Daily Archives: February 18, 2021

Although the widespread and sudden shift to remote workearly last year was a shocking change, a pre-existing movement toward more flexible work options was already well underway, making some companies better positioned to weather the upheaval.

The short-term outlook for the future of workplaces, particularly offices, is marked by uncertainty as the recovery from the coronavirus pandemiccontinues. Recent data paints a dim picture of marketstrength with a national office vacancy rate at 14.2% in December 2020, according to a Yardi Matrix report. All cities tracked were above 10% vacancy, with Houston topping out at 22.1%. Bay Area office vacancy was 14.3%. With market turbulence expected to continue at least through midyear, questions swirl about what the future holds for office product.

A focus group of 32 office owners, occupiers and placemakers conducted by Cushman & Wakefield along with George Washington Universitys Center for Real Estate and Urban Analysis, revealed that above all, flexible and adaptable work environments are the defining feature of future workplaces. In their report, Workplace Ecosystems of the Future, the authors found that though the focus group participants rated the work-from-home experience as better than expected with high productivity levels, many workers are missing the culture and collaboration that drives innovation in in-person environments.

Courtesy of Matthew Millman

CBREs San Francisco office located at Salesforce Tower.

These testimonies and research findings provide further evidence that people still need a space to collaborate, innovate and stay connected and the office provides that, Cushman & Wakefield Global Head of Occupier Research David C. Smith said in a press release. The pandemic has given us the opportunity to test remote work. Moving forward, occupiers will need to strike the right balance between remote and in-office work, and our research indicates a need for fundamental change in the culture and flexibilityof the real estate industry in order to remain relevant in a post-pandemic environment.

Hybrid work ecosystems are in development among companies like Google and Salesforce, with occupiers expectations of movement toward hybrid models increasing from 29% pre-COVID to 81% post-COVID, according to a survey by CoreNet Global and Cushman & Wakefield. The Workplace Ecosystems of the Future report forecast that office workers, on average, will work remotely between one and a half and three days per week post-COVID.

Such flexible work environments arent new for some companies. Unlike Yahoo, which made headlines for banning employees from working remotely in 2013, CBRE had already opted for a different approach by launching its Workplace360 initiative in 2011. Over the past decade, CBRE has turned 90 of its global offices into free-address, flexible, collaborative, technology-enabled destinations of choice for employees. The heart of the initiative gives employees greater control over where they work, whether it be more space options in physical offices or technological upgrades that facilitate remote work. Internal research showed that 93% of employees were satisfied with the changes and didnt want to return to the assigned desk model.

The flexible model enabled employees to be better prepared for the pandemics onset as they were already trained on how to access and share files when working from home, according to CBREs Corporate Real Estate Global Lead Peter Van Emburgh. As some CBRE employees return to offices, investments made in amenities and technologies like Liquid Galaxy, an immersive multi-screen presentation tool powered by Google Earth that cant be used remotely, have paid off, he said.

The key driver for any space is choice, and our future Workplace360 enhancements will shift some space allocation from individual spaces to collaboration spaces, and well introduce new space types and technologies that support the distributed workforce, Van Emburgh said. For example, the conference rooms, enclosed focus rooms and reservable offices will be equipped with video capabilities to provide a balance for in-person and virtual attendees in meetings.

Expectations for office amenities like flexible workspaces, dining options and recreational areas were high in the Bay Area pre-pandemic, which resulted in competition between companies to attract the most talented employees with luxurious campuses. Post-pandemic, the expectations will likely continue to be high and come with added demand for safety and wellness elements.

Fitwel, a healthy building platform and certification developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and now run by the Center for Active Design, had experienced an 80% year-over-year increase in the use of its services pre-COVID, according to Fitwel President and CEO Joanna Frank. Last year, despite hardly doing any business in Q2, Fitwel experienced a 140% increase in the use of its services during 2020. In response to the pandemic, Fitwel developed a Viral Response Module that established best practices for mitigating respiratory diseases in buildings. Frank said it is crucial for the commercial real estate industry to gain trust from users.

We just did this survey with a huge swath of investors globally, Frank said. They are all planning to continue to prioritize health as they are looking for investment in real estate. If the investors are looking to invest in properties that are prioritizing health and are measuring how they are supporting and promoting the health of stakeholders within their properties, [the CRE industry as a whole] will continue to prioritize health.

Healthy workplaces have far-reaching implications for the productivity andmental and physical health of employees. They pose a host of equity issues as significant disparities exist regarding access to healthy work environments for different demographics. Frank said one of the essential facets of a healthy work environment is giving employees choices about how and where they work.

However, these issues are hardly limited to traditional offices. The pandemic posed grave challenges to health care facilities maintaining safe environments for staff and patients alike. A lack of both space and flexible spaces resulted in hospital beds lining hallways and overall capacity maxed out. These outcomes will likely result in more overflow areas and multifunctional designs incorporated into future facilities, according to HOK Regional Leader of Healthcare Hunvey Chen. Chen also said that the rise of remote work would impact the real estate assets of health care systems with an increase in outpatient and clinic-style facilities for treating a broader range of conditions while hospitals may increasingly be reserved for the sickest of patients. This will, in turn, give rise to more medical office buildings that are more suited to the needs of telehealth services.

The surge in telehealth service beginning last March caught many of our providers off-guard, Chen said. Our medical office buildings werent prepared for the sudden influx in telehealth needs. In future buildings, we will need to incorporate carefully designed, private spaces that can accommodate societys new comfort with telehealth treatment.

Technology, in general, is expected to feature more prominently in buildings moving forward in the recovery. For example, a 125K SF Class-A office project by developer SteelWave near completion in Sunnyvale named Central Station, features UV light air purification in the lobby and touchless fixtures throughout. MERV 14 filters in ventilation systems and more access to outdoor space will likely become commonplace.

Courtesy of Matthew Millman

Cove, which began as a coworking space company, has more recently launched a building technology platform as a way to modernize existing buildings. Established on the East Coast, the company plans to expand to three office buildings in San Jose this month. The platform includes an app that allows building occupants to unlock doors, reserve amenity spaces and schedule cleanings of conference rooms, among other functions.

I'm very bullish on the notion of the evolution of the office and how the office can modernize to meet that demand, Cove CEO Adam Segal said. That doesn't mean that there's going to be an increase in demand for space, but there's an increase in demand for solutions. This is an opportunity for ownership to differentiate and really capture that demand.

Cove is one of many companies trying to address the rise of a hybrid work model and demand for healthy spaces. Food ordering platform Sharebite recently partnered with HqO, a commercial office building tenant operating system platform, to facilitate contactless lunch delivery services to office workers. URBN Playground is an amenity management firm that operates lifestyle and wellness programs in commercial and residential buildings. Another company, Essensys, has a software platform geared to enhance the overall experience of office dwellers. Among other things, it provides collaboration tools for employees and asset flexibility pathways for landlords.

While all these tools may help with efficiency, Navitas Capital Managing Partner Gary Dillabough, who has helped develop office and mixed-use projects in the South Bay, thinks that making offices desirable places to return to is a multifaceted equation. He said that live-work-play environments in dense downtowns that allow for short commutes would create the kind of flexibility that is in demand. Such urban environments would enable employees to, for example, leave work briefly to attend their childs school play and then quickly return to the office afterward.

I think the best tools are the things that are inspiring and help keep you healthier and help keep connections to nature, being able to walk outside your door, fresh air, having sunlight coming in, just feeling healthy, Dillabough said. Those are going to ultimately make you more productive and make a better experience. Thats what we're really fascinated by and it's a little harder to deliver.

Such momentum toward flexible work options may help kick-start a thriving office market once again. However, the anticipated hybrid models will likelydiminish the total square footage of offices in general. The Workplace Ecosystems of the Future report forecast decreases in annual net absorption for offices due to remote work. Market simulations revealed an average change in net absorption by -0.28%, with -0.18% in San Jose and -0.4% in Austin.

Demand is going down; there's no question, as a whole, the sheer absorption of space is going to go down, Segal said. The question is where is that demand going to go and what's the willingness to pay. Quite frankly, I think there's a high willingness to pay for the right solutions. How are you positioning it, so you're solving problems instead of just offering people space.

CORRECTION, Feb. 18, 10:45 A.M. PT: A previous version of this story had a caption for the first image that referred to it as a rendering when it is an actual photograph. The caption has been updated.

Excerpt from:

Workplace Must Adapt Or Die, But Evolution Was Never Optional - Bisnow

How has the Opportunity Zone marketplace evolved over the past 2+ years and how will it continue to evolve going forward?

Peter Truog is founder of The Opportunity Exchange, a marketplace that connects impactful Opportunity Zone projects to capital sources. The Opportunity Exchange is a key partner in OZ Pitch Day.

Click the play button below to listen to my conversation with Peter.

The Opportunity Exchange builds community & economic development software that helps community leaders ideate, develop, and build more inclusive communities. A portion of their work focuses on helping communities connect Opportunity Zone investors to impactful projects in their city, county, or state.

Hosted by OpportunityDb.com founder Jimmy Atkinson, theOpportunity Zones Podcastfeatures guest interviews from fund managers, advisors, policymakers, tax professionals, and other foremost experts in opportunity zones.

Jimmy: Welcome to the Opportunity Zones Podcast. Im your host, Jimmy Atkinson. Last November, I hosted OZ Pitch Day 2020. And a key partner for that event was and continues to be The Opportunity Exchange. The Opportunity Exchange is an OZ marketplace that builds community and economic development software that helps community leaders ideate, develop, and build more inclusive communities. A portion of The Opportunity Exchanges work focuses on helping communities connect Opportunity Zone investors to impactful projects in their city, county, or state. And that work is much of what well be discussing today. Joining me today is the founder of The Opportunity Exchange, Peter Truog. And Peter joins us from Cleveland, Ohio. Peter, its great to have you back on the podcast. Welcome.

Peter: Yeah. Thanks for having me, Jimmy. Glad to be back on.

Jimmy: Yeah, you bet. So I do want to recap OZ Pitch Day 2020 with you, Peter, and all of the work that you and your team at The Opportunity Exchange did to make that a great event and to add a lot of value for some of the fund issuers who participated in that event. Ill get to that a little bit later in the episode today. But first, for those who may not be aware, you were a guest on this podcast way back in November 2019, over a year ago now, when The Opportunity Exchange was just getting started. You guys were just a few months old then at that point. So, to start us off today, to get the conversation rolling, Peter, can you just give me and our listeners a high level update on how The Opportunity Exchange has evolved since our last interview? And maybe you can give an update on the OZ marketplace as a whole as well.

Peter: Yeah, absolutely. Im happy to kick things off in that fashion. And, you know, its really quite an experience being back on the podcast again. When we were last on we were, as you mentioned, just in the very early stages. We had been working on The Opportunity Exchange for just less than a year at that point. And so now coming back on, you know, almost a year and a half later, its interesting as I was thinking about some of the things to talk about on the podcast to reflect a little bit on what weve learned since we were last on and think about what to share. So, for the folks who maybe are encountering us for the first time or not familiar with our work, my name is Peter. Im the co-founder of The Opportunity Exchange. We build software that helps community leaders ideate, develop, and create impactful projects in their community.

And as Jimmy mentioned, a major focus of our work to date has been around supporting communities as they think about initiating kind of proactive strategies to capture opportunities with regard to the Opportunity Zone incentives. Where we started as a company was very much focused on the idea of facilitating a marketplace to help community sponsored projects, community aligned projects, better connect with Opportunity Zone capital. My background in community economic development along with my co-founders background in government technology really led us to this point of departure where, collectively, we saw just a lack of tools available to municipalities, counties, states that would enable them to more proactively and more in real time build an inventory of potential OZ projects and kind of get the word out about those and to facilitate connections with those projects with this new investor class that the Opportunity Zone incentive created.

And so thats where we started, was really on supporting the kind of community aligned side of the OZ market, specifically by working with cities, counties, and states to help them stand up a digital community marketplace via which Opportunity Zone investors could connect to deals in their community. That was really where we were focused when we were last on the pod in November of 2019. We, at the time, were working with between, you know, 5 to 10 different states and cities, helping them kind of get these early building blocks in place with Opportunity Zone strategy.

In the intervening, I guess, 14 months or so, a lot has happened. You know, the pandemic aside, there has been just massive change in terms of I think the level of understanding around the Opportunity Zone incentive. And some of the strategies that particularly communities are deploying to try to capture the benefits from that incentive. Two things that weve seen which we can go into more detail over the course of this conversation are, one, I think our recognition that while, you know, this marketplace idea, this need to really be thoughtful about the connectivity of projects to capital, its certainly one of the needs that exists in this space.

Theres been a growing recognition and I think identification of other needs that also exist perhaps earlier in the process before a given fund or before a given project might present to an investor, that would be really impactful for communities to be able to take advantage of as they think about shepherding deals on their way to market. And so weve really been focused on not only understanding what some of the other pain points are in the process for community and economic developers or project sponsors as they take deals to market, but beginning to address some of those needs as well. I think the other theme that weve seen is not only this need for kind of a deeper toolkit, if you will, a deeper ecosystem of tools that communities and sponsors can avail themselves of, but also a growing, I guess, exploration on the part of particularly cities and counties around how this incentive will fit into sort of longer-term community and economic development strategy that community may be pursuing.

A lot of what we saw initially was a number of sort of very discrete Opportunity Zone focused efforts that were, you know, laser targeted on trying to develop a strategy for a given city to take advantage of the OZ incentive. What were seeing now is a recognition that in the longer-term, those approaches, which initially started as very OZ-centric will need to be integrated into the longer-term sort of economic and community development vision for communities in order to be sustaining. And so were seeing a lot of places begin to experiment with how best to do so. And to integrate some of the learnings and support that theyve developed OZs over the course of the past two years into their work more generally. Im happy to go into more detail and talk about this kind of more generally. But those are two of the big themes that weve been discovering over the course of the past year in the work that we do. And also that weve been working on a bit as well to begin to address some of those needs that have arisen.

Jimmy: Yeah, thats great, Peter. I actually would like to drill down into those points here in a moment. As a listener, if youve been listening to this podcast over the last few weeks, you know, recently I had Steve Glickman and Ira Weinstein on the show a short while back, and throughout the course of that show, we had identified several groups of key stakeholders in the Opportunity Zone ecosystem. And, you know, what I love about what youve done, Peter, is The Opportunity Exchange really attempts to bring all of those different types of stakeholders together to see the different types of deals and to match capital with those deals. Those stakeholders that you go after, specifically, are the Opportunity Zone investors themselves, the real estate developers, and deal sponsors. I believe you have some business deals listed on the website as well.

And of course, the keystone to make all of this happen are the Opportunity Zone communities and community leaders themselves. So, yeah, could you drill down into those two points you brought up, the growing recognition of needs that exist for communities? What can communities do? What are some of the best practices youve seen? And I think the other point that you made was about tools and layering other tools into Opportunity Zones. Tell us more about that as well.

Peter: Yeah. Well, thanks, Jimmy, for so succinctly summarizing the different folks who engage with the Opportunity Zone. Youre absolutely right, with The Opportunity Exchange, youre absolutely right. Those are kind of the three parties that weve built the platform around. With the thesis being, you know, the transparency and connectivity of those groups, the greater that we can help facilitate interactions between those parties, the more well be able to unlock the community aligned outcomes that this incentive was really designed to try to help facilitate.

As a company, like you were saying, we focus primarily on building tools to help enable those community leaders to really build that ecosystem in their community and enable better connectivity from the other two parties you described between investors and deal sponsors. And so, Ill talk a little bit about some of the evolution that weve seen in terms of how communities are thinking about approaching that challenge from an OZ perspective, and then share a couple of reflections on how were starting to see that bleed over into other types of work they do beyond OZ.

But starting with Opportunity Zone, specifically, you know, I think the journey has been winding for communities as theyve thought about, you know, the role that they can play here. As folks listening will well now, you know, its not necessarily clear when, upon first glance, what role the public sector has to play in shaping the Opportunity Zone market in general, right? Investors can come together with project sponsors and make deals independent of public involvement. And its not like other community economic development sort of incentives or programs like new markets where theres a need for public sector involvement. Opportunity Zone incentive can happen entirely within the private market. And so, initially, a lot of communities were saying, Well, what role is there for us to play here in shaping how these fields might unfold in our community?

And right from the beginning, we saw a handful of approaches begin to emerge. You know, a lot of communities perhaps began their work by building a community perspective. This was something that was pioneered in a few places, the Accelerator for America put out a really helpful template for communities in terms of thinking through how to do this. And this was one approach that communities took right off the bat to try to introduce themselves to investors in a way that was really compelling and kind of market forward. Building on the community perspectives idea that a lot of communities sort of initiated the Opportunity Zone work with, we saw a number of communities then begin to stand up ways to showcase, in real time, deals that they wanted investors to be looking at in their community. This was a key way that we started as a company working with cities and states by helping them to stand up these portals.

But over the course of the past 12 months or so, we really saw an evolution in terms of what those needs look like. While there was a lot of really promising progress that was made when it came to beginning to more proactively build these pipelines and communities, it was really clear that more tools would be needed to help projects advance along the sort of project development process so that they could ultimately be more competitive when they went to market. And so some of those tools that have come up have been things like, a lot of the projects that we see our community partners working with oftentimes begin the process maybe at an earlier stage of project development.

And, you know, building a pro forma for their deal is something that can be quite challenging for them, or perhaps theyve never put together sort of a one-page tear sheet for their project that they can use to pitch an investor. And so weve been thinking about ways to really deepen the suite of tools that we can provide the sponsors along that process so that as they navigate their path to market, they have a continuum of resources available at their disposal that they can avail themselves of along the way.

The second way that were working on trying to make this more repeatable for communities is thinking about ways to have those resources be more available, more visible, more readily accessible, and more standardized so that, from the municipality side of things, as they think about scaling this process and supporting more and more and more sponsors through this work, you know, theyre able to do so in a way that doesnt demand a one for one increase in their time and capacity or resources as they think about ways to more deeply support sponsors in their community.

And so I think this has been a really common theme that weve seen over the course of, you know, the past six months, especially as it became clear that the first step for a community was often to stand up a marketplace to showcase deals, and then really became apparent that things like providing this more deep technical assistance around deal structuring or deal financials, or kind of legal and accounting implications for specific projects, those needs really emerged. And I think were seeing communities begin to challenge themselves more and more around, you know, how do we make those resources available to OZ projects in our community. I think, and Im sure, you know, a lot of the work that youve done, Jimmy, through this pod and like the folks that have engaged in this community youve built has really been, I think, really critical to making that happen.

Perhaps 12 months ago or when we were first on in 2019, it wasnt necessarily even a level of familiarity with the OZ incentive generally to enable folks to get to the second order questions around, Okay, I know this is something Im interested in. How do I make it work? But were consistently starting to see those next level questions or sort of more deeper questions around perhaps specifics of applying the incentive to a given project rather than what is the Opportunity Zone incentive in the first place. More and more become things that were commonly seeing on behalf of communities. Thats a bit about what weve been observing around sort of the evolving way that were seeing communities wade into this Opportunity Zone landscape writ large.

Jimmy: Yeah. Thats great, Peter. Excellent observations overall. You know, I dont disagree with anything you said. And it is nice to see how the ecosystem has evolved the way that it has over the last year or two in that, yeah, people arent, you know, the key stakeholders are no longer asking, Okay, what is this program? Theyre diving deeper into the questions. Of course, you do still have new investors, new people getting turned on to the program every day who need that basic one-on-one intro to what Opportunity Zones are. But for the most part, at least the key stakeholders, the fund issuers, the deal sponsors themselves, the communities themselves have a pretty firm grasp of the program now. How do you expect the marketplace and The Opportunity Exchange in particular to continue to evolve over the next few months or throughout the course of this year?

Peter: Yeah, absolutely. Very pertinent question as were sort of in the early part of 2021, thinking about, you know, what are our goals and objectives for this year is something weve been spending a lot of time thinking about over the course of the past couple months. You know, Id be remiss, I know that theres such a big focus on this podcast to kind of providing actionable resources and information. So I realized I alluded to a lot of tools and resources that are out there in my sort of previous comment and just want to be specific about, so, for folks who are listening, how they can access some of them. And then it will be very clear, I think, as Ill share those, and then kind of can use that as a stepping stone into where were headed next, and how all these things come together.

But I laid out a couple of specific pain points that communities and sponsors face going through this process and just want to be forthright in directing folks to resources that are out there to be helpful. One is, I mentioned the aspiration for many communities to put together a community perspective or a community kind of marketing profile. I alluded to or mentioned the Accelerator for Americas template for how to do so. Thats a great place to get started. Weve also partnered with Opportunity Alabama to build a community profile building tool that can really help facilitate the process of kind of digitized community perspective building as a way to help make that work more maintainable, visible, and scalable across, you know, neighborhoods in your city or counties in your state.

The second thing I alluded to that I wanted to mention was the pro forma development as a challenge that many sponsors face, or as something that a lot of community development officials kind of regularly encounter in their work, but maybe dont always feel fully equipped with how to answer questions around, you know, what does the return profile look like for this deal and what assumptions were made in terms of thinking about how that return profile was generated? The Governance Project created a really helpful tool called GroundUp, which sort of is like the TurboTax for pro forma modeling. It walks folks through a step by step process to build a pro forma for a particular real estate deal or you can access it at groundupmodel.org. Its free to access there. But I encourage folks who are curious about that to go and check that out.

Finally, I think there was a big interest by a number of communities and sponsors around community impact. Jimmy, its something that you highlighted right off the beginning as something thats kind of core to the vision of Opportunity Zones. A really helpful tool in terms of thinking through some of those questions around how certain projects may deliver benefit to the communities in which theyre in. The Urban Institute built a really useful Community Impact Assessment Tool, which I recommend folks to check out. Weve partnered with them and are integrating that into The Opportunity Exchange so folks who have projects on the platform can immediately avail themselves of the ability to use that scorecard as well as the pro forma tool that I mentioned.

And so, just wanted to really help folks who are thinking through some of these questions themselves, ensure that thats providing kind of direct resources and links and things for you all to go check it out as you listen, in case any of these pain points are particularly germane to your work. In terms of how this all comes together, and then I think where we see sort of this market heading is, one, a continued desire to explore and add tools to this project development toolkit in the first place.

So I think if there are folks who are listening who have ideas or who have stories that would be about your experience kind of navigating the OZ project development process, either from the community perspective, or project sponsor perspective, or an investor or fund perspective, I would love to have a conversation with you to continue to understand sort of what other needs might exist and how can we be helpful in helping solve those pain points.

I think the other thing that we commonly observed is, and this alludes to something I brought up earlier, were seeing an expansion in terms of the way that communities think about integrating Opportunities Zone into their community economic development strategies. So, if I take a specific project, for example, a lot of times the process that will happen will be maybe the sponsor wants to build a mixed use space with some commercial space on the first floor or perhaps some market rate and affordable housing units above, theyll go through the process to begin to structure, you know, Okay, what is the kind of market study look like that will support the viability of this deal? How do we think the financials might come together? Theyll begin to engage with one of the cities or municipalities that we work with via The Opportunity Exchange.

And over the course of that work, we often see kind of the realization that, you know, this might be a really viable and great project. But for any number of reasons, maybe Opportunity Zones might not be exactly the right tool in this instance. One of the things that we see happening more and more often is then communities being proactive and saying, you know, Okay, thats all right. Theres other tools that are out there. Lets be thoughtful in terms of how we can connect you to other sources of capital that might be more appropriate for the type of project that youre working on.

And that last step is something that I think will be really critical to watch in the coming 12 months as we think about sort of the longer-term integration of some of this OZ work into how communities approach community economic development from on a more regular basis because it will really signal the integration of a cohesive sort of network where, you know, any project thats going through the development process and need some assistance from the public sector, will be able to enter into this ecosystem and not only access the continuum of tools that will be able to help it kind of navigate any step in the process.

But once they start to think about that capital attraction step, therell be sort of this more accessible and more built-out menu of options, if you will. In the case where, you know, Opportunity Zones is the right choice for a project, great. Theres been a lot of investment on behalf of everybody whos probably listening and helping to build that ecosystem over the course of the past couple of years. But thinking about connectivity to other sources of capital is a big thing that we anticipate being more and more important for folks as they kind of integrate this work into their ongoing operations from the community economic development side of things.

From our perspective, thats something that were really focused on. We began working with a couple of different CDFIs across the country. Were working with the list office in Detroit, as well as a group in Alabama called Neighborhood Concepts to help them build out more sort of digitized application intake review mechanisms for managing the work of their loan funds within their CDFI. And for us, this is one way to begin to wade into that sort of capital connectivity piece that I was just alluding to, to begin to provide a wider array of options for sponsors who are using The Opportunity Exchange to help bring their deal to market so that theres a greater connectivity for them as they think about, All right. Well, who should I be talking to when it comes to thinking about how the financing for this project might work?

Jimmy: Yeah, tremendous, Peter. A lot to unpack there. A lot of great resources that you rattled off. For listeners out there today, I will have show notes for this episode at opportunitydb.com/podcast. And Ill be sure to link to all of those resources on this episode show notes page, the resources that Peter just mentioned. A lot of great online tools there. And its important to be able to take advantage of these tools. I mean, so far, you know, in the first couple plus years of the program, tens of billions of dollars have been raised by Opportunity Zone funds and theres still a lot of money left to be raised out there over the life of this program over the next several years, until we run up to the end date year-end 2026 as it stands right now.

A couple other tools that I want to mention, Id be remiss if I didnt mention them are, one is a community platform that we just launched from OZPros.com is OZworks Group. That community can be accessed at OZworksGroup.com. And the goal there is for us to put together all of these different stakeholders into one platform where they can really interact and meet. And weve already had several success stories come out of that in the early days there. So I encourage you to check out OZworksGroup.com when you get a moment. And then, you know, I also haveand well be talking about OZ Pitch Day 2020 here in a minute, Peter, but also wanted to mention the fact that Im doing another OZ Pitch Day event in March coming up pretty soon here. So, you can check out whats on tap for that event by heading to OZPitchDay.com.

And were gonna have more funds present their different investment options for you investors out there who may be running up against a March 31 deadline. Thats the deadline that was extended by the IRS back in January, on January 19th they extended out that deadline once again. So if you missed the old December 31, 2020 deadline, you now have until the end of March of this year, 2021, to still rollover capital gains that may have been accrued along certain timeframes going back as far as 2019 in some cases. So thats a couple of plugs I wanted to make sure that I got in there, Peter.

Jimmy: Yeah. No, its really exciting. Ive been following along with OZworks work as its been merging. And I think it really fits into a lot of the same themes that weve been talking about over the course of this podcast, you know, having a deep set of resources and tools and advice for folks to be able to avail themselves of as they consider how Opportunity Zones might fit with their work. And to make that advice really accessible on a regular basis for folks, I think, its really exciting what youre what youre putting together and Im eager to continue to follow along and help out as we can.

Jimmy: Yeah. Well, thanks for that, Peter, thanks for your support so far on that endeavor. I appreciate it. I did want to kind of wrap things up here by recapping the OZ Pitch Day that we partnered on back in November of 2020. It took place on November 17th of last year, 2020. For those who are unaware, it was a one day all day Opportunity Zone pitch fest, essentially, hosted by OpportunityDb. And I partnered with Peter and his team at The Opportunity Exchange to help put it on. And just to briefly recap it, we did have 12 different qualified Opportunity Funds pitch their different investments throughout the course of the day. We had over 1,200 investors register for the event. And I believe we had close to 500 of them attend that live online event throughout the course of the day on November 17th. And many more who have watched the recording of the event since then, it was really incredible to see the way that it all came together. And Ive gotten great feedback from those who had attended the event.

I sent out a survey shortly after the event asking people, Hey, how did you like it? You know, what did you think? And are you actually going to invest in a qualified Opportunity Fund? And you know, one of my favorite questions that I got responses to from that survey is, I asked, Did this event, did OZ Pitch Day improve your likelihood of investing in a qualified Opportunity Fund? And I was blown away by the fact that 83% of the respondents said yes. And I have heard, anecdotally, I dont collect hard data on this, but anecdotally, Ive heard from several, multiple of the qualified opportunity funds that presented that day that they did raise capital as a direct result of being involved with that event. You know, millions and millions of dollars were raised from investors who were pitched to on that day.

So, that was great to hear that it was successful both for the investors who attended and for the fund managers who pitched during the course of the event. So, Peter, turning to you now, I wanted to ask you if you could tell our listeners what The Opportunity Exchange did for three of the presenting qualified Opportunity Fund partners on the event, Urban Catalyst, USG/OZIs Investors Choice OZ Fund, and Origin Investments. I know that you got involved with those three funds to build out their listings on your marketplace. Can you go into a little bit more detail there about what youve done?

Peter: Yeah, absolutely, Jimmy. Its awesome to hear some of the updates and enthusiasm that was shared back about the events. From the way that we were involved, as we mentioned before, one of the kind of key folks that engages with The Opportunity Exchange is this investor and fund base that we have. And so, when Jimmy approached us about his ideas for a Pitch Day and how he thought the event could come together, it was sort of a natural fit for us to figure out how to work together to make the event successful. What weve done is put together three fund portfolios for the three funds that Jimmy mentioned, Origin Investments, USG/OZI Investors Choice, and Urban Catalysts. You can find those at theopportunityexchange.com/opportunitydb/portfolios. If youre curious to see, you can go there.

Id encourage everybody whos listening, you know, visit the podcast notes, go to the URL I just mentioned. Youll be able to see the three different funds that weve set up. And you can look at the different projects that are going to be part of those different funds. You can understand a little bit about what the vision for the fund is, and then, you know, reach out and get connected to those groups. Id encourage folks who are curious to learn more, to visit those different profiles and get connected. This was a really exciting event, I think, in general because of its focus on really providing a dedicated venue to help facilitate, you know, not only the sort of information sharing, you know, to your point, Jimmy, the fact that folks are saying, Hey, this made me more likely to engage with this incentive in general, is an awesome outcome. And I think its testament to the sort of continued learning and continued ecosystem building work that everybody in this OpportunityDb ecosystem is committed to doing.

And it was also really special because of the amount of space that was given to the different funds who were pitching at the event to really be able to go into detail about kind of their vision and the work that they were hoping to do. It was a really unique event from our perspective. And, yeah, we were really excited to be able to help out, you know, bringing some investors to the event and then also showcasing these fund profiles here over the course of the coming month. Again, the place to go to check them out is theopportunityexchange.com/opportunitydb/portfolios. Youll see the three portfolios for the different funds that we mentioned. Oregon Investments, Urban Catalysts, and USG/OZI Investors Choice. You can click on them, see some of the deals that theyre working on. And I encourage folks to reach out and connect through some of those profiles to learn more.

Jimmy: Yeah, fantastic. And thank you once again, Peter, for partnering with me on OZ Pitch Day and partnering with those three qualified opportunity funds in order to get their portfolios up on your website. Its tremendous. And, again, just to reiterate what I said before, really pleased with how the first OZ Pitch Day went last November. And again, for those who may have missed that event or for those who liked it and want to do it again, I am doing another one. I am planning on doing multiple OZ Pitch Day events throughout the course of this year.

And the first one for this year is coming up on March 9th. And you can learn more about that at OZPitchDay.com. Its positioned such that it is a few weeks before that March 31 deadline that many investors are facing. So, the idea being attend OZ Pitch Day, learn about several different Qualified Opportunity Funds, and maybe youll find one you like and you can place your capital gains into one of those funds before that deadline arrives.

For our listeners out there today, as I mentioned before, I always produce show notes on the Opportunity Zones database website where you can learn more about todays episode. You can find those show notes at opportunitydb.com/podcast. And there you will find links to all of the resources that Peter and I discussed on todays show. Peter, again, thanks for coming on the show today. Its been a pleasure.

Peter: Yeah. Thanks so much for having me, Jimmy. I look forward to coming on again in 18 months from now and talking about what more weve learned. Thanks so much for the opportunity to share our thoughts with you today.

Jimmy: Awesome. Thank you, Peter.

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The Evolution of the OZ Marketplace, with Peter Truog - OpportunityDb

Three conformations of the DNA double helix: A (left), B (center) and left-handed Z (right). Credit: David S. Goodsell and RCSB PDB

Darwins theory of evolution should be expanded to include consideration of a DNA stability energy code so-called molecular Darwinism to further account for the long-term survival of species characteristics on Earth, according to Rutgers scientists.

The iconic genetic code can be viewed as an energy code that evolved by following the laws of thermodynamics (flow of energy), causing its evolution to culminate in a nearly singular code for all living species, according to the Rutgers co-authored study in the journal Quarterly Reviews of Biophysics.

These revelations matter because they provide entirely new ways ofanalyzing the human genome and the genome of any living species, the blueprints of life, said senior author Kenneth J. Breslauer, Linus C. Pauling Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology in the School of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers UniversityNew Brunswick. He is also affiliated with the Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey. The origins of the evolution of the DNA genetic code and the evolution of all living species are embedded in the different energy profiles of their molecular DNA blueprints. Under the influence of the laws of thermodynamics, this energy code evolved, out of an astronomical number of alternative possibilities, into a nearly singular code across all living species.

Scientists investigated this so-called universal enigma, probing the origins of the astounding observation that the genetic code evolved into a nearly uniform blueprint that arose from trillions of possibilities.

The scientists expanded the underpinnings of the landmark survival of the fittest Darwinian evolutionary theory to include molecular Darwinism. Darwins revolutionary theory is based on the generational persistence of a species physical features that allow it to survive in a given environment through natural selection. Molecular Darwinism refers to physical characteristics that persist through generations because the regions of the molecular DNA that code for those traits are unusually stable.

Different DNA regions can exhibit differential energy signatures that may favor physical structures in organisms that enable specific biological functions, Breslauer said.

Next steps include recasting and mapping the human genome chemical sequence into an energy genome, so DNA regions with different energy stabilities can be correlated with physical structures and biological functions. That would enable better selection of DNA targets for molecular-based therapeutics.

Reference: Energy mapping of the genetic code and genomic domains: implications for code evolution and molecular Darwinism by Horst H. Klump, Jens Vlker and Kenneth J. Breslauer, 4 November 2020, Quarterly Reviews of Biophysics.DOI: 10.1017/S0033583520000098

Jens Vlker, an associate research professor in RutgersNew Brunswicks Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, co-authored the study, along with first author Horst H. Klump at the University of Cape Town.

Funding: U.S. National Institutes of Health, NRF (Pretoria, RSA).

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DNA Energy Code: Survival of the Fittest Phenomenon Is Only Part of the Evolution Equation - SciTechDaily

One of the major challenges for pitchers this season is the jump in innings, as theyll go from pitching in a 60-game season last year to a full 162-game slate this year.

Angels left-hander Andrew Heaney is well aware of that and prepared himself this offseason to get ready for an increase in workload. He made 12 starts last year, throwing 66 2/3 innings with a 4.46 ERA and 70 strikeouts compared to 19 walks. But he's had experience with building innings back up -- he was injured in 2017 and threw just 21 2/3 innings, only to bounce back in '18 with 30 starts and a career-high 180 innings.

"I took a little less time off from throwing than normal, Heaney said via Zoom on Wednesday. Maybe two to three weeks. Two weeks off from lifting and then kind of got going again. It made for a little bit more of a slower escalation for throwing, but I think it's a good thing. I feel really good. So, I'm glad."

Heaney, 29, made another change this offseason, purchasing his own Rapsodo pitching device and a slow-motion camera to better track his throwing sessions. It allowed Heaney to measure things such as his spin rate on certain pitches, while also using the slow-motion camera to analyze his grips and how the ball was coming out of his hand.

Heaney consulted with former Angels pitching coach Doug White to get a better feel for the data he was receiving, as Heaney did most of his throwing on his own at his offseason home in Oklahoma.

"For the most part, I was kind of on my own, and so I felt like I needed a little bit more of that feedback," Heaney said. "I wasn't specifically working on any single pitch. I think I just wanted to get a better understanding of what I do, how I can be better with it. You know, what little changes I can make here and there."

Angels manager Joe Maddon believes those little changes can be something as simple as changing Heaneys pitch mix to get better results. Heaney has above-average strikeout and walk rates, but he has had trouble limiting hard contact in recent seasons. He's struck out 188 batters and walked just 49 in 162 innings over the last two seasons, but he has also posted a 4.72 ERA that's slightly above the league average.

"He's got great talent," Maddon said. "He's got such a quick arm and gets that carry to the baseball. The big thing for Andrew, for me, is to really understand how to utilize his weapons and how to put them away. That's it. It's probably a game planning or sequencing, because he has all this ability. He has all the tools in the toolbox, but he just has to parcel them out better."

Heaney, set to be a free agent after the season, is buying in to changing his methods on the mound -- especially since this is his seventh season with the Angels, and the clubs in the American League West are very familiar with him and his arsenal.

"I think that there is an element of my game that I am a little bit stubborn," Heaney said. "I know I have a good fastball. I like to throw my four-seam, I like to move it in and out, like to try and get it in on guys' hands. Maybe our new front office will bring in some new information to help us. But I've been stubborn, and I've been in the same league -- and let's face it, there's not an element of surprise any more. So I think an evolution needs to happen with how I approach hitters and the way I use my stuff."

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Heaney: 'An evolution needs to happen' - MLB.com

Just a few years back, as the top marketing individual at both a for-profit and then a non-profit organization, I was initially responsible for brand or product management, market research and effective advertising. My role -- along with those of my professional colleagues in the field -- rapidly evolved.Chief marketing officers (CMO) continue to see ...

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The evolution of the chief marketing officer Maryland Daily Record - Maryland Daily Record

What will menswear look like in 2021? As cultural ideas about what is considered masculine shift, so do traditional ideas of dress. Take the latest couture season as proof: Bespoke menswear found itself woven throughout collections from Valentino, Giambattista Valli, and Fendi during a week that is usually exclusive to womenswear.

The emerging designers at New York Fashion Week Mens Day perhaps exemplify the changing points of view about menswear best. Many of them offered genderless collections, while others debuted womenswear lines alongside their menswear. Others found inspirations in the past to lead us to a more harmonious future. Here, six new names to watch.

Photo: Courtesy of Chelsea Grays

Why would anyone want to relive the trials of 2020? For Chelsea Grays, the woeful year had a few silver linings. With the drastic changes of 2020, it showed me that nothing is forever and to expect the unexpected, Grays tells Vogue. There were personal challenges that I had to face and it was time to boss up. This season, the unisex brand stayed close to its roots of political and social commentary. Photographed on the streets of Paris, each upcycled look reflects a specific struggle: coronavirus, climate change, and voting and racial injustice issues. Done in an abstract, artful way, Grayss are pieces worthy of attention.

Photo: Courtesy of Federico Cina

Photo: Courtesy of Federico Cina

Photo: Courtesy of Federico Cina

Federico Cinas genderless brand is based in Milan. His new collection was inspired by Per Strada, a series of photographs taken by photographer Guido Guidi from 1980 to 1994 on the citys Via Emilia, and the loose-fitted ensembles do indeed nod to the Italian fashion capitals day-to-day glamour.

Photo: Courtesy of Ka Wa Key

Photo: Courtesy of Ka Wa Key

Photo: Courtesy of Ka Wa Key

Photo: Courtesy of Ka Wa Key

Fantasy and reality have always been propped up as opposing themes, but London-based designers Key Chow and Jarno Leppanen play with harmoniously combining the two into one. Their playful new collection, Through the Looking Glass, is inspired by characters like Willy Wonka, Peter Pan, the Mad Hatter, and Schitts Creeks Moira Rose. Imagination is not tied to a time or a place; it is universal and for everyone, they say. This season, the duos imagined reality is one characterized by reimagined knits, loud colorful prints, and oversized silhouettes.

Photo: Courtesy of KoH T

Photo: Courtesy of KoH T

Photo: Courtesy of KoH T

Guided by the ideas of yin and yang, the Japanese label KoH T stands for the idea that everything in this world is originally beautiful. For fall 2021, designer Taisuke Kohji found inspiration in the work of Honami Koetsu, a Japanese craftsman from the 1500s, creating a monochromatic and utilitarian collection designed to resemble traditional Japanese paper crafts. What KoH T and Koetsu have in common is that they both seek to produce the highest-quality product by designing familiar things with innovative ideas, Kohji says. The collection was photographed in a mix of urban and rural settings, proving KoH Ts garments will work in any environment.

Photo: Courtesy of ONYRMRK

Photo: Courtesy of ONYRMRK

Photo: Courtesy of ONYRMRK

Rwang Pam and Mark Kim of Onyrmrk (pronounced on your mark) are reimagining normalcy for fall 2021. The clothes are a direct nod to the relaxed silhouettes of the 90s and utilize only natural fabrics. It is not so much optimism that is important, but rather the resilience and strength we have garnered through the mutual support of those around uswhich is more sustainable especially as people of color, the duo says. That is why this season our collection, titled Kinship, portrays the strength of the bond between people within a community.

Photo: Courtesy of The Stolen Garment

Photo: Courtesy of The Stolen Garment

Photo: Courtesy of The Stolen Garment

A trip to a used bookstore inspired The Stolen Garment designer Jungwoo Parks first New York Fashion Week collection. In the dusty adult book section of the store, Park was struck by the tragic poignancy of book titles from the 90s with words and phrases like passion, delinquent, and end of the world. He translated this into his lineup through spiked crowns, roped harnesses, ponchos, and even a robe adorned with green protruding mushrooms. According to the Korean designer, the books produce an untranslatable feeling that was reflected through Parks quirky garments.

Originally posted here:

New York Fashion Week Mens Day Hints at the Evolution of Menswear - Vogue.com

National Review

After a campaign in which Joe Biden expressed supreme confidence that he could bring an end to, or at least substantially curb the damage wrought by, the coronavirus pandemic, his administrations handling of the pandemic has left much to be desired. Rewind back to last fall. Biden was giving speeches about how while he trusted vaccines in general, he didnt trust Donald Trump, and was thus skeptical of the coronavirus vaccines in particular. Bidens running mate, then-senator Kamala Harris, said that shed be hesitant to take a vaccine that came out during Trumps term. When pressed about whether she would do so if Dr. Anthony Fauci and other reputable health authorities endorsed it, she doubled down: Theyll be muzzled; theyll be suppressed. By December, it was clear that the vaccines were in fact on the brink of FDA approval, and that by the time Biden and Harris took their respective positions atop the executive branch, distribution would be well underway. Biden received the Pfizer vaccine mid-month, and Harris got it just before the years end. It was only right that the principals of the incoming administration should be protected. But it remains the case that Biden and Harris, without basis, undermined confidence in a medical miracle for their own political benefit and then jumped to the front of the considerable line for it. After receiving the vaccine, Biden moved into the White House with a mandate to get the pandemic under control. He announced his moonshot plan for national vaccination: administering 100 million shots by his 100th day in office. This was a dishonest PR ploy. During the week of Bidens inauguration, the U.S. averaged 983,000 vaccinations a day, meaning the administration was setting itself a benchmark it could already be assured of hitting. Naturally, the public noticed, and almost immediately Biden was forced to increase his goal: He would now be aiming for an average of 1.5 million vaccinations a day at the end of his first 100 days. Already, weve reached that higher target, and not because of the Biden administrations novel efforts. As National Reviews Jim Geraghty has reported, the Biden administrations vaccination plan includes new federal sites, but no more doses of the vaccine. This presents not an opportunity to expand vaccination efforts there are already plenty of places where people can be inoculated but a bureaucratic obstacle that has made things harder on the states, some of which were not even aware that additional doses would not be made available at the new sites. Even worse, yesterdays Morning Jolt noted that theres still a substantial gap between the number of vaccines provided by Pfizer and Moderna and the number of vaccines actually being administered: As of this morning, according to the New York Times, Moderna and Pfizer have shipped more than 70 million doses to the states, and somehow the states have gotten only 52.8 million of those shots into peoples arms. The Bloomberg chart has a slightly better figure, showing states have administered 54.6 million doses, out of roughly the same total. That leaves anywhere from 15.4 to 17.2 million doses either in transit or sitting on shelves somewhere. The country is vaccinating about 1.67 million people per day according to the Times data, 1.69 million per day on the Bloomberg chart. Not great. The Biden administration has been similarly lackadaisical in its approach to school reopenings. White House press secretary Jen Psaki announced last week that its goal was to have 51 percent of schools open at least one day a week. This target suffers from the same problem as the vaccination target: Its already been met, and exceeded. Around 64 percent of school districts were already offering some kind of in-person instruction when Psaki spoke. The objective, given the enormous costs of virtual instruction on students, should be to open up the remaining 36 percent and turn partial reopenings back into full-time ones. To some extent, Biden walked Psakis stunningly slothful goal back during a CNN town-hall event on Tuesday, saying I think many of them [will be open] five days a week. The goal will be five days a week, and calling Psakis statement a mistake. Questions remain, though: If it was only a mistake, why did it take a week for it to be corrected? And why is the correction so vague as to leave room for fudging? How many, exactly, constitutes many to the Biden administration? Bidens expectations game is a symptom of a greater problem: He never had the plan for handling the pandemic that he said he did. His campaign-season contention that he did was always a smoke-and-mirrors act that had more to do with tone and messaging than it did policy. To cover up the absence of tangible changes that its brought to the table, the new administration has tried to flood the zone with already achieved objectives and then tout their achievement as accomplishments. Dishonesty has many forms, and the Biden administration has proven itself no more forthright than its predecessors, even if its deceptions are sometimes more artful.

Continued here:

The evolution of how actors play their own lookalikes in movies, from 'The Parent Trap' to 'An American Pickle' - Yahoo News

Automation is making waves in many industries worldwide and encompasses a wide range of technologies including endpoint management, robotic process automation (RPA), artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).

Automation allows organizations to get more things done at a lower cost. It increases the efficiency of individuals, teams and companies as a whole, and is likely to revolutionize the way organizations function.

Lets take a look at a simple three-level hierarchy of automation technologies.

The foundational layer of all automation technologies is the automation of IT processes. This involves the automation of routine IT tasks and workflows such as server maintenance, software patch management and software updates. It also includes auto-remediation of IT incidents and associated service tickets.

IT processes are automated by running scripts or what we call Agent Procedures. With Kaseya VSA, our unified remote monitoring and management (URMM) software, you can customize pre-built automation scripts or create your own in the Agent Procedure Editor.

Auto-remediation of incidents involves first setting up monitoring on the endpoint and then automatically executing the script(s) when an alert occurs. This process can involve both the endpoint management tool and your service desk solution where you manage tickets. Tickets can automatically be created by the endpoint management tool. Then, those tickets can be resolved using automated workflows in the service desk to run the scripts.

A few benefits of IT process automation are:

The major challenge with automating IT processes is creating the scripts that automate the tasks. With the Kaseya Automation Exchange, you can get started quickly and easily. Kaseya Automation Exchange offers more than 800 pre-built automation scripts, monitor sets and reports that can be used to reduce the time it takes for you to implement automation.

Research firm Gartner predicted that the global robotic process automation (RPA) market revenue will reach $1.89 billion in 2021 an increase of 19.5 percent from 2020.

RPA is the business process layer. In RPA, simple, repeatable rules are followed by bots or virtual systems to automate manual computing steps or simple business processes. For example, in the insurance industry, RPA allows companies to automate the processing of claims without manual intervention. In any organization, the process of onboarding/offboarding of employees can be done with RPA.

Another use case for RPA is in the hiring process. It enables human resource executives to automate some or all of the process. This means a job candidate can be hired or rejected automatically based on a certain set of rules.

Hyperautomation brings together artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) tools with RPA to enable the automation of complex business processes. Hyperautomation can lead to real digital transformation of the business. As one of the top 10 strategic trends of 2021 touted by Gartner, the idea of hyperautomation is to automate anything that can be automated.

Implementing hyperautomation requires streamlining entire processes in an organization, getting rid of legacy applications and enforcing lean, optimized and interconnected processes.

One of the hyperautomation use cases is automating all banking processes. Right from regulatory reporting, marketing, bank servicing, payment and lending operations to customer support, all functions can be automated for a swift banking experience.

The major challenge with hyperautomation is actually automating complex processes. Grappling with process complexity can cause frustration and increase implementation costs.

Create a roadmap for the processes to be automated. Start with the smaller ones and expand to the most complicated ones.

For automation to be highly beneficial, companies must choose which activities to automate, the level of automation to be implemented and the technologies to adopt based on their business needs. Having a strong foundation in IT process automation is the best place to start.

Learn about the 7 Processes to Automate to Improve Productivity and Reduce IT Costs in our checklist.

The post The Evolution of Automation Technologies appeared first on Kaseya.

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Blog Kaseya authored by John Emmitt. Read the original post at: https://www.kaseya.com/blog/2021/02/16/the-evolution-of-automation-technologies/

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The Evolution of Automation Technologies - Security Boulevard

For years I have been content to be conflicted about Alexey Navalny. On the one hand, I thought he was an extraordinarily brave, inventive, and committed opponent of Vladimir Putins regime. On the other hand, he had allied himself with ultranationalists and had expressed views that I found extremely objectionable and potentially dangerous. Over the years, Ive had a couple of arguments with Navalny and a few with my friends whose support for him flummoxed mea mentor of his who is Jewish, a tireless campaign volunteer who is Armenianbut I felt I could respect him and disagree with him at the same time. Nationalist leaders have, historically, often played key roles in building democracies. And its not as if I had to decide whether to vote for Navalny.

Now Navalny is in jail, facing years behind bars. (His current sentence of two years and eight months is likely just the beginning.) He has survived more than one Kremlin-backed assassination attempt, and people close to him fear that he will now be killed in prison. The Kremlin, which for years banned his name from the airwaves, has accused him of staging his own near-death and unleashed a propaganda offensive against him, deploying, among others, the accusation that he is a far-right ethno-nationalist. In the English-language press, the socialist magazine Jacobin published an article branding Navalny an anti-immigrant nationalist who cannot be trusted; the British journalist Anatol Lieven, who covered Eastern Europe in the nineteen-eighties and nineties, has warned against idealizing Navalny; and the N.Y.U. professor Eliot Borenstein, one of American academias most prolific commentators on contemporary Russia, wrote on Facebook, Hes not Nelson Mandela. Hes Aung San Suu Kyi.

On the other hand, several academics, politicians, and policy experts have nominated Navalny for the Nobel Peace Prizean initiative that now includes Lech Walesa, the former Polish President and leader of the Solidarity trade-union movement, who received the prize in 1983. The effort was launched last September by Alexander Etkind, a Russian exile, professor at the European University in Florence, and, in my opinion, the single most insightful scholar of contemporary Russian culture and politics. Etkind is Jewish. A nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize is not something one undertakes while holding ones nose. I called Etkind and other prominent and decidedly anti-nationalist Navalny supporters to learn why they didnt seem conflicted about him. I learned a few things about Navalnys personal and political evolution and also about the workings of the Kremlin propaganda machine. I also realized that I should have undertaken this research sooner.

Navalnys reputation as an ultranationalist stems from statements and actions that are more than a decade old. In 2007, he left the socialist-democratic party Yabloko, where he had served as the deputy head of the Moscow chapter, to start a new political movement. He and his co-founders called their movement NAROD, the Russian word for people and, in their case, also an acronym for National Russian Liberation Movement. Navalny recorded two videos to introduce their new movement; they were his dbut on YouTube. One was a forty-second argument for gun rights. The other, a minute long, featured Navalny dressed as a dentist, presenting a slightly confusing parable that likened interethnic conflict in Russia to cavities and argued that fascism can be prevented only by deporting migrants from Russia. Navalny closed his monologue with We have a right to be [ethnic] Russians in Russia. And we will defend this right. It is decidedly disturbing to view. Around the time Navalny released the video, and for a couple of years after, Navalny took part in the Russian March, an annual demonstration in Moscow that draws ultranationalists, including some who adopt swastika-like symbols. In 2008, Navalny, like an apparent majority of Russians, supported Russian aggression in Georgia. In 2013, he made illegal immigration from Central Asia a central theme of his campaign for mayor of Moscow. In 2014, after Russia occupied Crimea, he said that, while he opposed the invasion, he did not think that Crimea could be just handed back by a post-Putin Russian government. In the past seven years, though, Navalny appears to have not made any comments that could be interpreted as hateful or ethno-nationalist. He has publicly apologized for his comments on Georgia.

Yevgenia Albats, a Russian investigative journalist and a close friend of the Navalny familys, told me that she persuaded Navalny to attend the Russian March. In 2004, Albats had returned to Moscow after defending her doctoral dissertation in political science at Harvard. In the preceding four years, Putin had taken control of the media and dismantled the electoral system, effectively destroying Russian politics as it had been constituted. Older, experienced politicians were disoriented. But a crop of younger activists, who had not experienced party politics in what had been a somewhat functional electoral system, were rearing to go. Albats, who had researched grassroots organizing during her years at Harvard, started gathering the young activists in her Moscow apartment. About twenty people of different political stripesfrom social democrats to libertarians to religious-rights activistsattended Tuesday-night seminars with Albats for about a year, she told me by Zoom from Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she is wrapping up a research fellowship. Albats was in her late forties and an observant Jew. Navalny, in his late twenties, was the oldest among those who gathered at her house but also the least articulate and least educated: most of the others had gone to prestigious colleges, while Navalny was a military brat with an undergraduate law degree from a decidedly second-tier school. For as long as she has known him, Albats told me, Navalny has been teaching himself how to be a politician: he taught himself public speaking; while he was under house arrest a few years back, he taught himself English.

In the absence of politics, in the absence of any public conversation, little remained to form political alliances around. Putin was trafficking in nostalgia for the Soviet empire. The only alternative seemed to be broadly ethno-nationalist ideas, which also addressed a sense of humiliationand these were emerging both on what could be roughly described as the left and vaguely designated as the right. Activists who didnt share ethno-nationalist ideas believed that they had to form alliances with Russias emerging nationalist movements. The chess champion Garry Kasparov, for example, who quit the sport in 2005 to launch a political career, created a joint movement with the National-Bolshevik Party. At the time, he told me that only a united front could overthrow the Putin regime, and only after that should pro-Western liberal democrats like him hash out their differences with the ethno-nationalists. Albats recalled that it was in this context that she told Navalny that he should attend the Russian March. They went together. I wore a giant Star of David that I made sure could be seen from a distance, she told me. He took a lot of shit for walking with a kike. Their efforts to engage people in conversation failed, and after three years they gave up.

Navalny has often said that he saw the Russian March as a form of valid political expression, that in the kind of Russia that he and his supporters are fighting fora free, democratic societythe Russian March will be a festive annual event like the St. Patricks Day Parade. He believes that if you dont talk to the kind of people who attend these marches, they will all become skinheads, Leonid Volkov, who runs the political-organizing part of Navalnys organization, told me over the phone. But, if you talk to them, you may be able to convince them that their real enemy is Putin. Volkov, who is Jewish, lives in exile in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania.

In 2015, the Polish journalist and former dissident Adam Michnik and Navalny recorded a series of conversations that Michnik compiled into a book. My idea is that you have to communicate with nationalists and educate them, Navalny told Michnik. Many Russian nationalists have no clear ideology. What they have is a sense of general injustice to which they respond with aggression against people with a different skin color or eyes of a different shape. I think its extremely important to explain to them that beating up migrants is not the solution to the problem of illegal immigration; the solution is a return to competitive elections that would allow us to get rid of the thieves and crooks who are getting rich off of illegal immigration.

According to Volkov, Navalny now regrets making the 2007 video in which he advocated for deporting Central Asian migrants, but he has not deleted it from YouTube because its a historical fact. Navalny stands by his support for gun ownership, an issue on which he and Volkov disagree. On immigration, Navalny has refined and reframed his position: when he advocates for a visa regime with Central Asian countries now, he emphasizes the need to protect the rights of migrant laborers. Russia definitely needs immigrants, Volkov said, but ones who receive work permits and pay taxes. This position is part of a broader economic platform worked out with the help of another Navalny political mentor, the brilliant Russian economist Sergei Guriev. Guriev, who is now a professor at Sciences Po, has lived in exile in Paris since 2013. Under Gurievs influence, Volkov told me, we have moved significantly to the left economically. In 2018, Navalny added a federal minimum wage to his platform: he believes it should be twenty-five thousand rubles a month, roughly twice the current legal requirement.

Link:

The Evolution of Alexey Navalnys Nationalism - The New Yorker

As Americans anxiously watch variants first identified in the United Kingdom and South Africa spread in the United States, scientists are finding a number of new variants that originated here. More concerning, many of these variants seem to be evolving in the same direction potentially becoming contagious threats of their own.

In a study posted on Sunday, a team of researchers reported seven growing lineages of the novel coronavirus, spotted in states across the country. All of them have evolved a mutation in the same genetic letter.

Theres clearly something going on with this mutation, said Jeremy Kamil, a virologist at Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center Shreveport and a co-author of the new study.

Its unclear whether it makes the variants more contagious. But because the mutation appears in a gene that influences how the virus enters human cells, the scientists are highly suspicious.

I think theres a clear signature of an evolutionary benefit, Dr. Kamil said.

The history of life is full of examples of so-called convergent evolution, in which different lineages follow the same path. Birds gained wings as they evolved from feathered dinosaurs, for example, just as bats did when they evolved from furry, shrew-like mammals. In both cases, natural selection gave rise to a pair of flat surfaces that could be flapped to generate lift enabling bats and birds alike to take to the sky and fill an ecological niche that other animals could not.

Charles Darwin first recognized convergent evolution by studying living animals. In recent years, virologists have found that viruses can evolve convergently, too. H.I.V., for example, arose when several species of viruses shifted from monkeys and apes to humans. Many of those lineages of H.I.V. gained the same mutations as they adapted to our species.

As the coronavirus now branches into new variants, researchers are observing Darwins theory of evolution in action, day in and day out.

Dr. Kamil stumbled across some of the new variants while he was sequencing samples from coronavirus tests in Louisiana. At the end of January, he observed an unfamiliar mutation in a number of samples.

The mutation altered the proteins that stud the surface of the coronavirus. Known as spike proteins, they are folded chains of more than 1,200 molecular building blocks called amino acids. Dr. Kamils viruses all shared a mutation that changed the 677th amino acid.

Investigating these mutant viruses, Dr. Kamil realized they all belonged to the same lineage. The earliest virus in the lineage dated back to Dec. 1. In later weeks, it grew more common.

On the evening of his discovery, Dr. Kamil uploaded the genomes of the viruses to an online database used by scientists across the world. The next morning, he got an email from Daryl Domman of the University of New Mexico. He and his colleagues had just found the same variant in their state, with the same 677 mutation. Their samples dated back to October.

The scientists wondered whether the lineage they had discovered was the only one to have a 677 mutation. Probing the database, Dr. Kamil and his colleagues found six other lineages that independently gained the same mutation on their own.

Its difficult to answer even basic questions about the prevalence of these seven lineages because the United States sequences genomes from less than 1 percent of coronavirus test samples. The researchers found samples from the lineages scattered across much of the country. But they cant tell where the mutations first arose.

Feb. 18, 2021, 12:59 p.m. ET

Id be quite hesitant to give an origin location for any of these lineages at the moment, said Emma Hodcroft, an epidemiologist at the University of Bern and a co-author of the new study.

Its also hard to say whether the increase in variants is actually the result of their being more contagious. They might have become more common simply because of all of the travel over the holiday season. Or they might have exploded during superspreader events at bars or factories.

Still, scientists are worried because the mutation could plausibly affect how easily the virus gets into human cells.

An infection begins when a coronavirus uses the tip of the spike protein to latch onto the surface of a human cell. It then unleashes harpoon-like arms from the spikes base, pulling itself to the cell and delivering its genes.

Before the virus can carry out this invasion, however, the spike protein has to bump into a human protein on the surface of the cell. After that contact, the spike becomes free to twist, exposing its harpoon tips.

The 677 mutation alters the spike protein next to the spot where our proteins nick the virus, conceivably making it easier for the spike to be activated.

Jason McLellan, a structural biologist at the University of Texas at Austin who was not involved in the study, called it an important advance. But he cautioned that the way that the coronavirus unleashed its harpoons was still fairly mysterious.

Its tough to know what these substitutions are doing, he said. It really needs to be followed up with some additional experimental data.

Dr. Kamil and his colleagues are starting those experiments, hoping to see whether the mutation does indeed make a difference to infections. If the experiments bear out their suspicions, the 677 mutation will join a small, dangerous club.

Convergent evolution has transformed a few other spots on the spike protein as well. The 501st amino acid has mutated in a number of lineages, for example, including the contagious variants first observed in the United Kingdom and South Africa. Experiments have revealed that the 501 mutation alters the very tip of the spike. That change allows the virus to latch onto cells more tightly, and infect them more effectively.

Scientists anticipate that coronaviruses will converge on more mutations that give them an advantage against not only other viruses but also our own immune system. But Vaughn Cooper, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Pittsburgh and a co-author of the new study, said lab experiments alone wouldnt be able to reveal the extent of the threat.

To really understand what the mutations are doing, he said, scientists will need to analyze a much bigger sampling of coronaviruses gathered from across the country. But right now, they can look at only a relatively meager number of genomes collected by a patchwork of state and university labs.

Its ridiculous that our country is not coming up with a national strategy for doing surveillance, Dr. Cooper said.

Excerpt from:

7 Virus Variants Found in U.S. Carrying the Same Mutation - The New York Times