Right now, during Covid-19, I think is the perfect time to be transparent with our needs, said Lupe Nambo, a licensed marriage and family therapist. We might assume our co-workers know that wed like to talk more frequently, but if you havent communicated your wishes to them, she said, then they arent going to be able to show up in the way you need or expect.

Dont be shy about creating a new pattern for these friendships, Ms. Nelson said. It might feel uncomfortable to say, Hey, I miss you, but she recommends expressing that because we dont know how much longer this pandemic will last. Just knowing you have this connection with cherished co-workers will do so much for you feeling engaged and supported and seen, she said.

If its been a while since youve talked to a favorite acquaintance at work, Ms. Nambo recommends sending a low-stakes text, Slack or email saying, Hey, Im just thinking about you. I hope youre doing all right. Or sending an email that says, Hey, I miss you. I hope youre doing OK. You dont have to overwhelm the other person by organizing a virtual get-together right off the bat, she said. The goal is to just touch base and then see how it goes (and, of course, be mindful of professionalism and company culture and protocols).

If youre looking for more connection with a colleague youve already maintained some communication with, Ms. Nambo recommends coming up with ways you can increase the intimacy of your interactions. This could look like:

Posting photos and updates in an online group.

Sharing interesting or relevant articles youve read.

Chatting in a dedicated Slack channel.

Scheduling lunch dates over Zoom.

Planning a virtual happy hour.

Organizing a socially distanced picnic in the park.

Ms. Nambo suggests keeping workplace-related gossip to a minimum when you speak to one another, as the goal is to unwind and focus on bringing back the friendship you enjoyed so much.

All that said: Be mindful if co-workers are too overwhelmed for extra communication, and try to be receptive to any subtle hints they might give to indicate they dont have the time or mental space to chat.

By switching to remote work, what weve lost is proximity and spontaneity, Ms. Nelson said. And those were two of the drivers that made workplace friendships easier than our nonwork relationships. Therefore we need to be more proactive about maintaining contact with one another. Pick a day when you reach out say, Thursdays and schedule check-ins with one or two co-workers. Treat it like an appointment.

Even a 15-minute phone call is going to leave you feeling more connected than almost anything else you can schedule into your day, Ms. Nelson said. Chatting on the phone not only gives you a break from draining video calls, but it will leave you both feeling more connected than texting or email.

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How to Connect With the Co-Workers Youre Missing - The New York Times

The following film criticism contains major spoilers for the filmIm Thinking of Ending Thingsas well as references to suicide.

NetflixsIm Thinking of Ending Thingsis without a doubt one of the strangest, most out-there films I have seen in a long while, not just in 2020. I watched the film with a couple of friends, and once the end credits rolled, all we could say to ourselves was,What the fuck?This is a film that can be incredibly frustrating and confusing at times. It is also a movie that will stick with you, and something I will most likely revisit in the future.

Im Thinking of Ending Things, written and directed by Charlie Kaufman (BeingJohnMalkovich,Adaptation,Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) follows the story of an unnamed woman (Jessie Buckley) who travels with her boyfriend Jake (Jesse Plemons) to meet his parents (David Thewlis and Toni Collette) while she contemplates ending her relationship with him.

This is a film that I have been looking forward to for quite a while, given the involvement of Charlie Kaufman. Kaufman is a deep, surrealist writer who explores themes relating to identity crises, mortality, and the meaning of life. The movies he writes demand multiple viewings if one wants to fully understand them and the messages they express. Whether its understanding what it truly means to be John Malkovich, how to get over a breakup with someone you thought was the one, or dissecting Kaufmans mind and what goes through his head, Kaufman is very methodical and intelligent when it comes to his writing, andIm Thinking of Ending Thingsis certainly no exception.

WhileIm Thinking of Ending Thingsmay present itself as a simple road trip story with surrealist elements, it actually tells a story about a man contemplating suicide. Throughout the film, there are several scenes that focus on an unfulfilled, depressed janitor (Guy Boyd); by the end of the film, the audience realizes that the janitor is the most important character in the entire movie.

Im Thinking of Ending Thingsfollows an old, depressed janitor who struggles with suicidal thoughts. To combat it, the janitor fantasizes about what his life could have been like if he had asked out the woman he sees through the window in the opening scene. Events in whichthe janitors physical appearance is uninvolvedare all inside this janitors fantasy, with Jake (the boyfriend) representing the janitors younger self. Everything that happens within this fantasy is a series of hypothetical situations of the janitors life had it not been for his timid nature, a character trait that his mother mentions in a scene where the girlfriend talks to a younger version of the mother. Grasping this twist completely changes how you view the events that occur in the film, especially upon a second viewing.

This fabricated fantasy explains the strange, abstract events that occur throughout the film. The girlfriend possesses multiple namesLucy, Amy, Luciabecause the janitor hasnt really come up with one. Jakesparentsages fluctuate because the janitor is not entirely sure at what point in hislifehe will get the chance to introduce his hypothetical girlfriend. Jake fears the basement because the basement contains everything that symbolizes the janitors failures and grim reality: the janitors uniform in the washing machine and the abandoned paintings labeledJake,which indicate that the janitors past artistic aspirations, now lost forever.

Im Thinking of Ending Thingsis described by some as a horror film, and while I believe there is some truth to that, it is much darker than any conventional horror movie likeThe Conjuring. The sinisterforcein Kaufmans movie isnt a ghost or a crazy murder cult, but something much moresinisterand grounded in reality: the feeling of loneliness and worthlessness. Throughout the movie, the janitor seems incredibly unfulfilled with his life as he lives in solitude. He hates working as a janitor at his school because no one notices all the good deeds he has done, as mentioned by his fantasy self. Instead, he is either ignored or sneered at by students at the school (who, interestingly enough, also appear in his fantasy at the ice cream store). This is all conveyed by the janitor, who, despite not saying much in the movie, managed to break my heart by the end of the film. The only thing that gives the janitor any purpose in life is the arts, which is why elements of musicals, movies, and poems are either incorporated into his fantasy (e.g. music from the musicalOklahoma!) or explicitly referenced (poems by William Wordsworth). The janitor finds fascination with art that people treasure because of its sense of timelessness, something that the janitor wishes he had.

The janitor eventually gives in to his suicidal thoughts. The janitor (not Jake) later encounters the girlfriend who is trying to look for her boyfriend. When the janitor asks what he looks like, the girlfriend says she doesnt really remember his appearance. Instead, she reveals that nothing happened between her and Jake on the night they met, claiming she was made uncomfortable by Jake staring at her. After the girlfriend gives this confession, the janitor/Jake finally comes to terms with himself, which is indicated by the sad smile the janitor gives to the girlfriend before Kaufman transitions to a beautifully choreographed ballet scene.

Through Kaufmans writing, direction, and the janitors performance, we, the audience, understand that no matter how much the janitor fantasizes, he cannot change the reality of his situation, and while a younger man may have done something to change his life, the janitor/Jake is now too old to do such a thing.

The janitor is forced to face his wasted potential, which is symbolized by a ballet sequence that follows the girlfriends confession. More attractive-looking versions of Jake and the girlfriend begin engaging in a ballet, and right when they are about to get married, another dancer, dressed as the janitor, tries to steal the girlfriend. The girlfriend runs away from this janitor dancer, causing the dual Jakes to fight one another before the real Jake stabs fantasy Jake to death, ending the janitors imaginary sphere for good. After cleaning the school one last time, he goes back inside his truck, sets the key down, and decides to let himself freeze and die of hypothermia rather than continue to live in his depressing, grim reality.

Movies likeIm Thinking of Ending Thingsare why I love Charlie Kaufman. The movies he writes and directs have relatable messages I enjoy. Admittedly, I was a bit frustrated after watching the film the first time because I simply did not understand what Kaufmans message was. However, I better understoodthe meaning after the second viewing, and I also appreciated it more. Not only do I recommend you watch this film, I recommend you watch it twice. I would give it a 9/10.

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I'm Thinking That I'm Too Stupid to Understand "I'm Thinking of Ending Things" - The Chicago Maroon

If you are a health-conscious person, then chances are that you have a variety of supplements lying in your bathroom cabinets. Dietary supplements have become a commonplace among so many households and not just because they are well-advertised, but because of their immense benefits. Youll bear witness that there are so many nutrients that you dont get from the foods you eat.

While there have been discussions about eating healthy and leading a healthier lifestyle to enjoy and expose yourself to a robust and salubrious life, it could be that your body is not deriving enough nutrients and vitamins from the foods you are eating. This is where dietary supplements come in handy. With that in mind, below are things to keep in mind when buying dietary supplements online.

For those leading an active lifestyle, having a dietary supplement that supplies you with the nutritional requirements to sustain such a busy lifestyle will help you to lead a fulfilled life thats not filled with bouts of exhaustion and fatigue. Peter Tzemis from CPOE.org says that youll need to go through a handful of reviews and customer testimonials to know just what dietary supplements are right for you or will help to resolve most if not all your dietary needs. With a plethora of supplements to choose from, this can prove to be quite an overwhelming undertaking.

Today, you have dietary supplements from so many manufacturers, but unfortunately, not all will contain ingredients that are best suited to your specific health needs. Additionally, advancements in technology have made a significant impact on the production processes. You now have synthetic ingredients that could have dire effects on your overall health, and on the other hand, there are dietary supplements that contain naturally sourced ingredients. Its up to you to choose a supplement that contains the right ingredients. While in the same vein, avoid dietary supplements with an extra dose of ingredients as it could cause you unwanted side effects.

One thing to note is that some dietary supplements contain active ingredients that could exacerbate your underlying medical conditions. Among the things you can do to avoid this is to check in with your doctor or nutritionist before investing in just any dietary supplements. Some supplements might also put you at a greater risk of serious health repercussions, especially in the case of pregnant or nursing mothers, or those with chronic health conditions such as heart diseases, hypertension, or diabetes.

Its for this reason that youll want to consult with your physician before taking any dietary supplement as theyll dig deeper into your medical history to advise you appropriately on the best dietary supplements to take. Those taking other prescription drugs also need to be extra cautious when combining them with supplements. You just dont know of the interaction effects this could have on your system.

Now, not every dietary supplement brand you see out there will guarantee quality. Additionally, some labels are just too good to be true. Always ensure that your supplements are FDA approved. Going through online reviews could help in determining the best dietary supplements as there will be testimonials from customers whove interacted with these supplements on a personal level. Go for reputable brands that have been in business for long and companies that are after your best interests.

There are so many misconceptions surrounding the dietary supplement industry. Some of them have deep roots in traditional beliefs, while some are just unfounded and ungrounded myths. The only way you can reap the full benefits of dietary supplements is to have a resolute mind and goals into what you want to achieve. This includes a healthier life from making sound judgments. A lot has been said and done concerning dietary supplements, and it is up to you to decide what works for you and what doesnt. Among the most common misconceptions about dietary supplements include:

With that in mind, you have all that you need to make sound decisions into what you need and what works for you best. Dietary supplements work, and thats for a fact. However, youll need to be cautious about the choices you make as some could cause you unwanted side effects.

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Things To Keep In Mind When Buying Dietary Supplements Online - Blog - The Island Now

A new research paper, An Image Is Worth 1616 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale, has the machine learning community both excited and curious. With Transformer architectures now being extended to the computer vision (CV) field, the paper suggests the direct application of Transformers to image recognition can outperform even the best convolutional neural networks when scaled appropriately. Unlike prior works using self-attention in CV, the scalable design does not introduce any image-specific inductive biases into the architecture.

But just whose potential breakthrough is this? The paper is currently under double-blind review for the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2021, and thus the authors names and institutions are masked. The paper was spotted on the ICLR 2021 research repository OpenReview, and social media ML sleuths quickly went to work.

The paper were discussing here uses a JFT- 300M dataset that is not available to the public, only to Google, noted Yannic Kilcher, host of a popular eponymous YouTube channel. (JFT-300M is an internal dataset Google built to improve computer vision algorithms, that includes 300M images labelled with 18291 categories.) Kilcher identified numerous other clues suggesting the paper comes from Google, as part of a spirited and sarcastic rant against vulnerabilities and shortcomings in the double-blind review process.

Although reviewers comments remain anonymous, that doesnt mean the double-blind peer review process is sabotage-free. Some in the community have previously voiced concerns that the positive public comments a paper attracts on social media can give a paper an advantage during the review. Others are concerned that apparent hints indicating a paper is from a renowned institution could bias reviewers decisions.

The papers premise already has many respected AI practitioners predicting it could bring revolutionary changes to the CV field, where convolutional architectures are the go-to for difficult tasks. The paper asserts this reliance on CNNs is not necessary and a pure transformer can perform very well on image classification tasks when applied directly to sequences of image patches.

Google DeepMind Research Scientist Oriol Vinyals tweeted his take on the paper as farewell convolutions : ), with OpenAI Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever responding that the new research offers an anonymous mathematical proof for attention is all you need.

Both researchers are very familiar with Transformer architectures, which enabled DeepMinds AlphaStar bot to defeat pro StarCraft players and OpenAIs 175 billion parameter language model GPT-3 to deliver SOTA performance in NLP tasks.

Sutskevers approval of the paper is noteworthy as he was one of the first to show the potential of CNNs in CV. In 2012, as a graduate student at the University of Toronto, Sutskever worked with AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton and first author Alex Krizhevsky on the milestone paper ImageNet Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks.

Tesla Director of AI Andrej Karpathy is also excited about the new paper. His PhD at the Stanford Vision Lab focused on the intersection of convolutional/recurrent neural networks and CV and NLP applications, and his advisor at Stanford was ImageNet creator Professor Fei-Fei Li. Karpathy said the paper takes further steps towards deprecating ConvNets with Transformers. Loving the increasing convergence of Vision/ NLP and the much more efficient/ flexible class of architectures.

As Synced previously reported, the use of Transformers has already been explored in the CV field. But classic ResNet-like architectures remain dominant in large-scale tasks such as image recognition. In May, Facebook AI released Detection Transformers (DETR) for object detection and panoptic segmentation tasks. DETR can directly predict the final set of detections by combining a common CNN with a Transformer architecture. In June, OpenAI showed that large Transformer-based language models trained on pixel sequences can generate coherent images without the use of labels.

While the research community will have to wait for official confirmation of the papers source, that delay is unlikely to diminish enthusiasm surrounding the significant technical insights and potential breakthroughs for the use of Transformer architectures in the expanding CV field.

The paper An Image Is Worth 1616 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale is available on OpenReview.

Reporter: Fangyu Cai | Editor: Michael Sarazen

Synced Report |A Survey of Chinas Artificial Intelligence Solutions in Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic 87 Case Studies from 700+ AI Vendors

This report offers a look at how China has leveraged artificial intelligence technologies in the battle against COVID-19. It is also available onAmazon Kindle.Along with this report, we also introduced adatabasecovering additional 1428 artificial intelligence solutions from 12 pandemic scenarios.

Clickhereto find more reports from us.

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Farewell Convolutions ML Community Applauds Anonymous ICLR 2021 Paper That Uses Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale - Synced

by Liz Covey, LMHC

Question: I think this year might kill me. What can I do to survive the seemingly never-ending onslaught of bad news?

Dear Reader,

Water imagery abounds in therapy practice these days.

I cant seem to keep my head above water, says one client. I feel like Im drowning with work plus having the kids home from school says another. A third says, I feel like a tsunami came and swept away everything that I genuinely enjoyed about my life.

So when I was reflecting on your succinct and timely question, Reader, something a client said recently came instantly to mind, giving me direction for how to respond. He said: All I can do lately is try to stay afloat.

Due to the catastrophic events of this year, my practice has utterly changed. It has become completely immersed in grief, a thing that is often present in this field, though not completely dominant like it is right now. During times of grief, we dwell for a while in the realm of deep, existential truths, and we work more directly with symbol and metaphor. These days that means talking a lot about deep and dangerous waters.

In normal times, therapy related to grief is based on the theory that help comes more easily from a person who is not experiencing the loss, and who can assist the sufferer back to the safe shore of a regulated, and increasingly pleasant life. The grieving person regains a small bit of that safe shore a little at a time, until eventually there is once again a sense of normalcy.

But now this grief is felt by everyone, and in a sweeping and sustained way. As you say, Reader, there is an onslaught of bad news, or in keeping with this metaphor, I might say a flood. One that seems to get worse with every passing week. This leaves therapists everywhere asking: how can we help our clients when there is no identified safe shore? When we too are in this grievous mess? And when there is no end in sight?

No one ever told me that grief would feel so much like fear, wrote C.S. Lewis in A Grief Observed, a memoir about the death of his wife. I think of this quote often these days, because what we are experiencing now is mountainous, collective grief, and not the kind that tends to make us weepy. Rather, as Lewis describes in detail, so much of grief feels like being rattled and is devastating. Sure, there is sadness. But there is also abundant fear.

Owing to the magnitude of everything fear-inducing that is afoot today with a pandemic, an environmental disaster, a long-overdue racial justice movement, and economic chaos, I have decided to follow the metaphor through, and to see our plight in this time to be a literal encounter with dangerous, choppy waters at the brink of disaster. Why? Because this is how I experience people are living it.

But Ive grown tired of making lists detailing how to cope with the tough emotions during these legitimately terrifying times. Fortified by the bad-assery of having been a frontline emotional worker through the whole of this thing (and were still in the beginning, I suspect), I choose to run headlong into the dangerous waters, armed with some survival skills. It seems clear to me that our task these days is not to thrive, exactly, but only to prevent ourselves from drowning in the hellishness in our midst.

All I can do lately is try to stay afloat. Amen to that.

As I turned toward resources specific to water safety, I was surprised to find a considerable amount of common ground with counseling psychology. Survival guides for drowning prevention, in fact, could almost read as therapy manuals on grief. But dont take my word for it.

In his book 100 Deadly Skills, retired Navy SEAL Clint Emerson wrote about how to prevent drowning by using some of the following guidelines. Heres the advice I ran across from him, as well as the Red Cross and U.S. Centers for Disease Control, that is pertinent to water safety and which seems to sufficiently mirror our mental health needs in order to survive this doozy of a year:

Go Prepared, and Dont Go Alone. Make sure you have all of your needed supplies and equipment such as life jacketslifejackets and flares (or more appropriately, face masks and hand sanitizer). Meeting practical needs is essential. It is also important to have a swim buddy, so that you have someone to count on if the conditions become rough.

Dont Panic. A key to surviving a risky water encounter is to avoid flailing about, which leads to hyperventilation, a key factor in drowning deaths. Some survival tips to avoid hyperventilation are to focus on your breath and cue your rational mind to the importance of remaining calm and in the present moment. If this is difficult, try calming your body: tread water or take rhythmic, slow and strong swimming strokes. You might also try floating on your back to initiate relaxation.

Its All About the Breath, and Buoyancy. Emerson notes that buoyancy is the key thing to strive for when one is stranded in open water. To achieve this, he recommends filling your lungs to make floating easier. Keeping yourself oxygenated in a regulated way is advised.

Avoid Alcohol. Swimmers need to minimize or eliminate anything that impairs judgment for what might be needed in times of duress.

Dont Get Complacent. Remember that water poses danger, so we do well to remain awake to our environment, to current conditions, and to our needs. Use good judgment, and skew on the side of low-risk activity.

The approach I am advocating to get through this godawful year, Reader, is one of mere survival. We do well in times of abject crisis to aim for what is possible, and for what we can realistically achieve. Today that is to keep our heads above the water line. We can aim for more as the tides turn, and the pressure of today is relieved in the weeks or months to come.

To draw on my clients words in closing is to point out that he mentioned floating, an activity that I saw recommended in many of these guides as a tip for both survival and for emotional stability in a catastrophic event.

Float, dont swim, the guides advise. It reserves energy and induces calm.

Sounds about right to me.

Counselors Roy Fisher and Liz Covey answer readers questions for the South Seattle Emeralds Ask a Therapist. Have a question about a relationship? Wondering about the struggles of being a parent? Others likely have the same questions and Covey and Fisher bring years of professional experience to provide their insights.

If you have a question, please click here and let us know. We will select two questions each month to answer. The form requires no email address or identification and is completely anonymous. If you are in crisis or in immediate need of care, please contact Crisis Connections at 1-866-427-4747.

Featured Image: Walking The Ledge Part IV by StarMama is licensed under CC BY 2.0. View a copy of this license here.

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Ask a Therapist: How Not to Drown in the Deluge of the Negativity That Is 2020 - southseattleemerald.com