Monthly Archives: January 2022

Arena Download – Complete GUI for chess engines that will …

Posted: January 24, 2022 at 10:33 am

Offers assistance in analyzing a chess game, the way the chess pawns have been moved, the tactics and also you can play a game of chess. Besides it also provides testing solutions for chess engines. It is compatible with Winboard protocol I, II and UCI protocol I, II.

Arena is a complete GUI for chess engines. The program already comes with an engine that enables you to play against the computer, but it also supports almost all popular engines. The program is vastly customizable and easy to use, so you create exactly the kind of game you want. Thanks to the adjustable strength, you can select the difficulty level and increase it as you get more acquainted with game and more skillful.

What is great is that the program provides detailed information about moves and thinking process of the computer. This can help you learn from the engine to defeat your enemies faster. You can even play online with other people or create tournaments between two engines to learn from them too. Other useful features of the program include printing capabilities, support of the DGT Chessboard, EPD and PGN support, user interface available in multiple languages, to name but a few. In short, Arena is a wonderful program that includes everything chess players need to become professional players.

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A hundred years of exactitude: Jos Ral Capablanca – TheArticle

Posted: at 10:33 am

In the summer of 1922, a century ago, London played host to a galaxy of international chess stars, including Alexander Alekhine , Akiba Rubinstein and Efim Bogoljubov. But the most incandescent amongst this stellar congregation was the Cuban genius, Jos Ral Capablanca. The previous year Capa, as he was widely known, had crushed the incumbent world champion, Emanuel Lasker, by the score of four wins to zero, with ten draws. This was one of the very few world title clashes in which the winner lost no games at all. Indeed, Capa established a reputation for invincibility and accuracy which remains undiminished to this day.

Full cross table of London 1922

Jos Ral Capablanca y Graupera (1888-1942) was world chess champion from 1921-1927. Apart from accuracy and invincibility, Capa was widely renowned for his exceptional strategic vision, endgame skill and speed of play.

Capablanca s victory over the dominant American champion, Frank Marshall in a 1909 match earned him an invitation to the 1911 San Sebastian tournament, which, against all initial odds, he won ahead of players such as Akiba Rubinstein, Aron Nimzowitsch and Siegbert Tarrasch. Capa only received his invitation at Marshalls generous insistence and over the objections of established Grandmasters, Aron Nimzowitsch and OssipBernstein. This grandmasterly duo complained about the inclusion of a relative neophyte, but in an almost inevitable stroke of poetic justice, Capa trounced both of them in their individual encounters.

Capablanca finally won the world chess championship title from Emanuel Lasker in 1921 , thus contributing to an extraordinary record in that Capa was undefeated from 10 February 1916 until 21 March 1924, a period that included the world championship match against Lasker. To go for eight years without loss, including several international standard tournaments, a world championship match and the cosmic gathering in London a century ago, is a record which is likely to stand until chess as we know it is no longer played.

Capablanca lost the title in 1927 to Alexander Alekhine, who, astonishingly, had never beaten Capablanca before this match. Following unsuccessful attempts to arrange a rematch over subsequent years, relations between the two colossi became embittered. Capablanca continued his excellent tournament results, including first prizes in Moscow and Nottingham, but he also suffered from symptoms of high blood pressure. He died in 1942 of a brain haemorrhage.

Capablanca excelled in simplified positions and endgames; Bobby Fischer, employing his easy going transatlantic vernacular, described him as possessing a real light touch. He could play tactical chess when necessary, although he rarely invited complications, and possessed iron defensive technique. He wrote several chess books, of which Chess Fundamentals was regarded somewhat controversially, I might add by Mikhail Botvinnik as the best chess book ever written.

Despite his books, Capablanca preferred not to engage in detailed analysis but focused on critical moments in a game. His style of chess influenced the play of future world champions such as Vassily Smyslov, Tigran Petrosian, Bobby Fischer and Anatoly Karpov. A major difference, though, was Capa s reluctance to research and innovate in the openings and his reliance on his own instinct, talent and genius to support him in any situation or predicament.

Five years after his triumph in London, Capa undertook his most strenuous challenge since his struggle with Lasker for the world sceptre. The New York chess tournament, held between 19 February and 23 March 1927, involved six of the worlds strongest masters playing a quadruple round-robin, with the others being Alexander Alekhine, Rudolf Spielmann, Milan Vidmar, Aron Nimzowitsch and Frank Marshall.

Before the tournament, Capablanca wrote that he had more experience but less power than in 1911, that he had peaked around 1919 and that some of his competitors had gained in strength in the intervening years. In spite of such pessimistic forebodings, Capablanca enjoyed overwhelming success, finishing undefeated with 14/20, winning the micro-matches with each of his rivals, 2 points ahead of second-placed Alekhine, and won a special prize for a victory over Spielmann.

Since Capablanca had won the New York 1927 chess tournament overwhelmingly and had never lost a game to Alekhine, most pundits regarded the Cuban as the clear favourite in their World Chess Championship 1927 match. But Alekhine won the match, played from September to November 1927 at Buenos Aires, by 6 wins, 3 losses, and 25 draws the longest World Championship match ever, until the aborted contest in 198485 between Anatoly Karpov and Garry Kasparov.

Alekhines victory surprised almost the entire chess world. After Capablancas passing, Alekhine himself expressed surprise at his own victory, since in 1927 he had not truly believed that he was superior to Capablanca, and he suggested that Capablanca had been overconfident. Capablanca entered the fray with no technical or physical preparation, while Alekhine trained himself into good physical condition and had closely studied Capablancas play, in the course of which thorough investigation he convinced himself that he had found some promising chinks in the champions armour.

In his last major appearance, Capablanca played for Cuba in the 8th Chess Olympiad, held in Buenos Aires in 1939, and won the gold medal for the best performance on the top board. According to the extensive essay on Capa to be found on Wikipedia, for which I am grateful for many of the facts in this column, while Capablanca and Alekhine (France) were both representing their countries in Buenos Aires, Capablanca made a final attempt to arrange a World Championship match. Alekhine declined, saying he was obliged to help defend his adopted homeland, since World War II had just broken out. This was a strange decision, since Alekhine was then in his late forties and an unlikely candidate for strenuous or indeed any military service. As fate would have it, Alekhine would have done better to stay in Buenos Aires and contest a match against Capablanca on the spot.

Alekhine wrote in a 1942 tribute to Capablanca: Capablanca was snatched from the chess world much too soon. With his death, we have lost a very great chess genius whose like we shall never see again. Lasker once said: I have known many chess players, but only one chess genius: Capablanca.

Capa has been an inspiration for chess in Cuba ever since, culminating in the 1966 Havana Olympiad, where I, as a member of the England team, was even invited to dinner with Fidel Castro. An annual Capablanca Memorial tournament has also been held in Cuba, most often in Havana, since 1962. In 1974 I had the honour of being invited and winning the Capablanca Masters.

Astonishingly, Capablanca lost only 34 serious tournament and match games during his adult career. Again, according to Wiki statistics, he was undefeated from 10 February 1916, when he lost to Oscar Chajes in the New York 1916 tournament, to 21 March 1924, when he succumbed to the revolutionary Hypermodern complexities of Richard Rti in the New York International tournament. During this unbeaten streak, which included his 1921 World Championship match against Lasker, Capablanca racked up 63 tournament or match games, winning 40 and drawing 23.

In fact, only Frank Marshall, Emanuel Lasker, Alexander Alekhine and Rudolf Spielmann were able to win two or more formal games from the mature Capablanca, though in most cases their overall lifetime scores were minus (Capablanca beat Marshall +202=28, Lasker +62=16, Alekhine +97=33). Only Spielmann was level (+22=8). Of top players, Paul Keres alone had a narrow plus score against Capa (+10=5). Keress sole win came at the AVRO tournament of 1938 in Holland. This event was staged on the peripatetic principle of holding different rounds each day in separate towns. During this tournament Capablanca turned 50, while Keres was 22. It was overall Capas worst performance and it can certainly be explained, partly by age disparity, poor health and constant travel favouring younger players, but also by Capas infelicitous choice of the French Defence, which did not suit his fluid style.

Statistical ranking systems place Capablanca high among the greatest of all time. Nathan Divinsky and I, in our book Warriors of the Mind (1989) ranked him fifth, behind Garry Kasparov, Anatoly Karpov, Bobby Fischer and Mikhail Botvinnik but immediately ahead of Emanuel Lasker. In his 1978 book The Rating of Chessplayers, Past and Present, Arpad Elo allotted retrospective ratings to players based on their performance over the best five-year span of their career. He concluded that Capablanca was the strongest of those surveyed, with Lasker and Botvinnik sharing second place.

Most importantly for my theme, a 2006 engine-based study found that Capablanca was the most accurate of all the World Champions, when compared with computer analysis of World Championship match games. This was confirmed by a 2011 computer analysis from the duo of Bratko and Guido, using the strong engines Rybka 2 and Rybka 3. In other words, Capa had, up to that moment, been the most exact champion of all time, certainly of the champions who trained without computers in the pre-Carlsen era.

Boris Spassky, World Champion from 1969 to 1972, considered Capablanca the best player of all time. As we have seen, Bobby Fischer, who held the title from 1972 to 1975, admired Capablancas light touch and ability to see the right move instantly. Fischer reported that in the 1950s, veteran members of the Manhattan Chess Club recalled Capablancas blitz chess exploits with absolute awe.

Capablanca excelled in simplified positions and endgames, and his strategic judgment was outstanding, to such an extent that attempts to attack him directly almost always foundered on his impervious defence. Nevertheless, Capa could also play stirring tactical chess when necessary most famously in the 1918 Manhattan Chess Club Championship tournament, whenFrank Marshall sprang a deeply analysed prepared variation on him,which he refuted while playing under the constraints of a time limit. He was also capable of aggressive tactical play to exploit a positional advantage, provided he considered it the most secure and efficient way to win for example against Spielmann in the 1927 New York tournament.

In summary, Capa was a phenomenon, a sportsman without nerves, blessed with astoundingly rapid sight of the board and a nearly infallible instinct for the right move in any situation. If, as I believe, mathematics, music and chess in some way manifest the harmony of the universe, then Capablanca represents chess in the way that Pythagoras stands for mathematics and Mozart exemplifies music.

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Intel Core i5-12400 vs AMD Ryzen 5 5600X Face-Off: The Gaming Value Showdown – Tom’s Hardware

Posted: at 10:33 am

The $199 Intel Core i5-12400 vs $299 Ryzen 5 5600X contest is a pitched battlethat finds AMD's most popular CPU facing off against an Intel competitor that costs roughly $100 less at retail. That may seem odd, but AMD abandoned the sub-$200 market when it launched itsRyzen 5000processors, leaving its older processors to hold the line as Intel opens a new front in the AMD vs Intel price wars.

Based on pricing alone, the aging Zen 2-powered Ryzen 5 3600X and 3600 will remain the go-to competitors for the 12400 even though they debuted nearly two and a half years ago.As you'll see, those old Zen 2 chips aren't competitive, and AMD's $259 Ryzen 5 5600G APU targets a different market. That means AMD's least expensive Zen 3 model, the Ryzen 5 5600X, is the 12400's only true competitor in our benchmarks.

Intel'sAlder Lakechips are surprisingly powerful, already earning key upsets against higher-priced Ryzen chips on our list of Best CPUs for gamingand CPU Benchmark hierarchy. As seen in our previous faceoffs, Intel's hybrid x86 Alder Lake design, which mixes fast performance cores (P-cores) with small efficiency cores (E-Cores), represents the company's most disruptive architectural shift in a decade. As a result, Intel upsets AMD's highest-end mainstream chips, particularly in price-to-performance metrics.

However, the Core i5-12400 doesn't have a hybrid architecture. Instead, it comes with a more traditional design and only has six P-Cores active, so it doesn't use Gracemont-based cores for background tasks. That means this six-core 12-thread processor doesn't need Intel's new Windows 11-exclusiveThread Directortechnology to place workloads on the correct cores. As a result, unlike Intel's hybrid models, the 12400 is just as potent in Windows 10 as it is in Windows 11.

Below we've put the Core i5-12400 vs Ryzen 5 5600X through a six-round faceoff to see which chip takes the crown in our gaming and application benchmarks, along with other key criteria like power consumption and pricing. We have the final score and summary at the end of the article. Let's start with the tale of the tape.

The Core i5-12400 has six P-cores and 12 threads that operate at a 2.5 GHz base and 4.4 GHz boost clock. The chip comes armed with 18MB of L3 cache and has 65W PBP (base) and 117W MTP (peak) power ratings. The chip also comes with a bundled Laminar RM1 cooler with a semi-transparent plastic shroud and a blue ring lining the fin stack.

The Core i5-12400 is a locked chip, meaning it isn't overclockable. However, Intel supports memory overclocking on Z690, B660, and H670 motherboards (Z690 doesn't make sense for this class of chip, though). As you'll soon see, manipulating the power limits can eke out some additional performance in some types of gaming and threaded work.

The chip has the UHD Graphics 730 engine with 24 EUs running at a 300/1450 MHz base/boost frequency. If you're looking to save some coin, the graphics-less Core i5-12400F comes with a $25 price reduction and has the same specs as the 12400, which is incredibly attractive if you plan on using a discrete graphics card. Notably, you will lose Quick Sync capabilities and the iGPU fallback that you can use for troubleshooting in the event of an issue with a discrete GPU. However, there also isn't an option for graphics on AMD's Ryzen 5 5600X or the Ryzen 5 3600X and 3600, though all three of those competing chips also come with a bundled cooler.

Unlike the standard Ryzen 5000 models, the Ryzen 5 5600G APU does come with integrated graphics. This Cezanne APU pairs six Zen 3 execution cores with the Radeon Vega graphics engine for iGPU-powered gaming rigs. As a result, this APU is the best value on the market if you're looking to game at lower resolutions without a discrete GPU. But aside from gaming on the iGPU, it can't compete with the Core i5-12400 and comes at a higher price point.

The 12400 goes toe-to-toe with the 6-core, 12-thread Ryzen 5 5600X that has long been the favorite for enthusiasts because of its incredible blend of pricing and performance. This chip comes with a 65W TDP rating, 32MB of L3 cache, and has only high-performance cores. It also supports DDR4-3200 memory and the PCIe 4.0 interface.

All Alder Lake chips support DDR4-3200 orup toDDR5-4800 memory (odd DDR5 population rules apply). Unfortunately, these new technologies add cost to the 600-series motherboards that house the chips, and DDR5 memory is largely unavailable. However, plenty of DDR4-powered motherboard options are available, especially with the value-centric B- and H-series chipsets that make the most sense for this class of chips. AMD also has a robust ecosystem of affordable AM4 motherboards on offer.

Winner: Intel

Intel's chip pricing is an advantage, and the 600-series platform also has a clear connectivity advantage: With DDR5 and PCIe 5.0 on the menu, AMD's AM4 platform finds itself looking a bit long in the tooth, but Intel's new features do make for more expensive motherboards. DDR5 pricing is terrible, and we expect that to continue for some time. Fortunately, the 12400 is just as fast with DDR4 in the majority of tasks, and you can pick from plenty of cost-saving DDR4 motherboards.

The Core i5-12400 comes with integrated graphics by default, though you can sacrifice those and save $25 with the Core i5-12400F. Meanwhile, you'll have to look to AMD's Ryzen 5 5600G APU if you want integrated graphics from Team Red in this price range, but that chip isn't really directly comparable to the 12400 in our performance benchmarks.

This article is an overview of our much more in-depth testing in our Intel Core i5-12400 review. We're focusing on our Windows 11 test results in this article, but you should experience similar results in Windows 10. We also include tests with the Core i5-12400 with the power limits lifted and overclocked memory (again, head to the review for details).

Below you can see the geometric mean of our gaming tests with the Core i5-12400 vs the Ryzen 5 5600X and Ryzen 5 5600G at 1080p and 1440p, with each resolution split into its own chart. Notably, these results aren't too important for the 5600G the 5600G is designed to use its integrated graphics, not a discrete GPU, and easily beats the 12400 in every iGPU contest (You can see an example of that here). As per usual, we're testing with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 to reduce GPU-imposed bottlenecks as much as possible, and differences between test subjects will shrink with lesser cards or higher resolutions.

Paired with affordable DDR4 memory at the 1080p resolution, the previous-gen flagship $584 Core i9-11900K is a scant 2.5% faster than the $199 Core i5-12400, but tuning the Core i5's memory to DDR4-3800 gives it a 1.9% lead over the stock 11900K in our cumulative performance measurement.Even though the 11900K would take the lead after overclocking, that's an incredible gen-on-gen improvement in performance.

At 1080p, the Core i5-12400 at stock settings is 1.9% faster than AMD's venerable ~$299 Ryzen 5 5600X. After tuning, the Core i5-12400 ties the overclocked 5600X, an impressive showing for a chip that costs $100 less.

It's a bit unfair to compare the $259 Ryzen 5 5600G to the Core i5-12400; AMD's APU isn't designed as a direct competitor and is more expensive than the 12400. However, aside from the Ryzen 5 3600X and 3600, the $259 5600G is the only AMD processor close to this price class. Regardless, with a discrete GPU, the Core i5-12400 is 16.8% faster than the 5600G and 14% faster after tuning both chips. However, if you're looking for the best performance without a discrete GPU, the Ryzen 5 5600G outclasses the 12400.

The Ryzen 5 3600X and 3600 also feel like odd comparisons to the 12400 both are several years old and have the previous-gen Zen 2 architecture. But, again, these are the only suitable comparables from the AMD camp. The Core i5-12400 is 22.7% and 26% faster than the Ryzen 5 3600X and 3600, respectively. As you can imagine, overclocking the Ryzen chips doesn't do much to close that chasm.

Naturally, moving over to 1440p pushes the bottleneck to the GPU, so the difference between the chips shrinks tremendously. Gamers with lower-resolution panels with high refresh rates will benefit more from Alder Lake's faster frame rates. Flipping through the 99th percentile charts shows larger deltas between the chips, but Windows 11 seems to suffer from more framerate variability than Windows 10.

The AMD vs Intel gaming competition is closer now, with some games favoring one architecture over the other. As such, it's best to make an informed decision based on the types of games that you play frequently. Be sure to check out the individual tests in the above album. It's noteworthy that the synthetic benchmarks (Futuremark suite and chess benchmarks) don't tend to translate well to real-world gaming, but they do show us the raw amount of compute power exposed to game engines.

Winner: Intel

The Core i5-12400 leads convincingly over all of the chips in its price class and also punches up to beat the Ryzen 5 5600X and the 5600G at stock settings. It even stands toe-to-toe with the $100 more expensive 5600X after tuning. The Ryzen 5 3600X and 3600 shouldn't be asked to face the 12400, they aren't in the same performance class, but AMD's decision to abandon the low-end market makes this an unfortunate reality.

Overall it's clear that the Core i5-12400 is now the value gaming champion, offering a superior level of performance at its price point with no clear price/performance competitors.

We can boil down productivity application performance into two broad categories: single- and multi-threaded. The first slide above shows the geometric mean of performance in several of our most important tests in the single-threaded category, but be sure to look at the expanded results below.

The Core i5-12400 is 13.5% faster than the Ryzen 5 5600G in single-threaded work (10% faster after tuning the 5600G), and a whopping 24% and 27% faster than the Ryzen 5 3600X and 3600, respectively. You'll have to look to other Alder Lake chips to find faster performance in single-threaded work: As you can see in ourCPU Benchmarkhierarchy, even the beastly$799 Ryzen 9 5950Xcan't match the Core i5-12400 in single-threaded tasks.

As expected, we don't see a significant difference between the 12400's different power/memory settings, which has more impact on threaded work and gaming, but the 12400 doesn't need much help. The chip is 2.3% faster than the Core i9-11900K, 6% faster than the 11700K, and an incredible 15.7% faster than the 11400.

This superior performance in lightly-threaded apps will equate to a snappier, faster experience in all manner of light day-to-day tasks. The 12400's snappy performance will be most noticeable in gaming, web browsers, and application start-up tasks.

The 12400 is incredibly competitive against the Ryzen 5 models in threaded workloads, even beating the potent Ryzen 5 5600X by 2.3% at standard settings and 6.7% after tuning both chips. That's impressive given the 12400's much more forgiving price tag, but as you'll see in the benchmarks above, the Ryzen 5 5600X does carve out wins in more than a few of those applications.

We see larger gains over the Ryzen 5 5600G, 3600X, and 3600, with the stock 12400 taking leads of 15.8%, 22.4%, and 23.6%, respectively. Frankly, AMD really doesn't have any worthy competing chips at this price point for this type of work.

Removing the power restrictions gives the Core i5-12400 a 7% boost in our cumulative measure of threaded performance, allowing it to beat the overclocked Ryzen 5 5600X, not to mention the rest of the competing Ryzen chips.

Winner: Intel

Given its price point, the Core i5-12400 offers an incredible blend of performance in both single- and multi-threaded apps that simply can't be beaten. You'll have to look to Intel's own Alder Lake family for faster single-threaded performance, and the 12400 often beats the price-comparable Ryzen models (and even the $100 more expensive Ryzen 5 5600X) in threaded applications by convincing margins.If you need more threaded horsepower, Intel's Core i5-12600K offers a 21% boost over the 12400 due to its additional E-cores and is officially overclockable, but you'll have to fork out some extra cash for the privilege.

Intel's Core i5-12400 isn't an overclockable part, so you shouldn't be able to manipulate core clocks, though you can remove power limits and overclock the memory. However, enterprising motherboard manufacturers have found a way to sidestep Intel's restrictions and allow BCLK overclocking, which in turn has led to spectacular overclocking results with "locked" processors.

As you would expect, Intel has said this is an unsupported practice. As we've seen in the past with other similar workarounds, we expect that Intel will alter its microcode to prevent such efforts soon by locking out BCLK overclocking. Therefore you won't be able to update your BIOS to newer versions if you want to continue to leverage BCLK overclocking. Additionally, Intel theoretically could push microcode updates via Windows Update, which could provide another avenue to disable BCLK overclocking. Since we expect the feature to be disabled soon, we won't take BCLK overclockability into account for scoring in this round.

Intel has long kept overclocking as a feature of its pricey K-series chips and Z-series motherboards, while AMD freely allows overclocking with all SKUs on almost any platform (except A320). Intel has made strides with its overclocking, though. For example, the Core i5-12400 is a locked chip, but you can overclock the memory on Z-, B- and some H-series motherboards. You can also lift the power limits, which serves as a sort of quasi-overclock (definitely not as effective) that will boost performance in some threaded applications and gaming, all while technically remaining within the definition of stock settings (and thus warrantied).

Memory overclocking allows tuners to extract more performance from the chips, particularly in gaming, via easy-to-use XMP profiles or manual tuning. Naturally, the rules around Intel's Gear 1 and Gear 2 modes apply here, and you'll want to stick with the low-latency Gear 1 for most practical use-cases (especially gaming). For the Core i5-12400, the effective limit of Gear 1 operation is around DDR4-3800. That means you can buy a reasonably-priced XMP-equipped memory kit and reap pretty substantial benefits.

AMD's Ryzen chips are all fully overclockable. However, these chips come with innovative boost technology that largely consumes most of the available frequency headroom, so there is precious little room for bleeding-edge clock rates. In fact, all-core overclocking with AMD's chips is lackluster; you're often better off using its auto-overclocking Precision Boost Overdrive 2 (PBO2) feature that boosts multi-threaded performance. AMD also has plenty of Curve Optimization features that leverage undervolting to increase boost activity.

However, it's always important to remember that chip quality can vary for both vendors, so the silicon lottery always comes into play. That will apply to any unsupported BCLK overclocking for the Core i5-12400, along with the standard memory supported memory overclocking capabilities integrated memory controller (IMC) quality has a big impact on how well the Core i5-12400 can support overclocked memory in the Gear 1 configuration.

Winner: AMD

Intel has long locked all overclocking features to K-series chips on Z-series motherboards, but the company has made strides by allowing memory overclocking for non-K processors on almost all chipsets that support Alder Lake (except some H-series boards).

However, this is still a far cry from AMD's practice of allowing full core and memory overclocking with all of its chips and nearly all chipsets (except A320). That gives AMD the win in the overclocking category, but bear in mind that some of the AMD chips in this face-off can't beat the Core i5-12400 in gaming and application benchmarks, even after overclocking.

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Intel Core i5-12400 vs AMD Ryzen 5 5600X Face-Off: The Gaming Value Showdown - Tom's Hardware

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Suspended animation – Wikipedia

Posted: at 10:32 am

Slowing or stopping of life without death

Suspended animation is the temporary (short- or long-term) slowing or stopping of biological function so that physiological capabilities are preserved. It may be either hypometabolic or ametabolic in nature. It may be induced by either endogenous, natural or artificial biological, chemical or physical means. In its natural form it may be spontaneously reversible as in the case of species demonstrating hypometabolic states of hibernation or require technologically mediated revival when applied with therapeutic intent in the medical setting as in the case of deep hypothermic circulatory arrest (DHCA).[1][2]

Suspended animation is understood as the pausing of life processes by exogenous or endogenous means without terminating life itself.[3] Breathing, heartbeat and other involuntary functions may still occur, but they can only be detected by artificial means.[4] For this reason, this procedure has been associated with a lethargic state in nature when animals or plants appear, over a period, to be dead but then can wake up or prevail without suffering any harm. This has been termed in different contexts hibernation, dormancy or anabiosis (this last in some aquatic invertebrates and plants in scarcity conditions).

In July 2020, marine biologists reported that aerobic microorganisms (mainly), in "quasi-suspended animation", were found in organically-poor sediments, up to 101.5 million years old, 68.9 metres (226 feet) below the seafloor in the South Pacific Gyre (SPG) ("the deadest spot in the ocean"), and could be the longest-living life forms ever found.[5][6]

This condition of apparent death or interruption of vital signs may be similar to a medical interpretation of suspended animation. It is only possible to recover signs of life if the brain and other vital organs suffer no cell deterioration, necrosis or molecular death principally caused by oxygen deprivation or excess temperature (especially high temperature).[7]

Some examples of people that have returned from this apparent interruption of life lasting over half an hour, two hours, eight hours or more while adhering to these specific conditions for oxygen and temperature have been reported and analysed in depth, but these cases are not considered scientifically valid. The brain begins to die after five minutes without oxygen; nervous tissues die intermediately when a "somatic death" occurs while muscles die over one to two hours following this last condition.[8]

It has been possible to obtain a successful resuscitation and recover life in some instances, including after anaesthesia, heat stroke, electrocution, narcotic poisoning, heart attack or cardiac arrest, shock, newborn infants, cerebral concussion, or cholera.

Supposedly, in suspended animation, a person technically would not die, as long as he or she were able to preserve the minimum conditions in an environment extremely close to death and return to a normal living state. An example of such a case is Anna Bgenholm, a Swedish radiologist who allegedly survived 80 minutes under ice in a frozen lake in a state of cardiac arrest with no brain damage in 1999.[9] [10]

Other cases of hypothermia where people survived without damage are:

It has been suggested that bone lesions provide evidence of hibernation among the early human population whose remains have been retrieved at the Archaeological site of Atapuerca. In a paper published in the journal LAnthropologie, researchers Juan-Luis Arsuaga and Antonis Bartsiokas point out that primitive mammals and primates like bush babies and lorises hibernate, which suggests that the genetic basis and physiology for such a hypometabolism could be preserved in many mammalian species, including humans.[15]

Since the 1970s, induced hypothermia has been performed for some open-heart surgeries as an alternative to heart-lung machines. Hypothermia, however, provides only a limited amount of time in which to operate and there is a risk of tissue and brain damage for prolonged periods.

There are many research projects currently investigating how to achieve "induced hibernation" in humans.[16][17] This ability to hibernate humans would be useful for a number of reasons, such as saving the lives of seriously ill or injured people by temporarily putting them in a state of hibernation until treatment can be given.

The primary focus of research for human hibernation is to reach a state of torpor, defined as a gradual physiological inhibition to reduce oxygen demand and obtain energy conservation by hypometabolic behaviors altering biochemical processes. In previous studies, it was demonstrated that physiological and biochemical events could inhibit endogenous thermoregulation before the onset of hypothermia in a challenging process known as "estivation". This is indispensable to survive harsh environmental conditions, as seen in some amphibians and reptiles.[18]

Lowering the temperature of a substance reduces chemical activity by the Arrhenius equation. This includes life processes such as metabolism. If cryonics are ever perfected, it would then be a form of long-term suspended animation.[19]

Emergency Preservation and Resuscitation (EPR) is a way to slow the bodily processes that would lead to death in cases of severe injury.[20] This involves lowering the body's temperature below 94 degrees Fahrenheit, which is the current standard for therapeutic hypothermia.[20]

In June 2005, scientists at the University of Pittsburgh's Safar Center for Resuscitation Research announced they had managed to place dogs in suspended animation and bring them back to life, most of them without brain damage, by draining the blood out of the dogs' bodies and injecting a low temperature solution into their circulatory systems, which in turn keeps the bodies alive in stasis. After three hours of being clinically dead, the dogs' blood was returned to their circulatory systems, and the animals were revived by delivering an electric shock to their hearts. The heart started pumping the blood around the body, and the dogs were brought back to life.[21]

On 20 January 2006, doctors from the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston announced they had placed pigs in suspended animation with a similar technique. The pigs were anaesthetized and major blood loss was induced, along with simulated - via scalpel - severe injuries (e.g. a punctured aorta as might happen in a car accident or shooting). After the pigs lost about half their blood the remaining blood was replaced with a chilled saline solution. As the body temperature reached 10C (50F) the damaged blood vessels were repaired and the blood was returned.[22] The method was tested 200 times with a 90% success rate.[23]

The laboratory of Mark Roth at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and institutes such as Suspended Animation, Inc are trying to implement suspended animation as a medical procedure which involves the therapeutic induction to a complete and temporary systemic ischemia, directed to obtain a state of tolerance for the protection-preservation of the entire organism, this during a circulatory collapse "only by a limited period of one hour". The purpose is to avoid a serious injury, risk of brain damage or death, until the patient reaches specialized attention.[24]

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Delving into the sci-fi world of cryonics – SaskToday.ca

Posted: at 10:32 am

"The Beautiful Place"

By Lee Gowan

Published by Thistledown Press

$24.95 ISBN 978-1-77187-208-9

Saskatchewan born-and-raised writer Lee Gowan has penned a thick new novel "The Beautiful Place" and its a beautiful thing. Gowans three previous novels have garnered much attention ("Make Believe Love" was shortlisted for Ontarios Trillium Award), and his screenplay, "Paris or Somewhere," was nominated for a Gemini Award.

Currently the program director of the Creative Writing and Business Communications department at the University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies, this award-winning author is giving readers something completely different with "The Beautiful Place," which delves into the sci-fi world of cryonics; the realistic world of failed marriages, 21st century parenting and dementia; and the ever-precarious world of art and art making.

What Gowan has done is ingenious: hes imagined an ongoing life for Philip Bentley, Sinclair Rosss protagonist in "As for Me and My House." Gowans tri-provincial sequel to that prairie classic is told from the perspective of the minister-turned-artists grandson, also known as Bentley. The younger Bentley a fired, semi-suicidal cryonics salesman, writer and father of two daughters from different wives is approached by a beguiling woman named Mary Abraham who met Jesus in a dream and walked with him to a desert well and met Buddha under a tree by a river.

Abraham has also dreamed about the younger Bentley, and shes on a mission, as hes one of few who know where the cryonics company, Argyle, keeps the frozen bodies of the deceased. He must reveal this location so she can extract her late husbands disembodied head, because he posthumously told her he wished to be buried and that it was [her] duty to get him underground.

The younger Bentley must also try to appease his wise-cracking ex-wife and finance their rebellious 23-year-old daughters New York art school, plus figure out his own place in the world as the grandson of a famous painter (whose body is also in The Beautiful Place). Bentley himself doesnt believe in cryonics a longshot gamble at eternal life even though he was Argyles sales manager.

Its complicated, but, Gowan adeptly directs this cast of disparate characters with their strange plights, and the often witty dialogue reveals why hes such a revered writer. Upon the birth of a daughter, Bentleys wife says: She looks like a live roast. Another character says urologists always have such lovely personalities. Speaking of his wifes TV-star ex, the protagonist says: He wishes he were indigenous; he wishes he were gay. And its a hoot to read that Philip Bentley lived beyond Rosss novel and became an artist with pictures hanging in the Vancouver Art Gallery next to Emily Carr.

This book is a complex weaving of the real and the impossible, of hope and grief, and of dreams and hard realities. Though the protagonist believes The point of existence ... was to vanish with as little trace as possible. Stay out of the frame, this shimmering and beautifully-organized novel will ensure that its author, Lee Gowan, will not disappear within the lexicon of Canadian literary writers.

This book is available at your local bookstore or from the Saskatchewan Publishers Group http://www.skbooks.com.

Efforts to Rein in Big Tech May Be Running Out of Time – Good Times Weekly

Posted: at 10:31 am

By Cecilia Kang and David McCabe, The New York Times

Lawmakers on Capitol Hill are readying a major push on bills aimed at restraining the power of the countrys biggest tech companies, as they see the window of opportunity closing quickly before the midterm elections.

In a significant step forward, a Senate committee Thursday voted to advance a bill that would prohibit companies such as Amazon, Apple and Google from promoting their own products over those of competitors. Many House lawmakers are pressing a suite of antitrust bills that would make it easier to break up tech giants. And some are making last-ditch efforts to pass bills meant to strengthen privacy, protect children online, curb misinformation, restrain targeted advertising and regulate artificial intelligence and cryptocurrencies.

Most of the proposals before Congress are long shots. President Joe Biden and top Democrats in Congress have said addressing the industrys power is a high priority, but numerous other issues rank even higher on their list. These include passing voting rights legislation, correcting labor and supply chain constraints, enacting a social services package and steering the nation out of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Still, the next few months are probably the last best chance for a while. After that, attention will turn to the midterm elections, and Democrats, who support the efforts aimed at tech in far greater numbers than Republicans, could lose control of Congress.

This is a problem that has been brewing for a long time, and its become pretty obvious to everyone, said Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., who has led the push for tougher laws on the tech companies. But when you get to the fall, it will be very difficult to get things done because everything is about the election.

Congress has unified around a growing concern about the technology giants over the last several years. Still, dozens of bills have failed to pass, even as many other countries have beefed up their regulations for the industry.

When Biden took office last year, he promised to inject more competition into the economy, particularly in the tech sector. He appointed vocal tech critics to lead antitrust agencies, and this month, his press secretary said Biden was encouraged to see bipartisan interest in Congress in passing legislation to address the power of tech platforms through antitrust legislation.

Bruce Reed, White House deputy chief of staff, and Brian Deese, director of the National Economic Council, met Wednesday with executives from companies including Yelp and Sonos, which have lobbied for antitrust action against the tech giants. They discussed the difficulties that entrepreneurs, brick-and-mortar retailers, and other businesses face competing in sectors dominated by a few large platforms, White House officials said. The administration said it anticipated working with Congress but has not endorsed any of the specific legislation aimed at the companies.

Complicating matters is that even though the two parties widely agree that Congress should do something, they often disagree on what that should be.

In the past few years, dozens of privacy, speech, security and antitrust bills have withered amid disagreements over how to balance protecting consumers while encouraging the growth of Silicon Valley. Some bills, such as those that address online content moderation, are especially polarizing: Democrats have called for measures that would push the companies to remove from their sites more misinformation and content that contributed to real-world harm. Republicans have backed laws to force the companies to leave more content up.

Everyone has a bone to pick with Big Tech, but when it comes to doing something, thats when bipartisanship falls apart, said Rebecca Allensworth, a Vanderbilt Law School professor who specializes in antitrust law. At the end of day, regulation is regulation, so you will have a hard time bringing a lot of Republicans on board for a bill viewed as a heavy-handed aggressive takedown through regulation of Big Tech.

The bill that the Senate Judiciary Committee advanced Thursday, for instance, could prevent Amazon from steering shoppers to its Amazon-branded toilet paper and socks while making it harder to find comparisons for those products from other brands. It could force Apple to allow alternatives to Apple Pay within iPhone apps. And it could prevent Google from putting its own services such as travel prices, restaurant reviews and shopping results at the top of search results.

Introduced by Klobuchar and Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, the legislation aims to address concerns that a handful of tech giants act as gatekeepers to digital goods and services. Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft have a combined market capitalization of more than $9 trillion. Several Republicans voted in favor of the bill, which passed 16-6. Although Mike Lee, R-Utah, repeated a consistent party talking point of unintended consequences to future businesses that can be swept under the law, others said the threats posed by tech giants outweighed those worries.

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, voted in favor of the bill and emphasized that his greatest concern was how giant social media companies have moderated content. He and other Republicans on the committee said they believe companies such as Apple, Google and Facebook have censored conservative voices by banning apps such as Parler, a right-wing site, and by taking down accounts of conservative figures.

It would provide protections to content providers that are discriminated against for the content they produce, Cruz said. I think that that is a meaningful step forward.

Klobuchar described the vote as a historic and important moment as the first antitrust bill aimed at tech to advance out of the committee.

As dominant digital platforms some of the biggest companies our world has ever seen increasingly give preference to their own products and services, we must put policies in place to ensure small businesses and entrepreneurs still have the opportunity to succeed in the digital marketplace, she said.

But she acknowledged there is much work ahead for her and Grassley to persuade congressional leadership to support final passage of legislation.

Consumer groups and a coalition of dozens of tech startups back the bill. Some consumer advocates have compared the legislation to a law that forced monopoly TV providers to offer all networks access to cable customers. That action, they say, did not lead to the demise of the cable television business, but kept monopoly providers from shutting out competition.

Consumers will benefit from this bill by making it easier to install, choose and use alternative apps and online services, said Sumit Sharma, a senior researcher for tech competition at Consumer Reports, enabling both consumers and small businesses to more easily switch between ecosystems by mixing and matching services from different providers.

Silicon Valley lobbyists have fought the bill in published opinion pieces, ad campaigns and one-on-one appeals. Sundar Pichai, CEO of Googles parent company, Alphabet, and Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, have called lawmakers to oppose the bill.

The companies lobbyists have argued that the legislation could make it harder to ward off malware and bugs in devices and could make their services less useful. In a blog post Tuesday, Googles chief legal officer, Kent Walker, painted a dire vision of the impacts that it and other bills could have: The company may have to stop including a map of vaccination sites in search results if the law passes, he said. It may have to stop blocking spam in Gmail. It may not be able to show someone searching for medical help clear information and instead be required to direct you to a mix of low-quality results.

The companies have also said the proposals focused on their bigness would hurt small businesses. In recent months, Amazon has urged the merchants who sell products through its marketplace to contact lawmakers with concerns about the bills.

Brian Huseman, Amazons vice president of public policy, said in a statement that the legislation could imperil the companys ability to offer Prime shipping benefits to those sellers or allow them onto its platform at all.

Klobuchars bill in particular targets a growing business for Amazon: competing directly with those outside merchants by offering its own products, such as its Amazon Basics line.

Amazon argues that many major retailers, including Costco and Walmart, do the same thing. The bills authors are targeting common retail practices and, troublingly, appear to single out Amazon while giving preferential treatment to other large retailers that engage in the same practices, Huseman said. Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Alex Padilla, two Democrats from California, repeated the companies arguments, saying the Silicon Valley giants were being unfairly targeted by a bill that could help the rise of rivals in China such as TikTok and Tencent.

Klobuchar said tech companies have lobbed misleading attacks. They dont like our bill, she said. You can see the ads on TV.

Before Thursdays session, Klobuchar and Grassley proposed changes that they said would address concerns about user privacy and hindering subscription services such as Amazon Prime. The new version also appeared likely to cover TikTok.

Even though Klobuchars bill moved beyond the Judiciary Committee on Thursday, its sponsors face the steeper challenge of getting 60 senators to support it. In the House, advocates of the antitrust bills also need to get enough Republicans on board to account for Democrats who oppose the proposals.

Theyve talked about the cascade of legislative possibilities, said William Kovacic, a former chair of the Federal Trade Commission. None of it has happened. And the clock is running.

This article originally appeared inThe New York Times.

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Efforts to Rein in Big Tech May Be Running Out of Time - Good Times Weekly

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Tech spent big on lobbying last year – Politico

Posted: at 10:31 am

With help from Rebecca Kern

Editors Note:Morning Tech is a free version of POLITICO Pro Technology's morning newsletter, which is delivered to our subscribers each morning at 6 a.m. The POLITICO Pro platform combines the news you need with tools you can use to take action on the days biggest stories.Act on the news with POLITICO Pro.

Lobbying surge:The major tech companies boosted their lobbying spending by more than $21 million in 2021, and their smaller rivals spent more, too.

Natsec takes center stage:Big tech companies are mobilizing around the message that antitrust reform could hurt U.S. national security.

Privacy warning: In the latest volley in the back and forth over federal privacy legislation, a tech-funded research paper argues that the growing patchwork of state privacy laws could cost the industry more than $1 trillion.

HAPPY MONDAY. Im your temporary host, tech lobbying and influence reporter Emily Birnbaum. What stood out to you in the 2021 lobbying disclosures?

Contact me on Twitter with lobbying tips @birnbaum_ e or by email at [emailprotected]. Got an event for our calendar? Send details to [emailprotected]. Anything else? Team info below. And dont forget: Add @MorningTech and @PoliticoPro on Twitter.

TECH LOBBYING SURGE Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook spent a total of more than $55 million on lobbying the federal government in 2021, according to newly filed lobbying disclosures, breaking their own records and outstripping other top-spending industries in Washington, such as defense and pharmaceuticals, for another year in a row. In comparison, the Big Four tech companies spent about $34 million on lobbying in 2020.

Behind the increase: Googles spending jumped roughly 27 percent, from $7.5 million in 2020 to $9.5 million in 2021, as the company has sought to fend off antitrust legislation and has dealt with concerns about YouTubes contribution to right-wing radicalization.

Facebook and Amazon broke their own spending records, with Amazon shelling out $19.3 million and Facebook spending more than $20 million. Facebooks spending spree came as the company dealt with fallout from whistleblower Frances Haugens revelations; Amazon has faced antitrust heat as well as significant labor complaints.

Apple, which has had a more muted presence in Washington, spent $6.5 million in 2021 a small number compared to its Big Four peers but still vastly more than smaller tech companies such as Spotify, which spent $820,000 in 2021.

Speaking of those smaller rivals 2021 was a huge year for the small- to medium-sized tech companies, which say they have been harmed by gatekeeping by giants like Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple. Complaints from companies like Oracle, Yelp, Tile and Spotify have taken center stage and informed antitrust legislation now moving through the House and Senate Judiciary Committees. As a result, Big Techs rivals are spending more than ever, too:

Oracle, the software company known for taking on Google, spent $9.1 million on lobbying in 2021, up from about $8 million the year before.

Microsoft, though hardly a small company, has gained a reputation for lobbying against its tech-sector rivals. It spent about $10.2 million on lobbying in 2021 compared to $9.4 million in 2020, an increase of roughly 8 percent.

Fox Corp., the media company owned by Big Tech antagonist Rupert Murdoch, increased its spending by about 22 percent between 2020 and 2021, as the company lobbied in favor of the antitrust bills in both chambers. Fox spent $3.6 million in 2021, compared with $3 million in 2020.

Epic Games, which is locked in a legal battle with Apple over Apples App Store, registered its first in-house lobbyists during the last month of 2021, reporting $40,000 in in-house lobbying spending. Epic also tapped a pair of high-powered outside lobbying firms last year, the Gibson Group and Subject Matter.

Overall, this spending pales in comparison to the tens of millions spent by Facebook, Amazon and Google. But its still notable that these companies are dialing up their presences in Washington, readying themselves for all the fights ahead.

NATSEC HAWKS ARE CIRCLING As the tech antitrust bills pick up steam in the Senate, Google has been the tech company most forcefully pushing the idea that reforms could threaten national security.

Handicapping Americas technology leaders would threaten our leading sources of research and development spending, Googles president of global affairs and chief legal officer, Kent Walker, wrote in a blog post last week. He argued that the bill that received a markup, S. 2992 (117), would give a free pass to foreign companies and cited a letter from last year from twelve former U.S. national security officials who argued the antitrust bill could hurt U.S. competitiveness. (All 12 former officials have ties to major tech companies, as POLITICO previously reported.)

The legislation would prohibit Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Google from favoring their own products and discriminating against rivals on their platforms. Google spokesperson Julie Tarallo told MT that the company believes S.2992 risks threatening our global competitiveness and security, which is why we will continue urging Congress to take more time to consider these and other unintended consequences.

Meanwhile, The Taxpayers Protection Alliance, which receives funding from Google and is backed by groups connected to conservative billionaire Charles Koch, last week announced a seven-figure digital ad buy criticizing the antitrust legislation, emphasizing how the bills could harm national security and American jobs.

How its landing: Several Democratic and Republican lawmakers during last weeks markup raised concerns that one antitrust bill, S.2992, could make the U.S. less competitive with China, echoing the companies arguments. I want to make sure we are not inadvertently harming national security, Sen. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) (D-Vt.) said during last weeks markup. Two congressional aides, who requested anonymity because they are not authorized to speak on the record, told MT that Google and Amazon have been relying on those arguments particularly with China hawks in the Senate, such as Sen. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR).

Kicking into high gear: Amazon, Facebook and the Computer and Communications Industry Association, a tech trade group of which they are members, in recent months have all started donating significant sums to the Center for International and Strategic Studies, a leading defense and national security think tank. Their new donations highlight how the companies are leaning into national security messaging as CSIS becomes more involved in the antitrust debate. (A spokesperson for Meta, the parent company of Facebook, said Meta supports CSIS along with a number of nonprofit groups.)

CSIS updated its corporate donors list last month to show that Amazon and Facebook are now big supporters, with Facebook giving between $200,000 and $499,000 (the highest corporate donor bracket) and Amazon giving between $35,000 and $64,999. CCIA also joined as a donor in the $100,000 to $199,999 category. Google and Apple were already donors in some of the smaller brackets.

The counterargument: Embattled industries have long argued that regulation. could harm U.S. competitiveness and security, only to be proven wrong once antitrust action is taken. Qualcomm, for example, argued that the Trump administration was risking ceding the future of 5G to China by pursuing a case against the company; AT&T in the 1980s told the Defense Departmentthat the governments antitrust lawsuit could make the U.S. vulnerable to attack. Those doomsday predictions did not bear out.

The argument they make is that gigantic tech companies are the only ones who can innovate and compete with China, said Ernesto Falcon, senior legislative counsel with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. But this completely misses the point. When companies have monopolies, they have no reason to innovate, since they have captured the market.

Digital rights groups like EFF argue that these national security arguments ring hollow because companies loyalties are to their shareholders, not to U.S. national security. In fact, top tech companies like Apple and Googlehave done extensive business in China .

Relying on large monopoly corporations to act in the best interest of national security is futile and goes against their very legal and operational foundations, advocacy groups, including the American Economic Liberties Project, wrote in a letter sent to House leadership last year.

A message from Charter Communications:

Were proud that Spectrum Internet ranks No. 1 in the U.S. News & World Report 2021-22 Best Rural Internet Service Providers rankings. This recognition underscores our ongoing commitment to connecting more communities from coast to coast, including rural areas. And were just getting started.

STATE PRIVACY LAWS ADD UP: Over a 10-year period, a patchwork of privacy laws across all 50 states could lead to company compliance costs exceeding $1 trillion, according to a report from a tech-funded think tank, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. In the absence of a federal privacy law, conflicting compliance regimes for companies could cost companies between $98 million to $112 billion annually, the report found. ITIF receives funding from the tech industry, including Apple, Microsoft, Google, Intel and more.

The report provides evidence for policymakers to decide what are the economic ramifications if they dont pass a federal law, Daniel Castro, a vice president at ITIF and report author, told Rebecca.

Privacy advocates perspective: Some tech critics have argued that its better for U.S. states to pass strong legislation than for the federal government to pass a watered-down privacy law. But many of the state laws that have passed over the past year have been panned by privacy advocates as weak, prompting both privacy groups and industry to push for their own preferred models of federal privacy legislation.

To date, Congress has failed to reach bipartisan agreement on a federal privacy bill, so California, Virginia and Colorado have passed their own laws. This means tech companies will have to comply with privacy rules in-state and out-of state if they operate in multiple states.

Im cautiously optimistic that there's a willingness to compromise because businesses want a federal law, Castro said. That might be the motivation it takes to get something done.

FIRST IN MT: AI REGULATION GETS PUBLIC BACKING More than 80 percent of Americans favor regulating all or most uses of artificial intelligence technologies, according to a survey from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Respondents identified self-driving vehicles, law enforcement and health care as the top uses of AI they want to see regulated, based on the survey of 1,000 respondents throughout the country.

More than 80 percent of respondents said the U.S. should lead in AI tech development in general. Americans surveyed also recognized that there will be job loss due to automation 42 percent of respondents said believe AI will lead to some job loss in the U.S.

BSA | The Software Alliance is adding Alteryx and Dropbox as global members. Chris Lal, chief legal officer at Alteryx, will join BSAs board of directors. Data analytics company LightBox has contracted with the state of Montana to supply its GIS technology and SmartFabric tools (unveiled last month) as part of the states efforts to create more accurate broadband maps, the company is announcing today Ellen Canale, who has directed communications for Mozilla, is joining Stellar Development next month Karen Modlin, who has managed corporate communications at Dish Network, has joined Zayo Group as director of communications

The story of an Amazon warehouse: How a small town in England has adapted after an Amazon warehouse was built in its midst, via The Wall Street Journal.

Another obstacle: Congress antitrust effort has been complicated by hate speech concerns, Protocol reports.

Merger surge: Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet announced more acquisitions in 2021 than any other year in the past decade, according to CNBC.

A message from Charter Communications:

Stock scrutiny: Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene sold up to $15,000 worth of Activision Blizzard stock on the day Microsoft announced its acquisition, Business Insider reports.

Parents sue Meta, Snap: A girls mother is suing Meta and Snap, alleging social media was to blame for the suicide of her 11-year-old daughter, according to Bloomberg.

ICYMI: Republicans say the FCC disregarded advice from its own inspector general for preventing fraud in its $14 billion broadband program. John has more for Pros.

A message from Charter Communications:

Access for all means opportunity for everyone. Thats why were investing billions to extend our network to reach those who need it most. Over the next several years, Charter will build more than 100,000 miles of new U.S. broadband infrastructure that will deliver reliable, high-speed internet access to even more communities from coast to coast. Thats an extension long enough to circle the equator four times.

This $5 billion initiative will connect an FCC-estimated one million currently unserved, mostly rural families and small businesses to reliable internet service with speeds of up to 1 gigabit per second.

TTYL!

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Why Big Tech Companies Have Been Quiet on Texas Abortion Law – WIRED

Posted: at 10:31 am

Most companies that signed the letters were midsize tech and consumer brands trying to attract younger customers and workers, says Jen Stark, senior director of corporate strategy at Tara Health Foundation, which engages the private sector on reproductive rights and helped organize the letters. The largest tech companiesAlphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoftstayed mum. Notably silent, Stark says.

Companies were caught flat footed by the threats to abortion rights. Now theyre kind of scrambling.

Anthony Johndrow, corporate adviser

WIRED contacted 16 tech companies with sizable Texas workforces about the law and its impact on workers. Alphabet, Amazon, Cisco, Dell, Dropbox, eBay, Indeed, Meta, Oracle, PayPal, Samsung, SpaceX, and Tesla did not respond. Intel and Microsoft declined to comment. HP Enterprise has not taken a position on the law, but the company said, We encourage our team members to make their voices heard through advocacy and at the ballot box. The company said its medical plans cover out-of-state medical care, including abortion.

We're not asking companies to weigh in on when life begins, Stark says. We're simply asking for companies to understand abortion as a workforce issue that impacts worker well-being and the achievement of an individual's full potential, and see its connection to equity issues around gender and race. Tara Health asks companies to stop donating to anti-choice politicians and to review their benefits to mitigate the impact of abortion restrictions on their workforces.

Although the majority of Americans think abortion should be legal, a sizable minority believes the opposite. According to Pew Research, 39 percent of Americans think abortion should be illegal in most or all cases, including 37 percent of women. Thats a large group, including customers, shareholders, and employees who are going to get really, really angry with you for taking a position, says Paul Argenti, a Dartmouth corporate communications professor who wrote an article titled When Should Your Company Speak Up About A Social Issue?

But as the spate of LGBTQ corporate activism demonstrated, companies do sometimes speak up, even when it makes people mad. A 2020 George Washington University study of Fortune 500 companies proposed one reason: pressure from employee resource groups. The researchers found that in highly educated workforces, LGBTQ employees persuaded companies to take stances on their rights, even when it may have been costly to business.

Years ago, companies were reluctant to speak out on LGBTQ issues, says Shelley Alpern, director of corporate engagement for the investment firm Rhia Ventures, which submits shareholder resolutions supporting reproductive rights. Part of what got them to move away from that taboo is that their employees started to speak up through LGBTQ affinity groups, she says. That made a huge difference because I think corporate managers realized this was not an abstract question. This has a real impact on employees.

Employee mobilization around abortion rights has yet to reach this level. Johndrow, the reputation adviser, says his clients have not mentioned workplace organizing around the issue. To my knowledge, and I work with a fair number of big companies, there were no groups like that, he says. Im sure theyre forming now.

They are, says Deena Fidas, managing director of the LGBTQ workplace equality nonprofit Out and Equal. Fidas is trying to apply the lessons of LGBTQ workplace organizing to reproductive health. LGBTQ pressure campaigns were decades in the making, she says, starting at a time when these workers lacked legal protections against employment discrimination. Now, Fidas works with Tara Health and other organizations to convene womens employee resource groups and help them advocate for access to reproductive care. She says employees are starting to raise the issue as one where their employers should weigh in. Change is definitely afoot.

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Why Big Tech Companies Have Been Quiet on Texas Abortion Law - WIRED

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Netflix and Microsoft show that video gaming has become too big for tech giants to ignore – CNBC

Posted: at 10:31 am

Young happy Asian couple playing video games in living room. Cheerful people having fun with computer gaming concept.

Blue Planet Studio

The business of video games is having a moment.

Less than two weeks after Take-Two announced its $12.7 billion for Zynga, and just days after Microsoft announced its record-breaking $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard, Netflix co-founder and co-chief executive officer Reed Hastings said Thursday that building out video gaming to where Netflix can "amaze our members by having the absolute best in the category" is his goal.

"We have to be differentially great at it," Hastings said during Netflix's earnings conference call. "When mobile gaming is world leading, and we're some of the best producers, like where we are in film today, having two of the top ten, then you should ask what's next. Let's nail the thing and not just be in it for the sake of being in it."

That's a tall task for Netflix, which is building its gaming unit from scratch. Netflix chief operating officer Greg Peters said Thursday the company plans to license "large game" intellectual property that "people will recognize" later this year. Hastings added Netflix will use its "walk, crawl, run" strategy around gaming, where it purposefully grows the business gradually to learn about user habits and use resources efficiently.

Netflix, of course, has used this general strategy before in streaming video. The company licensed well-known movies and TV shows to build out its user base as a cable TV supplement before slowly wading into original content. After years of experimenting on a show-by-show or film-by-film basis, Netflix felt its recommendation algorithm and user data could accurately predict new popular original content. Today, Netflix spends billions of dollars each year on originals.

The Microsoft acquisition and the Netflix commentary is a general acknowledgment that gaming has become an important part of global entertainment, especially with young audiences. Netflix has often pointed out that gaming, such as Fortnite, competes with its core streaming service for eyeballs.

This isn't new, exactly. Microsoft has owned Xbox for decades. But it's obviously never spent nearly $70 billion to acquire anything, let alone a video game company.

Gaming has jumped to the forefront of many people's attention as companies like Meta and Roblox build strategies around a vaguely defined immersive consumer computing strategy called the "metaverse," which will almost certainly involve gaming at some level.

But the acquisition rush likely suggests something far simpler: Gaming has become ubiquitous. Mobile devices and online play, connecting people to play real-time games, has given gaming a wider audience and significance in youth culture. The Entertainment Software Association, the U.S. video game's trade association, claims more people play video games than ever before.

Big tech and media companies have flirted with gaming in the past, with mixed success. Disney and Google are among the large companies who decided to abandon their video game aspirations in recent years. And it's probably far too early to position a company for the metaverse, when it's still entirely unclear what the metaverse encompasses.

But gaming is clearly a major interest two of the world's largest tech companies. That's meaningful, and it probably means there's more large gaming consolidation to come.

WATCH: There's probably more risk than people realize, says Michael Nathanson of MoffettNathanson

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Netflix and Microsoft show that video gaming has become too big for tech giants to ignore - CNBC

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More And More Israelis Are Growing Horns: Startup Nation Out, Big Tech Nation In – Forbes

Posted: at 10:30 am

This might sound strange, but Israelis are growing horns more than ever before;unicorn horns, that is (why, what did you think I was talking about?). World, pay attention: more than 35 companies in Israel reached unicorn status over the last year or raised private capital at a valuation of over $1 billion.

Some of the newest Unicorn Club members are only one year old. Only a few years ago, valuations of $1 billion or more were reserved for the most established, large companies. In the era of Covid, with new problems to solve, and the need to adjust to a new normal, many Israeli companies seize the day and made a fortune providing innovative solutions.

More than 35 companies in Israel reached unicorn status over the last year or raised private capital ... [+] at a valuation of over $1 billion.

Even before Corona, the US stock market was at low tide; meanwhile this has turned out to be the longest period of this kind in its history. Consequently, the private money market has been flooded with more and more new entrants. Private investment and venture capital doubled to more than $3 trillion by 2020. Together with hedge funds and real estate investment funds, these sums have already reached $10 trillion. There was so much money in the private market that capital raised soared to a peak of $2 trillion in early 2020.

At that time, dozens of unicorns were born in Israel, which was a fantastic phenomenon, but then Covid hit. After a short while of paralysis, the stock market began to recover, and the private investors were back . Israeli companies stood by, waiting to pick the fruits.

In 2021, Israeli startups raised over $25 billion, (which is 2.5X of last years amounts and about 25X what it was 15 years ago). In recent years, Israel has experienced a major scale-up, with an exponential increase in financing and unicorns. Some attribute this to world-class talents trained in the top R&D units of the IDF as well as its unique intellectual property; Israel is notably a domain expert in the fields of cyber security, AI, computer vision, adtech, semiconductors and sensors, among others. Some credit the formation and density of startups: there are 6000-9000 active startups and around 1000 new companies are formed every year.

Masters of Their Domain

While the newly minted unicorns in Israel are based in diverse industry segments, the strong domains are enterprise software, cyber security, fintech and insurtech.

In the past year, several companies in new business segments reached unicorn status. These segments include semiconductors (Wiliot, Valens, Innoviz, Hailo and Next Silicon); digital healthcare ( K Health, Immunai) and the industrial sector (Augury and Fabric).

Yahal Zilka, serial entrepreneur, cofounder and managing partner at 10D, is a long time veteran of the VC industry. He has led multiple well-performing global funds and has been an early investor in numerous unicorns, including: Waze, DriveNets, Fundbox, Valens ( NYSE: VLN), Appsflyer, and Innoviz (Nasdaq:INVZ). The companies have one thing in common besides their over a billion dollars value: theyre all Israeli. Israeli companies, says Zillka as he attempts to explain the secret sauce of the Israeli unicorns, are by and large focused on deep technology, out of the box unique offerings and the ability to develop solutions that are scalable.

From Tech Focused to Full Scale Solutions

Historically, Israeli entrepreneurs focused on products which provided a component or subsystem. Nevertheless, they were not directly selling to customers. Over the past few years, Zilka says, with greater availability of capital, the focus has shifted to providing a full solution and offering while directly serving the customer. Israeli entrepreneurs, founders and management teams are keen to develop and provide multiple solutions, thus advancing in the the value chain. Therefore valuations are also impacted upward. This is demonstrated by companies such as Waze and Solaredge.

"With greater availability of capital, the focus has shifted to providing a full solution and ... [+] offering while directly serving the customer." Yahal Zilka

Despite the dynamic startup industry, Israeli companies have had to cope with a geographic glass ceiling; they were excluded from the main global markets. Due to this handicap, Zilka suggests, remote skills were adopted and developed and eventually brought to the forefront by the pandemic, which succeeded in flattening the world.' This long-term competitive advantage for the Israeli tech ecosystem was created, eliminating the distance component. These are challenges Israelis have been working to overcome for years. They have had ample time to hone their remote skills in sales, onboarding, implementation, customer success and more.

No Exit

Jewish mothers used to wish their kids would grow up to become doctors or lawyers. In the past 30 years, with the rapidly growing startup nation, this traditional hope was replaced with the desire for a startup exit. In 2022, this shifted once again. In the past, Zilka says, most Israeli startups were acquired by leading technology corporations for hundreds of millions of dollars, mainly due to the obstacle of building large scale companies outside of Israel and the availability and scarcity of growth capital. In the past twenty-four months this has changed dramatically. With this new growth of capital, both entrepreneurs and investors believe they will build very strong companies that will be leaders in their field.

SPAC/PIPE, a new financial vehicle that appeared in 2020 provides new financing opportunities for younger companies that are recognized leaders but only have bookings to show, rather than revenue track records. In addition, there has been a major shift to IPOs as these startups choose to stay independent and build full scale businesses, reaching valuations in the billions, insists Zilka as he lays out the very good reasons companies are no longer in a rush to exit. In 2021 alone, several companies have achieved valuations of over $10 billion; this is a feat that was previously achieved only once every 5-10 years.

Biotech startup Immunai earned its unicorn status with a $215 million Series B investment round. The Israeli company has developed a technological platform that maps the entire immune system for better detection, diagnosis, and treatment of disease. It was founded in 2018 by Noam Solomon (CEO) and Luis Voloch (CTO); the company has raised $295M in funding to-date.

CEO Noam Solomon says that only a year ago, the company had to invest resources to attract the attention of big pharma companies. Now we get requests from C-level executives that already know the company and want to partner, which clearly help us grow faster.

There is something about the direct and straightforward nature of Israelis. Noam Solomon

The pandemic greatly accelerated their unicorn status: Our mission is to fully map and unlock the secrets of the human immune system and develop better medicines. Covid19 had a huge impact on the world and on all of us, and it demonstrated how critically important understanding the human immune system is. Our unique value proposition became more attractive to investors and partners and ignited our growth. He credits much of the companys success to the Israeli culture: There is something about the direct and straightforward nature of Israelis, who feel more comfortable sharing their disagreement without apologizing, that when coupled with a strong team above I mentality, can create a whole much larger than the sum of its parts.

Tipalti, a leading global payables solution, announced it has raised $270 million in series F funding at a valuation of $8.3 billion, bringing total funding raised to date to just over $550 million and placing it among the most valuable private fintech companies in the world. Thousands of global companies, from Amazon Twitch, GoDaddy, Roku, to WordPress.com, and ZipRecruiter etc., use Tipalti to reduce operational workload by 80%.

The recent shift by which Israeli entrepreneurs are no longer seeking an "exit" at a moderate ... [+] valuation is a sign of the mature approach." Chen Amit

CEO Chen Amit admits that the companys unicorn status has impacted employees, hiring, and the ecosystem as well as the customers. Covid played a huge role in the companys growth: With remote work, there is the need to digitize finance processes that were previously manual. He defines the growing unicorn phenomena as part of the industrys maturity. The recent shift by which Israeli entrepreneurs are no longer seeking an "exit" at a moderate valuation is a sign of the mature approach. I believe that considering Israels small population, it was overrepresented in the tech economy, and now it is overrepresented in the unicorn community. Chen goes even further and says that the term unicorn is obsolete. It's no longer such a unique and fantastic being. There are too many unicorns around for this term to be relevant. I wish that there was a different term for $1B companies, and perhaps the real unicorns today are companies valued at $50B or $100B which is really rare for private companies.

Believe You Will Find a Solution to Any Given Problem

Melio, a leading B2B payments platform for small businesses whose mission is to Keep Small Business in Business has raised over $500 million to date, with its latest funding round in September bringing the companys value to $4 billion. Matan Bar, CEO, says that just two years ago, pre-Covid, the company had 30 employees. Today it has almost 500. The strong culture we built made this expansion possible; however, there is also a growing trend by which people are interested in transitioning from large corporations to pre-IPO startups like us. Covid created the ideal opportunity, he admits. We were in the right place at the right time and are now the fastest-growing B2B payments company in the U.S. There are $14 trillion in funds in the U.S. that are transferred in checks between businesses. But during the pandemic, businesses that were used to paying their suppliers in checks suddenly found that they had to transition to digital payments. Also, many small businesses faced more frequent and severe cash flow challenges due to global financial volatility. We grew our team quickly to make sure we provided the right level of support during a time they needed us the most. He credits much of their success to Melios Israeli roots: Creativity is usually sparked when there are obstacles to overcome and Israel has faced many obstacles since it was established.

We were in the right place at the right time and are now the fastest-growing B2B payments company ... [+] in the U.S." Matan Bar

Orca Security, the cloud security innovation leader, is valued at $1.8 Billion. Today, the company provides instant-on security and compliance for Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, and many more. CEO Avi Shua says that in 2021 alone, Orca Security achieved more than 800 percent year-over-year growth, expanded rapidly around the globe, gained notable customers across industries, went from dozens to hundreds of employees, and opened a London office as well as a U.S. headquarters in Portland, Oregon. Like many of the other new Israeli unicorns, the company noted a huge increase in demand when Covid struck, and that demand is only growing. I spent a decade in Unit 8200 of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), and another decade at Check Point Software as its chief technologist. The most important cyber security defense lesson I learned in the IDF was that security basics are always more important than shiny new security toys because attackers will use the simplest means possible to breach your defenses. Theres a popular Unit 8200 mantra, he shares, that also rings true for entrepreneurs: Believe youll find a solution to any given problem. Never assume that existing approaches are the only possible solutions. So, we invented an entirely new approach to cloud security that doesnt rely on installing and maintaining agents or network scanning tools. Those legacy approaches didnt provide complete coverage back then and they certainly dont work for the cloud.

"Believe youll find a solution to any given problem." Avi Shua

A Unicorn Bubble?

Zilka admits there is clearly a concern with some of the valuations, as they represent 50-300X over next year revenues. Though revenues are strong, expenses are also mushrooming. Nevertheless, the majority of these companies have clear Product Market Fit, strong pull from customers, unique offerings, meaningful revenues, strong growth rates, as well as strong leadership and management teams.

As for the driving force behind the major growth, Zilka credits the Israeli entrepreneurs who have the experience and desire to swing for the fences. Whether its the large pool of second-time entrepreneurs, the graduates of the elite military units taking their knowledge of building large scale complicated software solutions to the private sector or the seasoned technologists who put in the time at leading multinational corporations, the breadth and depth of this talent pool is putting the Israeli ecosystem ahead of the pack.

Link:

More And More Israelis Are Growing Horns: Startup Nation Out, Big Tech Nation In - Forbes

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