Every December Jews celebrate the eight-day festival of Hanukkah, perhaps the best-known and certainly the most visible Jewish holiday.

While critics sometimes identify Christmas as promoting the prevalence in America today of what one might refer to as Hanukkah kitsch, this assessment misses the social and theological significance of Hanukkah within Judaism itself.

Early history

Though it is 2,200 years old, Hanukkah is one of Judaisms newest holidays, an annual Jewish celebration that does not even appear in the Hebrew Bible. The historical event that is the basis for Hanukkah is told, rather, in the post-biblical Books of the Maccabees, which appear in the Catholic biblical canon but are not even considered part of the Bible by Jews and most Protestant denominations.

Based on the Greco-Roman model of celebrating a military triumph, Hanukkah was instituted in 164 B.C. to celebrate the victory of the Maccabees, a ragtag army of Jews, against the much more powerful army of King Antiochus IV of Syria. In 168 B.C., Antiochus outlawed Jewish practice and forced Jews to adopt pagan rituals and assimilate into Greek culture.

The Maccabees revolted against this persecution. They captured Jerusalem from Antiochuss control, removed from the Jerusalem Temple symbols of pagan worship that Antiochus had introduced and restarted the sacrificial worship, ordained by God in the Hebrew Bible, that Antiochus had violated.

Hanukkah, meaning dedication, marked this military victory with a celebration that lasted eight days and was modeled on the festival of Tabernacles (Sukkot) that had been banned by Antiochus.

How Hanukkah evolved

The military triumph, however, was short-lived. The Maccabees descendants the Hasmonean dynasty routinely violated their own Jewish law and tradition.

Even more significantly, the following centuries witnessed the devastation that would be caused when Jews tried again to accomplish what the Maccabees had done. By now, Rome controlled the land of Israel. In A.D. 68-70 and again in A.D. 133-135, the Jews mounted passionate revolts to rid their land of this foreign and oppressing power.

The first of these revolts ended in the destruction of the Second Jerusalem Temple, the preeminent center of Jewish worship, which had stood for 600 years. As a result of the second revolt, the Jewish homeland was devastated and countless Jews were put to death.

War no longer seemed an effective solution to the Jews tribulations on the stage of history. In response, a new ideology deemphasized the idea that Jews should or could change their destiny through military action. What was required, rabbis asserted, was not battle but perfect observance of Gods moral and ritual law. This would lead to Gods intervention in history to restore the Jewish peoples control over their own land and destiny.

In this context, rabbis rethought Hanukkahs origins as the celebration of a military victory. Instead, they said, Hanukkah should be seen as commemorating a miracle that occurred during the Maccabees rededication of the temple: The story now told was how a jar of temple oil sufficient for only one day had sustained the temples eternal lamp for a full eight days, until additional ritually appropriate oil could be produced.

The earliest version of this story appears in the Talmud, in a document completed in the sixth century A.D. From that period on, rather than directly commemorating the Maccabees victory, Hanukkah celebrated Gods miracle.

This is symbolized by the kindling of an eight-branched candelabra (Menorah or Hanukkiah), with one candle lit on the holidays first night and an additional candle added each night until, on the final night of the festival, all eight branches are lit. The ninth candle in the Hanukkiah is used to light the others. Throughout the medieval period, however, Hanukkah remained a minor Jewish festival.

What Hanukkah means today

How then to understand what happened to Hanukkah in the past hundred years, during which it has achieved prominence in Jewish life, both in America and around the world?

The point is that even as the holidays prior iterations reflected the distinctive needs of successive ages, so Jews today have reinterpreted Hanukkah in light of contemporary circumstances a point that is detailed in religion scholar Dianne Ashtons book, Hanukkah in America. Ashton demonstrates while Hanukkah has evolved in tandem with the extravagance of the American Christmas season, there is much more to this story.

Hanukkah today responds to Jews desire to see their history as consequential, as reflecting the value of religious freedom that Jews share with all other Americans. Hanukkah, with its bright decorations, songs, and family- and community-focused celebrations, also fulfills American Jews need to reengage disaffected Jews and to keep Jewish children excited about Judaism.

Poignantly, telling a story of persecution and then redemption, Hanukkah today provides a historical paradigm that can help modern Jews think about the Holocaust and the emergence of Zionism. In short, Hanukkah is as powerful a commemoration as it is today because it responds to a host of factors pertinent to contemporary Jewish history and life.

Over two millennia, Hanukkah has evolved to narrate the story of the Maccabees in ways that meet the distinctive needs of successive generations of Jews. Each generation tells the story as it needs to hear it, in response to the eternal values of Judaism but also as is appropriate to each periods distinctive cultural forces, ideologies, and experiences.

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Persecution and Redemption: The evolution of Hanukkah and its symbolism about Jewish survival - Milwaukee Independent

Its not often that a fossil truly rewrites human evolution, but the recent discovery of an ancient extinct ape has some scientists very excited. According to its discoverers, Danuvius guggenmosi combines some human-like features with others that look like those of living chimpanzees. They suggest that it would have had an entirely distinct way of moving that combined upright walking with swinging from branches. And they claim that this probably makes it similar to the last shared ancestor of humans and chimps.

We are not so sure. Looking at a fossilized animals anatomy does give us insights into the forces that would have operated on its bones and so how it commonly moved. But its a big leap to then make conclusions about its behavior, or to go from the bones of an individual to the movement of a whole species. The Danuvius fossils are unusually complete, which does provide some vital new evidence. But how much does it really tell us about how our ancestors moved around?

Danuvius has long and mobile arms, habitually extended (stretched out) legs, feet which could sit flat on the floor, and big toes with a strong gripping action. This is a unique configuration. Showing that a specimen is unique is a prerequisite for classifying it as belonging to a separate, new species that deserves its own name.

But what matters in understanding the specimen is how we interpret its uniqueness. Danuviuss discoverers go from describing its unique anatomy to proposing a unique pattern of movement. When we look at living apes, the relationship between anatomy and movement is not so simple.

The Danuvius find actually includes fossils from four individuals, one of which is nearly complete. But even a group of specimens may not be typical of a species more generally. For instance, humans are known for walking upright, not climbing trees, but the Twa hunter-gatherers are regular tree climbers. These people, whose bones look just like ours, have distinctive muscles and ranges of movement well beyond the human norm. But you could not predict their behavior from their bones.

Every living ape uses a repertoire of movements, not just one. For example, orangutans use clambering, upright or horizontal climbing, suspensory swinging, and assisted bipedalism (walking upright using hands for support). Their movement patterns can vary in complex ways because of individual preference, body mass, age, sex, or activity.

Gorillas, meanwhile, are knuckle-walkers and we used to think they were unable to stand fully upright. But the walking gorilla Ambam is famous for his humanlike stride.

Ultimately, two animals with very similar anatomies can move differently, and two with different anatomies can move in the same way. This means that Danuvius may not be able to serve as a model for our ancestors behavior, even if its anatomy is similar to theirs.

In fact, we believe there are other plausible interpretations of Danuviuss bones. These alternatives give a picture of a repertoire of potential movements that may have been used in different contexts.

For example, one of Danuviuss most striking features is the high ridge on the top of its shinbone, which the researchers say is associated with strongly developed cruciate ligaments, which stabilize the knee joint. The researchers link these strong stabilizing ligaments with evidence for an extended hip and a foot that could be placed flat on the floor to suggest that this ape habitually stood upright. Standing upright could be a precursor to bipedal walking, so the authors suggest that this means Danuvius could have been like our last shared ancestor with other apes.

However, the cruciate ligaments also work to stabilize the knee when the leg is rotating. This only happens when the knee is bent with the foot on the ground. This is why skiers who use knee rotation to turn their bodies often injure these ligaments.

We have not seen the Danuvius bones in real life. But, based on the researchers excellent images and descriptions, an equally plausible interpretation of the pronounced ridge on the top of the shinbone could be that the animal used its knee when it was bent, with significant rotational movement.

Perhaps it hung from a branch above and used its feet to steer by gripping branches below, rather than bearing weight through the feet. This could have allowed it to capitalize on its small body weight to access fruit on fine branches. Alternatively, it could have hung from its feet, using the legs to maneuver and the hands to grasp.

All of these movements fit equally well with Danuvius bones, and could be part of its movement repertoire. So there is no way to say which movement is dominant or typical. As such, any links to our own bipedalism look much less clear-cut.

Danuvius is undoubtedly a very important fossil, with lots to teach us about how varied ape locomotion can be. But we would argue that it is not necessarily particularly like us. Instead, just like living apes, Danuvius would probably have displayed a repertoire of different movements. And we cant say which would have been typical, because anatomy is not enough to reconstruct behavior in full.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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New fossils provide evidence about the evolution of walking - Quartz

Read: A rare universal pattern in human languages

LDT told people, basically, dont bother to go look for speech abilities in anything other than modern humans, says Thomas Sawallis, one of the authors of the new paper. Those speech abilities could include distinct vowels and consonants, syllables, or even syntaxall of which, according to LDT, should be impossible for any animal without a human vocal tract. There was always this idea, says Greg Hickok, a cognitive-science professor at the University of California at Irvine who was not involved in the study, that there was one thing that had to happen and that released the linguistic abilities. For Noam Chomsky and his followers, that thing was the invention of syntax. For proponents of LDT, it was the reshaping of the human throat.

Part of the reason LDT caught on to begin with is that language evolution, as a field, lacks concrete data. As John Locke, a linguistics professor at Lehman College, put it, Motor control rots when you die. Soft tissues like tongues and nerves and brains generally dont fossilize; DNA sequencing is impossible past a few hundred thousand years; no one has yet found a diary or rap track recorded by a teenage Australopithecus. So the anatomical argument presented by LDT gave researchers something to latch on to. Until the 60s, people who studied language evolution were considered crackpots because they didnt have any data, Locke says. When youve got nothing on the table, a little something goes a long ways.

The researcher generally credited with developing laryngeal descent theory is Philip Lieberman, now a professor at Brown University. He called the new paper just a complete misrepresentation of the entire field, among other things. One of the quantitative models the new study relies on, he says, doesnt properly represent the shape of the larynx, tongue, and other parts we use to talk: It would convert a mailing tube into a human vocal tract. And according to Lieberman, laryngeal descent theory never claimed language was not possible prior to the critical changes in our ancestors throat anatomy. Theyre trying to set up a straw man, he said.

Yet other experts I spoke with told me that setting an upper bound on when speech, and therefore language, could have possibly evolved was exactly the effect that LDT had on anyone studying language evolution. Hickok said that when he was being trained in linguistics, this was an established, almost dogmatic idea. The new study is a dramatic reversal of the status quo, he said: The phrase that came to mind when I finished it was mic drop.

Read: How F sounds might break a fundamental rule of linguistics

Still, he doesnt agree entirely with Sawallis and his co-authors conclusions. Rather than 27 million years, Hickok proposes that the earliest bound on any sort of speech ability would be nearer to human ancestors split with the Pan genus, which includes chimpanzees and bonobos, our closest living relatives. That split happened about 5 million to 7 million years agocertainly longer than 200,000 years, but a far cry from 27 million. Lieberman argues that the precursors of speech might have emerged about a little more than 3 million years ago, when artifacts like jewelry appear in the archaeological record. The idea is that both language and jewelry are intimately related to the evolution of symbolic thinking.

Read more from the original source:

A Mic Drop on a Theory of Language Evolution - The Atlantic

The cortical dysconnectivity characteristic of schizophrenia may result from evolutionary modifications that support higher brain function, according to study results published in Brain. The study, led by Martijn van den Heuvel of the Connectome Laboratory at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in The Netherlands, examined in vivo neuroimaging data from adult humans and chimpanzees.

Investigators compared the species connectome layouts based on magnetic resonance imaging data in 58 humans (mean age, 42.59.8 years) and 22 chimpanzees (mean age, 29.412.8 years). In addition, the study analyzed 3 schizophrenia datasets with 118 patients and 113 healthy controls total. To ensure specificity given overlapping neural phenotypes in psychiatric disorders, datasets for 7 other brain disorders were also included.

Scans were processed in FreeSurfer and parcellated according to the Desikan-Killiany atlas. Connectivity was then reconstructed with deterministic fiber tracking, and the investigators used fractional anisotropy as a measure of connectivity strength and tract integrity. To assess brain dysconnectivity, they performed edgewise comparisons of connectome maps and determined t-statistics. Connections were considered specific to humans if they were seen in more than 60% of human subjects and 0% of chimpanzees, whereas shared connections had to be observed in 60% of both groups.

To determine whether connections seen in humans were unique to the evolution of homo sapiens, investigators also conducted post hoc analyses comparing human and chimpanzee connections with those of the brain in rhesus macaques (n=8).

The chimpanzee and human brain networks showed a strong binary connectome overlap of 94% (P <.001) and an overall correlation in connectivity strength (r = 0.93; P <.001). Investigators observed 27 human-specific connections (3.5% of the total connectome) compared with 7 chimpanzee-specific connections (1.1%), and the 2 groups shared 428 connections.

Evaluations of schizophrenia-related brain dysconnectivity demonstrated human patient-control differences of lower fractional anisotropy in the isthmus, parietal and temporal cortices, insula, and precuneus, among others.

Subsequently, when exploring schizophrenia-related dysconnectivity and human evolutionary modifications, human-specific connections displayed a significantly higher level of congruence with the pattern of schizophrenia dysconnectivity compared with the set of human-chimpanzee shared connections in all 3 schizophrenia datasets (P = .019, P =.012, and P =.005). The level of human-chimpanzee connectivity difference was also moderately correlated with schizophrenia dysconnectivity in all 3 datasets (r = 0.17; P =.021; r = 0.22; P =.001; and r = 0.17; P =.034). Second to human-specific connections, shared connections more common in humans demonstrated high levels of schizophrenia-related dysconnectivity (P = .0020, P =.004, and P =.010).

The investigators found no significant involvement of human-specific connections in other brain disorders. In the post hoc analysis comparing human and chimpanzee connections with those seen in rhesus macaques, the set of connections unique to humans showed significantly greater involvement compared with the set of species-shared connections in the 3 datasets (P <.001, P =.031, and P =.0020).

The investigators noted that modifications in brain circuitry in service of developing more complex brain functionality in humans may have potentially also shaped aspects of human-specific brain dysfunction. Study limitations included the relatively sparse availability of connectome data from different primate species and the variety of employed methodologies and experimental conditions used to derive connectomes.

Our findings suggest that evolutionary modifications to connections of the human cerebrum are associated with the pattern of cortical dysconnectivity in schizophrenia, the investigators wrote, Compared to our closest living relative the chimpanzee, connections present only in humans showed on average a higher involvement in schizophrenia pathology than the majority class of connections that are shared between the two species.

Reference

van den Heuvel MP, Scholtens LH, de Lange SC, et al. Evolutionary modifications in human brain connectivity associated with schizophrenia [published online November 14, 2019]. Brain. doi:10.1093/brain/awz330

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Evolution of Higher Function May Have Set the Stage for Schizophrenia in Humans - Psychiatry Advisor

Once again, as we wind down another year, weve invited Ella Beaudoin and Briana Pobiner from the Smithsonians National Museum of Natural History to update us on what is new in the area of human evolution. Read on to see why it is our pleasure to showcase these authors insights year after year. JMO

By Ella Beaudoin, BA, and Briana Pobiner, PhD, Human Origins Program, Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of Natural History

It almost seems like every year is a new, incredible year for human evolution discoveries! There was no exception in 2019, keeping human evolution researchers (and students) on their toes. This years blog post is going to focus on discoveries that give us a new twist on old ideas from previously unknown hominin species to other evidence that sheds new light on old questions. If you want to learn more about our favorite discoveries from previous years, read our 2017 and 2018 blog posts.

1) The human family tree gets another branch: Homo luzonensis

Whereas the march of progress an iconic image of human evolution moving from chimp to upright human is a common image when it comes to human evolution, it reinforces a few misconceptions. One is that there was a simple progression from more primitive forms to more advanced forms, with modern humans at the pinnacle of evolution; another is that there was only one species or type of early human around at any one time. Nope! The best way to understand evolution is to imagine a short tree or bush: the leaves at the top outside edges of the tree are those lineages that have evolved from earlier lineages and are still around today (like modern humans and other living primates), and all of the branches lower down, that twist and turn and end without leaves, are extinct species. Some of these branches are part of the same overall branch that led to us, so they are our ancestors. Others are branches near ours which end before they reach the top of the tree; theyre essentially our evolutionary cousins.

Now enter Homo luzonensis, fossil remains of at least two adults and one child of a new hominin species found in Callao Cave on the island of Luzon in the Philippines dated to between 50,000-67,000 years old. This discovery was announced in April of this year by a team led by Florent Dtroit from the Muse de lHomme in Paris, France, and its exciting not just because its a new species, but because of how it changes our earlier understanding of the first hominin migrations out of Africa and into Asia. Homo luzonensis was around at the same time as Neanderthals, Denisovans, Homo floresiensis, and our own species, Homo sapiens, but it displays a unique mosaic of physical characteristics unlike any of these other hominins. Some of its features look very ancient for instance, the small size and simplified crowns of its molars and the 3D shape and curvature of its finger and toe bones look most similar to australopiths whereas other features of its teeth are more similar to Paranthropus, Homo erectus, and even Homo sapiens! Since its hands and feet have features that are even more ancient than those of Homo erectus, does this mean that its ancestor is an even earlier hominin that migrated out of Africa? Only the discovery of more fossils will answer this question. This question of whether an even more ancient species than Homo erectus migrated out of Africa was raised with the discovery of Homo floresiensis in 2004 (as this species also has some anatomical features similar to early species of Homo), and this question seems even less settled now with the discovery of another late-surviving island-dwelling species outside of Africa.

2) Australopithecus anamensis gets a face

Another really exciting fossil find from this year was not a new species, but a new body part of a previously known species: Australopithecus anamensis. First named in 1995, this species was known from teeth, jaws, and some postcranial bones from the sites of Allia Bay and Kanapoi in northern Kenya dated to between about 4.2 and 3.9 million years ago. But in September of this year, a team led by the Cleveland Museum of Natural Historys Yohannes Hailie-Selassie made a stunning announcement: they had found a nearly complete 3.8 million year old Australopithecus anamensis skull, MRD-VP-1/1, at the site of Woronso-Mille in Ethiopia. This extremely well-preserved skull meant that researchers could finally characterize the face of the earliest known species of Australopithecus. Furthermore, the age of the MRD cranium indicates that A. anamensis overlapped in time with A. afarensis, the species that the well-known fossil partial skeleton nicknamed Lucy belongs to. Why is that important? Until this year, most researchers had thought that A. anamensis gradually evolved into A. afarensis, with no overlap in time. While Hailie-Selassies research team say this could still be the case, they think instead its more likely to have occurred through a speciation event, in which a small group of genetically isolated A. anamensis rather than the entire species A. anamensis evolved into A. afarensis, which then lived side by side for at least 100,000 years.

3) DNA of diverse Denisovans

Aside from the discovery of fossil remains of an entirely new species, or the discovery of previously unknown skeletal elements of other species, ancient DNA is among the most cutting-edge tools that paleoanthropologists have to investigate our origins. In fact, in 2010, ancient mitochondrial DNA was extracted from the 30,000-50,000 year old fossil finger bone of a young woman from Denisova Cave in Siberia, where both modern human and Neanderthal fossils had been discovered. But she was neither human nor Neanderthal she was from an extinct population which before then had been unknown to scientists. Though their still fragmentary fossil record has meant that scientists have not designated them as a new species, they are called Denisovans after the place where their remains were first discovered. Scientists have since determined that Denisovans interbred with both modern humans and Neanderthals.

In April of this year, a new study of 161 modern human genomes from 14 island groups in Island Southeast Asia and New Guinea region led by Murray Cox of Massey University in New Zealand was published. The results indicate that modern humans interbred with at least three Denisovan groups that were geographically isolated from each other in deep time. One of these Denisovan lineages is found in East Asians, whose DNA indicates a close relationship to the fossil remains found in Denisova Cave. The other two Denisovan lineages diverged from each other around 363,000 years ago and split off from the first lineage about 283,000 years ago. Traces of one of these two lineages is mainly found in modern Papuans, while the other is found in people over a much larger area of Asia and Oceania. The implication? Denisovans are actually three different groups, with more genetic diversity in less than a dozen bones that currently comprise their entire fossil sample than in the >7.7 billion modern humans alive today.

4) Necklace-wearing Neanderthals

Early depictions of Neanderthals, our short, stocky now-extinct relatives who were built for the cold and lived in Europe and western Asia between about 400,000 and 40,000 years ago, portrayed them as brutish and unintelligent but subsequent research indicated they were accomplished hunters who made complex tools, buried their dead, and may have taken care of the sick and injured. But were they capable of creating symbolic culture, like the early modern humans who ventured into Neanderthal territory in Europe and left behind a swath of cave paintings and cultural artifacts that could be considered art? In November of this year, a research team led by Antonio Rodrguez-Hidalgo from the Institute of Evolution in Africa (IDEA) in Madrid swooped in with an answer. They studied imperial eagle talons from Cova Foradada Cave in Calafell, Spain and concluded that since theres hardly any meat on eagle feet, the cut marks on these talons must mean that the Neanderthals were using them as jewelry! While a handful of previous examples of Neanderthals making necklaces from the bones of birds of prey have been found, this is the first evidence of the use of personal ornaments among Iberian Neanderthals, and at 44,000 years ago, among the most recent evidence of this behavior in Neanderthals in general. This discovery revisits questions about Neanderthal self-expression, community identity, cultural complexity, and how they signaled their social affiliation to outside groups.

5) Bendy-backed bipedal apes

Bipedalism was one of the earliest hominin traits to evolve. But among primates, is bipedalism unique to hominins? In November of this year, a team led by Carol Ward from the University of Missouri reported on their study of a recently discovered 10 million year old pelvis of a medium dog-sized fossil ape species Rudapithecus hungaricus from Rudabnya, Hungary. After using 3-D modeling techniques to digitally fill in missing parts of the pelvis, they determined that it probably moved around in tree branches like modern apes do, climbing with its arms and holding its body upright. But this species had a much more flexible torso than any of todays living apes, who have short lower back and longer pelves and it might have been able to stand upright when it was on the ground, like modern and ancient humans. This suggests that a Rudapithecus body plan might be a better model for the body plan our earliest ancestors than the body plan of modern apes who have all been evolving for just as long as we have.

6) Ape teeth, ancient proteins, and orangutan relatives: Gigantopithecus!

Speaking of fossil apesour last discovery for this year features an ape fossil, ancient proteins, and a link to living orangutans. In November of this year, a team led by Frido Welker from the University of Copenhagen published a paper on their analysis of proteome (ancient protein) sequences they retrieved from a 1.9 million year old Gigantopithecus blacki molar from Chuifeng Cave, China. They concluded that the enormous Gigantopithecus blacki, which probably stood nearly 10 feet tall and weighed over a thousand pounds (although it is only known from teeth and lower jaws), is most closely related to living orangutans with whom it shared a common ancestor between about 1210 million years ago. One of the most exciting things about this research is that up until now, the oldest genetic material (namely, DNA) from subtropical areas like where Gigantopithecus blacki lived in Asia has only been about 10,000 years old. The fact that this team was able to retrieve ancient proteins from nearly two-million-year-old fossils in China makes us optimistic about the possibility of doing the same with hominin fossils in the future!

Ella Beaudoin is a Paleolithic archaeologist whose research interests span from cultural adaption and resistance to colonialism, to early hominin cultural evolution and landscape use. She has conducted fieldwork in the US, Kenya, and South Africa. She was previously a student at American University and staff member of the Koobi Fora Field School. She joined the Smithsonian in 2017.

Briana Pobiner is a paleoanthropologist whose research centers on the evolution of human diet (with a focus on meat-eating), but has included topics as diverse as human cannibalism and chimpanzee carnivory. She has done fieldwork in Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa, and Indonesia. Since joining the Smithsonian in 2005 to help put together the Hall of Human Origins, in addition to continuing her active field, laboratory, and experimental research programs, she also leads the Human Origins Programs education and outreach efforts and is an Associate Research Professor of Anthropology at the George Washington University.

Want to stay connected with #SciCommPLOS or pitch an idea for a blog post? Tweet us at @SciCommPLOSor email us atscicommplos@gmail.com.

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Top 6 Discoveries in Human Evolution, 2019 Edition | PLOS SciComm - PLoS Blogs

Despite creative efforts to tackle it, belief in conspiracy theories, alternative facts and fake news show no sign of abating. This is clearly a huge problem, as seen when it comes to climate change, vaccines and expertise in general with anti-scientific attitudes increasingly influencing politics.

So why cant we stop such views from spreading? My opinion is that we have failed to understand their root causes, often assuming it is down to ignorance. But new research, published in my book, Knowledge Resistance: How We Avoid Insight from Others, shows that the capacity to ignore valid facts has most likely had adaptive value throughout human evolution. Therefore, this capacity is in our genes today. Ultimately, realising this is our best bet to tackle the problem.

So far, public intellectuals have roughly made two core arguments about our post-truth world. The physician Hans Rosling and the psychologist Steven Pinker argue it has come about due to deficits in facts and reasoned thinking and can therefore be sufficiently tackled with education.

Meanwhile, Nobel Prize winner Richard Thaler and other behavioural economists have shown how the mere provision of more and better facts often lead already polarised groups to become even more polarised in their beliefs.

The conclusion of Thaler is that humans are deeply irrational, operating with harmful biases. The best way to tackle it is therefore nudging tricking our irrational brains for instance by changing measles vaccination from an opt-in to a less burdensome opt-out choice.

Such arguments have often resonated well with frustrated climate scientists, public health experts and agri-scientists (complaining about GMO-opposers). Still, their solutions clearly remain insufficient for dealing with a fact-resisting, polarised society.

In my comprehensive study, I interviewed numerous eminent academics at the University of Oxford, London School of Economics and Kings College London, about their views. They were experts on social, economic and evolutionary sciences. I analysed their comments in the context of the latest findings on topics raging from the origin of humanity, climate change and vaccination to religion and gender differences.

It became evident that much of knowledge resistance is better understood as a manifestation of social rationality. Essentially, humans are social animals; fitting into a group is whats most important to us. Often, objective knowledge-seeking can help strengthen group bonding such as when you prepare a well-researched action plan for your colleagues at work.

But when knowledge and group bonding dont converge, we often prioritise fitting in over pursuing the most valid knowledge. In one large experiment, it turned out that both liberals and conservatives actively avoided having conversations with people of the other side on issues of drug policy, death penalty and gun ownership. This was the case even when they were offered a chance of winning money if they discussed with the other group. Avoiding the insights from opposing groups helped people dodge having to criticise the view of their own community.

Similarly, if your community strongly opposes what an overwhelming part of science concludes about vaccination or climate change, you often unconsciously prioritise avoiding getting into conflicts about it.

This is further backed up by research showing that the climate deniers who score the highest on scientific literacy tests are more confident than the average in that group that climate change isnt happening despite the evidence showing this is the case. And those among the climate concerned who score the highest on the same tests are more confident than the average in that group that climate change is happening.

This logic of prioritising the means that get us accepted and secured in a group we respect is deep. Those among the earliest humans who werent prepared to share the beliefs of their community ran the risk of being distrusted and even excluded.

And social exclusion was an enormous increased threat against survival making them vulnerable to being killed by other groups, animals or by having no one to cooperate with. These early humans therefore had much lower chances of reproducing. It therefore seems fair to conclude that being prepared to resist knowledge and facts is an evolutionary, genetic adaptation of humans to the socially challenging life in hunter-gatherer societies.

Today, we are part of many groups and internet networks, to be sure, and can in some sense shop around for new alliances if our old groups dont like us. Still, humanity today shares the same binary mindset and strong drive to avoid being socially excluded as our ancestors who only knew about a few groups. The groups we are part of also help shape our identity, which can make it hard to change groups. Individuals who change groups and opinions constantly may also be less trusted, even among their new peers.

In my research, I show how this matters when it comes to dealing with fact resistance. Ultimately, we need to take social aspects into account when communicating facts and arguments with various groups. This could be through using role models, new ways of framing problems, new rules and routines in our organisations and new types of scientific narratives that resonate with the intuitions and interests of more groups than our own.

There are no quick fixes, of course. But if climate change were reframed from the liberal/leftist moral perspective of the need for global fairness to conservative perspectives of respect for the authority of the father land, the sacredness of Gods creation and the individuals right not to have their life project jeopardised by climate change, this might resonate better with conservatives.

If we take social factors into account, this would help us create new and more powerful ways to fight belief in conspiracy theories and fake news. I hope my approach will stimulate joint efforts of moving beyond disputes disguised as controversies over facts and into conversations about what often matters more deeply to us as social beings.

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Conspiracy theories: how belief is rooted in evolution not ignorance - The Conversation UK

Kolter Homes a leader in developing next-generation, highly-amenitized, master-planned active adult communities in the Southeastern U.S. continues to evolve its active adult product to meet the changes and needs of the 55+ market. When Cresswind Georgia at Twin Lakes, located in Hoschton, Georgia, opens for sales in spring 2020, homebuyers will experience the next evolution in homes, amenities, landscaping and lifestyle.

"When the active adult market started in the 1940s and 1950s, it wasn't at all lifestyle-focused," Kolter Homes President Robert Rademacher said. "The main focus was to get out of the big house. Homes typically included two bedrooms, a dining room and living room, and they were more cut up as far as the flow from room-to-room."

As the active adult market has evolved, propelled by the Boomers, homes and clubhouses evolved with it. Over the past 20 years, home plans have changed drastically. Both the living room and formal dining room have become ideas of the past. Homes have become more open concept. Whoever is doing the cooking doesn't want to be cut off from the family during holidays and family gatherings.

"When designing homes, we pay attention to everything including the shortest distance from the garage to the kitchen," Rademacher said.

Additionally, today's active adult doesn't want lawn work, they want to travel. They aren't focused on a big lawn, but instead, they are focused on the rear of the home where they can have privacy on a covered patio or porch to entertain family and friends.

Cresswind plans offer the ability to add an 8- to 16-foot covered porch on the back of the home. Having a big front porch was a 1960s and 1970s concept, and now homebuyers would rather spend the money on outdoor living with privacy.

"Meeting your neighbors and seeing everyone is done at the clubhouse now," Rademacher said. "We include streetlights and wide sidewalks in our communities to encourage and support walkability."

Storage space is another popular necessity for homes. By including plenty of flexible space, such as garage extensions or a bonus loft, buyers gain choices on how to make the home live for them. For example, having permanent storage space is important.

"At some point in life, you don't want to crawl through a hole in the ceiling to get to the attic and the decorations that are stored there," Rademacher said.

As a solution to this, Cresswind communities offer bonus lofts with permanent staircases. These lofts can be used in a variety of ways, for storage, as a finished secondary bedroom or even as a craft space that is out of the way. Loft areas offer expandability and an area that you don't have to clean every day.

"A loft is an inexpensive way to expand a house to meet our buyers' needs, without going into a huge second story," Rademacher said. "This meets their needs and keeps the price of the house down."

In Georgia, homebuyers can often add a basement, and this offers additional flexibility. Whether they want to add a complete guest quarter and still have a ton of space left over for storage, a living room with a guest room or an entertainment room, buyers like the options and flexibility that are available.

According to Rademacher, active adults do not always need or want a large home. In response, Kolter is introducing a new collection of homes for Cresswind Georgia at Twin Lakes to cater to a new group of homebuyers. These 30-foot-wide homes will be situated on 40-foot homesites and mixed in among the bigger homes and lots.

The lifestyle component of active adult communities has become more important and more dynamic. Where bocce ball and horseshoe pits used to be the craze, today's clubhouses are more like a cruise ship on land with programmed activities, clubs and plenty of amenities. Kolter Homes employs a full-time Director of Lifestyle, Mark LaClaire, who focuses on the residents' experience, as well as furthering the amenity-rich environments and award-winning quality of all Kolter lifestyle facilities, programs, staff and operations.

Pickleball has become the hot amenity at active adult communities, and Cresswind Georgia at Twin Lakes will be one of the largest facilities available.

"It is very fast growing and has been so successful that we are offering a lot of courts," Rademacher said. "This means there will be less wait time on the courts, and we can work to attract national tournaments to Atlanta.

"People like pickleball because it is more social, there are fewer injuries and pretty much everyone can play this sport. It is a great exercise option," Rademacher concluded.

Clubhouses have also become more flexible than ever. At Cresswind, clubhouses are expansive spaces with tons of flexibility for multiple activities.

"Where previously we had an aerobics room, craft room, fitness room, pools inside and out, we now build much larger fitness centers and create the maximum amount of open space as possible allowing the absolute most use of the space," Rademacher said. "For instance, we might host a big concert Saturday night and then Sunday pull in dividers for six or eight clubs to meet. We can give people the space they want and serve a multitude of functions."

Amenities also include event lawns, indoor and outdoor pools and more. At all Cresswind communities, close attention is paid to the grooming and landscaping throughout. Homebuyers might not realize it at first because it just looks right, but the communities always look terrific because the landscaping is generous and well maintained.

By comparison, it is easy to see the fantastic evolution that active adult communities have made over the years. To learn more about the unbeatable active adult lifestyle coming soon to Cresswind Georgia at Twin Lakes, visit http://www.KolterHomes.com/new-homes/active-adult-community-cresswind-georgia.

*See an SR Homes specialist for complete details.

This post is an advertorial piece contributed by a Patch Community Partner, a local sponsor. The views expressed in this post are the author's own.

For more about Community Partner, click here.

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Cresswind Leads Evolution of Active Adult Product - Patch.com

Many technologists at financial services firms are concerned about how to advocate for the high cost of tech investment in the face of potential economic downturn.

I feel like I always operate in a recession, Robert Candler, the head of digital client strategy at Bernstein Private Wealth Management, told the audience at InVest|West.

Ron Shevlin, managing director of fintech research at Cornerstone Advisors, estimates U.S. banks have spent $67 billion overall on tech budgets.

Meanwhile, integrating increasingly advanced technology onto existing bank infrastructure is getting tougher.

Kabir Sethi, director of digital wealth management at Merrill Lynch, provided an anecdote to the audience to explain: The project to build a new onboarding system for its digital platform at his firm took more than a year and 130 staff.

No financial services firm can avoid such investment, though, as it will be critical to leaner and more efficient operations, according to a new study from Accenture.

U.S. and Canadian banks could save more than $70 billion through 2025 using technology to automate jobs or assist employees, the firm found, according to Bloomberg News.

As part of tackling costs and investment, banks will have to rethink the resource allocation discussion, said Anton Honikman, chief executive of MyVest, an enterprise wealth management platform provider owned by the insurance giant TIAA.

"It's a real challenge," Honikman said. "They must ask, does our organizational design and structure hold back progress? Firms not only are organized a certain way, but their budgets are allocated in that same way, teams are formed that way, and data structure is ordered to support those fiefdoms."

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7 things that will affect next stage of banking's evolution - American Banker

We live in a time when science and technology are having an impact on our society in more and more ways. And the decisions that shape how these new fields of knowledge develop ultimately affect all of us.

When I studied biology in high school, I didnt learn about DNA for a very simple reason. The work of Francis Crick, James Watson, Rosalind Franklin and others who unlocked the structure of the basic code of life was still years away. The idea of engineering human beings? Well, that was firmly the stuff of science fiction, like Aldous Huxleys dystopian novel Brave New World (published a year after my birth). It seemed as likely as, say, going to the moon.

There are a few inferences you can make from this framing of my life. One is that I have been on the planet for a while. The other is the speed of change in what we know about what life is, and how we can control it, has accelerated at a rapid rate. Now we as a species are on the precipice of being able to manipulate the very building blocks of human evolution, not to mention wield unpredictable change on the greater world around us. Even as I commit that thought to paper, I pause in awe at its implications.

I have lived through eventful times and my job as a journalist has been to chronicle wars, presidents and sweeping social movements such as civil rights. I have seen a world in flux, but when I try to peer into the future I come to the conclusion that this story of humankinds ability to understand life on its most intimate level and be able to tinker with it for our benefit or detriment is likely to be the biggest one I will ever cover.

We are living in one of the greatest epochs of human exploration and it will shape our world as profoundly as the age of the transoceanic explorers. It is just that the beachheads on which we are landing and the continents we are mapping comprise a world far too small to see with the naked eye. Some of it is even invisible to our most powerful microscopes.

This brings me to a term that has become a big part of my life over the last few years: Crispr. Perhaps you know of it. Perhaps you dont. When I first heard of it, I thought it might be a new brand of toaster. I now know its an extremely powerful tool for editing genes in seemingly any organism on Earth, including humans. Scientists doing basic research have been uncovering the mechanisms of life for decades. They have been creating tools for modifying individual genes but Crispr is one of those revolutions where what researchers thought might be possible in the distant horizon is suddenly available now. Its cheap, its relatively simple and its remarkably precise.

I immediately knew that this was a story that needed telling. Human Nature, the resulting film full disclosure, I am executive producer came out of our conversations with scientists. They tend not to be the type of people who hype things but when they talk about Crispr you can feel the urgency in their voices. This is something you need to know about. All of you. If you are worried about your health or the health of your children. If you are concerned about how we might need to engineer our planet in the face of the climate crisis. If you are in finance, law or the world of tech. This will shape all of it.

And as we grapple with the unintended consequences of the internet and social media, as we try to make progress against a heating planet, I humbly submit that we as a species tend not to be good at thinking through where we are going until a crisis is already upon us. I fervently hope with Crispr that we can start the conversation sooner. That we can start it now. Thats why we made the film.

To be clear, we are probably a long way from designing babies to be more intelligent or more musically inclined. Life is just too complex for that, at least right now. More immediately, there is so much about this technology that is very exciting. As someone who remembers a time when my classmates were struck down with childhood diseases for which we now have vaccines, I know science can have profound applications for human health. Crispr could cure genetic diseases such as sickle cell and Huntingtons. It is being tested against cancers and HIV. It could also potentially be used to make crops more drought-resistant or food more nutritious.

On the other hand, we are walking closer to a world Aldous Huxley foresaw. What does it mean to be human? Where should we draw the boundaries beyond which we dare not cross? The inspiring researchers we talked to for the film know that the ethical and moral questions this technology raises are not for them to decide. Science has given us the tools, but not the answers. This is up to us, all of us. We need to be informed. We need to be honest with whats real and whats not. And we need to add our voices to a global conversation. Thats part of our responsibility as humans living on Earth today.

Dan Rather is one of the USs most feted journalists. He anchored CBS Evening News for 24 years

Human Nature is in UK cinemas now before a university town tour in the new year, wondercollaborative.org/human-nature-documentary-film/#screenings . It will be shown on BBC Storyville in spring/summer 2020

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Gene editing will let us control our very evolution. Will we use it wisely? - The Guardian

Great-power competition was the central organizing principle of the just-concluded December 2019 sessions of the Loisach Group, the track 1.5 German-American security dialogue co-hosted by The George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies and the Munich Security Conference. Yet while there was unanimous agreement that both China and Russia are revisionist powers seeking to alter, redefine or even abolish the rules that have governed the international system since the end of the Cold War, as part of their efforts to reduce the overall influence of the Euro-Atlantic world in global affairsgreat power competition does not automatically lend itself to shared solutions.

Part of the problem is that all three words of the bumper sticker are open to major differences in interpretation. First and foremost, what constitutes competition? Which sports metaphor best describes what sort of competition we are discussing? Is this a sudden-death, single-game match where winning and losing are zero-sum in nature, like a game of football (in either its international or American variants)? Is it more akin to a tournament like the Tour de France where winning individual races matters less than overall performance? Is it like the golf circuit where winning conveys more prestige and prize money but where other finalists can still walk away with substantial prize purses? To put in more bluntly, there is a major difference between great power competition where the goal is to eliminate rivals versus one where all the great powers are still standing at the end of the day and the focus is on their standing in the international system.

Second, who are the powers that are competing? The default assumption of the U.S. national security community is that we are focusing attention on the big three revisionists of Russia, China, and Iran. Yet among a large swathe of the populist base, security allies but economic competitors like Japan and Germany are also equally the subject of competition. And who are the technological powers against which the United States must either partner or compete? I recall clearly a fascinating session at the Center for the National Interest some fifteen years ago where former National Security Advisor Robert Bud McFarlane made the point that the country which succeeds in breaking dependence on hydrocarbons to power its vehicles and transport infrastructure will become the major winner of the twenty-first century. During the Cold War, we tended to think of the technological and industrial powerhouses of East Asia, Western Europe and North America as forming a unified conglomerate under the rubric of the Free Worldbut is that going to remain operative as we move into the mid-twenty-first century?

Finally, what makes a power great? Nuclear weapons (so does this induct Pakistan and North Korea into the ranks of the great powers)? Global power projection capabilities? Economic and financial resources? Soft or sharp power tools to influence other societies? Under some rankings, Russia falls off the list of great powerscertainly not the perspective of many in the U.S. national security community who routinely include Russia as one of the great powers with which the United States is in competition.

We also cannot ignore the geographic question. Much to the chagrin and confusion of some in the U.S. national security community, Central European states who vigorously resist the expansion of Russian influence also eagerly accept Chinese investment and loans and the introduction of Chinese telecommunications technology. In part, this is because countries like Poland have a clear historical experience of occupation at the hands of different regimes centered to the east (Russian Empire and the USSR), but no worries of domination from Beijing (short-lived Mongol incursions in the thirteenth century notwithstanding). Similarly, Americas East Asian allies are well aware of the threat posed by a rising Chinaand do not trust Xi Jinpings win-win formulationsand, conscious of the need to keep Russia as a balancing factor in northeast Asian politics, are less inclined to join Western sanctions measures imposed on Moscow over its incursions into Ukraine.

One solution would be to force the spring in terms of pushing Moscow and Beijing into each others arms to such an extent that Moscow and Beijing become equal problems for Central Europeans and East Asian states alike, marrying Chinas economic and military potentials with Russias energy and sharp power tools. This would also entail resurrecting concepts of a global NATO based less on shared values and more on the perception that durable trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific coalitions would be needed to contain and balance both China and Russia. Another approach would be to disaggregate Russia and China in such a fashion so that regional balances can be preserved. Vietnam and India have traditionally maintained their security relationships with Moscow for precisely such reasons, while Central Europeans see Chinese investment in Ukraine as a way to counterbalance Russias geoeconomic pressure.

One thing is certain, however. Key European and Asian allies and partners of America have embraced the language of great power competitionbut still have divergent definitions, not only with Washington but with each other. And the acceptance of a term at dialogues and security conferences does not change Elbridge Colbys observation: We now live in a world of multiple powers with divergent interests and objectives. The task is to ensure that the analytic tool of great power competition helps to illuminate rather than obscure this reality.

Nikolas K. Gvosdev is a contributing editor at the National Interest.

Image: Reuters

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The Evolution of China's Great Power Competition - The National Interest Online

There's a lot of Pokemon Sword and Shield evolution items you can use to evolve all sorts of Pokemon in the game, and understanding what each of them does is crucial to completing the Pokedex. From the Razor Claw and the Sun Stone to the Protector and Reaper Cloth, all manner of Pokemon require special items to evolve. We've got the low down for every single one right here, including all of the different stones in Pokemon Sword and Shield.

If you're looking to evolve a female Snorunt or male Kirlia, you'll want to get your hands on a Pokemon Sword and Shield Dawn Stone.

The Pokemon Sword and Shield Dusk Stone can be used to evolve both Lampent and Doublade into Chandelure and Aegislash respectively, and we know where to get them.

A classic, the Pokemon Sword and Shield Fire Stone evolves three Gen 1 Pokemon; Vulpix, Growlithe, and Eevee.

You can evolve Eevee into Glaceon and Galarian Darumaka into Galarian Darmanitan with a Pokemon Sword and Shield Ice Stone.

Get your hands on a Pokemon Sword and Shield Leaf Stone to evolve Nuzleaf, Gloom, and Eevee (into Leafeon).

Another classic first discovered in the series in Mt. Moon, the Pokemon Sword and Shield Moon Stone can be used to evolve Clefairy into Clefable and Munna into Musharna.

Ooh, shiny! The Pokemon Sword and Shield Shiny Stone will evolve Minccino, Roselia, and Togetic.

Gloom gets another evolution in the form of Bellossom with the Pokemon Sword and Shield Sun Stone, and you can also evolve Cottonee and Helioptile.

Use the Pokemon Sword and Shield Thunder Stone to evolve everyone's favourite mouse, Pikachu, along with Eevee (into Jolteon) and Charjabug.

The Pokemon Sword and Shield Water Stone can be used to evolve Lombre into Ludicolo, Shellder into Cloyster, and Eevee into Vaporeon.

On to non-stone evolution items now, and the Pokemon Sword and Shield Metal Coat is what you need to evolve Onix into Steelix.

If you want to evolve Pokemon Sword and Shield Feebas into Milotic, you'll need to get your hands on a Prism Scale and trade it.

The Pokemon Sword and Shield Protector is used to evolve Rhydon into Rhyperior, but only when you trade it while it's holding one.

The ominously named Pokemon Sword and Shield Reaper Cloth will evolve Dusclops into Dusknoir when traded.

Get your hands on a Pokemon Sword and Shield Sachet and you'll be able to evolve Spritzee into Aromatisse when it's traded.

To evolve Swirlix into Slurpuff, you'll need to trade it while it's holding a Pokemon Sword and Shield Whipped Dream.

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Pokemon Sword and Shield evolution items: All the items you can use to evolve Pokemon in Galar - GamesRadar

As digital payments evolve and become more commonplace, an increasing number of businesses are accepting them, with some businesses rejecting cash payments entirely. While digital payments can certainly be convenient for customers and businesses alike, its important to understand the integration process and avoid any potential pitfalls.

We asked the members of Young Entrepreneur Council for their takes on digital payments. They shared 10 things you should keep in mind as digital payment options evolve, and how those offerings will impact your business in the future.

Young Entrepreneur Council members discuss key considerations for adopting digital payments.

1. Anticipate Integration Into Daily Life

The emergence of smart appliances shows just how much payments will be integrated into daily life in the future. For example, Samsung's Family Hub refrigerator uses an app from MasterCard that allows families to order groceries directly from the fridge. Additionally, Whirlpool has a dishwasher that can order detergent from Amazon when current levels run low. What does this mean for your business? It means that consumers will expect shopping and purchasing to be as seamless as possible. As a business owner, you should expect to deal more with artificial intelligence, biometrics and increased integration of payment systems with smart devices. - Shu Saito, Godai

2. Go Digital, But Don't Discredit Cash Completely

There will always be something new. Digital wallets and mobile payment methods are rapidly evolving. This means that updates are constantly needed if businesses want to stay up to date with the latest and greatest. Constant updates to all the POS systems used by a company is no small task, especially for larger corporations. Be prepared to find what works best for your business and stick with it. Dont discredit cash; there will always be people that want to pay with cash. Some people use only cash to help them manage their finances better. Some people work in industries where they are tipped out in cash and therefore receive the bulk of their income that way. If you remove paying in cash entirely, you will likely miss out on some customers along the way. - Jared Weitz, United Capital Source Inc.

3. Listen To Your Customers

Keep in mind that there are more and more digital payment systems available, all with different benefits and attributes. Before deciding on one, make sure you have your customers' payment preferences in mind. You might want to send out a survey if you don't have this data. Choose a product that doesn't fit your needs and you won't be getting all you can get out of this payment option. - Andrew Schrage, Money Crashers Personal Finance

4. Focus On Security

Staying on top of digital trends in e-commerce is necessary for survival. However, due diligence and security measures should always be in place. It's important to protect your customers' information and your own with the right software and protocols. Make sure that you keep your software updated to patch any vulnerabilities. Stay on top of any data threats and monitor your third-party software for potential risks. Always ensure that you work with reliable and trustworthy applications that have data privacy and security measures in place. It's also a good idea to stay informed about the best practices in cybersecurity. Make sure that you inform your visitors and customers about your privacy policy. Also, ensure that you have systems in place to inform them about data breaches. - Blair Williams, MemberPress

5. Choose Your Vendors Carefully

If you decide to work with payment vendors that customers don't use or like, you hurt your chances of being seen as a credible and reliable business. People take security very seriously, and if they feel the options you provide don't keep their information safe, they'll refrain from doing business with you. Research your payment vendors to ensure you want to work with them. What do their reviews say? If they lack reviews, it means that they're either new or people don't like them. Consumers always have something to say about their purchasing experiences, so few to no reviews might be a red flag. - Stephanie Wells, Formidable Forms

6. Embrace The Trend

As time goes on, the world evolves and we find new ways to solve problems and get things done faster. Part of this is implementing more digital payment options and getting rid of time-consuming practices such as writing checks or wiring money. Just because things are changing doesn't mean it has to be a negative thing. Instead, you can take advantage of this upcoming trend by embracing it. It's about what works best for the consumer. Not every consumer is going to agree, but if the majority say that digital payments work fine and that's where the payment process is headed anyway, then it makes sense to go with the flow. Every day, more and more businesses switch to more modern solutions that resolve customer pain points, and you should, too. - Jared Atchison, WPForms

7. Consider Your Location

While it is true that digital payments are becoming the norm, it isn't wise to assume that this is the case in every part of the world. If you have a product that caters to people in different regions and countries, you have to be prepared for differences. What is well established in your location may not be the case elsewhere. There are several countries in which credit card penetration is still low. There may also be a reluctance to use online payment options as they are considered unsafe. For example, in India, cash-on-delivery is popular and a preferred method of payment. It's important to do research on the types of payments that are common in your customers' locations. You can then offer different payment options that allow them to easily buy your product. - Syed Balkhi, WPBeginner

8. Accept Cryptocurrencies Cautiously

More businesses are accepting alternative forms of digital payments than ever before, the most common being cryptocurrencies. Popular coins like Bitcoin are gaining momentum in the mainstream, but they are far from ubiquitous. One advantage of using cryptos is that you can send payment across borders without worrying about exchange rates. Cryptos also have lower fees and faster transmission speeds than traditional payment forms. They also have many disadvantages with extreme price volatility being the main one. A coin could lose half of its value overnight. Its difficult to collect payment based on a currency that unstable. For this reason, unless you are in tech or have many international clients, you should think twice about accepting cryptos until they become more stable and mainstream. - Shaun Conrad, My Accounting Course

9. Don't Miss Out On Future Opportunities

Even if your business is currently based entirely online and has no physical storefronts, you should avoid implementing payment systems and processors that completely eliminate the ability to process cash payments. You don't know if you'll be interested in pursuing physical retail locations in the future, and thats not to mention appearances at expos and other live events. Fully embracing digital payment options can still be viable in these environments thanks to services like Stripe and Venmo, but they still permanently bar access for some customers which can affect your growth. - Bryce Welker, Accounting Institute of Success

10. Be Prepared To Educate Customers

Digital payments are becoming more and more popular, but not all customers are on board yet. Before you decide to implement digital payment options, consider what your customers want. For example, maybe many of your customers are just using old-fashioned credit cards and aren't familiar with digital payment options like PayPal yet. Get feedback from your customers on what digital payment options they're interested in using before making the decision. Also, consider that when you add a new digital payment option, you need to spend some time educating your customers about the option, why you've added it and how it will benefit them. - David Henzel, LTVPlus

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Going Cashless? 10 Things To Know About The Evolution Of Digital Payments - Forbes

In "The Mixer," Michael Cox tells the story of Manchester United winger Andrei Kanchelskis (1991-95) muttering "English football is s---" as he stormed off the practice field, protesting what he felt were pointless crossing drills. Kanchelskis wasn't wrong. In the years following the Heysel ban, as English teams were reintegrated into European football competitions, it had quickly become clear that English football was stuck in the dark ages. No team advanced beyond the second round of the European Cup from 1991 to '93, and when the competition became the UEFA Champions League and introduced group play, nobody made it out of the group stage in 1994 or 1995.

While the game was evolving into something more controlled and creative in other parts of Europe, English football was still pretty reliant on long-bomb passing, hopeful crosses and hard tackles.

Alex Ferguson, Kanchelskis' manager at the time of "s---," took these failures to heart. Long considered a "man-manager" (the soccer way of saying "players' coach") more than a master tactician, his biggest strength ended up becoming his adaptability. He brought more creativity to the club and he expanded his tactical repertoire. Both he and United evolved. They not only dominated the Premier League (eight titles between 1993 and 2003), but in 1997, they broke through to the Champions League semifinals. Two years later, they won the whole thing.

2 Related

United served as a bellwether of sorts for the rest of the Premier League, giving other clubs a template from which to work, and the combination of tactical awareness and increasing money from TV rights -- which allowed top clubs to import choice playing and coaching talent from all over the globe -- would turn the league into a juggernaut. Liverpool won the Champions League, with Chelsea reaching the semifinals, in 2005. Arsenal made the finals in 2006, and three English teams made at least the semifinals in 2007, 2008 and 2009. United won its second title in 2008.

But innovation never stops. It is a constant race to stay ahead. Ferguson was kept from two more European crowns by Pep Guardiola and Barcelona in 2009 and 2011, and by the end of Ferguson's United tenure in 2013, the Premier League had again lost its edge. From 2010 to '13, English teams made only two combined semifinal appearances (United lost in the 2011 finals, Chelsea won an unlikely title in 2012) and in 2013, no team made it out of the Round of 16. Ferguson's retirement left a void not only for United but also for this rich but increasingly directionless league.

It was somewhat symbolic that Barcelona was the team to hold Man United back. Those Barca teams, along with the Spain squads (loaded with Barca players) that won Euro 2008, the 2010 World Cup and Euro 2012, did more to redefine the game of soccer than any in recent times. Barca showed the world the platonic ideal of an ultra-patient, possession-first, kill-the-body-and-the-head-will-follow squad. By the time of Ferguson's retirement, Guardiola had left Barcelona and was preparing for three seasons at Bayern Munich. And by the time Guardiola came to England to coach Manchester City in 2016, the league's re-evolution had taken hold.

It has only picked up speed since.

Here are a few stats for the average Premier League team in different ranges of seasons:

*Direct speed is an Opta measure that defines how quickly you are attempting to advance the ball vertically, presented in meters per second.

The average Premier League team is far more pragmatic than it was a few years ago. There are fewer wasted possessions (and fewer possessions overall), fewer low-percentage shots and fewer low-percentage passes. There are fewer long balls, too, and more commitment to passing triangles and retention. The data was already trending in this direction before Guardiola's arrival, and it went into overdrive after. In short, English teams - in particular, the Big Six (Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United and Tottenham) -- have more control over the ball than they used to.

Taking Guardiola's average-skewing City out of the equation, average possession for the five other members of the Big Six only went up from 57% before Fergie's retirement to 58%. Still, while possession itself didn't change, teams' tendencies in possession did: the Big Six Sans City have gone from 503 passes over 103 possessions per 90 minutes before Fergie's retirement to 557 in 97 since. Their percentage of forward passes has dropped, and their direct speed has fallen from 1.8 meters per second to 1.5. (For context, 1.8 would have ranked 10th in 2013 but would rank second today. The league is far less "vertical" now.)

Adapting in this way, and continuing to spend on big talent, helped open the spigot for European wins again. After claiming just two of 16 Champions League semifinal spots from 2014 to '17, Liverpool made the finals in 2018, then Liverpool beat Tottenham in the finals in 2019. (City, though dominant, have fallen short thanks to back-to-back quarterfinal upsets against Premier League rivals: Liverpool in 2018, Spurs last year.)

It's too early to know what to make of this Premier League season; the teams are not yet through half of their 38 games and there's plenty of time for regression to the mean. But things have changed this fall.

Here is the same chart as above, but with 2019-20 data included:

Until this fall, almost any English team attempting to play the possession game like the "big boys" was rewarded with defeat. Over the past five seasons, only 11 teams outside of the Big Six have enjoyed a rate of possession over 50%: Everton (four times), Southampton (three), Bournemouth (two), Leicester City (one) and Swansea City (one). They averaged a ranking of 10.5 in the final league table but never finished ahead of any Big Six teams while doing it.

Granted, no strategy was likely to regularly get you ahead of those six, but a lesser form of the possession game didn't always do much for these teams in the standings. Bournemouth finished 16th in 2016, for instance, and Southampton 17th in 2018. Meanwhile, the 10 most successful non-Big Six clubs of these five seasons (according to average points won per match) included the direct, vertical and 43% possession Leicester squad that won the league in 2016; the 2018-19 Wolves squad that had 46% possession, played bend-don't-break defense and allowed almost no clean shots on goal; and the definitively old-school 2017-18 Burnley team that enjoyed 43% possession, threw bodies in front of every opposing shot and attempted mostly forward passes, take-ons and crosses on offense.

Possession has primarily been the favorite's tactic, not the underdog's. But that has not been the story in 2019-20.

1. There are a few identity crises within the Big Six. I have mostly spoken in this piece about the six richest clubs as a monolith, deploying the same strategy and equally sharing the top six spots in the table among themselves. That, of course, is not how things have played out, especially since Guardiola's second season. The 2017-18 and 2018-19 City squads dominated the Premier League at a level rarely seen, with Jurgen Klopp's Liverpool joining them in an all-time, one-on-one race last spring. Their runaway success appears to have led to identity crises and increased managerial churn at their immediate rivals

Arsenal just fired manager Unai Emery and were, until Monday's win at West Ham, closer to the relegation zone than fifth place. Spurs ran out of gas under manager Mauricio Pochettino and recently handed the reins to former Chelsea and United manager Jose Mourinho. They are seventh. Manchester United finished sixth last season and have had to deploy a solid recent run of form to get back to that level now. City have lost some of their form, too.

It's a bit of a chicken-or-egg situation here. Did slippage from a few big clubs open the door for others, or did familiarity and the rise of certain clubs and tactics speed up the slip? Or is it both? Teams definitely adjust over time no matter what your style: you have to get better at the style to retain the same level of success. Some members of the Big Six most certainly haven't gotten better.

Also, the possession game has been a bit more egalitarian this fall. At 58%, Brendan Rogers' Leicester have the best possession rate for a non-Big Six team since Southampton in 2013-14, while Brighton, Everton and Norwich City are all at 50% or higher. That none of those last three are higher than 12th in the table tells us something about possession's slipping correlation with winning, though Leicester are second heading into the festive period. They're a special case, perhaps reaping the financial dividends sown from Champions League participation and the sale of some star players (N'Golo Kante, Riyad Mahrez and Harry Maguire).

1:34

Craig Burley thinks Pep Guardiola might have lingering doubts about staying for another rebuild at Manchester City.

2. Teams appear more capable of following the "Beating Man City" blueprint. Guardiola's side look downright mortal in his fourth season. While Liverpool has managed to somehow upgrade last year's form (2.9 points won per match currently), City are 14 points back. Granted, City's "mortal" is most clubs' "fantastic." They are averaging two points per match and have once again advanced to the Champions League last-16 with ease. Still, slippage is slippage.

So what's gone wrong? Offensively, not much of anything. City have scored 44 goals in 16 matches, which projects to 105 for the season. Only one club (2017-18 Manchester City) has scored more. They are taking possession in their opponent's defensive third more than ever, and more sequences of play are leading to shots than ever. While their 65% possession rate is their lowest in three years, it's still the highest in the league.

No, their main problem is in defense, as Premier League opponents appear more capable than ever of exploiting the vulnerabilities of Guardiola's high-line system. They've given up at least two goals in all six league "non-wins" (two draws, four losses), and their 1.19 goals allowed per game belies that of an eighth- or ninth-place team, not a contender. These issues have been twofold. First, despite having more money at their disposal than most nation-states, City have personnel problems. Club icon Vincent Kompany is gone, center-back Aymeric Laporte is out with a long-term knee injury and another center-back, John Stones, missed more than a month with a muscle injury. The closest thing to a steadying presence in the back is Nicolas Otamendi, and he's three years past his peak.

Beyond that, the back line is always going to be the most vulnerable spot for a Guardiola team. Back in his Barca days, he famously said, "Without the ball, we are a disastrous team, a horrible team, so we need the ball."

The keys to beating a Guardiola team are, and have always been, transition opportunities and set pieces, and while opponents are generating only slightly more chances via set pieces, they are advancing the ball far more directly and effectively. Whether opponents have adjusted to take better advantage of this (both in terms of tactics and personnel), or whether City just isn't as good at transition defense, the table has shifted a bit out of their favor.

Let's look at some sequence data. Opta defines sequences as "passages of play which belong to one team and are ended by defensive actions, stoppages in play or a shot." (They differ from possessions in that possessions can make up a series of sequences.)

- Sequences ending in a shot: 6.2 in 2017-18, 6.3 in 2018-19, 7.3 in 2019-20 (to date)- Sequences ending in a shot and featuring fewer than six passes: 5.6 in 2017-18, 5.4 in 2018-19, 6.3 in 2019-20- Sequences featuring only one player: 1.9 in 2017-18, 1.6 in 2018-19, 2.1 in 2019-20- Average sequence time: 12.8 seconds in 2017-18, 12.4 in 2018-19, 11.7 in 2019-20

So what happens now? Is this a shift toward a new, evolved tactical landscape or a brief, confused interlude? For all we know, City buys a couple of A+++ defenders in the upcoming transfer window and never loses again. They still have all the money in the world, after all, and from an expected goals perspective, they have been a bit unlucky: their xG differential is an otherworldly +1.87 per match compared to their current goal differential of +1.56. The universe could right itself pretty quickly.

If nothing else, though, we may have caught a glimpse of what said landscape could resemble.

Is Liverpool the template? They benefit from talent most other clubs won't have: one of the greatest managers in recent history (Jurgen Klopp), a high payroll, and perfect-for-the-system players like tireless ball-recovery masters Sadio Man and Roberto Firmino.

Is Leicester the template? Expected goals suggest their form could regress soon (their goal differential is +1.81 goals per match, but their xG differential is just +0.89), but Brendan Rodgers has crafted a nice balance of possession and generally combative play (lots of ball recoveries, lots of take-ons), with strong execution on set pieces.

Is the template overseas? In Spain, where possession play has reigned for a longer period of time and almost everyone is pretty proficient, more old-fashioned tactics like winning duels and aerials (and executing on set pieces) have begun to correlate more strongly with wins and losses again.

In conclusion, teams and leagues are always evolving. City took possession play to extremes, and in response, the Premier League shifted into a more modern, possession-based league. Now, the top teams are again championing speed in transition to catch opponents out. Something will shift this status quo. We just don't know if it will happen first in England or elsewhere.

Excerpt from:

The Premier League's next evolution: Is the obsession with possession coming to an end? - ESPN

Wikipedia defines cyber threat hunting as the process of proactively and iteratively searching through networks to detect and isolate advanced threats that evade existing security solutions. In practice, this is a very manual process where trained hunters combine expertise in attacker behavior and techniques with deep knowledge on the networks and assets that they are protecting to iteratively search for and uncover threats that have otherwise gone undetected by deployed security tools.

Depending on who you ask, threat hunting has been around for upwards of 20 years, with the job title, threat hunter, originating in the last 5-6 years. Today, there are nearly 1000 profiles on Linkedin with either a headline or job title matching the term, reflecting simultaneously the explosion of popularity of threat hunting techniques in the enterprise and the cool factor of the name.

Initially, hunters sought to identify Indicators of Compromise (IOCs). At its simplest, an IOC is evidence that an attack of some sort has occurred. Examples of IOCs include malware infection, unexpected outbound traffic from an internal asset, large outbound data transfers, etc. The goal behind IOC identification is to shrink the 170 day average dwell time before a company detects a threat. The problem with the IOC approach is that its completely reactive the damage has already been done.

This IOC shortcoming has lead infosec teams to move up their detection capabilities, focusing not on What has happened, but to What is happening. The hunt for Indicators of Attack (IOAs) focuses more on the activities and behaviors that adversaries undertake leading up to an attack, often corresponding to the reconnaissance step of the Cyber Kill Chain. While IOA detection helps to identify threats sooner in the process, its Achilles Heel is that detection is still only possible after an initial infiltration event has occurred.

In light of these challenges, threat hunting teams are increasingly turning their attention to indicators that are observable before the adversary has infiltrated the organization Indicators of Risk (IORs). As with the IOC and IOA models, the threat hunter starts with hypotheses on how attacks might be conducted, and iterates through testing, but the difference with IORs is that the focus is on conducting this analysis before any attack begins.

IORs tell the threat hunter whether the organization is vulnerable to a particular type of attack, not whether or not an attack is happening right then. Lets look at how this works in practice.

Suppose your organization hosts several of its most mission critical applications on Linux servers running SMB/CIFS. You might hypothesize that attackers would go after these assets, potentially exploiting the SambaCry vulnerability. With an IOA/IOC approach, you need to wait for this vulnerability to be exploited, and then catch the adversary red handed. Using the IOR approach, however, you can check proactively with a simple query no need to search through old vulnerability scan reports or manually check hundreds of software versions.

Heres an example using Balbix. With a single query using the built-in natural language search capability, you can see that there are 105 Linux servers still vulnerable, across a range of different corporate locations.

Consider a more general example, where you simply want to look for critical assets that are unpatched and subject to a broad range of exploits. Another simple search shows 157 critical assets, including Exchange Servers and Domain Controllers that have not been properly patched.

One final example illustrates the human factor involved in the threat. Suppose you suspect that web browsing activities on smartphones connected to the corporate network are exposing individuals in one of your offices to increased risk of being phished. Here we see 59 individuals with iPhones in the Bangalore office with elevated risk of being phished, perhaps an indication that additional security training is in order.

Reacting to threats after theyve happened, or even as they happen, will always be a losing proposition. As the enterprise attack surface continues to grow, proactive cybersecurity posture transformation is the only viable path forward. Balbix can help take a look.

Read the original here:

The Evolution of Threat Hunting - Security Boulevard

Sickly or Super?

Efforts to control urban rat populations rarely if ever result in the complete eradication of the pests. Most of the time, the goal is to simply reduce rodent numbers enough to minimize the spread of disease or damage to property.

But according to Jonathan Richardson, an assistant professor of biology at the University of Richmond, letting some rats slip through the cracks can cause a local population to swiftly evolve, leading to either of two long-term outcomes: sickly rats or super ones.

In June, the journal Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution published a study in which Richardson and his colleagues analyzed the genes of rats in Salvador, Brazil, before and after the city launched a 2015 eradication campaign that ultimately cut the population in half.

They found that the campaign eliminated 90 percent of the genetic variation in the rats, meaning the rats that remained were far more alike genetically than the population as a whole prior to the campaign.

In a newly published Conversation post, Richardson explained how that could impact the future rat population in two distinct ways.

On the one hand, because the rats lack genetic variance, they could produce offspring that are more sickly, the same way inbreeding in people can cause health problems.

But on the other, if the rats who survived the campaign did so because they were the fittest, they could pass along whatever made them fit to future generations leading to a population of super rats that are even harder to kill.

READ MORE: Super rats or sickly rodents? Our war against urban rats could be leading to swift evolutionary changes [The Conversation]

More on rats: Scientists Taught Rats How to Drive Tiny Cars

Excerpt from:

Our Attempts to Kill Rats Are Making Them Evolve at Super Speed - Futurism

It seems fitting that Frozen 2 is a film about change. As the animated sequel was being made, Walt Disney Animation Studios, and especially Jennifer Lee who directed the original and sequel with Chris Buck and also wrote both screenplays were going through some pretty big metamorphoses of their own.

The Oscar-winning 2013 musical Frozen, inspired by Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen, followed the tale of two princess sisters, Elsa and Anna, forced to grow up isolated from each other and the world because of Elsa's potentially dangerous magic ability to conjure ice. The film grossed a whopping $1.27 billion worldwide, and fans were so charmed by the characters voiced by Idina Menzel and Kristen Bell that they weren't able to "Let It Go" (the catchy power ballad that earned songwriters Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez an Oscar), making a sequel all but inevitable.

But where to go with the story? When last we saw the sisters at the conclusion of Frozen, they were back in their home of Arendelle, celebrating the return of spring with Anna's love interest Kristoff (Jonathan Groff), his reindeer Sven and sentient snowman Olaf (Josh Gad). Lee and Buck, who stayed onboard for the sequel, as did producer Peter Del Vecho and many other collaborators, thought long and hard, ultimately deciding to go where few fairy tales have gone before: into adulthood.

"What we really wanted to look at was change and maturity as you go through life," notes Lee. "We didn't want to stay in the same place and repeat ourselves. It's an evolution with the characters and thematically looking at love and fear and family from the point of view of change."

Frozen 2 takes place three years after the events in the original and begins with one simple question: Why does Elsa have powers? To discover the answer, she leaves Arendelle, joined by Anna, Kristoff, Sven and Olaf, on a quest. Explains Lee: "One of the things we'd heard a lot in response to Frozen particularly Elsa and 'Let It Go' [is that] it set [the audience] free from something that was really weighing on them some aspect of themselves they couldn't release into the world or the pressure they feel [of] high expectations, which a lot of kids feel."

The filmmakers started by going back to basics and studying ancient myths and archetypes. "The mythic figure, who's usually magical, carries the weight of the world on their shoulders," Lee says. "They usually end up sacrificing for us, carrying our wounds, and that was fascinating because it really felt like Elsa. We realized it was only through Anna [that] a tragic fate didn't happen to her. Anna fights to be the optimist to get through everything. We knew this is how they'd go through their journey. It wasn't sisters against each other, which is more of a cliche to me, but really two women who are on each other's side. And yet life challenges us so much, and it's hard at moments to know when to protect and when to let go."

As a new story expanded the scope of Elsa and Anna's journey, the voice cast expanded as well, with Evan Rachel Wood signing on as the sisters' mother, Queen Iduna (in flashbacks), and Sterling K. Brown as kindly new character Lieutenant Mattias, whom the sisters meet in an enchanted forest. There's also a water creature, Earth Giants and a fire-breathing salamander (more about them later).

Of course, music is every bit as important to a Frozen movie as its archetypes. And the seven new original songs in the sequel are once again penned and composed by husband-wife duo Lopez and Anderson-Lopez. Christophe Beck, who scored the first Frozen, also was brought back for the second, while country singer Kacey Musgraves, '90s alt-rock band Weezer and pop-punk band Panic! at the Disco contribute tunes to the end credits.

Menzel's Queen Elsa, who made "Let It Go" a feminist anthem to millions of girls around the globe, gets two featured songs in the new movie, the first being "Into the Unknown," in which she decides that she must follow a mysterious voice calling to her. Anderson-Lopez says that discussions with Lee, Buck and the story team inspired the song, which also features a mysterious ethereal voice (belonging to Norwegian artist Aurora). "That voice is a metaphor for the voice inside of us that really seeks to find where you belong in the world, and your purpose, which to me is the most exciting thing about why we did Frozen 2 to tell the story of a woman who has to learn to listen to her gut and find where she belongs in the world," says Anderson-Lopez. "The idea was that this voice was calling Elsa away from comfort and Arendelle." She adds that they took some inspiration for the number from a herding song used in parts of Norway and Sweden to call livestock. "It's a beautiful sound, so we adapted it to a duet with Elsa," Anderson-Lopez explains.

Reflecting their growth and seriousness, the filmmakers traded in the princess ball gowns for autumn travel attire. Anna was given a Parisian-inspired black dress, and, for a pop of color, the inner lining of her burgundy cape and the sole of her boots were magenta. Anna's new look references Christian Dior's 1947 New Look debut haute couture collection, as well as contemporary designers including Valentino, Elie Saab, Ferragamo, Louis Vuitton and Manolo Blahnik. Her cape is embellished with designs drawn from Norway's traditional folk Bunad costumes.

For magical queen Elsa, visual development artist Brittney Lee explains that she wanted "to celebrate that she is of snow and ice."

"We decided to open up the back of her coat to have a peek-a-boo back with a snowflake emblem encrusted on it," she adds. The cape has strong shoulders to "feel a little militaristic and like this is a bit of her queen uniform."

Along with these new looks came fresh locations. Production designer Michael Giaimo notes that a September 2016 research trip brought the filmmakers back to Norway as well as to Finland and Iceland. An 8-mile hike in Finnish forests to Pielpajrvi Wilderness Church gave them plenty of ideas for the enchanted forest where Anna and Elsa begin their quest. "Our fall palette is basically oranges, orange red, to red violet," says Giaimo. "Very narrow. We don't have a lot of yellow a little bit of it. But in narrowing that red, we can focus on the characters and create special palettes for them. We noticed on the hike this incredible ground cover that was turning from green to rust to reds. Most of it was bearberry; there were also crowberry plants. They just created beautiful fall carpet." It also steered the art department toward tree varieties including aspens, alders and birch.

During the journey, Elsa finally must leave Anna behind because she can't protect her sister in the Dark Sea, where she meets the mythical water spirit, the Nokk, a creature made of water that takes the form of a horse.

The sequence proved to be the most challenging for VFX supervisor Steve Goldberg. "We wanted to make sure it didn't end up with the appearance of a glass horse or a crystal horse, so [the water visible inside the horse is] always dynamic and moving, as is the mane and the tail," Goldberg says. "What we also wanted to do was support the amount of ripple, which really had to do with the horse's mental state."

When the horse was underwater, the challenge was to distinguish the Nokk from the sea water. "If it's made of water and it's in water, what are we seeing?" Goldberg says. The mane and tail were given a gentle flow, "almost like a sea grass or a kelp, like hair underwater," he explains.

The Nokk isn't the only mythical character that the ragtag adventurers meet on their journey. There's the wind spirit Gale, visualized as a force of energy made up of fall leaves, darting and dancing between the characters. The massive Earth Giants are made up of rock formations with some set in the riverbank while others are animated to walk through the enchanted forest and then there's the adorable fire spirit Bruni, a pale blue baby salamander that spits fire.

"They spent a lot of time coming up with the right technology, called Swoop, that allowed them to turn the wind into a character and show some personality," explains producer Del Vecho. "But each one of those, in and of itself, is a technical challenge. I think this whole movie is probably one of the more technically complicated movies that we've ever attempted to make."

During the middle of production, however, Jennifer Lee and Disney went through some growing pains of their own, when, in spring 2018, chief creative officer John Lasseter exited Disney following misconduct allegations. Lee was promoted to chief creative officer of Walt Disney Animation Studios but kept working on Frozen 2 despite the bigger job. "It was a struggle a little with my schedule," she says. "But as a studio, we all rally together on films in production anyway. I was writing [script revisions] early in the morning, and we just stayed very connected."

Meanwhile, as Lee and the team put the final touches on the film, Disney fired up its marketing snow blowers, with a blizzard of publicity that included a global tour with premieres in Los Angeles and London as well as the launching of a whole new wave of Frozen toys just in time for Christmas.

And, as with all the best fairy tales, even the sequels, there's a happy ending, at least for Disney, Lee and Buck. Since its Nov. 22 release, Frozen 2's box office has been piling up higher than the snows of the northern realm, soaring toward $1 billion.

This story first appeared in a December stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.

Originally posted here:

Making of 'Frozen 2': Disney Aimed to Mark an "Evolution" for Elsa and Anna - Hollywood Reporter

Usually, when you hatch a Pokmon egg, youre left with the earliest creature in an evolutionary line. This monster will only know basic moves. If you want a stronger creature, you have to level it up ... that is, unless you know of a new exploit discovered in Pokmon Sword and Shield.

The trick is simple, yet tricky you need exact timing. First, you get the egg parent of the same species and place it in your party. The parent needs to be one rare candy away from leveling up and evolving. Then, you put the egg directly below the parent in the party menu. From there, you take the rare candy and use it on the parent. Immediately upon doing so, press down and hold the button. If you miss the timing, nothing will happen. But if you get it right, the process will somehow affect the egg, rather than the parent. The game will say that the egg is evolving, which shouldnt be possible, except that it is! You can see it in action in this video by Austin John Plays:

You still need to actually hatch the egg, but once you do, it wont be a baby it will be evolved. You can use this process to skip the typical evolutionary process and go straight into, say, a monsters final evolution. Except that evolved monster will be level one, somehow.

You can also use this exact same trick to teach an egg TMs before it actually hatches. The moves need to be in the Pokemons actual repertoire, but still, its a neat (and bizarre) trick. Thats not all: you can also use this method to bypass an evolutions gender requirements, thereby allowing you to do things like hatch a Salazzle from a male Salandit (which normally wouldnt be possible.) Wild, but also, proceed with caution, as theres no telling whether or not Game Freak will patch this out.

Originally posted here:

Pokmon Sword and Shield egg glitch hatches evolved monsters - Polygon

Technology solutions must make care delivery easier not frustrate providers.

If you take a close look inside todays health information technology (HIT) environment, youll encounter a fundamental frustration by providers struggling to master the technology that is intended to ease the delivery of patient care.

Simply put, we need ways to remove the technological frustration that pervades the healthcare world.

As the chief technology officer of a leading healthcare IT security company, I regularly see this frustration firsthand. I have an operating model, which I call QS4, that helps HIT leaders address this challenge. Its been my North Star when conducting IT operations.

To break down QS4, quality is at the top, supported by four S's representing stability, security, speed and simplicity, in order of priority.

Speed, in this case, refers both to the speed of compute and the speed of deployment, leaning more toward deployment.

Stability, security and speed are all built on the foundation of simplicity. The simpler you can make things, the more stable, secure and speedy they will be.

Using the theory of QS4, I believe HIT leaders can improve IT operations and innovation processes.

Navigating Innovation In Healthcare

I believe there are two types of innovation: evolutionary and revolutionary.

Im not a revolutionary kind of guy I just dont have the right thought processes for it. I am, however, a huge fan of evolutionary innovation. Ignore thoughts of Darwin that slow generational timeline think about the type of evolution that happens quickly. Evolutionary innovation involves the kind of rapid change that, in a business setting, new technologies can bring to bear on how companies are run. Sometimes it appears an industrywide disruption, or it can be simply new software that completely changes almost overnight how certain business practices are run.

Within evolutionary innovation, there are two subcategories: operational and strategic. I think QS4 is well suited for use in operational evolution because it is, at its core, an operating model. It also plays an important, although smaller, part in strategic evolution. But its fundamental utility is helping improve operations.

Processes and practices dont just evolve, though. Theres a trigger or catalyst for that evolution. In healthcare, that catalyst should derive from observations done at the point of patient care. Healthcare providers are, almost without exception, laser-focused on patients when theyre delivering care. They dont have time to examine new technologies that may help them deliver more value to their patients and families, nor do they have time to suggest ways to remove the technological friction that exists in todays HIT environment.

Indeed, this friction reflects the increasing burden routinely placed on doctors and nurses, creating challenges for clinical staff that are truly immense. When our healthcare system reaches a point where clinicians feel that technology is the problem, the entire healthcare industry should take notice.

For HIT vendors, the key is to realize that no matter how small our contribution, we can and must play a central role. We are perfectly positioned to bring evolutionary innovation directly into the marketplace, and help it work across health networks. How?

Vendors must first fully understand the form, function, application and significance of clinical workflows. By engaging directly with clinical staff, vendors can ideally support and streamline those clinical workflows all under clinician guidance.

Doctors and nurses will always do whatever it takes to complete their work and care for their patients this is their mission. This commitment to care is so prevalent that if healthcare administrators arent careful, care providers can get dangerously overworked. HIT leaders can protect against this possibility and avoid taking advantage of the mission-based devotion to care by providing clinicians with tools that let them fulfill their ethical commitments. At the same time, this investment will help these dedicated providers maintain a sustainable life balance.

As HIT leaders, we must step up to this challenge. We must work alongside caregivers to find evolutionary innovations that remove technological friction, or, if we cant do that, provide more value for the friction that cant be eliminated.

We must stop expecting technological innovation from our clinical and business partners because they're focused on working in the business and have no time to work on the business. I depend on them to provide great patient care and outstanding support; they should rightfully depend on people like me to bring them technological innovation.

Its important to look beyond titles that serve only to separate us from working together. Thats why my favorite title from my various workplaces is partner experience and innovation. It describes exactly what the old desktop titles are evolving into. Im also stuck on calling the clinical and business folks we support partners rather than "customers."

The QS4 model comes in handy for partner experience and innovation teams. They already know, from an operational perspective, how they support their business and clinical partners on a day-to-day basis, and how the QS4 model helps separate the wheat from the chaff in operational priorities. They know that if they work on simplicity, theyll be able to affect the stability, security and speed of the service their partners are depending upon.

All we need to do, HIT leaders, is give our folks the time to focus on using QS4 for something other than break-fix operational prioritization. That just perpetuates the current friction and doesnt increase value.

Instead, use QS4 to advance the kind of evolutionary innovation described above and (hopefully) experience what delighting your partners feels like! Thats the best way we can help our clinical and business partners deliver the highest-quality, most compassionate care to our patients and families.

View original post here:

Evolutionary Innovation In Healthcare: Helping Providers Deliver The Best Possible Care - Forbes

Speech is part of what makes us uniquely human, but what if our ancestors had the ability to speak millions of years before Homo sapiens even existed?

Some scientists have theorized that it only became physically possible to speak a wide range of essential vowel sounds when our vocal anatomy changed with the rise of Homo sapiens some 300,000 years ago. This theoretical timeline means that language, where the brain associates words with objects or concepts and arranges them in complex sentences, would have been a relatively recent phenomenon, developing with or after our ability to speak a diverse array of sounds.

But a comprehensive study analyzing several decades of research, from primate vocalization to vocal tract acoustic modeling, suggests the idea that only Homo sapiens could physically talk may miss the mark when it comes to our ancestors first speechby a staggering 27 million years or more.

Linguist Thomas Sawallis of the University of Alabama and colleagues stress that functional human speech is rooted in the ability to form contrasting vowel sounds. These critical sounds are all that differentiates entirely unrelated words like "bat," "bought," "but" and "bet." Building a language without the variety of these contrasting vowel sounds would be nearly impossible. The research teams new study in Science Advances concludes that early human ancestors, long before even the evolution of the genus Homo, actually did have the anatomical ability to make such sounds.

When, over all those millions of years, human ancestors developed the cognitive ability to use speech to converse with each other remains an open question.

What were saying is not that anyone had language any earlier, Sawallis says. Were saying that the ability to make contrasting vowel qualities dates back at least to our last common ancestor with Old World monkeys like macaques and baboons. That means the speech system had at least 100 times longer to evolve than we thought.

The study explores the origins and abilities of speech with an eye toward the physical processes that primates use to produce sounds. Speech involves the biology of using your vocal tracts and your lips. Messing around with that as a muscular production, and getting a sound out that can get into somebody elses ear that can identify what was intended as soundsthats speech, Sawallis says.

A long-popular theory of the development of the larynx, first advanced in the 1960s, held that an evolutionary shift in throat structure was what enabled modern humans, and only modern humans, to begin speaking. The human larynx is much lower, relative to cervical vertebrae, than that of our ancestors and other primates. The descent of the larynx, the theory held, was what elongated our vocal tract and enabled modern humans to begin making the contrasting vowel sounds that were the early building blocks of language. The question is whether thats the key to allowing a full, usable set of contrasting vowels, Sawallis says. Thats what we have, we believe, definitely disproven with the research thats led up to this article.

The team reviewed several studies of primate vocalization and communication, and they used data from earlier research to model speech sounds. Several lines of research suggested the same conclusionhumans arent alone in their ability to make these sounds, so the idea that our unique anatomy enabled them doesnt appear to hold water.

Cognitive scientist Tecumseh Fitch and colleagues in 2016 used X-ray videos to study the vocal tracts of living macaques and found that monkey vocal tracts are speech ready. Our findings imply that the evolution of human speech capabilities required neural changes rather than modifications of vocal anatomy. Macaques have a speech-ready vocal tract but lack a speech-ready brain to control it, the study authors wrote in Science Advances.

In a 2017 study, a team led by speech and cognition researcher Louis-Jean Bo of Universit Grenoble Alpes in France, also lead author of the new study, came to the same conclusion as the macaque study. By analyzing over 1,300 naturally produced vocalizations from a baboon troop, they determined that the primates could make contrasting proto-vowel sounds.

Some animals, including birds and even elephants, can mimic human voice sounds by using an entirely different anatomy. These amazing mimics illustrate how cautious scientists must be in assigning sounds or speech to specific places in the evolutionary journey of human languages.

Of course, vocalization involves vowel production and of course, vocalization is a vital evolutionary precursor to speech, says paleoanthropologist Rick Potts of Smithsonians Human Origins Program, in an email. The greatest danger is equating how other primates and mammals produce vowels as part of their vocalizations with the evolutionary basis for speech.

While anatomy of the larynx and vocal tract help make speech physically possible, they arent all thats required. The brain must also be capable of controlling the production and the hearing of human speech sounds. In fact, recent research suggests that while living primates can have a wide vocal rangeat least 38 different calls in the case of the bonobothey simply dont have the brainpower to develop language.

The fact that a monkey vocal tract could produce speech (with a human like brain in control) does not mean that they did. It just shows that the vocal tract is not the bottle-neck, says University of Vienna biologist and cognitive scientist Tecumseh Fitch in an email.

Where, when, and in which human ancestor species a language-ready brain developed is a complicated and fascinating field for further research. By studying the way our primate relatives like chimpanzees use their hands naturally, and can learn human signs, some scientists suspect that language developed first through gestures and was later made much more efficient through speech.

Other researchers are searching backward in time for evidence of a cognitive leap forward which produced complex thought and, in turn, speech language abilities able to express those thoughts to othersperhaps with speech and language co-evolving at the same time.

Language doesnt leave fossil evidence, but more enduring examples of how our ancestors used their brains, like tool-making techniques, might be used as proxies to better understand when ancient humans started using complex symbolsvisual or vocalto communicate with one another.

For example, some brain studies show that language uses similar parts of the brain as toolmaking, and suggest that by the time the earliest advanced stone tools emerged 2 million years ago, their makers might have had the ability to talk to each other. Some kind of cognitive advance in human prehistory could have launched both skills.

Sawallis says that the search for such advances in brain power can be greatly expanded, millions of years back in time, now that its been shown that the physical ability for speech has existed for so long. You might think of the brain as a driver and the vocal tract as a vehicle, he says. Theres no amount of computing power that can make the Wright Flyer supersonic. The physics of the object define what that object can do in the world. So what were talking about is not the neurological component that drives the vocal tract, were just talking about the physics of the vocal tract.

How long did it take for our ancestors to find the voices they were equipped with all along? The question is a fascinating one, but unfortunately their bones and stones remain silent.

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Human Ancestors May Have Evolved the Physical Ability to Speak More Than 25 Million Years Ago - Smithsonian

How did the most famous concept devised in neurobiology--the homunculus of neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield - originate?

Some answers derive fromassessing Penfield's archives at the Osler Library of McGill University, as well as the only known copy from which the beginnings of the homunculus may be traced--Edwin Boldrey's 1936 McGill master's degree thesis supervised by Penfield.

The iconic homunculus was devised by Penfield as a teaching tool to aid memory, and was drawn by Hortense Cantlie, a medical illustrator at McGill. She rendered the complex idea simply for its first appearance in 1937 as an acrobat hanging from a trapeze by his knees, with his head tilted up to look at the audience. The areas devoted to the opposable thumbs, necessary for grasping tools, and to the tongue and lips, necessary for speech, are disproportionally large, reflecting their relative importance with respect to human experience.

Boldrey, one of Penfield's neurosurgery trainees, wrote the analysis of the largest and most intricately studied collection of intraoperative stimulations and mappings during human brain surgery ever performed up to that time and his thesisprovides an incredible record of electrical brain stimulations of over 100 patients studied from 1928 to 1936 during open brain surgery, and includes later additional cases. Each stimulation point was assigned to one of 28 brain maps, each representing a specific function. These included movement and sensation of the tongue, mouth, jaw, face, and throat; swallowing; vocalizing; and sensation and movements of fingers, hand, arm, shoulder, trunk, leg, and foot.

Vision and audition were also represented, as were autonomic functions and head and eye movements. Each stimulation point was placed on the appropriate composite map according to its distance from the sylvian and rolandic fissures, thereby creating a cluster diagram of individual data points. In this way, probabilistic maps with widely outlying points were created, a reflection of the individual variations that one sees in grouped data obtained from biological systems.

Drs. Mark Preul, Gurpreet Gandhoke, and Richard Leblanc state, "Penfield's homunculus is a symbol of the extraordinary efforts that were expended in the exploration of the conscious human brain, which was achieved with the most rudimentary technology, and captured the imagination of succeeding generations of neurobiologists. One of Penfield's greatest contributions may be that he sought to explain the mysteries of the brain to everyone, as proclaimed by his own notes and letters, and he realized that there was no better way to understand cerebral functional organization than by a humanoid mnemonic, 'the sort of thing that people in general understand,' as he wrote in his letters. Boldrey's thesis is one of the most remarkable publications in the history of neuroscience and provides a fascinating window into the origin of the extraordinarily influential and endearing concept of Wilder Penfield's homunculus."

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The Origin And Evolution Of The Homunculus - Science 2.0