical step remains: carrying out a periodic review and update. Page 5 of 7, see disclaimer on final page Upon changes in occupation or employment If you or your spouse changed jobs, you may need to make revisions in your estate plan. Upon changes in family situations You need to update your plan if: (1) your (or your children's or grandchildren's) marital status has changed, (2) a child (or grandchild) has been born or adopted, (3) your spouse, child, or grandchild has died, (4) you or a close family member has become ill or incapacitated, or (5) other individuals (e.g., your parents) have become dependent on you. Upon changes in your closely held business interest A review is in order if you have: (1) formed, purchased, or sold a closely held business, (2) reorganized or liquidated a closely held business, (3) instituted a pension plan, (4) executed a buy-sell agreement, (5) deferred compensation, or (6) changed employee benefits. Upon changes in the estate plan Of course, if you make a change in part of your estate plan (e.g., create a trust, execute a codicil, etc.), you should review the estate plan as a whole to ensure that it remains cohesive and effective. Upon major transactions Be sure to check your plan if you have: (1) Upon changes in insurance coverage Making changes in your insurance coverage may change your estate planning needs or may make changes necessary. Therefore, inform your estate planning advisor if you make any change to life insurance, health insurance, disability insurance, medical insurance, liability insurance, or beneficiary designations. Upon death of trustee/executor/guardian If a designated trustee, executor, or guardian dies or changes his or her mind about serving, you need to revise the parts of your estate plan affected (e.g., the trust agreement and your will) to replace that individual. Upon other important changes None of us has a crystal ball. We can't think of all the conditions that should prompt us to review and revise our estate plans. Use your common sense. Have your feelings about charity changed? Has your son finally become financially responsible? Has your spouse's health been declining? Are your children through college now? All you need to do is give it a little thought from time to time, and take action when necessary. received a sizable inheritance, bequest, or similar disposition, (2) made or received substantial gifts, (3) borrowed or lent substantial amounts of money, (4) purchased, leased, or sold material assets or investments, (5) changed residences, (6) changed significant property ownership, or (7) become involved in a lawsuit. Page 6 of 7, see disclaimer on final page Raymond James & Associates, Inc. Tandy G. Lewis, CFP®, WMS Managing Director, Investments 333 Texas Street, Suite 175 Shreveport, LA 71101 318-677-5518 866-297-6576 [email protected] https://bowenlewis.com April 26, 2016 Prepared by Broadridge Investor Communication Solutions, Inc. Copyright 2016 This information was developed by Broadridge, an independent third party. It is general in nature, is not a complete statement of all information necessary for making an investment decision, and is not a recommendation or a solicitation to buy or sell any security. Investments and strategies mentioned may not be suitable for all investors. Past performance may not be indicative of future results. Raymond James & Associates, Inc. member New York Stock Exchange/SIPC does not provide advice on tax, legal or mortgage issues. These matters should be discussed with an appropriate professional. Page 7 of 7

Use information from the article only to explain your answer. Do not rely on outside knowledge. What are three advantages of Trusts when planning your estate? Raymond James & Associates, Inc. Tandy G. Lewis, CFP®, WMS Managing Director, Investments 333 Texas Street, Suite 175 Shreveport, LA 71101 318-677-5518 866-297-6576 [email protected] https://bowenlewis.com Estate Planning Basics April 26, 2016 Estate Planning--An Introduction By definition, estate planning is a process designed to help you manage and preserve your assets while you are alive, and to conserve and control their distribution after your death according to your goals and objectives. But what estate planning means to you specifically depends on who you are. Your age, health, wealth, lifestyle, life stage, goals, and many other factors determine your particular estate planning needs. For example, you may have a small estate and may be concerned only that certain people receive particular things. A simple will is probably all you'll need. Or, you may have a large estate, and minimizing any potential estate tax impact is your foremost goal. Here, you'll need to use more sophisticated techniques in your estate plan, such as a trust. To help you understand what estate planning means to you, the following sections address some estate planning needs that are common among some very broad groups of individuals. Think of these suggestions as simply a point in the right direction, and then seek professional advice to implement the right plan for you. Over 18 Since incapacity can strike anyone at anytime, all adults over 18 should consider having: • A durable power of attorney: This document lets you name someone to manage your property for you in case you become incapacitated and cannot do so. • An advanced medical directive: The three main types of advanced medical directives are (1) a living will, (2) a durable power of attorney for health care (also known as a health-care proxy), and (3) a Do Not Resuscitate order. Be aware that not all states allow each kind of medical directive, so make sure you execute one that will be effective for you. Young and single If you're young and single, you may not need much estate planning. But if you have some material possessions, you should at least write a will. If you don't, the wealth you leave behind if you die will likely go to your parents, and that might not be what you would want. A will lets you leave your possessions to anyone you choose (e.g., your significant other, siblings, other relatives, or favorite charity). Unmarried couples You've committed to a life partner but aren't legally married. For you, a will is essential if you want your property to pass to your partner at your death. Without a will, state law directs that only your closest relatives will inherit your property, and your partner may get nothing. If you share certain property, such as a house or car, you might consider owning the property as joint tenants with rights of survivorship. That way, when one of you dies, the jointly held property will pass to the surviving partner automatically. Married couples For many years, married couples had to do careful estate planning, such as the creation of a credit shelter trust, in order to take advantage of their combined federal estate tax exclusions. A new law passed in 2010 allows the executor of a deceased spouse's estate to transfer any unused estate tax exclusion amount to the surviving spouse without such planning. This provision is effective for estates of decedents dying in 2011 and later years. You may be inclined to rely on these portability rules for estate tax avoidance, using outright bequests to your spouse instead of traditional trust planning. However, portability should not be relied upon solely for utilization of the first to die's estate tax exemption, and a credit shelter trust created at the first spouse's death may still be advantageous for several reasons: • Portability may be lost if the surviving spouse remarries and is later widowed again • The trust can protect any appreciation of assets from estate tax at the second spouse's death • The trust can provide protection of assets from the reach of the surviving spouse's creditors • Portability does not apply to the generation-skipping transfer (GST) tax, so the trust may be needed to fully leverage the GST exemptions of both spouses Married couples where one spouse is not a U.S. citizen have special planning concerns. The marital deduction is not allowed if the recipient spouse is a non-citizen spouse, but a $148,000 (in 2016, $147,000 in 2015) annual exclusion is allowed. If certain requirements By definition, estate planning is a process designed to help you manage and preserve your assets while you are alive, and to conserve and control their distribution after your death according to your goals and objectives. Page 2 of 7, see disclaimer on final page are met, however, a transfer to a qualified domestic trust (QDOT) will qualify for the marital deduction. Married with children If you're married and have children, you and your spouse should each have your own will. For you, wills are vital because you can name a guardian for your minor children in case both of you die simultaneously. If you fail to name a guardian in your will, a court may appoint someone you might not have chosen. Furthermore, without a will, some states dictate that at your death some of your property goes to your children and not to your spouse. If minor children inherit directly, the surviving parent will need court permission to manage the money for them. You may also want to consult an attorney about establishing a trust to manage your children's assets. You may also need life insurance. Your surviving spouse may not be able to support the family on his or her own and may need to replace your earnings to maintain the family. Comfortable and looking forward to retirement You've accumulated some wealth and you're thinking about retirement. Here's where estate planning overlaps with retirement planning. It's just as important to plan to care for yourself during your retirement as it is to plan to provide for your beneficiaries after your death. You should keep in mind that even though Social Security may be around when you retire, those benefits alone may not provide enough income for your retirement years. Wealthy and worried Depending on the size of your estate, you may need to be concerned about estate taxes. Estates of $5,450,000 (in 2016, $5,430,000 in 2015) are effectively exempt from the federal gift and estate tax. Estates over that amount may be subject to the tax at a top rate of 40 percent. Similarly, there is another tax, called the generation-skipping transfer (GST) tax, that is imposed on transfers of wealth that are made to grandchildren (and lower generations). The GST tax exemption is $5,450,000 (in 2016, $5,430,000 in 2015) and the GST tax rate is 40 percent. Whether your estate will be subject to state death taxes depends on the size of your estate and the tax laws in effect in the state in which you are domiciled. Elderly or ill If you're elderly or ill, you'll want to write a will or update your existing one, consider a revocable living trust, and make sure you have a durable power of attorney and a health-care directive. Talk with your family about your wishes, and make sure they have copies of your important papers or know where to locate them. Consider saving some of your accumulated wealth using other retirement and deferred vehicles, such as an individual retirement account (IRA). Page 3 of 7, see disclaimer on final page Steps to Estate Planning Success Estate Planning Pyramid Page 4 of 7, see disclaimer on final page Advantages of Trusts Why you might consider discussing trusts with your attorney • Trusts may be used to minimize estate taxes for married individuals with substantial assets. • Trusts provide management assistance for your heirs.* • Contingent trusts for minors (which take effect in the event that both parents die) may be used to avoid the costs of having a court-appointed guardian to manage your children's assets. • Properly funded trusts avoid many of the administrative costs of probate (e.g., attorney fees, document filing fees). • Generally, revocable living trusts will keep the distribution of your estate private. • Trusts can be used to dispense income to • Trusts can ensure that assets go to your intended beneficiaries. For example, if you have children from a prior marriage you can make sure that they, as well as a current spouse, are provided for. • Trusts can minimize income taxes by allowing the shifting of income among beneficiaries. • Properly structured irrevocable life insurance trusts can provide liquidity for estate settlement needs while removing the policy proceeds from estate taxation at the death of the insured. *This is particularly important for minors and incapacitated adults who may need support, maintenance, and/or education over a long period of time, or for adults who have difficulty managing money. intermediate beneficiaries (e.g., children, elderly parents) before final property distribution. Conducting a Periodic Review of Your Estate Plan With your estate plan successfully implemented, one final but critical step remains: carrying out a periodic review and update. Imagine this: since you implemented your estate plan five years ago, you got divorced and remarried, sold your house and bought a boat to live on, sold your legal practice and invested the money that provides you with enough income so you no longer have to work, and reconciled with your estranged daughter. This scenario may look more like fantasy than reality, but imagine how these major changes over a five-year period may affect your estate. And that's without considering changes in tax laws, the stock market, the economic climate, or other external factors. After all, if the only constant is change, it isn't unreasonable to speculate that your wishes have changed, the advantages you sought have eroded or vanished, or even that new opportunities now exist that could offer a better value for your estate. A periodic review can give you peace of mind. When should you conduct a review of your estate plan? Every year for large estates Those of you with large estates (i.e., more than the federal or your state's exemption amount, whichever is smaller) should review your plan annually or at certain life events that are suggested in the following paragraphs. Not a year goes by without significant changes in the tax laws. You need to stay on top of these to get the best results. Every five years for small estates Those of you with smaller estates (under the applicable exclusion amount) need only review every five years or following changes in your life events. Your estate will not be as affected by economic factors and changes in the tax laws as a larger estate might be. However, your personal situation is bound to change, and reviewing every five years will bring your plan up to date with your current situation. Upon changes in estate valuation If the value of your estate has changed more than 20 percent over the last two years, you may need to update your estate plan. Upon economic changes You need to review your estate plan if there has been a change in the value of your assets or your income level or requirements, or if you are retiring. What is a trust? A trust is a legal entity that is created for the purpose of transferring property to a trustee for the benefit of a third person (beneficiary). The trustee manages the property for the beneficiary according to the terms specified in the trust With your estate plan successfully implemented, one final but critical step remains: carrying out a periodic review and update. Page 5 of 7, see disclaimer on final page Upon changes in occupation or employment If you or your spouse changed jobs, you may need to make revisions in your estate plan. Upon changes in family situations You need to update your plan if: (1) your (or your children's or grandchildren's) marital status has changed, (2) a child (or grandchild) has been born or adopted, (3) your spouse, child, or grandchild has died, (4) you or a close family member has become ill or incapacitated, or (5) other individuals (e.g., your parents) have become dependent on you. Upon changes in your closely held business interest A review is in order if you have: (1) formed, purchased, or sold a closely held business, (2) reorganized or liquidated a closely held business, (3) instituted a pension plan, (4) executed a buy-sell agreement, (5) deferred compensation, or (6) changed employee benefits. Upon changes in the estate plan Of course, if you make a change in part of your estate plan (e.g., create a trust, execute a codicil, etc.), you should review the estate plan as a whole to ensure that it remains cohesive and effective. Upon major transactions Be sure to check your plan if you have: (1) Upon changes in insurance coverage Making changes in your insurance coverage may change your estate planning needs or may make changes necessary. Therefore, inform your estate planning advisor if you make any change to life insurance, health insurance, disability insurance, medical insurance, liability insurance, or beneficiary designations. Upon death of trustee/executor/guardian If a designated trustee, executor, or guardian dies or changes his or her mind about serving, you need to revise the parts of your estate plan affected (e.g., the trust agreement and your will) to replace that individual. Upon other important changes None of us has a crystal ball. We can't think of all the conditions that should prompt us to review and revise our estate plans. Use your common sense. Have your feelings about charity changed? Has your son finally become financially responsible? Has your spouse's health been declining? Are your children through college now? All you need to do is give it a little thought from time to time, and take action when necessary. received a sizable inheritance, bequest, or similar disposition, (2) made or received substantial gifts, (3) borrowed or lent substantial amounts of money, (4) purchased, leased, or sold material assets or investments, (5) changed residences, (6) changed significant property ownership, or (7) become involved in a lawsuit. Page 6 of 7, see disclaimer on final page Raymond James & Associates, Inc. Tandy G. Lewis, CFP®, WMS Managing Director, Investments 333 Texas Street, Suite 175 Shreveport, LA 71101 318-677-5518 866-297-6576 [email protected] https://bowenlewis.com April 26, 2016 Prepared by Broadridge Investor Communication Solutions, Inc. Copyright 2016 This information was developed by Broadridge, an independent third party. It is general in nature, is not a complete statement of all information necessary for making an investment decision, and is not a recommendation or a solicitation to buy or sell any security. Investments and strategies mentioned may not be suitable for all investors. Past performance may not be indicative of future results. Raymond James & Associates, Inc. member New York Stock Exchange/SIPC does not provide advice on tax, legal or mortgage issues. These matters should be discussed with an appropriate professional. Page 7 of 7

Only use the provided text to respond. Do not use any outside sources.

What are the two options for license plate size?

Be it enacted by the Legislature of the State of Arizona: 2 Section 1. Section 28-2351, Arizona Revised Statutes, is amended to 3 read: 4 28-2351. License plate provided; design 5 A. Notwithstanding any other law, the department shall provide to 6 every owner one license plate for each vehicle registered. At the request 7 of the owner and on payment of a fee in an amount prescribed by the 8 director by rule, the department shall provide one additional license 9 plate for a vehicle for which a special plate is requested pursuant to 10 this chapter. 11 B. The license plate shall display the number assigned to the 12 vehicle and to the owner of the vehicle and the name of this state, which 13 may be abbreviated. The director shall coat the license plate with a 14 reflective material that is consistent with the determination of the 15 department regarding the color and design of license plates and special 16 plates. The director shall design the license plate and the letters and 17 numerals on the license plate to be of sufficient size to be plainly 18 readable during daylight from a distance of one hundred feet. In addition 19 to the standard license plate issued for a trailer before August 12, 2005, 20 the director shall issue a license plate for trailers that has a design 21 that is similar to the standard size license plate for trailers but that 22 is the same size as the license plate for motorcycles. The trailer owner 23 shall notify the department which size license plate the owner wants for 24 the trailer. 25 C. In addition to the requirements PRESCRIBED in subsection B of 26 this section, for all license plates, including all special plates, that 27 are designed or redesigned on or after September 24, 2022: 28 1. The background color of the license plate shall contrast 29 significantly with the color of the letters and numerals on the license 30 plate and with the name of this state on the license plate. 31 2. The name of this state shall appear on the license plate in 32 capital letters in sans serif font and be three-fourths of an inch in 33 height. 34 D. Notwithstanding any other law, the department shall not contract 35 with a nongovernmental entity to purchase or secure reflective material 36 for the plates issued by the department unless the department has made a 37 reasonable effort to secure qualified bids or proposals from as many 38 individual responsible respondents as possible.

Only use the provided text to respond. Do not use any outside sources. Be it enacted by the Legislature of the State of Arizona: 2 Section 1. Section 28-2351, Arizona Revised Statutes, is amended to 3 read: 4 28-2351. License plate provided; design 5 A. Notwithstanding any other law, the department shall provide to 6 every owner one license plate for each vehicle registered. At the request 7 of the owner and on payment of a fee in an amount prescribed by the 8 director by rule, the department shall provide one additional license 9 plate for a vehicle for which a special plate is requested pursuant to 10 this chapter. 11 B. The license plate shall display the number assigned to the 12 vehicle and to the owner of the vehicle and the name of this state, which 13 may be abbreviated. The director shall coat the license plate with a 14 reflective material that is consistent with the determination of the 15 department regarding the color and design of license plates and special 16 plates. The director shall design the license plate and the letters and 17 numerals on the license plate to be of sufficient size to be plainly 18 readable during daylight from a distance of one hundred feet. In addition 19 to the standard license plate issued for a trailer before August 12, 2005, 20 the director shall issue a license plate for trailers that has a design 21 that is similar to the standard size license plate for trailers but that 22 is the same size as the license plate for motorcycles. The trailer owner 23 shall notify the department which size license plate the owner wants for 24 the trailer. 25 C. In addition to the requirements PRESCRIBED in subsection B of 26 this section, for all license plates, including all special plates, that 27 are designed or redesigned on or after September 24, 2022: 28 1. The background color of the license plate shall contrast 29 significantly with the color of the letters and numerals on the license 30 plate and with the name of this state on the license plate. 31 2. The name of this state shall appear on the license plate in 32 capital letters in sans serif font and be three-fourths of an inch in 33 height. 34 D. Notwithstanding any other law, the department shall not contract 35 with a nongovernmental entity to purchase or secure reflective material 36 for the plates issued by the department unless the department has made a 37 reasonable effort to secure qualified bids or proposals from as many 38 individual responsible respondents as possible. What are the two options for license plate size?

{instruction} ========== In your answer, refer only to the context document. Do not employ any outside knowledge {question} ========== [user request] {passage 0} ========== [context document]

Give me a bullet-point timeline showing how Vuori has grown over the past ten years. Keep each bullet point under 20 words, and be sure to mention how their product line has changed over the years.

Vuori, The Athleisure Brand Valued At $4 Billion, Is Halfway To Opening 100 Stores By 2026 Say athleisurewear and one name comes immediately to mind: Lululemon. For athletic wear, one name dominates the conversation, NikeNKE -1%, with honorable mention to Adidas and Puma. Vuori is far behind the leaders in both realms, but then the market share leaders had a big head start. Joe Kudla founded Vuori only in 2014, while Lululemon got started in 1998 and Nike back in 1964. But Vuori aims to become a brand as big if not bigger than those market leaders: “Vuori wants to be a relevant household name 20 years from now. We have no interest in growing really, really fast just to hit some number and then falling out of favor with consumers or having a major quality issue,” Kudla shared with Retail Dive. Slow And Steady Wins The Race Kudla has followed a methodical path to growth by correcting mistakes and filling whitespace left by the big guys. That strategy propelled it forward fast to reach a valuation of $4 billion in late 2021 after receiving $400 million in venture funding by Softback Investment Advisors and Trinity West Venture, according to Pitchbook. Now, Bloomberg reports it is considering an IPO this year, though the company has not confirmed the rumors. Nonetheless, Kudla has accomplished much with Vuori in its ten short years. Before becoming an entrepreneur, he was working as an accountant and had little fashion experience, though he did a modeling stint for a few years, which gave him a passion for the business. It was as an athlete, particularly his mountain climbing experience, where he found the business opportunity: filling the performance gap in men’s athletic apparel. And the company’s name came from those roots: Vuori is the Finnish word for “mountain.” The brand’s first product was a simple pair of men’s shorts made from super-soft, high-quality fabrics that look good enough to wear around town, but also provide support and wick away moisture when running the track. And whether in town or on the track, the shorts were super-comfortable to wear. Vuori became an instant hit with athletes who valued its superior quality and didn’t want to be a walking – or running – billboard for another brand. By year two, it was generating $1 million in DTC revenues and even more remarkable for a startup, it was profitable, credited to Kudla’s accounting background that kept him fixated on the books. “We never acquired a customer at a loss,” Kudla shared with Fast Company. “We were hyper-focused on cash flow, and getting the unit economics of a transaction profitable.” Reaching Further Growing buzz about the brand put it on REI’s radar, which after testing it in a few stores, found such strong customer affinity that it put it into more than 150 locations. By 2018, Vuori was generating upwards of $30 million in sales, much of it coming from wholesale distribution, which generates less revenue than DTC but gives a brand credibility and added exposure by having a respected retailer choose to carry it. Currently, it’s retail partners include NordstromJWN -1.3%, Selfridges, Harrods, Equinox Gyms, Barry’s Bootcamp and numerous specialty independent retailers. It was also in 2018 that Vuori launched into women’s apparel, reaching the other half of the athletic apparel market, estimated at $158 billion in North America in 2023 and expected to grow 6% CAGR through 2027, according to McKinsey. That combined with opening its first store in hometown Encinitas, CA got the brand’s flywheel humming. Currently, it operates over 50 stores in 17 states and internationally in London, Shanghai and Seoul, up from just four in 2019 all located in California. Plans are to open 20 to 25 stores over the next two or so years to reach 100 by 2026. Tasked with that mission is vice president of retail Catherine Pike who joined the company in 2019. A lawyer by training, Pike came from fitness franchiser Fit4Mom where she led franchise operations and before that, she spent eight years with Lululemon, rising from local store to regional manager.

{instruction} ========== In your answer, refer only to the context document. Do not employ any outside knowledge {question} ========== Give me a bullet-point timeline showing how Vuori has grown over the past ten years. Keep each bullet point under 20 words, and be sure to mention how their product line has changed over the years. {passage 0} ========== Vuori, The Athleisure Brand Valued At $4 Billion, Is Halfway To Opening 100 Stores By 2026 Say athleisurewear and one name comes immediately to mind: Lululemon. For athletic wear, one name dominates the conversation, NikeNKE -1%, with honorable mention to Adidas and Puma. Vuori is far behind the leaders in both realms, but then the market share leaders had a big head start. Joe Kudla founded Vuori only in 2014, while Lululemon got started in 1998 and Nike back in 1964. But Vuori aims to become a brand as big if not bigger than those market leaders: “Vuori wants to be a relevant household name 20 years from now. We have no interest in growing really, really fast just to hit some number and then falling out of favor with consumers or having a major quality issue,” Kudla shared with Retail Dive. Slow And Steady Wins The Race Kudla has followed a methodical path to growth by correcting mistakes and filling whitespace left by the big guys. That strategy propelled it forward fast to reach a valuation of $4 billion in late 2021 after receiving $400 million in venture funding by Softback Investment Advisors and Trinity West Venture, according to Pitchbook. Now, Bloomberg reports it is considering an IPO this year, though the company has not confirmed the rumors. Nonetheless, Kudla has accomplished much with Vuori in its ten short years. Before becoming an entrepreneur, he was working as an accountant and had little fashion experience, though he did a modeling stint for a few years, which gave him a passion for the business. It was as an athlete, particularly his mountain climbing experience, where he found the business opportunity: filling the performance gap in men’s athletic apparel. And the company’s name came from those roots: Vuori is the Finnish word for “mountain.” The brand’s first product was a simple pair of men’s shorts made from super-soft, high-quality fabrics that look good enough to wear around town, but also provide support and wick away moisture when running the track. And whether in town or on the track, the shorts were super-comfortable to wear. Vuori became an instant hit with athletes who valued its superior quality and didn’t want to be a walking – or running – billboard for another brand. By year two, it was generating $1 million in DTC revenues and even more remarkable for a startup, it was profitable, credited to Kudla’s accounting background that kept him fixated on the books. “We never acquired a customer at a loss,” Kudla shared with Fast Company. “We were hyper-focused on cash flow, and getting the unit economics of a transaction profitable.” Reaching Further Growing buzz about the brand put it on REI’s radar, which after testing it in a few stores, found such strong customer affinity that it put it into more than 150 locations. By 2018, Vuori was generating upwards of $30 million in sales, much of it coming from wholesale distribution, which generates less revenue than DTC but gives a brand credibility and added exposure by having a respected retailer choose to carry it. Currently, it’s retail partners include NordstromJWN -1.3%, Selfridges, Harrods, Equinox Gyms, Barry’s Bootcamp and numerous specialty independent retailers. It was also in 2018 that Vuori launched into women’s apparel, reaching the other half of the athletic apparel market, estimated at $158 billion in North America in 2023 and expected to grow 6% CAGR through 2027, according to McKinsey. That combined with opening its first store in hometown Encinitas, CA got the brand’s flywheel humming. Currently, it operates over 50 stores in 17 states and internationally in London, Shanghai and Seoul, up from just four in 2019 all located in California. Plans are to open 20 to 25 stores over the next two or so years to reach 100 by 2026. Tasked with that mission is vice president of retail Catherine Pike who joined the company in 2019. A lawyer by training, Pike came from fitness franchiser Fit4Mom where she led franchise operations and before that, she spent eight years with Lululemon, rising from local store to regional manager. https://www.forbes.com/sites/pamdanziger/2024/02/25/vuori-the-athleisure-brand-valued-at-4-billion-is-halfway-to-opening-100-stores-by-2026/

You may only answer questions based solely on the information in the context block. You may not use any external sources or knowledge.

What does a positive Stemmer sign indicate?

CLINICAL MANIFESTATIONS OF LIPEDEMA It is defined as a chronic disease that predominantly affects women and it is normally first noticed at puberty, pregnancy or menopause1,15. In 97% of the cases lipedema is located in lower limbs and in 31% in upper extremities14 . Patients present a symmetrical and abnormal increase of adipose tissue from the hips, involving the buttocks as well as the regions of thigh and calf (Figure 1c). The enlargement of the lower limbs is disproportionate in relation to the upper part of the body16 . Patients complain that edema in lower limbs may worsen in the afternoon or evening and increased swelling is often related to the orthostasis and heat with an increased sensitivity to pain and appearance of spontaneous or minimal trauma-induced bruising. Other symptoms include plantar arch abnormalities, cold skin and spontaneous pain. As lipedema progresses a significant volume excess is associated, and the occurrence of hip and knee joint damage that lead to orthopedic disorders adds gait alterations thus complicating the patient’s life (Figure 4d). In severe stages, the lymphatic system becomes decompensated to various degrees and it can also associate uni- or rather bilateral lymphedema that can be suspected with the swelling of the dorsum of the foot, a positive Stemmer sign (the inability to pinch a fold of skin at the base of the second toe due to thickening of the skin and subcutaneous tissues) or deep skin folds. The combination of lymphatic insufficiency and lipedema is called lipolymphedema or lympholipedema depending on the terminology (Figure 2). Concomitance with severe venous insufficiency is rare; however, varicosity is often seen among lipedematous patients17. We must bear in mind that lipedema is often combined with obesity and the clinical diagnosis may be confused as lipedema sufferers are commonly heavily overweight.

System instruction: [You may only answer questions based solely on the information in the context block. You may not use any external sources or knowledge.] question: [What does a positive Stemmer sign indicate?] context block: [CLINICAL MANIFESTATIONS OF LIPEDEMA It is defined as a chronic disease that predominantly affects women and it is normally first noticed at puberty, pregnancy or menopause1,15. In 97% of the cases lipedema is located in lower limbs and in 31% in upper extremities14 . Patients present a symmetrical and abnormal increase of adipose tissue from the hips, involving the buttocks as well as the regions of thigh and calf (Figure 1c). The enlargement of the lower limbs is disproportionate in relation to the upper part of the body16 . Patients complain that edema in lower limbs may worsen in the afternoon or evening and increased swelling is often related to the orthostasis and heat with an increased sensitivity to pain and appearance of spontaneous or minimal trauma-induced bruising. Other symptoms include plantar arch abnormalities, cold skin and spontaneous pain. As lipedema progresses a significant volume excess is associated, and the occurrence of hip and knee joint damage that lead to orthopedic disorders adds gait alterations thus complicating the patient’s life (Figure 4d). In severe stages, the lymphatic system becomes decompensated to various degrees and it can also associate uni- or rather bilateral lymphedema that can be suspected with the swelling of the dorsum of the foot, a positive Stemmer sign (the inability to pinch a fold of skin at the base of the second toe due to thickening of the skin and subcutaneous tissues) or deep skin folds. The combination of lymphatic insufficiency and lipedema is called lipolymphedema or lympholipedema depending on the terminology (Figure 2). Concomitance with severe venous insufficiency is rare; however, varicosity is often seen among lipedematous patients17. We must bear in mind that lipedema is often combined with obesity and the clinical diagnosis may be confused as lipedema sufferers are commonly heavily overweight. ]

This task requires you to answer questions based solely on the information provided in the prompt. You are not allowed to use any external resources or prior knowledge.

Give me a summary of the events that led to Bed Bath & Beyond's cash flow problems.

The company has avoided a bankruptcy filing for now by completing a complex stock offering that will give it an immediate injection of $225 million in funds and a pledge for $800 million in the future to pay down its current debt load. Bed Bath & Beyond is also shrinking to save money. The company said it plans to close around 400 of its roughly 760 Bed Bath & Beyond stores. It will keep open its most profitable stores in key markets. The moves are a lifeline for Bed Bath & Beyond. They will give the company time to pursue a turnaround without a bankruptcy filing, which can be costly, out of its control and wind up in a liquidation. “They are essentially doing a reorganization outside of bankruptcy court,” said Daniel Gielchinsky, an attorney at DGIM Law specializing in bankruptcy. “Slow the cash burn is the name of the game for the next 6 to 12 months and allow the company to pivot into a profitable position.” It will be a complicated turnaround and the company’s future remains uncertain. If Bed Bath & Beyond comes up short in the current version of its turnaround plan, the likelihood of a liquidation increases. Here’s how Bed Bath & Beyond, once a retailer pioneer, veered to the edge of bankruptcy and where it turns next. Superstore era Bed Bath & Beyond had been a crown jewel of the era of so-called “category killers”: chains that dominated a category of retail, such as Toys “R” Us, Circuit City and Sports Authority. Those companies, too, ultimately filed for bankruptcy. Bed Bath & Beyond became known for pots and pans, towels and bedding stacked from the floor to the ceilings at its cavernous stores — and for its ubiquitous 20%-off coupons. The blue-and-white coupons became something of a pop culture symbol, and millions of Americans wound up stashing them away in their cars, closets and basements. The retailer attracted a broad range of customers by selling name brands at cut-rate prices. Brands coveted a spot on Bed Bath & Beyond’s shelves, knowing it would lead to big sales. Plus, the open-store layout encouraged impulse buying: Shoppers would come in to buy new dishes and walk out with pillows, towels and other items. Stores were a fixture for shoppers around the winter holidays and during the back-to-school and college seasons, and Bed Bath & Beyond also had a strong baby and wedding registry business. Founded in 1971 by two veterans of discount retail in Springfield, New Jersey, the chain of small linen and bath stores — then called Bed ‘n Bath — first grew around the northeast and in California selling designer bedding, a new trend at the time. Unlike department stores, it didn’t rely on sales events to draw customers. “We had witnessed the department store shakeout and knew that specialty stores were going to be the next wave of retailing,” co-founder Leonard Feinstein reportedly said in 1993. “It was the beginning of the designer approach to linens and housewares and we saw a real window of opportunity.” In 1987, the company changed its name to Bed Bath & Beyond to reflect its expanded merchandise and bigger “superstores.” The company went public in 1992 with 38 stores and around $200 million in sales. By 2000, those figures leaped to 241 stores and $1.1 billion in sales. The 1,000th Bed Bath & Beyond store opened in 2009, when the chain had reached $7.8 billion in sales. The company was something of an iconoclast. It spent little on advertising, relying instead on print coupons distributed in weekly newspapers to attract customers. “Why not just tell the customer that we’ll give you a discount on the item you want — and not the one that we want to put on sale? We’ll mail a coupon, and it will be a lot cheaper,” Bed Bath & Beyond co-founder Warren Eisenberg, now 92, said in a 2020 New York Times interview. The chain was known for giving autonomy to store managers to decide which products to stock, allowing them to customize their individual stores, and for shipping products directly to stores instead of a central warehouse. The rise of e-commerce But as brick-and-mortar began to give way to e-commerce, Bed Bath & Beyond was slow to make the transition — a misstep compounded by the fact that home decor is one of the most commonly bought categories online. “We missed the boat on the internet,” Eisenberg said in a recent Wall Street Journal interview. Online shopping weakened the allure of Bed Bath & Beyond’s fan-favorite coupons, too, because consumers could find plenty of cheaper alternatives on Amazon or browse a wider selection on sites like Wayfair (W). It wasn’t just Amazon and online shopping that sank Bed Bath & Beyond, however. Walmart (WMT), Target (TGT) and Costco (COST) have grown over the past decade, and they have been able to draw Bed Bath & Beyond customers with lower prices and a wider array of merchandise. Discount chains such as HomeGoods and TJ Maxx and have also undercut Bed Bath & Beyond’s prices. Without the differentiators of the lowest prices or widest selection, Bed Bath & Beyond’s sales stagnated from 2012 to 2019. The company was hit hard during the pandemic, closing stores temporarily during 2020 while rivals remained open. Sales sunk 17% in 2020 and 15% in 2021. What’s more, Bed Bath & Beyond has rotated through several different executives and turnaround strategies in recent years. Former Target executive Mark Tritton took the helm in 2019 with backing from investors and a bold new strategy. He scaled back coupons and inventory from national brands in favor of Bed Bath & Beyond’s own private-label brands. But this change alienated customers who were loyal to big brands. The company also fell behind on payments to vendors and stores did not have enough merchandise to stock shelves. Tritton left as CEO in 2022. As of late November the company had 949 stores, including 762 Bed Bath & Beyond stores and 137 buybuyBaby stores. It said Tuesday that it will ultimately have about half that number – 360 Bed Bath & Beyond stores and 120 buybuyBaby locations. What’s next? Bed Bath & Beyond will close stores that drain the most cash out of its business. But the closures will mean Bed Bath & Beyond will give up on stores that brought in $1.2 billion in annual sales, Michael Lasser, an analyst at UBS, said in a note to clients Tuesday. Bed Bath & Beyond will recapture a portion of those sales from its other stores and online, Lasser said, but the majority will go to other retailers. But, to survive, the company needs to grow sales at its remaining stores. Otherwise, too much of Bed Bath & Beyond’s revenue will go toward repaying debt that it won’t be able to turn a profit. Reversing sales declines won’t be easy given challenges with waning customer demand, online traffic and rising competition in Bed Bath & Beyond product categories, Lasser said. Bed Bath & Beyond will have to overcome its significant hurdles to become a healthy, profitable company. Bankruptcy lawyer Daniel Gielchinsky, however, said it was an encouraging sign that Bed Bath & Beyond was able to raise enough cash through a public offering to stay afloat. The offering was reportedly backed by investment firm Hudson Bay Capital. (Hudson Bay did not respond to a CNN Business request for comment.) Still, liquidators will be watching closely, he said, eager to pounce. “They are assuredly waiting on the sidelines to dismantle the company at the ready

Give me a summary of the events that led to Bed Bath & Beyond's cash flow problems. This task requires you to answer questions based solely on the information provided below. You are not allowed to use any external resources or prior knowledge. The company has avoided a bankruptcy filing for now by completing a complex stock offering that will give it an immediate injection of $225 million in funds and a pledge for $800 million in the future to pay down its current debt load. Bed Bath & Beyond is also shrinking to save money. The company said it plans to close around 400 of its roughly 760 Bed Bath & Beyond stores. It will keep open its most profitable stores in key markets. The moves are a lifeline for Bed Bath & Beyond. They will give the company time to pursue a turnaround without a bankruptcy filing, which can be costly, out of its control and wind up in a liquidation. “They are essentially doing a reorganization outside of bankruptcy court,” said Daniel Gielchinsky, an attorney at DGIM Law specializing in bankruptcy. “Slow the cash burn is the name of the game for the next 6 to 12 months and allow the company to pivot into a profitable position.” It will be a complicated turnaround and the company’s future remains uncertain. If Bed Bath & Beyond comes up short in the current version of its turnaround plan, the likelihood of a liquidation increases. Here’s how Bed Bath & Beyond, once a retailer pioneer, veered to the edge of bankruptcy and where it turns next. Superstore era Bed Bath & Beyond had been a crown jewel of the era of so-called “category killers”: chains that dominated a category of retail, such as Toys “R” Us, Circuit City and Sports Authority. Those companies, too, ultimately filed for bankruptcy. Bed Bath & Beyond became known for pots and pans, towels and bedding stacked from the floor to the ceilings at its cavernous stores — and for its ubiquitous 20%-off coupons. The blue-and-white coupons became something of a pop culture symbol, and millions of Americans wound up stashing them away in their cars, closets and basements. The retailer attracted a broad range of customers by selling name brands at cut-rate prices. Brands coveted a spot on Bed Bath & Beyond’s shelves, knowing it would lead to big sales. Plus, the open-store layout encouraged impulse buying: Shoppers would come in to buy new dishes and walk out with pillows, towels and other items. Stores were a fixture for shoppers around the winter holidays and during the back-to-school and college seasons, and Bed Bath & Beyond also had a strong baby and wedding registry business. Founded in 1971 by two veterans of discount retail in Springfield, New Jersey, the chain of small linen and bath stores — then called Bed ‘n Bath — first grew around the northeast and in California selling designer bedding, a new trend at the time. Unlike department stores, it didn’t rely on sales events to draw customers. “We had witnessed the department store shakeout and knew that specialty stores were going to be the next wave of retailing,” co-founder Leonard Feinstein reportedly said in 1993. “It was the beginning of the designer approach to linens and housewares and we saw a real window of opportunity.” In 1987, the company changed its name to Bed Bath & Beyond to reflect its expanded merchandise and bigger “superstores.” The company went public in 1992 with 38 stores and around $200 million in sales. By 2000, those figures leaped to 241 stores and $1.1 billion in sales. The 1,000th Bed Bath & Beyond store opened in 2009, when the chain had reached $7.8 billion in sales. The company was something of an iconoclast. It spent little on advertising, relying instead on print coupons distributed in weekly newspapers to attract customers. “Why not just tell the customer that we’ll give you a discount on the item you want — and not the one that we want to put on sale? We’ll mail a coupon, and it will be a lot cheaper,” Bed Bath & Beyond co-founder Warren Eisenberg, now 92, said in a 2020 New York Times interview. The chain was known for giving autonomy to store managers to decide which products to stock, allowing them to customize their individual stores, and for shipping products directly to stores instead of a central warehouse. The rise of e-commerce But as brick-and-mortar began to give way to e-commerce, Bed Bath & Beyond was slow to make the transition — a misstep compounded by the fact that home decor is one of the most commonly bought categories online. “We missed the boat on the internet,” Eisenberg said in a recent Wall Street Journal interview. Online shopping weakened the allure of Bed Bath & Beyond’s fan-favorite coupons, too, because consumers could find plenty of cheaper alternatives on Amazon or browse a wider selection on sites like Wayfair (W). It wasn’t just Amazon and online shopping that sank Bed Bath & Beyond, however. Walmart (WMT), Target (TGT) and Costco (COST) have grown over the past decade, and they have been able to draw Bed Bath & Beyond customers with lower prices and a wider array of merchandise. Discount chains such as HomeGoods and TJ Maxx and have also undercut Bed Bath & Beyond’s prices. Without the differentiators of the lowest prices or widest selection, Bed Bath & Beyond’s sales stagnated from 2012 to 2019. The company was hit hard during the pandemic, closing stores temporarily during 2020 while rivals remained open. Sales sunk 17% in 2020 and 15% in 2021. What’s more, Bed Bath & Beyond has rotated through several different executives and turnaround strategies in recent years. Former Target executive Mark Tritton took the helm in 2019 with backing from investors and a bold new strategy. He scaled back coupons and inventory from national brands in favor of Bed Bath & Beyond’s own private-label brands. But this change alienated customers who were loyal to big brands. The company also fell behind on payments to vendors and stores did not have enough merchandise to stock shelves. Tritton left as CEO in 2022. As of late November the company had 949 stores, including 762 Bed Bath & Beyond stores and 137 buybuyBaby stores. It said Tuesday that it will ultimately have about half that number – 360 Bed Bath & Beyond stores and 120 buybuyBaby locations. What’s next? Bed Bath & Beyond will close stores that drain the most cash out of its business. But the closures will mean Bed Bath & Beyond will give up on stores that brought in $1.2 billion in annual sales, Michael Lasser, an analyst at UBS, said in a note to clients Tuesday. Bed Bath & Beyond will recapture a portion of those sales from its other stores and online, Lasser said, but the majority will go to other retailers. But, to survive, the company needs to grow sales at its remaining stores. Otherwise, too much of Bed Bath & Beyond’s revenue will go toward repaying debt that it won’t be able to turn a profit. Reversing sales declines won’t be easy given challenges with waning customer demand, online traffic and rising competition in Bed Bath & Beyond product categories, Lasser said. Bed Bath & Beyond will have to overcome its significant hurdles to become a healthy, profitable company. Bankruptcy lawyer Daniel Gielchinsky, however, said it was an encouraging sign that Bed Bath & Beyond was able to raise enough cash through a public offering to stay afloat. The offering was reportedly backed by investment firm Hudson Bay Capital. (Hudson Bay did not respond to a CNN Business request for comment.) Still, liquidators will be watching closely, he said, eager to pounce. “They are assuredly waiting on the sidelines to dismantle the company at the ready.

Base your entire response on the document I gave you. I need to know the absolute basic information about what is being said here.

Summarize the Annual Report.

section should be read in conjunction with the Consolidated Financial Statements and accompanying notes thereto included in Item 8 of this Annual Report on Form 10-K. Overview Timberland Bancorp, Inc., a Washington corporation, is the holding company for Timberland Bank. The Bank opened for business in 1915 and serves consumers and businesses across Grays Harbor, Thurston, Pierce, King, Kitsap and Lewis counties, Washington with a full range of lending and deposit services through its 23 branches (including its main office in Hoquiam). At September 30, 2022, the Company had total assets of $1.86 billion, net loans receivable of $1.13 billion, total deposits of $1.63 billion and total shareholders’ equity of $218.57 million. The Company’s business activities generally are limited to passive investment activities and oversight of its investment in the Bank. Accordingly, the information set forth in this report relates primarily to the Bank’s operations. The Bank is a community-oriented bank which has traditionally offered a variety of savings products to its retail and business customers while concentrating its lending activities on real estate secured loans. Lending activities have been focused primarily on the origination of loans secured by real estate, including residential construction loans, one- to four-family residential loans, multi-family loans and commercial real estate loans. The Bank originates adjustable-rate residential mortgage loans, some of which do not qualify for sale in the secondary market. The Bank also originates commercial business loans and other consumer loans. The profitability of the Company’s operations depends primarily on its net interest income after provision for (recapture of) loan losses. Net interest income is the difference between interest income, which is the income that the Company earns on interest-earning assets, which are primarily loans and investments, and interest expense, which is the amount that the Company pays on its interest-bearing liabilities, which are primarily deposits and borrowings (as needed). Net interest income is affected by changes in the volume and mix of interest-earning assets, the interest earned on those assets, the volume and mix of interest-bearing liabilities and the interest paid on those interest-bearing liabilities. Management attempts to maintain a net interest margin placing it within the top quartile of its Washington State peers. Changes in market interest rates, the slope of the yield curve, and interest we earn on interest earning assets or pay on interest bearing liabilities, as well as the volume and types of interest earning assets, interest bearing and non-interest bearing liabilities and shareholders’ equity, usually have the largest impact on changes in our net interest spread, net interest margin and net interest income during a reporting period. Since March 2022, in response to inflation, the FOMC of the Federal Reserve has increased the target range for the federal funds rate by 300 basis points, including 150 basis points during the third calendar calendar quarter of 2022, to a range of 3.00% to 3.25% as of September 30, 2022. In November 2022, the FOMC increased the target range for the federal funds rate another 75 basis points to a range of 3.75% to 4.00%. We believe our balance sheet is structured to enhance our average yield on interest-earning assets as the lagging benefit of variable rate interest-earnings assets beginning to reprice occurs as well as a higher net interest margin if the FOMC continues to raise the targeted federal funds rate in an effort to curb inflation, which appears likely based on recent Federal Reserve communications and interest rate forecasts. The provision for (recapture of) loan losses is dependent on changes in the loan portfolio and management’s assessment of the collectability of the loan portfolio as well as prevailing economic and market conditions. The allowance for loan losses reflects the amount that the Company believes is adequate to cover probable credit losses inherent in its loan portfolio. The Company recorded a provision for loan losses of $270,000 for the year ended September 30, 2022, primarily due to increased loan portfolio growth. The Company did not record a provision for loan losses for the year ended September 30, 2021, primarily reflecting the improving economy and the resulting decline in forecasted probable loan losses from COVID-19 during that fiscal year. Net income is also affected by non-interest income and non-interest expense. For the year ended September 30, 2022, non-interest income consisted primarily of service charges on deposit accounts, gain on sales of loans, ATM and debit card interchange transaction fees, an increase in the cash surrender value of BOLI, escrow fees and other operating income. Noninterest income is also increased by net recoveries on investment securities and reduced by net OTTI losses on investment securities, if any. Non-interest income is also decreased by valuation allowances on loan servicing rights and increased by recoveries of valuation allowances on loan servicing rights, if any. Non-interest expense consisted primarily of salaries and employee benefits, premises and equipment, advertising, ATM and debit card interchange transaction fees, postage and courier expenses, amortization of CDI, state and local taxes, professional fees, FDIC insurance premiums, loan administration and foreclosure expenses, data processing and telecommunications expenses, deposit operation expenses and other non-interest expenses. Non-interest expense in certain periods are reduced by gains on the sale of premises and equipment and by gains on the sale of OREO. Non-interest income and non-interest expense are affected by the growth of the Company's operations and growth in the number and balances of loan and deposit accounts. 51 Results of operations may be affected significantly by general and local economic and competitive conditions, changes in market interest rates, governmental policies and actions of regulatory authorities. Operating Strategy The Company is a bank holding company which operates primarily through its subsidiary, the Bank. The Company's primary objective is to operate the Bank as a well capitalized, profitable, independent, community-oriented financial institution, serving customers in its primary market area of Grays Harbor, Pierce, Thurston, Kitsap, King and Lewis counties. The Company's strategy is to provide products and superior service to small businesses and individuals located in its primary market area. The Company's goal is to deliver returns to shareholders by focusing on the origination of higher-yielding assets (in particular, commercial real estate, construction, and commercial business loans), increasing core deposit balances, managing problem assets, efficiently managing expenses, and seeking expansion opportunities. The Company seeks to achieve these results by focusing on the following objectives: Expand our presence within our existing market areas by capturing opportunities resulting from changes in the competitive environment. We currently conduct our business primarily in western Washington. We have a community bank strategy that emphasizes responsive and personalized service to our customers. As a result of the consolidation of banks in our market areas, we believe that there is an opportunity for a community and customer focused bank to expand its customer base. By offering timely decision making, delivering appropriate banking products and services, and providing customer access to our senior managers, we believe that community banks, such as Timberland Bank, can distinguish themselves from larger banks operating in our market areas. We believe that we have a significant opportunity to attract additional borrowers and depositors and expand our market presence and market share within our extensive branch footprint. Portfolio diversification. In recent years, we have limited the origination of speculative construction loans and land development loans in favor of loans that possess credit profiles representing less risk to the Bank. We continue originating owner/builder and custom construction loans, multi-family loans, commercial business loans and commercial real estate loans which offer higher risk adjusted returns, shorter maturities and more sensitivity to interest rate fluctuations than fixed-rate oneto four-family loans. We anticipate capturing more of each customer's banking relationship by cross selling our loan and deposit products and offering additional services to our customers. Increase core deposits and other retail deposit products. We focus on establishing a total banking relationship with our customers with the intent of internally funding our loan portfolio. We anticipate that the continued focus on customer relationships will increase our level of core deposits. In addition to our retail branches, we maintain technology based products such as business cash management and a business remote deposit product that enable us to compete effectively with banks of all sizes. Managing exposure to fluctuating interest rates. For many years, the majority of the loans the Bank has retained in its portfolio have generally possessed periodic interest rate adjustment features or have been relatively short-term in nature. Loans originated for portfolio retention have generally included ARM loans, short-term construction loans, and, to a lesser extent, commercial business loans with interest rates tied to a market index such as the Prime Rate. Longer term fixed-rate mortgage loans have generally been originated for sale into the secondary market, although from time to time, the Bank may retain a portion of its fixed-rate mortgage loan originations and extend the initial fixed-rate period of its hybrid ARM commercial real estate loans for asset/liability purposes. Continue generating revenues through mortgage banking operations. The majority of the fixed-rate residential mortgage loans we originate have historically been sold into the secondary market with servicing retained. This strategy produces gains on the sale of such loans and reduces the interest rate and credit risk associated with fixed-rate residential lending. We continue to originate custom construction and owner/builder construction loans for sale into the secondary market upon the completion of construction. Maintaining strong asset quality. We believe that strong asset quality is a key to our long-term financial success. The percentage of non-performing loans to loans receivable, net was 0.18% and 0.29% at September 30, 2022 and 2021, respectively. The Company's percentage of non-performing assets to total assets at September 30, 2022 was 0.12% compared to 0.18% at September 30, 2021. Non-performing assets have decreased to $2.17 million at September 30, 2022 from $3.17 million at September 30, 2021. We continue to seek to reduce the level of non-performing assets through collections, writedowns, modifications and sales of OREO. We also take proactive steps to resolve our non-performing loans, including negotiating payment plans, forbearances, loan modifications and loan extensions and accepting short payoffs on delinquent loans when such actions have been deemed appropriate. Although the Company plans to continue to place emphasis on certain 52

Base your entire response on the document I gave you. I need to know the absolute basic information about what is being said here. Summarize the Annual Report. section should be read in conjunction with the Consolidated Financial Statements and accompanying notes thereto included in Item 8 of this Annual Report on Form 10-K. Overview Timberland Bancorp, Inc., a Washington corporation, is the holding company for Timberland Bank. The Bank opened for business in 1915 and serves consumers and businesses across Grays Harbor, Thurston, Pierce, King, Kitsap and Lewis counties, Washington with a full range of lending and deposit services through its 23 branches (including its main office in Hoquiam). At September 30, 2022, the Company had total assets of $1.86 billion, net loans receivable of $1.13 billion, total deposits of $1.63 billion and total shareholders’ equity of $218.57 million. The Company’s business activities generally are limited to passive investment activities and oversight of its investment in the Bank. Accordingly, the information set forth in this report relates primarily to the Bank’s operations. The Bank is a community-oriented bank which has traditionally offered a variety of savings products to its retail and business customers while concentrating its lending activities on real estate secured loans. Lending activities have been focused primarily on the origination of loans secured by real estate, including residential construction loans, one- to four-family residential loans, multi-family loans and commercial real estate loans. The Bank originates adjustable-rate residential mortgage loans, some of which do not qualify for sale in the secondary market. The Bank also originates commercial business loans and other consumer loans. The profitability of the Company’s operations depends primarily on its net interest income after provision for (recapture of) loan losses. Net interest income is the difference between interest income, which is the income that the Company earns on interest-earning assets, which are primarily loans and investments, and interest expense, which is the amount that the Company pays on its interest-bearing liabilities, which are primarily deposits and borrowings (as needed). Net interest income is affected by changes in the volume and mix of interest-earning assets, the interest earned on those assets, the volume and mix of interest-bearing liabilities and the interest paid on those interest-bearing liabilities. Management attempts to maintain a net interest margin placing it within the top quartile of its Washington State peers. Changes in market interest rates, the slope of the yield curve, and interest we earn on interest earning assets or pay on interest bearing liabilities, as well as the volume and types of interest earning assets, interest bearing and non-interest bearing liabilities and shareholders’ equity, usually have the largest impact on changes in our net interest spread, net interest margin and net interest income during a reporting period. Since March 2022, in response to inflation, the FOMC of the Federal Reserve has increased the target range for the federal funds rate by 300 basis points, including 150 basis points during the third calendar calendar quarter of 2022, to a range of 3.00% to 3.25% as of September 30, 2022. In November 2022, the FOMC increased the target range for the federal funds rate another 75 basis points to a range of 3.75% to 4.00%. We believe our balance sheet is structured to enhance our average yield on interest-earning assets as the lagging benefit of variable rate interest-earnings assets beginning to reprice occurs as well as a higher net interest margin if the FOMC continues to raise the targeted federal funds rate in an effort to curb inflation, which appears likely based on recent Federal Reserve communications and interest rate forecasts. The provision for (recapture of) loan losses is dependent on changes in the loan portfolio and management’s assessment of the collectability of the loan portfolio as well as prevailing economic and market conditions. The allowance for loan losses reflects the amount that the Company believes is adequate to cover probable credit losses inherent in its loan portfolio. The Company recorded a provision for loan losses of $270,000 for the year ended September 30, 2022, primarily due to increased loan portfolio growth. The Company did not record a provision for loan losses for the year ended September 30, 2021, primarily reflecting the improving economy and the resulting decline in forecasted probable loan losses from COVID-19 during that fiscal year. Net income is also affected by non-interest income and non-interest expense. For the year ended September 30, 2022, non-interest income consisted primarily of service charges on deposit accounts, gain on sales of loans, ATM and debit card interchange transaction fees, an increase in the cash surrender value of BOLI, escrow fees and other operating income. Noninterest income is also increased by net recoveries on investment securities and reduced by net OTTI losses on investment securities, if any. Non-interest income is also decreased by valuation allowances on loan servicing rights and increased by recoveries of valuation allowances on loan servicing rights, if any. Non-interest expense consisted primarily of salaries and employee benefits, premises and equipment, advertising, ATM and debit card interchange transaction fees, postage and courier expenses, amortization of CDI, state and local taxes, professional fees, FDIC insurance premiums, loan administration and foreclosure expenses, data processing and telecommunications expenses, deposit operation expenses and other non-interest expenses. Non-interest expense in certain periods are reduced by gains on the sale of premises and equipment and by gains on the sale of OREO. Non-interest income and non-interest expense are affected by the growth of the Company's operations and growth in the number and balances of loan and deposit accounts. 51 Results of operations may be affected significantly by general and local economic and competitive conditions, changes in market interest rates, governmental policies and actions of regulatory authorities. Operating Strategy The Company is a bank holding company which operates primarily through its subsidiary, the Bank. The Company's primary objective is to operate the Bank as a well capitalized, profitable, independent, community-oriented financial institution, serving customers in its primary market area of Grays Harbor, Pierce, Thurston, Kitsap, King and Lewis counties. The Company's strategy is to provide products and superior service to small businesses and individuals located in its primary market area. The Company's goal is to deliver returns to shareholders by focusing on the origination of higher-yielding assets (in particular, commercial real estate, construction, and commercial business loans), increasing core deposit balances, managing problem assets, efficiently managing expenses, and seeking expansion opportunities. The Company seeks to achieve these results by focusing on the following objectives: Expand our presence within our existing market areas by capturing opportunities resulting from changes in the competitive environment. We currently conduct our business primarily in western Washington. We have a community bank strategy that emphasizes responsive and personalized service to our customers. As a result of the consolidation of banks in our market areas, we believe that there is an opportunity for a community and customer focused bank to expand its customer base. By offering timely decision making, delivering appropriate banking products and services, and providing customer access to our senior managers, we believe that community banks, such as Timberland Bank, can distinguish themselves from larger banks operating in our market areas. We believe that we have a significant opportunity to attract additional borrowers and depositors and expand our market presence and market share within our extensive branch footprint. Portfolio diversification. In recent years, we have limited the origination of speculative construction loans and land development loans in favor of loans that possess credit profiles representing less risk to the Bank. We continue originating owner/builder and custom construction loans, multi-family loans, commercial business loans and commercial real estate loans which offer higher risk adjusted returns, shorter maturities and more sensitivity to interest rate fluctuations than fixed-rate oneto four-family loans. We anticipate capturing more of each customer's banking relationship by cross selling our loan and deposit products and offering additional services to our customers. Increase core deposits and other retail deposit products. We focus on establishing a total banking relationship with our customers with the intent of internally funding our loan portfolio. We anticipate that the continued focus on customer relationships will increase our level of core deposits. In addition to our retail branches, we maintain technology based products such as business cash management and a business remote deposit product that enable us to compete effectively with banks of all sizes. Managing exposure to fluctuating interest rates. For many years, the majority of the loans the Bank has retained in its portfolio have generally possessed periodic interest rate adjustment features or have been relatively short-term in nature. Loans originated for portfolio retention have generally included ARM loans, short-term construction loans, and, to a lesser extent, commercial business loans with interest rates tied to a market index such as the Prime Rate. Longer term fixed-rate mortgage loans have generally been originated for sale into the secondary market, although from time to time, the Bank may retain a portion of its fixed-rate mortgage loan originations and extend the initial fixed-rate period of its hybrid ARM commercial real estate loans for asset/liability purposes. Continue generating revenues through mortgage banking operations. The majority of the fixed-rate residential mortgage loans we originate have historically been sold into the secondary market with servicing retained. This strategy produces gains on the sale of such loans and reduces the interest rate and credit risk associated with fixed-rate residential lending. We continue to originate custom construction and owner/builder construction loans for sale into the secondary market upon the completion of construction. Maintaining strong asset quality. We believe that strong asset quality is a key to our long-term financial success. The percentage of non-performing loans to loans receivable, net was 0.18% and 0.29% at September 30, 2022 and 2021, respectively. The Company's percentage of non-performing assets to total assets at September 30, 2022 was 0.12% compared to 0.18% at September 30, 2021. Non-performing assets have decreased to $2.17 million at September 30, 2022 from $3.17 million at September 30, 2021. We continue to seek to reduce the level of non-performing assets through collections, writedowns, modifications and sales of OREO. We also take proactive steps to resolve our non-performing loans, including negotiating payment plans, forbearances, loan modifications and loan extensions and accepting short payoffs on delinquent loans when such actions have been deemed appropriate. Although the Company plans to continue to place emphasis on certain 52

You can only respond using information in the context block.

Provide a summary of changes to top tax rates and exemption amounts for estate taxes over time.

Early History of U.S. Taxes on Transfers Taxes on the transfer of assets have existed throughout history, dating back to ancient Egypt. In the United States, they were used prior to the modern estate and gift tax in 1916 to finance wars and similar emergencies.8 The first was enacted in 1797 to expand the Navy, given strained relationships with France. At that time, a documentary stamp tax on the inventories of deceased persons, the receipt of inheritances from an estate (except those to a wife, children, or grandchildren), and the probates and letters of administration of estates was imposed. These taxes were fixed amounts, although they were larger for larger inheritances and small inheritances were exempt. These taxes were repealed in 1802. In 1862, during the Civil War, an inheritance tax was imposed. Unlike the current estate tax, the tax was imposed on the beneficiaries, but unlike the stamp tax, it was a percentage of the inheritance. The tax was also imposed on gifts during the lifetime. The rate depended on the family relationships of the beneficiaries, and spouses and small inheritances were exempt. This tax was repealed in 1870. The 1894 income tax was not a transfer tax, but it included inheritances and gifts in income. It was short-lived after being found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in Pollock v. Farmers’ Loan and Trust Company. In 1898, an estate tax was enacted to finance the Spanish-American War. Rates were graduated depending on degree of kinship and size, bequests to spouses were exempt, and there was an overall exemption that excluded small estates. It was repealed in 1902. The Modern Estate and Gift Tax Lawmakers enacted the direct ancestor of the current estate tax in 1916. It contained exemptions that excluded small estates, and rates were graduated based on the size of the estate. Over time, rates were increased, but the basic form of the tax remained. The top rate was 10% in 1916 with a $50,000 exemption, and it was increased to 25% in 1917, with the first $50,000 taxed at 2%. At the end of World War I in 1918, rates were reduced on smaller estates and charitable deductions were allowed. The top rate was increased to 40% in 1924, and a credit for state taxes was allowed for up to 25% of estate tax liability. The top rate was reduced to 20% from 1926 to 1931, increased to 40% in 1932, and eventually rose as high as 77% from 1941 to 1976. A separate gift tax was enacted in 1924 with the same rates and exemptions, and an annual exclusion per donee of $500. The tax was repealed in 1926, then reenacted in 1932 with a $5,000 annual exclusion per donee. In 1942, changes addressed the difference in treatment in community property states, where each spouse owned half the assets and only the half owned by the decedent was subject to tax. In other states where couples could own assets jointly, exclusions were allowed only if the surviving spouse contributed to the assets. The 1942 act treated assets in community property states the same as in other states. In 1948, this rule was changed to allow a deduction for property transferred to a spouse whether by the will or by law. The 1942 act made other changes in rates and exemptions and instituted a $3,000 annual gift exclusion per donee. The Tax Reform Act of 1976 (P.L. 94-455) created the modern unified estate and gift tax with a unified credit and graduated rates applied to all transfers. The 1976 act also instituted carryover basis for inherited assets, but that provision resulted in considerable controversy and was repealed retroactively in 1980. The exemption was increased from $60,000 to $120,000, and the top rate was lowered to 70%. The Economic Growth and Tax Relief Act of 2001 (EGTRRA; P.L. 107-16) provided for a gradual reduction in the estate tax. The law applied a unified exemption for both lifetime gifts and the estate of $675,000 prior to these changes. Under EGTRRA, the estate tax exemption rose from $675,000 in 2001 to $3.5 million in 2009, and the top tax rate fell from 55% to 45%. Although combined estate and gift tax rates are graduated, the exemption is effectively in the form of a credit that eliminates tax due at lower rates, resulting in a flat rate on taxable assets under 2009 law. The gift tax exemption was, however, restricted to $1 million. For 2010, EGTRRA scheduled the elimination of the estate tax, although it retained the gift tax and its $1 million exemption. EGTRRA also provided for a carryover of basis for assets inherited at death in 2010, so that, in contrast with prior law, heirs who sold assets would have to pay tax on gains accrued during the decedent’s lifetime. This provision had a $1.3 million exemption for gain (plus $3 million for a spouse). As with other provisions of EGTRRA, the estate tax revisions were to expire in 2011, returning the tax provisions to their pre-EGTRRA levels. The exemption would have reverted to $1 million (a value that had already been scheduled for pre-EGTRRA law) and the rate to 55% (with some graduated rates). The carryover basis provision effective in 2010 would have been eliminated (so that heirs would not be taxed on gain accumulated during the decedent’s life when they inherited assets). During debate on the estate tax, most agreed that the 2010 provisions would not be continued and, indeed, could be repealed retroactively. President Obama proposed a permanent extension of the 2009 rules (a $3.5 million exemption and a 45% tax rate), and the House provided for that permanent extension on December 3, 2009 (H.R. 4154). The Senate Democratic leadership indicated a plan to retroactively reinstate the 2009 rules for 2010 and beyond. Senate Minority Leader McConnell proposed an alternative of a 35% tax rate and a $5 million exemption.9 A similar proposal for a $5 million exemption and a 35% rate, which also included the ability of the surviving spouse to inherit any unused exemption of the decedent, is often referred to as Lincoln-Kyl (named after two Senators who sponsored it). Other proposals began with the $3.5 million exemption and 45% rate and would have phased in the $5 million exemption and 55% rate. Some Members of Congress argued for permanent estate tax repeal.10 At the end of 2010, P.L. 111-312 enacted a temporary two-year extension of the estate and gift tax, with a $5 million unified exemption, a 35% rate, and inheritance of unused spousal exemptions. For 2010, estates could elect to be taxed under the estate tax or under the carryover rules. These provisions provided for estate tax rules through 2012, after which the provisions would have reverted to the pre-EGTRRA rules ($1 million exemption, 55% top rate) absent legislation. The American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012 (P.L. 112-240) established the permanent exemption ($5.25 million, indexed for inflation?) and rate (40%) described above. The 2017 tax revision (P.L. 115-97) doubled the exemption for the years 2018 through 2025. The House had proposed doubling the exemption through 2024 and then repealing the estate tax and lowering the gift tax rates to 35%. One issue that arises with the expiration of the increased exemptions is the treatment of gifts that had been transferred with exemptions higher than the exemptions that the law would revert to.

You can only respond using information in the context block. Provide a summary of changes to top tax rates and exemption amounts for estate taxes over time. Early History of U.S. Taxes on Transfers Taxes on the transfer of assets have existed throughout history, dating back to ancient Egypt. In the United States, they were used prior to the modern estate and gift tax in 1916 to finance wars and similar emergencies.8 The first was enacted in 1797 to expand the Navy, given strained relationships with France. At that time, a documentary stamp tax on the inventories of deceased persons, the receipt of inheritances from an estate (except those to a wife, children, or grandchildren), and the probates and letters of administration of estates was imposed. These taxes were fixed amounts, although they were larger for larger inheritances and small inheritances were exempt. These taxes were repealed in 1802. In 1862, during the Civil War, an inheritance tax was imposed. Unlike the current estate tax, the tax was imposed on the beneficiaries, but unlike the stamp tax, it was a percentage of the inheritance. The tax was also imposed on gifts during the lifetime. The rate depended on the family relationships of the beneficiaries, and spouses and small inheritances were exempt. This tax was repealed in 1870. The 1894 income tax was not a transfer tax, but it included inheritances and gifts in income. It was short-lived after being found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in Pollock v. Farmers’ Loan and Trust Company. In 1898, an estate tax was enacted to finance the Spanish-American War. Rates were graduated depending on degree of kinship and size, bequests to spouses were exempt, and there was an overall exemption that excluded small estates. It was repealed in 1902. The Modern Estate and Gift Tax Lawmakers enacted the direct ancestor of the current estate tax in 1916. It contained exemptions that excluded small estates, and rates were graduated based on the size of the estate. Over time, rates were increased, but the basic form of the tax remained. The top rate was 10% in 1916 with a $50,000 exemption, and it was increased to 25% in 1917, with the first $50,000 taxed at 2%. At the end of World War I in 1918, rates were reduced on smaller estates and charitable deductions were allowed. The top rate was increased to 40% in 1924, and a credit for state taxes was allowed for up to 25% of estate tax liability. The top rate was reduced to 20% from 1926 to 1931, increased to 40% in 1932, and eventually rose as high as 77% from 1941 to 1976. A separate gift tax was enacted in 1924 with the same rates and exemptions, and an annual exclusion per donee of $500. The tax was repealed in 1926, then reenacted in 1932 with a $5,000 annual exclusion per donee. In 1942, changes addressed the difference in treatment in community property states, where each spouse owned half the assets and only the half owned by the decedent was subject to tax. In other states where couples could own assets jointly, exclusions were allowed only if the surviving spouse contributed to the assets. The 1942 act treated assets in community property states the same as in other states. In 1948, this rule was changed to allow a deduction for property transferred to a spouse whether by the will or by law. The 1942 act made other changes in rates and exemptions and instituted a $3,000 annual gift exclusion per donee. The Tax Reform Act of 1976 (P.L. 94-455) created the modern unified estate and gift tax with a unified credit and graduated rates applied to all transfers. The 1976 act also instituted carryover basis for inherited assets, but that provision resulted in considerable controversy and was repealed retroactively in 1980. The exemption was increased from $60,000 to $120,000, and the top rate was lowered to 70%. The Economic Growth and Tax Relief Act of 2001 (EGTRRA; P.L. 107-16) provided for a gradual reduction in the estate tax. The law applied a unified exemption for both lifetime gifts and the estate of $675,000 prior to these changes. Under EGTRRA, the estate tax exemption rose from $675,000 in 2001 to $3.5 million in 2009, and the top tax rate fell from 55% to 45%. Although combined estate and gift tax rates are graduated, the exemption is effectively in the form of a credit that eliminates tax due at lower rates, resulting in a flat rate on taxable assets under 2009 law. The gift tax exemption was, however, restricted to $1 million. For 2010, EGTRRA scheduled the elimination of the estate tax, although it retained the gift tax and its $1 million exemption. EGTRRA also provided for a carryover of basis for assets inherited at death in 2010, so that, in contrast with prior law, heirs who sold assets would have to pay tax on gains accrued during the decedent’s lifetime. This provision had a $1.3 million exemption for gain (plus $3 million for a spouse). As with other provisions of EGTRRA, the estate tax revisions were to expire in 2011, returning the tax provisions to their pre-EGTRRA levels. The exemption would have reverted to $1 million (a value that had already been scheduled for pre-EGTRRA law) and the rate to 55% (with some graduated rates). The carryover basis provision effective in 2010 would have been eliminated (so that heirs would not be taxed on gain accumulated during the decedent’s life when they inherited assets). During debate on the estate tax, most agreed that the 2010 provisions would not be continued and, indeed, could be repealed retroactively. President Obama proposed a permanent extension of the 2009 rules (a $3.5 million exemption and a 45% tax rate), and the House provided for that permanent extension on December 3, 2009 (H.R. 4154). The Senate Democratic leadership indicated a plan to retroactively reinstate the 2009 rules for 2010 and beyond. Senate Minority Leader McConnell proposed an alternative of a 35% tax rate and a $5 million exemption.9 A similar proposal for a $5 million exemption and a 35% rate, which also included the ability of the surviving spouse to inherit any unused exemption of the decedent, is often referred to as Lincoln-Kyl (named after two Senators who sponsored it). Other proposals began with the $3.5 million exemption and 45% rate and would have phased in the $5 million exemption and 55% rate. Some Members of Congress argued for permanent estate tax repeal.10 At the end of 2010, P.L. 111-312 enacted a temporary two-year extension of the estate and gift tax, with a $5 million unified exemption, a 35% rate, and inheritance of unused spousal exemptions. For 2010, estates could elect to be taxed under the estate tax or under the carryover rules. These provisions provided for estate tax rules through 2012, after which the provisions would have reverted to the pre-EGTRRA rules ($1 million exemption, 55% top rate) absent legislation. The American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012 (P.L. 112-240) established the permanent exemption ($5.25 million, indexed for inflation?) and rate (40%) described above. The 2017 tax revision (P.L. 115-97) doubled the exemption for the years 2018 through 2025. The House had proposed doubling the exemption through 2024 and then repealing the estate tax and lowering the gift tax rates to 35%. One issue that arises with the expiration of the increased exemptions is the treatment of gifts that had been transferred with exemptions higher than the exemptions that the law would revert to.

You must only draw information for your response from the text provided. Do not use any external sources. Your answer is always less than 200 words. When mentioning Newcastle United you refer to the club as NUFC and always in bold. When mentioning Sports Direct you will refer to the company as SD and always in italics.

How many clubs do the allegations affect?

In summary, the Claimant alleges that: 1. The Club has abused its dominant position in the market for the wholesale supply of Newcastle United replica kit in the UK, in breach of the prohibition in Chapter II of the Act, by refusing to supply Sports Direct with the Club’s replica kit for the 2024/25 season and granting JD Sports, another UK sports retailer, exclusive rights as a third-party retailer of the Club’s replica kit (alongside only the Club’s and Adidas’s own channels), thereby foreclosing Sports Direct from the downstream retail market and eliminating effective competition on that market; and 2. If and to the extent that the Club contends that the refusal to supply is the necessary result of exclusivity arrangements it has agreed with JD Sports and/or Adidas, any such agreement is itself in breach of the prohibition in Chapter I of the Act and therefore void, and insofar as the Club implements any such agreement, it is breaching the Chapter I prohibition. The Claimant seeks an injunction restraining the Defendants from engaging in, and/or implementing the above breaches, damages and other relief. According to the Claim, replica kit are authentic reproductions of the short- and long-sleeved shirt, shorts, training wear, and socks (home, away, third, goalkeeper and special edition) in adult, junior and infant sizes to which a football club’s trademark is applied and which are worn by the club’s players when competing in professional football matches.

System Instruction: You must only draw information for your response from the text provided. Do not use any external sources. Your answer is always less than 200 words. When mentioning Newcastle United you refer to the club as NUFC and always in bold. When mentioning Sports Direct you will refer to the company as SD and always in italics. Question: How many clubs do the allegations affect? Context: In summary, the Claimant alleges that: 1. The Club has abused its dominant position in the market for the wholesale supply of Newcastle United replica kit in the UK, in breach of the prohibition in Chapter II of the Act, by refusing to supply Sports Direct with the Club’s replica kit for the 2024/25 season and granting JD Sports, another UK sports retailer, exclusive rights as a third-party retailer of the Club’s replica kit (alongside only the Club’s and Adidas’s own channels), thereby foreclosing Sports Direct from the downstream retail market and eliminating effective competition on that market; and 2. If and to the extent that the Club contends that the refusal to supply is the necessary result of exclusivity arrangements it has agreed with JD Sports and/or Adidas, any such agreement is itself in breach of the prohibition in Chapter I of the Act and therefore void, and insofar as the Club implements any such agreement, it is breaching the Chapter I prohibition. The Claimant seeks an injunction restraining the Defendants from engaging in, and/or implementing the above breaches, damages and other relief. According to the Claim, replica kit are authentic reproductions of the short- and long-sleeved shirt, shorts, training wear, and socks (home, away, third, goalkeeper and special edition) in adult, junior and infant sizes to which a football club’s trademark is applied and which are worn by the club’s players when competing in professional football matches.

Summarize the provided text. Only use information from the provided context. Do not rely on your own knowledge or outside sources of information.

Summarize the text.

CHAPTER ONE INFECTIOUS DISEASES 1. Introduction to infectious diseases Generally infectious diseases result from bacteria, viruses, fungi, and parasites. Despite decades of dramatic progress in their treatment and prevention, infectious diseases remain a major cause of death and are responsible for worsening the living conditions of many millions of people around the world especially in the developing countries. Infections frequently challenge the clinician’s diagnostic skill and must be considered in the differential diagnosis of syndromes affecting a multitude of organ systems. Infectious diseases often do not occur in isolated cases; rather they spread through a group exposed from a point source (e.g. a water supply contaminated with cholera) or from individual to individual (e.g. via respiratory droplets spreading tuberculosis). Many factors affect the likelihood of acquiring infections which include, host, environmental microbial factors. Host and Environmental Factors For any infectious process to occur, the parasite and the host must first encounter each other. Factors such as geography (e.g. altitude and malaria), environment (e.g. mosquito breeding site and malaria), disease vectors and host behavior (e.g. sexual behavior and sexually transmitted diseases) thus influence the likelihood of infection. Many Host Factors such as age, immunization, prior illness, nutritional status, pregnancy, coexisting illnesses and emotional status all have some impact on the risk of infection after exposure to a particular pathogen. Medical care itself can increase the patient’s risk of acquiring an infection. This can occur in several ways: through contact with the pathogens during hospitalization, through injections, surgical incisions, via mucosal surfaces by end tracheal tubes and bladder catheters, through the introduction of foreign bodies, through alteration of the natural flora with antibiotics, and through treatment with suppressive drugs such as steroids. Microbial Factors Infection involves complicated interaction of parasites and host and inevitably affects both. In most cases a pathogenic process consisting of several steps is required for the development of infections. Internal Medicine 2 Since the competent host has a complex series of defense mechanisms in place to prevent infection, the successful parasite must utilize specific strategies at each of these steps. The specific strategies used by bacteria, viruses, and parasites have some similarities, but the details are unique not only for each class of organism but also for individual species within a class; Invasion; Microorganisms attached to mucosal surface use specific mechanisms to invade deeper structures. For example, meningococci and gonococci penetrate and traverse mucosal epithelial cells by transcytotic mechanism. Tropism; In order to infect a host successfully, many pathogens occupy highly specific place within the host and thus are tropic to a particular body site or cell type. For example, malaria sporozoites are rapidly cleared from the blood into the hepatocyts, where they undergo maturation and release into the circulation; trophozoites in turn can infect only the erythrocytes. Microbial virulence strategies; Microbes have developed a variety of strategies for escaping the immunity. For example, some pathogenic organisms elaborate toxins and enzymes that facilitate the invasion of the host and are often responsible for the disease state and many bacteria are encapsulated with polysaccharides that allow them to invade and deposit in the absence of specific antibodies. Immune response: Is a defense mechanism developed by the host for recognizing and responding to microorganisms. It is divided I to two major classes. Innate and Acquired Immunity. Innate immunity (Natural Immunity): Is first line of defense and serves to protect the host with out prior exposure to the infectious agent. This immune response is nonspecific and has no memory. Examples of Innate immunity include skin and mucous mebrane, phagocytoses by macrophages and nutrophils, complement system etc Acquired (Adaptive) Immunity: Is specific immune mechanism developed against a particular organism. It takes time to develop and it has long standing memory. It has two major arms: Internal Medicine 3 • Cellular immunity: comprising T- lymphocytes, NK cells • Humeral Immunity: comprises of B-Lymphocytes and antibodies produced by plasma cells. Laboratory diagnosis The lab diagnosis of infections requires the demonstration, either 1. Direct microscopic visualization of pathogens in clinical material (e.g. Plasmodium species in blood films) or the growth of microorganisms in the laboratory (e.g. culture) or 2. Indirect (e.g. antibody / serology test for HIV), of viral, bacterial, mycotic, or parasitic agents in tissues, fluids, or excreta of the host. Treatment; Optimal therapy for infectious diseases requires a broad knowledge of medicine and careful clinical judgment. Life threatening infections such as bacterial meningitis and sepsis require urgent initiation of therapy often before a specific infective organism is identified. Antimicrobial agents must be chosen empirically and must be against the range of potential infectious agents consistent with the clinical condition. In contrast, good clinical judgment sometimes dictates withholding of antimicrobials in a self limited process or until a specific diagnosis is made. Certain infections (e.g. peritonitis, necrotizing fascitis, and abscess) require surgery as a primary means of cure; in these conditions, antibiotics play only as an adjunctive role. References: 1. Kasper L., Braunwald E., Harrison’s principles of Internal medicine, 16th Edition, Intruducion to infectious diseases, pages 695-700.

Summarize the provided text. Only use information from the provided context. Do not rely on your own knowledge or outside sources of information. CHAPTER ONE INFECTIOUS DISEASES 1. Introduction to infectious diseases Generally infectious diseases result from bacteria, viruses, fungi, and parasites. Despite decades of dramatic progress in their treatment and prevention, infectious diseases remain a major cause of death and are responsible for worsening the living conditions of many millions of people around the world especially in the developing countries. Infections frequently challenge the clinician’s diagnostic skill and must be considered in the differential diagnosis of syndromes affecting a multitude of organ systems. Infectious diseases often do not occur in isolated cases; rather they spread through a group exposed from a point source (e.g. a water supply contaminated with cholera) or from individual to individual (e.g. via respiratory droplets spreading tuberculosis). Many factors affect the likelihood of acquiring infections which include, host, environmental microbial factors. Host and Environmental Factors For any infectious process to occur, the parasite and the host must first encounter each other. Factors such as geography (e.g. altitude and malaria), environment (e.g. mosquito breeding site and malaria), disease vectors and host behavior (e.g. sexual behavior and sexually transmitted diseases) thus influence the likelihood of infection. Many Host Factors such as age, immunization, prior illness, nutritional status, pregnancy, coexisting illnesses and emotional status all have some impact on the risk of infection after exposure to a particular pathogen. Medical care itself can increase the patient’s risk of acquiring an infection. This can occur in several ways: through contact with the pathogens during hospitalization, through injections, surgical incisions, via mucosal surfaces by end tracheal tubes and bladder catheters, through the introduction of foreign bodies, through alteration of the natural flora with antibiotics, and through treatment with suppressive drugs such as steroids. Microbial Factors Infection involves complicated interaction of parasites and host and inevitably affects both. In most cases a pathogenic process consisting of several steps is required for the development of infections. Internal Medicine 2 Since the competent host has a complex series of defense mechanisms in place to prevent infection, the successful parasite must utilize specific strategies at each of these steps. The specific strategies used by bacteria, viruses, and parasites have some similarities, but the details are unique not only for each class of organism but also for individual species within a class; Invasion; Microorganisms attached to mucosal surface use specific mechanisms to invade deeper structures. For example, meningococci and gonococci penetrate and traverse mucosal epithelial cells by transcytotic mechanism. Tropism; In order to infect a host successfully, many pathogens occupy highly specific place within the host and thus are tropic to a particular body site or cell type. For example, malaria sporozoites are rapidly cleared from the blood into the hepatocyts, where they undergo maturation and release into the circulation; trophozoites in turn can infect only the erythrocytes. Microbial virulence strategies; Microbes have developed a variety of strategies for escaping the immunity. For example, some pathogenic organisms elaborate toxins and enzymes that facilitate the invasion of the host and are often responsible for the disease state and many bacteria are encapsulated with polysaccharides that allow them to invade and deposit in the absence of specific antibodies. Immune response: Is a defense mechanism developed by the host for recognizing and responding to microorganisms. It is divided I to two major classes. Innate and Acquired Immunity. Innate immunity (Natural Immunity): Is first line of defense and serves to protect the host with out prior exposure to the infectious agent. This immune response is nonspecific and has no memory. Examples of Innate immunity include skin and mucous mebrane, phagocytoses by macrophages and nutrophils, complement system etc Acquired (Adaptive) Immunity: Is specific immune mechanism developed against a particular organism. It takes time to develop and it has long standing memory. It has two major arms: Internal Medicine 3 • Cellular immunity: comprising T- lymphocytes, NK cells • Humeral Immunity: comprises of B-Lymphocytes and antibodies produced by plasma cells. Laboratory diagnosis The lab diagnosis of infections requires the demonstration, either 1. Direct microscopic visualization of pathogens in clinical material (e.g. Plasmodium species in blood films) or the growth of microorganisms in the laboratory (e.g. culture) or 2. Indirect (e.g. antibody / serology test for HIV), of viral, bacterial, mycotic, or parasitic agents in tissues, fluids, or excreta of the host. Treatment; Optimal therapy for infectious diseases requires a broad knowledge of medicine and careful clinical judgment. Life threatening infections such as bacterial meningitis and sepsis require urgent initiation of therapy often before a specific infective organism is identified. Antimicrobial agents must be chosen empirically and must be against the range of potential infectious agents consistent with the clinical condition. In contrast, good clinical judgment sometimes dictates withholding of antimicrobials in a self limited process or until a specific diagnosis is made. Certain infections (e.g. peritonitis, necrotizing fascitis, and abscess) require surgery as a primary means of cure; in these conditions, antibiotics play only as an adjunctive role. References: 1. Kasper L., Braunwald E., Harrison’s principles of Internal medicine, 16th Edition, Intruducion to infectious diseases, pages 695-700. Summarize the text.

You must answer questions based exclusively on the information provided in the prompt. You can not use external resources or prior knowledge.

What are the key differences between each clinical trial phase?

Clinical Trial Phases  Phase 1 Trials. Phase 1 trials are the first time the product is introduced in human subjects. These carefully controlled trials typically involve 20 to 80 patients or volunteer subjects, though the exact numbers may vary depending on the product. Phase 1 trials generally assess how the product acts in the body and evaluate initial safety (i.e., side effects). They may also be used to determine the dosing levels to use in phase 2 (e.g., the maximum safe dose or what dose is required to have an effect). Depending on the product, phase 1 trials may also provide some initial indication as to whether the product may be effective. In the case of vaccines specifically, phase 1 trials also assess their ability to provoke an immune response in the body (i.e., immunogenicity).  Phase 2 Trials. Phase 2 trials continue to assess safety but also evaluate the product’s effectiveness and common short-term side effects or other risks associated with the product. Phase 2 trials are also used to determine the optimal dose of the product. For vaccines, phase 2 assesses how much of the vaccine to administer and on what dosing schedule (e.g., whether a boost is needed to maximize its effectiveness or whether the vaccine must be administered on a regular schedule to maintain immunity). As with phase 1 studies, phase 2 studies are carefully controlled. However, phase 2 involves a larger (though still relatively limited) number of volunteer subjects—generally no more than a few hundred participants.  Phase 3 Trials. Phase 3 trials involve an expanded number of participants—from several hundred to thousands—and are used to assess the product’s safety and effectiveness across a wide range of patient categories through controlled and uncontrolled studies. These trials are intended to present a clearer picture of expected risks and benefits under real-world conditions. The information obtained from phase 3 trials also forms the basis for the product’s labeling. Sponsors must generally complete all three phases to obtain FDA approval unless they obtain accelerated approval, in which case FDA requires post-approval trials to confirm the expected clinical benefit. FDA may also require, at its discretion, additional clinical trials after approval (i.e., phase 4 trials) for any approved product to continue assessing the product’s safety and effectiveness once on the market.

What are the key differences between each clinical trial phase? You must answer questions based exclusively on the information provided in the prompt. You can not use external resources or prior knowledge. Clinical Trial Phases  Phase 1 Trials. Phase 1 trials are the first time the product is introduced in human subjects. These carefully controlled trials typically involve 20 to 80 patients or volunteer subjects, though the exact numbers may vary depending on the product. Phase 1 trials generally assess how the product acts in the body and evaluate initial safety (i.e., side effects). They may also be used to determine the dosing levels to use in phase 2 (e.g., the maximum safe dose or what dose is required to have an effect). Depending on the product, phase 1 trials may also provide some initial indication as to whether the product may be effective. In the case of vaccines specifically, phase 1 trials also assess their ability to provoke an immune response in the body (i.e., immunogenicity).  Phase 2 Trials. Phase 2 trials continue to assess safety but also evaluate the product’s effectiveness and common short-term side effects or other risks associated with the product. Phase 2 trials are also used to determine the optimal dose of the product. For vaccines, phase 2 assesses how much of the vaccine to administer and on what dosing schedule (e.g., whether a boost is needed to maximize its effectiveness or whether the vaccine must be administered on a regular schedule to maintain immunity). As with phase 1 studies, phase 2 studies are carefully controlled. However, phase 2 involves a larger (though still relatively limited) number of volunteer subjects—generally no more than a few hundred participants.  Phase 3 Trials. Phase 3 trials involve an expanded number of participants—from several hundred to thousands—and are used to assess the product’s safety and effectiveness across a wide range of patient categories through controlled and uncontrolled studies. These trials are intended to present a clearer picture of expected risks and benefits under real-world conditions. The information obtained from phase 3 trials also forms the basis for the product’s labeling. Sponsors must generally complete all three phases to obtain FDA approval unless they obtain accelerated approval, in which case FDA requires post-approval trials to confirm the expected clinical benefit. FDA may also require, at its discretion, additional clinical trials after approval (i.e., phase 4 trials) for any approved product to continue assessing the product’s safety and effectiveness once on the market.

{instruction} ========== In your answer, refer only to the context document. Do not employ any outside knowledge {question} ========== [user request] {passage 0} ========== [context document]

What is considered the president's core constitutional powers and what is the case law that the court relies on to reach this core? Please list the case law at the end of your response in bulleted form. Give me the full case citation so I can look them up myself later.

The D. C. Circuit affirmed. 91 F. 4th 1173 (2024) (per curiam). Citing Marbury v. Madison, 1 Cranch 137 (1803), the court distinguished between two kinds of official acts: discretionary and ministerial. 91 F. 4th, at 1189–1190. It observed that “although discretionary acts are ‘only politically examinable,’ the judiciary has the power to hear cases” involving ministerial acts that an officer is directed to perform by the legislature. Ibid. (quoting Marbury, 1 Cranch, at 166). From this distinction, the D. C. Circuit concluded that the “separation of powers doctrine, as expounded in Marbury and its progeny, necessarily permits the Judiciary to oversee the federal criminal prosecution of a former President for his official acts because the fact of the prosecution means that the former President has allegedly acted in defiance of the Congress’s laws.” 91 F. 4th, at 1191. In the court’s view, the fact that Trump’s actions “allegedly violated generally applicable criminal laws” meant that those actions “were not properly within the scope of his lawful discretion.” Id., at 1192. The D. C. Circuit thus concluded that Trump had “no structural immunity from the charges in the Indictment.” Ibid. Like the District Court, the D. C. We granted certiorari to consider the following question: “Whether and if so to what extent does a former President enjoy presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for conduct alleged to involve official acts during his tenure in office.” 601 U. S. ___ (2024). II This case is the first criminal prosecution in our Nation’s history of a former President for actions taken during his Presidency. We are called upon to consider whether and under what circumstances such a prosecution may proceed. Doing so requires careful assessment of the scope of Presidential power under the Constitution. We undertake that responsibility conscious that we must not confuse “the issue of a power’s validity with the cause it is invoked to promote,” but must instead focus on the “enduring consequences upon the balanced power structure of our Republic.” Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, 343 U. S. 579, 634 (1952) (Jackson, J., concurring). The parties before us do not dispute that a former President can be subject to criminal prosecution for unofficial acts committed while in office. See Tr. of Oral Arg. 28. They also agree that some of the conduct described in the indictment includes actions taken by Trump in his unofficial capacity. See id., at 28–30, 36–37, 124. They disagree, however, about whether a former President can be prosecuted for his official actions. Trump contends that just as a President is absolutely immune from civil damages liability for acts within the outer perimeter of his official responsibilities, Fitzgerald, 457 U. S., at 756, he must be absolutely immune from criminal prosecution for such acts. Brief for Petitioner 10. And Trump argues that the bulk of the indictment’s allegations involve conduct in 6 TRUMP v. UNITED STATES Opinion of the Court his official capacity as President. See Tr. of Oral Arg. 30– 32. Although the Government agrees that some official actions are included in the indictment’s allegations, see id., at 125, it maintains that a former President does not enjoy immunity from criminal prosecution for any actions, regardless of how they are characterized. See Brief for United States 9. We conclude that under our constitutional structure of separated powers, the nature of Presidential power requires that a former President have some immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts during his tenure in office. At least with respect to the President’s exercise of his core constitutional powers, this immunity must be absolute. As for his remaining official actions, he is also entitled to immunity. At the current stage of proceedings in this case, however, we need not and do not decide whether that immunity must be absolute, or instead whether a presumptive immunity is sufficient. A Article II of the Constitution provides that “[t]he executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” §1, cl. 1. The President’s duties are of “unrivaled gravity and breadth.” Trump v. Vance, 591 U. S. 786, 800 (2020). They include, for instance, commanding the Armed Forces of the United States; granting reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States; and appointing public ministers and consuls, the Justices of this Court, and Officers of the United States. See §2. He also has important foreign relations responsibilities: making treaties, appointing ambassadors, recognizing foreign governments, meeting foreign leaders, overseeing international diplomacy and intelligence gathering, and managing matters related to terrorism, trade, and immigration. See §§2, 3. Domestically, he must “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed,” §3, and he bears responsibility for the Cite as: 603 U. S. ____ (2024) 7 Opinion of the Court actions of the many departments and agencies within the Executive Branch. He also plays a role in lawmaking by recommending to Congress the measures he thinks wise and signing or vetoing the bills Congress passes. See Art. I, §7, cl. 2; Art. II, §3. No matter the context, the President’s authority to act necessarily “stem[s] either from an act of Congress or from the Constitution itself.” Youngstown, 343 U. S., at 585. In the latter case, the President’s authority is sometimes “conclusive and preclusive.” Id., at 638 (Jackson, J., concurring). When the President exercises such authority, he may act even when the measures he takes are “incompatible with the expressed or implied will of Congress.” Id., at 637. The exclusive constitutional authority of the President “disabl[es] the Congress from acting upon the subject.” Id., at 637–638. And the courts have “no power to control [the President’s] discretion” when he acts pursuant to the powers invested exclusively in him by the Constitution. Marbury, 1 Cranch, at 166. 8 TRUMP v. UNITED STATES Opinion of the Court (1872). But in 1870, Congress enacted a provision that prohibited using the President’s pardon as evidence of restoration of property rights. Id., at 143–144. Chief Justice Chase held the provision unconstitutional because it “impair[ed] the effect of a pardon, and thus infring[ed] the constitutional power of the Executive.” Id., at 147. “To the executive alone is intrusted the power of pardon,” and the “legislature cannot change the effect of such a pardon any more than the executive can change a law.” Id., at 147–148. The President’s authority to pardon, in other words, is “conclusive and preclusive,” “disabling the Congress from acting upon the subject.” Youngstown, 343 U. S., at 637–638 (Jackson, J., concurring). Some of the President’s other constitutional powers also fit that description. “The President’s power to remove—and thus supervise—those who wield executive power on his behalf,” for instance, “follows from the text of Article II.” Seila Law LLC v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, 591 U. S. 197, 204 (2020). We have thus held that Congress lacks authority to control the President’s “unrestricted power of removal” with respect to “executive officers of the United States whom he has appointed.” Myers v. United States, 272 U. S. 52, 106, 176 (1926); see Youngstown, 343 U. S., at 638, n. 4 (Jackson, J., concurring) (citing the President’s “exclusive power of removal in executive agencies” as an example of “conclusive and preclusive” constitutional authority); cf. Seila Law, 591 U. S., at 215 (noting only “two exceptions to the President’s unrestricted removal power”). The power “to control recognition determinations” of foreign countries is likewise an “exclusive power of the President.” Zivotofsky v. Kerry, 576 U. S. 1, 32 (2015). Congressional commands contrary to the President’s recognition determinations are thus invalid. Ibid.

{instruction} ========== In your answer, refer only to the context document. Do not employ any outside knowledge {question} ========== What is considered the president's core constitutional powers and what is the case law that the court relies on to reach this core? Please list the case law at the end of your response in bulleted form. Give me the full case citation so I can look them up myself later. {passage 0} ========== The D. C. Circuit affirmed. 91 F. 4th 1173 (2024) (per curiam). Citing Marbury v. Madison, 1 Cranch 137 (1803), the court distinguished between two kinds of official acts: discretionary and ministerial. 91 F. 4th, at 1189–1190. It observed that “although discretionary acts are ‘only politically examinable,’ the judiciary has the power to hear cases” involving ministerial acts that an officer is directed to perform by the legislature. Ibid. (quoting Marbury, 1 Cranch, at 166). From this distinction, the D. C. Circuit concluded that the “separation of powers doctrine, as expounded in Marbury and its progeny, necessarily permits the Judiciary to oversee the federal criminal prosecution of a former President for his official acts because the fact of the prosecution means that the former President has allegedly acted in defiance of the Congress’s laws.” 91 F. 4th, at 1191. In the court’s view, the fact that Trump’s actions “allegedly violated generally applicable criminal laws” meant that those actions “were not properly within the scope of his lawful discretion.” Id., at 1192. The D. C. Circuit thus concluded that Trump had “no structural immunity from the charges in the Indictment.” Ibid. Like the District Court, the D. C. We granted certiorari to consider the following question: “Whether and if so to what extent does a former President enjoy presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for conduct alleged to involve official acts during his tenure in office.” 601 U. S. ___ (2024). II This case is the first criminal prosecution in our Nation’s history of a former President for actions taken during his Presidency. We are called upon to consider whether and under what circumstances such a prosecution may proceed. Doing so requires careful assessment of the scope of Presidential power under the Constitution. We undertake that responsibility conscious that we must not confuse “the issue of a power’s validity with the cause it is invoked to promote,” but must instead focus on the “enduring consequences upon the balanced power structure of our Republic.” Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, 343 U. S. 579, 634 (1952) (Jackson, J., concurring). The parties before us do not dispute that a former President can be subject to criminal prosecution for unofficial acts committed while in office. See Tr. of Oral Arg. 28. They also agree that some of the conduct described in the indictment includes actions taken by Trump in his unofficial capacity. See id., at 28–30, 36–37, 124. They disagree, however, about whether a former President can be prosecuted for his official actions. Trump contends that just as a President is absolutely immune from civil damages liability for acts within the outer perimeter of his official responsibilities, Fitzgerald, 457 U. S., at 756, he must be absolutely immune from criminal prosecution for such acts. Brief for Petitioner 10. And Trump argues that the bulk of the indictment’s allegations involve conduct in 6 TRUMP v. UNITED STATES Opinion of the Court his official capacity as President. See Tr. of Oral Arg. 30– 32. Although the Government agrees that some official actions are included in the indictment’s allegations, see id., at 125, it maintains that a former President does not enjoy immunity from criminal prosecution for any actions, regardless of how they are characterized. See Brief for United States 9. We conclude that under our constitutional structure of separated powers, the nature of Presidential power requires that a former President have some immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts during his tenure in office. At least with respect to the President’s exercise of his core constitutional powers, this immunity must be absolute. As for his remaining official actions, he is also entitled to immunity. At the current stage of proceedings in this case, however, we need not and do not decide whether that immunity must be absolute, or instead whether a presumptive immunity is sufficient. A Article II of the Constitution provides that “[t]he executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” §1, cl. 1. The President’s duties are of “unrivaled gravity and breadth.” Trump v. Vance, 591 U. S. 786, 800 (2020). They include, for instance, commanding the Armed Forces of the United States; granting reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States; and appointing public ministers and consuls, the Justices of this Court, and Officers of the United States. See §2. He also has important foreign relations responsibilities: making treaties, appointing ambassadors, recognizing foreign governments, meeting foreign leaders, overseeing international diplomacy and intelligence gathering, and managing matters related to terrorism, trade, and immigration. See §§2, 3. Domestically, he must “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed,” §3, and he bears responsibility for the Cite as: 603 U. S. ____ (2024) 7 Opinion of the Court actions of the many departments and agencies within the Executive Branch. He also plays a role in lawmaking by recommending to Congress the measures he thinks wise and signing or vetoing the bills Congress passes. See Art. I, §7, cl. 2; Art. II, §3. No matter the context, the President’s authority to act necessarily “stem[s] either from an act of Congress or from the Constitution itself.” Youngstown, 343 U. S., at 585. In the latter case, the President’s authority is sometimes “conclusive and preclusive.” Id., at 638 (Jackson, J., concurring). When the President exercises such authority, he may act even when the measures he takes are “incompatible with the expressed or implied will of Congress.” Id., at 637. The exclusive constitutional authority of the President “disabl[es] the Congress from acting upon the subject.” Id., at 637–638. And the courts have “no power to control [the President’s] discretion” when he acts pursuant to the powers invested exclusively in him by the Constitution. Marbury, 1 Cranch, at 166. 8 TRUMP v. UNITED STATES Opinion of the Court (1872). But in 1870, Congress enacted a provision that prohibited using the President’s pardon as evidence of restoration of property rights. Id., at 143–144. Chief Justice Chase held the provision unconstitutional because it “impair[ed] the effect of a pardon, and thus infring[ed] the constitutional power of the Executive.” Id., at 147. “To the executive alone is intrusted the power of pardon,” and the “legislature cannot change the effect of such a pardon any more than the executive can change a law.” Id., at 147–148. The President’s authority to pardon, in other words, is “conclusive and preclusive,” “disabling the Congress from acting upon the subject.” Youngstown, 343 U. S., at 637–638 (Jackson, J., concurring). Some of the President’s other constitutional powers also fit that description. “The President’s power to remove—and thus supervise—those who wield executive power on his behalf,” for instance, “follows from the text of Article II.” Seila Law LLC v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, 591 U. S. 197, 204 (2020). We have thus held that Congress lacks authority to control the President’s “unrestricted power of removal” with respect to “executive officers of the United States whom he has appointed.” Myers v. United States, 272 U. S. 52, 106, 176 (1926); see Youngstown, 343 U. S., at 638, n. 4 (Jackson, J., concurring) (citing the President’s “exclusive power of removal in executive agencies” as an example of “conclusive and preclusive” constitutional authority); cf. Seila Law, 591 U. S., at 215 (noting only “two exceptions to the President’s unrestricted removal power”). The power “to control recognition determinations” of foreign countries is likewise an “exclusive power of the President.” Zivotofsky v. Kerry, 576 U. S. 1, 32 (2015). Congressional commands contrary to the President’s recognition determinations are thus invalid. Ibid. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-939_e2pg.pdf

Answer the question based solely on the information provided in the passage. Do not use any external knowledge or resources. [user request] [context document]

Summarize the provided information about Shigella in less than 600 words. At the end of the summary, list the symptoms one may experience in bold print.

Clinical Manifestations Symptoms of shigellosis include abdominal pain, tenesmus, watery diarrhea, and/or dysentery (multiple scanty, bloody, mucoid stools). Other signs may include abdominal tenderness, fever, vomiting, dehydration, and convulsions. Structure, Classification, and Antigenic Types Shigellae are Gram-negative, nonmotile, facultatively anaerobic, non-spore-forming rods. Shigella are differentiated from the closely related Escherichia coli on the basis of pathogenicity, physiology (failure to ferment lactose or decarboxylate lysine) and serology. The genus is divided into four serogroups with multiple serotypes: A (S dysenteriae, 12 serotypes); B (S flexneri, 6 serotypes); C (S boydii, 18 serotypes); and D (S sonnei, 1 serotype). Pathogenesis Infection is initiated by ingestion of shigellae (usually via fecal-oral contamination). An early symptom, diarrhea (possibly elicited by enterotoxins and/or cytotoxin), may occur as the organisms pass through the small intestine. The hallmarks of shigellosis are bacterial invasion of the colonic epithelium and inflammatory colitis. These are interdependent processes amplified by local release of cytokines and by the infiltration of inflammatory elements. Colitis in the rectosigmoid mucosa, with concomitant malabsorption, results in the characteristic sign of bacillary dysentery: scanty,. unformed stools tinged with blood and mucus. Host Defenses Inflammation, copious mucus secretion, and regeneration of the damaged colonic epithelium limit the spread of colitis and promote spontaneous recovery. Serotype-specific immunity is induced by a primary infection, suggesting a protective role of antibody recognizing the lipopolysaccharide (LPS) somatic antigen. Other Shigella antigens include enterotoxins, cytotoxin, and plasmid-encoded proteins that induce bacterial invasion of the epithelium. The protective role of immune responses against these antigens is unclear. Epidemiology Shigellosis is endemic in developing countries were sanitation is poor. Typically 10 to 20 percent of enteric disease, and 50% of the bloody diarrhea or dysentery of young children, can be characterized as shigellosis, and the prevalence of these infections decreases significantly after five years of life. In developed countries, single-source, food or water-borne outbreaks occur sporadically, and pockets of endemic shigellosis can be found in institutions and in remote areas with substandard sanitary facilities. Diagnosis Shigellosis can be correctly diagnosed in most patients on the basis of fresh blood in the stool. Neutrophils in fecal smears is also a strongly suggestive sign. Nonetheless, watery, mucoid diarrhea may be the only symptom of many S sonnei infections, and any clinical diagnosis should be confirmed by cultivation of the etiologic agent from stools. Control Prevention of fecal-oral transmission is the most effective control strategy. Severe dysentery is treated with ampicillin, trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole, or, in patients over 17 years old, a 4-fluorquinolone such as ciprofloxacin. Vaccines are not currently available, but some promising candidates are being developed. Gram-negative, facultative anaerobes of the genus Shigella are the principal agents of bacillary dysentery. This disease differs from profuse watery diarrhea, as is commonly seen in choleraic diarrhea or in enterotoxigenic Escherichia coli diarrhea, in that the dysenteric stool is scant and contains blood, mucus, and inflammatory cells. In some individuals suffering from shigellosis, however, moderate volume diarrhea is a prodrome or the sole manifestation of the infection. Bacillary dysentery constitutes a significant proportion of acute intestinal disease in the children of developing countries, and this infection is a major contributor to stunted growth of these children. Shigellosis also presents a significant risk to travelers from developed countries when visiting in endemic areas, and sporadic food or water-borne outbreaks occur in developed countries. The pathogenic mechanism of shigellosis is complex, involving a possible enterotoxic and/or cytotoxic diarrheal prodrome, cytokine-mediated inflammation of the colon, and necrosis of the colonic epithelium. The underlying physiological insult that initiates this inflammatory cascade is the invasion of Shigella into the colonic epithelium and the lamina propria. The resulting colitis and ulceration of the mucosa result in bloody, mucoid stools, and/or febrile diarrhea.

Answer the question based solely on the information provided in the passage. Do not use any external knowledge or resources. Summarize the provided information about Shigella in less than 600 words. At the end of the summary, list the symptoms one may experience in bold print. Clinical Manifestations Symptoms of shigellosis include abdominal pain, tenesmus, watery diarrhea, and/or dysentery (multiple scanty, bloody, mucoid stools). Other signs may include abdominal tenderness, fever, vomiting, dehydration, and convulsions. Structure, Classification, and Antigenic Types Shigellae are Gram-negative, nonmotile, facultatively anaerobic, non-spore-forming rods. Shigella are differentiated from the closely related Escherichia coli on the basis of pathogenicity, physiology (failure to ferment lactose or decarboxylate lysine) and serology. The genus is divided into four serogroups with multiple serotypes: A (S dysenteriae, 12 serotypes); B (S flexneri, 6 serotypes); C (S boydii, 18 serotypes); and D (S sonnei, 1 serotype). Pathogenesis Infection is initiated by ingestion of shigellae (usually via fecal-oral contamination). An early symptom, diarrhea (possibly elicited by enterotoxins and/or cytotoxin), may occur as the organisms pass through the small intestine. The hallmarks of shigellosis are bacterial invasion of the colonic epithelium and inflammatory colitis. These are interdependent processes amplified by local release of cytokines and by the infiltration of inflammatory elements. Colitis in the rectosigmoid mucosa, with concomitant malabsorption, results in the characteristic sign of bacillary dysentery: scanty,. unformed stools tinged with blood and mucus. Host Defenses Inflammation, copious mucus secretion, and regeneration of the damaged colonic epithelium limit the spread of colitis and promote spontaneous recovery. Serotype-specific immunity is induced by a primary infection, suggesting a protective role of antibody recognizing the lipopolysaccharide (LPS) somatic antigen. Other Shigella antigens include enterotoxins, cytotoxin, and plasmid-encoded proteins that induce bacterial invasion of the epithelium. The protective role of immune responses against these antigens is unclear. Epidemiology Shigellosis is endemic in developing countries were sanitation is poor. Typically 10 to 20 percent of enteric disease, and 50% of the bloody diarrhea or dysentery of young children, can be characterized as shigellosis, and the prevalence of these infections decreases significantly after five years of life. In developed countries, single-source, food or water-borne outbreaks occur sporadically, and pockets of endemic shigellosis can be found in institutions and in remote areas with substandard sanitary facilities. Diagnosis Shigellosis can be correctly diagnosed in most patients on the basis of fresh blood in the stool. Neutrophils in fecal smears is also a strongly suggestive sign. Nonetheless, watery, mucoid diarrhea may be the only symptom of many S sonnei infections, and any clinical diagnosis should be confirmed by cultivation of the etiologic agent from stools. Control Prevention of fecal-oral transmission is the most effective control strategy. Severe dysentery is treated with ampicillin, trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole, or, in patients over 17 years old, a 4-fluorquinolone such as ciprofloxacin. Vaccines are not currently available, but some promising candidates are being developed. Gram-negative, facultative anaerobes of the genus Shigella are the principal agents of bacillary dysentery. This disease differs from profuse watery diarrhea, as is commonly seen in choleraic diarrhea or in enterotoxigenic Escherichia coli diarrhea, in that the dysenteric stool is scant and contains blood, mucus, and inflammatory cells. In some individuals suffering from shigellosis, however, moderate volume diarrhea is a prodrome or the sole manifestation of the infection. Bacillary dysentery constitutes a significant proportion of acute intestinal disease in the children of developing countries, and this infection is a major contributor to stunted growth of these children. Shigellosis also presents a significant risk to travelers from developed countries when visiting in endemic areas, and sporadic food or water-borne outbreaks occur in developed countries. The pathogenic mechanism of shigellosis is complex, involving a possible enterotoxic and/or cytotoxic diarrheal prodrome, cytokine-mediated inflammation of the colon, and necrosis of the colonic epithelium. The underlying physiological insult that initiates this inflammatory cascade is the invasion of Shigella into the colonic epithelium and the lamina propria. The resulting colitis and ulceration of the mucosa result in bloody, mucoid stools, and/or febrile diarrhea. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK8038/

You may only respond to the prompt using information provided in the context block.

Can I reuse the OEM hardware for this?

Before beginning the installation, thoroughly & completely read these instructions. Please refer to the Parts List to insure that all parts & hardware are received prior to the disassembly of the vehicle. If any parts are found to be missing, contact SKYJACKER® Customer Service at 318-388-0816 to obtain the needed items. If you have any questions or reservations about installing this product, contact SKYJACKER® Technical Assistance at 318-388-0816. Installation: 1. Park the vehicle on a flat, level surface & block the front & rear tires. 2. Place the transmission in neutral. 3. Loosen all of the engine mount bolts about ½ turn. 4. Support the transfer case cross member with a transmission or floor jack. Remove the bolts & nuts for each side of the cross member. 5. Slowly lower the cross member, approximately 2", to allow enough room to install the new Skyjacker tubular spacers. 1994-2001 Jeep Cherokee XJ Install the new Skyjacker transfer case linkage pivot drop bracket to the stock pivot bracket using the OEM hardware. Using the two 1/4" x 1" bolts with a flat washer & self locking nut, bolt the ball swivel bracket (See Arrow in Photo # 3) to the new Skyjacker drop bracket. Note: The bracket has two sets of holes. The bottom holes are for a 4" lift as shown & the upper holes are for a 2 1/2" lift. 2. Placing the pivot bracket back in location, start the end of the rod through the ball swivel & bolt the bracket in location with the OEM hardware. (See Photo # 4) 3. Check to make sure that the transfer case will fully engage at each end of the shifter travel. If linkage adjustment is required, 4. Check the transfer case shifter to see if it will move to 4L. If not, the linkage will need adjusting as follows. Place the shifter in 4L, loosen the adjustment bolt & push the linkage ("B" Arrow in Photo # 5) forward until it stops. Now retighten adjustment bolt. Check to be sure the 4WD works properly. 5. On 5 speed models, engage the clutch & check the transmission shifter to see if it will go into 2nd gear. If not, the shifter housing on the floor will need trimming. Remove the center console, pull back the carpet, remove the screws holding the shifter boot to the floor, & trim or grind the floor board until sufficient clearance is obtained. Shift through each gear to check clearance at this time. Now reinstall the shifter boot, carpet, & console.

You may only respond to the prompt using information provided in the context block. Can I reuse the OEM hardware for this? Before beginning the installation, thoroughly & completely read these instructions. Please refer to the Parts List to insure that all parts & hardware are received prior to the disassembly of the vehicle. If any parts are found to be missing, contact SKYJACKER® Customer Service at 318-388-0816 to obtain the needed items. If you have any questions or reservations about installing this product, contact SKYJACKER® Technical Assistance at 318-388-0816. Installation: 1. Park the vehicle on a flat, level surface & block the front & rear tires. 2. Place the transmission in neutral. 3. Loosen all of the engine mount bolts about ½ turn. 4. Support the transfer case cross member with a transmission or floor jack. Remove the bolts & nuts for each side of the cross member. 5. Slowly lower the cross member, approximately 2", to allow enough room to install the new 6. Install the new Skyjacker tubular spacers between the cross member & frame. Slowly raise the jack to firmly hold the tubular spacers in place. 7. Install the OEM nuts, removed in Step # 4, onto the studs that are protruding out of the frame on each side to hold the top half of the new spacers in place. Note: There is only one stud on each side protruding out of the frame. Next, install the 3/8" x 1" bolt on each side through the cross member & the bottom half of the new tubular spacers. Install the 3/8 nut, washer, & hand tighten. 8. Install the new 10mm x 60mm bolt up through the cross member & tubular spacer & tighten to 33 ft. lbs. (See Photo # 2) 9. Tighten the 3/8" nut down onto the 3/8" x 1" bolt from Step # 7 to 33 ft-lbs. Remove the transmission jack & set aside. 10. Re-torque the engine mount bolts loosened in Step # 3. The engine mount to block bolts torque to 45 ft-lbs. The engine mount to frame bolts torque to 30 ft-lbs. The thru bolts torque to 48 ft-lbs. 11. Install the transfer case linkage bracket. (See Steps # 1 thru # 5 Below) Skyjacker tubular spacers. 1994-2001 Jeep Cherokee XJ Install the new Skyjacker transfer case linkage pivot drop bracket to the stock pivot bracket using the OEM hardware. Using the two 1/4" x 1" bolts with a flat washer & self locking nut, bolt the ball swivel bracket (See Arrow in Photo # 3) to the new Skyjacker drop bracket. Note: The bracket has two sets of holes. The bottom holes are for a 4" lift as shown & the upper holes are for a 2 1/2" lift. 2. Placing the pivot bracket back in location, start the end of the rod through the ball swivel & bolt the bracket in location with the OEM hardware. (See Photo # 4) 3. Check to make sure that the transfer case will fully engage at each end of the shifter travel. If linkage adjustment is required, 4. Check the transfer case shifter to see if it will move to 4L. If not, the linkage will need adjusting as follows. Place the shifter in 4L, loosen the adjustment bolt & push the linkage ("B" Arrow in Photo # 5) forward until it stops. Now retighten adjustment bolt. Check to be sure the 4WD works properly. 5. On 5 speed models, engage the clutch & check the transmission shifter to see if it will go into 2nd gear. If not, the shifter housing on the floor will need trimming. Remove the center console, pull back the carpet, remove the screws holding the shifter boot to the floor, & trim or grind the floor board until sufficient clearance is obtained. Shift through each gear to check clearance at this time. Now reinstall the shifter boot, carpet, & console.

Draw your answer from the prompt text only.

What examples does the text give of government interests that are important enough to justify regulating speech related to strict and intermediate scrutiny?

Levels of Scrutiny and Key Concepts Most often, a court adjudicating a free speech challenge will analyze the constitutionality of a law or government action by applying a level of scrutiny derived from the Supreme Court’s First Amendment precedents. The two most common levels of scrutiny in free speech analysis are strict and intermediate scrutiny.35 Strict scrutiny generally applies to laws that regulate speech on the basis of its content or message. 36 It is a “demanding standard” that the government is rarely able to meet.37 Intermediate scrutiny has several different formulations but generally applies to content-neutral laws and commercial speech restrictions. 38 Intermediate scrutiny too presents a high bar for the government, but regulations of speech are more likely to survive intermediate than strict scrutiny. To varying degrees, each level of scrutiny requires the government to prove that it has a sufficiently important interest in regulating the speech at issue and that the law directly advances and is narrowly tailored to that interest. While laws that fail strict or intermediate scrutiny often do so on lack-of-tailoring grounds, the government sometimes fails to show that its interests are “real” and “not merely conjectural.”39 For example, it may be insufficient for the government to cite an interest that is significant in the abstract if the government lacks evidence of a concrete harm threatening that interest.40 For “prophylactic” speech restrictions in particular, the government must “demonstrate that it is regulating speech in order to address what is in fact a serious problem and that the preventative measure it proposes will contribute in a material way to solving that problem.”41 For more information on the levels of scrutiny and other key First Amendment concepts, readers of this report’s HTML and PDF formats can click on a term or phrase in the text box titled “Free Speech Terminology” to navigate to a discussion of that concept. Strict Scrutiny Strict scrutiny generally applies to content-based laws—laws that regulate speech on the basis of its subject matter, topic, or substantive message.42 A law can be content based on its face or in its design or purpose.43 The Supreme Court considers viewpoint discrimination—distinctions based on a “specific motivating ideology,” opinion, or perspective—to be “an egregious form of content discrimination.”44 For this reason, courts sometimes invalidate viewpoint-based laws summarily, without undertaking a strict scrutiny analysis.45 Under strict scrutiny, the government must prove that its law is narrowly tailored to advance a compelling governmental interest and that the law is the least restrictive means of serving that interest.46 While not an exhaustive list, the Supreme Court has identified the following interests as compelling, at least in certain contexts: • “national security”; 47 • “public confidence in judicial integrity”; 48 • “protecting the physical and psychological well-being of minors”; 49 • “ensur[ing] the basic human rights of members of groups that have historically been subjected to discrimination”; 50 • “eradicating discrimination against [a state’s] female citizens”; 51 and • “depriving criminals of the profits of their crimes, and in using these funds to compensate victims.” 52 Both strict and intermediate scrutiny require narrow tailoring, 53 meaning that the government must “pursue its legitimate interests through ‘means that are neither seriously underinclusive nor seriously overinclusive.’” 54 The precise degree of tailoring required under each standard differs. Under strict scrutiny, the challenged law or action must be the “least restrictive means” of satisfying the government’s compelling interest. In other words, “[i]f a less restrictive alternative would serve the Government’s purpose, the legislature must use that alternative.”55 Intermediate Scrutiny Intermediate scrutiny typically applies to content-neutral laws and commercial speech restrictions, albeit following different lines of Supreme Court precedent. 56 A law is content neutral if it “serves purposes unrelated to the content of expression”57 and does not, on its face, regulate speech on the basis of its subject matter, topic, or viewpoint.58 The Supreme Court has established an intermediate scrutiny standard for content-neutral time, place, or manner regulations.59 Specifically, the Court has held that “[e]xpression, whether oral or written or symbolized by conduct, is subject to reasonable time, place, or manner restrictions,” 60 such as a regulation to control the volume of music played at a bandshell in a public park.61 Time, place, or manner restrictions “are valid provided that they are justified without reference to the content of the regulated speech, that they are narrowly tailored to serve a significant governmental interest, and that they leave open ample alternative channels for communication of the information.” 62 A similar test set out in United States v. O’Brien is used to evaluate restrictions on certain types of expressive conduct, such as “when ‘speech’ and ‘nonspeech’ elements are combined in the same course of conduct.”63 Intermediate scrutiny is also the standard applied to commercial speech restrictions. Commercial speech is (1) speech that “does no more than propose a commercial transaction” (e.g., an advertisement for a product or service); 64 or (2) “expression related solely to the economic interests of the speaker and its audience.”65 To sustain a restriction on lawful, nonmisleading commercial speech, the government must meet the standard set out in Central Hudson Gas and Electric Corp. v. Public Service Commission. 66 Specifically, the government must show that its law “directly advances” a “substantial” governmental interest and is narrowly tailored—that is, “not more extensive than necessary”—to serve that interest. 67 Examples of substantial or important governmental interests include • protecting the public from deceptive and misleading trade practices;68 • “maintaining standards of ethical conduct in the licensed professions”; 69 • “energy conservation”; 70 • preventing “quid pro quo” corruption or its appearance in election campaigns;71 and “promoting fair competition in the market for television programming.” 72 The tailoring requirement for intermediate scrutiny is less rigorous than for strict scrutiny. Under intermediate scrutiny, a law “need not be the least restrictive or least intrusive means” of advancing the government’s interest.73 Nevertheless, the government “still ‘may not regulate expression in such a manner that a substantial portion of the burden on speech does not serve to advance its goals.’” 74 Narrow tailoring for commercial speech restrictions, for example, requires “a fit that is not necessarily perfect, but reasonable; that represents not necessarily the single best disposition but one whose scope is in proportion to the interest served.”

Draw your answer from the prompt text only. What examples does the text give of government interests that are important enough to justify regulating speech related to strict and intermediate scrutiny? Levels of Scrutiny and Key Concepts Most often, a court adjudicating a free speech challenge will analyze the constitutionality of a law or government action by applying a level of scrutiny derived from the Supreme Court’s First Amendment precedents. The two most common levels of scrutiny in free speech analysis are strict and intermediate scrutiny.35 Strict scrutiny generally applies to laws that regulate speech on the basis of its content or message. 36 It is a “demanding standard” that the government is rarely able to meet.37 Intermediate scrutiny has several different formulations but generally applies to content-neutral laws and commercial speech restrictions. 38 Intermediate scrutiny too presents a high bar for the government, but regulations of speech are more likely to survive intermediate than strict scrutiny. To varying degrees, each level of scrutiny requires the government to prove that it has a sufficiently important interest in regulating the speech at issue and that the law directly advances and is narrowly tailored to that interest. While laws that fail strict or intermediate scrutiny often do so on lack-of-tailoring grounds, the government sometimes fails to show that its interests are “real” and “not merely conjectural.”39 For example, it may be insufficient for the government to cite an interest that is significant in the abstract if the government lacks evidence of a concrete harm threatening that interest.40 For “prophylactic” speech restrictions in particular, the government must “demonstrate that it is regulating speech in order to address what is in fact a serious problem and that the preventative measure it proposes will contribute in a material way to solving that problem.”41 For more information on the levels of scrutiny and other key First Amendment concepts, readers of this report’s HTML and PDF formats can click on a term or phrase in the text box titled “Free Speech Terminology” to navigate to a discussion of that concept. Strict Scrutiny Strict scrutiny generally applies to content-based laws—laws that regulate speech on the basis of its subject matter, topic, or substantive message.42 A law can be content based on its face or in its design or purpose.43 The Supreme Court considers viewpoint discrimination—distinctions based on a “specific motivating ideology,” opinion, or perspective—to be “an egregious form of content discrimination.”44 For this reason, courts sometimes invalidate viewpoint-based laws summarily, without undertaking a strict scrutiny analysis.45 Under strict scrutiny, the government must prove that its law is narrowly tailored to advance a compelling governmental interest and that the law is the least restrictive means of serving that interest.46 While not an exhaustive list, the Supreme Court has identified the following interests as compelling, at least in certain contexts: • “national security”;47 • “public confidence in judicial integrity”;48 • “protecting the physical and psychological well-being of minors”; 49 • “ensur[ing] the basic human rights of members of groups that have historically been subjected to discrimination”; 50 • “eradicating discrimination against [a state’s] female citizens”; 51 and • “depriving criminals of the profits of their crimes, and in using these funds to compensate victims.” 52 Both strict and intermediate scrutiny require narrow tailoring, 53 meaning that the government must “pursue its legitimate interests through ‘means that are neither seriously underinclusive nor seriously overinclusive.’” 54 The precise degree of tailoring required under each standard differs. Under strict scrutiny, the challenged law or action must be the “least restrictive means” of satisfying the government’s compelling interest. In other words, “[i]f a less restrictive alternative would serve the Government’s purpose, the legislature must use that alternative.”55 Intermediate Scrutiny Intermediate scrutiny typically applies to content-neutral laws and commercial speech restrictions, albeit following different lines of Supreme Court precedent. 56 A law is content neutral if it “serves purposes unrelated to the content of expression”57 and does not, on its face, regulate speech on the basis of its subject matter, topic, or viewpoint.58 The Supreme Court has established an intermediate scrutiny standard for content-neutral time, place, or manner regulations.59 Specifically, the Court has held that “[e]xpression, whether oral or written or symbolized by conduct, is subject to reasonable time, place, or manner restrictions,”60 such as a regulation to control the volume of music played at a bandshell in a public park.61 Time, place, or manner restrictions “are valid provided that they are justified without reference to the content of the regulated speech, that they are narrowly tailored to serve a significant governmental interest, and that they leave open ample alternative channels for communication of the information.”62 A similar test set out in United States v. O’Brien is used to evaluate restrictions on certain types of expressive conduct, such as “when ‘speech’ and ‘nonspeech’ elements are combined in the same course of conduct.”63 Intermediate scrutiny is also the standard applied to commercial speech restrictions. Commercial speech is (1) speech that “does no more than propose a commercial transaction” (e.g., an advertisement for a product or service); 64 or (2) “expression related solely to the economic interests of the speaker and its audience.”65 To sustain a restriction on lawful, nonmisleading commercial speech, the government must meet the standard set out in Central Hudson Gas and Electric Corp. v. Public Service Commission. 66 Specifically, the government must show that its law “directly advances” a “substantial” governmental interest and is narrowly tailored—that is, “not more extensive than necessary”—to serve that interest.67 Examples of substantial or important governmental interests include • protecting the public from deceptive and misleading trade practices;68 • “maintaining standards of ethical conduct in the licensed professions”;69 • “energy conservation”;70 • preventing “quid pro quo” corruption or its appearance in election campaigns;71 and “promoting fair competition in the market for television programming.”72 The tailoring requirement for intermediate scrutiny is less rigorous than for strict scrutiny. Under intermediate scrutiny, a law “need not be the least restrictive or least intrusive means” of advancing the government’s interest.73 Nevertheless, the government “still ‘may not regulate expression in such a manner that a substantial portion of the burden on speech does not serve to advance its goals.’” 74 Narrow tailoring for commercial speech restrictions, for example, requires “a fit that is not necessarily perfect, but reasonable; that represents not necessarily the single best disposition but one whose scope is in proportion to the interest served.”

You must answer my questions based solely on the information provided. Do not use any external resources or prior knowledge.

When can the school year visitation schedule be reset?

II. PARENTING TIME/VISITATION SCHEDULES The following schedule should not be construed as precluding other visitation or alternative arrangements. The best visitation plan is one the parties have agreed to, rather than one imposed by the Court. However, the Court will only enforce the strict terms of this Parenting Plan in the event of any future disagreements concerning visitation. A. Parenting Time/Visitation-General This visitation schedule is broken up into several different sections or types of visitation. Regardless of the age of the child(ren) whose custody is being addressed herein, this visitation schedule is organized to include visitation during the school year, during holidays from school and during summer. For all purposes herein, the following terms shall be applicable: 1) Visitation during school year: If the child(ren) are not enrolled in school, the published schedule of the local public school where the primary custodian resides shall be utilized. If the child(ren) are enrolled in school, the schedule of the school system in which the child(ren) is/are actually enrolled shall be utilized. In the event there is more than one child and the children are enrolled in schools which observe different schedules, the parties shall utilize a hybrid schedule that reflects the holidays which are common to all applicable school systems (the applicable schedule shall be referred to as the “School Year”). This schedule may also be referred to as the “Regular Schedule” or “Day-To-Day Schedule” herein. 2) Visitation during Thanksgiving Break: This period of visitation includes the dates that the applicable school system recesses for at least two consecutive school days in November of every year (“Thanksgiving Break”). This schedule begins to be applicable at 6:00 p.m. on the date that the Thanksgiving Break begins and ends at 6:00 p.m. on the Sunday after Thanksgiving. 3) Visitation during Winter Break: This period of visitation includes the dates that the applicable school system recesses for winter break and which includes December 25 of every year (“Winter Break”). This schedule begins to be applicable at 6:00 p.m. on the date that the Winter Break begins and ends at 6:00 p.m. on the day before school resumes. 4) Visitation during Spring Break: This period of visitation includes the dates that the applicable school system recesses for a full week in the month of March or April of every year (“Spring Break”). This schedule begins to be applicable at 6:00 p.m. on the day that school recesses for Spring Break and ends at 6:00 p.m. on the day before school resumes. 5) Visitation during Summer: This period of visitation includes the dates that the applicable school system recesses for at least one full month in the summer and is the period between academic years (“Summer Break”). The Summer Break begins to be applicable on the day that school recesses for Summer Break and ends at 6:00 p.m. five (5) days before school resumes. 6) Weekend: For purposes of this parenting plan, a weekend begins at 6:00 p.m. on Friday and ends at 6:00 p.m. on Sunday. 7) Weekday visitation: Weekday visitation begins at 4:00 p.m. and ends at 7:30 p.m. The party with weekday visitation shall provide the child(ren)’s evening meal and complete any homework assigned for that evening. B. Visitation during School Year: (Choose one of the following) During the school year, the Non-Custodial Parent shall have at a minimum the following rights of parenting time/visitation (choose an item): ( ) The weekend of the first, third and fifth Friday (if any) of each month. ( ) Every other weekend starting the second weekend after the date of this plan. Additionally, the Non-Custodial Parent shall have weekday parenting time/visitation on (choose an item): ( ) None ( ) One afternoon each week to be agreed upon by the parties. If the parties cannot agree, weekday visitation shall be on Tuesday. C. Visitation during Thanksgiving Break: (Choose one of the following) ( ) Applicable ( ) Not applicable, the Day-to-Day schedule applies ( ) See Paragraph XI below _______ In even-numbered years, the Non-Custodial Parent will have the child(ren) with him/her for the entire Thanksgiving Break. In odd-numbered years, the Custodial Parent shall have the child(ren) with him/her for the entire Thanksgiving Break. OR _______ The ( ) Custodial Parent ( ) Non-Custodial Parent shall have the child(ren) for the first period of Thanksgiving Break, beginning at the time that school recesses for Thanksgiving Break until 3:00 p.m. on Thanksgiving Day in (X) odd-numbered years ( ) even-numbered years ( ) every year. The other parent will have the child(ren) for the second period of Thanksgiving Break, beginning at 3:00 p.m. on Thanksgiving Day until 6:00 p.m. on the evening before Thanksgiving Break ends. Unless otherwise indicated, the parties shall alternate the first and second periods of Thanksgiving Break each year. D. Visitation during Winter Break: (Choose one of the following) ( ) Applicable ( ) Not applicable, the Day-to-Day schedule applies ( ) See Paragraph XI below _______ The ( ) Custodial Parent ( ) Non-Custodial Parent shall have the child(ren) for the first period of Winter Break, beginning at the time that school recesses for Winter Break until December 26th at 10:00 a.m. in ( ) odd-numbered years ( ) even-numbered years ( ) every year. The other parent will have the child(ren) for the second period of Winter Break, beginning at 10:00 a.m. on December 26th until 6:00 p.m. on the evening before Winter Break ends. Unless otherwise indicated, the parties shall alternate the first and second periods of Winter Break each year. For the purpose of resuming visitation during the School Year, the parent who exercised visitation during the first half of Winter Break shall have the child(ren) with that parent on the first weekend following the end of Winter Break visitation. This is the only time that visitation during the School Year might be reset. E. Visitation during Summer: (Choose one of the following) ( ) Applicable ( ) Not applicable, the day-to-day schedule applies ( ) See Paragraph XI below Unless the parties agree otherwise, visitation with the child(ren) during the Summer Break shall be alternated on a week-to-week basis. The first week of visitation during Summer Break begins on the Sunday after school recesses for the Summer Break at 6:00 p.m. and ends on the following Sunday at 6:00 p.m. The Non-Custodial Parent shall have the first week of Summer Break visitation. The Custodial Parent shall have the next week and the parties shall continue to alternate weeks of visitation during Summer Break thereafter. In all cases, the child(ren) shall be with the Custodial Parent for the last five consecutive days before Summer Break ends and the next School Year begins. ( ) Other: ___ F. Visitation during Spring Break: (Choose one of the following) ( ) Applicable ( ) Not applicable, the day-to-day schedule applies ( ) See Paragraph XI below ____In odd-numbered years, the Non-Custodial Parent shall have the child(ren) for Spring Break. In even-numbered years, the Custodial Parent shall have the child(ren) for the entire Spring Break. OR _______ The parties shall divide visitation during every Spring Break. If the parties are unable to agree on visitation during the child(ren)’s spring break, the parent whose Regular Schedule of visitation would include the first weekend of Spring Break will have the child(ren) for that weekend through 12:00 noon on Wednesday. At that time, the child(ren) will be returned to the other parent who will have visitation with the child(ren) for the remainder of Spring Break. G. Other holiday schedule: The child(ren) shall be with Mother on every Mother’s Day from 6:00 pm on the Saturday which precedes Mother’s Day until 6:00 pm of Mother’s Day. The child(ren) shall be with Father on every Father’s Day from 6:00 pm on the Saturday which precedes Father’s Day until 6:00 pm on Father’s Day. This schedule will be maintained, regardless of which parent the children would have been with on that particular weekend under the Regular Schedule of visitation or under the schedule of visitation applicable to Summer Break. H. School holidays that precede or follow weekend visitation during the school year For the purposes of this parenting plan, if the Non-Custodial Parent exercises visitation during the School Year on a weekend in which there is a Friday and/or Monday school holiday which immediately precedes and/or follows his weekend visitation, Non-Custodial Parent’s visitation shall include that Friday and/or Monday school holiday (“Holiday Extension”). For the purposes of this paragraph, a “school holiday” includes a teacher work day or other day in which students are not required to attend school and which is announced by the applicable school system before the end of the Non-Custodial Parent’s normal weekend visitation.

System Instruction: You must answer my questions based solely on the information provided. Do not use any external resources or prior knowledge. Question: When can the school year visitation schedule be reset? Context Block: II. PARENTING TIME/VISITATION SCHEDULES The following schedule should not be construed as precluding other visitation or alternative arrangements. The best visitation plan is one the parties have agreed to, rather than one imposed by the Court. However, the Court will only enforce the strict terms of this Parenting Plan in the event of any future disagreements concerning visitation. A. Parenting Time/Visitation-General This visitation schedule is broken up into several different sections or types of visitation. Regardless of the age of the child(ren) whose custody is being addressed herein, this visitation schedule is organized to include visitation during the school year, during holidays from school and during summer. For all purposes herein, the following terms shall be applicable: 1) Visitation during school year: If the child(ren) are not enrolled in school, the published schedule of the local public school where the primary custodian resides shall be utilized. If the child(ren) are enrolled in school, the schedule of the school system in which the child(ren) is/are actually enrolled shall be utilized. In the event there is more than one child and the children are enrolled in schools which observe different schedules, the parties shall utilize a hybrid schedule that reflects the holidays which are common to all applicable school systems (the applicable schedule shall be referred to as the “School Year”). This schedule may also be referred to as the “Regular Schedule” or “Day-To-Day Schedule” herein. 2) Visitation during Thanksgiving Break: This period of visitation includes the dates that the applicable school system recesses for at least two consecutive school days in November of every year (“Thanksgiving Break”). This schedule begins to be applicable at 6:00 p.m. on the date that the Thanksgiving Break begins and ends at 6:00 p.m. on the Sunday after Thanksgiving. 3) Visitation during Winter Break: This period of visitation includes the dates that the applicable school system recesses for winter break and which includes December 25 of every year (“Winter Break”). This schedule begins to be applicable at 6:00 p.m. on the date that the Winter Break begins and ends at 6:00 p.m. on the day before school resumes. 4) Visitation during Spring Break: This period of visitation includes the dates that the applicable school system recesses for a full week in the month of March or April of every year (“Spring Break”). This schedule begins to be applicable at 6:00 p.m. on the day that school recesses for Spring Break and ends at 6:00 p.m. on the day before school resumes. 5) Visitation during Summer: This period of visitation includes the dates that the applicable school system recesses for at least one full month in the summer and is the period between academic years (“Summer Break”). The Summer Break begins to be applicable on the day that school recesses for Summer Break and ends at 6:00 p.m. five (5) days before school resumes. 6) Weekend: For purposes of this parenting plan, a weekend begins at 6:00 p.m. on Friday and ends at 6:00 p.m. on Sunday. 7) Weekday visitation: Weekday visitation begins at 4:00 p.m. and ends at 7:30 p.m. The party with weekday visitation shall provide the child(ren)’s evening meal and complete any homework assigned for that evening. B. Visitation during School Year: (Choose one of the following) During the school year, the Non-Custodial Parent shall have at a minimum the following rights of parenting time/visitation (choose an item): ( ) The weekend of the first, third and fifth Friday (if any) of each month. ( ) Every other weekend starting the second weekend after the date of this plan. Additionally, the Non-Custodial Parent shall have weekday parenting time/visitation on (choose an item): ( ) None ( ) One afternoon each week to be agreed upon by the parties. If the parties cannot agree, weekday visitation shall be on Tuesday. C. Visitation during Thanksgiving Break: (Choose one of the following) ( ) Applicable ( ) Not applicable, the Day-to-Day schedule applies ( ) See Paragraph XI below _______ In even-numbered years, the Non-Custodial Parent will have the child(ren) with him/her for the entire Thanksgiving Break. In odd-numbered years, the Custodial Parent shall have the child(ren) with him/her for the entire Thanksgiving Break. OR _______ The ( ) Custodial Parent ( ) Non-Custodial Parent shall have the child(ren) for the first period of Thanksgiving Break, beginning at the time that school recesses for Thanksgiving Break until 3:00 p.m. on Thanksgiving Day in (X) odd-numbered years ( ) even-numbered years ( ) every year. The other parent will have the child(ren) for the second period of Thanksgiving Break, beginning at 3:00 p.m. on Thanksgiving Day until 6:00 p.m. on the evening before Thanksgiving Break ends. Unless otherwise indicated, the parties shall alternate the first and second periods of Thanksgiving Break each year. D. Visitation during Winter Break: (Choose one of the following) ( ) Applicable ( ) Not applicable, the Day-to-Day schedule applies ( ) See Paragraph XI below _______ The ( ) Custodial Parent ( ) Non-Custodial Parent shall have the child(ren) for the first period of Winter Break, beginning at the time that school recesses for Winter Break until December 26th at 10:00 a.m. in ( ) odd-numbered years ( ) even-numbered years ( ) every year. The other parent will have the child(ren) for the second period of Winter Break, beginning at 10:00 a.m. on December 26th until 6:00 p.m. on the evening before Winter Break ends. Unless otherwise indicated, the parties shall alternate the first and second periods of Winter Break each year. For the purpose of resuming visitation during the School Year, the parent who exercised visitation during the first half of Winter Break shall have the child(ren) with that parent on the first weekend following the end of Winter Break visitation. This is the only time that visitation during the School Year might be reset. E. Visitation during Summer: (Choose one of the following) ( ) Applicable ( ) Not applicable, the day-to-day schedule applies ( ) See Paragraph XI below Unless the parties agree otherwise, visitation with the child(ren) during the Summer Break shall be alternated on a week-to-week basis. The first week of visitation during Summer Break begins on the Sunday after school recesses for the Summer Break at 6:00 p.m. and ends on the following Sunday at 6:00 p.m. The Non-Custodial Parent shall have the first week of Summer Break visitation. The Custodial Parent shall have the next week and the parties shall continue to alternate weeks of visitation during Summer Break thereafter. In all cases, the child(ren) shall be with the Custodial Parent for the last five consecutive days before Summer Break ends and the next School Year begins. ( ) Other: ___ F. Visitation during Spring Break: (Choose one of the following) ( ) Applicable ( ) Not applicable, the day-to-day schedule applies ( ) See Paragraph XI below ____In odd-numbered years, the Non-Custodial Parent shall have the child(ren) for Spring Break. In even-numbered years, the Custodial Parent shall have the child(ren) for the entire Spring Break. OR _______ The parties shall divide visitation during every Spring Break. If the parties are unable to agree on visitation during the child(ren)’s spring break, the parent whose Regular Schedule of visitation would include the first weekend of Spring Break will have the child(ren) for that weekend through 12:00 noon on Wednesday. At that time, the child(ren) will be returned to the other parent who will have visitation with the child(ren) for the remainder of Spring Break. G. Other holiday schedule: The child(ren) shall be with Mother on every Mother’s Day from 6:00 pm on the Saturday which precedes Mother’s Day until 6:00 pm of Mother’s Day. The child(ren) shall be with Father on every Father’s Day from 6:00 pm on the Saturday which precedes Father’s Day until 6:00 pm on Father’s Day. This schedule will be maintained, regardless of which parent the children would have been with on that particular weekend under the Regular Schedule of visitation or under the schedule of visitation applicable to Summer Break. H. School holidays that precede or follow weekend visitation during the school year For the purposes of this parenting plan, if the Non-Custodial Parent exercises visitation during the School Year on a weekend in which there is a Friday and/or Monday school holiday which immediately precedes and/or follows his weekend visitation, Non-Custodial Parent’s visitation shall include that Friday and/or Monday school holiday (“Holiday Extension”). For the purposes of this paragraph, a “school holiday” includes a teacher work day or other day in which students are not required to attend school and which is announced by the applicable school system before the end of the Non-Custodial Parent’s normal weekend visitation.

If you cannot answer using the context alone, say "I cannot answer that." Draw your answer from the text only. Use full sentences in your response.

What works have been cited?

2.1 IntroductionDefining terminology is a useful starting point when reading or writing on the subject of service to prevent any confusion or assumptions that we all understand the terms to mean the same thing. So, what do we mean by goods, products and services? This is a book about service, but what is a ‘service’ and how is it different to ‘goods’ or ‘products’? Whilst most people intuitively know the difference between a product and service, actually defining this difference with clarity and accuracy of text is not straight forward. The terms ‘goods’ and ‘products’ appear to be used interchangeably in much of the literature, but even here we can find debate about meaning (Araujo and Spring 2006; Callon 1991, 2002). However, for the sake of brevity we will here accept that they both refer to the same thing and focus on attempts to differentiate goods and services. This quest is far from straightfor-ward. Since the early eighteenth century academics and scholars from different domains have attempted to define these terms explicitly (Say 1803; Levitt 1981; Hill 1999; Gadrey 2000). In this chapter we will attempt to illustrate their findings in order to provide some background to the debate. 2.2 GoodsIn the eighteenth century Adam Smith (1776) stated that goods have exchange-able value and so a characteristic of a good is that its ownership rights can be established and exchanged. Goods can be considered as embodying specialised knowledge in a way that is highly advantageous for promoting the division of labour (Smith 1776; Demsetz 1993). Nassau Senior (1863) described goods as material things, meaning that goods are tangible and have physical dimensions. These concepts were still accepted over 100 years later when The System of National Accounts (SNA) (1993) defined goods as physical objects for which a demand exists, over which ownership rights can be established and whose owner-ship can be transferred from one institutional unit to another by engaging in transactions on markets. Hill (1999) summed up the major characteristics of goods as an entity that exists independently of its owner and preserves its identity through time; his definition supporting of that of the SNA. Following these defini-tions we can outline a set of attributes for goods:Physical objects for which a demand exists•Their physical attributes are preserved over time•Ownership rights can be established•They exist independently of their owner•They are exchangeable•Unit ownership rights can be exchanged between institutions•They can be traded on markets•They embody specialised knowledge in a way that is highly advantageous for •promoting the division of labourThese attributes are broadly accepted by academics and reflect 200 years of ongoing debate. 2.3 ServicesAlthough we have found a long standing agreement over the definition of products/goods and their characteristics, the definition of services has never reached consen-sus. Consequently it is hard to obtain full acceptance about the distinction between goods and services. Here we will present some of the different perspectives on service from the literature. 2.4 Intangible, Heterogeneous, Inseparable & Perishable (IHIP) CharacteristicsAs marketers began to recognise and emphasise the importance of services (Fisk et al. 1993) they consequently called for services to form a separate part of a com-panies’ marketing strategy (Lovelock 1983). A major contribution to the services debate was a classification consisting of four features: •Intangible •Heterogeneous

If you cannot answer using the context alone, say "I cannot answer that." Draw your answer from the text only. Use full sentences in your response. What works have been cited? 2.1 IntroductionDefining terminology is a useful starting point when reading or writing on the subject of service to prevent any confusion or assumptions that we all understand the terms to mean the same thing. So, what do we mean by goods, products and services? This is a book about service, but what is a ‘service’ and how is it different to ‘goods’ or ‘products’? Whilst most people intuitively know the difference between a product and service, actually defining this difference with clarity and accuracy of text is not straight forward. The terms ‘goods’ and ‘products’ appear to be used interchangeably in much of the literature, but even here we can find debate about meaning (Araujo and Spring 2006; Callon 1991, 2002). However, for the sake of brevity we will here accept that they both refer to the same thing and focus on attempts to differentiate goods and services. This quest is far from straightfor-ward. Since the early eighteenth century academics and scholars from different domains have attempted to define these terms explicitly (Say 1803; Levitt 1981; Hill 1999; Gadrey 2000). In this chapter we will attempt to illustrate their findings in order to provide some background to the debate. 2.2 GoodsIn the eighteenth century Adam Smith (1776) stated that goods have exchange-able value and so a characteristic of a good is that its ownership rights can be established and exchanged. Goods can be considered as embodying specialised knowledge in a way that is highly advantageous for promoting the division of labour (Smith 1776; Demsetz 1993). Nassau Senior (1863) described goods as material things, meaning that goods are tangible and have physical dimensions. These concepts were still accepted over 100 years later when The System of National Accounts (SNA) (1993) defined goods as physical objects for which a demand exists, over which ownership rights can be established and whose owner-ship can be transferred from one institutional unit to another by engaging in transactions on markets. Hill (1999) summed up the major characteristics of goods as an entity that exists independently of its owner and preserves its identity through time; his definition supporting of that of the SNA. Following these defini-tions we can outline a set of attributes for goods:Physical objects for which a demand exists•Their physical attributes are preserved over time•Ownership rights can be established•They exist independently of their owner•They are exchangeable•Unit ownership rights can be exchanged between institutions•They can be traded on markets•They embody specialised knowledge in a way that is highly advantageous for •promoting the division of labourThese attributes are broadly accepted by academics and reflect 200 years of ongoing debate. 2.3 ServicesAlthough we have found a long standing agreement over the definition of products/goods and their characteristics, the definition of services has never reached consen-sus. Consequently it is hard to obtain full acceptance about the distinction between goods and services. Here we will present some of the different perspectives on service from the literature. 2.4 Intangible, Heterogeneous, Inseparable & Perishable (IHIP) CharacteristicsAs marketers began to recognise and emphasise the importance of services (Fisk et al. 1993) they consequently called for services to form a separate part of a com-panies’ marketing strategy (Lovelock 1983). A major contribution to the services debate was a classification consisting of four features: •Intangible •Heterogeneous

Draw your answer only from the context block below and not from external sources.

What does Apple not receive from me when I use Siri?

The Siri and Dictation features of the iOS Software may not be available in all languages or regions and features may vary by region. If your iOS Device supports Siri and Dictation, these features may allow you to make requests, give commands and dictate text to your device using your voice. When you use Siri or Dictation, the things you say will be recorded and sent to Apple in order to convert what you say into text and to process your requests. Your device will also send Apple other information, such as your name and nickname; the names, nicknames, and relationship with you (e.g., “my dad”) of your address book contacts; and song names in your collection (collectively, your “User Data”). All of this data is used to help Siri and Dictation understand you better and recognize what you say. It is not linked to other data that Apple may have from your use of other Apple services. By using Siri or Dictation, you agree and consent to Apple’s and its subsidiaries’ and agents’ transmission, collection, maintenance, processing, and use of this information, including your voice input and User Data, to provide and improve Siri, Dictation, and dictation functionality in other Apple products and services. If you have Location Services turned on, the location of your iOS Device at the time you make a request to Siri may also be sent to Apple to help Siri improve the accuracy of its response to your location-based requests. You may disable the location-based functionality of Siri by going to the Location Services setting on your iOS Device and turning off the individual location setting for Siri. Siri can allow you to interact with your iOS Device without needing to unlock it. If you have enabled a passcode on your iOS Device and would like to prevent Siri from being used from the lock screen, you can tap Settings, tap General, tap Passcode Lock and turn the Siri option to “off”. You can also turn off Siri and Dictation altogether at any time. To do so, open Settings, tap General, tap Siri, and slide the Siri switch to “off”.

Draw your answer only from the context block below and not from external sources. What does Apple not receive from me when I use Siri? [The Siri and Dictation features of the iOS Software may not be available in all languages or regions and features may vary by region. If your iOS Device supports Siri and Dictation, these features may allow you to make requests, give commands and dictate text to your device using your voice. When you use Siri or Dictation, the things you say will be recorded and sent to Apple in order to convert what you say into text and to process your requests. Your device will also send Apple other information, such as your name and nickname; the names, nicknames, and relationship with you (e.g., “my dad”) of your address book contacts; and song names in your collection (collectively, your “User Data”). All of this data is used to help Siri and Dictation understand you better and recognize what you say. It is not linked to other data that Apple may have from your use of other Apple services. By using Siri or Dictation, you agree and consent to Apple’s and its subsidiaries’ and agents’ transmission, collection, maintenance, processing, and use of this information, including your voice input and User Data, to provide and improve Siri, Dictation, and dictation functionality in other Apple products and services. If you have Location Services turned on, the location of your iOS Device at the time you make a request to Siri may also be sent to Apple to help Siri improve the accuracy of its response to your location-based requests. You may disable the location-based functionality of Siri by going to the Location Services setting on your iOS Device and turning off the individual location setting for Siri. Siri can allow you to interact with your iOS Device without needing to unlock it. If you have enabled a passcode on your iOS Device and would like to prevent Siri from being used from the lock screen, you can tap Settings, tap General, tap Passcode Lock and turn the Siri option to “off”. You can also turn off Siri and Dictation altogether at any time. To do so, open Settings, tap General, tap Siri, and slide the Siri switch to “off”.]

Answer the question using only the information provided in the context and do not use any outside sources. Limit your response to 300 words.

In what circumstances would each type of foreign aid be best?

Types of Foreign Aid Foreign assistance takes various forms. It may include the direct provision of commodities and equipment (e.g., food and generators); capacity-building technical assistance to partner governments or local beneficiaries; funding for transportation, water, or energy infrastructure; support to the general budget of foreign governments and international organizations; and direct lending or loan guarantees to partner governments, among others. For reporting purposes, agencies categorize all of these activities under five aid “types”: Projects, Administrative Costs, Core Contributions, Budget Support, Technical Assistance, and Other. Most U.S. foreign aid in recent years has been classified as projects, funded and managed through aid agencies (see Figure 1). These categories may be misleading. Project-based aid includes certain types of assistance provided directly to partner governments for ongoing operations, or for purchasing commodities delivered directly to disaster-affected communities. U.S. foreign assistance agencies report aid type under a framework agreed and maintained by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD’s) Development Assistance Committee (DAC), a forum of leading bilateral donor countries.8 This reporting paradigm applies to all donors, and it does not account for the U.S. approach to foreign assistance delivery, leading to some apparently anomalous classifications. For instance, aid appropriated as “direct financial support” to the Government of Ukraine in 2022 was structured as a reimbursement for verified government expenditures—such as teachers’ salaries and social assistance payments—and managed by the World Bank. That funding has been classified as a project, including in the above figure, though the funding is meant to support Ukraine’s central budget. The aid type classifications used in reporting are important background to understand agencies’ relationships with an implementing partner, though the partner type is highly consequential for how aid will be implemented (see “Implementing Partner Types ”). While data reported in foreignassistance.gov may lack nuances necessary to understand the nature of each partnership, it still provides useful topline information about relative aid flows. Projects Projects take many forms but generally involve a third-party implementing partner working under an agreement with the managing foreign aid agency (see “Managing, Funding, and Implementing Agencies” text box). Such projects generally have a high-level goal, several objectives to advance that goal, a series of quantitative targets for making progress toward that objective, and a welldefined “scope of work” for the implementing partner (see “Key Terms” text box). Usually, the project goal is aspirational and would require complementary developments outside the project itself to be achieved—such as effective leadership by the central government, receptivity to new practices by local populations, and a relatively stable implementing environment. In practice, projects are diverse. A project’s scope may involve delivery of medicine or food, building a highway, researching a new technology, or advising a government on customs procedures, among others. A nongovernmental organization (NGO) is the most common partner organization for USAID. Of the $181.5 billion in foreign assistance obligations for projects by USAID from FY2013 to 2022, 9 NGOs implemented $109.8 billion (60%). 10 Public international organizations (PIOs) are the second-largest category of project-based implementing partners. Project-based assistance is the predominant method of providing foreign assistance for several reasons. For one, this structure mitigates the risk of implementing partners diverting funding to objectives outside of U.S. priorities.12 Project-based aid expenditures are to be “allowable, allocable, and reasonable” under an agency-designed scope of work. 13 Detailed scopes of work allow audits of project costs and direct oversight of project activities, making reporting lines clearer. USAID typically initiates projects by developing a preliminary design and a research agenda to further scope the concept. 14 Agency staff develop these proposals and then submit them for approval.15 The resulting proposal (1) states a development problem (usually associated with objectives in a country strategy or a global initiative’s strategy), (2) hypothesizes how a project may solve it (a “theory of change”), and (3) proposes an approach to implementing that solution. If approved, USAID then issues a call for proposals from implementing partners, with the implementation approach as the “scope of work.” For instance, a USAID project may identify evidence that professionalizing a government’s revenue collection and budget development processes leads to improved government responsiveness to its constituents more generally, improving faith in government and stabilizing democratic institutions. USAID officials then may propose a fiscal management project intended to build capacity in a partner government’s tax and budget bureaus. 16 Such projects may comprise a single implementing partner award or several. A paradigmatic project contains a dedicated scope of work with established deliverables and performance targets, to be carried out by an implementing partner’s team over a defined time period (typically not to exceed five years). A project may include building infrastructure, technical assistance, supply of goods or services, or some combination of all three. Usually, projects are divided into several work streams, each called “components.” The fiscal management project, for example, may include (1) technical assistance to reform an agency’s administrative procedures, (2) training for bureau staff in modern accounting practices, (3) a quantitative analysis of current tax compliance rates, (4) a marketing campaign encouraging citizens to pay their taxes, and (5) sourcing of new accounting software for each bureau to track finances better. Projects often have “cross-cutting themes” as well, which may include addressing the needs of vulnerable populations and ensuring the views of local residents are taken into account, among others. Budget Support and Core Contributions In contrast to project-based assistance, a U.S. foreign assistance agency may fund the general budget of a recipient organization. The Foreignassistance.gov database uses the label “budget support” for funding provided to a recipient government to support general operating costs rather than a specific scope of work. The label “core contribution” is used when such funding is provided to public international organizations (such as United Nations entities). Since at least 1995, most such assistance has been provided to public international organizations, with a smaller share going to foreign governments. Since 2022, the substantial budget support to Ukraine has reversed this balance, although that aid has been classified as a project. 17 USAID generally has issued budget support to foreign governments in a funding tranche after the government has met a predefined milestone.18 In providing budget support, USAID generally has relinquished exclusive control over spending, and funds instead have been managed according to the recipient’s own budgetary procedures and authorities.19 While USAID has less direct control over the recipient’s use of budget support aid, the agency does control whether it issues a funding tranche. For instance, USAID generally has provided budget support to Jordan (a top recipient of U.S. budget support aid) after the USAID/Jordan mission certifies annually that certain policy reforms have been met. For core contributions, the United States generally has not structured its funding in tranches. Rather, U.S. representatives have a direct role in the organization’s decisionmaking—often as a shareholder, member of the Board of Directors, or in appointing the organization’s leadership. For instance, the United States influences the World Bank’s decisionmaking as a major shareholder and nominates its president. 20 Budget Support: Loans and Loan Guarantees Historically, U.S. budget support to governments included a substantial lending element. From 1962 to 1988, loans represented 28% of total U.S. economic foreign assistance.21 Since 1988, Congress and the executive branch have shifted away from lending toward primarily grant-based assistance, viewing loans as contributing to already-burdensome debt levels among aid recipients.22 There has been some recent renewed interest in converting grant-based budget support to loans, with an FY2024 aid package to Ukraine requiring budget support through a loan rather than a grant.23 More frequently since the end of the Cold War, USAID has provided financing to governments through loan guarantees rather than direct loans. Loan guarantees are a commitment to repay all or part of a loan in the event a borrower stops payments. From 1993 to 2017, USAID issued 20 guarantees of sovereign bond issuances to Middle Eastern states and Ukraine, but only three remain active.24 The most recent such guarantees were issued in support of countries facing fiscal constraints due to political crises (the Arab Spring and the Russian incursion into Crimea and Eastern Ukraine). USAID has not issued any guarantees since 2017.25 Development financing to private entities, including loans and loan guarantees, remains an active area of U.S. support for international development. The U.S. International Development Finance Corporation administers most of those activities, typically by financing private sector projects rather than sovereign debt. 26 This financing generally has been based on market rates and, as a result, has not been accounted as foreign assistance. Administrative Costs Administrative costs are funds used to deliver or implement aid that do not fit the definitions of project aid or budget support/core contributions.27 From FY2013 to FY2022, U.S. assistance agencies directed 7.7% of nonmilitary foreign assistance obligations toward administrative costs. The parameters of administrative costs are highly nuanced and differ from agency to agency: some agencies, for instance, classify monitoring and evaluation as an administrative cost, while others do not. Congressional directives from the 1970s have shaped what USAID classifies as administrative costs. Congress directed that the following two categories be funded by the “Operating Expenses” account: • All salaries and benefits of USAID direct hires, including Foreign Service and Civil Service, including when those employees are working to oversee a project activity. • All costs not directly related to a specific project. 28 USAID classifies all Operating Expenses as an administrative cost. Activities are considered operating expenses if they are inherently governmental or part of the cost of doing business. Examples include developing USAID policies and notices to Congress, drafting contract agreements for projects, and managing USAID accounting.29 Because all USAID salaries are considered administrative costs, work such as supporting project implementation and designing development interventions are considered administrative expenditures. By contrast, administrative work by USAID implementing partners is considered a project cost.

In what circumstances would each type of foreign aid be best? Answer the question using only the information provided in the context and do not use any outside sources. Types of Foreign Aid Foreign assistance takes various forms. It may include the direct provision of commodities and equipment (e.g., food and generators); capacity-building technical assistance to partner governments or local beneficiaries; funding for transportation, water, or energy infrastructure; support to the general budget of foreign governments and international organizations; and direct lending or loan guarantees to partner governments, among others. For reporting purposes, agencies categorize all of these activities under five aid “types”: Projects, Administrative Costs, Core Contributions, Budget Support, Technical Assistance, and Other. Most U.S. foreign aid in recent years has been classified as projects, funded and managed through aid agencies (see Figure 1). These categories may be misleading. Project-based aid includes certain types of assistance provided directly to partner governments for ongoing operations, or for purchasing commodities delivered directly to disaster-affected communities. U.S. foreign assistance agencies report aid type under a framework agreed and maintained by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD’s) Development Assistance Committee (DAC), a forum of leading bilateral donor countries.8 This reporting paradigm applies to all donors, and it does not account for the U.S. approach to foreign assistance delivery, leading to some apparently anomalous classifications. For instance, aid appropriated as “direct financial support” to the Government of Ukraine in 2022 was structured as a reimbursement for verified government expenditures—such as teachers’ salaries and social assistance payments—and managed by the World Bank. That funding has been classified as a project, including in the above figure, though the funding is meant to support Ukraine’s central budget. The aid type classifications used in reporting are important background to understand agencies’ relationships with an implementing partner, though the partner type is highly consequential for how aid will be implemented (see “Implementing Partner Types ”). While data reported in foreignassistance.gov may lack nuances necessary to understand the nature of each partnership, it still provides useful topline information about relative aid flows. Projects Projects take many forms but generally involve a third-party implementing partner working under an agreement with the managing foreign aid agency (see “Managing, Funding, and Implementing Agencies” text box). Such projects generally have a high-level goal, several objectives to advance that goal, a series of quantitative targets for making progress toward that objective, and a welldefined “scope of work” for the implementing partner (see “Key Terms” text box). Usually, the project goal is aspirational and would require complementary developments outside the project itself to be achieved—such as effective leadership by the central government, receptivity to new practices by local populations, and a relatively stable implementing environment. In practice, projects are diverse. A project’s scope may involve delivery of medicine or food, building a highway, researching a new technology, or advising a government on customs procedures, among others. A nongovernmental organization (NGO) is the most common partner organization for USAID. Of the $181.5 billion in foreign assistance obligations for projects by USAID from FY2013 to 2022, 9 NGOs implemented $109.8 billion (60%). 10 Public international organizations (PIOs) are the second-largest category of project-based implementing partners. Project-based assistance is the predominant method of providing foreign assistance for several reasons. For one, this structure mitigates the risk of implementing partners diverting funding to objectives outside of U.S. priorities.12 Project-based aid expenditures are to be “allowable, allocable, and reasonable” under an agency-designed scope of work. 13 Detailed scopes of work allow audits of project costs and direct oversight of project activities, making reporting lines clearer. USAID typically initiates projects by developing a preliminary design and a research agenda to further scope the concept. 14 Agency staff develop these proposals and then submit them for approval.15 The resulting proposal (1) states a development problem (usually associated with objectives in a country strategy or a global initiative’s strategy), (2) hypothesizes how a project may solve it (a “theory of change”), and (3) proposes an approach to implementing that solution. If approved, USAID then issues a call for proposals from implementing partners, with the implementation approach as the “scope of work.” For instance, a USAID project may identify evidence that professionalizing a government’s revenue collection and budget development processes leads to improved government responsiveness to its constituents more generally, improving faith in government and stabilizing democratic institutions. USAID officials then may propose a fiscal management project intended to build capacity in a partner government’s tax and budget bureaus. 16 Such projects may comprise a single implementing partner award or several. A paradigmatic project contains a dedicated scope of work with established deliverables and performance targets, to be carried out by an implementing partner’s team over a defined time period (typically not to exceed five years). A project may include building infrastructure, technical assistance, supply of goods or services, or some combination of all three. Usually, projects are divided into several work streams, each called “components.” The fiscal management project, for example, may include (1) technical assistance to reform an agency’s administrative procedures, (2) training for bureau staff in modern accounting practices, (3) a quantitative analysis of current tax compliance rates, (4) a marketing campaign encouraging citizens to pay their taxes, and (5) sourcing of new accounting software for each bureau to track finances better. Projects often have “cross-cutting themes” as well, which may include addressing the needs of vulnerable populations and ensuring the views of local residents are taken into account, among others. Budget Support and Core Contributions In contrast to project-based assistance, a U.S. foreign assistance agency may fund the general budget of a recipient organization. The Foreignassistance.gov database uses the label “budget support” for funding provided to a recipient government to support general operating costs rather than a specific scope of work. The label “core contribution” is used when such funding is provided to public international organizations (such as United Nations entities). Since at least 1995, most such assistance has been provided to public international organizations, with a smaller share going to foreign governments. Since 2022, the substantial budget support to Ukraine has reversed this balance, although that aid has been classified as a project. 17 USAID generally has issued budget support to foreign governments in a funding tranche after the government has met a predefined milestone.18 In providing budget support, USAID generally has relinquished exclusive control over spending, and funds instead have been managed according to the recipient’s own budgetary procedures and authorities.19 While USAID has less direct control over the recipient’s use of budget support aid, the agency does control whether it issues a funding tranche. For instance, USAID generally has provided budget support to Jordan (a top recipient of U.S. budget support aid) after the USAID/Jordan mission certifies annually that certain policy reforms have been met. For core contributions, the United States generally has not structured its funding in tranches. Rather, U.S. representatives have a direct role in the organization’s decisionmaking—often as a shareholder, member of the Board of Directors, or in appointing the organization’s leadership. For instance, the United States influences the World Bank’s decisionmaking as a major shareholder and nominates its president. 20 Budget Support: Loans and Loan Guarantees Historically, U.S. budget support to governments included a substantial lending element. From 1962 to 1988, loans represented 28% of total U.S. economic foreign assistance.21 Since 1988, Congress and the executive branch have shifted away from lending toward primarily grant-based assistance, viewing loans as contributing to already-burdensome debt levels among aid recipients.22 There has been some recent renewed interest in converting grant-based budget support to loans, with an FY2024 aid package to Ukraine requiring budget support through a loan rather than a grant.23 More frequently since the end of the Cold War, USAID has provided financing to governments through loan guarantees rather than direct loans. Loan guarantees are a commitment to repay all or part of a loan in the event a borrower stops payments. From 1993 to 2017, USAID issued 20 guarantees of sovereign bond issuances to Middle Eastern states and Ukraine, but only three remain active.24 The most recent such guarantees were issued in support of countries facing fiscal constraints due to political crises (the Arab Spring and the Russian incursion into Crimea and Eastern Ukraine). USAID has not issued any guarantees since 2017.25 Development financing to private entities, including loans and loan guarantees, remains an active area of U.S. support for international development. The U.S. International Development Finance Corporation administers most of those activities, typically by financing private sector projects rather than sovereign debt. 26 This financing generally has been based on market rates and, as a result, has not been accounted as foreign assistance. Administrative Costs Administrative costs are funds used to deliver or implement aid that do not fit the definitions of project aid or budget support/core contributions.27 From FY2013 to FY2022, U.S. assistance agencies directed 7.7% of nonmilitary foreign assistance obligations toward administrative costs. The parameters of administrative costs are highly nuanced and differ from agency to agency: some agencies, for instance, classify monitoring and evaluation as an administrative cost, while others do not. Congressional directives from the 1970s have shaped what USAID classifies as administrative costs. Congress directed that the following two categories be funded by the “Operating Expenses” account: • All salaries and benefits of USAID direct hires, including Foreign Service and Civil Service, including when those employees are working to oversee a project activity. • All costs not directly related to a specific project. 28 USAID classifies all Operating Expenses as an administrative cost. Activities are considered operating expenses if they are inherently governmental or part of the cost of doing business. Examples include developing USAID policies and notices to Congress, drafting contract agreements for projects, and managing USAID accounting.29 Because all USAID salaries are considered administrative costs, work such as supporting project implementation and designing development interventions are considered administrative expenditures. By contrast, administrative work by USAID implementing partners is considered a project cost.

Your response must be based solely on the information provided in the prompt. You are not allowed to use any external resources or prior knowledge.

How does broadband internet help job seekers?

The intersection of these three literatures leaves the total effect of broadband internet on mental health and wellbeing ambiguous. There is some evidence that broadband internet may have deleterious effects on mental health (e.g., Donati et al., 2022). However, the evidence that broadband internet has positive economic effects combined with the evidence that positive economic effects lead to fewer deaths by suicide could mean that broadband internet might have positive effects on mental health. The total effect depends on which force predominates. Using all-cause mortality data from the National Center for Health Statistics, we find that the introduction of broadband internet during the initial roll out of broadband from 2000 to 2008 is associated with a reduction in the number of deaths by suicide in a county. We find that a ten percent increase in the proportion of county residents with access to broadband internet in a year leads to 0.11 fewer deaths by suicide in a county, which is a 1.02% reduction in suicides overall. As expected, the effect of access to broadband internet on suicides fades after 2008, when rapid proliferation began to slow. Nevertheless, when estimating the effect of the rollout of broadband internet between 2000 to 2018, we find an overall reduction in deaths by suicide of about 1.6% for a 10% increase in access to broadband. In addition, using data from the Center for Disease Control’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), we some evidence that increased access to broadband internet leads to improved measures of mental and physical health and less binge drinking, suggesting that improvements in mood is an important mechanism. We further find that this reduction in suicide deaths is likely due to economic improvements in counties that have access to broadband internet. Counties with increased access to broadband internet see reductions in poverty rate and unemployment rate. In addition, zip codes that gain access to broadband internet see increases in the numbers of employees and establishments in those zip codes. In addition, heterogeneity analysis indicates that the positive effects are concentrated in the working age population, those between 25 and 64 years old. This pattern is precisely what is predicted by the literature linking economic conditions to suicide risk. These results provide important support for existing policies that seek to expand broadband access across the country. While some measures of broadband proliferation appear to be nearly complete as early as 2008, there remains a large digital divide between populations with access to broadband internet and those without (Rachfal, 2021). According to FCC data in 2019, 98.8% of Americans living in urban areas had access to fixed broadband internet, but only 82.8% of Americans living in rural areas had access to fixed broadband internet.3 In some states, the percentage of the rural population with access to fixed broadband internet was as low as 63.3%. Our results indicate that closing the digital divide can have tangible mental health benefits. II. Background Broadband Internet, Economic Growth, and Mental Health A robust literature connects access to broadband internet and improved local economic conditions. These improvements occur along two axes: first, broadband internet affects the labor market outcomes of individual workers, and second, broadband internet impacts the behavior of firms. These papers then link to another arm of economic research that explores the ways in which economic conditions impact mental health. Several papers indicate that the internet generally, and broadband specifically, is a useful tool for job seekers. Kunn and Mansour (2014) find that internet job searches are effective at reducing the length of unemployment periods. This is a contradiction of an earlier study finding internet job search to be ineffective, which the authors attribute to the changing nature of internet job search between their two study periods. More recently, Zuo (2021) uses Comcast’s Internet Essentials program to study the effect of broadband internet access. Zuo finds that the program, which was designed to increase broadband access for low-income families, is associated with increased employment, increased labor force participation, decreased unemployment, and increased income. Similarly, Gurtzgen and colleagues (2021) find that broadband access is associated with improved rates of reemployment after the first month of unemployment. These recent studies are consistent with prior papers as well (Atasoy, 2013; Dettling, 2015; Hjort & Poulsen, 2019). Bhuller, Kostol, and Vigtel (2020) suggest that these improved outcomes may be a function of improved job searches. Their examination of the roll out of broadband internet in Norway leads them to draw three conclusions. First, broadband leads to improved recruitment processes. Second, that improved match quality is a benefit to job seekers. Finally, broadband internet facilitates better information flow. At the individual level, it seems, access to the additional informational and communications resources of broadband internet is beneficial for employment outcomes.

context block: [The intersection of these three literatures leaves the total effect of broadband internet on mental health and wellbeing ambiguous. There is some evidence that broadband internet may have deleterious effects on mental health (e.g., Donati et al., 2022). However, the evidence that broadband internet has positive economic effects combined with the evidence that positive economic effects lead to fewer deaths by suicide could mean that broadband internet might have positive effects on mental health. The total effect depends on which force predominates. Using all-cause mortality data from the National Center for Health Statistics, we find that the introduction of broadband internet during the initial roll out of broadband from 2000 to 2008 is associated with a reduction in the number of deaths by suicide in a county. We find that a ten percent increase in the proportion of county residents with access to broadband internet in a year leads to 0.11 fewer deaths by suicide in a county, which is a 1.02% reduction in suicides overall. As expected, the effect of access to broadband internet on suicides fades after 2008, when rapid proliferation began to slow. Nevertheless, when estimating the effect of the rollout of broadband internet between 2000 to 2018, we find an overall reduction in deaths by suicide of about 1.6% for a 10% increase in access to broadband. In addition, using data from the Center for Disease Control’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), we some evidence that increased access to broadband internet leads to improved measures of mental and physical health and less binge drinking, suggesting that improvements in mood is an important mechanism. We further find that this reduction in suicide deaths is likely due to economic improvements in counties that have access to broadband internet. Counties with increased access to broadband internet see reductions in poverty rate and unemployment rate. In addition, zip codes that gain access to broadband internet see increases in the numbers of employees and establishments in those zip codes. In addition, heterogeneity analysis indicates that the positive effects are concentrated in the working age population, those between 25 and 64 years old. This pattern is precisely what is predicted by the literature linking economic conditions to suicide risk. These results provide important support for existing policies that seek to expand broadband access across the country. While some measures of broadband proliferation appear to be nearly complete as early as 2008, there remains a large digital divide between populations with access to broadband internet and those without (Rachfal, 2021). According to FCC data in 2019, 98.8% of Americans living in urban areas had access to fixed broadband internet, but only 82.8% of Americans living in rural areas had access to fixed broadband internet.3 In some states, the percentage of the rural population with access to fixed broadband internet was as low as 63.3%. Our results indicate that closing the digital divide can have tangible mental health benefits. II. Background Broadband Internet, Economic Growth, and Mental Health A robust literature connects access to broadband internet and improved local economic conditions. These improvements occur along two axes: first, broadband internet affects the labor market outcomes of individual workers, and second, broadband internet impacts the behavior of firms. These papers then link to another arm of economic research that explores the ways in which economic conditions impact mental health. Several papers indicate that the internet generally, and broadband specifically, is a useful tool for job seekers. Kunn and Mansour (2014) find that internet job searches are effective at reducing the length of unemployment periods. This is a contradiction of an earlier study finding internet job search to be ineffective, which the authors attribute to the changing nature of internet job search between their two study periods. More recently, Zuo (2021) uses Comcast’s Internet Essentials program to study the effect of broadband internet access. Zuo finds that the program, which was designed to increase broadband access for low-income families, is associated with increased employment, increased labor force participation, decreased unemployment, and increased income. Similarly, Gurtzgen and colleagues (2021) find that broadband access is associated with improved rates of reemployment after the first month of unemployment. These recent studies are consistent with prior papers as well (Atasoy, 2013; Dettling, 2015; Hjort & Poulsen, 2019). Bhuller, Kostol, and Vigtel (2020) suggest that these improved outcomes may be a function of improved job searches. Their examination of the roll out of broadband internet in Norway leads them to draw three conclusions. First, broadband leads to improved recruitment processes. Second, that improved match quality is a benefit to job seekers. Finally, broadband internet facilitates better information flow. At the individual level, it seems, access to the additional informational and communications resources of broadband internet is beneficial for employment outcomes. ] question: [How does broadband internet help job seekers?] system instruction: [Your response must be based solely on the information provided in the prompt. You are not allowed to use any external resources or prior knowledge.]

Only use the text provided to answer. Do not use outside information.

Please give a summary of how Covid19 has affected behavior health.

Behavioral Health During the COVID-19 Pandemic Data from multiple sources suggest that mental health symptoms and substance use have increased since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. These symptoms include emotional distress and anxiety, depression, and trauma-related conditions. Substance use refers to the number of individuals using substances such as alcohol or illicit drugs, and the frequency and quantities of use. Typically, comprehensive national morbidity and mortality data on mental health conditions, substance use, associated hospitalizations, and substance-related overdose deaths take months to compile and report. Comprehensive national data for 2020 are not yet available. Several organizations, including multiple federal agencies, have used short surveys and rapid data reporting to monitor mental health symptoms and substance use during the COVID-19 pandemic. Although the methodological differences between these surveys and perennial surveys make comparisons between years imperfect, most of the 2020 data suggest an increase in behavioral health morbidity in the United States over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. Mental Health Data collected from multiple surveys during the COVID-19 pandemic suggest that Americans experienced increased stress and symptoms of mental health conditions. In a survey conducted in April 2020, the State Health Access Data Assistance Center (SHADAC)—a program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation—found that over 90% of U.S. adults reported experiencing additional levels of stress caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. In this context, stress refers to psychological stress, which occurs when individuals believe that the consequences of a situation outweigh their ability to adequately cope with it. Reactions to stressors may include fear and concern about the future, tension and irritability, sadness or depression, or feeling powerless or overwhelmed, among others. Without adequate coping strategies, stress can have detrimental effects on mental health. Coping strategies include any behavioral, social, or cognitive techniques used to mitigate the effects of stress. Coping strategies can be adaptive, meaning they promote better overall functioning (e.g., social connections, physical activities, hobbies, good sleep hygiene), or they can be maladaptive, meaning they are more likely to result in worse overall functioning (e.g., substance use, excessive screen time, risky behaviors). Although maladaptive coping strategies may reduce stress in the moment, they may exacerbate problems in the long term. Many individuals experiencing stress may have adequate coping strategies, meaning that stress is present but does not impair their daily functioning. For others, stress—and in particular stress caused by the pandemic—may have detrimental effects on their mental health. A nationally representative survey conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) throughout the pandemic found that an increasing number of Americans reported that pandemic-related stress was affecting their mental health. In March 2020, 32% of respondents felt that worry or stress related to coronavirus had a negative impact on their mental health. In April 2020 that number rose to 45%, and in July 2020, 53% reported that pandemic-related stress was affecting their mental health. Mental Health Disorders In some cases, extreme or prolonged stress can lead to mental health disorders. According to data collected by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), the percentage of Americans experiencing symptoms of a mental health disorder appears to have increased during the COVID19 pandemic. NCHS—a research agency under the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)—partnered with the U.S. Census Bureau on the Household Pulse Survey to monitor the social and economic effects of the pandemic on American households. The nationally representative survey collected data on employment status, food security, housing, physical and mental health, access to health care (including mental health care), and education disruption during the coronavirus pandemic. NCHS survey questions were designed to obtain information on the frequency of anxiety and depression symptoms. Other indicators of psychological distress appear elevated during the first phases of the pandemic. For example, CDC analysis of national emergency department (ED) visits showed that socioeconomic and psychosocial-related visits increased during April 2020 (compared with April 2019), while total ED visits decreased over 40%. Socioeconomic or psychosocial factors were one of a few categories of ED visits that increased; most of the 200 common diagnostic causes of ED visits decreased during that same time. Other research suggests that ED visits for mental health conditions may have decreased during the first few months of the pandemic, to a lesser extent than overall ED visits. Suicide Some evidence suggests that suicidal thoughts may have increased during the pandemic. One CDC analysis found that during the pandemic approximately twice as many U.S. adults reported serious consideration of suicide in the previous 30 days compared with 2018 (10.7% versus4.3%). Although the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline did not report increases in call volume, the Disaster Distress Helpline (part of the Suicide Lifeline) experienced a 335% increase in calls during the first five months of the pandemic. The effects of the pandemic on suicide attempts and suicide deaths is unclear, though it appears that suicide mortality has decreased compared with previous years. An increase in suicidal thoughts does not necessarily equate to an increase in suicide attempts or suicide deaths. Research from CDC shows a decrease in emergency department (ED) visits for suicide attempts between March and October 2020 compared with the same period in 2019, but to a lesser extent than overall ED visits. Preliminary national suicide mortality data in the United States for 2020 show that suicide deaths in the United States may have decreased in 2020 compared with the three previous years. In addition, regional differences may account for changes in suicide mortality. For example, some individual states and municipalities have reported stable rates in suicide deaths during the pandemic, whereas others have reported decreased rates. There may be demographic differences in suicide rates during the pandemic also. For example, CDC reported that in May 2020 ED visits for suspected suicide attempts began to increase among adolescents, especially girls. Researchers in Maryland found that suicide mortality rates increased for Black residents from March 2020 to May 2020, while decreasing for White residents over that same time. Substance Use-Related Overdoses Comprehensive national data on drug-related overdoses and overdose deaths during the pandemic are not yet available. Preliminary data from the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) suggest increases in drug-related overdoses during the first few months of the pandemic. The Overdose Detection Mapping Application Program (ODMAP), an ONDCP surveillance system that tracks suspected overdose data nationally in near real-time, reported an increase of 11% in fatal overdoses and a 19% increase in nonfatal overdoses from March through May 2020 compared with the same months in 2019. Nearly 62% of participating counties reported increases from March to May 2020. Other areas have reported stable rates of overdose deaths. Notably, ODMAP overdose submissions appeared to be trending upward prior to the onset of the pandemic, making it difficult to determine the effects of the pandemic and mitigation measures using these data. CDC also noted an increase in drug-related overdose deaths in the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Similar to the ODMAP data, the CDC data showed that overdose deaths were already increasing in the months preceding the pandemic. However, CDC data showed the rate of overdose deaths accelerating after the pandemic began. In an analysis of provisional CDC mortality data, the National Institute for Health Care Management found that the rise is particularly notable for deaths involving synthetic opioids. In addition, the institute reported increases in deaths involving commonly prescribed opioids and heroin—both of which had been declining in recent years. When examining emergency department (ED) visits, CDC found a higher number of drug overdoses—including opioid overdoses—between March and October 2020 compared with the same period in 2019. Put together, the ODMAP and CDC data suggest that drug-related overdoses and overdose deaths have increased during the COVID-19 pandemic. Individuals with substance use disorders may be at higher risk of contracting SARS-CoV-2 due to unstable housing situations, high incarceration rates, or the inability to physically distance themselves. In addition, those with substance use disorders may be at higher risk for complications of COVID-19 because substance use can often suppress the immune system or inhibit respiratory functioning.

System instructions: Only use the text provided to answer. Do not use outside information. Context: Behavioral Health During the COVID-19 Pandemic Data from multiple sources suggest that mental health symptoms and substance use have increased since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. These symptoms include emotional distress and anxiety, depression, and trauma-related conditions. Substance use refers to the number of individuals using substances such as alcohol or illicit drugs, and the frequency and quantities of use. Typically, comprehensive national morbidity and mortality data on mental health conditions, substance use, associated hospitalizations, and substance-related overdose deaths take months to compile and report. Comprehensive national data for 2020 are not yet available. Several organizations, including multiple federal agencies, have used short surveys and rapid data reporting to monitor mental health symptoms and substance use during the COVID-19 pandemic. Although the methodological differences between these surveys and perennial surveys make comparisons between years imperfect, most of the 2020 data suggest an increase in behavioral health morbidity in the United States over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. Mental Health Data collected from multiple surveys during the COVID-19 pandemic suggest that Americans experienced increased stress and symptoms of mental health conditions. In a survey conducted in April 2020, the State Health Access Data Assistance Center (SHADAC)—a program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation—found that over 90% of U.S. adults reported experiencing additional levels of stress caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. In this context, stress refers to psychological stress, which occurs when individuals believe that the consequences of a situation outweigh their ability to adequately cope with it. Reactions to stressors may include fear and concern about the future, tension and irritability, sadness or depression, or feeling powerless or overwhelmed, among others. Without adequate coping strategies, stress can have detrimental effects on mental health. Coping strategies include any behavioral, social, or cognitive techniques used to mitigate the effects of stress. Coping strategies can be adaptive, meaning they promote better overall functioning (e.g., social connections, physical activities, hobbies, good sleep hygiene), or they can be maladaptive, meaning they are more likely to result in worse overall functioning (e.g., substance use, excessive screen time, risky behaviors). Although maladaptive coping strategies may reduce stress in the moment, they may exacerbate problems in the long term. Many individuals experiencing stress may have adequate coping strategies, meaning that stress is present but does not impair their daily functioning. For others, stress—and in particular stress caused by the pandemic—may have detrimental effects on their mental health. A nationally representative survey conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) throughout the pandemic found that an increasing number of Americans reported that pandemic-related stress was affecting their mental health. In March 2020, 32% of respondents felt that worry or stress related to coronavirus had a negative impact on their mental health. In April 2020 that number rose to 45%, and in July 2020, 53% reported that pandemic-related stress was affecting their mental health. Mental Health Disorders In some cases, extreme or prolonged stress can lead to mental health disorders. According to data collected by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), the percentage of Americans experiencing symptoms of a mental health disorder appears to have increased during the COVID19 pandemic. NCHS—a research agency under the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)—partnered with the U.S. Census Bureau on the Household Pulse Survey to monitor the social and economic effects of the pandemic on American households. The nationally representative survey collected data on employment status, food security, housing, physical and mental health, access to health care (including mental health care), and education disruption during the coronavirus pandemic. NCHS survey questions were designed to obtain information on the frequency of anxiety and depression symptoms. Other indicators of psychological distress appear elevated during the first phases of the pandemic. For example, CDC analysis of national emergency department (ED) visits showed that socioeconomic and psychosocial-related visits increased during April 2020 (compared with April 2019), while total ED visits decreased over 40%. Socioeconomic or psychosocial factors were one of a few categories of ED visits that increased; most of the 200 common diagnostic causes of ED visits decreased during that same time. Other research suggests that ED visits for mental health conditions may have decreased during the first few months of the pandemic, to a lesser extent than overall ED visits. Suicide Some evidence suggests that suicidal thoughts may have increased during the pandemic. One CDC analysis found that during the pandemic approximately twice as many U.S. adults reported serious consideration of suicide in the previous 30 days compared with 2018 (10.7% versus4.3%). Although the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline did not report increases in call volume, the Disaster Distress Helpline (part of the Suicide Lifeline) experienced a 335% increase in calls during the first five months of the pandemic. The effects of the pandemic on suicide attempts and suicide deaths is unclear, though it appears that suicide mortality has decreased compared with previous years. An increase in suicidal thoughts does not necessarily equate to an increase in suicide attempts or suicide deaths. Research from CDC shows a decrease in emergency department (ED) visits for suicide attempts between March and October 2020 compared with the same period in 2019, but to a lesser extent than overall ED visits. Preliminary national suicide mortality data in the United States for 2020 show that suicide deaths in the United States may have decreased in 2020 compared with the three previous years. In addition, regional differences may account for changes in suicide mortality. For example, some individual states and municipalities have reported stable rates in suicide deaths during the pandemic, whereas others have reported decreased rates. There may be demographic differences in suicide rates during the pandemic also. For example, CDC reported that in May 2020 ED visits for suspected suicide attempts began to increase among adolescents, especially girls. Researchers in Maryland found that suicide mortality rates increased for Black residents from March 2020 to May 2020, while decreasing for White residents over that same time. Substance Use-Related Overdoses Comprehensive national data on drug-related overdoses and overdose deaths during the pandemic are not yet available. Preliminary data from the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) suggest increases in drug-related overdoses during the first few months of the pandemic. The Overdose Detection Mapping Application Program (ODMAP), an ONDCP surveillance system that tracks suspected overdose data nationally in near real-time, reported an increase of 11% in fatal overdoses and a 19% increase in nonfatal overdoses from March through May 2020 compared with the same months in 2019. Nearly 62% of participating counties reported increases from March to May 2020. Other areas have reported stable rates of overdose deaths. Notably, ODMAP overdose submissions appeared to be trending upward prior to the onset of the pandemic, making it difficult to determine the effects of the pandemic and mitigation measures using these data. CDC also noted an increase in drug-related overdose deaths in the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Similar to the ODMAP data, the CDC data showed that overdose deaths were already increasing in the months preceding the pandemic. However, CDC data showed the rate of overdose deaths accelerating after the pandemic began. In an analysis of provisional CDC mortality data, the National Institute for Health Care Management found that the rise is particularly notable for deaths involving synthetic opioids. In addition, the institute reported increases in deaths involving commonly prescribed opioids and heroin—both of which had been declining in recent years. When examining emergency department (ED) visits, CDC found a higher number of drug overdoses—including opioid overdoses—between March and October 2020 compared with the same period in 2019. Put together, the ODMAP and CDC data suggest that drug-related overdoses and overdose deaths have increased during the COVID-19 pandemic. Individuals with substance use disorders may be at higher risk of contracting SARS-CoV-2 due to unstable housing situations, high incarceration rates, or the inability to physically distance themselves. In addition, those with substance use disorders may be at higher risk for complications of COVID-19 because substance use can often suppress the immune system or inhibit respiratory functioning. Please give a summary of how Covid19 has affected behavior health.

<TASK DESCRIPTION> Only use the provided text to answer the question, no outside sources. <QUESTION> [user request] <TEXT> [context document]

I live in Osceola County, and I intend to open a bottle club where I will serve alcoholic drinks and beverages. This text contains the rules that apply. My neighbor told me that I need to close the club at midnight on Saturday and Sunday, even though these are the busiest times of the nightlife. I don't want to close my bottle club at midnight! I also want you to give me a summary in list format with all the information that might be relevant. Write no more than 150 words.

Chapter 3 - ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGES[1] Footnotes: --- (1) --- Editor's note— Ord. No. 02-06, § 1—6, adopted April 8, 2002, repealed ch. 3 in its entirety and enacted new provisions as herein set out. Formerly, ch. 3 pertained to similar provisions and derived from Ord. No. 71-8, §§ 1—4, and Ord. No. 78-7, §§ 1, 2. Cross reference— Licenses, taxation and miscellaneous business regulations, Ch. 13; adult entertainment centers, § 13-86 et seq.; open containers of alcohol in vehicles, § 14-1. Sec. 3-1. - Jurisdiction and scope. (a)This chapter shall apply to, and be effective within, the unincorporated areas of the county and any municipality which has not adopted an ordinance covering the subject matter, activity, or conduct regulated herein.(b)Any person violating this chapter shall be guilty of a misdemeanor of the second degree, punishable as provided under state law.(c)Nothing in this chapter shall be construed to conflict with F.S. chapters 561—568, the beverage laws of the state. (Ord. No. 02-06, § 1, 4-8-02) Sec. 3-2. - Definitions. Alcoholic beverage shall mean and include all beverages containing more than one (1) percent of alcohol by weight. Bottle club shall mean a place or establishment where a product or article, for a consideration, is sold, dispensed, served, or provided, with the knowledge, either actual or implied, that same will be or is intended to be mixed, combined with or drunk in connection or combination with, an alcoholic beverage, for consumption on the premises of said place or establishment. (Ord. No. 02-06, § 2, 4-8-02) Sec. 3-3. - Hours of sale for on premise consumption and service. (a)No alcoholic beverages, of any kind, may be sold, consumed, or served, either by the package or drink, or permitted to be sold, consumed, or served, either by the package or drink, in, at or on the premises of any place holding a license under the division of alcoholic beverages and tobacco of the state department of business and professional regulation, except between the hours of 7:00 a.m. and 2:00 a.m. on all days of the week except Sunday. Sunday sales of alcoholic beverages shall only be permitted between the hours of 11:00 a.m. Sunday and 2:00 a.m. of the following day except:(1)The sale, consumption and service of alcoholic beverages at any golf course holding a license as required above, may begin at 7:00 a.m. on Sunday.(2)The sale, consumption and service of alcoholic beverages at any private function which is being held at a banquet hall, convention facility, or the like, which holds a license as required above, may begin at 7:00 a.m. on Sunday, provided that the hall or facility has a minimum square footage of two thousand (10,000) square feet available for the private function.(3)The sale, consumption and service of alcoholic beverages in any private guest room of any hotel or motel, holding a license as required above, may begin at 7:00 a.m. on Sunday. (Ord. No. 02-06, § 3, 4-8-02) Sec. 3-4. - Hours of sale for off premise consumption. No alcoholic beverages of any kind may be sold, or permitted to be sold, by any place or establishment holding a license under the division of alcoholic beverages and tobacco of the state department of business and professional regulation, which license permits licensee to sell alcoholic beverages for consumption off of the premises of the licensee, except between the hours of 7:00 a.m. and 2:00 a.m. on all days of the week except Sunday. Sunday sales of alcoholic beverages, to be consumed off of the premises of the licensee, shall only be permitted between the hours of 9:00 a.m. Sunday and 2:00 a.m. of the following day. (Ord. No. 02-06, § 4, 4-8-02) Sec. 3-5. - Closing hours for bottle clubs. All bottle clubs located in the unincorporated areas of the county, shall remain closed from the hours of 3:00 a.m. to 7:00 a.m. on each day of the week except that all such bottle clubs shall remain closed from midnight on each Saturday until 7:00 a.m. on the following Monday. (Ord. No. 02-06, § 5, 4-8-02)

<TASK DESCRIPTION> Only use the provided text to answer the question, no outside sources. <QUESTION> I live in Osceola County, and I intend to open a bottle club where I will serve alcoholic drinks and beverages. This text contains the rules that apply. My neighbor told me that I need to close the club at midnight on Saturday and Sunday, even though these are the busiest times of the nightlife. I don't want to close my bottle club at midnight! I also want you to give me a summary in list format with all the information that might be relevant. Write no more than 150 words. <TEXT> Chapter 3 - ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGES[1] Footnotes: --- (1) --- Editor's note— Ord. No. 02-06, § 1—6, adopted April 8, 2002, repealed ch. 3 in its entirety and enacted new provisions as herein set out. Formerly, ch. 3 pertained to similar provisions and derived from Ord. No. 71-8, §§ 1—4, and Ord. No. 78-7, §§ 1, 2. Cross reference— Licenses, taxation and miscellaneous business regulations, Ch. 13; adult entertainment centers, § 13-86 et seq.; open containers of alcohol in vehicles, § 14-1. Sec. 3-1. - Jurisdiction and scope. (a)This chapter shall apply to, and be effective within, the unincorporated areas of the county and any municipality which has not adopted an ordinance covering the subject matter, activity, or conduct regulated herein.(b)Any person violating this chapter shall be guilty of a misdemeanor of the second degree, punishable as provided under state law.(c)Nothing in this chapter shall be construed to conflict with F.S. chapters 561—568, the beverage laws of the state. (Ord. No. 02-06, § 1, 4-8-02) Sec. 3-2. - Definitions. Alcoholic beverage shall mean and include all beverages containing more than one (1) percent of alcohol by weight. Bottle club shall mean a place or establishment where a product or article, for a consideration, is sold, dispensed, served, or provided, with the knowledge, either actual or implied, that same will be or is intended to be mixed, combined with or drunk in connection or combination with, an alcoholic beverage, for consumption on the premises of said place or establishment. (Ord. No. 02-06, § 2, 4-8-02) Sec. 3-3. - Hours of sale for on premise consumption and service. (a)No alcoholic beverages, of any kind, may be sold, consumed, or served, either by the package or drink, or permitted to be sold, consumed, or served, either by the package or drink, in, at or on the premises of any place holding a license under the division of alcoholic beverages and tobacco of the state department of business and professional regulation, except between the hours of 7:00 a.m. and 2:00 a.m. on all days of the week except Sunday. Sunday sales of alcoholic beverages shall only be permitted between the hours of 11:00 a.m. Sunday and 2:00 a.m. of the following day except:(1)The sale, consumption and service of alcoholic beverages at any golf course holding a license as required above, may begin at 7:00 a.m. on Sunday.(2)The sale, consumption and service of alcoholic beverages at any private function which is being held at a banquet hall, convention facility, or the like, which holds a license as required above, may begin at 7:00 a.m. on Sunday, provided that the hall or facility has a minimum square footage of two thousand (10,000) square feet available for the private function.(3)The sale, consumption and service of alcoholic beverages in any private guest room of any hotel or motel, holding a license as required above, may begin at 7:00 a.m. on Sunday. (Ord. No. 02-06, § 3, 4-8-02) Sec. 3-4. - Hours of sale for off premise consumption. No alcoholic beverages of any kind may be sold, or permitted to be sold, by any place or establishment holding a license under the division of alcoholic beverages and tobacco of the state department of business and professional regulation, which license permits licensee to sell alcoholic beverages for consumption off of the premises of the licensee, except between the hours of 7:00 a.m. and 2:00 a.m. on all days of the week except Sunday. Sunday sales of alcoholic beverages, to be consumed off of the premises of the licensee, shall only be permitted between the hours of 9:00 a.m. Sunday and 2:00 a.m. of the following day. (Ord. No. 02-06, § 4, 4-8-02) Sec. 3-5. - Closing hours for bottle clubs. All bottle clubs located in the unincorporated areas of the county, shall remain closed from the hours of 3:00 a.m. to 7:00 a.m. on each day of the week except that all such bottle clubs shall remain closed from midnight on each Saturday until 7:00 a.m. on the following Monday. (Ord. No. 02-06, § 5, 4-8-02) https://library.municode.com/fl/osceola_county/codes/code_of_ordinances?nodeId=PTIIOSCOCOOR_CH3ALBE_S3-1JUSC

Provide your answer in full sentences, referencing the document using quotations.

According to this document only, what is the specific impacts of internet use on children?

**Are Children Smarter Because of the Internet? Website** Modern children and the adolescents represent the first generation that has grown surrounded by the Internet technology. This can be compared to the children of the 1920s and 1950s who grew up surrounded by the buzz of the radio and television respectively. In this era of advanced technology, it is almost mandatory that school going children acquire the knowledge on internet use because education curricula are quickly transforming towards technology use. Furthermore, with the widespread use of tech-related gadgets in almost all activities, such as mobile phones, play- stations and many others in day to day life, it seems embracing of technology is a foregone conclusion . This paper will aspire to explore the question on whether children are smarter or more socialized due to the Internet. Internet Use among Children The use of internet among children today is ranked in the same category with watching television or using the phone. In developed countries, up to 87% of children aged between twelve and seventeen are online. The internet is however better in comparison to the others due to the platform it offers to enhance interaction. According to a study conducted by Genevieve Marie Johnson, it was found out that children were likely to use Internet more at school than at home. However, they enjoyed using the Internet at home more than at school . Children perceive the use of Internet in a different perspective compared to adults. There is no doubt that the Internet has a significant influence on children. Impact of Internet Use The Internet is used both at school and at home by children. At school, the children’s Internet use is governed by the children’s Internet Protection Act (Yan, 2006). The children’s use of Internet is associated with various risks despite being beneficial is some ways. Parents and guardians need to implement various strategies that favor co-use and interaction rules to children to reduce the risk associated with Internet use among children. However, these strategies were found to be less effective in limiting the risks. In a study conducted regarding the influence of the Internet on children from low income families, it was indicated that children who had access to the Internet recorded high scores compared to those who had limited access to the Internet. It was also found out that age did not have an impact on the performance of the children. Another study conducted on the influence of Internet use by the children on family relationships and parental mediation established that parental recommendations on useful websites and co-using were positively associated with the frequency with children would engage in educative, online activities. Nevertheless, it was found that parental restrictions on time and websites did not impact on the actual Internet use by children. Children are difficult to tame when it comes to unsafe Internet use. It has been established that unsafe Internet use among children is likely to occur within the homes. With the Internet, it is possible to form virtual relationships among various people. In a study that was conducted by Bonetti, Campbell and Gilmore (2010), it was revealed that children who were lonely engaged more in online communications than those who did not report being lonely. Through the Internet, such children are able to fulfill special needs in respect to social interactions, self exposure, and exploring their identity. In a study conducted among the Latino children in Los Angeles, it was observed that strict parental strategies limited children in respect to Internet use. Nevertheless, these children were able to pursue their own interests and motivations online though on a restricted level. The Internet has had far-reaching impacts on the society in general and children have not been spared. From the studies that have been conducted, it can be observed that though parents have been restrictive in allowing access of their children to the Internet, this has come with various challenges. The children have always had a way to access Internet and parents have been left with very little in controlling what the children access. In general, this young generation seems to be inseparable with the internet. Much as some are opposed to internet use among children, the benefits accrued from its use surpass the negative impacts especially when used in controlled environments. Based on numerous studies by academics and social experts, it is clear that the use of internet has provided a chance for children to acquire a wide range of knowledge through easy access to information compared to the scenario in the past where information sources were quite limited. Internet also provides a perfect platform for children to gain vital communication skills that in turn enhance social development. Psychology experts have identified a link between constructive use of internet and student performance in school particularly in language expressivity. Children access information by visiting websites and this enhances their learning skills. The internet also makes learning an enjoyable experience because most websites contain graphics that effectively capture children’s’ imagination and creativity. This is important in stimulating the functioning of their brains and transforming them into effective learners. The process of acquiring the information from the internet is also vital in a child’s developmental skills such as information evaluation, research techniques as well as work planning strategies. Children with prowess in internet gaming demonstrate better levels of visual memory and pattern recognition when compared to those who did not. This has a positive impact on their ability to interpret graphical data and enhanced diagram visualization and interpretation. From the data collected by Jennifer Bremmer from Chicago University; department of Child Psychiatry, up to 84% of parents interviewed, agreed that internet use has had a positive impact on their children’s school life and particularly in academics. Eighty one percent of the respondents said that their children acquired most of their information from the internet. Majority of those interviewed said they felt that without the internet their children would perform poorly. According to government budgetary allocations of the United States in 2000, $4 billion was dedicated for connecting students to internet, a clear indication of the government’s commitment towards use of technology in education. The internet also gives access to more up-dated information compared to books, thus improving on the child’s vocabulary in the offered curriculum and in the research projects. The One Child One Laptop project in Africa is expected to give African children an opportunity to access world wide information and be able to effectively contribute their ideas on a world platform. This could also create a chance for them to earn a living as they mature since they can work on- line and link up with other people in the world. Based on the scientific background information on stimulation and response, it can be conclusively deduced that the use of internet by growing children has a positive effect on their development. The prolonged use of computer while searching for information from the internet could improve the coordination patterns of eye and hand through the use of the mouse, keyboard and screen. Though no specific research has been done on this phenomenon, it’s scientifically proven that habits enhance brain development and the associated physical development. The use of internet also has a social dimension. Antagonists on internet use argue that it has replaced human interactions. On the other hand, the protagonists claim that with professional use, internet use can be a medium to enhance this interaction. The use of the chat rooms, email services and other communication platforms available on the internet, are believed to enhance social skills alongside communication skills. Social and culture exchanges among young children has been enhanced through the internet mailing facility and through the available social sites such as Face book and Twitter. Children get an opportunity to interact in educative and productive communication. A perfect example is the Spank Magazine, which gives a platform for world wide interactions on youth issues where any one can interact and communicate their ideas for free. Social studies analysts have shown that the use of internet by school going children in class work has a marked positive impact on their performance. This has been linked to the fun associated with learning using the internet. The use of internet also enhances cooperation and sharing of ideas among the children, a vital life skill. Studies have indicated improved performances in many pupils using internet as a learning tool, and who initially had difficulties in using the conventional learning models. This in turn, positively influences their attitude toward school works as among other reasons it gives the students a relatively independent environment for learning and interaction. The internet has become a tool of entertainment. Research on internet use has shown that many children use it as a leisure tool to pursue amusement and enjoyment. The family set ups today are more individualized and physical interactions among children mostly at home is limited to a certain extent. Such children resort to internet for companionship. Through the process of enjoying themselves, they are subconsciously benefiting by acquiring other skills such as analyzing skills, creative and critical thinking leading to improved understanding of concepts. Children are also molded socially by the Internet through listening to music, watching movies and documentaries, world news and any other entertainment features. This makes the children smarter on issues happening in the world and prepares them for more networking in the social world. Internet also provides children with physical impairment, an opportunity to find pleasure they may not acquire anywhere else due to their disabilities. The experts’ research data explained above clearly indicates that, yes, internet is useful and almost a basic necessity for today’s school going children, however; on the other hand, utmost care must be observed since uncontrolled use of the internet has been reported to have negative impacts on the children. As is the norm, everything that has benefits comes along with challenges as well. Social psychologists have revealed several negative impacts of internet use on the social, physical and cognitive spheres of their life. Information fatigue syndrome is among the most common and comes as a result of reading and analyzing too much information from the internet.

[text] ========== **Are Children Smarter Because of the Internet? Website** Modern children and the adolescents represent the first generation that has grown surrounded by the Internet technology. This can be compared to the children of the 1920s and 1950s who grew up surrounded by the buzz of the radio and television respectively. In this era of advanced technology, it is almost mandatory that school going children acquire the knowledge on internet use because education curricula are quickly transforming towards technology use. Furthermore, with the widespread use of tech-related gadgets in almost all activities, such as mobile phones, play- stations and many others in day to day life, it seems embracing of technology is a foregone conclusion . This paper will aspire to explore the question on whether children are smarter or more socialized due to the Internet. Internet Use among Children The use of internet among children today is ranked in the same category with watching television or using the phone. In developed countries, up to 87% of children aged between twelve and seventeen are online. The internet is however better in comparison to the others due to the platform it offers to enhance interaction. According to a study conducted by Genevieve Marie Johnson, it was found out that children were likely to use Internet more at school than at home. However, they enjoyed using the Internet at home more than at school . Children perceive the use of Internet in a different perspective compared to adults. There is no doubt that the Internet has a significant influence on children. Impact of Internet Use The Internet is used both at school and at home by children. At school, the children’s Internet use is governed by the children’s Internet Protection Act (Yan, 2006). The children’s use of Internet is associated with various risks despite being beneficial is some ways. Parents and guardians need to implement various strategies that favor co-use and interaction rules to children to reduce the risk associated with Internet use among children. However, these strategies were found to be less effective in limiting the risks. In a study conducted regarding the influence of the Internet on children from low income families, it was indicated that children who had access to the Internet recorded high scores compared to those who had limited access to the Internet. It was also found out that age did not have an impact on the performance of the children. Another study conducted on the influence of Internet use by the children on family relationships and parental mediation established that parental recommendations on useful websites and co-using were positively associated with the frequency with children would engage in educative, online activities. Nevertheless, it was found that parental restrictions on time and websites did not impact on the actual Internet use by children. Children are difficult to tame when it comes to unsafe Internet use. It has been established that unsafe Internet use among children is likely to occur within the homes. With the Internet, it is possible to form virtual relationships among various people. In a study that was conducted by Bonetti, Campbell and Gilmore (2010), it was revealed that children who were lonely engaged more in online communications than those who did not report being lonely. Through the Internet, such children are able to fulfill special needs in respect to social interactions, self exposure, and exploring their identity. In a study conducted among the Latino children in Los Angeles, it was observed that strict parental strategies limited children in respect to Internet use. Nevertheless, these children were able to pursue their own interests and motivations online though on a restricted level. The Internet has had far-reaching impacts on the society in general and children have not been spared. From the studies that have been conducted, it can be observed that though parents have been restrictive in allowing access of their children to the Internet, this has come with various challenges. The children have always had a way to access Internet and parents have been left with very little in controlling what the children access. In general, this young generation seems to be inseparable with the internet. Much as some are opposed to internet use among children, the benefits accrued from its use surpass the negative impacts especially when used in controlled environments. Based on numerous studies by academics and social experts, it is clear that the use of internet has provided a chance for children to acquire a wide range of knowledge through easy access to information compared to the scenario in the past where information sources were quite limited. Internet also provides a perfect platform for children to gain vital communication skills that in turn enhance social development. Psychology experts have identified a link between constructive use of internet and student performance in school particularly in language expressivity. Children access information by visiting websites and this enhances their learning skills. The internet also makes learning an enjoyable experience because most websites contain graphics that effectively capture children’s’ imagination and creativity. This is important in stimulating the functioning of their brains and transforming them into effective learners. The process of acquiring the information from the internet is also vital in a child’s developmental skills such as information evaluation, research techniques as well as work planning strategies. Children with prowess in internet gaming demonstrate better levels of visual memory and pattern recognition when compared to those who did not. This has a positive impact on their ability to interpret graphical data and enhanced diagram visualization and interpretation. From the data collected by Jennifer Bremmer from Chicago University; department of Child Psychiatry, up to 84% of parents interviewed, agreed that internet use has had a positive impact on their children’s school life and particularly in academics. Eighty one percent of the respondents said that their children acquired most of their information from the internet. Majority of those interviewed said they felt that without the internet their children would perform poorly. According to government budgetary allocations of the United States in 2000, $4 billion was dedicated for connecting students to internet, a clear indication of the government’s commitment towards use of technology in education. The internet also gives access to more up-dated information compared to books, thus improving on the child’s vocabulary in the offered curriculum and in the research projects. The One Child One Laptop project in Africa is expected to give African children an opportunity to access world wide information and be able to effectively contribute their ideas on a world platform. This could also create a chance for them to earn a living as they mature since they can work on- line and link up with other people in the world. Based on the scientific background information on stimulation and response, it can be conclusively deduced that the use of internet by growing children has a positive effect on their development. The prolonged use of computer while searching for information from the internet could improve the coordination patterns of eye and hand through the use of the mouse, keyboard and screen. Though no specific research has been done on this phenomenon, it’s scientifically proven that habits enhance brain development and the associated physical development. The use of internet also has a social dimension. Antagonists on internet use argue that it has replaced human interactions. On the other hand, the protagonists claim that with professional use, internet use can be a medium to enhance this interaction. The use of the chat rooms, email services and other communication platforms available on the internet, are believed to enhance social skills alongside communication skills. Social and culture exchanges among young children has been enhanced through the internet mailing facility and through the available social sites such as Face book and Twitter. Children get an opportunity to interact in educative and productive communication. A perfect example is the Spank Magazine, which gives a platform for world wide interactions on youth issues where any one can interact and communicate their ideas for free. Social studies analysts have shown that the use of internet by school going children in class work has a marked positive impact on their performance. This has been linked to the fun associated with learning using the internet. The use of internet also enhances cooperation and sharing of ideas among the children, a vital life skill. Studies have indicated improved performances in many pupils using internet as a learning tool, and who initially had difficulties in using the conventional learning models. This in turn, positively influences their attitude toward school works as among other reasons it gives the students a relatively independent environment for learning and interaction. The internet has become a tool of entertainment. Research on internet use has shown that many children use it as a leisure tool to pursue amusement and enjoyment. The family set ups today are more individualized and physical interactions among children mostly at home is limited to a certain extent. Such children resort to internet for companionship. Through the process of enjoying themselves, they are subconsciously benefiting by acquiring other skills such as analyzing skills, creative and critical thinking leading to improved understanding of concepts. Children are also molded socially by the Internet through listening to music, watching movies and documentaries, world news and any other entertainment features. This makes the children smarter on issues happening in the world and prepares them for more networking in the social world. Internet also provides children with physical impairment, an opportunity to find pleasure they may not acquire anywhere else due to their disabilities. The experts’ research data explained above clearly indicates that, yes, internet is useful and almost a basic necessity for today’s school going children, however; on the other hand, utmost care must be observed since uncontrolled use of the internet has been reported to have negative impacts on the children. As is the norm, everything that has benefits comes along with challenges as well. Social psychologists have revealed several negative impacts of internet use on the social, physical and cognitive spheres of their life. Information fatigue syndrome is among the most common and comes as a result of reading and analyzing too much information from the internet. ---------------- [query] ========== According to this document only, what is the specific impacts of internet use on children? ---------------- [task instructions] ========== Provide your answer in full sentences, referencing the document using quotations.

<TASK DESCRIPTION> Only use the provided text to answer the question, no outside sources. <QUESTION> [user request] <TEXT> [context document]

I would like a policy analysis based on this article. I will need you to focus more on the EV parts so make sure to be more detailed on those.

The Canadian government is imposing a 100 per cent tariff on imports of Chinese-made electric vehicles (EVs), aluminum and steel. The announcement, made by Department of Finance Canada during the Liberal cabinet retreat in Halifax on Monday, follows a 30-day federal consultation period that began in July. The move reflects the government’s growing concerns over China’s trade practices in the EV sector. It aims to address issues related to unfair competition, labour and environmental standards and national security over data. “Canadian workers and critical sectors, including steel and aluminum…are facing an intentional, state-directed policy of overcapacity, undermining Canada’s ability to compete in domestic and global markets,” says Chrystia Freeland, deputy prime minister and minister of finance, in a statement. “That is why our government is moving forward with decisive action to level the playing field, protect Canadian workers, and match measures taken by key trading partners.” The tariffs will take effect on October 1. The EV-related tarrif will apply to a range of vehicles, including electric and certain hybrid passenger vehicles, trucks, buses and delivery vans. The new surtax will be added on top of the existing 6.1 per cent Most-Favoured Nation import tariff already in place for EVs produced in China. In addition to the tariffs on EVs, Canada is imposing a 25 per cent tariff on Chinese steel and aluminum. The government is also taking steps to limit the eligibility of Chinese-made EVs for federal incentives, such as the Incentives for Zero-Emission Vehicles, Medium- and Heavy-Duty Zero-Emission Vehicles, and the Zero-Emission Vehicle Infrastructure Program. Chinese-made cars in Canada The automakers likely to face the most immediate impact from the new EV tariff are Tesla and Polestar, both of which currently sell Chinese-made EVs in Canada. According to federal lobbyist registry documents, Tesla updated its lobbying goals in August (just days before the government’s announcement) to include efforts to “engage with government and provide guidance with regard to policy responses to China’s automotive trade practices, in an effort to protect Canada’s automotive sector, ensure electric vehicle affordability for Canadian consumers, and the achievement of Canada’s greenhouse gas reduction objectives.” (Latest data released by Transport Canada show that Tesla is leading in iZEV rebate claims, with 4,826 in May and a total of 20,293 claims in 2024, so far.) Another automaker that may face negative effects from the sanctions is China’s largest EV manufacturer, BYD. Earlier this month, lobbyist documents revealed BYD’s plans to enter the Canadian electric passenger vehicle market. The new tariffs will potentially complicate the company’s expansion plans here due to increased costs associated with importing Chinese-made vehicles. Elsewhere, BYD’s market strategy has already been influenced by tariffs. In May, the Biden Administration imposed a 100 per cent tariff on Chinese-made EVs, as well as tariffs on advanced batteries, solar cells, steel and aluminum. BYD’s Executive Vice President and CEO of BYD Americas, Stella Li, has previously stated that the company had no plans to enter the U.S. market because of political complications. Europe’s stance on Chinese-made EVs is similar to both Canada and U.S. Last week, the European Commission announced new tariff rates as part of an ongoing investigation into Chinese electric car subsidies. These tariffs, ranging from nine per cent to 36.3 per cent, are slightly lower than the initially proposed range of 17.4 per cent to 38.1 per cent in June. Mixed reactions The announcement of the new tariffs was positively welcomed by Canada’s auto industry and labour unions. “Given the highly integrated nature of the automotive industry across North America, alignment with the U.S. on the approach to China is fundamental to its continued success,” said Brian Kingston, president & CEO of the Canadian Vehicle Manufacturers’ Association, in a press statement. “With an upcoming review of the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement in 2026 there is simply too much at stake for the automotive industry and the broader economy if Canada is misaligned.” Unifor, the largest private-sector union in Canada, also supports the tariffs, stressing the need to protect Canadian workers and build a forward-looking auto industry that provides “good union jobs” and “economic benefits.” “Canada can and must protect auto and manufacturing jobs here in this country, which thousands of workers rely on for their livelihoods,” said Unifor National president, Lana Payne. “There is no justification to trade away high-paying, high-skilled jobs for cheap high-carbon intensive vehicles built under deplorable working conditions. However, not all groups are in favour of tariffs. Clean Energy Canada raised concerns that the decision could lead to fewer affordable electric vehicles for Canadians, reduced competition and increased climate pollution. “Strong EV demand depends on building and offering EVs that Canadians want — and can afford. If Canadian EV sales drop as a result of the new measures, this might be used as a justification for cancelling, delaying, or downgrading EV ambitions and, ironically, further delaying the domestic production they’re meant to protect.” Clean Energy Canada suggests the federal government complement its trade measures with an EV affordability package, including extending the iZEV program until 2028, lowering the price cap on rebates to $50,000 to compel automakers to drop their EV prices below the cap and introducing rebates for used EVs. More consultations coming The federal government says it will review the tariffs on Chinese-made EVs, aluminum and steel within a year of implementation, with the possibility of extending the policy or introducing additional measures, if necessary. The Canadian government is also concerned that China’s non-market practices are jeopardizing other key sectors within Canada’s EV supply chain, including batteries, semiconductors, solar products and critical minerals. In 2023, China’s battery production alone was enough to meet global demand, according to BloombergNEF. The International Energy Agency reports that China dominates the processing of critical minerals and handles over half of the world’s lithium, cobalt, graphite and rare earth elements. Barclays projects that China’s semiconductor manufacturing capacity could more than double within five to seven years, potentially leading to market oversupply by 2026. In response to these developments, the Government of Canada is launching a second 30-day consultation focused on the vital sectors of batteries, semiconductors, solar products and critical minerals.

<TASK DESCRIPTION> Only use the provided text to answer the question, no outside sources. <QUESTION> I would like a policy analysis based on this article. I will need you to focus more on the EV parts so make sure to be more detailed on those. <TEXT> The Canadian government is imposing a 100 per cent tariff on imports of Chinese-made electric vehicles (EVs), aluminum and steel. The announcement, made by Department of Finance Canada during the Liberal cabinet retreat in Halifax on Monday, follows a 30-day federal consultation period that began in July. The move reflects the government’s growing concerns over China’s trade practices in the EV sector. It aims to address issues related to unfair competition, labour and environmental standards and national security over data. “Canadian workers and critical sectors, including steel and aluminum…are facing an intentional, state-directed policy of overcapacity, undermining Canada’s ability to compete in domestic and global markets,” says Chrystia Freeland, deputy prime minister and minister of finance, in a statement. “That is why our government is moving forward with decisive action to level the playing field, protect Canadian workers, and match measures taken by key trading partners.” The tariffs will take effect on October 1. The EV-related tarrif will apply to a range of vehicles, including electric and certain hybrid passenger vehicles, trucks, buses and delivery vans. The new surtax will be added on top of the existing 6.1 per cent Most-Favoured Nation import tariff already in place for EVs produced in China. In addition to the tariffs on EVs, Canada is imposing a 25 per cent tariff on Chinese steel and aluminum. The government is also taking steps to limit the eligibility of Chinese-made EVs for federal incentives, such as the Incentives for Zero-Emission Vehicles, Medium- and Heavy-Duty Zero-Emission Vehicles, and the Zero-Emission Vehicle Infrastructure Program. Chinese-made cars in Canada The automakers likely to face the most immediate impact from the new EV tariff are Tesla and Polestar, both of which currently sell Chinese-made EVs in Canada. According to federal lobbyist registry documents, Tesla updated its lobbying goals in August (just days before the government’s announcement) to include efforts to “engage with government and provide guidance with regard to policy responses to China’s automotive trade practices, in an effort to protect Canada’s automotive sector, ensure electric vehicle affordability for Canadian consumers, and the achievement of Canada’s greenhouse gas reduction objectives.” (Latest data released by Transport Canada show that Tesla is leading in iZEV rebate claims, with 4,826 in May and a total of 20,293 claims in 2024, so far.) Another automaker that may face negative effects from the sanctions is China’s largest EV manufacturer, BYD. Earlier this month, lobbyist documents revealed BYD’s plans to enter the Canadian electric passenger vehicle market. The new tariffs will potentially complicate the company’s expansion plans here due to increased costs associated with importing Chinese-made vehicles. Elsewhere, BYD’s market strategy has already been influenced by tariffs. In May, the Biden Administration imposed a 100 per cent tariff on Chinese-made EVs, as well as tariffs on advanced batteries, solar cells, steel and aluminum. BYD’s Executive Vice President and CEO of BYD Americas, Stella Li, has previously stated that the company had no plans to enter the U.S. market because of political complications. Europe’s stance on Chinese-made EVs is similar to both Canada and U.S. Last week, the European Commission announced new tariff rates as part of an ongoing investigation into Chinese electric car subsidies. These tariffs, ranging from nine per cent to 36.3 per cent, are slightly lower than the initially proposed range of 17.4 per cent to 38.1 per cent in June. Mixed reactions The announcement of the new tariffs was positively welcomed by Canada’s auto industry and labour unions. “Given the highly integrated nature of the automotive industry across North America, alignment with the U.S. on the approach to China is fundamental to its continued success,” said Brian Kingston, president & CEO of the Canadian Vehicle Manufacturers’ Association, in a press statement. “With an upcoming review of the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement in 2026 there is simply too much at stake for the automotive industry and the broader economy if Canada is misaligned.” Unifor, the largest private-sector union in Canada, also supports the tariffs, stressing the need to protect Canadian workers and build a forward-looking auto industry that provides “good union jobs” and “economic benefits.” “Canada can and must protect auto and manufacturing jobs here in this country, which thousands of workers rely on for their livelihoods,” said Unifor National president, Lana Payne. “There is no justification to trade away high-paying, high-skilled jobs for cheap high-carbon intensive vehicles built under deplorable working conditions. However, not all groups are in favour of tariffs. Clean Energy Canada raised concerns that the decision could lead to fewer affordable electric vehicles for Canadians, reduced competition and increased climate pollution. “Strong EV demand depends on building and offering EVs that Canadians want — and can afford. If Canadian EV sales drop as a result of the new measures, this might be used as a justification for cancelling, delaying, or downgrading EV ambitions and, ironically, further delaying the domestic production they’re meant to protect.” Clean Energy Canada suggests the federal government complement its trade measures with an EV affordability package, including extending the iZEV program until 2028, lowering the price cap on rebates to $50,000 to compel automakers to drop their EV prices below the cap and introducing rebates for used EVs. More consultations coming The federal government says it will review the tariffs on Chinese-made EVs, aluminum and steel within a year of implementation, with the possibility of extending the policy or introducing additional measures, if necessary. The Canadian government is also concerned that China’s non-market practices are jeopardizing other key sectors within Canada’s EV supply chain, including batteries, semiconductors, solar products and critical minerals. In 2023, China’s battery production alone was enough to meet global demand, according to BloombergNEF. The International Energy Agency reports that China dominates the processing of critical minerals and handles over half of the world’s lithium, cobalt, graphite and rare earth elements. Barclays projects that China’s semiconductor manufacturing capacity could more than double within five to seven years, potentially leading to market oversupply by 2026. In response to these developments, the Government of Canada is launching a second 30-day consultation focused on the vital sectors of batteries, semiconductors, solar products and critical minerals. https://electricautonomy.ca/policy-regulations/2024-08-27/canada-imposes-tariffs-on-chinese-made-evs-aluminum-steel/

You must draw your answer from the below text. You may NOT use any outside resources. You may NOT use prior knowledge in any way.

How was the Falcon sensor relevant to this event?

The use of information technology (IT) across industries has created opportunities for disruptions and vulnerabilities in the supply chain for products and services. For example, some firms may be more susceptible to system failures, data breaches, and cyberattacks than others depending on the security of the IT systems used.1 Recent examples include the February 2024 cyberattack on Change Healthcare, a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group, Inc.,2 and a series of data breaches beginning in April 2024 that may have affected about 165 organizations using Snowflake, a cloud-based data management platform.3 The impact of these disruptions may be more widespread when components of IT systems are concentrated among a limited number of providers. On July 19, 2024, CrowdStrike Holdings, Inc. (hereinafter CrowdStrike) released a software update with a defective file for devices using the Windows operating system, causing some Windows devices to crash. CrowdStrike and Microsoft subsequently released updated safe files and recovery tools.4 Some users were able to fix the issue by rebooting impacted devices multiple times, while others had to take additional steps.5 CrowdStrike’s faulty update does not appear to be related to a cyberattack or data breach; instead, it is an example of the pervasiveness of some IT components and how an issue with an IT component may affect multiple sectors simultaneously, resulting in a host of disruptions domestically and internationally. This FAQ provides a description of CrowdStrike and the faulty update and discusses how the faulty update affected certain sectors in the United States. How did the faulty CrowdStrike update occur, and what is CrowdStrike? 6 CrowdStrike delivers cybersecurity products and services to its customers via a cloud computing platform—the Falcon platform.7 CrowdStrike, through its cloud-based platform, deploys and installs a software called the Falcon Agent or the Falcon Sensor on each connected endpoint device (e.g., individual computer) of its customers.8 On July 19, 2024, CrowdStrike released “a sensor configuration update” over the cloud to its customers’ endpoint computers that were running the Falcon sensor for Windows operating systems.9 The update “triggered a logic error resulting in a system crash and blue screen [error]” on impacted computers.10 Those computers that were online and downloaded the faulty update within a certain time period on that day “were susceptible to a system crash.”11 CrowdStrike’s faulty update does not appear to be related to a cyberattack or data breach. The outage occurred as part of the company’s effort to deliver its cybersecurity services. CrowdStrike claims that its cybersecurity products through the Falcon Agent can identify and prevent “known and unknown malware and fileless attacks” to protect its customers’ endpoint devices while “capturing and recording … endpoint data.”12 The cyberattack events and data captured by the agent are streamed back to the Falcon platform’s cloud infrastructure in real time “in order to be further analyzed” to optimize its cybersecurity algorithms.13 The agent can also be remotely reconfigured in real time to take other actions “as risk and threat postures change.”14 This agent is built to support major computer operating systems, including Microsoft’s Windows.15

You must draw your answer from the below text. You may NOT use any outside resources. You may NOT use prior knowledge in any way. The use of information technology (IT) across industries has created opportunities for disruptions and vulnerabilities in the supply chain for products and services. For example, some firms may be more susceptible to system failures, data breaches, and cyberattacks than others depending on the security of the IT systems used.1 Recent examples include the February 2024 cyberattack on Change Healthcare, a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group, Inc.,2 and a series of data breaches beginning in April 2024 that may have affected about 165 organizations using Snowflake, a cloud-based data management platform.3 The impact of these disruptions may be more widespread when components of IT systems are concentrated among a limited number of providers. On July 19, 2024, CrowdStrike Holdings, Inc. (hereinafter CrowdStrike) released a software update with a defective file for devices using the Windows operating system, causing some Windows devices to crash. CrowdStrike and Microsoft subsequently released updated safe files and recovery tools.4 Some users were able to fix the issue by rebooting impacted devices multiple times, while others had to take additional steps.5 CrowdStrike’s faulty update does not appear to be related to a cyberattack or data breach; instead, it is an example of the pervasiveness of some IT components and how an issue with an IT component may affect multiple sectors simultaneously, resulting in a host of disruptions domestically and internationally. This FAQ provides a description of CrowdStrike and the faulty update and discusses how the faulty update affected certain sectors in the United States. How did the faulty CrowdStrike update occur, and what is CrowdStrike? 6 CrowdStrike delivers cybersecurity products and services to its customers via a cloud computing platform—the Falcon platform.7 CrowdStrike, through its cloud-based platform, deploys and installs a software called the Falcon Agent or the Falcon Sensor on each connected endpoint device (e.g., individual computer) of its customers.8 On July 19, 2024, CrowdStrike released “a sensor configuration update” over the cloud to its customers’ endpoint computers that were running the Falcon sensor for Windows operating systems.9 The update “triggered a logic error resulting in a system crash and blue screen [error]” on impacted computers.10 Those computers that were online and downloaded the faulty update within a certain time period on that day “were susceptible to a system crash.”11 CrowdStrike’s faulty update does not appear to be related to a cyberattack or data breach. The outage occurred as part of the company’s effort to deliver its cybersecurity services. CrowdStrike claims that its cybersecurity products through the Falcon Agent can identify and prevent “known and unknown malware and fileless attacks” to protect its customers’ endpoint devices while “capturing and recording … endpoint data.”12 The cyberattack events and data captured by the agent are streamed back to the Falcon platform’s cloud infrastructure in real time “in order to be further analyzed” to optimize its cybersecurity algorithms.13 The agent can also be remotely reconfigured in real time to take other actions “as risk and threat postures change.”14 This agent is built to support major computer operating systems, including Microsoft’s Windows.15 How was the Falcon sensor relevant to this event?

Formulate your answer using only the provided text; do not use your own knowledge or the use of any outside sources.

What would change if marijuana was changed from a schedule I drug to a schedule III drug?

Drugs and Biologics Aside from Schedule I substances, controlled substances have accepted medical uses and may be lawfully dispensed by prescription under the CSA, subject to various restrictions. Accordingly, rescheduling marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III would open the door for the medical marijuana industry to market their products consistent with federal law. Any such products must still comply with other federal legal requirements, such as the FD&C Act, before they could be legally marketed in the United States. Rescheduling thus would not automatically legalize medical marijuana in the United States. The FD&C Act requires new drugs, including both small-molecule drugs that are synthesized in a laboratory and biologics that are derived from living organisms (e.g., vaccines), to be approved by FDA before they can be marketed and sold in the United States. For FDA to approve a new drug, the drug sponsor must submit a new drug application (NDA) with “substantial evidence” that the drug is safe and effective for its proposed use. Similarly, for FDA to approve a biologic, a sponsor must submit a biologics license application (BLA) demonstrating that the product is safe, potent, and pure. Certain chemicals related to or derived from marijuana may be considered small-molecule drugs, while other components of the cannabis plant—including marijuana itself—may be considered a biologic. Congressional Research Service 3 Marijuana itself is not an approved drug, but FDA has approved four drugs derived from or related to cannabis. FDA approved a drug containing CBD called Epidiolex, which is used to treat certain kinds of seizures. FDA also approved Marinol and Syndros for the treatment of anorexia associated with weight loss in AIDS patients, as well as Cesamet for the treatment of nausea and vomiting in patients undergoing chemotherapy. Marinol and Syndros contain the active ingredient dronabinol, a synthetic delta-9- tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), which is considered the psychoactive component of cannabis. Cesamet contains the active ingredient nabilone, which is synthetically derived and has a chemical structure similar to THC. Despite obtaining FDA approval, Epidiolex, Marinol, Syndros, and Cesamet could not immediately be marketed in the United States because CBD and synthetic tetrahydrocannabinols were considered Schedule I substances. The DOJ rescheduled each of these drugs within a few months to a couple years of their approval by FDA, thereby allowing the drugs to be marketed and prescribed. The DOJ rescheduled Epidiolex as a Schedule V drug, and the 2018 farm bill completely descheduled Epidiolex because it is considered hemp under the new definition. FDA-approved products containing dronabinol were rescheduled to Schedule II or Schedule III under the CSA, depending on their form, and FDA-approved products containing nabilone were rescheduled to Schedule II. Other tetrahydrocannabinols remain Schedule I substances, and, because they are scheduled separately from marijuana, they are not included in the DOJ’s proposed rule rescheduling marijuana. Drugs Marketed Without FDA Approval New drugs that FDA has not approved cannot legally be marketed in interstate commerce under the FD&C Act. FDA categorizes products based on how they are marketed rather than based on how the manufacturer or seller categorizes them. FDA may therefore consider some products marketed as a food, dietary supplement, tobacco product, or cosmetic to be illegal drugs (assuming they have not obtained FDA approval for marketing as a drug) if the product’s packaging makes claims that it is intended to cure, mitigate, or treat a disease or health-related condition. The FD&C Act defines a “drug” to include “articles intended for use in the diagnosis, cure, mitigation, treatment, or prevention of disease.” Therefore, FDA may deem products to be “drugs” under this definition if they are marketed as a treatment for a disease. FDA has issued warning letters to companies marketing cannabis products, including CBD tea and hemp-infused body butter, whose labeling makes these kinds of treatment claims, advising that drugs must undergo the NDA process before they can be marketed in interstate commerce. A manufacturer or seller of one of these products can remedy the issue by submitting an NDA and obtaining FDA approval to market its product as a drug, or by removing the claims. Medical Research To obtain approval for a new drug or biologic, sponsors must conduct research, including clinical trials on human subjects, to generate the required evidence regarding the drug’s safety and effectiveness. Before conducting research with marijuana, a researcher must obtain a DEA registration and an FDA authorization of an investigational new drug application (IND) containing details on how the researcher plans to conduct the study. Then, the researcher must use marijuana from a DEA-registered source. Generally, rescheduling a drug from Schedule I to Schedule III loosens the controls on medical research involving that drug. Researchers and manufacturers of Schedule III substances are subject to less-onerous registration requirements than researchers and manufacturers of Schedule I substances. However, medical researchers and drug sponsors of marijuana or CBD containing drugs would not benefit from these looser restrictions associated with rescheduling without congressional action. In 2022, Congress passed the Medical Marijuana and Cannabidiol Research Expansion Act (P.L. 117-215), which amended the CSA for medical research involving marijuana or CBD to lessen the stringent controls typically applicable for Schedule I substances. The act created separate requirements for marijuana researchers and manufacturers Congressional Research Service 4 to expedite registration with the DEA, and these separate requirements would not be affected by rescheduling without additional congressional action.

Formulate your answer using only the provided text; do not use your own knowledge or the use of any outside sources. Provided text: Drugs and Biologics Aside from Schedule I substances, controlled substances have accepted medical uses and may be lawfully dispensed by prescription under the CSA, subject to various restrictions. Accordingly, rescheduling marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III would open the door for the medical marijuana industry to market their products consistent with federal law. Any such products must still comply with other federal legal requirements, such as the FD&C Act, before they could be legally marketed in the United States. Rescheduling thus would not automatically legalize medical marijuana in the United States. The FD&C Act requires new drugs, including both small-molecule drugs that are synthesized in a laboratory and biologics that are derived from living organisms (e.g., vaccines), to be approved by FDA before they can be marketed and sold in the United States. For FDA to approve a new drug, the drug sponsor must submit a new drug application (NDA) with “substantial evidence” that the drug is safe and effective for its proposed use. Similarly, for FDA to approve a biologic, a sponsor must submit a biologics license application (BLA) demonstrating that the product is safe, potent, and pure. Certain chemicals related to or derived from marijuana may be considered small-molecule drugs, while other components of the cannabis plant—including marijuana itself—may be considered a biologic. Congressional Research Service 3 Marijuana itself is not an approved drug, but FDA has approved four drugs derived from or related to cannabis. FDA approved a drug containing CBD called Epidiolex, which is used to treat certain kinds of seizures. FDA also approved Marinol and Syndros for the treatment of anorexia associated with weight loss in AIDS patients, as well as Cesamet for the treatment of nausea and vomiting in patients undergoing chemotherapy. Marinol and Syndros contain the active ingredient dronabinol, a synthetic delta-9- tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), which is considered the psychoactive component of cannabis. Cesamet contains the active ingredient nabilone, which is synthetically derived and has a chemical structure similar to THC. Despite obtaining FDA approval, Epidiolex, Marinol, Syndros, and Cesamet could not immediately be marketed in the United States because CBD and synthetic tetrahydrocannabinols were considered Schedule I substances. The DOJ rescheduled each of these drugs within a few months to a couple years of their approval by FDA, thereby allowing the drugs to be marketed and prescribed. The DOJ rescheduled Epidiolex as a Schedule V drug, and the 2018 farm bill completely descheduled Epidiolex because it is considered hemp under the new definition. FDA-approved products containing dronabinol were rescheduled to Schedule II or Schedule III under the CSA, depending on their form, and FDA-approved products containing nabilone were rescheduled to Schedule II. Other tetrahydrocannabinols remain Schedule I substances, and, because they are scheduled separately from marijuana, they are not included in the DOJ’s proposed rule rescheduling marijuana. Drugs Marketed Without FDA Approval New drugs that FDA has not approved cannot legally be marketed in interstate commerce under the FD&C Act. FDA categorizes products based on how they are marketed rather than based on how the manufacturer or seller categorizes them. FDA may therefore consider some products marketed as a food, dietary supplement, tobacco product, or cosmetic to be illegal drugs (assuming they have not obtained FDA approval for marketing as a drug) if the product’s packaging makes claims that it is intended to cure, mitigate, or treat a disease or health-related condition. The FD&C Act defines a “drug” to include “articles intended for use in the diagnosis, cure, mitigation, treatment, or prevention of disease.” Therefore, FDA may deem products to be “drugs” under this definition if they are marketed as a treatment for a disease. FDA has issued warning letters to companies marketing cannabis products, including CBD tea and hemp-infused body butter, whose labeling makes these kinds of treatment claims, advising that drugs must undergo the NDA process before they can be marketed in interstate commerce. A manufacturer or seller of one of these products can remedy the issue by submitting an NDA and obtaining FDA approval to market its product as a drug, or by removing the claims. Medical Research To obtain approval for a new drug or biologic, sponsors must conduct research, including clinical trials on human subjects, to generate the required evidence regarding the drug’s safety and effectiveness. Before conducting research with marijuana, a researcher must obtain a DEA registration and an FDA authorization of an investigational new drug application (IND) containing details on how the researcher plans to conduct the study. Then, the researcher must use marijuana from a DEA-registered source. Generally, rescheduling a drug from Schedule I to Schedule III loosens the controls on medical research involving that drug. Researchers and manufacturers of Schedule III substances are subject to less-onerous registration requirements than researchers and manufacturers of Schedule I substances. However, medical researchers and drug sponsors of marijuana or CBD containing drugs would not benefit from these looser restrictions associated with rescheduling without congressional action. In 2022, Congress passed the Medical Marijuana and Cannabidiol Research Expansion Act (P.L. 117-215), which amended the CSA for medical research involving marijuana or CBD to lessen the stringent controls typically applicable for Schedule I substances. The act created separate requirements for marijuana researchers and manufacturers Congressional Research Service 4 to expedite registration with the DEA, and these separate requirements would not be affected by rescheduling without additional congressional action. What would change if marijuana was changed from a schedule I drug to a schedule III drug?

Answer in a single sentence. Use only the document as your source.

According to this document, how many patients with COVID-19 had a history of stroke?

**COVID-19 and Stroke Incidence** Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has been declared a pandemic for two years already.1,2 As of July 2022, more than 575 million people have been infected, of which around 6.39 million have died.3 Although its case fatality rate of »2% is lower compared to past influenza pandemics, its highly transmissible nature strains the health care systems leading to significant increases in mortalities and unfavorable morbidities even in highly urbanized countries.1,4 With the appearance of delta and other variants, the devastation induced by COVID-19 is not likely to end soon. While most COVID-19 patients present in the hospital with respiratory symptoms, other organ systems may also be affected.5,6 Around 0.8-6% will develop stroke among COVID-19 patients, while 2-3% of admitted stroke patients will harbor severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection.7,8 These COVID-19 stroke patients have twice the risk of death and they have 20% more risk of having a moderate disability compared to patients with COVID-19 only.9 Nevertheless, COVID19 stroke patients were usually older and had similar risk factors as those patients with stroke alone, implying that the usual determinants for stroke may be the ones responsible for these increased risks and not COVID-19.1,7,9 However, in smaller case series and cross-sectional studies, COVID-19 patients with stroke were younger, with a cryptogenic type of stroke, and with no identifiable risk factors compared to those without COVID-19.9,10 Since SARS-CoV-2 infection affects organ systems by inducing thrombosis secondary to a hypercoagulable state, the incidence of stroke, especially the ischemic type, may plausibly be increased in COVID-19.10
12 While most large studies about the possible association of COVID-19 and stroke were done in high-income countries, only one study with a small sample size have been done in low- to middle-income countries (LMIC) like the Philippines.13 Developed countries have more organized and advanced health care systems and reliable national insurance services; hence, the incidence of stroke, its risk factors and mortality rate among COVID-19 patients may not be comparable to the true situation in LMIC.6,8 A recently concluded nationwide multicenter, comparative, retrospective cohort study was conducted from February to December 2020 to identify the different neurologic manifestations of COVID-19 in the Philippines.6 A total of 10,881 reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) confirmed COVID-19 cases were collected.6 Our main objectives were a) to determine the risk factors of stroke among hospitalized COVID19 patients in the Philippines, b) to determine the possible association between these risk factors and stroke among the same cohort, and c) to determine if there is an association between mortality and stroke in this same group. Methodology Study design The data analyzed in this study were obtained from a previously published nationwide retrospective cohort study that identified the different neurologic manifestations of COVID-19 in the Philippines.6 Inclusion and exclusion criteria RT-PCR-confirmed adult COVID-19 patients, more than 18 years of age, with final hospital disposition, were included in the study. Those with pneumonia caused by other etiologies other than SARS-CoV-2 were excluded. A complete enumeration of all patients fulfilling these criteria, who were admitted to the hospitals from February until December 2020, was performed. The definition of neurological symptoms was based on the previously published protocol.6 A patient who developed focal sensory or motor deficit confirmed by either cranial computed tomography (CT) scan or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) were recorded as a stroke patient, as seen on chart review. The imaging was the basis for classifying the patient as either infarct or hemorrhagic stroke. COVID-19 stroke patients comprised the cases while COVID-19 only patients constituted the control group. Study site Data collection was done in 37 referral hospitals for COVID-19. Identification of these sites and other information regarding methods for data collection were described in the published protocol.6 Study investigators This is a part of the Philippine CORONA Study which aimed to determine the incidence of the different neurological diseases and their association with different risk factors and outcomes in a large cohort of COVID-19 patients. This was headed by four steering committee members with 37 study site teams, of which the principal investigators were all neurologists.6 2 R.D.G. JAMORA ET AL. Data collection The method of data collection has already been published.6 In brief, all COVID-19 confirmed admissions with disposition (discharged or deceased) at the time of data collection were included in the study. A pre-made detailed abstraction form containing the variables of interest was filled out by the field physician by chart review. Possible risk factors for stroke or increased COVID-19 severity such as age, sex, smoking, hypertension, diabetes mellitus (DM), heart failure, coronary artery disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), bronchial asthma, chronic kidney disease, liver disease, obesity, malignancy, and human immunodeficiency virus infection was obtained. For stroke, the neurologic symptoms and final diagnosis during admission, and different outcome measures like the severity of the disability, intensive care unit (ICU) admission, duration from admission to final disposition, mortality status, and final disposition were included in the form. Abstraction forms were then assessed for validity and inconsistencies before they were de-identified, encoded, and collated per hospital and sent to the Steering Committee of the Philippine CORONA study. Data analysis Age was presented as mean, while categorical data were presented as proportions. Standard deviation was used as measure of dispersion. Means and proportions were tested for significance using unpaired t-test and test of two proportions, respectively. Prevalence ratio, defined as the ratio of the proportion of patients with a particular risk factor in COVID-19 stroke patients divided by the proportion of patients with the same risk factor among COVID-19 only patients were computed separately. These were used as estimates of relative risks. The incidence of stroke among patients with COVID-19 was computed by dividing the number of stroke patients by the population (n = 10,881). Likewise, the incidence of different outcome measures like mortality, disability, and intensive care unit (ICU) admission in both COVID-19 stroke patients and COVID-19 patients only were obtained by dividing the number of each of these outcome measures by the number of patients who developed stroke and those who did not, respectively. Subsequently, relative risks were computed by dividing the incidence of each outcome measure among COVID-19 stroke patients by the incidence of outcome measure among those with COVID-19 patients only. To determine the association between stroke and different risk factors; and the different outcome measures and stroke among COVID-19 patients, a univariate logistic regression was done. Stroke and outcome measures were used as dependent variables separately, while risk factors for stroke, and stroke were used as their independent variables, respectively. An extended Cox proportional hazard survival analysis was also done using mortality status as the failure event and the duration from admission to either censoring or failure as survival time. Significant risk factors identified in the logistic regression was used as the predictor variables with presence of stroke as the focus. Since the presence of stroke was a time dependent variable based on the usage of scaled and unscaled Schoenfield residuals, an extended Cox model was used. All data were captured and analyzed using Stata Pro BE 17, with alpha set at < 0.05 as indicator of significance. Results Baseline characteristics There were 10,881 RT-PCR confirmed COVID-19 cases included in the Philippine CORONA Study. The patients were mostly males (n = 5780, 53.1%), with history of neurological disorder (n = 7560, 69.5%), with hypertension (n = 3647, 33.5%), and DM (n = 2191, 20.1%). Only 321 patients with COVID-19 (3%) had a history of stroke. The overall incidence of stroke among COVID-19 patients was 3.4% (n = 367). Of these, 262 (71.4%) had acute ischemic stroke (AIS) and 101 (27.5%) had acute hemorrhagic stroke (AHS). The incidence of AIS and AHS were 2.4% and 0.9%, respectively. A total of 1697 COVID-19 patients (15.6%) died due to various etiologies. Most patients who had neurologic symptoms were stable but had persistent deficits at discharge (71.7%). Only 1751 patients (16%) were admitted to the ICU primarily due to acute respiratory failure.

[Query] ================== According to this document, how many patients with COVID-19 had a history of stroke? ================ [Task] ================== Answer in a single sentence. Use only the document as your source. ================ [Text Passage] ================== **COVID-19 and Stroke Incidence** Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has been declared a pandemic for two years already.1,2 As of July 2022, more than 575 million people have been infected, of which around 6.39 million have died.3 Although its case fatality rate of »2% is lower compared to past influenza pandemics, its highly transmissible nature strains the health care systems leading to significant increases in mortalities and unfavorable morbidities even in highly urbanized countries.1,4 With the appearance of delta and other variants, the devastation induced by COVID-19 is not likely to end soon. While most COVID-19 patients present in the hospital with respiratory symptoms, other organ systems may also be affected.5,6 Around 0.8-6% will develop stroke among COVID-19 patients, while 2-3% of admitted stroke patients will harbor severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection.7,8 These COVID-19 stroke patients have twice the risk of death and they have 20% more risk of having a moderate disability compared to patients with COVID-19 only.9 Nevertheless, COVID19 stroke patients were usually older and had similar risk factors as those patients with stroke alone, implying that the usual determinants for stroke may be the ones responsible for these increased risks and not COVID-19.1,7,9 However, in smaller case series and cross-sectional studies, COVID-19 patients with stroke were younger, with a cryptogenic type of stroke, and with no identifiable risk factors compared to those without COVID-19.9,10 Since SARS-CoV-2 infection affects organ systems by inducing thrombosis secondary to a hypercoagulable state, the incidence of stroke, especially the ischemic type, may plausibly be increased in COVID-19.10
12 While most large studies about the possible association of COVID-19 and stroke were done in high-income countries, only one study with a small sample size have been done in low- to middle-income countries (LMIC) like the Philippines.13 Developed countries have more organized and advanced health care systems and reliable national insurance services; hence, the incidence of stroke, its risk factors and mortality rate among COVID-19 patients may not be comparable to the true situation in LMIC.6,8 A recently concluded nationwide multicenter, comparative, retrospective cohort study was conducted from February to December 2020 to identify the different neurologic manifestations of COVID-19 in the Philippines.6 A total of 10,881 reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) confirmed COVID-19 cases were collected.6 Our main objectives were a) to determine the risk factors of stroke among hospitalized COVID19 patients in the Philippines, b) to determine the possible association between these risk factors and stroke among the same cohort, and c) to determine if there is an association between mortality and stroke in this same group. Methodology Study design The data analyzed in this study were obtained from a previously published nationwide retrospective cohort study that identified the different neurologic manifestations of COVID-19 in the Philippines.6 Inclusion and exclusion criteria RT-PCR-confirmed adult COVID-19 patients, more than 18 years of age, with final hospital disposition, were included in the study. Those with pneumonia caused by other etiologies other than SARS-CoV-2 were excluded. A complete enumeration of all patients fulfilling these criteria, who were admitted to the hospitals from February until December 2020, was performed. The definition of neurological symptoms was based on the previously published protocol.6 A patient who developed focal sensory or motor deficit confirmed by either cranial computed tomography (CT) scan or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) were recorded as a stroke patient, as seen on chart review. The imaging was the basis for classifying the patient as either infarct or hemorrhagic stroke. COVID-19 stroke patients comprised the cases while COVID-19 only patients constituted the control group. Study site Data collection was done in 37 referral hospitals for COVID-19. Identification of these sites and other information regarding methods for data collection were described in the published protocol.6 Study investigators This is a part of the Philippine CORONA Study which aimed to determine the incidence of the different neurological diseases and their association with different risk factors and outcomes in a large cohort of COVID-19 patients. This was headed by four steering committee members with 37 study site teams, of which the principal investigators were all neurologists.6 2 R.D.G. JAMORA ET AL. Data collection The method of data collection has already been published.6 In brief, all COVID-19 confirmed admissions with disposition (discharged or deceased) at the time of data collection were included in the study. A pre-made detailed abstraction form containing the variables of interest was filled out by the field physician by chart review. Possible risk factors for stroke or increased COVID-19 severity such as age, sex, smoking, hypertension, diabetes mellitus (DM), heart failure, coronary artery disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), bronchial asthma, chronic kidney disease, liver disease, obesity, malignancy, and human immunodeficiency virus infection was obtained. For stroke, the neurologic symptoms and final diagnosis during admission, and different outcome measures like the severity of the disability, intensive care unit (ICU) admission, duration from admission to final disposition, mortality status, and final disposition were included in the form. Abstraction forms were then assessed for validity and inconsistencies before they were de-identified, encoded, and collated per hospital and sent to the Steering Committee of the Philippine CORONA study. Data analysis Age was presented as mean, while categorical data were presented as proportions. Standard deviation was used as measure of dispersion. Means and proportions were tested for significance using unpaired t-test and test of two proportions, respectively. Prevalence ratio, defined as the ratio of the proportion of patients with a particular risk factor in COVID-19 stroke patients divided by the proportion of patients with the same risk factor among COVID-19 only patients were computed separately. These were used as estimates of relative risks. The incidence of stroke among patients with COVID-19 was computed by dividing the number of stroke patients by the population (n = 10,881). Likewise, the incidence of different outcome measures like mortality, disability, and intensive care unit (ICU) admission in both COVID-19 stroke patients and COVID-19 patients only were obtained by dividing the number of each of these outcome measures by the number of patients who developed stroke and those who did not, respectively. Subsequently, relative risks were computed by dividing the incidence of each outcome measure among COVID-19 stroke patients by the incidence of outcome measure among those with COVID-19 patients only. To determine the association between stroke and different risk factors; and the different outcome measures and stroke among COVID-19 patients, a univariate logistic regression was done. Stroke and outcome measures were used as dependent variables separately, while risk factors for stroke, and stroke were used as their independent variables, respectively. An extended Cox proportional hazard survival analysis was also done using mortality status as the failure event and the duration from admission to either censoring or failure as survival time. Significant risk factors identified in the logistic regression was used as the predictor variables with presence of stroke as the focus. Since the presence of stroke was a time dependent variable based on the usage of scaled and unscaled Schoenfield residuals, an extended Cox model was used. All data were captured and analyzed using Stata Pro BE 17, with alpha set at < 0.05 as indicator of significance. Results Baseline characteristics There were 10,881 RT-PCR confirmed COVID-19 cases included in the Philippine CORONA Study. The patients were mostly males (n = 5780, 53.1%), with history of neurological disorder (n = 7560, 69.5%), with hypertension (n = 3647, 33.5%), and DM (n = 2191, 20.1%). Only 321 patients with COVID-19 (3%) had a history of stroke. The overall incidence of stroke among COVID-19 patients was 3.4% (n = 367). Of these, 262 (71.4%) had acute ischemic stroke (AIS) and 101 (27.5%) had acute hemorrhagic stroke (AHS). The incidence of AIS and AHS were 2.4% and 0.9%, respectively. A total of 1697 COVID-19 patients (15.6%) died due to various etiologies. Most patients who had neurologic symptoms were stable but had persistent deficits at discharge (71.7%). Only 1751 patients (16%) were admitted to the ICU primarily due to acute respiratory failure.

<TASK DESCRIPTION> Only use the provided text to answer the question, no outside sources. <QUESTION> [user request] <TEXT> [context document]

Examine the dual influence of technological innovation and political diplomacy in shaping the design and use of rooms s-116 and s-117 in the senate foreign relations Committee suite. In your response, connect the symbolic contribution of both robert and benjamin to at least two major us foreign policies debated in the room. Additionally, analyze how frescoes depicting their legaixes impacted both domestic and international legislative decisions; do not mention any historical event that occurred before 1840; and ensure that every sentence references a different artistic or architectural feature if the suite

The U.S. SenaTe Foreign relaTionS CommiTTee SUiTe The U.S. SenaTe Foreign relaTionS Committee The Senate Committee on Foreign Relations was established in 1816 as one of the original eleven permanent standing committees of the Senate. Throughout its history, the Foreign Relations Committee has been instrumental in developing The Senate Foreign Relations Committee Room (S-116) and influencing U.S. foreign policy. The committee tee considers, debates, and negotiates important treaties and legislation that support the national interest. It also holds jurisdiction over all democratic nominations. Through these powers, the committee has helped shape foreign policy of broad significance in matters of war and peace and international relations. The committee receives honored guests and con- ducts official business in its historic, two-room suite, located in the northeast corner of the Senate extension, built between 1851 and 1868. History Like many Senate spaces in the Capitol, S-116 and S-117 have served many different committees and offices. The first known use of S-116 was as the Senate folding room. It was here that publications were stored and where clerks prepared documents, bills, and speeches for distribution. Eventually this service was transferred to the Government printing ing Office. The Senate Committee on Patents, which held jurisdiction over patents and patent law, moved into S-116 in the 1870s. It was during the Patent Committee’s nearly two-decade occu- pancy of the room that artist Constantino Brumidi executed the fresco of American innovator Robert Fulton above the entrance to the committee room. Robert Fulton depicted in the lunette over S-116, then used by the Committee on Patents from 1872-1895 This follows a precedent applied throughout the Capitol’s corridors of relating the figurative murals to the achievements or work of the committee in the nearby room. The fresco above the door to S-116 depicts Fulton with his left hand resting on mechanical diagrams and his right hand gesturing ing towards a steamboat traveling the Hudson River—references to Fulton’s success at harnessing steam engine technology to create the first viable commercial steamboat service in the early 19th century. Brumidi incorporated emblems representing ing science, agriculture, navigation, and the arts on the ceiling in the spacious lobby outside S-116, known as the Patent Corridor. The original occupant of S-117 was the Senate Committee on Post-Offices and Post-Roads. To recognize this committee, Brumidi painted a fresco above the room’s entrance depicting Benjamin Franklin, the first postmaster general, surrounded by his inventions. The Retrenchment Committee using S-116 The two rooms, S-116 and S-117, continued to serve separate purposes until 1931. Occupants of the rooms reflected the concerns of a growing nation, including the committees on Retrenchmentment, Patents, Agriculture, Immigration, Territories, Female Suffrage, and Naval Affairs. In 1931, S-116 and S-117 became associated as a suite to accommodate the needs of the Naval Affairs Committee. Shortly after, in 1933, the Committee on Foreign Relations moved into the two-room suite, an assignment it retains to this day. While the Foreign Relations Com- mittee maintains several offices throughout the Capitol complex, the two rooms in the Capitol have become symbolic of the committee and its notable diplomatic work. Occupancy The following occupancy lists are compiled from a variety of resources, including architectural plans, guidebooks, contemporary records, and the annual directory of the United States Congress— first published in 1869. S–116 1869 Senate Folding Room 1870-1871 Committee on Retrenchment 1872-1881 Committee on Patents 1882-1884 Committee on Patents and Committee on Female Suffrage 1885-1895 Committee on Patents 1896-1914 Senate Post-Office 1915 Committee on Agriculture and Forestry 1916 Committee on Contingent Expenses 1917 Committee on Industrial Expositions 1918-1924 Committee on Immigration 1925 Committee on Territories 1926-1928 Committee on Territories and Insular Possessions 1929-1930 Committee on Printing 1931-1932 Committee on Naval Affairs 1933-present Committee on Foreign Relations S–117 1869-1895 Committee on Post-Offices and Post-Roads 1896-1901 Committee on Foreign Relations 1902-1909 Committee on Printing 1910-1914 Committee on Agriculture and Forestry 1915 Committee on the Library 1915-1917 Committee on Agriculture and Forestry 1918-1920 Committee on Census 1921-1923 Committee on Enrolled Bills 1924-1932 Committee on Naval Affairs 1933-present Committee on Foreign Relations Decorative Highlights The Senate extension and its companion House extension, designed by Thomas U. Walter and built by Montgomery C. Meigs, were meant to inspire visitors to reflect upon the Capitol as a symbol of American democracy and to showcase case the nation’s accomplishments, resources, and wealth. To this end, the extensions featured elaborate wall and ceiling murals, as well as the finest workmanship, the most exquisite building materials, and the latest technologies. Offices boasted high vaulted ceilings, ornamental cast-iron door and window frames, interior wood shutters, carved marble mantels, and marble baseboards, in addition to unique decorative details. Colorful floor tiles from Minton, Hollins & Company of England were used throughout to enliven spaces and add pattern. Accompanying this architectural grandeur, ventilation, heating, water closets, and gas lighting provided valuable comfort to the occupants. The central floor medallion in S-116 Natural light floods S-117 through the four generously ously proportioned windows. Today, the corner room’s windows offer views north to Union Station and east to the Supreme Court building. Ornamental bands of stylized leaves decorate the arched cast-iron window and door frames. The room retains its original marble mantel, crowned by a gilded Neoclassical Revival mirror whose frame features a prominent cornice with bead-and-reel and egg-and-dart ornaments, fluted pilasters, and acan—thus leaves that delicately wrap around the corners of the frame. Aside from the windows, the room is lit by a central crystal chandelier and four inverted crystal tal cone pendants The mantel and mirror in S-117 lights, and eight sconces installed on the window frames. The pendant lights were added in the 1960s and were designed to integrate with the committee room’s existing 19th-century chandelier and sconces. While not the original light fixtures, the chandelier and sconces are early 20th-century pieces reminiscent of new, vibrant chandeliers that were appearing in Senate spaces at the time. The newly constructed 1909 Senate Russell Office Buildinging’s committee rooms sparkled with silver and crystal fixtures, and in 1910, seven striking crystal chandeliers acquired from the White House were installed in the Capitol. These bright, vivid lights offered a welcome contrast to the darker, dull metal ones that hung in most extension spaces, so silver and crystal chandeliers were purchased for many Capitol offices. The painted decoration on the ceiling in S-117 emphasizes the architectural vault lines and dates from the turn of the 20th century, when a comprehensive decorative campaign for the Capitol was implemented. While some of the colors have changed with repainting over the years, the style of ornamentation holds true to the original design. Room S-116, which was first used as the folding ing room, was probably very plainly decorated. Initially, there were not even fireplaces. The two existing marble mantels were presumably installed in 1872, when the prominent Committee on Pensions was assigned the room. The Rococo Revival mirrors that rest on the mantels feature a central cartouche, scrolls, stylized leaves, and flowers. The decorative painted banding on the ceiling in S-116 probably dates to sometime after 1900 and is documented in images as early as 1946. The impressive, obround-shaped committee table fills the room and accommodates every current member of the committee. Each senator has an assigned seat, marked by an engraved brass name- plate. A bronze bust of Cordell Hull by George Conlon oversees the activities of the Foreign Rela- tions Committee from the central window well. Hull’s commemoration in the Foreign Relations Committee Room is fitting given his work as secretary of state, promoting peace and international alliances, and establishing the United Nations.

<TASK DESCRIPTION> Only use the provided text to answer the question, no outside sources. <QUESTION> Examine the dual influence of technological innovation and political diplomacy in shaping the design and use of rooms s-116 and s-117 in the senate foreign relations Committee suite. In your response, connect the symbolic contribution of both robert and benjamin to at least two major us foreign policies debated in the room. Additionally, analyze how frescoes depicting their legaixes impacted both domestic and international legislative decisions; do not mention any historical event that occurred before 1840; and ensure that every sentence references a different artistic or architectural feature if the suite <TEXT> The U.S. SenaTe Foreign relaTionS CommiTTee SUiTe The U.S. SenaTe Foreign relaTionS Committee The Senate Committee on Foreign Relations was established in 1816 as one of the original eleven permanent standing committees of the Senate. Throughout its history, the Foreign Relations Committee has been instrumental in developing The Senate Foreign Relations Committee Room (S-116) and influencing U.S. foreign policy. The committee tee considers, debates, and negotiates important treaties and legislation that support the national interest. It also holds jurisdiction over all democratic nominations. Through these powers, the committee has helped shape foreign policy of broad significance in matters of war and peace and international relations. The committee receives honored guests and con- ducts official business in its historic, two-room suite, located in the northeast corner of the Senate extension, built between 1851 and 1868. History Like many Senate spaces in the Capitol, S-116 and S-117 have served many different committees and offices. The first known use of S-116 was as the Senate folding room. It was here that publications were stored and where clerks prepared documents, bills, and speeches for distribution. Eventually this service was transferred to the Government printing ing Office. The Senate Committee on Patents, which held jurisdiction over patents and patent law, moved into S-116 in the 1870s. It was during the Patent Committee’s nearly two-decade occu- pancy of the room that artist Constantino Brumidi executed the fresco of American innovator Robert Fulton above the entrance to the committee room. Robert Fulton depicted in the lunette over S-116, then used by the Committee on Patents from 1872-1895 This follows a precedent applied throughout the Capitol’s corridors of relating the figurative murals to the achievements or work of the committee in the nearby room. The fresco above the door to S-116 depicts Fulton with his left hand resting on mechanical diagrams and his right hand gesturing ing towards a steamboat traveling the Hudson River—references to Fulton’s success at harnessing steam engine technology to create the first viable commercial steamboat service in the early 19th century. Brumidi incorporated emblems representing ing science, agriculture, navigation, and the arts on the ceiling in the spacious lobby outside S-116, known as the Patent Corridor. The original occupant of S-117 was the Senate Committee on Post-Offices and Post-Roads. To recognize this committee, Brumidi painted a fresco above the room’s entrance depicting Benjamin Franklin, the first postmaster general, surrounded by his inventions. The Retrenchment Committee using S-116 The two rooms, S-116 and S-117, continued to serve separate purposes until 1931. Occupants of the rooms reflected the concerns of a growing nation, including the committees on Retrenchmentment, Patents, Agriculture, Immigration, Territories, Female Suffrage, and Naval Affairs. In 1931, S-116 and S-117 became associated as a suite to accommodate the needs of the Naval Affairs Committee. Shortly after, in 1933, the Committee on Foreign Relations moved into the two-room suite, an assignment it retains to this day. While the Foreign Relations Com- mittee maintains several offices throughout the Capitol complex, the two rooms in the Capitol have become symbolic of the committee and its notable diplomatic work. Occupancy The following occupancy lists are compiled from a variety of resources, including architectural plans, guidebooks, contemporary records, and the annual directory of the United States Congress— first published in 1869. S–116 1869 Senate Folding Room 1870-1871 Committee on Retrenchment 1872-1881 Committee on Patents 1882-1884 Committee on Patents and Committee on Female Suffrage 1885-1895 Committee on Patents 1896-1914 Senate Post-Office 1915 Committee on Agriculture and Forestry 1916 Committee on Contingent Expenses 1917 Committee on Industrial Expositions 1918-1924 Committee on Immigration 1925 Committee on Territories 1926-1928 Committee on Territories and Insular Possessions 1929-1930 Committee on Printing 1931-1932 Committee on Naval Affairs 1933-present Committee on Foreign Relations S–117 1869-1895 Committee on Post-Offices and Post-Roads 1896-1901 Committee on Foreign Relations 1902-1909 Committee on Printing 1910-1914 Committee on Agriculture and Forestry 1915 Committee on the Library 1915-1917 Committee on Agriculture and Forestry 1918-1920 Committee on Census 1921-1923 Committee on Enrolled Bills 1924-1932 Committee on Naval Affairs 1933-present Committee on Foreign Relations Decorative Highlights The Senate extension and its companion House extension, designed by Thomas U. Walter and built by Montgomery C. Meigs, were meant to inspire visitors to reflect upon the Capitol as a symbol of American democracy and to showcase case the nation’s accomplishments, resources, and wealth. To this end, the extensions featured elaborate wall and ceiling murals, as well as the finest workmanship, the most exquisite building materials, and the latest technologies. Offices boasted high vaulted ceilings, ornamental cast-iron door and window frames, interior wood shutters, carved marble mantels, and marble baseboards, in addition to unique decorative details. Colorful floor tiles from Minton, Hollins & Company of England were used throughout to enliven spaces and add pattern. Accompanying this architectural grandeur, ventilation, heating, water closets, and gas lighting provided valuable comfort to the occupants. The central floor medallion in S-116 Natural light floods S-117 through the four generously ously proportioned windows. Today, the corner room’s windows offer views north to Union Station and east to the Supreme Court building. Ornamental bands of stylized leaves decorate the arched cast-iron window and door frames. The room retains its original marble mantel, crowned by a gilded Neoclassical Revival mirror whose frame features a prominent cornice with bead-and-reel and egg-and-dart ornaments, fluted pilasters, and acan—thus leaves that delicately wrap around the corners of the frame. Aside from the windows, the room is lit by a central crystal chandelier and four inverted crystal tal cone pendants The mantel and mirror in S-117 lights, and eight sconces installed on the window frames. The pendant lights were added in the 1960s and were designed to integrate with the committee room’s existing 19th-century chandelier and sconces. While not the original light fixtures, the chandelier and sconces are early 20th-century pieces reminiscent of new, vibrant chandeliers that were appearing in Senate spaces at the time. The newly constructed 1909 Senate Russell Office Buildinging’s committee rooms sparkled with silver and crystal fixtures, and in 1910, seven striking crystal chandeliers acquired from the White House were installed in the Capitol. These bright, vivid lights offered a welcome contrast to the darker, dull metal ones that hung in most extension spaces, so silver and crystal chandeliers were purchased for many Capitol offices. The painted decoration on the ceiling in S-117 emphasizes the architectural vault lines and dates from the turn of the 20th century, when a comprehensive decorative campaign for the Capitol was implemented. While some of the colors have changed with repainting over the years, the style of ornamentation holds true to the original design. Room S-116, which was first used as the folding ing room, was probably very plainly decorated. Initially, there were not even fireplaces. The two existing marble mantels were presumably installed in 1872, when the prominent Committee on Pensions was assigned the room. The Rococo Revival mirrors that rest on the mantels feature a central cartouche, scrolls, stylized leaves, and flowers. The decorative painted banding on the ceiling in S-116 probably dates to sometime after 1900 and is documented in images as early as 1946. The impressive, obround-shaped committee table fills the room and accommodates every current member of the committee. Each senator has an assigned seat, marked by an engraved brass name- plate. A bronze bust of Cordell Hull by George Conlon oversees the activities of the Foreign Rela- tions Committee from the central window well. Hull’s commemoration in the Foreign Relations Committee Room is fitting given his work as secretary of state, promoting peace and international alliances, and establishing the United Nations. https://www.senate.gov/art-artifacts/publications/pdf/room-foreign-relations.pdf

Only consider the following text in your answer. Format your answer into between 10 and 15 bullet points.

Please summarize this information for a person not familiar with advertising or business models.

In this paper, we provide a generalizable distribution of television advertising elasticities for established products that can serve as a prior distribution for firms and researchers. Providing generalizable estimates of TV advertising effects necessitates transparent and replicable estimation methods and an a priori relevant population of products. Our analy- sis is based on a sample of 288 large, national CPG brands that are selected using a clear research protocol, and our data sources (Nielsen Ad Intel and RMS scanner data) are widely used by marketing managers and academic researchers. We find that the median of the distribution of estimated long-run advertising elasticities is between 0.0085 and 0.0142, and the corresponding mean is between 0.0098 and 0.0261. We draw two main lessons from these results. First, the estimated advertising elastic- ities are small, and two thirds of the estimates are not statistically distinguishable from zero. The estimates are also economically small, in the sense that more than 80% of all brands have a negative ROI of advertising at the margin. The estimates are roughly half the size of the most comparable prior study, Lodish et al. (1995), which used data from the 1980s. This difference is consistent with an overall decline in TV advertising effectiveness over the last three decades. Second, our results are robust. In particular, across a wide range of specifications, the overall distribution of advertising elasticities is stable. Due to this fact, together with the institutional details of the ad buying process that underlie our identification strategy, it appears implausible that our results are affected by any remaining confounds. Our results have important positive and normative implications. A central finding is the over-investment in advertising for more than 80% of brands, a significant misalloca- tion of resources by firms. Our data are identical to the commercially available data used by firms, and hence it is unlikely that firms observe larger advertising effects because of access to alternative data sources. This raises an economic puzzle. Why do firms spend billions of dollars on TV advertising each year if the return is negative? There are sev- eral possible explanations. First, agency issues, in particular career concerns, may lead managers (or consultants) to overstate the effectiveness of advertising if they expect to lose their jobs if their advertising campaigns are revealed to be unprofitable. Second, an incorrect prior (i.e. conventional wisdom that advertising is typically effective) may lead a decision maker to rationally shrink the estimated advertising effect from their data to an incorrect, inflated prior mean. Third, the estimated advertising effects may be inflated if confounding factors are not adequately adjusted for. The last two explanations do not as- sume irrational behavior, but may simply represent a cost of conducting causal inference 23 to acquire accurate information on the effect of advertising. We view this explanation as plausible given that unified, formal approaches to causal inference have only recently been widely adopted. These proposed explanations are not mutually exclusive. In par- ticular, agency issues may be exacerbated if the general effectiveness of advertising or a specific advertising effect estimate is overstated.13 While we cannot conclusively point to these explanations as the source of the documented over-investment in advertising, our discussions with managers and industry insiders suggest that these may be contributing factors. This brings us back to a key motivating question for this research, the long-run viabil- ity of traditional media markets. The documented over-investment in advertising suggests a threat to the survival of media markets in their current form, once knowledge about the small degree of TV advertising effectiveness becomes common knowledge. But our results also indicate that for a substantial number of brands (34% based on the point estimates), the observed advertising schedules are valuable compared to the counterfactual of no ad- vertising. There is a large degree of statistical uncertainty about the exact ROIs, and only for 12% of brands the predicted ROIs from the observed advertising schedules are positive and statistically different from zero. This suggests a large option value from adopting im- proved methods or research designs, such as A/B tests, to estimate the causal effect and ROI of advertising. Our results also do not foreclose the possibility that advertising can be profitable with alternative scheduling, targeting, or advertising copy strategies. The rise of addressable television, in particular, should allow advertisers and researchers to experiment with individual level targeting in the future. These approaches for improving advertising measurement, scheduling, and targeting may well ensure the long-run viability of media markets. While improvements in targeting technology may theoretically increase the potential for higher advertising returns, they do not solve the underlying agency problems that allow sub-optimal advertising decisions to persist in the traditional TV advertising model we evaluate in this paper. Together with past research documenting similar results in digital advertising markets (Blake et al. 2015; Lewis and Rao 2015), our work should motivate economists to further study the managerial and agency issues in advertising markets.

Only consider the following text in your answer. Format your answer into between 10 and 15 bullet points. In this paper, we provide a generalizable distribution of television advertising elasticities for established products that can serve as a prior distribution for firms and researchers. Providing generalizable estimates of TV advertising effects necessitates transparent and replicable estimation methods and an a priori relevant population of products. Our analy- sis is based on a sample of 288 large, national CPG brands that are selected using a clear research protocol, and our data sources (Nielsen Ad Intel and RMS scanner data) are widely used by marketing managers and academic researchers. We find that the median of the distribution of estimated long-run advertising elasticities is between 0.0085 and 0.0142, and the corresponding mean is between 0.0098 and 0.0261. We draw two main lessons from these results. First, the estimated advertising elastic- ities are small, and two thirds of the estimates are not statistically distinguishable from zero. The estimates are also economically small, in the sense that more than 80% of all brands have a negative ROI of advertising at the margin. The estimates are roughly half the size of the most comparable prior study, Lodish et al. (1995), which used data from the 1980s. This difference is consistent with an overall decline in TV advertising effectiveness over the last three decades. Second, our results are robust. In particular, across a wide range of specifications, the overall distribution of advertising elasticities is stable. Due to this fact, together with the institutional details of the ad buying process that underlie our identification strategy, it appears implausible that our results are affected by any remaining confounds. Our results have important positive and normative implications. A central finding is the over-investment in advertising for more than 80% of brands, a significant misalloca- tion of resources by firms. Our data are identical to the commercially available data used by firms, and hence it is unlikely that firms observe larger advertising effects because of access to alternative data sources. This raises an economic puzzle. Why do firms spend billions of dollars on TV advertising each year if the return is negative? There are sev- eral possible explanations. First, agency issues, in particular career concerns, may lead managers (or consultants) to overstate the effectiveness of advertising if they expect to lose their jobs if their advertising campaigns are revealed to be unprofitable. Second, an incorrect prior (i.e. conventional wisdom that advertising is typically effective) may lead a decision maker to rationally shrink the estimated advertising effect from their data to an incorrect, inflated prior mean. Third, the estimated advertising effects may be inflated if confounding factors are not adequately adjusted for. The last two explanations do not as- sume irrational behavior, but may simply represent a cost of conducting causal inference 23 to acquire accurate information on the effect of advertising. We view this explanation as plausible given that unified, formal approaches to causal inference have only recently been widely adopted. These proposed explanations are not mutually exclusive. In par- ticular, agency issues may be exacerbated if the general effectiveness of advertising or a specific advertising effect estimate is overstated.13 While we cannot conclusively point to these explanations as the source of the documented over-investment in advertising, our discussions with managers and industry insiders suggest that these may be contributing factors. This brings us back to a key motivating question for this research, the long-run viabil- ity of traditional media markets. The documented over-investment in advertising suggests a threat to the survival of media markets in their current form, once knowledge about the small degree of TV advertising effectiveness becomes common knowledge. But our results also indicate that for a substantial number of brands (34% based on the point estimates), the observed advertising schedules are valuable compared to the counterfactual of no ad- vertising. There is a large degree of statistical uncertainty about the exact ROIs, and only for 12% of brands the predicted ROIs from the observed advertising schedules are positive and statistically different from zero. This suggests a large option value from adopting im- proved methods or research designs, such as A/B tests, to estimate the causal effect and ROI of advertising. Our results also do not foreclose the possibility that advertising can be profitable with alternative scheduling, targeting, or advertising copy strategies. The rise of addressable television, in particular, should allow advertisers and researchers to experiment with individual level targeting in the future. These approaches for improving advertising measurement, scheduling, and targeting may well ensure the long-run viability of media markets. While improvements in targeting technology may theoretically increase the potential for higher advertising returns, they do not solve the underlying agency problems that allow sub-optimal advertising decisions to persist in the traditional TV advertising model we evaluate in this paper. Together with past research documenting similar results in digital advertising markets (Blake et al. 2015; Lewis and Rao 2015), our work should motivate economists to further study the managerial and agency issues in advertising markets. Please summarize this information for a person not familiar with advertising or business models.

[question] [user request] ===================== [text] [context document] ===================== [instruction] Answer the question using only the information provided in the context. Do not rely on external knowledge or sources.

I need a thesis statement, fit for a 2nd year undergrad paper, on the potential clinical effects of a training guided by the concept of 'Paideia' on one hand and standard technical training on the other, in no more than 300 words.

In the health area, a habitual behavior is observed among professionals of using knowledge about diseases and treatments (generating authority) over the passivity of those who need care – the patient (perpetuating dependence) – and this marks a strong characteristic of paternalism. For many professionals, it is difficult to assess an individual’s ability to decide on an indication based on clinical and laboratory evaluation. Often, there is still a very strong belief in professional knowledge as sovereign1.Involving patients in decision-making helps professionals ensure that the treatment provided reflects their preferences and values. Ethics, here understood as a reflection on moral and deontological norms and rules and the values that should guide how professionals should behave, is essential to the practice of health care, and respect for patient autonomy is present in the professions’ codes of ethics. Patients must have the exercise of their autonomy fully guaranteed. Thus, all information must be presented, allowing this autonomy to be exercised2-5.It is recommended that professionals make decisions considering clinical, epidemiological, psychosocial and ethical aspects, never forgetting that these complement each other. With this in mind, it is necessary to consider that competencies can be understood as the skills and knowledge that are acquired throughout training. When we talk about healthcare professionals, understanding the user’s role in decision-making is a competency that needs to be acquired by everyone. Thus, we must remember that the logic of training in the dierent specialties in some health courses, such as medicine, nursing and nutrition, including specialization in Nephrology, is focused on the idea of clinical skills, that is, education acts as a teaching guide for including the professionals into the work process, but often it does not work as Paideia (broad, holistic training with cultural identity) and perpetuates the status quo of technical, procedure-centered training5-7.The vision of skills has been changing daily, as the place of study has expanded. As authors have suggested, there is a need for training that understands the reality of the population, and not just the constant identification of diseases and pre-determined treatments. In this sense, providing the training of reflective professionals who are less attentive to the closed content of the disciplines, developing autonomy, focusing on learning to learn and the student’s protagonism, with the aim of creating care practices that go beyond the strict needs of a population that has a specific characteristic, and yes, the look at the extramural scenario that society presents6-7.Most schools that train health specialties rely on educational methods that support technological logic, focusing on imaging and equipment, dispensing with or makinglearning about interpersonal relationships a secondary aspect. The work of the dierent professionals who comprise the team must be orchestrated and aligned, to present a relationship with the user that directs the team’s form and action. The construction of knowledge occurs through collective lines of force, especially when we are talking about health care6,8. When thinking about strategies to improve professional training, we must look at the national curricular guidelines (DCN, Diretrizes Curriculares Nacionais) for undergraduate courses in the health area. Since 2001, the articulation between the training of professionals and the field of health practice has been presented as necessary and essential. The resolutions show the need to promote graduates capable of working in the promotion, prevention, recovery and rehabilitation of health, through generalist, humanist, critical and reflective training to work with quality, competence and respecting the principles of ethics/bioethics, noting that health care goes beyond the technical act of care, requiring the resolution of individual and collective health problems. It is worth noting that the same is expected in the competency matrix for the training of nephrology specialists.

[question] I need a thesis statement, fit for a 2nd year undergrad paper, on the potential clinical effects of a training guided by the concept of 'Paideia' on one hand and standard technical training on the other, in no more than 300 words. ===================== [text] In the health area, a habitual behavior is observed among professionals of using knowledge about diseases and treatments (generating authority) over the passivity of those who need care – the patient (perpetuating dependence) – and this marks a strong characteristic of paternalism. For many professionals, it is difficult to assess an individual’s ability to decide on an indication based on clinical and laboratory evaluation. Often, there is still a very strong belief in professional knowledge as sovereign1.Involving patients in decision-making helps professionals ensure that the treatment provided reflects their preferences and values. Ethics, here understood as a reflection on moral and deontological norms and rules and the values that should guide how professionals should behave, is essential to the practice of health care, and respect for patient autonomy is present in the professions’ codes of ethics. Patients must have the exercise of their autonomy fully guaranteed. Thus, all information must be presented, allowing this autonomy to be exercised2-5.It is recommended that professionals make decisions considering clinical, epidemiological, psychosocial and ethical aspects, never forgetting that these complement each other. With this in mind, it is necessary to consider that competencies can be understood as the skills and knowledge that are acquired throughout training. When we talk about healthcare professionals, understanding the user’s role in decision-making is a competency that needs to be acquired by everyone. Thus, we must remember that the logic of training in the dierent specialties in some health courses, such as medicine, nursing and nutrition, including specialization in Nephrology, is focused on the idea of clinical skills, that is, education acts as a teaching guide for including the professionals into the work process, but often it does not work as Paideia (broad, holistic training with cultural identity) and perpetuates the status quo of technical, procedure-centered training5-7.The vision of skills has been changing daily, as the place of study has expanded. As authors have suggested, there is a need for training that understands the reality of the population, and not just the constant identification of diseases and pre-determined treatments. In this sense, providing the training of reflective professionals who are less attentive to the closed content of the disciplines, developing autonomy, focusing on learning to learn and the student’s protagonism, with the aim of creating care practices that go beyond the strict needs of a population that has a specific characteristic, and yes, the look at the extramural scenario that society presents6-7.Most schools that train health specialties rely on educational methods that support technological logic, focusing on imaging and equipment, dispensing with or makinglearning about interpersonal relationships a secondary aspect. The work of the dierent professionals who comprise the team must be orchestrated and aligned, to present a relationship with the user that directs the team’s form and action. The construction of knowledge occurs through collective lines of force, especially when we are talking about health care6,8. When thinking about strategies to improve professional training, we must look at the national curricular guidelines (DCN, Diretrizes Curriculares Nacionais) for undergraduate courses in the health area. Since 2001, the articulation between the training of professionals and the field of health practice has been presented as necessary and essential. The resolutions show the need to promote graduates capable of working in the promotion, prevention, recovery and rehabilitation of health, through generalist, humanist, critical and reflective training to work with quality, competence and respecting the principles of ethics/bioethics, noting that health care goes beyond the technical act of care, requiring the resolution of individual and collective health problems. It is worth noting that the same is expected in the competency matrix for the training of nephrology specialists. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/384023444_Nephrologist_training_a_bioethical_analysis ===================== [instruction] Answer the question using only the information provided in the context. Do not rely on external knowledge or sources.

In this task, your answers must be based solely on information provided in the prompt. Information from prior knowledge and external sources is not permitted.

Summarize the included text in a bullet point list and use bold to highlight any company names.

Future Possibilities of Big Tech in Finance This report generally provides an overview of Big Tech’s current financial offerings, how the existing regulatory framework applies to these operations, and related policy implications. However, should Big Tech seek to expand its offerings, as its actions have sometimes suggested and some observers have speculated, the relevant concerns may change considerably. At the same time, regulatory treatment may change irrespective of Big Tech’s activities, as policymakers and lawmakers continue to assess various Big Tech financial-services-related activities, such as data practices, and potential antitrust issues. For policymakers concerned about the potential implications of becoming dominant in financial markets, financial products where Big Tech could expand is also relevant for current policy. This section considers the potential evolution of financial services offered by Big Tech and the attendant policy implications. While it considers possible alternatives and issues that may arise from possible paths, the report does not assume that any one is more or less likely or that the companies are considering pursuing any particular strategy. Investment Advisory Services Investment advisory services refer to professionals that provide advice on securities to investors and include asset, portfolio, and wealth managers.156 More than 90% of wealth managers believe Big Tech companies will enter the market, with greater than 50% expecting significant disruption if it happens, according to a November 2021 survey.157 Over the past decade, fintechs have entered the investment management area, using machine learning to offer services such as robo- advising and retail stock trading. If Big Tech companies were to consider this approach, they would have to register as investment advisors with the Securities and Exchange Commission. They may also be required to register with the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority if they plan to offer brokerage services. Insurance According to one major management consulting firm, “[o]utside tech-powered giants … are shaping the insurance market.”158 Both Amazon and Google have partnered with insurance companies, much like they did banks, to offer various insurance products.159 Any intention to push further without relying on a partner would invite regulation at the state level,160 where most of the regulation of insurance occurs: The role of the federal government in regulating private insurance is relatively limited compared with its role in banking and securities. Insurance companies, unlike banks and securities firms, have been chartered and regulated solely by the states for the past 150 years. There are no federal regulators of insurance akin to those for securities or banks, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) or the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), respectively.161 Banking There are few issues at the nexus of technology and finance that generate greater interest and speculation than the prospect of Big Tech’s entry into banking. As it stands, some have pursued nonbank lending. The “Plex” project (see “Google “Plex” textbox), which Google abandoned in late 2021, was the most direct step to date by the industry, seeming to confirm collective and long-held suspicions that Big Techs were interested in becoming banks. However, if any of the companies were to consider an expansion into more bank-like activities, such as accepting deposits, their only option would likely be to pursue an industrial loan company charter, which has a complex framework and history. Legislative Framework Generally, U.S. law prohibits commercial enterprises (i.e., nonfinancial firms) from operating banks. Since at least as far back as the Glass-Steagall Act (Sections 20, 21, 26, and 32 of the Banking Act of 1933; P.L. 73-66), and then in the Bank Holding Company Act, Congress has sought to separate banking enterprises that take deposits and make loans from commercial enterprises producing and selling goods and services.162 In short, the separation aims to prevent one company from both offering a product and the loan to purchase that product funded with deposits publicly guaranteed by FDIC insurance. One exception to this general separation of commerce and banking is the role of industrial loan companies (ILCs). ILCs are financial institutions charted in six states163 that function much like typical banks. Unlike other banks, ILCs can be owned by nonfinancial, commercial firms. Under the Bank Holding Company Act (12 U.S.C. 1841 (c)(2)(h)), ILCs, provided they meet certain criteria, are exempt from the definition of bank. Pursuant to that exemption, a company that owns a bank is not a bank holding company and as such is not subject to oversight by the Federal Reserve. However, ILCs are considered state banks for the purposes of the FDIC Act (12 U.S.C. 1813 (a)(2)). Under that law, they are defined as banks and thus eligible for deposit insurance. Thus, this patchwork legal framework creates the opportunity for a company with other commercial interests to offer banking services, obtain deposit insurance, and operate nationally without being subject to consolidated supervision by the Federal Reserve System. Relevant History Historically, nonfinancial companies interested in a banking license have taken the ILC approach. In the mid-2000s, both Walmart and Home Depot began unsuccessful attempts to establish or acquire ILCs.165 Both ultimately dropped their attempts in the face of public opposition, after which the FDIC imposed an official moratorium on considering new insurance applications from ILCs between July 2006 and January 2008, and Section 603 of the Dodd-Frank Act imposed another temporary statutory moratorium between July 2010 and July 2013. Though the official moratoria had ended, the FDIC did not grant an ILC insurance application again until March 2020, when it approved two ILCs—Nelnet and Square166—for deposit insurance. Square offers many of the same services as the Big Techs in this report, including mobile wallet with payment and peer-to-peer transfer functions.167 Also relevant is an outstanding application for an ILC charter by Japanese e-commerce company Rakuten. Rakuten filed its most recent ILC application on January 15, 2021, following two previous applications that it withdrew before rulings. Rakuten is sometimes referred to as the “Amazon of Japan”168 and has a similar business model to U.S. Big Tech companies. As such, any decision by the FDIC will have regulatory arbitrage considerations (see “Systemic Risk” above) and is likely to be interpreted by others with similar models considering entering banking. Theoretically, a Big Tech with an ILC charter could benefit from access to deposits and deposit insurance without the increased regulatory burden and costs of consolidated financial oversight by the Federal Reserve System

In this task, your answers must be based solely on information provided in the prompt. Information from prior knowledge and external sources is not permitted. Summarize the included text in a bullet point list and use bold to highlight any company names. Future Possibilities of Big Tech in Finance This report generally provides an overview of Big Tech’s current financial offerings, how the existing regulatory framework applies to these operations, and related policy implications. However, should Big Tech seek to expand its offerings, as its actions have sometimes suggested and some observers have speculated, the relevant concerns may change considerably. At the same time, regulatory treatment may change irrespective of Big Tech’s activities, as policymakers and lawmakers continue to assess various Big Tech financial-services-related activities, such as data practices, and potential antitrust issues. For policymakers concerned about the potential implications of becoming dominant in financial markets, financial products where Big Tech could expand is also relevant for current policy. This section considers the potential evolution of financial services offered by Big Tech and the attendant policy implications. While it considers possible alternatives and issues that may arise from possible paths, the report does not assume that any one is more or less likely or that the companies are considering pursuing any particular strategy. Investment Advisory Services Investment advisory services refer to professionals that provide advice on securities to investors and include asset, portfolio, and wealth managers.156 More than 90% of wealth managers believe Big Tech companies will enter the market, with greater than 50% expecting significant disruption if it happens, according to a November 2021 survey.157 Over the past decade, fintechs have entered the investment management area, using machine learning to offer services such as robo- advising and retail stock trading. If Big Tech companies were to consider this approach, they would have to register as investment advisors with the Securities and Exchange Commission. They may also be required to register with the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority if they plan to offer brokerage services. Insurance According to one major management consulting firm, “[o]utside tech-powered giants … are shaping the insurance market.”158 Both Amazon and Google have partnered with insurance companies, much like they did banks, to offer various insurance products.159 Any intention to push further without relying on a partner would invite regulation at the state level,160 where most of the regulation of insurance occurs: The role of the federal government in regulating private insurance is relatively limited compared with its role in banking and securities. Insurance companies, unlike banks and securities firms, have been chartered and regulated solely by the states for the past 150 years. There are no federal regulators of insurance akin to those for securities or banks, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) or the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), respectively.161 Banking There are few issues at the nexus of technology and finance that generate greater interest and speculation than the prospect of Big Tech’s entry into banking. As it stands, some have pursued nonbank lending. The “Plex” project (see “Google “Plex” textbox), which Google abandoned in late 2021, was the most direct step to date by the industry, seeming to confirm collective and long-held suspicions that Big Techs were interested in becoming banks. However, if any of the companies were to consider an expansion into more bank-like activities, such as accepting deposits, their only option would likely be to pursue an industrial loan company charter, which has a complex framework and history. Legislative Framework Generally, U.S. law prohibits commercial enterprises (i.e., nonfinancial firms) from operating banks. Since at least as far back as the Glass-Steagall Act (Sections 20, 21, 26, and 32 of the Banking Act of 1933; P.L. 73-66), and then in the Bank Holding Company Act, Congress has sought to separate banking enterprises that take deposits and make loans from commercial enterprises producing and selling goods and services.162 In short, the separation aims to prevent one company from both offering a product and the loan to purchase that product funded with deposits publicly guaranteed by FDIC insurance. One exception to this general separation of commerce and banking is the role of industrial loan companies (ILCs). ILCs are financial institutions charted in six states163 that function much like typical banks. Unlike other banks, ILCs can be owned by nonfinancial, commercial firms. Under the Bank Holding Company Act (12 U.S.C. 1841 (c)(2)(h)), ILCs, provided they meet certain criteria, are exempt from the definition of bank. Pursuant to that exemption, a company that owns a bank is not a bank holding company and as such is not subject to oversight by the Federal Reserve. However, ILCs are considered state banks for the purposes of the FDIC Act (12 U.S.C. 1813 (a)(2)). Under that law, they are defined as banks and thus eligible for deposit insurance. Thus, this patchwork legal framework creates the opportunity for a company with other commercial interests to offer banking services, obtain deposit insurance, and operate nationally without being subject to consolidated supervision by the Federal Reserve System. Relevant History Historically, nonfinancial companies interested in a banking license have taken the ILC approach. In the mid-2000s, both Walmart and Home Depot began unsuccessful attempts to establish or acquire ILCs.165 Both ultimately dropped their attempts in the face of public opposition, after which the FDIC imposed an official moratorium on considering new insurance applications from ILCs between July 2006 and January 2008, and Section 603 of the Dodd-Frank Act imposed another temporary statutory moratorium between July 2010 and July 2013. Though the official moratoria had ended, the FDIC did not grant an ILC insurance application again until March 2020, when it approved two ILCs—Nelnet and Square166—for deposit insurance. Square offers many of the same services as the Big Techs in this report, including mobile wallet with payment and peer-to-peer transfer functions.167 Also relevant is an outstanding application for an ILC charter by Japanese e-commerce company Rakuten. Rakuten filed its most recent ILC application on January 15, 2021, following two previous applications that it withdrew before rulings. Rakuten is sometimes referred to as the “Amazon of Japan”168 and has a similar business model to U.S. Big Tech companies. As such, any decision by the FDIC will have regulatory arbitrage considerations (see “Systemic Risk” above) and is likely to be interpreted by others with similar models considering entering banking. Theoretically, a Big Tech with an ILC charter could benefit from access to deposits and deposit insurance without the increased regulatory burden and costs of consolidated financial oversight by the Federal Reserve System

[question] [user request] ===================== [text] [context document] ===================== [instruction] Answer the question using only the information provided in the context. Do not rely on external knowledge or sources.

I have hypothyroidism, but I just started taking ashwagandha, and I'm noticing decent effects on my stress levels. What are studies showing regarding the helpfulness of this supplement? Is there anything I need to be worried about? What is known about its drug interactions?

Efficacy Stress and anxiety A 2021 systematic review identified seven studies investigating ashwagandha to treat stress and anxiety. A total of 491 adults, all from India, with either self-reported high stress and anxiety or a diagnosed anxiety disorder, were randomized to take ashwagandha or placebo for 6 to 8 weeks. Six of the studies used extracts made from ashwagandha root alone (three studies, KSM-66), root and leaf (two studies, Sensoril or Shoden), or unspecified parts (one study), while the seventh study used dried root powder made into granules. The ashwagandha dose varied from 240 to 1,250 mg/day of extract or 12,000 mg/day of whole root granules equivalent to 6,000 mg of root powder. Overall, the studies found that ashwagandha significantly reduced stress and anxiety levels (subjectively measured by validated rating scales), reduced sleeplessness and fatigue, and reduced serum cortisol (a stress hormone) levels, compared with placebo. In several studies, benefits appeared to be greater with doses of 500 to 600 mg/day compared with lower doses. Results from three additional small studies published after this 2021 review also suggest that ashwagandha has a beneficial impact on perceived stress. One clinical trial conducted in Florida included 60 men and women experiencing perceived stress. Participants took capsules containing 225 mg/day or 400 mg/day of a proprietary ashwagandha root and leaf extract (NooGandha) or placebo for 30 days. Compared with placebo, participants taking both doses of ashwagandha extract reported positive effects on stress, anxiety, depression, and food cravings as measured by validated rating scales. In addition, participants taking the 225 mg dose had lower saliva cortisol levels than those in the placebo group. At the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, 60 students were randomized to take an ashwagandha root extract (Gaia Herbs) or placebo for 30 days in a double-blind trial . The extract contained 2.5 mg withanolides per 350-mg capsule, and participants took two capsules daily. The investigators gathered qualitative, subjective information from participants during daily check-ins and focus groups. Participants who took ashwagandha extract reported increased well-being, including a sense of calm, improved energy levels, heightened mental clarity, and enhanced sleep quality. While descriptions of stress were comparable in both groups, participants taking ashwagandha were more likely to describe their stress as manageable compared with those taking placebo. Sleep Research is limited, but the results from a few clinical trials suggest that ashwagandha extracts may help with sleep. For example, at one study center in India, 150 healthy men and women age 18 to 65 years with self-reported sleep problems characterized by insomnia and lack of restful sleep were randomized to take an ashwagandha root and leaf extract (Shoden) or placebo for 6 weeks. The extract was standardized to contain 21 mg of withanolide glycosides per 60-mg capsule, and participants took two capsules each day. Both groups reported improvements in sleep quality as measured by a validated rating scale, but the improvements were greater in the ashwagandha group (72%) compared with the placebo group (29%). In addition, participants taking ashwagandha extract showed improvements in sleep efficiency (time in bed spent in sleep), total sleep time, sleep latency (time taken to fall asleep), and awakening after sleep onset as assessed by actigraphy, which involves wearing a watch monitor on the wrist to measure body motion. They also reported improvements in quality of life. In another trial conducted in India, 80 healthy men and women age 18 to 50 years, half of them with insomnia, were randomized to take an ashwagandha root extract (KSM-66) or placebo for 8 weeks. The extract was standardized to a withanolide content of more than 5% per 300-mg capsule, and participants took two capsules each day. Participants with insomnia who took ashwagandha extract showed improvements in sleep quality, sleep onset latency, mental alertness on rising, and perceived anxiety symptoms compared with those taking placebo, as measured by actigraphy and validated rating scales. Participants without insomnia taking ashwagandha also reported improved sleep but not perceived anxiety symptoms or mental alertness on awakening. A 2021 systematic review and meta-analysis included five studies (including the two described above), investigating ashwagandha to promote sleep. All studies were conducted in India. A total of 372 adults, either self-described as healthy or with insomnia, took ashwagandha or placebo for 6 to 12 weeks. The dose of the ashwagandha supplement used in these studies ranged from 250 to 600 mg/day as a root extract (KSM-66) or, in one study, 120 mg/day of a root and leaf extract (Shoden). Overall, the studies found that ashwagandha extract had a small but significant effect on improving sleep compared with placebo. The benefits were more prominent when the dose was 600 mg/day and when the treatment duration was at least 8 weeks. Benefits were also more prominent in participants with insomnia. Safety In the studies described above and in many other clinical trials, ashwagandha has been well tolerated by participants for up to about 3 months of use. Common side effects are mild and include stomach upset, loose stools, nausea, and drowsiness. However, evidence on the safety of longer term ashwagandha use over many months or years is lacking. There are a few reports of more serious side effects associated with ashwagandha use, including adverse effects on liver function. In an early report of liver injury associated with ashwagandha use, a 20-year-old man in Japan developed liver dysfunction and hyperbilirubinemia after using ashwagandha in combination with multiple antianxiety drugs. Since then, the use of ashwagandha has been linked to acute liver injury in other case reports. These include five cases (three men and two women, age range 21 to 62 years), who reportedly took supplements containing 450 to 1,350 mg ashwagandha daily over the course of 1 week to 4 months when signs of liver injury, such as jaundice, pruritus, nausea, lethargy, abdominal discomfort, and hyperbilirubinemia, appeared. In these cases and others, the conditions of the individuals improved over time after they stopped taking the supplement; some also received medical treatment. However, the contents of the products that the individuals took were not independently verified in all cases, and some products were combination products containing ashwagandha and other ingredients. Some research in mice and humans suggests that ashwagandha might affect thyroid function. In one study, three adult men who took 500 mg/day of a standardized ashwagandha extract (Sensoril) for 8 weeks had small increases in blood thyroxine (T4) levels. A small clinical trial with 50 participants with subclinical hypothyroidism found that ashwagandha (KSM-66), at 300 mg twice daily for 8 weeks, lowered serum thyroid stimulating hormone (TSH) and increased triiodothyronine (T3) and T4 levels compared with placebo. These findings suggest that ashwagandha might interact with thyroid hormone medications. Ashwagandha might also interact with other medications including antidiabetes medications, antihypertensives, immunosuppressants, and sedatives. Implications for use Several randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trials, most of them fairly small in size and of short duration, have found that ashwagandha may reduce perceived stress and anxiety and improve the quality and duration of sleep. Because studies have used various ashwagandha preparations (with different extraction and standardization processes) and doses, it is difficult to identify specific extracts or recommended amounts. In addition, most studies have been conducted as part of a traditional medical system, so the potential effects of ashwagandha when used as a dietary supplement outside of that approach remain unclear. Ashwagandha appears to be well tolerated for up to 3 months of use. However, the efficacy and safety of long-term ashwagandha use over months or years for stress, anxiety, or sleep is not known. In addition, ashwagandha may have potential adverse effects on the liver and thyroid and might not be safe for people with prostate cancer or those who are pregnant or nursing.

[question] I have hypothyroidism, but I just started taking ashwagandha, and I'm noticing decent effects on my stress levels. What are studies showing regarding the helpfulness of this supplement? Is there anything I need to be worried about? What is known about its drug interactions? ===================== [text] Efficacy Stress and anxiety A 2021 systematic review identified seven studies investigating ashwagandha to treat stress and anxiety. A total of 491 adults, all from India, with either self-reported high stress and anxiety or a diagnosed anxiety disorder, were randomized to take ashwagandha or placebo for 6 to 8 weeks. Six of the studies used extracts made from ashwagandha root alone (three studies, KSM-66), root and leaf (two studies, Sensoril or Shoden), or unspecified parts (one study), while the seventh study used dried root powder made into granules. The ashwagandha dose varied from 240 to 1,250 mg/day of extract or 12,000 mg/day of whole root granules equivalent to 6,000 mg of root powder. Overall, the studies found that ashwagandha significantly reduced stress and anxiety levels (subjectively measured by validated rating scales), reduced sleeplessness and fatigue, and reduced serum cortisol (a stress hormone) levels, compared with placebo. In several studies, benefits appeared to be greater with doses of 500 to 600 mg/day compared with lower doses. Results from three additional small studies published after this 2021 review also suggest that ashwagandha has a beneficial impact on perceived stress. One clinical trial conducted in Florida included 60 men and women experiencing perceived stress. Participants took capsules containing 225 mg/day or 400 mg/day of a proprietary ashwagandha root and leaf extract (NooGandha) or placebo for 30 days. Compared with placebo, participants taking both doses of ashwagandha extract reported positive effects on stress, anxiety, depression, and food cravings as measured by validated rating scales. In addition, participants taking the 225 mg dose had lower saliva cortisol levels than those in the placebo group. At the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, 60 students were randomized to take an ashwagandha root extract (Gaia Herbs) or placebo for 30 days in a double-blind trial . The extract contained 2.5 mg withanolides per 350-mg capsule, and participants took two capsules daily. The investigators gathered qualitative, subjective information from participants during daily check-ins and focus groups. Participants who took ashwagandha extract reported increased well-being, including a sense of calm, improved energy levels, heightened mental clarity, and enhanced sleep quality. While descriptions of stress were comparable in both groups, participants taking ashwagandha were more likely to describe their stress as manageable compared with those taking placebo. Sleep Research is limited, but the results from a few clinical trials suggest that ashwagandha extracts may help with sleep. For example, at one study center in India, 150 healthy men and women age 18 to 65 years with self-reported sleep problems characterized by insomnia and lack of restful sleep were randomized to take an ashwagandha root and leaf extract (Shoden) or placebo for 6 weeks. The extract was standardized to contain 21 mg of withanolide glycosides per 60-mg capsule, and participants took two capsules each day. Both groups reported improvements in sleep quality as measured by a validated rating scale, but the improvements were greater in the ashwagandha group (72%) compared with the placebo group (29%). In addition, participants taking ashwagandha extract showed improvements in sleep efficiency (time in bed spent in sleep), total sleep time, sleep latency (time taken to fall asleep), and awakening after sleep onset as assessed by actigraphy, which involves wearing a watch monitor on the wrist to measure body motion. They also reported improvements in quality of life. In another trial conducted in India, 80 healthy men and women age 18 to 50 years, half of them with insomnia, were randomized to take an ashwagandha root extract (KSM-66) or placebo for 8 weeks. The extract was standardized to a withanolide content of more than 5% per 300-mg capsule, and participants took two capsules each day. Participants with insomnia who took ashwagandha extract showed improvements in sleep quality, sleep onset latency, mental alertness on rising, and perceived anxiety symptoms compared with those taking placebo, as measured by actigraphy and validated rating scales. Participants without insomnia taking ashwagandha also reported improved sleep but not perceived anxiety symptoms or mental alertness on awakening. A 2021 systematic review and meta-analysis included five studies (including the two described above), investigating ashwagandha to promote sleep. All studies were conducted in India. A total of 372 adults, either self-described as healthy or with insomnia, took ashwagandha or placebo for 6 to 12 weeks. The dose of the ashwagandha supplement used in these studies ranged from 250 to 600 mg/day as a root extract (KSM-66) or, in one study, 120 mg/day of a root and leaf extract (Shoden). Overall, the studies found that ashwagandha extract had a small but significant effect on improving sleep compared with placebo. The benefits were more prominent when the dose was 600 mg/day and when the treatment duration was at least 8 weeks. Benefits were also more prominent in participants with insomnia. Safety In the studies described above and in many other clinical trials, ashwagandha has been well tolerated by participants for up to about 3 months of use. Common side effects are mild and include stomach upset, loose stools, nausea, and drowsiness. However, evidence on the safety of longer term ashwagandha use over many months or years is lacking. There are a few reports of more serious side effects associated with ashwagandha use, including adverse effects on liver function. In an early report of liver injury associated with ashwagandha use, a 20-year-old man in Japan developed liver dysfunction and hyperbilirubinemia after using ashwagandha in combination with multiple antianxiety drugs. Since then, the use of ashwagandha has been linked to acute liver injury in other case reports. These include five cases (three men and two women, age range 21 to 62 years), who reportedly took supplements containing 450 to 1,350 mg ashwagandha daily over the course of 1 week to 4 months when signs of liver injury, such as jaundice, pruritus, nausea, lethargy, abdominal discomfort, and hyperbilirubinemia, appeared. In these cases and others, the conditions of the individuals improved over time after they stopped taking the supplement; some also received medical treatment. However, the contents of the products that the individuals took were not independently verified in all cases, and some products were combination products containing ashwagandha and other ingredients. Some research in mice and humans suggests that ashwagandha might affect thyroid function. In one study, three adult men who took 500 mg/day of a standardized ashwagandha extract (Sensoril) for 8 weeks had small increases in blood thyroxine (T4) levels. A small clinical trial with 50 participants with subclinical hypothyroidism found that ashwagandha (KSM-66), at 300 mg twice daily for 8 weeks, lowered serum thyroid stimulating hormone (TSH) and increased triiodothyronine (T3) and T4 levels compared with placebo. These findings suggest that ashwagandha might interact with thyroid hormone medications. Ashwagandha might also interact with other medications including antidiabetes medications, antihypertensives, immunosuppressants, and sedatives. Implications for use Several randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trials, most of them fairly small in size and of short duration, have found that ashwagandha may reduce perceived stress and anxiety and improve the quality and duration of sleep. Because studies have used various ashwagandha preparations (with different extraction and standardization processes) and doses, it is difficult to identify specific extracts or recommended amounts. In addition, most studies have been conducted as part of a traditional medical system, so the potential effects of ashwagandha when used as a dietary supplement outside of that approach remain unclear. Ashwagandha appears to be well tolerated for up to 3 months of use. However, the efficacy and safety of long-term ashwagandha use over months or years for stress, anxiety, or sleep is not known. In addition, ashwagandha may have potential adverse effects on the liver and thyroid and might not be safe for people with prostate cancer or those who are pregnant or nursing. https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/Ashwagandha-HealthProfessional/ ===================== [instruction] Answer the question using only the information provided in the context. Do not rely on external knowledge or sources.

You are required to answer by only using information in the above text. Don't insert any intro or outro, just the answer to the prompt. Use bullet points and be extremely concise. Don't use hypotheticals in your answers, state only what you can prove to be true based on the text.

Explain how the proposed framework in the above text relates to python code snippets.

Adverse Drug Reactions (ADRs) are a leading cause of hospital admissions and healthcare costs. Traditional methods of ADR reporting often rely on post-marketing surveillance, and manual reporting of ADRs to the local or national pharmacovigilance agencies for causality assessment and final reporting to the WHO. High-income countries have their own national (i.e., USFDA) and regional (i.e., European Medicines Agency / EMA) pharmacovigilance agencies. However, this process is slow and inefficient. This article proposes a novel framework for integrating ADR detection into clinical workflows using Electronic Medical Record (EMR) systems, crowdsourced reporting from patients and healthcare professionals, and graph theory for generating automated ADR signals and reports to the local or national pharmacovigilance agencies. The system leverages automated data collection from EMRs (drug prescriptions, clinical notes) by EMR data scraping, integrating ADR dictionaries and drug databases to automate the generation of ranked ADR signals. By applying graph theory, the system filters and upranks connections between drugs and ADRs, considering the temporal relationship between drug administration and ADR occurrence. This automated approach offers a significant improvement in ADR reporting, enabling faster detection and more accurate predictions. Methodologies, framework visualizations and python code snippets are included to aid implementation.

Adverse Drug Reactions (ADRs) are a leading cause of hospital admissions and healthcare costs. Traditional methods of ADR reporting often rely on post-marketing surveillance, and manual reporting of ADRs to the local or national pharmacovigilance agencies for causality assessment and final reporting to the WHO. High-income countries have their own national (i.e., USFDA) and regional (i.e., European Medicines Agency / EMA) pharmacovigilance agencies. However, this process is slow and inefficient. This article proposes a novel framework for integrating ADR detection into clinical workflows using Electronic Medical Record (EMR) systems, crowdsourced reporting from patients and healthcare professionals, and graph theory for generating automated ADR signals and reports to the local or national pharmacovigilance agencies. The system leverages automated data collection from EMRs (drug prescriptions, clinical notes) by EMR data scraping, integrating ADR dictionaries and drug databases to automate the generation of ranked ADR signals. By applying graph theory, the system filters and upranks connections between drugs and ADRs, considering the temporal relationship between drug administration and ADR occurrence. This automated approach offers a significant improvement in ADR reporting, enabling faster detection and more accurate predictions. Methodologies, framework visualizations and python code snippets are included to aid implementation. Explain how the proposed framework in the above text relates to python code snippets. You are required to answer by only using information in the above text. Don't insert any intro or outro, just the answer to the prompt. Use bullet points and be extremely concise. Don't use hypotheticals in your answers, state only what you can prove to be true based on the text.

Answer the question using only the given context block. Do not use any outside resources or prior knowledge. Format your answer in a paragraph with no more than 150 words. If you cannot answer using the context block alone, respond with "I'm sorry. I cannot find the answer in the context source."

What limits the scope of Biden's pardon for marijuana possession?

Federal Clemency for Marijuana Possession On October 6, 2022, President Biden issued a proclamation granting “a full, complete, and unconditional pardon” to “all current United States citizens and lawful permanent residents” who had committed or been convicted of simple possession of marijuana under the CSA or a related provision of the D.C. Code. President Biden’s invocation of the clemency power means that persons who committed simple possession of marijuana before the date of the proclamation may not be prosecuted or punished for the offense under the relevant provisions of the CSA or the D.C. Code. (Although the District of Columbia has its own criminal code, its criminal justice system has some overlap with the federal system and is subject to the President’s clemency power.) Several factors limit the scope of the pardon. First, it applies only to violations of federal and D.C. law and does not affect other state law marijuana offenses. In announcing the pardon, President Biden also encouraged state governors to take similar steps but, under the United States’ federalist system of government, the President has no direct power to change state law or compel the states to adopt federal policies. While some governors have taken similar steps or expressed willingness to do so, in some states, governors cannot independently grant clemency. Second, the pardon applies only to simple possession of marijuana, not to other marijuana-related CSA offenses such as manufacture, distribution, or possession with intent to distribute or to other federal crimes. Federal prosecutions of simple possession of marijuana are relatively uncommon. The U.S. Sentencing Commission (USSC) reports that about 7,700 people subject to the pardon were convicted of only simple possession since FY1992, none of whom are currently in federal custody. (Additional individuals not subject to the pardon were convicted during that period.) In FY2021, 117 people subject to the pardon were convicted of only simple possession. A smaller number of people were convicted of possessing marijuana and possessing other illicit drugs or committing other crimes. Those people would remain liable for the other offenses. Shortly after the pardon was announced, the USSC issued policy priorities including “consideration of possible amendments to the [Sentencing] Guidelines Manual relating to criminal history to address … the impact of simple possession of marihuana offenses.” Third, the pardon by its terms “does not apply to individuals who were non-citizens not lawfully present in the United States at the time of their offense.” According to a 2016 USSC report, the vast majority of federal marijuana possession arrests occur at the border between the United States and Mexico. Among offenders sentenced for marijuana possession in FY2013, the USSC reports that over 94% of those arrested at the border were not U.S. citizens. To the extent those individuals were not lawfully present in the country, they would not benefit from the pardon. Fourth, the pardon applies only to offenses committed before the proclamation. The Supreme Court has explained that the President may issue a pardon “at any time after [an offense’s] commission, either before legal proceedings are taken, or during their pendency, or after conviction and judgment.” While DOJ is currently not prioritizing prosecuting low-level marijuana offenses, the October 2022 pardon does not prevent prosecution of future offenses if the current Administration or a future Administration adopts a different policy. Fifth, the pardon may not remove all legal consequences of marijuana possession, because it does not expunge convictions. Moreover, some collateral consequences of marijuana-related activities do not depend on a person being charged with or convicted of a CSA violation. Finally, and most fundamentally, the pardon does not change the status of marijuana under federal law. The President lacks the power to make such a change unilaterally. In announcing the grant of clemency, President Biden directed the Attorney General to review the classification of marijuana under the CSA, which is one way the federal government could change the status of the substance consistently with relevant separation-of-powers principles and the CSA’s procedural requirements. Any agency action in response to that directive would likely occur through notice-and-comment rulemaking, subject to judicial review and applicable international treaty obligations. Notwithstanding the foregoing limitations, some commentators have described the October 2022 pardon as a significant development in national marijuana policy that may restore some civic rights to those who benefit from it. Some have expressed concerns that the pardon might benefit offenders who committed more serious offenses but pleaded guilty to simple possession or that relaxing controls on marijuana may generally lead to an increase in crime. Others advocate for further pardons, expungements, and legal reforms to decriminalize marijuana.

Answer the question using only the given context block. Do not use any outside resources or prior knowledge. Format your answer in a paragraph with no more than 150 words. If you cannot answer using the context block alone, respond with "I'm sorry. I cannot find the answer in the context source." What limits the scope of Biden's pardon for Marijuana Possession? Federal Clemency for Marijuana Possession On October 6, 2022, President Biden issued a proclamation granting “a full, complete, and unconditional pardon” to “all current United States citizens and lawful permanent residents” who had committed or been convicted of simple possession of marijuana under the CSA or a related provision of the D.C. Code. President Biden’s invocation of the clemency power means that persons who committed simple possession of marijuana before the date of the proclamation may not be prosecuted or punished for the offense under the relevant provisions of the CSA or the D.C. Code. (Although the District of Columbia has its own criminal code, its criminal justice system has some overlap with the federal system and is subject to the President’s clemency power.) Several factors limit the scope of the pardon. First, it applies only to violations of federal and D.C. law and does not affect other state law marijuana offenses. In announcing the pardon, President Biden also encouraged state governors to take similar steps but, under the United States’ federalist system of government, the President has no direct power to change state law or compel the states to adopt federal policies. While some governors have taken similar steps or expressed willingness to do so, in some states, governors cannot independently grant clemency. Second, the pardon applies only to simple possession of marijuana, not to other marijuana-related CSA offenses such as manufacture, distribution, or possession with intent to distribute or to other federal crimes. Federal prosecutions of simple possession of marijuana are relatively uncommon. The U.S. Sentencing Commission (USSC) reports that about 7,700 people subject to the pardon were convicted of only simple possession since FY1992, none of whom are currently in federal custody. (Additional individuals not subject to the pardon were convicted during that period.) In FY2021, 117 people subject to the pardon were convicted of only simple possession. A smaller number of people were convicted of possessing marijuana and possessing other illicit drugs or committing other crimes. Those people would remain liable for the other offenses. Shortly after the pardon was announced, the USSC issued policy priorities including “consideration of possible amendments to the [Sentencing] Guidelines Manual relating to criminal history to address … the impact of simple possession of marihuana offenses.” Third, the pardon by its terms “does not apply to individuals who were non-citizens not lawfully present in the United States at the time of their offense.” According to a 2016 USSC report, the vast majority of federal marijuana possession arrests occur at the border between the United States and Mexico. Among offenders sentenced for marijuana possession in FY2013, the USSC reports that over 94% of those arrested at the border were not U.S. citizens. To the extent those individuals were not lawfully present in the country, they would not benefit from the pardon. Fourth, the pardon applies only to offenses committed before the proclamation. The Supreme Court has explained that the President may issue a pardon “at any time after [an offense’s] commission, either before legal proceedings are taken, or during their pendency, or after conviction and judgment.” While DOJ is currently not prioritizing prosecuting low-level marijuana offenses, the October 2022 pardon does not prevent prosecution of future offenses if the current Administration or a future Administration adopts a different policy. Fifth, the pardon may not remove all legal consequences of marijuana possession, because it does not expunge convictions. Moreover, some collateral consequences of marijuana-related activities do not depend on a person being charged with or convicted of a CSA violation. Finally, and most fundamentally, the pardon does not change the status of marijuana under federal law. The President lacks the power to make such a change unilaterally. In announcing the grant of clemency, President Biden directed the Attorney General to review the classification of marijuana under the CSA, which is one way the federal government could change the status of the substance consistently with relevant separation-of-powers principles and the CSA’s procedural requirements. Any agency action in response to that directive would likely occur through notice-and-comment rulemaking, subject to judicial review and applicable international treaty obligations. Notwithstanding the foregoing limitations, some commentators have described the October 2022 pardon as a significant development in national marijuana policy that may restore some civic rights to those who benefit from it. Some have expressed concerns that the pardon might benefit offenders who committed more serious offenses but pleaded guilty to simple possession or that relaxing controls on marijuana may generally lead to an increase in crime. Others advocate for further pardons, expungements, and legal reforms to decriminalize marijuana.

Draw your answer from the below context block.

I am having trouble understanding the text; please summarize it so that people who are unfamiliar with nanomaterials can understand and learn about them.

Aim of Work Nanomaterials (nanocrystalline materials) are substances possessing grain sizes on the order of a billionth of a meter. They manifest extraordinarily charming and beneficial properties, which can be exploited for a ramification of structural and nonstructural packages. Seeing that Nanomaterials own unique, beneficial chemical, bodily, and mechanical houses, they may be use for an extensive form of programs, like next era laptop chips, kinetic power (KE) penetrators with more advantageous lethality, better insulation materials, Phosphors for excessive-Defination TV, Low cost Flat-Panel displays, more and more difficult cutting tools, elimination of pollution, excessive strength density, Batteries, excessive power magnets, high sensitive sensors, motors with greater gas efficiency, Aerospace addititives with superior performance characteristics, higher and density weapons platforms, Longer-Lasting Satellites. Longer-Lasting medical implants, Ductile, Machinable ceramics, huge electro chromic show devices. Nanotechnology has the potential to be the key to a brand new world in the field of construction and building materials. Although replication of natural systems is one of the most promising areas of this technology, scientists are still trying to grasp their astonishing complexities. Furthermore, a nanotechnology is a rapidly expanding area of research where novel properties of materials manufactured on nanoscale can be utilized for the benefit of construction infrastructure, Therefore, the main objective of preparing this study is the importance of nanomaterials and their use in many modern industries due to their mechanical, electrical and chemical properties and for the purpose of identifying the most important methods of preparation, detection methods, types and applications of each type. Abstract Nanomaterials (NMs) are gaining significance in technological applications due to their tunable chemical, physical, and mechanical properties and enhanced performance when compared with their bulkier counterparts. This study presents a summary of the general types of NMs and provides an overview of the various synthesis methods of nanoparticles (NPs) and their functionalization via covalent or noncovalent interactions using different methods. It highlights the techniques used for the characterization of NPs and discusses their physical and chemical properties. Due to their unique properties, NMs have several applications and have become part of our daily lives. As a result, research is gaining attention since some NPs are not easily degraded by the environment. Thus, this study also highlights research efforts into the fate, behavior, of different classes of (NMs) in the environment. General Introduction Nanotechnology is an interdisciplinary study which allows us to develop new materials with new, interesting and useful properties. These new materials are nanomaterials made from nanoparticles. Nanoparticles are ultra-small particles with exceptional properties which can direct medicines straight to the place where the human body needs them, they can make materials stronger and they can convert solar energy more efficiently. Nanoparticles possess different properties and behave differently to the classical, larger building blocks of substances. From a scientific point of view, these interesting new properties are not so much the results from the fact that nanoparticles are small, but they result from the fact that a particle consisting of a relatively limited number of molecules behaves and interacts differently with its surroundings for fundamental physical reasons. Nanoparticles and nanomaterials have gained prominence in technological advancements due to their adjustable physicochemical characteristics such as melting point, wettability, electrical and thermal conductivity, catalytic activity, light absorption and scattering resulting in enhanced performance over their bulk counterparts. By controlling the shape, size and internal order of the nanostructures, properties (electrical conductivity, colour, chemical reactivity, elasticity, etc.) can be modified. Some nanomaterials occur naturally, but of particular interest are engineered nanomaterials (EN), which are designed for, and already being used in many commercial products and processes. They can be found in such things as sunscreens, cosmetics, sporting goods, stainresistant clothing, tires, electronics, as well as many other everyday items, and are used in medicine for purposes of diagnosis, imaging and drug delivery. Engineered nanomaterials are resources designed at the molecular (nanometre) level to take advantage of their small size and novel properties which are generally not seen in their conventional, bulk counterparts. The two main reasons why materials at the nano scale can have different properties are increased relative surface area and new quantum effects. Nanomaterials have a much greater surface area to volume ratio than their conventional forms, which can lead to greater chemical reactivity and affect their strength. Also at the nano scale, quantum effects can become much more important in determining the materials properties and characteristics, leading to novel optical, electrical and magnetic behaviors. 1.1 Definition of Nanomaterials Nanoscale materials are defined as a set of substances where at least one dimension is less than approximately 100 nanometers. A nanometer is one millionth of a millimeter - approximately 100,000 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair. Nanomaterials are of interest because at this scale unique optical, magnetic, electrical, and other properties emerge. These emergent properties have the potential for great impacts in electronics, medicine, and other fields [1] . 1.2 History of Nanomaterials Nanotechnology involves the synthesis and application of materials in dimensions of the order of a billionth of a meter (1x10-9). This categorizes them under ultrafine particles. (Figure 1.1) reveals the size comparison of the nanoparticles against different living and nonliving species [2]. The properties of nanoparticles vary from their bulk counterpart and their chemistry [2]. The electronic structure, reactivity, and thermal and mechanical properties tend to change when the particles reach the nanoscale. Through nanotechnology, we can build materials and devices with control down to the level of individual atoms and molecules. In the past two decades, there were reports of colloids and nanoparticles designed by nature [3, 4]. The history of nanomaterials began immediately after the big bang when Nanostructures were formed in the early meteorites. Nature later evolved many other Nanostructures like seashells, skeletons etc. Nanoscaled smoke particles were formed during the use of fire by early humans. The scientific story of nanomaterials however began much later. One of the first scientific report is the colloidal gold particles synthesized by Michael Faraday as early as 1857. Nanostructured catalysts have also been investigated for over 70 years. By the early 1940’s, precipitated and fumed silica nanoparticles were being manufactured and sold in USA and Germany as substitutes for ultrafine carbon black for rubber reinforcements [1]. Over the past few years, nanomaterials (NMs) have attracted the researchers because of their nanosize, physical, biological, and chemical properties compared to their bulk materials. These NMs are classified based on their size, chemical composition, shape, and sources. Different types of NMs have been synthetized from different sources and they are being classified accordingly. Many NMs have been produced in large quantities based on the requirements for many industrial applications. The two main sources through which NMs are being produced are synthetic source and naturally occurring nanoparticles (NPs). In this chapter, we discuss the types and classifications of NMs and broadly discuss the different types of nanomaterials isolated from natural and synthetic sources [5]. 1.3 Main differences between nanomaterials and bulk materials Nanomaterials are particles that have their size in 1-100 nm range at least in one dimension. We cannot see their particles through the naked eye. Moreover, examples of these materials include nanozymes, titanium dioxide nanoparticles, graphene, etc. Bulk materials are particles that have their size above 100 nm in all dimensions. We can see their particles through the naked eye. The examples of these materials include plaster, sand, gravel, cement, ore, slag, salts, etc.

System Instructions: Draw your answer from the below context block. Question: I am having trouble understanding the text; please summarize it so that people who are unfamiliar with nanomaterials can understand and learn about them. Context Block: Aim of Work Nanomaterials (nanocrystalline materials) are substances possessing grain sizes on the order of a billionth of a meter. They manifest extraordinarily charming and beneficial properties, which can be exploited for a ramification of structural and nonstructural packages. Seeing that Nanomaterials own unique, beneficial chemical, bodily, and mechanical houses, they may be use for an extensive form of programs, like next era laptop chips, kinetic power (KE) penetrators with more advantageous lethality, better insulation materials, Phosphors for excessive-Defination TV, Low cost Flat-Panel displays, more and more difficult cutting tools, elimination of pollution, excessive strength density, Batteries, excessive power magnets, high sensitive sensors, motors with greater gas efficiency, Aerospace addititives with superior performance characteristics, higher and density weapons platforms, Longer-Lasting Satellites. Longer-Lasting medical implants, Ductile, Machinable ceramics, huge electro chromic show devices. Nanotechnology has the potential to be the key to a brand new world in the field of construction and building materials. Although replication of natural systems is one of the most promising areas of this technology, scientists are still trying to grasp their astonishing complexities. Furthermore, a nanotechnology is a rapidly expanding area of research where novel properties of materials manufactured on nanoscale can be utilized for the benefit of construction infrastructure, Therefore, the main objective of preparing this study is the importance of nanomaterials and their use in many modern industries due to their mechanical, electrical and chemical properties and for the purpose of identifying the most important methods of preparation, detection methods, types and applications of each type. Abstract Nanomaterials (NMs) are gaining significance in technological applications due to their tunable chemical, physical, and mechanical properties and enhanced performance when compared with their bulkier counterparts. This study presents a summary of the general types of NMs and provides an overview of the various synthesis methods of nanoparticles (NPs) and their functionalization via covalent or noncovalent interactions using different methods. It highlights the techniques used for the characterization of NPs and discusses their physical and chemical properties. Due to their unique properties, NMs have several applications and have become part of our daily lives. As a result, research is gaining attention since some NPs are not easily degraded by the environment. Thus, this study also highlights research efforts into the fate, behavior, of different classes of (NMs) in the environment. General Introduction Nanotechnology is an interdisciplinary study which allows us to develop new materials with new, interesting and useful properties. These new materials are nanomaterials made from nanoparticles. Nanoparticles are ultra-small particles with exceptional properties which can direct medicines straight to the place where the human body needs them, they can make materials stronger and they can convert solar energy more efficiently. Nanoparticles possess different properties and behave differently to the classical, larger building blocks of substances. From a scientific point of view, these interesting new properties are not so much the results from the fact that nanoparticles are small, but they result from the fact that a particle consisting of a relatively limited number of molecules behaves and interacts differently with its surroundings for fundamental physical reasons. Nanoparticles and nanomaterials have gained prominence in technological advancements due to their adjustable physicochemical characteristics such as melting point, wettability, electrical and thermal conductivity, catalytic activity, light absorption and scattering resulting in enhanced performance over their bulk counterparts. By controlling the shape, size and internal order of the nanostructures, properties (electrical conductivity, colour, chemical reactivity, elasticity, etc.) can be modified. Some nanomaterials occur naturally, but of particular interest are engineered nanomaterials (EN), which are designed for, and already being used in many commercial products and processes. They can be found in such things as sunscreens, cosmetics, sporting goods, stainresistant clothing, tires, electronics, as well as many other everyday items, and are used in medicine for purposes of diagnosis, imaging and drug delivery. Engineered nanomaterials are resources designed at the molecular (nanometre) level to take advantage of their small size and novel properties which are generally not seen in their conventional, bulk counterparts. The two main reasons why materials at the nano scale can have different properties are increased relative surface area and new quantum effects. Nanomaterials have a much greater surface area to volume ratio than their conventional forms, which can lead to greater chemical reactivity and affect their strength. Also at the nano scale, quantum effects can become much more important in determining the materials properties and characteristics, leading to novel optical, electrical and magnetic behaviors. 1.1 Definition of Nanomaterials Nanoscale materials are defined as a set of substances where at least one dimension is less than approximately 100 nanometers. A nanometer is one millionth of a millimeter - approximately 100,000 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair. Nanomaterials are of interest because at this scale unique optical, magnetic, electrical, and other properties emerge. These emergent properties have the potential for great impacts in electronics, medicine, and other fields [1] . 1.2 History of Nanomaterials Nanotechnology involves the synthesis and application of materials in dimensions of the order of a billionth of a meter (1x10-9). This categorizes them under ultrafine particles. (Figure 1.1) reveals the size comparison of the nanoparticles against different living and nonliving species [2]. The properties of nanoparticles vary from their bulk counterpart and their chemistry [2]. The electronic structure, reactivity, and thermal and mechanical properties tend to change when the particles reach the nanoscale. Through nanotechnology, we can build materials and devices with control down to the level of individual atoms and molecules. In the past two decades, there were reports of colloids and nanoparticles designed by nature [3, 4]. The history of nanomaterials began immediately after the big bang when Nanostructures were formed in the early meteorites. Nature later evolved many other Nanostructures like seashells, skeletons etc. Nanoscaled smoke particles were formed during the use of fire by early humans. The scientific story of nanomaterials however began much later. One of the first scientific report is the colloidal gold particles synthesized by Michael Faraday as early as 1857. Nanostructured catalysts have also been investigated for over 70 years. By the early 1940’s, precipitated and fumed silica nanoparticles were being manufactured and sold in USA and Germany as substitutes for ultrafine carbon black for rubber reinforcements [1]. Over the past few years, nanomaterials (NMs) have attracted the researchers because of their nanosize, physical, biological, and chemical properties compared to their bulk materials. These NMs are classified based on their size, chemical composition, shape, and sources. Different types of NMs have been synthetized from different sources and they are being classified accordingly. Many NMs have been produced in large quantities based on the requirements for many industrial applications. The two main sources through which NMs are being produced are synthetic source and naturally occurring nanoparticles (NPs). In this chapter, we discuss the types and classifications of NMs and broadly discuss the different types of nanomaterials isolated from natural and synthetic sources [5]. 1.3 Main differences between nanomaterials and bulk materials Nanomaterials are particles that have their size in 1-100 nm range at least in one dimension. We cannot see their particles through the naked eye. Moreover, examples of these materials include nanozymes, titanium dioxide nanoparticles, graphene, etc. Bulk materials are particles that have their size above 100 nm in all dimensions. We can see their particles through the naked eye. The examples of these materials include plaster, sand, gravel, cement, ore, slag, salts, etc.

Answer only using information from the provided text. You are not allowed to use any external resources or prior knowledge. Limit the response to 200 words.

Explain the gender unique challenges of women with autism.

Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) face an assortment of social, emotional, and mental challenges. Typically, individuals with ASD have different and unexpected communication styles, difficulty recognizing others’ social cues, discomfort when making eye contact, delayed speech and unusual speech styles, and a preference for narrow or extreme groups of interests (Lai, Lombardo, Baron-Cohen, & Simon, 2014). Notable strengths can include an ability to focus on details, a perseverance for completing tasks, and an aptitude in following rules or instructions. While little is understood about the origins of autism, there is evidence to suggest atypical brain development and organization that may be related to genetic and environmental factors (Chaste & Leboyer, 2012). The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2018) reported that in 2014 one out of every fifty-nine individuals was identified with ASD, in contrast to the 1:150 ratio in the year 2000. More recently, research has revealed an even higher uptick, reflecting occurrences as high as one in 40 individuals having ASD (Kogan et al., 2018). Since 2006, when ASD screening became recommended, the familiarity and acceptance of the disorder has grown, leading to a spike in diagnoses in recent years (Wright, 2017). Although ASD has numerous subtypes, many studies depict how females with ASD are characteristically different than their male counterparts across the spectrum. Females with ASD have not only demonstrated a different set of mannerisms, but also face a variety of unique challenges. Females are often under-recognized on the spectrum and are three to four times less likely to be diagnosed with autism than males (Loomes et al., 2017). Males, on the other hand, not only dominate the autism spectrum in numbers, but also in the amount of research done on ASD. This brings into question whether males are more likely to develop ASD or if there is a diagnostic gender bias causing females to be underdiagnosed (Gould & Ashton-Smith, 2011). In this paper, I will evaluate the literature that examines the specific, gender-unique challenges that females with ASD experience. I will be discussing the underdiagnosis of females with ASD, the higher risk of sexual abuse for females with ASD, and the frequent development of secondary mental health concerns in females with ASD. Females with Autism are Underdiagnosed Females with ASD often go undiagnosed or receive a late diagnosis (Mandic-Maravic et al., 2015). An accurate and early diagnosis for individuals with ASD is essential to optimize their social and emotional development (Milner, McIntosh, Colvert, & Happé, 2019). Baldwin and Costley (2016) found that females who did not receive a diagnosis until the age of 18 or older were far more likely to struggle later in life because of the lack of necessary assistance and treatment they could have received in their adolescent years. In this section, I will discuss two common explanations as to why females may be underdiagnosed: camouflaging and differences in presentation than males. Camouflaging Females with ASD are able to camouflage their autistic traits better than males with ASD (Lai et al. 2011). Camouflaging is defined as presenting and behaving oneself as neurotypical in order to fit into society (Milner et al., 2019; Schuck, Flores, & Fung, 2019). Mimicking behaviors, communicating nonverbally, reducing strange behaviors around others, and preparing small talk or “scripts” beforehand are ways females attempt to camouflage (Hull et al., 2017). In one study, women and girls reported to successfully hide their autistic traits by learning stock phrases or studying the appropriate amount of time they needed to maintain eye contact in order to appear normal in conversation (Lai et al., 2019). In another study, some females with autism reported that they camouflage in order to connect with friends, go on dates, get out of the spotlight, get a job, or simply be seen as neurotypical (Hull et al., 2017). Researchers presented a questionnaire to individuals with ASD and found that 89.2% of males with ASD and 90.9% of females with ASD attempt to camouflage their autism in order to fit in (Cassidy, Bradley, Shaw, & Baron-Cohen, 2018). Though both females and males try to hide autistic traits, females attained much higher scores, indicating that they are more adept at camouflaging and do so in more situations than males (Lai et al., 2011). Differences in presentation from males Autistic traits manifest differently between males and females with ASD, which subsequently causes false negative results in females being evaluated

System instruction: Answer only using information from the provided text. You are not allowed to use any external resources or prior knowledge. Limit the response to 200 words. Context: Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) face an assortment of social, emotional, and mental challenges. Typically, individuals with ASD have different and unexpected communication styles, difficulty recognizing others’ social cues, discomfort when making eye contact, delayed speech and unusual speech styles, and a preference for narrow or extreme groups of interests (Lai, Lombardo, Baron-Cohen, & Simon, 2014). Notable strengths can include an ability to focus on details, a perseverance for completing tasks, and an aptitude in following rules or instructions. While little is understood about the origins of autism, there is evidence to suggest atypical brain development and organization that may be related to genetic and environmental factors (Chaste & Leboyer, 2012). The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2018) reported that in 2014 one out of every fifty-nine individuals was identified with ASD, in contrast to the 1:150 ratio in the year 2000. More recently, research has revealed an even higher uptick, reflecting occurrences as high as one in 40 individuals having ASD (Kogan et al., 2018). Since 2006, when ASD screening became recommended, the familiarity and acceptance of the disorder has grown, leading to a spike in diagnoses in recent years (Wright, 2017). Although ASD has numerous subtypes, many studies depict how females with ASD are characteristically different than their male counterparts across the spectrum. Females with ASD have not only demonstrated a different set of mannerisms, but also face a variety of unique challenges. Females are often under-recognized on the spectrum and are three to four times less likely to be diagnosed with autism than males (Loomes et al., 2017). Males, on the other hand, not only dominate the autism spectrum in numbers, but also in the amount of research done on ASD. This brings into question whether males are more likely to develop ASD or if there is a diagnostic gender bias causing females to be underdiagnosed (Gould & Ashton-Smith, 2011). In this paper, I will evaluate the literature that examines the specific, gender-unique challenges that females with ASD experience. I will be discussing the underdiagnosis of females with ASD, the higher risk of sexual abuse for females with ASD, and the frequent development of secondary mental health concerns in females with ASD. Females with Autism are Underdiagnosed Females with ASD often go undiagnosed or receive a late diagnosis (Mandic-Maravic et al., 2015). An accurate and early diagnosis for individuals with ASD is essential to optimize their social and emotional development (Milner, McIntosh, Colvert, & Happé, 2019). Baldwin and Costley (2016) found that females who did not receive a diagnosis until the age of 18 or older were far more likely to struggle later in life because of the lack of necessary assistance and treatment they could have received in their adolescent years. In this section, I will discuss two common explanations as to why females may be underdiagnosed: camouflaging and differences in presentation than males. Camouflaging Females with ASD are able to camouflage their autistic traits better than males with ASD (Lai et al. 2011). Camouflaging is defined as presenting and behaving oneself as neurotypical in order to fit into society (Milner et al., 2019; Schuck, Flores, & Fung, 2019). Mimicking behaviors, communicating nonverbally, reducing strange behaviors around others, and preparing small talk or “scripts” beforehand are ways females attempt to camouflage (Hull et al., 2017). In one study, women and girls reported to successfully hide their autistic traits by learning stock phrases or studying the appropriate amount of time they needed to maintain eye contact in order to appear normal in conversation (Lai et al., 2019). In another study, some females with autism reported that they camouflage in order to connect with friends, go on dates, get out of the spotlight, get a job, or simply be seen as neurotypical (Hull et al., 2017). Researchers presented a questionnaire to individuals with ASD and found that 89.2% of males with ASD and 90.9% of females with ASD attempt to camouflage their autism in order to fit in (Cassidy, Bradley, Shaw, & Baron-Cohen, 2018). Though both females and males try to hide autistic traits, females attained much higher scores, indicating that they are more adept at camouflaging and do so in more situations than males (Lai et al., 2011). Differences in presentation from males Autistic traits manifest differently between males and females with ASD, which subsequently causes false negative results in females being evaluated Question: Explain the gender unique challenges of women with autism.

Use only the details found in the text above to inform your answer.

Which composers are credited with creating and expanding the framework for aleatory composition in its early days?

8 In section 4 we discussed various tendencies that began to emerge during and after the phase of punctual music. Around 1956 these became much clearer and enabled composers to draw certain conclusions. 1. The statistical approach to music came to the foreground. The primary consideration became the ordering of higher categories of form rather than the organisation of detail. This was already indicated by use of the term 'group' to refer to what is really the smallest unit, characterised by the detailed effect of pitch, duration, timbre, etc.; within the group, however, a certain freedom was possible without encroaching on the characteristic of the group. This freedom was also evident in an easier use of interval proportions than was ever conceivable in classical dodecaphony. It was no longer a question of 'this and this' or 'so and so many notes, but of a certain degree of density. Density, register, direction of movement, degree of periodicity and many other concepts emerged as aspects of music that could be ordered serially. Attention to elements of detail made way for a more global determination, and thus for the concept of form. 2. In this process the series became increasingly neutral, functioning more and more as a regulatory factor. Proportions became decisive: a 3rd from a pitch series is a 5/4 proportion that can be manifest in any other musical ele- ment. In so far as pitch series were still employed, they likewise had a neutral character and were naturally no longer bound to the twelve notes. The series in Gruppen still had twelve notes, and indeed a pronounced shape of its own, presumably to attain large proportional contrasts in the macrofield. The Klavierstücke I-IV however, dating from 1954, retained only the rudiments of the 12-note series. In the second and third pieces, respectively, they are as fol- lows: Nono's Il Canto sospeso (1956) was based on the all-interval series shown in Example 109. Something similiar occurred in Messiaen's Livre d'Orgue (see Example 16). 3. The outstanding scholar Györgi Ligeti, who has already been mentioned, introduced the concept of interval permeability. In section 4 we have already observed how the interval, and indeed other musical elements too, lost its own existence by being taken up in higher, statistically determinable quanti- ties.4 This desensitisation evoked new problems and new possibilities. The music became manifest in layers, no longer characterised by the detail but by a global 'material state' (rough, granular, smooth, etc.). Such layers could be combined, and exact synchronisation was obviously no longer relevant. Indeed, exactness acquired a certain margin: synchronism was not essential, but rather the spatial distribution of 'material states'. Something of the sort had already been achieved by Messiaen, among others, with his modality, in which a certain indifferentiation likewise arose in terms of sequence of notes and intervals. In serial music composers went further: different tempos were combinable, and the new concept of field magnitude emerged, heralding another important phase in new music that is usually described as aleatory composition. 9 This did not appear out of thin air. Directly after the rigorously punctual style of the Structures, Boulez reacted with his Marteau sans Maître, completed in 1954, in which the tempo in particular fluctuates through the many changes, directions such as 'tempo et nuances très instables', etc. The work breathes a freedom and suppleness that reminds one immediately of Debussy. The many short notes, separate or clustered, and the irrational values create a sort of written-out rubato (see Example 35). This differentiation, which was also manifest, though somewhat differently, in Stockhausen's work of the same period, moved the latter to express the following thoughts (freely cited): 'An inaccuracy factor arises in performance. The areas within which this factor is manifest are time fields, and their dimensions are field magnitudes. In the past too this margin existed in performance, but was coincidental. Now we wish to capture these inaccuracies functionally. A series of field magnitudes, rather than a traditional series of fixated durations, can now be determinant.' This meant the abandonment of our quantitative system of fixed-value notation and the creation of a way of indicating the boundaries within which indeterminacy may occur, something that could be done in many ways. In Example 67 Boulez used the sign to indicate the boundaries within which a number of short notes may be freely placed. Stockhausen developed a different method to indicate action duration, based on the principle that note duration is no longer counted, but determined during performance by means of a particular action prescribed by the composer. Thus, the time between two notes, for instance, may depend on that required by the player to move his hand, on the degree of complexity of a given touch or pedal movement, or on breathing considerations, etc. Once again, such physiolog- ical reactions had always existed; but Stockhausen wished to incorporate them functionally in his music. Although it sounds paradoxical, all this revealed a desire to control musical elements that cannot be accurately com- mitted to paper. It is clear, therefore, that it was not a question of the absolute values of these elements, but of their mutual relationships. The rapidity of these innovations was remarkable. While the correspon- dence between macro- and micro-areas discussed in the previous sections was still hardly formulated, new territory was being explored. And each discovery required years of elaboration! Perhaps it was this hurried course of events that caused problems in Stockhausen's first composition in this field. Let us take a closer look at the Klavierstück XI of 1957. Nineteen groups are written down on a large piece of paper, all of very dif- ferent length and without any suggestion of sequence; some are illustrated in Example 110. According to the composer each group is in itself the result of serial ordering, based on different series to organise field magnitude propor- tions. We must take his word for it, since we have arrived at a situation in which serial manipulation can no longer be reconstructed without the help of the composer. Some groups include the familiar notes in small print that are to be played as fast as possible'. Action duration is taken into account, for the composer says that 'difficult chords and large leaps with one hand obviously require more time than simple chords and smaller intervals'. Although the notes in normal print have the customary quantitive notation of duration, an unexpected element is to play a role. Stockhausen prescribes the following: the performer is to glance unintentionally at the page and play the first group that catches his eye, in the tempo, dynamics and touch of his choice. The lat- ter, however, are classified by the composer beforehand: there are six tempos, for instance, ranging from tempo I, very fast, to tempo 6, very slow. Subsequently, the player's eye is caught unintentionally (without any attempt to connect particular groups) by another group which he now plays in accor- dance with directions given at the end of the previous group. Each group can be connected to any of the other eighteen, and all nineteen groups can there- fore be performed in the prescribed degrees of tempo, dynamics and touch. The characteristics of all groups are therefore variable within the chosen boundaries. The field magnitude of a following group is determined by indi- cations at the end of the preceding one. A performance does not necessarily include all the groups. If a group is repeated, indications are given for small modifications in the second render- ing, usually in the form of somewhat elementary octave transpositions. If a group occurs for a third time, it also brings one of the possible realisations of the whole piece to an end. The work is an example of open form, without direction or termination. The groups are spatially juxtaposed and can be com- bined in countless ways. In the many commentaries on this composition two aspects have been neglected or confused. 1. The action duration - a decidedly positive element. Instead of ‘counting' with a margin of inaccuracy, a spontaneous reaction arises, a realisation of the time structure at the moment of the action itself. Such music can therefore no longer be approached from the score, since the time structure is now deter- mined by the perception time of the performer himself, which is inseparable from physical reactions and abilities. Such freedom is therefore ostensible. Nothing is added to an existing structure (unlike jazz or basso continuo tech- nique); on the contrary, the player remains entirely bound to the composer's directions, but he becomes involved right down to his physical reactions. Notice that this action duration takes place within the boundaries of each group. The mutual bond between the groups is quite a different matter; it is created by means of what one could call: 2. the spontaneous decision. The player is required to glance 'unintention- ally' and to link the very first group that catches his eye with the preceding one. The word 'chance' crops up here and is indeed to stay with us, whether relevant or not. But it is not a question of chance, for the performer may choose from no more than the 18 options determined by the composer. All possibilities are already enclosed in the concept. At best there is mention of an unconsidered decision at the last moment - freedom, indeed, but a free- dom without sense. The actual time experience of the action duration is absent, as is the considered decision of the composition process. It is a free- dom that is only possible thanks to another concept of form, that of the open form without causality. These new concepts of form have already been dis- cussed at several points, especially in relation to the theory of musical space. In this light Stockhausen's Klavierstück XI is hardly new, but merely a confir- mation of a concept of form already found in Debussy. Stockhausen's step was to transfer choice from the composer to the per- former; instead of a single notated version, many realisations of a piece become feasible. - Boulez was the first to recognise the real problem of the Klavierstück XI. In the same period, but independently of Stockhausen, he worked on his Third Piano Sonata; at the same time he was confronted by the work of Mallarmé, whose literary preoccupations ran remarkably parallel despite the great dis- parity in time. In Boulez, too, the player gains a more important role, but this does nothing the composer believes - to change the problem of form. He felt the necessity to develop a new form that adapts to the material available to the serial composer, which was constantly becoming more elastic. But form to Boulez was something more than the mosaics of Stockhausen's music, which were really nothing other than constantly changing combinations from millions of options. If the performer was free to choose, then his choice should preferably be made after some consideration, and with only a very lim- ited number of possibilities that were precisely determined by the composer. An example is the overall structure of the Sonata (comprising five move- ments in the first concept): Antiphonie, Trope, Constellation, Strophe, Séquence. The sequence of the movements is free, providing that Constellation is always in the middle. The internal structure reflects the same approach. One of the movements, Trope, has four components: two so-called structures complexes (Parenthèse, Commentaire) and two structures simples (Glose, Texte). In the 'complex structures' the performer is again free to include or omit certain additional variants (given between brackets). The sequence of these components is indicated in an ingenious manner. The unnumbered pages of the score are in a ring binder, and the player may begin where he wishes. The sequence is therefore directed - we usually read from front to back - but not predetermined (Boulez speaks of a forme circu- laire). There are normally four options, therefore, depending on the starting point: - P, C, C, G, T G, T, P G, T, P C T, P, C, G But since the Commentaire section is included twice, four other possibilities become available, depending on where this section is placed (it may only be performed once); this can be represented as in Figure 7. Altogether eight dif- ferent sequences are therefore available; compared to the millions in Stockhausen, this illustrates just how much more control the composer has retained over the final outcome. The Trope from Boulez's Third Piano Sonata provided only a first and simple answer to the new problems of form. Although the composer already estab- lished new structural concepts, the territory as such was as yet hardly explored. This is particularly evident if we bear in mind that the free sequence of sections, which caused the most sensation in the beginning, was merely one aspect of the complex concept of form that awaited exploitation. However the case may be, through these preoccupations, form acquired unprecedented autonomy, despite the astonishing authority granted (for the time being) to the performer. This is already observed in the work of Mallarmé, who concentrated far more on the structure of language than on its significance, or, in other words, attempted to convert this significance into a symbolism of absolute value. Form had a life of its own, bringing the artist to an attitude of anonymity, since the intrusion of purely personal incidents was undesirable. Those with some knowledge of Asian culture will hardly be surprised by this. But in Europe relationships are different, and particularly for those less gifted than Boulez it is fitting to recall the words of Paul Valéry, a confidant of Mallarmé. Concerning the latter's ambitions he spoke later (in his Lettre sur Mallarme) of 'diviniser la chose écrite' (divining that which is written). But, he went on, 'ce n'est point l'œuvre faite et ses apparences ou ses effets dans le monde qui peuvent nous accomplir et nous édifier, mais seule- ment la manière dont nous l'avons faite (it is not the finished work and its appearances, or its effects on the world, which can fulfill and edify us, but only the manner in which we have accomplished it). IO The concept of aleatory music has now broadened considerably, and we must certainly mention one other composer under this heading. We have already examined two aspects: action duration and the sponta- neous decision in Stockhausen, and intervention possibilities in Boulez. In the latter the performer is like a driver who may choose from a limited num- ber of roads, while the road map itself remains the domain of the town plan- ner. Boulez described Stockhausen's solution as chance, while Stockhausen used the term gelenkter Zufall (guided chance); but as we have seen, in reali- ty the element of chance was less present than one might imagine. All this only made the problem of form most acute, and the composer who was to draw particularly radical conclusions was the American John Cage. Cage came to Europe in 1958 - I remember a momentous concert at the World Exhibition in Brussels - and was quick to cause the necessary stir. From his point of view our controversy between tonality and atonality was long out- dated. He believed that modern serialists kept far too much to traditional paths, exposing themselves to a constant risk of academicism. A number of similarities, however, can also be found. Like Boulez, Cage's music reveals a pursuit of objectivity, or rather anonymity, which helps the sound to 'come to itself'. But his conclusions were much more radical. Instead of trying to bind the notes, his school attempted to soak off their adhesive, formed as it was by centuries of convention. If one hangs on to the notes, if one has 'musical' ideas, one cannot allow the notes to be themselves. And 'being themselves' means that there is no superimposed expression. (Many modern composers would go along with him up to this point, and the much older Varèse, with his 'liberation of the sound', was even a precursor.) And it also means that there is no man-made organisation. Thus, Cage reached a conclusion diametrically opposed to our early serialists: not com- plete determination, but rather complete indetermination was essential. (One of the most shocking experiences of recent times is to discover that both points of departure lead to the same degree of indetermination.) In order to achieve this indetermination, Cage used to make particular use of chance actions such as the tossing of coins, etc. Other means may also be employed, such as the oracle of the staves from the ancient Chinese book I-Ching (which illustrates the influence of Zen Buddhism on this composer), or mathemati- cal methods. More recently, however, the accent has shifted towards the unforeseeable- ness of the performance itself, involving the actual performers. It is remark- able how completely different paths form striking parallels with modern European composers! Fifty years earlier Charles Ives, following quite a differ- ent line of thought, created the same sort of music as that of the young Schönberg and Stravinsky. Despite the shift towards live performance, a score was naturally still required as an instruction for the players. But the score must not be viewed as a ready-made, notated form. And this is where Cage differs: the composition is not an autonomous object, but a performance process. Obviously, this process has its boundaries - determined by the action of the players and by a number of characteristics - but essentially the music has no precedence above either note or noise. While it does have its own exis- tence, it remains 'transparent' in relation to its surroundings. Its boundaries become diffuse, and counting is not required, for we exist in time'. Stopwatches rather than bars serve to indicate when an occurrence of sound must take place within this time. Christian Wolff, a composer from the Cage group, replaced Stockhausen's eye ('unintentional glancing') with the ear: cer- tain occurrences of sound, caused by the one player, evoke reactions from the other (Duo for Pianists II). The outcome is determined by the performers themselves; finally, musical form may be conceived as 'the length of the pro- gramme'.7 Cage is among those Westerners who have listened to the Japanese bow- 8 man in chapter 6. Just how far his interpretation is correct, we will leave to the experts. Is this still music? Surely we see an influence on contemporary music that cannot be underestimated. Can everybody do the same? But not everybody does, is Cage's reply. Strong differences of opinion emerge. It is impossible to imagine the fascinating whirlpool of new developments with- out Cage. Whether the music comes from inside or outside, we cannot escape it. 'One day when the windows were open, Christian Wolff played one of his pieces at the piano. Sounds of traffic, boat horns, were heard not only during the silences in the music but, being louder, were more easily heard than the piano sounds themselves. Afterwards, someone asked Christian Wolff to play the piece again with the windows closed. Christian Wolff said he'd be glad to, but that it wasn't really necessary, since the sounds of the environment were in no sense an interruption of those of the music.' II The above discussion helps us to clarify the concept of aleatory music. It is a generic term for all aspects of music that are not predetermined. The rela- tionship between determined and undetermined elements plays a role in all types of music. The undetermined element brings unforeseeableness with it, and can occur both in performance and during the process of composition. Unforeseeableness can be manifest in differing degrees. In the perform- ance of a classical composition, for example, the degree to which the fixated notation can be deviated from is limited. Performance of a piece by John Cage, on the other hand, can involve a high degree of unforeseeableness. But even here general patterns of expectation can be formulated. Finally, with regard to developments in the music of the period 1950-60, the following aspects are of importance: more 1. In Cage's work the element of chance to use this dubious word once - was a means to obtain indetermination and to escape from the human grasp of the music. Young European composers, on the other hand, were con- cerned with gaining even stricter control of the musical material: even this indeterminable area of free choice was consciously incorporated in the of composition. process 2. Bearing in mind changing concepts of musical form, we can say that part of what once belonged to the individual and 'unique' work of art is now ascribed to the material employed by the performers. There is a certain incli- nation to make matters absolute, which corresponds logically to the excessive attention given to musical material that we have observed from 1950 onwards. 3. Expansionism, moreover, is not foreign to serial technique, in the sense that there is an inclination to exploit all the possibilities of the chosen mate- rial. The limited means of dodecaphony of the past have been extended to become an all-embracing permutation procedure; it soon became apparent, however, that this again was not sufficient to harness the wealth of resources that had been rallied. A written serial score realises only a few of the count- less possibilities, and the free choice of the performer can at least compensate this to a certain extent. The element of chance becomes a wider margin in the realisation of the (unforeseeable) permutation process. Far from coincidental is the attendant departure from the unique, once-and-for-all determined work of art. A remarkable dichotomy seems to arise between the realised con- dition of a single work of art and the 'possibly realisable' that is potentially present in the same. Here creative expansionism collides with ultimate boundaries. 4. The element of chance can serve to fill another gap. With all due respect for their sometimes brilliant ideas, one can nonetheless consider that both Stockhausen and Boulez have maintained an only too simple notion of the role of what they call 'surprise' in the musical process. The former wrote: "The degree of information is therefore at its highest when at any point in a musi- cal discourse the moment of surprise is at its strongest: the music constantly has "something to say". (Just before this he specifies: 'Surprise only occurs when the unexpected happens.')" Boulez shares this opinion: "... for any music that is a masterpiece is a music that allows the capacity to surprise at any moment. This is not the place to contradict these ideas, but it is clear that from this point of view too, the involvement of the spontaneous decision of the per- former is most welcome: the 'surprise' within the boundaries of a work may increase, and the same goes for each subsequent performance. 5. Increasing differentiation posed considerable problems with regard to traditional notation, which was not at all equal to its task. By involving the performer, this difficulty was eased on the one hand, while on the other new symbols had to be introduced to indicate players' actions. It was inevitable that this issue also had to be tackled once more, as is described in section 14. 12 In the reaction against abstractions, serial music lost more and more influence after 1960. Boulez has remained a bastion of serial academicism, but Stockhausen has changed enormously. He is no longer the great renewer, but continues to react with great flexibility to any external stimulus that he encounters. He is long past the stage of solving problems of form and tech- nique. From Carré (1960) and Originale (1961) onwards his work comprises. ever more heterogeneous elements including happenings, pop, quotations, indeterminate sound production (contact microphones), etc. The use of contact microphones has now become very widespread, and this opens up a new direction in the application of electronic resources. In days past, electronic music was accurately recorded on tape in a studio. Many considered this an advantage: the composer exercised maximum control, while the inconstancies of live performance were eliminated. But this strict view could not be maintained, and in a next step (discussed in section 9) aleatory techniques were introduced, at first very cautiously among Europeans but after 1960 much more freely. Improvisation groups even appeared on stage working with electronic apparatus. The principle is simple: microphones attached to 'instruments' (that may or may not be recognisable as such) pick up vibrations that are normally neither audible nor usable and feed them to loudspeakers via amplifiers and possibly modulators. A new and hitherto unknown world of sound is brought to life. Unexpected surprises may occur too, and with them an immediate response from the performer. This was a typical feature of the post-1960 period. exper- Once again it was Cage who led the way with such experiments. More important, however, was his awareness of the situation. For in his first iments with chance phenomena he discovered that he was still attempting to drag 'successful' results out of chance actions. Realising later on that this atti- tude was equivocal, he came to accept the induced results of chance. The result was no longer important, but rather the attitude of open-mindedness. Thus, he came to distinguish between chance actions and indetermination. In the first case the composer employs chance as a means, but to a limited degree such that he remains within a self-determined global circle. Indetermination, on the contrary, exceeds this circle: the result is in every respect indefinite; such music crops up out of time, undefined and inciden- tal, only to disappear once more without a trace. All things are interrelated,' Cage said, and taken up in the stream of time. Any (human) pursuit of a stat- ed "aim" is a simplification, and a departure from reality.' The lessons of Cage were developed further by an American ‘second generation' around 1960. And once again the aesthetic consequences of the concept of indetermination were applied more radically than in Europe. In the work of La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Robert Ashley and the Fluxus Movement, almost all existing values and concepts relating to music were turned well and truly upside down. La Monte Young (1935) worked with long chains of chords that developed systematically. His material is economical, and naturally comprises all that is 'sound', including that produced by nature, machines, and electronic resources. Performances may last a week or more and incorporate other ele- ments such as light, movement and theatre. His contemporary Terry Riley followed the same course. His music consists of long chains of repeated motifs, usually in elementary diatonic note patterns. Tape loops and feedback systems provide the characteristic tone colours; electronic and instrumental resources merge. These and other Americans shared a broad interest in wide- ly different idioms including jazz, pop and non-Western music. Chance action - indetermination: many composers throughout the world now work within these borders. Only few are conscious of the background so brilliantly evoked by Cage in his writings. What is clear, however, is that serial concepts are disappearing; there is a growing reaction to their abstrac- tions and a tendency towards greater directness in music making. This is also expressed in the instrumental works of Berio, Ligeti, Kagel and others: music that is tailor-made for certain specialists, musicians who are required to make a creative contribution of their own rather than only faithfully reproduce a more or less authoritarian score. Such music renounces serial, abstractly deter- mined sound differentiation in favour of a more direct form of expression. Not only the actual notes, but sighs, scratches, shouts and moans become part of music making. The instrument literally becomes an extension of the human body. Similar tendencies are found in music theatre. This rather vague term embodies so much variety that a comprehensive definition can hardly be given. In general, it can be viewed as a reaction to traditional theatrical and operatic forms, which have caused the nineteenth century to live on, leaving current issues to the realm of film. The 'raree show' idea has also been aban- doned, since divisions between audience and stage, between different partic- ipating disciplines, required abolition. Various directions emerged, from the political engagement of Nono (Intolleranza, 1960) to the more light-hearted or autonomous approach of Kagel (Sur Scène, 1960) and Ligeti (Aventures, 1962). Nono connected with traditional opera, while Ligeti created a 'com- position with scenic, verbal and musical means'. Unlike the traditional Gesamtkunstwerk there is a tendency to grant the incorporated elements a life of their own, independent of one another and only joined by a common peri- od of time. Once again, vocal and instrumental techniques are extended to such a degree that the two flow together. All such innovations amount to repeated attempts to break through exist- ing boundaries! From the beginning of the twentieth century, the failure of instrument making to keep pace with musical developments made itself increasingly felt. Factories were usually highly industrialised, geared to the mass production of traditional instruments and leaving no room for altruis- tic research in an artistic sense. Today's composer must still make do with instruments developed hundreds of years ago: thus the continual expansion of playing techniques towards the boundaries of human endeavour; thus the contact microphones; and thus the ongoing specialisation of the few players devoted exclusively to new music.

8 In section 4 we discussed various tendencies that began to emerge during and after the phase of punctual music. Around 1956 these became much clearer and enabled composers to draw certain conclusions. 1. The statistical approach to music came to the foreground. The primary consideration became the ordering of higher categories of form rather than the organisation of detail. This was already indicated by use of the term 'group' to refer to what is really the smallest unit, characterised by the detailed effect of pitch, duration, timbre, etc.; within the group, however, a certain freedom was possible without encroaching on the characteristic of the group. This freedom was also evident in an easier use of interval proportions than was ever conceivable in classical dodecaphony. It was no longer a question of 'this and this' or 'so and so many notes, but of a certain degree of density. Density, register, direction of movement, degree of periodicity and many other concepts emerged as aspects of music that could be ordered serially. Attention to elements of detail made way for a more global determination, and thus for the concept of form. 2. In this process the series became increasingly neutral, functioning more and more as a regulatory factor. Proportions became decisive: a 3rd from a pitch series is a 5/4 proportion that can be manifest in any other musical ele- ment. In so far as pitch series were still employed, they likewise had a neutral character and were naturally no longer bound to the twelve notes. The series in Gruppen still had twelve notes, and indeed a pronounced shape of its own, presumably to attain large proportional contrasts in the macrofield. The Klavierstücke I-IV however, dating from 1954, retained only the rudiments of the 12-note series. In the second and third pieces, respectively, they are as fol- lows: Nono's Il Canto sospeso (1956) was based on the all-interval series shown in Example 109. Something similiar occurred in Messiaen's Livre d'Orgue (see Example 16). 3. The outstanding scholar Györgi Ligeti, who has already been mentioned, introduced the concept of interval permeability. In section 4 we have already observed how the interval, and indeed other musical elements too, lost its own existence by being taken up in higher, statistically determinable quanti- ties.4 This desensitisation evoked new problems and new possibilities. The music became manifest in layers, no longer characterised by the detail but by a global 'material state' (rough, granular, smooth, etc.). Such layers could be combined, and exact synchronisation was obviously no longer relevant. Indeed, exactness acquired a certain margin: synchronism was not essential, but rather the spatial distribution of 'material states'. Something of the sort had already been achieved by Messiaen, among others, with his modality, in which a certain indifferentiation likewise arose in terms of sequence of notes and intervals. In serial music composers went further: different tempos were combinable, and the new concept of field magnitude emerged, heralding another important phase in new music that is usually described as aleatory composition. 9 This did not appear out of thin air. Directly after the rigorously punctual style of the Structures, Boulez reacted with his Marteau sans Maître, completed in 1954, in which the tempo in particular fluctuates through the many changes, directions such as 'tempo et nuances très instables', etc. The work breathes a freedom and suppleness that reminds one immediately of Debussy. The many short notes, separate or clustered, and the irrational values create a sort of written-out rubato (see Example 35). This differentiation, which was also manifest, though somewhat differently, in Stockhausen's work of the same period, moved the latter to express the following thoughts (freely cited): 'An inaccuracy factor arises in performance. The areas within which this factor is manifest are time fields, and their dimensions are field magnitudes. In the past too this margin existed in performance, but was coincidental. Now we wish to capture these inaccuracies functionally. A series of field magnitudes, rather than a traditional series of fixated durations, can now be determinant.' This meant the abandonment of our quantitative system of fixed-value notation and the creation of a way of indicating the boundaries within which indeterminacy may occur, something that could be done in many ways. In Example 67 Boulez used the sign to indicate the boundaries within which a number of short notes may be freely placed. Stockhausen developed a different method to indicate action duration, based on the principle that note duration is no longer counted, but determined during performance by means of a particular action prescribed by the composer. Thus, the time between two notes, for instance, may depend on that required by the player to move his hand, on the degree of complexity of a given touch or pedal movement, or on breathing considerations, etc. Once again, such physiolog- ical reactions had always existed; but Stockhausen wished to incorporate them functionally in his music. Although it sounds paradoxical, all this revealed a desire to control musical elements that cannot be accurately com- mitted to paper. It is clear, therefore, that it was not a question of the absolute values of these elements, but of their mutual relationships. The rapidity of these innovations was remarkable. While the correspon- dence between macro- and micro-areas discussed in the previous sections was still hardly formulated, new territory was being explored. And each discovery required years of elaboration! Perhaps it was this hurried course of events that caused problems in Stockhausen's first composition in this field. Let us take a closer look at the Klavierstück XI of 1957. Nineteen groups are written down on a large piece of paper, all of very dif- ferent length and without any suggestion of sequence; some are illustrated in Example 110. According to the composer each group is in itself the result of serial ordering, based on different series to organise field magnitude propor- tions. We must take his word for it, since we have arrived at a situation in which serial manipulation can no longer be reconstructed without the help of the composer. Some groups include the familiar notes in small print that are to be played as fast as possible'. Action duration is taken into account, for the composer says that 'difficult chords and large leaps with one hand obviously require more time than simple chords and smaller intervals'. Although the notes in normal print have the customary quantitive notation of duration, an unexpected element is to play a role. Stockhausen prescribes the following: the performer is to glance unintentionally at the page and play the first group that catches his eye, in the tempo, dynamics and touch of his choice. The lat- ter, however, are classified by the composer beforehand: there are six tempos, for instance, ranging from tempo I, very fast, to tempo 6, very slow. Subsequently, the player's eye is caught unintentionally (without any attempt to connect particular groups) by another group which he now plays in accor- dance with directions given at the end of the previous group. Each group can be connected to any of the other eighteen, and all nineteen groups can there- fore be performed in the prescribed degrees of tempo, dynamics and touch. The characteristics of all groups are therefore variable within the chosen boundaries. The field magnitude of a following group is determined by indi- cations at the end of the preceding one. A performance does not necessarily include all the groups. If a group is repeated, indications are given for small modifications in the second render- ing, usually in the form of somewhat elementary octave transpositions. If a group occurs for a third time, it also brings one of the possible realisations of the whole piece to an end. The work is an example of open form, without direction or termination. The groups are spatially juxtaposed and can be com- bined in countless ways. In the many commentaries on this composition two aspects have been neglected or confused. 1. The action duration - a decidedly positive element. Instead of ‘counting' with a margin of inaccuracy, a spontaneous reaction arises, a realisation of the time structure at the moment of the action itself. Such music can therefore no longer be approached from the score, since the time structure is now deter- mined by the perception time of the performer himself, which is inseparable from physical reactions and abilities. Such freedom is therefore ostensible. Nothing is added to an existing structure (unlike jazz or basso continuo tech- nique); on the contrary, the player remains entirely bound to the composer's directions, but he becomes involved right down to his physical reactions. Notice that this action duration takes place within the boundaries of each group. The mutual bond between the groups is quite a different matter; it is created by means of what one could call: 2. the spontaneous decision. The player is required to glance 'unintention- ally' and to link the very first group that catches his eye with the preceding one. The word 'chance' crops up here and is indeed to stay with us, whether relevant or not. But it is not a question of chance, for the performer may choose from no more than the 18 options determined by the composer. All possibilities are already enclosed in the concept. At best there is mention of an unconsidered decision at the last moment - freedom, indeed, but a free- dom without sense. The actual time experience of the action duration is absent, as is the considered decision of the composition process. It is a free- dom that is only possible thanks to another concept of form, that of the open form without causality. These new concepts of form have already been dis- cussed at several points, especially in relation to the theory of musical space. In this light Stockhausen's Klavierstück XI is hardly new, but merely a confir- mation of a concept of form already found in Debussy. Stockhausen's step was to transfer choice from the composer to the per- former; instead of a single notated version, many realisations of a piece become feasible. - Boulez was the first to recognise the real problem of the Klavierstück XI. In the same period, but independently of Stockhausen, he worked on his Third Piano Sonata; at the same time he was confronted by the work of Mallarmé, whose literary preoccupations ran remarkably parallel despite the great dis- parity in time. In Boulez, too, the player gains a more important role, but this does nothing the composer believes - to change the problem of form. He felt the necessity to develop a new form that adapts to the material available to the serial composer, which was constantly becoming more elastic. But form to Boulez was something more than the mosaics of Stockhausen's music, which were really nothing other than constantly changing combinations from millions of options. If the performer was free to choose, then his choice should preferably be made after some consideration, and with only a very lim- ited number of possibilities that were precisely determined by the composer. An example is the overall structure of the Sonata (comprising five move- ments in the first concept): Antiphonie, Trope, Constellation, Strophe, Séquence. The sequence of the movements is free, providing that Constellation is always in the middle. The internal structure reflects the same approach. One of the movements, Trope, has four components: two so-called structures complexes (Parenthèse, Commentaire) and two structures simples (Glose, Texte). In the 'complex structures' the performer is again free to include or omit certain additional variants (given between brackets). The sequence of these components is indicated in an ingenious manner. The unnumbered pages of the score are in a ring binder, and the player may begin where he wishes. The sequence is therefore directed - we usually read from front to back - but not predetermined (Boulez speaks of a forme circu- laire). There are normally four options, therefore, depending on the starting point: - P, C, C, G, T G, T, P G, T, P C T, P, C, G But since the Commentaire section is included twice, four other possibilities become available, depending on where this section is placed (it may only be performed once); this can be represented as in Figure 7. Altogether eight dif- ferent sequences are therefore available; compared to the millions in Stockhausen, this illustrates just how much more control the composer has retained over the final outcome. The Trope from Boulez's Third Piano Sonata provided only a first and simple answer to the new problems of form. Although the composer already estab- lished new structural concepts, the territory as such was as yet hardly explored. This is particularly evident if we bear in mind that the free sequence of sections, which caused the most sensation in the beginning, was merely one aspect of the complex concept of form that awaited exploitation. However the case may be, through these preoccupations, form acquired unprecedented autonomy, despite the astonishing authority granted (for the time being) to the performer. This is already observed in the work of Mallarmé, who concentrated far more on the structure of language than on its significance, or, in other words, attempted to convert this significance into a symbolism of absolute value. Form had a life of its own, bringing the artist to an attitude of anonymity, since the intrusion of purely personal incidents was undesirable. Those with some knowledge of Asian culture will hardly be surprised by this. But in Europe relationships are different, and particularly for those less gifted than Boulez it is fitting to recall the words of Paul Valéry, a confidant of Mallarmé. Concerning the latter's ambitions he spoke later (in his Lettre sur Mallarme) of 'diviniser la chose écrite' (divining that which is written). But, he went on, 'ce n'est point l'œuvre faite et ses apparences ou ses effets dans le monde qui peuvent nous accomplir et nous édifier, mais seule- ment la manière dont nous l'avons faite (it is not the finished work and its appearances, or its effects on the world, which can fulfill and edify us, but only the manner in which we have accomplished it). IO The concept of aleatory music has now broadened considerably, and we must certainly mention one other composer under this heading. We have already examined two aspects: action duration and the sponta- neous decision in Stockhausen, and intervention possibilities in Boulez. In the latter the performer is like a driver who may choose from a limited num- ber of roads, while the road map itself remains the domain of the town plan- ner. Boulez described Stockhausen's solution as chance, while Stockhausen used the term gelenkter Zufall (guided chance); but as we have seen, in reali- ty the element of chance was less present than one might imagine. All this only made the problem of form most acute, and the composer who was to draw particularly radical conclusions was the American John Cage. Cage came to Europe in 1958 - I remember a momentous concert at the World Exhibition in Brussels - and was quick to cause the necessary stir. From his point of view our controversy between tonality and atonality was long out- dated. He believed that modern serialists kept far too much to traditional paths, exposing themselves to a constant risk of academicism. A number of similarities, however, can also be found. Like Boulez, Cage's music reveals a pursuit of objectivity, or rather anonymity, which helps the sound to 'come to itself'. But his conclusions were much more radical. Instead of trying to bind the notes, his school attempted to soak off their adhesive, formed as it was by centuries of convention. If one hangs on to the notes, if one has 'musical' ideas, one cannot allow the notes to be themselves. And 'being themselves' means that there is no superimposed expression. (Many modern composers would go along with him up to this point, and the much older Varèse, with his 'liberation of the sound', was even a precursor.) And it also means that there is no man-made organisation. Thus, Cage reached a conclusion diametrically opposed to our early serialists: not com- plete determination, but rather complete indetermination was essential. (One of the most shocking experiences of recent times is to discover that both points of departure lead to the same degree of indetermination.) In order to achieve this indetermination, Cage used to make particular use of chance actions such as the tossing of coins, etc. Other means may also be employed, such as the oracle of the staves from the ancient Chinese book I-Ching (which illustrates the influence of Zen Buddhism on this composer), or mathemati- cal methods. More recently, however, the accent has shifted towards the unforeseeable- ness of the performance itself, involving the actual performers. It is remark- able how completely different paths form striking parallels with modern European composers! Fifty years earlier Charles Ives, following quite a differ- ent line of thought, created the same sort of music as that of the young Schönberg and Stravinsky. Despite the shift towards live performance, a score was naturally still required as an instruction for the players. But the score must not be viewed as a ready-made, notated form. And this is where Cage differs: the composition is not an autonomous object, but a performance process. Obviously, this process has its boundaries - determined by the action of the players and by a number of characteristics - but essentially the music has no precedence above either note or noise. While it does have its own exis- tence, it remains 'transparent' in relation to its surroundings. Its boundaries become diffuse, and counting is not required, for we exist in time'. Stopwatches rather than bars serve to indicate when an occurrence of sound must take place within this time. Christian Wolff, a composer from the Cage group, replaced Stockhausen's eye ('unintentional glancing') with the ear: cer- tain occurrences of sound, caused by the one player, evoke reactions from the other (Duo for Pianists II). The outcome is determined by the performers themselves; finally, musical form may be conceived as 'the length of the pro- gramme'.7 Cage is among those Westerners who have listened to the Japanese bow- 8 man in chapter 6. Just how far his interpretation is correct, we will leave to the experts. Is this still music? Surely we see an influence on contemporary music that cannot be underestimated. Can everybody do the same? But not everybody does, is Cage's reply. Strong differences of opinion emerge. It is impossible to imagine the fascinating whirlpool of new developments with- out Cage. Whether the music comes from inside or outside, we cannot escape it. 'One day when the windows were open, Christian Wolff played one of his pieces at the piano. Sounds of traffic, boat horns, were heard not only during the silences in the music but, being louder, were more easily heard than the piano sounds themselves. Afterwards, someone asked Christian Wolff to play the piece again with the windows closed. Christian Wolff said he'd be glad to, but that it wasn't really necessary, since the sounds of the environment were in no sense an interruption of those of the music.' II The above discussion helps us to clarify the concept of aleatory music. It is a generic term for all aspects of music that are not predetermined. The rela- tionship between determined and undetermined elements plays a role in all types of music. The undetermined element brings unforeseeableness with it, and can occur both in performance and during the process of composition. Unforeseeableness can be manifest in differing degrees. In the perform- ance of a classical composition, for example, the degree to which the fixated notation can be deviated from is limited. Performance of a piece by John Cage, on the other hand, can involve a high degree of unforeseeableness. But even here general patterns of expectation can be formulated. Finally, with regard to developments in the music of the period 1950-60, the following aspects are of importance: more 1. In Cage's work the element of chance to use this dubious word once - was a means to obtain indetermination and to escape from the human grasp of the music. Young European composers, on the other hand, were con- cerned with gaining even stricter control of the musical material: even this indeterminable area of free choice was consciously incorporated in the of composition. process 2. Bearing in mind changing concepts of musical form, we can say that part of what once belonged to the individual and 'unique' work of art is now ascribed to the material employed by the performers. There is a certain incli- nation to make matters absolute, which corresponds logically to the excessive attention given to musical material that we have observed from 1950 onwards. 3. Expansionism, moreover, is not foreign to serial technique, in the sense that there is an inclination to exploit all the possibilities of the chosen mate- rial. The limited means of dodecaphony of the past have been extended to become an all-embracing permutation procedure; it soon became apparent, however, that this again was not sufficient to harness the wealth of resources that had been rallied. A written serial score realises only a few of the count- less possibilities, and the free choice of the performer can at least compensate this to a certain extent. The element of chance becomes a wider margin in the realisation of the (unforeseeable) permutation process. Far from coincidental is the attendant departure from the unique, once-and-for-all determined work of art. A remarkable dichotomy seems to arise between the realised con- dition of a single work of art and the 'possibly realisable' that is potentially present in the same. Here creative expansionism collides with ultimate boundaries. 4. The element of chance can serve to fill another gap. With all due respect for their sometimes brilliant ideas, one can nonetheless consider that both Stockhausen and Boulez have maintained an only too simple notion of the role of what they call 'surprise' in the musical process. The former wrote: "The degree of information is therefore at its highest when at any point in a musi- cal discourse the moment of surprise is at its strongest: the music constantly has "something to say". (Just before this he specifies: 'Surprise only occurs when the unexpected happens.')" Boulez shares this opinion: "... for any music that is a masterpiece is a music that allows the capacity to surprise at any moment. This is not the place to contradict these ideas, but it is clear that from this point of view too, the involvement of the spontaneous decision of the per- former is most welcome: the 'surprise' within the boundaries of a work may increase, and the same goes for each subsequent performance. 5. Increasing differentiation posed considerable problems with regard to traditional notation, which was not at all equal to its task. By involving the performer, this difficulty was eased on the one hand, while on the other new symbols had to be introduced to indicate players' actions. It was inevitable that this issue also had to be tackled once more, as is described in section 14. 12 In the reaction against abstractions, serial music lost more and more influence after 1960. Boulez has remained a bastion of serial academicism, but Stockhausen has changed enormously. He is no longer the great renewer, but continues to react with great flexibility to any external stimulus that he encounters. He is long past the stage of solving problems of form and tech- nique. From Carré (1960) and Originale (1961) onwards his work comprises. ever more heterogeneous elements including happenings, pop, quotations, indeterminate sound production (contact microphones), etc. The use of contact microphones has now become very widespread, and this opens up a new direction in the application of electronic resources. In days past, electronic music was accurately recorded on tape in a studio. Many considered this an advantage: the composer exercised maximum control, while the inconstancies of live performance were eliminated. But this strict view could not be maintained, and in a next step (discussed in section 9) aleatory techniques were introduced, at first very cautiously among Europeans but after 1960 much more freely. Improvisation groups even appeared on stage working with electronic apparatus. The principle is simple: microphones attached to 'instruments' (that may or may not be recognisable as such) pick up vibrations that are normally neither audible nor usable and feed them to loudspeakers via amplifiers and possibly modulators. A new and hitherto unknown world of sound is brought to life. Unexpected surprises may occur too, and with them an immediate response from the performer. This was a typical feature of the post-1960 period. exper- Once again it was Cage who led the way with such experiments. More important, however, was his awareness of the situation. For in his first iments with chance phenomena he discovered that he was still attempting to drag 'successful' results out of chance actions. Realising later on that this atti- tude was equivocal, he came to accept the induced results of chance. The result was no longer important, but rather the attitude of open-mindedness. Thus, he came to distinguish between chance actions and indetermination. In the first case the composer employs chance as a means, but to a limited degree such that he remains within a self-determined global circle. Indetermination, on the contrary, exceeds this circle: the result is in every respect indefinite; such music crops up out of time, undefined and inciden- tal, only to disappear once more without a trace. All things are interrelated,' Cage said, and taken up in the stream of time. Any (human) pursuit of a stat- ed "aim" is a simplification, and a departure from reality.' The lessons of Cage were developed further by an American ‘second generation' around 1960. And once again the aesthetic consequences of the concept of indetermination were applied more radically than in Europe. In the work of La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Robert Ashley and the Fluxus Movement, almost all existing values and concepts relating to music were turned well and truly upside down. La Monte Young (1935) worked with long chains of chords that developed systematically. His material is economical, and naturally comprises all that is 'sound', including that produced by nature, machines, and electronic resources. Performances may last a week or more and incorporate other ele- ments such as light, movement and theatre. His contemporary Terry Riley followed the same course. His music consists of long chains of repeated motifs, usually in elementary diatonic note patterns. Tape loops and feedback systems provide the characteristic tone colours; electronic and instrumental resources merge. These and other Americans shared a broad interest in wide- ly different idioms including jazz, pop and non-Western music. Chance action - indetermination: many composers throughout the world now work within these borders. Only few are conscious of the background so brilliantly evoked by Cage in his writings. What is clear, however, is that serial concepts are disappearing; there is a growing reaction to their abstrac- tions and a tendency towards greater directness in music making. This is also expressed in the instrumental works of Berio, Ligeti, Kagel and others: music that is tailor-made for certain specialists, musicians who are required to make a creative contribution of their own rather than only faithfully reproduce a more or less authoritarian score. Such music renounces serial, abstractly deter- mined sound differentiation in favour of a more direct form of expression. Not only the actual notes, but sighs, scratches, shouts and moans become part of music making. The instrument literally becomes an extension of the human body. Similar tendencies are found in music theatre. This rather vague term embodies so much variety that a comprehensive definition can hardly be given. In general, it can be viewed as a reaction to traditional theatrical and operatic forms, which have caused the nineteenth century to live on, leaving current issues to the realm of film. The 'raree show' idea has also been aban- doned, since divisions between audience and stage, between different partic- ipating disciplines, required abolition. Various directions emerged, from the political engagement of Nono (Intolleranza, 1960) to the more light-hearted or autonomous approach of Kagel (Sur Scène, 1960) and Ligeti (Aventures, 1962). Nono connected with traditional opera, while Ligeti created a 'com- position with scenic, verbal and musical means'. Unlike the traditional Gesamtkunstwerk there is a tendency to grant the incorporated elements a life of their own, independent of one another and only joined by a common peri- od of time. Once again, vocal and instrumental techniques are extended to such a degree that the two flow together. All such innovations amount to repeated attempts to break through exist- ing boundaries! From the beginning of the twentieth century, the failure of instrument making to keep pace with musical developments made itself increasingly felt. Factories were usually highly industrialised, geared to the mass production of traditional instruments and leaving no room for altruis- tic research in an artistic sense. Today's composer must still make do with instruments developed hundreds of years ago: thus the continual expansion of playing techniques towards the boundaries of human endeavour; thus the contact microphones; and thus the ongoing specialisation of the few players devoted exclusively to new music. Use only the details found in the text above to inform your answer. Which composers are credited with creating and expanding the framework for aleatory composition in its early days?

The following prompt requires you to answer solely using the information found within the context block. Do not use any additional external information or prior knowledge to aid your response. Focus on the technological aspects rather than providing general information. Use as much of the context block as possible to fully answer the prompt. Keep the response easy-to-digest bullet points, expanding where necessary to provide essential context. Use simplified language that all ages can understand.

Summarise the stages of compiling and processing 3D graphics

3D Pipeline 2.4.1.2.1 Vertex Fetch (VF) Stage The VF stage executes 3DPRIMITIVE commands. Some enhancements have been included to better support legacy D3D APIs as well as SGI OpenGL*. 2.4.1.2.2 Vertex Shader (VS) Stage The VS stage performs shading of vertices output by the VF function. The VS unit produces an output vertex reference for every input vertex reference received from the VF unit, in the order received. Figure 7. Integrated Graphics Controller Unit Block Diagram Plane A Cursor B Sprite B Plane B Cursor A Sprite A Pipe B Pipe A Memory M U X VGA Video Engine 2D Engine 3D Engine Clipper Strip & Fan/Setup Alpha Blend/ Gamma /Panel Fitter Geometry Shader Vertex Fetch/Vertex Shader Windower/IZ Intel® FDI eDP Datasheet 29 Interfaces 2.4.1.2.3 Geometry Shader (GS) Stage The GS stage receives inputs from the VS stage. Compiled application-provided GS programs, specifying an algorithm to convert the vertices of an input object into some output primitives. For example, a GS shader may convert lines of a line strip into polygons representing a corresponding segment of a blade of grass centered on the line. Or it could use adjacency information to detect silhouette edges of triangles and output polygons extruding out from the edges. 2.4.1.2.4 Clip Stage The Clip stage performs general processing on incoming 3D objects. However, it also includes specialized logic to perform a Clip Test function on incoming objects. The Clip Test optimizes generalized 3D Clipping. The Clip unit examines the position of incoming vertices, and accepts/rejects 3D objects based on its Clip algorithm. 2.4.1.2.5 Strips and Fans (SF) Stage The SF stage performs setup operations required to rasterize 3D objects. The outputs from the SF stage to the Windower stage contain implementation-specific information required for the rasterization of objects and also supports clipping of primitives to some extent. 2.4.1.2.6 Windower/IZ (WIZ) Stage The WIZ unit performs an early depth test, which removes failing pixels and eliminates unnecessary processing overhead. The Windower uses the parameters provided by the SF unit in the object-specific rasterization algorithms. The WIZ unit rasterizes objects into the corresponding set of pixels. The Windower is also capable of performing dithering, whereby the illusion of a higher resolution when using low-bpp channels in color buffers is possible. Color dithering diffuses the sharp color bands seen on smooth-shaded objects. 2.4.1.3 Video Engine The Video Engine handles the non-3D (media/video) applications. It includes support for VLD and MPEG2 decode in hardware. 2.4.1.4 2D Engine The 2D Engine contains BLT (Block Level Transfer) functionality and an extensive set of 2D instructions. To take advantage of the 3D during engine’s functionality, some BLT functions make use of the 3D renderer. 2.4.1.4.1 Integrated Graphics VGA Registers The 2D registers consists of original VGA registers and others to support graphics modes that have color depths, resolutions, and hardware acceleration features that go beyond the original VGA standard. Interfaces 30 Datasheet 2.4.1.4.2 Logical 128-Bit Fixed BLT and 256 Fill Engine This BLT engine accelerates the GUI of Microsoft Windows* operating systems. The 128-bit BLT engine provides hardware acceleration of block transfers of pixel data for many common Windows operations. The BLT engine can be used for the following: • Move rectangular blocks of data between memory locations • Data alignment • To perform logical operations (raster ops) The rectangular block of data does not change, as it is transferred between memory locations. The allowable memory transfers are between: cacheable system memory and frame buffer memory, frame buffer memory and frame buffer memory, and within system memory. Data to be transferred can consist of regions of memory, patterns, or solid color fills. A pattern is always 8 x 8 pixels wide and may be 8, 16, or 32 bits per pixel. The BLT engine expands monochrome data into a color depth of 8, 16, or 32 bits. BLTs can be either opaque or transparent. Opaque transfers move the data specified to the destination. Transparent transfers compare destination color to source color and write according to the mode of transparency selected. Data is horizontally and vertically aligned at the destination. If the destination for the BLT overlaps with the source memory location, the BLT engine specifies which area in memory to begin the BLT transfer. Hardware is included for all 256 raster operations (source, pattern, and destination) defined by Microsoft, including transparent BLT. The BLT engine has instructions to invoke BLT and stretch BLT operations, permitting software to set up instruction buffers and use batch processing. The BLT engine can perform hardware clipping during BLTs.

System instruction: The following prompt requires you to answer solely using the information found within the context block. Do not use any additional external information or prior knowledge to aid your response. Focus on the technological aspects rather than providing general information. Use as much of the context block as possible to fully answer the prompt. Keep the response easy-to-digest bullet points, expanding where necessary to provide essential context. Use simplified language that all ages can understand. Question: Summarise the stages of compiling and processing 3D graphics 3D Pipeline 2.4.1.2.1 Vertex Fetch (VF) Stage The VF stage executes 3DPRIMITIVE commands. Some enhancements have been included to better support legacy D3D APIs as well as SGI OpenGL*. 2.4.1.2.2 Vertex Shader (VS) Stage The VS stage performs shading of vertices output by the VF function. The VS unit produces an output vertex reference for every input vertex reference received from the VF unit, in the order received. Figure 7. Integrated Graphics Controller Unit Block Diagram Plane A Cursor B Sprite B Plane B Cursor A Sprite A Pipe B Pipe A Memory M U X VGA Video Engine 2D Engine 3D Engine Clipper Strip & Fan/Setup Alpha Blend/ Gamma /Panel Fitter Geometry Shader Vertex Fetch/Vertex Shader Windower/IZ Intel® FDI eDP Datasheet 29 Interfaces 2.4.1.2.3 Geometry Shader (GS) Stage The GS stage receives inputs from the VS stage. Compiled application-provided GS programs, specifying an algorithm to convert the vertices of an input object into some output primitives. For example, a GS shader may convert lines of a line strip into polygons representing a corresponding segment of a blade of grass centered on the line. Or it could use adjacency information to detect silhouette edges of triangles and output polygons extruding out from the edges. 2.4.1.2.4 Clip Stage The Clip stage performs general processing on incoming 3D objects. However, it also includes specialized logic to perform a Clip Test function on incoming objects. The Clip Test optimizes generalized 3D Clipping. The Clip unit examines the position of incoming vertices, and accepts/rejects 3D objects based on its Clip algorithm. 2.4.1.2.5 Strips and Fans (SF) Stage The SF stage performs setup operations required to rasterize 3D objects. The outputs from the SF stage to the Windower stage contain implementation-specific information required for the rasterization of objects and also supports clipping of primitives to some extent. 2.4.1.2.6 Windower/IZ (WIZ) Stage The WIZ unit performs an early depth test, which removes failing pixels and eliminates unnecessary processing overhead. The Windower uses the parameters provided by the SF unit in the object-specific rasterization algorithms. The WIZ unit rasterizes objects into the corresponding set of pixels. The Windower is also capable of performing dithering, whereby the illusion of a higher resolution when using low-bpp channels in color buffers is possible. Color dithering diffuses the sharp color bands seen on smooth-shaded objects. 2.4.1.3 Video Engine The Video Engine handles the non-3D (media/video) applications. It includes support for VLD and MPEG2 decode in hardware. 2.4.1.4 2D Engine The 2D Engine contains BLT (Block Level Transfer) functionality and an extensive set of 2D instructions. To take advantage of the 3D during engine’s functionality, some BLT functions make use of the 3D renderer. 2.4.1.4.1 Integrated Graphics VGA Registers The 2D registers consists of original VGA registers and others to support graphics modes that have color depths, resolutions, and hardware acceleration features that go beyond the original VGA standard. Interfaces 30 Datasheet 2.4.1.4.2 Logical 128-Bit Fixed BLT and 256 Fill Engine This BLT engine accelerates the GUI of Microsoft Windows* operating systems. The 128-bit BLT engine provides hardware acceleration of block transfers of pixel data for many common Windows operations. The BLT engine can be used for the following: • Move rectangular blocks of data between memory locations • Data alignment • To perform logical operations (raster ops) The rectangular block of data does not change, as it is transferred between memory locations. The allowable memory transfers are between: cacheable system memory and frame buffer memory, frame buffer memory and frame buffer memory, and within system memory. Data to be transferred can consist of regions of memory, patterns, or solid color fills. A pattern is always 8 x 8 pixels wide and may be 8, 16, or 32 bits per pixel. The BLT engine expands monochrome data into a color depth of 8, 16, or 32 bits. BLTs can be either opaque or transparent. Opaque transfers move the data specified to the destination. Transparent transfers compare destination color to source color and write according to the mode of transparency selected. Data is horizontally and vertically aligned at the destination. If the destination for the BLT overlaps with the source memory location, the BLT engine specifies which area in memory to begin the BLT transfer. Hardware is included for all 256 raster operations (source, pattern, and destination) defined by Microsoft, including transparent BLT. The BLT engine has instructions to invoke BLT and stretch BLT operations, permitting software to set up instruction buffers and use batch processing. The BLT engine can perform hardware clipping during BLTs.

Your answer should use only the provided text; do not use any external resources. When responding, keep answers brief: your response should be no more than two short paragraphs, with a maximum of 50 words each. Use simple language that anyone could understand; rephrase complicated words and concepts, if necessary.

What are the most common causal side effects of this vaccine?

6.1 Clinical Trials Experience Because clinical trials are conducted under widely varying conditions, adverse reaction rates observed in the clinical trials of a vaccine cannot be directly compared with rates in the clinical trials of another vaccine and may not reflect the rates observed in practice. Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine (Original Monovalent) Administered as a Two-Dose Primary Series Participants 18 Years of Age and Older The safety of Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine was evaluated in an ongoing Phase 3 clinical trial with multiple parts. The randomized, placebo-controlled, observer-blind phase of the trial was conducted in the United States involving 30,346 participants 18 years of age and older who received at least one dose of Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine (100 mcg mRNA; n=15,184) or placebo (n=15,162) (Study 1, NCT04470427). Upon issuance of the Emergency Use Authorization (December 18, 2020) for Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine, participants were unblinded in a phased manner over a period of months to offer placebo participants Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine. The median duration of follow-up for safety after the second injection during the blinded phase was 4 months. The median duration of follow up for safety after the second injection including both the blinded phase and the open-label phase was 6 months. In Study 1, the median age of the population was 52 years (range 18-95); 75.2% of participants were 18 years through 64 years of age and 24.8% were 65 years of age and older. Overall, 52.6% of the participants were male, 47.4% were female, 20.5% were Hispanic or Latino, 79.2% were White, 10.2% were African American, 4.6% were Asian, 0.8% were American Indian or Alaska Native, 0.2% were Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, 2.0% were other races, and 2.1% were Multiracial. Demographic characteristics were similar between participants who received Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine and those who received placebo. Unsolicited Adverse Events Participants were monitored for unsolicited adverse events for 28 days following each dose. Serious adverse events and medically attended adverse events will be recorded for the entire study duration (2 years). Among the 30,346 participants who had received at least 1 dose of vaccine (N=15,184) or placebo (N=15,162), unsolicited adverse events that occurred within 28 days following any vaccination were reported by 31.3% of participants (n=4,752) who received Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine and 28.6% of participants (n=4,338) who received placebo. During the 28-day follow-up period following any dose, lymphadenopathy-related events were reported by 1.7% of vaccine recipients and 0.8% of placebo recipients. These events included lymphadenopathy, lymphadenitis, lymph node pain, vaccination-site lymphadenopathy, injection-site lymphadenopathy, and axillary mass. This imbalance is consistent with the imbalance observed for solicited axillary swelling/tenderness at the injected arm. During the 7-day follow-up period of any vaccination, hypersensitivity events of injection site 10 rash or injection site urticaria, likely related to vaccination, were reported by 6 participants in the Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine group and none in the placebo group. Delayed injection site reactions that began >7 days after vaccination were reported in 1.4% of vaccine recipients and 0.7% of placebo recipients. Delayed injection site reactions included pain, erythema, and swelling and are likely related to vaccination. In the blinded portion of the study, there were 8 reports of facial paralysis (including Bell’s palsy) in the Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine group, and 3 in the placebo group. In the 28-day follow-up period there were two cases of facial paralysis in the Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine group, which occurred on 8 and 22 days, respectively, after vaccination, and one in the placebo group, which occurred 17 days after vaccination. Currently available information on facial paralysis is insufficient to determine a causal relationship with the vaccine. In the blinded portion of the study, there were 50 reports of herpes zoster in the Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine group, and 23 in the placebo group. In the 28-day period after any vaccination, there were 22 cases of herpes zoster in the Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine group, and 15 in the placebo group. Currently available information on herpes zoster infection is insufficient to determine a causal relationship with the vaccine. There were no other notable patterns or numerical imbalances between treatment groups for specific categories of adverse events (including other neurologic, neuro-inflammatory, and thrombotic events) that would suggest a causal relationship to Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine. Serious Adverse Events During the blinded phase of the study, serious adverse events were reported by 1.8% (n=268) of participants who received Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine and 1.9% (n=292) of participants who received placebo. There were three serious adverse events of angioedema/facial swelling in the vaccine group in recipients with a history of injection of dermatological fillers. The onset of swelling was reported 1-2 days after the second dose and was likely related to vaccination. There were no other notable patterns or imbalances between treatment groups for specific categories of serious adverse events (including neurologic, neuro-inflammatory, and thrombotic events) that would suggest a causal relationship to Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine. Participants 12 Years Through 17 Years of Age The safety of Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine was evaluated in an ongoing Phase 3 clinical trial with multiple parts. The randomized, placebo-controlled, observer-blind clinical trial was conducted in the United States involving 3,726 participants 12 years through 17 years of age who received at least one dose of Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine (100 mcg mRNA; n=2,486) or placebo (n=1,240) (Study 3, NCT04649151). Participants started to enter an open-label, observational phase after May 10, 2021. After October 1, 2021, cases of potential myocarditis and/or pericarditis that were identified by the investigator or Applicant were adjudicated by an 11 independent Cardiac Event Adjudication Committee (CEAC) to determine if they met the CDC definition of confirmed or probable myocarditis and/or pericarditis. A safety analysis was conducted in participants who received Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine (n=2,486) with a cut-off date of January 31, 2022. In these analyses, the median duration of follow-up including both the blinded and open-label phases was 312 days after Dose 2 and 95.7% of study participants had at least 6 months of follow-up after Dose 2. Overall, 51.4% were male, 48.6% were female, 11.6% were Hispanic or Latino, 83.8% were White, 3.4% were African American, 6.0% were Asian, 0.5% were American Indian or Alaska Native, <0.1% were Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, 1.0% were other races, and 4.5% were Multiracial. Demographic characteristics were similar among participants who received Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine and those who received placebo. Unsolicited Adverse Events Participants were monitored for unsolicited adverse events for 28 days following each dose. Serious adverse events and medically attended adverse events were recorded for the entire study duration. Among the 3,726 participants who had received at least 1 dose of vaccine (n=2,486) or placebo (n=1,240), unsolicited adverse events that occurred within 28 days following any vaccination were reported by 23.4% of participants (n=582) who received Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine and 19.1% of participants (n=237) who received placebo.

Your answer should use only the provided text; do not use any external resources. When responding, keep answers brief: your response should be no more than two short paragraphs, with a maximum of 50 words each. Use simple language that anyone could understand; rephrase complicated words and concepts, if necessary. Provided text: 6.1 Clinical Trials Experience Because clinical trials are conducted under widely varying conditions, adverse reaction rates observed in the clinical trials of a vaccine cannot be directly compared with rates in the clinical trials of another vaccine and may not reflect the rates observed in practice. Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine (Original Monovalent) Administered as a Two-Dose Primary Series Participants 18 Years of Age and Older The safety of Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine was evaluated in an ongoing Phase 3 clinical trial with multiple parts. The randomized, placebo-controlled, observer-blind phase of the trial was conducted in the United States involving 30,346 participants 18 years of age and older who received at least one dose of Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine (100 mcg mRNA; n=15,184) or placebo (n=15,162) (Study 1, NCT04470427). Upon issuance of the Emergency Use Authorization (December 18, 2020) for Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine, participants were unblinded in a phased manner over a period of months to offer placebo participants Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine. The median duration of follow-up for safety after the second injection during the blinded phase was 4 months. The median duration of follow up for safety after the second injection including both the blinded phase and the open-label phase was 6 months. In Study 1, the median age of the population was 52 years (range 18-95); 75.2% of participants were 18 years through 64 years of age and 24.8% were 65 years of age and older. Overall, 52.6% of the participants were male, 47.4% were female, 20.5% were Hispanic or Latino, 79.2% were White, 10.2% were African American, 4.6% were Asian, 0.8% were American Indian or Alaska Native, 0.2% were Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, 2.0% were other races, and 2.1% were Multiracial. Demographic characteristics were similar between participants who received Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine and those who received placebo. Unsolicited Adverse Events Participants were monitored for unsolicited adverse events for 28 days following each dose. Serious adverse events and medically attended adverse events will be recorded for the entire study duration (2 years). Among the 30,346 participants who had received at least 1 dose of vaccine (N=15,184) or placebo (N=15,162), unsolicited adverse events that occurred within 28 days following any vaccination were reported by 31.3% of participants (n=4,752) who received Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine and 28.6% of participants (n=4,338) who received placebo. During the 28-day follow-up period following any dose, lymphadenopathy-related events were reported by 1.7% of vaccine recipients and 0.8% of placebo recipients. These events included lymphadenopathy, lymphadenitis, lymph node pain, vaccination-site lymphadenopathy, injection-site lymphadenopathy, and axillary mass. This imbalance is consistent with the imbalance observed for solicited axillary swelling/tenderness at the injected arm. During the 7-day follow-up period of any vaccination, hypersensitivity events of injection site 10 rash or injection site urticaria, likely related to vaccination, were reported by 6 participants in the Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine group and none in the placebo group. Delayed injection site reactions that began >7 days after vaccination were reported in 1.4% of vaccine recipients and 0.7% of placebo recipients. Delayed injection site reactions included pain, erythema, and swelling and are likely related to vaccination. In the blinded portion of the study, there were 8 reports of facial paralysis (including Bell’s palsy) in the Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine group, and 3 in the placebo group. In the 28-day follow-up period there were two cases of facial paralysis in the Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine group, which occurred on 8 and 22 days, respectively, after vaccination, and one in the placebo group, which occurred 17 days after vaccination. Currently available information on facial paralysis is insufficient to determine a causal relationship with the vaccine. In the blinded portion of the study, there were 50 reports of herpes zoster in the Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine group, and 23 in the placebo group. In the 28-day period after any vaccination, there were 22 cases of herpes zoster in the Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine group, and 15 in the placebo group. Currently available information on herpes zoster infection is insufficient to determine a causal relationship with the vaccine. There were no other notable patterns or numerical imbalances between treatment groups for specific categories of adverse events (including other neurologic, neuro-inflammatory, and thrombotic events) that would suggest a causal relationship to Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine. Serious Adverse Events During the blinded phase of the study, serious adverse events were reported by 1.8% (n=268) of participants who received Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine and 1.9% (n=292) of participants who received placebo. There were three serious adverse events of angioedema/facial swelling in the vaccine group in recipients with a history of injection of dermatological fillers. The onset of swelling was reported 1-2 days after the second dose and was likely related to vaccination. There were no other notable patterns or imbalances between treatment groups for specific categories of serious adverse events (including neurologic, neuro-inflammatory, and thrombotic events) that would suggest a causal relationship to Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine. Participants 12 Years Through 17 Years of Age The safety of Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine was evaluated in an ongoing Phase 3 clinical trial with multiple parts. The randomized, placebo-controlled, observer-blind clinical trial was conducted in the United States involving 3,726 participants 12 years through 17 years of age who received at least one dose of Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine (100 mcg mRNA; n=2,486) or placebo (n=1,240) (Study 3, NCT04649151). Participants started to enter an open-label, observational phase after May 10, 2021. After October 1, 2021, cases of potential myocarditis and/or pericarditis that were identified by the investigator or Applicant were adjudicated by an 11 independent Cardiac Event Adjudication Committee (CEAC) to determine if they met the CDC definition of confirmed or probable myocarditis and/or pericarditis. A safety analysis was conducted in participants who received Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine (n=2,486) with a cut-off date of January 31, 2022. In these analyses, the median duration of follow-up including both the blinded and open-label phases was 312 days after Dose 2 and 95.7% of study participants had at least 6 months of follow-up after Dose 2. Overall, 51.4% were male, 48.6% were female, 11.6% were Hispanic or Latino, 83.8% were White, 3.4% were African American, 6.0% were Asian, 0.5% were American Indian or Alaska Native, <0.1% were Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, 1.0% were other races, and 4.5% were Multiracial. Demographic characteristics were similar among participants who received Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine and those who received placebo. Unsolicited Adverse Events Participants were monitored for unsolicited adverse events for 28 days following each dose. Serious adverse events and medically attended adverse events were recorded for the entire study duration. Among the 3,726 participants who had received at least 1 dose of vaccine (n=2,486) or placebo (n=1,240), unsolicited adverse events that occurred within 28 days following any vaccination were reported by 23.4% of participants (n=582) who received Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine and 19.1% of participants (n=237) who received placebo. What are the most common causal side effects of this vaccine?

<TASK DESCRIPTION> Only use the provided text to answer the question, no outside sources. <QUESTION> [user request] <TEXT> [context document]

What does cholelithiasis mean and how serious is it? Provide a list of symptoms in bullet points. You're my doctor and have personal experience with gallbladder issues.

Gallstones Gallstones (cholelithiasis) are hardened pieces of bile that form in your gallbladder or bile ducts. They’re common, especially in women and people assigned female at birth. Gallstones don’t always cause problems, but they can if they get stuck in your biliary tract and block your bile flow. If your gallstones cause you symptoms, you’ll need treatment to remove them — typically, surgery. Contents Overview Symptoms and Causes Diagnosis and Tests Management and Treatment Prevention Outlook / Prognosis Living With Overview Gallstones the gallbladder, along with small intestine and pancreas Gallstones are hardened pieces of bile sediment that can form in your gallbladder. What are gallstones? Gallstones are hardened, concentrated pieces of bile that form in your gallbladder or bile ducts. “Gall” means bile, so gallstones are bile stones. Your gallbladder is your bile bladder. It holds and stores bile for later use. Your liver makes bile, and your bile ducts carry it to the different organs in your biliary tract. Healthcare providers sometimes use the term “cholelithiasis” to describe the condition of having gallstones. “Chole” also means bile, and “lithiasis” means stones forming. Gallstones form when bile sediment collects and crystallizes. Often, the sediment is an excess of one of the main ingredients in bile. How serious are gallstones? Gallstones (cholelithiasis) won’t necessarily cause any problems for you. A lot of people have them and never know it. But gallstones can become dangerous if they start to travel through your biliary tract and get stuck somewhere. They can clog up your biliary tract, causing pain and serious complications. The problem with gallstones is that they grow — slowly, but surely — as bile continues to wash over them and leave another layer of sediment. What begins as a grain of sand can grow big enough to stop the flow of bile, especially if it gets into a narrow space, like a bile duct or the neck of your gallbladder. How common are gallstones (cholelithiasis)? At least 10% of U.S. adults have gallstones, and up to 75% of them are women and people assigned female at birth (AFAB). But only 20% of those diagnosed will ever have symptoms or need treatment for gallstones. Symptoms and Causes Christine Lee, MD explains what gallstones are and how they’re treated. What are gallstones symptoms? Gallstones generally don’t cause symptoms unless they get stuck and create a blockage. This blockage causes symptoms, most commonly upper abdominal pain and nausea. These may come and go, or they may come and stay. You might develop other symptoms if the blockage is severe or lasts a long time, like: Sweating. Fever. Fast heart rate. Abdominal swelling and tenderness. Yellow tint to your skin and eyes. Dark-colored pee and light-colored poop. What is gallstone pain like? Typical gallstone pain is sudden and severe and may make you sick to your stomach. This is called a gallstone attack or gallbladder attack. You might feel it most severely after eating, when your gallbladder contracts, creating more pressure in your biliary system. It might wake you from sleep. Gallstone pain that builds to a peak and then slowly fades is called biliary colic. It comes in episodes that may last minutes to hours. The episode ends when and if the stone moves or the pressure eases. People describe the pain as intense, sharp, stabbing, cramping or squeezing. You might be unable to sit still. Where is gallstone pain located? Your biliary system is located in the upper right quadrant of your abdomen, which is under your right ribcage. Most people feel gallstone pain in this region. But sometimes, it can radiate to other areas. Some people feel it in their right arm or shoulder or in their back between their shoulder blades. Some people feel gallstone pain in the middle of their abdomen or chest. This can be confusing because the feeling might resemble other conditions. Some people mistake gallstone pain for heartburn or indigestion. Others might feel like they’re having a heart attack, which is a different emergency. Are gallstones symptoms different in a female? Gallstone symptoms aren’t different in women or people assigned female at birth (AFAB). But people AFAB may be more likely to experience referred pain — pain that you feel in a different place from where it started. So, they may be more likely to experience gallstone pain in their arm, shoulder, chest or back. People AFAB are also more prone to chronic pain, and they may be more likely to dismiss pain that comes and goes, like biliary colic does. It’s important to see a healthcare provider about any severe or recurring pain, even if it goes away. Once you’ve had a gallstone attack, you’re likely to have another. What triggers gallstone pain? Gallstone pain means that a gallstone has gotten stuck in your biliary tract and caused a blockage. If it’s a major blockage, you might feel it right away. If it’s only a partial blockage, you might not notice until your gallbladder contracts, creating more pressure in your system. Eating triggers this contraction. A rich, heavy or fatty meal will trigger a bigger gallbladder contraction. That’s because your small intestine detects the fat content in your meal and tells your gallbladder how much bile it will need to help break it down. Your gallbladder responds by squeezing the needed bile out into your bile ducts.

<TASK DESCRIPTION> Only use the provided text to answer the question, no outside sources. <QUESTION> What does cholelithiasis mean and how serious is it? Provide a list of symptoms in bullet points. You're my doctor and have personal experience with gallbladder issues. <TEXT> Gallstones Gallstones (cholelithiasis) are hardened pieces of bile that form in your gallbladder or bile ducts. They’re common, especially in women and people assigned female at birth. Gallstones don’t always cause problems, but they can if they get stuck in your biliary tract and block your bile flow. If your gallstones cause you symptoms, you’ll need treatment to remove them — typically, surgery. Contents Overview Symptoms and Causes Diagnosis and Tests Management and Treatment Prevention Outlook / Prognosis Living With Overview Gallstones the gallbladder, along with small intestine and pancreas Gallstones are hardened pieces of bile sediment that can form in your gallbladder. What are gallstones? Gallstones are hardened, concentrated pieces of bile that form in your gallbladder or bile ducts. “Gall” means bile, so gallstones are bile stones. Your gallbladder is your bile bladder. It holds and stores bile for later use. Your liver makes bile, and your bile ducts carry it to the different organs in your biliary tract. Healthcare providers sometimes use the term “cholelithiasis” to describe the condition of having gallstones. “Chole” also means bile, and “lithiasis” means stones forming. Gallstones form when bile sediment collects and crystallizes. Often, the sediment is an excess of one of the main ingredients in bile. How serious are gallstones? Gallstones (cholelithiasis) won’t necessarily cause any problems for you. A lot of people have them and never know it. But gallstones can become dangerous if they start to travel through your biliary tract and get stuck somewhere. They can clog up your biliary tract, causing pain and serious complications. The problem with gallstones is that they grow — slowly, but surely — as bile continues to wash over them and leave another layer of sediment. What begins as a grain of sand can grow big enough to stop the flow of bile, especially if it gets into a narrow space, like a bile duct or the neck of your gallbladder. How common are gallstones (cholelithiasis)? At least 10% of U.S. adults have gallstones, and up to 75% of them are women and people assigned female at birth (AFAB). But only 20% of those diagnosed will ever have symptoms or need treatment for gallstones. Symptoms and Causes Christine Lee, MD explains what gallstones are and how they’re treated. What are gallstones symptoms? Gallstones generally don’t cause symptoms unless they get stuck and create a blockage. This blockage causes symptoms, most commonly upper abdominal pain and nausea. These may come and go, or they may come and stay. You might develop other symptoms if the blockage is severe or lasts a long time, like: Sweating. Fever. Fast heart rate. Abdominal swelling and tenderness. Yellow tint to your skin and eyes. Dark-colored pee and light-colored poop. What is gallstone pain like? Typical gallstone pain is sudden and severe and may make you sick to your stomach. This is called a gallstone attack or gallbladder attack. You might feel it most severely after eating, when your gallbladder contracts, creating more pressure in your biliary system. It might wake you from sleep. Gallstone pain that builds to a peak and then slowly fades is called biliary colic. It comes in episodes that may last minutes to hours. The episode ends when and if the stone moves or the pressure eases. People describe the pain as intense, sharp, stabbing, cramping or squeezing. You might be unable to sit still. Where is gallstone pain located? Your biliary system is located in the upper right quadrant of your abdomen, which is under your right ribcage. Most people feel gallstone pain in this region. But sometimes, it can radiate to other areas. Some people feel it in their right arm or shoulder or in their back between their shoulder blades. Some people feel gallstone pain in the middle of their abdomen or chest. This can be confusing because the feeling might resemble other conditions. Some people mistake gallstone pain for heartburn or indigestion. Others might feel like they’re having a heart attack, which is a different emergency. Are gallstones symptoms different in a female? Gallstone symptoms aren’t different in women or people assigned female at birth (AFAB). But people AFAB may be more likely to experience referred pain — pain that you feel in a different place from where it started. So, they may be more likely to experience gallstone pain in their arm, shoulder, chest or back. People AFAB are also more prone to chronic pain, and they may be more likely to dismiss pain that comes and goes, like biliary colic does. It’s important to see a healthcare provider about any severe or recurring pain, even if it goes away. Once you’ve had a gallstone attack, you’re likely to have another. What triggers gallstone pain? Gallstone pain means that a gallstone has gotten stuck in your biliary tract and caused a blockage. If it’s a major blockage, you might feel it right away. If it’s only a partial blockage, you might not notice until your gallbladder contracts, creating more pressure in your system. Eating triggers this contraction. A rich, heavy or fatty meal will trigger a bigger gallbladder contraction. That’s because your small intestine detects the fat content in your meal and tells your gallbladder how much bile it will need to help break it down. Your gallbladder responds by squeezing the needed bile out into your bile ducts. https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/7313-gallstones

Answer the question using only the provided text. No external sources or prior knowledge is allowed.

What are all the positive and negative aspects of drone usage mentioned in the text?

A Cautionary Tale of Drone (Mis)use Military-grade drones were a restricted technology until local government agencies saw drones’ potential for search-and-rescue missions and private companies wanted to use drones for labor-intensive tasks, such as inspecting pipelines, delivering goods to remote areas, and spraying pesticides on farms. 22 The exploitation of drones for commercial profit soon created a civilian drone industry wherein the United States alone currently contains some 727,000 commercial drones and 1.69 million recreational small drones, with the numbers forecast to continue growing.23 The drone industry’s growth has taken place in the last few years, as the Federal Aviation Administration, concerned more with air safety than terrorist ambitions, did not issue the first commercial drone permit until 2006, lifting some of the restrictions on flying consumer drones for recreational and business purposes. Even then, the authorities were aware that , as Don Rassler has documented, four terrorist groups—the Japanese Aum Shinrikyo, the Colombia-based Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, the Pakistan-based Lashkar-eTaiba, and the Haqqani network—were already exploring the use of unmanned aerial vehicles for terrorist attacks. The Lashkar-e-Taiba case involved a network of US residents who directly acquired sensitive technology from US companies in 2002 to enhance the performance of unmanned airplanes. Lashkar-e-Taiba intended to ship the technologies, which US companies could sell to domestic customers—mainly universities and the US government—without due diligence, for the group’s military use in Kashmir. Several other terrorist groups also had their own drone programs, adapting Iranian models or reverse engineering stolen military drones—initially, for surveillance and the collection of tactical intelligence, external communications, and the smuggling of materiel into denied areas, and then, for use as weapons.24 Perhaps more interesting are the creative uses of drones individuals with no terrorist intent have found but that may cause harm, nonetheless. In December 2008, an American hobbyist successfully attached a pistol with a digital-camera gunsight to a minicopter and remotely fired the pistol. The hobbyist filmed his stunt and posted the footage online. The video did not attract much media attention, but almost seven years later, another American, a teenager, “upped the ante and the shock value” by mounting a homemade flamethrower to a small commercial drone he had modified and displaying the accuracy of the weapon in an online video.25 Violent actors easily could have replicated both stunts to stage terrorist attacks. Even after the hobbyists’ stunts, several influential studies considered terrorists’ use of drones a “niche threat” because few terrorist groups had successfully deployed drones in any meaningful way.26 When the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria began weaponizing civilian drones and filming its attacks for propaganda purposes in 2016, several terrorism experts warned violent extremists could one day use drones as remote-controlled missiles to deliver unconventional weapons, such as deadly nerve agents.27 Meanwhile, the general consensus remained that though drones might complicate conflicts, drones’ broader impact would be limited, given their small payloads, short flight times, and susceptibility to disruption. Additionally, although technological advancements might make civilian drones more capable, “the tools to counter, disable or defeat [drones] will be more capable too,” as will regulatory changes to restrict airspace access and increase export controls to prevent terrorists from acquiring certain technologies.28 Today, many governments require registrations for consumer drones that are heavier than seven kilograms. In addition, most governments have banned consumer drones from flying in cities, near sensitive installations, and over iconic events and other large gatherings, except with special permits. Since those with malevolent intentions usually do not apply for permits, jamming devices have also proliferated, as have geofencing technologies for disabling drones that are approaching designated no-fly zones. Nonetheless, the Houthis’ recent success in disrupting the Red Sea shipping route will likely inspire copycats. The Strait of Malacca, for instance, is another global trade route with several choke points. Any threat to shipping in this narrow channel bordered by Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand will severely impact economies in East Asia and cause ripple effects throughout the rest of the world. Weaponized drones will be a game changer for Southeast Asian terrorist groups. During the siege of Marawi City, Philippines, in June 2017, pro–Islamic State of Iraq and Syria militants reportedly used consumer-grade quadcopter drones to track, evade, and coordinate attacks on Philippine soldiers, inspiring the Philippine military to use similar drones. 29 But regional authorities apparently judged the drone use in Marawi City to be an outlier, a tactic imported by foreign fighters. The prevailing assessment is Southeast Asian terrorist groups like Jemaah Islamiyah and the various pro–Islamic State of Iraq and Syria offshoots in Indonesia and Malaysia will not expend their limited resources on drones when the supply of suicide bombers is seemingly unlimited. The use of drones for terrorist attacks is nevertheless a growing concern in Southeast Asia. Recent developments indicate Indonesian terrorists are hoping to acquire drone-warfare capability. In May 2023, the Indonesian counterterrorism unit Densus 88 obtained intelligence that Indonesian nationals whom the unit suspected of being affiliated with al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula were undergoing training to fly drones in Yemen. Individuals affiliated with pro–Islamic State of Iraq and Syria militant factions were also sharing tutorials on how to make “drone bombs” with members of their private social-media chat groups.

System instruction: Answer the question using only the provided text. No external sources or prior knowledge is allowed. User question: What are all the positive and negative aspects of drone usage mentioned in the text? Context block: A Cautionary Tale of Drone (Mis)use Military-grade drones were a restricted technology until local government agencies saw drones’ potential for search-and-rescue missions and private companies wanted to use drones for labor-intensive tasks, such as inspecting pipelines, delivering goods to remote areas, and spraying pesticides on farms. 22 The exploitation of drones for commercial profit soon created a civilian drone industry wherein the United States alone currently contains some 727,000 commercial drones and 1.69 million recreational small drones, with the numbers forecast to continue growing.23 The drone industry’s growth has taken place in the last few years, as the Federal Aviation Administration, concerned more with air safety than terrorist ambitions, did not issue the first commercial drone permit until 2006, lifting some of the restrictions on flying consumer drones for recreational and business purposes. Even then, the authorities were aware that , as Don Rassler has documented, four terrorist groups—the Japanese Aum Shinrikyo, the Colombia-based Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, the Pakistan-based Lashkar-eTaiba, and the Haqqani network—were already exploring the use of unmanned aerial vehicles for terrorist attacks. The Lashkar-e-Taiba case involved a network of US residents who directly acquired sensitive technology from US companies in 2002 to enhance the performance of unmanned airplanes. Lashkar-e-Taiba intended to ship the technologies, which US companies could sell to domestic customers—mainly universities and the US government—without due diligence, for the group’s military use in Kashmir. Several other terrorist groups also had their own drone programs, adapting Iranian models or reverse engineering stolen military drones—initially, for surveillance and the collection of tactical intelligence, external communications, and the smuggling of materiel into denied areas, and then, for use as weapons.24 Perhaps more interesting are the creative uses of drones individuals with no terrorist intent have found but that may cause harm, nonetheless. In December 2008, an American hobbyist successfully attached a pistol with a digital-camera gunsight to a minicopter and remotely fired the pistol. The hobbyist filmed his stunt and posted the footage online. The video did not attract much media attention, but almost seven years later, another American, a teenager, “upped the ante and the shock value” by mounting a homemade flamethrower to a small commercial drone he had modified and displaying the accuracy of the weapon in an online video.25 Violent actors easily could have replicated both stunts to stage terrorist attacks. Even after the hobbyists’ stunts, several influential studies considered terrorists’ use of drones a “niche threat” because few terrorist groups had successfully deployed drones in any meaningful way.26 When the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria began weaponizing civilian drones and filming its attacks for propaganda purposes in 2016, several terrorism experts warned violent extremists could one day use drones as remote-controlled missiles to deliver unconventional weapons, such as deadly nerve agents.27 Meanwhile, the general consensus remained that though drones might complicate conflicts, drones’ broader impact would be limited, given their small payloads, short flight times, and susceptibility to disruption. Additionally, although technological advancements might make civilian drones more capable, “the tools to counter, disable or defeat [drones] will be more capable too,” as will regulatory changes to restrict airspace access and increase export controls to prevent terrorists from acquiring certain technologies.28 Today, many governments require registrations for consumer drones that are heavier than seven kilograms. In addition, most governments have banned consumer drones from flying in cities, near sensitive installations, and over iconic events and other large gatherings, except with special permits. Since those with malevolent intentions usually do not apply for permits, jamming devices have also proliferated, as have geofencing technologies for disabling drones that are approaching designated no-fly zones. Nonetheless, the Houthis’ recent success in disrupting the Red Sea shipping route will likely inspire copycats. The Strait of Malacca, for instance, is another global trade route with several choke points. Any threat to shipping in this narrow channel bordered by Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand will severely impact economies in East Asia and cause ripple effects throughout the rest of the world. Weaponized drones will be a game changer for Southeast Asian terrorist groups. During the siege of Marawi City, Philippines, in June 2017, pro–Islamic State of Iraq and Syria militants reportedly used consumer-grade quadcopter drones to track, evade, and coordinate attacks on Philippine soldiers, inspiring the Philippine military to use similar drones. 29 But regional authorities apparently judged the drone use in Marawi City to be an outlier, a tactic imported by foreign fighters. The prevailing assessment is Southeast Asian terrorist groups like Jemaah Islamiyah and the various pro–Islamic State of Iraq and Syria offshoots in Indonesia and Malaysia will not expend their limited resources on drones when the supply of suicide bombers is seemingly unlimited. The use of drones for terrorist attacks is nevertheless a growing concern in Southeast Asia. Recent developments indicate Indonesian terrorists are hoping to acquire drone-warfare capability. In May 2023, the Indonesian counterterrorism unit Densus 88 obtained intelligence that Indonesian nationals whom the unit suspected of being affiliated with al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula were undergoing training to fly drones in Yemen. Individuals affiliated with pro–Islamic State of Iraq and Syria militant factions were also sharing tutorials on how to make “drone bombs” with members of their private social-media chat groups.

Avoid using information outside of the provided text.

What are the benefits of high-quality staff?

Financial intermediaries reduce transaction, information and search costs mainly by exploiting economies of scale. By increasing the volume of transactions, the cost per unit of transaction decreases. Moreover, by focusing on growing in size, financial intermediaries are able to draw standardised contracts and monitor customers so that they enforce these contracts. They also train high-quality staff to assist in the process of finding and monitoring suitable units in deficit (borrowers). It would be very difficult, time-consuming and costly for an individual to do so. Financial intermediaries can reduce risks by ‘pooling’, or aggregating, individual risks so that in normal circumstances, surplus units will be depositing money as deficit units make withdrawals. This enables banks, for instance, to collect relatively liquid deposits and invest most of them in long-term assets. Another way to look at this situation is that large groups of depositors are able to obtain liquidity from the banks while investing savings in illiquid but more profitable investments (Diamond and Dybvig, 1983).

Avoid using information outside of the provided text. Financial intermediaries reduce transaction, information and search costs mainly by exploiting economies of scale. By increasing the volume of transactions, the cost per unit of transaction decreases. Moreover, by focusing on growing in size, financial intermediaries are able to draw standardised contracts and monitor customers so that they enforce these contracts. They also train high-quality staff to assist in the process of finding and monitoring suitable units in deficit (borrowers). It would be very difficult, time-consuming and costly for an individual to do so. Financial intermediaries can reduce risks by ‘pooling’, or aggregating, individual risks so that in normal circumstances, surplus units will be depositing money as deficit units make withdrawals. This enables banks, for instance, to collect relatively liquid deposits and invest most of them in long-term assets. Another way to look at this situation is that large groups of depositors are able to obtain liquidity from the banks while investing savings in illiquid but more profitable investments (Diamond and Dybvig, 1983). What are the benefits of high-quality staff?

When responding, restrict yourself to only information found within the given article - no other information is valid or necessary.

How should we as a labor hire provider respond if a labor hire worker refuses to carry out work due to safety concerns?

GUIDE | Labour hire: duties of persons conducting a business or undertaking Page 1 of 7 Labour hire: duties of persons conducting a business or undertaking This Guide provides information for persons conducting a business or undertaking (PCBUs) involving the supply of workers (labour hire PCBUs) to work for another business or undertaking (host PCBUs) on complying with their health and safety duties under the model Work Health and Safety (WHS) laws. Model Work Health and Safety Act and labour hire arrangements Labour hire arrangements are covered by the model WHS Act. The primary duty of care under the model WHS Act is owed by a PCBU to a ‘worker’, which includes a labour hire worker. All labour hire PCBUs and host PCBUs have a primary duty of care to ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, the health and safety of labour hire workers engaged by, or caused to be engaged by them, or whose activities are influenced or directed by the PCBU. The model WHS Act provides that more than one duty holder may have the same duty, in this instance a labour hire PCBU and a host PCBU. Labour hire arrangements can be complex. In some circumstances, there may be more than one labour hire or host PCBU. If more than one person has a duty for the same matter, each person must meet their duty to the extent to which they have the capacity to influence and control the matter. A labour hire PCBU or host PCBU may exercise influence and control over a relevant matter through, for example, the terms of a contract or directing workers in a practical sense. However, duty holders cannot contract out of or transfer their WHS obligations to another person. Consultation between PCBUs All duty holders in a labour hire arrangement must consult, cooperate and coordinate with each other so far as is reasonably practicable. Each duty holder should share information to find out who is doing what and work together in a cooperative and coordinated way to ensure compliance with WHS laws. For example, host and labour hire PCBUs must discuss consultation arrangements, the hazards and risks associated with the work, what precautions will be taken to ensure the health and safety of the labour hire worker and the respective roles the organisations in responding to an incident. Some labour hire PCBUs may have substantial knowledge of WHS issues and risk management practices in their industry that may assist in assessing the practices of a host PCBU and ensuring compliance with WHS laws. Duty holders should not assume that someone else is taking care of a health and GUIDE | Labour hire: duties of persons conducting a business or undertaking Page 2 of 7 safety matter. Find out who is doing what and work together with other duty holders so risks are eliminated or minimised as far as is reasonably practicable. What is reasonable practicable will depend on the circumstances. Relevant issues for duty holders to discuss will depend on the circumstances. These may include: • hazards and risks that may arise, taking into account things like the physical environment where work will occur • control measures to eliminate or minimise risks and the suitability of those measures • compliance with minimum requirements set by legislation, such as the WHS laws • how work will be carried out (including safe work methods and processes that are already in place or need to be in place) • the people involved in the work (including supervision arrangements) • competency and training requirements, including arrangements for the provision of additional training required for the particular work • arrangements for facilitating assessments of the individual worker’s needs and/or competencies, as appropriate • arrangements for health monitoring and relevant vaccinations • the respective roles of the organisations in responding to an incident, as well as relevant policies and procedures, and • any other factors which may impact the work environment and how work is carried out. Like all PCBUs, labour hire and host PCBUs are required to be proactive in managing hazards and risks. The duties in the model WHS Act are ongoing and must be complied with throughout the labour hire arrangement. Be aware that circumstances can change over time and this may result in a change in the hazards and risks or in the ways they may be eliminated or minimised. Changes that may necessitate a review of hazards, risks and control measures may include: • change in a work process • change in the physical environment • different people undertaking the work, with different skills or means of co-ordinating activities • new hazards are identified, and • new ways to eliminate or minimise risks are identified or invented. If a labour hire worker has a reasonable concern that to carry out the work would expose them to a serious health or safety risk, they may cease, or refuse to carry out work. A labour hire and host PCBU must not discriminate against a worker for exercising this or any other right under the model WHS Act. Duties of a host PCBU As a host PCBU under the model WHS Act, you have the same health and safety duties to labour hire workers as you do to other types of workers. It is your duty to ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, the health and safety of all workers while at work. This duty requires you to eliminate or, if that is not reasonably practicable, to minimise risks to their health and safety. To identify what is reasonably practicable to do, you must take into account all the relevant matters and work with the labour hire PCBU/s to provide the highest level of protection that is both possible and reasonable in the circumstances. GUIDE | Labour hire: duties of persons conducting a business or undertaking Page 3 of 7 As a host PCBU, you must also consult, cooperate and coordinate activities with the labour hire PCBU/s to ensure you meet your obligations. The model WHS Act specifically provides that you cannot contract out of or transfer your WHS obligations to another party, including labour hire or other host PCBUs. Before engaging labour hire workers Before you engage labour hire workers to carry out work, you should consider: • providing the labour hire PCBU/s with detailed information about the nature of work to be carried out including details of, and where possible supporting material, relating to: o the work environment/s o tasks to be performed o accommodation arrangements o any known hazards or risks o any plant or equipment to be used o organisational and WHS arrangements, including supervision arrangements and any other organisations responsible for the worker during the arrangement o health and safety risks associated with the work, and o any skills, knowledge, licenses and qualifications required to safely undertake the work. • verifying, in consultation with the labour hire PCBU, that the selected worker/s have any necessary qualifications, licences, skills and training to carry out the work safely. In limited circumstances, you may be required to verify the worker/s are medically fit to carry out the work (see regulations 168 and 417(3)(b) of the model WHS Regulations) • discussing with the labour hire PCBU arrangements for health monitoring and vaccinations • consulting with the labour hire PCBU/s on WHS matters including in relation to who will provide any necessary equipment such as personal protective equipment (PPE), and relevant points of contact for health and safety between the organisations • ensuring that general health and safety information about the work, workplace and work environment has been provided to the worker/s. Check that you have provided this information in a way that is suitable, adequate and readily understandable for the worker/s • eliminating or, if that is not reasonably practicable, minimising risks in the workplace • establishing, in consultation with the labour hire PCBU/s, a review process for ensuring the ongoing WHS of workers, and • any more you can do to ensure the health and safety of all your workers. During a labour hire worker’s placement While labour hire workers are carrying out work, you should consider: • providing the worker/s with a site specific safety induction outlining WHS duties, policies, procedures and practices in the workplace including consultation methods • where WHS advice or workplace assessments are required, ensuring the persons engaged to conduct GUIDE | Labour hire: duties of persons conducting a business or undertaking Page 4 of 7 those assessments are suitably qualified • treating labour hire workers as you would employees and other workers with respect to health and safety and the provision of a safe working environment and PPE (if PPE is not provided by the labour hire PCBU/s) • providing adequate supervision of the worker/s at all times to ensure that work is being performed safely • consulting with the labour hire PCBU/s and worker/s regarding any changes which may affect WHS. Ensure you do not transfer workers to new tasks or change the nature of their work tasks, work environment or work location until you have consulted with the worker/s and obtained the approval of the labour hire PCBU/s • encouraging labour hire workers to participate in the identification of hazards and risks specific to their work • supporting and encouraging labour hire workers to participate in workplace safety consultative arrangements • working with the labour hire PCBU/s to facilitate appropriate WHS arrangements. For example, allow the labour hire PCBU/s access to workers, the workplace and relevant documents for the purpose of workplace safety assessments and to fulfil their WHS duties as a PCBU • facilitating any assessments conducted by the labour hire PCBU/s, for example, WHS management assessments or work site assessments • providing any further training, instruction or information prior to transferring a labour hire worker to new tasks, in a way that is suitable, adequate and readily understandable to the worker. • encouraging labour hire workers to maintain contact with the labour hire PCBU/s throughout their placement, and • in the event of an incident, notifying the labour hire PCBU/s as soon as practicable and working with them to implement agreed arrangements. For example, allowing the labour hire PCBU/s access to the workplace and to relevant documents to fulfil their WHS duties as a PCBU. Duties of a labour hire PCBU As a labour hire PCBU under the model WHS laws, it is your duty to ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, the health and safety of workers during their placement with the host PCBU/s. It is your duty to eliminate or, if that is not reasonably practicable, minimise risks to health and safety a labour hire worker may encounter. In some circumstances, this means not placing workers in, or removing workers from, a workplace where you believe there is a risk to their health and safety or where risks have not been adequately controlled. Before placing labour hire workers Before you place labour hire workers, you should consider: • reviewing the host PCBU’s safety record to satisfy yourself that they provide a safe workplace • gathering information about the work and the workplace/s, including the work environment/s, accommodation arrangements, organisational arrangements, health and safety risks associated with the work and any skills and knowledge the worker will require to safely undertake the GUIDE | Labour hire: duties of persons conducting a business or undertaking Page 5 of 7 work. This might include information about facilities, work schedules and environmental factors, such as whether work will be conducted outdoors • providing workers with suitable, adequate and readily understandable WHS induction and training. Include any risks you have identified and consultation methods you have established with workers and the host PCBU/s • verifying and working with the host PCBU to ensure site specific and task specific induction, training and PPE is provided to labour hire workers in a way that is suitable, adequate and readily understandable to them • assessing the workplace/s for any risks to health and safety, as appropriate. Work with the host PCBU/s to gather enough information to make an assessment, for example, by arranging a workplace visit. Where risks are identified, consult with the host/s to ensure they are eliminated, or if that is not reasonably practicable, minimised • ensuring that workers have the necessary qualifications, licences, skills and training to safely carry out the work. In limited circumstances you may be required to verify the worker/s are medically fit to carry out the work (see regulations 168 and 417(3)(b) of the model WHS Regulations). • consulting with the host PCBU and workers to ensure you and the workers understand and are confident in your understanding of the WHS policies, procedures and practices of the host PCBU/s • discussing with the host PCBU arrangements for health monitoring and vaccinations • establishing communication methods workers can use to contact you if they consider there is any risk to their health or safety • discussing consultation arrangements with the host PCBU/s • ensuring workers have the means to identify and take action in an unsafe situation at the host workplace, such as stopping work or bringing it to the attention of the host PCBU/s, a health and safety committee representative or health and safety representative • ensuring workers have the means to raise safety issues with you if they are unsatisfied with the host PCBU’s response • establishing, in consultation with the host PCBU/s, a review process for ensuring the ongoing WHS of workers, and • any more you can do to ensure the health and safety of the labour hire worker. During a labour hire worker’s placement While your workers are placed with the host PCBU, you should consider: • consulting with the host PCBU/s and labour hire workers on any changes which may affect their health and safety. For example, this may include consultation about the use of plant and equipment not envisaged prior to placement • working with the host PCBU/s to undertake workplace safety assessments in accordance with agreed arrangements GUIDE | Labour hire: duties of persons conducting a business or undertaking Page 6 of 7 • where WHS advice or workplace assessments are required, working with the host PCBU to ensure the person/s engaged to conduct those assessments are suitably qualified • monitoring the workplace for new risks to health and safety and consulting with the host PCBU/s about how they might be addressed. This might include regular visits to the host/s workplace • encouraging workers to maintain contact with you and to provide feedback on health and safety matters in the host/s workplace • taking effective action when the worker or host PCBU/s identifies risks or raises concerns about health and safety. This might include removing the worker from the workplace, and • in the event of an incident, working with the host PCBU/s to respond effectively. Further information More information on the topics covered in this Guide can be found here: • How to determine what is reasonably practicable to meet a health and safety duty • The meaning of ‘persons conducting a business or undertaking’ • Work health and safety consultation, cooperation and coordination You can also find further information about other WHS topics on the Safe Work Australia website swa.gov.au. Safe Work Australia is a national policy body responsible for WHS and workers’ compensation arrangements. We do not regulate or enforce WHS or workers’ compensation laws. This guide provides information on the model WHS laws. It is important to consider the WHS laws that apply in your circumstances. To find out more, contact your WHS regulator. Where your business arrangements span multiple jurisdictions, you may need to contact more than one WHS regulator. The relevant contact details are available on our website swa.gov.au/whs-authorities-contactinformation. In most jurisdictions the labour hire PCBU (not the host PCBU) is responsible for providing workers’ compensation to the worker, however there are exemptions to this. However, labour hire and host PCBUs should work together to coordinate return to work arrangements and support workers through the return to work process. It is important to contact your workers’ compensation authority for more information on understanding and complying with your workers’ compensation obligations as penalties can apply. Some jurisdictions have implemented a labour hire licensing scheme. Safe Work Australia cannot provide advice in relation to these schemes. It is your responsibility to identify whether these requirements apply to you. GUIDE | Labour hire: duties of persons conducting a business or undertaking Page 7 of 7 Disclaimer Safe Work Australia is an Australian Government statutory agency established in 2009. Safe Work Australia includes Members from the Commonwealth, and each state and territory, Members representing the interests of workers and Members representing the interests of employers. Safe Work Australia works with the Commonwealth, state and territory governments to improve work health and safety and workers’ compensation arrangements. Safe Work Australia is a national policy body, not a regulator of work health and safety. The Commonwealth, states and territories have responsibility for regulating and enforcing work health and safety laws in their jurisdiction. ISBN 978-1-76051-811-0 (PDF) ISBN 978-1-76051-812-7 (DOCX) Creative Commons With the exception of the Safe Work Australia logo, this copyright work is licensed under a Creative Commons AttributionNoncommercial 4.0 International licence. To view a copy of this licence, visit creativecommons.org/licenses In essence, you are free to copy, communicate and adapt the work for non-commercial purposes, as long as you attribute the work to Safe Work Australia and abide by the other licence terms. Contact information Safe Work Australia | [email protected] | www.swa.gov.au

When responding, restrict yourself to only information found within the given article - no other information is valid or necessary. How should we as a labor hire provider respond if a labor hire worker refuses to carry out work due to safety concerns? GUIDE | Labour hire: duties of persons conducting a business or undertaking Page 1 of 7 Labour hire: duties of persons conducting a business or undertaking This Guide provides information for persons conducting a business or undertaking (PCBUs) involving the supply of workers (labour hire PCBUs) to work for another business or undertaking (host PCBUs) on complying with their health and safety duties under the model Work Health and Safety (WHS) laws. Model Work Health and Safety Act and labour hire arrangements Labour hire arrangements are covered by the model WHS Act. The primary duty of care under the model WHS Act is owed by a PCBU to a ‘worker’, which includes a labour hire worker. All labour hire PCBUs and host PCBUs have a primary duty of care to ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, the health and safety of labour hire workers engaged by, or caused to be engaged by them, or whose activities are influenced or directed by the PCBU. The model WHS Act provides that more than one duty holder may have the same duty, in this instance a labour hire PCBU and a host PCBU. Labour hire arrangements can be complex. In some circumstances, there may be more than one labour hire or host PCBU. If more than one person has a duty for the same matter, each person must meet their duty to the extent to which they have the capacity to influence and control the matter. A labour hire PCBU or host PCBU may exercise influence and control over a relevant matter through, for example, the terms of a contract or directing workers in a practical sense. However, duty holders cannot contract out of or transfer their WHS obligations to another person. Consultation between PCBUs All duty holders in a labour hire arrangement must consult, cooperate and coordinate with each other so far as is reasonably practicable. Each duty holder should share information to find out who is doing what and work together in a cooperative and coordinated way to ensure compliance with WHS laws. For example, host and labour hire PCBUs must discuss consultation arrangements, the hazards and risks associated with the work, what precautions will be taken to ensure the health and safety of the labour hire worker and the respective roles the organisations in responding to an incident. Some labour hire PCBUs may have substantial knowledge of WHS issues and risk management practices in their industry that may assist in assessing the practices of a host PCBU and ensuring compliance with WHS laws. Duty holders should not assume that someone else is taking care of a health and GUIDE | Labour hire: duties of persons conducting a business or undertaking Page 2 of 7 safety matter. Find out who is doing what and work together with other duty holders so risks are eliminated or minimised as far as is reasonably practicable. What is reasonable practicable will depend on the circumstances. Relevant issues for duty holders to discuss will depend on the circumstances. These may include: • hazards and risks that may arise, taking into account things like the physical environment where work will occur • control measures to eliminate or minimise risks and the suitability of those measures • compliance with minimum requirements set by legislation, such as the WHS laws • how work will be carried out (including safe work methods and processes that are already in place or need to be in place) • the people involved in the work (including supervision arrangements) • competency and training requirements, including arrangements for the provision of additional training required for the particular work • arrangements for facilitating assessments of the individual worker’s needs and/or competencies, as appropriate • arrangements for health monitoring and relevant vaccinations • the respective roles of the organisations in responding to an incident, as well as relevant policies and procedures, and • any other factors which may impact the work environment and how work is carried out. Like all PCBUs, labour hire and host PCBUs are required to be proactive in managing hazards and risks. The duties in the model WHS Act are ongoing and must be complied with throughout the labour hire arrangement. Be aware that circumstances can change over time and this may result in a change in the hazards and risks or in the ways they may be eliminated or minimised. Changes that may necessitate a review of hazards, risks and control measures may include: • change in a work process • change in the physical environment • different people undertaking the work, with different skills or means of co-ordinating activities • new hazards are identified, and • new ways to eliminate or minimise risks are identified or invented. If a labour hire worker has a reasonable concern that to carry out the work would expose them to a serious health or safety risk, they may cease, or refuse to carry out work. A labour hire and host PCBU must not discriminate against a worker for exercising this or any other right under the model WHS Act. Duties of a host PCBU As a host PCBU under the model WHS Act, you have the same health and safety duties to labour hire workers as you do to other types of workers. It is your duty to ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, the health and safety of all workers while at work. This duty requires you to eliminate or, if that is not reasonably practicable, to minimise risks to their health and safety. To identify what is reasonably practicable to do, you must take into account all the relevant matters and work with the labour hire PCBU/s to provide the highest level of protection that is both possible and reasonable in the circumstances. GUIDE | Labour hire: duties of persons conducting a business or undertaking Page 3 of 7 As a host PCBU, you must also consult, cooperate and coordinate activities with the labour hire PCBU/s to ensure you meet your obligations. The model WHS Act specifically provides that you cannot contract out of or transfer your WHS obligations to another party, including labour hire or other host PCBUs. Before engaging labour hire workers Before you engage labour hire workers to carry out work, you should consider: • providing the labour hire PCBU/s with detailed information about the nature of work to be carried out including details of, and where possible supporting material, relating to: o the work environment/s o tasks to be performed o accommodation arrangements o any known hazards or risks o any plant or equipment to be used o organisational and WHS arrangements, including supervision arrangements and any other organisations responsible for the worker during the arrangement o health and safety risks associated with the work, and o any skills, knowledge, licenses and qualifications required to safely undertake the work. • verifying, in consultation with the labour hire PCBU, that the selected worker/s have any necessary qualifications, licences, skills and training to carry out the work safely. In limited circumstances, you may be required to verify the worker/s are medically fit to carry out the work (see regulations 168 and 417(3)(b) of the model WHS Regulations) • discussing with the labour hire PCBU arrangements for health monitoring and vaccinations • consulting with the labour hire PCBU/s on WHS matters including in relation to who will provide any necessary equipment such as personal protective equipment (PPE), and relevant points of contact for health and safety between the organisations • ensuring that general health and safety information about the work, workplace and work environment has been provided to the worker/s. Check that you have provided this information in a way that is suitable, adequate and readily understandable for the worker/s • eliminating or, if that is not reasonably practicable, minimising risks in the workplace • establishing, in consultation with the labour hire PCBU/s, a review process for ensuring the ongoing WHS of workers, and • any more you can do to ensure the health and safety of all your workers. During a labour hire worker’s placement While labour hire workers are carrying out work, you should consider: • providing the worker/s with a site specific safety induction outlining WHS duties, policies, procedures and practices in the workplace including consultation methods • where WHS advice or workplace assessments are required, ensuring the persons engaged to conduct GUIDE | Labour hire: duties of persons conducting a business or undertaking Page 4 of 7 those assessments are suitably qualified • treating labour hire workers as you would employees and other workers with respect to health and safety and the provision of a safe working environment and PPE (if PPE is not provided by the labour hire PCBU/s) • providing adequate supervision of the worker/s at all times to ensure that work is being performed safely • consulting with the labour hire PCBU/s and worker/s regarding any changes which may affect WHS. Ensure you do not transfer workers to new tasks or change the nature of their work tasks, work environment or work location until you have consulted with the worker/s and obtained the approval of the labour hire PCBU/s • encouraging labour hire workers to participate in the identification of hazards and risks specific to their work • supporting and encouraging labour hire workers to participate in workplace safety consultative arrangements • working with the labour hire PCBU/s to facilitate appropriate WHS arrangements. For example, allow the labour hire PCBU/s access to workers, the workplace and relevant documents for the purpose of workplace safety assessments and to fulfil their WHS duties as a PCBU • facilitating any assessments conducted by the labour hire PCBU/s, for example, WHS management assessments or work site assessments • providing any further training, instruction or information prior to transferring a labour hire worker to new tasks, in a way that is suitable, adequate and readily understandable to the worker. • encouraging labour hire workers to maintain contact with the labour hire PCBU/s throughout their placement, and • in the event of an incident, notifying the labour hire PCBU/s as soon as practicable and working with them to implement agreed arrangements. For example, allowing the labour hire PCBU/s access to the workplace and to relevant documents to fulfil their WHS duties as a PCBU. Duties of a labour hire PCBU As a labour hire PCBU under the model WHS laws, it is your duty to ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, the health and safety of workers during their placement with the host PCBU/s. It is your duty to eliminate or, if that is not reasonably practicable, minimise risks to health and safety a labour hire worker may encounter. In some circumstances, this means not placing workers in, or removing workers from, a workplace where you believe there is a risk to their health and safety or where risks have not been adequately controlled. Before placing labour hire workers Before you place labour hire workers, you should consider: • reviewing the host PCBU’s safety record to satisfy yourself that they provide a safe workplace • gathering information about the work and the workplace/s, including the work environment/s, accommodation arrangements, organisational arrangements, health and safety risks associated with the work and any skills and knowledge the worker will require to safely undertake the GUIDE | Labour hire: duties of persons conducting a business or undertaking Page 5 of 7 work. This might include information about facilities, work schedules and environmental factors, such as whether work will be conducted outdoors • providing workers with suitable, adequate and readily understandable WHS induction and training. Include any risks you have identified and consultation methods you have established with workers and the host PCBU/s • verifying and working with the host PCBU to ensure site specific and task specific induction, training and PPE is provided to labour hire workers in a way that is suitable, adequate and readily understandable to them • assessing the workplace/s for any risks to health and safety, as appropriate. Work with the host PCBU/s to gather enough information to make an assessment, for example, by arranging a workplace visit. Where risks are identified, consult with the host/s to ensure they are eliminated, or if that is not reasonably practicable, minimised • ensuring that workers have the necessary qualifications, licences, skills and training to safely carry out the work. In limited circumstances you may be required to verify the worker/s are medically fit to carry out the work (see regulations 168 and 417(3)(b) of the model WHS Regulations). • consulting with the host PCBU and workers to ensure you and the workers understand and are confident in your understanding of the WHS policies, procedures and practices of the host PCBU/s • discussing with the host PCBU arrangements for health monitoring and vaccinations • establishing communication methods workers can use to contact you if they consider there is any risk to their health or safety • discussing consultation arrangements with the host PCBU/s • ensuring workers have the means to identify and take action in an unsafe situation at the host workplace, such as stopping work or bringing it to the attention of the host PCBU/s, a health and safety committee representative or health and safety representative • ensuring workers have the means to raise safety issues with you if they are unsatisfied with the host PCBU’s response • establishing, in consultation with the host PCBU/s, a review process for ensuring the ongoing WHS of workers, and • any more you can do to ensure the health and safety of the labour hire worker. During a labour hire worker’s placement While your workers are placed with the host PCBU, you should consider: • consulting with the host PCBU/s and labour hire workers on any changes which may affect their health and safety. For example, this may include consultation about the use of plant and equipment not envisaged prior to placement • working with the host PCBU/s to undertake workplace safety assessments in accordance with agreed arrangements GUIDE | Labour hire: duties of persons conducting a business or undertaking Page 6 of 7 • where WHS advice or workplace assessments are required, working with the host PCBU to ensure the person/s engaged to conduct those assessments are suitably qualified • monitoring the workplace for new risks to health and safety and consulting with the host PCBU/s about how they might be addressed. This might include regular visits to the host/s workplace • encouraging workers to maintain contact with you and to provide feedback on health and safety matters in the host/s workplace • taking effective action when the worker or host PCBU/s identifies risks or raises concerns about health and safety. This might include removing the worker from the workplace, and • in the event of an incident, working with the host PCBU/s to respond effectively. Further information More information on the topics covered in this Guide can be found here: • How to determine what is reasonably practicable to meet a health and safety duty • The meaning of ‘persons conducting a business or undertaking’ • Work health and safety consultation, cooperation and coordination You can also find further information about other WHS topics on the Safe Work Australia website swa.gov.au. Safe Work Australia is a national policy body responsible for WHS and workers’ compensation arrangements. We do not regulate or enforce WHS or workers’ compensation laws. This guide provides information on the model WHS laws. It is important to consider the WHS laws that apply in your circumstances. To find out more, contact your WHS regulator. Where your business arrangements span multiple jurisdictions, you may need to contact more than one WHS regulator. The relevant contact details are available on our website swa.gov.au/whs-authorities-contactinformation. In most jurisdictions the labour hire PCBU (not the host PCBU) is responsible for providing workers’ compensation to the worker, however there are exemptions to this. However, labour hire and host PCBUs should work together to coordinate return to work arrangements and support workers through the return to work process. It is important to contact your workers’ compensation authority for more information on understanding and complying with your workers’ compensation obligations as penalties can apply. Some jurisdictions have implemented a labour hire licensing scheme. Safe Work Australia cannot provide advice in relation to these schemes. It is your responsibility to identify whether these requirements apply to you. GUIDE | Labour hire: duties of persons conducting a business or undertaking Page 7 of 7 Disclaimer Safe Work Australia is an Australian Government statutory agency established in 2009. Safe Work Australia includes Members from the Commonwealth, and each state and territory, Members representing the interests of workers and Members representing the interests of employers. Safe Work Australia works with the Commonwealth, state and territory governments to improve work health and safety and workers’ compensation arrangements. Safe Work Australia is a national policy body, not a regulator of work health and safety. The Commonwealth, states and territories have responsibility for regulating and enforcing work health and safety laws in their jurisdiction. ISBN 978-1-76051-811-0 (PDF) ISBN 978-1-76051-812-7 (DOCX) Creative Commons With the exception of the Safe Work Australia logo, this copyright work is licensed under a Creative Commons AttributionNoncommercial 4.0 International licence. To view a copy of this licence, visit creativecommons.org/licenses In essence, you are free to copy, communicate and adapt the work for non-commercial purposes, as long as you attribute the work to Safe Work Australia and abide by the other licence terms. Contact information Safe Work Australia | [email protected] | www.swa.gov.au

"================ <TEXT PASSAGE> ======= [context document] ================ <QUESTION> ======= [user request] ================ <TASK> ======= You are an expert in question answering. Your task is to reply to a query or question, based only on the information provided by the user. It should only use information in the article provided."

How does the Celcomen model ensure the robustness and identifiability of the gene-gene interactions through both simulation and biological experiments? What are the specific methodologies used in validating these interactions?

Simulations testing Celcomen’s identifiability guarantees Simulations were done in Python and completed by first generating a ground truth genegene interaction matrix. This was achieved by creating a n-genes by n-genes matrix of random values; for these experiments four genes were used. We then utilized Celcomen’s generative module, Simcomen, to learn a spatially-resolved counts matrix reflective of the ground truth gene-gene interaction matrix. Comparisons to the randomly initialized count matrix are termed “Raw input” and those to the learned count matrix are termed “SCC output”. To interrogate for self-consistency, we initialized Celcomen’s inference module with a random gene-gene interaction matrix and asked it to utilize the learned count matrix from Simcomen to decipher the ground truth gene-gene interaction matrix. Comparisons to the Celcomen outputted gene-gene interaction matrix are termed “CCC output”. Spearman correlation was used to compare the ground-truth gene-gene interaction values and the simulated-then-inferred gene-gene interaction values to test for model robustness and identifiability. For all exact parameter values utilized during the experiments, see the “analysis.simulations.ipynb” notebook in the reproducibility GitHub. Biological testing of Celcomen’s identifiability guarantees Biological confirmation of Celcomen’s identifiability guarantee was done by training two Celcomen inference module instances at the same time and comparing their derived gene-gene interaction results. The first model instance, which we call sample-specific, was trained only on one sample. The second model instance, which we call rest, was trained on the remaining samples. Thus, these two model instances are never trained on the same samples. Each model is trained to completion utilizing the same model hyperparameters, and their gene-gene interaction matrices are retrieved after the final epoch. We correlate a flattened version of their gene-gene interaction matrices using Spearman’s correlation due to the possible non-linear nature of the matrices’ values. We repeat this experiment for each of the samples in the fetal spleen dataset. The results across each sample’s experiments are aggregated together and compared in a bar plot. We derived a “random” control to compare to by shuffling the order of the flattened genegene interaction matrices and computing a correlation of the shuffled values. MannWhitney U test is used to derive p-values and all p-values are labeled on plot. For the full code utilized, see the “analysis.biological.ipynb” notebook in the reproducibility GitHub. Interferon knockout experiment on Xenium of human glioblastoma Processed Xenium data was subjected to the inference module of Celcomen, CCE, and then these gene-gene interaction values were annotated as containing cytoplasmic, surface membrane (plasma membrane GO ID via GO cellular component), or secreted (extracellular space GO ID also via GO cellular component) genes according to their GO IDs from QuickGO36. IFITM3 was knocked out in a randomly selected previously IFITM3 positive cell. First neighbors were defined as less than 15 µm away and second neighbors were defined as less than 30 µm away. Changes in each gene’s expression in each cell were calculated and these changes in expression pre- and post- perturbation were compared between different specified cellular subsets. These are the differential genes later used for differential expression analysis and pathway enrichment. Gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA) in R (v4.1.2) was utilized to perform pathway enrichment analysis on differentially post-perturbation affected genes. The interferon signature was derived directly from tissue by computing the differentially expressed genes between interferon high and low cells and taking the top 25, excluding the perturbed IFITM3 as that would bias analyses. For the full model parameters and code utilized, see the “analysis.perturbation.ipynb” notebook in the reproducibility GitHub. Counterfactual prediction validation via in vivo perturbed lung tumors Spatial perturbation data was acquired from previously published Perturb-map technology, GSE19346027. Their processed spaceranger output and annotations were read in and wild-type (WT) lesions, as previously annotated, were identified and any spots that were within two degrees of a perturbation specific cluster were trimmed away; this was done via a <100 filter in spatial distance with the value of 100 visually acquired from a histogram of spot-spot spatial distances (i.e. distance of 100 was the second non-zero peak). Lesions were then fed into the Celcomen model to identify gene-gene relationships and the trained gene-gene interaction matrix was used by Simcomen for counterfactual predictions. In detail, each lesion was examined for Tgfbr2+ spots and had a random positive spot knocked out (KO) in terms of Tgfbr2 expression. Simcomen then utilized the learned gene-gene interaction matrix to predict the whole transcriptome of every spot post perturbation. We then compared the change in expression in the KO spot compared to WT spots. Spearman correlation was used to compare model Tgfbr2 KO versus WT gene rankings with those directly derived from experimental Tgfbr2 KO spots and WT, i.e. the published data includes an in vivo bona fide Tgfbr2 KO lesion and this was used as ground truth. We derived “random” controls for each lesion by computing correlations on shuffled gene rankings of the observed and predicted differentials between Tgfbr2 KO and WT. Mann-Whitney U test is used to derive p-value when comparing observed lesion derived gene rankings with those from random shufflings. For the full code utilized, see the “analysis.biological.ipynb” notebook in the reproducibility GitHub.

"================ <TEXT PASSAGE> ======= Simulations testing Celcomen’s identifiability guarantees Simulations were done in Python and completed by first generating a ground truth genegene interaction matrix. This was achieved by creating a n-genes by n-genes matrix of random values; for these experiments four genes were used. We then utilized Celcomen’s generative module, Simcomen, to learn a spatially-resolved counts matrix reflective of the ground truth gene-gene interaction matrix. Comparisons to the randomly initialized count matrix are termed “Raw input” and those to the learned count matrix are termed “SCC output”. To interrogate for self-consistency, we initialized Celcomen’s inference module with a random gene-gene interaction matrix and asked it to utilize the learned count matrix from Simcomen to decipher the ground truth gene-gene interaction matrix. Comparisons to the Celcomen outputted gene-gene interaction matrix are termed “CCC output”. Spearman correlation was used to compare the ground-truth gene-gene interaction values and the simulated-then-inferred gene-gene interaction values to test for model robustness and identifiability. For all exact parameter values utilized during the experiments, see the “analysis.simulations.ipynb” notebook in the reproducibility GitHub. Biological testing of Celcomen’s identifiability guarantees Biological confirmation of Celcomen’s identifiability guarantee was done by training two Celcomen inference module instances at the same time and comparing their derived gene-gene interaction results. The first model instance, which we call sample-specific, was trained only on one sample. The second model instance, which we call rest, was trained on the remaining samples. Thus, these two model instances are never trained on the same samples. Each model is trained to completion utilizing the same model hyperparameters, and their gene-gene interaction matrices are retrieved after the final epoch. We correlate a flattened version of their gene-gene interaction matrices using Spearman’s correlation due to the possible non-linear nature of the matrices’ values. We repeat this experiment for each of the samples in the fetal spleen dataset. The results across each sample’s experiments are aggregated together and compared in a bar plot. We derived a “random” control to compare to by shuffling the order of the flattened genegene interaction matrices and computing a correlation of the shuffled values. MannWhitney U test is used to derive p-values and all p-values are labeled on plot. For the full code utilized, see the “analysis.biological.ipynb” notebook in the reproducibility GitHub. Interferon knockout experiment on Xenium of human glioblastoma Processed Xenium data was subjected to the inference module of Celcomen, CCE, and then these gene-gene interaction values were annotated as containing cytoplasmic, surface membrane (plasma membrane GO ID via GO cellular component), or secreted (extracellular space GO ID also via GO cellular component) genes according to their GO IDs from QuickGO36. IFITM3 was knocked out in a randomly selected previously IFITM3 positive cell. First neighbors were defined as less than 15 µm away and second neighbors were defined as less than 30 µm away. Changes in each gene’s expression in each cell were calculated and these changes in expression pre- and post- perturbation were compared between different specified cellular subsets. These are the differential genes later used for differential expression analysis and pathway enrichment. Gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA) in R (v4.1.2) was utilized to perform pathway enrichment analysis on differentially post-perturbation affected genes. The interferon signature was derived directly from tissue by computing the differentially expressed genes between interferon high and low cells and taking the top 25, excluding the perturbed IFITM3 as that would bias analyses. For the full model parameters and code utilized, see the “analysis.perturbation.ipynb” notebook in the reproducibility GitHub. Counterfactual prediction validation via in vivo perturbed lung tumors Spatial perturbation data was acquired from previously published Perturb-map technology, GSE19346027. Their processed spaceranger output and annotations were read in and wild-type (WT) lesions, as previously annotated, were identified and any spots that were within two degrees of a perturbation specific cluster were trimmed away; this was done via a <100 filter in spatial distance with the value of 100 visually acquired from a histogram of spot-spot spatial distances (i.e. distance of 100 was the second non-zero peak). Lesions were then fed into the Celcomen model to identify gene-gene relationships and the trained gene-gene interaction matrix was used by Simcomen for counterfactual predictions. In detail, each lesion was examined for Tgfbr2+ spots and had a random positive spot knocked out (KO) in terms of Tgfbr2 expression. Simcomen then utilized the learned gene-gene interaction matrix to predict the whole transcriptome of every spot post perturbation. We then compared the change in expression in the KO spot compared to WT spots. Spearman correlation was used to compare model Tgfbr2 KO versus WT gene rankings with those directly derived from experimental Tgfbr2 KO spots and WT, i.e. the published data includes an in vivo bona fide Tgfbr2 KO lesion and this was used as ground truth. We derived “random” controls for each lesion by computing correlations on shuffled gene rankings of the observed and predicted differentials between Tgfbr2 KO and WT. Mann-Whitney U test is used to derive p-value when comparing observed lesion derived gene rankings with those from random shufflings. For the full code utilized, see the “analysis.biological.ipynb” notebook in the reproducibility GitHub. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.05804 ================ <QUESTION> ======= How does the Celcomen model ensure the robustness and identifiability of the gene-gene interactions through both simulation and biological experiments? What are the specific methodologies used in validating these interactions? ================ <TASK> ======= You are an expert in question answering. Your task is to reply to a query or question, based only on the information provided by the user. It should only use information in the article provided."

Use only the Context Block to answer the Question. Your audience is people with limited tech knowledge.

What is the example provided for the importance of Alert Verification in Intrusion Detection Systems?

Abstract This chapter describes security threats that systems face when they are connected to the Internet. We discuss their security requirements, potential security threats and different mechanisms to combat these. In addition, the text presents the two most popular protocols (SSL and its successor TLS) to secure data transmitted over the Internet. Finally, we describe wellknown applications such as Secure Shell (ssh) and Secure File Transfer Protocol (sftp) that provide a reasonable level of security for common tasks. They may be utilized as underlying building blocks to create secure, Internet enabled applications. In order to provide useful services or to allow people to perform tasks more conveniently, computer systems are attached to networks and get interconnected. This resulted in the world-wide collection of local and wide-area networks known as the Internet. Unfortunately, the extended access possibilities also entail increased security risks as it opens additional avenues for an attacker. For a closed, local system, the attacker was required to be physically present at the network in order to perform unauthorized actions. In the networked case, each host that can send packets to the victim can be potentially utilized. As certain services (such as web or name servers) need to be publicly available, each machine on the Internet might be the originator of malicious activity. This fact makes attacks very likely to happen on a regularly basis. The following text attempts to give a systematic overview of security requirements of Internetbased systems and potential means to satisfy them. We define properties of a secure system and provide a classification of potential threats to them. We also introduce mechanisms to defend against attacks that attempt to violate desired properties. The most widely used means to secure application data against tampering and eavesdropping, the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and its successor, the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol are discussed. Finally, we briefly describe popular application programs that can act as building blocks for securing custom applications. Before one can evaluate attacks against a system and decide on appropriate mechanisms against them, it is necessary to specify a security policy [23]. A security policy defines the desired properties for each part of a secure computer system. It is a decision that has to take into account the value of the assets that should be protected, the expected threats and the cost of proper protection mechanisms. A security policy that is sufficient for the data of a normal user at home may not be sufficient for bank applications, as these systems are obviously a more likely target and have to protect more valuable resources. Although often neglected, the formulation of an adequate security policy is a prerequisite before one can identify threats and appropriate mechanisms to face them. Security Attacks and Security Properties For the following discussion, we assume that the function of a system that is the target of an attack is to provide information. In general, there is a flow of data from a source (e.g. host, file, memory) to a destination (e.g. remote host, other file, user) over a communication channel (e.g. wire, data bus). The task of the security system is to restrict access to this information to only those parties (persons or processes) that are authorized to have access according to the security policy in use. In the case of an automation system which is remotely connected to the Internet, the information flow is from/to a control application that manages sensors and actuators via communication lines of the public Internet and the network of the automation system (e.g. a field-bus). The normal information flow and several categories of attacks that target it are shown in Figure 1 and explained below (according to [22]). 1. Interruption: An asset of the system gets destroyed or becomes unavailable. This attack targets the source or the communication channel and prevents information from reaching its intended target (e.g. cut the wire, overload the link so that the information gets dropped because of congestion). Attacks in this category attempt to perform a kind of denial-of-service (DOS). 2. Interception: An unauthorized party gets access to the information by eavesdropping into the communication channel (e.g. wiretapping). 3. Modification: The information is not only intercepted, but modified by an unauthorized party while in transit from the source to the destination. By tampering with the information, it is actively altered (e.g. modifying message content). 4. Fabrication: An attacker inserts counterfeit objects into the system without having the sender doing anything. When a previously intercepted object is inserted, this processes is called replaying. When the attacker pretends to be the legitimate source and inserts his desired information, the attack is called masquerading (e.g. replay an authentication message, add records to a file). The four classes of attacks listed above violate different security properties of the computer system. A security property describes a desired feature of a system with regards to a certain type of attack. A common classification following [5, 13] is listed below. • Confidentiality: This property covers the protection of transmitted data against its release to non-authorized parties. In addition to the protection of the content itself, the information flow should also be resistant against traffic analysis. Traffic analysis is used to gather other information than the transmitted values themselves from the data flow (e.g. timing data, frequency of messages). • Authentication: Authentication is concerned with making sure that the information is authentic. A system implementing the authentication property assures the recipient that the data is from the source that it claims to be. The system must make sure that no third party can masquerade successfully as another source. • Non-repudiation: This property describes the feature that prevents either sender or receiver from denying a transmitted message. When a message has been transferred, the sender can prove that it has been received. Similarly, the receiver can prove that the message has actually been sent. • Availability: Availability characterizes a system whose resources are always ready to be used. Whenever information needs to be transmitted, the communication channel is available and the receiver can cope with the incoming data. This property makes sure that attacks cannot prevent resources from being used for their intended purpose. • Integrity: Integrity protects transmitted information against modifications. This property assures that a single message reaches the receiver as it has left the sender, but integrity also extends to a stream of messages. It means that no messages are lost, duplicated or reordered and it makes sure that messages cannot be replayed. As destruction is also covered under this property, all data must arrive at the receiver. Integrity is not only important as a security property, but also as a property for network protocols. Message integrity must also be ensured in case of random faults, not only in case of malicious modifications. Security Mechanisms Different security mechanisms can be used to enforce the security properties defined in a given security policy. Depending on the anticipated attacks, different means have to be applied to satisfy the desired properties. We divide these measures against attacks into three different classes, namely attack prevention, attack avoidance and attack detection. Attack Prevention Attack prevention is a class of security mechanisms that contains ways of preventing or defending against certain attacks before they can actually reach and affect the target. An important element in this category is access control, a mechanism which can be applied at different levels such as the operating system, the network or the application layer. Access control [23] limits and regulates the access to critical resources. This is done by identifying or authenticating the party that requests a resource and checking its permissions against the rights specified for the demanded object. It is assumed that an attacker is not legitimately permitted to use the target object and is therefore denied access to the resource. As access is a prerequisite for an attack, any possible interference is prevented. The most common form of access control used in multi-user computer systems are access control lists for resources that are based on the user identity of the process that attempts to use them. The identity of a user is determined by an initial authentication process that usually requires a name and a password. The login process retrieves the stored copy of the password corresponding to the user name and compares it with the presented one. When both match, the system grants the user the appropriate user credentials. When a resource should be accessed, the system looks up the user and group in the access control list and grants or denies access as appropriate. An example of this kind of access control is a secure web server. A secure web server delivers certain resources only to clients that have authenticated themselves and that posses sufficient credentials for the desired resource. The authentication process is usually handled by the web client such as the Microsoft Internet Explorer or Mozilla by prompting the user for his name and password. The most important access control system at the network layer is a firewall [4]. The idea of a firewall is based on the separation of a trusted inside network of computers under single administrative control from a potential hostile outside network. The firewall is a central choke point that allows enforcement of access control for services that may run at the inside or outside. The firewall prevents attacks from the outside against the machines in the inside network by denying connection attempts from unauthorized parties located outside. In addition, a firewall may also be utilized to prevent users behind the firewall from using certain services that are outside (e.g. surfing web sites containing pornographic material). For certain installations, a single firewall is not suitable. Networks that consist of several server machines which need to be publicly accessible and workstations that should be completely protected against connections from the outside would benefit from a separation between these two groups. When an attacker compromises a server machine behind a single firewall, all other machines can be attacked from this new base without restrictions. To prevent this, one can use two firewalls and the concept of a demilitarized zone (DMZ) [4] in between as shown in Figure 2. In this setup, one firewall separates the outside network from a segment (DMZ) with the server machines while a second one separates this area from the rest of the network. The second firewall can be configured in a way that denies all incoming connection attempts. Whenever an intruder compromises a server, he is now unable to immediately attack a workstation located in the inside network. The following design goals for firewalls are identified in [4]. 1. All traffic from inside to outside, and vice versa, must pass through the firewall. This is achieved by physically blocking all access to the internal network except via the firewall. 2. Only authorized traffic, as defined by the local security policy, will be allowed to pass. 3. The firewall itself should be immune to penetration. This implies the use of a trusted system with a secure operating system. A trusted, secure operating system is often purpose-built, has heightened security features and only provides the minimal functionality necessary to run the desired applications. These goals can be reached by using a number of general techniques for controlling access. The most common is called service control and determines Internet services that can be accessed. Traffic on the Internet is currently filtered on basis of IP addresses and TCP/UDP port numbers. In addition, there may be proxy software that receives and interprets each service request before passing it on. Direction control is a simple mechanism to control the direction in which particular service requests may be initiated and permitted to flow through. User control grants access to a service based on user credentials similar to the technique used in a multi-user operating system. Controlling external users requires secure authentication over the network (e.g. such as provided in IPSec [10]). A more declarative approach in contrast to the operational variants mentioned above is behavior control. This technique determines how particular services are used. It may be utilized to filter e-mail to eliminate spam or to allow external access to only part of the local web pages. A summary of capabilities and limitations of firewalls is given in [22]. The following benefits can be expected. • A firewall defines a single choke point that keeps unauthorized users out of the protected network. The use of such a point also simplifies security management. • It provides a location for monitoring security related events. Audits, logs and alarms can be implemented on the firewall directly. In addition, it forms a convenient platform for some non-security related functions such as address translation and network management. • A firewall may serve as a platform to implement a virtual private network (e.g. by using IPSec). The list below enumerates the limits of the firewall access control mechanism. • A firewall cannot protect against attacks that bypass it, for example, via a direct dial-up link from the protected network to an ISP (Internet Service Provider). It also does not protect against internal threats from an inside hacker or an insider cooperating with an outside attacker. • A firewall does not help when attacks are against targets whose access has to be permitted. • It cannot protect against the transfer of virus-infected programs or files. It would be impossible, in practice, for the firewall to scan all incoming files and e-mails for viruses. Firewalls can be divided into two main categories. A Packet-Filtering Router, or short packet filter, is an extended router that applies certain rules to the packets which are forwarded. Usually, traffic in each direction (in- and outgoing) is checked against a rule set which determines whether a packet is permitted to continue or should be dropped. The packet filter rules operate on the header fields used by the underlying communication protocols, for the Internet almost always IP, TCP and UDP. Packet filters have the advantage that they are cheap as they can often be built on existing hardware. In addition, they offer a good performance for high traffic loads. An example for a packet filter is the iptables package which is implemented as part of the Linux 2.4 routing software. A different approach is followed by an Application-Level Gateway, also called proxy server. This type of firewall does not forward packets on the network layer but acts as a relay on the application level. The user contacts the gateway which in turn opens a connection to the intended target (on behalf of the user). A gateway completely separates the inside and outside networks at the network level and only provides a certain set of application services. This allows authentication of the user who requests a connection and session-oriented scanning of the exchanged traffic up to the application level data. This feature makes application gateways more secure than packet filters and offers a broader range of log facilities. On the downside, the overhead of such a setup may cause performance problems under heavy load. Another important element in the set of attack prevention mechanisms is system hardening. System hardening is used to describe all steps that are taken to make a computer system more secure. It usually refers to changing the default configuration to a more secure one, possible at the expense of ease-of-use. Vendors usually pre-install a large set of development tools and utilities, which, although beneficial to the new user, might also contain vulnerabilities. The initial configuration changes that are part of system hardening include the removal of services, applications and accounts that are not needed and the enabling of operating system auditing mechanisms (e.g., Event Log in Windows). Hardening also involves a vulnerability assessment of the system. Numerous open-source tools such as network (e.g., nmap [8]) and vulnerability scanners (e.g., Nessus [12]) can help to check a system for open ports and known vulnerabilities. This knowledge then helps to remedy these vulnerabilities and close unnecessary ports. An important and ongoing effort in system hardening is patching. Patching describes a method of updating a file that replaces only the parts being changed, rather than the entire file. It is used to replace parts of a (source or binary) file that contains a vulnerability that is exploitable by an attacker. To be able to patch, it is necessary that the system administrators keep up to date with security advisories that are issued by vendors to inform about security related problems in their products. Attack Avoidance Security mechanisms in this category assume that an intruder may access the desired resource but the information is modified in a way that makes it unusable for the attacker. The information is pre-processed at the sender before it is transmitted over the communication channel and postprocessed at the receiver. While the information is transported over the communication channel, it resists attacks by being nearly useless for an intruder. One notable exception are attacks against the availability of the information as an attacker could still interrupt the message. During the processing step at the receiver, modifications or errors that might have previously occurred can be detected (usually because the information can not be correctly reconstructed). When no modification has taken place, the information at the receiver is identical to the one at the sender before the pre-processing step. The most important member in this category is cryptography which is defined as the science of keeping messages secure [18]. It allows the sender to transform information into a random data stream from the point of view of an attacker but to have it recovered by an authorized receiver (see Figure 3). The original message is called plain text (sometimes clear text). The process of converting it through the application of some transformation rules into a format that hides its substance is called encryption. The corresponding disguised message is denoted cipher text and the operation of turning it back into clear text is called decryption. It is important to notice that the conversion from plain to cipher text has to be loss-less in order to be able to recover the original message at the receiver under all circumstances. The transformation rules are described by a cryptographic algorithm. The function of this algorithm is based on two main principles: substitution and transposition. In the case of substitution, each element of the plain text (e.g. bit, block) is mapped into another element of the used alphabet. Transposition describes the process where elements of the plain text are rearranged. Most systems involve multiple steps (called rounds) of transposition and substitution to be more resistant against cryptanalysis. Cryptanalysis is the science of breaking the cipher, i.e. discovering the substance of the message behind its disguise. When the transformation rules process the input elements one at a time the mechanism is called a stream cipher, in case of operating on fixed-sized input blocks it is called a block cipher. If the security of an algorithm is based on keeping the way how the algorithm works (i.e. the transformation rules) secret, it is called a restricted algorithm. Those algorithms are no longer of any interest today because they don’t allow standardization or public quality control. In addition, when a large group of users is involved, such an approach cannot be used. A single person leaving the group makes it necessary for everyone else to change the algorithm. Modern cryptosystems solve this problem by basing the ability of the receiver to recover encrypted information on the fact that he possesses a secret piece of information (usually called the key). Both encryption and decryption functions have to use a key and they are heavily dependent on it. When the security of the cryptosystem is completely based on the security of the key, the algorithm itself may be revealed. Although the security does not rely on the fact that the algorithm is unknown, the cryptographic function itself and the used key together with its length must be chosen with care. A common assumption is that the attacker has the fastest commercially available hardware at his disposal in his attempt to break the cipher text. The most common attack, called known plain text attack, is executed by obtaining cipher text together with its corresponding plain text. The encryption algorithm must be so complex that even if the code breaker is equipped with plenty of such pairs and powerful machines, it is infeasible for him to retrieve the key. An attack is infeasible when the cost of breaking the cipher exceeds the value of the information or the time it takes to break it exceeds the lifespan of the information. Given pairs of corresponding cipher and plain text, it is obvious that a simple key guessing algorithm will succeed after some time. The approach of successively trying different key values until the correct one is found is called brute force attack because no information about the algorithm is utilized whatsoever. In order to be useful, it is a necessary condition for an encryption algorithm that brute force attacks are infeasible. Depending on the keys that are used, one can distinguish two major cryptographic approaches - public and secret key cryptosystems. Secret Key Cryptography This is the kind of cryptography that has been used for the transmission of secret information for centuries, long before the advent of computers. These algorithms require that the sender and the receiver agree on a key before communication is started. It is common for this variant (which is also called single key or symmetric encryption) that a single secret key is shared between the sender and the receiver. It needs to be communicated in a secure way before the actual encrypted communication can start and has to remain secret as long as the information is to remain secret. Encryption is achieved by applying an agreed function to the plain text using the secret key. Decryption is performed by applying the inverse function using the same key. The classic example of a secret key block cipher which is widely deployed today is the Data Encryption Standard (DES) [6]. DES has been developed in 1977 by IBM and adopted as a standard by the US government for administrative and business use. Recently, it has been replaced by the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES - Rijndael) [1]. It is a block cipher that operates on 64-bit plain text blocks and utilizes a key with 56-bits length. The algorithm uses 16 rounds that are key dependent. During each round 48 key bits are selected and combined with the block that is encrypted. Then, the resulting block is piped through a substitution and a permutation phase (which use known values and are independent of the key) to make cryptanalysis harder. Although there is no known weakness of the DES algorithm itself, its security has been much debated. The small key length makes brute force attacks possible and several cases have occurred where DES protected information has been cracked. A suggested improvement called 3DES uses three rounds of the simple DES with three different keys. This extends the key length to 168 bits while still resting on the very secure DES base. A well known stream cipher that has been debated recently is RC4 [16] which has been developed by RSA. It is used to secure the transmission in wireless networks that follow the IEEE 802.11 standard and forms the core of the WEP (wired equivalent protection) mechanism. Although the cipher itself has not been broken, current implementations are flawed and reduce the security of RC4 down to a level where the used key can be recovered by statistical analysis within a few hours. Public Key Cryptography Since the advent of public key cryptography, the knowledge of the key that is used to encrypt a plain text also allowed the inverse process, the decryption of the cipher text. In 1976, this paradigm of cryptography was changed by Diffie and Hellman [7] when they described their public key approach. Public key cryptography utilizes two different keys, one called the public key, the other one called the private key. The public key is used to encrypt a message while the corresponding private key is used to do the opposite. Their innovation was the fact that it is infeasible to retrieve the private key given the public key. This makes it possible to remove the weakness of secure key transmission from the sender to the receiver. The receiver can simply generate his public/private key pair and announce the public key without fear. Anyone can obtain this key and use it to encrypt messages that only the receiver with his private key is able to decrypt. Mathematically, the process is based on the trap door of one-way functions. A one-way function is a function that is easy to compute but very hard to inverse. That means that given x it is easy to determine f(x) but given f(x) it is hard to get x. Hard is defined as computationally infeasible in the context of cryptographically strong one-way functions. Although it is obvious that some functions are easier to compute than their inverse (e.g. square of a value in contrast to its square root) there is no mathematical proof or definition of one-way functions. There are a number of problems that are considered difficult enough to act as one-way functions but it is more an agreement among crypto analysts than a rigorously defined set (e.g. factorization of large numbers). A one-way function is not directly usable for cryptography, but it becomes so when a trap door exists. A trap door is a mechanism that allows one to easily calculate x from f(x) when an additional information y is provided. A common misunderstanding about public key cryptography is thinking that it makes secret key systems obsolete, either because it is more secure or because it does not have the problem of secretly exchanging keys. As the security of a cryptosystem depends on the length of the used key and the utilized transformation rules, there is no automatic advantage of one approach over the other. Although the key exchange problem is elegantly solved with a public key, the process itself is very slow and has its own problems. Secret key systems are usually a factor of 1000 (see [18] for exact numbers) faster than their public key counterparts. Therefore, most communication is stilled secured using secret key systems and public key systems are only utilized for exchanging the secret key for later communication. This hybrid approach is the common design to benefit from the high-speed of conventional cryptography (which is often implemented directly in hardware) and from a secure key exchange. A problem in public key systems is the authenticity of the public key. An attacker may offer the sender his own public key and pretend that it origins from the legitimate receiver. The sender then uses the faked public key to perform his encryption and the attacker can simply decrypt the message using his private key. In order to thwart an attacker that attempts to substitute his public key for the victim’s one, certificates are used. A certificate combines user information with the user’s public key and the digital signature of a trusted third party that guarantees that the key belongs to the mentioned person. The trusted third party is usually called a certification authority (CA). The certificate of a CA itself is usually verified by a higher level CA that confirms that the CA’s certificate is genuine and contains its public key. The chain of third parties that verify their respective lower level CAs has to end at a certain point which is called the root CA. A user that wants to verify the authenticity of a public key and all involved CAs needs to obtain the self-signed certificate of the root CA via an external channel. Web browsers (e.g. Netscape Navigator, Internet Explorer) usually ship with a number of certificates of globally known root CAs. A framework that implements the distribution of certificates is called a public key infrastructure (PKI). An important protocol for key management is X.509 [25]. Another important issue is revocation, the invalidation of a certificate when the key has been compromised. The best known public key algorithm and textbook classic is RSA [17], named after its inventors Rivest, Shamir and Adleman at MIT. It is a block cipher that is still utilized for the majority of current systems, although the key length has been increased over recent years. This has put a heavier processing load on applications, a burden that has ramifications especially for sites doing electronic commerce. A competitive approach that promises similar security as RSA using far smaller key lengths is elliptic curve cryptography. However, as these systems are new and have not been subject to sustained cryptanalysis, the confidence level in them in not yet as high as in RSA. Authentication and Digital Signatures An interesting and important feature of public key cryptography is its possible use for authentication. In addition to making the information unusable for attackers, a sender may utilize cryptography to prove his identity to the receiver. This feature is realized by digital signatures. A digital signature must have similar properties as a normal handwritten signature. It must be hard to forge and it has to be bound to a certain document. In addition, one has to make sure that a valid signature cannot be used by an attacker to replay the same (or different) messages at a later time. A way to realize such a digital signature is by using the sender’s private key to encrypt a message. When the receiver is capable of successfully decrypting the cipher text with the sender’s public key, he can be sure that the message is authentic. This approach obviously requires a cryptosystem that allows encryption with the private key, but many (such as RSA) offer this option. It is easy for a receiver to verify that a message has been successfully decrypted when the plain text is in a human readable format. For binary data, a checksum or similar integrity checking footer can be added to verify a successful decryption. Replay attacks are prevented by adding a time-stamp to the message (e.g. Kerberos [11] uses timestamps to prevent that messages to the ticket granting service are replayed). Usually, the storage and processing overhead for encrypting a whole document is too high to be practical. This is solved by one-way hash functions. These are functions that map the content of a message onto a short value (called message digest). Similar to one-way functions it is difficult to create a message when given only the hash value itself. Instead of encrypting the whole message, it is enough to simply encrypt the message digest and send it together with the original message. The receiver can then apply the known hash function (e.g. MD5 [15]) to the document and compare it to the decrypted digest. When both values match, the messages is authentic. Attack and Intrusion Detection Attack detection assumes that an attacker can obtain access to his desired targets and is successful in violating a given security policy. Mechanisms in this class are based on the optimistic assumption that most of the time the information is transferred without interference. When undesired actions occur, attack detection has the task of reporting that something went wrong and then to react in an appropriate way. In addition, it is often desirable to identify the exact type of attack. An important facet of attack detection is recovery. Often it is enough to just report that malicious activity has been found, but some systems require that the effect of the attack has to be reverted or that an ongoing and discovered attack is stopped. On the one hand, attack detection has the advantage that it operates under the worst case assumption that the attacker gains access to the communication channel and is able to use or modify the resource. On the other hand, detection is not effective in providing confidentiality of information. When the security policy specifies that interception of information has a serious security impact, then attack detection is not an applicable mechanism. The most important members of the attack detection class, which have received an increasing amount of attention in the last few years, are intrusion detection systems (aka IDS). Intrusion Detection [2, 3] is the process of identifying and responding to malicious activities targeted at computing and network resources. This definition introduces the notion of intrusion detection as a process, which involves technology, people and tools. An intrusion detection system basically monitors and collects data from a target system that should be protected, processes and correlates the gathered information and initiate responses, when evidence for an intrusion is detected. IDS are traditionally classified as anomaly or signature-based. Signature-based systems act similar to virus scanners and look for known, suspicious patterns in their input data. Anomaly- based systems watch for deviations of actual from expected behavior and classify all ‘abnormal’ activities as malicious. The advantage of signature-based designs is the fact that they can identify attacks with an acceptable accuracy and tend to produce fewer false alarms (i.e. classifying an action as malicious when in fact it is not) than their anomaly-based cousins. The systems are more intuitive to build and easier to install and configure, especially in large production networks. Because of this, nearly all commercial systems and most deployed installations utilize signature-based detection. Although anomaly-based variants offer the advantage of being able to find prior unknown intrusions, the costs of having to deal with an order of magnitude more false alarms is often prohibitive. Depending on their source of input data, IDS can be classified as either network or host-based. Network-based systems collect data from network traffic (e.g. packets by network interfaces in promiscuous mode) while host-based systems monitor events at operating system level such as system calls or receive input from applications (e.g. via log files). Host-based designs can collect high quality data directly from the affected system and are not influenced by encrypted network traffic. Nevertheless, they often seriously impact performance of the machines they are running on. Network-based IDS, on the other hand, can be set up in a non-intrusive manner - often as an appliance box without interfering with the existing infrastructure. In many cases, this makes them the preferred choice. As many vendors and research centers have developed their own intrusion detection system versions, the IETF has created the intrusion detection working group [9] to coordinate international standardization efforts. The aim is to allow intrusion detection systems to share information and to communicate via well defined interfaces by proposing a generic architectural description and a message specification and exchange format (IDMEF). A major issue when deploying intrusion detection systems in large network installations are the huge numbers of alerts that are produced. These alerts have to be analyzed by system administrators who have to decide on the appropriate countermeasures. Given the current state-of-the-art of intrusion detection, however, many of the reported incidents are in fact false alerts. This makes the analysis process for the system administrator cumbersome and frustrating, resulting in the problem that IDSs are often disabled or ignored. To address this issue, two new techniques have been proposed: alert correlation and alert verification. Alert correlation is an analysis process that takes as input the alerts produced by intrusion detection systems and produces compact reports on the security status of the network under surveillance. By reducing the total number of individual alerts and aggregating related incidents into a single report, is is easier for a system administrator to distinguish actual and bogus alarms. In addition, alert correlation offers the benefit of recognizing higher-level patterns in an alert stream, helping the administrator to obtain a better overview of the activities on the network. Alert verification is a technique that is directly aimed at the problem that intrusion detection systems often have to analyze data without sufficient contextual information. The classic example is the scenario of a Code Red worm that attacks a Linux web server. It is a valid attack that is seen on the network, however, the alert that an IDS raises is of no use because the Linux server is not vulnerable (as Code Red can only exploit vulnerabilities in Microsoft’s IIS web server). The intrusion detection system would require more information to determine that this attack cannot possibly succeed than available from only looking at network packets. Alert verification is a term that is used for all mechanisms that use additional information or means to determine whether an attack was successful or not. In the example above, the alert verification mechanism could supply the IDS with the knowledge that the attacked Linux server is not vulnerable to a Code Red attack. As a consequence, the IDS can react accordingly and suppress the alert or reduce its priority and thus reduce the workload of the administrator. Secure Network Protocols After the general concepts and mechanisms of network security have been introduced, the following section concentrates on two actual instances of secure network protocols, namely the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL, [20]) and the Transport Layer Security (TLS, [24]) protocol. The idea of secure network protocols is to create an additional layer between the application and the transport/network layer to provide services for a secure end-to-end communication channel. TCP/IP are almost always used as transport/network layer protocols on the Internet and their task is to provide a reliable end-to-end connection between remote tasks on different machines that intend to communicate. The services on that level are usually directly utilized by application protocols to exchange data, for example HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) for web services. Unfortunately, the network layer transmits this data unencrypted, leaving it vulnerable to eavesdropping or tampering attacks. In addition, the authentication mechanisms of TCP/IP are only minimal, thereby allowing a malicious user to hijack connections and redirect traffic to his machine as well as to impersonate legitimate services. These threats are mitigated by secure network protocols that provide privacy and data integrity between two communicating applications by creating an encrypted and authenticated channel. SSL has emerged as the de-facto standard for secure network protocols. Originally developed by Netscape, its latest version SSL 3.0 is also the base for the standard proposed by the IETF under the name TLS. Both protocols are quite similar and share common ideas, but they unfortunately can not inter-operate. The following discussion will mainly concentrate on SSL and only briefly explain the extensions implemented in TLS. The SSL protocol [21] usually runs above TCP/IP (although it could use any transport protocol) and below higher-level protocols such as HTTP. It uses TCP/IP on behalf of the higher-level protocols, and in the process allows an SSL-enabled server to authenticate itself to an SSL-enabled client, allows the client to authenticate itself to the server, and allows both machines to establish an encrypted connection. These capabilities address fundamental concerns about communication over the Internet and other TCP/IP networks and give protection against message tampering, eavesdropping and spoofing. • SSL server authentication allows a user to confirm a server’s identity. SSL-enabled client software can use standard techniques of public-key cryptography to check that a server’s certificate and public key are valid and have been issued by a certification authority (CA) listed in the client’s list of trusted CAs. This confirmation might be important if the user, for example, is sending a credit card number over the network and wants to check the receiving server’s identity. • SSL client authentication allows a server to confirm a user’s identity. Using the same techniques as those used for server authentication, SSL-enabled server software can check that a client’s certificate and public key are valid and have been issued by a certification authority (CA) listed in the server’s list of trusted CAs. This confirmation might be important if the server, for example, is a bank sending confidential financial information to a customer and wants to check the recipient’s identity. • An encrypted SSL connection requires all information sent between a client and a server to be encrypted by the sending software and decrypted by the receiving software, thus providing a high degree of confidentiality. Confidentiality is important for both parties to any private transaction. In addition, all data sent over an encrypted SSL connection is protected with a mechanism for detecting tampering – that is, for automatically determining whether the data has been altered in transit. SSL uses X.509 certificates for authentication, RSA as its public-key cipher and one of RC4-128, RC2-128, DES, Triple DES or IDEA as its bulk symmetric cipher. The SSL protocol includes two sub-protocols, namely the SSL Record Protocol and the SSL Handshake Protocol. The SSL Record Protocol simply defines the format used to transmit data. The SSL Handshake Protocol (using the SSL Record Protocol) is utilized to exchange a series of messages between an SSL-enabled server and an SSL-enabled client when they first establish an SSL connection. This exchange of messages is designed to facilitate the following actions. • Authenticate the server to the client. • Allow the client and server to select the cryptographic algorithms, or ciphers, that they both support. • Optionally authenticate the client to the server. • Use public-key encryption techniques to generate shared secrets. • Establish an encrypted SSL connection based on the previously exchanged shared secret. The SSL Handshake Protocol is composed of two phases. Phase 1 deals with the selection of a cipher, the exchange of a secret key and the authentication of the server. Phase 2 handles client authentication, if requested and finishes the handshaking. After the handshake stage is complete, the data transfer between client and server begins. All messages during handshaking and after, are sent over the SSL Record Protocol layer. Optionally, session identifiers can be used to re-established a secure connection that has been previously set up. Figure 4 lists in a slightly simplified form the messages that are exchanged between the client C and the server S during a handshake when neither client authentication nor session identifiers are involved. In this figure, {data}key means that data has been encrypted with key. The message exchanges shows that the client first sends a challenge to the server which responds with a X.509 certificate containing its public key. The client then creates a secret key and uses RSA with the server’s public key to encrypt it, sending the result back to the server. Only the server is capable of decrypting that message with its private key and can retrieve the shared, secret key. I order to prove to the client that the secret key has been successfully decrypted, the server encrypts the client’s challenge with the secret key and returns it. When the client is able to decrypt this message and successfully retrieves the original challenge by using the secret key, it can be certain that the server has access to the private key corresponding to its certificate. From this point on, all communication is encrypted using the chosen cipher and the shared secret key. TLS uses the same two protocols shown above and a similar handshake mechanism. Nevertheless, the algorithms for calculating message authentication codes (MACs) and secret keys have been modified to make them cryptographically more secure. In addition, the constraints on padding a message up to the next block size have been relaxed for TLS. This leads to an incompatibility between both protocols. SSL/TLS is widely used to secure web and mail traffic. HTTP as well as the current mail protocols IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) and POP3 (post office protocol, version 3) transmit user credential information as well as application data unencrypted. By building them on top of a secure network protocol such as SSL/TLS, they can benefit from secured channels without modifications. The secure communication protocols simply utilize different well-known destination ports (443 for HTTPS, 993 for IMAPS and 995 for POP3S) than their insecure cousins. Secure Applications A variety of popular tools that allow access to remote hosts (such as telnet, rsh and rlogin) or that provide means for file transfer (such as rcp or ftp) exchange user credentials and data in plain text. This makes them vulnerable to eavesdropping, tampering and spoofing attacks. Although the tools mentioned above could have also been built upon SSL/TLS, a different protocol suite called Secure Shell (SSH) [19] has been developed which follows partial overlapping goals. The SSH Transport and User Authentication protocols have features similar to those of SSL/TLS. However, they are different in the following ways. • TLS server authentication is optional and the protocol supports fully anonymous operation, in which neither side is authenticated. As such connections are inherently vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks, SSH requires server authentication. • TLS does not provide the range of client authentication options that SSH does - public-key via RSA is the only option. • Most importantly, TLS does not have the extra features provided by the SSH Connection Protocol. The SSH Connection Protocol uses the underlying connection, aka secure tunnel, which has been established by the SSH Transport and User Authentication protocols between two hosts. It provides interactive login sessions, remote execution of commands and forwarded TCP/IP as well as X11 connections. All these terminal sessions and forwarded connections are realized as different logical channels that may be opened by either side on top of the secure tunnel. Channels are flow-controlled which means that no data may be sent to a channel until a message is received to indicate that window space is available. The current version of the SSH protocol is SSH 2. It represents a complete rewrite of SSH 1 and improves some of its structural weaknesses. As it encrypts packets in a different way and has abandoned the notion of server and host keys in favor of host keys only, the protocols are incompatible. For applications built from scratch, SSH 2 should always be the preferred choice. Using the means of logical channels for interactive login sessions and remote execution, a complete replacement for telnet, rsh and rlogin could be easily implemented. A popular site that lists open-source implementations which are freely available for many different platforms can be found under [14]. Recently, a secure file transfer (sftp) application has been developed that makes the use of regular FTP based programs obsolete. Notice that it is possible to tunnel arbitrary application traffic over a connection that has been previously set up by the SSH protocols. Similar to SSL/TLS, web and mail traffic could be securely transmitted over a SSH connection before reaching the server port at the destination host. The difference is that SSH requires that a secure tunnel is created in advance which is bound to a certain port at the destination host. The set up of this secure channel, however, requires that the client that is initiating the connection has to log into the server. Usually, this makes it necessary that the user has an account at the destination host. After the tunnel has been established, all traffic sent into by the client gets forwarded to the desired port at the target machine. Obviously, the connection is encrypted. In contrast to that, SSL/TLS connects directly to a certain point without prior logging into the destination host. The encryption is set up directly between the client and the service listening at the destination port without a prior redirection via the SSH server. The technique of tunneling application traffic is often utilized for mail transactions when the mail server does not support SSL/TLS directly (as users have accounts at the mail server anyway), but it is less common for web traffic. Summary This chapter discuses security threats that systems face when they are connected to the Internet. In order to achieve the security properties that are required by the security policy in use, three different classes of mechanisms can be adopted. The first is attack prevention, which attempts to stop the attacker before it can reach its desired goals. Such techniques fall into the category of access control and firewalls. The second approach aims to make the data unusable for unauthorized persons by applying cryptographic means. Secret key as well as public keys mechanism can be utilized. The third class of mechanisms contains attack detection approaches. They attempt to detect malicious behavior and recover after undesired activity has been identified. The text also covers secure network protocols and applications. SSL/TLS as well as SSH are introduced and its most common fields of operations are highlighted. These protocols form the base of securing traffic that is sent over the Internet in behalf of a variety of different applications.

Use only the Context Block to answer the Question. Your audience is people with limited tech knowledge. What is the example provided for the importance of Alert Verification in Intrusion Detection Systems? Abstract This chapter describes security threats that systems face when they are connected to the Internet. We discuss their security requirements, potential security threats and different mechanisms to combat these. In addition, the text presents the two most popular protocols (SSL and its successor TLS) to secure data transmitted over the Internet. Finally, we describe wellknown applications such as Secure Shell (ssh) and Secure File Transfer Protocol (sftp) that provide a reasonable level of security for common tasks. They may be utilized as underlying building blocks to create secure, Internet enabled applications. In order to provide useful services or to allow people to perform tasks more conveniently, computer systems are attached to networks and get interconnected. This resulted in the world-wide collection of local and wide-area networks known as the Internet. Unfortunately, the extended access possibilities also entail increased security risks as it opens additional avenues for an attacker. For a closed, local system, the attacker was required to be physically present at the network in order to perform unauthorized actions. In the networked case, each host that can send packets to the victim can be potentially utilized. As certain services (such as web or name servers) need to be publicly available, each machine on the Internet might be the originator of malicious activity. This fact makes attacks very likely to happen on a regularly basis. The following text attempts to give a systematic overview of security requirements of Internetbased systems and potential means to satisfy them. We define properties of a secure system and provide a classification of potential threats to them. We also introduce mechanisms to defend against attacks that attempt to violate desired properties. The most widely used means to secure application data against tampering and eavesdropping, the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and its successor, the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol are discussed. Finally, we briefly describe popular application programs that can act as building blocks for securing custom applications. Before one can evaluate attacks against a system and decide on appropriate mechanisms against them, it is necessary to specify a security policy [23]. A security policy defines the desired properties for each part of a secure computer system. It is a decision that has to take into account the value of the assets that should be protected, the expected threats and the cost of proper protection mechanisms. A security policy that is sufficient for the data of a normal user at home may not be sufficient for bank applications, as these systems are obviously a more likely target and have to protect more valuable resources. Although often neglected, the formulation of an adequate security policy is a prerequisite before one can identify threats and appropriate mechanisms to face them. Security Attacks and Security Properties For the following discussion, we assume that the function of a system that is the target of an attack is to provide information. In general, there is a flow of data from a source (e.g. host, file, memory) to a destination (e.g. remote host, other file, user) over a communication channel (e.g. wire, data bus). The task of the security system is to restrict access to this information to only those parties (persons or processes) that are authorized to have access according to the security policy in use. In the case of an automation system which is remotely connected to the Internet, the information flow is from/to a control application that manages sensors and actuators via communication lines of the public Internet and the network of the automation system (e.g. a field-bus). The normal information flow and several categories of attacks that target it are shown in Figure 1 and explained below (according to [22]). 1. Interruption: An asset of the system gets destroyed or becomes unavailable. This attack targets the source or the communication channel and prevents information from reaching its intended target (e.g. cut the wire, overload the link so that the information gets dropped because of congestion). Attacks in this category attempt to perform a kind of denial-of-service (DOS). 2. Interception: An unauthorized party gets access to the information by eavesdropping into the communication channel (e.g. wiretapping). 3. Modification: The information is not only intercepted, but modified by an unauthorized party while in transit from the source to the destination. By tampering with the information, it is actively altered (e.g. modifying message content). 4. Fabrication: An attacker inserts counterfeit objects into the system without having the sender doing anything. When a previously intercepted object is inserted, this processes is called replaying. When the attacker pretends to be the legitimate source and inserts his desired information, the attack is called masquerading (e.g. replay an authentication message, add records to a file). The four classes of attacks listed above violate different security properties of the computer system. A security property describes a desired feature of a system with regards to a certain type of attack. A common classification following [5, 13] is listed below. • Confidentiality: This property covers the protection of transmitted data against its release to non-authorized parties. In addition to the protection of the content itself, the information flow should also be resistant against traffic analysis. Traffic analysis is used to gather other information than the transmitted values themselves from the data flow (e.g. timing data, frequency of messages). • Authentication: Authentication is concerned with making sure that the information is authentic. A system implementing the authentication property assures the recipient that the data is from the source that it claims to be. The system must make sure that no third party can masquerade successfully as another source. • Non-repudiation: This property describes the feature that prevents either sender or receiver from denying a transmitted message. When a message has been transferred, the sender can prove that it has been received. Similarly, the receiver can prove that the message has actually been sent. • Availability: Availability characterizes a system whose resources are always ready to be used. Whenever information needs to be transmitted, the communication channel is available and the receiver can cope with the incoming data. This property makes sure that attacks cannot prevent resources from being used for their intended purpose. • Integrity: Integrity protects transmitted information against modifications. This property assures that a single message reaches the receiver as it has left the sender, but integrity also extends to a stream of messages. It means that no messages are lost, duplicated or reordered and it makes sure that messages cannot be replayed. As destruction is also covered under this property, all data must arrive at the receiver. Integrity is not only important as a security property, but also as a property for network protocols. Message integrity must also be ensured in case of random faults, not only in case of malicious modifications. Security Mechanisms Different security mechanisms can be used to enforce the security properties defined in a given security policy. Depending on the anticipated attacks, different means have to be applied to satisfy the desired properties. We divide these measures against attacks into three different classes, namely attack prevention, attack avoidance and attack detection. Attack Prevention Attack prevention is a class of security mechanisms that contains ways of preventing or defending against certain attacks before they can actually reach and affect the target. An important element in this category is access control, a mechanism which can be applied at different levels such as the operating system, the network or the application layer. Access control [23] limits and regulates the access to critical resources. This is done by identifying or authenticating the party that requests a resource and checking its permissions against the rights specified for the demanded object. It is assumed that an attacker is not legitimately permitted to use the target object and is therefore denied access to the resource. As access is a prerequisite for an attack, any possible interference is prevented. The most common form of access control used in multi-user computer systems are access control lists for resources that are based on the user identity of the process that attempts to use them. The identity of a user is determined by an initial authentication process that usually requires a name and a password. The login process retrieves the stored copy of the password corresponding to the user name and compares it with the presented one. When both match, the system grants the user the appropriate user credentials. When a resource should be accessed, the system looks up the user and group in the access control list and grants or denies access as appropriate. An example of this kind of access control is a secure web server. A secure web server delivers certain resources only to clients that have authenticated themselves and that posses sufficient credentials for the desired resource. The authentication process is usually handled by the web client such as the Microsoft Internet Explorer or Mozilla by prompting the user for his name and password. The most important access control system at the network layer is a firewall [4]. The idea of a firewall is based on the separation of a trusted inside network of computers under single administrative control from a potential hostile outside network. The firewall is a central choke point that allows enforcement of access control for services that may run at the inside or outside. The firewall prevents attacks from the outside against the machines in the inside network by denying connection attempts from unauthorized parties located outside. In addition, a firewall may also be utilized to prevent users behind the firewall from using certain services that are outside (e.g. surfing web sites containing pornographic material). For certain installations, a single firewall is not suitable. Networks that consist of several server machines which need to be publicly accessible and workstations that should be completely protected against connections from the outside would benefit from a separation between these two groups. When an attacker compromises a server machine behind a single firewall, all other machines can be attacked from this new base without restrictions. To prevent this, one can use two firewalls and the concept of a demilitarized zone (DMZ) [4] in between as shown in Figure 2. In this setup, one firewall separates the outside network from a segment (DMZ) with the server machines while a second one separates this area from the rest of the network. The second firewall can be configured in a way that denies all incoming connection attempts. Whenever an intruder compromises a server, he is now unable to immediately attack a workstation located in the inside network. The following design goals for firewalls are identified in [4]. 1. All traffic from inside to outside, and vice versa, must pass through the firewall. This is achieved by physically blocking all access to the internal network except via the firewall. 2. Only authorized traffic, as defined by the local security policy, will be allowed to pass. 3. The firewall itself should be immune to penetration. This implies the use of a trusted system with a secure operating system. A trusted, secure operating system is often purpose-built, has heightened security features and only provides the minimal functionality necessary to run the desired applications. These goals can be reached by using a number of general techniques for controlling access. The most common is called service control and determines Internet services that can be accessed. Traffic on the Internet is currently filtered on basis of IP addresses and TCP/UDP port numbers. In addition, there may be proxy software that receives and interprets each service request before passing it on. Direction control is a simple mechanism to control the direction in which particular service requests may be initiated and permitted to flow through. User control grants access to a service based on user credentials similar to the technique used in a multi-user operating system. Controlling external users requires secure authentication over the network (e.g. such as provided in IPSec [10]). A more declarative approach in contrast to the operational variants mentioned above is behavior control. This technique determines how particular services are used. It may be utilized to filter e-mail to eliminate spam or to allow external access to only part of the local web pages. A summary of capabilities and limitations of firewalls is given in [22]. The following benefits can be expected. • A firewall defines a single choke point that keeps unauthorized users out of the protected network. The use of such a point also simplifies security management. • It provides a location for monitoring security related events. Audits, logs and alarms can be implemented on the firewall directly. In addition, it forms a convenient platform for some non-security related functions such as address translation and network management. • A firewall may serve as a platform to implement a virtual private network (e.g. by using IPSec). The list below enumerates the limits of the firewall access control mechanism. • A firewall cannot protect against attacks that bypass it, for example, via a direct dial-up link from the protected network to an ISP (Internet Service Provider). It also does not protect against internal threats from an inside hacker or an insider cooperating with an outside attacker. • A firewall does not help when attacks are against targets whose access has to be permitted. • It cannot protect against the transfer of virus-infected programs or files. It would be impossible, in practice, for the firewall to scan all incoming files and e-mails for viruses. Firewalls can be divided into two main categories. A Packet-Filtering Router, or short packet filter, is an extended router that applies certain rules to the packets which are forwarded. Usually, traffic in each direction (in- and outgoing) is checked against a rule set which determines whether a packet is permitted to continue or should be dropped. The packet filter rules operate on the header fields used by the underlying communication protocols, for the Internet almost always IP, TCP and UDP. Packet filters have the advantage that they are cheap as they can often be built on existing hardware. In addition, they offer a good performance for high traffic loads. An example for a packet filter is the iptables package which is implemented as part of the Linux 2.4 routing software. A different approach is followed by an Application-Level Gateway, also called proxy server. This type of firewall does not forward packets on the network layer but acts as a relay on the application level. The user contacts the gateway which in turn opens a connection to the intended target (on behalf of the user). A gateway completely separates the inside and outside networks at the network level and only provides a certain set of application services. This allows authentication of the user who requests a connection and session-oriented scanning of the exchanged traffic up to the application level data. This feature makes application gateways more secure than packet filters and offers a broader range of log facilities. On the downside, the overhead of such a setup may cause performance problems under heavy load. Another important element in the set of attack prevention mechanisms is system hardening. System hardening is used to describe all steps that are taken to make a computer system more secure. It usually refers to changing the default configuration to a more secure one, possible at the expense of ease-of-use. Vendors usually pre-install a large set of development tools and utilities, which, although beneficial to the new user, might also contain vulnerabilities. The initial configuration changes that are part of system hardening include the removal of services, applications and accounts that are not needed and the enabling of operating system auditing mechanisms (e.g., Event Log in Windows). Hardening also involves a vulnerability assessment of the system. Numerous open-source tools such as network (e.g., nmap [8]) and vulnerability scanners (e.g., Nessus [12]) can help to check a system for open ports and known vulnerabilities. This knowledge then helps to remedy these vulnerabilities and close unnecessary ports. An important and ongoing effort in system hardening is patching. Patching describes a method of updating a file that replaces only the parts being changed, rather than the entire file. It is used to replace parts of a (source or binary) file that contains a vulnerability that is exploitable by an attacker. To be able to patch, it is necessary that the system administrators keep up to date with security advisories that are issued by vendors to inform about security related problems in their products. Attack Avoidance Security mechanisms in this category assume that an intruder may access the desired resource but the information is modified in a way that makes it unusable for the attacker. The information is pre-processed at the sender before it is transmitted over the communication channel and postprocessed at the receiver. While the information is transported over the communication channel, it resists attacks by being nearly useless for an intruder. One notable exception are attacks against the availability of the information as an attacker could still interrupt the message. During the processing step at the receiver, modifications or errors that might have previously occurred can be detected (usually because the information can not be correctly reconstructed). When no modification has taken place, the information at the receiver is identical to the one at the sender before the pre-processing step. The most important member in this category is cryptography which is defined as the science of keeping messages secure [18]. It allows the sender to transform information into a random data stream from the point of view of an attacker but to have it recovered by an authorized receiver (see Figure 3). The original message is called plain text (sometimes clear text). The process of converting it through the application of some transformation rules into a format that hides its substance is called encryption. The corresponding disguised message is denoted cipher text and the operation of turning it back into clear text is called decryption. It is important to notice that the conversion from plain to cipher text has to be loss-less in order to be able to recover the original message at the receiver under all circumstances. The transformation rules are described by a cryptographic algorithm. The function of this algorithm is based on two main principles: substitution and transposition. In the case of substitution, each element of the plain text (e.g. bit, block) is mapped into another element of the used alphabet. Transposition describes the process where elements of the plain text are rearranged. Most systems involve multiple steps (called rounds) of transposition and substitution to be more resistant against cryptanalysis. Cryptanalysis is the science of breaking the cipher, i.e. discovering the substance of the message behind its disguise. When the transformation rules process the input elements one at a time the mechanism is called a stream cipher, in case of operating on fixed-sized input blocks it is called a block cipher. If the security of an algorithm is based on keeping the way how the algorithm works (i.e. the transformation rules) secret, it is called a restricted algorithm. Those algorithms are no longer of any interest today because they don’t allow standardization or public quality control. In addition, when a large group of users is involved, such an approach cannot be used. A single person leaving the group makes it necessary for everyone else to change the algorithm. Modern cryptosystems solve this problem by basing the ability of the receiver to recover encrypted information on the fact that he possesses a secret piece of information (usually called the key). Both encryption and decryption functions have to use a key and they are heavily dependent on it. When the security of the cryptosystem is completely based on the security of the key, the algorithm itself may be revealed. Although the security does not rely on the fact that the algorithm is unknown, the cryptographic function itself and the used key together with its length must be chosen with care. A common assumption is that the attacker has the fastest commercially available hardware at his disposal in his attempt to break the cipher text. The most common attack, called known plain text attack, is executed by obtaining cipher text together with its corresponding plain text. The encryption algorithm must be so complex that even if the code breaker is equipped with plenty of such pairs and powerful machines, it is infeasible for him to retrieve the key. An attack is infeasible when the cost of breaking the cipher exceeds the value of the information or the time it takes to break it exceeds the lifespan of the information. Given pairs of corresponding cipher and plain text, it is obvious that a simple key guessing algorithm will succeed after some time. The approach of successively trying different key values until the correct one is found is called brute force attack because no information about the algorithm is utilized whatsoever. In order to be useful, it is a necessary condition for an encryption algorithm that brute force attacks are infeasible. Depending on the keys that are used, one can distinguish two major cryptographic approaches - public and secret key cryptosystems. Secret Key Cryptography This is the kind of cryptography that has been used for the transmission of secret information for centuries, long before the advent of computers. These algorithms require that the sender and the receiver agree on a key before communication is started. It is common for this variant (which is also called single key or symmetric encryption) that a single secret key is shared between the sender and the receiver. It needs to be communicated in a secure way before the actual encrypted communication can start and has to remain secret as long as the information is to remain secret. Encryption is achieved by applying an agreed function to the plain text using the secret key. Decryption is performed by applying the inverse function using the same key. The classic example of a secret key block cipher which is widely deployed today is the Data Encryption Standard (DES) [6]. DES has been developed in 1977 by IBM and adopted as a standard by the US government for administrative and business use. Recently, it has been replaced by the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES - Rijndael) [1]. It is a block cipher that operates on 64-bit plain text blocks and utilizes a key with 56-bits length. The algorithm uses 16 rounds that are key dependent. During each round 48 key bits are selected and combined with the block that is encrypted. Then, the resulting block is piped through a substitution and a permutation phase (which use known values and are independent of the key) to make cryptanalysis harder. Although there is no known weakness of the DES algorithm itself, its security has been much debated. The small key length makes brute force attacks possible and several cases have occurred where DES protected information has been cracked. A suggested improvement called 3DES uses three rounds of the simple DES with three different keys. This extends the key length to 168 bits while still resting on the very secure DES base. A well known stream cipher that has been debated recently is RC4 [16] which has been developed by RSA. It is used to secure the transmission in wireless networks that follow the IEEE 802.11 standard and forms the core of the WEP (wired equivalent protection) mechanism. Although the cipher itself has not been broken, current implementations are flawed and reduce the security of RC4 down to a level where the used key can be recovered by statistical analysis within a few hours. Public Key Cryptography Since the advent of public key cryptography, the knowledge of the key that is used to encrypt a plain text also allowed the inverse process, the decryption of the cipher text. In 1976, this paradigm of cryptography was changed by Diffie and Hellman [7] when they described their public key approach. Public key cryptography utilizes two different keys, one called the public key, the other one called the private key. The public key is used to encrypt a message while the corresponding private key is used to do the opposite. Their innovation was the fact that it is infeasible to retrieve the private key given the public key. This makes it possible to remove the weakness of secure key transmission from the sender to the receiver. The receiver can simply generate his public/private key pair and announce the public key without fear. Anyone can obtain this key and use it to encrypt messages that only the receiver with his private key is able to decrypt. Mathematically, the process is based on the trap door of one-way functions. A one-way function is a function that is easy to compute but very hard to inverse. That means that given x it is easy to determine f(x) but given f(x) it is hard to get x. Hard is defined as computationally infeasible in the context of cryptographically strong one-way functions. Although it is obvious that some functions are easier to compute than their inverse (e.g. square of a value in contrast to its square root) there is no mathematical proof or definition of one-way functions. There are a number of problems that are considered difficult enough to act as one-way functions but it is more an agreement among crypto analysts than a rigorously defined set (e.g. factorization of large numbers). A one-way function is not directly usable for cryptography, but it becomes so when a trap door exists. A trap door is a mechanism that allows one to easily calculate x from f(x) when an additional information y is provided. A common misunderstanding about public key cryptography is thinking that it makes secret key systems obsolete, either because it is more secure or because it does not have the problem of secretly exchanging keys. As the security of a cryptosystem depends on the length of the used key and the utilized transformation rules, there is no automatic advantage of one approach over the other. Although the key exchange problem is elegantly solved with a public key, the process itself is very slow and has its own problems. Secret key systems are usually a factor of 1000 (see [18] for exact numbers) faster than their public key counterparts. Therefore, most communication is stilled secured using secret key systems and public key systems are only utilized for exchanging the secret key for later communication. This hybrid approach is the common design to benefit from the high-speed of conventional cryptography (which is often implemented directly in hardware) and from a secure key exchange. A problem in public key systems is the authenticity of the public key. An attacker may offer the sender his own public key and pretend that it origins from the legitimate receiver. The sender then uses the faked public key to perform his encryption and the attacker can simply decrypt the message using his private key. In order to thwart an attacker that attempts to substitute his public key for the victim’s one, certificates are used. A certificate combines user information with the user’s public key and the digital signature of a trusted third party that guarantees that the key belongs to the mentioned person. The trusted third party is usually called a certification authority (CA). The certificate of a CA itself is usually verified by a higher level CA that confirms that the CA’s certificate is genuine and contains its public key. The chain of third parties that verify their respective lower level CAs has to end at a certain point which is called the root CA. A user that wants to verify the authenticity of a public key and all involved CAs needs to obtain the self-signed certificate of the root CA via an external channel. Web browsers (e.g. Netscape Navigator, Internet Explorer) usually ship with a number of certificates of globally known root CAs. A framework that implements the distribution of certificates is called a public key infrastructure (PKI). An important protocol for key management is X.509 [25]. Another important issue is revocation, the invalidation of a certificate when the key has been compromised. The best known public key algorithm and textbook classic is RSA [17], named after its inventors Rivest, Shamir and Adleman at MIT. It is a block cipher that is still utilized for the majority of current systems, although the key length has been increased over recent years. This has put a heavier processing load on applications, a burden that has ramifications especially for sites doing electronic commerce. A competitive approach that promises similar security as RSA using far smaller key lengths is elliptic curve cryptography. However, as these systems are new and have not been subject to sustained cryptanalysis, the confidence level in them in not yet as high as in RSA. Authentication and Digital Signatures An interesting and important feature of public key cryptography is its possible use for authentication. In addition to making the information unusable for attackers, a sender may utilize cryptography to prove his identity to the receiver. This feature is realized by digital signatures. A digital signature must have similar properties as a normal handwritten signature. It must be hard to forge and it has to be bound to a certain document. In addition, one has to make sure that a valid signature cannot be used by an attacker to replay the same (or different) messages at a later time. A way to realize such a digital signature is by using the sender’s private key to encrypt a message. When the receiver is capable of successfully decrypting the cipher text with the sender’s public key, he can be sure that the message is authentic. This approach obviously requires a cryptosystem that allows encryption with the private key, but many (such as RSA) offer this option. It is easy for a receiver to verify that a message has been successfully decrypted when the plain text is in a human readable format. For binary data, a checksum or similar integrity checking footer can be added to verify a successful decryption. Replay attacks are prevented by adding a time-stamp to the message (e.g. Kerberos [11] uses timestamps to prevent that messages to the ticket granting service are replayed). Usually, the storage and processing overhead for encrypting a whole document is too high to be practical. This is solved by one-way hash functions. These are functions that map the content of a message onto a short value (called message digest). Similar to one-way functions it is difficult to create a message when given only the hash value itself. Instead of encrypting the whole message, it is enough to simply encrypt the message digest and send it together with the original message. The receiver can then apply the known hash function (e.g. MD5 [15]) to the document and compare it to the decrypted digest. When both values match, the messages is authentic. Attack and Intrusion Detection Attack detection assumes that an attacker can obtain access to his desired targets and is successful in violating a given security policy. Mechanisms in this class are based on the optimistic assumption that most of the time the information is transferred without interference. When undesired actions occur, attack detection has the task of reporting that something went wrong and then to react in an appropriate way. In addition, it is often desirable to identify the exact type of attack. An important facet of attack detection is recovery. Often it is enough to just report that malicious activity has been found, but some systems require that the effect of the attack has to be reverted or that an ongoing and discovered attack is stopped. On the one hand, attack detection has the advantage that it operates under the worst case assumption that the attacker gains access to the communication channel and is able to use or modify the resource. On the other hand, detection is not effective in providing confidentiality of information. When the security policy specifies that interception of information has a serious security impact, then attack detection is not an applicable mechanism. The most important members of the attack detection class, which have received an increasing amount of attention in the last few years, are intrusion detection systems (aka IDS). Intrusion Detection [2, 3] is the process of identifying and responding to malicious activities targeted at computing and network resources. This definition introduces the notion of intrusion detection as a process, which involves technology, people and tools. An intrusion detection system basically monitors and collects data from a target system that should be protected, processes and correlates the gathered information and initiate responses, when evidence for an intrusion is detected. IDS are traditionally classified as anomaly or signature-based. Signature-based systems act similar to virus scanners and look for known, suspicious patterns in their input data. Anomaly- based systems watch for deviations of actual from expected behavior and classify all ‘abnormal’ activities as malicious. The advantage of signature-based designs is the fact that they can identify attacks with an acceptable accuracy and tend to produce fewer false alarms (i.e. classifying an action as malicious when in fact it is not) than their anomaly-based cousins. The systems are more intuitive to build and easier to install and configure, especially in large production networks. Because of this, nearly all commercial systems and most deployed installations utilize signature-based detection. Although anomaly-based variants offer the advantage of being able to find prior unknown intrusions, the costs of having to deal with an order of magnitude more false alarms is often prohibitive. Depending on their source of input data, IDS can be classified as either network or host-based. Network-based systems collect data from network traffic (e.g. packets by network interfaces in promiscuous mode) while host-based systems monitor events at operating system level such as system calls or receive input from applications (e.g. via log files). Host-based designs can collect high quality data directly from the affected system and are not influenced by encrypted network traffic. Nevertheless, they often seriously impact performance of the machines they are running on. Network-based IDS, on the other hand, can be set up in a non-intrusive manner - often as an appliance box without interfering with the existing infrastructure. In many cases, this makes them the preferred choice. As many vendors and research centers have developed their own intrusion detection system versions, the IETF has created the intrusion detection working group [9] to coordinate international standardization efforts. The aim is to allow intrusion detection systems to share information and to communicate via well defined interfaces by proposing a generic architectural description and a message specification and exchange format (IDMEF). A major issue when deploying intrusion detection systems in large network installations are the huge numbers of alerts that are produced. These alerts have to be analyzed by system administrators who have to decide on the appropriate countermeasures. Given the current state-of-the-art of intrusion detection, however, many of the reported incidents are in fact false alerts. This makes the analysis process for the system administrator cumbersome and frustrating, resulting in the problem that IDSs are often disabled or ignored. To address this issue, two new techniques have been proposed: alert correlation and alert verification. Alert correlation is an analysis process that takes as input the alerts produced by intrusion detection systems and produces compact reports on the security status of the network under surveillance. By reducing the total number of individual alerts and aggregating related incidents into a single report, is is easier for a system administrator to distinguish actual and bogus alarms. In addition, alert correlation offers the benefit of recognizing higher-level patterns in an alert stream, helping the administrator to obtain a better overview of the activities on the network. Alert verification is a technique that is directly aimed at the problem that intrusion detection systems often have to analyze data without sufficient contextual information. The classic example is the scenario of a Code Red worm that attacks a Linux web server. It is a valid attack that is seen on the network, however, the alert that an IDS raises is of no use because the Linux server is not vulnerable (as Code Red can only exploit vulnerabilities in Microsoft’s IIS web server). The intrusion detection system would require more information to determine that this attack cannot possibly succeed than available from only looking at network packets. Alert verification is a term that is used for all mechanisms that use additional information or means to determine whether an attack was successful or not. In the example above, the alert verification mechanism could supply the IDS with the knowledge that the attacked Linux server is not vulnerable to a Code Red attack. As a consequence, the IDS can react accordingly and suppress the alert or reduce its priority and thus reduce the workload of the administrator. Secure Network Protocols After the general concepts and mechanisms of network security have been introduced, the following section concentrates on two actual instances of secure network protocols, namely the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL, [20]) and the Transport Layer Security (TLS, [24]) protocol. The idea of secure network protocols is to create an additional layer between the application and the transport/network layer to provide services for a secure end-to-end communication channel. TCP/IP are almost always used as transport/network layer protocols on the Internet and their task is to provide a reliable end-to-end connection between remote tasks on different machines that intend to communicate. The services on that level are usually directly utilized by application protocols to exchange data, for example HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) for web services. Unfortunately, the network layer transmits this data unencrypted, leaving it vulnerable to eavesdropping or tampering attacks. In addition, the authentication mechanisms of TCP/IP are only minimal, thereby allowing a malicious user to hijack connections and redirect traffic to his machine as well as to impersonate legitimate services. These threats are mitigated by secure network protocols that provide privacy and data integrity between two communicating applications by creating an encrypted and authenticated channel. SSL has emerged as the de-facto standard for secure network protocols. Originally developed by Netscape, its latest version SSL 3.0 is also the base for the standard proposed by the IETF under the name TLS. Both protocols are quite similar and share common ideas, but they unfortunately can not inter-operate. The following discussion will mainly concentrate on SSL and only briefly explain the extensions implemented in TLS. The SSL protocol [21] usually runs above TCP/IP (although it could use any transport protocol) and below higher-level protocols such as HTTP. It uses TCP/IP on behalf of the higher-level protocols, and in the process allows an SSL-enabled server to authenticate itself to an SSL-enabled client, allows the client to authenticate itself to the server, and allows both machines to establish an encrypted connection. These capabilities address fundamental concerns about communication over the Internet and other TCP/IP networks and give protection against message tampering, eavesdropping and spoofing. • SSL server authentication allows a user to confirm a server’s identity. SSL-enabled client software can use standard techniques of public-key cryptography to check that a server’s certificate and public key are valid and have been issued by a certification authority (CA) listed in the client’s list of trusted CAs. This confirmation might be important if the user, for example, is sending a credit card number over the network and wants to check the receiving server’s identity. • SSL client authentication allows a server to confirm a user’s identity. Using the same techniques as those used for server authentication, SSL-enabled server software can check that a client’s certificate and public key are valid and have been issued by a certification authority (CA) listed in the server’s list of trusted CAs. This confirmation might be important if the server, for example, is a bank sending confidential financial information to a customer and wants to check the recipient’s identity. • An encrypted SSL connection requires all information sent between a client and a server to be encrypted by the sending software and decrypted by the receiving software, thus providing a high degree of confidentiality. Confidentiality is important for both parties to any private transaction. In addition, all data sent over an encrypted SSL connection is protected with a mechanism for detecting tampering – that is, for automatically determining whether the data has been altered in transit. SSL uses X.509 certificates for authentication, RSA as its public-key cipher and one of RC4-128, RC2-128, DES, Triple DES or IDEA as its bulk symmetric cipher. The SSL protocol includes two sub-protocols, namely the SSL Record Protocol and the SSL Handshake Protocol. The SSL Record Protocol simply defines the format used to transmit data. The SSL Handshake Protocol (using the SSL Record Protocol) is utilized to exchange a series of messages between an SSL-enabled server and an SSL-enabled client when they first establish an SSL connection. This exchange of messages is designed to facilitate the following actions. • Authenticate the server to the client. • Allow the client and server to select the cryptographic algorithms, or ciphers, that they both support. • Optionally authenticate the client to the server. • Use public-key encryption techniques to generate shared secrets. • Establish an encrypted SSL connection based on the previously exchanged shared secret. The SSL Handshake Protocol is composed of two phases. Phase 1 deals with the selection of a cipher, the exchange of a secret key and the authentication of the server. Phase 2 handles client authentication, if requested and finishes the handshaking. After the handshake stage is complete, the data transfer between client and server begins. All messages during handshaking and after, are sent over the SSL Record Protocol layer. Optionally, session identifiers can be used to re-established a secure connection that has been previously set up. Figure 4 lists in a slightly simplified form the messages that are exchanged between the client C and the server S during a handshake when neither client authentication nor session identifiers are involved. In this figure, {data}key means that data has been encrypted with key. The message exchanges shows that the client first sends a challenge to the server which responds with a X.509 certificate containing its public key. The client then creates a secret key and uses RSA with the server’s public key to encrypt it, sending the result back to the server. Only the server is capable of decrypting that message with its private key and can retrieve the shared, secret key. I order to prove to the client that the secret key has been successfully decrypted, the server encrypts the client’s challenge with the secret key and returns it. When the client is able to decrypt this message and successfully retrieves the original challenge by using the secret key, it can be certain that the server has access to the private key corresponding to its certificate. From this point on, all communication is encrypted using the chosen cipher and the shared secret key. TLS uses the same two protocols shown above and a similar handshake mechanism. Nevertheless, the algorithms for calculating message authentication codes (MACs) and secret keys have been modified to make them cryptographically more secure. In addition, the constraints on padding a message up to the next block size have been relaxed for TLS. This leads to an incompatibility between both protocols. SSL/TLS is widely used to secure web and mail traffic. HTTP as well as the current mail protocols IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) and POP3 (post office protocol, version 3) transmit user credential information as well as application data unencrypted. By building them on top of a secure network protocol such as SSL/TLS, they can benefit from secured channels without modifications. The secure communication protocols simply utilize different well-known destination ports (443 for HTTPS, 993 for IMAPS and 995 for POP3S) than their insecure cousins. Secure Applications A variety of popular tools that allow access to remote hosts (such as telnet, rsh and rlogin) or that provide means for file transfer (such as rcp or ftp) exchange user credentials and data in plain text. This makes them vulnerable to eavesdropping, tampering and spoofing attacks. Although the tools mentioned above could have also been built upon SSL/TLS, a different protocol suite called Secure Shell (SSH) [19] has been developed which follows partial overlapping goals. The SSH Transport and User Authentication protocols have features similar to those of SSL/TLS. However, they are different in the following ways. • TLS server authentication is optional and the protocol supports fully anonymous operation, in which neither side is authenticated. As such connections are inherently vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks, SSH requires server authentication. • TLS does not provide the range of client authentication options that SSH does - public-key via RSA is the only option. • Most importantly, TLS does not have the extra features provided by the SSH Connection Protocol. The SSH Connection Protocol uses the underlying connection, aka secure tunnel, which has been established by the SSH Transport and User Authentication protocols between two hosts. It provides interactive login sessions, remote execution of commands and forwarded TCP/IP as well as X11 connections. All these terminal sessions and forwarded connections are realized as different logical channels that may be opened by either side on top of the secure tunnel. Channels are flow-controlled which means that no data may be sent to a channel until a message is received to indicate that window space is available. The current version of the SSH protocol is SSH 2. It represents a complete rewrite of SSH 1 and improves some of its structural weaknesses. As it encrypts packets in a different way and has abandoned the notion of server and host keys in favor of host keys only, the protocols are incompatible. For applications built from scratch, SSH 2 should always be the preferred choice. Using the means of logical channels for interactive login sessions and remote execution, a complete replacement for telnet, rsh and rlogin could be easily implemented. A popular site that lists open-source implementations which are freely available for many different platforms can be found under [14]. Recently, a secure file transfer (sftp) application has been developed that makes the use of regular FTP based programs obsolete. Notice that it is possible to tunnel arbitrary application traffic over a connection that has been previously set up by the SSH protocols. Similar to SSL/TLS, web and mail traffic could be securely transmitted over a SSH connection before reaching the server port at the destination host. The difference is that SSH requires that a secure tunnel is created in advance which is bound to a certain port at the destination host. The set up of this secure channel, however, requires that the client that is initiating the connection has to log into the server. Usually, this makes it necessary that the user has an account at the destination host. After the tunnel has been established, all traffic sent into by the client gets forwarded to the desired port at the target machine. Obviously, the connection is encrypted. In contrast to that, SSL/TLS connects directly to a certain point without prior logging into the destination host. The encryption is set up directly between the client and the service listening at the destination port without a prior redirection via the SSH server. The technique of tunneling application traffic is often utilized for mail transactions when the mail server does not support SSL/TLS directly (as users have accounts at the mail server anyway), but it is less common for web traffic. Summary This chapter discuses security threats that systems face when they are connected to the Internet. In order to achieve the security properties that are required by the security policy in use, three different classes of mechanisms can be adopted. The first is attack prevention, which attempts to stop the attacker before it can reach its desired goals. Such techniques fall into the category of access control and firewalls. The second approach aims to make the data unusable for unauthorized persons by applying cryptographic means. Secret key as well as public keys mechanism can be utilized. The third class of mechanisms contains attack detection approaches. They attempt to detect malicious behavior and recover after undesired activity has been identified. The text also covers secure network protocols and applications. SSL/TLS as well as SSH are introduced and its most common fields of operations are highlighted. These protocols form the base of securing traffic that is sent over the Internet in behalf of a variety of different applications.

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How does Herbalife's "seed to feed" strategy influence its product quality and sourcing?

2022 Annual Report To Our Shareholders, We all know coming out of the pandemic has caused many companies to relook at their operations. 2022 was a year of change for Herbalife as well as a year of challenge. With every challenge, there is great opportunity. I came back to Herbalife because I believe passionately about what Herbalife does, and what it provides for health and income. Since returning to Herbalife, I along with our management team and distributor leaders from around the world have embarked on a journey to expand our content, enhance the business opportunity, modernize our brand, and expand our digital platform – with the aim to reach more customers and to provide our distributors a better plat- form to operate their business. Our vision is to be the world’s premier health and wellness company and community. As I write this, more than 3,000 distributor leaders from around the world are traveling to Los Angeles to meet together for the first time in three years to learn, to share, to innovate, and to build a path forward for Herbalife. The time is now for us to reconnect, build on our strategic plan, and provide growth for all of our stakeholders. Our digital transformation “Herbalife One” will enhance the Company’s two main platforms: content and busi- ness opportunity. Our content is our product. With obesity levels hitting record highs around the globe and a greater demand for health and wellness support, we have plans to grow our product portfolio through our daily nutrition products with expanded vegan and protein lines. We plan to explore other health and wellness opportunities that will be based on global as well as regional consumer demands. For example, our unique Ayurvedic product line in India has contributed to the success of our fastest growing market. We are unleashing similar innovative products regionally in Europe, Asia and China, and we will continue to look for synergies and opportunities to globalize our regional product offerings. With enhancements to the business opportunity, our global distributor network will continue to give us a com- petitive advantage to reach more consumers with more offerings than ever before. Our distributors give a personal voice and passion to our products. Spanning across 95 markets, our distributors are amazing entrepreneurs who have unique relationships with their customers, and through an expanded use of data, we will be able to assist our distributors to sell more products and work more closely and efficiently with consumers on their health and wellness journey. To this end, we are modernizing our brand and compensation structure, including new promotions to energize and incentivize our distributors to earn early in their Herbalife business opportunity journey. Together with Herbalife One, our business opportunity will differentiate us and strengthen our leadership in the marketplace. 2023 is a start of a new chapter – one that is both motivating and exciting. In March, I marked my 20th year of devoting my time, passion, and energy to Herbalife. I feel more optimistic about where we are headed today than ever before. Our distributors and employees make Herbalife a community unlike any other. I know our distrib- utors and employees are as incredibly excited about the future as I am. Thank you for your trust and support. Michael O. Johnson Chairman and Chief Executive Officer This letter contains “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Although we believe that the expectations reflected in any of our forward-looking statements are reasonable, actual results or outcomes could differ materially from those pro- jected or assumed in any of our forward-looking statements. Our future financial condition and results of oper- ations, as well as any forward-looking statements, are subject to change and to inherent risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond our control. Additionally, many of these risks and uncertainties are, and may continue to be, amplified by the COVID-19 pandemic. Important factors that could cause our actual results, performance and achievements, or industry results to differ materially from estimates or projections contained in or implied by our forward-looking statements include the following: the potential impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and current global economic conditions, including inflation, on us; our Members, customers, and supply chain; and the world economy; our ability to attract and retain Members; our relationship with, and our ability to influence the actions of, our Members; our noncompliance with, or improper action by our employees or Members in violation of, applicable U.S. and foreign laws, rules, and regulations; adverse publicity associated with our Company or the direct-selling industry, including our ability to comfort the marketplace and regulators regard- ing our compliance with applicable laws; changing consumer preferences and demands and evolving industry standards, including with respect to climate change, sustainability, and other environmental, social, and gover- nance, or ESG, matters; the competitive nature of our business and industry; legal and regulatory matters, including regulatory actions concerning, or legal challenges to, our products or network marketing program and product liability claims; the Consent Order entered into with the FTC, the effects thereof and any failure to comply therewith; risks associated with operating internationally and in China; our ability to execute our growth and other strategic initiatives, including implementation of our Transformation Program and increased pene- tration of our existing markets; any material disruption to our business caused by natural disasters, other cata- strophic events, acts of war or terrorism, including the war in Ukraine, cybersecurity incidents, pandemics, and/ or other acts by third parties; our ability to adequately source ingredients, packaging materials, and other raw materials and manufacture and distribute our products; our reliance on our information technology infra- structure; noncompliance by us or our Members with any privacy laws, rules, or regulations or any security breach involving the misappropriation, loss, or other unauthorized use or disclosure of confidential information; contractual limitations on our ability to expand or change our direct-selling business model; the sufficiency of our trademarks and other intellectual property; product concentration; our reliance upon, or the loss or departure of any member of, our senior management team; restrictions imposed by covenants in the agreements governing our indebtedness; risks related to our convertible notes; changes in, and uncertainties relating to, the application of transfer pricing, income tax, customs duties, value added taxes, and other tax laws, treaties, and regulations, or their interpretation; our incorporation under the laws of the Cayman Islands; and share price volatility related to, among other things, speculative trading and certain traders shorting our common shares. Forward-looking statements in this letter speak only as of March 14, 2023. We do not undertake any obligation to update or release any revisions to any forward-looking statement or to report any events or circumstances after such date or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events, except as required by law. UNITED STATES SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION Washington, D.C. 20549 Form 10-K (Mark One) ANNUAL REPORT PURSUANT TO SECTION 13 OR 15(d) OF THE SECURITIES EXCHANGE ACT OF 1934 For the fiscal year ended December 31, 2022 OR TRANSITION REPORT PURSUANT TO SECTION 13 OR 15(d) OF THE SECURITIES EXCHANGE ACT OF 1934 For the transition period from to Commission file number: 1-32381 HERBALIFE NUTRITION LTD. (Exact name of registrant as specified in its charter) Cayman Islands 98-0377871 (State or other jurisdiction of (I.R.S. Employer incorporation or organization) Identification No.) P.O. Box 309GT Ugland House, South Church Street Grand Cayman, Cayman Islands (Address of principal executive offices) (Zip Code) (213) 745-0500 (Registrant’s telephone number, including area code) Securities registered pursuant to Section 12(b) of the Act: Title of each class: Trading Symbol(s): Name of each exchange on which registered: Common Shares, par value $0.0005 per share HLF New York Stock Exchange Securities registered pursuant to Section 12(g) of the Act: None Indicate by check mark if the registrant is a well-known seasoned issuer, as defined in Rule 405 of the Securities Act. Yes ☒ No ☐ Indicate by check mark if the registrant is not required to file reports pursuant to Section 13 or Section 15(d) of the Act. Yes ☐ No ☒ Indicate by check mark whether the registrant: (1) has filed all reports required to be filed by Section 13 or 15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 during the preceding 12 months (or for such shorter period that the registrant was required to file such reports), and (2) has been subject to such filing requirements for the past 90 days. Yes ☒ No ☐ Indicate by check mark whether the registrant has submitted electronically every Interactive Data File required to be submitted pursuant to Rule 405 of Regulation S-T (§232.405 of this chapter) during the preceding 12 months (or for such shorter period that the registrant was required to submit such files). Yes ☒ No ☐ Indicate by check mark whether the registrant is a large accelerated filer, an accelerated filer, a non-accelerated filer, a smaller reporting company, or an emerging growth company. See the definitions of “large accelerated filer,” “accelerated filer,” “smaller reporting company,” and “emerging growth company” in Rule 12b-2 of the Exchange Act. Large accelerated filer ☒ Accelerated filer ☐ Non-accelerated filer ☐ Smaller reporting company ☐ Emerging growth company ☐ If an emerging growth company, indicate by check mark if the registrant has elected not to use the extended transition period for complying with any new or revised financial accounting standards provided pursuant to Section 13(a) of the Exchange Act. ☐ Indicate by check mark whether the registrant has filed a report on and attestation to its management’s assessment of the effectiveness of its internal control over financial reporting under Section 404(b) of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (15 U.S.C. 7262(b)) by the registered public accounting firm that prepared or issued its audit report. ☒ If securities are registered pursuant to Section 12(b) of the Act, indicate by check mark whether the financial statements of the registrant included in the filing reflect the correction of an error to previously issued financial statements. ☐ Indicate by check mark whether any of those error corrections are restatements that required a recovery analysis of incentive-based compensation received by any of the registrant’s executive officers during the relevant recovery period pursuant to §240.10D-1(b). ☐ Indicate by check mark whether registrant is a shell company (as defined in Rule 12b-2 of the Exchange Act). Yes ☐ No ☒ There were 97,920,728 common shares outstanding as of February 7, 2023. The aggregate market value of the Registrant’s common shares held by non-affiliates was approximately $896 million as of June 30, 2022, based upon the last reported sales price on the New York Stock Exchange on that date of $20.45. For the purposes of this disclosure only, the registrant has assumed that its directors, executive officers, and the beneficial owners of 5% or more of the registrant’s outstanding common stock are the affiliates of the registrant. DOCUMENTS INCORPORATED BY REFERENCE Portions of the registrant’s Definitive Proxy Statement to be filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission no later than 120 days after the end of the Registrant’s fiscal year ended December 31, 2022, are incorporated by reference in Part III of this Annual Report on Form 10-K. 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS Page No. PART I Item 1. Business 5 Item 1A. Risk Factors 19 Item 1B. Unresolved Staff Comments 43 Item 2. Properties 43 Item 3. Legal Proceedings 44 Item 4. Mine Safety Disclosures 44 PART II Item 5. Market for Registrant’s Common Equity, Related Stockholder Matters and Issuer Purchases of Equity 45 Securities Item 6. [Reserved] 46 Item 7. Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations 47 Item 7A. Quantitative and Qualitative Disclosures About Market Risk 67 Item 8. Financial Statements and Supplementary Data 69 Item 9. Changes in and Disagreements With Accountants on Accounting and Financial Disclosure 70 Item 9A. Controls and Procedures 70 Item 9B. Other Information 70 Item 9C. Disclosure Regarding Foreign Jurisdictions that Prevent Inspections 70 PART III Item 10. Directors, Executive Officers and Corporate Governance 71 Item 11. Executive Compensation 71 Item 12. Security Ownership of Certain Beneficial Owners and Management and Related Stockholder Matters 71 Item 13. Certain Relationships and Related Transactions, and Director Independence 71 Item 14. Principal Accounting Fees and Services 71 PART IV Item 15. Exhibits, Financial Statement Schedules 72 Item 16. Form 10-K Summary 125 2 FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS This Annual Report on Form 10-K contains “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended. All statements other than statements of historical fact are “forward-looking statements” for purposes of federal and state securities laws, including any projections of earnings, revenue or other financial items; any statements of the plans, strategies and objectives of management, including for future operations, capital expenditures, or share repurchases; any statements concerning proposed new products, services, or developments; any statements regarding future economic conditions or performance; any statements of belief or expectation; and any statements of assumptions underlying any of the foregoing or other future events. Forward-looking statements may include, among other, the words “may,” “will,” “estimate,” “intend,” “continue,” “believe,” “expect,” “anticipate” or any other similar words. Although we believe that the expectations reflected in any of our forward-looking statements are reasonable, actual results or outcomes could differ materially from those projected or assumed in any of our forward-looking statements. Our future financial condition and results of operations, as well as any forward-looking statements, are subject to change and to inherent risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond our control. Additionally, many of these risks and uncertainties are, and may continue to be, amplified by the COVID-19 pandemic. Important factors that could cause our actual results, performance and achievements, or industry results to differ materially from estimates or projections contained in or implied by our forward-looking statements include the following: • the potential impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and current global economic conditions, including inflation, on us; our Members, customers, and supply chain; and the world economy; • our ability to attract and retain Members; • our relationship with, and our ability to influence the actions of, our Members; • our noncompliance with, or improper action by our employees or Members in violation of, applicable U.S. and foreign laws, rules, and regulations; • adverse publicity associated with our Company or the direct-selling industry, including our ability to comfort the marketplace and regulators regarding our compliance with applicable laws; • changing consumer preferences and demands and evolving industry standards, including with respect to climate change, sustainability, and other environmental, social, and governance, or ESG, matters; • the competitive nature of our business and industry; • legal and regulatory matters, including regulatory actions concerning, or legal challenges to, our products or network marketing program and product liability claims; • the Consent Order entered into with the FTC, the effects thereof and any failure to comply therewith; • risks associated with operating internationally and in China; • our ability to execute our growth and other strategic initiatives, including implementation of our Transformation Program and increased penetration of our existing markets; • any material disruption to our business caused by natural disasters, other catastrophic events, acts of war or terrorism, including the war in Ukraine, cybersecurity incidents, pandemics, and/or other acts by third parties; • our ability to adequately source ingredients, packaging materials, and other raw materials and manufacture and distribute our products; • our reliance on our information technology infrastructure; • noncompliance by us or our Members with any privacy laws, rules, or regulations or any security breach involving the misappropriation, loss, or other unauthorized use or disclosure of confidential information; • contractual limitations on our ability to expand or change our direct-selling business model; • the sufficiency of our trademarks and other intellectual property; • product concentration; • our reliance upon, or the loss or departure of any member of, our senior management team; • restrictions imposed by covenants in the agreements governing our indebtedness; 3 • risks related to our convertible notes; • changes in, and uncertainties relating to, the application of transfer pricing, income tax, customs duties, value added taxes, and other tax laws, treaties, and regulations, or their interpretation; • our incorporation under the laws of the Cayman Islands; and • share price volatility related to, among other things, speculative trading and certain traders shorting our common shares. Additional factors and uncertainties that could cause actual results or outcomes to differ materially from our forward-looking statements are set forth in this Annual Report on Form 10-K, including in Part I, Item 1A, Risk Factors, and Part II, Item 7, Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations, and in our Consolidated Financial Statements and the related Notes. In addition, historical, current, and forward-looking sustainability-related statements may be based on standards for measuring progress that are still developing, internal controls and processes that continue to evolve, and assumptions that are subject to change in the future. Forward-looking statements in this Annual Report on Form 10-K speak only as of the date hereof. We do not undertake any obligation to update or release any revisions to any forward-looking statement or to report any events or circumstances after the date hereof or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events, except as required by law. The Company “We,” “our,” “us,” “Company,” “Herbalife,” and “Herbalife Nutrition” refer to Herbalife Nutrition Ltd., a Cayman Islands exempted company incorporated with limited liability, and its subsidiaries. Herbalife Nutrition Ltd. is a holding company, with substantially all of its assets consisting of the capital stock of its direct and indirectly-owned subsidiaries. 4 PART I Item 1. Business GENERAL Herbalife Nutrition is a global nutrition company that provides health and wellness products to consumers in 95 markets, which consists of countries and territories, through our direct-selling business model. Our products are primarily in the categories of weight management, sports nutrition, and targeted nutrition. We use a direct-selling business model to distribute and market our nutrition products to and through a global network of independent members, or Members. Members include consumers who purchase products for their own personal use and distributors who wish to resell products or build a sales organization. We believe that direct selling is ideally suited for our business because the distribution and sales of our products with personalized support, coaching, and education provide a supportive and understanding community of like-minded people who prioritize health and nutrition. In addition to the effectiveness of personalized selling through a direct-selling business model, we believe the primary drivers for our success throughout our 43-year operating history have been enhanced consumer awareness and demand for our products due to global trends such as the obesity epidemic, increasing interest in a fit and active lifestyle, living healthier, and the rise of entrepreneurship. PRODUCT SALES Our science-backed products help Members and their customers improve their overall health, enhance their wellness, and achieve their fitness and sport goals. As of December 31, 2022, we marketed and sold approximately 131 product types. Our products are often sold as part of a program and therefore our portfolio is comprised of a series of related products designed to simplify weight management, health and wellness, and overall nutrition for our Members and their customers. Our Formula 1 Nutritional Shake Mix, our best-selling product line, approximated 26% of our net sales for the year ended December 31, 2022. The following table summarizes our products by product category: Percentage of Net Sales 2022 2021 2020 Description Representative Products Weight Management 56.8% 58.1% 59.8% Meal replacement, protein Formula 1 Healthy Meal, shakes, drink mixes, weight Herbal Tea Concentrate, loss enhancers and healthy Protein Drink Mix, snacks Personalized Protein Powder, Total Control®, Formula 2 Multivitamin Complex, Prolessa™ Duo, and Protein Bars Targeted Nutrition 29.1% 28.2% 27.6% Functional beverages and Herbal Aloe Concentrate, dietary and nutritional Active Fiber Complex, supplements containing Niteworks®, and quality herbs, vitamins, Herbalifeline® minerals and other natural ingredients Energy, Sports, and 10.6% 9.5% 7.9% Products that support a Herbalife24® product line, Fitness healthy active lifestyle N-R-G Tea, and Liftoff® energy drink Outer Nutrition 1.6% 1.9% 2.0% Facial skin care, body care, Herbalife SKIN line and and hair care Herbal Aloe Bath and Body Care line Literature, Promotional, 1.9% 2.3% 2.7% Start-up kits, sales tools, Herbalife Member Packs and Other and educational materials and BizWorks 5 Product returns and buyback policies We offer a customer satisfaction guarantee in substantially all markets where our products are sold. If for any reason a customer or preferred member is not satisfied with an Herbalife Nutrition product, they may return it or any unused portion of the product within 30 days from the time of receipt for a full refund or credit toward the exchange of another Herbalife Nutrition product. In addition, in substantially all markets, we maintain a buyback program pursuant to which we will purchase back unsold products from a Member who decides to leave the business. Subject to certain terms and conditions that may vary by market, the buyback program generally permits a Member to return unopened products or sales materials in marketable condition purchased within the prior twelve- month period in exchange for a refund of the net price paid for the product and, in most markets, the cost of returning the products and materials to us. Together, product returns and buybacks were approximately 0.1% of net sales for each of the years ended December 31, 2022, 2021, and 2020. Product development Our products are focused on nutrition and seek to help consumers achieve their goals in the areas of weight management; targeted nutrition (including everyday wellness and healthy aging); energy, sports, and fitness; and outer nutrition. We believe our focus on nutrition and botanical science and the combination of our internal efforts with the scientific expertise of outside resources, including our ingredient suppliers, major universities, and our Nutrition Advisory Board, have resulted in product differentiation that has given our Members and consumers increased confidence in our products. We continue to invest in scientific and technical functions, including research and development associated with creating new or enhancing current product formulations and the advancement of personalized nutrition solutions; clinical studies of existing products or products in development; technical operations to improve current product formulations; quality assurance and quality control to establish the appropriate quality systems, controls, and standards; and rigorous ingredient and product testing to ensure compliance with regulatory requirements, as well as in the areas of regulatory and scientific affairs. Our personalized nutrition solutions include tools which aid in the development of optimal product packages specific to our customers’ individual nutritional needs, based on their expected wellness goals. Our product development strategy is twofold: (1) to increase the value of existing customers by investing in products that address customers’ health, wellness and nutrition considerations, fill perceived gaps in our portfolios, add flavors, increase convenience by developing products like snacks and bars, and expand afternoon and evening consumption with products like savory shakes or soups; and (2) to attract new customers by entering into new categories, offering more choices, increasing individualization, and expanding our current sports line. We have a keen focus on product innovation and aim to launch new products and variations on existing products on a regular basis. Once a particular market opportunity has been identified, our scientists, along with our operations, marketing, and sales teams, work closely with Member leadership to introduce new products and variations on existing products. Our Nutrition Advisory Board and Dieticians Advisory Board are comprised of leading experts around the world in the fields of nutrition and health who educate our Members on the principles of nutrition, physical activity, diet, and healthy lifestyle. We rely on the scientific contributions from members of our Nutrition Advisory Board and our in-house scientific team to continually upgrade existing products or introduce new products as new scientific studies become available and are accepted by regulatory authorities around the world. COMPETITION The nutrition industry is highly competitive. Nutrition products are sold through a number of distribution channels, including direct selling, online retailers, specialty retailers, and the discounted channels of food, drug and mass merchandise. Our competitors include companies such as Conagra Brands, Hain Celestial, and Post. Additionally, we compete for the recruitment of Members from other network marketing organizations, including those that market nutrition products and other entrepreneurial opportunities. Our direct-selling competitors include companies such as Nu Skin, Tupperware, and USANA. Our ability to remain competitive depends on many factors, including having relevant products that meet consumer needs, a rewarding compensation plan, enhanced education and tools, innovation in our products and services, competitive pricing, a strong reputation, and a financially viable company. We have differentiated ourselves from our competitors through our Members’ focus on the consultative sales process, which includes ongoing personal contact, coaching, behavior motivation, education, and the creation of supportive communities. For example, many Members have frequent contact with and provide support to their customers through a community-based approach to help them achieve nutrition goals. Some methods include Nutrition Clubs, Weight Loss Challenges, Wellness Evaluations, and Fit Camps. 6 For additional information regarding competition, see Part I, Item 1A, Risk Factors, of this Annual Report on Form 10-K. OUR NETWORK MARKETING PROGRAM General Our products are sold and distributed through a global direct selling business model which individuals may join to become a Member of our network marketing program. We believe that the one-on-one personalized service inherent in the direct-selling business model is ideally suited to marketing and selling our nutrition products. Sales of nutrition products are reinforced by the ongoing personal contact, coaching, behavior motivation, education, and the creation of supportive communities. This frequent, personal contact can enhance consumers’ nutritional and health education as well as motivate healthy behavioral changes in consumers to begin and maintain an active lifestyle through wellness and weight management programs. In addition, our Members consume our products themselves, and, therefore, can provide first-hand testimonials of the use and effectiveness of our products and programs to their customers. The personalized experience of our Members has served as a very powerful sales tool for our products. People become Herbalife Nutrition Members for a number of reasons. Many first start out as consumers of our products who want to lose weight or improve their nutrition, and are customers of our Members. Some later join Herbalife Nutrition and become Members themselves, which makes them eligible to purchase products directly from us, simply to receive a discounted price on products for them and their families. Some Members are interested in the entrepreneurial opportunity to earn compensation based on their own skills and hard work and join Herbalife Nutrition to earn part-time or full-time income. Our objective is sustainable growth in the sales of our products to our Members and their customers by increasing the productivity, retention and recruitment of our Member base through the structure of our network marketing program. Segmentation In many of our markets, including certain of our largest markets such as the United States, Mexico, and India, we have segmented our Member base into two categories: “preferred members” – who are consumers who wish to purchase product for their own household use, and “distributors” – who are Members who also wish to resell products or build a sales organization. This Member segmentation provides a clear differentiation between those interested in retailing our products or building a sales organization, and those simply consuming our products as discount customers. This distinction allows us to more effectively communicate and market to each group, and provides us with better information regarding our Members within the context of their stated intent and goals. As of December 31, 2022, we had approximately 6.2 million Members, including 2.9 million preferred members and 2.0 million distributors in the markets where we have established these two categories and 0.3 million sales representatives and independent service providers in China. The number of preferred members and distributors may change as a result of segmentation and/or conversion, and do not necessarily represent a change in the total number of Members. Any future change in the number of preferred members or distributors is not necessarily indicative of our future expected financial performance. Our Members We believe our Members are the most important differentiator as we go to market with our nutrition products, because of the one- on-one direct contact they have with their customers, along with the education, training and community support services that we believe help improve the nutrition habits of consumers. We work closely with our entrepreneurial Members to improve the sustainability of their businesses and to reach consumers. We require our Members to fairly and honestly market both our products and the Herbalife Nutrition business opportunity. Our relationship with our Members is key to our continued success as they allow us direct access to the voice of consumers. Many of our entrepreneurial Members identify and test new marketing efforts and programs developed by other Members and disseminate successful techniques to their sales organizations. For example, Members in Mexico developed businesses that became known as “Nutrition Clubs,” marketing techniques that improve the productivity and efficiency of our Members as well as the affordability of our weight loss products for their customers. Rather than buying several retail products, these businesses allow consumers to purchase and consume our products each day (a Member marketing technique we refer to as “daily consumption”), while continuing to benefit from the support and interaction with the Member as well as socializing with other customers in a designated location. Other programs to drive daily consumption, whether for weight management or for improved physical fitness, include Member- conducted weight loss contests, or Weight Loss Challenges, Member-led fitness programs, or Fit Camps, and Member-led Wellness Evaluations. We refer to successful Member marketing techniques that we disseminate throughout our Member network, such as Nutrition Clubs, Weight Loss Challenges, and Fit Camps, as Daily Methods of Operations, or DMOs. 7 We believe that personal and professional development is key to our Members’ success and, therefore, we and our sales leader Members – those that achieve certain levels within our Marketing Plan – have meetings and events to support this important objective. We and our Member leadership, which is comprised of sales leaders, conduct in-person and virtual training sessions on local, regional, and global levels attended by thousands of Members to provide updates on product education, sales and marketing training, and instruction on available tools. These events are opportunities to showcase and disseminate our Members’ evolving best marketing practices and DMOs from around the world and to introduce new or upgraded products. A variety of training and development tools are also available through online and mobile platforms. On July 18, 2002, we entered into an agreement with our Members that provides that we will continue to distribute Herbalife Nutrition products exclusively to and through our Members and that, other than changes required by applicable law or necessary in our reasonable business judgment to account for specific local market or currency conditions to achieve a reasonable profit on operations, we will not make any material changes to certain aspects of our Marketing Plan that are adverse to our Members without the support of our Member leadership. Specifically, any such changes would require the approval of at least 51% of our Members then at the level of President’s Team earning at the production bonus level of 6% who vote, provided that at least 50% of those Members entitled to vote do in fact vote. We initiate these types of changes based on the assessment of what will be best for us and our Members and then submit such changes for the requisite vote. We believe that this agreement has strengthened our relationship with our existing Members, improved our ability to recruit new Members and generally increased the long-term stability of our business. Member Compensation and Sales Leader Retention and Requalification In addition to benefiting from discounted prices, Members interested in the entrepreneurial opportunity may earn profit from several sources. First, Members may earn profits by purchasing our products at wholesale prices, discounted depending on the Member’s level within our Marketing Plan, and reselling those products at prices they establish for themselves to generate retail profit. Second, Members who sponsor other Members and establish, maintain, coach, and train their own sales organizations may earn additional income based on the sales of their organization, which may include royalty overrides, production bonuses, and other cash bonuses. Members earning such compensation have generally attained the level of sales leader as described below. There are also many Members, which include distributors, who have not sponsored another Member. Members who have not sponsored another Member are generally considered discount buyers or small retailers. While a number of these Members have also attained the level of sales leader, they do not receive additional income as do Members who have sponsored other Members. We assign point values, known as Volume Points, to each of our products to determine a Member’s level within the Marketing Plan. See Part II, Item 7, Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Operating Results, of this Annual Report on Form 10-K for a further description of Volume Points. Typically, a Member accumulates Volume Points for a given sale at the time the Member pays for the product. However, since May 2017, a Member does not receive Volume Points for a transaction in the United States until that product is sold to a customer at a profit and it is documented in compliance with the consent order, or Consent Order, we entered into with the Federal Trade Commission, or the FTC, in 2016. The Member’s level within the Marketing Plan is used to determine the discount applied to their purchase of our products and whether they have qualified to become a sales leader. To become a sales leader, or qualify for a higher level within our Marketing Plan, Members must achieve specified Volume Point thresholds of product sales or earn certain amounts of royalty overrides during specified time periods and generally must re-qualify once each year. Qualification criteria vary somewhat by market. We have initial qualification methods of up to 12 months to encourage a more gradual qualification. We believe a gradual qualification approach is important to the success and retention of new sales leaders and benefits the business in the long term as it allows new Members to obtain product and customer experience as well as additional training and education on Herbalife Nutrition products, daily consumption based DMOs, and the business opportunity prior to becoming a sales leader. The basis for calculating Marketing Plan payouts varies depending on product and market: for 2022, we utilized on a weighted- average basis approximately 90% of suggested retail price, to which we applied discounts of up to 50% for distributor allowances and payout rates of up to 15% for royalty overrides, up to 7% for production bonuses, and approximately 1% for a cash bonus known as the Mark Hughes bonus. We believe that the opportunity for Members to earn royalty overrides and production bonuses contributes significantly to our ability to retain our most active and productive Members. Our Marketing Plan generally requires each sales leader to re-qualify for such status each year, prior to February, in order to maintain their 50% discount on products and be eligible to receive additional income. In February of each year, we demote from the rank of sales leader those Members who did not satisfy the re-qualification requirements during the preceding twelve months. The re- qualification requirement does not apply to new sales leaders (i.e. those who became sales leaders subsequent to the January re- qualification of the prior year). 8 As of December 31, 2022, prior to our February re-qualification process, approximately 772,000 of our Members have attained the level of sales leader, of which approximately 734,000 have attained this level in the 94 markets where we use our Marketing Plan and 38,000 independent service providers operating in our China business. See Business in China below for a description of our business in China. The table below reflects sales leader retention rates by year and by region: Sales Leader Retention Rate 2023 2022 2021 North America 69.7% 58.8% 70.8% Latin America (1) 71.6% 69.3% 67.0% EMEA 64.6% 77.1% 72.7% Asia Pacific 66.6% 66.5% 63.5% Total sales leaders 67.6% 68.9% 67.9% (1) The Company combined the Mexico and South and Central America regions into the Latin America region in 2022. Historical information has been reclassified to conform with the current period geographic presentation. For the latest twelve-month re-qualification period ending January 2023, approximately 67.6% of our sales leaders, excluding China, re-qualified, versus 68.9% for the twelve-month period ended January 2022. The Company throughout its history has adjusted the re-qualification criteria from time to time in response to evolving business objectives and market conditions, and the above results include the effects of all such changes. For example, in recent years certain markets have allowed members to utilize a lower re- qualification volume threshold and the Company has continued to expand this lower re-qualification method to additional markets. Separately, with revised business requirements in place following the Consent Order, as described in Network Marketing Program below, we utilize a re-qualification equalization factor for U.S. Members to better align their re-qualification thresholds with Members in other markets, and retention results for each of the years presented include the effect of the equalization factor. We believe this factor preserves retention rate comparability across markets. Also, for each of the years presented, the retention results exclude certain markets for which, due to local operating conditions, sales leaders were not required to requalify. We believe sales leader retention rates are the result of efforts we have made to try and improve the sustainability of sales leaders’ businesses, such as encouraging Members to obtain experience retailing Herbalife Nutrition products before becoming a sales leader and providing them with advanced technology tools, as well as reflecting market conditions. As our business operations evolve, including the segmentation of our Member base in certain markets and changes in sales leader re-qualification thresholds for other markets, management continues to evaluate the importance of sales leader retention rate information. The table below reflects the number of sales leaders as of the end of February of the year indicated (subsequent to the annual re- qualification process) and by region: Number of Sales Leaders 2022 2021 2020 North America 80,278 95,402 71,202 Latin America (1) 125,726 131,359 134,401 EMEA 183,056 158,153 130,438 Asia Pacific 201,137 173,582 158,815 Total sales leaders 590,197 558,496 494,856 China 33,486 68,301 70,701 Worldwide total sales leaders 623,683 626,797 565,557 (1) The Company combined the Mexico and South and Central America regions into the Latin America region in 2022. Historical information has been reclassified to conform with the current period geographic presentation. The number of sales leaders as of December 31 will exceed the number immediately subsequent to the preceding re-qualification period because sales leaders qualify throughout the year but sales leaders who do not re-qualify are removed from the rank of sales leader the following February. 9 Business in China Our business model in China includes unique features as compared to our traditional business model in order to ensure compliance with Chinese regulations. As a result, our business model in China differs from that used in other markets. Members in China are categorized differently than those in other markets. In China, we sell our products to and through independent service providers and sales representatives to customers and preferred customers, as well as through Company-operated retail platforms when necessary. In China, while multi-level marketing is not permitted, direct selling is permitted. Chinese citizens who apply and become Members are referred to as sales representatives. These sales representatives are permitted to sell away from fixed retail locations in the provinces where we have direct selling licenses, including in the provinces of Jiangsu, Guangdong, Shandong, Zhejiang, Guizhou, Beijing, Fujian, Sichuan, Hubei, Shanxi, Shanghai, Jiangxi, Liaoning, Jilin, Henan, Chongqing, Hebei, Shaanxi, Tianjin, Heilongjiang, Hunan, Guangxi, Hainan, Anhui, Yunnan, Gansu, Ningxia, and Inner Mongolia. In Xinjiang province, where we do not have a direct selling license, we have a Company-operated retail store that can directly serve customers and preferred customers. With online orderings throughout China, there has been a declining demand in Company-operated retail stores. Sales representatives receive scaled rebates based on the volume of products they purchase. Sales representatives who reach certain volume thresholds and meet certain performance criteria are eligible to apply to provide marketing, sales and support services. Once their application is accepted, they are referred to as independent service providers. Independent service providers are independent business entities that are eligible to receive compensation from Herbalife Nutrition for the marketing, sales and support services they provide so long as they satisfy certain conditions, including procuring the requisite business licenses, having a physical business location, and complying with all applicable Chinese laws and Herbalife Nutrition rules. In China, our independent service providers are compensated for marketing, sales support, and other services, instead of the Member allowances and royalty overrides utilized in our global Marketing Plan. The service hours and related fees eligible to be earned by the independent service providers are based on a number of factors, including the sales generated through them and through others to whom they may provide marketing, sales support and other services, the quality of their service, and other factors. Total compensation available to our independent service providers in China can generally be comparable to the total compensation available to other sales leaders globally. The Company does this by performing an analysis in our worldwide system to estimate the potential compensation available to the service providers, which can generally be comparable to that of sales leaders in other countries. After adjusting such amounts for other factors and dividing by each service provider’s hourly rate, we then notify each independent service provider the maximum hours of work for which they are eligible to be compensated in the given month. In order for a service provider to be paid, the Company requires each service provider to invoice the Company for their services. RESOURCES We seek to provide the highest quality products to our Members and their customers through our “seed to feed” strategy, which includes significant investments in obtaining quality ingredients from traceable sources, qualified by scientific personnel through product testing, and increasing the amount of self-manufacturing of our top products. Ingredients Our seed to feed strategy is rooted in using quality ingredients from traceable sources. Our procurement process for many of our botanical products now stretches back to the farms and includes self-processing of teas and herbal ingredients into finished raw materials at our own facilities. Our Changsha, China facility exclusively provides high quality tea and herbal raw materials to our manufacturing facilities as well as our third-party contract manufacturers around the world. We also source ingredients that we do not self-process from companies that are well-established, reputable suppliers in their respective field. These suppliers typically utilize similar quality processes, equipment, expertise, and having traceability as we do with our own modern quality processes. As part of our program to ensure the procurement of high-quality ingredients, we also test our incoming raw materials for compliance to potency, identity, and adherence to strict specifications. 10 Manufacturing The next key component of our seed to feed strategy involves the high-quality manufacturing of these ingredients into finished products, which are produced at both third-party manufacturers and our own manufacturing facilities. As part of our long-term strategy, we seek to expand and increase our self-manufacturing capabilities. Our manufacturing facilities, known as Herbalife Innovation and Manufacturing Facilities, or HIMs, include HIM Lake Forest, HIM Winston-Salem, HIM Suzhou, and HIM Nanjing. HIM Winston- Salem is currently our largest manufacturing facility at approximately 800,000 square feet. Together, our HIM manufacturing facilities produce approximately 51% of our inner nutrition products sold worldwide. Self-manufacturing also enables us greater control to reduce negative environmental impacts of our operations and supply chain. As described in the Sustainability section below, we are focused on developing science-based green-house gas emission reduction targets for our manufacturing facilities as part of our sustainability goals. We are also focused on reducing single-use plastics throughout our global distribution network and incorporating more sustainable content, such as post-consumer recycled resin, into our packaging. Our finished products are analyzed for label claims and tested for microbiological purity, thereby verifying that our products comply with food safety standards, meet label claims and have met other quality standards. For self-manufactured products, we conduct all of our testing in-house at our fully-equipped, modern quality control laboratories in the U.S. and China. We have two quality control laboratories in Southern California and Changsha, China (including a Center of Excellence in both locations). In addition, we also have a Center of Excellence laboratory in Bangalore, India, and a quality control laboratory in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Suzhou, China, and Nanjing, China. All HIM quality control labs contain modern analytical equipment and are backed by the expertise in testing and methods development of our scientists. In our U.S. HIM facilities, which manufacture products for the U.S. and most of our international markets, we operate and adhere to the regulations established by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, or FDA, and strict Current Good Manufacturing Practice regulations, or CGMPs, for food, acidified foods, and dietary supplements. We also work closely with our third-party manufacturers to ensure high quality products are produced and tested through a vigorous quality control process at approved contract manufacturer labs or third-party labs. For these products manufactured at other facilities, we combine four elements to ensure quality products: (1) the same selectivity and assurance in ingredients as noted above; (2) use of reputable, CGMP-compliant, quality- and sustainability-minded manufacturing partners; (3) supplier qualification through annual audit programs; and (4) significant product quality testing. During 2022, we purchased approximately 15% of our products from our top three third-party manufacturers. Infrastructure and Technology Our direct-selling business model enables us to grow our business with moderate investment in infrastructure and fixed costs. We incur no direct incremental cost to add a new Member in our existing markets, and our Member compensation varies directly with product sales. In addition, our Members also bear a portion of our consumer marketing expenses, and our sales leaders sponsor and coordinate Member recruiting and most meeting and training initiatives. Additionally, our infrastructure features scalable production and distribution of our products as a result of having our own manufacturing facilities and numerous third-party manufacturing relationships, as well as our global footprint of in-house and third-party distribution centers. An important part of our seed to feed strategy is having an efficient infrastructure to deliver products to our Members and their customers. As the shift in consumption patterns continues to reflect an increasing daily consumption focus, one focus of this strategy is to provide more product access points closer to our Members and their customers. We have both Company-operated and outsourced distribution points ranging from our “hub” distribution centers in Los Angeles, Memphis, and Venray, Netherlands, to mid-size distribution centers in major countries, to small pickup locations spread throughout the world. We also expect to continue to improve our distribution channels relating to home delivery as we expect to see continued increased demands for our products being shipped to our Members in certain of our larger markets. In addition to these distribution points, we partner with certain retail locations to provide Member pickup points in areas which are not well serviced by our distribution points. We have also identified a number of methods and approaches that better support Members by providing access points closer to where they do business and by improving product delivery efficiency through our distribution channels. Specific methods vary by markets and consider local Member needs and available resources. In aggregate, we have over 1,500 distribution points and partner retail locations around the world. In addition to our distribution points, we contract third party-run drop-off locations where we can ship to and Members can pick up ordered products. 11 We leverage our technology infrastructure in order to maintain, protect, and enhance existing systems and develop new systems to keep pace with continuing changes in technology, evolving industry and regulatory standards, emerging data security risks, and changing user patterns and preferences. We also continue to invest in our manufacturing and operational infrastructure to accelerate new products to market and accommodate planned business growth. We invest in business intelligence tools to enable better analysis of our business and to identify opportunities for growth. We will continue to build on these platforms to take advantage of the rapid development of technology around the globe to support a more robust Member and customer experience. In addition, we leverage an Oracle business suite platform to support our business operations, improve productivity and support our strategic initiatives. Our investment in technology infrastructure helps support our capacity to grow. In 2021, we also initiated a global transformation program to optimize global processes for future growth, or the Transformation Program. The Transformation Program involves the investment in certain new technologies and the realignment of infrastructure and the locations of certain functions to better support distributors and customers. The Transformation Program is still ongoing and expected to be completed in 2024 as described further in Part II, Item 7, Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Operating Results, of this Annual Report on Form 10-K and Note 14, Transformation Program, to the Consolidated Financial Statements included in Part IV, Item 15, Exhibits, Financial Statement Schedules, of this Annual Report on Form 10-K. In addition, many Members rely on the use of technology to support their goals and businesses. As part of our continued investment in technology to further support our Members and drive long-term growth, we have enhanced our product access and distribution network to support higher volumes of online or mobile orders, allowing Members and their customers to select home or business delivery options. We have also implemented information technology systems to support Members and their increasing demand to be more connected to Herbalife Nutrition, their business, and their consumers with tools such as HN MyClub, Engage, HNconnect, BizWorks, MyHerbalife, GoHerbalife, and Herbalife.com. Additionally, we continue to support a growing suite of point-of-sale tools to assist our Members with ordering, tracking, and customer relationship management. These tools allow our Members to manage their business and communicate with their customers more efficiently and effectively. During 2022, we also commenced a Digital Technology Program to develop a new enhanced platform to provide enhanced digital capabilities and experiences to our Members. This is a multi-year program and we expect our capital expenditures to increase in 2023 and future years as result of our investments in this Digital Technology Program as described further in Part II, Item 7, Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Operating Results, of this Annual Report on Form 10-K. Intellectual Property and Branding Marketing foods and supplement products on the basis of sound science means using ingredients in the composition and quantity as demonstrated to be effective in the relevant scientific literature. Use of these ingredients for their well-established purposes is by definition not novel, and for that reason, most food uses of these ingredients are not subject to patent protection. Notwithstanding the absence of patent protection, we do own proprietary formulations for substantially all of our weight management products and dietary and nutritional supplements. We take care in protecting the intellectual property rights of our proprietary formulas by restricting access to our formulas within the Company to those persons or departments that require access to them to perform their functions, and by requiring our finished goods suppliers and consultants to execute supply and non-disclosure agreements that contractually protect our intellectual property rights. Disclosure of these formulas, in redacted form, is also necessary to obtain product registrations in many countries. We also make efforts to protect certain unique formulations under patent law. We strive to protect all new product developments as the confidential trade secrets of the Company. We use the umbrella trademarks Herbalife®, Herbalife Nutrition®, and the Tri-Leaf design worldwide, and protect several other trademarks and trade names related to our products and operations, such as Niteworks® and Liftoff®. Our trademark registrations are issued through the United States Patent and Trademark Office, or USPTO, and comparable agencies in the foreign countries. We believe our trademarks and trade names contribute to our brand awareness. To increase our brand awareness, we and our Members use a variety of tools and marketing channels. These can include anything from traditional media to social media and alliances with partners who can promote our goal of better living through nutrition. Herbalife Nutrition sponsorships of and partnerships with featured athletes, teams, and events promote brand awareness and the use of Herbalife Nutrition products. We continue to build brand awareness with a goal towards becoming the most trusted brand in nutrition. We also work to leverage the power of our Member base as a marketing and brand-building tool. We maintain a brand style guide and brand asset library so that our Members have access to the Herbalife Nutrition brand logo and marketing materials for use in their marketing efforts. 12 Sustainability Our goals and objectives to nourish people and communities and to improve the planet are part of both our day-to-day activities and our long-term growth strategy. As a signatory of the United Nations Global Compact, or UNGC, we have aligned our sustainability initiatives outlined by the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. Our current sustainability initiatives focus on issues including climate and emissions, packaging, and operational waste. For example, we have implemented projects that have reduced overall packaging materials and incorporated usage of recycled materials in the packaging of our flagship product, Formula 1 Healthy Meal Nutritional Shake in North America, Mexico, and in certain markets where permitted by regulations. We are seeking opportunities across operations to reduce waste-prone materials such as single-use plastics. More information on these efforts is provided in the Manufacturing section above. For information relating to our culture, diversity, equity, and inclusion, please see the Human Capital section below. REGULATION General In our United States and foreign markets, we are affected by extensive laws, governmental regulations, administrative determinations and guidance, court decisions and similar constraints that regulate the conduct of our business. Such laws, regulations and other constraints exist at the federal, state or local levels in the United States and at all levels of government in foreign jurisdictions, and include regulations pertaining to: (1) the formulation, manufacturing, packaging, labeling, distribution, importation, sale, and storage of our products; (2) product claims and advertising, including direct claims and advertising by us, as well as claims and advertising by Members, for which we may be held responsible; (3) our network marketing program; (4) transfer pricing and similar regulations that affect the level of U.S. and foreign taxable income and customs duties; (5) taxation of our Members (which in some instances may impose an obligation on us to collect the taxes and maintain appropriate records); (6) our international operations, such as import/export, currency exchange, repatriation and anti-bribery regulations; (7) antitrust issues; and (8) privacy and data protection. See Part I, Item 1A, Risk Factors, of this Annual Report on Form 10-K for additional information. Products In the United States, the formulation, manufacturing, packaging, holding, labeling, promotion, advertising, distribution, and sale of our products are subject to regulation by various federal governmental agencies, including: (1) the FDA; (2) the FTC; (3) the Consumer Product Safety Commission, or CPSC; (4) the United States Department of Agriculture, or USDA; (5) the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA; (6) the United States Postal Service; (7) United States Customs and Border Protection; and (8) the Drug Enforcement Administration. Our activities also are regulated by various agencies of the states, localities and foreign countries in which our products are manufactured, distributed, or sold. The FDA, in particular, regulates the formulation, manufacture, and labeling of over-the-counter, or OTC, drugs, conventional foods, dietary supplements, and cosmetics such as those distributed by us. The majority of the products marketed by us in the United States are classified as conventional foods or dietary supplements under the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act, or FFDCA. Internationally, the majority of products marketed by us are classified as foods, health supplements, or food supplements. FDA regulations govern the preparation, packaging, labeling, holding, and distribution of foods, OTC drugs, cosmetics, and dietary supplements. Among other obligations, they require us and our contract manufacturers to meet relevant CGMP regulations for the preparation, packaging, holding, and distribution of OTC drugs and dietary supplements. The FDA also requires identity testing of all incoming dietary ingredients used in dietary supplements, unless a company successfully petitions for an exemption from this testing requirement in accordance with the regulations. The CGMPs are designed to ensure that OTC drugs and dietary supplements are not adulterated with contaminants or impurities, and are labeled to accurately reflect the active ingredients and other ingredients in the products. We have implemented a comprehensive quality assurance program that is designed to maintain compliance with the CGMPs for products manufactured by us or on our behalf for distribution in the United States. As part of this program, we have regularly implemented enhancements, modifications and improvements to our manufacturing and corporate quality processes. We believe that we and our contract manufacturers are compliant with the FDA’s CGMPs and other applicable manufacturing regulations in the United States. The U.S. Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994, or DSHEA, revised the provisions of FFDCA concerning the composition and labeling of dietary supplements. Under DSHEA, dietary supplement labeling may display structure/function claims that the manufacturer can substantiate, which are claims that the products affect the structure or function of the body, without prior FDA approval, but with notification to the FDA. They may not bear any claim that they can prevent, treat, cure, mitigate or diagnose disease (a drug claim). Apart from DSHEA, the agency permits companies to use FDA-approved full and qualified health claims for food and supplement products containing specific ingredients that meet stated requirements. 13 U.S. law also requires that all serious adverse events occurring within the United States involving dietary supplements or OTC drugs be reported to the FDA. We believe that we are in compliance with this law having implemented a worldwide procedure governing adverse event identification, investigation and reporting. As a result of reported adverse events, we may from time to time elect, or be required, to remove a product from a market, either temporarily or permanently. Some of the products marketed by us are considered conventional foods and are currently labeled as such. Within the United States, this category of products is subject to the federal Nutrition, Labeling and Education Act, or NLEA, and regulations promulgated under the NLEA. The NLEA regulates health claims, ingredient labeling and nutrient content claims characterizing the level of a nutrient in the product. The ingredients in conventional foods must either be generally recognized as safe by experts for the purposes to which they are put in foods, or be approved as food additives under FDA regulations. The federal Food Safety Modernization Act, or FSMA, is also applicable to some of our business. We follow a food safety plan and have implemented preventive measures required by the FSMA. Foreign suppliers of our raw materials are also subject to FSMA requirements, and we have implemented a verification program to comply with the FSMA. Dietary supplements manufactured in accordance with CGMPs and foods manufactured in accordance with the low acid food regulations are exempt. In foreign markets, prior to commencing operations and prior to making or permitting sales of our products in the market, we may be required to obtain an approval, license or certification from the relevant country’s ministry of health or comparable agency. Prior to entering a new market in which a formal approval, license or certificate is required, we work with local authorities in order to obtain the requisite approvals. The approval process generally requires us to present each product and product ingredient to appropriate regulators and, in some instances, arrange for testing of products by local technicians for ingredient analysis. The approvals may be conditioned on reformulation of our products, or may be unavailable with respect to some products or some ingredients. The FTC, which exercises jurisdiction over the advertising of all of our products in the United States, has in the past several years instituted enforcement actions against several dietary supplement and food companies and against manufacturers of weight loss products generally for false and misleading advertising of some of their products. In addition, the FTC has increased its scrutiny of the use of testimonials, which we also utilize, as well as the role of expert endorsers and product clinical studies. We cannot be sure that the FTC, or comparable foreign agencies, will not question our advertising or other operations in the future. In Europe, where an EU Health Claim regulation is in effect, the European Food Safety Authority, or EFSA, issued opinions following its review of a number of proposed claims documents. ESFA’s opinions, which have been accepted by the European Commission, have limited the use of certain nutrition-specific claims made for foods and food supplements. Accordingly, we revised affected product labels to ensure regulatory compliance. We are subject to a permanent injunction issued in October 1986 pursuant to the settlement of an action instituted by the California Attorney General, the State Health Director and the Santa Cruz County District Attorney. We consented to the entry of this injunction without in any way admitting the allegations of the complaint. The injunction prevents us from making specified claims in advertising of our products, but does not prevent us from continuing to make specified claims concerning our products, provided that we have a reasonable basis for making the claims. The injunction also prohibits certain recruiting-related investments from Members and mandates that payments to Members be premised on retail value (as defined); the injunction provides that we may establish a system to verify or document such compliance. Network Marketing Program Our network marketing program is subject to a number of federal and state regulations administered by the FTC and various state regulators as well as regulations in foreign markets administered by foreign regulators. Regulations applicable to network marketing organizations generally are directed at ensuring that product sales ultimately are made to consumers and that advancement within the organization is based on sales of the organization’s products rather than investments in the organization or other non-retail sales related criteria. When required by law, we obtain regulatory approval of our network marketing program or, when this approval is not required, the favorable opinion of local counsel as to regulatory compliance. 14 On July 15, 2016, we reached a settlement with the FTC and entered into a proposed Stipulation to Entry of Order for Permanent Injunction and Monetary Judgment, or the Consent Order, which resolved the FTC’s multi-year investigation of us. The Consent Order became effective on July 25, 2016, or the Effective Date, upon final approval by the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. Pursuant to the Consent Order, we implemented and continue to enhance certain procedures in the U.S. and agreed to be subject to certain audits by an independent compliance auditor (Affiliated Monitors, Inc.) for a period of seven years. Among other requirements, the Consent Order requires us to categorize all existing and future Members in the U.S. as either “preferred members” – who are simply consumers who only wish to purchase product for their own household use — or “distributors” – who are Members who wish to resell some products or build a sales organization. We also agreed to compensate distributors on U.S. eligible sales within their downline organizations, which include purchases by preferred members, purchases by a distributor for his or her personal consumption within allowable limits and sales of product by a distributor to his or her customers. The Consent Order also requires distributors to meet certain conditions before opening Nutrition Clubs and/or entering into leases for their Herbalife Nutrition business in the United States. The Consent Order also prohibits us from making expressly or by implication, any misrepresentation regarding certain lifestyles or amount or level of income, including full-time or part-time income that a participant can reasonably expect to earn in our network marketing program. The Consent Order also prohibits us and other persons who act in active concert with us from misrepresenting that participation in the network marketing program will result in a lavish lifestyle and from using images or descriptions to represent or imply that participation in the program is likely to result in a lavish lifestyle. In addition, the Consent Order prohibits specified misrepresentations in connection with marketing the program, including misrepresentations regarding any fact material to participation such as the cost to participate or the amount of income likely to be earned. The Consent Order also requires us to clearly and conspicuously disclose information related to our refund and buyback policy on certain company materials and websites. The terms of the Consent Order do not change our going to market through direct selling by independent distributors, and compensating those distributors based upon the product they and their sales organization sell. We have implemented new and enhanced procedures required by the terms of the Consent Order and will continue to do so. We continue to monitor the impact of the Consent Order and our board of directors originally established the Implementation Oversight Committee in connection with monitoring compliance with the Consent Order, and more recently, our Audit Committee assumed oversight of continued compliance with the Consent Order. While we currently do not expect the Consent Order to have a long-term and material adverse impact on our business and our Member base, our business and our Member base, particularly in the U.S., have been in the past, and may in the future, be negatively impacted as we and they adjust to the changes. However, the terms of the Consent Order and the ongoing costs of compliance may adversely affect our business operations, our results of operations, and our financial condition. See Part I, Item 1A, Risk Factors, of this Annual Report on Form 10-K for a discussion of risks related to the settlement with the FTC. On January 4, 2018, the FTC released its nonbinding Business Guidance Concerning Multi-Level Marketing, or MLM Guidance. The MLM Guidance explains, among other things, lawful and unlawful compensation structures, the treatment of personal consumption by participants in determining if an MLM’s compensation structure is unfair or deceptive, and how an MLM should approach representations to current and prospective participants. We believe our current business practices, which include new and enhanced procedures implemented in connection with the Consent Order, are in compliance with the MLM Guidance. Additionally, the FTC has promulgated nonbinding Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising, or Guides, which explain how the FTC interprets Section 5 of the FTC Act’s prohibition on unfair or deceptive acts or practices. Consequently, the FTC could bring a Section 5 enforcement action based on practices that are inconsistent with the Guides. Under the Guides, advertisements that feature a consumer and convey his or her atypical experience with a product or service are required to clearly disclose the typical results that consumers can generally expect. The revised Guides also require advertisers to disclose connections between the advertiser and any endorsers that consumers might not expect, known as “material connections.” We have adapted our practices and rules regarding the practices of our Members to comply with the Guides and to comply with the Consent Order. We also are subject to the risk of private party challenges to the legality of our network marketing program both in the United States and internationally. For example, in Webster v. Omnitrition International, Inc., 79 F.3d 776 (9th Cir. 1996), the network marketing program of Omnitrition International, Inc., or Omnitrition, was challenged in a class action by Omnitrition distributors who alleged that it was operating an illegal “pyramid scheme” in violation of federal and state laws. We believe that our network marketing program satisfies federal and other applicable state statutes and case law. In some countries, regulations applicable to the activities of our Members also may affect our business because in some countries we are, or regulators may assert that we are, responsible for our Members’ conduct. In these countries, regulators may request or require that we take steps to ensure that our Members comply with local regulations. The types of regulated conduct include: (1) representations concerning our products; (2) income representations made by us and/or Members; (3) public media advertisements, which in foreign markets may require prior approval by regulators; (4) sales of products in markets in which the products have not been approved, licensed or certified for sale; and (5) classification by government agencies of our Members as employees of the Company. 15 In some markets, it is possible that improper product claims by Members could result in our products being reviewed by regulatory authorities and, as a result, being classified or placed into another category as to which stricter regulations are applicable. In addition, we might be required to make labeling changes. We also are subject to regulations in various foreign markets pertaining to social security assessments and employment and severance pay requirements. As an example, in some markets, we are substantially restricted in the amount and types of rules and termination criteria that we can impose on Members without having to pay social security assessments on behalf of the Members and without incurring severance obligations to terminated Members. In some countries, we may be subject to these obligations in any event. It is an ongoing part of our business to monitor and respond to regulatory and legal developments, including those that may affect our network marketing program. However, the regulatory requirements concerning network marketing programs do not include bright line rules and are inherently fact-based. An adverse judicial or regulatory determination with respect to our network marketing program could have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition, and operating results and may also result in negative publicity, requirements to modify our network marketing program, or a negative impact on Member morale. In addition, adverse rulings by courts in any proceedings challenging the legality of network marketing systems, even in those not involving us directly, could have a material adverse effect on our operations. Although questions regarding the legality of our network marketing program have come up in the past and may come up from time to time in the future, we believe, based in part upon guidance to the general public from the FTC, that our network marketing program is compliant with applicable law. Income Tax, Transfer Pricing, and Other Taxes In many countries, including the United States, we are subject to income tax, transfer pricing and other tax regulations designed to ensure that appropriate levels of income are reported as earned by our U.S. and local entities and are taxed accordingly. In addition, our operations are subject to regulations designed to ensure that appropriate levels of customs duties are assessed on the importation of our products. Although we believe that we are in substantial compliance with all applicable tax rules, regulations, and restrictions, we are subject to the risk that governmental authorities could assert that additional taxes are owed based on findings of their audit. For example, we are currently subject to pending or proposed audits that are at various levels of review, assessment or appeal in a number of jurisdictions involving transfer pricing issues, income taxes, duties, value added taxes, withholding taxes and related interest and penalties in material amounts. In some circumstances, additional taxes, interest and penalties have been assessed, and we will be required to appeal or litigate to reverse the assessments. We have taken advice from our tax advisors and believe that there are substantial defenses to the allegations that additional taxes are owed, and we are vigorously defending against the imposition of additional proposed taxes. The ultimate resolution of these matters may take several years, and the outcome is uncertain. In the event that the audits or assessments are concluded adversely, we may or may not be able to offset or mitigate the consolidated effect of foreign income tax assessments through the use of U.S. foreign tax credits. The laws and regulations governing U.S. foreign tax credits are complex and subject to periodic legislative amendment, and there are restrictions on the utilization of U.S. foreign tax credits. Therefore, we cannot be sure that we would in fact be able to take advantage of any foreign tax credits in the future. Compliance Procedures As indicated above, Herbalife Nutrition, our products and our network marketing program are subject, both directly and indirectly through Members’ conduct, to numerous federal, state and local regulations, in the United States and foreign markets. In 1985, we began to institute formal compliance measures by developing a system to identify specific complaints against Members and to remedy any violations of Herbalife Nutrition’s rules by Members through appropriate sanctions, including warnings, fines, suspensions and, when necessary, terminations. We prohibit Members from making therapeutic claims for our products or misrepresentations regarding participating in our network marketing program, including in our manuals, seminars, and other training programs and materials. Our general policy is to reject Member applications from individuals who do not reside in one of our approved markets. 16 In order to comply with regulations that apply to both us and our Members, we research the applicable regulatory framework prior to entering any new market to identify necessary licenses and approvals and applicable limitations relating to our operations in that market and then work to bring our operations into compliance with the applicable limitations and to maintain such licenses. Typically, we conduct this research with the assistance of local legal counsel and other representatives. We also research laws applicable to Member operations and revise or alter our Member applications, rules, and other training materials and programs to provide Members with guidelines for operating their independent business, marketing and distributing our products and similar matters, as required by applicable regulations in each market. While we have rules and guidelines for our Members and monitor their market conduct, we are, however, unable to ensure that our Members will not distribute our products in countries where we have not commenced operations. In addition, regulations in existing and new markets often are ambiguous and subject to considerable interpretive and enforcement discretion by the responsible regulators. Moreover, even when we believe that we and our Members are in compliance with all applicable regulations, new regulations are being added regularly and the interpretation of existing regulations is subject to change. Further, the content and impact of regulations to which we are subject may be influenced by public attention directed at us, our products, or our network marketing program, so that extensive adverse publicity about us, our products, or our network marketing program may increase the likelihood regulatory scrutiny or action. HUMAN CAPITAL At Herbalife Nutrition, our commitment to improving lives and our communities is at the core of everything we do. This commitment also informs how we value and treat our employees. We seek to provide a work environment where employees can grow and thrive while supporting our Members and their customers. We believe attracting, developing, and retaining a talented and diverse workforce are critical factors that contribute to the success and growth of our business. We have operations globally, requiring investment to assess local labor market conditions and recruit and retain the appropriate workforce. Having a business presence in multiple domestic and international markets also requires us to monitor local labor and employment laws for which we often engage third-party advisors. We monitor the talent needs of our departments and functions with particular focus on the areas where human capital resources are important to daily operations to ensure we can timely manufacture, distribute, and sell products to our Members. As of December 31, 2022, we had approximately 10,100 employees, of which approximately 2,800 were located in the United States. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion We believe diversity is a strength and embrace a core vision that a diverse, equitable, and inclusive culture is imperative to enable us to better serve our Members, stakeholders, and communities. As such, we seek to promote a work environment where all people can thrive, and are committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, at all levels, from our employees, management and executive leadership to our board of directors. Our DEI strategy is currently focused on creating opportunities to further recruit and support diverse talent at all levels, encouraging inclusion and belonging, and embedding equity throughout our culture and operations. Current initiatives include the implementation of a global applicant tracking system to deepen our commitment to fair recruitment processes, offering unconscious bias trainings for all employees, the expansion of existing employee networks which help employees build community and foster a culture of belonging, and further development and involvement of Global and Regional DEI Councils to drive DEI progress. Additionally, we have set diversity goals and targets for women in leadership roles globally and for racial and ethnic minorities in leadership roles in the U.S. Talent Acquisition and Development We seek to attract and retain a talented and diverse workforce. To foster an inclusive hiring process in the U.S., we use a tool that helps ensure that job descriptions do not unintentionally exclude potential applicants. Investment in our employees' professional growth and development is important and helps establish a strong foundation for long- term success. At our Company, we strive to create a learning culture, one in which development is an ongoing focus for all employees and managers. We invest in our employees’ development through a variety of programs. These programs are designed to help our employees grow professionally and strengthen their skills throughout their careers. Examples of these programs include the following: • Training Programs – We provide our employees access to an internal learning management system, Herbalife Nutrition University, which provides professional development courses, technical training, and compliance training to all employees globally. 17 • Mentorship Programs – The principle of servant leadership is a crucial part of our culture. We believe that one way to be a servant leader is to mentor others, and, in 2020, we introduced a new mentorship program to help guide junior employees in their professional journey. Through this program, participating employees can be provided with a one-on-one professional development opportunity, in which they receive dedicated coaching, feedback, and encouragement. • Educational Assistance – Another way we support employees’ continual professional development is by offsetting a portion of the cost of higher education. Program offerings and eligibility vary by region, but may include partial reimbursement of tuition fees incurred for undergraduate and graduate degrees, certificate programs, or skills-based courses. Compensation and Benefits Our Board of Directors and its Compensation Committee establish our general compensation philosophy and oversee and approve the development, adoption, and implementation of compensation policies and programs, which are set at a global level, but also adapted to meet local country requirements as needed. We provide base pay that aligns with employee positions, skill levels, experience, contributions, and geographic location. In addition to base pay, we seek to reward employees with annual incentive awards, recognition programs, and equity awards for employees at certain job grades. Our benefit programs are designed to enhance employee well-being and assist employees in the event of illness, injury, or disability. To this end, we offer benefits that vary worldwide, but may include health insurance, retirement savings programs, and wellness incentives designed to promote a healthy and active lifestyle. We believe we offer our employees wages and benefits packages that are in line with respective local labor markets and laws. Safety, Health, and Well-Being As a nutrition company, we believe the safety, health, and well-being of our employees is of the utmost importance. We endeavor to promote these principles by providing a safe and healthy work environment and encouraging healthy, active lifestyles. Our efforts to provide a safe workplace are guided by various formal policies and programs, which are designed to protect employees, contractors, and visitors from accidents, illnesses, and injuries, while operating in compliance with applicable regulations, including OSHA guidelines in the U.S. We also follow policies and programs regarding material health and safety risks, workplace violence prevention, and incident response and management. In the U.S., our manufacturing facilities in Winston-Salem and Lake Forest are ISO 45001 certified, an international standard for occupational health and safety management. While the COVID-19 pandemic has increased the resources required to keep our employees safe and healthy, we continue to make what we believe are the necessary investments to achieve this goal. In response to, and during various phases of, the pandemic, we have taken several actions, including supporting our employees to work from home when possible, offering mental and emotional wellness resources, and implementing safety measures when necessary at our facilities. Over the course of the pandemic, our senior management team has relied on cross-functional teams to monitor, review, and assess the evolving situation. These cross-functional teams are responsible for recommending risk mitigation actions based on the local risks and in accordance with regulatory requirements and guidelines for the health and safety of our employees and, in the U.S., protocols to align with all federal, state, and local public health guidelines. We believe our proactive efforts have been successful in supporting our business growth despite the obstacles and challenges presented by COVID-19. In addition, we believe in the importance of well-being and provide resources for our employees that support their pursuit of a healthy and active lifestyle. Our flagship wellness program in the U.S., “Wellness for Life,” offers employees a suite of activities to achieve overall wellness through improved fitness, nutrition, intellectual well-being, and financial literacy. The variety of activities offered ensures all employees may participate, no matter where they may be in their wellness journey. While we have many existing regional wellness programs, a new and enhanced global wellness program will launch in January 2023 and feature Herbalife fitness, health and nutrition experts from around the globe. We also have facilities and programs in place that allow employees to incorporate fitness into their daily schedule, such as onsite gyms at several facilities and live virtual classes. Our Members We are dependent on our Members to sell and promote our products to their customers. We frequently interact and work directly with our sales leaders to explore ways to support our and our Members’ businesses, and their customers’ personal goals of living a healthier and more active lifestyle. See the Our Network Marketing Program – Member Compensation and Sales Leader Retention and Requalification section above for sales leader and requalification metrics and further discussion on our sales leaders. 18 Available Information Our Internet website address is www.herbalife.com and our investor relations website is ir.herbalife.com. We make available free of charge on our website our Annual Reports on Form 10-K, Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q, Current Reports on Form 8-K, proxy statements, and amendments to those reports filed or furnished pursuant to Section 13(a) or 15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, or the Exchange Act, as soon as reasonably practical after we file such material with, or furnish it to, the Securities and Exchange Commission, or SEC. The SEC maintains an Internet website that contains reports, proxy and information statements, and other information regarding issuers that file electronically with the SEC at www.sec.gov. We also make available free of charge on our investor relations website at ir.herbalife.com our Principles of Corporate Governance, our Code of Conduct, and the Charters of our Audit Committee, Nominating and Corporate Governance Committee, Compensation Committee, and ESG Committee of our board of directors. Unless expressly noted, the information on our website, including our investor relations website, or any other website is not incorporated by reference in this Annual Report on Form 10-K and should not be considered part of this Annual Report on Form 10-K or any other filing we make with the SEC. Item 1A. Risk Factors Please carefully consider the following discussion of significant factors, events, and uncertainties that make an investment decision regarding our securities risky. The factors, events, uncertainties, and consequences discussed in these risk factors could, in circumstances we may not be able to accurately predict, recognize, or control, have a material adverse effect on our business, reputation, prospects, financial condition, operating results, cash flows, liquidity, and share price. These risk factors do not identify all risks that we face. We could also be affected by factors, events, or uncertainties that are not presently known to us or that we currently do not consider to present material risks. Additionally, the COVID-19 pandemic has amplified many of the other risks discussed below to which we are subject. We are unable to predict the duration and extent to which the pandemic and its related impacts will adversely impact our business, financial condition, and operating results as well as our share price. In addition, given the unpredictable, unprecedented, and fluid nature of the pandemic, it may also materially and adversely affect our business, financial condition, and operating results in ways that are not currently anticipated by or known to us or that we currently do not consider to present material risks. Risk Factor Summary This risk factor summary contains a high-level summary of certain of the principal factors, events and uncertainties that make an investment in our securities risky, including risks related to our business and industry, risks related to regulatory and legal matters, risks related to our international operations, risks related to our indebtedness and risks related to our common shares. The following summary is not complete and should be read together with the more detailed discussion of these and the other factors, events, and uncertainties set forth below before making an investment decision regarding our securities. The principal factors, events, and uncertainties that make an investment in our securities risky include the following: Risks Related to Our Business and Industry • Our failure to establish and maintain Member and sales leader relationships could negatively impact sales of our products and materially harm our business, financial condition, and operating results. • Because we cannot exert the same level of influence or control over our Members as we could if they were our employees, our Members could fail to comply with applicable law or our rules and procedures, which could result in claims against us that could materially harm our business, financial condition, and operating results. • Adverse publicity associated with our Company or the direct-selling industry could materially harm our business, financial condition, and operating results. • Our failure to compete successfully could materially harm our business, financial condition, and operating results. • Our contractual obligation to sell our products only through our Member network and to refrain from changing certain aspects of our Marketing Plan may limit our growth. • Our failure to appropriately respond to changing consumer trends, preferences, and demand for new products and product enhancements could materially harm our Member relationships, our Members’ customer relationships, and product sales or otherwise materially harm our business, financial condition, and operating results. • If we fail to further penetrate existing markets, the growth in sales of our products, along with our operating results could be negatively impacted. 19 • Since one of our products constitutes a significant portion of our net sales, significant decreases in consumer demand for this product or our failure to produce a suitable replacement, could materially harm our business, financial condition, and operating results. • Our business could be materially and adversely affected by natural disasters, other catastrophic events, acts of war or terrorism, cybersecurity incidents, pandemics, and/or other acts by third parties. • We depend on the integrity and reliability of our information technology infrastructure, and any related interruptions or inadequacies may have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition, and operating results. • Disruption of supply, shortage, or increases in the cost of ingredients, packaging materials, and other raw materials as well as climate change could materially harm our business, financial condition, and operating results. • If any of our manufacturing facilities or third-party manufacturers fail to reliably supply products to us at required levels of quality or fail to comply with applicable laws, our financial condition and operating results could be materially and adversely impacted. • If we lose the services of members of our senior management team, our business, financial condition, and operating results could be materially harmed. • Our share price may be adversely affected by third parties who raise allegations about our Company. • ESG matters, including those related to climate change and sustainability, may have an adverse effect on our business, financial condition, and operating results and may damage our reputation. Risks Related to Regulatory and Legal Matters • Our products are affected by extensive regulations, and our failure or our Members’ failure to comply with any regulations could lead to significant penalties or claims, which could materially harm our financial condition and operating results. • Our network marketing program is subject to extensive regulation and scrutiny and any failure to comply, or alteration to our compensation practices in order to comply, with these regulations could materially harm our business, financial condition, and operating results. • We are subject to the Consent Order with the FTC, the effects of which, or any failure to comply therewith, could materially harm our business, financial condition, and operating results. • Our actual or perceived failure to comply with privacy and data protection laws, rules, and regulations could materially harm our business, financial condition, and operating results. • We are subject to material product liability risks, which could increase our costs and materially harm our business, financial condition, and operating results. • If we fail to protect our intellectual property, our ability to compete could be negatively affected, which could materially harm our financial condition and operating results. • If we infringe the intellectual property rights of others, our business, financial condition, and operating results could be materially harmed. • We may be held responsible for additional compensation, certain taxes, or assessments relating to the activities of our Members, which could materially harm our financial condition and operating results. Risks Related to Our International Operations • A substantial portion of our business is conducted in foreign jurisdictions, exposing us to the risks associated with international operations. • We are subject to the anti-bribery laws, rules, and regulations of the United States and the other foreign jurisdictions in which we operate. • If we do not comply with transfer pricing, customs duties VAT, and similar regulations, we may be subject to additional taxes, customs duties, interest, and penalties in material amounts, which could materially harm our financial condition and operating results. • Our business in China is subject to general, as well as industry-specific, economic, political, and legal developments and risks and requires that we utilize a modified version of the business model we use elsewhere in the world. • The United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union could adversely impact us. 20 Risks Related to Our Indebtedness • The terms and covenants in our existing indebtedness could limit our discretion with respect to certain business matters, which could harm our business, financial condition, and operating results. • The conversion or maturity of our convertible notes may adversely affect our financial condition and operating results, and their conversion into common shares could have a dilutive effect that could cause our share price to go down. Risks Related to Our Common Shares • Holders of our common shares may difficulties in protecting their interests because we are incorporated under Cayman Islands law. • Provisions of our articles of association and Cayman Islands law may impede a takeover or make it more difficult for shareholders to change the direction or management of the Company, which could reduce shareholders’ opportunity to influence management of the Company. • There is uncertainty as to shareholders’ ability to enforce certain foreign civil liabilities in the Cayman Islands. • U.S. Tax Reform may adversely impact certain U.S. shareholders of the Company. Risks Related to Our Business and Industry Our failure to establish and maintain Member and sales leader relationships could negatively impact sales of our products and materially harm our business, financial condition, and operating results. We distribute our products exclusively to and through our independent Members, and we depend on them directly for substantially all of our sales. To increase our revenue, we must increase the number and productivity of our Members. Accordingly, our success depends in significant part on our relationships with our sales leaders and our ability to recruit, retain, and motivate a large base of Members, including through an attractive compensation plan, the quality of our reputation, the maintenance of an attractive product portfolio, the breadth and quality of our Member services, and other incentives. The loss of a significant number of Members, changes to our network marketing program, our inability to respond to Member demand or generate sufficient interest in our business opportunities, products, or services, decreases in Member engagement, loss of Member or consumer confidence, or any legal or regulatory impact to our Members’ ability to conduct their business could negatively impact sales of our products and our ability to attract and retain Members, each of which could have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition, and operating results. In our efforts to attract and retain Members, we compete with other direct-selling organizations. In addition, our Member organization has a high turnover rate, which is common in the direct-selling industry, in part because our Members, including our sales leaders, may easily enter and exit our network marketing program without facing a significant investment or loss of capital. For example, the upfront financial cost to become a Member is low, we do not have time or exclusivity requirements, we do not charge for any required training, and, in substantially all jurisdictions, we maintain a buyback program. We believe the COVID-19 pandemic could have an adverse impact on the pipeline of new Members and our Member turnover rate, and may impact our future net sales. See the COVID-19 Pandemic and Sales by Geographic Region sections in Part II, Item 7, Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations, of this Annual Report on Form 10-K for further discussion of the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on our business and results of operations. For additional information regarding sales leader retention rates, see Part I, Item 1, Business, of this Annual Report on Form 10-K. Because we cannot exert the same level of influence or control over our Members as we could if they were our employees, our Members could fail to comply with applicable law or our rules and procedures, which could result in claims against us that could materially harm our business, financial condition, and operating results. Our Members are independent contractors and, accordingly, we are not in a position to provide the same direction, motivation, and oversight as we could if Members were our employees. As a result, there can be no assurance that our Members will participate in our marketing strategies or plans, accept our introduction of new products, or comply with applicable legal requirements or our rules and procedures. 21 We are subject to extensive federal, state, local, and foreign laws, rules, and regulations that regulate our business, products, direct sales channel, and network marketing program. See the Regulation section of Part I, Item 1, Business, of this Annual Report on Form 10- K for additional information. While we have implemented policies and procedures designed to govern Member conduct and to protect the goodwill associated with Herbalife Nutrition, it can be difficult to enforce these policies and procedures because of our large number of Members and their status as independent contractors and because our policies and procedures differ by jurisdiction as a result of varying local legal requirements. In addition, although we train our Members and attempt to monitor our Members’ marketing materials, we cannot ensure that our Members will comply with applicable legal requirements or our policies and procedures or that such marketing materials or other Member practices comply with applicable laws, rules, and regulations. It is possible that a court could hold us liable for the actions of our Members, which could materially harm our business, financial condition, and operating results. Adverse publicity associated with our Company or the direct-selling industry could materially harm our business, financial condition, and operating results. Our reputation and the quality of our brand are critical to our business, and the size and success of our Member organization, our operating results, and our share price may be significantly affected by the public’s perception of Herbalife Nutrition and other direct- selling companies. This perception is dependent upon opinions concerning a number of factors, including: • the safety, quality, and efficacy of our products, as well as those of similar companies; • our Members; • our network marketing program or the attractiveness or viability of the financial opportunities it may provide; • the direct-selling business generally; • actual or purported failure by us or our Members to comply with applicable laws, rules, and regulations, including those regarding product claims and advertising, good manufacturing practices, the regulation of our network marketing program, the registration of our products for sale in our target markets, or other aspects of our business; • our commitment to ESG matters and our ESG practices; • the security of our information technology infrastructure; and • actual or alleged impropriety, misconduct, or fraudulent activity by any person formerly or currently associated with our Members or us. Adverse publicity concerning any of the foregoing whether or not accurate or resulting in investigation, enforcement, or other legal or regulatory actions or the imposition of fines, penalties, or other sanctions, could negatively impact our reputation, our ability to attract, motivate, and retain Members, and our ability to generate revenue. In addition, our Members’ and consumers’ perception of Herbalife Nutrition and our direct-selling business as well as similar companies can be significantly influenced by media attention, publicized scientific research or findings, product liability claims, and other publicity, whether or not it is legitimate. For example, as a result of the prevalence and marked increase in the use of blogs, social media platforms, and other forms of Internet-based communications, the opportunity for dissemination of information, both accurate and inaccurate, is seemingly limitless and readily available, and often does not provide any opportunity for correction or other redress. Adverse publicity that associates use of our products or any similar products with adverse effects, questions the quality or benefits of any such products, or claims that any such products are ineffective, inappropriately labeled, or have inaccurate instructions as to their use, could lead to lawsuits or other legal or regulatory challenges and could materially and adversely impact our reputation, the demand for our products, and our business, financial condition, and operating results. Adverse publicity relating to us has had, and could again have, a negative effect on our ability to attract, motivate, and retain Members, on consumer perception of Herbalife Nutrition, and on our share price. For example, the resulting adverse publicity from the 1986 permanent injunction entered in California caused a rapid, substantial loss of Members in the United States and a corresponding reduction in sales beginning in 1985. See also the risk factor titled “Our share price may be adversely affected by third parties who raise allegations about our Company.” We expect that adverse publicity will, from time to time, continue to negatively impact our business in particular markets and may adversely affect our share price. 22 Our failure to compete successfully could materially harm our business, financial condition, and operating results. The business of developing and marketing weight management and other nutrition and personal care products is highly competitive and sensitive to the introduction of new products and weight management plans, including various prescription drugs, which may rapidly capture a significant share of the market. Our competitors include numerous manufacturers; distributors; marketers; online, specialty, mass, and other retailers; and physicians that actively compete for the business of consumers both in the United States and abroad. Some of our competitors have longer operating histories, significantly greater resources, better-developed and more innovative sales and distribution channels and platforms, greater name recognition, and larger established customer bases than we do. Our present and future competitors may be able to offer products at lower prices or better withstand reductions in prices or other adverse economic or market conditions than we can; develop products that are comparable or superior to those we offer; adapt more quickly or effectively to new technologies, changing regulatory requirements, evolving industry trends and standards, and customer requirements than we can; and/or devote greater resources to the development, promotion, and sale of their products than we do. We are also subject to significant competition for the recruitment of Members from other direct-selling organizations, including those that market weight management products, dietary and nutritional supplements, personal care products, and other types of products, as well as those organizations in which former employees or Members are involved. In addition, because the industry in which we operate is not particularly capital intensive or otherwise subject to high barriers to entry, it is relatively easy for new competitors to emerge that will compete with us, including for our Members and their customers. Accordingly, competition may intensify and we may not be able to compete effectively in our markets. If we are not able to retain our Members and their customers or otherwise compete successfully, our business, financial condition, and operating results would be materially adversely affected. Our contractual obligation to sell our products only through our Member network and to refrain from changing certain aspects of our Marketing Plan may limit our growth. We are contractually prohibited from expanding our business by selling Herbalife Nutrition products through other distribution channels that may be available to our competitors, such as over the Internet, through wholesale sales, by establishing retail stores, or through mail order systems. To the extent legally permitted, an agreement we entered into with our Members provides assurances that we will not sell Herbalife Nutrition products worldwide through any distribution channel other than our network of Members. Since this is an open-ended commitment, there can be no assurance that we will be able to take advantage of innovative new distribution channels that are developed in the future or appropriately respond to consumer preferences as they continue to evolve. In addition, this agreement with our Members provides that we will not make any material changes adverse to our Members to certain aspects of our Marketing Plan that may negatively impact our Members without their approval as described in further detail below. For example, our agreement with our Members provides that we may increase, but not decrease, the discount percentages available to our Members for the purchase of products or the applicable royalty override percentages and production and other bonus percentages available to our Members at various qualification levels within our Member hierarchy. We may not modify the eligibility or qualification criteria for these discounts, royalty overrides, and production and other bonuses unless we do so in a manner to make eligibility and/or qualification easier than under the applicable criteria in effect as of the date of the agreement. Our agreement with our Members further provides that we may not vary the criteria for qualification for each Member tier within our Member hierarchy, unless we do so in such a way so as to make qualification easier. We reserved the right to make changes to our Marketing Plan without the consent of our Members in the event that changes are required by applicable law or are necessary in our reasonable business judgment to account for specific local market or currency conditions to achieve a reasonable profit on operations. In addition, we may initiate other changes that are adverse to our Members based on an assessment of what will be best for the Company and its Members. Under the agreement with our Members, these other adverse changes would then be submitted to our Member leadership for a vote. The vote would require the approval of at least 51% of our Members then at the level of President’s Team earning at the production bonus level of 6% who vote, provided that at least 50% of those Members entitled to vote do in fact vote. While we believe this agreement has strengthened our relationship with our existing Members, improved our ability to recruit new Members, and generally increased the long-term stability of our business, there can be no assurance that our agreement with our Members will not restrict our ability to adapt our Marketing Plan or our business to the evolving requirements of the markets in which we operate. As a result, our growth may be limited. 23 Our failure to appropriately respond to changing consumer trends, preferences, and demand for new products and product enhancements could materially harm our Member relationships, Members’ customer relationships, and product sales or otherwise materially harm our business, financial condition, and operating results. Our business is subject to rapidly changing consumer trends and preferences and product introductions, especially with respect to our nutrition products. Our continued success depends in part on our ability to anticipate and respond to these changes and introductions, and we may not respond or develop new products or product enhancements in a cost-effective, timely, or commercially appropriate manner, or at all, particularly while the COVID-19 pandemic persists. Current consumer trends and preferences have evolved and will continue to evolve as a result of, among other things, changes in consumer tastes; health, wellness, and nutrition considerations; competitive product and pricing pressures; changes in consumer preferences for certain sales channels; shifts in demographics; and concerns regarding the environmental and sustainability impact of the product manufacturing process. The success of our response to changing consumer trends and preferences and product introductions, including any new product offerings and enhancements, depends on a number of factors, including our ability to: • accurately anticipate consumer needs; • innovate and develop new products and product enhancements that meet these needs; • successfully commercialize new products and product enhancements; • price our products competitively; • manufacture and deliver our products in sufficient volumes, at our required levels of quality, and in a cost-effective and timely manner; and • differentiate our product offerings from those of our competitors and successfully respond to other competitive pressures, including technological advancements, evolving industry standards, and changing regulatory requirements. Our failure to accurately predict changes in consumer demand and technological advancements could negatively impact consumer opinion of our products or our business, which in turn could harm our Member relationships and the Members’ relationships with their customers, and cause a loss of sales. In addition, if we do not introduce new products or make enhancements to meet the changing needs of our Members and their customers in a cost-effective, timely, and commercially appropriate manner, or if our competitors release new products or product enhancements before we do, some of our product offerings could be rendered obsolete, which could cause our market share to decline and negatively impact our business, financial condition, and operating results. If we fail to further penetrate existing markets, the growth in sales of our products, along with our operating results, could be negatively impacted. The success of our business is to a large extent contingent on our ability to further penetrate existing markets, which is subject to numerous factors, many of which are out of our control. Our ability to increase market penetration may be limited by the finite number of persons in a given country inclined to pursue a direct-selling business opportunity or consumers aware of, or willing to purchase, Herbalife Nutrition products. Moreover, our growth in existing markets will depend upon increased brand awareness and improved training and other activities that enhance Member retention in our markets. While we have recently experienced significant growth in certain of our foreign markets, we cannot assure you that such growth levels will continue in the immediate or long-term future. Furthermore, our efforts to support growth in such foreign markets could be hampered to the extent that our infrastructure in such markets is deficient when compared to our infrastructure in our more developed markets, such as the United States. For example, there can be no assurances that we will be able to successfully manage expansion of manufacturing operations and a growing and dynamic sales force in China. If we are unable to effectively scale our supply chain and manufacturing infrastructure to support future growth in China or other foreign markets, our operations in such markets may be adversely impacted. Therefore, we cannot assure you that our general efforts to increase our market penetration and Member retention in existing markets will be successful. If we are unable to further penetrate existing markets, our business, financial condition, and operating results could materially suffer. Since one of our products constitutes a significant portion of our net sales, significant decreases in consumer demand for this product or our failure to produce a suitable replacement could materially harm our business, financial condition, and operating results. Our Formula 1 Healthy Meal, which is our best-selling product line, approximated 26% of our net sales for the year ended December 31, 2022. If consumer demand for this product decreases significantly or we cease offering this product without a suitable replacement, or if the replacement product fails to gain market acceptance, our business, financial condition, and operating results could be materially harmed. 24 Our business could be materially and adversely affected by natural disasters, other catastrophic events, acts of war or terrorism, cybersecurity incidents, pandemics, and/or other acts by third parties. We depend on the ability of our business to run smoothly, including the ability of Members to engage in their day-to-day selling and business building activities. In coordination with our suppliers, third-party manufacturers, and distributors, our ability to make and move our products reasonably unimpeded around the world is critical to our success. Any material disruption to our collective operations or supply, manufacturing, or distribution capabilities caused by unforeseen or catastrophic events, such as (i) natural disasters or severe weather conditions, including droughts, fires, floods, hurricanes, volcanic eruptions, and earthquakes; (ii) power loss or shortages; (iii) telecommunications or information technology infrastructure failures; (iv) acts or threats of war, terrorism, or other armed hostilities; (v) outbreaks of contagious diseases, epidemics, and pandemics; (vi) cybersecurity incidents, including intentional or inadvertent exposure of content perceived to be sensitive data; (vii) employee misconduct or error; and/or (viii) other actions by third parties and other similar disruptions, could materially adversely affect our ability to conduct business and our Members’ selling activities. For example, our operations in Central America were impacted in November 2020 when Hurricanes Eta and Iota made landfall in the region. The storms disrupted our supply chain transportation network and our ability to import product. In addition, our distribution center in Honduras experienced flooding, which damaged or destroyed product. Furthermore, our headquarters and one of our distribution facilities and manufacturing facilities are located in Southern California, an area susceptible to fires and earthquakes. Although the events in Central America did not have a material negative impact on our operations, we cannot make assurances that any future catastrophic events will not adversely affect our ability to operate our business or our financial condition and operating results. In addition, catastrophic events may result in significant cancellations or cessations of Member orders; contribute to a general decrease in local, regional, or global economic activity; directly impact our marketing, manufacturing, financial, or logistics functions; impair our ability to meet Member demands; harm our reputation; and expose us to significant liability, losses, and legal proceedings, any of which could materially and adversely affect our business, financial condition, and operating results. In March 2020, the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 outbreak a global pandemic. The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly impacted health and economic conditions globally, disrupted global supply chains, and has adversely affected the Company’s business and that of its Members in certain of the Company’s markets and may continue to impact those markets or others in the future. Government, agency, and other regulatory recommendations, guidelines, mandates, and actions to address public health concerns, including restrictions on movement, public gatherings, and travel and restrictions on, or in certain cases outright prohibitions of, companies’ ability to conduct normal business operations, have and may continue to adversely affect our business. Although we have been classified as an essential business in most jurisdictions where we operate, there is no guarantee that this classification will not change. We may also be forced to or voluntarily elect to limit or cease operations in one or more markets for other reasons, such as the health and safety of our employees or because of disruptions in the operation of our supply chain and sources of supply. For example, it is possible that closures of our manufacturing facilities or those of our third-party contract manufacturers or suppliers could impact our distribution centers and our ability to manufacture and deliver products to our Members. In general, our inventory of products continues to be adequate to meet demand, but we do expect our supply chain and our ability to source and/or manufacture products will be negatively impacted if the negative effects of the pandemic continue for a prolonged period of time or worsen. The pandemic has had an adverse impact on our distribution channels and Members’ product access in some markets, which may, and in some cases will, continue until conditions improve. Our third-party contract manufacturers and suppliers and our Members’ businesses are also subject to many of the same risks and uncertainties related to the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as other pandemic-related risks and uncertainties that may not directly impact our operations, any of which could adversely affect demand for our products. For example, limitations on public gatherings have restricted our Members’ ability to hold meetings with their existing customers and to attract new customers. Significant limitations on cash transactions could also have an adverse effect on sales of products in certain markets. The COVID-19 pandemic has also adversely affected the economies and financial markets of many countries, at times causing a significant deceleration of or interruption to economic activity, which during various stages of the pandemic has reduced production, decreased demand for a broad variety of goods and services, diminished trade levels, and led to widespread corporate downsizing. We have also seen periods of significant disruption of and extreme volatility in the global capital markets, which could increase the cost of, or entirely restrict access to, capital. Further, while some countries have progressed in distributing COVID-19 vaccines to the general population, many countries have limited to no access to vaccines at this time. To the extent the global supply of vaccine remains limited or vaccination rates do not significantly increase, government restrictions in the countries with limited to no access or low vaccination rates may persist or increase and economic activity may remain at depressed levels in those countries or regions. 25 Despite the relaxation of pandemic-related constraints in certain markets, considerable uncertainty still surrounds the COVID-19 pandemic, its potential effects, and the extent and effectiveness of government responses to the pandemic. If the pandemic is not contained, or if new variants emerge or effective vaccines are not made available and utilized quickly enough, the adverse impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic could worsen, impacting all segments of the global economy, and result in a significant recession or worse. However, the unprecedented and sweeping nature of the COVID-19 pandemic makes it extremely difficult to predict how our business and operations will be affected in the long run. Further, the resumption of normal business operations after the disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic may be delayed or constrained by the pandemic’s lingering effects on our Members, consumers, and third- party contract manufacturers and suppliers. Accordingly, our ability to conduct our business in the manner previously done or planned for the future could be materially and adversely affected, and any of the foregoing risks, or other cascading effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, or any other pandemic that may emerge in the future, that are not currently foreseeable, could materially and adversely affect our business, financial condition, and operating results. See the COVID-19 Pandemic and Sales by Geographic Region sections in Part II, Item 7, Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations, of this Annual Report on Form 10- K for further discussion of the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on our business and operating results. We depend on the integrity and reliability of our information technology infrastructure, and any related interruptions or inadequacies may have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition, and operating results. Our business, including our ability to provide products and services to and manage our Members, depends on the performance and availability of our information technology infrastructure, including our core transactional systems. The most important aspect of our information technology infrastructure is the system through which we record and track Member sales, Volume Points, royalty overrides, bonuses, and other incentives. The failure of our information systems to operate effectively, or a breach in security of these systems, could adversely impact the promptness and accuracy of our product distribution and transaction processing. While we continue to invest in our information technology infrastructure, there can be no assurance that there will not be any significant interruptions to such systems, that the systems will be adequate to meet all of our business needs, or that the systems will keep pace with continuing changes in technology, legal and regulatory standards. Further, as discussed in Part II, Item 7, Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations, we recently commenced a Digital Technology Program to develop a new enhanced platform to provide enhanced digital capabilities and experiences to our Members. Our information technology infrastructure, as well as that of our Members and the other third parties with which we interact, may be damaged, disrupted, or breached or otherwise fail for a number of reasons, including power outages, computer and telecommunication failures, internal design, manual or usage errors, workplace violence or wrongdoing, or catastrophic events such as natural disasters, severe weather conditions, or acts of war or terrorism. In addition, numerous and evolving cybersecurity threats, including advanced and persistent cyberattacks, such as unauthorized attempts to access, disable, improperly modify, exfiltrate, or degrade our information technology infrastructure, or the introduction of computer viruses, malware, “phishing” emails, and other destructive software, and social engineering schemes, could compromise the confidentiality, availability, and integrity of our information technology infrastructure as well as those of the third parties with which we interact. These attacks may come from external sources, such as governments or hackers, or may originate internally from an employee or a third party with which we interact. We have been the target of, and may be the target of in the future, malicious cyberattacks, although to date none of these attacks have had a meaningful adverse impact on our business, financial condition, or operating results. The potential risk of cyberattacks may increase as we introduce new technology systems and services. Additionally, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, many of our employees have been encouraged to work remotely, which may increase our exposure to significant systems interruptions, cybersecurity attacks, and otherwise compromise the integrity and reliability of our information technology infrastructure and our internal controls. Any disruptions to, or failures or inadequacies of, our information technology infrastructure that we may encounter in the future may result in substantial interruptions to our operations, expose us to significant liability, and may damage our reputation and our relationships with, or cause us to lose, our Members, especially if the disruptions, failures, or inadequacies impair our ability to track sales and pay royalty overrides, bonuses, and other incentives, any of which would harm our business, financial condition, and operating results. Any such disruptions, failures, or inadequacies could also create compliance risks under the Consent Order and result in penalties, fines, or sanctions under any applicable laws or regulations. Furthermore, it may be expensive or difficult to correct or replace any aspect of our information technology infrastructure in a timely manner, if at all, and we may have little or no control over whether any malfunctioning information technology services supplied to us by third parties are appropriately corrected, if at all. We have encountered, and may encounter in the future, errors in our software and our enterprise network, and inadequacies in the software and services supplied by certain of our vendors, although to date none of these errors or inadequacies have had a meaningful adverse impact on our business, financial condition or operating results. In addition, developments in technology are continuing to evolve and affecting all aspects of our business, including how we effectively manage our operations, interact with our Members and their customers, and commercialize opportunities that accompany the evolving digital and data driven economy. Therefore, one of our top priorities is to modernize our technology and data infrastructure by, among other things, creating more relevant and more personalized experiences wherever our systems interact with Members and their customers; and developing ways to create more powerful digital tools and capabilities for Members to enable them to grow their 26 businesses. These initiatives to modernize our technology and data infrastructure are expected to be implemented over the course of many years and to require significant investments. If these initiatives are not successful, our ability to attract and retain Members and their customers, increase sales, and reduce costs may be negatively affected. Further, these initiatives may be subject to cost overruns and delays and may cause disruptions in our operations. These cost overruns and delays and disruptions could adversely impact our business, financial condition, and operating results. Disruption of supply, shortage, or increases in the cost of ingredients, packaging materials, and other raw materials as well as climate change could materially harm our business, financial condition, and operating results. We and our third-party contract manufacturers depend on third-party suppliers to supply us with the various ingredients, packaging materials, and other raw materials that we use in the manufacturing and distribution of our products. Our business could be materially harmed if we experience operational difficulties with our third-party suppliers, such as increases in costs, reductions in the availability of materials or production capacity, errors in complying with specifications or applicable law, insufficient quality control, and failures to meet production or shipment deadlines. If we fail to develop or maintain our relationships with our third-party suppliers or if such suppliers cease doing business with us or go out of business, we could face difficulties in finding or transitioning to alternative suppliers that meet our standards. Many of the ingredients, packaging materials, and other raw materials we use are subject to fluctuations in availability and price due to a number of factors beyond our control, including crop size, ingredient, water, and land scarcity, market demand for raw materials, commodity market speculation, energy costs, currency fluctuations, supplier and logistics service capacities, import and export requirements, tariffs, and other government policies, and drought, excessive rain, temperature extremes, and other severe weather events. If we experience supply shortages, price increases, or supplier or regulatory impediments with respect to any of the materials we use in our products or packaging, we may need to seek alternative supplies or suppliers and may experience difficulties in finding replacements that are comparable in quality and price. For a discussion of the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on our supply chain see “If any of our manufacturing facilities or third-party manufacturers fail to reliably supply products to us at required levels of quality or fail to comply with applicable laws, our financial condition and operating results could be materially and adversely impacted” below. Further, the risks related to our ability to adequately source the materials required to meet our needs may be exacerbated by the effects of climate change and the legal, regulatory, or market measures that may be implemented to address climate change. There is growing concern that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere may have an adverse impact on global temperatures, weather patterns, and the frequency and severity of extreme weather and natural disasters. If climate change has a negative effect on agricultural productivity, we may be subject to decreased availability or less favorable pricing for certain raw materials that are necessary for our products, such as soybeans, wheat, tea leaves, and nuts. Severe weather conditions and natural disasters can reduce crop size and crop quality, which in turn could reduce our supplies of raw materials, lower recoveries of usable raw materials, increase the prices of our raw materials, increase our cost of storing and transporting our raw materials, or disrupt production schedules. The impacts of climate change may also cause unpredictable water availability or exacerbate water scarcity. In addition, the increasing concern over climate change and related sustainability matters may also result in more federal, state, local, and foreign legal and regulatory requirements relating to climate change, which may significantly increase our costs of operation and delivery. 27

Use only the document provided and nothing else. How does Herbalife's "seed to feed" strategy influence its product quality and sourcing? 2022 Annual Report To Our Shareholders, We all know coming out of the pandemic has caused many companies to relook at their operations. 2022 was a year of change for Herbalife as well as a year of challenge. With every challenge, there is great opportunity. I came back to Herbalife because I believe passionately about what Herbalife does, and what it provides for health and income. Since returning to Herbalife, I along with our management team and distributor leaders from around the world have embarked on a journey to expand our content, enhance the business opportunity, modernize our brand, and expand our digital platform – with the aim to reach more customers and to provide our distributors a better plat- form to operate their business. Our vision is to be the world’s premier health and wellness company and community. As I write this, more than 3,000 distributor leaders from around the world are traveling to Los Angeles to meet together for the first time in three years to learn, to share, to innovate, and to build a path forward for Herbalife. The time is now for us to reconnect, build on our strategic plan, and provide growth for all of our stakeholders. Our digital transformation “Herbalife One” will enhance the Company’s two main platforms: content and busi- ness opportunity. Our content is our product. With obesity levels hitting record highs around the globe and a greater demand for health and wellness support, we have plans to grow our product portfolio through our daily nutrition products with expanded vegan and protein lines. We plan to explore other health and wellness opportunities that will be based on global as well as regional consumer demands. For example, our unique Ayurvedic product line in India has contributed to the success of our fastest growing market. We are unleashing similar innovative products regionally in Europe, Asia and China, and we will continue to look for synergies and opportunities to globalize our regional product offerings. With enhancements to the business opportunity, our global distributor network will continue to give us a com- petitive advantage to reach more consumers with more offerings than ever before. Our distributors give a personal voice and passion to our products. Spanning across 95 markets, our distributors are amazing entrepreneurs who have unique relationships with their customers, and through an expanded use of data, we will be able to assist our distributors to sell more products and work more closely and efficiently with consumers on their health and wellness journey. To this end, we are modernizing our brand and compensation structure, including new promotions to energize and incentivize our distributors to earn early in their Herbalife business opportunity journey. Together with Herbalife One, our business opportunity will differentiate us and strengthen our leadership in the marketplace. 2023 is a start of a new chapter – one that is both motivating and exciting. In March, I marked my 20th year of devoting my time, passion, and energy to Herbalife. I feel more optimistic about where we are headed today than ever before. Our distributors and employees make Herbalife a community unlike any other. I know our distrib- utors and employees are as incredibly excited about the future as I am. Thank you for your trust and support. Michael O. Johnson Chairman and Chief Executive Officer This letter contains “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Although we believe that the expectations reflected in any of our forward-looking statements are reasonable, actual results or outcomes could differ materially from those pro- jected or assumed in any of our forward-looking statements. Our future financial condition and results of oper- ations, as well as any forward-looking statements, are subject to change and to inherent risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond our control. Additionally, many of these risks and uncertainties are, and may continue to be, amplified by the COVID-19 pandemic. Important factors that could cause our actual results, performance and achievements, or industry results to differ materially from estimates or projections contained in or implied by our forward-looking statements include the following: the potential impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and current global economic conditions, including inflation, on us; our Members, customers, and supply chain; and the world economy; our ability to attract and retain Members; our relationship with, and our ability to influence the actions of, our Members; our noncompliance with, or improper action by our employees or Members in violation of, applicable U.S. and foreign laws, rules, and regulations; adverse publicity associated with our Company or the direct-selling industry, including our ability to comfort the marketplace and regulators regard- ing our compliance with applicable laws; changing consumer preferences and demands and evolving industry standards, including with respect to climate change, sustainability, and other environmental, social, and gover- nance, or ESG, matters; the competitive nature of our business and industry; legal and regulatory matters, including regulatory actions concerning, or legal challenges to, our products or network marketing program and product liability claims; the Consent Order entered into with the FTC, the effects thereof and any failure to comply therewith; risks associated with operating internationally and in China; our ability to execute our growth and other strategic initiatives, including implementation of our Transformation Program and increased pene- tration of our existing markets; any material disruption to our business caused by natural disasters, other cata- strophic events, acts of war or terrorism, including the war in Ukraine, cybersecurity incidents, pandemics, and/ or other acts by third parties; our ability to adequately source ingredients, packaging materials, and other raw materials and manufacture and distribute our products; our reliance on our information technology infra- structure; noncompliance by us or our Members with any privacy laws, rules, or regulations or any security breach involving the misappropriation, loss, or other unauthorized use or disclosure of confidential information; contractual limitations on our ability to expand or change our direct-selling business model; the sufficiency of our trademarks and other intellectual property; product concentration; our reliance upon, or the loss or departure of any member of, our senior management team; restrictions imposed by covenants in the agreements governing our indebtedness; risks related to our convertible notes; changes in, and uncertainties relating to, the application of transfer pricing, income tax, customs duties, value added taxes, and other tax laws, treaties, and regulations, or their interpretation; our incorporation under the laws of the Cayman Islands; and share price volatility related to, among other things, speculative trading and certain traders shorting our common shares. Forward-looking statements in this letter speak only as of March 14, 2023. We do not undertake any obligation to update or release any revisions to any forward-looking statement or to report any events or circumstances after such date or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events, except as required by law. UNITED STATES SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION Washington, D.C. 20549 Form 10-K (Mark One) ANNUAL REPORT PURSUANT TO SECTION 13 OR 15(d) OF THE SECURITIES EXCHANGE ACT OF 1934 For the fiscal year ended December 31, 2022 OR TRANSITION REPORT PURSUANT TO SECTION 13 OR 15(d) OF THE SECURITIES EXCHANGE ACT OF 1934 For the transition period from to Commission file number: 1-32381 HERBALIFE NUTRITION LTD. (Exact name of registrant as specified in its charter) Cayman Islands 98-0377871 (State or other jurisdiction of (I.R.S. Employer incorporation or organization) Identification No.) P.O. Box 309GT Ugland House, South Church Street Grand Cayman, Cayman Islands (Address of principal executive offices) (Zip Code) (213) 745-0500 (Registrant’s telephone number, including area code) Securities registered pursuant to Section 12(b) of the Act: Title of each class: Trading Symbol(s): Name of each exchange on which registered: Common Shares, par value $0.0005 per share HLF New York Stock Exchange Securities registered pursuant to Section 12(g) of the Act: None Indicate by check mark if the registrant is a well-known seasoned issuer, as defined in Rule 405 of the Securities Act. Yes ☒ No ☐ Indicate by check mark if the registrant is not required to file reports pursuant to Section 13 or Section 15(d) of the Act. Yes ☐ No ☒ Indicate by check mark whether the registrant: (1) has filed all reports required to be filed by Section 13 or 15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 during the preceding 12 months (or for such shorter period that the registrant was required to file such reports), and (2) has been subject to such filing requirements for the past 90 days. Yes ☒ No ☐ Indicate by check mark whether the registrant has submitted electronically every Interactive Data File required to be submitted pursuant to Rule 405 of Regulation S-T (§232.405 of this chapter) during the preceding 12 months (or for such shorter period that the registrant was required to submit such files). Yes ☒ No ☐ Indicate by check mark whether the registrant is a large accelerated filer, an accelerated filer, a non-accelerated filer, a smaller reporting company, or an emerging growth company. See the definitions of “large accelerated filer,” “accelerated filer,” “smaller reporting company,” and “emerging growth company” in Rule 12b-2 of the Exchange Act. Large accelerated filer ☒ Accelerated filer ☐ Non-accelerated filer ☐ Smaller reporting company ☐ Emerging growth company ☐ If an emerging growth company, indicate by check mark if the registrant has elected not to use the extended transition period for complying with any new or revised financial accounting standards provided pursuant to Section 13(a) of the Exchange Act. ☐ Indicate by check mark whether the registrant has filed a report on and attestation to its management’s assessment of the effectiveness of its internal control over financial reporting under Section 404(b) of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (15 U.S.C. 7262(b)) by the registered public accounting firm that prepared or issued its audit report. ☒ If securities are registered pursuant to Section 12(b) of the Act, indicate by check mark whether the financial statements of the registrant included in the filing reflect the correction of an error to previously issued financial statements. ☐ Indicate by check mark whether any of those error corrections are restatements that required a recovery analysis of incentive-based compensation received by any of the registrant’s executive officers during the relevant recovery period pursuant to §240.10D-1(b). ☐ Indicate by check mark whether registrant is a shell company (as defined in Rule 12b-2 of the Exchange Act). Yes ☐ No ☒ There were 97,920,728 common shares outstanding as of February 7, 2023. The aggregate market value of the Registrant’s common shares held by non-affiliates was approximately $896 million as of June 30, 2022, based upon the last reported sales price on the New York Stock Exchange on that date of $20.45. For the purposes of this disclosure only, the registrant has assumed that its directors, executive officers, and the beneficial owners of 5% or more of the registrant’s outstanding common stock are the affiliates of the registrant. DOCUMENTS INCORPORATED BY REFERENCE Portions of the registrant’s Definitive Proxy Statement to be filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission no later than 120 days after the end of the Registrant’s fiscal year ended December 31, 2022, are incorporated by reference in Part III of this Annual Report on Form 10-K. 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS Page No. PART I Item 1. Business 5 Item 1A. Risk Factors 19 Item 1B. Unresolved Staff Comments 43 Item 2. Properties 43 Item 3. Legal Proceedings 44 Item 4. Mine Safety Disclosures 44 PART II Item 5. Market for Registrant’s Common Equity, Related Stockholder Matters and Issuer Purchases of Equity 45 Securities Item 6. [Reserved] 46 Item 7. Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations 47 Item 7A. Quantitative and Qualitative Disclosures About Market Risk 67 Item 8. Financial Statements and Supplementary Data 69 Item 9. Changes in and Disagreements With Accountants on Accounting and Financial Disclosure 70 Item 9A. Controls and Procedures 70 Item 9B. Other Information 70 Item 9C. Disclosure Regarding Foreign Jurisdictions that Prevent Inspections 70 PART III Item 10. Directors, Executive Officers and Corporate Governance 71 Item 11. Executive Compensation 71 Item 12. Security Ownership of Certain Beneficial Owners and Management and Related Stockholder Matters 71 Item 13. Certain Relationships and Related Transactions, and Director Independence 71 Item 14. Principal Accounting Fees and Services 71 PART IV Item 15. Exhibits, Financial Statement Schedules 72 Item 16. Form 10-K Summary 125 2 FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS This Annual Report on Form 10-K contains “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended. All statements other than statements of historical fact are “forward-looking statements” for purposes of federal and state securities laws, including any projections of earnings, revenue or other financial items; any statements of the plans, strategies and objectives of management, including for future operations, capital expenditures, or share repurchases; any statements concerning proposed new products, services, or developments; any statements regarding future economic conditions or performance; any statements of belief or expectation; and any statements of assumptions underlying any of the foregoing or other future events. Forward-looking statements may include, among other, the words “may,” “will,” “estimate,” “intend,” “continue,” “believe,” “expect,” “anticipate” or any other similar words. Although we believe that the expectations reflected in any of our forward-looking statements are reasonable, actual results or outcomes could differ materially from those projected or assumed in any of our forward-looking statements. Our future financial condition and results of operations, as well as any forward-looking statements, are subject to change and to inherent risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond our control. Additionally, many of these risks and uncertainties are, and may continue to be, amplified by the COVID-19 pandemic. Important factors that could cause our actual results, performance and achievements, or industry results to differ materially from estimates or projections contained in or implied by our forward-looking statements include the following: • the potential impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and current global economic conditions, including inflation, on us; our Members, customers, and supply chain; and the world economy; • our ability to attract and retain Members; • our relationship with, and our ability to influence the actions of, our Members; • our noncompliance with, or improper action by our employees or Members in violation of, applicable U.S. and foreign laws, rules, and regulations; • adverse publicity associated with our Company or the direct-selling industry, including our ability to comfort the marketplace and regulators regarding our compliance with applicable laws; • changing consumer preferences and demands and evolving industry standards, including with respect to climate change, sustainability, and other environmental, social, and governance, or ESG, matters; • the competitive nature of our business and industry; • legal and regulatory matters, including regulatory actions concerning, or legal challenges to, our products or network marketing program and product liability claims; • the Consent Order entered into with the FTC, the effects thereof and any failure to comply therewith; • risks associated with operating internationally and in China; • our ability to execute our growth and other strategic initiatives, including implementation of our Transformation Program and increased penetration of our existing markets; • any material disruption to our business caused by natural disasters, other catastrophic events, acts of war or terrorism, including the war in Ukraine, cybersecurity incidents, pandemics, and/or other acts by third parties; • our ability to adequately source ingredients, packaging materials, and other raw materials and manufacture and distribute our products; • our reliance on our information technology infrastructure; • noncompliance by us or our Members with any privacy laws, rules, or regulations or any security breach involving the misappropriation, loss, or other unauthorized use or disclosure of confidential information; • contractual limitations on our ability to expand or change our direct-selling business model; • the sufficiency of our trademarks and other intellectual property; • product concentration; • our reliance upon, or the loss or departure of any member of, our senior management team; • restrictions imposed by covenants in the agreements governing our indebtedness; 3 • risks related to our convertible notes; • changes in, and uncertainties relating to, the application of transfer pricing, income tax, customs duties, value added taxes, and other tax laws, treaties, and regulations, or their interpretation; • our incorporation under the laws of the Cayman Islands; and • share price volatility related to, among other things, speculative trading and certain traders shorting our common shares. Additional factors and uncertainties that could cause actual results or outcomes to differ materially from our forward-looking statements are set forth in this Annual Report on Form 10-K, including in Part I, Item 1A, Risk Factors, and Part II, Item 7, Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations, and in our Consolidated Financial Statements and the related Notes. In addition, historical, current, and forward-looking sustainability-related statements may be based on standards for measuring progress that are still developing, internal controls and processes that continue to evolve, and assumptions that are subject to change in the future. Forward-looking statements in this Annual Report on Form 10-K speak only as of the date hereof. We do not undertake any obligation to update or release any revisions to any forward-looking statement or to report any events or circumstances after the date hereof or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events, except as required by law. The Company “We,” “our,” “us,” “Company,” “Herbalife,” and “Herbalife Nutrition” refer to Herbalife Nutrition Ltd., a Cayman Islands exempted company incorporated with limited liability, and its subsidiaries. Herbalife Nutrition Ltd. is a holding company, with substantially all of its assets consisting of the capital stock of its direct and indirectly-owned subsidiaries. 4 PART I Item 1. Business GENERAL Herbalife Nutrition is a global nutrition company that provides health and wellness products to consumers in 95 markets, which consists of countries and territories, through our direct-selling business model. Our products are primarily in the categories of weight management, sports nutrition, and targeted nutrition. We use a direct-selling business model to distribute and market our nutrition products to and through a global network of independent members, or Members. Members include consumers who purchase products for their own personal use and distributors who wish to resell products or build a sales organization. We believe that direct selling is ideally suited for our business because the distribution and sales of our products with personalized support, coaching, and education provide a supportive and understanding community of like-minded people who prioritize health and nutrition. In addition to the effectiveness of personalized selling through a direct-selling business model, we believe the primary drivers for our success throughout our 43-year operating history have been enhanced consumer awareness and demand for our products due to global trends such as the obesity epidemic, increasing interest in a fit and active lifestyle, living healthier, and the rise of entrepreneurship. PRODUCT SALES Our science-backed products help Members and their customers improve their overall health, enhance their wellness, and achieve their fitness and sport goals. As of December 31, 2022, we marketed and sold approximately 131 product types. Our products are often sold as part of a program and therefore our portfolio is comprised of a series of related products designed to simplify weight management, health and wellness, and overall nutrition for our Members and their customers. Our Formula 1 Nutritional Shake Mix, our best-selling product line, approximated 26% of our net sales for the year ended December 31, 2022. The following table summarizes our products by product category: Percentage of Net Sales 2022 2021 2020 Description Representative Products Weight Management 56.8% 58.1% 59.8% Meal replacement, protein Formula 1 Healthy Meal, shakes, drink mixes, weight Herbal Tea Concentrate, loss enhancers and healthy Protein Drink Mix, snacks Personalized Protein Powder, Total Control®, Formula 2 Multivitamin Complex, Prolessa™ Duo, and Protein Bars Targeted Nutrition 29.1% 28.2% 27.6% Functional beverages and Herbal Aloe Concentrate, dietary and nutritional Active Fiber Complex, supplements containing Niteworks®, and quality herbs, vitamins, Herbalifeline® minerals and other natural ingredients Energy, Sports, and 10.6% 9.5% 7.9% Products that support a Herbalife24® product line, Fitness healthy active lifestyle N-R-G Tea, and Liftoff® energy drink Outer Nutrition 1.6% 1.9% 2.0% Facial skin care, body care, Herbalife SKIN line and and hair care Herbal Aloe Bath and Body Care line Literature, Promotional, 1.9% 2.3% 2.7% Start-up kits, sales tools, Herbalife Member Packs and Other and educational materials and BizWorks 5 Product returns and buyback policies We offer a customer satisfaction guarantee in substantially all markets where our products are sold. If for any reason a customer or preferred member is not satisfied with an Herbalife Nutrition product, they may return it or any unused portion of the product within 30 days from the time of receipt for a full refund or credit toward the exchange of another Herbalife Nutrition product. In addition, in substantially all markets, we maintain a buyback program pursuant to which we will purchase back unsold products from a Member who decides to leave the business. Subject to certain terms and conditions that may vary by market, the buyback program generally permits a Member to return unopened products or sales materials in marketable condition purchased within the prior twelve- month period in exchange for a refund of the net price paid for the product and, in most markets, the cost of returning the products and materials to us. Together, product returns and buybacks were approximately 0.1% of net sales for each of the years ended December 31, 2022, 2021, and 2020. Product development Our products are focused on nutrition and seek to help consumers achieve their goals in the areas of weight management; targeted nutrition (including everyday wellness and healthy aging); energy, sports, and fitness; and outer nutrition. We believe our focus on nutrition and botanical science and the combination of our internal efforts with the scientific expertise of outside resources, including our ingredient suppliers, major universities, and our Nutrition Advisory Board, have resulted in product differentiation that has given our Members and consumers increased confidence in our products. We continue to invest in scientific and technical functions, including research and development associated with creating new or enhancing current product formulations and the advancement of personalized nutrition solutions; clinical studies of existing products or products in development; technical operations to improve current product formulations; quality assurance and quality control to establish the appropriate quality systems, controls, and standards; and rigorous ingredient and product testing to ensure compliance with regulatory requirements, as well as in the areas of regulatory and scientific affairs. Our personalized nutrition solutions include tools which aid in the development of optimal product packages specific to our customers’ individual nutritional needs, based on their expected wellness goals. Our product development strategy is twofold: (1) to increase the value of existing customers by investing in products that address customers’ health, wellness and nutrition considerations, fill perceived gaps in our portfolios, add flavors, increase convenience by developing products like snacks and bars, and expand afternoon and evening consumption with products like savory shakes or soups; and (2) to attract new customers by entering into new categories, offering more choices, increasing individualization, and expanding our current sports line. We have a keen focus on product innovation and aim to launch new products and variations on existing products on a regular basis. Once a particular market opportunity has been identified, our scientists, along with our operations, marketing, and sales teams, work closely with Member leadership to introduce new products and variations on existing products. Our Nutrition Advisory Board and Dieticians Advisory Board are comprised of leading experts around the world in the fields of nutrition and health who educate our Members on the principles of nutrition, physical activity, diet, and healthy lifestyle. We rely on the scientific contributions from members of our Nutrition Advisory Board and our in-house scientific team to continually upgrade existing products or introduce new products as new scientific studies become available and are accepted by regulatory authorities around the world. COMPETITION The nutrition industry is highly competitive. Nutrition products are sold through a number of distribution channels, including direct selling, online retailers, specialty retailers, and the discounted channels of food, drug and mass merchandise. Our competitors include companies such as Conagra Brands, Hain Celestial, and Post. Additionally, we compete for the recruitment of Members from other network marketing organizations, including those that market nutrition products and other entrepreneurial opportunities. Our direct-selling competitors include companies such as Nu Skin, Tupperware, and USANA. Our ability to remain competitive depends on many factors, including having relevant products that meet consumer needs, a rewarding compensation plan, enhanced education and tools, innovation in our products and services, competitive pricing, a strong reputation, and a financially viable company. We have differentiated ourselves from our competitors through our Members’ focus on the consultative sales process, which includes ongoing personal contact, coaching, behavior motivation, education, and the creation of supportive communities. For example, many Members have frequent contact with and provide support to their customers through a community-based approach to help them achieve nutrition goals. Some methods include Nutrition Clubs, Weight Loss Challenges, Wellness Evaluations, and Fit Camps. 6 For additional information regarding competition, see Part I, Item 1A, Risk Factors, of this Annual Report on Form 10-K. OUR NETWORK MARKETING PROGRAM General Our products are sold and distributed through a global direct selling business model which individuals may join to become a Member of our network marketing program. We believe that the one-on-one personalized service inherent in the direct-selling business model is ideally suited to marketing and selling our nutrition products. Sales of nutrition products are reinforced by the ongoing personal contact, coaching, behavior motivation, education, and the creation of supportive communities. This frequent, personal contact can enhance consumers’ nutritional and health education as well as motivate healthy behavioral changes in consumers to begin and maintain an active lifestyle through wellness and weight management programs. In addition, our Members consume our products themselves, and, therefore, can provide first-hand testimonials of the use and effectiveness of our products and programs to their customers. The personalized experience of our Members has served as a very powerful sales tool for our products. People become Herbalife Nutrition Members for a number of reasons. Many first start out as consumers of our products who want to lose weight or improve their nutrition, and are customers of our Members. Some later join Herbalife Nutrition and become Members themselves, which makes them eligible to purchase products directly from us, simply to receive a discounted price on products for them and their families. Some Members are interested in the entrepreneurial opportunity to earn compensation based on their own skills and hard work and join Herbalife Nutrition to earn part-time or full-time income. Our objective is sustainable growth in the sales of our products to our Members and their customers by increasing the productivity, retention and recruitment of our Member base through the structure of our network marketing program. Segmentation In many of our markets, including certain of our largest markets such as the United States, Mexico, and India, we have segmented our Member base into two categories: “preferred members” – who are consumers who wish to purchase product for their own household use, and “distributors” – who are Members who also wish to resell products or build a sales organization. This Member segmentation provides a clear differentiation between those interested in retailing our products or building a sales organization, and those simply consuming our products as discount customers. This distinction allows us to more effectively communicate and market to each group, and provides us with better information regarding our Members within the context of their stated intent and goals. As of December 31, 2022, we had approximately 6.2 million Members, including 2.9 million preferred members and 2.0 million distributors in the markets where we have established these two categories and 0.3 million sales representatives and independent service providers in China. The number of preferred members and distributors may change as a result of segmentation and/or conversion, and do not necessarily represent a change in the total number of Members. Any future change in the number of preferred members or distributors is not necessarily indicative of our future expected financial performance. Our Members We believe our Members are the most important differentiator as we go to market with our nutrition products, because of the one- on-one direct contact they have with their customers, along with the education, training and community support services that we believe help improve the nutrition habits of consumers. We work closely with our entrepreneurial Members to improve the sustainability of their businesses and to reach consumers. We require our Members to fairly and honestly market both our products and the Herbalife Nutrition business opportunity. Our relationship with our Members is key to our continued success as they allow us direct access to the voice of consumers. Many of our entrepreneurial Members identify and test new marketing efforts and programs developed by other Members and disseminate successful techniques to their sales organizations. For example, Members in Mexico developed businesses that became known as “Nutrition Clubs,” marketing techniques that improve the productivity and efficiency of our Members as well as the affordability of our weight loss products for their customers. Rather than buying several retail products, these businesses allow consumers to purchase and consume our products each day (a Member marketing technique we refer to as “daily consumption”), while continuing to benefit from the support and interaction with the Member as well as socializing with other customers in a designated location. Other programs to drive daily consumption, whether for weight management or for improved physical fitness, include Member- conducted weight loss contests, or Weight Loss Challenges, Member-led fitness programs, or Fit Camps, and Member-led Wellness Evaluations. We refer to successful Member marketing techniques that we disseminate throughout our Member network, such as Nutrition Clubs, Weight Loss Challenges, and Fit Camps, as Daily Methods of Operations, or DMOs. 7 We believe that personal and professional development is key to our Members’ success and, therefore, we and our sales leader Members – those that achieve certain levels within our Marketing Plan – have meetings and events to support this important objective. We and our Member leadership, which is comprised of sales leaders, conduct in-person and virtual training sessions on local, regional, and global levels attended by thousands of Members to provide updates on product education, sales and marketing training, and instruction on available tools. These events are opportunities to showcase and disseminate our Members’ evolving best marketing practices and DMOs from around the world and to introduce new or upgraded products. A variety of training and development tools are also available through online and mobile platforms. On July 18, 2002, we entered into an agreement with our Members that provides that we will continue to distribute Herbalife Nutrition products exclusively to and through our Members and that, other than changes required by applicable law or necessary in our reasonable business judgment to account for specific local market or currency conditions to achieve a reasonable profit on operations, we will not make any material changes to certain aspects of our Marketing Plan that are adverse to our Members without the support of our Member leadership. Specifically, any such changes would require the approval of at least 51% of our Members then at the level of President’s Team earning at the production bonus level of 6% who vote, provided that at least 50% of those Members entitled to vote do in fact vote. We initiate these types of changes based on the assessment of what will be best for us and our Members and then submit such changes for the requisite vote. We believe that this agreement has strengthened our relationship with our existing Members, improved our ability to recruit new Members and generally increased the long-term stability of our business. Member Compensation and Sales Leader Retention and Requalification In addition to benefiting from discounted prices, Members interested in the entrepreneurial opportunity may earn profit from several sources. First, Members may earn profits by purchasing our products at wholesale prices, discounted depending on the Member’s level within our Marketing Plan, and reselling those products at prices they establish for themselves to generate retail profit. Second, Members who sponsor other Members and establish, maintain, coach, and train their own sales organizations may earn additional income based on the sales of their organization, which may include royalty overrides, production bonuses, and other cash bonuses. Members earning such compensation have generally attained the level of sales leader as described below. There are also many Members, which include distributors, who have not sponsored another Member. Members who have not sponsored another Member are generally considered discount buyers or small retailers. While a number of these Members have also attained the level of sales leader, they do not receive additional income as do Members who have sponsored other Members. We assign point values, known as Volume Points, to each of our products to determine a Member’s level within the Marketing Plan. See Part II, Item 7, Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Operating Results, of this Annual Report on Form 10-K for a further description of Volume Points. Typically, a Member accumulates Volume Points for a given sale at the time the Member pays for the product. However, since May 2017, a Member does not receive Volume Points for a transaction in the United States until that product is sold to a customer at a profit and it is documented in compliance with the consent order, or Consent Order, we entered into with the Federal Trade Commission, or the FTC, in 2016. The Member’s level within the Marketing Plan is used to determine the discount applied to their purchase of our products and whether they have qualified to become a sales leader. To become a sales leader, or qualify for a higher level within our Marketing Plan, Members must achieve specified Volume Point thresholds of product sales or earn certain amounts of royalty overrides during specified time periods and generally must re-qualify once each year. Qualification criteria vary somewhat by market. We have initial qualification methods of up to 12 months to encourage a more gradual qualification. We believe a gradual qualification approach is important to the success and retention of new sales leaders and benefits the business in the long term as it allows new Members to obtain product and customer experience as well as additional training and education on Herbalife Nutrition products, daily consumption based DMOs, and the business opportunity prior to becoming a sales leader. The basis for calculating Marketing Plan payouts varies depending on product and market: for 2022, we utilized on a weighted- average basis approximately 90% of suggested retail price, to which we applied discounts of up to 50% for distributor allowances and payout rates of up to 15% for royalty overrides, up to 7% for production bonuses, and approximately 1% for a cash bonus known as the Mark Hughes bonus. We believe that the opportunity for Members to earn royalty overrides and production bonuses contributes significantly to our ability to retain our most active and productive Members. Our Marketing Plan generally requires each sales leader to re-qualify for such status each year, prior to February, in order to maintain their 50% discount on products and be eligible to receive additional income. In February of each year, we demote from the rank of sales leader those Members who did not satisfy the re-qualification requirements during the preceding twelve months. The re- qualification requirement does not apply to new sales leaders (i.e. those who became sales leaders subsequent to the January re- qualification of the prior year). 8 As of December 31, 2022, prior to our February re-qualification process, approximately 772,000 of our Members have attained the level of sales leader, of which approximately 734,000 have attained this level in the 94 markets where we use our Marketing Plan and 38,000 independent service providers operating in our China business. See Business in China below for a description of our business in China. The table below reflects sales leader retention rates by year and by region: Sales Leader Retention Rate 2023 2022 2021 North America 69.7% 58.8% 70.8% Latin America (1) 71.6% 69.3% 67.0% EMEA 64.6% 77.1% 72.7% Asia Pacific 66.6% 66.5% 63.5% Total sales leaders 67.6% 68.9% 67.9% (1) The Company combined the Mexico and South and Central America regions into the Latin America region in 2022. Historical information has been reclassified to conform with the current period geographic presentation. For the latest twelve-month re-qualification period ending January 2023, approximately 67.6% of our sales leaders, excluding China, re-qualified, versus 68.9% for the twelve-month period ended January 2022. The Company throughout its history has adjusted the re-qualification criteria from time to time in response to evolving business objectives and market conditions, and the above results include the effects of all such changes. For example, in recent years certain markets have allowed members to utilize a lower re- qualification volume threshold and the Company has continued to expand this lower re-qualification method to additional markets. Separately, with revised business requirements in place following the Consent Order, as described in Network Marketing Program below, we utilize a re-qualification equalization factor for U.S. Members to better align their re-qualification thresholds with Members in other markets, and retention results for each of the years presented include the effect of the equalization factor. We believe this factor preserves retention rate comparability across markets. Also, for each of the years presented, the retention results exclude certain markets for which, due to local operating conditions, sales leaders were not required to requalify. We believe sales leader retention rates are the result of efforts we have made to try and improve the sustainability of sales leaders’ businesses, such as encouraging Members to obtain experience retailing Herbalife Nutrition products before becoming a sales leader and providing them with advanced technology tools, as well as reflecting market conditions. As our business operations evolve, including the segmentation of our Member base in certain markets and changes in sales leader re-qualification thresholds for other markets, management continues to evaluate the importance of sales leader retention rate information. The table below reflects the number of sales leaders as of the end of February of the year indicated (subsequent to the annual re- qualification process) and by region: Number of Sales Leaders 2022 2021 2020 North America 80,278 95,402 71,202 Latin America (1) 125,726 131,359 134,401 EMEA 183,056 158,153 130,438 Asia Pacific 201,137 173,582 158,815 Total sales leaders 590,197 558,496 494,856 China 33,486 68,301 70,701 Worldwide total sales leaders 623,683 626,797 565,557 (1) The Company combined the Mexico and South and Central America regions into the Latin America region in 2022. Historical information has been reclassified to conform with the current period geographic presentation. The number of sales leaders as of December 31 will exceed the number immediately subsequent to the preceding re-qualification period because sales leaders qualify throughout the year but sales leaders who do not re-qualify are removed from the rank of sales leader the following February. 9 Business in China Our business model in China includes unique features as compared to our traditional business model in order to ensure compliance with Chinese regulations. As a result, our business model in China differs from that used in other markets. Members in China are categorized differently than those in other markets. In China, we sell our products to and through independent service providers and sales representatives to customers and preferred customers, as well as through Company-operated retail platforms when necessary. In China, while multi-level marketing is not permitted, direct selling is permitted. Chinese citizens who apply and become Members are referred to as sales representatives. These sales representatives are permitted to sell away from fixed retail locations in the provinces where we have direct selling licenses, including in the provinces of Jiangsu, Guangdong, Shandong, Zhejiang, Guizhou, Beijing, Fujian, Sichuan, Hubei, Shanxi, Shanghai, Jiangxi, Liaoning, Jilin, Henan, Chongqing, Hebei, Shaanxi, Tianjin, Heilongjiang, Hunan, Guangxi, Hainan, Anhui, Yunnan, Gansu, Ningxia, and Inner Mongolia. In Xinjiang province, where we do not have a direct selling license, we have a Company-operated retail store that can directly serve customers and preferred customers. With online orderings throughout China, there has been a declining demand in Company-operated retail stores. Sales representatives receive scaled rebates based on the volume of products they purchase. Sales representatives who reach certain volume thresholds and meet certain performance criteria are eligible to apply to provide marketing, sales and support services. Once their application is accepted, they are referred to as independent service providers. Independent service providers are independent business entities that are eligible to receive compensation from Herbalife Nutrition for the marketing, sales and support services they provide so long as they satisfy certain conditions, including procuring the requisite business licenses, having a physical business location, and complying with all applicable Chinese laws and Herbalife Nutrition rules. In China, our independent service providers are compensated for marketing, sales support, and other services, instead of the Member allowances and royalty overrides utilized in our global Marketing Plan. The service hours and related fees eligible to be earned by the independent service providers are based on a number of factors, including the sales generated through them and through others to whom they may provide marketing, sales support and other services, the quality of their service, and other factors. Total compensation available to our independent service providers in China can generally be comparable to the total compensation available to other sales leaders globally. The Company does this by performing an analysis in our worldwide system to estimate the potential compensation available to the service providers, which can generally be comparable to that of sales leaders in other countries. After adjusting such amounts for other factors and dividing by each service provider’s hourly rate, we then notify each independent service provider the maximum hours of work for which they are eligible to be compensated in the given month. In order for a service provider to be paid, the Company requires each service provider to invoice the Company for their services. RESOURCES We seek to provide the highest quality products to our Members and their customers through our “seed to feed” strategy, which includes significant investments in obtaining quality ingredients from traceable sources, qualified by scientific personnel through product testing, and increasing the amount of self-manufacturing of our top products. Ingredients Our seed to feed strategy is rooted in using quality ingredients from traceable sources. Our procurement process for many of our botanical products now stretches back to the farms and includes self-processing of teas and herbal ingredients into finished raw materials at our own facilities. Our Changsha, China facility exclusively provides high quality tea and herbal raw materials to our manufacturing facilities as well as our third-party contract manufacturers around the world. We also source ingredients that we do not self-process from companies that are well-established, reputable suppliers in their respective field. These suppliers typically utilize similar quality processes, equipment, expertise, and having traceability as we do with our own modern quality processes. As part of our program to ensure the procurement of high-quality ingredients, we also test our incoming raw materials for compliance to potency, identity, and adherence to strict specifications. 10 Manufacturing The next key component of our seed to feed strategy involves the high-quality manufacturing of these ingredients into finished products, which are produced at both third-party manufacturers and our own manufacturing facilities. As part of our long-term strategy, we seek to expand and increase our self-manufacturing capabilities. Our manufacturing facilities, known as Herbalife Innovation and Manufacturing Facilities, or HIMs, include HIM Lake Forest, HIM Winston-Salem, HIM Suzhou, and HIM Nanjing. HIM Winston- Salem is currently our largest manufacturing facility at approximately 800,000 square feet. Together, our HIM manufacturing facilities produce approximately 51% of our inner nutrition products sold worldwide. Self-manufacturing also enables us greater control to reduce negative environmental impacts of our operations and supply chain. As described in the Sustainability section below, we are focused on developing science-based green-house gas emission reduction targets for our manufacturing facilities as part of our sustainability goals. We are also focused on reducing single-use plastics throughout our global distribution network and incorporating more sustainable content, such as post-consumer recycled resin, into our packaging. Our finished products are analyzed for label claims and tested for microbiological purity, thereby verifying that our products comply with food safety standards, meet label claims and have met other quality standards. For self-manufactured products, we conduct all of our testing in-house at our fully-equipped, modern quality control laboratories in the U.S. and China. We have two quality control laboratories in Southern California and Changsha, China (including a Center of Excellence in both locations). In addition, we also have a Center of Excellence laboratory in Bangalore, India, and a quality control laboratory in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Suzhou, China, and Nanjing, China. All HIM quality control labs contain modern analytical equipment and are backed by the expertise in testing and methods development of our scientists. In our U.S. HIM facilities, which manufacture products for the U.S. and most of our international markets, we operate and adhere to the regulations established by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, or FDA, and strict Current Good Manufacturing Practice regulations, or CGMPs, for food, acidified foods, and dietary supplements. We also work closely with our third-party manufacturers to ensure high quality products are produced and tested through a vigorous quality control process at approved contract manufacturer labs or third-party labs. For these products manufactured at other facilities, we combine four elements to ensure quality products: (1) the same selectivity and assurance in ingredients as noted above; (2) use of reputable, CGMP-compliant, quality- and sustainability-minded manufacturing partners; (3) supplier qualification through annual audit programs; and (4) significant product quality testing. During 2022, we purchased approximately 15% of our products from our top three third-party manufacturers. Infrastructure and Technology Our direct-selling business model enables us to grow our business with moderate investment in infrastructure and fixed costs. We incur no direct incremental cost to add a new Member in our existing markets, and our Member compensation varies directly with product sales. In addition, our Members also bear a portion of our consumer marketing expenses, and our sales leaders sponsor and coordinate Member recruiting and most meeting and training initiatives. Additionally, our infrastructure features scalable production and distribution of our products as a result of having our own manufacturing facilities and numerous third-party manufacturing relationships, as well as our global footprint of in-house and third-party distribution centers. An important part of our seed to feed strategy is having an efficient infrastructure to deliver products to our Members and their customers. As the shift in consumption patterns continues to reflect an increasing daily consumption focus, one focus of this strategy is to provide more product access points closer to our Members and their customers. We have both Company-operated and outsourced distribution points ranging from our “hub” distribution centers in Los Angeles, Memphis, and Venray, Netherlands, to mid-size distribution centers in major countries, to small pickup locations spread throughout the world. We also expect to continue to improve our distribution channels relating to home delivery as we expect to see continued increased demands for our products being shipped to our Members in certain of our larger markets. In addition to these distribution points, we partner with certain retail locations to provide Member pickup points in areas which are not well serviced by our distribution points. We have also identified a number of methods and approaches that better support Members by providing access points closer to where they do business and by improving product delivery efficiency through our distribution channels. Specific methods vary by markets and consider local Member needs and available resources. In aggregate, we have over 1,500 distribution points and partner retail locations around the world. In addition to our distribution points, we contract third party-run drop-off locations where we can ship to and Members can pick up ordered products. 11 We leverage our technology infrastructure in order to maintain, protect, and enhance existing systems and develop new systems to keep pace with continuing changes in technology, evolving industry and regulatory standards, emerging data security risks, and changing user patterns and preferences. We also continue to invest in our manufacturing and operational infrastructure to accelerate new products to market and accommodate planned business growth. We invest in business intelligence tools to enable better analysis of our business and to identify opportunities for growth. We will continue to build on these platforms to take advantage of the rapid development of technology around the globe to support a more robust Member and customer experience. In addition, we leverage an Oracle business suite platform to support our business operations, improve productivity and support our strategic initiatives. Our investment in technology infrastructure helps support our capacity to grow. In 2021, we also initiated a global transformation program to optimize global processes for future growth, or the Transformation Program. The Transformation Program involves the investment in certain new technologies and the realignment of infrastructure and the locations of certain functions to better support distributors and customers. The Transformation Program is still ongoing and expected to be completed in 2024 as described further in Part II, Item 7, Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Operating Results, of this Annual Report on Form 10-K and Note 14, Transformation Program, to the Consolidated Financial Statements included in Part IV, Item 15, Exhibits, Financial Statement Schedules, of this Annual Report on Form 10-K. In addition, many Members rely on the use of technology to support their goals and businesses. As part of our continued investment in technology to further support our Members and drive long-term growth, we have enhanced our product access and distribution network to support higher volumes of online or mobile orders, allowing Members and their customers to select home or business delivery options. We have also implemented information technology systems to support Members and their increasing demand to be more connected to Herbalife Nutrition, their business, and their consumers with tools such as HN MyClub, Engage, HNconnect, BizWorks, MyHerbalife, GoHerbalife, and Herbalife.com. Additionally, we continue to support a growing suite of point-of-sale tools to assist our Members with ordering, tracking, and customer relationship management. These tools allow our Members to manage their business and communicate with their customers more efficiently and effectively. During 2022, we also commenced a Digital Technology Program to develop a new enhanced platform to provide enhanced digital capabilities and experiences to our Members. This is a multi-year program and we expect our capital expenditures to increase in 2023 and future years as result of our investments in this Digital Technology Program as described further in Part II, Item 7, Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Operating Results, of this Annual Report on Form 10-K. Intellectual Property and Branding Marketing foods and supplement products on the basis of sound science means using ingredients in the composition and quantity as demonstrated to be effective in the relevant scientific literature. Use of these ingredients for their well-established purposes is by definition not novel, and for that reason, most food uses of these ingredients are not subject to patent protection. Notwithstanding the absence of patent protection, we do own proprietary formulations for substantially all of our weight management products and dietary and nutritional supplements. We take care in protecting the intellectual property rights of our proprietary formulas by restricting access to our formulas within the Company to those persons or departments that require access to them to perform their functions, and by requiring our finished goods suppliers and consultants to execute supply and non-disclosure agreements that contractually protect our intellectual property rights. Disclosure of these formulas, in redacted form, is also necessary to obtain product registrations in many countries. We also make efforts to protect certain unique formulations under patent law. We strive to protect all new product developments as the confidential trade secrets of the Company. We use the umbrella trademarks Herbalife®, Herbalife Nutrition®, and the Tri-Leaf design worldwide, and protect several other trademarks and trade names related to our products and operations, such as Niteworks® and Liftoff®. Our trademark registrations are issued through the United States Patent and Trademark Office, or USPTO, and comparable agencies in the foreign countries. We believe our trademarks and trade names contribute to our brand awareness. To increase our brand awareness, we and our Members use a variety of tools and marketing channels. These can include anything from traditional media to social media and alliances with partners who can promote our goal of better living through nutrition. Herbalife Nutrition sponsorships of and partnerships with featured athletes, teams, and events promote brand awareness and the use of Herbalife Nutrition products. We continue to build brand awareness with a goal towards becoming the most trusted brand in nutrition. We also work to leverage the power of our Member base as a marketing and brand-building tool. We maintain a brand style guide and brand asset library so that our Members have access to the Herbalife Nutrition brand logo and marketing materials for use in their marketing efforts. 12 Sustainability Our goals and objectives to nourish people and communities and to improve the planet are part of both our day-to-day activities and our long-term growth strategy. As a signatory of the United Nations Global Compact, or UNGC, we have aligned our sustainability initiatives outlined by the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. Our current sustainability initiatives focus on issues including climate and emissions, packaging, and operational waste. For example, we have implemented projects that have reduced overall packaging materials and incorporated usage of recycled materials in the packaging of our flagship product, Formula 1 Healthy Meal Nutritional Shake in North America, Mexico, and in certain markets where permitted by regulations. We are seeking opportunities across operations to reduce waste-prone materials such as single-use plastics. More information on these efforts is provided in the Manufacturing section above. For information relating to our culture, diversity, equity, and inclusion, please see the Human Capital section below. REGULATION General In our United States and foreign markets, we are affected by extensive laws, governmental regulations, administrative determinations and guidance, court decisions and similar constraints that regulate the conduct of our business. Such laws, regulations and other constraints exist at the federal, state or local levels in the United States and at all levels of government in foreign jurisdictions, and include regulations pertaining to: (1) the formulation, manufacturing, packaging, labeling, distribution, importation, sale, and storage of our products; (2) product claims and advertising, including direct claims and advertising by us, as well as claims and advertising by Members, for which we may be held responsible; (3) our network marketing program; (4) transfer pricing and similar regulations that affect the level of U.S. and foreign taxable income and customs duties; (5) taxation of our Members (which in some instances may impose an obligation on us to collect the taxes and maintain appropriate records); (6) our international operations, such as import/export, currency exchange, repatriation and anti-bribery regulations; (7) antitrust issues; and (8) privacy and data protection. See Part I, Item 1A, Risk Factors, of this Annual Report on Form 10-K for additional information. Products In the United States, the formulation, manufacturing, packaging, holding, labeling, promotion, advertising, distribution, and sale of our products are subject to regulation by various federal governmental agencies, including: (1) the FDA; (2) the FTC; (3) the Consumer Product Safety Commission, or CPSC; (4) the United States Department of Agriculture, or USDA; (5) the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA; (6) the United States Postal Service; (7) United States Customs and Border Protection; and (8) the Drug Enforcement Administration. Our activities also are regulated by various agencies of the states, localities and foreign countries in which our products are manufactured, distributed, or sold. The FDA, in particular, regulates the formulation, manufacture, and labeling of over-the-counter, or OTC, drugs, conventional foods, dietary supplements, and cosmetics such as those distributed by us. The majority of the products marketed by us in the United States are classified as conventional foods or dietary supplements under the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act, or FFDCA. Internationally, the majority of products marketed by us are classified as foods, health supplements, or food supplements. FDA regulations govern the preparation, packaging, labeling, holding, and distribution of foods, OTC drugs, cosmetics, and dietary supplements. Among other obligations, they require us and our contract manufacturers to meet relevant CGMP regulations for the preparation, packaging, holding, and distribution of OTC drugs and dietary supplements. The FDA also requires identity testing of all incoming dietary ingredients used in dietary supplements, unless a company successfully petitions for an exemption from this testing requirement in accordance with the regulations. The CGMPs are designed to ensure that OTC drugs and dietary supplements are not adulterated with contaminants or impurities, and are labeled to accurately reflect the active ingredients and other ingredients in the products. We have implemented a comprehensive quality assurance program that is designed to maintain compliance with the CGMPs for products manufactured by us or on our behalf for distribution in the United States. As part of this program, we have regularly implemented enhancements, modifications and improvements to our manufacturing and corporate quality processes. We believe that we and our contract manufacturers are compliant with the FDA’s CGMPs and other applicable manufacturing regulations in the United States. The U.S. Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994, or DSHEA, revised the provisions of FFDCA concerning the composition and labeling of dietary supplements. Under DSHEA, dietary supplement labeling may display structure/function claims that the manufacturer can substantiate, which are claims that the products affect the structure or function of the body, without prior FDA approval, but with notification to the FDA. They may not bear any claim that they can prevent, treat, cure, mitigate or diagnose disease (a drug claim). Apart from DSHEA, the agency permits companies to use FDA-approved full and qualified health claims for food and supplement products containing specific ingredients that meet stated requirements. 13 U.S. law also requires that all serious adverse events occurring within the United States involving dietary supplements or OTC drugs be reported to the FDA. We believe that we are in compliance with this law having implemented a worldwide procedure governing adverse event identification, investigation and reporting. As a result of reported adverse events, we may from time to time elect, or be required, to remove a product from a market, either temporarily or permanently. Some of the products marketed by us are considered conventional foods and are currently labeled as such. Within the United States, this category of products is subject to the federal Nutrition, Labeling and Education Act, or NLEA, and regulations promulgated under the NLEA. The NLEA regulates health claims, ingredient labeling and nutrient content claims characterizing the level of a nutrient in the product. The ingredients in conventional foods must either be generally recognized as safe by experts for the purposes to which they are put in foods, or be approved as food additives under FDA regulations. The federal Food Safety Modernization Act, or FSMA, is also applicable to some of our business. We follow a food safety plan and have implemented preventive measures required by the FSMA. Foreign suppliers of our raw materials are also subject to FSMA requirements, and we have implemented a verification program to comply with the FSMA. Dietary supplements manufactured in accordance with CGMPs and foods manufactured in accordance with the low acid food regulations are exempt. In foreign markets, prior to commencing operations and prior to making or permitting sales of our products in the market, we may be required to obtain an approval, license or certification from the relevant country’s ministry of health or comparable agency. Prior to entering a new market in which a formal approval, license or certificate is required, we work with local authorities in order to obtain the requisite approvals. The approval process generally requires us to present each product and product ingredient to appropriate regulators and, in some instances, arrange for testing of products by local technicians for ingredient analysis. The approvals may be conditioned on reformulation of our products, or may be unavailable with respect to some products or some ingredients. The FTC, which exercises jurisdiction over the advertising of all of our products in the United States, has in the past several years instituted enforcement actions against several dietary supplement and food companies and against manufacturers of weight loss products generally for false and misleading advertising of some of their products. In addition, the FTC has increased its scrutiny of the use of testimonials, which we also utilize, as well as the role of expert endorsers and product clinical studies. We cannot be sure that the FTC, or comparable foreign agencies, will not question our advertising or other operations in the future. In Europe, where an EU Health Claim regulation is in effect, the European Food Safety Authority, or EFSA, issued opinions following its review of a number of proposed claims documents. ESFA’s opinions, which have been accepted by the European Commission, have limited the use of certain nutrition-specific claims made for foods and food supplements. Accordingly, we revised affected product labels to ensure regulatory compliance. We are subject to a permanent injunction issued in October 1986 pursuant to the settlement of an action instituted by the California Attorney General, the State Health Director and the Santa Cruz County District Attorney. We consented to the entry of this injunction without in any way admitting the allegations of the complaint. The injunction prevents us from making specified claims in advertising of our products, but does not prevent us from continuing to make specified claims concerning our products, provided that we have a reasonable basis for making the claims. The injunction also prohibits certain recruiting-related investments from Members and mandates that payments to Members be premised on retail value (as defined); the injunction provides that we may establish a system to verify or document such compliance. Network Marketing Program Our network marketing program is subject to a number of federal and state regulations administered by the FTC and various state regulators as well as regulations in foreign markets administered by foreign regulators. Regulations applicable to network marketing organizations generally are directed at ensuring that product sales ultimately are made to consumers and that advancement within the organization is based on sales of the organization’s products rather than investments in the organization or other non-retail sales related criteria. When required by law, we obtain regulatory approval of our network marketing program or, when this approval is not required, the favorable opinion of local counsel as to regulatory compliance. 14 On July 15, 2016, we reached a settlement with the FTC and entered into a proposed Stipulation to Entry of Order for Permanent Injunction and Monetary Judgment, or the Consent Order, which resolved the FTC’s multi-year investigation of us. The Consent Order became effective on July 25, 2016, or the Effective Date, upon final approval by the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. Pursuant to the Consent Order, we implemented and continue to enhance certain procedures in the U.S. and agreed to be subject to certain audits by an independent compliance auditor (Affiliated Monitors, Inc.) for a period of seven years. Among other requirements, the Consent Order requires us to categorize all existing and future Members in the U.S. as either “preferred members” – who are simply consumers who only wish to purchase product for their own household use — or “distributors” – who are Members who wish to resell some products or build a sales organization. We also agreed to compensate distributors on U.S. eligible sales within their downline organizations, which include purchases by preferred members, purchases by a distributor for his or her personal consumption within allowable limits and sales of product by a distributor to his or her customers. The Consent Order also requires distributors to meet certain conditions before opening Nutrition Clubs and/or entering into leases for their Herbalife Nutrition business in the United States. The Consent Order also prohibits us from making expressly or by implication, any misrepresentation regarding certain lifestyles or amount or level of income, including full-time or part-time income that a participant can reasonably expect to earn in our network marketing program. The Consent Order also prohibits us and other persons who act in active concert with us from misrepresenting that participation in the network marketing program will result in a lavish lifestyle and from using images or descriptions to represent or imply that participation in the program is likely to result in a lavish lifestyle. In addition, the Consent Order prohibits specified misrepresentations in connection with marketing the program, including misrepresentations regarding any fact material to participation such as the cost to participate or the amount of income likely to be earned. The Consent Order also requires us to clearly and conspicuously disclose information related to our refund and buyback policy on certain company materials and websites. The terms of the Consent Order do not change our going to market through direct selling by independent distributors, and compensating those distributors based upon the product they and their sales organization sell. We have implemented new and enhanced procedures required by the terms of the Consent Order and will continue to do so. We continue to monitor the impact of the Consent Order and our board of directors originally established the Implementation Oversight Committee in connection with monitoring compliance with the Consent Order, and more recently, our Audit Committee assumed oversight of continued compliance with the Consent Order. While we currently do not expect the Consent Order to have a long-term and material adverse impact on our business and our Member base, our business and our Member base, particularly in the U.S., have been in the past, and may in the future, be negatively impacted as we and they adjust to the changes. However, the terms of the Consent Order and the ongoing costs of compliance may adversely affect our business operations, our results of operations, and our financial condition. See Part I, Item 1A, Risk Factors, of this Annual Report on Form 10-K for a discussion of risks related to the settlement with the FTC. On January 4, 2018, the FTC released its nonbinding Business Guidance Concerning Multi-Level Marketing, or MLM Guidance. The MLM Guidance explains, among other things, lawful and unlawful compensation structures, the treatment of personal consumption by participants in determining if an MLM’s compensation structure is unfair or deceptive, and how an MLM should approach representations to current and prospective participants. We believe our current business practices, which include new and enhanced procedures implemented in connection with the Consent Order, are in compliance with the MLM Guidance. Additionally, the FTC has promulgated nonbinding Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising, or Guides, which explain how the FTC interprets Section 5 of the FTC Act’s prohibition on unfair or deceptive acts or practices. Consequently, the FTC could bring a Section 5 enforcement action based on practices that are inconsistent with the Guides. Under the Guides, advertisements that feature a consumer and convey his or her atypical experience with a product or service are required to clearly disclose the typical results that consumers can generally expect. The revised Guides also require advertisers to disclose connections between the advertiser and any endorsers that consumers might not expect, known as “material connections.” We have adapted our practices and rules regarding the practices of our Members to comply with the Guides and to comply with the Consent Order. We also are subject to the risk of private party challenges to the legality of our network marketing program both in the United States and internationally. For example, in Webster v. Omnitrition International, Inc., 79 F.3d 776 (9th Cir. 1996), the network marketing program of Omnitrition International, Inc., or Omnitrition, was challenged in a class action by Omnitrition distributors who alleged that it was operating an illegal “pyramid scheme” in violation of federal and state laws. We believe that our network marketing program satisfies federal and other applicable state statutes and case law. In some countries, regulations applicable to the activities of our Members also may affect our business because in some countries we are, or regulators may assert that we are, responsible for our Members’ conduct. In these countries, regulators may request or require that we take steps to ensure that our Members comply with local regulations. The types of regulated conduct include: (1) representations concerning our products; (2) income representations made by us and/or Members; (3) public media advertisements, which in foreign markets may require prior approval by regulators; (4) sales of products in markets in which the products have not been approved, licensed or certified for sale; and (5) classification by government agencies of our Members as employees of the Company. 15 In some markets, it is possible that improper product claims by Members could result in our products being reviewed by regulatory authorities and, as a result, being classified or placed into another category as to which stricter regulations are applicable. In addition, we might be required to make labeling changes. We also are subject to regulations in various foreign markets pertaining to social security assessments and employment and severance pay requirements. As an example, in some markets, we are substantially restricted in the amount and types of rules and termination criteria that we can impose on Members without having to pay social security assessments on behalf of the Members and without incurring severance obligations to terminated Members. In some countries, we may be subject to these obligations in any event. It is an ongoing part of our business to monitor and respond to regulatory and legal developments, including those that may affect our network marketing program. However, the regulatory requirements concerning network marketing programs do not include bright line rules and are inherently fact-based. An adverse judicial or regulatory determination with respect to our network marketing program could have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition, and operating results and may also result in negative publicity, requirements to modify our network marketing program, or a negative impact on Member morale. In addition, adverse rulings by courts in any proceedings challenging the legality of network marketing systems, even in those not involving us directly, could have a material adverse effect on our operations. Although questions regarding the legality of our network marketing program have come up in the past and may come up from time to time in the future, we believe, based in part upon guidance to the general public from the FTC, that our network marketing program is compliant with applicable law. Income Tax, Transfer Pricing, and Other Taxes In many countries, including the United States, we are subject to income tax, transfer pricing and other tax regulations designed to ensure that appropriate levels of income are reported as earned by our U.S. and local entities and are taxed accordingly. In addition, our operations are subject to regulations designed to ensure that appropriate levels of customs duties are assessed on the importation of our products. Although we believe that we are in substantial compliance with all applicable tax rules, regulations, and restrictions, we are subject to the risk that governmental authorities could assert that additional taxes are owed based on findings of their audit. For example, we are currently subject to pending or proposed audits that are at various levels of review, assessment or appeal in a number of jurisdictions involving transfer pricing issues, income taxes, duties, value added taxes, withholding taxes and related interest and penalties in material amounts. In some circumstances, additional taxes, interest and penalties have been assessed, and we will be required to appeal or litigate to reverse the assessments. We have taken advice from our tax advisors and believe that there are substantial defenses to the allegations that additional taxes are owed, and we are vigorously defending against the imposition of additional proposed taxes. The ultimate resolution of these matters may take several years, and the outcome is uncertain. In the event that the audits or assessments are concluded adversely, we may or may not be able to offset or mitigate the consolidated effect of foreign income tax assessments through the use of U.S. foreign tax credits. The laws and regulations governing U.S. foreign tax credits are complex and subject to periodic legislative amendment, and there are restrictions on the utilization of U.S. foreign tax credits. Therefore, we cannot be sure that we would in fact be able to take advantage of any foreign tax credits in the future. Compliance Procedures As indicated above, Herbalife Nutrition, our products and our network marketing program are subject, both directly and indirectly through Members’ conduct, to numerous federal, state and local regulations, in the United States and foreign markets. In 1985, we began to institute formal compliance measures by developing a system to identify specific complaints against Members and to remedy any violations of Herbalife Nutrition’s rules by Members through appropriate sanctions, including warnings, fines, suspensions and, when necessary, terminations. We prohibit Members from making therapeutic claims for our products or misrepresentations regarding participating in our network marketing program, including in our manuals, seminars, and other training programs and materials. Our general policy is to reject Member applications from individuals who do not reside in one of our approved markets. 16 In order to comply with regulations that apply to both us and our Members, we research the applicable regulatory framework prior to entering any new market to identify necessary licenses and approvals and applicable limitations relating to our operations in that market and then work to bring our operations into compliance with the applicable limitations and to maintain such licenses. Typically, we conduct this research with the assistance of local legal counsel and other representatives. We also research laws applicable to Member operations and revise or alter our Member applications, rules, and other training materials and programs to provide Members with guidelines for operating their independent business, marketing and distributing our products and similar matters, as required by applicable regulations in each market. While we have rules and guidelines for our Members and monitor their market conduct, we are, however, unable to ensure that our Members will not distribute our products in countries where we have not commenced operations. In addition, regulations in existing and new markets often are ambiguous and subject to considerable interpretive and enforcement discretion by the responsible regulators. Moreover, even when we believe that we and our Members are in compliance with all applicable regulations, new regulations are being added regularly and the interpretation of existing regulations is subject to change. Further, the content and impact of regulations to which we are subject may be influenced by public attention directed at us, our products, or our network marketing program, so that extensive adverse publicity about us, our products, or our network marketing program may increase the likelihood regulatory scrutiny or action. HUMAN CAPITAL At Herbalife Nutrition, our commitment to improving lives and our communities is at the core of everything we do. This commitment also informs how we value and treat our employees. We seek to provide a work environment where employees can grow and thrive while supporting our Members and their customers. We believe attracting, developing, and retaining a talented and diverse workforce are critical factors that contribute to the success and growth of our business. We have operations globally, requiring investment to assess local labor market conditions and recruit and retain the appropriate workforce. Having a business presence in multiple domestic and international markets also requires us to monitor local labor and employment laws for which we often engage third-party advisors. We monitor the talent needs of our departments and functions with particular focus on the areas where human capital resources are important to daily operations to ensure we can timely manufacture, distribute, and sell products to our Members. As of December 31, 2022, we had approximately 10,100 employees, of which approximately 2,800 were located in the United States. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion We believe diversity is a strength and embrace a core vision that a diverse, equitable, and inclusive culture is imperative to enable us to better serve our Members, stakeholders, and communities. As such, we seek to promote a work environment where all people can thrive, and are committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, at all levels, from our employees, management and executive leadership to our board of directors. Our DEI strategy is currently focused on creating opportunities to further recruit and support diverse talent at all levels, encouraging inclusion and belonging, and embedding equity throughout our culture and operations. Current initiatives include the implementation of a global applicant tracking system to deepen our commitment to fair recruitment processes, offering unconscious bias trainings for all employees, the expansion of existing employee networks which help employees build community and foster a culture of belonging, and further development and involvement of Global and Regional DEI Councils to drive DEI progress. Additionally, we have set diversity goals and targets for women in leadership roles globally and for racial and ethnic minorities in leadership roles in the U.S. Talent Acquisition and Development We seek to attract and retain a talented and diverse workforce. To foster an inclusive hiring process in the U.S., we use a tool that helps ensure that job descriptions do not unintentionally exclude potential applicants. Investment in our employees' professional growth and development is important and helps establish a strong foundation for long- term success. At our Company, we strive to create a learning culture, one in which development is an ongoing focus for all employees and managers. We invest in our employees’ development through a variety of programs. These programs are designed to help our employees grow professionally and strengthen their skills throughout their careers. Examples of these programs include the following: • Training Programs – We provide our employees access to an internal learning management system, Herbalife Nutrition University, which provides professional development courses, technical training, and compliance training to all employees globally. 17 • Mentorship Programs – The principle of servant leadership is a crucial part of our culture. We believe that one way to be a servant leader is to mentor others, and, in 2020, we introduced a new mentorship program to help guide junior employees in their professional journey. Through this program, participating employees can be provided with a one-on-one professional development opportunity, in which they receive dedicated coaching, feedback, and encouragement. • Educational Assistance – Another way we support employees’ continual professional development is by offsetting a portion of the cost of higher education. Program offerings and eligibility vary by region, but may include partial reimbursement of tuition fees incurred for undergraduate and graduate degrees, certificate programs, or skills-based courses. Compensation and Benefits Our Board of Directors and its Compensation Committee establish our general compensation philosophy and oversee and approve the development, adoption, and implementation of compensation policies and programs, which are set at a global level, but also adapted to meet local country requirements as needed. We provide base pay that aligns with employee positions, skill levels, experience, contributions, and geographic location. In addition to base pay, we seek to reward employees with annual incentive awards, recognition programs, and equity awards for employees at certain job grades. Our benefit programs are designed to enhance employee well-being and assist employees in the event of illness, injury, or disability. To this end, we offer benefits that vary worldwide, but may include health insurance, retirement savings programs, and wellness incentives designed to promote a healthy and active lifestyle. We believe we offer our employees wages and benefits packages that are in line with respective local labor markets and laws. Safety, Health, and Well-Being As a nutrition company, we believe the safety, health, and well-being of our employees is of the utmost importance. We endeavor to promote these principles by providing a safe and healthy work environment and encouraging healthy, active lifestyles. Our efforts to provide a safe workplace are guided by various formal policies and programs, which are designed to protect employees, contractors, and visitors from accidents, illnesses, and injuries, while operating in compliance with applicable regulations, including OSHA guidelines in the U.S. We also follow policies and programs regarding material health and safety risks, workplace violence prevention, and incident response and management. In the U.S., our manufacturing facilities in Winston-Salem and Lake Forest are ISO 45001 certified, an international standard for occupational health and safety management. While the COVID-19 pandemic has increased the resources required to keep our employees safe and healthy, we continue to make what we believe are the necessary investments to achieve this goal. In response to, and during various phases of, the pandemic, we have taken several actions, including supporting our employees to work from home when possible, offering mental and emotional wellness resources, and implementing safety measures when necessary at our facilities. Over the course of the pandemic, our senior management team has relied on cross-functional teams to monitor, review, and assess the evolving situation. These cross-functional teams are responsible for recommending risk mitigation actions based on the local risks and in accordance with regulatory requirements and guidelines for the health and safety of our employees and, in the U.S., protocols to align with all federal, state, and local public health guidelines. We believe our proactive efforts have been successful in supporting our business growth despite the obstacles and challenges presented by COVID-19. In addition, we believe in the importance of well-being and provide resources for our employees that support their pursuit of a healthy and active lifestyle. Our flagship wellness program in the U.S., “Wellness for Life,” offers employees a suite of activities to achieve overall wellness through improved fitness, nutrition, intellectual well-being, and financial literacy. The variety of activities offered ensures all employees may participate, no matter where they may be in their wellness journey. While we have many existing regional wellness programs, a new and enhanced global wellness program will launch in January 2023 and feature Herbalife fitness, health and nutrition experts from around the globe. We also have facilities and programs in place that allow employees to incorporate fitness into their daily schedule, such as onsite gyms at several facilities and live virtual classes. Our Members We are dependent on our Members to sell and promote our products to their customers. We frequently interact and work directly with our sales leaders to explore ways to support our and our Members’ businesses, and their customers’ personal goals of living a healthier and more active lifestyle. See the Our Network Marketing Program – Member Compensation and Sales Leader Retention and Requalification section above for sales leader and requalification metrics and further discussion on our sales leaders. 18 Available Information Our Internet website address is www.herbalife.com and our investor relations website is ir.herbalife.com. We make available free of charge on our website our Annual Reports on Form 10-K, Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q, Current Reports on Form 8-K, proxy statements, and amendments to those reports filed or furnished pursuant to Section 13(a) or 15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, or the Exchange Act, as soon as reasonably practical after we file such material with, or furnish it to, the Securities and Exchange Commission, or SEC. The SEC maintains an Internet website that contains reports, proxy and information statements, and other information regarding issuers that file electronically with the SEC at www.sec.gov. We also make available free of charge on our investor relations website at ir.herbalife.com our Principles of Corporate Governance, our Code of Conduct, and the Charters of our Audit Committee, Nominating and Corporate Governance Committee, Compensation Committee, and ESG Committee of our board of directors. Unless expressly noted, the information on our website, including our investor relations website, or any other website is not incorporated by reference in this Annual Report on Form 10-K and should not be considered part of this Annual Report on Form 10-K or any other filing we make with the SEC. Item 1A. Risk Factors Please carefully consider the following discussion of significant factors, events, and uncertainties that make an investment decision regarding our securities risky. The factors, events, uncertainties, and consequences discussed in these risk factors could, in circumstances we may not be able to accurately predict, recognize, or control, have a material adverse effect on our business, reputation, prospects, financial condition, operating results, cash flows, liquidity, and share price. These risk factors do not identify all risks that we face. We could also be affected by factors, events, or uncertainties that are not presently known to us or that we currently do not consider to present material risks. Additionally, the COVID-19 pandemic has amplified many of the other risks discussed below to which we are subject. We are unable to predict the duration and extent to which the pandemic and its related impacts will adversely impact our business, financial condition, and operating results as well as our share price. In addition, given the unpredictable, unprecedented, and fluid nature of the pandemic, it may also materially and adversely affect our business, financial condition, and operating results in ways that are not currently anticipated by or known to us or that we currently do not consider to present material risks. Risk Factor Summary This risk factor summary contains a high-level summary of certain of the principal factors, events and uncertainties that make an investment in our securities risky, including risks related to our business and industry, risks related to regulatory and legal matters, risks related to our international operations, risks related to our indebtedness and risks related to our common shares. The following summary is not complete and should be read together with the more detailed discussion of these and the other factors, events, and uncertainties set forth below before making an investment decision regarding our securities. The principal factors, events, and uncertainties that make an investment in our securities risky include the following: Risks Related to Our Business and Industry • Our failure to establish and maintain Member and sales leader relationships could negatively impact sales of our products and materially harm our business, financial condition, and operating results. • Because we cannot exert the same level of influence or control over our Members as we could if they were our employees, our Members could fail to comply with applicable law or our rules and procedures, which could result in claims against us that could materially harm our business, financial condition, and operating results. • Adverse publicity associated with our Company or the direct-selling industry could materially harm our business, financial condition, and operating results. • Our failure to compete successfully could materially harm our business, financial condition, and operating results. • Our contractual obligation to sell our products only through our Member network and to refrain from changing certain aspects of our Marketing Plan may limit our growth. • Our failure to appropriately respond to changing consumer trends, preferences, and demand for new products and product enhancements could materially harm our Member relationships, our Members’ customer relationships, and product sales or otherwise materially harm our business, financial condition, and operating results. • If we fail to further penetrate existing markets, the growth in sales of our products, along with our operating results could be negatively impacted. 19 • Since one of our products constitutes a significant portion of our net sales, significant decreases in consumer demand for this product or our failure to produce a suitable replacement, could materially harm our business, financial condition, and operating results. • Our business could be materially and adversely affected by natural disasters, other catastrophic events, acts of war or terrorism, cybersecurity incidents, pandemics, and/or other acts by third parties. • We depend on the integrity and reliability of our information technology infrastructure, and any related interruptions or inadequacies may have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition, and operating results. • Disruption of supply, shortage, or increases in the cost of ingredients, packaging materials, and other raw materials as well as climate change could materially harm our business, financial condition, and operating results. • If any of our manufacturing facilities or third-party manufacturers fail to reliably supply products to us at required levels of quality or fail to comply with applicable laws, our financial condition and operating results could be materially and adversely impacted. • If we lose the services of members of our senior management team, our business, financial condition, and operating results could be materially harmed. • Our share price may be adversely affected by third parties who raise allegations about our Company. • ESG matters, including those related to climate change and sustainability, may have an adverse effect on our business, financial condition, and operating results and may damage our reputation. Risks Related to Regulatory and Legal Matters • Our products are affected by extensive regulations, and our failure or our Members’ failure to comply with any regulations could lead to significant penalties or claims, which could materially harm our financial condition and operating results. • Our network marketing program is subject to extensive regulation and scrutiny and any failure to comply, or alteration to our compensation practices in order to comply, with these regulations could materially harm our business, financial condition, and operating results. • We are subject to the Consent Order with the FTC, the effects of which, or any failure to comply therewith, could materially harm our business, financial condition, and operating results. • Our actual or perceived failure to comply with privacy and data protection laws, rules, and regulations could materially harm our business, financial condition, and operating results. • We are subject to material product liability risks, which could increase our costs and materially harm our business, financial condition, and operating results. • If we fail to protect our intellectual property, our ability to compete could be negatively affected, which could materially harm our financial condition and operating results. • If we infringe the intellectual property rights of others, our business, financial condition, and operating results could be materially harmed. • We may be held responsible for additional compensation, certain taxes, or assessments relating to the activities of our Members, which could materially harm our financial condition and operating results. Risks Related to Our International Operations • A substantial portion of our business is conducted in foreign jurisdictions, exposing us to the risks associated with international operations. • We are subject to the anti-bribery laws, rules, and regulations of the United States and the other foreign jurisdictions in which we operate. • If we do not comply with transfer pricing, customs duties VAT, and similar regulations, we may be subject to additional taxes, customs duties, interest, and penalties in material amounts, which could materially harm our financial condition and operating results. • Our business in China is subject to general, as well as industry-specific, economic, political, and legal developments and risks and requires that we utilize a modified version of the business model we use elsewhere in the world. • The United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union could adversely impact us. 20 Risks Related to Our Indebtedness • The terms and covenants in our existing indebtedness could limit our discretion with respect to certain business matters, which could harm our business, financial condition, and operating results. • The conversion or maturity of our convertible notes may adversely affect our financial condition and operating results, and their conversion into common shares could have a dilutive effect that could cause our share price to go down. Risks Related to Our Common Shares • Holders of our common shares may difficulties in protecting their interests because we are incorporated under Cayman Islands law. • Provisions of our articles of association and Cayman Islands law may impede a takeover or make it more difficult for shareholders to change the direction or management of the Company, which could reduce shareholders’ opportunity to influence management of the Company. • There is uncertainty as to shareholders’ ability to enforce certain foreign civil liabilities in the Cayman Islands. • U.S. Tax Reform may adversely impact certain U.S. shareholders of the Company. Risks Related to Our Business and Industry Our failure to establish and maintain Member and sales leader relationships could negatively impact sales of our products and materially harm our business, financial condition, and operating results. We distribute our products exclusively to and through our independent Members, and we depend on them directly for substantially all of our sales. To increase our revenue, we must increase the number and productivity of our Members. Accordingly, our success depends in significant part on our relationships with our sales leaders and our ability to recruit, retain, and motivate a large base of Members, including through an attractive compensation plan, the quality of our reputation, the maintenance of an attractive product portfolio, the breadth and quality of our Member services, and other incentives. The loss of a significant number of Members, changes to our network marketing program, our inability to respond to Member demand or generate sufficient interest in our business opportunities, products, or services, decreases in Member engagement, loss of Member or consumer confidence, or any legal or regulatory impact to our Members’ ability to conduct their business could negatively impact sales of our products and our ability to attract and retain Members, each of which could have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition, and operating results. In our efforts to attract and retain Members, we compete with other direct-selling organizations. In addition, our Member organization has a high turnover rate, which is common in the direct-selling industry, in part because our Members, including our sales leaders, may easily enter and exit our network marketing program without facing a significant investment or loss of capital. For example, the upfront financial cost to become a Member is low, we do not have time or exclusivity requirements, we do not charge for any required training, and, in substantially all jurisdictions, we maintain a buyback program. We believe the COVID-19 pandemic could have an adverse impact on the pipeline of new Members and our Member turnover rate, and may impact our future net sales. See the COVID-19 Pandemic and Sales by Geographic Region sections in Part II, Item 7, Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations, of this Annual Report on Form 10-K for further discussion of the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on our business and results of operations. For additional information regarding sales leader retention rates, see Part I, Item 1, Business, of this Annual Report on Form 10-K. Because we cannot exert the same level of influence or control over our Members as we could if they were our employees, our Members could fail to comply with applicable law or our rules and procedures, which could result in claims against us that could materially harm our business, financial condition, and operating results. Our Members are independent contractors and, accordingly, we are not in a position to provide the same direction, motivation, and oversight as we could if Members were our employees. As a result, there can be no assurance that our Members will participate in our marketing strategies or plans, accept our introduction of new products, or comply with applicable legal requirements or our rules and procedures. 21 We are subject to extensive federal, state, local, and foreign laws, rules, and regulations that regulate our business, products, direct sales channel, and network marketing program. See the Regulation section of Part I, Item 1, Business, of this Annual Report on Form 10- K for additional information. While we have implemented policies and procedures designed to govern Member conduct and to protect the goodwill associated with Herbalife Nutrition, it can be difficult to enforce these policies and procedures because of our large number of Members and their status as independent contractors and because our policies and procedures differ by jurisdiction as a result of varying local legal requirements. In addition, although we train our Members and attempt to monitor our Members’ marketing materials, we cannot ensure that our Members will comply with applicable legal requirements or our policies and procedures or that such marketing materials or other Member practices comply with applicable laws, rules, and regulations. It is possible that a court could hold us liable for the actions of our Members, which could materially harm our business, financial condition, and operating results. Adverse publicity associated with our Company or the direct-selling industry could materially harm our business, financial condition, and operating results. Our reputation and the quality of our brand are critical to our business, and the size and success of our Member organization, our operating results, and our share price may be significantly affected by the public’s perception of Herbalife Nutrition and other direct- selling companies. This perception is dependent upon opinions concerning a number of factors, including: • the safety, quality, and efficacy of our products, as well as those of similar companies; • our Members; • our network marketing program or the attractiveness or viability of the financial opportunities it may provide; • the direct-selling business generally; • actual or purported failure by us or our Members to comply with applicable laws, rules, and regulations, including those regarding product claims and advertising, good manufacturing practices, the regulation of our network marketing program, the registration of our products for sale in our target markets, or other aspects of our business; • our commitment to ESG matters and our ESG practices; • the security of our information technology infrastructure; and • actual or alleged impropriety, misconduct, or fraudulent activity by any person formerly or currently associated with our Members or us. Adverse publicity concerning any of the foregoing whether or not accurate or resulting in investigation, enforcement, or other legal or regulatory actions or the imposition of fines, penalties, or other sanctions, could negatively impact our reputation, our ability to attract, motivate, and retain Members, and our ability to generate revenue. In addition, our Members’ and consumers’ perception of Herbalife Nutrition and our direct-selling business as well as similar companies can be significantly influenced by media attention, publicized scientific research or findings, product liability claims, and other publicity, whether or not it is legitimate. For example, as a result of the prevalence and marked increase in the use of blogs, social media platforms, and other forms of Internet-based communications, the opportunity for dissemination of information, both accurate and inaccurate, is seemingly limitless and readily available, and often does not provide any opportunity for correction or other redress. Adverse publicity that associates use of our products or any similar products with adverse effects, questions the quality or benefits of any such products, or claims that any such products are ineffective, inappropriately labeled, or have inaccurate instructions as to their use, could lead to lawsuits or other legal or regulatory challenges and could materially and adversely impact our reputation, the demand for our products, and our business, financial condition, and operating results. Adverse publicity relating to us has had, and could again have, a negative effect on our ability to attract, motivate, and retain Members, on consumer perception of Herbalife Nutrition, and on our share price. For example, the resulting adverse publicity from the 1986 permanent injunction entered in California caused a rapid, substantial loss of Members in the United States and a corresponding reduction in sales beginning in 1985. See also the risk factor titled “Our share price may be adversely affected by third parties who raise allegations about our Company.” We expect that adverse publicity will, from time to time, continue to negatively impact our business in particular markets and may adversely affect our share price. 22 Our failure to compete successfully could materially harm our business, financial condition, and operating results. The business of developing and marketing weight management and other nutrition and personal care products is highly competitive and sensitive to the introduction of new products and weight management plans, including various prescription drugs, which may rapidly capture a significant share of the market. Our competitors include numerous manufacturers; distributors; marketers; online, specialty, mass, and other retailers; and physicians that actively compete for the business of consumers both in the United States and abroad. Some of our competitors have longer operating histories, significantly greater resources, better-developed and more innovative sales and distribution channels and platforms, greater name recognition, and larger established customer bases than we do. Our present and future competitors may be able to offer products at lower prices or better withstand reductions in prices or other adverse economic or market conditions than we can; develop products that are comparable or superior to those we offer; adapt more quickly or effectively to new technologies, changing regulatory requirements, evolving industry trends and standards, and customer requirements than we can; and/or devote greater resources to the development, promotion, and sale of their products than we do. We are also subject to significant competition for the recruitment of Members from other direct-selling organizations, including those that market weight management products, dietary and nutritional supplements, personal care products, and other types of products, as well as those organizations in which former employees or Members are involved. In addition, because the industry in which we operate is not particularly capital intensive or otherwise subject to high barriers to entry, it is relatively easy for new competitors to emerge that will compete with us, including for our Members and their customers. Accordingly, competition may intensify and we may not be able to compete effectively in our markets. If we are not able to retain our Members and their customers or otherwise compete successfully, our business, financial condition, and operating results would be materially adversely affected. Our contractual obligation to sell our products only through our Member network and to refrain from changing certain aspects of our Marketing Plan may limit our growth. We are contractually prohibited from expanding our business by selling Herbalife Nutrition products through other distribution channels that may be available to our competitors, such as over the Internet, through wholesale sales, by establishing retail stores, or through mail order systems. To the extent legally permitted, an agreement we entered into with our Members provides assurances that we will not sell Herbalife Nutrition products worldwide through any distribution channel other than our network of Members. Since this is an open-ended commitment, there can be no assurance that we will be able to take advantage of innovative new distribution channels that are developed in the future or appropriately respond to consumer preferences as they continue to evolve. In addition, this agreement with our Members provides that we will not make any material changes adverse to our Members to certain aspects of our Marketing Plan that may negatively impact our Members without their approval as described in further detail below. For example, our agreement with our Members provides that we may increase, but not decrease, the discount percentages available to our Members for the purchase of products or the applicable royalty override percentages and production and other bonus percentages available to our Members at various qualification levels within our Member hierarchy. We may not modify the eligibility or qualification criteria for these discounts, royalty overrides, and production and other bonuses unless we do so in a manner to make eligibility and/or qualification easier than under the applicable criteria in effect as of the date of the agreement. Our agreement with our Members further provides that we may not vary the criteria for qualification for each Member tier within our Member hierarchy, unless we do so in such a way so as to make qualification easier. We reserved the right to make changes to our Marketing Plan without the consent of our Members in the event that changes are required by applicable law or are necessary in our reasonable business judgment to account for specific local market or currency conditions to achieve a reasonable profit on operations. In addition, we may initiate other changes that are adverse to our Members based on an assessment of what will be best for the Company and its Members. Under the agreement with our Members, these other adverse changes would then be submitted to our Member leadership for a vote. The vote would require the approval of at least 51% of our Members then at the level of President’s Team earning at the production bonus level of 6% who vote, provided that at least 50% of those Members entitled to vote do in fact vote. While we believe this agreement has strengthened our relationship with our existing Members, improved our ability to recruit new Members, and generally increased the long-term stability of our business, there can be no assurance that our agreement with our Members will not restrict our ability to adapt our Marketing Plan or our business to the evolving requirements of the markets in which we operate. As a result, our growth may be limited. 23 Our failure to appropriately respond to changing consumer trends, preferences, and demand for new products and product enhancements could materially harm our Member relationships, Members’ customer relationships, and product sales or otherwise materially harm our business, financial condition, and operating results. Our business is subject to rapidly changing consumer trends and preferences and product introductions, especially with respect to our nutrition products. Our continued success depends in part on our ability to anticipate and respond to these changes and introductions, and we may not respond or develop new products or product enhancements in a cost-effective, timely, or commercially appropriate manner, or at all, particularly while the COVID-19 pandemic persists. Current consumer trends and preferences have evolved and will continue to evolve as a result of, among other things, changes in consumer tastes; health, wellness, and nutrition considerations; competitive product and pricing pressures; changes in consumer preferences for certain sales channels; shifts in demographics; and concerns regarding the environmental and sustainability impact of the product manufacturing process. The success of our response to changing consumer trends and preferences and product introductions, including any new product offerings and enhancements, depends on a number of factors, including our ability to: • accurately anticipate consumer needs; • innovate and develop new products and product enhancements that meet these needs; • successfully commercialize new products and product enhancements; • price our products competitively; • manufacture and deliver our products in sufficient volumes, at our required levels of quality, and in a cost-effective and timely manner; and • differentiate our product offerings from those of our competitors and successfully respond to other competitive pressures, including technological advancements, evolving industry standards, and changing regulatory requirements. Our failure to accurately predict changes in consumer demand and technological advancements could negatively impact consumer opinion of our products or our business, which in turn could harm our Member relationships and the Members’ relationships with their customers, and cause a loss of sales. In addition, if we do not introduce new products or make enhancements to meet the changing needs of our Members and their customers in a cost-effective, timely, and commercially appropriate manner, or if our competitors release new products or product enhancements before we do, some of our product offerings could be rendered obsolete, which could cause our market share to decline and negatively impact our business, financial condition, and operating results. If we fail to further penetrate existing markets, the growth in sales of our products, along with our operating results, could be negatively impacted. The success of our business is to a large extent contingent on our ability to further penetrate existing markets, which is subject to numerous factors, many of which are out of our control. Our ability to increase market penetration may be limited by the finite number of persons in a given country inclined to pursue a direct-selling business opportunity or consumers aware of, or willing to purchase, Herbalife Nutrition products. Moreover, our growth in existing markets will depend upon increased brand awareness and improved training and other activities that enhance Member retention in our markets. While we have recently experienced significant growth in certain of our foreign markets, we cannot assure you that such growth levels will continue in the immediate or long-term future. Furthermore, our efforts to support growth in such foreign markets could be hampered to the extent that our infrastructure in such markets is deficient when compared to our infrastructure in our more developed markets, such as the United States. For example, there can be no assurances that we will be able to successfully manage expansion of manufacturing operations and a growing and dynamic sales force in China. If we are unable to effectively scale our supply chain and manufacturing infrastructure to support future growth in China or other foreign markets, our operations in such markets may be adversely impacted. Therefore, we cannot assure you that our general efforts to increase our market penetration and Member retention in existing markets will be successful. If we are unable to further penetrate existing markets, our business, financial condition, and operating results could materially suffer. Since one of our products constitutes a significant portion of our net sales, significant decreases in consumer demand for this product or our failure to produce a suitable replacement could materially harm our business, financial condition, and operating results. Our Formula 1 Healthy Meal, which is our best-selling product line, approximated 26% of our net sales for the year ended December 31, 2022. If consumer demand for this product decreases significantly or we cease offering this product without a suitable replacement, or if the replacement product fails to gain market acceptance, our business, financial condition, and operating results could be materially harmed. 24 Our business could be materially and adversely affected by natural disasters, other catastrophic events, acts of war or terrorism, cybersecurity incidents, pandemics, and/or other acts by third parties. We depend on the ability of our business to run smoothly, including the ability of Members to engage in their day-to-day selling and business building activities. In coordination with our suppliers, third-party manufacturers, and distributors, our ability to make and move our products reasonably unimpeded around the world is critical to our success. Any material disruption to our collective operations or supply, manufacturing, or distribution capabilities caused by unforeseen or catastrophic events, such as (i) natural disasters or severe weather conditions, including droughts, fires, floods, hurricanes, volcanic eruptions, and earthquakes; (ii) power loss or shortages; (iii) telecommunications or information technology infrastructure failures; (iv) acts or threats of war, terrorism, or other armed hostilities; (v) outbreaks of contagious diseases, epidemics, and pandemics; (vi) cybersecurity incidents, including intentional or inadvertent exposure of content perceived to be sensitive data; (vii) employee misconduct or error; and/or (viii) other actions by third parties and other similar disruptions, could materially adversely affect our ability to conduct business and our Members’ selling activities. For example, our operations in Central America were impacted in November 2020 when Hurricanes Eta and Iota made landfall in the region. The storms disrupted our supply chain transportation network and our ability to import product. In addition, our distribution center in Honduras experienced flooding, which damaged or destroyed product. Furthermore, our headquarters and one of our distribution facilities and manufacturing facilities are located in Southern California, an area susceptible to fires and earthquakes. Although the events in Central America did not have a material negative impact on our operations, we cannot make assurances that any future catastrophic events will not adversely affect our ability to operate our business or our financial condition and operating results. In addition, catastrophic events may result in significant cancellations or cessations of Member orders; contribute to a general decrease in local, regional, or global economic activity; directly impact our marketing, manufacturing, financial, or logistics functions; impair our ability to meet Member demands; harm our reputation; and expose us to significant liability, losses, and legal proceedings, any of which could materially and adversely affect our business, financial condition, and operating results. In March 2020, the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 outbreak a global pandemic. The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly impacted health and economic conditions globally, disrupted global supply chains, and has adversely affected the Company’s business and that of its Members in certain of the Company’s markets and may continue to impact those markets or others in the future. Government, agency, and other regulatory recommendations, guidelines, mandates, and actions to address public health concerns, including restrictions on movement, public gatherings, and travel and restrictions on, or in certain cases outright prohibitions of, companies’ ability to conduct normal business operations, have and may continue to adversely affect our business. Although we have been classified as an essential business in most jurisdictions where we operate, there is no guarantee that this classification will not change. We may also be forced to or voluntarily elect to limit or cease operations in one or more markets for other reasons, such as the health and safety of our employees or because of disruptions in the operation of our supply chain and sources of supply. For example, it is possible that closures of our manufacturing facilities or those of our third-party contract manufacturers or suppliers could impact our distribution centers and our ability to manufacture and deliver products to our Members. In general, our inventory of products continues to be adequate to meet demand, but we do expect our supply chain and our ability to source and/or manufacture products will be negatively impacted if the negative effects of the pandemic continue for a prolonged period of time or worsen. The pandemic has had an adverse impact on our distribution channels and Members’ product access in some markets, which may, and in some cases will, continue until conditions improve. Our third-party contract manufacturers and suppliers and our Members’ businesses are also subject to many of the same risks and uncertainties related to the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as other pandemic-related risks and uncertainties that may not directly impact our operations, any of which could adversely affect demand for our products. For example, limitations on public gatherings have restricted our Members’ ability to hold meetings with their existing customers and to attract new customers. Significant limitations on cash transactions could also have an adverse effect on sales of products in certain markets. The COVID-19 pandemic has also adversely affected the economies and financial markets of many countries, at times causing a significant deceleration of or interruption to economic activity, which during various stages of the pandemic has reduced production, decreased demand for a broad variety of goods and services, diminished trade levels, and led to widespread corporate downsizing. We have also seen periods of significant disruption of and extreme volatility in the global capital markets, which could increase the cost of, or entirely restrict access to, capital. Further, while some countries have progressed in distributing COVID-19 vaccines to the general population, many countries have limited to no access to vaccines at this time. To the extent the global supply of vaccine remains limited or vaccination rates do not significantly increase, government restrictions in the countries with limited to no access or low vaccination rates may persist or increase and economic activity may remain at depressed levels in those countries or regions. 25 Despite the relaxation of pandemic-related constraints in certain markets, considerable uncertainty still surrounds the COVID-19 pandemic, its potential effects, and the extent and effectiveness of government responses to the pandemic. If the pandemic is not contained, or if new variants emerge or effective vaccines are not made available and utilized quickly enough, the adverse impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic could worsen, impacting all segments of the global economy, and result in a significant recession or worse. However, the unprecedented and sweeping nature of the COVID-19 pandemic makes it extremely difficult to predict how our business and operations will be affected in the long run. Further, the resumption of normal business operations after the disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic may be delayed or constrained by the pandemic’s lingering effects on our Members, consumers, and third- party contract manufacturers and suppliers. Accordingly, our ability to conduct our business in the manner previously done or planned for the future could be materially and adversely affected, and any of the foregoing risks, or other cascading effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, or any other pandemic that may emerge in the future, that are not currently foreseeable, could materially and adversely affect our business, financial condition, and operating results. See the COVID-19 Pandemic and Sales by Geographic Region sections in Part II, Item 7, Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations, of this Annual Report on Form 10- K for further discussion of the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on our business and operating results. We depend on the integrity and reliability of our information technology infrastructure, and any related interruptions or inadequacies may have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition, and operating results. Our business, including our ability to provide products and services to and manage our Members, depends on the performance and availability of our information technology infrastructure, including our core transactional systems. The most important aspect of our information technology infrastructure is the system through which we record and track Member sales, Volume Points, royalty overrides, bonuses, and other incentives. The failure of our information systems to operate effectively, or a breach in security of these systems, could adversely impact the promptness and accuracy of our product distribution and transaction processing. While we continue to invest in our information technology infrastructure, there can be no assurance that there will not be any significant interruptions to such systems, that the systems will be adequate to meet all of our business needs, or that the systems will keep pace with continuing changes in technology, legal and regulatory standards. Further, as discussed in Part II, Item 7, Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations, we recently commenced a Digital Technology Program to develop a new enhanced platform to provide enhanced digital capabilities and experiences to our Members. Our information technology infrastructure, as well as that of our Members and the other third parties with which we interact, may be damaged, disrupted, or breached or otherwise fail for a number of reasons, including power outages, computer and telecommunication failures, internal design, manual or usage errors, workplace violence or wrongdoing, or catastrophic events such as natural disasters, severe weather conditions, or acts of war or terrorism. In addition, numerous and evolving cybersecurity threats, including advanced and persistent cyberattacks, such as unauthorized attempts to access, disable, improperly modify, exfiltrate, or degrade our information technology infrastructure, or the introduction of computer viruses, malware, “phishing” emails, and other destructive software, and social engineering schemes, could compromise the confidentiality, availability, and integrity of our information technology infrastructure as well as those of the third parties with which we interact. These attacks may come from external sources, such as governments or hackers, or may originate internally from an employee or a third party with which we interact. We have been the target of, and may be the target of in the future, malicious cyberattacks, although to date none of these attacks have had a meaningful adverse impact on our business, financial condition, or operating results. The potential risk of cyberattacks may increase as we introduce new technology systems and services. Additionally, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, many of our employees have been encouraged to work remotely, which may increase our exposure to significant systems interruptions, cybersecurity attacks, and otherwise compromise the integrity and reliability of our information technology infrastructure and our internal controls. Any disruptions to, or failures or inadequacies of, our information technology infrastructure that we may encounter in the future may result in substantial interruptions to our operations, expose us to significant liability, and may damage our reputation and our relationships with, or cause us to lose, our Members, especially if the disruptions, failures, or inadequacies impair our ability to track sales and pay royalty overrides, bonuses, and other incentives, any of which would harm our business, financial condition, and operating results. Any such disruptions, failures, or inadequacies could also create compliance risks under the Consent Order and result in penalties, fines, or sanctions under any applicable laws or regulations. Furthermore, it may be expensive or difficult to correct or replace any aspect of our information technology infrastructure in a timely manner, if at all, and we may have little or no control over whether any malfunctioning information technology services supplied to us by third parties are appropriately corrected, if at all. We have encountered, and may encounter in the future, errors in our software and our enterprise network, and inadequacies in the software and services supplied by certain of our vendors, although to date none of these errors or inadequacies have had a meaningful adverse impact on our business, financial condition or operating results. In addition, developments in technology are continuing to evolve and affecting all aspects of our business, including how we effectively manage our operations, interact with our Members and their customers, and commercialize opportunities that accompany the evolving digital and data driven economy. Therefore, one of our top priorities is to modernize our technology and data infrastructure by, among other things, creating more relevant and more personalized experiences wherever our systems interact with Members and their customers; and developing ways to create more powerful digital tools and capabilities for Members to enable them to grow their 26 businesses. These initiatives to modernize our technology and data infrastructure are expected to be implemented over the course of many years and to require significant investments. If these initiatives are not successful, our ability to attract and retain Members and their customers, increase sales, and reduce costs may be negatively affected. Further, these initiatives may be subject to cost overruns and delays and may cause disruptions in our operations. These cost overruns and delays and disruptions could adversely impact our business, financial condition, and operating results. Disruption of supply, shortage, or increases in the cost of ingredients, packaging materials, and other raw materials as well as climate change could materially harm our business, financial condition, and operating results. We and our third-party contract manufacturers depend on third-party suppliers to supply us with the various ingredients, packaging materials, and other raw materials that we use in the manufacturing and distribution of our products. Our business could be materially harmed if we experience operational difficulties with our third-party suppliers, such as increases in costs, reductions in the availability of materials or production capacity, errors in complying with specifications or applicable law, insufficient quality control, and failures to meet production or shipment deadlines. If we fail to develop or maintain our relationships with our third-party suppliers or if such suppliers cease doing business with us or go out of business, we could face difficulties in finding or transitioning to alternative suppliers that meet our standards. Many of the ingredients, packaging materials, and other raw materials we use are subject to fluctuations in availability and price due to a number of factors beyond our control, including crop size, ingredient, water, and land scarcity, market demand for raw materials, commodity market speculation, energy costs, currency fluctuations, supplier and logistics service capacities, import and export requirements, tariffs, and other government policies, and drought, excessive rain, temperature extremes, and other severe weather events. If we experience supply shortages, price increases, or supplier or regulatory impediments with respect to any of the materials we use in our products or packaging, we may need to seek alternative supplies or suppliers and may experience difficulties in finding replacements that are comparable in quality and price. For a discussion of the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on our supply chain see “If any of our manufacturing facilities or third-party manufacturers fail to reliably supply products to us at required levels of quality or fail to comply with applicable laws, our financial condition and operating results could be materially and adversely impacted” below. Further, the risks related to our ability to adequately source the materials required to meet our needs may be exacerbated by the effects of climate change and the legal, regulatory, or market measures that may be implemented to address climate change. There is growing concern that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere may have an adverse impact on global temperatures, weather patterns, and the frequency and severity of extreme weather and natural disasters. If climate change has a negative effect on agricultural productivity, we may be subject to decreased availability or less favorable pricing for certain raw materials that are necessary for our products, such as soybeans, wheat, tea leaves, and nuts. Severe weather conditions and natural disasters can reduce crop size and crop quality, which in turn could reduce our supplies of raw materials, lower recoveries of usable raw materials, increase the prices of our raw materials, increase our cost of storing and transporting our raw materials, or disrupt production schedules. The impacts of climate change may also cause unpredictable water availability or exacerbate water scarcity. In addition, the increasing concern over climate change and related sustainability matters may also result in more federal, state, local, and foreign legal and regulatory requirements relating to climate change, which may significantly increase our costs of operation and delivery. 27

Answer the question based solely on the information provided in the passage. Do not use any external knowledge or resources. [user request] [context document]

Briefly summarize the Ed Sheeran case in no more than 3 bullets and then identify at least 3 other cases mentioned in the article and describe their differences to the Ed Sheeran case in no more than 2 bullets each.

The Case Between Two Top Hits On May 4, 2023, jurors in a Manhattan federal court sided with pop-star Ed Sheeran in a copyright infringement dispute over his Grammy-winning song “Thinking Out Loud.” The daughter of co-writer Ed Townsend of Marvin Gaye’s classic hit “Let’s Get It On” filed the lawsuit a few years ago. The controversial, closely watched trial saw Sheeran label testimony given by the plaintiff’s musicologist expert witness as “criminal.” He also testified he would “quit music” if he lost this trial. Townsend’s daughter alleged Sheeran used the chords, rhythm, and melody from her father’s hit song. Here, the plaintiff had a high burden to satisfy. While Sheeran argued that the chord progression and rhythmic pattern was generic and not protected by copyright, Townsend’s daughter disagreed. The plaintiff failed to prove the combination of those elements, how they were selected and arranged in the music, was original enough to warrant copyright protection. This is not the first case Sheeran has won regarding infringement. The pop star previously won a lawsuit alleging he infringed on a 2015 song called “Oh Why” by Sami Chokri, another U.K. artist. Chokri’s lawsuit alleged Sheeran copied his song by repeating “Oh, I” in the refrain of “Shape of You,” similar to Chokri’s song. While Sheeran might have prevailed this past week, there is still ongoing litigation brought by Structured Asset Sales (“SAS”), which owns a portion of the Townsend family rights to the same song. However, Sheeran’s legal counsel believes that litigation should be resolved due to the outcome of the Townsend family case. Others have stated that SAS are copyright “trolls,” as they are an entity that purchases copyrights for purely for financial gain. The Status of Copyright Law in Pop Music Copyright infringement has been a hot topic in the pop music industry. As a musical genre that has limited chord progressions and rhythm, artists argue there are going to be very similar songs out there that cannot be prevented. The Copyright Act passed by Congress provides nothing to help solve the question of “how similar is too similar” to determine a song infringed on another. The courts have been trying to answer this question, developing the rules on how to handle these matters. As such, litigation has picked up, with it impossible to avoid going to trial by early dismissal or summary judgment. Recently, Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams were found to have infringed on another Gaye hit song, “Got to Give it Up” in 2015 on their hit song, “Blurred Lines.” The pair were ordered to pay over $5 million in damages. The judgment brought an uneasiness to the music world, as many criticized the jury verdict and the Ninth Circuit’s decision, arguing the harmonies and rhythmic patterns were basic building blocks that were free for any musician to use. However, Led Zeppelin was able to fight off a similar infringement case based on the chords and rhythm for their song “Stairway to Heaven,” with a ruling passed down by the Ninth Circuit stating some elements of creative works were so common, an infringement claim needed to be based on “virtually identical” versions. These opposing verdicts made the case against Sheeran high stakes for those in the music industry, watching if the verdict would bring some stability to songwriting or further disrupt the longstanding idea that basic genre elements were fair game for songwriters. However, those who are in support of a looser threshold argue that the songwriter and artist need to be protected. Townsend’s daughter here argued that Sheeran stole the “musical heart” of her father’s work and that artists should be given credit when proper. Supporters of Townsend argue that properly crediting the artists who came before does not stifle creativity. The Potential for Change and the Implications of Sheeran’s Win Overall, some argue that the current copyright law must be changed to avoid high amounts of litigation. A law scholar from UC Berkeley, Peter Menell, suggests a system that would mimic the current system that allows artists to record their own versions of existing music, as long as they pay a licensing fee in advance to the original composer. This is the concept of recording covers of songs. The suggested system would introduce mechanical remix royalties, allowing artists to license their compositions to others. This would allow the purchaser of the license to change aspects of the song to make it their own. Menell argues this would create clarity in the intellectual property landscape and reduce the workload of the courts. However, those who side with Sheeran might argue that a licensing aspect to “remix” a song is not necessary when it comes to the basic structure of a songwriting, and it ultimately prohibits creativity. Jennifer Jenkins, a Duke Law professor who specializes in music copyright, argued that privatizing common chord progressions and elements that were commonplace would remove the “essential ingredients from every songwriter’s tool kit.” In a way, this prevents the starving artist from creating if they cannot afford a license to a common chord progression. However, for right now, songwriters should believe the outcome of the Sheeran case is a step in the right direction.

Answer the question based solely on the information provided in the passage. Do not use any external knowledge or resources. Briefly summarize the Ed Sheeran case in no more than 3 bullets and then identify at least 3 other cases mentioned in the article and describe their differences to the Ed Sheeran case in no more than 2 bullets each. The Case Between Two Top Hits On May 4, 2023, jurors in a Manhattan federal court sided with pop-star Ed Sheeran in a copyright infringement dispute over his Grammy-winning song “Thinking Out Loud.” The daughter of co-writer Ed Townsend of Marvin Gaye’s classic hit “Let’s Get It On” filed the lawsuit a few years ago. The controversial, closely watched trial saw Sheeran label testimony given by the plaintiff’s musicologist expert witness as “criminal.” He also testified he would “quit music” if he lost this trial. Townsend’s daughter alleged Sheeran used the chords, rhythm, and melody from her father’s hit song. Here, the plaintiff had a high burden to satisfy. While Sheeran argued that the chord progression and rhythmic pattern was generic and not protected by copyright, Townsend’s daughter disagreed. The plaintiff failed to prove the combination of those elements, how they were selected and arranged in the music, was original enough to warrant copyright protection. This is not the first case Sheeran has won regarding infringement. The pop star previously won a lawsuit alleging he infringed on a 2015 song called “Oh Why” by Sami Chokri, another U.K. artist. Chokri’s lawsuit alleged Sheeran copied his song by repeating “Oh, I” in the refrain of “Shape of You,” similar to Chokri’s song. While Sheeran might have prevailed this past week, there is still ongoing litigation brought by Structured Asset Sales (“SAS”), which owns a portion of the Townsend family rights to the same song. However, Sheeran’s legal counsel believes that litigation should be resolved due to the outcome of the Townsend family case. Others have stated that SAS are copyright “trolls,” as they are an entity that purchases copyrights for purely for financial gain. The Status of Copyright Law in Pop Music Copyright infringement has been a hot topic in the pop music industry. As a musical genre that has limited chord progressions and rhythm, artists argue there are going to be very similar songs out there that cannot be prevented. The Copyright Act passed by Congress provides nothing to help solve the question of “how similar is too similar” to determine a song infringed on another. The courts have been trying to answer this question, developing the rules on how to handle these matters. As such, litigation has picked up, with it impossible to avoid going to trial by early dismissal or summary judgment. Recently, Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams were found to have infringed on another Gaye hit song, “Got to Give it Up” in 2015 on their hit song, “Blurred Lines.” The pair were ordered to pay over $5 million in damages. The judgment brought an uneasiness to the music world, as many criticized the jury verdict and the Ninth Circuit’s decision, arguing the harmonies and rhythmic patterns were basic building blocks that were free for any musician to use. However, Led Zeppelin was able to fight off a similar infringement case based on the chords and rhythm for their song “Stairway to Heaven,” with a ruling passed down by the Ninth Circuit stating some elements of creative works were so common, an infringement claim needed to be based on “virtually identical” versions. These opposing verdicts made the case against Sheeran high stakes for those in the music industry, watching if the verdict would bring some stability to songwriting or further disrupt the longstanding idea that basic genre elements were fair game for songwriters. However, those who are in support of a looser threshold argue that the songwriter and artist need to be protected. Townsend’s daughter here argued that Sheeran stole the “musical heart” of her father’s work and that artists should be given credit when proper. Supporters of Townsend argue that properly crediting the artists who came before does not stifle creativity. The Potential for Change and the Implications of Sheeran’s Win Overall, some argue that the current copyright law must be changed to avoid high amounts of litigation. A law scholar from UC Berkeley, Peter Menell, suggests a system that would mimic the current system that allows artists to record their own versions of existing music, as long as they pay a licensing fee in advance to the original composer. This is the concept of recording covers of songs. The suggested system would introduce mechanical remix royalties, allowing artists to license their compositions to others. This would allow the purchaser of the license to change aspects of the song to make it their own. Menell argues this would create clarity in the intellectual property landscape and reduce the workload of the courts. However, those who side with Sheeran might argue that a licensing aspect to “remix” a song is not necessary when it comes to the basic structure of a songwriting, and it ultimately prohibits creativity. Jennifer Jenkins, a Duke Law professor who specializes in music copyright, argued that privatizing common chord progressions and elements that were commonplace would remove the “essential ingredients from every songwriter’s tool kit.” In a way, this prevents the starving artist from creating if they cannot afford a license to a common chord progression. However, for right now, songwriters should believe the outcome of the Sheeran case is a step in the right direction. https://lawreview.syr.edu/stealing-the-heart-of-the-musical-work-sheerans-win-doesnt-necessarily-ease-songwriters-anxieties/

You are given a reference document. You must only use information found in the reference document to answer the question asked.

What are the six "recession-proof" careers?

Top 6 Recession-Proof Careers By Team Stash Here are six examples of jobs that are likely to survive a financial slump. While no career is completely recession proof, plenty of jobs withstand economic downturns well. In fact, people with jobs in healthcare, education, and technical fields often thrive during recessions. Here are six examples of jobs that are likely to survive a financial slump. They’re also unlikely to succumb to automation anytime soon. Learn more >> How to prepare for a recession Mental Health Counselors Counselors and psychologists are often in higher demand during recessions than when the economy is humming. Job loss, or the fear of it, induces financial stress which can negatively impact all areas of a person’s life. Counselors help people learn to cope. Demand for marriage and family therapists also increases during recessions since divorce rates tend to spike during periods of economic uncertainty. Mental health counselors need a post-graduate degree and have a median income of about $44,000 a year. Dental Hygienists People require dental care in every type of economic situation, making the dental field virtually recession proof. Dental hygienists educate patients, clean teeth, and provide assistance during complex procedures. They often have more interaction with patients than dentists do. Dental hygienists need a two-year degree and have a median income of about $73,000 a year. Software Developers Demand for talented software developers is soaring and shows no signs of slowing down, even during times of economic duress. Companies are racing to take advantage of big data and are always looking to improve their mobile presence. App development is still huge, and developers that stay current have a wide range of career options available to them. Software developers have a median income of about $102,000 a year. Educators People need education regardless of the way the economy is performing. In fact, many people head back to school during recessions to shore up their skills or learn new ones, and there’s always a need for preschool, elementary, and secondary teachers. Educators need a bachelor’s degree or higher. High school teachers have a median income of about $58,000 a year, and elementary teachers have a median income of about $55,000 a year. Postsecondary educators have a median income of about $75,000 a year. Information Technology Staff IT professionals are always in high demand. In fact, demand is so high that even if your employer reduces its IT workforce during a recession, it’s likely other companies will expand theirs. While outsourcing is a valid concern for workers in the field, enough jobs must remain on site to make it a great career choice. Network and database administration are two strong areas within the larger IT arena. IT professionals need a bachelor’s degree or higher, although some companies will waive this requirement for employees with the right technical skills. They have a median income of about $82,000 a year. Sales Representatives Sales departments have such an enormous impact on a company’s gross income that employers tend to expand them during recessions. Since sales reps are such an integral part of a company’s success, especially during times of slow or negative economic growth, high-performers can expect significant job security. Many sales reps work on a commission basis; if a sales rep doesn’t produce, his income shrinks. This makes it relatively safe for companies to hire and retain them during recessions. Sales reps in non-technical positions often only need a high school diploma. Reps in technical and scientific areas need a bachelor’s degree or higher in a field related to the products they sell. Pay varies widely according to field and experience, but they have a median income of about $60,000 a year. Finding a recession-proof job that pays well and you enjoy is often challenging, but can be done. Plenty of great options exist. All you have to do is choose one and obtain the necessary skills and education.

You are given a reference document. You must only use information found in the reference document to answer the question asked. What are the six "recession-proof" careers? Top 6 Recession-Proof Careers By Team Stash Here are six examples of jobs that are likely to survive a financial slump. While no career is completely recession proof, plenty of jobs withstand economic downturns well. In fact, people with jobs in healthcare, education, and technical fields often thrive during recessions. Here are six examples of jobs that are likely to survive a financial slump. They’re also unlikely to succumb to automation anytime soon. Learn more >> How to prepare for a recession Mental Health Counselors Counselors and psychologists are often in higher demand during recessions than when the economy is humming. Job loss, or the fear of it, induces financial stress which can negatively impact all areas of a person’s life. Counselors help people learn to cope. Demand for marriage and family therapists also increases during recessions since divorce rates tend to spike during periods of economic uncertainty. Mental health counselors need a post-graduate degree and have a median income of about $44,000 a year. Dental Hygienists People require dental care in every type of economic situation, making the dental field virtually recession proof. Dental hygienists educate patients, clean teeth, and provide assistance during complex procedures. They often have more interaction with patients than dentists do. Dental hygienists need a two-year degree and have a median income of about $73,000 a year. Software Developers Demand for talented software developers is soaring and shows no signs of slowing down, even during times of economic duress. Companies are racing to take advantage of big data and are always looking to improve their mobile presence. App development is still huge, and developers that stay current have a wide range of career options available to them. Software developers have a median income of about $102,000 a year. Educators People need education regardless of the way the economy is performing. In fact, many people head back to school during recessions to shore up their skills or learn new ones, and there’s always a need for preschool, elementary, and secondary teachers. Educators need a bachelor’s degree or higher. High school teachers have a median income of about $58,000 a year, and elementary teachers have a median income of about $55,000 a year. Postsecondary educators have a median income of about $75,000 a year. Information Technology Staff IT professionals are always in high demand. In fact, demand is so high that even if your employer reduces its IT workforce during a recession, it’s likely other companies will expand theirs. While outsourcing is a valid concern for workers in the field, enough jobs must remain on site to make it a great career choice. Network and database administration are two strong areas within the larger IT arena. IT professionals need a bachelor’s degree or higher, although some companies will waive this requirement for employees with the right technical skills. They have a median income of about $82,000 a year. Sales Representatives Sales departments have such an enormous impact on a company’s gross income that employers tend to expand them during recessions. Since sales reps are such an integral part of a company’s success, especially during times of slow or negative economic growth, high-performers can expect significant job security. Many sales reps work on a commission basis; if a sales rep doesn’t produce, his income shrinks. This makes it relatively safe for companies to hire and retain them during recessions. Sales reps in non-technical positions often only need a high school diploma. Reps in technical and scientific areas need a bachelor’s degree or higher in a field related to the products they sell. Pay varies widely according to field and experience, but they have a median income of about $60,000 a year. Finding a recession-proof job that pays well and you enjoy is often challenging, but can be done. Plenty of great options exist. All you have to do is choose one and obtain the necessary skills and education.

Answer the question based solely on the information provided in the passage. Do not use any external knowledge or resources. [user request] [context document]

How are smart devices able to spy on people's browsing history, financial transactions, and even health issues? Some apps can bypass security by just tapping into the wifi. how does that work? What do you think about the fact that once a device is connected it can control all of the other devices without consent?

cepro.com New Research Uncovers Litany of Privacy/Security Issues in Consumer IoT Devices Zachary Comeau 5–6 minutes An international team of researchers has unveiled findings on the widespread security and privacy challenges posed by IoT devices in smart homes, delving into the intricacies of local network interactions between 93 different IoT devices and mobile apps. The paper, titled In the Room Where It Happens: Characterizing Local Communication and Threats in Smart Homes, reveals a litany of previously undisclosed security and privacy threats. The research team included researchers from the New York Tandon School of Engineering, Northeastern University, University of Madrid, University of Calgary, the International Computer Science Institute and IMDEA Networks. The research was presented last month at the ACM Internet Measurement Conference last month in Montreal. Researchers narrow in on the local network and how IoT devices can inadvertently compromise consumer privacy through the exposure of sensitive data within those local networks using standard protocols such as UPnP or mDNS. Researchers say this essentially allows nearly any company to learn what devices are in a home, when the user is home, and where the home is. According to the paper, these threats include the exposure of unique device names, UUIDs, and even household geolocation data, all of which can be harvested by companies involved in surveillance capitalism without user awareness. NYU Tandon, quoting PhD student and research co-author Vijay Prakash, says in a writeup that researchers found evidence of IoT devices inadvertently compromising consumer privacy by exposing at least one personally identifiable information, such as unique hardware addresses, UUID, or unique device names, in thousands of existing smart homes. That information can be pieced together to make a house very identifiable, researchers say. The devices included in the research include 93 consumer IP-based smart home devices, as well as their companion apps. Devices included in the study were smart doorbells, smart bulbs, smart thermostats, smart TVs, smart plugs, smart speakers, smart sensors and smart home hubs. Specifically, most of the devices tested are widely available online or in stores, including Amazon Echo devices, Google Nest products, Apple TVs, and more. These local network protocols can be employed as side-channels to access data that is supposedly protected by several mobile app permissions such as household locations, researchers say. Narseo Vallina-Rodriguez, Associate Research Professor of IMDEA Networks and co-founder of AppCensus, says in a statement that side channels are a sneaky way of indirectly accessing sensitive data. “For example, Android app developers are supposed to request and obtain users’ consent to access data like geolocation,” Vallina-Rodriguez says. “However, we have shown that certain spyware apps and advertising companies do abuse local network protocols to silently access such sensitive information without any user awareness. All they have to do is kindly ask for it to other IoT devices deployed in the local network using standard protocols like UPnP.” In addition, Juan Tapiador, professor at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, says the study shows that local network protocols used by IoT devices are not sufficiently protected and expose sensitive information about the home and the homeowners’ use of the devices. “This information is being collected in an opaque way and makes it easier to create profiles of our habits or socioeconomic level,” Tapiador says. In other comments, Dr. Joel Reardon, PhD, associate professor of computer science at the University of Calgary, says the research shows the home network is not as secure as once thought. “If a new phone connects to a network, then all the apps on it can have direct access to everything else on that network,” Reardon says. “The spyware I found in apps with tens of millions of installs was in fact scanning networks and talking to routers.” The research follows multiple separate cybersecurity threats-related to IoT devices uncovered this month. Towards the middle of the month, the Electronic Frontier Foundation nonprofit put out a call to action for the FTC to block the sales of Android TV boxes potentially infected with botnet malware. Researchers around this time also published a report in FCC filings for the Cyber Trust Mark proceedings warning of ultrasonic commands that could potentially be used to activate and control voice assistants. If you enjoyed this article and want to receive more valuable industry content like this, click here to sign up for our digital newsletters!

Answer the question based solely on the information provided in the passage. Do not use any external knowledge or resources. How are smart devices able to spy on people's browsing history, financial transactions, and even health issues? Some apps can bypass security by just tapping into the wifi. how does that work? What do you think about the fact that once a device is connected it can control all of the other devices without consent? cepro.com New Research Uncovers Litany of Privacy/Security Issues in Consumer IoT Devices Zachary Comeau 5–6 minutes An international team of researchers has unveiled findings on the widespread security and privacy challenges posed by IoT devices in smart homes, delving into the intricacies of local network interactions between 93 different IoT devices and mobile apps. The paper, titled In the Room Where It Happens: Characterizing Local Communication and Threats in Smart Homes, reveals a litany of previously undisclosed security and privacy threats. The research team included researchers from the New York Tandon School of Engineering, Northeastern University, University of Madrid, University of Calgary, the International Computer Science Institute and IMDEA Networks. The research was presented last month at the ACM Internet Measurement Conference last month in Montreal. Researchers narrow in on the local network and how IoT devices can inadvertently compromise consumer privacy through the exposure of sensitive data within those local networks using standard protocols such as UPnP or mDNS. Researchers say this essentially allows nearly any company to learn what devices are in a home, when the user is home, and where the home is. According to the paper, these threats include the exposure of unique device names, UUIDs, and even household geolocation data, all of which can be harvested by companies involved in surveillance capitalism without user awareness. NYU Tandon, quoting PhD student and research co-author Vijay Prakash, says in a writeup that researchers found evidence of IoT devices inadvertently compromising consumer privacy by exposing at least one personally identifiable information, such as unique hardware addresses, UUID, or unique device names, in thousands of existing smart homes. That information can be pieced together to make a house very identifiable, researchers say. The devices included in the research include 93 consumer IP-based smart home devices, as well as their companion apps. Devices included in the study were smart doorbells, smart bulbs, smart thermostats, smart TVs, smart plugs, smart speakers, smart sensors and smart home hubs. Specifically, most of the devices tested are widely available online or in stores, including Amazon Echo devices, Google Nest products, Apple TVs, and more. These local network protocols can be employed as side-channels to access data that is supposedly protected by several mobile app permissions such as household locations, researchers say. Narseo Vallina-Rodriguez, Associate Research Professor of IMDEA Networks and co-founder of AppCensus, says in a statement that side channels are a sneaky way of indirectly accessing sensitive data. “For example, Android app developers are supposed to request and obtain users’ consent to access data like geolocation,” Vallina-Rodriguez says. “However, we have shown that certain spyware apps and advertising companies do abuse local network protocols to silently access such sensitive information without any user awareness. All they have to do is kindly ask for it to other IoT devices deployed in the local network using standard protocols like UPnP.” In addition, Juan Tapiador, professor at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, says the study shows that local network protocols used by IoT devices are not sufficiently protected and expose sensitive information about the home and the homeowners’ use of the devices. “This information is being collected in an opaque way and makes it easier to create profiles of our habits or socioeconomic level,” Tapiador says. In other comments, Dr. Joel Reardon, PhD, associate professor of computer science at the University of Calgary, says the research shows the home network is not as secure as once thought. “If a new phone connects to a network, then all the apps on it can have direct access to everything else on that network,” Reardon says. “The spyware I found in apps with tens of millions of installs was in fact scanning networks and talking to routers.” The research follows multiple separate cybersecurity threats-related to IoT devices uncovered this month. Towards the middle of the month, the Electronic Frontier Foundation nonprofit put out a call to action for the FTC to block the sales of Android TV boxes potentially infected with botnet malware. Researchers around this time also published a report in FCC filings for the Cyber Trust Mark proceedings warning of ultrasonic commands that could potentially be used to activate and control voice assistants. If you enjoyed this article and want to receive more valuable industry content like this, click here to sign up for our digital newsletters! https://www.cepro.com/networking/new-research-uncovers-litany-of-privacy-security-issues-in-consumer-iot-devices/

System Instruction: Use only the following information labeled "Context". Do not use any other source of information other than what is provided below.

Question: According to the Judgement of Myers v. United States is the President legally allowed to remove executive officers of the United States whom he has appointed by and with the advice and consent of the Senate from office?

Context: The State Supreme Court’s inclusion of vote counts based on these variant standards exemplifies concerns with the remedial processes that were under way … In addition to these difficulties the actual process by which the votes were to be counted under the Florida Supreme Court’s decision raises further concerns. That order did not specify who would recount the ballots. The county can- vassing boards were forced to pull together ad hoc teams of judges from various Circuits who had no previous training in handling and interpreting ballots. Furthermore, while others were permitted to observe, they were prohibited from objecting during the recount. The recount process, in its features here described, is inconsistent with the minimum procedures necessary to protect the fundamental right of each voter in the special instance of a statewide recount under the authority of a single state judicial officer. Our consideration is limited to the present circumstances, for the problem of equal protection in election processes generally presents many complexities. The question before the Court is not whether local entities, in the exercise of their expertise, may develop different sys- tems for implementing elections. Instead, we are presented with a situation where a state court with the power to assure uniformity has ordered a statewide recount with minimal procedural safeguards. When a court orders a statewide rem- edy, there must be at least some assurance that the rudimentary requirements of equal treatment and fundamental fair- ness are satisfied … Upon due consideration of the difficulties identified to this point, it is obvious that the recount cannot be conducted in compliance with the requirements of equal protection and due process without substantial additional work. It would require not only the adoption (after opportunity for argument) of adequate statewide standards for determining what is a legal vote, and practicable procedures to implement them, but also orderly judicial review of any disputed matters that might arise. In addition, the Secretary has advised that the recount of only a portion of the ballots requires that the vote tabulation equipment be used to screen out undervotes, a function for which the machines were not designed. If a recount of overvotes were also required, perhaps even a second screening would be necessary. Use of the equipment for this purpose, and any new software developed for it, would have to be evaluated for accuracy by the Secretary … Because it is evident that any recount seeking to meet the December 12 date will be unconstitutional for the reasons we have discussed, we reverse the judgment of the Supreme Court of Florida ordering a recount to proceed … None are more conscious of the vital limits on judicial authority than are the Members of this Court, and none stand more in admiration of the Constitution’s design to leave the selection of the President to the people, through their leg- islatures, and to the political sphere. When contending parties invoke the process of the courts, however, it becomes our unsought responsibility to resolve the federal and constitutional issues the judicial system has been forced to confront. The judgment of the Supreme Court of Florida is reversed, and the case is remanded for further proceedings not incon- sistent with this opinion. It is so ordered. STRUCTURE OF THE PRESIDENCY | 60 Excerpted by Alexandria Metzdorf § 61 | STRUCTURE OF THE PRESIDENCY Appointment and Removal Powers Myers v. United States 272 U.S. 52 (1926) Decision: Affirmed Vote: 6-3 Majority: Taft, joined by Van Devanter, Sutherland, Butler, Sanford, Stone Dissent: Holmes Dissent: McReynolds Dissent: Brandeis MR. CHIEF JUSTICE TAFT delivered the opinion of the Court. This case presents the question whether, under the Constitution, the President has the exclusive power of removing exec- utive officers of the United States whom he has appointed by and with the advice and consent of the Senate. Myers … was, on July 21, 1917, appointed by the President, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, to be a postmaster of the first class at Portland, Oregon, for a term of four years. On January 20, 1920, Myers’ resignation was demanded. He refused the demand. On February 2, 1920, he was removed from office by order of the Postmaster Gen- eral, acting by direction of the President. February 10th, Myers sent a petition to the President and another to the Sen- ate Committee on Post Offices, asking to be heard if any charges were filed. He protested to the Department against his removal, and continued to do so until the end of his term. He pursued no other occupation, and drew compensation for no other service during the interval. On April 21, 1921, he brought this suit in the Court of Claims for his salary from the date of his removal, which, as claimed by supplemental petition filed after July 21, 1921, the end of his term, amounted to $8,838.71 … [By the law] under which Myers was appointed with the advice and consent of the Senate as a first-class postmaster, it is provided that “Postmasters of the first, second and third classes shall be appointed and may be removed by the President by and with the advice and consent of the Senate and shall hold their offices for four years unless sooner removed or suspended accord- ing to law.” The Senate did not consent to the President’s removal of Myers during his term. If this statute, in its requirement that his term should be four years unless sooner removed by the President by and with the consent of the Senate, is valid, the appellant, Myers’ administratrix, is entitled to recover his unpaid salary for his full term, and the judgment of the Court of Claims must be reversed. The Government maintains that the requirement is invalid for the reason that, under Article APPOINTMENT AND REMOVAL POWERS | 62 II of the Constitution the President’s power of removal of executive officers appointed by him with the advice and con- sent of the Senate is full and complete without consent of the Senate … We are therefore confronted by the constitutional question, and cannot avoid it … The question where the power of removal of executive officers appointed by the President by and with the advice and consent of the Senate was vested was presented early in the first session of the First Congress. There is no express pro- vision respecting removals in the Constitution, except as Section 4 of Article II … provides for removal from office by impeachment … It was pointed out in this great debate [constitutional convention] that the power of removal, though equally essential to the executive power is different in its nature from that of appointment. Madison, 1 Annals of Congress, 497 et seq.; Cly- mer, 1 Annals, 489; Sedgwick, 1 Annals, 522; Ames, 1 Annals, 541, 542; Hartley, 1 Annals, 481. A veto by the Senate-a part of the legislative branch of the government-upon removals is a much greater limitation upon the executive branch, and a much more serious blending of the legislative with the executive, than a rejection of a proposed appointment. It is not to be implied. The rejection of a nominee of the President for a particular office does not greatly embarrass him in the conscientious discharge of his high duties in the selection of those who are to aid him, because the President usually has an ample field from which to select for office, according to his preference, competent and capable men. The Senate has full power to reject newly proposed appointees whenever the President shall remove the incumbents. Such a check enables the Senate to prevent the filling of offices with bad or incompetent men, or with those against whom there is ten- able objection. The power to prevent the removal of an officer who has served under the President is different from the authority to con- sent to or reject his appointment. When a nomination is made, it may be presumed that the Senate is, or may become, as well advised as to the fitness of the nominee as the President, but in the nature of things the defects in ability or intel- ligence or loyalty in the administration of the laws of one who has served as an officer under the President are facts as to which the President, or his trusted subordinates, must be better informed than the Senate, and the power to remove him may therefor be regarded as confined for very sound and practical reasons, to the governmental authority which has administrative control. The power of removal is incident to the power of appointment, not to the power of advising and consenting to appointment, and when the grant of the executive power is enforced by the express mandate to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, it emphasizes the necessity for including within the executive power as conferred the exclusive power of removal. … The vesting of the executive power in the President was essentially a grant of the power to execute the laws. But the Pres- ident, alone and unaided, could not execute the laws. He must execute them by the assistance of subordinates. This view has since been repeatedly affirmed by this Court. Wilcox v. Jackson (1839) … It was urged that the natural meaning of the term “executive power” granted the President included the appointment and removal of executive subordinates. If such appointments and removals were not an exercise of the executive power, what were they? They certainly were not the exercise of legislative or judicial power in government as usually understood … It is true that the remedy for the evil of political executive removals of inferior offices is with Congress by a simple expedi- ent, but it includes a change of the power of appointment from the President with the consent of the Senate. Congress 63 | APPOINTMENT AND REMOVAL POWERS must determine first that the office is inferior, and second that it is willing that the office shall be filled by appoint- ment by some other authority than the President with the consent of the Senate. That the latter may be an important consideration is manifest, and is the subject of comment by this Court in its opinion in the case of Shurtleff v. United States, (1903), where this Court said: “To take away this power of removal in relation to an inferior office created by statute, although that statute provided for an appointment thereto by the President and confirmation by the Senate, would require very clear and explicit language. It should not be held to be taken away by mere inference or implication … ” [P]ostmasters were all by law appointed by the Postmaster General. This was because Congress … so provided. But there- after, Congress required certain classes of them to be, as they now are, appointed by the President with the consent of the Senate. This is an indication that Congress deemed appointment by the President with the consent of the Senate essential to the public welfare, and, until it is willing to vest their appointment in the head of the Department, they will be subject to removal by the President alone, and any legislation to the contrary must fall as in conflict with the Consti- tution. Summing up, then, the facts as to acquiescence by all branches of the Government in the legislative decision of 1789, as to executive officers, whether superior or inferior, we find that from 1789 until 1863, a period of 74 years, there was no act of Congress, no executive act, and no decision of this Court at variance with the declaration of the First Congress, but there was, as we have seen, clear, affirmative recognition of it by each branch of the Government. Article II grants to the President … the general administrative control of those executing the laws, including the power of appointment and removal of executive officers … the President’s power of removal is further established as an incident to his specifically enumerated function of appointment by and with the advice of the Senate, but that such incident does not, by implication, extend to removals the Senate’s power of checking appointments, and … to hold otherwise would make it impossible for the President, in case of political or other differences with the Senate or Congress, to take care that the laws be faithfully executed … While this Court has studiously avoided deciding the issue until it was presented in such a way that it could not be avoided, in the references it has made to the history of the question, and in the presumptions it has indulged in favor of a statutory construction not inconsistent with the legislative decision of 1789, it has indicated a trend of view that we should not and cannot ignore. When, on the merits, we find our conclusion strongly favoring the view which prevailed in the First Congress, we have no hesitation in holding that conclusion to be correct, and it therefore follows that the Tenure of Office Act of 1867, insofar as it attempted to prevent the President from removing executive officer who had been appointed by him by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, was invalid, and that subsequent legislation of the same effect was equally so. For the reasons given, we must therefore hold that the provision of the law of 1876, by which the unrestricted power of removal of first class postmasters is denied to the President, is in violation of the Constitution, and invalid. This leads to an affirmance of the judgment of the Court of Claims. Judgment affirmed. APPOINTMENT AND REMOVAL POWERS | 64 Excerpted by Alexandria Metzdorf § Humphrey’s Executor v. United States 295 U.S. 602 (1935) Decision: Affirmed Vote: 9-0 Majority: Sutherland, joined by Hughes, Van Devanter, McReynolds, Brandeis, Butler, Stone, Roberts, and Cardozo Mr. Justice SUTHERLAND delivered the opinion of the Court. Plaintiff brought suit in the Court of Claims against the United States to recover a sum of money alleged to be due the deceased for salary as a Federal Trade Commissioner from October 8, 1933, when the President undertook to remove him from office, to the time of his death on February 14, 1934. The court below has certified to this court two questions … in respect of the power of the President to make the removal. The material facts which give rise to the questions are as follows: William E. Humphrey, the decedent, on December 10, 1931, was nominated by President Hoover to succeed himself as a member of the Federal Trade Commission, and was confirmed by the United States Senate. He was duly commissioned for a term of seven years, expiring September 25, 1938; and, after taking the required oath of office, entered upon his duties. On July 25, 1933, President Roosevelt addressed a letter to the commissioner asking for his resignation, on the ground ‘that the aims and purposes of the Administration with respect to the work of the Commission can be carried out most effectively with personnel of my own selection,’ but disclaiming any reflection upon the commissioner personally or upon his services. The commissioner replied, asking time to consult his friends. After some further correspondence upon the subject, the President on August 31, 1933, wrote the commissioner expressing the hope that the resignation would be forthcoming, and saying: ‘You will, I know, realize that I do not feel that your mind and my mind go along together on either the policies or the administering of the Federal Trade Commission, and, frankly, I think it is best for the people of this country that I should have a full confidence.’ The commissioner declined to resign; and on October 7, 1933, the President wrote him: ‘Effective as of this date you are hereby removed from the office of Commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission.’ Humphrey never acquiesced in this action, but continued thereafter to insist that he was still a member of the commis- sion, entitled to perform its duties and receive the compensation provided by law at the rate of $10,000 per annum. Upon these and other facts set forth in the certificate, which we deem it unnecessary to recite, the following questions are certi- fied: 1. Do the provisions of section 1 of the Federal Trade Commission Act, stating that ‘any commissioner may be removed by the President for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office’, restrict or limit the power of 65 | APPOINTMENT AND REMOVAL POWERS the President to remove a commissioner except upon one or more of the causes named? If the foregoing question is answered in the affirmative, then— 2. If the power of the President to remove a commissioner is restricted or limited as shown by the foregoing inter- rogatory and the answer made thereto, is such a restriction or limitation valid under the Constitution of the United States?’ The Federal Trade Commission Act … creates a commission of five members to be appointed by the President by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, and section 1 provides: ‘Not more than three of the commissioners shall be members of the same political party. … ‘ [The Act] in part provides that: ‘Unfair methods of competition in commerce are declared unlawful. The commission is empowered and directed to prevent persons, partnerships, or corporations, except banks, and com- mon carriers subject to the Acts to regulate commerce, from using unfair methods of competition in commerce … ‘ First. The question first to be considered is whether, by the provisions of section 1 … the President’s power is limited to removal for the specific causes enumerated therein. The negative contention of the government is based principally upon the decision of this court in Shurtleff v. United States, (1903) … The situation here presented is plainly and wholly different. The statute fixes a term of office, in accordance with many precedents … The words of the act are definite and unambiguous. … The fixing of a definite term subject to removal for cause, unless there be some countervailing provision or circum- stance indicating the contrary, which here we are unable to find, is enough to establish the legislative intent that the term is not to be curtailed in the absence of such cause. But if the intention of Congress that no removal should be made dur- ing the specified term except for one or more of the enumerated causes were not clear upon the face of the statute, as we think it is, it would be made clear by a consideration of the character of the commission and the legislative history which accompanied and preceded the passage of the act. The commission is to be nonpartisan; and it must, from the very nature of its duties, act with entire impartiality. It is charged with the enforcement of no policy except the policy of the law. Its duties are neither political nor executive, but predominantly quasi judicial and quasi legislative. Like the Interstate Commerce Commission, its members are called upon to exercise the trained judgment of a body of experts ‘appointed by law and informed by experience’ … The legislative reports in both houses of Congress clearly reflect the view that a fixed term was necessary to the effective and fair administration of the law … [T]he language of the act, the legislative reports, and the general purposes of the legislation as reflected by the debates, all combine to demonstrate the congressional intent to create a body of experts who shall gain experience by length of service; a body which shall be independent of executive authority, except in its selection, and free to exercise its judgment APPOINTMENT AND REMOVAL POWERS | 66 without the leave or hindrance of any other official … To the accomplishment of these purposes, it is clear that Congress was of opinion that length and certainty of tenure would vitally contribute. And to hold that, nevertheless, the members of the commission continue in office at the mere will of the President, might be to thwart, in large measure, the very ends which Congress sought to realize by definitely fixing the term of office. … Second. To support its contention that the removal provision … is an unconstitutional interference with the executive power of the President, the government’s chief reliance is Myers v. United States (1926) … [T]he narrow point actually decided was only that the President had power to remove a postmaster of the first class, without the advice and consent of the Senate as required by act of Congress. In the course of the opinion of the court, expressions occur which tend to sustain the government’s contention, but these are beyond the point involved and, therefore, do not come within the rule of stare decisis … The office of a postmaster is so essentially unlike the office now involved that the decision in the Myers case cannot be accepted as controlling our decision here. A postmaster is an executive officer restricted to the performance of executive functions. He is charged with no duty at all related to either the legislative or judicial power. The actual decision in the Myers case finds support in the theory that such an officer is merely one of the units in the executive department and, hence, inherently subject to the exclusive and illimitable power of removal by the Chief Executive, whose subordinate and aid he is. Putting aside dicta, which may be followed if sufficiently persuasive but which are not controlling, the nec- essary reach of the decision goes far enough to include all purely executive officers. It goes no farther; much less does it include an officer who occupies no place in the executive department and who exercises no part of the executive power vested by the Constitution in the President. The Federal Trade Commission is an administrative body created by Congress to carry into effect legislative policies embodied in the statute in accordance with the legislative standard therein prescribed, and to perform other specified duties as a legislative or as a judicial aid. Such a body cannot in any proper sense be characterized as an arm or an eye of the executive. Its duties are performed without executive leave and, in the contemplation of the statute, must be free from executive control. In administering the provisions of the statute in respect of ‘unfair methods of competition,’ that is to say, in filling in and administering the details embodied by that general standard, the commission acts in part quasi leg- islatively and in part quasi judicially … To the extent that it exercises any executive function, as distinguished from execu- tive power in the constitutional sense, it does so in the discharge and effectuation of its quasi legislative or quasi judicial powers, or as an agency of the legislative or judicial departments of the government … If Congress is without authority to prescribe causes for removal of members of the trade commission and limit executive power of removal accordingly, that power at once becomes practically all-inclusive in respect of civil officers with the exception of the judiciary provided for by the Constitution … We are thus confronted with the serious question whether not only the members of these quasi legislative and quasi judicial bodies, but the judges of the legislative Court of Claims, exercising judicial power … con- tinue in office only at the pleasure of the President. We think it plain under the Constitution that illimitable power of removal is not possessed by the President in respect of officers of the character of those just named. The authority of Congress, in creating quasi legislative or quasi judicial agencies, to require them to act in discharge of their duties independently of executive control cannot well be doubted. CHIEF JUSTICE REHNQUIST delivered the opinion of the Court. This case presents us with a challenge to the independent counsel provisions of the Ethics in Government Act of 1978 … We hold today that these provisions of the Act do not violate the Appointments Clause of the Constitution, Art. II, § 2, cl. 2, or the limitations of Article III, nor do they impermissibly interfere with the President’s authority under Article II in violation of the constitutional principle of separation of powers. Briefly stated, Title VI of the Ethics in Government Act … allows for the appointment of an “independent counsel” to investigate and, if appropriate, prosecute certain high-ranking Government officials for violations of federal criminal laws … The Act requires the Attorney General, upon receipt of information that he determines is “sufficient to constitute grounds to investigate whether any person [covered by the Act] may have violated any Federal criminal law,” to conduct a preliminary investigation of the matter … If … the Attorney General has determined that there are “reasonable grounds to believe that further investigation or prosecution is warranted,” then he “shall apply to the division of the court for the appointment of an independent counsel … ” With respect to all matters within the independent counsel’s jurisdiction, the Act grants the counsel “full power and independent authority to exercise all investigative and prosecutorial functions and powers of the Department of Justice, the Attorney General, and any other officer or employee of the Department of Justice … ” The functions of the inde- pendent counsel include conducting grand jury proceedings and other investigations, participating in civil and criminal court proceedings and litigation, and appealing any decision in any case in which the counsel participates in an official capacity … the counsel’s powers include “initiating and conducting prosecutions in any court of competent jurisdiction, framing and signing indictments, filing informations, and handling all aspects of any case, in the name of the United States … ” … An independent counsel has “full authority to dismiss matters within [his or her] prosecutorial jurisdiction without conducting an investigation or at any subsequent time before prosecution, if to do so would be consistent” with Department of Justice policy … Two statutory provisions govern the length of an independent counsel’s tenure in office. The first defines the procedure for removing an independent counsel. Section 596(a)(1) provides: “An independent counsel appointed under this chapter may be removed from office, other than by impeachment and conviction, only by the personal action of the Attorney General … ” If an independent counsel is removed pursuant to this section, the Attorney General is required to submit a report to both the Special Division and the Judiciary Committees of the Senate and the House “specifying the facts found and the ultimate grounds for such removal.” § 596(a)(2). Under the current version of the Act, an independent counsel can obtain judicial review of the Attorney General’s action by filing a civil action in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia … The reviewing court is authorized to grant reinstatement or “other appropriate relief.” § 596(a)(3) … The other provision governing the tenure of the independent counsel defines the procedures for “terminating” the coun- sel’s office. Under § 596(b)(1), the office of an independent counsel terminates when he or she notifies the Attorney Gen- eral that he or she has completed or substantially completed any investigations or prosecutions undertaken pursuant to the Act … 69 | APPOINTMENT AND REMOVAL POWERS Finally, the Act provides for congressional oversight of the activities of independent counsel … On April 23, 1986, the Special Division appointed James C. McKay as independent counsel to investigate “whether the testimony of … Olson and his revision of such testimony on March 10, 1983, violated either 18 U. S. C. § 1505 or § 1001, or any other provision of federal law … ” McKay later resigned as independent counsel, and on May 29, 1986, the Division appointed appellant Morrison as his replacement, with the same jurisdiction … [I]n May and June 1987, appellant caused a grand jury to issue and serve … on appellees. All three appellees moved to quash the subpoenas, claiming, among other things, that the independent counsel provisions of the Act were unconsti- tutional and that appellant accordingly had no authority to proceed … The initial question is, accordingly, whether appellant is an “inferior” or a “principal” officer … If she is the latter, as the Court of Appeals concluded, then the Act is in violation of the Appointments Clause. The line between “inferior” and “principal” officers is one that is far from clear, and the Framers provided little guidance into where it should be drawn … [I]n our view appellant clearly falls on the “inferior officer” side of that line. Several factors lead to this conclusion. First, appellant is subject to removal by a higher Executive Branch official. Although appellant may not be “subordinate” to the Attorney General (and the President) insofar as she possesses a degree of independent discretion to exercise the powers delegated to her under the Act, the fact that she can be removed by the Attorney General indicates that she is to some degree “inferior” in rank and authority. Second, appellant is empowered by the Act to perform only certain, limited duties … Admittedly, the Act delegates to appellant “full power and independent authority to exercise all investigative and prosecutorial functions and powers of the Department of Justice,” § 594(a), but this grant of authority does not include any authority to formulate policy for the Government or the Executive Branch, nor does it give appellant any administrative duties outside of those necessary to operate her office. The Act specifically provides that in policy matters appellant is to comply to the extent possible with the policies of the Department … Third, appellant’s office is limited in jurisdiction. Not only is the Act itself restricted in applicability to certain federal officials suspected of certain serious federal crimes, but an independent counsel can only act within the scope of the juris- diction that has been granted by the Special Division pursuant to a request by the Attorney General. Finally, appellant’s office is limited in tenure. There is concededly no time limit on the appointment of a particular counsel. Nonetheless, the office of independent counsel is “temporary” in the sense that an independent counsel is appointed essentially to accomplish a single task, and when that task is over the office is terminated, either by the counsel herself or by action of the Special Division. Unlike other prosecutors, appellant has no ongoing responsibilities that extend beyond the accom- plishment of the mission that she was appointed for and authorized by the Special Division to undertake. In our view, these factors relating to the “ideas of tenure, duration … and duties” of the independent counsel, Germaine, are sufficient to establish that appellant is an “inferior” officer in the constitutional sense. This conclusion is consistent with our few previous decisions that considered the question whether a particular Govern- ment official is a “principal” or an “inferior” officer … APPOINTMENT AND REMOVAL POWERS | 70 Appellees argue that even if appellant is an “inferior” officer, the Clause does not empower Congress to place the power to appoint such an officer outside the Executive Branch. They contend that the Clause does not contemplate congres- sional authorization of “interbranch appointments,” in which an officer of one branch is appointed by officers of another branch. The relevant language of the Appointments Clause is worth repeating. It reads: ” … but the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments.” On its face, the language of this “excepting clause” admits of no limitation on interbranch appointments. Indeed, the inclusion of “as they think proper” seems clearly to give Congress significant discretion to determine whether it is “proper” to vest the appointment of, for example, executive officials in the “courts of Law … ” We also note that the history of the Clause provides no support for appellees’ position … We do not mean to say that Congress’ power to provide for interbranch appointments of “inferior officers” is unlimited. In addition to separation-of-powers concerns, which would arise if such provisions for appointment had the potential to impair the constitutional functions assigned to one of the branches, Ex parte Siebold (1879) itself suggested that Con- gress’ decision to vest the appointment power in the courts would be improper if there was some “incongruity” between the functions normally performed by the courts and the performance of their duty to appoint … In this case, however, we do not think it impermissible for Congress to vest the power to appoint independent counsel in a specially created federal court … We now turn to consider whether the Act is invalid under the constitutional principle of separation of powers. Two related issues must be addressed: The first is whether the provision of the Act restricting the Attorney General’s power to remove the independent counsel to only those instances in which he can show “good cause,” taken by itself, impermis- sibly interferes with the President’s exercise of his constitutionally appointed functions. The second is whether, taken as a whole, the Act violates the separation of powers by reducing the President’s ability to control the prosecutorial powers wielded by the independent counsel. Unlike both Bowsher and Myers, this case does not involve an attempt by Congress itself to gain a role in the removal of executive officials other than its established powers of impeachment and conviction. The Act instead puts the removal power squarely in the hands of the Executive Branch; an independent counsel may be removed from office, “only by the personal action of the Attorney General, and only for good cause.” § 596(a)(1) … There is no requirement of congres- sional approval of the Attorney General’s removal decision, though the decision is subject to judicial review. § 596(a)(3). In our view, the removal provisions of the Act make this case more analogous to Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, (1935), and Wiener v. United States, (1958), than to Myers or Bowsher … Appellees contend that Humphrey’s Executor and Wiener are distinguishable from this case because they did not involve officials who performed a “core executive function.” They argue that our decision in Humphrey’s Executor rests on a distinction between “purely executive” officials and officials who exercise “quasi-legislative” and “quasi-judicial” powers. In their view, when a “purely executive” official is involved, the governing precedent is Myers, not Humphrey’s Executor. And, under Myers, the President must have absolute discretion to discharge “purely” executive officials at will … We undoubtedly did rely on the terms “quasi-legislative” and “quasi-judicial” to distinguish the officials involved in Humphrey’s Executor and Wiener from those in Myers, but our present considered view is that the determination of whether the Constitution allows Congress to impose a “good cause”-type restriction on the President’s power to remove 71 | APPOINTMENT AND REMOVAL POWERS an official cannot be made to turn on whether or not that official is classified as “purely executive … ” The analysis con- tained in our removal cases is designed not to define rigid categories of those officials who may or may not be removed at will by the President … but to ensure that Congress does not interfere with the President’s exercise of the “execu- tive power” and his constitutionally appointed duty to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed” under Article II. Myers was undoubtedly correct in its holding, and in its broader suggestion that there are some “purely executive” officials who must be removable by the President at will if he is to be able to accomplish his constitutional role … But as the Court noted in Wiener: “The assumption was short-lived that the Myers case recognized the President’s inherent constitutional power to remove officials no matter what the relation of the executive to the discharge of their duties and no matter what restrictions Con- gress may have imposed regarding the nature of their tenure … ” [T]he real question is whether the removal restrictions are of such a nature that they impede the President’s ability to perform his constitutional duty, and the functions of the officials in question must be analyzed in that light. Considering for the moment the “good cause” removal provision in isolation from the other parts of the Act at issue in this case, we cannot say that the imposition of a “good cause” standard for removal by itself unduly trammels on executive authority. There is no real dispute that the functions performed by the independent counsel are “executive” in the sense that they are law enforcement functions that typically have been undertaken by officials within the Executive Branch. As we noted above, however, the independent counsel is an inferior officer under the Appointments Clause … we simply do not see how the President’s need to control the exercise of that discretion is so central to the functioning of the Executive Branch as to require as a matter of constitutional law that the counsel be terminable at will by the President … Nor do we think that the “good cause” removal provision at issue here impermissibly burdens the President’s power to control or supervise the independent counsel, as an executive official, in the execution of his or her duties under the Act. This is not a case in which the power to remove an executive official has been completely stripped from the President, thus providing no means for the President to ensure the “faithful execution” of the laws. Rather, because the indepen- dent counsel may be terminated for “good cause,” the Executive, through the Attorney General, retains ample authority to assure that the counsel is competently performing his or her statutory responsibilities in a manner that comports with the provisions of the Act … Here, as with the provision of the Act conferring the appointment authority of the indepen- dent counsel on the special court, the congressional determination to limit the removal power of the Attorney General was essential, in the view of Congress, to establish the necessary independence of the office. We do not think that this limitation as it presently stands sufficiently deprives the President of control over the independent counsel to interfere impermissibly with his constitutional obligation to ensure the faithful execution of the laws … The final question to be addressed is whether the Act, taken as a whole, violates the principle of separation of powers by unduly interfering with the role of the Executive Branch. Time and again we have reaffirmed the importance in our con- stitutional scheme of the separation of governmental powers into the three coordinate branches … We have not hesitated to invalidate provisions of law which violate this principle. On the other hand, we have never held that the Constitution requires that the three branches of Government “operate with absolute independence … ” In the often-quoted words of Justice Jackson: APPOINTMENT AND REMOVAL POWERS | 72 “While the Constitution diffuses power the better to secure liberty, it also contemplates that practice will integrate the dispersed powers into a workable government. It enjoins upon its branches separateness but interdependence, autonomy but reciprocity.” Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, (1952) (concurring opinion). We observe first that this case does not involve an attempt by Congress to increase its own powers at the expense of the Executive Branch … Indeed, with the exception of the power of impeachment — which applies to all officers of the United States — Congress retained for itself no powers of control or supervision over an independent counsel. The Act does empower certain Members of Congress to request the Attorney General to apply for the appointment of an inde- pendent counsel, but the Attorney General has no duty to comply with the request, although he must respond within a certain time limit. § 592(g). Other than that, Congress’ role under the Act is limited to receiving reports or other informa- tion and oversight of the independent counsel’s activities, § 595(a), functions that we have recognized generally as being incidental to the legislative function of Congress … Similarly, we do not think that the Act works any judicial usurpation of properly executive functions. As should be apparent from our discussion of the Appointments Clause above, the power to appoint inferior officers such as indepen- dent counsel is not in itself an “executive” function in the constitutional sense, at least when Congress has exercised its power to vest the appointment of an inferior office in the “courts of Law.” … In addition, once the court has appointed a counsel and defined his or her jurisdiction, it has no power to supervise or control the activities of the counsel. … [T]he various powers delegated by the statute to the Division are not supervisory or administrative, nor are they functions that the Constitution requires be performed by officials within the Executive Branch. The Act does give a federal court the power to review the Attorney General’s decision to remove an independent counsel, but in our view this is a function that is well within the traditional power of the Judiciary. Finally, we do not think that the Act “impermissibly undermine[s]” the powers of the Executive Branch … or “disrupts the proper balance between the coordinate branches [by] prevent[ing] the Executive Branch from accomplishing its con- stitutionally assigned functions … ” It is undeniable that the Act reduces the amount of control or supervision that the Attorney General and, through him, the President exercises over the investigation and prosecution of a certain class of alleged criminal activity … The Act … gives the Executive a degree of control over the power to initiate an investigation by the independent counsel. In addition, the jurisdiction of the independent counsel is defined with reference to the facts submitted by the Attorney General, and once a counsel is appointed, the Act requires that the counsel abide by Justice Department policy unless it is not “possible” to do so. Notwithstanding the fact that the counsel is to some degree “inde- pendent” and free from executive supervision to a greater extent than other federal prosecutors, in our view these features of the Act give the Executive Branch sufficient control over the independent counsel to ensure that the President is able to perform his constitutionally assigned duties. In sum, we conclude today that it does not violate the Appointments Clause for Congress to vest the appointment of independent counsel in the Special Division; that the powers exercised by the Special Division under the Act do not vio- late Article III; and that the Act does not violate the separation-of-powers principle by impermissibly interfering with the functions of the Executive Branch. The decision of the Court of Appeals is therefore Reversed. JUSTICE KENNEDY took no part in the consideration or decision of this case. 73 | APPOINTMENT AND REMOVAL POWERS Original excerpt in Lawrence Lessig, Constitutional Law: Separation of Powers, Federalism, and Fourteenth Amendment, published by H2O. Further excerpted by Alexandria Metzdorf. Licensed under CC BY-NC-SA. § NLRB v. Canning 573 U.S. 513 (2014) Decision: Affirmed Vote: 9-0 Majority: Breyer, joined by Kennedy, Ginsburg, Sotomayor, and Kagan Concurrence: Scalia (in judgment), joined by Roberts, Thomas, and Alito Note: A pro forma session is defined as “From the Latin, meaning ‘as a matter of form,’ a pro forma session is a brief meeting of the Senate, often only a few minutes in duration.” https://www.senate.gov/general/Features/Ses- sions.htm#:~:text=Pro%20Forma%20Session%3A%20From%20the,following%20the%20November%20gen- eral%20elections. Visit https://www.c-span.org/video/?526638-1/senate-pro-forma-session to see the c-span to view a pro forma session. Justice Breyer delivered the opinion of the Court. Ordinarily the President must obtain “the Advice and Consent of the Senate” before appointing an “Office[r] of the United States.” U. S. Const., Art. II, §2, cl. 2. But the Recess Appointments Clause creates an exception. It gives the Pres- ident alone the power “to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commis- sions which shall expire at the End of their next Session.” Art. II, §2, cl. 3. We here consider three questions about the application of this Clause. The first concerns the scope of the words “recess of the Senate.” Does that phrase refer only to an inter-session recess (i.e., a break between formal sessions of Congress), or does it also include an intra-session recess, such as a summer recess in the midst of a session? We conclude that the Clause applies to both kinds of recess. The second question concerns the scope of the words “vacancies that may happen.” Does that phrase refer only to vacan- cies that first come into existence during a recess, or does it also include vacancies that arise prior to a recess but continue to exist during the recess? We conclude that the Clause applies to both kinds of vacancy. The third question concerns calculation of the length of a “recess.” The President made the appointments here at issue on January 4, 2012. At that time the Senate was in recess pursuant to a December 17, 2011, resolution providing for a series of brief recesses punctuated by “pro forma session[s],” with “no business … transacted,” every Tuesday and Friday through January 20, 2012 … In calculating the length of a recess are we to ignore the pro forma sessions, thereby treating the series of brief recesses as a single, month-long recess? We conclude that we cannot ignore these pro forma sessions. APPOINTMENT AND REMOVAL POWERS | 74 Our answer to the third question means that, when the appointments before us took place, the Senate was in the midst of a 3-day recess. Three days is too short a time to bring a recess within the scope of the Clause. Thus we conclude that the President lacked the power to make the recess appointments here at issue. The case before us arises out of a labor dispute. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) found that a Pepsi-Cola distributor, Noel Canning, had unlawfully refused to reduce to writing and execute a collective-bargaining agreement with a labor union. The Board ordered the distributor to execute the agreement and to make employees whole for any losses … The Pepsi-Cola distributor subsequently asked the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to set the Board’s order aside. It claimed that three of the five Board members had been invalidly appointed, leaving the Board with- out the three lawfully appointed members necessary for it to act … The three members in question were Sharon Block, Richard Griffin, and Terence Flynn. In 2011 the President had nom- inated each of them to the Board. As of January 2012, Flynn’s nomination had been pending in the Senate awaiting confirmation for approximately a year. The nominations of each of the other two had been pending for a few weeks. On January 4, 2012, the President, invoking the Recess Appointments Clause, appointed all three to the Board. The distributor argued that the Recess Appointments Clause did not authorize those appointments. It pointed out that on December 17, 2011, the Senate, by unanimous consent, had adopted a resolution providing that it would take a series of brief recesses beginning the following day … Pursuant to that resolution, the Senate held pro forma sessions every Tuesday and Friday until it returned for ordinary business on January 23, 2012 … The President’s January 4 appoint- ments were made between the January 3 and January 6 pro forma sessions. In the distributor’s view, each pro forma session terminated the immediately preceding recess. Accordingly, the appointments were made during a 3-day adjourn- ment, which is not long enough to trigger the Recess Appointments Clause. The Court of Appeals agreed that the appointments fell outside the scope of the Clause. But the court set forth different reasons … Since the second session of the 112th Congress began on January 3, 2012, the day before the President’s appointments, those appointments occurred during an intra-session recess, and the appointments consequently fell out- side the scope of the Clause … We asked the parties to address not only the Court of Appeals’ interpretation of the Clause but also the distributor’s initial argument, namely, “[w]hether the President’s recess-appointment power may be exercised when the Senate is con- vening every three days in pro forma sessions … ” … [T]he Recess Appointments Clause reflects the tension between, on the one hand, the President’s continuous need for “the assistance of subordinates,” Myers v. United States, (1926), and, on the other, the Senate’s practice, particularly dur- ing the Republic’s early years, of meeting for a single brief session each year … We seek to interpret the Clause as granting the President the power to make appointments during a recess but not offering the President the authority routinely to avoid the need for Senate confirmation. 75 | APPOINTMENT AND REMOVAL POWERS Second, in interpreting the Clause, we put significant weight upon historical practice. For one thing, the interpretive questions before us concern the allocation of power between two elected branches of Government. Long ago Chief Jus- tice Marshall wrote that “a doubtful question, one on which human reason may pause, and the human judgment be suspended, in the decision of which the great principles of liberty are not concerned, but the respective powers of those who are equally the representa- tives of the people, are to be adjusted; if not put at rest by the practice of the government, ought to receive a considerable impression from that practice.” McCulloch v. Maryland, (1819) … The first question concerns the scope of the phrase “the recess of the Senate … ” The Constitution provides for congres- sional elections every two years. And the 2-year life of each elected Congress typically consists of two formal 1-year ses- sions, each separated from the next by an “inter-session recess … ” The Senate or the House of Representatives announces an inter-session recess by approving a resolution stating that it will “adjourn sine die,” i.e., without specifying a date to return (in which case Congress will reconvene when the next formal session is scheduled to begin). The Senate and the House also take breaks in the midst of a session. The Senate or the House announces any such “intra- session recess” by adopting a resolution stating that it will “adjourn” to a fixed date, a few days or weeks or even months later. All agree that the phrase “the recess of the Senate” covers inter-session recesses. The question is whether it includes intra-session recesses as well. In our view, the phrase “the recess” includes an intra-session recess of substantial length … History … shows only that Congress generally took long breaks between sessions, while taking no significant intra-session breaks at all (five times it took a break of a week or so at Christmas) … In 1867 and 1868, Congress for the first time took substantial, nonholiday intra-session breaks, and President Andrew Johnson made dozens of recess appointments. The Federal Court of Claims upheld one of those specific appointments, writing “[w]e have no doubt that a vacancy occur- ring while the Senate was thus temporarily adjourned” during the “first session of the Fortieth Congress” was “legally filled by appointment of the President alone.” Gould v. United States, (1884) … … [R]estricting the Clause to inter-session recesses would frustrate its purpose. It would make the President’s recess- appointment power dependent on a formalistic distinction of Senate procedure. Moreover, the President has consis- tently and frequently interpreted the word “recess” to apply to intra-session recesses, and has acted on that interpretation. The Senate as a body has done nothing to deny the validity of this practice for at least three-quarters of a century … [A] 3-day recess would be too short … The Adjournments Clause reflects the fact that a 3-day break is not a significant interruption of legislative business. As the Solicitor General says, it is constitutionally de minimis. A Senate recess that is so short that it does not require the consent of the House is not long enough to trigger the President’s recess-appoint- ment power. In sum, we conclude that the phrase “the recess” applies to both intra-session and inter-session recesses. If a Senate recess is so short that it does not require the consent of the House, it is too short to trigger the Recess Appointments Clause. See Art. I, §5, cl. 4. And a recess lasting less than 10 days is presumptively too short as well. Applying this standard, we find that the pro forma sessions were sessions for purposes of the Clause. First, the Senate said it was in session. The Journal of the Senate and the Congressional Record indicate that the Senate convened for a series of twice-weekly “sessions” from December 20 through January 20 … Second, the Senate’s rules make clear that during its pro forma sessions, despite its resolution that it would conduct no business, the Senate retained the power to conduct business. During any pro forma session, the Senate could have con- ducted business simply by passing a unanimous consent agreement … It is consequently unsurprising that the Senate has enacted legislation during pro forma sessions even when it has said that no business will be transacted. Indeed, the Senate passed a bill by unanimous consent during the second pro forma session after its December 17 adjournment … The Recess Appointments Clause responds to a structural difference between the Executive and Legislative Branches: The Executive Branch is perpetually in operation, while the Legislature only acts in intervals separated by recesses. The purpose of the Clause is to allow the Executive to continue operating while the Senate is unavailable. We believe that the Clause’s text, standing alone, is ambiguous. It does not resolve whether the President may make appointments during intra-session recesses, or whether he may fill pre-recess vacancies. But the broader reading better serves the Clause’s struc- tural function. Moreover, that broader reading is reinforced by centuries of history, which we are hesitant to disturb. We thus hold that the Constitution empowers the President to fill any existing vacancy during any recess—intra-session or inter-session—of sufficient length. Given our answer to the last question before us, we conclude that the Recess Appointments Clause does not give the President the constitutional authority to make the appointments here at issue. Because the Court of Appeals reached the same ultimate conclusion (though for reasons we reject), its judgment is affirmed. It is so ordered. Justice Scalia, with whom The Chief Justice, Justice Thomas, and Justice Alito join, concurring in the judgment. Except where the Constitution or a valid federal law provides otherwise, all “Officers of the United States” must be appointed by the President “by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate.” U. S. Const., Art. II, §2, cl. 2. That general rule is subject to an exception: “The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session.” Id., §2, cl. 3. This case requires us to decide whether the Recess Appointments Clause authorized three appointments made by President Obama to the National Labor Relations Board in January 2012 without the Senate’s consent. To prevent the President’s recess-appointment power from nullifying the Senate’s role in the appointment process, the Constitution cabins that power in two significant ways. First, it may be exercised only in “the Recess of the Senate,” that is, the intermission between two formal legislative sessions. Second, it may be used to fill only those vacancies that “hap- pen during the Recess,” that is, offices that become vacant during that intermission. Both conditions are clear from the Constitution’s text and struc ture, and both were well understood at the founding. The Court of Appeals correctly held that the appointments here at issue are invalid because they did not meet either condition … The Court’s decision transforms the recess-appointment power from a tool carefully designed to fill a narrow and specific need into a weapon to be wielded by future Presidents against future Senates. To reach that result, the majority casts aside APPOINTMENT AND REMOVAL POWERS | 78 the plain, original meaning of the constitutional text in deference to late-arising historical practices that are ambiguous at best. The majority’s insistence on deferring to the Executive’s untenably broad interpretation of the power is in clear conflict with our precedent and forebodes a diminution of this Court’s role in controversies involving the separation of powers and the structure of government. I concur in the judgment only … The first question presented is whether “the Recess of the Senate,” during which the President’s recess-appointment power is active, is (a) the period between two of the Senate’s formal sessions, or (b) any break in the Senate’s proceedings. I would hold that “the Recess” is the gap between sessions and that the appointments at issue here are invalid because they undisputedly were made during the Senate’s session. The Court’s contrary conclusion—that “the Recess” includes “breaks in the midst of a session,” ante, at 9—is inconsistent with the Constitution’s text and structure, and it requires judicial fabrication of vague, unadministrable limits on the recess-appointment power (thus defined) that overstep the judicial role. And although the majority relies heavily on “historical practice,” no practice worthy of our deference sup- ports the majority’s conclusion on this issue … What does all this amount to? In short: Intra-session recess appointments were virtually unheard of for the first 130 years of the Republic, were deemed unconstitutional by the first Attorney General to address them, were not openly defended by the Executive until 1921, were not made in significant numbers until after World War II, and have been repeatedly criticized as unconstitutional by Senators of both parties. It is astonishing for the majority to assert that this history lends “strong support,” ante, at 11, to its interpretation of the Recess Appointments Clause. The second question presented is whether vacancies that “happen during the Recess of the Senate,” which the President is empowered to fill with recess appointments, are (a) vacancies that arise during the recess, or (b) all vacancies that exist during the recess, regardless of when they arose. I would hold that the recess-appointment power is limited to vacancies that arise during the recess in which they are filled, and I would hold that the appointments at issue here—which undisputedly filled pre-recess vacancies—are invalid for that reason as well as for the reason that they were made during the session. The Court’s contrary conclusion is inconsistent with the Constitution’s text and structure, and it further undermines the balance the Framers struck between Presidential and Senatorial power. Historical practice also fails to support the majority’s conclusion on this issue … In sum: Washington’s and Adams’ Attorneys General read the Constitution to restrict recess appointments to vacancies arising during the recess, and there is no evidence that any of the first four Presidents consciously departed from that reading. The contrary reading was first defended by an executive official in 1823, was vehemently rejected by the Senate in 1863, was vigorously resisted by legislation in place from 1863 until 1940, and is arguably inconsistent with legislation in place from 1940 to the present. The Solicitor General has identified only about 100 appointments that have ever been made under the broader reading, and while it seems likely that a good deal more have been made in the last few decades, there is good reason to doubt that many were made before 1940 (since the appointees could not have been compensated). I can conceive of no sane constitutional theory under which this evidence of “historical practice”—which is actually evi- dence of a long-simmering inter-branch conflict—would require us to defer to the views of the Executive Branch … What the majority needs to sustain its judgment is an ambiguous text and a clear historical practice. What it has is a clear text and an at-best-ambiguous historical practice … 79 | APPOINTMENT AND REMOVAL POWERS The real tragedy of today’s decision is not simply the abolition of the Constitution’s limits on the recess-appointment power and the substitution of a novel framework invented by this Court. It is the damage done to our separation-of- powers jurisprudence more generally. It is not every day that we encounter a proper case or controversy requiring inter- pretation of the Constitution’s structural provisions. Most of the time, the interpretation of those provisions is left to the political branches—which, in deciding how much respect to afford the constitutional text, often take their cues from this Court. We should therefore take every opportunity to affirm the primacy of the Constitution’s enduring principles over the politics of the moment. Our failure to do so today will resonate well beyond the particular dispute at hand. Sad, but true: The Court’s embrace of the adverse-possession theory of executive power (a characterization the majority resists but does not refute) will be cited in diverse contexts, including those presently unimagined, and will have the effect of aggrandizing the Presidency beyond its constitutional bounds and undermining respect for the separation of powers. I concur in the judgment only. Excerpted by Alexandria Metzdorf § Lucia v. SEC 585 U.S. ___ (2018) Decision: Reversed and remanded Vote: 7-2 Majority: Kagan, joined by Roberts, Kennedy, Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch Concurrence: Thomas, joined by Gorsuch Concur/dissent: Breyer, joined by Ginsburg, and Sotomayor (Part III only) Dissent: Sotomayor, joined by Ginsburg Justice Kagan delivered the opinion of the Court. The Appointments Clause of the Constitution lays out the permissible methods of appointing “Officers of the United States,” a class of government officials distinct from mere employees … This case requires us to decide whether adminis- trative law judges (ALJs) of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC or Commission) qualify as such “Officers.” In keeping with Freytag v. Commissioner, (1991), we hold that they do … The SEC has statutory authority to enforce the nation’s securities laws. One way it can do so is by instituting an admin- istrative proceeding against an alleged wrongdoer. By law, the Commission may itself preside over such a proceeding … But the Commission also may, and typically does, delegate that task to an ALJ … The SEC currently has five ALJs. Other staff members, rather than the Commission proper, selected them all … APPOINTMENT AND REMOVAL POWERS | 80 An ALJ assigned to hear an SEC enforcement action has extensive powers—the “authority to do all things necessary and appropriate to discharge his or her duties” and ensure a “fair and orderly” adversarial proceeding … As that list suggests, an SEC ALJ exercises authority “comparable to” that of a federal district judge conducting a bench trial. Butz v. Economou, (1978) … This case began when the SEC instituted an administrative proceeding against petitioner Raymond Lucia and his invest- ment company. Lucia marketed a retirement savings strategy called “Buckets of Money.” In the SEC’s view, Lucia used misleading slideshow presentations to deceive prospective clients. The SEC charged Lucia under the Investment Advis- ers Act, and assigned ALJ Cameron Elliot to adjudicate the case. After nine days of testimony and argument, Judge Elliot issued an initial decision concluding that Lucia had violated the Act and imposing sanctions, including civil penalties of $300,000 and a lifetime bar from the investment industry … On appeal to the SEC, Lucia argued that the administrative proceeding was invalid because Judge Elliot had not been constitutionally appointed. According to Lucia, the Commission’s ALJs are “Officers of the United States” and thus subject to the Appointments Clause … [T]he Commission had left the task of appointing ALJs, including Judge Elliot, to SEC staff members … As a result, Lucia contended, Judge Elliot lacked constitutional authority to do his job … The sole question here is whether the Commission’s ALJs are “Officers of the United States” or simply employees of the Federal Government. The Appointments Clause prescribes the exclusive means of appointing “Officers.” Only the Pres- ident, a court of law, or a head of department can do so. Two decisions set out this Court’s basic framework for distinguishing between officers and employees. Germaine v. US (1879) held that “civil surgeons” (doctors hired to perform various physical exams) were mere employees because their duties were “occasional or temporary” rather than “continuing and permanent … ” Stressing “ideas of tenure [and] dura- tion,” the Court there made clear that an individual must occupy a “continuing” position established by law to qualify as an officer. Buckley v. Valeo (1976) then set out another requirement, central to this case. It determined that members of a federal commission were officers only after finding that they “exercis[ed] significant authority pursuant to the laws of the United States … ” The inquiry thus focused on the extent of power an individual wields in carrying out his assigned functions. Both the amicus and the Government urge us to elaborate on Buckley’s “significant authority” test, but another of our precedents makes that project unnecessary … [I]n Freytag v. Commissioner, (1991), we applied the unadorned “signifi- cant authority” test to adjudicative officials who are near-carbon copies of the Commission’s ALJs. As we now explain, our analysis there (sans any more detailed legal criteria) necessarily decides this case. The officials at issue in Freytag were the “special trial judges” (STJs) of the United States Tax Court. The authority of those judges depended on the significance of the tax dispute before them. In “comparatively narrow and minor matters,” they could both hear and definitively resolve a case for the Tax Court … In more major matters, they could preside over the hearing, but could not issue the final decision; instead, they were to “prepare proposed findings and an opinion” for a regular Tax Court judge to consider … 81 | APPOINTMENT AND REMOVAL POWERS This Court held that the Tax Court’s STJs are officers, not mere employees. Citing Germaine, the Court first found that STJs hold a continuing office established by law … They serve on an ongoing, rather than a “temporary [or] episodic[,] basis”; and their “duties, salary, and means of appointment” are all specified in the Tax Code. For all the reasons we have given, and all those Freytag gave before, the Commission’s ALJs are “Officers of the United States,” subject to the Appointments Clause … This Court has held that “one who makes a timely challenge to the con- stitutional validity of the appointment of an officer who adjudicates his case” is entitled to relief. Ryder v. United States, (1995). Lucia made just such a timely challenge: He contested the validity of Judge Elliot’s appointment before the Com- mission, and continued pressing that claim in the Court of Appeals and this Court. So what relief follows? This Court has also held that the “appropriate” remedy for an adjudication tainted with an appointments violation is a new “hearing before a properly appointed” official … And we add today one thing more. That official cannot be Judge Elliot, even if he has by now received (or receives sometime in the future) a constitutional appointment. Judge Elliot has already both heard Lucia’s case and issued an initial decision on the merits. He cannot be expected to consider the matter as though he had not adjudicated it before. To cure the constitutional error, another ALJ (or the Commission itself) must hold the new hearing to which Lucia is entitled. We accordingly reverse the judgment of the Court of Appeals and remand the case for further proceedings consistent with this opinion. It is so ordered. Note: In June of 2020, Lucia entered a settlement with the SEC which banned Lucia from the securities industry, though he could reapply for admittance, and included a fine of $25,000.00. (see https://www.investmentnews.com/sec-ray-lucia- settle-lawsuit-194238, last accessed on April 27, 2023.) § APPOINTMENT AND REMOVAL POWERS | 82 Executive Privilege United States v. Nixon 418 U.S. 683 (1974) Decision: Affirmed Vote: 8-0 Majority: Burger, joined by Douglas, Brennan, Stewart, White, Marshall, Blackmun, and Powell MR. CHIEF JUSTICE BURGER delivered the opinion of the Court. This litigation presents for review the denial of a motion … to quash a third-party subpoena duces tecum issued … pur- suant to Fed. Rule Crim. Proc. 17 (c). The subpoena directed the President to produce certain tape recordings and doc- uments relating to his conversations with aides and advisers … On March 1, 1974, a grand jury of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia returned an indictment charging seven named individuals with various offenses, including conspiracy to defraud the United States and to obstruct justice. Although he was not designated as such in the indictment, the grand jury named the President, among others, as an unindicted coconspirator … [W]e turn to the claim that the subpoena should be quashed because it demands “confidential conversations between a President and his close advisors that it would be inconsistent with the public interest to produce … ” The first contention is a broad claim that the separation of powers doctrine precludes judicial review of a President’s claim of privilege. The second contention is that if he does not prevail on the claim of absolute privilege, the court should hold as a matter of constitutional law that the privilege prevails over the subpoena duces tecum. In the performance of assigned constitutional duties each branch of the Government must initially interpret the Consti- tution, and the interpretation of its powers by any branch is due great respect from the others. The President’s counsel, as we have noted, reads the Constitution as providing an absolute privilege of confidentiality for all Presidential commu- nications. Many decisions of this Court, however, have unequivocally reaffirmed the holding of Marbury v. Madison, (1803), that “[i]t is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is … ” Since this Court has consistently exercised the power to construe and delineate claims arising under express powers, it must follow that the Court has authority to interpret claims with respect to powers alleged to derive from enumerated powers … Our system of government “requires that federal courts on occasion interpret the Constitution in a manner at variance with the construction given the document by another branch.” Powell v. McCormack, (1969) … And in Baker v. Carr (1961), the Court stated: 83 | EXECUTIVE PRIVILEGE “Deciding whether a matter has in any measure been committed by the Constitution to another branch of government, or whether the action of that branch exceeds whatever authority has been committed, is itself a delicate exercise in con- stitutional interpretation, and is a responsibility of this Court as ultimate interpreter of the Constitution.” Notwithstanding the deference each branch must accord the others, the “judicial Power of the United States” vested in the federal courts by Art. III, § 1, of the Constitution can no more be shared with the Executive Branch than the Chief Executive, for example, can share with the Judiciary the veto power, or the Congress share with the Judiciary the power to override a Presidential veto. Any other conclusion would be contrary to the basic concept of separation of powers and the checks and balances that flow from the scheme of a tripartite government … We therefore reaffirm that it is the province and duty of this Court “to say what the law is” with respect to the claim of privilege presented in this case. In support of his claim of absolute privilege, the President’s counsel urges two grounds, one of which is common to all governments and one of which is peculiar to our system of separation of powers. The first ground is the valid need for protection of communications between high Government officials and those who advise and assist them in the perfor- mance of their manifold duties; the importance of this confidentiality is too plain to require further discussion … The second ground asserted by the President’s counsel in support of the claim of absolute privilege rests on the doctrine of separation of powers. Here it is argued that the independence of the Executive Branch within its own sphere … insu- lates a President from a judicial subpoena in an ongoing criminal prosecution, and thereby protects confidential Presi- dential communications. However, neither the doctrine of separation of powers, nor the need for confidentiality of high-level communications, without more, can sustain an absolute, unqualified Presidential privilege of immunity from judicial process under all cir- cumstances. The President’s need for complete candor and objectivity from advisers calls for great deference from the courts … [W]e find it difficult to accept the argument that even the very important interest in confidentiality of Presi- dential communications is significantly diminished by production of such material for in camera inspection with all the protection that a district court will be obliged to provide. The impediment that an absolute, unqualified privilege would place in the way of the primary constitutional duty of the Judicial Branch to do justice in criminal prosecutions would plainly conflict with the function of the courts under Art. III. In designing the structure of our Government and dividing and allocating the sovereign power among three co-equal branches, the Framers of the Constitution sought to provide a comprehensive system, but the separate powers were not intended to operate with absolute independence … To read the Art. II powers of the President as providing an absolute privilege as against a subpoena essential to enforce- ment of criminal statutes on no more than a generalized claim of the public interest in confidentiality of nonmilitary and nondiplomatic discussions would upset the constitutional balance of “a workable government” and gravely impair the role of the courts under Art. III. Since we conclude that the legitimate needs of the judicial process may outweigh Presidential privilege, it is necessary to resolve those competing interests in a manner that preserves the essential functions of each branch. The right and indeed the duty to resolve that question does not free the Judiciary from according high respect to the representations made on behalf of the President … EXECUTIVE PRIVILEGE | 84 When he signed the Act into law, President George W. Bush issued a statement declaring his position that § 214 would, “if construed as mandatory rather than advisory, impermissibly interfere with the President’s constitutional authority to formulate the position of the United States, speak for the Nation in international affairs, and determine the terms on which recognition is given to foreign states … ” The President concluded, “U.S. policy regarding Jerusalem has not changed … ” In considering claims of Presidential power this Court refers to Justice Jackson’s familiar tripartite framework from Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, (1952) (concurring opinion) … [W]hen “the President takes measures incompatible with the expressed or implied will of Congress … he can rely only upon his own constitutional powers minus any constitutional powers of Congress over the matter.” To succeed in this third category, the President’s asserted power must be both “exclusive” and “conclusive” on the issue … In this case the Secretary contends that § 214(d) infringes on the President’s exclusive recognition power by “requiring the President to contradict his recognition position regarding Jerusalem in official communications with foreign sover- eigns.” In so doing the Secretary acknowledges the President’s power is “at its lowest ebb … ” Because the President’s refusal to implement § 214(d) falls into Justice Jackson’s third category, his claim must be “scrutinized with caution,” and he may rely solely on powers the Constitution grants to him alone … Recognition is a “formal acknowledgment” that a particular “entity possesses the qualifications for statehood” or “that a particular regime is the effective government of a state … ” Recognition is often effected by an express “written or oral declaration … ” It may also be implied—for example, by concluding a bilateral treaty or by sending or receiving diplo- matic agents … Despite the importance of the recognition power in foreign relations, the Constitution does not use the term “recogni- tion,” either in Article II or elsewhere. The Secretary asserts that the President exercises the recognition power based on the Reception Clause, which directs that the President “shall receive Ambassadors and other public Ministers.” Art. II, § 3. As Zivotofsky notes, the Reception Clause received little attention at the Constitutional Convention … At the time of the founding, however, prominent international scholars suggested that receiving an ambassador was tan- tamount to recognizing the sovereignty of the sending state … It is a logical and proper inference, then, that a Clause directing the President alone to receive ambassadors would be understood to acknowledge his power to recognize other nations … The inference that the President exercises the recognition power is further supported by his additional Article II powers. It is for the President, “by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate,” to “make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur.” Art. II, § 2, cl. 2. In addition, “he shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors” as well as “other public Ministers and Consuls.” As a matter of constitutional structure, these additional powers give the President control over recognition decisions. At international law, recognition may be effected by different means, but each means is dependent upon Presidential power. In addition to receiving an ambassador, recognition may occur on “the conclusion of a bilateral treaty,” or the “formal initiation of diplomatic relations,” including the dispatch of an ambassador … The Constitution thus assigns the President means to effect recognition on his own initiative. Congress, by contrast, has no constitutional power that PRESIDENTIAL POWERS IN FOREIGN AFFAIRS | 146 would enable it to initiate diplomatic relations with a foreign nation. Because these specific Clauses confer the recogni- tion power on the President, the Court need not consider whether or to what extent the Vesting Clause, which provides that the “executive Power” shall be vested in the President, provides further support for the President’s action here. Art. II, § 1, cl. 1. The text and structure of the Constitution grant the President the power to recognize foreign nations and governments. The question then becomes whether that power is exclusive. The various ways in which the President may unilaterally effect recognition—and the lack of any similar power vested in Congress—suggest that it is. So, too, do functional con- siderations. Put simply, the Nation must have a single policy regarding which governments are legitimate in the eyes of the United States and which are not. Foreign countries need to know, before entering into diplomatic relations or com- merce with the United States, whether their ambassadors will be received; whether their officials will be immune from suit in federal court; and whether they may initiate lawsuits here to vindicate their rights. These assurances cannot be equivocal … It remains true, of course, that many decisions affecting foreign relations—including decisions that may determine the course of our relations with recognized countries—require congressional action. Congress may “regulate Commerce with foreign Nations,” “establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization,” “define and punish Piracies and Felonies commit- ted on the high Seas, and Offences against the Law of Nations,” “declare War,” “grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal,” and “make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces … ” Although the President alone effects the formal act of recognition, Congress’ powers, and its central role in making laws, give it substantial authority regarding many of the policy determinations that precede and follow the act of recognition itself. If Congress disagrees with the President’s recognition policy, there may be consequences. Formal recognition may seem a hollow act if it is not accompanied by the dispatch of an ambassador, the easing of trade restrictions, and the con- clusion of treaties. And those decisions require action by the Senate or the whole Congress. In practice, then, the President’s recognition determination is just one part of a political process that may require Con- gress to make laws. The President’s exclusive recognition power encompasses the authority to acknowledge, in a formal sense, the legitimacy of other states and governments, including their territorial bounds. Albeit limited, the exclusive recognition power is essential to the conduct of Presidential duties. The formal act of recognition is an executive power that Congress may not qualify. If the President is to be effective in negotiations over a formal recognition determination, it must be evident to his counterparts abroad that he speaks for the Nation on that precise question … Here, history is not all on one side, but on balance it provides strong support for the conclusion that the recognition power is the President’s alone. As Zivotofsky argues, certain historical incidents can be interpreted to support the posi- tion that recognition is a shared power. But the weight of historical evidence supports the opposite view, which is that the formal determination of recognition is a power to be exercised only by the President … As the power to recognize foreign states resides in the President alone, the question becomes whether § 214(d) infringes on the Executive’s consistent decision to withhold recognition with respect to Jerusalem … Section 214(d) requires that, in a passport or consular report of birth abroad, “the Secretary shall, upon the request of the citizen or the citizen’s legal guardian, record the place of birth as Israel” for a “United States citizen born in the city 147 | PRESIDENTIAL POWERS IN FOREIGN AFFAIRS of Jerusalem.” That is, § 214(d) requires the President, through the Secretary, to identify citizens born in Jerusalem who so request as being born in Israel. But according to the President, those citizens were not born in Israel. As a matter of United States policy, neither Israel nor any other country is acknowledged as having sovereignty over Jerusalem. In this way, § 214(d) “directly contradicts” the “carefully calibrated and longstanding Executive branch policy of neutrality toward Jerusalem.” If the power over recognition is to mean anything, it must mean that the President not only makes the initial, formal recognition determination but also that he may maintain that determination in his and his agent’s statements. This con- clusion is a matter of both common sense and necessity. If Congress could command the President to state a recognition position inconsistent with his own, Congress could override the President’s recognition determination … Although the statement required by § 214(d) would not itself constitute a formal act of recognition, it is a mandate that the Executive contradict his prior recognition determination in an official document issued by the Secretary of State … As a result, it is unconstitutional. This is all the more clear in light of the longstanding treatment of a passport’s place- of-birth section as an official executive statement implicating recognition … The Secretary’s position on this point has been consistent: He will not place information in the place-of-birth section of a passport that contradicts the President’s recognition policy … If a citizen objects to the country listed as sovereign over his place of birth, then the Secretary will accommodate him by listing the city or town of birth rather than the country … But the Secretary will not list a sovereign that contradicts the President’s recognition policy in a passport. Thus, the Secretary will not list “Israel” in a passport as the country containing Jerusalem … From the face of § 214, from the legislative history, and from its reception, it is clear that Congress wanted to express its displeasure with the President’s policy by, among other things, commanding the Executive to contradict his own, earlier stated position on Jerusalem. This Congress may not do. It is true, as Zivotofsky notes, that Congress has substantial authority over passports … The Court does not question the power of Congress to enact passport legislation of wide scope … The problem with § 214(d), however, lies in how Congress exercised its authority over passports. It was an improper act for Congress to “aggrandiz[e] its power at the expense of another branch” by requiring the President to contradict an ear- lier recognition determination in an official document issued by the Executive Branch. Freytag v. Commissioner, (1991). To allow Congress to control the President’s communication in the context of a formal recognition determination is to allow Congress to exercise that exclusive power itself. As a result, the statute is unconstitutional … In holding § 214(d) invalid the Court does not question the substantial powers of Congress over foreign affairs in general or passports in particular. This case is confined solely to the exclusive power of the President to control recognition deter- minations, including formal statements by the Executive Branch acknowledging the legitimacy of a state or government and its territorial bounds. Congress cannot command the President to contradict an earlier recognition determination in the issuance of passports. The judgment of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit is Affirmed. PRESIDENTIAL POWERS IN FOREIGN AFFAIRS | 148 Excerpted by Alexandria Metzdorf Justice Scalia, with whom The Chief Justice and Justice Alito join, dissenting. Before this country declared independence, the law of England entrusted the King with the exclusive care of his king- dom’s foreign affairs. The royal prerogative included the “sole power of sending ambassadors to foreign states, and receiv- ing them at home,” the sole authority to “make treaties, leagues, and alliances with foreign states and princes,” “the sole prerogative of making war and peace,” and the “sole power of raising and regulating fleets and armies.” W. Blackstone, Commentaries. The People of the United States had other ideas when they organized our Government. They considered a sound structure of balanced powers essential to the preservation of just government, and international relations formed no exception to that principle. The People therefore adopted a Constitution that divides responsibility for the Nation’s foreign concerns between the legislative and executive departments. The Constitution gave the President the “executive Power,” authority to send and responsibility to receive ambassadors, power to make treaties, and command of the Army and Navy—though they qual- ified some of these powers by requiring consent of the Senate. Art. II, §§1–3. At the same time, they gave Congress pow- ers over war, foreign commerce, naturalization, and more. Art. I, §8. “Fully eleven of the powers that Article I, §8 grants Congress deal in some way with foreign affairs.” L. Tribe, American Constitutional Law, §5–18, p. 965. This case arises out of a dispute between the Executive and Legislative Branches about whether the United States should treat Jerusalem as a part of Israel. The Constitution contemplates that the political branches will make policy about the territorial claims of foreign nations the same way they make policy about other international matters: The President will exercise his powers on the basis of his views, Congress its powers on the basis of its views. That is just what has happened here. The political branches of our Government agree on the real-world fact that Israel controls the city of Jerusalem … They disagree, however, about how official documents should record the birthplace of an American citizen born in Jerusalem. The Executive does not accept any state’s claim to sovereignty over Jerusalem, and it maintains that the birthplace des- ignation “Israel” would clash with this stance of neutrality. But the National Legislature has enacted a statute that pro- vides: “For purposes of the registration of birth, certification of nationality, or issuance of a passport of a United States citizen born in the city of Jerusalem, the Secretary [of State] shall, upon the request of the citizen or the citizen’s legal guardian, record the place of birth as Israel.” Foreign Relations Authorization Act, Fiscal Year 2003, §214(d). Menachem Zivotofsky’s parents seek enforcement of this statutory right in the issuance of their son’s passport and consular report of birth abroad … Before turning to Presidential power under Article II, I think it well to establish the statute’s basis in congressional power under Article I. Congress’s power to “establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization,” Art. I, §8, cl. 4, enables it to grant American citizenship to someone born abroad. United States v. Wong Kim Ark., (1898). The naturalization power also enables Congress to furnish the people it makes citizens with papers verifying their citizenship—say a consular report of birth abroad (which certifies citizenship of an American born outside the United States) or a passport (which certifies cit- izenship for purposes of international travel). As the Necessary and Proper Clause confirms, every congressional power 149 | PRESIDENTIAL POWERS IN FOREIGN AFFAIRS “carries with it all those incidental powers which are necessary to its complete and effectual execution.” Cohens v. Vir- ginia, (1821). Even on a miserly understanding of Congress’s incidental authority, Congress may make grants of citizen- ship “effectual” by providing for the issuance of certificates authenticating them. One would think that if Congress may grant Zivotofsky a passport and a birth report, it may also require these papers to record his birthplace as “Israel.” … No doubt congressional discretion in executing legislative powers has its limits; Congress’s chosen approach must be not only “necessary” to carrying its powers into execution, but also “proper.” Congress thus may not transcend boundaries upon legislative authority stated or implied elsewhere in the Constitution. But as we shall see, §214(d) does not transgress any such restriction. The Court frames this case as a debate about recognition. Recognition is a sovereign’s official acceptance of a status under international law … To know all this is to realize at once that §214(d) has nothing to do with recognition. Section 214(d) does not require the Secretary to make a formal declaration about Israel’s sovereignty over Jerusalem. And nobody suggests that international custom infers acceptance of sovereignty from the birthplace designation on a passport or birth report, as it does from bilateral treaties or exchanges of ambassadors. Recognition would preclude the United States (as a matter of international law) from later contesting Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem. But making a notation in a passport or birth report does not encumber the Republic with any international obligations. It leaves the Nation free (so far as international law is con- cerned) to change its mind in the future. That would be true even if the statute required all passports to list “Israel.” But in fact it requires only those passports to list “Israel” for which the citizen (or his guardian) requests “Israel”; all the rest, under the Secretary’s policy, list “Jerusalem.” It is utterly impossible for this deference to private requests to constitute an act that unequivocally manifests an intention to grant recognition. … The best indication that §214(d) does not concern recognition comes from the State Department’s policies concerning Taiwan. According to the Solicitor General, the United States “acknowledges the Chinese position” that Taiwan is a part of China, but “does not take a position” of its own on that issue. Brief for Respondent 51–52. Even so, the State Depart- ment has for a long time recorded the birthplace of a citizen born in Taiwan as “China.” It indeed insisted on doing so until Congress passed a law (on which §214(d) was modeled) giving citizens the option to have their birthplaces recorded as “Taiwan.” The Solicitor General explains that the designation “China” “involves a geographic description, not an asser- tion that Taiwan is … part of sovereign China.” Brief for Respondent 51–52. Quite so. Section 214(d) likewise calls for nothing beyond a “geographic description”; it does not require the Executive even to assert, never mind formally recog- nize, that Jerusalem is a part of sovereign Israel … Even if the Constitution gives the President sole power to extend recognition, it does not give him sole power to make all decisions relating to foreign disputes over sovereignty. To the contrary, a fair reading of Article I allows Congress to decide for itself how its laws should handle these controversies … PRESIDENTIAL POWERS IN FOREIGN AFFAIRS | 150 The Constitution likewise does not give the President exclusive power to determine which claims to statehood and terri- tory “are legitimate in the eyes of the United States,” ante, at 11. Congress may express its own views about these matters by declaring war, restricting trade, denying foreign aid, and much else besides … No consistent or coherent theory supports the Court’s decision … International disputes about statehood and territory are neither rare nor obscure. Leading foreign debates during the 19th century concerned how the United States should respond to revolutions in Latin America, Texas, Mexico, Hawaii, Cuba. During the 20th century, attitudes toward Communist governments in Russia and China became conspicuous subjects of agitation. Disagreements about Taiwan, Kashmir, and Crimea remain prominent today. A President empow- ered to decide all questions relating to these matters, immune from laws embodying congressional disagreement with his position, would have un- controlled mastery of a vast share of the Nation’s foreign affairs. That is not the chief magistrate under which the American People agreed to live when they adopted the national charter. They believed that “[t]he accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, … may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” The Federalist No. 47, p. 301 (Madison). For this reason, they did not entrust either the President or Congress with sole power to adopt uncontradictable policies about any subject—foreign- sovereignty disputes included. They instead gave each political department its own powers, and with that the freedom to contradict the other’s policies. Under the Constitution they approved, Congress may require Zivotofsky’s passport and birth report to record his birthplace as Israel, even if that requirement clashes with the President’s preference for neutral- ity about the status of Jerusalem. I dissent. Excerpted by Rorie Solberg § Trump v. Hawaii 585 U.S. ___ (2018) Decision: Reversed and remanded Vote: 5-4 Majority: Roberts, joined by Kennedy, Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch Concurrence: Kennedy Concurrence: Thomas Dissent: Breyer, joined by Kagan Dissent: Sotomayor, joined by Ginsburg Chief Justice Roberts delivered the opinion of the Court. 151 | PRESIDENTIAL POWERS IN FOREIGN AFFAIRS Under the Immigration and Nationality Act, foreign nationals seeking entry into the United States undergo a vetting process to ensure that they satisfy the numerous requirements for admission. The Act also vests the President with authority to restrict the entry of aliens when- ever he finds that their entry “would be detrimental to the interests of the United States.” 8 U. S. C. §1182(f). Relying on that delegation, the President concluded that it was necessary to impose entry restrictions on nationals of countries that do not share adequate information for an informed entry determination, or that otherwise present national security risks. Presidential Proclamation No. 9645 (Proclamation). The plaintiffs in this litigation, respondents here, challenged the application of those entry restrictions to certain aliens abroad. We now decide whether the President had authority under the Act to issue the Proclamation, and whether the entry policy vio- lates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment … DHS collected and evaluated data regarding all foreign governments. §1(d). It identified 16 countries as having deficient information-sharing practices and presenting national security concerns, and another 31 countries as “at risk” of similarly failing to meet the baseline. §1(e). The State Department then undertook diplomatic efforts over a 50-day period to encourage all foreign governments to improve their practices. §1(f ). As a result of that effort, numerous countries pro- vided DHS with travel document exemplars and agreed to share information on known or suspected terrorists. Following the 50-day period, the Acting Secretary of Homeland Security concluded that eight countries—Chad, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen—remained deficient in terms of their risk profile and willingness to provide requested information. The Acting Secretary recommended that the President impose entry restrictions on certain nationals from all of those countries except Iraq … Plaintiffs challenged the Proclamation—except as applied to North Korea and Venezuela—on several grounds. As rele- vant here, they argued that the Proclamation contravenes provisions in the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) … Plaintiffs further claimed that the Proclamation violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, because it was motivated not by concerns pertaining to national security but by animus toward Islam … The INA establishes numerous grounds on which an alien abroad may be inadmissible to the United States and ineligible for a visa … Congress has also delegated to the President authority to suspend or restrict the entry of aliens in certain cir- cumstances. The principal source of that authority, §1182(f ), enables the President to “suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens” whenever he “finds” that their entry “would be detrimental to the interests of the United States.” Plaintiffs argue that the Proclamation is not a valid exercise of the President’s authority under the INA. In their view, §1182(f ) confers only a residual power to temporarily halt the entry of a discrete group of aliens engaged in harmful conduct. They also assert that the Proclamation violates another provision of the INA— 8 U. S. C. §1152(a)(1)(A)—because it discriminates on the basis of nationality in the issuance of immigrant visas … §1182(f ) exudes deference to the President in every clause. It entrusts to the President the decisions whether and when to suspend entry … whose entry to suspend … for how long … and on what conditions … It is therefore unsurprising that we have previously observed that §1182(f ) vests the President with “ample power” to impose entry restrictions in addition to those elsewhere enumerated in the INA … The Proclamation falls well within this comprehensive delegation. The sole prerequisite set forth in §1182(f ) is that the President “find[ ]” that the entry of the covered aliens “would be detrimental to the interests of the United States.” PRESIDENTIAL POWERS IN FOREIGN AFFAIRS | 152 The President has undoubtedly fulfilled that requirement here … The Proclamation therefore “craft[ed] … country-spe- cific restrictions that would be most likely to encourage cooperation given each country’s distinct circumstances,” while securing the Nation “until such time as improvements occur.” Plaintiffs … argue, as an initial matter, that the Proclamation fails to provide a persuasive rationale for why nationality alone renders the covered foreign nationals a security risk. And they further discount the President’s stated concern about deficient vetting because the Proclamation allows many aliens from the designated countries to enter on nonimmigrant visas. Such arguments are grounded on the premise that §1182(f ) not only requires the President to make a finding that entry “would be detrimental to the interests of the United States,” but also to explain that finding with sufficient detail to enable judicial review. That premise is questionable. But even assuming that some form of review is appropriate, plaintiffs’ attacks on the sufficiency of the President’s findings cannot be sustained. The 12-page Proclamation—which thoroughly describes the process, agency evaluations, and recommendations underlying the President’s chosen restric- tions—is more detailed than any prior order a President has issued under §1182(f ) … Like its predecessors, the Proclamation makes clear that its “conditional restrictions” will remain in force only so long as necessary to “address” the identified “inadequacies and risks” within the covered nations … To that end, the Procla- mation establishes an ongoing process to engage covered nations and assess every 180 days whether the entry restrictions should be modified or terminated. §§4(a), (b). Indeed, after the initial review period, the President determined that Chad had made sufficient improvements to its identity-management protocols, and he accordingly lifted the entry suspension on its nationals … In short, the language of §1182(f ) is clear, and the Proclamation does not exceed any textual limit on the President’s authority … Plaintiffs’ structural argument starts with the premise that §1182(f ) does not give the President authority to counter- mand Congress’s considered policy judgments. The President, they say, may supplement the INA, but he cannot sup- plant it … We may assume that §1182(f ) does not allow the President to expressly override particular provisions of the INA. But plaintiffs have not identified any conflict between the statute and the Proclamation that would implicitly bar the Presi- dent from addressing deficiencies in the Nation’s vetting system … Plaintiffs suggest that the entry restrictions are unnecessary because consular officers can simply deny visas in individual cases when an alien fails to carry his burden of proving admissibility—for example, by failing to produce certified records regarding his criminal history. But that misses the point: A critical finding of the Proclamation is that the failure of certain countries to provide reliable information prevents the Government from accurately determining whether an alien is inadmissible or poses a threat. Proclamation §1(h). Unless consular officers are expected to apply categorical rules and deny entry from those countries across the board, fraudulent or unreliable documentation may thwart their review in individual cases. And at any rate, the INA certainly does not require that systemic problems such as the lack of reliable States, and of compounding the American people into one common mass. Of consequence, when they act, they act in their States. But the measures they adopt do not, on that account, cease to be the measures of the people themselves, or become the measures of the State governments … The assent of the States in their sovereign capacity is implied in calling a convention, and thus submitting that instrument to the people. But the people were at perfect liberty to accept or reject it, and their act was final. It required not the affir- mance, and could not be negatived, by the State Governments. The Constitution, when thus adopted, was of complete obligation, and bound the State sovereignties … From these conventions, the Constitution derives its whole authority. The government proceeds directly from the peo- ple; is ‘ordained and established,’ in the name of the people; and is declared to be ordained, ‘in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, and secure the blessings of liberty to themselves and to their posterity.’ The assent of the states, in their sovereign capacity, is implied, in calling a convention, and thus submitting that instrument to the people. But the people were at perfect liberty to accept or reject it; and their act was final. It required not the affirmance, and could not be negatived, by the state governments. The constitution, when thus adopted, was of complete obligation, and bound the state sovereignties … This government is acknowledged by all, to be one of enumerated powers. The principle, that it can exercise only the powers granted to it, would seem too apparent, to have required to be enforced by all those arguments, which its enlight- ened friends, while it was depending before the people, found it necessary to urge; that principle is now universally admitted. But the question respecting the extent of the powers actually granted, is perpetually arising, and will probably continue to arise, so long as our system shall exist … [T]he government of the Union, though limited in its powers, is supreme within its sphere of action. This would seem to result, necessarily, from its nature. It is the government of all; its powers are delegated by all; it represents all, and acts for all. Though any one state may be willing to control its operations, no state is willing to allow others to control them. The nation, on those subjects on which it can act, must necessarily bind its component parts. But this question is not left to mere reason: the people have, in express terms, decided it … Among the enumerated powers, we do not find that of establishing a bank or creating a corporation. But there is no phrase in the instrument which, like the articles of confederation, excludes incidental or implied powers; and which requires that everything granted shall be expressly and minutely described … A constitution, to contain an accurate detail of all the subdivisions of which its great powers will admit, and of all the means by which they may be carried into exe- cution, would partake of the prolixity of a legal code, and could scarcely be embraced by the human mind. It would, probably, never be understood by the public. Its nature, therefore, requires, that only its great outlines should be marked, its important objects designated, and the minor ingredients which compose those objects, be deduced from the nature of the objects themselves. That this idea was entertained by the framers of the American constitution, is not only to be inferred from the nature of the instrument, but from the language. Why else were some of the limitations, found in the 9th section of the 1st article, introduced? It is also, in some degree, warranted, by their having omitted to use any restric- tive term which might prevent its receiving a fair and just interpretation … 161 | SOURCES AND SCOPE OF LEGISLATIVE POWERS Although, among the enumerated powers of government, we do not find the word ‘bank’ or ‘incorporation,’ we find the great powers, to lay and collect taxes; to borrow money; to regulate commerce; to declare and conduct a war; and to raise and support armies and navies. The sword and the purse, all the external relations, and no inconsiderable portion of the industry of the nation, are intrusted to its government. It is not denied, that the powers given to the government imply the ordinary means of execution. That, for example, of raising revenue, and applying it to national purposes, is admitted to imply the power of conveying money from place to place, as the exigencies of the nation may require, and of employing the usual means of conveyance. But it is denied, that the government … may … erect a corporation. On what foundation does this argument rest? On this alone: the power of creating a corporation, is one appertaining to sovereignty, and is not expressly conferred on congress. This is true. But all legislative powers appertain to sovereignty. The original power of giving the law on any subject whatever, is a sovereign power … if the government of the Union is restrained from creating a corporation … on the single reason that the creation of a corporation is an act of sovereignty … there would be some difficulty in sustaining the authority of congress to pass other laws for the accomplishment of the same objects. The government which has a right to do an act, and has imposed on it, the duty of performing that act, must, according to the dictates of reason, be allowed to select the means … those who contend that it may not … take upon themselves the burden of establishing that exception … In America, the powers of sovereignty are divided between the government of the Union, and those of the states. They are each sovereign, with respect to the objects committed to it, and neither sovereign, with respect to the objects commit- ted to the other … Some state constitutions were formed before, some since that of the United States. We cannot believe, that their relation to each other is in any degree dependent upon this circumstance. Their respective powers must, we think, be precisely the same, as if they had been formed at the same time … To [Congress’] enumeration of powers is added, that of making ‘all laws which shall be necessary and proper, for carrying into execution the foregoing powers, and all other powers vested by this constitution, in the government of the United States, or in any department thereof.’ The counsel for the state of Maryland have urged various arguments, to prove that this clause, though, in terms, a grant of power, is not so, in effect; but is really restrictive of the general right, which might otherwise be implied, of selecting means for executing the enumerated powers. In support of this proposition, they have found it necessary to contend, that this clause was inserted for the purpose of conferring on congress the power of mak- ing laws. That, without it, doubts might be entertained, whether congress could exercise its powers in the form of legis- lation … Could it be necessary to say, that a legislature should exercise legislative powers, in the shape of legislation? After allowing each house to prescribe its own course of proceeding, after describing the manner in which a bill should become a law, would it have entered into the mind of a single member of the convention, that an express power to make laws was neces- sary, to enable the legislature to make them? That a legislature, endowed with legislative powers, can legislate, is a propo- sition too self-evident to have been questioned … But the argument which most conclusively demonstrates the error of the construction contended for by the counsel for the state of Maryland, is founded on the intention of the convention, as manifested in the whole clause. To waste time and argument in proving that, without it, congress might carry its powers into execution, would be not much less idle, than to hold a lighted taper to the sun. As little can it be required to prove, that in the absence of this clause, congress SOURCES AND SCOPE OF LEGISLATIVE POWERS | 162 would have some choice of means … This clause, as construed by the state of Maryland, would abridge, and almost anni- hilate, this useful and necessary right of the legislature to select its means. That this could not be intended, is, we should think, had it not been already controverted, too apparent for controversy. We think so for the following reasons: 1st. The clause is placed among the powers of Congress, not among the limitations on those powers. 2d. Its terms purport to enlarge, not to diminish, the powers vested in the Government. It purports to be an additional power, not a restriction on those already granted. No reason has been or can be assigned for thus concealing an intention to narrow the discretion of the National Legislature under words which purport to enlarge it. The framers of the Con- stitution wished its adoption, and well knew that it would be endangered by its strength, not by its weakness. Had they been capable of using language which would convey to the eye one idea and, after deep reflection, impress on the mind another, they would rather have disguised the grant of power than its limitation. If, then, their intention had been, by this clause, to restrain the free use of means which might otherwise have been implied, that intention would have been inserted in another place, and would have been expressed in terms resembling these. “In carrying into execution the fore- going powers, and all others,” &c., “no laws shall be passed but such as are necessary and proper.” Had the intention been to make this clause restrictive, it would unquestionably have been so in form, as well as in effect. The result of the most careful and attentive consideration bestowed upon this clause is that, if it does not enlarge, it can- not be construed to restrain, the powers of Congress, or to impair the right of the legislature to exercise its best judgment in the selection of measures to carry into execution the Constitutional powers of the Government. If no other motive for its insertion can be suggested, a sufficient one is found in the desire to remove all doubts respecting the right to legislate on that vast mass of incidental powers which must be involved in the Constitution if that instrument be not a splendid bauble. We admit, as all must admit, that the powers of the Government are limited, and that its limits are not to be transcended. But we think the sound construction of the Constitution must allow to the national legislature that discretion with respect to the means by which the powers it confers are to be carried into execution which will enable that body to per- form the high duties assigned to it in the manner most beneficial to the people. Let the end be legitimate, let it be within the scope of the Constitution, and all means which are appropriate, which are plainly adapted to that end, which are not prohibited, but consist with the letter and spirit of the Constitution, are Constitutional … After the most deliberate consideration, it is the unanimous and decided opinion of this Court that the act to incorporate the Bank of the United States is a law made in pursuance of the Constitution, and is a part of the supreme law of the land. The branches, proceeding from the same stock and being conducive to the complete accomplishment of the object, are equally constitutional … It being the opinion of the Court that the act incorporating the bank is constitutional, and that the power of establishing a branch in the State of Maryland might be properly exercised by the bank itself, we proceed to inquire: 163 | SOURCES AND SCOPE OF LEGISLATIVE POWERS 2. Whether the State of Maryland may, without violating the Constitution, tax that branch? [See McCulloch v. Maryland in the Federalism chapter.] Excerpted by Alexandria Metzdorf § Chae Chan Ping v. United States 130 U.S. 581 (1889) Decision: Affirmed Vote: Unanimous Majority: Field,, joined by Fuller, Miller, Bradley, Harlan, Gray, Blatchford, and Lamar MR. JUSTICE FIELD delivered the opinion of the Court. The appeal involves a consideration of the validity of the Act of Congress of October 1, 1888, prohibiting Chinese labor- ers from entering the United States who had departed before its passage, having a certificate issued under the act of 1882 as amended by the act of 1884, granting them permission to return. The validity of the act is assailed as being in effect an expulsion from the country of Chinese laborers, in violation of existing treaties between the United States and the government of China, and of rights vested in them under the laws of Congress … British subjects in China were often subjected not only to the violence of mobs, but to insults and outrages from local authorities of the country, which led to retaliatory measures for the punishment of the aggressors. To such an extent were these measures carried and such resistance offered to them that in 1856, the two countries were in open war … England requested of the President the concurrence and active cooperation of the United States … [A]s the rights of citizens of the United States might be seriously affected by the results of existing hostilities, and commercial intercourse between the United States and China be disturbed, it was deemed advisable to send to China a minister plenipotentiary to repre- sent our government and watch our interests there. Accordingly, Mr. William B. Reed, of Philadelphia, was appointed such minister, and instructed, while abstaining from any direct interference, to aid by peaceful cooperation the objects the allied forces were seeking to accomplish … Through him a new treaty was negotiated with the Chinese government. It was concluded in June, 1858, and ratified in August of the following year … [A]dditional articles to the treaty of 1858 were agreed upon which gave expression to the general desire that the two nations and their peoples should be drawn closer together. The new articles, eight in number, were agreed to on the 28th of July, 1868, and ratifications of them were exchanged at Pekin in November of the following year … “ARTICLE VI. Citizens of the United States visiting or residing in China shall enjoy the same privileges, immunities, or exemptions in respect to travel or residence as may there be enjoyed by the citizens or subjects of the most favored nation, and reciprocally, Chinese subjects visiting or residing in the United shall enjoy the same privileges, immunities, SOURCES AND SCOPE OF LEGISLATIVE POWERS | 164 and exemptions in respect to travel or residence as may there be enjoyed by the citizens or subjects of the most favored nation. But nothing herein contained shall be held to confer naturalization upon citizens of the United States in China, nor upon the subjects of China in the United States … ” The discovery of gold in California in 1848, as is well known, was followed by a large immigration thither from all parts of the world, attracted not only by the hope of gain from the mines, but from the great prices paid for all kinds of labor. The news of the discovery penetrated China, and laborers came from there in great numbers, a few with their own means, but by far the greater number under contract with employers for whose benefit they worked. These laborers readily secured employment … They were generally industrious and frugal. Not being accompanied by families except in rare instances, their expenses were small and they were content with the simplest fare, such as would not suffice for our laborers and artisans. The competition between them and our people was for this reason altogether in their favor, and the consequent irritation, proportionately deep and bitter, was followed, in many cases, by open conflicts, to the great disturbance of the public peace. The differences of race added greatly to the difficulties of the situation … As they grew in numbers each year, the people of the coast saw, or believed they saw, in the facility of immigration and in the crowded millions of China, where popu- lation presses upon the means of subsistence, great danger that at no distant day that portion of our country would be overrun by them unless prompt action was taken to restrict their immigration. The people there accordingly petitioned earnestly for protective legislation … So urgent and constant were the prayers for relief against existing and anticipated evils, both from the public authorities of the Pacific coast and from private individuals that Congress was impelled to act on the subject. Many persons, how- ever, both in and out of Congress, were of opinion that so long as the treaty remained unmodified, legislation restricting immigration would be a breach of faith with China. A statute was accordingly passed appropriating money to send com- missioners to China to act with our minister there in negotiating and concluding by treaty a settlement of such matters of interest between the two governments as might be confided to them …

System Instruction: Use only the following information labeled "Context". Do not use any other source of information other than what is provided below. Question: According to the Judgement of Myers v. United States is the President legally allowed to remove executive officers of the United States whom he has appointed by and with the advice and consent of the Senate from office? Context: The State Supreme Court’s inclusion of vote counts based on these variant standards exemplifies concerns with the remedial processes that were under way … In addition to these difficulties the actual process by which the votes were to be counted under the Florida Supreme Court’s decision raises further concerns. That order did not specify who would recount the ballots. The county can- vassing boards were forced to pull together ad hoc teams of judges from various Circuits who had no previous training in handling and interpreting ballots. Furthermore, while others were permitted to observe, they were prohibited from objecting during the recount. The recount process, in its features here described, is inconsistent with the minimum procedures necessary to protect the fundamental right of each voter in the special instance of a statewide recount under the authority of a single state judicial officer. Our consideration is limited to the present circumstances, for the problem of equal protection in election processes generally presents many complexities. The question before the Court is not whether local entities, in the exercise of their expertise, may develop different sys- tems for implementing elections. Instead, we are presented with a situation where a state court with the power to assure uniformity has ordered a statewide recount with minimal procedural safeguards. When a court orders a statewide rem- edy, there must be at least some assurance that the rudimentary requirements of equal treatment and fundamental fair- ness are satisfied … Upon due consideration of the difficulties identified to this point, it is obvious that the recount cannot be conducted in compliance with the requirements of equal protection and due process without substantial additional work. It would require not only the adoption (after opportunity for argument) of adequate statewide standards for determining what is a legal vote, and practicable procedures to implement them, but also orderly judicial review of any disputed matters that might arise. In addition, the Secretary has advised that the recount of only a portion of the ballots requires that the vote tabulation equipment be used to screen out undervotes, a function for which the machines were not designed. If a recount of overvotes were also required, perhaps even a second screening would be necessary. Use of the equipment for this purpose, and any new software developed for it, would have to be evaluated for accuracy by the Secretary … Because it is evident that any recount seeking to meet the December 12 date will be unconstitutional for the reasons we have discussed, we reverse the judgment of the Supreme Court of Florida ordering a recount to proceed … None are more conscious of the vital limits on judicial authority than are the Members of this Court, and none stand more in admiration of the Constitution’s design to leave the selection of the President to the people, through their leg- islatures, and to the political sphere. When contending parties invoke the process of the courts, however, it becomes our unsought responsibility to resolve the federal and constitutional issues the judicial system has been forced to confront. The judgment of the Supreme Court of Florida is reversed, and the case is remanded for further proceedings not incon- sistent with this opinion. It is so ordered. STRUCTURE OF THE PRESIDENCY | 60 Excerpted by Alexandria Metzdorf § 61 | STRUCTURE OF THE PRESIDENCY Appointment and Removal Powers Myers v. United States 272 U.S. 52 (1926) Decision: Affirmed Vote: 6-3 Majority: Taft, joined by Van Devanter, Sutherland, Butler, Sanford, Stone Dissent: Holmes Dissent: McReynolds Dissent: Brandeis MR. CHIEF JUSTICE TAFT delivered the opinion of the Court. This case presents the question whether, under the Constitution, the President has the exclusive power of removing exec- utive officers of the United States whom he has appointed by and with the advice and consent of the Senate. Myers … was, on July 21, 1917, appointed by the President, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, to be a postmaster of the first class at Portland, Oregon, for a term of four years. On January 20, 1920, Myers’ resignation was demanded. He refused the demand. On February 2, 1920, he was removed from office by order of the Postmaster Gen- eral, acting by direction of the President. February 10th, Myers sent a petition to the President and another to the Sen- ate Committee on Post Offices, asking to be heard if any charges were filed. He protested to the Department against his removal, and continued to do so until the end of his term. He pursued no other occupation, and drew compensation for no other service during the interval. On April 21, 1921, he brought this suit in the Court of Claims for his salary from the date of his removal, which, as claimed by supplemental petition filed after July 21, 1921, the end of his term, amounted to $8,838.71 … [By the law] under which Myers was appointed with the advice and consent of the Senate as a first-class postmaster, it is provided that “Postmasters of the first, second and third classes shall be appointed and may be removed by the President by and with the advice and consent of the Senate and shall hold their offices for four years unless sooner removed or suspended accord- ing to law.” The Senate did not consent to the President’s removal of Myers during his term. If this statute, in its requirement that his term should be four years unless sooner removed by the President by and with the consent of the Senate, is valid, the appellant, Myers’ administratrix, is entitled to recover his unpaid salary for his full term, and the judgment of the Court of Claims must be reversed. The Government maintains that the requirement is invalid for the reason that, under Article APPOINTMENT AND REMOVAL POWERS | 62 II of the Constitution the President’s power of removal of executive officers appointed by him with the advice and con- sent of the Senate is full and complete without consent of the Senate … We are therefore confronted by the constitutional question, and cannot avoid it … The question where the power of removal of executive officers appointed by the President by and with the advice and consent of the Senate was vested was presented early in the first session of the First Congress. There is no express pro- vision respecting removals in the Constitution, except as Section 4 of Article II … provides for removal from office by impeachment … It was pointed out in this great debate [constitutional convention] that the power of removal, though equally essential to the executive power is different in its nature from that of appointment. Madison, 1 Annals of Congress, 497 et seq.; Cly- mer, 1 Annals, 489; Sedgwick, 1 Annals, 522; Ames, 1 Annals, 541, 542; Hartley, 1 Annals, 481. A veto by the Senate-a part of the legislative branch of the government-upon removals is a much greater limitation upon the executive branch, and a much more serious blending of the legislative with the executive, than a rejection of a proposed appointment. It is not to be implied. The rejection of a nominee of the President for a particular office does not greatly embarrass him in the conscientious discharge of his high duties in the selection of those who are to aid him, because the President usually has an ample field from which to select for office, according to his preference, competent and capable men. The Senate has full power to reject newly proposed appointees whenever the President shall remove the incumbents. Such a check enables the Senate to prevent the filling of offices with bad or incompetent men, or with those against whom there is ten- able objection. The power to prevent the removal of an officer who has served under the President is different from the authority to con- sent to or reject his appointment. When a nomination is made, it may be presumed that the Senate is, or may become, as well advised as to the fitness of the nominee as the President, but in the nature of things the defects in ability or intel- ligence or loyalty in the administration of the laws of one who has served as an officer under the President are facts as to which the President, or his trusted subordinates, must be better informed than the Senate, and the power to remove him may therefor be regarded as confined for very sound and practical reasons, to the governmental authority which has administrative control. The power of removal is incident to the power of appointment, not to the power of advising and consenting to appointment, and when the grant of the executive power is enforced by the express mandate to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, it emphasizes the necessity for including within the executive power as conferred the exclusive power of removal. … The vesting of the executive power in the President was essentially a grant of the power to execute the laws. But the Pres- ident, alone and unaided, could not execute the laws. He must execute them by the assistance of subordinates. This view has since been repeatedly affirmed by this Court. Wilcox v. Jackson (1839) … It was urged that the natural meaning of the term “executive power” granted the President included the appointment and removal of executive subordinates. If such appointments and removals were not an exercise of the executive power, what were they? They certainly were not the exercise of legislative or judicial power in government as usually understood … It is true that the remedy for the evil of political executive removals of inferior offices is with Congress by a simple expedi- ent, but it includes a change of the power of appointment from the President with the consent of the Senate. Congress 63 | APPOINTMENT AND REMOVAL POWERS must determine first that the office is inferior, and second that it is willing that the office shall be filled by appoint- ment by some other authority than the President with the consent of the Senate. That the latter may be an important consideration is manifest, and is the subject of comment by this Court in its opinion in the case of Shurtleff v. United States, (1903), where this Court said: “To take away this power of removal in relation to an inferior office created by statute, although that statute provided for an appointment thereto by the President and confirmation by the Senate, would require very clear and explicit language. It should not be held to be taken away by mere inference or implication … ” [P]ostmasters were all by law appointed by the Postmaster General. This was because Congress … so provided. But there- after, Congress required certain classes of them to be, as they now are, appointed by the President with the consent of the Senate. This is an indication that Congress deemed appointment by the President with the consent of the Senate essential to the public welfare, and, until it is willing to vest their appointment in the head of the Department, they will be subject to removal by the President alone, and any legislation to the contrary must fall as in conflict with the Consti- tution. Summing up, then, the facts as to acquiescence by all branches of the Government in the legislative decision of 1789, as to executive officers, whether superior or inferior, we find that from 1789 until 1863, a period of 74 years, there was no act of Congress, no executive act, and no decision of this Court at variance with the declaration of the First Congress, but there was, as we have seen, clear, affirmative recognition of it by each branch of the Government. Article II grants to the President … the general administrative control of those executing the laws, including the power of appointment and removal of executive officers … the President’s power of removal is further established as an incident to his specifically enumerated function of appointment by and with the advice of the Senate, but that such incident does not, by implication, extend to removals the Senate’s power of checking appointments, and … to hold otherwise would make it impossible for the President, in case of political or other differences with the Senate or Congress, to take care that the laws be faithfully executed … While this Court has studiously avoided deciding the issue until it was presented in such a way that it could not be avoided, in the references it has made to the history of the question, and in the presumptions it has indulged in favor of a statutory construction not inconsistent with the legislative decision of 1789, it has indicated a trend of view that we should not and cannot ignore. When, on the merits, we find our conclusion strongly favoring the view which prevailed in the First Congress, we have no hesitation in holding that conclusion to be correct, and it therefore follows that the Tenure of Office Act of 1867, insofar as it attempted to prevent the President from removing executive officer who had been appointed by him by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, was invalid, and that subsequent legislation of the same effect was equally so. For the reasons given, we must therefore hold that the provision of the law of 1876, by which the unrestricted power of removal of first class postmasters is denied to the President, is in violation of the Constitution, and invalid. This leads to an affirmance of the judgment of the Court of Claims. Judgment affirmed. APPOINTMENT AND REMOVAL POWERS | 64 Excerpted by Alexandria Metzdorf § Humphrey’s Executor v. United States 295 U.S. 602 (1935) Decision: Affirmed Vote: 9-0 Majority: Sutherland, joined by Hughes, Van Devanter, McReynolds, Brandeis, Butler, Stone, Roberts, and Cardozo Mr. Justice SUTHERLAND delivered the opinion of the Court. Plaintiff brought suit in the Court of Claims against the United States to recover a sum of money alleged to be due the deceased for salary as a Federal Trade Commissioner from October 8, 1933, when the President undertook to remove him from office, to the time of his death on February 14, 1934. The court below has certified to this court two questions … in respect of the power of the President to make the removal. The material facts which give rise to the questions are as follows: William E. Humphrey, the decedent, on December 10, 1931, was nominated by President Hoover to succeed himself as a member of the Federal Trade Commission, and was confirmed by the United States Senate. He was duly commissioned for a term of seven years, expiring September 25, 1938; and, after taking the required oath of office, entered upon his duties. On July 25, 1933, President Roosevelt addressed a letter to the commissioner asking for his resignation, on the ground ‘that the aims and purposes of the Administration with respect to the work of the Commission can be carried out most effectively with personnel of my own selection,’ but disclaiming any reflection upon the commissioner personally or upon his services. The commissioner replied, asking time to consult his friends. After some further correspondence upon the subject, the President on August 31, 1933, wrote the commissioner expressing the hope that the resignation would be forthcoming, and saying: ‘You will, I know, realize that I do not feel that your mind and my mind go along together on either the policies or the administering of the Federal Trade Commission, and, frankly, I think it is best for the people of this country that I should have a full confidence.’ The commissioner declined to resign; and on October 7, 1933, the President wrote him: ‘Effective as of this date you are hereby removed from the office of Commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission.’ Humphrey never acquiesced in this action, but continued thereafter to insist that he was still a member of the commis- sion, entitled to perform its duties and receive the compensation provided by law at the rate of $10,000 per annum. Upon these and other facts set forth in the certificate, which we deem it unnecessary to recite, the following questions are certi- fied: 1. Do the provisions of section 1 of the Federal Trade Commission Act, stating that ‘any commissioner may be removed by the President for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office’, restrict or limit the power of 65 | APPOINTMENT AND REMOVAL POWERS the President to remove a commissioner except upon one or more of the causes named? If the foregoing question is answered in the affirmative, then— 2. If the power of the President to remove a commissioner is restricted or limited as shown by the foregoing inter- rogatory and the answer made thereto, is such a restriction or limitation valid under the Constitution of the United States?’ The Federal Trade Commission Act … creates a commission of five members to be appointed by the President by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, and section 1 provides: ‘Not more than three of the commissioners shall be members of the same political party. … ‘ [The Act] in part provides that: ‘Unfair methods of competition in commerce are declared unlawful. The commission is empowered and directed to prevent persons, partnerships, or corporations, except banks, and com- mon carriers subject to the Acts to regulate commerce, from using unfair methods of competition in commerce … ‘ First. The question first to be considered is whether, by the provisions of section 1 … the President’s power is limited to removal for the specific causes enumerated therein. The negative contention of the government is based principally upon the decision of this court in Shurtleff v. United States, (1903) … The situation here presented is plainly and wholly different. The statute fixes a term of office, in accordance with many precedents … The words of the act are definite and unambiguous. … The fixing of a definite term subject to removal for cause, unless there be some countervailing provision or circum- stance indicating the contrary, which here we are unable to find, is enough to establish the legislative intent that the term is not to be curtailed in the absence of such cause. But if the intention of Congress that no removal should be made dur- ing the specified term except for one or more of the enumerated causes were not clear upon the face of the statute, as we think it is, it would be made clear by a consideration of the character of the commission and the legislative history which accompanied and preceded the passage of the act. The commission is to be nonpartisan; and it must, from the very nature of its duties, act with entire impartiality. It is charged with the enforcement of no policy except the policy of the law. Its duties are neither political nor executive, but predominantly quasi judicial and quasi legislative. Like the Interstate Commerce Commission, its members are called upon to exercise the trained judgment of a body of experts ‘appointed by law and informed by experience’ … The legislative reports in both houses of Congress clearly reflect the view that a fixed term was necessary to the effective and fair administration of the law … [T]he language of the act, the legislative reports, and the general purposes of the legislation as reflected by the debates, all combine to demonstrate the congressional intent to create a body of experts who shall gain experience by length of service; a body which shall be independent of executive authority, except in its selection, and free to exercise its judgment APPOINTMENT AND REMOVAL POWERS | 66 without the leave or hindrance of any other official … To the accomplishment of these purposes, it is clear that Congress was of opinion that length and certainty of tenure would vitally contribute. And to hold that, nevertheless, the members of the commission continue in office at the mere will of the President, might be to thwart, in large measure, the very ends which Congress sought to realize by definitely fixing the term of office. … Second. To support its contention that the removal provision … is an unconstitutional interference with the executive power of the President, the government’s chief reliance is Myers v. United States (1926) … [T]he narrow point actually decided was only that the President had power to remove a postmaster of the first class, without the advice and consent of the Senate as required by act of Congress. In the course of the opinion of the court, expressions occur which tend to sustain the government’s contention, but these are beyond the point involved and, therefore, do not come within the rule of stare decisis … The office of a postmaster is so essentially unlike the office now involved that the decision in the Myers case cannot be accepted as controlling our decision here. A postmaster is an executive officer restricted to the performance of executive functions. He is charged with no duty at all related to either the legislative or judicial power. The actual decision in the Myers case finds support in the theory that such an officer is merely one of the units in the executive department and, hence, inherently subject to the exclusive and illimitable power of removal by the Chief Executive, whose subordinate and aid he is. Putting aside dicta, which may be followed if sufficiently persuasive but which are not controlling, the nec- essary reach of the decision goes far enough to include all purely executive officers. It goes no farther; much less does it include an officer who occupies no place in the executive department and who exercises no part of the executive power vested by the Constitution in the President. The Federal Trade Commission is an administrative body created by Congress to carry into effect legislative policies embodied in the statute in accordance with the legislative standard therein prescribed, and to perform other specified duties as a legislative or as a judicial aid. Such a body cannot in any proper sense be characterized as an arm or an eye of the executive. Its duties are performed without executive leave and, in the contemplation of the statute, must be free from executive control. In administering the provisions of the statute in respect of ‘unfair methods of competition,’ that is to say, in filling in and administering the details embodied by that general standard, the commission acts in part quasi leg- islatively and in part quasi judicially … To the extent that it exercises any executive function, as distinguished from execu- tive power in the constitutional sense, it does so in the discharge and effectuation of its quasi legislative or quasi judicial powers, or as an agency of the legislative or judicial departments of the government … If Congress is without authority to prescribe causes for removal of members of the trade commission and limit executive power of removal accordingly, that power at once becomes practically all-inclusive in respect of civil officers with the exception of the judiciary provided for by the Constitution … We are thus confronted with the serious question whether not only the members of these quasi legislative and quasi judicial bodies, but the judges of the legislative Court of Claims, exercising judicial power … con- tinue in office only at the pleasure of the President. We think it plain under the Constitution that illimitable power of removal is not possessed by the President in respect of officers of the character of those just named. The authority of Congress, in creating quasi legislative or quasi judicial agencies, to require them to act in discharge of their duties independently of executive control cannot well be doubted. CHIEF JUSTICE REHNQUIST delivered the opinion of the Court. This case presents us with a challenge to the independent counsel provisions of the Ethics in Government Act of 1978 … We hold today that these provisions of the Act do not violate the Appointments Clause of the Constitution, Art. II, § 2, cl. 2, or the limitations of Article III, nor do they impermissibly interfere with the President’s authority under Article II in violation of the constitutional principle of separation of powers. Briefly stated, Title VI of the Ethics in Government Act … allows for the appointment of an “independent counsel” to investigate and, if appropriate, prosecute certain high-ranking Government officials for violations of federal criminal laws … The Act requires the Attorney General, upon receipt of information that he determines is “sufficient to constitute grounds to investigate whether any person [covered by the Act] may have violated any Federal criminal law,” to conduct a preliminary investigation of the matter … If … the Attorney General has determined that there are “reasonable grounds to believe that further investigation or prosecution is warranted,” then he “shall apply to the division of the court for the appointment of an independent counsel … ” With respect to all matters within the independent counsel’s jurisdiction, the Act grants the counsel “full power and independent authority to exercise all investigative and prosecutorial functions and powers of the Department of Justice, the Attorney General, and any other officer or employee of the Department of Justice … ” The functions of the inde- pendent counsel include conducting grand jury proceedings and other investigations, participating in civil and criminal court proceedings and litigation, and appealing any decision in any case in which the counsel participates in an official capacity … the counsel’s powers include “initiating and conducting prosecutions in any court of competent jurisdiction, framing and signing indictments, filing informations, and handling all aspects of any case, in the name of the United States … ” … An independent counsel has “full authority to dismiss matters within [his or her] prosecutorial jurisdiction without conducting an investigation or at any subsequent time before prosecution, if to do so would be consistent” with Department of Justice policy … Two statutory provisions govern the length of an independent counsel’s tenure in office. The first defines the procedure for removing an independent counsel. Section 596(a)(1) provides: “An independent counsel appointed under this chapter may be removed from office, other than by impeachment and conviction, only by the personal action of the Attorney General … ” If an independent counsel is removed pursuant to this section, the Attorney General is required to submit a report to both the Special Division and the Judiciary Committees of the Senate and the House “specifying the facts found and the ultimate grounds for such removal.” § 596(a)(2). Under the current version of the Act, an independent counsel can obtain judicial review of the Attorney General’s action by filing a civil action in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia … The reviewing court is authorized to grant reinstatement or “other appropriate relief.” § 596(a)(3) … The other provision governing the tenure of the independent counsel defines the procedures for “terminating” the coun- sel’s office. Under § 596(b)(1), the office of an independent counsel terminates when he or she notifies the Attorney Gen- eral that he or she has completed or substantially completed any investigations or prosecutions undertaken pursuant to the Act … 69 | APPOINTMENT AND REMOVAL POWERS Finally, the Act provides for congressional oversight of the activities of independent counsel … On April 23, 1986, the Special Division appointed James C. McKay as independent counsel to investigate “whether the testimony of … Olson and his revision of such testimony on March 10, 1983, violated either 18 U. S. C. § 1505 or § 1001, or any other provision of federal law … ” McKay later resigned as independent counsel, and on May 29, 1986, the Division appointed appellant Morrison as his replacement, with the same jurisdiction … [I]n May and June 1987, appellant caused a grand jury to issue and serve … on appellees. All three appellees moved to quash the subpoenas, claiming, among other things, that the independent counsel provisions of the Act were unconsti- tutional and that appellant accordingly had no authority to proceed … The initial question is, accordingly, whether appellant is an “inferior” or a “principal” officer … If she is the latter, as the Court of Appeals concluded, then the Act is in violation of the Appointments Clause. The line between “inferior” and “principal” officers is one that is far from clear, and the Framers provided little guidance into where it should be drawn … [I]n our view appellant clearly falls on the “inferior officer” side of that line. Several factors lead to this conclusion. First, appellant is subject to removal by a higher Executive Branch official. Although appellant may not be “subordinate” to the Attorney General (and the President) insofar as she possesses a degree of independent discretion to exercise the powers delegated to her under the Act, the fact that she can be removed by the Attorney General indicates that she is to some degree “inferior” in rank and authority. Second, appellant is empowered by the Act to perform only certain, limited duties … Admittedly, the Act delegates to appellant “full power and independent authority to exercise all investigative and prosecutorial functions and powers of the Department of Justice,” § 594(a), but this grant of authority does not include any authority to formulate policy for the Government or the Executive Branch, nor does it give appellant any administrative duties outside of those necessary to operate her office. The Act specifically provides that in policy matters appellant is to comply to the extent possible with the policies of the Department … Third, appellant’s office is limited in jurisdiction. Not only is the Act itself restricted in applicability to certain federal officials suspected of certain serious federal crimes, but an independent counsel can only act within the scope of the juris- diction that has been granted by the Special Division pursuant to a request by the Attorney General. Finally, appellant’s office is limited in tenure. There is concededly no time limit on the appointment of a particular counsel. Nonetheless, the office of independent counsel is “temporary” in the sense that an independent counsel is appointed essentially to accomplish a single task, and when that task is over the office is terminated, either by the counsel herself or by action of the Special Division. Unlike other prosecutors, appellant has no ongoing responsibilities that extend beyond the accom- plishment of the mission that she was appointed for and authorized by the Special Division to undertake. In our view, these factors relating to the “ideas of tenure, duration … and duties” of the independent counsel, Germaine, are sufficient to establish that appellant is an “inferior” officer in the constitutional sense. This conclusion is consistent with our few previous decisions that considered the question whether a particular Govern- ment official is a “principal” or an “inferior” officer … APPOINTMENT AND REMOVAL POWERS | 70 Appellees argue that even if appellant is an “inferior” officer, the Clause does not empower Congress to place the power to appoint such an officer outside the Executive Branch. They contend that the Clause does not contemplate congres- sional authorization of “interbranch appointments,” in which an officer of one branch is appointed by officers of another branch. The relevant language of the Appointments Clause is worth repeating. It reads: ” … but the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments.” On its face, the language of this “excepting clause” admits of no limitation on interbranch appointments. Indeed, the inclusion of “as they think proper” seems clearly to give Congress significant discretion to determine whether it is “proper” to vest the appointment of, for example, executive officials in the “courts of Law … ” We also note that the history of the Clause provides no support for appellees’ position … We do not mean to say that Congress’ power to provide for interbranch appointments of “inferior officers” is unlimited. In addition to separation-of-powers concerns, which would arise if such provisions for appointment had the potential to impair the constitutional functions assigned to one of the branches, Ex parte Siebold (1879) itself suggested that Con- gress’ decision to vest the appointment power in the courts would be improper if there was some “incongruity” between the functions normally performed by the courts and the performance of their duty to appoint … In this case, however, we do not think it impermissible for Congress to vest the power to appoint independent counsel in a specially created federal court … We now turn to consider whether the Act is invalid under the constitutional principle of separation of powers. Two related issues must be addressed: The first is whether the provision of the Act restricting the Attorney General’s power to remove the independent counsel to only those instances in which he can show “good cause,” taken by itself, impermis- sibly interferes with the President’s exercise of his constitutionally appointed functions. The second is whether, taken as a whole, the Act violates the separation of powers by reducing the President’s ability to control the prosecutorial powers wielded by the independent counsel. Unlike both Bowsher and Myers, this case does not involve an attempt by Congress itself to gain a role in the removal of executive officials other than its established powers of impeachment and conviction. The Act instead puts the removal power squarely in the hands of the Executive Branch; an independent counsel may be removed from office, “only by the personal action of the Attorney General, and only for good cause.” § 596(a)(1) … There is no requirement of congres- sional approval of the Attorney General’s removal decision, though the decision is subject to judicial review. § 596(a)(3). In our view, the removal provisions of the Act make this case more analogous to Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, (1935), and Wiener v. United States, (1958), than to Myers or Bowsher … Appellees contend that Humphrey’s Executor and Wiener are distinguishable from this case because they did not involve officials who performed a “core executive function.” They argue that our decision in Humphrey’s Executor rests on a distinction between “purely executive” officials and officials who exercise “quasi-legislative” and “quasi-judicial” powers. In their view, when a “purely executive” official is involved, the governing precedent is Myers, not Humphrey’s Executor. And, under Myers, the President must have absolute discretion to discharge “purely” executive officials at will … We undoubtedly did rely on the terms “quasi-legislative” and “quasi-judicial” to distinguish the officials involved in Humphrey’s Executor and Wiener from those in Myers, but our present considered view is that the determination of whether the Constitution allows Congress to impose a “good cause”-type restriction on the President’s power to remove 71 | APPOINTMENT AND REMOVAL POWERS an official cannot be made to turn on whether or not that official is classified as “purely executive … ” The analysis con- tained in our removal cases is designed not to define rigid categories of those officials who may or may not be removed at will by the President … but to ensure that Congress does not interfere with the President’s exercise of the “execu- tive power” and his constitutionally appointed duty to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed” under Article II. Myers was undoubtedly correct in its holding, and in its broader suggestion that there are some “purely executive” officials who must be removable by the President at will if he is to be able to accomplish his constitutional role … But as the Court noted in Wiener: “The assumption was short-lived that the Myers case recognized the President’s inherent constitutional power to remove officials no matter what the relation of the executive to the discharge of their duties and no matter what restrictions Con- gress may have imposed regarding the nature of their tenure … ” [T]he real question is whether the removal restrictions are of such a nature that they impede the President’s ability to perform his constitutional duty, and the functions of the officials in question must be analyzed in that light. Considering for the moment the “good cause” removal provision in isolation from the other parts of the Act at issue in this case, we cannot say that the imposition of a “good cause” standard for removal by itself unduly trammels on executive authority. There is no real dispute that the functions performed by the independent counsel are “executive” in the sense that they are law enforcement functions that typically have been undertaken by officials within the Executive Branch. As we noted above, however, the independent counsel is an inferior officer under the Appointments Clause … we simply do not see how the President’s need to control the exercise of that discretion is so central to the functioning of the Executive Branch as to require as a matter of constitutional law that the counsel be terminable at will by the President … Nor do we think that the “good cause” removal provision at issue here impermissibly burdens the President’s power to control or supervise the independent counsel, as an executive official, in the execution of his or her duties under the Act. This is not a case in which the power to remove an executive official has been completely stripped from the President, thus providing no means for the President to ensure the “faithful execution” of the laws. Rather, because the indepen- dent counsel may be terminated for “good cause,” the Executive, through the Attorney General, retains ample authority to assure that the counsel is competently performing his or her statutory responsibilities in a manner that comports with the provisions of the Act … Here, as with the provision of the Act conferring the appointment authority of the indepen- dent counsel on the special court, the congressional determination to limit the removal power of the Attorney General was essential, in the view of Congress, to establish the necessary independence of the office. We do not think that this limitation as it presently stands sufficiently deprives the President of control over the independent counsel to interfere impermissibly with his constitutional obligation to ensure the faithful execution of the laws … The final question to be addressed is whether the Act, taken as a whole, violates the principle of separation of powers by unduly interfering with the role of the Executive Branch. Time and again we have reaffirmed the importance in our con- stitutional scheme of the separation of governmental powers into the three coordinate branches … We have not hesitated to invalidate provisions of law which violate this principle. On the other hand, we have never held that the Constitution requires that the three branches of Government “operate with absolute independence … ” In the often-quoted words of Justice Jackson: APPOINTMENT AND REMOVAL POWERS | 72 “While the Constitution diffuses power the better to secure liberty, it also contemplates that practice will integrate the dispersed powers into a workable government. It enjoins upon its branches separateness but interdependence, autonomy but reciprocity.” Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, (1952) (concurring opinion). We observe first that this case does not involve an attempt by Congress to increase its own powers at the expense of the Executive Branch … Indeed, with the exception of the power of impeachment — which applies to all officers of the United States — Congress retained for itself no powers of control or supervision over an independent counsel. The Act does empower certain Members of Congress to request the Attorney General to apply for the appointment of an inde- pendent counsel, but the Attorney General has no duty to comply with the request, although he must respond within a certain time limit. § 592(g). Other than that, Congress’ role under the Act is limited to receiving reports or other informa- tion and oversight of the independent counsel’s activities, § 595(a), functions that we have recognized generally as being incidental to the legislative function of Congress … Similarly, we do not think that the Act works any judicial usurpation of properly executive functions. As should be apparent from our discussion of the Appointments Clause above, the power to appoint inferior officers such as indepen- dent counsel is not in itself an “executive” function in the constitutional sense, at least when Congress has exercised its power to vest the appointment of an inferior office in the “courts of Law.” … In addition, once the court has appointed a counsel and defined his or her jurisdiction, it has no power to supervise or control the activities of the counsel. … [T]he various powers delegated by the statute to the Division are not supervisory or administrative, nor are they functions that the Constitution requires be performed by officials within the Executive Branch. The Act does give a federal court the power to review the Attorney General’s decision to remove an independent counsel, but in our view this is a function that is well within the traditional power of the Judiciary. Finally, we do not think that the Act “impermissibly undermine[s]” the powers of the Executive Branch … or “disrupts the proper balance between the coordinate branches [by] prevent[ing] the Executive Branch from accomplishing its con- stitutionally assigned functions … ” It is undeniable that the Act reduces the amount of control or supervision that the Attorney General and, through him, the President exercises over the investigation and prosecution of a certain class of alleged criminal activity … The Act … gives the Executive a degree of control over the power to initiate an investigation by the independent counsel. In addition, the jurisdiction of the independent counsel is defined with reference to the facts submitted by the Attorney General, and once a counsel is appointed, the Act requires that the counsel abide by Justice Department policy unless it is not “possible” to do so. Notwithstanding the fact that the counsel is to some degree “inde- pendent” and free from executive supervision to a greater extent than other federal prosecutors, in our view these features of the Act give the Executive Branch sufficient control over the independent counsel to ensure that the President is able to perform his constitutionally assigned duties. In sum, we conclude today that it does not violate the Appointments Clause for Congress to vest the appointment of independent counsel in the Special Division; that the powers exercised by the Special Division under the Act do not vio- late Article III; and that the Act does not violate the separation-of-powers principle by impermissibly interfering with the functions of the Executive Branch. The decision of the Court of Appeals is therefore Reversed. JUSTICE KENNEDY took no part in the consideration or decision of this case. 73 | APPOINTMENT AND REMOVAL POWERS Original excerpt in Lawrence Lessig, Constitutional Law: Separation of Powers, Federalism, and Fourteenth Amendment, published by H2O. Further excerpted by Alexandria Metzdorf. Licensed under CC BY-NC-SA. § NLRB v. Canning 573 U.S. 513 (2014) Decision: Affirmed Vote: 9-0 Majority: Breyer, joined by Kennedy, Ginsburg, Sotomayor, and Kagan Concurrence: Scalia (in judgment), joined by Roberts, Thomas, and Alito Note: A pro forma session is defined as “From the Latin, meaning ‘as a matter of form,’ a pro forma session is a brief meeting of the Senate, often only a few minutes in duration.” https://www.senate.gov/general/Features/Ses- sions.htm#:~:text=Pro%20Forma%20Session%3A%20From%20the,following%20the%20November%20gen- eral%20elections. Visit https://www.c-span.org/video/?526638-1/senate-pro-forma-session to see the c-span to view a pro forma session. Justice Breyer delivered the opinion of the Court. Ordinarily the President must obtain “the Advice and Consent of the Senate” before appointing an “Office[r] of the United States.” U. S. Const., Art. II, §2, cl. 2. But the Recess Appointments Clause creates an exception. It gives the Pres- ident alone the power “to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commis- sions which shall expire at the End of their next Session.” Art. II, §2, cl. 3. We here consider three questions about the application of this Clause. The first concerns the scope of the words “recess of the Senate.” Does that phrase refer only to an inter-session recess (i.e., a break between formal sessions of Congress), or does it also include an intra-session recess, such as a summer recess in the midst of a session? We conclude that the Clause applies to both kinds of recess. The second question concerns the scope of the words “vacancies that may happen.” Does that phrase refer only to vacan- cies that first come into existence during a recess, or does it also include vacancies that arise prior to a recess but continue to exist during the recess? We conclude that the Clause applies to both kinds of vacancy. The third question concerns calculation of the length of a “recess.” The President made the appointments here at issue on January 4, 2012. At that time the Senate was in recess pursuant to a December 17, 2011, resolution providing for a series of brief recesses punctuated by “pro forma session[s],” with “no business … transacted,” every Tuesday and Friday through January 20, 2012 … In calculating the length of a recess are we to ignore the pro forma sessions, thereby treating the series of brief recesses as a single, month-long recess? We conclude that we cannot ignore these pro forma sessions. APPOINTMENT AND REMOVAL POWERS | 74 Our answer to the third question means that, when the appointments before us took place, the Senate was in the midst of a 3-day recess. Three days is too short a time to bring a recess within the scope of the Clause. Thus we conclude that the President lacked the power to make the recess appointments here at issue. The case before us arises out of a labor dispute. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) found that a Pepsi-Cola distributor, Noel Canning, had unlawfully refused to reduce to writing and execute a collective-bargaining agreement with a labor union. The Board ordered the distributor to execute the agreement and to make employees whole for any losses … The Pepsi-Cola distributor subsequently asked the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to set the Board’s order aside. It claimed that three of the five Board members had been invalidly appointed, leaving the Board with- out the three lawfully appointed members necessary for it to act … The three members in question were Sharon Block, Richard Griffin, and Terence Flynn. In 2011 the President had nom- inated each of them to the Board. As of January 2012, Flynn’s nomination had been pending in the Senate awaiting confirmation for approximately a year. The nominations of each of the other two had been pending for a few weeks. On January 4, 2012, the President, invoking the Recess Appointments Clause, appointed all three to the Board. The distributor argued that the Recess Appointments Clause did not authorize those appointments. It pointed out that on December 17, 2011, the Senate, by unanimous consent, had adopted a resolution providing that it would take a series of brief recesses beginning the following day … Pursuant to that resolution, the Senate held pro forma sessions every Tuesday and Friday until it returned for ordinary business on January 23, 2012 … The President’s January 4 appoint- ments were made between the January 3 and January 6 pro forma sessions. In the distributor’s view, each pro forma session terminated the immediately preceding recess. Accordingly, the appointments were made during a 3-day adjourn- ment, which is not long enough to trigger the Recess Appointments Clause. The Court of Appeals agreed that the appointments fell outside the scope of the Clause. But the court set forth different reasons … Since the second session of the 112th Congress began on January 3, 2012, the day before the President’s appointments, those appointments occurred during an intra-session recess, and the appointments consequently fell out- side the scope of the Clause … We asked the parties to address not only the Court of Appeals’ interpretation of the Clause but also the distributor’s initial argument, namely, “[w]hether the President’s recess-appointment power may be exercised when the Senate is con- vening every three days in pro forma sessions … ” … [T]he Recess Appointments Clause reflects the tension between, on the one hand, the President’s continuous need for “the assistance of subordinates,” Myers v. United States, (1926), and, on the other, the Senate’s practice, particularly dur- ing the Republic’s early years, of meeting for a single brief session each year … We seek to interpret the Clause as granting the President the power to make appointments during a recess but not offering the President the authority routinely to avoid the need for Senate confirmation. 75 | APPOINTMENT AND REMOVAL POWERS Second, in interpreting the Clause, we put significant weight upon historical practice. For one thing, the interpretive questions before us concern the allocation of power between two elected branches of Government. Long ago Chief Jus- tice Marshall wrote that “a doubtful question, one on which human reason may pause, and the human judgment be suspended, in the decision of which the great principles of liberty are not concerned, but the respective powers of those who are equally the representa- tives of the people, are to be adjusted; if not put at rest by the practice of the government, ought to receive a considerable impression from that practice.” McCulloch v. Maryland, (1819) … The first question concerns the scope of the phrase “the recess of the Senate … ” The Constitution provides for congres- sional elections every two years. And the 2-year life of each elected Congress typically consists of two formal 1-year ses- sions, each separated from the next by an “inter-session recess … ” The Senate or the House of Representatives announces an inter-session recess by approving a resolution stating that it will “adjourn sine die,” i.e., without specifying a date to return (in which case Congress will reconvene when the next formal session is scheduled to begin). The Senate and the House also take breaks in the midst of a session. The Senate or the House announces any such “intra- session recess” by adopting a resolution stating that it will “adjourn” to a fixed date, a few days or weeks or even months later. All agree that the phrase “the recess of the Senate” covers inter-session recesses. The question is whether it includes intra-session recesses as well. In our view, the phrase “the recess” includes an intra-session recess of substantial length … History … shows only that Congress generally took long breaks between sessions, while taking no significant intra-session breaks at all (five times it took a break of a week or so at Christmas) … In 1867 and 1868, Congress for the first time took substantial, nonholiday intra-session breaks, and President Andrew Johnson made dozens of recess appointments. The Federal Court of Claims upheld one of those specific appointments, writing “[w]e have no doubt that a vacancy occur- ring while the Senate was thus temporarily adjourned” during the “first session of the Fortieth Congress” was “legally filled by appointment of the President alone.” Gould v. United States, (1884) … … [R]estricting the Clause to inter-session recesses would frustrate its purpose. It would make the President’s recess- appointment power dependent on a formalistic distinction of Senate procedure. Moreover, the President has consis- tently and frequently interpreted the word “recess” to apply to intra-session recesses, and has acted on that interpretation. The Senate as a body has done nothing to deny the validity of this practice for at least three-quarters of a century … [A] 3-day recess would be too short … The Adjournments Clause reflects the fact that a 3-day break is not a significant interruption of legislative business. As the Solicitor General says, it is constitutionally de minimis. A Senate recess that is so short that it does not require the consent of the House is not long enough to trigger the President’s recess-appoint- ment power. In sum, we conclude that the phrase “the recess” applies to both intra-session and inter-session recesses. If a Senate recess is so short that it does not require the consent of the House, it is too short to trigger the Recess Appointments Clause. See Art. I, §5, cl. 4. And a recess lasting less than 10 days is presumptively too short as well. Applying this standard, we find that the pro forma sessions were sessions for purposes of the Clause. First, the Senate said it was in session. The Journal of the Senate and the Congressional Record indicate that the Senate convened for a series of twice-weekly “sessions” from December 20 through January 20 … Second, the Senate’s rules make clear that during its pro forma sessions, despite its resolution that it would conduct no business, the Senate retained the power to conduct business. During any pro forma session, the Senate could have con- ducted business simply by passing a unanimous consent agreement … It is consequently unsurprising that the Senate has enacted legislation during pro forma sessions even when it has said that no business will be transacted. Indeed, the Senate passed a bill by unanimous consent during the second pro forma session after its December 17 adjournment … The Recess Appointments Clause responds to a structural difference between the Executive and Legislative Branches: The Executive Branch is perpetually in operation, while the Legislature only acts in intervals separated by recesses. The purpose of the Clause is to allow the Executive to continue operating while the Senate is unavailable. We believe that the Clause’s text, standing alone, is ambiguous. It does not resolve whether the President may make appointments during intra-session recesses, or whether he may fill pre-recess vacancies. But the broader reading better serves the Clause’s struc- tural function. Moreover, that broader reading is reinforced by centuries of history, which we are hesitant to disturb. We thus hold that the Constitution empowers the President to fill any existing vacancy during any recess—intra-session or inter-session—of sufficient length. Given our answer to the last question before us, we conclude that the Recess Appointments Clause does not give the President the constitutional authority to make the appointments here at issue. Because the Court of Appeals reached the same ultimate conclusion (though for reasons we reject), its judgment is affirmed. It is so ordered. Justice Scalia, with whom The Chief Justice, Justice Thomas, and Justice Alito join, concurring in the judgment. Except where the Constitution or a valid federal law provides otherwise, all “Officers of the United States” must be appointed by the President “by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate.” U. S. Const., Art. II, §2, cl. 2. That general rule is subject to an exception: “The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session.” Id., §2, cl. 3. This case requires us to decide whether the Recess Appointments Clause authorized three appointments made by President Obama to the National Labor Relations Board in January 2012 without the Senate’s consent. To prevent the President’s recess-appointment power from nullifying the Senate’s role in the appointment process, the Constitution cabins that power in two significant ways. First, it may be exercised only in “the Recess of the Senate,” that is, the intermission between two formal legislative sessions. Second, it may be used to fill only those vacancies that “hap- pen during the Recess,” that is, offices that become vacant during that intermission. Both conditions are clear from the Constitution’s text and struc ture, and both were well understood at the founding. The Court of Appeals correctly held that the appointments here at issue are invalid because they did not meet either condition … The Court’s decision transforms the recess-appointment power from a tool carefully designed to fill a narrow and specific need into a weapon to be wielded by future Presidents against future Senates. To reach that result, the majority casts aside APPOINTMENT AND REMOVAL POWERS | 78 the plain, original meaning of the constitutional text in deference to late-arising historical practices that are ambiguous at best. The majority’s insistence on deferring to the Executive’s untenably broad interpretation of the power is in clear conflict with our precedent and forebodes a diminution of this Court’s role in controversies involving the separation of powers and the structure of government. I concur in the judgment only … The first question presented is whether “the Recess of the Senate,” during which the President’s recess-appointment power is active, is (a) the period between two of the Senate’s formal sessions, or (b) any break in the Senate’s proceedings. I would hold that “the Recess” is the gap between sessions and that the appointments at issue here are invalid because they undisputedly were made during the Senate’s session. The Court’s contrary conclusion—that “the Recess” includes “breaks in the midst of a session,” ante, at 9—is inconsistent with the Constitution’s text and structure, and it requires judicial fabrication of vague, unadministrable limits on the recess-appointment power (thus defined) that overstep the judicial role. And although the majority relies heavily on “historical practice,” no practice worthy of our deference sup- ports the majority’s conclusion on this issue … What does all this amount to? In short: Intra-session recess appointments were virtually unheard of for the first 130 years of the Republic, were deemed unconstitutional by the first Attorney General to address them, were not openly defended by the Executive until 1921, were not made in significant numbers until after World War II, and have been repeatedly criticized as unconstitutional by Senators of both parties. It is astonishing for the majority to assert that this history lends “strong support,” ante, at 11, to its interpretation of the Recess Appointments Clause. The second question presented is whether vacancies that “happen during the Recess of the Senate,” which the President is empowered to fill with recess appointments, are (a) vacancies that arise during the recess, or (b) all vacancies that exist during the recess, regardless of when they arose. I would hold that the recess-appointment power is limited to vacancies that arise during the recess in which they are filled, and I would hold that the appointments at issue here—which undisputedly filled pre-recess vacancies—are invalid for that reason as well as for the reason that they were made during the session. The Court’s contrary conclusion is inconsistent with the Constitution’s text and structure, and it further undermines the balance the Framers struck between Presidential and Senatorial power. Historical practice also fails to support the majority’s conclusion on this issue … In sum: Washington’s and Adams’ Attorneys General read the Constitution to restrict recess appointments to vacancies arising during the recess, and there is no evidence that any of the first four Presidents consciously departed from that reading. The contrary reading was first defended by an executive official in 1823, was vehemently rejected by the Senate in 1863, was vigorously resisted by legislation in place from 1863 until 1940, and is arguably inconsistent with legislation in place from 1940 to the present. The Solicitor General has identified only about 100 appointments that have ever been made under the broader reading, and while it seems likely that a good deal more have been made in the last few decades, there is good reason to doubt that many were made before 1940 (since the appointees could not have been compensated). I can conceive of no sane constitutional theory under which this evidence of “historical practice”—which is actually evi- dence of a long-simmering inter-branch conflict—would require us to defer to the views of the Executive Branch … What the majority needs to sustain its judgment is an ambiguous text and a clear historical practice. What it has is a clear text and an at-best-ambiguous historical practice … 79 | APPOINTMENT AND REMOVAL POWERS The real tragedy of today’s decision is not simply the abolition of the Constitution’s limits on the recess-appointment power and the substitution of a novel framework invented by this Court. It is the damage done to our separation-of- powers jurisprudence more generally. It is not every day that we encounter a proper case or controversy requiring inter- pretation of the Constitution’s structural provisions. Most of the time, the interpretation of those provisions is left to the political branches—which, in deciding how much respect to afford the constitutional text, often take their cues from this Court. We should therefore take every opportunity to affirm the primacy of the Constitution’s enduring principles over the politics of the moment. Our failure to do so today will resonate well beyond the particular dispute at hand. Sad, but true: The Court’s embrace of the adverse-possession theory of executive power (a characterization the majority resists but does not refute) will be cited in diverse contexts, including those presently unimagined, and will have the effect of aggrandizing the Presidency beyond its constitutional bounds and undermining respect for the separation of powers. I concur in the judgment only. Excerpted by Alexandria Metzdorf § Lucia v. SEC 585 U.S. ___ (2018) Decision: Reversed and remanded Vote: 7-2 Majority: Kagan, joined by Roberts, Kennedy, Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch Concurrence: Thomas, joined by Gorsuch Concur/dissent: Breyer, joined by Ginsburg, and Sotomayor (Part III only) Dissent: Sotomayor, joined by Ginsburg Justice Kagan delivered the opinion of the Court. The Appointments Clause of the Constitution lays out the permissible methods of appointing “Officers of the United States,” a class of government officials distinct from mere employees … This case requires us to decide whether adminis- trative law judges (ALJs) of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC or Commission) qualify as such “Officers.” In keeping with Freytag v. Commissioner, (1991), we hold that they do … The SEC has statutory authority to enforce the nation’s securities laws. One way it can do so is by instituting an admin- istrative proceeding against an alleged wrongdoer. By law, the Commission may itself preside over such a proceeding … But the Commission also may, and typically does, delegate that task to an ALJ … The SEC currently has five ALJs. Other staff members, rather than the Commission proper, selected them all … APPOINTMENT AND REMOVAL POWERS | 80 An ALJ assigned to hear an SEC enforcement action has extensive powers—the “authority to do all things necessary and appropriate to discharge his or her duties” and ensure a “fair and orderly” adversarial proceeding … As that list suggests, an SEC ALJ exercises authority “comparable to” that of a federal district judge conducting a bench trial. Butz v. Economou, (1978) … This case began when the SEC instituted an administrative proceeding against petitioner Raymond Lucia and his invest- ment company. Lucia marketed a retirement savings strategy called “Buckets of Money.” In the SEC’s view, Lucia used misleading slideshow presentations to deceive prospective clients. The SEC charged Lucia under the Investment Advis- ers Act, and assigned ALJ Cameron Elliot to adjudicate the case. After nine days of testimony and argument, Judge Elliot issued an initial decision concluding that Lucia had violated the Act and imposing sanctions, including civil penalties of $300,000 and a lifetime bar from the investment industry … On appeal to the SEC, Lucia argued that the administrative proceeding was invalid because Judge Elliot had not been constitutionally appointed. According to Lucia, the Commission’s ALJs are “Officers of the United States” and thus subject to the Appointments Clause … [T]he Commission had left the task of appointing ALJs, including Judge Elliot, to SEC staff members … As a result, Lucia contended, Judge Elliot lacked constitutional authority to do his job … The sole question here is whether the Commission’s ALJs are “Officers of the United States” or simply employees of the Federal Government. The Appointments Clause prescribes the exclusive means of appointing “Officers.” Only the Pres- ident, a court of law, or a head of department can do so. Two decisions set out this Court’s basic framework for distinguishing between officers and employees. Germaine v. US (1879) held that “civil surgeons” (doctors hired to perform various physical exams) were mere employees because their duties were “occasional or temporary” rather than “continuing and permanent … ” Stressing “ideas of tenure [and] dura- tion,” the Court there made clear that an individual must occupy a “continuing” position established by law to qualify as an officer. Buckley v. Valeo (1976) then set out another requirement, central to this case. It determined that members of a federal commission were officers only after finding that they “exercis[ed] significant authority pursuant to the laws of the United States … ” The inquiry thus focused on the extent of power an individual wields in carrying out his assigned functions. Both the amicus and the Government urge us to elaborate on Buckley’s “significant authority” test, but another of our precedents makes that project unnecessary … [I]n Freytag v. Commissioner, (1991), we applied the unadorned “signifi- cant authority” test to adjudicative officials who are near-carbon copies of the Commission’s ALJs. As we now explain, our analysis there (sans any more detailed legal criteria) necessarily decides this case. The officials at issue in Freytag were the “special trial judges” (STJs) of the United States Tax Court. The authority of those judges depended on the significance of the tax dispute before them. In “comparatively narrow and minor matters,” they could both hear and definitively resolve a case for the Tax Court … In more major matters, they could preside over the hearing, but could not issue the final decision; instead, they were to “prepare proposed findings and an opinion” for a regular Tax Court judge to consider … 81 | APPOINTMENT AND REMOVAL POWERS This Court held that the Tax Court’s STJs are officers, not mere employees. Citing Germaine, the Court first found that STJs hold a continuing office established by law … They serve on an ongoing, rather than a “temporary [or] episodic[,] basis”; and their “duties, salary, and means of appointment” are all specified in the Tax Code. For all the reasons we have given, and all those Freytag gave before, the Commission’s ALJs are “Officers of the United States,” subject to the Appointments Clause … This Court has held that “one who makes a timely challenge to the con- stitutional validity of the appointment of an officer who adjudicates his case” is entitled to relief. Ryder v. United States, (1995). Lucia made just such a timely challenge: He contested the validity of Judge Elliot’s appointment before the Com- mission, and continued pressing that claim in the Court of Appeals and this Court. So what relief follows? This Court has also held that the “appropriate” remedy for an adjudication tainted with an appointments violation is a new “hearing before a properly appointed” official … And we add today one thing more. That official cannot be Judge Elliot, even if he has by now received (or receives sometime in the future) a constitutional appointment. Judge Elliot has already both heard Lucia’s case and issued an initial decision on the merits. He cannot be expected to consider the matter as though he had not adjudicated it before. To cure the constitutional error, another ALJ (or the Commission itself) must hold the new hearing to which Lucia is entitled. We accordingly reverse the judgment of the Court of Appeals and remand the case for further proceedings consistent with this opinion. It is so ordered. Note: In June of 2020, Lucia entered a settlement with the SEC which banned Lucia from the securities industry, though he could reapply for admittance, and included a fine of $25,000.00. (see https://www.investmentnews.com/sec-ray-lucia- settle-lawsuit-194238, last accessed on April 27, 2023.) § APPOINTMENT AND REMOVAL POWERS | 82 Executive Privilege United States v. Nixon 418 U.S. 683 (1974) Decision: Affirmed Vote: 8-0 Majority: Burger, joined by Douglas, Brennan, Stewart, White, Marshall, Blackmun, and Powell MR. CHIEF JUSTICE BURGER delivered the opinion of the Court. This litigation presents for review the denial of a motion … to quash a third-party subpoena duces tecum issued … pur- suant to Fed. Rule Crim. Proc. 17 (c). The subpoena directed the President to produce certain tape recordings and doc- uments relating to his conversations with aides and advisers … On March 1, 1974, a grand jury of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia returned an indictment charging seven named individuals with various offenses, including conspiracy to defraud the United States and to obstruct justice. Although he was not designated as such in the indictment, the grand jury named the President, among others, as an unindicted coconspirator … [W]e turn to the claim that the subpoena should be quashed because it demands “confidential conversations between a President and his close advisors that it would be inconsistent with the public interest to produce … ” The first contention is a broad claim that the separation of powers doctrine precludes judicial review of a President’s claim of privilege. The second contention is that if he does not prevail on the claim of absolute privilege, the court should hold as a matter of constitutional law that the privilege prevails over the subpoena duces tecum. In the performance of assigned constitutional duties each branch of the Government must initially interpret the Consti- tution, and the interpretation of its powers by any branch is due great respect from the others. The President’s counsel, as we have noted, reads the Constitution as providing an absolute privilege of confidentiality for all Presidential commu- nications. Many decisions of this Court, however, have unequivocally reaffirmed the holding of Marbury v. Madison, (1803), that “[i]t is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is … ” Since this Court has consistently exercised the power to construe and delineate claims arising under express powers, it must follow that the Court has authority to interpret claims with respect to powers alleged to derive from enumerated powers … Our system of government “requires that federal courts on occasion interpret the Constitution in a manner at variance with the construction given the document by another branch.” Powell v. McCormack, (1969) … And in Baker v. Carr (1961), the Court stated: 83 | EXECUTIVE PRIVILEGE “Deciding whether a matter has in any measure been committed by the Constitution to another branch of government, or whether the action of that branch exceeds whatever authority has been committed, is itself a delicate exercise in con- stitutional interpretation, and is a responsibility of this Court as ultimate interpreter of the Constitution.” Notwithstanding the deference each branch must accord the others, the “judicial Power of the United States” vested in the federal courts by Art. III, § 1, of the Constitution can no more be shared with the Executive Branch than the Chief Executive, for example, can share with the Judiciary the veto power, or the Congress share with the Judiciary the power to override a Presidential veto. Any other conclusion would be contrary to the basic concept of separation of powers and the checks and balances that flow from the scheme of a tripartite government … We therefore reaffirm that it is the province and duty of this Court “to say what the law is” with respect to the claim of privilege presented in this case. In support of his claim of absolute privilege, the President’s counsel urges two grounds, one of which is common to all governments and one of which is peculiar to our system of separation of powers. The first ground is the valid need for protection of communications between high Government officials and those who advise and assist them in the perfor- mance of their manifold duties; the importance of this confidentiality is too plain to require further discussion … The second ground asserted by the President’s counsel in support of the claim of absolute privilege rests on the doctrine of separation of powers. Here it is argued that the independence of the Executive Branch within its own sphere … insu- lates a President from a judicial subpoena in an ongoing criminal prosecution, and thereby protects confidential Presi- dential communications. However, neither the doctrine of separation of powers, nor the need for confidentiality of high-level communications, without more, can sustain an absolute, unqualified Presidential privilege of immunity from judicial process under all cir- cumstances. The President’s need for complete candor and objectivity from advisers calls for great deference from the courts … [W]e find it difficult to accept the argument that even the very important interest in confidentiality of Presi- dential communications is significantly diminished by production of such material for in camera inspection with all the protection that a district court will be obliged to provide. The impediment that an absolute, unqualified privilege would place in the way of the primary constitutional duty of the Judicial Branch to do justice in criminal prosecutions would plainly conflict with the function of the courts under Art. III. In designing the structure of our Government and dividing and allocating the sovereign power among three co-equal branches, the Framers of the Constitution sought to provide a comprehensive system, but the separate powers were not intended to operate with absolute independence … To read the Art. II powers of the President as providing an absolute privilege as against a subpoena essential to enforce- ment of criminal statutes on no more than a generalized claim of the public interest in confidentiality of nonmilitary and nondiplomatic discussions would upset the constitutional balance of “a workable government” and gravely impair the role of the courts under Art. III. Since we conclude that the legitimate needs of the judicial process may outweigh Presidential privilege, it is necessary to resolve those competing interests in a manner that preserves the essential functions of each branch. The right and indeed the duty to resolve that question does not free the Judiciary from according high respect to the representations made on behalf of the President … EXECUTIVE PRIVILEGE | 84 When he signed the Act into law, President George W. Bush issued a statement declaring his position that § 214 would, “if construed as mandatory rather than advisory, impermissibly interfere with the President’s constitutional authority to formulate the position of the United States, speak for the Nation in international affairs, and determine the terms on which recognition is given to foreign states … ” The President concluded, “U.S. policy regarding Jerusalem has not changed … ” In considering claims of Presidential power this Court refers to Justice Jackson’s familiar tripartite framework from Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, (1952) (concurring opinion) … [W]hen “the President takes measures incompatible with the expressed or implied will of Congress … he can rely only upon his own constitutional powers minus any constitutional powers of Congress over the matter.” To succeed in this third category, the President’s asserted power must be both “exclusive” and “conclusive” on the issue … In this case the Secretary contends that § 214(d) infringes on the President’s exclusive recognition power by “requiring the President to contradict his recognition position regarding Jerusalem in official communications with foreign sover- eigns.” In so doing the Secretary acknowledges the President’s power is “at its lowest ebb … ” Because the President’s refusal to implement § 214(d) falls into Justice Jackson’s third category, his claim must be “scrutinized with caution,” and he may rely solely on powers the Constitution grants to him alone … Recognition is a “formal acknowledgment” that a particular “entity possesses the qualifications for statehood” or “that a particular regime is the effective government of a state … ” Recognition is often effected by an express “written or oral declaration … ” It may also be implied—for example, by concluding a bilateral treaty or by sending or receiving diplo- matic agents … Despite the importance of the recognition power in foreign relations, the Constitution does not use the term “recogni- tion,” either in Article II or elsewhere. The Secretary asserts that the President exercises the recognition power based on the Reception Clause, which directs that the President “shall receive Ambassadors and other public Ministers.” Art. II, § 3. As Zivotofsky notes, the Reception Clause received little attention at the Constitutional Convention … At the time of the founding, however, prominent international scholars suggested that receiving an ambassador was tan- tamount to recognizing the sovereignty of the sending state … It is a logical and proper inference, then, that a Clause directing the President alone to receive ambassadors would be understood to acknowledge his power to recognize other nations … The inference that the President exercises the recognition power is further supported by his additional Article II powers. It is for the President, “by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate,” to “make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur.” Art. II, § 2, cl. 2. In addition, “he shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors” as well as “other public Ministers and Consuls.” As a matter of constitutional structure, these additional powers give the President control over recognition decisions. At international law, recognition may be effected by different means, but each means is dependent upon Presidential power. In addition to receiving an ambassador, recognition may occur on “the conclusion of a bilateral treaty,” or the “formal initiation of diplomatic relations,” including the dispatch of an ambassador … The Constitution thus assigns the President means to effect recognition on his own initiative. Congress, by contrast, has no constitutional power that PRESIDENTIAL POWERS IN FOREIGN AFFAIRS | 146 would enable it to initiate diplomatic relations with a foreign nation. Because these specific Clauses confer the recogni- tion power on the President, the Court need not consider whether or to what extent the Vesting Clause, which provides that the “executive Power” shall be vested in the President, provides further support for the President’s action here. Art. II, § 1, cl. 1. The text and structure of the Constitution grant the President the power to recognize foreign nations and governments. The question then becomes whether that power is exclusive. The various ways in which the President may unilaterally effect recognition—and the lack of any similar power vested in Congress—suggest that it is. So, too, do functional con- siderations. Put simply, the Nation must have a single policy regarding which governments are legitimate in the eyes of the United States and which are not. Foreign countries need to know, before entering into diplomatic relations or com- merce with the United States, whether their ambassadors will be received; whether their officials will be immune from suit in federal court; and whether they may initiate lawsuits here to vindicate their rights. These assurances cannot be equivocal … It remains true, of course, that many decisions affecting foreign relations—including decisions that may determine the course of our relations with recognized countries—require congressional action. Congress may “regulate Commerce with foreign Nations,” “establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization,” “define and punish Piracies and Felonies commit- ted on the high Seas, and Offences against the Law of Nations,” “declare War,” “grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal,” and “make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces … ” Although the President alone effects the formal act of recognition, Congress’ powers, and its central role in making laws, give it substantial authority regarding many of the policy determinations that precede and follow the act of recognition itself. If Congress disagrees with the President’s recognition policy, there may be consequences. Formal recognition may seem a hollow act if it is not accompanied by the dispatch of an ambassador, the easing of trade restrictions, and the con- clusion of treaties. And those decisions require action by the Senate or the whole Congress. In practice, then, the President’s recognition determination is just one part of a political process that may require Con- gress to make laws. The President’s exclusive recognition power encompasses the authority to acknowledge, in a formal sense, the legitimacy of other states and governments, including their territorial bounds. Albeit limited, the exclusive recognition power is essential to the conduct of Presidential duties. The formal act of recognition is an executive power that Congress may not qualify. If the President is to be effective in negotiations over a formal recognition determination, it must be evident to his counterparts abroad that he speaks for the Nation on that precise question … Here, history is not all on one side, but on balance it provides strong support for the conclusion that the recognition power is the President’s alone. As Zivotofsky argues, certain historical incidents can be interpreted to support the posi- tion that recognition is a shared power. But the weight of historical evidence supports the opposite view, which is that the formal determination of recognition is a power to be exercised only by the President … As the power to recognize foreign states resides in the President alone, the question becomes whether § 214(d) infringes on the Executive’s consistent decision to withhold recognition with respect to Jerusalem … Section 214(d) requires that, in a passport or consular report of birth abroad, “the Secretary shall, upon the request of the citizen or the citizen’s legal guardian, record the place of birth as Israel” for a “United States citizen born in the city 147 | PRESIDENTIAL POWERS IN FOREIGN AFFAIRS of Jerusalem.” That is, § 214(d) requires the President, through the Secretary, to identify citizens born in Jerusalem who so request as being born in Israel. But according to the President, those citizens were not born in Israel. As a matter of United States policy, neither Israel nor any other country is acknowledged as having sovereignty over Jerusalem. In this way, § 214(d) “directly contradicts” the “carefully calibrated and longstanding Executive branch policy of neutrality toward Jerusalem.” If the power over recognition is to mean anything, it must mean that the President not only makes the initial, formal recognition determination but also that he may maintain that determination in his and his agent’s statements. This con- clusion is a matter of both common sense and necessity. If Congress could command the President to state a recognition position inconsistent with his own, Congress could override the President’s recognition determination … Although the statement required by § 214(d) would not itself constitute a formal act of recognition, it is a mandate that the Executive contradict his prior recognition determination in an official document issued by the Secretary of State … As a result, it is unconstitutional. This is all the more clear in light of the longstanding treatment of a passport’s place- of-birth section as an official executive statement implicating recognition … The Secretary’s position on this point has been consistent: He will not place information in the place-of-birth section of a passport that contradicts the President’s recognition policy … If a citizen objects to the country listed as sovereign over his place of birth, then the Secretary will accommodate him by listing the city or town of birth rather than the country … But the Secretary will not list a sovereign that contradicts the President’s recognition policy in a passport. Thus, the Secretary will not list “Israel” in a passport as the country containing Jerusalem … From the face of § 214, from the legislative history, and from its reception, it is clear that Congress wanted to express its displeasure with the President’s policy by, among other things, commanding the Executive to contradict his own, earlier stated position on Jerusalem. This Congress may not do. It is true, as Zivotofsky notes, that Congress has substantial authority over passports … The Court does not question the power of Congress to enact passport legislation of wide scope … The problem with § 214(d), however, lies in how Congress exercised its authority over passports. It was an improper act for Congress to “aggrandiz[e] its power at the expense of another branch” by requiring the President to contradict an ear- lier recognition determination in an official document issued by the Executive Branch. Freytag v. Commissioner, (1991). To allow Congress to control the President’s communication in the context of a formal recognition determination is to allow Congress to exercise that exclusive power itself. As a result, the statute is unconstitutional … In holding § 214(d) invalid the Court does not question the substantial powers of Congress over foreign affairs in general or passports in particular. This case is confined solely to the exclusive power of the President to control recognition deter- minations, including formal statements by the Executive Branch acknowledging the legitimacy of a state or government and its territorial bounds. Congress cannot command the President to contradict an earlier recognition determination in the issuance of passports. The judgment of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit is Affirmed. PRESIDENTIAL POWERS IN FOREIGN AFFAIRS | 148 Excerpted by Alexandria Metzdorf Justice Scalia, with whom The Chief Justice and Justice Alito join, dissenting. Before this country declared independence, the law of England entrusted the King with the exclusive care of his king- dom’s foreign affairs. The royal prerogative included the “sole power of sending ambassadors to foreign states, and receiv- ing them at home,” the sole authority to “make treaties, leagues, and alliances with foreign states and princes,” “the sole prerogative of making war and peace,” and the “sole power of raising and regulating fleets and armies.” W. Blackstone, Commentaries. The People of the United States had other ideas when they organized our Government. They considered a sound structure of balanced powers essential to the preservation of just government, and international relations formed no exception to that principle. The People therefore adopted a Constitution that divides responsibility for the Nation’s foreign concerns between the legislative and executive departments. The Constitution gave the President the “executive Power,” authority to send and responsibility to receive ambassadors, power to make treaties, and command of the Army and Navy—though they qual- ified some of these powers by requiring consent of the Senate. Art. II, §§1–3. At the same time, they gave Congress pow- ers over war, foreign commerce, naturalization, and more. Art. I, §8. “Fully eleven of the powers that Article I, §8 grants Congress deal in some way with foreign affairs.” L. Tribe, American Constitutional Law, §5–18, p. 965. This case arises out of a dispute between the Executive and Legislative Branches about whether the United States should treat Jerusalem as a part of Israel. The Constitution contemplates that the political branches will make policy about the territorial claims of foreign nations the same way they make policy about other international matters: The President will exercise his powers on the basis of his views, Congress its powers on the basis of its views. That is just what has happened here. The political branches of our Government agree on the real-world fact that Israel controls the city of Jerusalem … They disagree, however, about how official documents should record the birthplace of an American citizen born in Jerusalem. The Executive does not accept any state’s claim to sovereignty over Jerusalem, and it maintains that the birthplace des- ignation “Israel” would clash with this stance of neutrality. But the National Legislature has enacted a statute that pro- vides: “For purposes of the registration of birth, certification of nationality, or issuance of a passport of a United States citizen born in the city of Jerusalem, the Secretary [of State] shall, upon the request of the citizen or the citizen’s legal guardian, record the place of birth as Israel.” Foreign Relations Authorization Act, Fiscal Year 2003, §214(d). Menachem Zivotofsky’s parents seek enforcement of this statutory right in the issuance of their son’s passport and consular report of birth abroad … Before turning to Presidential power under Article II, I think it well to establish the statute’s basis in congressional power under Article I. Congress’s power to “establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization,” Art. I, §8, cl. 4, enables it to grant American citizenship to someone born abroad. United States v. Wong Kim Ark., (1898). The naturalization power also enables Congress to furnish the people it makes citizens with papers verifying their citizenship—say a consular report of birth abroad (which certifies citizenship of an American born outside the United States) or a passport (which certifies cit- izenship for purposes of international travel). As the Necessary and Proper Clause confirms, every congressional power 149 | PRESIDENTIAL POWERS IN FOREIGN AFFAIRS “carries with it all those incidental powers which are necessary to its complete and effectual execution.” Cohens v. Vir- ginia, (1821). Even on a miserly understanding of Congress’s incidental authority, Congress may make grants of citizen- ship “effectual” by providing for the issuance of certificates authenticating them. One would think that if Congress may grant Zivotofsky a passport and a birth report, it may also require these papers to record his birthplace as “Israel.” … No doubt congressional discretion in executing legislative powers has its limits; Congress’s chosen approach must be not only “necessary” to carrying its powers into execution, but also “proper.” Congress thus may not transcend boundaries upon legislative authority stated or implied elsewhere in the Constitution. But as we shall see, §214(d) does not transgress any such restriction. The Court frames this case as a debate about recognition. Recognition is a sovereign’s official acceptance of a status under international law … To know all this is to realize at once that §214(d) has nothing to do with recognition. Section 214(d) does not require the Secretary to make a formal declaration about Israel’s sovereignty over Jerusalem. And nobody suggests that international custom infers acceptance of sovereignty from the birthplace designation on a passport or birth report, as it does from bilateral treaties or exchanges of ambassadors. Recognition would preclude the United States (as a matter of international law) from later contesting Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem. But making a notation in a passport or birth report does not encumber the Republic with any international obligations. It leaves the Nation free (so far as international law is con- cerned) to change its mind in the future. That would be true even if the statute required all passports to list “Israel.” But in fact it requires only those passports to list “Israel” for which the citizen (or his guardian) requests “Israel”; all the rest, under the Secretary’s policy, list “Jerusalem.” It is utterly impossible for this deference to private requests to constitute an act that unequivocally manifests an intention to grant recognition. … The best indication that §214(d) does not concern recognition comes from the State Department’s policies concerning Taiwan. According to the Solicitor General, the United States “acknowledges the Chinese position” that Taiwan is a part of China, but “does not take a position” of its own on that issue. Brief for Respondent 51–52. Even so, the State Depart- ment has for a long time recorded the birthplace of a citizen born in Taiwan as “China.” It indeed insisted on doing so until Congress passed a law (on which §214(d) was modeled) giving citizens the option to have their birthplaces recorded as “Taiwan.” The Solicitor General explains that the designation “China” “involves a geographic description, not an asser- tion that Taiwan is … part of sovereign China.” Brief for Respondent 51–52. Quite so. Section 214(d) likewise calls for nothing beyond a “geographic description”; it does not require the Executive even to assert, never mind formally recog- nize, that Jerusalem is a part of sovereign Israel … Even if the Constitution gives the President sole power to extend recognition, it does not give him sole power to make all decisions relating to foreign disputes over sovereignty. To the contrary, a fair reading of Article I allows Congress to decide for itself how its laws should handle these controversies … PRESIDENTIAL POWERS IN FOREIGN AFFAIRS | 150 The Constitution likewise does not give the President exclusive power to determine which claims to statehood and terri- tory “are legitimate in the eyes of the United States,” ante, at 11. Congress may express its own views about these matters by declaring war, restricting trade, denying foreign aid, and much else besides … No consistent or coherent theory supports the Court’s decision … International disputes about statehood and territory are neither rare nor obscure. Leading foreign debates during the 19th century concerned how the United States should respond to revolutions in Latin America, Texas, Mexico, Hawaii, Cuba. During the 20th century, attitudes toward Communist governments in Russia and China became conspicuous subjects of agitation. Disagreements about Taiwan, Kashmir, and Crimea remain prominent today. A President empow- ered to decide all questions relating to these matters, immune from laws embodying congressional disagreement with his position, would have un- controlled mastery of a vast share of the Nation’s foreign affairs. That is not the chief magistrate under which the American People agreed to live when they adopted the national charter. They believed that “[t]he accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, … may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” The Federalist No. 47, p. 301 (Madison). For this reason, they did not entrust either the President or Congress with sole power to adopt uncontradictable policies about any subject—foreign- sovereignty disputes included. They instead gave each political department its own powers, and with that the freedom to contradict the other’s policies. Under the Constitution they approved, Congress may require Zivotofsky’s passport and birth report to record his birthplace as Israel, even if that requirement clashes with the President’s preference for neutral- ity about the status of Jerusalem. I dissent. Excerpted by Rorie Solberg § Trump v. Hawaii 585 U.S. ___ (2018) Decision: Reversed and remanded Vote: 5-4 Majority: Roberts, joined by Kennedy, Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch Concurrence: Kennedy Concurrence: Thomas Dissent: Breyer, joined by Kagan Dissent: Sotomayor, joined by Ginsburg Chief Justice Roberts delivered the opinion of the Court. 151 | PRESIDENTIAL POWERS IN FOREIGN AFFAIRS Under the Immigration and Nationality Act, foreign nationals seeking entry into the United States undergo a vetting process to ensure that they satisfy the numerous requirements for admission. The Act also vests the President with authority to restrict the entry of aliens when- ever he finds that their entry “would be detrimental to the interests of the United States.” 8 U. S. C. §1182(f). Relying on that delegation, the President concluded that it was necessary to impose entry restrictions on nationals of countries that do not share adequate information for an informed entry determination, or that otherwise present national security risks. Presidential Proclamation No. 9645 (Proclamation). The plaintiffs in this litigation, respondents here, challenged the application of those entry restrictions to certain aliens abroad. We now decide whether the President had authority under the Act to issue the Proclamation, and whether the entry policy vio- lates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment … DHS collected and evaluated data regarding all foreign governments. §1(d). It identified 16 countries as having deficient information-sharing practices and presenting national security concerns, and another 31 countries as “at risk” of similarly failing to meet the baseline. §1(e). The State Department then undertook diplomatic efforts over a 50-day period to encourage all foreign governments to improve their practices. §1(f ). As a result of that effort, numerous countries pro- vided DHS with travel document exemplars and agreed to share information on known or suspected terrorists. Following the 50-day period, the Acting Secretary of Homeland Security concluded that eight countries—Chad, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen—remained deficient in terms of their risk profile and willingness to provide requested information. The Acting Secretary recommended that the President impose entry restrictions on certain nationals from all of those countries except Iraq … Plaintiffs challenged the Proclamation—except as applied to North Korea and Venezuela—on several grounds. As rele- vant here, they argued that the Proclamation contravenes provisions in the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) … Plaintiffs further claimed that the Proclamation violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, because it was motivated not by concerns pertaining to national security but by animus toward Islam … The INA establishes numerous grounds on which an alien abroad may be inadmissible to the United States and ineligible for a visa … Congress has also delegated to the President authority to suspend or restrict the entry of aliens in certain cir- cumstances. The principal source of that authority, §1182(f ), enables the President to “suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens” whenever he “finds” that their entry “would be detrimental to the interests of the United States.” Plaintiffs argue that the Proclamation is not a valid exercise of the President’s authority under the INA. In their view, §1182(f ) confers only a residual power to temporarily halt the entry of a discrete group of aliens engaged in harmful conduct. They also assert that the Proclamation violates another provision of the INA— 8 U. S. C. §1152(a)(1)(A)—because it discriminates on the basis of nationality in the issuance of immigrant visas … §1182(f ) exudes deference to the President in every clause. It entrusts to the President the decisions whether and when to suspend entry … whose entry to suspend … for how long … and on what conditions … It is therefore unsurprising that we have previously observed that §1182(f ) vests the President with “ample power” to impose entry restrictions in addition to those elsewhere enumerated in the INA … The Proclamation falls well within this comprehensive delegation. The sole prerequisite set forth in §1182(f ) is that the President “find[ ]” that the entry of the covered aliens “would be detrimental to the interests of the United States.” PRESIDENTIAL POWERS IN FOREIGN AFFAIRS | 152 The President has undoubtedly fulfilled that requirement here … The Proclamation therefore “craft[ed] … country-spe- cific restrictions that would be most likely to encourage cooperation given each country’s distinct circumstances,” while securing the Nation “until such time as improvements occur.” Plaintiffs … argue, as an initial matter, that the Proclamation fails to provide a persuasive rationale for why nationality alone renders the covered foreign nationals a security risk. And they further discount the President’s stated concern about deficient vetting because the Proclamation allows many aliens from the designated countries to enter on nonimmigrant visas. Such arguments are grounded on the premise that §1182(f ) not only requires the President to make a finding that entry “would be detrimental to the interests of the United States,” but also to explain that finding with sufficient detail to enable judicial review. That premise is questionable. But even assuming that some form of review is appropriate, plaintiffs’ attacks on the sufficiency of the President’s findings cannot be sustained. The 12-page Proclamation—which thoroughly describes the process, agency evaluations, and recommendations underlying the President’s chosen restric- tions—is more detailed than any prior order a President has issued under §1182(f ) … Like its predecessors, the Proclamation makes clear that its “conditional restrictions” will remain in force only so long as necessary to “address” the identified “inadequacies and risks” within the covered nations … To that end, the Procla- mation establishes an ongoing process to engage covered nations and assess every 180 days whether the entry restrictions should be modified or terminated. §§4(a), (b). Indeed, after the initial review period, the President determined that Chad had made sufficient improvements to its identity-management protocols, and he accordingly lifted the entry suspension on its nationals … In short, the language of §1182(f ) is clear, and the Proclamation does not exceed any textual limit on the President’s authority … Plaintiffs’ structural argument starts with the premise that §1182(f ) does not give the President authority to counter- mand Congress’s considered policy judgments. The President, they say, may supplement the INA, but he cannot sup- plant it … We may assume that §1182(f ) does not allow the President to expressly override particular provisions of the INA. But plaintiffs have not identified any conflict between the statute and the Proclamation that would implicitly bar the Presi- dent from addressing deficiencies in the Nation’s vetting system … Plaintiffs suggest that the entry restrictions are unnecessary because consular officers can simply deny visas in individual cases when an alien fails to carry his burden of proving admissibility—for example, by failing to produce certified records regarding his criminal history. But that misses the point: A critical finding of the Proclamation is that the failure of certain countries to provide reliable information prevents the Government from accurately determining whether an alien is inadmissible or poses a threat. Proclamation §1(h). Unless consular officers are expected to apply categorical rules and deny entry from those countries across the board, fraudulent or unreliable documentation may thwart their review in individual cases. And at any rate, the INA certainly does not require that systemic problems such as the lack of reliable States, and of compounding the American people into one common mass. Of consequence, when they act, they act in their States. But the measures they adopt do not, on that account, cease to be the measures of the people themselves, or become the measures of the State governments … The assent of the States in their sovereign capacity is implied in calling a convention, and thus submitting that instrument to the people. But the people were at perfect liberty to accept or reject it, and their act was final. It required not the affir- mance, and could not be negatived, by the State Governments. The Constitution, when thus adopted, was of complete obligation, and bound the State sovereignties … From these conventions, the Constitution derives its whole authority. The government proceeds directly from the peo- ple; is ‘ordained and established,’ in the name of the people; and is declared to be ordained, ‘in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, and secure the blessings of liberty to themselves and to their posterity.’ The assent of the states, in their sovereign capacity, is implied, in calling a convention, and thus submitting that instrument to the people. But the people were at perfect liberty to accept or reject it; and their act was final. It required not the affirmance, and could not be negatived, by the state governments. The constitution, when thus adopted, was of complete obligation, and bound the state sovereignties … This government is acknowledged by all, to be one of enumerated powers. The principle, that it can exercise only the powers granted to it, would seem too apparent, to have required to be enforced by all those arguments, which its enlight- ened friends, while it was depending before the people, found it necessary to urge; that principle is now universally admitted. But the question respecting the extent of the powers actually granted, is perpetually arising, and will probably continue to arise, so long as our system shall exist … [T]he government of the Union, though limited in its powers, is supreme within its sphere of action. This would seem to result, necessarily, from its nature. It is the government of all; its powers are delegated by all; it represents all, and acts for all. Though any one state may be willing to control its operations, no state is willing to allow others to control them. The nation, on those subjects on which it can act, must necessarily bind its component parts. But this question is not left to mere reason: the people have, in express terms, decided it … Among the enumerated powers, we do not find that of establishing a bank or creating a corporation. But there is no phrase in the instrument which, like the articles of confederation, excludes incidental or implied powers; and which requires that everything granted shall be expressly and minutely described … A constitution, to contain an accurate detail of all the subdivisions of which its great powers will admit, and of all the means by which they may be carried into exe- cution, would partake of the prolixity of a legal code, and could scarcely be embraced by the human mind. It would, probably, never be understood by the public. Its nature, therefore, requires, that only its great outlines should be marked, its important objects designated, and the minor ingredients which compose those objects, be deduced from the nature of the objects themselves. That this idea was entertained by the framers of the American constitution, is not only to be inferred from the nature of the instrument, but from the language. Why else were some of the limitations, found in the 9th section of the 1st article, introduced? It is also, in some degree, warranted, by their having omitted to use any restric- tive term which might prevent its receiving a fair and just interpretation … 161 | SOURCES AND SCOPE OF LEGISLATIVE POWERS Although, among the enumerated powers of government, we do not find the word ‘bank’ or ‘incorporation,’ we find the great powers, to lay and collect taxes; to borrow money; to regulate commerce; to declare and conduct a war; and to raise and support armies and navies. The sword and the purse, all the external relations, and no inconsiderable portion of the industry of the nation, are intrusted to its government. It is not denied, that the powers given to the government imply the ordinary means of execution. That, for example, of raising revenue, and applying it to national purposes, is admitted to imply the power of conveying money from place to place, as the exigencies of the nation may require, and of employing the usual means of conveyance. But it is denied, that the government … may … erect a corporation. On what foundation does this argument rest? On this alone: the power of creating a corporation, is one appertaining to sovereignty, and is not expressly conferred on congress. This is true. But all legislative powers appertain to sovereignty. The original power of giving the law on any subject whatever, is a sovereign power … if the government of the Union is restrained from creating a corporation … on the single reason that the creation of a corporation is an act of sovereignty … there would be some difficulty in sustaining the authority of congress to pass other laws for the accomplishment of the same objects. The government which has a right to do an act, and has imposed on it, the duty of performing that act, must, according to the dictates of reason, be allowed to select the means … those who contend that it may not … take upon themselves the burden of establishing that exception … In America, the powers of sovereignty are divided between the government of the Union, and those of the states. They are each sovereign, with respect to the objects committed to it, and neither sovereign, with respect to the objects commit- ted to the other … Some state constitutions were formed before, some since that of the United States. We cannot believe, that their relation to each other is in any degree dependent upon this circumstance. Their respective powers must, we think, be precisely the same, as if they had been formed at the same time … To [Congress’] enumeration of powers is added, that of making ‘all laws which shall be necessary and proper, for carrying into execution the foregoing powers, and all other powers vested by this constitution, in the government of the United States, or in any department thereof.’ The counsel for the state of Maryland have urged various arguments, to prove that this clause, though, in terms, a grant of power, is not so, in effect; but is really restrictive of the general right, which might otherwise be implied, of selecting means for executing the enumerated powers. In support of this proposition, they have found it necessary to contend, that this clause was inserted for the purpose of conferring on congress the power of mak- ing laws. That, without it, doubts might be entertained, whether congress could exercise its powers in the form of legis- lation … Could it be necessary to say, that a legislature should exercise legislative powers, in the shape of legislation? After allowing each house to prescribe its own course of proceeding, after describing the manner in which a bill should become a law, would it have entered into the mind of a single member of the convention, that an express power to make laws was neces- sary, to enable the legislature to make them? That a legislature, endowed with legislative powers, can legislate, is a propo- sition too self-evident to have been questioned … But the argument which most conclusively demonstrates the error of the construction contended for by the counsel for the state of Maryland, is founded on the intention of the convention, as manifested in the whole clause. To waste time and argument in proving that, without it, congress might carry its powers into execution, would be not much less idle, than to hold a lighted taper to the sun. As little can it be required to prove, that in the absence of this clause, congress SOURCES AND SCOPE OF LEGISLATIVE POWERS | 162 would have some choice of means … This clause, as construed by the state of Maryland, would abridge, and almost anni- hilate, this useful and necessary right of the legislature to select its means. That this could not be intended, is, we should think, had it not been already controverted, too apparent for controversy. We think so for the following reasons: 1st. The clause is placed among the powers of Congress, not among the limitations on those powers. 2d. Its terms purport to enlarge, not to diminish, the powers vested in the Government. It purports to be an additional power, not a restriction on those already granted. No reason has been or can be assigned for thus concealing an intention to narrow the discretion of the National Legislature under words which purport to enlarge it. The framers of the Con- stitution wished its adoption, and well knew that it would be endangered by its strength, not by its weakness. Had they been capable of using language which would convey to the eye one idea and, after deep reflection, impress on the mind another, they would rather have disguised the grant of power than its limitation. If, then, their intention had been, by this clause, to restrain the free use of means which might otherwise have been implied, that intention would have been inserted in another place, and would have been expressed in terms resembling these. “In carrying into execution the fore- going powers, and all others,” &c., “no laws shall be passed but such as are necessary and proper.” Had the intention been to make this clause restrictive, it would unquestionably have been so in form, as well as in effect. The result of the most careful and attentive consideration bestowed upon this clause is that, if it does not enlarge, it can- not be construed to restrain, the powers of Congress, or to impair the right of the legislature to exercise its best judgment in the selection of measures to carry into execution the Constitutional powers of the Government. If no other motive for its insertion can be suggested, a sufficient one is found in the desire to remove all doubts respecting the right to legislate on that vast mass of incidental powers which must be involved in the Constitution if that instrument be not a splendid bauble. We admit, as all must admit, that the powers of the Government are limited, and that its limits are not to be transcended. But we think the sound construction of the Constitution must allow to the national legislature that discretion with respect to the means by which the powers it confers are to be carried into execution which will enable that body to per- form the high duties assigned to it in the manner most beneficial to the people. Let the end be legitimate, let it be within the scope of the Constitution, and all means which are appropriate, which are plainly adapted to that end, which are not prohibited, but consist with the letter and spirit of the Constitution, are Constitutional … After the most deliberate consideration, it is the unanimous and decided opinion of this Court that the act to incorporate the Bank of the United States is a law made in pursuance of the Constitution, and is a part of the supreme law of the land. The branches, proceeding from the same stock and being conducive to the complete accomplishment of the object, are equally constitutional … It being the opinion of the Court that the act incorporating the bank is constitutional, and that the power of establishing a branch in the State of Maryland might be properly exercised by the bank itself, we proceed to inquire: 163 | SOURCES AND SCOPE OF LEGISLATIVE POWERS 2. Whether the State of Maryland may, without violating the Constitution, tax that branch? [See McCulloch v. Maryland in the Federalism chapter.] Excerpted by Alexandria Metzdorf § Chae Chan Ping v. United States 130 U.S. 581 (1889) Decision: Affirmed Vote: Unanimous Majority: Field,, joined by Fuller, Miller, Bradley, Harlan, Gray, Blatchford, and Lamar MR. JUSTICE FIELD delivered the opinion of the Court. The appeal involves a consideration of the validity of the Act of Congress of October 1, 1888, prohibiting Chinese labor- ers from entering the United States who had departed before its passage, having a certificate issued under the act of 1882 as amended by the act of 1884, granting them permission to return. The validity of the act is assailed as being in effect an expulsion from the country of Chinese laborers, in violation of existing treaties between the United States and the government of China, and of rights vested in them under the laws of Congress … British subjects in China were often subjected not only to the violence of mobs, but to insults and outrages from local authorities of the country, which led to retaliatory measures for the punishment of the aggressors. To such an extent were these measures carried and such resistance offered to them that in 1856, the two countries were in open war … England requested of the President the concurrence and active cooperation of the United States … [A]s the rights of citizens of the United States might be seriously affected by the results of existing hostilities, and commercial intercourse between the United States and China be disturbed, it was deemed advisable to send to China a minister plenipotentiary to repre- sent our government and watch our interests there. Accordingly, Mr. William B. Reed, of Philadelphia, was appointed such minister, and instructed, while abstaining from any direct interference, to aid by peaceful cooperation the objects the allied forces were seeking to accomplish … Through him a new treaty was negotiated with the Chinese government. It was concluded in June, 1858, and ratified in August of the following year … [A]dditional articles to the treaty of 1858 were agreed upon which gave expression to the general desire that the two nations and their peoples should be drawn closer together. The new articles, eight in number, were agreed to on the 28th of July, 1868, and ratifications of them were exchanged at Pekin in November of the following year … “ARTICLE VI. Citizens of the United States visiting or residing in China shall enjoy the same privileges, immunities, or exemptions in respect to travel or residence as may there be enjoyed by the citizens or subjects of the most favored nation, and reciprocally, Chinese subjects visiting or residing in the United shall enjoy the same privileges, immunities, SOURCES AND SCOPE OF LEGISLATIVE POWERS | 164 and exemptions in respect to travel or residence as may there be enjoyed by the citizens or subjects of the most favored nation. But nothing herein contained shall be held to confer naturalization upon citizens of the United States in China, nor upon the subjects of China in the United States … ” The discovery of gold in California in 1848, as is well known, was followed by a large immigration thither from all parts of the world, attracted not only by the hope of gain from the mines, but from the great prices paid for all kinds of labor. The news of the discovery penetrated China, and laborers came from there in great numbers, a few with their own means, but by far the greater number under contract with employers for whose benefit they worked. These laborers readily secured employment … They were generally industrious and frugal. Not being accompanied by families except in rare instances, their expenses were small and they were content with the simplest fare, such as would not suffice for our laborers and artisans. The competition between them and our people was for this reason altogether in their favor, and the consequent irritation, proportionately deep and bitter, was followed, in many cases, by open conflicts, to the great disturbance of the public peace. The differences of race added greatly to the difficulties of the situation … As they grew in numbers each year, the people of the coast saw, or believed they saw, in the facility of immigration and in the crowded millions of China, where popu- lation presses upon the means of subsistence, great danger that at no distant day that portion of our country would be overrun by them unless prompt action was taken to restrict their immigration. The people there accordingly petitioned earnestly for protective legislation … So urgent and constant were the prayers for relief against existing and anticipated evils, both from the public authorities of the Pacific coast and from private individuals that Congress was impelled to act on the subject. Many persons, how- ever, both in and out of Congress, were of opinion that so long as the treaty remained unmodified, legislation restricting immigration would be a breach of faith with China. A statute was accordingly passed appropriating money to send com- missioners to China to act with our minister there in negotiating and concluding by treaty a settlement of such matters of interest between the two governments as might be confided to them …

This task requires you to answer questions based solely on the information provided in the prompt. You are not allowed to use any external resources or prior knowledge. Respond in a bulleted list with additional information for each point.

How can I distinguish different forms of seizures or epilepsy?

Generalized seizures are produced by electrical impulses from throughout the entire brain, whereas partial seizures are produced (at least initially) by a relatively small part of the brain. The part of the brain generating the seizures is sometimes called the focus. Generalized Seizures • The most common and most dramatic is the generalized convulsion, also called the generalized tonic clonic (“grand mal”) seizure. The patient loses consciousness and usually collapses. There is generalized body stiffening (called the “tonic” phase) for 30 to 60 seconds, followed by violent jerking (the “clonic” phase) for 30 to 60 seconds, after which the patient goes into a deep sleep (the “postictal” or after-seizure phase). During these seizures, injuries and accidents may occur, such as tongue biting and urinary incontinence. • Absence seizures cause a short loss of consciousness (just a few seconds) with few or no other symptoms. The patient, most often a child, typically interrupts an activity and stares blankly. These seizures begin and end abruptly and may occur several times a day. Patients are usually not aware that they are having a seizure, except that they may be aware of “losing time.” • Myoclonic seizures consist of sporadic jerks, usually on both sides of the body. Patients sometimes describe the jerks as brief electrical shocks. When violent, these seizures may result in dropping or involuntarily throwing objects. • Clonic seizures are repetitive, rhythmic jerks that involve both sides of the body at the same time. • Tonic seizures are characterized by stiffening of the muscles. • Atonic seizures consist of a sudden and general loss of muscle tone, particularly in the arms and legs, which often result in a fall. Partial Seizures Partial seizures are divided into simple, complex, and those that evolve into (secondary) generalized seizures. The difference between simple and complex partial seizures is that during simple partial seizures, patients retain awareness; during complex partial seizures, they lose awareness. • Simple partial seizures are further subdivided into four categories according to the nature of their symptoms: motor, sensory, autonomic or psychological. o Motor symptoms include movements such as jerking and stiffening. o Sensory symptoms caused by seizures involve unusual sensations affecting any of the five senses (vision, hearing, smell, taste or touch). o When simple partial seizures cause sensory symptoms only (and no motor symptoms), they are called “auras.” o The only common autonomic symptom is a peculiar sensation in the stomach that is experienced by many patients with temporal lobe epilepsy. o Finally, simple partial seizures with psychological symptoms are characterized by various experiences involving memory (the sensation of deja-vu), emotions (such as fear or pleasure), or other complex psychological phenomena. • Complex partial seizures, by definition, include impairment of awareness. Patients seem to be “out of touch,” “out of it” or “staring into space” or “in a trance” during these seizures. There are often odd movements called automatisms, which are involuntary but coordinated movements that tend to be purposeless and repetitive. Common automatisms include lip smacking, chewing, fidgeting and walking. • The third kind of partial seizure is one that begins as a focal seizure and evolves into a generalized convulsive (“tonic clonic”) seizure. Most types of seizures occur in different types of epilepsy, and most patients with epilepsy experience more than one seizure type. This is because seizures are only symptoms. Therefore, it is essential that your neurologist diagnose your type of EPILEPSY, not just the type(s) of SEIZURE you are having. Epilepsy can be divided into two broad categories: idiopathic and symptomatic. Idiopathic epilepsy is caused by genetic factors, as opposed to brain damage. Symptomatic epilepsy is caused by physical defects in the brain. Based on the type of seizure affecting the patient, idiopathic and symptomatic epilepsies can be further categorized. Type 1: Idiopathic Generalized Epilepsy • This is a genetic and inherited group of disorders, so there is often, but not always, a family history of epilepsy. • Idiopathic generalized epilepsy tends to appear during childhood or adolescence, although it may not be diagnosed until adulthood. • In this type of epilepsy, there are no nervous system abnormalities other than the seizures; the brain is structurally normal. • People with idiopathic generalized epilepsy have normal intelligence, and the results of the neurological examination and brain scan are normal. • The results of the electroencephalogram (EEG - a test which measures electrical impulses in the brain) are also normal, except for the discharges associated with epilepsy. • The types of seizures affecting patients with idiopathic generalized epilepsy may include myoclonic, absence, and generalized tonic-clonic seizures, with one type predominating. Idiopathic generalized epilepsy is usually treated with medications and is a condition that is commonly outgrown, as in childhood absence epilepsy. Type 2: Idiopathic Partial Epilepsies • Idiopathic partial epilepsy begins in childhood (between ages 5 and 8) and runs in families. • Also known as benign focal epilepsy of childhood or benign Rolandic epilepsy, this is one of the mildest types of epilepsy. • It is almost always outgrown by puberty and is never diagnosed in adults. • Seizures tend to occur during sleep and are most often simple partial motor seizures that involve the face and secondarily generalized (grand mal) seizures. Type 3: Symptomatic Generalized Epilepsy • This is caused by widespread brain damage, and injury during birth is the most common cause. • When the cause of symptomatic general epilepsy cannot be identified, the disorder may be referred to as cryptogenic epilepsy. • Specific, inherited brain diseases, such as adrenoleukodystrophy (ADL, which was featured in the movie “Lorenzo’s Oil”), or brain infections (such as meningitis and encephalitis) can also cause symptomatic generalized epilepsy. • In addition to seizures, these patients often have other neurological problems, such as developmental delay, mental retardation or cerebral palsy. • These epilepsies include different subtypes—the most typical is the Lennox-Gastaut syndrome. Multiple types of seizures (generalized tonic-clonic, tonic, myoclonic, tonic, atonic and absence seizures) are common and can be difficult to control. Type 4: Symptomatic Partial Epilepsy • This is the most common type of epilepsy to begin in adulthood. • It is caused by a localized abnormality of the brain, which can result from strokes, tumors, trauma, scarring or “sclerosis” of brain tissue (common in the temporal lobe), cysts or infections. • Sometimes these brain abnormalities can be seen on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans, but often they cannot be identified, despite repeated attempts, because they are microscopic. • When the cause of symptomatic partial epilepsy cannot be identified, the disorder may be referred to as cryptogenic epilepsy. The diagnosis is based on: • The patient’s medical history, including any family history of seizures, associated medical conditions and current medications. Some important questions you will be asked include: o At what age did the seizures begin? o What circumstances surrounded your first seizure? o What factors seem to bring on the seizures? o What do you feel before, during and after the seizures? o How long do the seizures last? o Have you been treated for epilepsy before? What medications were prescribed and in what dosages? Was the treatment effective? o Others who have often seen you before, during and after seizures, such as family and close friends, should be present to provide details of your seizures if they involve loss of consciousness. • A complete physical and neurological examination —your muscle strength, reflexes, eye sight, hearing and ability to detect various sensations are tested so your doctors can better understand the cause of your seizures • An electroencephalogram (EEG), which measures electrical impulses in the brain. o This is the only test that directly detects electrical activity in the brain, and seizures are defined by abnormal electrical activity in the brain. During an EEG, electrodes (small metal disks) are attached to specific locations on your head. The electrodes are attached to a monitor to record the brain’s electrical activity. The EEG is useful not only to confirm a diagnosis of epilepsy, but also to determine the type of epilepsy. o A routine EEG only records about 20 minutes of brain waves (however, the routine EEG procedure takes about 90 minutes). Because 20 minutes is such a short amount of time, the results of routine EEG studies are often normal, even in people known to have epilepsy. Therefore, prolonged EEG monitoring may be necessary. Prolonged o EEG-video monitoring is an even better diagnostic method. During this type of monitoring, an EEG monitors the brain’s activity and cameras videotape body movements and behavior during a seizure. Prolonged monitoring often requires the patient to spend time in a special facility for several days. Prolonged EEG-video monitoring is the only definitive way to diagnose epilepsy. • Imaging studies of the brain, such as those provided by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). This can identify the cause of the seizures, but the vast majority of patients with epilepsy have normal MRIs.

This task requires you to answer questions based solely on the information provided in the prompt. You are not allowed to use any external resources or prior knowledge. Respond in a bulleted list with additional information for each point. How can I distinguish different forms of seizures or epilepsy? Generalized seizures are produced by electrical impulses from throughout the entire brain, whereas partial seizures are produced (at least initially) by a relatively small part of the brain. The part of the brain generating the seizures is sometimes called the focus. Generalized Seizures • The most common and most dramatic is the generalized convulsion, also called the generalized tonic clonic (“grand mal”) seizure. The patient loses consciousness and usually collapses. There is generalized body stiffening (called the “tonic” phase) for 30 to 60 seconds, followed by violent jerking (the “clonic” phase) for 30 to 60 seconds, after which the patient goes into a deep sleep (the “postictal” or after-seizure phase). During these seizures, injuries and accidents may occur, such as tongue biting and urinary incontinence. • Absence seizures cause a short loss of consciousness (just a few seconds) with few or no other symptoms. The patient, most often a child, typically interrupts an activity and stares blankly. These seizures begin and end abruptly and may occur several times a day. Patients are usually not aware that they are having a seizure, except that they may be aware of “losing time.” • Myoclonic seizures consist of sporadic jerks, usually on both sides of the body. Patients sometimes describe the jerks as brief electrical shocks. When violent, these seizures may result in dropping or involuntarily throwing objects. • Clonic seizures are repetitive, rhythmic jerks that involve both sides of the body at the same time. • Tonic seizures are characterized by stiffening of the muscles. • Atonic seizures consist of a sudden and general loss of muscle tone, particularly in the arms and legs, which often result in a fall. Partial Seizures Partial seizures are divided into simple, complex, and those that evolve into (secondary) generalized seizures. The difference between simple and complex partial seizures is that during simple partial seizures, patients retain awareness; during complex partial seizures, they lose awareness. • Simple partial seizures are further subdivided into four categories according to the nature of their symptoms: motor, sensory, autonomic or psychological. o Motor symptoms include movements such as jerking and stiffening. o Sensory symptoms caused by seizures involve unusual sensations affecting any of the five senses (vision, hearing, smell, taste or touch). o When simple partial seizures cause sensory symptoms only (and no motor symptoms), they are called “auras.” o The only common autonomic symptom is a peculiar sensation in the stomach that is experienced by many patients with temporal lobe epilepsy. o Finally, simple partial seizures with psychological symptoms are characterized by various experiences involving memory (the sensation of deja-vu), emotions (such as fear or pleasure), or other complex psychological phenomena. • Complex partial seizures, by definition, include impairment of awareness. Patients seem to be “out of touch,” “out of it” or “staring into space” or “in a trance” during these seizures. There are often odd movements called automatisms, which are involuntary but coordinated movements that tend to be purposeless and repetitive. Common automatisms include lip smacking, chewing, fidgeting and walking. • The third kind of partial seizure is one that begins as a focal seizure and evolves into a generalized convulsive (“tonic clonic”) seizure. Most types of seizures occur in different types of epilepsy, and most patients with epilepsy experience more than one seizure type. This is because seizures are only symptoms. Therefore, it is essential that your neurologist diagnose your type of EPILEPSY, not just the type(s) of SEIZURE you are having. Epilepsy can be divided into two broad categories: idiopathic and symptomatic. Idiopathic epilepsy is caused by genetic factors, as opposed to brain damage. Symptomatic epilepsy is caused by physical defects in the brain. Based on the type of seizure affecting the patient, idiopathic and symptomatic epilepsies can be further categorized. Type 1: Idiopathic Generalized Epilepsy • This is a genetic and inherited group of disorders, so there is often, but not always, a family history of epilepsy. • Idiopathic generalized epilepsy tends to appear during childhood or adolescence, although it may not be diagnosed until adulthood. • In this type of epilepsy, there are no nervous system abnormalities other than the seizures; the brain is structurally normal. • People with idiopathic generalized epilepsy have normal intelligence, and the results of the neurological examination and brain scan are normal. • The results of the electroencephalogram (EEG - a test which measures electrical impulses in the brain) are also normal, except for the discharges associated with epilepsy. • The types of seizures affecting patients with idiopathic generalized epilepsy may include myoclonic, absence, and generalized tonic-clonic seizures, with one type predominating. Idiopathic generalized epilepsy is usually treated with medications and is a condition that is commonly outgrown, as in childhood absence epilepsy. Type 2: Idiopathic Partial Epilepsies • Idiopathic partial epilepsy begins in childhood (between ages 5 and 8) and runs in families. • Also known as benign focal epilepsy of childhood or benign Rolandic epilepsy, this is one of the mildest types of epilepsy. • It is almost always outgrown by puberty and is never diagnosed in adults. • Seizures tend to occur during sleep and are most often simple partial motor seizures that involve the face and secondarily generalized (grand mal) seizures. Type 3: Symptomatic Generalized Epilepsy • This is caused by widespread brain damage, and injury during birth is the most common cause. • When the cause of symptomatic general epilepsy cannot be identified, the disorder may be referred to as cryptogenic epilepsy. • Specific, inherited brain diseases, such as adrenoleukodystrophy (ADL, which was featured in the movie “Lorenzo’s Oil”), or brain infections (such as meningitis and encephalitis) can also cause symptomatic generalized epilepsy. • In addition to seizures, these patients often have other neurological problems, such as developmental delay, mental retardation or cerebral palsy. • These epilepsies include different subtypes—the most typical is the Lennox-Gastaut syndrome. Multiple types of seizures (generalized tonic-clonic, tonic, myoclonic, tonic, atonic and absence seizures) are common and can be difficult to control. Type 4: Symptomatic Partial Epilepsy • This is the most common type of epilepsy to begin in adulthood. • It is caused by a localized abnormality of the brain, which can result from strokes, tumors, trauma, scarring or “sclerosis” of brain tissue (common in the temporal lobe), cysts or infections. • Sometimes these brain abnormalities can be seen on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans, but often they cannot be identified, despite repeated attempts, because they are microscopic. • When the cause of symptomatic partial epilepsy cannot be identified, the disorder may be referred to as cryptogenic epilepsy. The diagnosis is based on: • The patient’s medical history, including any family history of seizures, associated medical conditions and current medications. Some important questions you will be asked include: o At what age did the seizures begin? o What circumstances surrounded your first seizure? o What factors seem to bring on the seizures? o What do you feel before, during and after the seizures? o How long do the seizures last? o Have you been treated for epilepsy before? What medications were prescribed and in what dosages? Was the treatment effective? o Others who have often seen you before, during and after seizures, such as family and close friends, should be present to provide details of your seizures if they involve loss of consciousness. • A complete physical and neurological examination —your muscle strength, reflexes, eye sight, hearing and ability to detect various sensations are tested so your doctors can better understand the cause of your seizures • An electroencephalogram (EEG), which measures electrical impulses in the brain. o This is the only test that directly detects electrical activity in the brain, and seizures are defined by abnormal electrical activity in the brain. During an EEG, electrodes (small metal disks) are attached to specific locations on your head. The electrodes are attached to a monitor to record the brain’s electrical activity. The EEG is useful not only to confirm a diagnosis of epilepsy, but also to determine the type of epilepsy.

The user will provide a question. Answer based exclusively on the context block. Do not use any outside knowledge or any prior knowledge.

What could cause the flavor of my espresso to be kind of charred?

Thank you for choosing the Capresso Steam PRO Espresso & Cappuccino Machine. It is the perfect starter machine for espressos, cappuccinos and lattes. With a bit of practice you will be able to produce two to four cappuccinos or lattes at a time. Please read all of the instructions in this booklet before operating your new machine. Understanding and complying with these instructions is essential to ensure that the machine is utilized without risk and to ensure safety during operation and maintenance. 2. HOW TO REACH JURA-CAPRESSO Should you require further information or if particular problems occur that are not covered in this manual, please • CALL our toll free HELP LINE: 1-800-767-3554 Monday -Thursday 8AM to 9PM, Friday 8AM to 8PM and Saturday 9AM to 5PM Eastern Standard Time. Feel free to call at any time. If you are connected to our voicemail, PLEASE DO NOT HANG UP. Leave your name, telephone number and we will return your call. Please also leave the model number of your Capresso product, in this case it is #304. • FAX us at 1-201-767-9684 • E-MAIL us at [email protected] • VISIT our website at www.capresso.com • WRITE to Jura Capresso, Inc., Customer Service, P.O. Box 775, Closter, NJ 07624 3. DE-PRESSURIZING CAUTION! Never open the boiler cap and never remove the filter holder as long as there is pressure in the boiler container. In order to check if the machine is still under pressure follow these steps: 1. The machine is on, the filter holder is inserted and the boiler cap is closed. 2. Place an empty cup under the frother nozzle (fig. 10). 3. Move the coffee/steam selector to the steam symbol (fig. 8). 4. Open the steam knob (fig. 9). Wait until all steam is released. 6 5. Turn the power switch off (fig. 6). 6. Open and remove the boiler cap (see chapter 5) 7. It is now safe to remove the filter holder. 8. Move the coffee/steam selector to the cup symbol (fig. 8). Caution: Never try to remove the filter holder with the carafe in place. Pressure could force the filter holder down, smashing the carafe and causing severe injuries. Always remove the carafe first. Caution: Never leave machine unattended when it is turned on (red light in the power switch is illuminated). Always turn the machine off when finished. 5. SAFETY BOILER CAP To open the boiler cap: turn the cap a quarter turn counter clockwise. Slightly lift the cap and turn another quarter turn counter clockwise and lift the cap. To close the boiler cap: Place the cap onto the boiler neck and turn clockwise until cap sinks into the groove. Continue turning the cap until firmly locked. 6. HELPFUL HINTS • Espresso Drink: An espresso is a far richer drink with a more intense taste than regular brewed drip coffee. An espresso is normally 1 1/2 to 2 oz. of strong coffee. Espresso should be served immediately after brewing. If the espresso is too strong, you can add hot water. Add sugar to taste. • Preparing espresso is different than preparing regular drip coffee. The machine works under pressure, bringing the water to a boil and then forcing it through the ground coffee in a short period of time. • Important: The water in the boiler of the machine will get hotter during the brewing process. Towards the end of the brewing process the water will be so hot that it would burn your espresso. Therefore you never want to process all the water through the coffee as this will result in a burnt taste. • Which Coffee? Any coffee labeled "espresso" is suitable for your machine. Any coffee with at least 80% Arabica beans is ideal for espresso preparation. Check with your local coffee store • Which Grind? Steam boiler espresso machines, do not require a fine espresso grind. For maximum flavor and aroma we recommend a medium espresso grind or a fine drip grind. If you grind your own coffee we recommend using a burr or disk/burr grinder. Small blade grinders can create "coffee dust". Coffee dust can dramatically slow down the water flow during brewing resulting in bitter and overheated coffee taste. • Cappuccino: 1 1/2 to 2 oz. of espresso coffee with 3 to 4 oz. of steamed and frothed milk on top. Sprinkle chocolate shavings or cinnamon on top of 7 the milk froth. For a stronger taste increase the amount of coffee. For a milder taste increase the amount of milk. • Latte: 1 1/2 to 2 oz. of espresso coffee with 3 to 4 oz. of steamed milk (very little or no milk froth). • Frothing: Foamy layer of milk froth on top of hot milk. • Which kind of milk? Skim milk and 1% milk will produce more milk froth than 2% or regular milk. • Markings on Glass Carafe: The markings on the glass carafe help you in the preparation of brewing and frothing. Upper rim of metal band: Maximum capacity of boiler (approx. 10 oz.). For best results always fill the boiler with 10 oz. of fresh cold water. 4 cup marking: Maximum amount of espresso you should brew (approx. 8 oz.). If you brew more than 8 oz. the coffee will taste burnt. Depending on the coffee roast you might even want to brew a little less to avoid a bitter aroma. 2 cup marking: (approx. 4 oz.), guide line for a double shot of espresso. Bottom line marking: Once the coffee has reached this level there is enough pressure in the boiler for steaming and frothing. 7. PREPARING ESPRESSO Caution: Do not leave the machine alone during brewing. Keep children away during brewing. 1. Make sure the machine is plugged in and turned off. The glass carafe is removed from the drip tray. Important: The steam knob (fig. 9) must be in the closed position. The coffee/steam selector points to the cup symbol in front of the machine (stronger coffee). Moving the coffee/steam selector to the right, accelerates brewing and decreases coffee strength. 2. Fill the basket with ground coffee, using the measuring scoop (fig.1). The basket is marked on the inside indicating "2 cups" and "4 cups". Never overfill the basket. Clear any excess coffee from the rim of the filter holder. Important: it is not necessary to tamp (press down) the coffee. 3. Insert the basket into the filter holder (fig. 2), then insert the filter holder into the machine (fig. 3). 4. Turn filter holder to the right until it reaches the "locked" position (fig.1,8). 5. Fill the glass carafe to the upper rim of the metal band (approx. 10 oz.) with fresh, cold water. 6. Unscrew the boiler cap (see chapter 5). Using the glass carafe, fill the boiler with water (fig. 4) and close the boiler cap securely (see chapter 5). 7. Place the carafe lid on the carafe so that the opening on the lid points towards the pouring spout of the carafe (fig. 7). Place the carafe on the drip tray as shown in fig. 1. 8. Turn the power switch on (fig. 6). The power switch illuminates and the machine starts heating the water. 9. After approx. 2 1/2 to 3 minutes hot water will start forcing its way through the filter holder into the carafe. When you have enough espresso in the glass carafe turn the power switch off and turn the coffee/steam selector to the steam symbol on the left to stop the flow. Remove the carafe and serve. Add a bit of sugar and enjoy. Tip: To avoid a "burnt taste" never process all the water through the coffee. Once the brewing noise increases and steam develops, stop the brewing. 8 10. Important: Do not open the boiler cap. Do not remove the filter holder. First depressurize the machine. See chapter 3. 11. After de-pressurizing remove the filter holder by turning it to the left to the "open lock" symbol. Then push the thumb-guard of filter holder over the hot rim of the basket. Dump the used coffee (fig. 13) and rinse the basket and the filter holder under running water. Return the coffee/steam selector to the cup symbol.

The user will provide a question. Answer based exclusively on the context block. Do not use any outside knowledge or any prior knowledge. Thank you for choosing the Capresso Steam PRO Espresso & Cappuccino Machine. It is the perfect starter machine for espressos, cappuccinos and lattes. With a bit of practice you will be able to produce two to four cappuccinos or lattes at a time. Please read all of the instructions in this booklet before operating your new machine. Understanding and complying with these instructions is essential to ensure that the machine is utilized without risk and to ensure safety during operation and maintenance. 2. HOW TO REACH JURA-CAPRESSO Should you require further information or if particular problems occur that are not covered in this manual, please • CALL our toll free HELP LINE: 1-800-767-3554 Monday -Thursday 8AM to 9PM, Friday 8AM to 8PM and Saturday 9AM to 5PM Eastern Standard Time. Feel free to call at any time. If you are connected to our voicemail, PLEASE DO NOT HANG UP. Leave your name, telephone number and we will return your call. Please also leave the model number of your Capresso product, in this case it is #304. • FAX us at 1-201-767-9684 • E-MAIL us at [email protected] • VISIT our website at www.capresso.com • WRITE to Jura Capresso, Inc., Customer Service, P.O. Box 775, Closter, NJ 07624 3. DE-PRESSURIZING CAUTION! Never open the boiler cap and never remove the filter holder as long as there is pressure in the boiler container. In order to check if the machine is still under pressure follow these steps: 1. The machine is on, the filter holder is inserted and the boiler cap is closed. 2. Place an empty cup under the frother nozzle (fig. 10). 3. Move the coffee/steam selector to the steam symbol (fig. 8). 4. Open the steam knob (fig. 9). Wait until all steam is released. 6 5. Turn the power switch off (fig. 6). 6. Open and remove the boiler cap (see chapter 5) 7. It is now safe to remove the filter holder. 8. Move the coffee/steam selector to the cup symbol (fig. 8). Caution: Never try to remove the filter holder with the carafe in place. Pressure could force the filter holder down, smashing the carafe and causing severe injuries. Always remove the carafe first. Caution: Never leave machine unattended when it is turned on (red light in the power switch is illuminated). Always turn the machine off when finished. 5. SAFETY BOILER CAP To open the boiler cap: turn the cap a quarter turn counter clockwise. Slightly lift the cap and turn another quarter turn counter clockwise and lift the cap. To close the boiler cap: Place the cap onto the boiler neck and turn clockwise until cap sinks into the groove. Continue turning the cap until firmly locked. 6. HELPFUL HINTS • Espresso Drink: An espresso is a far richer drink with a more intense taste than regular brewed drip coffee. An espresso is normally 1 1/2 to 2 oz. of strong coffee. Espresso should be served immediately after brewing. If the espresso is too strong, you can add hot water. Add sugar to taste. • Preparing espresso is different than preparing regular drip coffee. The machine works under pressure, bringing the water to a boil and then forcing it through the ground coffee in a short period of time. • Important: The water in the boiler of the machine will get hotter during the brewing process. Towards the end of the brewing process the water will be so hot that it would burn your espresso. Therefore you never want to process all the water through the coffee as this will result in a burnt taste. • Which Coffee? Any coffee labeled "espresso" is suitable for your machine. Any coffee with at least 80% Arabica beans is ideal for espresso preparation. Check with your local coffee store • Which Grind? Steam boiler espresso machines, do not require a fine espresso grind. For maximum flavor and aroma we recommend a medium espresso grind or a fine drip grind. If you grind your own coffee we recommend using a burr or disk/burr grinder. Small blade grinders can create "coffee dust". Coffee dust can dramatically slow down the water flow during brewing resulting in bitter and overheated coffee taste. • Cappuccino: 1 1/2 to 2 oz. of espresso coffee with 3 to 4 oz. of steamed and frothed milk on top. Sprinkle chocolate shavings or cinnamon on top of 7 the milk froth. For a stronger taste increase the amount of coffee. For a milder taste increase the amount of milk. • Latte: 1 1/2 to 2 oz. of espresso coffee with 3 to 4 oz. of steamed milk (very little or no milk froth). • Frothing: Foamy layer of milk froth on top of hot milk. • Which kind of milk? Skim milk and 1% milk will produce more milk froth than 2% or regular milk. • Markings on Glass Carafe: The markings on the glass carafe help you in the preparation of brewing and frothing. Upper rim of metal band: Maximum capacity of boiler (approx. 10 oz.). For best results always fill the boiler with 10 oz. of fresh cold water. 4 cup marking: Maximum amount of espresso you should brew (approx. 8 oz.). If you brew more than 8 oz. the coffee will taste burnt. Depending on the coffee roast you might even want to brew a little less to avoid a bitter aroma. 2 cup marking: (approx. 4 oz.), guide line for a double shot of espresso. Bottom line marking: Once the coffee has reached this level there is enough pressure in the boiler for steaming and frothing. 7. PREPARING ESPRESSO Caution: Do not leave the machine alone during brewing. Keep children away during brewing. 1. Make sure the machine is plugged in and turned off. The glass carafe is removed from the drip tray. Important: The steam knob (fig. 9) must be in the closed position. The coffee/steam selector points to the cup symbol in front of the machine (stronger coffee). Moving the coffee/steam selector to the right, accelerates brewing and decreases coffee strength. 2. Fill the basket with ground coffee, using the measuring scoop (fig.1). The basket is marked on the inside indicating "2 cups" and "4 cups". Never overfill the basket. Clear any excess coffee from the rim of the filter holder. Important: it is not necessary to tamp (press down) the coffee. 3. Insert the basket into the filter holder (fig. 2), then insert the filter holder into the machine (fig. 3). 4. Turn filter holder to the right until it reaches the "locked" position (fig.1,8). 5. Fill the glass carafe to the upper rim of the metal band (approx. 10 oz.) with fresh, cold water. 6. Unscrew the boiler cap (see chapter 5). Using the glass carafe, fill the boiler with water (fig. 4) and close the boiler cap securely (see chapter 5). 7. Place the carafe lid on the carafe so that the opening on the lid points towards the pouring spout of the carafe (fig. 7). Place the carafe on the drip tray as shown in fig. 1. 8. Turn the power switch on (fig. 6). The power switch illuminates and the machine starts heating the water. 9. After approx. 2 1/2 to 3 minutes hot water will start forcing its way through the filter holder into the carafe. When you have enough espresso in the glass carafe turn the power switch off and turn the coffee/steam selector to the steam symbol on the left to stop the flow. Remove the carafe and serve. Add a bit of sugar and enjoy. Tip: To avoid a "burnt taste" never process all the water through the coffee. Once the brewing noise increases and steam develops, stop the brewing. 8 10. Important: Do not open the boiler cap. Do not remove the filter holder. First depressurize the machine. See chapter 3. 11. After de-pressurizing remove the filter holder by turning it to the left to the "open lock" symbol. Then push the thumb-guard of filter holder over the hot rim of the basket. Dump the used coffee (fig. 13) and rinse the basket and the filter holder under running water. Return the coffee/steam selector to the cup symbol. What could cause the flavor of my espresso to be kind of charred?

Only answer using the text I provide. Answer in four sentences that are no longer than 24 words each.

What are the pros and cons of restitution orders specifically related to victims?

Participation in restorative justice programs is voluntary. As a result, offenders often comply with restitution agreements when they have followed a restorative justice program (Van Hecke & Wemmers, 1992). Offenders who do not accept their responsibility and who are not open to the idea of reparation will not enter a program. Thus, once admitted into a restorative justice program, offenders are prone to accept responsibility for their behaviour and repair the harm caused to the victim and, as a result, the victims of these offenders are likely to receive reparation. In their meta-analysis, Umbreit, Coates and Vos (2001) found that 90% of cases that are addressed through mediation end in an agreement. In most cases, these agreements consisted of a monetary sum, community service, or services rendered directly to the victim, and around 80-90% of the agreements were respected. Several researchers studying restorative justice have also observed a very high rate of satisfaction among participants in victim-offender mediation who frequently perceive the process and the result as fair (Umbreit, Coates & Vos 2001; Wemmers & Canuto 2002; Strang 2002; Wemmers & Cyr 2005; Van Camp 2016). According to Carriere, Malsch, Vermunt and De Keijser (1998), victims are generally more satisfied with restitution when they suffer less psychological damages and when their damages are primarily material. In contrast, other researchers find that restorative justice is particularly satisfying for victims of serious violent crimes and that when these victims participate in restorative justice programs they are usually satisfied with mediation, and the restorative justice process often has a positive impact on their well-being (Strang 20 2002; Strang et al 2006; Van Camp 2015; Wemmers 2016). Besides financial needs, other needs often expressed by victims of crime are the need for recognition and validation (Wemmers, 2017). Victims of serious violent crime generally seek other forms of reparation besides compensation, such as recognition of the wrong done by the offender, which is often very important to the victims (Van Camp & Wemmers 2015; Van Camp 2016). In restorative justice, victims’ needs are important and reparation aims to address the consequences of victimization (Wemmers, 2014; 2017). As such, restorative justice is more flexible than restitution orders and, for this reason, it is better able to adapt to the specific needs of the victim. Restitution is an integral part of victim reparation, and its necessity is well recognized by the UN as well as in the Canadian Victims’ Bill of Rights. In Canada, the Criminal Code highlights restitution orders and their application. However, before the introduction of the Victims’ Bill of Rights, restitution orders were a seldom-used measure in the Canadian criminal justice system: Only 2.3% of cases where the offender was found guilty included a restitution order. In order to encourage and facilitate requests by victims for restitution, a standard form was introduced in 2015. Restitution includes numerous advantages, but also has important limitations. It lessens the consequences of the crime for the victim, can reinstate their confidence in the criminal justice system, and can increase denunciation (Hoskins, Care & Ruback, 2015). Nevertheless, Canadian criminal law gives priority to the offender’s rehabilitation and social reintegration. As such, the needs of the victim are secondary. An important obstacle observed across the different models presented, is the conflict between criminal law and civil law. This legal distinction makes it so that judges are often reluctant to issue a restitution order and, if they do so, damages must be easy to determine, which leads to the inapplicability of restitution for emotional or psychological injury. Although lawyers place great importance on this distinction, it is perceived by victims as artificial and is often misunderstood (Helby, Van Dongen & Lindenberg, 2014). Even if restitution is ordered by a criminal court, it is the offender’s civil obligation. The restitution order as well as the civil party pose difficulties for victims with regards to the collection of their money. Civil law is complex and victims lack information on the procedures to undertake in order to obtain restitution. We have seen that the state can implement services to facilitate the collection of restitution. For example, the state can treat the order as a fine and take responsibility for its collection. The state can even advance money to the victim and then use subrogation in order to recover the money from the offender. Studies are nevertheless necessary to evaluate the effects of these types of services on victims and their impact on the effectiveness of restitution. Victim reparation is wider than restitution. Restorative justice programs do not suffer from the same limitations as restitution orders. They give an important place to the victim and can recognize all their needs including recognition, validation, as well as their financial needs. Hence, they are not limited by the offender’s financial insolvency. Restitution remains, after all, a right clearly defined in the Canadian Victims’ Bill of Rights, and significant effort must be deployed in order to ensure its effective application. The information presented in this article clearly points to a lack of data on the implementation and effectiveness of restitution orders. It also highlights the necessity to give more attention to the needs of victims of crime, as well as address the obstacles that hinder the satisfaction of victims’ needs, in order to maximize the benefits of this penal measure for victims, offenders and society as a whole.

Only answer using the text I provide. Answer in four sentences that are no longer than 24 words each. Participation in restorative justice programs is voluntary. As a result, offenders often comply with restitution agreements when they have followed a restorative justice program (Van Hecke & Wemmers, 1992). Offenders who do not accept their responsibility and who are not open to the idea of reparation will not enter a program. Thus, once admitted into a restorative justice program, offenders are prone to accept responsibility for their behaviour and repair the harm caused to the victim and, as a result, the victims of these offenders are likely to receive reparation. In their meta-analysis, Umbreit, Coates and Vos (2001) found that 90% of cases that are addressed through mediation end in an agreement. In most cases, these agreements consisted of a monetary sum, community service, or services rendered directly to the victim, and around 80-90% of the agreements were respected. Several researchers studying restorative justice have also observed a very high rate of satisfaction among participants in victim-offender mediation who frequently perceive the process and the result as fair (Umbreit, Coates & Vos 2001; Wemmers & Canuto 2002; Strang 2002; Wemmers & Cyr 2005; Van Camp 2016). According to Carriere, Malsch, Vermunt and De Keijser (1998), victims are generally more satisfied with restitution when they suffer less psychological damages and when their damages are primarily material. In contrast, other researchers find that restorative justice is particularly satisfying for victims of serious violent crimes and that when these victims participate in restorative justice programs they are usually satisfied with mediation, and the restorative justice process often has a positive impact on their well-being (Strang 20 2002; Strang et al 2006; Van Camp 2015; Wemmers 2016). Besides financial needs, other needs often expressed by victims of crime are the need for recognition and validation (Wemmers, 2017). Victims of serious violent crime generally seek other forms of reparation besides compensation, such as recognition of the wrong done by the offender, which is often very important to the victims (Van Camp & Wemmers 2015; Van Camp 2016). In restorative justice, victims’ needs are important and reparation aims to address the consequences of victimization (Wemmers, 2014; 2017). As such, restorative justice is more flexible than restitution orders and, for this reason, it is better able to adapt to the specific needs of the victim. Restitution is an integral part of victim reparation, and its necessity is well recognized by the UN as well as in the Canadian Victims’ Bill of Rights. In Canada, the Criminal Code highlights restitution orders and their application. However, before the introduction of the Victims’ Bill of Rights, restitution orders were a seldom-used measure in the Canadian criminal justice system: Only 2.3% of cases where the offender was found guilty included a restitution order. In order to encourage and facilitate requests by victims for restitution, a standard form was introduced in 2015. Restitution includes numerous advantages, but also has important limitations. It lessens the consequences of the crime for the victim, can reinstate their confidence in the criminal justice system, and can increase denunciation (Hoskins, Care & Ruback, 2015). Nevertheless, Canadian criminal law gives priority to the offender’s rehabilitation and social reintegration. As such, the needs of the victim are secondary. An important obstacle observed across the different models presented, is the conflict between criminal law and civil law. This legal distinction makes it so that judges are often reluctant to issue a restitution order and, if they do so, damages must be easy to determine, which leads to the inapplicability of restitution for emotional or psychological injury. Although lawyers place great importance on this distinction, it is perceived by victims as artificial and is often misunderstood (Helby, Van Dongen & Lindenberg, 2014). Even if restitution is ordered by a criminal court, it is the offender’s civil obligation. The restitution order as well as the civil party pose difficulties for victims with regards to the collection of their money. Civil law is complex and victims lack information on the procedures to undertake in order to obtain restitution. We have seen that the state can implement services to facilitate the collection of restitution. For example, the state can treat the order as a fine and take responsibility for its collection. The state can even advance money to the victim and then use subrogation in order to recover the money from the offender. Studies are nevertheless necessary to evaluate the effects of these types of services on victims and their impact on the effectiveness of restitution. Victim reparation is wider than restitution. Restorative justice programs do not suffer from the same limitations as restitution orders. They give an important place to the victim and can recognize all their needs including recognition, validation, as well as their financial needs. Hence, they are not limited by the offender’s financial insolvency. Restitution remains, after all, a right clearly defined in the Canadian Victims’ Bill of Rights, and significant effort must be deployed in order to ensure its effective application. The information presented in this article clearly points to a lack of data on the implementation and effectiveness of restitution orders. It also highlights the necessity to give more attention to the needs of victims of crime, as well as address the obstacles that hinder the satisfaction of victims’ needs, in order to maximize the benefits of this penal measure for victims, offenders and society as a whole. What are the pros and cons of restitution orders specifically related to victims?

Answer this question in one concise paragraph. Use the text provided. Do not use text from any other online source.

How can review mining ensure it represents low-frequency terms in customer reviews?

**Mining and Summarizing Customer Reviews** Minqing Hu and Bing Liu Department of Computer Science University of Illinois at Chicago 851 South Morgan Street Chicago, IL 60607-7053 {mhu1, liub}@cs.uic.edu 1. INTRODUCTION With the rapid expansion of e-commerce, more and more products are sold on the Web, and more and more people are also buying products online. In order to enhance customer satisfaction and shopping experience, it has become a common practice for online merchants to enable their customers to review or to express opinions on the products that they have purchased. With more and more common users becoming comfortable with the Web, an increasing number of people are writing reviews. As a result, the number of reviews that a product receives grows rapidly. Some popular products can get hundreds of reviews at some large merchant sites. Furthermore, many reviews are long and have only a few sentences containing opinions on the product. This makes it hard for a potential customer to read them to make an informed decision on whether to purchase the product. If he/she only reads a few reviews, he/she may get a biased view. The large number of reviews also makes it hard for product manufacturers to keep track of customer opinions of their products. For a product manufacturer, there are additional difficulties because many merchant sites may sell its products, and the manufacturer may (almost always) produce many kinds of products. In this research, we study the problem of generating feature-based summaries of customer reviews of products sold online. Here, features broadly mean product features (or attributes) and functions. Given a set of customer reviews of a particular product, the task involves three subtasks: (1) identifying features of the product that customers have expressed their opinions on (called product features); (2) for each feature, identifying review sentences that give positive or negative opinions; and (3) producing a summary using the discovered information. Let us use an example to illustrate a feature-based summary. Assume that we summarize the reviews of a particular digital camera, digital_camera_1. The summary looks like the following: Digital_camera_1: Feature: **picture quality** Positive: 253 <individual review sentences> Negative: 6 <individual review sentences> Feature: **size** Positive: 134 <individual review sentences> Negative: 10 <individual review sentences> … **Figure 1: An example summary** In Figure 1, picture quality and (camera) size are the product features. There are 253 customer reviews that express positive opinions about the picture quality, and only 6 that express negative opinions. The <individual review sentences> link points to the specific sentences and/or the whole reviews that give positive or negative comments about the feature. With such a feature-based summary, a potential customer can easily see how the existing customers feel about the digital camera. If he/she is very interested in a particular feature, he/she can drill down by following the <individual review sentences> link to see why existing customers like it and/or what they complain about. For a manufacturer, it is possible to combine summaries from multiple merchant sites to produce a single report for each of its products. Our task is different from traditional text summarization in a number of ways. First of all, a summary in our case is structured rather than another (but shorter) free text document as produced by most text summarization systems. Second, we are only interested in features of the product that customers have opinions on and also whether the opinions are positive or negative. We do not summarize the reviews by selecting or rewriting a subset of the original sentences from the reviews to capture their main points as in traditional text summarization. As indicated above, our task is performed in three main steps: (1) Mining product features that have been commented on by customers. We make use of both data mining and natural language processing techniques to perform this task. For completeness, we will summarize its techniques in this paper and also present a comparative evaluation. (2) Identifying opinion sentences in each review and deciding whether each opinion sentence is positive or negative. Note that these opinion sentences must contain one or more product features identified above. To decide the opinion orientation of each sentence (whether the opinion expressed in the sentence is positive or negative), we perform three subtasks. First, a set of adjective words (which are normally used to express opinions) is identified using a natural language processing method. These words are also called opinion words in this paper. Second, for each opinion word, we determine its semantic orientation, e.g., positive or negative. A bootstrapping technique is proposed to perform this task using WordNet. Finally, we decide the opinion orientation of each sentence. An effective algorithm is also given for this purpose. (3) Summarizing the results. This step aggregates the results of previous steps and presents them in the format of Figure 1. 2. RELATED WORK Existing text summarization techniques mainly fall in one of the two categories: template instantiation and passage extraction. Work in the former framework emphasizes on identification and extraction of certain core entities and facts in a document, which are packaged in a template. This framework requires background knowledge in order to instantiate a template to a suitable level of detail. Therefore, it is not domain or genre independent. This is different from our work as our techniques do not fill any template and are domain independent. The passage extraction framework identifies certain segments of the text (typically sentences) that are the most representative of the document’s content. Our work is different in that we do not extract representative sentences, but identify and extract those specific product features and the opinions related to them. Boguraev and Kennedy propose to find a few very prominent expressions, objects or events in a document and use them to help summarize the document. Our work is again different as we find all product features in a set of customer reviews regardless whether they are prominent or not. Thus, our summary is not a traditional text summary. Most existing works on text summarization focus on a single document. Some researchers also studied summarization of multiple documents covering similar information. Their main purpose is to summarize the similarities and differences in the information content among these documents. Our work is related but quite different because we aim to find the key features that are talked about in multiple reviews. We do not summarize similarities and differences of reviews. In terminology finding, there are basically two techniques for discovering terms in corpora: symbolic approaches that rely on syntactic description of terms, namely noun phrases, and statistical approaches that exploit the fact that the words composing a term tend to be found close to each other and reoccurring. However, using noun phrases tends to produce too many non-terms (low precision), while using reoccurring phrases misses many low frequency terms, terms with variations, and terms with only one word. Our association mining based technique does not have these problems, and we can also find infrequent features by exploiting the fact that we are only interested in features that the users have expressed opinions on. 3. THE PROPOSED TECHNIQUES The inputs to the system are a product name and an entry Web page for all the reviews of the product. The output is the summary of the reviews as the one shown in the introduction section. The system performs the summarization in three main steps (as discussed before): (1) mining product features that have been commented on by customers; (2) identifying opinion sentences in each review and deciding whether each opinion sentence is positive or negative; (3) summarizing the results. These steps are performed in multiple sub-steps. Given the inputs, the system first downloads (or crawls) all the reviews, and put them in the review database. It then finds those “hot” (or frequent) features that many people have expressed their opinions on. After that, the opinion words are extracted using the resulting frequent features, and semantic orientations of the opinion words are identified with the help of WordNet. Using the extracted opinion words, the system then finds those infrequent features. In the last two steps, the orientation of each opinion sentence is identified and a final summary is produced. Note that POS tagging is the part-of-speech tagging from natural language processing, which helps us to find opinion features. 4. CONCLUSIONS Our experimental results indicate that the proposed techniques are very promising in performing their tasks. We believe that this problem will become increasingly important as more people are buying and expressing their opinions on the Web. Summarizing the reviews is not only useful to common shoppers, but also crucial to product manufacturers. In our future work, we plan to further improve and refine our techniques, and to deal with the outstanding problems identified above, i.e., pronoun resolution, determining the strength of opinions, and investigating opinions expressed with adverbs, verbs and nouns. Finally, we will also look into monitoring of customer reviews. We believe that monitoring will be particularly useful to product manufacturers because they want to know any new positive or negative comments on their products whenever they are available. The keyword here is new. Although a new review may be added, it may not contain any new information.

{Question} ================== How can review mining ensure it represents low-frequency terms in customer reviews? ---------------- {System Instruction} ================== Answer this question in one concise paragraph. Use the text provided. Do not use text from any other online source. ---------------- {Document} ================== **Mining and Summarizing Customer Reviews** Minqing Hu and Bing Liu Department of Computer Science University of Illinois at Chicago 851 South Morgan Street Chicago, IL 60607-7053 {mhu1, liub}@cs.uic.edu 1. INTRODUCTION With the rapid expansion of e-commerce, more and more products are sold on the Web, and more and more people are also buying products online. In order to enhance customer satisfaction and shopping experience, it has become a common practice for online merchants to enable their customers to review or to express opinions on the products that they have purchased. With more and more common users becoming comfortable with the Web, an increasing number of people are writing reviews. As a result, the number of reviews that a product receives grows rapidly. Some popular products can get hundreds of reviews at some large merchant sites. Furthermore, many reviews are long and have only a few sentences containing opinions on the product. This makes it hard for a potential customer to read them to make an informed decision on whether to purchase the product. If he/she only reads a few reviews, he/she may get a biased view. The large number of reviews also makes it hard for product manufacturers to keep track of customer opinions of their products. For a product manufacturer, there are additional difficulties because many merchant sites may sell its products, and the manufacturer may (almost always) produce many kinds of products. In this research, we study the problem of generating feature-based summaries of customer reviews of products sold online. Here, features broadly mean product features (or attributes) and functions. Given a set of customer reviews of a particular product, the task involves three subtasks: (1) identifying features of the product that customers have expressed their opinions on (called product features); (2) for each feature, identifying review sentences that give positive or negative opinions; and (3) producing a summary using the discovered information. Let us use an example to illustrate a feature-based summary. Assume that we summarize the reviews of a particular digital camera, digital_camera_1. The summary looks like the following: Digital_camera_1: Feature: **picture quality** Positive: 253 <individual review sentences> Negative: 6 <individual review sentences> Feature: **size** Positive: 134 <individual review sentences> Negative: 10 <individual review sentences> … **Figure 1: An example summary** In Figure 1, picture quality and (camera) size are the product features. There are 253 customer reviews that express positive opinions about the picture quality, and only 6 that express negative opinions. The <individual review sentences> link points to the specific sentences and/or the whole reviews that give positive or negative comments about the feature. With such a feature-based summary, a potential customer can easily see how the existing customers feel about the digital camera. If he/she is very interested in a particular feature, he/she can drill down by following the <individual review sentences> link to see why existing customers like it and/or what they complain about. For a manufacturer, it is possible to combine summaries from multiple merchant sites to produce a single report for each of its products. Our task is different from traditional text summarization in a number of ways. First of all, a summary in our case is structured rather than another (but shorter) free text document as produced by most text summarization systems. Second, we are only interested in features of the product that customers have opinions on and also whether the opinions are positive or negative. We do not summarize the reviews by selecting or rewriting a subset of the original sentences from the reviews to capture their main points as in traditional text summarization. As indicated above, our task is performed in three main steps: (1) Mining product features that have been commented on by customers. We make use of both data mining and natural language processing techniques to perform this task. For completeness, we will summarize its techniques in this paper and also present a comparative evaluation. (2) Identifying opinion sentences in each review and deciding whether each opinion sentence is positive or negative. Note that these opinion sentences must contain one or more product features identified above. To decide the opinion orientation of each sentence (whether the opinion expressed in the sentence is positive or negative), we perform three subtasks. First, a set of adjective words (which are normally used to express opinions) is identified using a natural language processing method. These words are also called opinion words in this paper. Second, for each opinion word, we determine its semantic orientation, e.g., positive or negative. A bootstrapping technique is proposed to perform this task using WordNet. Finally, we decide the opinion orientation of each sentence. An effective algorithm is also given for this purpose. (3) Summarizing the results. This step aggregates the results of previous steps and presents them in the format of Figure 1. 2. RELATED WORK Existing text summarization techniques mainly fall in one of the two categories: template instantiation and passage extraction. Work in the former framework emphasizes on identification and extraction of certain core entities and facts in a document, which are packaged in a template. This framework requires background knowledge in order to instantiate a template to a suitable level of detail. Therefore, it is not domain or genre independent. This is different from our work as our techniques do not fill any template and are domain independent. The passage extraction framework identifies certain segments of the text (typically sentences) that are the most representative of the document’s content. Our work is different in that we do not extract representative sentences, but identify and extract those specific product features and the opinions related to them. Boguraev and Kennedy propose to find a few very prominent expressions, objects or events in a document and use them to help summarize the document. Our work is again different as we find all product features in a set of customer reviews regardless whether they are prominent or not. Thus, our summary is not a traditional text summary. Most existing works on text summarization focus on a single document. Some researchers also studied summarization of multiple documents covering similar information. Their main purpose is to summarize the similarities and differences in the information content among these documents. Our work is related but quite different because we aim to find the key features that are talked about in multiple reviews. We do not summarize similarities and differences of reviews. In terminology finding, there are basically two techniques for discovering terms in corpora: symbolic approaches that rely on syntactic description of terms, namely noun phrases, and statistical approaches that exploit the fact that the words composing a term tend to be found close to each other and reoccurring. However, using noun phrases tends to produce too many non-terms (low precision), while using reoccurring phrases misses many low frequency terms, terms with variations, and terms with only one word. Our association mining based technique does not have these problems, and we can also find infrequent features by exploiting the fact that we are only interested in features that the users have expressed opinions on. 3. THE PROPOSED TECHNIQUES The inputs to the system are a product name and an entry Web page for all the reviews of the product. The output is the summary of the reviews as the one shown in the introduction section. The system performs the summarization in three main steps (as discussed before): (1) mining product features that have been commented on by customers; (2) identifying opinion sentences in each review and deciding whether each opinion sentence is positive or negative; (3) summarizing the results. These steps are performed in multiple sub-steps. Given the inputs, the system first downloads (or crawls) all the reviews, and put them in the review database. It then finds those “hot” (or frequent) features that many people have expressed their opinions on. After that, the opinion words are extracted using the resulting frequent features, and semantic orientations of the opinion words are identified with the help of WordNet. Using the extracted opinion words, the system then finds those infrequent features. In the last two steps, the orientation of each opinion sentence is identified and a final summary is produced. Note that POS tagging is the part-of-speech tagging from natural language processing, which helps us to find opinion features. 4. CONCLUSIONS Our experimental results indicate that the proposed techniques are very promising in performing their tasks. We believe that this problem will become increasingly important as more people are buying and expressing their opinions on the Web. Summarizing the reviews is not only useful to common shoppers, but also crucial to product manufacturers. In our future work, we plan to further improve and refine our techniques, and to deal with the outstanding problems identified above, i.e., pronoun resolution, determining the strength of opinions, and investigating opinions expressed with adverbs, verbs and nouns. Finally, we will also look into monitoring of customer reviews. We believe that monitoring will be particularly useful to product manufacturers because they want to know any new positive or negative comments on their products whenever they are available. The keyword here is new. Although a new review may be added, it may not contain any new information.

Answer using only information from the prompt and context block. Answer using only bullet points.

Compare and contrast the power sources used by the Mars Pathfinder during its cruise phase and after landing on Mars.

If the lander comes to rest on a rock, the entire lander may be tilted, but further maneuvering of the petals can be performed during surface operations to lower the overall tilt of the lander. Telecommunications during entry should provide significant information about the behavior of the entry, descent and landing subsystem. Digital data will not be acquired, however, because of the extremely weak signal. 25 The amplitude and frequency of the spacecraft will be observed in real-time during entry and descent, and may be seen during petal deployment, depending on the lander's orientation once it comes to a stop on the Martian surface. Changes in amplitude are expected at cruise stage separation, parachute deployment, surface impact and during the airbag retraction and petal deployment. Changes in frequency reflect changes in the spacecraft's speed and will be most pronounced during the period of peak deceleration. The spacecraft also will deliberately change the frequency of the subcarrier to signal other key events. These include heat shield separation, bridle deployment, crossing the threshold altitude of 600 meters (about 2,000 feet) above the surface, completion of airbag retraction and completion of the petal deployment sequence. These planned frequency changes -- called "semaphores" -- are not likely to be detected in real-time, but can be extracted by post-processing the recorded data. In addition, key spacecraft telemetry data will be recorded and played back after landing. Other key data to be transmitted to Earth include accelerometer measurements and selected atmospheric structure instrument measurements. The Deep Space Network's 70-meter (230-foot) and 34-meter (110-foot) antennas in Madrid, Spain, will be used to support entry communications. Prime Mission Mars Pathfinder's primary mission begins when its lander petals have been fully unfolded and the lander switches to a sequence of computer commands that will control its functions. The spacecraft lands about 2-1/2 hours before sunrise on Mars and will spend the time in darkness retracting its airbags, standing itself upright and opening the petals so that solar panels can be powered up after sunrise. The lander's first task will be to transmit engineering and science data collected during its descent through the thin atmosphere of Mars. If no errors are detected in these data and the spacecraft is basically healthy, a real-time command will be sent from Earth instructing the lander to unlock the imager camera head, deploy and point the high-gain antenna. If conditions are different than expected, which is not unlikely, the opeation team will execute a contingency plan that has been placed onboard the spacecraft in expectation of such conditions. In the normal plan, the lander's camera will begin taking images -- including a panoramic view of the Martian landscape -- and will begin transmitting the data directly to Earth at 2,250 bits per second. The first images of the Martian landscape will tell engineers whether the airbags are fully retracted and whether the rover's exit ramp can be safely and successfully deployed. Once either or both ramps are deployed, additional images will be acquired to show the terrain beyond the ramps so that engineers can decide on the safest exit route. If the highgain antenna is not available, data will be sent over the lander’s low-gain antenna at a much lower rate of 40 bits per second. In this case, only a few, highly compressed images will be sent. 26 Once a decision on the route has been made, commands will be sent to deploy the rover. Sojourner will spend about a quarter of an hour exiting its ramp. The rover should be deployed within the first three days after landing. Driving off onto the floor of an old outflow channel, Sojourner will explore the surface at the command of Earth-based operators, who will rely on lander-based images to select a path and target for the rover. The six-wheeled Sojourner travels at 1 centimeter (0.4 inch) per second, performing mobility tests, imaging its surroundings and deploying an alpha proton x-ray spectrometer designed to study the elemental composition of rocks. During its prime mission, the rover will likely range a few tens of meters (yards) from the lander. Also mounted on the lander are wind sensors, wind socks and high- and low-gain antennas. Instruments will be used to measure the pressure, temperature and density of the Martian atmosphere. Magnets mounted on the lander will collect magnetic specimens of Martian dust and soil as small as 100 microns (about 1/250th of an inch). Extended Missions The primary mission lasts seven Martian days, or "sols," for the rover, and 30 Martian days, or "sols," for the lander. The rover could carry out an extended mission beyond that period, depending on how long its power sources and electronics last; engineers expect that the most probable reason for it to stop functioning is hot-cold cycling of its onboard electronics between Martian day and night. Sojourner's extended mission activities would include repeating soil mechanics experiments on various soils; additional spectrometer measurements of both rocks and soil; obtaining images of selected areas with the rover camera, including close-ups of the lander; obtaining images of the lander's landing and tumbling path; and traveling longer distances, with the possibility of going over the horizon, up to hundreds of meters (yards). For the lander, an extended mission lasting up to one year after landing is possible. Lander activities in the extended mission would include continued use of the lander camera to obtain images of the terrain and atmosphere, collection of key engineering telemetry and continued collection of meteorology data. Mission Operations All operations for Mars Pathfinder will be conducted at JPL, where the operations and science teams reside. Science data, both raw and processed, will be transferred after a period of validation to NASA's Planetary Data System archive for access and use by the planetary community at large and the general public. The Planetary Data System home page is at http://pds.jpl.nasa.gov/pds_home.html . Images from planetary missions are also available via the web from NASA’s Planetary Photojournal at http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov . 27 Spacecraft At launch the Mars Pathfinder spacecraft weighed about 895 kilograms (1,973 pounds), including its cruise stage, heat shield and backshell (or aeroshell), solar panels, propulsion stage, medium- and- high-gain antennas and 94 kilograms (207 pounds) of cruise propellant. The cruise vehicle measures 2.65 meters (8.5 feet) in diameter and stands 1.5 meters (5 feet) tall. The lander is a tetrahedron, a small pyramid standing about 0.9 meter (3 feet) tall with three triangular-shaped sides and a base. When Pathfinder is poised to enter the Martian atmosphere, its main components are the aeroshell, folded lander and rover, parachute, airbag system and three rocket engines. Combined, the spacecraft’s mass is about 570 kilograms (1,256 pounds) at entry. Once it has landed and its airbags have been deflated, Pathfinder’s mass will be about 360 kilograms (793 pounds). Subsystems contributing to its landed weight include the opening/uprighting mechanism, lander cabling and electronics, instruments and rover. When it is unfolded and lying flat on the surface, the spacecraft will measure 2.75 meters (9 feet) across with a mast-mounted camera standing up about 1.5 meters (5 feet) from the ground. The lander is controlled by a derivative of the commercially available IBM 6000 computer. This processor and associated components are radiation-hardened and mounted on a single electronics board. The computer has a 32-bit architecture which executes about 20 million instructions per second. The computer will store flight software as well as engineering and science data, including images and rover information, in 128 megabytes of dynamic random access memory. During interplanetary cruise, the spacecraft requires 178 watts of electrical power, provided by 2.5 square meters (27 square feet) of gallium arsenide solar cells. The lander has three solar panels, with a total area of 2.8 square meters (30 square feet) and supplying up to 1,200 watt-hours of power per day on clear days. At night, the lander will operate on rechargeable silver zinc batteries with a capacity at the beginning of the Mars surface mission of more than 40 amp-hours. The Pathfinder lander carries a camera on a mast to survey its immediate surroundings. The camera has two optical paths for stereo imaging, each with a filter wheel giving 12 color bands in the 0.35 to 1.1 micron range; exposures through different filters can be combined to produce color images. The camera’s field-of-view is 14 degrees in both horizontal and vertical directions, and it will be able to take one frame (256 by 256 pixels) every two seconds.

Answer using only information from the prompt and context block. Answer using only bullet points. Compare and contrast the power sources used by the Mars Pathfinder during its cruise phase and after landing on Mars. If the lander comes to rest on a rock, the entire lander may be tilted, but further maneuvering of the petals can be performed during surface operations to lower the overall tilt of the lander. Telecommunications during entry should provide significant information about the behavior of the entry, descent and landing subsystem. Digital data will not be acquired, however, because of the extremely weak signal. 25 The amplitude and frequency of the spacecraft will be observed in real-time during entry and descent, and may be seen during petal deployment, depending on the lander's orientation once it comes to a stop on the Martian surface. Changes in amplitude are expected at cruise stage separation, parachute deployment, surface impact and during the airbag retraction and petal deployment. Changes in frequency reflect changes in the spacecraft's speed and will be most pronounced during the period of peak deceleration. The spacecraft also will deliberately change the frequency of the subcarrier to signal other key events. These include heat shield separation, bridle deployment, crossing the threshold altitude of 600 meters (about 2,000 feet) above the surface, completion of airbag retraction and completion of the petal deployment sequence. These planned frequency changes -- called "semaphores" -- are not likely to be detected in real-time, but can be extracted by post-processing the recorded data. In addition, key spacecraft telemetry data will be recorded and played back after landing. Other key data to be transmitted to Earth include accelerometer measurements and selected atmospheric structure instrument measurements. The Deep Space Network's 70-meter (230-foot) and 34-meter (110-foot) antennas in Madrid, Spain, will be used to support entry communications. Prime Mission Mars Pathfinder's primary mission begins when its lander petals have been fully unfolded and the lander switches to a sequence of computer commands that will control its functions. The spacecraft lands about 2-1/2 hours before sunrise on Mars and will spend the time in darkness retracting its airbags, standing itself upright and opening the petals so that solar panels can be powered up after sunrise. The lander's first task will be to transmit engineering and science data collected during its descent through the thin atmosphere of Mars. If no errors are detected in these data and the spacecraft is basically healthy, a real-time command will be sent from Earth instructing the lander to unlock the imager camera head, deploy and point the high-gain antenna. If conditions are different than expected, which is not unlikely, the opeation team will execute a contingency plan that has been placed onboard the spacecraft in expectation of such conditions. In the normal plan, the lander's camera will begin taking images -- including a panoramic view of the Martian landscape -- and will begin transmitting the data directly to Earth at 2,250 bits per second. The first images of the Martian landscape will tell engineers whether the airbags are fully retracted and whether the rover's exit ramp can be safely and successfully deployed. Once either or both ramps are deployed, additional images will be acquired to show the terrain beyond the ramps so that engineers can decide on the safest exit route. If the highgain antenna is not available, data will be sent over the lander’s low-gain antenna at a much lower rate of 40 bits per second. In this case, only a few, highly compressed images will be sent. 26 Once a decision on the route has been made, commands will be sent to deploy the rover. Sojourner will spend about a quarter of an hour exiting its ramp. The rover should be deployed within the first three days after landing. Driving off onto the floor of an old outflow channel, Sojourner will explore the surface at the command of Earth-based operators, who will rely on lander-based images to select a path and target for the rover. The six-wheeled Sojourner travels at 1 centimeter (0.4 inch) per second, performing mobility tests, imaging its surroundings and deploying an alpha proton x-ray spectrometer designed to study the elemental composition of rocks. During its prime mission, the rover will likely range a few tens of meters (yards) from the lander. Also mounted on the lander are wind sensors, wind socks and high- and low-gain antennas. Instruments will be used to measure the pressure, temperature and density of the Martian atmosphere. Magnets mounted on the lander will collect magnetic specimens of Martian dust and soil as small as 100 microns (about 1/250th of an inch). Extended Missions The primary mission lasts seven Martian days, or "sols," for the rover, and 30 Martian days, or "sols," for the lander. The rover could carry out an extended mission beyond that period, depending on how long its power sources and electronics last; engineers expect that the most probable reason for it to stop functioning is hot-cold cycling of its onboard electronics between Martian day and night. Sojourner's extended mission activities would include repeating soil mechanics experiments on various soils; additional spectrometer measurements of both rocks and soil; obtaining images of selected areas with the rover camera, including close-ups of the lander; obtaining images of the lander's landing and tumbling path; and traveling longer distances, with the possibility of going over the horizon, up to hundreds of meters (yards). For the lander, an extended mission lasting up to one year after landing is possible. Lander activities in the extended mission would include continued use of the lander camera to obtain images of the terrain and atmosphere, collection of key engineering telemetry and continued collection of meteorology data. Mission Operations All operations for Mars Pathfinder will be conducted at JPL, where the operations and science teams reside. Science data, both raw and processed, will be transferred after a period of validation to NASA's Planetary Data System archive for access and use by the planetary community at large and the general public. The Planetary Data System home page is at http://pds.jpl.nasa.gov/pds_home.html . Images from planetary missions are also available via the web from NASA’s Planetary Photojournal at http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov . 27 Spacecraft At launch the Mars Pathfinder spacecraft weighed about 895 kilograms (1,973 pounds), including its cruise stage, heat shield and backshell (or aeroshell), solar panels, propulsion stage, medium- and- high-gain antennas and 94 kilograms (207 pounds) of cruise propellant. The cruise vehicle measures 2.65 meters (8.5 feet) in diameter and stands 1.5 meters (5 feet) tall. The lander is a tetrahedron, a small pyramid standing about 0.9 meter (3 feet) tall with three triangular-shaped sides and a base. When Pathfinder is poised to enter the Martian atmosphere, its main components are the aeroshell, folded lander and rover, parachute, airbag system and three rocket engines. Combined, the spacecraft’s mass is about 570 kilograms (1,256 pounds) at entry. Once it has landed and its airbags have been deflated, Pathfinder’s mass will be about 360 kilograms (793 pounds). Subsystems contributing to its landed weight include the opening/uprighting mechanism, lander cabling and electronics, instruments and rover. When it is unfolded and lying flat on the surface, the spacecraft will measure 2.75 meters (9 feet) across with a mast-mounted camera standing up about 1.5 meters (5 feet) from the ground. The lander is controlled by a derivative of the commercially available IBM 6000 computer. This processor and associated components are radiation-hardened and mounted on a single electronics board. The computer has a 32-bit architecture which executes about 20 million instructions per second. The computer will store flight software as well as engineering and science data, including images and rover information, in 128 megabytes of dynamic random access memory. During interplanetary cruise, the spacecraft requires 178 watts of electrical power, provided by 2.5 square meters (27 square feet) of gallium arsenide solar cells. The lander has three solar panels, with a total area of 2.8 square meters (30 square feet) and supplying up to 1,200 watt-hours of power per day on clear days. At night, the lander will operate on rechargeable silver zinc batteries with a capacity at the beginning of the Mars surface mission of more than 40 amp-hours. The Pathfinder lander carries a camera on a mast to survey its immediate surroundings. The camera has two optical paths for stereo imaging, each with a filter wheel giving 12 color bands in the 0.35 to 1.1 micron range; exposures through different filters can be combined to produce color images. The camera’s field-of-view is 14 degrees in both horizontal and vertical directions, and it will be able to take one frame (256 by 256 pixels) every two seconds.

Answer the question based solely on the information provided in the passage. Do not use any external knowledge or resources. [user request] [context document]

I have a hernia in my lower back and my doctor wants to do a laminotomy. I want to know more information about this surgery. Please explain the different types of spinal decompression surgeries and what I should expect. Use more than 400 words.

What is spinal decompression surgery? Spinal decompression surgery is performed to relieve symptoms related to compression of the spinal cord or its roots, which may include back or neck pain and radiating limb pain (radiculopathy). What symptoms does spinal decompression surgery treat? Spinal nerve compression symptoms include pain, altered sensations, muscle weakness or dysfunction, and even gait abnormalities. These symptoms can be caused by a wide variety of conditions. In some of these, such as in cervical spinal stenosis that leads to cervical myelopathy, you may feel symptoms in the arms, hands, legs or feet, and/or have balance problems, or even incontinence issues (bowel dysfunction, unexpected need to urinate, etc.). A rapid onset of these symptoms can indicate a condition known as cauda equina syndrome, which can cause paralysis and other serious problems if not addressed in a timely manner. Pain and other symptoms treated by these surgeries are most common in the lower back (lumbar spine), followed by the neck (cervical spine). Symptoms in the upper back (thoracic spine) are possible but less common because it is the most stable part of the spine, due in part to its being connected to the rib cage. Neuropathies may involve feelings of numbness or a "pins and needles" tingling sensation and cause weakness or instability, primarily in lower the back. What happens during spinal decompression surgery? Every type of spinal decompression modifies or removes bone, spinal disc or soft tissues that are causing compression of a nerve. The techniques vary according to which tissues are causing the compression. For example, laminoplasty involves the reshaping of part of a vertebral lamina, a laminotomy the making of a small hole the lamina, and a laminectomy the complete removal of a lamina, all to relieve pressure on the nerves. What types of spine decompression surgery are there? Types of spine decompression surgery performed at HSS include laminectomy, laminotomy, laminoplasty, discectomy and microdiscectomy, among others. Lumbar decompression surgery may be used to address problems in the lower back, such as lumbar laminectomy, laminotomy, or microdiscectomy. Types of spinal decompression surgery Laminectomy is the removal in one or more vertebrae of the lamina (bony roof over the spinal canal). This decompresses both sides (left and right) of the canal. Laminotomy is removal of a small portion of the lamina to decompress one side (left or right) of the canal. This leaves most of the lamina intact. Microsurgical laminoplasty is a minimally invasive surgical decompression technique that uses small incisions viewed through an operating microscope. (Find a laminoplasty spine specialist.) Microdiscectomy (also known as spinal microdecompression surgery): This minimally invasive spine procedure is commonly performed on patients who have sciatica and/or a herniated disc in the lumbar section of the spine (lower back). Using muscle-sparing incisions, this removes portions of a herniated disc that is putting pressure on the spinal nerve and causing pain. Minimally invasive lumbar discectomy (also known as endoscopic percutaneous disc removal) is similar to microdiscectomy and uses a scope to make very small incisions in the skin, through which a portion of the herniated disc that is compressing spinal nerves is removed. Decompression with fusion Some decompression surgeries may require the addition of a fusion procedure simultaneously. This depends on the type of disease being treated and the technique being used to address the disease. This includes lumbar decompressions, such as lumbar interbody fusion (LIF) techniques, which may indirectly decompress the spine, or cervical decompressions, such as anterior cervical discectomy and fusion (ACDF surgery), which are dependent on the differential anatomy of the spine. Who is a good candidate for spinal decompression surgery? Decompression surgery can be a good option for people who have back or neck pain and/or neuropathies due to nerve compression caused by a herniated disc, spinal stenosis, spondylolisthesis, and for whom nonsurgical methods such as physical therapy, epidural steroid injections or pain management regimens have failed to provide relief. Find an HSS spine surgeon by decompression procedure all spinal decompression laminectomy laminoplasty discectomy and microdiscectomy Will I have to go under anesthesia for spinal decompression surgery? Most spinal decompression surgeries will be performed under general anesthesia, with the patient completely unconscious. Some modern techniques allow for spinal surgery under regional anesthesia (either spinal or epidural anesthesia). These techniques allow patients to breathe on their own without the need for mechanical assistance. These techniques may reduce complications associated with general anesthesia but are not widely available and may be performed on a case-by-case basis. How long will I stay in the hospital after spinal decompression surgery? In many cases, patients undergoing decompressions such as a laminectomy, discectomy, or microdiscectomy can go home the same day. This is often the case with a laminectomy, microdiscectomy, and there is research to suggest that even multilevel ACDF surgeries may be safely done on an outpatient basis. Some patients having spinal decompression may need to stay one or more nights including those who have chronic diseases or sleep. Some patients require a spinal fusion may stay overnight and return home one or two days after surgery. Rarely, a patient may need to stay as many longer. In addition, some decompression spine surgeries may be planned as an ambulatory (outpatient) procedure, but then converted to an overnight stay to monitor the patient. In one study of more than 1,000 patients who underwent an ambulatory one- or two-level lumbar decompression, 58% ended up staying over at least one night. How soon can I walk after a decompression spine surgery? At HSS patients are encouraged to walk the same day of most decompression surgeries. How soon can I return to work after spinal decompression? Depending on the specific procedure and other factors, patients generally are able to return to work between two and four weeks after surgery. Some patients who have a microdiscectomy decompression may be able to return to work after less than two weeks. What is the recovery time of spinal decompression surgery? The recovery time for decompression surgery alone is generally faster compared to procedures that include a fusion. Owing to the wide range of decompression surgery types and the number of spinal levels addressed with surgery there is likewise some variability in recovery duration. There is recent evidence that microdiscectomy patients can return to physical therapy and low impact aerobic exercise within four weeks of surgery. Patients undergoing laminectomy procedure can expect surgery pain to ease within two to four weeks of surgery and starting physical therapy and other activities by about six weeks. Fusion procedures are likewise highly variable and recovery times prolonged, approaching three to six months before patients can return to exercise or sports activities. Please confer with your surgeon regarding your procedure and expected recovery. What is the success rate of spinal decompression surgery? Precise success rates of spinal decompression surgery can be difficult to calculate due to the wide variety of procedures, severity of spinal conditions, and the age and health of individual patients. Patients can expect a significant decrease in their pain and an improvement in their overall function.

Answer the question based solely on the information provided in the passage. Do not use any external knowledge or resources. I have a hernia in my lower back and my doctor wants to do a laminotomy. I want to know more information about this surgery. Please explain the different types of spinal decompression surgeries and what I should expect. Use more than 400 words. What is spinal decompression surgery? Spinal decompression surgery is performed to relieve symptoms related to compression of the spinal cord or its roots, which may include back or neck pain and radiating limb pain (radiculopathy). What symptoms does spinal decompression surgery treat? Spinal nerve compression symptoms include pain, altered sensations, muscle weakness or dysfunction, and even gait abnormalities. These symptoms can be caused by a wide variety of conditions. In some of these, such as in cervical spinal stenosis that leads to cervical myelopathy, you may feel symptoms in the arms, hands, legs or feet, and/or have balance problems, or even incontinence issues (bowel dysfunction, unexpected need to urinate, etc.). A rapid onset of these symptoms can indicate a condition known as cauda equina syndrome, which can cause paralysis and other serious problems if not addressed in a timely manner. Pain and other symptoms treated by these surgeries are most common in the lower back (lumbar spine), followed by the neck (cervical spine). Symptoms in the upper back (thoracic spine) are possible but less common because it is the most stable part of the spine, due in part to its being connected to the rib cage. Neuropathies may involve feelings of numbness or a "pins and needles" tingling sensation and cause weakness or instability, primarily in lower the back. What happens during spinal decompression surgery? Every type of spinal decompression modifies or removes bone, spinal disc or soft tissues that are causing compression of a nerve. The techniques vary according to which tissues are causing the compression. For example, laminoplasty involves the reshaping of part of a vertebral lamina, a laminotomy the making of a small hole the lamina, and a laminectomy the complete removal of a lamina, all to relieve pressure on the nerves. What types of spine decompression surgery are there? Types of spine decompression surgery performed at HSS include laminectomy, laminotomy, laminoplasty, discectomy and microdiscectomy, among others. Lumbar decompression surgery may be used to address problems in the lower back, such as lumbar laminectomy, laminotomy, or microdiscectomy. Types of spinal decompression surgery Laminectomy is the removal in one or more vertebrae of the lamina (bony roof over the spinal canal). This decompresses both sides (left and right) of the canal. Laminotomy is removal of a small portion of the lamina to decompress one side (left or right) of the canal. This leaves most of the lamina intact. Microsurgical laminoplasty is a minimally invasive surgical decompression technique that uses small incisions viewed through an operating microscope. (Find a laminoplasty spine specialist.) Microdiscectomy (also known as spinal microdecompression surgery): This minimally invasive spine procedure is commonly performed on patients who have sciatica and/or a herniated disc in the lumbar section of the spine (lower back). Using muscle-sparing incisions, this removes portions of a herniated disc that is putting pressure on the spinal nerve and causing pain. Minimally invasive lumbar discectomy (also known as endoscopic percutaneous disc removal) is similar to microdiscectomy and uses a scope to make very small incisions in the skin, through which a portion of the herniated disc that is compressing spinal nerves is removed. Decompression with fusion Some decompression surgeries may require the addition of a fusion procedure simultaneously. This depends on the type of disease being treated and the technique being used to address the disease. This includes lumbar decompressions, such as lumbar interbody fusion (LIF) techniques, which may indirectly decompress the spine, or cervical decompressions, such as anterior cervical discectomy and fusion (ACDF surgery), which are dependent on the differential anatomy of the spine. Who is a good candidate for spinal decompression surgery? Decompression surgery can be a good option for people who have back or neck pain and/or neuropathies due to nerve compression caused by a herniated disc, spinal stenosis, spondylolisthesis, and for whom nonsurgical methods such as physical therapy, epidural steroid injections or pain management regimens have failed to provide relief. Find an HSS spine surgeon by decompression procedure all spinal decompression laminectomy laminoplasty discectomy and microdiscectomy Will I have to go under anesthesia for spinal decompression surgery? Most spinal decompression surgeries will be performed under general anesthesia, with the patient completely unconscious. Some modern techniques allow for spinal surgery under regional anesthesia (either spinal or epidural anesthesia). These techniques allow patients to breathe on their own without the need for mechanical assistance. These techniques may reduce complications associated with general anesthesia but are not widely available and may be performed on a case-by-case basis. How long will I stay in the hospital after spinal decompression surgery? In many cases, patients undergoing decompressions such as a laminectomy, discectomy, or microdiscectomy can go home the same day. This is often the case with a laminectomy, microdiscectomy, and there is research to suggest that even multilevel ACDF surgeries may be safely done on an outpatient basis. Some patients having spinal decompression may need to stay one or more nights including those who have chronic diseases or sleep. Some patients require a spinal fusion may stay overnight and return home one or two days after surgery. Rarely, a patient may need to stay as many longer. In addition, some decompression spine surgeries may be planned as an ambulatory (outpatient) procedure, but then converted to an overnight stay to monitor the patient. In one study of more than 1,000 patients who underwent an ambulatory one- or two-level lumbar decompression, 58% ended up staying over at least one night. How soon can I walk after a decompression spine surgery? At HSS patients are encouraged to walk the same day of most decompression surgeries. How soon can I return to work after spinal decompression? Depending on the specific procedure and other factors, patients generally are able to return to work between two and four weeks after surgery. Some patients who have a microdiscectomy decompression may be able to return to work after less than two weeks. What is the recovery time of spinal decompression surgery? The recovery time for decompression surgery alone is generally faster compared to procedures that include a fusion. Owing to the wide range of decompression surgery types and the number of spinal levels addressed with surgery there is likewise some variability in recovery duration. There is recent evidence that microdiscectomy patients can return to physical therapy and low impact aerobic exercise within four weeks of surgery. Patients undergoing laminectomy procedure can expect surgery pain to ease within two to four weeks of surgery and starting physical therapy and other activities by about six weeks. Fusion procedures are likewise highly variable and recovery times prolonged, approaching three to six months before patients can return to exercise or sports activities. Please confer with your surgeon regarding your procedure and expected recovery. What is the success rate of spinal decompression surgery? Precise success rates of spinal decompression surgery can be difficult to calculate due to the wide variety of procedures, severity of spinal conditions, and the age and health of individual patients. Patients can expect a significant decrease in their pain and an improvement in their overall function. https://www.hss.edu/condition-list_spinal-decompression-surgery.asp

For this task, you are only to answer questions based entirely on the information provided in the prompt. No external resources or prior knowledge are allowed in this case.

In simple language, tell me about the Supreme Court's Code of Conduct?

Recent Changes to Supreme Court Financial Disclosure Requirements Statutory Updates On May 13, 2022, President Biden signed the Courthouse Ethics and Transparency Act, which requires online publication of financial disclosure reports of judicial officers (including Supreme Court Justices), bankruptcy judges, and magistrate judges. While the EIGA always mandated public access to judicial officer financial disclosure reports, there was no central database to access the filings, and reports were available only “in paper documents or on thumb drives.” The new law directed the Administrative Office of the United States Courts (AO) to establish a “searchable internet database to enable public access to any report required to be filed” under the EIGA. The AO launched the public database on November 7, 2022, and the public can now access electronic versions of federal judges’ reports. The EIGA’s allowance for security-related redactions in judicial branch financial disclosure reports remains unchanged. The Courthouse Ethics and Transparency Act also extended the STOCK Act’s PTR requirements to judicial officers (including Supreme Court Justices), bankruptcy judges, and magistrate judges. Under the provisions discussed above, federal judges are now required to report any purchase, sale, or exchange of securities that exceeds $1,000 within 45 days of the transaction. The new public database includes access to all of these periodic transaction reports. Regulatory Updates Interpretation of the EIGA’s financial disclosure requirements as applied to judicial officers and employees has also recently changed. As mentioned above, the Committee on Financial Disclosure within the Judicial Conference prescribes rules regarding financial disclosure by judicial officers. Those rules are found in Volume 2, Part D, of the Guide to Judiciary Policy. As noted above, as part of their financial disclosure reports, all covered individuals are statutorily required to report gifts received from any source other than a relative with the exception of “food, lodging, or entertainment received as personal hospitality.” The EIGA defines personal hospitality of any individual as “hospitality extended for a nonbusiness purpose by an individual, not a corporation or organization, at the personal residence of that individual or the individual’s family or on property or facilities owned by that individual or the individual’s family.” According to a March 2023 letter from the director of the AO, the Committee on Financial Disclosure revised its regulations, effective March 14, 2023, specifically regarding the definition of personal hospitality. These updated regulations appear in the notes that accompany the definition of personal hospitality: (1) The personal hospitality gift reporting exemption applies only to food, lodging, or entertainment and is intended to cover such gifts of a personal, non-business nature. Therefore, the reporting exemption does not include: gifts other than food, lodging or entertainment, such as transportation that substitutes for commercial transportation; gifts extended for a business purpose; Congressional Research Service 4 gifts extended at property or facilities owned by an entity, rather than by an individual or an individual’s family, even if the entity is owned wholly or in part by an individual or an individual’s family; gifts paid for by any individual or entity other than the individual providing the hospitality, or for which the individual providing the hospitality receives reimbursement or a tax deduction related to furnishing the hospitality; or gifts extended at a commercial property, e.g., a resort or restaurant, or at a property that is regularly rented out to others for a business purpose. The notes also clarify that judicial officers and employees are never permitted “to solicit or accept anything of value from a person seeking official action from or doing business with the court or other entity served by the judicial officer or employee, or from any other person whose interests may be substantially affected by the performance or nonperformance of the judge’s official duties.” There is some uncertainty as to whether these regulations apply to the Supreme Court. Although the regulations explicitly include Justices in the definition of judicial officer, some have questioned whether the Judicial Conference has authority over the Supreme Court. In his 2011 Year-End Report, the Chief Justice explained that because the “Judicial Conference is an instrument for the management of the lower federal courts, its committees have no mandate to prescribe rules or standards for any other body.” Nonetheless, at least one Associate Justice has indicated his intention to follow the 2023 guidance going forward, and, as discussed further below, the Justices have stated that they comply with current Judicial Conference regulations on financial disclosure. Supreme Court Code of Conduct On November 13, 2023, the United States Supreme Court announced it was, for the first time, adopting a Code of Conduct “to set out succinctly and gather in one place the ethics rules and principles that guide the conduct of the Members of the Court.” Noting that most of the rules and principles within the Code “are not new,” the Court explained that the Code “largely represents a codification of principles that we have long regarded as governing our conduct.” The Code, discussed in more detail in another Legal Sidebar, is a set of five ethical canons and accompanying commentary. The canons are nearly the same as the existing canons in the Code of Conduct for U.S. Judges, which applies only to lower federal judges. While many provisions of the Supreme Court Code generally address conflicts of interest and appearances of impropriety, specific Code provisions discuss requirements related to financial activities and compliance with the EIGA. For example, Canon 4(H) declares the Justices’ commitment to comply with financial disclosure laws, and the commentary accompanying the Code states that the Justices comply with the EIGA, STOCK Act, and current Judicial Conference regulations on financial disclosure. Although the Code affirms the Justices’ compliance with existing financial disclosure laws and regulations, it seemingly does not impose any new financial disclosure requirements on the Justices. Considerations for Congress Financial disclosure laws are used to identify potential or actual conflicts of interest in order to promote integrity in the federal government. Congress may consider options to modify or clarify current financial disclosure requirements for judicial officers. For example, the Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal, and Transparency Act would, according to its sponsor, “improve disclosure of travel and hospitality for judges” by requiring the counselor to the Chief Justice (with approval of the Chief Justice) to adopt rules regarding disclosure of gifts, travel, and income that are “at least as rigorous as the House and Senate disclosure rules.” This proposal was introduced before the Justices released their November 2023 Code of Conduct, and it is unclear to what extent the Code may overlap with some of the requirements that this bill would impose. Congressional Research Service 5 LSB10949 · VERSION 2 · UPDATED Financial disclosure is only one facet of a wider theme of government ethics. The EIGA, as amended, includes not only the financial disclosure requirements discussed above but also gift and outside earned income and employment limitations that apply to all officers and employees of the government. While the Judicial Conference’s implementing regulations for these laws exclude Supreme Court Justices from coverage, the commentary accompanying the recent Supreme Court Code of Conduct states that the Justices comply with current Judicial Conference regulations on gifts, foreign gifts and decorations, and outside earned income, honoraria, and employment in addition to regulations about financial disclosure. This is consistent with the Justices’ long-standing voluntary compliance with certain Judicial Conference regulations. The Code, however, does not include any enforcement mechanisms, meaning there is no process to address alleged violations of the Code. Proposed legislation about Supreme Court financial disclosure and other ethics requirements, including congressional attempts to enforce the Supreme Court Code of Conduct through legislation or oversight, may raise questions regarding Congress’s authority to regulate the Supreme Court. Some scholars have suggested that Chief Justice Roberts in his 2011 Year-End Report questioned whether Congress may impose ethical requirements on the Supreme Court. Other scholars have argued that while constitutional obstacles—such as separation-of-powers issues—may exist, the Constitution does provide Congress with authority to regulate Supreme Court ethics. This authority, however, is untested, leaving a wide array of questions unanswered regarding the validity of current law and the extent to which Congress may impose future regulations. Despite any doubts as to congressional authority, the Justices, through their newly released Code of Conduct, have acknowledged that they file “the same financial disclosure reports as other federal judges.” Without enforcement mechanisms in the Code, however, compliance with federal ethics laws may be left to the discretion of the Justices.

[For this task, you are only to answer questions based entirely on the information provided in the prompt. No external resources or prior knowledge are allowed in this case.] [In simple language, tell me about the Supreme Court's Code of Conduct?] [Recent Changes to Supreme Court Financial Disclosure Requirements Statutory Updates On May 13, 2022, President Biden signed the Courthouse Ethics and Transparency Act, which requires online publication of financial disclosure reports of judicial officers (including Supreme Court Justices), bankruptcy judges, and magistrate judges. While the EIGA always mandated public access to judicial officer financial disclosure reports, there was no central database to access the filings, and reports were available only “in paper documents or on thumb drives.” The new law directed the Administrative Office of the United States Courts (AO) to establish a “searchable internet database to enable public access to any report required to be filed” under the EIGA. The AO launched the public database on November 7, 2022, and the public can now access electronic versions of federal judges’ reports. The EIGA’s allowance for security-related redactions in judicial branch financial disclosure reports remains unchanged. The Courthouse Ethics and Transparency Act also extended the STOCK Act’s PTR requirements to judicial officers (including Supreme Court Justices), bankruptcy judges, and magistrate judges. Under the provisions discussed above, federal judges are now required to report any purchase, sale, or exchange of securities that exceeds $1,000 within 45 days of the transaction. The new public database includes access to all of these periodic transaction reports. Regulatory Updates Interpretation of the EIGA’s financial disclosure requirements as applied to judicial officers and employees has also recently changed. As mentioned above, the Committee on Financial Disclosure within the Judicial Conference prescribes rules regarding financial disclosure by judicial officers. Those rules are found in Volume 2, Part D, of the Guide to Judiciary Policy. As noted above, as part of their financial disclosure reports, all covered individuals are statutorily required to report gifts received from any source other than a relative with the exception of “food, lodging, or entertainment received as personal hospitality.” The EIGA defines personal hospitality of any individual as “hospitality extended for a nonbusiness purpose by an individual, not a corporation or organization, at the personal residence of that individual or the individual’s family or on property or facilities owned by that individual or the individual’s family.” According to a March 2023 letter from the director of the AO, the Committee on Financial Disclosure revised its regulations, effective March 14, 2023, specifically regarding the definition of personal hospitality. These updated regulations appear in the notes that accompany the definition of personal hospitality: (1) The personal hospitality gift reporting exemption applies only to food, lodging, or entertainment and is intended to cover such gifts of a personal, non-business nature. Therefore, the reporting exemption does not include: gifts other than food, lodging or entertainment, such as transportation that substitutes for commercial transportation; gifts extended for a business purpose; Congressional Research Service 4 gifts extended at property or facilities owned by an entity, rather than by an individual or an individual’s family, even if the entity is owned wholly or in part by an individual or an individual’s family; gifts paid for by any individual or entity other than the individual providing the hospitality, or for which the individual providing the hospitality receives reimbursement or a tax deduction related to furnishing the hospitality; or gifts extended at a commercial property, e.g., a resort or restaurant, or at a property that is regularly rented out to others for a business purpose. The notes also clarify that judicial officers and employees are never permitted “to solicit or accept anything of value from a person seeking official action from or doing business with the court or other entity served by the judicial officer or employee, or from any other person whose interests may be substantially affected by the performance or nonperformance of the judge’s official duties.” There is some uncertainty as to whether these regulations apply to the Supreme Court. Although the regulations explicitly include Justices in the definition of judicial officer, some have questioned whether the Judicial Conference has authority over the Supreme Court. In his 2011 Year-End Report, the Chief Justice explained that because the “Judicial Conference is an instrument for the management of the lower federal courts, its committees have no mandate to prescribe rules or standards for any other body.” Nonetheless, at least one Associate Justice has indicated his intention to follow the 2023 guidance going forward, and, as discussed further below, the Justices have stated that they comply with current Judicial Conference regulations on financial disclosure. Supreme Court Code of Conduct On November 13, 2023, the United States Supreme Court announced it was, for the first time, adopting a Code of Conduct “to set out succinctly and gather in one place the ethics rules and principles that guide the conduct of the Members of the Court.” Noting that most of the rules and principles within the Code “are not new,” the Court explained that the Code “largely represents a codification of principles that we have long regarded as governing our conduct.” The Code, discussed in more detail in another Legal Sidebar, is a set of five ethical canons and accompanying commentary. The canons are nearly the same as the existing canons in the Code of Conduct for U.S. Judges, which applies only to lower federal judges. While many provisions of the Supreme Court Code generally address conflicts of interest and appearances of impropriety, specific Code provisions discuss requirements related to financial activities and compliance with the EIGA. For example, Canon 4(H) declares the Justices’ commitment to comply with financial disclosure laws, and the commentary accompanying the Code states that the Justices comply with the EIGA, STOCK Act, and current Judicial Conference regulations on financial disclosure. Although the Code affirms the Justices’ compliance with existing financial disclosure laws and regulations, it seemingly does not impose any new financial disclosure requirements on the Justices. Considerations for Congress Financial disclosure laws are used to identify potential or actual conflicts of interest in order to promote integrity in the federal government. Congress may consider options to modify or clarify current financial disclosure requirements for judicial officers. For example, the Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal, and Transparency Act would, according to its sponsor, “improve disclosure of travel and hospitality for judges” by requiring the counselor to the Chief Justice (with approval of the Chief Justice) to adopt rules regarding disclosure of gifts, travel, and income that are “at least as rigorous as the House and Senate disclosure rules.” This proposal was introduced before the Justices released their November 2023 Code of Conduct, and it is unclear to what extent the Code may overlap with some of the requirements that this bill would impose. Congressional Research Service 5 LSB10949 · VERSION 2 · UPDATED Financial disclosure is only one facet of a wider theme of government ethics. The EIGA, as amended, includes not only the financial disclosure requirements discussed above but also gift and outside earned income and employment limitations that apply to all officers and employees of the government. While the Judicial Conference’s implementing regulations for these laws exclude Supreme Court Justices from coverage, the commentary accompanying the recent Supreme Court Code of Conduct states that the Justices comply with current Judicial Conference regulations on gifts, foreign gifts and decorations, and outside earned income, honoraria, and employment in addition to regulations about financial disclosure. This is consistent with the Justices’ long-standing voluntary compliance with certain Judicial Conference regulations. The Code, however, does not include any enforcement mechanisms, meaning there is no process to address alleged violations of the Code. Proposed legislation about Supreme Court financial disclosure and other ethics requirements, including congressional attempts to enforce the Supreme Court Code of Conduct through legislation or oversight, may raise questions regarding Congress’s authority to regulate the Supreme Court. Some scholars have suggested that Chief Justice Roberts in his 2011 Year-End Report questioned whether Congress may impose ethical requirements on the Supreme Court. Other scholars have argued that while constitutional obstacles—such as separation-of-powers issues—may exist, the Constitution does provide Congress with authority to regulate Supreme Court ethics. This authority, however, is untested, leaving a wide array of questions unanswered regarding the validity of current law and the extent to which Congress may impose future regulations. Despite any doubts as to congressional authority, the Justices, through their newly released Code of Conduct, have acknowledged that they file “the same financial disclosure reports as other federal judges.” Without enforcement mechanisms in the Code, however, compliance with federal ethics laws may be left to the discretion of the Justices.]

"================ <TEXT PASSAGE> ======= [context document] ================ <QUESTION> ======= [user request] ================ <TASK> ======= You are an expert in question answering. Your task is to reply to a query or question, based only on the information provided by the user. It should only use information in the article provided."

Can you explain to me why staphylococcus aureus is a pathogen that is of particular worry for humans? What disease does it cause? What are the reasons behinds its success?

Staphylococcus aureus is a Gram-positive, nonmotile, coagulase-positive coccoid bacterium of the Firmicutes phylum. Although the Staphylococcus genus includes 52 species and 28 subspecies (List of Prokaryotic names with Standing in Nomenclature), S. aureus is by far the most clinically relevant. S. aureus is found in the human commensal microbiota of the nasal mucosa in 20–40% of the general population1,2. The reported prevalence varies owing to differences in the size and demographics of the study populations, quality of sampling and culture techniques utilized3. When the cutaneous and mucosal barriers are disrupted, for example, owing to chronic skin conditions, wounds or surgical intervention, S. aureus can gain access to the underlying tissues or the bloodstream and cause infection. Persons with invasive medical devices (such as peripheral and central venous catheters) or compromised immune systems are particularly vulnerable to S. aureus infection4. Methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA) was first described in England in 1961 (Ref.5), soon after methicillin was introduced into clinical practice. Methicillin was initially widely used; however, because of its toxicity, it is now no longer marketed for human use and has largely been replaced by similar, more-stable penicillins such as oxacillin, flucloxacillin and dicloxacillin6. Nevertheless, the term methicillin-resistant S. aureus continues to be used. In the decade following its initial description, MRSA was responsible for hospital outbreaks (health-care-associated MRSA (HA-MRSA)) in many parts of the world7. A substantial change in MRSA epidemiology was observed when it was detected in individuals without previous health-care contact (referred to as community-associated MRSA (CA-MRSA)), notably among indigenous populations in Australia in the 1980s8 and otherwise healthy persons, including children, in the United States in the 1990s9. Since the mid-2000s, it has also been associated with livestock exposure (livestock-associated MRSA (LA-MRSA))10. Several S. aureus clones (that is, bacteria that are indistinguishable from each other by a variety of genetic tests (for example, pulsed-field gel electrophoresis, multilocus enzyme electrophoresis or ribotyping) or that are so similar that they are presumed to be derived from a common parent11) have developed into MRSA by uptake via horizontal gene transfer of staphylococcal cassette chromosome mec (SCCmec)12, a mobile genetic element that encodes the genes mecA or mecC, which confer resistance to methicillin and, therefore, to most β-lactam antibiotics. MRSA is often also resistant to multiple other antibiotic classes. Indeed, S. aureus has the remarkable ability to acquire resistance to any antibiotic7, which has major implications for current as well as future treatment options for this pathogen. Individuals with MRSA colonization or carriage (that is, the presence of bacteria that do not cause a detectable host immune response, cellular damage or clinical signs and symptoms of infection) have an increased risk of subsequent infection and are an important source of person-to-person transmission. Health-care facilities host persons who are predisposed to infection (for example, owing to invasive procedures and/or immune compromise) and are environments with high antibiotic selection pressure (which can contribute to the selection of antimicrobial resistance in bacteria) and frequent contact between individuals. These conditions have facilitated the epidemic spread of MRSA in hospitals; MRSA is now endemic in many health-care facilities throughout the world and, as a consequence, it has become a major focus for infection control efforts globally.

"================ <TEXT PASSAGE> ======= Staphylococcus aureus is a Gram-positive, nonmotile, coagulase-positive coccoid bacterium of the Firmicutes phylum. Although the Staphylococcus genus includes 52 species and 28 subspecies (List of Prokaryotic names with Standing in Nomenclature), S. aureus is by far the most clinically relevant. S. aureus is found in the human commensal microbiota of the nasal mucosa in 20–40% of the general population1,2. The reported prevalence varies owing to differences in the size and demographics of the study populations, quality of sampling and culture techniques utilized3. When the cutaneous and mucosal barriers are disrupted, for example, owing to chronic skin conditions, wounds or surgical intervention, S. aureus can gain access to the underlying tissues or the bloodstream and cause infection. Persons with invasive medical devices (such as peripheral and central venous catheters) or compromised immune systems are particularly vulnerable to S. aureus infection4. Methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA) was first described in England in 1961 (Ref.5), soon after methicillin was introduced into clinical practice. Methicillin was initially widely used; however, because of its toxicity, it is now no longer marketed for human use and has largely been replaced by similar, more-stable penicillins such as oxacillin, flucloxacillin and dicloxacillin6. Nevertheless, the term methicillin-resistant S. aureus continues to be used. In the decade following its initial description, MRSA was responsible for hospital outbreaks (health-care-associated MRSA (HA-MRSA)) in many parts of the world7. A substantial change in MRSA epidemiology was observed when it was detected in individuals without previous health-care contact (referred to as community-associated MRSA (CA-MRSA)), notably among indigenous populations in Australia in the 1980s8 and otherwise healthy persons, including children, in the United States in the 1990s9. Since the mid-2000s, it has also been associated with livestock exposure (livestock-associated MRSA (LA-MRSA))10. Several S. aureus clones (that is, bacteria that are indistinguishable from each other by a variety of genetic tests (for example, pulsed-field gel electrophoresis, multilocus enzyme electrophoresis or ribotyping) or that are so similar that they are presumed to be derived from a common parent11) have developed into MRSA by uptake via horizontal gene transfer of staphylococcal cassette chromosome mec (SCCmec)12, a mobile genetic element that encodes the genes mecA or mecC, which confer resistance to methicillin and, therefore, to most β-lactam antibiotics. MRSA is often also resistant to multiple other antibiotic classes. Indeed, S. aureus has the remarkable ability to acquire resistance to any antibiotic7, which has major implications for current as well as future treatment options for this pathogen. Individuals with MRSA colonization or carriage (that is, the presence of bacteria that do not cause a detectable host immune response, cellular damage or clinical signs and symptoms of infection) have an increased risk of subsequent infection and are an important source of person-to-person transmission. Health-care facilities host persons who are predisposed to infection (for example, owing to invasive procedures and/or immune compromise) and are environments with high antibiotic selection pressure (which can contribute to the selection of antimicrobial resistance in bacteria) and frequent contact between individuals. These conditions have facilitated the epidemic spread of MRSA in hospitals; MRSA is now endemic in many health-care facilities throughout the world and, as a consequence, it has become a major focus for infection control efforts globally. https://www.nature.com/articles/nrdp201833 ================ <QUESTION> ======= Can you explain to me why staphylococcus aureus is a pathogen that is of particular worry for humans? What disease does it cause? What are the reasons behinds its success? ================ <TASK> ======= You are an expert in question answering. Your task is to reply to a query or question, based only on the information provided by the user. It should only use information in the article provided."

"================ <TEXT PASSAGE> ======= [context document] ================ <QUESTION> ======= [user request] ================ <TASK> ======= You are an expert in question answering. Your task is to reply to a query or question, based only on the information provided by the user. It should only use information in the article provided."

A streamer I like was recently diagnosed with bronchitis, and now I'm curious about what it is. Summarize this article on bronchitis for me and format your response in bullet form.

Cough is the most common illness-related reason for ambulatory care visits in the United States. Acute bronchitis is a clinical diagnosis characterized by cough due to acute inflammation of the trachea and large airways without evidence of pneumonia. Pneumonia should be suspected in patients with tachypnea, tachycardia, dyspnea, or lung findings suggestive of pneumonia, and radiography is warranted. Pertussis should be suspected in patients with cough persisting for more than two weeks that is accompanied by symptoms such as paroxysmal cough, whooping cough, and post-tussive emesis, or recent pertussis exposure. The cough associated with acute bronchitis typically lasts about two to three weeks, and this should be emphasized with patients. Acute bronchitis is usually caused by viruses, and antibiotics are not indicated in patients without chronic lung disease. Antibiotics have been shown to provide only minimal benefit, reducing the cough or illness by about half a day, and have adverse effects, including allergic reactions, nausea and vomiting, and Clostridium difficile infection. Evaluation and treatment of bronchitis include ruling out secondary causes for cough, such as pneumonia; educating patients about the natural course of the disease; and recommending symptomatic treatment and avoidance of unnecessary antibiotic use. Strategies to reduce inappropriate antibiotic use include delayed prescriptions, patient education, and calling the infection a chest cold. Acute bronchitis is most often caused by a viral infection.3,4 The most commonly identified viruses are rhinovirus, enterovirus, influenza A and B, parainfluenza, coronavirus, human metapneumovirus, and respiratory syncytial virus.3 Bacteria are detected in 1% to 10% of cases of acute bronchitis.3–5 Atypical bacteria, such as Mycoplasma pneumoniae, Chlamydophila pneumoniae, and Bordetella pertussis, are rare causes of acute bronchitis. In a study of sputum samples of adults with acute cough for more than five days, M. pneumoniae was isolated in less than 1% of cases and C. pneumoniae was not identified.6 Approximately 10% of patients presenting with a cough lasting at least two weeks have evidence of B. pertussis infection.7,8 During outbreaks, pertussis detection is more likely in children and those with prolonged coughs.6,9 Antibiotics can eradicate B. pertussis from the nasopharynx. They do not seem to shorten the course of illness unless given in the first one to two weeks.10 Isolated outbreaks of pertussis occur throughout the United States, and increased testing of adults and children should be considered during these periods. Cough is the predominant and defining symptom of acute bronchitis. The primary diagnostic consideration in patients with suspected acute bronchitis is ruling out more serious causes of cough, such as asthma, exacerbation of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, heart failure, or pneumonia. The diagnoses that have the most overlap with acute bronchitis are upper respiratory tract infections and pneumonia. Whereas acute bronchitis and the common cold are self-limited illnesses that do not require antibiotic treatment, the standard therapy for pneumonia is antibiotics. Besides cough, other signs and symptoms of acute bronchitis include sputum production, dyspnea, nasal congestion, headache, and fever.4,11,12 The first few days of an acute bronchitis infection may be indistinguishable from the common cold. Patients may have substernal or chest wall pain when coughing. Fever is not a typical finding after the first few days, and presence of a fever greater than 100°F (37.8°C) should prompt consideration of influenza or pneumonia. Production of sputum, even purulent, is common and does not correlate with bacterial infection.13,14 Because the cough associated with bronchitis is so bothersome and slow to resolve, patients often seek treatment. Patients and clinicians may underestimate the time required to fully recover from acute bronchitis.15 The duration of acute bronchitis–related cough is typically two to three weeks, with a pooled estimate of 18 days in one systematic review.15 This corresponds to results of a prospective trial, which found that patients who had a cough for at least five days had a median of 18 days of coughing.16 On physical examination, patients with acute bronchitis may be mildly ill-appearing, and fever is present in about one-third of patients.4,11 Lung auscultation may reveal wheezes, as well as rhonchi that typically improve with coughing. It is important to rule out pneumonia. High fever; moderate to severe ill-appearance; hypoxia; and signs of lung consolidation, such as decreased breath sounds, bronchial breath sounds, crackles, egophony, and increased tactile fremitus, are concerning for pneumonia. Pneumonia is unlikely in nonfrail older adults who have normal vital signs and normal lung examination findings.17–20

"================ <TEXT PASSAGE> ======= Cough is the most common illness-related reason for ambulatory care visits in the United States. Acute bronchitis is a clinical diagnosis characterized by cough due to acute inflammation of the trachea and large airways without evidence of pneumonia. Pneumonia should be suspected in patients with tachypnea, tachycardia, dyspnea, or lung findings suggestive of pneumonia, and radiography is warranted. Pertussis should be suspected in patients with cough persisting for more than two weeks that is accompanied by symptoms such as paroxysmal cough, whooping cough, and post-tussive emesis, or recent pertussis exposure. The cough associated with acute bronchitis typically lasts about two to three weeks, and this should be emphasized with patients. Acute bronchitis is usually caused by viruses, and antibiotics are not indicated in patients without chronic lung disease. Antibiotics have been shown to provide only minimal benefit, reducing the cough or illness by about half a day, and have adverse effects, including allergic reactions, nausea and vomiting, and Clostridium difficile infection. Evaluation and treatment of bronchitis include ruling out secondary causes for cough, such as pneumonia; educating patients about the natural course of the disease; and recommending symptomatic treatment and avoidance of unnecessary antibiotic use. Strategies to reduce inappropriate antibiotic use include delayed prescriptions, patient education, and calling the infection a chest cold. Acute bronchitis is most often caused by a viral infection.3,4 The most commonly identified viruses are rhinovirus, enterovirus, influenza A and B, parainfluenza, coronavirus, human metapneumovirus, and respiratory syncytial virus.3 Bacteria are detected in 1% to 10% of cases of acute bronchitis.3–5 Atypical bacteria, such as Mycoplasma pneumoniae, Chlamydophila pneumoniae, and Bordetella pertussis, are rare causes of acute bronchitis. In a study of sputum samples of adults with acute cough for more than five days, M. pneumoniae was isolated in less than 1% of cases and C. pneumoniae was not identified.6 Approximately 10% of patients presenting with a cough lasting at least two weeks have evidence of B. pertussis infection.7,8 During outbreaks, pertussis detection is more likely in children and those with prolonged coughs.6,9 Antibiotics can eradicate B. pertussis from the nasopharynx. They do not seem to shorten the course of illness unless given in the first one to two weeks.10 Isolated outbreaks of pertussis occur throughout the United States, and increased testing of adults and children should be considered during these periods. Cough is the predominant and defining symptom of acute bronchitis. The primary diagnostic consideration in patients with suspected acute bronchitis is ruling out more serious causes of cough, such as asthma, exacerbation of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, heart failure, or pneumonia. The diagnoses that have the most overlap with acute bronchitis are upper respiratory tract infections and pneumonia. Whereas acute bronchitis and the common cold are self-limited illnesses that do not require antibiotic treatment, the standard therapy for pneumonia is antibiotics. Besides cough, other signs and symptoms of acute bronchitis include sputum production, dyspnea, nasal congestion, headache, and fever.4,11,12 The first few days of an acute bronchitis infection may be indistinguishable from the common cold. Patients may have substernal or chest wall pain when coughing. Fever is not a typical finding after the first few days, and presence of a fever greater than 100°F (37.8°C) should prompt consideration of influenza or pneumonia. Production of sputum, even purulent, is common and does not correlate with bacterial infection.13,14 Because the cough associated with bronchitis is so bothersome and slow to resolve, patients often seek treatment. Patients and clinicians may underestimate the time required to fully recover from acute bronchitis.15 The duration of acute bronchitis–related cough is typically two to three weeks, with a pooled estimate of 18 days in one systematic review.15 This corresponds to results of a prospective trial, which found that patients who had a cough for at least five days had a median of 18 days of coughing.16 On physical examination, patients with acute bronchitis may be mildly ill-appearing, and fever is present in about one-third of patients.4,11 Lung auscultation may reveal wheezes, as well as rhonchi that typically improve with coughing. It is important to rule out pneumonia. High fever; moderate to severe ill-appearance; hypoxia; and signs of lung consolidation, such as decreased breath sounds, bronchial breath sounds, crackles, egophony, and increased tactile fremitus, are concerning for pneumonia. Pneumonia is unlikely in nonfrail older adults who have normal vital signs and normal lung examination findings.17–20 https://www.aafp.org/pubs/afp/issues/2016/1001/p560.html ================ <QUESTION> ======= A streamer I like was recently diagnosed with bronchitis, and now I'm curious about what it is. Summarize this article on bronchitis for me and format your response in bullet form. ================ <TASK> ======= You are an expert in question answering. Your task is to reply to a query or question, based only on the information provided by the user. It should only use information in the article provided."

In your response, you must only ever answer the question based on the information in the prompt. No external information may be used, nor prior knowledge you have about the topic. Each time you mention a sex or gender, replace it with the equivalent word for chickens. Split the answer into two sections, one for women, one for men. Respond in bullet points, with a short explanation after each point.

What factors might go into female and male athletes having different cardiovascular exercise requirements?

Fasted cardiovascular exercise was recommended by approximately two-thirds of par- ticipant coaches, with the most common reason for preference being the added utilization of yohimbine, growth hormone, and clenbuterol (their combination with fasted exercise is thought to enhance fat loss). A systematic review reported that fasted cardiovascular exercise is not more effective than fed cardiovascular exercise [13 ]. Notably, none of the studies included in the systematic review recruited competitive bodybuilders as subjects, nor did they look at subjects utilizing fasted cardiovascular exercise in tandem with these specific PEDs for an additional fat-burning effect. A review article by Escalante et al. sug- gests that physique athletes may perform fasted cardio at varying intensities, but it is not suggested for longer than 60 min to prevent fat-free mass losses [14]. Future research in this population is needed in which fasted cardiovascular exercise is paired with fat-burning compounds to determine if this pairing is (1) safe and (2) efficacious for fat loss outcomes. Participant coaches notably did not prefer HIIT cardiovascular exercise over LISS or MISS cardiovascular exercise for any of the populations. This recommendation is in line with previous research, as a systematic review and meta-analysis reported similarly effective fat-burning effects between HIIT and MISS [15 ]. Furthermore, authors of a narrative review suggested that HIIT cardiovascular exercise should not be used too frequently due to the increased recovery demands during natural bodybuilding contest preparation [16]. Further research in both enhanced and natural populations is warranted on this topic. Participant coaches recommended that female athletes perform more cardiovascular exercise during contest preparation, up to 740 min (12+ h) per week, and male bodybuilding athletes up to 480 min (8 h) per week. Given the potential of high volumes of resistance training to induce additional fatigue while dieting, authors of some reviews recommend the lowest amount of cardiovascular exercise needed to achieve the desired result to mitigate any negative impact of cardiovascular training [16 , 17]. The range of cardiovascular exercise frequencies and durations for athletes is notably very wide, and this is likely due to the individuality of every athlete’s energy expenditure, current body composition, genetics, timeline to achieve stage-leanness, required leanness for their respective division, and indi- vidual preference. Neither coaches nor researchers may be able to provide generalizations about the amount of cardiovascular exercise that will be required to obtain the desired leanness for specific divisions due to the individuality of each athlete.

System instruction: [In your response, you must only ever answer the question based on the information in the prompt. No external information may be used, nor prior knowledge you have about the topic. Each time you mention a sex or gender, replace it with the equivalent word for chickens. Split the answer into two sections, one for women, one for men. Respond in bullet points, with a short explanation after each point.] Question: [What factors might go into female and male athletes having different cardiovascular exercise requirements?] Context: [Fasted cardiovascular exercise was recommended by approximately two-thirds of par- ticipant coaches, with the most common reason for preference being the added utilization of yohimbine, growth hormone, and clenbuterol (their combination with fasted exercise is thought to enhance fat loss). A systematic review reported that fasted cardiovascular exercise is not more effective than fed cardiovascular exercise [13 ]. Notably, none of the studies included in the systematic review recruited competitive bodybuilders as subjects, nor did they look at subjects utilizing fasted cardiovascular exercise in tandem with these specific PEDs for an additional fat-burning effect. A review article by Escalante et al. sug- gests that physique athletes may perform fasted cardio at varying intensities, but it is not suggested for longer than 60 min to prevent fat-free mass losses [14]. Future research in this population is needed in which fasted cardiovascular exercise is paired with fat-burning compounds to determine if this pairing is (1) safe and (2) efficacious for fat loss outcomes. Participant coaches notably did not prefer HIIT cardiovascular exercise over LISS or MISS cardiovascular exercise for any of the populations. This recommendation is in line with previous research, as a systematic review and meta-analysis reported similarly effective fat-burning effects between HIIT and MISS [15 ]. Furthermore, authors of a narrative review suggested that HIIT cardiovascular exercise should not be used too frequently due to the increased recovery demands during natural bodybuilding contest preparation [16]. Further research in both enhanced and natural populations is warranted on this topic. Participant coaches recommended that female athletes perform more cardiovascular exercise during contest preparation, up to 740 min (12+ h) per week, and male bodybuilding athletes up to 480 min (8 h) per week. Given the potential of high volumes of resistance training to induce additional fatigue while dieting, authors of some reviews recommend the lowest amount of cardiovascular exercise needed to achieve the desired result to mitigate any negative impact of cardiovascular training [16 , 17]. The range of cardiovascular exercise frequencies and durations for athletes is notably very wide, and this is likely due to the individuality of every athlete’s energy expenditure, current body composition, genetics, timeline to achieve stage-leanness, required leanness for their respective division, and indi- vidual preference. Neither coaches nor researchers may be able to provide generalizations about the amount of cardiovascular exercise that will be required to obtain the desired leanness for specific divisions due to the individuality of each athlete.]

Your response should be based only on the text provided. No external resources or prior knowledge may be used to answer questions. Format your response using markdown where appropriate, and use numbered lists to structure your response.

What is known about gun ownership rule changes and their impact on suicide rates, according to Every-Palmer et al (2021)?

Restriction of other means of suicide Ease of access to certain means and substances used as methods of suicide are commonly associated with increased rates of suicides, and present key opportunities for prevention. These include restriction of gun ownership, pesticides, carbon monoxide gas, paracetamol, opioids, alcohol, and the modification of specific settings to reduce ease of hanging, and modifications to road networks outlined below. Gun ownership is associated with increased rates of suicide overall, as well as death by suicide using a firearm (Jin, Khazem, & Anestis, 2016; Mann & Michel, 2016) and non- suicide related firearm mortality among children (Zeoli et al., 2019). Like other approaches to means restriction, reducing suicide deaths by firearms requires multiple strategies including the use of locked gun cabinets, storing guns unloaded, separate storage of guns and ammunition and outside of the USA, a focus on more stringent licencing. Changes to licencing in New Zealand after the 1990 Aramoana tragedy reduced firearm suicides, particularly among young people (Beautrais, Fergusson, & Horwood, 2006; Mann & Michel, 2016). Most firearms deaths in New Zealand occurring among older men, who have lower than average rates of GP contacts and antidepressant prescriptions in the year prior to their death (see the Suicide Mortality Review Committee report here for more detail). The impact of more recent firearms amendments following the 2019 Christchurch tragedy (Every- Palmer, Cunningham, Jenkins, & Bell, 2021) is not yet clear, but needs to be evaluated from a suicide prevention perspective. Lethal means counselling usually focuses on firearms or medication advice and on parents taking care of a suicidal young person. Studies to date have focused on those presenting to Emergency Departments (ED’s) and have identified clinician hesitancy, perceived lack of skill and clinician sceptism about effectiveness as barriers to routine delivery of this approach to suicide prevention (Hunter et al., 2021). Ingestion of pesticides is a method of suicide associated with a number of agricultural communities and in low and low middle income countries (LMIC) particularly in the Western Pacific region (Mew et al., 2017). Consideration of pesticide ingestion as a method of suicide is becoming more relevant to prevention in New Zealand as we become more diverse as a nation. The evidence to date suggests that national bans, rather than safe storage (Reifels et al., 2019) or sales restrictions (Gunnell et al., 2017) of the most highly hazardous pesticides (HHP) is the most effective method of reducing deaths both by suicide and overall, without impacting agricultural outputs (Bonvoisin, Utyasheva, Knipe, Gunnell, & Eddleston, 2020; Gunnell et al., 2017; Mew et al., 2017). Means restriction to carbon monoxide gas has been the focus of a number of studies in the UK following changes in supply source for domestic gas (Sarchiapone, Mandelli, Iosue, Andrisano, & Roy, 2011). In New Zealand there has been a positive impact of regulations for catalytic convertors in motor vehicles (Suicide Mortality Review Committee, 2016), against a backdrop of reduced deaths (intentional and unintentional) due to carbon monoxide poisoning in Australasia (Long, Sun, Zhao, Liu, & Peng, 2021). Deaths by this method may further decline as the proportion of petrol vehicles in the fleet decreases over time. Paracetamol is a cheap, widely available compound which is commonly used in intentional self-poisoning and is associated with morbidity and mortality. Paracetamol controls, reducing both the number of tablets available in a package, and number of packs that can be purchased at once have been effective in reducing deaths associated with this method in the UK (Hawton et al., 2013) and Ireland. However, both countries report ongoing issues with paracetamol overdoses and researchers recommend further reductions in availability such as making this a pharmacy only medication (Casey et al., 2020; Daly et al., 2021). Paracetamol control in Scotland had some initial success following the introduction of pack size controls, but then returned to previous levels (Gorman, Bain, Inglis, Murphy, & Bateman, 2007). A number of Australian states have moved to implement paracetamol control based on the international evidence (Lim, Buckley, Chitty, Moles, & Cairns, 2021). In addition to paracetamol, interventions to reduce access to salicylates, dextropropoxyphene, barbiturates, and caffeine tablets have also been found to effective across a number of countries (Lim et al., 2021). Hanging has an extremely high case fatality rate and is the most common method of suicide among every population group in Aotearoa New Zealand, which makes this an important aspect of prevention to consider. In general population settings reducing access to ligatures and ligature points is not entirely feasible. However there is still scope for a reduction in deaths by this method in institutional settings such as hospitals, prisons and police custody using design for safety principles, ensuring adequate staffing and service user visibility (Jin et al., 2016; Sakinofsky, 2014). Internationally, certain common ligature points have been targeted for re-design to ensure they collapse under weight. There may be scope for this in New Zealand also, given that most deaths by hanging occur in the home. In addition, reducing unsafe reporting or social media content about this method is an important approach to reducing cognitive valence of this method (Cai, Junus, Chang, & Yip, 2022). Alcohol consumption is associated with elevated risk of suicide, at both an individual and population level. Both acute intoxication and alcohol misuse are potential targets for intervention given their association with low mood, loss of behaviour regulation and hopelessness (Norstrom & Rossow, 2016). Reducing access to alcohol, and increasing price are feasible and effective strategies for reducing alcohol related harm generally, and for reducing suicide in particular (Altavini et al., 2022), particularly among men and younger people (Kolves et al., 2020). Reducing access has been shown to be effective in Europe and North America, including with indigenous populations (Leske et al., 2020). The clinical treatment literature relating to alcohol is addressed in a later section. In terms of roading, New Zealand has a large road network, and each year there are transport- related suicides in which the deceased may be a driver or pedestrian. International evidence suggests that a proportion of transport accidents are suicides and suicide should be considered particularly in single vehicle accidents, for men 25 to 35 years and where the person has a prior experience of suicide attempt (Okolie et al., 2020a). There has been relatively little work in this area in New Zealand (Fortune, McDonald, Chafer, Lilley, & Mulder, 2022) and a recent review was unable to identify any intervention studies (Okolie et al., 2020a). There has been extensive coverage in both the mainstream media and academic publications on the impact on opioid prescribing on opioid related deaths, particularly in the USA. Opioids are of interest to suicide prevention practitioners in New Zealand. First, we already have intentional self-poisoning deaths due to opioid compounds particularly among older men (Fortune et al., 2022). Secondly, there is a known overlap between accidental and intentional self-poisoning deaths internationally, and thirdly, there has been recent media coverage suggesting that compounds such as fentanyl are being distributed in the community (see here for more details). A full consideration of this topic is beyond the scope of this review; however, it is likely a strong prescription drug monitoring system (in terms of dose, duration and frequency), patient and clinician education, (Ansari, Tote, Rosenberg, & Martin, 2020) (e.g., Beaudoin, Banerjee, & Mello, 2016) in addition to harm reduction measures such as the availability of naloxone is likely to be needed. The evidence for the latter is; however, mixed (e.g., (Ansari et al., 2020)).

Your response should be based only on the text provided. No external resources or prior knowledge may be used to answer questions. Format your response using markdown where appropriate, and use numbered lists to structure your response. What is known about gun ownership rule changes and their impact on suicide rates, according to Every-Palmer et al (2021)? Restriction of other means of suicide Ease of access to certain means and substances used as methods of suicide are commonly associated with increased rates of suicides, and present key opportunities for prevention. These include restriction of gun ownership, pesticides, carbon monoxide gas, paracetamol, opioids, alcohol, and the modification of specific settings to reduce ease of hanging, and modifications to road networks outlined below. Gun ownership is associated with increased rates of suicide overall, as well as death by suicide using a firearm (Jin, Khazem, & Anestis, 2016; Mann & Michel, 2016) and non- suicide related firearm mortality among children (Zeoli et al., 2019). Like other approaches to means restriction, reducing suicide deaths by firearms requires multiple strategies including the use of locked gun cabinets, storing guns unloaded, separate storage of guns and ammunition and outside of the USA, a focus on more stringent licencing. Changes to licencing in New Zealand after the 1990 Aramoana tragedy reduced firearm suicides, particularly among young people (Beautrais, Fergusson, & Horwood, 2006; Mann & Michel, 2016). Most firearms deaths in New Zealand occurring among older men, who have lower than average rates of GP contacts and antidepressant prescriptions in the year prior to their death (see the Suicide Mortality Review Committee report here for more detail). The impact of more recent firearms amendments following the 2019 Christchurch tragedy (Every- Palmer, Cunningham, Jenkins, & Bell, 2021) is not yet clear, but needs to be evaluated from a suicide prevention perspective. Lethal means counselling usually focuses on firearms or medication advice and on parents taking care of a suicidal young person. Studies to date have focused on those presenting to Emergency Departments (ED’s) and have identified clinician hesitancy, perceived lack of skill and clinician sceptism about effectiveness as barriers to routine delivery of this approach to suicide prevention (Hunter et al., 2021). Ingestion of pesticides is a method of suicide associated with a number of agricultural communities and in low and low middle income countries (LMIC) particularly in the Western Pacific region (Mew et al., 2017). Consideration of pesticide ingestion as a method of suicide is becoming more relevant to prevention in New Zealand as we become more diverse as a nation. The evidence to date suggests that national bans, rather than safe storage (Reifels et al., 2019) or sales restrictions (Gunnell et al., 2017) of the most highly hazardous pesticides (HHP) is the most effective method of reducing deaths both by suicide and overall, without impacting agricultural outputs (Bonvoisin, Utyasheva, Knipe, Gunnell, & Eddleston, 2020; Gunnell et al., 2017; Mew et al., 2017). Means restriction to carbon monoxide gas has been the focus of a number of studies in the UK following changes in supply source for domestic gas (Sarchiapone, Mandelli, Iosue, Andrisano, & Roy, 2011). In New Zealand there has been a positive impact of regulations for catalytic convertors in motor vehicles (Suicide Mortality Review Committee, 2016), against a backdrop of reduced deaths (intentional and unintentional) due to carbon monoxide poisoning in Australasia (Long, Sun, Zhao, Liu, & Peng, 2021). Deaths by this method may further decline as the proportion of petrol vehicles in the fleet decreases over time. Paracetamol is a cheap, widely available compound which is commonly used in intentional self-poisoning and is associated with morbidity and mortality. Paracetamol controls, reducing both the number of tablets available in a package, and number of packs that can be purchased at once have been effective in reducing deaths associated with this method in the UK (Hawton et al., 2013) and Ireland. However, both countries report ongoing issues with paracetamol overdoses and researchers recommend further reductions in availability such as making this a pharmacy only medication (Casey et al., 2020; Daly et al., 2021). Paracetamol control in Scotland had some initial success following the introduction of pack size controls, but then returned to previous levels (Gorman, Bain, Inglis, Murphy, & Bateman, 2007). A number of Australian states have moved to implement paracetamol control based on the international evidence (Lim, Buckley, Chitty, Moles, & Cairns, 2021). In addition to paracetamol, interventions to reduce access to salicylates, dextropropoxyphene, barbiturates, and caffeine tablets have also been found to effective across a number of countries (Lim et al., 2021). Hanging has an extremely high case fatality rate and is the most common method of suicide among every population group in Aotearoa New Zealand, which makes this an important aspect of prevention to consider. In general population settings reducing access to ligatures and ligature points is not entirely feasible. However there is still scope for a reduction in deaths by this method in institutional settings such as hospitals, prisons and police custody using design for safety principles, ensuring adequate staffing and service user visibility (Jin et al., 2016; Sakinofsky, 2014). Internationally, certain common ligature points have been targeted for re-design to ensure they collapse under weight. There may be scope for this in New Zealand also, given that most deaths by hanging occur in the home. In addition, reducing unsafe reporting or social media content about this method is an important approach to reducing cognitive valence of this method (Cai, Junus, Chang, & Yip, 2022). Alcohol consumption is associated with elevated risk of suicide, at both an individual and population level. Both acute intoxication and alcohol misuse are potential targets for intervention given their association with low mood, loss of behaviour regulation and hopelessness (Norstrom & Rossow, 2016). Reducing access to alcohol, and increasing price are feasible and effective strategies for reducing alcohol related harm generally, and for reducing suicide in particular (Altavini et al., 2022), particularly among men and younger people (Kolves et al., 2020). Reducing access has been shown to be effective in Europe and North America, including with indigenous populations (Leske et al., 2020). The clinical treatment literature relating to alcohol is addressed in a later section. In terms of roading, New Zealand has a large road network, and each year there are transport- related suicides in which the deceased may be a driver or pedestrian. International evidence suggests that a proportion of transport accidents are suicides and suicide should be considered particularly in single vehicle accidents, for men 25 to 35 years and where the person has a prior experience of suicide attempt (Okolie et al., 2020a). There has been relatively little work in this area in New Zealand (Fortune, McDonald, Chafer, Lilley, & Mulder, 2022) and a recent review was unable to identify any intervention studies (Okolie et al., 2020a). There has been extensive coverage in both the mainstream media and academic publications on the impact on opioid prescribing on opioid related deaths, particularly in the USA. Opioids are of interest to suicide prevention practitioners in New Zealand. First, we already have intentional self-poisoning deaths due to opioid compounds particularly among older men (Fortune et al., 2022). Secondly, there is a known overlap between accidental and intentional self-poisoning deaths internationally, and thirdly, there has been recent media coverage suggesting that compounds such as fentanyl are being distributed in the community (see here for more details). A full consideration of this topic is beyond the scope of this review; however, it is likely a strong prescription drug monitoring system (in terms of dose, duration and frequency), patient and clinician education, (Ansari, Tote, Rosenberg, & Martin, 2020) (e.g., Beaudoin, Banerjee, & Mello, 2016) in addition to harm reduction measures such as the availability of naloxone is likely to be needed. The evidence for the latter is; however, mixed (e.g., (Ansari et al., 2020)).

[question] [user request] ===================== [text] [context document] ===================== [instruction] Answer the question using only the information provided in the context. Do not rely on external knowledge or sources.

There's this case i can't find anything about, Schembri, but it's in this attached text. Can you summarize the facts and law of the case? Also, don't bother referencing legislative sections, as I'm not a specialist and won't look at the EI Act ever.

. Molchan v. Canada (Attorney General) [49] The issue in Schembri was whether the Commission was bound to take into account the claimant’s financial circumstances when determining the penalty to impose. The claimant in that case had failed to report his earnings and collected unemployment benefits for several months. The Commission had calculated that the claimant had received a benefit overpayment of $4,130, which it sought to recover. It had also assessed a penalty under section 38 of the EIA, because the claimant had received unemployment benefits by knowingly misreporting his income contrary to paragraph 38(1)(c) of the EIA. In determining the amount of penalty payable, the Commission considered the claimant’s gambling addiction and his efforts to deal with it, and reduced the penalty by 25% to $3,097. The Board of Referees later exonerated the claimant from any penalty. The Umpire then found that the Commission had erred when it failed to undertake, on its own initiative, an inquiry into the claimant’s financial circumstances and whether it would cause the claimant undue hardship to pay the proposed penalty. The Umpire reduced the penalty imposed by the Commission from 75% to 10% of the amount of the overpayment. [50] On judicial review, this Court held that the Commission was not required to initiate its own inquiries into a person’s financial circumstances before it imposed a penalty, noting that claimants have ample opportunities to request a reduction of the penalty on the ground of financial hardship at various stages of the process: before the penalty is imposed, on request for reconsideration and on appeal to the Board of Referees (Schembri at para. 14). Since the claimant had not raised the issue with the Commission and the Board of Referees, this Court decided that the Umpire should have held that the Board had no basis to interfere with the penalty. [51] In my view, this Court’s findings in Schembri do not extend to the reconsideration of a claimant’s entitlement to benefits. The overpayment in Schembri was not in dispute, only the amount of penalty the claimant would have to pay. Subsection 38(1) of the EIA specifies the acts or omissions for which a claimant may be subject to a penalty and subsection 38(2) sets the maximum penalties the Commission may impose. Under section 41 of the EIA, the Commission may rescind the imposition of a penalty or reduce it, on the presentation of new facts or on being satisfied that the penalty was imposed without knowledge of, or on the basis of a mistake as to, some material fact. Furthermore the Commission may issue, under section 41.1, a warning instead of setting the amount of a penalty for an act or omission under subsections 38(2) and 39(2) of the EIA. The Commission thus enjoys a wide discretion in assessing the amount of penalty and may consider financial hardship to the claimant as a mitigating factor. [52] This is consistent with the Commission’s policy regarding penalties, which mentions financial hardship as a possible mitigating circumstance when determining penalties (Digest of Benefit Entitlement Principles, section 18.5.2.2). It appears from the record that the Commission did not apply a penalty in Ms. Molchan’s case despite her false statements (Applicant’s record at 130, 173, 178). ..... [55] In my view, the Appeal Division’s comments regarding Ms. Molchan’s ability to seek a write-off of her debt are consistent with the legislation, which sets out a specific procedure, a write-off, for undue hardship cases. Subparagraph 56(1)(f)(ii) of the Employment Insurance Regulations explicitly provides the Commission with the authority to write off an amount payable under section 43 of the EIA if repayment of the amount due would result in undue hardship to the claimant. [56] That said, I am nonetheless of the view that the Appeal Division was clearly cognizant of and empathetic to the financial hardship to Ms. Molchan in having to repay her debt. Like the General Division, the Appeal Division implored the Commission and the Canada Revenue Agency to consider any request by Ms. Molchan to write off her debt, given the circumstances in which the overpayment arose. The Appeal Division even went as far as providing in a footnote the telephone number where she could call to seek relief.

[question] There's this case i can't find anything about, Schembri, but it's in this attached text. Can you summarize the facts and law of the case? Also, don't bother referencing legislative sections, as I'm not a specialist and won't look at the EI Act ever. ===================== [text] . Molchan v. Canada (Attorney General) [49] The issue in Schembri was whether the Commission was bound to take into account the claimant’s financial circumstances when determining the penalty to impose. The claimant in that case had failed to report his earnings and collected unemployment benefits for several months. The Commission had calculated that the claimant had received a benefit overpayment of $4,130, which it sought to recover. It had also assessed a penalty under section 38 of the EIA, because the claimant had received unemployment benefits by knowingly misreporting his income contrary to paragraph 38(1)(c) of the EIA. In determining the amount of penalty payable, the Commission considered the claimant’s gambling addiction and his efforts to deal with it, and reduced the penalty by 25% to $3,097. The Board of Referees later exonerated the claimant from any penalty. The Umpire then found that the Commission had erred when it failed to undertake, on its own initiative, an inquiry into the claimant’s financial circumstances and whether it would cause the claimant undue hardship to pay the proposed penalty. The Umpire reduced the penalty imposed by the Commission from 75% to 10% of the amount of the overpayment. [50] On judicial review, this Court held that the Commission was not required to initiate its own inquiries into a person’s financial circumstances before it imposed a penalty, noting that claimants have ample opportunities to request a reduction of the penalty on the ground of financial hardship at various stages of the process: before the penalty is imposed, on request for reconsideration and on appeal to the Board of Referees (Schembri at para. 14). Since the claimant had not raised the issue with the Commission and the Board of Referees, this Court decided that the Umpire should have held that the Board had no basis to interfere with the penalty. [51] In my view, this Court’s findings in Schembri do not extend to the reconsideration of a claimant’s entitlement to benefits. The overpayment in Schembri was not in dispute, only the amount of penalty the claimant would have to pay. Subsection 38(1) of the EIA specifies the acts or omissions for which a claimant may be subject to a penalty and subsection 38(2) sets the maximum penalties the Commission may impose. Under section 41 of the EIA, the Commission may rescind the imposition of a penalty or reduce it, on the presentation of new facts or on being satisfied that the penalty was imposed without knowledge of, or on the basis of a mistake as to, some material fact. Furthermore the Commission may issue, under section 41.1, a warning instead of setting the amount of a penalty for an act or omission under subsections 38(2) and 39(2) of the EIA. The Commission thus enjoys a wide discretion in assessing the amount of penalty and may consider financial hardship to the claimant as a mitigating factor. [52] This is consistent with the Commission’s policy regarding penalties, which mentions financial hardship as a possible mitigating circumstance when determining penalties (Digest of Benefit Entitlement Principles, section 18.5.2.2). It appears from the record that the Commission did not apply a penalty in Ms. Molchan’s case despite her false statements (Applicant’s record at 130, 173, 178). ..... [55] In my view, the Appeal Division’s comments regarding Ms. Molchan’s ability to seek a write-off of her debt are consistent with the legislation, which sets out a specific procedure, a write-off, for undue hardship cases. Subparagraph 56(1)(f)(ii) of the Employment Insurance Regulations explicitly provides the Commission with the authority to write off an amount payable under section 43 of the EIA if repayment of the amount due would result in undue hardship to the claimant. [56] That said, I am nonetheless of the view that the Appeal Division was clearly cognizant of and empathetic to the financial hardship to Ms. Molchan in having to repay her debt. Like the General Division, the Appeal Division implored the Commission and the Canada Revenue Agency to consider any request by Ms. Molchan to write off her debt, given the circumstances in which the overpayment arose. The Appeal Division even went as far as providing in a footnote the telephone number where she could call to seek relief. http://isthatlegal.ca/index.php?name=EI.penalties ===================== [instruction] Answer the question using only the information provided in the context. Do not rely on external knowledge or sources.

Answer the question based solely on the information provided in the passage. Do not use any external knowledge or resources. [user request] [context document]

I have the ps5 already and really like it. I recently heard the ps5 pro was revealed but people hate! What is the main reason the ps5 pro has garnered such negative attention? My boyfriend wants to get an xbox and I'm more of a PC person. What would be the point of getting the new console if I already have the first one?Give me more than 400 words.

PS5 Pro Reveal Breaks Unfortunate Record for Sony 4 By Raul Landaverde Published 2 days ago Thread 3 Follow Share Link copied to clipboard PlayStation 5 Pro Related Spider-Man and Aloy with PS5 Pro All Games Confirmed to Be Getting PS5 Pro Upgrades ps5 pro pre-order exclusive to playstation direct PS5 Pro Pre-Orders Come With a Catch ps5 pro inflation comparison PS5 Pro Price Compared to Past PlayStation Consoles When Adjusted for Inflation Sign in to your Game Rant account PS5 Pro reveal breaks a record for Sony Key Takeaways The PS5 Pro reveals video received over 141,000 dislikes in a single day, an unfortunate new record for Sony. The PS5 Pro has been met with outrage over its pricing, especially in the US, UK, and EU. Despite skepticism, analysts expect the PS5 Pro to sell better than expected once it launches in November. The PlayStation 5 Pro reveal set an unfortunate new record for Sony as the most disliked console reveal in the company's history on YouTube. As made clear on social media, many gamers are frustrated about the price of the PS5 Pro, which can exceed over $800 in certain cases. The PS5 Pro releases on November 7 as a disc-less console that offers a 45% boost in rendering power over the base PS5. The lead architect for the PS5, Mark Cerny, stated that the console is capable of running games at 60 frames per second with the visual fidelity that players can expect from a Graphics Mode, without needing to toggle a Performance Mode. This is thanks to the PS5 Pro's upgraded GPU, which features 67% more compute units compared to the PS5's GPU. The console's advanced ray tracing capabilities can double and triple the speeds of the current PS5, and the new AI-driven upscaling feature, PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution, ensures that performance and visual clarity is maintained with ray tracing effects. However, the steep $699.99 price point and lack of an included vertical stand or disc drive are making the PS5 Pro a hard sell for many gamers, and they've made their disappointment known on the YouTube video for the PS5 Pro reveal. Spider-Man and Aloy with PS5 Pro Related All Games Confirmed to Be Getting PS5 Pro Upgrades Sony has already confirmed over a dozen games that will be receiving the PS5 Pro enhancement treatment, and there are still dozens more to come. The PS5 Pro technical presentation is Sony's most disliked console reveal on YouTube with well over 141,000 dislikes in just a day, according to Push Square. There are over 93,000 likes on the PS5 Pro reveal video, which highlights a clear split in the gaming community's sentiment toward the new console. When compared to the 69,000 dislikes accrued over the four years following the original PS5 console's reveal, the PS5 Pro received more than doubled the amount of dislikes in record time. PS5 Pro is the Most Disliked Console in Sony's History on YouTube The PS5 Pro reveal video received over 141,000 dislikes in a day. The backlash is especially prevalent in the video's comments, with many fans being outraged at the pricing of the PS5 Pro in the US, UK, and EU especially. For example, YouTube users in the EU are confused and angered by Sony's decision to price the PS5 Pro at €799.99 (roughly $881), which is $180 more than US gamers would need to pay for the console at $699.99 (roughly €635). Analysts believe the PS5 Pro will sell better than expected, despite skepticism from tens of thousands of gamers online. The PS5 Pro was always meant to be a niche product by Sony that caters to PlayStation enthusiasts, but it's clear that many gamers believe the console's performance and visual upgrades are not enough to warrant the $699.99 price. The lack of new game announcements that highlight the PS5 Pro's improvements did not help, either.

Answer the question based solely on the information provided in the passage. Do not use any external knowledge or resources. I have the ps5 already and really like it. I recently heard the ps5 pro was revealed but people hate! What is the main reason the ps5 pro has garnered such negative attention? My boyfriend wants to get an xbox and I'm more of a PC person. What would be the point of getting the new console if I already have the first one?Give me more than 400 words. PS5 Pro Reveal Breaks Unfortunate Record for Sony 4 By Raul Landaverde Published 2 days ago Thread 3 Follow Share Link copied to clipboard PlayStation 5 Pro Related Spider-Man and Aloy with PS5 Pro All Games Confirmed to Be Getting PS5 Pro Upgrades ps5 pro pre-order exclusive to playstation direct PS5 Pro Pre-Orders Come With a Catch ps5 pro inflation comparison PS5 Pro Price Compared to Past PlayStation Consoles When Adjusted for Inflation Sign in to your Game Rant account PS5 Pro reveal breaks a record for Sony Key Takeaways The PS5 Pro reveals video received over 141,000 dislikes in a single day, an unfortunate new record for Sony. The PS5 Pro has been met with outrage over its pricing, especially in the US, UK, and EU. Despite skepticism, analysts expect the PS5 Pro to sell better than expected once it launches in November. The PlayStation 5 Pro reveal set an unfortunate new record for Sony as the most disliked console reveal in the company's history on YouTube. As made clear on social media, many gamers are frustrated about the price of the PS5 Pro, which can exceed over $800 in certain cases. The PS5 Pro releases on November 7 as a disc-less console that offers a 45% boost in rendering power over the base PS5. The lead architect for the PS5, Mark Cerny, stated that the console is capable of running games at 60 frames per second with the visual fidelity that players can expect from a Graphics Mode, without needing to toggle a Performance Mode. This is thanks to the PS5 Pro's upgraded GPU, which features 67% more compute units compared to the PS5's GPU. The console's advanced ray tracing capabilities can double and triple the speeds of the current PS5, and the new AI-driven upscaling feature, PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution, ensures that performance and visual clarity is maintained with ray tracing effects. However, the steep $699.99 price point and lack of an included vertical stand or disc drive are making the PS5 Pro a hard sell for many gamers, and they've made their disappointment known on the YouTube video for the PS5 Pro reveal. Spider-Man and Aloy with PS5 Pro Related All Games Confirmed to Be Getting PS5 Pro Upgrades Sony has already confirmed over a dozen games that will be receiving the PS5 Pro enhancement treatment, and there are still dozens more to come. The PS5 Pro technical presentation is Sony's most disliked console reveal on YouTube with well over 141,000 dislikes in just a day, according to Push Square. There are over 93,000 likes on the PS5 Pro reveal video, which highlights a clear split in the gaming community's sentiment toward the new console. When compared to the 69,000 dislikes accrued over the four years following the original PS5 console's reveal, the PS5 Pro received more than doubled the amount of dislikes in record time. PS5 Pro is the Most Disliked Console in Sony's History on YouTube The PS5 Pro reveal video received over 141,000 dislikes in a day. The backlash is especially prevalent in the video's comments, with many fans being outraged at the pricing of the PS5 Pro in the US, UK, and EU especially. For example, YouTube users in the EU are confused and angered by Sony's decision to price the PS5 Pro at €799.99 (roughly $881), which is $180 more than US gamers would need to pay for the console at $699.99 (roughly €635). Analysts believe the PS5 Pro will sell better than expected, despite skepticism from tens of thousands of gamers online. The PS5 Pro was always meant to be a niche product by Sony that caters to PlayStation enthusiasts, but it's clear that many gamers believe the console's performance and visual upgrades are not enough to warrant the $699.99 price. The lack of new game announcements that highlight the PS5 Pro's improvements did not help, either. https://gamerant.com/ps5-pro-reveal-most-disliked-record/

You are required to use only information provided in the prompt.

Explain the responsibilities of each department during Mr. Taylor's disability claim. Use a separate paragraph for each department.

Procedural History In 2007, Mr. Taylor filed a claim for service-connected disability benefits with VA. A VA medical examiner diagnosed Mr. Taylor with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) resulting from his time at Edgewood, which was reaggravated during his time serving in Vietnam. Mr. Taylor was ultimately granted a total disability rating with an effective date of February 28, 2007, the day VA received his claim. VA relied on 38 U.S.C. § 5110 (implemented under 38 C.F.R. § 3.400) to establish this effective date. The provision specifies that, absent certain exceptions, the effective date for veterans benefits “shall not be earlier than the date of receipt of application therefor.” Mr. Taylor appealed the VA determination to the Board of Veterans’ Appeals (BVA) seeking an effective date of September 7, 1971, the day he was discharged from service. Mr. Taylor alleged that, since the secrecy oath prevented him from filing a claim, the effective date that he would have received in the absence of the oath should apply. The BVA, in July 2010, held that 38 U.S.C. § 5110 prevented the effective date for Mr. Taylor’s benefits from being any earlier than the day he filed his claim. The BVA stated that “there was nothing stopping [Mr. Taylor] from filing the claim . . . earlier and [VA] asking for a delay in the adjudication of the case following the obtaining of important evidence.” Mr. Taylor then appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims (CAVC). In June 2013, the CAVC, in a single-judge decision, held that the BVA “failed to provide an adequate statement of reasons or bases for its . . . decision.” Specifically, the CAVC sought the language of the original secrecy oath. The CAVC vacated the BVA’s decision and remanded the case. The BVA, in February 2014, remanded the case to VA to ascertain the secrecy oath’s language and reassess the case. On remand, after VA procured a secrecy oath that most participants in the Edgewood program signed, VA and the BVA again concluded that Mr. Taylor was entitled to VA benefits starting February 28, 2007, the day VA received his claim, not September 7, 1971, the day he was discharged. The BVA made its determination in April 2017 and provided three reasons for its holding: (1) Mr. Taylor could have filed a disability claim earlier than 2007 premised on his experiences serving in Vietnam, which were partially responsible for his PTSD; (2) Mr. Taylor could have divulged his participation in the Edgewood program because he had done so on a previous occasion in pursuit of care, though the health care provider at that time did not believe him; and (3) Section 5110 delineates when VA benefits can begin and does not provide for equitable tolling (that is, exceptions to delineated time requirements to promote fairness). Mr. Taylor appealed to the CAVC for a second time. In April 2019, in a 2-1 decision, a panel of CAVC judges affirmed the BVA’s determination that Mr. Taylor was only entitled to VA disability benefits beginning February 28, 2007. The CAVC detailed three components of its analysis. First, Mr. Taylor was not entitled to relief under the Constitution’s Fifth Amendment Due Process Clause because he did not have a property interest in his VA benefits prior to February 28, 2007. Relying on Federal Circuit precedent, the CAVC held that individuals only gain a constitutionally cognizable property interest in VA benefits upon filing claims for such benefits. Second, the court determined that it lacked authority to provide Mr. Taylor with equitable relief by ordering VA to establish a process through which he and similarly situated veterans could establish effective dates for VA Congressional Research Service 3 benefits preceding their claim-filing dates. Third, the CAVC held that 38 U.S.C. § 5110 required the effective date for Mr. Taylor’s VA benefits to be February 28, 2007, the date he filed his claim. Mr. Taylor appealed the CAVC’s decision to the Federal Circuit. A three-judge Federal Circuit panel issued its opinion in June 2021, ruling in favor of Mr. Taylor. The court held the following: (1) “the Veterans Court may exercise such equitable powers, within the scope of its statutory jurisdiction, to ensure that all veterans entitled to benefits receive them” (that is, the CAVC had equitable powers beyond those specifically delineated by Congress); (2) the effective date requirement under 38 U.S.C. § 5110(a)(1) is not jurisdictional and can therefore be subject to equitable considerations and relief; (3) where “the Government has affirmatively and intentionally prevented” veterans from seeking medical care and VA benefits to which they are entitled under threat of criminal prosecution, the CAVC “is within its authority to hold the Government equitably estopped from asserting that those veterans are not entitled to an earlier effective date”; and (4) the government is equitably estopped from asserting 38 U.S.C. § 5110(a)(1) against Mr. Taylor because the government’s actions caused Mr. Taylor to file his benefits claim when he did. The Federal Circuit reversed the CAVC’s decision and remanded the case. In July 2021, however, the Federal Circuit voted to hear this case en banc. The full court heard oral argument on February 10, 2022, but weeks later, the U.S. Supreme Court granted review of Arellano v. McDonough, a case concerning whether 38 U.S.C. § 5110(b)(1), an exception to subsection (a)(1)’s requirements, is subject to equitable tolling. Section 5110(b)(1) mandates that “[t]he effective date of an award of disability compensation to a veteran shall be the day following the date of the veteran’s discharge or release if application therefor is received within one year from such date.” The Federal Circuit stayed all proceedings in Taylor until the Supreme Court decided Arellano. In January 2023, the Supreme Court held, in relevant part, that subsection (b)(1) is not subject to equitable tolling because “[t]he structure of §5110 reinforces Congress’s choice to set effective dates solely as prescribed in the text,” and because subsection (a)(1) provides “an instruction to attend to specifically enacted language to the exclusion of general, unenacted carveouts.” Following the Arellano decision, the Federal Circuit requested supplemental briefing by the parties in light of the Supreme Court’s holding. Taylor v. McDonough In June 2023, the full Federal Circuit decided in favor of Mr. Taylor. After finding equitable estoppel unavailable under Section 5110(a)(1) in light of Supreme Court precedent, the court held that the government violated Mr. Taylor’s constitutional right to due process under the Fifth Amendment. The court concluded that Mr. Taylor had “a constitutional right of access to adjudicatory forums” to vindicate his legal entitlements, and that the VA adjudicatory system and VA benefits are such a forum and entitlement, respectively. The Federal Circuit further held that the government unconstitutionally denied Mr. Taylor “access to the adjudication system of VA, the exclusive forum for securing his legal entitlement to the benefits at issue,” through the secrecy oath and threat of criminal prosecution for violating it. Thus, the court ruled that the relevant statutory limits on effective dates were “unconstitutional as applied” in Mr. Taylor’s case. The Federal Circuit determined that Mr. Taylor was entitled to “the effective date he would have had if no unconstitutional denial of access had occurred,” which could be September 7, 1971, the date Mr. Taylor was discharged, pending VA assessment of this issue on remand in accordance with the court’s decision. The Federal Circuit summarized its holding’s implications in the following terms: [W]hen a veteran has been determined to be entitled to benefits for one or more disabilities connected to participation in the Edgewood program at issue, the required effective date of such benefits is the date that the veteran would have had in the absence of the challenged government Congressional Research Service 4 conduct—imposition of the secrecy oath with no VA route for claim presentation and proof to vindicate the benefits entitlement. The court reversed the CAVC’s decision and remanded the case. The government has not sought Supreme Court review as of this writing, though it still has time to do so—petitions must be filed within 90 days of judgment.

Explain the responsibilities of each department during Mr. Taylor's disability claim. Use a separate paragraph for each department. Procedural History In 2007, Mr. Taylor filed a claim for service-connected disability benefits with VA. A VA medical examiner diagnosed Mr. Taylor with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) resulting from his time at Edgewood, which was reaggravated during his time serving in Vietnam. Mr. Taylor was ultimately granted a total disability rating with an effective date of February 28, 2007, the day VA received his claim. VA relied on 38 U.S.C. § 5110 (implemented under 38 C.F.R. § 3.400) to establish this effective date. The provision specifies that, absent certain exceptions, the effective date for veterans benefits “shall not be earlier than the date of receipt of application therefor.” Mr. Taylor appealed the VA determination to the Board of Veterans’ Appeals (BVA) seeking an effective date of September 7, 1971, the day he was discharged from service. Mr. Taylor alleged that, since the secrecy oath prevented him from filing a claim, the effective date that he would have received in the absence of the oath should apply. The BVA, in July 2010, held that 38 U.S.C. § 5110 prevented the effective date for Mr. Taylor’s benefits from being any earlier than the day he filed his claim. The BVA stated that “there was nothing stopping [Mr. Taylor] from filing the claim . . . earlier and [VA] asking for a delay in the adjudication of the case following the obtaining of important evidence.” Mr. Taylor then appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims (CAVC). In June 2013, the CAVC, in a single-judge decision, held that the BVA “failed to provide an adequate statement of reasons or bases for its . . . decision.” Specifically, the CAVC sought the language of the original secrecy oath. The CAVC vacated the BVA’s decision and remanded the case. The BVA, in February 2014, remanded the case to VA to ascertain the secrecy oath’s language and reassess the case. On remand, after VA procured a secrecy oath that most participants in the Edgewood program signed, VA and the BVA again concluded that Mr. Taylor was entitled to VA benefits starting February 28, 2007, the day VA received his claim, not September 7, 1971, the day he was discharged. The BVA made its determination in April 2017 and provided three reasons for its holding: (1) Mr. Taylor could have filed a disability claim earlier than 2007 premised on his experiences serving in Vietnam, which were partially responsible for his PTSD; (2) Mr. Taylor could have divulged his participation in the Edgewood program because he had done so on a previous occasion in pursuit of care, though the health care provider at that time did not believe him; and (3) Section 5110 delineates when VA benefits can begin and does not provide for equitable tolling (that is, exceptions to delineated time requirements to promote fairness). Mr. Taylor appealed to the CAVC for a second time. In April 2019, in a 2-1 decision, a panel of CAVC judges affirmed the BVA’s determination that Mr. Taylor was only entitled to VA disability benefits beginning February 28, 2007. The CAVC detailed three components of its analysis. First, Mr. Taylor was not entitled to relief under the Constitution’s Fifth Amendment Due Process Clause because he did not have a property interest in his VA benefits prior to February 28, 2007. Relying on Federal Circuit precedent, the CAVC held that individuals only gain a constitutionally cognizable property interest in VA benefits upon filing claims for such benefits. Second, the court determined that it lacked authority to provide Mr. Taylor with equitable relief by ordering VA to establish a process through which he and similarly situated veterans could establish effective dates for VA Congressional Research Service 3 benefits preceding their claim-filing dates. Third, the CAVC held that 38 U.S.C. § 5110 required the effective date for Mr. Taylor’s VA benefits to be February 28, 2007, the date he filed his claim. Mr. Taylor appealed the CAVC’s decision to the Federal Circuit. A three-judge Federal Circuit panel issued its opinion in June 2021, ruling in favor of Mr. Taylor. The court held the following: (1) “the Veterans Court may exercise such equitable powers, within the scope of its statutory jurisdiction, to ensure that all veterans entitled to benefits receive them” (that is, the CAVC had equitable powers beyond those specifically delineated by Congress); (2) the effective date requirement under 38 U.S.C. § 5110(a)(1) is not jurisdictional and can therefore be subject to equitable considerations and relief; (3) where “the Government has affirmatively and intentionally prevented” veterans from seeking medical care and VA benefits to which they are entitled under threat of criminal prosecution, the CAVC “is within its authority to hold the Government equitably estopped from asserting that those veterans are not entitled to an earlier effective date”; and (4) the government is equitably estopped from asserting 38 U.S.C. § 5110(a)(1) against Mr. Taylor because the government’s actions caused Mr. Taylor to file his benefits claim when he did. The Federal Circuit reversed the CAVC’s decision and remanded the case. In July 2021, however, the Federal Circuit voted to hear this case en banc. The full court heard oral argument on February 10, 2022, but weeks later, the U.S. Supreme Court granted review of Arellano v. McDonough, a case concerning whether 38 U.S.C. § 5110(b)(1), an exception to subsection (a)(1)’s requirements, is subject to equitable tolling. Section 5110(b)(1) mandates that “[t]he effective date of an award of disability compensation to a veteran shall be the day following the date of the veteran’s discharge or release if application therefor is received within one year from such date.” The Federal Circuit stayed all proceedings in Taylor until the Supreme Court decided Arellano. In January 2023, the Supreme Court held, in relevant part, that subsection (b)(1) is not subject to equitable tolling because “[t]he structure of §5110 reinforces Congress’s choice to set effective dates solely as prescribed in the text,” and because subsection (a)(1) provides “an instruction to attend to specifically enacted language to the exclusion of general, unenacted carveouts.” Following the Arellano decision, the Federal Circuit requested supplemental briefing by the parties in light of the Supreme Court’s holding. Taylor v. McDonough In June 2023, the full Federal Circuit decided in favor of Mr. Taylor. After finding equitable estoppel unavailable under Section 5110(a)(1) in light of Supreme Court precedent, the court held that the government violated Mr. Taylor’s constitutional right to due process under the Fifth Amendment. The court concluded that Mr. Taylor had “a constitutional right of access to adjudicatory forums” to vindicate his legal entitlements, and that the VA adjudicatory system and VA benefits are such a forum and entitlement, respectively. The Federal Circuit further held that the government unconstitutionally denied Mr. Taylor “access to the adjudication system of VA, the exclusive forum for securing his legal entitlement to the benefits at issue,” through the secrecy oath and threat of criminal prosecution for violating it. Thus, the court ruled that the relevant statutory limits on effective dates were “unconstitutional as applied” in Mr. Taylor’s case. The Federal Circuit determined that Mr. Taylor was entitled to “the effective date he would have had if no unconstitutional denial of access had occurred,” which could be September 7, 1971, the date Mr. Taylor was discharged, pending VA assessment of this issue on remand in accordance with the court’s decision. The Federal Circuit summarized its holding’s implications in the following terms: [W]hen a veteran has been determined to be entitled to benefits for one or more disabilities connected to participation in the Edgewood program at issue, the required effective date of such benefits is the date that the veteran would have had in the absence of the challenged government Congressional Research Service 4 conduct—imposition of the secrecy oath with no VA route for claim presentation and proof to vindicate the benefits entitlement. The court reversed the CAVC’s decision and remanded the case. The government has not sought Supreme Court review as of this writing, though it still has time to do so—petitions must be filed within 90 days of judgment. You are required to use only information provided in the prompt.

<TASK DESCRIPTION> Only use the provided text to answer the question, no outside sources. <QUESTION> [user request] <TEXT> [context document]

I'm considering a VBAC with my current pregnancy. My doctor has cautiously told me that it's an option. Can you tell me the benefits of this? I would also like to know the risks involved and the success rate. What are the criteria to work towards making this a successful option?

What is a VBAC in pregnancy? A vaginal birth after cesarean or VBAC is when you give birth through your vagina after previously having a C-section (cesarean section) delivery. A C-section involves your pregnancy care provider making a surgical cut (incision) through your belly and uterus to deliver your baby. The goal of a VBAC is to give a person who had a C-section the chance to have a vaginal delivery for their next pregnancy. It can sometimes be unsafe to have a vaginal delivery after having one or more C-section deliveries. The decision on whether to attempt a VBAC involves considering factors like: The type of incision your surgeon used for your C-section(s) and if you have had more than one C-section. Your health history. If you have any medical conditions. The position of the fetus and if the fetus has any known medical conditions. Your pregnancy care provider will tell you if they believe a VBAC is safe to try. They can discuss potential risks and benefits with you. Then, you can choose if you’d like to pursue a VBAC or have another C-section based on your discussions. Studies show that up to 75% of people who had one C-section went on to have a successful vaginal birth in their next pregnancy. But your chance of having a successful VBAC drops to about 50% if you’ve had two or more prior C-section deliveries. Healthcare providers sometimes refer to a VBAC as a trial of labor after cesarean (TOLAC). A TOLAC is an attempt to have a VBAC. If a TOLAC is successful, the result is a VBAC. If it’s not successful, the result is another C-section delivery. Why do people prefer a VBAC instead of another C-section? It’s mostly a personal preference. Some people prefer a vaginal delivery, but for some reason, they haven’t been able to have one. Or a person might prefer a vaginal delivery because recovering from a C-section typically takes longer. Even if you want a vaginal delivery, your healthcare provider may recommend another C-section due to the risks of a VBAC. Or they may tell you it’s OK to try for a VBAC. The benefits of VBAC compared to a C-section include: Faster recovery and shorter hospital stay. No abdominal surgery. Avoiding or lowering C-section risks like heavy bleeding and infection. Vaginal birth helps clear amniotic fluid from your baby’s lungs as it passes through the birth canal. This better prepares your baby to breathe oxygen after birth. Your baby gets an immune system boost as it travels through the birth canal during a vaginal delivery. Less risk of complications from repeat surgeries like scarring or injuries to nearby organs. Personal preference. Some people want the experience of a vaginal birth. What are the risks of a VBAC? Because a C-section leaves a scar on your uterus, the pressure of labor could cause your uterus to open (rupture) along your C-section scar. But recent studies show it’s possible to have a safe VBAC after having a C-section in most cases. Although rare, a uterine rupture is a serious complication that can have life-threatening results. If you’re at a high risk for uterine rupture, your healthcare provider will typically not attempt a VBAC. Other risks of attempting a VBAC are: Blood loss. Infection. Emergency C-section (which is riskier than a planned C-section). What’s the risk of a uterine rupture if you’ve had a previous C-section? The risk of uterine rupture if you’ve had a C-section with a transverse cut (sideways across the lower part of the uterus) is about 0.9% or slightly less than 1 in 100. Does the type of incision I got from my last C-section matter if I want a VBAC? Yes. There are different types of C-section incisions: A low transverse incision has the lowest risk of uterine rupture. This horizontal cut is made across the lower, thinner part of your uterus. A low vertical incision (up and down cut) has a higher risk of rupture than a low transverse incision. This vertical cut is made in the lower, thinner part of your uterus. A high vertical incision (“classical” incision) in the upper part of your uterus has the highest risk of uterine rupture. Surgeons may need to use this type of incision for a premature baby or one that’s in a difficult position to deliver. The location and direction of the outer incision on your belly doesn’t mean that the incision in your uterus is in the same location or the same direction. For example, it may appear that the scar on your belly is transverse, yet the scar on your uterus is vertical. The information about the location and direction of the incision on your uterus should be in your medical records. When you talk about how safe VBAC is with your provider, make sure they look at your medical records and the reasons for any C-sections you’ve had. Is a VBAC safer than a repeat C-section? Talk with your healthcare provider about your health history, current pregnancy and why you had a C-section in your last pregnancy. Your chances of having a successful VBAC may be higher if you: Have had previous C-section deliveries (one or two) with low transverse incisions. Have had a vaginal birth before. Haven’t had any other uterine surgeries (such as fibroid removal, also called myomectomy). Have no history of uterine rupture. Don’t have a medical condition (like fibroids or problems with the location of your placenta) that makes a vaginal delivery risky. Go into labor on your own before your due date. If you’ve already had a successful VBAC — without complications such as ruptured uterus — you’re more likely to have successful future vaginal deliveries. Your chances of having a successful VBAC may be lower if you: Had a prior C-section due to labor not progressing. This means you didn’t dilate (cervix opens) or efface (cervix shortens) during a vaginal delivery. Are older than 35. Have obesity or overweight. Are giving birth to a large fetus or expecting multiples. Are past your due date. Had a baby within the last 18 months (short time between pregnancies). Have preeclampsia. (Healthcare providers may prefer a C-section delivery.) What are the risks of multiple C-sections? There isn’t a set number of C-sections you can have. But some evidence shows that people who have many C-sections are at a higher risk for: Heavy bleeding. Bladder and bowel injury. Infection. Placental conditions like placenta previa or placenta accreta in a future pregnancy where the placenta is abnormally attached. Uterine rupture. Adhesions (scarring). These risks vary and depend mostly on your health history and the specific circumstances of each pregnancy and delivery. Your healthcare provider is the best person to talk to about the risks and benefits of a repeat C-section versus a VBAC. Topics to discuss with your pregnancy care provider include: Past pregnancies and deliveries. Reason(s) you had a C-section. Safety of VBAC and a repeat C-section for you and your baby. Reasons you should or shouldn’t consider VBAC. Reasons you should or shouldn’t consider repeat C-section. A plan for inducing labor (or not). If the healthcare facility can manage emergency deliveries. Your plan for more children. Just because you had a C-section delivery in the past, doesn’t mean you can’t have a VBAC in the future. You may have heard or read that the scars from a C-section may rupture in a future pregnancy. But every situation is unique. Discuss your wishes and concerns with your pregnancy care provider early in your pregnancy. They can discuss the risks and benefits with you and help you decide if a VBAC is safe. As your pregnancy progresses, make sure you and your provider discuss and review your delivery plan at your prenatal visits.

<TASK DESCRIPTION> Only use the provided text to answer the question, no outside sources. <QUESTION> I'm considering a VBAC with my current pregnancy. My doctor has cautiously told me that it's an option. Can you tell me the benefits of this? I would also like to know the risks involved and the success rate. What are the criteria to work towards making this a successful option? <TEXT> What is a VBAC in pregnancy? A vaginal birth after cesarean or VBAC is when you give birth through your vagina after previously having a C-section (cesarean section) delivery. A C-section involves your pregnancy care provider making a surgical cut (incision) through your belly and uterus to deliver your baby. The goal of a VBAC is to give a person who had a C-section the chance to have a vaginal delivery for their next pregnancy. It can sometimes be unsafe to have a vaginal delivery after having one or more C-section deliveries. The decision on whether to attempt a VBAC involves considering factors like: The type of incision your surgeon used for your C-section(s) and if you have had more than one C-section. Your health history. If you have any medical conditions. The position of the fetus and if the fetus has any known medical conditions. Your pregnancy care provider will tell you if they believe a VBAC is safe to try. They can discuss potential risks and benefits with you. Then, you can choose if you’d like to pursue a VBAC or have another C-section based on your discussions. Studies show that up to 75% of people who had one C-section went on to have a successful vaginal birth in their next pregnancy. But your chance of having a successful VBAC drops to about 50% if you’ve had two or more prior C-section deliveries. Healthcare providers sometimes refer to a VBAC as a trial of labor after cesarean (TOLAC). A TOLAC is an attempt to have a VBAC. If a TOLAC is successful, the result is a VBAC. If it’s not successful, the result is another C-section delivery. Why do people prefer a VBAC instead of another C-section? It’s mostly a personal preference. Some people prefer a vaginal delivery, but for some reason, they haven’t been able to have one. Or a person might prefer a vaginal delivery because recovering from a C-section typically takes longer. Even if you want a vaginal delivery, your healthcare provider may recommend another C-section due to the risks of a VBAC. Or they may tell you it’s OK to try for a VBAC. The benefits of VBAC compared to a C-section include: Faster recovery and shorter hospital stay. No abdominal surgery. Avoiding or lowering C-section risks like heavy bleeding and infection. Vaginal birth helps clear amniotic fluid from your baby’s lungs as it passes through the birth canal. This better prepares your baby to breathe oxygen after birth. Your baby gets an immune system boost as it travels through the birth canal during a vaginal delivery. Less risk of complications from repeat surgeries like scarring or injuries to nearby organs. Personal preference. Some people want the experience of a vaginal birth. What are the risks of a VBAC? Because a C-section leaves a scar on your uterus, the pressure of labor could cause your uterus to open (rupture) along your C-section scar. But recent studies show it’s possible to have a safe VBAC after having a C-section in most cases. Although rare, a uterine rupture is a serious complication that can have life-threatening results. If you’re at a high risk for uterine rupture, your healthcare provider will typically not attempt a VBAC. Other risks of attempting a VBAC are: Blood loss. Infection. Emergency C-section (which is riskier than a planned C-section). What’s the risk of a uterine rupture if you’ve had a previous C-section? The risk of uterine rupture if you’ve had a C-section with a transverse cut (sideways across the lower part of the uterus) is about 0.9% or slightly less than 1 in 100. Does the type of incision I got from my last C-section matter if I want a VBAC? Yes. There are different types of C-section incisions: A low transverse incision has the lowest risk of uterine rupture. This horizontal cut is made across the lower, thinner part of your uterus. A low vertical incision (up and down cut) has a higher risk of rupture than a low transverse incision. This vertical cut is made in the lower, thinner part of your uterus. A high vertical incision (“classical” incision) in the upper part of your uterus has the highest risk of uterine rupture. Surgeons may need to use this type of incision for a premature baby or one that’s in a difficult position to deliver. The location and direction of the outer incision on your belly doesn’t mean that the incision in your uterus is in the same location or the same direction. For example, it may appear that the scar on your belly is transverse, yet the scar on your uterus is vertical. The information about the location and direction of the incision on your uterus should be in your medical records. When you talk about how safe VBAC is with your provider, make sure they look at your medical records and the reasons for any C-sections you’ve had. Is a VBAC safer than a repeat C-section? Talk with your healthcare provider about your health history, current pregnancy and why you had a C-section in your last pregnancy. Your chances of having a successful VBAC may be higher if you: Have had previous C-section deliveries (one or two) with low transverse incisions. Have had a vaginal birth before. Haven’t had any other uterine surgeries (such as fibroid removal, also called myomectomy). Have no history of uterine rupture. Don’t have a medical condition (like fibroids or problems with the location of your placenta) that makes a vaginal delivery risky. Go into labor on your own before your due date. If you’ve already had a successful VBAC — without complications such as ruptured uterus — you’re more likely to have successful future vaginal deliveries. Your chances of having a successful VBAC may be lower if you: Had a prior C-section due to labor not progressing. This means you didn’t dilate (cervix opens) or efface (cervix shortens) during a vaginal delivery. Are older than 35. Have obesity or overweight. Are giving birth to a large fetus or expecting multiples. Are past your due date. Had a baby within the last 18 months (short time between pregnancies). Have preeclampsia. (Healthcare providers may prefer a C-section delivery.) What are the risks of multiple C-sections? There isn’t a set number of C-sections you can have. But some evidence shows that people who have many C-sections are at a higher risk for: Heavy bleeding. Bladder and bowel injury. Infection. Placental conditions like placenta previa or placenta accreta in a future pregnancy where the placenta is abnormally attached. Uterine rupture. Adhesions (scarring). These risks vary and depend mostly on your health history and the specific circumstances of each pregnancy and delivery. Your healthcare provider is the best person to talk to about the risks and benefits of a repeat C-section versus a VBAC. Topics to discuss with your pregnancy care provider include: Past pregnancies and deliveries. Reason(s) you had a C-section. Safety of VBAC and a repeat C-section for you and your baby. Reasons you should or shouldn’t consider VBAC. Reasons you should or shouldn’t consider repeat C-section. A plan for inducing labor (or not). If the healthcare facility can manage emergency deliveries. Your plan for more children. Just because you had a C-section delivery in the past, doesn’t mean you can’t have a VBAC in the future. You may have heard or read that the scars from a C-section may rupture in a future pregnancy. But every situation is unique. Discuss your wishes and concerns with your pregnancy care provider early in your pregnancy. They can discuss the risks and benefits with you and help you decide if a VBAC is safe. As your pregnancy progresses, make sure you and your provider discuss and review your delivery plan at your prenatal visits. https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/articles/21687-vaginal-birth-after-cesarean-vbac