Playwright Sarah Ruhl hit a high point in her career when her play opened on Broadway in 2009. The MacArthur Genius fellow (2006) had a full and satisfying personal life with a loving husband and three kids at home. However, she physically couldnt smile because she was suffering from Bells palsy, a mysterious and sudden paralysis of the face that usually resolves on its own after a few months. But for Sarah, it has lasted for 10 years. She writes about this in her new memoir, Smile: The Story of a Face.

Ruhl got Bells palsy when she just gave birth to healthy twins, named Hope and William, after a difficult pregnancy. When the lactation consultant checked on her the next day, she noticed Ruhl had a droopy eye and told her to look in the mirror.

The whole left side of my face had fallen down and was immovable. And at first I thought it [sic] had a stroke. And a neurologist came in and diagnosed Bell's palsy, Ruhl tells Press Play.

I couldn't say my ps, I drooled when I ate. And I had terrible headache, and loud noises hurt my ear. So my baby's crying especially was painful because the cranial nerve muffled sound. And I think the particular neurologist I had he said, Well, we don't know if you'll get better or not. You probably will. So I think there was something about having an idiopathic disease, where you don't know what the outcome will be, that was alarming.

Scientists know Bells palsy can be caused by a virus and Lyme disease, and it can appear more regularly among women in their third trimester postpartum than other people, Ruhl explains. It supposedly can be genetic too, as her mother and uncle both had it. However, what truly causes the condition remains unclear.

She also has celiac disease, which partly made her Bells palsy last so long. Celiac means you're not digesting your food properly, so I wasn't getting B-12 vitamins, and B-12 vitamins are what cause the nerve to regrow. My nervous system was being starved.

Mind vs. body

She describes at one point: My face was in a deep freeze. And so I decided to live inside my mind instead of my body. I think I wrote off my body as a source of disappointment. And I thought, Well, I'll write plays, I'll think I'll love my family, I'll do all the activities I normally do. And I kind of gave up on my body.

She says the divide grew between her mind and body. Because I couldn't make certain expressions on my face, I just didn't try. I just tried to remain neutral and impassive. And I think for a writer, that was maybe an easier stance than for, say, an actor to retreat into an observer role. It was not until I started writing the book that I started to put the two halves together again.

Raising her babies and learning different communication avenues

Ruhl says that her daughter Anna was old enough to read her intentions, but she was worried that her babies registered only a lopsided grimace when she was trying to show/teach them love and joy.

She didnt have many photos of herself with the babies because she didnt want to be photographed at the time, and when taking videos, she was always behind the camera.

I found that I was smiling with my voice at William and Hope. I was constantly, with the warmth of my voice, showing and giving love. And it's funny that I didn't realize at the time that touch and gesture and the voice is as capable of showing warmth and affection as the faces.

Now as the world is dealing with the coronavirus pandemic and regularly wearing face masks, theyre more communicative with their eyes and (hand) gestures, and being more direct about things they might have tried to signal through facial expressions. However, Ruhl notes that masks bring a loss: It's harder to invite human connection without the whole face.

Finding the best therapy

Ruhl turned to a chiropractor, acupuncture, Zen Buddhism, steroids, and all sorts of approaches to ameliorate Bells palsy.

She says spiritually and physically, her path forward was about slow and small improvements strewn with disappointments and uncertainty. She also immersed herself in daily life and shoved the fact that I wasn't getting better way down deep.

There was a sense that there was something wrong with me for not getting better, or for being an outlier in the pattern of the disease. I listened to my doctors. And I think it took me a really long time to take control of the narrative to be more active in the process of trying to get better and to try to find the right specialist.

Ruhl says she felt objectified in the medical process. It was usually a man looking at me saying, How much of a smile can you give me? And that was literally the language they would use.

Then she went to a physical therapist a woman who once had Bells palsy.

She would do expressions with me. Instead of making me look in the mirror with a forced smile that I couldn't even replicate, she would have me look at her face, and she'd say smile, and we would both smile. Or she would say grimace, and we both grimace. And there's this concept of learn non-use with stroke victims, where if you don't use a muscle for a long time, it forgets how to move. And so I think, with physical therapy, I was able to wake some of that up. ... Physical therapy helped me a great deal.

Life today

Ruhl says this recovery took her about 10 years, and she will never be totally cured.

If you look at me, you'll see that my smile is crooked. And when I speak, it's a little bit lopsided. But just to be able to smile, to communicate that I'm smiling, to blink, to communicate friendliness to strangers, to laugh in public, I mean, all these things that I couldn't do for a very long time, now I can do, which is incredible.

Ruhls current project is Eurydice, for which she wrote the libretto, and its running now through December 16 at New Yorks Metropolitan Opera.

Go here to see the original:
This writer couldn't smile due to Bell's palsy. How she found the right therapy and turned inward - KCRW

That might be a new face in the Coeur d'Alene Regional Chamber of Commerce's President/CEO's office, but it's sure no stranger to the community.

Linda Coppess, 52, is a Coeur d'Alene native. Since joining the chamber last year, she has served as Vice President of Member Relations and interim President/CEO.

Following the resignation of former President/CEO Derrel Hartwick in mid-September, the chamber board of directors reviewed over 100 applications. But Coppess was always at the top of the stack, board chair Rick Rasmussen said.

"Linda was head and shoulders in front of the other finalists," he said.

A Coeur d'Alene High School and University of Washington graduate, Coppess spent 24 years working at Microsoft, a multinational technology corporation.

There, she held various sales, marketing, and product management leadership roles that took her around the world. Like many young people, Coppess had always dreamed of returning home to Coeur d'Alene but struggled to find career opportunities in the area.

"Her Microsoft experience gives her a giant corporation background, but she also understands what it means to grow up in Coeur d'Alene," Rasmussen said. "It's a win-win situation."

Taking the chamber president/CEO role and continuing giving back to her hometown is an honor, Coppess said.

"I feel like I'm living in my own real-life Hallmark movie," she said. "It's amazing for me to be back home and be able to do this. There's nowhere more beautiful than Coeur d'Alene."

While working at Microsoft, Coppess found her "true passion" people and relationship building with executive audiences. By better understanding what people cared about, Coppess would build programs that generated more value. That resulted in a better and more strategic partnership, she said.

Seeing this skill set, former chamber board chair Heidi Rogers convinced Coppess to take the organization's Vice President of Member Relations position in 2020.

"As soon as I met Linda, I knew she had a passion for the Coeur d'Alene community," said Rogers, Northwest Council for Computer Education CEO. "Having someone with deep roots and a bond to our community is such a major asset for the Coeur d'Alene Regional Chamber."

To Coppess, taking the VPMR position was a "direct step" from her previous role at Microsoft and something she had "been praying about for a long time."

"I was searching for something I could do here that would allow me to use my skills and my experience for our community," Coppess said. "I was able to introduce some of my program and operational experience at Microsoft to help our members engage at a deeper level. We are continually looking for new and fresh ways to get our members better connected, noticed, and supported in our community."

The Coeur d'Alene Regional Chamber is a membership organization that works with over 800 businesses and organizations. Rasmussen said its immersion in the community makes it a critical partner in addressing issues like housing, education, and economic development.

"Linda is going to be vital in economic development, helping to address the public policy issues we stand for on education and being a voice for the businesses we represent," Rasmussen said. "Our future is bright with her as president."

Ann Thomas, past chair of the chamber's board and vice president at Mountain West Bank, described Coppess as "member-focused" with a passion for the community that will be "integral in leading our chamber and the region into the next chapter."

"We're at an exciting time in looking at what the chamber can do for our members," Thomas said. "Linda is all about leading change and looking at those things. She will do a fantastic job getting to know our members and creating new benefits for them."

Since taking on the interim President/CEO role, Coppess has spoken with business leaders and others to identify the community's changing needs and rethink how the chamber can serve them.

"We've got a strong and engaged community here, but how do we evolve our offerings to meet the needs of the world today?" she said. "I am really excited to find new ways to appeal to and add more value for our members."

Economic development, increasing the business community's role in shaping responsible growth, and membership development are top goals for the chamber, Coppess said.

"I think it starts with listening more than speaking," she said. "There are so many issues people are concerned with like infrastructure, workforce development, and education. So how can we, as a business community, help drive those conversations and encourage people to come up with solutions and ideas?"

Here is the original post:
Her mind is on business - Coeur d'Alene Press

Optical illusions never cease to amaze the human mind. This is something that one woman on TikTok (@mysweetadeline) has figured out and turned into a following of almost one million people.

Why do we love optical illusions so much? Do we like being fooled? Or are just really attracted to things we cant explain?

According to Scientific American, our deep fascination with them dates back to the ancient Greeks.

SUNY Downstate Medical Center professors of ophthalmology Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen L. Macknik state, It is a fact of neuroscience that everything we experience is a figment of our imagination.

Everything?

In an article in Popular Mechanics, Aude Oliva, a cognitive scientist from MIT, says, The human brain is really tuned to learning new things. Anything that is new and surprising is something we naturally like because it means that we may learn something from it.

Optical illusions certainly fit the bill there.

Popular Science says we should actually be calling them visual illusions.

Optical illusions are tricks of the light, while a visual illusion occurs in your brain.

Your brain is interpreting and heavily editing all the information coming in. A visual illusion is a profound misunderstanding; its a fundamental misrepresentation, says Pascal Wallisch, a neuroscientist and psychology professor at New York University who has studied the viral phenomenon known as The Dress.

Ah yes, The Dress. Who will ever forget that?

Certainly not this TikToker, Adeline, who shares surprising, unusual and weird art on her account.

Perhaps the most popular of these videos posted by Adeline is an optical illusion she refers to as reverse perspective.

Before you watch her TikTok video, take a look at a still image of her creation.

Looks like a hallway with some are hanging on the walls, some ceiling light panels and a wooden floor heading down the hall, right?

Wrong.

Ill post a tutorial soon. ##creative ##fyp ##BetterTogetherChallenge ##illusion ##opticalillusion ##illusionart ##artistsoftiktok ##trick

Stuck in the Middle Tai Verdes

Pretty cool, huh? Heres how you can create this optical illusion yourself.

Reply to @chloestiktok21 I want to see your reverse perspective rooms! ##creative ##arttutorial ##illusion ##opticalillusion ##illusionart ##artistoftiktok

Stuck in the Middle Tai Verdes

Now take a look at this. And when I say take a look at it. Really give it a minute and stare at it.

Its my art in a reverse perspective gallery. ##illusion ##opticalillusion ##illusionart ##artistoftiktok ##creative ##trick ##mindblown ##reverseperspective

CRAFT OFEKNIV

Think thats crazy. You aint seen nothing yet.

I love this stuff! ##illusion ##opticalillusion ##ASOSChaoticToCalm ##illusionart ##artistoftiktok ##creative ##trick ##fyp

Stuck in the Middle Tai Verdes

Brain does not compute.

By the way, that image at the top of the page? Its not a GIF. Your mind just thinks that the squiggles are moving.

Read more:
TikToker Blows Millions Of Minds With Optical Illusions And Tutorial Videos - BroBible

Everybodys entitled to a little privacy. Character development in drama is similar to a growing friendshipa process of gradual divulgence. The puzzle of someones bearing and outward presentation gives way to the collection of secrets and fears and family history that make upand, over time, help to explainthat person. Still, the most interesting people, onstage and in our lives, hold on to a whiff of mystery. Theres something alien and ineffable about them that cant be reduced to mere facts, or be rationalized by psychology. Call it soul.

Lynn Nottages new play, Clydes, directed by Kate Whoriskey (at the Helen Hayes), about the staff of a run-down sandwich joint at a truck stop, takes a stark either-or stance regarding the lives of its characters. They spill their guts without much prompting, and, in the spilling, court intimacyor, in the frustrating case of the title character, give nothing at all. Both approaches render surfaces rather than spirit.

Clyde (Uzo Aduba) is the badass, shit-talking, intermittently horny, sometimes violent proprietor of the roadside shop. She wears formfitting clothes that highlight her curves and pedestal her dcolletage. Sex has something to do with her powerthe passes she makes at her employees register as vague threats. She always wants the sandwiches to come out faster, and she has no patience for the culinary ambition thats growing in the kitchen under her nose. She wants the basics, nothing more. Sometimes she shows up with odd gifts that might or might not be ill-gotten, the kind of stuff that euphemistically falls off the back of a trucksome olive oil from Central Europe, an inexplicable mess of wilted chard, a plastic bag full of sea bass in greenish liquid.

The fish smells rank, somebody says, to which Clyde replies, You know my policy. If it aint brown or gray, it can be fried. Fire up the skillet. A free beer for anybody who gets sick. Thats the kind of place this is.

Clyde is an ex-convict, and so are the people who work for her, a fact that she hangs over their heads like rain in a cloud at every opportunitynobody else is going to hire them, so theyd better submit to her whims, however brutal. Tish (Kara Young, who spins great performances out of straw in every show I see her in) is a single mom saddled by a trifling, untrustworthy co-parent. Rafael (Reza Salazar) fumblingly pines for her. Jason (Edmund Donovan) is the new guy, initially quiet and sullen, marked up with white-supremacist tattoos. Theyre all under the thrall of the sagelike Montrellous (Ron Cephas Jones), a kind of sandwich guru, who wants to jazz up the place with new recipes and more tender attention to ingredients. He leads the group in sessions of visualization and conjecturewhat kind of sandwich can your mind conjure up?

Often, the sessions lead to bouts of confessionall the employees give up the goods on why they did time, even, eventually, Jason. This is supposed to deepen the bonds among them, and, perhaps, to offer a well of complexity not often granted to working-class people chewed up by the system and given a harsh set of choices: eat shit, starve, or go back in. But the life stories come between slapstick riffs on sandwich-making and kitchen etiquettea bunch of well-performed gagsand as a result the play has trouble finding its tone. Its hard to figure out how seriously to take the putatively tough moments in Clydes, or what to do with the biographies were offered. (Clydes own answer to anybody elses suffering is to dismiss it. I dont do pity, she says.) The lighting, by Christopher Akerlind, tries to indicate emotionwhen Montrellous is rhapsodizing, he gets a fuchsia glowbut nothing that any character says steers the play in a new direction. Sad tales are divots for us to navigate between laughs.

Much of the problem lies with Clyde herself. In an early private moment, Clyde and Montrellouswho have a history that remains shrouded throughout the playare arguing about the future of the shop. Montrellous lets slip that Clyde has fallen into gambling debt, and that the shop is somehow mixed up in the trouble. Thats the only thing we ever really learnor, at least, think we learnabout Clyde. She rings a bell when new orders come in, appearing at the window to the kitchen all of a sudden, like a poltergeist at the climax of a horror flick. She rages through the kitchen, spewing just enough bile to get the objects of her tyranny complaining again, but shes never subjected to the kind of scrutiny that makes watching a character worthwhile.

Uzo Aduba is one of my favorite televisual performers of recent yearsas Suzanne (Crazy Eyes) Warren in Netflixs Orange Is the New Black, and as the therapist Brooke Taylor in the new season of HBOs In Treatmentlargely because she holds within her characters, and gradually reveals, many layers of tenderness and brokenness, irrationality and explosive pain. At her best, her eyes, deep with feeling, are like bowls left out in the rain, steadily filling up with the liquid stuff of personality. Here, those skills are tossed aside. Clyde toys with angry fear when her troubles come up, but she never revisits it. Shes like an ungenerous sketch-comedy depiction of a woman we want to meet, whom Aduba could, I think, play well: wrathful and dangerous, yes, but welling up and bubbling over with a pastand some drastic actionto justify it.

Speaking of justification, Trouble in Mindthe 1955 play by Alice Childress, now making its much belated dbut on Broadway (directed by Charles Randolph-Wright for Roundabout Theatre Company, at the American Airlines Theatre)slowly unravels an aging actress named Wiletta (LaChanze), who is reluctantly exposed to an acting approach that asks her to find emotions to support the actions of her character. Her director, Al Manners (Michael Zegen), fancies himself a social and artistic progressive. The play theyre rehearsing, slated for Broadway, is about small-town Black folks who, because they want the right to vote, get threatenedand worseby a gathering lynch mob.

Manners, who is white, thinks the play is on the cutting edge of race relationsat least, as close to that edge as the theatres commercial imperatives will allow. He pokes and prods Wiletta, expressing dissatisfaction with her performance as a mother whose son is in big trouble, asking her to justify her characters decisions, not merely to act them out with rote professionalism. Hes trying to make high art out of a play he doesnt know is offensive trash. The problem is that Wilettas got a real artist inside herI want to be an actress! she says in the middle of a reverieand she learns the new method a bit too well. She begins asking questions that the script, and her director, just cant answer.

Wiletta starts out as a jaded veteran, advising a younger actor to laugh at the directors jokes and tell little lies to pad his rsum. Shes not the only cynical one: her castmate Millie (the very funny Jessica Frances Dukes) is in a wry fury about how poorly shes served by the roles shes made to play. Last show I was in, I wouldnt even tell my relatives, Millie says. All I did was shout Lord, have mercy! for almost two hours every night. Its a representational lament that sounds stale until you realize that the play was written more than sixty-five years ago.

Trouble in Mind is pessimistic about the structures that underpin the entertainment industry, but it is bullish about the possibilities of earnest artistic pursuit. Even a schmuck like Manners can read some Stanislavsky, bring it clumsily into rehearsals, and, unwittingly, spark the beginnings of a revolution.

The rest is here:
The Search for Justification in Clydes and Trouble in Mind - The New Yorker

Modern recommender systems have countless real-world applications and have made astonishing progress thanks to the ever-increasing size of deep neural network models which have grown from Googles 2016 model with 1 billion parameters to Facebooks latest model with 12 trillion parameters. There seems to be no limit to the significant quality boosts delivered by such model scaling, and deep learning practitioners believe the era of 100 trillion parameter systems will arrive sooner than later.

The training of extremely large models that are both memory and computation-intensive is however challenging, even with the support of industrial-scale data centers. In the new paper PERSIA: An Open, Hybrid System Scaling Deep Learning-based Recommenders up to 100 Trillion Parameters, a research team from Kwai Inc., Kuaishou Technology and ETH Zrich proposes PERSIA, an efficient distributed training system that leverages a novel hybrid training algorithm to ensure both training efficiency and accuracy in such recommender models. The team provides theoretical demonstrations and empirical studies to validate the effectiveness of PERSIA on recommender systems of up to 100 trillion parameters.

The team summarizes their studys main contributions as:

The team first proposes a novel sync-async hybrid algorithm, where the embedding module trains in an asynchronous fashion while the dense neural network is updated synchronously. This hybrid algorithm enables hardware efficiency that is comparable with the fully asynchronous mode without sacrificing statistical efficiency.

The team designed PERSIA (parallel recommendation training system with hybrid acceleration) to support the aforementioned hybrid algorithm with two fundamental aspects: 1) the placement of the training workflow over a heterogeneous cluster, and 2) the corresponding training procedure over the hybrid infrastructure. PERSIA features four modules designed to provide efficient autoscaling and support recommender models of up to 100 trillion parameters:

The team evaluated PERSIA on three open-source benchmarks (Taobao-Ad, Avazu-Ad and Criteo-Ad) and the real-world production microvideo recommendation workflow at Kwai. They used two state-of-the-art distributed recommender training systems XDL and PaddlePaddle as their baselines.

The proposed hybrid algorithm achieved much higher throughput compared to all other systems. PERSIA reached nearly linear speedups with significantly higher throughput compared with XDL and PaddlePaddle, and 3.8 higher throughput compared with the fully synchronous algorithm on the Kwai-video benchmark. Moreover, PERSIA demonstrated stable training throughput even when model size increased up to 100 trillion parameters, achieving 2.6 higher throughput than the fully synchronous mode.

Overall, the results show the proposed PERSIA effectively supports the efficient and scalable training of recommender models at a scale of up to 100 trillion parameters. The team hopes their study and insights can benefit both academia and industry.

The code is available on the projects GitHub. The paper PERSIA: An Open, Hybrid System Scaling Deep Learning-based Recommenders up to 100 Trillion Parameters is on arXiv.

Author: Hecate He |Editor: Michael Sarazen

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Kwai, Kuaishou & ETH Zrich Propose PERSIA, a Distributed Training System That Supports Deep Learning-Based Recommenders of up to 100 Trillion...