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Year in Review 2019: The five fastest-growing jobs in Singapore – Yahoo Singapore News

Posted on December 27, 2019 by Danzig

SINGAPORE Demand for digital talent skyrocketed in 2019 as Singapore continued its push towards becoming a Smart Nation, and companies accelerated their own transformation journeys. Here are some of the fastest-growing jobs in the city state this year, based on Yahoo Finance searches.

1. AI Specialist

Singaporeslead in the global race for attracting robotic and AI investmentskicked AI Specialists to the top of this years list. Global giants with AI facilities in the city state include Alibaba Group, Salesforce, YITU Technology and Adatos. Demand is expected to intensify with Singapores recently announcednational AI strategy, which includes its plans to deploy AI at a national scale, and become a global leader in the developing and deploying the technology by 2030. Those seeking a job in the field should purse skills in TensorFlow, machine learning, Python, and computer vision, according to a LinkedIn, which put AI Specialist at the top of its list of fastest growing jobs in 2019.

An engineer sets up a CloudMinds robot with a 5G sign before a performance at the World Robot Conference in Beijing, China August 20, 2019. (PHOTO: REUTERS/Jason Lee)

2. Robotics Engineer

Increasing use of robotics from chatbots to driverless technology - in industries from manufacturing and healthcare to hospitality and education put demand for Robotics Engineers capable of building and deploying Robotics Process Automation (RPA) software second only to AI specialists. Robotic Engineers automate mundane tasks or processes, speeding them up significantly to reduce costs, grow revenue and improve customer experience. Demand is expected to increase further Singapore currently has the worlds second most automated workplace, with advisory, broking and solutions firm Willis Towers Watson projecting that robots will account for29% of all work done by companies in Singapore in 2020.

3. Data Scientist

With access to a growing amount of data, organisations are looking to data scientists to unlock trends, and generate actionable insights that will allow them to deliver more relevant products, streamline business practices, and identify business opportunities. In the four years to 2017, jobs in data science jumped by 17 times, and according to a LinkedIn study, data scientists continued to be the most-viewed profession in LinkedIn in 2019. According to Singapores Economic Development Board, data analytics industry will contribute an estimated US$730 million to the nations economy annually.

4. Cyber security analyst

Demand for cyber security analysts grew across industries this year alongside growing awareness of cyber threats. It was cited among the top five jobs in demand in Singapore by LinkedIn, as well as recruitment consultancies Robert Half and BGC. According to Robert Half, cyber security analysts can expect salaries ranging from S$90,000 to S$150,000, depending on how relevant the candidates experience is. Cyber security analysts are responsible for protecting sensitive information, including information stored in computer networks, cloud servers, and mobile devices, as well as for designing firewalls, monitoring the use of data files and protecting the network.

5. Human Resource Officer

Hiring in the human resource industry increased 48 per cent this year, and will continue to increase over the next three years, according to recruitment consultancy Michael Page, who places Chief Human Resource Officeramong Singapores highest paying job at $275,000 per annum on average. According to BGC, organisations are looking to recruit professionals with strong experience in HR technologies and talent acquisition. As competition for technology-related skills heats up, it has also driven an increasing demand for those with relevant talent acquisition experience in the technology sector.

ANCHORAGE PRESS PERSON OF THE YEAR: At 95, Vic Fischer continues to fight for the Alaska Constitution he drafted – Anchorage Press

Posted on December 27, 2019 by Danzig

Alaskas constitutional system of government has never faced an assault like the one it endured in 2019 from Governor Mike Dunleavy and Attorney General Kevin Clarkson. Yet as we head into 2020, the Alaska Constitution, and the Alaskan people, are winning. The rule of law is prevailing because of the wisdom of Alaskas statehood founders, and the last living constitutional convention delegate continues to fight in the trenches to defend the Constitution he drafted.

Even at the age of 95, Vic Fischer shows no signs of slowing down. When the clarion call went out to recall the governor this summer, he could be seen at just about every signature drive as a tireless grassroots worker much more than a symbolic figurehead for the movement.

For this type of service, after a lifetime invested in building Alaska, Vic Fischer is our choice for Anchorage Press Person of the Year.

I asked Vic about why he chose to be one of the primary co-sponsors of the recall campaign, and about how he sees Governor Dunleavys agenda as a threat to the statehood eras monumental achievements. Because the direction Dunleavy was pursuing was designed to undermine everything wed we created with the Constitution and with statehood, Fischer said. Our goal was to remove Outside control of Alaska and her resources. In contrast, the Governor has solicited Outside support while cutting education, cutting health care, and the Governors agenda runs counter to what so many of us had been working for over the last sixty or seventy years.

In May, Fischer addressed the House State Affairs Committee two days after his 95th birthday and strongly condemned three unconstitutional amendments put forth by the Dunleavy administration, which would have the effect of making any sort of taxation virtually impossible.

It is concise. Short, declarative statements of policy, of process, of organization. The amendments are atrociously written, Fischer said. The power of taxation shall never be surrendered. Period. That is a solid policy statement And then this proposed amendment goes on to undermine this policy.

Vic Fischer has never been shy about standing up to power.

He grew up in Stalinist Russia, and barely escaped annihilation both by the Soviets and the Nazis. After emigrating to the United States, he served in the U.S. Army during WWII, then completed his education at MIT.

With the choice of settling anywhere in the United States, Fischer moved to Alaska in 1950 and immediately became involved in local politics, working as a city planner for Anchorage, and then with the statehood movement. During the three-month long Constitutional Convention that began on November 8, 1955, he served as a delegate to the Alaska Constitutional Convention, where he drafted much of the document that is still the basis of our states laws. Fischer also served as a Delegate in Alaskas last Territorial legislature, and as a State Senator in the 1980s. He founded the Institute for Social and Economic Research (ISER), which continues to be the most respected institution in the state for modeling fiscal and economic policy.

Alaskas Constitution was a model in 1956, and remains so today. It contains powerful language regarding collective benefits from resource development, along with clear protections for personal privacy and civil liberties. Equally important, the Constitution sets out a meritocratic system of judicial selection that comes as close as possible to guaranteeing a non-partisan judiciary. Finally, the Constitution thoroughly and thoughtfully establishes a balance of power among the governor, legislature, and judiciary.

The last year has made clear that the Constitution and Governor Dunleavys agenda are mutually incompatible. The Governor has attempted to seize the legislatures power of appropriation by refusing to disburse funds appropriated for public schools. Hes attempted to neuter the judiciary by defunding part of its budget over an abortion ruling that clearly aligns with the Constitution and long-standing case law. Dunleavy has declared war on workers job security and rights to collectively bargain, but has lost high profile court cases related to privatization of Alaska Psychiatric Institute and dues collection by public employee unions. Dunleavy has also gone to extreme lengths to advocate for permitting of Pebble Mine, even cutting-and-pasting lettaers from Pebble lobbyists onto Governors stationary. Yet Dunleavys legal effort to shut down the free speech of fishermen protesting the mine proposal was blocked in court. Dunleavy has accumulated a remarkable 0-7 record in his attempt to tear down long-standing legal statutes, both because his vision is fundamentally inconsistent with the Constitution and because Alaskas merit-based system of judicial appointments elevates judges who respect the law rather than subordinating it to partisan interests.

From Dunleavys perspective, the lost lawsuits are not the endgame. It has been clear since the beginning of his administration that the Governor is laying the groundwork to campaign for opening the Constitution to revision through a Constitutional Convention. Such as question last appeared before voters in 2012 and each decade before. Though voters generally reject re-writing the Constitution by a 2 to 1 margin, weve never faced a situation in which the Governor and Outside interests like the Koch Brothers coordinate to push for a Convention. Fortunately, Vic Fischer is still with us to defend the Constitution that has served Alaska well for more than sixty years.

When I interviewed Fischer for the Press in 2016, he was fighting to protect our merit-based system of judicial appointment. Fischer has not slowed down since: He is co-chairing the campaign to recall Governor Dunleavy, along with Arliss Sturgelewski and Joe Usibelli. Fischer testified before the legislature in 2019 to oppose Governor Dunleavys proposed Constitutional amendments. He said the byzantine proposals to effectively block any new revenue measure is preposterous, and concluded that: What seems to be behind the proposals is a strategy of reducing the wealth of the people of Alaska, he said. If you apply those into the future, Alaska will become impoverished. Its a downhill spiral.

Fischer also was on the front lines helping to block Dunleavys budget proposals, advocating for public schools, Medicaid health insurance, Pioneer Homes, and ferry system.

As Alaska ages, few of its founders are still with us. Fischer is the last living delegate from the Constitutional Convention. Governors Jay Hammond and Wally Hickel, who remained active in public affairs late in life, have passed away in the last decade and a half. Vic Fischer is the only Statehood era leader with us today who has the moral and historic authority to protect Alaskas Constitutional legacy across multiple centuries.

Alaskans have far higher incomes and lower inequality, and more secure civil rights than citizens of most states. We have outstanding public schools and a university with world-renowned research programs, despite a tiny population and correspondingly limited tax base.

To a great extent, Alaskans have built a strong state democracy, state economy, and public institutions on the foundation that Vic Fischer and other statehood founders provided with our Constitution. Vic Fischer is not simply resting after sixty years of public service, but continues to be at the forefront defending Alaska and the many institutions he helped establish.

And as he told legislators back in May, Im still alive, and if I can be of any help, I will be happy (to).

Zack Fields is a long-time Anchorage Press contributing writer and currently represents District 20 in the Alaska State Legislature.

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ANCHORAGE PRESS PERSON OF THE YEAR: At 95, Vic Fischer continues to fight for the Alaska Constitution he drafted - Anchorage Press

Moe has no regrets about divisive 2019 as he targets more autonomy in New Year – Regina Leader-Post

Posted on December 27, 2019 by Danzig

For Premier Scott Moe, the political low-point of the year came in a tension-filled office on Parliament Hill.

It was Nov. 12, 2019. That was the day he met with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to present, in person, his new deal for Canada.

It was a frustrating meeting for me, likely one of the more disappointing meetings that Ive had in my political career, he said in a year-end interview with the Leader-Post.

The meeting was important for Moe. It had been a challenging year for Saskatchewan, capped off by a divisive election that proved how deep the frustrations ran on the Prairies.

In Moes view, Trudeau had spent the past year making it worse.

The biggest challenge that this province has had over the course of this last year has been on two fronts, he said. One has been natural resource prices. Two has been natural resource policies coming out of the federal government and so we need to continue to work with, stare down at times, our federal government.

But Trudeau would not be stared down. Moe came out of the prime ministers office saying he heard nothing new.

Premier Scott Moe in the cabinet meeting office in the Saskatchewan Legislative Building in Regina on Tuesday, Dec. 10, 2019.TROY FLEECE / Regina Leader-Post

It was a fitting symbol of a year of intergovernmental drama that produced plenty of harsh words, but little in the way of concrete change.

Moes government spent 2019 directing a full rhetorical and constitutional assault against a federal carbon tax that still doesnt show any sign of going away.

A May decision at the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal, which ruled the tax constitutional, was another tough moment for Moe. But it didnt change his mind about broad-based carbon pricing.

We were aware that this was not an open and shut case for either side. It is an area of jurisdiction that has some questions around it. I was disappointed, he said.

I firmly believe that it doesnt work. The carbon tax does not reduce emissions here in the province of Saskatchewan.

On April 4, 2019 hundreds of vehicles that took part in the Regina Rally Against The Carbon Tax in Regina gather at Evraz Place. Premier Scott Moe spoke with those in attendance.TROY FLEECE / Regina Leader-Post

As Moe looks forward to 2020, hes trying to remain hopeful that federal-provincial relations might improve in the New Year.

We have the same Prime Minister but a much different face to our federal government. Its a minority administration, they are going to need the support of at least one other party with any of the legislation that they move forward on, he said.

So I am optimistic that we will see some different direction.

There were also high points, of course, including on the national stage. Moe pointed to his recent meeting with other premiers that produced a more united agenda to take to Trudeau.

That meeting, Moe explained, is how he prefers to work.

Im viewed as a very confrontational politician with our federal government, he said. Thats not my first place of comfort. My first place of comfort is where we got to with the premiers. Its to collaborate, identify the challenges, identify positive solutions pick one and go.

We havent been able to this point do that with the prime minister.

Other victories Moe cited came on the provincial stage. He celebrated the completion of the Jim Pattison Childrens Hospital and the Saskatchewan Hospital in North Battleford.

What I am most proud of over the course of the last year is the opening of two new healthcare facilities that are indicative of what growth can achieve in this province, he said.

He said his growth plan, unveiled this fall, is the key to ensuring the money is there to pay for those kinds of projects.

On March 19, 2019, Minister Donna Harpauer, left, and Premier Scott Moe watch the Federal Finance Ministers Budget speech from the Legislative Building in Regina.TROY FLEECE / Regina Leader-Post

The March budget also stood out as a victory for Moe. It marked the end of a three-year struggle to return to the black after tumbling resource revenues drove the province into the red.

For the premier, its more than an accomplishment. Its a way to differentiate his party from the rival NDP which has publicly mused about deficit spending with an election campaign set for this coming fall.

Theres one party that is committed to continuing to balance that budget and not leveraging against the next generations future and theres a party that is willing to spend their childrens income far into the future, Moe said. So thats a difference.

Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe is seen during a news conference after a meeting with Canadas provincial premiers in Toronto on Dec. 2, 2019.CARLOS OSORIO / REUTERS

He said the key to victory in 2020 is keeping a steady course, but also an open mind.

We need to continue doing exactly what weve been doing for 22 years now as a party, to focus on the growth of our economy, focus on investing the proceeds of that growth back in our communities, thats the simple answer, he said.

The other part of that is we need to keep listening. We need to keep listening to people right across this province, whether theyre in urban or rural Saskatchewan, wherever they are.

Saskatchewan people should expect a focus on three points over the coming year, according to Moe. Saskatchewan will build up its economic independence, its financial independence and its political autonomy all the better to resist the kind of challenges he saw in 2019.

That means balanced budgets. It also means a push for more control over issues like immigration and tax collection. In an end-of-year surprise this December, Moe floated efforts to explore a Quebec-style approach on those two points.

As Moe looked back at all the fire and fury of Saskatchewan politics in 2019, he said he harbours no regrets.

He dismisses the idea that an unexpected debate over abortion was a distraction. Comments by his then-minister of rural and remote health, Greg Ottenbreit, turned the focus on anti-abortion sentiment in the Saskatchewan Party.

On Nov. 26, 2019, Canadas Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, left, meets with Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe in the Premiers office at the Saskatchewan Legislative Building.BRANDON HARDER / Regina Leader-Post

Moe said he believes that debate is healthy.

I dont think its a distraction, he said. I think its something that should be debated from time to time, at any level of leadership, if you will.

There are laws, and those laws need to be respected, despite what your personal beliefs may be on whatever topic that may be. So, I have my own personal views. But I also have my own personal views about following the law in the nation of Canada.

And he still isnt willing to let NDP Leader Ryan Meili off the hook for refusing to attend the Regina Rally Against the Carbon Tax.

Meili had raised concerns that it was a yellow vest rally without the yellow vests.

Ill be honest with you, I did not have any idea or understanding of where the leader of the Opposition was coming from with respect to his claims accusatory claims namely directed at a farmer from Estevan, but also directed by grouping anyone that would attend such a rally in a yellow vest as being anti-Semitic and anti-Islamic, he said.

Meili later insisted he was talking about the worst of the worst of the yellow-vest movement, not everyone who planned to attend the rally. But eight months later, Moe faulted him for tarring people with the same brush.

I didnt understand why it got as personal, said Moe.

He shouldnt have said it, and he should apologize for it.

But Moes party was willing to make things personal too, issuing ads against Meili calling him out of touch with Saskatchewan and making links with unpopular figures like Jagmeet Singh and Justin Trudeau.

The premier isnt about to apologize.

awhite-crummey@postmedia.com

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Moe has no regrets about divisive 2019 as he targets more autonomy in New Year - Regina Leader-Post

65 Outstanding Black And Hispanic Men Leading In Cannabis – Benzinga

Posted on December 27, 2019 by Danzig

This article was originally published on The WeedHeads blog, authored by Dasheeda Dawson.

While researching for the latest update of our top-selling workbook, How to Succeed in the Cannabis Industry, 3rd edition, I found information around Black and Hispanic-owned businesses in the legal cannabis industry underwhelming. Far too often invisible. From High Times Magazine to MJ Biz Daily, people of color are rarely included in the global lists highlighting key cannabis industry insiders in significant numbers. Only a few consistent names make the mainstream round-ups, largely focused on big name celebrities doing little to truly impact the industry's public perception, government regulations or social equity.

For most, especially men of color, there are no shortcuts to success in the legal cannabis industry. Through the years, I have been inspired by those working passionately on the ground to make it happen for themselves and their communities. Yet, the stories of impactful work, inherent risks and incredible sacrifices of the Black and Latinx cannabis community remain far too often untold. Legitimate and visible representation matters to the future of this industry. While too many men of color have been rendered victims or criminals by prohibition, there are some making headway in legal cannabis. This list offers a glimpse into the ways Black and Hispanic men are trailblazing the legal cannabis industry. These 65 outstanding men are truly pioneers, reshaping the narrative around marijuana and hemp to push the movement beyond past incarceration and current domination by a wealthy and privileged few. This list of men to watch in 2020 aims to inspire, motivate and empower the next wave of professionals, entrepreneurs and investors looking for their successful path into the legal cannabis industry.

As one of the first internal medicine doctors in Florida to recommend medical cannabis treatments for patients, Dr. Joseph Rosado is a global pioneer and best-selling author of Hope & Healing: The Case for Cannabis. He is the CEO of International Medical Consultants and medical director of Minorities for Medical Marijuana.

Raft Hollingsworth III is the CEO and co-founder of The Hollingsworth Cannabis Company (THC Co), a Black-owned, family farm developing premium cannabis products for the Washington market. THC Co. has been featured on CNN, Buzzfeed and Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown.

Board Chairman for Minorities for Medical Marijuana, co-founder of Art 420 and founder of Monarch Manufacturing & Distribution, Erik Range wears many hats as an entrepreneur and leading advocate in the cannabis industry. A seasoned community engagement director, he is also co-host of CannaTalk with Roz, providing weekly cannabis insights and education. He is a member of Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity, Inc.

Co-founder of the California Minority Alliance and a founder emeritus of the Southern California Coalition , Virgil Grant is an OG pioneer and staple in the California cannabis industry. A dispensary owner for over 15 years, he has been at the forefront of the movement for social equity since Prop 215 as both an entrepreneur and an activist.

#5 Jim Jones - Global

Legendary hip-hop icon Jim Jones is the face of Saucey Extracts, a California-based brand known for a patented extraction methodology to create full-spectrum cannabis oil. Bringing his east coast flare to the Cali market, Jim Jones has been featured on cannabis panels at Source 360 Summit and Cannabis World Congress & Business Expo (CWCBExpo).

Award-winning advocate and pioneer in the cannabis industry, Leo Bridgewater is the National Director of Outreach for Edify PAC, working toward responsible, regulated, and socially just cannabis access and distribution. A strong and well known voice for veteran access to medical marijuana, Leo is also the National Director of Veterans Outreach for Minorities for Medical Marijuana (M4MM).

A native of New Jersey, Dr. Rasean Hodge is a family physician and medical director of Premier Chronic Pain Care in Atlanta. In addition to serving three times as "Doctor of the Day" for the Georgia House of Representatives, Dr. Hodge was a contributory factor in writing the law for HB 722 and its inclusiveness of Peripheral Neuropathy, as one of the qualifying conditions for participation in Georiga's medical cannabis program.

David Kellman, an experienced cannabis cultivator and vape technologist, is the Strategic Partnerships Manager for The WeedHead & Company, working to de-stigmatize the plant and educate consumers on cannabis as medicine. A college athlete turned advocate of criminal justice reform and sustainable environmental practices, David uses his platform MoarBluntsnStuff to be a unique voice for millennials focused on conscious cannabis consumption and patient-centered regulations.

A cannabis advocate since high school, Jason Ortiz started his career in advocacy with Students for Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP) and has worked with multiple organizations to put together model legalization bills for cannabis policy development. Today, he is President of the Minority Cannabis Business Association (MCBA), the first 501(c)(6) non-profit business league created to serve the specific needs of minority cannabis entrepreneurs, workers, and consumers.

Award-winning cannabis reporter with nearly 5,000 articles published on mass media, Javier Hasse is the author of "Start Your Own Cannabis Business: A Step-by-Step Guide to the Marijuana Business," a #1 best-seller on Amazon via Entrepreneur Press. He is also Managing Director at Benzinga Cannabis.

NFL Super bowl champion and cannabis advocate, Marvin Washington has become a leading voice in the huddle of former NFL players speaking out about the benefits of CBD for opioid addiction and CTE. He is the VP of Business Development for Isodiol, co-founder of Isodiol's performance brand, Iso-sport and on the Board of Directors for Athletes For Care.

After 18 years of experience in executing top development and management projects in New York City, Florida, & Haiti, James Victor is the co-founder and CEO of James Henry SF, a responsible lifestyle, health and wellness brand with proprietary cannabis formulations for therapeutic use. He is also a member of the Minority Cannabis Business Association (MCBA) Medical Committee.

Mehka King is a journalist, host of the "CashColorCannabis" podcast, and the filmmaker behind The Color Green: Cash, Color, and Cannabis a documentary investigating racial disparities in the cannabis space. CashColorCannabis is "a higher level of conversation" highlighting upcoming brands and voices in the budding industry.

A former NYC teacher and sales executive for JP Morgan Chase, Rani Soto is an educator, advocate and entrepreneur within the cannabis industry. After helping to launch the largest recurring cannabis industry networking event in New York, he is now president of Brote AG, a hemp distribution company. He also serves as National Director of Latinx outreach for Minorities for Medical Marijuana (M4MM).

Corporate-to-cannabis crossover, John Gilstrap went back to his farming roots as co-founder and VP Business Development for Hudson Hemp, an association of farmers located in NY's Hudson Valley focusing on regenerative agriculture and soil science to cultivate organic sun grown hemp using environmentally sustainable practices. He is also co-founder of the NY Cannabis + Hemp Trade Association.

Alphonso Blunt is co-owner of Oakland's Blunts + Moore, the first fully equity-owned dispensary in the world. An Oakland-native, Alphonso had been working to open a dispensary since 1999 before he was awarded a license by the city through the equity program lottery.

A U.S. Navy Veteran and retired firefighter paramedic, Stanley Atkins is an advocacy leader and medical cannabis healthcare educator in Georgia, where he played an active role in the formation and expansion of the GA Medical Cannabis Program (HB65) along with key decriminalization laws. Best-known as "The CanniMedic", Stanley is the M4MM chapter president for Georgia and go-to cannabis resource for state legislators, brands and consumers in the market.

The most vocal public advocate for full cannabis legalization in Minnesota, Marcus Harcus is an experienced community organizer and former City Council candidate responsible for launching the Minnesota Campaign for Full Legalization (MN CFL) in 2017 after four legalization bills were introduced in the state legislative session. In his role as Executive Director, Marcus' efforts helped to elect a pro-legalization governor in 2018.

Jesce Horton is a well known pioneer in the cannabis industry with many noteworthy accomplishments including co-founder of Minority Cannabis Business Association (MCBA) and founder of award-winning Panacea Valley Gardens, a state-of-the-art Oregon cannabis cultivation. Recently, he co-founded NuLeaf Project, specifically designed to address the various hurdles that people of color face when entering the cannabis industry. He is a member of Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, Inc.

Founder of Philadelphia's Color of Cannabis Conference, Tauhid is a digital content expert with the Philadelphia Inquirer. As an executive board member for the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists (PABJ), he used his influence to create the first media-led cannabis conference aimed specifically to reverse the stigma of cannabis use and to educate local media on why covering underrepresented minority issues surrounding cannabis legalization is important and necessary as a function of the media industry.

Sean Tolliver is co-founder and CEO of CannaTrax (C-Trax) Software Solutions, provider of point of sale (POS), customer relationship management (CRM), merchant services and business intelligence to cannabis retailers. Now working with some of the largest hemp retailers in North Carolina, Sean is an active advocate for legalization, serving as both co-president for M4MM North Carolina chapter and on the board of directors for Charlotte NORML.

Retired NBA champion, Matt Barnes came into the cannabis advocacy spotlight after admitting to smoking weed before every NBA game. Already known for his advocacy work as founder of Athletes vs. Cancer (AVC), a 3-day event aimed at raising awareness for cancer research, Matt added a cannabis component to the ACV all-star weekend in 2018. He is also the first athlete endorsed by RAW papers and now launching his own brand of pre-rolls called Swish, in partnership with Sacramento-based Seven Leaves.

A Students for Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP) alum, Jake Plowden is co-founder and Deputy Director of the Cannabis Cultural Association (CCA), a NY-based non-profit organization helping marginalized and underrepresented communities engage in the legal cannabis industry, emphasizing criminal justice reform, access to medical cannabis, and adult use legalization. He is also executive producer and co-host of In the Know 420 podcast.

Canadian native , Raymond C. Dabney is co-founder and CEO of Cannabis Science, Inc. (OTC: CBIS), a U.S. company founded in 2009 specializing in the research and development of cannabinoid-based medicines. CBIS works with leading global experts in drug development, medicinal characterization, and clinical research. It is one of the key industry partners in the recently launched, ground-breaking International Phytomedicines Institute (IPI) at Harvard Medical School.

An expert on market research, John Kagia has been delivering big data insights for 15 years. Now, Chief Knowledge Officer for New Frontier Data, John was the one of the first data scientists to focus exclusively on legal cannabis. A highly-sought speaker and advisor, he oversees development of data, business intelligence, and risk management solutions for businesses and municipalities navigating the industrys complex global dynamics.

A highly-decorated executive chef and U.S. Marine veteran, Scott Durrah is co-founder, COO and Master Cannabis Chef for Simply Pure, one of the first dispensaries owned by an African-American in the country. As a cannabis industry leader and advocate, he has been featured across multiple media outlets, including CNBC's Marijuana USA and remains a strong voice for more minority inclusion in the industry.

Landon Dais is the Chief Strategy Officer of Plant Inspired Future (PIF), a minority-owned multi-state cannabis operation with a medical marijuana license in Michigan and hemp license in New York. An accomplished cannabis professional, political strategist, attorney & public speaker, Landon is also General Counsel to Plush Green Hemp Company and previously served as NY State Policy Director for Marijuana Policy Project (MPP). He is a member of Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity, Inc.

Nadir Pearson is a multi-talented millennial taking the cannabis industry by storm with his content creation, digital strategy and passion for advocacy. While at Brown University, Nadir launched the Student Marijuana Alliance for Research and Transparency (SMART), a college cannabis community striving for positive social change. He is also a digital media strategist for Ardent Cannabis and Herb.

With more than 10 years in food service management, Luis Vega is a well-known east coast cannabis advocate and now, the only Latino to receive an industrial hemp license in Connecticut. Founder of Wepa! Hemp Farms, producing thousands of pounds of hemp flower for CBD products and stalk for construction, he is also co-host of Cannabis Corner: New Haven on 103.5 FM WNHH Community Radio. He is a member of Lambda Alpha Upsilon Fraternity, Inc.

Brooklyn-native and political strategist, Kamani Jefferson is co-founder and principal at North Star Liberty Group. With an extensive background in regulatory and municipal affairs as a cannabis lobbyist, Kamani focuses on multi-state public policies in this emerging industry. Before North Star Liberty, Kamani served as the President of the Massachusetts Recreational Consumer Council (MRCC).

Retired NBA player, Al Harrington founded Viola Brands in 2011, naming the company after his grandmother. Inspired by her experience as a cannabis patient, Al has become a global cannabis advocate and Viola is now a nationwide leader in the production and sale of premium quality cannabis products, licensed to operate in Colorado, Oregon, Michigan and California, with plans to expand into Arizona and Nevada in 2020.

Known as "The Digital Marketing Ninja", Gary George has been an entrepreneur for over 20 years as President & CEO of Blazin' Multimedia helping companies in multiple industries increase revenue, market share and customer loyalty with creative & technical digital marketing solutions. He recently transitioned his expertise into the cannabis industry, launching Real Cannabis Entrepreneur, providing professional training and coaching from an elite group of proven cannabis pioneers.

Jose Belen is a decorated U.S. Army combat veteran and co-founder of Florida Mission Zero, a nonprofit organization addressing the PTSD and suicide epidemic plaguing U.S. veterans. An inspiring public speaker and an outspoken advocate for compassionate access to medical cannabis, he is one of six individuals and organizations who are currently suing the federal government to remove cannabis from its list of Schedule I drugs.

A Rebel Minded Society (A.R.M.S.), founded by Grizzly Bocourt, is a lifestyle brand known for curating events, producing content, as well as providing platforms that educate and equip millennials with tools to actualize positive change in their communities. A leader in the New York cannabis community, Grizzly is founder and Creative Director of Cannaware Society and head of NY Cannabis United, a coalition of advocacy groups.

The other half of the dynamic duo behind James Henry SF, John Alston is a U.S. Navy veteran and mechanical engineer transferring his previous operational skills and experience with atmospheric gases to the cannabis space. As co-founder and COO, he is innovating and setting new standards in the cannabis industry with products carefully curated from seed-to-sale and undergoing various checkpoints during the CO2 extraction and distillation processes.

Headquartered in Oregon, Elev8 Cannabis is a multi-state operator of cannabis dispensaries founded by Chicago-native, Seun Adedeji. Leading the industry in his commitment to service, inclusion, and social equity, Seun is the youngest Black man in the country running a cannabis dispensary, with licenses and plans to open additional stores in Massachusetts and Illinois.

Todd Hughes is an experienced project manager, engineer and entrepreneur who has consulted with over 100 companies since his business EntreVation was formed in 2015. A business incubator and accelerator, EntreVation provides project management services and human capital development for public and private sector clients, including a vertical specifically for cannabis. He recently became Chairman of the Board of Directors for Minority Cannabis Business Association (MCBA).

With over 20 years of experience in software development and consulting, Roger Obando is co-founder and former Chief Technology Officer for Baker Technologies, a leading CRM software platform for the cannabis industry, servicing more than 800 dispensaries across the US and Canada. In 2018, after one the largest cannabis tech acquisitions in the history of the industry, Roger successfully exited from Baker. He is the author of The Highest Common Denominator, available on Amazon.

Clinton Carter, Jr. is co-founder of Comfy Hemp, an e-commerce business offering hemp-derived, CBD-infused tinctures, salves and protein for multiple ailments. As a patient treating his seizures with cannabis, CJ is committed to providing full-spectrum CBD hemp extract through multiple consumption methods to accommodate and help consumers. He is the president of Minorities for Medical Marijuana (M4MM) Kentucky chapter.

Zachary Knox, Esq., a partner at Knox and Ross Law Group with extensive experience with in business law, tax and corporate finance, is Legal Counsel and a key team member at Make Green Go., the first consulting firm to be awarded a government contract to support social equity applicants. He is also the Vice Chair of the City of Oakland's Cannabis Regulatory Commission.

After experiencing an injury and subsequent opioid dependency, pro baller Mike James turned to cannabis and ultimately, became the first NFL player in league history to request an official "therapeutic use exemption" from the NFL's substance abuse policy. Mike has chosen to ignore the league's warnings and anti-cannabis education to remain a vocal advocate. He has been featured on CNN documentary series Weed 4: Pot vs. Pills with Dr. Sanjay Gupta and works closely with various organizations to lobby on behalf of medical cannabis and access for professional athletes.

Buffalo-native and cannabis advocate, Reggie Keith is the founder and visionary behind Canna-House, Western New York's #1 platform for education and activity-based cannabis events. Reggie has built the Canna-House community on the foundation of inclusion, innovation and information, providing much-needed resources for individuals looking to get medical marijuana certification in the northeast. Working in partnership with WNY NORML, he recently worked to bring Netflix' Grass is Greener film screening to Buffalo.

Brandon Banks is co-founder and COO of Natural Selections Dispensary in Colorado. After years of working for several fortune 500 companies including McDonalds Co, JP Morgan Chase, and Philip Morris, Brandon moved to Colorado and transitioned to the medical marijuana industry. An award-winning master grower, Brandon recently joined the Minority Cannabis Business Association (MCBA) Board of Directors, serving as co-Chair of the Economic Empowerment Committee.

Nelson Guerrero is co-founder and Executive Director of the Cannabis Cultural Association (CCA). Under his leadership, CCA has become one of the most influential advocacy groups in the industry, most notably one of six plaintiffs suing the Department of Justice and DEA for the removal of Cannabis from The Controlled Substances Act. A bilingual Ecuadorian-American, Nelson is also the Vice-Chair of the Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Committee of the National Cannabis Industry Association.

Founding board member of Chicago NORML, Donte Townsend is the regional chapter's Communications Director, amplifying the chapter's efforts to specifically educate and motivate communities of color to de-stigmatize and accept the cannabis plant as a vehicle for health, wellness, political and economic empowerment. Donte is a leader in the industrial hemp industry, providing premium products grown and harvested in an Illinois-based facility with over 3 million square feet.

Morehouse graduate and commercial real estate expert, Kevin Ford is CEO of Uplift Maryland. Under his vision and leadership, Uplift strives seeks to End The Stigma associated with cannabis through education and training. The company works to increase diversity and inclusion within the emerging medical cannabis industry, ensuring Black and Hispanic communities have an opportunity to participate in the economy of the future. He is a member of Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, Inc.

Brian Williams is an engineer and full stack developer with significant early stage experience and operational knowledge. He is Managing Partner for Wayne & Reed, a startup consulting firm focused on B2B cannabis technologies. A former management consultant for Accenture now leading the way in "cannatech", Brian also previously worked as Chief Technology Officer for BDTNDR, a proprietary learning management system for cannabis retail employees or "budtenders". He is a member of Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity, Inc.

Howard University graduate, Rashaan Everett is the founder and CEO of Good Tree Technology, a vertically integrated cannabis brand with over 30,000 square feet of space throughout Los Angeles, Oakland, and San Francisco. After generating more than 20,000 deliveries and over $1.5 million in revenue with Good Tree, Rashaan also established Growing Talent, a community-driven solution that provides aspiring minorities with capital and software training to operate Good Tree franchise dispensaries.

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65 Outstanding Black And Hispanic Men Leading In Cannabis - Benzinga

Plaque Psoriasis Treatment Market Expansion Projected to Gain an Uptick During 2017 2025 – Info Street Wire

Posted on December 27, 2019 by Danzig

The comprehensive report published by Persistence Market Research offers an in-depth intelligence related to the various factors that are likely to impact the demand, revenue generation, and sales of the Plaque Psoriasis Treatment Market. In addition, the report singles out the different parameters that are expected to influence the overall dynamics of the Plaque Psoriasis Treatment Market during the forecast period 2017 2025.

As per the findings of the presented study, the Plaque Psoriasis Treatment Market is poised to surpass the value of ~US$ XX by the end of 2029 growing at a CAGR of ~XX% over the assessment period. The report includes a thorough analysis of the upstream raw materials, supply-demand ratio of the Plaque Psoriasis Treatment in different regions, import-export trends and more to provide readers a fair understanding of the global market scenario.

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The report segregates the Plaque Psoriasis Treatment Market into different segments to provide a detailed understanding of the various aspects of the market. The competitive analysis of the Plaque Psoriasis Treatment Market includes valuable insights based on which, market players can formulate impactful growth strategies to enhance their presence in the Plaque Psoriasis Treatment Market.

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market players are also exploring the developing market. Novartis launched its Cosentyx in Japan for the treatment of psoriasis arthritis in adults who are not adequately responding to systemic therapy.

Plaque Psoriasis Treatment Market: Market Players

Company manufacturer is converting innovative research into a new therapy by constantly investing in research activities. The number of drugs approved for plaque psoriasis is constantly increasing the number of treatment options for the physician and patients. Eli Lillys interleukin inhibitor was approved by the FDA, second molecule to be approved after Novartis Cosentyx.

Some of the plaque psoriasis treatment market contributors are Allergan, Johnson and Johnson, Amgen, Abbvie, Eli Lilly, Dermira Inc., Novartis, Galectin Therapeutics, Cellceutix Corporation and Biogen Inc., Bayer.

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Plaque Psoriasis Treatment Market Expansion Projected to Gain an Uptick During 2017 2025 - Info Street Wire

He is Trying to Get Fire Victims Paid. He Has to Find Them First. – The New York Times

Posted on December 27, 2019 by Danzig

Ms. Foreman, 22, was hired by Mr. Kasolas to help spread the word about filing claims. She spent her day taping fliers to pizza boxes at Red Lion Pizza in Magalia, just north of Paradise, and handing out others to churches and agencies, hoping it would prompt even one more person to file a claim.

But time is short, and a bigger problem persists.

We know there was significant post-fire displacement people had to move away, said Steven Skikos, a lawyer appointed by the court to represent victims interests. But we dont know the specifics of who ended up where. Thats a real problem.

An analyst at Chico State provided Mr. Kasolas with a map produced from United States Postal Service information showing that wildfire victims had moved to almost every state, with significant clusters in the Pacific Northwest, Arizona, Texas and Tennessee. But the map does not provide addresses.

For its part, PG&E said it had employed a broad campaign to ensure that wildfire victims received information about filing claims, including newspaper, magazine, radio, social media and digital advertisements. The utility sent emails to about four million customers and claim forms by mail to more than six million customers.

We feel this is the most robust noticing effort in bankruptcy history, including outreach through national publications, Paul Moreno, a PG&E spokesman, said.

But sometimes the trouble with filing a claim is more a problem with the process.

Rosemary Peterson had traveled from Magalia for the food giveaway at Paradise Alliance Church when she saw the table with the information about filing a claim.

Ms. Peterson, 88, had tried to submit a claim online but struggled to complete it on her own. Although her home survived the Camp Fire, smoke damage required some restoration. The trees in her yard have died. And her friends and neighbors have scattered.

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He is Trying to Get Fire Victims Paid. He Has to Find Them First. - The New York Times

Celadon leaves former drivers hanging without bankruptcy filing in Canada – FreightWaves

Posted on December 27, 2019 by Danzig

Barb Taylor, 56, has a reminder for anyone sent to repossess her black International LoneStar truck the one with the giant pink ribbon decal.

Thats my truck, said Taylor, who has lived six years after her breast cancer returned as stage 4. Doctors expected her to live for just two.

Owning a truck is on my bucket list, Taylor added.

That truck also has the decal of Hyndman Transport, the Canadian trucking company that shut down on Dec. 9 after its U.S. owner Celadon Group filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

Former employees and contractors are facing the staggering challenge of claiming what they say Celadon owes them under Canadian law. Making matters more difficult, Celadon hasnt filed for bankruptcy in Canada something that ironically could help former Canadian workers make claims and secure federal benefits.

Taylor, a lease-operator for Hyndman, had put about C$150,000 into lease and maintenance payments since 2015. She has just C$39,000 in payments left until she owns the truck.

Taylor wants to buy out the remainder of the lease but is now fearful that the rig will be repossessed and that shell lose the investment.

I could buy a house with that money, she said.

Taylor drove that truck proudly for Hyndman across North America and took part in fundraising events such as Trucking for a Cure. Her Canadian supervisors, meanwhile, worked to ensure she got the freight she wanted and got back to Canada for her treatments.

Hyndman treated me well, Taylor said. But Celadon is getting away with so much.

Randy James Ulch, a former employee-driver for Hyndman Transport, said he is owed around C$2,000 in accrued vacation pay and severance from his year at Hyndman.

There are others who are out a hell of a lot more, Ulch said.

Former employees have a clear interest in Canadian bankruptcy proceedings. They can get preferential status as a creditor in a bankruptcy, under Canadas Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act. Along with a filing, a court-appointed trustee would oversee and facilitate any outstanding obligations to Celadons Canadian employees and contractors.

In addition, even if former employees are unable to collect from the sale of any company assets, they can apply to have the federal government compensate them.

Celadon CEO Paul Svindland did not respond to FreightWaves questions about outstanding pay for its former Canadian workers or if the company has plans to have Hyndman file for bankruptcy in Canada.

While Canadian subsidiaries frequently file for bankruptcy concurrently with their U.S. parents, but they arent necessarily legally required to do so.

Celadons obligations would depend on its corporate structure and relationship between the U.S. and Canadian companies, said Hans Parmar, a spokesperson for the federal Ministry of Innovation, Science and Economic Development, which oversees bankruptcy and insolvencies.

Sara Slinn, a professor at Osgoode Hall Law School at York University in Toronto and Canadian labor law expert, said Hyndmans former employees and contractors could consider pooling their resources for a lawyer and taking their case to the federal Industrial Relations Board for unpaid wages or severance, independent of any bankruptcy proceedings.

If they can coordinate themselves and work as a group, they have a much greater chance of success, Slinn said.

Owner-operators and lease-operators could also potentially challenge their status as contractors depending on the specifics of their work with Hyndman.

Misclassification is very common in trucking, Slinn said.

Slinn couldnt speak to the particulars of how Celadon shut down Hyndman but said U.S. firms are known to neglect their obligations to Canadian workers, particularly in cases of mass dismissals resulting from closures or bankruptcies.

This is a problem in Canada. We have a lot of American companies operating here. Its not that uncommon to have employees left in the lurch when they shut down and often the executives are untouchable.

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Celadon leaves former drivers hanging without bankruptcy filing in Canada - FreightWaves

Exploring the origins and evolution of the Festival of Lights – PAHomePage.com

Posted on December 27, 2019 by Danzig

WILKES-BARRE, LUZERNE COUNTY (WBRE/WYOU) Thursday night is the fifth night of Hanukkah and Eyewitness News reporter Kevin Hayes has more about the origins and evolution of the Festival of Lights.

As the sun set over northeast and central Pennsylvania, thousands of families came together lighting candles to celebrate a tradition over 1,000 years old. But what exactly are they celebrating?

It is both a celebration of the military victory of the Maccabees who led the Jewish rebellion against the Hellenized Assyrians. They were from the north, Rabbi David Kaplan of Ohav Zedek of Wilkes-Barre, said.

They cleaned out the temple from all the Greek gods, the pantheon of gods that were placed there. They needed to rededicate it and thats where the word Hanukkah comes from. The idea of rededication of that temple, Rabbi Larry Kaplan, Temple Israel in Wilkes-Barre said.

Rabbi David of Ohav Zedek says the origin continues in a second part.

At the same time, when they came back to the ruined temple in Jerusalem, there is the second miracle, the oil, Rabbi David said.

Oil that was only expected to burn for one night as the Jews waited for replenishment lasted eight nights and is remembered this time each year. That leads to the version we know today after more than a millennia of it being a more somber celebration.

About 60 or 70 years ago, Jewish kids were coming home from school, saw that their friends were all getting Christmas presents. They werent getting anything and so Jewish parents decided to sort of give Christmas presents to their Jewish kids wrapped in Hanukkah paper, Rabbi Larry said.

But the core values of Hanukkah remain today with roots in intimate observances, traditions, and the fire in eight candles.

We try to illuminate, and again, its just that little bit of light that can bring solace to us and to humanity itself, Rabbi David said.

So whether youre celebrating the Festival of Lights or just trying to bring light to the world, Happy Hanukkah.

The eight-day holiday runs through Sunday night.

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Exploring the origins and evolution of the Festival of Lights - PAHomePage.com

The Evolution Of A Real Estate Agent – Forbes

Posted on December 27, 2019 by Danzig

Messy could be the perfect word to describe a successful real estate broker in the 1980s. And one would take pride in being messy, for brokers worked with listings cut directly out of the newspaper and had all the available listings printed out and displayed on a wall. It was a sort of art. The printed listings would be filled with Post-its and would (mostly) be removed once the apartments were gone. The landline phone (extension included) was an agents best friend, and walk-in clients were widespread. For the most part, real estate agents (and their clients) have since evolved.

From Early Bird Gets The Worm To Work Smart And Hard

Being the first agent at the office is not enough. Today, agents are expected to be good at marketing, networking, real estate and technology. Not having any one of these skills means falling behind.

Having all agents work from the office is now becoming a thing of the past, as customers often prefer calling agents directly on their cellphones, and many agents prefer to work from home. To add to this, brokerages nowadays tend to operate on slim margins and have significant bills to pay, so agents are sometimes encouraged to work from home and use the tools at their disposal.

But the flexibility of working from home comes at a price. Agents now have to take care of most of their marketing expenditure to get new clients and must step up their game when it comes to technology. Advertising platforms now include social media as well, making it harder for agents to figure out a strategy that makes financial sense for them.

To be a successful agent today, you need referrals, which means that it is more important than ever to end up with a happy customer who will be willing to tell their neighbors and family all about you. So as an agent, you want to get your clients an excellent apartment and create a pleasant, more holistic experience in their search for a place in the city.

Real Estate Is A Vocation, Not A Vacation

Learning that real estate has to be done full-time for an agent to succeed can be a harsh lesson. Have you ever asked yourself why brokerages dont invest more in their agents education? The harsh truth has two words: agent turnover.

As the cofounder and CEO of a listings platform in which agents advertise rental apartments in New York, I can share with you that the most frequent reason for an agent deleting their account with us is because theyre no longer doing real estate. This fact is astounding to me. Agents who leave their companies or brokerages most often do so because theyve simply moved on from real estate. Managers may not be willing to spend much on their agents education because, from a statistical standpoint, their probabilities of retaining an agent long enough for the training to pay off are very slim. Even worse, theres always the possibility of investing in an agents education only to see them go work for a competitor a few days later.

Moving In The Right Direction

It was not so long ago that people didnt require a license to be compensated for acting as a real estate agent. Today, there are tens of thousands of real estate salespersons in New York City alone. Yes, we moved one step forward by requiring special education to become an agent, but theres still more to be done.

In the future, it would be interesting to see more requirements and commitment needed to become a real estate agent, so that customers can interact with fewer, more knowledgeable agents who are committed to finding them a place to call home. Were moving slowly, but in the right direction.

Real estate agents will continue existing for a long time; their roles, however, are rapidly evolving into ones in which they're expected to know their market, be tech-savvy and take risks. Missing any of these skills will pose a threat to their survival. The silver lining for those active agents who can acquire a healthy dose of each skill is that the industry will naturally filter out those who don't add consumer value, leaving fewer but more capable real estate agents.

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The Evolution Of A Real Estate Agent - Forbes

In the evolution of jam bands, its Twiddles time – The Boston Globe

Posted on December 27, 2019 by Danzig

His sound was like a bumblebee exploded, Savoulidis, 33, recalls on the phone from his home in Middlebury, Vt.

It sculpted a sizable portion of the young guitarists style and remains a key influence in the mix that forms the sound of Twiddle, the foursome thats emerged in recent years as one of the most buzzed-about young jam bands.

Twiddle closes the year with shows at Paradise Rock Club on Monday and the House of Blues on New Year's Eve.

By no means am I as good and tasteful as him, Savoulidis who also performs as a solo artist billed under his first name says of Ranglin, but when I play really fast I swing it the way he does, and for the reggae songs, all the palm muting I do with my right hand is right out of his playbook.

Twiddle is very much a Vermont band. It was nourished in the fertile musical ecosystem of Burlington after forming at Castleton State College (now Castleton University) in 2004, when Savoulidis and keyboardist Ryan Dempsey were seated next to each other during orientation and discovered they shared some musical interests.

Savoulidis was a New Jersey kid who was familiar with Vermont from family vacations and went to college in order to more or less major in starting a band. (Indeed, he made it just one semester before shifting gears into spending all his time playing and writing music.) Dempsey, drummer Brook Jordan, and bassist Zdenek Gubb are all Vermont natives. So too was original bassist Billy Comstock, who left the group in 07 and focused on studies at Berklee College of Music.

Twiddles members are very upfront about the role that musical influence plays in the development of their sound. As a millennial jam band, theyre synthesizing styles from groups that emerged in the 1980s and 90s as well as legends like Ranglin.

Savoulidiss enunciation and cadence as a vocalist reflect the hours he spent listening to Dave Matthews Band as a teen. He traces Twiddles more intricate compositions to Dempseys affection for Bla Fleck and the Flecktones. And things get a bit self-referential when it comes to Gubb, who was already a certified Twiddle fan before he joined the band as a senior in high school. Gubb recalls being denied entrance to Twiddle shows when he was underage but sticking around and listening from the sidewalk outside.

Then theres the "P" word.

Phish spent at least its first decade or so being understandably evasive about its members affection for the Grateful Dead, owing to the music presss overreliance on comparisons between the groups.

But by the time Twiddle was aspiring to play Burlington club Nectar's a common goal for emerging Vermont bands the venue had long been canonized on the unofficial National Register of Historic Phish Places, from the many gigs it played there after forming at the University of Vermont.

Twiddle's members freely acknowledge that Phish's mix of psychedelic rock, general whimsy, and moves borrowed from funk looms large in its aesthetic.

And without engaging in jam band false equivalence, its fair to note that many diehard Phish fans the ones who are vocal on social media, at least have been resistant to Twiddles rise and lobbed some of the same complaints with which Deadheads once dismissed the nascent Phish. Too silly. Not enough soul.

"I feel like our scene is just different in the sense where the music really has such an impact on people that their favorite band is their favorite band," Gubb, 29, says, putting a heavy emphasis on the last three words.

Twiddle first headlined the Paradise in 2015. It played there twice the next year and three times in 2017. Last year it paired end-of-year-shows at the Paradise and the House of Blues, whose capacity is almost three times larger. If the band happens to sell out New Years this year, itll be looking at multiple nights at the House of Blues next year.

Obviously the goal was to play at Nectars, Savoulidis says of his bands earliest ambitions. "We played for like 100 people, and the next time it was sold out. And we moved up to opening for other people at Higher Ground, and our friends would come out in hordes and wed finish playing and the room would empty for the band we were opening for.

I remember thinking: Maybe theres something to this.

Twiddle's growth has reached the point where there's even some concern about older fans making room for the newbies.

"It's an awesome thing to see so many people coming together," Gubb says. "I just hope that people are accepting of the new fans and welcoming them in. And I think they are."

TWIDDLE

At Paradise Rock Club, Dec. 30 (sold out). At House of Blues, Dec. 31 at 7 p.m. Tickets $40.50-$50.50, http://www.houseofblues.com/boston

Jeremy D. Goodwin can be reached at jeremy@jeremydgoodwin.com. Follow him on Twitter @jeremydgoodwin.

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In the evolution of jam bands, its Twiddles time - The Boston Globe

5 Animals That Have Evolved Recently Now. Powered by – Now. Powered by Northrop Grumman.

Posted on December 27, 2019 by Danzig

We often think of evolution as an imperceptible, gradual change over time. But consider animals that have evolved right before our eyes: bugs, fish, birds and more. The degree and speed of change varies, depending on environmental conditions and the amount of time between generations. Some species evolved rapidly to adapt to major changes in their environment.

Back in the 1850s, Darwin had assumed that evolution was a slow, invisible process that could take as many as thousands of generations to produce a new species. However, Discover Magazine reported that in 1981 a researcher named David Reznick demonstrated that you can see animals evolve within a lifetime. This was a pivotal moment in changing the way scientists understand evolutionary biology. It turns out that some animals evolve so quickly that researchers can actually observe the changes.

Resznick wanted to watch evolution happen in real time, so he experimented with changing the predators in guppies environment. He moved one group of guppies to a stream without predators to see if they would thrive, and added predatory fish called cichlids to guppy sites that previously didnt have predators.

In just four years, or six to eight guppy generations, the guppies adapted to their new environments. The group in the stream without predators were larger, matured later and reproduced slower. The guppies who lived with cichlids matured at an earlier age and produced more babies.

When brown anole lizards invaded green anole territory in Florida, the green lizards adapted in just 15 years. Discover Magazine reported that only 20 generations after the invasive brown lizards arrived, the green lizards developed larger toepads and more scales, which helped them cling to higher branches to avoid competition from the brown lizards on lower branches.

Salmon have remained resilient, despite several challenges caused by humans. When commercial fishing in the 1920s threatened Chinook salmon from Alaska to California, the fish became smaller and shorter-lived, according to Discover Magazine. Pink salmon have adapted to migrate earlier because of climate change. Salmon are migrating from the ocean to the river two weeks earlier than they did 40 years ago, in response to warmer ocean temperatures. Furthermore, Mental Floss pointed out that this isnt just a behavior change, but a change at the genetic level, with natural selection favoring fish that migrate earlier.

One of the peskiest animals that have evolved quickly is pesticide-resistant bugs. Bedbugs were common in the 1940s and 1950s, according to the BBC, but when humans introduced DDT and other insecticides to control the bugs, the plan totally backfired. By the 1960s, future generations of the bugs were equipped with thicker shells, more resilient nerve cells and an enzyme that helps break down toxic substances. Now, New York City hosts super-strong bedbugs that are 250 times more resistant to pesticides than bedbugs in Florida, according to Mental Floss.

Tawny owls in Finland adapted their coloration in response to warmer winters. The owls are either pale gray or reddish brown. Previously, more owls were pale gray, which helped them avoid predators by blending in with the snow. According to Discover Magazine, a 2011 study revealed that while temperatures rise and theres less snow in Finland, more Tawny owls are brown. As winters are becoming milder, natural selection is favoring feathers that camouflage with the brown forest instead of snow.

In stable conditions, theres no reason for a species to change. If there is a major change to the environment, such as new predators, human interference, an invasive species or rising temperatures, then the species will adapt and evolve. Natural selection will favor the animals that are better suited for surviving the new environment.

Climate change is placing environmental stressors on animals right now, therefore several species are evolving faster than ever before.

We can see that animals have evolved in our lifetime, and humans are still evolving, too. Were not a perfect species, and even if we were, new environmental pressures could make us favor certain traits. Some evidence for current human evolution includes a reduction in Alzheimers genes, the ability to digest cows milk and Dutch men getting taller, according to Popular Science.

Evolution isnt just part of our history; its happening right now, to all sorts of species, even our own. Its just easier to observe these changes in animals that have shorter lifespans because we can witness their generational turnover.

5 Animals That Have Evolved Recently Now. Powered by - Now. Powered by Northrop Grumman.

Alles Klar? Jerry Coyne on an Argument from Incredulity – Discovery Institute

Posted on December 27, 2019 by Danzig

If you look at Jerry Coynes blog Why Evolution Is True from over the past weekend, you will find his rebuttal to what Coyne calls an argument from incredulity. He comments, You will recognize this argument as the basis for Intelligent Design.

We have taken Coynes rebuttal, deleted the inessentials, and placed in bold all of the inferential steps, credulous guesses, and other leaps of imagination. It is astonishing that anyone would think the result a scientific argument, or, even, an argument at all. From A creationist writes in espousing the Argument from Incredulity, suitably modified:

Lets take the larval waspThe way to address the incredulity argument is to postulate aplausiblestep-by-step process in which each step is adaptive.

In the case of the wasp, all that is required is that different larvae have different propensities to eat the organs of the spider. How could this happen? Well, presumably the different organs of a spider can be perceived differently by the larval wasp, either by their location or, more plausibly, by the fact that they taste different. If different wasps prefer different tastes (or internal locations), and some of that variation is based on variation in genes, then the problem is solved. Over time, this results in the evolution of a behavior And this is not implausible.

Well, all you need is a starting behavior that can be improved and refined Of course that seems implausible because it requires that one envision fish that have some tendency to spit water in the first place, and of what use is that?

How could that evolve? While its not difficult to see that once you can acquire food by squirting insects and knocking them into the water, natural selection will then improve your aim, enabling you to judge distance, compensate for refraction, and so on.

Some archerfishuse a similar technique to displace siltbeneaththe water, uncovering hidden prey. Thats pretty easy to explain, as youre not really aiming but foraging, and you already have the equipment to do that: producing jets of water outside of your mouth, which is apparently common in fish.

TheNew Scientistarticlethat I found in about a minute of Googline [sic] says this

The big question is: how did they know beforehand which type of silt was which, and so how long they should blast it for? asks [Stefan] Schuster. The answer might be that they are adept underwater shooters in the wild, too.

Which came first aerial or underwater shooting also remains to be established.

Perhaps some tendency to produce underwater jets might have been there first, because this is widespread among fish, says Schuster. Many other fish and invertebrates forage by disturbing the ground, and this is probably the ancestral condition, saysAlex Kacelnikof the University of Oxford. Archerfish probably thus started with this ordinary skill then transitioned to targets probably at, or narrowly above, the surface and this created new selective pressures to focus and aim water jets at ever higher targets. Schuster says the two techniques might have evolved in parallel

So here we have an initial condition whose evolution isnt hard to understand. Once you squirt at the silt below you to uncover prey, selection would improve that ability, as would learning, and maybe youd start homing in on things that you see in the sediment.You then have the ability to be a living squirt gun. If a mutant fish then simply squirted at an object it could see, but oneat the surface or above the water,a successful squirt would bring you food, and, importantly, reproduction. You might in fact get more food than other individuals in the population who arent aiming at insects directly but just foraging willy-nilly, with most of their squirts being fruitless. And if that were the case, both selection and learning (apparently fish can learn!) would work together to improve the ability of archerfish to squirt at prey above the water. The compensation for refraction, intensity of squirt, and so on, would then be honed by both selection and learning.

Now I dont know if this scenario really happened

Well, he got that last part right.

We do not know whether Coynes self-satisfaction is more ridiculous than his self-assurance, or the other way around, but together they make a powerful combination. To his credit, he offers this delightful nature video of the archerfish at its work. You will enjoy it:

Illustration credit: A banded archerfish, from Popular Science Monthly Volume 44 [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

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Alles Klar? Jerry Coyne on an Argument from Incredulity - Discovery Institute

Chimp study may give insight into the evolution of human complexity – Haaretz

Posted on December 27, 2019 by Danzig

A study of wild apes sharing tools to catch termites could bring insight into the origin of cultural complexity in humans, suggest the humans behind the new study.

The motivating question behind the research is how cumulative culture develops. Going by the mounting complexity of stone tool culture in humans over hundreds of thousands of years, cumulative technology involving a learning process seems to go back to the dimmest reaches of human evolution.

Now, a team has had a stab at gaining insight on the origins of social learning by looking at wild chimpanzees who share termite-fishing gear, Stephanie Musgrave of the University of Miami, Crickette Sanz and colleagues suggest in PNAS.

Our cousin the chimp, from whom our ancestors parted ways six or seven million years ago, is a famed tool user. Wild chimps have been known to use rocks as remotely applied accoutrements of aggression meaning they can and will throw rocks at one another. They have recently been observed throwing rocks at specific trees for no obvious reason, which some scientists suspect may be a primitive ritual. One bonobo unexpectedly fashioned a spear to try to stab a scientist, but the irritated ape was captive, unable to escape her bane. And wild chimps fish for termites and manipulate the source material: theyre actually making tools, as opposed to picking up some blobject and using it as is.

So, seeking potential insight into early human propensities, anthropologists examined termite-fishing techniques and tool-sharing in two wide-separated populations of wild chimpanzees.

For what its worth, most people think termites are a sort of white, sun-fearing ant. Actually, they evolved from cockroaches. Now you know.

Back to the chimps. One group living in Gombe, Tanzania, used only one type of tool a fishing probe that could be made of twigs, vine, bark or grass and resisted sharing, usually rejecting requests from other chimps, including their own kids.

A second group living in the Goualougo basin in the Republic of Congo sequentially used multiple, different types of tools, which the apes made from certain plant species. They modified the tools to improve efficiency and as hypothesized by the scientists based on the complexity of the behavior the Goualougo mother chimps proved to be three times more amenable to sharing the tools (mainly with the kids) upon request than their counterparts at Gombe, according to the new paper, published Tuesday in PNAS.

We predicted that at Goualougo compared to Gombe requests or attempts to take tools would more often result in a change of possession, the scientists write. And so it was.

In both groups, what sharing there was usually took place between mothers and offspring. In general, the chimps were much more likely to share tools with females and juveniles who asked for them, compared with males and infants. The kids, by the way, were perfectly capable of stealing tools; possibly they hadnt yet learned how to ask nicely.

"A tool transfer is defined as a change in possession of a tool, which can occur in different ways. Mothers at Gombe do sometimes transfer tools, for example by allowing infants to take a fishing probe from their hands, or by picking up a fishing probe they (the mothers) have set down," Musgrave tells Haaretz. "Only at Goualougo, however, do chimpanzees exhibit active transfers, defined as an individual moving to actively facilitate a transfer after another individual requests the too"

For example, in an active transfer, a mother chimpanzee might extend her arm to give it to a child or divide a tool in half lengthwise to produce two usable tools and then provide half to offspring, she says.

Males would sometimes share tools with young chimps but in general, the sharers were female, Musgrave says.

Plausibly, the willingness to share helped the Goualougo chimps develop and sustain relatively complex tool manufacture and use, the team suggests. Thus, they could be a model for early human behavior.

Monkey see, monkey do

In humans, cumulative culture is hypothesized to have begun with imitation and teaching forms of social learning that enabled the accurate replication of complex behaviors.

Making stone tools by chipping a target rock using another rock goes back at least 3.3 million years. That is 3 million years before anatomically modern humans began to evolve.

The earliest stone tools were crude, large beasts that could weigh several pounds. By the time of the Neanderthal, stone tool technology had become quite a technological art. Some researchers infer that not only social learning but language may go back farther than we imagine, to precursors of modern humankind, based on the sheer complexity of stone-tool manufacturing processes developing over hundreds of thousands of years.

Chimps, crows and some other beings capable of complex tool-related behaviors dont have schooling, but do have social learning mainly, novices learning by themselves from other members of the species. Its more monkey see, monkey do.

But the more prosocial the behavioral patterns, the more likely complexity is to emerge, according to the theory.

Prosocial refers to behaviors performed for someone elses benefit: think of it as altruism-lite, with low cost. Prosocial fishing-rod transfers between apes count as teaching, the researchers argue: The tool-giver is forgoing potential food in favor of the tool-taker, and the sharing plausibly facilitates the novices learning process.

And communication asking for the tool by whimpering or holding out a hand or other, as opposed to hanging around scratching fleabites until a tool is abandoned is key.

At Gombe, requests were more likely to be met with resistance than at Goualougo, and the observed fishing behavior was commensurately simpler.

It also bears adding that tool acquisition skills at Goualougo lasted into subadulthood and the kids only learned how to make tools after they had learned to use them (to fish for termites adeptly).

Monkey say, monkey do

Wild chimpanzees live in permanent groups with multiple males and females, within which they tend to form fluid cliques. But in any case, they are characterized by strong social interaction and bonds.Maternal dependence in chimpanzees lasts for years. Baby chimps only start eating solid food at about 6 months and cling to or stay by the mother until the age of 3.5 years. They continue to nurse until age 4 or 5, and like humans only reach sexual maturity in their early teens.

The famous primatologist Jane Goodall discovered that orphaned baby chimps are often taken care of by others in the group, including in one case an older brother. That is charming.

Whoever the chimp kids stay with, its for years, and they have ample opportunity to learn education by master-apprenticeship, as Tetsuro Matsuzawa called it.

Whats more, who knows: maybe the chimps really do talk. Captive ones can certainly be taught some sign language and researchers think they have managed to interpret no fewer than 66 gestures sign language in wild apes.

The current study observed that chimpanzee mothers at Goualougo, where technologies became complex, were three times more likely to share tools with the kids than mothers at Gombe, where tool-use was simpler.

The upshot seems to be that the cooperative chimps had developed and improved variegated methods of achieving their aim, feasting on plump juicy cockroach cousins, while the insular chimps had one basic method: "Chimpanzees at Goualougo, but not at Gombe, also intentionally modify herb probes to fashion the end into a brush tip. This modification makes the fishing probe ten times more efficient at capturing termites," Musgrave tells Haaretz.

And that could cast light on how technology transfer emerged in early archaic humans, ultimately resulting in the conveniences of modern society. You cant teach young uns to manufacture a telephone or, at the other end of the spectrum, an F-15, by mime.

Chimp study may give insight into the evolution of human complexity - Haaretz

Generative adversarial networks: What GANs are and how theyve evolved – VentureBeat

Posted on December 27, 2019 by Danzig

Perhaps youve read about AI capable of producing humanlike speech or generating images of people that are difficult to distinguish from real-life photographs. More often than not, these systems build upon generative adversarial networks (GANs), which are two-part AI models consisting of a generator that creates samples and a discriminator that attempts to differentiate between the generated samples and real-world samples. This unique arrangement enables GANs to achieve impressive feats of media synthesis, from composing melodies and swapping sheep for giraffes to hallucinating footage of ice skaters and soccer players. In point of fact, its because of this prowess that GANs have been used to produce problematic content like deepfakes, which is media that takes a person in existing media and replaces them with someone elses likeness.

The evolution of GANs which Facebook AI research director Yann LeCun has called the most interesting idea of the decade is somewhat long and winding, and very much continues to this day. They have their deficiencies, but GANs remain one of the most versatile neural network architectures in use today.

The idea of pitting two algorithms against each other originated with Arthur Samuel, a prominent researcher in the field of computer science whos credited with popularized the term machine learning. While at IBM, he devised a checkers game the Samuel Checkers-playing Program that was among the first to successfully self-learn, in part by estimating the chance of each sides victory at a given position.

But if Samuel is the grandfather of GANs, Ian Goodfellow, former Google Brain research scientist and director of machine learning at Apples Special Projects Group, might be their father. In a seminal 2014 research paper simply titled Generative Adversarial Nets, Goodfellow and colleagues describe the first working implementation of a generative model based on adversarial networks.

Goodfellow has often stated that he was inspired by noise-contrastive estimation, a way of learning a data distribution by comparing it against a defined noise distribution (i.e., a mathematical function representing corrupted or distorted data). Noise-contrastive estimation uses the same loss functions as GANs in other words, the same measure of performance with respect to a models ability to anticipate expected outcomes.

Of course, Goodfellow wast the only one to pursue an adversarial AI model design. Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence Research co-director Juergen Schmidhuber advocated predictability minimization, a technique that models distributions through an encoder that maximizes the objective function (the function that specifies the problem to be solved by the system) minimized by a predictor. It adopts whats known as a minimax decision rule, where the possible loss for a worst case (maximum loss) scenario is minimized as much as possible.

And this is the paradigm upon which GANs are built.

Again, GANs consist of two parts: generators and discriminators. The generator model produces synthetic examples (e.g., images) from random noise sampled using a distribution, which along with real examples from a training data set are fed to the discriminator, which attempts to distinguish between the two. Both the generator and discriminator improve in their respective abilities until the discriminator is unable to tell the real examples from the synthesized examples with better than the 50% accuracy expected of chance.

GANs train in an unsupervised fashion, meaning that they infer the patterns within data sets without reference to known, labeled, or annotated outcomes. Interestingly, the discriminators work informs that of the generator every time the discriminator correctly identifies a synthesized work, it tells the generator how to tweak its output so that it might be more realistic in the future.

In practice, GANs suffer from a number of shortcomings owing to their architecture. The simultaneous training of generator and discriminator models is inherently unstable. Sometimes the parameters the configuration values internal to the models oscillate or destabilize, which isnt surprising given that after every parameter update, the nature of the optimization problem being solved changes. Alternatively, the generator collapses, and it begins to produce data samples that are largely homogeneous in appearance.

Above: The architecture of a generative adversarial network (GAN).

Image Credit: Google

The generator and discriminator also run the risk of overpowering each other. If the generator becomes too accurate, itll exploit weaknesses in the discriminator that lead to undesirable results, whereas if the discriminator becomes too accurate, itll impede the generators progress toward convergence.

A lack of training data also threatens to impede GANs progress in the semantic realm, which in this context refers to the relationships among objects. Todays best GANs struggle to reconcile the difference between palming and holding an object, for example a differentiation most humans make in seconds.

But as Hanlin Tang, senior director of Intels AI laboratory, explained to VentureBeat in a phone interview, emerging techniques get around these limitations. One entails building multiple discriminator into a model and fine-tuning them on specific data. Another involves feeding discriminator dense embedding representations, or numerical representations of data, so that they have more information from which to draw.

There [arent] that many well-curated data sets to start applying GANs to, Tang said. GANs just follow where the data sets are going.

On the subject of compute, Youssef Mroueh, a research staff member in the IBM multi-modal algorithms and engines group, is working with colleagues to develop lightweight models dubbed small GANs that reduce training time and memory usage. The bulk of their research is concentrated in the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, a joint AI research effort between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and IBM.

[Its a] challenging business question: How can we change [the] modeling without all the computation and hassle? Mroueh said. Thats what were working toward.

GANs are perhaps best known for their contributions to image synthesis.

StyleGAN, a model Nvidia developed, has generated high-resolution head shots of fictional people by learning attributes like facial pose, freckles, and hair. A newly released version StyleGAN 2 makes improvements with respect to both architecture and training methods, redefining the state of the art in terms of perceived quality.

In June 2019, Microsoft researchers detailed ObjGAN, a novel GAN that could understand captions, sketch layouts, and refine the details based on the wording. The coauthors of a related study proposed a system StoryGAN that synthesizes storyboards from paragraphs.

Such models have made their way into production. Startup Vue.ais GAN susses out clothing characteristics and learns to produce realistic poses, skin colors, and other features. From snapshots of apparel, it can generate model images in every size up to five times faster than a traditional photo shoot.

Elsewhere, GANs have been applied to the problems of super-resolution (image upsampling) and pose estimation (object transformation). Tang says one of his teams used GANs to train a model to upscale 200-by-200-pixel satellite imagery to 1,000 by 1,000 pixels, and to produce images that appear as though they were captured from alternate angles.

Above: Examples of edits performed by GAN Paint Studio.

Scientists at Carnegie Mellon last year demoed Recycle-GAN, a data-driven approach for transferring the content of one video or photo to another. When trained on footage of human subjects, the GAN generated clips that captured subtle expressions like dimples and lines that formed when subjects smiled and moved their mouths.

More recently, researchers at Seoul-based Hyperconnect published MarioNETte, which synthesizes a reenacted face animated by a persons movement while preserving the faces appearance.

On the object synthesis side of the equation, Google and MITs Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) developed a GAN that can generate images of 3D models with realistic lighting and reflections and enables shape and texture editing, as well as viewpoint shifts.

Predicting future events from only a few video frames a task once considered impossible is nearly within grasp thanks to state-of-the-art approaches involving GANs and novel data sets.

One of the newest papers on the subject from DeepMind details recent advances in the budding field of AI clip generation. Thanks to computationally efficient components and techniques and a new custom-tailored data set, researchers say their best-performing model Dual Video Discriminator GAN (DVD-GAN) can generate coherent 256 x 256-pixel videos of notable fidelity up to 48 frames in length.

In a twist on the video synthesis formula, Cambridge Consultants last year demoed a model called DeepRay that invents video frames to mitigate distortion caused by rain, dirt, smoke, and other debris.

GANs are capable of more than generating images and video footage. When trained on the right data sets, theyre able to produce de novo works of art.

Researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad and the Sri Sathya Sai Institute of Higher Learning devised a GAN, dubbed SkeGAN, that generates stroke-based vector sketches of cats, firetrucks, mosquitoes, and yoga poses.

Scientists at the Maastricht University in the Netherlands created a GAN that produces logos from one of 12 different colors.

Victor Dibia, a human-computer interaction researcher and Carnegie Mellon graduate, trained a GAN to synthesize African tribal masks.

Meanwhile, a team at the University of Edinburghs Institute for Perception and Institute for Astronomy designed a model that generates images of fictional galaxies that closely follow the distributions of real galaxies.

In March during its GPU Technology Conference (GTC) in San Jose, California, Nvidia took the wraps off of GauGAN, a generative adversarial AI system that lets users create lifelike landscape images that never existed. GauGAN whose name comes from post-Impressionist painter Paul Gauguin improves upon Nvidias Pix2PixHD system introduced last year, which was similarly capable of rendering synthetic worlds but left artifacts in its images. The machine learning model underpinning GauGAN was trained on more than one million images from Flickr, imbuing it with an understanding of the relationships among over 180 objects including snow, trees, water, flowers, bushes, hills, and mountains. In practice, trees next to water have reflections, for instance, and the type of precipitation changes depending on the season depicted.

GANs are architecturally well-suited to generating media, and that includes music.

In a paper published in August, researchers hailing from the National Institute of Informatics in Tokyo describe a system thats able to generate lyrics-conditioned melodies from learned relationships between syllables and notes.

Not to be outdone, in December, Amazon Web Services detailed DeepComposer, a cloud-based service thattaps a GAN to fill in compositional gaps in songs.

For a long time, [GANs research] has been about improving the training instabilities whatever the modality is text, images, sentences, et cetera. Engineering is one thing, but its also [about] coming up with [the right] architecture, said Mroueh. Its a combination of lots of things.

Google and Imperial College London researchers recently set out to create a GAN-based text-to-speech system capable of matching (or besting) state-of-the-art methods. Their proposed system GAN-TTS consists of a neural network that learned to produce raw audio by training on a corpus of speech with 567 pieces of encoded phonetic, duration, and pitch data. To enable the model to generate sentences of arbitrary length, the coauthors sampled 44 hours worth of two-second snippets together with the corresponding linguistic features computed for five-millisecond snippets. An ensemble of 10 discriminators some of which assess linguistic conditioning, while others assess general realism attempt to distinguish between real and synthetic speech.

In the medical field, GANs have been used to produce data on which other AI models in some cases, other GANs might train and to invent treatments for rare diseases that to date havent received much attention.

In April, the Imperial College London, University of Augsburg, and Technical University of Munich sought to synthesize data to fill in gaps in real data with a model dubbed Snore-GAN. In a similar vein, researchers from Nvidia, the Mayo Clinic, and the MGH and BWH Center for Clinical Data Science proposed a model that generates synthetic magnetic resonance images (MRIs) of brains with cancerous tumors.

Baltimore-based Insilico Medicine pioneered the use of GANs in molecular structure creation for diseases with a known ligand (a complex biomolecule) but no target (a protein associated with a disease process). Its team of researchers is actively working on drug discovery programs in cancer, dermatological diseases, fibrosis, Parkinsons, Alzheimers, ALS, diabetes, sarcopenia, and aging.

The field of robotics has a lot to gain from GANs, as it turns out.

A tuned discriminator can determine whether a machines trajectory has been drawn from a distribution of human demonstrations or from synthesized examples. In that way, its able to train agents to complete tasks accurately, even when it has access only to the robots positional information. (Normally, training robot-directing AI requires both positional and action data. The latter indicates which motors moved over time.)

The idea of using adversarial loss for training agent trajectories is not new, but whats new is allowing it to work with a lot less data, Tang said. The trick to applying these adversarial learning approaches is figuring out which inputs the discriminator has access to what information is available to avoid being tricked [by the discriminator] [In state-of-the-art approaches], discriminators need access to [positional] data alone, allowing us to train with expert demonstrations where all we have are the state data.

Tang says this enables the training of much more robust models than was previously possible models that require only about two dozen human demonstrations. If you reduce the amount of data that the discriminator has access to, youre reducing the complexity of the data set that you have to provide to the model. These types of adversarial learning methods actually work pretty well in low-data regimes, he added.

GANs ability to generate convincing photos and videos of people makes them ripe targets for abuse. Already, malicious actors have used models to generate fake celebrity pornography.

But preliminary research suggests GANs could root out deepfakes just as effectively as they produce them. A paper published on the preprint server Arxiv.org in March describes spamGAN, which learns from a limited corpus of annotated and unannotated data. In experiments, the researchers say that spamGAN outperformed existing spam detection techniques with limited labeled data, achieving accuracy of between 71% and 86% when trained on as little as 10% of labeled data.

What might the future hold with respect to GANs? Despite the leaps and bounds brought by this past decade of research, Tang cautions that its still early days.

GANs are still [missing] very fine-grained control, he said. [Thats] a big challenge.

For his part, Mroueh believes that GAN-generated content will become increasingly difficult to distinguish from real content.

My feeling is that the field will improve, he said. Comparing image generation in 2014 to today, I wouldnt have expected the quality to become that good. If the progress continues like this, [GANs] will remain a very important research project.

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Generative adversarial networks: What GANs are and how theyve evolved - VentureBeat

Is ID the Best Kept Secret? No Longer – Discovery Institute

Posted on December 27, 2019 by Danzig

When I started working for Discovery in 2006, I would mention the name of Discovery Institute to my friends or acquaintances and would get a blank stare. Few people had heard of intelligent design (ID) or Discovery Institutes Center for Science & Culture. But all that has changed this year, thanks to generous donors who have supported us.

ID is no longer the best-kept secret on the planet. This year alone, our videos on YouTube have had over 3.2 million views, Evolution News and Science Today articles have reached over 1.7 million users, and our Intelligent Design the Future podcasts have been downloaded well over 600,000 times.

Our donors made it possible for Stephen Meyer, Michael Behe, David Berlinski, and others to be featured on the Ben Shapiro Show, Uncommon Knowledge, and Prager University. Through these partnerships our message has been introduced to millions more and has brought exponentially more traffic to our social media and websites.

These statistics are impressive, but they dont tell the whole story of the reach of our message or the lives impacted through our Media & Communications initiative. Every week I receive an email or speak with someone about how critical our work is in making the case for design and purpose in the universe and biology. Here are just two of the many comments received in response our Science Uprising series, launched this year:

Great, simple way to reveal the self-contradiction of materialism!

And:

This is excellent. I have been looking for a visual resource to speak to my students who struggle to grasp the issue of materialism abstractly; these videos seem to be just what I was looking for.

But we cant sit back and rest on the laurels of our success this past year. In 2020 we have plans to produce and promote a second season of Science Uprising, to launch a series of short videos featuring Michael Behe, and to generously promote Stephen Meyers upcoming book The Return of the God Hypothesis. These are just a few of the projects that have the potential to reach millions more with the powerful truth of intelligent design. There is much more on the horizon and we need you to join in supporting our work as we move into the new year.

Heres how your gift can make an impact:

Take a moment to give now, before December 31, so that we can enter 2020 with a solid base of support for the year. Every dollar makes an impact!

Thank you for your part in our present and future success! By the way, online gifts must be transacted by 5 pm Pacific time on December 31, to make sure they are counted as 2019 gifts.

Photo: A scene from Science Uprising, via Discovery Institute.

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Is ID the Best Kept Secret? No Longer - Discovery Institute

The Weapons of Sexual Rivalry – Scientific American

Posted on December 27, 2019 by Danzig

In the vast arsenal of animal weaponry, the most exaggerated, elaborate and diverse devices such as tusks, claws and antlers have not been shaped by a need to fend off fierce predators. Rather, these impressive forms are driven by sex.

Everybody understands at a gut level that its usually males that have flashy displays or weapons like tusks and antlers, says Doug Emlen, an animal weapon expert at the University of Montana in Missoula. Biologists say that these fantastic shapesfrom the giant curved tusks of woolly mammoths to the nightmarish jaws of stag beetlesevolved to ward off competition from rival males and to impress females.

Examples of such sexually selected weapons abound throughout the animal kingdom in insects, fish, crustaceans, reptiles and mammals as varied as narwhal, rhinoceros and moose. Even extinct species such as trilobites and dinosaurs sported elaborate projections. The number and variety of examples argue that evolution has turned to weaponry time and again in the race to reproduce successfully.

Its such a common theme that Emlen had to persuade his editors to include seven detailed, full-page line drawings in a survey of natures weapons that he wrote for the 2008 Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics, featuring more than 280 examples of fantastical spikes, horns, antlers, pincers, tusks, claws, extended jaws, saws and spears. The illustration above offers a taste.

Scientists still debate the degree to which female choice plays a role in shaping the weapons flair and are still trying to figure out what factors drive the diversity of weapon forms seen among even closely related species. But its clear that the wild array of weapons evolved to aid successful mating.

Like the structures, types of combat vary greatly. Rhinoceros beetles, named for their rhino-like horns, guard access to the oozes of tree sap that females feed upon before laying eggs. Rival males size each other up, and if their horns sizes are similarly matched, a face-off ensues and each uses his horns to try to flip, pry and toss his rival off the tree branch.

Most species of male fiddler crabs guard their burrows, where mating takes place. Dueling males shove and tap on each others single, enlarged clawand, should the fight escalate, they lock claws, secret-handshake style, as if theyre testing the others strength. If one decides he has the upper hand, he flings his opponent away from the burrow.

The fearsome weapons seem to evolve whenever three criteria are met, Emlen says. One: Males must be competing over either resources such as food or over females. Two: Its possible for access to those resources to successfully be guarded. And three: Males of the species compete in one-on-one duels.

But the fighting is almost never to the death and rarely results in serious wounds. Scientists say that this supports the idea that these weapons are built for rivalrytheir designs optimized not for destruction but for power struggles. Indeed, variation in the size of male weaponry is huge, Emlen notes: While overall body size among adult male elk might vary by a factor of 2 at most, their antler racks can vary by a factor of more than 30, he says. And the most dazzling weapons act largely as deterrents, with actual fights breaking out only when males are closely matched.

As the weapons grow bigger and flashier, they come with the cost of producing and lugging around such big structures. (And sometimes other costs: Male fiddler crabs can only stuff algae in their mouths with one claw.) Studies show that the weapons sizes are sensitive to nutrition, parasite load, stress and overall physical conditionand so the healthiest, most fit individuals sport the most impressive weapons.

Researchers consider these ostentatious male weapons to be honest signalsadvertising the owners might and fitness accurately. And not just physical fitness. A study of nearly 200 Iberian red deer stags measured the size and complexity of the animals antlers and found that bigger and more elaborate racks correlated with both bigger testes and faster-swimming sperm. From that and other evidence, many biologists think that bigger weapons can advertise reproductive superiority, too.

And while Emlen believes that male weapons evolved primarily for the purposes of male-male rivalry battles, comparative physiologist Brook Swanson of Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington, argues that those signals are almost certainly also being assessed by females choosing mates. Even if a male could beat up all the other males, females almost always have a choice among mates, he says.

Take those fiddler crabs. Males of more than 100 species of the crabs have enlarged claws, and research suggests that the females can be picky. Some will cruise an area of multiple male burrows and size up the weapons being waved at them, among other things, before selecting a mate. We dont know what the females thinking, but shes taking into account a bunch of complicated information, Swanson says.

Though scientists believe that the primary role for these animal weapons is in reproduction, there are cases in which the weapons also serve as deterrents or defenses against predatorslikely as an evolutionary bonus. Elk antlers are a case in point. Unlike many other North American species in the deer family, elk hang onto their antlers until March, long after the mating season has ended in October. When Matt Metz, a PhD student at the University of Montana, and his colleagues tracked wolf kills in Yellowstone National Park they found that during March, wolves are three to four times more likely to attack an antlerless male elk than one still wearing his rack.

Since elk rarely use the antlers in defense, preferring to rear up and kick predators with their front hooves, presumably the structures serve as deterrents, Metz says. Yet if antler weapons had evolved primarily as a defense against predators, it wouldnt make sense to shed them at all, he addsand females should have them, too.

Why nature came up with such a bizarre array of weapon shapes and forms remains a bit of a mystery. But as a general rule, Swanson says, evolution tended to exaggerate structures already in existence. Crabs and lobsters have pincer claws that over evolutionary time became enlarged. And arthropods (spiders, insects and crustaceans) have exoskeletonsthat genetic changes could sculpt to form projections such as the horns or giant mandibles seen in beetles.

Weapons also are probably molded by the type of fighting and where its doneas borne out by work on the shapes of rhinoceros beetle horns by evolutionary biologist Erin McCullough. As a graduate student with Emlen, she spent two summers in Taiwan videotaping battles of the Japanese horned beetle, which has a pitchfork-shaped horn. She compared its fights to those of the Hercules beetle, which sports thick, pinching horns, and a species of Golofa beetle, which has thinner, sword-like horns. Each fights in slightly different ways, all with the goal of flicking their opponent off a tree branch or bamboo shoot.

McCullough, now a postdoctoral researcher at Syracuse University in New York, first measured how much force was needed to dislodge an average-size male from a branch. Next, she CT-scanned the critters horns, built 3-D computer models of the structures and used engineering tools to calculate the stresses and strains that the structures could withstand. She found that each horn performed best under the forces of its species-specific fighting style. This is a big component for why different species have different weapons, she says.

In October, an international group of researchers used the same computer modeling techniques to suggest that the largest antlers ever to existthe 12-feet-across by 5-feet-high rack of the prehistoric Irish elkwere used for male sparring, too.

But McCullough notes that the scariest, showiest weapons are not always very lethal. Some diversity, such as curlicues and extra tines, is probably driven by the display functions of weapons, she says.

Some of the largest animal weapons ever found adorned dinosaur heads. An example is seen in the horns and frills of the triceratops, a type of ceratopsid dinosaurbig-bodied herbivores that lived in large herds in open spaces, not unlike caribou. They had the biggest skulls of land-living animals that ever lived, partly due to these big bony structures on their heads, says Scott Sampson, paleontologist and executive director of the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco.

Of course, its tricky to study dinosaur behavior, or even determine a skeletons sex, from fossils. Paleontologists continue to debate whether such unusual face decor was used to help dinosaur species recognize their own kind, for male-male mating contests or signals to females, or for defense. But Sampson says several lines of evidence persuade him that these horns were sexual weapons or displays rather than spears to fend off predators.

Importantly, these features werent fully grown until the animals reached adult size and reproductive age. And many of the features of dinosaur horns, spikes and frills were lousy as weapons against carnivorous predators, Sampson says. Some were thin to the point of fragility or curved in seemingly the wrong direction. Take, for example, Kosmoceratops, a flamboyant fossil found in southern Utah that sported 15 horns on its face, the top of its skull and its bony frill, some of which curve back on themselves. Im quite certain this pattern is all about show, Sampson says. Ceratopsids, he says, would have been more likely to use their sheer size as a weapon against predators.

From spines and plates on late Cretaceous behemoths to horns on tiny, modern-day beetles, making and carrying flashy weapons can come at a huge energy cost. An elks antlers are akin to a 180-pound man wearing a 12-pound gold chain around his neck.

But the costs are worth it. In a lot of mating systems, if you dont produce a weapon, then you have zero success, Swanson says. You have no choice but to play the game.

This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, an independent journalistic endeavor from Annual Reviews. Sign up for the newsletter.

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The Weapons of Sexual Rivalry - Scientific American

Angus Thirlwell on the ‘perpetual evolution’ of Hotel Chocolat – FoodNavigator.com

Posted on December 27, 2019 by Danzig

British chocolatier Hotel Chocolate grows its own cacao in Saint Lucia and sells chocolates direct-to-consumer via physical store, online, and subscription channels.

The brand boasts a revenue of 132.5m (up 14% from 2018) with 10.9m profit after tax, and is expanding its presence into international markets, including Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, Scandinavia, and the US.

However, the company started with very modest ambitions, according to CEO Angus Thirlwell, who describes Hotel Chocolats journey a perpetual evolution with perpetual growing ambitions.

Speaking at start-up event Bread and Jam earlier this year, Thirlwell said his initial start-up which he launched with business partner Peter Harris was founded on the nichest idea youve ever heard of.

The concept was to supply customised branded peppermints to corporates, and in doing so, replace plastic branded promotional pens. The B2B model was relatively cash generative, said Thirlwell, we made it work and got to a few million pounds-worth of sales.

Once The Mint Marketing Company expanded its concept into chocolate, the business partners observed that chocolate had the power to excite people in a way that peppermints didnt. There was a very fertile possibility of using imagination to create something interesting, Thirlwell recalled.

The duo quickly fell under the spell of chocolate and started researching the B2C market. Their next offering, which launched in the late 1990s, was the Chocogram a chocolate box that fit through a letterbox with a gift card attached.

While that model worked very well, Thirlwell felt the company was being held back by its brand name: Choc Express. Further, repeat custom was infrequent. In 1998, the partners integrated the Chocolate Tasting Club into the business, whereby subscribers received mixed selection chocolate box every month.

Two years later, Choc Express began to ask subscribers to score the chocolate recipes a concept that still exists today. With approximately 100,000 members, the company was now modestly profitable, said Thirlwell, and at a point where we [needed] to get a proper brand name.

Having spent time in France, Thirlwell was convinced he wanted the French word for chocolate, chocolat, in the brand name. And the word hotel offered the promise of a place, he elaborated. A hotel is a refuge, its somewhere that people look forward to going to. Putting the two together created some kind of magic.

It was at this time that Hotel Chocolat established its three pillars the three things that we wanted to focus on forever, as a brand and a business. These are originality, authenticity, and ethics.

CEO Angus Thirlwell on Hotel Chocolats three pillars

Originality:We want to be continually driven by imagination. Doing things in a fresher, better way, and not copying other people or following, in our case, Belgian chocolate, Swiss chocolate, or French chocolate.

Authenticity:We have gradually been putting more and more cocoa, and less sugar, into our chocolates. We also want to be the real deal in terms of knowledge. This is what ultimately led us to buying our cacao estate, because we needed to know absolutely everything about the star ingredient: the cacao.

Ethics:Ethics [is about] being a good world citizen, going about things in a responsible way, [including] the way we do deals with suppliers and pay on time, through to making sure that all the cacao we use [is aligned with] engaged ethics which goes beyond broader [sustainability] programmes.

Hotel Chocolat is also committed to reducing waste, using every part of the cacao bean, such as the cacao shells which it uses in infusions. Any misshapen chocolates that are made with premium ingredients go into the companys reduced-priced Ugly But Good bags.

Hotel Chocolats ambition again notched up a level when it took the plunge into brick-and-mortar retail, said Thirlwell. Creating a branded Hotel Chocolat space addressed the immediate gratification element of chocolate, he explained. Not everybody is prepared to wait a day for their chocolate to arrive. When you decide you want it, you want it right now and we were not providing a solution to that.

The retail model really started to work, attracting a broader demographic compared to the companys online subscription model. The team also observed that physical retail played a huge role in building brand awareness.

Some call brick-and-mortar outlay rent, but the self-proclaimed big fan of physical retail said it can otherwise be interpreted as marketing: Its the cost of acquiring a new customer.

Since opening that first store in 2004, Hotel Chocolat has amassed 115 stores in the UK.

In 2006, the duo made their foray into the cocoa growing world, with the acquisition of Rabot Estate a 250-year-old cocoa plantation in Saint Lucia.

In doing so, Thirlwell hoped to raise consumers awareness of the entire chocolate production process starting on the farm. Nobody ever talked about [the agricultural side], he recalled. Unlike wine or olive oil, the agricultural discussion is never there. And therefore, the potential profits from a successful consumer good doesnt make it there either.

Not only would purchasing a cocoa plantation be an amazing business adventure that would help build a stronger brand, but Thirlwell was also convinced they would be doing something good that would nourish the ethical and authentic elements of [the] brand.

Buying Rabot Estate has enabled Hotel Chocolat to build up knowledge in the entire chocolate making process, including how to grow cacao organically, how to preserve old gene types of trees, and how flavour can vary from grove to grove.

In 2011, Hotel Chocolate opened a hotel and restaurant on the estate. Thirlwell estimates 70% of the guests come from the US. Having coincidentally launched in the US in 2018, the CEO predicts the hotel will be more valuable than expected in terms of reaching US-based audiences and creating a new narrative on chocolate.

Hotel Chocolat aspires to reinvent chocolate. Part of this mission is encouraging consumers and brands to pay close attention toingredients lists.

As such, the brand is campaigning for tighter regulations regarding how the term chocolate is used. As it stands, its meaning is quite loose, he said. In my book, its quite easy. If cocoa is the number one ingredient [in a product], you can use the word chocolate. If sugar is the biggest ingredient, then there is another word that is available: its confectionery.

The CEO said he is asking chocolate associations to tighten up rules regarding its use. Mixing [chocolate and confectionery] up has done a good job of confusing the customer for decades. I think chocolate associations should do a better job of providing guidance for the consumer.

Another of Hotel Chocolats missions is to reinvent hot chocolate. We are trying to bring back the reference of drinking chocolate that used to exist in the 1700s in Europe, and before that, in early Mayan civilisations, explained the CEO.

The brands current range includes single serves of grated hot chocolate products, in flavours such as salted caramel and clementine; 100% Mayan red Honduras, and maple and pecan.

Weve got to get people to stop thinking about hot chocolate as an instant powder full of sugar, skimmed milk, and a tiny bit of cocoa powder, and instead as coffee has done very successfully bring it back to this noble drink that is full of good nutrients.

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Angus Thirlwell on the 'perpetual evolution' of Hotel Chocolat - FoodNavigator.com

Games that defined the Decade: Pokemon Go proved that evolution and community is the key to greatness – GamesRadar+

Posted on December 27, 2019 by Danzig

We're celebrating the end of an incredible 10 years for games, movies, and TV shows. Pokemon GO is one of the games that defined the last 10 years of play, placing 22nd in our100 best games of the decaderankings. Be sure to check out the full list to see if your favourites made the cut.

Niantic's promise of Pokemon brought to life via the medium of an augmented reality smartphone app, it seemed too good to be true. While the company's previous mobile game, Ingress, turned people's real-world environs into a battle between two factions, could that same energy translate into a nostalgia-fuelled Pokemon adventure in the palm of your hand? Early trailers promised Charizards residing amongst clifftops, Pikachu scampering through picturesque city streets, and at that point it all seemed too good to be true.

And for some, it was that, just a pipe-dream. You couldn't stumble upon a hyper-realistic Pokemon in its natural habitat; Gyarados couldn't be found leaping out of the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, you didn't have to travel to an electrical power plant to find a Voltorb, and Pigeotto was found on the ground rather than soaring through the skies.

"The game is a safe haven for players of any age, it gives people a reason to get out of the house"

But that didn't stop millions of people playing it in those first early months. And I mean everybody. Kids, parents, grandparents, the miserable bloke who lives a few doors down from you and never says hi as you walk past on a morning Immediately, the sense of community spirit was incredible, with people taking to the streets, glued to their phones even more than ever, all for the same reason; fictional monsters you can search out and collect.

Although that initial surge of popularity dampened, Niantic's dedication to updating and improving the game means that the community passion for Pokemon Go continues to soar, with the game hitting one billion downloads earlier this year. Even if half of those are new players, that means approximately 7% of the global population have played Pokemon Go.

When the game launched, it arrived with just the original 151 Pokemon, but in the months and years that followed, Niantic has transformed its initial basic gameplay offerings to the behemoth the game is today. New events and mechanics are introduced frequently; the monthly community days bring back the sense of spirit found during that summer of 2016; and there are over 600 Pokemon to seek out and catch. Team Rocket has even made a recent appearance, as have much-requested features like trading and PvP battling.

The core mechanics of collecting and catching haven't changed much over these two years, but for the most engaged players it's a constantly evolving Pokemon paradise found right in their back yards - or at least their local towns - where thriving Pokemon communities lurk in Discord and take over towns on community days. For most, the goal is to simply fill out as much of the Pokedex as possible, but it's this desire stemming from childhood to be the very best, like no-one ever was and catch 'em all that keeps players returning.

With over three generations' worth of Pokemon still to be added and innovations in gameplay arriving frequently, Pokemon Go has a lot to offer for anyone interested in those pesky pocket monsters. Those who fell to the wayside shortly after launch will wonder what warrants it being included as a game of the decade, but the answer to that is simple: it's less about how Pokemon Go plays, and more to do with what it means.

The game is a safe haven for players of any age, it gives people a reason to get out of the house and do more exercise, explore countries they've never visited before in search of rare regional Pokemon, make friends and acquaintances throughout their local community, and so much more.

There's a community that will never stop playing Pokemon Go, but not because it's a rich experience with deep elements but rather because Pokemon Go reminds me that there are still plenty of good people in the world. And, for me, it's a crucial way I connect with my father who lives on the other side of the country, especially as he was the one who first introduced me to Pokemon Blue back in the day. Cheers, Niantic.

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Games that defined the Decade: Pokemon Go proved that evolution and community is the key to greatness - GamesRadar+

Facebook Discovers Fakes That Show Evolution of Disinformation – The New York Times

Posted on December 27, 2019 by Danzig

Facebook said on Friday that it had removed hundreds of accounts with ties to the Epoch Media Group, parent company of the Falun Gong-related publication and conservative news outlet The Epoch Times.

The accounts, including pages, groups and Instagram feeds meant to be seen in both the United States and Vietnam, presented a new wrinkle to researchers: fake profile photos generated with the help of artificial intelligence.

The idea that artificial intelligence could be used to create wide-scale disinformation campaigns has long been a fear of computer scientists. And they said it was worrying to see it already being used in a coordinated effort on Facebook.

While the technology used to create the fake profile photos was most likely a far cry from the sophisticated A.I. systems being created in labs at big tech companies like Google, the network of fake accounts showed an eerie, tech-enabled future of disinformation, said Graham Brookie, director of the Atlantic Councils Digital Forensic Research Lab.

The people behind the network of 610 Facebook accounts, 89 Facebook Pages, 156 Groups and 72 Instagram accounts posted about political news and issues in the United States, including President Trumps impeachment, conservative ideology, political candidates, trade and religion.

This was a large, brazen network that had multiple layers of fake accounts and automation that systematically posted content with two ideological focuses: support of Donald Trump and opposition to the Chinese government, Mr. Brookie said in an interview.

The Atlantic Councils lab and another company, Graphika, which also studies disinformation, released a joint report analyzing the Facebook takedown.

The Epoch Media Group denied in an email sent to The New York Times that it was linked to the network targeted by Facebook, and said that Facebook had not contacted the company before publishing its conclusions.

The people behind the network used artificial intelligence to generate profile pictures, Facebook said. They relied on a type of artificial intelligence called generative adversarial networks. These networks can, through a process called machine learning, teach themselves to create realistic images of faces, even though they do not belong to a real person.

Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebooks head of security policy, said in an interview that using A.I.-generated photos for profiles has been talked about for several months, but for Facebook, this is the first time weve seen a systemic use of this by actors or a group of actors to make accounts look more authentic.

He added that this A.I. technique did not actually make it harder for the companys automated systems to detect the fakes, because the systems focus on patterns of behavior among accounts.

Ben Nimmo, director of investigations at Graphika, said that we need more research into A.I.-generated imagery like this, but it takes a lot more to hide a fake network than just the profile pictures.

Facebook said the accounts masked their activities by using a combination of fake and authentic American accounts to manage pages and groups on the platforms. The coordinated, inauthentic activity, Facebook said, revolved around the media outlet The BL short for The Beauty of Life which the fact-checking outlet Snopes said in November was building a fake empire on Facebook and getting away with it.

Mr. Gleicher said Facebook began its investigation into The BL in July, and accelerated its efforts when the network became more aggressive in posting this fall. It is continuing to investigate other links and networks tied to The BL, he said.

Facebook said the network had spent less than $9.5 million on Facebook and Instagram ads. On Friday, Facebook said The BL would be banned from the social network.

The Epoch Times and The BL have denied being linked, but Facebook said it had found coordinated, inauthentic behavior from the network to the Epoch Media Group and individuals in Vietnam working on its behalf.

The Epoch Media Group said in its email that The BL was founded by a former employee and employs some of its former employees. However, that some of our former employees work for BL is not evidence of any connection between the two organizations, the company said.

A Facebook spokeswoman said executives The BL were active administrators on Epoch Media Group Pages as recently as Friday morning.

In August, Facebook banned advertising from The Epoch Times after NBC News published a report that said The Epoch Times had obscured its connection to Facebook ads promoting President Trump and conspiracy content.

Twitter said on Friday that the social network was also aware of The BL network, and had already identified and suspended approximately 700 accounts originating from Vietnam for violating our rules around platform manipulation. A company spokeswoman added that its investigation was still open, but Twitter has not identified links between the accounts and state-backed actors.

Facebook also said on Friday that it had taken down a network of more than 300 pages and 39 Facebook accounts and their coordinated, inauthentic activities on domestic political news in Georgia.

Facebook said the network tried to conceal its coordination but it found that the accounts responsible were run by the Georgian Dream-led government, and Panda, a local advertising agency in the country. The owners of the Facebook pages masqueraded as news organizations and impersonated public figures, political parties and activist groups.

In a related move, Twitter said it also took down 32 million tweets from nearly 6,000 accounts related to a Saudi Arabian social media marketing company called Smaat, which ran political and commercial influence operations.

Smaat was led in part by Ahmed Almutairi, a Saudi man wanted by the F.B.I. on charges that he recruited two Twitter employees to search internal company databases for information about critics of the Saudi government, said Renee DiResta, a disinformation researcher at the Stanford Internet Observatory, which separately analyzed Twitters takedown.

The operation was extremely high volume, and automatically generated by Twitter apps that made religious posts, posts about the weather and other topics, Ms. DiResta said.

At times, the accounts were used for more tailored purposes, including more than 17,000 tweets related to Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi dissident and columnist for The Washington Post, who was killed while visiting a Saudi consulate in October last year.

Many of the tweets claimed that those criticizing the Saudi government for their involvement were doing so for their own political purposes.

How to evolve Yamask in Pokemon Sword and Shield – GamesRadar

Posted on December 27, 2019 by Danzig

A number of Pokemon have received special Galarian forms and evolutions in the latest games, so if you're wondering how to evolve Yamask in Pokemon Sword and Shield, we can help. The new Yamask has adopted the Ground-type alongside the usual Ghost-type in Pokemon Sword and Shield, along with a brand new evolution; Runerigus. How to evolve Yamask into Runerigus in Pokemon Sword and Shield isn't an easy task however, so read on for everything you need to know.

When you've finally got your hands on a Yamask (35% chance to spawn on Route 6 in all weather), there's some seriously odd tasks you need to complete in order to evolve it into Runerigus.

Firstly, you need to make your Galarian Yamask take more than 49 damage, but don't let it faint. You can heal it in this process, but as long as your Yamask's remaining HP is less than 49 of its total, this step will be complete. The best way to do it is simply go and battle wild Pokemon around the same level as your Yamask.

Next, you need to head to the Dusty Bowl region of the Wild Area. With Yamask in your party weakened by 49 HP or more, walk underneath the stone archway. If both conditions are met, your Galarian Yamask will evolve into Runerigus. We don't know why it works this way, but it does.

If you want more than one Runerigus, you're going to need to keep using this method. In fact, you could (probably) have a full party of Galarian Yamask with 49 HP or more missing and evolve all six of once. Woohoo, efficiency.

You can grab a normal Yamask by trading a Galarian Yamask for it with a girl in an Eevee costume found in the entrance hall to Ballonlea Gym. Evolving this one is much simpler, as you just need to get it to level 34 in order to get a Cofagrigus.

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How to evolve Yamask in Pokemon Sword and Shield - GamesRadar

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