Physiology

Crop Biotechnology, physiology and translational genomics to feed and fuel the world – Newswise

Newswise October 6, 2020 Accelerated crop improvement is needed to meet both global population growth and climate change generated stresses on crops. TheCrop Biotechnology, physiology and translational genomics to feed and fuel the worldsymposium at theTranslating Visionary Science to Practice ASA, CSSA, SSSA International Annual Meetingwill address these topics.

The meeting is being held virtually, Nov. 9-13, 2020 and is hosted by the American Society of Agronomy, Crop Science Society of America and Soil Science Society of America. Media are invited; preregistration is required.

The presentations are:

Presentations may be watched asynchronously, and there will be a scheduled Q&A time to speak with presenters during the meeting. Presentations will be available for online viewing for 90 days after the meeting for all registrants. For more information about theTranslating Visionary Science to Practice 2020meeting,visithttps://www.acsmeetings.org/.

Media are invited to attend the conference. Pre-registration by Nov. 2, 2020 is required. Visithttps://www.acsmeetings.org/mediafor registration information.

To speak with one of the scientists, contact Susan V. Fisk, 608-273-8091,sfisk@sciencesocieties.orgto arrange an interview.

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Crop Biotechnology, physiology and translational genomics to feed and fuel the world - Newswise

Biochemistry

Synthace Announces the Launch of New Product Helping Scientists Execute and Scale Key Assays – BioSpace

Oct. 7, 2020 08:00 UTC

BOSTON & LONDON--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Synthace Ltd, the company behind Antha, the cloud-based software platform for automating and improving the success rate of biological processes, has launched a new software capability for streamlining a fundamental workhorse of biochemistry: the enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). Antha now allows researchers to flexibly design and execute automated ELISA protocols and automatically gather, structure, and analyze the data in an accessible, in-depth format, saving researchers valuable time from design to data acquisition.

A Powerful Detection Tool

ELISA protocols are ubiquitous in life science research but feature prominently in drug discovery, pathology (plant and animal), medical diagnostics, and quality control. Essentially, ELISAs use specific antibodies, like those generated by our immune system, to detect antigens and give off a detectable signal using an enzyme such as horseradish peroxidase. Without these assays, scientists would not be able to rapidly identify viral proteins, like in the HIV test, or detect potential allergens or toxins in food. An ELISA test for coronavirus was one of the first antibody detection methods available at the outset of the pandemic.

Shifting Bottlenecks and Reducing Burdens

ELISA protocols have repetitive liquid handling steps that lend themselves easily to automation. These complex protocols are often performed on multiple pieces of equipment that are not always physically connected. This creates several barriers: the scientist must know how to program all of the machines involved as well as acquire and process the data from them individually. Ultimately, automating ELISA assays reduces the time spent on liquid handling, but creates two new bottlenecks in programming and data handling.

To reduce the programming and data handling burdens for researchers, Synthaces Antha acts as a single point of contact to perform the assay and acquire results. Antha is device-agnostic, with an intuitive user interface that allows scientists to design a flexible, end-to-end protocol and test it step-by-step in silico before sending it to the machines involved.

Changing How We Gather Data

In addition to showing the user a preview of the experiment, Antha automatically gathers tracks and structures data generated during the assays, even from non-integrated devices. At the conclusion of the protocol, Antha will generate a complete data analysis and visualization of these data automatically, saving time and resources spent gathering data and formatting it manually.

Clients trialing the new ELISA feature in Antha reported:

ELISAs are a critical assay across many fields within life science. As highly sensitive assays, they require precision and reproducibility that automation can provide. Flexible end-to-end approaches for ELISAs help scale key assays across many sectors, including biopharmaceutical development.

This addition to our Antha platform will enable scientists to perform key assays reliably and reproducibly at scale. Most importantly, this will allow scientists to spend less time in the lab, enabling them to design better experiments, explore new insights, and ultimately increase the impact of their research, concluded Dr. Tim Fell, CEO of Synthace.

Join the Synthace team on Friday, 16th October at 3pm BST / 10am EDT for a live demo to learn more about Antha-powered ELISAs and to ask our experts about automation, Antha, and more!

To learn more about automating ELISA protocols and getting the most from your data, visit: https://www.synthace.com/our-protocols/elisa-detail/

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About Synthace

Based in London, UK, and Boston, the US, Synthace is accelerating biological discovery & optimization through computer-aided biology. Our cloud software platform, Antha, empowers biologists by enabling them to flexibly program their lab automation without the need to code. The graphical user interface has been designed by biologists for biologists, intuitively enabling them to automate their whole experiment from planning to execution, data collection, and analysis. Antha is the cornerstone of the lab of the future, seamlessly connecting the digital realm of data with the physical of lab automation and wet-lab biology, automatically collecting and structuring data to accelerate biological understanding.

Synthace is unlocking the potential of biology for humankind and our environment. Synthace works with biopharmaceutical companies, and in 2016 was recognized by the World Economic Forum as a Technology Pioneer that is helping shape the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and in 2018 as a cool vendor by Gartner.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201007005087/en/

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Synthace Announces the Launch of New Product Helping Scientists Execute and Scale Key Assays - BioSpace

Biochemistry

Rare genetic disease of the nervous and heart system discovered in children – Euro Weekly News

A rare genetic disease of the nervous and heart system has been discovered in children.

RESEARCHERS from Idibell and Hospital Sant Joan de Du in Barcelona have discovered a new severe rare genetic disease of metabolism that affects children and is characterised by problems in brain and heart development.

The gene that causes the disease, SHMT2, has been identified through the analysis of the genome of five patients -three Spanish, one French and one American.

The study of patients from overseas was made possible by the GeneMatcher platform, which connects clinicians and researchers from all over the world interested in the study of the same genes.

Children with SHMT2 deficiencies suffer from cognitive development problems, motor disorders and progressive heart disease that may even need transplantation.

To analyse the genome, the Idibell team developed sophisticated algorithms aimed at identifying the DNA changes in the genes most likely to cause disease.

The SHMT2 gene directs the production of an enzyme that controls the metabolism of folic acid and amino acids, essential elements to form proteins, with a key function in the development of the brain.

In the patients cells obtained through skin biopsy, the researchers have been able to determine the altered function by measuring the metabolites of the pathway in the biochemistry laboratory of the Hospital Sant Joan de Du (HSJD).

This discovery has been carried out by the team led by the geneticist and researcher Aurora Pujol.

Thanks to genomic medicine we can diagnose patients who have been unresponsive for many years, and better understand the mechanisms that govern essential biochemical reactions and the development of organs and tissues, she explained.

ngels Garca-Cazorla, a neuropediatrician who controls the three diagnosed patients and co-leader of the research, adds that Since these are known biochemical pathways, we are working on experimental treatments to supplement the deficient metabolites with the aim of improving the quality of life of the patients.

On the other hand, the team of researchers has also found alterations in the mitochondria, the organelles responsible for energy production and essential for most of the biochemical functions essential to life.

The study, published in the scientific journal Acta Neuropathologica and financed by funds from the Carlos III Health Institute, Ciberer and the project of undiagnosed neurological diseases of Catalonia, URD-Cat, identifies the gene that causes the disease, SHMT2, and opens the way to work on experimental treatments that will improve the lives of patients.

Thank you for reading this article Rare genetic disease of the nervous and heart system discovered in children.

Euro Weekly Newscontinues to bring you a range of News that doesnt cost you anything but your internet connection. Whether its Local Spanish News or International Entertainment News, weve got you covered!

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Rare genetic disease of the nervous and heart system discovered in children - Euro Weekly News

Human Behavior

Expert: How geotagged content is used in research – Newswise

Newswise BUFFALO, N.Y. In a recent commentary published in the journal Nature Human Behavior, University at Buffalo geographic information science expert Yingjie Hu and colleague Ruo-Qian Wang wrote about how Twitters decision to remove users ability to tag the precise locations of Tweets might affect research in disaster response, public health and other areas.

The authors concluded that the change may not have a pivotal impact on studies that rely on this kind of content, as a large proportion of precisely geotagged posts in three Twitter datasets they examined originated from third-party apps like Instagram (the datasets were originally collected for other studies examining peoples reaction to extreme weather events). The researchers also noted that Twitter still allows for less precise geotagging, enabling users to tag places such as a restaurant, a park, a city or a country, as opposed to a precise latitude and longitude.

Nevertheless, the recent change raises a number of issues that scientists must consider, Hu and Wang said in their Sept. 7 piece.

From a privacy protection perspective, Twitters decision reflects the concerns of society in general on privacy issues. Researchers should increase our awareness of the potential privacy and safety issues that may exist in our data and research practice and should follow relevant guidelines, such as those from institutional review boards (IRBs), to protect the privacy of individuals, according to Hu, PhD, an assistant professor of geography in the UB College of Arts and Sciences, and Wang, PhD, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering in the Rutgers University-New Brunswick School of Engineering, writing in Nature Human Behavior.

In an interview, Hu explained how geotagged social media content can enable valuable research.

After a major disaster, such as an earthquake or a hurricane, geotagged information can provide firsthand information about the situation on the ground, Hu said. Even before first responders arrive at those locations, information posted directly by the people from the disaster-affected area can inform disaster response.

Another application for geotagged content is in public health. From geotagged tweets, we can know what people are talking about and from which locations, and we can further identify the geographic areas where people are talking about flu, cough, or other health-related keywords. In political science, geotagged posts can provide some understanding of peoples political opinions in different geographic locations, or of how people are reacting to new government policies.

As scientists conduct this type of research, Hu believes its vital not only for researchers like himself to think about privacy and ways to safeguard data, but for app developers and corporations to do the same. One important step involves transparency. He argues that its important for companies to make it clear to users how their data may be used. And that goes for both social media platforms that allow people to geotag posts, and for apps that engage in location-tracking, he says.

I think it will be good if individuals can have more information and get a better understanding of how their data are collected, Hu said.

Ultimately, he added, If we can provide good privacy protection measures on location data, we can use those data for many applications that benefit our society, such as in disaster response, public health, transportation modeling and other areas.

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Human Behavior

Gravyty Launches Gravyty Guard the First Data Security Solution Built to Protect Donor Data at Nonprofit Organizations – AiThority

Gravyty Expands AI Platform to Address Human-Layer Data Security Risks

Gravyty, the market-defining leader of artificial intelligence (AI) for Social Good, announced Gravyty Guard, the first data security technology focused on the human layer of security and specifically designed to protect the most sensitive donor data at nonprofit organizations from intentional and unintentional data breaches. The announcement comes in direct response to the worst year for nonprofit data security, with thousands of nonprofit organizations announcing data breaches and millions of donor data records compromised. Gravyty Guard protects nonprofit organizations and their well-intentioned employees from unintentional and malicious data breaches and provides the first solution to secure organizations most sensitive data.

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Over the past six months, remote work has redefined how workforces access and share donor data, creating new and alarming security vulnerabilities for nonprofit organizations, particularly through well-intentioned employees who have authorized access to their organizations data. In fact,85%of data breaches occur as a result of inadvertent actions. As data sets grow exponentially and organizations become more data-driven, these vulnerabilities are only projected to get worse. The most prominent risks now become well-intentioned employees who make mistakes with their organizations data.

Nonprofit organizations find themselves in the crosshairs of being data-driven and needing to protect their most sensitive donor data. In the past, weve relied on policy to provide security assurances, but 2020 has proven that we need more, and it has to start at the most vulnerable level the human layer, explainedAdam Martel, co-founder and CEO, Gravyty. With Gravytys deep understanding of the nonprofit sector and human behavior in advancement, we realized that we could expand our AI platform so nonprofits can address the security challenge that will define this decade, protecting against fraud and data breaches with world-class technology.

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By understanding human behaviors unique to the nonprofit fundraising space, Gravyty uses advanced technologies to train models, deploy proactive alerts, and provide detailed, flexible reporting to protect employees from being the source maliciously or accidentally of the next donor data security breach. Known ashuman-layer security, the technologies behind Gravyty Guard proactively alert fundraisers to potential data breaches and provide steps to remediate data risks. These protections include threats such as:

Phishing, spear phishing, and other email infiltration attacks attempt to trick humans into scenarios that allow hackers to extract sensitive donor data through ransomware, trojan malware, and other methods. An estimated 135 million of these attacks are attempted every day. Historically focused on the for-profit sector, the nonprofit sector has only recently become a target for bad actors. Gravyty Guard is flexible, configuring to the specific needs of any organization to alert and protect fundraisers from these attacks.

Exfiltration happens when employees use email, text messages, messaging apps, thumb drives, cloud apps, and other vehicles to transfer data to places it should never be, without authorization. The most common data exfiltration occurs when an employee forwards a work email to their personal account.75%of IT leaders say employeesintentionallyput an organizations data at risk through exfiltration methods. Gravyty Guard allows nonprofit organizations to select compliance frameworks that apply to their business GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, or otherwise and alerts managers when a fundraiser is about to create a vulnerability.

IT security is often highly effective at monitoring networks for abnormal traffic. However, we cant say the same about tracking abnormalities in human behavior. More than70%of people have mistakenly sent personally identifiable information (PII) or business-sensitive data to the wrong email recipient, creating a data breach. The source of these breaches could be as small as trusting auto-suggest to fill in an email address or a typo. Gravyty Guard uses AI to monitor security anomalies at the human-layer, alerting fundraisers when something doesnt line up about the data within their message and the recipients to whom its being sent.

The last 30 years in security have been defined by protecting networks and devices. Now, bad actors have turned their attention to new vulnerabilities an organizations employees, saidRich Palmer, co-founder and CTO, Gravyty. As the leader in AI technology for the nonprofit sector, addressing human-layer security is a natural progression for Gravyty because frontline fundraisers access sensitive donor data every day. Well empower nonprofit organizations to ensure their employees dont make mistakes that cause donor data breaches.

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Gravyty Launches Gravyty Guard the First Data Security Solution Built to Protect Donor Data at Nonprofit Organizations - AiThority

Human Behavior

Europe is building a ‘digital twin’ of Earth to revolutionize climate forecasts – Science Magazine

At 1-kilometer resolution, a European climate model (left) is nearly indistinguishable from reality (right).

By Paul VoosenOct. 1, 2020 , 10:40 AM

The European Union is finalizing plans for an ambitious digital twin of planet Earth that would simulate the atmosphere, ocean, ice, and land with unrivaled precision, providing forecasts of floods, droughts, and fires from days to years in advance. Destination Earth, as the effort is called, wont stop there: It will also attempt to capture human behavior, enabling leaders to see the impacts of weather events and climate change on society and gauge the effects of different climate policies.

"Its a really bold mission, I like it a lot, says Ruby Leung, a climate scientist at the U.S. Department of Energys (DOEs) Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. By rendering the planets atmosphere in boxes only 1 kilometer across, a scale many times finer than existing climate models, Destination Earth can base its forecasts on far more detailed real-time data than ever before. The project, which will be described in detail in two workshops later this month, will start next year and run on one of the three supercomputers that Europe will deploy in Finland, Italy, and Spain.

Destination Earth rose out of the ashes of Extreme Earth, a proposal led by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) for a billion-euro flagship research program. The European Union ultimately canceled the flagship program, but retained interest in the idea. Fears that Europe was falling behind China, Japan, and the United States in supercomputing led to the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking, an 8 billion investment to lay the groundwork for eventual exascale machines capable of 1 billion billion calculations per second. The dormant Extreme Earth proposal offered a perfect use for such capacity. This blows a soul into your digital infrastructure, says Peter Bauer, ECMWFs deputy director of research, who coordinated Extreme Earth and has been advising the European Union on the new program.

Typical climate models run at resolutions of 50 or 100 kilometers; even top ones like ECMWFs European model run at 9 kilometers. The new models 1-kilometer resolution will enable it to directly render convection, the vertical transport of heat critical to the formation of clouds and storms, rather than relying on an algorithmic approximation. I call it the third dimension of climate modeling, says Bjorn Stevens, a climate scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology. The model will also simulate the ocean in fine enough detail to capture the behavior of swirling eddies that are important movers of heat and carbon.

In Japan, pioneering runs of a 1-kilometer global climate model have shown that directly simulating storms and eddies leads to better short-term rainfall predictions. But it should also improve climate forecasts over periods of months and years. Recent work has shown climate models are not capturing predictable changes in wind patterns that drive swings in regional temperature and rainfallprobably because the models fail to reproduce storms and eddies.

The high resolution will also enable Destination Earth to base its forecasts on more detailed data. Weather models suck in observations of temperature and pressure from satellites, weather stations, aircraft, and buoys to guide their simulations. But coarse grids mean the models cant assimilate measurements that dont average well or cover broad areas, such as fractures opening up in sea ice. Destination Earth will close this gap, says Sandrine Bony, a cloud scientist at the Pierre Simon Laplace Institute. The scales that are resolved are closer to the scales that are measured.

The model will also incorporate real-time data charting atmospheric pollution, crop growth, forest fires, and other phenomena known to affect weather and climate, says Francisco Doblas-Reyes, an earth system scientist at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center. If a volcano goes off tomorrow, thats important for the risk of tropical precipitation failure in a few months. And it will fold in data about society, such as energy use, traffic patterns, and human movements (traced by mobile phones).

The goal is to allow policymakers to directly gauge how climate change will impact societyand how society could alter the trajectory of climate change. For example, the model could predict how climate change will affect agriculture and migration patterns in Braziland also how cuts in ethanol subsidies might limit deforestation in the Amazon. Currently, climate scientists extract regional results from global climate models and pass them to experts in agriculture or economics to understand effects on human behavior. Now, says Erin Coughlan de Perez, a climate hazard scientist at the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, modelers are moving from just forecasting what weather will be, to what the weather will do.

Getting there wont be easy. Exascale supercomputers rely on both traditional computer chips as well as graphical processing units (GPUs), which are efficient at handling intensive calculations. GPUs are good for running model components in parallel and training artificial intelligence algorithmstwo techniques Destination Earth will lean on to enhance performance. But old climate modeling code will have to be reworked. ECMWF has a head start: It is adapting its forecast model to a GPU-based environment, and last year tested it at 1-kilometer resolution for 4 simulated months on Summit, the U.S. supercomputer that was the worlds fastest until a Japanese machine recently eclipsed it.

The massive amount of data generated by the model will be a problem of its own. When the Japanese team ran its 1-kilometer-scale experiment, it took half a year to extract something useful from a couple days of data, Doblas-Reyes says. Theres a bottleneck when we try to access the data and do something clever with it. A big part of Destination Earth will be solving this problem, designing ways to analyze model results in real time.

As an operational system, Destination Earth will likely run at several time scales, Bauer says. One will be near daily, perhaps targeting individual extreme weather events weeks or months in the future. Runs in the other modelong-term predictionswould be less frequent: perhaps a decadelong prediction of the climate made every half-year or so. If this works, it could be a template for other countries to follow, Bauer says.

The Europeans arent alone in planning for exascale climate models. Were heading in that direction as well, but weve yet to reach that level of effort, says Leung, who serves as chief scientist for DOEs earth system model.

Stevens says its thrilling to be involved in a truly planetary-scale information system that can reveal not just the proverbial butterfly effect in weather and climate, but also how local human actions manifest globally. Thats the story of globalization. Thats the story of the Anthropocene. And this is the scientific platform that will allow you to explore those.

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Europe is building a 'digital twin' of Earth to revolutionize climate forecasts - Science Magazine

Human Behavior

Journeys of Discovery: Grand Canyon murdera true story of redemption – KCBX

Correspondent Tom Wilmer visits withAnnette McGivney, author of "Pure Land: A True Story of Three Lives, Three Cultures, and the Search for Heaven on Earth." McGivney is Southwest Editor forBackpacker Magazineand former professor of journalism at Northern Arizona University.

McGivneys book tells the story of Tomomi Hanamure, a Japanese citizen who loved exploring the wilderness of the American Southwest. She was murdered on her birthdayMay 8, 2006. She was stabbed 29 times as she hiked to Havasu Falls on the Havasupai Indian Reservation at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Her killer was a distressed 18-year-old Havasupai youth.

This show was originally broadcast July 31, 2018 and is reposted as a best-of-the-best podcast in celebration of Journeys of Discoverys 30th anniversary producing on-air and digital media podcasts featured on KCBX and NPR One.

"Pure Land" is about this tragedy. But it is also the story of how McGivneys quest to understand Hanamures life and death wound up guiding the author through her own life-threatening crisis.

On this journeystretching from the southern tip of Japan to the bottom of the Grand Canyon, and into the ugliest aspects of human behavior"Pure Land" offers proof of the healing powers of nature and the resiliency of the human spirit.

You are invited to subscribe to the Lowell Thomas Award-winning podcast travel show,Journeys of Discovery with Tom Wilmer,featured on theNPR Podcast Directory,Apple Podcast,theNPR One App&Stitcher.com.Twitter: TomCWilmer.Instagram: Thomas.Wilmer.Underwriting support provided byThe Society of St. Vincent de Paul,and Honolulu based, Hawaiian Legacy Reforestation Initiative.

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Journeys of Discovery: Grand Canyon murdera true story of redemption - KCBX

Human Behavior

Frederick Wiseman on the life of American institutions – Minneapolis Star Tribune

NEW YORK Frederick Wiseman has spent more than half a century documenting American institutions.

With a small crew, he has tirelessly made lengthy, sober, engrossing filmic portraits of life in Jackson Heights, Queens; a Texas boxing gym; a Maine fishing village; small-town Indiana; a Massachusetts hospital for the criminally insane; a Philadelphia high school; a Colorado meatpacking plant; the New York public library.

Wiseman, 90, records sound himself, holding the boom microphone. He doesn't research beforehand, instead letting what he sees dictate a film. No one lives more by the dictum of showing, not telling, than Wiseman. After assembling 100-250 hours of rushes, he toils over the footage, assembling sequences that capture life at a certain time and place, stitching together a narrative of expansive, long-take detail. Collectively, the films constitute a sprawling, clear-eyed mosaic of America.

Many consider Wiseman the greatest living documentary filmmaker. In 2016, he received an honorary Academy Award. "It's as important to document kindness, civility and generosity of spirit as it is cruelty, banality and indifference," he said.

In a time of unprecedented strain on federal institutions, Wiseman's latest is a profile of a more local, functioning realm of U.S. civic life. "City Hall," which played to typical acclaim at the Venice, Toronto and New York film festivals over the past few weeks, documents the daily hum and long-range aspirations of the Boston city government under Mayor Marty Walsh. It opens in virtual theaters Oct. 28.

Wiseman, who spoke in a recent interview from the apartment in Paris that's been his most regular home for the past 15 years, finished post-production on "City Hall" just as the pandemic was beginning. Aside from walks to relax, he's stayed mostly inside since March. Asked about his health, he replied, "Well, I'm still breathing." But sitting still is hard for someone who has averaged a movie a year for five decades. "For the first time in 55 years, I don't have a movie to work on," he said.

___

AP: The communal worlds of your films where groups of people are so often in rooms talking to one another feels very far away right now, doesn't it?

WISEMAN: At the moment I can't work. It's terrible. To make the kind of movies I make I can encounter a couple hundred people every day. I'm working on a script to a short fiction film that I can shoot in a modest way with a small crew in an isolated place. But not having any work to do is a serious problem. I'm bored out of my mind, actually.

AP: In "City Hall" we see such a wide scope of civic operations, from garbage collection to homeless outreach, from building inspections to mayoral staff meetings.

WISEMAN: City government touches more aspects of our lives than any other form of government. Among other things, it provides the necessary limits as to what we have to do to get along with each other and live together. Speeding limits. Places to park. Minimum health requirements for restaurants. The control of violence. The monopoly on the right to use force. Providing health services. It goes on and on and on. You sort of, or at least I did, take it for granted.

AP: Do you consider "City Hall" a response to Donald Trump?

WISEMAN: If I made "City Hall" when Obama was president, one would be measuring Walsh against Obama. But in the current context, we're measuring him against Trump, so he comes out so much better. Not that he's not good, but the contrast is extreme. The film doesn't in any way suggest the government of Boston is perfect. But it does suggest, I hope, that there's a mayor who cares and is trying to implement programs and raise money for services that will make a difference in people's lives.

AP: What draws you to institutions as subjects?

WISEMAN: The institution is also just an excuse to observe human behavior in somewhat defined conditions. The films are as much about that as they are about institutions. For most of the films, all the encounters take place within a relatively limited geographical framework. Sometimes it's just a building or in the case of "Boxing Gym," a couple of rooms. In the case of "National Gallery," it's a big building. In the case of "Public Housing," it was a housing project. Anything that takes place within the geographic boundaries of the institution is fair game to include in the film. Anything that takes place outside those boundaries is another film.

AP: Are you partly motivated to leave these films behind as time capsules to show the way people talked and dressed and moved?

WISEMAN: You're quite right. I'm very interested in that. I hope 50 years from now they'll be interested in the films because it's a body of films which represent the work of one person exploring contemporary American life. I hope they'll always be interested in them. I made "Law and Order" (about the Kansas City police department) in 1968 and the issues that film tries to deal with are very contemporary.

AP: There's a scene in that where a policeman chokes a black woman.

WISEMAN: That aroused almost no comment when the film was the shown in 1968. It was sort of by the by. It was more tisk-tisk. No protests. There was no political activity in Kansas, Missouri, as a consequence of that sequence, and it's pretty horrible.

AP: Those kinds of incidents of police brutality are more widely recorded now. Do you think them being better documented will change the behavior?

WISEMAN: Ah, that's the million-dollar question. I don't know what changes human behavior. I think human behavior has been set now for 10,000 or 15,000 years.

AP: You've said you watch fiction films more than documentaries. Which filmmakers have had an influence on you?

WISEMAN: I've probably been more influenced by the books I've read than the movies I've seen. I've never consciously drawn on the work of another filmmaker while I'm shooting or editing. When I read a novel or read a poem, I think about the same kind of things that I do when I'm editing. When I went to college a long time ago, it was called close reading. It probably has a fancier name now. But we were taught to pay close attention to the text and not incorporate in our analysis of the text anything outside of it. In other words, we weren't encouraged to read a biography of Ernest Hemingway to read "The Sun Also Rises." So I learned how to pay close attention. So when I'm shooting and in particular when I'm editing, in order to make a film out of 150 hours of rushes, I have to pay close attention to what people are saying and doing and how they're moving and how they're dressed and the language they're using. I have to explain the behavior that I'm seeing and hearing to myself in order to make a judgment. The making of these films involves an effort to be aware, in a sense to be awake.

AP: You have a good line about "verit" filmmaking in which you say you're "somewhat more conscious than a fly."

WISEMAN: The whole notion of a fly on the wall I find disgusting. It's demeaning, really.

AP: And you don't like the word "documentary," right?

WISEMAN: I'm happy with the word "movies." I make movies. Maybe it's because when I was growing up, "documentary" had an aura about it. You were supposed to see it because it was good for you, a bit like ex-lax. I think a movie should be entertaining, instructive, dramatic, funny. You should look for the same qualities in a documentary as in a fiction film. I hate didacticism in writing and I also hate it in movies. I don't like to be told what to think. I like to be asked to work and figure out what's going on, so I discover.

AP: Was "City Hall" enjoyable to make?

WISEMAN: They're all enjoyable to make. One of the reasons I like doing this is because it's fun. Each movie is a new subject. I like to think I learned something. I have an intense absorption in the film, in the shooting and the editing. It's physically and emotionally and intellectually demanding. That's a good combination of things for me.

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Frederick Wiseman on the life of American institutions - Minneapolis Star Tribune

Human Behavior

A Killing Eve-inspired fashion line is on its way – Dazed

Fans of Villanelle can now dress up like their favourite knife-wielding murderess because a Killing Eve-inspired line of clothing is on its way.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, AMC Network and Sid Gentle Films the companies that own the shows licensing rights have signed an agreement with IMG for the BBC America series to develop and manufacture consumer products, experiences, and collaborations. Simply put, it means that we can expect Killing Eve-branded clothes, beauty products, games, and more to appear in the near future.

Killing Eve hits on multiple notes and nuances of human behavior that naturally translate into licensing, said Sherikay Chaffee, VP of licensing at IMG, in a statement. Aside from being one of the most popular and loved shows on TV, its also one of the most clever and stylish. The dual aspect and opposing nature between its two lead characters can be used to tell a story about a product.

While theres no further information as to when we can expect to see these products, Killing Eve is known for serving some major fashion lewks, including frou-frou dresses courtesy of Molly Goddard and tongue-in-cheek Undercover baseball caps, a green, fluffy Charlotte Knowles coat and Gucci tailoring.Needless to say, were excited.

In the meantime, heres some inspo:

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A Killing Eve-inspired fashion line is on its way - Dazed

Human Behavior

Historian John Barry compares COVID-19 to the 1918 flu pandemic – University of Rochester

October 6, 2020

John Barry 69 (MA) says that the virulence of the 1918 flu made it a very different disease than COVID-19, but the lessons of that pandemic still resonate.

John Barry studied in the graduate program in history at the University of Rochester. He went on to work as a football coach and then as a journalist in Washington, DC, covering economics and national politics. Hes now adjunct faculty at Tulane Universitys School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine and the author of books including The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History, The Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America, and Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty.

When the novel coronavirus went from epidemic to pandemic early this year, John Barry 69 (MA) found himself in rather familiar territory. Barry is the author of The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History. When the book was first published, in 2004, the National Academy of Sciences named it the outstanding book of the year on science and medicine. In 2020, Barrys book has returned to bestseller status.

In The Great Influenza, he considers what became known as the Spanish fluso called because the press in Spain, which stayed neutral in World War I, had not clamped down on coverage in the name of moralefrom a broad range of angles: scientists quest to understand a new pathogen, officials efforts (or lack thereof) to contain the spread of infection, and communities and families horrifying experiences of a disease so contagious and lethal that it infected about a quarter of the US population and killed between 50 and 100 million people around the world, the equivalent of 220 to 440 million today.

Anchoring The Great Influenza is Barrys consideration of leadership, science, and society. Trust, he argues, is crucial, because without trust in information people have no reliable knowledge of what is happening. In 1918, when leaders gave wartime morale priority over public health communication, terror overran society, so much so that some flu victims starved to death because others were too frightened to bring them food.

The fundamental lesson of the 1918 pandemic, Barry writes, is this: Those in authority must retain the publics trust. The way to do that is to distort nothing, to put the best face on nothing, to try to manipulate no one.

Barrys expertise drew him into public policy. In the year The Great Influenza was published, he began to collaborate with federal government entities and the National Academies on influenza preparedness and response. He was part of the original group that developed plans for public health measures in a pandemic before a vaccine is developed, and he contributed to pandemic preparedness and response efforts during the administrations of Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

This conversation has been edited and condensed.

Theyre both animal viruses that jumped to humans. So, theyre novel for the given population. The mode of transmission is identical: primarily droplets, some airborne, maybe some fomite [transmission from contact with objects]nobody knows how much.

Number three, theyre both primarily respiratory viruses.

Number four is less well known, and that is that the 1918 virus infected practically every organ, much like COVID-19. There were notable neurological impacts and cardiovascular eventsthey were very common. Its been noted that even the testes can be affected. That was true in 1918 as well. Thats very unusual and certainly not the case for other influenza viruses.

Its hard to say whats most important, but I guess the most important one is a different target demographic. In 1918, 95 percent, roughly, of the mortality was among people younger than 65. Of course, thats the opposite with COVID.

And number two is duration. This virus moves much more slowly than influenza, whether its the incubation period, how long you shed virus, or how long youre sick.

It has put vastly more stress on the economy because of the duration. We tried to interrupt transmission and save peoples lives, which I think was the right thing to do. But it certainly caused an increase in economic stress.

The most obvious difference is virulencethe rapidity of the viruss spread and its severity. In 1918, it was many times more virulent.

As a general rule, public health is pretty easy compared to the hard science. In the present case, obviously, the reversal on mask usage caused a lot of confusion, though I think right now theres pretty widespread acceptance.

Normally, public health is not a frontier. You may refine your methodsand in this case, the main method has always been there. Social distancing is more important than anything else.

There was a lot more reason to be afraid in 1918. People saw death all around themand in many cases, horrible deaths. There is fear out here now, but its not, in most cases, the same intensity.

I think fear is pretty clearly a much more important and driving motivemuch more effective, lets sayin getting people to act than the idea that you ought to protect some stranger you cross paths with somewhere.

So in terms of getting people to comply with the [public health] advice, I think if people are deeply concerned that they themselves are vulnerable and could be killed, thats much more powerful than worrying, well, you know, maybe this person Im having a drink with might go home and infect their grandmothermaybe.

A lot of countries did the right thing. They were extremely transparent. In those early meetings about nonpharmaceutical interventions [in the advisory groups that Barry joined in 2004], my message was to always tell the truth. And I didnt get a lot of pushback. Every now and then somebody would say, Well, we dont really want to scare people. Yeah, you do, actually. You dont want to use fear as a tool, but you want them to be able to judge the risk themselves, truthfully. And to understand the risk. And be honest. And a lot of countries have done thatnot because they read my book, but because its pretty clearly the best thing to do, whether its South Korea or Singapore or Germany or Austria or New Zealand. A lot of countries were totally transparent and have been pretty effective in containing the virus.

And as you know, the US is pretty close to dead last in the developed world in containing the virus.

Ive never been able to come up with a good explanation as to why theres so little written about the 1918 pandemic. There was quite a bit of pulp fiction written in the 1920s. I didnt know that myself until somebody else who was interviewing me said they collected it. But not serious fiction. There were only a tiny handful [of writers who addressed it], such as William Maxwell and Katherine Anne Porter. John Dos Passos is one of my favorite writers. He got influenza on a troop ship, one of the worst places to get it, and he wrote about two lines in his entire body of work.

When I first started researching this book, which was quite a while ago now, I had an aunt who was then in her 90s. And when I mentioned it to her, she grabbed her chest and said, Oh! It was the only time I saw my father cry. It certainly was burned into her consciousness. And whenever I mentioned it to somebody old enough to have lived through it, I got a similar response. They certainly didnt forget it, but why it didnt register in our literature to a greater degree, I dont know. I mean, it was briefyoure talking about a period of weeks. It also occurred simultaneously with the war. But I have no good explanation.

As far as this pandemic, yes, I think theres a very good chance that this will be a defining event for a generation, depending upon the effectiveness and speed with which we get a vaccine.

In April, I said I didnt expect summer to provide relief. I said I expected something akin to ocean swells rather than waves, depending on how we came out of various phases. I also said that there is a danger of a storm surge. Its relatively easy at this point to predict the behavior of the virus, but you cannot predict human behavior. And you cant predict the weather. If we have a really mild fall and people tend to be outside a lot, deep into the fall, that will have some impact on transmission. If the weather is rotten and people are forced inside earlier, thats something else again.

The key is really behavior. And what worries me most is the real possibility of that storm surge.

And theres still so much we dont know about the virus, such as its long-term impact. We know a significant percentage of those who get sick show some kind of heart damage. Is that permanent? Does it heal? Even people who have no symptoms whatsoever on X-ray show whats referred to as ground glass opacity in the lung. What is that damage? What does that mean long term?

The virus certainly affects blood vessels. What does that mean in terms of stroke and other cardiovascular problems years from now? In 1918, there were complications that didnt surface at all until the 1920s. So, we just dont know.

Tags: Arts and Sciences, COVID-19, Department of History, John Barry

Category: Society & Culture

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Historian John Barry compares COVID-19 to the 1918 flu pandemic - University of Rochester