By James Preston Allen, Publisher

The era that we have come to know as the 60s actually started much earlier 1955 to be exact. It began with simple act of defiance by a woman of color refusing to give up her seat on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Rosa Parks would eventually become a national symbol for the civil rights movement and Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. would become a Nobel Prize recipient before he was assassinated and martyred just as he began to speak out against the war in Vietnam and fight for economic justice for the working class.

In November 1963, I was just a month shy of turning 13 when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. It was a devastating shock to this nation. Im not sure we have ever quite recovered from nor come to a full understanding of its significance. Yet, from that time through all of the riots, demonstrations and subsequent murders of political leaders that followed, it formed a national consciousness that remains to this day. It even influences those who were not yet born then. The end of the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal and the impeachment of a sitting president Richard M. Nixon punctuated this era of the 1960s. The echos of that impeachment is whats resonating in the current congressional proceedings.

Recently, I was invited to lecture to a class at Los Angeles Harbor College to a class of students recently. Most of the students werent even born in the past century. I was asked to frame the history of the 60s in something other than a textbook version, something more personal. It could have been a lecture on the influence of rock n roll, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and The Who, but this was a history class.

So I started telling them about high school in 1964 about how some of my friends and I started the first off campus newspaper, which had to be published anonymously because it was not sanctioned by the school administration. In those days, student free speech was not protected and we all would have been expelled from school if we had been caught.

I recounted how one clever teacher, Mr. Wooten, figured out the identity of the main culprit behind the unsanctioned newspaper and convinced the school counselor to put me in his honors social studies class. It was an honor my grades at that time didnt support. I was the kind of student he wanted in his class who would ask questions that others would not. Looking back, much of what I read and discussed in that one class has informed me ever since.

It was during this same time that my father paid for me to take a trip to the United Nations in New York and Washington D.C., ostensibly to see how government worked. At the U.N. we saw the famous painting of Guernica by Pablo Picasso and the huge room of the general assembly. And then, it was off to the nations capital.

We arrived on April 3, 1968 and our chaperones had planned for us mostly white suburban kids to have an interracial dance party with some of the inner city kids from the District of Columbia. Just as the music started to kick up, the party was stopped by the news of Dr. Martin Luther King Jrs assassination that day in Memphis, Tenn. The women began to cry, the men shook their heads and the teenagers all stopped and held their breath. Its the saddest dance party that Ive ever attended.

The outrage in the neighborhoods surrounding the National Mall exploded that evening and our adult handlers evacuated us back to our hotel rooms with orders not to leave. By nightfall, the grief and the outrage escalated into riots and fires. The National Guard was called in to occupy the Mall and protect the national monuments. I didnt sleep much that night. By the next morning, we were still under orders not to go outside, but in my usual sense of curiosity I snuck out, anyway, onto the National Mall. There, to my amazement, were rows of concertina wire and machine guns guarding the Supreme Court and the steps to the U.S. Congress. The smell of tear gas and smoke lingered in the air. There was a pregnant silence like a battlefield after the shooting stops and I thought to myself, If my father wanted me to see how government actually worked, he really got his moneys worth! This was history in the making and I took pictures with my square Kodak camera and never forgot this.

Back in Los Angeles, on June 4 of the same year, on the night of the California Democratic primary Robert Kennedy, the leading contender for nomination to run against Richard Nixon, was assassinated at the Ambassador Hotel. Again the nation was in mourning and the question of where this nation would have gone if he, his brother, John, and Dr. King had lived still haunts us like a giant question mark.

My question to these mostly young people the other day (if not to ourselves generally) is whether our history is just circling back on us with issues unresolved from before? Racism and seemingly endless foreign wars and now a corrupt president who, very much like Nixon before him, is willing to flaunt the U.S. Constitution in order to maintain power.

My answer is that it is up to each generation to protect the liberties enshrined in our Constitution and the Bill of Rights. For even as technology has changed, human behavior has barely evolved. The ghosts of our past are very much with us today, even as they place a statue of Rosa Parks near the Montgomery, Ala. bus stop this week, where she was once arrested.

See more here:
Ghosts of Vietnam and Memphis - Random Lengths

Its been a tough year for the trucking business. And the outlook for next year isnt looking any rosier.

Despite a growing economy, many truckers continued to struggle with lower than desired shipping rates and shipment levels. Tariffs took their toll, manufacturing continued to contract and the closely watched Cass Freight Index which measures North American freight volumes and expenditures logged yet another decline, its eleventh in a row, this October. Not only that but trucking companies in California are now fighting a new law that will require them to reclassify how they treat their independent drivers.

The evidence overwhelmingly suggests 2020 is going to be a very, very tough year, industry analyst Kenny Vieth said at a recent conference. Freight recovery is dependent on the speed at which equipment supply and freight demand are brought back into line.

On top of all that, trucking companies across the country are now approaching a national compliance deadline that while it will certainly contribute to improved measurement and safety is also just as certainly to add more costs. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administrations rule, which goes into effect on 16 December, will require all trucks on American roads to be outfitted with an electronic logging device (ELD). The purpose of the new technology, according to the FMCSA is to help create a safer work environment for drivers, and make it easier and faster to accurately track, manage, and share records of duty status.

Unfortunately, many trucking companies have put things off until the last minute and some experts are concerned that these companies are underestimating the time and costs to make this technology transition. Besides potential problems with connectivity or software bugs, fleets might (also) have problems with hardware, Ken Evans, the founder and CEO of Konexial, an ELD solutions company told Freight Waves. Evans also noted that human behavior shouldnt be taken for granted. Learning a new piece of software and working around with the hours of service rules is a big change for people, he said.

There is one bit of good news, however. According to industry reports like this one, another rule that was about to go into effect in December a rule which would require truckers to provided mandated training to entry level drivers will likely be delayed for two years. Of course, more and better training particularly for new drivers seems like a pretty darn good idea. But unfortunately the states and federal people still need more time to get themselves aligned. Im sure many trucking company executives welcome the breather.

You would think that running a trucking company in 2020 would be a profitable affair, given a strong environment for consumer sales and online shopping. But shippers particularly smaller shippers continue to face driver shortages, significant competition, trade uncertainty, manufacturing declines and government regulations that present many challenges. Yes, as I wrote here previously, some managers could do a better job at forecasting their demand and managing their cash flow during these challenging times.

But Im betting that even the best managers in the trucking business are struggling to navigate their companies through the coming year and wondering when things will get better.

See the original post here:
2020 looks set to be a tough year for the American trucking industry - The Guardian

Person having feet up under blanket and watching TV

Despite decades of predictions that different types of internet usage would usurp TV viewing, how much TV and video Americans watch has actually gone up in the last 25 years. And now that weve entered the holiday season, screen time is about to reach another peak for most people in the western world. The days will be at their shortest, the weather cold, children will be out of school, and both broadcasters and online TV companies will be promoting and screening some of their best new shows as well as favorite old holiday movies. But why, when there are now so many other potential distractions in our fast-paced world, do people continue to watch so much TV and video?

According to new research byLondon Business School professorPatrick Barwiseand senior researchersSteven BellmanandVirginia Bealat the University of South Australia, its because TV viewing still meetsour psychological needs to relax and escape, as well as being a much cheaper time filler than other activities, and is now more available than ever.

The new study, along withNielsen Media Research, shows that offline viewing of TV has remained constant for the past 25 years, but the growth of online viewing has led to a 15% bump in the overall consumption of television and video. In fact, we now, on average, spend about a quarter of our lives watching moving pictures on a screen and most of this is still live or time-shifted TV on a TV set.

On one hand, the increase in sedentary activities has been shown to lead to a plethora ofnegative mental and physical health effects. But on the other hand, previous media research (including Professor Barwises own earlier studies of viewing behavior) has suggested that watching television helps people relax and allows them, at least temporarily, to escape from their day-to-day worries.

The new study confirms this interpretation by drawing together the results of recent lab-based research using electroencephalography (EEG) and reaction-time measures. More specifically, the authors found that watching TV and video generated brainwaves associated with pleasant, wakeful relaxation and absorbed cognitive capacity, taking viewers minds off other things. They conclude that viewing has increased because it still meets the same basic psychological needs as in the past but we now have many more opportunities to meet those needs throughout the day and, increasingly, wherever we are.

Evolution Not Revolution

The average U.S. adult (18 and older) now watches almost six hours of television and video per day. That's around 30% of waking hours. And, despite all the hype, theres been less change in the patterns underlying this viewing than you might think.

The explosion in television and video distribution technologies since the 1970s has led to more complex viewing patterns, but the changes so far have been evolutionary, not revolutionary, according to the research, published in theJournal of Advertising Research. The authors say that when, where and how people watch as well as why has changed little, with the new patterns of viewing being mostly additional to the old ones, rather than replacing them.

Forget Your Bad Boss, Bills, and Break Up

One of the studys most intriguing results relates to why TV viewing is so good at helping people at least, while they are watching escape from their worries. Referring to the limited capacity media consumption model ofProfessor Annie Langat the University of Indiana, who led many of the lab-based studies they cite, the authors say thatwatching a moving picture on a screen automatically absorbs a significant amount of cognitive capacity, reflected in slower reaction times on a secondary task such as pressing a button in response to a stimulus. In other words, watching TV literally takes our minds off other things meaning it helps us stop thinking about problems we dont want to think about - like our horrible boss, unpaid bills and personal problems.

Despite younger people watching TV in many different ways (including online),more than 50% of millennials viewing is still on a traditional television set. At the same time, our aging population is not the main driving force behind increased overall television consumption. As people get older, their TV watching does increase, but this new research contends that demographic changes account for very little of the long-term increase in viewing. Its really about what we, as humans, are looking for when we view, and the increasing number of opportunities to look at moving pictures on a screen.

Per the new research, the key is Psychophysiological patterns suggesting that television and video may help viewers relax by automatically inducing a pleasant, comfortable mental state, reflected in a relatively high incidence of alpha waves, and escape, by literally taking their mind off other things, reflected in longer secondary task reaction times.

The researchers also draw an interesting contrast between TV viewingand radio listening. Most radio consumption is a secondary activity. Where, when and how it happens are quite different from TV viewing. Because it does not involve visual processing,radio listening is mentally less taxingthan watching television and seems to haveno significant impact on primary task reaction times. Thus, television and radio appear to be meeting complementary needs. Radio is reserved for background while doing boring, repetitive work like laundry, driving or eating, and it does not automatically absorb so much mental capacity that it reduces performance on the primary task. (In contrast, talking on even a hands-free phone while driving does slow down reaction time, with potentially fatal results). Think of radio as taking your mind off of what you are doing at that moment - something boring. Television watching, on the other hand, is usually a primary activity to help you unwind and take your mind off things you don't want to think about then because theyre unpleasant.

While debate will continue over how good, bad, healthy, and unhealthy television and screen time are for people of all ages, one thing is clear: it isnt going anywhere. TV and video tap into basic human needs and are a cheap, familiar, reliable, easy to use, and increasingly ubiquitous means of entertainment. And if theres anything weve come to understand about human behavior, it would be that its very difficult to change established habits and patterns.

See the rest here:
Psychological Research Explains Why TV Viewing Is Higher than Ever - Forbes

New research at the University of Barcelona (UB) found the first genetic evidence that humanity has self-domesticated.

The team found a network of genes involved in the evolution of human face structure and prosociality in modern humans which is absent in the Neanderthal genome. This suggests that our ancestors preferred to hang out and mate with friendlier and more cooperative companions over less-cooperative, more aggressive ones. In effect, this amounted to selective pressure for prosocial behavior over time, meaning that we domesticated our own species.

Certain anatomical, cognitive, and behavioral traits of modern humans chief among them docility and a fragile facial structure are hallmarks of the domestication process. This led to the idea of human self-domestication being developed all the way back in the 19th century, the team explains. However, we lacked the tools to confirm that this process took place (i.e. that theres genetic evidence for it).

The study builds on the teams previous research that looked into genetic similarities between humans and domesticated animals. Now, the team went one step further and looked for genetic evidence for self-domestication in neural crest cells. This is a population of cells that have a major role to play in the early development of vertebrate embryos by differentiating into more specialized cells.

A mild deficit of neural crest cells has already been hypothesized to be the factor underlying animal domestication, explains co-author Alejandro Andirk, a Ph.D. student at the Department of Catalan Philology and General Linguistics of the UB.

Could it be that humans got a more prosocial cognition and a retracted face relative to other extinct humans in the course of our evolution as a result of changes affecting neural crest cells?

In order to test their hypothesis, the team focused on Williams syndrome disorder, a human-specific neurodevelopmental disorder caused by a deficit of neural crest cells as the embryo develops. It is characterized by mild to moderate intellectual disability or learning problems, unique personality characteristics, distinctive facial features, and cardiovascular problems.

The researchers used in vitro models of Williams syndrome (stem cells derived from the skin of patients with this syndrome). After poking around, they found that the BAZ1B gene, conveniently located in the region of the genome associated with Williams syndrome, is responsible for controlling the behavior of neural crest cells. If this gene was under-expressed, it led to reduced migration of these cells; higher expression levels led to greater neural crest migration. Then, they compared this gene to its equivalent in samples of archaic (i.e. extinct) and modern (i.e. our ancestors) human genomes.

We wanted to understand if neural crest cell genetic networks were affected in human evolution compared to the Neanderthal genomes, says Cedric Boeckx, ICREA professor at the Department of Catalan Philology and General Linguistics.

Differences in the BAZ1B gene between archaic and modern humans led to a high frequency of mutations in that accumulated over time in modern humans but not in any of the archaic genomes currently available. The team says this points to BAZ1B as being an important reason our face is so different when compared with our extinct relatives, the Neanderthals.

In the big picture, it provides for the first-time experimental validation of the neural crest-based self-domestication hypothesis, Boeckx adds.

The paper Dosage analysis of the 7q11.23 Williams region identifies BAZ1B as a major human gene patterning the modern human face and underlying self-domestication has been published in the journal Science Advances.

See the original post here:
We have the first genetic evidence of human self-domestication - ZME Science

Since the start of the Privacy Project, the most common response I have gotten from readers is a request for some kind of solution. Theyre slightly freaked out and hoping for tips to shore up their digital hygiene or for a guide that might help them navigate the internet without giving away their personal data. For months Ive included a Tip of the Week feature for this very reason, but Ive always felt conflicted about it, because the hard truth is that our data is leaking and trading all the time, in places we might not even know to look. Each privacy tip you follow is undoubtedly helpful (and you should follow them!), but its a bit like a single sandbag in a hurricane: You need to amass so, so many and be extremely vigilant to make a difference.

I have argued previously that the personal-responsibility frame for privacy is unfair. And I believe that the only way to fully transform privacy is if data protection moves from individuals to institutions. But that said, I was moved over the holiday weekend by an argument that gave me a bit of hope that there are small ways we individuals can make a difference.

The idea came from the writer Dave Eggers. In an interview with Voxs Ezra Klein, Eggers who doesnt have Wi-Fi in his home and still uses a flip phone makes the argument that our public demand for more and more information plays a meaningful role in the privacy discussion:

We cant just blame the Big Five [Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon] and the surveillance they do and the N.S.A., because we are constantly using these tools on each other and thinking its O.K. Whether its getting email receipts, whether its parents surveilling their kids, even at college. Whether its spouses surveilling each other through their smartphones all the spying people do on each other. People surreptitiously taking photos of each other because its so easy now and you always have a high-level camera in your hands. I think that we dont necessarily realize how quickly weve evolved and how quickly we have superseded our idea of our right to privacy by our right to know.

He continues:

Weve evolved to the point where our ideas of privacy have evolved or our value of it is almost completely gone. I think theres a few square feet and our skulls that we still retain. Theres the bathroom, the bedroom after a certain hour and theres the space in our brain. But nowhere else do we expect privacy. And I think thats a radical shift in evolution, and it happened in a few years.

There are bits in the larger conversation that I disagree with Eggers on, mostly because I think it offers too much cover for Big Tech. I think his argument that theres a public market for privacy-invading services and that tech companies are merely responding to it and building products is a backward interpretation. Id argue that its human behavior thats responding to powerful, addictive products and well-crafted marketing campaigns. Regardless, I think theres something poignant about this line: We have superseded our idea of our right to privacy by our right to know.

Writing about technology for roughly a decade, Ive felt this strongly at times. I noticed it first watching Reddit threads after a mass shooting in 2012 inside a movie theater in Aurora, Colo. a kind of online vigilante detective emerged, powered by the idea that almost any piece of information could be found and that, by virtue of being online, we were entitled to it. Since then, the behavior has embedded itself into the dark soul of the internet. The hunt for the Boston bombers, Gamergate, the 4chan culture of doxing some of it is predicated on a behavior to want information that, 15 years ago, we might not have felt entitled to.

Link:
We No Longer Expect Privacy. You Can Change That. - The New York Times

A new paper shows that people drive less and slow down when gasoline prices rise.

I drive an electric vehicle. So I am, of course, better than you and now get to say all sorts of snarky things about you gas guzzling large vehicle enthusiasts. So here we go. We energy economists spend most of our time complaining about the absence of a carbon tax and the rest of our time quantifying aspects of human behavior. Some of the most interesting questions are in the transportation sector, which is the main source of greenhouse gas emissions in California. More driving plus heavier, less fuel efficient and more quickly driven cars lead to more gas consumption, local and global pollution. More driving and bigger cars also lead to more congestion.

In the US we have tried to put downward pressure on gasoline consumption by regulating the fuel economy of the fleet. More efficient vehicles are of course more efficient, but also decrease the cost per mile driven, which provides an incentive to drive more. This is called the rebound effect. If you face a lower price of gasoline (either implicitly through more fuel efficiency or explicitly through lower prices at the pump), how does your behavior change? Do you drive more? If so, how much? Do you drive faster, which burns more fuel per mile driven?

While most of us were passed out in a tryptophan or soy induced daze on our couch, Energy Institute alum (and now fancy MIT Sloan Professor) Chris Knittel and his coauthor Shinsuke Tanaka released a really interesting and pleasantly short new working paper providing some interesting new answers. They start with a jealousy-inducing new dataset from Japan, which via a mobile phone app collected detailed micro-level information on gasoline consumption, vehicle distance traveled, and gasoline prices paid for each fill up for over 90,000 drivers for 10 years!!!! This is next-level stuff. For comparison, most of the papers so far use monthly consumption data aggregated to the US state level, which does not allow you to study the finer aspects of consumer behavior. Specifically, they shine some light on three aspects of behavior.

The results are the best kind: interesting and policy relevant. First off, they find that drivers are much more price responsive than the majority of the existing literature finds. This is relevant, as government agencies use these numbers to project energy consumption at the national level. Is the difference small? No! An order of magnitude (that is 10x for you non-nerds) smaller. They estimate that a 10% increase in gas prices leads to a 3.7% decrease in gas consumption, when most of the literature suggests a 0.3% decrease. Wow.

Second, they decompose this response and show a significantly larger response of Vehicle Miles Travelled (VMT) to changes in gas prices than the remainder of the literature. Of the 3.7% price response, 3% can be attributed to decreases in VMT. The remaining 0.7% are attributed to changes in driving behavior. This could either be driving your car more slowly and getting better fuel economy, or increasing fuel saving maintenance such as properly inflating your tires. Why is this so cool? Nobody has been able to estimate this parameter before. This is nerd speak for we have actually measured a hypothesized type of behavioral response in the wild! When astronomers discover a black hole, the world gets excited! This is our version of actually seeing a black hole. Bam.

Third, they examine whether changes in prices a long time ago versus more recently have differential behavioral effects. Do we learn over time and form habits as we drive through life? The answer is no. There is no evidence of this. Drivers seem to react to the most recent fluctuations in prices.

Finally, and this is really cool, they show that humans are strange creatures. When we teach intermediate economics, we generally argue that price responses are symmetric. This means if price goes up by one percent and you consume 3 fewer marshmallows, we would assume that if price dropped by one percent, you would eat 3 more marshmallows. This paper shows that the consumers in the sample do not exhibit this symmetry. The price response is twice as high when prices go up compared to when they go down. I guess we are a tank is half empty type of society.

There are a bunch of caveats. This paper deals with very short run fluctuations in gas prices and hence characterizes very short responses of drivers. Also, this is Japanese drivers over the past decade who self-selected into signing up for the app. The road network, public transportation infrastructure and vehicle and gas pricing are very different from what they are in the US. But beyond the caveats, what the authors suggest is that gas taxes alone may have a transitory effect on driving behavior and may need to be supplemented by fuel efficiency standards and other policies such as feebate policies (which I am a HUGE fan of). However, I am somewhat skeptical of that interpretation as gas taxes are permanent price changes, which consumers react to differently than to short run price fluctuations.

Overall, this is a major step forward in what we know about consumers response to short run gas price fluctuations in Japan! I am hoping that someone will replicate this study in the US, Europe and possibly a lower income country to see whether these responses are similar.

Keep up with Energy Institute blogs, research, and events on Twitter @energyathaas.

Suggested citation: Auffhammer, Maximilian. Taking The Pedal Off The Metal Energy Institute Blog, UC Berkeley, December 2, 2019, https://energyathaas.wordpress.com/2019/12/02/taking-the-pedal-off-the-metal/

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Taking The Pedal Off The Metal - Energy Institute at Haas

University of Minnesota researchers recently found that the way the body responds to stress can change during puberty.

The bodys stress response typically becomes set during childhood and does not change. For children who have experienced adversity early in life, this can lead to a stress response that does not work properly. The study, which was published last month, shows that during puberty the response can change and adapt to a new environment.

We thought that was really promising because obviously a lot of people were thinking that early childhood was the end-all, be-all, said co-author Carrie DePasquale, a doctoral student in the Universitys Institute of Child Development. Now what were showing is adolescence and puberty is actually potentially another time where the system can re-calibrate.

The main findings of the study revolve around the bodys hormonal stress response system, commonly referred to as the HPA axis, she said. When the human body undergoes stress, the hormone cortisone is produced to adapt to different life experiences.

When the stress response systems are overactive, and they have chronic, prolonged activity, this can be really damaging, DePasquale said, and can lead to attention issues or problems with self-regulation.

This can happen to children who grew up in orphanages or in neglectful environments where they may have lacked a proper caregiver, she said.

Even if theyre adopted into [a] supported, well-researched home, DePasquale said. Theyre still not able to activate their stress response in a way thats helpful.

The study showed that over a period of five years, the stress response systems for children who grew up in a more positive environment were able to adapt and begin to look like a typical childs response, she said.

Were such a long-lived organism, and the world can change, and puberty is a time of heightened plasticity of the brain, said Megan Gunnar, the study's co-author and director of the Universitys Institute of Child Development.

Throughout the five stages of puberty, researchers saw gradual changes to support this.

Its telling us that if theres not a sensitive period, theres at least another very open and plastic period, she said. Thats a hopeful sign for kids that have experienced a lot of adversity early in life.

Researchers are still looking for additional evidence that this is the case in humans.

The next question is really, how far does this extend? To what other systems does this extend? Gunnar said.

Theres also the question of whether this can occur in all children, said Laura Stroud, a psychiatry and human behavior professor at Brown University.

Would we see these changes if they were in situations where there wasnt such extreme deprivation in the past? she said.

Puberty can also be a troublesome time when things like depression or other disorders surface, Stroud said. This can change that narrative.

Starting to think of adolescence as a time of opportunity, I think, is just important as a society, she said. Perhaps studies like these that help us understand the positive aspects of pubertal development may help us as a society sort of make life better for adolescents.

See original here:
Puberty may be able to change the body's stress response, UMN research says - Minnesota Daily

JAXenter:Hi Debbie, thanks for taking the time to answer some questions for JAXenter. UX isnt a topic that comes up that frequently in discussions about DevOps, and yet, like you say in the description of your DevOpsCon Munich talk: Your customer only sees your UX, not 1,000 developers or whether you were agile. Do you think that the importance of UX has been severely underestimated in DevOps setups?

Every website you stopped going to, every company you cancelled, and every app you uninstalled probably had UX failures that made you feel done with them.

Debbie:Hi, Chris. Thanks for asking! Before I answer that, I should mention that I see the definitions of DevOps changing a bit. My focus is where DevOps goals include customer satisfaction, increasing your ability to build the right product, faster fixes (though Id say fewer fixes if we want to reduce defects), improving efficiency, and improving product quality.

This is where UX best overlaps DevOps goals, and why I named my presentations and workshops DevOps ICU (ICU is the hospital intensive care unit taking care of the most serious patients). Ill be renaming it Dev && UX for 2020. So people dont assume its a DevOps presentation!:)

JAXenter:Why do you think this is the case?

Debbie:From my experiences and what Ive heard from others, Engineering, DevOps, and other related teams are often siloed from UX. There might be a gatekeeper, or the teams sometimes silo themselves because they dont have a good understanding of what each team does, and collaboration went badly. Combine that with a general misunderstanding of UX, as well as Agile materials and coaches excluding us (again, due to lack of understanding), and you end up with companies trying to build better products but without changing their processes or bringing in the UX experts who would get it done.

JAXenter:What are the benefits of making UX a more prominent consideration in the development cycle?

Debbie:There are three main beneficiaries of correctly integrating UX into dev cycles. The first are our potential and real customers. Dont wait until they are complaining, angry, or dumping you for the competition for you to put in more effort to create something that better fits their needs. It rarely gets fixed later, and by then, we may have lost customers or found our product is harder to sell.

The ROI is measurable, and businesses love that!

The second beneficiary is all of Engineering. They will save time, money, and sanity when UX pros are able to research, architect, design, test, and iterate on concepts before Engineering writes a line of code. This should drastically cut down on surprise changes of mind that waste time now, and it should cut down on fixing it later when we learn after expensive dev cycles that we need to build something better for customers.

The third beneficiary is the business. People who are watching budgets and measuring ROI are often hesitant to add UX to the process. Without understanding what UX does, how, or why, they see them as an expensive line item we can cut or skimp on. Once they get UX, its clearer how some time and money spent up front will save way more time and money during engineering and then after release. Youll even spend less on customer support when products better match peoples needs, are easy to learn, and easy to use. The ROI is measurable, and businesses love that!

JAXenter:Are there any examples that stand out to you of how a big project was ultimately let down by the UX? Why was it so problematic?

There are many examples of products that were let down by excluding, circumventing, overruling, or skimping on UX.

Debbie:There are many examples of products that were let down by excluding, circumventing, overruling, or skimping on UX. The easiest example would be every time you uninstalled an app because it was garbage or not what you needed. That company failed you. Did they even research with people like you to learn who you are and what you need? Or did some stakeholder just announce this is what were building, and theyll figure it out? Every website you stopped going to, every company you cancelled, and every app you uninstalled probably had UX failures that made you feel done with them. And this can all be avoided by hiring at least one expert per project.

For more famous examples, people can research what happened when Skype and Snapchat separately made big UX changes that customers hated. Read all the bad press, see how the stock price dropped, check out the angry Twitterstorms, and read about how it alienated customers. Consider what that cost those companies to build and then have to undo or rebuild. Its painful!

JAXenter:Youve previously written about how its important not just to consider one end user, and how user testing should be integrated into the UX process. What would you say is your dream scenario for UX in software development setups?

Testing is the QA of UX.We dont write code and then decide its probably good enough to release.

Debbie:The dream scenario for UX testing would be to have the time and budget to run multiple rounds of testing with real and/or archetypal users. Sometimes we dont have real customers yet because this product is new. But if UX research does a great job helping us focus on where the sweet spots of our target customers are, we build for them and we test with them. Many projects can work with realistic UX prototypes, saving Engineering from having to build our prototypes. We can then give real people some real tasks, and see where there are flaws.

Testing is the QA of UX.We dont skimp on testing our code. We dont write code and then decide its probably good enough to release, so lets skip QA. UX testing is hugely important and can often be done fairly quickly.

Ultimately, the dream scenario for CX and UX is to be better understood in all areas of companies. Were not the people who sketch screens. Were not artsy fartsy hipsters. The core of UX lives in cognitive psychology, far from anything artistic. We must be able to understand and predict human behavior. We must be problem finders and problem solvers. We must be able to predict and mitigate business risks. Great UX meets and exceeds the metrics and goals the business has set out, but UX rarely gets the credit.

Its time to finally understand what UX is, who does it, how and why, and how it can be Agile, Lean, and collaborative.

Read more:
UX and DevOps: "Every app you uninstalled probably had UX failures" - JAXenter

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As the Washington DC area continues to grow as a cultural center for performing arts, one mysterious industry has begun to appear within the District. Seemingly out of nowhere, but really, with a calculated and careful practice, a group of magicians and mentalists have settled into the city and made the magical arts an avenue for entertainment, education and wonder.

Brian Curry

Brian Curry wears an easy smile every time hes talking to you. Theres a natural charm and friendliness, as if hes welcoming you into his home. That feeling seeps through over the phone as we chat, and even through our email communications.

In person, that charm is even more prominent. As Curry performs a trick where he takes an audience members drivers license, the audience member is smiling even before the reveal. The appearance of Currys license, in place of her own, (thought to be held safely under the palm of her hand) is met with an incredulous burst of laughter.

While Vegas may have flashy productions and big-name performers like Penn and Teller, Criss Angel and David Copperfield, Washington, D.C. has seen a growing number in of magicians find a home and a growing audience over the last five years.

Weve had magic show after magic show appear and stick around, which is really rare, Curry says. DC has more resident shows than most other cities in the whole country and theyve been coming really hard and fast.

On Yelp, the number of listed magicians in DC is in the high 30s. These include performers that have a theatrical location to perform in, as well as individuals who perform for events or parties. For New York City, that number is only slightly higher. Based on these numbers, Curry and others have begun to refer to Washington, D.C. as the Magic Capital of the U.S.

There are currently [at least] 6 long running shows, Curry shares. His current show, The Good Liar, runs every Saturday at the Capital Hilton.

In [The Good Liar], I explore how we lie, and how we get lied to, all while performing mind-blowing magic and mind reading.

Rich Bloch

Unlike the often temporary format of theatrical productions, magic performers in DC are finding ways to establish a permanent home residency in a DC venue or institution. Rich Bloch, a magician who has performed worldwide, from Vegas to cruise ships to Broadway, is the resident magician at the O Street Mansion near Dupont Circle. His monthly show is performed before a backdrop of one-of-a-kind collectibles and memorabilia.

The place is a living memorial to imagination. The place is absolutely magic, Bloch says, as he describes the 112-room mansion. Bloch performs 3 shows a month in this venue, while retaining his Delaware-based show at Dickens Parlour Theatre and a specials effect company.

Bloch mentions how DC, as a center for business and political tourism, has provided a fresh alternative to the DC entertainment options. New York is bubbling at all times, with food, entertainment, all that [In DC], you cant go through 300 streets of bars, etc. The opportunity to have performers at various hotels and venues opens up an avenue that had not been fully realized. This type of entertaining gives folks sitting in a hotel an important option.

An interesting feature of Blochs career in the local scene is his dual career as an arbitration lawyer, a story which has been covered by the Washington Post. He successfully balances his dual careers by recognizing how both feed a curiosity for discovery and possibility.

The magic is all about passion and getting the juices flowing. The law tempers passions and magic should be something that inspires them. Bloch describes this feeling in terms of the What if factor. Those two words as the heart of everything that sets humans apart: the ability to make art and architecture and music and imagination: people who sit down to say What if I did this?

Savino Recine

The variety of the type of performance these magicians offer is one of the reasons that the citys moniker as a Magic Capital works. While DC audiences may be fascinated by the illusions and the performances, it cannot be ignored that the city has other reputations, namely that as a foodie city. Savino Recine, the former chef-owner of Primi Piatti and other restaurants, has taken his talents in the restaurant industry and his love of magic to help deliver a unique dinner-and-a-show production.

The $75 per person dinner at the Arts Club of Washington, performed with Savinos business partner and magician David Morey, is a venue that attracts adult audiences looking for a magical dining experience. The two-hour dinner is highlighted by the show, but you can expect table-side talents presented by the magicians in performance.

Recine describes this blend of business acumen as one of the many talents magicians develops while theyre building their skills. When you start to perform regularly and you become a good performer, magic becomes part of your life.

Recine gives off the spirit of a man confident and welcoming in his performance space, charming his guests while engaged in predicting an audience members hope and dreams. He describes himself as a mentalist, a person with the ability to read peoples minds, It gives you an incredible confidence that you can achieve goals in your life that you never thought could be possible.

Have an aspiring magician on your gift list? Brian Curry suggests The Magic Warehouse

Mark Phillips

While each performer showcases a unique set of talents and type of show, the collaboration between this group of magicians is impossible to miss. Mark Phillips and Brian Curry first performed The Magic Duel in 2015.

Today, Phillips performs the duel with Ryan Phillips, in a production that has the two out-magic each other in front of a voting audience.

As for Phillips, the love of magic comes from his interaction with audiences,A friend once remarked that there are two kinds of magic tricks:Challenges, where you tell the audience you are going to do something impossible in advance, and surprises, where the magical ending is a complete shock, Phillips says, The surprises are more fun for me. When an audience suddenly realizes that the impossible has already happened and they are about to see it; that is a really happy moment.

These artists, in choosing DC as home, perform for a very specific crowd. Our show is designed for an adult audience out for an evening of fun and thought-provoking entertainment. We put a lot of work into keeping the shows humor topical, which means it is also political, Phillips says. There are a number of family friendly magic shows in DC, we are not one of them.

Peter Wood

One thing you will notice about Peter Wood, whether hes performing his Collector of the Impossible show or in residence at the International Spy Museum, is you cant stop looking at his hands. That is, of course, where he wants you looking. His hands are in constant motion, and always held above the waist. Its a familiar stance for the city of politicos and professional public speakers.

His production for the Spy Museum focuses on the art of deceit, misdirection, illusion, and sleight of hand used by spies in the field. Its no wonder why magicians may feel at home in a city where citizens cant even trust the hands in front of them, even if Wood doesnt promote the use of magic for nefarious purposes.

The more you perform magic, the more you learn about human behavior, Wood says. Its my job to manipulate minds for entertainment purposes. Believable lies, directing attention, the illusion of choice, exploiting assumptions; these are all in my toolbox, but arent exclusive to magicians. Its frustrating when I see people using these techniques to get what they want in business, politics, or social situations.

The Collector of the Impossible production, since 1994, allows Wood to share objects, skills, and stories that seem to defy explanation. This performance, which he holds for private or public events. focuses less on magical abilities, and more about inviting the audience to interact with these objects.

Michael Jons

While so many of these in-DC magicians perform skilled misdirections and artful displays of physical impossibilities, one of the curious talents these individuals share is their ability to read minds. Michael Jons, a classically trained mind-reader, describes his work in the upcoming Wicked Thoughts as a study into how our personal and group minds are being manipulated, whether it be by politicians, social-media, and propaganda.

Wicked Thoughts is my attempt to tell a story which explores the current state of our culture through interactive theater and stage mentalism, Jons explains. The audience is the main character of the show, and who better than an expert in behavior and persuasion to help make sense of the current state of our mind?

In the end, the work each one of these artists deliver a production that is as much theatrical as it is cerebral, in what is a growing genre for DC.

Our primary goal is always to entertain people, Jons says. Its all about sharing a fun, unique experience. If you go to a comedy club, you expect to laugh. Similarly, if you attend any one of these magic shows, you should expect to experience amazement.

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Meet the magicians making Washington, DC the Magic Capital of America - DC Theatre Scene

In any other whistleblower drama, Tim Robbins Tom Terp would be a villain. The supervising partner to Mark Ruffalos corporate environmental defense attorneyRob Bilott in Todd Haynes legal drama Dark Waters (opening wide this weekend), Terp is initially skeptical about Bilotts budding crusade against the big chemical corporation DuPont. Understandably so: One of the biggest clients for the firm where they both work,Taft Law, is DuPont. Both Terp and Bilott are close buds with DuPontsin-house corporate counsel Phil Donnelly (Victor Garber).

But as the film heads into its eye-opening reveal of DuPonts history of chemical cover-ups,Dark Waters pulls the rug from under our expectations of Ruffalo, Robbins, and even Garbers characters.

The story plays out almost note-for-note to our expectations of a David and Goliath whistleblower drama: Mere days after he is promoted to partner, Ruffalos anxious Rob Bilott proposes legal action against DuPont to investigate the potential chemical contamination of a farmers land adjacent to one of the companys West Virginia factories. Tom Terp reluctantly agrees on the condition that the case not take away from Bilotts other work, but as the months stretch into years, Bilott grows slowly obsessed with the case and Terp gets increasingly frustrated with Bilotts agitation of Taft Laws valued relationship with DuPont. But in the powerful scene in which Bilott dumps all his findings in front of the Taft Law partners and reveals the decades of chemical cover-ups by DuPont, Terp does something unexpected: he throws his weight behind Bilott.

Its tough in a culture like that to step outside of that culture, Robbins said in in an interview with /Film on taking on the character of Terp in Dark Waters. How do we remember our moral compass when being guided by that compass will affect our income and our livelihood? What strength does that take? What kind of moral character does that take? Were living in a pretty ruthless economic system that forces us to make moral choice choices that might be compromising to us.

The real-life Terp was one of Bilotts biggest supporters in his18-year legal battle against DuPont. As one of the senior partners, Terp has the closest working relationship with DuPont and its in-house legal counsel Phil Donnelly, while he and Bilott are at first barely friends. But when Bilott turns up irrefutable evidence against DuPont, Terp has a dramatic change of heart embodied in a passionate monologue as the lawyer rallies the other Taft partners to support Bilotts case. It was that unexpected facet of Terp that drew Robbins to the role.

Im not going to do it as a stereotype character if its written that way, Robbins said. I think our job as actors is to find the complexities in human behavior, the dichotomies all good people have, the devil tugging on them. All bad people have an angel tugging at them, and everyone was a beautiful child at one point. And whatever has their lives take them on. Its interesting stories that have interesting complexities in their characters.

Terp may be an unusual character on the big screen, but hes not an unusual character in real life. There are hundreds of Tom Terps of the world, Robbins noted, adding that he hopes that the film will encourage those people who think themselves indebted to corporate culture to do the right thing. I feel like the story can be inspirational to people like that.

But where Robbins is a character who audiences might expect to become the villain of the piece only to become Bilotts greatest ally, Garber plays perhaps the most straightforward villain ofDark Waters. However, theres a complexity to Garbers Phil Donnelly and a purposefulness to casting the affable Emmy-winning actor that keeps the character from becoming too much of a cartoonish bad guy.

Every so-called villain has a story, Garber said. Hes a company man,in thrall to his own conviction. Hes been there this whole time [so he sees no reason] for things to change.

Unlike Rob Bilott and Tom Terp, Phil Ronnelly is a composite of several real people. However, Garber did go back to the source to build his performance, referring to videotaped depositions from DuPont counsels to immerse himself in the role. I think hes a composite of a couple people, Garber said. I saw a deposition [the real DuPont corporate counsel] did was able to piece together a voice and mannerisms and put it together in my subconscious. Its an interesting villain because hes just doing what he was told.

Unlike Tom Terp, the real-life DuPont legal counsel retired without much fanfare still ostensibly the company man that Garber plays. But Garber hopes that Dark Waterswill be a wake-up call not only to the corporate lawyers of the world but to all audiences who see it.

We can see how were affecting the environment every day, Garber said. This is true. Its happening now. We have to be conscious of what chemicals are going into our environment. Its a new world for all the horrors going on, but theres much awareness and people trying to make a difference. I think its definitely happening.

Robbins, who himself is well-known for his environmental activism outside of his acting career, agreed, adding, I have hope that things will change. I know that there are very powerful, powerful people at work to try to discredit to ignore to walk away from environmental protection. I think it would be nice if this film inspired more people to stop giving money to corporations that are poisoning them. That would be a nice first step.

Dark Waters is currently playing in select theaters. It expands to more theaters onDecember 6, 2019.

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Tim Robbins and Victor Garber Offer Opposing Portrayals of Real People in 'Dark Waters' - /FILM