Bob Kovacs, former Technology Editor for TV Tech recently wrote an article for TV Technology “NBC Rises to the Tech Challenges of the 2024 Olympics.” Kovacs highlights how NBC will leverage NDI, HDR, ST 2110 and REMI workflows to broadcast the 2024 Olympics.
According to Darryl Jefferson, senior vice president of engineering and technology for NBC Olympics and Sports, NBC, the official U.S. broadcaster for the Olympic games has been working for almost two years in both Paris & the NBC Sports Hub in Stamford, Connecticut to ensure a broadcast that is swifter, higher and stronger.
This will be Jefferson’s first games as head of NBC Olympics’ tech operations. Jefferson has been with NBC Olympics since 2008 in Post Production and Asset Management teams.
“We started design and peer review about 20 months ago, with build, configure and test in our integration facility. We tested video paths, workflows, delivery mechanisms and failure modes all before items shipped out. We ship gear mostly pre-configured, pre-installed, and pre-tested, for both speed of deployment and for peace of mind.” Darryl Jefferson
The Broadcast is going to be complex, with numerous venues and the the need to integrate feeds from the primary Olympics video system. There are a lot of moving parts. Their goal is for viewers to experience a seamless broadcast. So seamless viewers won’t notice that many of the on-air talent is in Stamford, while the bustle is happening in Paris.
“The biggest leap is splitting large parts of our team between Paris and Stamford. Transporting large quantities of cameras, effects gear and studios full of equipment all the way home has historically not been financially viable. In some cases, the latency was unacceptable. That split approach allows us to cover more sports with fewer total people traveling than just a few Games ago.” Darryl Jefferson
Darryl Jefferson(Image credit: NBC)
NBC Is prepared to give the viewers a seamless broadcast with the revolution in connectivity and capability.
“With new tools, robust networks, capacity with cloud infrastructure, and the ability to approach signal transport differently, there exists a whole host of new options today” Darryl Jefferson
The Oylmpics will be broadcasted in 4K/HDR and 5.1.4 immersive audio. Jefferson says “It may be a tie between getting HDR support everywhere we may need it, and the large cut over to support IP in many places. Although we’ve had important experience with both, there exist so many devices, solutions, vendors and third parties that do not support wide color gamut today, or equipment through which color information doesn’t survive.”
One of NBC’s most basic decisions assembling a system of this size is where to use the SMPTE ST 2110 IP video standard and where to use the older SMPTE SDI standard. “We have a healthy mixture of both, but are about 60% ST 2110 handoff, venue and core orchestration,” Jefferson said. “In some cases, we support both formats within a Tech Center, or gateway translation to convert one to the other. Fortunately, we have spent the last few Games [since Tokyo] making the transition over time, and certainly learning all the lessons.”
In addition to SDI and ST 2110, NBC is also using some NDI. “We are using NDI in some areas, specifically NDI v6, with support of HDR and enhanced audio,” Jefferson said.
“We have a whole trove of new technology, some of which is well behind the camera [ST 2110 and Dante, HDR and ATMOS everywhere], new encoding mezzanine formats, and also a good deal of enhancements to bring viewers further behind the scenes. Backstage cameras, audio from coaches, cameras in the stands with families, even biometrics on family and coaches. The goal of all this technology is to bring more elements of storytelling around each athlete’s journey.” Darryl Jefferson
Choosing WordPress to power your website is a smart move. You’ll gain access to a world of themes, plugins, and possibilities.
There are also some responsibilities, though. Making sure your installation is up-to-date is among them. And software updates come frequently. Experts tell us to apply updates as they are released. Doing so improves website security, squashes bugs, and adds features.
We may assume that hitting the update button is the right thing to do. But what could go wrong? Is there a potential for harm?
That came to light during a supply chain attack on multiple WordPress plugins. Hackers infiltrated each plugin’s code repository. From there, they added malicious code to otherwise legitimate software. Once installed, that code created a shadow administrator account. It’s scary stuff.
Perhaps this isn’t a common scenario. But it’s a reminder to take precautions before installing an update.
Here are some tips to keep your site safe when updating WordPress.
Find out What’s Changing
Yes, you can automatically update WordPress core, plugins, and themes. That puts you at risk for a supply chain attack, however.
There’s nothing wrong with automatically updating minor versions of WordPress core. They often contain security fixes. But it’s safer to update plugins and themes manually.
You’ll want to know what’s changing and why. A little research will tell you everything you need to know.
First, take a look at what updates are available for your site. Navigate to Dashboard > Updates to see what’s available.
Next, take note of any plugin and theme updates. Plugins offer version details. Click the link next to each item to see them.
Plugins hosted on WordPress.org also have a support forum. Check them to see if other users have reported issues. You may also find notes from the developer.
It will take a bit more research for items hosted elsewhere. You might check their documentation, private support forum, or GitHub repository.
These details will help you make an informed decision. Seeing bug reports, for example, may lead you to hold off on updating.
Feel free to ask questions if you have concerns. Knowledge is power, as they say.
Back up Your Website Frequently
Security isn’t the only potential issue here. A software update could cause other problems. You might find a compatibility issue. Or an update might introduce a conflict with another plugin or theme. There’s also a chance that the update will fail.
It’s never a bad idea to back up your site before applying updates. You’ll have peace of mind knowing you can roll back if needed.
Your web host may provide backup capabilities. If not, you can also use a backup plugin. These options are usually seamless. Choose one that fits your desired workflow.
A tool that creates incremental backups is preferred. The feature improves the efficiency of both backing up and restoring your site.
And don’t forget about backing up your database! Some updates make changes there as well.
Test Each Update for Issues
Don’t update and walk away. You’ll never know what sort of trouble you left behind. At least, not until a client discovers it.
Be sure to test updates after installing them. Ideally, you’ll have a staging environment to work with. That gives you the freedom to test without impacting users.
So, what should you test? That depends on the type of updates you installed.
If you updated WooCommerce, look at your site’s products. Add an item to your cart and test the checkout process. Edit a product or setting from the WordPress dashboard. Be on the lookout for anything that doesn’t work as expected.
Follow the same pattern for other items. Determine what could be impacted by the update. Then, test on both the front and back ends.
You can use your browser’s developer tools to help. For example, the console tab will alert you to issues like 404 and JavaScript errors. These can affect stability and site performance.
The process shouldn’t take more than a few minutes. And you’ll rest easy knowing that everything is working correctly.
A Holistic Approach to Updating WordPress
We all appreciate convenience – especially with mundane tasks. Such is the case with updating WordPress. It’s easy to hit the update button without a second thought.
That puts your site at risk, however. There are a myriad of things that can go wrong. Therefore, it’s worth paying attention.
Perform some research regarding each update. Get a sense of what is changing. From there, you can gauge the potential impact.
In some cases, you might want to delay installing an update. That’s OK. Only security-related updates should be considered an emergency.
Being proactive also means keeping site backups. That will be your safety net should something go wrong. Testing on a staging environment is also recommended.
The bottom line is to pay attention. Your site and its users will be glad you did.
Kunitsu-Gami is the kind of wonderful, left-field Capcom release we don’t see often these days. Bound to be a cult classic in the future, Path of the Goddess is original and does not lean on any of Capcom’s established properties. Instead, it relies on an admittedly difficult-to-explain but well-executed gameplay loop that I found hard to put down with an art style that is equally challenging to look away from.
Players take on the role of Soh, a masked swordsperson bound to protect the divine maiden Yoshiro as she slowly dances along the path of Mt. Kafuku to purge and cleanse it from invading demons. During the day, Yoshiro moves through a level while you explore to find experience points and villagers who can be assigned a job to help protect the maiden during the night as demons pour out from gates in all directions. The loop is intense and engaging as you rush through the levels during daylight to prepare and fight the demons under the moon.
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Kunitsu-Gami is undeniably original, but it is not without its inspirations. If I had to assign it a genre, I would say tower defense with a heavy dose of Pikmin, but I spent plenty of time executing combos with my sword, strategically placing troops before and during combat, and even restoring each village I saved between the action-focused levels. Kunitsu-Gami never overstays its welcome or spends too much time making you repeat yourself.
The moment I got the hang of the basics, I encountered a boss who made me re-evaluate my strategies, or I was forced to play out a scenario while making my way across a lake on a series of boats. I was impressed by how Kunitsu-Gami never let me get too comfortable and forced me to try new strategies in new settings in ways that were exciting instead of frustrating. There are even levels where all you can do is direct your villagers with no opportunity to fight yourself, and even those were thrilling and fun.
New Game Plus options and harder difficulties will undoubtedly test your resolve, but I appreciate that the strategy and action never got too complicated or difficult. Nothing frustrates me more in comparable genres than when I spend hours preparing for an encounter, only for it to fall apart at the end and force an extended restart. I certainly had to replay certain attempts, but I never felt fully cheated, and thankfully, no level is so long that a restart became a consistent nuisance.
Between the Yoshiro protection levels and boss fights, you return to rescued villages and assign villagers to fix up their demon-destructed homes. Restoring villages rewards experience and other goodies that can be used to upgrade Soh and the various villager classes. That simple loop frequently made me stay up late. The quiet period between action sequences serves to excite you to try out new upgrades and is perfect at setting you up for one more try – I always fell victim to it.
Kunitsu-Gami’s story is light but effective, with every moment delivered through simple choreography free of dialogue. I was more invested in the upgrade loop than the story and felt it ended without an emotionally satisfying conclusion, but I enjoyed making my way along the path of Mt. Kafuku. Time will tell if Capcom pushes Kunitsu-Gami along the same track as games like Monster Hunter or Resident Evil, but I would be perfectly happy for it to forever exist as an excellent standalone experiment that delivered satisfying results.
We’ve reached the end of Game Informer’s Dragon Age: The Veilguard cover story coverage as we prepare to launch our next exciting issue. But I still have this one last feature to publish, and it’s about Bellara Lutara, the Dalish elf and member of the new Veil Jumpers faction in the game. During my visit to BioWare’s Edmonton, Canada, office earlier this year, I checked out the game’s expansive character creator, its in medias res prologue, and the first mission after said prologue.
Though BioWare released a big look at Veilguard’s prologue via a 20-minute gameplay trailer last month, they haven’t released much about that subsequent mission, where you meet and recruit your first companion, Bellara. I learned a lot about this character, and knowing I was one of the first outside of the studio to see the mission where you meet her, I spent a chunk of my interviews with the team’s leads talking about Bellara. So, for my final feature on Dragon Age: The Veilguard, here’s everything I learned about this quirky elven mage.
Everything We Learned About Bellara Lutara In Dragon Age: The Veilguard
In talking with BioWare’s various leads, like game director Corinne Bushce, creative director John Epler (who is personally responsible for writing Bellara and leading her development), and BioWare general manager Gary McKay, it’s clear the team has a deep love for this character. She’s energetic, effervescent, and academic, and as a companion for combat, she’s a character I’m pretty excited to use in my party.
“I love Bellara, I think she’s fantastic,” McKay tells me. “I see people that I know in her and so that’s how she really resonates with me. I love the whole tinkerer aspect to her. It was a collective to bring that character to life. It was everything from the writers, to the editors, the animators, to character modelers, to the texturing, to how we light her. I’m really proud of that character.”
Bellara In Combat
When I ask Busche about Bellara, she gives me some insight into what I can expect of the mage on the battlefield. And Bellara sounds like an excellent choice for both support and elemental combos.
“Oh my goodness, she is amazing,” Busche says. “So, first of all, she is a mage. She is an explorer of ancient Elven ruins. She is an elf herself and a member of the Veil Jumpers faction. They investigate the ancient ruins of Arlathan. Everything about her character as a mage leans into that, but she also challenges the kind of archetypal idea of a mage.”
She does that by attacking with a bow at range using electrically charged arrows. But she’s also casting spells that slow down time or heal allies and Rook. She does that by challenging magical energy into her gauntlet. Busche says she starts as a support character in combat, thanks to her healing spells, but notes players don’t have to build her out that way. She also leans into electrical damage, and “damage type really matters a lot when we get into the strategy and tactics,” Busche says.
“You can spec her out in a way where she’s unleashing this devastating vortex that pulls in all enemies into an electrical storm. Maybe then we unleash our own [area of effect attack] with all the enemies clumped together,” Busche adds. “She can debuff all the enemies with the shocked affliction, where they’re taking passive damage. I mentioned she can slow time, she can heal. She is one of the characters that you can build out [to have her] healing spells heal you autonomously, so if you’re the kind of player that likes to be on the frontlines […] Bellara might just be the perfect companion for you.”
Bellara’s Place In The World
Epler, who writes Bellara, tells me about her place in Thedas as an elf and the connection elves have to the magic of the world. He says if you’ve paid attention to the franchise, you likely already know that elves are historically an oppressed people in the games. Now, with two of their gods on the loose in Veilguard, magic has poured back into the world in a big way.
“She represents the Veil Jumpers,” Epler explains. “Now, the Veil Jumpers are a faction that’s appeared in the comics before, but otherwise, this is the first time it’s appeared in the games, and they are the ones journeying through Arlathan, where the ancient elven empire used to exist and left a lot of artifacts when it disappeared. When the elves fell from immortality thousands of years ago, they still left a lot of their artifacts and a lot of their, for lack of a better term, magical technology behind, and Bellara represents this yearning to find the truth of who the elves were because not only did they lose their magic and their immortality, they lost a lot of their history.
“A lot of what they know of their past is based on myth, it’s based on rumor. Bellara is a knowledge seeker. She wants to find out what’s true, what’s not; she wants to find the pieces of who the elves used to be and really understand what their story was, where they came from, as well as figure out where they’re going next, and find a future for the elves. And within the context of The Veilguard, she joins the team, first of all, to help stop the gods because Bellara feels at least partially responsible since they are elven gods, but also to maybe find a little bit more of who they used to be. Because again, you’re dealing with these elves that were around millennia ago that have now reemerged into the world, and who better to teach her who the elves used to be than them.”
A Quick Detour: Magic
For one of my last questions to Epler, I was curious about the contrast between Bellara, an elven mage who is optimistic and bubbly, and Solas, a determined and tragic character. He indicated there might be more to Bellara than meets the eye.
“Solas sees himself as the tragic hero,” Epler says. “He’s not capable of really being happy, he can’t let himself be happy, partially because he carries the guilt of what he did bringing the Veil, doing what he did to the world. Whereas Bellara is somebody who has seen tragedy, and as you get into her character arc and get into her backstory, you realize this is a character who has seen a lot of tragedy. But that tragedy, instead of wallowing in it, she’s forced herself to push past it. She looks at her regrets, and she tells herself, ‘I don’t want to feel regret.’
“Whereas again, Solas tends to wallow in his to a large degree. And it allows us to create a very big differentiation. Part of it is also because Solas is an ancient elf, whereas Bellara is a Dalish elf, but she just sees a problem and wants to solve it. She feels a tremendous amount of responsibility to her people […] to the Dalish, and to the Veil Jumpers, and that drives her forward. That said, she does have her moments where she has doubt, she has moments where she has a more grim outlook, and there are moments where you realize that some of her sunny, optimistic outlook is kind of a mask that she puts on to hide the fact that she’s hurting, she’s in pain. But in general, she doesn’t see any benefit to wallowing in those regrets.”
We learned today that Bellara will be voiced by Jee Young Han, known for her roles in Perry Mason,Unprisoned, and as Sentinel Dax in a previous Bioware game, Anthem. To see the rest of the cast, along with Rook’s four voice options, click here.
For more about the game, including exclusive details, interviews, video features, and more, click the Dragon Age: The Veilguard hub button below.
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Ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS) is a type of preinvasive tumor that sometimes progresses to a highly deadly form of breast cancer. It accounts for about 25 percent of all breast cancer diagnoses.
Because it is difficult for clinicians to determine the type and stage of DCIS, patients with DCIS are often overtreated. To address this, an interdisciplinary team of researchers from MIT and ETH Zurich developed an AI model that can identify the different stages of DCIS from a cheap and easy-to-obtain breast tissue image. Their model shows that both the state and arrangement of cells in a tissue sample are important for determining the stage of DCIS.
Because such tissue images are so easy to obtain, the researchers were able to build one of the largest datasets of its kind, which they used to train and test their model. When they compared its predictions to conclusions of a pathologist, they found clear agreement in many instances.
In the future, the model could be used as a tool to help clinicians streamline the diagnosis of simpler cases without the need for labor-intensive tests, giving them more time to evaluate cases where it is less clear if DCIS will become invasive.
“We took the first step in understanding that we should be looking at the spatial organization of cells when diagnosing DCIS, and now we have developed a technique that is scalable. From here, we really need a prospective study. Working with a hospital and getting this all the way to the clinic will be an important step forward,” says Caroline Uhler, a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS), who is also director of the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and a researcher at MIT’s Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS).
Uhler, co-corresponding author of a paper on this research, is joined by lead author Xinyi Zhang, a graduate student in EECS and the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center; co-corresponding author GV Shivashankar, professor of mechogenomics at ETH Zurich jointly with the Paul Scherrer Institute; and others at MIT, ETH Zurich, and the University of Palermo in Italy. The open-access research was published July 20 in Nature Communications.
Combining imaging with AI
Between 30 and 50 percent of patients with DCIS develop a highly invasive stage of cancer, but researchers don’t know the biomarkers that could tell a clinician which tumors will progress.
Researchers can use techniques like multiplexed staining or single-cell RNA sequencing to determine the stage of DCIS in tissue samples. However, these tests are too expensive to be performed widely, Shivashankar explains.
In previous work, these researchers showed that a cheap imagining technique known as chromatin staining could be as informative as the much costlier single-cell RNA sequencing.
For this research, they hypothesized that combining this single stain with a carefully designed machine-learning model could provide the same information about cancer stage as costlier techniques.
First, they created a dataset containing 560 tissue sample images from 122 patients at three different stages of disease. They used this dataset to train an AI model that learns a representation of the state of each cell in a tissue sample image, which it uses to infer the stage of a patient’s cancer.
However, not every cell is indicative of cancer, so the researchers had to aggregate them in a meaningful way.
They designed the model to create clusters of cells in similar states, identifying eight states that are important markers of DCIS. Some cell states are more indicative of invasive cancer than others. The model determines the proportion of cells in each state in a tissue sample.
Organization matters
“But in cancer, the organization of cells also changes. We found that just having the proportions of cells in every state is not enough. You also need to understand how the cells are organized,” says Shivashankar.
With this insight, they designed the model to consider proportion and arrangement of cell states, which significantly boosted its accuracy.
“The interesting thing for us was seeing how much spatial organization matters. Previous studies had shown that cells which are close to the breast duct are important. But it is also important to consider which cells are close to which other cells,” says Zhang.
When they compared the results of their model with samples evaluated by a pathologist, it had clear agreement in many instances. In cases that were not as clear-cut, the model could provide information about features in a tissue sample, like the organization of cells, that a pathologist could use in decision-making.
This versatile model could also be adapted for use in other types of cancer, or even neurodegenerative conditions, which is one area the researchers are also currently exploring.
“We have shown that, with the right AI techniques, this simple stain can be very powerful. There is still much more research to do, but we need to take the organization of cells into account in more of our studies,” Uhler says.
This research was funded, in part, by the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center at the Broad Institute, ETH Zurich, the Paul Scherrer Institute, the Swiss National Science Foundation, the U.S. National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Office of Naval Research, the MIT Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning and Health, the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, and a Simons Investigator Award.
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We’ve spent the past several weeks covering Bioware’s upcoming RPG Dragon Age: The Veilguard as part of our cover story, and part of that content has focused on the game’s colorful cast of characters. Today, Bioware has revealed the actors voicing this lineup of characters, including the different options for the protagonist Rook’s voices. Here they are, alongside roles you might recognize them from:
Rook will be played by Alex Jordan (Cyberpunk 2077, The Amazing World of Gumball), Bryony Corrigan (Baldur’s Gate 3, Good Omens), Erika Ishii (Apex Legends, Destiny 2), and Jeff Berg (Battlefield 1, NCIS)
Harding will be played byAli Hillis (Mass Effect 3, Naruto)
Davrin will be played by Ike Amadi (Mass Effect 3, Halo 5: Guardians, Marvel’s Spider-Man)
Bellara will be played by Jee Young Han (Perry Mason, Unprisoned)
Neve will be played by Jessica Clark (True Blood, Pocket Listing)
Taash will be played by Jin Maley (Star Trek: Picard, Silicon Valley)
Emmrich will be played by Nick Boraine (Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, Black Sails)
Manfred will be played by Matthew Mercer (Critical Role, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth)
Lucanis will be played by Zach Mendez (Horizon Forbidden West, Married Alive)
Finally, Solas and Varric’s voice actors, Gareth David-Lloyd and Brian Bloom, respectively, will reprise their roles from Dragon Age Inquisition.
