Image source: Discovery Institute Press.

A new episode ofID the Futurekicks off a three-part series featuringTaking Leave of Darwin author Neil Thomas interviewed by radio host Hank Hanegraaff. Hanegraaff lauds Thomass book and underscores how influential Darwins theory of evolution has been on Western culture. Thomas sketches the cultural milieu and individual motivations that hes convinced drew Darwin toward his formulation of the theory of evolution by natural selection.

Here the focus is not on the various evidential weaknesses of Darwins theory (which Thomas does cover in his book) but on a question that puzzled Thomas once he became convinced of just how evidentially weak the case for Darwinism was: How was it that a theory so poorly supported by the evidence (such that even some of its most ardent supporters found themselves rejecting key aspects of it) nevertheless came to dominate the academy? Tune in to find out what Thomas ultimately concluded from his autopsy of the theory and its early reception. Download the podcast or listen to it here.

Excerpt from:

Neil Thomas: An Autopsy of Darwinism - Discovery Institute

Photo: Przewalski's horse, by Solar Olga, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons.

Over a series of articles Ive been reviewing a 2007 lecture at the American Museum of Natural History by Eugenie Scott, titled What Do Creationists Believe about Human Evolution? The lecture was recently posted on the Leakey Foundations YouTube channel. As weve seen, Dr. Scott, who at the time led the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), makes themistake of conflating ID with creationism,overstates the evidence from hominid skulls for human evolution from apelike precursors, andhinders science by prematurely (and ultimately wrongly) declaring the beta-globin pseudogene to be non-functional junk DNA.

The final argument for evolution in her lecture comes from human chromosomal fusion. As the argument goes, apes have two more chromosomes than humans (48 in apes versus 46 in humans). So if common ancestry is correct then we must account for this missing pair of homologous chromosomes in humans. Purportedly, we can do this by finding that human chromosome 2 appears to be the result of fusion between two ape chromosomes. Scott calls this one of the very best bits of evidence for common ancestry of humans and apes.

As in the pseudogene example, Scott is borrowing arguments from Kenneth MillersKitzmiller v. Dovertestimony. I responded to Miller long ago, in late 2005 or early 2006, at the IDEA Center in an article titled And the Miller Told His Tale: Ken Millers Cold (Chromosomal) Fusion. In her lecture Dr. Scott cites and critiques my article, saying it is so full of basic misunderstandings of basic biology that it isnt funny.

This may seem like ancient history, but bear with me. Before we get into the specifics, its important to observe that Dr. Scott never even attempts a rebuttal to my main argument in the article. My main point about chromosomal fusion has never been to dispute the evidence for fusion in human chromosome 2 my article concedes that there is good direct empirical evidence for a chromosomal fusion event which created human chromosome 2. Mymainargument is also not that an individual with a fused chromosome could not spread that trait throughout a population. My purpose instead has been to rebut what Francis Collins wrote about human chromosomal fusion inThe Language of God.As he said there, it is very difficult to understand this [fusion] observation without postulating a common ancestor. This is not at all the case, because humanity could have been separately designed from apes with 48 chromosomes, and then we experienced a fusion event in our history. Under this simple scenario the evidence would appear exactly as it is, as seen in the diagram below:

Thus, its very easy to account for the fusion evidence without requiring a common ancestor between humans and apes. At most what this evidence requires is that we derive from a 48-chromosome ancestor. Whether that ancestor traces back to a common ancestor we share with apes is a separate question that is not addressed by the fusion issue.

When considering phylogenetic relationships, its important to appreciate the fact that this fused chromosome is foundonlyin humans (and not apes). In the language of cladistics, therefore, our fused chromosome is considered an apomorphy,definedbyOxford Referenceas a A novel evolutionary trait that is unique to a particular species and all its descendants. Because this trait is found in only a single living species (humans), we would call it an autapomorphy. According toOxford Reference, under the logic of cladistics, autapomorphies cannot provide useful information about phylogenetic relationships:

An apomorphy that is restricted to a single species is termed an autapomorphy. It alonecannot provide any information about the phylogenetic relations of that species, although it can indicate the degree of divergence of a species from its nearest relatives. An example is speech, which is found solely in humans (Homo sapiens) and not in other primates. [Emphasis added.]

The same could be said of this fusion trait: it is found only inHomo sapiensand not in other primates. Similarly, the textbookTree Thinking: An Introduction to Phylogenetic Biologystates:

These characters are uniquely derived characters (sometimes called autapomorphies). Because they can be parsimoniously explained as having evolved on a terminal branch of the tree,they do not help tell us which tips share more recent common ancestry.

Likewise, the volumeThe Character Concept in Evolutionary Biologystates:

Characters that tend to show unique states in each taxon of a clade, like any autapomorphy,will contribute little to resolving phylogenetic relationships.

ID critics arequick to slamID proponents when we make (supposed) mistakes related to cladistics or systematics. But in this situation, leading evolutionary scientists are trying to claim that an autapomorphy provides evidence of an ancestral relationship between two different types of organisms. Their own literature says this shouldnt be done, meaning that they are trying to carve out an exception to their own rule. Scotts lecture doesnt touch this problem, which undercuts the import of fusion for supporting common ancestry.

I grant that there is one aspect of this evidence that provides evidence for common descent namely that common descent requires a fused chromosome in humans given that apes have 48 chromosomes and humans have 46. In that sense this is a fulfilled prediction of the model, but its not special evidence for common ancestry because the same evidence is not at all hard to explain if common descent were false. Given that fact, and given that there isother evidenceagainst common descent, I see this as a non-determinative factor in the overall debate.

The foregoing was the main subject of the article I wrote that Scott critiques. But at the end of those 1,800 words, I added a 370-word section titled, It only gets worse for Neo-Darwinism. That section included a secondary argument. It was always intended to be an afterthought. But it made a point worth raising: Millers story implies that at some point a 48-chromosome ancestor experienced a chromosomal fusion event and then that individual interbred with others so that eventually the fused chromosome spread through the population. Yet initially, individuals with the fused chromosome would have had an abnormal number of chromosomes compared to most members of the population. And that frequently leads to problems, typically one of the following: either you arent viable, or you cant produce offspring, or your offspring arent fertile.

Reduced to its essence, this basic point was valid, as many sources attest:

Textbooks and authorities on genetics observe that changes in the number of chromosomes frequently lead to disease, nonviability, sterility, or sterility of offspring. This suggests that left to its own course, such a fusion event might have a hard time spreading to fixation. But Eugenie Scott seems unable or unwilling to acknowledge these basic points. In fact, it was because of this very point that she said my article was full of basic misunderstandings of basic biology and called it absolute nonsense.

But I did make a mistake and Scott points this out. In my original post, I said that allof our experience with mammalian genetics tells us that such a chromosomal aberration should have resulted in a non-viable mutant, or non-viable offspring. That was too strong a claim, because, as well see, in rare situations it is possible that individuals with fused chromosomes can survive, reproduce, and in very rare cases even leave fertile offspring.

I fixed this error in my article years ago, deleting the words all of and should and changing the sentence to read:

our experience with mammalian genetics tells us that such a chromosomal aberration could have created a non-viable mutant, a normal individual who could not reproduce, or a normal individual whose offspring were infertile.

Nonetheless, both the original and fixed versions support the same conclusion: Neo-Darwinism has a hard time explaining why such a random fusion event was somehow advantageous.

I wasnt the only one who overstated things here. In her lecture Dr. Scott claims that I argued (her paraphrase) if there was a translocation [fusion] of that sort, that the animal, the organism would not be able to reproduce. I never said anything like that. Even the original version of my article acknowledged that an individual with a fused chromosome could potentially reproduce:

In most of our experience, individuals with the randomly-fused chromosome can be normal, but it is very likely that their offspring will ultimately have a genetic disease.

I further said (in the original): a random chromosomal fusion event in our experience ultimately results in offspring with genetic diseases. Now that language does wrongly suggest that chromosomal fusion must ultimately result in a genetic disease (Ive also fixed this language). But it doesnotdeny that an individual with a fused chromosome can reproduce.

I never denied that an individual with fused chromosomes can survive and even leave offspring. But its offspring may have severe disabilities, as is the case with Translocation Downs Syndrome (where a parent has a fused chromosome) and other genetic abnormalities.

In her lecture, the main evidence that Dr. Scott cites to argue that chromosomal fusions arent necessarily deleterious comes not from humans but from horses. A rare and endangered breed from Mongolia called Przewalskis horse (Equus przewalskii) has 66 chromosomes two more than the common domestic horse (Equus ferus caballus), which has 64 chromosomes. It has been proposed that the domestic horse arose from a 66-chromosome ancestor like Przewalskis horse that underwent a fusion of two chromosomes during meiosis. Theres good evidence for this hypothesis: these two breeds of horse can still mate and produce fertile offspring.

Scotts claim about horses traces back to a 1974 article by Shortet al.in the journalCytogenetics and Cell Genetics,Meiosis in interspecific equine hybrids. They proposed a potential genetic mechanism by which a chromosome could have been fused in Przewalskis horse, which then could have spread through a subpopulation via genetic drift. The key is that all of the original genetic material is there its just been moved around (translocated) as two chromosomes became fused. Whether or not something like this happened in humans, its not impossible for a fusion of this type to become spread in a population.

But as to my updated argument, this paper supports my point. There are at least seven different living species of equines, and they all have different numbers of chromosomes. The paper has a very useful table showing what happens when those different species of horses attempt to interbreed:

Of all known cases of attempted cross-breeding between these seven living species, in only one example can the mating lead to fertile offspring. This is the one that Eugenie Scott cites a fertile hybrid between Przewalskis horse and the domestic horse. In all the other cases you either get no offspring (8 cases, it would seem) or sterile offspring (12 cases). Thats pretty interesting. In the best case that Eugenie Scott raises horses only 1 in 21 types of potential hybrids is known to produce fertile offspring. This shows its not impossible for a fusion event to be spread throughout a population, but it also supports my general point that changes in differences in chromosome numbers are frequently barriers to evolutionary success.

Should I have known about this obscure paper from 1974? Ideally, sure. But theres a lot of literature out there.

Yet the hypothesis that the beta-globin pseudogene is functional,which I discussed in my previous response, also existed long before Scott and Miller declared it was a non-functional broken gene to courts, the media, and the public. The2013 paper which first identified empirical evidence supporting functionality for this pseudogenemakes a relevant passing comment:

Several decades ago, a hypothesis was formulated holding an important regulatory role ofHBDandHBBP1in the Hb fetal-to-adult switch that matches quite well the assumption of strong negative selective forces acting on these sequences (Ottolenghi et al. 1979; Bank et al. 1980; Chang and Slightom 1984; Goodman et al. 1984).

So, papers from the 1980s had already proposed that the beta-globin pseudogene is functional and has a regulatory role. I dug up those citations and found that one of them from 1984 clearly stated a hypothesis that the beta-globin pseudogene (often called-globin)appears to have a conserved sequence, has a function to function regulate other protein-coding beta-globin genes, and is involved in the switch from fetal to adult globin expression. Heres exactly what was proposed byChang and Slightomin theJournal of Molecular Biology:

Our analysis of the-globin gene family of gorilla and chimpanzee, by lambda cloning followed by restriction mapping, blot hybridizations, and DNA sequencing clearly shows that these primate species have the same organization of-globin genes, including the pseudogene, as that found for humans. The-genes of the three hominoids contain the same transcriptional and translational defects. they were clearly pseudogenes before the three species separated. The accompanying papers by Harris et al. (1984) and Goodman et al. (1984) confirm that this gene locus has a very long evolutionary history.

Reasons why this locus has been conserved are not yet apparent. Possibly after its inactivation its role may have changed from that of a polypeptide-encoding gene to that of regulation of other genes in the-globin gene family. Fritsch et al. (1979), Bernards & Flavell (1980) and Collins & Weissman (1984) have suggested that DNA sequences located between the y- and b-genes may be important in maintaining acis-acting regulatory signal necessary for the switch from fetal to adult globin gene expression, which occurs shortly before birth. Such acis-acting regulator may not directly involve specific sequences in the-gene locus, but the presence of this locus may be necessary for the proper phasing of the regulatory mechanism. In this connection, our major finding is that the stretch of DNA which constitutes the-globin locus is evolving at a rate much slower than that expected for non-functional DNA. Indeed, these hominoid-gene sequences are evolving even slower than the IVS 2 sequences for the human and gorilla fetal globin genes. With our evidence showing that the nucleotide sequences in and around the-globin locus are conserved in hominoids, the suggestion that this locus is involved in the regulation of other-globin genes may have merit.

This 1984 paper was prescient and turned out to be basically correct. The hypothesis, albeit stated in a relatively obscure paper, was out there in 2005 when Ken Miller testified at Dover, and in 2007 when Eugenie Scott gave her lecture claiming the-globinwas non-functional and didnt do diddly.

Mistakes happen. Thats OK. Whats important is what you do about that. Ive corrected my error. I hope Dr. Scott does the same with hers.

In her lecture, though, she goes much further than merely critiquing a mistake. She uses it as an occasion to smear an entire class of people, stating:

Creationists excel at misunderstanding science, misunderstanding its conclusions, and getting things wrong.

The Darwin lobby has a long history of such broad-brushing and stereotyping, and theyve never really reformed their ways. Back in 2009 I shared the stage at a symposium with an NCSE-affiliated theologian, Peter Hess, whosaid, A third problem with intelligent design is that its practitioners are either ignorant of science or seriously deluded or fundamentally dishonest. Scott herself is famous forhaving stated, There are no weaknesses in the theory of evolutiona blatant falsehood. Statements like this are still made today. This is not ancient history at all.

Yet should we say that Scott and Miller have basic misunderstandings of basic biology simply because they werent aware of an obscure paper from the 1980s? No, that would be unfair. Should we indict them and say they excel at misunderstanding science, misunderstanding its conclusions, and getting things wrong simply because they made an inaccurate evolutionary prediction about a pseudogene being non-functional? Nope. That would be uncharitable and wrong.

Speaking about evolution, Eugenie Scott closes her talk by saying, How sad that students are not being able to learn this wonderful, fascinating science. She implies that we are among those who dont want evolution to be taught. Then, as now, her statement is false. Studentsarelearning about evolution, and Discovery Institute andproponents of intelligent designdowant evolution to be taught. What we dont want are dumbed-down versions of evolution that pretend there are no weaknesses in the theory or use oversimplified proofs of evolutionary that dont hold up to scrutiny. To my knowledge, Scott has never backed down from her no weaknesses claim. That, like her uncorrected smears from 2007, is a legacy that hurts this debate. But it doesnt have to be that way. As I hope this episode has shown, its not too late to correct past mistakes.

Link:

Chromosomal Fusion and Correcting Mistakes - Discovery Institute

As networks continue to evolve and security threats get more complex, security analytics plays an increasingly critical role in securing the enterprise. By combining software, algorithms and analytic processes, security analytics helps IT and security teams proactively (and reactively) detect threats before they result in data loss or other harmful outcomes.

Given that the average time to identify and contain a data breach in 2021 was 287 days, its more important than ever for organizations to include security analytics in their threat detection and response programs. But how has this technology changed over the last decade? In this article, I will explore the evolution and importance of security analytics.

This evolution has had two main trends.

First, security analytics is becoming more sophisticated. In the last 10 years the industry has transitioned from rule-based alerting to big data and machine learning analysis. Second, products have become more open and customizable.

As these technologies have advanced, so too have their specific use cases, with organizations using these for identity analytics (examining authentication, authorization and access for anomalies), fraud (finding anomalous transactions), and more. Today, security analytics plays a central role in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solutions and Network Detection and Response products (not to mention standalone security analytics software).

To better understand this evolution and the capabilities of current security analytics solutions, lets dive into the three primary generations of security analytics advancement.

Traditional security analytics focused on correlation and rules within a proprietary platform.

Users imported data into a closed database, the data was normalized and run through a correlation engine, and then the system produced alerts based on rules. Products typically included alert enrichment, which provided more useful context along with an alert, such as linking it to a specific user, host, or IP address.

However, this era often suffered from alert fatigue where the analytic solution produced more alerts than the security team could investigate, including high numbers of false positives. Sorting which alerts were important and which ones werent involved a great deal of manual work. Furthermore, these solutions were often entirely proprietary, with little to no options for customization. This prevented the security team from tweaking rules to cut down on the number of bad alerts. They were stuck with the alert fatigue issue.

The second generation of security analytics began to incorporate big data and statistical analysis, while remaining a black box to users.

These solutions offered data lakes instead of databases, which allowed for a greater variety of data to be gathered and analyzed, but they were still proprietary. New analytics capabilities emerged, such as the ability to include cloud data, network packets and flow data, but users still couldnt see how they worked or verify the results.

Data enrichment was better, but users largely could not customize the contextual data they wanted with their alerts. For example, a security team might want to add asset criticality data so they can prioritize events that affect key pieces of their infrastructure or include information from external sources like VirusTotal.

Many solutions started offering threat hunting capabilities as well, which made it easier for security teams to proactively search for suspicious activity that evaded perimeter security controls.

But false positives and limited bandwidth on security teams continued to be a major challenge. In fact, this remains a challenge today. According to the 2021 Insider Threat Report from Cybersecurity Insiders, 33% of respondents said the biggest hurdle to maximizing the value of their SIEM was not having enough resources and 20% said too many false positives.

The third generation of security analytics technologies brings us to the current day, where machine learning, behavioral analysis and customization are driving innovation.

There are now SIEM products that allow organizations to use their existing data lakes, rather than forcing customers to use proprietary ones. And some solutions have opened their analytics, enrichment, and machine learning models so users can better understand them and modify as needed.

Today, powerful algorithms find patterns in data, set baselines and identify outliers. Theres also a greater focus on identifying anomalous behavior (a user taking suspicious actions) and on prioritizing and ranking the risk of alerts based on contextual information like data from Sharepoint or IAM systems. For example, a user accessing source code with legitimate credentials might be a low-priority alert at best, but that user doing so in the middle of the night for the first time in weeks from a suspicious location should trigger a high-priority alert. Thanks to these capabilities, analytic solutions are reaching the point where they can trigger remediation actions automatically.

Security analytics have evolved quickly in recent years and as we look ahead, the industry is starting to combine SIEM, User Entity Behavioral Analytics (UEBA), Security Orchestration, Automation and Response (SOAR) and Extended Detection and Response (XDR) for a more automated and telemetry rich approach to threat detection and response.

But today, the latest advancements are helping to reduce the workload on security teams, allowing them to better detect and contain both known and unknown threats more quickly. Open access to security analytics is also a monumental shift that helps teams better understand and tweak these solutions so they can verify models and generate better results.

Ideally, analytics solutions should have strong pre-built libraries of machine learning models that dont require users to be data scientists to edit them (but give them the editing option if needed). As these capabilities continue to develop, I believe theyll be a key factor in helping security teams reduce that 287-day average time to contain a breach in the coming years.

See the rest here:

The evolution of security analytics - Help Net Security

Sex is an expensive business, biologically speaking. Finding a suitable mate takes time and energy. Offspring are also a huge investment of resources. But sex does offer a rewarding possibility: children who are fitter than their parents thanks to new and better combinations of genes. Darwin realised that many animal species therefore carefully select their mates.

There is an innate biological inequality, however. Eggs are relatively few in number a large and costly investment while sperm are small and vastly more abundant. And embryos often need further investment in the body or outside. Since the greater investment tends to fall on females, they are often the more selective sex (while males compete to be chosen).

But according to a new paper, published in Science, Charles Darwins patriarchal world view led him to dismiss female agency and mate choice in humans.

He also downplayed the role of female variation in other animal species, assuming they were rather uniform, and always made similar decisions. And he thought there was enormous variation among the males who battled for female attention by showing off stunning ranges of skills and beauty. This maintained the focus on the dynamics of male dominance hierarchies, sexual ornamentation and variation as drivers of sexual selection, even if females sometimes did the choosing.

But do Darwins ideas on sexual selection hold up today?

When animals choose a partner, their appearance, sound and smell can all be accurate guides to the survival ability of the prospective mate. For example, large antlers in deer are a good indicator of fighting ability, dominance and overall fitness. But many other traits can be chosen because they are otherwise conspicuous and attractive yet may be a poor guide to overall genetic quality, or even misleading.

Females may evolve to choose mates with whom their offspring are less likely to survive, provided there are more such offspring as a trade off. In some species of poecilid fish, for example, male attractiveness is linked to genes that can reduce their survival. Females therefore face a dilemma: mate with a more attractive male and produce some highly attractive but otherwise less vigorous sons, or mate with a less attractive male to maximise the survival of those sons. Which strategy will produce most grandchildren?

Females may therefore select for traits in males that apparently have no other bearing upon their ability to survive. The peacocks tail is a handicap in most other aspects of its life an impediment to flight and evading predators save for the attraction of a female. However, it may also be true that the ability of a male to manage such a burden is itself a marker of overall genetic quality and rigour.

It isnt always females who choose. In pipefishes, the males invest heavily by carrying the fertilised eggs until they hatch, and it is the females who compete with each other in order to secure the attentions of males.

Optimal mate choice is not the same for all individuals, or at all times in their development. For example, younger satin bowerbirds are frightened by the most vigorous male displays, while older females typically find these most attractive. And many fishes are sequential hermaphrodites, changing sex and therefore mate choices as they age.

Research since Darwin therefore reveals that mate choice is a far more complex process than he may have supposed, and is governed by variation in both sexes.

So, is the accusation of sexism levelled at Darwin really valid, and did this cloud his science? There is certainly some evidence that Darwin underestimated the importance of variation, strategy and even promiscuity in most female animals.

For example, Darwin - possibly as a result of a prevailing prudishness - placed little emphasis on mechanisms of sexual selection that operate after mating. Female birds and mammals may choose to mate with multiple males, and their sperm can compete to fertilise one or more eggs within the reproductive tract.

Cats, dogs and other animals can have litters with multiple fathers (the gloriously named heteropaternal superfecundation - even though the sound of it is really quite atrocious!). There is even some suggestion that the human penis being thicker than our nearest primate relatives is an adaptation for physically displacing the sperm of competing males. Such earthy speculations were anathema to Darwins sensibilities.

Female blue tits often mate with multiple males in order to ensure their protection and support - a somewhat manipulative strategy when paternity for the prospective fathers is uncertain. All this challenges Darwins assumption that females are relatively passive and non-strategic.

Where males make a greater investment, they become more active in mate choice. Male (rather than female) poison dart frogs (Dendrobates auratus) protect the young, and therefore attract multiple females who compete to lay eggs for them to fertilise. Many bird species have biparental care, and therefore a richer diversity of mating systems.

Inevitably, Darwins world view was shaped by the culture of his time, and his personal writings make it difficult to mount a particularly robust defence. In a letter from 1882, he wrote I certainly think that women, though generally superior to men to [sic] moral qualities are inferior intellectually; & there seems to me to be a great difficulty from the laws of inheritance in their becoming the intellectual equals of man.

He also deliberated over the relative merits of marriage, famously noting: Home, & someone to take care of house Charms of music & female chit-chat. These things good for ones health. but terrible loss of time.

Unsurprisingly there is much that Darwin did not fully understand. Darwin like Albert Einstein, H.G. Wells and Edgar Allan Poe married his first cousin, Emma Wedgwood. Ironically, he knew nothing of genetics and the mechanisms by which close relatives are more likely to have offspring with certain genetic diseases. Intriguingly, our closest relatives in the tree of life, the chimpanzees, naturally circumvent this problem, since females select mates that are more distantly related to them than the average male in the available pool.

Despite its omissions, however, Darwins understanding was radically more advanced than anything that preceded it. When combined with the subsequent understanding of genetics and inheritance, Darwins writings are still the bedrock of all modern evolutionary biology.

Excerpt from:

Evolution: how Victorian sexism influenced Darwin's theories new research - The Conversation UK

The emo subculture had teens by the throat during the late 2000s. Unfortunately, when the great MySpace-to-Facebook migration happened, the emo subculture that had floundered there lost a lot of its members and soon faded into the background. Now, most would say that emo is dead, and that is true to an extent: the genre itself and its standing in modern pop culture is practically on life support. That being said, however, emo has evolved into a new, possibly more popular subculture.

The emo subculture stemmed directly from the music of its namesake, which featured the likes of My Chemical Romance, Fall Out Boy, and Panic! at the Disco. Its fashion was characterized by skinny jeans, eyeliner, painted nails, band t-shirts, studded belts, wristbands, and the iconic straight jet-black hair with an asymmetrical fringe. Emo managed to become an influential subculture through MySpace, which allowed young people to interact with each other without having to leave home, giving young emos easy access to like-minded people across the world. But as the subculture found mainstream popularity, so did the negative connotations it carried, often being associated with depression, self-harm, and suicide. These stereotypes led to a lot of backlash against the emo subculture, and consequently caused Panic! At the Disco and My Chemical Romance to deny being emo. This negative reputation and the eventual migration from MySpace to Facebook spelled the end for the emo subculture in its original form.

Luckily for emo, before the end of its original run, it had already evolved into a new subculture, known as scene. Scene saw emo expand its musical repertoire to include metal, crunk, electronic, indie rock, emo pop, and pop-punk, taking a detour away from emotional emphasis while still leaning towards rock influences. Fashion-wise, scene took the core of emo fashion and added more color and accessorization to it. Unfortunately, the popularity that emo found in its new life as scene wouldnt last much longer. By the late 2010s, scene began losing its popularity and eventually faded away completely.

However, scene wasnt the end of emos evolution; the two would further evolve into a new subculture. E-kids, the collective term for e-boys and e-girls, are the most recent iteration of emo. The e-kid subculture started in 2018, and quickly rose to popularity following the worldwide release of TikTok in the same year. Unlike scene, the e-kid subculture continued to pull away from its rock-based roots while also returning to the emotional emphasis of the emo genre. E-kids are strongly associated with sad boy music, which is music that focuses on sadness and mental illness, such as emo rap.

With e-kids being the most recent iteration of emo, their success in infiltrating pop culture raises an important question: why are e-kids so popular while emo and scene kids werent? E-kids beat out emo and scene in popularity due to various reasons, such as being associated with more mainstream music and more fashionable styling, making the subculture easier to get into. This new iteration of emo is primarily known for fashion and thirst traps, which are popular both within the subculture and on TikToks platform as a whole. On top of this, e-kid fashion draws considerable influence from K-pop fashion, which started becoming mainstream in western media around the same time. Simply put, a lot of the subcultures popularity comes down to the timing of its emergence and its fresh spin on what its predecessors left it with.

Follow this link:

Emo to e-boy: the evolution of a subculture - Campus Times

In part one of our interview with Rudy Von Berg, we kicked off by looking back at the 2019 IRONMAN 70.3 World Championship in Nice, an event he described as a dream race.

A venue which means a lot to him, being brought up riding on the hills and roads around the Alps-Maritimes, its probably no surprise to find out that IRONMAN France this year, scheduled for June 26, will be the venue for his full-distance debut.

In part two, we turn our attentions to those longer distances and what could lead to the IRONMAN World Championship in Hawaii. While Nice could open the door to Kona, its not a given just yet that it would be an automatically accepted invitation.

As Von Berg explains, the landscape is changing for professional athletes.

The overall idea was that I didnt want to start doing Ironman races too early. I wanted to develop at 70.3, and reach my potential, and even though I dont think Ive reached my very best at 70.3 yet, Ill be in the year of turning 29 and so that feels like its old enough that I can start doing Ironman.

I always wanted to do France, for the reasons I mentioned earlier, growing up there. I was going to do it last year, but due to COVID it was postponed to a week before or after St George (70.3 World Championship), so that was out, and I didnt want to scramble to find another Ironman and so I thought Ill just do it in 2022 and properly prepare for it.

The only thing is I hope I didnt lose too much shape kind of medium term with my Mono, because I lost quite a bit of muscle in my legs when I was sick. I lost a lot of weight I just hope that didnt set me back too much, especially for an Ironman, when its really the years of training before that count. Thats my only question mark. But, Ill put in six good months of training now, and hopefully be at my very best.

The typical assumption is that if you earn a Kona slot (for October 2022), you take it. The IRONMAN World Championship is part of the Von Berg family DNA his father, Rodolphe senior, has been a Kona Age-Group World Champion himself but the decision on whether junior will be there this October, isnt clear yet. Would he take a Kona slot, if France goes well?

Likely but the problem is that the calendar is quite difficult. Up to Nice I will probably do two half races before the IRONMAN. Then a month later theres the PTO Canadian Open, then a month later the Collins Cup than a month later the PTO US Open, and then theres the two World Champs in October.

Its not possible to be your best at all of those, not even three of those. Usually I can peak in June and peak again in September and then be close to peaking for the last race in November or something. But thats going to be tough.

Given that Von Bergs earliest triathlon memory is watching his father racing in Kona almost 25 years ago, the pull towards the Big Island is strong. Its clear this wont be an easy decision either way:

So, I havent decided yet exactly whats going to happen for that. If I qualify for Kona, Ill see what I want to focus on. I cant not do these PTO Tour races because these are the type of races that weve been waiting for as Pros for many years; some big prize money races, something like Regional Champs where all the best athletes will be at for many years to come, rather than at diluted races usually.

So, the short answer is well have to see as its kind of tough. I dont want to be average at Kona and the 70.3 St. George World Champs, I want to be really good at one of the two.

Ive been thinking about Kona for so long that if I qualify it would be kind of dumb not to do it, but also I have to think about my career in the big picture. Theres still time to focus on the 70.3 Worlds for example and then try to go for Kona the next year but then also a career goes by fast and when you have opportunities, they wont always be next year.

Results in Nice, of course, will determine whether those considerations need to be resolved. For this year, at least.

As well as new events creating decisions for athletes to make and perhaps a choose your battles wisely situation the PTO Tour could also impact the distance focus of an athlete career. IRONMAN France will represent a full-distance debut for Rudy, but not necessarily the beginnings of an all-in move towards that seven-hour-plus format:

Things are changing a little with the PTO Tour races for example. Out of the four PTO Tour races [Ed. The European Open and Asian Open will be added in 2023], there will be three 100km races and one 200km race, so pretty much three halfs and one Ironman. So, the focus for that is a little more on the shorter distance, so I dont think I will ever go to just be a full Ironman athlete. Ill definitely still want to perform really well at half distance, and so I think Ill max do two ironman races per year and then theres still room to do really well at half with that.

The PTO is kind of changing that, in a good way, because I think the 70.3 is a really good distance and makes it a good mix of the endurance and the speed.

We love to race. I like to be more of a Frodeno type where I want to prepare and do a race only if Im going to be really good at it. Ill race slightly less, but I still always have that urge to add races into the calendar. Its just my rational part that says thats a little too much. We love the process of training, but the only reason we do it is because of racing.

Its long been a part of their mission, and was reiterated in our discussions with the PTOs CEO Sam Renouf before Christmas, the best to race the best. That aim is in line with the direction that Rudy sees the sport moving, talking us through his potential 2022 schedule as an example:

I think more and more now its going to be championship-type races, because even some of those Regional Championship races I did, they didnt have quite the fields that the PTO Tours will have, which is literally 40 of the top 50 guys in the world. Its going to be world champ events every time.

For me its only going to be the big races. I mean Oceanside 70.3 (April) in North America is the first big race of the year, then Chattanooga 70.3, North American Champs in May, then IRONMAN France.

That might have actually a slightly weaker field maybe, IRONMAN France, even though its a race thats more and more on the map and I wouldnt be surprised if a Norwegian goes, or some top guys like that, or a Cam Wurf type.

After that its just all World Champs events two PTO Tours, Collins Cup, Kona if qualified and 70.3 Worlds in St. George. Thats why I was saying that you really want to be at your best in these events. If you are just at 90% then you are going to be 15th.

Something weve certainly referenced many times over the last two years is the impact of the pandemic. With limited racing opportunities, those events that have gone ahead have regularly featured pro fields with notable depth. While that, perhaps, indirectly gave a glimpse of the future, Von Berg is clear where the driver of change will continue to come from:

Thats true, COVID definitely created that a little, but I think the bigger reason now and moving forward is the PTO for sure.

Creating these big events and that 100km distance, which is as short of a long distance as they could for TV and putting these million dollar prize purses up. I think this is what is going to really develop the sport of triathlon professionally, and just kind of like in tennis, its a familiar notion to have these grand slam / regional champs type of events, and the PTO is going to focus on these main races plus the Collins Cup and develop that.

Hopefully that PTO Tour Series will become a really interesting series for triathlon and fans of triathlon.

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Kona bound? Rudy Von Berg on the evolution of long-course racing - Tri247.com

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Its brutal running a security operations center (SOC) today. The attack surface continues to expand, in a lot of cases exponentially, as data moves to SaaS, applications move to containers, and the infrastructure moves to the cloud. The tools used by the SOC analysts are improving, but not fast enough. It seems adversaries remain one (or more) steps ahead. There arent enough people to get the job done. Those that you can hire typically need a lot of training, and retaining them continues to be problematic. As soon as they are decent, they head off to their next gig for a huge bump in pay.

At the same time, security is under the spotlight like never before. Remember the old days when no one knew about security? Those days are long gone, and they arent coming back. Thus, many organizations embrace managed services for detection and response, mostly because they have to.

Something has to change. Actually, a lot has to change. Thats what this series, entitled SOC 2025 is about. How can we evolve the SOC over the next few years to address the challenges of dealing with todays security issues, across the expanded attack surface, with far fewer skilled people, while positioning for tomorrow?

We want to thank Splunk(you may have heard of them) for agreeing to be the preliminary licensee for the research. That means when we finish up the research and assemble it as a paper, they will have an opportunity to license it. Or not. There are no commitments until the paper is done, in accordance with our Totally Transparent Research methodology.

There tend to be two use cases main use cases for the SOC. Detecting, investigating, and remediating attacks and substantiating the controls for audit/compliance purposes. We are not going to cover the compliance use case in this series. Not because it isnt important, audits are still a thing, and audit preparation should still be done in as efficient and effective a manner as possible. But in this series, were tackling the evolution of the Security OPERATIONS Center, so were going to focus on the detection, investigation, and remediation aspects of the SOCs job.

You cant say (for most organizations anyway) there hasnt been significant investment in security tooling over the past five years. Or ten years. Whatever your timeframe, security budgets have increased dramatically. Of course, there was no choice given the expansion of the attack surface and the complexity of the technology environment. But if the finance people objectively look at the spending on security, they can (and should) ask some tough questions about the value the organization receives from those significant investments.

And there is the rub. We, as security professionals, know that there is no 100% security. That no matter how much you spend, you can (and will) be breached. We can throw out platitudes about reducing the dwell time or make the case that the attack would have been much worse without the investment. And youre are probably right. But as my drivers education teacher told me over 35 years ago, you may be right, but youll still be dead.

What we havent done very well is manage to Security Outcomes and communicate the achievements. What do we need the outcome to be for our security efforts? Our mindset needs to shift from activity to outcomes. So what is the outcome we need from the SOC? We need to find and fix security issues before data loss. That means we have to sharpen our detection capabilities and dramatically improve and streamline our operational motions. There is no prize for finding all the vulnerabilities. Like there are no penalties for missing them. The SOC needs to master detecting, investigating, and turning that information into effective remediation before data is lost.

Once weve gotten our arms around the mindset shift in focusing on security outcomes, we can focus on the how. How is the SOC going to get better in detecting, investigating, and remediating attacks? Thats where better tooling comes into play. The good news is that SOC tools are much better than even five years ago. Innovations like improved analytics and security automation give SOCs far better capabilities. But only if the SOC uses them.

What SOC leader in their right mind wouldnt take advantage of these new capabilities? In concept, they all would and should. In reality, far too many havent and cant. The problem is one of culture and evolution. The security team can handle detection and even investigation. But remediation is a cross-functional effort. And what do security outcomes depend on? You guessed it remediation. So at its root, security is a team sport, and the SOC is one part of the team.

This means addressing security issues needs to fit into the operational motions of the rest of the organization. The SOC can and should automate where possible, especially the things within their control. But most automation requires buy-in from the other operational teams. Ultimately if the information doesnt consistently and effectively turn into action, the SOC fails in its mission.

In this series, we will deal with both internal and external evolution. Well start by turning inward and spending time understanding the evolution of how the SOC collects security telemetry from both internal and external sources. Given the sheer number of new data sources that much be considered (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, containers, DevOps, etc.), making sure the right data is aggregated is the first step in the battle.

Next, well tackle detection and analytics since that is the lifeblood of the SOC. Again, you get no points for detecting things, but youve got no chance of achieving desired security outcomes if you miss attacks. The analytics area is where the most innovation has happened over the past few years, so well dig into some use cases and help you understand how frameworks like ATT&CK and buzzy marketing terms like eXtended Detection and Response (XDR) should influence your SOC plans.

Finally, well wrap up the series by taking the what (accurate detections) and turning them into the how (effective remediation), resulting in positive security outcomes. Operationalizing is a key concept in that context. So buckle up and come along on the SOC evolution ride as we define SOC 2025.

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*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Securosis Blog authored by [emailprotected] (Securosis). Read the original post at: http://securosis.com/blog/soc-2025-the-coming-soc-evolution

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SOC 2025: The Coming SOC Evolution - Security Boulevard

SOFIA FORCAST measurements (orange) of the V838 Mon spectrum, and the best-fit composite model of SOFIA data with a silicate-to-alumina ratio of 50:50 (yellow), overlaid atop an image of V838 Mon obtained by the Hubble Space Telescope, which shows the light echo illuminating circumstellar material. Credit: V838 Mon: ESA/Hubble & NASA; Spectra: Woodward et al.

Everything we see in the universe is a snapshot of the past: As light takes its time to reach our telescopes, the system were observing continues to evolve, and what we end up seeing is a moment in its history. By revisiting an object over the course of decades, we can look not only into its past, but can watch its history unfold.

Eleven years after it was last observed and 17 years after a stellar merger occurred, SOFIA looked at V838 Monocerotis, or V838 Mon, a binary star system about 19 thousand light-years away from Earth, capturing a snapshot in time of its makeup. This confirmed that the dust chemistry of the system has changed significantly over the course of nearly two decades following the merger, particularly over the past decade. This provided a history we otherwise cannot look at and offered an archaeological view of its evolution.

Because V838 Mon is quite bright and can saturate other telescopes, SOFIA is the only observatory capable of observing it at infrared wavelengths required to monitor this dust process. The researchers used SOFIAs FORCAST camera, which allows for low-resolution spectroscopy and deep imaging of bright objects.

Its very rare to see this progression of dust transformation in objects that is predicted to happen, said Charles Woodward, astrophysicist at the University of Minnesota and lead author on the paper describing the observation. To catch one is pretty cool.

An Armstrong F/A-18 flying safety and photo chase for NASAs SOFIA 747. Credit: NASA / Jim Ross

Material expelled as a result of a merger may provide hints about how our own early solar system evolved. Understanding how dust condensation occurs from material originally in a hot gas phase is related to how rocky planets, like Earth, form out of the gas and debris that surround young stars.

Its these small, micron-sized pieces of material that eventually build into planets like the one we sit on, Woodward said.

In environments like this that are conducive to forming dust, the way that the different materials are incorporated and condense affects the geology of the final product. This is especially true when aluminum which is very chemically active and can quickly deplete its surrounding oxygen is involved. In V838 Mon, the chemical composition of the dust has changed from primarily comprising of alumina components in 2008 to being dominated by silicates, as the alumina bond with their oxygen neighbors. Notably, this progression can be seen in real time.

If we look at theoretical condensation sequences for how this is supposed to work, this is an example of us being able to test those hypotheses, Woodward said.

While most astronomical events occur on a timescale of millions of years, this is one example of human-timescale astronomy, reminding us that immense changes can occur in a very short period of time.

Often when people think about astronomy, things are in stasis and they take millions and billions of years to occur. This was in the blink of an eye that the source went through evolution, Woodward said. Certain astrophysical phenomena are really dynamic.

Reference: The Infrared Evolution of Dust in V838 Monocerotis by C. E. Woodward, A. Evans, D. P. K. Banerjee, T. Liimets, A. A. Djupvik, S. Starrfield, G. C. Clayton, S. P. S. Eyres, R. D. Gehrz and R. M. Wagner, 7 October 2021, The Astronomical Journal.DOI: 10.3847/1538-3881/ac1f1e

SOFIA is a joint project of NASA and the German Space Agency at DLR. DLR provides the telescope, scheduled aircraft maintenance, and other support for the mission. NASAs Ames Research Center in Californias Silicon Valley manages the SOFIA program, science, and mission operations in cooperation with the Universities Space Research Association, headquartered in Columbia, Maryland, and the German SOFIA Institute at the University of Stuttgart. The aircraft is maintained and operated by NASAs Armstrong Flight Research Center Building 703, in Palmdale, California.

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A Stellar Merger's Astrophysical Evolution in the Blink of an Eye - SciTechDaily

UFC Welterweight Champion Kamaru Usman has praised heavyweight king Francis Ngannou for his adaptability at UFC 270, branding him the evolution of the heavyweights.

At the opening pay-per-view of 2022 this past weekend, Ngannou returned to defend his title for the first time since winning it at UFC 260 last March. Ahead of his unification showdown with former teammate Gane, a lot was being made about his future, preparation, and mindset.

Would his ongoing contractual dispute with the UFC affect his performance? Would his desire for a crossover to boxing distract him from the threat of Bon Gamin? Would Ganes technical style and fast movement nullify his power? Was a knockout his only path to victory?

When the iconic voice of Bruce Buffer called out and still after 25 minutes of action, Ngannou had successfully answered all of those questions.

After struggling on the feet for the opening two rounds, it appeared The Predator was on his way to a first defeat since 2018 and a potential departure from the promotion. But in the third frame, a momentous takedown changed the game.

After seeing the control he could employ on the ground, the UFCs hardest-hitting knockout artist put his grappling improvements on full display, earning the nickname Francis Ngannoumedov from some fans with the performance.

One man who had a front-row seat for Ngannous impressive strategy towards the end of the UFC 270 main event, and who knows a bit or two about wrestling, was reigning welterweight king Usman.

Speaking to BT Sport in the aftermath of his fellow African champs victory, The Nigerian Nightmare described Ngannou as the evolution of the heavyweights and suggested even he doesnt perform the sweep The Predator employed while on his back in the fifth and final frame.

Francis, thats the thing about him, hes one of those special athletes that he takes everything as it comes, said Usman. He was gonna be able to deal with whatever was coming at him. He didnt initially engage in the clinch or the wrestling the first round. That came from Gane, which I thought was an excellent game plan.

But were just seeing the evolution of heavyweights. I mean, did you see that sweep in the fifth? I mean, damn. Even I dont do that one. So youre seeing the evolution of the game, and Francis is a scary man.

While an Ngannou prediction was hardly left field prior to UFC 270, the manner in which he defeated the previously unbeaten Gane was one in which not many, if anybody, had seen coming.

With a clearly developed ground game to go along with the immense KO power that has left the likes of Jairzinho Rozenstruik and Stipe Miocuc unconscious, the champion is a scary prospect for the rest of the divisionif he remains in the promotion beyond 2022, that is.

What did you make of Francis Ngannous performance at UFC 270?

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Usman: Ngannou Showed The Evolution of Heavyweights At UFC 270 - MMA News

If Remco Evenepoel completes a stage race, he wins it.

At least that is how it works if his staggering form of the last two seasons is a correct indication of how a race will unfold.

In the last six stage races that the Belgian superstar has started and finished, he has topped the general classification in them all, picking up eight stage wins en-route.

Yet for a man blessed with such extraordinary talent and self-belief, there is already an asterisk hovering over his results: he has yet to do it in a Grand Tour or a truly big stage race, such as the Critrium du Dauphin.

He made his three-week race debut at last springs Giro dItalia, sitting second on GC for a period of time until stage 11, before eventually withdrawing before stage 18. This season he will target the Vuelta a Espaa as he seeks to prove that he can transform one-week dominance into three-week superiority.

The season that just passed proved one of maturation for Evenepoel, who turns 22 on January 25. His QuickStep-AlphaVinyl sports director Tom Steels told Cycling Weekly: I think last year for Remco, and for everybody else too I think, was a good year in the sense of learning that not everything comes easy.

He is the biggest of talents, but they all have to be prepared that they cannot take five steps forward in a row forever.

Despite his tender years and only having completed three professional seasons, Evenepoel has grown into a natural leader, a fierce winner who demands nothing less than the best from himself and others around him.

He has also caused controversy with other riders, notably his compatriot Wout van Aert who publicly voiced his disappointment after Evenepoel questioned Belgiums tactics at the World Championships in September.

Steels acknowledged his young riders temperament but views it as a positive. That winning mentality I see as an advantage, he continued.

We all know the guys who really cannot stand losing after a race are quite outspoken, but I must say I always see it as a quality.

Of course, you have to manage it after a race as frustration itself comes from losing, but it also means you gave everything to win the race. Thats the balance you have to find, although its not easy.

With Remco, if he gets frustrated with another rider it can be headline news. You have to manage that so its not a real problem.

After a race on the bus, sometimes youre wondering how the windows are still in because the tension can get so high.

>>> From 83m of altitude during the day to 4,500m at night: Pros check into simulated altitude training hotel room

Evenepoel will begin his season at the Volta a Valenciana, having enjoyed a full block of uninterrupted winter training, something he was deprived of last year thanks to a slower than expected recovery from a crash he sustained at Il Lombardia that resulted in a fractured pelvis.

At the end of the year, we saw once again the Remco we wanted to see, Steels added. The way he rode the Europeans and the Worlds, but we also saw that at the end of the season his basic condition was not at the best. It was a difficult year for him.

He has trained this winter without problems and is by far in a better place than last year, even two years ago.

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The evolution of Remco Evenepoel: 'He has learned he cannot take five steps forward in a row forever' - Cycling Weekly

This is a year of opportunity for contractors working in the built environment. Regenerative infrastructure projects including innovations in highways, rail and flood defences will play a vital role in creating stronger local economies in a post-pandemic world. But as well as being a year of opportunity for contractors, it should be seen as an opportunity to evolve procurement.

Mark Robinson is group chief executive at leading procurement authority Scape

As part of the UKs recovery efforts, government departments and local authorities have been tasked with delivering such high-quality projects at speed in order to drive better outcomes for communities across the UK.

Yet we still live in turbulent times. The industry has had every challenge thrown at it over the last two years and while the end of Covid pandemic might be in sight, the ongoing squeeze to the supply of labour and concerns around inflation and supply chain disruption are likely to affect the speed at which future projects get off the ground.

While many contractors remain upbeat about the outlook ahead, changes within the governance of public sector procurement have paved the way for a transformation in the way in which these future projects will be delivered, and, more importantly, what is now expected from civil delivery partners.

Three recent developments will reshape public procurement in the UK. All civils projects in 2022 must follow the principles of the Construction Playbook, the governments blueprint for best practice and take into account the findings of the independent Cabinet Office construction frameworks review, led by former Kings College London director of construction law David Mosey. Both developments are spearheaded by the Procurement Bill which will appear before parliament this year to underline the reforms to public procurement regulations.

When taxpayers money is concerned, procurement must be best-in-class. These legislative and policy developments have not only set a new gold standard for public sector clients, framework providers and contractors but will go a long way in helping to deliver projects with strong social value and green credentials.

As one of the organisations consulted on how we should define this gold standard, I welcome the findings of the Mosey review and the long-term direction that government is taking to drive value whether social, environmental or economic.

These plans will be further shaped by the 24 recommendations set out by the review, which include extensive support and accountability in relation to helping the public estate achieve net zero status, generating social value, stimulating innovation through modern methods of construction, minimising or eradicating waste, connecting supply chains and ensuring that they are treated fairly. Critically, Mosey calls for contractually binding action plans around these objectives something that, again, many have long been implementing.

Ultimately, we need to see greater consistency in the outcomes created by publicly funded civil engineering frameworks. As the Mosey Review highlights, bid costs are no small undertaking for contractors, so it is vital that framework providers offer robust support to those securing places on them, as well as the supply chain.

The best outcomes can be achieved where there is active management of frameworks to produce tangible outcomes. We have in-built standards that ensure a constant focus on value in all its varied forms, and every 1M spent on our frameworks generates 300,000 of social value for the local community. This can only be done with a programme of early engagement, which we enable with our direct award approach and local supply chain delivery.

Where we as procurement specialists, and those using our services, should take heart is in the component parts that the Mosey Review expects the gold standard to be made of. Indeed, I would go as far as to argue that many frameworks are already meeting or exceeding these standards. The reviews recommendations to set standards will raise the bar across the sector, while driving further innovation among those already operating at or beyond them.

The key now is to take these pockets of innovation and turn them into business as usual.If more projects and contractors can adopt best-practice behaviours and processesthen theres no reason we cant deliver on the UKs infrastructure needs in the coming years.

We are already seeing some significant innovation from our own civil delivery partners from the Scape Civil Engineering framework, using technology, creativity and a real commitment to improve the design, delivery and whole life cost performance of our national infrastructure. In most parts, the Whitehall recommendations seek to rubber-stamp a way forward where many in the industry were already leading by example.

In terms of the opportunities ahead, Scape is preparing to open bidding in February for spots on its next generation civil engineering framework. The re-procurement is a suite of 4bn, including a 3.25bn framework for England, Wales and Northern Ireland and a separate 750M framework for Scotland, managed and operated by Scape Scotland.

Scapes existing frameworks, both secured by Balfour Beatty, have delivered more than 250 projects to date for public sector clients and are due to expire in January 2023.

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This year needs to be one of procurement evolution - New Civil Engineer

This article originally appeared on VICE Belgium.

When it comes to skateboarding, the only thing more important than actually going skating is making sure that you have footage of you doing it. You can tell people youve pulled off this, or jumped that, but without actual evidence of those particular alleged achievements, people will take you as seriously as Boris Johnsons apologies.

Skating owes much of its enduring popularity precisely to these videos. This has been the case for the past half a century, with the first ever skateboarding video dating back to 1965. Titled Skaterdater, a dialogue-free, coming of age short film shot in sunny California focused on a group of downhill skaters known as the Imperial Skate Board Club as they hoped to impress local girls with their prowess.

The film won the Palme dOr for Best Short Film at 1966s Cannes Film Festival and has proved to have a long shelf-life, having been the subject of both academic study and extreme sports fandom. Skaterdater is still of cultural interest, even if it presents us with a vision of skate videos that looks nothing like the ones that aficionados like myself and my friends sit down and enjoy together today.

As skateboarding became increasingly popular amongst young people the world over, Hollywood cottoned on to the fact, featured skating in cult movies like Back to the Future and Gleaming the Cube. This was, as skate historians might remind you, a moment when the sport was still largely confined to pools, bowls, and ramps. The Californian surf-inspired skating scene of the 1970s was immortalised for younger skaters in the 2001 documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys, directed by skate supremo Stacy Peralta.

Thats not to say that skating was the sole preserve of pool-plunging ex-surfers. By the mid-80s, the likes of Rodney Mullen and Mark Gonzales were laying the foundations of what we now know as street skating. They just werent dragging cameramen along with them for the ride.

In 1988, the movie Shackle Me Not came out. This hour-long video was released by H-Street a skate team based in San Diego, California, founded by pro skateboarders Tony Mag and Mike Ternasky in 1986 and arguably marked the birth of the modern skate video. Its combination of gritty footage and a punk soundtrack set the tone for the avalanche of skate videos that were to follow in its wake.

These releases included the legendary Video Days, the 1991 classic released by the skateboarding brand Blind. Directed by future-Hollywood darling, Spike Jonze, and featuring the skating talents of Jason Lee amongst others, Video Days was dynamic, action-oriented, and in your face. Other big hitters in the heady days of the 1990s include Plan Bs Questionable (1992), Girl Skateboards Mouse (1996) and Toy Machines Welcome to Hell (also 1996).

The thing that made this explosion of skate videos possible was Sonys era-defining VX1000 camcorder, the first device to use MiniDV tapes, which were much smaller than previous tapes. The camcorders relative affordability, portability and ease of use made it an essential on the skate scene and led to a standardisation of a skate video aesthetic. One of the defining visual characteristics of that aesthetic is the fish-eye lens, which shows up everywhere in skate videos of the 1990s and 2000s and still features in tapes released today.

Another technological advance, the internet, has allowed skaters to delve into the history of their hobby. File-sharing services like Limewire gave people the opportunity to fill their hard drives with all manner of skate footage. The ability to easily and freely consume those videos allowed people like me and my friends to develop a serious interest in skate culture.

Then, YouTube came in the latter half the the early 2000s, and killed off the skate DVD, which had already replaced skate VHS. Magazines like Thrasher and Transworld which attempted to bolster sales by bundling DVDs with their latest issues had to find new ways to stay relevant in a context where audiences didnt need to spend money for content.

Thrasher managed to drag themselves into the digital age of skateboarding pretty quickly, joining YouTube back in 2006 and amassing nearly three million subscribers along the way. Theyre also about to celebrate the publication of their 500th issue, a testament to their work and to their fans eagerness to preserve their culture, even for a price.

If YouTube shortened skateboarders attention spans, then Instagram decimated them, ushering the era of the minute-long video. Suddenly, videos that were 10 or 20 minutes were considered excessive, and while this led to a proliferation of free content, something was lost, too. Inviting friends over, grabbing a pizza and settling down on the sofa to watch a 15-minute video always felt a little lacking in the old magic.

Things got even shorter when TikTok launched in 2016. The super-short videos hosted on the platform opened up the skate scene to more people than ever, with skater girls, queer and non-binary skaters finally finding their online home.

For skaters themselves, the rise of social media opened up new avenues for self-promotion. It was now easier than ever to try and catch the eye of professional skate teams. Rather than having to mail out physical evidence of ones abilities, you could just upload them for the whole world in a matter of minutes. This gave skaters a sense of independence, putting (some of) the power in their hands. In addition to their finely-honed array of tricks, skaters increasingly learned how best to get eyes on their videos, understanding that big brands are impressed by viewers, followers, and subscribers.

Not everyone abandoned the traditional video formats, and by the mid-2010s things were getting longer once again. Brands like Palace and Bronze 56K extended the length of their releases, giving the worlds skaters something to really sink their teeth into on the sofa in the evening.

If the modern skate film has a superstar director, it might well be William Strobeck, the American cinematographer best known for his work with Supreme.The 2014 film Cherry marked a return to the old school full-length video format, and he did it again in 2018 with the instant classic Blessed. Both films have made a mark on a new generation of skaters who never knew they were looking for a long-form video to change their lives.

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The Evolution of Skate Videos, From VHS to TikTok - VICE

At every meal, especially breakfast, the absurdity, the outrageous absurdity of evolution becomes frighteningly obvious. Take the humble pomegranate. It evolved? How? Did a single pomegranate seed evolve first? If so, starting as some early life form, how could a seedcontaining the concept of a pomegranate tree, along with the contents to grow onehave been formed, step by step, with no direction imposed on it?

Or instead of the seed, did the pomegranate itselfa single pomegranateevolve first? But how could a pomegranate with skin, seeds, and fruit on the seeds, come into existence through a long, slow process of evolution? How many endless proto pomegranates sitting on the ground (where else?) over millions of years came and went until one, finally, became a functioning and edible pomegranate (seeds, skin, and fruit together)?

Or maybe the pomegranate tree began it all? But what evolved first: the roots, the trunk, the branches, the leaf, or the pomegranate itself with seeds within it? Or did they all start evolving at once: a partial root, a partial trunk, a partial branch, a partial leaf, and a partial pomegranate with partial seeds until, finallyafter millions of inchoate and evolving proto-pomegranate trunks and roots and leaves and seeds arising, dying, rottingone, the fittest, survived into the first full-fledged pomegranate tree, the progenitor of all other pomegranates? (How, though, does the nutritive value of the pomegranate, along with its appealing taste, smell, and texture, fit in with this survival of the fittest story, anyway? Would not an uglier, unhealthier, and more tasteless pomegranate add to its survivability?)

Also, where did the idea of a pomegranate, or a pomegranate seed, or pomegranate tree come from to begin with? In evolutionary theory, there was never an idea of anything pomegranatey at all. Just wait long enough and, sooner or later, thanks to random mutation and natural selection, a pomegranate treeseeds, trunk, leaves, root and fruitwill just happen. Thats, at least, the narrative.

Evolutionists who want a Christian spin on creation would answer, of course, that Jesus, the Creator (see John 1:13), did it.

OK. But how?

Did Jesus first put the idea of a pomegranate seed in some very early life form, and then let that life form over millions of years (with a divine tweak every now and then) evolve into a pomegranate seed, which spawned the first pomegranate tree?

Or did He put into this early life the idea of a pomegranate and then said, And let it evolve into a pomegranate, from whose seeds the tree, bearing its own seed, will come. And (millions of years later) it was so?

Or did Jesus put the idea of a pomegranate tree into that early life form first? And, then simply let nature take its course until, eons later, the first pomegranate tree emerged?

However Jesus supposedly did it, evolution still demands millions of years of pre-pomegranate seeds, pre-pomegranates trees, and pre-pomegranates themselves fading in and out, step by step, until (again, maybe with fine-tuning) the first pomegranate treeseeds, leaves, trunk, branches and pomegranatesfinally arrived as a functioning and reproducing whole.

What other options are there? Evolutionary biologists tell us that Genesis 1:11 Then God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb that yields seed, and the fruit tree that yields fruit according to its kind, whose seed is in itself, on the earth; and it was so (Genesis 1:11) cannot be true. But the pomegranate is still here, and because it had to come from somewhere, I humbly ask, From where?

If any of the above scenarios are off, could someonetoo enlightened to believe in Genesis 1:11explain how the pomegranate evolved? And if they dont know how the pomegranate did, how about the blueberry, the avocado, the apple, the melon, the radish, the peach, the almond, the cherry, the tomatoor even the potato? How did any of these, or their first progenitor, step by step, slowly evolve into existence?

In stunning contrast, there is the six-day creation (Genesis 1-2), in which the love and power of God, tasted in every plant-based bite, reveals the wisdom of the world (1 Corinthians 3:19) as obviously, even outrageously, wrong.

Clifford Goldstein is the editor of Adult Bible Study Guides at the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists, and a longtime columnist for Adventist Review.

Read more from the original source:

Cliff's Edge -- The Evolution of the Pomegranate - Adventist Review

In our latest episode of NothingWasted!, we bring you a dynamic session from WasteExpo Together Online 2021, National Food Recovery Evolution: MealConnect and Feeding America. This session features speakers Justin Block, Managing Director of Digital Platform Technology, and Nathan Crone, Senior Account Manager of Agri Sourcing Partnerships, both at Feeding Americathe largest domestic hunger-relief organization in the U.S. Dr. Stuart Buckner of Buckner Environmental Associates, LLC, served as moderator.

Heres a sneak peek into the presentation:

Block set the stage by talking about Feeding Americas engagement in the issues of hunger and food waste. He noted that these are urgent threats, particularly with over $218 billion worth of food being thrown away each year. He also pointed out that 275 U.S. counties have food insecurity rates over 20%. The Feeding America approach and process relies on a wide array of food donors, its network of more than 200 certified member food banks, and the agencies that utilize the food in helping to feed the 37 million hungry Americans.

Block went on to talk about MealConnect, the first nationally available food-donation app. Its free to use and allows organizations to post donations; trucks can also reroute rejected loads to food banks. Since its launch in 2014, the app has facilitated the rescuing of 2.9 billion pounds of food, which has helped 10,200 hunger relief organizations. Feeding America is continuing to expand MealConnect as well as access better food-waste data through it. Its 2.0 release is coming soon, which will enable users to better find the produce they need, better match supply and demand, and will feature a mobile, more user-friendly design.

Crone went on to elaborate on the emphasis on produce. On top of the fact that billions of pounds of produce go to waste each year, there is of course great nutritional value in suchand providing food-insecure people with produce encourages more balanced diets and helps to stretch food budgets. Some of the key challenges his team is working on include:

To wrap things up, Block showed off some of the marketing materials related to MealConnects new campaign.

After the presentation, Bruckner posed questions including, How can consumers help reduce food waste? Block encouraged becoming champions and advocates and encouraging businesses to be more mindful and intentional about unsalable product. Taking that one step further, consumers can visit FeedingAmerica.orgs Food Bank Finder and help local food businesses further up the supply chainpackers, distributors, wholesalersthey may not even realize they can donate their extra food. So if you can help making the initial connectionjust letting them know that food bank is in the community, it is a big help.

Listen to the full session above.

#NothingWastedPodcast

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Episode 138: National Food Recovery Evolution: MealConnect and Feeding America - waste360

Do you remember Lionel Messi? Little guy, used to have a bowl cut? Started off by dribbling past everyone, but getting fouled all the time? Then he turned into the best passer in the world and also the best goal scorer? Finally cut his hair, but bleached it blonde? Rinsed the peroxide out and grew a beard? Seemed like he'd washed out that crisis, only to then tattoo his entire leg in black ink? Won the Ballon d'Or seven times? Ever heard of him?

He used to be everywhere, always. To watch soccer for the past 15 years was to try to pay attention to someone else on a given Saturday or Sunday, only for Messi to remind you that you were wasting your time not watching him.

Enjoying that Bayern Munich match? Hey, I just dribbled through Getafe's entire team. Oh man, this Zlatan guy is pretty interesting, huh? You know what's interesting? I just scored 50 goals and tossed in 16 assists in 38 La Liga games. Whoa, is Manchester City ever going to lose a match? Uh, my team just took 20 shots in a game and I attempted or assisted every single one. All right, seems like it's time to enjoy some of this Erling Haaland business? I'm 32 years old and I'm going to put up a 20-20 goals and assists season just for fun.

Every month during the season, European Sports Media -- a group of 14 European magazines -- votes on a Team of the Month. There's an archive of their selections going all the way back to the 1995-96 season. Since then, Messi has been voted in 84 times. No other player has made more than 51 appearances (Cristiano Ronaldo). Put another way, over his 16 seasons with Barcelona, Messi was voted into the Team of the Month an absurd 60% of the time. For more than a decade-and-a-half, Messi's average month was better than everyone else's best. He's the only player who was more likely to be in the team than not.

Then, all of a sudden, he disappeared.

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There's just ... nothing. No breathtaking runs, no physics-defying free kicks, and barely any goals. Twenty-one matches into his first Ligue 1 season for Paris Saint-Germain, the greatest soccer player of all time has scored one time. In the 2012-13 season, he'd already scored 33 goals at this point in the domestic campaign. In his last three years at Barcelona, he'd averaged 16 goals through the first 21 matches of the La Liga season. Let me repeat: Lionel Messi has scored ONE GOAL in Ligue 1 this season. Unsurprisingly, given that -- and shockingly, given everything else -- he's yet to be selected to the ESM Team of the Month this season. He's been so absent from the everyday rhythms of European soccer that some people actually got mad when he won the Ballon d'Or.

It sure feels like the beginning of the end -- or maybe it's the start of something new.

The rest is here:

Lionel Messi's evolution at PSG: After 20 years, is he finally learning not to do it all himself? - ESPN

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Negative observational learning might play a limited role in the cultural evolution of technology | Scientific Reports - Nature.com

Sitting at 2-0, the 49ers hosted the Packers in their first home game with fans since the 2019 NFC Championship game. The 49ers paid homage to the 1994 team by donning the red throwback uniforms for the first time. It was a nationally televised game on Sunday Night Football.

The table was set for the 49ers, but they came out flat, fell behind 17-0, and their comeback fell short, as Aaron Rodgers and the Packers drove the field for a game-winning field goal in 37 seconds.

If youre a Packers fan, your natural inclination is to use that Packers win as evidence for why they will repeat that performance on Saturday. If youre a 49ers fan, youre hoping the outcome will be different during this weekends NFC Divisional battle.

But how much have the 49ers evolved since that Week 3 loss, and are those differences between the teams enough for San Francisco to advance to the NFC Championship game?

The development of the 49ers pass rush and their improved run defense

In Week 3, the 49ers generated seven pressures against Aaron Rodgers and only sacked the Packers signal-caller once. In the last two weeks, San Franciscos defense has generated 27 pressures and sacked the opposing quarterback 10 times.

Arden Key played three snaps as an edge rusher in that first matchup, whereas now Key is rushing from the inside as an extremely valuable piece on this defensive line.

Samson Ebukam has really developed into a capable rusher off the edge, which simply wasnt the case early in the season as he was still adapting to the role. Arik Armstead played 27 snaps at defensive end in Week 3. Since Week 9, hes exclusively moved inside as a 3T and been dominating. He finished with a season-high six pressures last week vs. Cowboys.

San Franciscos run defense hasnt been emphasized enough, but since Week 10, they have been the best in the NFL. Their rushing defense is No. 1 in the following categories: DVOA, EPA per play, Success Rate, and Explosive Runs allowed.

Theyll face a strong rushing attack, as the Packers are No. 1 in rushing success rate on offense. Aaron Jones and A.J. Dillon will be a load to tackle in the freezing temperatures of Wisconsin, but the 49ers improved defense should be up to the task.

Kyle Shanahans mid-season discovery of 49ers offensive identity

The 49ers were a highly-efficient offense all season long, but they really discovered their offensive identity mid-season in Chicago. Early in the year, it felt like Shanahan was struggling to find a rhythm as a play-caller, balancing Jimmy Garoppolo and Trey Lance.

Halfway through 2021, Shanahan punted the Trey Lance package into the sun, moved Deebo Samuel into his wide-back position, emphasized a run-heavy attack with Elijah Mitchell at the forefront.

Since Week 10, the 49ers offense has taken off to a whole another level. Their offense is second in passing DVOA and sixth in rushing DVOA. The 49ers offense also has the highest rate of explosive passing plays during this span as well. Shanahans bunch is also fourth in EPA per play and sixth in success rate. All of the advanced metrics show that the 49ers have assembled a Top-5 offense (based on efficiency) ahead of the Packers matchup.

Samuel has come into his own as a true running back, Jauan Jennings has developed into a legitimate third-down threat, and Brandon Aiyuk has become the 49ers best route runner. Not to mention George Kittles duality as a receiving or blocking tight end depending on the matchup.

Green Bays abysmal run defense

It doesnt make sense given their personnel, but all the advanced numbers show that the Packers run defense is one of the worst units in football.

Since Week 10, the Packers rushing defense is 27th in DVOA, 27th in EPA per play, 32nd in Success Rate, and 32nd in Explosive Run Plays allowed. They get gashed between every gap and havent been able to contain opposing running backs.

The Browns provided the blueprint for how to attack this Packers rushing defense, gashing them for 219 yards on 25 carries (8.8 yards per attempt). Thats similar to Raheem Mosterts box score from the 2019 NFC Title game.

Its clear how the 49ers are going to attack; its just a matter of winning in the trenches and dominating the blocks up front for San Francisco. If they can control the line of scrimmage, theyll have success running the ball against this Green Bay front.

San Franciscos dominance in the Red Zone

It was pretty clear early on in the season that the 49ers red-zone offense was dramatically improved this season. Its been an area of struggle the last few seasons under Kyle Shanahan for whatever reason. Between George Kittle, Deebo Samuel, and the emergence of Jauan Jennings, the 49ers have some legitimate red-zone threats that should keep defensive coordinators awake at night.

Shanahans red-zone offense ranks No. 1 in the NFL this season at 67 percent, while the Packers red-zone defense ranks No. 28. I think its a significant advantage because every time the 49ers get into the red area, theyll look to punch it in for six. Theyve had success all year long doing it, and it seems like the Packers defense has struggled to stop opponents.

Will this be a George Kittle game?

There was a three-week stretch where George Kittle reminded everyone in the National Football League who the most dominant tight end was. He had back-to-back games of at least 150 receiving yards, with three touchdowns, followed up by a 93-yard performance.

Kittles dominance in the run game as a blocker is widely known, but hes been a force as a receiving threat whenever the 49ers have needed it especially on the road.

The Packers have struggled to cover tight ends all season long. Theyre 28th in DVOA when covering opposing tight ends. Kittle caught seven passes for 93 yards in the first meeting this season and has generally had a ton of success against the Packers.

Id expect Kittle to be a major factor over the middle in this game, especially as a big, easy target for quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo.

Prediction: Green Bay 31, San Francisco 27

I think the 49ers are the toughest matchup for anyone in the NFL right now. They play a brand of football that travels anywhere and is uncommon in this day and age. San Franciscos physical rushing defense and pass rush should wreak more havoc than it did in Week 3. Their rushing attack should have success against the Packers front and be able to control this game.

The biggest questions to me heading into a game are the same as always:

Its been the same questions with this team all year long. Theyve generally been able to manage it in wins, and when they have lost, its typically been because of one of these three things.

I think they match up very well with the Packers, and I can see them winning this game and advancing to the NFC Championship game. However, at the same time, I dont trust the 49ers offense (especially their quarterback) to put together four quarters of high-level football on the road, and thats the difference in this game.

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Is the 49ers evolution since Week 3 enough to beat the Packers? - Niners Nation

New research led by the University of Bristol has revealed how giant 50-tonne sauropod dinosaurs, like Diplodocus, evolved from much smaller ancestors, like the wolf-sized Thecodontosaurus

In a new study published today in the journal Royal Society Open Science, researchers present a reconstruction of the limb muscles of Thecodontosaurus, detailing the anatomy of the most important muscles involved in movement.

Thecodontosaurus was a small to medium sized two-legged dinosaur that roamed around what today is the United Kingdom during the Triassic period (around 205 million years ago).

This dinosaur was one of the first ever to be discovered and named by scientists, in 1836, but it still surprises scientists with new information about how the earliest dinosaurs lived and evolved.

Antonio Ballell, PhD student in Bristols School of Earth Sciences and lead author of the study, said: The University of Bristol houses a huge collection of beautifully preserved Thecodontosaurus fossils that were discovered around Bristol. The amazing thing about these fossilised bones is that many preserve the scars and rugosities that the limb musculature left on them with its attachment.

These features are extremely valuable in scientific terms to infer the shape and direction of the limb muscles. Reconstructing muscles in extinct species requires this kind of exceptional preservation of fossils, but also a good understanding of the muscle anatomy of living, closely related species.

Antonio Ballell added: In the case of dinosaurs, we have to look at modern crocodilians and birds, that form a group that we call archosaurs, meaning ruling reptiles. Dinosaurs are extinct members of this lineage, and due to evolutionary resemblance, we can compare the muscle anatomy in crocodiles and birds and study the scars that they leave on bones to identify and reconstruct the position of those muscles in dinosaurs.

Professor Emily Rayfield, co-author of the study, said: These kinds of muscular reconstructions are fundamental to understand functional aspects of the life of extinct organisms. We can use this information to simulate how these animals walked and ran with computational tools.

From the size and orientation of its limb muscles, the authors argue that Thecodontosaurus was quite agile and probably used its forelimbs to grasp objects instead of walking.

This contrasts with its later relatives, the giant sauropods, which partly achieved these huge body sizes by shifting to a quadrupedal posture. The muscular anatomy of Thecodontosaurus seems to indicate that key features of later sauropod-line dinosaurs had already evolved in this early species.

Professor Mike Benton, another co-author, said: From an evolutionary perspective, our study adds more pieces to the puzzle of how the locomotion and posture changed during the evolution of dinosaurs and in the line to the giant sauropods.

How were limb muscles modified in the evolution of multi-ton quadrupeds from tiny bipeds? Reconstructing the limb muscles of Thecodontosaurus gives us new information of the early stages of that important evolutionary transition.

This research was funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC).

Paper:

Walking with early dinosaurs: appendicular myology of the Late Triassic sauropodomorph Thecodontosaurus antiquus by A. Ballell, E. J. Rayfield and M. J. Benton in Royal Society Open Science.

See the original post here:

January: dinosaur movement evolution | News and features - University of Bristol

News headlines in both financial services trade publications and national media outlets alike have homed in over the past several weeks on the topic of interest rateson where they have come from, where they stand now and what level rates may reach in the new year.

As often happens in such situations, PLANADVISER has received an extensive amount of written commentary from investment experts on the interrelated subjects of interest rates, inflation and economic growth. They offer viewpoints that seek to go beyond the headlines and illuminate the underlying market forces defining the day.

In the analysis of Brad McMillan, chief investment officer (CIO) for Commonwealth Financial Network, market watchers may be feeling an undue sense of panic about the current interest rate situation.

The panic of the day is the news about interest rates, he writes. The headlines state (correctly) that rates have moved up sharply in recent days. They state (correctly) that stocks have pulled back, noting this fact is due to that increase (which is possibly but not necessarily true). And they state (incorrectly, I believe) that higher rates are going to derail the economy and the markets, in that order.

McMillan says this narrative is pretty standard for this stage of the economic cycle.

The economy is growing, so the Fed, more worried about inflation than employment, starts to raise interest rates, he notes. Higher rates, mathematically, will mean slow growth and lower stock valuations. Cue the headlines. What is missing, as usual, is context.

In McMillans view, the growing concerns about the recent rise in interest rates are based on a couple of assumptions. First is the assumption that the increase reflects a problem with the financial markets.

Second, there is the thinking that current ratesfrom which we see the increaseare, by definition, correct, and the increase, therefore, represents a change from the correct rate levels, McMillan writes. Both assumptions are wrong.

For context, McMillan looks at the past 10 years of interest rates for the 10-year Treasury note. The current yield is about 1.8%, up in recent days from around 1.5%. McMillan agrees with the broader headlines that this is a sharp and sizable increase.

But this rate increase is dwarfed by the ones we saw in 2020 and 2021, he points out. Neither of those increases derailed the recovery, despite the headlines at the time. And, looking back before the pandemic, the interest rates take us back only to the lower end of the range in the latter part of the last decade. In other words, the recent spike is simply reversing part of the drop during the pandemica drop caused by extreme fiscal and monetary policy actions.

Put another way, McMillan argues, rates right now are moving back to the lower end of the normal range for the past decade. He says this should give individual and institutional investors some solace amid the frightening headlines.

Comments sent from investment management firm Ninety One, penned by strategist Russell Silberston, sound a decidedly different note. Silberston argues investors may actually be underestimating how far interest rates will rise, meaning bond yields have much further to riseand bond prices to fallthan commonly expected. He says his argument is based on some basic market history from the past 10 years.

In December 2015, six years after the global financial crisis overwhelmed the global economy and caused interest rates around the world to be slashed, the U.S. Federal Reserve raised the target for its benchmark federal funds rate by 0.25% to 0.5%, Silberston recalls. However, it then took a year for the tightening cycle to kick off in earnest, with another 25 basis point [bps] hike in December 2016, which, in turn, was followed by a series of 25-point hikes each calendar quarter that followed.

This took the Feds overnight rate to 2.5% by December 2018, Silberston explains, and, within seven months, the Fed was forced to partially reverse some of this tightening, reducing its rate to 1.75% over the second half of 2019 as financial markets wobbled badly despite the economy performing well.

With the Federal Reserve again on the verge of a tightening cycle, financial markets are replaying the post-crisis playbook and assuming the Fed is only going to be able to raise its rate to around 1.75%, Silberston says. This is well short of any assessment of the economically neutral level of interest rates, as they will be stymied by the desire to shrink their balance sheet, too. Why, then, in the face of multi-decade highs in inflation, are markets so sanguine about the interest rate outlook? The answer lies in the Feds balance sheet, and in particular the level of excess reserves placed there by commercial banks.

As Silberston observes, when a central bank undertakes quantitative easing, it creates reserves for itself and, with these, buys government bonds and other assets. These sit as an asset on the banks balance sheets.

The money they created to buy those assets ends up in the banking system, and in turn finds its way back to the central bank as excess reserves, he writes. These, like any bank deposit, are a liability for the central bank. Thus, in accounting terms, both assets and liabilities at the central bank have grown. When it comes to quantitative tightening, the process is reversed. The central bank either sells or allows a bond to mature, thus shrinking their assets. However, their liabilities also shrink as commercial bank excess reserves fall in tandem.

Looking forward and comparing the Federal Reserves policy options that are available today relative to what was possible in the wake of the Great Recession, Silberston says the situation is quite differentmore different than some market watchers appear to realize. His arguments are fairly technical and have to do with the way the Federal Reserve estimates its liabilitieshow it did so in the period before the pandemic and how it is doing so now.

Whatever the reason, [in the prior cycle] the Feds compass was on the wrong setting and it overdid quantitative tightening and withdrew far more liquidity than the banking sector needed, Silberston writes. It is this rather technical aspect of the Feds operations that we believe was behind the aborted tightening cycle in 2016 to 2018, rather than the federal funds rate being driven to a level that the economy could not withstand.

This time, in Silberstons view, is different. He warns that, to avoid the same whipsaw happening again when it embarks on quantitative tightening in this cycle, the Fed has introduced new on-demand tools to control overnight interest rates, both to the upside and downside. In theory, at least, policymakers should be able to run the balance sheet down more quickly without causing the liquidity shortages that characterized the last tightening cycle.

Again, if this view is correct, the market is underestimating how far high interest rates will rise, meaning bond yields have much further to rise, and bond prices to fallthan hitherto, Silberston concludes.

For his part, McMillan does not fully agree with that take, but he also acknowledges that investors may be overlooking some potential risks.

Lets look at a few assumptions. The first one says the current spike is a problem in financial markets, McMillan suggests. Looking at the [historical rate] chart, however, the problem seems to have come from the pandemic. Now, from an economic perspective, this problem is starting to fade. In this sense, the recent increase is a recovery from a problem, not an indicator of one.

The second assumption says recent rates are the correct and normal ones, McMillan writes.

Yet here again, due to the pandemic, this is definitely not the case, he argues. If both of these assumptions are wrongand they arethe narrative we are seeing in the headlines must be wrong as well. This logic would also extend to further rate increases. If rates for the 10-year Treasury notes go to 2.5%, they would be within the central range over the pre-pandemic years. It is only when rates begin to rise above 3% for a sustained period, not briefly, that the prospects of significant economic damage will start to get material. The years from 2013 to 2019 show that the economy and the markets can do quite well with rates between 2% and 3%.

After making that point, McMillan is quick to point out that significant risks remain.

Growth stocks are showing the strain, and this has had a disproportionate impact on the market, he observes. The housing sector might slow down as mortgage rates increase, but again this trend would be an adjustment, not a wholesale change. The economy and markets can and do adjust to changes in interest rates. This environment is a normal part of the cycle and one we see on a regular basis. The current trend is perhaps a bit faster than weve been seeing, but it is a response to real economic factorsand, therefore, normal in context. That is why there is no need to panic.

Link:

Making Sense of the Interest Rate Evolution - Planadviser.com

Mitch Gould Developed a System to Centralize Essential Services that New Products Need to Thrive in America

This press release was orginally distributed by ReleaseWire

Boca Raton, FL (ReleaseWire) 01/24/2022 Product manufacturers have many obstacles when they decide to launch a new product to American consumers.

A launch campaign needs at least a sales staff, logistical and operational support, and marketing expertise.

"Everything costs money, especially if you are an international health and wellness brand," said Mitch Gould, founder and CEO of Nutritional Products International, a global brand management firm based in Boca Raton, FL. "International brands often don't understand the American retail industry or our culture."

Gould said he developed the "Evolution of Distribution" system to streamline the product launch process and keep costs down.

"I brought all the services involved in a product launch under the NPI banner," Gould said. "NPI provides a seasoned sales staff, warehousing, logistics, regulatory compliance, and specialized marketing services."

With NPI, Gould said domestic and international product manufacturers don't have to rent office or warehouse space.

"They don't have to hire a sales team with support staff. We have a Food Scientist to make sure their labels are FDA approved," he added. "We have the knowledge and experience our clients are seeking."

Gould said he also founded InHealthMedia, a marketing agency that specializes in the health and wellness sector.

"You have to understand the products and the industry to market them effectively," he said.

The marketing plan can include social media influencers, strategic professionally written press releases, TV segments that can reach more than 100 million households, and media outreach.

"We also have gotten major general and trade publications to cover our clients," Gould said.

For more information, visitnutricompany.com.

About NPI and Its Founder NPI is a privately-held company specializing in the retail distribution of nutraceuticals, dietary supplements, functional beverages, and skin-care products. NPI offers a unique, proven approach for product manufacturers worldwide seeking to launch or expand their products' distribution in the U.S. retail market.

Mitch Gould, the founder of NPI, is a third-generation retail distribution and manufacturing professional. Gould developed the "Evolution of Distribution" platform, which provides domestic and international product manufacturers with the sales, marketing, and product distribution expertise required to succeed in the world's largest market the United States. In the early 2000s, Gould was part of a "Powerhouse Trifecta" that placed more than 150 products on Amazon's new health and wellness category.

Gould, known as a global marketing guru, also has represented icons from the sports and entertainment worlds such as Steven Seagal, Hulk Hogan, Ronnie Coleman, Roberto Clemente Jr., Chuck Liddell, and Wayne Gretzky.

For more information on this press release visit: http://www.releasewire.com/press-releases/nutritional-products-internationals-evolution-of-distribution-platform-helps-health-and-wellness-brands-enter-the-us-market-1352240.htm

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Nutritional Products International's Evolution of Distribution Platform Helps Health and Wellness Brands Enter the U.S. Market - Digital Journal