Bringing the craic to Jasper this St Patrick’s Day Jasper’s source for news, sports, arts, culture, and more – the fitzhugh

Posted on by

Bands led by Celtic redheads, Rymestone and 0Stella, perform at Jasper Legion on St Patricks Day, March 17. | Supplied photo

Fuchsia Dragon | publisher@fitzhugh.ca

Get set for an all-Irish blowout at Jasper Legion this St Patricks Day.

Irish Jasperite Roisin Seifert is bringing a taste of her motherlands festivities to town this March 17 a day traditionally celebrated with community festivities and plenty of Guinness.

St Patricks Day is kind of a big deal for me, she said.

I want to bring the town a flavour of the warm, lively, creativity and friendship focused aspect of Irish culture that I miss.

Seifert said St Patricks Days back in Belfast meant live music and hanging out with friends. She said she is on a mission to bring some genuine Irish craic to Jasper this St Patricks Day, to counter all the green beer, which she insists is uncouth and only became a thing in Ireland due to demand from rowdy American tourists in Dublin who expected the Liffy River that flows through the city to run green.

But what is the craic? According to Seifert, the craic means fun but with overtones of camaraderie and shenanigans.

And she certainly plans to bring it to the Legion next week.

Seifert has booked two indie-rock acts fronted by red-headed celtic femmes.

Rymestone, a genre-defying high-energy guitar-driven act currently on tour from the Prairies, is led by singer Emma Jean Anderson, whose mom immigrated directly from the Scottish Highlands.

And Dubliner-turned-Edmontonian Liz Pomeroy is bringing her indie-rock fiddle driven solo project 0Stella.

Plus, Jaspers own Group du Jour will emerge from the woodwork to support those out-of town acts.

Seifert will be dishing up homemade Irish stew with soda bread and lashings of butter, and the Legion will have Guiness promotions.

Doors open at 6:30 p.m. on Tuesday, March 17, with music starting at 7:30 p.m. and a $10 cover.

More:

Bringing the craic to Jasper this St Patrick's Day Jasper's source for news, sports, arts, culture, and more - the fitzhugh

Twitch star Dr Disrespect on life-changing money, gaming, and being a villain – The Verge

Posted on by

Violence becomes him. Stalking through the wild grass and brutalist concrete wilderness of Tarkov, hes implacable, the unstoppable force youve always secretly wanted to see come up against an object that claims to be immovable. He sees an enemy unaware. He snarls. The sights come up instinctively. In the pause before the man drops, you can see the Doc smile and his mouse twitch.

If youve ever seen an action movie, you already know Dr Disrespect (no dot because, if what I overheard is correct, the medical profession does not like those outside it stealing its valor). The army boots. A jet-black mullet wig and a dyed mustache. Mirrored sunglasses. A villain thats as familiar as he is menacing. We know him. We know what he wants. And thats why hes probably the most important persona in the internets extended streaming universe: the Doc is the future of live entertainment.

Currently, the Doc is in a nondescript building in Glendale, California. Over the course of two days, the cockpit of a helicopter has taken shape in the middle of a very large soundstage, an assemblage of 80s-era buttons and dials and a generous amount of black paint. Its all because Doc is here to shoot a hype video for his latest announcement: hes re-signed to Twitch for an exclusive two-year contract for a lot of money.

The precise figures havent been disclosed. Heres what he has to say about it: Lets just say, when I first started streaming, was something like this fathomable? If it was, youre dreaming really, really big. To me, its pretty shocking, and its very obviously life-changing, rewarding.

When the mullet wig comes off, the man underneath has fashionably cropped salt-and-pepper hair. This is Herschel Guy Beahm who stands 6 feet, 8 inches, taller than a 2017 Toyota Sienna. Or a pony. As Dr Disrespect, Beahm is somehow even taller, though that could just be the army boots.

You could sum up Docs appeal with one of his catchphrases: Violence! Speed! Momentum! Twitch, on the other hand, is harder to explain. Its a platform that lets anyone stream themselves doing just about anything that falls within the companys terms of service which is to say, if youre following all applicable local laws, youre probably just fine. (Though nudity, even if its partial, is frowned upon by the powers that be.)

But if you log on to Twitch right now, what youll mostly see is people playing video games. The view counts vary, but the basic visual format is pretty much the same: most of the screen is taken up by the game. And then, in an unobtrusive corner, you can see the streamer, live, wherever theyre broadcasting from. Most people are playing themselves.

Beahm, on the other hand, is playing the Doctor, which means theres a real distance between the mustache and the man behind it. As the character, his broadcasts combine a mix of over-the-top CG graphics, played over a series of green screens in his house; they show a nightmarish cyberpunk-y landscape, all blacks and grays and reds, where Doc seems to live. Theres a sinister sports stadium with a locker room that Doc hangs out in; he sometimes appears to drive a 1990 Lamborghini Diablo VT, though it never goes anywhere, not really. The landscape is totally devoid of other people, and it is always night. It looks like an adolescent boys id.

And as a character, Doc is purely id. Hes based on the bad guys, on one bad guy more than any of the others: Fender Tremolo, the archvillain of 1989s Cyborg. Fender leads a gang of pirates; hes ripped but not roided out, with dreadlocks and intense blue eyes that peer from behind blacked-out sunglasses. He has authority, and he uses it to literally crucify Jean-Claude van Damme. It was like a post-apocalyptic world and hes the one that dominated this world. There was just something about him, Beahm says.

In the end, Fender dies impaled on a meat hook. Ive always wanted a movie where the bad guy came out on top. It would shock the world. Dr Disrespect is the villain who could finally win.

Over the last four-ish years, the Doc has risen through Twitchs charts to become one of the biggest streamers on the platform. He performs to a live audience of more than 20,000 people during any one of his regular streams, which is good enough to make him the 10th-most-watched channel on Twitch, according to Twitchmetrics, a site-wide stat tracker. Hes racked up nearly 4 million followers there since he joined the site about four years ago, and his streams have landed him a TV development deal with Skybound.

That leaves Beahm and Steven Stev Lawson, Beahms manager and a business development executive at Boom.tv, dreaming about the characters potential. I think the brand is going to become the Batman of the future generations in 10, 15, 20, Lawson says. Now I dont know how long its going to take to get there, but thats where I see the brand going.

The Docs rise, however, couldnt have taken place without online streaming. He has a long history with Twitch; he joined as a viewer when it was called Justin.TV to watch Call of Duty pros throw down. (The name change occurred in February 2014.) Historically, Twitch has been the best place for people to live-stream themselves playing video games twitch referring to the term twitch gameplay, which is gaming that tests a players reaction time and their lives, too. In the beginning, Justin.TV was a place where the founder, Justin Kan, streamed himself live just about every minute of every day. By the time of its acquisition by Amazon in August 2014 for nearly a billion dollars, Twitch had focused entirely on capturing the nascent live-streaming market.

Of course, Twitch isnt the only live-streaming platform, and lately, its been fielding some real competition. Theres Mixer, a streaming service Microsoft acquired in 2016 back when it was called Beam. Theres Facebook, which has begun to throw its weight around in Facebook Gaming; Fox has backed another competitor called Caffeine. DLive is a blockchain-based platform that doesnt yet make sense as a business, a value proposition for creators, or a place for audiences that appears to be going after the segment of audiences who like to hodl. And then theres the real elephant in the room: YouTube Gaming, which already gets most live-streamed content from creators as VODs uploaded to those creators channels.

Demand for streamers, naturally, has shot up, which has kicked off a war for talent. And Microsoft fired the first shot.

In August 2019, Tyler Ninja Blevins, the most famous gamer in the world, announced he would stream exclusively on Mixer, reportedly for a figure between $20 and $30 million. Felix PewDiePie Kjellberg, the most famous YouTuber in the world with 103 million subscribers, signed an exclusive deal with DLive in April 2019. YouTube Gaming stole Jack CourageJD Dunlop from Twitch at the beginning of November, and Facebook Gaming picked up Jeremy DisguisedToast Wang at the months end.

Streamers are valuable because they make everything people want to consume on a platform. That means the stakes are existential for platforms. Twitchs default partner contract has an exclusivity clause, but when those contracts expire, anything goes. Many of the biggest names on Twitch have left for greener pastures literally. Besides Ninja, Cory KingGothalion Michael, Michael Shroud Grzesiek, and Soleil Ewok Wheeler have also departed after being offered extravagant sums of money.

In January, reporting in Kotaku broke some of the secrecy around these deals. For Blevins, Twitch counter-offered $15 million for a three-year commitment; Mixer and Facebook, on the other hand, came in around $20 million per year. Grzesieks deal was worth less than Blevins but was still worth tens of millions. In response, Twitch has been re-signing its own streamers, Doc included. Imane Pokimane Anys, one of the most popular variety streamers on the entire site, re-signed with the platform for a reported $4.5 million. It also kept Ben DrLupo Lupo, Timothy TimTheTatman Betar, and Saqib Lirik Zahid all huge names who draw big audience numbers whenever theyre live.

Sometimes it seems like anyone whos amassed a following can get themselves to the bargaining table and then win or at least cash out. That brings us to Beahm: if Dr Disrespect didnt re-sign with Twitch, it would have been a real sign of the companys vulnerability.

Beahm is important to Twitch because hes important to millions of people around the world, and that makes his decisions worth millions of dollars. Twitch is also important to Beahm. Its the platform of my choice simply because its embedded, he says. Beahm was approached with a partnership relatively early, in February 2016, a little under a year since his first stream on Twitch, which was in May the year before. He cites it as a sign of mutual respect. They just saw the potential of this guy, he says, meaning his spirited alter ego. Because, again, hes such a different type of streamer. Hes unique, hes over the top and can feel like he might be a little threatening or dangerous, in terms of an investment.

Thats true; the character does feel dangerous, even if that danger is mostly to the flow of brand dollars on the platform. Last year, the Doc got banned from Twitch for two weeks and had his E3 pass revoked after he ventured into a bathroom while he was live on Twitch. While he was live, it didnt even cross his mind that streaming live from a bathroom was wrong; now, Beahm says he understands why what he did was wrong, even if he didnt intend to do anything wrong. If my kid was in there, I wouldnt want him to be filmed by this guy and his camera crew, and it actually goes out, its a live stream. It could have been a lot worse. It could have been. It was also solidly on-brand for the Disrespect persona; transgressing is something that fans of the character like. And its their feelings that propel the character.

His fans send Doc donations on Twitch with notes attached; some tell him that hes helped with their depression, anxiety, and PTSD, he says. I think they see a lot of confidence in him. I think they feel empowered by him, Beahm says. Theres something there where they see this guy and hes so cocky, so confident, so over the top, but he can still relate to you. The streams are a safe space. The reality that the character of the Doctor means a lot to a lot of people, however, does seem to take Beahm aback. Its hard to gauge that, because Im sitting in my room all alone... Screaming.

Among the Docs fans are two of the actors on set, Mike Ferguson whose card calls him a scumbag for hire and Will Mann. Ferguson, a grizzled, tattooed graybeard, is playing the seasoned PILOT (50s); Mann, fresh-faced and seraphic, is his starry-eyed CO-PILOT (30s).

After lunch, Ferguson steps outside for a pre-take cigarette. This isnt his first time working with the Doc: in a commercial for G-Fuel, an energy drink that sponsors a lot of big streamers, he loses an arm-wrestling match to Disrespect. His kids are fans of the Doc character, too. Ferguson on Dr Disrespect: Hes the fucking man. He dont give a fuck. You know what Im saying? Literally, he doesnt give a fuck.

Mann loves Twitch because he grew up watching his brother and friends play video games and finds watching gameplay comforting. The 26-year-old is also a Disrespect fan. I guess he provides a little more escapism for Twitch, because a lot of the times youre just watching a real dude play a game, which is great, he says. But you go in there and its kind of like, oh theres this character dude, thats obviously like a character. But you get to watch him for like five hours do his thing and kind of get invested in that.

On set, everything has been built around Dr Disrespect. Lena Lollis, the red-headed costume designer, has sourced each piece of Docs costume individually aside from the wig, sunglasses, and custom headset, which the Doc has generously provided himself. The hardest thing to find, though, was a copy of Docs red flak vest. As Lollis points out, red is not a popular color because, generally, you dont want your camouflage or armor to be seen by the enemy.

Once Doc has left hair and makeup, he heads to the part of the cavernous studio where hes been rigged up in a harness. (The Doc does his own stunts.) He is floating above a blanket-covered crashpad in a faux-wingsuit that Lollis made by hand out of neoprene, black with red elastic detailing. He looks relaxed; it seems like hes done this before. Tim Hendrix has directed the shoots director of photography, Powell Robinson, to get a close-up of Docs snarling face after hes punched a hole in the helicopters roof and then jumped out as hes soaring through the night sky.

Hendrix got the job because he got an email out of the blue from a creative consultant at Twitch in the middle of December. I came in knowing very little about the Doctor or Twitch, he says. As Hendrix describes it, Docs idea was fairly complete creatively the character was going to jump out of a helicopter and fly down to a purple-hued city so his task was to figure out the execution.

It seemed an interesting challenge for Hendrix, whose background is mostly in music videos. (Hes most famous for directing the music video to Panic! At The Discos Dont Threaten Me With A Good Time, which features an interesting take on tentacle porn.) Directing music videos and directing a hype video for a streamer are similar because theyre about taking performers who are known quantities and showing them in a new light.

There is one crucial difference, though: Twitch pays better. Its very different from music videos in that this will actually let me eat, Hendrix says. A person in the room points out that Brendon Urie, the lead singer of Panic! At The Disco, also streams on Twitch. Oh, Hendrix says. Maybe someday hell pay me a living wage, too.

The next day, Beahm performs the Dr Disrespect character in 90-second chunks, over and over and over again, because Hendrix wants coverage but also because its hard to get everything right. Watching him in the monitors behind the helicopters cockpit, the character feels undiluted. I can see why his manager is comparing him to Batman: it might be that the characters real essence is meant for the big screen not lots of little ones.

Guy Beahm, the man behind the mullet and the mustache, is 37, and his first two loves are sports and video games. His grandfather gave him his first computer when he was in second or third grade. At the time, his favorite game was Asteroids, which changed after his grandfather bought him a NES. He was online at an early age, an only child looking up cheat codes on Prodigy when he wasnt hanging out with his parents and their friends. Beahm went to college because he wanted to play basketball, and the team he played on at Cal Poly Pomona was good. (Education, he says, was secondary, though he did study business and marketing.) After college, he took a few random jobs because he wasnt sure what he wanted to do. He was a temp administrative assistant at Stanford, a sales rep for a roof tile company, and a mortgage consultant, all in quick succession after he graduated.

Dr Disrespect was born during that time as a disembodied voice in Halo 2s lobbies and in its proximity chat. Even then, it was clear hed hit on something special; other players wanted to be on his team, after witnessing him barreling through his enemies and then roasting them when they died.

In his first video posted a full decade ago Docs first words, spoken directly to camera, show an unpolished Disrespect, though the character is nevertheless familiar: People have gotta understand you gotta attack. Attack. Attack. But dont get it mistaken. Certain individuals you dont attack. You run from. Aggression radiates from behind his mirrored sunglasses. The video cuts to him playing Call of Duty.

The YouTube videos continued, and subscriptions began to roll in. At first, it was one or two videos a month; Beahms real goal was to get into game development. Eventually, he found a role as a community manager at Sledgehammer Games, a studio that had just finished developing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, and from there, he became a multiplayer level designer on Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare.

After the games release in 2014, Beahm began work on the next Call of Duty game and then had a moment of clarity. From there, as he saw it, the future was pretty mapped out: hed go from associate level designer to level designer to senior level designer. It was a career, sure, but one that he wasnt so certain he wanted to pursue. I saw the path in the next five, 10, 15 years. I just was like, I dont know if this is it. I decided to just like, you know what? Let me look somewhere else. Beahm quit and went looking for other jobs in the industry. Eventually, he managed to wrangle an offer from another big game developer.

That was when his current business partner, Sumit Gupta, came to him with an offer to work at his startup Boom.tv where he was developing some new streaming tech based around VR. But it wouldnt be a desk job; Beahm would be helping Gupta figure out the streaming landscape, starting with setting him up to stream on Twitch. And so Gupta said: Hey, what do you think about reviving your old Doctor character?

He was in his 30s; he wasnt a kid anymore. He was choosing between another Triple-A job and an as-yet-unknown momentum, and the week Gupta gave him to decide was up. Ive already offered this. Either youre on board or not, Beahm recalled him saying. And its like, fuck all right.

The gambit worked, and the fans began to trickle in, which is the hardest part of doing anything on the internet; that goes double for Twitch. Finding an audience there is a mysterious business, maybe more than anywhere else online. Part of that is because you have to convey the force and depth of your personality to other people, live, and part of it is because its exceedingly difficult to get people to care about what youre doing until youre already far enough along that it doesnt matter. You have to bet on yourself, again and again and again. And even then, it might not work. You almost never get to quit your day job.

Reflecting on what hes accomplished so far, Beahm says he feels like hes getting closer to what he wants to do. The pistons are moving. The momentums you can feel it, right, but were not there yet, he says.

The problem with being a villain is that the hero always wins. See, after Doc punches a hole in the helicopters roof and jumps through the glass as the pilots cackle themselves into a tailspin, the rotorcraft is supposed to crash.

A few weeks after Doc leaves the soundstage, Kobe Bryant was flying with his daughter to his youth basketball academy in a helicopter that never made its destination. The day after the tragedy, I get a call from Docs publicist: the announcement is going forward, but his original video will never see the light of day. (Eventually, a modified version is released, months later, featuring a military-grade spacecraft.) No one wants to make light of a real death.

This makes sense. Beahm is a father, too. And though Disrespect is what hes famous for, Beahms alter ego exists to let him do things he cant do as himself. Personally, theres no way I could sit here as Guy Beahm, and sit in front of a camera and stream, he says. Not that I cant do it; Im not interested in it. When hes out of character, Beahm is a little fidgety, and his voice is pitched just a bit higher. The Doctor, on the other hand, doesnt fidget; hes almost unnaturally still, except for when hes baring his teeth. There is a barely suppressed rage in him, as though hes waiting to strike or be struck.

On his stream that day, the day after Kobe Bryant died, was the first time Ive ever not known whos on camera whether the man speaking on stream was Guy Beahm or Dr Disrespect. He addresses the situation with his hype video shoot obliquely, while hes not playing anything at all: I dont even know if that video will ever make it out simply because of the content thats involved. But that got me trippin, man, he says, though its clear that the ultimate fate of the video isnt whats bothering him. Im a little upset today. Im upset. Im sad and Im getting upset.

The donations keep flowing in, all $8.24 in honor of the numbers Bryant wore while he played for the Los Angeles Lakers, and he reads nearly every one: theyre all about people who are gone now, both loved ones and celebrities. Docs stream that day is a site of collective mourning. Finally, he boots up Escape From Tarkov. On-screen, his boots crunch as he steps out into the maps wildness. And then his figure stills as he begins to perform.

Read this article:

Twitch star Dr Disrespect on life-changing money, gaming, and being a villain - The Verge

Trump to Discuss Economic Steps; Italy Halts Most Travel; Stocks and Oil Prices Plunge – The New York Times

Posted on by

Italy says its halting most travel and public gatherings to try to restrain the outbreak.

The Italian government on Monday night extended restrictions on personal movement and public events to the entire country in a desperate effort to stem the coronavirus outbreak an extraordinary set of measures in a modern democracy that values individual freedoms.

Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte announced in a prime-time news conference that public gatherings were banned and that people would be allowed to travel only for work or for emergencies.

[Read: For Italians, dodging coronavirus has become a game of chance.]

Those restrictions had been placed on the red zone created in northern Italy, covering about 16 million people, but Mr. Conte extended them to an entire nation of 60 million.

We all have to renounce something for the good of Italy, said Mr. Conte, saying that the government would enact more stringent rules over the entire Italian peninsula

President Trump says he will discuss economic measures with Congress.

President Trump announced on Monday that he would work with Congress on measures to bolster the economy following the steepest market drop in more than a decade, fueled by fear over the coronavirus outbreak.

Mr. Trump told reporters at the White House that he would meet with Senate leaders and House Republicans on Tuesday to discuss a very substantial payroll tax cut and legislation intended to protect hourly wage earners who may have to miss work because of the virus. He also said he would ensure that the Small Business Administration extends more loans.

This was something that we were thrown into, and were going to handle it, and we have been handling it very well, Mr. Trump said. He added, The main thing is that were taking care of the American public, and we will be taking care of the American public.

At the same news briefing, Vice President Mike Pence said that more than a million coronavirus tests have been distributed, and that another four million tests would be distributed by the end of the week.

Neither Mr. Pence nor Mr. Trump has been tested. The presidents spokeswoman, Stephanie Grisham, said on Tuesday night that Mr. Trump would not be tested because he has neither had prolonged close contact with confirmed patients nor does he have any symptoms.

Asian markets open mixed on Tuesday after financial rout.

Asian markets opened mixed on Tuesday, in an apparent sign that investors were trying to regain their footing one day after the worst financial rout in years. Stocks in the United States had suffered their worst single-day decline in more than a decade on Monday, as the coronavirus and an oil price war fueled concerns about the global economy.

[Update: Trumps unilateral travel ban leaves Americans in Europe scrambling to get home.]

The S&P 500 fell 7.6 percent on Monday, falling so swiftly in early trading that trading was briefly halted early in the day a rare occurrence meant to prevent stocks from crashing. The Dow Jones industrial average fell 2,000 points, or 7.8 percent.

The S&P index ended the day 19 percent below the peak it reached last month. A decline of 20 percent from that high would be seen as marking the end of the bull market that began exactly 11 years ago.

Tokyo fell more than 1 percent in early trading on Tuesday, and shares in China opened nearly 1 percent lower. But Australian shares were up nearly 1 percent and Hong Kong opened more than 1 percent higher. Futures markets were predicting that Wall Street and Europe would open higher later on Tuesday.

Oil prices rose about 6 percent, though they remained well below levels from last week, before Saudi Arabia announced it would slash prices amid a dispute over supplies with Russia. Futures tracking the price of gold, long seen as a safe haven for nervous investors in times of trouble, fell in Asian trading.

Mondays drop was the worst for stocks in the United States since December 2008, when the country was still reeling from the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the housing crisis that dragged the economy into a recession.

At the Seattle-area nursing home linked to 19 deaths, 31 more residents have tested positive.

Test results have come back on 35 more residents of a locked-down nursing home in the Seattle suburbs that is already linked to 19 coronavirus deaths, and nearly all of them are infected, officials said on Monday.

Tim Killian, a spokesman for the home, Life Care Center of Kirkland, said 31 out of 35 residents tested positive but none of them had symptoms serious enough to require hospitalization. He said test results were still pending on 20 more residents.

Vanessa Phelps said she got a phone call from Life Care late on Monday afternoon telling her that her 90-year-old mother, Fiona, had tested positive for the coronavirus.

Her mother has severe chronic lung disease, Ms. Phelps said. She needs to get out of there and be in a hospital, Ms. Phelps said. She has the disease. She has the virus.

Residents have been pleading for days to be tested. Mr. Killian said on Saturday that the facility had received enough test kits to check all its residents, but not all its employees, dozens of whom are showing symptoms of illness.

In addition to the 19 known coronavirus deaths, at least one other resident connected to the home had already tested positive before Monday. There have been 11 more deaths at the home since Feb. 19, for which the facility has no post-mortem test results.

The cruise ship isolated off the California coast docks.

A cruise ship isolated off the coast of California amid a coronavirus outbreak has docked at the Port of Oakland, and officials are preparing to quarantine the thousands of people who have been stranded on board.

Passengers who had been stuck inside their cabins for days cheered and smiled as the ship passed under the Golden Gate Bridge on Monday. Were home, one passenger said.

They waved from their balconies as they approached the port, where portable hand-washing stations and a crew of employees in khaki uniforms awaited them.

State and federal agencies had been putting together a detailed plan for how to contain coronavirus cases from the vessel, which is carrying 2,421 passengers and 1,113 crew members. Last week, 45 people on the ship were tested for coronavirus and 21 tested positive, 19 of them crew members.

Everyone on the ship, the Grand Princess, will be quarantined for 14 days, with the majority being held at military bases or on the ship itself.

It is expected to take two to three days to clear the ship, with priority given to the patients who tested positive and other people who need medical care.

The Securities and Exchange Commission, in response to a potential coronavirus case, on Monday required a part of its staff to stay away from the agencys Washington headquarters and advised all other employees there to work from home as well, a person briefed on the matter said. The move was reported earlier by The Washington Post.

An email that the agency sent to workers said the requirement applied to those on the ninth floor of the headquarters, the person confirmed. The email said a doctor had told an S.E.C. employee with respiratory symptoms earlier that they could be because of the coronavirus.

Federal health officials are urging older Americans and their families to take a host of precautions against infection.

In addition to the basics recommended for everyone like washing hands often, Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said on Monday that people over 80 should:

Avoid crowded, poorly ventilated areas;

Stock up on medications, groceries and other necessities now;

Have a backup plan for health care if they are homebound;

Try not to make contact with high-touch surfaces in public areas;

Forget about traveling aboard a cruise ship.

Older adults with additional health conditions are far more likely to become severely ill or die from a coronavirus infection than younger people are. According to a study of more than 72,000 patients in China, the death rate was less than 1 percent of those under 50, but rose to 8 percent for those in their 70s and 15 percent for those in their 80s.

The United States faces an accelerating pace of new coronavirus case reports as well as the prospect of more sweeping measures to fight the spread of the virus. On Monday, the national total of infections surpassed 700 and the death toll hit 26; it was the seventh consecutive day with more diagnoses than the previous day.

A number of new cases have raised concerns about transmission in public places.

In Kentucky, a patient who tested positive had worked at a Walmart in Cynthiana, near Lexington, officials said. In Washington, D.C., a church rector who gave communion and shook hands with parishioners at Christ Church Georgetown was identified as a patient, prompting officials to urge hundreds of parishioners to self-quarantine. The church organist later tested positive, a church spokesman said Monday night.

Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington said he was considering mandatory measures to keep people apart. School districts in several states have shut down, universities are moving classes online, companies are telling employees to work from home, and houses of worship are limiting services.

The Army announced on Monday that the commander of U.S. forces in Europe, Lt. Gen. Christopher G. Cavoli, along with several members of his staff, had been exposed to the coronavirus and would self-quarantine as they wait to see if they develop symptoms.

In Georgia, the Fulton County school system, covering suburbs of Atlanta, announced it would close on Tuesday the largest U.S. district to do so after an employee tested positive.

But U.S. officials are not yet talking about locking down whole cities, as China and Italy have done.

I dont think you want to have folks shutting down cities like in northern Italy we are not at that level, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the leading American expert on infectious diseases, said in an interview. Social distancing like in Seattle is the way to go.

Boston calls off its St. Patricks Day parade.

The coronavirus outbreak has prompted the cancellation of one of Bostons iconic events: the citys St. Patricks Day parade.

This decision is being made out of an abundance of caution, to ensure that we are doing what is needed to keep the residents of Boston safe and healthy, Mayor Martin J. Walsh said on Monday.

The parade, which draws thousands to South Boston, was scheduled to take place next Sunday, the weekend before the holiday.

Twenty-eight coronavirus cases have been confirmed in Massachusetts, and another 22 cases across the country have been traced to a recent business conference in Boston.

Representatives Matt Gaetz of Florida and Doug Collins of Georgia said on Monday that they had interacted, at the Conservative Political Action Conference, with a person who had tested positive for the virus and would isolate themselves voluntarily. Also putting himself into isolation was Mark Meadows, the presidents newly designated White House chief of staff, who tested negative for the coronavirus after coming into contact with the same person.

The presidents spokeswoman said Mr. Trump would not be tested because he had no symptoms and no prolonged close contact with confirmed patients.

Two other Republicans, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and Representative Paul Gosar of Arizona, said on Sunday they would self-quarantine after coming into contact with the same conference attendee.

[Update: Sophie Grgoire Trudeau, wife of Canadas leader, tests positive for coronavirus.]

Mr. Gaetz boarded Air Force One with Mr. Trump on Monday before announcing that he had been tested. A flamboyant ally of the president, he turned heads last week when he wore a gas mask on the House floor before a vote on an emergency virus-related spending bill.

Mr. Collins interacted directly with Mr. Trump on Friday, shaking the presidents hand and standing directly behind him as he toured the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

New York has 142 confirmed cases, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said on Monday, and one of them is the executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, Rick Cotton.

The cluster of cases in Westchester County has grown to 98 cases, Mr. Cuomo said. Nineteen cases are in New York City, 18 are on Long Island (all but one in Nassau County), and four are in Rockland County. Three cases are farther upstate: one in Ulster County and two in Saratoga.

In New Jersey, where 11 cases have been confirmed, Gov. Philip D. Murphy declared a state of emergency and a public health emergency on Monday, effective immediately.

Mr. Cotton is one of the most prominent public officials in the United States to have contracted the virus. The agency he leads operates the metropolitan areas three major airports, as well as numerous other transportation facilities including bridges and tunnels, bus terminals and seaports.

Colleges in the Northeast and West shift classes online.

University of California, Berkeley, and New York University are among the latest schools to suspend in-person classes and move to an online format. Amherst College announced that students will need to move off campus completely by next Monday.

N.Y.U. said that it would move to online learning on Wednesday, and that students could leave campus early for spring break if they want to take remote classes from home. After the break, N.Y.U. will continue to hold classes online through at least March 27.

Princeton University has said it would make a similar move starting on March 23, after its spring break.

The schools join a snowballing list of colleges and universities that have suspended in-person classes, including the University of Washington, Stanford, Columbia, Barnard, Juilliard, Rice, Fordham University and Yeshiva University.

The number of infections in Europe continued to surge at an alarming pace, more than doubling in three days to more than 14,000 confirmed by Monday, with more than 520 deaths.

Italy, with 9,172 cases and 463 deaths by Monday, surpassed South Korea over the weekend to become the country with the second-largest outbreak, after China.

Irelands government canceled all St. Patricks Day parades, including Dublins.

Germany, France and Spain each have well over 1,000 cases, and Frances culture minister, Franck Rister, announced that he had tested positive for the virus. Switzerland, the Netherlands, Britain, Sweden, Belgium and Norway each have more than 200.

The French government announced a ban on almost all public gatherings with more than 1,000 people, and said that the Champions League soccer game between Paris Saint-Germain and Borussia Dortmund on Wednesday would be played without fans in the stadium. A France-Ireland rugby game scheduled for Saturday was postponed.

Germanys status as the only country with a large outbreak but no fatalities came to an end, with its first two coronavirus deaths.

Saudi Arabia shut off air and sea travel to nine countries in an effort to slow transmission of the virus as the kingdom grappled with a simultaneous blow to its economy from a severe plunge in oil prices.

Effectively isolating itself from its neighbors, Saudi Arabia closed air and sea travel to the Arab states of Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Kuwait, Lebanon, Syria and the United Arab Emirates, as well as to Italy and South Korea. The kingdom had already closed its land borders, and travel to and from neighboring Qatar has been banned since 2017 because of a political dispute.

The kingdom has also suspended pilgrimages to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina.

The virus outbreak is presenting challenges during the U.S. election season.

Washington State, the state hardest hit by the virus, is holding its 2020 primary on Tuesday. It votes by mail, which eliminates most concerns about viral transmission.

Looking ahead to November, Congress should right now be considering federal legislation that would address potential voting trouble, said Rick Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California-Irvines law school. The closer we to get to the election, the harder its going to be to come up with rules that look fair, he said.

Public health officials have said adults over 60 are most at risk and should avoid crowds. Joseph R. Biden Jr. is 77, Bernie Sanders is 78 and Mr. Trump is 73.

Mr. Sanders, asked by the CNN host Jake Tapper whether the three candidates should all limit their travel and avoid crowds, replied: In the best of all possible worlds, maybe. But right now, were running as hard as we can.

Reporting was contributed by Mitch Smith, Sarah Mervosh, Thomas Fuller, Jim Tankersley, Alan Rappeport, Anemona Hartocollis, Peter Baker, Roni Caryn Rabin, Elisabetta Povoledo, Declan Walsh, Matthew Haag, Carlos Tejada, David Kirkpatrick, Marc Santora, Steven Lee Myers, Claire Fu, Alissa J. Rubin, Gillian Wong, Jason Horowitz, Emma Bubola, Ellen Tumposky, Neil Vigdor, Russell Goldman, Eric Schmitt, Kirk Johnson, Campbell Robertson, Richard Prez-Pea, Katie Benner, Patrick McGeehan, Isabel Kershner and Nicholas Fandos.

More:

Trump to Discuss Economic Steps; Italy Halts Most Travel; Stocks and Oil Prices Plunge - The New York Times

90 year old Siloam Springs woman to be inducted into Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame – 4029tv

Posted on by

90 year old Willa Faye Mason played for the All- American Redheads, the first pro women's basketball team for seven seasons starting in 1948. Mason will be inducted into the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame on March 14, 2020 in Little Rock. Mason said the All- American Redheads are also having a reunion that weekend to coincide with the induction. The team is already a member of the Naismith and Women's Basketball Hall of Fames. Mason said, "The whole story is amazing. The way it was all organized and the way we played it. We played every night for six months.'' The All- American Redheads played against men and women. The team started playing in 1936 and ended in 1986.

90 year old Willa Faye Mason played for the All- American Redheads, the first pro women's basketball team for seven seasons starting in 1948.

Mason will be inducted into the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame on March 14, 2020 in Little Rock. Mason said the All- American Redheads are also having a reunion that weekend to coincide with the induction.

The team is already a member of the Naismith and Women's Basketball Hall of Fames. Mason said, "The whole story is amazing. The way it was all organized and the way we played it. We played every night for six months.''

The All- American Redheads played against men and women. The team started playing in 1936 and ended in 1986.

Go here to read the rest:

90 year old Siloam Springs woman to be inducted into Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame - 4029tv

‘The Bachelor’: Hannah Ann Sluss and Peter Weber’s Breakup Timeline Fills in Every Red Flag – Showbiz Cheat Sheet

Posted on by

[Spoiler alert: The Bachelor Season 24.] The Bachelor Season 24 finale was the most dramatic ending weve seen but it certainly wasnt for the right reasons. In the March 10 episode, Peter Weber got engaged and broke up with Hannah Ann Sluss. The 28-year-old then showed up at the After the Final Rose live taping head-over-heels in love with Madison Prewett. So what happened to the supposed love story we were promised when the season started? Recently, Hannah Ann shared her breakup timeline with Weber, including how The Bachelorettes Hannah Brown fit into the puzzle. And quite frankly, the whole debacle has us stunned.

As you may know, Webers final rose ceremony on The Bachelor was filmed on Nov. 17, 2019. Pilot Pete proposed to Hannah Ann and she accepted. However, the model was unaware of Webers feelings toward Madison.

Two days prior to the couples engagement, Madison left The Bachelor. The next day, Weber had his final date with Hannah Ann and noted his heart was still being torn in two. He did not say anything about Madisons self-elimination. Then when Weber proposed to Hannah Ann, he briefly explained what happened.

So Madison, she actually left two days ago, Weber said. But was that all the bachelor said about Madisons exit? According to Hannah Ann, yes.

When speaking with Becca Kufrin and Rachel Lindsay on the Bachelor Happy Hour podcast, Hannah Ann broke down the timeline of her breakup with Weber. And the 23-year-old shared Pilot Pete did not delve deeper into his split with Madison.

It was completely downplayed, didnt give me the courtesy or respect to have a sit-down conversation, Hannah Ann said. [He] just told me that very quickly and downplayed it. And then immediately went to, But my heart chooses you. Youre the love of my life.

Nevertheless, Hannah Ann still said yes to the engagement. My instincts were telling me I wasnt getting all the information I needed to make a decision with Peter, she explained. And should I have stayed in that bed in Australia? Absolutely. But I wasnt going to give up on someone that I loved.

Hannah Ann continued: The last words he told me on our last-chance date was he was going to make a decision that was best for both of us and to trust him. When youre with someone, you trust their word. And thats why I showed up. I was going to trust his words and follow through.

During The Bachelor finale, Weber met up with his family when he returned from Australia. Peter Sr. revealed it had been about a week since they last met. So what was Weber doing all this time? In the Bachelor Happy Hour podcast, Kufrin revealed the winning couple gets to spend a few days together before heading back home. But even at this time, Weber did not explain the Madison situation.

Hannah Ann said whenever Madison was brought up, Weber would not delve deeper. He insisted the Auburn alum was in the past. And ultimately, Weber gave Hannah Ann hope.

He always made sure to reassure me I was his person, that I was the love os his life, and that he would always choose me, she said. However, as the season started in early January 2020, things werent quite adding up.

When The Bachelor Season 24 premiered on Jan. 6, 2020, Hannah Ann and Weber were still together. But sometime in early January, Hannah Ann experienced her first red flag.

Beginning of January was when he approached me he needed to speak with Hannah Brown. That was the first red flag, she said. He was trying to convince me that I should feel comfortable with that.

Hannah also revealed she wasnt aware of what happened between Weber and the former bachelorette during the group date in the premiere. I was not on that group date with Hannah Brown, she said. I had not seen that episode of them all cozy up on the couch, crying, her possibly coming back in the house.

In the end, Weber wanting to reach out to Brown showed Hannah Ann the bachelor wasnt ready for any kind of commitment, let alone an engagement. She added, I was questioning my own self because he was trying to convince me that was something he needed. I didnt feel settled with that.

Still speaking with the Bachelor Happy Hour podcast, Hannah Ann revealed the split with Weber happened a week after he approached her about contacting Brown. However, as Hannah Ann mentioned during After the Final Rose, she was blindsided.

Weber mentioned having unresolved issues when re-watching the first few episodes of The Bachelor as it aired on ABC. However, the on-camera breakup was a surprise.

When I showed up to the breakup, that was the first time I heard him say, I cant give you my whole heart,' Hannah Ann said. And it seems the model even asked the bachelor to give her a heads up beforehand if he planned to end their relationship.

I told him before I even went out there, I said, Hey, if youre wanting to end things, can you give me a little bit of a heads up? Ill be fine, trust me. Ill cry, but just give me a heads up,' she said. We actually had talked that morning that we werent going to break up, that we were going to work through it.

Hannah Ann also added Weber spoke with her parents after the breakup, explaining he didnt know how to process his emotions.

Now it seems Hannah Ann is over Weber after watching The Bachelor unfold live on-air.

I dont exactly what happened. Nothing really surprises me by Peter, she told Kufrin and Lindsay. Watching back the season has been really helpful for me. Its helped me work through any unresolved feelifngs I had towards him. Im able to see how he is consistently indecisive and confused. And who wants to be with that?

Hannah Ann then noted Webers actions didnt make her feel secure in their relationship. Its really helped me move forward because I know I deserve more than someone just half-loving me, she said. I deserve someone whos going to give me 100 percent.

She continued: I felt like me being so clear and not playing mind games with him that he would give me that in return. But really, he was just reckless with my heart.

Read more: The Bachelor: Hannah Anns Instagram Posts Are Like Her Breakup Speech to Peter Weber, Part Two

More:

'The Bachelor': Hannah Ann Sluss and Peter Weber's Breakup Timeline Fills in Every Red Flag - Showbiz Cheat Sheet

ALFORD: Sometimes ‘knot heads’ don’t tell you what you need to know – The Sentinel-Echo

Posted on by

An elderly lady called the hospital switchboard and asked in a soft and gentle voice: "Could someone please tell me how a patient is doing?

The operator said, Ill be glad to help. Whats the patients name and room number?

The elderly lady, talking oh so sweetly, said, Her name is Alma. Shes in room 319.

"Let me place you on hold while I check with her nurse, the operator said.

A couple minutes later, the operator returned to the phone and said, "Oh, I have good news. The nurse just told me Alma is doing very well. Her blood pressure is fine; her blood work just came back as normal; and her doctor has scheduled her to be discharged on Thursday."

The elderly lady thanked the operator, telling her, I had been so worried. I appreciate the wonderful news.

The operator asked, Is Alma your daughter?

No, Im Alma, the elderly lady said, her voice not so soft and gentle now. I called you because these knot heads up here never tell me anything.

Wed likely all agree that it would be unacceptable for nurses and doctors to withhold good news from patients. In fact, nurses and doctors should be excited to share good news with those theyre responsible for. They should rush to their patients as quickly as possible to let them know they have found a treatment for the condition, so that they can be made well.

Nurses and doctors arent the only ones who have good news to deliver. Christians have the best news of all. They know a cure that can prevent sin from destroying people eternally, and Christians have been given the great privilege to share that good news. In fact, Jesus told us: Go ye into all the world, and preach the Gospel to every creature. Gospel, of course, means good news.

Were all thrilled to receive good news. But isnt it wonderful to share good news. How many times have we hoped for good news? Words like: Its not cancer, or Weve finished the surgery and hes doing fine, or, Im from Publishers Clearing House, and youve just won a million dollars.

All those things would be welcome news, but for a person who is carrying the guilt and shame of sin, there can be no better news than that, through Jesus, your sin can be forgiven and you can be made new.

Im reminded of Isaiah 1:18, which says, Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.

In that hospital, Alma received good news that she was doing well and would soon be released to go home. In this world, when sin has taken hold and we feel like were weighed down with a heavy load, the best news of all comes straight from the mouth of Jesus:

Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest (Matthew 11:28).

Roger Alford is pastor of South Fork Baptist Church. Reach him at P.O. Box 673, Owenton, Ky. 40359 or 502-514-6857.

See the original post here:

ALFORD: Sometimes 'knot heads' don't tell you what you need to know - The Sentinel-Echo

Sophie Skelton Interview About Outlander, the Fan Response to Brianna, and Her Character’s PTSD – TownandCountrymag.com

Posted on by

Skelton wears a dress by Prada and jewelry by Coomi.

Philip Friedman

On the day of Sophie Skeltons final Outlander audition, nothing went as planned. You know how people say bad things come in threes? the actress remembers. She had caught a cold on the flight from the UK to L.A. that left a ringing in her ears; her Uber got into an accident; and on top of everything else, it was pouring down rain.

Everyone kept saying, It never rains in L.A. But that seems to be my thing now. Anytime I go to Los Angeles it rains. I always bring that with me, she says.

Skelton doesnt recall much about the meeting, just that it was a chemistry test with actress Caitriona Balfe, who was already starring in the show as Claire Randall Fraser, a WWII-era nurse who had traveled back in time to 18th-century Scotland. Skelton was up for the role of her daughter Brianna, and the audition felt natural, which is funny because in audition rooms, things never feel natural, she says.

Often when you do a take and you can't remember it, when its a blur, that's when it's the best performance because you're just in it. I can't really remember too much about that day, only that my trip to L.A. had been a bit of a mess."

But she kept telling herself, Everything that goes wrong, something right has to come out of it. And by the time Skelton returned to the UK just a few days later, she had the part.

Aimee Spinks

The news was especially sweet for Skelton, who had first auditioned for the show years before, but didn't hear back.

I think the first time I auditioned for Brianna was about 2014, and then I didn't hear anything for a year. There aren't many times where you really feel protective over the role. For some reason, I really did for Brianna. You go on so many auditions and often you don't hear anything, and that's fine, but this one actually really hurt, she says.

Turns out, producers weren't ignoring herthey had just decided not to bring Brianna into the story until a later season. It was a huge relief for Skelton to learn that. "I was like, Oh. Sometimes it can be as simple as that. You have to have such a thick skin because there are so many cogs turning that you don't know about.

"There aren't many times where you really feel protective over the role. For some reason, I really did for Brianna," says Skelton of her first audition for Outlander. Here, she wears a Chanel dress and jewelry by Jacob and Co.

In Diana Gabaldons Outlander books, which serve as the source material for the Starz series, Brianna is described as being exceptionally tall, almost Amazon-like, with "thick red hair" and "deep blue eyes"a physical reminder of her father, a fiery 18th-century Highlander named Jamie Fraser (played on the show by Sam Heughan).

But sitting across from me in a conference room in Town & Countrys New York City office, Skelton couldnt be more than 5' 8''. She's wrapped up in a robe, her brown eyes adorned with glossy charcoal-colored shadow, and her almost-black hair slicked back for her impending photoshoot. Today, she's trading in her 1770s-era dresses (and the sheer floral turtleneck and high-waisted jeans she arrived on set in) for bold styles from Chanel, Prada, and Olivier Theyskens.

In terms of her physical appearance, she isn't a perfect match for Gabaldon's Brianna, but that was far a dealbreaker for Outlander's executive producer Maril Davis.

"There just aren't a lot of 6-foot-tall redheads. We sent the book description along [to casting director Suzanne Smith], but at the end of the day we wanted the best actor for the role," Davis tells me over the phone. After a difficult search, Skelton emerged as the clear choice.

"Obviously, Sophie's not 6 feet tall and doesn't have red hair, but Sam Heughan doesn't have red hair either, and that's a hurdle we overcame," Davis says. "And we were really blown away by her performance. There was a strength to her and a steeliness, but she was also able to bring some warmth to Brianna that I think is necessary because Brianna is a very strong character, but you want that strength to come across in a way that you're rooting for her."

So the Outlander hair and makeup team set out to turn Skelton's brown hair red. At first, they tried to dye her strandsto somewhat disastrous results.

Aimee Spinks

They had to bleach it, but then it got bad. It became like straw and then it just kind of fell out, she says. I remember one of the first days when we went to the salon and the head of hair and makeup was in there. They put all that foil on, and I never really dyed my hair, so I had the foil, and then they took it off and all I could hear was someone behind me go, Oh my God.

These days a wig gives Bree her iconic red hair, while a practiced American accent hides Skeltons English roots. Skelton was raised near Manchester in a village called Woodford, the youngest child in a family with two older brothers. I was always running around the fields and going on lots of walks and horse riding. I think all that came in handy for Outlander, she remembers.

A classically trained dancer, Skelton had started ballet lessons by the age of three, and her love of performing eventually led to an interest in acting. You get a wonderful rush when you go on stage, but you have to make everything really, really big, she says. I love the truth to screen. You somehow feel more in the room with someone when you're watching them on TV than you do in a theater. And I just went into the acting world from there.

Skelton's parents, independent toy inventors who have created games for brands like Hasbro and Disney, have always been cautiously supportive of their daughter's pursuit of the arts. They even let her defer university a year to try acting full time. Theres one thing my parents really warned me about when I said that I was interested in acting. They were like, Being self-employed is not easy, she says. I think they're just proud and relieved that it worked.

The risk paid off. Less than a year after deferring her acceptance to school, Skelton booked Outlander, and the show has been a real turning point in her career, spring-boarding her from small parts in long-running British TV series like Casualty and Doctors to the kind of fame that only comes from starring in a show with a large, incredibly passionate fanbase.

Michael Kovac

While at times she says it feels like her life hasnt changed that much (in Glasgow, where the show films for the bulk of the year, it's not a big deal), in certain circles in the States and corners of the internet, Outlander is a very big deal. As in, people are willing to sleep on the streets of New York City in order to meet the stars kind of big deal.

Skelton, like the rest of the Outlander cast, only has kind things to say about the shows legion of adoring fans, who discuss every detail of the series on social media, though she did admit that the community can sometimes be intense. Still, she says, "the intensity is what's driven the show.

Without those fans, we wouldn't be where we are. I think it's brilliant. I love how passionate they are about something. I don't think there was ever a show where I was that sort of fanatic about it. Some women in the community even feel protective of the character of Brianna, and at times, of Skelton herself.

Philip Friedman

But Skelton has also faced criticism from Outlander fans, perhaps more so than other actors on the series. Her character, Brianna, isnt as universally admired as Skeltons on-screen parents, Jamie and Claire. And Brees relationship with her now-husband Roger MacKenzie (played by Richard Rankin) is rockier and less idyllic (and some might say more realistic) than the aspirational time-and-space-defying romance at the heart of the series.

People sometimes equate you to the character, and it's like, Dude, I didn't throw a fire poker through a window, she says, referencing a rage-filled scene in Gabaldon's Dragonfly in Amber book.

For those unfamiliar with the intricacies of the Outlander plot, Brianna has had something of a rough go of it over the past few seasons. Conceived in the 1740s, but born in the 1960s, she had a difficult relationship with her mother, Claire. Bree, as she's known to friends and family, was closer with the man she believed to be her dad, Frank Randall (played by Tobias Menzies, one of Skeltons favorite people to work with). But when Frank died, Claire revealed the truth about both her time-traveling journey and Brianna's biological father, Jamie.

Claire then returns to the 18th century in hopes of reuniting with Jamie, and Brianna eventually follows after her, attempting to warn her parents about a historic deadly fire. In season four, after traveling through time and across an ocean to pre-Revolutionary North Carolina, Brianna finally meets Jamie for the first time, but not before being brutally raped at the hands of Stephen Bonnet, a sadistic pirate played by Downton Abbey-alum Ed Speleers.

"Just give the girl a break," Skelton says. I feel very protective of Brianna and I feel like she gets some bad press, but she's really the female Jamie. I think what people think looks very sexy and brooding on an 18th-century 6-foot-whatever Highlander, once you put that on a 16-year-old girl, people just think, oh, she's bratty and mean and rude. But, you know what? She's had a tough life.

When Outlander first premiered in 2014, it was heralded as a more feminist alternative to Game of Thrones. Both were fantasy shows on premium cable with explicit violence and sex, but unlike Thrones, Outlander didnt feature gratuitous female nudity. If anything, it played to the female gaze, and celebrated romance and female pleasure. Middle-aged womenlong fans of Gabaldons books and severely under-served by TV programming for yearsflocked to the series, which steadily amassed a sizable audience.

Simon Mein

But as the seasons continued, and the #MeToo movement forced Hollywood to take a look at rape culture both on and offscreen, Outlander began to receive criticism for its depictions of sexual violence, and more specifically, how its often used as a device to move the action of the show forward. Brianna's sexual assault is a key plot point from Gabaldon's books; to leave it out would completely alter the Outlander story, but it's also one more rape on a show that has already had many.

"Deep into its fourth season, its beginning to feel like Outlander is as much a story about sexual violence as it is about anything else, and in spite of that topics immense importance, its frustrating that Outlanders characters apparently have few other ways to experience sudden emotional turmoil," Vulture's Kathryn VanAredonk wrote at the time.

But Bonnet's attack on Bree in season four represents a shift in how the show handles sexual violence. The scene is depicted offscreenheard, but not seen. Davis says the scene wasn't a direct response to criticism, but rather a choice specific to the storyline.

Aimee Spinks

"Unfortunately, there's quite a bit of rape in these books," she says. "We approach each one differently and try to decide what's best for that scene and also what's best for the season and that character."

With Brianna's rape, the showrunners wanted to show that people could hear her struggling and screaming and crying, but they didn't step in to stop Bonnet. "I think people sometimes watch this series from a contemporary viewpoint. [The ask,] 'Why didn't anyone call the police and why didn't anyone do anything?' I think that's what we're trying to show that this is a different time period," says Davis. "Things were different. People's viewpoints of things were different. How they treated women was different. It wasn't right, but it was the reality."

And as with Jamie's rape in season one, the aftermath of sexual trauma continues to affect Brianna; it isn't something that happens one episode and is forgotten the next. More than in the book we have carried her PTSD through from season four, which is something I fought for, Skelton tells me. It's not just like it happens in one episode and we're done with it. We show the brutality of rape and the aftermath, the trauma, and the PTSD. We never glorify it.

Skelton feels a huge responsibility to rape survivors to get her performance right, and she continues to research both the stories of women who have gone through what her character has, and the biological impact of PTSD. She also recognizes that Outlanders violent storylines can be hard for some people to watch.

Ahead of the season five premiere, which featured a flashback to her attack, for example, she tweeted a trigger warning about the episodes content complete with the number for the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN) helpline.

It is a shame in a way that that there is so much [sexual violence in the show] because I do think it must be tremendously difficult for some people to watch, but I think the way Outlander handles it is ultimately good, she says.

She believes the show can function as a cathartic outlet for viewers, and hopes that watching Brianna's journey provides solace to sexual assault survivors in real life. I think we live our traumas and our joys through characters, she says. I just hope that it helps more than hinders people.

Book readers know that Brianna's healing is far from done, and Bonnet remains a threat both to her and to her son Jemmy. But Davis was tightlipped about what to expect this season from Brianna, saying only that Skelton's performances are heartbreaking.

There are episodes we haven't gotten to yet but she's incredibly powerful, Davis says.

Skelton, too, was careful not to spoil what's to come for her character. When asked about the possibility of a future confrontation between Brianna and Bonnet, she simply said, Brianna's work is not done.

Outlander airs Sunday nights on Starz.

Originally posted here:

Sophie Skelton Interview About Outlander, the Fan Response to Brianna, and Her Character's PTSD - TownandCountrymag.com

Learning to live without football – The Irish News

Posted on by

NOTHING about the Belfast Knee Clinic suggests that it is what it is. Tucked up a residential side street just off the Lisburn Road, its red brick exterior and bright red door blend in with the houses either side.

Oran Sludden is fed up looking at its inside. Two months ago, on January 14, the former Tyrone minor and Dromore senior footballer slid through and climbed to shake hands with Chris Connolly.

Ulsters foremost knee surgeon is not a man you want to be on first name terms with. But Sludden is coming in for his third cruciate knee ligament operation.

Its the second on his right leg, having first done his left in 2016 at the age of 17.

The youngest brother of Tyrone senior star Niall, Oran was a championship winning captain at U16 level with Dromore, and on the Tyrone minor squad a year early, coming off the bench that year in Celtic Park.

Injury struck and he was only just back when he came on against Derry again the following summer.

He was back establishing himself in Dromores senior setup and the clubs under-21s were just embarking on an adventure that would see them become the clubs first ever adult Ulster club champions.

Training on a Friday night two weeks before Christmas, the hard work is already done for the evening. The game at the end of the session on their 3G pitch is in full flow when Sludden comes to collect a ball. Turns to go and pop.

The pain was horrific. My first one, I played on, so I knew this was serious. I remember roaring and screeching until you took a couple of breaths and calmed down.

Conciliatory tones fall on deaf ears. He knows himself what it is. Within days, the same balloon of swelling has grown over the top of his knee. The scan is only a formality.

If it was only a knee problem that began that night, he could have coped. But over the next 12 months, the absence of football sees Sluddens life spiral down the plughole.

Without sports structure, drinking and gambling co-exist. The light starts to get shut out, the walls close in and in the space of six weeks between Halloween and early December 2019, Oran Sludden attempts suicide twice.

Hes adamant there will be no third time.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

FROM the chieftains, as he calls them, Kevin and Colette (ne McAnenly from Glencull), through sister Cara (29) and brothers Niall (27), Ruairi (25), Tiarnan (22) to 20-year-old Oran himself, to famous former refereeing uncle Martin, theres an entangled connection with the GAA, both club and county.

Every evening, every weekend, his social circle, his holidays, his girlfriend, every conversation, it was all football.

For as long as it loved him, he loved it.

But with that twist of the knee in late 2018, the relationship became fractured.

The timing was particularly bad. It had been nine months since Dromore won the Tyrone U21 title. While his team-mates are just after beating Magherafelt and earning their place in the Ulster final, hes preparing to hop on to the hospital bed for surgery.

That night, they go off on a bus to celebrate in Belfast and try to persuade him to go too, but he heads home to Dromore instead.

I went back down the road, and the power of social media, the lads get a few drinks and it starts flowing. You feel lost because you think it should be you too.

He stopped going to training up until the Friday night before the final against Carryduff. Sludden and fellow knee victim Jack McShane travel on the bus with the team, theyre in the changing room, but they dont go into the team photo before the game.

It just didnt feel right. Travelling on the bus didnt feel right. Everythings going past you, youre nearly in a daydream. Youre happy for them but theres that sense of hurt that you didnt take part.

That night the team goes back to Dromore to a heroes welcome. All Sludden can think of is putting enough drink into himself that he can slip away early.

He joins the team in Belfast for the week, where hes studying Liberal Arts at St Marys, and returns home the following Wednesday barely fit to walk with his knee.

Days in the city played out behind another red door of another red brick building 48 Damascus Street where he lived with brother Tiarnan and another couple of Dromore lads.

He found himself going out during the week and then lying in bed the whole next day, missing class and sinking deeper into depression.

I was making the excuse of not being hungover and not making class, but the real fact was I was depressed and I wasnt able to get out of my bed.

You just wanted to pull the blanket back over you. I was lying in bed until 3 or 4 oclock in the day, getting up then, no breakfast, no lunch and going back down to the pub then.

I knew there was something wrong but you couldnt put your hand on it.

Hed been diligent after his first cruciate but this was very different. The appetite to go at it again just isnt there.

There were days I was going to the gym, standing there for 40 minutes and walking out again.

I missed that freedom of taking a bag of balls to the pitch for an hour and kicking about. To just kick the next one, and the next one, and the next one.

Id have been telling ones I was doing rehab but I was down here doing that.

And yet he needs football. As with so many young players, it is a central pillar in his life. The drinking continues, and the gambling starts to get its claws into him.

What started with 10 on a few teams at the weekend grew as the wires of his connection to playing frayed.

Trips to the Irish Grand National and a student day at the May Day races at Down Royal both end up with him spending all his money on drink and horses.

That turned to sitting on his phone at night, adding random ice hockey or NFL or Brazilian soccer teams to a betslip that hed know nothing more about until he checked his balance in the morning.

There was always some measure of control in that he never borrowed money to gamble, but when he was sitting alone at home in Dromore one sunny evening last June, it came to a head.

There was a four-horse race in Sligo. I had 125 left in my bank account. The favourite was 6/5, the second favourite was 6/1. I knew nothing about it other than maybe Davy Russell was on it, but I put the whole 125 on it.

The horse came last out of the four. I had 40p left in my bank. The only thing saved me was working wages coming in the next morning.

He went on a lads holiday to Greek island Kavos soon after and spilled his guts about the gambling to his friends. When he came home, he headed straight for Dunlewey Addiction Services.

Its been largely under control since then, and he still visits once a month.

But when the rest of his life started to slip again in early October, he found himself sneaking out of St Marys to run down to the bookiesand throw money he didnt have on a horse he didnt know.

By that stage, it had become a symptom rather than a cause. His demons were getting the better of him.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

AUGUST 24 was the date for the comeback. Hed played a half against Clonoe reserves the week before, and then came off the bench against Carrickmore for his first senior game back.

It was just six months after surgery and he knew the work wasnt near done, but everything behind closed doors was eating so far through him that he had to try anyway.

He scored three points from play, but within 10 minutes, hed planted his right foot to push off and felt the wobble in the knee. Another 10 minutes passed before he had to give in and come off, already dreading what was inevitably to follow.

The following week, it was confirmed that hed wrecked the right knee again. Dromore was gone, Tyrone was gone, Sigerson with St Marys was gone.

For Halloween, he went back to Belfast. Out on the Sunday night. In bed until 3pm on Monday, up and straight back to the pub, drinking doubles.

He and girlfriend Tara returned to the house to get ready for the evening and as she was doing her make-up in a bedroom upstairs, Oran paced the kitchen.

I walked to the drawer, pulled it open and lifted out a big knife for cutting bread. I pinched it to my stomach and it wasnt gonna do any harm, so I put it back.

The only other thingI could see was a small chopping knife. I took it out, pinched it to my stomach and knew it would go through.

All he remembers from there is the sound of the ambulance coming, and then being in a haze, screaming at the top of his lungs on a hospital operating table.

In stabbing himself in the stomach, he missed all his major organs and arteries. Within 10 days the stitches were out, but more crucially, within 24 hours he had given him the all-clear to go home.

I dont blame anybody for it but the mental health team came to assess me and they just made me feel like it was normal teenager behaviour.

I probably didnt release as much emotion as I could have, and they maybe just felt it was an impulsive thing that happened and that itd go away with a wee bit of counselling.

Inside, he was desperate for help. After the clubs gala dinner two weeks later, where there were 500 people in the function room of the Great Northern Hotel in Bundoran who all knew what had happened, Sludden confessed to Tara that he wanted to end his life.

I went back to the room and completely broke down.

On December 8, they went to Sallys nightclub in Omagh.

That morning, he and Tara had been due to do the Rudolph 10k run in Eskra but he pulled out, instead heading to Castle Archdale and embarking on his own jog to try and clear the mind.

I ran for 35 minutes and when I got back in the car, nothing had changed.

Come midnight, hes telling Tara hes going home, but she instinctively knows. By the time she catches up, hes hanging over the railings of the Sacred Heart Bridge, which runs over the Omagh-Derry bypass.

That state of mind is black, total devastation.

There were tears. I just felt at that stage it was the right thing to do, to just end it all there. Ones were ringing and texting in a panic. I text my Mum and Dad and said I love you all. That sent them into a complete panic.

I climbed the rail with tears flooding out of me. I couldnt see any way out. I was hanging to the rails, a couple of people came, Tara came and theyre trying to talk you out.

I let go and youre just in freefall. I remember hitting the ground and that was it until I woke up in Altnagelvin the next morning.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

THE dam busts. For three days in Altnagelvin Hospital in Derry, Oran Sludden cried.

The physical pain was remarkably minor. Having come down on his feet, the 30-foot drop on to a main road had resulted in just a couple of minor fractures in his foot and his hand.

Mentally, though, hed taken all he could take.

He refused to leave until hed been signed in somewhere that could properly deal with his mental health problems. After Altnagelvins assessment, they recommended hemoveacross to Gransha Hospital.

The ambulance moved him just after midnight on December 10. He resolved to tell the professionals every single thing that came into his head.

Nothing was held back. Seven days later, the Sludden family got their boy back. There would be no empty chair at Christmas.

Gransha will always be close to my heart for kick-starting my recovery, he says, speaking with a composure and confidence that belies his incredibly tender years.

His knee injuries were the root cause of a depression that spiralled to depths that he kept hidden from view for almost a full year.

Not being able to fulfil his dreams of playing on big summer days for Dromore, perhaps even Tyrone, threatened to consume him.

Hed drank to cover the pain, gambled for the sensory deprivation caused by not playing. But in being able to recognise that in himself, and to remove himself from the vicious worlds Instagram and Snapchat, the first steps back to comfort and happiness were made.

Attending a cognitive behaviour therapist every week has changed his way of thinking.

Hes taught me that mental health doesnt define Oran Sludden, and not to dwell on the past. He also changed my outlook on the pressures of the GAA, which played with my head at the worst times.

Im a lot healthier now. I would have been an avid Tyrone fan, gone to every game. I havent watched a Tyrone game this year, havent gone to a game, and it doesnt bother me.

There was a time I could see nothing other than football. Id have been planning everything around it.

This year, if Dromore have a league game and theres something else on, Im gonna go and do it.

I know Ill be happier doing the other thing than going down to watch the football.

My attachment to the GAA, compared to what it was, is day and night. Ive completely changed my outlook on football.

Im happier.

And so when he walked through that red door on Ulsterville Avenue two weeks ago, part of him almost wanted Chris Connolly to tell him it was over. And part was relieved when the surgeon said that, off the back of his third cruciate operation in January, it was salvageable if he really wanted.

Right now, he doesnt. Time might change that.

It's not what's behind the red door that counts any more.

Every day is recovery of the mind, not just the knee.

A healthy, happy, rejuvenated Oran Sludden, hopping out of his bed in the morning again, is what matters.

Originally posted here:

Learning to live without football - The Irish News

Puzzle about nitrogen solved thanks to cometary analogues – Space Daily

Posted on by

Comets and asteroids are objects in our solar system that have not developed much since the planets were formed. As a result, they are in a sense the archives of the solar system, and determining their composition could also contribute to a better understanding of the formation of the planets.

One way to determine the composition of asteroids and comets is to study the sunlight reflected by them, since the materials on their surface absorb sunlight at certain wavelengths. We talk about a comet's spectrum, which has certain absorption features.

VIRTIS (Visible, InfraRed and Thermal Imaging Spectrometer) on board the European Space Agency's (ESA) Rosetta space probe mapped the surface of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, known as Chury for short, from August 2014 to May 2015.

The data gathered by VIRTIS showed that the cometary surface is uniform almost everywhere in terms of composition: The surface is very dark and slightly red in color, because of a mixture of complex, carbonaceous compounds and opaque minerals. However, the exact nature of the compounds responsible for the measured absorption features on Chury has been difficult to establish until now.

Cometary Analogue Provided the Solution to the PuzzleTo identify which compounds are responsible for the absorption features, researchers led by Olivier Poch from the Institute of Planetology and Astrophysics at the Universite de Grenoble Alpes carried out laboratory experiments in which they created cometary analogues and simulated conditions similar to those in space.

Poch had developed the method together with researchers from Bern when he was still working at the University of Bern Physics Institute. The researchers tested various potential compounds on the cometary analogues and measured their spectra, just as the VIRTIS instrument on board Rosetta had done with Chury's surface. The experiments showed that ammonium salts explain specific features in the spectrum of Chury.

Antoine Pommerol from the University of Bern Physics Institute is one of the co-authors of the study, which is now published in the Science journal. He explains: "While Olivier Poch was working at the University of Bern, we jointly developed methods and procedures to create replicas of the surfaces of cometary nuclei." The surfaces were altered by sublimating the ice on them under simulated space conditions.

"These realistic laboratory simulations allow us to compare laboratory results and data recorded by the instruments on Rosetta or other comet missions. The new study builds on these methods to explain the strongest spectral feature observed by the VIRTIS spectrometer with Chury," Pommerol continues.

Nicolas Thomas, Director of the University of Bern Physics Institute and also co-author of the study, says: "Our laboratory in Bern offers the ideal opportunities to test ideas and theories with experiments that have been formulated on the basis of data gathered by instruments on space missions. This ensures that the interpretations of the data are really plausible."

Vital Building Block "Hides" in Ammonium SaltsThe results are identical to those from the Bern mass spectrometer ROSINA, which had also gathered data on Chury on board Rosetta. A study published in Nature Astronomy in February under the leadership of astrophysicist Kathrin Altwegg was the first to detect nitrogen, one of the basic building blocks of life, in the nebulous covering of comets. It had "hidden" itself in the nebulous covering of Chury in the form of ammonium salts, the occurrence of which could not be measured until now.

Although the exact amount of salt is still difficult to estimate from the available data, it is likely that these ammonium salts contain most of the nitrogen present in the Chury comet. According to the researchers, the results also contribute to a better understanding of the evolution of nitrogen in interstellar space and its role in prebiotic chemistry.

Research Report: "Ammonium Salts Are a Reservoir of Nitrogen on a Cometary Nucleus and Possibly on Some Asteroids"

Related LinksRosetta at ESAAsteroid and Comet Mission News, Science and Technology

With the rise of Ad Blockers, and Facebook - our traditional revenue sources via quality network advertising continues to decline. And unlike so many other news sites, we don't have a paywall - with those annoying usernames and passwords.

Our news coverage takes time and effort to publish 365 days a year.

If you find our news sites informative and useful then please consider becoming a regular supporter or for now make a one off contribution.

More here:

Puzzle about nitrogen solved thanks to cometary analogues - Space Daily

How The Coronavirus Is Forcing Italy To Become A Digital Country, At Last – Forbes

Posted on by

Every cloud has a silver lining, they say, and Italians do need to find some consolation, at a time when our usual life hangs in a sort of limbo, waiting to be reactivated. Its certainly a small thing, compared to the grief and losses of many, but the Coronavirus emergency is forcing citizens and institutions to come to terms with digital technologies, at last.

For many years, the country steadily ranked among the less advanced European countries in the Digital Economy and Society Index published by the European Commission. As of 2019, three out of ten people in Italy were not regular internet users yet, and more than half of the population still lacked basic digital skills. Only Greece, Romania, Bulgaria and Poland fared worse. Thats very likely going to change.

Closed in their homes, not even allowed to take a stroll without carrying a self-signed document that explains where they are going, people are inventing new ways to stay together, work and have fun. Ways that, needless to say, rely on the Internet.

From theatres to museums, culture moves online

Lots of live events have been canceled, but culture doesnt stop. From Genoa to Turin, from Palermo to Milan and Parma, theaters have found alternative channels to communicate with their audience. Under the #iorestoacasa (I stay at home) hashtag the Carlo Felice Theater in Genoa is streaming every day pearls from its archive: connect at 8 p.m. (CET) today, and Tchaikovskys The Nutcracker will be waiting for you, followed by La bohme, tomorrow. Opera and ballet are not your thing? What about some classical music, say Ludwig Van Beethoven directed by Zubin Metha? Theyve got you covered: just head to Palermos Teatro Massimo website to get that. The YouTube channel of Venices La Fenice is another unmissable bookmark if you want to enjoy some top-level shows for free. Museum and cultural institutions are also adapting. Milans Triennale is organizing every day on Instagram, "Decameron", a digital festival with well-know Italian authors, singers, writers and journalists telling their "stories" following in Boccaccios footsteps. The Museum of Modern Art of Bologna is creating short videos in which artists exhibiting at the museum explain the meaning and the work behind their creations.

Teachers brushing up their digital skills

Since schools of every order have been shut by the government, the small "Insegnanti 2.0" (teachers 2.0) closed Facebook group has seen an explosion in admission requests, skyrocketing to 36.900 members. Everyone is looking for advice, tutorials, quick tips on how to handle the emergency and avoid losing precious school days. "How do you share your PCs audio with Google Meet?," one member asks; "In my school, virtual classrooms have been canceled. The network couldnt cope," says another.

As in many other fields, Google here is dominating: many Italian schools have subscribed to its G-Suite for Education. Microsoft Teams and Office 365 Education A1 are also widespread. Both for privacy and ideological reasons (not everyone is happy with Big Techs access to school data) and for the perceived limits of these platforms, some are looking for open-source alternatives: Jitsi, Jami, are among the most widely mentioned videoconferencing tools and OBS Studio is going strong for screen capture and live streaming.

The numerous WiFi networks visible in an apartment building in Turin, Italy, on 11 March 2020, after ... [+] the Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte's decree "I rest home", applied from yesterday to 3 April. The decree made it possible for many Italians to work from home thanks to smart working. Italy has imposed unprecedented national restrictions on its 60 million people to control the deadly COVID-19 coronavirus. (Photo by Massimiliano Ferraro/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Besides mutual help on Facebook groups, theres no shortage of public and private initiatives aimed at helping teachers bridge their skills gap in the digital sector. The national TV broadcaster, for instance, has launched a new section on the "Learning" channel of RaiPlay, with short educational pills for teachers.

Following an agreement with the Ministry of Education, the famous Treccani encyclopedia has made freely available to schools and students its e-learning platform Treccani Scuola, to help them collaborate remotely. Will this in-depth immersion in new technologies leave any trace in teaching methodology when the emergence is over? Its too early to tell, and no one knows how long this period will last, anyway. Theoretically, schools should re-open in April, but much will depend on how the situation is evolving.

Remote working

For those that have been freelancing from home for a while, the current lockdown doesnt change much. But for many others, the need to turn to some sort of smart working to keep things going, implies a huge shift in mindset and process. More for companies than for employees, perhaps. While corporations are more open, Italian SMEs, that make the most of the countrys industrial fabric, have traditionally been wary of letting their employees work from home.

According to Eurostat data, in 2018 only 3,6% of employed people worked from home in Italy, compared to 14% in the Netherlands or 6,5% in France. The reasons are mainly cultural: Italian companies are highly hierarchical and bosses like to have their employees close, where they think they can better control them. Besides that, productivity is not always measured on achieved goals, but it is often confused with how many hours you spend at the office. With the result that people spend there much more time than in other countries - drinking coffee. The COVID-19 might have an impact on that.

New legislation introduced by the government during the first days of the lockdown allows companies to implement forms of smart working without the need of a previous agreement (as it was before). The financial newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore asked its LinkedIn followers to describe how their employers were taking advantage of the opportunity. The instant survey paints a black and white picture, with positive reviews as well as negative experiences by struggling white collars. Many commenters, however, on LinkedIn as well as in newspaper interviews, see the disruption brought by the virus as an opportunity to modernize the Italian workplace routine.

Not everyone could work from home but, according to some studies, more than 8 million people in Italy could benefit from that, up from 570,000 right now. If only a fraction of them would be involved, the landscape would change dramatically.

Follow this link:

How The Coronavirus Is Forcing Italy To Become A Digital Country, At Last - Forbes

Good sleep hygiene is the new wellness goal. Try telling that to an eight-month-old baby – The Guardian

Posted on by

The most common signifiers of adulthood used to be getting a mortgage and gearing up for the midlife crisis. But who these days has the money for the former, or the time for the latter? Nowadays, the surest signs that youve reached maturity are an obsession with property magazines and a fascination with the quality of your sleep. Going by this criteria, I am more middle-aged than the most middle-aged sitcom dad ever (Darrin from Bewitched, who, Google informs me, was played by an actor five years younger than me when the show started. I am totally and definitely fine about this.)

I am fascinated with sleep but nowhere near as fascinated as everyone else, it seems. I can hardly walk down the street without someone telling me about their latest sleep app, or reading an article about good sleep hygiene, or hearing how sleep deprivation is the health equivalent of chaining 40 Benson & Hedges a day, and of course how tired so very, very tired everyone is, because they didnt get their requisite eight hours last night.

How I laugh at this. I throw my head back and laugh the kind of full-throated cackle an evil genius makes right before he presses the red button that blows up the world. I have barely slept more than five hours a night since my daughter was born eight months ago, and there is something genuinely hilarious about this era of sleep obsession when you have a baby who refuses to let you sleep. Its like living in a busted shack when everyone around you is banging on about the problems with their new basement extension. (I told you I was into property magazines.) The truth about why you keep waking up at 3am a doomy headline in this paper read recently. Is it because theres a screaming baby in the cot next to your bed?

God, Im so tired, I used to say when I was young and merrily childfree. Talking about how tired I was back then seemed to be a way of proving how deeply sensitive I was (too fragile to sleep) while simultaneously giving the impression that I led an extremely exciting social life (too fabulous to sleep). But I did genuinely think I was tired, and this is what I want to say to my twentysomething self and any other young person who is about to say how tired they are: youre not.

If you have the energy to ascertain your tiredness and then talk about it, youre not actually tired. Youre just thinking too much about yourself, which is what the entire wellness industry is based on, and which ultimately becomes detrimental because focusing too much on sleep will only exacerbate your sleeplessness. If anyone is worrying that they only got seven and a half hours sleep last night, allow me to reassure you: I have done interviews on three hours sleep, written articles on four hours, and Im typing this after being woken three times in the night (as Amy Poehler says in her memoir, Yes Please, everything written by men and women with children under six should come with a sleep-deprived sticker on it). And Im fine. OK, I can feel my brain cells self-cannibalising and have possibly given myself premature dementia: it took me two days last week to think of the word gondola. But I am still fine. Well, alive, anyway. I am definitely 100% alive.

So no, I dont want to hear about how tired you are. But if youre all having such trouble sleeping, how about if you take over the night shift with my baby? Ill definitely sleep, and you and the baby can rave all night together. David Baddiel has said that the only thing that cured his insomnia was having kids, because they exhausted it out of him. Think of the money you could save on sleep apps, kids!

Awake at 4am, I fantasise about a time when my kids are teenagers and sleeping until midday, which means Ill sleep until midday, too. Or perhaps not: older parents warn me that, while child-induced sleeplessness cures insomnia, it also breaks you, leaving you doomed for ever after to wake at 6am. So maybe weve got this parenting thing all wrong: just as twentysomething bodies are supposed to cope best with pregnancy and childbirth, perhaps fifty- and sixtysomething biorhythms work best with a babys sleeping patterns. Older friends and relatives could rise at 6am and take the baby out for a nice walk around the park, while we broken thirty- and fortysomethings could be left to get on with other things. Like sleeping. Strangely, none have yet accepted my suggestion, but theyre probably just mulling it over.

Last weekend I went away for a friends 40th, alone. We had dinner on the first night, and it was lovely, but I was impatient to get back to my hotel room where I knew the fun would really begin. Reader, I slept solidly for 11 hours. When I woke naturally, as opposed to being woken I nearly wept with happiness. The second night was a party and, giddy with freedom and an unaccustomed feeling of being well rested, I danced until the sky was light. The next day, I went home, and my husband, who had been looking after all three kids all weekend, asked how I was. I looked him right in the eyes and said, God, Im so tired.

Read the original:

Good sleep hygiene is the new wellness goal. Try telling that to an eight-month-old baby - The Guardian

Why so many robotic startups fail, and what can be done about it – TechCrunch

Posted on by

At last weeks TC Sessions: Robotics+AI, I felt it was important to focus at least one panel on companies that are working to foster robotics startups. NVIDIAs VP of Engineering Claire Delaunay and Freedom Robotics co-founder and CEO Joshua Wilson joined me to offer unique perspectives.

Both companies help provide building blocks for founders. NVIDIA is using some of its tremendous resources to create platforms like Isaac, designed to help prototype robots. And Freedom, a fairly fresh startup in its own right, is designing AI offerings to ease the deployment of those manner of systems.

But the first step of helping robotic startups help themselves is identifying why so many fail. Citing a handful of high-profile examples like Rethink, Anki, Jibo and CyPhy Works, I put the question to the panelists: even with a lot of funding and plenty of smart people on board, why do so many robotic startups fail?

I think its just very hard to solve robotics problems today, which makes it still very expensive and very hard to get to even an MVP (minimum viable product) in the development cycle of the of the company, said Delaunay. Too many people focus still on robotics problem, not on the final problem, not on the on the business proposition.

There are lots of reasons why robotics startups fail, but Delaunay honed in on one of the principle issues right out of the gate: unlike many other tech startups, robotics companies arent focused on solving a problem. But thats often out of necessity. Imagine starting a car company but you first have to mine cobalt for the battery and pave the roads. Or, to use Delaunays analogy, building and manufacturing your own smartphone in order to launch an app.

See original here:

Why so many robotic startups fail, and what can be done about it - TechCrunch

Fiona Hodgson: Why plumbing industry is thriving in an age of robotics – HeraldScotland

Posted on by

Industries which innovate and adapt to changing circumstances have a fighting chance of survival in a fiercely competitive commercial environment. That is one of the fundamental reasons that the plumbing and heating sector is now more buoyant than it has been for many years.

From an employers perspective, business in Scotland is riding a wave, with new build housing, City Deals and private contracts all adding to a significantly increasing workload and a demand for new skills.

From an employees viewpoint, there has seldom been a better time to become involved in a vibrant and dynamic industry at the forefront of new technologies which are showcasing renewables and meeting the demand for clean energy in an age of climate change.

And, at a time when the advance of robotics is generating disturbing headlines for working people across the spectrum, the exponentially-increasing complexity of the skills required by plumbers and heating engineers, the need for dexterity, hand-eye coordination and flexibility, mean that their services will still be in demand long into the future.

The challenge for those with the interests of the industry at heart is maintaining a pipeline of these highly-technical skillsets, in order that their knowledge can be passed on in turn. And that means one thing: apprentices.

In this area, Scotland is still recovering from the 2008 recession, when the number of apprentices dropped from 1800 in training to 700, a collapse which had serious implications for the sustainability of the profession.

The numbers have since recovered with just under 900 apprentices currently in training but there is still a long way to go if we are to meet the demands of the sector. What is heartening is the quality of the young people coming through out of the eight plumbing apprentices competing in the WorldSkills UK competition in Birmingham recently (November 2019), five were from Scotland taking home gold and silver medals and two being eligible to compete in China in 2021.

It is vital that we maintain this level of quality and increase the number of apprentices coming through the system. However, to do this we must address one of the issues facing the sector which is how to improve the perception of employment within it, and to have it recognised for what it is challenging, rewarding, worthwhile and socially useful.

Of immediate help would be support from the Scottish Government for adult apprenticeships, which are denied the same levels of funding and are therefore less attractive to employers, who also pay adults higher pay rates.

Such career opportunities would be very attractive to the many people who are seeing their jobs disappear in sectors such as retail, and in other employment areas which are about to be ground under the wheels of the juggernaut of automation.

It is also important to emphasise that, apart from take home salaries which would be the envy of many graduates, the plumbing and heating industry can be a springboard for careers in management, sales, lecturing and entrepreneurship.

Of course, as well as maintaining the quality of intake, the sector has to ensure the capability of the existing offering.

Governmental announcements on climate change such as that of former Chancellor Phillip Hammond who said that gas boilers were to be phased out in new build homes by 2025 present opportunities but also challenges for the sector. Many firms have welcomed the opportunity and have enthusiastically moved on to ground and air source heat pumps.

Mixes of hydrogen and natural gas are being trialled for use in homes in conjunction with existing wet heating systems, again reducing our reliance on fast-diminishing carbon-based resources. However, we not only need to ensure that only qualified, skilled labour undertake this type of work but also that they are sufficient in numbers to do so.

Scotland has even more ambitious carbon reduction targets than the rest of the UK and, as well as phasing out combustion heat in new homes, there is a wealth of work to be done in retro-fitting existing stock with the latest energy-saving technology.

We are experiencing a sea change in attitude to energy use, with the wish to restrict carbon consumption moving quickly into the mainstream. Plumbers and heating engineers will be in the vanguard of this very necessary revolution.

Fiona Hodgson is chief executive of the Scottish and Northern Ireland Plumbing Employers Federation, the trade association for plumbing and heating businesses.

Original post:

Fiona Hodgson: Why plumbing industry is thriving in an age of robotics - HeraldScotland

Insights into the Global Food Robotics Market – Analysis, Trends and Forecasts (2020 to 2025) – ResearchAndMarkets.com – Business Wire

Posted on by

DUBLIN--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The "Food Robotics - Market Analysis, Trends, and Forecasts" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

Food Robotics market worldwide is projected to grow by US$1.8 Billion, driven by a compounded growth of 13%. Low (< 10 Kg), one of the segments analyzed and sized in this study, displays the potential to grow at over 14.2%. The shifting dynamics supporting this growth makes it critical for businesses in this space to keep abreast of the changing pulse of the market. Poised to reach over US$1.3 Billion by the year 2025, Low (< 10 Kg) will bring in healthy gains adding significant momentum to global growth.

Representing the developed world, the United States will maintain a 14% growth momentum. Within Europe, which continues to remain an important element in the world economy, Germany will add over US$70.3 Million to the region's size and clout in the next 5 to 6 years. Over US$86.1 Million worth of projected demand in the region will come from Rest of Europe markets. In Japan, Low (< 10 Kg) will reach a market size of US$107 Million by the close of the analysis period.

As the world's second largest economy and the new game changer in global markets, China exhibits the potential to grow at 12.8% over the next couple of years and add approximately US$316.2 Million in terms of addressable opportunity for the picking by aspiring businesses and their astute leaders. Presented in visually rich graphics are these and many more need-to-know quantitative data important in ensuring quality of strategy decisions, be it entry into new markets or allocation of resources within a portfolio.

Several macroeconomic factors and internal market forces will shape growth and development of demand patterns in emerging countries in Asia-Pacific. All research viewpoints presented are based on validated engagements from influencers in the market, whose opinions supersede all other research methodologies.

Competitors identified in this market include, among others,

Key Topics Covered:

I. INTRODUCTION, METHODOLOGY & REPORT SCOPE

II. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

1. MARKET OVERVIEW

2. FOCUS ON SELECT PLAYERS

3. MARKET TRENDS & DRIVERS

4. GLOBAL MARKET PERSPECTIVE

III. MARKET ANALYSIS

GEOGRAPHIC MARKET ANALYSIS

IV. COMPETITION

V. CURATED RESEARCH

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/kapavu

See original here:

Insights into the Global Food Robotics Market - Analysis, Trends and Forecasts (2020 to 2025) - ResearchAndMarkets.com - Business Wire

A robotics researcher is sending drones where few have gone before – create digital

Posted on by

One case in which it has shone has been stope mapping, replacing old cavity monitoring systems a camera or lidar on a boom, inserted manually into a passage by a worker.

The onboard lidar and the SLAM simultaneous location and mapping algorithms allow a drone to operate inside a virtual safety sphere and avoid collisions while collecting 300,000 points per second through a constantly-spinning Velodyne puck lidar, creating a point cloud.

Data is logged onboard and processed afterwards at half the speed of the capture time.

Hovermap also has potential in search and rescue, asset inspection and other scenarios.

In the year since it started with $3.5 million in seed funding, Emesent has grown its team from seven ex-CSIRO members Hrabar and CTO Farid Kendoul are co-founders to 20 full-timers.

It has also established distribution channels, including in China, Japan, South Korea and the US, and is a key part of the only Australian team to qualify for the three-year DARPA Subterranean Challenge, which pushes teams to drive novel approaches and technologies to map, navigate, and search underground environments.

Its been a crash course in business, too, for Hrabar, who began his tertiary studies as a mechanical engineer at the University of Cape Town.

Towards the end of his bachelors degree, Hrabar developed an interest in connecting computers with machinery.

For my final project I ended up building an automated warehouse system out of Lego, but it was controlled from a computer. I was reading in barcodes from a scanner and controlling the warehouse, so it was scanning barcodes of products and then packing them on shelves and keeping track of inventory, he told create.

I think from early on I was interested in that connection. And then I actually was interested in doing animatronics.

Animatronics turned out to be puppetry, at the end of the day, and the lack of intelligence in the automatons meant he lost interest.

However, following a year as a consulting engineer in London, Hrabar did end up creating a quarter-scale, animatronic aardvark as part of his mechanical engineering masters.

Its movement was enabled by hobby servos and controlled by a Handy Board microcontroller. The animatron featured in a National Geographic wildlife film.

While completing his degree, Hrabar also took in two years of computer science studies to fulfil the prerequisites for beginning a PhD in robotics at the University of Southern California. His PhD work focused on stereo vision and optic flow for drone collision avoidance, working with petrol-powered, single-rotor drones.

Post-PhD, most of the drone work in the US at the time was in defence, said Hrabar. The required security clearance was not easy to achieve for a non-US citizen.

A 2004 research internship at CSIRO in Brisbane working with Peter Corke (now Director at the Australian Centre for Robotic Vision and then a lab director at CSIRO) led to a move to Australia to work as a research scientist.

He worked with a group making drones smarter, while another focused on SLAM.

The next logical step was to put the two together, so that we could do SLAM on the drone in real time to help it navigate and collect that data for offline processing after the flight, he recalled.

Read more:

A robotics researcher is sending drones where few have gone before - create digital

Column | Outside the Surgical Suite: Robotic Solutions on the Battlefield and Beyond – MedTech Intelligence

Posted on by

When author Isaac Asimov introduced the world to the Three Laws of Robotics in his 1942 short story Runaround, little did he know that less than 45 years later the first non-laparoscopic robot, the Puma 560, would enter the surgical landscape. This would be followed several years later by the da Vinci robotic surgical system, now the standard robotic technique used by hospitals in the United States and many other countries when performing marginally invasive surgical procedures.

Or perhaps the visionary whose famous three laws were intended for human interactions with autonomous robots did indeed have prescient knowledge of the scientific breakthroughs that were to come. One can only wonder what Asimov would think of a surgical robotic solution that could be applied in war and disaster zonesand perhaps even one day in space.

While control, flexibility and precision are the hallmarks of the widely utilized da Vinci system, due to its bulk and need for fixed installation and a sterile, controlled temperature environment, it cannot be used in areas where it may be most neededbattlefields and natural disaster sites.

Presently, advancements are in process to bring surgical robotic application, guided by surgeons from remote locations, to battlefields and as close as the firing line. It is a methodology that has captured the attention, interest and positive reviews from the military and U.S. Department of Defense (DOD).

Dr. Darrin Frye of the DOD imparts oversight support and assistance with the research and development of Defense Health competences that will facilitate military healthcare providers in their responsibility to protect and treat those on the battlefield and in the air space. According to Dr. Frye, the present challenges inherent with evacuating the injured to treatment sites makes the prospect of surgical robotics technology of great promise and appeal to expeditionary medical and theater hospital specialists.

The product now in development marries elements of technologies that bear CE certification with a native design for field operations.

Currently, in the absence of a more effective solution, patients in war zones and disasters are triaged and transported to treatment centers for surgery. As a result, they receive only the most minimal of care during the first most critical hours following injury.

Present day robotic surgical solutions, because of their size, weight and aforementioned fixed installation and sterile environment requirements, cannot be applied at a war or other disaster site. Moreover, surgical robotics now in use do not convert from laparoscopic to open surgery functions fluidly and surgeons are required to operate in extremely close proximity to the injured.

The remote methodology soon to head to market comprises onsite containers with surgical robots and actual emergency rooms guided remotely by off-site surgeonsa superior alternative to transporting a critically wounded patient miles to a treatment center. Changes in todays battlefields and air space have made it challenging to evacuate patients to different locations for treatment, making surgical robotics technology particularly promising to expeditionary medical and theater hospital environments.

This advanced methodology is comprised of a number of surgical units with each unit maintaining a base with one degree of freedom (DoF), an anthropomorphous robotic arm with seven DoFs; an end-effector, mounted at the arm wrist, carrying three actuators that drive the surgical tool and a three DoFs surgical tool. The first six DoFs of the arm have torque sensing. Each surgical tool is comprised of a distal component, a rod and an interface component.

The digital component serves as the actual surgical tool, with capabilities as grasper, scissors and dissector. With two rotational joints, the tool can angle its tip around two perpendicular axes and has the capability to open and close its jaws. That, in combination with movement scaling estimated to surpass the accuracy of standard surgical robots by 10 times. The learning curve to use the surgical robot is relatively easy as the tool provides heightened vision, superior navigation and quality dexterity. More than noteworthy is that fact that units are limited to less than 300 pounds for easy transport using normal military vehicles.

This proprietary work in progress is being developed with artificial intelligence, making the technology fully autonomous. Its anticipated multi-capabilities would be well suited to environments outside the surgical suite due to its sensitivity, flexibility, size and cost efficiencies.

Modular in design, this pioneering technology allows for easy and quick set-up and makes multi-quadrant procedures possible. Other salient features include its facility to perform both laparoscopic and open procedures with microsurgery precision and inclusion of sensors and software to simplify the coordination of surgical movements. Compact and light, this robotic solution can be moved from one operating site to another within minutes.

At a cost of 50% less per procedure than the standard da Vinci method, the remote technology is not only price effective, but can perform five to 10 times higher the number of procedures per tool and be used in any procedure.

The benefits of deploying life-saving artificial intelligence procedures to the battlefield, to regions hit by natural or man-made disaster and perhaps eventually to space is now beyond the imagine phase and entering the stringent certification process. What do you think would Isaac Asimov be impressed or merely say, I told you so.

Surgeons recently demonstrated that autonomous robotic soft tissue surgery outperforms standard clinical methods.

Identifying user needs and actually turning them into actionable inputs during the design process can be a challenge.

All of the issues that ECRI calls out on its list are preventable, so device manufacturers and healthcare providers should take serious note.

How can medtech manufacturers navigate the roadblocks?

Continued here:

Column | Outside the Surgical Suite: Robotic Solutions on the Battlefield and Beyond - MedTech Intelligence

Taking a look at how the robotics field is growing at UTM – The Medium

Posted on by

One of the several areas the University of Toronto Mississauga is focusing on expanding is the innovative field of robotics. The Medium spoke to Julian Sequeira, a fourth-year computer science student at UTM and the events coordinator of the UTM Robotics Club, about robotics at UTM and the exciting projects the robotics club is currently working on.

The UTM Robotics Club was founded in September 2019 after Dr. Florian Shkurti, an assistant professor of mathematical and computational sciences at UTM, advised his CSC477: Introduction to Mobile Robotics students that it was the ideal time to start a robotics club since UTM was making a big investment into robotics. Sequeira and four other students thought it was a great idea so they worked together to initiate a robotics club at UTM.

As Sequeira details, UTM launched a couple of robotics classes last fall [and] hired three robotics professors. The professors bring with them expertise and innovation: Dr. Jessica Burgner-Kahrs, a worldwide expert in continuum robotics; Dr. Florian Shkurti, who completed his Ph.D. in computer science and robotics from McGill University; and Dr. Animesh Garg, who previously completed a post-doctoral fellowship at Stanford University. There are [also] plans to offer more robotics courses next year, hire a couple more professors in robotics, and offer a robotics specialist for students. Sequiera furthermore recalls Shkurti mentioning that there will be a new building for robotics at UTM along with ten fully-featured robotic arms and facilities for robotics clubs and grad students.

The robotics club offers an opportunity for students to work with physical hardware since there are no relevant classes currently being offered. The club offer[s] workshops on Arduinos [and] 3D printers, and, essentially, offers an avenue for students to build things on a physical level. The club is also a great opportunity for first and second-year students who are interested in robotics but cannot enrol in the third and fourth-year classes just yet.

The club is working on a few different projects. The first one is a self-balancing pendulum[for which they are currently] printing parts and [plan to] later write code to make it self balancing. Another project is a a self-driving car project spearheaded by students who are taking an independent study class with Shkurti. The aim is to program the car so that it can drive around campus and pick up trash. Right now, the team is training a neural net on [the car], which, in laymans terms, [means] that [the team] drives it around the Deerfield building, taking pictures and controlling it with a joystick. If [the car] see a picture of a wall, the joystick input would be to turn left or right so it doesnt crash into a wall, [and] later, when it is driving autonomously, it will see the wall, and based on the training it has, it will go left or right to avoid that wall. The team will also be training a neural net on the car to teach it what items are garbage.

The third project UTMs robotics club is working on involves training a drone to recognize different gestures, and based on those gestures, do something. As of now, they have trained it to follow faces. For instance, if the drone sees and recognizes a team members face and the person turns twenty degrees to the right, the drone will also turn twenty degrees to the right.

The club holds weekly sessions where members can come in and work on projects. It helps if you have some computer science background, but if you do not, its completely fine. Everyone is welcome to join. The executives are always willing to mentor participants and to try finding something they can work on or get excited about. In the future, the team looks forward to grow[ing] alongside UTM investing in robotics.

Go here to read the rest:

Taking a look at how the robotics field is growing at UTM - The Medium

Construction Workers Embrace the Robots That Do Their Jobs – WIRED

Posted on by

The International Union of Operating Engineers has plenty of big toys at its training center in Crosby, Texas, but one that began rolling across the 265-acre campus last week is an oddity. The modified Caterpillar 336 excavator can use onboard computers and sensors to perform by itself some of the work the center trains human operators to do, such as digging trenches for gas pipelines or wind turbine foundations.

The IUOEs new robotic excavator is the result of an unusual partnership with Built Robotics, a San Francisco startup that sells a box that can enable a backhoe or bulldozer to pilot itself for some tasks. It contains a high-powered computer, motion and angle sensors, and a laser scanner called a lidar commonly used in self-driving cars.

Although Builts product is designed to remove workers from the cab of construction equipment, IUOEs director of construction training, Chris Treml, says the union wants to train its members to work with the technology. Operating engineers are always on the cutting edge of technology, he says.

After construction workers describe an excavation using GPS coordinates, the vehicle can drive itself across a site to its starting point and go to work.

The IUOE was founded in 1896 and its logo features a steam gauge with the needle at 420 pounds per square inch, the operating pressure of some steam engines. Its training center teaches members to use remotely operated robotic equipment such as drones and mini-cranes, as well as fine-grade GPS equipment to guide construction vehicles to grade dirt at precise angles.

Treml says members now need to get familiar with autonomous construction equipment, because it too is set to become a standard part of the industry. The last thing I want to see is people losing their jobs, he says. But this is something thats out there and its going to be part of our industry, and so we want to be a part of it. Built plans to help IUOE expand its fleet of autonomous vehicles over the coming year.

While a vehicle is in autonomous mode, a single worker needs to stay on hand in case of problems.

Here is the original post:

Construction Workers Embrace the Robots That Do Their Jobs - WIRED

Robots Are Helping to Eliminate Coronavirus Transmission – ETF Trends

Posted on by

By now, everyone is well aware of the preventative measures for avoiding the coronavirus pandemic, which could be as simple as normal hygienewashing hands for example. However, robots are taking coronavirus containment to another level, especially in areas where the likelihood of contracting the virus is highhospitals for example.

One Danish company, UVD Robots, is making machines that can help disinfect these high-risk areas.

Per an IEEE Spectrum report, these robots are able to disinfect patient rooms and operating theaters in hospitals. Theyre able to disinfect pretty much anything you point them ateach robot is amobile array ofpowerful short-wavelengthultraviolet-C(UVC) lightsthatemit enough energy to literally shred the DNA or RNA of any microorganismsthat have the misfortune of being exposed to them.

The initial volume is in the hundreds of robots; the first ones went to Wuhan where the situation is the most severe, UVD Robots CEOJuul Nielsen toldIEEE Spectrum.Were shipping every weektheyre going air freight into China because theyre so desperately needed. The goal is to supply the robots to over 2,000 hospitals and medical facilities in China.

^SPKR data by YCharts

The robots could be coming to a local hospital near you, and it would serve traders best to capitalize on this move to robotics with ETFs like theRobotics & AI Bull 3X ETF(NYSEArca: UBOT). Traders looking to capitalize on the move to robotics can use UBOT as a tool.

UBOT seeks daily investment results equal to 300 percent of the daily performance of the Indxx Global Robotics and Artificial Intelligence Thematic Index, which is designed to provide exposure to exchange-listed companies in developed markets that are expected to benefit from the adoption and utilization of robotics and/or artificial intelligence.

The robotics space is certainly in a push-pull dichotomy of investors capitalizing on the latest in disruptive technology, while at the same time, getting push back from those threatened by the wider adoption of robots. The fears are warranted given that robotics technology has the capacity to supplant human jobs.

Key characteristics of UBOT:

For more market trends, visitETF Trends.

Original post:

Robots Are Helping to Eliminate Coronavirus Transmission - ETF Trends

Numina Group, Waypoint Robotics to Launch Innovative Autonomous Batch Cart Order Fulfillment Solution – Supply and Demand Chain Executive

Posted on by

Numina Group and Waypoint Robotics have teamed up to create a powerful autonomous batch order automated order picking solution.

Numina Groups Real-time Distribution Software, RDS Batch Bot Voice Picking Application integrates with Waypoint Robotics Vector Autonomous Mobile Robot (AMR) to provide an innovative, highly efficient order picking solution. The RDS automation module uses pick by voice commands to direct operator zone movement and picking tasks while coordinating the Waypoint Vector AMR batch cart movement throughout the distribution center. Using the Kingpin technology, the AMRs efficiently pick up and move carts with heavy and/or large quantities of orders, allowing the operators to focus on the high value order picking duties. The Vector AMR Kingpin connects and drops carts quickly, resulting in higher hourly throughput per cart, and a more efficient pick, pack and ship operation.

The solution simultaneously coordinates both the Waypoint AMR and order picking to eliminate wasted operator walk time and fatigue caused by manually pushing carts with up to 600 pounds of products throughout the DC. RDS directs the Vector AMR with Kingpin pick and drop technology, so the pick carts automatically move to each shelf or rack location. At pick completion, RDS directs the AMR to transport the finished carts to packing workstations. Vector combined with the RDS Batch Bot solution provides higher order fulfillment efficiency, reducing labor costs by 40% or more compared to a manual cart picking process.

Numina Groups RDS Warehouse Execution and Control Software Suite now includes a new Batch Bot Module to optimize, manage and track (AMR) activities, says Numina Group chief executive officer Dan Hanrahan. The new software module extends the capabilities of our RDS Pick by Voice picking application so both the workers and the autonomous batch cart movements are coordinated throughout pick and pack. The Batch Bot module includes order release and prioritization, cartonization pick to carton, put to light order consolidation and labor and order tracking performance metrics reporting.

Waypoints Kingpin is the first of its kind dual-use module that enables Vector and MAV3K AMRs to automatically load and unload payloads as well as hitch and transport carts of all sizes, says Waypoint Robotics chief executive officer Jason Walker. Now you dont have to dedicate a robot for one task or another, with Kingpin you can do both. This combined with Numina Groups RDS order fulfillment automation suite creates a powerful but easy to use solution to improve worker productivity and safety by reducing the heavy lifting

Read more:

Numina Group, Waypoint Robotics to Launch Innovative Autonomous Batch Cart Order Fulfillment Solution - Supply and Demand Chain Executive