#nini as a lab intern

[twilit-tragedy]

Getting to work already cranky on a Monday morning and seeing that someone from another team put their Petri dishes on OUR fridge shelf

[davidlatreillewhatsup]

World Premiere at the North Bay Film Festival

RACHEL premiered during the North Bay Film Festival on November 18 at the historic Capitol Centre.

About

NBFF is dedicated to showcasing the best in contemporary cinema with a focus on emerging Canadian and northern Ontario filmmakers. From our home on the shores of Lake Nipissing, we encourage audiences to explore a variety of programs while aiming to present stories from a diverse background of perspectives. The festival takes place annually at the historic Capitol Centre Theatre and features international, Canadian and local films paired with panel discussions, receptions, workshops and industry events. Programming for North Bay Film is brought to you by the Near North Mobile Media Lab, a non-profit media arts organization dedicated to providing students, artists and audiences in Northern Ontario the means to produce, present and enjoy media art. North Bay Film has been a local tradition for over 25 years and is a member of the Toronto International Film Festival Circuit. 

Feature Films

THE SISTERS BROTHERS by Jacques Audiard Starring: John C. Reilly, Joaquin Phoenix, Jake Gyllenhaal BEAUTIFUL BOY by Felix Van Groeningen Starring: Steve Carell, Timothée Chalamet, Maura Tierney ANTHROPOCENE by Edward Burtynsky, Jennifer Baichwal, Nicholas De Pencier Starring: Alicia Vikander SHOPLIFTERS by Kore-Eda Hirokazu Starring: Kirin Kiki, Lily Franky, Sôsuke Ikematsu THE MISEDUCATION OF CAMERON POST by Desiree Akhavan Starring: Chloë Grace Moretz, Steven Hauck, Quinn Shephard RAFIKI by Wanuri Kahiu Starring: Nini Wacera, Samantha Mugatsia, Sheila Munyiva TROUBLE IN THE GARDEN by Roz Owen Starring: Cara Gee, Jon Cor, Fiona Reid THE DISCARDED by Piotr Skowronski Starring: Zara Jestadt ANGELIQUE’S ISLE by Marie-Helene Cousineau, Michelle Derosier Starring: Julia Jones, Tantoo Cardinal, Aden Young FALLS AROUND HER by Darlene Naponse Starring: Tantoo Cardinal, Lewis Hodgson, Johnny Issaluk THE FRUIT MACHINE by Sarah Fodey Starring: John Sawatsky, Patti Gray, Lucie Laperle, Suzanne-Thibault

Canadian Shorts Showcase

THE HOLE IN RESERVOIR HILL by Shasha Nakhai RACHEL by David Latreille  L’HOMME ET LE POISSON by Lewis Leon SILVER LIGHT by Brad McDermott 

Student Showcase

MICHEAL KLEIN IS DEAD by Sean Cullen from Sheridan College SEEING SOUND by Alec Jordan from Canadore College SHARK by Curtis Carriere from Canadore College THE TRI TOWN SKI & SNOWBOARD VILLAGE by Jordan Vandenberg from Canadore College

Near North Mobile Media Lab

The Near North Mobile Media Lab actively promotes media arts access for all artists, regardless of age, class, gender, sexual orientation, race or ability. We provide the tools that media artists, students, and media arts audiences in Northern Ontario need to produce, present and enjoy all forms of contemporary media art. We envision a thriving media arts community in northern Ontario that produces innovative work, has access to contemporary presentations, and is an active participant in a national discourse by overcoming regional limitations. ln concrete terms, the Near North Mobile Media Lab facilitates educational workshops, presents exhibitions, screenings and festivals, mentors and provides support to our membership through equipment rentals and project assistance. Far from the centres of population in Ontario, our collective continues to encourage our peers and youth in their explorations of electronic media, in developing their film-making skills and through the professional presentation of their art works.

Holly Cunningham, executive Director at Near North Mobile Media Lab

After graduating from Sheridan College’s Media Arts program, Holly completed a Fine Arts degree from Nipissing University which prompted her move to Northern Ontario. Working as the Executive Director of the Near North Mobile Media Lab (N2M2L) for the past five years, Holly has worked to grow the organization and establish programs that aim to engage youth and emerging artists through the digital and media arts. Holly also sits on the board of directors of the Media Arts Network of Ontario, is chair of the local artist-run centre White Water Gallery and is currently the North Bay rep for Cultural Industries Ontario North. 

Capitol Centre

In 1927, a businessman from Sturgeon Falls purchased the property at 150 Main Street East in North Bay to build a theatre. During construction he went bankrupt and sold his interests to the Famous Players of Canada Corporation. Famous Players opened the doors to the new Capitol Theatre on June 1, 1929 for the screening of In Old Arizona, the first Fox Pictures “talkie” motion picture (movies with sound) of its kind. This brand new theatre had 1455 seats, state-of-the-art technology, elaborate decorative touches, and was referred to as a “palace of splendour.” It wasn’t the only theatre downtown; there was the Bay (Club 151), the Odeon (Northern Tikes), the Crystal Palace (next to Guardian Drugs), and the Royal (Royal Office Suites) – but the Capitol was the grandest of them all and is the only one left open today.

It was in the offices of the Capitol Theatre that Roy Thomson, Lord Thomson of Fleet, started his media empire with the opening of his (and Northern Ontario’s) first radio station CFCH on March 3, 1931 – this later became CKAT. It was in the Capitol Theatre that the Dionne Quints enjoyed many Friday night movies when they could get away from their celebrity lives. The Capitol stood tall through the Great Depression and the Second World War, bringing laughter and plenty of wartime films like All Quiet on the Western Front to North Bay and area audiences. During wartime, patrons could purchase tickets with a scrap of metal from home (pipes, jewellery, cookware, cutlery, etc). This metal was melted down and used to produce munitions for the war effort.

In the 1970s, an organization called North Bay Theatre and Arts Community Centre (TACC) was formed with the goal of establishing an art centre to house all arts-related endeavours within the city and surrounding district. At the time, North Bay had finally developed the Golden Mile area of the Lake Nipissing waterfront, had built arenas and parks throughout the city, and the final missing piece was to have a local performance hall and art gallery. When Famous Players announced in the 1980s that they wanted to convert the Capitol into smaller cinemas, TACC decided that the Capitol was too wonderful to get chopped up into small rooms, and that it could be the perfect facility for their dream arts centre. Since its reopening in 1987 the Capitol Centre and the WKP Kennedy Gallery has seen many great artists Canadian and international, both cherished celebrities and beloved locals like Johnny Cash, Phyllis Diller, Lynn Johnston, Brenda Lee, Roy Orbison, Jack Klugman, Blue Rodeo, Canada’s Group of Seven, The Barenaked Ladies, Graham Nash, Ed Eng, Jann Arden, Tom Cochrane, and many more. The Capitol truly is your home for arts and entertainment.

[un-enfant-immature]

Vannevar Labs comes out of stealth to bring best-in-class AI tech to national security agencies

Few organizations have the complex data and analytics problems that challenge the defense and intelligence communities every single day. Whether it is managing petabytes of text, audio, or video data, finding extraordinarily small patterns in the noise, or processing multilingual analytics, the agencies at the heart of America’s national security system confront cutting-edge problems every day.

Despite the desire for better tools though, intelligence analysts are often stymied to procure up-to-date software due to the byzantine rules that drive Pentagon and intelligence procurement.

That’s why a former intelligence official and former intelligence investor are looking to build a new platform that connects the best minds in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing and bundling it together into a service purchasable by these government agencies.

Through Palo Alto-based Vannevar, co-founders Brett Granberg and Nini Moorhead are hoping to launch their first product, which is focused on bringing NLP technologies like feature detection to international counterterrorism missions.

Co-founders Nimi Moorhead and Brett Granberg of Vannevar Labs. Photo via Vannevar Labs.

The company is named for Vannevar Bush, who is often credited with inventing an early form of the computer, putting together the Manhattan Project which led to the atom bomb, and for writing a seminal essay that sort of predicted the internet decades before its inception.

The two chose this particular product as an entrée because of their past experiences. Before beginning Vannevar, Granberg spent two years at In-Q-Tel, the non-profit VC firm that works deeply with the intelligence community to supply agencies with the best in startup technology. He also was an advisor at Lilt, a real-time deep learning translation product that spun out of Chris Manning’s famed Stanford NLP research lab.

Meanwhile, Moorhead spent seven years working as a counterterrorism officer within the intelligence community, working to disrupt terrorist networks.

The two met while they overlapped at Stanford GSB and realized they had seen similar problems that they both wanted to solve. While in business school, “top of mind for me was some of the technological challenges that I encountered as an end user [and] analyst in the intelligence community,” Moorhead said. “We immediately connected and shared a lot of experiences in common in terms of seeing gaps between the really hard domain problems that I’d been working on in my career as an analyst and some of the technology that was available to me,” she said. The two actually met the first day of school.

Their approach is to take proven techniques and attempt to translate them into government use cases. “We’re not sort of inventing new math to solve these problems, we’re more taking cutting-edge approaches and just applying them to specific use cases,” Granberg said.

While the project is early, the team raised a $4.5 million seed venture capital funding from fellow GSB alum Katherine Boyle of General Catalyst and Costanoa Ventures. Boyle has made a big push into defense and highly-regulated industries as part of her investment practice, where she previously funded Anduril, the company started by Oculus founder Palmer Luckey that has attempted to apply ML technology to security issues such as battlefield awareness and border control (and gotten into some controversy along the way as well).

She is particularly excited about new ways for startups to secure government contracts at a speed faster than the sun burning out. Talking to me about the potential in this industry, she said:

We’ve been spending a lot of time with companies that are going after what’s known as Other Transaction Authorities, which are a new type of contracting vehicle that was developed in 2015 by former Secretary of Defense Ash Carter, to help tech companies work very quickly with the Department of Defense and with the intelligence community. So what historically might have taken 18 months to get a contract now takes 30 to 60 days for critical pieces of technology

Boyle explained that Vannevar fits directly into her thesis for the future of government procurement. “Our view is that the companies that do best in the space are people who have worked in government or understand how to sell to governments,” she said. She noted that the company is very early, and her investment was primarily focused on the team.

I asked about recent controversies that have hit companies like Google, which saw a revolt by some employees over its involvement with a defense program called Project Maven, which attempted to use machine learning technology and apply that to the battlefield, so that, for instance, drones could increase their effectiveness during strikes.

Granberg said that “we think that the people that defend our country should have access to the best tools and technologies to do their job. We know these people, we used to work with them, and we want to help them.”

He understands the concerns of critics though, and says that Vannevar intends to work with the government to ensure ethics remains core to its product. “We believe it’s our responsibility to sort of shape that technology and help the government think about putting in place policies that … prevent the misuse from happening.”

Boyle agreed. “One of the things that we’ve noticed is that if you’re very transparent and upfront about the types of products you’re going to be building in the beginning, it’s not a recruitment problem, it’s not an ethics problem.” Unlike Google, which had a six-figure large workforce with many employees who don’t want to touch defense-related code, the hope for Granberg and Moorhead is that a company like Vannevar can build a coalition of the willing, as it were, and maybe solve some serious security problems as well.

[twilit-tragedy]

Scientific endeavours making me feel like 😤 today. Not even lab procedures or getting results, straight up interpersonal relationships and task management.

[twilit-tragedy]

Turns out, being the bitch that does the English, grammar, text flow check in school group projects leads to... being the bitch that does the English, grammar, text flow check in scientific articles. Guess who's breaking a messy introduction written by three Portuguese native speakers into puzzle pieces and refitting it into something that resembles a cohesive text by a fluent English speaker? C'est moi. This is going to give me such an endorphins hit when it's finished. I should do this for a living lmao

[twilit-tragedy]

Sometimes you unintentionally say a sentence that goes so hard you're proud of it ages later. Like yesterday, when I updated an ex-colleague who was visiting on my current situation: "I don't know if you've heard: I'm working for professor B now. 'Cause professor B pays me in money, and A only pays me in disappointment." 💀 Girl, where did that even come from.

[twilit-tragedy]

Me, a life sciences lab rat, when I see medical professionals walking in administrative hallways, between buildings, into the damn cantine in their white coats / uniforms:

[twilit-tragedy]

Starting to wonder if academic journals number the reviewers a posteriori according to who gives the most scathing feedback on a paper or if the reviewer #2 meme is strictly coincidental. I received an email yesterday in which the reviewer comments can be summarized as such:

"Reviewer #1 (Comments for the Author): General remarks: This paper addresses an important topic and it is well written. However, there are minor issues which need to be sorted before it can be accepted for publication. The few issues detected in the different sections are shown below." Reviewer #2 (Comments for the Author): General remarks: This paper must've been written by apes. This kind of assays is difficult and clearly too much for your underdeveloped brains. Your data makes no sense. Your controls are shit. You clearly don't know what you're talking about. Go fuck yourself.

[twilit-tragedy]

Epá, eu adoro uma colega do meu lab antigo. Temos falado por mail enquanto eu faço a tese, e trocamos versões do próximo paper a publicar, e acabei de me aperceber que acabei o meu e-mail da mesma forma que ela 🥺💕.

O último que ela me enviou acabou assim:

E o meu, hoje:

opaaaaaá, eu amo esta moça 😭💕

[twilit-tragedy]

Adoro a minha colega brasileira no estágio. Não me via há umas semanas e a primeira coisa que me disse foi "oi, Dani, sua safadinha sumida" 😂

[twilit-tragedy]

I am this 👌 close to snapping at people from the internship. I worked all damn summer to compensate for focusing on exams in June and none of these people have done anything in months. I throw in the air that Someone Else could help by extracting some samples. Everyone ignores it. My mom keeps asking me when I'm going there, like I don't have a ton of work for my Master's thesis AND like I'm not carrying this damn project. I'm trying not to be salty, but everyone is ghosting this, and when and if this paper is published, we'll all be getting second author for VERY different amounts of work 😐

[twilit-tragedy]

Just saw one of the baby interns sitting on his phone with his gloves on. And THEN, I saw the other one in the bathroom with her LAB COAT AND GLOVES 💀💀💀💀 who taught y'all?

[twilit-tragedy]

I... guess I must be doing something right when the PI herself calls me to ask where stuff is in the lab? 😭

Just got a call from her. "Can you tell me where the Chelex is? [self-deprecating scoff] In MY lab?"

Yes, professor, in fact I can. It's in the middle drawer of the storage in room 1.16 😂😭

[twilit-tragedy]

Feeling like this video, but the WhatsApp notifications are from 4+ groups and 3+ personal convos, all to write ONE paper.

[twilit-tragedy]

Experiências estranhas com o meu nome, hoje. Não sou particular fã dele por natureza, se calhar é por isso.

1) dou o meu nome ao segurança de serviço qd entro, pk é fim-de-semana. E este homem que eu vi pela primeira vez ontem às 7:30 e a quem só disse 'bom dia' vira-se "E a Daniela vai para onde?" ou seja, que sala/corredor. E eu por dentro (hmm, não uses o meu nome assim, eu nem te conheço 🤨) 😂

2) Mesmo agora, a sair, vejo um colega a entrar pelo nosso corredor e digo atrás dele "Alô". E ele, antes de se virar e me ver, responde "Oi, Dani." Estou intrigada sobre como é que ele me identificou lol. Mas desci as escadas a pensar sobre como quase toda a gente aqui me chama Dani por causa da Denise (DÂ-ni, sotaque brasileiro, as opposed to Dá-NI, que a minha família sempre me chamou e alguns amigos tbm). E como às vezes gente me chama Dani pk ouve sempre a Denise a dizer isso, e eu fico (🤨? Mas que confianças são estas?) 😂

3) Deixo as escadas, encontro o segundo segurança do dia. Antes de eu virar a esquina e o cumprimentar, é logo "Daniela? 👈👀" E eu que, lá está, nunca vi este homem na vida pk nunca cá pus os pés no fds e já estou a pensar no assunto do meu nome, fico tipo "Sim???? 😳" e ela explica-me que, quando começou o turno, o colega lhe disse que 'a Daniela está lá em cima na malária'. E eu só, mas que raio 😭😂 isso não lhe diz nada se não conhecer a minha cara e nome de antemão 😂

Pronto, foi só bizarro. Mas se calhar eu tenho é falta de sono pela semana que tive e falta de assunto por ter passado o dia sozinha a passar pequenos volumes de líquido de um lado para o outro.

[twilit-tragedy]

One of the fridges at the lab died, which:

sucks, because we had to put the reagents we had in there elsewhere and it messed with our system;

slaps, because we threw out a bunch of shit that was taking space and not being used (if you didn't claim your shit in time, bye-bye!)

This deeply satisfies the part of me who wants to do inventory of this place and reorganize the "floorplan" of freezers and fridges. Fuck yeah.