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Best AI Tools for Graphic Design

AI Tools for Graphic Design: Revolutionizing Creativity and Efficiency

The graphic design industry is fast-growing, and by integrating creativity and technology into it, AI is a helpful friend for designers. As artificial intelligence has taken over a major part of our lives, it is natural that it is shifting toward graphic design. These tools are not only helping professional designers enhance their skills but are also helping people who have never designed anything before create great images. In today’s detailed article, we are going to discuss the area of AI Tools for Graphic design, how it works, its advantages, and some of the most crucial aspects that one must know about the same.

The Advent of AI in Graphic Design

Graphic design is commonly regarded as an area that requires constant evolution and new ideas. In the past, the so-called designers had to rely on talent and inspiration to put into practice things that they had in mind. However, the integration of AI in the creation of graphics in design has come up as a new factor that shapes this discipline. The use of AI in the design process can actually be regarded as the tools used to assist, improve, and even extend the length of the design process.

Benefits of Using AI Tools in Graphic Design

1. Enhanced Creativity

Creativity is another area that is best managed by AI tools, as the decision-making process is improved. It is due to such tools that a human designer may come up with options and designs that he or she might not have thought of. For instance, advanced applications in designing software can look at popular designs common in the market and suggest suitable colors, fonts, and layouts. This not only saves time for the client and the designers but also makes sure that the designs are modern and beautiful.

2. Increased Efficiency

Computer-aided design is the practical use of artificial intelligence in designing as it saves time by automatizing many functions. This in turn enables the designers to concentrate on the artistic part of their job without finding themselves overwhelmed by the many trivialities that arise in the process. For example, some activities such as transforming images, adjusting color depths, or generating several versions of a layout for various media, can be effectively managed by AI, hence rapidly increasing the overall speed of designs.

3. Cost-Effective

AI Tools for Graphic Design can help to minimize time and costs for the proper design offering such functions as an automated design and searching for necessary materials. This can be advantageous since companies, especially those that are new or those with a small capital cannot afford to hire many designers. AI-powered design tools are useful as they offer quality work like professional designers at a cheaper price.

4. Accessibility for Non-Designers

AI tools are bringing about graphic design to the general market and thus those who do not have a background in design. Thanks to simple and clear, interfaces and options these tools help even the less computer-literate person make beautiful graphics. As a result, we can observe the democratization of design which is rather helpful for small business owners, marketers, and content creators who need good-looking visuals, but don’t know how to deal with professional designers.

Key Features of AI Tools for Graphic Design

1. Design Generation

It is also possible to use AI tools to create design ideas on the basis of the parameters that can be entered by a user. For instance, you are blanking out on an idea or a new project that you want to start. For instance, if you type some specific words or descriptions about the design, the AI can produce several design themes for you.

2. Image Recognition and Editing

Modern AI environments include machine learning tools that are capable of image recognition. Therefore they are capable of finding certain aspects within an image and providing recommendations on how it can be altered in the process of editing. For instance, if you want to upload a photo, the AI will be able to analyze the objects, people, and background so you can justify the corrections or enhancements to be made. This is especially useful for some tasks like erasing backgrounds, changing the contrast, and other related operations.

3. Template Libraries

Most of the AI design tools that are available as applications or plugins have numerous templates that can be further modified. These templates can be accessed by the appropriate professionals and are available in various categories like social media, marketing, presentations, and others. Through these templates, it is possible for you to design new systems with good quality within the shortest time possible.

4. Style Transfer

The style transfer is one of the most interesting possible features that can be implemented through the help of AI and it is the process of one image using the style of another one but putting its own features on the second image. This can be particularly handy for developing emblematic and heavily graphical graphic design. For example, one may decide to employ a painting technique of a particular artwork, apply it to a photo, and come up with a whole new realm of artistry.

5. Natural Language Processing (NLP)

Some of the techniques used in designing some of these AI tools include natural language processing through which the tool can comprehend textual input from the user. This enables users to provide an overview of what they are looking for in terms of designs in simple language and the AI comes up with designs acceptable to the users. For instance, a user might set the task to something like ‘design a minimalist logo for a business firm operating in the technology industry’.

How to Use AI Tools for Graphic Design

Step 1: Choose the Right Tool - The first aspect, that will help to start using AI in graphic design, is to select the appropriate tool. There are, of course, a multitude of AI design tools, each having its navigational and functional features. There are numerous logo makers with artificial intelligence currently available on the market among which are Adobe Sensei, Canva, Fotor, as well as Designhill’s logo maker. Online social media monitoring and tracking tool If you want to track social media but do not have time for constant monitoring, you need to choose an appropriate tool, that meets requirements and cost estimations.

Step 2: Input Your Requirements - The next step that one will have to take after choosing a tool is presenting the specifications of the design. This may comprise uploading pictures or graphics, typing text, or choosing options including color, font, and style. This means that if you as the user are specific on the inputs that you give to the AI, then the results that you get will align with your expectations.

Step 3: Review and Customize - When using the AI to design a logo, check out the designs that are produced and choose the most appropriate ones. As with most designs, most AI tools that are used to create these designs offer further customizations. This is because there are specifics in color, fonts, and layouts that can be changed to meet the brands or the project outlook.

#ai #ai tools #graphic design #post

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doshmanziari · 4 years ago

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Musical Offerings for the New Year || What is “Radical Music” in 2021?

Near the end of 2020, a bunch of musicians populating a chatroom, including myself, each submitted ten minutes’ worth of our work to another musician, Chimeratio, who generously compiled it all into a set totaling nearly ten hours.¹ The work didn’t need to be new; just what we thought might best represent our abilities/style(s) and/or perhaps what we were especially pleased with. The set premiered in late January. Since I have some tentative plans for reorienting Brick By Brick this year, while not overriding its emphases, I wanted to share that music with anyone who’s interested.

I compiled the four videos into a playlist, although you can also access them individually: here (1), here (2), here (3), and here (4). If you care to, and are on a computer, you can also view the accompanying chatlog and read people’s responses from when they were listening to the live broadcast.

The compulsion for this project was sparked by excited discussions over and usage of the term “digital fusion”, most helpfully propagated by Aivi Tran, designating a computer-based body of work that for years lacked the rooftop of a commonly agreed upon genre-name. While describing my music has never been a big concern, even if it’s usually felt impossible (what, for example, is this? or this? I dunno!), I’ve appreciated how the spread and application of this term has brought together people who may have felt isolated.²

As “digital fusion” gained designative traction, I witnessed the activity in the aforementioned chatroom explode over the course of a few days. Before, a day’s discussion might’ve been a few dozen messages; now, there were dozens of messages every half-minute. This had positive and negative ramifications, the negative being that conversations often proceeded at a pace of rapidity which precluded concentrated thought. Eventually, I bowed out because the rapidity exceeded my threshold for meaningful interaction; but I was glad that significant invigoration was going on.

I wanted to share this music also because it intersects with thoughts and talks I’ve been having stemming from the question, “What is ‘radical music’ in 2021?” This was stimulated by a 2014 talk given by the writer Mark Fisher, wherein he contends that, were we to play prominent “cutting edge” music from now to people twenty years ago, very nearly none of it would be aesthetically shocking, bizarre, or revelatory (think of playing house music to an audience in the early 1960s!). Fisher also observes a trend of returning to music which once was seen as the future -- as if, deprived of a shared prograde vision, imaginations turn hazily retrograde; ergo, genres such as synthwave or albums like Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories.

It isn’t my goal here to argue about the “end of history.” Fisher’s time-travel hypothetical, however, rings loud and true to me. Visible musical radicalism has, for at least a decade, been strictly extra-musical, in the sense of songs like “This is America” or “WAP”, where one’s response is primarily to the spectacle of the music video, the performer’s identistic markers, and/or the manner in which the lyrics intersect with (mostly US-centric) ideological hotspots. Musically, there is really nothing radical here. Any vociferous condemnations or defenses of a song like “WAP” deal in moralizing reactions to semantics or imagery: how progressive or regressive is the political aspect? how propelled or repelled are we by the word “pussy”?

It would be a mistake, and simply wrong, to assert that the only music one can enjoy escapes the parameters outlined above; and my inability to coherently categorize some of my own music hardly raises that portion to the status of radicality. But the question here pertains to what is being made, and I think that if we’re going to seriously consider the nature of truly radical music today, we do need to question if such a quality can prominently exist when our hyper-fast consumerist cycle seems to forbid not just sustained, lifelong relationships to artwork but also the local, unhurried nourishment of creative gestation. Now, in my opinion, there are good, even great, examples of radical music still being made in deep Internet-burrows, and for evidence of that I would offer some of the material contained in the linked playlists. Moreover, I’d say that this quality can exist in part because these little artistic communities are so buried.

Let me share a quote that another person shared with me recently:

For culture to shift, you need pockets of isolated humanity. Since all pockets of humanity (outside of the perpetually isolated indigenous people in remote wilderness) are connected in instantaneous fashion, independent ideas aren’t allowed to ferment on their own. When you cook a meal, you have to bring ingredients together that have had time to grow, ferment, or decompose separately. A cucumber starts out as a seed, then you mix it with the soil, water and sunlight. You can’t bring the seed, soil, water and sunlight to the kitchen from the get-go. When you throw those things in to the mixture without letting them mature, the flavor cannot stand out on its own. Same thing with art and fashion. A kid in Russia can come up with a new way to dance, gets filmed on a phone, it goes viral quickly but gets lost in the morass of all of the other multitudinous forms of dance. Sure it spread far and wide, but it gets forgotten in a week. In the past, his new art form would have been confined locally, nurtured, honed, then spread geographically, creating a distinct new cultural idiosyncrasy with a strong support base. By the time it was big enough to be presented globally, it was already a cultural phenomenon locally. This isn’t possible anymore. We’re consuming too many unripened fruits.

The main impression I have here is that radical music today will, and must be, folk music. Our common idea of folkiness might be the scrappy singer strumming a guitar, but my interpretive reference rather has to do with the idea of a music being written, first of all, for one’s self, and then shared with a small-scale community, which in turn helps the artist grow at their own pace. This transcends a dependence upon image, the primacy of acoustic instrumentation, or the signaling of sincerity versus insincerity. It is a return to the valuation of outsider art, so rare nowadays. As someone who I was recently in dialogue with wrote, “Where can you find new genuine folk music? Pretty much just with your friends, imo. Even then, the global world is so influential and seeps into any crack it can find. I think vaporwave was radical and folk for a while. Grant Forbes made that music way before the world knew about it.”

Sometimes, a lot of fuss is made over what’s seen as “gatekeeping” within certain communities. It can be, depending on the context, justifiable to question and critique this behavior. At other times, the effort of maintaining a level of exclusivity, of retaining an idiosyncratic shapeliness to the communal organism, can be a legitimate attempt to protect the personal, interpersonal, and cultural aspects from the flattening effect of monoculture. Hypothetically, I welcome the Castlevania TV series and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate having introduced new and younger demographics to Castlevania. In actuality, stuff like “wholesome sad gay himbo Alucard”, image macros, and neurotic “stan” fanfiction being what’s now first associated with the series makes me want to put as much distance as possible between my interests and those latecoming impositions.

The group-terminology David Chapman uses in his essay “Geeks, MOPs, and Sociopaths in Subculture Evolution” is kinda cringey, but some of the cultural/behavioral patterns he lays out are relevant to the topic. Give it a look. If we cross his belief that “[subcultures] are no longer the primary drivers of cultural development” with our contemporary consume-and-dispose customs, we’re left with the predicament of it’s even worth attempting to bring radical/outsider art beyond its rhizomatic habitat. This is troubling, because it would mean that artistic radicality no longer might not only refuse to but cannot encompass cultural upheaval. It would be like if dance music were invented and -- instead of progressively permeating nightlife, stimulating countercultural trends, and ultimately being adapted as the basis for pop music globally -- only were listened to via headphones by a few thousand people on their own, stimulated a group meeting once a year or two, and never affected music beyond a niche-within-a-niche. That’s a very sad picture to me.

⁂

¹ Chimeratio has also maintained an excellent blog on here dedicated to looking at videogame music written in irregular time signatures, far preceding higher-profile examinations like 8-bit Music Theory’s video on the same topic.

² For myself, creative isolation has had its uses, because it has led me down routes that are highly personalized. The isolation can be dispiriting too. Although a lot of my music is videogame-music-adjacent, almost none of it uses “authentic” technology, such as PSG synthesizers or FM synthesis; and the identification of those sounds is fairly important for recognition.

#music analysis #radicalism #digital fusion

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matildainmotion · 3 years ago

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All That We Carry - and the launch of the MWM Peer Mentoring Programme.

Image by Zoe Gardner @limberdoodle

“How are you?”

“Oh, you know, surviving,” I say.

“Taking it a day at a time.”

“Just about upright!”

Or sometimes I say nothing but describe a hilly landscape with my hand - “Up and down,” I might add.

Over the last ten years, since my son was born, I have accrued a ready-made stock of replies when someone - at the school gate, the shops, on a zoom call- asks the generic “how are you?” I can’t bring myself to smile gaily and say, “Great, thank you!” so my responses are designed to indicate just enough of the truth not to make the questioner worried or burdened, but do not tip me into the territory of barefaced lying. Because, the fact is, it’s hard.

‘It’ means everything - my son, my daughter, their school, my mother, time for my husband, the house, my work, my health, my sleep, the world.

‘It’ is a tiny word. In this context ‘it’ makes me think of an ant - the way they clamber across the dirt track by our house, carrying a stick, twice their size and weight. We do this. Parents and carers do it. Women do it. Non-binary people too. We carry A LOT, and often we do it in relative silence, either because we are too exhausted to shout about it, or even to notice or fully acknowledged it to ourselves, or because we do not know who to tell or how to tell them.

This is not new. Not news. We have been doing this - carrying a lot - for a long, long time. In fact, there is even a well-researched theory that the first thing that a mother ever made was probably a net or sling* - a thing to put things in, to enable her to carry more than she could manage to hold with just her hands, just her arms. We have been carrying stuff around in nets, slings, sacks, pots, on our heads, on our backs, in our bellies, in our hearts, we have had loads on our minds for millennia. The act that is less well documented, because it happens less, is that of us setting things down. Of course, some brave pioneers have done it, through acts of radical art, or resistance: Hildegard of Bingen, Rosa Parks, Mary Wollstonecraft. But all too often when we hear of someone ceasing to carry it all, it is a story of crisis - of dropping the lot, out of exhaustion, ill health, burn out. Because mostly, as a carer, there are so few opportunities to set things down, we just carry on carrying.

Six months into motherhood, when I was feeling the hardness of it already, I enrolled on a support course for parents and I still remember the phrase that the course facilitator used: most parents, she said, walk around with “a huge empathy deficit.” Empathy, I believe, involves someone else bearing witness to all you are carrying, acknowledging its full weight. It is a miraculous thing, but this acknowledgment in itself lightens the load, or perhaps, more accurately, the load gets no lighter but we feel stronger, better able to bear it. Earlier this year - still feeling the struggle - I enrolled on another course, a Hand in Hand Parenting one. The founder of Hand in Hand, Patty Wifler, did so out of a recognition of the severe lack of support that parents receive in our culture to do the enormous task of raising children. A cornerstone of her approach, her answer to the ‘empathy deficit’ is the idea of Listening Partnerships - a peer support arrangement that enables parents to offload regularly, safely, with another adult.

For a long time now, I have wanted to run something like this within Mothers Who Make- a way to provide one another with support, encouragement and accountability, as we do the almighty work of caring and creating. It is the same impulse that informs our peer support groups, but there is something vitally different that can take place in a one to one exchange - a more precise sharing of the weight of what you are carrying, a chance, for however brief a time, to set it down and take a good look at it. This month then, I am delighted to announce the launch of the MWM Peer Mentoring Programme. I ran a trial in July and it was everything I hoped it could be, so I am very excited to offer it again now. Please read about the programme below - what it is, how it works, how to enroll. Before you do, however, I want to use this moment as I might a peer-mentoring session, to set down what I am carrying, not because I need empathy (though, like everyone else, I do!) but because I hope it will give you permission to do the same. One thing I love about writing is that, despite the distances of time and space it traverses, it is strangely intimate, like a one on one exchange - just me, telling this to just you.

So, in answer to the question, “How are you?” here is the fuller response, which I do not give most of the time:

I am tired, always, and tired of being tired. The nights feel like dark imprints of the days, a negative image, not restful but grainy, smudge. Last night I slept on the children’s bedroom floor because it was easier to relax without the pressure of being in a bed, with the hardness of the floor against me. Today my breasts are tender even though I am only partway through my cycle - I googled it - another symptom of the perimenopause. Next door, as I write, my son is playing Lego Star Wars on the TV and my daughter is watching Lego Friends on Granny’s iPad - their daily dose of screen time so that I can have my daily dose of this, but it never sits easy. I dread the week ahead, of dressing them in bed, still half-asleep, readying them for school, where it is uncertain how their day will go, how long they will stay before I get a call asking me to pick them up, how they will be when they come home - it is a shock, although it shouldn’t be, to realise that both my children are neurodiverse. This is a trendy term nowadays, one to celebrate, and I do, but it is also a weight, to carry all the not-fitting-in-ness that goes with it. The last two nights my son has thrown up with anxiety, from the fear of anything bad happening to any one of us. I managed to get the potty-as-sick-bowl there in time, on to his top bunk, calmed him at last, till he fell asleep just before midnight. I went downstairs to turn off the lights - I always stop at this moment, to look through the back window into the tiny dark of the garden, to Granny’s room, or shed, at the end of it, and wonder how long my mother will live and if it will be long enough to see my novel published - apparently it takes two years even once you’ve got a publisher. I told her this yesterday and she frowned, said she would have a word with God, thought she ought to be able to manage it. I am wondering, though, how I will manage it - manage to do the rewrites the book needs, to do the work MWM requires, and the work I have taken on for Improbable, the finding of a new home for the company, but also for us, a new school, a place for us to be. And meanwhile, the house is overspilling – every room - with toys, books, dvds, with plastic trinkets from the inside of Kinder eggs, dried up felt tip pens and stale biscuits, stored in tins too late, which I should throw away but I can’t face the waste and so I continue to pretend that one day they may get eaten.

That’s me. And all the short answers are still true - I am surviving, I am still upright, taking it a day at a time, through all the ups and downs, and I am, actually, in a position of great privilege, on many levels.

And you? How are you? That’s my question for the month. And I’m interested in the long answer. Here are some ways you can respond:

You can post below this.

You can participate in the MWM Peer Mentoring Programme - read all about it and apply here: https://motherswhomake.org/peer-mentoring

You can attend a peer support meeting - read all about that and book your space here: https://motherswhomake.org/international

*The Carrier Bag Theory of Evolution by Elizabeth Fisher in Women’s Creation (McGraw-Hill 1973)

Image by Zoe Gardner @Limberdoodle

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shji4321 · 4 years ago

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HOW TO BOOST ONLINE SALES

When seen even years back, trading was one of the oldest professions in the world. Since the ancient times, people have been buying things they needed in exchange for currency or items of use. Due to this, marketplaces have always been an important part of any civilization gaining even more importance with time. Over time, these marketplaces evolved to suit the needs of buyers and sellers. What started as small shops and hawkers, turned into huge shopping malls and market complexes over time, going through a further evolution with time.

However, arrival of the internet era had its effect on everything; from education, businesses to recreation and with it changed the concept of shopping. We now have online shopping as the highest revenue generating segment of trade, be it in Europe, Asia or Africa. We can buy anything imaginable from local and international markets from the comfort of our homes with just a few clicks. This has also changed business reach potential buyers. Online shopping facility is now perhaps the most important aspect of running a successful business. With every business trying to secure their share of the e-commerce segment, the competition is cut-throat. It is therefore important to use the right e-commerce mediums and tools, and have a proper strategy in place to gain an edge over the competition.

So what exactly is a “Good” e-commerce strategy? Well, it is a combination of several components which come together to form an effective online sales strategy. Let us break them down for you here:

Proper Website

The most important factor enhancing online sales is the establishment of a proper website, with an easy interface. A shopping website is the first step leading a buyer to the business world. With days of buyers spent on looking at the websites of different brands, and engaging outlook of a website leads a buyer into the brand website. For this, it is necessary to build the website from scratch and bringing the customers to it.

Prices against Products

When it comes to boosting online sales, the first thing buyers look into is the products displayed on the website with their prices. Price is the main concern involving most of the online customers. The fair the price of the products more will be the customers attracted to it. Discounted packages or early bird offers again engage the customers into buying the products. Most of the people who are looking to buy things later at some point are engaged by the offers displayed against the products. It not only urges them to buy things immediately but also encourages an extra buying from the customers. It helps businesses bloom by selling out their low-demanded products directly to their customers.

Online Payment Options

Paying for a product online is what a customer is most reluctant about. It involves the fear of fraud and theft. With easy online payment options, it becomes convenient for the customers to pay for the products via debit/credit cards, PayPal, Zelle, Venmo, etc. as per the target market. Further, a money-back guarantee added to the products is a bonus in boosting online sales. It is made eligible for the customers with the product delivered of not the promised quality or size. For businesses, it is important to ensure proper sales analytics. Targets are to be met timely with sales goals accomplished.

Easy Checkout

As the customers buy products online, they want minimum hassle while leaving the page so an easy checkout is what a customer’s look for. It enhances the sales of a brand by identifying it as an easy platform while comparing it with others. Lesser the forms on the website at the time of checking out, lesser will be the client’s frustration buying products online, and more will be the sales of the brand.

Urgency

To accelerate online sales, urgency is the key to success, acting as a fuel to the jet. People who are reluctant to buy products on the spot or look for different places wasting their time need a spark of urgency added to their lives. It not only boosts the sales online but also helps customers find their desired products on time. It is done by announcing packages that will end soon or by bringing up offers that are only for the few early buyers.

Effective Product Reviews

Fraud and cheating are common in businesses that tend to work online. For this, most of the buyers are reluctant to shop online for products. Effective product reviews and testimonials from customers’ is an enchanting sales strategy. More the positive reviews of a brand better will be its online sales. Adding the customers’ images with the testimonials further adds a boosting effect on online sales as it gives a sense of security to the buyers.

Marketing Mediums

With the emergence of several online platforms, it has become difficult for a business to catch the eye online. Marketing in this scenario helps business bloom. A number of marketing mediums are used for the purpose including ads on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and google ads. However, for the businesses, that have a proper budget allotted to marketing, it can be television ads too. It helps brands and businesses to get recognition and catch the eye of the customers.

Paid Promotions

Targeting the specific audience for campaigns is necessary for brands and businesses to boost online sales. Therefore, the businesses go for paid promotions to hit the desired set of population, which is not only capable to buy the set products but is also willing to pay its reasonable price. Email and message marketing is used to reach a specific audience based on geo-location or previous interests of the customers. These emails and promotions highlight the positive brand image in the eyes of its customers.

Marketing Budget

Sales, being a diverse field, has its online platform gaining significance. Setting a marketing budget for the businesses and then using it wisely to boost online sales helps businesses grow in the right direction. It’s important to not only rely on a single channel for selling the products out. Businesses working on multi-channels and platforms have a greater scope of growth in sales. Most businesses hire a sales executive to efficiently; manage the marketing budget.

Research and Development

Opting a secure marketing strategy when it comes to grabbing the attention of customers is significant for the sales department. Research and development are ensured in this case to meet the needs of the customers based on their feedback. It is best to hire professionals for this task or use agency services or to build an in-house team tailored to the needs and requirements of the customers.

Search Engine Optimization

For businesses, it is important to not only secure the existing customers but to also look for new ones to make money with. SEO, which is Search Engine Optimization helps in making sure that the website shows on top, in the search engines with proper SEO implementation. It helps in brand-recognition and is a useful tool used to boost online sales. For all the new customers looking for attractive packages with desirable quality products will be attracted to the brand’s website.

Conclusion

In this era of technology where the internet has an overcoming power over all other mediums, online sales are what most businesses look for. It is the new trend moving around in all marketplaces. It helps them lower the costs of employing people to business and paying the utility bills. Therefore, with proper implementation and use of all the above selling techniques, a business will definitely see a rise in its online sales figures and will be able to secure its share in an ever-growing competition.

#webdevelopm #seo #digitalmarketing #branddesign

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berniesrevolution · 6 years ago

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WARNING: LONG ARTICLE! (It’s worth it, though)

It’s Time to Give Socialism a Try.” So declared the headline of a Washington Post column in March; one imagines Katharine Graham spitting out her martini. The article, by a twenty-seven-year-old columnist named Elizabeth Bruenig, drew more than 3,000 comments (a typical column gets a few hundred); a follow-up piece, urging a “good-faith argument about socialism,” received nearly as much attention.

By now, the rebirth of socialism in American politics needs little elaboration. Bernie Sanders’s surprisingly strong showing in the 2016 Democratic primary, and his continued popularity, upset just about everyone’s intuition that the term remains taboo. Donald Trump’s victory, meanwhile, made all political truisms seem up for grabs. Polls show that young people in particular view socialism more favorably than they do capitalism. Membership in the Democratic Socialists of America, which has been around since 1982, has grown from about 5,000 to 35,000 since November 2016, and dozens of DSA candidates are running for office around the country. In June, one of them, twenty-eight-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, upset New York City Congressman Joe Crowley in the Democratic primary, knocking off a ten-term incumbent and one of the most powerful Democrats in the House.

The meaning of socialism has always been maddeningly slippery, in part because it has always meant different things to different people. Michael Harrington, one of the founders of the DSA and the most outspoken American socialist of the postwar era, writes on the first page of his 1989 book, Socialism: Past and Future, that socialism is “the hope for human freedom and justice.” By the end of the book, the definition hasn’t gotten much more concrete. Karl Marx himself spent more time critiquing capitalism than describing communism, a habit that subsequent generations of leftists inherited. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously said of pornography that, while he couldn’t define it, “I know it when I see it.” Socialism sometimes feels like the inverse: socialists know it when they don’t see it. Bernie has only made things murkier by defining his brand of socialism in terms hardly indistinguishable from New Deal liberalism. “I don’t believe the government should own the corner drugstore or the means of production,” he declared in the fall of 2015, at a speech at Georgetown University, “but I do believe that the middle class and the working families who produce the wealth of America deserve a fair deal.” But while the meaning of American socialism in 2018 begins with Bernie, it doesn’t end there. Every political movement needs an intellectual movement, and when it comes to today’s brand of socialism, it’s the thirty-five-and-under crowd doing much of the heavy lifting.

The American left of center is like a soft mattress, and Bernie is an anvil dropped in the middle: whichever side you’re lying on, gravity pulls you a little closer to him.

Bruenig, the Post columnist, is perhaps the most prominently placed of a small but increasingly visible group of young writers unabashedly advocating for democratic socialism. In writing her attention-grabbing article, she helped elevate a discussion that has long taken place on Twitter. Of course, the relative merits of socialism—and Marxism, Maoism, anarcho-syndicalism, you name it—have been debated in lefty journals and academic circles for a century or more. Members of this new generation, however, aren’t just talking among themselves; they’re trying to take socialism mainstream. And unlike their predecessors, they have reason to think Americans will take their ideas seriously.

They’ve got a double challenge. The first is to convince skeptical Americans that, despite what they may have learned in high school, socialism doesn’t have to mean Stalinism, and it doesn’t lead inexorably to the gulags of Soviet Russia or the starvation of Nicolas Maduro’s Venezuela. The second may be even trickier. They must explain how their version of socialism fits, or doesn’t, into the American political system while showing how, specifically, it is distinct from traditional Democratic Party liberalism. In other words, they must not only defend socialism in the twenty-first century; they must define it.

Nathan Robinson hated Bernie Sanders before he loved him.

It was the fall of 2015. Robinson, a doctoral candidate at Harvard and, at the time, a recent law school graduate, had been steeped in socialist thought since high school, when he discovered the writings of anarchistic socialists like Mikhail Bakunin and Noam Chomsky. Socialism has always been dogged by the question of whether it’s possible to participate in electoral politics while remaining truly radical. Like many leftists, Robinson initially saw Sanders as an example of intolerable compromise.

“Based on Senator Bernie Sanders’s public statements, one of the following things must be true,” he declared on his blog in October 2015. “(1) Bernie Sanders is unaware of the definition of socialism or (2) Bernie Sanders is fully aware of the definition of socialism, and is lying about it.” Sanders, he explained in a follow-up post, was “not asking for public ownership of the major sectors of the economy,” but merely calling for expanded welfare and regulations. “Socialism means an end to capitalism. Bernie Sanders does not want to end capitalism. Bernie Sanders is not a socialist.”

(Nathan Robinson, the editor of Current Affairs, sees socialism not as an economic platform, but as a strong commitment to certain principles.)

Those turned out to be among Robinson’s last blog posts. In January 2016, he launched Current Affairs, a deeply irreverent leftist magazine, with backing from a Kickstarter crowd-funding campaign. Despite being essentially a one-man operation, Current Affairs quickly developed a substantial following on the left thanks to Robinson’s extraordinary writing talent—especially his knack for composing viral takedowns of conservative intellectual hucksters like Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson.

By 2017, Robinson seemed to have fully shed his earlier hostility toward Sandersian socialism. Here he was, last summer, writing on the difference between leftism and liberalism: “As Nancy Pelosi said of the present Democratic party: ‘We’re capitalist.’ When Bernie Sanders is asked if he is a capitalist, he answers flatly: ‘No.’ Sanders is a socialist, and socialism is not capitalism, and there is no possibility of healing the ideological rift between the two.”

That’s a long way from calling Sanders an ignoramus or a liar. What happened?

Much has been made of how Sanders has pulled the Democratic mainstream to the left. Presumptive 2020 presidential candidates are racing to capture the Bernie vote by declaring their support for policies—single-payer health care, free college—that once seemed impossibly radical. But Robinson’s evolution on Sanders is representative of a complementary phenomenon that has received less notice: Sanders seems to have also pulled the far left closer to the mainstream. The American left of center is like a soft mattress, and Bernie is an anvil dropped in the middle: whichever side you’re lying on, gravity pulls you a little closer to him.

“Those of us who consider ourselves on the more radical left were kind of disdainful of the political system,” said Robinson. “It was a real minority within Occupy saying you should even contest elections.” Sanders’s tantalizingly strong primary run—roughly equivalent to the MIT basketball team making the Final Four—made some lefties reconsider. For the first time, it seemed as though they could actually win. But winning requires engaging in politics, and politics requires some degree of pragmatism—a recognition that the achievable will always fall short of the ideal. That, in turn, requires giving up the ideological purity of the fringe.

Consider Jacobin magazine, the leading publication of the Millennial far left. It’s a magazine that wears its Marxist affections on its sleeve, with the tagline “Reason in Revolt.” Across the first seventeen issues, by my count, the word “Marx” or its derivations appeared an average of about forty times. But, since then—that is, beginning in summer 2015, when people started feeling the Bern—that’s fallen to only about twelve times on average.

Bhaskar Sunkara founded Jacobin in 2011, while an undergraduate at George Washington University—which now makes him, at age twenty-nine, something like the granddaddy of Millennial socialists. The magazine doesn’t have a strict party line. In May 2015, its website ran dueling pieces on Sanders’s candidacy. One, by Ashley Smith, called Sanders’s campaign an “obstacle” to the formation of a new left. But the other, by Sunkara, argued that the left should welcome Bernie’s run, “even if Sanders’s welfare-state socialism doesn’t go far enough.”

Since then, while Sunkara continues to distinguish in theory between Sandersism and full-blown socialism, Bernie has practically become the magazine’s mascot. A Jacobin Facebook ad, which reads, “It’s not you, it’s capitalism,” features an image of Sanders superimposed over the Jacobin logo. The winter 2016 issue featured a cartoon of Sanders on its cover, alongside Jeremy Corbyn of the British Labour Party. And a health care–focused issue from earlier this year reads as an extended brief in favor of Medicare for All, Bernie’s single-payer plan, featuring a fawning Q&A with Sanders. The editor’s note that opens the issue begins, “When future historians chronicle how Medicare for All was finally won . . .” To cast Medicare for All—not even fully socialized medicine, since it would nationalize insurance, but not providers—in such grandiose terms is a striking shift of the socialist goalposts.

(Bhaskar Sunkara, the editor of Jacobin, is at age twenty-nine something like the granddaddy of Millennial socialists.)

“We push for social democratic reforms in the here and now,” Sunkara told me, though he insisted that his long-term vision remained as radical as ever. “There’s a need to at least dabble a little bit more with strategy and some more policy-oriented stuff, instead of just merely trying to build an opposition movement and mainly talk about theory.”

Not everyone on the left is happy about it. Socialists, the leftist writer Fredrik deBoer wrote last year for Current Affairs, “seem to be falling into the models of the welfare state without really knowing we’re doing it, sliding rightward as we talk about a reinvigorated left, slouching towards liberalism.” At its core, he argued, socialism means moving sectors of the economy into communal ownership—not merely expanding the welfare state, which is social democracy, or perhaps social insurance, but not democratic socialism. Taking issue with an op-ed by Sunkara in the New York Times, deBoer worried that the Jacobin editor’s “alternative” vision “does not look very different from a more humane, more nurturing liberal capitalist state.”

Nathan Robinson, who published deBoer’s piece, and is currently at work on a book about what socialism means to young people, doesn’t deny that his own thinking has become less doctrinaire. “I’ve sort of come around to the idea that ‘socialism,’ the word, should less be used to describe a state-owned or collectively owned economy, and more used to describe a very strong commitment to a certain fundamental set of principles,” he said. “It should be used to describe the position that is horrified by solvable economic depravations, rather than a very specific and narrow way of ordering the economic system.”

For Robinson, the heart of socialism is not this or that policy, but rather the fundamental values that should drive our politics. During the election, Hillary Clinton bragged about having the support of “real billionaires” like Mark Cuban and Michael Bloomberg, in a shot at Trump’s refusal to disclose his finances. Obama, after he left office, was promptly seen vacationing on Richard Branson’s private island and partying with celebrities on billionaire David Geffen’s yacht. That makes someone like Robinson skeptical that the Democratic Party is actually committed to reducing inequality—which, after all, would require taking back some of the wealth of people like David Geffen.

A socialist, in other words, is hungry for a little class warfare. Sunkara, in the intro to his Sanders interview in Jacobin, wrote that while Sanders “may share some of the same policy goals as progressives like Elizabeth Warren,” the difference is his “confrontational vision of social change,” which involves calling out “the millionaires and billionaires” who are hoarding too much wealth.

Or, as Robinson put it in a Current Affairs essay (published under a pen name, a habit he has since dropped) titled “It’s Basically Just Immoral to Be Rich,”

After all, there are plenty of people on this earth who die—or who watch their loved ones die—because they cannot afford to pay for medical care. There are elderly people who become homeless because they cannot afford rent. There are children living on streets and in cars, there are mothers who can’t afford diapers for their babies. All of this is beyond dispute. And all of it could be ameliorated if people who had lots of money simply gave those other people their money. It’s therefore deeply shameful to be rich. It’s not a morally defensible thing to be.

If Sanders and the prospect of political power have made some preexisting radical leftists start talking more like New Deal liberals, the even bigger effect of his prominence has been compositional: by defining socialism in an especially capacious and inviting way, he pulled in people who might otherwise still identify as liberal or progressive. “What Roosevelt was stating in 1944, what Martin Luther King Jr. stated in similar terms twenty years later, and what I believe today, is that true freedom does not occur without economic security,” he said in his Georgetown speech in November 2015. “Democratic socialism means that we must create an economy that works for all, not just the very wealthy.”

This kind of talk is enough to make a certain kind of liberal’s eyes roll clean out of her head. What Democrat doesn’t believe in those things? But Sanders couldn’t have claimed this ideological real estate if his overwhelmingly Millennial supporters didn’t feel that mainstream liberals—embodied by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic establishment that lined up behind her—had abandoned it.

Briahna Gray, a contributing editor at Current Affairs who was recently hired as a politics editor at the Intercept, told me she probably wouldn’t have identified as a socialist in 2015. “The primary in 2016 radicalized me,” she said. Gray, a Harvard Law School–educated lawyer, has made a name for herself by embodying an intersection of identities that’s rare in media: a leftist, Sanders-supporting black woman. That has given her credibility to puncture the “Bernie bro” stereotype and take on Sanders critics who dismiss his movement as insufficiently attuned to racial or gender issues.

(Briahna Gray, an editor at the Intercept, came to socialism more recently. “The primary in 2016 radicalized me,” she said.)

“The most disappointing part of the 2016 primary was centrist candidates convincing Americans that policies that are implemented in wealthy nations all over the world, much less wealthy than ours, are completely a fantasy world,” she said. (Clinton declared during a primary debate that single-payer health care would “never, ever come to pass,” and later ridiculed Sanders in her campaign memoir for essentially promising Americans free ponies.) This was a recurring theme in conversations with young socialists. To their ears, the term “liberal” has come to represent an intolerably unimaginative posture toward politics: less “Yes we can” than “Not so fast.”

Still, the worldview Gray sketched out—“where socialism is used to mitigate the negative effects of capitalism”—sounded like good old Keynesian liberalism. If you’re someone who believes a word should have a fixed meaning over time, or who believes in the importance of the liberal tradition, then this approach—socialism as liberalism, just more liberal—can be deeply exasperating. Sean Wilentz, a historian and longtime friend of the Clintons, captured some of this frustration in a recent essay in the Democracy journal. “[T]here is something essentially dishonest about trying to assimilate the New Deal legacy as ‘socialism,’ ” he wrote, referring to the speech in which Sanders tied himself to Franklin Roosevelt.

There’s no denying that much of what today’s socialists are demanding fits within the liberal tradition of a Ted Kennedy or Paul Wellstone. Advocating something like single-payer health care, but calling yourself a socialist, can look like mere positioning. In fact, the socialist writers I spoke with didn’t really have a problem with that. “Part of it is just a rhetorical claim,” said Ryan Cooper, an opinion writer at the Week who identifies as a democratic socialist. He said that the core aspects of his political agenda are creating a “complete welfare state” and reducing inequality by democratizing ownership of capital. Why use a term as loaded as socialism to describe those ideals? “The point is to say, ‘Here’s a left,’ in a way that just could not possibly be co-opted by Andrew Cuomo types.”

Nathan Robinson echoed the sentiment. “I used to call myself ‘progressive,’ and then the term became used by everybody, and now it doesn’t really mean anything,” he said. “If you’re trying to say, ‘I’m further to the left than Obama and the Clintons,’ you’re stuck!” (Disclosure: I’m friendly with Cooper, who is a former Washington Monthly web editor, and Robinson.)

The divide may owe as much to differences in memory as to ideology. If you’re old enough to remember Democrats getting absolutely creamed in three consecutive presidential elections in the 1980s, then you’re old enough to remember them seemingly needing to pivot to the center to regain power in 1992. They didn’t compromise their core values (they would love a complete welfare state, if only it were possible), they just did what they had to do to win votes from what looked like an overwhelmingly conservative electorate. That included getting cozier with Wall Street and members of the plutocracy to ensure a stream of campaign funding that could rival the right’s.

But if the 1980s are when you were born, that’s not your experience. You remember that the Bill Clinton years were pretty good—but yielded George W. Bush. We got eight years of Obama—then Trump. If cautious, corporate-friendly liberalism gives way time after time to revanchist Republican administrations, is it really doing its job? If liberal figureheads stop even talking about a truly ambitious social safety net, how long should we keep assuming that’s what they want, deep down? Someone under thirty-five years old has no memory of a Democratic presidential nominee, let alone president, to the ideological left of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Meanwhile, that young person is broke: a report by the St. Louis Federal Reserve recently warned that households headed by ’80s babies have 34 percent less wealth than expected based on earlier generations at that age, and are thus “at greatest risk of becoming a ‘lost generation’ for wealth accumulation.”

Telling a young radical that, despite all their sharp disagreements with the liberal mainstream, they’re really a part of it, is a bit like telling a football fan that the Cleveland Browns are actually good because they won some championships in the ’50s and ’60s. It’s fair to wonder how many years a political movement can distance itself from certain principles before it runs the risk of a rival movement claiming them for its own.

(It must be said, too, that “liberal” is an unfortunate term. It belongs to that category of words—like “sanction” or“oversight”—that mean both a thing and its opposite; thus a “classical liberal” is really a free-market conservative. An acute instance of this problem is the even more awful “neoliberal,” which itself has two meanings: one is simply Reagan-Thatcher laissez-faire capitalism; the other, elaborated in the pages of this magazine in the 1980s, is more akin to the “New Democrat” philosophy of Bill Clinton. But these definitions overlap, because Clinton added financial deregulation to the agenda.)

It’s a bit unfair to ask the term “liberal” to cover every political position to the left of conservative and to the right of seizing the factories. The socialist label might be annoying, but it’s useful. Of course, the policies Bernie Sanders and many of his followers are calling for fit within the American liberal tradition, if you go back far enough. But to insist that they therefore owe loyalty to liberalism itself is to get the point of political movements backward. Ask not what you can do for your ideology; ask what your ideology can do for you. If young people increasingly feel like liberalism as it exists today doesn’t represent their values, then perhaps it’s up to liberalism to win them back.

If you think the Millennial socialist movement is only about protesting Clintonism, however, you haven’t been paying close enough attention.

The tricky part of advancing ideas under the banner of “socialism” is threading the needle between two contradictory critiques. The first is an evergreen: that real-world socialism inevitably leads to catastrophe and dictatorship, and only someone totally ignorant of history could deny this. (A representative headline in the National Review: “Despite Venezuela, Socialism Is Still Popular in the U.S.”) The second critique, as we’ve seen, is that self-identified socialists actually aren’t socialists. (David Brooks managed to make both these points at once in a recent column. The idea that capitalism is inherently flawed, he wrote, has “been rejected by most on the left.” Nonetheless, today’s progressive left, drunk on populism and identity politics, “seems likely to bring us the economic authoritarianism of a North American version of Hugo Chávez.”)

Few people seem to be working harder to tackle that challenge than Matt Bruenig, the twenty-nine-year-old founder of the People’s Policy Project, a one-man socialist think tank—and the husband and intellectual teammate of Liz Bruenig, the Washington Post columnist. I met them for lunch near Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C., in April. Former high school sweethearts who met on the debate team in Arlington, Texas, they’re an odd couple, by which I mean both that they are different from each other and that they are individually odd. Matt is tall and scruffy, with a paunch and a patchy beard. Liz is barely five feet tall and had her hair pulled into a tidy bun the day we met. He is hyper-analytical and obsessed with economic policy. She is a religious Catholic—her pro-life views have made her enemies on the left, whereas Matt, she joked, “loves abortion”—and more concerned with philosophical questions than policy specifics. “I make a much more romantic case for socialism than Matt does,” she said.

(Matt Bruenig’s one-man think tank, the People’s Policy Project, specializes in left-wing policy wonkery.)

Matt gained some notoriety in 2016 when he was fired from his part-time blogging gig at Demos, a liberal think tank, after directing a stream of Twitter insults at the head of a different liberal think tank. At the time, Liz was thirty-eight weeks pregnant with their daughter, Jane. I asked what happened after the kerfuffle.

“We went to Twitter boot camp,” Liz said.

“Who was the drill sergeant?”

“Me.”

In 2017, Matt launched his crowd-funded think tank, which immediately began being noticed in liberal policy circles. His work, which in its faith in winning arguments by marshaling the right facts calls to mind a socialist Ezra Klein, is often cited in places like the Atlantic and Vox, and he has been quoted as an expert by CBS News and elsewhere. Even among prominent young lefties, his Twitter presence, even post–boot camp, stands out—277,000 followers as of June.

(Elizabeth Bruenig, a twenty-seven-year-old columnist at the Washington Post, has devoted columns to making the case for socialism.)

The Bruenigs argue, as Liz has written in the Post, that “it makes sense to think of socialism on a spectrum, with countries and policies being more or less socialist, rather than either/or.” Much of Matt’s work revolves around making the case that real socialist policies have been implemented successfully in other countries, particularly Nordic nations like Norway and Sweden. The question of how to describe the governance of these places has become quite contentious, because if these healthy, happy, rich nations are meaningfully socialist in some way, it’s hard to argue that socialism always ends in disaster. Conservatives protest the most loudly, but liberals, too, deny that socialism is afoot in Scandinavia. These countries are, we’re told, “mixed economies” or “social democracies”—bigger welfare states, sure, but fundamentally capitalist systems.

But in a post last summer, Matt used data from the OECD library and the International Labour Organization to show that a strong welfare state is only one part of the story. Most strikingly, at least some of the Nordics come out ahead on that textbook aspect of socialism, state ownership. In Norway and Finland, he wrote, the government owns “financial assets equal to 330 percent and 130 percent of each country’s respective GDP,” compared to 26 percent in the U.S. Norway’s government owns around 60 percent of the nation’s wealth—nearly double the level for the Chinese government—including a third of its domestic stock market. “There is little doubt that, in terms of state ownership at least, Norway is the most socialist country in the developed world,” Bruenig wrote a few months later—“and, not coincidentally, the happiest country in the world according to the UN’s 2017 World Happiness Report.”

The Norwegian example figures prominently in what is probably Matt’s most interesting policy proposal. In a New York Times op-ed last November, he argued that the easiest way to combat American inequality would be a “social wealth fund,” which he described as akin to an index or mutual fund, “but one owned collectively by society as a whole.”

Norway has such a fund, he pointed out, which is valued at over $1 trillion and is used to pay for its generous welfare state. Alaska has one, too, paying its citizens cash dividends from the proceeds of a diversified investment fund that, like Norway’s, started with oil money. Under Bruenig’s idea, the federal government would create an investment portfolio—perhaps by selling federal assets, or through “taxes on capital that affect mostly the wealthy,” or by redirecting recession spending by the Federal Reserve—and distribute a regular cash dividend to every American, or every American adult, each of whom would have one equal share in the fund. If the fund came to own a third of the nation’s wealth, he calculated, that would have meant an $8,000 payout to everyone between the ages of eighteen and sixty-four in 2016.

In addition to arguing for a social wealth fund, Bruenig published a long paper authored by Ryan Cooper, the writer at the Week, and Peter Gowan, a Dublin-based researcher, arguing that the best response to the problem of housing affordability would be a massive new “social housing” project, in which the federal government would pay to build ten million homes over the next ten years. Unlike traditional American public housing, this would be “designed to cater to people of various income levels, rather than just serving the ‘deserving poor.’ ” Again, they point to Europe for proof of concept: in the 1960s, facing a housing crisis, Sweden built one million social-housing units over the course of a decade, increasing its housing stock by a third. In Vienna, Austria, they report, “3 in 5 residents live in housing built, owned, or managed by the municipal government.”

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easyfoodnetwork · 4 years ago

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Ghost Kitchens Are the Wave of the Future. But Is That a Good Thing?

Rows of shipping containers were used to create the small kitchens inside the Grand Food Depot in LA. | Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

Delivery-only restaurants, which have proliferated during the pandemic, could change the way the industry does business for years to come

Sunset Squares Pizza has fewer than 1,000 followers on Instagram. Delivery in its neighborhood — San Francisco’s Sunset district — costs $5, while those farther afield in the city pay $10. There’s a handful of pizzas and nondairy focaccia options on the menu, a couple salads, and a dessert. The dough is made from sourdough and a wild yeast starter, and the pies are, of course, square. What started as a pandemic-era baking project between a father and his teen daughters this spring has now turned into a viable business operation: Three or four pizzas a week to friends grew as word of mouth spread; the Instagram posts and tags followed.

The difference between Sunset Squares and, say, your neighbor slinging pizzas from his garage and selling them on Instagram is that this business was started by a notable San Francisco chef with several restaurants of his own. He remains purposefully anonymous for now.

“San Francisco is a really small food community. That has certain advantages but also has disadvantages. In many ways it’s hurt the development of restaurants and new food ideas,” says the chef. “At the end of the day, especially with certain cuisines, if you don’t come from a lauded Michelin pedigree, food journalists and the general community — because San Francisco has shifted and morphed into this elitist consumer market — just want to follow brand recognition versus thinking on their own what they think is good food or not.”

A market research firm recently estimated that delivery-only restaurants could be a $1 trillion business by 2030.

Several months in, Sunset Squares is still a bit of a secret. The chef and his family and friends handle the deliveries for a flat rate of $5 in the neighborhood, $10 elsewhere in SF, and $20 for neighborhoods outside the city. But it’s poised for a public debut soon; the chef has hired two additional chefs to help develop the concept further, and plans to launch it on third-party delivery platforms like DoorDash in a couple months.

Virtual brands, ghost kitchens, delivery-only concepts — whatever you call them — have thrived during COVID-19. Euromonitor, a market research firm, recently estimated that they could be a $1 trillion business by 2030. That’s happening concurrently with near-impossible working conditions for many brick-and-mortar restaurants. Stores in cities that once did a brisk lunch business saw sales fall off a cliff. To mitigate losses, some restaurants are throwing everything they have at virtual expansion, creating entirely new brands that live online.

Many of these concepts partner with large delivery companies like DoorDash and Uber Eats for online ordering, pickup, and delivery; others look to companies that build and operate kitchen facilities that host multiple concepts under one roof. One such company, CloudKitchens, started by former Uber founder and CEO Travis Kalanick, has received hundreds of millions of dollars in funding, and according to a recent Wall Street Journal report, it’s spent more than $130 million in the last two years on real estate for its kitchens. Ordermark, a software company that helps restaurants manage online orders and host virtual brands from their existing kitchens, recently received a $120 million investment.

Nikki Freihofer, a senior strategist for the Culinary Edge, a restaurant consulting firm that regularly advises clients on virtual brand creation, compares the current wave of virtual restaurants to direct-to-consumer brands like Casper mattresses or Quip toothbrushes. “Consumers are trusting [direct-to-consumer brands] based on their digital presence alone and then ordering something that comes straight to their door,” she says. “At the fundamental level that’s the same thing as a virtual restaurant brand.”

Sunset Squares embodies everything that a brand consultant likely looks for: It serves a purpose, has a focused vision, and tells a compelling story. But its intentional execution and unorthodox origin story make it exceedingly rare among the glut of ghost kitchens launched to prominence on UberEats.

When experts talk about virtual restaurants, they talk about “intelligently leveraging brands” and establishing “brand-cohesive touchpoints.” It’s more jargon than you’d expect when talking about an upstart casual restaurant, but many concepts are the result of digital strategies calculated to help stand out in a crowded market.

Melt Shop operates 17 restaurants in five states serving the kind of comfort food you might want after a big night out (cheesy chicken sandwiches, chicken tenders, tater tots). In early spring, amid COVID lockdowns and plummeting sales, the team quickly launched two new virtual brands: Melt’s Wing Shop and Melt’s Cheesesteaks. They were built fast but intentionally, says Melt Shop founder and CEO Spencer Rubin, by taking advantage of data Melt had on hand.

Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images

The Doordash Kitchens building in Redwood City, California

That data told Rubin that “Chicken sells… period,” but also that customers wanted more dinner options and that wings could drive a larger check average. “It’s very hard to make money delivering a $10 meal for one person. We saw that selling family-sized meals for two, three, four people is how to actually turn a profit in the delivery space,” Rubin says. “We also saw that the first few hours of team shifts each day had time to integrate more prep work without adding too much complication. We were able to optimize schedules by moving tasks to different parts of the day.”

But even with hard data and a good gut instinct, virtual concepts fail just as easily as their brick-and-mortar counterparts. Melt’s Cheesesteaks lasted less than two months.

“I don’t think there’s any brands that are successful in the long term by half-assing it, and I don’t think anyone who has their doors open in this environment right now is half-assing anything,” Rubin says. “People’s idea of quality and people’s ability to execute vary dramatically. Even though some people may be giving it 100 percent, it still may not be good enough for the market.”

“By having multiple brands, we own a greater portion of digital real estate.”

Third-party services provide ample opportunity for expansion, according to Aaron Noveshen, CEO of the Culinary Edge consulting firm and founder of Starbird Chicken, a Bay Area fried chicken restaurant with several physical stores. Starbird operates several virtual brands, too: Starbird Wings, Starbird Salads, Starbird Bowls, and Garden Bird.

“By having multiple brands, we own a greater portion of digital real estate,” Novoshen says. “[With] five brands on an Uber Eats or a DoorDash, we can target a consumer who’s looking for a more specialized product. We can make that site highlight a full menu category.”

Instead of a huge menu where some items might get lost, those items can be broken out and highlighted as brands of their own, a benefit for existing restaurants looking to make more money. Zuul, a ghost kitchens company, rents kitchen space to restaurant businesses in Manhattan. Since COVID, Zuul has seen an uptick in interest: The company receives multiple inquiries per day from both existing restaurants looking to expand and virtual concepts looking to launch, according to Kristen Barnett, Zull’s director of strategy. A year ago, she had to explain to friends in the food industry what she did for a living. Now, “Everyone I speak to in the food industry understands what a ghost kitchen is,” Barnett says.

Zuul houses delivery-only kitchens for existing brick-and-mortar brands like Sweetgreen and has helped a few of its clients launch virtual-only brands from existing restaurants. Virtual brand Rival Sandwich Co. was born from the two-location Manhattan pizzeria Stone Bridge Pizza. “They were cooking off their pizza dough and dusting it with fresh herbs and salt to make really delicious fresh baked bread, and then making baked sandwiches with it,” Barnett says. “But they were completely hidden in the far corner of their menu and we didn’t see many sales.”

Zuul’s team spun up the virtual sandwich concept from idea to operations in two weeks. In its first week, Rival Sandwich Co. sold three times the amount of sandwiches Stone Bridge was selling on its own.

Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

Charles Jones makes a customers order inside the kitchen of Taco Pete at the Grand Food Depot ghost kitchen.

There are still limits to what kind of concepts work, even in a vast virtual world. Building an online-only brand requires attracting a broad enough market to buy what you’re selling. “Realistically, there are only so many products being launched in the virtual restaurant space. It’s a lot of chicken wings, a lot of grain bowls, and sandwiches and pastas, things that travel well,” says Freihofer, the Culinary Edge strategist.

Zuul’s Barnett, however, argues that virtual brands are in “a nascent phase of evolution.” They’re optimized for simplicity, so the easiest launches come first.

Freihofer agrees. “The virtual space is ripe for innovation and I doubt the overriding trend will be homogeneity,” she says. “The virtual space allows for a certain degree of flexibility and the ability to be nimble to adapt to consumer preferences, so operators shouldn’t shy away from innovation or creativity by any means.”

And of course, even with the rapid pace of brand creation and evolution, “it can’t seem like you hodge-podge makeshifted your brand together,” she added.

“It was the only way we could start something up with no capital, and so we figured it would be a great opportunity for us to build a brand.”

According to the chef behind Sunset Squares, there’s still ample opportunity for creativity and interesting new concepts in the virtual space. “Definitely seemingly limiting at first glance, but constraints and adversity always push creativity,” he says. “I think our pizza concept and operations are great examples. We have okonomiyaki-style pizza with bulgogi beef, pork belly and kimchi pizza, a New England chowder-inspired white pie, a drizzle and dip sauce section featuring homemade hot honey, white sauce made with miso, and an umami-rich pink sauce made with mentaiko.”

Virtual concepts are also emerging as stepping stones for unestablished entrepreneurs.

Cat-Su Sando in Chicago opened in September, offering “an American approach to classic Japanese foods.” It’s a virtual restaurant from Shawn Clendening and Will Schlaeger, two chefs with backgrounds in fine dining. Neither claim Japanese ancestry nor have traveled to Japan, but they’ve launched a business selling katsu sandwiches, skewers, and pancakes through third-party delivery services like Uber Eats. The restaurant operates out of a Cloud Kitchens facility in Chicago.

The choice to start as a virtual brand was opportunistic. “It was the only way we could start something up with no capital, and so we figured it would be a great opportunity for us to build a brand and maybe establish ourselves a little bit in the industry so we can open our doors in the future for larger projects,” Schlaeger says. Cat-Su Sando went from concept to opening in just over a month. “That brand kind of popped out of nowhere for us,” he continues. “We got a good general response from people right off the bat, we kind of ran with it. We didn’t have jobs anyway.”

The duo hope to open a slightly different brick-and-mortar restaurant next year, though they have yet to work out all the details of that concept. Clendening says they’re open to focusing on takeout and delivery if the climate continues to support it. In that sense, Cat-Su Sando serves as a test ground for what might come next in an uncertain market.

While there are fewer startup costs and the timeline is shorter, some aspects of launching a virtual brand and opening a new restaurant are the same. “Any restaurant is nothing but trying to figure out solutions, and it’s just shifted in a different way,” says Schlaeger.

“Coming up with names is the hardest part,” Clendening says.

Schlaeger agrees. “When you have something that clicks, you just go with it.”

Toward the end of our conversation, the restaurant’s publicist chimes in to call out the playful add-ons at the bottom of Cat-Su Sando’s menu — a can of Spam and a dime bag full of catnip. “Because they love cats. You know, Cat-Su,” she says.

Clendening jumps in. “We’re actually dog people,” he says.

Kristen Hawley writes about restaurant operations, technology, and the future of the business from San Francisco.

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Rows of shipping containers were used to create the small kitchens inside the Grand Food Depot in LA. | Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

Delivery-only restaurants, which have proliferated during the pandemic, could change the way the industry does business for years to come

A market research firm recently estimated that delivery-only restaurants could be a $1 trillion business by 2030.

Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images

The Doordash Kitchens building in Redwood City, California

But even with hard data and a good gut instinct, virtual concepts fail just as easily as their brick-and-mortar counterparts. Melt’s Cheesesteaks lasted less than two months.

“By having multiple brands, we own a greater portion of digital real estate.”

Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

Charles Jones makes a customers order inside the kitchen of Taco Pete at the Grand Food Depot ghost kitchen.

Zuul’s Barnett, however, argues that virtual brands are in “a nascent phase of evolution.” They’re optimized for simplicity, so the easiest launches come first.

And of course, even with the rapid pace of brand creation and evolution, “it can’t seem like you hodge-podge makeshifted your brand together,” she added.

“It was the only way we could start something up with no capital, and so we figured it would be a great opportunity for us to build a brand.”

Virtual concepts are also emerging as stepping stones for unestablished entrepreneurs.

“Coming up with names is the hardest part,” Clendening says.

Schlaeger agrees. “When you have something that clicks, you just go with it.”

Clendening jumps in. “We’re actually dog people,” he says.

Kristen Hawley writes about restaurant operations, technology, and the future of the business from San Francisco.

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#Blogger #cooking #Eater #food #recipes

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yogaadvise · 4 years ago

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YogaHub Teacher Spotlight: Chris Flack

All people at YogaHub are really excited to reveal the brand-new YogaHub Instructor Limelights on our blog site. Every 3-4 weeks, we'll tell the story of one of our gorgeous trainers. Enjoy!

Chris Flack informs us regarding his yoga journey by breaking down his experience with reflection, as well as uses helpful meditation tips!

www.UnPlug.ie

I meditate 24×7. I, am a legend.

... I do not as well as, I'm not. When I started meditating I'm quite certain that was my goal.

On a yoga resort ten years ago we did a walking reflection as well as, I won. I 'd absorbed the environments, considered what I was mosting likely to have for supper and also what yoga exercise pose I could photograph to look awesome on my new Facebook account. I was the fastest to the midway point and also was pleased with myself. At that factor the trainer discreetly informed the group that the idea was to be your slowest self. Heading back I remained in last area the entire means. I remember believing to myself, " I am a tale".

Five years later, pressing myself as difficult as I might for success in the company globe I wound up burnt-out as well as was identified with depression.

Today I practice meditation two times daily. Am I worry totally free? No. Yet I have an extremely active life and also this is an essential component to maintain me solid. My emphasis is extra acute, my rest deeper, and also I do everything slower. That does not indicate I do not get points done, yet I observe initially then respond. An easy instance would be being reduced up on my bike when cycling to work (generally other bikers with earphones). Previously I might have right away screamed '**** off you ****** **** arsehole", whereas currently, I 'd stop as well as possibly silently mumble "arsehole" (nobody is perfect). The advantages, however, just really came when I began doing it frequently, and also yet among the obstacles to meditation for a lot of is locating time. this post will hopefully bring some light to how to remove such barriers.

Why is this relevant to you? Being stressed out is currently normal. The pace of contemporary life indicates the majority of us are conditioned to be on vehicle pilot and in a haze of ideas 24×7. It's as if we get on a continuous adrenaline drip as well as whilst that aids us endure challenges, being ' constantly on' is not sustainable. As mindfulness expert Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn explains: " We have Stone Age minds in a digital globe,".

If we assume of this continuous sound creating a practice of interruption, meditation is one option to bring us back to the here and now moment. Each time we do it we are exercising a mental workout to strengthen the routine of focus.

Meditation is usually marketed as bells and smells which does not interest everyone. Thankfully this is changing (although I personally enjoy the scents and bells!) and also right here's why:

1) The evolution of mindfulness means meditation is currently clinically proven.

Just to get the definitions out the method here's mine (some individuals might not agree with these however they're how I separate both):

Meditation is a formal method (there are many strategies which I'll go on to in my next message "I'm a meditation flirt"), to focus on today minute without reasoning ie. the image of the individual sitting with their eyes closed. Transcendental Meditation (emphasis on a specific concept in an official practice).

Mindfulness is an informal practice to focus on today minute with no judgement. ie. something we can do in whatever we do. Jon Kabat-Zinn took this mainstream when he established MBSR (Mindfulness Based Tension Reduction) taking this ancient word for recognition, constructing a clinical situation for huge well-being benefits and making it something any person can do by providing it in a secular way. For instance, mindful strolling (ie. practising a normal task however simply doing that point (single tasking), no listening to music or inspecting your snapstreak).

2) Science (neuroplasticity) has confirmed we can improve our brain physical fitness at any type of age.

And why is this important? Workout just truly removed when scientists started to show the advantages. The large difference there was that it gives more pleasure principle towards goals such as limited buns and a six pack.

Celebrity endorsement as well as glossy products like Headspace as well as Buddhify go some way to make it attractive but unlike physical health and wellness, you can disappoint off your mind health and wellness in a bikini so it will certainly be a slow-moving revolution

3) Being 'always on' produces a habit of interruption as well as mediation does the contrary. Most of us struggle in the present interest economic climate and also yet those diversions are only going to obtain stronger. I'm a little prejudice right here as I run UnPlug, a individuals advancement company that runs business programmes to assist individuals develop focus in a distracted world. Disconnect programmes provide behavior change as well as conscious practice is a tiny element of what we do yet a very essential part.

I am confident that (3) will imply meditation and mindfulness become mainstream as it will certainly not simply be a method to aid us with enhanced well-being however an exercise to make use of to maintain focus in an ever disruptive world.

So here are my meditation tips (note: I am not a professional. I'm somebody experienced fatigue, was identified with depression and also researched reflection as one of the approaches to preserve good brain wellness as well as it's functioned):

- Reflection is not a magic pill, it does not treat anxiety, turn you into a hippy or make Trump disappear. If you have a trouble you require to handle, reflection will, however, assistance as a coping device. As the ABC anchorman Dan Harris created it makes him " 10% Happier". For me, I see more concentrate on favorable and also much less on unfavorable in my life. Absolutely nothing remarkable yet gradually that shift is fundamental.

- Reflection is simple however difficult to practice. When starting arbitration, we wind up in a ferocious circle. We try to block out ideas and all of a sudden create anxiety that we can not practice meditation. If we really did not have thoughts it would be like doing bicep swirls without weights. Assume of it rather than not giving the thoughts your interest. When we sleep, we usually have a mind full of ideas and also the much less focus we offer to those thoughts the more unwinded we become. The difference is that we practice meditation with a straight spinal column (so our nerve system is energetic and, preferably (!) we don't fall asleep).

- With the ' constantly on' society this is becoming harder. Nonetheless, what we have to remember is that the very best things we have actually found out have actually come with practice.

- You possibly do not have time to practice meditation. When you practice meditation for some time you'll really have more time as your life will have even more focus. Also if it's simply 2 minutes a day, do it regularly as opposed to binging. Practice is hard yet fool your system by beginning small.

- Meditation can set you back nothing to countless bucks. However, it's worth considering this is your mind wellness. We invest thousands on our exterior appearance and rarely consider our brain health, commonly getting to for tablets when we are worried. One of the most typical anti anxiety medication on the market supplies males the beautiful side result of erectile dysfunction. If being dispirited wasn't bad enough.

- It is necessary to find what jobs for you. Behaviors just develop when we such as something. If tibetan bells or silent retreats make you wince take into consideration a non-traditional reflection such as colouring in books or calligraphy (the trick is to do something you take pleasure in and also single job). Or if your mind is really busy try a more energetic meditation such as strolling or dancing. It's everything about discovering an anchor for your thoughts that functions for you and your present circumstance. I made use of to contemplate the way to work when I resided in Delhi, my emphasis was on the material stream of noise. My mom reviews her prayers every early morning. She's simply doing that a person thing (there's no Sweet Crush in one hand whilst listening to Radio 2 as well as reviewing her prayers). Consider the words utilized. If you're ill of seeing ' Mindfulness' or ' Meditation' in your newsfeed after that take a leaf out of worldwide firm Mondelez's publication. Julia Freeman created a program that never uses those words, instead it utilizes the adhering to words as well as it's been a big success.

Meditation is one point you can do to boost your mind health/fitness. Sleep, nutrition, relationships as well as workout are equally as crucial as well as I'll discuss how I preserve total brain fitness in a future post.

Even if its' just 2 minutes. Do it daily. Change is a procedure not an occasion so try to make it a habit but see to it you start small.

Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed this short article I would certainly value a share. 🙏

Chris is Chief Executive Officer and Creator of UnPlug. Reflection is just one of his individual passions. UnPlug aids people handle digital interruptions resulting in boosted focus. The UnPlug team includes psychologists, technology and neuroscience professionals. Conscious method is a little part of UnPlug's behavioural modification programmes.

#bikram yoga #hot yoga #meditating #meditation #meditation tips #pilates #yoga

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shirlleycoyle · 4 years ago

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The History of TV Color Bars, One of the First Electronic Graphics Ever Made

A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.

You don’t know Norbert D. Larky and David D. Holmes, but you’ve definitely seen their work thousands of times in your life.

It’s the kind of thing that has existed in the brains of people who left the TV on an obscure cable channel in the middle of the night, the kind that doesn’t have 24 hours of content to fill their day.

Or maybe there was a glitch at the station and they needed to fill some airtime. What Larky and Holmes created in the early 1950s was the one of the most iconic test patterns the world has ever seen.

You know the one, with the bright color bars that are hard to miss. It’s probably the most widely recognized, but test patterns like it have been a key element of television almost since the beginning.

Read on to learn how we got them, and what they do.

“A significant on-screen representative and host of the New World of television programming emerging in the 1930s and 1940s, the test pattern entered into an existing world of settler colonial mass media power and control over representations of Indians, in which the culturally and socially multidimensional and fluid indigenous is practically negated and absent.”

— Dustin Tahmahkera, an associate professor with the American Indian Studies program at the University of Illinois, discussing the simplistic and stereotypical nature of the “Indian head” illustration, a drawing of a generic Native American man wearing a headdress, used on early television test patterns in his 2014 book Tribal Television: Viewing Native People in Sitcoms. Tahmahkera, a citizen of the Comanche Nation of Oklahoma who specializes in researching Native American images in media, notes that at the time, it was one of the few mainstream portrayals of Native Americans in popular culture (he calls it “television’s first famous Indian”), and compared the portrayal to the type used on coins immediately before the test pattern came into use.

Sadly, the people credited with inventing the color test pattern haven’t gotten a ton of public recognition for it

Let’s say you’re floating around an obituary page in a newspaper—let’s say the Los Angeles Times—and you see this line crop up:

He earned his engineering and electronics degrees from Lehigh University and his master’s from Princeton University. Dave had a distinguished career with 13 patents to his name, including the color television and the color test pattern.

This guy has a patent for inventing the color TV? And there’s not a reported obituary about his life?

That was an experience that readers of the Times could have had in August of 2018, when an obituary for the 91-year-old Norbert David Larky (who generally went by his middle name) ran in its newspaper.

Clearly, this was a missed opportunity for the L.A. Times, as Larky (along with David D. Holmes) legitimately did receive the first patent for the color test pattern generator, which was granted in 1956 after being filed for in 1951.

The color TV concept does predate Larky, but as an employee of early color television innovator RCA, he did develop some key patents on that front.

To be clear, there is evidence that Larky and Holmes have received the initial patent for this invention, though others were, without realizing it, competing with them around the same time. For example, Charles J. Hirsch of the technology company Hazeltine wrote a lengthy piece for the academic journal Advances in Electronics and Electron Physics in 1953, in which he described that company’s work on color television, including a discussion on the creation of color bars.

These test bars, throughout their evolutions—with the most recent occurring in 2002 to account for the HDTV switch—remain important in the television industry, as they allow engineers to adjust color schemes to correctly match what’s on the screen and modify accordingly.

But, thinking bigger picture, they represent some of the first electronically produced graphics ever displayed on a screen—a pretty significant development in a world where graphics are everywhere. (Graphics, while a fundamental part of computing today, didn’t become mainstream on computers until the 1970s, when terminals transferred from printers to monitors.)

An example of a black and white test pattern from the mid-1950s. The “Indian head” test pattern of the era is better known, but it’s a relic of the past that doesn’t really need to be displayed anymore. Plenty of places to find that stereotyped image on the internet. 1950sUnlimited/Flickr

Before those color bars, a wide variety of different black-and-white images were used, most notably the “Indian head” graphic created by RCA in 1938, which became the first popular test image of the era.

Writer John R. Meagher explained in a 1948 Radio Electronics article the necessity of these test patterns at the time. Early televisions needed much more in the way of constant tuning, which meant that guidelines that helped owners test for the curve of the picture, the overall focus, the shading, and for interlacing were necessary.

“There is no standard test pattern in general use. The nearest thing to a standard is the RCA ‘Indian head’ monoscope, which is used by a number of TV stations,” Meagher wrote. “[The Radio Manufacturers Association] has proposed a standard ‘resolution chart,’ but for various reasons it has not been adopted by TV stations for air use.”

During the early television era, this image showed up multiple times a day on some channels, along with an accompanying sine wave tone, which generally blared at a 1kHz frequency. (You’ve assuredly heard this dull blare many times in your life.)

Over time, color bars became even more familiar to TV viewers than the black and white equivalents. (Probably a good thing, as the black-and-white test pattern used a stereotypical image of Native Americans.)

Beyond its technical reasons for existence—initially, it was used for calibration in early color televisions, and is today used as a way to ensure chroma and luminance levels in modern screens of all types—it became a pop culture icon of its own. The mobile game show HQ Trivia, for example, directly riffs on the color bars just before a game starts, integrating a modern twist on a vintage look. And Elliott Smith wrote a song about them.

While the NTSC version is probably the best known, it’s not the only one that large numbers of people recognize. Outside of North America, a highly complex PAL variant developed by the electronics company Philips in the mid-1960s has frequently appeared on television in different parts of the world over the years.

TV pictures eventually became much easier to keep tuned, which meant that the reasoning for the regular use of color bars and other test patterns was less essential on a regular basis, but they became a part of the fabric of modern life, especially on cable channels that didn’t have enough content to fill out an entire day.

Why does the NTSC color bar system look the way it does?

Over the years, the color bar test pattern has evolved multiple times to cover different color schemes, with the basic guideline for NTSC sets managed by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers. As the YouTube video highlights above, the exact sequence of color bars evolved significantly from its first appearance in 1954—in which the bottom bars, a small part of the test sequence today, once took up more than half of the screen.

But even if the general design has evolved and the use case has become a bit more narrow, they remain incredibly common.

The most well-known design for the color bars, set by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers in 1978 and updated in 1990, uses three rows of bars.

The first row, intended to show a basic color field, relies on a general mixture of the three primary colors—red, green, and blue—in different combinations, starting with white (though it is displayed as something of a grayish color in practice), then going to yellow (a combination of red and green), cyan (a combination of green and blue), green, magenta (a combination of red and blue), red, and blue. (Some variants, including the original 1954 specification and the more recent HDTV version, add tones of gray or black.)

On a TV screen, these blocks appear as a row of colors, but if you look at the bars in a waveform monitor, it displays the colors in a stair-step layout to highlight the scale of brightness, with the brightest color on the left and the darkest on the right.

An example of a grayscale version of the NTSC color bars, with the blue hues separated out, given a blue “multiply” hue in Photoshop. As you’ll see, the top two rows of bars line up. Image: Photo illustration via Wikimedia Commons

The tiny second row, added in the 1978 edition of the color bars, exists essentially as an alignment system for color that takes personal judgment out of the equation. If you were to display only a blue version of the screen, as much professional equipment does, the middle bars will closely match with the top. The result is that you can measure color hue and saturation quickly and objectively, which comes in handy if, say, you’re working with a lot of video equipment and you need to calibrate it.

The final row (which I’m simplifying a little for sake of not going over people’s heads) contains full-intensity white block and a low-intensity black block. Along with other blocks—a dull purple and blue block that are used to ensure the color signal is being properly demodulated, and a series of short black bars, known as the “pluge pulse,” that help calibrate black levels on the monitor—the bottom row effectively works as something of a utility row to help fine-tune different settings, something shown in the Lynda.com video above.

The result is that you can calibrate screens consistently and perfectly across the board—something that still matters in the world of video production, even if our modern TV sets need it less.

“When we did it, nobody thought it would last for more than a few years, because none of the other test cards had.”

— Carole Hersee, known as the BBC’s “Test Card girl,” discussing how her picture, which appeared within a test card shown during dead periods on the BBC schedule for more than 30 years, making the picture of her—sitting next to a stuffed clown toy, doing a tic-tac-toe puzzle—one of the most common seen on British television. The card, shown between 1967 and 1998, disappeared from air between 1998 and 2009, at which point it returned with BBC’s HD broadcasts to help digital TV owners tune their screens. Hersee, who was 50 at the time of its reappearance, wasn’t necessarily psyched about her childhood photo making a comeback. “I am a bit bemused as I would have thought they would want to modernize it, but if they feel it is suitable to use after all these years, then fine,” she told The Telegraph.

An example of a test pattern on Netflix’s website, which borrows some inspiration from the BBC’s Test Card F. We’ve come a long way from the test patterns of the 1940s. Image: Netflix

There are test patterns hiding all over Netflix, and they’re more entertaining than some of their shows

These types of test patterns, despite not being useful for most TV owners, have never gone away. In fact, they retain much of their value in professional contexts.

And if you go digging far enough on YouTube, you can find examples of test patterns being used by major networks, some of which differ greatly from the standard styles you’re used to.

But those color-bar variants from CBS and NBC are nothing compared to what you can find on Netflix. Netflix, despite having no traditional broadcast component, has numerous test signals openly hanging out on its platforms, and they are fascinating.

Netflix has four “seasons” of what is guaranteed to be its most ASMR show, called “Test Patterns.” For the most part, the tests are simple, showing moving images, bright colors, and simple noises. They seem like the kind of thing that we should not be able to find on Netflix, Easter eggs of a sort, but they’re so easy fo find that you don’t even need an account to view them.

These test patterns are far from alone, either. There are numerous examples of tests on the service, including a test for sRGB graphics, tests of different menu styles, and examples of test footage designed for testing motion and high dynamic range.

One of the greatest examples of the test footage on Netflix is an 11-minute “example show”, dating to the early 2010s and starring an actor named “Actor.” An unintentional example of the kind of content Netflix should be making, it’s an endlessly fascinating watch, as the unnamed actor runs through the Netflix headquarters, behind a water fountain, and at one point moonwalks while holding a laptop.

I recently immersed myself in Netflix looking for examples of these, and it was endlessly entertaining. Given the fact that Netflix has literally thousands of hours of stuff to watch, it makes sense that I would choose to look for stuff that they don’t actually intend on you watching.

YouTube itself, side note, is known for unusual tests of its own: It has a test channel called Webdriver Torso which shows very brief animations of blocky images in quick succession. Sometimes, the images feature a silhouette of Rick Astley. It was not known whether Webdriver Torso was a test channel initially. It just showed up on YouTube one day, and people noticed. Eventually, Google confirmed it was a test channel, and if you search for the term on Google, an Easter egg replaces the Google logo.

The color bar design, more complex than it seems, is so utterly pervasive in modern life that we kind of ignore it’s there.

But one person who did not ignore it was David D. Holmes, the late co-creator of the color bars, who died in 2006. After his passing, a letter that he sent family members was emailed to the video production website Video University. And it was obvious to him how much of an impact his color bar generator had made on modern culture.

An example of color bars painted, in mural form, inside of a barber shop, given a off-kilter tone thanks to lomography. Cameron Russell/Flickr

“Later, when traveling around the world, I saw color bar generators everywhere. There were tens of thousands of them,” Holmes wrote to family members in 2005. “If you see any news room on TV you will likely see color bars on one of the monitors. They show up on the air now and then from BBC in London and others. They are exactly the same as the first one I built fifty-five years ago.”

Which makes it sad that neither Holmes nor Larky received broad notice for this invention that remains in use for video production facilities globally. There are TV shows and movies—lots of them—that have gotten less exposure than the color bars have over the years, and they’ve come and gone. Color bars have certainly changed—they kind of had to, given the fact that our screen sizes changed—but they’ve remained persistent, not just to test image quality, but as an iconic part of television all its own.

You should celebrate this amazing invention by watching them on your screen for a while. You never know. Something might happen.

The History of TV Color Bars, One of the First Electronic Graphics Ever Made syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

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liliannorman · 5 years ago

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The many efforts to lick cat allergies

Time magazine’s list of Best Inventions of 2006 included an unusual creation. It wasn’t a gadget; it was a cat.

“Love cats but your nose doesn’t?” the magazine asked. “A San Diego company is breeding felines that are naturally hypoallergenic.” (Hypoallergenic means that something is unlikely to cause an allergic response.) There was a 15-month waiting list for these “sniffleproof kitties,” which sold for $3,950 or more.

The company selling the cats was Allerca. It had tapped into a tantalizing dream for allergy-prone cat lovers. Just two genes are responsible for making cats a problem for many people. It therefore seemed like a no-brainer to engineer cats that lacked those genes — or to simply breed cats with versions of the genes that made the animals less allergenic.

But so far, itchy-eyed cat lovers have been left disappointed.

Explainer: What are allergies?

By 2010, Allerca had stopped taking orders. Lawsuits were lining up. The sniffle-proof kitties never materialized. Some angry customers said they never received a kitten. Others were sent a cat that set off their allergies.

But for all those who haven’t given up hope, there may be new options around the corner. An allergic owner might pop open a can of allergy-fighting food — for the cat. Or maybe vaccinate the cat to produce fewer allergens. And allergy shots for owners might shift from weekly or monthly injections to a shot that offers immediate relief.

The new gene-editing tool CRISPR/Cas9 might even come to the rescue. This technology might deliver the ultimate dream to those who can afford it: a cat that doesn’t produce allergens at all. One company has made some progress applying CRISPR/Cas9 to cats.

Success in taming cat allergies might even bring good news for people whose allergies have nothing to do with cats. If any of the cat allergy–fighting measures prove safe and effective, they might be deployed against other allergens. They could prove especially useful against airborne ones like pollen, dog dander or dust mites. Up to 30 percent of the world’s population suffers from allergens in the air. So that’s plenty of runny noses to dry up.

Explainer: What are proteins?

When it comes to cat allergies, the main culprit is Fel d1. This small protein is produced primarily in cats’ salivary and sebaceous glands. Fel d1 is found in flakes of dead skin, or dander. It is spread to hair when a cat licks itself. Thus it’s not cat hair that people are allergic to, just hair coated in cat spit.

A singular target

As allergens go, Fel d1 gets around. It sticks to hair and clothing, so it’s easily carried from place to place. It lasts for weeks or months before breaking down. It’s light and easily enters the air. That makes it even more insidious. In fact, even houses without a cat tend to have a little Fel d1 in their dust, says Martin Chapman. This immunologist is president and CEO of Indoor Biotechnologies. It’s a company in Charlottesville, Va., that tests for allergens and allergies.

All cats produce some amount of Fel d1. However, that doesn’t mean that all cats are equally allergenic. In tests of hundreds of cats, Indoor Biotechnologies found levels ranging from just 5 to as much as 2,000 micrograms of Fel d1 per gram of fur. Variations in two key genes explain much of that wide range. But no one knows exactly which versions of the genes result in low-allergen cats.

It’s also not clear what role Fel d1 plays in cats. Lions and other big cats have their own version of the protein, Chapman notes. So it seems to have stuck around during cat evolution. That suggests the protein does something. Male cats that haven’t been neutered tend to have the highest Fel d1 levels, which have been linked to male hormones. Based on that association and the protein’s similarity to other molecules, Fel d1 might be a pheromone. That’s a chemical used to communicate via scent. But no one knows whether the protein plays some role in keeping cats healthy.

It’s not clear what role Fel d1 plays in cats. But lions and other big cats have their own version of the protein, which suggests it must do something, Martin Chapman says.Bernard Bialorucki/iStock/Getty Images Plus

All this uncertainty has made allergies to cats difficult to tackle. For now, options are limited. People can take antihistamines and other medications to reduce symptoms. But such drugs don’t stop the allergy.

Traditional allergy shots are known as immunotherapy or desensitization therapy. They aim to retrain a person’s immune system to be less sensitive to an allergen. But those shots are a commitment. A patient may need up to 100 injections over three to five years.

Some people can avoid needles by taking under-the-tongue daily drops of the same U.S. Food and Drug Administration–approved allergens as in the injections. But this treatment often is not covered by insurance.

“Desensitization therapy has been the only therapy for decades,” says Gerald Nepom. He is director of the Immune Tolerance Network in Seattle, Wash. It’s a research group funded by the National Institutes of Health. Exactly how desensitization works is still not fully understood. But the basic idea is that exposing the immune system to small amounts of allergens causes the body to make antibodies that block part of the allergic response. Unfortunately, Nepom says, desensitization generally doesn’t eliminate all symptoms. And the effects aren’t always permanent.

Allergy treatments

There is no permanent cure for cat allergies, though a number of available treatments can reduce symptoms in many allergy sufferers. New treatments aim to do a better job at this or stop the allergy process in its tracks.

TREATMENTAVAILABLE NOW?ACTIONPROSCONSAntihistaminesYesBlock histamine productionNewer drugs like cetirizine (Zyrtec) and fexofenadine (Allegra) cause less drowsiness than previous drugsMay not eliminate symptomsNasal steroidsYesReduce inflammation in the noseReduce sneezing, congestion and runny noseOnly treat symptomsTraditional allergy shots or dropsYesExact mechanism unknown; may increase helpful antibodiesThe only current therapy that reverses some allergiesRequires many shots over several yearsAllergy shots of lab-made antibodyNoBlock immune system’s recognition of allergenFast-acting prevention of allergic responseBoosters requiredPet food with antibodiesNoCuts amount of active Fel d1 allergen in cat salivaNo shots neededDoes not eliminate all Fel d1Vaccine for catsNoPrevents human immune system from recognizing cat allergenNo shots needed for peopleDoes not eliminate all Fel d1; more testing needed to confirm safety for catsGenetic engineering of catsNoRemoves genes that direct Fel d1 production in cats With no Fel d1, nearly all cat allergies would be eliminatedEffects on cats are unknown

Newer approaches are focusing on Fel d1. They either directly neutralize it or block its interaction with the human immune system. The competition to devise an effective solution to cat allergies is fierce. Because of the large potential market — about 10 percent (some estimate 20 percent) of people are allergic to cats — a successful approach could make companies a lot of money.

Applying lessons learned here to other allergies is a strong motivator, too.

Improving immunotherapy

One problem with traditional immunotherapy is that it tries to stop one of the later steps in the allergic response. Immunoglobulin E, or IgE, is an antibody that triggers an allergic reaction. Antibodies patrol the body looking for specific interlopers. In people with allergies, the IgE only latches onto the proteins or chemicals — allergens — that trigger their allergy.

When an IgE find its allergen, the antibody raises an alarm. It does that by telling certain cells that something is wrong. Those cells make chemicals called histamines (HIS-tuh-meens). It’s the job of histamines to get rid of bothersome things by any means necessary. Those histamine chemicals might make eyes water, or trigger coughing, sneezing or itching. That’s helpful when the substance poses harm. But it is not pleasant when the substance — like cat dander — is actually harmless. In allergies, this histamine response can go way too far. It can even cause people’s throats to swell shut and other life-threatening consequences.

Traditional immunotherapy blocks the histamine-producing part of this reaction. Yet that’s only one part of the body’s response to an allergen.

“We now see allergy as an immune-activation symphony,” explains Nepom. Rather than a strict chain of single events, it’s more like an orchestra. And it has many players (molecules) performing on cue.

Today, Nepom says, allergy researchers are getting a clearer understanding of the role of each player. “This is like figuring out which part of the orchestra is creating the problem. Is it the horn section or the strings? Or do you have a single oboe player going rogue?” Knowing that could help researchers target players in the immune system more efficiently, he says.

For example, one research group funded by the Immune Tolerance Network is wrapping up a human trial that goes by the name of CATNIP. This clinical trial is testing what’s called an “allergen-plus” approach. Scientists combine small amounts of Fel d1 with an antibody that blocks a substance important to triggering the allergic response. That substance is a protein that helps spark and maintain allergic reactions. It may be one of those rogue oboists. The idea is that if this treatment works, a patient would develop a long-lasting tolerance from a one-year series of allergy shots. That may sound like a lot, but today’s version of such a therapy requires three to five years of shots.

Other parts of the allergic response are prime targets, too, says Jamie Orengo. She is an immunologist at Regeneron Pharmaceuticals in Tarrytown, N.Y. (Regeneron is a major financial supporter of the Society for Science & the Public. The Society publishes Science News for Students.)

In a test of people with cat allergies, one injection of an antibody that binds to the protein Fel d1 provided more relief from nasal symptoms than did a placebo shot. SOURCE: J.M. Orengo et al/Nature Communications 2018 T. Tibbitts

The company has designed antibodies that are highly specific to Fel d1. These antibodies bind to and lock up the allergen before the immune system can react to it. It’s an amped-up version of traditional immunotherapy. And it’s one that could be used to target other allergens, Orengo notes.

“We don’t have to rely on the human body. We can make those antibodies in the laboratory instead of waiting for them to be generated by the person naturally,” Orengo says. Tests in mice and in people allergic to cats showed fewer allergy symptoms after just one treatment, her team reported in a 2018 paper in Nature Communications. That one treatment gave results that used to be seen only after years of conventional immunotherapy. Most people treated saw as much as a 60 percent reduction in nasal symptoms.

One shortcoming: While this approach is very fast-acting, it doesn’t retrain the person’s immune system. Someone receiving the treatment would need periodic boosters — perhaps every few months.

Special cat food

Cat saliva is the biggest source of Fel d1. Researchers at Nestlé Purina are now testing cat food containing an antibody. It binds to the protein in saliva as a cat eats. This antibody doesn’t prevent the cat from producing the allergen. It does, however, make it almost impossible for the human immune system to recognize the allergen.

“In fact, this was an important strategy behind our research,” says Ebenezer Satyaraj. This immunologist is leading the research at the Purina Institute in St. Louis, Mo. “We didn’t want to stop the production of Fel d1 because currently it is not clear what role it has in the cat.”

When 105 cats were fed an experimental Purina pet food containing a Fel d1 antibody, levels of the allergen dropped below baseline levels over a 10-week period. SOURCE: E. Satyaraj et al/Immun., Inflamm. and Disease 2019T. Tibbitts

Tests so far suggest that the food can knock down the amount of active allergen on cat hair by about half. That may be enough to offer relief to some people with mild to moderate cat allergies. The company expects to begin selling the cat food later this year.

But it won’t help everyone. People with severe allergies or asthma may be unable to tolerate any amount of Fel d1 without causing symptoms, says Michael Blaiss. He is executive medical director of the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology in Augusta, Ga.

Vaccinate the cat

There are cat lovers out there who’d probably be happier letting the cat get the shots. So another new approach aims to vaccinate cats against their own Fel d1. The shot would stimulate a cat’s immune system to produce antibodies that bind to Fel d1. That should make it so that human immune cells no longer recognize — and react — to the protein.

Researchers at HypoPet AG in Zurich, Switzerland, studded an inactive fragment of a virus with dozens of Fel d1 molecules. “If you make the allergen look like a virus, the immune system thinks it is a virus,” says Martin Bachmann. He is chief scientific officer of HypoPet. He’s also an immunologist at the University of Bern in Switzerland. This “Trojan horse” then triggers the cat’s immune system to start seeing Fel d1 — which it normally ignores — as an invader.

An initial test was done in more than 50 cats. Three injections of the vaccine were given three weeks apart. They stimulated the cats to make antibodies specific to the allergen. This reduced the cats’ secretion of the protein by more than half. And it did this without harming the cats, the researchers reported last July in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology. The company now plans further safety testing, Bachmann says. HypoPet is working with U.S. and European Union regulators to bring the vaccine to market.

The hypoallergenic cat

Producing a cat that makes no allergens at all is still the goal for some researchers. The fact that some cats are naturally low in Fel d1 suggests that such pets could be bred. This is what Allerca tried and failed to do a decade ago. But frustratingly, you can’t just breed two cats with low Fel d1 levels and get a litterful of hypoallergenic kittens.

Tom Lundberg breeds Siberian cats in Oregon. He cautions that breeding two cats that are naturally low in the allergen Fel d1 doesn’t guarantee their kittens will also have low levels of the protein. His advice: If you need a low-allergen cat, get it tested and meet the cat before bringing it home.Sarah Starr

Oregon cat breeder Tom Lundberg has bred Siberian cats for more than 10 years. His goal has been to breed low-allergen cats. Lundberg himself is allergic to cats. He became fascinated by Siberians after owning one to which he was not allergic. But a second one, he recalls, gave him a “snotty nose and itchy eyes.”

Lundberg has long measured his cats’ allergen levels and tracked the results of breeding. He can confirm that there’s no way to guarantee that all the kittens in a litter will hit the genetic jackpot. He and his wife, Meredith, now sell the cats they breed based on their Fel d1 levels. Those tested with the lowest levels, which are the most rare, command the highest prices. These cost up to $5,200 for a kitten in the “extremely low” range of less than 1 microgram of Fel d1 per gram of fur. Only about 1 in 15 of the kittens he breeds from low-allergen cats fall into that category, he says.

Lundberg has received hundreds of calls from people giving up Siberian cats that breeders had claimed were hypoallergenic. “They’ll say the kittens were ‘bred from hypoallergenic lines,’” he says. “That’s like saying corn was bred from corn — it’s meaningless.”

Anyone interested in buying a low-allergen cat, he says, should insist on seeing test data. He also notes that buyers with severe allergies may not be able to tolerate any amount of Fel d1.

Indoor Biotechnologies is trying to genetically engineer a cat that makes no Fel d1. “We’re working on it,” says Chapman, who founded the company. This company has used CRISPR/Cas9 to delete two genes. The company has filed for a patent on the process. Called Ch1 and Ch2, the genes being deleted would have instructed cells on how to make Fel d1. So far, the gene edits have worked for cat cells growing in cell-culture dishes.

Next, the company will try knocking out these genes in cat salivary tissues, also growing in a lab dish. Researchers will then make sure Fel d1 is no longer being made, says Nicole Brackett. She’s a postdoctoral scientist at the company. She has analyzed the DNA sequence of the Ch1 and Ch2 genes of 50 cats. She now has plans to do the same for 200 more cats. That will help identify the best gene region to target using CRISPR/Cas9.

If the genetic trick works, engineered cats would lack part or all of the genes needed to make Fel d1. Some cats naturally produce very little of this with no ill effects. So the thinking is that preventing cats from making the protein is unlikely to harm them. But scientists won’t know for sure until someone tries it. “That’s precisely the reason to do the experiment,” Chapman says.

Typically, producing such a cat would require deleting the gene from an embryo. The embryo would then be implanted in a female cat until the kitten is born. But Chapman doesn’t want to get into the breeding business. Instead, he hopes to ultimately edit the genes of adult cats. That is similar to gene therapies being developed now for people (which use a harmless virus to deliver gene-editing tools). Recent experiments have successfully edited the genes of adult mice and even people with sickle-cell disease, for instance.

Such a virus could be delivered by having a veterinarian inject it into the cat’s salivary glands. Or it might come as skin treatment to reach the sebaceous glands in the skin. And if it edits the genes for Fel d1, “that would be exciting,” Chapman says.

One researcher working to wipe out cat allergies won’t be standing in line for any injections, however. Bachmann, of HypoPet, says that he and his son are allergic to cats. When asked if he would try any of the new allergy treatments, he replied no. “I don’t love cats that much,” he says. “I’m more a dog person.”

A personal quest

Stoli (shown here) is a Siberian cat that belongs to the author of this article. Siberian cats are considered hypoallergenic by some people. But there’s no evidence that any cat breed is universally low in Fel d1. E. Engelhaupt

I’ve always been a cat person. So when I married Jay, who’s allergic to cats, among other things, I had a problem. Whenever Jay spent time around a cat, his eyes would start to itch. His nose would run.

But Jay loves cats, too. Like many allergy sufferers, he tried all the usual treatments. For a couple of years, he got monthly allergy shots. He now uses daily nasal steroids and the antihistamine cetirizine. Eventually, his allergies didn’t seem so bad. So we wondered if he could tolerate a cat. I’d been seeing a lot of claims about hypoallergenic cat breeds. I was skeptical but curious.

We’re both biologists by training, so we dove into the scientific literature. We didn’t find much. One small study in Veterinary Sciences from 2017 reported on mutations in Siberian cats that could potentially lower their Fel d1 levels or render the protein less allergenic. It was the barest of hints. But we decided to visit a Siberian cat breeder in Georgia and see if we might luck out.

That day we brought home Stoli on a trial basis. Stoli is a nearly 17-pound sweetheart. Jay’s allergic reaction to him was occasional and mild. And over a few months the sniffling seemed to diminish even more. We thought we’d found our low Fel d1 cat!

Then in the course of reporting this story, I decided to test Stoli. I sent off a fur sample to Indoor Biotechnologies. The result: Stoli’s fur tested at 790 micrograms per gram of fur — pretty darn high.

Maybe the immunotherapy that Jay has endured over the years gets more credit than Stoli’s genes. It’s OK. Despite those test results, we are definitely keeping the cat.— Erika Engelhaupt

The many efforts to lick cat allergies published first on https://triviaqaweb.tumblr.com/

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uandhealth · 6 years ago

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Why is Digital Marketing Automation Important in 2019?

Is the year 2019 going to be the year when time travel-travel comes to life and advertising will now be in more complex networks? Marketing automation is defined as a software that helps automate dull and boring tasks that happens most of the time in the course of a business and is usually manually operated. An example is a continuing transactional communication delivered to a customer after every purchase. This allows the business to be empowered as it empowers brands to gather and analyse data and run targeted audience with effective communication personalized and highly relevant.

Marketing is strongly driven by data and technology and is now more evident in the marketing automation field. Not only is has enabled marketers to do some cool stuff, but it also moved beyond the simplest form of marketing automation by emails and other B2B marketings.

The Marketing Automation Evolution

Businesses are now slowly unfolding with the basic fact that consumers are also evolving with their easy access to channels and online information through network communication.

Product advertising are now rampant and continuously expecting to emerge and win loyal and existing customers.

Marketing technology helps you save money and save time as it scales your business and raises your ROI more effectively. According to recent research, there are 44% of marketing professionals who will incorporate automation marketing skill in 2020 and new staff will be reskilled in hiring in 2019.

This year, B2B marketers have gone and beyond the simplest form of marketing automation. It helps in sending welcome emails and autoresponders even when you are at rest. Email marketing automation shows evident success in the business field.

Marketing professionals utilize marketing automation as it brings more efficiency, cost reduction and enhanced customer experience. In this year 2019, embarking on automation journey for small and large business may seem challenging, but with the right amount of strategy, it is much easier than you think!

56% of marketer’s population think that the digital marketing industry is growing faster than other companies’ marketing technology

In this article, we will discuss everything that you need to know about marketing automation and its importance in 2019.

Chatbots and Artificial Intelligence

You can’t just ignore that Artifical Intelligence (AI) is the next big thing in the marketing automation and it has taken our world by storm. Almost 51% of marketing experts are already using AI, with more advancement in the next two years. AIs are the marketers that understand the great need of working smart and technology optimization, and it has come a long way to explore more stuff on their plate. AIs has indeed, become the artificial brain in marketing automation.

Chatbots are content creators. It’s an AI-powered PPC advertising, used for personalized website experience, advanced push notifications enhancing customer engagements determined to identify customer’s behavior through automated image recognition applied through the use of the artificial brain.

Automated Social Media Outreach

Did you notice that when you search for clothes on an e-commerce site and there will be ads relating to your searches when you log in to your Facebook account or even when you are just surfing the net? Social media has shown evident engagement with customers thru powerful channels marketing their product exploring the great opportunity.

Tools that allow you to schedule, manage and generate reports for social media engagements like Hubspot and Hootsuite allows auto publishing on Instagram. Optimizing the outreach of products and services is now made easy through filtering targeted audience with SocialDrift.

Content works is a content marketing tool that works like an agency built to understand your brand, tell a story and achieve your goals. It analyzes existing content marketing strategies through managing content marketing plans that won’t compromise your existing resources.

Voice Search

Voice searching is now becoming the next new messaging channel for messages thru marketing automation. Almost 32% of B2B marketers are already applying optimized voice-activated personal assistants. This trend is about to accelerate in 2019, and will likely to get a good effect in marketing automation.

Have you tried and listened to how your automated emails? The launching of Siri, Google and Alexa have seen its momentum swiftly. These interactive devices have risen this 2019. Voice search helps in multitasking and handling several other high-priority things that assist in organizing your resources. According to Gartner, by 2020 30% of web browsing will be screen-less. This trend will continue to unravel when we see better voice search technology.

Hyper-personalization

Personalization is outdated and no longer special anymore. Customers ignore emails if the first name is used. With hyper-personalization, it gives up-to-date customer databased with obtained attributes. Hyper-personalization uses real-time data with relevance to the customer via contextual communication. There are nearly 9 out of 10 (88%) claims that their customers expect a more personalized experience. An approach where it enables you to connect with the ideal customer and prospect their connection with your brand. In 2019, these strategies would concentrate more on understanding what communication the customer wants to receive instead of what the business what to build.

Content

Content is the center of the online world. Through marketing automation, you will have the ability to show more personalized content to your website visitors through automation tools. It lets you distribute relevant content on the basis of the IP address to the website visitors. This trend continues to emerge in 2019 because marketing automation platforms continue to create a distribution of platforms and personalized content in an effortless and efficient manner.

Closing thoughts

In the marketing automation world, 2019 seems brighter and bring about new and advanced strategies. The perfect time to put solid marketing techniques in action is happening now. Marketing tool thus helps build in executing campaigns that engage target customers effectively and efficiently. Today, Marketing automation keeps more customers engaged and delivers an increase in ROI. The year 2019 is a year to focus on marketing automation trends as we can expect to see more in the marketing realm.

Want more marketing tips? Visit us at http://bit.ly/digiMarketHubSchedule

#marketing realm #digital marketing #marketing automation #marketing strategy #digital market hub

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sherryyeliu · 6 years ago

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Art for Activation

Just like the word in “A Tale of two cities.”

“It was the best of times; it was the worst times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness…….We had everything before us. We had nothing before us; we were all going directly to heaven, We were all going direct the other way.”

I think this description does not only apply to the age of the French Revolution. But today’s as well.

It turns out, good and evil always are relative. Everyone should gently and sturdily embrace their time and shoulder on their responsibilities. Change the subject or state something positive in response could have a possibility of seeing a hopeful world.

The industrial revolution has resulted in the rapid evolution in human society which produces an enduring vision of the world and causes profound effects. The world is witnessing the coming of global contemporaneity. The continuous development leads to increasingly complicated relations in each field, environment, culture, history, economy, as well as politics and it seems to be going somewhere uncontrollable.

Under this circumstances, the contemporary art practised a pluralistic perspective could be as a valid strategy to activate the 'zones of silence', and this is the crucial point for change. Because art can be related to discovery, education, exchange and cooperation.

The following are the key points of the art engagement

Decolonisation

Reinhabiting

Contemporaneity

Site-specificity

Participation

In these part, I would like to combine my experience in Art field Japan with some theory to explore how art activates a community.

This area consists of 200 small villages, located in the southern region of Niigata, with a wonderful landscape. However, this area had been ever abandoned by the government.

From its name, we can see the situation.

Echi —— Uninhabited

Go—— Economic depression

So, what happened in the early 20th century.

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This area is buried in the snow for more than six months of a year, and therefore it led to low production in agriculture and population loss. Due to the low-speed development, The villagers had lost their pride in their hometown and local culture. At the end of the 20th century, this area hadn’t entered into the automobile society yet, They had no sense of identity for a new city or a new country.

However, what this area looks like today. It has experienced a fantastic development and become the most outstanding example in the world. It is a favourite place in Japan and has held some international communication events.

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why art was associated with this area in the 20th century, the government has tried to do many ways, but there was no effective improvement because of the four complicated problems: passive attitude, place identity, culture shock and decline of the economy.

In 1995, an art director Fram Kitagawa proposed a bold idea that public art is a valid strategy. He wrote this book to record the whole festival.

However, a challenge was that how could the young modern art be grafted on such an ancient farming civilization? No one believed that holding an art festival can help them to solve practical economic and social problems.

How art did?

Decolonisation

Gruenewald (2003a, p. 9）states that the significant factor involved in decolonisation is the development of the ability to recognise ways of think that injure and exploit other people and place.

Nikos Papastergiadis and Gerardo Mosquera (2014) mention that the vitality and value of culture rely on exchange and is benefited by communication.

Therefore, communication is the top priority. It took Fram 7 years to publicize everywhere and organized a volunteer team “ Koheibi” that consists of young people from different backgrounds. Developing empathy in the relationship between them and residents.

It requires artists to see beyond the private and individual and establish a relationship with residents upon mutual interests and mutual respect.

Instead of dominating art to space, Art in this place should be a collective experiment which finally is responded actively and extended widely to a multicultural form.

Reinhabiting

'Reinhabition involves identifying, affirming, conserving and creating those focus of cultural knowledge that nurtures and protect people and ecosystem.’ (Gruenewald, 2003a, p. 9)

The typical feature of the social theory is that "the lack of interest in the place, material context and the land, the social science also tend to the generalization without the consideration of specific context. And this caused the placelessness in Modernity while postmodernity requires the recognition of the multiplicity of places. (Somerville 2010)

As the centre of experience, the local place explains how the world works and how their lives fit into the space they occupy. Therefore, it is necessary for residents to rediscover and rethink this place.

(Provided by Tokamachi City Tourist Association)

‘Gift for Frozen Village’ Takahashi Kamasata, 2012

Rethink the nature

It is important to rebuild the confidence of their hometown by rediscovering nature. This, in turn, can change their attitudes and make them rethink nature. Artists created a variety of artworks to reflect the beauty of nature, this is an example, this artwork names ‘Gift for Frozen Village’, artist fully utilized the snow’s features to combine with the people, fields and forest around, each resident was told to plant a LED “light seed” to bloom in the snow. Gradually, villagers were no longer afraid of the snow. Instead, they began to enjoy the snow and finally, they proposed a slogan “snow is our friend”.

A new view appeared in their familiar scene could draw more concerns, and it gradually benefits to the awareness enhancement as well as encourages the local residents rediscovering their environment, nature and civilizations, reviewing place values and a possibility of art and land. (Kwon 2004, p.66)

Learning about the resource

“Empty House” project

Artists point out to employ the empty house project that rebuilds the destroyed house and school and transform them into the natural resource museum.

photo credit: Echigo tsumari.jp

‘The Rice Field’， Ilya & Emilia Kabakov ，2000

Developing a sense of place and Recognition of the culture

Talking About the recognition of the culture. Integrating the local culture into artworks can help them to realize their own value: agricultural society

“The Rice Field”. Before the first art festival held, artists came here and were deeply touched by seeing farmers working hard among the snow in the early spring. So they set up coloured farmer images about farming in the farmland. In the meantime, they set up a viewing platform on the opposite of the rice field. With a poem which praises their farming culture.

Contemporaneity

It really differs from the Modernity, and it requires artworks bridge the gap among pastness, presentness and future, and this finally engages with the sensitive and incisive social issues of our time, to evoke some positive response. (Smith 2006)

Recording the changes in the multiple time series could draw more attention to the age of terror and prompt to an active confrontation throughout time, things, and thoughts (Bennett 2012).

‘The Rice Field’， Ilya & Emilia Kabakov ，2000

Reproduce life and reconstruct space had established a new relationship between man and man, man and field.

This work highlights the culture of this place but also draw the attention to develop the place image and enhance personal identity. Moreover, In scenes reminiscent of the cultivation, this work evokes the consideration of the current situation and explore a direct experience of multiple time series.

According to (Stephen 2015), more than 50% of farmlands had been reused in 2006, and almost 90% of the land was used in 2015.

The last class， 2006

Review the history

This work is one of the ‘empty house projects’, and it was a school destroyed by a snowstorm. Now it has been rebuilt to reflect the difficulties of livelihood issues and the sustainability of education by the emphasis on the absence of children.

Windows are all in black, and the whole space is filled with the darkness. At the end of the corridor, there is a microphone amplifier with the sound of the heartbeat as well as flashing lights.

The desks and chairs stacked together and are covered with huge white cloth and projected the image with flower and fuzzy light spot. Faint light shakes through the darkness. The dreams of the past intertwine with memories, reminding the time and minds in that time. There were many young lives.

The deconstructive translation seems to increase the sense of empathy, which removes the specificity of identity and let our body to connect with the place.

Ubusuna House Yoshitoki Irisawa and Kuhihiro Ando, 2006

Back to the past

Reuse the abandoned house and reappear the scene of life to evoke people’s memories.

Ubusuna House is inspired by life, ceramicists use local clays to draw a disused house, each surface of the objects in this area such as pit furnaces, stoves, roods and the floor has been decorated with ceramics. Originally it was artwork for exhibition and currently has been used as a restaurant. Artists invited women to manage these art houses and cook local food to tourists. This has created job opportunities for locals and attracted people to come back. No more is a personal house, it seems to be a heritage of community culture.

As traditional culture, ceramics carries on the history and memory, and the return of these residents also connect the pastness with the presentness.

It is reported that the number of population in Niigata increased from 75000 in 1990 to 800,000 in 2018. (Yoshiaki Ito)

Site-specificity & Participation

At the moment of global contemporaneity. Things and places are interrelated. Place as a connecting zone, requires the recognition of the multiplicity and complexity of places (Somerville 2010,p.327).

Although some parts of the memory in the place could be painful, there is no denying that place is the most productive. As a framework for creating, visual proofs rooted in physical reality might generate new story and memories. (Somerville 2010, p.328)

Art in combination with daily life could be the physical contact with the specific place which contributes to a public context and the alternative representation. This is also the chance to increase participation and connect society.

Gift for Frozen Village

Forest School

Consideration of the natural environment and culture value

Gift for Frozen Village and Forest School highlights the importance of the Site-specificity. They present the different functions of the snow as well as the utilise of the physical feature of the place.

The figure of forest school is abstracted by the snake to respond to the local field culture, and according to the surrounding geographical characteristics and weather conditions, its materials, colour and construction have been deeply considered. Made of the thick acrylic, windows can perfectly combine the building with the surrounding environment regardlessness of the change of season. The apparent colour and the huge figure can navigate the directions in the field and particularly in winter, it will be mainly covered by snow, but the snow wall is still visible. Nowadays, the school has been transformed into a natural science museum that displaying all of the wild animal specimens in this place and the traditional farming tools. The artist collected stories from villagers and cooperated with bioscientists to employ this project, transforming the abandonment of the school into a social environment that presents the value of countless personal, collective and agricultural history.

Cai Guoqiang, 2015 ‘Penglai island.’

Participation and Education & Culture Sustainment

This is a collective experiment, Penglai island, which is organized by Cai, a Chinese artist. In China, Penglai is an ideal place where is peaceful and without any conflicts. He used Penglai island to describe Echigo, with different transportations made by children around it, when he designed it, he taught children to design different patterns, then invited old people who master the traditional handicraft techniques to teach children that use local materials to weave. And he just wanted to express that Echigo is a beautiful paradise and industrial society would not destroy it. This work exchanged the traditional culture of two different countries and also contributes to the protection and inheritance of traditional techniques.

The Transformation of place to art also involves the changes in spirit and recognition. Participation, as a contributor, is the significant factor to maintain sustainable communications and exchanges. (Bishop 2006, p67).

Walter Benjamin proposed that art can be explored into a social intervention and provide a means of producing which allows the multi-participation with viewers (Bishop 2006, p11).

Collective elaboration is the priority of art practice because the production is local and responsive. So art cannot be pre-empted to dominate before the local people sharing their stories. During the process of creating, the local story must be integrated. And this finally creates an active mode of production with the function of connecting a community and restoring the social bond.

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In this tour, I learned and gained a lot. Before I came here, I have never thought of that Social engagement can be like this. The Most surprising is the participation and acceptability of art in here is so high. Travellers and volunteers come from all over the world, and local residents organize spontaneously to be the manager for protecting these art places. By now, more than a thousand artworks are permanently displayed in here.

In the closing ceremony, everyone was here, even the art festival director Fram Kitagawa and the mayor of Nigata. The interaction between us is really grateful and enjoyable, and I realize that art can create more possibilities and carry a lot of importance to the development of our life and future. under a state of passive reception, art might be our opportunity to break through, as it can connect life and culture, integrate all things together and prompt our thinking.

#social engagement #art place japan

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easyfoodnetwork · 4 years ago

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Rows of shipping containers were used to create the small kitchens inside the Grand Food Depot in LA. | Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images Delivery-only restaurants, which have proliferated during the pandemic, could change the way the industry does business for years to come Sunset Squares Pizza has fewer than 1,000 followers on Instagram. Delivery in its neighborhood — San Francisco’s Sunset district — costs $5, while those farther afield in the city pay $10. There’s a handful of pizzas and nondairy focaccia options on the menu, a couple salads, and a dessert. The dough is made from sourdough and a wild yeast starter, and the pies are, of course, square. What started as a pandemic-era baking project between a father and his teen daughters this spring has now turned into a viable business operation: Three or four pizzas a week to friends grew as word of mouth spread; the Instagram posts and tags followed. The difference between Sunset Squares and, say, your neighbor slinging pizzas from his garage and selling them on Instagram is that this business was started by a notable San Francisco chef with several restaurants of his own. He remains purposefully anonymous for now. “San Francisco is a really small food community. That has certain advantages but also has disadvantages. In many ways it’s hurt the development of restaurants and new food ideas,” says the chef. “At the end of the day, especially with certain cuisines, if you don’t come from a lauded Michelin pedigree, food journalists and the general community — because San Francisco has shifted and morphed into this elitist consumer market — just want to follow brand recognition versus thinking on their own what they think is good food or not.” A market research firm recently estimated that delivery-only restaurants could be a $1 trillion business by 2030. Several months in, Sunset Squares is still a bit of a secret. The chef and his family and friends handle the deliveries for a flat rate of $5 in the neighborhood, $10 elsewhere in SF, and $20 for neighborhoods outside the city. But it’s poised for a public debut soon; the chef has hired two additional chefs to help develop the concept further, and plans to launch it on third-party delivery platforms like DoorDash in a couple months. Virtual brands, ghost kitchens, delivery-only concepts — whatever you call them — have thrived during COVID-19. Euromonitor, a market research firm, recently estimated that they could be a $1 trillion business by 2030. That’s happening concurrently with near-impossible working conditions for many brick-and-mortar restaurants. Stores in cities that once did a brisk lunch business saw sales fall off a cliff. To mitigate losses, some restaurants are throwing everything they have at virtual expansion, creating entirely new brands that live online. Many of these concepts partner with large delivery companies like DoorDash and Uber Eats for online ordering, pickup, and delivery; others look to companies that build and operate kitchen facilities that host multiple concepts under one roof. One such company, CloudKitchens, started by former Uber founder and CEO Travis Kalanick, has received hundreds of millions of dollars in funding, and according to a recent Wall Street Journal report, it’s spent more than $130 million in the last two years on real estate for its kitchens. Ordermark, a software company that helps restaurants manage online orders and host virtual brands from their existing kitchens, recently received a $120 million investment. Nikki Freihofer, a senior strategist for the Culinary Edge, a restaurant consulting firm that regularly advises clients on virtual brand creation, compares the current wave of virtual restaurants to direct-to-consumer brands like Casper mattresses or Quip toothbrushes. “Consumers are trusting [direct-to-consumer brands] based on their digital presence alone and then ordering something that comes straight to their door,” she says. “At the fundamental level that’s the same thing as a virtual restaurant brand.” Sunset Squares embodies everything that a brand consultant likely looks for: It serves a purpose, has a focused vision, and tells a compelling story. But its intentional execution and unorthodox origin story make it exceedingly rare among the glut of ghost kitchens launched to prominence on UberEats. When experts talk about virtual restaurants, they talk about “intelligently leveraging brands” and establishing “brand-cohesive touchpoints.” It’s more jargon than you’d expect when talking about an upstart casual restaurant, but many concepts are the result of digital strategies calculated to help stand out in a crowded market. Melt Shop operates 17 restaurants in five states serving the kind of comfort food you might want after a big night out (cheesy chicken sandwiches, chicken tenders, tater tots). In early spring, amid COVID lockdowns and plummeting sales, the team quickly launched two new virtual brands: Melt’s Wing Shop and Melt’s Cheesesteaks. They were built fast but intentionally, says Melt Shop founder and CEO Spencer Rubin, by taking advantage of data Melt had on hand. Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images The Doordash Kitchens building in Redwood City, California That data told Rubin that “Chicken sells… period,” but also that customers wanted more dinner options and that wings could drive a larger check average. “It’s very hard to make money delivering a $10 meal for one person. We saw that selling family-sized meals for two, three, four people is how to actually turn a profit in the delivery space,” Rubin says. “We also saw that the first few hours of team shifts each day had time to integrate more prep work without adding too much complication. We were able to optimize schedules by moving tasks to different parts of the day.” But even with hard data and a good gut instinct, virtual concepts fail just as easily as their brick-and-mortar counterparts. Melt’s Cheesesteaks lasted less than two months. “I don’t think there’s any brands that are successful in the long term by half-assing it, and I don’t think anyone who has their doors open in this environment right now is half-assing anything,” Rubin says. “People’s idea of quality and people’s ability to execute vary dramatically. Even though some people may be giving it 100 percent, it still may not be good enough for the market.” “By having multiple brands, we own a greater portion of digital real estate.” Third-party services provide ample opportunity for expansion, according to Aaron Noveshen, CEO of the Culinary Edge consulting firm and founder of Starbird Chicken, a Bay Area fried chicken restaurant with several physical stores. Starbird operates several virtual brands, too: Starbird Wings, Starbird Salads, Starbird Bowls, and Garden Bird. “By having multiple brands, we own a greater portion of digital real estate,” Novoshen says. “[With] five brands on an Uber Eats or a DoorDash, we can target a consumer who’s looking for a more specialized product. We can make that site highlight a full menu category.” Instead of a huge menu where some items might get lost, those items can be broken out and highlighted as brands of their own, a benefit for existing restaurants looking to make more money. Zuul, a ghost kitchens company, rents kitchen space to restaurant businesses in Manhattan. Since COVID, Zuul has seen an uptick in interest: The company receives multiple inquiries per day from both existing restaurants looking to expand and virtual concepts looking to launch, according to Kristen Barnett, Zull’s director of strategy. A year ago, she had to explain to friends in the food industry what she did for a living. Now, “Everyone I speak to in the food industry understands what a ghost kitchen is,” Barnett says. Zuul houses delivery-only kitchens for existing brick-and-mortar brands like Sweetgreen and has helped a few of its clients launch virtual-only brands from existing restaurants. Virtual brand Rival Sandwich Co. was born from the two-location Manhattan pizzeria Stone Bridge Pizza. “They were cooking off their pizza dough and dusting it with fresh herbs and salt to make really delicious fresh baked bread, and then making baked sandwiches with it,” Barnett says. “But they were completely hidden in the far corner of their menu and we didn’t see many sales.” Zuul’s team spun up the virtual sandwich concept from idea to operations in two weeks. In its first week, Rival Sandwich Co. sold three times the amount of sandwiches Stone Bridge was selling on its own. Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images Charles Jones makes a customers order inside the kitchen of Taco Pete at the Grand Food Depot ghost kitchen. There are still limits to what kind of concepts work, even in a vast virtual world. Building an online-only brand requires attracting a broad enough market to buy what you’re selling. “Realistically, there are only so many products being launched in the virtual restaurant space. It’s a lot of chicken wings, a lot of grain bowls, and sandwiches and pastas, things that travel well,” says Freihofer, the Culinary Edge strategist. Zuul’s Barnett, however, argues that virtual brands are in “a nascent phase of evolution.” They’re optimized for simplicity, so the easiest launches come first. Freihofer agrees. “The virtual space is ripe for innovation and I doubt the overriding trend will be homogeneity,” she says. “The virtual space allows for a certain degree of flexibility and the ability to be nimble to adapt to consumer preferences, so operators shouldn’t shy away from innovation or creativity by any means.” And of course, even with the rapid pace of brand creation and evolution, “it can’t seem like you hodge-podge makeshifted your brand together,” she added. “It was the only way we could start something up with no capital, and so we figured it would be a great opportunity for us to build a brand.” According to the chef behind Sunset Squares, there’s still ample opportunity for creativity and interesting new concepts in the virtual space. “Definitely seemingly limiting at first glance, but constraints and adversity always push creativity,” he says. “I think our pizza concept and operations are great examples. We have okonomiyaki-style pizza with bulgogi beef, pork belly and kimchi pizza, a New England chowder-inspired white pie, a drizzle and dip sauce section featuring homemade hot honey, white sauce made with miso, and an umami-rich pink sauce made with mentaiko.” Virtual concepts are also emerging as stepping stones for unestablished entrepreneurs. Cat-Su Sando in Chicago opened in September, offering “an American approach to classic Japanese foods.” It’s a virtual restaurant from Shawn Clendening and Will Schlaeger, two chefs with backgrounds in fine dining. Neither claim Japanese ancestry nor have traveled to Japan, but they’ve launched a business selling katsu sandwiches, skewers, and pancakes through third-party delivery services like Uber Eats. The restaurant operates out of a Cloud Kitchens facility in Chicago. The choice to start as a virtual brand was opportunistic. “It was the only way we could start something up with no capital, and so we figured it would be a great opportunity for us to build a brand and maybe establish ourselves a little bit in the industry so we can open our doors in the future for larger projects,” Schlaeger says. Cat-Su Sando went from concept to opening in just over a month. “That brand kind of popped out of nowhere for us,” he continues. “We got a good general response from people right off the bat, we kind of ran with it. We didn’t have jobs anyway.” The duo hope to open a slightly different brick-and-mortar restaurant next year, though they have yet to work out all the details of that concept. Clendening says they’re open to focusing on takeout and delivery if the climate continues to support it. In that sense, Cat-Su Sando serves as a test ground for what might come next in an uncertain market. While there are fewer startup costs and the timeline is shorter, some aspects of launching a virtual brand and opening a new restaurant are the same. “Any restaurant is nothing but trying to figure out solutions, and it’s just shifted in a different way,” says Schlaeger. “Coming up with names is the hardest part,” Clendening says. Schlaeger agrees. “When you have something that clicks, you just go with it.” Toward the end of our conversation, the restaurant’s publicist chimes in to call out the playful add-ons at the bottom of Cat-Su Sando’s menu — a can of Spam and a dime bag full of catnip. “Because they love cats. You know, Cat-Su,” she says. Clendening jumps in. “We’re actually dog people,” he says. Kristen Hawley writes about restaurant operations, technology, and the future of the business from San Francisco. from Eater - All https://ift.tt/3lkrGOM

http://easyfoodnetwork.blogspot.com/2020/11/ghost-kitchens-are-wave-of-future-but.html

#EasyFoodNetwork #ComfortFoodRecipes #EasyRecipes #GoodFood #BestComfortFoodRecipes #TastyFoodv

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roseacisco · 6 years ago

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Hands-on with Microsoft’s new HoloLens 2

Earlier this week, Microsoft used its MWC press conference to announce the next version of its HoloLens mixed reality visor. When it demoed the first version back in 2015, quite a few pundits assumed that the company had somehow faked the demos because this kind of real-time tracking and gesture recognition, combined with a relatively high-res display and packaged as a standalone device, had never been done before.

The fact that Microsoft took its sweet time to release this next version clearly shows that it wanted to gather feedback from its first set of users and developers who wrote apps for it. Microsoft also wasn’t under a lot of pressure to release an update, given that it never had a real competitor, with maybe the exception of Magic Leap, which is still in its very early days.

If version 1 came as a major surprise, then version 2, which I’ve now had time to try at MWC, is in many ways the natural evolution of the original promise: it’s more comfortable to wear, the field of view is large enough to feel more natural and the interaction model has been tweaked to make using HoloLens apps faster and easier. The hardware, too, has obviously been brought up to modern specs.

The first thing you’ll notice when you try the new version is that the initial calibration process that measures the distance between your eyes is now automatic. You essentially play a little game where you track a light in front of you and the new gaze recognition system takes care of setting up the calibration. Once that’s done, a hummingbird appears and lands on your hand. That’s also when you realize how much bigger the field of view has become. The bird is big enough that I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t have fit into the relatively small box that restricted the HoloLens 1’s field of view.

Don’t get me wrong, the experience is still not quite what Microsoft’s videos would have you believe. You are still very aware of the fact that there’s an abrupt end between where the AR images appear and where they end — but it’s far less jarring now that you have this bigger box. As far as the resolution goes, the specs are pretty much the same and there’s no practical difference that I noted.

The other thing you’ll notice right from the get-go is that Microsoft wasn’t kidding when it said that the new HoloLens would be far more comfortable to wear. The original felt clamped to your head (and for me, it had a tendency to slowly slide down my face) and you never quite forgot how heavy it was. The new one rests comfortably on your forehead, and, while you still essentially clamp it to your face by tightening a knob at the back, wearing it feels far more natural. The actual device is only a few grams lighter than the first edition, but with what I assume is a different weight distribution, it simply feels lighter. And if you wear glasses, then there’s no pressure on those anymore either because none of the weight rests on your nose.

Another major difference: The HoloLens 2 is now a real visor that you can flip open. So while you can obviously look through the lenses, you can now also easily move the HoloLens away from your face.

As you go through the process of trying the new HoloLens, you’ll sooner or later come across menus, buttons and sliders. In the first version, the hand and gesture tracking wasn’t quite there to let you interact with those naturally. You’d have to use special gestures for that. Now, you simply tap on them as if you were using a smartphone. And when there’s a slider, you grab it and move it. The new demo applications that Microsoft showed off at MWC make good use of all of these.

And there’s another difference: This time around, Microsoft is clearly stating that the HoloLens 2 is for business users, and all of the demos focused on those. Gone are the days of shooting aliens as they break through your walls or playing virtual Minecraft on a table in your living room. Indeed, as Lorraine Bardeen, general manager of Engineering, D365 Mixed Reality Apps at Microsoft told me, the company clearly encouraged a lot of experimentation when it launched the first version. By now, those use cases have become clear.

“When we first started with HoloLens, both internally and in the first wave when we talked about, that this was a completely wide open technology,” she said. “It’s like if you had asked 30 years ago, what could you do with a personal computer. We started by making a bunch of sample applications.” Those applications showed off what you could do in gaming, communications, commercial applications, etc.

“We started by saying that this could be and do anything,” she added. But as HoloLens 1 arrived in the hands of users, a couple of clusters emerged and it’s those that Microsoft wants to focus on for the best out-of-box experience. But it’s also worth noting that Microsoft has committed to keeping HoloLens an open ecosystem. So if game developers want to create games — or their own game stores — there’s nothing holding them back.

Even though it’s now a far more capable device, at $3,500, it’s not a consumer device, and I don’t expect we’ll see any AAA games ported to HoloLens 2 anytime soon.

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alicemccombs · 6 years ago

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I Ching for the Day

5 Hsu / Waiting (Nourishment) Changing to 63 Chi Chi / After Completion

February 6, 2019 Sunrise Waxing Moon Question: What does Earth need most to be healed at this time? 5 Hsu / Waiting (Nourishment) Changing to 63 Chi Chi / After Completion Cast Hexagram

5 Hsu / Waiting (Nourishment) https://ichingfortune.com/hexagrams/5.php Above K'an the abysmal, Water Below Ch'ien the Creative, Heaven Introduction All beings have need of nourishment from above. But the gift of food comes in its own time, and for this one must wait. This hexagram shows the clouds in the heavens, giving rain to refresh all that grows and to provide mankind with food and drink. The rain will come in its own time. We cannot make it come; we have to wait for it. The idea of waiting is further suggested by the attributes of the two trigrams--strength within, danger in from. Strength in the face of danger does not plunge ahead but bides its time, whereas weakness in the face of danger grows agitated and has not the patience to wait. Judgement Waiting. If you are sincere, You have light and success. Perseverance brings good fortune. It furthers one to cross the great water. Judgement Commentary Waiting is not mere empty hoping. It has the inner certainty of reaching the goal. Such certainty alone gives that light which leads to success. This leads to the perseverance that brings good fortune and bestows power to cross the great water. One is faced with a danger that has to be overcome. Weakness and impatience can do nothing. Only a strong man can stand up to his fate, for his inner security enables him to endure to the end. This strength shows itself in uncompromising truthfulness [with himself]. It is only when we have the courage to face things exactly as they are, without any sort of self-deception or illusion, that a light will develop out of events, by which the path to success may be recognized. This recognition must be followed by resolute and persevering action. For only the man who goes to meet his fate resolutely is equipped to deal with it adequately. Then he will be able to cross the great water--that is to say, he will be capable of making the necessary decision and of surmounting the danger. The Image Clouds rise up to heaven: The image of Waiting. Thus the superior man eats and drinks, Is joyous and of good cheer. Image Commentary When clouds rise in the sky, it is a sign that it will rain. There is nothing to do but to wait until after the rain falls. It is the same in life when destiny is at work. We should not worry and seek to shape the future by interfering in things before the time is ripe. We should quietly fortify the body with food and drink and the mind with gladness and good cheer. Fate comes when it will, and thus we are ready. Changing Line (2) Nine in the second place means: Waiting on the sand. There is some gossip. The end brings good fortune. The danger gradually comes closer. Sand is near the bank of the river, and the water means danger. Disagreements crop up. General unrest can easily develop in such times, and we lay the blame on one another. He who stays calm will succeed in making things go well in the end. Slander will be silenced if we do not gratify it with injured retorts. Changing only this line creates Hexagram 63 - Chi Chi / After Completion which indicates any success attained will be modest at best and even that could fail at the last hurdle through carelessness. This line shows how the failure is most likely to occur, disagreements, gossip even slander. However words are not often fatal, as Legge says "...he suffers the small injury of being spoken against... in the end good fortune". Just remember what Chi Chi means and make sure that you calmly maintain your efforts right to the end of your endeavor. Transformed Hexagram

63 Chi Chi / After Completion https://ichingfortune.com/hexagrams/63.php

Above K'an the abysmal, Water Below Li the Clinging, Fire This hexagram is the evolution of T'ai Peace (11) . The transition from confusion to order is completed, and everything is in its proper place even in particulars. The strong lines are in the strong places, the weak lines in the weak places. This is a very favorable outlook, yet it gives reason for thought. For it is just when perfect equilibrium has been reached that any movement may cause order to revert to disorder. The one strong line that has moved to the top, thus effecting complete order in details, is followed by the other lines. Each moving according to its nature, and thus suddenly there arises again the hexagram P'i, Standstill (12).Hence the present hexagram indicates the conditions of a time of climax, which necessitate the utmost caution. Judgement After Completion. Success in small matters. Perseverance furthers. At the beginning good fortune. At the end disorder. Judgement Commentary The transition from the old to the new time is already accomplished. In principle, everything stands systematized, and it si only in regard to details that success is still to be achieved. In respect to this, however, we must be careful to maintain the right attitude. Everything proceeds as if of its own accord, and this can all too easily tempt us to relax and let thing take their course without troubling over details. Such indifference is the root of all evil. Symptoms of decay are bound to be the result. Here we have the rule indicating the usual course of history. But this rule is not an inescapable law. He who understands it is in position to avoid its effects by dint of unremitting perseverance and caution. The Image Water over fire: the image of the condition In After Completion. Thus the superior man takes thought of misfortune and arms himself against it in advance. Image Commentary When water in a kettle hangs over fire, the two elements stand in relation and thus generate energy (cf. the production of steam). But the resulting tension demands caution. If the water boils over, the fire is extinguished an its energy is lost. If the heat is too great, the water evaporates into the air. These elements here brought in to relation and thus generating energy are by nature hostile to each other. Only the most extreme caution can prevent damage. In life too there are junctures when all forces are in balance and work in harmony, so that everything seems to be in the best of order. In such times only the sage recognizes the moments that bode danger and knows how to banish it by means of timely precautions.

#HealEarth

https://thehealearthproject.blogspot.com/2018/12/welcome-about-healearth-project.html If you would like to participate in The #HealEarth Project, please send an email to:[email protected]

#HealEarth #EarthHeal #The HealEarth Project #I Ching #I Ching for the Day

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oasis-nadrama · 6 years ago

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The evolution of politics in the original Alien trilogy

Oasis Nadrama, 31/01/2019

[Content warning: rape, misogyny, homophobia]

[Artwork by H.R. Giger]

ALIEN: A FEMINIST TALE

The central figure of the movie is the heroine, Ripley. Even if she ended up sexualized by the director in the final scene, and also in a heterosexual relationship with Dallas in removed material, Ripley was originally designed as agender – the character could be played by a man or a woman. And it shows in the story’s structure, her actions and fundamental personality are not gendered. There is no particular vulnerability in this woman, there is no exaggerate display of empathy, or “girlish” passions, or anything else stereotypically feminine. Ellen Ripley is a complete and focused character, often taking strong and autonomous initiatives, such as obstructing the exploration team from coming back to the ship, getting more data on Ash, or reactivating the murderous android to get even more data. Good information and firm decisions are the sinews of war, and nothing will stop her from obtaining the former and reaching the latter. In the fight for survival, Ripley may be the most proactive member of the crew – and that’s why she’s the one making it. And who is her best ally in the ship? Neither her male coworkers, who constantly talk down to her and dispute her positions, or her quickly collapsing female coworker… but rather the feminine-coded computer appropriately named Mother, whose cryosleep and interface rooms are the only places on the ship with clean light and warm colors. Despite her limitations, this maternal figure is a powerful protector.

What threat is Ripley facing? The threat of rape. For the first movie is about rape. Not merely in the action – the invasive xenomorph reproduction cycle is based on the nonconsensual penetration and insemination of other species –, Alien was written from the start with rape in mind.

“One thing that people are all disturbed about is sex… I said ‘That’s how I’m going to attack the audience; I’m going to attack them sexually. And I’m not going to go after the women in the audience, I’m going to attack the men. I am going to put in every image I can think of to make the men in the audience cross their legs. Homosexual oral rape, birth. The thing lays its eggs down your throat, the whole number.”

(Dan O’Bannon)

The extraterrestrial being is not phallic by mere chance; it is an incarnation of masculine violence.

The audiences and critics back then understood pretty well Alien is a feminist movie. Also largely realized today is the anti-corporate message – as a faceless presence as the unamed Weyland-Yutani –which, like the rape and heroine features, goes way further than Parker’s line about the “damn company”. For Alien is a slow movie, often displaying laborious situations and actions. It takes the Nostromo crew thirty minutes to reach the subject matter, and this time is not spent in character development or precise worldbuilding, but rather in processes: go out of hypersleep, wake up, talk about the primes, consult with Mother, prepare the landing, etc. Most of these details are generally left to elliptical narration, but in Alien, they are the star, they are crucial. Everything is slow, heavy, this world is a gigantic, sultry machine whose Nostromo is a mere reflection of. This is the face of capitalism, a system bound to trap, enslave, use and discard humans. And yet these humans only talk about money, about orders, about regulations, and the first thing they think about when they have the opportunity to answer a distress signal (even more important, a non-human distress signal) is “What about the money?”. Capitalism destroys social link, empathy, curiosity and leaves only in place the function, the action to work to earn money, money becoming the only measure of value, pleasure, survival and freedom. In this system, people are worth nothing if they do not work to obtain money; they do not get the various pleasures of life if they do not have money; they do not survive if they do not have money; they do not have choices if they do not have money. So it is work, work, work, for money, money, money, and thus the worker becomes a cog in the machine, they are deshumanized and reduced to their function, and trapped in a factory-prison. Even in space, the ultimate place of freedom and infinite possibilities, they are surrounded by a gigantic machine, the mirror image of the custodial system.

The extraterrestrial being is not biomechanical by mere chance; it is an incarnation of industrial violence.

And, just like the creature mixes phallic and mechanical imagery, the feminist and anticapitalist thematics should not be considered as contradictory, or even simply coexisting: they are two faces of the same coin. They complete each other. For in true kyriarchic fashion, patriarchy completes capitalism. Heterocentrism is a facet of production (to produce workers through reproduction) and women are the lowest proletariat (the proletariat of the proletariat, supporting the male workers with their free domestic and emotional labour).

In patriarchal imagery, the Man is a strong, powerful figure, who does not need to feel or to express his emotions. He is neither a listener or a “whiner”, he’s a warrior, he’s a worker. The Man is a cold statue going through life with ever-repeted motions, the face of a purposeful, productive society, and he will produce goods, services and other Men to keep the machine moving.

The patriarchal Man is a robot. Therefore, as a traitor, a protector to the creature, an agent of the faceless company, and the wannabe murderer of Ripley, Ash comes as no surprise: he is the synthesis of ALL of the movie’s thematics. He is the Man, the Robot and the Corporate Machine altogether. He is the epitome of deshumanization, the Man without humanity, feeling or even flesh. And despite his robotic nature, he’s biomechanical, as if he was a brother to the creature, Alien and android linked as twin incarnations of the same ills. Furthermore, Ash is sexualized through both his seminal (milky) blood and his agression: he tries to kill Ripley by choking her with a rolled-up newspaper, another oral rape echoing the parasite’s action. Ash has no feelings, only a function, the function to work/kill/rape.

Today, Alien can appear as toothless feminism. Amongst other thinkers, the queer afrofeminist writer Caroline Colvin asked the question Is Alien still a feminist film?, a pertinent interrogation, opening a highroad to more in-depth analysis. But for now, we can notice it is not this toothless: it is a very consistent piece, a specific attack on patriarchy and capitalism. It is a radical feminist/anticapitalist movie.

ALIEN$: ANTITHESIS

The first movie was self-sufficient, and the sequel a capitalist action by itself: in this society of business and rentability, a successful movie needed an episode 2. This initial decision came to condition the entire development of the work; unlike Alien, the singular product of the reunion of various creative minds (most of them originally assembled for Jodorowsky’s stillbirth project Dune), Alien 2 was going to be a company product. Most of the artists behind Alien being discarded or simply not interessed in producing a sequel, the project quickly became James Cameron’s baby. Cameron took the final decisions regarding the film: it was gonna be bigger, louder, with a lot of Aliens and a super-Alien, a Queen. The creature had always displayed insect-like features, so why not bring the logic to its end and make it a space ant?

So what is there to say about AlienS? Not much, really. It is a good movie, a very good movie even, an extremely efficient, clean, sharp blockbuster. And… it is extremely devoid of deeper meaning, mostly being about the survival of two species, through the fight of two enemy mothers.

To be fair, the story does interrogate toxic masculinity. After Alien’s often arrogant masculine crewmembers come stereotypical “alpha” males. The Space Marines want to be manly; from their first appearance and initial bravado, they exude a desperate need of strength and recognition. Even the two female Marines are tomboys who gladly participate in the virile arms race. Take this early dialogue for instance:

Hudson: Hey Vasquez, have you ever been mistaken for a man?

Vasquez: No, have you?

Pushing further the idea of absurd masculine assurance, Cameron only builds up these caricatures in order to set them for the fall. He wants to break these ridiculous superhuman figures, he wants these hercules to fail, to collapse and to disappear in this sci-fi version of the Vietnam war. Quickly, facing a stealthy and foreign enemy, the Marines are brought to their knees.

But this time, things are not so streamlined as they are in Alien. For the toxic masculinity’s failure is only superficial, and other characters betray underlying problems.

For example, neither Bishop or Burke manages to convey anything meaningful about gender or corporate thematics; they appear as toned-down narrative sons of Ash, the android and the traitor now separate. Bishop is even repurposed in Cameron’s big project for the cast, the construction of a family, part of an even bigger project: the repurposing of Ripley.

Rather than an individual struggling to survive, the director turns Ellen Ripley into a champion of her species – therefore she must incarnate her species/society’s values.

This time, she is not valued through her qualities of determination and search of information, but through her sheer bravery, physical courage, and her ability to work various weapons and vehicles, and even the Power Loader, a large humanoid machine. This time, the machine is not a vast and dirty trap as the Nostromo was, but a clean, friendly tool. The power structures of society, its workings and Ripley’s very work are not oppressive anymore; they are means to an end, they are a friendly thing she can use and leave as she sees fits. Furthermore, the tall, heavy, square Power Loader is visually a masculine-looking machine, as if Ripley was putting on a costume of masculinity. The tools (spaceship, dropship, armored car, tracking watch, weapons, Power Loaders) may be a little masculine, and lent by society, the army and the men around Ripley, but in the end, their only important feature is their usefulness. Their purpose. Their function.

And what is the main function of a woman in patriarchy? To give birth.

So Ripley is reinvented as a mother, first in the past (we learn the existence of Amanda Ripley, her late child), then in the present with the symbolical daughter Newt, and finally in the future with the budding romance between her and Hicks. Facing the threat of a mother of another species, she’s brought back to her real purpose in Cameron’s eyes. Big Jim is unable to imagine a strong woman without making her a mother, and basically turns Ripley into Sarah Connor. And like Sarah Connor in the soon-to-come Terminator 2, Ripley is given an entire family: a husband, a daughter, and even a paternal uncle, Bishop, who will be able to save Newt during the final fight.

Ripley is no longer a character, she’s an ideal, a worker/warrior/mother ideal. An ideal of function and usefulness. An essentialist, productivist figure. For Cameron, women can be strong as long as they are workers, as long as they are mothers. They need the function, they are the function. While not misogynistic or procapitalist per se, AlienS is definitely a centrist, conservative piece.

ALIEN 3: SYNTHESIS

The next story immediately refuses and destroys whatever Cameron had built. In an iconoclast move, Fincher kills off all of Ripley’s family, only leaving Bishop as a half-dead creature, a ghost coming back for beyond the grave with a message: the Alien is here, you’re fucked.

You’re fucked, it’s also what the superintendent tells Ripley. And indeed she is literally fucked – this time, she’s the one getting raped by the hostile lifeform, at the very beginning of the movie. She’s impregnated. And she’s almost raped in a more conventional way by human beings later in the movie. This time, far from being an ideal, an almost legendary figure of power, function and motherness, Ripley is a victim and a survivor. She’s a broken cog in the machine, she will fight against the machine, and once again she’s all alone in an hostile setting.

Alien 3 mirrors Alien in more ways than one, and the spectacular return to the franchise’s roots is displayed through the environment: once again, vastness, dirtiness, heaviness, a nightmarish labyrinth of metal, the decor equivalent to the creature. As in the Nostromo, the entity does not need mucus secretions to blend in; it looks like the pipes, chains and wirings, and the pipes, chains and wirings look like it. This time, we are in a literal prison, the industrial society laying bare in all its ugliness; in this mechanical and destructive system, humans are unarmed, formatted, their skull shaved and their neck stamped with a barcode. More than ever, they are prisoners, workers and products. More than ever, they are also monsters, destroyed by society, dangers to each other. It makes sense that after criticizing the casual misogyny of the Nostromo crew, then the more aggressive toxic masculinity of the Space Marines, we end up with the most toxic and frontally male representants of masculin oppressions.

In some ways, Alien 3 is a feminist failure, for it put Ripley in the role of the victim and receiver of the rape, something the series had avoided until then, something weirdly prophesied by the female colon victim in AlienS’ chestburster scene. In another text, Monster pregnancy and misogyny: putting women back “where they belong”, I talked about that, about the concerning fact that a series which was initially written about the masculine fear of rape came to mainly represent women being attacked and used as incubators by the Aliens.

But thankfully, and in mirror fashion to the superficial fauxminism of AlienS hiding conservative values, Alien 3 goes way beyond the fact Ripley was inseminated. The offscreen rape is a mere starting point to her final thematic evolution.

Ellen Ripley gets closer to the creature by adopting an androgynous look, by bearing an Alien herself – her role becomes more ambiguous and yet clearer.

First, we get back to the seeker of truth of the first movie. Gone is the Ripley-worker, the Ripley-warrior, the Ripley-mother, or even the Ripley-wife: she mainly sleeps with Clemens in order to distract him, and answers “No” when he asks if she’s married. Once again our heroine is mainly looking for information. What happened to the EEV? Is Newt infected? What does the Company want? Each time, Ripley is rewarded with answers, and the final one will determine her final choice.

But what does Ripley want?

Ripley is not fighting for herself, she’s fighting for the survival of her species. And this time, she has seen the truth of the world, she has seen the prison. She fully knows the prison, the Company, the machine of society does not care about anyone, and destroys everyone.

“What makes you think they're gonna care about a bunch of lifers who found God at the ass-end of space? You really think they're going to let you interfere with their plans for this thing? They think we're crud, and they don't give a fuck about one friend of yours that's died. Not one.”

This time, the survival of the species doesn’t come from traditional, patriarchal, productive values; when Bishop II promises Ripley she can still have children, a family, the idea seems outright absurd. Ellen Ripley refuses her function.

Nuclear family, a traditional maternal role, productivity are not answers to the challenges of existence; rather, they are illusions and obstacles. For our heroine, the species, or the world, needs to be preserved in a much larger sense: the world and its well-being are absolute values. In this way, her philosophical alignment runs parallel to the faith of Dillon’s cult, for Ripley believes in something higher than corporate power and traditional gender roles. She believes in life, in freedom, in survival, in agency and autonomy. She knows the Company does not care about any of that and will endanger and destroy all of those without hesitation.

Ripley’s final line is “You’re crazy” and in the end it is the only answer one can give to patriarchy, capitalism, and all kinds of systems of domination. They make no sense, they have no deeper purpose beyond short-term profit for the privileged and the reassurance of an apparently functional system. And these systems oppress, and these systems destroy. They are akin to the Alien’s face, to the secret behind the eyeless features of this dark phallic and biomechanical beast: beyond the dome, there’s no intelligence, there’s a human skull. Beyond the efficiency of domination, there’s only death.

#alien #aliens #alien 3 #politics #feminism #anticapitalism #ridley scott #james cameron #david fincher #dan o'bannon #h.r. giger #science-fiction #various articles #oasis-nadrama

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