Category Archives: Evolution

TUCSON, Ariz. (KGUN) Recently, the National Science Foundation awarded Biosphere 2's Landscape Evolution Observatory a $3.5 million grant to study how life grows in certain landscapes, particularly those impacted by fires or volcanic eruptions.

The Landscape Evolution Observatory or LEO is the world's largest laboratory experiment in the interdisciplinary Earth sciences and it's dedicated to understanding complex ecosystems. After years of planning, construction started in 2011 and took about 15 months to build.

Over the last five years, the scientists have observed how landscapes change without plant life other than moss and microbes. Now, the grant will allow the team to grow plants and make it a more complete ecosystem.

"It's a new laboratory where we can learn how to built ecosystems from scratch," Scott Saleska, University of Arizona and LEO's director, said. "There's nothing growing on it now but we just recieved a $3.5 million grant to help put life on LEO."

Saleska said the experiment helps shed light on the impacts of climate change on our ecosystem, especially in terms of water. He said the experiement helps them understand how landscapes work which will help us learn how to restore damaged landscapes.

"The idea is that this will give us the science to restore landscapes to recover mill tailings to mines and to deal with desertification and all the problems that are buffeting our globe from climate change," Saleska said.

Because LEO allows scientists to watch an ecosystem grow from scratch, Saleska said it's the key to fundamental science and fixing the future.

Leo consists of three steel 100 foot long structures inside glass domes at Biosphere 2 filled with crushed basalt rock, armed with over 1,800 sensors for observation. It mimics watershed in the natural world, which is the area of land where all water that drains goes to the same place like a lake or stream.

We have rainfall sprinklers on here that create rain and one of the great fundamental questions for putting life on Leo or life on the planet is water," Saleska said. "And it's about learning how life interacts with water especially as water becomes more limited, as it is happening in Arizona because of climate change."

The new research will bring insight into the effects of the changing climate on the landscapes and even help tell astronauts how to grow crops on Mars. ----

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Grant awarded to Landscape Evolution Observatory at Biosphere 2 - KGUN

Hindsight is 20/20. When asked how the smart cities movement has changed in the past five years, many city leaders describe how an early exuberance for the potential of new smart city technologies may have distracted them from their primary concern: the residents, their perspectives and their needs.

Five years ago, the smart cities movement was not focused on people, said Portland, Oregon,Smart City PDX Manager, Kevin Martin, in response to several questions from a recent Smart Cities Dive survey of the smart cities movement over the past five years.It was focused on technology that was oversold and that communities werent asking for, he said.

That technology-first approach "largely failed"because cities were not trusted stewards of data and technology, especially in underserved communities, Martin said. Also, cities lacked policy processes and systems that support the increased use and collection of data that new technologies provided, he added.

Portlands smart cities approach has changed since then, according to Martin. "Its been a satisfying evolution, from focusing on technologies like autonomous vehicles to developing more comprehensive, just approaches to becoming a digital city, in partnership with Portland communities,"he said.

Local leaders from other major U.S. cities also said in the survey that they have shifted the focus of their smart city initiatives over the past five years from implementing the newest technologies to prioritizing the needs of their community and its residents. Some of those new priorities include finding smarter ways including with new technologies to meet those needs while safeguarding residents privacy. Sparking a lot of that change was the COVID-19 pandemic, which surfaced inequities, especially around digital access, and highlighted the need for governments to transform.

The U.S. smart cities movement to date has been marked by high-profile projects that havent always come to fruition, including Sidewalk Labs Toronto development and Replicas work in Portland, Oregon. Other major technology players have also apparently lost some steam: Early smart cities enthusiast and tech giant Cisco announced at the end of last year that it was foldingone of its main smart cities software platforms.

In recent years, the sense of what innovation looks like has evolved, noted JenSanders, executive director of the North Texas Innovation Alliance, which is also part of the larger National Smart Coalitions Partnership.

"The movement and coined term of 'smart cities' was very focused on the big audacious vision,"and the way people described that vision, it "often came in the form of things like self-driving and self-flying cars and other flashy representations,"she wrote in an email interview.

Even those who saw value in such efforts are realizing now where they may have fallen short.

Five years ago, the focus on new technology generated new data streams that helped inform various problems cities were facing, but it was difficult to justify the technologys cost, said Linda Gerull, executive director of San Franciscos technology department and the citys chief information officer. It was not used in a way that delivered new service, she said.

"While these technologies were exciting, there was a hollowness to the topic because [they] did not completely address the challenges and needs of residents,"said Gerull.

Vendors drove the "first wave"of the smart cities movement, selling new hardware and software that they said would make cities smarter, said Debra Lam, managing director of Georgia Techs Smart Cities and Inclusive Innovation initiative. It created an unnecessary "tech arms race,"she said.

When pursuing these technologies, many cities were not starting with a problem first, said Lam. "They were kind of thinking, heres the solution, and trying to figure out how this would fit in the city, versus starting with the problem and thinking about what the most appropriate technologies would be in their wider toolkit,"said Lam.

Cities are now finally starting to select interventions and projects from a menu of available technologies that are based on local conditions and concerns, said Jennifer Clark, professor and head of Ohio State Universitys city and regional planning section within its College of Engineering. As that thinking has shifted, cities have boosted their in-house smart city expertise, allowing local leaders to focus more on using the technology to address the needs of the city and its residents, said Lam.

Smart city companies, Clark added, are also recognizing the complexity of the smart cities market and the realities of building and managing public-private partnerships.

On the more everyday scale of city operations, technology innovations have yet to meaningfully address certain city challenges, including illegal dumping, neighborhood blight and flood monitoring, according to Houston Mayors Office of Innovation Director Jesse Bounds.

And if smart city innovations require residents to interact with government via technology, todays greater awareness of the depth of the digital divide indicates the progress cities still need to make on that front. Its "difficult to talk about smart cities"when many residents dont even have access or the ability to use a computer or the internet, Bounds said in response to the survey.

"There are lots of novel solutions that would work in an ideal lab-type environment, but nothing feasible at scale,"he said.

Today, the "digital cities"concept is now widely used to describe modernizing and transforming city services and systems, providing better accessibility to residents, and viewing service from an equity perspective, San Franciscos Gerull said. It also places cybersecurity and data privacy as its cornerstones.

The core elements of a smart city, Sanders with the North Texas Innovation Alliance said, are rarely visible to the average person walking down the street. However, she said, people can experience the impacts of those investments in their daily lives, such as shortened commute times, faster 911 responses or lower incidence of asthma.

"This is why starting with the simple and, in many cases, the 'unsexy' technologies is what creates the building blocks toward full value,"she said. "With the anchor infrastructure, governance and functionality covered, the public sector can get to a risk/innovation balance of 'pragmatically flashy'."

Karen Lightman, executive director of Carnegie Mellon Universitys Metro21: Smart Cities Institute, noted that some of the most transformational changes cities can make today stem from simply breaking down silos of information, often stored in archaic ways, and making data open and accessible.

Some cities are communicating their more modest goals and efforts as well as the resident-first approach they are taking.Lightman pointed to the city of Bostons Smart City Playbook as a leading example of how a city has strived to define and communicate how it will interact with vendors and potential technologies.

Kris Carter, co-chair of the Boston Mayors Office of New Urban Mechanics, elaborated on that approach. During the past five years, the city has "reframed innovation as care,"he said in his survey response. Bostons smart city efforts are "not about moving fast and breaking things'but rather as an exercise in care caring for, caring with, caring about,"Carter said. He also said the city has moved to "not worship efficiency because a city is not a stream of data; its people, and sometimes the social fabric of a city is lost with a singular focus on process improvement."

The city of Orlando has also reoriented its approach. In 2019, it started developing its first smart city master plan, which it has since reframed as plans for a "Future-Ready City."The city is now in the process of implementing short-term strategies the plan outlines related to better defining the digital divide, partnering with the entrepreneur community, testing out food recovery logistics platforms, and other efforts, said Future-Ready Director Michael Hess in response to the survey.

Once led by vendors and their priorities, smart cities are now defined by city governments and their priorities, said David Edinger, Denvers chief information officer.

Denver now is focusing on "less than a handful"of smart initiatives to avoid spreading its resources too thinly, said Edinger in response to the survey question. This includes an initiative that aims to improve air quality near schools and a data hub project that Edinger considers "the backbone of future efforts."

Washington, D.C. also shifted its smart city focus in recent years from technology to how it trains and prepares its employees, residents and businesses so they can all have a fair shot in the digital age, the citys Office of the Chief Technology Officer said in a statement in response to the survey.

The smart cities concept has become more holistic, according to Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego, moving beyond the implementation of technology to encompass meaningful community engagement, fluid communication capabilities, eliminating waste, sustainable environmental practices, the smarter use of resources and a better quality of life.

But the shift to that new approach has also been a challenge for many in the space.

"While the concept of smart cities is becoming more familiar, it remains a new concept for many practitioners,"said Gallego in her survey response. "It is challenging to ensure practitioners understand the comprehensive approach and holistic thinking necessary to achieve a truly smart city."

The COVID-19 pandemic shattered the normalcy of city life, closing stores and restaurants, emptying out offices and commuter trains, and sending hordes of delivery drivers dashing through the streets. It forced cities to reassess their priorities and challenged city leaders to become more inclusive in their planning.

Some shortcomings became apparent when cities turned to technology for their COVID response. Dallas quickly learned it had a language problem, for example. "While translation services have been made available for some resident-facing city services, the pandemic and the shift to more prevalent use of digital communication led to an increased need for a wider variety of language access,"said Amanda Nabours, IT architect for the city of Dallas, in response to the survey.The city subsequently created a map that details the most commonly spoken languages in each ZIP code, enabling Dallas to expand the availability of translation services and materials.

The pandemic also laid bare the limitations of technology in underserved communities.The chief innovation officer for San Antonio, Brian Dillard, said in response to the survey question that it "created more urgency around issues like the digital divide, data governance, digital infrastructure and community co-creation."

That was echoed by Jeanne Holm, deputy mayor of budget and innovation for the city of Los Angeles. "The pandemic changed the way Los Angeles provisioned its services and heightened its focus towards equity, especially surrounding issues of internet access and connectivity and digital literacy,"she replied to the survey.

"What COVID did around internet access is that it made the inequities impossible not to see,"said LaVonna Lewis, associate dean of diversity, equity and inclusion at the University of Southern California Sol Price School of Public Policy. Schoolchildren suddenly forced to attend classes online may not have had internet access at home, or they had service that couldnt support siblings and working parents all attempting to be online at the same time.

Some cities were hit hard by the downturn in tax and other revenues as businesses shut down, tourism all but stopped and conventions were called off. "The federal intervention very much helped the cities, but it's harder when your tax base is not strong to begin with,"said David Sloane, a professor in the Department of Urban Planning and Spatial Analysis within the Price School of Public Policy at the University of Southern California.

Finding funds for smart city projects became a "limitation"as cities imposed drastic budget cuts, said Philadelphia Smart City Director Emily Yates in response to the survey.

Detroit Chief Information Officer Art Thompson also said in his survey response that "financial challenges will continue to be challenging as we look to provide more information."

Like other parts of the tech sector, the smart cities movement is "maturing,"Ohio State Universitys Clark said. The shift, she said, is partially due to pushback from citizens groups against specific interventions, like data-gathering smart streetlights, and large-scale integrated smart development projects like the discontinued Sidewalk Labs initiative in Toronto.

"Today, community engagement and trust are essential to setting smart cities priorities when adopting tools and processes designed for communities,"Clark said.

One issue with this "techlash"is that it has spurred views of technology that are "very extreme one way or the other,"said Lightman. "What I worry about is this idea that all facial recognition is bad. And it's this very black and white thinking,"she said.

On the connected and autonomous vehicle front, for example, regulatory changes and the heavy lift of consensus-building have slowed progress, noted Tampa, Florida, Smart Mobility Manager Brandon Campbell in response to the survey.Were still seeing advances, but five years ago, the industry may have had overly optimistic aspirations for the timeline of the technologys maturation, he said.

Portland is now also focused on rebuilding trust and applying basic justice principles to its smart city work, said Martin. It is developing new policies with various underrepresented communities that provide a foundation for its use of its data and technology, such as policies that ensure surveillance technology, machine learning and artificial intelligence do not harm civil rights and liberties, he said.

"We think that [the process of rebuilding trust] starts with community engagement, policy development, and new systems to govern data and technology, said Martin. Digital justice demands more transparency, accountability, and access to resources, literacy, information and decision-making in technology and information."

Change is coming also as a result of the pandemic. Previously, said LAs Holm, the citys "smart city focus was more towards technologies versus who can access the technologies and understand how to use [them]."

In Philadelphia, where a quarter of the population is at or below the federal poverty level, "Equity and inclusion are critical to all SmartCityPHL pilots and projects,"according to Yates.

But USCs Lewis cautioned that what planners may want might not be what city residents want or see value in. "If they're not the things that they want, or they're not educated on how [initiatives] may be responsive to some of the things that they want, then there's a disconnect, and we've got to deal with that disconnect,"she said.

San Antonios Dillard concurred. "The pandemic has made smart city approaches that center on peoples needs even more urgent."

Cailin Crowe contributed reporting to this story.

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Smart city evolution: How cities have stepped back from a 'tech arms race' - Smart Cities Dive

Chevron Corporation (CVX) is priced at $115.85 after the most recent trading session. At the very opening of the session, the stock price was $113.80 and reached a high price of $114.305, prior to closing the session it reached the value of $114.23. The stock touched a low price of $113.59.Recently in News on November 3, 2021, Trial Lawyer Majed Nachawati Appointed Co-Lead Counsel in Litigation Over Weed Killers Links to Parkinsons Disease. Consolidated lawsuits in California seek justice for those exposed to paraquat. You can read further details here

Chevron Corporation had a pretty favorable run when it comes to the market performance. The 1-year high price for the companys stock is recorded $116.21 on 11/10/21, with the lowest value was $83.89 for the same time period, recorded on 01/04/21.

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Price records that include history of low and high prices in the period of 52 weeks can tell a lot about the stocks existing status and the future performance. Presently, Chevron Corporation shares are logging -0.31% during the 52-week period from high price, and 42.97% higher than the lowest price point for the same timeframe. The stocks price range for the 52-week period managed to maintain the performance between $81.03 and $116.21.

The companys shares, operating in the sector of Energy managed to top a trading volume set approximately around 4207810 for the day, which was evidently lower, when compared to the average daily volumes of the shares.

When it comes to the year-to-date metrics, the Chevron Corporation (CVX) recorded performance in the market was 35.26%, having the revenues showcasing 13.19% on a quarterly basis in comparison with the same period year before. At the time of this writing, the total market value of the company is set at 220.06B, as it employees total of 47736 workers.

During the last month, 17 analysts gave the Chevron Corporation a BUY rating, 2 of the polled analysts branded the stock as an OVERWEIGHT, 13 analysts were recommending to HOLD this stock, 0 of them gave the stock UNDERWEIGHT rating, and 0 of the polled analysts provided SELL rating.

According to the data provided on Barchart.com, the moving average of the company in the 100-day period was set at 103.63, with a change in the price was noted +8.82. In a similar fashion, Chevron Corporation posted a movement of +8.23% for the period of last 100 days, recording 10,132,732 in trading volumes.

Total Debt to Equity Ratio (D/E) can also provide valuable insight into the companys financial health and market status. The debt to equity ratio can be calculated by dividing the present total liabilities of a company by shareholders equity. Debt to Equity thus makes a valuable metrics that describes the debt, company is using in order to support assets, correlating with the value of shareholders equity The total Debt to Equity ratio for CVX is recording 0.27 at the time of this writing. In addition, long term Debt to Equity ratio is set at 0.27.

Raw Stochastic average of Chevron Corporation in the period of last 50 days is set at 98.91%. The result represents improvement in oppose to Raw Stochastic average for the period of the last 20 days, recording 96.10%. In the last 20 days, the companys Stochastic %K was 80.19% and its Stochastic %D was recorded 78.29%.

Bearing in mind the latest performance of Chevron Corporation, several moving trends are noted. Year-to-date Price performance of the companys stock appears to be pessimistic, given the fact the metric is recording 35.26%. Additionally, trading for the stock in the period of the last six months notably improved by 3.09%, alongside a boost of 41.60% for the period of the last 12 months. The shares increased approximately by -0.44% in the 7-day charts and went down by 4.98% in the period of the last 30 days. Common stock shares were driven by 13.19% during last recorded quarter.

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Chevron Corporation (CVX) is primed for evolution with the beta value of 1.27 - The InvestChronicle

Over the years, financial practices have developed to keep pace with the rapid improvement in technologies. One of the best examples is the crypto trading market, which transacts digital assets using a digital trading system.

Particularly, the unregulated and decentralised nature of the Bitcoin marketplace has turned out to be a goldmine for aspiring traders who are trying to make significant profits.

Auto-trading apps have made cryptocurrency trading easier than ever before. Even if you only trade contracts for difference or CFDs, you can generate a substantial income from it.

Bitcoin Evolution is a software application that incorporates cutting-edge technology and complex algorithms that have made crypto trading easier by simplifying the process. Besides, you can also check out the bitcoin revolution review to learn more about this apps earning potential.

A market-leading trading app like Bitcoin Evolution has been a popular choice for investors because of its simplicity, outstanding reputation, and high accuracy. The platforms accuracy rate is higher than that of most other applications available today. Using the softwares automatic trading mode, users may identify and profit from variations in the price of cryptocurrencies.

Advantages for Traders

A quality trading app has a number of interesting options. Simple, quick transactions and withdrawals are made possible because of the apps user-friendly interface. Within days or weeks of signing up, the programme allows users to generate big money.

Besides, the app has a few more advantages:

A User-Friendly Interface

When it comes to user experience, a trading app provides a great one. It is difficult for consumers to navigate and conduct critical functions on most other programmes in the dynamic crypto market because of their complicated design. This is why traders feel helpless when navigating important areas using these types of apps. Top-tier trading apps like Bitcoin Evolution have been designed with ease of use in mind, especially for first-time traders.

Traders excitement for crypto trading is often dampened by complicated trading apps. A trading apps principal goal is to make the work of even novice traders easy instead of causing them to be confused.

For example, in the Bitcoin Evolution app, users can simply move through various sections and execute a wide range of tasks with only a few clicks. To use the programme, there is no need for you to have the technical knowledge or comprehend complex code.

Provides Accurate Trading Alerts

To increase their chances of making money, traders typically buy many crypto tokens instead of trading on just one. With this in mind, the developers of trading apps have integrated a bot that scans the financial market and tracks price movements of cryptocurrencies to help traders make the most money possible.

Alerts from various crypto assets are detected by trading apps. All cryptocurrencies are extensively analysed, their prospective price variations are examined, and the ones that are expected to rise the most are selected. To maximise your chances of making more money, you might choose trading on certain websites considering the apps signals.

Extensive Market Analysis

Often even the most experienced cryptocurrency traders might lose money due to hurried trading. New traders should stay away from such high-risk trading practices. In the bitcoin market, overambitious trading may prove to be costly. Automated trading is a good alternative for novice investors who want to reduce their risk and increase their chances of earning significant profits.

A leading trading software application analyses a large volume of data in a matter of minutes to predict which crypto prices will increase and decrease. Trades may be made gradually while avoiding losses thanks to this function, which reduces the need for manual trading.

Data and Funds Security

A trading app applies a robust and high level of security to safeguard investors data and funds. SSL Encryption is used to protect traders confidential data and earnings from hackers.

Investors Can Trade on Various Crypto Tokens

Cryptocurrencies that are authorised to be traded on trading programmes are determined by current rules. Apps like Bitcoin Evolution may be used to buy and sell a wide range of digital currencies.

The software can help you become financially independent by generating regular income. By signing up and depositing 250/250, you can start live trading right away.

So, if you want to increase your profits, now is the time to sign up for the Bitcoin Evolution app. In the profitable crypto industry, many traders are achieving their financial goals, and now its time for you to make the most of it.

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The Evolution of Bitcoin has Opened New Doors to Earning Opportunities - The London Economic

Lets start up with the current stock price of fuboTV Inc. (FUBO), which is $24.92 to be very precise. The Stock rose vividly during the last session to $25.24 after opening rate of $25.10 while the lowest price it went was recorded $24.06 before closing at $24.54.Recently in News on November 11, 2021, fuboTV to Participate in November 2021 Virtual Investor Conferences. fuboTV Inc. (NYSE: FUBO), the leading sports-first live TV streaming platform, announced today that Co-founder and CEO David Gandler and CFO Simone Nardi will present and host one-on-one investor meetings at the following investor conferences this month:. You can read further details here

fuboTV Inc. had a pretty favorable run when it comes to the market performance. The 1-year high price for the companys stock is recorded $57.47 on 01/27/21, with the lowest value was $14.64 for the same time period, recorded on 05/11/21.

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Price records that include history of low and high prices in the period of 52 weeks can tell a lot about the stocks existing status and the future performance. Presently, fuboTV Inc. shares are logging -59.99% during the 52-week period from high price, and 70.22% higher than the lowest price point for the same timeframe. The stocks price range for the 52-week period managed to maintain the performance between $14.64 and $62.29.

The companys shares, operating in the sector of Communication Services managed to top a trading volume set approximately around 3817445 for the day, which was evidently lower, when compared to the average daily volumes of the shares.

When it comes to the year-to-date metrics, the fuboTV Inc. (FUBO) recorded performance in the market was -12.36%, having the revenues showcasing -10.89% on a quarterly basis in comparison with the same period year before. At the time of this writing, the total market value of the company is set at 3.61B, as it employees total of 220 workers.

During the last month, 0 analysts gave the fuboTV Inc. a BUY rating, 0 of the polled analysts branded the stock as an OVERWEIGHT, 0 analysts were recommending to HOLD this stock, 0 of them gave the stock UNDERWEIGHT rating, and 0 of the polled analysts provided SELL rating.

According to the data provided on Barchart.com, the moving average of the company in the 100-day period was set at 27.85, with a change in the price was noted -7.52. In a similar fashion, fuboTV Inc. posted a movement of -23.28% for the period of last 100 days, recording 6,779,374 in trading volumes.

Total Debt to Equity Ratio (D/E) can also provide valuable insight into the companys financial health and market status. The debt to equity ratio can be calculated by dividing the present total liabilities of a company by shareholders equity. Debt to Equity thus makes a valuable metrics that describes the debt, company is using in order to support assets, correlating with the value of shareholders equity The total Debt to Equity ratio for FUBO is recording 0.53 at the time of this writing. In addition, long term Debt to Equity ratio is set at 0.52.

Raw Stochastic average of fuboTV Inc. in the period of last 50 days is set at 16.64%. The result represents improvement in oppose to Raw Stochastic average for the period of the last 20 days, recording 6.52%. In the last 20 days, the companys Stochastic %K was 4.01% and its Stochastic %D was recorded 11.44%.

Now, considering the stocks previous presentation, multiple moving trends are noted. Year-to-date Price performance of the companys stock appears to be encouraging, given the fact the metric is recording -12.36%. Additionally, trading for the stock in the period of the last six months notably improved by 20.29%, alongside a boost of 59.14% for the period of the last 12 months. The shares increased approximately by -25.23% in the 7-day charts and went down by -11.54% in the period of the last 30 days. Common stock shares were lifted by -10.89% during last recorded quarter.

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fuboTV Inc. (FUBO) is primed for evolution with the beta value of 3.03 - The InvestChronicle

LEHI, Utah, Nov. 15, 2021 /PRNewswire/ --Podium, a communication and payments platform for local businesses, announced today it has raised $201 million in Series D funding, led by YC Continuity with participation from Durable Capital Partners, Arpex Capital, Accel, Album VC, IVP, Sapphire Ventures, Summit Partners, and Sorenson Capital. This latest round brings the company's valuation to over $3 billion.

"We see this as a watershed moment for local businesses all over the world, especially as the world opens up again and local businesses are tasked with meeting the changing preferences of consumers who have welcomed digital-first interactions through the pandemic," said Eric Rea, co-founder and CEO of Podium. "Our goal is to help communities get back on their feet and to help local businesses participate in a meaningful way in the digital evolution happening at the local level."

Podium is helping thousands of local businesses facilitate millions of interactions with consumers today, from text messaging, website chat, marketing campaigns, to payment transactions. Podium's mission is to help all local businesses thrive, and will continue to play an integral role in transitioning their analog operations to a digital one, so that they can get back to what they do best -- serve their customers.

"Podium brings world-class marketing and payments tools to the small and medium businesses that power our economy and employ the lion's share of workers. These businesses have traditionally been overlooked by technology companies," says Ali Rowghani, Managing Director of YC Continuity. "Podium's products level the playing field for SMBs and help them compete in a changing world."

Additional funding will support Podium's expansion to reach more local businesses all over the world as well as deeper investments to build out their payments, communications and marketing technology. This includes supporting everything a local business may need to collect payments, manage all their communications with consumers, and create more personalized and effective marketing campaigns that drive conversations and revenue.

About Podium Podium exists to help local businesses thrive, so they can focus on what matters most: their customers. Today, more than 100,000 local businesses are powered by Podium, helping to facilitate millions of customer interactions and payment transactions. From customer-generated reviews, to more seamless communication offerings and contactless payment tools, Podium is modernizing the way local businesses operate and grow their businesses. Podium is headquartered in Lehi, Utah, and was founded in 2014. To learn more, visit http://www.podium.com.

About YC Continuity YC Continuityis a growth fund that invests early in Y Combinator's most elite companies. In addition to Podium, their portfolio includes Stripe, Coinbase, DoorDash, Instacart, Checkr, Brex, Zapier, Fivetran, Faire, GitLab, Gusto, Segment, and others.

SOURCE Podium

Messaging Tools For Local Business

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Podium Raises $201M in Series D Funding to Accelerate the Digital Evolution for Local Businesses - PRNewswire

MoneyGram International Inc. (MGI) is priced at $6.30 after the most recent trading session. At the very opening of the session, the stock price was $5.74 and reached a high price of $6.475, prior to closing the session it reached the value of $5.60. The stock touched a low price of $5.71.Recently in News on November 10, 2021, MoneyGram to Participate in Northcoast Research Virtual Fall Management Forum. MoneyGram International, Inc. (NASDAQ: MGI), the global leader in the evolution of digital P2P payments, today announced that Alex Holmes, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, and Larry Angelilli, Chief Financial Officer, will participate in investor meetings at the Northcoast Research Virtual Fall Management Forum on Monday, November 15, 2021. To request a meeting, please contact your Northcoast Research representative. You can read further details here

MoneyGram International Inc. had a pretty favorable run when it comes to the market performance. The 1-year high price for the companys stock is recorded $12.36 on 07/21/21, with the lowest value was $5.06 for the same time period, recorded on 11/03/21.

3 Tiny Stocks Primed to Explode The world's greatest investor Warren Buffett has a simple formula for making big money in the markets. He buys up valuable assets when they are very cheap. For stock market investors that means buying up cheap small cap stocks like these with huge upside potential.

We've set up an alert service to help smart investors take full advantage of the small cap stocks primed for big returns.

Click here for full details and to join for free

Sponsored

Price records that include history of low and high prices in the period of 52 weeks can tell a lot about the stocks existing status and the future performance. Presently, MoneyGram International Inc. shares are logging -49.03% during the 52-week period from high price, and 27.79% higher than the lowest price point for the same timeframe. The stocks price range for the 52-week period managed to maintain the performance between $4.93 and $12.36.

The companys shares, operating in the sector of Financial managed to top a trading volume set approximately around 7193825 for the day, which was evidently higher, when compared to the average daily volumes of the shares.

When it comes to the year-to-date metrics, the MoneyGram International Inc. (MGI) recorded performance in the market was 15.28%, having the revenues showcasing -30.46% on a quarterly basis in comparison with the same period year before. At the time of this writing, the total market value of the company is set at 513.51M, as it employees total of 2269 workers.

During the last month, 0 analysts gave the MoneyGram International Inc. a BUY rating, 0 of the polled analysts branded the stock as an OVERWEIGHT, 0 analysts were recommending to HOLD this stock, 0 of them gave the stock UNDERWEIGHT rating, and 0 of the polled analysts provided SELL rating.

According to the data provided on Barchart.com, the moving average of the company in the 100-day period was set at 8.72, with a change in the price was noted -4.21. In a similar fashion, MoneyGram International Inc. posted a movement of -40.06% for the period of last 100 days, recording 2,153,831 in trading volumes.

Raw Stochastic average of MoneyGram International Inc. in the period of last 50 days is set at 29.11%. The result represents downgrade in oppose to Raw Stochastic average for the period of the last 20 days, recording 44.45%. In the last 20 days, the companys Stochastic %K was 26.70% and its Stochastic %D was recorded 22.80%.

Lets take a glance in the erstwhile performances of MoneyGram International Inc., multiple moving trends are noted. Year-to-date Price performance of the companys stock appears to be pessimistic, given the fact the metric is recording 15.28%. Additionally, trading for the stock in the period of the last six months notably deteriorated by -16.45%, alongside a boost of 1.29% for the period of the last 12 months. The shares increased approximately by 20.00% in the 7-day charts and went up by -19.33% in the period of the last 30 days. Common stock shares were lifted by -30.46% during last recorded quarter.

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MoneyGram International Inc. (MGI) is primed for evolution with the beta value of 1.46 - The InvestChronicle

An underrated joy of modern life is that you dont have to watch live TV to see all of the uncomfortable situations people find themselves in on live TV. I dont even own a television, nor would I ever watch NBC Sports coverage of a NASCAR race, yet I still got the chance to see the October 2 clip of the reporter Kelli Stavast attempting to interview the race-car driver Brandon Brown after an unexpected victory while the crowd behind them chanted Fuck Joe Biden. And you can hear the chants from the crowd, Stavast narrated for the camera, before repeating what she seemed to think she was hearing: Lets go, Brandon. As I would say after texting this link to someone in the middle of the workday: LOL!

Then it became a hashtag and a whole thing, which you may have heard about. People who dont like Joe Biden picked up Lets go, Brandon and immediately ran the joke into the ground. People who do like Joe Biden started fighting it on social media, as if the phrase were the latest and greatest threat to democracy, and social media were the place where great threats to democracy should be fought. This is political discourse in the Twitter era: A hashtag becomes annoying to a group of people, so they try to repurpose it, or replace it with an artificially juiced hashtag of their own. If you happen to have seen a liberal on your timeline in the past few weeks tweeting #ThankYouBrandon to a president they are purporting to like and support, this is why. But as for all of it together, the bigger question is still unanswered: Why?

Republican politicians embraced Lets go, Brandon with verve, probably because it recalled the unhinged, grassroots meme energy that defined the Trump presidency. Representative Jeff Duncan of South Carolina found a Lets Go Brandon face mask to wear; Senator Ted Cruz of Texas did a couple of confusing tweets signaling his enjoyment of the phrase; Representative Bill Posey of Florida was the first to say it during a speech on the floor of Congress. Lauren Boebert, the representative from Colorado who is better known for having once endorsed the QAnon conspiracy theory, had Lets Go Brandon added to the back of a dress she wore to a party at Donald Trumps Mar-a-Lago resort in early November, imitating Alexandria Ocasio-Cortezs Tax the Rich Met Gala gown.

Meanwhile, the attention economy provides other incentives. TikTok and Twitter users uploaded clips of groups chanting Lets go, Brandon at various sporting events; someone hacked two random road signs in Northern Virginia to display the phrase; a handful of people incorporated it into their Halloween costume, and at least one guy put it on his truck. More than one TikTok user rearranged big, decorative letters at Hobby Lobby to spell out Lets go, Brandon, in pursuit of going a little viral. When Bryson Gray, a rapper who has been profiled by The New Yorker for being both a Trump supporter and a rapper, released a Lets Go Brandon song, it displaced Adele from the top of the iTunes sales chart. Predictably, the Trump campaign started selling Lets Go Brandon T-shirts too.

If this all sounds sort of juvenile to you: Yes. Which might be why liberalsscarred from the 2016 election, when they learned that juvenile memes and online pranks could be cause for concernreacted as if Lets go, Brandon were code for something more sinister than a pretty boring insult, and then chose to respond to Brandon (in a juvenile way) with more Brandon. In early November, MeidasTouch, an anti-Trump political action committee specializing in social media, started encouraging its followers to subvert the original #LetsGoBrandon hashtag by posting sincere thank-you notes to the president and tagging them #ThankYouBrandon. Lol we always ruin their moronic and childish slogans, the well-known #Resistance figure Scott Dworkin joked with his 1 million followers. This worked to the extent that #ThankYouBrandon became a trending hashtag in the U.S., though it also prompted a victory lap for the #LetsGoBrandon crowd, which had been presented with yet another opportunity to point out that the left is cringe and cant meme. Soon, MeidasTouch was selling #ThankYouBrandon T-shirts, hoodies, and coffee mugs.

In other words, Democrats are reclaiming the name Brandon from Republicans. But to what end? In spirit, Brandon vs. Brandon recalls the manic energy of the 2016 election cycle, when Trump voters reclaimed the insult deplorables as a badge of honor and then Hillary Clinton voters eagerly took up nasty woman, in a showdown of symmetrical, unbearable smugness. But todays hashtag tug-of-war has a little more in common with last summers push by K-Pop fans to flood the #WhiteLivesMatter hashtagitself a backlash to the original #BlackLivesMatter movementwith irrelevant content and videos of K-Pop stars. Those efforts were of dubious utility, and the K-Pop fans were criticized afterward for having turned #WhiteLivesMatter into a trending topic on Twitter and thereby expanding its reach.

Leticia Bode, a communication researcher at Georgetown University, has studied a related behavior, which she and her colleagues labeled hashjacking. For a paper published in 2014, they looked at how Tea Party conservatives deployed liberal hashtags like #p2for Progressives 2.0during the 2010 midterms in the hopes of encroaching on oppositions keywords to inject contrary perspectives into a discourse stream. (Others have since observed the right-wing hijacking of the popular hashtags #MeToo and #ShoutYourAbortion.) Yet even Bode has no idea whether these sorts of online pranks have any real effects. We dont have good data on whether it works, she told me.

The clearest precedent for Thank you, Brandon began in 2009 with Thanks, Obama, the catchphrase uttered most often by Tea Party personalities and boys I went to high school with. That phrase originated on Twitter in its earliest days of political relevance, and was affixed to snide tweets about Barack Obamas failures, both real and fabricated. By 2012, liberals had flipped around its meaning, such that Thanks, Obama, when attached to some trivial or mundane grievance, could be repurposed as a satire of conservative petulance. But Thanks, Obama would eventually become bipartisan, used online as an absurd, sarcastic rejoinder to pretty much anything. By 2015, Thanks, Obama had grown so old and toothless that Obama himself could riff on it in a BuzzFeed videoand it didnt even make him seem like an oversensitive loser. (Though it is pretty corny to watch now. Its very of its time.)

Already, of course, #ThankYouBrandon is being co-opted by sarcastic Republicans as a sequel to Thanks, Obama. (Walked right into that one!) If Democrats relaxed a little bit, they could turn this around. They could just do what they did last timerepeat the words of the original meme until they become mush. But if I were to predict an outcome here, its that Thank you, Brandon, which makes absolutely no sense, will soon disappear, while Lets go, Brandon, which is at least subversive and fun (to a point), will stick around. For any slogan to take off, it really needs to mean something for people, says the sociologist Jen Schradie, who wrote a 2019 book on digital activism, The Revolution That Wasnt.

Lets go, Brandon does mean something to the people who are chanting it: It means Fuck Joe Biden, which resonates with anybody who strongly dislikes the president, and it also means Nobody can prove that I am saying Fuck Joe Biden, which satisfies the human urge to stick out your tongue. Thank you, Brandon lacks the same power because, uh, Brandon is not the presidents name, and if I liked the president a lot, I wouldnt want to call him some random name that isnt his name.

The rest is here:

The Embarrassing Evolution of 'Let's Go, Brandon' - The Atlantic

With a flash of lightning and a crash of thunder, a mad cackle rings out from a dark laboratory. Inside, a frail, large-lobed scientist hunches over his latest abomination. The archetype of the mad geniusa malevolent, weak-bodied creature with an oversized headdidnt come out of nowhere. It was set in place by early science fiction authorsmost notably H.G. Wells, in books like The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) and War of the Worlds (189798). And, according to humanities scholar Anne Stiles, writers like Wells were taking inspiration from one form of evolutionary theory.

Stiles argues that the now-familiar trope of the mad scientisttraces its roots to the clinical association between genius and insanity that developed in the mid-nineteenth century. In the early 1800s, the Romantics saw the condition as a mystical phenomenon beyond the reach of scientific investigation. The Victorians took a more detached and critical approach. Rather than glorifying creative powers, Victorians pathologized genius and upheld the mediocre man as an evolutionary ideal, Stiles writes. All aberrations from the norm could be seen as pathological, including extreme intelligence.

For the source of many of these ideas, Stiles points to the Mind, the first English journal dedicated to psychology and philosophy, which often hosted popular discussions of genius and insanity. In these papers, scientists, philosophers, and physicians provided an evolutionary rationale for associating genius with things like madness, degeneracy, and infertility. In his essay The Insanity of Genius (1891), Scottish philosopher John Ferguson Nisbet defined genius as a kind of hereditary, degenerate brain condition symptomatic of nerve disorder which runs in the blood.' He declared that genius, insanity, idiocy, scrofula, rickets, gout, consumption, and the other members of the neuropathic family of disorders reveal want of equilibrium in the nervous system. Genius and gout: truly, two sides of the same coin.

In the pages of the Mind, scientists argued (using what Stiles calls surprisingly unscientific rationale) that mankind had evolved larger brains at the expense of muscular strength, reproductive capacity, and moral sensibility. Scientists worried about the potential to pass genius (and, by extension, insanity) on to future generations. Of course, many also conceded that extraordinary men were relatively unlikely to reproduce, with one scientist blaming shy, odd manners, often met with in young persons of genius, according to Stiles.

But what if these nerds did reproduce? Working from Lamarckian theories of evolution, these scientists hypothesized that the more humans relied on their brains, the weaker the rest of their bodies would become. One possible conclusion of rapid Lamarckian brain evolution, then, was a species of morally insane beings boasting enormous cerebrums and minuscule bodies, writes Stiles.

Stiles uses early stories by H.G. Wells as a case study for the cross-fertilization between literature and scientific ideas. In his writings, Wells imagines the distant evolutionary future of mankind. With the mad-scientist villain of The Island of Dr. Moreau, Wells shares a vision of great thinkers as diseased victims of biological determinism, according to Stiles. Stiles also cites Wellss The First Men in the Moon (1901), in which the author depicts brains becoming steadily larger and more powerful as bodies grow smaller and more useless, emotions increasingly muted, and conscience all but silenced.

This nightmarish vision of massively overevolved brains makes appearances across Wellss body of work, taken to the extreme with his vision of malevolent, unfeeling extraterrestrials in War of the Worlds. Thankfully, most modern scientists no longer view this archetype as a terrifying potential future for humanity. Nowadays, the unfeeling mad scientist is much more likely to be found in movies and literature, not in the pages of academic journals.

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By: Anne Stiles

Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 70, No. 2 (Apr., 2009), pp. 317-339

University of Pennsylvania Press

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The Evolution of the Mad Scientist - JSTOR Daily

This article is part of our reviews of AI research papers, a series of posts that explore the latest findings in artificial intelligence.

Hundreds of millions of years of evolution have blessed our planet with a wide variety of lifeforms, each intelligent in its own fashion. Each species has evolved to develop innate skills, learning capacities, and a physical form that ensure its survival in its environment.

But despite being inspired by nature and evolution, the field of artificial intelligence has largely focused on creating the elements of intelligence separately and fusing them together after development. While this approach has yielded great results, it has also limited the flexibility of AI agents in some of the basic skills found in even the simplest lifeforms.

In a new paper published in the scientific journal Nature, AI researchers at Stanford University present a new technique that can help take steps toward overcoming some of these limits. Titled Deep Evolutionary Reinforcement Learning, the new technique uses a complex virtual environment and reinforcement learning to create virtual agents that can evolve both in their physical structure and learning capacities. The findings can have important implications for the future of AI and robotics research.

Credit: Ben Dickson / TechTalks

In nature, body and brain evolve together. Across many generations, every animal species has gone through countless cycles of mutation to grow limbs, organs, and a nervous system to support the functions it needs in its environment. Mosquitos have thermal vision to spot body heat. Bats have wings to fly and an echolocation apparatus to navigate dark places. Sea turtles have flippers to swim and a magnetic field detector system to travel very long distances. Humans have an upright posture that frees their arms and lets them see the far horizon, hands and nimble fingers that can manipulate objects, and a brain that makes them the best social creatures and problem solvers on the planet.

Interestingly, all these species descended from the first lifeform that appeared on Earth several billion years ago. Based on the selection pressures caused by the environment, the descendants of those first living beings evolved in many different directions.

Studying the evolution of life and intelligence is interesting. But replicating it is extremely difficult. An AI system that would want to recreate intelligent life in the same way that evolution did would have to search a very large space of possible morphologies, which is extremely expensive computationally. It would need a lot of parallel and sequential trial-and-error cycles.

AI researchers use several shortcuts and predesigned features to overcome some of these challenges. For example, they fix the architecture or physical design of an AI or robotic system and focus on optimizing the learnable parameters. Another shortcut is the use of Lamarckian rather than Darwinian evolution, in which AI agents pass on their learned parameters to their descendants. Yet another approach is to train different AI subsystems separately (vision, locomotion, language, etc.) and then tack them on together in a final AI or robotic system. While these approaches speed up the process and reduce the costs of training and evolving AI agents, they also limit the flexibility and variety of results that can be achieved.

Credit: Ben Dickson / TechTalks

In their new work, the researchers at Stanford aim to bring AI research a step closer to the real evolutionary process while keeping the costs as low as possible. Our goal is to elucidate some principles governing relations between environmental complexity, evolved morphology, and the learnability of intelligent control, they write in their paper.

Their framework is called Deep Evolutionary Reinforcement Learning. In DERL each agent uses deep reinforcement learning to acquire the skills required to maximize its goals during its lifetime. DERL uses Darwinian evolution to search the morphological space for optimal solutions, which means that when a new generation of AI agents are spawned, they only inherit the physical and architectural traits of their parents (along with slight mutations). None of the learned parameters are passed on across generations.

DERL opens the door to performing large-scale in silico experiments to yield scientific insights into how learning and evolution cooperatively create sophisticated relationships between environmental complexity, morphological intelligence, and the learnability of control tasks, the researchers write.

For their framework, the researchers used MuJoCo, a virtual environment that provides highly accurate rigid-body physics simulation. Their design space is called UNIversal aniMAL (UNIMAL), in which the goal is to create morphologies that learn locomotion and object-manipulation tasks in a variety of terrains.

Each agent in the environment is composed of a genotype that defines its limbs and joints. The direct descendant of each agent inherits the parents genotype and goes through mutations that can create new limbs, remove existing limbs, or make small modifications to characteristics such as the degrees of freedom or the size of limbs.

Each agent is trained with reinforcement learning to maximize rewards in various environments. The most basic task is locomotion, in which the agent is rewarded for the distance it travels during an episode. Agents whose physical structure are better suited for traversing terrain learn faster to use their limbs for moving around.

To test the systems results, the researchers generated agents in three types of terrains: flat (FT), variable (VT), and variable terrains with modifiable objects (MVT). The flat terrain puts the least selection pressure on the agents morphology. The variable terrains, on the other hand, force the agents to develop a more versatile physical structure that can climb slopes and move around obstacles. The MVT variant has the added challenge of requiring the agents to manipulate objects to achieve their goals.

One of the interesting findings of the DERL is the diversity of the results. Other approaches to evolutionary AI tend to converge on one solution because new agents directly inherit the physique and learnings of their parents. But in DERL, only morphological data is passed on to descendants, the system ends up creating a diverse set of successful morphologies, including bipeds, tripeds, and quadrupeds with and without arms.

At the same time, the system shows traits of the Baldwin effect, which suggests that agents that learn faster are more likely to reproduce and pass on their genes to the next generation. DERL shows that evolution selects for faster learners without any direct selection pressure for doing so, according to the Stanford paper.

Intriguingly, the existence of this morphological Baldwin effect could be exploited in future studies to create embodied agents with lower sample complexity and higher generalization capacity, the researchers write.

Finally, the DERL framework also validates the hypothesis that more complex environments will give rise to more intelligent agents. The researchers tested the evolved agents across eight different tasks, including patrolling, escaping, manipulating objects, and exploration. Their findings show that in general, agents that have evolved in variable terrains learn faster and perform better than AI agents that have only experienced flat terrain.

Their findings seem to be in line with another hypothesis by DeepMind researchers that a complex environment, a suitable reward structure, and reinforcement learning can eventually lead to the emergence of all kinds of intelligent behaviors.

The DERL environment only has a fraction of the complexities of the real world. Although DERL enables us to take a significant step forward in scaling the complexity of evolutionary environments, an important line of future work will involve designing more open-ended, physically realistic, and multi-agent evolutionary environments, the researchers write.

In the future, the researchers will expand the range of evaluation tasks to better assess how the agents can enhance their ability to learn human-relevant behaviors.

The work can have important implications for the future of AI and robotics and push researchers to use exploration methods that are much more similar to natural evolution.

We hope our work encourages further large-scale explorations of learning and evolution in other contexts to yield new scientific insights into the emergence of rapidly learnable intelligent behaviors, as well as new engineering advances in our ability to instantiate them in machines, the researchers write.

This article was originally published by Ben Dickson onTechTalks, a publication that examines trends in technology, how they affect the way we live and do business, and the problems they solve. But we also discuss the evil side of technology, the darker implications of new tech, and what we need to look out for. You can read the original articlehere.

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AI is now learning to evolve like earthly lifeforms - The Next Web