In terms of intangibles, is there anyone in the NHL more underrated than Andrew Shaw? Although the Blackhawks boast 10 players who were selected to represent their countries in Sochi, would the Blackhawks be where they are without their 22-year-old unsung hero? While Shaw's statistical achievements may be light, the intangibles of Andrew Shaw are attributes that are difficult to teach, or manufacture for that matter.
Shaw has made his presence known since his NHL debut in 2012, fighting Dan Carcillo and notching his first career NHL goal against the Philadelphia Flyers. Much to Chicago's delight, Shaw's blue collared performance was a display of things to come. Since coming up an assist short of a Gordie Howe hat trick in his first game, Shaw has gone on to score 35 goals and 29 assists through 143 NHL games. Although Shaw does not possess the offensive prowess of teammates Patrick Kane and Patrick Sharp, it's his toughness that sets him apart.
After taking a puck to the face in Game 6 of last season's Stanley Cup Finals, Shaw earned the respect of the hockey world by returning to the game after being stitched up. While helping the Blackhawks secure their 2nd championship in four years, Shaw played and celebrated with a battle wound on his face that stood out like a third ear. His toughness, however, is not defined alone in playing through injury. Since joining the Blackhawks three seasons ago, only Brandon Bollig has spent more time in the penalty box than Shaw with the next closest teammate (Bryan Bickell) trailing Shaw's 133 penalty minutes by 48 minutes.
The Blackhawks have counted on and thrived on Shaw's toughness. The player who describes himself as "ratty" has adopted a reputation in the league, as well as various media outlets, as an agitator who can actually play.
Andrew Shaw wears a black bracelet with the writing, Ironworkers Local 721, as a reminder of his roots. The tribute to a local labor union accurately depicts Shaw's working man's mentality. "He always supports me, so I wanted to support him because growing up in a small town, not a lot of people make it out and I'm representing them and my family," Shaw said of his best friend, Shannon Kirby.
It's Shaw's work ethic, which was described by head coach Joel Quenneville as a "key attribute," that not only landed the undersized Shaw in the NHL, but rewarded him with a new 2-year-deal worth $4 million as well. "Andrew has proven his ability to play a a prominent role on our team, and we look forward to watching him continue to grow as a player," said Blackhawks GM Stan Bowman.
While no one will mistake Shaw for the type of player that teammate Patrick Kane is, Shaw's rise to relevancy after going undrafted for two straight seasons is unmistakably the result of sweat and struggle.
Despite only being able to legally drink alcohol for a year and a half now, Shaw is already battle tested. In only his third season in the NHL, the Belleville, Ontario native has seen some things – most notably, what it takes to win a Stanley Cup. With such a small sample size in years in the league, Shaw overwhelmingly makes up for that with what he's been a part of to this point.
If Shaw can stay healthy, he is on pace to become even more of a commodity than he already is. With playoff experience and the tutelage of some of the games best players and head coach, Andrew Shaw is no doubt developing into a player that already makes his $2 million-a-year cap hit an absolute bargain – even if he only has two points in his last 10 games. After all, intangibles aren't necessarily measured on the stat sheet.


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SS-56, a novel cellular target of autoantibody responses in Sjögren syndrome and systemic lupus erythematosus
Odile Billaut-Mulot, … , André Capron, George M. Bahr
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Certain autoimmune disorders, including Sjögren syndrome (SS) and systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), are characterized by autoantibodies against the Ro/SSA and La/SSB cellular antigens. Although the implication of these autoantibodies in disease pathogenesis is still unclear, it is believed that the aberrant responses against autoantigens may extend to other proteins that are not yet well defined. In an attempt to analyze the regulated gene expression in lymphocytes by an HIV-suppressive immunomodulator, we have identified and cloned a novel gene encoding a 56-kDa protein, named SS-56, which is structurally related to the 52-kDa Ro/SSA antigen. The new protein showed primarily perinuclear cytoplasmic localization, and recombinant SS-56 was found to react in ELISA with sera from most patients with SS or SLE. Western blot analysis confirmed the autoantigenic nature of native SS-56 in extracts from HeLa cells. Interestingly, the incidence of antibodies to SS-56 was associated with visceral complications in SLE, and roughly half of the 17 SS or SLE patients with no detectable antibodies to SSA and SSB antigens presented measurable antibodies against recombinant SS-56. Thus, SS-56 represents a new member of the SS family of autoantigens and could become an additional and important diagnostic marker for SS and SLE.
Odile Billaut-Mulot, Cécile Cocude, Vincent Kolesnitchenko, Marie-José Truong, Edward K.L. Chan, Eric Hachula, Xavier de la Tribonnière, André Capron, George M. Bahr
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Northern blot analysis of SS-56 mRNA expression in normal human tissues. Multiple tissue blot (lane 1, spleen; lane 2, lymph node; lane 3, thymus; lane 4, peripheral blood leukocyte; lane 5, bone marrow; lane 6, fetal liver) was hybridized with specific oligonucleotides for SS-56 (top) or with β-actin cDNA (bottom) as described in Methods.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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Home/Culture and Society/Arts/Theater/Cabaret Review (NYC): 'Tis the Season with Vickie and Nickie
Vickie and Nickie get the balance between spoof and sincerity just right.
Theater/Cabaret Review (NYC): 'Tis the Season with Vickie and Nickie
Jon Sobel December 7, 2009 Comments Off on Theater/Cabaret Review (NYC): 'Tis the Season with Vickie and Nickie 248 Views
I don't know about you-all, but I started my holiday season off just right with a trip to Don't Tell Mama for Vickie and Nickie's holiday show.
I hadn't been to the legendary cabaret spot for years and was glad to find the place still going strong. A full house turned up for real-life sisters Lisa and Lori Brigantino, who play Vickie and Nickie, two busy Midwestern moms who take to the stage to delight and entertain with humorous banter (abundant), multi-instrumental musical talents (considerable), and big ol' personalities (wickedly twisted, if all in good family-friendly fun).
Straight from "the prison circuit" and the land of lutefisk – Garrison Keillor fans will know what that is – the pair poke good-natured fun at middle-of-the-road American culture while revving up the crowd with perfectly executed vocal harmonies and musicianship (keyboards, guitar, uke, sax…). In this edition they got the balance between spoof and sincerity just right, heavy on the former, belting out Christmas favorites ranging from straight-up takes on "Feliz Navidad" and "Blue Christmas" to Springsteen and Streisand versions of classic carols, supplemented by a couple of punchy original Vickie and Nickie numbers. Amidst the holiday cheer they also worked in hilariously non-jokey versions of "Under Pressure" and that new camp classic, Beyonce's "Single Ladies," which got the audience shouting along in delight. They've discovered, and nailed, the big secret: playing things more or less straight can get more laughs than a lot of horsing around.
Undercurrents of anger and competitiveness make Vickie and Nickie both campier and realer than they'd otherwise seem, while the Brigantino sisters' high-end musical skills allow them to make the act, with its unflagging energy and common-denominator humor, look easy.
'Tis the Season with Vickie and Nickie had two performances last week at Don't Tell Mama. Visit their website for news of upcoming shows, or just hang around the local women's prison till they show up, bewigged and besparkled, spreading good old-fashioned cheer whatever the time of year.
Tags theatre Vickie and Nickie
About Jon Sobel
Jon Sobel is Publisher and Executive Editor of Blogcritics as well as lead editor of the Culture & Society section. As a writer he contributes most often to Culture, where he reviews NYC theater; he also covers interesting music releases in various genres. Through Oren Hope Marketing and Copywriting at http://www.orenhope.com/ you can hire him to write or edit whatever marketing or journalistic materials your heart desires. Jon also writes the blog Park Odyssey at http://parkodyssey.blogspot.com/ where he visits every park in New York City. And by night he's a part-time working musician: lead singer, songwriter, and bass player for Whisperado, a member of other bands as well, and a sideman.
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CES 2023: Technology Expanding in Every Direction
Theater Review (NYC): 'Where Are You? (New York)' – Dances with Death
In her collage-theater piece 'Where Are You? (New York)' Singapore- and New York-based creator Sim Yan Ying 'YY' explores many of the ways we deal with a loved one's death – including dance, music and humor.


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interesting stories about local theater organizations, premieres, outreach projects, workshops/classes & the all of the terrific people involved in local theater-making it happen.
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Clauses of Section 56 of the I-T Act won't apply to cos if they meet criteria laid down by DPIIT.
The tax came to be called 'angel tax' after some startups received income tax notices on investments received from angel investors.
NEW DELHI: India has notified the new tax regime for startups to shield them from 'angel tax.' The new regime will be effective from February 19 and the Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) will implement the detailed framework provided by the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT).
The latest notification of the CBDT clarifies that the provisions of Section 56 (2) (viib) of the Income Tax Act won't apply to consideration received by a company for the issue of shares in excess of their face value if these funds have been received in accordance with the conditions put in place by the DPIIT.
As per the notification, entities can be recognised as startups for 10 years, as against seven years earlier, if their turnover does not exceed Rs 100 crore in any of the financial years as against Rs 25 crore earlier. The DPIIT had also raised the aggregate consideration threshold to Rs 25 crore from Rs 10 crore earlier.
The Section 56 clause provides that if a closely held company issues shares at a price more than its fair market value, the excess amount will be taxed as income from other sources. This section was introduced as an anti-abuse measure in 2012 by then finance minister Pranab Mukherjee.
The tax came to be called 'angel tax' after some startups received income tax notices on investments received from angel investors. The DPIIT has since taken steps to address the concerns of the startup community.
Tax experts said the CBDT notification is procedural.
"Automatic exemption from the angel tax provision for DPIIT-recognised startups, increase in the period and turnover criteria to qualify as a startup are very welcome changes," said Subramaniam Krishan, partner – private equity tax at EY India.
Krishan pointed out that startups may, however, find it limiting that they would be restricted from investing in shares and securities or make capital contributions for a seven-year period after raising capital from their investors.


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Artificial intelligence in financial services industry
By the standards of today's chatbots, Cobot was primitive. Introduced into the halls of LambdaMOO, an online forum disguised as a multiplayer game, Cobot was trained to respond to its human counterpart by quoting essays and books loaded into its program. The exchanges were by turns prosaic, creepy and baffling. "[C]obot is an evil mastermind lurking behind the false guise of a mere bot," observed the user Technicolor_Guest. "Sunshine! You validate me!" the chatbot replied.
Cobot's life on the site was an ample demonstration of the extent to which ordinary people could acclimatise to the presence of an artificial intelligence (AI), provided that the complexity of its programming matched the environment in which it was placed. It's a fine line that has been trodden with increasing success by vendors and banks since then. Currently, chatbots are capable of solving simple customer queries and facilitating transactions. The increasing popularity of deep learning applications in voice recognition and internal reasoning have seen even more complex voice assistants, such as Amazon's Alexa and Google Home, enter the market.
The increasing popularity of deep learning applications in voice recognition and internal reasoning have seen even more complex voice assistants enter the market.
According to Edwin van der Ouderaa, managing director for financial services, digital and analytics at Accenture, the ability of these products to provide answers to complex queries at the drop of a hat opens up the possibility for a return to what he considers to be a more intuitive approach to banking. "It's because that's how we always used to do it," says Van der Ouderaa. "It's back to the future. In the 1970s, when I went as a young person to a bank branch, there were no computers. What did I do? I spoke to a teller. We've stopped speaking to people and it's taken us 40 years to evolve technology to get back to that."
Adviser in the machine
As a former student of venerated AI scientist Marvin Minsky, Van der Ouderaa is uniquely qualified in providing an overview of how machine-learning techniques are set to disrupt banking on both sides of the transaction. He cites Colette, Accenture's automated mortgage adviser, as a prime example of how AI is already capable of triggering smart efficiencies in customer interaction.
"If a human being were to learn about mortgages, he or she would sit in a classroom and a teacher would very simply explain, step by step, how they work," explains Van der Ouderaa. Colette, meanwhile, has been imbued with the ability to learn the same corpus of definitions, rules and regulations during a set training period. "She will listen to pre-recorded conversations of real mortgage advisers, learn from that, and make her own conclusions based on that."
Crucially, Colette is able to understand, to a limited extent, the context in which statements are being made by the user on the other end of the phone. "What is happening when we speak to each other using natural speech is that only 10% of what I'm intending to tell you is actually spoken," explains Van der Ouderaa. The other 90%, he goes on, is left unsaid and beyond complete understanding. "You can't read my brain and I don't know how you think, and that's where misunderstandings between people come from all the time. That's the problem with conversations, but that is how our brain works and also how these engines work."
For the moment, Colette is being deployed in simple conversations with customers, withdrawing when the situation is deemed too complex for her programming to handle. Yet, Van der Ouderaa is convinced that it won't be long until she, or similar programs, will be put to work on more complicated tasks. In fact, that's already happening, to some extent, in the training of human mortgage advisers.
"There are a lot of situations where the Colette-type solution can deliver full advice," he explains. This can be accomplished either through Colette solving simple customer queries or allowing the chatbot to provide a more complex briefing for a human mortgage adviser. "I was really struck by that when we were showing Colette to a number of banks. They actually wanted to use it first to give advice to the adviser."
Back-office blues
AI is also set to transform the back office, an area traditionally considered to be ripe for efficiencies incurred through automation. Robotic process optimisation is already a simple example of this. "It's just advanced enough so that the computer system can replace a person who had a seat in the back office," explains Van der Ouderaa. AI, meanwhile, promises to vastly accelerate this process.
"They are already very good and accomplish a lot, but it's clear that these programs have limits," says Van der Ouderaa. The problem, he contends, is that these applications are often only able to search for information or point the user to where it might be; anything more complex, like ordering a taxi or booking a hotel room, is beyond its capabilities. The recent development of new voice assistants like 'Viv', which has been trained to independently write code to connect the user to single or multiple vendors, seems to ordain a pathway to facilitating more complex financial transactions made through speech alone.
According to Van der Ouderaa, the further development of AI assistants along these lines could lead to a future where customers need never personally communicate with their banks ever again. This degree of reliance on software, however, inevitably raises questions about who really benefits from the use of such advanced software. "A lot of banks are saying, 'Oh, great; this is the next user interface'," explains Van der Ouderaa. "And it's true, but I always say, 'be careful', because whose side is Alexa on? Is it on the bank's side or the customer's?
In principle, a voice assistant that is able to seamlessly connect across multiple credit providers would, logically, be able to differentiate loan offers according to the interests of its owner. That not only places a new emphasis on banking institutions not to be caught on the back foot when it comes to their product portfolio but also on their efforts to keep up with the latest innovations in AI to ensure that customers do not leave them behind.
Demystified algorithms
Then there's the question of how these systems actually work. Software containing elements of AI has drifted into messaging apps, banking and video games, and some of the most recent research papers in the field have already demonstrated applications for deep learning in lip-reading, summarising text and style transfer in video. However, the machine-learning algorithms that power these programs are enormously complicated and, in some cases, not even the scientists who built them know the precise reasoning behind certain calculations. This notion of AI as a 'black box' could have dire implications for its growing use in front-facing and back-office applications in banking, especially if something goes wrong.
The machine-learning algorithms that power these programs are enormously complicated and, in some cases, not even the scientists who built them know the precise reasoning behind certain calculations.
"There is a distinction we have to make between what we call predictability and explainability," says Van der Ouderaa. "It's a different thing for the model to have predictive powers - to be able to make decisions, come up with solutions and retain the ability to do that very accurately - versus the explainability of why the answer is what it is. For me, the two need to go hand in hand."
That can start with regulators anticipating the greater role AI can play in facilitating transactions and optimising the back office by mandating the authority of these programs to make decisions on behalf of customers and the institution. Van der Ouderaa says that the best solution to this problem would be to develop dedicated AI software that allows the user to trace the reasoning behind particular decisions. "The more you use algorithms that are not transparent in how they come to the conclusions that they do, the more you're going to get into trouble and the more harm it's going to cause," he says. "I would plead for using AI algorithms that are as traceable as possible."
In the end, acceptance of AI's role in banking could all come down to trust, the lack of which has remained a familiar feature whenever people are confronted with a new technology that they cannot understand. It was a sentiment unintentionally reflected during experiments with chatbot technology on LamdaMOO in the 1990s.
"Cobot's conversation topics just get weirder and weirder," observed Fawn_Guest to another human user. "In spite of every sign I'm an intelligent being who means no harm, you continue to hate and fear me," the chatbot interjected. He was quoting Planet of the Apes.