Latest news with #Seed
Irish Examiner
19 hours ago
- General
- Irish Examiner
Jennifer Horgan: Our obsession with youth is a way of denying death, but we should embrace it
Did you ever enter a contest to see who could lift a corpse? No? Not recently? Maybe you wrestled over a corpse then, or played cards, handing the deceased their own hand. No? Not that one either. Ok, last one - did you ever hide under a corpse, shaking it to scare the incoming mourners - especially the kids. No? Well, don't worry. It's not you, it's me. In truth, these questions would only make sense to someone who lived in Ireland 100 years ago. We called them wake games and right up until the middle of the last century, these farewells to our loved ones were packed full of mischief, merriment, and matchmaking. It was a time for divine madness, drinking and kissing and the presence of mná caointe, keening women, who wailed and sang, lamenting our dead. To give you more of a flavour, one game involved someone donning a collar and sitting in a corner to 'hear confessions'. The 'priest' would act horrified, imposing an embarrassing and severe penance, which had to be performed for all to see and enjoy. Things got so bad that in 1927, the Synod of Maynooth 'forbade absolutely' unseemly and lewd behaviour around corpses. It all sounds a bit mad, doesn't it? Sex and death – all deeply Freudian. If you've spent time over in England, you'll recognise that we've retained some of our ancestors' customs. Plenty of English people find our open coffin and open-door policies around death unsettling. Their upper lip seems to only get stiffer around stiffs. Nonetheless, compared with 1925, Irish deaths in 2025 have become sober and sanitised affairs. Children are generally left out. Last week, I went to a Seed talk with Marian Ó Tuama, a Psychotherapist, who warned that children are better off seeing dead bodies early, particularly the bodies of people they don't love. At the removals and funerals I've most recently attended, children were kept at home unless a part of the immediate family. Bereaved children no longer see their peers in their grief. It happens away from their everyday realities. And as for us adults, far from engaging in revelry, we stick to a very specific script. Lining up in perfectly managed and curated funeral homes we say we are 'Sorry for your loss' on repeat. Hands are held and hands are dropped, and then out the door we go again. What's crazier? Playing games over a corpse or paying doctors and dentists to give Botox injections? Death has become a sober, serious, adult-only affair. The madness of grief has drained from our communities, our practices. Stories and tributes are typed online rather than shared in person, in letters, or in our chat. But before we start to think we're evolving towards sophistication, let me address our ancestors with questions us modern urbanites understand. Tell me, great-grandmother Horgan, did you ever inject poison into your face? No, seriously, did you ever inject your face with something that would make you look younger than you are? Ancestor of 100 years ago, your doctor or your dentist – did they ever put something in your face, Botox or fillers, to make you appear younger than you are? What's crazier? Playing games over a corpse or paying doctors and dentists to give Botox injections? Or put it another way – What's crazier? Accepting death as an inherent part of living and marking it as a whole community, or denying we age and die at all. What's more concerning, the cheeky sneaky Botox or the obvious Botox? According to a Women's Health and Wellbeing Survey, commissioned by the Irish Examiner, and involving over 1,000 women, 'one in 10 women states their GP offers cosmetic treatments and one in seven that their dentist does'. What do you think? Might the people lining up for Botox be better off drinking and having sex around corpses? I know it sounds facetious but I'm deadly (pardon the pun) serious. We used to mix sex and death freely. Now we accentuate one and deny the other. I'm convinced that our ancestors were onto something – that it's healthier to put death front and centre, to literally place the corpse at the centre of the party. Increasingly, we hide death away, pretending it is not coming closer and closer the longer we live. Another study, this time carried out by University College London last year, found anxiety was the most reported problem among 511 Botox patients surveyed, with 85 people claiming they suffered it after the jab. I'm eager to know if they also suffered it before the jab. A woman explaining why she gets Botox said to me recently that she does it to look less tired. The thing is – she is tired. Her body and face are tired from being a body and a face for over 40 years. It's a tiredness that's different from a phase, a mood, an episode. Generational differences The differences in attitudes to aging and dying are not only between us and our ancestors, however. Changes are also taking place between generations. I chatted with a beautician this week about who comes into her salon. 'There's a huge difference between the attitudes of younger and older women when it comes to Botox and fillers,' she says. Younger women want to look like they've had work done. 'They're proud of it. It's a sign of success – a badge of honour, that they can look like they've had their lips done.' I must assume that the same goes for their foreheads, shined and buffed and glistening. We all know, I mean rationally, that human skin has never been so shiny. We see it happening in front of us - these young women becoming the shiny plastic dolls they once played with as children. Older women, and men, want to look natural, just not as tired. What does that tell us about how we're evolving? What's more concerning, the cheeky sneaky Botox or the obvious Botox? Is it possible we're moving from mild death anxiety (where on some level we know it's nonsense) to absolute death denial – where to look good, or cool, or current, is to look like something unhuman, something like AI. There is no suggestion that Madonna is trying to look her age anymore. File photo:) Madonna's face is a good example – there is no suggestion that she is trying to look her age anymore. She's not even trying to look like a person anymore. She has a mask on, and it's completely unrelated to her biography. The Irish Examiner Women's Health and Wellbeing Survey surprised me in one thing. It suggests that fewer women, fewer of our peers, are getting Botox than we think. The survey reveals that 10% of the women interviewed had Botox, 6% fillers and 12% either treatment. However, most women (45%) believe that 'most women my age have undergone some form of cosmetic treatment'. I wonder how interviewees interpreted the words 'cosmetic treatment'. Death anxiety Read between the lines, if the lines are still there, and it may be true that a lot of women are getting cosmetic treatments, just not Botox or fillers. A lot of people, particularly people with money, are going for less invasive services like skin peeling, micro-needling and laser resurfacing. I suppose you might call it death anxiety light, or death anxiety for beginners. But it's still death anxiety, right? You know, looking your best, looking less tired – covering up or reversing excessive living to stay sexy. And I'll pre-empt the comments about dying your hair if I may. Death anxiety is not something new. We have always tried to look younger. The earliest documented use of hair dye can be traced to Ancient Egypt, over 4,000 years ago. It's just that our death anxiety is ramping up, and it's not necessarily good for us. For anyone who cares, corpse-me is all for a party. Feel free to enjoy a smooch and a tickle around me; give me an old shake too if you fancy. I won't be looking. And if I am – I'm smiling.
Chicago Tribune
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
‘A Photographic Memory' review: A beautiful search for a long-lost parent, in words and pictures
Unusual in the pre-digital age, before rampant cellphone camera chronicles of everyone's lives changed our visual landscape forever. This is what photographer and filmmaker Rachel Elizabeth Seed remembers of her childhood in 'A Photographic Memory,' a supple nonfiction triumph with a weeklong run at the Siskel Film Center. Seed's film pieces together an idea of a vanished loved one, from inchoate fragments of loss unique to those who never really knew a parent. The filmmaker's mother, Sheila Turner Seed, was a remarkable, adventurous spirit and an accomplished global photographer, writer, interviewer and Albany Park native. She died suddenly, of a cerebral hemorrhage, in 1979. She was 42. Daughter Rachel was 18 months old. There were photographs, of course, many taken by Seed's father, British photographer Brian Seed, who sold stock images featuring young Rachel as a frequent camera subject. She was just an everygirl in those photos, at a birthday party, or playing with friends on the sidewalk, or twirling around the house. It was, as director, co-writer and co-editor Seed says in 'A Photographic Memory,' a false front of normalcy. In 2008, well into adulthood, Seed discovered a stash of reel-to-reel audiotapes — hours and hours of interviews her mother conducted in the early 1970s with 10 celebrated photographers, including Henri Cartier-Bresson. This was a complicated emotional lifeline: the sound of her mother's voice, at long last. Seed, who followed her parents' career paths as a photographer, also discovered a trove of her mother's own photographs, revealing a distinctive, clear-eyed aesthetic and a nomadic itch. Turner Seed, as one of her friends and colleagues interviewed for 'A Photographic Memory' phrases it, wasn't a workaholic, exactly. She was a 'lifeaholic,' living, traveling, striving for the fullest possible existence. Her recorded conversations with Cartier-Bresson, Gordon Parks and others, and daughter Seed's own interviews decades later with many of the same people, become a beguiling whole in 'A Photographic Memory.' Turner Seed's interviews served as the basis for the popular eight-part audiovisual educational project 'Images of Man.' From this wellspring, Seed's documentary took shape, though it took a full 16 years to come to fruition. The delicately woven final version, made with co-writer and lead editor Christopher Stoudt, devotes precisely the right amount of screen time to Seed's own perspective and life circumstances. It's a movie about how we remember, and how photographs and audio recordings can answer questions, though never fully, and always open to interpretation. There are, however, remnants of Turner Seed's life that her daughter shares with us in this film that are wonderfully direct. Some are ordinary journal entries that turn out to be succinctly extraordinary in their brevity. At one point, teenage Turner Seed wrote in her journal: 'Mom told me I should marry him. How can she play with my life that way?' Without playing with anyone's life, 'A Photographic Memory' makes beautiful sense of the connections between mother and daughter, work and love and other mysteries. No MPA rating (brief partial nudity) Running time: 1:25 How to watch: June 20-26, Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State St.; filmmaker Rachel Elizabeth Seed will introduce and discuss 'A Photographic Memory' at several screenings, details at
Business Wire
2 days ago
- Business
- Business Wire
Multiplier Holdings Launches With $27.5 Million in Funding to Accelerate the AI Journey for Professional Services Firms
SINGAPORE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Today, Multiplier Holdings, a technology company building AI-native professional services firms, publicly launched with $27.5 million in Seed and Series A funding. The Series A round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from Ribbit Capital (led the Seed), EDBI, and SV Angel. Multiplier is helping to overcome the AI adoption hurdle by acquiring specialized professional services firms and integrating custom AI automation to deliver better results for clients, drive efficiency and fuel growth. Globally, the professional services market is valued at over $6 trillion, and is projected to grow significantly in the coming years (e.g., tax advisory services are forecasted to grow at 11.2% CAGR). Tax, accounting, specialized advisory and other high-stakes professional services firms face more demand than they can supply with a declining workforce, alongside high labor costs and legacy technologies. Multiplier acquires ambitious boutique services firms, onboards them to its AI-driven practice management platform, and then iteratively and diligently works with the firms' domain experts to uplevel the client experience and improve the scalability of the business. "Vertical SaaS might not be the best path to modernize an industry. Building an AI-native professional services platform from the ground up creates the most technological leverage and captures more incentive alignment between domain and technology experts than traditional SaaS,' said Justin Overdorff, Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners. 'The Multiplier approach—an AI-first software company acquiring existing service firms to compete directly in the services business by using proprietary technology—allows us to elevate the client and staff experience in a radical way. As it scales, Multiplier can become the preferred buyer in these categories by underwriting the largest and most repeatable post-acquisition improvements to the business while ensuring firm owners and staff participate in the upside." Multiplier partners with the firms it owns to directly embed its technology, iteratively developing new features and offering hands-on technical support as a long-term owner, working alongside the firm's staff to create customized AI-driven solutions to fit the exact needs of each specialized firm. This approach enables Multiplier to build customizable solutions to automate critical but time-consuming tasks and free up time to deliver better outcomes for clients. "We believe the market will reward players who compete on technology-enabled client service through an integrated platform of people and tech. While our portfolio firms maintain operational independence, we align incentives across all stakeholders—from Multiplier leadership to firm leaders and staff—creating hybrid technology firms with exceptional client service, automation, and quality that traditional firms using off-the-shelf AI solutions simply cannot match," said Noah Pepper, CEO of Multiplier Holdings and former Stripe executive. The model is working. Within the first eight months since starting their tech build-out, Multiplier's AI-powered platform helped Citrine International Tax multiply cash flows by approximately 2.5 times and eliminate large swaths of highly manual work. A significant portion of this lift was shared back with the staff of the firm in the form of performance bonuses while delivering enhanced service to clients. "When Noah approached us, we saw Multiplier as a unique opportunity to become part of a technology firm and deliver a truly differentiated level of client service– all while growing the business together," said Gregory Trotman, founder of Citrine International Tax. 'The Multiplier team immersed themselves in our workflows, built a custom end-to-end technology platform and worked with our staff to streamline everything from client onboarding to billing, resulting in a huge lift in productivity.' Clients are noticing the impact of the technology too: 'Citrine has been a major upgrade compared to prior firms we used. Emily, our advisor at Citrine, is more responsive and easier to work with, and the tools she's using help us gain clarity and confidence about where our return is in the workflow - and rapidly confirm when things have been submitted to the authorities,' said Keith Robinson, an American technology investor and former C-level executive living in London who became a Citrine client in the last year. About Lightspeed Venture Partners Lightspeed Venture Partners is a multi-stage venture capital firm focused on accelerating disruptive innovations and trends in AI, Enterprise, Consumer, Health, and Fintech. Over the past 25 years, the Lightspeed team has backed hundreds of entrepreneurs and helped build more than 500 companies globally including Abridge, Affirm, Anthropic, Cato Networks, Epic Games, Glean, Mistral, Moveworks, Navan, Netskope, Rubrik, Snap, Wiz, and more. Lightspeed and its global team currently manage over $30B in AUM across the Lightspeed platform, with investment professionals and advisors in the U.S., Europe, India, Israel, and Southeast Asia. Multiplier Holdings scales high-impact professional services firms through the power of AI. Multiplier's unique model entails acquiring professional services firms, like specialized tax and accounting practices, and transforming them into more scalable, profitable businesses by systematically integrating custom AI solutions. Multiplier holds a library of AI and workflow components developed in-house that can be configured to fit the needs of each acquired firm. This allows Multiplier to automate critical, time-consuming tasks to increase firm efficiency and productivity and drive growth, while improving both the customer and employee experience. To learn more, visit
Los Angeles Times
13-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
‘A Photographic Memory' charts a daughter's dive into the legacy of a mother she never knew
The accomplished mother that photographer-writer Rachel Elizabeth Seed never knew is the star of her deeply affecting 'A Photographic Memory,' one of last year's best documentaries, finally making its way to Los Angeles theaters. This poetic gem is a journey from the weight of absence to the serenity of presence, thanks in no small part to the inquisitive, gifted woman pulled from obscurity: Sheila Turner-Seed, whose life was short but full and worth revitalizing. Turner-Seed, a journalist, was 42 when she died in 1979, leaving behind an 18-month-old daughter, a bereft photographer husband (Brian Seed) and a legacy of wide-ranging, globe-trotting reportage that culminated in a renowned oral and visual history called 'Images of Man.' The project was anchored by Turner-Seed's groundbreaking interviews with the world's best living photographers at the time, including Henri Cartier-Bresson, Cecil Beaton, Lisette Model and Gordon Parks. And though she only ever referred to herself as an amateur with a camera, Turner-Seed once saw a photo of hers land on the cover of the New York Times. That her daughter also pursued photography and nonfiction storytelling could be viewed as the manifestation of a deeply felt connection. Was following her mother's passion the most readily available way to process a personal loss the director essentially had no memory of? Seed only began exploring the true breadth and emotion of her mother's legacy when she herself reached the age that her mom died, a milestone fraught for many grown, parentless children. What the younger Seed found, accompanied by memories from her mother's colleagues, was a rich archive of adventurous work and personal expression: photos, journals, contact sheets, Super8 film, audio pieces and a trove of interviews. These discussions reveal a soulful, probing mind that not only kept her subjects on their toes, but warmly elicited thoughtful answers about the nature of their moment-in-time art. Turner-Seed's own writing lays bare a struggle for self-fulfillment, to reconcile the traditional values pushed by her Jewish immigrant parents with a restless need to discover and make her own way. In an especially revealing journal entry from 1972, she wonders if she'll grow in her chosen fields if she marries and has a child — but also, will she want to? A lanky, warm presence with a sociable smile, Turner-Seed is never far from a keenly observed thought or ambivalent feeling. Why 'A Photographic Memory' stands out, however, is her daughter's handling of this precious life. It's a heartbreakingly imaginative conjuring of the parent-child connection that never came to be, but which Seed and her editors (including documentary cutting legend Maya Daisy Hawke) finesse to life. With melancholy and playfulness both, Seed threads in her own introspective voice-over and contemporary footage (poring over material, visiting her dad, sparring with a boyfriend). She also adds grainy period re-creations of her mom's interviews, Seed playing her own parent in these 8mm snippets. Eventually, technology allows these distant intimates to share a frame. Biographical and essayistic, 'A Photographic Memory' suggests both a woman interested in locating her remarkable mother, gone too soon, and an artist exploring her own place. Of the impulse to take a photo, to grab the moment, we hear Cartier-Bresson excitedly tell Turner-Seed, 'Life is once, forever.' Her future daughter's marvelous movie embodies that idea beautifully.
Business Wire
11-06-2025
- Business
- Business Wire
Bolo AI is Building the Operating System for Heavy Industries With an $8.1 Million Seed Round
PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Bolo AI, an enterprise AI company building intelligent tools for the people powering heavy industry, today announced an $8.1 million Seed round led by True Ventures, with participation from Benchstrength, Accomplice, J Ventures, and Beat Ventures. Bolo AI is the AI system of action for heavy industries, a $20 trillion sector that's long been overlooked by modern software. It unlocks the knowledge buried across procedures, documents, and legacy systems so teams can act quickly, safely, and with confidence. The result: reduced downtime, improved safety margins, and smarter, faster operations across the industrial value chain. Bolo AI was co-founded by Diti Sood and Dr. Lalit Jain. Sood began her career as a field engineer with SLB, the world's largest oilfield services company. She spent five years working on oil and gas field sites across the UAE and Qatar, often in extreme conditions — and was the first woman in her district to take on rig and offshore jobs. At times on the job with few accommodations, she slept in her truck between shifts. 'I've handled radioactive tools and explosives, worked 24-hour shifts and longer in 120°F heat, and relied on outdated manuals and siloed systems to make critical decisions,' said Sood, CEO and co-founder of Bolo AI. 'That gave me deep respect for the people doing this work — and a front-row seat to envisioning tools and products to enable them to make the best decisions every single time no matter the challenges facing them. Bolo brings AI into the daily flow of work — helping technical and frontline teams make faster, more confident decisions in operations, maintenance, engineering, safety, project management and more...' After earning her MBA from Harvard Business School, Sood led go-to-market strategy for enterprise AI products. Jain, co-founder of Bolo AI, is a machine learning expert with more than 15 years of experience building applied AI systems across cybersecurity, finance, and automation — bringing deep technical grounding to Bolo's platform. 'Diti and Lalit are building the infrastructure to make critical operations in heavy industries more intelligent and efficient with AI,' said Helen Min, venture partner at True Ventures. "The founding team has the unique talent, technical ability, and required customer empathy to transform an industry previously very underserved by technology." Bolo AI counts a Fortune 500 industrial firm and the largest oil refinery in the U.S. as early partners collaborating on both a strategic pilot program and proof of concept. With Seed funding, Bolo AI will grow its engineering and go-to-market teams, deepen integrations with enterprise systems, and accelerate deployments across energy, utility, and industrial operations. About Bolo AI Bolo AI is the daily AI system of action for the people who operate the world's infrastructure — in the field, plant, or office. By unlocking knowledge buried across documents, procedures, and legacy systems, Bolo helps industrial teams act quickly, work safely, and drive better outcomes. The company is headquartered in Palo Alto, with an engineering hub in Bangalore, India.
