Category Archives: Evolution

The only political office I have ever been elected to was a seat on the Jefferson County Republican Executive Committee. My name was on the ballot and I got the most votes. (Out of the very few cast back then in the Republican primary.) I lived in Birmingham.

But that Republican party was nothing like it is today. The people I met were honestly interested in good government and putting forth candidates of integrity, conviction and who were trustworthy. They were not the wackos we see too much of today. No Ted Cruz, no Ron Johnson, no Marjorie Taylor Greene. They were not trying to divide people and make fear and hate the main message of their campaigns for office.

So what happened? Or did anything really?

In 1948, something called the States Rights Democratic Party came into being. It was most commonly known as the Dixiecrat party. Its followers were Democrats from the deep South who were upset that President Harry Truman ordered integration of the military in 1948 and was seen as friendly to civil rights issues of Black Americans.

This did not sit well with southerners who were staunch segregationists. So the Dixiecrats were born. Their presidential candidate was Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, who became a Republican in 1964. As Black people got the right to vote and became politically involved, they flocked to the Democratic party.

White flight was not just about southern whites response to school integration, it was also about the growth of the Republican party throughout Dixie.

Peggy Wallace Kennedy has written a fascinating and courageous book, The Broken Road,about her famous father, George C. Wallace. She makes it clear that she saw little difference in the political stances of her father in the 1960s and those of Donald Trump in 2016.

Listen to her Daddys politics were more than just bombastic style. The establishment and other politicians viewed him as a demagogue. Nobody will buy what he is selling, they declared. Just take a look at him. Take him out of those Alabama backwoods and hell be finished. That was a mistake. And forty-four years later, disaffected voters responded similarly toTrump. They rebelled against the same intellectualism and paternalism that Daddy railed against.

Daddys strategy of articulating and mobilizing the grievances of the dispossessed would become one of the core strategies of the Trump campaign forty-four years later. It was the politics of rage and fear. It was resentment for no particular reason. It was a tent revival in the dead of summer, slapping mosquitoes and singing Amazing Grace while the preacher was fooling around out back.

Strom Thurmond got 78 percent of the vote in the Alabama 1948 general election. Republican Thomas Dewey only 19 percent. In 2020 Donald Trump got 62 percent of the vote compared to Bidens 37 percent.

So the case can certainly be made that the DNA of Alabama voters has not changed much since at least 1948 and the Republican party has morphed into the old Dixiecrat party. Given that the majority of Alabamians are descendants of Scots-Irish, this is understandable. In general, Scots-Irish who came to this country were fierce, violent and independent people. They set their own rules and dared anyone to try and change them.

Their pride overruled common sense and permitted them to cast votes that were hurtful to their own well-being.

Look at Strom Thurmond in 1948. Or better yet, look at Barry Goldwater in 1964. Goldwater was a U.S. Senator from Arizona known for his straight talk and fiery rhetoric. Just the kind of candidate that the Scots-Irish loved. A candidate without a snow balls chance in Hell, but boy he could stir a Southern heart. Just like Donald Trump could do.

Even though Goldwater lost to Lyndon Johnson in the general election by the largest margin in history, he got 69 percent of the Alabama vote. (Second only to Mississippi.) Goldwater only won six states. His Arizona home and Louisiana, Mississippi,

Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina. Alabama also elected five Republicans to the national House of Representatives in 1964..

While the Dixiecrat party was then ancient history, Goldwater showed us that the Republican Party was fertile ground for right wing believers. In fact, Goldwaters conservatism, initially rejected as radical, infused the Republican Party.

If you dont think so, then look at what just happened in Georgia where the Republican led legislature has passed new law about how elections should be conduced.. A law that makes it illegal to give someone waiting in line to vote a bottle of water. No doubt Strom Thurmond would be elated. And most of us have now seen the photo with the governor surrounded by six white male legislators as he signed the bill.

And just outside the governors closed door a Black female legislator was arrested and taken to jail for knocking on the door.

You got to give Trump credit for one thing. He figured out that the Dixiecrat/Republicans were a festering wound. All they needed was someone to come along and pull the scab off. He obliged.

Ultimately national Republicans will have to realize that water fountains in downtown Atlanta and Birmingham are no longer labeled, For whites only and support policy that appeals to a much broader spectrum of Americans than they do now. If not, then they are only marking time until the day they end up where the Dixiecrats did. On the outside looking in.

As to Alabama, the Dixiecrat/Republicans will probably be around for a long time, too often listening to the radical voices that tell them a long-ago world still exists and sending people to Washington who may have a votebut no influence.

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Opinion | From Dixiecrat until today. The evolution of the Republican Party - alreporter.com

Tweed peacoats, plaid dresses, corsets, and cutlasses found discarded in antique store basements have attracted a new group of buyers in 2021: Teenagers.

Aesthetics, a branch of philosophy that studies the nature and qualifications of beauty, taste, and art, has been given a whole new meaning in the last decade by Gen Z social media users. The contemporary understanding of the term has completely changed to now align with a collection of visuals that represent a broad array of concepts ranging from historical eras, locations, genres of fiction, music, and even pre-existing subcultures. The most prevalent of 2021 aesthetics can be narrowed down to two categories: Cottagecore, an aesthetic that romanticizes cottage life, and Dark Academia, a style that engages in the eerie visuals of early 20th-century academia. As these two aestheticsalong with many other similar aestheticsgain popularity in the online lives of young people, it becomes important to understand how they arose, what they are, and what their modern-day implications may be.

For starters, Tumblr might have a few answers. Created in 2007, Tumblr was the first image-oriented social media platform to go mainstream. Pinterest and Instagram, both launched in 2010, followed soon after. Unlike its other social media predecessors, the platform centered around users ability to create a distinct visual identity by curating their blog with an individualized colour scheme and font palette, along with the reblogging of content. Zoe Karkossa, U4 Science, has avidly tracked the development of Tumblr aesthetics since she started her blog in 2013.

Tumblr was the first platform to really capitalize on the use of visual images as symbols, Karkossa said. You had Flickr [before], but that was [] meant to be photos that you took. [On] Tumblr, you had the option of curating [] images that other people have taken.

Karkossa argues that Tumblr provided access to a huge database of pictures and GIFs, which made certain recurring images, products, and color schemes popular among users. Before the white, upper-middle class VSCO blogger aesthetic, there were basic bloggers who drank Starbucks, wore Uggs, and posted highly stylized inspirational quotes on Instagram. While older millennials were evolving from the Scene kids of MySpace into early 2010s Hipsters, younger millennials and Gen Z-ers were building off of the styles on these online platforms to curate their own visual identities.

Beyond curating moodboard blogs, Tumblr was ultimately a fan-centric space. Teens on 2012-2014 era Tumblr created fandoms surrounding YouTubers, bands, shows, and even authors. With so many people discussing the same contentwhether it was the Arctic Monkeys AM, Troye Sivan and Tyler Oakleys Boyfriend Tag video, or the unforgettable Mishapocalypsecertain fashion styles also gained popularity on the website, like galaxy leggings and flower crowns. In turn, the mainstream basic aesthetic contended with a newer, though no less homogenous, fandom aesthetic.

Carrie Rentschler, an associate professor at McGills Department of Art History & Communication Studies who studies aesthetics through the lens of social media activism, noted that social media users must be aware of how different websites provide different avenues of expression for their creators. An aesthetic develops when certain visuals can move between different platforms, adapting in accordance to the new websites.

There is a kind of [] revision process that aesthetics are going through as part of the creative process, Rentschler said. You have this corpus of material on social media and cross-platform movement of [] emerging aesthetics and [] conventions. [Content creators have] a way of doing things that is not directly agreed upon [but rather, they] have chosen to make similar decisions.

Whereas Tumblr provided anonymity through its reblogging functionallowing the creation of a visual identity to be developed sans ownershipInstagram shifted visual communication toward a form of individualized social signalling. Instagram users do not simply curate content, they create it. The images an individual posts on Instagramlike the Helvetica-filtered early 2010s circle of shoes photosignified, to some extent, the fashion that they subscribed to and the internet subculture they were a part of. Simultaneously, Pinterest users can curate their style by searching up images and creating boards. Not long after, Instagram pages with moodboards followed.

It should come as no surprise, then, that the aesthetics that originated on Tumblr and were popularized through Instagram have taken TikTok by storm. The significance of aesthetics, however, lies not in their existence, but in their unexpected mainstream appeal, global influence, and escapist nature.

No aesthetic is perhaps as escapist as Cottagecore, a theme that originated on Tumblr in 2017although arguably popularized by Marie Antoinetteand presents a romanticized version of rural life, complete with green-coated fields, airy dresses, flowers, woven baskets, self-subsistence, and frolics through mystical fields. While it is an undeniably beautiful and otherworldly aesthetic that has sprouted many offshoots of its own, Cottagecore also has complicated socio-political undertones. It upholds a conservatively traditional lifestyle, yet at the same time is championed by queer women who find sapphic appeal in a sustainable, unpreturbed, romantic pastoral life. Furthermore, it idolizes anti-capitalism in its pursuit of self-subsistence, but is inherently consumerist in its pursuit of a certain lifestyleit takes money to be able to buy an array of vintage dresses, curate a charcuterie board, and to even have the time to frolic in a field.

Even so, the Cottagecore aesthetic holds no malicious intent, and provides the viewer a flower-spotted escape from a complicated and stressful world. Taylor Swifts release of two Cottagecore-themed albums in 2020 has pushed the aesthetic into the mainstream.

On the other end of the optical and atmospheric spectrum is Dark Academia, a neoclassicist subset of the larger Academia aesthetic which focusses on a certain macabre, academically rigorous, elite university lifestyle, reminiscent of Donna Tartts The Secret History. Think studying in a coffee-stained sweater vest, hidden in the nook of a snowed-in library, while you pore over an ancient Greek text to the sound of Vivaldi far off in the distance.

Jesse Smith, U1 Arts and TikTok content creator, delves into the details of their preferred aesthetic: Dark Academia.

Whereas Cottagecore is Midsommarwithout the horror [], Dark Academia is very Dead Poets Society,Good Will Hunting,[and] to an extent, Harry Potter, Smith said. A lot of the aesthetic has the undertones of nefariousness. You want to create a secret society with your friends and hide murder. That is not actuallysomething you want to do, but thats the vibe youre going for.

What both of these aesthetics have in common is that they provide young people a form of unique self-expression and a way to elude a world filled with death, disease, racialized violence, and political turmoil. Smith argues that Dark Academia ultimately boils down to self-expression and a growing opposition to the conventions and practices of the fashion industry.

We have a lot more of an opportunity, and a willingness to not conform, Smith said. A lot of the movement towards aesthetics is against the fashion industry [because] aesthetics cant be mass produced in the quality people are looking for. Fashion aesthetics have moved the younger generations more towards thrifting and higher quality clothing [.] People care a lot more about how they feel in their clothing rather than how that clothing presents them to the world.

Maybe the emergence of these strange subcultures is for the best: Pushing against fast fashion, pursuing a unique sense of self-expression in lockdown, and looking for a fantastical form of escape are arguably some of the best things young people can be doing right now. When the world feels like it is on fire, there is nothing wrong with putting on a flowy dress, closing your eyes, and thinking of a life where a trickling stream, a bloom of lily flowers, and a homemade meal await you by a cottage on a hill. Maybe you will even find yourself along the way.

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Escapism, identity, and the evolution of TikTok aesthetics - McGill Tribune

Iconic and superb,the Volkswagen Transporter - in its camper van versions - has always been a symbol of freedom and adventure. Throughout the years, it has beenthe favorite mean of transport for the hippies, the best van for surfers from all over the world, and the first point of reference to all the outdoors enthusiasts.

There have always been several companies involved in convertingthe VW Transporter, like Westfalia - the first one in 1953 and probably the most productiveone -, Reimo or Dehler. Only recently, Volkswagen Californiahas begun operatingas an independent brand, producing their own factory-converted vans. Whatever the case, let'stake a look at the VW Camper Van's evolution.

Related:Volkswagen Teases Massive Camper Van- The California XXL

It all started in 1949, when a man called Ben Pon, a Dutch businessman involved in importing Volkswagen Beetles into the Netherlands, visited a VW factory in Wolfsburg, and sketched out an idea for a brand-new automobile. The VW engineers wouldbe inspired by his sketches to bring the first Bulli -Bus e Lieferwagen (van) -to life.

In 1953,Wesfalia introduced the Camping Box,a set of custom wooden furniture for the Combi (different from the Commercial Transporter).Starting with a large all-in-one unit that fits behind the cockpit, this piece of furniturehides all the mattresses and cushions that form the sofa bed. Also,a place for a basin or a stove, as well as drawers for storing kitchen accessories were included. Finally, a removable table is installed perpendicularly to form a dinette. The canvas mushroom pop-top roof was a cool optional, destined to grow bigger in time.

In 1968, Volkswagen had produced more than 1 million Transporters and released a newervan:although it looked pretty similar to the T1, the T2 was very different. It had a new engine, new suspension, and a stabilizing bar was added to the back.The firstdifference that you could spot, however, is that the split windscreen was replaced with a singular window panel, that is why the T2 has also been named Bay-Window, or simply Bay.

The T2 was upgraded in 1973 and friendly referred to as the late-bay, with previous models being labeled early-bay.The late-bay had a slightly different look, including different front lights, a squared bumper,improved brakes, and the option of a larger engine.Based on Combis whose roof was cut offfromthe factory, the evolution towards a biggerpop-top roof was then perfectly natural and quite simple to implement in the Westfalia factories.

In 1979VW began the production of theT3 van.The numerous Westfalia camper versions were heavily marketed by VW, and those were thefirst vans featuring hard-tops. The T3was also noted bya large number of camper conversionmanufacturers, that wouldwork on the basis of the VW T3, drawinginspiration from therise of the motorhomes in the 1980s.

Available in a pop-top and high-top version, the Volkswagen T3 Joker edition wascharacterized by an L-shaped sofa bed, with beige furniture and fancyfabrics. Also in its Syncro version - 4 wheels driving - the Joker wasjust one of the various editions available during the '80s, marking the T3 one of the most appreciated van by the European adventurers.

Famous for its squared and marked shape, these days the T3 is gaining popularity again, and of course, it's super Instagrammable. The arrival of water-cooled and diesel engines allowed it to engulf even greater distances.Larger than the previous T2, it offersmore storage space.The American versionwas calledVanagon by VWto highlight the van hadthe room of a van, but the driving experience of astation wagon.

Variations of the US Vanagon model included the Standard Vanagon, with vinyl seats and a spartan interior; the Vanagon L with optional fabric seats, chrome window frames, more exclusive interior panels, and an optional dashboard fan and the Vanagon GLthat featured a padded steering wheel and front armrests. TheWestfaliapop-top Vanagons campers were available in the Campmobile version, fully equipped for camping, and the Weekender, a more basic edition equipped for shorter vacations.

In its unique '90s look, this is the fourth-generation Transporter. What all T4s have in common is the modern driving concept, still valid today, with a bigger front-engine and front-wheel drive: this makes the VWT4 easier for inexperienced Bulli drivers.

Among the different models available, this is the T4 California Freedom: with itsfancy equipment, it marks the higher-end versionin the California range. Just to mention few features: 5 cylinders 150hp TDI engine, auxiliary heating, cruise control, navigation system. Basically everything you need for a comfortable camping experience.

Related:10 Camper Vans That Are Perfect For Social Distancing

The California T5 was introduced in 2003 in the Beach and Comfortline series. The Beach is more simply equipped and available at a lower basic price. A folding roof, in which a bed was optional.

The Comfortline gives you a kind of being-at-homefeelingwith several cupboards and storage compartments, a refrigerator, a two-burner stove, a sink, and a sofa bed. A table can be opened and combined with the rotating front seats to form a seating group for four people. A camping table is stored in the sliding door, which can be used outside the vehicle with the two camping chairs in the tailgate. Unlike its predecessor, the furniture is no longer made of MDF, but of aluminum finished with wood veneer.

Following the launch of the T6 Transporter, in 2015 a new version of the VW California was released to replace the older T5 version. Some changes applied to the revised van area restyled grille, redesigned headlamps, and wing mirrors. Three equipment levels in this lineup were available: the T6 Ocean, the T6 Coast, and the T6 Beach. Yes, even at VW theyknow how bad you need a vacation in a tropical spot.

The California Ocean features an electro-hydraulically elevating aluminum roof that sustains abed. The rear seating in the California Oceancan also easily turn into an additional bed, givingthe kids a place to sleep.

The latest version of our beloved VW Camper Van was released between 2019 and 2020. Thenew VW California 6.1,with its series of aesthetic, technological, and technical innovations,is the ultimateanswerfor travelers who require high-end comforts on long journeys.

A larger chrome grille in the front and LED lights are the main exterior changes. About the interior, everything turned to be electrically controlled and set: Digital Cockpit on the dashboard and a control panel above the head - a touchpad that will make you feel inside a space shuttle - that can control thepop-top, heating, level functions to see if youre parked ready for sleeping, alarm and the sunrise function which lights up the interior at a specific time in the morning to wake you up.

Related:Volkswagen Will Debut Upgraded T6.1 California Camper At Caravan Salon

With this electric prototype,Volkswagenprojects the Bulli, the iconic Volkswagen minibus, into the future. VW grants flexibleinteriorsto take advantage of the room available and to find the setting that best suits the customer's needs.

According to Volkswagen, the van will feature an AR head-up displaythat projects the navigation directly in front of the car, onto the road. And thanks to the augmented reality projection, the directional arrows will indicate exactly the path you need to follow. Will this be the solution forreaching your destination without taking your eyes off the road? We don't know. But we do know that we just can't stop taking our eyes off those VW Camper Vans.

Next:Surprising Facts About Volkswagen And Its Cars

Next 12 Most Realistic Car Tuning & Racing Games For Real Gearheads

Dave D'Alcamo is a writer based in the Italian Motor Valley, but probably he is currently typing from the couch of his van. Pathologically into classics and vans, he shares the devotion for engines with his dad.

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This Is The Evolution Of The VW Camper Van | HotCars - HotCars

Instagram was once a great social media platform specifically tailored for users to share photos of everyday life with friends and family. However, today, it has transformed into a free, revenue-generating app for users around the world. Not many people use this app to become rich and famous in the first place, which may have led to a decline in average users.

This is not to say that Instagram has to worry about the app failing or not generating enough revenue to sustain itself; but that the evolution of how one uses the app has drastically changed.

Many people may recall the rise in social media influencers and famous celebrities promoting supplements such as Flat Tummy Tea. This drastically changed how the app was used in starting to promote products; as users were making money on this free app, where this did not benefit the apps revenue.

The rise in promotions has prompted users to only show the best parts of their life, to dress the best and not be their authentic selves, creating a social media persona, as well as shifting a focus on how many followers you have, how many likes, and how your follower to following ratio should be, etc. The shift in focus lessens the relaxation of the app, causing users to not enjoy it as much.

This shift in usage led to the creation of having a fake Instagram or a Finsta, in which only users closest peers follow and they share more personal and behind-the-scenes photos, that you would not want on your Rinsta, aka a real Instagram. What is interesting is that you are actually real on the Finsta rather than on the Rinsta because you are only highlighting the absolute best images you want others to see?

Having these two accounts proves how social media has become an essential tool in personal brands. Users have the option to turn their pages into a business page, a blog or an outlet through which they can share their talents and local and world news. It has become an all-encompassing app that displays a lot of information that can be beneficial and harmful. This is because of how information is spread on the app; in which they now have regulations on in terms of the verification of the claims made by different accounts and users.

Although many people have lost the use for actively posting on their Rinsta, the app itself is essential because of how fast users can share information with followers. Throughout COVID-19 and the world slowly opening back up, this is a platform that a lot of people have access to and could potentially reach a multitude of people to share all kinds of information for the masses.

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Instagram is dying: The fall and evolution of Instagram - Chargerbulletin

Key Takeaways

At the QCon in March, I gave a talk on the evolution of distributed systems with Kubernetes. First, I want to start with a question, what comes after microservices? I'm sure you all have an answer to that, and I have mine too. You'll find out at the end what I think that will be. To get there, I suggest we look at what are the needs of the distributed systems. And how those needs have been evolving over the years, starting with monolithic applications to Kubernetes and with more recent projects such as Dapr, Istio, Knative, and how they are changing the way we do distributed systems. We will try to make some predictions about the future.

To set a little more context on this talk, when I say distributed systems, what I have in mind is systems composed of multiple components, hundreds of those. These components can be stateful, stateless, or serverless. Moreover, these components can be created in different languages running on hybrid environments and developing open-source technologies, open standards, and interoperability. I'm sure you can make such systems using closed source software or create them on AWS and other places. For this talk specifically, I'm looking at the Kubernetes ecosystem and how you can create such a system on the Kubernetes platform.

Let's start with the needs of distributed systems. What I have in mind is we want to create an application or service and write some business logic. What else do we need from the platform from our runtime to build distributed systems? At the foundation, at the beginning is we want some lifecycle capabilities. When you write your application in any language, then we want to have the ability to package and deploy that application reliably, to do rollbacks, health checks. And be able to place the application on different nodes and do resource isolation, scaling, configuration management, and all of these things. These are the very first things you would need to create a distributed application.

The second pillar is around networking. Once we have an application, we want it to reliably connect to other services, whether within the cluster or in the outside world. We want to have abilities such as service discovery, load balancing. We want to do traffic shifting, whether for different release strategies or some other reasons. Then we want to have an ability to do resilient communication with other systems, whether that is through retries, timeouts, circuit breakers, of course. Have security in place, and get adequate monitoring, tracing, observability, and all that.

Once we have networking, the next thing is we want to have the ability to talk to different APIs and endpoints, i.e., resource bindings - to talk to other protocols and different data formats. Maybe even be able to transform from one data format to another one. I would also include here things such as light filtering, that is, when we subscribe to a topic, maybe we are interested only in certain events.

What do you think is the last category? It is state. When I say state and stateful abstractions, I'm not talking about the actual state management, such as what a database does or a file system. I'm talking more about developer abstractions that behind the scenes rely on the state. Probably, you need to have the ability to do workflow management. Maybe you want to manage long-running processes or do temporal scheduling or some cron jobs to run your service periodically. Perhaps you also want to do distributed caching, have idempotence, or be able to do rollbacks. All of these are developer-level primitives, but behind the scenes, they rely on having some state. You want to have these abstractions at your disposal to create sound distributed systems.

We will use this framework of distributed system primitives to evaluate how these have been changing on Kubernetes and other projects.

Suppose we start with the monolithic architectures and how we get those capabilities. In that case, the first thing is when I say monolith, and what I have in mind, in the context of distributed applications, is the ESB. ESBs are pretty powerful, and when we check our list of needs, we would say that ESBs had excellent support for all stateful abstractions.

With an ESB, you could do the orchestration of long-running processes, do distributed transactions, rollbacks, and idempotence. Furthermore, ESBs also provide outstanding resource binding capabilities and have hundreds of connectors, support transformation, orchestration, and even have networking capabilities. And lastly, an ESB can even do service discovery and load balancing.

It has all things around the resiliency of the networking connection so that it can do retries. Probably, because by nature, an ESB is not very distributed, it doesn't need very advanced networking and releases capabilities. Where ESB lacks is primarily lifecycle management. Because it's a single runtime, the first thing is you are limited to using a single language. That's typically the language that the actual runtime is created in, Java, or .NET, or something else. Then, because it's a single runtime, we cannot easily do declarative deployments or do an automatic placement. The deployments are pretty big, quite heavy, so it usually involves human interaction. And another difficulty with such a monolithic architecture is scaling: We cannot scale individual components.

Last but not least, around isolation, whether that's resource isolation or fault isolation. None of these can be done with monolithic architectures. From our needs' framework point of view, the ESB's monolithic architectures don't qualify.

Next, I suggest we look at cloud-native architectures and how those needs have been changing. If we look at a very high level, how those architectures have been changing, cloud-native probably started with the microservices movement. Microservices allow us to split a monolithic application by business domain. It turned out that containers and Kubernetes are actually a good platform for managing those microservices. Let's see some of the concrete features and capabilities that Kubernetes becomes particularly attractive for microservices.

In the very beginning, the ability to do health probes is what made Kubernetes popular. In practice, it means when you deploy your container in a pod, Kubernetes will check the health of your process. Typically, that process model is not good enough. You still may have a process that's up and running, but it's not healthy. That's why there is also the option of using readiness and liveness checks. Kubernetes will do a readiness check to decide when your application is ready to accept traffic during startup. It will do a liveness check to check the health of your service continuously. Before Kubernetes, this wasn't very popular, but today almost all languages, all frameworks, all runtimes have health checking capabilities where you can quickly start an endpoint.

The next thing that Kubernetes introduced is around the managed lifecycle of your application - what I mean is that you are no longer in control of when your service will start up and when it will shut down. You trust the platform to do that. Kubernetes can start up your application; it can shut it down, move it around on the different nodes. For that to work, you have to properly implement the events that the platform is telling you during startup and shutdown.

Another thing that Kubernetes made popular is around deployments and having those declaratively. That means you don't have to start the service anymore; check the logs whether it has started. You don't have to upgrade instances manually - Kubernetes with declarative deployments can do that for you. Depending on the strategy you chose, it can stop old instances and start new ones. Moreover, if something goes wrong, it can do a rollback.

Another thing is around declaring your resource demands. When you create a service, you containerize it. It is a good practice to tell the platform how much CPU and memory that service will require. Kubernetes uses that knowledge to find the best node for your workloads. Before Kubernetes, we had to manually place an instance to a node based on our criteria. Now we can guide Kubernetes with our preferences, and it will make the best decision for us.

Nowadays, on Kubernetes, you can do polyglot configuration management. You don't need in your application runtime anything to do configuration lookup. Kubernetes will make sure that the configurations end up on the same node where your workload is. The configurations are mapped as a volume or environment variable ready for your application to use.

It turns out those specific capabilities I just spoke about are also related. For example, if you want to do an automatic placement, you have to tell Kubernetes the resource requirements of your service. Then you have to tell it what deployment strategy to use. For the strategy to work correctly, your application has to implement the events coming from the environment. It has to implement health checks. Once you put all of these best practices in place and use all of these capabilities, your application becomes an excellent cloud-native citizen, and it's ready for automation on Kubernetes (this represents the foundational patterns for running workloads on Kubernetes). And lastly, there are other patterns around structuring the containers in a pod, configuration management, and behavior.

The next topic I want to cover briefly is around workloads. From the lifecycle point of view, we want to be able to run different workloads. We can do that on Kubernetes, too. Running Twelve-Factor Apps and stateless microservices is pretty straightforward. Kubernetes can do that. That's not the only workload you will have. Probably you will also have stateful workloads, and you can do that on Kubernetes using a stateful set.

Another workload you may have is a singleton. Maybe you want an instance of an app to be the only one instance of your app throughout the whole cluster - you want it to be a reliable singleton. When it fails, it should be started again. Hence, you can choose between stateful sets and replica sets depending on your needs and whether you want the singleton to have at least one or at most one semantic. Another workload you may have is around jobs and cron jobs - with Kubernetes, you can do those as well.

If we map all of these Kubernetes features to our needs, Kubernetes satisfies the life cycle needs. The list of requirements I usually create is primarily driven by what Kubernetes provides us today. These are expected capabilities from any platform, and what Kubernetes can do for your deployment is configuration management, resource isolation, and failure isolation. Furthermore, it supports different workloads except serverless on its own.

Then, if that's all Kubernetes gives for developers, how do we extend Kubernetes? And how can we make it give us more features? Therefore, I want to describe the two common ways that are used today.

The first thing is the concept of a pod, an abstraction used to deploy containers on nodes. Moreover, a pod gives us two sets of guarantees:

Depending on if you're using init containers or application containers, you get different guarantees. For example, init containers are run at the beginning; when a pod starts, it runs sequentially, one after another. They run only if the previous container has been completed successfully. They help implement workflow-like logic driven by containers.

Application containers, on the other hand, run in parallel. They run throughout the lifecycle of the pod, and this is the foundation for the sidecar pattern. A sidecar can run multiple containers that cooperate and jointly provide value to the user. That's one of the primary mechanisms we see nowadays for extending Kubernetes with additional capabilities.

To explain the following capability, I have to tell you how Kubernetes works internally briefly. It is based on the reconciliation loop. The idea of the reconciliation loop is to drive the desired state to the actual state. Within Kubernetes, many bits rely on that. For example, when you say I want two pod instances, this is the desired state of your system. There is a control loop that continually runs and checks if there are two instances of your pod. If two instances are not there, it will calculate the difference if there is one or more than two. It will make sure that there are two instances.

There are many examples of this. Some are replica sets or stateful sets. The resource definition maps to what the controller is, and there is a controller for each resource definition. This controller makes sure that the real world matches the desired one, and you can even write your own custom controller.

When running an application in a pod and you cannot load any configuration file changes at runtimes. However, you can write a custom controller that detects config map changes, restart your pod and application - and thus pick up the configuration changes.

It turns out that even though Kubernetes has a good collection of resources, that they are not enough for all the different needs you may have. Kubernetes introduced the concept of custom resource definitions. That means you can go and model your requirements and define an API that lives within Kubernetes. It lives next to other Kubernetes native resources. You can write your own controller in any language that understands your model. You can design a ConfigWatcher implemented in Java that describes what we explained earlier. That is what the operator pattern is, a controller that works with the custom resource definitions. Today, we see lots of operators coming up, and that's the second way for extending Kubernetes with additional capabilities.

Next, I want to briefly go over a few platforms built on top of Kubernetes, which heavily use sidecars and operators to give developers additional capabilities.

Lets start with the service mesh, and what is a service mesh?

We have two services, service A that wants to call service B, and it can be in any language. Consider that this is our application workload. A service mesh uses sidecar controllers and injects a proxy next to our service. You will end up with two containers in the pod. The proxy is a transparent one, and your application is completely unaware that there is a proxy - that is intercepting all incoming and outgoing traffic. Furthermore, the proxy also acts as a data firewall.

The collection of these service proxies represents your data plane and are small and stateless. To get all the state and configuration, they rely on the control plane. The control plane is the stateful part that keeps all the configurations, gathers metrics, takes decisions, and interacts with the data plane. Moreover, they are the right choice for different control planes and data planes. And as it turns out, we need one more component - an API gateway to get data into our cluster. Some service meshes have their own API gateway, and some use a third party. All of these components, if you look into those, provide the capabilities we need.

An API gateway is primarily focused on abstracting the implementation of our services. It hides the details and provides borderline capabilities. Service mesh does the opposite. In a way, it enhances the visibility and reliability within the services. Jointly, we can say that API gateway and service mesh provide all the networking needs. To get networking capabilities on top of Kubernetes, using just the services is not enough: You need some service mesh.

The next topic I like to discuss is Knative - a project started by Google a few years ago. It is a layer on top of Kubernetes that gives you serverless capabilities and has two main modules:

Just to give you a feel, what Knative Serving is? With Knative Serving, you define a service, but that is different from a Kubernetes service. This is a Knative service. Once you define a workload with a Knative service, you get a deployment but with serverless characteristics. You don't need to have an instance up and running. It can be started from zero when a request arrives. You get serverless capabilities; it can scale up rapidly and scale down to zero.

Knative Eventing gives us a fully declarative event management system. Let's assume we have some external systems we want to integrate with, some external event producers. At the bottom, we have our application in a container that has an HTTP endpoint. With Knative Eventing, we can start a broker, which can trigger a broker that Kafka maps, or it can be in memory or some cloud service. Furthermore, we can start importers that connect to the external system and import events into our broker. Those importers can be, for example, based on Apache Camel, which has hundreds of connectors.

Once we have our events going to the broker, then declaratively with the YAML file, we can subscribe our container to those events. In our container, we don't need any messaging clients - for example, a Kafka client. Our container would get events through HTTP POST using cloud events. This is a fully platform-managed messaging infrastructure. As a developer, you have to write your business code in a container and don't deal with any messaging logic.

From our needs' point of view, Knative satisfies a few of those. From a lifecycle point of view, it gives our workloads serverless capabilities, so the ability to scale to zero, and activate from zero and go up. From a networking point of view, if there is some overlap with the service mesh, Knative can also do traffic shifting. From a binding point of view, it has pretty good support for binding using Knative importers. It can give us Pub/Sub, or point-to-point interaction, or even some sequencing. It satisfies the needs in a few categories.

Another project using sidecars and operators is Dapr, which was started by Microsoft only a few months ago - and is rapidly getting popular. Moreover, version 1.0 is considered to be production-ready. It is a distributed systems toolkit as a sidecar - everything in Dapr is provided as a sidecar and has a set of what they call building blocks or a set of capabilities.

What are those capabilities? The first set of capabilities is around networking. Dapr can do service discovery and point-to-point integration between services. Similarly, it can also do the tracing, reliable communications, retries, and recovery to service mesh. The second set of capabilities is around resource binding:

Interestingly, Dapr also introduces the notion of state management. In addition to what Knative and service mesh gives you, Dapr also has abstraction on top of the state store. Furthermore, you can have key-value-based interaction with Dapr backed by a storage mechanism.

At a high level, the architecture is you have your application at the top, which can be in any language. You can use the client libraries provided by Dapr, but you don't have to. You can use the language features to do HTTP and gRPC called the sidecar. The difference to service mesh is that here the Dapr sidecar is not a transparent proxy. It is an explicit proxy that you have to call from your application and interact with over HTTP or gRPC. Depending on what capabilities you need, Dapr can talk to other systems, such as cloud services.

On Kubernetes, Dapr is deployed as a sidecar and can work outside of Kubernetes (it's not only Kubernetes). Furthermore, it also has an operator - and sidecars and operators are the primary extension mechanism. A few other components manage certificates, deal with actor-based modeling, and inject the sidecars. Your workload interacts with the sidecar and does all the magic to talk to other services, giving you some interoperability with different cloud providers. It also gives you additional distributed system capabilities.

If I were to sum up, what these projects are giving you, we could say that ESB is the early incarnation of distributed systems where we had the centralized control plane and data plane - yet it didn't scale well. There is still a centralized control plane with cloud-native, but the data plane is decentralized - and is highly scalable with sound isolation.

We always would need Kubernetes to do good lifecycle management, and on top of that, you would probably need one or more add-ons. You may need Istio to do advanced networking. You may use Knative to do serverless workloads or Dapr to do the integration. Those frameworks play nicely with Istio and Envoy. From a Dapr and Knative point of view, you probably have to pick one. Jointly, they are providing what we used to have on an ESB in a cloud-native way.

For the next part, I have made an opinionated list of a few projects where I think exciting developments are happening in these areas.

I want to start with the lifecycle. With Kubernetes, we can do a useful lifecycle of your application, which might not be enough for more complex lifecycle management. For example, you may have scenarios where the deployment primitive in Kubernetes is not enough for your application if you have a more complex stateful application.

In these scenarios, you can use the operator pattern. You can use an operator that does deployment and upgrade where it also backs up maybe the storage of your service to S3. Furthermore, you may also find out that the actual health checking mechanism in Kubernetes is not good enough. Suppose the liveness check and readiness check are not good enough. In that case, you can use an operator to do a more intelligent liveness and readiness check of your application, and based on that, perform recovery.

A third area would be auto-scaling and tuning. You can have an operator understanding your application better and do auto-tune on the platform. Today, there are primarily two frameworks for writing operators, the Kubebuilder from Kubernetes special interest group and the Operator SDK, which is part of the operator framework created by Red Hat. It has a few things:

The Operator SDK lets you write operators - an Operator Lifecycle Manager, about managing the operators lifecycle and OperatorHub, where you can publish your operator. You will see over 100 operators manage databases, message queues, and monitoring tools if you go there today. From lifecycle space, probably operators are the area where most active development is happening in the Kubernetes ecosystem.

Another project I picked is Envoy. The introduction of service mesh interfaces specification will make it easier for you to switch different service mesh implementations. There has been some consolidation on Istio architecture in the deployment. You don't have to deploy seven pods for the control plane; now, you can just deploy once. More interestingly is what's happening at the data plane in the Envoy project. We see that more and more Layer 7 protocols are added to Envoy.

Service mesh adds support for more protocols such as MongoDB, ZooKeeper, MySQL, Redis, and the most recent one is Kafka. I see that the Kafka community is now further improving their protocol to make it friendlier for service meshes. We can expect that there will be even more tight integration, more capabilities. Most likely, there will be some bridging capability. You can do an HTTP call locally from your application in your service, and the proxy will, behind the scene, use Kafka. You can do transformation and encryption outside of your application in a sidecar for the Kafka protocol.

Another exciting development has been the introduction of HTTP caching. Now Envoy can do HTTP caching. You don't have to use caching clients within your applications. All of that is done transparently in a sidecar. There are tap filters, so you can tap the traffic and get a copy of the traffic. Most recently, the introduction of WebAssembly, means if you want to write some custom filter for Envoy, you don't have to write it in C++ and compile the whole Envoy runtime. You can write your filter in WebAssembly, and deploy that at runtime. Most of these are still in progress. They are not there, indicating that the data plane and service mesh have no intention of stopping, just supporting HTTP and gRPC. They are interested in supporting more application-layer protocols to offer you more, to enable more use cases. Mostly, with the introduction of WebAssembly, you can now write your custom logic in the sidecar. That's fine as long as you're not putting there some business logic.

Apache Camel is a project for doing integrations, and it has lots of connectors to different systems using enterprise integration patterns. Camel version 3, for instance, is deeply integrated into Kubernetes and uses the same primitives we spoke about so far, such as operators.

You can write your integration logic in Camel in languages such as Java, JavaScript, or YAML. The latest version has introduced a Camel operator that runs in Kubernetes and understands your integration. When you write your Camel application, deploy it to a custom resource, the operator then knows how to build the container or find dependencies. Depending on the platform's capabilities, whether that's Kubernetes only, whether that's Kubernetes with Knative, it can decide what services to use and how to materialize your integration. There is quite a lot of intelligence going outside of your runtime - but into the operator - and all of that happens pretty fast. Why would I say it's a binding trend? Mainly because of the capabilities of Apache Camel with all the connectors it provides. The interesting point here is how it integrates deeply with Kubernetes.

Another project I like to discuss is Cloudstate and around state-related trends. And Cloudstate is a project by Lightbend and primarily focused on serverless and function-driven development. With their latest releases, they are integrating deeply with Kubernetes using sidecars and operators.

The idea is, when you write your function, all you have to do in your function is use gRPC to get state, to interact with state. The whole state management happens in a sidecar that is clustered with other sidecars. It enables you to do event sourcing, CQRS, key-value lookups, messaging.

From your application point of view, you are not aware of all these complexities. All you do is a call to a local sidecar, and the sidecar handles the complexity. It can use, behind the scenes, two different data sources. And it has all the stateful abstractions you would need as a developer.

So far, we have seen the current state of the art in the cloud-native ecosystem and some of the recent developments that are still in progress. How do we make sense of all that?

If you look at how microservice looks on Kubernetes, you will need to use some platform functionality. Moreover, you will need to use Kubernetes features for lifecycle management primarily. And then, most likely, transparently, your service will use some service mesh, something like an Envoy, to get enhanced networking capabilities, whether that's traffic routing, resilience, enhanced security, or even if it is for a monitoring purpose. On top of that, depending on your use case, you may need Dapr or Knative, depending on your workloads. All of these represent your out-of-process, additional capabilities. What's left to you is to write your business logic, not on top, but as a separate runtime. Most likely, future microservices will be this multi-runtime composed of multiple containers. Some of those are transparent, and some of those are very explicit that you use.

If I look a little bit deeper, how that might look like, you write your business logic in some high-level language. It doesn't matter what it is; it doesn't have to be Java only as you can use any other language and develop your custom logic in-house.

All the interactions of your business logic with the external world happen through the sidecar, integrating with the platform and does the lifecycle management. It does the networking abstractions for the external system and gives you advanced binding capabilities and state abstraction. The sidecar is something you don't develop. You get it off the shelf. You configure it with a little bit of YAML or JSON, and you use it. That means you can update sidecars easily because it's not embedded anymore into your runtime. It makes patching, updating easier. It enables polyglot runtime for our business logic.

That brings me to the original question, what comes after microservices?

If we see how the architectures have been evolving, application architectures at a very high level started with monolithic applications. Yet Microservices gives us the guiding principles on how to split a monolithic application into separate business domains. After that came serverless and Function-as-a-Service (FaaS), where we said we could split those further by operations, giving us extreme scaling - because we can scale each operation individually.

I would argue that maybe FaaS is not the best model - as functions are not the best model for implementing reasonably complex services where you want multiple operations to reside together when they have to interact with the same dataset. Probably, multi-runtime, I call it Mecha architecture, where you have your business logic in one container, and you have all the infrastructure-related concerns as a separate container. They jointly represent a multi-runtime microservice. Maybe that's a more suitable model because it has better properties.

You get all the benefits of microservice. You still have all your domain, all the bounded contexts in one place. You have all the infrastructure and distributed application needs in a separate container, and you combine them at runtime. Probably, the closest thing that's getting to that right now is Dapr. They are following that model. If you're only interested from a networking aspect, probably using Envoy is also getting close to this model.

Bilgin Ibryam is a product manager and a former architect at Red Hat, a committer, and a member of the Apache Software Foundation. He is an open-source evangelist, regular blogger, speaker, and author of Kubernetes Patterns and Camel Design Patterns books. Bilgins current work focuses on distributed systems, event-driven architecture, and repeatable cloud-native application development patterns and practices. Follow him @bibryam for future updates on similar topics.

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Documentary Showcases 20 Years Of Fair Trade Evolution In Long Beach | News | gazettes.com

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Wednesday, March 31, 2021

"Long Beach Local Business" is a 20-year-long project documenting the evolution of Long Beach.

The documentary is the product of a collaboration between 7SUN MEDIA and Fair Trade Long Beach a coalition dedicated to increasing the availability of fair trade items sold in the city. The documentary will showcase the fair trade shift among the city's evolving shopping base.

"This is a story of one woman's mid-life epiphany transpiring into a community-wide collective of over 25 empowered Fair Trade businesses," Rose Lazon, assistant director, said in a release. "The collective model then became the glue, the key to survival of this precious ideology through the global trauma of the pandemic."

We're always interested in hearing about news in our community. Let us know what's going on!

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The most incredible -- if not scary -- thing about UFC heavyweight Francis Ngannou is that even if he hasn't improved at all in the areas that fueled his 2018 title defeat to Stipe Miocic, or if it's even possible he somehow got worse, the native of Cameroon could still exit the Octagon on Saturday as the next UFC champion.

Of all the great power punchers and devastating strikers in the nearly 30-year history of the UFC, none have been as menacing as the 6-foot-4 "Predator," who has recorded finishes -- often of the extremely violent variety -- in all of his 10 victories since making his Octagon debut in 2015.

Riding a four-fight win streak in which he logged less than three minutes of total cage time, Ngannou (15-3) will get a second crack at the heavyweight crown Miocic (20-3) regained in 2019 when the pair of sluggers headline UFC 260 inside the Apex facility in Las Vegas.

The central theme surrounding this weekend's fight is an easy one to understand: how much has Ngannou improved from the standpoint of wrestling, conditioning and fight IQ since his largely remedial performance (save for an exciting first round) in a five-round unanimous decision loss to Miocic at UFC 220? But it's the answer to that question that is anything but easy to take a stab at.

Despite six consecutive stoppage wins to open his UFC career, including a first-round KO via uppercut against Alistair Overeem that might be the sport's most brutal finish to date, Ngannou was rushed into the title shot by UFC brass against Miocic, largely in hopes it had uncovered MMA's answer to Mike Tyson of the 1980s.

Not only was Ngannou's game not ready for someone as well-rounded and seasoned as Miocic, the aftermath would prove that he wasn't ready for the pressure either. The fallout of UFC 220 saw Ngannou publicly spar with UFC president Dana White, who accused him of being a diva after Ngannou produced a lifeless performance in a forgettable decision loss to Derrick Lewis six months later that was completely devoid of action.

To Ngannou's credit, he humbly returned to the gym at Xtreme Couture in Las Vegas and took a long look at what was missing from his game, his preparation and his mindset.

"After the Stipe fight, I realized a lot of things. I took a step back and tried to look at that side and try and see all the mistakes and all I did wrong," Ngannou told CBS Sports in November. "I also began to understand many aspects of this sport that I never knew because, growing up, I had never been a competitor or an athlete. I had to learn everything from the bottom and I took a lot from that fight. I learned a lot from that fight and I keep learning."

Can't get enough boxing and MMA? Get the latest in the world of combat sports from two of the best in the business. Subscribe to Morning Kombat with Luke Thomas and Brian Campbell for the best analysis and in-depth news.

Now 34, Ngannou's path to the status of elite UFC fighter remains unique unto itself. He left his native Cameroon for Paris at the age of 26 to pursue a career in professional boxing, although the journey in getting there was anything but simple.

Traveling from Cameroon to Morocco took Ngannou one full year spent illegally crossing borders, living in the bush and surviving on food he literally picked from trash. His first attempt to cross the Mediterranean Sea and enter Europe illegally was met with a two-month jail sentence in Spain.

With no money or a place to live, Ngannou was homeless for months and living in parking lots upon his arrival in Paris. He eventually joined forces with MMA Factory gym where his boxing hopes were transitioned into that of MMA.

What's most incredible is that only three months after he began training, Ngannou had his first pro fight and would go on to make his UFC debut just two years later. Yet while Ngannou's remarkable backstory shows just how much room for growth he still has as a pro fighter, it doesn't necessarily fill in the blanks regarding whether or not he will prove able to stop the 38-year-old Miocic from repeatedly taking him down in their rematch.

"I think what has changed is just me, the young fighter, improving because despite my age, I'm still very young sport-wise," Ngannou said. "I just started fighting like seven years ago so I think I still have a big pace of improvement in my game. That's what makes me believe in myself and think I can do something very big in this sport. Other than other guys, I still have a big space of improvement."

Although Ngannou's impressive four-fight knockout streak came against a mixture of elite foes and former champions -- Curtis Blaydes, Cain Velasquez, Junior dos Santos and Jairzinho Rozenstruik -- none lasted beyond 71 seconds against his punching power.

Asked on Tuesday during an interview on "Morning Kombat" how much he believes Ngannou's ground game and conditioning have improved, Miocic was understandably uncertain.

"I don't know [but] I will find out. If it happens, I'll let you know when we get down there," Miocic said. "But wherever it goes, I'll be fine. If it stays on the feet, I'll be fine. If it goes onto the ground, I'll be fine. Nothing is going to change. I have a great game plan and I'm conditioned and I'm ready. I've done everything I need to do to win this fight and that's what I'm going to do."

Ngannou will have UFC welterweight champion Kamaru Usman as a cornerman on Saturday, which Miocic believes suggests a focus on wrestling should be implied. From Ngannou's perspective, he can only improve from 2018 when Miocic gassed him out early and spent the final four rounds largely laying on top of him and controlling the action with ease.

"Even when I wasn't fighting [last year,] I have been training wrestling and jiu-jitsu and started understanding stuff and I found it very fascinating because it was a thing I didn't know before," Ngannou said. "It's very exciting to see how much more I can improve."

Yet for all this talk about wrestling and the potential of what Ngannou might look like should the fight extend to the championship rounds, there's always the possibility that it's a moot point. In fact, just like ahead of their first meeting, oddsmakers still prefer Ngannou and his menacing power as the betting favorite.

It's a reality that Miocic must face -- for the second time. Although he went on to largely dominate Ngannou and used his speed advantage to land heavy right hands in the opening round, Miocic was forced to walk through hell early on to get there and exited the fight with major swelling around his left eye.

"He hits hard, no question. He does bring the power, but if I keep my hands up and my chin down, I'll be good," Miocic said. "We all get hit, it's a fight. Unfortunately, I get touched up easily so if you flick me, I'll have bruises. He does hit hard but I just need to weather that storm and I will be good.

"I have good speed and I think that I have gotten faster as I have gotten older. I squashed a few [pounds] and I think I have got more efficient. I feel good."

Even if Ngannou is unable to explain the source of his other worldly power, it's certainly the main reason he has gotten this far in such an alarmingly short period of time. But will he need more than that to best Miocic in his second chance at UFC glory?

Only time will tell on Saturday.

"I don't know, so sometimes I am kind of surprised by [my power] myself," Ngannou said. "It's like, 'OK, that's it? [The fight] is over? What went wrong?' But obviously, that's it.

"That's what I want to prove, [that I can wrestle]. That's what I want to really check. It will be different this time."

Who wins Miocic vs. Ngannou, and which picks do you need to parlay together for a mammoth payout of almost 20-1?Visit SportsLine now to get detailed picks on UFC 260, all from the ultimate insider who went an amazing 58-14 on picks last year.

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UFC 260: Francis Ngannou must display unseen evolution of his game to get past Stipe Miocic and secure title - CBS Sports

I can't take the shots that people throw out. They don't ever really think about the effort and time we put in, or the journey that we've been through as a band to put out this record."

Its moments like this that the Curb Your Enthusiasm theme song was built for.

Cast your mind back, if you will, to early March 2021 a simpler time. In an interview with Zane Lowe, Adam Levine who, need you be reminded, fronts a band lamented the fact that there are, quote, no bands anymore.

Of course, the Maroon 5 frontman expanded contextually in the actual interview, saying that there were far more bands on the charts when they started out as opposed to now which, to be disappointingly fair, is true. In the current Billboard Hot 100 at the time of writing, there are four bands Glass Animals, Imagine Dragons, All Time Low and yes, Maroon 5. Had Levine glanced outside of his bubble, however say, over at the UK charts he would have seen something different entirely.

Architects, a global force in heavy music and importantly to this story a band, scored the number-one album in their homeland the week that Levine made these comments. Simultaneously, the band were number-one on the ARIA charts here. Across each chart, they rubbed shoulders with the likes of The Weeknd, Dua Lipa, Harry Styles and Ariana Grande further emphasising just how far this fish was flung out of water.

Ive got no respect for Adam Levine, says Architects frontman Sam Carter, when the aforementioned contrast is laid out for him. I couldnt give a toss what he thinks. Its the same shit whenever guys like Gene Simmons run their mouths these guys get rolled out once a year to say the exact same thing for clickbait. Its just so boring. Like, I feel like if you actually are in a rock band, youre so aware of so many cool bands that are coming through and doing so much cool stuff. Whenever anyone says that it, shows their disconnect from the scene and how great the scene is. Mr. Levine can shove it up his arse!

What is even more unique for Architects recent success is that the album in question, For Those That Wish to Exist, is the Brighton bands ninth. To achieve their first-ever number-one on any chart some 15 years into their career is a remarkable effort, and a further testament to the quintets staying power.

Obviously, we dont we dont write music with the charts in mind, says Carter. Weve never done that. I will say, though, that it feels a little bit cool that were getting this recognition especially now. People are coming together and being like, were going to push these bands into the mainstream, and were going to buy these records because we support this music. It really does show how big this scene is.

Of course, For Those That Wish to Exist hasnt come without its share of detractors. Not long before its ascent to the top of the charts, internet tastemaker Anthony Fantano derided the record as symphonic pop-metal that border[s] on parody. Reviews on Rateyourmusic, too, also chastise the band for its tough guy Christian butt rock and for chasing what Bring Me The Horizon did six years ago. Contrast that with a glowing five-star review in Kerrang! or its 9/10 review in Clash, and you really start to get a sense of the albums divisive nature.

So, does Carter pay any mind to The DiscourseTM? I just cant take it, he replies. I cant take the shots that people throw out. They dont ever really think about the effort and time we put in, or the journey that weve been through as a band to put out this record. I mean, theres so many records that I dont like, but I would never go on record and say it.

I cant take the shots that people throw out. They dont ever really think about the effort and time we put in, or the journey that weve been through as a band to put out this record.

A good thing that was said to me was Why would you accept criticism from someone you wouldnt ask advice from? That was a big thing for me. Its just a weird culture people are really angry, and they dont really seem to know why. Theyre just ready to take a shot at somebody for trying to do something positive. If it wasnt you that they were going to have a go at, it was gonna be the post office worker or someone at Woolworths. These people are just angry.

Carter goes on to explain the difficult position that bands like Architects find themselves in. They are, after all, 15 years removed from their debut album Nightmares and the only person still in the band that played on that record is drummer/songwriter Dan Searle. Needless to say, the band Architects are now is not the one it once was not least of all given the passing of Dans brother Tom, a co-founding member, who lost a battle with cancer in 2016.

So, whats a band to do? If they continue making the same style of music that originally brought them to prominence, theyll be chastised for spinning their wheels and making the same record again and again. Should they venture out of that framework, however, theyll be greeted with accusations of selling out and asked why they dont make music that sounds like their old records.

It would have been a lot easier for us to stay there, says Carter of the bands metalcore origins. Im always confident when we make new music, but I also know how nerve-wracking it can be. Every record we move further and further away from that route we set out on, when the safer thing would have been to stick to it. To me, though, safe is boring. I love all the records weve made, but it just feels silly to carry on doing it just for the sake of it.

Carter points to Searles passing as one of the reasons Architects have continued to adapt and evolve sonically. Even in the final stages of his life, the late guitarist was speaking to his bandmates about where he envisioned them heading after he was gone. Its around this point that it becomes clear why Carter and co. have largely shunned public opinion on the bands musical direction the reality is that there was only one person they have really been trying to please.

Whats left of Architects is the five of us that are here, says Carter. There were still a lot of riffs Tom had written that made it onto [previous album, 2018s] Holy Hell, but now thats behind us. We cant just do a Tom Searle tribute record where we try and write like Tom I think that would be like disrespectful to him. To truly honour what he was doing and how he pushed himself creatively, it felt like we needed to move in a new direction.

Carter points to the song Animals which also gave the band their first-ever Hottest 100 placement back in January as the point in the creative process where Exist truly began to take shape. Not only was it a fresh approach for the band, it also aligned with their final conversations with Searle. One of the things we talked about was moving into a of heavy, bio-industrial world, says Carter. Its funny bio-industrial means nothing to anyone, but to us it was like organic, industrial metal. When we finished Animals, it felt like the first time that wed actually done that since since he passed away. I remember just being like, man, I just wish he could hear the song. I feel like wed finally done what he was setting out to do with the next record, if he was still here.

Outside of its sonic forays into alternative metal, djent, symphonic metal and even pop, For Those That Wish to Exist is also an intriguing listen from a lyrical perspective. As a lyricist, Dan Searle paints quite biblical imagery life and death, heaven and hell, utopia and armageddon. Its not a new thing for the band, by any stretch their biggest single is literally titled Doomsday but it appears to play a bigger role in the lyricism here than ever before. For Carter who describes his religious affiliation as christened, but not a Christian singing these lyrics was an intriguing experience.

Its super interesting, he says of Searles writing. I think its through ways of getting the point across, yknow? Heaven and Hell is basically like a good-and-evil sort of way of lateral thinking. I think the way he does it is great. What hes doing taking you on a journey somewhere else. Thats one of lifes biggest questions when you look at good versus evil, right versus wrong. Youre like, hang on a minute, does that exist? Can it exist? Is there an answer out there?

The involvement between Carter and Searle on the record develops even further when its noted that Searle co-produced it alongside lead guitarist Josh Middleton. Its in moments like this that the camaraderie and mutual respect between the band members becomes increasingly clear. It has to sound real, says Carter. I have to make it sound like Ive written the lyrics, or that Dans singing them. It has to be coming from that place. I back everything that he writes, and I stand by him. Were all so close as a friendship group that we all kind of know what each other is about as well. When we go into the studio, Im ready to sing about these things that Im super passionate about, and Dans writing them in a far better way than I could.

More than merely a reflection of the heavy music he listens to, Carter sees Architects as a vehicle for all of his various inspirations. Across the conversation, hell lather praise onto bands as unexpected as R.E.M. (Honestly, how good are they?) and Mew (We used to blast Frengers in the van on every single tour). Carter also points to post-hardcore veterans Thrice as one of his biggest inspirations behind the bands sonic evolution. We kind of grew up at the same time, just in different parts of the world, he says of the cult American band.

The Artist in the Ambulance is a heavy record, just like our early stuff. Vheissu is more in the spirit of bands like Radiohead, and it came out around the exact same time I was discovering them myself. Their later records, like Beggars, are much roomier and more focused on the groove. I just see them as a band that pushes the envelope with every single release. They could just phone it in every time, but they dont. They put real effort into their albums every song has a purpose, and they create pieces of art rather than just singles. As weve gotten older and changed our sound, theyve been such a big inspiration to us.

This also reflects in the guests selected to perform on Exist. Parkway Drives Winston McCall is an obvious choice, given their similar trajectory out of metalcore and into the mainstream, but members of bands like Biffy Clyro and Royal Blood may not quite align with your usual Architects fare. They came about really naturally, says Carter of the collaborations.

I dont think Im ever satisfied. I dont ever want to sit around and pat myself on the back. Therell be time for that.

Simon [Neil]s part in Goliath already felt like a Biffy part to us we all thought that he would smash it. Wed sort of befriended him from just chatting at various music festivals, so when we emailed him he said yes straightaway. That meant a lot to us, as were all huge Biffy fans. As for Mike [Kerr], hes one of my best mates. We actually rehearse in the same space as Royal Blood, so were super close with them. When he came in for Little Wonder, he smashed it instantly.

With all this talk of longevity and the veteran status of Architects, its worth noting that the band members are only in their early-to-mid 30s. The Searle twins formed the band when they were just 16 years old, and Carter himself joined not long after turning 18 himself. The band has essentially grown up in public perhaps not with the same fanfare as, say, Panic! At The Disco or Paramore, but certainly in their own respect and within the ever-burgeoning UK heavy music scene. As our conversation draws to a close, Carter is queried on his motivations behind the bands continuation and his own personal creative quest.

I think its the same as it was when I was a kid, he says. I dont think Im ever satisfied. I dont ever want to sit around and pat myself on the back. Therell be time for that. Therell be a time where I can sit there and look back at everything and be like, that was really cool that you did that. Right now, though, I think I just want to just keep going.

I think if you stop and stand still and spend too much time looking around, you lose focus. You lose the reason why you did it in the first place. Youve always got to try and do better be a better band, be a better vocalist, put on a better live show. Im still just as hungry to do that now as I ever was.

David James Young is a freelance writer who will always come out of mosh retirement whenever required.

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Architects On Their Critics, Evolution, And Why Adam Levine Can Shove It - Junkee

A microscope image of the intertidal flatworm Procerodes littoralis. Credit: Katharine Clayton, University of Plymouth

A tiny flatworm found commonly on the coasts of western Europe and North America is living proof that species may be able to evolve and adapt to rapid climate change.

Research by the University of Plymouth examined the extent to which the intertidal flatworm Procerodes littoralis was able to regenerate and repair itself when challenged with different seawater conditions.

Repeating a study conducted more than a century earlier it was shown that the response of individuals had changed markedly since then.

The original study was conducted by Dorothy Jordan Lloyd, who was based at the Marine Biological Association in Plymouth, and focussed on individuals found in Wembury Bay, Plymouth.

Katharine Clayton examines a sample of Procerodes littoralis found in Wembury Bay, Plymouth. Credit: University of Plymouth

It was published in 1914, and the current study led by BSc (Hons) Marine Biology graduate Katharine Clayton replicated it in terms of the processes followed and the precise locations from which samples were collected.

When tested across a range of different concentrations of saltwater in the laboratory, scientists showed the flatworm was able to regenerate following minor injuries at lower salinities than were recorded originally.

They also demonstrated that while in 1914 there was an optimum salinity level for individuals to regenerate this is no longer the case, suggesting individuals have extended their tolerance range in the intervening 104 years.

Scientists also examined rainfall levels for the Wembury Bay area and found they had increased between 1914 and 2018, which is likely to result in exposure to lower salinities in the intertidal region, where the flatworm is found.

Put together, they say it shows how individual species may be able to adapt and survive the localized effects of climate change which, if correct, provides some of the first evidence of evolutionary rescue taking place in the wild.

Dorothy Jordan Lloyd (left) working with colleagues at the Marine Biological Association in 1911. Credit: Marine Biological Association

Katharine Clayton began the study as part of her undergraduate degree and wrote it up for her final year dissertation. Now pursuing a PhD at the University of Exeter, she said: When we first began looking at this flatworm, we were interested in how it tolerated salinity levels in it natural habitat. However, we quickly found out about Dorothys study in 1914 so it became a perfect test of how an individual population had adapted to changes within its immediate environment. The findings provide really interesting evidence of the impacts of climate change, but it has also been inspiring for me to revisit Dorothys work and highlight a pioneering female scientist of her time.

The researchs co-author, Professor of Marine Zoology John Spicer, supervised Katharines work and is a world-leading authority on how marine species can adapt to climate change. He added: There has been an idea around for the last 15 to 20 years called evolutionary rescue where, faced with rapid climate change, animals evolve to survive. Many, including myself, have doubted the possibility of such rescue, especially over such a short space of time in terms of species evolution. But this study shows it may well be possible in the wild because, in comparing two identical experiments 100 years apart, the animal has changed how it works, its physiology.

It is proof that evolutionary rescue may exist in the wild, not just in the laboratory, and is a major step forward in our understanding of how species can adapt as the environment around them changes. With the two studies being conducted 50 years before and after the start of the Anthropocene, it also provides a fascinating insight into the effect humans are having on species with whom we share our planet.

Reference: Evidence for physiological niche expansion of an intertidal flatworm: evolutionary rescue in the wild by Katharine A. Clayton and John I. Spicer, 1 October 2020, Marine Ecology Progress Series.DOI: 10.3354/meps13473

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Scientists Repeat Century-Old Experiment to Reveal Evidence of Evolutionary Rescue in the Wild - SciTechDaily

Communication across the 250 miles of London Undergrounds track is essential to those working in the rail sector to ensure safety and lack of disruption for passengers, and to run safety protocols.

Every train driver, every train and every station within London Underground is connected by the communications network, Connect, to always enable communication between employees. If this connection is broken or facing issues, trains are unable to leave platforms on time, stations close and the safety of passengers and staff is at risk.

Thales has recently completed an upgrade of the Connect system, which sees the system running the most up-to-date technology available to the industry.

Thales staff have been working on replacing this technology for the past two years, removing the old legacy equipment and installing the new technology. The upgrade took place while London Underground continued to operate which presented challenges for the team. Thales programme director Peter Gaylor explained these challenges and how the system works. Credit: Thales.

Peter Gaylor (PG): Thales started the relationship with Transport for London on this project back in 1999, and that was always going to be a 20-year period for us to design, build and operate the network with the London Underground. You can imagine whats gone on in computing and technology in general over the last 20 years; for some of this kit to have been around in those locations, its coming to the end of its life.

London Underground are quite keen to make sure that what theyre installing now has a lifespan thats taking them into the foreseeable future. When the contract was awarded to us in 2019, we agreed that as part of that contract wed upgrade the network. Its [now] upgraded to the latest terrestrial trunked radio (TETRA) technologies.

The technology that were talking about now, the basic technology hasnt changed, its still TETRA and what was installed is the latest hardware or software to support that. So, for our customers, its less about the bells and whistles that you see with the 4G and 5G.

This technology is available and reliable, it works when you need it the most. Thats whats really key to our supply, so its not the most glamorous technology in the world, but you know if you press the button to talk to somebody is going to work, we guarantee.

GlobalData's TMT Themes 2021 Report tells you everything you need to know about disruptive tech themes and which companies are best placed to help you digitally transform your business.

PG: The technology has a roadmap in terms of hardware; this is it really for the next 10 years, we wont be changing any hardware. There will be continued reviews as we get with all technology and software, its continually being reviewed.

Were continually introducing new features, new functionality, [and] they tend to come out once or twice a year. So those will be going on in the background overnight for the next 10 years or so, thats just the business how we manage on a day-to-day basis.

PG: Connect is the umbrella term for the contract that we have. Connect isnt just about the radio technology, its about the transmission network that we have for London Underground, the video network that we have in place and the radio technology.

The most visible element of Connect is when you go to an underground station and the station staff have a radio on their jackets, that is Connect is the most visible form. The station staff are using Connect every single day every single shift. Stations will not open if Connect is not working because stations cant communicate between their staff to trains.

The next step is the train communications, the ability for station staff to potentially talk to drivers, the drivers to be able to talk to dispatchers so that if a station is closed for an hour for example because of a fire alarm or person on the track then the communication between the dispatcher, train, the operators, and the station staff can all take place.Credit: Thales.

PG: Theres been many, many challenges, its taken us two and a half years to get to the position where we are today. We havent had the luxury of switching off the old network. If you were doing this for any other business, you would switch off the old network and rip it out, youll clean everything up, put the new kit in, youll commission it and then youd hand it over.

Weve had to integrate the two networks at the same time so that means physically installing new infrastructure. Stations arent the easiest thing to install the racks and cabinets, and theres not many goods lifts in these locations. So, transporting and installing a lot of this kit has really been a challenge.

Then you throw in the pandemic as well and try to limit the amount of time that we have people working in the same locations, having to wear masks, all the testing. Theres been a lot of challenges just from physically installing the technology, parallel running it, commissioning it, and the people element as well.

PG: Weve just finished the core radio element and thats the servers behind the network, the brains of the network. Were currently upgrading the dispatchers, so that was also awarded at the same time. So, all the dispatcher locations around the network are being upgraded at the moment with the latest technology.

Weve just commenced the upgrading of the base stations, so thats the radio infrastructure. Weve got 300 of those that we will be upgrading between now and 2023, thats the next thing we will be celebrating.

PG: I would ask readers to do their research around Thales. Thales is a global organisation that is very, very widespread and has an impact on everybodys lives in ways that people probably dont really appreciate.

Thales has a huge presence, and I would advise people to do their own investigations, Thales reaches and innovates in a number of spaces that people probably arent even aware of.

Surge Protection and Voltage Limiting Devices for Railways

28 Aug 2020

Road-Rail Vehicles for Track Maintenance

28 Aug 2020

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Timeline: tracing the evolution of hyperloop rail technology - Railway Technology