Big data: Healthcare, Marketing, Finance, Consumer Behavior and Social—all sectors are very excited but worried as no one wants to be left out! Everyone is exploring the best possible way to leverage the big data in their favor. So the million-dollar question is—does anyone understand the big data? Or how will the big data be relevant in business or strategy? My answer will be probably “no” but could be—as a typical MBA would answer —“it depends.”

Being in healthcare data analytics by occupation and being a biologist by education, I will first pick the classic example of big data—the human genome project in which the whole DNA was sequenced and tons of data and information were generated. At the start of the project, everyone was very excited that it would revolutionize healthcare and lead to tailored and personalized medicines. And I agree, it should have! Recently President Obama has initiated “precision medicine,” which is more or less same thing as personalized medicine. But even after fifteen years of decoding our whole genome along with hundreds of other species’ genomes, do we have personalized medicine? No. Other examples are the two historically data-rich fields: stock market and the NBA. So can we pick better stocks now, or can we predict the baseball champion team in NBA league? Answer, again, would be “no!” Similarly, can human resources, having access to millions of candidates’ database and analytics, hire better employees? Or can we pick better life partner from the pool of millions of profiles available with all cool matchmaking analytics? Answer will be, again, “no!” Similarly there are many others.

Then what’s wrong with the data? Why is the data not helping us to predict better future outcomes or performance in stock market or in baseball games or hire better employees or find better life partners? Why do we still not have personalized or precision medicines despite having the whole genome sequences figuratively on our fingertips? Why are we not able to predict more accurately despite having huge data, information and analytics? Is the problem lies with the data, or with the analytics approach?

My answer would be—there is nothing wrong with the data, or analytics. It’s just that we need to better understand the big data and how it should used. In simple terms—or rather in sophisticated statistics terms—the “big data” means population data. Historically, we have not had the technology or resources to collect population data. The exception being the census where we did, and still do, count the whole population and collected data of the whole population. For the census, we use huge resources and time to do it, but it is necessary and we only need to do it once in a decade. Before the “technology,” we used to rely on sample data, where the fewer, randomized, stratified, best normalized, statistically significant and relevant but small set of data would be good enough to analyze and predict the trend or outcome. The best example of sample approach is the exit polls of the U.S. president elections. These exits polls, usually based of 1000 to 10,000 responses, have been pretty good recently in predicting the election results and outcome of about 150 to 200 million votes!

The problem with big data is that there is too much data and information to handle and to analyze—and often, either most of the information is just repetitive, or the information is not significant or relevant. That’s why the big data approach is not a much better than a “good” sample based approach. The key is to design and construct the good sample. Whereas in big data we can to skip the step of designing the sample and can analyze and visualize the whole data, which usually has lots of noise. Why? Because we try to automate the big data analytics by use of technology and we skip to design good research methodology as we do in case of designing the good sample and analyzing it. But when the methodology is good, the big data analytics has been useful. The best example is the Netflix hit series of “House of Cards” or “Breaking Bad,” which were designed after analysis of millions of customer data and their behavior. But that remains to be seen and validated as Netflix continues to produce repeated “hit” shows or movies.

But most of the time it is difficult to design or rather program a good methodology for analysis of big data and requires more expensive resources than to design the methodology for analysis of sample data. Machine and technology can help to drill down the big data, find trends, find clusters and could be a quicker and cheaper option than sample design approach. In the cases of trend and clusters analysis, the big data could be useful and efficient. But if the trend and clusters are not part of objective, then big data might not necessary be significant or relevant to your business or part of your strategy. The sample-based analysis will be still more useful, effective and efficient than the big data analytics. As even in the age of big data and analytics, the human resource still heavily relies on good referrals for employee hires, and there is more probability of finding a good life partner among friends and acquaintances. So unless you have unlimited resources and time, I would suggest to go sample-based analytical approach than to run after the mirage of big data.

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When I was a student, most of the economics courses focused on the real economy and money and banking. Finance courses were not as developed and not as important as they are now. Now, the financial side of the economy has grown rapidly over the last three decades and has become as important as the real side.

More recently, we had the Great Recession which was not caused conventionally by the real side of the economy such as housing and the business cycle but by the financial side such as bad balance sheets and financial innovations.

Then came quantitative easing, which has been practiced by major central banks in the world such as the Federal Reserve System, Bank of Japan, European Central Bank and People’s Bank of China. QE has inflated the financial side of the economy, but did not expand the real side by the same proportion. The gap between the real and financial sides has widened and the financial side overwhelmed the real side. Fiscal policy, which is more connected to the real economy, is much harder to use and can blow political winds that cannot be steered to real economic growth by politicians. Moreover, financial variables such as interest rates, exchange rates and derivatives move much faster than real variables such as GDP, investment and consumption. They have left the real variables behind, and we should expected the next recession to be caused by the financial variables and not housing, inflation, inventories, etc. as before.

Inflating the financial side has already created problems for itself and for the real side. In China, for example, reducing interest rates to stabilize stock markets is at odds with supporting the exchange rates. Any increase in liquidity to reduce the interest rates is at conflict with intervening in the foreign exchange market through selling dollars and buying the yuan. Expanding the financial sectors in U.S. and major economies is adversely affecting financial stability, it has worsened income inequality. Appreciating the value of financial assets has benefited asset owners at the expenses of wages and salary. It brought new regulations to the economy that helped curtail productivity and real investment. There is also a QE exit problem for the Fed, which has been brewing for some time. By dropping interest rate to zero, the Fed has no dry power to fight any future recessions. QE has encouraged investors to take more risks and businesses to borrow more money and engage in financial engineering. Banks, investment companies and other businesses now own oil storage tanks in Cushing, Oklahoma to trade oil when prices go up.

Globalization and communication seem to inflate the financial sector much more than the real sector, which has contributed to the widening gap and disconnection between the two sides of the economy.

Now the policy makers on the financial side are running out of tools with the much expanded and globalized financial sector. This implies that the fast-running financial sides in the world must run on their own and connected each other through globalization and competition and less with the real sides. This means the groping to a balanced equilibrium by the financial side will take a long time until the economic sides catch up. The obvious implication is we have to grow the real side and reduce the gap with the financial side without reducing the financial side. Trying to expand or tie up the financial side is not the best solution without expanding the real side. My recent research with doctorate students at Drexel has dealt with this issue.

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When I teach students about World War II, I reserve two topics for the end of the discussion: the Holocaust and the atomic bomb. Both events grew out of the war, but neither essentially affected it. Both were also unprecedented in human history. Genocides had taken place before, but never until the Holocaust had the physical extermination of an entire people been the object of a painstaking and systematic policy conceived at the highest levels of government and carried out in a breathtakingly short period of time. Carpet bombing had inflicted casualty levels comparable to those of Hiroshima on Japanese and German cities throughout the last two years of the war, but never had a single weapon dropped from a single plane caused the instantaneous destruction of an entire city. The world recognized, immediately in the case of Hiroshima and more slowly in that of the Holocaust, that history itself had been changed, and that human civilization itself would never again be the same.

After seventy years, the Holocaust is widely regarded, at least in the West, as an epitome of human evil. Memorials to it abound, museums and libraries are dedicated to it in both the old World and the New; and German public leaders have acknowledged it as a moral burden their country will continue to bear. It is true that fringe groups of Holocaust minimizers or deniers exist, and that in non-Western countries the Holocaust is a more remote phenomenon. But its status as a singular atrocity in world history is still widely acknowledged.

Not so with Hiroshima. No American president, indeed no ranking American official, has ever expressed regret or apology for the destruction of Hiroshima or Nagasaki, the other city obliterated three days later by a second bomb. To the contrary, the atomic bomb became the symbol of America’s proud new might in the world, and the next decade saw the highly public testing of successively larger and deadlier nuclear weapons as the United States made the Pacific into a kind of atomic playground. The bomb entered popular culture and American women showed themselves off in a new style of swimwear named after Bikini, the Pacific atoll destroyed by postwar atomic testing in 1946. To be sure, America offered to treat disfigured female victims of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the so-called Hiroshima Maidens, but this was represented as an expression of generosity toward a defeated foe. No suggestion of apology, let alone atonement, ever attached to the program. Rather, it was presented as an occasion for national self-congratulation.

For many others, however, the bomb represented a shocking use of militarily irrelevant force against a civilian population with no means of defense. The decision to drop it, moreover, was a political one, since none of the major American theater commanders — General Douglas MacArthur and Admiral William Halsey in the Pacific, and Dwight Eisenhower in Europe —believed its use to be militarily necessary or justified, and even Curtis LeMay, whose bombers had destroyed Tokyo and other Japanese cities by firestorm, refused to defend dropping it. Beyond this, the bomb ushered in an age of apocalypticism in which the threat of human self-extinction through atomic war was considered a real and even likely possibility. By the end of the 1940s, the Soviet Union had its own bomb, and in the mid-1950s, both sides were armed with nuclear weapons a thousandfold more powerful than the ones that had annihilated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Strategists planned for wars in which tens if not hundreds of millions would die even in an initial exchange, and the planet might be rendered incapable of sustaining human life.

These dire scenarios were not played out, although the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 brought America and the Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear war while a helpless world looked on. Whether the Soviet-American postwar rivalry would have taken such a turn had it not been for the example of Hiroshima cannot be said, but it was certainly a spur to it. The Holocaust, for all its horror, might be considered a one-off event unlikely to be repeated, whereas Hiroshima looked increasingly like a dress rehearsal for the end of civilization if not of humanity. Had the bomb been developed but not used, it might have been quarantined as a device actually incompatible with warfare (its de facto status today). With Hiroshima, however, a moral threshold was crossed. Cities might be destroyed at the flick of a switch by operatives thousands of miles away and immune from reprisal. Drone warfare is in fact conducted this way, without (as yet) a nuclear payload but based on the premise that war need no longer involve physical proximity or personal risk.

Many people are intuitively disturbed at this kind of war-making, without knowing why. The answer, I would suggest, is that whereas war, as classically conceived, involved direct tests of courage, endurance, and loyalty, the drone warrior is just a man going about his job, not unlike you and me going about ours. I teach; you may build, buy, or sell; the drone operator kills. But when killing becomes mere routinized labor, war disappears and another activity takes its place for which we have, as yet, no name. War appeals to all that is most atavistic in us: bloodlust; the love of danger and adventure; the license to behave as one would never dare to under other circumstances. But the drone warrior — or the nuclear technician in his hardened silo — doesn’t indulge his instincts; he negates them. He becomes, in short, a robot. War may be a hateful activity, but at least it is a comprehensible one.

Those who kill with impunity from a distance at the command of others are doing a thing never done before by humans. Rapid-fire weapons, long-range artillery and aerial bombardment all prepared the way for this, but Hiroshima showed for the first time what killing at a distance without risk or valor was like. It had been a fundamental principle of human combat that one did not kill the unarmed and helpless, even when one sought the advantage of surprise. The principle was the same whether one killed one or many. Naturally, it was often flouted — war is not a game of nice observances — but Hiroshima simply abolished it. That a single plane could destroy an entire city was so disproportionate and hitherto unthinkable an event, that any notion of “combat” simply disappeared in it. World War II was not in fact ended by an act of war, but by something that transcended it. The act that inaugurated the Atomic Age changed many things, but the first of them was the moral relation of human violence itself.
The Japanese commemorated the twin anniversaries of Hiroshima and Nagasaki solemnly, as they always do. The United States marked instead the seventieth anniversary of V-J Day, the unconditional surrender of the Japanese Empire that followed the dropping of the bombs. Of the bombs themselves, as usual, no mention was made. The official position of the Truman administration was that they had saved lives by shortening the war, although its senior military commanders would all give the lie to this afterward. The unspoken position was that the Japanese had started the war by their sneak attack on Pearl Harbor and deserved all the hell they could get. A similar mindset would lead to a destructive rampage through the Middle East in the wake of the 9/11 attacks more than fifty years later that has left the region in chaos. American exceptionalism means American impunity; and impunity means that there is never a need for apology.

But there is such a need, and since none of my political representatives has ever seen fit to make such an apology, I’ll do it myself. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were needless. They took humanity to a terrible new place from which there will never be return. We will have to live in this place from now on. An apology does not go far under such circumstances, but at least it is somewhere to start. Individual Americans have joined with the Japanese in lighting candles in remembrance and in hope of peace, but words must be spoken too. Not for Japan’s sake, although I am sure they would be welcome, but above all for our own. Hiroshima should not have been destroyed. Nagasaki should not have been destroyed. And whatever historical circumstance can explain the fact that they were, nothing will ever justify it.

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Back in June, Caitlyn Jenner graced the cover of Vanity Fair with the story of her transition. Asking the world to now “Call Her Caitlyn,” she shared with us not only how struggled she was in revealing her true gender identity but also how freeing her transition has been.

America was, surprisingly, fairly accepting of her transition. While there were obviously those naysayers who would still call her by her former name and insisted that she no longer is the great athlete that she once was, most of the words used to describe Caitlyn were in regards to her beauty and her strength. She very quickly became an important figurehead for the transgender movement in America, alongside star Laverne Cox from “Orange is the New Black.”

John Stewart was quick to point out that the support of Caitlyn was not actually as supportive as let on. In his segment welcoming Caitlyn to being a woman, he made the surface appreciation for Caitlyn apparent with his clips highlighting reporters focusing on her looks, her genitalia and comparing Caitlyn to her ex-wife Kris.

News about Caitlyn has now been revolving around her new show “I Am Cait,” which documents Caitlyn’s day-to-day life as a new woman. One recent episode revealed her wearing a swimsuit for the first time. She described the experience as “freeing” and showed delight in finally being who she is.

Meanwhile, news outlets have run away with the swimsuit reveal with some headlines claiming it is a “must-see.” Why is it a must-see? Is it because she is now a woman and we must objectify women in swimsuits? Or is it maybe because she is, more specifically, a transgendered woman, and we must judge how well she fits the visual of what we think a woman should look like?

It is this kind of false support that damages the transgender movement as a whole. While Caitlyn had the means to transition, many others are not so fortunate. Many do not even have access to clothing of their gender, let alone the surgeries required to transition completely. Caitlyn has earned attention and respect because she can pass as a female, but those who cannot afford to make the same physical changes but still identify with a
different gender should be availed the same kind of respect.

How well someone looks post-transition should not be the reason why we should respect and support them. Being able to take that step into being the person they want to be is the reason we should. The precedent we are setting with our treatment of Caitlyn is one that is suggesting that transgender people should have our support only if they do a good job at passing for their new gender and not one that suggests that we should respect people for who they are on the inside.

Even if Caitlyn did not look good in a swimsuit, even if she could not afford gender reassignment surgery, we should still be able to accept her for who she is on the inside and “Call Her Caitlyn.”

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China recently devalued its yuan by about 1.9 percent, marking the largest drop in two decades. The devaluation came as a surprise to many markets and central bankers. While the move may be unanticipated, it is justified. The market rate for the yuan has moved away from the midpoint, or the fixing point, for this major currency which clearly has shown that it is overvalued and should be adjusted. Moreover, China wants the yuan to be one of the elite currencies that make up the International Monetary Fund’s currency, known as the Special Drawing Rights. The IMF wants China to make its currency more market-determined.

How can we rationalize this surprise inside China? The yuan had appreciated against the dollar by 30 percent since 2005, and by more than 12 percent last month. It is justified on the basis of the divergence between market rate and the fixed rate for the yuan. Thus, the devaluation looks good because it may make China like a free market. It is part of a processed called quantitative easing that other regions including the United States, the Eurozone and Japan followed before to stimulate economic growth. The People’s Bank of China has reduced interest rate four times in the last few years, but this policy did not bear good fruit. It reduced the reserve requirement, and this tool did not help much. The current policy is to devalue the currency. They are all part of QE. China also tried fiscal policy but that did not help much. All these polices indicate that China needs to substantially reform its economy.

Outside of China, the IMF applauded the devaluations and considered it a “welcome” step towards making the yuan more market-based. The major international organization is preparing the yuan as one of the elite currencies in the world, and thus the devaluation of the yuan in honor of market forces pleases the IMF. The U.S. lawmakers will see it as a currency manipulation to give China more comparative trade advantage over other countries, including the United States.

The devaluation is intended to energize China’s export sector at a time when its economic growth is slowing down below 7 percent. It may hamper China’s effort to restructure the economy away from depending on exports and towards domestic consumption. The export sector is still important in the Chinese economy, accounting for about 25 percent but is still less than the 30-35 percent it had last decade. While this devaluation should help the Chinese exports and economic growth modestly due to the reduced share of exports in gross domestic product, it is in this sense a setback to China’s macroencomic reforms. On the other hand, it is welcomed by the IMF since it makes the exchange rate look more market dependent.

The devaluation has economic and political ripples that have resonated around the globe, given the importance of the Chinese economy as the second in the world after that of the United States. Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, the five major emerging national economies that are often referred to the BRICS, depend on exports as a major thrust of their economic growth. Retaliatory devaluation should come from Brazil and others in the BRICS and Indonesia and South Korea among others in Asia who are not members of the BRICS. They should devalue their currencies to stay as competitive as China. The Philippines responded immediately by expanding the exchange rate band for its currency. These actions will create chain reactions around the world and depreciate against the dollar, which in turn should depress commodity prices including oil prices. Commodity-exporting countries, which are mostly emerging market economies, should be negatively affected by the expected plunge of their goods. This in turn should push down global inflation, which makes it harder for the United States to hike short-term interest rates in September.

If you are a currency trader or a central banker, what have you learned from this surprise devaluation? Currency traders and central bankers should watch the diversion between the market rate and the fixed rate. If the divergence comes close to 2 percent, get set for a yuan depreciation. This advice is supported by the government’s recent statement that it will base its future official rates more closely on transactions taking place in the exchange market. I hope this policy is not asymmetric, in the sense that the governmnet will be willing to let the yuan appreciate by 2 percent if the deviation warrants it and the currency becomes undervalued. If that happens, we have a symmetric exchange rate policy that inches closer to a market-based intervention policy. Once this happens, the yuan will become a major currency touching shoulders with the dollar, euro, yen and the British pound, the elites of the SDR.

The post Plot twist, China devalues currency in economic strategy appeared first on The Triangle.

The rumors seen everywhere on Drexel social media (including my own personal Facebook rants) in the past few weeks have proven true. The beloved Blue and Gold route is seeing its path altered to exclude the current Walnut Street portion and is shortening its hours from offering service at midnight to sending the last bus from library at 8 p.m.  Now, while I’m as upset as the next person that I don’t have a bus to transport my eggs and iced tea from Fresh Grocer anymore, the change in the hours of operation is much more concerning.

Many students use the shuttle as a way to travel quickly and safely from campus to their homes in the Powelton Village and Mantua neighborhoods. Drexel has been attempting to increase campus engagement and school spirit partly by encouraging students to live on campus and stay on it as much as possible. The reality of the situation is that most students cannot afford to spend around $3,500 per term on dorm living, nor just under $1,000 a month for alternatives provided by American Campus Communities, as reflected by over 70 percent of students living off-campus. By restricting the shuttle schedule’s hours, Drexel is effectively limiting the amount of time that students will spend on campus and reinforcing the common campus opinion that the University is being greedy and “shafting” its off-campus students who can’t afford other forms of transportation.

In addition to limiting students who actually have options, Drexel is depriving students that have part-time jobs or participate in extracurricular activities that prevent them from making it home before late in the evening. This doesn’t even include students that need to work late at the library for a group project or to use the campus’ wifi and other resources.

While getting an escort home is still a safe transport option, it cannot be denied that a majority of students will not choose to wait fifteen minutes for an escort to show up and awkwardly walk them home when they’re already exhausted from a day’s work. This option is also not feasible during the harsh winter months and could lead to Drexel having to spend more money for walking escorts due to a higher demand, which contradicts their original goal of saving money.

Given the high number of Drexel alerts sent out over the past two months for muggings and assaults in the Powelton Village area, most of which are concentrated in the evening hours, this change could not be more of a misstep. In the midst of recommending students to be wary of traveling home alone at night, Drexel is unwisely removing one of the few University-sponsored ways of doing this to save money for its bottom line. This move will quickly become costly not only for its safety rating but its students’ sense of security.

Considering the bloated price we pay for tuition, free group transport home at night to densely-populated student areas is what we need, not new offers to live in costly on-campus housing. Drexel should reduce the frequency of shuttle runs to being on the hour or half-hour to reduce spending while continuing to offer late-night travel. If you agree that we have a right to safety, send an email expressing your concerns to the facilities Vice President at robert.a.francis@drexel.edu and President Fry at jaf@drexel.edu.

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Cecil was a beloved lion in Zimbabwe that was killed by dentist Walter Palmer while he was hunting for sport (why his occupation matters, I have no idea but it seems that everyone is referring to him as such so when in Rome…). Cecil’s death has created a huge uproar (pun intended) throughout the world and the web. Petitions are being signed, Palmer’s house has been vandalized with graffiti, he’s had to close down his practice for the time being and even celebrities are getting in on it. On his show, Jimmy Kimmel had to hold back tears over Cecil’s death. But it isn’t just him that feels this way, this sentiment seems to be shared amongst most people.

There are a lot of implications that Cecil’s death holds, ranging from animal welfare, how game hunting from Westerners ties to colonialism, how although so many people are so outraged about this many of them cannot even locate Zimbabwe on a map, how Teddy Roosevelt and his son killed 17 lions and 494 other animals on one hunting trip alone, and so much more. What really gets me, however, is how people are more outraged over the death of one lion than that of other humans. People are more willing to bestow compassion on an animal than a fellow human being.

It’s not just the mourning and outrage of Cecil; I’ve seen people treat their pets better than they treat their friends. Why? Maybe it’s not that we value animal life more, maybe it’s that we just value one another less. Or maybe it’s because we don’t really see one another as people rather as objects, obstacles in one another’s ways, stepping stones to better jobs and a better life. We look at one another and instead of seeing a human and someone that should treated as such we see labels. Whether it’s black, white, basic, stupid, rich, poor, slut or prude, we make judgments and treat others like what we think they are as opposed to who they actually are, which is a person first and the everything else second. When we put that label on them, we take away part of their humanity and as they become an object, we treat them as such. As we do this over and over again, we devalue one another to the point that our lives don’t mean as much anymore.

On the other hand, I’d like to give the society the benefit of the doubt and say that maybe the thought of other humans suffering is just too much for us to handle. I hope that the burden of thinking about all the poor that are starving in Zimbabwe is too much to bear so instead we cling on to things like Cecil because we can shoulder that instead. So we yell and petition and we are ready to crucify the man who killed him because justice for Cecil is something that we can handle. But then I look at stories of #BlackLivesMatter, of people like Sandra Bland or Samuel Dubose. I think about the Planned Parenthood story of brokering fetal body parts and it’s sad because, hard though it may be too real to think about the injustice of these situations, it’s our responsibility to do so. We should be petitioning, outraged, tweeting, holding back tears for their justice, for their deaths. But we’re not.

I don’t really know how to rationalize it, but all I can say is that we have so far to go if we are more angered over the death of lion than the death of our own.

The post The lion, the dentist, and the outrage appeared first on The Triangle.

I have good news and bad news.

The good news: chivalry is not dead.

The bad news: chivalry wasn’t really about me at all.

Perhaps it would be best to start where most European history seems to begin: the Church. In short, after the invasion of the Normans from what is now France in the tenth century, the Church decided to ease the terror by instilling an honor code for aristocratic, self-professed Christian knights to follow in their personal lives and when they encountered neutral common folk while in uniform.

Now, imagine you are one of these country women used to being barged in on by foreign troops and you are greeted by a cavalry of knights and horses. In such a case, chivalry dictates a sort of etiquette for these knights to communicate to the woman that though they are indeed large and intimidating, they do not intend to hurt her.

In this situation, I don’t imagine that anyone would have a problem with chivalry. Love your neighbor, and don’t rape and pillage an innocent village. If you want a wife, don’t abduct her. Common sense. But note: innocent villages are full of men, women and children; and they are innocent because they do not possess the same force as the knights do.

The aristocratic man continued to practice chivalry even without the constant threat of war, deeming it his individualistic duty to protect his household, physically or verbally, whenever it came under attack. A woman, however, did not possess similar influence to defend her family’s honor and was thus deemed dependent on a more influential class: in this case, the males, who have traditionally had power in Western civilization.

The problem arises when we attempt to reconcile our modern ideals with the medieval chivalric code. We have decided that women are fit to work alongside men, own property and hold public office, yet we have spent these hundreds of years since the end of the Dark Ages recovering from the idea that women are inherently powerless and that we must defend them as if they are domestic goodness and powerlessness incarnate.

A man, unfortunately, never knows what to expect when he holds a door for a woman anymore: maybe eye rolling, perhaps a pleasant smile and the occasional I-can-do-it-myself-thank-you scowl. I like holding doors for people, too, regardless of their gender. It’s a nice thing to do and I like it when other people do it for me, too. Other women understand this practice: they go through the door when I hold it, and most of the time, they look up and say thank you.

In my experience, men generally have a harder time with doors. Some will go through the door and perhaps say thank you as well, but many will stop dead in their tracks, pace around the entry in confusion or even declare that it’s not my place to hold the door. Often, they’ll place a hand on the door to supplement mine and not acknowledge me at all.

Allow me to share some a couple more specific experiences: Once, I opened a door for an older man in the morning, and he loudly declared, “OH, NO! My father would roll over in his GRAVE if he saw this!” and took the door from me. I stared at the ground as I shuffled inside. I encountered him again a couple months later, and he did the same exact thing. Turns out that he simply has his script rehearsed and ready to go.

My personal favorite is the time I held the door for a boy before we both went down a flight of stairs. He tried to take the door from me and insisted multiple times that I go in before him, but I smiled and told him that I was opening it specifically for him. His expression grew from friendly to almost scary, and he looked me in the eye and said, “Stop trying to be noble.”

But what if we can all be noble? It only takes one mean-spirited woman to counterclaim the idea that all women possess some sort of intrinsic defenselessness. Chivalry is founded on the ideal that civilized knights, or gentlemen (can we coin the term “gentlewomen” now that chain mail is outdated but the ideal of a “gentleman” lives on?), have a responsibility to defend the powerless. Those that we would point to and declare true gentlemen today value those that society looks over and treats them as equals, not as dependents.

My point is this: men, hold the door for people. Women, hold the door for people, too. Both of you, go through doors when others open them for you; an open door is an extension of virtue. Accept it. Chivalry is noble, but practice chivalry not to lord it over another because of your own privilege, but rather to uphold honor. No one owes you anything for your chivalry, but all of us should practice chivalry nonetheless. Your honor exists regardless of whether or not another is there to accept it, and you cannot earn honor by demeaning that of another; on the contrary, you must create your own.

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VidCon, the annual conference for online video in California, began yesterday. When I remembered, I realized that I haven’t recreationally watched YouTube videos for at least a couple years.

Remember the first time that you went on YouTube? It’s a tough thing to forget. My first time was in 2005, when I was still in elementary school and my cousin showed me some stupid cartoon on this website whose potential was yet to be determined.

YouTube was always intended to serve as a free and open platform for idea sharing, which set it apart from purely consumer-centered networks such as America Online and MySpace. What was most unique about YouTube was its uncanny ability to make even the most mundane content stupidly famous, like that time when Internet duo Smosh was just a couple of college students who lip synched to the Pokemon theme song, put it up for friends and unintentionally racked up 25 million views on the most viewed video of 2006 (for comparison, Psy’s “Gangnam Style” music video is currently the most viewed video of all time with 2.4 billion views).

A new era of the Internet had begun, where nerds were allowed to nerd out together, those with niche hobbies around the world were able to get in touch and a new integrated “YouTuber” culture formed with its own etiquette and inside jokes.

Such success stories became the norm, even after the purchase of YouTube by Google in late 2006, and “vloggers,” or video bloggers, came to form a sort of community with their fans. Many moved to the Los Angeles area to collaborate with other content creators. During this period characterized by unrestricted creation, which ranged from around 2007 to a year or so after the first VidCon in 2010, creators were for the first time completely in control of what they put up and able to directly communicate with their fanbases in their comments sections and on newfangled democratic social media sites like Twitter, which launched in 2006. But more interestingly, the idea of “success” at the time was still making it to television, film or whatever industry would best utilize a vlogger’s broadcasted talent. How would YouTube influence our media in real life and social interactions?

YouTube vloggers had a unique power to organize informal community meetups, but Hank Green of the Vlogbrothers YouTube channel — more recognizably, the brother of John Green, author of “The Fault in Our Stars” and the other half of Vlogbrothers — endeavored to create a more formal meet-up for YouTubers to be together all at once. Thus, the first VidCon was created and it attracted less than 1,500 attendees to a Los Angeles Hyatt. Always reflective of quirky YouTube culture, it advertised a ball pit and an evening dance party.

I had the privilege of attending the first VidCon in 2010, which had two ticket tracks: community and industry, which was intended for content creators and Internet whizzes serious enough to make money off of online media. Both tracks had access to the entire conference, as all the industry stuff took place on a separate day. I came as a fan, but most of the attendees I encountered were content creators who were surprised to find that they had “fans” to begin with. The hotel lobby became a place for YouTubers of any subscriber count to collaborate and hang out without expectations, contracts or hidden agendas. I’m pretty sure my favorite YouTuber went into shock when he found out he had a 13-year-old fangirl, but we ended up becoming friends, and we still stay in touch today.

I stopped attending VidCon after 2012. My first VidCon had encouraged me to try making vlogs, but after a year, I put my account on private. Still, it was worth trying, and as a result, I established a connection to the creator community. The “famous” YouTuber I befriended was part of a group of mostly teenaged content creators around the country who met because they made videos and occasionally collaborated with one another. Some struck it big and some didn’t, but no amount of success affected their relationship. I was inspired by this diverse group of not-quite-college-aged kids that threw themselves into video making to practice their own artistic talents, voice their opinions and learn how to relate to those who responded to their content. These kids were entrepreneurs, and their spirit could not have been revealed as tangibly as it was without the common YouTube platform.

VidCon 2012, whose massive ticket sales moved the location to the Anaheim Convention Center, introduced the expo track, which gave an attendee access to an expanded expo hall area but prohibited attendance to panels. VidCon 2010 and 2011 both had a fair amount of vendors and informal YouTuber signings, but in 2012 third-party networks ruled the expo hall. Even the official VidCon website acknowledges that the once-blurred line between fans and creators is now hardened.

As much as I want to decry the so-called “mainstreaming” of online video with its increasingly brand-centered programming — one brand representative coined the word “Veatles” to compare vloggers’ fangirls to Beatlemania — the truth is that I haven’t been to VidCon in three years. I still have hope in VidCon 2015’s expected attendance of over 20,000 and the change from the “community” track to “creator” track, which gives additional benefits to creators but restricts their access to the expo hall in order to encourage collaboration with industry in a more innovation-oriented environment.

Was any of this shared experience really about the videos? It’s always been about community. As long as we’re all connected through the common platform of online media, we are able to transcend physical and cultural barriers to establish a community with its own culture no matter what common interest we happen to share. Countries such as Iran, Tunisia and Egypt have already used amateur online video to voice their unity in the midst of revolution, and countless of otherwise unheard stories have been shared using YouTube.

Online video encourages innovation because we have found that we’re not alone. No longer is YouTube merely a vessel to more accepted forms of success; rather, it is our success itself. The power is in the hands of the user, and by participating in deliberate creation, we are uniting.

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Being a teenage girl is difficult. Puberty sucks. Getting your period sucks. You have no idea if Timmy likes you because last week he said he did but now he’s hanging out with Martha, and you’re just really confused about life in general. This time can be brutal for all girls’ self-esteem but especially for black girls’.

I spent most of my adolescence in a predominantly white, middle class and suburban community. To say that my town lacked diversity would be an understatement. This impacted the way I saw the world. As the daughter of two Kenyan immigrants, I was different, and being different at a young age isn’t easy. My skin never really bothered me. I would make jokes about not having to wear sunscreen or always having a tan to my friends with much paler complexions. But I never felt like I was beautiful. Mostly this derived from my hair.

Everyone around me had variations of long silky hair. Meanwhile, I was left to fight my kinky, curly locks that often broke combs and left me in tears. Even when I used harsh chemicals to straighten it, it was never like everyone else’s. I would stick up when the wind blew in it and while my friends would complain about their hair being too oily, mine wasn’t oily enough.

Watching TV, any black women that I did see were either had mixed ancestry where their hair grew out in nice curls or wore expensive weaves. All the celebrities I saw, all the models, all of the dolls I played with, everything that was supposed to be an example of “beauty” was nothing like what I had. So I found myself to be unbeautiful, because I could not meet the Eurocentric beauty standards set before me.

Unfortunately, this is still the case for many girls today. Actually, not just girls but women as well. But you may say, “Oh no, you had it different, your surroundings are what made you feel this way.” But even within the black community itself, beauty standards are often dictated by colorism and an idea of “good” hair which eventually winds back to those good old Eurocentric beauty ideals. I’ve heard mothers tell their daughters that they need to get their hair done or that they have “bad” hair. By that they mean their daughter need to make themselves look more like their Caucasian counterparts. So this mentality just recycles itself, with generations following one another with this lie that who they are is not as good as others around them.

I’ve spoken with friends who refuse to let the world see their natural hair. They shift from weaves to braids, swearing that no one can ever see them without add-ons because somewhere along the way the world convinced them that who they are, the way they were born, was inadequate. Because over time, the media and the rest of society has shown them that having your hair be a giant fluff ball is not attractive, because the work place has made them feel like the kinky curls so tight that you can only really understand them when you feel them are somehow unprofessional.

As great as it would be to say that beauty doesn’t matter, that it’s all about what’s underneath (which it should be), no one likes to feel like a bump on a log. Feeling beautiful is often tied to people’s self-worth, especially for young women. When people feel that they are undesirable, that they are worth less than others, often times they seek that approval elsewhere. Sometimes, it can be from good sources like education, but often times this sense of approval is sought through other, less beneficial media. To empower young black women, to make them feel like they are beautiful and they’re heard is to change future generations.

This sense of empowerment can only come from ourselves. How we treat one another, how the media portrays their ideas of beauty and strength. In a recent conversation with a friend, they brought up this good question: what would happen in Michelle Obama went natural? How great would it be for other girls throughout the nation see this strong, driven, role model accepting what so many have told them is ugly? But that may turn off other demographics, thinking she’s “too black.” But to quote the first lady herself, “Black girls rock!” and our society needs to start telling them that a little bit more.

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