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mcatmemoranda · 4 years

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Reviewing questions:

Non-caseating granulomas with multinucleated giant cells (macrophages that fuse together and therefore the multinucleated giant cells have multiple nuclei) and increased serum calcium are seen in pts with sarcoidosis. You see bilateral hilar lymphadenopathy. Activated macrophages make 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D-> increased Ca2+. I remember posting about why sarcoidosis causes increased calcium before. Here's what I said:

I wasn’t understanding how/why sarcoidosis causes hypercalcemia. It’s because the epithelioid histiocytes [macrophages in the epithelial tissue] of the granulomas have alpha 1 hydroxylase, which converts vitamin D to the active form, which makes you absorb more calcium. I know alpha 1 hydroxylase is in the kidney. Apparently, it’s also in the noncaseating granulomas you see in sarcoidosis.

Glucocorticoids can be given to treat sarcoidosis in the short term. Glucocorticoids reduce inflammation by decreasing transcription of proinflammatory genes-> decreased macrophage and lymphocyte activation, so no inflammatory mediators (IL-1, IFN-gamma). Glucocorticoids also prevent endothelial cells from expressing selectins, which are necessary for neutrophils to leave the blood and go to sites of cytokine release. Glucocorticoids basically prevent margination and emigration of neutrophils-> increased neutrophil count in the blood. IL-8 = inflammatory cytokine that summons neutrophils; reduced by steroids. IL-10 = anti-inflammatory cytokine; increased by steroids. Steroids also cause apoptosis of eosinophils, monocytes, and lymphs-> susceptibility to infection. Steroids inhibit phospholipase A2-> decreased PGEs and leukotriene. Adverse effects of steroids include weight gain and glucose intolerance.

DiGeorge syndrome-> no thymus, so no T cells-> recurrent sinopulmonary infections. The structures that derive from the 3rd and 4th pharyngeal pouches (i.e., thymus) don't develop. Specifically, the ventral wings of the third pharyngeal pouch give rise to the thymus gland. In DiGeorge syndrome, this fails. Without a thymus, T cells can't mature and pts are susceptible to bacterial, viral, fungal, and protozoal pathogens. T cells are in the paracortex of lymph nodes (the cortex contains the naive B cells and the medulla contains the memory B cells). The paracortex of lymph node is undedeveloped in pts with DiGeorge syndrome (because there are no T cells to inhabit the paracortex).

Eosinophils respond to IgG and IgA on parasites by releasing their granules (e.g., major basic protein) and reactive oxygen species, which kill the parasites. This is antibody-dependent cell-mediated cytotoxicity. Th2 and mast cells make IL-5, which stimulates eosinophil activation and proliferation.

The Membrane Attack Complex (MAC) is made with complement factors C5b, C6, C7, C8, and C9. The MAC kills bacteria such as N. meningitidis. If you lack complement factors C5b through 9 (terminal complement deficiency), you can't make MAC and thus are susceptible to N. meningitidis meningitis. The petechial rash (on palms and soles, among other places) that you may see in N. meningitidis meningitis is due to vasculitis of small blood vessels due to N. meningitidis.

SCID = Sever Combined Immunodeficiency; can be X-linked recessive or AR; T cells don't develop; B cells also don't function normally; pts present with failure to thrive, recurrent viral, fungal, and opportunistic infections, and diarrhea. Pts will have hypogammaglobulinemia (not enough immunoglobulins) and lymphopenia (not enough B cells and T cells). When you do candidal antigen skin testing, these pts don't respond (no induration at site). In the candidal antigen skin test, you are trying to elicit the cell-mediated immune response of the type IV HSR, which involves not only CD8+ cytotoxic T cells, but also CD4+ helper T cells and macrophages. Macrophages are APCs, which present candida Ag to helper T cells, who then release cytokine to activate cytotoxic T cells, which destroy infected cells. IFN-gamma from both helper and cytotoxic T cells enhances macrophage phagocytosis of candida. Tx of SCID = stem cell transplant. Must r/o congenital HIV.

CD14 is the cell marker for macrophages. I didn't know that and that's what a question was asking. -_-

I answered a question where an old man got the flu even though he was vaccinated. The reason he got the flu was because of impaired naive B cell production. Vaccines expose you to antigens and your B cells should respond by making antibodies to the antigen. Vaccine failure will occur if the pt has atopy, uses steroids, or has impaired naive B cell production due to aging (called immunosenescence). So immunosenescence makes an older pt less likely to respond to a vaccine. Apparently, chronic inflammation with aging causes the B cells and T cells to respond to antigens the pt has already encountered and makes the pt less likely to respond to new Ags (e.g., those presented to the immune system in a flu vaccine).

From Wikipedia:

Immunosenescence refers to the gradual deterioration of the immune system brought on by natural age advancement. The adaptive immune system is affected more than the innate immune system.

Immunosenescence involves both the host's capacity to respond to infections and the development of long-term immune memory, especially by vaccination.[2] This age-associated immune deficiency is ubiquitous and found in both long- and short-living species as a function of their age relative to life expectancy rather than chronological time.[3] It is considered a major contributory factor to the increased frequency of morbidity and mortality among the elderly.

T cells are made in the bone marrow and mature in the thymus, hence T cells are also called "thymocytes." He explained T cell maturation with positive and negative selection really well in OnlineMedEd, so I won't go over it again here. I get it. Hopefully I will remember it.

Macrophages infected with intracellular pathogens (like mycobacterium tuberculosis) release IL-12-> T cells and NK cells release IFN-gamma-> macrophages become activated and increase phagocytosis; macrophages also release TNF-alpha, which leads to granuloma formation. IFN-gamma binds the IFN-gamma receoptor on macrophages-> receptor dimerization-> activation of Janus kinase 1 and 2-> STAT1 translocated to nucleus-> increased macrophage phagocytosis and killing of bacteria. Problems with the IFN-gamma pathway-> inability to kill M. tuberculosis-> disseminated infection.

From Wikipedia:

The JAK-STAT signalling pathway is a chain of interactions between proteins in a cell, and is involved in processes such as immunity, cell division, cell death and tumour formation. The pathway communicates information from chemical signals outside of a cell to the cell nucleus, resulting in the activation of genes through a process called transcription. There are three key parts of JAK-STAT signalling: Janus kinases (JAKs), signal transducer and activator of transcription proteins (STATs), and receptors (which bind the chemical signals).[1] Disrupted JAK-STAT signalling may lead to a variety of diseases, such as skin conditions, cancers, and disorders affecting the immune system.[1]

The JAK-STAT pathway in cytokine receptor signalling can activate STATs, which can bind to DNA and allow the transcription of genes involved in immune cell division, survival, activation and recruitment. For example, STAT1 can enable the transcription of genes which inhibit cell division and stimulate inflammation.

IFN-apha and beta are made by cells infected by viruses; the interferons prevent protein synthesis in virally infected cells. Specifically, IFN-alpha and beta cause cells to make enzymes that degrade viral proteins (e.g., RNAse L).

Neutrophils respond to IL-8, a pro-inflammatory cytokine. Pus = liquor puris + leukocytes (mostly neutrophils). So pus is basically dead neutrophils and a proteinaceous fluid called liquor puris. Chemotaxis = IL-8 released by macrophages at site of infection summons neutrophils. Other chemokines = leukotriene C4, C5a, 5-HETE.

TNF-alpha, IL-1, and IL-6 induce inflammation during sepsis. TNF-alpha from macrophages summons neutrophils and more macrophages.

In chronic lung transplant rejection, small airways become inflamed due to lymphocytes-> scar tissue blocks small airways (bronchiolitis obliterans).

Wiskott Aldrich syndrome = X-linked recessive mutation of genes coding for cell cytoskeleton proteins; pts present with thrombocytopenia (low platelets) + eczema + B cell and T cell deficiency (presents as recurrent infections). Platelets will be abnormal-> petechiae, epistaxis. No B cells-> pyogenic infections; no T cells-> opportunistic infections. Tx = bone marrow transplant.

HLA-DP, HLA-DQ, and HLA-DR are the genes that encode MHC Class II. In bare lymphocyte syndrome type II, you lack MHC Class II, so you can't activate B cells and T cells (normally, APCs present foreign antigens to naive B cells on their MHC-II receptors; this then causes B cells to activate T cells, which give the costimulatory signal to B cells, allowing the B cells to proliferate and class switch).

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thewriterslament · 5 years

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writing a resume from scratch

as with literally everything i write, this got really fucking long! like, wordcounter.net estimates this will take 7 minutes to read. so i’ve placed the bulk of this post under a read more

this is not a quick tips kind of post; this is a detailed breakdown of how to write a resume from scratch, with examples that are largely taken from my own resume. this is primarily a resource for people who don’t know where to start with writing a resume, not for people who just want resume hacks

i’m saying all this so i don’t get people in my inbox complaining about how long this is. writing a resume takes a lot of time and effort, and this post does not shy away from that

creating a resume will take you a while, especially if this is your first attempt. don’t be discouraged! take breaks, and don’t try to make the perfect resume on the first try. this tutorial is designed to be completed in rounds

it usually takes me a week to get a new master resume into working order

don’t worry about page length right now. you should make a multipage master resume that contains every relevant experience before making a 1-page resume. after you’ve made the master, you can build custom resumes from it for job applications

this post is best viewed on desktop, because i use nested bullets, and tumblr mobile hates those

let’s get into it!

step 1:

list out everything you’ve ever done that could feasibly count as a resume entry: extracurriculars, jobs, volunteer positions, research, organizations you were a part of (professional or casual), freelance work, long-term hobbies. i will refer to each different experience as an “entry”

for each entry, write where (city + state) and when (timespan) you did that thing

ex. tritones a cappella group, los angeles, ca, august 20xx - present

going forward, update this list as you join or complete new jobs/hobbies/whatever so that you don’t have to wrack your brain a year down the road wondering how long you held down that job or leadership role

step 2:

describe each entry

use bullet points to list out all the things you did within that role. start with the big picture, then move on to the small stuff

big picture: the goal of the role/organization/research, overarching and long-term projects, what results you were trying to achieve + why

ex. “studied the neuroanatomy and synaptopathy of the inner ear to determine the role of glutamate receptors in hearing loss”

small stuff: literal day-to-day tasks, every software and hardware you worked with, any particularly successful moments

basically, walk through a typical day or week in this role and list out every single thing you have to do, even the grunt work.

ex. “used redcap to administer neuropsychological batteries and collect biological data”

ex. “designed and implemented a novel article format that yielded a 10% increase in audience retention”

if you still have access to the original job posting or a corporate description of responsibilities for your role, pull that up and see how much you can paraphrase from it

no duty is too stupid rn. did you google weather forecasts for your boss every week? write it down. you can make it fancy or choose to delete it later

step 3:

fancify this shit

rewrite your bullet points from step 2 with better jargon. tell your employers what you did in a concise yet assertive manner

it helps to break down each point into its most basic components, which you can then generalize or rephrase

ex. “googled weather forecasts” might become “compiled weekly reports on changing data points to assess weather trends over time”

use action words. you can find resources all over the internet for this, but if you’re still struggling, shoot me an ask and i’ll link some of the resources i’ve used myself

caution: you don’t want to sound like you used a thesaurus on every word. make sure you aren’t obscuring the meaning of your bullet points. “googled weather forecasts” should not become “utilized online databases to assemble weekly communications on meteorological variations”

start thinking about how your responsibilities for each entry relate to a) what skills you want to showcase and b) what the employer wants from you. does the employer want you to demonstrate familiarity with online databases, or does the employer want you to demonstrate familiarity with weather forecasts? your bullet point for “googled the weather” will change depending on the answer to these questions

step 4:

look at the big picture

you probably have a metric buttload of bullet points for each entry. now you need to cut that down to what’s relevant. think about which bullets are most impressive, noteworthy, and descriptive of each entry

aim for 3-5 bullet points. any less than that and you have to ask why you’re including that entry. any more than that and the employer’s eyes will glaze over

try to combine bullet points

ex. “identify content and write articles when necessary,” “maintain a pool of freelancers,” and “identify key graphics and maintain tagging structure when uploading articles” all involve the process of creating an article, so they can be combined into: “identify content, assign stories to freelancers, write articles when necessary, and upload with appropriate graphics and tags”

start thinking about tailoring your word choices and bullet points to what the employer is looking for

if you can, pull up the job posting or a sample resume for the job you’re applying to and compare your resume to it. are you using similar language? are you demonstrating similar skills?

jobhero.com is a lifesaver

finally, eliminate redundancy in your resume, both in every individual entry and in the resume as a whole. if a skill can be demonstrated by multiple entries, you only need to list it once

kill your darlings! it may sound harsh, but the things that seem super impressive to you probably won’t even be a blip on the employer’s radar. “but saying i made coffee runs shows i’m dependable and a team player!” the employer isn’t looking that deep, my dude. you can showcase your dependability in your cover letter or your interview

you should redo steps 3 and 4 several times, soliciting feedback from your parents, peers, career center, etc each time

step 5:

add the Other Stuff

education

typically, you should only include institutions for the highest level of education you’ve attended. (undergrad and grad school both count as college for this purpose)

there are exceptions to this, depending on how long you’ve spent at a higher level of education, whether your alma mater will earn you brownie points, whether you had genuinely impressive accomplishments earlier in your life, etc.

once you hit, like, 2 years in college, you should try to get rid of high school achievements and showcase college achievements instead

list the school name, city + state, degree type (BA/MA/etc) and expected graduation date (even if it’s in the future), your major(s) + minor(s), and any related coursework (ie preprofessional tracks, specific courses related to the job). you can list your gpa if you feel it’s relevant, but i caution against doing this once you’ve graduated

ex. (where // indicates a new line) harvard university, boston, ma, may 2020 // bachelor of arts in cognitive neuroscience // minor: english: focus in creative writing // related coursework: pre-medicine, computer science 101 and 102 // gpa: 3.9/4.0 (dean’s list, all semesters)

skills

a list of items without descriptions. you can do a bulleted list or you can list the entries in paragraph form, separated by commas or bold bullets

hard skills: hardware, software, languages (spoken and programming), digital and communication platforms, social media proficiencies, other technologies and devices

ex. microsoft office suite, java, wordpress, slack, familiarity with ap and chicago style

soft skills: general qualities, buzzwords, personality traits

ex. leadership, conflict resolution, time management

certifications and awards

can be one section or two depending on how many of each you have

list each one on a separate bullet point

for each, write the certification or award, the institution that granted it, and the month and/or year you received it if relevant

publications

tbh i just cite my publications in the following format instead of following a style guide

lastname, firstname. “article or chapter title.” book title, publisher (aka company or website). publication date.

if you’re the sole author, you don’t need to list the author’s name

interlude: stretch the truth a bit. don’t lie about having experience or skills you don’t, but if you can reasonably google how to do something, boom! you’re proficient in it. if you worked with two team members who never pulled their weight? you just became the sole project lead. were you a beta reader for anime fanfiction back in the day? you’re a freelance editor, baby!

step 6:

now you have to organize all the entries from step 4

separate your entries into relevant sections. what’s relevant might change based on what you’re applying for

i’ve had, at various points in my life, some subset of the following sections: work experience, volunteer experience, leadership experience, research experience, writing experience, other relevant experience

list sections in order of descending importance

write all entries in reverse chronological order: start with the most recent and work your way backwards

write all bullet points in order of descending importance. unfortunately, i don’t have any quick tips on determining what’s important, but it helps to look at the job posting and see what matters to the employer

i tend to list big picture goals, then personal accomplishments (leadership skills, projects), then daily tasks

step 7:

format this shit

you can find resume templates online or in your word processor. templates serve as a good starting point, but i recommend creating your own format so you can edit and customize it with ease. this will probably involve a lot of fiddling with indentations, paragraph spacing, and moving things around

don’t go smaller than 10pt font

mess around with line and paragraph spacing to get the right balance of white space. if you’re curious about what i use, shoot me an ask and i’ll share my weirdly specific settings

keep an eye out for bullet points with orphan words (ie lines containing only 1-3 words) and get rid of them to streamline your resume

margins can be anywhere between 0.5″ and 1″

consistency is key! make sure each entry has the same kind of spacing. don’t use hyphens in one entry and en dashes in another

in the header, write your name, email, phone number, and address

interlude: save this version of your resume as your master resume. this gives you an unedited list of everything you ever did that you can now pick and choose from when you apply to jobs. update this list every 3-6 months.

step 8:

customize your resume for the job application

unless you’ve been in the industry for several years, your job-specific resume should be no more than 1 page

if you have more than 1 page: compare the job listing and your resume side by side and ask which entries demonstrate your capabilities most effectively, which bullet points are the punchiest, and if there’s any extraneous info

match each job requirement to one bullet point on your resume. then match each bullet point on your resume to a requirement in the listing. get rid of any bullet points that don’t meet either of those criteria. if multiple bullet points match the same job requirement, get rid of the extra bullet points

if you have significantly less than 1 page: see if you can add more bullet points or reformat your resume to introduce some more white space. a 2-column set-up is great for this, with section headers on the left and bullets on the right. do you have any hobbies you’re forgetting about? any soft skills you could add?

emulate the language of the job posting; use the same action words, the same soft skills

coda

your resume should work in tandem with your cover letter, but that’s a topic for another post. maybe in another 6 months i’ll write a post on that, too

always save your resume as a pdf! you don’t want your employer to have access to your metadata

if you made it through this whole post... i’m so sorry lmao but also thanks for sticking with me

let me know if you found this helpful or if this method scored you a job!

#studyblr #adulting #adulthood #job hunt #job applications #applying to jobs #resume #resume writing #studyspo #study blog #mine

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arkus-rhapsode · 4 years

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Ok. So what do you think of the latest chapters of fairy tail 100 years quests? What what's happening to characters? I think you're so possed that you even stopped reading more

Hoo boy... *Cracks knuckles* We may be here for a while.

So before I start, let me make clear that I actually keep up with 100YQ, though not for any actual interest anymore. I now stay with it for ironic enjoyment. Because I could say EZ has dumb stuff, but at this point, if you’re Hiro Mashima’s main audience, its fine. No, 100YQ is unique in that it has WTF moments that transcend just the FT fandom sensibilities.

Before I dig in, I’m gonna lay out some formatting rules because we’re cover A LOT. Im gonna be fair and split this up into positive and negative aspects of the series. Because I at least try to be intellectually in what I do.

To avoid from going on tangents and jumping around, I’m gonna be going in chronological order of events. Now this will not be an overview of the series up to this point because that’s stuff I’ve already talked about. Instead I’m gonna start from the point this went from genuine interest to ironic interest. That begin the Whited Out FT Guild.

Positives:

The concept of the wood dragon god having a kingdom on his back is really cool world building. Its actually something that I really liked about the Sea Dragon God as well. Having a realm reliant on the dragon as well as a reason to revere them. What with the water dragon god controlling the tides while wood dragon god is the supporting the city on his back actually makes them seem like god figures and adds to the lore of the world of Earthland in a way that Ishgar and Alvarez sorely failed at.

Laxus punching out Kyria. Petty yes, as Kyria is my least favorite dragon slayer. However a lot of Whited out FT mages were getting jobbered like crazy or just given unceremonious defeats. So Laxus actually seeming like an obstacle was good.

The cat twist with Touka is actually a funny bit of trolling and was one of the few times there was effective foreshadowing with Touka having a tail. (Too bad it was suck in the meandering Gajeel plot.)

The Dragon Eater guild is a much better final villain army than Spriggan 12. The 12 had little structure as to who was the stronger members, resulting in multiple Spriggans feeling like such major disappointments.

Most Mashima Villain organizations tend to broken up like this: Boss->Special Units (I.E Spriggan 12, Nine Demon Gates, Element 4)->Fodder Units.

No one cares when the fodder of a villain group is beaten as they’re just faceless minions. However, when you get to the special unit, that’s wheen there are actual obstacles and the villains start becoming more like characters. However, Hiro has been bad at this when he’s dealing with bigger organizations.

He never had to worry about telling you which member of the villain group’s special unit were more powerful than the others. Due to working with units composed of low amounts of characters, such as Team Lyon, Element 4, and Death’s Head.

You could say that all were roughly around the same power threshold. However, where the spriggan 12 royally failed was there were 12 of them in that unit and they were all just given the blanket term of being on the same level of the number 1 wizard saint. Yeah... that’s a check so large that Hiro could not cash it.

Hiro even seemed to retroactively acknowledge this by stating that August, Irene, and Larcarde were the three best to cover his ass for the fact that all the spriggans seemed to be jobbered far easier than ones supposedly equal to the number 1 saint.

However, the Dragon Eaters are opponents we’re gradually introduced to over the storyline and we actually see a demonstration of what a group of them can do, instead of 1 just trying take on all of team Natsu at once. We see that Skullion’s team is roughly equal to Team Natsu, giving us a gauge for the Dragon Eater strength, but then we get both Wraith and Nebal, underlings not part of Skullion’s thre man team, implying that are of a weaker variety and thus serving as a stepping stone to fight Skullion. But also introducing us to the Black Dragon Slayer Cavalry. Members above Skullion’s team that give us an idea if when they show up what the audience should expect of their strength level.

There’s a reason why in One Piece why Yonkou opperations have so many categories. You’re not gonna care about the minor thugs, but by making a distinction between the Headliners and the Disasters in Kaidou’s crew, you’ve made it so that we the audience will not feel disappointed if a Headliner is beat by a weaker character like say Usopp but still know that they are more than a foot soldier so this win meant something.

Now time for the negatives:

The concept of White Out is not awful, and is actually a fairly interesting concept for a villain motivation in FT. However, the White Witch is one of the most transparently evil characters in the series, thus you know that she’s doing this morally ambiguous action because she’s evil. Imagine if this were about humans or royals who feared the growing power of mages. Or a disillusioned mage with the concept of people like Zeref or the GMG, where is seems like magic is endless and how that’s a threat to the world. No, White Witch really seems like she wants to be this grand manipulator and actively enjoys calling heer whited out people, puppets.

However, there’s also the fact the whiting out doesn’t make too much sense. Some characters seem like mind controlled puppets like Juvia, while others are basically the same except their evil now like Gajeel, Mira, Elfman, Laxus. And some are dumb jokes like Jellal.

So there’s no consistency to this brainwashing. Only other time I’ve seen a mind control plot like that in media before is Yugioh GX. Sometimes people act like they’ve been brainwashed into something different like Alexis. But then people like Bastion and a lot of the gag members of the society like Rose and Bob act as if they’re not affected by anything.

Yeah, this white witch plot feels distractedly ripped off from the society of Light from Yugioh GX.

The concept of Team Natsu vs FT in the vain of the fighting festival arc is dumb narratively from two standpoints. First from a story standpoint in the idea that why the battle of FT arc was opportunity, due to the fact they were all willing to fight to free the frozen girls. Which allowed for others to show shades to their motivations Like Alzack willing to mow through his other comrades for Bisca or Thunder God Tribe assisting in protecting Laxus so he’s the last man standing. There’s a tangible reward on th line that motivates the characters to act as do.

Here, the characters are clearly fighting against their will because of an intangible force. This white magic makes them slaves and are fighting because “white doctrine.” Something they only believeebecause brainwashing. As such, you want to see Natsu and gang beat them up to stop the white witch and free them. There’s no force or intrigue that makes the audience care about both sides like seeing Alzack vs Jet and Droy because you know they both want to save their partners but only one can. Instead people only care because a surface level of “friend turned evil” device. It takes the B and C list cast of the FT guild and makes them props.

And from a meta standpoint, there is no tension, due to the fact this is a post final battle with acnologia Team Natsu. The team is bounds ahead of so many guild members like Macao, Reedus, Max etc. that the only real threat is the S class mages. So that makes that big page spread of evil FT in cult robes dull as only like 3 of them are gonna actually matter.

Then there’s Wraith. Nebal was a boring an generic crazy guy is unimpressive, Wriath was actually really interesting at first. Is ghost magic allowed for an interesting fight and his possession actually having limitations on how effective it was made for a cool skill.

But then the reveal about him and Makarov. I eye-rolled at that point, but then I saw the previews and was like, maybe this’ll be the best thing to come out of this series. Everyone wants to know more about past FT around team Makarov’s time.

But all the potential of young Makarov and young Porylusica and the rest of their team is put on fast forward as they’re all suddenly thinking about leaving. But maybe the reveal with Wraith could be interesting. I saw a lot of good theories like Wraith was Makarov’s half brother or Wraith was the son of Makarov and Porylusica who was killed by Ivan.

Well... Any theory would’ve been better than Wraith was some random ass mage and when they say he a Makarov are related its because the bonds of FT that is real family and transcends death itself.

...Gag me...

And and Wraith just fucks off into the afterlife. Because we can’t actually end a fight because of the protagonist’s ingenuity. No, the villain just kills themselves because feels. Isn’t that right August and Irene?

In conclusion

That’s my thoughts as briefly and coherent as I could make them. So if you wanna know my feelings on 100YQ, it can basically be summed in FT being FT. If you expected more, you’re gonna be disappointed. But if you genuinely love the world and character regardless of Hiro’s writing, you’ll probably still enjoy it regardless of what I’m saying

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letterboxd · 6 years

Photo

Ballad.

Dominic Corry is in New York to see the Coen Brothers’ latest opus, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs starring Tim Blake Nelson (above).

The Coen brothers unveiled their latest work The Ballad of Buster Scruggs at the New York Film Festival last week, and it’s yet another masterpiece from the peerless filmmakers. Perhaps even more so than their acclaimed True Grit (2010), which garnered ten Oscar nominations, Buster Scruggs betrays their extreme affection for—and deep knowledge of—the Western, cinema’s first and longest-lasting genre.

The Netflix-backed project was erroneously initially reported to be a TV series, but according to the brothers it was always planned as an anthology film comprised of six individual stories. Each one embodies and gently subverts a particular Western sub-genre, from the singing cowboy films typified by those starring Gene Autry, to the fatalistic grime of Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns, to a wagon train drama, with multiple stops in between, ending on a dark tale that wouldn’t be all that out of place as a Twilight Zone episode.

It’s funny, tragic and savagely ironic in the manner only the Coens seem to be able to pull off. The stories feature a host of amazing actors doing fantastic work, including, but not limited to: Liam Neeson, Bill Heck, Zoe Kazan, Tom Waits, James Franco, Stephen Root, Tyne Daly, Brendan Gleeson and the great Clancy Brown (albeit briefly), whose presence elevates anything he appears in. The only person missing was the late Walter Brennan, the Western genre's all-time greatest old coot who I am confident is smiling down upon this film from wherever he may currently reside.

Zoe Kazan, Joel Coen, Tim Blake Nelson and Ethan Coen at NYFF 56. / Photo: Evan Agostini

Tim Blake Nelson (O Brother, Where Art Thou?) is absolutely hilarious as the title character (the aforementioned singing cowboy), whose story kicks off the anthology. He joined the Coens on stage following the screening for a discussion of the work. Here’s some highlights:

On the origins of the project: Joel Coen: The first story [we wrote] was the first story in the movie. These are stories that were written over 25 years really, so that goes way back, that one. They follow, with a couple of exceptions, in a kind of chronological order in terms of when they were written, roughly. They just got put in a drawer because they were short movies and we didn’t know what we were gonna do with them. We probably didn’t even expect to make them until maybe eight or ten years ago when we started thinking, “well, maybe we could do these”. They could be seen as a sequenced series of stories or tracks on a record album or something like that. It’s a weird animal in terms of the format.

On whether or not they considered merging the stories into one larger narrative: JC: No. Like I said before we had these stories, they were all westerns so there was that and then they seemed to relate to each other, but kind of retrospectively, rather than consciously when we started doing it. There was never the impulse to [combine them] but as I said it’s kind of a strange form but it grew out of just the odd nature of how they came into existence.

On the experience of the actors: Tim Blake Nelson: We all got to read the entire script before we shot our individual constituent parts, unrelated to the others, but I think probably as actors we all felt a responsibility toward the genre of each film in which we appear. Because what I think is astonishing about this is it’s six different movies within the Western genre but then each one is in the vernacular of a sub-genre in and of itself. And that, at least for me, and I’m pretty sure with the other actors, just underscored one’s responsibility to appear indelibly within the genre in which you appeared. And so understanding that and then getting to see the successes of the others, it was just really rewarding to encounter that in all the stories. So that’s what was most gratifying about seeing the whole, was experiencing the success of others.

On the public confusion over whether or not this was a series or a movie, and whether or not any stories got culled: JC: I think that’s an artifact of what a strange animal it is. None of us really knew what to call it or how to classify it. Aside from the confusion about the classification, what we were going to shoot, the length of all the stories, which vary, there was never anything we were considering doing differently. There were never any more stories, and they were always intended to be seen together as a group.

On the large presence of animals in the film, which prominently features a dog and and owl, among other critters: JC: Flies are very hard to work with. There are a lot of animals. We do tend to load the movies up with domestic animals don’t we? It’s a Western, there are horses. It is true, I have to say, you do a Western, you spend 90% of your time dealing with and thinking about the horses.

Ethan Coen: And the oxen. The oxen were new to us. I asked Travis, who was the oxen wrangler, we wanted the oxen to do something specific for a take, and I asked him if he could do that and he just sighed. He looked at me like I was an idiot and said, “Driving oxen is not self-evident”.

On collaborating on this film with longtime composer Carter Burwell: EC: As Tim said, they’re all Westerns but they’re such different kinds of stories, we would talk about to what extent the music should play off those different [genres] and to what extent it should tie the things together. It’s a question we confronted. They’re so different. How much are you gonna accent the differences and how much are you gonna say it’s all the same movie [with the music]?

JC: It’s something that wasn’t just limited to the music, it’s an issue that came up in terms of the shooting styles and the color timing look of the movie, and how much to differentiate between the different stories and how much not to. How much to push that and how much to pull back a little bit in terms of your original instincts about it. And that went through a lot of iterations. It’s the kind of thing that’s very easy to iterate and re-iterate now that color timing is done in a computer as opposed to photo-chemically, so that went back and forth a little bit too and sort of found its place.

On how Joel and Ethan have evolved over the years as filmmakers: TBN: Yeah they finally know what they’re doing. They figured it out on this movie. [Big laughs from the crowd.] At a previous Q&A I suddenly realized the oxymoronic nature of who and what Joel and Ethan are as directors and filmmakers, because they’re incredibly, unbelievably, in an unparalleled way, meticulous and prepared as filmmakers. So that when you get to the set there really are no decisions being made during the shooting time that could’ve been made earlier, and that rigor pays off in an interesting way because it allows for the actors inside of that meticulous preparation, to be utterly free, to have all the time an actor could possibly want. So I think it’s the amount of preparation, with which I became familiar on O Brother, and I’d never encountered before in any movie I’d done with any director, or directors. And it’s repeated once more here, with the added challenge I think for Joel and Ethan that they were making effectively six films with six different linguistic principals inside the language of the Western and I found the specificity with which they were working on the one I’m in, unbelievable in terms of its extremes and its fearlessness. And the way that they were pushing me, and in certain cases allowing me to do certain stuff. And then seeing the whole movie, watching five other versions of that, was truly astonishing. So what I guess I really mean to say is that the opposite of my joke is true: they continue to be unparalleled in terms of the work they put in, the preparation they do, and the specificity borne out of the shooting and also in the result.

‘The Ballad of Buster Scruggs’ is available on Netflix and in select theaters from November 16. Letterboxd recommends seeing it on the big screen if you can!

#letterboxd #director #coen brothers #buster scruggs #nyff 2018

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stephaniemanaois · 3 years

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Mobile Journalism

Mobile Journalism is the new way of media to present news via storytelling where reporters use different portable electronic devices with internet or wireless connection to gather information, edit images, audio and video and distribute news using a smartphone. Some of the basic gadgets that we can use for Mobile Journalism are smartphones, gimbal (stabilizer) tripod, monopod or selfie stick, earphones, lens, lapel or boom mic, power bank, hand light, and pocket wifi to boost the signal especially in remote areas. Also, it gives journalists better access to information because of the less intimidating feeling when capturing video using a mobile phone camera. Hence, people are more willing to open up and there is less cumbersome to a reporter when they interview someone. When we shoot a video for television it should be capture horizontally and it must capture the emotions of the specific activity you want to focus on for the story to become more effective to the viewers.

In engaging with your audience, I learned that you can copy but you should alter or even adapt catchy titles of videos with the greatest number of views that can evoke your audience's emotion and look for influencers with whom we can share your story and have a collaboration with them. Also, we can maximize push notification by pasting the link of an old or related story to our comments section, in that way if they are interested in the topic, they can visit your old post and it can add to your views. The most important tricks that I learned and I think the most useful one to directly connect to someone is by using at least 10 hashtags to make our post searchable. Before, I was wondering why many of the influencer or vloggers on social uses a lot of hashtags in their post. Now that Mr. Cayabyab enlightens us about it and teaches us different techniques on how to engage with the audience, I will apply what I learned every time I post content on my social media accounts.

As an aspiring journalist, now is the best time to learn how to edit videos by starting with the simple chronology of videos, producing videos that are close to our heart like birthday celebrations, outings with family, and others. It is important to use effect, text, and music in learning how to edit video because someday in the work field it can be my edge among other applicants. In producing Digital Stories, the video should be clear and has audible audio because people can tolerate blurry videos like CCTV footage because it is understandable but they will immediately leave when the sound quality of your video is low and we must avoid shaky hands and abrupt camera movements. Mr. Cayabyab reminded us that our video can be produced into multiple outputs and formats so it is better to save HD video before posting and we can also repackage our one-hour live video into 30 seconder stories. However, there are dangers of going live because errors are inevitable, the rights of others may be violated which includes his or her privacy, or the minors maybe show, and there is a tendency that you showed unforeseen gory and shocking images and profanity.

Indeed, Mobile Journalism is a big help for every journalist but it is also additional work to them because they need to video themselves while reporting, but in a positive perspective, it can lessen the things that they need to bring and it is easy to set up when there is news coverage. Also, most people nowadays know how to use mobile phone cameras, as a result, they can easily use them. Nonetheless, journalists and other parts of the news industry have a big role in providing quality news to the public. They gather and publish unbiased information based on facts and are supported with proofs or pieces of evidence. Without them, people are not aware and updated on what is happening in their community and even in their entire country. Journalists contributed a lot to our society because their main purpose is to serve the citizens by giving them quality news and information.

@bertongbigtime

#acm4305

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lostinyourears · 6 years

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Masked Matches of May VII : Super Astro vs El Satanico, marked 1984

Video link to the match on Youtube : https://youtu.be/2ZHJhhbQtmc

No cagematch page exists for this match/event.

Who’s Who?

Satanico

Satanico is a pillar of modern post 1980′s lucha libre. He debutted in 1973 when he would have been 18 years old. For a majority of his career El Satanico worked in EMLL it of course changed it’s name in the early 1990′s when it left NWA to become its own none affiliated entity known as CMLL. Going roughly from the Mexican Lucha Libre Company to the Global Lucha Libre Company.

The first decade of Satanicos career was all building towards what he will like be remembered for. 1984 where he had a fantastic year of matches on top of making a rudo trios. In the early 1980′s trio wrestling was becoming a hot ticket with UWA’s Los Misioneros de Muerte (the Missionaries of Death) which were Negro Navarro, El Sign and El Texano being a big part of that. So in response EMLL decided to make their own rudo trios team. Which had Satanico as the leader, this trios of course being Los Infernales who would go on to be one of the most important trios of the time and of all time. This group consisted of Satanico, Pirata Morgan and MS-1.

At this time Satanico’s Luchas de Apuestas record was 11-5-1, yes he actually tied with Sangre Chicana in 1982 resulting in both getting shaved. At this time he was also in his 4th reign as NWA World Middleweight Championship a belt that would define his legacy though he also held the NWA World Light Heavyweight Champion 4 times in the late 80′s and early 90′s and also hold the Mexican National and CMLL World Trios championships multiple times.

He is the headtrainer for CMLL's wrestling school in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico and as such has trained dozens and perhaps even hundreds of luchadors over the last decade as primarily a trainer for the company.

Super Astro

Super Astro isn’t the huge name that Satanico is, but is still fairly well known. Back in the day he was in a very popular team Los Cadetes del Espacio(The Space Cadets) with Solar and Ultraman in the 1980′s. Super Astro has worked many places making his debut in 1974 when he would have only been 12! Or 12 and a half, regardless he got started pretty young. So at the time of this match he would have been 22ish.

I’m not going to go into Super Astros Luchas de Apuestas record, because I don’t really have complete information or he didn’t have many. I’m guessing it’s the former and his wins in the 1970′s and 1980′s aren’t as recorded... because they may not have been major. He could have won some in indie feds and the records just aren’t well known. He was at either 2-0-0 or 3-0-0 depending on the date in 1984 this happened. On July 8th 1984 Space Cadets would win a Masks vs Hairs match over Black Terry, Jose Luis Feliciano & Lobo Rubio.

Much like Satanico, Super Astro was a middle weight and carried the UWA World Middleweight title which he won for the first time in 1984. Super Astro may have won more belts, but he is only credited 3 on cagematch. He was a fan favorite and the trios Space Cadets would be in the cover of magazines and publications.

So in 1984, Super Astro is in a popular UWA trios Los Cadetes del Espacio and the UWA Middleweight champion vs. Satanico who is in popular EMLL trios Los Infernales and the NWA Middleweight Champion. This match is a great example of the crossover we saw with EMLL/UWA and even CMLL and UWA as the name change for CMLL came before UWA shut their doors in 1995.

How is the match?

Fantastic, it took a while to get to two lucha guys fighting in this series. I just did this looking to go chronological to make planning better which made this list NJPW front loaded. This probably happened in UWA, but might have been a UWA/EMLL joint show as well which weren’t unheard of. Regardless of who brought these guys together I’m glad that they got together. They would feud in UWA some over the UWA Middleweight belt in 1985 a year after this.

This is the best match in this series so far and might keep that distinction for a while. It might be one of the best matches of the 1980′s. I really enjoyed it and Satanico looked like a million bucks here playing an excellent rudo. You can see in this match why he is considered the best lucha talents ever.

On the other hand Super Astro has to be someone you want to root for in order for Satanico to be such a good villain. Super Astro’s legacy seems to be a little forgotten so it’s nice that CMLL have booked him lately since he mostly worked indie dates after 2000. His son making his CMLL debut recently got Super Astro chants on the night he debuted. So Super Astro is at least well remembered.

This match feels pretty perfect for a classic lucha libre match. 2/3 falls format being used again to perfection. Satanico’s rudo game is on point and Super Astro was a master of the ropes with Satanico reacting perfectly whenever Super Astro’s offense needed a catch or in one point a none catch to sell the high risk nature of that sort of offense. Finish is great and exciting coming out of nowhere to finish the match off on a high note. Definitely check this out one before it disappears from Youtube and becomes myth.

Highlights :

Super Astro vs El Satanico, marked 1984, Promotion uncertain

#El Satanico #Super Astro #MMoM #UWA #EMLL #CMLL

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forlawfirmsonlymarketing · 4 years

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YouTube’s Organic Visibility Tops Wikipedia in Google SERPs via @gregjarboe

When Searchmetrics presented Slide #14 in their “2019 SEO Year-End Review” presentation, you could have knocked me over with a feather.

That’s when I discovered that YouTube has steadily (and stealthily) increased its organic visibility in Google’s SERPs over the past two years and recently surpassed Wikipedia for the #1 spot.

Stop the presses! That’s significant information. So, why did Searchmetrics bury their lead? Because they told the story of how the SEO industry changed during 2019 in chronological order. In fact, YouTube reaching #1 was the fourth topic covered in the on-demand version of their webcast. Now, I realize that Google’s core updates on March 12, June 3, and September 24 deserved to be covered in a 2019 SEO year-end review. And so did Google’s BERT update on October 24. But, none of these stories are “new” news to SEOs. Ironically, this meant that the most newsworthy information followed a third section on “industry trends.” But, from a journalist’s perspective, YouTube edging past Wikipedia in organic visibility in Google SERPs is the most important “news you can use” in 2020.

How to Optimize Your Videos for YouTube & Google

Now, to use this news, you’ll need to optimize your videos for YouTube as well as for Google. I’ll tell you how to do that, but it isn’t that simple. First, you need to optimize your videos for YouTube’s algorithm. And, as I mentioned last year in my post, “Why You Must Unlearn What You Know About the YouTube Algorithm,” it’s hard to boil that down when YouTube’s algorithm works one way when videos are brand new and another way when they are more than six weeks old. As a quick recap, optimizing your metadata (the titles, tags, and descriptions for your content) matters less once YouTube has more data on watch time (the amount of time in aggregate that your viewers are watching your videos). Second, you also need to optimize your videos for Google’s universal search algorithm. And, as SEOs know all too well, Google made 3,234 “improvements” to search in 2018 – an average of almost 9 per day. Although most of these changes were minor, Google occasionally rolls out major algorithmic updates (like the three core updates in 2019) that affect search results in more significant ways. But, there is some high-level guidance that I can share with the SEO community.

1. Create Great YouTube Content for Both the YouTube & Google Audiences

The key to success is to create great YouTube content for both YouTube and Google audiences. And, the biggest difference between them isn’t demographic or geographic. It’s psychographic. Your YouTube audience is twice as likely to be early adopters, agreeing that “I am among the first of my friends and colleagues to try new products.” And your YouTube audience is 1.8x more likely to be influencers, agreeing that “people often come to me for advice before making a purchase.” Now, you generally need your primary audience to discover, watch, like, share, and add comments to your video content on YouTube before your secondary audience will see it in a Google SERP. The exceptions to this process are compelling commercials or funny skits on TV that people hear about from their friends, family, or colleagues and then go searching for on Google as well as YouTube. For example, if you analyze YouTube’s list of Top Trending Videos of 2019 (USA), then you’ll quickly see that all but two were uploaded by popular YouTube Creators (aka early adopters and influencers). But, let’s take a closer look at the two exceptions, which also appeared on TV. One is “We Believe: The Best Men Can Be | Gillette (Short Film).” As the video’s description says:

“Bullying. Harassment. Is this the best a man can get? It’s only by challenging ourselves to do more, that we can get closer to our best. To say the right thing, to act the right way. We are taking action at https://gillette.com/en-us/about/the-best-men-can-be Join us.”

Uploaded on January 13, 2019, the video is 1:48 long, and has more than 33 million views and 807,000 “Likes,” making it the fifth most liked video of the year. And, as you can see below, it ranks #1 in Google.

The other is “R. Kelly Interview Cold Open – SNL.” As the video’s description says:

“Gayle King (Leslie Jones) interviews R. Kelly (Kenan Thompson) about the allegations leveled against him.”

Uploaded on March 10, 2019, this 7:36 video has almost 15.9 million views and 233,000 “Likes,” making it the ninth most liked videos of the year. And as you can see below, the YouTube version ranks #1, the version on NBC.com ranks #2, the Facebook version ranks #3, and the Dailymotion version ranks #4 in the Google SERP.

In other words, you need to create great YouTube content or great TV content that is also uploaded to YouTube if you want it to appear in Google’s SERPs. And, although many brands and media companies create TV content, they seem to be afraid or unable to create the kind of great content that popular YouTube Creators, Gillette, and SNL created in 2019. There are other steps that you should take to optimize your videos for YouTube and Google.

2. Create Descriptive & Accurate Metadata & Thumbnails

Now, I don’t need to tell SEOs that YouTube is the world’s second-largest search engine, behind only Google. But, did you know they have different algorithms? The goals of YouTube’s search and discovery algorithm are:

“To help viewers find the videos they want to watch, and to maximize long-term viewer engagement and satisfaction.”

So, before or after you’ve created great YouTube content that maximizes viewer engagement and satisfaction, you should:

Conduct Keyword Research

Conduct keyword research to find what your target audiences want to watch on YouTube or discover on Google. I recommend using one or both of the following tools: Google Trends This tool has both Google and YouTube search data going back more than 12 years. This enables you to see if there is existing YouTube search interest as well as Google search interest in the keywords, terms, and phrases that you plan to use to write optimized titles, tags, and descriptions for your video content. And don’t be surprised to discover that search interest trends on YouTube are different than they are on Google. Keyword Tool & Its Sister Keyword Tool for YouTube Both use the autocomplete features on Google as well as YouTube to generate highly relevant long-tail keywords. While there are lots of other keyword tools for Google, you want to identify terms and phrases that will help your videos get found on both YouTube and Google. So, that narrows your list of tool options fairly dramatically.

Use Compelling Titles for Your Videos That Accurately Represent the Content

How do you make a video’s title compelling? Well, ask yourself, “If it showed up in a search, would my target viewer click on it?” Now, basic YouTube SEO advice recommends that you should include relevant keywords in your title. The study by Justin Briggs that I wrote about last year found that this advice was still valid. But, an analysis of text-based targeting came to a more nuanced conclusion. The study, which looked at 3.8 million data points across 100,000 videos and 75,000 channels, found that:

90% of high ranking videos had some had some variant of the keyword in the title. So, exact match keywords help, but they aren’t required.

There is a relationship between title length and ranking performance. Most titles on videos ranking in the top 20 positions averaged around 47-48 characters, with the highest-ranking YouTube videos having titles 20-40 characters long.

Write Detailed Descriptions Using Video SEO Best Practices

The same study by Briggs found that there is a positive relationship between broad match keyword usage in descriptions and ranking. However, with only 75% of top 20 results using some broad match variant in their description text, it was not as essential as including your keyword in your title. But, it is still highly recommended. Briggs also found that a lengthy and more robust description was advantageous, but only to a point. The sweet spot seemed to be between 200 and 350 words. Beyond 350 words, average rank performed worse on average. Now, only the first few sentences of your description will appear in search results or above the fold on a watch page – so make them count!

Use a Comprehensive Number of Related Video Tags

Although Google does not use the keywords meta tag in web ranking, YouTube uses tags to help viewers find the videos they want to watch. And, the YouTube Search and Discovery team says that the influence of tags is variable based on different factors, such as how closely the tags are related to each other on a topic. In the past, YouTube has recommended using the whole 270-character limit. And Briggs found the sweet spot was around 200 to 300 characters. So, it seems that the more data you give YouTube in the keyword tag field, the better a video performs in YouTube search and suggested videos. YouTube also seemed to prefer 2-4 word phrases over many single word phrases when Briggs compared this to the optimal number of unique tags used to achieve the character count. Tag performance was highest between 31 and 40 distinct tags, which may suggest it’s better to target multiple moderate-length keywords than it is to use very short or very long keyword phrases.

Create Thumbnails That Accurately Represent Your Content

Although it doesn’t impact ranking, you should also create thumbnails that accurately represent your content. Thumbnails show up in different sizes and formats all across YouTube and outside of it on Google. You need to make sure you’ve got a strong, vibrant image that pops no matter what size it is. This can encourage a viewer to click on your video even if it’s ranked below another one.

3. Keep Viewers Watching with Video Best Practices

Once viewers have discovered your video, you need to keep them watching it – if you are going to rack up enough watch time to rank well on YouTube as well as appear in Google. This means you need to be an effective editor. Create a compelling opening to your videos to hook viewers right from the start, as well as maintain and build interest throughout the video. To do this, you need to master the storytelling techniques that I wrote about in my October 2018 post entitled, “6 Lessons In Video Storytelling You Can Learn from Indian Brands.” So, how long a story should you tell? Before October 2012, I would have said about 2 to 3 minutes long. But, based on the importance of watch time in YouTube’s ranking algorithm, I now recommend that you create great content that is longer than 4:30, but shorter than 16:00. In fact, the study by Briggs found that “duration,” or how long a YouTube video is, had several surprising impacts on ranking and viewer behavior. He said:

“A lot of creators struggle with how long they should make a video, and this data helps answer that.”

Briggs found viewers tended to like longer, but not too long, videos. For example, the videos that were most effective at converting views into likes were those between 10 and 16 minutes long. Videos less than 5 minutes long tended to get a lower percentage of positive reviews, and videos longer than 16 minutes started to see a decline in engagement. His study also found that short videos were typically rated very poorly. In general, videos less than a minute did very, very poorly concerning positive reviews. Positive sentiment improved with every minute up until about 4 minutes, where it evened out. But, how does duration influence rankings? Briggs found that YouTube’s algorithm seemed to follow the audience. The algorithm appeared to rank videos less than 2 minutes notably worse, but this evened out after about 4 minutes. He also found that a video’s duration helps a lot to drive incremental watch time up until about 4.5 minutes, but it only helps a little after 4.5 minutes. However, it didn’t decline. It continues to rise, so if you’re trying to maximize watch time, do not shy away from 10+ minute videos. Also, there is no decline in sentiment, rank, or views for videos beyond 10 minutes. This point is vital, because watch time is a significant ranking factor. While there is a retention curve associated with video duration which describes how users typically “fall off” throughout a video, longer videos can drive incremental watch time, even if they become less efficient at doing this with each additional minute. In simple terms, a 5-minute video might get more views than a 10-minute video, but the 10-minute video is more likely to accumulate a substantial amount of watch time to make up for that. In the study by Briggs, 10-minute videos had about 15% more watch time than those that were 5 minutes. And Briggs saw 10+ minute videos ranking well in YouTube search. In fact, the average duration of videos that ranked in the top 5 positions was 11 minutes and 44 seconds, and there appeared to be a positive relationship between video length and ranking.

Now, you can’t fix the duration of your existing videos retroactively. So, you’ll need to start creating a higher percentage of longer videos going forward. You should also build your subscriber base. Subscribers are your most loyal fans and will be notified of new videos and playlists to watch. In addition, the study by Briggs found that larger channels with higher subscriber counts also had higher rankings than those with fewer subscribers in their niche. He said:

“There is a positive relationship between subscriber counts and rankings. While this might be a ‘channel authority’ style signal, it’s important to think of subscriptions as a CRM / distribution list. Channels with larger subscriber counts have a useful tool that drives views through browse features, personalized recommendations, and notifications.”

Briggs added:

“It’s also suggestive of an inherent, engaged audience that can seed videos with a baseline level of views from viewers that are prone to have better retention and longer session durations, driving up watch time relative to channels with less brand affinity. It may also be suggestive of a higher likelihood of binge-watching and playlist usage, which can help seed videos with better co-watch data to power video recommendations.”

You should also engage your audience. Online video is an inherently social medium. Involve your audience in your videos, encourage comments, and interact with your viewers as part of the content. In addition, leverage other social media, especially Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

4. Organize & Program Your Content

Build Long Watch-Time Sessions by Organizing Themed Content Using Playlists

ou can use your own videos, other videos, or a combination of both. This not only creates another asset that can appear in YouTube search results and in Suggested Videos, it also increases the watch time of videos on your channel and across YouTube.

Create a Regular Release Schedule and Publish Videos More Frequently

Releasing content frequently on a recurring schedule keeps your audience’s interest and impacts YouTube’s algorithm. This means you need to develop a programming strategy.

If You Can’t Beat Them, Join Them

Although it’s relatively new “news” that YouTube.com has steadily (and stealthily) increased its organic visibility in Google’s SERPs over the past two years and recently surpassed Wikipedia.org for the #1 spot, most of the best practices for video SEO were published almost a year ago. So, why haven’t more SEOs taken advantage of this significant trend? Well, I suspect there are several possible explanations. For starters, YouTube videos started appearing in Google universal search results back in May 2007, but only 500,000 out of the 3 million SEOs in the world mention “video SEO” in their LinkedIn profile today. So, five out of six SEOs around the globe still don’t think video SEO is part of their job. In addition, many organizations put SEO and YouTube marketing in different silos in the org chart and even different locations around the country. So, there is little informal collaboration between the two. Finally, as I mention above, many brands and media companies seem to be afraid or unable to create the kind of great content that popular YouTube Creators, Gillette, and SNL created in 2019. So, let me conclude by giving you another option: Sponsored videos. According to Tubular Labs data, 180,000 brands have sponsored 1.3 million videos in 400,000 campaigns created by 115,000 content partners. In other words, if your organization or client can’t or won’t create the kind of great content that popular YouTube Creators do, then sponsor their next video. For example, Sam’s Club sponsored a video entitled, “Real Life Trick Shots 3 | Dude Perfect.” Uploaded February 25, 2019, this video is 3:42 long, and it has 69.5 million views and 1.5 million “Likes.”

And, as you can see below, it ranks #1 on Google.

In other words, if you can’t beat them, join them. More Resources:

Image Credits In-Post Image: Searchmetrics All screenshots taken by author, December 2019

https://www.businesscreatorplus.com/youtubes-organic-visibility-tops-wikipedia-in-google-serps-via-gregjarboe/

#googlesearchranking #localseo #onlinemarketing #dailydoseofmarketing

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topfenstrudel · 7 years

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reference review - story genius

How to Use Brain Science to Go Beyond Outlining And Write A Riveting Novel* [*Before You Waste Three Years Writing 327 Pages That Go Nowhere] – Lisa Cron

Something a little different for this almost-month; I happened to go to the library a little while ago. As you do I pottered around the reference section aimlessly poking around for things to take home and not read, and decided to impulse borrow this book. Then for once I actually read it. We’re all capable of the impossible

Rating: Helpful but Egregiously Patronising/10

You may have heard of the exTRORdinarily popular (I think) Snowflake Method, which boils down to, “get the basic plot of your novel and extrapolate all the bits in the middle of those bits (and then develop those bits into smaller bits)”. It’s essentially an exercise in “working backwards” from what you know to fill in the gaps in your planning. However, if you’ve tried to use it you may have found out that actually doing this is not as simple as it sounds. Either you end up with no ideas at all, or have too many, and not much reason for you to pick one idea over the other. The reason you need a planning method is that you don’t know what to do next, but Snowflake doesn’t give you very much guidance given on how you should fill in the gaps; you’re just told to do it in a certain order. So, unless you already have a lot of well-developed ideas it can be frustratingly difficult to use. It doesn’t really do anything to solve the underlying problem – why should I put anything here? What am I doing???? Help?????????

You’d have to work it out on your own and we all (read: I) just can’t be bothered honestly. I don’t want to think critically about how I should put the meat in my novel sandwich, I am a big baby and want somebody to do it for me.

If you sympathise with this, you may find this book helpful.

Cron’s approach in this book is that everything in a novel is centred around its “third rail” - the protagonist’s emotional journey. If it’s not related to their struggle (“what they learn”, ”the theme”, etc.), chuck it! Basically:

The internal struggle (emotional journey) is what they have to deal with internally in order to solve the external plot problem

The protagonist has a desire & misbelief; these conflict; it's very important to know WHY the protagonist has developed these

The plot events are created to force the internal change, not the other way around - what do the events MEAN to the protagonist?

Cause & effect - the plot should be (in some sense) karma, not “what goes around comes around” but “if you lie about graduating college, when you’re about to get your dream job, that lie is bound to surface”. (Dramatic, much? Very Hollywood when at its most extreme like this, but imo the point should stand at some level.)

The cause and effect should reveal the logic behind everything, both internally (what would my protagonist’s beliefs/ past experience cause them to do in this situation) and externally (how will the other characters and world react to what my protagonist will do).

Each scene has an external & internal change within it, which leads directly to what should be the next scene (“if this, therefore that” not “and then”). Each scene must have a single big purpose e.g. "this is the scene where she kidnaps the dog".

As for scene content, you can ask yourself a series of questions such as “is this necessary for the plot?” “Is this logical externally (logistically)?” “Is this logical internally (for the protagonist’s/character’s current states of mind)?”

Ask “Why” of everything, and don’t stop asking until you’ve reached the most story-specific, concrete, “close your eyes and you can see it unfold” origin and there are no “whys” left to ask.

Ask “And so?” of everything. “And so, why does my reader need to know this?” “And so, how does this move the story forward?” “And so, what will happen as a result?” I.e. WHAT IS THE POINT!

That’s about it. I saved you approximately ten hours. Despite its Hollywood-ness, I really like her approach. I think this is a really logical way to plan a novel!

Her process – which you carry out through the exercises, and if you don’t want to do that then don’t bother reading the book – is to develop a base of information for the cause-and-effect trajectory. She leads you through developing the protagonist from the ground up (read: past-up, including their misbelief & desire), writing some beginning/starting scenes and the "ending" (the protagonist’s final big moment of realisation), then a sample of the rest of your planning experience, which will basically be simultaneously developing & writing the novel in chronological order. It’s expected that as you do stuff you’ll naturally think up more questions you’ll need to answer and have to go through and carry through changes (in writing & plan).

As for how to fill in the blanks in your novel, Cron’s idea is that the answer is in the content that you already have. Go through the story and search for the event, given who the characters are, that would logically happen next, or trigger the next thing you know will happen (or that needs to happen to get whatever you know happens at the end of the blank). Then think about what will happen next, etc., etc.! She emphasises that the solution to all types of missing content (character details, empty middle bits) is to ask “why” of your novel, or “and so?” - what logically should happen next. A lot more detailed than Mr Snowflake.

Compared to Mr Snowflake’s start-(middle stuff you’re supposed to just know I guess)-end to start- mid-steps – (middle stuff) – more mid-steps –end, Cron’s method makes a lot more sense to me. If you find that you haven’t figured out the middle you don’t have to just stop stuck, you just have to ask more questions. It really helps that (after you work out the “ending”) it’s chronologically ordered (start-end to start-logical post-start - end) as well. This planning method that she provides (also including a folder structure!) via her exercises I found incredibly helpful. Her writing style, however, not so much.

Cron’s language is liberally peppered with buzzwords, repeated information, and unnecessary references to other books. Points are repeated multiple times or rehashed into new metaphors so often that by the time you get to the end of the book you’ll have forgotten what the original words were supposed to mean. Instead of simply “the why of the story as per Chapter Four” it’s a constant barrage of “the why of your story, which you HAVE to touch on, ASK yourself about each time, YOU HAVENT FORGOTTEN YET ALREADY HAVE YOU I THINK YOU HAVE SURELY?”. It feels like I’m assumed to have the attention span of a child, and combined with the friendly tone, am being talked down to as if I’m one.

Having to constantly struggle to understand buzzwords of Cron’s own definition, or tell whether something is actually new information, makes the book confusing and frustrating to read. It felt sometimes like I was relying on the examples (also horridly written, but they do their job well) to be able to understand what I was supposed to do. These are not things that should be able to be said about an educational novel (surprise!).

Overall the tone doesn’t really serve the intended purpose, so to me it feels more like Cron is trying to self-aggrandisingly sell you on the methods of a book that you’ve already bought and half-consumed, than reassuring you that you’re doing well.

Buzzwords (which is, by the way, how you tell/rate a bad self-help book; thankfully she didn’t use any acronyms)

Minor Nit-Picks

If you want to write A Theme Book for Grown-Ups not a “Hollywood Movie”-esque story, or anything in a non-Western story structure, this probably isn’t for you. I don’t really like that she frames this as the only proper way to write a good story. You could probably replace the “everything has to link back to the third rail” with “the theme” or “the question” for a similar effect.

This book is (by its own admission) about how to write an entertaining novel, not a well-written or thematically complex one. Think an Agatha Christie or 50 Shades.

I feel like missing from the book is a "these methods may not work for you", and even if sensible adults should be able to understand this on their own, to me it feels a bit dishonest to leave it out, especially given the tone.

Brain science not from a brain scientist

In possibly one of the most annoying failures at gender equality Cron refers to “your protagonist” alternatively with “she” and “he” pronouns for the whole book instead of using singular “they” thus slapping you in the mental face each time she switches and sounding like a pedantic uneducated twat

I don’t really agree with the ideas of where, or with what, a novel should start; you might need more set-up for the world than starting at the “point of no return” for the protagonist;

Could’ve used chapter summaries considering the roundabout writing style

This isn’t a nitpick but the "what if" (primary-school writing prompts) segment is really insightful? Also her recommendation of writing the ending scene really helped to discover/iron out the kinks in my stuff and is super good to help you keep in mind where you’re going and please do it? I REFUSE to ruin my formatting just for the sake of a good thing she did

Overall I can only come down in favour of this book. If you’ve struggled with planning a novel or even wrapping your head around writing one but you want to, I won’t say it’s THE book for you, but it’s a book, and if you can get over Cron’s horrid writing then I really recommend it to you.

Personally I recommend that if you feel like there are ANY scenes in your novel that you can write, right now, that you try finishing one or two BEFORE going into this book. Mainly for your own motivation, but, it might also help you figure out whether or not Cron’s techniques are for you.

Finally, a quote:

"There is no firmly established next [...] writers very often stop writing after the first twenty pages because THEY have no idea what comes next either. The problem is that BECAUSE there are so many options, it's the same as having none."

Regardless of any of its other qualities or flaws, Story Genius solves that problem. It really helped me to plan MYYYY novel and they don’t teach you how to do that in school.

#don’t talk to me about the third rail #don't ask me about my english study score #reference review

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unit8rosiefryer · 5 years

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Evaluation

For my final major project, I created an animated music video which could better be described as a motion graphic. It’s visually narrative, as it follows along with the lyrics of my song of choice, and is therefore both informative as well as aesthetically pleasing. When designing this piece I imagined it joining many other music videos on YouTube, which meant that the audience would likely be younger people (25 or under) as they are the current primary demographic for this site. However, due to it’s storytelling nature, I also believe that those old older generations will enjoy watching it and learning about the story within the song. In fact, when I showed it to my family, the majority of positive feedback came from people aged over 35.

I went into this project with a very basic understanding of the software that I chose (Adobe Illustrator and Adobe After Effects). This was actually quite motivating to me as it meant that if I wanted to produce something that I could be proud of, I would have to research, practice, and learn to expand my skills. For the most part I think that I completed my plan well, as the end result was fairly accurate to the image I had in my head. Having said that, if I could go back in time and chose what I was going to create again, I think I might have chosen differently. This isn’t because I didn’t enjoy the challenge - I actually found the progress very rewarding - but because I discovered that the reason I enjoyed this was because it involved visual story telling, and not because of the animation aspect of it. Following this, I believe I would chose to do a form of info-graphics next time, perhaps a series of advertising posters with an underlying satirical/sarcastic tone. I think that this would play to my strengths more, as I enjoy the cryptic aspect of designing something that has to be thought about to be understood, but could also be interpreted differently by various people.

When it came to researching for this project, I was reluctant because I didn’t know where to start. I knew that I had seen motion graphics used in advertising before, but I couldn’t remember where or when. However, luckily for me advertising is everywhere, and it didn’t take long before I saw an example that portrayed exactly what I enjoy about the style. From here I searched digital art websites and found many more portrayals of what I wanted to create: a simple, visually pleasing motion graphic, which had smooth transitions and told a story. Finding inspiration for my elements was even easier, as I had a solid image in my head of what I wanted them to look like, I just needed a guide to make sure some pieces were recognisable for what they were. Both of these instances refer to secondary research. I found primary research harder to acquire, as there is very little around me which I could have gathered to use as inspiration for my design, as it is set on a hillside and I live in a city. However there is one scene containing a skyline of city buildings, and I could have explored my home further to find inspiration for this instead, of just using the internet; which is what I did. I was able to obtain one source of primary research however, and this was in the form of a survey. I asked people around me of varying ages and occupations how they felt about animated music videos. I believe that this sample was fairly representative as some of the people have knowledge of this area, whereas others have none; and both of these groups were a mix of ages. I used my findings to approach my project in a way that would please as many people as possible, as that is one of its primary functions - to be viewed and enjoyed.

As stated earlier, during my time collecting secondary research, I mostly used the internet, as it contains anything and everything I could want. For one occasion, I saw some inspiration on an advert when I was in the cinema, and then found the link to it later on YouTube. I didn’t use books at any time, but I feel that this is justified because of the digital field that my project is set in. I was sure to reference all my research in my bibliography, although I think I might have lacked mentioning it during my reflective journals, and expressing when and where it had inspired me. For another project I would be sure to gather more primary research, because I think it can give a project a more personal impression, as it contains elements of my life, not just ideas from already existing sources.

During my time creating this animation I ran into quite a few problems. I decided to alter my plan in the first week of animating, by removing a character that I had originally wanted to be in there. This meant that I had to redesign some of the frames on my storyboard to be as expressive without using a face to portray emotions. I suppose this was less of a problem and more a consequential decision, but even so it put me a little off-track. Further issues arose at various points, for example, the format of the software I was using was accidentally altered once, and I didn’t know how to access my work, but a classmate helped me to fix that. The biggest issues came about in regards to my memory stick. This was a large project storage-wise, and when it came towards the end I had to get a new one to save my rendered version on to. There were also complications when I (foolishly) moved some files around, and made them inaccessible to the original piece of work; which meant that none of my elements were visually available, but again this was fixed within the hour.

Due to the removal of the character in the beginning of the project, my end result is a bit different to my original sketches and storyboard. However I don’t think that this is a bad thing; in fact, I think that it ended up better than I had planned, as without the characters face to express emotions on, I had to think of creative and subjective ways to do this, which can be interpreted by each viewer differently. I truly don’t believe that I could have dealt with any issues in a more effective way. They didn’t set me back too much and ultimately, allowed my project to become what it is and I’m happy with that. I learned a lot from fixing them, for example I should never alter the placement of files during such a big project, without being sure that I had multiple copies saved first in case anything went wrong. I also feel that I have become more confident when asking for help, as it just allows me to progress faster and doesn’t (often) effect anyone else.

To produce this project I planned a reasonable amount. I created sketches and storyboards for each scene of my animation, as well as annotating to show how one would morph into the next. My schedule was broken down into weeks which were spent creating the elements, and then creating the animation. In reality these two activities overlapped a little due to some changes to the plan, but I still managed to finish with comfortable time in-hand. In this sense, I feel like I was efficient, because if I hadn't been then I would have either struggled to finish, or the quality of my end product would be affected more than it has been. If I had to complete this exact project again knowing what I know now, I don’t imagine that there is much I would change. The digital quality of my animation could be clearer, so if I were to repeat this I may do some more research into how to make this happen, but i don’t feel that the lack of research in this area has been particularly detrimental to my project.

For the whole of this project I used software that I had used before, and knew vaguely, as the original time pressure to get everything finished felt like enough of a challenge, that didn’t need adding to by using unknown software. If I had wanted a challenge, there are many pieces of software in which to create animations that I could have researched and used; but as After Effects was the only one I knew (even though I was only introduced to it in the last 6 months) I decided to stick with this, and to challenge myself by learning new skills and techniques. I did this by following YouTube tutorials, one of which for example taught me how to create the simple motion graphics of the expanding circles and stars that I used to imitate the beat in the intro and chorus. Now that I know how long this process takes, and that I was able to finish a 3.5 minute animation in 6 weeks, next time I might venture into new territory software-wise, as I feel that this could be interesting, but may also allow me to complete this to a higher standard than After Effects did.

I used my blog as a journal throughout this process, by writing up how each week had gone. In these entries I included how far along I was, any problems that had occurred, how I solved these as well as how I was feeling about the whole process. My evaluations were an honest reflection of my performance that week - if I hadn’t been overly motivated then I would mention it because I wanted to admit when I wasn’t trying my hardest, and use this as motivation to do better next week. For a future assignment, I may use a rating system to show how each aspect of my project is coming along, for example I would use headers such as ‘progress’, ‘problem solving’, ‘timekeeping’, and ‘personal feelings’ under which I could describe the week, and then give a rating out of 10 for each section. Doing this would give me both qualitative and quantitative data, from which I could produce a form of chart at the end, so I could see how consistent I was in each area week by week. I could then use this to improve my work methods for anything else that I complete.

I chose to use this layout for my blog as opposed to a grid layout, as I think that having my posts in a chronological timeline paints a better picture of the process I went through, and the progress that I made along the way. I added a profile picture which is the same as the one on my YouTube channel, and my Behance page, as I feel that some consistency across these sites will look more professional. I made sure to use headers for each blog post to explain what they were showing, and used images where I felt they were appropriate. My only issue with this method of tracking progress, was that if I wanted to add in something which was more relevant 2 weeks ago, it had to be at the top of the timeline so everything isn’t as in order as I would like. I considered starting a new blog so that once everything was written, I could put every post in the order that I wanted it to be in, but decided that this wasn’t fully representative of what I had been doing. Instead I just explained in some posts that the content was created a while ago and I just hadn’t had to opportunity to upload it until now. I have learned that tracking my progress is a very good way of motivating me, as I can look back and see how far I’ve come, and remember problems that seemed so dire, as menial and unimportant now. The chronology of my blog allows it to tell the story of how I made each decision, and whether or not that worked for me, and I now find this almost as rewarding to look at as I do my final piece.

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mozgoderina · 7 years

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MARTIN PURYEAR: Multiple Dimensions

Internationally recognized, well exhibited, and critically acclaimed sculptor Martin Puryear currently has a fantastic show of drawings and prints on view at the Art Institute of Chicago. (An iteration of this show was at the Morgan Library through January 10, 2016.) The works included in this tightly curated exhibition span the artist’s career, from his time in Sierra Leone in the early-mid ’60s to a recent batch of etchings.

In laying out the show roughly chronologically, the curators create a fluidity that the Morgan version lacked, allowing the viewer to track Puryear’s progress from a fine draftsman to a respected sculptor. Multiple Dimensions succeeds because it presents these works, many of which have not previously made it out of Puryear’s studio, as more than sketches that simply register the development of a sculpture realizing its final form. Rather, the exhibition gives the works on paper critical attention, links the concerns embedded in them to those of his sculptures, and demonstrates the breadth and depth of Puryear’s inquiry into how organic, abstract forms can resonate politically.

On the first wall of the show hangs a cluster of drawings, mostly in ink and mostly with line, that demonstrate Puryear’s early dedication to close looking. After college, Puryear joined the Peace Corps to teach French, English, and biology in Sierra Leone, one of two countries in West Africa where American slaves had been repatriated. Puryear refused to take a camera because he didn’t want what he was seeing to be filtered through its lens.[1] Instead, he drew what he saw—houses, figures, animals, foliage—with a confident thin line, hatched shadows and delicate ink washes, sometimes adding brief, written captions like “grass roofed house in area across from our house.” These are drawings Puryear has kept in his various studios (in Williamsburg in the ’70s, Chicago in the ’80s, and the Hudson Valley currently) for decades, drawings he made before he realized he was a sculptor.

They are interesting not only in that they are beautiful, delicate and well-composed, but also because they anticipate the formal interests that crop up repeatedly throughout his career: how things are constructed, how texture and surface—of skin, grass, thatch, and cloth—vary. The tight grip of Joseph Momoh’s hands (Untitled (Joseph Momoh), 1965) foreshadows the attention Puryear would give to his joinery. In the oval forms that comprise Gbago’s neck and the cactus (Gbago, 1966, and Cacti, 1965), we see Puryear looking both to document his surroundings and to understand how parts fit together. The drawings reveal how the Adam’s apple meets the neck skin, how the plant’s tubercles protrude from its spine, how the beetle’s legs attach to the stomach (Rhinoceros-Beetle—Female, 1965). In his sitters’ casual poses and frank gazes, these drawings expose the familiarity that Puryear cultivated with the community he was teaching and living, the Mende. These drawings are rooted in that time and in that place, which Puryear has called, in a 2016 conversation with Theaster Gates,“one of the most important experiences I could have had […] to finish college, go into the Peace Corps, and live among people who lived in the place, the part of the world that stamped me, as a black American.”[2]

Indeed, after leaving Sierra Leone to study at the Royal Academy in Sweden, Puryear made a number of prints that reworked the drawings he made in Africa. Modifying these images to make Gbow’s Gard (1966) and Gbago, Puryear added further compositional complexity and subtle tonal gradation. As a result, these prints—which resemble beautiful postcards—have a higher level of finish than the drawings. Alongside the prints that register his memory of Sierra Leone, Puryear made etchings of different architectural structures that are rooted in reality—in actual, monumental forms that Puryear transposed onto copper and then onto paper: Belltower, Stonehenge I, Stonehenge II, and Gate (all 1966).

In 1967, something new happened in Puryear’s work. The monumental became the archetypal. Puryear subsumed the real, architectural forms he had transposed into rounded mounds: Zig (1966 – 67) and Klot (1967). The thatched roof of the Mende huts was incorporated as a zigzag pattern; it lost its site specificity but kept its textural sensuality. Both Zig and Klot required multiple steps to achieve the final image and demonstrate Puryear’s dedication to craft, to the precise execution of the technical, and often finicky, process of printmaking. In using two plates for Zig and four plates for Quadroon (1966 – 67), Puryear broke away from the rectangular format that drawing and etching expect. Image and form converged; abstraction became Puryear’s language.

In titling this evocative piece Quadroon, Puryear acknowledged the social connotations of the image he made. He arranged three blush colored plates and a black plate around a diamond of blank paper, at once evocative of an orifice and an acknowledgement of the complexity of racial categorization. After all, “quadroon” was a widely popular term used to refer to an individual who had one black grandparent and three white ones. It is interesting that this piece came after his time in Sierra Leone, a time when a shift in context might have allowed him to recognize how deeply, yet how falsely, the binary of black and white exists in the American conception of race, how society has developed terminology dedicated to the classification that helps keep that hierarchy entrenched.[3] Throughout his career, Puryear has often used titles like this to hint, subtly or overtly, at the so-called “content” of the work; yet his art never feels illustrative of an idea. Rather, it is suggestive and deeply personal; the title functions as an ex post facto name in which Puryear makes textual a feeling or idea he sees in the piece.

In its selection of drawings, Multiple Dimensions suggests that Puryear’s drawing practice anticipates his sculpture not only in that it often provides a carpenter’s guide for what he must execute, but as a way for him to find his forms. In preparatory drawings, Puryear works in two dimensions, looking to the third. His drawings speak to a future thing that will exist beyond the paper, in our space. But, in some drawings, we see Puryear repeating himself to find the forms that will reappear in his sculpture. These drawings register discovery. In a charcoal drawing from 1990, “Drawing for Untitled,” he makes an elongated head and neck form, reminiscent of a Fang Mask, a Brancusi sculpture, and a drinking vessel. This elegant, evocative form informs many of his later sculptures, such as Bearing Witness (installed 1997), which stands outside the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington DC, and Guardian Stone (2002), which was commissioned to sit outside TV Asahi’s headquarters in Tokyo. Many of Puryear’s commissioned sculptures use large formats so that the piece’s scale is divorced from its source, abstracting the thing and making it just unrecognizable enough to surprise. Puryear’s drawings, too, often feel bigger than their actual size. And here, Puryear demonstrates his accomplished sense of how to manipulate space, whether that is the plane of the paper or the places where he installs his public sculpture.

The final selection of works is perhaps the most exciting and illuminating in demonstrating the sustained process by which Puryear makes drawings and etchings to discover his forms and then uses drawing to plan their construction. In 2003, Puryear made two graphite drawings, both titled Drawing for Untitled. The smaller one renders a shaded, three-dimensional form—shaped almost like an elephant’s seated body—that curves to leave a key-shape opening. The larger flattens this form to reveal a cross-sectional slice, which looks to be made of stacked wood or stone. In two other Drawing from Untitled also from 2003, Puryear adds two more holes and softens any sharp edges. He elaborates on these forms in a more complex drawing, Untitled (2003), made with charcoal and conté crayon, so that the textures of the drawing suggest the material of the sculpture he seems to be planning. In 2012, Puryear made an etching of this more complicated form, suggesting cogs in some kind of machine. On view are two maquettes, Untitled, Maquette for Deichman Library, Oslo (2013), and Shackled (2014). The latter’s title, along with its prominent cuff, presages the forty-foot wooden sculpture Puryear plans to install in Madison Square Park in May 2016. More than a decade in development, this sculpture, crowned with an oversized gold shackle, will function as a temporary and hugely visible memorial to the slave trade so important to the growth of New York City.

Endnotes. [1] Mark Pascale and Ruth Fine, Martin Puryear: Multiple Dimensions. (Yale University Press, 2015): 33. [2] “Artist Conversation: Martin Puryear and Theaster Gates.” The Art Institute of Chicago (February 4, 2016) 30’27’’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LVmdOrC91c [3] Ibid. 37’50’’

Source: The Brooklyn Rail / Kate Liebman. Link: MARTIN PURYEAR: Multiple Dimensions Illustration: Martin Puryear [USA] (b 1941). 'Untitled (State 1)', 2016. Intaglio in 3 colors on Hahnemuhle Bright White paper with deckled edge (104 x 101.5 cm). Moderator: ART HuNTER.

#art #contemporary art #martin puryear #sculpture #article #brainslide bedrock great art talk #the brooklyn rail

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paleorecipecookbook · 7 years

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RHR: How to Slow Down Aging—with Sara Gottfried

In this episode we discuss:

Telomeres and their connection to aging

Genetic vs. environmental factors

The role of inflammation on aging

The FTO, APOE, and JAK-2 genes

The clock gene and its effect on weight

How do you measure aging?

The FKBP5 gene and stress response

The effect of eating meat on aging

Show notes:

Younger: A Breakthrough Program to Reset Your Genes, Reverse Aging, and Turn Back the Clock 10 Years by Sara Gottfried

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youtube

Chris Kresser: Hey, everybody, Chris Kresser here. Welcome to another episode of Revolution Health Radio. Today, I'm going to be talking to Dr. Sara Gottfried about aging, genetics, the exposome, and the environment. Dr. Gottfried is a Harvard-educated physician and two-time New York Times bestselling author. In her new book, Younger, she shows how to reset gene expression in order to slow down aging and lengthen healthspan. We’re going to get back to the listener Q&A format pretty soon. We have been doing some interviews lately with Robb Wolf and Stephan Guyenet about their books, and this will be the last one of these for a little while. But as you probably know, I'm a voracious reader, and this kind of research and learning is a big part of what I do, and I also consider it to be my job to bring these new resources to your attention when they become available if I think they're valuable. It just so happened that three of the people that I respect the most in terms of their work and their perspective have published books almost back to back. In particular, with Sara’s book, Younger, this is one of the few popular resources that goes into depth but is still accessible on genetics, the exposome, and aging. Those are topics that we’ve talked a lot about, the relationship between genes and the exposome on my blog and a little bit on the podcast, but we haven’t gone into much detail on those topics as they relate to aging and healthy aging, which of course is a concern for everybody. Sara’s one of the people that I know that has done the deepest dive in this area and she knows more about it than just about anybody. I'm really excited to welcome her on the show and to share some of this knowledge with all of you. So, without further ado, let’s do that. Chris Kresser: Sara Gottfried. It's such a pleasure to have you back on the show. Dr. Sara Gottfried: Happy to be here, Chris. Hi. Chris: I'm excited about today because I have definitely written and spoken about genetics, epigenetics, and the exposome on my blog and podcast, but I haven't really done it in the context of aging well, and that's really what your latest book, Younger, is all about. It's something that really spans all ages and demographics. There's nobody that's not interested in aging well, at least on some level. How interested they are and how much they're changing their behavior as a result is a different question, but I think if you ask just about anyone on the street, they would like to age well. I'm really looking forward to diving into this with you. Sara: Yeah, thank you. I agree with you. I think there's no lower limit on age, or even an upper limit, although sometimes it's the big birthdays that get you more intrigued. I just turned 50. You had 40 a couple of years ago, but it's often, I think a lot of people don't know that aging can be happening at a faster clip than they realize. That's what I want to bring attention to.

Can you affect how fast your body ages? Sara Gottfried says you can.

Telomeres and their connection to aging

Chris: It can be a birthday for some people and for other people it can be kind of really an extreme kind of stress event or maybe an injury or an illness. You, yourself, diagnosed yourself in kind of stress failure or the failure state as you refer to it. Was that the turning point for you? Tell us a little more about what happened there. Sara: Yeah. I definitely had a failure state that occurred five years ago. (I just want to apologize here at the beginning because I've got a bit of a voice “failure state” today. Hopefully, we can laugh a bit which helps it immensely.) For me, I think of these failure states as a failure of homeostasis. I remember you talked about this in your show with Peter Attia and you and I have talked about this for years, but there are a lot of different failure states. It could be a failure of the stress response system, which was my story. It can be cancer. It can be SIRS. It can be depression, fatty liver, diabetes. What happened in my case was when I was 44 I got very interested in the science of telomeres, in part because we have luminous neighbor, Elizabeth Blackburn, who got the Nobel Prize along with two others in 2009 for her work on telomeres. I imagine your audience has heard of telomeres before. They're the little caps on chromosomes that are a marker of your cellular aging process. It's a proxy for biological aging compared with your chronological aging. At 44, I thought I was doing great. I thought I was aging well. My hormones were in a healthy place. I was a yoga teacher. I was relatively sane but this test showed otherwise. At 44, I had the telomere length of a 64-year-old woman. Chris: That was a little bit of a wakeup call, huh? Sara: Huge wakeup call. From that test, I concluded that I was aging poorly and I needed to do something about it. I think you may do this too. When I have a health crisis like this, that can sometimes create fear and humility. What I do in response is to dive into the literature. Knowledge really becomes the best salve for me. I dove into the studies looking at telomere science and accelerated aging. That's how I created this functional medicine protocol that became my new book, Younger. But I should add that it wasn't just my telomeres in isolation, it was part of a larger narrative. Before the telomere test, I definitely had problems with my control system for stress, my HPA axis (the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis), and this went on for about a decade at least, that I was measuring and looking at. At 35, I had a serum cortisol that was three times where it should be. I had a fasting blood sugar of about 110, a hemoglobin A1c that was 5.8 to 6. There were multiple biomarkers showing me that my homeostatic system was toast. I had fried it. I needed to surrender to kind of a new way of thinking about it, a new paradigm, in order to heal it.

Genetic vs. environmental factors

Chris: That's interesting because from one perspective you could look at that and say, “Oh, too bad. I have bad genes and that's just the fact that I was dealt.” But of course, that's not actually the way to look at it, is it? Sara: It's definitely not. I imagine you were taught this as well. But I went through medical school beginning in 1989 and at that time we thought that your genes were probably your fate. The idea that environment plays such a large role, that's relatively new. That's been the last 12 to 15 years. Of course, the gene–environment interaction is complex and at the risk of oversimplifying, I think, about the 90/10 rule here. The idea which you've talked about in your amazing podcast is that genes load the gun, but environment pulls the trigger. Honestly, I want a less violent analogy. Chris: Yeah. We’ve got enough of the war analogy all through medicine, don't we? Sara: We totally do. But it's a helpful way to look at the relative weight of your genetics that you got from your parents versus environment. And when it comes to chronic disease or the signs of aging, genes are only about 10 percent of the story. Environment is 90 percent, much of which is under your control. Chris: Let's use a gardening analogy. You need good seed, healthy seeds, in order to grow a plant, but so much more. There is the water, the quality of the soil, the sun and the care of the gardener making sure that weeds don't take over and get in the way of that. How’s that? Are getting closer? I think it worked. Sara: That’s so much better, so much better. Chris: Okay, great. Now we just need a short pithy way of referring to it in seven or eight words or whatever the other one is, but we'll work on that and get back to everybody. Sara: All right. Chris: All right. Yes, definitely, we've talked about this in other contexts where 85 to 90 percent of the chronic disease burden has been estimated to be related to environmental factors. Certainly, our genes determine what our predispositions are, and I always explain this to my patients as like, “One person when they're exposed to our modern diet and lifestyle will develop rheumatoid arthritis, whereas another person will develop multiple sclerosis, whereas yet another person will develop, you know, IBS or inflammatory bowel disease.” And to me, both our own genes and then the genes of our microbiome are what are driving how the actual expression of disease. Sara: That's right. I think it's a helpful place to start because it gives you probabilities. It helps you focus on maybe what your vulnerabilities are. A good example here is I probably have some genes related to my HPA axis that are different than your system. And so, the way my life has been constructed, the way it's been architected, has made some of those genes turn on. It silenced other genes in your case. I think you've shared this publicly before. You have a vulnerability with your gut function. We all have different vulnerabilities and it relates to our exposome. How that affects gene function with the external factors and also the internal environment we create as a result of that exposome.

The role of inflammation on aging

Chris: Absolutely. In your book, you used this great term, I'm not sure if you came up with it or someone else did. Sara: No, I didn’t. Chris: “In-flam-MAGING” or “in-FLAM-maging,” there are different ways of pronouncing it. “In-FLAM-maging” makes it sound like hemorrhaging, like, “This is very serious. We need to stop it.” While “in-flam-MAGING” sounds almost a little like a French word or something. I'm talking just about the phonetics, but of course, we’re really referring to a combination of inflammation and aging here. Tell us more about what you learned in your deep dive about the contribution of inflammation to aging. Sarah: Yeah, I definitely call it in-flam-MAGING. It's not a sexy French word. It's an unfortunate combination, as you said, of inflammation and then how that accelerates the aging process. I didn't come up with this term. It's something that I read about, but I think it's a helpful kind of pin on which to hang a hat because it's a way of thinking about this process of information, which is a through line, really, in all of functional medicine. I was trying to think before talking to say, “Are there any conditions you can think of that don't have inflammation as part of the back story?” Chris: I've tried to think of those for a long time and I have not been able to come up with a modern chronic disease where inflammation isn’t implicated in some way. Sara: Right. I've been doing the same, so we'll have to keep sleuthing. Chris: Right. We can say a very high percentage. Whether we come up with one or two, it's above 99 percent. Sara: For sure. In my case, I definitely had this background of inflammation that accelerated the shortening of my telomeres. I have these short stubby telomeres. I’ll actually tell you towards the end about what's happened with my telomeres over time. But it shows up in different ways. For some people, it starts in their muscles. I also had an issue with this a couple of years ago. I went to a spa with my husband, who is a former athlete and loves physical fitness. We went to a high-intensity interval training class, and the instructor who was 25 and gorgeous, wanted us to jump up and down on a box, jump box. He put this 18-inch box in front of me, and I thought, “Oh, you know, I'm a former gymnast. I can do this.” I did it and I was sort of proud of myself and then he wanted us to do it 13 more times and three sets. I pretty much wiped out. I just realized that I didn't have those fast-twitch fibers. I didn't have the jumping capability that I had in my 20s and 30s. It was another wakeup call where I believe that I had some issues with my mitochondria. I didn't have the power that I used to have in my muscles. That's a common way of looking at the early signs of inflammaging. Another way to look at it is your memory recall, your executive functioning that involves more inflammation in the brain and how that accelerates aging. We all have different ways that aging can show up. For some people, it's in their face with kind of more puffiness and wrinkles. I think it's a helpful way to kind of think about the aging process. Chris: Yeah, I would definitely agree. Especially that the cognitive symptoms seem to be from what I have seen in working with a lot of patients, one of the most reliable observable indicators of inflammaging. There’s this difficulty with word recall, not being able to remember names or even common words, difficulty concentrating. Of course with Alzheimer's and dementia, as prevalent as they've become and as serious as they are, it's one of the signs that should be triggering all of us to get help when we start to notice that sort of thing—especially if it's happening earlier on in life, in the 40s and 50s. Sara: For sure. And I would even go further and say unfortunately the symptoms of memory loss or having a problem with your hippocampus—that part of the brain that's involved in memory consolidation and emotional regulation—I want to address inflammation ideally a few decades before the symptoms show up. For our listeners who are thinking, “You know, I walk into a room and I remember why I went there, I don't know what they're talking about with this memory issue. That's not my problem.” These are things that you want to address ideally in your 30s and 40s, early 50s before the symptoms begin.

The FTO, APOE and JAK-2 genes

Chris: I want to switch gears a little bit and talk about some specific genes. You know there's been a lot of discussion in the blogosphere about MTHFR. A lot of people have heard of this gene by now and I've talked about it on the podcast several times with several different guests, but let's talk about some of the genes that people may be less familiar with or some that are somewhat familiar, but you have an interesting take on. The ones that come to mind are FTO, certainly APOE, especially since we’re just talking about Alzheimer’s and dementia, and JAK-2, which is a breast cancer gene mutation that doesn't get as much play as BRCA and some of the other genes that are involved there. Why should people be paying attention to these and what should they know about them in terms of actionable steps they can take if they have polymorphism in those genes? Sara: Right, right. I have variants of pretty much all of these genes, and I hope it's okay with you to give a little bit of the background of talking about this with you because you and I have been in a mastermind together for years, and I remember when I first started writing this book and I said, “Guys I've narrowed this down to 25 genes and I'm going to focus on in this new book.” And you, along with the others, were like, “Okay, you've got to narrow down further, 25 is still way too overwhelming.” FTO—it's unfortunately named the “fatso gene.” I think of FTO as a nutrient sensor. It stands for fat mass and obesity-associated gene. It's located on chromosome 16, and its job is that it's strongly associated with your level of fat composition, so your body mass index and consequently, your risk of obesity and diabetes. I have the variant. I have a large number of obesity genes. I joke that I'm genetically programmed to be a 200-pound diabetic with thinning hair, which is not exactly the picture of middle age that I have for myself. Chris: Nor is it what you look like, most importantly. Sara: That's the benefit of environmental changes. Chris: Exposome. Sara: Exactly. When you have the variant, the main thing that it does is you have sloppy control of leptin, so you knew I was going to work in hormones somewhere here. Hormones are so key, and genes control so much of hormonal balance, and leptin is the hormone that's responsible for satiety. It tells you to put the fork down. For people who have a problem with this gene, they are hungry all the time, and that was certainly my story before I learned how to regulate this gene. This gene is interesting because it's very prevalent in the Amish population, and one of the ways that the Amish regulate this gene, because you don't think of the Amish as being obese or diabetic, but one of the ways they regulate it is with hard physical labor. Chris: Manual labor all day. Sara: Right. That's certainly not what I do, but it turns out that even 30 minutes of moderate exercise every day can regulate this gene in a way that helps you prevent obesity and diabetes. You can also do it with your carb thresholds. A lower-carb food plan, that's kind of a murky, complicated topic because I think you need enough carbs to kind of take care of your adrenals and thyroid function, especially if you're female. But really, defining your carb threshold can help with this gene along with making sure that you get adequate fiber. That's a really important gene. You also mentioned APOE, which is I think one of the most fascinating genes. As you mentioned, if you inherit one of the variants, APOE4, that can put you at a greater risk of Alzheimer's disease, so this is kind of known as the Alzheimer's gene. There are other Alzheimer's genes, but this is the one that's responsible for about 95 percent of the genetic risk of Alzheimer's. This one, if you inherit one copy of the APOE4 allele, it gives you about a two- to threefold increase risk of Alzheimer's disease. It's not a death sentence, but it does increase your risk. If you inherit two copies, it's somewhere around 8- to 15-fold increased risk. But this gene is a little bit complicated because it's not … the number of different alleles is ... there are four of them. There are three that are kind of popular, but four in total. You can inherit the APOE2, the APOE3, and the APOE4. I happen to be an APOE2/3, and what that means, because this gene is in some ways also a nutrient sensor, especially how you respond to fat and it's involved in the trafficking of cholesterol in your body, so what this means for me is that if I go on a low-fat diet, which was kind of all the rage when I was in high school and college, it actually creates inflammation and it increases my risk of heart disease. Not only is it modulating your risk of Alzheimer's, it also modulates your risk of heart disease, and it can give us some guidance about how tolerant you are of fat in your diet. Chris: Right. And then JAK-2, that's an interesting one because it’s, as I said, not one that gets as much airplay in terms of breast cancer risk. Sara: Yeah. JAK-2 is super-interesting. It's a tumor suppressor gene, so similar to BRCA1 and BRCA2 in that regard, but I had never heard of it, honestly. I've done research on breast cancer. I've kind of followed the breast cancer field pretty carefully, but it wasn't until I sat down to make a list of all of the gene mutations related to breast cancer risk that I started to look at the literature on JAK-2. In some ways, I feel like writing this book saved my life because I discovered as I made this list of gene mutations that I have the JAK-2 mutation. What that means is I have about a threefold increased risk of breast cancer. My lifetime risk of breast cancer is about 39 percent. For most women living in Northern California, that risk is about 12 percent lifetime risk. That really got me into action in kind of a new way in the way that I look at this particular gene and how to modulate its expression. I also have a greater risk of colon cancer. What's recommended if you have a gene mutation like mine with JAK-2 is that you start mammograms and breast MRIs every 6 to 12 months starting at age 40, colonoscopy every five years. This was a big change, you know, versus what I had been doing for breast cancer screening. But it also, in some ways, it's strangely liberating to learn about your genetics because it allows you to kind of accept your probabilities in a different way. It kind of gives you a place to focus with your lifestyle management and with your exposome. It's definitely changing the course of what I'm going to do to prevent breast cancer. Chris: Yeah. I mean, I think this is really something that is shifting and I'm glad to see it shifting. All of my listeners will know I have been a huge advocate of a personalized approach to diet and lifestyle and behavior, environmental exposome factors, and that was largely what my first book was based on. Part of the argument for personalization comes down to these differences in gene expression. That conversation comes up a lot in my patients who have elevated lipids, like LDL particle number and lipoprotein(a), and the conversation I often have with them is, “Look, maybe that a low-carb, high-fat diet is a good idea for a lot of people, but we have clear evidence that it's driving your LDL-P through the roof, and we need to have a conversation about what the additive risk is there and what other alternatives there might be in terms of diet that would still meet your other needs without causing this increase in LDL particle number.” It's just a much more nuanced, individualized way of looking at nutrition and diet than I think what the conversation that we had been having for a couple of decades leading up to this. Sara: Yeah. Well, this is why your waitlist is so long, Chris, because I think this way of practicing that you and I have of being preventive, predictive, participatory—the four Ps of medicine—it's the future. At least I hope it's the future because our healthcare system is completely broken. But it allows us to look at that issue of inflammation and to say, “Okay, here's the genetic contribution to the aggregate of inflammation in your body. What can we do about it?” How do your genetics point to a particular way of addressing your lifestyle design so that we can really dial this in and reduce your risk of chronic disease?

The clock gene and its effect on weight

Chris: Along those lines, there are a couple other genes I would love to talk about that are really interesting. One we've already kind of referred to in terms of the HPA axis and reprogramming of that by stressful events that can actually pass down from one generation to another, which is I guess not the greatest news since we don't have control over that, but as you said, it can be liberating to know that. FKBP5 and then clock gene. Sara: Yeah, the clock gene is a little simpler, so maybe I'll start with that one. Chris: Yes. Sara: The clock gene on chromosome 12, it modulates your circadian rhythm, your ideal 24-hour sleep-wake cycle. If you have the bad variant, which once again I have, you have higher blood ghrelin levels. That's the hormone that makes you hungry. Chris: Appetite. Sara: It increases appetite. It makes you pick up the fork, as opposed to leptin, which makes you put down the fork, and you have resistance to weight loss. Pretty much, there are so many hormones that are released on the circadian rhythm. They're affected as well by the clock gene, and the idea here is that you have thousands of biological patterns in your body that are regulated by the circadian rhythm. We have an epidemic of dyscircadianism. If you inherit the variant of the clock gene, the idea is to really protect your circadian rhythm to keep your body on a normal sleep-wake cycle, and that will help you regulate hormone production. For me, if I want to lose weight, I have all these obesity genes and I'm trying to manage, I have to get seven to 8.5 hours of sleep if I want to lose weight. Weight loss isn't the only factor, but it's one of the outcomes that has been probably defined the best when it comes to the clock gene. Chris: This is something we've talked about a lot on the show, how the circadian rhythm is just absolutely crucial to all aspects of how every single cell in the body responds to it and even the simplest single-celled organism appears to be impacted by the 24/7 light-dark cycles. In Stephan Guyenet’s most recent book, we just had him on this show and we were talking about the neurobiology of weight regulation, he believes—and I think the research supports this—that aside from diet, sleep and circadian regulation is possibly the second-most significant controllable factor when it comes to weight gain and weight loss. These are really important things to be paying attention to. Sara: I totally agree. I mean, I think that restorative sleep may be as close to a panacea as we have in functional medicine. When I go back to that failure state that I had at 44, I think one of my issues beyond the ten-plus years of problems with my HPA and with cortisol production, one of my issues is that I was skimping on sleep. It's just kind of the nature of being a mother (working mother or a working father), and I can't tolerate that. Only about 3 percent of the population has the short sleep gene, where they function well on six hours or less per night. The other 97 percent of us, for the most part, need to really pay attention to circadian rhythm. For me, I was working full time at 44, practicing functional medicine, and then I was writing my first book at night, and so my sleep was definitely affected. I was getting to about six hours a night and using caffeine to kind of make up the difference ... which I think of now as a high-interest loan. So I really had to pay attention to this. What happened over that time is that I steadily, somewhat below the radar, gained about 20 pounds and inflammaging was ... it was part of this process.

How do you measure aging?

Chris: When you did this research for the book, you looked at the genes, you looked at all of the markers, the telomere test, and all of the other biomarkers (some of which you talked about earlier). When you put this all together, what's your current take on the best way to measure aging? I mean, there's still a lot that we don't understand about aging and what it even means and how to measure it. Where did you come out on that? Sara: I came out a little disappointed, honestly, because I wish we had one simple blood test that could tell you definitively. But here's where we are, and I do want to answer your question about one of the stress genes, the FKBP5. I talked about telomeres kind of at the beginning, in the way that I defined a failure state for myself, and they're a good marker, but they're not perfect. Despite what you might hear from telomere books, it turns out that cancer cells, for instance, have longer telomeres. That's part of the failed homeostatic mechanism is that the telomeres are longer, so you can get—if you're looking at the question of rapid aging, telomeres can give you a false negative. They're not a perfect test. If you look at the Baltimore Longevity Study, one of the markers that they think is the most helpful is interleukin 6, which is one of those cytokines or chemical messages of inflammation. Hand grip strength. I'm a fan of using any markers that are free, and hand grip strength is a good one. It's used in a lot of the studies of aging, especially in older folks. The way I work on my hand grip strength is to hang from a bar, like a pull-up bar. I go to bar class about four times a week and I hang from a pull-up bar for about one to two minutes. Testing your hand grip strength is another way of looking at this. There are a lot of different ways of looking at aging. I think some of the inflammatory markers beyond interleukin 6 can also be helpful. Do you have a way that you measure it, Chris? Chris: Not quickly like that. I mean I just put together a picture with a number of these different inflammatory markers, some of the cardiovascular disease risk markers. I look at cognitive markers for cognitive function. I guess the shorthand version is it's kind of a gestalt at this point and I'm looking at mostly markers of inflammation from a biomarker perspective, but this isn't something that I've looked into in as great of detail as you have. Sara: Well, you know what I did, I did the same thing. I created a gestalt and what I did was to put together kind of the latest thinking on how to track the aging process. I have a quiz, kind of a lengthy quiz, that you can do to assess your health span. There's also the RealAge Test, for instance, which is now about 15 years out of date and doesn't include a lot of the latest thinking about inflammation, but if people are interested in doing that quiz, we can mention that as well. That's what I used, kind of the quiz together with some biomarkers. Fasting blood sugar is another good one. I think it's another way of kind of looking at the failure state. How's your glucose homeostasis? That's a really important predictor of the aging process. When I turned 50 two weeks ago, I was very sad to discover a study that showed that your fasting glucose goes up by about 10 points by age 50, and then it continues to climb if you don't do anything about it. Depending on diet and sleep and these other levers of healthspan, kind of that period of time where you feel like you're in your prime and your biology is working for you. It continues to climb by about 10 points every decade. I think fasting blood sugar is kind of the easiest thing that people can get from their conventional doctor and it's a really important biomarker.

The FKBP5 gene and stress response

Chris: Let's return to FKBP5 and the role in the stress response and PTSD. I just did a presentation not last weekend, but the weekend before at UCSF on the myth of adrenal fatigue and I talked about genetic and epigenetic reprogramming of the HPA axis that can happen even in utero that leads to changes in cortisol levels throughout a person's entire life. I didn't go into any detail on the specific genes and gene expression involved there, but I'm curious. A lot of the research I've seen is the same as what you refer to, the Holocaust, and the Dutch Hunger Cohort, and then 9/11. There's also Norrbotten, the far northern part of Sweden and the feast-and-famine kind of research there. Tell us a little bit more about this gene and its role in the stress response and then how stress affects our physiology. Sara: Yeah. Well, this gene FKBP5 is involved in your HPA. And I agree with you—traumatic stress has lasting effects on your body, and it can also affect your children and your grandchildren via epigenetic change. When I struggle with my stress response system and my telomeres, my fasting blood sugar, my cortisol levels, it's helpful to know that it's not necessarily all you. It could be related to the stress your mother or grandmother felt. In my case, my mother was going through a divorce when she was pregnant with me, so she definitely had a lot of stress and it was at a time in 1967, it was the era of Twiggy. She was underweight and only gained about 20 pounds with me and it wasn't trendy to breastfeed. There were a number of epigenetic changes that occurred for me. But more specifically, let's look at the science. The person who's done the most compelling work in this field is Rachel Yehuda. She's at Mount Sinai Hospital. She's a professor of psychiatry and neurosciences. Her work has mostly been on the Holocaust and the 9/11 terrorist attacks. First with the Holocaust, she looked at the genes of 32 Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. She lives in maybe the perfect area to study these folks and then she looked at the genes of their children. She compared as a control group their results to Jewish families living outside of Europe during the war. She had a really profound control group and her focus was FKBP5 because it's the gene that seems to regulate the HPA perhaps more powerfully than other genes. What she found was epigenetic inheritance of the survivor trauma. The DNA didn't change in the survivors, but the epigenetic marks did. I think of those marks as being kind of like sticky notes that attach to the FKBP5 gene, and they increase your risk of post-traumatic stress disorder. Those sticky notes that she found in the survivors that attached to this gene were passed on to their offspring. She also looked at the women who were pregnant at or near the World Trade Center in New York City during the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and she had a total of 35 pregnant women. Again, they had alterations to FKBP5, and they increased a woman's risk of developing post-traumatic stress disorder and then passing it onto her baby. There's another study that is worth mentioning because it was a different type of stress, and this might even be more relevant for our audience today. It was an ice storm in Canada that occurred in 1998, and what happened was a vicious cold snap. They had severe sub-zero weather that led to power outages and extreme cold exposure that went on for several weeks, and people were basically homebound. They were stuck at home. Researchers have then tracked the women who are pregnant at that time, and their kids are now, you know, 18 to 20 years old, and they looked at genetic tags that were placed by the prenatal stress and then compared them to normal women. Again, they found that the DNA methylation signatures were different in the children of these women that were in utero during the ice storm and the cold snap, and what is profound to me is that they found that their immune cells showed profound differences. They had methylation in gene promoter regions, which are the switches for genes to be turned on and off, especially the genes that control insulin and blood sugar and maybe even immune function. This provides even more evidence of the epigenetic switch that can occur during severe stress. Chris: Yeah. And as I was saying before, that it's really crazy to see how much these genes can affect every part of physiology. We now know there are connections between changes in the circadian rhythm and blood sugar regulation, inflammatory signaling, which, as we talked about, virtually affects every chronic disease that we know about so far, affects changes in hormone balance and regulation. We have ... we evolved in this environment of 24/7 light-dark cycle that was unchanged for millions—billions of years, really—and it wasn't until the last 150 years that we developed artificial light and the ability to get exposure to light at night. That affects our circadian rhythm, and it's just this gigantic experiment. It's not really surprising, actually, to me to recognize that the changes in the expression of these genes can have such a profound impact on our health. Sara: Yeah, huge. And I think it's helpful maybe to just talk briefly about the Dutch famine study because it points to a few other outcomes. If we didn't get your attention with the diabetes and the genes that can regulate your risk of post-traumatic stress disorder, when you look at the Dutch famine, that data is really compelling to me because this was 1944 in Western Netherlands. There was a German blockade of transport and it led to a catastrophic drop in food availability, and people barely survived on a dramatic reduction in the calories that they were getting each day. Some even dropped down to 600 calories per day. They were so desperate they were digging up tulip bulbs to eat. They then got liberated by the Allies in 1945, and they had 20,000 people who died of starvation. The women who were pregnant before, during, and immediately after the famine, they then looked very carefully because the Dutch keep such meticulous health records; and now these famine babies, there's about 2,400 of them there now about 70 years old, and they know that the babies born to those women who were in the Dutch famine, they had a normal birth weight. They were able to kind of get what they needed from their mothers, but their children were fat. The offspring, the Dutch famine grandbabies, had neonatal adiposity. They were fatter babies and they also had poorer health later on, and then another piece that I think is interesting is that if you look at the brains of the people who were in utero during the famine, they have accelerated aging. There are about 300 adults that survived, and now the most recent data shows they have definitely weaker hand grip strength. They have weaker muscles. They have physical frailty and their brain function, especially attention and focus, is compromised compared to controls.

The effect of eating meat on aging

Chris: Right. I want to talk about one last thing here, which is meat. It’s always fun to talk about meat. We earlier talked about this new, maybe not new, but a shift in the idea that there's not just one diet that's best for anybody. Now of course we've been talking about this for years, but I think this is this concept is starting to get out there more in the mainstream, and I'm glad to see the discussion shifting maybe a little bit from low carb or low fat or this idea that everyone should do the same thing, which is preposterous. Tell us what your thoughts are (which may be different than my thoughts or the thoughts of other people who have been on the show) about meat consumption and an individual approach to that based on gene and environment interactions. Sara: Sure. Well, I think in some ways you and I are very much on the same page agreeing that there isn't one-size-fits-all, and even what worked for you 10 years ago might not work for you now. For most of my life, I've been an omnivore. I had a period of time in medical school when we were doing anatomy dissection where I was just so grossed out by the fat and the flesh that I went vegan, and when I went vegan I dropped weight. I had no energy and frankly I looked like I was on the cover of National Geographic. My boobs deflated. I probably had almost no estrogen, almost no pregnenolone. I come at this from a place of being an omnivore, but what I found is that there some very interesting work, especially by Martin Blaser. Chris: Yeah. Sara: Looking at the microbiomes and how it's involved in estrogen modulation. Specifically, what's known as the estrobolome. What I suspect personally is that when I eat more red meat, I tend to recycle estrogen to excess. The concept here is that your gut microbes can influence your systemic estrogen levels, as they contain certain enzymes like glucuronidase which render estrogens re-absorbable. It may be that modulation of the estrobolome could be helpful, and this seems to be more of a factor for women than men. For women, it may impact your risk of breast and endometrial cancer or maybe even diabetes, and for men more your risk of prostate cancer. I have to acknowledge that the evidence here is limited. Much of it is association, not causation. Most of it is observational. But women who eat more meat seem to have higher serum estrogen levels. Now, it could be other things that they're having with the meat, maybe it's the barbecue sauce or the bun or the French fries cooked in industrial seed oils. Maybe it's SIBO. Maybe vegetarians are less stressed, we don't really know. But I do have a gene called PPARG which seems to perform better with marine fat compared with animal fat, and observational studies show that there's more weight loss in women who have this gene variant who eat more seafood compared to meat. There's some other evidence that supports this, pretty much all observational. Including after menopause, eating red meat can increase your breast cancer risk by a modest amount, about 22 percent. Dairy consumption is associated with higher estrogen levels. Vegetarians have lower estrogen levels than omnivores and have a lower risk of breast cancer, but maybe it's fiber. Maybe it has nothing to do with the meat versus no meat. Japanese women definitely less meat than American women. They have lower rates of breast cancer, but who knows, maybe it's the green tea. I say this because you know I love your work and I think part of the takeaway here is what's the N of 1 experiment—in many ways a randomized trial is the gold standard that we have in medicine, we're kind of stuck with it—but the N of 1 experiment I think is even more important when it comes to figuring out what's the truth for you when we talk about this gene-environment interaction. Chris: Yeah. It's very much underrated, actually, I think. I mean, certainly we have to be aware of the limitations of N=1, and I think the biggest limitation or concern is that people use N=1 experience and extrapolate that to assume that that will be other people's experience as well. For example, the diet evangelists, someone here whose life was changed by a low-carb diet or a vegan diet or whatever, and then assumes that everybody else will have the same experience. But if you do understand the limitations of N=1 and you know how to properly perform those experiments, it can be incredibly powerful. At the end of the day, I'm always having this conversation with patients, “No matter what you believe, your body is the final arbiter.” If you think a ketogenic diet sounds really cool and you're convinced by what people are writing about and talking about in relation to it and then you try it, you stick with it, and you feel like a total train wreck, then what's the more important piece of factor there in that decision? I would argue that it's your experience. Sara: Oh, for sure, for sure. I totally appreciate that. I don't think I'm a food evangelist. I think I'm more of a food agnostic because I really want people to do this N of 1 experiment and I'm not saying that I don't eat meat. I mean, you know that because I've shared a cow with you. My freezer might have a little bit more meat than yours left over. I totally agree with you. I went on a very strict kind of Paleo regimen, and I could get to a body mass index of 23, and I couldn't get lower than that. And so for me, my N of 1 experiment showed me that if I want to fit into my clothes, I need a few more carbohydrates, I have to modify. And I tried a ketogenic. I think you and I talked a little bit about this a couple of summers ago. I went on a ketogenic diet with my husband. I was my usual kind of obsessive way of going about it and checking blood ketones throughout the day. I was in ketosis for three months and I gained 14 pounds. It was a disaster. There are about 10 different enzyme defects that can make you have a lot of difficulty and inflammation with a ketogenic diet, and I probably have one of those. This N of 1 experiment, I think, is just a really important way to be thinking about how to slow down the aging process, how to reduce inflammation that's at the root of all the chronic disease that we're talking about. Chris: Yeah. And this is something that always comes up with patients. In fact, I can think of several off the top of my head who I thought would be a great candidate for a ketogenic diet. They have a number of conditions that would benefit from it, they're overweight, they have some neurological issues, neurocognitive problems, maybe chronic infection. They're kind of the poster child for benefiting from a ketogenic approach, and yet when they do it—even with a lot of tweaking and sticking with it to get through that difficult transition period of fat adaptation and trying exogenous ketones and trying different ratios of macronutrients, lowering protein intake, adding some low-intensity aerobic exercise like walking, all the tweaks, and not to say that there still aren’t others that might have worked—but at some point, you start to realize that you're kind of beating your head up against a wall trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. For me, fortunately, that doesn't go on for as long because I don't have the belief that it should work for everybody. Sara: That's right. Chris: Yeah. Well, Sara thanks so much for coming on the show. It's always a pleasure. I appreciate your balanced and measured approach—your evidence-based approach, but also your consideration of other factors outside of the framework of the cherished randomized controlled trial. Which, as we all know, has shortcomings and those shortcomings have become even more apparent lately with the work of John Ioannidis and others who've pointed out the inherent flaws in our current research paradigm. It's great to see how all of those different perspectives come together in your book, Younger. Tell people when is it out, where can they find it, and anything else they should know about it. Sara: Yeah. My book is out. It's available anywhere books are sold. You can get it on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or your local independent bookseller. I really want for people to care about aging. That's kind of my bottom line and to care about the N of 1 experiment. Those are the two biggest takeaways. The other great part here is that you're never too young, you're never too old to care about aging. Chris: Yeah. I agree with that completely and I've seen pretty remarkable turnarounds even late in life for people who've never really thought much about this, so it's never too late to start, and yet the earlier you do start, the better. If you're a young person listening to this, it might be harder for you to think about the perils of aging because you haven't really had an experience of your own mortality or morbidity perhaps, but the sooner you can get tuned into some of this stuff, the better your chances for a long healthy lifespan will be. Thanks again, Sara, and I'll see you next week, but we will make sure to have you back on the podcast for your next book, which I'm sure there will be one. Sara: That's for sure. Thanks, Chris. Thanks everyone.

Source: http://chriskresser.com April 06, 2017 at 06:05PM

#paleo #recipe #food #delicious #healthy #yum #diet

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howtomakeagingersnap-blog · 5 years

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ADVENT, 1977

When Adventure (shortened to ADVENT) was released in 1977, creator and developer Will Crowther merely wanted to connect with his daughters. An avid cave explorer and spelunker, Crowther had intended to create a digital role playing game that allowed his daughters to interact with a fictional world on their own terms. This open-world format would later go on to be the very foundation of modern role playing games like the ever popular Elder Scrolls or Fallout series(owned by Bethesda Studios).

In the game, using an “action-object” format for inserting commands (such as “throw axe”, players can explore a system of caves that feature mythological creatures, pirates, magic objects and phrases, and labyrinth like mazes that connect them all. The game is ultimately a puzzle; the player must pay attention to key phrases and winding maps in order to reach their objective.

My personal experience with Adventure was simultaneously infuriating and engaging. The objective is still unclear, but I’m happy to explore this strange world presented within the cave system all the same. The puzzles are certainly mind boggling at times, some of my solves have been less due to intelligent deduction and more a result of randomly combining actions and objects until I get a result. I enjoy the whimsical, illogical nature of the game. Until I’ve figured out the set of rules that defines the world created by Adventure, a lot of what I’m doing is experimental. I’ve taken a playground approach to the game, in that I simply wander and interact with what I can and attempt to solve puzzles, without any sort of long term goal in mind. As long as I’m able to discover new parts of the map and new things to interact with, new puzzles to solve, I’m satisfied. The game is hypnotic in a sense; I feel like the protagonist of my favorite novel due to the text based storytelling format. I feel like a hobbit wandering through a dragon’s lair. It makes sense to me that this form of fiction would be so engaging to me, however- I’ve been an avid reader since a young age, and instead of simply escaping into someone else’s world, in the case of Adventure, the fictional world in question becomes my own, and I an active, participating party within it.

In addition to being simply mind bogglingly fun, Adventure has a significant amount of literary value. Although I’m yet to reach it’s conclusion, the story definitely follows a distinct structure that is consistent with fantasy, fairy tales, and great epics- The Hero’s Journey. The distinguished professor of mythology, Dr. Joseph Campbell, described this journey to be one that is followed by a great number of heroes in literature and myth. Achilles, Odysseus, Beowulf, and more all followed along this structure of story on their path to legacy. George Lucas, in fact, personally consulted Dr. Campbell while writing the story of Star Wars. In the Hero’s Journey, the story is divided up into three parts, each of which has multiple sub parts. These plot points are carried out in a specific chronology, which inevitably results in the hero’s victory over their plight.

***If you’re attempting to avoid spoilers, stop reading here***

First, the Departure. The departure begins set in the ordinary world, where the hero encounters nothing beyond the day to day of their life. In Adventure, this takes place at the End of the Road. The hero then receives their call to adventure, which propels them along their journey. In this case, it’s the exploration of the world of Adventure, wherein players first find a set of items in a well house, and then follow a valley and streambed, which brings the player to a grate in the ground. The hero meets a mentor, who can guide and assist them in their quest but must not interfere; much like the narration system of Adventure does to players. The final part of the Departure, according to Campbell, is the Crossing of the Threshold. Campbell’s theory states that the hero must get past a test of sorts for a guardian or gatekeeper to pass the threshold and into the world of their adventure. Just like Campbell says, in Adventure, the player must solve the first puzzle of the game; the grate. The player must have grabbed the set of keys in the well house in order to unlock the grate, after which they can enter the grate, and into the fantastic world of Adventure.

Next in Campbell’s cycle is the Initiation. This phase begins with tests that the hero must pass. The hero is required to grow along their journey, and these tests prepare them for what lies ahead while also ensuring that they are worthy of the quest’s reward. They must acquire allies and face small enemies, cooperating in order to succeed while also learning how to distinguish foes. Adventure mirrors this step as well. The player must grab important objects, like a bird cage and a rod, take note of the magic word “XYZZY”, and catch the bird, which will be needed later. They enter the pit, and must fight off angry dwarves and distract massive snakes that block their way. As the hero continues with the Initiation phase, they prepare for their greatest challenge. Campbell describes this as the “Approach to the Innermost Cave”; a very fitting description for Crowther’s Adventure. As the climax of the story approaches, the hero is faced with increasingly difficult enemies and puzzles. This too applies to Adventure. After exploring the entirety of the Hall of Mists and off shooting rooms, players are likely to realize that waving the rod creates a crystal bridge across the fissure at the end of the hall. Before they figure that out, however, they must get past the snakes in the hall of kings, lurking dwarves with knives and axes, and a frustratingly limited inventory system that only allows for some of the items players come across to be taken at once, despite all likely being significant. On the other side of the crystal bridge, players encounter their biggest challenge and puzzle yet: the maze.

Before continuing further with my comparison of Campbell’s Heroic Journey and Crowther’s Adventure, I must get deeper into the plot of Adventure. I’m sure I’ve barely scratched the surface so far. I’ll include two screencasts of some of my interactions with the game from this weekend in my next post. The first will be of my first five minutes playing during one session, the other from the last five minutes of that session. There’s about a two to three hour gap between the two screencasts, because I assumed three hours of content was far too much for anyone to watch, but it should effectively outline my progress. The first screencast contains more gameplay, with no narration and just a little background music, whereas the second screencast is full of narration and review of that session. In the second screencast I don’t input too many commands; this is primarily because I had repeated every action I could think of in each room at least twice before even hopping on the screencast. I was looking for any details or places to go I might have potentially missed, and when I was unable to find some, I attempted to tackle the maze, but simply didn’t get anywhere while trying to solve it.

I’ll definitely be playing again, most likely after consulting with other players about what to do next.

Even though I interacted with Adventure as part of a college course, I highly recommend it to anyone who might enjoy reading books, especially of the fantasy genre, or to anyone who enjoys RPG games, either console or tabletop. The joy of being the protagonist in your favorite story is indescribable. For once, I’m not shaking my head as protagonists make clearly bad choices. This time, I get to make the bad decisions, and I bear the consequences with pride.

I’ll include the link to Adventure in my next post, where I’ll be including the screencasts of my session as well.

If there’s one thing I learned from playing this game, it’s that I named this blog very aptly- the puzzles and frustrations of this game are certainly a major point of it’s appeal, but may also shed some light on why so many RPG gamers end up going bald at such a young age from stress.

#IFSpring2019 #interactivefiction #advent #adventure #joseph campbell #plugh

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cryptnus-blog · 6 years

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By 2020, 1-in-5 healthcare orgs will adopt blockchain; here’s why

New Post has been published on https://cryptnus.com/2018/08/by-2020-1-in-5-healthcare-orgs-will-adopt-blockchain-heres-why/

By 2020, 1-in-5 healthcare orgs will adopt blockchain; here’s why

While the financial services and shipping industries have been quick to deploy blockchain, the healthcare industry could soon follow their lead as it looks to increase efficiency and security, reduce costs and expand services with the distributed ledger technology.

In essence, blockchain could help reshape healthcare interoperability by serving as a next-generation middleware that couples health data with decentralized, distributed, and immutable qualities, according to a new report by IDC Health Insights.

As a result, by 2020, 20% of healthcare organizations will have moved beyond pilot projects and be “using blockchain for operations management and patient identity,” the report said.

Blockchain’s interoperability could underpin data exchange, serving as an alternative to today’s health information exchanges (HIEs); essentially, it would act as a mesh network for transmitting secure, near real-time patient data for healthcare providers, pharmacies, insurance payers and clinical researchers, according to IDC.

While blockchain may be moving from test cases to production systems in other industries, its adoption by healthcare has been slowed by the technology’s nascence coupled with heavier regulatory and security concerns, data harmonization, and blockchain resource availability, the report said.

Even the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) – typically a leader in deploying technology early – has been slow to dip its toes into distributed ledger technology. (The VA was an early adopter of electronic health records or EHRs.)

Last year, the agency’s IT department published a research paper on blockchain’s attributes and vulnerabilities. It noted that cryptography used to secure the blockchain itself and communicate between the elements of the system provides integrity on messages from users or between server nodes.

“It ensures participants can see the parts of the ledger that are relevant to them, and that transactions are secure, authenticated, and verifiable,” the VA paper stated, noting that with “permissioned” blockchains, users have to be enrolled before they are allowed to add or review records.

To date, however, the VA has yet to test blockchain related to its massive healthcare system.

Still, a small number of healthcare providers are beginning to consider the technology as a way of leaving behind interoperability issues.

Data harmonization

While there is some degree of network interoperability between healthcare providers, pharmacies and insurance companies through various frameworks like HIEs, they’ve had “varying degrees of success and penetration,” IDC said. It cited innate shortcomings that include “limitations in the interoperability standard or protocol itself, workflow and policy differences between entities, information blocking, and technology requirements.”

Two leading HIEs – CommonWell Health Alliance, a trade association working toward healthcare record interoperability, and Carequality, a public-private collaborative created to establish a common interoperability framework – have had success in establishing a solid industry foundation for data exchange with the backing of EHR vendors.

“And that’s facilitating a somewhat limited form of query-based [data] exchange,” said Mutaz Shegewi, IDC’s research director for provider IT transformation strategies. Shegewi was referring to the ability to search for secured patient information online.

“So, I don’t think they’re falling short, but there are limitations in terms of how many of them can do health information exchange orientated around the long term,” Shegewi said.

The problem is multifaceted, but primarily stems from a lack of unified data standards, frameworks and protocols that span healthcare facilities and the industry as a whole, according to Shegewi.

“It’s the variety of EHR systems and interfaces, data sources, and uniformity in workflows,” he said. “It’s a big conundrum.”

Blockchain as a ‘single source of truth’

Because it’s a transparent, electronic ledger that can be shared among a permissioned group of users, allowing everyone in the group to see the latest data in near real time, blockchain could improve patient data discovery across a wide specrtum. It can also leverage the open, API-compatible Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) interface, a set of standards that will be available in every major EHR to consolidate lifetime clinical records from different EHR providers.

(The FHIR interface is also at the center of Apple’s new Health Record, a mobile application that allows patients to pull their data in from multiple EHR systems.)

Acting as a mesh network, blockchain could accelerate clinical data distribution while using FHIR to standardize the data format, patient profiles, and secure indexes at the coding level, according to IDC.

“It doesn’t really influence the way data is conveyed or any data rules or anything that would take data to the next level. It’s the lattice work or the skeleton for it,” Shegewi said.

Blockchain could, for example, play a supportive role in a variety of areas: allowing for shared statistics on population health, clinical trials research, drug supply chain integrity, remote auditing, claim adjudication, and professional credentialing, IDC said.

Not only can it record any event, such as a patient diagnosis or treatment, drug prescription or insurance payout in chronological order, it can store those events as unchangeable records. With blockchain, additional data points can be added but previous entries are unalterable. So, in essence, it offers a single “source of truth” for everyone authorized to view data in the online network, according to Shegewi.

“Blockchain paves the way for interoperability to happen at some point. It’s better distributed. It’s more decentralized. It’s more permanent, more transparent, more accessible,” Shegewi said.

But that won’t happen overnight, especially in a highly regulated industry that’s necessarily cautious about how it handles sensitive patient data.

“In terms of blockchain being widely adopted as a core technology in healthcare, that’s going to be a much longer time line – maybe well beyond five to seven years in terms of being central to clinical workflows,” Shegewi said.

Cloud adoption is driving blockchain interest

“I think everyone’s enthusiastic about blockchain. Adoption is not a technical issue. It’s getting the foundations in place because this is a highly regulated industry,” said John Sculley, chief marketing officer of Massachusetts-based start-up RxAdvance, a pharmacy benefit management (PBM) cloud service.

The PBM and specialy drug industry is an $840 billion marketplace, Sculley said, yet it’s largely using the same technology on which it was built 35 years ago. “It’s still mainframes, like AS400s; it’s still green screen command line Cobol-programming,” he said.

While RxAdvance is aimed at streamlining the adjudication process for reimbursements between pharma companies, healthcare plans and insurers, it is not currently based on blockchain; Sculley, however, believes the distributed ledger technology will be foundational within five years.

“We’re not deploying it now because there are so many regulatory issues,” said Sculley, the former CEO of both Apple and Pepsi-Cola. “So, that’s not the low-hanging fruit for us. But we do understand it will eventually be mainstream.”

Blockchain’s ability to create an unbroken chain of data entries from point of origin to transaction completion, and secure that data through cryptography, offers a “huge advantage for privacy,” Sculley added. And “it’s obviously more efficient.

“Building more and more systems in healthcare that will be cloud based is another reason why blockchain will make sense,” Sculley said, referring to the online, peer-to-peer architecture on which blockchain exists.

Big tech players, such as Amazon, Apple, Google, IBM, and Microsoft — even retail giants like Walmart — are aggresively staking a claim in healthcare and in many cases how blockchain might be applied.

Smart contracts can automate manual processes

Beyond solving interoperability issues, blockchain could unleash value from today’s stagnant, siloed healthcare data repositories by serving as smart contracts – scripts that self-execute based on pre-determined rules.

For example, if a patient were to fill out paperwork in one doctor’s office and then, a few months later, goes to a different physician, a smart contract could automate the transfer of patient data based on pre-set rules the patient could control.

“One big pain point for providers and payers is preauthorization and availability checks – running processes to ensure a patient is eligible for a care option or treatment or intervention,” Shegewi said. Following pre-determined rules of approval, smart contracts could check a patient’s record to automate that process.

A blockchain-based smart contract could also automate payment for a treatment once a healthcare provider, patient and insurer all agree treatment has been done.

Having a transparent platform using a standard data model would also address the patient information blocking that sometimes occurs between EHR systems.

Since the enactment of the HITECH Act of 2009, which required the industry to adopt EHRs, data sharing between disparate vendor platforms, geographically dispersed facilities and unassociated medical institutions has improved; but data transparency has not. EHR vendors still use proprietary protocols to corner their respective markets, meaning not all data is shared equally. In fact, some vendors have been accused of working to ensure data can’t be shared easily.

“The industry is in a better place in terms of openness and wanting to exchange information and data,” Shegewi said. “Still, there is some information blocking if they can get away with it.”

Additionally, blockchain would give patients more control over their own health information, something proprietary systems stifle.

Under current federal guidelines for Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement, U.S. healthcare providers are rewarded for meeting performance goals, “while the most important influencers of care (i.e., patients and their families) are largely left out of the data equation,” IDC said.

Patients could see another advantage: Because blockchain can create cryptocurrencies, patients could get digital tokens as an incentive to share data.

Rewards for sharing healthcare data

Among those looking seriously as blockchain now is the Mayo Clinic and London-based start-up Medicalchain; both are working together to develop a variety of services in the future.

Medicalchain created a blockchain-based EHR ledger that can be used by patients, healthcare providers and insurance companies to exchange EHR information; the first application for its platform was a telemedicine service called MyClinic.com, which allows patients to consult healthcare providers remotely. The platform also allows them to share their anonymized medical data with researchers, and in return to get Medicalchain’s cryptocurrency: MedTokens.

Medicalchain

MyClinic.com allows patients to consult healthcare providers remotely, share anonymized medical data with researchers and get MedTokens for doing so.

Mayo Clinic, which has three main campuses and more than 70 smaller hospitals, is not currently looking for ways to use blockchain to secure EHRs; It’s working with Epic Systems, one of the top five EHR providers, to roll out a single, integrated health record and billing system — a monumental task in and of itself.

“We will explore various potential benefits of blockchain technology in healthcare – to bring efficiencies and strengthen security in data transactions. The agreement [with Medicalchain] has just recently been signed, so the explorations are in very early stages,” a Mayo spokesperson said via email.

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kaihatespeople · 6 years

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I add to this when I’m sad lul

“There are memories that time does not erase... Forever does not make loss forgettable, only bearable.” ― Cassandra Clare, City of Heavenly Fire

I don’t even really know where to begin, coherent thoughts are not what I have anymore, so let’s just write and see what I come up with.

Memories are a fickle thing. I’ve always considered myself as a somewhat “smart” person, I guess that’s relative but you know, writing this now I feel stupid, the fact that I have to constantly correct myself or add important parts I’ve somehow missed frustrates me, I guess it happens when you attempt to write down the incoherent ramblings of a madman.

This post is a work in progress, an autobiography of an irrelevant person that’s purpose is to try and provide some insight into why I made the decision I did. I don’t know if I’ll ever actually finish this post but I hope that I can before I’m done. It will be long and arduous to both write and read I presume and it might not all be in chronological order, this may not be properly formatted or structured because I’m technologically inept sometimes, sorry in advance.

To my dad Dad and sister Allaniah when you eventually read this if ever, know that I am sorry. You may not understand or even disagree with the way I portray certain events during this but I want you to understand first and foremost, I do not write it to hurt you, I do not write this to cause sadness or pain, I know that those feelings will be inevitable but I ask that you attempt to put those emotions aside and simply try to understand. This is not something I take pleasure in you reading but either way, I have to do this or it wouldn’t get recorded at all and I feel like you deserve something, some kind of understanding if I do choose to act on how I feel every day.

So, let’s begin.

The story of my life. (A biased view)

Schooling.

I was a terrible kid, trying to give context to that seems impossible and we should leave it at that but fuck it, where should I start. I have had anger/behavior issues my whole life, I was kicked out of my first school at the age of 6 because I got kicked out of recorder club, I was taken into a room after throwing a tantrum and decided to climb on top of a metal filing cabinet and drop a bin from it onto the deputy headteachers head. I guess that’s where it all really started, after that, I was homeschooled, thrown around different centers for a bit until I ended up at Yeading junior school.

In year 3 I used to get annoyed easily, I remember being in Dr. Sydneys class and whenever I would get annoyed, I would turn my chair to the left or right and read a book from the bookshelf that was right behind me, that continued until one day, she came up to me when I was reading a book and told me that if I put more effort and focus on the class, she would invite me to the gifted and talented after school club, I did so and I was invited and attended until it stopped in year 4.

Year 4-6 of school were a blur really, I never really remember being in class albeit only with teachers I enjoyed listening to, Mr. Griff, for instance, was a man that everyone saw as mean, moody, grumpy whatever, but he saw something in me that I can’t explain and I think he was one of the first people I’d ever respected truly. I can’t remember the name of my class teacher in year 4-5, she was a really pretty Arab woman, young, everyone enjoyed having her as our teacher, but it was at that time that a few different fucked up memories come to mind.

I remember when one of our classmates died in a fire, Miriam was her name, I still picture her face in my head when I think about that name because I picture the memorial card clear as day, I remember walking into class and there were tables set up with Lego and me not really understanding what had happened but I made a roller coaster out of it. Apparently the fire was caused by an electrical malfunction and they found her/her brothers shoes/bodies at the back door, apparently having tried to escape, such a fucking sad thought now that I process it, I didn’t really understand when I was a kid, but fuck me thinking about it now makes me sick.

It got to the point where I wouldn’t really go to any lesson, I would give my Mum shit almost every single day in an attempt to not go to school, this is where the depression for her started but we’ll get into that later. I had the police called multiple times because I’d sit in the arts and craft cupboard and decide to walk around the school with a stick etc, sometimes I’d just sit in the library and read, used to be my favorite thing to do (Probably why I ended up having the reading age of an 18-year-old at the age of 9/10). I remember taking an exam in the library because I refused to do it anywhere else and bringing in a pack of 5 Cadbury fudge bars and no one saying anything to the weird kid who sat in the corner doing an exam eating chocolate. What a weird thing to remember.

At some point during this time frame, I was having pretty big issues at home, I was an extremely cantankerous kid, I refused to do anything, I refused to go to school I refused to listen to my mum and I used to get hit for it. Hit pretty bad, I remember there were times where my mum would tell my dad what I’ve been like that day and he would hit me so hard, there was a time where I was on top of the bunk bed and he grabbed a metal drawer for a shelf and tried to hit my legs with it because I was standing up backed up against the wall. My mum swung a buzz lightyear toy at my head and cracked it open. There was a lot of shit that happened but there’s no point delving any deeper, let’s just leave it as I got hit, a lot, probably deservedly.

Around the same time, I was put into care after another altercation with my mum, during which she tried to kick me out of her room after I had fallen to the carpet, resulting in a carpet burn on my face. I remember going to my teachers class, she asked me how did that happen and I replied oh it was my mum like it was the most normal thing in the world. Within a few hours, I was sat in front of the Mrs. Jones the headteacher and a social worker who was asking me a bunch of different questions about the incident and stuff, she took me to the social services center near Hillingdon hospital where they recorded my weight and all that jazz, I remember when my mum came to the center and the look of disgust she gave me was something I’ll never forget. I couldn’t really look at her because I knew that I’d fucked up somehow. I was sent to a shared house with other kids in West Drayton.

I remember sitting in that room and thinking I don’t want to be here anymore, enough was enough time to get over it. I took a bus back to Hayes and knocked on the front door of my house, my mum answered and I walked in like nothing happened, we talked for a bit in the kitchen before I went back to the home and told them I wanted to go back to my mum now. It took a while but I did eventually, I remember stealing their milkshake before I went too, I’m pretty sure it was banana.

Continuing from the depression point earlier, I know it was at this point that my mum started to become depressed, depressed with my behavior, depressed at the child I had become. She couldn’t work or do anything because she’d receive a call almost daily from my school requesting her to come in and collect me or something along those lines. It didn’t help that I used to love being at home, I would intentionally try to get sent home not knowing the profound effect it was having on her and her mental state. I want whoever reads this to know that I blame myself. I blame myself for her depression, I understand I was a kid and that sometimes kids are hard but I was something else and I will blame myself for as long I live, nothing anyone says to me will ever change that and I would never want to forget that it was my fault, it fuels me sometimes, it gives me anger when there’s nothing in me and sometimes I need it, I need to feel hurt, I need to feel angry.

During that whole time at Yeading Junior School, every time I was angry or every time I caused issues, Mrs. Jones never once permanently excluded me. That’s something I still think about to this day, no matter how bad I got she never did, she always saw something more in me and I think she believed I could be better. I remember riding home from the gym once a few months after Mum died and thinking about Mrs. Jones, I called the school randomly and spoke to her briefly, I told her that I was thankful, thankful for everything she had ever done for me, thankful that she stuck her neck out for me and kept me there, kept me learning. I will have the utmost respect for that woman until the day I die and I hope she remains healthy and well for a long time.

After leaving Yeading it was time for high school, I think that’s the point I really became something else. I started attending Barnhill community high and I was permanently excluded within three? weeks due to a stack of reports inches high. My mum was told that I should never have been allowed to attend a mainstream school and that there was nothing they could do for me.

I have a few memories that stand out from Barnhill in the short duration I was there, most notably the Miss Dossou incident. Miss Dossou was my French teacher who seemed to have a problem with me for what I presumed to be no reason, looking back I can almost guarantee it was because I was the “Class clown” and constantly messed around/disrupted the classroom, there was one incident in particular however that was the catalyst for all to come. One day Miss Dossou decided that I should move seat because someone else at my table was talking, I was being punished for SOMEONE ELSE TALKING? I decided to change seats but not without making an offhanded comment that went something like “At least it doesn’t look like I was hit in the face with a frying pan this morning” in an obvious attempt to mock her relatively flat facial features, she didn’t like that one bit, such a stupid series of events orchestrated by the mind of a child that didn’t know any better.

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periodicreviews · 6 years

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Orchestras and Backing Tracks

Last week, at the very last minute I learned that an orchestra would be playing songs from Final Fantasy XV at PAX East in Boston on that upcoming Friday. So I did what any sane person would do. I paid too much for a plane ticket, left work at 12pm and made it into a seat in the auditorium at 8pm. The orchestra was great and not just because I feel obligated to say that due to the amount of money it cost.

But, it reminded me of a post I started to write but never finished about the use of backing tracks during orchestral performances. Everyone uses them, but when do they start to hurt rather than help?

Specifically, this is going to reference the Video Games Live on 5/18/2014 versus 3/23/18, “Star Trek The Ultimate Voyage” 50th Anniversary concert on 1/22/2016, and the Video Game Orchestra performance at PAX East 2018 on 4/6/18.

Video Games Live

After seeing Video Games Live for the first time in May 2014, it started my “obsession” with these concerts featuring music from movies/video games. I had an amazing time at that show, not just because I had wanted to see Video Games Live for quite some time, but also because of the energy of the crowd and the quality of the orchestra which if I remember correctly was the Orlando Philharmonic. The general format of all of these concerts is that the orchestra plays the main theme or a medley of themes while video of gameplay or cutscenes plays along on a screen. After this show I went on to see the Star Trek, Pixar, Pokemon, Final Fantasy, and Zelda themed concerts, but whenever the topic of orchestra concerts would come up, I would always tell people “The others are good, but Video Games Live is the best.”

3 years passed and I’d sufficiently hyped myself up for a repeat of the same level of greatness for the 2018 show. But unfortunately, it fell very short. When the orchestra walked on stage, I could immediately tell there was a problem. The stage wasn’t filled with a full orchestra like last time and there were probably on 20-25 players. The number of players isn’t necessarily the issue, but the fact that it was different got me wondering what had happened. Later on, Tommy Tallarico, the guy who runs it all/plays guitar in the shows, introduced them generically as fantastic players from Central Florida. Maybe scheduling prevented them from getting a full orchestra like the Orlando Philharmonic again.

This isn’t necessarily an attack on freelance musicians since I’ve seen orchestras where there has been a great ensemble of non-related musicians. But it did seem like a few of the players weren’t masters of their craft since I swear that I heard a few incorrect notes during the night. Not that that also doesn’t happen in large orchestras, but at least with a larger number of players, it’s harder to hear those mistakes.

Another issue was the fact that on the screens, in between showing gameplay footage, they showed closeups of various instruments being played. At first, I assumed there were multiple cameras but then I realized that the lighting in the videos didn’t match what I was seeing in real life. This footage was from a completely different performance in another time and place. I’m assuming this footage was being used to create the feeling of a larger orchestra, but the result was that it highlighted just how empty the stage in front of me was. I couldn’t shake this feeling that I was being actively deceived and at that point I couldn’t care less about the rest of the performance.

I said the point of this post was about backing tracks, so let me finally get around to discussing that too. I’m aware that just about everyone uses backing tracks. It’s physically impossible for someone like Michael Jackson to dance all night long and *still* have enough lung capacity/composure to hit every note perfectly like you hear it on the album. They’re also helpful when it’s hard to reproduce an array of sound effects and post production effects, such as the intro to Metallica’s “Blackened” which features a recording of a guitar being played in reverse or “One” which features bombs/gunshots. In the case of the Video Games Live 2018 performance, it felt like just another layer of the deception.

Either on accident or on purpose, the backing track was so prominent in the mix, that it was not accurate to call it backing but rather leading. For some tracks, like the Metal Gear Solid 2 theme, the lack of synthesizers on stage required them to be played through the use of the backing track. But for other pieces, it felt like the orchestra on stage wasn’t even playing and that I was just listening to the .mp3 file. It felt like they were playing this backing track so loud to make up for the lack of musicians on stage. At that point, what honestly is the point of seeing the orchestra live? I can listen to the mp3 file any time I want to, but I’m paying extra money to experience it played live.

It wasn’t all terrible though. The truly standout moment of the night was the accordion player they brought on stage to play various covers, seemingly from memory. It felt like I was seeing something original and not being deceived at all. He also took requests from the fans to play something from Suidoken which had the most requests on the Facebook event page.

I want to note as a disclaimer that I attended this with a group of friends and everyone else seemed to thoroughly enjoy the experience, since they were all seeing it for the first time. The guy in the row behind me seemed to have the time of his life as he was screaming the whole night.

Star Trek Orchestra

Video Games Live 2018 wasn’t my first experience with the feeling of being deceived. That honor goes to the “Star Trek: The Ultimate Voyage” concert.

Given my experience at previous concerts, I expected 6 segments with one for each crew. Although there was indeed a segment for each, they were interspersed between themed segments. There was a montage of Klingons, from TOS to Into Darkness. There was a montage of all the alien races, from TOS to Into Darkness. Followed by others about family, risk, love, etc. These themed segments would’ve been fine, but I felt the editing could’ve been better. I wish I had noted a specific example at the time but I’ve since forgotten it.

Another problem with these Star Trek montage segments, was that the music they used was the main theme from each series. So when I saw the theme for Voyager playing with clips from TOS and Enterprise, it felt very jarring. Depending on how you watched the series, you may or may not have sat through the opening theme for every episode. But let's say you did. I would argue that the opening theme for each series has a dual role. To begin with, it's composed with the crew and the direction of the series in mind. Then over time, you began to associate the story of the series with that particular music. It’s hard to associate the music with anything else after watching 50+ episodes.

I do respect that for the segments dedicated to each particular series, they would just let the scene play out in full while the orchestra accompanied it. There was a scene with Janeway on Voyager from the “Year of Hell” and another where Picard played his flute solo. I also respect that for these series specific pieces, they went in chronological order from TOS to Enterprise.

If I were doing this show, I would've kept the chronological ordering. But before showing a scene in full I would use an extended form of the main theme over a montage of clips from that specific series laying out the premise and the characters, perhaps with dialogue from the various characters. At the end of the show, maybe I would do a big montage with clips from all the shows and movies.

Again, I digress because this post is supposed to be about backing tracks and not why I regretted my purchases. When the orchestra first started playing, I thought it sounded weird for some reason but I couldn’t pinpoint what was weird about it. I’d been to Dr. Phillips Center for other orchestras and it sounded different from those other times. At one point, the audio and video stuttered for a second and you could hear the backing track drop out.

I realized that the backing track was making the orchestra sound fuller than it actually was and with the secret revealed, I couldn’t shake the feeling of deception. My assumption was that the backing track was being used because of the massive “bridge” set on stage that limited the number of performers they could fit. Personally, I could care less about set decoration. It looked nice, but wasn’t worth the cost of a degraded performance. And especially for a series that doesn’t require strange synthesizers or sound effects, the backing track felt unnecessary.

FFXV Video Games Orchestra

Before the various fixes to the story/DLC, I had told many people my favorite parts of Final Fantasy XV were the music and the combat (things which had been refined over 10 years, unlike the story which only came together at the end). The soundtrack has some great battle themes and some great emotional themes that really enhance the game as a whole. Previously, a live performance of FFXV songs from Abbey Road Studios had been streamed by Square Enix. They also later performed two piano concerts in Japan which I have yet to hear. I also attended Final Fantasy: A New World and Distant Worlds, each of which played only a single track from the games, “Safe Haven” and “Apocalpysis Noctis”. But I needed more.

The XV concert featured a small 10-15 orchestra with a band composed of keyboard, drums, guitar, bass, synthesizers, and 4 vocalists. The performance was great not just because of the quality of the musicians, but because of the energy of the performers. I enjoyed they all got their chance for a small solo either within the tracks or during the “solo” segment. There was a good energy between the performers as they joked with each other and seemed to be having a great time. The orchestra itself seemed to be nothing formal, but just a collection of various players and that didn’t seem to affect the quality of the performance. That’s not to say Tommy Tallarico didn’t joke around with everyone during Video Games Live, but I think I was just hating it all at that point and no joke could bring it back.

“But Andrew, what about the backing track?” Right. So there indeed was a backing track, most prevalent during the intro to Veiled in Black. I was a little confused why the orchestra just didn’t play this intro part since they were all there just kind of sitting, but I guess they just made that decision for some reason. But besides that, the backing track remained in the background where it should be. The musicians on stage always seemed to be louder in the mix and it allowed them all to shine through. For some tracks like “Home Sweet Home”, it appeared they didn’t play a backing track at all, or it was just so quiet I couldn’t hear it. That track in particular is an emotional piece and the extra layer of originality/uniqueness from the live performance makes it just incredible. The other standout tracks were an original arrangement of Luna’s theme, an original arrangement of Noctis’s theme with vocals, and a super extended Chocobo theme with the incredible leader guitarist.

In conclusion, if I’m paying to see it live, I want the backing track in the background and don’t try to deceive me. You’ll probably get away with it for 90% of the audience, but for that other 10% that has been to enough shows, they’re going to hate it.

#video games live #pax east #star trek #video game orchestra

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