Monthly Archives: July 2017

1925 Scopes Trial Pits Creationism Against Evolution – Voice of America

Posted: July 22, 2017 at 8:14 am

To understand the significance of the so-called Monkey Trial, one must try to imagine the America of 1925; specifically, the southern state of Tennessee.

Under pressure by a coalition of strict Christians, Tennessee became the first state in the United States to pass a law the Butler Act that deemed it illegal to "teach any theory that denies the Story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animal."

The act alarmed many in the legal community, including the recently formed American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which persuaded John Scopes, a 24-year-old high school science teacher and football coach from Illinois, to test the constitutionality of the law in what became known as The Monkey Trial.

The trial also attracted intense media attention, including live radio broadcasts of the trial for the first time in history, according to an award-winning documentary by PBS's American Experience on the trial.

Attorney Clarence Darrow represented Scopes; William Jennings Bryan, a Democratic conservative, represented both Tennessee and the fundamentalists who were deeply opposed to Charles Darwin's theory.

"I knew, sooner or later, that someone would have to stand up to the stifling of freedom that the anti-evolution act represented," Scopes wrote in his 1967 book Center of the Storm: Memoirs of John T. Scopes.

The trial ended on July 21 with a guilty verdict and $100 fine.

A year later, the ACLU issued its appeal to the Tennessee Supreme Court, which upheld the law, but overturned the conviction of Scopes on a legal technicality.

Decades later in 1967, Tennessee repealed the act and teachers were free to teach the theories of Darwin without breaking the law.

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Sing Different: Steve Jobs’ Life Becomes An Opera – NPR

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Edward Parks, who plays Steve Jobs, and the Santa Fe Opera Chorus in The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs. Ken Howard/Courtesy of the Santa Fe Opera hide caption

Edward Parks, who plays Steve Jobs, and the Santa Fe Opera Chorus in The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs.

Mark Campbell is one of the most prolific and celebrated librettists in contemporary American opera. But, as he recently told an audience at the Guggenheim Museum, not everyone thought his latest project was a good idea.

"I've had a number of socialist friends of mine saying, 'Why would you write an opera about Steve Jobs? He was the worst capitalist!' " he said.

Campbell's response to those naysayers? " 'Reach in your pocket you probably have an iPhone there.' "

Jobs has been the subject of movies and books, and now the Apple co-founder's life has also become the stuff of opera. A decade after Apple released its first smartphone, The (R)evolution Of Steve Jobs premieres Saturday on the stage of the Santa Fe Opera.

Even Campbell was initially skeptical of the idea, which came from 40-year-old composer Mason Bates. Bates was convinced that in Jobs' "complicated and messy" life, he'd found the right subject for his very first opera.

"He had a daughter he didn't acknowledge for many years; he had cancer you can't control that," Bates says. "He was, while a very charismatic figure, quite a hard-driving boss. And his collisions with the fact that he wanted to make everything sleek and controllable yet life is not controllable is a fascinating topic for an opera."

The (R)evolution Of Steve Jobs shifts back and forth in time over the course of 18 scenes. Its fragmented, non-linear narrative was a deliberate choice by Campbell and Bates, who wanted to reflect Jobs' personality and psyche. "Steve Jobs did have a mind that just jumped from idea to idea to idea it was very quick," Campbell says.

Bates also created a different "sound world" to match each character. Jobs, for instance, played guitar and spent much of his life dealing with electronics, and so he "has this kind of busy, frenetic, quicksilver world of acoustic guitar and electronica," Bates explains. On the other hand, he says, Jobs' wife, Laurene Powell, inhabits a "completely different space, of these kind of oceanic, soulful strings."

Other characters include Steve Wozniak, Jobs' business partner, and the Japanese-born Zen priest Kobun Chino Otogawa, who led Jobs to convert to Buddhism and served as a mentor for much of his life. Otogawa's "almost purely electronic" sound world makes use of prayer bowls and processed Thai gongs.

As often happens when his compositions premiere, Bates will be seated among the orchestra musicians, triggering sounds and playing rhythms from two laptops. And before you ask: Yes, they are Mac computers. (Bates is quick to note he's not sponsored.)

Even the set echoes Jobs' creations. After a prologue in the iconic garage where Jobs' ideas first took shape, the garage walls explode into six moving cubes with screens that look a lot like iPhones. "We're doing something called projection mapping, where all of the scenic units have little sensors, so the video actually moves with them," opera director Kevin Newbury explains. "We wanted to integrate it seamlessly into the design because that's what Steve Jobs and Apple did with the products themselves."

Jobs's design sensibilities were enormously influenced by Japanese calligraphy including the ens, a circle that depicts the mind being free to let the body create. Bates says that also figures in the opera's title: The (R)evolution Of Steve Jobs, with the capital "R" in parentheses.

"Of course, there's the revolution of Steve Jobs in his creations and his devices. There's also the evolution from a countercultural hippie to a mogul of the world's most valuable company," Bates points out. "And there's the revolution in a circle of Steve Jobs as he looks at the ens, this piece of Japanese calligraphy, and finds that when he can kind of come full circle, he reaches the kind of completion that he sought so long in his life."

That's the side of Jobs this new opera explores: the way his life was marked by the struggle to find the balance between life's imperfections and his drive to create the perfect thing.

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Sing Different: Steve Jobs' Life Becomes An Opera - NPR

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A simple bacteria reveals how stress drives evolution – Phys.Org

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July 20, 2017 by Elizabeth Howell , Astrobiology Magazine The researchers examined the biological processes of E.coli, a common bacteria. Credit: NIAID

A common bacteria is furthering evidence that evolution is not entirely a blind process, subject to random changes in the genes, but that environmental stressors can also play a role.

A NASA-funded team is the first group to design a method demonstrating how transposonsDNA sequences that move positions within a genomejump from place to place.

The researchers saw that the jumping rate of these transposons, aptly-named "jumping genes," increases or decreases depending on factors in the environment, such as food supply.

"This is a new window into how environment can affect evolution rates," said Nigel Goldenfeld, director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute for Universal Biology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "We can measure evolution rates for the first time, and we can see evolution acting at the molecular level."

Thomas Kuhlman, a physicist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, said bacteria species can also play a role in jumping rates, as well as the environment.

"The activity of these transposal elements is not uniformly random; it's not just a pile of cells," he said.

Kuhlman and Goldenfeld recently published a paper on the research, "Real-time transposable element activity in individual live cells," in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The research was led by Neil Kim, a physics graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and also included work from fellow students Gloria Lee, Nicholas Sherer and Michael Martini.

True colors

Goldenfeld studies the role of the environment on evolution, while Kuhlman focuses on the biological processes of E. coli, a common bacteria that lives in the digestive tracts of humans and animals and the cause of infections by way of contaminated feces.

The two researchers came up with a novel approach to watching the movement of jumping genes by engineering an E. coli that expresses a fluorescent protein when the transposons "jump" out of a genome. Because the cell lights up when this occurs, the researchers were able to record the cells that jump more than others.

"The cells light up only when a transposon jumps," Goldenfeld said. "So we can see how often they jump, and when they jump, and where they jump from."

Goldenfeld's team also constructed a computer simulation of the jumping activity that was able to rule out random activity as the primary reason for jumping. Once they compared the simulation with the laboratory trials, it was clear that the transposons were not jumping randomly. Goldenfeld said the findings shed more light on the mechanisms of evolution.

A fundamental assumption of evolution has been that mutations and other instabilities in the genomes randomly occur in an organism as a 'blind" evolutionary force, and those that are beneficial to the cell lead to reproductive success. Another possibility, less accepted by biologists, is that the environment prompts the cell or organism to mutate in order for the cell to prosper better. These adaptive mutations, or stress-induced mutations, occur in response to stressors in the environment.

"Our work shows that the environment does affect the rate at which transposons become active, and subsequently jump into the genome and modify it," Goldenfeld said. "Thus the implication is that the environment does change the evolution rate. What our work does not answer at this point is whether the transposon activity suppresses genes that are bad in the particular environment of the cell. It just says that the rate of evolution goes up in response to environmental stress.

"This conclusion," he added, "was already known through other studies, for certain types of mutation, so is not in itself a complete reversal of the current dogma. We hope that future work will try to measure whether or not the genome instabilities that we can measure are adaptive."

Kuhlman said he has hopes of future research on more complex organisms.

"The next step is operating in yeast, as a very simple eukaryotic cell. Then eventually much further down the road, we'll get [the process] working in mammalian or human cells."

The research is not only useful for understanding the origins of life, but also uncovering situations where cells undergo rapid mutations. One possible application could be routing out the pathways of cancer, which happens when cells abnormally grow and cause problems with the rest of the body.

Goldenfeld added that the findings also have clear implications to astrobiology.

"One of the things that astrobiology is concerned with is the interaction between the environment and the rate of evolution," he said. "Our work showed for the first time that there are environmental influences on the rate of transposon activity, because we could literally measure the effect. We did this quantitatively and compared it with theoretical predictions that assumed that transposon activity was random. We could show that the activity is not random at all."

The NASA Astrobiology Institute funded the research.

Explore further: Watching 'jumping genes' in action

More information: Neil H. Kim et al. Real-time transposable element activity in individual live cells, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2016). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1601833113

This story is republished courtesy of NASA's Astrobiology Magazine. Explore the Earth and beyond at http://www.astrobio.net .

"Jumping genes" are ubiquitous. Every domain of life hosts these sequences of DNA that can "jump" from one position to another along a chromosome; in fact, nearly half the human genome is made up of jumping genes. Depending ...

Nature is full of parasitesorganisms that flourish and proliferate at the expense of another species. Surprisingly, these same competing roles of parasite and host can be found in the microscopic molecular world of the ...

By inserting an amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS)-linked human gene called TDP-43 into fruit flies, researchers at Stony Brook University and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory discovered a potential role for 'transposons' in ...

The vesper bats are the largest and best-known common family of bats, with more than 400 species spread across the globe, ranking second among mammals in species diversity.

The genome is not a fixed code but flexible. It allows changes in the genes. Transposons, however, so-called jumping genes, interpret this flexibility in a much freer way than "normal" genes. They reproduce in the genome ...

The human genome shares several peculiarities with the DNA of just about every other plant and animal. Our genetic blueprint contains numerous entities known as transposons, or "jumping genes," which have the ability to move ...

(Phys.org)A large international team of researchers has conducted a genetic analysis and comparison of the world's biggest cats to learn more about their history. In their paper published on the open source site Science ...

Optimization for self-production may explain key features of ribosomes, the protein production factories of the cell, reported researchers from Harvard Medical School in Nature on July 20.

For mice and men, a strength in one area of Darwinian fitness may mean a deficiency in another. A look at Olympic athletes shows that a wrestler is built much differently than a marathoner. It's long been supposed that strength ...

Grasshopper mice (genus Onychomys), rodents known for their remarkably loud call, produce audible vocalizations in the same way that humans speak and wolves howl, according to new research published in Proceedings of the ...

Three new species of toads have been discovered living in Nevada's Great Basin in an expansive survey of the 190,000 square mile ancient lake bottom. Discoveries of new amphibians are extremely rare in the United States with ...

Cutting through the ocean like a jet through the sky, giant bluefin tuna are built for performance, endurance and speed. Just as the fastest planes have carefully positioned wings and tail flaps to ensure precision maneuverability ...

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What Really Happened At That Robotics Competition You’ve Heard So Much About – NPR

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The DAR Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C. was transformed into a competitive robotics arena, when teenagers from 157 countries gathered for the FIRST Global Challenge on July 17. Liam James Doyle/NPR hide caption

The DAR Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C. was transformed into a competitive robotics arena, when teenagers from 157 countries gathered for the FIRST Global Challenge on July 17.

This week a highly-anticipated robotics competition for 15- to 18-year-olds from 157 countries ended the way it began with controversy.

On Wednesday, the team from the violence-torn east African country of Burundi went missing. Well before the competition even began, the teams from Gambia and Afghanistan made headlines after the U.S. State Department denied them visas. Eventually, they were allowed to compete.

The team from Honduras tend to their robot creation in preparation for competition. Liam James Doyle/NPR hide caption

The team from Honduras tend to their robot creation in preparation for competition.

The drama marred an otherwise upbeat event focused on kids and robots.

Every team arrived with a robot in tow, each built with the exact same components, but designed, engineered and programmed differently. The goal: to gobble up and sort blue and orange plastic balls representing clean water and contaminated water.

For two days, teenagers rich and poor, male and female competed on a level playing field.

Pictured top-left going clockwise, Brendan Alinquant of Ireland, Andrea Tern of Mexico, Helder Mendonca of Mozambique, Anis Eljorni of Libya, Sarah Lockyer of Australia and twins Rinat and Shir Hadad of Israel. Liam James Doyle/NPR hide caption

Pictured top-left going clockwise, Brendan Alinquant of Ireland, Andrea Tern of Mexico, Helder Mendonca of Mozambique, Anis Eljorni of Libya, Sarah Lockyer of Australia and twins Rinat and Shir Hadad of Israel.

But there were reminders that in some parts of the world there is no such thing as a level playing field. And no team understood that better than Team Hope, made up of Syrian refugees who've fled to Lebanon.

As Fadil Harabi, the team's mentor, pointed out, "more than 90 percent of Syrian refugees in Lebanon don't have legal status. They don't have passports."

Getting passports for the team, Harabi said, turned out to be a lot more complicated than building a robot.

Competing teams created robots with the goal to gobble up and sort blue and orange plastic balls, which represented clean water and contaminated water, respectively. Liam James Doyle/NPR hide caption

Competing teams created robots with the goal to gobble up and sort blue and orange plastic balls, which represented clean water and contaminated water, respectively.

Team Hope's robot didn't do very well, but every time the Syrian kids competed, they attracted a crowd that would clap and chant, "Team Hope, Team Hope!"

For Colleen Johnson 18, a member of the all-girl U.S. team, that's what this event was all about.

"Everybody here is working together, loaning each other batteries, tools, helping each other fix programming issues to lift each other up," she said.

Still, the technology gap between poor and rich nations was evident. For team Honduras though, that gap is due to the lack of opportunity, not just the lack of resources.

Competitors from Team Hope, center in black, test the performance of their robot in a designated practice area. The unique team was comprised of Syrian refugees who had fled to Lebanon. Liam James Doyle/NPR hide caption

Competitors from Team Hope, center in black, test the performance of their robot in a designated practice area. The unique team was comprised of Syrian refugees who had fled to Lebanon.

"Honduras is a country where there aren't many opportunities," explained the team's leader, 17-year-old Daniel Marquez.

Marquez and his teammates all came from a tiny village, a seven-hour drive and world away from Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital. Not a single member of the team had ever handled a remote control, let alone built a robot.

"But the world today demands that we understand technology," said Melissa Lemus, one of two girls on the Honduran team.

As the competition entered its third and final day, I checked in on Afghanistan's all-girl team. It seemed they had grown weary of the media frenzy around them.

Speaking through a translator, 15-year-old Lida Azizi said she was disappointed that her teammates' skills, and the robot they built, had gotten a lot less attention than the team's visa problems, which nearly kept them out of the competition.

The Afghan team's consolation prize: a medal for "courageous achievement," and knowing that they placed much higher than countries like Canada, the United Kingdom and the U.S.

Top honors went to Team Europe, Poland and Armenia.

The all-girls team of competitors from Afghanistan worked together to build their robot. The team faced adversity when the U.S. State Department initially denied them visas. Liam James Doyle/NPR hide caption

The all-girls team of competitors from Afghanistan worked together to build their robot. The team faced adversity when the U.S. State Department initially denied them visas.

The awards ceremony and closing ceremony felt like one big party, not so much a goodbye. It was a celebration with a hopeful message delivered by World Bank President Jim Yong Kim:

"You are the first generation in human history that can end extreme poverty in the world," Kim said. "And from what I saw of these robots, I know you can do it."

His message was not lost: Intelligence and talent with a moral vision have no race, nationality, religion or gender.

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Burundi High School Robotics Team Reported Missing In DC – NPR

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The missing teens are Aristide Irambona, 18 (clockwise from top left), Nice Munezero, 17, Audrey Mwamikazi, 17, Don Ingabire, 16, Richard Irakoze, 18, and Kevin Sabumukiza, 17. DC Metropolitan Police Department hide caption

The missing teens are Aristide Irambona, 18 (clockwise from top left), Nice Munezero, 17, Audrey Mwamikazi, 17, Don Ingabire, 16, Richard Irakoze, 18, and Kevin Sabumukiza, 17.

Washington, D.C., police say six teenagers from Burundi who competed in an international robotics competition were reported missing on Wednesday.

Two of the teens 16-year-old Don Ingabire and 17-year-old Audrey Mwamikazi were last seen leaving the U.S. and heading into Canada, the Metropolitan Police Department tells The Two-Way blog, adding that there is "no indication of foul play."

The six-person team participated in the first international high school robotics competition, called the First Global Challenge, earlier this week.

They were reportedly last seen on Tuesday, the final day of the competition.

The Metropolitan Police Department says it has no further information as of early Thursday afternoon about the whereabouts of Richard Irakoze, 18, Kevin Sabumukiza, 17, Nice Munezero, 17, and Aristide Irambona, 18, and adds that the case is under investigation.

The six teens four males and two females are shown smiling and posing with Burundi's flag on their team page on the competition's website. It says the teens were chosen from schools around the capital, Bujumbura, and are accompanied by a mentor.

According to The Washington Post, a spokesperson for the competition said "FIRST Global president Joe Sestak, a former Navy admiral and congressman, called police after receiving word from the team's mentor, Canesius Bindaba, that the teens had gone missing."

The Metropolitan Police provided NPR with six nearly identical police reports, which all state that Bindaba accompanied the teen to the robotics competition at Washington's DAR Constitution Hall. They each had one-year visas to the U.S. The mentor stated that each teen "went missing and he does not know where [they] could have went."

Authorities also says they canvassed the location where the event was held.

Burundi, which is in central Africa, has faced intense political unrest since 2015. "Hundreds of people have been killed, and many others tortured or forcibly disappeared," according to Human Rights Watch. "The country's once vibrant independent media and nongovernmental organizations have been decimated, and more than 400,000 people have fled the country."

The robotics competition previously attracted international headlines when Afghanistan's team of six teen girls were denied visas twice. As NPR's Laurel Wamsley reported, President Trump "intervened to find a way to permit the girls entry."

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Six teenagers disappear after international robotics competition in Washington – ABC Online

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Posted July 22, 2017 11:48:14

The big controversy leading up to the FIRST Global international robotics competition in Washington was whether a team of girls from Afghanistan would be able to participate, after their initial visa applications were denied.

As it turned out, the Afghan girls got into the country, after direct intervention from President Donald Trump, and competed without incident.

Instead, it was a team from Burundi that created an immigration-related uproar after it disappeared in what appeared to be an effort to avoid returning to their home country.

The disappearance of the six Burundi teenagers, four boys and two girls, from the competition is casting a spotlight on the visa process used to admit competitors.

Police in Washington DC are continuing to investigate the disappearance, which was reported on July 19, the day after the robotics competition ended.

Two of the six teens were seen crossing the border into Canada, police said.

Event organisers believe the youths may have planned their disappearance, and members of the Burundi-American community say there is little doubt they are planning to seek asylum, either in the United States or in Canada.

The robotics team's coach, Canesius Bindaba, told The Washington Post that he had heard rumours the teens might be planning to stay in the United States, which he hoped were not true.

"I just tried to build some kind of trust, hoping they were just rumours," he said.

Police reports indicate that the Burundians were in the country on travel visas valid for one year, although immigration law experts said Customs and Border Patrol agents would have limited the stay to a certain number of days when the team arrived.

William Cocks, spokesman for the State Department's Division of Consular Affairs, said the State Department screens visa applications, and one of its goals is to ensure that visa applicants are not trying to use a tourist visa to permanently immigrate into the US.

He declined to discuss the Burundi teenagers' specific situation.

A spokesman for Customs and Border Protection also declined comment.

The competition, designed to encourage youths to pursue careers in math and science, attracted teams of teenagers from more than 150 nations.

AP

Topics: community-and-society, immigration, science-and-technology, robots-and-artificial-intelligence, united-states

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Six teenagers disappear after international robotics competition in Washington - ABC Online

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Robotics and STEM education nonprofit moves headquarters to … – Tribune-Review

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Robotics and STEM education nonprofit moves headquarters to ... - Tribune-Review

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Sami Atiya from ABB says industrial robots will add jobs, not take … – TechCrunch

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In and interview earlier this week at theTechCrunch Robotics Sessionheld on the MIT campus in Cambridge, MA, Sami Atiya, president of ABBs Robotics and Motion division, said he believes bringing robots into the manufacturing process actually adds jobs instead of killing them.

ABB certainly has some data points with more than 300,000 industrial robots installed worldwide, and Atiya claims that conventional wisdom is wrong when it comes to robots and jobs. Automation is going to drive more productivity and also jobs, he said. He went on to say that countries with the highest ratios of humans to industrial robots in production environments also have the lowest rates of manufacturing unemployment.

If you look at pure data and statistics, he said, in the countries that have the highest rates of robots per employees, which is Japan and Germany, they have about 300 robots per 10,000 employees, and they have the least unemploymentin the manufacturing sector.

He also claimed that there have been 100,000 industrial robots installed in the U.S. in the last five years, which has resulted in 270,000 additional jobs, more than two jobs for every robot. (ABB cites the International Federation of Robotics, World Bank, OECD and BLS as sources for these numbers.)

There has been, of course, a lot of speculation that as companies increase the use of robots to automate jobs, there will be corresponding job loss. In May, an article in the LA Times appeared to back up this assertion, citing a study by PwC, whichclaimed that 38 percent of all U.S. jobs could be lost to automation by the early 2030s. Thats a frightening prospect to many people and to policy makers who would have to deal with the fallout if that were to happen.

An article on CNN Money from last March, smack dab in the middle of the contentious presidential campaign, cited numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that 5 million manufacturing jobs have been lost since 2000. While there has been much debate for the reason, the article claims robots and machines have been a big contributing factor in replacing workers. Its worth noting that there are still more than 12 million jobs in the sector in spite of decades of steady decline.

ABB Robot arm. Photo: Veanne Cao, TechCrunch

Atiya said one of the reasons companies are moving to robots is they simply cant compete without them. If you look at this from a macro-[economic] perspective, skilled labor is becoming [more scarce], and its not a question [whether] you want to do it or not. You have to do it to stay competitive as a nation, and also as a company, he said.

Atiya used the standard argument for these types of historical economic transitions, comparing the increasing use of robotics with the rise of the steam engine, electricity and industrialization. The common belief during all of these key changes was that they would kill jobs, but in the end they created more jobs because of productivity increases, he said (and history backs him up).

Obviously we have concerns and fears about new technologies, but ultimately we humans, Im very convinced, will find ways to cope with them, and use them as tools as opposed to substituting our own work, he said.

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Not meeting your goals – HuffPost

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I gave up daily vlogging recently. On January 1, 2017, I announced Id start uploading a video every single day. There was no end in mind. Some people have taken on this challenge and lasted days. Some people have lasted years. I lasted a little over 3 months.

The breaking point was a company meetup at Highrise, a simple CRM company I took over from Basecamp in 2014. Our meetup was just a handful of days. But those days were optimized to spend every minute possible together since were all working remotely the rest of the year.

There was a lot of great footage from the meetup, but I didnt have any time to edit fun stories together. Or think about pacing. Add music.

I shot YouTube live videos to at least get something out and keep my commitment to the daily vlog, but my YouTube stats started to tank.

So, I decided to focus on creating better videosones I thought could get the most likes and viewsfor each and every upload. My daily vlog became a barely weekly vlog. Sometimes Id get two videos done in a week. Sometimes none.

And I started disliking the project more and more.

On the first day of my Sophomore year in high school, there was a welcome students event in our auditorium. I was barely paying attention but heard my name called out. Ugh, whats this about? The dread became surprise and then elation when they announced I had the highest grade point average so far of our entire class of 400+ kids. Woah. I was not expecting that.

With this newfound ability to compete at having the highest grade point average, I just wanted to keep competing. Could I be my high school valedictorian in a few years?

That Sophomore year, I was in an AP (Advanced Placement) art class. For some reason the teachers and I did not get along. And I guess I didnt have much talent with the art assignments. It showed in my grade for the class. My hopes for valedictorian were evaporating. It felt awful.

Junior year rolled around, and work just got harder. More tough classes, even less time for school work with all the extracurricular activities I was doing. My goal of having the best grades got worse.

But then I started making better friends with this guy, Al Wyman. Al and I had known each other since basketball camp in grade school. When we found ourselves in the same ethics class Junior year, we began talking more and more.

Those talks changed something in me. Wed banter back and forth about the books we were reading (or supposed to be reading for class) from the likes of Herman Hesse or Camus. And I realized how much I enjoyed our chats about school work. Not the competition for grades. But the act of learning, debate, application.

Why was I so focused on grades, when I should be more focused on the act of education?

In that ethics class, there was a project about the famous Edward Hopper painting Nighthawks: Redraw the painting and write an essay of whose in our version and why.

I experimented with the idea that maybe I could just focus on learning and enjoying the experience instead of getting the best grade.

But there was a catch. There wasnt enough time to thoroughly tackle this project without pulling yet another all nighter. So I just didnt do it when the teacher wanted it done.

After the project was due, I finally had an opportunity to focus on getting the project done and give it my all, learning even more about the original painting, and about the people I felt interesting enough to belong in my version. I turned the project in a couple days later and felt great about what I had learned and produced.

What happened was kind of a surprise. The teacher took it, looking at me a bit quizzically. I said, Sorry I couldnt turn this in on time. But here is my work. I hope I can still get some credit for it.

A few days later he gave it back to me, with a great grade on iteven accounting for the points he took off for turning it in late.

It taught me a valuable lesson. I could still perform well without actually focusing on that as a goal. Really, I needed to take care of myself, and commit to a system of learning, not a goal of the best grades.

My time in highschool got so much better after that. There were multiple projects I started turning in late so I could get more sleep. And I learned so much more in the process.

I still ended up with a really high average when I graduated. I wasnt the valedictorian. I was close, but it didnt matter anymore. That last year and a half of high school was some of the best time of my life, and I got so much out of it.

If I look back at my career, the best moments are when I repeated what I did in high schoolfocus on systems, not goals. If I focused too much on where my startup would be when I wanted it to be there, I was miserable. When I focused on just showing up, learning as much as I could, delivering things our customers wanted on a regular basis, I enjoyed it, and we still got great results.

My first Y Combinator startup from 2006 didnt turn into the mega-success I had envisioned, but became an enjoyable ride that still propelled my career forward and turned into even better and brighter things for others as well.

I had a goal with Y Combinator in 2011 to create a Groupon-sized success. Again I became miserable. Until I instead focused on a system of creating things that met needs I understood well because I had them myself.

That led to Draft, simple writing and version control software. It wasnt the thing I envisioned making in 2011, but the system got me what Id call a pretty wild success.

Now I run Highrise. The founders of Basecamp handed me the reigns when they wanted to spin it off. That was never a goal. How could it be? No one could have made it an intention. But this system of showing up every day and creating new things regularly got me here.

Staring at my YouTube stats was a mistake. Theres so much to getting traction, and so much of it isnt under my control.

What I can focus on is showing up every day. Filming. Editing (when I can). Getting on camera. Trying to find a story from the day even if it doesnt work out.

I sure as hell enjoy it more. And I think I might still get great results. Maybe not what I envisioned at first. But it seems like things have a way of working themselves out.

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Not meeting your goals - HuffPost

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Virtual Reality Expert Filip Baba Shares His Newest Project and How VR is Changing Entertainment – Parade

Posted: at 8:12 am

July 21, 2017 1:10 PM BySam Coley Parade @samlcoley More by Sam

Virtual reality (VR) pro Filip Baba swears that a great VR experience is just like jumping into your favorite sci-fi novel.

Its what you used to read about in sci-fi books or watched on Star Trek. Its pretty close, Baba says.

A self-taught expert, Baba is the CEO and founder of the virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR) agencyAnyworld, which creates VR and AR experiences for clients like real estate companies and artists.

Recently, Baba and Anyworld worked with R&B singer, Tangina Stone, on her latest music video. The virtual reality music video, called the Anxious 360 Experience, debuted at her album launch party in New York City.

Baba talked with Parade on how he created the VR music video, why people are fascinated by VR and what the future holds for the industry.

What was it like creating a virtual reality music video for Tangina Stone?

It was a really fun experience. The whole screenplay and story was all hers. It was about Tangina dealing with anxiety. So, we tried to put the user in the type of anxiety shed be feeling. We sat down with her and got her creative vision, and then we went ahead and technologically did it. We did all the 3-D environments and screenplayed the whole thing. She came up with the concept on that, so she had a lot of fun doing it, as well.

Tell us about the scenes of the music video and how you created those.

In the beginning, you see [a sign post that says] Canton and Brooklyn. Since the whole beginning scene is VR and 360, it forces you to look away. But [when] you look back, that spot isnt the sign post anymoreits actually a burning tree. The burning tree symbolizes the odd one out of the whole forest, and under it is an old TV playing a 2-D version of the music video. Then, theres a glitch effect. We use that to glitch into another scene. In VR, it takes you by surprise. Then in the second scene, youre in a room and it starts to grow big around you. You start to feel smaller, which is a lot more pronounced when youre in VR. All of a sudden, you start flying up. We very slowly start lifting the person up, and it gives you the sensation of flying, and youre getting pulled out of this room. The third and last scene is a mental ward. Around you are whiskey bottles, which is one of her things shes dealt withalcoholism. All of a sudden, the display breaks. When youre in VR, it seems like the glass shards are coming at your face. Then, you look down and the floor falls under you. Youre floating in darkness, and you see the room above you just fading away. It was a bit of a trip to create.

How would you say VR has grown through the years, and where do you see it going in the future?

The hardware has definitely gotten a lot more polished. Now, a lot of the mobile [devices] are becoming more affordable. Most of our smartphones can be used as VR headsets. Its all getting more mainstream. Now, its up to the content creators to create content and distribute it. I believe that in the futurenow, we have 2-D screens, monitors, phonesthings are going to meld and be more augmented. More and more consumers are going to demand these experiences. I think it will become as common as how people go to the movies or watch TV at home.

Why do you think theres a growing appeal for virtual realityexperiences?

When you try some good VR, its what you used to read about in sci-fi books or watched in Star Trek. Its pretty close, I would say. Im a gamer. I used to play classic PC games, but I play some VR games now. Theyre competitive, too. They get you up on your feet. Youre actually movingits got that Wii appeal. If you get someone in a VR experience, you could take full control over what theyre going to experience.

In what ways do you think virtual reality could be used in other forms of entertainment, like movies and TV?

Its already happening. I know some movies have VR experience booths. I dont think thats going to be the main thing. Itll probably start with artists and specific genres. Maybe the horror genreI can totally see them capitalizing on something like that. Events are going to play a large role. People love installations at events, and a VR installation gets a lot of attention. Sometimes at Anyworld, well do a tradeshow and people respond positively. They love coming up and trying something.

Do you have any other projects coming up?

Were starting to teach AR classes with the new Apple AR kit thats coming out. We also do things with real estate, so were going to have some AR and VR solutions for real estate coming soon. I think [AR] is going to be even bigger than VR is right now.

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Virtual Reality Expert Filip Baba Shares His Newest Project and How VR is Changing Entertainment - Parade

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