Category Archives: Evolution

Pokmon Go is one of the busiest and the most played games, with new events, updates, and content regularly added to the game. As a part of Adventure Week 2022, Niantic is releasing Tyrunt and Evolution Tyruntrum for trainers. Both Tyrunt and Evolution Tyruntrum are Gen 6 Pokmon that debuted in the Season of Go. Heres our Pokmon Go guide to tell you how to get Tyrunt and evolution Tyruntrum.

Tyrunt is a rock and dragon-type Pokmon which first appeared on June 7, 2022, in Pokmon Go. Like every other new Pokmon that gets introduced to the game, trainers can use different ways to get Tyrunt. Heres how you can get Tyrunt:

Tyrunt can be easily obtained in the wild as the Pokmon appears regularly during set hours on Research Day, June 12.

Trainers can also obtain Tyrunt by hatching 7km eggs. These eggs must be collected during the adventure week to have a chance to hatch Tyrunt.

Trainers can get Tyrunt by earning 5 candies while exploring with their buddies.

Trainers can get Tyrunt by walking 5 kilometers and Spinning 25 PokStops or Gyms.It is important to note that these will only give trainers an easy chance to encounter Tyrunt and will not guarantee a Tyrunt, because the rewards from these research tasks can also turn out to be Amaura which was also released during the adventure week.Users must catch plenty of Tyrunt as they need the candy for its evolution.

Trainers must also remember that if they wish to catch Tyrunt by completing Research Tasks, they will have a hard time finding specific tasks as these tasks keep changing daily. As of now, the spawn rate of Tyrunt is unavailable, but it is safe to assume that players will have to put in some work to get it.

Users can stay updated about all the information by visiting the official website or following the official social media handles.

Did you find our guide on How to get Tyrunt and evolution Tyruntrum in Pokmon GO useful? Let us know in the comments below!

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Pokmon Go Guide: How to get Tyrunt and do Tyruntrum evolution - GamingonPhone

John Merrell, speaking in a southern drawl, apologized for presenting over Zoom in such casual attire. The lack of a jacket and tie, he said, was intentional. He was on-site with a client.

I figured this group would appreciate as much as any that you know, when youve got a lawyer in your facility, you usually dont want them to come in looking all lawyered up, said Merrell, a management labor attorney at the firm Ogletree Deakins, a South Carolina-based law firm that specializes in closely advising businesses on how to counter union organizing drives. Im trying to be somewhat incognito.

The group had gathered to speak candidly about creative new ways in which employers can subtly counter union organizing. Theres a huge uptick in activity, Merrell began, not just at name brand companies like Starbucks, but union drives even in the Carolinas where [I am] based, were seeing a lot of an uptick of activity in some kind of unexpected places, unexpected industries, not the industries that you typically think of as being your unionized industries.

In the heyday for union organizing, he continued, we just thought of them as seeking better wages and working conditions for their workers. Now, workers were agitating for respect and in opposition to harassment, bigotry, discrimination and retaliation, said Merrell, quoting a mission statement from the Alphabet Workers Union, which secured bargaining rights for a small group of Google Fiber workers in Kansas City, Missouri, in March.

Corporations, advised Merrell, should be ready to pivot and respond quickly to these social justice-driven campaigns.

Across the country, particularly in highly educated workplaces, employee activism has centered on demands that go beyond the bread and butter of higher salaries and better retirement benefits. YouTube and Facebook employees have demanded that management take a greater role in censoring content viewed as sexist or racist. Amazon corporate headquarters workers this month staged a protest to demand that the company restrict the sales of books that are perceived by some activist groups as anti-trans. The union that represents workers at NPR has demanded that the media outlet develop demographic tools to track the race and gender of every source that appears in stories.

Workers now have a heightened focus on the optics of race, continued Merrell, so management should do more to match the demographics of the workforce. Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives, social consciousness raising, and constant surveys were all on the table as tools to monitor employee sentiment.

Merrells presentation was just one in a two-day April conference that showcased the changing face of union-busting. Over a dozen other presenters who work in union avoidance gave talks during the virtual conference, sponsored by a group called CUE, on the latest trends in organizing, strike-breaking, and how to get ahead of changes in the law and political environment that could provide an edge to the labor movement. They included representatives from Kelloggs, John Deere, Five Below, Lowes, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, as well as a consultant hired by Amazon to oppose the warehouse worker union drives.

In the new environment, businesses facing worker uprisings are attempting to co-opt the language of social justice movements and embrace trends around self-growth and positive lifestyles to counter demands for unionization a far cry from the old days of union prevention, a history that featured employers routinely threatening workers with private guards and violent clashes on the picket lines.

Businesses facing worker uprisings are attempting to co-opt the language of social justice movements and embrace trends around self-growth and positive lifestyles to counter demands for unionization.

Leny Riebli, the vice president of human resources at Ross Stores, noted that given whats happening at Amazon and Starbucks, her company had retooled its training to remain union-free. We really had to redouble our efforts, said Riebli. The company, said Riebli, closely monitors employee concerns that might spill over into support for unionization, so managers have been trained not only to spot potential card check organizing, but also listen for issues around safety, scheduling, and respect in the workplace.

This relates to our diversity, equality and inclusion efforts, explained Riebli, noting that the company sought managers who can be approachable to an array of worker issues.

Virtually none of the presenters identified explicitly as anti-union agents. Many described themselves or had professional biographies emphasizing their role as DEI experts, developers of human capital, and champions of workplace belonging. The industry has undergone somewhat of a rebranding, with many labor relations executives now identifying as people experts and diversity executives.

Even the host of the conference was camouflaged. The conference was organized by a group called CUE, which bills itself publicly as simply a community for positive employee relations. But that sunny image belies its true agenda: Founded in 1977 by the National Association of Manufacturers, as part of a sweeping crusade against organized labor, CUE is formally known as the Council for a Union-Free Environment. The organization provides research and training for the union suppression tactics, an estimated $340-million-per-year cottage industry of lawyers and consultants who specialize in assisting corporations with mitigating the threat of organized labor.

But there was no doubt that they understood how controversial their work can be. Ken Hurley, the vice president of Kelloggs Co. for human resources and labor relations who presided over the effort last year to replace striking cereal workers, said he did not want participants to share his slide deck, for fear of leaks. And, after The Intercept published his remarks in which he described the union as behaving more like terrorists than partners, Hurley left Kelloggs.

Union workers rally in support of unionizing Alabama Amazon workers in downtown Los Angeles on March 22, 2021.

Photo: Al Seib/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

So-called union avoidance consultants, also known as persuaders, work in a specialty profession that has been honed in recent decades. They are hired by corporations to train managers to spot union sympathies or to lead captive audience lectures where attendance is mandatory to pressure workers against voting for a union.

These seminars can involve threats of retaliation, warnings that a union will force the company to close down, and claims that union dues will negate any benefit of a union contract. But the most important aspect of these meetings, experts say, can be collecting information to identify union supporters within a workplace so that they may be sidelined or fired before they gain influence with their co-workers.

The industry has undergone somewhat of a rebranding, with many labor relations executives now identifying as people experts and diversity executives.

The persuader industry has evolved to match the cultural trends among many workers. Jason Greer, who has led a diversity seminar at CUE in the past, embodies the evolution of the anti-union industry to match cultural trends among workers. Greer, founder of the eponymous business Greer Consulting, is a persuader who helps companies fend off unionization drives, but you wouldnt necessarily know it from talking to him.

I do leadership coaching. I do diversity management training, said Greer. Im known as the employee whisperer within my industry.

Major corporations are at once under pressure to appear sensitive to employees from marginalized groups and eager to blunt unionization efforts that would hurt their bottom line. Thanks to consultants like Greer and others, these companies can sometimes kill two birds with one stone by wrapping anti-union talking points in a patina of racial sensitivity and commitment to diversity; Greers company advertises labor relations alongside diversity training.

Over the last year, Greer and his team have worked for B&H Photo, Keurig Dr Pepper, Studio in a School, and Blues City Brewery, and are paid as much as $2,000 per day to pressure workers not to join a labor union. B&H, notably, settled a federal racial discrimination lawsuit in 2017, and agreed to paying $3.2 million in back pay to over 1,300 individuals.

Employees, said Greer, fundamentally want respect and dignity on the job. Listening to worker demands, he explained, can prevent workers from drifting toward a third party, like a labor union. In some cases, that means providing seminars on leadership and understanding, or creating employee resource groups that provide special recognition to marginalized communities.

People will work for money, but they will die for respect and die for recognition, continued Greer. If your employees are talking about wanting diversity and inclusion practices, dont shut your eyes and, you know, shut your ears to that.

The Labor Pros, a Florida-based firm that runs anti-union campaigns across the country, prominently presents a diverse team that conducts diversity training adjacent to interventions to remove the union threat.

Nekeya Nunn, the chief executive officer of the Labor Pros, has adopted terminology from left-wing, activist spaces. Im a proponent of listening, heart-led leaders, people who make decisions on how they would want somebody else to treat them, said Nunn, in an interview with The Intercept.

Nunn echoed Merrells argument, that employees care as much about dignity as wages and benefits. People unionize against bad managers, not bad companies, she said. Programs that help people from different demographics and different nationalities integrate are simply part of a positive workplace culture, she continued. People work for companies that make them feel valued and included, so if thats a tactic to not have a union, then so be it.

A contract obtained by The Intercept shows that the Labor Pros provided a menu of options to Hilton Hotels last year on options for persuading workers against joining a union. The firm offered up to four consultants to speak to 80 employees for four days at a cost of $43,120, plus per diem.

Danine Clay and Byron Clay of the firm Diverse Workforce Consultants are among the union avoidance professionals who have worked on recent high-profile campaigns to persuade workers against joining a union at Hersheys and at Mission Hospital in North Carolina, according to disclosures. Their firm touts its ability to empower management with employee selection, retention, diversity training and skills, and union avoidance tools and strategies are unmatched.

Danine Clay was listed on disclosure forms as a consultant for Amazon engaged in persuading warehouse workers not to join a union. Over the phone, she said the disclosure form was incorrect but declined to comment further.

Theres kind of a jiujitsu, to get employees thinking about racial justice issues, at least superficially, as a way to deflect labor and collective bargaining, said Michael C. Duff, a law professor at the University of Wyoming. Duff attended law school after union organizing cost him his job working for an airline. He understands why the diversity, equity, and inclusion field has become an asset for companies hoping to skirt unionization particularly at a time when employee interest in both is rising rapidly.

Labor consultant folks converting into DEI folks, added Duff. Its really a wonderful kind of psyops, right, because these people are supposed to be close to employees.

The approach is on display in some of the most high-profile union battles going on now. One example is Starbucks, which has faced growing unionization pressure as over 100 stores have voted to join a union. The company, in response, launched an anti-union website earlier this year. Among the reasons not to join a union? The Starbucks website says the firm already provides an inclusive environment and maintains a strong commitment to diverse hiring practices.

So far, the approach has mostly backfired for the company. Starbucks claims to be a progressive company, and theyre using this social justice language, but people see past that, said Joseph Thompson, a student barista who organized two Starbucks locations in Santa Cruz, California.

Thompson has corresponded with other baristas seeking to form unions around the country as far away as Idaho. Many have voiced frustration at the companys union-busting tactics in contrast to its purported values, he said.

Despite the rosy image of inclusiveness and activism touted in Starbucks press releases, the company has been accused of over200 violations of federal labor laws, and over 20 baristas say they have been illegally fired in retaliation for attempting to form a union.

Its a brutal anti-union campaign, but also one that tries to appeal to the sort of progressive sensibilities of the kinds of people who work at Starbucks, said John Logan, professor and director of labor and employment studies at San Francisco State University.

Effective or not, its becoming a standard playbook. Princeton University, in a page outlining alternatives to unionizing for graduate students, notes that the school already welcomes input on all areas of university life, such as professional development and diversity and inclusion.Princeton University has so far prevailed: The graduate student union has not held a unionization vote, there is no recognition to bargain with the graduate students, and they do not have a contract.

When workers at vegan food company No Evil Foods, which makes imitation meat products sold at Whole Foods and other upscale groceries, held captive audience anti-union seminars, the company warned workers about the old white guys in union leadership and compared union dues to taxpayers funding President Donald Trumps golf junkets.

In other records leaked out of the No Evil Foods seminars, workers were warned that unions were hotbeds of sexism and sexual harassment, and did not share the vegan food manufacturers progressive values. The union drive at the firm ultimately failed.

Corporations are trying to hijack the language of liberation as a way to prevent workers from having a voice at the table and a say in their jobs.

Critics say that many corporations merely channel concerns around racial injustice into a reputation-laundering strategy, one that can serve the bottom line of keeping workers in check. For lack of a better word, were in this woke moment, said Wes McEnany, a former organizer with CODE-CWA, a project of the Communication Workers of America to unionize the tech industry. Corporations are trying to hijack the language of liberation as a way to prevent workers from having a voice at the table and a say in their jobs.

McEnany noted that when he worked on a campaign to organize workers at Mapbox, a technology firm that provides custom online maps, management responded with accusations of bigotry, claiming efforts to prevent the offshoring of jobs reeked of xenophobia.

Medium, the publishing website launched by Twitter co-founder Ev Williams, countered a union organizing drive with a promise to increase spending on diversity and inclusion efforts, according to McEnany. After the union vote failed by one vote, Medium liquidated its primary editorial division.

Such left-leaning language and promises were on display in the recent organizing drive at REI, the outdoor clothing and equipment retailer. The company this year posted an internal podcast featuring its chief executive, Eric Artz, and the companys chief diversity and social impact officer, Wilma Wallace, discussing why REI doesnt think unionization is the right thing for the co-op or for the employees.

Much of the conversation centered on claims that a union would hamper the companys ability to listen and communicate directly with our employees and reduce the companys ability to be flexible in resolving workplace concerns. Such arguments are routine in most organizations facing a union vote.

But what stood out was the language of social justice that filled the discussion. Wallace began the talk by stating her preferred pronouns and a land acknowledgement to honor the traditional lands of the Ohlone people. Artz, while arguing against unionization, peppered his remarks with comments about how REI intends to maintain its focus on inclusion and racial equity.

Finally, Dollar General is perhaps one of the most glaring retailers facing criticism for its labor practices. The company, in its latest annual disclosure, reported that its median annual salary for workers was $17,773. Workers have cited broken air conditioners, mold in the break rooms, and little safety precautions for employees who face constant robberies and violent incidents within stores. The widespread problems have led to a worker revolt, including store clerks posting TikTok videos of unsanitary work environments and grossly understaffed stores, and some moving toward demands for a labor union to negotiate better conditions.

Dollar General has responded with an aggressive anti-union effort that is overseen by Kathy Reardon, the companys chief people officer. In public, Reardon is touted for leading the discount retailers ongoing diversity and inclusion journey and for creating an allyship guide that helps employees play an active role in creating a more inclusive environment.

Records show that Reardon is involved in the hiring of $2,700-per day consultants who have helped the firm defeat a push for a labor union at its Connecticut locations.

One of the most insidious tactics have been the use of supposed employee resource groups, also known as affinity groups or ERGs, to undermine labor activism. Many companies offer specific ERGs for Asian, Black, Latino, or LGBTQ+ individuals, among other identity-based suborganizations as part of a larger diversity and inclusion program.

The management-sanctioned groups are attempts to create safe spaces for historically marginalized identities to voice shared concerns and create a sense of community within the workplace. According to a study published last year by McKinsey & Co. that surveyed 423 organizations employing 12 million people, close to 35 percent of firms have added or expanded ERGs since 2020.

Supporters of these initiatives say these groups provide a useful channel to improve communications and spotlight company practices that might be shaped by racial biases or lack of sensitivity to minority cultures.

These lofty goals, however, at times run parallel to or even in conjunction with anti-union measures at some firms. IRI Consultants, a union avoidance firm, noted in one publication that unions in some industries, particularly high tech, have drifted toward capitalizing on demands that employers do a better job of hiring diverse talent. One way to union-proof your business, IRI claims, is to develop effective leadership, consistent employee training, and diversity and inclusion (D&I) initiatives that address challenges like unconscious bias in the human resources (HR) process.

When people feel powerless, resentment festers until someone comes along, like a union representative saying, You have a right to be heard. We can help you get a voice in your workplace, and your employer will have to listen, IRI noted in another publication.

In response, IRI suggests the creation of ERGs within a workplace. If you dont give todays employees a voice, the workforce is likely to have a low engagement level, and the union is going to see an opportunity, warns IRI.

ERGs are becoming more and more common. CUE, along with Littler Mendelson and Jackson Lewis, two of the largest union suppression law firms, have encouraged them.

Thats because ERGs can provide a useful corporate alternative to unions that places management in control. The tech reporting site Protocol noted that when tech firms such as Mapbox faced a union organizing drive, the company kicked off DEI-related efforts, including ERGs, in order to allay worker concerns.

ERGs kind of passively work against the idea of a union in that theyre a way for you to kind of spend your energy without it turning into anything, one tech worker told the media outlet.

When Google, notably, hired IRI Consultants to suppress union activism within the tech giant, the decision, recent court documents show, was made by the then-chief diversity officer, Danielle Brown, who previously led the firms ERG programs.

The ERG is essentially the companys union. Its more about surveillance, about keeping an eye on workers.

The ERG is essentially the companys union. Its engaged in this way: Oh, youre from a marginalized identity group, you have a place to speak, said McEnany, the organizer. But if you talk to a lot of workers interested in real change, they see this as a way to throw money for a party. Its more about surveillance, about keeping an eye on workers.

In the late19th and early20th century, in the early days of the U.S. labor movement, corporations facing labor activism would often create fake union organizations controlled by management. These so-called company unions would provide a false sense of worker empowerment, with some fringe benefits like a pool hall or recreation center, while keeping wage and benefit decisions controlled by corporate leaders.

The National Labor Relations Act of 1935, also known as the Wagner Act, which enshrined federal labor union rights, expressly outlawed the formation of company unions. Corporations cannot form worker organizations that claim to negotiate on behalf of employees.

Company unions were a major concern of Sen. [Robert F.] Wagner because its very easy for a working person to mistake these groups as third parties, said Duff, the University of Wyoming law professor.

The movement to create ERGs at a time when workers demand better conditions could be a violation of labor law, Duff argued.

Its a distraction. The idea is, Were going to siphon off energy that might be devoted to creating your own arms-length groups that would be adversarial, he added.

Nunn, of the Labor Pros, agreed that operating ERGs in some ways could run in violation of the National Labor Relations Act but questioned the wisdom of such prohibitions. So workers get what they want, companies could not have to deal with a union if they didnt want, and employees would still feel theyre fairly compensated and they work in a just environment that speaks up on social justice issues. It would make unions obsolete, said Nunn.

If a company is willing to create those things outside of the union, outside the labor union, whats the problem with that? she asked.

The success or failure of a union election is almost always determined by knowledge of the workforce and an intimate understanding of the values and beliefs of each employee. The union suppression industry has made workforce intelligence gathering a key element of its trade.

In the70s and 80s, industrial psychologist Charles Hughes trained over 27,000 managers and supervisors to make unions unnecessary. One of his methods was to promote the use of surveys to collect information about workers. Employers signed up by the hundreds to attend Hughess talks, including a seminar titled, Attitude Survey Techniques for Measuring Union Sentiments. CUE which hosted the conference helped streamline the emerging industry of management consultants, industrial psychologists, and law firms that helped turn the tide against the labor movement, which has declined precipitously since the 70s.

Its intimate to talk about race and identity, said Duff. That creates a vulnerability, and to have consultants come in and say, Hey, look, I understand the discrimination youve gone through, you can open up to me, that can get you a lot of valuable intelligence.

Such vulnerabilities can be key insights during an organizing drive. In 2011, Pratt Logistics opened a new plant in Pennsylvania. The company brought in a man who only identified himself as an efficiency expert named Jay. Jay went around conducting one-on-one interviews with workers, asking them about what problems they faced, their values, and concerns.

Later, when truckers and warehouse workers at Pratt began steps to form a union at the new plant, the company instantly fired union sympathizers. It wasnt until later that they found out Jays real identity: Jason Greer, the union suppression consultant, who had been hired explicitly to identify potential union supporters.

When the Teamsters union later brought the case to court, arguing illegal retaliation and unfair labor practices, labor attorneys noted that Greer on his website explicitly advertised himself as a union buster who wakes up every day with one goal in mind, and thats to keep unions from taking over and ruining businesses that my friends and my clients have worked their entire lives to build.

Those words are gone from Greers website. Now he lists himself as a diversity consultant.

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The Evolution of Union-Busting - The Intercept

CHARLOTTE (QUEEN CITY NEWS) Though wide acceptance of gay culture is a thing of recent history, the gay bar has been around for well over 100 years. But some bar owners feel wider acceptance has come at a price: the need for gay bars.

Petras in Plaza Midwood is a snapshot of the story of the American gay bar.

It happened that there was another bar in town called Liasons that closed around 2009 or 2010, and that clientele started coming over here. Since it was already gay-owned, it was just a natural fit, said Petras Owner Curtis Tutt.

Gay-owned and operated from its opening in 2007, Petras quickly became known as a safe haven for Charlottes LGBTQ community.

Billy Reasor says he came out around the time Petras opened. He was just getting out of a heterosexual marriage, finding his place in his new community.

I was finding a place in the LGBT community, and this was a place that felt safe, said Reasor. I could do things that I thought were so taboo and I could live my authentic life. And that happened here. That happened at Petras.

That was the role of gay bars for thousands, if not millions of the countrys LGBTQ population, particularly during the 1970s. Gay bars were a place to drink, dance, and be unapologetically yourself.

The gay bar is where I met my husband. The gay bar is where I felt it was OK to be me. Because I hid me for so long, said Reasor.

But the story of the gay bar doesnt end there and its not a fairytale. The number of gay bars has declined significantly over the past few decades. For example, San Francisco, which has one of the largest LGBTQ populations in the country. Slate News reports the Gayellow Pages placed 118 gay bars in San Francisco in 1973. In 2011, that number plummeted to 33.

And in New York City, Manhattan had 86 gay bars at its peak in 1978. By 2011, there were 44.

Weve changed so much now that we dont really need the safe haven part of it because people feel comfortable anywhere, said Tutt.

Its not just growing acceptance thats contributed to the decline of gay bars. Online dating has also forced bar owners to make some tough choices.

It comes to a point of change or die, said Tutt. We really dont identify as a gay bar anymore, but we are and always have been accepting and open to everybody.

Download the Queen City News appto stay updated on the go.Sign up for QC News email alertsto have breaking news sent to your inbox.Find todays top stories on QCNews.comfor Charlotte, NC, and all of the Carolinas.

Its a sad reality for those who once relished in the unwavering acceptance that comes with a space designed for people just like them. But some argue there is still a place for gay bars in todays world. Some people will never feel comfortable going to bars where they risk discrimination and hateful rhetoric.

There are still [gay bars] here in Charlotte and some that I go to semi-regularly. But theyre not the place to be like they used to be, said Tutt. Its wonderful that they dont feel the need to have that safe haven. But at the same time, its sad.

A side effect of progress: inclusivity at the price of exclusivity.

Link:

A place that felt safe: The evolution of the gay bar across the U.S. - Fox 46 Charlotte

I have unfinished business with the future, said David Cronenberg, announcing his long-awaited return to body horror with Crimes of the Future. The Canadian director hadnt made a movie quite in that vein since 1999s eXistenZ, but given that films forward-looking vision of a virtual reality, one mightve thought his business with the future largely complete. Its not an accident, though, that the real reference to the future in Cronenbergs cheeky statement was, in fact, to his second feature, an experimental science-fiction film from 1970, also titled Crimes of the Future, about a dermatologist who falls in with a group of pedophiles after a plague wipes out all sexually mature women. The new film and the old have nothing actually to do with each other, except perhaps as point/counterpoint. Fifty-two years on, Cronenbergs formal acuity is sharper and his ideas about medicine, about psychology, about the flesh have matured considerably. The result is a carefully considered uncertainty, in which the wizened perspective of an older artist befits material whose boundary pushing is most evident in the spaces between the surface horrors. A far cry from his original fresh-out-of-college experiment in shock.

In the new Crimes of the Future, shock is mundane. Viggo Mortensen plays Saul Tenser, a performance artist of a particular sort. In a world wrecked by climate catastrophe and industrial waste, where most people no longer feel pain and some select humans are mutating and growing brand new organs (Accelerated Evolution Syndrome, they call it), Tenser puts on grotesquely clinical shows of his surgeries to cut those organs out. Lea Seydoux is both his lover and the woman wielding the knife, a distinction blurred in classic Cronenbergian fashion and later underlined by an admiring Kristen Stewart, who remarks, Surgery is the new sex. Where the director might once have bought into that sort of out-of-bounds provocation, pushing the audience to the limits as he did to greatest effect in 1996s Crash, here he is decidedly more ambivalent. Surgery might be the new sex, but not all sex is good or fun or interesting, and most of it isnt worth the attention of an audience other than dull art snobs whose sense for the outre has less to do with provoking revolutionary thought than flattering egos.

If re-using the title invites us to think back over the gruesome terrors of Cronenbergs filmography, it is also an invitation to consider the role of skepticism in his work. From his very first shorts, he was a filmmaker deeply mistrustful of institutions like psychiatry, medical research, and the tech industry. Each claiming knowledge about those things which appear to make us human: the mind, the flesh and the technology we use to interface those bodily attributes with the world around us. In 2022, the themes havent changed, but Cronenbergs relationship to them and to himself most certainly has. Embodied by proxy in Tensers troubled artist, whose painful mutations and acts of literal sacrifice inspire and influence other (lesser) artists, the director evinces a depressed rootlessness in a cinematic world he birthed but no longer knows quite what to do with.

Crimes of the Future thus exists in an unusual space for the filmmaker. Filmed in a dilapidated Greece, with its rough stone walls shot in clinically lit darkness, its a long way off from the odd concrete and glass Canadian urban architecture he so lovingly made alien in much of his earlier work. A budgetary consideration, no doubt, but also a reflection of how the world has caught up with Cronenbergs troubling visions of where humanity is headed. When an underground organization of plastic-eaters in the film seeks to adapt humanity to the environmental degradation we have wrought, the troubling questions raised about our bodily relationship to the physical world come across less as disturbing dorm-room pontification than a picture of our present ecological reality. Cronenberg has said that his script for the film was originally penned not long after eXistenZ, and if thats the case, its concerns are shockingly prescient. Wrestling with how we shape the world is one thing. Reckoning with how that world might shape us in turn is yet another. And in Crimes of the Future, Cronenberg goes a step further, assessing the morality of going along now the damage is done.

The films autobiographical elements of an artist unsettled by the effect of his art on himself and the world find union in its bleak ambivalence about humanitys place in the future. The ambivalence is key. Its not just that Cronenberg doesnt pick a side, but that there really arent any sides at all when confronted with collapsing systems supporting culture, society, the planet, and life itself. Only in the context of that pessimism does eating plastic start to seem like more than just a viable option, but perhaps a moral necessity, and even an optimistic one in terms of human survival. Tenser, who as it turns out is also a police informant, is caught right in the middle of these moral quandaries, engaged in an endless dialectic with various characters (from detectives to art dealers to public health bureaucrats to revolutionaries) on matters that have no answers but the choices he makes, and often the ones he declines to make. As a portrait of the artist as an aging man, Crimes of the Future is fulfilling precisely in its refusal of easy fulfillment. Thats a young persons game.

Body horror is an odd sub-genre. In practical terms originated by Cronenberg himself with early films like Shivers and The Brood, its a mode of filmmaking defined by its graphic approach to bodily mutation and gore. A gross-out genre, often consumed by pure spectacle. Not so in Cronenbergs work, which has regularly used body horror for outward manifestations of concerns about psychological dynamics. At first glance, Crimes of the Future appears devoid of psychology, playing instead in a pool of politics and sociology and aesthetics. But then you remember that the Inner Beauty Pageant referenced in the film is itself an idea lifted from a concept in Cronenbergs Dead Ringers, among his most psychologically real and disturbing works. That unlikely connection between the film about people in the future spontaneously or maybe wilfully? growing new organs, and the one about twin gynaecologists dealing with warped sibling interdependence, dark sexual frustration, and wild substance abuse, is not down to simple self-thievery for the sake of plot. Within the evolution of Cronenbergs career, the fractured psychology of Dead Ringers is not absent from Crimes of the Future, its just become a given. The fact of our existence in the Anthropocene imprinted on our psyches, with only the flesh inner and outer left up for grabs.

Maybe thats why the film often plays less as sci-fi horror than dark comedy (its only resemblance to the original, very deadpan Crimes of the Future). Faced with the impossibilities of living in the world weve created, laughing at the absurdity feels only rational. Cronenberg stares this reality down, though, compelling us to consider that there really may be nothing more left for us, while in his sly way check out that mans devious grin in photos! proposing that there is still much left to do. What exactly we do, he cannot say. His work is only a diagnosis. The film opens with a mother murdering her child. It ends after that child has been carved open, his defaced insides displayed for an aghast world, with no intrinsic meaning to be found except that which might be made. This is the future Cronenberg gives us.

Corey Atad is a writer based in Toronto. His work has appeared at Esquire, Hazlitt and The Baffler and he has an unhealthy obsession with Air Bud.

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Crimes of the Future and the Evolution of David Cronenberg - Gawker

WASHINGTON (AP) Most every Republican lawmaker expressed outrage in the days after the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Some even blamed then-President Donald Trump.

But the larger GOP narrative shifted in the weeks and months that followed. Republican House leader Kevin McCarthy, who had said in the hours after the attack that it had been the saddest day I have ever had serving as a member of this institution, went on to visit Trump at his Florida home only weeks after the riot.

Others went further, with some Republican lawmakers defending the rioters or playing down the violence of the mob that beat police officers and smashed its way into the Capitol. The rioters, echoing Trumps falsehoods about widespread fraud in the election, temporarily stopped the certification of Joe Bidens presidential victory.

A few Republicans have consistently criticized Trump, putting their own political future in peril.

A look at comments from key Republicans in the year-and-a half since the attack as the House committee investigating the riot prepares to begin public hearings Thursday night.

HOUSE GOP LEADER KEVIN MCCARTHY, R-CALIF.

On Jan. 13, 2021, just before the Democratic-led House voted to impeach Trump over the insurrection, McCarthy said that the president bears responsibility for Wednesdays attack on Congress by mob rioters.

McCarthy said Trump should have immediately denounced the mob when he saw the violence unfolding.

These facts require immediate action by President Trump: accept his share of responsibility, quell the brewing unrest, and ensure President-elect Biden is able to successfully begin his term, McCarthy said. And the presidents immediate action also deserves congressional action, which is why I think a fact finding commission and a censure resolution would be prudent.

Just a week later, McCarthy told reporters, I dont believe he provoked it, if you listen to what he said at the rally, referring to Trumps speech to his supporters in front of the White House shortly before the assault on the Capitol. Trump had said to march peacefully to the Capitol, but he also told people in the crowd to fight like hell or youre not going to have a country anymore.

McCarthy later voted against forming a bipartisan commission to investigate the attack and has called the Democratic-led Jan. 6 committee a partisan sham. He is now appearing with Trump and praising the former president at fundraisers.

Trump never accepted responsibility for the insurrection and has defended the rioters.

___

SENATE REPUBLICAN LEADER MITCH MCCONNELL, R-KY.

McConnell spoke of the failed insurrection the night of the attack and said Congress will not be kept out of this chamber by thugs, mobs, or threats.

He voted weeks later to acquit Trump for inciting the insurrection. But he delivered a scorching rebuke of Trump after that vote, saying that there is no question that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of that day. The people who stormed this building believed they were acting on the wishes and instructions of their president.

McConnell continued: Their having that belief was a foreseeable consequence of the growing crescendo of false statements, conspiracy theories, and reckless hyperbole which the defeated president kept shouting into the largest megaphone on planet Earth.

That same month, McConnell said he would absolutely vote for Trump if he were the GOP nominee in 2024.

___

FORMER VICE PRESIDENT MIKE PENCE

Pence was under more pressure than any other Republican on Jan. 6, 2021 because Trump was calling on him to object to Bidens certification even though the vice president had no legal authority to do so in his ceremonial role presiding over the count.

Pence refused Trumps entreaties. As he hid in the Capitol during the insurrection, rioters breaking in were chanting hang Mike Pence.

Bringing the Senate back to session in the hours after the insurrection, Pence said he condemned the violence in the strongest possible terms.

To those who wreaked havoc in our Capitol today, you did not win, Pence said. Violence never wins. Freedom wins. And this is still the Peoples House.

Two weeks later, Pence attended Bidens inauguration. Trump refused to go.

Since then, Pence has repeatedly defended his decision to abide by his constitutional role. He has called for the GOP to move on from 2020 as he lays the groundwork for a potential presidential run that could put him in direct competition with his former boss.

He reinforced his stance in a speech this year, saying that President Trump is wrong. I had no right to overturn the election.

Still, he has walked a careful line, praising the Trump-Pence administrations policy accomplishments as he courts support from the partys base.

___

SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM, R-S.C.

Graham spoke emotionally and forcefully the night of the insurrection, suggesting that he would permanently break ties with Trump after the two had forged a close relationship during Trumps presidency.

Trump and I have had a hell of a journey, Graham said on the Senate floor in the hours after the attack. I hate it being this way. Oh my God, I hate it. From my point of view, he has been a consequential president. But today, the first thing you will see, all I can say is, count me out. Enough is enough. I tried to be helpful.

Graham voted to certify Bidens victory and praised Pence for resisting the pressure to object.

In the months afterward, Graham softened his stance, and he and the former president continued to talk.

Can we move forward without President Trump? The answer is no, Graham told Fox News host Sean Hannity in the spring of 2021. Ive determined we cant grow without him.

___

REP. MO BROOKS, R-ALA.

Brooks is the rare House Republican to have stepped up his criticism of Trump since the insurrection.

The Alabama Republican was one of Trumps most forceful allies on Jan. 6, 2021, telling the crowd at the rally near the White House before the riot, Today is the day American patriots start taking down names and kicking ass.

Brooks was one of several GOP lawmakers who tried to help Trump overturn his election defeat. Brooks said on the House floor after the violence that in his judgment, if only lawful votes cast by eligible American citizens are counted, Joe Biden lost and President Trump won the Electoral College.

In August, though, as he was running in a GOP primary for the Senate, Brooks told a crowd that it was time to move on from the 2020 election. Trump didnt like that and withdrew his Senate endorsement.

Brooks claimed that Trump rescinded his support after the two had a conversation in which he told Trump there was no legal way to rescind the results or hold a do-over of the 2020 election.

Brooks is now in a runoff for the GOP Senate nomination, having risen in the polls after Trump dropped him. And Brooks is asking the former president to back him again.

___

REP. LIZ CHENEY, R-WYO.

Cheney has been the most prominent and consistent GOP critic of Trump and shes staked her political career on it.

A week after the attack, Cheney was one of only 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump. In a statement, Cheney said that the president of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack. Everything that followed was his doing.

She said Trump should have intervened, but did not. There has never been a greater betrayal by a president of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution, Cheney said. I will vote to impeach the president.

Cheney, who was then a member of House leadership, faced immediate backlash from her party for the impeachment vote and for her forceful remarks. But she has not wavered in the year since, and accepted an invitation from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., to sit on the committee that is investigating the insurrection.

House Republicans booted Cheney from leadership and the party censured her and Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger, the only other Republican on the Jan. 6 committee. And she faces a strong challenge in the Wyoming primary from a Trump-backed candidate.

When I know something is wrong, I will say so, Cheney said in a campaign video announcing that she had filed for reelection. I wont waver or back down.

___

Associated Press writer Jill Colvin contributed to this report.

-

For full coverage of the Jan. 6 hearings, go to https://www.apnews.com/capitol-siege

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Then and now: GOP lawmakers' evolution on the Capitol riot - The Associated Press

This is a portion of a Cassini radar mapper image obtained by the Cassini spacecraft on its December 21, 2008, flyby of Saturns moon Titan. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASI.

The landscape of Saturns moon Titan, which features lakes,rivers, canyons, dissected plateaus, and sand dunes, can be strikingly likeEarths. The landforms reveal a world with active liquid transport cycles andsedimentary processes. On Titan, however, these processes are moderated byorganic hydrocarbon grains and liquid methane instead of silicate rock andliquid water as on Earth. This poses a problem: sand-sized organic grains aremore fragile than their silicate counterparts. And yet, Titans equatorial sanddunes have likely been active for tens to hundreds of thousands of years, a timescaleon which organic grains would have abraded or worn away into dust.

Mathieu Laptre (Stanford University) and coauthors put forward a new model to address this conflict. They hypothesize that growth due to sintering the process of neighboring organic grains being fused together when they are at rest could counterbalance the abrasion that grains experience when transported by winds or methane rivers. Comparing their calculations to existing data on Titans climate and atmospheric modeling, the authors also demonstrate how this balance could explain the latitudinal zoning of Titans geomorphology. The equatorial region is dominated by wind transport, which promotes abrasion over sintering and would produce the fine-grained sand necessary for the dune fields. The winds lull in the mid-latitudes, promoting sintering and the formation of coarse-grained sandstone, consistent with the observed plains. In the polar regions, more frequent rainstorms and river flow would carve plateaus made of this organic sandstone into observed dissected labyrinth terrain.

While well-reasoned, this model remains a hypothesis. When the planned Dragonfly octocopter spacecraft lands on Titan in the mid-2030s, it will help validate the model by measuring the composition, shapes, and sizes of grains within the dunes as well as the wind speeds, frequencies, and precipitation rates that shape them. READ MORE

See more here:

New Hypothesis on Titan Landscape Evolution | Planetary News - Planetary News

As recently as two years ago, banks and credit unions really didnt lend to true Main Street. They were focused on larger businesses who needed cash infusions of $1M+, had good credit, plenty of collateral, pristine cash flow and really didnt need a loan. Why? Because there wasnt a lot of (any?) technology used in the process, which meant it cost the same to process a loan for $1M as it did a loan for $10,000, so banks simply serviced larger loans and relied on relationships to keep business flowing.

Then the pandemic hit. And changed everything. While lockdowns and mandates dealt a heavy blow to the 70 percent of small businesses that shut down, the knock-out punch came when lendersevery single lenderturned off the spigot of cash, which effectively froze Main Street.

When the Paycheck Protection Program started, the closed banks needed to find a way to accept PPP applications on-line. For the most part, fintechs, Lendio included, became the bridge for lenders technology gap. Banks had a pretty steep learning curve in terms of technology, but the experience forced them to take a serious look at APIs, workflows, and digitization. They liked what they saw and many of them arent turning back.

This includes Texas National Bank (TNB), one of the over 300 traditional banks Lendio helped during the pandemic. TNBs President, Joe Quiroga, was kind enough to sit down with me to talk about the PPP experience, and how its changing the way his bank approaches small business lending going forward.

BROCK: The pandemic youve said that it helped you see a better approach to systems and processes that your bank used before the pandemic. Can you explain?

JOE: We had a day where we needed to book 300 loans on our system we had never had to book 300 loans in a month prior to the pandemic much less in one day and I just saw this escalating. I knew that maybe we could book 300 loans manually today, but tomorrow, if we had 500 or 1,000, there would be no way we could do that manually typing all of this into our system.

BROCK: So you made changes?

JOE: Yes. Thats when the importance of automating, integrating, and sharing data hit us. Eventually, we were at the point where we were booking 1,000 loans a day on an automated basis. It was just happening. We had no human physically typing these loans into our core system. We knew it was a better way of doing things now and going forward.

BROCK: How long would this evolution have taken without the pandemic?

JOE: Were a smaller institution. Were dynamic and were younger, so we were headed down that path already but I think what the pandemic forced it accelerated a 5-year project into a 1-year turnaround.

BROCK: How did these changes impact your bank?

JOE: When you compare us to the traditional bank in Texas or even in our region, we processed 5 to 10 times as many PPP loan applications relative to our size. It really paid off for us and we will now deploy that strategy toward small business lending. Ive called small business lending the last frontier of community bankingthese are the only types of loans that were hanging on to.

It works to have a partnership because we have something fintechs dont havewe have capital and fintechs have the right process and technology. Thats how this marriage comes together to say Hey, we can coexist. Quite frankly, we can now fund loan transactions that previously we didnt even see in our backyard. That, to a community banker, is the real evolution.

A new kind of borrower

What Joe didnt mention, however, was how much the market needs this evolution. More than 4.4 million new businesses were created in 2020 (source: U.S. Census Bureau). Last year, that jumped up to 5.4 million. Compare that to 3.5 million started in 2019 on the eve of the pandemic. BTW, 52 percent of these new businesses launched with less than 10K in funding and nearly half of that group had less than $5,000 when they opened their doors.

The majority of these new businesses rely on existing cash, savings, and family/friends for capital to start. But some are also realizing that there are new lending options available that simply werent there prior to the pandemic.

Were seeing a rise in lenders embracing the gig economy and underwriting loans that straddle the fence between a personal loan and a sole-proprietor loan. And, like Joe said, banks didnt really see these super-small businesses in the past. While there isnt a lot of good that you can say about a global pandemic, PPP loans pushed this evolution since so many of the people who received PPP loans were in fact sole proprietors. And for those who started business during the pandemic, theres never been a better time to get access to capital. Optimism on Main Street is strong and growing.

How lending is improving for the small business, too

We worked with thousands of business owners on PPP loans. For many, it was their first time ever applying for a loan outside of a traditional bank or credit union. For some, it was their first attempt applying for a business loan.

Regardless of whether they were successful in securing funds, much of the feedback we received from the applicants centered on how easy and how quickly we were able to process their paperwork. Clearly the PPP process had its share of snags, but it also introduced small business owners to a world of lending that they either didnt know about or perhaps never felt comfortable using before.

Today, that leaves us with business owners with more confidence and a better understanding of how to access capital. Theyre leveraging their access to cash in ways that have never been seen before in our industry. While uncertainties exist, including high inflation, supply chain slowdowns, and the global effects from the war in Ukraine, small businesses have a renewed focus and are better equipped to handle whatever lies ahead.

Weve got a long way to go to get back to where we were before the pandemic, but theres no doubt that Main Street and the financial institutions that support it are both more efficient and more resilient than ever before.

See the rest here:

Faster, Leaner, Better SMB Loans: How The Pandemic Triggered An Evolution On Main Street - Forbes

Following is a transcript of the video.

Narrator: If you peel back the layers of Rapunzel's hair in "Tangled," you'll see just how complicated animating 3D hair can be. But back then, Disney had mainly focused on straight hair, building on its previous 2D looks.

With "Encanto," the studio figured out how to create coiled hair like Mirabel's with natural movement. But the animators didn't stop there. "Encanto" made history as the first Disney animated movie to represent the full range of hair textures, from 1A to 4C.

Getting from here to here required over a decade of innovation.

The story begins with a familiar storybook princess who in 2010 was seen for the first time in 3D.

Disney's first major foray into 3D hair animation came with "Tangled." Rapunzel's 70 feet of hair was basically its own character in the movie, pretty much breaking every real-life law of motion, and not just because it was magical.

Hook Hand: That's a lot of hair.

Flynn: She's growing it out.

Nadim: Every shot of every movie has a lot of bending the laws of physics. Otherwise, things would look very flat.

Narrator: This emphasizes a key tenet of Disney's animated hair. The goal isn't always to make it as realistic as possible, but rather believable within the fictional world of the story.

To make Rapunzel's CG-animated locks look as appealing as Disney's hand-drawn ones, the filmmakers started with a "hair bible" created by artist Glen Keane, who was behind some of the biggest hair hits of Disney's 2D past. The bible set rules, like how Rapunzel's hair could never fall in anything resembling a straight line. It had to have volume; rhythmic curves, twists, and turns; and a signature swoop in the front.

But that shampoo-commercial hair wouldn't be so easy to replicate in 3D.

Nadim: It's not hand-drawn, where you're focusing more on the shaping and you could cheat. You have to kind of take everything into account when you're doing CG hair, even stuff that's not on screen.

Narrator: Like wind or different sources of light or shadow.

And Rapunzel's strands interacted with the environment in ways never seen before. You had hair interacting with cloth, with skin, with other hair. The other characters were constantly touching, pulling, climbing, and rolling in it. Accounting for all these interactions would require simulation, a way of automating the movement of elements like hair, fur, and cloth.

Michelle Lee Robinson: The only movie before "Tangled" where I think we had really even attempted simulated hair was "Bolt" with Penny. We knew we had a huge task ahead of us to go from basically that to 70-foot-long flowing hair.

Narrator: Engineers then created a program called Dynamic Wires, which combined physically based simulation with laws for determining the hair's behavior that defied physics. This allowed the artists to make Rapunzel's hair twist and turn in exactly the ways they wanted.

In real life, this hair would weigh 60 to 80 pounds, so it'd clump into a mass or drag on the ground, like a heavy tail. But in the movie, you see it gliding smoothly along.

Meanwhile, to give the artists more power to sculpt the look of Rapunzel's hair, the team broke down her 140,000 strands into 147 different tubes.

Michelle: The idea was to sculpt tubes of hair that would represent the main blocks of hair. That process allowed us to kind of control the way the hair would break apart and interpolate.

Narrator: This tube-grooming tool was the predecessor to Tonic, the hair-grooming software that Disney still uses today.

Nadim: A lot of the technology from that movie pretty much still exists till this day or has evolved into a newer form.

Narrator: You can see that clearly in "Frozen," which had over 50 unique hairstyles. Believe it or not, Elsa was originally going to have black, spiky short hair. But as the characters evolved, Disney decided to give both Elsa and Anna light-colored braids, in line with the Norwegian cultural traditions that inspired the movie.

Michelle: We were pulling the hair from her head, weaving it through into a braid all the way to the end. And just trying to ensure that those braid pieces didn't crash into each other and would bend and move properly was a challenge for us.

Narrator: For "Bolt," Disney had developed a hair-brushing tool called iGroom, which worked well on short-haired characters. But that plus the tube tools from "Tangled" weren't enough for braided looks, so Disney's engineers built a new hair-grooming system called Tonic. Tonic is a volume-based tool, which lets artists group the hairs on a character's head and move and direct those sections of hair in the desired ways. This allowed look artists like Michelle to create the first versions of complex styles within a few days, a process that before would've taken several weeks.

The team was also able to use Tonic for the hair on the wolves and horses and the shaggy reindeer hair on Sven's neck. Elsa's hair had another environmental element to adapt to: snow.

Michelle: Particles of snow or sparkles on top of hair is like procedural geometry on top of procedural geometry. So that was hard to figure out.

Narrator: And then there were the gusts of wind.

Michelle: Very stylized bang shapes that, you know, these kind of pieces that formed that really distinctive silhouette. She really does, towards the end of the movie, get blown around quite a bit, and trying to balance maintaining that stylization and that kind of appealing shape language with real physical motion.

Narrator: Figuring out hair's interaction with the wintry elements in "Frozen" paid off in "Moana," where the focus was on hair's interaction with more forces, like water and character movements.

Things might have been more straightforward if the demigod Maui had been bald, like The Rock himself, which was the original plan. But Polynesian cultural advisors pointed out that Maui's long hair is a source of his spiritual energy, so both Maui and Moana ended up with long, curly-wavy hair. I've only been thinking of keeping this hair silky and being awesome again.

Narrator: The first task was sculpting their zigzag, or S-shaped, curls, a hair shape Disney hadn't created before. Michelle: Making those shapes on very, very long hair and then trying to figure out how to manage those individual curl locks so they don't poke through each other and catch on each other.

Narrator: This task required Disney to expand Tonic's tube-grooming tool, giving it the ability to curl the hair up. After sculpting the shape, the team figured out how the waves would move and hold their look.

Nadim: Part of the trick with something like wavy hair or curly hair is retaining the volume of the hair. Because if you just sim it as is, it'll just collapse and fall flat on her head. So how do you retain the flowiness of it?

Narrator: The team developed what they called an elastic rod model, which determined the degree to which the hair would retain its twists and springiness under different forces, like wind or water.

Nadim: If, let's say, Moana is falling through the sky and her hair's really stretched, well, how much of her hair is going to be a full straight line versus how much curl is going to be there? Or if she compresses, how much is it going to bunch up?

Narrator: But Disney also wanted to give its animators an ability to guide the simulation of the hair. So the engineers built a new hair program, Quicksilver, that combined rigging and grooming controls. Instead of animating the characters with static hair, now, the animators could put the hair into starting poses, and Quicksilver's engine would use those poses to determine the resulting movement.

By allowing artists to shape the posing of the hair, Disney was able to recover some of the expressiveness of hand-drawn animation that could often get lost in CG.

Michelle: It's particularly useful for the interaction moments, where the character is doing something with their hair specifically, and the animator wants to guide what that's going to be.

Narrator: They wanted Moana in particular to be able to constantly play with her hair, since that habit is typical of teenagers, as they observed it in actor Auli'i Cravalho as she performed Moana's lines in the studio.

The characters' darker hair also broke new ground for Disney.

Nadim: If you look at kind of previous movies, "Tangled," "Frozen," we haven't really done any black, darkish hair colors. So that reacts fairly differently to light than other hair colors, and how do you kind of still show its richness? You kind of have to have a movie that needs a hair color to then be able to see how far your technology goes and then tune to that. And now we're at a pretty good spot with actually the shader being able to handle a wide range of hair colors.

Narrator: All of these technologies and more came into play in "Encanto."

The shading advancements from "Moana" made it possible to get the rich shades of hair in the Madrigal family, and the S-shaped curls seen on Moana and Maui appeared on some characters in "Encanto."

Jose: We had the software to be able to do type 1 hair, type 2 hair very easily, but we hadn't really figured out how to do coils that are actually helical and that actually look like springs. Specifically for Mirabel, she had kind of a type 3 curly hair, like, loose ringlets that get kind of tighter in certain places.

Narrator: The team added this tighter type of coil into Tonic.

Jose: So there was a lot of collaboration with the technology team trying to figure out what is hair actually doing when it starts to coil versus when it's wavy and then figuring out how we can get our tools to actually do that.

Narrator: Emphasizing the unique attributes of each hair type was a big part of Jose's job as a character look development artist.

Jose: We're trying to figure out, what naturally is beautiful about this type of hair and how can we emphasize that?

Narrator: And the diversity goes all the way down to the individual hairs on a character's head.

Jose: Curl direction is very important. Because you don't want two curls to look exactly the same, because then it feels very artificial. In everybody's hair, there's a lot of variation. Things like variety in size of the curls, hair color. We try to make sure that nothing is symmetrical.

Narrator: Every strand of hair also figured in to the dance sequences of "Encanto," building on the movement work in "Moana." The artists started by looking at a lot of reference material, including footage of the choreography.

Michelle: We knew that Mirabel and Luisa and a lot of the characters were going to be really active and jumping around and in a musical fantasy sequence that they could be hanging upside down. Sometimes in those tests, you find out that, like, one piece of hair is quite a bit longer than the other. And so you have to go back in and adjust it.

Narrator: The team would have to look at whether all the strands of hair reacted naturally to the character's movements and to each other. It was important as ever to honor differences in textures for every character.

Previously, Disney princesses had mostly straight hair that moved in big, sweeping paths. To make more tightly curled hair move naturally in "Encanto," the team had to adjust this approach.

Edna: We used to talk about how, when they were dancing, how the hair would have to move, how the hair would have to perform. For example, we have the idea that Afro hair, or African hair, has not movement. And we have the perception that that's something bad, but that's not bad. It's just our hair. Our hair doesn't have a lot of movement. It's OK that it stay like that, you know? So it doesn't have to be a ponytail with straight hair to be beautiful.

Narrator: What set "Encanto" apart from previous movies was also the sheer scale of its hair diversity, not just for the Madrigal family but for the entire town.

Edna: We have the 12 hair textures in the 12 chapters of the family, but also we have different styles in the whole town in "Encanto." You can see turbans. You can see other type of braids. More indigenous population, for example, in Colombia. There's a little girl in the town, she has an Afro not like this with turban, but all free. And also you can find women with braids, very Colombian and African style.

Narrator: Every single head of hair had to be styled meticulously by the artists, picking up where they left off with "Frozen."

Nadim: So if you watch kind of the evolution of having straight-hair characters, and then suddenly "Encanto" has all these crowd characters with braids, and we could barely do two-braid characters on "Frozen." So the advancements are really there, and they trickle down.

Narrator: But at the start of production, braiding hair was still a very manual process.

Jose: So, like, how you would actually braid actual hair in real life, we have to do that with essentially 3D tubes that we use in our computer. By the end of the movie, we had a more automatic process for making braids where you just draw or you create a curve, a line along the head where you want your braid to come out, and then it'll do a little computer-made braid for you.

Narrator: That doesn't mean all the work is finished.

Jose: There's so much diversity, even within braid types, that then there's more complex braids that we're looking at to try to figure out how to make those look really good.

Narrator: Ultimately, "Encanto" made history as the first Disney animated movie to represent the full range of hair textures, from 1A to 4C; a milestone reached by building a foundation of tools and then adapting them.

Nadim: What's also great about these tools is we're able to repurpose them in areas that you might not expect. The system that we use to do hair is the same system that we use to do plenty of other things, like Mirabel's dress. Her skirt has tons and tons of embroidery on it. We were able to use iGroom to be able to do some of the embroidery.

Narrator: The technological progress is impressive on its own, but it's always done in service of telling bigger stories.

Michelle: I think now at this point we have a really complete set of tools, and we should be able to make and represent the panoply of humanity, which is a really good place to be.

Continued here:

The evolution of Disney's 3D-animated hair from 'Tangled' to 'Encanto' - Insider

PORTSMOUTH, United Kingdom Science has finally uncovered the evolutionary reason why we tend to bite our nails, touch our face, or fidget when under stress. To evoke support! Scientists from the University of Portsmouth and Nottingham Trent University report that showing signs of stress may make people more likable and subtly encourage others to act more positively towards them.

Monkeys and apes display similar restless behavior when stressed out as well. So, the research team set out to investigate this instinctive paradox. According to the study, actions like scratching, nail-biting, fidgeting, and touching ones face or hair all tell onlookers that you are in a weakened state. Advertising vulnerability isnt exactly conducive to surviving out in the wild.

We wanted to find out what advantages there might be in signaling stress to others, to help explain why stress behaviors have evolved in humans, says Dr. Jamie Whitehouse, a research fellow at NTUs School of Social Sciences, in a university release.

If producing these behaviors leads to positive social interactions from others who want to help, rather than negative social interactions from those who want to compete with you, then these behaviors are likely to be selected in the evolutionary process. We are a highly cooperative species compared to many other animals, and this could be why behaviors which communicate weakness were able to evolve, he continues.

The investigation found that people are indeed quite capable of accurately noticing when someone around them is experiencing stress. Additionally, those noticing that something was off reacted more positively towards the anxious individuals.

The team recorded each person in their experiment while they participated in a mock presentation and interview session. Importantly, they told each person to prepare these presentations on very short notice. Researchers then showed the interviews to a different group of people they called raters. These raters had to assess the stress level of the people in the recordings.

Sure enough, participants who admitted to feeling stress during the presentation were perceived as being more stressed out by the raters. Those who displayed more stressful behaviors like nail-biting were also rated as being more stressed.

Critically, participants who were perceived as more stressed were also considered more likable by other people. Study authors theorize this may partially explain why primates evolved to outwardly display signs of stress.

If the individuals are inducing an empathetic-like response in the raters, they may appear more likable because of this, or it could be that an honest signal of weakness may represent an example of benign intent and/or a willingness to engage in a cooperative rather than competitive interaction, something which could be a likable or preferred trait in a social partner, explains study co-author Professor Bridget Waller.

This fits with current understanding of expressivity, which tends to suggest that people who are more emotionally expressive are more well-liked by others and have more positive social interactions, she adds.

All in all, these results strongly suggest the average person can accurately detect when someone else is feeling anxious based on their physical behaviors.

Our team is currently investigating whether young children also show this sensitivity to stress states. By looking at childhood we can understand how difficult it is to detect stress, as well as identifying how exposure to adults stress might impact young children, concludes study co-author Dr. Sophie Milward from the University of Portsmouth.

The study is published the journal Evolution and Human Behavior.

Read the rest here:

Evolution of anxiety: Humans may show signs of stress to gather support - Study Finds

Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, employees proved they could work effectively and productively from home and many are planning to continue doing so despite the widespread return to offices.

According to a recent study by CCS Insight, although pandemic restrictions are easing in many regions, employees are determined that remote working will continue to play a vital role. This will have a profound effect on the way IT departments reconfigure telephony, unified communications (UC) services and Wi-Fi networks to support post-pandemic working methods.

The survey of 660 employees in European and US organisations reports that 90% of those who are able to work remotely want to retain the option to do so, with just over a quarter (27%) wanting to work remotely all the time. The appetite for full-time remote working varies slightly by region, at 38% in Germany, 36% in the US and 33% in the UK.

A much higher proportion of respondents, at 62%, favour a hybrid model, whereby they would work from home three days per week.

Analysts at Gartner forecast that the number of remote workers will have doubled to over two-thirds of digital workers by 2023, shifting buyer requirements towards work-from-anywhere capabilities.

The nature of remote and hybrid working means people are continuing to hold meetings online, even with the easing of pandemic restrictions and offices reopening. According to CCS Insight, this continued reliance on virtual meetings is triggering disruption across the employee productivity technology market.

Its survey found that use of the two leading platforms Microsoft Teams and Zoom jumped by over 50% in 2021, with the products being used by 47% and 41% of employees respectively. This is having a dramatic impact on the use of traditional voice technologies in organisations, with phone calls down 20% compared with pre-pandemic levels.

This is not just about using video conferencing, says CCS Insight principal analyst Angela Ashenden. The lines between the different forms of work-related communications are blurring, with a shift from voice to telephony apps, she adds.

CCS Insights research found that almost a quarter of employees expect their use of desk phones to further decrease over the next 12 months, with voice-only and video calls on meeting apps expected to grow strongly.

Popular apps combine enterprise messaging, telephony and video conferencing as cloud-based UC services with relatively straightforward subscription plans. In fact, the unified communications as a service (UCaaS) market has reached a point of maturity where the services available are superior to on-premise systems.

Gartners Magic Quadrant for UCaaS report, published in October 2021, identifies Cisco, Microsoft, Zoom, 8x8 and RingCentral as market leaders.

According to the report, for Gartner clients that subscribe to Microsoft 365, messaging is almost always awarded to Microsoft. In the most challenging telephony environments, however, such as hospitals, manufacturing, field services and retail, its clients select providers with the most extensive capabilities and a longer track record, such as RingCentral, Cisco and 8x8.

However, while senior IT leaders understand infrastructure spending and will err towards economies of scale to reduce communications costs, CCS Insights Ashenden says employees prefer to use the tools they are accustomed to, which means they may organise and host conference calls on their favourite video conferencing app, even though the organisation may have a company-wide contract with another provider.

With 80 million monthly telephony users, Microsoft Teams has experienced the largest UCaaS adoption rate among the top providers.

Gartners Magic Quadrant for UCaaS highlights Microsofts expansion of Calling Plans from 11 to 28 countries, along with its introduction of an Operator Connect programme and a Voice-Enabled Channels feature, which Gartner says offers lightweight call centre-like capabilities.

Teams also offers location-based routing and live captions for calls. There are 1,000+ apps available in the Teams App store.

Regarding enhancements to Zoom, Gartner says the company has introduced Power Pack, a desktop experience for reception console users, and an enhanced dashboard for real-time and historic call queue analytics.

It is now offering a hardware-as-a-service option for IP phones in 18 countries, and Zoom United, a bundled phone, meeting and chat offering for less complexity and commercial effectiveness. It also offers the Phone Appliance, which allows a Zoom app experience for desk phones.

In July 2021, Zoom put in a $14.9bn bid to acquire contact centre-as-a-service (CCaaS) provider Five9. But the two companies failed to reach an agreement and the acquisition was abandoned in September 2021.

Gartner notes that Cisco has expanded the telephony feature set in its Webex service to support large organisations. Telephony is now available in 85 countries in 21 languages and Cisco now offers an e-commerce site for web-based purchasing.

Like many of the products featured in the Gartner report, Webex uses AI-based noise removal, which offers hybrid workers a better conferencing experience.

While it is known for its telephony service, RingCentral has been expanding into the online video conferencing market.

Gartner points out that the company has formed strategic partnerships with Verizon and Vodafone, made e-commerce investments for direct sales, and put a massive investment in RingCentral Video meetings, adding virtual backgrounds and closed captioning.

Other changes listed in the Gartner report include redesigned mobile and desktop clients to keep pace with rival offerings, and expanded developer support via RingCentral Engage application programming interfaces (APIs).

UCaaS is often discussed alongside communications platforms as a service (CPaaS), where services are more tailored to organisations wishing to develop functionality that fits closely with internal enterprise systems. CPaaS is generally seen as a way to help organisations develop and improve their end-to-end customer experience.

A study from Forrester, commissioned by Vonage, reported in October 2021 that seven in 10 firms feel they are able to provide information to customers when, where and how they want it. The online survey of 1,037 global customer and digital experience decision-makers and influencers found that 98% of CPaaS users are very or extremely effective at getting their customers the information they need, compared with just 37% of organisations that dont use a CPaaS.

According to Gartner, a capability that has seen increasing market demand is the integration of universal communications capabilities with business applications that make workflows more efficient. For instance, 8x8, one of the leaders in Gartners Magic Quadrant for UCaaS, develops software for the entire UCaaS and CCaaS stack.

There is clearly plenty of choice when it comes to selecting a unified communications service. The majority of products provide off-the-shelf video conferencing, telephony and messaging. Businesses looking to streamline workflows may need to consider how these systems integrate with their customer experience platform, customer relationship management (CRM) and other enterprise systems.

What is clear from the industry experts Computer Weekly has spoken to is that these systems need to be able to support hybrid working patterns and hence office wireless networks require a rethink.

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Evolution of unified comms services - ComputerWeekly.com