The Pulse: July 14, 2022

Cicadas help create the buzzing soundscape of the city on hot summer nights, but the insects themselves are a rare sight.

"I think I've only actually seen one in Edmonton. They like to go high up into trees, and they're really tough to get a hold of," said Ferf Brownoff, a self-described amateur cicada enthusiast, confirming the experience of a curious Taproot reader.

Unlike their impossible-to-ignore periodic cousins in the eastern U.S., which emerge in gigantic broods in 13- or 17-year cycles, the seven species of cicada in Alberta are annual varieties that have some nymphs reaching maturity every season. This makes them a more consistent part of our environment, but one whose limited numbers could easily be invisible in the landscape if not for their piercing calls.

"They sound like an oppressively hot day," said Brownoff, an undergrad in the conservation biology program at the University of Alberta. "I can hear them all the time on a nice, sunny, hot day. And typically, that's the only times that I do hear them."

Male cicadas produce their characteristic sound with a specialized organ called a tymbal. These membranes are found on the insect's abdomen and elicit a sharp click when they contract and relax. Buckling between 300 and 400 times per second, the tymbal's percussive noise sounds continuous to the human ear.

More than having just a sonic association with summer heat, the cicada's life cycle is precisely linked with temperature. Nymphs stay in the soil, feeding on sap from tree roots until the thermometer hits about 18 C.

"That's kind of a signal that tells them, 'Now it's OK. This is the time that you can come up from the ground, and then turn into your adult stage,'" Brownoff explained. Along with temperature, humidity has been associated with successful adult cicada populations, Brownoff said, making this year's muggy July an ideal time for them to shed their skin and join the raucous party in the treetops of the river valley.

Some form of cicada has existed on this planet since the Late Triassic, and they can be found on every continent except Antarctica. It was while living in Japan that Brownoff first noticed the insects dangling from tree branches, triggering his enduring fascination.

• The City of Edmonton is spending up to $1 million to accommodate the Pope's visit to the city from July 24 to 27. The city will contribute in-kind costs for security, transit, and rental fees for mass at Commonwealth Stadium, which is expecting 65,000 attendees. The city will also cover the costs of road closures and will make contributions to Indigenous-led events. The Edmonton Police Service will also be responsible for costs related to papal security.
• Royal LePage forecasts that Edmonton home prices will continue to rise in the months ahead, owing partly to an increase in buyers from other cities seeking a more affordable lifestyle. The aggregate home price rose 6.8% year-over-year in the second quarter of 2022. Across Canada, however, average home prices has dropped for the first time since 2019.
• The Indigenous Peoples Experience at Fort Edmonton Park, which launched in November 2021, has received the Urban Land Institute Americas Award for Excellence. The city said the exhibit's "equitable engagement and integration throughout all stages of project development" made it a standout among the nominees. In April, it also won the Thea Award for Outstanding Achievement, an international award that recognizes historical and educational projects.
• Statistics Canada data shows that people in Edmonton and Calgary make some of the highest wages in the country, with the average household recording income $10,000 higher than the Canadian average. The average Edmonton household made $84,000 in 2020, down from $87,000 in 2015.
• The Edmonton Oilers had a busy first day of free agency, having re-signed defenceman Brett Kulak for a four-year contract with an average annual value (AAV) of $2.75 million, added goaltender Jack Campbell for a five-year contract with an AAV of $5 million, and re-signed forward Evander Kane for a four-year contract with an AAV of $5.125 million.
• Recently released data from Statistics Canada's 2021 census sheds light on gender diversity among Alberta couples and parents. The census recorded about 8,170 same-sex couples in Alberta, of which about 4,300 were women and 3,900 men. The 2021 census, which was the first to distinguish between gender and assigned sex, also recorded 2,730 couples where at least one person identifies as transgender and 1,325 where at least one identifies as non-binary. Almost 99% of couples in Alberta are between women and men, and slightly more than half have kids.

Jeff Martin's forthcoming graphic novel will be his fifth set in the post-apocalyptic Alberta of Hockeypocalypse, but it represents several firsts.

Martin was joined in his imagined universe by Polish comics creator Lukasz Kowalczuk, who helped develop the story idea for Hockeypocalypse: Slashers, and drew the cover and 15 interior pages. Kowalczuk will also be translating and re-lettering Slashers for a Polish release, making it the first of Martin's books to be printed in another language.

Martin and Kowalczuk melded styles and drew on their love of '80s slasher movies and straight-to-VHS horror to produce a story Martin describes as "Goosebumps meets Mighty Ducks." After many back-and-forth emails, the plot and ideas he and Kowalczuk amassed presented an unanswered question to Martin when he sat down to put it all together: "What is the emotional story that makes the cool stuff we have figured out already matter?"

The answer turned out to be the peculiar dissatisfaction afflicting the main character, Stretch, who has everything he ever wanted. In a world where all he has to do is play hockey, he finds himself unable to focus and losing the enjoyment he'd once found in the sport. The situation rang true for Martin himself.

"I have achieved what started out as being the dream — pretty much all I do is work on comics," he said. "But then realizing that in itself isn't quite enough. At what point do you become satisfied with the thing that you want? Or does wanting that thing inherently prevent that satisfaction somehow?"

It's a problem any artist will face, Martin said, especially those hiring out their creative skills to make ends meet.

"You'll get hired for a gig that isn't something you're passionate about. But you need a gig, so you take it. Then, all of a sudden, you find yourself doing all kinds of other random crap around the house and putting off drawing. Like, 'Wait, what am I doing? When I actually sit down to draw, I'm going to have fun.' But sometimes sitting down to draw becomes the hard part. And that's kind of where Stretch's story comes from."

A crowdfunding campaign for the English version of Slashers will finish on July 21, and the books will be available in the coming months. No release date has been set for the Polish version.

Photo: The cover and an interior page of Hockeypocalypse: Slashers, the latest instalment in Jeff Martin's graphic novel series. (Supplied)

What if letting people play together in virtual reality helped you better understand how they would work together? That's the idea behind AlignVR, an Edmonton company founded by Alex and Nathaniel Rossol after fun and games led to an unexpected insight.

When the brothers launched a virtual-reality escape room company called vrCAVE in 2016, they noticed something about the teams coming through.

"As we were watching lots and lots of groups go through our VR escape rooms during our testing, we started to see a pattern," Alex Rossol told Episode 22 of Bloom, Taproot's podcast about innovation. "Shortly after a group goes in, within about the first five or 10 minutes, it was clear whether that team was going to succeed or not throughout the VR escape room experience."

The Rossols started using VR as part of their own hiring process, assigning groups short puzzles and watching the "social collisions" that emerged from their efforts to solve them.

Then Airbus came calling in search of a recruitment experience, those discussions led to experiments in using VR as a hiring tool, and soon, a company that was born in the B2C entertainment space found a big B2B opportunity. Now Rossol is keen to make more business leaders and HR professionals in Edmonton aware of the services AlignVR has to offer.

Learn more about the AlignVR story on the July 14 episode.

In our sponsor spot, you'll hear Darrell Petras, director of business and community development with Innovate Edmonton, in conversation with Taproot co-founder Mack Male.

Bloom is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and everywhere else you get your podcasts.

Photo: A team works together in virtual reality to solve an escape room puzzle. (AlignVR)