What’s the next step in financial planning’s evolution? Look to the Fitbit – Financial Planning

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Could clients soon receive financial advice in 30-second chunks via their wristwatch?

Not quite yet, but the potential to combine digital advice and big data is spawning an evolution in personal finance management apps that could soon upend how investment advice is delivered and consumed.

Wearable devices such as the Fitbit and Apple Watch have become increasingly seamless and nonintrusive in how they collect data, says Daniel Lattimore, senior vice president of Celent's banking practice and author of a new report on how personal finance management apps are evolving. Personal finance management apps, also known as PFM apps, will follow a similar development path.

"Consumers see that, and wonder, 'Why can't my finances be as easy as that? Why can I not in a seamless, non-active way get insights into my activity?"

Clients will be more deeply informed about their finances, he says, and with little effort on their part.

BITE-SIZED ADVICE Microadvice, he explains, will be delivered as "hints and nudges in the moment, the right context at the right time, on what you should be doing."

"It's a microburst of education, done in digestible chunks, so the consumer feels like they are learning," Lattimore adds. "As youre waiting for the bus, its 30 seconds of insight or education based on something you've just done, or expenditure that just came in."

Though the advice may come in small pieces, the stakes for monetizing that stream will be high. Banks and wealth managers will fight to control the flow of information, Lattimore says.

Plus, the advent of microadvice will impact advisers, as it will make any prospect that much more knowledgeable about their finances.

"You've got to evolve your offering to provide value to an educated consumer, and in a way thats a lot harder," Lattimore says.

Suleman Din is managing editor of SourceMedia's Investment Advisor Group. Follow him on Twitter at @sulemandn

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What's the next step in financial planning's evolution? Look to the Fitbit - Financial Planning

An RX for Social Darwinism – HuffPost

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The Republican controlled US Senate just voted to proceed to debate Trumpcarea major step in the repeal and/or replacement of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Following like docile sheep, most of the Republican Senators, who indisputably place party before country, voted yes not even knowing whats in the bill!

There are no profiles in courage among Republican Senators who voted to debate a bill that would, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), take health care away from upwards of 20 million Americans, obliterate protections for pre-existing conditions, and raise healthcare premiums across the board. Put more bluntly, if you get horribly sick, good luck finding insurance coverage. If you dont have the funds to pay for expensive cancer treatments or for assisted living, or for a nursing home, well just let these lesser people wither away. The strong survive. The weak sicken and die, which enables the fit to pad their already overflowing bank accounts..

If you think Im being harsh, consider the position of US Congressman Tom Reed (R-NY). In a June 24 Politicususa article Sean Colarossi reports that Reed

said on Saturday it doesnt bother him too much that 20,000 more Americans will die under the Republican health care plan as long as less money is going into Medicaid.

Mr. Reeds comments bring to mind a scene from Stanley Kubricks monumental film Dr. Strangelove. In the film, the President has called an emergency situation room meeting to discuss how to deal with a renegade nuclear attack ordered by an insane Air Force General, Jack D. Ripper. General Ripper illegally sent B-52s to obliterate the Russians with 40 megatons of nuclear bombs. Enter Air Force Chief of Staff General Buck Turgidson, played by the legendary George C Scott.

[Turgidson advocates a further nuclear attack to prevent a Soviet response to Ripper's attack]

General "Buck" Turgidson: Mr. President, we are rapidly approaching a moment of truth both for ourselves as human beings and for the life of our nation. Now, truth is not always a pleasant thing. But it is necessary now to make a choice, to choose between two admittedly regrettable, but nevertheless *distinguishable*, postwar environments: one where you got twenty million people killed, and the other where you got a hundred and fifty million people killed.

President Merkin Mufley: You're talking about mass murder, General, not war!

General "Buck" Turgidson: Mr. President, I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops. Uh, depending on the breaks.

If it is passed by the Republican controlled congress, Trumpcare may well result in a massive uptick of thousands if not millions of unnecessary deaths. Considering its unpopularity, why would any sane politician vote for such a politically and socially destructive bill? Why is it more important for Republican legislators to extend tax breaks to the wealthy than to save human lives?

What difference does it make if 20,000 people die if we are able to cut Medicaid?

What difference does it make if three million people die if we are able to extend tax breaks to the wealthy?

You might think that such poisonous thinking is social insanity, but the notion of social winners (who have earned health care) and social losers (who dont deserve heath care) has a long history in the United States.

Its not a pretty story, but its a tale well known to anthropologists.

Around the turn of the 20th century, the United States was a fundamentally racist society in which the rich (white people of means) led lives very different from the poor (immigrants and African Americans). Back then many of our elites followed the dictates of Social Darwinism in which British philosopher Herbert Spencer mangled the findings of Charles Darwin to suggest that natural selection applied to human beings and that the fittest, in this case, White Europeans, were better ablephysically, intellectually and emotionallyto adapt to the world. The strong and the fit would survive. Those who lacked fitness would sicken and dieridding the world of inferior traits. Spencers ideas gave rise to a scientific racism that posited that race was the determining factor in social fitness. Franz Boas, the founder of American anthropology used science to publicly refute these socially destabilizing ideas. Although these toxins never disappear, they have reemerged strongly in the alternative realities that motivate the me-first attitudes of President Trump and the Republicans who rule congress. From an anthropological perspective, Trumpcare is a path back to the gilded age in which income inequality, reinforced through financial and immigration policies, created a stark society that juxtaposed a slim minority that enjoyed unimaginable luxury to an ever-increasing majority that confronted misery and death each and every day. In that time, the wealthy used the ideology of Social Darwinism to reinforce their social, economic and political power.

From an anthropological perspective, Trumpcare is a back to the future move to socially engineer a society of winners, the fit, who are strong, and losers, the unfit who are weak. In this sophomoric mix, our cherished social contract will be lost, millions of our citizens will suffer and our society will be ripped to shreds.

Is this the legacy we want to bequeath to our grandchildren?

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An RX for Social Darwinism - HuffPost

Crushing the old economy: Robotics, artificial intelligence fund has tripled the Dow this year – CNBC

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Artificial intelligence, machine learning and robotics are making some real money for stock investors, and beating the market.

The Global X Robotics and Artificial Intelligence ETF (BOTZ) is up 30 percent this year and the ROBO Global Robotics and Automation Index (ROBO) is up 25 percent. That's roughly three times the Dow Jones industrial average's 9 percent rise and twice the S&P 500's 11 percent climb.

"Between the tech exposure and the international exposure, that's helped the group pretty well," said Jack Ablin, chief investment officer at BMO Private Bank. "Certainly thematically it's in a sweet spot."

The upward trend in robotics and artificial intelligence stocks is one proponents say, in the long-term, could top the so-called FANG stocks Facebook, Amazon.com, Netflix and Google parent Alphabet. Each FANG stock has rallied 20 to 50 percent this year and the companies are increasingly focused on using technologies such as artificial intelligence, or AI, to develop their businesses.

"In our opinion, robotics, automation, AI [RAAI] is really the next FANG trade if you will," William Studebaker, president and CIO at Robo Global, told CNBC.

"All the FANG companies are really redefining their business as AI first and they're investing" in these companies, Studebaker said. "We're selling the tech they're using to enable their business."

Relative performance of ROBO and BOTZ to the S&P 500 (year to date)

Source: FactSet

The tech-heavy Nasdaq composite has soared 19 percent in 2017 to hit a record high this week. More than half of the S&P 500's technology sector sales come from overseas, where economic growth has largely picked up more than in the U.S.

Many of the robotics or machine learning-focused companies in the BOTZ and ROBO ETFs are not based in the U.S., helping explain some of the funds' outperformance.

For BOTZ, Japanese companies compose nearly half of the 29-stock fund, followed by the U.S. and Switzerland, according to its fact sheet. More than half of ROBO's stocks are based outside North America.

The top 10 holdings of BOTZ include Intuitive Surgical, which received a $1,000 price target from Goldman Sachs in May, Mitsubishi Electric, Nvidia and Keyence. ROBO's major holdings include Swiss-based industrial company Abb, Chinese industrial name HollySys and U.S. health care company Accuray, according to a fact sheet.

"Many of these companies are not followed by Wall Street or underfollowed by Wall Street," Studebaker said. "This is an industry that's evolving and so it's going to explode."

Investors are starting to get interested as well. Studebaker said ROBO added $1 billion in assets under management over the last 12 months, while Global X said BOTZ's assets under management leaped from $1.5 million at its launch in September 2016 to $236 million Monday.

That jump in assets under management makes BOTZ the youngest fund in Global X's top 10 largest funds, according to Jay Jacobs, director of research and vice president at Global X Funds. "It's really hitting this inflection point," he said.

Increased focus on artificial intelligence is already showing up in the tech giants' earnings calls.

Google parent Alphabet reported better-than-expected second-quarter results after the close Monday. Its shares fell Tuesday on worries that rising traffic acquisition costs will hit future profit growth, but UBS analyst Eric Sheridan wrote in a Monday report that he still holds a long-term constructive view on Alphabet given its focus on artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Alphabet's earnings call was also the third straight quarter in which Google CEO Sundar Pichai mentioned artificial intelligence, Gene Munster, once a prominent Apple analyst, pointed out Tuesday.

"Google is betting on the right long-term trends (Google, AI, AR, VR)," Munster said in a note from his new firm Loup Ventures, a venture capital firm focused on artificial intelligence, robotics, virtual reality and augmented reality.

Facebook is scheduled to report quarterly earnings Wednesday, and Amazon.com on Thursday.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said on the video streaming company's earnings call last week that the company uses algorithms for personalization.

To be sure, since terms like artificial intelligence and robotics have become buzzwords, investors will need to do their research to determine leaders in the industry,

The number of U.S. corporate earnings call transcripts mentioning the words jumped to 124 last quarter, up from 107 in the first quarter and 50 in the second quarter of 2016, according to a search using AlphaSense. The analysis covered U.S. companies with more than $2 billion in market capitalization.

"In the tech boom," BMO's Ablin said, "random companies would put 'dotcom' at the end of their name just to prove they're different."

Disclaimer

CNBC's Tae Kim contributed to this report.

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Crushing the old economy: Robotics, artificial intelligence fund has tripled the Dow this year - CNBC

Girl Scouts add new STEM badges in robotics, coding, and racecar design – The Verge

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Today, the Girl Scouts of the USA introduced 23 new badges in the areas of science, technology, engineering, math, and the outdoors. This is the largest rollout of new badges for the organization in almost a decade, aiming its focus on encouraging interest in STEM and environmental conservation from an early age.

The new merit badges include Programming Robots, which requires Scouts to create simple programs that could be run by a robot and understand how machines use sensors, and Race Car Design Challenge, where Scouts have to design cars, tracks, and learn how to carry out fair tests. The organization created select badges with contributions from tech-related groups like Code.org, SciStarter, and GoldieBlox, and they join other Girl Scout STEM badges like Website Designer and Cybersecurity (which was announced this year and will be available in 2018).

The new merit badges include Programming Robots and Race Car Design Challenge

According to the organizations announcement, Girl Scouts are almost twice as likely as nonGirl Scouts to participate in STEM (60 percent versus 35 percent) and outdoor activities (76 percent versus 43 percent). They also note that Girl Scouts are more likely to seek careers in STEM, law, and business fields where women are traditionally underrepresented.

While these badge additions are a definite yay! moment, its worth noting theres still severe discrepancies between available badges for Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts. For example, the Girl Scouts have two meal-related badges Dinner Party (how to be the hostess with the mostest) and Simple Meals (serve a meal for family and friends), while the Boy Scouts cooking badge has a list of requirements, including trail meals and food-related careers.

The new badges are indicative of where the Girl Scouts are going, though, and its frankly super cool to see them stepping up to give us our next generation of robot-programming, racecar-building women.

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Girl Scouts add new STEM badges in robotics, coding, and racecar design - The Verge

Two members of missing Burundi robotics team found, US police say – Reuters

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Two members of a teenage robotics team from Burundi who went missing after a competition in Washington last week have been located and are safe, the city's Metropolitan Police Department said on Tuesday.

The teens, Don Ingabire, 16, and Audrey Mwamikazi, 17, were spotted last week crossing the border into Canada. The Metropolitan Police Department would not say on Tuesday where or when they were found, citing department procedures for missing persons.

"The others are still missing, so the case is still under investigation," police spokeswoman Karimah Bilal said.

Four boys and two girls from the African nation were last seen on July 18 after the FIRST Global Robotics Challenge concluded. Organizers have said the disappearance may have been "self-initiated" because the students' hotel keys were left in a chaperone's bag while their clothes were taken.

Police have said they did not suspect foul play.

The Burundian embassies in Ottawa and Washington said they were unaware on Tuesday that two of the students had been found.

The other missing Burundians have been identified as Nice Munezero, 17; Kevin Sabumukiza, 17; Richard Irakoze, 18; and Aristide Irambona, 18.

High school students from more than 150 countries took part in the FIRST Global competition. An all-girl squad from Afghanistan drew worldwide attention when President Donald Trump intervened after they were denied U.S. visas.

Burundi has long been plagued by civil war and other violence. Fighting has killed at least 700 people and forced 400,000 from their homes since April 2015.

Additional reporting by Anna Mehler Paperny in Toronto; Editing by Colleen Jenkins and Leslie Adler

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Two members of missing Burundi robotics team found, US police say - Reuters

Burundi Robotics Team Vanishes After US Competition – New York Times

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Joe Sestak, a former Pennsylvania congressman and retired Navy admiral who is president of First Global, the nonprofit group that organized the competition, made the initial call to the police shortly after midnight, officials said. The authorities began sharing photographs and descriptions of the teenagers on missing persons fliers on Wednesday.

The police searched Constitution Hall, interviewed other competitors in the dorms and unsuccessfully tried to reach one of the missing students uncles, according to police reports.

The teenagers all have one-year visas, officials say.

The Burundi Embassy in Washington said in an email that officials there had not known there was a team from their country in the United States until after the teenagers were reported missing.

In June, the State Department issued a travel warning for Americans going to Burundi, located between Rwanda and Tanzania, citing political tensions, political and criminal violence, and the potential for civil unrest. The warning took note of a tenuous political situation and reported ambushes and kidnappings.

More than 325,000 Burundians have fled the country since 2015, mostly to Tanzania, Rwanda, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, according to Human Rights Watch.

The First Global competition made international headlines after the all-girl team from Afghanistan struggled to get visas to attend the event, advertised as an international robotics Olympics. Students from more than 150 countries participated in the competition, organizers said. It is scheduled to take place in Mexico City next year.

First Global is always concerned about the safety of our students, said Jose P. Escotto, the organizations communications director. The group said it had advised students not to leave the dorms or Constitution Hall without a mentor.

Students and their mentors stayed in dorms at George Washington University and Trinity Washington University. The Burundi team stayed at Trinity Washington University in Cuvilly Hall, a university spokeswoman, Ann Pauley, confirmed in an email; the hall is locked at all times. First Global provided bus transportation between the dorm and Constitution Hall.

Members of the Norwegian team, waiting to leave for the airport Thursday morning outside Thurston Hall at George Washington University, had heard about the disappearance from another team but thought it was a misunderstanding.

They havent been found? asked Havard Krogstie, 17, from Trondheim. I thought it was just they had gone somewhere without telling anyone. I dont see why they would just run off in a foreign country.

Right now, he added, with a shake of his head, I realize that theyre actually missing.

A version of this article appears in print on July 21, 2017, on Page A12 of the New York edition with the headline: 6 African Teenagers Disappear After Robotics Contest.

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Burundi Robotics Team Vanishes After US Competition - New York Times

2 Missing Teens From African Robotics Team Found Safe: Police – Patch.com

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Patch.com
2 Missing Teens From African Robotics Team Found Safe: Police
Patch.com
WASHINGTON, DC Two of the six missing Burundian teens who disappeared from an international robotics competition in DC have been found safe, police said. Don Ingabire, 16, and Audrey Mwamikazi, 17, were located safely, police announced Tuesday ...

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2 Missing Teens From African Robotics Team Found Safe: Police - Patch.com

Afghan Robotics Team Wins Silver Medal For ‘Courage’ – TOLOnews

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The Afghan robotics team won a silver medal for 'courageous achievement' at the FIRST Global Challenge in Washington.

The Afghan robotics team won a silver medal in the "courageous achievement" category at the FIRST Global robotics competition in Washington DC.

The competition is considered to be the "Olympic's" of robotics contests and was represented by over 160 countries.

The Associated Press reported theteam that drew the most attention at the FIRST Global Challenge, which ended Tuesday, was a squad of girls from Afghanistan who were twice rejected for U.S visas before President Donald Trump intervened.

The Afghanistan team won a silver medal for "courageous achievement." The award recognized teams that exhibited a "can-do" attitude even under difficult circumstances or when things didn't go as planned. The gold medal in that category went to the South Sudan team and bronze to the Oman team, whose students are deaf, reported AP.

Rodaba Noori, Afghan robotics team member said: We were proud (of) ourselves and we tried a lot to get a position and we tried to win the game."

"I feel so confident about the last round of the competition. I'm very, very excited and also, I'm very hopeful. I believe we did well and I'm just waiting for the result, Kawsar Roshan, Afghan robotics team member said.

Teams left with gold, silver and bronze medals in a variety of categories, AP reported.

The Europe team won a gold award for picking up the highest cumulative points over the course of the competition. Poland got silver and Armenia bronze.

Finland won a gold award for earning the best win-loss record. Silver went to Singapore and bronze to India.

The 2018 competition will be held in Mexico City.

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Afghan Robotics Team Wins Silver Medal For 'Courage' - TOLOnews

Official: SSC releases admit cards for 2017 CGL Exam I – Business Standard

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Admit Cards For 2017 CGL Exam (I) are now available for download on the official website of SSC

Admit Cards for Combined Graduate Level Tier-I exam are now available for download on the official website of Staff Selection Commission (SSC). The Commission has released the Admit Card for different regions. The Commission was supposed to take the exam from August 1, 2017 to August 20, 2017. As per the official notification released later, the SSC is going to conduct the exam from August 5, 2017 to August 24, 2017.

There will be no exams conducted in between on 7th, 13th, 14th, and 15th. The candidates have to log in to the Commissions official site and provide their RegistrationNumber/Roll Number and the Password/D.O.B while logging in.

The SSC is set to releasethe release SSC CGL Admit Card 2017 separately for different levels of Examination. For instance the Admit Card for Tier-I has been released. Then the Commission will release the Admit Card for Tier-II exam and so on. Admit Card for Tier-II will be given to the candidates qualifying in Tier-I Exam. Likewise, Admit Card for Tier-III will be issued to the candidates qualifying in Tier-II exam.

Keep in mind that due to heavy traffic, the sites may be slow or crash. We ask the candidates to keep refreshing their regional sites. It may be found that some of the sites have not yet uploaded the Cards. However, the process of uploading the Admit Cards is underway. All of the sites will soon have the ACs for download. A total of 1, 80,365 candidates have been considered eligible for the SSC CGL Tier I examination from the North region.

Following are the details and URLs of the regional site. Candidates can click their respective regions site and download the Admit Card from that site.

Formed in 1975, the Staff Selection Commission (SSC), under the Government of India, engages in the recruitment of staff for various posts in the various Government Ministries and Departments and in Subordinate Offices. Every year the Commission conducts the SSC Combined Graduate Level exams for hiring non-gazette officers to various government jobs.

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Official: SSC releases admit cards for 2017 CGL Exam I - Business Standard

Love Island’s Olivia Buckland hits back as ‘insecure’ fianc Alex Bowen is criticised for undergoing MAJOR image update – CelebsNow

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Our Love Island lady Olivia Buckland is no stranger when it comes to speaking her mind.

So when her fianc and reality co-star Alex Bowen came under fire for one of his latest selfies, the 23-year-old was not about to take the comments lying down.

Read: All the Latest TV news

Brummy-born, Alex showed off his brand new set of teeth last week after deciding to treat himself to some shiny veneers and why not?

Uploading a snap of his gnashers on Instagram, the tattooed star wrote: Massive thank you to @ask_the_dentist for giving me my dream smile.

But unfortunately some of the stars 1.1 million followers werent a fan of his bright while smile, and went on to criticise Alex in a BIG way.

One fan ranted: I LOVED your teeth. They were what made you so gorgeous and were so unique to you. Im gutted. But you still look hot. Just a bit more generic sadly!

And this obviously didnt down too well with Olivia who has now admitted the comments really angered her.

More: I was really struggling: Love Islands Olivia Buckland praises the raunchy show for healing her depression and anxiety

Some people commented, saying he looked generic after he posted a selfie on Instagram. It really angered me, Liv wrote in her new! magazine column.

Explaining the reason behind her fiancs decision to get the dental procedure, she continued: Hes always felt insecure about his teeth but hasnt stopped smiling since he got his new ones.

I hated seeing bad comments under the photo, so I went through 400 of them and deleted all the horrible ones.

Alex has been showing off his brand new teeth on holiday in Rome [Instagram]

If youre considering getting them done, be warned its so hard to eat afterwards. I couldnt bit into a crisp or a crust of bread.

And when I tried to eat soup, it kept dribbling out of my mouth because it was numb and I couldnt feel it. So attractive, ha ha! LOL.

Were pretty sure these two are going to have the whitest teeth in Essex.

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Love Island's Olivia Buckland hits back as 'insecure' fianc Alex Bowen is criticised for undergoing MAJOR image update - CelebsNow

Why Philosophers Are Obsessed With Brains in Jars – The Atlantic

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Not many people get to contemplate their brain in a jar, but if all goes to plan then Ill be in that curious position by Christmas.

Happily, Ill still have the brain Im using right now, which is how Ill be able to do the contemplating. The other one will be my second brain. About the size of a frozen pea, it will have been grown from a small lump of flesh that researchers at the Institute of Neurology of University College London recently dug from my arm.

My skin cells will be transformed into a state akin to stem cells, which can grow into any type of tissue, using Nobel Prize-winning methods devised in the mid-2000s. These so-called induced pluripotent stem cells, or IPSCs, will then be gently coaxed into becoming neurons. Following much the same program as neurons in a fetus, the cultured cells will organize themselves into brain-like structures, taking on the identities of some of the brains different varieties of neurons and even starting to form hints of the familiar folds and convolutions.

The neurons will begin to send one another signals. We cant properly call this thinking, but it constitutes the ingredients of thinking. My mini-brain wont get any larger than its pea shape, however, because it will lack a blood supply: Above a certain size, the inner neurons would be deprived of oxygen and die.

The UCL folks are growing such mini-brains to study neurodegenerative diseases. By making these so-called organoids from the IPSCs of people with genetic predispositions to dementia-causing conditions such as Alzheimers, they can investigate how those genes create problems, and perhaps eventually find treatments. My mini-brain will be used as an anonymized healthy control sample for the research.

I have no idea yet how I will respond to my own brain in a jar. But it has set me thinking about how pervasive this cultural trope is, and how much is invested in it. There is something disturbingly intimate about seeing, perhaps even touching, the brain of another person, and its not surprising that the image features in tales of transgression both real and fictional. A heart preserved in formalin is often seen as mere inert offal, but we seem to suspect that within the soft clefts of the human brain the person themselves somehow residesor at least clues to what made them who they were.

So the brain in a jar has become a potentially misleading avatar of self. Its grey folded surface represents an illusory boundary between everything we know and everything outside of that knowledge.

* * *

To find the person, then, we go delving into the brain. Albert Einsteins brain, removed by pathologist Thomas Stoltz Harvey after the great physicists death in 1955, was cut into slices and preserved. Harvey himself kept some of those fragments almost obsessively; others have now found their way into museums, where they have become macabre emblems of genius.

Rumours abound about why Einsteins brain was special, but the truth is that everyones brain is likely to show some deviations from the norm. And while some behaviors can be linked to physical features of different brain regions, the structure of the brain itself responds to experience: Were not just who we are because of the way our brain is, but vice versa. For example, UCL neurologists have found that the rear of a London taxi drivers hippocampus, a brain region associated with memory and with navigation, will enlarge during training.

Still, the notion of brain as destiny persists. Think of Dr. Frankensteins crazed assistant Fritz giving him the abnormal brain of a criminal for his monster in James Whales 1931 movie, dooming the creature to be homicidal. (Mel Brookss Young Frankenstein spoofs that scene when Marty Feldman, the boggle-eyed assistant to Gene Wilders crazed doctor, tells his master that the brain belonged to Abby Normal.)

There are deviations from the respectable tradition of preserving brains for dissection that are far more grotesque than anything you find in Gothic horror novels. In the 1970s, it became clear that shelves of little brains in jars kept for decades in the basement of the Otto Wagner Hospital in Vienna were removed from children. The kids were held in a special childrens ward and murdered as mental defectives by command of the Nazi doctor Heinrich Gross, who apparently intended to study the anatomical causes of such defects.

Today, some people want their brain to end up in a jar by choicenot for the benefit of medical research, but because they figure they might need it again. Brain freezing is big business: Many hundreds of people have paid up to $200,000 or so for their bodiesor, for less than half that cost, just their headsto be cryogenically preserved after death. The hope is that science will one day enable the brain to be revived and the person, in effect, to be brought back to lifeand perhaps then to live forever. (You wont necessarily want your original body, especially if you died from some fatal accident or illness.)

Currently there seems to be no actual prospect that a frozen brain could be revived. Experts point out that todays cryogenic techniques inevitably cause damage to tissues, and that thawing would induce still more. But brain-freezing immortalists contend that the technology offers a glimmer of hope that death can one day be cheated. If you can bridge the gap (its only a few decades), then youve got it made, writes the computer scientist Ralph Merkle. All you have to do is freeze your system state if a crash occurs and wait for the crash technology to be developed ... You can be suspended until you can be uploaded.

A crash? Uploaded? You can see where this is going: The idea is that the brain is just a kind of computer, full of data that can be stored on a hard drive in a file labeled You.

As Merkle sees it, your brain is material, governed by the laws of physics; those laws can be simulated on a computer; therefore your brain can be, too. Although the network of neural connections in the brain is astronomically complex, we can put an upper limit on how many bits should be needed to encode it. Uploading the contents of a brain will need a computer memory of about 1018 bits, performing around 1016 logic operations a second, Merkle calculates. Thats perfectly imaginable with the current rate of technological advance.

According to this transhumanist vision, we will soon be able to live on inside computer hardware. The brain in a jar becomes the brain on a chip.

* * *

Such heady visions of brain downloads ignore the fact that the brain is not the hardware of the person but an organ of the body. Several experts in both AI and cognitive science argue that embodiment is central to experience and brain function. At the immediate physiological level, the brain doesnt just control the rest of the body, but engages in many-channeled discourse with its sensory experience, for example via hormones in the bloodstream.

And embodiment is central to thought itself, according to the AI guru Murray Shanahan, who acted as a consultant on Alex Garlands 2014 AI movie Ex Machina. Shanahan, a professor of cognitive robotics at Imperial College London, writes that cognition is largely about imagining the consequences of physical actions we might make in the worlda process of inner rehearsal of future scenarios.

In this view, then, the brain in a jar is not a feasible avatar of the entire human. One could argue that the brain-on-a-chip could be coupled to a robotic body that allows physical interaction with the surroundings, or even to just a simulation of a virtual environment. But Shanahans perspective raises questions about whether there is any purely mental essence of you that can be bottled in the first place.

The embodied aspect of the brain has long exercised philosophers, who debate whether what they call a brain in a vat alone can develop any reliable notion of truth about the world. The question stems from a hypothetical scenario: How do you know youre not just a brain in a vat being presented with a simulated world? How, then, can you know that all your beliefs about the world are not false?

The question has entered popular culture via the Matrix movies, now almost an obligatory port of call for discussions around the philosophy of mind. But the predicament was grist for the philosophical mill long before the Wachowskis picked it up. The most celebrated critic of brain in a vat skepticism was the late American philosopher Hilary Putnam, who argued in 1981 that the whole notion is contradictory. Words and concepts used by a brain in a vat cant be meaningfully applied to real objects outside of the brains experience, because the ability to have causal interaction with the specific things that words name is inherently how such words acquire meaning, Putnam argued. Even if there are actual trees in the world containing the vat that are simulated for the brain, the concept tree cant be said to refer to them from the brains point of view.

The same is true for the words brain and vat, which to a brain in a vat cant refer to actual brains and vats. The philosopher Anthony Brueckner expresses Putnams argument in a seemingly Zen-like turn of phrase: If I am a Brain in a Vat, then I am not a Brain in a Vat.

Its hardly surprising that not everyone is persuaded by Putnams subtle argument against our right to be skeptical. The philosopher Thomas Nagel adds to the impression that philosophers seem here to be attempting to escape, Houdini-like, from the sealed glass jar of their own minds. So what if I cant express my skepticism by saying Perhaps I am a brain in a vat and must instead say Perhaps I cant even think the truth about what I am, because I lack the necessary concepts and my circumstances make it impossible for me to acquire them? Thats still pretty skeptical, Nagel says.

No wonder Neo just decided to shoot his way out of the problem.

* * *

The brain in a vat might sound like one of those reductio ad absurdum scenarios for which philosophers enjoy notoriety, but some think it is already a reality. The anthropologist Hlne Mialet used precisely that expression to describe the British physicist Stephen Hawking on his 71st birthday, in 2013. Hawking, who has famously been confined to a wheelchair for decades by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, is now unable to volitionally use just about any muscles except for slight movements of those in his cheek, which are linked to a computer system that allows him to communicate and interact with the world. Mialet argued that this essentially makes him a brain hooked up to machinery: He has become more machine now than man, like Darth Vader.

The description, intended only to highlight our own increasing dependency on machine interfaces, drew intense criticism and condemnation. But perhaps Mialet was merely articulating in a direct and confrontational fashion how many people have long viewed Hawking: as a brilliant brain trapped in a non-functioning body. His remarkable endurance in the face of a condition unimaginable to most of us fits comfortablyor uncomfortablywith our predisposition to stuff all our notions of humanity into the single organ that orchestrates our existence in the world.

It may be that my own little brain in a jar will challenge me about that. Just suppose we could give it a blood supply and let it keep growing to full size. What then would it experience? Its an artificially ghoulish idea, but one that would worry me in the way that a full-grown liver in a vat would not. I would, I think, be forced to suspect that there was someone in thereand deep down, perhaps Id suspect it was me.

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Why Philosophers Are Obsessed With Brains in Jars - The Atlantic

The Pro-Trump Media Is Full Of Offensive Memes And Trolls, But Is It A Hate Group? – BuzzFeed News

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On July 19, the Anti-Defamation League kicked the pro-Trump media hornets nest with the publication of a new report cataloging the factions of the alt-right and their key voices. It also prompted the question: How do you classify a hate group in 2017?

Titled From Alt Right to Alt Lite: Naming The Hate," the ADL report attempts to define those movements, noting the meaningful differences between the two and listing 36 personalities closely associated with them. For example, the moniker alt-lite was coined by the alt-right in order to differentiate itself from those in the pro-Trump world who denounce white supremacist ideology.

The report's publication sparked near-immediate outrage from some of those who were included. New Right personality Mike Cernovich lambasted the ADLs report as a hit list of political opponents," alleging that by including him on a list of hate leaders, the organization had made him and his family targets of an intolerant and violent left that murder[s] those the ADL disagrees with politically." Jack Posobiec, a pro-Trump Twitter personality, took an equally combative stance. On vacation in Poland, he tweeted a short video from Auschwitz. "It would be wise of the ADL to remember the history of what happened the last time people started going around making lists of undesirables," he said, panning the camera across the concentration camp.

Over the next few days, the controversy gathered considerable momentum on Twitter. Cernovichs followers tweeted prayers for the safety of him and his family, and condemned the ADL. Gateway Pundit founder Jim Hoft called the organizations report a death list, while his White House reporter, Lucian Wintrich, decried the ADL as a liberal terrorist organization. Rebel Medias Gavin McInnes named on the list along with Wintrich threatened to sue the living shit out of everyone even remotely involved. The hashtag #ADLterror trended for a few hours. Last week, Republican Senate candidate and Ohio Treasurer Josh Mandel jumped into the controversy, siding with Cernovich and chastising the ADL.

But beneath all the murk and outrage and alt-right/alt-lite/New Right semantics was a reasonable question: In the Trump era, where is the line between hate speech and the extremist, often outlandish, conspiracy-propagating messaging of those movements?

For Cernovich who played a role in the Twitter propagation of the #Pizzagate conspiracy and has a history of tweeting incendiary opinions from everything from date rape and immigration (much of which he has argued was clear satire) the line doesn't fall anywhere near him. He argues that, while his statements might not be politically correct or always in good taste, they aren't hate speech, and certainly dont make him a member of a hate group.

What does the ADL have on me? Some satirical tweets, hell, even some mean tweets and stuff I'm not proud of? Cernovich told BuzzFeed News in response to the report. I have a lot of liberal friends. Many of them in high places. They think I'm an asshole, but 'hate group' has them livid.

Cernovich insists hes being unfairly targeted for his pro-Trump views. "This tweet mining bullshit is only used on the right," he argued. In his view, the New Right is a movement defined not by discrimination or hateful rhetoric, but by pugnacious political commentary and debate. It is nothing, he says, like the alt-right of Richard Spencer, which hews toward a race-based white nationalism. As with Trump himself, the New Rights true ideology isnt always clear, and the group tends to behave more as a pro-Trump media arm than as an ideological group. Its main target isnt a protected race or religion, but the mainstream media. It doesnt behave quite like any traditional hate group. So can it be called one?

In an interview with BuzzFeed News, the ADL argued that it most certainly can. I don't think irony and self-promotion is an excuse for bigotry of any kind, whether its misogyny or any other form of bigotry, said Oren Segal, who runs the ADL's Center on Extremism. Doing it in a way that's more modern or tech-y doesn't make it OK nor does it make it any less difficult for those who've been impacted.

"I don't think irony and self-promotion is an excuse for bigotry of any kind."

Segal noted that the alt-lite or New Right while not particularly well-defined as a movement includes individuals with extremist views. "These are people who are on the record with anti-Muslim bigotry and hatred and misogyny people who support trolling, he said in defense of the ADLs report.

Jeff Giesea, an entrepreneur and consultant who helped organize the pro-Trump DeploraBall an inaugural ball to celebrate the work of the pro-Trump internet sees the ADLs decision to categorize the New Right as hate group personalities as a bridge too far. Based on the ADL's logic, all 63 million Americans who voted for Trump should be on their hate list. If everyone is an extremist, no one is, he told BuzzFeed News.

Giesea argues that, historically, Cernovichs views are quite moderate. Perhaps more importantly, he contends that the New Rights strategy to promote a pro-Trump agenda via an ongoing, meme-fueled assault on the mainstream media is a new kind of political discourse.

"By being so quick to label something 'bigotry,' the ADL is getting in the way of the healthy exchange of ideas, Giesea said. It pushes people further right by pathologizing common sense. It is a mode of social control that simply doesn't work in the age of social media."

Based on the ADL's logic, all 63 million Americans who voted for Trump should be on their hate list."

Since the beginning of the 2016 election our political discourse has become increasingly fraught, muddied by misinformation and trolling from the fringes of both sides of the aisle. And within this morass, a reflex has emerged on both sides to reflexively label political disagreements as signs of hate. Back in April, the internet erupted over Cernovich and another pro-Trump reporter flashing the "OK" sign at the podium in the White House Briefing Room. A number of news outlets misidentified the sign as a white power symbol, falling for a trap laid by pro-Trump trolls who had been trying to trick the media into thinking the meaningless symbol had nefarious origins. The incident sparked a defamation lawsuit filed by one of the pro-Trump reporters, as well as an existential argument around when exactly a symbol morphs from an ironic troll to a real sign of hate.

Giesea has run this over in his mind frequently, and argues that theres more nuance and craft to the pro-Trump movements tactics. "Memetics is a form of art," he said. Shock and controversy is what makes memes effective. They push moral boundaries. Sometimes this is healthy and can challenge certain narratives, other times it can feel toxic and juvenile. Think about it - what memes would Voltaire share?" Giesea concedes that there are moral considerations to social media behavior, but suggests that the ADL list feels like an act of political warfare, rather than a good faith attempt to discuss these issues."

Ultimately, the problem appears to be definitional. For Heidi Beirich, the director of the Southern Poverty Law Centers Intelligence Project, the alt-right and alt-lite movements may be fluid, but the definition of hate is not. Beirich says the SPLC follows roughly the same standards for defining hate groups as the FBI uses for hate crimes. In a recent op-ed for Huffington Post, SPLC President Richard Cohen defined a hate group as those that have beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics.

We don't care as much about the pro-Trump stuff, Beirich told BuzzFeed News. It's the specific policies we're worried about whether it's anti-Muslim or anti-immigrant. For example, she noted that despite articles with anti-immigrant sentiment, we're not going to list a publication like Breitbart as a hate group unless they publish much more stuff thats much further over the line.

In trying to categorize the Cernoviches and Posobiecs of the world, Beirich said its best to categorize them on a case-by-case basis, remembering that hate speech isn't necessarily the only (or most) relevant category. Take Pizzagate, she said. We've written about anti-government conspiracy theorists since the 1990s and that's a different thing than our hate lists it doesnt excuse the behavior, but its different.

The ADL sees no such difference and, on its Naming the Hate report, is standing its ground. To Segal, the fact that the behavior of the New Right doesnt follow the established patterns of other fringe movements is reason enough to worry about its evolution and growth. In a sense this rhetoric is potentially more harmful because it's not so clearly being promoted as hate, he told BuzzFeed News. I think we can see through that. If they call it a joke, we're not laughing.

Charlie Warzel is a senior writer for BuzzFeed News and is based in New York. Warzel reports on and writes about the intersection of tech and culture.

Contact Charlie Warzel at charlie.warzel@buzzfeed.com.

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Cancer controversies and traditional medicines – Regina Leader-Post

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Traditional medicine is explained by Dell Rice-Sylverster during the University of Victoria and Camosun College celebration of International Aboriginal Day in Victoria, B.C. June 21, 2012. LYLE STAFFORD / TIMES COLONIST

The story of cancer patient Ric Richardson, a Mtis man from Green Lake, challenges us to think about patient autonomy, medical traditions and Saskatchewan health care.

Just as crucial, his story forces us to reconsider the use and acceptance of traditional Aboriginal knowledge not only in medicine but in society more broadly.

After a diagnosis of Stage 4 lung cancer, Richardson opted to use Indigenous therapies for his terminal cancer rather than chemotherapy, arguing that the northern boreal forest served as his medicine cabinet.

Several reasons influenced this choice. Richardson felt that in the final stages of his life he would be suffering from the side effects of chemo. Hed also have to sacrifice valuable time with his family and at his job. This was unacceptable.

I would have thought that the quality of my remaining life should be the prime consideration, Richardson noted. He has usedteas made from plants in the region, including dandelion root and balsam fir.

Alternatives to the medical mainstream, which include traditional Chinese or Eastern medicine, Aboriginal medicine, as well as faith-healing and fake drugs have a long history. Some are legitimate. Some are not.

Accounts of alternative medicines share certain commonalities with Richardsons story.

In the 1970s, medical authorities waged a war against the unproven Laetrile, an almond derivative used to treat various cancers. Its supporters numbered in the thousands and they used clever arguments about patients rights, medical freedom and an overbearing medical establishment.

Laetrile was a natural product which gained even more notoriety when actor Steve McQueen travelled to Mexico for an illegal dose.

A second alternative was heroin. In the early 1980s, Kenneth Walker, a Toronto-based celebrity doctor and syndicated columnist who wrote under the pseudonym W. Gifford-Jones launched a campaign to legalize heroin.

Having lost close friends to cancer, Walker concluded the drug was one answer to the problem of treating end-of-life pain associated with terminal cancer. In December 1984, Jake Epp, the federal health minister, announced the government would legalize the use of heroin in cases of severe chronic pain or terminal illness.

A final recent alternative to the medical mainstream is vaccine skeptic Jenny McCarthy. She has challenged the medical establishment, conventional wisdom, and championed untested approaches to treatment.

McCarthy promoted the idea that vaccines cause autism and that chelation therapy was a cure. Both claims remain unsupported by medical consensus, yet the fact that she empowered herself using the internet, discovered new treatments and essentially thumbed her nose at medical elites ingratiated her to many people.

Terminal cancer is of course a different beast from vaccination. Yet these examples highlight controversies having to do with patient decision-making, and acceptance of different medical traditions and treatments.

According to The Dread Disease, the history of cancer embodies all manner of social and cultural tensions. These include class and colonialism, ethics and ethnicity. For author Jim Patterson, these tensions have often led to cancer countercultures, where patients have grown increasingly skeptical about orthodox medical notions of disease and about the claims to expert knowledge.

As the discussion about terminal cancer and integration of traditional healing practices with western biomedicine proceeds, we should be mindful of the history and debates. As Richardson rightly pointed out, much Aboriginal knowledge has been discounted or demonized. That needs to change.

All of this is to say that Richardsons story should not be viewed in isolation. Lessons may be drawn from Aboriginal history and the history of medicine. Cultural sensitivity must constitute an element of treatment. It certainly doesnt help that some physicians push back overly hard and rather patronizingly, too against patient-consumer agency and choice in the medical sphere.

Richardson recently noted, Obviously were on the right track and things are working well. His tumours had diminished in size. This, along with the positive response hes received from the Saskatchewan Cancer Agency, amount to progress.

Richardson helps us appreciate the complexity of patient choice in the medical marketplace and the use of traditional Aboriginal knowledge in society. He also stands as an example of the ways in which citizens can take ownership in the health care system and potentially influence it.

Lucas Richert is a lecturer at the Centre for the Social History of Health and Healthcare, University of Strathclyde (Glasgow).

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Cancer controversies and traditional medicines - Regina Leader-Post

The truth about the dangers of dietary supplements – Atlanta Journal Constitution

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Dietary supplements in a variety of forms, including as vitamins, herbs or energy drinks, are often marketed to consumers as a simple solution to boost energy, induce weight loss and improve overall mood.

But new researchpublished Monday in the Journal of Medical Toxicology highlights the potential dangers of dietary supplements, which are not regulated by the Food and Drug Administration.

In fact, researchers found that the rate of supplement-related calls to poison control centers increased by 49.3 percent between 2005 and 2012.

According to data from the National Poison Data System, there were 274,998 dietary supplement exposures called in to U.S. poison control centers thats about one call every 24 minutes.

And of those exposures, 70 percent were in children ages six and under, nearly all unintentional and accidental.

Sometimes, parents don't think of keeping dietary supplements away from their kids, because they're not medicines prescribed by the doctor. People think of them as natural, Henry Spiller, lead author of the study and director of Central Ohio Poison Control,told CNN. "But they need to be treated as if they were a medicine. Don't leave them out on the counter. Keep them out of reach."

Approximately 4.5 percent of the cases (more than 12,300) led to serious medical complications.

Most dangerous supplements

While the majority of the cases didnt require treatment at a medical facility, authors of the study warn exposures to dietary supplements yohimbe (herbal supplement promoted as male sexual performance enhancer) and energy products are considerably toxic.

Overall, the most dangerous supplements, according to the study, are yohimbe, homeopathic agents marketed to help with conditions like asthma or migraines, energy drinks and ma huang, a stimulant with ephedra that was outlawed by the FDA in 2004 after it was linked to multiple deaths.

Authors plea for FDA regulation

Because dietary supplements are not regulated by the FDA, there are not robust studies done to ensure that they are efficacious or have a reliable safety profile, Jeannette Trella, managing director of the Poison Control Center at the Childrens Hospital of Philadelphia and not involved with the study,told CNN. We're often going down a path of unknowns, and for possibly no benefit at all.

But the Council for Responsible Nutrition, which leads trade for the dietary supplement industry, said it is invested in providing safe products for the more than 170 million Americans who take these supplements each year.

We recommend that consumers store dietary supplement products in safe places, out of a child's reach. In addition, we recommend that consumers talk with their doctor or pediatrician about their family's supplement use, the Council said in a statement.

Still, the authors of the study call on the FDA to consider the regulation of yohimbe and energy products as the administration did for ma huang, which helped dramatically plummet calls to poison centers in2004.

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The truth about the dangers of dietary supplements - Atlanta Journal Constitution

CRN announces addition of 11 new companies to membership roster – Drug Store News

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WASHINGTON The Council for Responsible Nutrition on Tuesday announced the addition of 11 new companies to the associations membership roster.

These companies include voting members Before Brands, Biova, Life Line Foods, Natrol, Nutrawise, Pharma Tech Industries, Shanghai Freemen and Trident Brands and associate members Michael Schaeffer, LLC, Natural Partners and SRQ-Bio.

Before Brands is a consumer product company that will soon launch an innovative line of dietary supplements enabling young families to take a proactive approach with nutrition and food allergens. Biova markets water-soluble egg membrane ingredients. And Life Line Foods specializes in the manufacturing of liquid minerals, liquid vitamins and liquid specialty nutrient formulas through Buried Treasure, their nutraceutical division.

Natrol has been a leading manufacturer of vitamins, minerals, and supplements for more than 35 years and is dedicated to empowering consumers to Own Your Health with the help of their top-selling products: melatonin, 5-HTP and biotin. Nutrawise is a leading manufacturer of health and wellness supplements including the line of youtheory products. Pharma Tech Industries is a family-owned-and-operated pharmaceutical contract manufacturing organization.

Shanghai Freemen offers ingredients and solutions to enhance the performance, taste and nutritional benefits of some of the world's most celebrated brands. And Trident Brands is a U.S. public company specializing in the functional food, supplement and active nutrition categories with an exclusive license to manufacture Everlast branded active nutrition products and supplements in North America.

New associate members include Michael Schaeffer, which provides consultation, professional and technical services for the natural products industry with an emphasis in dietary supplement label review, product formulation, international product registration and overall support to companies which market or distribute dietary supplements. Natural Partners is a resource for health care practitioners who strive to improve patient wellness by providing education and professional-grade products. And SRQ-Bio is a Florida-based research organization equipped to support ingredient/product integrity and safety with qualitative and quantitative identity testing, and screening for GMO and pesticides.

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CRN announces addition of 11 new companies to membership roster - Drug Store News

Magnesium warning: Too much of the supplement could trigger cardiac arrest – Express.co.uk

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GETTY

According to the NHS, it helps to turn the food we eat into energy, and ensures that parathyroid glands - which produce hormones essential for bone health - work normally.

The mineral is also important for maintaining heart health and blood sugar control.

Its present in many foods, such as green leafy vegetables, nuts, brown rice, fish, wholegrain bread, meat, dairy, peanut butter and soy milk.

However, many people dont consume enough through dietary sources.

GETTY

According to the NHS, the amount of magnesium you need a day if youre between 19 and 64 years includes 300mg for men and 270mg for women.

For example, its estimated that 80 per cent of Americans are deficient.

Signs of this include inability to sleep, sensitivity to noise, anxiety, muscle soreness and infertility.

It means that many people need to rely on magnesium supplements to top up adequately.

According to the NHS, the amount of magnesium you need a day if youre between 19 and 64 years includes 300mg for men and 270mg for women.

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A-Z of vitamins and minerals

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This is less than in the US where the National Institutes of Healths Office of Dietary Supplements recommend 400 to 420mg for men and 310 to 320mg for women.

Sometimes doctors may prescribe more to pregnant women or others with a particular condition.

However, just like vitamin C, it is possible to consume too much.

The NHS state: Taking high doses of magnesium - more than 400mg - for a short time can cause diarrhoea.

GETTY

If you take magnesium supplements, don't take too much as this could be harmful.

The Office for Dietary Supplements highlights another health issue too much magnesium can cause.

Technically known as hypermagnesemia, it occurs when theres too much magnesium in the blood.

Its rare because the kidneys usually work to get rid of excess magnesium, however people with kidney disease, heart disease and gastrointestinal disorders are at a higher risk.

It can cause nausea and vomiting, lethargy, muscle weakness, irregular heartbeat, low blood pressure, urine retention, respiratory distress and cardiac arrest, according to the Office for Dietary Supplements.

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Magnesium warning: Too much of the supplement could trigger cardiac arrest - Express.co.uk

Sentient Science raises $22.5 million in Series B growth-stage funding with Georgian Partners – Windpower Engineering (press release)

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Sentient Science announced that Toronto, Ontario-based growth equity firm,Georgian Partners, will fund $22.5 million in a Series B, growth-stage investment in the materials science-based software as a service company. Sentients expansion in thewind-energy market,providing prognostic health monitoring and life-extension actions for fielded wind turbines will soon be available to commercial customers in theaerospaceandrailmarkets.

Funds will be used to provide new technical, security, and software capabilities withinDigitalClone Live. Operators use DigitalClone Live to understand when failures can be expected in their turbine fleet.

Capital funds will be used to provide new technical, security, and software capabilities withinDigitalClone Livefor the continuation of rapid market growth from 20,000 wind turbines to 100,000 globally, and then to one-million rotating assets as more commercial operators and suppliers in aerospace and rail come on line.

Hiring plansinclude an additional 70 employees, including a chief financial officer, vice president of software, software developers, and sales and marketing staff in the offices located in United States, Europe and China.

We incentivize our employees with pre-IPO stock options, so were very strategic in who we bring in as partners. Were very excited and proud to be working with Georgian Partners, who is another important partner on our journey to IPO, said Ward Thomas, CEO & President of Sentient Science. I am incredibly thankful to our customers in the wind, aerospace and rail markets, and for our brilliant staff and management team who are truly the smartest people in the room.

Together, they made Q2-2017 our largest sales quarter in our companys history, while promoting clean energy. I would like to thankSimon Chongof Georgian Partners, for his commitment to help us further our agenda to significantly lower the cost to operate equipment through life extension actions, said Thomas. Sentient Sciences network effect increases the demand for longer life assets and components, and ultimately changes the way the world buys and sells aftermarket products and services through our SaaS platform. This is all completely differentiated, based on materials science versus just big data from sensors.

Sentientsmanagement teamincludesEd Wagner, BS, Chief Digital Officer;Dr. Nathan Bolander,Ph.D., Chief Technology Officer;Jason Rios, MBA, VP of Aerospace;Gerald Curtin, MBA, Vice President of Asset Actions and Delivery; andAaron Russell, MBA, Finance.

Ward and his impressive team at Sentient Science have a unique technology and business model that lowers the cost of energy through supply and demand integration, said Simon Chong, Managing Partner at Georgian Partners. Their DigitalClone Live software fits perfectly with our thesis area for artificial intelligence, and we look forward to working with Sentient to expand technical capabilities and added value within the core applications.

For more information on Sentient Science and to view the full article, click here.

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Sentient Science raises $22.5 million in Series B growth-stage funding with Georgian Partners - Windpower Engineering (press release)

SNC-Lavalin awarded contract on Sasol’s Fine Ash Dam 6 Project in South Africa – Markets Insider

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MONTREAL, July 26, 2017 /CNW Telbec/ -SNC-Lavalin (TSX: SNC) announces a contract award on the Fine Ash Dam 6 Project in Secunda for Sasol Group Technology in South Africa.

SNC-Lavalin's scope of work for this project includes the structural, mechanical electrical, instrumentation and piping (SMEIP) construction services for the new facility. This will consist of the installation of approximately 15 km of piping, 370 tons of steel, and various mechanical and electrical equipment.

The Fine Ash Dam 6 Project is to support the life extension of the Sasol Secunda operations facilities by constructing a new fine ash dam. This will take the ash generated by the Secunda operations, in stages, to the new Ash Dam 6 as Fine Ash Dam 5 is decommissioned. The construction of the project will be completed in a number of phases and this award is part of the first phase, with a peak workload forecast for September 2017 and an average team size of 125 people. Fine Ash Dam 6 will be constructed in accordance with the latest environmental requirements with the final phase being completed in 2021.

"We are delighted to be awarded work with Sasol, providing solutions to this logistically complex project," said Martin Adler, President, Oil & Gas "We are currently mobilizing and at the peak workload expect a team of up to 250. With our strong track record in training and development within the local community, we expect 80% of our craft team members to be from the local area. We look forward to executing the first phase and hope to continue working with Sasol through the latter phases of the project."

About SNC-LavalinFounded in 1911, SNC-Lavalin is a global fully integrated professional services and project management company and a major player in the ownership of infrastructure. From offices around the world, SNC-Lavalin's employees are proud to build what matters. Our teams provide comprehensive end-to-end project solutions including capital investment, consulting, design, engineering, construction, sustaining capital and operations and maintenance to clients in oil and gas, mining and metallurgy, infrastructure and power. http://www.snclavalin.com

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SNC-Lavalin awarded contract on Sasol's Fine Ash Dam 6 Project in South Africa - Markets Insider

An Unsung Hero in Our Midst: Ronald S. Sullivan Jr., the Man Who Dealt the Biggest Blow to Mass Incarceration – HuffPost

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At a time when alternative facts rule the day and the landmark achievements of the Civil Rights Movement, and democracy itself, are on life support, its important for those of us in the know and in the struggle to share stories of local victories and profiles in courage to fuel our hope for a better tomorrow (particularly as thousands of recent law school graduates sit and prepare for their bar exams). Indeed, two quotes come to mind the first from the late critically acclaimed historian and social activist Howard Zinn, the second from the slain New York Senator and promising presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy:

One such man is Harvard Law Professor and Harvard College Faculty Dean Ronald S. Sullivan Jr.

I first met Dean Sullivan seven years ago, at Morehouse Colleges A Candle in the Dark Gala, where I was honored to introduce him as that years Bennie Leadership Award recipient (one of the colleges highest alumni awards). Well, seven years ago, Sullivan was 43 years-old and just a year into his historic appointment as the first African American Faculty Dean (formerly known as House Master) in Harvards nearly 400-year history.

In addition to his appointment as Faculty Dean of Winthrop House at Harvard College, hed been recruited from the faculty of Yale Law School (where he won the award for outstanding teaching after his first year) to Harvard Law School by then-Harvard Law School Dean (now Supreme Court Justice) Elena Kagan where he continues to serve as a senior member of the faculty and Faculty Director of both the Criminal Justice Institute and the Trial Advocacy Workshop; before Yale, he served as Director of the D.C. Public Defender Service, where he broke records for never losing a case for his indigent defendants; and before that, he was a visiting scholar for the Law Society of Kenya, where he sat on a committee charged with drafting a new constitution for Kenya.

Seven years ago, hed achieved this and more, but seven years later, he has clearly established himself as a history-making social engineer (of course Charles Hamilton Houston reminds us that a lawyers either a social engineer or a parasite on society). Not only has he just completed a $300-million capital campaign to completely renovate Winthrop House, enabling New Winthrop to open to its 500-plus students, (historically diverse) faculty and staff next month (a year ahead of schedule), but he was also recently invited to give a TED Talk in Washington, DC on the news that hed won the release of more wrongfully incarcerated individuals over 6,000 than arguably anyone in U.S. history.

In her zeitgeist-shifting book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander reveals how President Reagan's malicious drug war media offensive cultivated an implicit bias against blacks, "[leaving] little doubt about who the enemy was in the War on Drugs," to the point where by the time a 1995 survey (published in the Journal of Alcohol and Drug Education) asked "Would you close your eyes for a second, envision a drug user, and describe that person to me?" 95% of respondents pictured a black drug user, while only 5% imagined other groups (of course multiple studies have now shown that whites use drugs at a similar or higher rate than blacks).

Consequently, with the presumption of "criminality" being ascribed to "blackness" in the public mind, "blackness" was increasingly met with the presumption of "guilt" (without due process/fair trial) in the criminal justice system a fact evinced by the rise in both (1) support for the racially biased death penalty over the past decades since the "get tough"/drug war campaigns, and (2) wrongful criminal convictions since that time.

On the latter, with "Gideon's promise" in mind, Dean Sullivan answered Justice's call in 2014 by designing and implementing a Conviction Review Unit for the newly elected Brooklyn District Attorney. In its first year, Sullivan discovered over 10 wrongful convictions (which the DA ultimately vacated, exonerating some citizens who had served over 30 years behind bars) and issued a clarion call to district attorneys across the nation to follow suit given the fact that out of 2,300 district attorney offices nationwide, just over a dozen had conviction integrity programs as of 2014. Brooklyns Conviction Review Unit went on to exonerate more wrongfully convicted persons and has become regarded as the model conviction integrity program in the nation. In fact, Sullivan was recently tapped by the newly elected District Attorney of Chicagos Cook County (the second-largest prosecutors office in the nation) to revamp that offices Conviction Integrity Unit, in hopes of ending Cook Countys reputation as the wrongful conviction capital of the U.S.

Whether at the D.C. Public Defender Service or in New Orleans in the wake of Katrina and the criminal justice crisis that came with it where Sullivan was tasked to design an indigent defense delivery system that resulted in the release of nearly all the 6,000 inmates who lacked representation and whose official records were destroyed by the hurricane; whether in Brooklyn or in Chicago; whether at Harvards Criminal Justice Institute educating law school students through practice in representing Massachusetts indigent defendants or at the White House serving on the team that represented former president Bill Clinton or serving as Chair of the Criminal Justice Advisory Committee for then-Senator Obamas (his former law school classmate) presidential campaign, member of the National Legal Advisory Group for the Obama campaign, and Advisor to the Department of Justice Presidential Transition Team; whether representing 1 of the Jena 6, the family of Michael Brown, or star athletes like Aaron Hernandez winning what many said was an unwinnable case due to Hernandezs prior murder conviction (not to mention the bitter-sweet posthumous exoneration on that prior conviction) Sullivan has clearly established himself as the Muhammad Ali in the fight against Mass Incarceration and, in so doing, inspired us all to take a minute of each day to do some justice (see the Ted Talk, below, that left many in tears and earned him the only standing ovation of the day).

Nevertheless, for all the heavy-lifting that Dean Sullivan and his contemporaries (those like Michelle Alexander and Bryan Stevenson, whom Ava DuVernays riveting documentary, 13th, prominently feature) have done, we have our work cut out for us. But with the wisdom of Coretta Scott King in mind (Struggle is a never ending process. Freedom is never really won, you earn it and win it in every generation.) we take solace in the fact best illustrated through the Latin metaphor nanos gigantum humeris insidentes, which essentially says that we, as small and powerless as we may seem, can see further because we stand on the shoulders of giants. And should we ever stumble or falter along the way, well look back, in Sankofa fashion, to glean from the luminous blueprint that these giants have left for us.

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An Unsung Hero in Our Midst: Ronald S. Sullivan Jr., the Man Who Dealt the Biggest Blow to Mass Incarceration - HuffPost

Victory Gardens Announces Casting for 2017 IGNITION Festival of New Plays – Broadway World

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Victory Gardens Theater announces the lineup for the 2017 IGNITION Festival of New Plays, including Tuvalu, or The Saddest Song by Antoinette Nwandu; This Land Was Made by Tori Sampson; Spin Moves by Ken Weitzman; Tell Them I'm Still Young by Julia Doolittle; Wolf Play by Hansol Jung; and Suspension by Kristiana Rae Coln.

The 2017 Festival runs August 4-6, 2017 at Victory Gardens Theater, located at 2433 N Lincoln Avenue. All readings will be free and open to the public, though a reservation is strongly encouraged. For more information or to RSVP, visit http://www.victorygardens.org/ignition or call the Victory Gardens Box Office at 773.871.3000.

IGNITION's six selected plays will be presented in a festival of readings and will be directed by leading artists from across the country. Following the readings, any number of the plays may be selected for intensive workshops during Victory Gardens Theater's 2017-18 season, and Victory Gardens may produce these plays in an upcoming season.

"At Victory Gardens, we bridge Chicago communities through innovative and challenging new plays by giving playwrights the time and space to develop their work. We are thrilled to welcome these six remarkable and unique voices in the American theater to our IGNITION Festival," comments Artistic Director Chay Yew. "These playwrights not only reflect the challenges in our current political climate, but push us to imagine a greater future."

"This year's lineup exemplifies the current political and cultural zeitgeist of our city and country: a young girl's journey to self-empowerment, a movement towards a revolution, the role basketball plays in international peace, how to recover from the loss of a child, America's role in Korean adoptions, and the ancestral power of #blackgirlmagic. Come experience these new plays and hear what they have to say about the world in which we live," remarks Director of New Play Development Isaac Gomez.

The 2017 Lineup Includes:

Friday, August 4, 2017 at 7:30 p.m.

Tuvalu, or The Saddest Song

By Antoinette Nwandu

Directed by Jess McLeod

It is Los Angeles in the mid-nineties, and Jackie-girl is at a crossroads. This lyrical and powerful coming of age story with a soundtrack asks how the girls whose mothers' lives have been tainted by abuse, violence, poverty, and shame ever grow into healthy and empowered women.

Tuvalu, or The Saddest Song features Aneisa J. Hicks (Jackie), Curtis Edward Jackson (Boy), Al'Jaleel McGhee (Man), Lanise Antoine Shelley (Momma), Kelly O'Sullivan (Nicole) and Penelope Walker (Raylene). Additional casting to be announced.

About Antoinette Nwandu

Antoinette Nwandu is a New York-based playwright via Los Angeles. Her play Pass Over received its World Premiere production at Steppenwolf in June 2017, and her play Breach will receive a World Premiere at Victory Gardens in February 2018. She is currently under commission from Echo Theater Company in Los Angeles. Antoinette's plays have been supported by the Cherry Lane Mentor Project (mentor: Katori Hall), Kennedy Center, Page73, Ars Nova, PlayPenn, Space on Ryder Farm, Southern Rep, The Flea, Naked Angels, Fire This Time, and The Movement Theater Company. Honors include a spot on the 2016 and 2017 Kilroys list, the Lorraine Hansberry Playwriting Award, the Negro Ensemble Company's Douglas Turner Ward Prize, and a Literary Fellowship at the Eugene O'Neill Playwrights Conference. Antoinette is an alum of the Ars Nova Play Group, the Naked Angels Issues PlayLab, and Dramatists Guild Fellowship. Additional honors include being named a Ruby Prize finalist, PONY Fellowship finalist, Page73 Fellowship finalist, NBT's I Am Soul Fellowship finalist, and two-time Princess Grace Award semi-finalist. Education: Harvard, The University of Edinburgh, Tisch School of the Arts.

IGNITION Opening Night Kick-Off at 9:30 p.m.

Victory Gardens Theater Lobby

Stick around for this opening night celebration with a live DJ, delicious appetizers, and complimentary drinks as we raise a glass to kick off our IGNITION Festival of New Plays.

Saturday, August 5, 2017 at 3:00 p.m.

This Land Was Made

By Tori Sampson

Directed by Chika Ike

Oakland in 1967 was a powder keg of social activism about to boil over into radical action that would soon change how the whole country engaged in politics. For the patrons of Miss Trish's Bar, however, these ain't nothing but talking points-that is, until the full seductive and explosive force of the revolution walks through the door.

This Land Was Made features Tyla Abercrumbie (Miss Trish), Will Allan (Herbert Heanes), Ayanna Bria Bakari (Gail), Jordan Brodess (John Frey), Sheldon Brown (Troy), Bernard Gilbert (Huey), Martasia Jones (Sassy), Daniel Kyri (Drew/Gene) and Dexter Zollicoffer (Mr. Far).

About Tori Sampson

Tori Sampson is a recent graduate of Yale School of Drama, where her credits include This Land Was Made, Some Bodies Travel, and If Pretty Hurts Ugly Must be a Muhfucka. Her plays have been developed at Great Plains National Theater Conference and Berkeley Repertory Theater's The Ground Floor residency program. She holds an Honorable Mention from the 2016 Relentless Award, is the Kennedy Center's 2016 Paula Vogel Playwright and second-place Lorraine Hansberry recipient. She is a 2017 finalist for the Alliance Theater's Kendeda Prize. Tori's other plays include Cadillac Crew, Black Girl Nerd and Cottoned Like Candy. Her short play, She's our President, will be produced by Baltimore Center Stage as part of the My America: She commission. Tori is currently working on a commission from Berkeley Repertory Theater and will spend the next year as a Jerome Fellow at The Playwrights' Center in Minneapolis. A native of Boston, Massachusetts, she holds a B.S. in sociology from Ball State University in Muncie, IN.

Bringing New Plays to Life at 5:00 p.m.

Panel Conversation

Rehearsal Room

Victory Gardens is home to some of the richest and boldest new plays premiering across the country. In a city where audiences are hungry for new theater work, what is the current state of new play development and its future? What are the best practices for new play collaborations? Join this timeless conversation on the new play process featuring IGNITION playwrights Antoinette Nwandu, Tori Sampson, Ken Weitzman, Julia Doolittle, Hansol Jung, and Kristiana Rae Coln.

Saturday, August 5, 2017 at 7:30 p.m.

Spin Moves

By Ken Weitzman

Directed by Devon de Mayo

It's 1996, the inaugural year of the WNBA, and Maja dreams of playing high school basketball - but having escaped to the U.S. from the war in Bosnia, panic attacks prevent her from playing the game she loves. That is, until a new coach appears at her high school. He helps Maja to face her fears, but his unorthodox tactics alarm Maja's fiercely protective mother.

Spin Moves features Brian Balcom (Willam), Hayley Burgess (Maya), Gabriel Ruiz (Coach), Kristina Valada-Viars (Melika) and Netta Walker (Trish).

About Ken Weitzman

Ken Weitzman's most recent play, Halftime with Don, is in the midst of a 2017 National New Play Network Rolling World Premiere. Ken's previous productions include, among others, The Catch (The Denver Center Theatre Company), Fire in the Garden (Indiana Repertory Theatre), The As If Body Loop (Humana Festival), Arrangements (Atlantic Theatre Company). His devised work includes Memorabilia (ALLIANCE THEATRE), Hominid (Out of Hand Theatre/Theatre Emory/Oerol Festival Netherlands), and Stadium 360 (Out of Hand Theatre). Plays-in-progress include Spin Moves (New Harmony Project) and seal boy (Keen Company Playwrights Lab, The Lark's Meeting of the Minds, Playwrights' Center of Minneapolis). National Awards include The L. Arnold Weissberger Award for Playwriting for Arrangements, TCG Edgerton Foundation New American Play Award for The Catch, the Fratti/Newman Political Play Contest Award for Fire in the Garden, and South Coast Repertory's Elizabeth George Commission for an Outstanding Emerging Playwright Organizations who have commissioned Ken's work include the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Arena Stage, the ALLIANCE THEATRE, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Theatre Emory, Out of Hand Theatre, and South Coast Repertory Theatre. Ken is a Core Writer at the Playwrights Center of Minneapolis, and a former board member of The New Harmony Project. Ken received his MFA from University of California, San Diego and has taught at UCSD, Emory University, Indiana University (head of MFA in Playwriting) and, currently, at Stony Brook University.

Artist Meet, Greet, & Ice Cream Social at 9:30 p.m.

Victory Gardens Theater Lobby

Hang out with the playwrights and artists while cooling off with boozy ice cream floats at this post-show artist meet and greet.

Sunday, August 6, 2017 at 12:00 p.m.

Tell Them I'm Still Young

By Julia Doolittle

Directed by Jessica L. Fisch

Allen and Kay are approaching sixty-five when their only daughter is killed in a car crash. Now parents without children, the two struggle to renegotiate their identities and their marriage, as the entrance of two young people revives a painful longing for what's been lost: their family and their futures.

Tell Them I'm Still Young features Marilyn Dodds Frank (Kay), Bryce Gangel (Taylor) and Joe Lino (Seth). Additional casting to be announced.

About Julia Doolittle

Julia Doolittle is a Brooklyn-based playwright and screenwriter whose work has been developed at the Williamstown Theatre Festival, Rattlestick Playwright's Theatre, The Tank, Tiny Rhino, The Women's Project, Ensemble Studio Theatre, Urban Stages, and Rogue Machine Theatre. She is a 2016 recipient of the Elizabeth George Commission from South Coast Rep. Upcoming, the Samuel French Off-Off-Broadway Play Festival.

Sunday, August 6, 2017 at 3:00 p.m.

Wolf Play

By Hansol Jung

Directed by Halena Kays

An American father un-adopts a Korean boy but just before he leaves the new house, the ex-father finds out that the new couple to whom he has "re-homed" his ex-son, is lesbian. This doesn't sit well with ex-father at all. The boy is actually not a real boy. He is a puppet. And his puppeteer is the Emcee of the evening, and spinner of the night's tale: a lone wolf.

Wolf Play features Charin Alvarez (Robin), Eddie Martinez (Ryan), Patrese McClain (Ash), Alec Silver (Wolf), and Eric Slater (Peter).

About Hansol Jung

Hansol Jung is a playwright and director from South Korea. Productions include Cardboard Piano (Humana Festival at Actors Theater of Louisville), Among the Dead (Ma-Yi Theatre Company), and No More Sad Things (co-world premiere at Sideshow Theatre, and Boise Contemporary Theatre). Commissions from Playwrights Horizons, Seattle Repertory Theatre, Artists Repertory Theater, the Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation grant with Ma-Yi Theatre and a translation of Romeo and Juliet for Play On! at Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Her work has been developed at The Public Theater, Royal Court, New York Theatre Workshop, Berkeley Repertory's Ground Floor, Sundance Theatre Lab, O'Neill Theater Center's New Play Conference, Lark Play Development Center, Salt Lake Acting Company, Boston Court Theatre, Bushwick Starr, Ma-Yi Theater Company, Asia Society New York, and Seven Devils Playwright Conference. She is the recipient of the Page 73 Playwright Fellowship, Rita Goldberg Playwrights' Workshop Fellowship at the Lark, 2050 Fellowship at New York Theater Workshop, MacDowell Colony Artist Residency, and International Playwrights Residency at Royal Court. She has translated over thirty English musicals into Korean, including Evita, Dracula, Spamalot, and The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, while working on several award winning musical theatre productions as director, lyricist and translator in Seoul, South Korea. Hansol holds a Playwriting MFA from Yale School of Drama, and is a member of the Ma-Yi Theatre Writers Lab.

The Race Race at 5:00 p.m.

Panel Conversation

Richard Christiansen Theater

In a country so divided and polarized by topics of race, how are these conflicts reflected in the dramatic arts? What role does theater play in conversations around race and how can it begin the process of healing and understanding? Join IGNITION and Chicago-based playwrights as we begin to uncover the role race plays in creating new work.

Sunday, August 6, 2017 at 7:30 p.m.

Suspension

By Kristiana Rae Coln

Directed by Monty Cole

On the 100th day of 45's first term, two Black teen girls stage a coup of the authoritarian regime of Climb & Succeed Charter Academy, a not-so-dystopian high school where campus security patrols the halls in riot gear and a new disciplinary code takes in-school suspension to a haunting extreme. Voltaire & Yansa, guided by a mystic teaching artist, learn to wield their ancestral magic and Blackgirl badassery to combat the harrowing militarization of public education.

Suspension features Caren Blackmore (yennenga uhura), Amy J. Carle (panoptica), Amanda Drinkall (ms. max), Brandon Greenhouse (mr. blaise), LaKecia Harris (yansa turner), Rory Hayes (rabbit), Kiah McKirnan (mika hampton), Ireon Roach (voltaire pride) and Sejah-Amaru Villegas (riley).

About Kristiana Rae ColnKristiana Rae Coln is a poet, playwright, actor, educator, Cave Canem Fellow, creator of #BlackSexMatters and co-director of the #LetUsBreathe Collective. She was awarded 2017 Best Black Playwright by The Black Mall. In 2016, her play good friday had its world premiere at Oracle Productions, Octagon had its American premiere at Jackalope Theater in Chicago, and but i cd only whisper had its American premiere at The Flea in New York. Octagon was the winner of Arizona Theater Company's 2014 National Latino Playwriting Award and Polarity Ensemble Theater's Dionysos Festival of New Work, and had its 2015 world premiere at the Arcola Theater in London. In 2013, she toured the UK for two months with her collection of poems promised instruments, winner of the inaugural Drinking Gourd Poetry Prize and published by Northwestern University Press. Kristiana is an alum of the Goodman Theater's Playwrights Unit where she developed florissant & canfield, an epic reimagining of the Ferguson protests, which was featured in the 2016 Hedgebrook Women Playwrights Festival. She is a resident playwright at Chicago Dramatists and one half of the brother/sister hip-hop duo April Fools. She appeared on the fifth season of HBO's Def Poetry Jam. Kristiana's writing, producing, and organizing work to radically reimagine power structures, our complicity in them, and visions for liberation.

Performances are at the Victory Gardens Biograph Theater, 2433 N Lincoln Avenue, in the heart of Chicago's Lincoln Park neighborhood. Admission to all festival readings and events is free, though an RSVP is strongly encouraged. For more information or to RSVP, visit http://www.victorygardens.org/ignition or call the Victory Gardens Box Office at 773.871.3000.

Under the leadership of Artistic Director Chay Yew and Managing Director Erica Daniels, Victory Gardens is dedicated to artistic excellence while creating a vital, contemporary American Theater that is accessible and relevant to all people through productions of challenging new plays and musicals. Victory Gardens Theater is committed to the development, production and support of new plays that has been the mission of the theater since its founding, set forth by Dennis Za?ek, Marcelle McVay, and the original founders of Victory Gardens Theater.

Victory Gardens Theater is a leader in developing and producing new theater work and cultivating an inclusive Chicago theater community. Victory Gardens' core strengths are nurturing and producing dynamic and inspiring new plays, reflecting the diversity of our city's and nation's culture through engaging diverse communities, and in partnership with Chicago Public Schools, bringing art and culture to our city's active student population.

Since its founding in 1974, the company has produced more world premieres than any other Chicago theater, a commitment recognized nationally when Victory Gardens received the 2001 Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theatre. Located in the Lincoln Park neighborhood, Victory Gardens Biograph Theater includes the Za?ek-McVay Theater, a state-of-the-art 259-seat mainstage and the 109-seat studio theater on the second floor, named the Richard Christiansen Theater.

Victory Gardens Ensemble Playwrights include Luis Alfaro, Philip Dawkins, Marcus Gardley, Ike Holter, Samuel D. Hunter, Naomi Iizuka, Tanya Saracho, and Laura Schellhardt. Each playwright has a seven-year residency at Victory Gardens Theater.

For more information about Victory Gardens, visit http://www.victorygardens.org. Follow us on Facebook at Facebook.com/victorygardens, Twitter @VictoryGardens and Instagram at instagram.com/victorygardenstheater.

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Victory Gardens Announces Casting for 2017 IGNITION Festival of New Plays - Broadway World