How Galaxies Die: New Insights Into Galaxy Halos, Black Holes, and Quenching of Star Formation – SciTechDaily

Posted on by

A simple model explains a wide range of observations by describing a contest between galaxy halos and their central black holes that eventually turns off star formation.

Astronomers studying galaxy evolution have long struggled to understand what causes star formation to shut down in massive galaxies. Although many theories have been proposed to explain this process, known as quenching, there is still no consensus on a satisfactory model.

Now, an international team led by Sandra Faber, professor emerita of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz, has proposed a new model that successfully explains a wide range of observations about galaxy structure, supermassive black holes, and the quenching of star formation. The researchers presented their findings in a paper published on July 1, 2020, in the Astrophysical Journal.

The model supports one of the leading ideas about quenching which attributes it to black hole feedback, the energy released into a galaxy and its surroundings from a central supermassive black hole as matter falls into the black hole and feeds its growth. This energetic feedback heats, ejects, or otherwise disrupts the galaxys gas supply, preventing the infall of gas from the galaxys halo to feed star formation.

The idea is that in star-forming galaxies, the central black hole is like a parasite that ultimately grows and kills the host, Faber explained. Thats been said before, but we havent had clear rules to say when a black hole is big enough to shut down star formation in its host galaxy, and now we have quantitative rules that actually work to explain our observations.

The basic idea involves the relationship between the mass of the stars in a galaxy (stellar mass), how spread out those stars are (the galaxys radius), and the mass of the central black hole. For star-forming galaxies with a given stellar mass, the density of stars in the center of the galaxy correlates with the radius of the galaxy so that galaxies with bigger radii have lower central stellar densities. Assuming that the mass of the central black hole scales with the central stellar density, star-forming galaxies with larger radii (at a given stellar mass) will have lower black-hole masses.

What that means, Faber explained, is that larger galaxies (those with larger radii for a given stellar mass) have to evolve further and build up a higher stellar mass before their central black holes can grow large enough to quench star formation. Thus, small-radius galaxies quench at lower masses than large-radius galaxies.

That is the new insight, that if galaxies with large radii have smaller black holes at a given stellar mass, and if black hole feedback is important for quenching, then large-radius galaxies have to evolve further, she said. If you put together all these assumptions, amazingly, you can reproduce a large number of observed trends in the structural properties of galaxies.

This explains, for example, why more massive quenched galaxies have higher central stellar densities, larger radii, and larger central black holes.

Based on this model, the researchers concluded that quenching begins when the total energy emitted from the black hole is approximately four times the gravitational binding energy of the gas in the galactic halo. The binding energy refers to the gravitational force that holds the gas within the halo of dark matter enveloping the galaxy. Quenching is complete when the total energy emitted from the black hole is twenty times the binding energy of the gas in the galactic halo.

Faber emphasized that the model does not yet explain in detail the physical mechanisms involved in the quenching of star formation. The key physical processes that this simple theory evokes are not yet understood, she said. The virtue of this, though, is that having simple rules for each step in the process challenges theorists to come up with physical mechanisms that explain each step.

Astronomers are accustomed to thinking in terms of diagrams that plot the relations between different properties of galaxies and show how they change over time. These diagrams reveal the dramatic differences in structure between star-forming and quenched galaxies and the sharp boundaries between them. Because star formation emits a lot of light at the blue end of the color spectrum, astronomers refer to blue star-forming galaxies, red quiescent galaxies, and the green valley as the transition between them. Which stage a galaxy is in is revealed by its star formation rate.

One of the studys conclusions is that the growth rate of black holes must change as galaxies evolve from one stage to the next. The observational evidence suggests that most of the black hole growth occurs in the green valley when galaxies are beginning to quench.

The black hole seems to be unleashed just as star formation slows down, Faber said. This was a revelation, because it explains why black hole masses in star-forming galaxies follow one scaling law, while black holes in quenched galaxies follow another scaling law. That makes sense if black hole mass grows rapidly while in the green valley.

Faber and her collaborators have been discussing these issues for many years. Since 2010, Faber has co-led a major Hubble Space Telescope galaxy survey program (CANDELS, the Cosmic Assembly Near-infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey), which produced the data used in this study. In analyzing the CANDELS data, she has worked closely with a team led by Joel Primack, UCSC professor emeritus of physics, which developed the Bolshoi cosmological simulation of the evolution of the dark matter halos in which galaxies form. These halos provide the scaffolding on which the theory builds the early star-forming phase of galaxy evolution before quenching.

The central ideas in the paper emerged from analyses of CANDELS data and first struck Faber about four years ago. It suddenly leaped out at me, and I realized if we put all these things togetherif galaxies had a simple trajectory in radius versus mass, and if black hole energy needs to overcome halo binding energyit can explain all these slanted boundaries in the structural diagrams of galaxies, she said.

At the time, Faber was making frequent trips to China, where she has been involved in research collaborations and other activities. She was a visiting professor at Shanghai Normal University, where she met first author Zhu Chen. Chen came to UC Santa Cruz in 2017 as a visiting researcher and began working with Faber to develop these ideas about galaxy quenching.

She is mathematically very good, better than me, and she did all of the calculations for this paper, Faber said.

Faber also credited her longtime collaborator David Koo, UCSC professor emeritus of astronomy and astrophysics, for first focusing attention on the central densities of galaxies as a key to the growth of central black holes.

Among the puzzles explained by this new model is a striking difference between our Milky Way galaxy and its very similar neighbor Andromeda. The Milky Way and Andromeda have almost the same stellar mass, but Andromedas black hole is almost 50 times bigger than the Milky Ways, Faber said. The idea that black holes grow a lot in the green valley goes a long way toward explaining this mystery. The Milky Way is just entering the green valley and its black hole is still small, whereas Andromeda is just exiting so its black hole has grown much bigger, and it is also more quenched than the Milky Way.

Reference: Quenching as a Contest between Galaxy Halos and Their Central Black Holes by Zhu Chen, S. M. Faber, David C. Koo, Rachel S. Somerville, Joel R. Primack, Avishai Dekel, Aldo Rodrguez-Puebla, Yicheng Guo, Guillermo Barro, Dale D. Kocevski, A. van der Wel, Joanna Woo, Eric F. Bell, Jerome J. Fang, Henry C. Ferguson, Mauro Giavalisco, Marc Huertas-Company, Fangzhou Jiang, Susan Kassin, Lin Lin, F. S. Liu, Yifei Luo, Zhijian Luo, Camilla Pacifici, Viraj Pandya, Samir Salim, Chenggang Shu, Sandro Tacchella, Bryan A. Terrazas and Hassen M. Yesuf, 7 July 2020, Astrophysical Journal.DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/ab9633

In addition to Faber, Chen, Koo, and Primack, the coauthors of the paper include researchers at some two dozen institutions in seven countries. This work was funded by grants from NASA and the National Science Foundation.

Link:

How Galaxies Die: New Insights Into Galaxy Halos, Black Holes, and Quenching of Star Formation - SciTechDaily

An open letter to Australia’s Education Minister Dan Tehan signed by 73 senior professors – The Conversation AU

Posted on by

This open letter is written in response to the Australian governments proposed reforms to the university sector, announced by Education Minister Dan Tehan on June 19, 2020. The so-called job-ready graduates package seeks to make courses in areas such as science, maths and teaching cheaper to encourage more students to get degrees in what the government sees to be job-growth areas. By contrast, fees for many humanities courses will more than double.

Read more: Fee cuts for nursing and teaching but big hikes for law and humanities in package expanding university places

Dear Minister,

We write regarding the recently proposed changes to Australian higher education funding. We welcome the much-needed intent to boost domestic student enrolments. But the complicated and inconsistent nature of the funding changes and the intent to identify work-relevant qualifications risk further undermining the nations fourth largest export industry at a time the Australian economy can ill afford it.

As laureate researchers spanning a wide range of disciplines in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), humanities, arts and social sciences (HASS) and other fields, we believe this proposal will bring severe negative national consequences for future university training. It is likely to have the unintentional effect of amplifying inequities in higher education, and will work against the very economic goals it is trying to achieve.

Successive Australian governments have refrained from picking winners in industry, but here we see that approach applied to education precisely at a time when future needs are becoming more heterogeneous and unpredictable.

Bracketing the humanities and social sciences as a category deemed less useful for future employment flies in the face of what we see among leaders in both politics and business. More Liberal frontbenchers, for instance, have received an arts degree than studied economics.

Business leader Jennifer Westacott, Chief Executive of the Business Council of Australia, emphasises the importance of a humanities education and Deloitte Access Economics stresses its value in teaching students to ask innovative questions, think critically for themselves, explain what they think, form ethical constructs and communicate flexibly across a range of perspectives.

Read more: If the government listened to business leaders, they would encourage humanities education, not pull funds from it

The proposed changes reflect an outdated view of both HASS and STEM. Each is concerned with advancing our understanding of the world and providing the intellectual framework and critical thinking skills needed to acquire that understanding.

These will be critical for creating a flexible, responsive workforce in an increasingly diverse economy. In the face of our uncertainty about where future needs will lie, what we can be sure of is that interdisciplinary training will become ever more important.

It is unhealthy for a democratic and inclusive society to make some fields the province of those who can pay more for them.

Different pricing is unhealthy for every academic field: the best outcomes grow from an optimal match between disciplines and the talents and interests of those who want to study them, undistorted by arbitrary price signals.

Even within its own premises, many of the subjects it claims to promote (such as maths) will suffer severe cuts. Universities may be discouraged from offering such subjects, or boost their offerings in fields that are cheaper to teach, to cross-subsidise the more expensive courses.

The recently floated patch of an integrity unit to prevent this would simply increase regulatory burdens and consume resources better spent directly on education.

Complex sets of discipline categories greatly reduce the transparency and efficiency of the system. Energy will needlessly be diverted into defining subjects into or out of categories favoured or disfavoured by the funding model.

Universities need to be able to plan intelligently, delivering world-class education and training in an uncertain 21st century. Well-intended but counter-productive distortions in the funding model will not help.

The national economic impacts of these decisions have not been convincingly worked through.

A forward-looking policy of higher-education funding thus needs to do three things:

1. Avoid complex different policies

These will necessitate increased regulation, while failing to achieve either the diversion of student numbers that are sought, or the social and technological goal of better preparing our students for the future.

The simplest way to achieve this is to reinstate a flat HECS rate a simple way to optimise the match between talent, interest and enrolment without distortions from family wealth, easy to administer, and immune from highly uncertain guesses about future trends.

2. Increase funding to universities in real terms

This will assure the growth in quality and capacity of one of Australias transformative success stories and its fourth greatest export. This should be a real increase, not funded from an arbitrary subset of future students at the outset of their careers in a time of great uncertainty.

We appreciate that the COVID-19 epidemic has put unprecedented pressures on the budget, but the need for greater support to our universities is more necessary than ever during this present time of huge financial stress, caused by the plummeting income of overseas students. Wise investment now will pay huge dividends later in the economic, scientific, social and cultural growth of the nation.

3. Integrate the systems for funding university and vocational education, which have long drifted apart

This will ensure every school-leaver has access to the level of training they need for a successful career. What is really needed is not a vocational approach to university education but a more systematic and thoughtful approach to vocational education.

In the modern economy, all kinds of work, including trades, require a broader range of skills than in the past, including communications and IT skills. We have much to learn here from the success of countries like Germany in integrating these two systems of higher education.

We urge this current piece of legislation be shelved in its current form, and replaced by one that has been drafted after proper consultation with a range of experts in the sector who are able to devise an optimal mechanism for building this vital part of our societys future.

Yours sincerely,

Professor Nicholas Evans, School of Culture, History and Language, Australian National University

Professor Chris Turney, Faculty of Science, University of New South Wales

Professor Joy Damousi, President, Australian Academy of the Humanities

Professor Christine Beveridge, School of Biological Sciences, University of Queensland

Professor John Quiggin, School of Economics, University of Queensland

Professor Matthew England, Climate Change Research Centre, The University of New South Wales

Professor Mathai Varghese, Mathematical Sciences, The University of Adelaide

Professor Sue O'Connor, Archaeology and Natural History, The Australian National

Professor Barry Brook, School of Biological Sciences, University of Tasmania

Professor Bostjan Kobe, School of Chemistry and Molecular Biosciences, University of Queensland

Professor Michael Bird, College of Science & Engineering, James Cook University

Professor Ben Andrews, Mathematical Sciences Institute, Australian National University

Professor Ian Reid, School of Computer Science, University of Adelaide

Professor Trevor J McDougall, School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of New South Wales

Professor Tamara Davis, School of Mathematics and Physics, University of Queensland

Professor Steven Sherwood, Climate Change Research Centre, University of New South Wales

Professor Peter Goodyear, Centre for Research on Learning and Innovation, The University of Sydney

Professor Madeleine JH van Oppen, Institute of Marine Science, The University of Melbourne

Professor Christopher Barner-Kowollik, School of Chemistry &Physics, Queensland University of Technology

Professor Hong Hao, Centre for Infrastructural Monitoring and Protection, Curtin University

Professor Paul S.C. Tacon, Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research, Griffith University

Professor Matthew Bailes, Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing, Swinburne University of Technology

Professor Warwick Anderson, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Sydney

Professor Malcolm McCulloch, Oceans Institute, The University of Western Australia

Professor Lynette Russell, Monash Indigenous Studies Centre, Monash University

Professor Ping Koy Lam, Research School of Physics, The Australian National University

Professor Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald, College of Arts, Society & Education, James Cook University

Professor Chennupati Jagadish, Research School of Physics, Australian National University

Professor Margaret Jolly, School of Culture, History and Language, The Australian National University

Professor Justin Marshall, Queensland Brain Institute, University of Queensland

Professor Jason Mattingley, Queensland Brain Institute, The University of Queensland

Professor George Zhao, Faculty of Engineering,Architecture and Information Technology, The University of Queensland

Professor John Dryzek, Institute for Governance & Policy Analysis, University of Canberra

Professor Brad Sherman, School of Law, University of Queensland

Professor Richard G. Roberts, ARC Centre of Excellence for AustralianBiodiversity and Heritage, University of Wollongong

Professor Geoffrey Ian McFadden, School of BioSciences, University of Melbourne, University of Melbourne

Professor Peter Taylor, ARC Centre of Excellence for Mathematical andStatistical Frontiers, The University of Melbourne

Professor Belinda Medlyn Hawkesbury, Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment, Western Sydney University

Professor Fedor Sukochev, School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of New South Wales

Professor Michelle Coote, Research School of Chemistry, Australian National University

Professor Michael Tobar, Department of Physics, The University of Western Australia

Professor Hilary Charlesworth, Melboure Law School, The University of Melbourne

Professor Mark Finnane, School of Humanities, Languages and Social Science, Griffith University

Professor Katherine Demuth, Faculty of Medicine, Macquarie University

Professor Jolanda Jetten, School of Psychology, The University of Queensland

Professor Jon Barnett, Faculty of Science, Melbourne University

Professor Matthew Spriggs, College of Arts and Social Sciences, The Australian National University

Professor Kate Smith-Miles, School of Mathematics and Statistics, The University of Melbourne

Professor Shizhang Qiao, School of Chemical Engineering and Advanced Materials, The University of Adelaide

Professor Peter Visscher, Institute for Molecular Bioscience, The University of Queensland

Professor Zheng-Xiang, Faculty of Science and Engineering, Curtin University

Professor Toby Walsh, School of Computer Science & Engineering, UNSW Sydney

Professor Martina Stenzel, ARC Training Centre for Chemical Industries, University of New South Wales

Professor David James, School of Life and Environmental Science, University of Sydney

Professor Ross Buckley, School of Law, University of New South Wales

Professor Alex Haslam, School of Psychology, University of Queensland

Professor Stuart Wyithe, School of Physics, University of Melbourne

Professor Sara Dolnicar, Faculty of Business, The University of Queensland

Professor Lesley Head, School of Geography, University of Melbourne

Professor Glenda Sluga, Department of History, University of Sydney

Professor Ann McGrath, School of History, Australian National University

Professor Bernard Degnan, School of Biological Sciences, University of Queensland

Professor Philip Boyd, Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, University of Tasmania

Professor Richard Shine, Department of Biological Sciences, Macquarie University

Professor Loeske Kruuk, Research School of Biology, Australian National University

Professor Kaarin Anstey, ARC Centre of Excellence in Population Ageing Research, UNSW

Professor Paul Mulvaney, School of Chemistry, University of Melbourne

Professor Lianzhou Wang, School of Chemical Engineering, The University of Queensland

Professor Peter Waterhouse, Centre for Agriculture and the Bioeconomy, Queensland University of Technology

Professor George Willis, Mathematical and Physical Science, University of Newcastle

Read more from the original source:

An open letter to Australia's Education Minister Dan Tehan signed by 73 senior professors - The Conversation AU

Its Amazing to Me How Distinctly I Remember Each of These Women – Slate

Posted on by

When we started this project, our goal was to talk to as many of the women in Ruth Bader Ginsburgs Harvard Law School class as possible. My colleague Molly Olmstead and I spent months tracking down the ones who are still alive, and interviewing family members in depth about the women who have passed. But then Justice Ginsburg agreed to speak to us, too. And so in late January, just weeks before the court emptied and went remote, a few colleagues and I headed up the sweeping marble steps of the Supreme Court. While we waited, a pot of tea with a single cup on a saucer was placed on the table across from me. And then, a few minutes later, Justice Ginsburg sat down in front of it. This is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation, focused on her time at Harvard Law School almost 65 years agoand her memories of the nine other women in their class of 500-plus men.

Dahlia Lithwick: When we started this project, I think we thought the nine women in your class would clump together and be like a pack. I was remembering when I started at Stanford Law School, in 1992, thats kind of how it was. But based on my conversations with your classmates, it doesnt seem like that necessarily organically happened.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Well for me, I had no time to waste, because Jane was 14 months when I started. So my time was used very efficiently, for classes, for studying after class, then come home at 4 p.m. to take care of Jane. I didnt have time for any socializing, except on weekends. So the only person among the women, for a time, that I was close to was Jinnie Davis. And that continued after law school. Read about Jinnies life, and her memories of Justice Ginsburg.

She was in my section, and she was just a lovely person. She was a Christian Scientist. When Marty had cancer his third year, our second year, she visited him in the hospital a few times, and I was wondering how that would be for her, because I watched her once in class. She was sitting a couple of rows ahead of me and she cut her finger, she had a paper cut, and her finger was bleeding. And I wanted to go over and blot it for her, but she didnt, she just let it

Just bleed onto the desk?

Yeah.

And so you werent sure how she would be when Marty was in the hospital, because

Well, just reacting to a hospital.

Ive heard there was a real dividing line between the women in your class who came with children and spouses, and the women who didnt. Was that your experience, too?

Well, in my first year, I was the only one who was married and had a child. I think Carol, I think she got married. And Alice got married at the end of her first year. So my first year, I was the only married woman in the class. And the only mother, because Rhoda [who was married] took her first year at Penn, and then she was in our second year.

Your classmate Carol describes sitting on the steps and doing crossword puzzles, and she and Flora recalled cooking dinners for the men in law schoolit just seems like they were in a really different world than you were. Read Carols memories of Harvard Law School.

I think thats so. [There was something] called the Radcliffe cooking contest. [One male student] and his roommates decided theyd have a competition, and theyd have a different girl come and cook for them. And at the end of the year, theyd give a prize to the winner of the Radcliffe cooking contest.

Then some of the guys at the law school decided they would take up that idea, but they would use the women in the class instead of the Radcliffe girls.

And this was fun for the women?

I dont know.

There was, in those years, the Harvard Law Wives Club. So most of the women I knew were married to men mostly in Martys class. And I got invited to the Law Wives Association because I was a law wife. But that was to help the wives be supportive of their husbands who were engaged in this intense education at the law school.

Did you feel isolated? I mean, did you feel as though you were having a very singular experience that wasnt really comparable to the other women in your class?

No, I did not feel any lack of companionship. I had Marty, and the people that we socialized with were mainly in his class. And then I was just so engaged all the time, with either law school, or with Jane. I had no time to be lonely. I was just constantly engaged, and it was even more intense my second year, when Marty had cancer.

One thing that was really stunning to hear during these interviews was the way the women had such different paths to Harvard. I think when we undertook this project, we envisioned a bunch of singularly driven, ambitious women who said, Im going to go to law school. And as we talked to either the families or to the women themselves, it turned out that a lot of them were trailing a male law student. There wasnt as much, I think, agency as I expected. Im using the word trailing reluctantly, because I know you went in some measure to be with Marty. But I think I was surprised at how many of the women were following a man.

Yeah. I think an exception to that was Ellie Voss. That was such a tragedy. [Editors note: Eleanor Voss died in a motorized scooter accident in her last year at Harvard.] And you can imagine how a young man who was driving that motorcycle mustve felt. I mean, he eventually came to terms with it, and he married and I hope had a happy life. But I dont think Ellie Voss came to Harvard because she was following a boyfriend. BJ, I dont knowof all the women in the class, I was most impressed with her, because she had been both a model and an actuary. Read BJs story.A very unusual combination. Also, she dated a friend of mine in our class. He was in my study group, Herb Lobel. He went out with both BJ and with Jinnie Davis.

Can we talk about the famous Dean Erwin Griswold story, where the dean asked the women of Harvard Law School why they were there taking the place of a man? I only bring it up because Flora told us that she actually thought he was trying to be helpful to women.

He was trying, he was. Theres a book that you probably saw, its called Pinstripes and Pearls, by Judy Hope. And she has as an appendix on the budget, on what it was going to cost for women to come to Harvard Law School. The cost was fixing up a bathroom in Austin Hall, which, by the way, was always overheated. There was asbestos dripping from the ceiling before we knew that asbestos wasnt good for peoples health.

Anyway, [at the dinner], each of us had an escort. [The dean] arranged for somebody on the faculty to sit next to each of the women. And my escort was a very well-known Columbia Law School professor, Herb Wechsler.

Im told that the escorts, before they came to Griswolds home for dinner, went nearby to Judge [Calvert] Magruders house. Because the dean didnt serve any alcohol, they went there first. There were many good things about Dean Griswold, including his bravery in the McCarthy erain the book he wrote about the Fifth Amendment. But he didnt have a sense of humor, and because he had been a proponent of the admission of women, he wanted to assure the doubting Thomases on the faculty that these women were going to do something worthwhile with their law degrees. So he asked that question, Why are you here occupying a seat that could be held by a man?, because he wanted to be armed with stories from the women themselves, about how they plan to make use of their law degrees, and not just waste this wonderful education they would get.

He didnt have any sense that he was making the women feel uncomfortable about this. I dont know if Flora told you about her answer, but as I remember it, she said, Dean Griswold, there are X number of us. There are 500 of them. What better place to find a man? Read Floras memory of the dinner at Griswolds house.

Can you tell me a bit more about the escorts?

They were just to sit next to us at dinner, and sit next to us when we moved from the dining room to the living room. And [the dean] had the chairs arranged in a horseshoe. So, Herb Wechsler was sitting next to me. In those days I smoked, and Herb was a chain smoker. So I had the ashtray that we were sharing on my lap, and when I got up to say something all the cigarette butts went on the floor, in Griswolds living room. Oh, it was really one of those moments, when you wish you could have a trapdoor to fall through. So I mumbled something about my husband is in the second year of class, and I think its important for a wife to understand her husbands work.

If you could answer it again today in the fullness of knowledge, what would your answer be?

It wasnt a truthful answer when I gave it.

But Id say I went to law school because I wanted to study law. In fact, I took the LSAT before Marty did, although he was a year ahead of me.

There was a story I heard from several of the women that I have to say my jaw hit the floor. They described something called ladies day, where the women in the class had to answer all the questions, and even had to sing on the spot.

The professor notorious for ladies day was Barton Leach. My section, we had no ladies day.

I knew about [Leach] lining them up in the first row, and after ignoring them the whole semester, that one day concentrating all [the] attention [on them]. But I think my classmates were warned by the women in the class ahead, of what they could expect. This is a funny storywhen I was, years later, at Columbia, Billie Jean King had just won her match with Bobby Riggs. One of the professors announced with great glee, Tomorrow in honor of Billie Jean King, were going to celebrate ladies day. And he had no idea what the history of ladies day had been.

Was it deliberate hazing? Or was it meant to be funny? Both Carol and Flora remembered it, the singing, but they both laughed about it. And then after laughing about it, Flora said, That was so degrading. Read Floras recollection of ladies day.

Well there were episodes like that. We had as visitors two people wed been close to in the Army. And I brought the woman to class with me, Jill, and she, far from going to law school, she hadnt even gone to college. So [William] McCurdy, my contracts professor, calls on her, and I stood up and said, Shes my house guest. And he said, Any fool can answer that question. You answer it. And then I got up and told him that he was rude to my guest, and I would answer the question.

Really?

Yes. And he said something about Mrs. Ginsburg being a killjoy.

Did he give you a C-plus in contracts?

No.

Maybe the best teacher I ever had, my first year in law school, was Ben Kaplan. He never, never did anything to wound or offend. He was a master of the Socratic technique, but he always used it in a positive way. So a student would give an answer; he would rephrase it as in You mean

McCurdy was a typical Harvard professor at that time and liked to make students feel uncomfortable.

One of the things that we heard from Alice Vogels family was that she got on Law Review, and then got a letter, We dont have dorms for you. Its only the men who are arriving early who are going to get dorms, and theres no place for you to sleep. Read about Alices experience at Harvard.

The Law Review invitations went out at the end of the first year. So it wasnt a competition, it was just strictly on the basis of grades. Alice was getting married, or she had just gotten married. And she just turned it down, because of her husband.

The dormitory was something else. I had come from Cornell, where the girls had to live in the dorms. That was Cornells excuse for having a 4-to-1 ratiofour guys to every galbecause the boys could live in town, but girls had to live in the dormitory. And I get to the Harvard Law School, and they had no room for the girls in the dorm. It didnt matter to me because I wasnt going to be in the dorm anyway. But that, that was one of the many ironies, that the girls needed to be protected, by being sheltered inside a dorm at Cornell. But at Harvard they had to find their own place to stay.

Another version of this was something we heard about Marilyn Rose: She wanted to be in the public defenders, a group at Harvard, and it was all male, and they were not going to let her in. And so, instead of trying to get herself in, she made sure that the women who came after her could be in the public defenders group. Read more about Marilyn Roses experience at Harvard.

And I think what Im trying to understand iswas that just a function of thats what you did if you couldnt get something, that you made sure the women who came after you got it?

I think you get that sense from Judy Hopes book too, that [the female students] benefited from the women in the class ahead of them. And in turn they wanted the women in the class behind them to have it easier. But most of this, it just came with the territory. We didnt even question it. I dont remember anyone asking to have a womens bathroom put in, in Langdell Hall. We just accepted thats the way it was. [Editors note: The family of Rhoda Solin Isselbacher actually recalled that Rhoda, as the law schools first pregnant student, once stood up in class to demand that the women be allowed to use the mens bathroom. Read that story here.]

And the same thing with the dormitories. They did have housing for married students. Marty had been in service for two years. So there are a number of people in his class who had been called into service at the tail end of the Korean War. And they were coming back to law school, and some of them lived in the apartments for married students. But none of their wives were attending law school.

We heard precious few stories of men who were great allies during that time. A lot of women, by the way, described Marty as a great ally but said they didnt have a lot of men around who were supporting them.

[There were] the two who tried to persuade Alice Vogel twice, at the end of her first year, end of her second year, [to join the Law Review]. John Winston and Frank Goodman. Frank ended up on the University of Pennsylvania law faculty, and he was married to Henry Friendlys daughter Joan Friendly. And John Winston, I dont know what he did, but hes still living, and hes living in New York. But they were very supportive of me, especially on the Law Review. Theyre both very funny fellows.

But then there was another type, there was someone who had been a year ahead of me at Cornell, who assured me that Harvard Law School was a very tough place, and I couldnt rely on a good memory to get me through. So there were those types that sort of resented the womens presence. But most of the people I mean for me, Harvard Law School was not a competitive place that second year. My second year, Martys third, when he was diagnosed with cancer, they rallied round us, his classmates, and they got him through that very trying year. And I had note takers in all of his classes, and members of his class came first to the hospital, and then to home to give him private tutorials.

Marty ended up having the best grades that he ever had in a semester. The semester was 15 weeks, I think he was in class for two weeks. But he had the best teachers, his classmates.

One of the most, Im sure, unsurprising things that Im going to tell you, is that all of these women had a really horrendous time getting jobs. And that the same doors that were closed to you were closed to them, and in many ways their stories track yours. Flora said something that I thought was sweet and wanted you to hear it: She said even after graduation and her father was telling her, Dont even bother to get a law job. Youre never going to get one. Find something else. She would look at you and say, Well, if Ruth Ginsburg cant get a job, then Im going to keep trying. She used you as her kind of marker of, Im not going to give up because this is systemic. She was using the fact that you were struggling to double down her effort. Read more about Floras attempt to get her first job.

There was one woman in Martys class, Nancy Boxley, later Tepper. She did get a job. She got a job with Whitney North Seymours firm. All through law school, I thought that Nancy Boxley from Virginia was in the fox-hunting crowd. It turned out that she was Jewish. She disguised who she was, and thats how she did get a job with a Wall Street firm. But for me, there wasnt a single firm in New York two called me back, I came down to have the interviews, but in the end

And one of the reasons was they were concerned about how their wives would feel about a man working closely with a woman. And it amazed me, because they all had women secretaries, but thats just the way it was.

Now Jerry Gunther [who taught me at Columbia Law School] tells a story that I was not aware of until he wrote it in the Hawaii Law Review. He said when he was in charge of clerkships for Columbia students, that he called every judge in Southern District, all the 2nd Circuit judges. And then he thought he had a good prospect, and that was Judge [Edmund] Palmieri, who had been a Columbia undergraduate and a Columbia Law School graduate. And as Jerry told the story, he said, Give her a chance, and if she doesnt work out, theres a young man in her class whos with a downtown firm, and hell jump in and take over. But if you wont give her a chance, then I will never recommend another Columbia clerk to you.

I thought all along that Palmieri took a chance on me, because he had two daughters, and he was envisioning how he would want the world to be for his daughters. It was not the case. In later years, he did become a big champion of womens opportunities. One of his daughters became a doctor, and he was very incensed about the discrimination that she was encountering, the uncompromising hours she had to work.

But anyway, I went through the clerkship thinking thats why Judge Palmieri took me on. But as Jerry tells the story, Palmieri wasnt resistant to having a woman as a clerk. He had already had one, but he was concerned about Jane, that he might need me and she might be sick.

There were so many women who described just being unbelievably proud of you. Carol talked about it. Its clear you represent so much that she is so proud of, and she sees it as her achievement too. Read more about Carol, who, like Justice Ginsburg, is still a practicing judge.

And then there were some who were, I think, frankly a little jealous. Who felt as though you had support from Marty, you had a loving spouse who put you and your career first. And if theyd had some of those breaks, they may have had a very different life. It was just such a complicated story about what we thought was a simple story of sisterhood, and support, and mutual admiration. While you were in it, did you ever have that sense, that this was a little bit fraught? That it was both competitive and supportive, and it was not uncomplicated?

Well, as I said, I had no time to think about emotions. Rhoda SolinI had no idea that she was ever jealous of me. I mean, that surprised me when you told me that. [Editors note: Prior to the interview, Slate sent Ginsburg some examples of what we had learned about her classmates. Read more about Rhodas familys memories of the relationship between the two women.]

For the women in my class and in Martys class, it was getting that first job that was powerfully hard. If the woman got her foot in the door, she did the job very well, and the second job was not the same hurdle.

What youre finding is these are not flaming feminists, these women, and its just pretty much the same in a book that I hope will before much longer see the light of day. [Former Berkeley Law Dean] Herma Hill Kay wrote many biographies of the 14 women in law teaching across the country who preceded her. She was the 15th woman on any law faculty. And when she died, I think she died in 2017, that manuscript got lost. And I dont know the full story of why it wasnt published earlier, but I was at Berkeley in September, and I encouraged Dean [Erwin] Chemerinskythey were having a celebration of herand I said, if you really want to celebrate her, youll see that her book is published. She spent 10 years writing it, and it tells the story of each of these women, and they have every kind of personality, some shy, some bold.

So there wasnt a type that became the first woman. When I transferred to Columbia, that class was considerably smaller than Harvard. But it had 12 women, including one who has been my friend for life, Nina Appel, who was dean of Loyola Chicago Law School for many years.

The women in my Harvard class I stayed in touch with Jinnie Nordin for many years. In fact, the summer after my second year, we had found an apartment across the street from the place where [Columbia] Law School is now, but we were going to live with Martys parents for the summer. So Jinnie was living in our apartment then. Shes the only one in the class that I stayed in touch with. I heard about Flora every now and then.

Floras a hoot. At the very end of her interview, I said, What should we be telling men? And she said, I just wish men were better. And that was very simple for her. But I love what youre saying, which is some of you were not flaming feminists, and some of you were just having fun, and some of you have gone on to have illustrious careers, and some have not. And that this wasnt a feminist project.

Right.

I interviewed you a couple of years ago, when Glamour made you woman of the year. And I asked, What do you do about young women who are coming up, who look at your life as though its a million years ago, and couldnt happen again? And yet theyre still facing glass ceilings at law firms, and theyre limited in some way. Not limited the way your life was, but limited opportunities and deep frustration about work-life balance. And I feel as though if I were a 1L listening to your story, it would seem like science fiction, so far away and so hard to relate to. And yet, I wonder if you can tell me the parts of what you were seeing at Harvard that are still urgently important for women to focus on.

Its an unconscious bias. Its the expectation. You have a lowered expectation when you hear a woman speaking, I think that still goes on. That instinctively when a man speaks, he will be listened to, where people will not expect the woman to say anything of value. But all of the women in my generation have had, time and again, that experience where you say something at a meeting, and nobody makes anything of it. And maybe half an hour later, a man makes the identical point, and people react to it and say, Good idea. That, I think, is a problem that persists. Some of it is getting over unconscious bias by becoming conscious of it, which I thought Ive told the story about the symphony orchestra many times. People were so sure that they could tell the difference between a woman playing and a man, and when put to the test, when blindfolded, they could not.

Willis Reese was a law professor at Columbia Law School. And he said, theres one thing he regrets about the old days. He said when the class was moving slowly, and you wanted to get a crisp right answer, You called on a woman. She was always prepared. And nowadays, he said, theres no difference, the women are as unprepared as the men.

Thats progress.

One thing that I did feel in law school was that if I flubbed, that I would be bringing down my entire sex. That you werent just failing for yourself, but people would say, Well, I did expect it of a woman. Its like they would say about a woman driver. So I was determined not to leave that impression.

Read the full stories of the lives of each of the nine other women in Justice Ginsburgs Harvard Law class here. Listen to our special audio series, The Class of RBG,hereor below.

See the original post:

Its Amazing to Me How Distinctly I Remember Each of These Women - Slate

What the pandemic can teach the climate movement – Fast Company

Posted on by

Politicians around the country have taken swift action to address the COVID-19 pandemic. But their all-hands-on-deck reactions have also exasperated climate change activists, who can only dream of the same urgency being applied to the arguably more deadly and far-reaching climate crisis.

But the pandemic does have something useful to teach the climate movement: How the courts might respond to intrusive but life-saving interventions.

Courts have on occasion enabled massive changes in societal structure before politicians were ready to, including school desegregation in Brown v. Board of Education and the more recent ruling on marriage equality. Moreover, judicial decisions have strength: Once legal precedent is established, it can be used by attorneys to shape subsequent cases. Furthermore, that precedent is binding on all courts lower than the deciding court, and highly persuasive to courts in other jurisdictions.

For these reasons, climate attorneys should be paying special attention to three distinct types of COVID-19 lawsuits, which could make the (literal) case for bolder action on climate.

First, the failure-to-protect suits that claim the government isnt doing its job in protecting the most vulnerable. Second, the misinformation suits that claim that media outlets are lying to the public about COVID-19 facts. And third, takings suits that claim government shutdowns are robbing people of property rights without just compensation.

Over the last two months, numerous pandemic-related lawsuits have been filed by civil libertarians and prison reform advocates against correctional authorities all over the country, from Los Angeles County to Kentucky to Connecticut. These suits seek the release of certain incarcerated persons from prisons to reduce their risk of contracting COVID-19. They have been filed on behalf of people held in jails on small bonds for nonviolent crimes, those to be released imminently from prison, and people at high risk of life-threatening complications, including those with autoimmune conditions and the elderly. These plaintiffs generally argue that deliberately putting them at risk of certain, but avoidable, bodily harm violates their Constitutional rights.

The pandemic has something useful to teach the climate movement: How the courts might respond to intrusive but life-saving interventions.

The theory that governments have failed to protect people from known threats has been usedunsuccessfully so farin climate suits. The most notable case is Juliana v. United States, where the plaintiffsmostly childrenclaimed that the federal government failed to protect them against climate change, despite knowing of its dangers. Indeed, the history of warning signs about a warming planet goes back more than a centuryfar longer than we have known of the dangers of COVID-19. Yet so far, the Juliana plaintiffs have failed: The Ninth Circuit recently dismissed their suit. (They have appealed.)

If any COVID-19 lawsuits are successful, the legal precedent created may support a more generalized type-of-harm claim for climate activists in the future.

The theory that misinformation disseminated by news media is actionable in court should also be watched by climate attorneys.

One pandemic-related suit that has received national attention is a complaint brought by a nonprofit against Fox News and several other defendants in Washington state court. The nonprofit alleges that, by misleading viewers about the true impact of the deadly virus, Fox News violated the states consumer protection act and committed the tort of outrage.

Despite overwhelming consensus among scientists that humans are the leading cause of climate change, news outlets often have displayed intentional or reckless disregard for the facts. If courts find disregard for COVID-19 facts to be actionable, perhaps the media will be held to a higher standard and climate activists can combat the denialism that persistently plagues the climate debate.

Several takings suits already have been filed against local and state governments. The plaintiffs include business owners closed by public orders and employees who have lost their jobs as a result. They argue that by forcing businesses to close to slow the spread of COVID-19, governments have violated the takings clause of the 5th Amendment.

Generally speaking, the Fifth Amendment requires governments to compensate those whose property has been taken for public use. This includes not just eminent domain but also regulatory takings. But courts have long held that if a government regulates to prevent a public nuisancefor instance, the spread of a deadly and fast-moving disease compensation will not be required.

So, barring novel arguments that resonate with courts, COVID-19 takings challenges will be unsuccessful. Yet they are still worth watching. If courts reject longstanding interpretations of the 5th Amendment and allow the plaintiffs to obtain compensation for the economic disruptions that they have faced, its time to worry.

In the future, climate activists are near-certain to need courts to uphold far-reaching actions needed to reduce carbon emissions into the atmosphere. These actions could include the shutdown of entire industries, such as fossil fuels or beef cattle, or production bans on certain products, such as gas-guzzling SUVs. Climate action might also involve limitations on energy or water consumption, which could be disruptive to our daily lives. As we have been hearing for decades from scientists, the longer we wait to take action, the more extreme future measures will have to be to save humankind.

We have all learned from the pandemic that changes in behavior can have dramatic and life-saving effects. We have bent the curve of COVID-19 infections, and our stay-at-home strategy appears to have worked, saving tens of thousands of lives. When it comes to climate action, though, individual changes in behavior may not be enough. We may need to turn to the courts. And its important to know how the courts will respond to government action (or inaction) when that time comes.

Sara C. Bronin is a law professor who runs the UConn Center for Energy & Environmental Law. An extended version of this essay was published in the Stanford Law Review Online.

Go here to see the original:

What the pandemic can teach the climate movement - Fast Company

This Century Will See Massive Shifts in the Global Population, Economy, and Power Structure – Singularity Hub

Posted on by

A lot of the predictions we hear about the future involve a hot, crowded planet, one where we need some serious science to figure out how to feed everyone and control rising global temperatures. The UNs population forecast of almost 10 billion people by 2050 is widely quoted, and with it has come much conjecture about what such a world will look like. Where will all those people live? What kind of jobs will they have? What will they eat?

But before we invest too much into preparing for an impending population boom, we should consider some factors that, though often overlooked, could have a massive impact on the worlds population 20, 30, and even 80 years from now. A paper published this week in The Lancet explores the impact on population of factors like fertility, mortality, and migration, and details potential deviations from a heavily-populated future Earth.

On top of forecasting the populations of 195 countries, the study looked at age demographics and the impact they could have on national economies and the global power structure.

Continued global population growth through the century is no longer the most likely trajectory for the worlds population, said the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) Director Dr. Christopher Murray, who led the research. This study provides governments of all countries an opportunity to start rethinking their policies on migration, workforces, and economic development to address the challenges presented by demographic change.

Here are some of the papers key findings, and what they could mean for the future of our countries, economies, and planet.

The study predicts that the global population will peak at around 9.7 billion, but not until 2064. By the end of the century in 2100, that number will plummet by almost a billion people, to 8.8 billion.

Its a pretty huge fluctuation in 35 years time, especially barring events that would take out a big chunk of people at once, like world wars, natural disasters, or pandemics. According to the research, though, 23 countries will see their populations shrink by more than half, including Japan, Thailand, Italy, and Spain.

The US would reach its projected peak of 364 million people in 2062, then fall to 336 million by 2100. This would make the US the worlds fourth most populous country after India, Nigeria, and China, in that order, followed by Pakistan in fifth place. Chinas population is expected to shrink to 732 million by 2100, while Nigerias is set to explode, more than tripling from its current 206 million to 791 million by 2100. Sub-Saharan Africas total population is also forecast to triple, reaching 3.07 billion by 2100.

The percentage of a countrys population thats of working agedefined by the OECD as 15 to 64has a significant impact on its economy. Its part of why China was able to spur such a massive change in its GDP and poverty rates in just 30 years; high birth rates before the countrys one-child policy meant the opening of Chinas economy coincided perfectly with a huge working-age population. Its also why Japans aging population could be called a demographic time bomb.

The IHME study predicts major shifts in the global age structure, with far more old than young people by 2100; it estimates therell be 2.37 billion people over 65 and only 1.7 billion under 20. Moreover, the countries with the most young people will be those that are currently poorer, and their large working-age populations should accelerate their GDP growth.

IHME Professor Stein Emil Vollset, first author of the paper, said, Our findings suggest that the decline in the numbers of working-age adults alone will reduce GDP growth rates that could result in major shifts in global economic power by the centurys end.

At the moment, tensions between China and the West seem to be mounting, with multiple countries recently moving to ban Chinese companies like Huawei and TikTok; meanwhile, China is steadily advancing in technologies like AI and genetic engineering. The US and China are, in a sense, vying for global dominance, and the international leadership vacuum left by the current US administrations foreign policy isnt helping.

The study predicts China will overtake the US economically by 2035, but if the US maintains a liberal immigration policy, it will go back to having the worlds biggest economy by 2098.

The emphasis on immigration as an economic bolster here is critical. Countries that promote liberal immigration, the paper says, are better able to maintain their population size and support economic growth, even in the face of declining fertility rates.

For high-income countries with below-replacement fertility rates, the best solutions for sustaining current population levels, economic growth, and geopolitical security are open immigration policies and social policies supportive of families having their desired number of children, said Murray.

Its crucial, though, that countries put womens rights, education, and healthcare ahead of population growth; we already saw what happens when a government tries to force women to have as many children as possible, and it wasnt pretty.

According to the paper, the UN uses trends from the past to predict how fertility and mortality will evolve across countries in the future. But it leaves out one huge influencer: the fact that theres not only room for improvement, but improvement is likely.

Though it may not seem like it right nowCovid-19 has thrown a big wrench in all kinds of statistics regarding both the present and the futurehuman well-being has been on a steady upward trajectory for the past couple decades. Infant and maternal mortality are down. Life expectancy is up, and gender equality is progressing. The widespread dissemination of technologies like smartphones, combined with government policies aimed at helping the most vulnerable, are lifting people out of poverty.

These trends are likely to continue and even accelerate, and as further gains are made in gender equality and access to education, one of the biggest knock-on effects well see is fewer babies.

At present, women in poor countries are far more likely than women in rich countries to start having babies young, and to have a lot of them. This is due to cultural factors, like marrying young, as well as lack of education and access to contraceptives. The IHME research accounted for the likelihood that women will continue to have greater access to education and reproductive health services, and as a result will delay childbirth and have fewer kids.

The difference between this studys projections and UN forecasts, then, come mainly from the associated decline in fertility rates. The team predicts that in sub-Saharan Africa there will be 702 million fewer people by 2100 than UN forecasts predict, and over 1 billion fewer in south and southeast Asia.

Despite advances in technology that include bigger agricultural yields, cheaper manufacturing, and closely-linked global supply chains, the resources available to us do have a limit, and fewer people means more resources per person.

Looking again to Chinas example, the country was in part able to achieve its astounding economic growth and decline in extreme poverty due to its one-child policy. The Chinese population grew just 38 percent from 1980 to 2013, while Indias grew by 84 percent and Sub-Saharan Africas by 147 percent in the same time period. Fewer mouths to feed means more food per mouth, more wealth per capita, and more people having their needs met.

This applies on a global scale, too, and the papers authors point out that their forecasts have positive implications for the environment, climate change, and food productionthough they acknowledge the predictions could have negative implications for labor forces, economic growth, and social support systems in the countries with the biggest fertility declines.

Humans are pretty good at adapting, though. Whether learning to stay inside for three months straight to curb the spread of a disease or figuring out how to cope with a smaller working-age population, odds are, well manage. A lot can change between now and the year 2100, but from our current vantage point, having fewer than 10 billion people on Earth doesnt sound too bad.

Image Credit: Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

See the original post here:

This Century Will See Massive Shifts in the Global Population, Economy, and Power Structure - Singularity Hub

Tesla Q2 Earnings Call On July 22 Heres The Best Way To Watch It (Not Just Listen) – CleanTechnica

Posted on by

Published on July 20th, 2020 | by Chanan Bos

Tesla has announced that its earnings call for shareholders will take place on July 22 at 2:30pm PST/5:30pm EST. While it might not be the most important investor call in the history of Tesla for the success of its mission, it for sure could be considered the most important investor call in Teslas history in terms of the stock market, as the outcome could decide whether Tesla enters the S&P 500.

As always, CleanTechnica will be there to stream it live with all the bells and whistles you have come to expect from our previous livestreams, and maybe even some new ones. Here is the link to our livestream, and its also embedded below. Just make sure to click that Set reminder button, and if you havent already subscribed to our channel, we recommend it. We will also be publishing an article tomorrow with all the analysts that might show up on the call, so keep an eye out for that, as its a critical report for anyone who owns shares or is interested in the company, and no one else publishes anything comparable.

Tags: Tesla, Tesla financials, Tesla S&P 500, Tesla stock

Chanan Bos Chanan grew up in a multicultural, multi-lingual environment that often gives him a unique perspective on a variety of topics. He is always in thought about big picture topics like AI, quantum physics, philosophy, Universal Basic Income, climate change, sci-fi concepts like the singularity, misinformation, and the list goes on. Currently, he is studying creative media & technology but already has diplomas in environmental sciences as well as business & management. His goal is to discourage linear thinking, bias, and confirmation bias whilst encouraging out-of-the-box thinking and helping people understand exponential progress. Chanan is very worried about his future and the future of humanity. That is why he has a tremendous admiration for Elon Musk and his companies, foremost because of their missions, philosophy, and intent to help humanity and its future. He sees Tesla as one of the few companies that can help us save ourselves from climate change.

Read more here:

Tesla Q2 Earnings Call On July 22 Heres The Best Way To Watch It (Not Just Listen) - CleanTechnica

Grab These Cotton Bra Packs Because Owning One Is Never Enough – NDTV Swirlster

Posted on by

You won't regret adding these bras to your life

Adding to the essentials in your wardrobe is never done in singularity. You can never own only one t-shirt or pair of jeans. The same goes with cotton bras. They are worn day in and day out, so it's only natural for you to own them in pairs, triplets or even more. Cotton is a breathable fabric for lingerie and when you find a bra that's comfortable and supportive enough, what should you do? Buy an entire pack of them, of course. That way, you can ensure your lingerie collection is filled with pieces that work well for you.

Grab these cotton bra packs right away - you'll regret it if you don't.

The bras included in this 6-piece set are made of poly cotton material, do not have padding or wires and come in 6 muted solid toned shades of oranges, browns and purples.

The bra pack of 3 pieces are seamless, non-wired and made of stretchable cotton fabric in pink, blue and grey.

The pack of 3 cotton sports bras have a camisole pattern with narrow straps in front and cutout horizontal strap designbehind.

The pack includes 6 bras of hosiery cotton material. They come in a mix of colour blocked shades with a contrasting panel below the cup and S-shaped adjustable straps.

Read the original:

Grab These Cotton Bra Packs Because Owning One Is Never Enough - NDTV Swirlster

Paul Andersen: ‘Beyond the wall of the unreal city ‘ – Aspen Times

Posted on by

A twig snaps in the dark woods near my camp. In the stillness of a calm night in the wilderness, its as loud as a gunshot. My ears are attuned to the slightest sound.

Something scratches around in the duff near the fire ring. Wavelets gently lap the shore of the lake. A faint whisper of a breeze stirs the spruce tops. Im fully in the moment and appreciate Ed Abbeys Nature Prayer.

Beyond the wall of the unreal city, beyond the security fences topped with barbed wire, beyond the asphalt belting of the superhighways, beyond the cemented backsides of our temporarily stopped and mutilated rivers, beyond the rage of lies that poisons the air

I am there, in Abbeys sacred place, alone and away from it all. I have found what Ed prescribes: the true world of the deserts, the mountains, the forests, the islands, the shores, the open plains. Go there. Be there. Walk gently and quietly deep within it.

Such was my goal in setting off last week from a trail head half an hour drive from my home on a three-day wilderness solo where Abbey set the tone.

May your trails be dim, lonesome, stony, narrow, winding and slightly uphill. May Gods dog serenade your campfire, may the rattlesnake and the screech owl amuse your reverie. May the Great Sun dazzle your eyes by day and the great Bear watch over you by night.

I dont see anyone for three days, yet I have plenty of company with my restive mind. In stillness, the brimming subconscious issues a flood of thoughts that bubble up randomly. Solitude affords communion with something bigger, as Thoreau discovered at Walden Pond: How could I be lonely; is not our planet part of the Milky Way?

John Muir became an accomplished soloist during his thousand-mile walk. Muir exulted while clinging ant-like to the swaying top of a 100-foot tree during a raging storm. He displayed his singularity by dancing a jig before President Teddy Roosevelt on the rim of Yosemite Valley after they had ignited a tall snag into a tower of flame.

Epiphanies of the ages have been instilled in wilderness through Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, Elijah. Each had a distinctly personal relationship with solitude in the most profound sense, to which I humbly aspire.

My campfire is the burning bush. My mystic sprites buzz about me in the form of mosquitoes. My animal spirit is in the guise a chattering squirrel scolding this wayward member of the human race.

The rising trout make circles on the lake and remind me of the food chain: Mosquitoes eat me. Trout eat mosquitoes. I eat trout caught with my fly rod. A complete cycle.

I dont fish for fun; I fish for food. As two rainbows simmer in my pan, I give thanks, not to the bounty of nature, but to the fish and game folks who stocked the lake that morning while I ascended the high ridge above the lake. From the tundra, I watched their low-flying plane execute a bombing run with a live slurry of fingerlings.

My ridge hike takes me to a 13,000-foot knob with a 360-view that encompasses one-quarter of Colorados Fourteeners. After a scramble down a couloir to the tundra basin, I rest in the shade of a krummholz stand where I find a wad of wooly white down shed by a mountain goat. I press the soft wool to my nose for an earthy scent of the goat.

That night, I hear the snap of the twig. Within the flimsy shield of my tent I humbly offer myself to whatever night marauder visits my camp. Surrender comes from trusting the benignity of Mother Nature. As her loving son, Im in a place thats far safer than the tumultuous and volatile human world against which Abbey inveighed.

In the bright and sunny morning, I lean back against a log and compose bad poetry. I lift my gaze to watch the lake change complexion and texture as wind/light/shadow alter it from a smooth plate of green glass into corrugations of gray steel.

Im fully in the moment and alive!

Paul Andersens column appears on Mondays. He may be reached at andersen@rof.net.

Go here to see the original:

Paul Andersen: 'Beyond the wall of the unreal city ' - Aspen Times

Evolution (2001) – IMDb

Posted on by

2 nominations. See more awards Learn more More Like This

Adventure | Comedy | Sci-Fi

The alumni cast of a space opera television series have to play their roles as the real thing when an alien race needs their help. However, they also have to defend both Earth and the alien race from a reptilian warlord.

Director:Dean Parisot

Stars:Tim Allen,Sigourney Weaver,Alan Rickman

Adventure | Comedy | Sci-Fi

Mere seconds before the Earth is to be demolished by an alien construction crew, journeyman Arthur Dent is swept off the planet by his friend Ford Prefect, a researcher penning a new edition of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy."

Director:Garth Jennings

Stars:Martin Freeman,Yasiin Bey,Sam Rockwell

Comedy | Fantasy

Hopeless dweeb Elliot Richards is granted seven wishes by the Devil to snare Allison, the girl of his dreams, in exchange for his soul.

Director:Harold Ramis

Stars:Brendan Fraser,Elizabeth Hurley,Frances O'Connor

Action | Adventure | Sci-Fi

Hoping to alter the events of the past, a 19th century inventor instead travels 800,000 years into the future, where he finds humankind divided into two warring races.

Director:Simon Wells

Stars:Guy Pearce,Yancey Arias,Mark Addy

Action | Comedy | Fantasy

A group of inept amateur superheroes must try to save the day when a supervillain threatens to destroy a major superhero and the city.

Director:Kinka Usher

Stars:Ben Stiller,Janeane Garofalo,William H. Macy

Comedy | Sci-Fi

Earth is invaded by Martians with unbeatable weapons and a cruel sense of humor.

Director:Tim Burton

Stars:Jack Nicholson,Pierce Brosnan,Sarah Jessica Parker

Comedy | Mystery | Sci-Fi

Two potheads wake up after a night of partying and cannot remember where they parked their car.

Director:Danny Leiner

Stars:Ashton Kutcher,Seann William Scott,Jennifer Garner

Adventure | Comedy | Sci-Fi

A star pilot and his sidekick must come to the rescue of a Princess and save the galaxy from a ruthless race of beings known as Spaceballs.

Director:Mel Brooks

Stars:Mel Brooks,John Candy,Rick Moranis

Action | Comedy | Fantasy

The discovery of a massive river of ectoplasm and a resurgence of spectral activity allows the staff of Ghostbusters to revive the business.

Director:Ivan Reitman

Stars:Bill Murray,Dan Aykroyd,Sigourney Weaver

Adventure | Comedy | Drama

An abortion clinic worker with a special heritage is called upon to save the existence of humanity from being negated by two renegade angels trying to exploit a loop-hole and reenter Heaven.

Director:Kevin Smith

Stars:Ben Affleck,Matt Damon,Linda Fiorentino

Action | Adventure | Comedy

A Las Vegas casino magnate, determined to find a new avenue for wagering, sets up a race for money.

Director:Jerry Zucker

Stars:Breckin Meyer,Amy Smart,Whoopi Goldberg

Adventure | Comedy | Sci-Fi

Private Joe Bauers, the definition of "average American", is selected by the Pentagon to be the guinea pig for a top-secret hibernation program. Forgotten, he awakes five centuries in the future. He discovers a society so incredibly dumbed down that he's easily the most intelligent person alive.

Director:Mike Judge

Stars:Luke Wilson,Maya Rudolph,Dax Shepard

When a meteorite falls to Earth two college professors, Dr. Ira Kane and Prof. Harry Phineas Block, are assigned the job of checking the site out. At the site, they discover organisms not of this planet. Soon the site is taken over by the government, forcing Ira and Harry to the side. As the new life-forms begin to evolve and start to get more and more dangerous, it's up to the two professors to save the planet. Written byFilmFanUK

Budget:$80,000,000 (estimated)

Opening Weekend USA: $13,408,351,10 June 2001

Gross USA: $38,345,494

Cumulative Worldwide Gross: $98,376,292

Runtime: 101 min

Aspect Ratio: 1.85 : 1

Looking for something to watch? Check out IMDb's "What to Watch" series to find out what's really worth watching.

Follow this link:

Evolution (2001) - IMDb

Darwin’s Theory of Evolution: Definition & Evidence | Live …

Posted on by

The theory of evolution by natural selection, first formulated in Darwin's book "On the Origin of Species" in 1859, is the process by which organisms change over time as a result of changes in heritable physical or behavioral traits. Changes that allow an organism to better adapt to its environment will help it survive and have more offspring.

Evolution by natural selection is one of the best substantiated theories in the history of science, supported by evidence from a wide variety of scientific disciplines, including paleontology, geology, genetics and developmental biology.

The theory has two main points, said Brian Richmond, curator of human origins at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. "All life on Earth is connected and related to each other," and this diversity of life is a product of "modifications of populations by natural selection, where some traits were favored in and environment over others," he said.

More simply put, the theory can be described as "descent with modification," said Briana Pobiner, an anthropologist and educator at the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., who specializes in the study of human origins.

The theory is sometimes described as "survival of the fittest," but that can be misleading, Pobiner said. Here, "fitness" refers not to an organism's strength or athletic ability, but rather the ability to survive and reproduce.

For example, a study on human evolution on 1,900 students, published online in the journal Personality and Individual Differences in October 2017, found that many people may have trouble finding a mate because of rapidly changing social technological advances that are evolving faster than humans. "Nearly 1 in 2 individuals faces considerable difficulties in the domain of mating," said lead study author Menelaos Apostolou, an associate professor of social sciences at the University of Nicosia in Cyprus. "In most cases, these difficulties are not due to something wrong or broken, but due to people living in an environment which is very different from the environment they evolved to function in." [If You Suck at Dating, It's Not You It's Evolution]

In the first edition of "On the Origin of Species" in 1859, Charles Darwin speculated about how natural selection could cause a land mammal to turn into a whale. As a hypothetical example, Darwin used North American black bears, which were known to catch insects by swimming in the water with their mouths open:

"I can see no difficulty in a race of bears being rendered, by natural selection, more aquatic in their structure and habits, with larger and larger mouths, till a creature was produced as monstrous as a whale," he speculated.

The idea didn't go over very well with the public. Darwin was so embarrassed by the ridicule he received that the swimming-bear passage was removed from later editions of the book.

Scientists now know that Darwin had the right idea but the wrong animal. Instead of looking at bears, he should have instead been looking at cows and hippopotamuses.

The story of the origin of whales is one of evolution's most fascinating tales and one of the best examples scientists have of natural selection.

To understand the origin of whales, it's necessary to have a basic understanding of how natural selection works. Natural selection can change a species in small ways, causing a population to change color or size over the course of several generations. This is called "microevolution."

But natural selection is also capable of much more. Given enough time and enough accumulated changes, natural selection can create entirely new species, known as "macroevolution." It can turn dinosaurs into birds, amphibious mammals into whales and the ancestors of apes into humans.

Take the example of whales using evolution as their guide and knowing how natural selection works, biologists knew that the transition of early whales from land to water occurred in a series of predictable steps. The evolution of the blowhole, for example, might have happened in the following way:

Random genetic changes resulted in at least one whale having its nostrils placed farther back on its head. Those animals with this adaptation would have been better suited to a marine lifestyle, since they would not have had to completely surface to breathe. Such animals would have been more successful and had more offspring. In later generations, more genetic changes occurred, moving the nose farther back on the head.

Other body parts of early whales also changed. Front legs became flippers. Back legs disappeared. Their bodies became more streamlined and they developed tail flukes to better propel themselves through water.

Darwin also described a form of natural selection that depends on an organism's success at attracting a mate, a process known as sexual selection. The colorful plumage of peacocks and the antlers of male deer are both examples of traits that evolved under this type of selection.

But Darwin wasn't the first or only scientist to develop a theory of evolution. The French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck came up with the idea that an organism could pass on traits to its offspring, though he was wrong about some of the details. Around the same time as Darwin, British biologist Alfred Russel Wallace independently came up with the theory of evolution by natural selection.

Darwin didn't know anything about genetics, Pobiner said. "He observed the pattern of evolution, but he didn't really know about the mechanism." That came later, with the discovery of how genes encode different biological or behavioral traits, and how genes are passed down from parents to offspring. The incorporation of genetics and Darwin's theory is known as "modern evolutionary synthesis."

The physical and behavioral changes that make natural selection possible happen at the level of DNA and genes. Such changes are called mutations. "Mutations are basically the raw material on which evolution acts," Pobiner said.

Mutations can be caused by random errors in DNA replication or repair, or by chemical or radiation damage. Most times, mutations are either harmful or neutral, but in rare instances, a mutation might prove beneficial to the organism. If so, it will become more prevalent in the next generation and spread throughout the population.

In this way, natural selection guides the evolutionary process, preserving and adding up the beneficial mutations and rejecting the bad ones. "Mutations are random, but selection for them is not random," Pobiner said.

But natural selection isn't the only mechanism by which organisms evolve, she said. For example, genes can be transferred from one population to another when organisms migrate or immigrate, a process known as gene flow. And the frequency of certain genes can also change at random, which is called genetic drift.

Even though scientists could predict what early whales should look like, they lacked the fossil evidence to back up their claim. Creationists took this absence as proof that evolution didn't occur. They mocked the idea that there could have ever been such a thing as a walking whale. But since the early 1990s, that's exactly what scientists have been finding.

The critical piece of evidence came in 1994, when paleontologists found the fossilized remains of Ambulocetus natans, an animal whose name literally means "swimming-walking whale." Its forelimbs had fingers and small hooves but its hind feet were enormous given its size. It was clearly adapted for swimming, but it was also capable of moving clumsily on land, much like a seal.

When it swam, the ancient creature moved like an otter, pushing back with its hind feet and undulating its spine and tail.

Modern whales propel themselves through the water with powerful beats of their horizontal tail flukes, but Ambulocetus still had a whip-like tail and had to use its legs to provide most of the propulsive force needed to move through water.

In recent years, more and more of these transitional species, or "missing links," have been discovered, lending further support to Darwin's theory, Richmond said.

Fossil "links" have also been found to support human evolution. In early 2018, a fossilized jaw and teeth found that are estimated to be up to 194,000 years old, making them at least 50,000 years older than modern human fossils previously found outside Africa. This finding provides another clue to how humans have evolved.

Despite the wealth of evidence from the fossil record, genetics and other fields of science, some people still question its validity. Some politicians and religious leaders denounce the theory of evolution, invoking a higher being as a designer to explain the complex world of living things, especially humans.

School boards debate whether the theory of evolution should be taught alongside other ideas, such as intelligent design or creationism.

Mainstream scientists see no controversy. "A lot of people have deep religious beliefs and also accept evolution," Pobiner said, adding, "there can be real reconciliation."

Evolution is well supported by many examples of changes in various species leading to the diversity of life seen today. "If someone could really demonstrate a better explanation than evolution and natural selection, [that person] would be the new Darwin," Richmond said.

Additional reporting by Contributor Alina Bradford and Staff Writer Tanya Lewis, Follow Tanya on Twitter. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+.

Additional resources

Related:

More:

Darwin's Theory of Evolution: Definition & Evidence | Live ...

human evolution | Stages & Timeline | Britannica

Posted on by

Human evolution, the process by which human beings developed on Earth from now-extinct primates. Viewed zoologically, we humans are Homo sapiens, a culture-bearing upright-walking species that lives on the ground and very likely first evolved in Africa about 315,000 years ago. We are now the only living members of what many zoologists refer to as the human tribe, Hominini, but there is abundant fossil evidence to indicate that we were preceded for millions of years by other hominins, such as Ardipithecus, Australopithecus, and other species of Homo, and that our species also lived for a time contemporaneously with at least one other member of our genus, H. neanderthalensis (the Neanderthals). In addition, we and our predecessors have always shared Earth with other apelike primates, from the modern-day gorilla to the long-extinct Dryopithecus. That we and the extinct hominins are somehow related and that we and the apes, both living and extinct, are also somehow related is accepted by anthropologists and biologists everywhere. Yet the exact nature of our evolutionary relationships has been the subject of debate and investigation since the great British naturalist Charles Darwin published his monumental books On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871). Darwin never claimed, as some of his Victorian contemporaries insisted he had, that man was descended from the apes, and modern scientists would view such a statement as a useless simplificationjust as they would dismiss any popular notions that a certain extinct species is the missing link between humans and the apes. There is theoretically, however, a common ancestor that existed millions of years ago. This ancestral species does not constitute a missing link along a lineage but rather a node for divergence into separate lineages. This ancient primate has not been identified and may never be known with certainty, because fossil relationships are unclear even within the human lineage, which is more recent. In fact, the human family tree may be better described as a family bush, within which it is impossible to connect a full chronological series of species, leading to Homo sapiens, that experts can agree upon.

Top Questions

Humans are culture-bearingprimates classified in the genusHomo, especially thespeciesHomo sapiens. They are anatomically similar and related to the greatapes (orangutans, chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas)but are distinguished by a more highly developedbrain that allows for the capacity for articulatespeechand abstractreasoning. Humans display a marked erectness of body carriage that frees thehandsfor use as manipulative members.

The answer to this question is challenging, since paleontologists have only partial information on what happened when. So far, scientists have been unable to detect the sudden moment of evolution for any species, but they are able to infer evolutionary signposts that help to frame our understanding of the emergence of humans. Strong evidence supports the branching of the human lineage from the one that produced great apes (orangutans, chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas) in Africa sometime between 6 and 7 million years ago. Evidence of toolmaking dates to about 3.3 million years ago in Kenya. However, the age of the oldest remains of the genus Homo is younger than this technological milestone, dating to some 2.82.75 million years ago in Ethiopia. The oldest known remains of Homo sapiensa collection of skull fragments, a complete jawbone, and stone toolsdate to about 315,000 years ago.

No. Humans are one type of several living species of great apes. Humans evolved alongside orangutans, chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas. All of these share a common ancestor before about 7 million years ago.

Yes. Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) were archaic humans who emerged at least 200,000 years ago and died out perhaps between 35,000 and 24,000 years ago. They manufactured and used tools (including blades, awls, and sharpening instruments), developed a spoken language, and developed a rich culture that involved hearth construction, traditional medicine, and the burial of their dead. Neanderthals also created art; evidence shows that some painted with naturally occurring pigments. In the end, Neanderthals were likely replaced by modern humans (H. sapiens), but not before some members of these species bred with one another where their ranges overlapped.

The primary resource for detailing the path of human evolution will always be fossil specimens. Certainly, the trove of fossils from Africa and Eurasia indicates that, unlike today, more than one species of our family has lived at the same time for most of human history. The nature of specific fossil specimens and species can be accurately described, as can the location where they were found and the period of time when they lived; but questions of how species lived and why they might have either died out or evolved into other species can only be addressed by formulating scenarios, albeit scientifically informed ones. These scenarios are based on contextual information gleaned from localities where the fossils were collected. In devising such scenarios and filling in the human family bush, researchers must consult a large and diverse array of fossils, and they must also employ refined excavation methods and records, geochemical dating techniques, and data from other specialized fields such as genetics, ecology and paleoecology, and ethology (animal behaviour)in short, all the tools of the multidisciplinary science of paleoanthropology.

This article is a discussion of the broad career of the human tribe from its probable beginnings millions of years ago in the Miocene Epoch (23 million to 5.3 million years ago [mya]) to the development of tool-based and symbolically structured modern human culture only tens of thousands of years ago, during the geologically recent Pleistocene Epoch (about 2.6 million to 11,700 years ago). Particular attention is paid to the fossil evidence for this history and to the principal models of evolution that have gained the most credence in the scientific community.See the article evolution for a full explanation of evolutionary theory, including its main proponents both before and after Darwin, its arousal of both resistance and acceptance in society, and the scientific tools used to investigate the theory and prove its validity.

Read the original post:

human evolution | Stages & Timeline | Britannica

The Evolution of ML Infrastructure Gigaom – Gigaom

Posted on by

Data is the new oil for modern tech, transforming countless industries and providing invaluable insight as organizations leverage artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. But this data-rich futurewhere information once bound for cold storage becomes an actionable, strategic assetcomes with challenges. More data must be stored safely at reasonable cost over longer time spans, even as enterprises forge a data foundation layer to transform every type of data they own from a liability to be stored and defended into an asset to be leveraged.

Enterprises need the right storage infrastructure to manage this transition and unlock the potential value in their data. In this blog post, we outline how storage has evolved to combat the challenges of AI, ML, and big data and how the new generation of data storage offers a better solution than traditional stacks.

To make a successful data storage layer for AI and ML operations using large amounts of data, your infrastructure must provide:

It is tough to find all of these characteristics in a traditional storage system. In fact, they look incompatible at first glance. Often, we must stack several different technologies to accomplish this:

Rather than create a complicated stack, a new answer has emerged over the last few years: Next-Generation Object Storage. This solution uses all-flash and hybrid (flash and spinning media) object stores to combine the characteristics of traditional object stores with those usually found in block and file storage. The result:

The challenges posed by AI and ML to data infrastructure have been resolved to some extent by the new generation of object stores.

Object storage now offers much more than it did in the past. It can offload several tasks from the rest of the infrastructure. It is faster and can form the data foundation layer for todays capacity needs and tomorrows next-generation and cloud-native applications. Finally, next-generation object stores make it easier to implement new initiatives based on ML and AI workloads. It allows for a quick start with the potential to grow and evolve the infrastructure as required by the business.

Read more from the original source:

The Evolution of ML Infrastructure Gigaom - Gigaom

Evolution Health Partners with Dina for Employee COVID-19 Screening – HomeCare

Posted on by

CHICAGO (July 21, 2020)Evolution Health, a home health, hospice and infusion therapy provider, has selected Dinas new Staff Screening and Check-In solution to automate its employee wellness and health screening process.

Digital health care company Dina is an artificial intelligence-powered care coordination platform that recently expanded its product line to include employee engagement, health screening and remote patient monitoring solutions.

Evolution Healths family of companies has implemented Dinas Staff Screening and Check-In technology to remotely engage and monitor approximately 1,000 clinicians in four states, with plans to expand to the entire organization. Headquartered in Dallas, Evolution operates Guardian Healthcare, Millennium Health Care, Gem City Home Care, Care Connection of Cincinnati, and The Valley Health Home Care.

Developed in response to the spread of COVID-19, Dinas solution helps employers:

Between 10% and 20% of U.S. coronavirus cases are health care workers, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

These solutions fit with our mission of helping people age in place and stay safe and healthy at home, said Dina CEO Ashish V. Shah. This starts with keeping our professional caregivers healthy. We believe this will be critical well beyond COVID-19, as states introduce mandates for proactive health care worker safety.

Dinas screening and engagement tools are currently operating in 20 states and managing more than 300,000 daily check-ins for hospitals and home health agencies.

Dinas screening solution helps us create a safe work environment and a safe patient-care environment, said Tom Wilken, Evolutions Vice President of Human Resources. The tool automates what was a tedious paper record-keeping process and frees up our clinicians and operators to spend more time on patient care.

Visit dinacare.com for more information.

See the original post:

Evolution Health Partners with Dina for Employee COVID-19 Screening - HomeCare

What works of art can tell us about the evolution of food – DW (English)

Posted on by

With food pictures filling the internet, often under the attention-grabbing tagline of #foodporn, future generations will have no trouble knowing what we've been chowing down on in the 21st century.

Yet the trend of admiring food in an artistic context is nothing new. Artists began depicting food in paintings centuries ago. The painting "Obststand" by the Flemish painter Frans Snyders, for example, depicts an abundance of fruit, including apples, grapes, peaches and an unusual-looking half melon with a white interior, which recently caught the attention of researchers.

Researchers David Vergauwen and Ive De Smet look fruit and vegetables on canvas during museum visits in their quest to learn more about the origins of our fruits and vegetables

When art history meets biology

"This is what watermelons must have looked like back then," art historian David Vergauwen conjectured when he saw the painting hanging in the Hermitage art museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. His colleague, Ive De Smet, a professor of molecular biology, was skeptical and countered that perhaps Frans Snyders simply wasn't a particularly good painter. Vergauwen explained that Snyders was one of the best artists of the 17th century.

Intrigued, the researchers decided to investigate. "We agreed that there must be dozens of fruit and vegetable varieties with interesting developmental histories that we do not know in detail," said Vergauwen. They decided to combine their disparate fields of research biology and art history to trace the evolution of plant foods, from their wild beginnings to modern varieties.

Wild bananas with seeds? No, thanks!

Many of the plant-based foods we use in our kitchens today once looked completely different. Once wild, over the years they were domesticated, cultivated and adapted to suit our taste. Scientists have bred larger plants that bear more fruit, even making undesirable characteristics disappear over time by genetic modification. Wild bananas have large seeds, for example, something one will never find in the supermarket variety.

The researchers hope that the interdisciplinary approach will give them a concrete idea of what wild fruit and vegetable varieties might have looked like and how they might have developed over the years. Although tracing DNA can be very helpful in evolutionary research, it does not paint a clear picture of the past. "We may have part of the genetic code for certain ancient plants, but we often don't have well-preserved specimens," explains De Smet, who works at the Flemish Institute of Biotechnology in Ghent, Belgium.

Too abstract: Picasso's "Pitcher and fruit bowl"

This is where art history comes into play. Over the centuries, numerous artists have depicted plant foods, often in detail. With the help of works of art, scientists have gained insights into the domestication and color of carrots, the production of modern wheat, the cultivation of strawberries and the origin of watermelon, according to the journal Trends in Plant Science.

But the method also has its pitfalls. For example, the reliability of depictions in old paintings is questionable, says Vergauwen. "If, for example, we were to study the phenotype of fruits at the beginning of the 20th century on the basis of Pablo Picasso's Pitcher and Bowl of Fruit, we would probably draw false conclusions." Even the Old Masters could be misleading. Although Hieronymus Bosch's work Garten der Lste (The Garden of Earthly Delights, 1503-1515) correctly depicted the strawberry in its shape and color, the size was clearly disproportionate.

In Hieronymus Bosch's "Garden of Earthly Delights" strawberries are sometimes as big as people

It is up to art historians to determine which artists are reliable and why, explains Vergauwen. "If an artist painted a building that still stands today, or a musical instrument that still exists today, it is likely that he or she did the same with perishable food.

A new hashtag

In order to create an extensive database of fruit and vegetable artworks, Vergauwen and De Smet are now counting on the help of museums and art lovers around the world. "It's easy for us to go to European collections like the Louvre in Paris, but there are museums in Asia or Central and South America that could teach us a thing or two," said Vergauwen.

As a result, they have launched the hashtag #ArtGenetics and are calling on people around the world to tag the artworks that depict plant food to help them in their quest.

While it may not be as catchy as the popular #foodporn hashtag, it's sure to provide some appetizing results.

See the rest here:

What works of art can tell us about the evolution of food - DW (English)

In Cells and Whole Organisms, Repair Mechanisms Imply Foresight, Not Evolution – Discovery Institute

Posted on by

Photo credit: JC Gellidon via Unsplash.

Cells and organisms come pre-equipped with repair mechanisms. It takes foresight to make complex tools and procedures that can restore the functions of other tools. A blind process like evolution can only see the immediate present; it would be unconcerned about what happens next. Repair implies something worth saving. The more delicate the product, the more elaborate the maintenance. Life is worth saving and it is delicate. Logically, therefore, the persistence of life presupposes elaborate repair systems are at work. The following research findings show just how complex some of these repair mechanisms are.

Here is a kind of repair strategy that truly would require foresight. A skilled orthopedic surgeon can look at a broken bone and, through years of training, know that before setting it, he needs to make the break worse. In a compound fracture, for instance, bending the bone farther can allow splintered bones to be put back together. Additionally, assistants in the operating room can apply materials or medicines while the surgeon holds the fracture open. Something like that happens in the nucleus or our cells, scientists found at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. Sometimes, when something is broken, the first step to fixing it is to break it even more. A molecular machine named XPG could be dubbed an orthogenic surgeon (ortho- meaning straight).

We saw that XPG makes a beeline for discontinuous DNA places where the hydrogen bonds between bases on each strand of the helix have been disrupted and then it very dramatically bends the strand at that exact location, breaking the interface that connects bases stacked on top of each other, said Susan Tsutakawa, a structural biologist in the Biosciences Area at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and first author on the work, published this month in PNAS. The bending activity adds to an already impressive arsenal, as XPG was first identified as a DNA chopping enzyme, responsible for cutting out nucleotide bases with chemical and UV radiation damage. [Emphasis added.]

Natural selection would never do this. First of all, how would XPG recognize a problem that doesnt affect it directly, and how would it know to make a beeline for something elses problem? Then, if by some accident of chance it bent the DNA strand, how would it know how to perform the next surgical step? XPG would be out of a job, rushing toward discontinuous DNA like a blind driver on a demolition derby, breaking genes here and there, killing the organism by a thousand cuts. Instead, look what it does:

An unexpected finding from our imaging data is that the flexible parts of the protein which were previously impossible to examine have the ability to recognize perturbations associated with many different types of DNA damage, said co-author Priscilla Cooper, a biochemist senior scientist in the Biosciences Area. XPG then uses its sculpting properties to bend the DNA in order to recruit and load into place the proteins that can fix that type of damage.

The scientists call this a protein with many jobs that is more like a master sculptor than a demolition crew. Without XPG, a person can incur devastating symptoms of diseases. Some of these fatal syndromes caused by faulty XPG are described in the press release. Often single amino acid substitutions can destabilize the entire protein, they say. If that doesnt clinch the case for design, consider also that the Lawrence Berkeley team found that XPG cooperates with other repair machines like BRCA1 and BRCA2. An entire operating-room team has the foresight to perform orthogenic surgery on DNA. The Darwin-free paper is published in PNAS.1

The brain is busier than a city all the time, even in sleep. Amidst all the clamor, one issue cannot be overlooked: how to dispose of dead cells. A recent article at Evolution News described how the cellular morgue takes care of the problem. In the brain, it is even more vital to quickly eliminate dead cells. A team at Yale School of Medicine heard music inside the skull: they found that astrocytes and microglia perform orchestrated roles and respect phagocytic territories during neuronal corpse removal in the brain. Each player knows its part.

Cell death is prevalent throughout life; however, the coordinated interactions and roles of phagocytes during corpse removal in the live brain are poorly understood. We developed photochemical and viral methodologies to induce death in single cells and combined this with intravital optical imaging. This approach allowed us to track multicellular phagocytic interactions with precise spatiotemporal resolution. Astrocytes and microglia engaged with dying neurons in an orchestrated and synchronized fashion. Each glial cell played specialized roles: Astrocyte processes rapidly polarized and engulfed numerous small dendritic apoptotic bodies, while microglia migrated and engulfed the soma and apical dendrites. The relative involvement and phagocytic specialization of each glial cell was plastic and controlled by the receptor tyrosine kinase Mertk Thus, a precisely orchestrated response and cross-talk between glial cells during corpse removal may be critical for maintaining brain homeostasis.

Their research is published in Science Advances.2 This paper was also Darwin-free except for an opening pinch of incense in the first sentence, Cell death is an evolutionarily conserved and ubiquitous process a useless offering that contributes nothing to the science except to show that evolution was not observed.

Every human life has value, even those with genetic defects (and which human being does not suffer from several?). Whats important to the argument for intelligent design from foresight is how carefully the body practices preventative medicine on the developing embryo. Scientists at Caltech point out,

The first few days of embryonic development are a critical point for determining the failure or success of a pregnancy. Because relatively few cells make up the embryo during this period, the health of each cell is vital to the health of the overall embryo. But often, these young cells have chromosomal aneuploidies meaning, there are too many or too few chromosome copies in the cell. Aneuploid cells lead to the failure of the pregnancy, or cause developmental defects such as Down syndrome later in gestation.

Fortunately, these young embryos perform their own quality control before most genetic abnormalities become established:

Researchers have found that the prevalence of aneuploidy is drastically lower as the embryo grows and develops. Using mouse embryos, scientists from the laboratory of Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz, Caltechs Bren Professor of Biology and Biological Engineering, now show that this is because embryos are able to rid themselves of abnormal cells just before and soon after implantation into the uterus, thereby keeping the whole embryo healthy.

It is remarkable that embryos can do this, says Zernicka-Goetz. It reflects their plasticity that gives them the power to self-repair.

The scientists found a double-protection mechanism. Not only are aneuploid cells detected and eliminated, but healthy cells are stimulated to proliferate, compensating for the loss of unhealthy cells. The research paper, which also fails to give credit to evolution for this wonderful example of foresight and design, appeared in Nature Communications on June 11.3

Even plants, lacking eyes and brains, know how to repair damage. Plants have a handicap that makes repair more difficult: their repair teams cannot migrate to the site of the injury. Austrian scientists discovered a clever way that a plant can send repair enzymes to the rescue when a stem gets wounded.

Plants are sessile organisms that cannot evade wounding or pathogen attack, and their cells are encapsulated within cell walls, making it impossible to use cell migration for wound healing like animals. Thus, regeneration in plants largely relies on the coordination of targeted cell expansion and oriented cell division. Here we show in the root that the major growth hormone auxin is specifically activated in wound-adjacent cells, regulating cell expansion, cell division rates, and regeneration-involved transcription factor ERF115. These wound responses depend on cell collapse of the eliminated cells presumably perceived by the cell damage-induced changes in cellular pressure. This largely broadens our understanding of how wound responses are coordinated on a cellular level to mediate wound healing and prevent overproliferation.

The research is published in PNAS.4 Its satisfying to say, again, that their paper did not give any credit to evolution. This is one way design wins by default: the repeated failure by Darwinists to show up for the game constitutes abdication.

The concept of repair presupposes foresight.5 How would a blind, unguided process recognize a problem? Even if a working plant or animal were granted a hypothetical existence by evolution, the easiest thing for natural selection to do when a problem occurs is to let the organism die. Uncaring selection owes it no further existence. As these examples show (and there are many, many more), life comes equipped with repair teams that are even more complex than expected. It is remarkable that embryos can do this, Caltech scientists said. Yale scientists watched a precisely orchestrated response to cell death in the brain. Lawrence Berkeley scientists did not expect to see a master sculptor in the nucleus already known to have an impressive arsenal of abilities able to surgically straighten DNA before their eyes. These are the emotional responses of people astonished by design beyond their dreams. If they assume these wonders emerged by evolution, their silence about how it did so speaks volumes.

Continue reading here:

In Cells and Whole Organisms, Repair Mechanisms Imply Foresight, Not Evolution - Discovery Institute

Unsolved Mysteries Is a Story of American Television’s Evolution – The New Republic

Posted on by

Unsolved Mysteries was made in the opposite style. Its episodes spooled through schlocky reenactments done by actors (including Matthew McConaughey, in his first credited screen role), extracting maximum drama from minimal fact. One segment, building on the eras Satanic Panic, argued that a teenage boys suicide was a Dungeons and Dragonsbased murder plot. By the time home footage became a part of TVs language (Candid Camera, etc.), those who might have watched Unsolved Mysteries were switching to fiction: The X Files scooped up the UFO-enthusiast market as soon as it aired in 1993, and helped mold anti-government conspiracy speculation into its own entertainment genre. Unsolved Mysteriesa show that despite its fantastical mix of genres saw 260 of its featured cases later resolved, sometimes through viewer tips, according to The New York Timessimply didnt feel novel anymore.

Elsewhere on television, a new genre with a different and more compelling spin on blurring fact and fiction would soon undercut the whole mystery genre: reality TV. From Judge Judy to 1992s smash hit The Real World, American entertainment in the 1990s took all that was most engaging about mystery documentary shows (real personalities, real stakes, a constant revolving door of content) and made it personal. Where shows like Unsolved Mysteries or Forensic Files had run on a strange mix of voyeurism and altruism, with the viewer at home playing star witness, reality television would run on voyeurism alonewhile proving easier and less expensive to make than documentaries.

The rise of true crime in recent years makes a lot of sense when you consider how fragmented American nonfiction television programming had become by the end of the 2010s. In 2009, for example, when recession and the prospect of perpetual war were rocking the United States, viewers looking for real life content were offered bafflingly stylized, even surreal shows like Cops, Jersey Shore, Teen Mom, and Toddlers and Tiaras. Quality documentary television was rare.

The decades-long progression from reenactments to amateur video footage and reality TV is, in part, a history of what makes on-screen events seem true in U.S. television. But its also, in Netflixs hands, data for an ever-churning algorithma way of predicting the next success. The new Unsolved Mysteries feels precision-engineered for a 2020 audiencelong-form, detailed, and bingeablebut devoid of all the flair and atmosphere that made the original seem untrue and yet interesting to watch.

Now there is no presenter or voiceover, and each hourlong episode focuses on a single, reality-style mystery; more like the chilling, unbelievable truth of The Jinx than the swirling dry ice of The X Files. Of six episodes, five revolve around people whose mysterious deaths were never solved, and one is about a UFO sighting. We meet the families of murder victims, see photos of their lost beloveds, and in one case hear what its like to discover your own brothers body rotting in a rural ditch.

Shawn Levy, who made Arrival, Night at the Museum, and Stranger Thingsalso for Netflix, and also rooted in the genre we could call 1980s paranormalis the shows executive producer. In press notes distributed by Netflix, he wrote that his new program is very loyal to the things we all love about the [Unsolved Mysteries] brand, citing its blend of supernatural with criminal topics and his retention of the old theme tune.

This reference to the shows brand reveals something hollow at the core of the reboot, a kind of cynical nostalgia out of sync with todays sensibilities. The final episode, Missing Witness, for example, is about a young girl whose mother almost certainly killed her. The dead girls sister says to the camera that she will devote her life to bringing her mother to justice. The previous episode was all about a group of people who claim, without much evidence, to have seen an enormous unidentified aircraft in September 1961. That contrastbetween a murdered child and a spaceshipfeels much more jarring than similar contrasts in the original show, in part because this shows new framing is otherwise very serious and intimate. The shows chemistryits balance of light and dark, schlock and the human heartis just plain strange, as if some robot at Netflix HQ were commissioned to create the most engaging possible TV show but had his empathy screw left loose.

Being unable to choose one documentary approach and stick with it, the new Unsolved Mysteries turns out to be a curiously soulless product that will leave viewers suspecting that one of their basest instincts (voyeurism) has been exploited in the name of one of their noblest (the desire to solve crimes, after all, is also an instinct toward justice). Theres nothing more ethical or truthful about this show compared to its predecessorits production is simply truthier in style. Were all smarter, more suspicious consumers of true crime than we were five years ago; we know now that DNA testing is a highly politicized technology, for example, and that Netflix will happily play fast and loose with the facts if it rakes in more viewers. In todays world, where cold case files are more likely to lead to a conversation critiquing the criminal justice system than a tangent on alien abductions, Unsolved Mysteries smacks of yesterdays news.

See the rest here:

Unsolved Mysteries Is a Story of American Television's Evolution - The New Republic

Fear Revisited: The Thrilling Evolution of the ‘[REC]’ Quadrilogy – Bloody Disgusting

Posted on by

Its been five years since the stateside release of[REC] 4: Apocalypse, the closing entry to a standout franchise in modern horror. Starting with 2007s[REC], this unique quadrilogy shook up the zombie formula and proved just how effective found footage could be at delivering visceral terror; at least at the start.

As with most franchises, each subsequent entry released saw diminishing returns, but that doesnt speak to the creativity or innovative mythology created by filmmakers Jaume Balaguer and Paco Plaza. Looking back, the [REC] series took some daring risks and delivered a cohesive four-film series that evolved in surprising ways.

[REC]

The idea behind 2007s[REC] was born from Balaguer and Plazas desire not just to make a terrifying horror movie but to make the audience an active participant in the fear unfolding on screen. The aim was to attempt to capture the same level of terror fans get from playing a horror video game. So, they decided upon a familiar horror story told through a single camera, treated almost as its if a character itself, relaying the narrative in real-time.

Using that conceit, the film follows reporter ngela Vidal (Manuela Velasco) and her cameraman Pablo, played by unseen actor Pablo Rosso, as they cover the night shift of a local fire station for their television series While Youre Sleeping. What begins as a quiet, dull evening inside turns harrowing when the pair accompany firefighters lex (David Vert) and Manu (Ferrn Terraza) on a call for a domestic disturbance at an apartment building. There they find an incoherent, sickly woman that aggressively attacks an officer, and the event sparks a deadly outbreak that leaves them trapped thanks to an unexpected quarantine.

On paper, that sounds like a generic zombie setup that weve seen countless times before. What transpires, however, thanks to the found footage technique and sense of realism the filmmakers introduce here, is every bit of the visceral thrill ride Balaguer and Plaza intended. The handheld camera provides the necessary limitations not just in the viewers range of sight but in how much of the story we can absorb and when. Balaguer and Plaza envisioned video game levels of unrelenting dread, and they essentially created a rail shooter with the film.

The audience knows about as much as poor ngela knows, and we learn more about whats happening within the building as she does, all while dodging and fleeing from increasingly infected residents. That the infection sets in at different rates for different people gives an unpredictability that keeps everyone on their toes. The sense of realism comes from the naturalistic way these characters interact, talk, and behave. Thats no accident, either. Velasco, who would win a 2007 Goya for her performance, spent years as a TV presenter, which translated seamlessly to her character.

As effective as the scares are, what solidified[REC]as a modern horror classic is that it changes the rules and mythology of the zombie outbreak by way of one unnerving final act. All alone in the penthouse suite, sole survivors ngela and Pablo are desperate for a way out. They soon discover that theyve entered the den of the outbreaks source; an agent of the Vatican brought a possessed girl, Tristana Medeiros, there to isolate the demonic enzyme within her. It mutated and became contagious, so the agent sealed her up in the attic to die. She infects mice, which in turn spreads to a residents pet, and thus the outbreak is unleashed. [REC] concludes with one brilliant payoff, in which a ghoulish Tristana (Javier Botet) descends from the attic and drags a screaming ngela off into the pitch-black darkness.

[REC] 2

How do you top that in a sequel released two years later? By picking up almost immediately where[REC]s end credits began. 2009s[REC] 2, working more like a continuation than a traditional sequel, starts about fifteen minutes after its predecessor, this time following Dr. Hunt (Jonathan Mellor) and a GEO team sent into the quarantined apartment building to control the infection. Concurrently, the father of Jennifer (from the first film) persuades a firefighter to sneak him back into the building from an underground tunnel so he can bring her prescription medication. Curious teens follow them. All characters, at least the surviving ones, eventually converge and stumble upon a miraculously safe but shocked ngela.

This sequel sustains the same level of terror as the first film but expands the demonic mythology in exciting ways. Dr. Owen is secretly a priest sent from the Vatican for a blood sample. The infected are revealed to respond to prayer and crucifixes, like the possessed. More intriguingly is that the infected share a connection with the source demon, Tristana, whos taken up residence in plucky reporter turned survivor ngela. Tristana wants out, to freely spread her demonic contagion.

[REC] 2, stylistically and technically, is more of the same. But the clever ways Balaguer and Plaza expand the mythos and introduce multiple character perspectives keep things feeling fresh. The impressively sustained intensity goes a long way, too. Knowing this format wouldnt work three times in a row, the filmmakers shook up the franchise with big swings that proved polarizing.

[REC] 3: Genesis

For the third and fourth entry, the dynamic duo split custody of their horror baby. Plaza took on the immediate follow-up,[REC] 3: Genesis. In terms of timeline, Genesis overlaps with the first two films, set at a large church for the wedding of Clara (Leticia Dolera) and Koldo (Diego Martin). Among the hundreds attending is an uncle who happened to be the veterinarian of Jennifers infected pet dog referred to in[REC]. It turns out that infected dog bites take a little while to transform a human into a rabid monster, and Clara and Koldo are at least allowed to make it through their ceremony and well into their reception before all hell breaks loose.

The most obvious shift inGenesis is from found footage to traditional film. Its a move that polarized upon release, but its the perfect antidote to the age-old found footage question; why dont they just put down the camera? It makes sense for cameras to be involved at a wedding, to capture the events for memories sake, and interview the guests. Once thats done, the party is in full swing, and when deadly chaos erupts, well, no one attending is going to want to keep filming.

The second most apparent shift is in tone. Genesisbears more in common tonally withEvil Dead 2than[REC]. Its another polarizing move. The gore for an already gory franchise is dialed up to splatstick levels, especially as Clara shreds her dress to wield chainsaws more handily and Koldo dons armor in attempts to hack his way to his bride. Plaza never loses sight of the series mythos, though, including subtle nods like the news footage outside of the original films building in the background of individual shots. More overtly, the priest freezing the infected in place via loudspeaker prayer is a nice touch. All of which to say that this sequel deserves far more credit than it received upon release. Think of it more as a fun sidequel.

[REC] 4: Apocalypse

Balaguer took the reins for the final film,[REC] 4: Apocalypse. Picking up after the second film, Apocalypse opens with a thrilling scene that sees a special ops team rescue ngela and destroy the building. Shortly after, she and the teams survivors, Lucas (Crspulo Cabezas) and Guzman (Paco Manzanedo), wake on board a ship quarantined at sea. The doctors there are determined to find a cure by any means necessary, using ngela as a guinea pig. Naturally, the contagion has followed her, and the vessel descends into a claustrophobic nightmare.

Of all the films in this franchise,Apocalypse fared the worst critically and financially. Balaguer continued where Plaza left off, in terms of traditional filmmaking over handheld found footage, and some less than spectacular effects work Im looking at you, dumb zombie monkeys- left a lot to be desired. That Balaguer tended to shoot high action scenes with shaky camera work frustrated many as well.

The director did play around with expectations in a fun way, though. From the get-go, its expected that ngelas role remains the same as in the previous installment, which is that of a demon using its host to gain freedom. It becomes a waiting game to see precisely when ngela will drop her innocent faade and let Tristana loose. Its not until the final act that it becomes clear our plucky heroine regained her agency from the thrilling opening scene, with Tristana latching on to a more reliable host in Guzman. Its also worth noting that this entry allows ngela to have one of the more fulfilling Final Girl arcs of all time, going from scared bystander to villain to fierce survivor throughout three films.

Apocalypse wraps up with an epic action-heavy spectacle, resulting in ngela finally free from Tristanas hold once and for all. Naturally, it also ends with a tease that the Tristana worm lives on, somewhere in the oceans food chain, with the potential to wind up inside a human again. The box office returns, however, say that no one should expect any follow-up to that dangling thread.

Its hard not to wonder what the reception wouldve been like forApocalypsehad it been a standalone release unaffiliated with the high standard of the[REC]series. Its heavily flawed, but its still a solid effort. At least compared to many other zombie films.

Each installment plays like an experiment for the filmmakers; the first two films are experiments in visceral, unrelenting horror, the third Plaza considered to be his adventure film, and the final movie goes full-throttle on the action. Its worth noting that they manage to be cohesive narratively throughout all the tonal shifts, style changes, and narrative expansions. Whether the latter half of the series works for you or not, I appreciate the risks taken and that Balaguer and Plaza understood they couldnt keep attempting to duplicate the success of the first film every single time.

Its been thirteen years since [REC]shook up horror, and only five since the quadrilogy concluded, but its a series I foresee creating great discussion and analysis for years to come.

Link:

Fear Revisited: The Thrilling Evolution of the '[REC]' Quadrilogy - Bloody Disgusting

Meet the man whos been behind nearly every evolution of the fund industry for two decades – MarketWatch

Posted on by

To call him financial services Forrest Gump might be a stretch, but Carlos Diez has been behind the scenes of just about every big fund-industry pivot for the past two decades. At the height of the dot-com boom, he saw the business opportunity of a growing consumer class interested in investing, then, a few years later, anticipated the future in indexing.

Hes had some crummy timing, though: It took so long to get his firm, MarketGrader, off the ground that the dot-com bubble popped and the U.S. entered a bear market. Several years later, an asset manager launched a suite of funds based on MarketGrader indexes. That was in October 2007 just as the cracks were starting to form in the global financial system, and at the very peak of that market cycle.

Diez says hes learned from the downs as well as the ups, and hes humble about it: The funds were closed in March 2009, just as the longest bull market in history was starting up. In the following decade, those indexes outperformed their benchmarks, returning 374%, compared to 318% for the S&P 500 SPX, +0.16% .

MarketWatch spoke with Diez about his career starting new things, and then starting again, as well as what hes thinking about now. The interview that follows has been edited for clarity.

MarketWatch: Could you share your biography?

Carlos Diez: I actually started the company right out of college. I went to college in California and graduated in 1999, so I went through all the dot-com experiences as a student. A lot of buddies of mine in college were, quote-unquote, investing in the stock market. I remember teammates on my soccer team would come and say, I bought this or that, and I would say what do they do? They would say I have no idea, but theyre up 30%.

I thought I could build a tool that would help investors understand what theyre buying. That was the genesis of MarketGrader. It took a little bit longer than I thought to get all the pieces together. And there was a big bear market that affected our launch plans. When we launched, in 2003, we started research for some institutions, some sell-side, some investment banks, and in parallel to that we started building our indexes. It was accidental, if you will. We were putting out ratings on companies in the U.S. and Canada and only 15% of companies were a buy, and people said, whats going on here? So we said, lets build a model portfolio of the best companies in MarketGrader. We didnt want to overweight the largest companies because we saw what happened in the late 1990s and early 2000s. So it was the 40 best companies in MarketGrader, equally weighted, and we rebalanced every six months. Dumb luck had it that that happened to be a banner year for stocks, so we did very well. This was well before smart beta and things that are so hot today.

We had built a good relationship with (asset manager) London & Capital and plowed head-on into the ETF space. I had always thought ETFs were going to be the next big thing in the space. We launched our first ETFs in October 2007 at the very top of the market. We rode the 2008-2009 market down and eventually the company (closed the funds). That was a big hit to our business.

Concurrently, we were developing a relationship with Dow Jones. We met the editors of Barrons in 2004. At the time, Barrons online was a novel product. Barrons wanted to find a tool that rated stocks like we did to complement their writers analysis. We built a tool called StockGrader to go alongside the new Barrons.com that launched in 2005. And because we were having success in the index business, we met with Dow Jones Indexes in 2007 and created the Barrons 400. (MarketWatch note: an ETF based on the index, the Barrons 400 ETF BFOR, +0.85% , launched in 2013.)

About six years ago, we really started focusing on building out our company globally. We were particularly focused on Asia, specifically China. I started visiting China in 2004-05, and we built a family of A-share indexes there. CSI (China Securities Index Co.) is owned by the two stock exchanges which are, by extension, owned by the state. We co-created two indexes that they started publishing and eventually we licensed one to VanEck in Australia, which has been doing really well. That was the beginning of our global expansion. VanEck in New York converted two of their ETFs to use MarketGrader benchmarks, one on China and one on India.

Related:The man behind Case-Shiller on why the housing index has no Houston and why thats no problem

MarketWatch: Can we go back to the October 2007 launch, and could you just talk a little about your feelings about being at the mercy of timing?

Diez: A few years ago, that was a big source of frustration for me personally and professionally. I felt like we were on our way and things happened that we couldnt control, not just a huge market event, but the fact that our client decided to exit the business. It was very frustrating. But now in hindsight, it was actually a good experience. I know that might sound masochistic, but we learned a lot. We learned about how to get involved and when not to get involved in the development of products, and how important it is, if someone goes out to offer an investment product to a client, its as important for the provider of that fund to know theres a match between the two as it is for the seller of the fund. If you sell someone a long-term capital appreciation strategy but the client is maybe focused on making money in the next couple of weeks or jumping on a bandwagon that might be doing well, its bound to wind up disappointing the client. We learned a lot about that process. Were not a product provider but weve try to work very closely with them London & Capital, VanEck and ALPS (the distributor of the Barrons 400 ETF.)

From a company-specific perspective, to be honest, in those early years we were doing fairly well and growing organically and thought that could continue, so we never sought a bigger partnership or more capital from a larger institution, we thought we could do it alone. In hindsight that was a mistake. Its important to have the capital and the right partners. We were flying on our own.

MarketWatch: Has that changed?

Diez: We have taken on more capital from our existing investors, not from a larger institution. But thats something that might happen at some point. In China specifically, we are making a concerted effort to find a partner, because for us to have success in China, although were fairly well-known, for us to go it alone in China is very difficult, almost impossible All the negative things you hear about, in terms of access for foreign firms, those are all very real.

MarketWatch: You didnt mention this much, but Ive heard from other people that you were pretty early to the idea of smart beta, even though some other companies, like Research Affiliates, have gotten a lot more attention for their work on it.

Diez: It was partly accidental, but we did feel that it was important to offer investors something different than what was out there, meaning purely market-cap-weighted stocks in indexes. At the time, people thought stock selection in passive strategies was anathema. Theyd say, oh, it goes against our creed. But I thought our process was transparent and it worked well, and you could call it an index because it was not one person selecting stocks. It was just an index that behaved differently.

We had latched on to London & Capital and we were a small company, growing, and they were opening up opportunities for us. Why not ride that opportunity while it lasted? So obviously things played out differently and thats why people dont know about us being in it early. Rafi has a very strong product. Very shrewdly and very smartly, rather than becoming a product company, they said, were going to license this and you can brand them your own thing, whether Pimco or Schwab or whatever. I think that was genius. I attribute a lot of their success as much to that as much as to the methodology.

MarketWatch: One of the biggest issues in the ETF ecosphere has to do with intellectual property. How do you think about that?

Diez: Long and hard. (Laughs.) I think about that often and I think, more than someone taking your idea and replicating it, theres also the risk, especially nowadays, of someone taking your message and taking ownership of it, even if the underlying exposure isnt as good as yours. In the early days of an ETF launch, the perception is just as important as reality. A lot of companies have the resources to go out and blast out a message that maybe might not be as much a part of their DNA as it is yours. At the end of the day, what matters is the perception from investors. Thats the biggest challenge for us, the ability to communicate is what allows people to try you out and test what youre offering.

I spend a lot of my time helping my clients. VanEck is the perfect example. Theyre a very good client to work with, and theres a lot of overlap between our views and theirs, especially on emerging markets and on China. They see the value that MarketGrader brings to the table but theyre big enough that they have the resources to do things their way. But they dont want to have another me-too product out there. Theyd rather have something that they think is unique, and Id like to think thats what they see in us.

MarketWatch: We talked a lot about your interest in China, but whats the next-next thing?

Diez: From a country-regional perspective, I think whats happening in China will continue to be front and center for some time. Weve made a strong case for investors having a good exposure to China, being there for a long time. It would be a mistake not to, in our opinion. But separate from that, based on whats happened geopolitically, theres been a clear separation of economies and markets which will continue. I dont think there is going to be a full disengagement between the U.S. and China, but were starting to see some countries pushing back on some of the things China has done. India (which just banned dozens of Chinese mobile apps), for example. The U.K. announced Huawei (will be excluded from its 5G wireless network).

That will have repercussions for investors. I think there will be an opportunity to build exposures around those themes. I feel strongly about growth in some Asian countries besides China, and I think investors may choose to invest in those. I think the indexes and products out there still leave room for companies like us to build products that are differentiated.

Read next:Coronavirus was the perfect storm for tech innovation, and this fund manager made out

The rest is here:

Meet the man whos been behind nearly every evolution of the fund industry for two decades - MarketWatch

How the data centre evolved to suit modern needs and new technology – YourStory

Posted on by

The basic principle of the IT industry is closely similar to how the rest of the world functions; things change after some time, new advancements and technologies are flown in along with a plethora of ideas and innovations. The past few months have changed how we deal with technology.

It has now become the backbone for business continuity and is mandatory for conventional businesses, data centres (DC) to adopt and be adept to the new norms and technology. As businesses run virtually and screen time of individuals increases, the real pressure is on data centres to be efficient than ever before.

While it is appalling, reality is to normalise the new normal. As per a recent CBRE report, Indias data centre market is set to grow in 2020 with rising demand and supply.

It further stated that with growing digital consumption patterns such as online gaming, education, streaming, ecommerce, data centre operators are expected to see a huge demand for data centre space.

As this data surge increases, traditional data centres will become bogged down. However, making the right investments in conjunction with Machine Learning (ML) can help these data centres drive operational efficiency and reduce costs.

Physical servers and storage equipment are the two key entities of any data centre. While their maintenance is not only time consuming but a potentially expensive task, if not done right, it can be a cause of the downfall of any conventional data centre.

Fortunately, AI-based predictive analysis has proven to be efficient for data centre managers to successfully distribute workloads across different servers.

A proper workload distribution allows each server to operate at its full potential, while also enabling to easily predict and manage data centre workload.

AI making services smarter is precisely why it has emerged as a priority.

ML has always been a blessing for IT professionals, having a unique capability to reduce human effort in daily IT monitoring tasks. ML solutions incorporate large amounts of data to accurately predict when a machine is close to its breaking point.

An intelligent rack power distribution unit enables a DC manager to monitor power distribution at a Power Distribution Unit (PDU) as well as the individual output level. It is also designed to give user-defined performance threshold alerts.

These notifications allow DC managers to effectively monitor the entire data centre without being physically present. This presents a huge opportunity in the current frame of business operation with social distancing being the new norm.

These intelligent PDUs give managers more real-time control of the DC operations turning a device on or off, managing if a device gets overheated, etc. Intelligence is the new progressive way to manage a data centre.

For data centre managers to redeem greater financial benefits and higher efficiency, ML and AI must be carefully infused with right data centre tools. This means that data centre managers must watch the AI and ML space carefully as they try to distinguish better approaches to improve traditional data centres.

Here again, a smart PDU proposition offers an edge clubbed with ML solutions. Data centre managers can effectively allocate resources when provided with insights to better manage power distribution, energy saving, and ensuring reduced server crashes.

For that, it is essential to accurately identify opportunities for improvement, analyse risks and implement solutions before the next evolution cycle takes place.

(Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of YourStory.)

Want to make your startup journey smooth? YS Education brings a comprehensive Funding Course, where you also get a chance to pitch your business plan to top investors. Click here to know more.

View original post here:

How the data centre evolved to suit modern needs and new technology - YourStory

Global Solid Inkjet Printer Market Predicted to Witness Sustainable Evolution in Years to Come – Cole of Duty

Posted on by

The global Solid Inkjet Printer market focuses on encompassing major statistical evidence for the Solid Inkjet Printer industry as it offers our readers a value addition on guiding them in encountering the obstacles surrounding the market. A comprehensive addition of several factors such as global distribution, manufacturers, market size, and market factors that affect the global contributions are reported in the study. In addition the Solid Inkjet Printer study also shifts its attention with an in-depth competitive landscape, defined growth opportunities, market share coupled with product type and applications, key companies responsible for the production, and utilized strategies are also marked.

This intelligence and 2026 forecasts Solid Inkjet Printer industry report further exhibits a pattern of analyzing previous data sources gathered from reliable sources and sets a precedented growth trajectory for the Solid Inkjet Printer market. The report also focuses on a comprehensive market revenue streams along with growth patterns, analytics focused on market trends, and the overall volume of the market.

Download PDF Sample of Solid Inkjet Printer Market report @ https://hongchunresearch.com/request-a-sample/36559

The study covers the following key players:Hewlett-PackardCanon U.S.A., Inc. (US)Agfa-Gevaert Group (Belgium)Eastman Kodak Company (US)Brother International Corporation (US)Electronics for Imaging, Inc. (US)Durst Phototechnik AG (Italy)Dell, Inc. (US)FUJIFILM Holdings Corporation (Japan)

Moreover, the Solid Inkjet Printer report describes the market division based on various parameters and attributes that are based on geographical distribution, product types, applications, etc. The market segmentation clarifies further regional distribution for the Solid Inkjet Printer market, business trends, potential revenue sources, and upcoming market opportunities.

Market segment by type, the Solid Inkjet Printer market can be split into,Type 1Type 2Type 3

Market segment by applications, the Solid Inkjet Printer market can be split into,Application 1Application 2Application 3

The Solid Inkjet Printer market study further highlights the segmentation of the Solid Inkjet Printer industry on a global distribution. The report focuses on regions of North America, Europe, Asia, and the Rest of the World in terms of developing business trends, preferred market channels, investment feasibility, long term investments, and environmental analysis. The Solid Inkjet Printer report also calls attention to investigate product capacity, product price, profit streams, supply to demand ratio, production and market growth rate, and a projected growth forecast.

In addition, the Solid Inkjet Printer market study also covers several factors such as market status, key market trends, growth forecast, and growth opportunities. Furthermore, we analyze the challenges faced by the Solid Inkjet Printer market in terms of global and regional basis. The study also encompasses a number of opportunities and emerging trends which are considered by considering their impact on the global scale in acquiring a majority of the market share.

The study encompasses a variety of analytical resources such as SWOT analysis and Porters Five Forces analysis coupled with primary and secondary research methodologies. It covers all the bases surrounding the Solid Inkjet Printer industry as it explores the competitive nature of the market complete with a regional analysis.

Brief about Solid Inkjet Printer Market Report with [emailprotected] https://hongchunresearch.com/report/solid-inkjet-printer-market-36559

Some Point of Table of Content:

Chapter One: Solid Inkjet Printer Market Overview

Chapter Two: Global Solid Inkjet Printer Market Landscape by Player

Chapter Three: Players Profiles

Chapter Four: Global Solid Inkjet Printer Production, Revenue (Value), Price Trend by Type

Chapter Five: Global Solid Inkjet Printer Market Analysis by Application

Chapter Six: Global Solid Inkjet Printer Production, Consumption, Export, Import by Region (2014-2019)

Chapter Seven: Global Solid Inkjet Printer Production, Revenue (Value) by Region (2014-2019)

Chapter Eight: Solid Inkjet Printer Manufacturing Analysis

Chapter Nine: Industrial Chain, Sourcing Strategy and Downstream Buyers

Chapter Ten: Market Dynamics

Chapter Eleven: Global Solid Inkjet Printer Market Forecast (2019-2026)

Chapter Twelve: Research Findings and Conclusion

Chapter Thirteen: Appendix continued

Check [emailprotected] https://hongchunresearch.com/check-discount/36559

List of tablesList of Tables and FiguresFigure Solid Inkjet Printer Product PictureTable Global Solid Inkjet Printer Production and CAGR (%) Comparison by TypeTable Profile of Type 1Table Profile of Type 2Table Profile of Type 3Table Solid Inkjet Printer Consumption (Sales) Comparison by Application (2014-2026)Table Profile of Application 1Table Profile of Application 2Table Profile of Application 3Figure Global Solid Inkjet Printer Market Size (Value) and CAGR (%) (2014-2026)Figure United States Solid Inkjet Printer Revenue and Growth Rate (2014-2026)Figure Europe Solid Inkjet Printer Revenue and Growth Rate (2014-2026)Figure Germany Solid Inkjet Printer Revenue and Growth Rate (2014-2026)Figure UK Solid Inkjet Printer Revenue and Growth Rate (2014-2026)Figure France Solid Inkjet Printer Revenue and Growth Rate (2014-2026)Figure Italy Solid Inkjet Printer Revenue and Growth Rate (2014-2026)Figure Spain Solid Inkjet Printer Revenue and Growth Rate (2014-2026)Figure Russia Solid Inkjet Printer Revenue and Growth Rate (2014-2026)Figure Poland Solid Inkjet Printer Revenue and Growth Rate (2014-2026)Figure China Solid Inkjet Printer Revenue and Growth Rate (2014-2026)Figure Japan Solid Inkjet Printer Revenue and Growth Rate (2014-2026)Figure India Solid Inkjet Printer Revenue and Growth Rate (2014-2026)Figure Southeast Asia Solid Inkjet Printer Revenue and Growth Rate (2014-2026)Figure Malaysia Solid Inkjet Printer Revenue and Growth Rate (2014-2026)Figure Singapore Solid Inkjet Printer Revenue and Growth Rate (2014-2026)Figure Philippines Solid Inkjet Printer Revenue and Growth Rate (2014-2026)Figure Indonesia Solid Inkjet Printer Revenue and Growth Rate (2014-2026)Figure Thailand Solid Inkjet Printer Revenue and Growth Rate (2014-2026)Figure Vietnam Solid Inkjet Printer Revenue and Growth Rate (2014-2026)Figure Central and South America Solid Inkjet Printer Revenue and Growth Rate (2014-2026)Figure Brazil Solid Inkjet Printer Revenue and Growth Rate (2014-2026)Figure Mexico Solid Inkjet Printer Revenue and Growth Rate (2014-2026)Figure Colombia Solid Inkjet Printer Revenue and Growth Rate (2014-2026)Figure Middle East and Africa Solid Inkjet Printer Revenue and Growth Rate (2014-2026)Figure Saudi Arabia Solid Inkjet Printer Revenue and Growth Rate (2014-2026)Figure United Arab Emirates Solid Inkjet Printer Revenue and Growth Rate (2014-2026)Figure Turkey Solid Inkjet Printer Revenue and Growth Rate (2014-2026)Figure Egypt Solid Inkjet Printer Revenue and Growth Rate (2014-2026)Figure South Africa Solid Inkjet Printer Revenue and Growth Rate (2014-2026)Figure Nigeria Solid Inkjet Printer Revenue and Growth Rate (2014-2026)Figure Global Solid Inkjet Printer Production Status and Outlook (2014-2026)Table Global Solid Inkjet Printer Production by Player (2014-2019)Table Global Solid Inkjet Printer Production Share by Player (2014-2019)Figure Global Solid Inkjet Printer Production Share by Player in 2018Table Solid Inkjet Printer Revenue by Player (2014-2019)Table Solid Inkjet Printer Revenue Market Share by Player (2014-2019)Table Solid Inkjet Printer Price by Player (2014-2019)Table Solid Inkjet Printer Manufacturing Base Distribution and Sales Area by PlayerTable Solid Inkjet Printer Product Type by PlayerTable Mergers & Acquisitions, Expansion PlansTable Hewlett-Packard ProfileTable Hewlett-Packard Solid Inkjet Printer Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2014-2019)Table Canon U.S.A., Inc. (US) ProfileTable Canon U.S.A., Inc. (US) Solid Inkjet Printer Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2014-2019)Table Agfa-Gevaert Group (Belgium) ProfileTable Agfa-Gevaert Group (Belgium) Solid Inkjet Printer Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2014-2019)Table Eastman Kodak Company (US) ProfileTable Eastman Kodak Company (US) Solid Inkjet Printer Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2014-2019)Table Brother International Corporation (US) ProfileTable Brother International Corporation (US) Solid Inkjet Printer Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2014-2019)Table Electronics for Imaging, Inc. (US) ProfileTable Electronics for Imaging, Inc. (US) Solid Inkjet Printer Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2014-2019)Table Durst Phototechnik AG (Italy) ProfileTable Durst Phototechnik AG (Italy) Solid Inkjet Printer Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2014-2019)Table Dell, Inc. (US) ProfileTable Dell, Inc. (US) Solid Inkjet Printer Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2014-2019)Table FUJIFILM Holdings Corporation (Japan) ProfileTable FUJIFILM Holdings Corporation (Japan) Solid Inkjet Printer Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2014-2019)Table Global Solid Inkjet Printer Production by Type (2014-2019)Table Global Solid Inkjet Printer Production Market Share by Type (2014-2019)Figure Global Solid Inkjet Printer Production Market Share by Type in 2018Table Global Solid Inkjet Printer Revenue by Type (2014-2019)Table Global Solid Inkjet Printer Revenue Market Share by Type (2014-2019)Figure Global Solid Inkjet Printer Revenue Market Share by Type in 2018Table Solid Inkjet Printer Price by Type (2014-2019)Figure Global Solid Inkjet Printer Production Growth Rate of Type 1 (2014-2019)Figure Global Solid Inkjet Printer Production Growth Rate of Type 2 (2014-2019)Figure Global Solid Inkjet Printer Production Growth Rate of Type 3 (2014-2019)Table Global Solid Inkjet Printer Consumption by Application (2014-2019)Table Global Solid Inkjet Printer Consumption Market Share by Application (2014-2019)Table Global Solid Inkjet Printer Consumption of Application 1 (2014-2019)Table Global Solid Inkjet Printer Consumption of Application 2 (2014-2019)Table Global Solid Inkjet Printer Consumption of Application 3 (2014-2019)Table Global Solid Inkjet Printer Consumption by Region (2014-2019)Table Global Solid Inkjet Printer Consumption Market Share by Region (2014-2019)Table United States Solid Inkjet Printer Production, Consumption, Export, Import (2014-2019)Table Europe Solid Inkjet Printer Production, Consumption, Export, Import (2014-2019)Table China Solid Inkjet Printer Production, Consumption, Export, Import (2014-2019)Table Japan Solid Inkjet Printer Production, Consumption, Export, Import (2014-2019)Table India Solid Inkjet Printer Production, Consumption, Export, Import (2014-2019)Table Southeast Asia Solid Inkjet Printer Production, Consumption, Export, Import (2014-2019)Table Central and South America Solid Inkjet Printer Production, Consumption, Export, Import (2014-2019) continued

About HongChun Research:HongChun Research main aim is to assist our clients in order to give a detailed perspective on the current market trends and build long-lasting connections with our clientele. Our studies are designed to provide solid quantitative facts combined with strategic industrial insights that are acquired from proprietary sources and an in-house model.

Contact Details:Jennifer GrayManager Global Sales+ 852 8170 0792[emailprotected]

More:

Global Solid Inkjet Printer Market Predicted to Witness Sustainable Evolution in Years to Come - Cole of Duty