Category Archives: Human Longevity

Executive Summary

The coronavirus crisis has led to new consumer behaviors and sentiments. The author recommends five ways for brands to serve and grow their customers, mitigate risk, and take care of their people during this difficult time: 1) Present with empathy and transparency; 2) Use media in more agile ways; 3) Associate your brand with good; 4) Track trends and build scenarios; 5) Adapt to new ways of working to keep delivering.

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In times of crisis, it may be hard for marketers to know where to begin. In just a few short weeks, people have shifted into protection mode, focused on themselves, their families, their employees, their customers, and their communities. Social media reflects this, with pleas for fellow citizens to follow government safety guidelines. People have crossed partisan lines to build bridges within their neighborhoods and communities and unify against an invisible force.

With social distancing keeping many people at home, were also seeing major shifts in behavioral trends. Consumers have returned to broadcast and cable television and other premium media sources for credible information. They are also seeking more in the way of escapism and entertainment downloading gaming apps, spending even more time on social media, and streaming more movies and scripted programming. And between remote working arrangements and live-streamed workout classes, college lectures, and social engagements, we are testing the bandwidth of our homes in a largely pre-5G world.

Meanwhile, the need for physical goods is placing pressure on new channels, with demand for e-commerce rising to new levels. For those who do venture out, grocery and convenience stores are the source for essentials, but supply is inconsistent. Health and safety concerns are driving more customers toward frictionless payment systems, such as using mobile phones to pay at check-out without touching a surface or stylus.

Some of these behavior changes may be temporary, but many may be more permanent. As people move beyond the current mode of survival, the momentum behind digital-experience adoption is unlikely to reverse as people are forced by circumstances to try new things. With so much changing so fast during this difficult time, what actions can brands take to serve and grow their customer base, mitigate risk, and take care of their people ?

People feel vulnerable right now. Empathy is critical. Many banks, for example, have moved to waive overdraft fees, recognizing the hardship on their customers. SAP has made its Qualtrics Remote Work Pulse platform free to companies who might be rapidly transitioning to new ways of working. Such instances show humility in the face of a force larger than all of us.

The nuances of brand voice are more delicate than ever. Brands that use this time to be commercially exploitative will not fare well. Better to do as Guinness did in the period surrounding St. Patricks Day, when the company shifted its focus away from celebrations and pub gatherings and instead leaned into a message of longevity and wellbeing. In these moments, we dont have all the answers, and we need to acknowledge that. If you make pledges, even during uncertain times, you have to be able to deliver on what you say.

To quickly pivot creative messages as circumstances change, marketers will want to build more rapid-response operating models internally and with agencies. Access to remote production and creative capacity will become particularly important as the crisis evolves. Nike, for example, immediately moved to adopt a new message: Play inside, play for the world. And in order to promote social distancing and show a commitment to public safety, Chiquita Brands removed Miss Chiquita from their logo. Im already home. Please do the same and protect yourself, its Instagram caption read.

Beyond creative, as the mix of actual media platforms used by consumers changes quickly, marketers should consider modifying their media mix. For example, with digital entertainment spiking, marketers may want to amplify their use of ad-supported premium video streaming and mobile gaming. Similarly, as news consumption peaks while consumers jostle to stay informed, brands should not fear that adjacency, given the level of engagement and relevance. News may simply be an environment that requires more careful monitoring of how frequently ads appear to avoid creative being over-exposed, which can damage brand equity.

People will remember brands for their acts of good in a time of crisis, particularly if done with true heart and generosity. This could take the form of donating to food banks, providing free products for medical personnel, or continuing to pay employees while the companys doors are closed. Adobe, for example, immediately made Creative Cloud available to K-12 institutions, knowing this was a moment to give rather than be purely commercial. Consumers will likely remember how Ford, GE, and 3M partnered to repurpose manufacturing capacity and put people back to work to make respirators and ventilators to fight coronavirus. And people appreciate that many adult beverage companies, from Diageo to AB InBev, repurposed their alcohol-manufacturing capabilities to make hand sanitizer, alleviating short supplies with their Its in our hands to make a difference message.

Feel-good content that alleviates anxiety and promotes positive messaging will go a long way to enhancing the brand. However, companies need to show that their contributions are material and not solely for commercial benefit. Consumers recognize authenticity and true purpose.

Frequent tracking of human behavioral trends will help marketers gain better insights in real time. Marketers will want to measure sentiment and consumption trends on a regular basis to better adapt messaging, closely observing the conversation across social-media platforms, community sites, and e-commerce product pages to look for opportunities and identify looming crises more quickly. Companies should consider quickly building dashboards with this kind of data to fuel the right decisions.

Marketers will also want to consider building deeper connections with their C-suite colleagues to provide insights to executives who, increasingly, will be involved with marketing choices. The marketing team should work closely with finance and operations to forecast different scenarios and potential outcomes, depending on how long the crisis lasts.

Its encouraging how quickly many companies were able to transition to remote working arrangements. Deploying collaboration technologies can seamlessly provide chat, file sharing, meeting and call capabilities, enabling teams to stay connected and remain productive. Already, virtual happy hours are emerging as the new normal to build team morale. Partners are pitching remotely, recognizing that an in-face sales call is unlikely to transpire for weeks to come. Leaders have to do their best to transition each element of the operating modelfrom marketing, to sales, to serviceto this new normal. New sources of innovation and even margin improvement will emerge out of our current discomfort.

We are in the acknowledge-and-adapt phase of the Covid-19 pandemic. But we also have to plan for lifebeyond the crisis. As we navigate what we know, marketing leaders must work externally to keep their brands and customer journeys as whole as possible, while working internally to do three things:

Unquestionably, there is a forced acceleration of the digital transformation agenda as we recognize how quickly customers and employees have embraced digitally enabled journeys and experiences.

Brands are all having to think, operate, and lead in new ways during these uncertain and unprecedented circumstances, and we will all have to learn together with both confidence and humility.

The views reflected in this article are the views of the authors and dont necessarily reflect the views of the global EY organization or its member firms.

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Brand Marketing Through the Coronavirus Crisis - Harvard Business Review

I once had a boyfriend with a very sensitive nose. It wasnt that his sense of smell was particularly extraordinary; on the contrary, it was rather bad. It was that his nose could hardly be touched without him emitting a suffering ouch! and immediately protecting his organ from further violation. Needless to say, I often happened to be the involuntary cause of this pain, and of his exclamation no, no, not my nose!

I often remembered this ex-boyfriends nose when I started to have issues with my own nose in the summer of 2016, although my symptoms were different. I also thought often of Nikolai Gogols famous short story The Nose, as well as Sigmund Freuds psychoanalytical conclusions about the naso-genital relationship, the fetishistic allure of the noses shine and phallic character. The latter was developed by Freuds close friend Wilhelm Fliess whounfortunately, and almost fatallyconvinced Freud of its relevance. All if this came back to me last year, when I curated Insurgency of Life, a retrospective exhibition of Goldin+Sennebys work.

As for my nose, it has demanded special attention since I was a child. Being prone to allergies, I blow my nose often, and use nose spray regularly. In 2016, the issues began in May with a simple cold caught on a trip to Singapore, which settled firmly in my snout. Week after week, this fairly prominent organ of mine was blocked, while at the same time continuously running, regardless of how much I cleared it. Now, you might find this too privateother peoples snot can be even more difficult to deal with than ones ownbut it is necessary to outline how relatively common symptoms turned into something quite unexpected.

There was no feverthe rest of my fifty-year-old body felt perfectly fine. There was just this blocked, and simultaneously running, nose of mine. After a month, I went to see a doctor in Stockholm who prescribed a course of antibiotics. But the snot kept running and the nose remained blocked. Two weeks later I went back to the clinic and, as it goes with the medical system in Sweden, I saw another doctor, only to be prescribed another course of the same antibiotics. It was high summer in Sweden and I began to feel out of place with my out-of-the-ordinary nose. I had to organize a special high-volume delivery of tissues to the island in the Stockholm archipelago where I spent vacation. Still no improvement. It was exhausting, and terribly annoying.

There was no other choice than to visit the doctor again. This third doctor determined that the problem was the kind of antibiotics I had been taking, and quickly prescribed another brand which would surely stave off the problem. This was at the end of July, the day before I would leave for South Korea to install and inaugurate the 11th Gwangju Biennale. Temperatures past 40 degrees Celsius and high humidity levels welcomed me there. All the while my nose was running, and still blocked. Then grinding headaches appeared with increasing intensity, which sometimes prevented me from speaking. Finally, my biennial colleagues convinced me to go to the emergency room at the local hospital, where I signed in at 5 p.m. on a Friday afternoon.

By 9 p.m. the same evening I was lying on a surgery table, surrounded by a swarm of people dressed in white. A scan had revealed that the entire sinusfrom the hollow parts around the nose up to the forehead, and further still to the paranasal cavities in the cranial boneswas full. My brain and eyes were threatened. The sinus turned out to be completely stuffed with nasal secretion so thick that it could only be removed mechanically. I was put to sleep, and upon awakening, my nose was sore. Very sore. The anesthetics made me nauseous. Smiling, a friendly doctor reported that the surgery went well: my sinus had been successfully emptied. They had also identified the cause of my peculiar nasal adventure: a creature. To be precise, a fungus. This particular fungus is common in hot and humid areas across the planet, thriving inside human noses, where it is wonderfully warm, damp, and dark.

In other words, for almost three months I had lived with another living entity. But this fellow traveler was different from the kilograms of bacteria we carry around. This fungus had decided that my body, my sinus, was perfect for its development. Expressing my surprise to the doctor, he in turn shocked me when he confessed that while I was under anesthesia, he had taken the liberty of performing a nose job on me. Which he then followed by asking if I enjoyed downhill skiing in that faraway northern homeland of mine. Though downhill skiing always frightened me and I had gone to some lengths to avoid it at school, the news of the nose job frightened me even more. Considering how popular it is for women in South Korea to reshape their noses, which mostly means diminishing them, and not having looked at a mirror after the surgery, I feared the worst. In Korean terms my snout is big, and a nose job would have surely provided me with a smaller one. As I scrambled for my purse containing my pocket mirror, the doctor continued: we discovered that your right nostril was narrow and crooked, so we have widened it and straightened it out.

While this might have amused Freud, who also had issues with his nose, it would probably have been less entertaining to his close friend, the nose, ear, and throat doctor Wilhelm Fliess. Interested in the relationship between the nose and the genitals, Fliess introduced the concept of nasality instead of anality. According to Fliess, the nose is simply a sign of the penis, with the swelling of nasal mucosa leading to a Fliess syndrome. Freuds nose problems were subsequently treated by Fliess, an otorhinolaryngologist who experimented with cocaine as an anesthetic. Freud fared better than another of Fliesss patients, Emma Eckstein, who was treated by Freud for hysteria and became a psychoanalyst herself. Fliess almost killed her by forgetting gauze inside her nose while operating on it. This unfortunate event led to one of Freuds most well-known dreams concerning Irmas injection, which became key to The Interpretation of Dreams. The dream is said to deal with Freuds anxiety around allowing Ecksteins mistreatment, through the dream function of displacing the latent contentwhich is connected to wish fulfillmentwith manifest content, i.e., the scenario of the dream. It is noteworthy that the nose has played such a seminal role in the development of the principle of displacementa major trope for todays contemporary art.

Whereas Freuds and Ecksteins noses were given medical treatment, in Nikolai Gogols satirical magical realist story in St. Petersburg, the nose disappears. One morning a barber finds a nose in his breakfast bread, while at the same time a civil servant looking for a pimple discovers that his entire olfactory organ has gone missing. Wild speculation about the disappearance and fate of the nose arise, until one day it comes parading down Nevsky Prospect wearing a full uniform and a plumed hat. The sword-carrying nose continues traveling around the city claiming to be a state councilor until the police return it to its rightful owner, who returns it to its rightful place. Expressing his befuddlement, Gogols civil servant exclaims that authors ought to write about such a strange thing happening.

Goldin+Senneby, Insurgency of Life at e-flux, New York, 2019. Installation view. Courtesy: the artists. Photo: Gustavo Murillo Fernndez-Valds.

And here I am, attempting to put my own nasal adventure into words. It feels a bit odd as I am not used to writing about myself, and even less about my body. And yet, this adventure was a transformative experience: a close, even intimate, encounter with another creature, a new arrival reminding me of the relentless contingency of the life I live alongside so many others. In Donna Haraways terms, I ended up being-in-encounter with another critter. I had an inner sputnik, a traveling companiona stowaway to be precise. For a moment, our shared material habitat made us companion species, where the one invisible to the naked eye almost knocked out the towering host. Not only did the experience lead to a very situated knowledge, it was indeed a multispecies encounter that surpassed sympoeisis to become making kin. I was forced to coexist with this other creature, and I had to deal with the situation and accept our shared condition. Eventually the kinship did not work out. I had the upper hand and forced the fungus out of my body, with the help of Western medicine practiced by a South Korean doctor.

Insisting on multi-relationality across conventional borders, Haraways writing, and especially her neologisms, practice the worlding that she describes. She hints at this implying the creation of something that goes beyond the status quo: internally and externally, this planet can no longer afford to remain the same. Like artists, she gives form to what is not yet there for us to grasp. She is trying to take response-ability for the condition we are in by using a new vocabulary to emphasize critical points. A new condition inevitably demands other ways of describing and dealing with it. Just as a young revolutionary society like the nascent Soviet state and its hitherto unheard of form of society needed a new human, it also needed new forms of relationships between people. In this way, Haraways Terrapolisa speculative fabulation of a space for multispecies becoming-withcan be compared to the strongest contemporary art projects, or, in her words, art science worldings as sympoietic practices for living on a damaged planet.1

The allergic fungal sinusitis I was diagnosed with probably had to do with my allergic sensitivity to pollen and cats, as well as all fresh fruit and most vegetables. As a psychological and social tendency, oversensitivity is familiar in popular culture as well as in the fine arts. We know a lot about high-strung individuals and their inner life, whether male geniuses, hysterical women, or something in between. In comparison, physical oversensitivity is not very well understood in medicine, culture, or society. And yet I share the condition with many other people. The World Allergy Organization states that 10 to 40 percent of the worlds population suffers from allergies. They predict that by 2025, half of the population of Europe will suffer from one allergy or another.2

It is well-known that allergies are the immune systems response to substances it cannot tolerate, treating otherwise harmless material in its environment as threats to be fought. The normal condition for the body should be peacethere is no reason per se to fight pollen, cats, fresh fruit, or even vegetablesyet this condition causes the body to forcefully defend itself, even declare war against enemy invaders. It is a kind of corporeal alarm giving way to a state of exception for the organism. This in turn can easily become a semi-permanent or even permanent state of exception, as with long-term states of emergency in countries like Syria, where it lasted for nearly fifty years (1963 to 2011), or for two years (2015 to 2017) more recently in France.

In reality, this immunological condition is a distant relative to autoimmune diseases such as AIDS and multiple sclerosis. These diseases are markers of our time; where the former carries the burden of a stigmatized new disease signifying an important moment of both solidarity and hostility in Western societies, the latter primarily afflicts the wealthy northern hemisphere. Furthermore, multiple sclerosis is three times more likely to be found in women than in men, which is fitting for a disease first described in 1884 by the neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, who famously researched female hysteria, and who also had considerable influence on Freuds work.

Goldin+Senneby, Insurgency of Life at e-flux, New York, 2019. Installation view. Courtesy: the artists. Photo: Gustavo Murillo Fernndez-Valds.

Curating Goldin+Sennebys exhibition Insurgency of Life at e-flux in New York last year brought me back to issues of autoimmunity. The exhibition centers on a fungus called Isaria sinclairii, and was introduced by the artists with the following passage:

You remember it as a stressful period.You had started a new job and your relationship was out of balance. Your partner had left for France and communication was difficult. You travelled to Paris so you could talk.Your left foot went stiff.Part of your abdomen went stiff, just around the solar plexus.Actually maybe more numb than stiff.The kind of numb, tingling sensation that you can have when your arm falls asleep. The pins and needles sensation. For a moment you cant locate your arm. You cant move it.Only this time the moment of numbness, of paresthesia, was extended. It went on too long. Your foot was numb. Your solar plexus was numb. And it wouldnt go away.You assumed it was psychological. Related to stress. The emotional stress of your crumbling relationship.

In an elongated clinical space with pale violet walls and bleachers at either end, the Isaria sinclairii fungus was cultivated with vast amounts of nutrient agar in a stainless-steel pool on legs. Contrary to that of my ex-boyfriend, when unblocked my nose is one of my most developed senses. Already before entering the exhibition during install I was worried about the potential smell of this impressive fungal pool, and the prospect of another habitat being made in my nose. As I entered, the smell was distinct but faint, vaguely similar to a forest. Used as a youth elixir in traditional Chinese medicine, this fungus is hyper-selective, or we might say oversensitive, in its choice of habitat. In the wild, it seeks out and exclusively grows on cicada nymphs when they are hatching below ground. After colonizing the cicada, the fungus eventually grows and sprouts from its head. This violent drama, whose visual appearance is not unlike images of the so-called mushroom clouds of atomic bombs, was captured by Goldin+Senneby on a large X-ray photograph hung on the wall facing every visitor entering the exhibition space. Again, I was reminded of my fungus, which similarly threatened my eyes and my brain.

The Isaria sinclairii fungus cultivated in the exhibition is used in a medication called Gilenya, which 50 percent of Goldin+Senneby, Jakob Senneby, used to take for multiple sclerosis. Diagnosed with the nervous system disease in 1999, Senneby participated in a clinical trial for this new medicine developed by the pharmaceutical multinational Novartis as the first ever pill-based MS treatment. As all treatments of autoimmune conditions suppress the immune system, the long-term consequences of such treatments are still largely unknown. In the US, the FDA recently warned that stopping Gilenya could cause severe flush-out effects that can worsen the condition severely and irreversibly. It is well-known that pharmaceutical companies, like insurance companies, are some of the most aggressive data harvesters of our time. Learning from patients posting tutorials on YouTube, the artists had ten Lego robots made, each carrying a smartphone rocking back and forth to making the pedometers tick. The rocking sound became a soundtrack that might have sounded like grown-up cicadas at dusk who, unlike their young counterparts, escaped the cruel fungus.

These DIY cheating machines are meant to trick the insurance companies who monitor physical activity to discount the cost of health care. Similar to the demand that Facebook should pay wages to those who indirectly work for them by providing content through our online activities, the Lego robots restore value to those who are deemed sick. Just as we might demand the restitution of ancient artworks and other objects, we might do the same with the most intimate of things: our body. As a way to reclaim the biological human bodyand prevent the invasion of privacythe Lego robots are a refusal to comply with a wholesale capitalization of very individual experiences, extracting ever more data, presumably indexical data, to most likely be used for marketing or research, the risks of which became apparent to Senneby in the Novartis trial.

As a focal point in the exhibition, the fungus-cultivating pool took as a reference Lucas Cranach the Elders painting Fountain of Youth from 1546. Set in a forest with fantastical mountains in the background, the painting centers on a rectangular pool with steps on each side descending into the water. If the exhibition space at e-flux bore some resemblance to an anatomical theater, the painting offers the image of a stage for a drama of revitalization. Herodotus described how the fountain of youths magic water grants eternal life, and Cranachs painting depicts old, crippled, and feeble women being taken to the pool in carriages and wheelbarrows to receive a rejuvenating bath, from which they emerge on the right side of the painting with smooth and erect bodies and long, wavy ginger hair. Awaiting them on this side are knights and other men with whom the rejuvenated maidens dine, dance, and probably engage in some amorous activities. In our own era, such erotics of longevity and immortality are expressed differently, from Silicon Valley executives receiving transfusions of teenage blood to more general longings for healing, convalescence, and recovery from any and all disease.

In a small room at the back of the exhibition space, a series of surrealistic drawings bore the iconography of the story of Insurgency of Life. Each drawing was made of ten layers stacked on top of each other, with cut-out holes in each layer, and were inspired by Tove Janssons acclaimed 1952 childrens book The Book About Moomin, Mymble, and Little My.3 As a story about a motley crew of critters imbued with a strong sense of both magic and realism, they could be a distant cousin of Gogols story, giving space to the fantastical while the relationships and feelings of the characters are plausible and realistic. A unique feature of Janssons book is that each spread has a hole allowing the reader to peek onto the following spread. In the story, Moominwho, like all Moomin trolls, has an enormous round nose that would have intrigued both Freud and Fliessis supposed to bring a bottle of milk to his mother. Carrying it through a forest and a rocky landscape, Moomin encounters a mix of scary and friendly creatures, all sharing the harsh weather conditions. When he finally reaches his mothers sunny, blossoming garden, the milk is sour. But rather than the storyline, it is the form of the book that is of interest: the peek onto the next spread underscoring connections and relations, continuity and storytelling.

To work sequentially with a particular project over an extended period of time is characteristic of Goldin+Sennebys work. Each component leads to the next, planting seeds for the sequels. Made up of multiple parts, this long-haul tactic requires a sort of persistence to be able to stay with the trouble (in Haraways words) and tell an incredibly complicated story emphasizing interconnectivity, causality, and a certain kind of feedback. Yet, despite the physical body of the artist being out of sight, it is at the very center of Insurgency of Life. It is the site. Like in Mary Kellys 1976 feminist classic Post-Partum Documenta six-year inquiry into childbirth and the development of the relationship between the mother and the infantthe body itself is nowhere to be seen. Such a displacement is followed by real indexical objects: for Kelly, diapers and parts of blankets, while for Goldin+Senneby the body is displaced by the body of the fungus. Avoiding anthropomorphism without abandoning the materiality of the body becomes a way to make something highly personal without being private. Simultaneously, and in contrast to their previous work, the artists are suddenly present in the flesh, doing a lecture performance at the opening.

Goldin+Senneby with Johan Hjerpe, Illustration in Seven Layers, 2019. Courtesy: the artists. Photo: Gustavo Murillo Fernndez-Valds.

With Insurgency of Life, life itself has broken into the work of Goldin+Senneby, opening a view onto a situation that has accompanied the duo since they started working together fifteen years ago. However, this situationand its stark medical realityhas not been detectable in their art until now. Between care and extraction, this version of the retrospective traced a physical condition, not a sequence of works. Forming the third and final part of a trilogy of retrospectives, the New York edition quite literally entered a different kind of biopolitics than both their previous work and their retrospectives in Stockholm and Brisbane.4 In New York, the duo relied again on a group of steady collaborators, outsourcing many parts of the work. Compared to their multi-year project Headless, Insurgency of Life is less concerned with neoliberal subterfuge. While they still outsource many tasks, with time, their service providers have become more like collaborators. In this way, they are foregrounding a network of dependencies more than one of anonymities. Accepting this kind of proximity and continuity does appear to become a process of immunization.

The exhibition was also the beginning of a new novel, written incrementally by the acclaimed author Katie Kitamura. As opposed to Headless, Goldin+Sennebys experimental 2015 novel, this new novel has exited the world of offshore finance only to enter the field of gene manipulation and bio-capitalism. During the course of the exhibition, a performance entitled Crying Pine Tree took place at Triple Canopy, where Kitamura read from her first chapter of the new novel. Here, the main character, a gene-manipulated and autoimmune pine tree, encounters an investor and a geneticist who accelerate and exaggerate the immune system of the conifer in order to make it produce more sap. As a source for clean energy, the sap might prove in the long run to be a kind of liquid gold, in addition to being a natural disinfectant used since antiquity to treat wounds. Hovering between science, art, and fiction, the narrative of the novel displaces the immunological concerns of MS onto the flora. For years to come, the writer and the artists will feed each others creative process by allowing each step to infuse the next one.

But what is the body at stake here? It is an artistic double-bodyindividual and singular, yet at the same time collectivewhich already complicates the tradition of retrospective exhibitions. Compared to a lot of performance and body art of earlier decades, the relation of this double-body to the self is already intensely, and differently, politicized. Whereas before, it elaborated the elusive anonymity of offshore finance in Goldin+Sennebys Headless, today it opens onto the absolute situatedness of disease. Now it is springtime again, and as I am blowing my nose in self-imposed quarantine due to Covid-19, I have begun to suspect those of us affected by immune-related conditions to be an involuntary avant-garde. Placed at the forefront of how illnesses develop today, our bodies become the site for a parallel climate change from within. In order to begin to grasp this, we need, among other things, a sequel to Michel Foucaults 1961 Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Perhaps it should be called something like Oversensitivity and the Planet: A History of Immunity in the Age of Profit.

Maria Lind is a curator, writer, and educator based in Berlin and Stockholm. She is a lecturer at Konstfacks CuratorLab. In 2019 she published Seven Years: The Rematerialisation of Art from 2011 to 2017 with Sternberg Press. She is the coeditor of the recent publications Red Love: A Reader on Alexandra Kollontai; The New Model: An Inquiry; and Migration: Traces in an Art Collection. On the first of January 2020 she launched the Instagram project 52proposalsforthe20s with fifty-two artists invited to make weekly proposals for the new decade.

2020 e-flux and the author

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What Is Wrong with My Nose: From Gogol and Freud to Goldin+Senneby (via Haraway) - Journal #108 April 2020 - E-Flux

There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.

So said Vladimir Ilyich Lenin of the ferment of revolution, but he could just as easily have been talking about the 100 days that have passed since the moment coronavirus officially became a global phenomenon, the day China reported the new contagion to the World Health Organization.

The world has been transformed in that time, perhaps nowhere more so than Britain.

A hundred days ago, on 31 December, the UK prime minister delivered a video message full of hope and promise.

The coming year would, he said, be a fantastic one, the start of an exhilarating decade of growth, prosperity and opportunity. In 2020, he enthused, Britain would brim with confidence.

The early weeks suggested the PM might be right on one count at least. After three and a half years of rancour over Brexit, some of the poison began to drain out of the issue. Of course, it wasnt done, as Johnson promised it would be, but it seemed as if we might dwell on lesser worries.

We saw in 2020 debating Megxit, a country with no greater angst on its mind than whether the Sussexes should carry on royalling.

On 31 January, the UK formally left the European Union. This new coronavirus was low down on the bulletins, safely tagged as foreign news.

Even by early March, it had not quite bared its teeth. People knew the official advice but werent sure quite how seriously they were meant to take it. Those politicians involved in public health messaging might attempt an awkward elbow bump at the start of a meeting, only to end it with a handshake or even a bear hug.

Johnson himself, at a press conference on 3 March, cheerfully boasted that he was still shaking hands with people he met including, he said, people infected with coronavirus.

And yet, after a couple of those weeks in which decades happen, on 23 March Johnson was delivering a TV address to the nation, announcing a lockdown in what might have been a hackneyed scene from dystopian fiction. The pubs were closed, along with the football grounds and the cinemas and the theatres and the schools. Places that normally throb with noise were suddenly quiet and have remained so.

You can jog through Leicester Square, London, a place normally teeming with tourists, and hear nothing more than the flapping of a distant flag.

Two weeks on from that original edict and now the death toll is in the thousands with the prime minister himself in intensive care, a development that shook people who did not expect to be shaken. Decades, in weeks.

This is a story of change so rapid, we can barely absorb it.

People focus on the questions that are human scale and therefore digestible how long is the queue outside the supermarket? Do I need to wash vegetables if theyre wrapped in plastic? Can I walk in a park if everyone else is walking in the same park? perhaps because the larger questions are too big to take in, including the largest of all: is this plague going to kill someone I love? Will it kill me?

This is the greatest UK public health crisis in a century. It threatens a death toll in five figures. It dwarfs any such menace since the Spanish flu afflicted a nation already staggering from the losses of the first world war. Perhaps it will come to seem like an act of God that none of us could have done anything about, a plague on all our houses that could not be averted.

Or maybe a future public inquiry will examine the fact that doctors and nurses were denied basic protective equipment, that care workers were forced to use bin liners for aprons and Marigolds for gloves, along with the paucity of ventilators and, above all, Britains apparent inability to follow the WHOs instruction to test, test, test, and conclude that the UK response to Covid-19 ranks as one of the severest failures of public administration in the countrys long history.

That makes this a political crisis.

They were very slow. They didnt understand the scale of this, says one senior figure, who has witnessed the governments response close up. He says those at the top were blase, that emergency Cobra meetings were nothing like the efficient coordination exercises that have followed terror attacks, but chaotic, lacking decisiveness.

As for the PM, I was surprised at how not in control Johnson appeared to be. There was a lack of comparative data on how other countries were responding, a lack of thinking strategically or several moves ahead. Put simply, he says, the government was winging it.

The cabinet has looked callow in this period, lacking the seasoned faces of cabinets past. Dominic Raab, Rishi Sunak, Matt Hancock: they dont have that many years on the clock.

Every time a Michael Heseltine or Gordon Brown comes on the radio, social media brims with nostalgia for the heavyweights of yore.

Its one reason why the weekend just gone seemed to calm nerves. On Saturday, Labour elected a new leader who looked competent and capable. That brought one sigh of relief. Sunday brought another, as the country heard from its longest-serving public figure, its head of state.

The Queens ability to reassure rests on her status as monarch, of course, but also on her extraordinary longevity at the centre of our national life. As she reminded viewers of her TV address that night a vanishingly rare event in itself she has been communicating with Britons at moments of distress for an astonishing 80 years.

She recalled broadcasting to child evacuees in 1940, thereby summoning up the mystic power of the event which serves as the foundation story of modern Britain the moment when we stood alone against an evil menace, and prevailed. Her promise that we will meet again, at once a glance back to the wartime past and a glimpse of a more hopeful future, will be remembered as one of the most significant because necessary acts of her 68-year reign.

Had the weekend ended that way, a calm might have settled on the land. As one observer noticed, the Queens message, along with Starmers election, suggested the scaffolding of the British state was being hoisted back into place.

But the calm lasted less than an hour, the nerves jangling once more with the news that the PM had been taken to hospital proof that even the most protected individual in the country, a Falstaffian figure of hale and hearty vigour, was not beyond the claw of this dreaded virus.

Even so, despite the fear and the loneliness and the claustrophobia and the economic hardship of lockdown, few would say the country has sunk into despair.

Privately, our lives have been pared down to their barest essentials: no sport, no live entertainment, no nights out just work, for those who still have it, family and remote contact with friends.

The work has changed all laptops, pyjamas and Zoom for those who once toiled in offices while family life has changed too, becoming much more concentrated and intense.

For some, that has been an unexpected joy; for others, it has been suffocating and even dangerous.

But our public life has also been stripped to its essentials. Weve come to see whats indispensable and what is not.

It turns out that we can function without celebrities or star athletes, but we really cannot function without nurses, doctors, care workers, delivery drivers, the stackers of supermarket shelves or, perhaps unexpectedly, good neighbours.

If you didnt value those people before some of those belatedly recognised as key workers are among the lowest paid you surely value them now. In a new tradition, we emerge from our homes and start clapping every Thursday night at 8pm to make sure they know.

Almost everything the prime minister predicted a hundred days ago has failed to come true: 2020 will not be a year of growth or prosperity, but the very opposite. And yet, on one thing he was right. Somehow, we have left the widest rift of recent years behind.

Leave or remain now feels like an ancient divide, made suddenly irrelevant when the only distinction that matters is alive or dead.

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Coronavirus crisis has transformed our view of whats important - The Guardian

Throughout the past decade, various topics related to stem cells have made headlines across all platforms. From being hailed as the most innovative method for eradicating specific diseases, to being protested by various groups and organizations, the use of stem cells has gained national attention repeatedly. With promising initial scientific findings, and avid researchers aiming to solidify the presence of stem cell usage in the realm of science on a normalized basis, increasing numbers of startups, biotech giants, and independent companies are forging ahead with stem cell-related projects. As global connectivity, technological advancements, and the marriage between medicine and technology continues to evolve swiftly, Jason Hope sees stem cells will undoubtedly remaining in the spotlight.

Over 20 years ago, scientists successfully extracted the first human embryonic stem cells, and effectively grew these cells in a lab setting. The remarkable feat of being able to successfully grow the parent cells, which essentially allow for the growth of new cells in the body, was a hopeful moment for the medical sector involved in creating effective regenerative treatments for conditions like heart disease, Alzheimers, stroke, and Parkinsons Disease. Using basic reasoning, the successful regeneration of parent cells could provide the regeneration of undesired cells, leading to anti-aging results, or effective care for many age-related conditions that deteriorate the body over time.

Though this initial breakthrough was promising, the scientific community has not yet made significant strides in bringing stem cell therapy to market in a way that is well-researched, backed by medical associations, and commonly accepted by the scientific community. In fact, the only readily utilized stem cell treatments are related to successfully growing blood cells from matching donors for patients with various blood disorders. According to entrepreneur, philanthropist, and expert in the realm of anti-aging and longevity, Jason Hope, these initial utilization of stem cells are commendable, but require a lot more research in order to maximize the potential widespread benefits of stem cells in medicine.

Hope, who has devoted much of his philanthropic endeavors within the medical industry via groups like the SENS Organization, recognizes that most stem cell implementations are rightfully considered experimental until appropriate research, testing, and development can occur. As an expert in the realm of anti-aging, and the championing of increasing health throughout a lifetime, Jason Hope recognizes the potential distrust that can be formulated by the general public as a result of eager companies making lofty claims or promoting potentially faulty treatments not yet fully vetted by the medical community. Thus, while he remains avidly enthralled by the potential maximization of stem cell therapies, hope supports the long-term research needed to safely, successfully, and effectively generate breakthrough stem cell treatments.

Providing continued backing for the extensive research completed at the SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) Organization, Hopes contributions aid in the research aiming to create preventative treatments for degenerative diseases and utilizing breakthrough science to increase the overall long-term quality of life for individuals. Instead of focusing on the treatment of symptoms and the disease throughout the progression of the condition, the scientists at SENS work to examine ways to successfully prevent the disease from happening. Through this boundary-pushing work, a lot of their research focuses on stem cell intervention. According to Hope, stem cell treatments for Parkinsons Disease are now in the second stage of clinical trials at SENS. While the process of undergoing such extensive trials may appear slow, it is crucial to maintaining overall public support via successful treatment launches and promising in terms of the long-term possibilities linked to stem cell treatments.

In addition to the research being conducted by SENS, preliminary medical studies are being conducted with a myriad of uses for stem cells. Experimental stem cell transplants of retinal cells were recently utilized in a small research study of macular generation, providing initially promising results for the handful of patients who have received artificially generated retinal cells. Elsewhere, scientists have begun to explore ways to minimize potential rejection of stem cells in organs like the liver, through maximizing the most conducive environment for stem cells to thrive. While these slow-moving vehicles of change are less prominent than startups promising the proverbial Fountain of Youth via experimental stem cell treatments, these medically sound research studies are forming the backbone of stem cell treatment for the future.

As with all scientific and medical innovations, Hope also recognizes the potential risks, hurdles, and roadblocks within the growing field of stem cell research, and integration into medicine. From supply chain concerns to potential long-term side effects, and the risk of overly eager startups making too-lofty claims, Hope understands that the road to the everyday utilization of stem cells remains lengthy and potentially bumpy. However, the proverbial juice may very well be worth the squeeze in this example. As stem cells harvest the potential power to overturn the degenerative effects of some of the most prominent diseases, allow individuals to maintain active health for elongated periods of time, and increase the quality of life for countless individuals, expanding upon the initial promising research is potentially a pivotal point for the medical community and humankind. Though the road to successful scientific integration of stem cells is long, the potential healthcare benefits are limitless, and according to industry experts like Jason Hope, worth investing in, exploring, and championing.

About Jason Hope

An avid entrepreneur, investor, and philanthropist, Jason Hope is a futurist involved in the championing of technological advancement, community involvement, and innovative medical interventions. Deeply passionate about the anti-aging, longevity, and human advancement niche of biomedicine, Hope remains actively involved in various scientific organizations.

After receiving a degree in Finance from ASU, and a subsequent MBA from ASUs W.P. Carey School of Business, Hope developed a successful mobile communications company. Professionally, he currently focuses on investing in startups and developing grant programs for small businesses.

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What Jason Hope Says About New Longevity Research - HealthTechZone

The ongoing biotechnology revolution is less discussed than the digital one, but is on par with it, if not more prevalent. While less visible to the everyday eye, progress in healthcare and genetics will dramatically alter the way and where we live. Indeed, it feels like science fiction has crept into reality.

For some time now, it has been possible to create an embryonic precursor from someones blood cells. Essentially, this means that scientists can recreate a younger you in the form of an unevolved and unaged specimen, which could eventually turn into a fetus that will grow into an adult, with your DNA. Some scientists are suggesting that DNA doesnt age much; what does is the epigenetic, or the molecular processes that regulate the expressions of DNA.

Nowadays, a growing scientific movement views aging not as a consequence of growing older, but as a condition in and of itself, a pathology. In other words, aging is a disease that is not a result of a degradation of DNA, but of the epigenetic. Once we understand how to reboot it and restore the functioning of DNA, we could have treatments for aging and perhaps even the possibility to reverse it.

Highly controversial, of course. Nevertheless, we are slowly but surely moving toward dramatically extending human longevity and eventually, towardcellular regeneration (i.e., regrowing limbs).

There are substantial investments being made with this goal in mind, and results will be obtained much faster than we are aware. As an example, in the 1990s, gene therapy was perceived as high-risk and elusive. Today, a group of technologies named CRISPR-Cas9 enables scientists to edit genomes and alter DNA sequences, with the potential to correct genetic diseases and cure cancer.We may even be able to create immortality. Scientists have not yet found how to do it, but at some point, they well could.

Think of the luminaries the world lost early, of diseases or from causes that genetics research seeks to cure. Steve Jobs lived to be 56. He died as Apple just started really growing exponentially in a business sense, and in creativity benefiting from his decades of experience.

Zaha Hadid, the first woman to win the Pritzker prize (considered the Nobel prize for architects) died in 2016 at age 65. She really began to be at the top of her field after 2000, or age 50. Considering that she still might have had her best years ahead, advances in longevity could have an enormously positive effect on our cities, if world-class architects and real estate developers are able to exponentially leverage their experience for longer. Good news.

Urbanism is turning into one of the worlds most pressing issues. Desirable cities are so unaffordable that housing negatively impairs national GDP growth by several points. And well-planned architecture has been found to reduce crime. Boosting longevity could have a direct correlation with much faster economic growth and lower crime. And immortality, all the more. All in all, as human progress accelerates, so should that of our cities and lifestyles.

Living longer would indeed drastically affect the demographic makeup of our cities. With the nationwide trend of migration back toward cities, downtowns have again become gravity centers as jobs, social life and opportunities are all located next to one another. In other words, cities are becoming harder to leave. As their inhabitants have children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and live longer, the populations of cities like New York could explode. And so could real estate prices, by the sheer force of supply and demand not to mention that the older the population grows, the higher the amount of savings in the economy, hence additional capital increasing housing prices.

There urgently need to be solutions. Just based on migration trends, nearly 70% of the worlds population will live in cities in 2050. (That number is over 54% today, and was 34% in 1960.)

One solution could be a movement that is already making a comeback in todays world: multigenerational housing, through which several generations of a same family coexist under the same roof. Would the United States then become more like traditional Europe, where close-knit families often live together for decades into adulthood? The potential societal changes are enormous. Cities would, in this case, revert to what they had always been before: homes for whole families, as opposed to, say, downtowns of solely high-earning young professionals.

Additionally, advances in transportation such as ride-sharing will reduce the need to own our own cars. If we need fewer roads, we will have more space to build probably taller, if the aforementioned experts live longer and are able to develop the appropriate real estate structures. There's another factor increasing urban density.

And what about zoning? If we know we will live until 150, will we take a different outlook at community board meetings, and be more open to rezonings to allow the additional housing that enables our family members to stay close to us? Longevity could lead to less friction on hot-button local issues.

The science fiction of longevity and immortality is much closer to reality than we think. It should be embraced, as it features the potential to drastically improve the way we live together. Optimism is de rigueur for one of the planets most challenging and divisive issues. Public policy must follow and allow cities to shape themselves and grow in a way that retains all this means allowing sound, large-scale construction and urbanism.

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Between Real Estate And Science Fiction: Cities Of Immortals - Forbes

The global longevity and anti-senescence therapies market should grow from $329.8 million in 2018 to $644.4 million by 2023 with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 14.3% during 2018-2023.

Report Scope:

The scope of this report is broad and covers various therapies currently under trials in the global longevity and anti-senescence therapy market. The market estimation has been performed with consideration for revenue generation in the forecast years 2018-2023 after the expected availability of products in the market by 2023. The global longevity and anti-senescence therapy market has been segmented by the following therapies: Senolytic drug therapy, Gene therapy, Immunotherapy and Other therapies which includes stem cell-based therapies, etc.

Get Sample Copy Of The Report@https://www.trendsmarketresearch.com/report/sample/11698

Revenue forecasts from 2028 to 2023 are given for each therapy and application, with estimated values derived from the expected revenue generation in the first year of launch.

The report also includes a discussion of the major players performing research or the potential players across each regional longevity and anti-senescence therapy market. Further, it explains the major drivers and regional dynamics of the global longevity and anti-senescence therapy market and current trends within the industry.

The report concludes with a special focus on the vendor landscape and includes detailed profiles of the major vendors and potential entrants in the global longevity and anti-senescence therapy market.

Report Includes:

71 data tables and 40 additional tables An overview of the global longevity and anti-senescence therapy market Analyses of global market trends, with data from 2017 and 2018, and projections of compound annual growth rates (CAGRs) through 2023 Country specific data and analysis for the United States, Canada, Japan, China, India, U.K., France, Germany, Spain, Australia, Middle East and Africa Detailed description of various anti-senescence therapies, such as senolytic drug therapy, gene therapy, immunotherapy and other stem cell therapies, and their influence in slowing down aging or reverse aging process Coverage of various therapeutic drugs, devices and technologies and information on compounds used for the development of anti-ageing therapeutics A look at the clinical trials and expected launch of anti-senescence products Detailed profiles of the market leading companies and potential entrants in the global longevity and anti-senescence therapy market, including AgeX Therapeutics, CohBar Inc., PowerVision Inc., T.A. Sciences and Unity Biotechnology

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Summary

Global longevity and anti-senescence therapy market deals in the adoption of different therapies and treatment options used to extend human longevity and lifespan. Human longevity is typically used to describe the length of an individuals lifetime and is sometimes used as a synonym for life expectancy in the demography. Anti-senescence is the process by which cells stop dividing irreversibly and enter a stage of permanent growth arrest, eliminating cell death. Anti-senescence therapy is used in the treatment of senescence induced through unrepaired DNA damage or other cellular stresses.

Global longevity and anti-senescence market will witness rapid growth over the forecast period (2018-2023) owing to an increasing emphasis on Stem Cell Research and an increasing demand for cell-based assays in research and development.

An increasing geriatric population across the globe and a rising awareness of antiaging products among generation Y and later generations are the major factors expected to promote the growth of global longevity and anti-senescence market. Factors such as a surging level of disposable income and increasing advancements in anti-senescence technologies are also providing traction to the global longevity and anti-senescence market growth over the forecast period (2018-2023).

According to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the total geriatric population across the globe in 2016 was over REDACTED. By 2022, the global geriatric population (65 years and above) is anticipated to reach over REDACTED. An increasing geriatric population across the globe will generate huge growth prospectus to the market.

Senolytics, placenta stem cells and blood transfusions are some of the hot technologies picking up pace in the longevity and anti-anti-senescence market. Companies and start-ups across the globe such as Unity Biotechnology, Human Longevity Inc., Calico Life Sciences, Acorda Therapeutics, etc. are working extensively in this field for the extension of human longevity by focusing on study of genomics, microbiome, bioinformatics and stem cell therapies, etc. These factors are poised to drive market growth over the forecast period.

Global longevity and anti-senescence market is projected to rise at a CAGR of REDACTED during the forecast period of 2018 through 2023. In 2023, total revenues are expected to reach REDACTED, registering REDACTED in growth from REDACTED in 2018.

The report provides analysis based on each market segment including therapies and application. The therapies segment is further sub-segmented into Senolytic drug therapy, Gene therapy, Immunotherapy and Others. Senolytic drug therapy held the largest market revenue share of REDACTED in 2017. By 2023, total revenue from senolytic drug therapy is expected to reach REDACTED. Gene therapy segment is estimated to rise at the highest CAGR of REDACTED till 2023. The fastest growth of the gene therapy segment is due to the Large investments in genomics. For Instance; The National Human Genome Research Institute (U.S.) had a budget grant of REDACTED for REDACTED research projects in 2015, thus increasing funding to REDACTED for approximately REDACTED projects in 2016.

Report Analysis@https://www.trendsmarketresearch.com/report/analysis/BCC/global-longevity-and-anti-senescence-therapy-market

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Longevity And Anti-Senescence Therapy Market Overview, Consumption, Supply, Demand & Insights - Kentucky Journal 24

New York, March 09, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Reportlinker.com announces the release of the report "Global Precision Medicine Software Market 2020-2024" - https://www.reportlinker.com/p05873485/?utm_source=GNW Our reports on global precision medicine software market provides a holistic analysis, market size and forecast, trends, growth drivers, and challenges, as well as vendor analysis covering around 25 vendors. The report offers an up-to-date analysis regarding the current global market scenario, latest trends and drivers, and the overall market environment. The market is driven by benefits of precision medicine.In addition, digitization of healthcare is anticipated to boost the growth of the global precision medicine software market as well.

Market Segmentation The global precision medicine software market is segmented as below: Delivery Mode: On-premise

Cloud-based

Geographic Segmentation: Asia

Europe

North America

ROW

Key Trends for global precision medicine software market growth This study identifies digitization of healthcare as the prime reasons driving the global precision medicine software market growth during the next few years.

Prominent vendors in global precision medicine software market We provide a detailed analysis of around 25 vendors operating in the global precision medicine software market , including some of the vendors such as F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd., Fabric Genomics Inc., Gene42 Inc., Human Longevity Inc., International Business Machines Corp., Koninklijke Philips NV, NantHealth Inc., Roper Technologies Inc., SOPHiA GENETICS SA and Syapse Inc. . The study was conducted using an objective combination of primary and secondary information including inputs from key participants in the industry. The report contains a comprehensive market and vendor landscape in addition to an analysis of the key vendors.Read the full report: https://www.reportlinker.com/p05873485/?utm_source=GNW

About ReportlinkerReportLinker is an award-winning market research solution. Reportlinker finds and organizes the latest industry data so you get all the market research you need - instantly, in one place.

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The Global Precision Medicine Software Market is expected to grow by USD 882.65 mn during 2020-2024, progressing at a CAGR of 11% during the forecast...

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There's a new trend emerging of AAA open world games built for longevity that flop at launch, only for the studios behind them to spend months, even years trying to save them.

No Man's Sky is one shining example of a rally that worked. Anthem, despite sputtering along for a year already, is just now beginning the process. And in about a month we'll see whether the results of Bethesda's attempt to save the flopped launch of Fallout 76 will bear any fruit.

That's because on April 7, Bethesda is launching the Wastelanders expansion, a supposedly massive free overhaul that adds -- among many other standard expansion components -- a huge change for the world of Fallout 76: non-player characters.

"We learned from launch was that there was a lot to do, but what we needed for a lot of our audience was to bring the humanity back"

If it seems odd that an open world game in a series known for its characters and writing might launch without any NPCs to support its world-building or quests, yeah, everyone else thought so too. The game launched in late 2018 to criticism for being "soulless," lacking a "strong focus," and "boring" -- problems which were all tied in some way to the lack of in-world characters with stories and stakes to provide motivation. While all the other additions included with Wastelanders -- new locations, enemies, equipment, and quests -- will likely improve Fallout 76's chances, lead designer Ferret Baudoin feels the NPCs are the most important key to righting the ship.

"There was quite a lot that worked at launch," he says at Bethesda's PAX East fan event. "If you're a person who liked exploration, for example, from our traditional games, it was possibly one of the best worlds to explore that we've ever had. It was just huge, full of stories and stuff like that. But there was a large portion of our audience that wanted people. They wanted an emotional connection. And if you know everyone is dead, and you come across a holotape from someone, it loses that hope that you might meet that person and help them out.

"I think what we learned from launch was that core combat was fun, it was great to explore, there was a lot to do, but what we needed for a lot of our audience was to bring the humanity back."

Baudoin acknowledges the humorous contradiction of needing computer-controlled NPCs to provide "human" experiences, but he adds that Fallout 76 isn't totally devoid of humanity. Because players only have one another to interact with, he says, the team has seen all sorts of unusual and uniquely human stories unfold just from players interacting in strange and often wonderful ways.

"The funny thing is that in some respects [the players] added the most human things of all," he says. "The role-playing, for example, or some of the stories you hear about people dressed up as Santa Claus giving out gifts. That was something we didn't anticipate.

"We had whole plans for ways to let players murder each other, and they just wouldn't do it"

"We had all these plans for PvP, and actually, we have the least PvP audience ever. We had whole plans for ways to let players murder each other, and they just wouldn't do it. We have a weird, wonderful audience that would rather help each other out even when they have the other options."

Baudoin is also candid about launching the game without a world full of characters not being the best decision. Had the team known what the response would have been at the time, he admits, they would have included more of what's coming in Wastelanders in the launch version of the game. But because of Fallout 76's relative novelty, Baudoin doesn't think there was any way the team could have known that not having NPCs would be so frustrating.

"At the time, there was no clear analog to what we were making," he says. "So it was very tricky, because you would make arguments as to what you think the game should be, but there was no clear right decision.

"As soon as we saw what people were saying, there was a real fire in the belly to say, 'No, we can address this.' If we solve these problems, there's a whole package here that is very enticing to people, and we just need to provide that extra step... It's far more of a Bethesda experience than we were at launch."

"At the time, there was no clear analog to what we were making"

Because it's such a well known series, Fallout 76 was met with rapid, vocal disapproval at launch. There have been plenty of suggestions across forums and social media outlets for how to improve the game, and while Baudoin says he tries to read as many of them as possible -- he checks one particular popular message board at least twice a day for feedback -- there's a degree of filtering that takes place when the team designs what to change, and how.

"In some respects, our own internal team makes suggestions which are mirrored by the community. We're experts at dealing with that. But you can definitely notice trends.

Originally, Fallout 76 was empty, with the player character the first to leave the vault after a nuclear apocalypse. But in Wastelanders, new faces arrive from outside Appalachia

"Neil Gaiman has that quote, 'When people tell you something's wrong or doesn't work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.' If there's an itch somewhere and it's bugging people, it's our job to figure out as experts how we can address the problem. Sometimes communities get it right, but you have to think of the millions of factors that go into that and make the best decision to address the problem that makes the itch go away and doesn't create further itches down the road."

"This is one of the first times I've been able to, before launch, see what people are reacting to and course-correct"

Later on, he adds:

"As a developer this is one of the first times I've been able to, before launch, see what people are reacting to and course correct. It's been fantastic."

Because the Wastelanders update is free, Baudoin is optimistic that a good chunk of the community that bought the game over a year ago will make their way back to see what's changed. He's hopeful, too, that an overarching love for the Fallout series among the community will keep them in the game.

"I think [Wastelanders] looks a lot more like a traditional Fallout game," he says. "The tagline in my head a lot of the time is: 'Fallout 76 is Fallout with friends.' I think now we've added more of the Fallout into it, the things you expected from Fallout 3, Fallout 4, are now in there. I think we're more properly delivering on that expectation that some people had."

Though Bethesda isn't revealing anything else new for now, Baudoin says that Wastelanders won't be the end of the team's work on Fallout 76. He describes the game as "a chance to tell an evolving story," with those opportunities only expanded by the addition of the characters and plotlines of this new update.

"You have to take risks," Baudoin says. "You have to reach for the stars sometimes. Sometimes you'll fall short, but if you don't, if you lack that ambition, the game is going to feel flatter. It's not going to be as interesting. Some of the things we've done...at the time sounded insane, but then we worked on it and we did it and lo and behold it really works. If we hadn't been willing to take that risk, it wouldn't've been there."

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Bethesda wants to bring humanity to Fallout 76 through NPCs - GamesIndustry.biz

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Manhattan

Lets just say it: The longest economic expansion in U.S. history may already be over, killed by Covid-19.

It might seem crazy to talk about a recession when jobs are plentiful. Today the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced a decline in the February unemployment rate to 3.5%, tying a 50-year low.

But a recession isnt when things are bad. Its when they arent quite as good as they were at the peak. (Conversely, an expansion begins when the economy hits bottom and starts back up.)

When economic historians look back, they may pick February as the peak of the expansion that began in June 2009. That would give it a longevity of 128 months, the longest in records maintained by the National Bureau of Economic Research going back to 1854.

This wouldnt be the first time the U.S. was in a recession without knowing it. In the summer of 2008 policymakers of the Federal Reserve were still predicting decent economic growth for that year and the nexteven though a recession had begun the previous December, as later determined by the business cycle dating committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

The February jobs report that just came out is based on household and business surveys conducted in the week containing the 12th of the month. A lot has changed since then. On Feb. 12 there were still almost no cases of Covid-19 reported in the U.S. By March 5 there were 99, including 10 deaths, reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

New research from State Street Associates and Massachusetts Institute of Technology indicates that the U.S. economy was vulnerable to a recession even before Covid-19 struck. In January the chance of recession over the next six months was about 70%, even though the stock market was then up about 22% over the previous year, it says.

Related video: Larry Summers Sees 80% Chance of U.S. Recession

UP NEXT

The stock markets sharp decline since January damages growth by making households feel poorer and businesses more pessimistic. The chance of a recession with stock prices where they were this week is around 75%, according to Will Kinlaw, a senior managing director and head of Cambridge, Mass.-based State Street Associates, the research unit of financial giant State Street Corp. If stocks give up all of their gains over the past 12 months, Kinlaw says, the likelihood of a recession will grow to 80%.

In addition to the stock market, the State Street Advisers forecasting model takes into account industrial production, the shape of the Treasury yield curve, and jobs. Its based on a statistical concept called the Mahalanobis distance, which was developed to comparehuman skulls in India.

Covid-19 hit an economy that was less robust than it might have appeared. Nonfarm payroll employment was up 1.4% in January from a year earlier, which is OK. But industrial production was down 0.8% in January from a year earlier. And the Treasury yield curve was perilously close to inversion in January. (Inversion of the yield curvein which long-term interest rates are lower than short-term onesis a strong indicator of recession.)

The only strong indicator in January was the stock market, and now, thanks to the coronavirus, that indicator is flashing red as well.

While few economists have said the economy may already be in recession, some are beginning to say one is probably imminent. Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moodys Analytics, says the chance of a recession this year is at least 50%.

In the financial markets, in contrast, recession talk is rampant. This is what the start of a recession after a long bull market feels like, John McClain, a portfolio manager at Diamond Hill Capital Management, told Bloomberg News today. This is the first day of seeing some panic in the market.

Kissing is frowned upon in the age of the coronavirus, but you might want to think about kissing goodbye to the longest economic expansion in U.S. history.

Read more: Coronavirus Could Cost the Global Economy $2.7 Trillion. Heres How

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The US might already be in a recession - msnNOW

If you need any further convincing that artificial intelligence (or AI to you and me) represents big business in the digital age, you simply need to see the level of investment in this technology and its associated start-ups.

However, this burgeoning market remains in its infancy, while AI is still a relatively under-used technology in the typical workplace. In this post, we'll discuss some of the key challenges facing AI brands and ask why it's still so difficult to build a functional robot.

What are the Challenges Facing AI Brands in 2020?

Unsurprisingly, one of the main challenges facing AI brands is creating robots that can function without being connected to an external power attachment. This issue is commonplace in the contemporary technology market, with smartphones and similar mobile devices facing significant challenges in terms of battery performance and longevity.

Of course, the development of Lithium Ion battery technology has helped to improve the lifespan of such devices on a single charge, while further research in this field has also helped to fuel the expansion in robot runtime and functionality.

While the available technology has advanced at a rapid pace during the last few years, however, much work is to be done to create fully functional robots that can operate for the requisite period of time.

More specifically, innovators must identify ways of maintaining power and longevity without introducing heavier battery units, as this would also increase the level of power consumption required, add further weight and subsequently and limit functionality in some instances.

Today's robots also struggle with perception, despite the advancements in machine learning and the increasingly intuitive nature of individual components such as microcontrollers. Sold widely through supplier such as RS Components, this component effectively serves as a mini-computer that sits on an integrated circuit chop and enables robots to carry out a number of core functions.

While such components are now capable of enabling devices to name pictures with sentences, however, they still lack the ability to recognise function and association.

Even though modern sensors have evolved to improve functionality and recognition amongst robots, they still lack the intuition to understand context and operate outside of simple processes and automated tasks.

The Last Word

This arguably provides the biggest to AI in the modern age, as while today's robots are increasingly effective that controlling pre-characterised processes and routines, they lack the capability to perform more intuitive tasks with the same efficiency as a human.

There's no doubt that machine learning is evolving at a rapid pace, however, while the increased level of investment in AI will expedite the speed with which the technology grows over the course of the next decade or so.

The increased spend in the market will also make it easier to build more effective and durable robots in the future, while potentially driving down the cost of construction and procuring individual components.

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Why Making Robots is Hard, Even in the Age of AI - University Herald