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482ffa6bc2407c72afb0441315778791 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/juliewalmsley/2018/09/30/5-tech-ideas-making-multimodal-transportation-easier-and-cheaper/ | 5 Tech Ideas Making Multimodal Transportation Easier And Cheaper | 5 Tech Ideas Making Multimodal Transportation Easier And Cheaper
Correction: An earlier version of this article stated that Moovit is San Francisco-based. San Francisco is the location of its North American offices. Moovit was founded and is headquartered in Tel Aviv, Israel. And Transit is available in over 100 U.S. regions, not 54.
Self-driving cars and air taxis won't solve your urban travel needs for a good while, but a raft of tech solutions can help you efficiently mix public transit, bikes, scooters, car-share, and ride-hail right now. Here are five particularly useful ones: Moovit It's somewhere between individual-focused Waze and Reddit in user-interface but aims to solve the broad public policy problem of transportation unknowns in disconnected areas. Tel Aviv-based Moovit helps you plan your trip, and you can provide input as a community contributor or "Mooviter." Those Mooviters are patching information together to create a coherent network, allowing underserved areas to connect with better-resourced areas. That is, people can get from here to there to meet personal needs, but their contributions showing who is moving where, in what mode and how fast, allow public agencies to craft better plans. Moovit reports that it is now in 2500 cities across 83 countries and can be used in 44 languages. Courtesy Moovit Moovit is free for Android, iOS, and online. It's not new on the scene or a secret. Its growth and fundraising have taken headlines. But a new Siri integration allows iPhone users to set their phones up so that Moovit gets them home (or anywhere) in the most efficient way possible when they ask Siri to do so.
Moovit reports that it is now in 2500 cities across 83 countries and can be used in 44 languages. The tech community clearly believes in it: in February, its Series D pulled in $50 million in a round led by Intel. It has raised $131.5 million altogether, Crunchbase shows.
Transit
If you're new to public transportation, you're not sure yet what your nearby options are. That's okay. Transit is a smartphone app on both iOS and Android that shows you upcoming departures in your area before you touch your screen. Those departures are updated in real time in most areas. And it's not just public transit. When you work your way up to multimodal, Transit can also help you plan car-share, bike-share, and Uber. Some services have integrated payment.
Transit is in 100 U.S. regions to help you orient yourself to bus and train, but does not have every micro-mobility partnership in every area.
Some car-share partnerships include Car2Go in Austin, Denver, Portland, and Washington, D.C. For bike-share, the function integrates with Motivate, the largest bike-share in the country, among others. Transit offers integrated bike-share payment for its partners in Chicago, Minneapolis, Detroit, Columbus, Louisville, Chattanooga, and Aspen. That is, you can unlock your bike and pay for it in the Transit app.
Migo
Migo lets you shop how you'd like to move today, choosing among Uber, Lyft, Car2Go, Yellow Cab, Lime, Flywheel, and public transit. It is so far only on iOS (Android is coming) but is available in 75 areas in North America. It works as a kind of customer acquisition strategy for mobility companies wanting to garner new clientele and a market survey for urbanites wanting maximum choice and minimum price as they go multimodal.
The mobility community believes in the Seattle-based startup. It just raised $9 million in an early round from the venture arms of Enterprise and Hyundai.
Connectpoint SmartStop For transit riders wanting planning assistance for their chosen mode of transit, rather than a third-party app to help them plan between and among buses, Goleta, Calif.-based Connectpoint makes digital bus stops, signage, and interactive kiosks for transit agencies in the U.S.
Its solar SmartStop displays real-time bus arrivals and departures at a given stop and allows riders to tap and swipe around a screen to plan an efficient trip. A new SmartStop installed at a Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority station. Credit Oran Viriyincy You don't have to download an app or navigate to any site to use the digital tools; they are part of the infrastructure at the individual stop. Connectpoint has contracts with the Washington Metro, the Chicago Transit Authority, the Austin Capital Metro, the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transit Agency, and the Silicon Valley-centered Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority.
Remix
Remix isn't for commuter use, but one day it will probably make your morning rush much better. It is something like Moovit geared toward urban planners. Instead of gathering and synthesizing information on street traffic for various applications, the San Francisco-based company is itself a software system for the actual design of streets. That includes the creation of roads and managing public transit and new mobility on those roads. It has so far pulled in $12 million, including a Sequoia Capital-led first round.
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94ae31f810f95f00a06ba6c886eb421b | https://www.forbes.com/sites/juliewalmsley/2018/10/09/lyft-creating-a-shark-tank-like-experience-for-its-drivers-in-a-good-way/ | Lyft Creating A Shark Tank-Like Experience For Its Drivers (In A Good Way) | Lyft Creating A Shark Tank-Like Experience For Its Drivers (In A Good Way)
Lyft Co-Founder and President John Zimmer on stage at the Collision 2018 conference in New Orleans.... [+] (Stephen McCarthy/Sportsfile via Getty Images)
Incredible ideas have come from ride-hail. Along with Uber-for-everything, there's nearly every service and tool to improve the workaday lives of all the gigmasters hustling for all of those conveniences that can now be booked with a swipe on a phone.
On-demand dog-walkers (Wag!, Rover), car washers (Spiffy), food and convenience store runners (Postmates), restaurant-to-your-home deliverers (DoorDash), kiddie carpool alternatives (Kango, HopSkipDrive, Zūm), and of course ride-hail drivers want to earn more, save money on gas, find parking, shield themselves from liability, identify areas with the most demand, avoid accidents as they go from one client-of-the-moment to the next, get paid for a day’s work as soon as possible and take advice from other drivers about how to do all of the above.
Fortunate for this growing class of microlaborers, all of those functions exist via apps, websites, hardware and even center console-strapped vending machines. Uber drivers can make their backseats into tiny convenience stores for a captive (and hopefully hungry) clientele and take a percentage on sales.
Some ideas to maximize earnings on the road, like Mystro’s automated toggling between apps for the multigiggers, Vugo’s geotargeted backseat digital advertising on a tablet, and The Rideshare Guy’s profitable driving consultancy-on-a-blog, are the brainchildren of now-funded entrepreneurs who were once ride-hail drivers.
Even where they don’t have an idea specifically for the gig economy, many ride-hail drivers choose to live as contractors for the flexibility to pursue their bold ideas on their own time. That’s where Lyft's latest initiative comes in.
The pink mustachioed powerhouse positioning itself as the community-oriented total mobility solution opened a pitch competition to its drivers. Right now Lyft Pitch isn't culling talent from its own labor pool to launch mobility concepts for integration with its own services. Not yet.
Lyft Marketing Manager Kate Glantz, who conceived of the contest in July 2017, said, "We're agnostic to their ideas. They don't even need to be fully-fledged businesses. What really struck us from [our internal survey last year] is that nearly one in five drivers, or 18%, is an entrepreneur."
Glantz, herself a former entrepreneur who's been through the incubator experience, is in charge of the mid-Atlantic region. That is, she is outside the tech world where "we all know that pitch competitions happen every day. But in the non-tech world, this is a pretty new notion." She expects to bring opportunity to people who would otherwise never access the exposure or the mentorship the competition will provide.
It's part of a larger effort by Lyft to secure opportunity for drivers, rather than compete in the modern mobility niche over maximum convenience and minimum price for customers. "So much of our marketing efforts tend to focus on passengers and we've really been, as a company, embracing marketing on both sides," Glantz said. "What's something that has the impact to affect tens of thousands?"
Lyft drivers must apply for the Shark Tank-esque pitch slam by Oct. 21. If you’re not a current Lyft driver and just need a little seed cash, you can still apply to become a driver in order to enter the competition as long as your new driver application is approved before Lyft Pitch applications close.
Applicants from either camp will submit an application and elevator pitch before eight finalists are announced Nov. 1. Those finalists will then go on to Washington, D.C. as a group of eight. After a pitch clinic, they’ll present their ideas to the leadership of Lyft, Intuit, and General Assembly. External partners -- not Lyft -- will act as mentors. They'll also get professional headshots. First and second place earn $15,000 and $10,000 respectively. The audience favorite will take $5,000. All finalists will get credits from General Assembly.
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4f5f316a0949d6cad1fb4b6a3ba3a141 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/juliewalmsley/2019/03/31/this-platform-books-flat-fee-airport-rides-for-your-trips-to-5-continents-in-your-local-currency/ | This Platform Books Flat-Fee Airport Rides For Your Trips To 5 Continents (In Your Local Currency) | This Platform Books Flat-Fee Airport Rides For Your Trips To 5 Continents (In Your Local Currency)
Jayride plans to become the global leader in ground transport from the airport. Getty
Late last month, Sydney-based Jayride added new ride-hail firms to its cut-rate offerings. While Uber and Lyft IPOs make news at home in the U.S., the transport aggregator for international destinations is yet one more company growing abroad, scaling up to keep the big two from taking over. Jayride is airport-focused, so doesn't present a threat in the race for carless urbanites, but airports and their guaranteed ride demand are an important pick-up destination for drivers.
Jayride books flat fares from the airport, allowing travelers to reserve and pay for a ride in their home currency, and avoid downloading an app for a ride service they might not use again. Put another way, Jayride gets people to try other on-demand transportation brands at teaser rates. Uber and Lyft's competitors get discounted trials sold for them.
However, Jayride is also at least partly an ally to the two, almost concurrently IPOing, perennial arch-rivals. The company sells fares for Lyft at 224 U.S. airports and for new Uber acquisition Careem at airports in the Middle East, Europe and Africa.
Exactly how strong a competitor (or ally) Jayride will be remains to be seen. It must accomplish positive word-of-mouth among travelers. So far, Yelp and TripAdvisor reviews portray a range of differing, mostly negative, experiences.
Common complaints include late and no-show rides, warning consumers against paying for a driver who never appears. As comparison, TripAdvisor-popular airport ride service Canada Transfers and its shuttles in Mexico offers pre-payment by credit card but also allows payment by cash in person in upon arrival. (The two companies are unrelated.)
But Jayride spokesman Ari Zaetz said by email that the company has developed a customer experience that is "seamless" and it has the technology to scale into different regions. Beyond the February addition of Gett in Europe and the Middle East, Lyft in the U.S., Cabify in Europe and South America, and Careem in the Middle East, Europe and Africa, it added more offerings through March and will continue through April.
It also has existing key partnerships. While it hands business to select transportation companies, it also gets business from other booking sites, namely Brisbane-based, Expedia-esque Flight Centre, a subsidiary of top travel sales firm Flight Centre Group, and Melbourne-based multimodal trip navigator Rome2Rio.
Beyond ride-hail alternatives, the company also books shared shuttle buses and meet-and-greet limousine services.
So, how do you use a ride-hail app like Lyft without the app? By phone dispatch. You book your Lyft airport transfer on Jayride with a fixed price set at the time of booking and paid in your local currency. Like a standard airport transfer, your reservation confirmation includes pick-up time and a phone number to call when you land. A Jayride dispatcher then deploys your Lyft driver to your terminal at the right time.
Long term, its goal is to become the world's first global aggregator of ground transportation services for travelers. It currently has over 3,000 companies on its platform, with services for more than 1,300 airports around the world.
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31aba1653a644113d296c4ceefc760e1 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/julieweed/2015/03/11/introducing-a-blog-about-the-legal-marijuana-industry-which-is-on-fire/ | Introducing A Blog About The Legal Marijuana Industry (Which Is On Fire) | Introducing A Blog About The Legal Marijuana Industry (Which Is On Fire)
When a bi-partisan bill comes to the floor of the US senate that would allow financial institutions to provide services to legal marijuana businesses, it’s a good time for Forbes to start covering the Cannabis Industry in earnest.
Twenty-three states already have laws legalizing marijuana in some form and the trend is fueling entrepreneurs’ ideas. The “Green Rush” includes marijuana growers, testers, and store owners. Others are creating pot delivery services, tourist activities, smokeless vaporizers, pot-infused edibles, and niche after niche of other marijuana–related paraphernalia and service. Creating this new industry from scratch, entrepreneurs hope to project a responsible image – more Napa Valley than back alley -- so restrictive laws don’t make a comeback.
Marijuana plants at Seattle's Skyhigh Gardens
The opportunities accompanying legalized marijuana sales are especially attractive to entrepreneurs, according to Kevin Oliver, who is on the National Board of NORML (National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws) and owns a cannabis farm north of Spokane Washington called Washington’s Finest Cannabis. Because laws vary by state, small local businesses can operate legally while large companies that operate in multiple states need to worry about running afoul of laws in non-legalized locations. Federal laws prohibiting banks from taking money associated with the sales of marijuana pose a roadblock locally, but even more so to multi-state companies. “Federal laws that prevent large companies like Philip Morris from getting into the industry are providing a place for small businesses to flourish,” he said.
Emerging industries favor creativity and nimbleness, and marijuana industry participants will need both of these attributes as laws and regulations continue to evolve. For example, while Washington State issued licenses to all growers who submitted a valid application in its initial process, there were so many applicants that the maximum acreage was reduced. Later on, the state increased its cap on total marijuana growing space from two million square feet for the state, to 8.5 million square feet. Advertising restrictions by companies like Apple , Facebook and Google make marketing online a game of cat-and-mouse with acceptable search terms.
While the direct growth and sales of marijuana are heavily regulated, associated businesses have very low barriers to entry or expansion. There are suddenly thousands of additional customers for legal products like rolling papers and pipes. Existing small businesses like t-shirt printers, agriculture suppliers, construction crews, and marketing firms have new businesses and customers to call on. Some of the new businesses can be segmented by neighborhood – another boon to hyper-local entrepreneurs like bakeries and spas. According to a new study by Public Health-Seattle & King County, 22 percent of adults in Seattle’s downtown neighborhood are taking advantage of legalization, while just one percent of residents of Mercer Island and East Renton reported getting high in the past 30 days. Others are segmented by age with high-end pot tours for baby-boomers who thought this day would never come.
Over the next weeks and months I will be exploring the world of the “Potrepreneur,” the “Canna-businessperson,” (for some reason the puns and wordplay are endless in this industry.) What services and products are they creating? Who are they hiring? What challenges and opportunities are they facing and how are their businesses different than other businesses? The legal marijuana industry is attracting executives with MBAs, technologists, stay-at-home parents and college students. Stoners are emerging from their basements, because it turns out they now have the expertise everybody is looking for.
You'll hear from underage college entrepreneurs running a pot delivery service, a farmer watching prices rise and fall, and other case studies, many of which, like this industry, are in their infancy. Read along and watch to see which of these businesses will blossom.
WATCH: Cannabis -- America's Fastest-Growing Industry
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a1a78ae2f85e7c31d5ab68bfe4ea3844 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/julieweed/2015/08/06/zoots-cannabis-edibles-trying-change-pots-back-alley-image/ | Zoots Cannabis Edibles Trying To Change Pot's Back-Alley Image | Zoots Cannabis Edibles Trying To Change Pot's Back-Alley Image
Db3’s ZootDrops come in two flavors: Yippee Ki-Yay which includes caffeine, and Kickback made with chamomile. The flavored THC-infused liquid is packaged in small discreet bottles and can be stirred into a beverage or consumed straight. Selling the drops, and sister-products ZootBites brownies, ZootRocks lozenges and ZootBlast energy shots at a rate of about half a million dollars in retail sales per month, Db3 has become the biggest seller of edible cannabis products in Washington state according to Tetratrak.com which analyzes data from the Washington Liquor and Cannabis Control Board.
The company aims to make products that offer a consistent, controllable high that consumers can use as a part of their everyday life. “We want to get away from the image of back alleys and dark parking lots,” Patrick Devlin said.
Ad for Zoots features regular-looking people doing regular activities (Source: Db3)
The idea for the family-owned Zoots cannabis edibles business was launched over a Thanksgiving dinner. The Devlin brothers, Michael, Dan and Patrick, each old enough to have grandchildren, decided to use their own backgrounds in business, retail and food products to jump into the burgeoning legal marijuana industry. Their company Db3 named for the three Devlin brothers now employs 35 people and distributes their products to 123 stores.
The brothers use the alcohol/spirits market as a model when they think about marijuana products, embracing the intoxication aspects of the product but delivered in a safe way. The standard serving size or dose of THC, the psychoactive component of cannabis, is 10mg according to Washington State law. Patrick Devlin said the company makes their Zoot products in small servings so people have more control over their experience.
“We all know how bad it is going overboard on edibles and not liking where you are,” he said, “This gives people a way to be more exact with their dosage.” If they start at a very low dosage, customers are more likely to enjoy the experience and do it again, he said, which would make them more likely to be a repeat buyer.
Db3 targets among others, the older customer, who may be returning to marijuana after a long absence. “People want to be social and able to converse and not say stupid things,” said Devlin. To attract that demographic, Zoots advertises in printed newspapers and uses “normal-looking people like you’d see in a stock photo,” in the ads said Devlin, doing everyday social activities like having a picnic, to convey that marijuana use can be part of a typical life.
“We want to normalize the product,“ said Devlin, and show it in the same situations other product ads might show.
“We’re like the Johnny Walker of pot,” he said , “We aim for the lower end of premium” to deliver quality but still keep a price that is accessible to most people.
Building the brand is important according to Meghan Larson co- founder and CEO of Adistry, a Boulder-based digital advertising company serving the cannabis industry. “Too many companies approach the cannabis industry with a "build it and they will come" mentality,” she said “The few companies that approach the market with a comprehensive strategy that includes branding are starting to gain momentum, attract consumers and gain visibility.”
Building the brand image of “responsible fun” will continue to be important as the Devlin brothers work with partners in other states where marijuana is legal to produce and sell the products that bear the Zoots name.
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caf115131be6ac98c39f5946d033d338 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/julieweed/2015/09/03/grandma-built-a-pot-shop-now-she-wants-to-sell-it/ | Grandma Built A Pot Shop -- Now She Wants To Sell It | Grandma Built A Pot Shop -- Now She Wants To Sell It
While many retirees spend time in their gardens, 82-year-old Florence Childs has chosen to work with another kind of plant. In 2014 she won the license for, and created the Top Shelf recreational cannabis store near Spokane Washington. Small and tidy, friendly and well-stocked, the store attracts tourists, locals and a handful of regulars who stop in everyday to “pick up a cookie or something,” said Childs. Yep, grandma built a pot shop.
Childs had managed her husband’s accounting business for 30 years and retired, but her children encouraged her to “find something to do,” she said, and then offered a specific suggestion. “I’ve got the reputation of being the luckiest member of the family,” said Childs so “my children encouraged me to enter the state lottery to try for a cannabis store license.”
She won.
Florence Childs hopes to sell her Spokane-area Washington Pot Shop. Photo by Max Lathrop
Getting from that license to an operational business, with no retail management experience and in an atmosphere where the laws and rules are evolving, “was an enormous amount of work,” she recalls, “very arduous.” Childs had to find a jurisdiction that would allow her to open a store, search for a property, remodel a building, secure the permits and create a retail business from scratch.
Her first location application, near the Washington-Idaho border was turned down by local officials because the police there thought it would create too much cross-border drug movement into Idaho where marijuana is illegal.
Childs said her adult children helped her get the store going but then left her to run it. She financed the store from her savings and her family pitched in remodeling skills. Childs says she has not taken a salary yet, preferring to plow profits back into the business.
Sales have grown rapidly, due to the store’s location on a busy street next to a Walmart and near a casino, popular fishing lakes and the Spokane airport. The closest recreational marijuana store is about 10 miles away. According to Brian Yauger, CEO of Tetratrak.com a business intelligence site that analyses Washington state recreational marijuana sales and trends, Top Shelf was the 77th highest earning retailer of 151 retailers in the state last month with $153,329 in sales.
From January of 2015 when the store opened, Childs has been onsite almost every day, often for eight hours a day, but she gives her small team credit for making the business so successful. Store manager Jennifer Bordoy had previously worked as a bartender, but was able to dive into retail and connect with vendors to stock store shelves. The two budtenders “love their customers and the customers love them,” said Childs. She recently hired a third employee so she could scale back her own hours.
About one quarter of her customers are regulars, says Childs. Some come once every week or few weeks and a few come to the store every day to buy a little something and chat with the budtenders. “It’s their stop in the morning instead of a coffee shop,” she said.
She doesn’t partake in cannabis products herself, but Childs can rattle off her most popular items, including pre-rolled joints, Sour Berry marijuana, and THC drinks. “We’re just getting a new butterscotch candy in,” she said, to add to their collection of candies and baked goods.
While she said it has been a fun and fascinating experience, Childs recently put the store on the market and is set to retire again. “I have family scattered across the United States and I want to visit them all,” she said. Childs also hopes the sale of the store will allow her to take a cruise through Europe and replace her old car.
Childs is selling without a broker and has already received more than 30 inquiries after a story on the sale was published recently in Marijuana Ventures magazine. While recreational marijuana sales licenses have been sold, hers is the first up-and-running recreational pot shop to go on the market.
Her advice for others thinking about entering the legal marijuana industry? “Go for it but keep realistic expectations,” she advises. It’s new, it’s exciting, it’s always changing, she said, “But don’t think you can sit back and watch the money roll in. It is a lot of work.”
Also on Forbes:
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b648ba1052465612f8379e5358d448eb | https://www.forbes.com/sites/julieweed/2015/09/25/payments-smelling-of-marijuana-and-other-facts-of-life-at-higher-standard-packaging/ | Payments Smelling Of Marijuana, And Other Facts of Life At Higher Standard Packaging | Payments Smelling Of Marijuana, And Other Facts of Life At Higher Standard Packaging
“$5400 -- all in small bills and the whole thing reeked of pot.”
That’s how entrepreneurs Deb Baker and Barb Diner describe the first payment they received from a Denver marijuana dispensary for their plastic cannabis containers. Afraid the local bank would look at them askance when they went to make the deposit, the two put the money in Baker’s clothes dryer and tumbled it with some Febreeze sheets to get the smell out. By then the bank had closed so they stored the money in Baker’s freezer under some loaves of bread until the next day. “We literally laundered the money,” Baker laughs, “and ended up with cold hard cash.” Such are the experiences of the service and supplies providers to the marijuana industry.
(Credit: Deb Baker)
Baker and Diner created their company Higher Standard Packaging one year ago to supply the legal marijuana industry with plastic containers and in doing so joined a raft of businesses, large and small going after the particular and evolving packaging needs of this growing industry.
Two years ago, a Colorado dispensary could “throw some weed in a baggie and send it out the door,” said Diner. Now a state government website specifies how to make the packaging compliant with the new laws including making the packaging child-resistant, opaque and bearing a warning.
In their research of existing containers, “What we smelled when we opened some of the sample vials concerned us,” said Baker. She worried the odor might mean the plastic container was slowly releasing a chemical like formaldehyde it was made with, a process called off-gassing. “It’s common sense that a recreational user or a person using marijuana products for medical reasons wants a container that won’t contaminate what’s inside,” she said, so The pair decided to use only containers approved by the FDA for food and pharmaceutical use. Higher Standard Packaging now distributes a variety of products including 12 sizes of BPA-free cylindrical jars and child-resistant caps that can be individually labeled to contain edibles, flower – a term for marijuana buds, and concentrates. Clients can even choose to have containers made from an eco-friendly resin that comes from recycled milk cartons.
Working 12 hour days and learning something new in each of them, the entrepreneurs say they have sold nearly three million containers in their first year. From an initial investment of $1200 each, they have also made enough profit to take salaries as well as invest back in the business. So far the pair has worked with partners to create their products and have not hired additional employees.
When the entrepreneurs first began talking to larger companies who could create or distribute their packaging, they were most often refused due to the nature of the product’s ultimate use. “They did not want to be in the marijuana business,” said Baker. Now, she says, some of those same companies are calling them for advice. “We’ve been to more than 100 dispensaries, growers, processors,” she said, “and we’ve talked to a lot of people about what their packaging needs are and what they want to see on the market.”
Until recently, marijuana stores and producers adapted pharmaceutical containers like vials with child-resistant caps or blisterpaks to their own use, but now companies including Higher Standard Packaging are collaborating with packaging manufacturers to design “first generation” products that are designed specifically for the cannabis industry. And while last year’s budtenders used to spend part of their day affixing labels to containers, producers now have labeling machines and printed jars.
The business is changing rapidly, said Diner, “the big players are getting into it now but there’s still a lot of opportunity.”
Also on Forbes:
Gallery: States That Could Soon Legalize Marijuana 5 images View gallery
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93a8f35f0253e4c238e56d9e343778bf | https://www.forbes.com/sites/julieweed/2015/10/18/now-your-phone-can-tell-you-if-you-are-you-too-high/ | Tech Entrepreneurs In The Marijuana Industry Deliver A Phone App To Tell You If You're High | Tech Entrepreneurs In The Marijuana Industry Deliver A Phone App To Tell You If You're High
A shot of vodka is a shot of vodka, but the THC level in a marijuana joint, vape or edible can vary tremendously from one strain or brand to another. This lack of uniform potency can make it harder to monitor marijuana’s impairment effects, and as marijuana legalization moves from state to state, more people will wonder how to use it safely. That’s what inspired the creators of Canary, an app that will tell users if they are impaired.
Self-funding the venture was important to Marc Silverman and his co-founder Lenny Frieling, a retired judge who worked to make marijuana legal in Colorado. “Taking other people’s money means you have other masters,” Silverman said. “If I want to focus on distribution and they want to focus on profit, that’s a problem.”
Silverman also says he has more freedom to change his product roadmap based on market conditions if he doesn’t have to get approval from outside investors. The co-founders also keep the business flexible and efficient by using a variety of part-time partners to develop and market the app.
The Canary App, available to download on the iPhone for $2.99, steps users through four short and simple tests on memory, attention, balance and time awareness, to let them know if they are impaired. Silverman had worked with NASA astronauts and professional athletes on assessing their performance on job-related tasks, and saw a similar opportunity in marijuana legalization. “People want to know if they are impaired,” he said.
To use the app, the user’s first step is to establish their own baseline measurement, taking the four short tests when they are not under the influence of drugs, alcohol or fatigue to establish their normal performance.
In the memory test, the user watches a series of numbers swirling one at a time on the screen and is asked to remember the numbers they saw and the order they saw them in.
To test attention, the user is shown a graphic symbol and then ask to tap on that symbol as it appears among other symbols randomly on the screen.
A balance tests mimics the sobriety test a police officer might administer. The user is asked to stand on one leg with arms crossed. A tone or vibration starts and ends the test, and the phone measures how steady they stayed.
The last test asks users to count out loud for what they think is twenty seconds, and compares that time to an accurate 20 second timer.
Canary displays a smiling canary or a frowning canary to indicate pass or fail.
To stretch their marketing budget, the company’s team works with NORML, the pro-legalization and safe-use group, in a partnership to get the word out. “We gave NORML members an early discount, and we donate a portion of our proceeds to the non-profit, and they help people learn about the app,” said Silverman. Canary has been downloaded more than 20,000 times since it launched a few months ago.
Silverman is talking with other potential partners to increase distribution.
Now that the product has been out on the market and been refined via user-suggestions, the co-founders are turning their sights towards new markets. One target may be parents who are handing car keys over to young drivers. “Canary could be a tool they could ask their kids to use,” said Silverman.
Another way to expand may be internationally. While Silverman can’t track the states where the app is downloaded, he can see which countries are downloading it and has been surprised at the breadth of geography. “We’re considering translating the app into Spanish and Chinese,” he said, noting that would be fairly easy and inexpensive to do because there isn’t much text associated with the product. He is guessing those international customers are using the app regarding alcohol impairment, rather than marijuana, so would take that into account in further product development.
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3d3ddc411fe667672d4f98b2ce4591d2 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/julieweed/2016/01/23/marijuana-related-web-domain-sales-are-generating-new-revenues/ | A Seller Of Marijuana-Related Domain Names Expects A Very Big Year | A Seller Of Marijuana-Related Domain Names Expects A Very Big Year
A marijuana plant is seen at a fair of products in Bogota, Colombia. AFP PHOTO / GUILLERMO LEGARIA /... [+] AFP / GUILLERMO LEGARIA
Drew Riegel makes a six-figure salary in the marijuana business without touching the plant, holding any physical inventory, or hiring any employees. Instead, he closely watches the development of the emerging industry, identifies the web domain names the players there might want, and buys them. Keeping about 1000 names at a time, he sells them to companies or individuals, through his web site MarijuanaNames.org. He keeps some names for himself and uses them to create web sites offering marijuana-related content that link to other web sites where customers can buy related products. Riegel receives a percentage of those sales revenues, a common internet practice called affiliate sales.
Some of his current favorite holdings right now are marijuanabook.com, marijuanagrowlight.com, and marijuanalawsuit.com.
Website names are important because Google does not allow cannabis advertising and key word sales. Because of this restriction, “organic search results,” the web addresses that appear when a user searches the internet using Google, are extremely important to companies in cannabis-related businesses. "You can't buy Google ads for rolling papers, pipes, vapes, hash oil equipment or most anything related to marijuana," said Riegel, so websites that appear organically when users search words like “marijuana vapes,” are important.
Of his 1000 domain names, 80% relate to marijuana at this time. Prices for the names range from $495 to $10k and are sometimes sold in packages. Riegel pays about $15K to hold that many names per year and buys generic terms, not trademarked ones to reduce the risk of other people claiming ownership of them. To minimize the risk of the US government shutting down his sites because marijuana is illegal at the federal level, he hosts them offshore in Panama.
Sometimes he sells the web domain names to other sole proprietors that want to create their own affiliate sales websites.
For those who want to make affiliate site of their own, Riegel says, “Define a business niche, search for a short related name, add 5-15 pages of high quality content that is free of errors, and construct the site for search engine optimization by following all the advice Google lists online.” He also advises newcomers to buy only “.com” sites, and not other three-letter-endings like “.net” People’s ingrained habits are to type “.com,” he said.
"For his own affiliate sites like http://marijuanadetox.net and http://drugflowers.com, Riegel hires independent content writers to create articles on related topics or writes his own. “I might have them write about the Marijuana DUI issue or Marijuana product recalls", he said, "The key to success for the little guy to rank on the internet is to have compelling content, with frequent updates.”
2016 looks like a watershed year for the legal marijuana business and his own slice of it, said Riegel, due to the possibility of additional states legalizing recreational cannabis, and the siren call of additional tax revenues. “Senators from other states have come to Colorado, visited our pot shops, and they see the sky isn’t falling, “said Riegel who lives in Fort Collins Colorado, “What they see is a lot of tax revenue.”
Correction: A previous version of this post reported that Drew Riegel owned the domain name www.WeedFlowers.com. Mr. Riegel said he made an error communicating this, and meant to say that he owns www.drugflowers.com.
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eee8c130aa2cc628a1050f17f7e79124 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/julieweed/2016/02/27/cannabis-entrepreneur-goes-from-dixie-cup-and-duct-tape-to-successful-clone-shipping-business/ | Cannabis Entrepreneur Turns Dixie Cups And Duct Tape Into Successful Pot Plant-Shipping Business | Cannabis Entrepreneur Turns Dixie Cups And Duct Tape Into Successful Pot Plant-Shipping Business
Larry Fenner loves to tinker, and his new invention demonstrates that you don’t have to have an engineering degree to turn an idea into a successful product. Starting with two Dixie cups, foam padding, a bulb, wires and duct tape two years ago, Fenner created the Clone Shipper, a way to transport young plants. In 2014 he secured $300K in investment capital and is on track to sell 80,000 units this year.
Larry Fenner and his Clone Shipper (Photo Credit: Julie Weed)
As a marijuana grower, Fenner knew that having “clones,” young plants with the exact genetic specifications desired, shaved six months off a farmer’s growing cycle compared to starting with seeds. “If you start with seeds, first you need them to sprout, then you need to sex the pants and just take the females, and then let them grow a bit to see what traits they have,” he said, likening the process to watching siblings grow up and seeing how they turned out. Once a plant with the required specifications is identified, cuttings can propagate the line, so each new plant is the same as its “mother.”
Growers prefer to start with these young clone plants but shipping/receiving clones has been challenging Fenner said, because they are young and fragile, and can die in transit if they spill, run out of water, or are deprived of light for too long. His two-connecting-Dixie-cup invention included a small light and a way to keep the soil moist without spilling. He started selling the hand-made pieces over the internet.
Just before he started selling his new product Larry did a patent search and did not find any filings that involved shipping or transporting live plants under light, so he applied for a patent.
In May of 2014, Fenner received a call from ArcView, a marijuana business investor group who had seen his product online. They told him if he paid $1500, he could come pitch his idea to investors. “I was like, ‘Show you my idea and pay you to do that? Forget it!’” he said.
A few more calls and a waiver on the presentation fee found Fenner presenting to a roomful of investors. One, Lester Gibson was especially intrigued by the idea and at a cocktail party soon after gathered promises of $300,000 from friends to fund the venture in return for 40% of the company. The group paid for injection molds to go from Dixie-cup invention to hard plastic container, and the Clone Shipper was born.
Sales have been increasing, and coming from different sources. While 60% of his customers originate from the cannabis industry, Fenner is getting more calls from growers of tomatoes, peaches and other plants.
As for Fenner the inventor, he is already designing new products and expects to bring them to market more quickly than the Clone Shipper. He says he has filed IP on methods for shipping larger plants as well as multiple plants. “This time I’ll know the steps I need to take to get patents, find funding and get the business going,” he said, noting to readers that he remains open to investment and new business opportunities.
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1f41d9f2b3b478c7d3bfb13c3701b804 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/julieweed/2016/07/16/denver-entrepreneurs-help-cannabis-concentrate-users-put-down-the-blow-torch/ | Dabado Helps Cannabis Concentrate Users Put Down The Blow Torch | Dabado Helps Cannabis Concentrate Users Put Down The Blow Torch
When young entrepreneur Steven Helfer put together a Facebook page about “dabbing” (smoking marijuana concentrate) featuring funny pictures, videos of people smoking and other pot-related content, he didn’t expect to get 110,000 “Likes.” And he didn’t expect to use it as a marketing platform to help launch a multi-million dollar business.
While mainstream advertising vehicles are closed to marijuana-related businesses, social media has been a way for people who enjoy pot and those who sell to them, to connect. Steven and his brother Nicholas used those networks to sell more than 10,000 “Bolts,” portable devices to smoke marijuana concentrate, over the last 9 months. The Bolts sell for $79-$129 each.
Smoking highly concentrated cannabis in its waxy form can be seen as complicated, intimidating and hard core. One reason is that the concentrates deliver a vastly higher level of THC than eating a brownie or smoking a joint. Now add the fact that users have traditionally been using a blowtorch to blast fumes onto the heating surface called a “nail” or a knife, and then inhale them from a glass piece.
Dabado staff at work (source: Dabado)
With marijuana legalization spreading however, more users are experimenting with these concentrates and looking for safer, healthier (no Benzene from the blowtorch), easier ways to do so.
The Helfer brothers of Denver Colorado, Nicholas and Steven, ages 23 and 20, are managing partners of Dabado (pronounced Dah-BOD-oh.) They created a small, electric bong-like device to allow users to smoke, or “Dab”, their concentrate without a blowtorch. They’ve been selling them online at DabadoVaporizers.com.
Dabado expects to end its first year with $3M in sales. Other companies making devices to smoke concentrates include G Pen and Puffco.
The brothers invested $150,000 of money they had made from prior endeavors and start-ups including collapsible gas cans, medical marijuana container recycling, and bongs that looked like fast food cups. Some of those businesses worked out, others folded.
The new business seems to be on trend. “Concentrates are shaping the future of cannabis,” said Steven, citing their rising sales in dispensaries and pot shops.
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One market segment for Dabado is medical marijuana patients who imbibe stronger doses of cannabis to combat pain, or treat other problems. “Cancer patients are not going to pull out a butane torch,” Steven said.
As with many cannabis-related businesses, even those that do not “touch the plant,” advertising and social media started as a series of challenges for Dabado. By trial and error, they have learned to navigate the social media channels that are open to them. “We build pages having to do with cannabis in general and then use those to market our products,” said Steven. The brothers post content on a wide variety of sites.
The combination of posting content and marketing has paid off. Dabado says they currently have 20,000 snapchat followers, 52,000 Instagram followers, 110,000 likes on Facebook, 11,500 Twitter followers, 12,000 Tumblr followers.
The brother also uses those forums to gather feedback. “Many aspects of our product design came from our social media followers,” said Steven.
The brothers attended college for one semester each and then left to continue pursue their entrepreneurial ideas. Their parents did not attend college and started a commercial cleaning company and hair salon from very little. “We were raised to think as entrepreneurs,” said Steven, “to always see things a little bit differently and be on the lookout for things that could be big in the future and align with what were good at.”
Steven says he and his brother "read a lot of business books,” and look for mentors to advise them. “We just contact people we admire or we can relate to,” said Steven.
While the brothers are young and enjoy cannabis themselves from time to time, Steven says, “We take business very professionally and seriously – we’re not just sitting here eating Doritos and watching Netflix.”
They hope to spend the next decade growing a portfolio of brands in the cannabis space.
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88528082d0388353c6333c9c3dd8ecd1 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/julieweed/2017/10/17/ellementa-founders-educate-women-about-cannabis-but-face-funding-stigmas/ | Ellementa Founders Educate Women About Cannabis But Face Funding Stigmas | Ellementa Founders Educate Women About Cannabis But Face Funding Stigmas
Women at Ellemental Meeting sharing experiences with cannabis in Seattle Aliza Sherman
On a warm evening this past summer, a group of women aged 24-70+ gathered at a community center in Seattle, to share stories of their cannabis use. One described her hilarious encounter with cannabis-infused sexual lubricant. Another described the side-effects of her chemotherapy and how medical marijuana had soothed them. As they continued around the circle, each story was unique but each showed the impact cannabis had on their lives.
The Seattle gathering had been organized by Aliza Sherman, co-founder of Ellementa, which aims to connect women online and in person to educate them about cannabis. Sherman, along with co-founders, Melissa Pierce, and Ashley E. Kingsley, had created the organization after coming together over their own use of medical marijuana. “We had each turned to cannabis for our own reasons, and we realized there weren’t any fact-based cannabis education resources available that were aimed at women,” said Sherman.
As a technology entrepreneur, Sherman had already founded an organization Webgrrls International, aimed at women teaching women about technology and the internet. With Ellementa, she plans to do the same for Cannabis.
Both for themselves and the people they take care of, women are interested in cannabis to help with insomnia, chronic pain, menopause symptoms and more, said Sherman. Soccer moms, executives, grandmothers, all want information, and Ellementa is all about, “providing education, clearing up misconceptions and removing the stigma,” said Sherman.
Ellementa meetings typically occur in a library, community center or coffee shop rather than a marijuana dispensary. “We are the bridge between a woman’s curiosity and the information she needs,” said Sherman.
The most popular topic is pain relief said Sherman, and the concept of cannabis micro-dosing, where people take enough THC to get rid of pain, but do not get high, is new information and useful to many people she said. “People want to get off or stay off opioids.”
For those who can’t attend a meeting or prefer anonymity, the Ellementa web site provides articles, and online private forums on Facebook offer conversations. Topics include how to manage chemotherapy side-effects with cannabis, how to talk to your kids about cannabis if you are using for medication, etc. Reviewers sample cannabis products and offer their feedback for the web site.
The small start-up is looking for funding, but stigma seems to be the main barrier holding back traditional investors said Sherman. “People believe in us and our mission, but tell us they don’t want to be associated with marijuana,” she said. “When you are inside the industry you forget how powerful that stigma can be.”
Ellementa is currently running a crowd-funding campaign on iFundWomen but is running into the same issue there. “People have asked how to contribute anonymously because they don’t want to publicly be seen giving money to a cannabis company,” said Sherman.
Another challenge to the business is the limited availability of nation-widecannabis-related sponsors. Events in each state need their own individual company sponsors because cannabis companies generally operate in only one state due to federal laws.
Ellementa’s revenue currently comes from ticket sales, sponsors for events, and women’s marketing consulting services. On October 25, the company will host a meeting in New York sponsored by HelloMD, an online cannabis community and telehealth service which helps people get medical cards in New York, and PharmaCannis, a licensed medical cannabis provider. With four dispensaries and cultivation and manufacturing facilities in New York, PharmaCannis will be sending a woman pharmacist to speak to the group. Pamela Hadfield, co-founder of HelloMD will also be on hand.
A new challenge recently appeared when the ticket registration site EventBrite threatened to take down Ellementa’s event ticket registration, and Sherman believes it is because the title of the event contained the word “Cannabis.”
“We are not a consumption event,” said Sherman, who has been trying to contact EventBrite to clear up the matter. “We are a discussion group.”
Despite the challenges, Sherman said, “We’re going for it. Education is legal. Information is legal.”
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764b6762c9f662f9c8fa60daa8aed938 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/julieweed/2017/11/26/california-weed-entrepreneurs-will-make-5-2b-in-2018-with-almost-no-banks-to-put-it-in/?utm_source=TWITTER&utm_medium=social&utm_content=1241688752&utm_campaign=sprinklrForbesMainTwitter | California Weed Entrepreneurs Will Make $5.2B In 2018 With Almost No Banks To Put It In | California Weed Entrepreneurs Will Make $5.2B In 2018 With Almost No Banks To Put It In
California cannabis entrepreneurs will earn $5.2B in revenue in 2018 as recreational use becomes legal there. The state will collect about one billion dollars in accompanying marijuana taxes. These numbers, estimated by Matt Karnes, industry analyst and managing partner of New York's GreenWave Advisors, point to the giant need for banking and financial services in the nascent legal cannabis industry. These services however are generally not available and are federally illegal. Some glimmers of change though, are on the horizon.
Banking is severely limited for the cannabis industry, even when it is legalized by state law. As a “schedule one” substance, cannabis is categorized to be as harmful as heroin, and banks risk losing their federal charter if they work with cannabis companies. Financial institutions need to go on record with the U.S. Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCen) when they establish a relationship with a known Marijuana Related Business, and Karnes estimates that just 5% of all banks have done that. He believes that fewer than 1% of all banks in the United States are currently working with cannabis related companies. Tyler Beuerlein, vice president of business development at Hypur, a financial technology company in the industry, says fewer than 25 banks and credit unions have at least 15 marijuana-related accounts, are openly banking cannabis companies, and are actively pursuing more clients.
Canna-bricks in Seattle Julie Weed
Beuerlein's company, Hypur, offers a system for banks that connects retailers to the bank and can be customized for the cannabis industry. At the point of sale in a cannabis store for example, Hypur’s Commerce product can give a financial institution the ability to limit the number of purchases, or cap the dollar amount of purchases, by a customer. “That helps provide the transparency needed for compliance officers and their regulators," he said. Hypur's general counsel, John Vardaman helped write the Justice Department’s 2014 Cole Memorandum which states a cannabis company following the laws and financial regulations in its own state, will not be prosecuted by the federal government. The Scottsdale Arizona technology company has cannabis banking clients in five markets “and plans to be in every state’s legal market by the end of 2018,” says Beuerlein.
Other technology start-ups like Shield Compliance in Illinois are also aiming to offer software to help banks with compliance, financial transparency and record-keeping to reduce the risk of working in the industry.
The tiny number of banks working with the legal marijuana industry leaves many of those businesses with no choice but to operate in cash. That means they need to spend extra money on safes, video camera systems, security guards, and armored car pick-ups. Public safety issues can also arise when so much cash is stored in known locations said Karnes.
With limited options, some businesses turn to other methods to find banking. Many hide the nature of their business from their banks according to Karnes. Others turn to cryptocurrencies, which have their own sets of problems. Cryptocurrencies have a “questionable ability to pass regulatory scrutiny,” because they are so complex, said Karnes. Their lack of transparency also “remains a major stumbling block.” They also tend to fluctuate in value, so are much less stable than regular currency.
Despite the complexities, the industry in California is hiring. Vangst, a recruitment firm specializing in the cannabis space, says the number of people working full time in legal cannabis grew from 43,374 people in January to 47,711 in September. And although the few banks serving the industry are generally keeping a low profile and not announcing their foray into the new customer base, businesses that “need to know,” are seeking them out. “Word of a financial institution serving the industry spreads pretty quickly,” said Beurlein.
While Attorney General Jeff Sessions regularly sends chills through the industry with his anti-marijuana pronouncements, Donald Trump’s desire to roll back banking regulations includes defanging The Sarbanes Oxley Act which was created to, among other things, reduce accounting fraud by asking company executives to certify their financial reports are accurate. This kind of deregulation could indirectly make cannabis banking easier. If the compliance burden associated with Sarbanes-Oxley is reduced said Karnes, banks and credit unions might have more time for their staff to focus on cannabis.
Canna Customs Promo stickers Julie Weed
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ddb455dd4cb7975d9563da2ae3406fa1 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/julieweed/2017/12/26/will-legal-cannabis-thrive-or-get-shutdown-2018-may-tell-us/ | Will Legal Cannabis Thrive Or Get Shutdown? 2018 Will Tell | Will Legal Cannabis Thrive Or Get Shutdown? 2018 Will Tell
Pickens Mountain Marijuana Farm - Washington State Greg James
California’s Berkeley Patients Group will be selling recreational cannabis starting at 6 A.M. on January 1st. They’ll be kicking off what is sure to be a pivotal year in Cannabis – one way or the other.
The industry has been expanding rapidly in sales and geography. North America spending on legal cannabis topped $7.3 billion in 2016 and grew 33% to end 2017 with $9.7 billion in sales according to industry watcher BDS analytics. 2018 promises a big revenue jump with California (Jan.), Maine (Feb.) and Massachusetts (July) all scheduled to open up recreational use markets. A long list of states might put forth November ballot initiatives to legalize adult-use cannabis, including Arizona, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, New Hampshire, New York, Ohio, Rhode Island and Vermont, according to the Cannabis Business Alliance.
On of the reasons they are succeeding is that cannabis companies are becoming more professional and transparent according to Gateway Accelerator co-founder Ben Larson. His company has helped launch 19 marijuana-related start-ups. The industry is also adopting more mainstream business practices like charitable giving. Denver’s cannabis dispensary chain Lightshade, recently opened its eighth location and will be donating some of its profits to neighboring Amazing Grace Community Church to support its food pantry and bi-monthly meal service.
Nevada Senator Tick Segerblom first customer at The+Source buying recreational cannabis Joe Fury
Entrepreneurs are also finding creative solutions to limitations and regulations. Marketing restrictions are tight on the cannabis industry, but the Merry Jane media company has found a way to slyly refer to cannabis and its effects by teaming up with fast food giant Jack-in-the-Box to offer a MERRY Munchie MealTM for a limited time in January in a few Long Beach, California stores.
Medical cannabis is also thriving and products developed as a result of medical research performed abroad are coming to the US through partnerships. Tikun Olam, (Hebrew for Repair the World) in Israel has ongoing clinical trials in that country’s regulated medical cannabis market, treating over 10,000 patients for a variety of symptoms of medical conditions such as Cancer, PTSD, AIDS, epilepsy, Crohn’s Disease/Colitis, multiple sclerosis, cerebral palsy, chronic pain and neuropathy. They are partnering with US companies in different states and recently joined with Washington DC cultivator Alternative Solutions to distribute their products.
Communication around medical marijuana research and potential medical uses is also growing. Skipta, a social network of specialized online medical communities for verified healthcare professionals including Oncology Nation, Psychiatrist Connect and Doctor Unite recently partnered with new media company The Fresh Toast to provide information on cannabinoid medicine.
But, “The reality of growing commercial marijuana is hugely different from the romantic version most growers initially thought it would be,” said Greg James of Marijuana Venture magazine, which is distributed through Barnes and Noble and other national outlets. “There are a lot of folks who want out.” He’s seen this first hand as some customers default on their advertising payments.
The lack of banking and capital resources, the inability to deduct business expenses from the annual tax bill, and changing regulations that add unexpected costs also hamper the industry’s growth. Many will enter the industry, and some will be washed out says James.
1000 Pounds of Bud Greg James
Of course the biggest risk of running a cannabis business is that it is federally illegal. While Donald Trump said he approved of medical marijuana when he was on the campaign trail, his attorney general Jeff Sessions’ hard-line anti-marijuana stance threatens the industry. Sessions has called marijuana only “slightly less awful” than heroin.
Will the legal cannabis industry be allowed to thrive? Will states continue to take in hundreds of millions of dollars of annual cannabis tax revenues? Or will the Trump administration bring the whole industry to a screeching halt and put entrepreneurs in prison?
Stay Tuned.
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b328e6d7ee979388b0d73eb848aa75c4 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/julieweed/2018/05/02/i-heart-jane-creates-ecommerce-software-for-cannabis-retailers/ | 'I Heart Jane' Offers Cannabis Ecommerce And 'Jane Lanes' | 'I Heart Jane' Offers Cannabis Ecommerce And 'Jane Lanes'
As a West Point graduate and Apache helicopter pilot, Soc Rosenfeld was “anti-cannabis,” he said. That changed when he returned from the war in Iraq. “I was always operating at an intensity level of 11,” he said, and that translated to a challenging re-entry to civilian life. Rosenfeld found the calming effects of cannabis helped him to re-adjust to the pace of life at home. He also found many other veterans using it -- to help with PTSD, sleeplessness, and anxiety, even though the Veterans Administration medical staff is prohibited from prescribing the substance.
After receiving his MBA from MIT, Rosenfeld and his brother decided to join the nascent the cannabis industry. They examined a number of sectors and business models and liked what they saw in the meal delivery service Grub Hub - a way to participate in the food industry without having to own a restaurant or cook a meal The founders translated that idea of serving an industry without creating a product to the legal cannabis marketplace and iheartjane.com was born.
The company, headquartered in Santa Cruz California, raised two million dollars from friends and family and opened for business on April 20 of 2017. It now serves 250 retailers in 10 state markets. Rosenfeld is currently raising $5-7 million from private investors.
The Rosenfelds' software offers cannabis retailers an eCommerce platform, modifying a dispensary’s existing website to be able take orders, and connecting it to their Point of Sale System. “We want to help cannabis sellers go from ‘brick and mortar’ to ‘click and mortar,’” he said. The iheartjane.com team sets up the dispensary's platform for free, and includes that shops’ inventory listing and locations in a larger website it runs listing all its customers products. To earn revenue, the company charges $1 per order placed .
Customers that order online from a dispensary or retail store, receive a text when the order is placed, another when it is ready for pickup, and a final one when the product has been purchased. Only customers that have purchased a product are then allowed to leave a review on the site about their experience or the product. It’s important to make sure reviews are credible, said Rosenfeld, so people can trust them. “It also helps managers be able to reach out to people who left negative reviews,” he said.
Delivery is available for locations where that service is legal. In general, customers come to the store to pick up their order and pay for it, sometimes in a special “Jane Lane” that the retailer has set up for faster pickup. “Some customers don’t want to wait in a line behind people who may be taking a long time deciding what they want, or asking questions,” said Rosenfeld. Other customers just don’t feel comfortable spending much time in a dispensary, he said.
Some customers use the system to take their time researching products online. Using the search function, customers for example can look up non-psychoactive topical creams, arthritis remedies, or sleep aids. “We believe our search function doubles the average amount people spend because they can find things they need or might want to try ,” said Rosenfeld.
iheartjane.com ecommerce software lets users search by product name or effect they are looking for IHeartJane
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adb004e2a72d707be31bc7999ae23c0e | https://www.forbes.com/sites/julieweed/2018/05/07/washington-state-marijuana-companies-getting-some-but-not-all-banking-services/ | Washington State Marijuana Companies Getting Some, But Not All Banking Services | Washington State Marijuana Companies Getting Some, But Not All Banking Services
Paper and Leaf - Cannabis Store on Bainbridge Island, WA paper and leaf
Recreational marijuana has been legal in Washington State since 2014 and increasingly, cannabis companies are finding credit unions and small community banks open to serving their basic financial needs.
Brendan Hill is co-owner of Paper & Leaf, a cannabis shop on Bainbridge Island located a short ferry ride from downtown Seattle. He and his business partner Steve Kessler started looking for a bank willing to do business with a cannabis retailer back in August of 2014. “There were only two such banks in Washington State at the time," and both operated solely in the state, he said.
Hill says the bank he chose, Timberland, has been around since the old timber rush days, and are proud of their connection to the frontier. “They welcomed us as a legitimate part of this community, they wanted to do their part,” he said.
Timberland Bank has twenty-two branches in Washington state and is considered to be a small community bank.
Salal Credit Union is another banking option for cannabis-related businesses in Washington State. It offers checking accounts, cash pick-up and other services to the industry.
To open a “Green” account at Timberland, Hill submitted his license information, operating agreement, and signed several waivers allowing for state cannabis agency scrutiny. The business has four accounts: two “Green” and two “Green related” accounts.
Hill says his local branch serves several cannabis retailers and growers who deposit cash daily or weekly. “Their bill counter gets a lot of mileage,” he said.
Hill’s business checking accounts have a debit Mastercard attached, but there are still some financial services that elude him and the rest of the industry. “We don’t have access to any lines of credit. There are no traditional business loans available to us at this time,” he said.
Because his is a cash only business, he has implemented extra security steps into his operations including end-of-day recounts, and multiple bank deposit runs daily.
State laws lay out extra requirements for the bank as well. Hill says Timberland does annual facility inspections of its cannabis business customers, making sure there are ID checkpoints at the door and register, that no employees are under the age of 21, that all security cameras are operational, and that there’s a fireproof safe and operational security system.
Banking is significantly harder to find in states that are newer to legal cannabis sales. Few want to be among the first to take the risk, especially in light of Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ stance and action regarding the industry. Sessions rescinded the Cole memorandum, which protected cannabis companies operating legally under their own state laws, from federal prosecution.
Donald Trump said he was in favor of medical marijuana availability, but that was when he was a presidential candidate. Until recently he had made no movements in that direction, but in April told Senator Cory Gardner of Colorado he would be open to legislation allowing states to determine their own cannabis laws.
Cannabis products at Paper and Leaf on Bainbridge Island, WA Paper and Leaf
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f11e2048584c536b50a0645759acd111 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/julieweed/2018/08/12/trumps-tariffs-set-to-hit-cannabis-industry/ | Trump Tariffs Set To Hit Cannabis Industry | Trump Tariffs Set To Hit Cannabis Industry
Egreen Oils' vaporizer accessories, pictured here behind other smoking accessories in a display case... [+] at the Puget Sound Smoke Shop on Martin Luther King Jr. Way S. in Seattle, Washington, are made in China. Carolyn Bick
It’s more than soybean farmers and car makers who could feel the effects of Donald Trump’s tariffs on Chinese products. The legal cannabis industry will take a hit as well.
Vaping devices, and batteries, filters and cartridges created for vaping devices are all subject to the new tariffs said Arnaud Dumas de Rauly, Co-CEO of The Blinc Group. His company develops and sells technologies and products related to vaping and other ancillary cannabis products, and runs an incubator program that helps develop, research, and brand technology related to cannabis and nicotine vaping.
On July 24th, Dumas de Rauly testified as part of The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative public hearings regarding the proposed tariffs, saying that they will raise prices for medical marijuana patients and other consumers who use vaporizers.
By increasing prices on Chinese-made products, Trump has essentially forced American manufacturers to take time out of running their businesses to find alternate suppliers, “or price themselves out of competition with other manufacturers," said Juan Carlos Negrin, President of the New Jersey Marijuana Retailers Association.
Smoke Wallin, president of Vertical, a multi-state cannabis growing and production company, said the tariffs have created a sense of urgency around finding new suppliers in America for vape pens, even though the Chinese manufacturers are much less expensive.
Vaporizers here in a display case at the Puget Sound Smoke Shop on Martin Luther King Jr. Way S. in... [+] Seattle, Washington, are made in China and could be subject to Trump's tariffs Carolyn Bick
The tariffs have consequences beyond just higher consumer costs Dumas de Rauly said. Higher prices lead to decreasing sales and a reduction in tax income for the states. The State of Colorado collected over $247M in Cannabis tax revenue in 2017 and “25% of sales come from cannabis vaping products,” said Mr. Dumas de Rauly.
Beyond vaporizer components, "any items essential to the day-to-day operations of a cannabis business, from construction equipment to cell phones, will likely increase in price,” said Kevin Hagan, a strategic advisor who consults on cannabis policy issues at Princeton Public Affairs Group.
Cannabis companies are especially vulnerable to changes in their input costs said Negrin because they are not allowed to deduct business expenses from their taxes. That lowers their profit margins. “A tariff on goods the companies use in daily operations will have a substantially negative impact on their earnings,” he said.
Brooke Davies, executive director of Cannabis Organization of Retail Establishments, a non-profit trade association representing cannabis retailers in Washington State, said that she has already begun to see the effects of the tariffs. Small growers like Sweetwater Farms in Eastern Washington buy glass jars from China to package their flower. With the price of cannabis dropping in Washington, an increased cost in packaging is very hard on a small farm she said.
“The Trump tariffs will undoubtedly hurt the rural parts of Washington State,” said Greg James. He communicates often with marijuana companies through the two magazines he publishes, Marijuana Venture and Sun Grower. “There could well be a snowball effect that results in the outdoor growing community having an even harder time selling their crop,” he said.
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3f44a1c5cd53c60b0b13449677588981 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/julieweed/2018/08/22/roll-out-feels-slow-but-california-could-sell-2-5-billion-of-legal-weed-this-year/ | Roll-Out Feels Slow, But California Could Sell $2.5 Billion Of Legal Weed This Year | Roll-Out Feels Slow, But California Could Sell $2.5 Billion Of Legal Weed This Year
Urban Leaf in San Diego, one of the highest grossing marijuana dispensaries in California, sells... [+] about $3M of cannabis each month Urban Leaf
$250,000 in sales per month, per retailer. That’s about how much cannabis is being sold in California on average, as the state marks the halfway point in its first year of legal recreational sales.
Cities are each able to make their own rules around cannabis, and a quick roll-out of the industry has been hampered as regulations are debated and implemented. Some cities are prohibiting cannabis storefronts and other cannabis related activities entirely, while others are welcoming the industry as a potential boon to the local tax base.
Still, the growth is eye-catching. The state released its cannabis sales tax data for the second quarter of 2018, and those tax numbers imply recreational retail revenues have grown 36% from the first quarter of 2018, to about $290 million, according to Matt Karnes founder of GreenWave Advisors, LLC.
That figure does not include medical marijuana sales. That’s because medical sales are not subject to sales and excise taxes. Karnes estimates the total market including medical marijuana to be about $600 million in the second quarter and over $1 billion for the first half of 2018.
A backlog of licensing applications shows the pent-up demand in the state. California has fewer licensed dispensaries per capita than other states where cannabis is legal, like Colorado for example. According to Karnes, there are about 400 licensed dispensaries in California (15% medical only, 80% medical/recreational and 5% recreational only) for a population of 40 million, while Colorado has 485 medical and 530 recreational dispensaries and a population of 5.6 million. As of July first, the state consolidated regulatory oversight of its recreational and medical markets, which should streamline some industry activities like issuing licenses to help the backlog of requests.
Line at Urban Leaf, a cannabis shop in San Diego Urban Leaf
Much is still in flux. The Bureau of Cannabis Control for example, is considering whether to review and clarify rules allowing the delivery of cannabis in California cities where dispensaries are prohibited.
As the market grows, entrepreneurs continue to jump in at every level from cultivation, to testing and distribution, to retail and ancillary products and services. Karnes estimates about $2.5 billion in legal cannabis will be sold by the end of 2018. Many industry-watchers believe the state will realize its full potential of $7 billion in yearly cannabis sales over the next five years as issues are worked out
The biggest competitor to legal cannabis is illegal cannabis according to Karnes. Legal cannabis is tested and labeled so consumers know what they are getting, but costs associated with that testing, packaging and other regulations mean that store-bought cannabis is more expensive than marijuana on the black market.
Karnes believes law enforcement may crack down on illegal sales because they rob the state of tax money.
California is expected to be the largest recreational market in the country and the United States is the largest market in dollar volume, but the international marketplace is growing as well. MJBizDaily’s new report -- International Countries to Watch--An Overview of Cannabis Legalization Around the World, estimates the global cannabis market will reach $10B-12B+ by the end of 2018, and with Canada’s federal recreational legalization, the report says that total could easily double.
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873496ccaa3a1f91cbcc3cde344a5c25 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/julieweed/2018/12/19/us-farm-bill-will-make-cbd-production-legal-and-cheaper/?ref=hackernoon.com | US Farm Bill Will Make CBD Production Legal And Cheaper | US Farm Bill Will Make CBD Production Legal And Cheaper
Indoor grow at California's Josh D Farms - will cannabis legalization be next? Alexander Rauber, Josh D Farms
The 2018 Farm Bill that overwhelmingly passed in the U.S. Senate has now become law. For hemp growers and CBD-product manufacturers the big news is hemp will no longer be equated under drug laws with its psychotropic cousin, marijuana. Industry-watchers wonder what this step could mean for future cannabis legalization.
Under the new laws, hemp will be managed by Department of Agriculture as a crop rather than by the Justice Department as an illegal substance.
Ed Schmults, chief executive of the multi-state cannabis grower Calyx Peak said the new law could reduce the price of CBD in the market for consumers and producers. “Hemp offers a lower cost option for CBD -- hemp is easier to grow than cannabis,” he said.
The passing of the farm bill will also lead to more transparency in the market according to Jeff Hilber, founder and owner of Modern Medicinals. “Past statutes reduced access to research and made the CBD landscape tricky to navigate for the consumer,” he said. His family-owned and operated CBD company based in Portland, Oregon makes medicinal CBD oils for people and pets.
Here are a few key Farm Bill points from Hoban Law Group's Senior Attorney Steve Schain:
Banks and payment processors/credit card companies can service the hemp industry Investment and capital infusion is allowed in both the oil and fibrous hemp businesses Interstate commerce of hemp and hemp products is allowed Convicted felons can join the industry 10 years after the bill passes Hemp farmers will be allowed to buy crop insurance for the first time. Hemp futures can be traded for the first time, locking in prices for farmers Help research will be allowed for pharmaceutical uses as well as for health, wellness and general nutrition, opening the doors for much more testing
Until now, for the most part, CBD product manufacturing and shipping across state lines has operated with little interference. In 2017, the FDA issued warning letters to several CBD companies, but those referred to health claims the companies were not allowed to make or dosages the companies claimed that were incorrect.
As public acceptance of CBD and marijuana products grows, public figures and lawmakers are changing their stance on the topic. Democrat Joe Kennedy, a Massachusetts congressman, had voted in the past against House amendments that allowed medical cannabis use. Recently he wrote an op-ed that said, “I believe legalization is our best chance to actually dedicate resources toward consumer safety, abuse prevention, and treatment for those who need it.”
Republicans are also supporting the idea. Hemp can be grown on tobacco fields like those in Kentucky, the state Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnel (R) hails from.
Schmults says the Farm Bill signifies the US Government’s continued evolution on the topic. “We think the tide has turned significantly in America's stance on cannabis decriminalization and this Farm Bill is a key first step towards this milestone.”
Modern Medicinals CBD Oil - Modern Medicinals is a family-owned and operated CBD company based in... [+] Portland, Oregon Modern Medicinals
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3f721e69d45398dd4669ccb32aa377bb | https://www.forbes.com/sites/julieweed/2019/02/07/400-cannabis-related-bills-in-state-capitols-and-congress-can-weed-businesses-keep-up/ | 590 Cannabis-Related Bills In State Capitols And Congress. Can Weed Businesses Keep Up? | 590 Cannabis-Related Bills In State Capitols And Congress. Can Weed Businesses Keep Up?
Dixie Brands of Colorado sells THC products in four states and needs to keep up with changing... [+] regulations in each one DIxie Brands
More than 900 cannabis-related bills moved through state capitols and Congress in 2018, and there are already about 600 bills for 2019 sessions, according to Marijuana Moment's Legislative Tracking Tools. Each state has its own regulations regarding the forms cannabis can be sold in, how it needs to be monitored, tested, packaged or advertised, and those rules are in flux as states figure out the best way to regulate the plant.
The industry is comprised predominantly by small businesses, so while changes are generally made for good reasons, each can result in a financial burden. For example, when Colorado decided all THC-infused chocolate had to display the THC symbol on the food itself so people would not mistakenly eat an “edible,” chocolate producers had to throw out their custom-made chocolate molds, and design and order new ones.
Last year, Colorado’s Marijuana Enforcement Division changed cannabis warning label verbiage from “Contains Marijuana. Keep out of reach of children” to “Contains Marijuana. Keep away from children.”Ari Cohen, vice president of operations for Dixie Brands, one of the industry's larger companies, said this seeming small change resulted in the need to develop new labeling for Dixie’s entire product portfolio. The company had over six months to comply but still had to work to make sure inventory levels of the original packaging and finished goods were significantly reduced prior to the deadline.
Dixie Brands sells cannabis-infused products in 4 states, employing about 100 people at their headquarters in CO, with Q3 2018 revenue of $2,435,000 (about double the sales of Q3 2017.) Like other cannabis companies, it is not allowed to deduct typical business expenses on its tax returns because the plant is still illegal at the federal level, so changes need to be made knowing there is less financial leeway than businesses in other industries.
Multi-state operators, companies like Dixie Brands that grow or sell cannabis in more than one state, have an especially complicated time with the changing regulations. They seek to establish a unified set of operating procedures, suppliers and product lines while obeying different sets of laws. “Consistency of the brand in terms of product, packaging and distribution is absolutely critical,’ as firms seek to go national, said Nick Kovacevich, CEO of KushCo Holdings a large provider of ancillary products and services for the cannabis industry. Still, those companies need to balance uniformity with individual state requirements.
The National Cannabis Industry Association’s map shows which states have legalized adult use of marijuana, which allow medical use of some sort, and which are still prohibition states. Many states, like California, are in transition between legalization on paper and a fully functioning market. And so the rules will continue to evolve.
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26abd3bec67958266de4461f8f7e7508 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/julieweed/2019/10/28/despite-uncertain-laws-hemp-and-cannabis-jobs-expand/?mc_cid=4df52fb2a8&mc_eid=%5BUNIQID%5D | Despite Uncertain Laws, Hemp and Cannabis Jobs Expand | Despite Uncertain Laws, Hemp and Cannabis Jobs Expand
“Imagine running a race with brand-new shoes and a burst of energy but no idea what the course looks like,” says Kristen Nichols, in the 2019 Hemp & CBD Industry Factbook, “That’s somewhat the position in which today’s hemp industry finds itself.”
From the looks of things, that race is attracting lots of participants. Retail sales of CBD in the U.S. are expected to surpass $1 billion in 2019 – a 133% increase over 2018 sales according to the report, which is produced by the editors of Hemp Industry Daily. Sales may go beyond $10 billion by 2024, it says.
The hemp supply chain from grower to manufacturer to retailer is looking to capitalize on the new legal status of hemp and the growing popularity of the non-psychoactive ingredient CBD, even if the array of over-the-counter health and wellness products lacks medical testing.
Uncertainty has always been part of the nascent THC and CBD markets. When Julie Berliner started the Sweet Grass Kitchen edibles company in Colorado, the cannabis regulations were changing so rapidly that she built her first kitchen in a race car trailer. “The idea was that if the rules change…I could pick up and move my kitchen to another facility with minimal loss,” she said. The trailer was an insurance policy of sorts. Berliner said she never had to make the move, and since then has built an 8,000 square foot production facility in south Denver.
sweet grass cookies sweet grass
Despite ambiguity in the regulations, more are finding employment in the industry. New cannabis and hemp ventures typically hire people across a wide range of education levels, specialties and salaries. A grower for example might hire farm workers, horticulturists, technologists to run lighting and watering systems, and managers, as well as accounting, legal, financial and marketing service providers.
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Marijuana Business Daily recently published a graph based on U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Employment Projections showing there were more people employed in cannabis than there were flight attendants, veterinarians or web developers.
Jobs in Cannabis compared to other industries Marijuana Business Daily
One of the companies growing cannabis-related jobs is Colorado’s Wana Brands. Nancy Whiteman co-founder and chief executive of Wana Brands has been creating marijuana infused edibles since 2010 in Colorado and last year sold more than $18 million worth of product. She employs about 90 people.
The company has a presence in seven states with plans to expand to seven more by the end of 2020. With the legalization of hemp and demand growing there, the company recently announced it would launch “Wana Wellness,” hemp-derived CBD products, starting with gummies.
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144523c51e0c569633e1082423c61b45 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/julieweed/2020/05/18/cannabis-education-arrives-virtually-at-more-american-universities/?fbclid=IwAR0CZGe0X-m0_MRO3X9jButhZwT9bs2xwT8htz4kNc33H2O81Igu8RdFBZo | Cannabis Education Arrives (Virtually) At More American Universities | Cannabis Education Arrives (Virtually) At More American Universities
Jobs in Cannabis are still "essential" and include horticulture, processing, testing, and sales. ... [+] Here: Denver, CO - Jan 13: Michael McGraw, production manager, wearing protective clothing and hair and face netting, shows off the perfect leaf of a marijuana plant while he works in the flowering room at the LivWell Enlightened Health cultivation facility. Some universities are offering online cannabis industry education. (Photo by Helen H. Richardson/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post via Getty Images) Denver Post via Getty Images
At first glance, they don’t seem to have much in common: college administrators seeking new revenue sources because their students have all gone home, and displaced workers looking into the legal cannabis industry because it’s still hiring during the pandemic. But the groups are converging. Five universities (with more in the pipeline) are working with Green Flower Media to provide coursework on growing, testing and selling legal cannabis.
Max Simon, Green Flower Media’s founder wasn’t getting much traction pitching cannabis-related online course content to American universities in 2019. Then the Coronavirus hit, and colleges started pivoting as fast as they could to online education, including not-for-credit “continuing education” offerings that could help re-train workers and add revenues to college coffers.
At the same time, cannabis production and sales were deemed “essential” businesses during the pandemic and allowed to remain open by the states where it was legal for medical or recreational purposes.
Still open! STUDIO CITY, CA - APRIL 16: Florist Jared Keim assists Prisila at Sweet Flower, a ... [+] licensed cannabis shop, in Studio City on Thursday, April 16, 2020 during the coronavirus outbreak. The company has adjusted its operations to follow public health guidelines by limiting the number of shoppers allowed inside and supplying workers with protective gear. (Photo by Sarah Reingewirtz/MediaNews Group/Los Angeles Daily News via Getty Images)"n MediaNews Group via Getty Images
By March, interest in Green Flower Media certificates focusing on cannabis business practices, medical applications, laws/compliance, and horticulture/agriculture, “jumped into high gear,” said Simon. In the next few months, Florida Atlantic University, Northern Michigan University, a California university (to be made public later,) Mount Aloysius College and the University of San Diego will begin offering the education certificates.
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Each of the four cannabis certificate types include three courses that are delivered over two months and cost $3000. The 405 hours of assignments and “class” time include one third videos and readings, with the rest is divided between research, homework, and internships when possible. For each cohort of 25 students, a facilitator helps with online forums and review projects.
There is demand for well-trained workers in the cannabis industry according to Dr. Steve VandenAvond, Northern Michigan University’ vice president for extended learning and community, because it requires highly specialized knowledge and skills in a number of areas.
Master growers who understand how to raise high quality plants on a large scale are very much in demand he said. Store managers need to understand and comply with an extra set of financial and security regulations related to cannabis sales. Even retail staff have to learn what they can and can not say when they are selling. “Companies have told us they don’t always have the capacity to train their employees to the level required,” said Green Flower’s Simon.
Barto, PA - March 30: Ben Davies holds harvested hemp buds grown at his Wild Fox Farm in Barto, Pa ... [+] "n(Bill Uhrich - MediaNewsGroup/Reading Eagle via Getty Images)"n MediaNews Group via Getty Images
Northern Michigan University, one of Green Flower’s new partners, has been offering a for-credit course, Medicinal Plant Chemistry, including information on THC extraction and testing of cannabis plants, since 2017. Hundreds applied for the first class, surprising the university, and the course has remained popular.
Soon after the class launched, the university started receiving student queries about cannabis coursework beyond the hard sciences. Medical marijuana has been legal in the state since 2008 through the Michigan Compassionate Care Initiative, and sales of adult recreational use cannabis products began in December 2019.
Steve VandenAvond chose Green Flower to supply a set of not-for-credit online courses to offer this summer. “We have a long history of engaging with the community and offering what the work force wants,” VandenAvond said. These classes were “a natural next step,” at school in a fairly rural part of Michigan’s upper peninsula. Cannabis jobs there have been deemed essential in the pandemic.
“There’s a need for trained workers and these courses do a good job mixing lectures, quizzes and other interactive media elements,” said VandenAvond.
Green Flower has connections with local employers to help find internships and full-time work for its students.
Simon believes this year will be a turning point in education when colleges “will see cannabis as a legitimate industry and cannabis education as a legitimate student education area.”
Looking to the future, Simon plans to expand the curriculum, and is already working on a Cannabis Criminal Justice certificate. He also hopes to sign more schools on – he said is in conversations with thirty other institutions.
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266b0e1a31554fb494abfbedcd91ad65 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/julieweed/2020/08/04/legal-cannabis-provides-a-bright-spot-in-a-bleak-economy/ | Legal Cannabis Provides A Bright Spot In A Bleak Economy | Legal Cannabis Provides A Bright Spot In A Bleak Economy
The pandemic has hobbled entire sectors of the economy but the cannabis industry is surviving, even thriving. Sales are up as consumers turn to marijuana for stress relief and recreation. Companies in the industry are making those sales easier and safer with online ordering to reduce contact between retailers and customers. There are even a variety of new products for consumers to try.
Consumers may be cutting their spending, but not on cannabis. Retail sales of medical and recreational cannabis in the U.S. is predicted to top $15 billion by the end of 2020 according to the Marijuana Business Factbook. That’s an increase of about 40% over 2019 sales.
Two thousand people who consume marijuana regularly were surveyed by Verilife and reported using more cannabis during the pandemic. Their increased consumption upped their average monthly spend on cannabis from $49 to $76.
Greg James, the publisher of Marijuana Venture and Sun Grower magazines, said at least part of the sales increase is due to the bars closing. “Staying home and enjoying a joint or edible becomes the thing to do,” he said.
One of the high growth areas noticed by Lightshade, which operates nine cannabis dispensaries in Colorado, is sales of cannabis flower products, including pre-rolls and expensive boutique brands. Lisa Gee, director of marketing at Lightshade, said that one reason behind the jump in flower sales is the increase in cannabis users now working from home who prefer to smoke cannabis over other ways of consuming it. “When you don’t have to go into the office every day, you don’t have to seek out more discreet methods of consumption,” she said. Work from home may now mean smoke at home.
Lightshade retail cannabis store in Colorado Emily Trigg LightShade
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While many businesses are shuttering, cannabis companies are unveiling new products. Wana Brands of Colorado recently launched Wana Quick Onset Gummies to meet one of the perennial challenges of the edibles’ category, the variability of the time it takes for consumers to feel the product’s effects. The new gummies aim for a five to fifteen minute onset time, with effects that will last about three hours. It also offers a “low dose” of THC, 5mg, which is half a standard dose. Eric Block, chief revenue officer of Wana Brands said his company had seen growth in cannabis-infused edibles sales during the pandemic.
Wana Sour Gummies introduced in Spring of 2020 aim for quick onset Wana
CBD products are also coming to market. Kimberly Dillon, previously the chief marketing officer at California’s Papa & Barkley, recently launched a line of CBD-infused hair and skincare products made for women of every background called Frigg Wellness.
Frigg launches new CBD hair products for all hair types Frigg
Martha Stewart’s line of CBD products for pets and humans, announced in June of 2019, will be making their market debut this fall.
To reduce interaction between customers and retailers, some companies are also implementing online ordering which allows patrons to spend less time in-store. That means no more leisurely chat with the local budtender. Block says Wana Brands is investing in digital and online technologies to educate customers. “Pre-COVID, the dispensary budtender has had an outsized influence on cannabis product purchases,” said Block. Now companies have a chance to control the conversation.
Of course, the cannabis industry is not a money-printing machine, even when demand expands. Basic business rules apply including follow the intricate laws carefully, keep pristine records, and hire excellent employees. Most businesses fail because they "have questionable management and unrealistic business plans,” said James. He has spoken with hundreds of cannabis companies during the six years his magazines have been published. “As with most businesses, the successful ones quickly adapt and figure out how to manage with the new normal,” he said. “Good management and well trained employees are as valuable in Cannabis as in every other industry.”
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dedcad50c96d8de32a13898c9f3f2d88 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/julieweed/2020/10/02/250000-americans-work-in-legal-cannabis-and-jobs-are-growing/?sh=5c7c2b5c3a7c | 250,000 Americans Work In Legal Cannabis And Jobs Are ‘Growing’ | 250,000 Americans Work In Legal Cannabis And Jobs Are ‘Growing’
About a quarter of a million people currently work part-time or full-time in the cannabis industry according to Leafly.com and those numbers are expected to grow significantly as marijuana legalization expands into new states and as nascent markets become more established. California, by dint of sheer size, as well as its long history of legal medical marijuana, represents the state with most cannabis jobs. Washington state and Colorado, the first two to legalize recreational use, are next on the list. Even more conservative states like Oklahoma are on track to add thousands of jobs in cannabis.
top 10 cannabis job markets Leafly
Few industries require such a wide gamut of expertise to run, from agriculture to new product development to chemical testing to retail, all accompanied by an extra layer of rules and regulations. That’s according to David Belsky, chief executive of FlowerHire, a staffing and talent strategy firm that serves the regulated cannabis industry. Salaries vary widely by state but jobs are available for people at all education levels Belsky said. There’s work for delivery drivers, bud trimmers and retail salespeople, as well as manufacturing and finance professionals, PhD chemists and horticulturists, and more.
Employees in traditional job areas like accounting, legal, security, manufacturing and retail operations, can draw heavily on other industry experience, adapting that professional knowledge to the cannabis marketplace. Other jobs with titles like “compliance director” or “cannabis growing director” require more specific knowledge and training.
A unique benefit of cannabis jobs to U.S. states is, “they can’t be moved out of state,” said Belsky. That’s due to federal regulations prohibiting cannabis from crossing state lines. Cannabis has to be grown, processed and sold in the state in which it is consumed.
A list of top open cannabis job postings on Glass Door recently included brand ambassador, sales manager, retail associate, delivery driver and security, which reflects the growing number of cannabis storefronts.
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As the markets develop in their own ways in each state, so do the job types. States or towns that allow delivery mean more jobs for drivers, security people, and in vehicle maintenance. States where retail shops are proliferating will need savvy marketers to combat the competition. Locales considering cannabis consumption clubs might draw from the dining and entertainment industries. And wherever there is new legalization, tech entrepreneurs will be needed to create seed-to-sale tracking software and to keep that software up to date with changing government rules.
Sales are increasing in every state where medical or adult use (recreational sales) are allowed said Belsky, and that means jobs are growing too. “Many other industries are faltering right now, but not cannabis.”
More cannabis job information comes from CNBC below:
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09cb3be0ed88a3272eb8fbafb62bab08 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/julieweed/2021/02/01/this-year-may-see-the-tipping-point-for-cannabis/?sh=5bee2583491e | This Year May See The Tipping Point For Cannabis | This Year May See The Tipping Point For Cannabis
beaker of cannabis liquid concentrate being poured into a test tube Jeramie Lu Photography
Call it “The Green Wave.” Eleven states have legalized cannabis for adult use, about twenty others allow medical marijuana, and some neighboring states are feeling a little left behind. Democrats, historically more open to laws allowing cannabis use, sales, and banking, control both the house and the senate. The customer base is growing and sales are climbing. Will 2021 be the year the rest of America lets cannabis in?
Neighbors
Jon Sandelman, CEO of Ayr Strategies which operates cannabis businesses in multiple states, predicts a “domino effect” of legalization in states adjacent to those making forward movement in cannabis legislation. Recent actions in New Jersey, Arizona, New York, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Maryland and Virginia could influence local governments nearby he said. That’s because states that come late to the party give their quick-acting neighbors a head start on building a thriving regional market. There’s also the lure of new job creation.
Another important draw is tax revenue, especially in Covid-affected economies. Nevada for example, brought in about $684 million in cannabis taxes in 2020.
cannabis legalization in the united states of america. cannabis leaf in hands on usa flag background getty
Federal Moves
Democrats, with their party in control of congress, may encourage the federal government to support laws easing restrictions on cannabis sales and use nationwide. Possible legislation could be something like The SAFE Banking Act, an attempt to bring cannabis banking, which is currently not allowed at federally chartered banking institutions, into the legal fold. The act passed the US House of Representatives in September 2020, but was subsequently stalled by Republicans. Proponents say allowing cannabis banking brings the industry under regulator control. It also opens up investment dollars for entrepreneurs.
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Federally sanctioned investing, banking, and loans will help the industry grow and mature said Sandelman, with well-run companies benefiting most from national legislation. “The best capitalized, best performing, and most efficiently run companies will receive the lion’s share of institutional investor attention,” he said.
Some states have been expunging low level cannabis convictions from their records. The federal government could do the same. It could also remove cannabis from the nation’s Schedule One drug list and re-classify it as a substance less harmful than heroin.
Winners and Losers
Optimism alone regarding possible new laws will inspire mergers and acquisitions in 2021 predicts Sandelman. Weaker companies will sell off assets, while those in the strongest financial shape “will be best positioned to take advantage of acquisition opportunities.” Multi-state operators will need to be disciplined and thoughtful, but also bold and strategic, he said.
Growing Customer Base
WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA - JANUARY 2: Customers line up outside MedMen on the first day of recreational ... [+] marijuana sales, January 2, 2018 in West Hollywood, California. (Photo by Christina House/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images) Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Gen-Z, the youngest age group of legal consumers, spent significantly more on cannabis products last year, growing from $376M in 2019 to $865M in 2020 according to the cannabis industry researcher HeadSet. That may be due to a combination of increasing numbers of Gen-Z’ers turning 21 and cannabis’ use as an alternative to consuming alcohol at bars during 2020’s lockdown. The substance is widely accepted by this growing consumer segment.
The growing confluence of consumer, state, and federal factors may make 2021 the year for a real Green New Deal.
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82a84353929df9514b28186771c8a3fc | https://www.forbes.com/sites/juliewilcox/2012/07/24/whip-your-body-in-shape/ | Whip Your Body In Shape With Inspiration From Sports Videos | Whip Your Body In Shape With Inspiration From Sports Videos
Being in shape and healthy should never be drudgery. Yoga, sports, exercise, and activity and movement of all kind is so much fun and super healthy. Check out these fabulous cutting-edge videos by Equinox Q and Project Dstllry on all kinds of fitness, sports (rowing, skating), and yoga. If nothing more, let them inspire you to go for a walk!
Josh Harris Rowing For Equinox Q
Dice Iida-Klein and his wife, Briohny Smyth, are awesome physical specimens and definitely seemed pretty cool and nice when I met them in a yoga inversions workshop. Thanks to this duo, I mastered my press to handstand. Watch this radical video here starring yogi Dice doing his yoga practice on a paddle board and Briohny doing some wonderful yoga in her bedroom here. The rowing video with USA National Team rower, Josh Crosby, is also totally inspirational and reminds me of the days when the pathway around Charles River was my running track (wherever you are, you can find beautiful places to get moving and workout). Rowing is fantastic for your cardio health and developing tone. Just watch out if your arms and legs tend to bulk up easily (mine do so I am careful about how I integrate rowing into my fitness workouts) because rowing might very quickly cause you to develop hulk-like muscles (not the look I like or want for myself). Here, Corbin Harris flies on his skateboard. Finally, if you're seeking a six-pack, check out this incredible core workout here. There is a world of physicality and well-being waiting for you to take advantage of. Figure out what you like and go do it!
Core Workout Video by Equinox Q
Briohny Smyth, Yoga Video For Equinox Q
Dice Smyth, Yoga and Paddle Board Video For Equinox Q
Corbin Harris Skateboarding Video, For Equinox Q
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872e50ed3fcc8551cad8eaf462deaaaa | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jumio/2021/02/01/how-to-fight-financial-crime-while-avoiding-costly-aml-compliance-mistakes/ | How To Fight Financial Crime While Avoiding Costly AML Compliance Mistakes | How To Fight Financial Crime While Avoiding Costly AML Compliance Mistakes
Failures in compliance processes cause firms to face heavy penalties, criminal proceedings and sanctions.
Jumio
Unfortunately, many firms keep making the same compliance mistakes and struggle to meet their regulatory obligations despite the repeated messages in these enforcement cases. The enduring problems reflect a lack of resourcing and the reliance on legacy systems that can’t keep up with the changing trends in financial crimes.
Fintechs, banks and credit unions, broker-dealers, lenders, cryptocurrency providers, marketplaces and other regulated organizations have had to cobble together several different point solutions — sometimes 10 to 20 of them — to combat financial crime and meet compliance mandates.
This is not surprising since there are many ingredients to AML compliance, including:
KYC Compliance: Know Your Customer (KYC) is the process of gathering data, verifying the identity and understanding the risks associated with doing business with a particular customer. KYC also encompasses customer due diligence (CDD), which is the process of assessing the risk both during the onboarding process and on an ongoing basis.
Transaction Monitoring: Transaction monitoring refers to monitoring customer accounts and activity for illegal behavior, and it is a primary tool in helping to detect and prevent money laundering and terrorist financing.
Case Management: Case management is the critical step where analysts at regulated organizations review and investigate suspicious activity that was detected by the KYC or transaction monitoring system.
SAR Filings: FinCEN requires financial institutions to file Suspicious Activity Reporting (SAR) forms, and modern case management systems can pre-populate these forms and electronically file them with the appropriate regulator.
Each amendment and law adds a layer of complexity and burden to the compliance teams of regulated institutions. The complexity is aggravated by the number of different solutions that need to be managed and orchestrated to satisfy different aspects of these regulations.
Time for a More Holistic Approach
Reducing this complexity was our motivation for acquiring Beam Solutions’ AML platform. Put simply, we wanted to create the first end-to-end identity verification and compliance solution. Now, firms can use Jumio’s KYX Platform to manage compliance throughout the entire customer journey, from onboarding to ongoing customer due diligence, transaction monitoring, case management and automated SAR reporting.
Detect Suspicious Activity: This entails analyzing vast amounts of financial data and adaptively searching for subtle trends and abnormal activity that may suggest a pattern of money laundering.
Simplified Case Management: A streamlined platform to investigate suspicious activity, document finding, complete a workflow and submit regulatory filings, all from a single interface.
A More Holistic Approach: Organizations need to have a more comprehensive and holistic view of the risk associated with each customer, which includes performing AML and KYC processes both upfront and on an ongoing basis.
The aim of an AML compliance program is to expose and correctly react to money laundering, terrorist financing and fraud-related risks. If your technology stack and internal processes are efficient and integrated, you dramatically improve your chances of identifying these risks without overburdening your compliance teams.
The Dawn of End-to-End AML Compliance, provides a game plan for combating financial crime and achieving AML compliance without sacrificing the user experience. You'll also discover the key components of an end-to-end AML compliance solution and how to put your organization on the right path.
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162ca5f7d97c292e2efdfc5687325ce9 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jumokedada/2017/10/21/technista-talk-neha-narkhede-linkedin-employee-to-confluent-boss/ | Technista Talk: Neha Narkhede - LinkedIn Employee To Confluent Boss | Technista Talk: Neha Narkhede - LinkedIn Employee To Confluent Boss
Neha Narkhede, Cofounder and CTO, Confluent at Kafka Summit Courtesy of Neha Narkhede
From the time Neha Narkhede was a young girl in India, she believed that she could create things and control her own destiny. To support her interests, her parents ensured that she did three things: learned how to use computers, attended the best schools and modeled women leaders. Unbeknownst to young Narkhede, her parents put her on a path to become a leader that women and girls would look up to one day.
Narkhede has moxie. It is her determination coupled with her confidence that inspired her to pursue her dreams of working in Silicon Valley while living in India. She applied to graduate school and when she was accepted into a program, she moved to the United States. After receiving her Masters in Computer Science from Georgia Tech, she landed her first job at Oracle. Once she realized that it was time to make a career move, she went to LinkedIn where she worked on a project that would change the course of her life.
In my interview, Narkhede talked about her journey to become the CTO of Confluent, the company leading the way with the Apache Kafka technology that is being used by major companies including LinkedIn, Netflix, Pinterest, Airbnb, Verizon, Salesforce and more.
Jumoke Dada: Tell me about your background and how you got started in tech.
Neha Narkhede: My parents bought me my first computer when I was 8 years old. Then I began dreaming about working with technology. When the time came to pursue higher learning, I applied to universities in the United States and went to Georgia Tech to get a Masters in Computer Science.
After graduation, my advisor wanted me to apply for the PhD program but I couldn't wait to create something in the real world, so I decided to accept an internship at Oracle and I was eventually hired. However, once I realized that I wanted to work in a more fast-paced environment, I started looking at startups. LinkedIn was in its hyper growth stage at the time so I accepted an offer to work there. Eventually, I worked on a project focused on accessing real time data which later became a big deal known as Apache Kafka.
Dada: You had very supportive parents. What are some of the values that they instilled in you?
Narkhede: My parents did a number of things that still impact my life today. First they instilled in me a belief that I could do anything. They helped me develop a growth mindset which allows me to approach things with the belief that over time I can learn something new even if I don't know anything about it on day one. Second, they taught me the value of education. Third, they ensured that I was exposed to women role models; they were not in tech but they were women leaders in India that helped shape what I wanted to become in some way.
Dada: Encouraging more girls to pursue STEM careers is a hot topic. Was it common for families to support girls interested in technology in India?
Narkhede: In big cities, particularly in the region where I grew up in Mumbai, there was a lot of focus on education and the importance of using it to escape poverty. I went to an all girls middle school which helped me because I didn’t develop insecurities. Since I didn't experience any inferiority, I didn’t enter college or the tech industry believing that boys or men could do more than girls or women. Many other girls in my area grew up the same way.
Dada: Let's fast forward and talk about your transition into the corporate world. Tell me a little about your job search and early experiences in your career.
Narkhede: My advisor at Georgia Tech was extremely supportive and helped me identify opportunities. It wasn’t until I worked at Oracle that I experienced my first obstacle.
I worked on a project where I had an idea of how the team should approach a problem but we followed the direction of the senior architect. I ended up having to prove my perspective and idea. The experience was very hard but I hung in there and eventually validated my program. The code exists today and sits in an Oracle database.
I realized that I was working at a big, hierarchical company and it wasn't the best fit for me. I always tell myself to fail fast so if an environment doesn't work for me, I move on quickly. I noticed that startups were growing rapidly and I could help make an impact. At the time, LinkedIn was a much smaller company so I went to work there.
Dada: I’m glad that you were able to recognize the type of environment that you needed to work in to thrive. Now let’s delve into your technical experience. What sparked your interest in Apache Kafka?
Narkhede: The funny story is that I was hired by LinkedIn to work on a project but there was a team struggling with the problem of collecting data in real time. Engineers were working on systems that needed data but no one was working on how to access the data. It was a big problem for LinkedIn and because of its importance to the company, I wanted to contribute to the solution.
I talked to my colleague at the time, Jay Kreps, because he was thinking about the data access problem. I asked him if I could help work on a solution and that's how we got started. We didn’t start by building technology. Instead we began by investigating the technologies that existed to understand their drawbacks. We concluded that a solution didn't exist.
Access to real-time data turned out to be an industry-wide problem. People wanted to collect data and process it in milliseconds versus hours. Apache Kafka allowed companies to get access to their data quickly so that leaders could make business decisions. Apache Kafka became a big deal so we open-sourced it. In short, my interest was sparked by solving a critical problem for a company that no one else wanted to solve.
Dada: What led you to leave LinkedIn and cofound Confluent?
Narkehede: A lot of companies began adopting Apache Kafka so the next step was to create a company around it. I pitched the idea to Jay Kreps and Jun Rao, and they both agreed. Here we are three years later as the founders of Confluent with technology used by thousands of companies worldwide.
Confluent founders pictured from left to right: Neha Narkhede, Jay Kreps and Jun Rao Courtesy of Neha Narkhede
Dada: You were fortunate to identify partners, but many women are struggling to find cofounders or developers to help bring their ideas to life. Do you have any tips on what to look for?
Narkhede: I believed in looking for people who were smart and whom I could relate to. Find a cofounder that shares your beliefs, respects your ideas, values your contributions and cares deeply about the problem that you want to solve. It takes a long time to agree on the culture of a company but make sure that you can work together.
Dada: Let’s talk about today's startup culture. There is a lot of talk about app development, venture capital, founders and more. Please share your take on the startup culture today.
Narkhede: On the positive side there’s a lot of awareness about startups as opposed to six years ago when I started. On the flip side, there is a lot of sexism and it's holding back women, especially engineers, that are equally talented. The stories that I've heard from friends and colleagues are scary.
I believe that change comes from the top. If there aren’t management teams or leaders who believe in equality, and are actively doing things to change company dynamics, things won't change. Women need to be hired for leadership positions because I think that there is very little engineers can do to effect change without it being an uphill battle.
Through my experiences I’ve seen that men are evaluated more based on potential and women are evaluated based on experience.
I purposely picked LinkedIn as my next company after Oracle because during the interview process, I met people who seemed accepting and respectful. I picked the path of least resistance in some sense but still fought my way through each milestone. Almost every promotion that I've received in my career I’ve asked for and I probably asked for it more than once. Through my experiences I’ve seen that men are evaluated more based on potential and women are evaluated based on experience. I’ve asked to be evaluated based on potential but it was an uphill battle.
Dada: You have a team but a lot of women are doing things on their own. Do you have any tips for encouragement for solopreneurs?
Narkhede: The reality of the startup ecosystem today is that it is still extremely skewed and prefers men. I think my startup did better initially because I have 2 male cofounders. You will have to fight extremely hard if you don’t have a male cofounder.
My first advice is to develop the mental strength to fight many battles. You have to develop the persistence to keep going. Also, mentorship is important. I’ve consistently modeled the behaviors of people that I look up to. You can save a lot of time by learning from the mistakes of others. It’s unfortunate but it’s really hard without male cofounders.
Dada: What are tools or must-have apps that you use for time management or productivity?
Narkhede: I use Google Keep to make sure that I make a list of five things that I will get through the day. Where did I get the number from? I don’t know but it works really well and it makes me feel good to make sure that the top priorities are done before I pay attention to anything else. If you want to cope with stress, exercise helps a lot.
Dada: You touched on mentorship. Who are some women that you look up or that you consider to be role models?
Narkhede: I look up to Padmashree Warrior, the ex-CTO at Cisco who is now the CEO and founder of NIO, an electric car startup. She comes from India and had a similar path here with leaving India, studying abroad, working in tech, and becoming an entrepreneur. I also look up to Indira Nooyi, Chairman and CEO of PepsiCo. She is also from India.
If you can see yourself in your role model's place then you feel like you can achieve what they did.
Dada: What’s next for you and for Confluent?
Narkhede: Next year is all about our next phase of growth. I'm spearheading the effort to launch Confluent cloud, which is a big product offering that will take Apache Kafka’s adoption to the next level.
I also want to kick up my time investment in mentorship now that Confluent is growing. I signed up for the Ascent program which was created by Sequoia Capital. It’s a network of women leaders in tech.
Dada: Will you do anymore writing in the future?
Narkhede: I do a lot of evangelism for Confluent. I recently co-authored the book Kafka: The Definitive Guide based on the technology that our team created. It took a lot of time to write the guide book so now I invest more time in other forms of evangelism.
I give keynote speeches at conferences throughout the year and I write blog posts to reach broader audiences quickly. I enjoy meeting women engineers at conferences. I hope that my getting on stage to speak about our technology encourages more women engineers to do more public speaking.
Dada: I read that you love to travel and that you dabble in photography. Tell me a little about your interests outside of tech.
Narkhede: I love to travel and I’m an avid scuba diver. My husband and I create lists of cool places to dive around the world. The last really cool place that we went to was the Great Blue Hole in Belize. There were a lot of sharks around so it was a bit of an adrenaline rush.
Dada: Is there anything else that you would like to share?
Narkhede: I will close with some advice for women engineers: believe in the growth mindset and develop the mental strength to fight biases and sexism. Do not quit.
Dada: What advice do you have for girls that look up to you?
Narkhede: I give them the same advice and I tell them to prepare for battle.
Neha Narkhede's mantra is to fail fast and keep moving. Courtesy of Neha Narkhede
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15d0f6c8e8c6b002ea8964480d8717e1 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jumokedada/2020/10/31/catalysts-for-change-18-women-who-used-technology-to-amplify-a-movement/ | Catalysts For Change: 18 Women Who Used Technology To Amplify Movements | Catalysts For Change: 18 Women Who Used Technology To Amplify Movements
Social networking service concept. Streaming video. getty
The world seems to be on fire literally and figuratively. Whether you’ve been following the wildfires on the West Coast or global political climates, you know that life as we know it has been heating up in more ways than one. Fortunately, despite the looming darkness surrounding death tolls, economic downturns, and civil unrest, there are still glimmers of light and hope.
Seen or unseen, history reveals that whenever there were calls to action, fights for equality, or problems to solve, women often played an intricate part in driving change. Women like Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony, Katherine Johnson, and many more serve as examples of the impact that can be made through one act. Today, while women continue to face social and political injustices, many now leverage technology to reach and galvanize the masses.
Here are a few women who used technology to solve a problem, start a movement, or amplify a cause:
Deepti Sharma, Founder & CEO, FoodtoEat
Cause: Support for Immigrant-Owned Food Businesses
Technology: A website
In 2011, Sharma - a first-generation Indian-American - was standing in line for a cookie when she realized that small food shops needed more infrastructure to make their businesses sustainable. As a result of her epiphany, she created an individual ordering platform for restaurants which grew to become much more.
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Today FoodtoEat is described as being the largest curated network of women, immigrant, and minority-owned restaurants and caterers across New York City. It is a concierge catering service that helps local restaurants partner with businesses and nonprofits for their culinary needs. Through its #IMadeYourFood campaign, FoodtoEat humanizes the food experience by spotlighting people behind the food on its website and social media accounts. Through its partnership with World Central Kitchen, they’ve provided more than 100,000 meals to hospitals and nursing homes and helped keep more than 30 immigrant, women, and minority-owned restaurants open.
When asked why she decided to help during the pandemic she shared, “I’m a New Yorker — born and brought up in Queens. I needed to do everything I could to help the people suffering due to job loss which has left many into food insecurity.”
Twitter: @foodtoeat
Deepti Sharma, founder of FoodToEat, delivering meals at a hospital in Bronx, New York City © 2020 Shravya Kag
DJ Switch, Songwriter and Musician, @djswitch_
Movement: End Police Brutality in Nigeria
Technology: A mobile device
On Thursday, October 8th, a peaceful protest against police brutality took place in Lagos, Nigeria. What followed in the days after was the inspiration for Nigerians around the world to raise awareness about the #EndSARS movement.
On Tuesday, October 20th, a hero arose and her name is DJ Switch. During a protest at the Lekki toll gate in Lagos, she used her cell phone to go Live on Instagram while in danger. On her Live viewers watched as she provided aid to those nearby that were wounded at what is now referred to as the #LekkiTollGateMassacre. Despite sharing that her cellphone battery was running low, she kept the Live on for as long as she could while also showing concern for the lives of everyone around her. A few days later, she provided an update on Instagram to let everyone know that she was OK. Her act of selflessness has since been praised by protestors and supporters around the world.
When asked why she did it she shared, "I believed we would all die. I didn't want to die in vain."
Twitter: @dj_switchaholic
DJ Switch in Lagos, Nigeria DJ Switch Instagram
Wen-kuni Ceant and Jordan Wilson, Founders, Politicking App
Cause: Activating Millennial Voting Power
Technology: A mobile app
After voting in the 2016 presidential election, Wen-Kuni Ceant realized that it would be helpful to have more information about political candidates and issues. She reached out to her fellow Howard University alum, now co-founder, Jordan Wilson who was already engaged in political work. Together they realized that there was a need for more voter literacy for 18-35-year-olds that had been historically disengaged from political conversations.
According to Ceant, the Politicking app was born out of necessity. It is a sociopolitical mobile application that is used to galvanize millennials of color about local, state, and federal elections. She believes that it is unique in this election cycle as it provides a non-partisan tool to cut through what she calls a “carcinogenic polarizing ecosystem that the political landscape currently resembles.”
When asked about her goal for the app, Ceant shared, "To eradicate political disparities both domestically and abroad. Also, to serve as a reminder that black and brown voters are not a monolith."
Twitter: @politickingapp
Wen-kuni Ceant and co-founder Jordan Wilson pictured as a finalist for the 1850 Brand Coffee's pitch ... [+] competition hosted by Alexis Ohanian Wen-kuni Ceant
Yasmine Mustafa, Co-Founder & CEO, ROAR for Good
Cause: Safety for Women in Hospitality
Technology: A proprietary platform that utilizes Bluetooth to triangulate employees with one touch of a button to summon help to their exact location.
In 2014, after a solo trip around the world, Mustafa decided that she wanted to create a device to help women notify contacts when they felt unsafe. In 2015, she launched a campaign for Athena – a wearable personal safety device and mobile app – which was later developed and reached thousands of women in 45 countries. However, in 2019, ROAR For Good, pivoted to B2B services and created a new product called AlwaysOn™ - a staff safety platform designed to protect employees with one touch of a button. Currently, they are working in the hospitality industry with plans to expand to healthcare workers.
When asked why she cares she shared, “We believe no one should be afraid while trying to earn a wage.”
Twitter: @roarforgood
Yasmine Mustafa 2018 Headshot Yasmine Mustafa
Reshma Saujani, Activist, Attorney, and founder of Girls Who Code
Technology: Computers
Cause: Decreasing the gender gap for girls in technology
Founded in 2012, Saujani whose parents were both engineers, created Girls Who Code when she noticed a gender gap between girls and computing interests. She wanted to do something about it therefore she started the nonprofit to help girls with interests in technology. Today, the organization has multiple established programs. According to their 2019 report, they raised over 100 million in revenue, served 300, 000 girls, and support 8000 clubs around the world.
On the website, Saujani states, “Girls Who Code is more than an international non-profit. We are a movement.”
Twitter: @girlswhocode
Reshma Saujani and members of Girls Who Code Northwestern Mutual
In addition to creating or building technologies, there are many women who leverage existing platforms like Instagram and Twitter to amplify a cause or movement with the use of hashtags. Below are a few examples.
A photo taken on October 21, 2020 shows the logo of the the American online social media and social ... [+] networking service, Facebook and Twitter on a computer screen in Lille. - A powerhouse line-up of earnings releases on Thursday is expected to show that giants of Big Tech are on firm financial footing despite turbulent politics and the coronavirus pandemic. Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Twitter and Google-parent Alphabet are all slated to disclose how their businesses faired in the third quarter of this year. (Photo by Denis Charlet / AFP) (Photo by DENIS CHARLET/AFP via Getty Images) AFP via Getty Images
#AskHerMore
Created by The Representation Movement in 2015, the goal of the campaign is to “Inspire people to call out sexist reporting and suggest ways to re-focus on women’s achievement.”
#BlackLivesMatter
The birth of the phrase is credited to Alize Garcia after a Facebook post in response to the acquittal of George Zimmerman for the death of Trayvon Martin. In 2013, together with Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi, they utilized the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter fight against violence inflicted on blacks. The hashtag was also used in 2014 after the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO. As a result of the Brown tragedy, an organizer named Leslie Mac, also took action and created the Ferguson Response Network.
Today, #BlackLivesMatter is recorded as one of the most used hashtags on social media.
Twitter: @blklivesmatter
#MeToo & #TimesUp
Founded in 2006 by Tarana Burke, to raise awareness about sexual abuse and harassment, the #MeToo hashtag went viral in 2017 through the support of Hollywood celebrities who came forward to share stories about their experiences with men of influence.
In 2018, in support of the Me Too Movement, once again Hollywood celebrities called for action against systemic sexual assault, harassment, and inequality in the workplace across all industries.
Twitter: @metoomvmt & @timesupnow
#NOMADNESS
The NOMADNESS Travel Tribe was created in September 2011 by Evita T. Robinson when she had a need for community and noticed a lack of representation for people of color in the travel industry. Robinson shared that today the travel tribe surpasses over 25,000 international members of color from around the world. Additionally, she considers #NOMADNESS to be the genesis community that spawned what is known as the black travel movement on social media.
Instagram: @nomadnesstribe
#SharetheMicNow
In 2020, during the coronavirus pandemic, #SharetheMicNow took off with a focus on allyship. For a designated time, black women were allowed to “take over” the Instagram accounts of white women in Hollywood to amplify various causes. The social media campaign was created by Bozoma Saint John, Luvvie Ajayi Jones, Glennon Doyle, and Stacey Bendet.
Instagram: @sharethemicnow
#WhyIStayed
It was created in 2014 as a response to several high-profile domestic violence incidents. To combat widespread victim-blaming, Beverly Gooden tweeted a few reasons why she stayed in an abusive marriage. Within the hour, the hashtag was trending globally. She also created the Bolt Bag Project with the goal to have stations around the country so that victims of domestic violence can pick up an escape bag using an access code.
Twitter: @bevtgooden
#YouOKSis
Started on Twitter in 2014 by Feminista Jones. It is a global movement to combat street harassment by using bystander intervention techniques that center around victims. The focus is on black and brown women who have been left out of anti-street harassment work.
Twitter: @feministajones
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01ebf5c81e8ce1143b3534004c284cec | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jumokedada/2021/02/18/meet-the-computer-scientist-who-puts-equity-in-diversity-and-inclusion-work-culture/ | Meet The Computer Scientist Who Puts Equity In Diversity And Inclusion Work Culture | Meet The Computer Scientist Who Puts Equity In Diversity And Inclusion Work Culture
Lisa Gelobter Lisa Gelobter from Valence
As the world remains impacted by the global pandemic, the new White House administration grapples with all that it inherited. Families continue to manage remote work and home-schooling schedules. Meanwhile, companies are faced with its own set of challenges around adjusting to telework norms while ensuring that company values, culture, and performance remain intact.
I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Lisa Gelobter who can relate to all that government, families, and companies are dealing with during these times. She was the Chief Digital Officer for the Department of Education under the Obama Administration. Today she is the CEO and Founder of tEQuitable, a company whose mission is to create a work culture that works for everyone by making workplaces more equitable.
We talked about becoming a computer scientist, landing her job at the White House, and pivoting into entrepreneurship. She also cleared up being credited with the creation of GIFs and shared what she considers to be her most impactful contribution to the tech industry to date.
Jumoke Dada: Tell me about one of your earliest or most significant experiences with technology.
Lisa Gelobter: Let me start by sharing that it took me 24 years to graduate from college. I started college early on then I dropped out to work then I went back to finish. To answer your question, I have a memory from the school where it was around 4 AM and I was up working on a robot project. I remember trying to figure out how to make it move towards the light. I had a moment when I realized that no one had figured it out and it dawned on me that I could actually invent something new.
Dada: As a computer scientist, you may have had multiple options for employment opportunities. How and why did you work in the entertainment industry?
Gelobter: I worked at Black Entertainment Television Networks (BET) and Hulu prior to working at the White House. From the outside, it looks like I was super intentional with my career moves. However, every time that I learned about a job opportunity, I would ask myself if I would learn or grow from it because I’m a big believer that every company is a tech company. I worked on the tech side of the entertainment industry by inventing the Shockwave technology that media companies were able to build upon. Shockwave was the invention of animation on the web.
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New York, New York, United States of America - January 4th, 2018: Portrait of Lisa Gelobter at her ... [+] home in the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Gelobter, a former technology executive at BET and Hulu, said she experienced "a moment of clarity." during the #MeToo movement. She wanted to take her own experiences with discrimination as a black woman in tech and co-found a startup, tEQuitable, aimed at helping companies and employees address issues of bias, discrimination, and harassment. Gelobter most recently worked as the chief digital service officer in the Obama administration's U.S. Department of Education, helping companies improve their cultures and address complaints. (Photo by An Rong Xu for The Washington Post via Getty Images) The Washington Post via Getty Images
Dada: What about your experience with launching HULU?
Gelobter: I usually talk about Shockwave first because, in my opinion, it was groundbreaking as it set the foundation for the modern web. It was the thing that made the web move and had the most significant impact in the U.S. from a technological perspective.
Hulu transformed the way people thought about digital media and consumed it. However, Shockwave laid the groundwork and the platform for building it. The Hulu development experience was interesting and amazing. When we first launched it, I was the only person at the company who had previously worked at a media and software company. As a result, I ended up being the translator between my software and media colleagues.
Dada: What about graphics interchange format (GIFs)?
Gelobter: I want to clarify that I did not create GIFs although I get credited for it a lot. I think people conflated thinking about animation on the web as being animated GIFs but that was Shockwave. Again, what we did with Shockwave was transformative.
Dada: What would you describe as your biggest contribution to the tech industry to date?
Gelobter: From a technology perspective, Shockwave has had the most impact and has had the most things built on or stem from it. Hulu has had the biggest impact from a consumer perspective. What I worked at the Department of Education under the Obama administration has had the most societal impact.
Dada: How did you land your job at the White House under the Obama Administration?
Gelobter: It’s a funny story. I was in my office while working at BET and I got a call from the White House. I was invited to attend a roundtable discussion focused on the government using technology to serve the American people better. I flew to Washington, D.C. to attend. About a dozen of us met with the former chief technology officer of the USA, former chief information officer, and former deputy administrator for the office of management. We then learned that it was a recruitment event. They shared the potential of the impact of our work and after some time, in walks former President Obama. It was my first time meeting him and after that meeting, I decided that I wanted to work for his administration.
I actually don’t tell this story often partially because when I got to the Department of Education, I realized that there were people on the ground daily who had been doing good work for years with little credit. They are the real heroes.
Dada: After working in government, why did you become an entrepreneur?
Gelobter: While at the White House I enjoyed working on a project called College Scorecard which helped students make informed choices about where they would go to school.
After leaving, I realized that I could help make systemic change. I decided that having worked on transformative technologies in tech, media, and government, I wanted to apply my experience to help the underrepresented, underserved, and underestimated.
I never planned to become an entrepreneur. At the time, Bloomberg Beta started Future Founders. I received an invite while working at the White House so I went and learned about it which helped me when I started my company.
Dada: Let’s talk about your company. What is tEQuitable?
Gelobter: I was fortunate as I don’t have the typical entrepreneurial journey. Through conversations with contacts at Kapor Capital, I was supported. I am risk-averse so if I had to raise on my own, like a friend and family round, for instance, I wouldn’t have done it. I also went through Y-Combinator to start.
My company is tEQuitable and we’re using technology to make workplaces more equitable. We help employees figure out their next steps when inappropriate things happen in the workplace like harassment, discrimination, etc. Companies don’t always have a good pulse on their work culture therefore we also provide data and insights so that they can make systematic change.
We created a third-party, confidential platform to address issues. For employees, we provide a sounding board where they can get advice, explore their options, and figure out their next steps. Meanwhile, we’re gathering data that we anonymize and aggregate, and use to identify systemic issues within an organization's culture. Based on our findings, we create a report for the management team with actionable recommendations. For us, it’s really important that we work on both sides of the equation.
O'Reilly Conferences from Velocity New York 2015 Photography by Tricia O'Neill. May be used for editorial and blog articles about Velocity 2015 or O'Reilly Media, Inc. Personal,
Dada: What do you believe is one of the biggest problems that women of color experience as entrepreneurs?
Gelobter: Every circumstance is different but I would say that it is fundraising. I’ll also add that there is something about the types of businesses that we create. Many black women, including myself, start mission-oriented or social impact businesses that may be considered to niche for funding opportunities. Kapor Capital only does social impact investing. They fund organizations that will have an impact on closing gaps and opportunities in life and work. We were fortunate to end up with investors whose values aligned with our mission.
Dada: How has your company adjusted to the “new normal” during the pandemic?
Gelobter: We’re a small software company. When covid-19 first struck, companies had to adapt to their new normal. We did a lot of work with reaching out to employees and companies for surveys and providing materials, accommodations, and remediations. We also made suggestions of things they could put into place culture, norms and behaviors.
Dada: Diversity and Inclusion is a hot topic, what are some programs that your company has in place to address it?
Gelobter: Our company is black and brown. What we do for a living is help companies address diversity and inclusion issues.
At the beginning of the pandemic, my biggest concern was that the strides that our company made in terms of people talking about culture, belonging, would take a hit due to budget changes. However, the business has taken off.
The fact of the matter is, in this new world, you want services like what we provide in place because you want employees to feel like they have somewhere to turn. Our services are something that can be dropped in to augment your HR team. Also, people use tEQuitable in uncertain times to reinforce the culture and values.
On the one hand, I’m glad that that business is taking off but on the other hand, it infuriates me that it took civil unrest and more for people to start addressing issues. We have been trying to tackle inequities and systemic injustices since we started the business. Now it’s not just about having companies step up but it’s also how making them bring a lens of inclusion to their company culture.
O'Reilly Conferences from Velocity New York 2015 Photography by Tricia O'Neill. May be used for editorial and blog articles about Velocity 2015 or O'Reilly Media, Inc. Personal,
Dada: Who inspires you and why?
Gelobter: My parents. They are immigrants who left everything behind to come to this country. My dad is a holocaust survivor from Poland and my mom is from the Caribbean. As people who have lost almost everything, they’ve owned more than once, they have a resilience that I admire. They are remarkable human beings who just celebrated their 60th anniversary. I even believe that my dad was a feminist before the word existed.
Dada: What advice do you have for future computer scientists, who are currently in or recently graduated from college?
Gelobter: I’m inspired by the younger generation, too. I believe that I can learn a lot from them. I feel like they don’t adhere to our standards and norms. They are about making change and questioning the status quo. I really appreciate it and I want to encourage them to continue to do two things: be true to themselves and make a social impact.
O'Reilly Conferences from Velocity New York 2015 Photography by Tricia O'Neill. May be used for editorial and blog articles about Velocity 2015 or O'Reilly Media, Inc. Personal,
The conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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e8dd9b848ca87c821977185232d73e35 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/juniper/2017/09/29/how-do-top-cybersecurity-experts-keep-our-data-safe/ | How Do Top Cybersecurity Experts Keep Our Data Safe? | How Do Top Cybersecurity Experts Keep Our Data Safe?
By Jeff Koyen
A number of high-profile cyberattacks have been making headlines lately — perhaps most notable among them the Equifax data breach, which affected 143 million Americans from mid-May through July. Whether it's unreleased episodes of “Game of Thrones,” a few million credit cards or the integrity of a national election, criminal hackers are regularly testing the defensive capabilities of a number of popular networks.
Protecting networks from cyberattacks can be a grueling marathon — one that’s testing the strength and stamina of IT security professionals across every industry.
Here, we talk with several leading professionals about how they're building up their cyber resiliency and attempt to distill their wisdom into a few guiding principles.
“With so many new solutions, it’s sometimes hard to see what’s great and what simply adds workload,” said Laurence Pitt, Juniper’s security strategy director. iStock
Complete Prevention Is A Myth
In simpler times, cybersecurity was largely a cat-and-mouse game of hackers trying to outsmart network defenses. Today’s attackers are far more sophisticated and require new rules of engagement.
“The adversary does not care about your risk management framework,” said Scott Niebuhr, director of cyber engineering and protection at the Aerospace Corporation, a federally funded research and development center. “They will find a way to get in. Or they're already in.”
Niebuhr isn’t alone in this thinking.
“The realization that attackers will find a way into your systems is a hard fact to acknowledge,” said Kevin Walker, security chief technology and strategy officer for Juniper’s engineering organization. “Rather than assume we can build unlimited defenses, we should focus on ensuring that our most valuable assets are stringently protected and routinely reviewed for access.”
Prioritize What You Protect (And Recover)
No one wants to admit that some data is expendable, but the inevitability of breaches can force cyber professionals to make difficult decisions.
“Protect what is most important to ensure the success of the business,” advised Niebuhr. “If intellectual property is your livelihood, focus efforts to protect that data. If service delivery is key to your business model, ensure you have business recovery and continuity-of-operations plans.”
That’s easier said than done, of course — especially for global organizations. “The majority of our success is in managing our own complexity,” said Walker. “As such, we need to focus on the most important services and data in our enterprise.”
Recovery efforts, too, must be triaged in this manner. Matthew L. Miller is a senior manager in Ernst & Young’s Fraud Investigation & Dispute Services division. During one incident, his team was given a client laptop that had been bricked by a malware breach.
Rather than try to recover the entire drive, Miller focused exclusively on a number of critical contracts that didn’t exist elsewhere on the network. The results? A 94 percent recovery rate.
“While a small minority of an organization's data is of critically high value, it is often not fully analyzed,” Miller said. “By knowing their data better on a global basis, [organizations] will drastically improve their cybersecurity posture.”
People, Not Just Programs
Just as the stereotypical hacker is no longer a bedroom-dwelling teenager, a la “War Games,” so too has the day-to-day reality of cybersecurity evolved over the years. Network defense is not a closed-door enterprise; teamwork and meaningful vendor relationships are critical for success.
“Cyber is a people industry,” said Dom Glavach, chief security strategist at CyberSN, a leading recruiter of cyber talent. “I retain team members by ensuring they are always challenged [and] have a great work environment.”
Walker agrees: “The absolute essential ingredient to a strong cyber program is the talent we must invest in and cultivate,” he said. “Not only the subject matter experts, but the talent across the organization.”
Strong external relationships are also important.
“With so many new solutions, it’s sometimes hard to see what’s great and what simply adds workload,” said Laurence Pitt, Juniper’s security strategy director. “As trusted allies, vendors must work on the best answer to a problem, rather than just adding layers that are harder to see through.”
Corporations Are Cutting-Edge
Traditionally, government networks and mainframes hosted much of the world’s most private data. Today, with so much consumer information collected and stored on private servers, the feds no longer have a monopoly on protecting sensitive information.
As a result, private companies are largely setting the pace of cyberdefense development.
“The future of cybersecurity is civilian,” said Merritt Baer, a veteran of the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Cybersecurity and Communications. “It is being negotiated between private sector companies [and] the governmental public interest.”
That’s not to discount the importance of public organizations. “Arguably, some of the best threat intelligence is sourced from government agencies,” said Craig Dods, Juniper’s chief architect of security. “For example, a not-so-insignificant portion of the Fortune 1000 relies on US-CERT for threat information.”
However, he agrees that “many of the security technologies being deployed in both the private and public sector are developed by civilian organizations.”
Security Is More Than A Network
Taken together, these insights lead to one conclusion: Effective cybersecurity is a dynamic challenge that demands more than off-the-shelf software.
“Once the low-hanging fruit has been taken care of by the commodity solutions,” said Dods, “custom solutions must be created to cover the use cases that have been left exposed.”
Juniper builds unified security platforms via software-defined secure networks, allowing cyber professionals to leverage automation, machine learning and real-time intelligence when they defend their network.
However, noted Pitt, “These solutions are intelligent, but they do not have intelligence. That’s the human value in the equation. Being able to think and see outside the box is our differentiator, and will continue to be for some years to come.”
Jeff Koyen is a journalist, editor and entrepreneur who specializes in travel, technology and culture.
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e07d8841f30d0bdd76ce2bc2390537c1 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/juniper/2017/11/01/cybersecurity-in-the-age-of-quantum-computing/ | Cybersecurity In The Age Of Quantum Computing | Cybersecurity In The Age Of Quantum Computing
By Jeff Koyen
Like black holes, quantum computing was for many years nothing more than a theoretical possibility. It was something that physicists believed could exist, but it hadn’t yet been observed or invented.
Today, not only is quantum computing a proven technology, it’s a radically new field with the potential to upend countless industries—not least being cybersecurity systems that rely on uncrackable encryption.
While acknowledging that quantum computers are still 20 years away, NIST believes that we “must begin now to prepare our information security systems to be able to resist quantum computing.” Shutterstock
The threat is serious enough that it’s piqued the interest of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), a non-regulatory agency of the United States Department of Commerce.
In December 2016, NIST announced the Post-Crypto Quantum Project and began accepting submissions for “quantum-resistant public-key cryptographic algorithms."
While acknowledging that quantum computers are still 20 years away, NIST believes that we “must begin now to prepare our information security systems to be able to resist quantum computing.”
To know what this means for network security professionals, let’s start with quantum computing’s current state.
Quantum Leaps
Whether it’s plotting flight paths for a space probe or retouching a family photo, every computer is essentially “computing” something.
What sets quantum computers apart is the use of atomic particles to form quantum bits, or qubits for short, rather than silicon-based transistors. This makes them exponentially more powerful. It’s estimated that a single 50-qubit quantum computer would outperform today’s most powerful mainframes—without breaking a sweat.
First postulated in the 1970s by several research physicists, quantum computers didn’t become a reality until 2000, when scientists at IBM strung together five qubits to solve a simple mathematical problem. Their “computer" was roughly as powerful as a handheld calculator, Wired reported at the time.
In the years since, quantum computing has grown rapidly in both computational power and accessibility thanks to investment from both the private and public sectors. Among the major players are household names such as Lockheed Martin and Microsoft. In 2011, working with the University of Southern California, Lockheed Martin launched its own quantum research division. Microsoft got in the game in 2016.
Earlier this year, IBM Q was launched “to build commercially available universal quantum computers for business and science.” This new unit has already built functioning 16-qubit and 17-qubit computers. IBM is offering developers beta access to the smaller unit.
Meanwhile, Google’s Quantum A.I. Lab claims to have built a working 20-qubit computer. This same team is reportedly on track to announce the world’s first 49-qubit chip by the end of 2017.
Network Insecurity
What’s this got to do with network security?
Whether you’re sending money via Paypal or authorizing a user for root access, you’re relying on security systems based on cryptography. And modern cryptography relies on mathematical calculations so complex—using such large numbers—that attackers can’t crack them.
But these math problems are not technically impossible to crack; they are practically impossible. Using the most powerful computers available today, hackers would need hundreds, thousands, even millions of years to perform these calculations.
A quantum computer, on the other hand, might do the same work in just minutes, rendering modern cryptography obsolete. When cryptography collapses so, too, does network security.
As quantum computers begin to crack this encryption, guessing the right private key may only take days or hours. Shutterstock
Bikash Koley, CTO for Juniper Networks, explains cryptography’s basic premise as data which is secured using a combination of public and private keys; while the public key is widely distributed, private keys are computed using mathematical algorithms. “The algorithms are designed in a way that acquiring the private keys from the public keys is nearly impossible,” he said. “For traditional computers, for example, it would take thousands—to millions—of years, depending on how many bits there are in the keys. Quantum computers are very good at number crunching, especially for a specific type of problem.”
As quantum computers begin to crack this encryption, guessing the right private key may only take days or hours. At that point, he said, encryption, as we currently know it, is seriously vulnerable.
Fighting Quantum With Quantum
Fortunately, this threat to modern encryption isn’t taking anyone by surprise. In fact, long-standing quantum theory itself may offer a solution.
In the simplest terms, quantum cryptography relies on the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which states that an observer cannot fully measure a moving object’s position and path without affecting one or the other.
Quantum cryptography was first proposed in the 1970s by Stephen Wiesner, a physicist who’s also credited with theorizing quantum computing around the same time. Building upon Weisner’s work, collaborative research by Charles H. Bennett, and Gilles Brassard of IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center and the University of Montreal, respectively, proposed a method for secure communication titles BB84.
Koley explains that quantum key distribution (QKD) is theoretically a completely secure method of key distribution, and relies on quantum entanglement to transmit information in quantum states, or qbits.
“Typically, photons are used over a fiber-optic channel to achieve this,” he said. “Any attempt to measure one of the entangled photons leads to changes in the quantum state of the other, and therefore is detected. Thus, QKD offers a key distribution mechanism where any attempt to intercept the key by eavesdropping is revealed and the keys are discarded. QKD is not vulnerable to cracking attempts by quantum computers the same way that traditional cryptographic techniques are because any interception attempts in the QKD paradigm are readily detected. This is one of the reasons QKD is considered to be a good candidate for post-quantum security.”
Koley further explains that as a practical application, QKD distributes encoding information in such a manner that, should an eavesdropper attempt to intercept the message, the act of interception changes the encryption itself.
Although they’re widely considered to be the most cryptographically secure communication channels, there may be no defense against the 50-qubit quantum computers that are expected to come online in the next decade. That’s not to mention the 100,000-qubit crypto-killers that IBM plans to eventually build.
Don’t Panic — Yet
But not everyone is worried.
Steve Wilson, principal analyst at Constellation Research, has been throwing bombs at quantum boosters since 2012 and remains skeptical that we’ll witness the collapse of conventional cryptography anytime soon.
“Quantum computing only makes the probability higher,” said Koley. “That means it’s equally important for network security professionals to deploy the right technology to very quickly detect breaches. Shutterstock
“It seems that practical engineering of quantum computers with large numbers of qubits will remain relatively expensive for a while yet,” said Wilson, who is a specialist on digital identity and privacy. “This means that crypto can probably buy some time, and stay ahead of quantum computing… The arms race between cryptographic key length and brute force attack may continue indefinitely."
While a security strategy—which includes the most secure encryption possible along with deploying the best firewalls—may start with preventing breaches, you have to expect that regardless of the strength of your security posture, some breaches may be inevitable.
“Quantum computing only makes the probability higher,” said Koley. “That means it’s equally important for network security professionals to deploy the right technology to very quickly detect breaches. The good news is that big data analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence can really help. Quantum computers will be helpful in substantially reducing the time it takes for such detection.”
The Uncertainty Principle
There’s a lot at stake in the race for so-called “quantum supremacy."
Even the skeptics agree that quantum computing has the potential to revolutionize every industry, from finance to healthcare to national defense. Imagine using a 50-qubit computer to forecast the stock market or to sequence an entire population’s DNA; or how the military could use a machine that’s one million times more powerful than today’s supercomputers.
The most likely winners, according to Koley, are the companies that are making early and significant investments into quantum computing today, as the technology requires more than a decade of continuous investment and innovation. Companies like IBM, Google and Microsoft, with an appetite to continue such investment, will have a clear edge, he said.
Juniper is pioneering the concept of a software-defined secure network to stay ahead of the curve in the post-quantum security world. We believe it’ll be a key pillar in securing network infrastructures in the next decade.
For network security professionals, deploying the right technology to detect breaches quickly will continue to be key. “The good news is that big data analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence can really help,” Koley said. “Quantum computers will be helpful in substantially reducing the time it takes for such detection.”
At the same time, the research, data and trade secrets that form the backbone of each of these industries must remain secure. In this chicken-and-egg paradox, quantum computing may deliver both salvation and damnation.
Jeff Koyen is a journalist, editor and entrepreneur who specializes in travel, technology and culture.
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3f1d55ec182cbe4653b59cba21529421 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/junwu1/2020/09/04/can-virtual-reality-help-us-connect-better-during-the-pandemic/?sh=3955ea3d6d94 | Can Virtual Reality Help Us Connect Better During The Pandemic? | Can Virtual Reality Help Us Connect Better During The Pandemic?
Happy couple on the beach breathing fresh air at sunset getty
In North America, as winter is fast approaches, everyone’s worried about another COVID-19 lockdown. Social isolation will once again be on everyone’s minds. AARP Innovation Labs released Alcove, a virtual reality app that enables friends and family to stay connected for Oculus Quest.
Increasingly, with extended times spent indoors, everyone can feel disconnected.
There’s only so much video conferencing anyone can do. Talking about each other’s day and feeling like you are forcing conversations may not be the optimal way to spend time with your loved ones.
Families need fun. Not everyone can play the type of video game that our children like to play. How to establish a bond between you and your mother, who might be living 3000 miles away? How to enable grandparents to take your children on adventures when they may not be able to go out because of pre-existing health conditions?
Virtual Reality Can Be Better Than Reality With Real Connections
Alcove came straight from AARP Innovation Labs to help families go on adventures together in virtual reality worlds modeled after the real world. As we venture further into all corners of the world, the idea is that as the world is feeling closer to us day-to-day, we live our lives together and apart, distributed on different continents and in other countries.
Video conferencing doesn’t connect us on a human level. It’s playing together or having shared experiences in the world that connects us and brings us closer together.
Rick Robinson, Vice President of AARP’s Innovation Labs, says, “Alcove allows people to truly break down the barrier of isolation is pretty remarkable. Some people naturally question whether it’s too complicated or advanced, but based on feedback and our extensive testing with consumers young and old, that’s not the case at all.”
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Robinson suggested that Alcove allows for a much richer way to communicate with one another than current video chat experiences.
“On Zoom or other video chat, you can catch up and talk about your day in a very flat way while in VR you can do so much more— you can meditate together and travel the world together. You can play games in a completely immersive way.”
In the virtual reality world, instead of being immersed inside one experience together, logistically, it’s easy to switch between experiences. This allows family members to explore different experiences to find what they like the best. Repeating experiences is easy. For instance, building a group meditation habit between a few adult family members is easy and feels immersive.
Robinson says, “It is an environment that we like to refer to as your family corner in VR, primarily because of the aesthetic. When you enter, you feel like you’re in a home with different rooms you can walk through, taking in all kinds of experiences that surround and envelope you.”
Although everyone has an avatar inside Alcove’s virtual worlds, the worlds are modeled after real worlds with 360 immersion. With heightened sensory experiences inside the VR world, the experiences can feel calming, soothing, and emotional. This helps to form real bonds between family members.
Cezara Windrem, Innovation Catalyst at AARP Innovation Labs, and Creator and Producer of Alcove, says, "The U.S. military has been using this for a couple of decades now for simulation and training. Now VR and AR are being used a lot more for high-level simulation training, educational programs, and more across industries because of its potential to create new worlds and immerse you in them in a way that can create new memories and allow your brain to make new and deeper connections with the content around. So, we're looking at VR as this complete 360-degree canvas that you are immersing yourself into, and it can be painted with any data information or media. And what's more, you can bring people in there and connect."
Starting With Comfort, Then Branching Out Into The World of Health and Wellness
When you look at how humans connect, comfort and safety are usually the foundations for real connection. This is why Alcove purposely designed the 360 immersive experience to start from the home's foundation, where most of us find safety and security. It is also designed to engage family members who might be consistently living in their worlds inside the same house.
Windrem says, "Think of Alcove as a magical space that is built at a human scale. You walk in, and by walking in, I mean, you put your headset on, and you're in, and you're looking around, and you feel at home because the environments are built to connect with what you're used to on a daily basis. There's a more modern feel to it. As you started walking around on your own or with your dear ones, inside there, you can start navigating and going into different rooms, which are not your regular home environment rooms, but magical spaces that bring amazing experiences to life."
In the U.S., one of the most significant childhood moments bonding with family is to play board games such as checkers, go fish, etc.. While playing, you are talking with your family, you are cracking jokes, and leaning into joyful moments. Alcove sets the scene for real bonding time with your family.
Cezara Windrem adds, “Alcove is a family platform. We’re hearing from virtual reality gamers and non-gamers that Alcove is an amazing place to connect with their family members. People from across all age groups are enjoying it.”
Alcove’s focus on health and wellness allows families to think mindfully about building a collective healthy lifestyle. Families can build healthy habits together inside experiences within the app. They can also watch out for one another and create emotional bonds linked to health and wellness experiences.
Windrem says, "While Alcove is not a clinical tool, socialization, or lack of socialization, can be a contributor to dementia and other similar issues. It's logical that if you could provide a tool that promotes socialization, it could help reduce the risk of dementia."
Where Does VR Go From Here?
As virtual reality applications move away from gaming into helping people improve their daily lives, people will use it to build a healthier lifestyle and stronger connection to each other and the world around them. As technologies progress, more immersive experiences will involve the integrating different technologies: virtual reality, augmented reality, artificial intelligence, and holographic. It presents a new frontier for technologists to experiment and create new mediums to improve people’s lives.
Windrem says, “VR can bring human connection to whole new levels—through its power to connect people with each other and the world in immersive ways, which may have been impossible in the past through traditional mediums. This is particularly relevant today, as our society battles the pandemic, social distancing separates us physically from our loved ones, and more and more adults experience social isolation and loneliness because of it.”
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a138a13a17f2025db697e6e06654b7d7 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/junwu1/2020/10/21/conversational-ai-based-on-nonverbal-cues-can-be-more-effective/ | Conversational AI Based On Nonverbal Cues Can Be More Effective | Conversational AI Based On Nonverbal Cues Can Be More Effective
female entrepreneur calling customer service. getty
Artificial Intelligence is now prevalent across customer service. However, most AI-enabled customer service applications remain rooted in Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques. With NLP, the software analyzes conversations and tries to infer the conversation's success from what is being said. Cogito, a Boston-based AI company conceived from technology and research out of the MIT Media Lab, uses voice-based AI to analyze behavioral cues and the content of the conversation to provide in-the-moment feedback during conversations, guiding individuals to have better interactions.
The company’s coaching software improves the outcome of customer service calls by gathering verbal and non-verbal cues from speech, such as pitch, tone, cadence, and turn-taking, to make more accurate predictions about the call outcome. These conversational nuances are instantly processed and used to coach customer service representatives to deliver resolutions more effectively and efficiently.
“Cogito was founded in 2006 by Dr. Alex “Sandy” Pentland, Dr. Ali Azarbayejani and Josh Feast,” Dr. Skyler Place, Chief Behavioral Science Officer at Cogito explained. “Sandy has decades of experience in understanding human performance and how different signals can be measured by machines to understand how people behave. He and Josh, who has had been our CEO since its founding, saw the need to help elevate our natural abilities. The original concept was based on this idea of ‘honest signals’ and how nonverbal cues can influence outcomes. Sandy had done a series of academic studies showing he could predict the likelihood of a first date being successful, job interview success, and salary negotiation success by how people are speaking. It is about understanding, the engagement and the connection between two people can be improved.”
Understanding the Successful Interaction
Interactions drive our world. During the pandemic, due to social distancing, we all noticed the gap we had in our daily work and private lives from the lack of human interactions. The restrictions in our virtual worlds via video conferencing tools tend to cause misunderstandings created by the lack of awareness of behavioral cues that allow us to understand the context of our conversations fully.
We have to communicate more directly with one another, center our discussions on relevant topics, and ask the right questions to achieve successful outcomes from our interactions.
But, as humans, we are inherently biased.
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When we interpret people’s behavioral cues, we are driven by our past interactions with the person. These past interactions are “colored” with judgments, emotions, and other personal lenses that we view our interactions. This is where data from AI can be helpful. Cues from Speech are distinct from person to person and situation to situation. It is data that is more reliable than people’s speech patterns alone. A script can alter verbal Speech, but the way people express themselves, the pattern of their “norm” is difficult to change or duplicate. By having their “norm,” any changes can be measured and detected to be correlated to behaviors that can help bring about more understanding.
“Rather than just notifying an agent that a customer is feeling a certain away, Cogito’s technology identifies patterns that are occurring and provides an assistance to their conversational techniques, like slowing down the pace,” Place highlighted. “We give agents specific guidance for the call in real-time – not after the fact when change is more likely to be out of context and not to stick. That’s really the heart of our system. This behavioral understanding and guidance in conversations that relates or correlates to the underlying emotions behind it.”
Place continued to explain, “We are not only providing a report that tells us that 20% of our customers are angry. We are giving customer service representatives guidance on what they can do to improve the call experience. Listen more effectively, increase empathy, increase energy, stop interrupting – you name it.”
Emotions, Empathy, and Engagement Impact Conversation Success
Cogito's Empathy Cue Image from Cogito
One of the biggest drivers for conversation success is empathy. When two people can recognize the other’s point of view, validate their stance, their conversation can have a more successful outcome. Cogito’s platform uniquely uses an empathy cue to help agents establish an acknowledgment and means to communicate with empathy in a given situation.
“The empathy cue was designed to detect moments where a customer would benefit from a recognition of a need for empathy and recognition of an emotional moment in conversation,” explained Place. “It could appear amid a positive or negative moment in an interaction, nudging the agent to react and respond given the context of the call. It is one of many ways we elevate the human experience and augment a person’s natural abilities with technology.”
By having an AI coach, customer service agents become more aware of human behaviors and continue to have the freedom to act as they usually would, but with more empathy.
The other driver for the successful outcome of a conversation is conversational context. Emotions drive context. People often say that “It’s not what you say but how you say it.”
The emotions gathered from the speech and someone’s speaking behaviors give the conversation context that allows others to retrieve insights. Unlike other AI-enabled customer service platforms, Cogito focuses on presenting solutions to help manage the underlying emotions expressed in conversations instead of merely identifying the feelings themselves.
Place explained, “We think about emotions as having two components. The first are the behaviors that are happening in any given moment and then the second are the relationship of the behavior to a desired outcomes. The actual emotion sits in the third bucket. We attack them indirectly through our machine learning approach. If I tell an agent that a customer is angry right now, they don’t necessarily know what to do with that information. What we do is detect what speaking behaviors are occurring and notify the agent on what to do to improve the underlying emotional aspect of the conversation.”
By focusing on presenting coaching solutions to customer service representatives, it increases the engagement inside the conversations. Cogito also provides dashboards that allow customer service managers to see the consolidated picture of customer service teams to help them be more engaged.
“Previously, before social distancing and remote work, call center managers would “walk the floor” to listen in on calls and detect who needed help,” Place said. “Now, however, they’ve completely lost that ability.”
When managers can take the “pulse” of the work environment, they can better understand how to foster positive emotions in a call center environment that is fraught with issues.
Place continued to explain, “At Cogito, we’ve taken our ability to understand calls and created dashboards to help empower managers understand how their employees are doing in real-time, in or out of the call center. As remote work pushes on, managers can virtually walk the floor and see performance – enabling them to manage, help and coach at home workers.”
By gathering this contextual level information that acts as a coach to help customer service agents, the aggregate contextual level information can act as a source for managers to understand their customer service representatives' emotional capabilities, workloads, and shift schedules. When managers can optimize their operations to be more human-centric and relationship-centered, their leadership can be more human-centric and effective over time.
Do We Need Better Algorithms For These Predictions? Do We Need More Data?
When it comes to AI-enabled customer service applications, we often imagine that gathering audio data is the first step. At some point, we will need to collect facial data to improve accuracy.
But, do we need all of this data?
“Today, we are focused only on audio, analyzing conversations and voice cues within the product, offering a rich data stream,” Place highlighted. “We don’t use facial recognition or video data to get the kind accuracy and value our clients look for. Most of our clients already record the conversations for compliance and quality purposes, informing customers on every call that these calls are recorded and monitored for quality purposes. The Cogito analytics is another layer of intelligence in addition to existing software that’s been analyzing calls for decades.”
Depending on the use-case and the purpose of the data, it’s entirely possible that in the customer service area, agents can provide an adequate level of service from AI-enabled coaching services that use only voice data for the predictions. However, when applications are more concerned with inferring the customer intentions of buying the product or affecting customer behavior, we may need more sophisticated algorithms beyond deep learning to gain more accuracy.
Place explained, “We have algorithms that look at two different categories of predictions right now. There are the ones that measure what is happening in a conversation, how quickly you are speaking, how much energy is in your voice and so forth. These measure physical signals and tend to be very accurate. Where things get interesting is when you look at the assessments and predictions of things like customer intention or the likelihood to buy a product. This is where in the last 10 years, technology has really advanced to with deep learning, more data, and creative approaches to increase accuracy. I think that’s where you’ll continue to see the potential for advancement and where new algorithms, new approaches will continue to open new doors for understanding the downstream business implications of some of these technologies.”
As the use of conversational AI become more prevalent, behavior prediction algorithms will also become more accurate. We will likely see more sophisticated applications in controlled environments such as interview settings, negotiation, etc. To impact a successful outcome, AI can provide more data and context for the participants of a conversation to improve their decision-making process. But, ultimately, the decision point of a discussion still resides with the individual participants.
“We view AI as not replacing the human connection,” Place said. “It’s meant to augment the abilities of the human and recognize the need for empathy, and then allow the human to make the decision to follow the best process that will lead to the best outcome, for the conversation and the customer.”
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d5854d146abb7c79746d0dff8e1181cf | https://www.forbes.com/sites/justcapital/2019/02/26/ceos-the-black-community-wants-you-to-be-bold/ | CEOs: The Black Community Wants You To Be Bold | CEOs: The Black Community Wants You To Be Bold
Too often, Black Americans do not have a voice in or are
not heard by corporate America.
Today, there are only three Black CEOs –
Craig Arnold of
Eaton,
Arnold Donald of
Carnival, and
Kenneth Frazier of
Merck
– leading the 890 companies we evaluate. While Black Americans comprise an
estimated 14% of the total U.S. workforce,
these CEOs represent just .003% of the chief executives at the largest, publicly traded U.S. companies – showing that the voices of Black Americans are grossly underrepresented in corporate leadership today.
Each year, JUST Capital surveys the American people to find out what they consider most important when it comes to just business behavior, giving us significant insight into what matters to the American public at large – as well as to the different populations (men and women, high- and low-income, urban and rural) that make up our country. This collection of perspectives together shape the foundation for our Rankings and tools. As Black History Month comes to a close, and as part of our mission to better align corporate practices with the priorities of the public, we are focusing on and striving to amplify the voices of the Black Americans we’ve engaged with over the last year through our polling.
In 2018, of the 9,000 Americans we surveyed, we reached 1,300 Black Americans, who agreed that CEOs of large companies should take a stand on important social issues – in fact, nearly three out of four respondents (73%) want to see CEOs of large companies taking a stand. Americans overall share this view, and look to CEOs to speak out on the issues that matter most – and when we asked them what message they would like to send to CEOs today, they pushed for workers’ rights, non-discrimination, and gender equality, among other key issues.
While Americans expect more of corporate leaders, they are also willing to do their part to incentivize change. Specifically, 83% of Black respondents also believe that people can be effective when they work together to drive change – a testament of faith in the power of the collective. As Americans, how we spend our dollars can provide an outlet for our collective voice and shared views, drawing attention to and driving change on the critical social challenges of our time. Perhaps even more important is where people choose to work.
As part of our survey, we asked Americans to consider how important different workplace topics were to them when accepting a job. In 2018, our Black respondents indicated that, of the issues set forth, the five that matter most when accepting a job, in order of importance, were that companies:
Provide full-time hours for employees who want to work full time. Provide health care benefits to employees. Have policies and opportunities for career advancement within the company. Have non-discrimination and anti-sexual harassment policies in place. Provide paid parental leave.
With non-discrimination policies one of the key elements Black respondents prioritize when accepting a job, we took a look at how the companies we rank performed on this particular issue. Furthermore, studies like this recent deep dive from Deloitte have shown that, while having Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) policies deliver value, setting concrete targets is crucial because “tangible goals make ambitions real.”
As part of our ranking methodology, we track whether companies have Diversity & Inclusion policies, as well as whether they set concrete D&I targets. Our research has shown that, of the companies we evaluate, six times as many disclose Diversity & Inclusion policies than disclose D&I targets, showing that companies still have a long way to go toward creating tangible, measurable goals.
Deloitte’s study points out that “the setting of specific diversity goals has been found to be one of the most effective methods for increasing the representation of women and other minority groups.” In implementing concrete targets, companies can not only take a stand on an issue of vital importance to the American public, but also improve representation on their teams. Furthermore, our research has shown that companies committed to anti-discrimination – through their policies and targets, along with a lack of fines or controversies around discrimination and equal opportunity – have higher returns on equity (an impressive 21% vs. 14%, respectively over the last five years). This finding is supported by ongoing studies like McKinsey’s Why Diversity Matters, which also demonstrates that diverse workforces perform better financially.
Companies looking to lead today should not only craft a strong Diversity & Inclusion policy, but also set specific goals and targets to incentivize and deliver lasting change. As Peter Drucker said, “You can't manage what you can't measure.” Not only do targets show a commitment to doing the right thing, they can drive stronger performance both in the workplace and in the market, building more diverse workforces and improving the bottom line. And once we have greater disclosure around this and other key issues, everyday Americans can together – through their dollars and their job choices – better support the companies striving to do better, and shareholders can reward executives for reaching the targets they set, helping to direct capital toward more just companies.
Celebrated Black writer and activist James Baldwin famously said “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” Today, his words ring strong and true, and corporate America would do well to listen. If business leaders can face these challenges with boldness and purpose, companies will not only reap the rewards, but will drive change on some of the issues that matter most to Black Americans.
This article was co-written by Fiyin Adesina and Sarah Vieux of JUST Capital.
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5d9cb89721e7473ae05a65296884049c | https://www.forbes.com/sites/justcapital/2020/06/02/corporate-america-speaking-up-on-systemic-racism-is-only-the-first-step-now-lets-act/?sh=4bd4a8414c85 | Corporate America: Speaking Up On Systemic Racism Is Only The First Step. Now Let’s Act. | Corporate America: Speaking Up On Systemic Racism Is Only The First Step. Now Let’s Act.
Protesters demonstrate on June 2, 2020, during a "Black Lives Matter" protest in New York City. - ... [+] Anti-racism protests have put several US cities under curfew to suppress rioting, following the death of George Floyd while in police custody. (Photo by Johannes EISELE / AFP) (Photo by JOHANNES EISELE/AFP via Getty Images) AFP via Getty Images
It’s good that corporate America has started to add its voice to the George Floyd protests. Business can and must play a leading role in addressing racial equity.
This past weekend, my mother and grandmother sat in the living room of my grandparents’ Brooklyn apartment, listening to the echoes of the past, as protesters and police clashed outside.
For me and many other Black Americans, we have been carrying the trauma and inequity that has ignited this social unrest long before it was televised. This is not new. And while it may be shocking to some, we are still struggling with the legacy of centuries of exploitation and subjugation of Black lives – from slavery, to Jim Crow, to mass incarceration – the root causes of where we are today.
The recent deaths of Black Americans – George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery – coupled with the COVID-19 pandemic, have exposed serious and profound fault lines in the country. Factors like a lack of access to affordable healthcare, higher levels of unemployment, lower wages, the racial wealth gap, unequal access to quality education, have created barriers to the well-being of Black Americans.
Well before coronavirus and this period of social unrest, Black Americans have historically faced considerable barriers in the labor market, including discrimination in their job searches, occupational segregation, lower wages, increased risks of being fired, and higher levels of unemployment than their White counterparts.
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At JUST Capital, we are motivated by the increasing number of corporations that are working to create a more just economy through stakeholder capitalism. If they take this approach seriously, they must do what they can to redress these racial inequities, which unfortunately grow deeper and more complex with each passing day.
Of the more than 100,000 Americans who have died from COVID-19, there is a disproportionately high number of deaths among members in the Black community. One of the reasons for this is that Black workers hold a higher proportion of jobs as essential workers on the frontline in grocery stores, public transit, and healthcare, as well as in cleaning staffs across businesses. It’s an unfortunate situation that many Black workers have had to choose between protecting their health and earning an (albeit low) income. Bureau of Labor Statistics data from April shows that African American unemployment has jumped to 16.7%, and a recent McKinsey report noted that 39% of all jobs held by Black Americans are now threatened by reductions in hours or pay, temporary furloughs, or permanent layoffs, totaling 7 million jobs.
In recent years, and especially over the last few days, business leaders have been adding their voices to the chorus of mourning, acknowledging and recognizing the racial divides that plague our society and economy. That’s obviously an important step, and it is welcomed. But we need more. As we stare down both economic recession and systemic discrimination, business leaders in America today have both a moral and economic responsibility to provide Black communities the financial and mental support that they so desperately deserve, as well as the opportunity for advancement and access to the resources required to do so. And if we wish to rebuild better on the other side of these crises, leaders must commit to actively working toward permanently eradicating the social and economic oppression of Black Americans, and addressing the structural inequities revealed by these appalling statistics.
First, don’t be silent. It starts with work in-house. In the past few days, CEOs from companies such as Target TGT , Intel INTC , Lowes, JPMorgan Chase JPM , and Verizon VZ have issued statements committing to support Black employees and communities, and to work on issues of racial equity. More are adding their voices. Thank you, but more needs to be done.
Second, listen to your Black employees and provide them with much-needed assistance in this moment. Provide employees with hazard pay and paid sick leave if they are performing essential services, back-up dependent care for those facing childcare issues, and mental health services – as this time is incredibly emotionally taxing. Many of your Black employees will have lost family members, friends, or members of their community. Provide your employees with some paid time off to mourn these losses. If you’ve had to consider furloughs or layoffs, do the work in advance to understand whether your plans disproportionately affect your Black employees.
Third, review representation of Black employees in your workforce to ensure that your team reflects the demographic makeup of the U.S., that Black workers are represented across all levels of your business, and that workers are receiving equal pay. And after that review has taken place, share the results. Our research shows that less than half (40%) of companies are transparent about the gender and racial makeup of their workforce. In fact, just one company – Intel – has published demographic data as part of its EEO-1 Survey and disclosed wage data by gender, ethnic, and racial breakdowns.
Disclosure of Workforce Demographic Data JUST Capital
This transparency, and the careful analysis that led to it, is a critical first step toward driving change. The results may not be pretty, but without them, corporate leaders can’t begin to have an honest internal conversation about racial equity.
As a community, we are mourning. As a nation, we are, as well. We need to start identifying what future we want for ourselves and work together to rebuild this country in an equitable way. It’s important that companies continue to work with and support Black communities in an effort to fix these structural issues and create an economy, and a country, that truly works for all Americans.
If you are looking for ways to support your Black and Brown employees, please see resources I’ve listed in this recent LinkedIn post.
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1114df0be007fe3747fb6497cf27fe4c | https://www.forbes.com/sites/justcapital/2021/01/21/a-scalable-system-to-lower-unemployment/ | A Scalable System To Lower Unemployment | A Scalable System To Lower Unemployment
Former Carlyle Group President and Chief Operating Officer Glenn Youngkin participates in a panel ... [+] discussion hosted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's in 2017. T(Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) Getty Images
In June of last year, Glenn Youngkin announced he was going to retire as co-CEO of The Carlyle Group. Youngkin had shared leadership of the asset manager with Kewsong Lee. As Youngkin explored a future in politics and was hailed as a potential gubernatorial candidate in Virginia, Lee made it clear he wanted the role of CEO to himself.
Youngkin obliged. We should be happy he did.
Since last summer, Youngkin has zagged when others expected him to zig by plunging directly into politics. Instead of running for governor, he pulled back and laid the groundwork for a future move into politics. I, for one, hopes he stays on his current path. What he’s doing now is far more interesting and vital. He founded, with an idea from his wife, an organization to help put Virginians back to work in the wake of unemployment as a result of the coronavirus lockdowns.
“What I do know is that I have long felt a calling to service,” Youngkin wrote to his colleagues. Covid-19’s massive disruptions and intense social and economic challenges have only strengthened that conviction.”
Less than a month before announcing his retirement, Youngkin had already launched the Virginia Ready Initiative, in cooperation with Gov. Ralph Northam. Youngkin recognized the need for it after the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic only months earlier.
The Wall Street Journal wrote: “Glenn Youngkin, co-chief executive of Carlyle, is serving as chairman of the new public charity, dubbed the Virginia Ready Initiative, or VA Ready, which aims to retrain out-of-work Virginia residents with the skills they need for high-demand jobs and to connect them with employment opportunities.”
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One can imagine few organizations right now with a more vitally important mission. As Wall Street revels in a financially leveraged euphoria, unemployment numbers remain ominously high for increasingly ignored sectors of our economy: middle- and lower-income families, as well as small and mid-sized businesses, the demographics most endangered by the economic fallout of Covid-19. It’s a familiar story: Main Street continues to tumble far behind Wall Street in our top-heavy economy.
Here’s how Virginia Ready is fighting back:
Anyone who enrolls in the program will receive free training for a new and potentially lucrative career, will be able to network with companies seeking to fill jobs and will be given a $1,000 bonus up front. The program has joined the state community college’s Fast Forward Initiative, striving to give enrollees a crash course in vital job skills in six to twelve weeks.
The $1,000 bonus is merely an incentive to get discouraged workers to enroll in one of 17 occupational seminars. As the Richmond Free Press reports, this coursework is based on the needs of existing companies that can’t find enough skilled workers to fill all of their openings. (This is the fulcrum of the whole program and why it’s such a promising development.) These careers range from computer network support to information security to medical support, as well as welding and advanced manufacturing. Enrolling in the Virginia Ready Initiative is almost a ticket to guaranteed employment.
Classes began in August.
Youngkin gave his wife Suzanne credit for this initiative. She deserves the recognition. Already in the spring, she was thinking about the economic future of millions who would soon be unemployed. As of March last year, almost a million Virginians had already filed initial claims for unemployment. So, yes, the writing was on the wall. But her idea is for the long-term future, not just the pandemic. More on that in a moment.
In his leadership of the Carlyle Group, Youngkin was in charge of infrastructure investments. He knew what to look for, and he recognized that Virginia has the systems already in place to deliver skilled workers to desperate companies. He told the Free Press that Virginia also had a sufficient number of robust businesses to ensure that those who enrolled in the coursework would be hired right there in the state.
“Too many Virginians have lost their jobs, and they deserve help to retool for in-demand jobs,” he said. “What we want to do is provide thousands of people with the right credentials to fill the jobs that are available.”
So, enrollment is, in reality, free. The classes cost around $2,400 but the state will cover two-thirds of the fee, leaving the $1,000 bonus to cover the rest, with a bit leftover. Community colleges also offer scholarships and private support, so the students could most likely save all of the bonus. Contrast this to the tuition being charged now at most colleges and universities.
Twenty businesses have donated a total of $10 million to fund the program’s ongoing budget and provide a fund of bonuses for at least 5,000 trainees this year and 5,000 next year.
When it fully ramps up, Youngkin expects Virginia Ready to distribute 7,500 bonuses per year.
If you multiply that number times the number of states in the union, you realize that this should not be a one-off initiative. It ought to become a franchise. With the sort of largesse flowing into the coffers of hundreds of major corporations this year, especially in the financial sector, CEOs in these companies should recognize Glenn Younkin as a role model. Virginia Ready could be a bellwether for identical programs that would be simple to kickstart with a $10 million grant in their own states. Do the math: if duplicated in every state of the nation that’s 390,000 displaced workers put back to work every year. In only a few years, we could be re-employing millions, building back our economy with a sustainable system that would zero in on one of the great weaknesses in our economy, the lack of targeted training for skilled jobs that have been going unfilled even in the best of economies.
If Virginia Ready works as intended, we’ll have a scalable model for the private sector to use as a kind of advanced trade school system. In it, everyone who enrolls is nearly guaranteed a career when they’re done—only three months later. And it’s free. If only our colleges and universities could promise the same. It’s time for dozens of other CEOs who recognize the need and see the opportunity to duplicate what Younkin has done in Virginia. If this concept could move from idea to reality in only a few months in Virginia, it can happen all across the country just in time for people to get back to work as Covid-19 recedes. The time to act is now.
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77a48f04e740b5a5f6b828cc2ea40876 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/justcapital/2021/02/04/a-path-for-diversity-on-americas-corporate-boards/ | A Path For Diversity On America’s Corporate Boards | A Path For Diversity On America’s Corporate Boards
The first class of Herndon Fellows. Courtesy of the Herndon Institute
Sometimes a great notion comes along and it’s so simple and brilliant, you marvel that no one thought of it sooner. My friend Roosevelt Giles, the executive chairman of Atlanta Life, had one of these brainstorms four years ago. Now he’s making it happen. He’s spearheading a school for corporate directors. The question is, why doesn’t every business school have one of these already?
It’s going to be big.
Herndon Directors Institute (HDI) is on a path to positively impact the evolving world of corporate governance. Backed by the Herndon Foundation, the philanthropy that partners with Atlanta Life, the HDI mandate is two-fold. It has selected its first class of distinguished fellows who are all under-represented on corporate boards: minorities and women. It will train them for service and leadership as board members, and it will provide them actual placement on a for-profit board. HDI will also instill in them the “scar tissue,” as Giles refers to it, the lessons that iconic corporate leaders earned during defining moments in their corporate history – something that prepares Herndon Fellows to ask corporate leaders about not just their decisions, but the thought processes behind them. HDI Fellows will be provided with experienced corporate board mentors as well as an entire network of connections to board and C-suite members, all of whom are committed to the growth and success of each Herndon fellow.
Ultimately, it will give minorities and women a greater ability to lead our private sector—showing them how to draw wisdom from across the corporation while leveraging power from the top. Even during a time of ever-increasing corporate board diversity, 37% of S&P 500 still have no black board members. Black corporate directors, in fact, comprise only 3% of the more than 4,000 directors on boards of companies in the S&P 500. The Herndon Directors Institute in partnership with notable business leaders and corporate partners will train and educate its fellows in a manner that will create greater representation for qualitied minority leaders on corporate boards nationwide.
The initial class of fellows have notable leadership records including roles as sitting CEOs in the private sector, military generals, and leaders from government and non-profit organizations. Many in this first class are first-generation college graduates with degrees often from notable universities including Harvard Business School. This group, like many accomplished business leaders from under-represented communities, has leadership positions and education accolades but lacks access to networks and many aspects of leadership training in corporate governance and board readiness required for consideration and ultimate success as a corporate director. As a program seeking to provide education both technical and practical to minorities and women business leaders, HDI educates its Fellows in the fiduciary obligations of corporate directors grounded in the many dimensions of stakeholder capitalism. Over time, HDI trained corporate directors will be a part of the evolution of the private sector toward the principles of stakeholder capitalism, optimizing the needs of all critical stakeholders: customers, workers, shareholders, suppliers/vendors, communities, the environment and the corporation itself.
We spoke with Giles recently and he described how the institute began and what it has set out to accomplish in the world of corporate governance:
“Four years ago, I spoke with some friends of mine in South Africa at Cape Town about the difficulties for minorities and women in finding a seat at the table,” he said. “If you look at capitalism, it is importantly about who is in the boardroom. If you don’t have a seat at that table, that’s like not having the ability to vote. Giving corporate leaders who hail from disadvantaged communities a path to that table is like creating a Voting Rights Act for corporate board service.”
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Last year Giles got serious and started mapping out the curriculum for this school. The best institutional corollary is to a part-time, learn-as-you-work, specialized executive MBA program for established business leaders like those offered today at graduate business schools such as Harvard Business School, Wharton, Booth, Kellogg, and many others. Eligible candidates for each class of HDI Fellows will be drawn from companies nationwide for training at the Herndon Director’s Institute four times per month, twice per week every other week for six months. On Feb. 10, the institute will begin training its first class of 19 fellows. The coursework will be led by iconic corporate leaders, current and former CEOs and subject matter specialists covering every facet of corporate board responsibility. Funded entirely by the Herndon Foundation, all programs will be free of charge, funded entirely by the visionary corporate governance that created the partnership between Atlanta Life and the Herndon Foundation.
All of this is in line with the Herndon Foundation’s mission. This partnership, secured by the visionary corporate structure of Atlanta Life, is one that has more than a century of history committed to supporting social justice in the communities nationally from which the insurance company draws its profits.
At first, it will operate only in Atlanta. Every year the foundation will expand its footprint to other cities around the country. As I wrote about in a post last year, Atlanta Life is a little known commercial insurance business with a long continuous history of partnering with minority communities to provide financial solutions. It was founded by an ex-slave, Alonzo Franklin Herndon, who became a sharecropper and then a barber and eventually became Atlanta’s wealthiest black man. He founded Atlanta Life with a $140 stake as an offshoot of various social justice organizations catering to low- and moderate-income consumers. Eventually, Herndon’s wealth—through the Herndon Foundation established by his son in 1950—became one of the financial pillars of the Civil Rights movement.
More than half a century later, it’s continuing to innovate for social justice.
Coursework will cover the fundamentals of annual reporting, SEC filings, corporate strategy, succession planning, risk assessment and oversight, human resources, data security, regulatory accountability and liability, brand excellence, capital planning to ensure growth and identification of market innovations. Here’s what’s unique about the curriculum, though. The school has assembled advisory boards of people drawn from lower reaches of organizations including suppliers and employees who interface with customers. These groups will sensitize potential new boards members to the needs of employees, customers and communities. All of this prepares these highly-trained new directors to move organizations more confidently toward the stakeholder capitalism model. As Giles put it, “They will hear from people within the organization who did not get a voice in the boardroom: store clerks, delivery drivers, junior associates, small business suppliers, nonprofits that will come in and speak to what it means for them to help carry out their mission, and what a fair wage means for them, as well as what they need in opportunities for promotion and training. It’s a 360-degree view. These individuals will be telling them what they need to excel. By doing this, you’re putting a human face on stakeholder capitalism.”
In the end, this groundbreaking institute will accomplish two critical objectives. It will empower generations of minorities and women on a path to simply be the best they can be in business and life. Secondly, it will demonstrate to the business community that diversity is a key to superior corporate performance. I, for one, wish Roosevelt and his brilliant idea all the success it deserves.
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918be40f17433b68e488e6152bb4fc89 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/justcapital/2021/02/18/shareholder-primacy-culture-and-the-cautionary-tale-of-boeing/ | Shareholder Primacy Culture And The Cautionary Tale Of Boeing | Shareholder Primacy Culture And The Cautionary Tale Of Boeing
Rescuers carry a body bag containing human remains recovered from the waters where Sriwijaya Air ... [+] passenger jet crashed in Jakarta, Indonesia, Sunday, Jan. 10, 2021. Indonesian rescuers pulled out body parts, pieces of clothing and scraps of metal from the Java Sea early Sunday morning, a day after a Boeing 737-500 with dozens of people onboard crashed shortly after takeoff from Jakarta, officials said. (AP Photo/Tatan Syuflana) ASSOCIATED PRESS
I began writing about the story of Boeing BA BA two years ago, not long after the crash of its new 737. It was, and remains, a shocking story not just of lives lost but of a corporate culture born of shareholder primacy that remains a pernicious and dangerous force today even as the ban on the aircraft has been lifted, the planes have returned to American airspace and the company settled a class action suit filed by the Justice Department for $2.5 billion dollars and admitted criminal wrongdoing.
What is critical now isn’t the what in this story, but the why. Why did intelligent, experienced leaders at Boeing take dangerous, risky shortcuts that cost human lives in two crashes, billions in lost revenue, and untold value in lost reputation? We must continue to ask questions about Boeing to prevent this kind of massive scale mistake and forge a better future.
I believe the facts surrounding the Boeing 737 ban point to a toxic corporate culture shaped by shareholder primacy and short-term profits — a culture where employee complaints were increasingly silenced, and individual’s resistance was blatantly ignored.
One such employee wrote to me after I contributed a column here on Forbes describing the horrific happenings at Boeing after records revealed that for years the company took dangerous, risky shortcuts to maximize short-term shareholder value. The letter I received, signed by a longtime Boeing machinist, begged me to continue to tell this story. He said management from time to time, talks about safety, but they don’t mean it. Look at their actions, he said. And we’re not allowed to complain. That’s the power of culture for good or evil.
The FAA became lax and is complicit in what transpired, but what drove Boeing to pull off this outrageous behavior was a culture that justified the company’s decision to take those short cuts. The actions were brazen and clearly visible. For a five-year period, in clear daylight, this once proud, creative company publicly committed to innovation and safety invested 43 billion in stock buybacks to enrich shareholders and only $15.7 billion in R&D, according to David Hay, at Evergreen Gavekal, a large private investment company. Did anyone become alarmed? The Boeing board, the financial community of brilliant analysts? Management, the culture says, has a fiduciary responsibility to maximize short-term shareholder value. Maximize in the short-term.
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The real question is fiduciary responsibility to whom?
At Boeing, way too slowly, the board acted. The CEO was fired and in January of this year, Dave Calhoun, a businessman with a stellar reputation, stepped in. The losses he faced were staggering – not only the 346 lives lost in two crashes, but also approximately $86 billion for everything from the expense of fixing the aircraft, to compensating the company’s customers, and the massive number of lost or cancelled orders for the aircraft and an extra two and a half billion in the class action lawsuit. Calhoun knew the company from having been one of its directors. He started with very few public announcements. He didn’t promise much. He went to work. Months went by. Fixes and redesigns were made. In November, 11 months after Calhoun took the helm, the 737 Max is flying again. It’s clearly a most encouraging sign. I don’t know Dave Calhoun. I suspect Boeing isn’t fully where it needs or wants to be. The Boeing culture of innovation and safety will take time to fully blossom once again. My machinist correspondent and his colleagues will have to fully trust the new regime. Will he and the rank-and-file workers be properly respected, allowed to speak out, be listened to? Will the new culture change, take hold? Yes, Boeing, fiduciary to whom?
The disastrous culture and governance at Boeing is an example that must be examined. There are lessons to be learned here, by business, by the government, by the American people. Governance creates powerful cultures that drive behavior for good or otherwise. Was business created simply to make a sizable but small minority of America rich? If so, look at the results — an America where socio-economic inequality is staggering. Look further at how the pandemic is attacking and killing the vulnerable majority at exponentially higher rates.
America clearly needs for business to create—with urgency—a new governance that will forge a new and better corporate culture. The answer is not mysterious. Business CEOs know it. Mr. Calhoun at Boeing knows it. So do dozens and dozens of other corporations who simply practice it. They all know that a company must have a fiduciary responsibility to multiple stakeholders: to the customer it serves (to the innocent flying public); to the workers who must be treated with respect and paid fairly; to the corporation itself which must continue to innovate to remain competitive; yes, to the shareholders who bring capital to the table; to the vendors and support organizations who partner in a corporation’s success; to the society/communities where corporations live and work; and finally, to our ultimate home, our planet that we are close to destroying.
Fiduciary responsibility to all these stakeholders must again become the law of the land. It must replace the culture that drove Boeing with such disastrous results. Stakeholder capitalism is the solution. America is craving the powerful, sustainable, win-win culture that stakeholder capitalism can most assuredly usher in.
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384e015c8a21be56dc53146c164b5155 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/justinbirnbaum/2019/12/24/artemi-panarins-hot-start-foreshadows-an-exciting-rangers-career/ | Artemi Panarin’s Hot Start Foreshadows An Exciting Rangers Career | Artemi Panarin’s Hot Start Foreshadows An Exciting Rangers Career
COLUMBUS, OH - DECEMBER 05: New York Rangers left wing Artemi Panarin (10) celebrates a goal during ... [+] the game between the Columbus Blue Jackets and the New York Rangers at Nationwide Arena in Columbus, Ohio on December 5, 2019.(Photo by Jason Mowry/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images) Icon Sportswire via Getty Images
There’s no team Artemi Panarin tormented more than the New York Rangers.
He scored his first NHL goal against the Blueshirts in 2015. Four months later, he netted his first career hat-trick against them. Then, as a member of the Columbus Blue Jackets in 2018, he burned the Rangers again with a four-point performance that included his second career hat-trick.
Panarin’s 18 points in 12 games against New York ranked as his highest total against any NHL club before this season. So, when the Russian-born winger hit free agency as one of the most coveted players on the market, the Rangers knew just how good he was first-hand.
But this past July, torment became joy as New York signed Panarin to a staggering seven-year, $81.5 million pact. Although the team is in the midst of a rebuild, the arrival of No. 10 in the Big Apple expedites their timeline. Even with room to improve this year, expectations are sky-high.
And through 36 games, Panarin has delivered. His early returns – 20 goals and 25 assists — are foreshadowing one of the greatest offensive seasons MSG has ever seen.
“In my lifetime as a center, he’s the best winger I have played with,’’ said Rangers forward Ryan Strome to The New York Times’ Allan Kreda. “Just the skill, how long he has the puck and holds on to it. He’s a game-breaker.”
However, Panarin’s fast start should come as no surprise. The Rangers did hand their new star the largest contract in franchise history. Still, his play has exceeded expectations as he’s threatening to record the Rangers’ first 100-point season since Jaromir Jagr did so in 2005-06. Panarin’s early returns, past performance and age could make him the best free-agent signing this franchise has seen since the turn of the millennium.
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Since entering the league in 2015, Panarin has been one of the most productive scorers in the NHL. According to the Hockey-Reference Play Index, his 365 points rank sixth during that span with only Sidney Crosby, Brad Marchand, Nikita Kucherov, Patrick Kane and Connor McDavid ahead of him. What’s even more impressive is Panarin was effective immediately when his career started. He’s one of 36 players in NHL history to record at least 320 points in his first four seasons and one of seven dating back to 2000-01.
And as good as Panarin’s track record has been, 2019-20 could be his best year yet. The 28-year-old is currently on pace for 103 points, blowing away his previous career-high of 87. The Rangers have only had six 100-point scorers in their 93-year history, putting Panarin in a prime position to etch his name into franchise lore.
He also has a shot to cross the 40-goal plateau if he keeps pace. The last free agent signing to hit that mark was Marian Gaborik, who scored 41 in 2011-12 and 42 in 2009-10 (Rick Nash scored 42 in 2014-15 but came over in a trade).
However, it’s reasonable to expect Panarin to slow down. His sample size of 36 games is small and he’s benefitted from an elevated shooting percentage this season. Panarin’s scored on 18.7 percent of his shots on goal, four percentage points higher than his career baseline. This could be a true skill improvement, but his track record says it isn’t and that he’s likely to have some regression.
But in the last few years, few players have had the performance stability of Panarin. He’s never missed more than three games in a season and never posted less than 74 points. Even if Panarin is smack in the middle of his prime at age-28, there’s a chance he’s only getting better even if the hockey aging curve says he shouldn’t.
According to research done by Eric Tulsky, Dawson Sprigings and Evolving Wild (independent of each other), forwards peak around ages 24-25 and decline slowly, before falling off a cliff at 30. When Gaborik arrived in New York at age-27, also in the heart of his prime, he exploded for a career-high 86 points. His Rangers total of 229 points in 255 games ranks the highest among any free agent signing in the last two decades. After Brad Richards joined the Rangers at age-31, his production never resembled his peak despite receiving a nine-year, $60 million deal.
Except for his second NHL season, Panarin’s point total has increased incrementally each year. If he tops Gaborik's numbers, it will likely be because of his exceptional passing ability. The Athletic's Ryan Stimson concluded that passing ability ages better than goal-scoring and Panarin’s 229 career assists account for 63 percent of his scoring. But this season offers a chance to net a career-high point total because his goal scoring is approaching a peak.
Panarin’s ability to trend upward as he ages only emphasizes his value. As he paces toward a potential career-best season in 2019-20, who knows how high his ceiling could be? And for the Rangers, who watched Panarin net a hat-trick earlier this season in Columbus, the best news is no longer having to face one of their biggest tormentors.
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ca99f34cb48d2ea43b06a51648d5f751 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/justinbirnbaum/2020/03/28/rangers-prospect-nils-lundkvist-is-a-right-handed-commodity/ | Rangers Prospect Nils Lundkvist Is A Right-Handed Commodity | Rangers Prospect Nils Lundkvist Is A Right-Handed Commodity
LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND - DECEMBER 03: #27 Nils Lundkvist of Lulea HF warms up prior the Champions ... [+] Hockey League match between Lausanne HC and Lulea HF at Vaudoise Arena on December 3, 2019 in Lausanne, Switzerland. (Photo by RvS.Media/Monika Majer/Getty Images) Getty Images
Imagine how ironic it would be if the future of the Rangers rested on another guy named Lundqvist. Maybe that’s a bit overdramatic, and it’s spelled with a K instead of a Q, but the team does have an elite prospect in Swedish defenseman Nils Lundkvist.
The Rangers drafted Lundkvist 28th overall in 2018, and his stock has steadily improved ever since. In 45 games with Luleå HF of the Swedish Hockey League this season, the 19-year-old has more than tripled his point total from a year ago (31) while averaging 20-plus minutes per game. Lundkvist also had an impressive showing at the most recent World Junior Championships, registering eight points in seven contests. His dynamic play, offensive prowess and speed earned him the third-best ranking among Rangers prospects, according to The Hockey News’ recent Future Watch issue.
“Since the draft, he keeps proving us right about his selection,” said Jan Gajdosik, the Rangers’ longest-tenured European scout, according to LoHud.com’s Vince Mercogliano.
And now, with the SHL’s postseason canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Lundkvist has a decision to make. Fellow Rangers prospect and 2018 draftee K’Andre Miller just signed his entry-level contract and turned pro. Is it time for Lundkvist to do the same?
Based on his raw talent alone, Lundkvist should give it a hard look. But the Swedish prospect has another thing working in his favor. He’s a right-shot defenseman, which is a commodity in today’s NHL.
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It’s strange to overvalue righties. Nine out of 10 people in the world are right-handed. If anything, lefties should be more in demand, as they are in baseball.
But as Seth Rorabaugh of TribLive.com noted last year, “Then there’s hockey, which goes completely against the grain.”
“We prefer to have guys on their strong sides as defensemen,” Penguins coach Mike Sullivan said to TribLive.com. “It helps going back for pucks. You’re always on your forehand. You have the ability to change the point of attack on your forehand, make that (defense-to-defense) pass. It puts guys in more advantageous positions. That’s not to say that some guys can’t play the off side. But I think it’s obvious that our preference is to keep them on their strong sides.”
Percent of available minutes played by pairings with a defenseman on his offside -- courtesy of ... [+] HockeyGraphs.com. Hockey-Graphs.com/MimiCohero
There’s a natural inclination to create defensive pairings balancing right and left-handers. According to Hockey-Graphs.com, the percentage of ice time played by pairings consisting of a defenseman playing on the opposite side fell steadily from 2008 to 2016. The innate orientation of the position makes it tougher for a blueliner to play on their off side.
The problem is every team can’t avoid these constraints. Of the 303 defensemen to participate in at least one game during the 2019-20 season, 60 percent are lefties. So, there aren’t enough righties to go around.
As Sullivan says, a defenseman can learn to play on the opposite side. But according to New York Islanders coach Barry Trotz, it’s trickier to find a player with the necessary skill set.
“It’s a huge luxury,” Trotz said to TribLive.com. “When you get a lefty and lefty [on defense], it takes a unique player, a guy like [former Penguins defenseman] Sergei Gonchar, who could do that a little bit. You lose about a third of your ice when you play your off-hand. Just offensively, you lose a third of the ice.”
And because teams want to avoid the issues created by unbalanced pairings, playing the right side has become extremely profitable. Seven of the 11 highest-paid defensemen in the NHL, based on average annual value, are right-handed defensemen.
Highest-paid NHL defensemen by average annual value. Orange indicates right-handers. Salaries in ... [+] millions courtesy of Spotrac.com. Justin Birnbaum
“Supply and demand, I guess,” Flyers right-handed defenseman Matt Niskanen, who signed a $40.25 million deal in 2014, told Triblive.com. “I don’t necessarily fall into this category, but highly skilled right-shot defensemen really work well [on the power play] because a lot of [passers] are lefties.”
Lundkvist fits that mold exceptionally well. His ability to move the puck well and make quick decisions already allow him to succeed in power-play situations. And Lundkvist’s ability to score the puck – five of his 11 goals in 2019-20 came on the man advantage, according to QuantHockey.com – doesn’t hurt either. His skill set profiles similar to Boston’s Charlie McAvoy, and McAvoy’s recent three-year, $14.7 million extension could be what the Rangers have to pay up after Lundkvist’s entry-level contract expires.
Whether Lundkvist reaches his potential remains to be seen. The biggest knock against him is his size. His 5-foot-11, 174-pound frame is less than ideal, according to The Athletic. Plus, the Rangers’ pairings are already balanced at the NHL level with Tony DeAngelo, Jacob Trouba and Adam Fox on the right side.
Still, Lundkvist’s speed grades well enough to cover any defensive shortcomings. And even though the Rangers had an even split in 2019-20, the number of left-handed defensemen in the organization (10) dwarfs the right-handed ones (5), according to CapFriendly.com.
If Lundkvist does decide to turn pro next season, he has a bright and possibly lucrative future ahead of him.
“I am sure he will be pushing hard for the spot in the New York Rangers’ lineup in the next season,” Gajdosik said, according to LoHud.com. “He is ready to fight for the spot with the big team.”
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3e5f46f6ef713e4bb741142b80a955d9 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/justinconklin/2016/04/24/when-good-treats-go-bad-flamin-hot-cheetos-marshmallow-crispy-treats/ | When Good Treats Go Bad: Flamin' Hot Cheetos Marshmallow Crispy Treats | When Good Treats Go Bad: Flamin' Hot Cheetos Marshmallow Crispy Treats
When I'm in the kitchen, it's rare that I follow a recipe as directed. I always want to add something or replace something or leave something out all together. I use recipes as a springboard to bigger, better food experiences like some kind of makeover show right there at the stove.
Photo by Justin Conklin
The creator of my latest adventure in Internet recipes must share a similar cooking philosophy, because that's the only way I can wrap my head around Flamin’ Hot Cheetos Marshmallow Crispy Treats. Who would do this on purpose? Who looked at a perfectly good rice crispy treat, glanced at a bag of Cheetos and nodded knowingly to themselves that they had just created something to unleash upon the unsuspecting masses?
Here's what they're supposed to look like. (Credit: Spoon University https://spoonuniversity.com)
Turns out it’s a video contributor at Spoon University, a plucky New York-based startup geared toward the college crowd. It's the same plucky startup where I found Lucky Charm Pancake Cups, my first Internet experiment in Things Millennials Will Eat.
The Procedure
I traversed into a carb-critical realm of the potato chip aisle to procure the key ingredient, Flamin' Hot Cheetos Snack Foods are really an all or nothing game for me; I can't get just one bag of chips, I have to get eleventy hundred ... because this one is kettle cooked and that one has ridges and this one is flavored like bacon. It gets out of hand in a hurry.
Returning home with one bag of Lay’s Kettle Cooked, Salt & Vinegar and Sour Cream & Onion each, as well as the required Cheetos Crunchy Flamin' Hot Cheese Flavored Snacks, I set to melting the butter and marshmallows. This process is pretty straight forward: crank the stove up, melt all the stuff, stir it around so it doesn't burn or stick. In between increasingly difficult rotations, I gave the 8 x 8 brownie pan a hearty spray of nonstick cooking spray and dumped the Cheetos into a mixing bowl which -- because of my lousy depth perception -- turned out to be two sizes too small (just like my heart).
Generally, I take my carbs in the form of alcohol and/or bread -- so I figured I’d try an unadulterated sample the Cheetos Crunchy Flamin' Hot Cheese Flavored Snack. It tasted like cheese until it became so spice. It was OK. Not something I'd freely choose to put in my food hole, but if someone offered me one I'd probably eat it to be polite and not make a face like I'd just ingested poison.
Ready to be mixed! (Photo by Justin Conklin)
It wasn't until I dumped the melted marshmallow mixture onto the Cheetos that I fully understood the red sticky marshmallow web in which I was almost inextricably stuck. Allow me to explain it in terms a pet owner will understand. If you’ve ever had to clean up after a furbaby whose eaten his or her dry food too fast -- that’s the texture I was forced to deal with. (If you don't own a pet, now is a perfect time to adopt one from a shelter. See all the fun you're missing out on?)
Thanks to the undersized bowl, things only got worse. Had I been a smarter man, I'd have given my hands a little squirt of cooking spray to ensure that the Cheetos and marshmallow wouldn’t become one with my body. While this may be one of those things I look back on in a few years and laugh about, the strings marshmallow and Cheetos stuck to my orange red hands still haunt my dreams.
(Photo by Justin Conklin)
At the time however, I did manage to get everything mixed and crammed into an baking dish. I then spent the allotted congealing hour by scrubbing the viscera-like ingredients from my hands until the skin matched the color Cheetos powder. Once the crispy treats were set, I sliced into them and made my roommates try it with me. If the worse were to occur, I was taking the entire apartment down with me.
The Verdict
I give this recipe 1 out of 5 stars for its outrageous inedibility. As a grown-up person who isn’t pregnant and does not partake of cannabis (legal or otherwise), I found nothing about this recipe appealing. Maybe it was the dayglo red color the crispy treats took on once they were coated in marshmallow. Perhaps it was the the burst of sweet and then the cheese and then the spice. If these treats were all I could eat for the rest of my life, I would figure out a way to consume the baking dish instead. In conclusion: There are a lot of other things in the grocery store that I would rather slather with marshmallow and cut into a bar.
Finished product. (Photo by Justin Conklin.)
Justin's Tweaks
There's really only one thing I would recommend with this one: Don't make them. As I said in my last post, there are plenty of promising recipe choices on Spoon U that don't seem nearly as risky. And while I’m a super fan of playing with taste profiles, but as one (possibly former) friend who was forced to try Flamin’ Hot Cheetos Marshmallow Crispy Treats told me, "I will never be able to untaste this." Sometimes the wheel doesn't actually need to be reinvented because you must might make it indigestible.
Experiment if you wish, but don't come crying to me when you're grossed out beyond belief.
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e8f1be4392bdf797fc8567da1b497cf9 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/justinconklin/2016/04/30/failed-food-alchemy-from-facebook-cauliflower-alfredo-sauce/ | Failed Food Alchemy From Facebook: Cauliflower Alfredo Sauce | Failed Food Alchemy From Facebook: Cauliflower Alfredo Sauce
One thing that Julia Child and I have in common is our love of butter. “With enough butter, anything is good," she's quoted as saying, and I couldn’t agree more. Butter adds so much flavor and silkiness to sauces, adds delight to steamed vegetables and I would argue that it is butter that makes crusts and baked goods what they are.
The ingredients. (Credit: Justin Conklin)
Imagine my dismay, then, when a recipe for Cauliflower Alfredo Sauce posted by Healthy Fitness Recipes popped up in my Facebook news feed. It’s not unusual that one of its recipes pops up for me as I liked the Facebook page in a healthy minded haze a couple of years back. The unusual thing is that this recipe contains no cream, garlic or butter; everything that makes Alfredo sauce what it is and life worth living. Naturally, I had to try it.
Into the food processor! (Credit: Justin Conklin)
The Procedure
The first step was to boil the cauliflower for an eternity; or 30-40 minutes until it was extremely tender. This literally felt like it took an entire lifetime. Watching paint dry would’ve have been a more entertaining and less stinky exercise in ineffective time usage.
See also: Forever Alone Pizza: 5-Minute Mug Pizza Is A Practically Perfect Internet Recipe
The rest of the instructions were pretty easy and quick; mix the bouillon water, cauliflower, cheese and salt in the food processor. I turned it on to let it do it’s work and set about getting some more water boiling for the fettuccine. I also purchased a package of pre-sliced grilled chicken that I planned to add to my finished plate because protein helps me not get hangry an hour after dinner.
Yum. (Credit: Justin Conklin)
The Verdict
This was a horrible, horrible flop. Very few times have I ever felt like I just wasted an hour of my life and lamented the fact that I would never get that time back. This was one such occasion.
The “sauce” was not so much a sauce as it was pureed cauliflower. It was thick and uncreamy like the pictures that Healthy Fitness Recipes provided with the recipe. I decided that perhaps it just needed a little more liquid. I hadn’t really measured the amount of cauliflower I used so maybe it was more than the 3 cups that the recipe said I would have. The result of adding more bullion water to the cauliflower was slightly runnier pureed cauliflower. The consistency more closely resembled mashed potatoes than it did an Alfredo sauce.
See also: Lucky Charm Pancake Cups: The Inevitable End Of The Internet's Recipe Rainbow
At this point, I pulled the water off the stove and dumped chicken into my bowl and slopped some of the mashed cauliflower on top. I added some garlic powder and while the end result was tasty and satisfying for what it was, it was not the Alfredo sauce that I had dreamed about all day.
If I could, I would rate this recipe -4 stars ... at least as an entrée. As it stands, I will rate it one out of five because it would make a nice side dish, but it definitely does not make a rich, creamy Alfredo sauce. When it comes to that, stick with the cream, butter and garlic.
Justin's Tweaks
If you’re looking for a healthy Alfredo sauce alternative, look elsewhere. This guy isn’t it. If you want a tasty side dish that’s something more than a steamed vegetable, give ita whirl.
This would be amazing with some roasted garlic chopped up and pureed with the cauliflower.
Save time and just steam the cauliflower in the microwave. Why waste your entire life when you can get the same result in under 5 minutes?
What will I next take from the Internet and into the kitchen? Only time will tell.
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d2da1eac1f57411ab7e368b263210f33 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/justinconklin/2017/04/26/best-value-colleges-2017-by-region-the-best-in-the-northeast-west-midwest-and-south/ | Best Value Colleges 2017 By Region: Northeast, West, Midwest And South | Best Value Colleges 2017 By Region: Northeast, West, Midwest And South
(Shutterstock) No matter where in the country you opt to attend college, be it sunny Miami or less-than-sunny Seattle, quality and good value spans coast to coast. Below, we’ve compiled some facts about this year’s list based on where the schools are located. For the complete ranking, visit the Best Value Colleges 2017 List.
Princeton University (AP Photo/Mel Evans) Northeast • The majority of schools (38%) are in this region. • Only 3 Northeastern schools place in the Top 10. • NY state contains the highest number of schools in the Northeast, with a total of 37.
Top 10 In The Northeast Princeton University, No. 3 Harvard University, No. 5 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, No. 6 Yale University, No. 13 Amherst College, No. 16 Cornell University, No. 17 Dartmouth College, No. 18 Georgetown University, No. 21 Brown University, No. 23 Wellesley College, No. 25
The Golden Dome on the campus of the University of Notre Dame (AP Photo/Joe Raymond) Midwest • 42% of the schools in the Midwest are high or very high activity research institutions. • Illinois is home to the majority of this region’s schools, totaling 11. • Over half the schools in this region scoring on this year’s list are private schools.
Top 10 In The Midwest University of Chicago, No. 28 Northwestern University, No. 33 U of Michigan-Ann Arbor, No. 34 U of Illinois At Urbana-Champaign, No. 41 University of Notre Dame, No. 45 Washington University in St. Louis, No. 53 Carleton College, No. 58 Grinnell College, No. 69 U of Wisconsin-Madison, No. 78 U Of Minnesota-Twin Cities, No. 82
Duke University (Jim R. Bounds/Bloomberg) South • The South contains the smallest percentage of schools on our list at 18%. • Public schools outnumber private schools in this region by 8%. • Texas is home to the largest number of schools in the South, totaling 13.
Top 10 In The South University of Florida, No. 4 Duke University, No. 12 Rice University, No. 14 University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, No. 15 University of Virginia, No. 20 Vanderbilt University, No. 24 College of William and Mary, No. 35 Emory University, No. 36 Davidson College, No. 47 Washington and Lee University, No. 55
Stanford University (Shutterstock) West • The West is home to this year’s No. 1 school — University of California-Berkeley. • 25% of schools in the 2017 ranking are located in the West. • The West contains 38 Best Value public schools — the highest of any of the four regions.
Top 10 In The West U.C. Berkeley, No. 1 UCLA, No. 2 Stanford University, No. 7 U.C. Irvine, No. 8 U.C. Davis, No. 9 Brigham Young University, No. 10 U. C. San Diego, No. 11 California Institute of Technology, No. 19 U.C. Santa Barbara, No. 22 Pomona College, No. 27
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2dde2814b100773667d7040a5e0a10b2 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/justingerdes/2012/03/31/under-ambitious-plan-denmark-to-double-wind-power-by-2020-be-fossil-fuel-free-by-2050/ | Denmark To Double Wind Power By 2020, Be Fossil Fuel-Free By 2050 | Denmark To Double Wind Power By 2020, Be Fossil Fuel-Free By 2050
Copenhagen, Denmark – On March 29, the U.S. Senate failed, again, to repeal billions in oil-industry tax breaks. The vote was only the latest in a long series of missed opportunities under which U.S. lawmakers could have hastened the country’s transition away from fossil fuels. The week before, with comity unthinkable in Congress, the Danish Parliament agreed to an energy plan that will double, to 50%, the share of the nation’s electricity coming from wind. The Danish Energy Agreement, announced March 22, also puts Denmark on a path to be fossil fuel-free by 2050.
“It has been a long, long process,” Martin Lidegaard, Minister for Climate, Energy, and Building, told me in an interview at his office overlooking Christiansborg Palace, home to the Danish Parliament, in Copenhagen’s city center.
The process began, he said, when Denmark established the Commission on Climate Change, an interdisciplinary team of 10 scientists, in March 2008. After that commission released its report, the former center-right government released its Energy Strategy 2050 (PDF) – “which was quite ambitious itself,” said Lidegaard. Negotiations on that plan stalled, however, as national elections were approaching. The election, in September 2011, brought a center-left government to power for the first time since 2001.
The new government, under Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt, floated its energy proposal in November 2011. “The new government took the energy strategy from the old government and we made it a little more ambitious,” said Lidegaard. The resulting Danish Energy Agreement (summary, PDF) passed with near consensus in Parliament (171 of 179 members, representing seven of eight parties). For the agreement to take effect, Lidegaard said, Parliament must pass five laws this year. The government wants to have the new framework made clear by 2013.
Denmark's new Energy Agreement doubles the share of electricity coming from wind power by 2020 and... [+] aims to eliminate fossil fuels from the nation's energy supply by 2050. Credit: Justin Gerdes
In our conversation, Lidegaard highlighted some of the major components of the Danish Energy Agreement.
Energy efficiency
In the plan, said Lidegaard, “You have probably the world’s most ambitious energy efficiency target, which, if you ask me, is even more important than the wind [target].” He noted that since 1980 Denmark has grown its economy yet held energy consumption steady. “Now, we want to do even better. We want to have an increase in growth, but decrease energy consumption”— to decouple economic growth from energy use, I offered. “Not only decouple but decrease,” he said. The agreement calls for a 12% reduction of gross energy consumption by 2020.
“That’s going to be a very difficult challenge, but we are convinced not just that it is doable but also that it is a very good idea to do it. And there’s a very good business case to do it.”
The business case
Lidegaard mentioned some numbers that have been absent, he said, in early media coverage of the energy agreement. “In 2020, the bill, for Danish society will be 3.5 billion kroner [$627 million] in extra investments in energy efficiency and renewables.”
“What should also be mentioned,” he said, “is that we will gain 6 billion kroner [$1.07 billion] because of less import of coal, oil, and gas simply because we are more energy efficient and produce more energy ourselves.”
“Of course I can’t guarantee that it will be the same households or industries that pay the bill and reap the gains. It depends on your behavior. Will you invest in energy savings? Will you take advantage of some of the support schemes? We want to have a push for more efficient behavior.”
“You could put it another way,” Lidegaard said. “It has a cost, to invest in this future – but there is also a cost not to do it.”
Business sector buy-in
Lidegaard said the energy agreement passed with the full support of the business sector. “A transformation of the size we want is simply not possible if we don’t get private investors with us. One of the things I am most happy about is that we have gained all the support we need from industry.”
“What they have told us, though, is that we need to get regulation in place so they can start to invest. My ambition is that we will have most of the framework, most of the laws, clear before summer so the private sector can start investments in wind mills, in biogas, in energy efficiency,” he said.
Smart grid and regional “super grid”
Another fundamental element of the energy agreement is the development of a smart grid in Denmark. The plan calls for a comprehensive strategy for the rollout of the Danish smart grid to be released by the end of the year. The road map will be clear in two to three months, Lidegaard said, and the core strategy completed by Christmas. The strategy is to include three parts: ensure strong transmission connections with neighboring countries; ensure the rollout of smart meters to all households and industries in Denmark; and establish dynamic tariffs which can help to match energy consumption to periods of plentiful renewable energy production.
“We need to have all of this in place before we double our wind energy, before we double our biogas,” he said.
Lidegaard also said he hopes in the coming years to advance a “new vision for the whole North Sea region” to develop a “super grid” – new transmission connections to the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Norway – and large offshore wind farms, with costs shared by participating countries.
Coal to biomass transition
The new energy plan includes incentives to encourage large-scale power plants to convert from coal to biomass. “What we do is basically put up an economic framework that should make it more attractive to make that transition,” said Lidegaard. Put another way, he said, “According to the largest energy company in Denmark, DONG Energy, their plan is to, this decade, shift from 15% biomass and 85% coal, to doing it vice versa. That’s a good picture of where we would like to go.”
Wave power demonstrations and synergy with offshore wind
The Danish Energy Agreement commits funding for wave energy research and demonstration projects – the latter will receive 25 million DKK ($4.5 million). “We have to recognize that this is a technology that needs a lot of investment and a lot of experiments to be able to commission a station,” said Lidegaard. “On the other hand, we see some possibilities in combining offshore wind with wave power.”
“At the offshore wind farms, we have the grid already established. There might be some potential in combining the connections.” He noted, too, that waves are fluctuating as the wind. “There might be some synergies in combining these two.”
New on- and offshore wind power
In order for Denmark to double the share of wind electricity feeding the grid by 2020, the government plans to build 2 gigawatts (GW) of new on- and offshore wind farms. Two large offshore wind farms will be erected by 2020: 600 megawatts (MW) at Kriegers Flak, between Denmark and Germany, 400 MW at Horns Rev off the west coast of Jutland. A further 500 MW of new projects will be built offshore by 2020. Onshore, the government wants to add a 500MW to the grid by re-powering the country’s best wind energy sites. Thirteen-hundred MW of older, inefficient turbines will be replaced by 1,800 MW of new, more powerful turbines.
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788b70fc6b69bd270583f4d897f0faf4 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/justingerdes/2012/05/30/g8-takes-on-short-lived-climate-pollutants/ | G8 Takes On Short-Lived Climate Pollutants | G8 Takes On Short-Lived Climate Pollutants
The unfolding drama surrounding the fate of the troubled eurozone and cratering Greek economy was surely higher on their agenda, but the world leaders who gathered at Camp David for the G8 summit earlier this month also managed to open a new front in the fight against climate change. As noted a few days after the summit, first by The Telegraph’s Geoffrey Lean and later by James Murray of BusinessGreen, buried in the final communiqué was an announcement that the G8 had agreed to join the U.S.-led Climate and Clean Air Coalition to Reduce Short-lived Climate Pollutants (CCAC). The coalition, announced by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in February, launched with seven members: Bangladesh, Canada, Ghana, Mexico, Sweden, and the United States, and the UN Environment Programme (UNEP). Coalition members pledge to collaboratively take actions to reduce emissions of short-lived climate pollutants such as black carbon (or soot), methane, and hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs). These pollutants account for over 30% of near-term global warming and cause 2 million premature deaths each year, according to the U.S. State Department. Clean cookstoves can reduce emissions of black carbon (or soot). At its May 2012 summit, G8 leaders... [+] joined the Climate and Clean Air Coalition to Reduce Short-lived Climate Pollutants, whose members pledge to curb black carbon, methane, and HFCs. Credit: U.S. Embassy, Nigeria; photo by Sani Mohammed Effective measures to reduce short-lived climate pollutants include: mitigating fine particle pollution from diesel engines; reducing methane emissions from landfills, agriculture, or oil and gas operations; preventing HFC leaks from air-conditioners and refrigerators; and distributing more efficient cookstoves in developing countries. Unlike CO2, which stays in the atmosphere for about a century, short-lived climate pollutants remain in the atmosphere from a few days to a few weeks (black carbon) to up to 15 years (methane, HFCs). Therein lies the opportunity. If policymakers put in place strong measures to tackle short-lived climate pollutants, which are much more potent planet-warming agents than CO2, it would significantly improve the odds of forestalling runaway climate change. On April 24, in Stockholm, UNEP, which administers the CCAC, announced five fast-tracked priorities: fast action on diesel emissions, including from heavy duty vehicles and engines; upgrading old inefficient brick kilns, which are a significant source of black carbon emissions; accelerating the reduction of methane emissions from landfills; speeding up cuts in methane and other emissions from the oil and gas industry; and accelerating alternatives to HFCs. At the Camp David summit, the G8 also commissioned the World Bank to investigate ways to integrate reduction of short-lived climate pollutants into its activities and asked the Bank to convene experts to evaluate new approaches to financing projects to reduce methane. Note: This is the first of two posts looking at short-lived climate pollutants. On May 31, I reported on a panel convened by the California Air Resources Board on the regional and global impacts of black carbon, methane, and HFCs emissions.
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bd614927d0d3130bba713332dc58aafa | https://www.forbes.com/sites/justingerdes/2012/05/31/california-lawmakers-approve-cap-and-trade-revenue-bill/ | California Lawmakers Approve Cap-And-Trade Revenue Bill | California Lawmakers Approve Cap-And-Trade Revenue Bill
How should California spend the billions in revenue to be generated in the coming years by its soon-to-launch cap-and-trade program? We’re closer to knowing the final answer, after a key vote in the California Legislature this week.
On Tuesday, the California Assembly voted 47-26 to approve AB 1532 (PDF), a bill written by Speaker John A. Pérez, which provides a framework for how the state will spend revenue generated by its carbon market. California’s cap-and-trade program launches on January 1, 2013; the launch will be preceded, on November 14, by the first of three state-run carbon allowance auctions scheduled for the California’s 2012-2013 fiscal year.
As I wrote at this blog last month, Capitol insiders had predicted that the fate of the billions in auction revenue would dominate the legislative agenda in Sacramento this year. For lawmakers who have grappled in recent years with California’s chronic budget shortfalls, the sums involved are not inconsequential. Governor Jerry Brown’s budget plan, released in January, projected auction revenue of $1 billion in 2012-13. When the cap-and-trade program expands to include transportation fuels in 2015, auction revenue will ratchet upwards.
AB 1352 designates five broad categories as permissible expenditures for auction revenue: renewable energy and energy efficiency; low-carbon transportation and infrastructure; natural resource protection; research and development; and empowering local leadership climate change planning and implementation.
The bill would create the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Account within the Air Pollution Control Fund, which is controlled by the Air Resources Board (CARB). AB 1352 would further direct CARB, the agency tasked with administering AB 32, California’s pioneering climate change law, to develop an investment plan for the auction revenues every three years. CARB would be required to submit a status report by December of each year to the Legislature on projects funded by the account.
Speaking at a carbon market conference in San Francisco last month, Panama Bartholomy, an energy adviser to Speaker Perez, had predicted that a final auction revenue bill would likely be a composite of his boss’ bill and several others. His office, he said, would work with the authors of competing bills to “try to have a smaller food fight.” Bartholomy’s magnanimity aside, it would appear that the Speaker’s Office has assured passage of the bill it wants, which happened to be its own.
On May 29, the California Assembly voted to approve AB 1352, a bill that establishes a framework for... [+] how the state will spend revenue from its carbon market. Credit: California State Capitol Museum
“California is a global leader in combating climate change, and we are proud that our state is the first to have created a carbon cap and trade system to reduce Greenhouse Gas emissions,” said Speaker Pérez in a statement.
“This measure will move that effort forward by establishing a process to allocate the funds generated by carbon auctions, ultimately helping our economy become more sustainable and prosperous for every Californian.”
AB 1352 now moves on to the Senate, where passage is likely. Legislation sponsored by the legislative leadership rarely languishes.
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d0f9dee4b032bbcae8b609b8e21f8b52 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/justingerdes/2012/06/19/uc-merceds-triple-zero-commitment-zero-net-energy-zero-landfill-waste-and-climate-neutrality-by-2020/ | UC Merced's Triple Zero Commitment: Zero Net Energy, Zero Landfill Waste, And Climate Neutrality By 2020 | UC Merced's Triple Zero Commitment: Zero Net Energy, Zero Landfill Waste, And Climate Neutrality By 2020
Covering the energy and climate beat can be a frustrating endeavor. Some weeks, the deluge of depressing news threatens to make optimism impossible.
I view this blog as an antidote to despair, with my reporting reminding readers that no matter how gloomy the news, entrepreneurs, policymakers, and scientists around the world are busy building, as Grist’s David Roberts puts it, a future that makes sense. And so I’ve reported on the cost-competitiveness of solar power, the growth of the commercial PACE market and global EV movement, and the marriage of solar power and battery storage, to name a few.
In that same spirit, I give you a promising story of sustainability in higher education. Last month, in a presentation at UC Berkeley, John Elliott, then the Director of Energy and Sustainability at the University of California, Merced, delivered a status update on a project he had shepherded at the campus for some five years. (Elliott was named the first Chief Sustainability Officer at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory on June 1.) Elliott’s charge had been to put UC Merced on a path to achieve a “triple zero commitment”: zero net energy, zero landfill waste, and zero net greenhouse gas emissions by 2020.
The newest University of California campus, UC Merced is a 2-hour drive southeast of the San Francisco Bay Area. The campus, now home to 5,000 students, will eventually host 25,000, with 600 to 800 students added each year.
The triple zero commitment was incorporated into the campus’ long-term development plan in early 2009. “It’s quite a serious commitment for us; it’s tied into all of our environmental permitting and the mitigation associated with that,” said Elliott.
Why did the university take on the goal? Elliott said many on campus are concerned about climate change. He noted the upwards trajectory of global CO2 emissions and the largely irreversible (at least at a human time scale) impacts of climate change such as sea level rise and increased land surface temperatures.
“Really we’re talking not about finding solutions to clean up what we’ve done; we’re talking about waking up in a new day and trying to do better,” he said.
“Universities are natural first-movers in this area,” he added. “To address problems [like climate change] we need to educate a new generation, figure out new ways to do things, and get real on-the-ground implementation experience.”
Zero net energy
UC Merced’s path to zero net energy rightly starts with an all-out effort to reap energy savings. “Our biggest and best resource is energy efficiency,” said Elliott. Energy efficiency will get the university about two-thirds of the way toward the net zero energy target through 2035, when the campus is built out.
UC Merced's triple zero commitment puts the university on a path to achieve zero net energy, zero... [+] landfill waste, and climate neutrality by 2020. Credit: UC Merced
The net zero energy plan includes aggressive development of on-site renewable energy. A 1-MW ground-mounted solar array was turned on in November 2009. The system generates enough electricity to meet half the campus load when the sun is shining during off-peak hours, about 30% at peak, and 17% overall. The university plans to install solar photovoltaic (PV) systems across an additional 200 acres – 50 acres of solar shading over parking and a 150-acre PV farm, an installation big enough to generate more electricity than the campus load.
UC Merced is also pursuing – at a research level for now – a waste-to-energy solution called plasma gasification (more on this below). It’s also looking to add electricity from water and the wind. The local irrigation district owns a 1-MW hydropower plant located within the campus boundary that could be added to the university’s electricity mix. In May, UC Merced released an RFP for a 1.6-MW wind turbine.
A district cooling system is used in lieu of conventional air-conditioning. (Temperatures can reach 110 degrees Fahrenheit in Merced in summer.) A central plant sends cold water via a network of pipes to campus buildings during the day. The university added 2 million gallons of thermal storage, which enables them to run their chillers overnight.
Elliott also described the university’s determination to design energy efficiency into new buildings and, importantly, to maintain it over time. In 2002, UC Merced announced that all new buildings would achieve at minimum a LEED Silver rating. The mandate is now LEED Gold, but university planners target LEED Platinum for new construction.
UC Merced took the additional step of ensuring that new buildings consume half the energy of similar university buildings in California. Controlling for climate, researchers figured out baselines for various building types (such as residence halls or laboratories) throughout the UC and California State University systems. Designers are then given an energy budget: the baseline, slashed in half.
“It makes sense to ask for efficiency,” said Elliott. “Nothing that we’re asking for here is financially imprudent. It’s saving money over the timescales that we do our planning at. It doesn’t make sense to go in there and say, ‘Let’s do the minimum required by code.’”
Elliott acknowledged some challenges unique to universities. Laboratories, for instance, are extremely energy-intensive buildings. UC Merced’s lab facility alone accounts for about half of the energy consumed on campus, he said.
But, with smart planning and advanced energy modeling, energy consumption can be reduced at the outset. “Just by asking for this efficiency and hiring the right design teams, we’re finding that we’re able to get what we would call 60% of benchmark, or 40% improvement compared to business as usual,” said Elliott.
Optimal energy performance is elusive without ongoing vigilance. Elliott said he had noticed a slight degradation in energy performance in several campus buildings – the central plant and science building among them – in recent years. The university is now retro-commissioning these and other buildings to ensure that systems are performing as designed.
Zero landfill waste
“In a university environment, waste, recycling, and composting is really the public face of sustainability,” said Elliott. By this measure, he admitted, UC Merced had not been a top performer, with 72% of waste sent to a landfill, 25% recycled, and just 3% composted. Until recently, the lone bright spot was the university’s handling of waste from new construction, 95% of which has been diverted from landfills. But, composting has now been added to the dining halls. Under its revised targets, the university plans to recycle 51% of its waste, compost 37%, and send 12% to a landfill (until the plasma gasification system is online).
To achieve ambitious recycling and composting targets, Elliott acknowledged, you can’t rely just on students, faculty, and staff making the conscientious choice. “What we’re really trying to do is work on the upstream end and change what we purchase,” he said.
And those purchasing decisions can be tricky. He recounted how the facilities staff had, with good intentions, purchased #7 bio-plastic cups. But the cups were neither compostable nor recyclable, at least with their vendor. The facilities team is now working to create zero-waste zones in the dining halls with simple messaging: if waste is clear, it’s recycled; if it’s paper, it’s composted.
UC Merced’s Sustainable Plasma Gasification Laboratory is testing the suitability of various waste streams such as sewage and almond hulls. The system converts organic matter into syngas that can be burned to generate heat and electricity. Elliott said that plasma gasification could add much-needed flexibility to the campus’ energy portfolio. The system’s dispatchable power could ramp or down quickly to supplement fluctuating solar or wind power.
Using Facebook to root out water waste
Elliott said he had spent the better part of a year working with facility staff to improve campus water efficiency. He had been “embarrassed,” for instance, by the absence of water metering. For help, UC Merced turned to a Los Gatos, California-based start-up called Aquacue. The company’s water management technology has “become an extremely valuable tool for our technicians,” said Elliott.
Aquacue customized its product to facilitate a campus competition, the UC Merced Water Battle 2011. The campus has 11 identical dorms, which made it easy to do side-by-side comparisons of water consumption in the residence halls. Aquacue integrated its data into UC Merced Facebook pages.
Elliott conceded his initial skepticism. In the past, he said, he had believed that if you give users information they will make wise choices, but results had not always borne this out. “In this case, I was really impressed,” he said. “We were getting a 15% reduction in water use, and we’ve actually seen persistence of that.”
Students could submit, via Facebook, “Leak Alerts” to report leaking toilets or dripping faucets. After the first week, Elliott had sent facilities staff six work tickets; each one represented 10 to 100 gallons of water lost each hour. “I don’t think the students were that interested in saving water,” said Elliott. “It was just done really well. It was on Facebook. And it was a cool competition.”
Not a quaint undertaking
UC Merced’s long-term goal is for the suite of energy efficiency and renewable energy improvements implemented campus-wide to deliver climate neutrality. Here’s the breakdown. For electricity, avoided emissions are to come from solar (28%), energy efficiency (27%), grid renewables or offsets (22%), plasma gasification (14%), and wind (9%). Avoided emissions from displaced natural gas are projected to come from energy efficiency (44%), biogas or offsets (28%), plasma gasification (25%), and solar (3%).
For now, UC Merced’s triple zero commitment is ambitious and rare. But it’s clear that John Elliott sees in the plan the new business-as-usual in a world shaped by climate change. “We shouldn’t think of these goals being set at the university level as just kind of quaint or interesting,” he said. “They’re examples of what needs to be happening across all organizations in order to combat a challenge like climate change.”
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83aaaf68fae665ed11c6aeaef364d73f | https://www.forbes.com/sites/justingerdes/2012/10/22/community-wind-projects-poised-to-take-off-in-denmark/ | Community Wind Projects Poised To Take Off In Denmark | Community Wind Projects Poised To Take Off In Denmark
Copenhagen, Denmark – Denmark recently launched a share buy-in scheme intended to help the country meet its ambitious wind energy goals and encourage local support of wind projects.
The new community wind plan would advance the mature and growing wind sector in Denmark. Wind accounted for 28% of the electricity mix in Denmark in 2011, according to the Danish Energy Agency, up from nearly 22% the year before. Under a national energy plan approved by the Danish Parliament in March, wind turbines should supply half of the electricity consumed in the country in 2020. The Danish Wind Industry Association says 1,800 megawatts (MW) of new wind turbines are expected to be installed onshore under the plan.
Under the “Buy Legal System,” which took effect in November 2011, developers of on- and offshore wind farms must offer shares worth at least 20% of the total project to local residents. Detailed information on the scheme is available from Energinet.dk, which operates the electricity and natural gas transmission grids in Denmark.
Søren Thorpstrup Laursen, an engineer with Copenhagen Energy, told me that the rules are intended not just to encourage new wind projects but to temper local opposition by turning residents into wind entrepreneurs.
The developer establishes a private company to distribute the local wind shares. The availability of shares must be advertised in the local newspaper. Shares are offered first to permanent residents 18 and older within 4.5 kilometers of the project site. Outstanding shares are then made available to residents beyond the 4.5-kilometer zone but within the municipality.
The developer is not permitted to make a profit on the 20% community share of the project, Laursen told me. Turbines comprising the local share of the wind farm must be offered at cost. Developers grudgingly accept these provisions, he says, in the hope they will persuade locals to embrace sometimes contentious projects.
Each share, sold for 4,000 Danish kroner ($700), corresponds to 1,000 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of annual output from the wind farm. Investors share costs, revenue, and risk on an equal footing with the wind project developer. Wind turbines under 25 meters, those deemed experimental, and offshore turbines deployed with public funds are exempted from the Buy Legal System 20% requirement.
The Buy Legal System builds upon a system used to partly fund the world’s first utility-scale offshore wind farm, Middelgrunden, an arc of 20 2-MW turbines perched in shallow water in Copenhagen Harbor. Middelgrunden, which came online in 2000, generates 100,000 megawatt-hours (MWh) annually, equivalent to 3% of the electricity consumed in Copenhagen. The 10 southern turbines were purchased by a cooperative of nearly 10,000 private investors. Copenhagen Energy’s Laursen himself owns shares in the Middelgrunden wind park, he told me.
Middelgrunden, the world's first commercial offshore wind park, was partly funded by nearly 10,000... [+] local investors. Credit: Justin Gerdes
As with the new Buy Legal System, Middelgrunden investors were able to buy shares in 1,000 kWh increments. In years one through six, each share delivered a return of 70 euros ($91) annually (minus 10 euros, $13.05, for maintenance). The rate of return in those years was 12.5%, with a simple payback of 8 years, according to Copenhagen Energy.
“Today, after more than 10 years, we have all the money back and you get about seven percent every year on invested capital. People are quite satisfied with this because it is much better than having it in a bank, and at the same time, you are doing something positive for the environment,” Hans Christian Sørensen, a board member of the cooperative that owns half of the wind park, told the Copenhagen Post last November.
Note: This is the first in a series of posts on clean energy and climate solutions in Denmark. Future installments looked at seawater-based district cooling in Copenhagen, the Project Zero carbon-neutrality plan, Copenhagen's success as a cleantech leader, and what other cities can learn from Copenhagen's climate adaptation plan. The reporting for this post was supported by a grant from the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs International Press Initiative.
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582e99f1302bc4ae410105b1059f119f | https://www.forbes.com/sites/justingerdes/2012/10/24/copenhagens-seawater-cooling-delivers-energy-and-carbon-savings/ | Copenhagen's Seawater Cooling Delivers Energy And Carbon Savings | Copenhagen's Seawater Cooling Delivers Energy And Carbon Savings
Copenhagen, Denmark – Situated in wind-swept, cloud-covered northern Europe, Copenhagen is probably not the first city to come to mind in need of air-conditioning. Summer high temperatures rarely exceed the mid-70s Fahrenheit, but, in buildings with large server rooms or where many people work or shop, there is a need for indoor cooling.
Copenhagen’s elegant solution is a district cooling system that takes advantage of free cooling provided by seawater drawn from the city’s harbor. Two years ago, Copenhagen Energy opened the city’s first district cooling plant, a 10-megawatt (MW) facility located on the site of a retired power plant on Adelgade, in the historic inner city.
The new cooling network complements the city’s existing district heating system, the world’s largest, which covers 98% of Copenhagen. On a recent reporting trip to Denmark, I was given a tour of the plant by Thomas Grinde, an engineer with Copenhagen Energy.
When the temperature of the water in Copenhagen Harbor is sufficiently cold, Grinde explained, the district cooling system draws water from an intake pipe located near the Royal Danish Playhouse and Nyhavn canal. Every degree saved by pre-cooling with seawater saves 15% on electricity at the chiller. (Mussels and other small sea life, in case you were wondering, are separated at the intake and re-established in suitable habitat, he says.)
The Adelgade plant is designed for three methods of cooling (more information about the district cooling system is available here [p. 35-37], and in this video):
1) Free cooling – Seawater temperature is below 5.5 degrees Celsius [42°F] and cooling demand low (less than 2,400kW). All cooling demands are covered by free cooling heat exchangers. 2) Combined operation – Seawater temperature is between 5.5°C and 11.5°C [52.7°F]. Heat exchangers are used for pre-cooling of the cooled water, before it is fully cooled by chillers to the desired temperature. 3) Chiller cooling – Seawater temperature is above 11.5°C. The seawater is too warm to be used for free cooling so absorption and compression chillers provide all cooling. Free cooling exchanges are bypassed completely.
The insulated pipes that carry chilled water to commercial and industrial buildings for indoor cooling can be located in the same underground tunnels that carry steam for the district heating system or in entirely new networks. The aim, Grinde says, is to target co-located buildings (department stores, commercial buildings, hotels, and facilities with data centers) with cooling demands of 150 kilowatts (kW) or more. Copenhagen Energy does not plan to offer district cooling to residential customers.
The decision to integrate the already efficient district heating and cooling systems into one network begets additional efficiencies. In summer, when space heating demand falls, surplus heat from Copenhagen’s combined heat and power (CHP) plants is re-directed to the steam-powered district cooling chillers. Sending steam to the district cooling plant helps balance the two systems and compensates for the lack of free seawater cooling.
Customers with large cooling needs pay a fee to connect to the network, Grinde told me, and they subscribe to the service based on their expected and actual load. The upfront fees help pay for the build-out of the system. Copenhagen Energy paid for the $14-million Adelgade cooling plant with proceeds from the sale of its electricity assets to state majority-owned DONG Energy.
Copenhagen's district cooling system reduces carbon emissions by nearly 70% and electricity... [+] consumption by 80% compared to conventional cooling. Credit: Justin Gerdes
The City of Copenhagen expects district cooling will prevent the release of 14,000 tons of CO2 annually by reducing carbon emissions by 67% and electricity consumption by 80% compared to conventional cooling.
There are additional benefits, Grinde explained, citing the example of hotels. Conventional compressor-based air-conditioning is not just more noisy, expensive, and energy-intensive than district cooling; it also takes up more space. Adopting district cooling opens up a parking space in the basement where the compressor once stood and opens up rooftop space that had been occupied by cooling towers. Grinde said he knew of one hotel that had installed a rooftop employee canteen in this found space.
The City of Copenhagen expects cooling demand to increase in the coming decades. Peak summer high temperatures, mild compared to warmer climes, are expected to rise by 2% to 3% by 2050, with average daily temperatures rising as well. Thomas Grinde told me that Copenhagen Energy estimates that winter cooling demand will eventually increase to about 40% of the summer load.
Copenhagen Energy envisions the need for as many as seven district cooling zones. The city’s second cooling plant, located near the central train station, is scheduled to come online in May 2013.
Note: This is the second in a series of posts on clean energy and climate solutions in Denmark. Other installments looked at Denmark’s new community wind shareholder plan, the Project Zero carbon-neutrality plan, Copenhagen's success as a cleantech leader, and what other cities can learn from Copenhagen's climate adaptation plan. The reporting for this post was supported by a grant from the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs International Press Initiative.
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b74a21179d8ad704265afc6931656b25 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/justingerdes/2012/10/29/project-zero-a-roadmap-for-local-energy-security-and-carbon-neutrality-in-southern-denmark/ | Project Zero: A Roadmap For Local Energy Security And Carbon Neutrality In Southern Denmark | Project Zero: A Roadmap For Local Energy Security And Carbon Neutrality In Southern Denmark
Sønderborg, Denmark – Denmark boasts forward-thinking top-down and bottom-up energy policies. At the national level, a political consensus unimaginable in the United States yielded, this March, an energy plan that commits the country to ditch fossil fuels by 2050.
At the local level, as in the United States, some of the most aggressive initiatives to cut carbon have been launched by cities. The clean energy transition under way on the island of Samsø, the subject of a 2008 feature by The New Yorker’s Elizabeth Kolbert, is the case study best known outside of Denmark. But there are many other examples. The island of Ærø, for instance, is home to the world’s largest solar heating plants.
On a recent reporting trip to Denmark organized by the State of Green consortium, I visited another, Project Zero, which is based in Sønderborg, a municipality of 77,000 located near the border with Germany.
The comprehensive plan being implemented in Sønderborg follows what can be thought of as the Danish model: energy efficiency coupled with a complementary mix of clean electricity and fuels harvested from local resources. The Project Zero goal is to reduce carbon emissions in the Sønderborg area by 25% from 2007 levels by 2015, and to achieve carbon neutrality by 2029.
“Project Zero is actually a vision,” says Christian Eriksen, Project Director, Project Zero A/S, the private firm charged with implementing the plan. “It’s a vision of a CO2-neutral Sønderborg area, no later than 2029. Not done by cutting the main breaker and killing the power, but based on sustainable growth and creating bright green jobs.”
“To do this,” he adds, “we’ve adopted a holistic approach that’s bottom-up. It’s not just top-down, about planning and coming up with business and new technology to drive this forward. It’s also very much about participation, about learning, and empowerment of our citizens and local companies.”
The backbone: an integrated district heating network
The most important near-term goal of the ZEROCarbon Roadmap is to, by 2015, build a transmission pipe to connect the area’s islanded district heating networks. Planners also want to expand the networks. Today, just 34% of the area’s buildings are connected to district heating. By 2015, one-half of the buildings in urban areas that currently burn oil or gas for space heating are expected to switch to district heating.
With the transmission backbone in place, the integrated district heating network will draw heat from multiple complementary renewable sources: geothermal, household waste, biogas, biomass, and solar.
“This means that the multiple sources that we have, our waste incineration facility, our geothermal facility, our straw- and wood chip-burning boilers, our solar heating facilities can be used to their maximum efficiency, and with the result being the cheapest price for our customers,” explains Eriksen.
On a tour of the Sønderborg region, we visited several of the area’s energy facilities. A biogas plant attached to the area’s wastewater treatment facility generates a half-million kilowatt-hours (kWh) annually. The waste-to-energy facility is a combined heat and power (CHP) plant that operates at more than 90% efficiency. The plant, which also burns biomass, produces ash clean enough to be used as fertilizer, Eriksen says.
Solar collectors in Vollerup, Denmark, send hot water to the local district heating system. Credit:... [+] Justin Gerdes
We also visited a solar heating plant in the village of Vollerup. There, 6,000 m2 of solar collectors (see picture at right) heat water to 130°C from early March until late November. In the United States, solar waters heaters generally sit atop individual homes and businesses, and the hot water is seldom used for space heating. At Vollerup, the hot water is instead fed into the local district heating system and a 4,000 m3 storage tank.
Additional pieces of the clean energy infrastructure have recently been added or are planned. A 29-megawatt (MW) geothermal plant opened in Sønderborg last year. Two CHP biogas plants, scheduled to come online in 2013 and 2015, will process manure from the area’s plentiful pig farms.
An offshore wind park with a capacity of 120 MW is planned for shallow waters 6 to 10 kilometers from the coast. Local residents could buy shares in the wind projects (see my recent post on Denmark’s new “Buy Legal System” community wind rules).
“We want to do this based on the area’s renewable resources,” says Eriksen. “In our mind, it’s not very sustainable to ferry wood chips all the way from Canada or from Africa to here to be CO2 neutral.”
Energy efficiency and community engagement
The Project Zero roadmap envisions that energy-efficient technologies and community engagement will reduce energy consumption by 38% by 2029. Much of the avoided energy consumption will come from the switch to carbon-neutral district heating (rural households will switch from oil, natural gas, and electric heating to heat pumps and biomass burners).
Eriksen emphasizes the importance of mobilizing consumers to make energy efficiency a way of life. “The most important thing we can do is to get citizen participation,” he says. Nearly 45% of the region’s carbon emissions come from heating and lighting, appliances, and electronics.
To engage households in the effort to slash energy use, Project Zero launched a pilot, ZEROFamily, which reached 115 families and 500 participants. At the end of a yearlong education and outreach campaign, participating households reduced energy consumption by an average of 25% and water use by an average of 45%.
The age of the local building stock represents a challenge, as well as an opportunity, to achieving the energy efficiency goals. The average age of homes in the area is 65 years, Eriksen says, well before Denmark’s first building energy efficiency standards appeared. “The majority of our houses here have a very low energy rating, meaning the E, F, and G range,” he says.
Project Zero employs a field energy adviser, Charlie, charged with visiting homes and producing a free energy report for the occupants. Charlie has already visited 700 Sønderborg-area homes. “It turns out that 65% of the people visited by Charlie go on to contact a craftsman or architects and actually get something done,” says Eriksen. “His visits, over the last year and a half, have generated more than 10 million euros of business for our carpenters.” The retrofit projects have created more than 300 local jobs.
Note: This is the third in a series of posts on clean energy and climate solutions in Denmark. Other installments looked at Denmark’s new community wind shareholder plan, seawater-based district cooling in Copenhagen, Copenhagen's success as a cleantech leader, and what other cities can learn from Copenhagen's climate adaptation plan. The reporting for this post was made possible by financial support from State of Green, the official green brand for Denmark, and a public-private partnership founded by the Danish Government and industry.
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6c6d1b6e48299722f10daef3b43fa47a | https://www.forbes.com/sites/justingerdes/2012/11/30/denmark-moves-to-cool-its-red-hot-solar-energy-market/ | Denmark Moves To Cool Its Red-Hot Solar Energy Market | Denmark Moves To Cool Its Red-Hot Solar Energy Market
Denmark’s energy minister introduced legislation earlier this month that would cool the country’s red-hot solar market. The new rules trim generous subsidies that in conjunction with the falling price of panels had triggered exponential growth in the number of residential solar energy systems added to the grid this year.
Homeowners have installed so many rooftop photovoltaic (PV) arrays in 2012 that Denmark exceeded its 2020 solar energy target (200 MW) eight years early. At the end of last year, total installed PV capacity in Denmark stood at just 17.5 MW; PV-Tech reported that according to Energinet, the Danish transmission system operator, total installed PV capacity reached 223 MW on November 9.
Unlike the solar energy booms in Germany, Spain, the Czech Republic, and Italy, where governments used feed-in tariffs to stimulate domestic PV markets, Denmark’s solar surge has been powered by net-metering rules. Under a feed-in tariff scheme, homeowners, businesses, or other PV system owners are paid above-market rate for electricity sold to the grid over a long-term contract, usually 20 years; in net-metering jurisdictions like Denmark or California, PV system owners receive credit for surplus electricity sent to the grid.
In Denmark, home to some of the highest electricity rates in Europe, the existing net-metering rules offer a generous return. According to PV industry magazine PHOTON, consumers pay 2.20 Danish kroner (DKK) ($0.38) per kilowatt-hour (kWh) for electricity in Denmark, with taxes accounting for 1.60 DKK ($0.27) of the total. Under the current net-metering scheme, PV system owners do not pay tax on the electricity generated by their rooftop arrays, which results in a subsidy of $0.27 per kWh.
“The demand for solar cells has increased dramatically since net metering was implemented in 2010,” Kim Schultz, Project Manager with Invest in Denmark, told State of Green. “Net metering gives private and public institutions the possibility of ‘storing’ surplus production in the public grid, which makes solar panels considerable more attractive.”
The new rules introduced by Danish Climate and Energy Minister Martin Lidegaard on November 20 reduce the incentives offered to solar system owners and make PV arrays larger than 6 kilowatts eligible for subsidies. According to a report from PHOTON, here is how incentives will change under the revised net-metering scheme:
PV system owners would get the full price – 2.20 DKK – for all electricity used within an hour of being produced. For electricity exported the grid, PV system owners would receive 1.30 DKK [22¢] per kWh in 2013. To account for falling PV module prices, this rate would fall to 1.17 DKK [20¢] in 2014 and about 1.00 DKK [17¢] in 2015. After 10 years, the rate would be down to about 0.60 DKK [10¢] per kWh.
Tweaks to the net-metering scheme reflect the government’s recognition of the falling price of solar panels and the pinch the current rules place on the treasury, some 270 million euros annually, according to Lidegaard. The new rules are not retroactive and apply only to electricity generated by solar panels purchased after November 20, 2012.
Under a generous net-metering scheme, solar installations in Denmark rocketed from 3,734 at the end... [+] of 2011 to 42,405 in November 2012. Credit: Justin Gerdes
Lidegaard now expects Denmark to reach 700 MW of installed solar power by 2020. The Danish Energy Association, DONG Energy, and Energinet estimate that installed solar power could hit 1,000 MW (1GW) by the same year and 3,400 MW (3.4 GW) by 2030, according to State of Green. Under a national energy plan approved by the Danish Parliament in March, renewables will account for 35% of the electricity fed to the Danish grid by 2020 and 100% by 2050.
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6b952b7f17b6b8bb0b85d9e5ea06c4fe | https://www.forbes.com/sites/justingerdes/2013/01/25/los-angeles-saves-millions-with-led-street-light-deployment/ | Los Angeles Saves Millions With LED Street Light Deployment | Los Angeles Saves Millions With LED Street Light Deployment
Next month marks the four-year anniversary of the world’s most ambitious LED street light conversion project. On February 16, 2009, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and President Bill Clinton announced [PDF] a partnership under which the city, advised by the Clinton Climate Initiative, would outfit 140,000 street lights with light-emitting diode (LED) fixtures.
Project planners faced daunting logistics. The City of Los Angeles owns and operates the nation’s second-largest street lighting system: 210,000 street lights (including 70,000 decorative street lamps that will be retrofitted in a second phase) anchored along 4,500 miles of illuminated streets.
The Los Angeles project is of a piece with a larger shift to LED street lighting. I reported at this blog last June, for instance, on results from a global trial of LED street lighting in a dozen cities. The City of Portland (OR) launches an LED retrofit project next month. I could wallpaper my office with press releases from the California Energy Commission announcing LED street light conversions completed in cities across the state over the past 16 months – many funded, as I’ve written about here, under the federal stimulus. A recent Pike Research report found that shipments of LED street lights will increase from fewer than 3 million last year to more than 17 million in 2020.
The scope of the Los Angeles undertaking, combined with results recorded from the tens of thousands of LED units already deployed, should hasten other cities move to LEDs. Street lighting can account for up to 40% of a city’s electricity bill, according to Pike Research.
On January 23, the Los Angeles Bureau of Street Lighting published an update [PDF] on the status of the LED conversion project. The results: 114,067 units replaced, $5,325,793 in annual electricity savings, and 63.3% electricity savings over the incumbent high-pressure sodium (HPS) street lights.
The anniversary is a good time to take a closer look at the results and lessons learned, with more than 80% of the LED fixtures planned for phase one deployed. The lessons learned are based on a presentation delivered by Ed Ebrahimian, Director, Los Angeles Bureau of Street Lighting, to the IES Street and Area Lighting Conference convened in Miami in September 2012. (Here is a presentation [PDF] Ebrahimian delivered at the DOE Municipal Solid-State Street Lighting Consortium Workshop held in Los Angeles, in April 2012, with much of the same information.)
1) Energy savings are real: “As the LEDs improve, and the manufacturers develop the technology, the energy savings are being realized and continue to increase,” wrote Ebrahimian. At the outset, city planners estimated LED fixtures would achieve a 40% electricity savings over HPS units; as noted above, the actual savings is more than 63%. In 2008, Los Angeles spent $16 million for the electricity to run its street lights. When the LED retrofit is completed, annual electricity savings should reach $7.5 million.
According to the city, the $57 million project, funded through a combination of energy rebates, the Street Lighting Assessment Fund, and a $40-million loan, will be repaid over seven years through electricity and maintenance savings alone.
The 6th Street Bridge, over the Los Angeles River, before conversion to LED street lighting. Credit:... [+] Los Angeles Bureau of Street Lighting
... and after the LED conversion. Credit: Los Angeles Bureau of Street Lighting
2) Maintenance savings are real, too: In 2008, pre-LED roll-out, Los Angeles logged 70,000 street light repair and maintenance events; in FY 2012, maintenance and repair events fell to 46,300. LEDs are longer lived than the incumbent units they replace (10-15 years versus 4-6 years), which means that maintenance should steadily decline as LED units are fully deployed. A remote monitoring system, installed with the LED fixtures, indentifies problems in real time.
LED fixtures also fail at a lesser rate than incumbent technologies. After 36 months of initial operation, for instance, high-intensity discharge (HID) fixtures in Los Angeles recorded an average failure rate of 10%; the average failure rate for LED fixtures, according to the latest figures, is 0.2% (189 of 98,000 installed). At full LED deployment, Los Angeles expects to save $2.5 million annually on maintenance costs.
3) Trust but verify: “Not all claims manufacturers make are true,” noted Ebrahimian. Los Angeles tests new LED fixtures every six months. Manufacturers interested in selling LED fixtures to the city can submit products for testing at the Bureau of Street Lighting website. City specifications are revised based on testing results and technology improvement.
These improvements, coupled with falling production costs, have yielded a reduction in per unit cost. At the time of Ebrahimian’s Miami presentation, September 2012, the per unit cost was $309 (85% materials, 10% engineering, and 5% labor); when Ebrahimian delivered his talk in Los Angeles six months before, the per unit cost was $495.33.
So far, manufacturers have requested evaluation of 244 LED units; 84 met the minimum requirements; 71 were installed and tested; and 20 units were approved for use. Approved LED fixtures for so-called “cobra head” street lights include: Cree’s XSP series and LEDway series, Hadco’s RX series (Hadco is a Philips company), and Leotek’s GC series.
4) Reality versus theory: “The change from HPS to white light with the LEDs is being perceived as a significant increase in lighting levels,” according to Ebrahimian. He added: “The change from HPS to white light [LEDs] have improved visibility as noticed by residents and encouraged by the police department.” In short, the city anticipated negative community feedback but citizens seem pleased with the change.
Though it is likely one among many factors, improved visibility in residential areas, where most of the LED fixtures have been installed, may be connected to a reduction in crime. From 2009 to 2011, citywide crime statistics show a decline in incidents between 7 p.m. and 7 a.m. (vehicle theft: -13.6%; burglary/robbery/theft: -7.82%; and vandalism: -10.9%).
Looking ahead, Los Angeles is testing and evaluating LED and induction units to deploy in phase two of the street lighting conversion, when the city will replace fixtures in 70,000 decorative street lamps.
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afca05b67a86714d86b0e2419d14a64c | https://www.forbes.com/sites/justingerdes/2013/02/28/why-the-u-s-needs-a-national-climate-and-energy-plan/ | Why The U.S. Needs A National Climate And Energy Plan | Why The U.S. Needs A National Climate And Energy Plan
I wrote yesterday about a bill recently introduced by a freshman state lawmaker that would require policymakers to plan for how California will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by 2050. The prudent proposal reminds lawmakers that California’s forward-thinking climate policy, which includes a declining cap on GHG emissions and, most importantly, a price on carbon, must be extended beyond 2020, when the state’s climate change law, AB32, expires.
California’s suite of complementary policies – including a cap-and-trade system, renewable portfolio standard, building and vehicle energy efficiency standards, and low-carbon fuel standard – provide investors, industry, and policymakers with certainty through 2020. A remarkable piece of reporting published this week by Bloomberg BNA correspondent Paul Shukovsky is a case study of the need for such certainty at the national level.
Shukovsky’s deeply reported story describes months-long deliberations between the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Corps), the Environmental Protection Agency (*EPA), the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), and the states of Oregon and Washington over how to account for the climate change impact of three coal-export terminals proposed for the West Coast.
Navigating the inter-agency dispute requires venturing into the arcane world of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). Basically, anytime a proposed action would take place on federal land, receive federal money, or fall under the jurisdiction of a federal agency, the responsible agency (often the BLM, Forest Service, or Fish and Wildlife Service) is required, under NEPA, to analyze the project’s environmental impact.
Into this relatively straightforward process – preparation of an environmental impact statement, identification of environmental impacts and possible mitigation measures, and a decision to approve or reject the project – a new obligation has recently been introduced: climate change. In the absence of a national climate and energy plan, how should agencies assess the planet-warming potential of individual projects?
That theoretical question has found a real-world example in the scoping process for the Corps’ environmental impact statement for the Gateway Pacific Terminal, a coal export facility proposed for a site on Puget Sound, close to the border with Canada. “At issue,” writes Shukovsky, “is how broadly the government should extend its analysis: whether to consider the impacts of each of the Pacific Northwest export terminals through narrowly tailored individual environmental impact statements or to assess their cumulative effects together, which would allow for a comprehensive analysis of possible climate change impacts.”
The Corps wants to draft a conventional project-specific environmental impact statement that assesses the Gateway Pacific Terminal in isolation; environmental advocates, the EPA, and the states of Oregon and Washington, meanwhile, want the Corps to draft a programmatic environmental impact statement that analyzes the cumulative impact of all three proposed coal-export terminals.
For now, CEQ, the referee in such matters, is not tipping its hand – CEQ responded to Shukovsky’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for information on its NEPA climate change guidance to federal agencies by sending heavily redacted e-mails.
Inter-agency debates over how to address and account for the climate change impacts of major... [+] projects signals the need for a national climate plan. Credit: Official White House Photo by Chuck Kennedy
Ray Clark, CEQ's deputy director for NEPA oversight during the Clinton administration, told Shukovsky that the Corps is not keen to evaluate the climate change impact of burning U.S. coal in Asia. “Why should the corps be saddled with all the baggage of making such a huge decision?” he asked. “It's not really a corps decision. This is a bigger thing than the Corps of Engineers. It's got a lot of implications. For example, why would you permit mining Powder River Basin coal [from federal land] with no place for it to go? There are a lot of decisions here. Why is the corps being asked to make these big macro decisions?” [my emphasis]
These are all valid points and get at what is, I think, the real takeaway from Shukovsky’s story: the United States must address how it will assess and account for the climate change impact, in and outside its borders, of major projects such as the construction of coal-export terminals and the Keystone XL pipeline and the below market price sale of coal from Wyoming’s Powder River Basin.
Guidance from the White House?
CEQ usually defers to the regulatory agency conducting the NEPA review, but, to account for climate change impacts, that might have to change. “The president could ask CEQ to require the cumulative analysis of the effect of a whole variety of projects on greenhouse gases worldwide,” Columbia University Law Professor Michael B. Gerrard told Shukovsky.
But for that to be a real alternative, or until political changes permit passage of climate change legislation in Congress, courts must settle whether federal agencies are permitted to account for overseas emissions in an environmental impact statement and the White House needs to release guidance for agencies. On the former point, Gerrard said: “It's very much an open question. And there is a great deal of variations among agencies in how they consider climate change under NEPA.”
In February 2010, CEQ Chairwoman Nancy Sutley issued draft guidance [PDF] on climate change for federal agencies, but it has not been implemented. Asked why the guidance had not been finalized, a CEQ spokesperson told Shukovsky that the office is “working to incorporate the extensive public comment we received on our draft NEPA guidance, and will release updated guidance when it is completed.”
Bloomberg BNA reported this morning that at a Center for Strategic and International Studies event convened yesterday Heather Zichal, deputy assistant to the president for energy and climate change, said that “President Obama will announce in the upcoming weeks and months decisive actions the administration is planning to combat climate change.”
We shall soon see whether final CEQ climate change guidance or plans to take on existing coal-fired power plants are among those announcements.
*Disclosure: My brother is a NEPA Specialist in the Environmental Review Office for EPA Region 9 in San Francisco. He participated in drafting the region's response to the CEQ solicitation of input for NEPA climate change guidance.
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c0750f392b9d0d8b82332a0cdd734035 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/justingerdes/2013/07/31/los-angeles-completes-worlds-largest-led-street-light-retrofit/ | Los Angeles Completes World's Largest LED Street Light Retrofit | Los Angeles Completes World's Largest LED Street Light Retrofit
Over the last few years, LED street lights have gone from something cities would love to have to the sector standard. That the market has shifted so swiftly is thanks to the efforts of early movers such as the City of Los Angeles, which last month completed the world’s largest LED street light replacement project.
When I reported on the city’s LED street light swap-out at this blog in January, more than 80% of the LED fixtures had been deployed. On June 18, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa announced [PDF] the completion of the first phase of the project, with LED fixtures installed on 141,089 street lights.
Los Angeles is certainly not alone in making the switch to LED street lighting. I’ve reported at this blog, for instance, about the many other California cities, big and small, that have done the same. In March of this year, the City of Las Vegas finished outfitting 42,000 street lights with LED fixtures. One month later, the City of Austin, Texas, announced plans to install 35,000 LED street lights. And, in December of last year, CPS Energy said it would install 20,000 LED street lights in San Antonio.
But, owing to its size and influence, Los Angeles, with its partners, the Clinton Climate Initiative (CCI) and the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group (C40), have done much to jump-start the market. Navigant (formerly Pike) Research recently predicted that shipments of LED street lights will increase from fewer than 3 million in 2012 to more than 17 million in 2020.
The City of Los Angeles estimates it will see at least $7 million in electricity savings and $2.5 million in avoided maintenance costs annually with the switch to LED street lights. Street lighting can account for up to 40% of a city’s electricity bill, according to Eric Woods, writing at the Navigant Research blog. The LED fixtures used in Los Angeles, which include Cree’s XSP series and LEDway series, Hadco’s RX series (Hadco is a Philips company), and Leotek’s GC series, consume about 63% less electricity, and last much longer, than the high-pressure sodium (HPS) fixtures they replaced.
For more information on the City of Los Angeles’ LED street lighting program, take a look at my January post or this presentation [PDF] delivered by Ed Ebrahimian, Director, Los Angeles Bureau of Street Lighting, at a seminar hosted by the U.S. Embassy in Helsinki on June 6.
Deployment drives innovation and lower prices
“As the LEDs improve, and the manufacturers develop the technology, the energy savings are being realized and continue to increase,” said Ebrahimian in a talk [PDF] delivered in April 2012. Before launching its street light replacement program, Los Angeles city planners had estimated that LED fixtures would yield a 40% electricity savings over HPS units. As noted above, the actual savings is just over 63%. Las Vegas officials discovered much the same. “What I’m seeing so far is that we’re actually exceeding our projected savings,” Tom Perrigo , the city’s chief sustainability officer, told the Sustainable City Network.
Deployment has driven down prices and improved the product. Yearly comparisons of LED fixture prices and specs compiled by Ebrahimian [PDF, p. 19] illustrate this trend. An LED fixture installed on a residential street light in Los Angeles, in 2009, cost an average of $432, illuminated at 42 lumens/watt, lasted 80,000 hours, and came with a 5-year warranty. By the end of 2012, that same fixture cost an average of $245, illuminated at 81 Lm/W, lasted at least 150,000 hours, and came with a 7-year warranty.
In the second phase of its LED replacement program, Los Angeles will retrofit 70,000 decorative street lamps. The city is testing and evaluating LED and induction fixtures for use in the 400 different styles of such lamps operating in Los Angeles. The city also announced, in April, that it would expand a pilot program with GE Lighting to measure the performance of GE’s LightGrid Outdoor Wireless Controller units. The technology enables remote monitoring and control of individual street lights.
Los Angeles’ Hoover Street before … Credit: Los Angeles Bureau of Street Lighting
… and after the conversion to LED street lighting. Credit: Los Angeles Bureau of Street Lighting
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ca87698dd9186a0fe62a87080ee94de7 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/justinoconnell/2019/10/07/former-bitcoin-core-developer-jeff-garzik-on-defi-stablecoins--bitcoin/ | Former Bitcoin Core Developer Jeff Garzik: ‘The Stablecoin is Here to Stay’ | Former Bitcoin Core Developer Jeff Garzik: ‘The Stablecoin is Here to Stay’
Stablecoins and Layer 1 Days
Former Bitcoin core code contributor Jeff Garzik says stablecoins are propelling Decentralized Finance (DeFi) to the next stage.
“Product-wise, we're in a generational shift,” he said earlier this year at Consensus 2019 in New York where he presented as Chief Architect of Metronome (MET), a cryptocurrency released in 2018. “The stablecoin is here to stay and now people are building on top of that.”
Stablecoins are a type of crypto asset that seek to eliminate the large price fluctuations common to most digital assets by fixing the value to fiat currency, exchange-traded commodities (such as precious metals), and cryptocurrency.
“The next big event is all of the decentralized financial products—the loans and the credit—built on top of those Layer 2 stablecoins, which are built on top of the Layer 1 cryptos like a Metronome or Bitcoin,” said Garzik, who is the CEO of Bloq, a Chicago-based company that creates blockchain technology for enterprise.
“You would not write a 30-year mortgage in BTC,” he said. “That would be financial suicide for either the mortgager or the mortgagee. But, you can do that with a stablecoin. Once you have a stable cryptocurrency, you can start creating loan products, credit products, 30-year mortgages, investments products that pay out dividends. It opens up a big, big, big world.
Stablecoins are built on top of a cryptocurrency currency like Bitcoin, and this layering function is what makes the stablecoin safe and stable. “You have unstable assets like MET or BTC as collateral and, say you have a $150 worth of unstable collateral parked in a smart contract, then that will issue $100 worth of stable token tied to the U.S. dollar. What that has done is unlocked a whole new universe, because before Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc. prices [were] volatile.”
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Despite the relative “success and survivability” of stablecoins, Garzik said by and large the blockchain industry is still in its early stages – ‘Layer 1’ days, he calls them.
“10 years in, we're still in the ‘I'm building a blockchain’ days,” he said. “DeFi is the first ‘I'm building on top of blockchain’ kind of use case. It is built on that lower layer infrastructure plumbing that the average users should not have to think about or know about—it should be there and it should work.”
He says the industry is a couple layers away from making blockchain products safe for the average user.
“Writ large, it’s still early days.”
In the early days, Bitcoin still plays a crucial role
Garzik, a Linux Foundation board member, says Bitcoin is still relevant today because its simpler and easier to secure than other blockchains. He also seems to believe it could lead to personal epiphanies.
“Bitcoin is like taking the red pill in the Matrix,” said Garzik. "That becomes your knowledge explosion and your intro to the cryptocurrency industry as a whole. Once you're onboarded to Bitcoin, you find out about this whole universe of blockchains, DeFi, and the Lightning protocol,” said Garzik. The Lightning protocol refers to a scaling solution built on top of the Bitcoin blockchain. That's the social and philosophical side of Bitcoin.
“And then the economic side is it’s the strongest chain,” he said. “Bitcoin is the root of the internet of chains. And so, if I'm pragmatically, rationally building a project, I want to build on the strongest chain. Bitcoin makes it more secure, easier to analyze, and easier to build secure software.”
The first cryptocurrency works for payments and moving assets, said Garzik, who calls Atlanta, Georgia home. But, he admits, Bitcoin is not flexible enough to achieve certain goals, especially on the enterprise side of things.
“If I want to build a completely decentralized ETF that manages 20 assets like an S&P 500 style index, Bitcoin is just not going to do that.”
Enterprise Bitcoin experiments have not gone very far, said Garzik. “Most people are looking at either Tendermint or Hyperledger on the private blockchain side for more smart contracts, supply chain, and provenance-type use cases.”
In order to illustrate where Bitcoin excels, Garzik cites BNY Mellon, a global financial services company that has experimented with Bitcoin.
The bank’s CIO, Suresh Kumar, told the Wall Street Journal the bank was researching ways to make transactions more efficient. BNY Mellon senior developer, Arun Battu, built an application using open source code from Bitcoin.org to run on BNY Mellon’s internal network.
The bank also reportedly tested so-called ‘BK Coins’ as incentives for the company’s corporate recognition program as a reward for creating select software services.
“[I]f we can find a way to make it tangible, in a controlled environment like our internal employee recognition program, then we have a great opportunity to help our businesses better understand the potential value," Kumar told WSJ, speaking of blockchain and cryptocurrency. BK Coins are redeemable for gift cards, vouchers and some other perks.
Kumar also told WSJ that there is a big change of mind set when it comes to new technologies like Bitcoin. Battu, a senior developer, noted his biggest challenge was transitioning to a peer-to-peer model from the traditional client-server architecture. Garzik agrees that the transition to blockchain-based technologies won’t be easy for many people to wrap their heads around.
“Owning your own keys is such an inversion from the banking days,” Garzik said. “Just like every technology, it is a double-edged sword. You have responsibility that comes with holding your own keys. If I stuff a bunch of hundred dollar bills under my mattress, maybe that's keeping it safe or maybe that's making it more vulnerable to theft. And, so it's a new way of thinking about, ‘How do I secure my assets?”
Bitcoin Creates Freedom
At the same time, Bitcoin is putting the user in control, which creates freedom. “That's freedom of choice, freedom of movement, freedom of association. Ultimately, I think it's freedom of speech. Code is speech. Monetary transactions are speech. And so, if you restrict that, as some governments are doing, you're restricting the freedom that people normally enjoy.”
If code is considered speech, a sometimes debated topic in open-source communities, then sending and receiving bitcoins might be protected by free speech laws. I asked, Is transacting a human right?
“The short answer is yes,” said Garzik. “The longer answer is what we've seen over the past 10 years, especially in the cryptocurrency industry, is bank de-risking, which we’ve seen in the US, Australia, and elsewhere.”
It's not the regulators and legislators banning blockchain-related companies, he observes. “What they're doing is they're saying, ‘We don't like bad actors,’ and then it's up to the banks to interpret what is a bad actor. And if they are interpreting that, they then have this liability. For if [they’re] banking Osama bin Laden and don't catch that, [they’re] liable. So, all banks see is this liability. If there's any gray area, [they don’t] bother with that at all.”
Banks then only allow certain people to open bank accounts, Garzik said. “Everyone else, you're just out of luck. And, from there, that is decoupling people from the monetary ecosystem. If I can't buy bread, if I can't buy shoes, I am forced to beg, forced to disconnect myself from society in a lot of ways.”
Jeff Garzik at TokenSummit 2019, presenting Vesper, the autonomous resource provisioning and ... [+] management engine "powering the tokenized world." Author
He recalls how in 2013 payment processors, such as VISA, MasterCard, and PayPal, stopped processing payments for Wikileaks. “They leaked various things, pissed off various governments, who leaned on the banks, who leaned on the payment processors, who flipped the off switch,” said Garzik. “And anyone who believed in that cause and wanted to support [Wikileaks], the government—in a very real way—said ‘I've chosen to not allow you to support this cause.’ So, the government is becoming a gatekeeper for what causes you can and can't support, which is totally anti-freedom.”
Bitcoin’s potential to enhance personal freedom had been made clear, he said. “As we become more cashless, it's easier for people in power to just flip that off switch and turn off not just an individual organization, but just entirely disadvantaged populations. There are inner city minority groups that just can't get bank accounts in the United States. This is not a third world country. They have to drive to the next city because this bank decided the entire area needs to be de-risked.”
Garzik contends limiting financial services not only dispossess the poor, but can also be a way of controlling speech, as in the case of Wikileaks. “It becomes a way of controlling what causes you can and can't support. So, as cashless marches on, that government control increases by default. The less you use cash, the easier it is to cut you off.”
But, blockchain is pushing back, he said—even if might take some time.
Why Garzik Gets Up in the Morning
“[Blockchain] is this autonomous layer of finance, and drives one of two reasons why I get up in the morning,” he said. “I really do believe, past all the press releases and hype, blockchain empowers people—the other 7 billion [people]. It gives you back the keys to your bank account that you didn't know you didn't have. That's very, very powerful.”
The second reason Garzik gets up in the morning is his science fiction vision of the future. Bitcoin is the currency of artificial intelligence, he has previously said.
“We're here to build the autonomous cars that own themselves and bid for lane space on the roads and stuff like that,” he said. “The robot and human future that we watch in ‘I, Robot’ and all these other movies. [Blockchain enables] this machine where I can hire some thing to do a job for me, maybe mow my lawn, and I don't have to care if that thing is a person or a robotic lawn mower or a drone service that drops a lawn mower off. It puts the machine web on an equal footing with your average person.”
Garzik helps this become reality with Bloq, a distributed company headquartered in Chicago and comprised of two divisions. With approximately 35 employees, Bloq is using DeFi as an inroad into a broader technological projects and experiences, he said. BloqEnterprise supplies blockchain technology to companies, with a main focus currently on BloqCloud, a platform that delivers a suite of blockchain managed services.
The other division is BloqLabs, a technical contributor, financial sponsor, and supporter of the projects under its umbrella. The BloqLabs roster includes Metronome, TITAN, Vesper, Veriblock, Civic, and others. Projects become a part of BloqLabs one of two ways: either grown internally (e.g., Metronome, Titan) or in instances where BloqLabs operates in more of an advisory capacity (e.g., VeriBlock).
Since Bloq chose not to raise money, the company, founded in 2015, was free from the constraints of the venture capital funding model. Garzik notices stark differences in how he is able to operate because of that decision.
“We started from day zero with zero funding to go out and look for a team,” he said. “That gave us the freedom to find the best people. Normally, at every other Silicon Valley startup, someone has an idea, they maybe build a product, and then go for some funding. When you have the freedom to look for the best people, the best team, right out of the gate, you come up with a totally different startup, a totally different flight path.”
User Experience Makes Blockchain Secure
Ultimately, Garzik wants to make blockchain easier to use for everyone, because complex user experiences make platforms less secure. Still, it's not about dumbing blockchain down, he insists.
“[I]ts securifying it up. It's making a secure user experience, which is one where the user doesn't have to see this incomprehensible hash and understand what that is.” It shouldn't be that hard, he said.
“You should just swipe a credit card, pay bitcoin, and receive a service. Simple user experiences and simple outcomes, that's going to bring more people into the space, which generates more freedom. And so, ultimately, it's about making it easier for this rough-edged, originally techie-focused, nerd-focused, kind of hard to use technology usable by the average person.”
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b0d697391cb8e17a44ea0b78ac5fe815 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/justinoconnell/2019/10/15/mlb-crypto-bobbleheads-are-selling-for-thousands-of-dollars/ | MLB Crypto Bobbleheads Have Sold For Thousands Of Dollars | MLB Crypto Bobbleheads Have Sold For Thousands Of Dollars
A 2018 digital bobblehead of then-Washington Nationals outfielder Bryce Harper stamped on the Ethereum blockchain has sold for $7,300 (25 Eth), while a bobblehead of LA Dodgers ace Clayton Kershaw sold for $3,500 (12.2 Eth).
The figures, bought and sold on the secondary market at MLBC.app, are a part of the MLB-licensed game MLB Champions, which was created by the Los Angeles-based Lucid Sight. The company is betting that people will start to understand digital scarcity and ownership.
This 2018 Bryce Harper figure sold on the MLBC secondary market for $7,300. MLB Champions
During the 2018 MLB baseball season, Lucid Sight released MLB Crypto Baseball, a beta version of MLB Champions, a digital collecting game in which fantasy players buy and sell collectibles that earn rewards based on the results of real life baseball games. During the World Series in late October, the company will launch a new version of the continuously-evolving game.
Lucid Sight CEO Randy Saaf and his co-founders grew up in the 1980s. He recalls a time when collector card stores were common. “You could buy baseball cards from 7/11,” he said. Baseball cards date back to the 19th century, and have over the years been packaged with items like tobacco and Cracker Jacks.
“[MLB Champions] is very similar to baseball cards,” said Saaf, a nearly lifelong LA Dodgers fan. “At the core it's still a collectibles game.”
The new version of the collectables, similar to the Harper and Kershaw figures, will be generated based on a user’s game play. For instance, If the New York Yankees make the World Series, and Yankees slugger Aaron Judge hits a grand slam to win the Fall Classic, MLB Champions memorializes this historic event by creating a token stamped on the Ethereum blockchain to represent it. MLBC uses Statcast, a high-speed, high-accuracy, automated tool developed to analyze player movements and game play to keep track of the events. MLB implemented Statcast into all 30 MLB stadiums in 2015 to track game play.
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MLBC has graphics and poses in which it puts the professional player. The fantasy player can then, if they so choose, click “mint” to create an ERC-721 Ethereum token of that player. The ERC-721 token standard makes it possible to create unique digital tokens that can represent valuable collectibles.
“That token is the crypto part that can be traded and sold,” said Saaf, who shared an example of a historic figure generated when former Dodgers player Howie Kendrick hit a grand slam home run in the 10th inning of Game 5 of the National League Division Series, sending the Washington Nationals to the NL Championship Series.
“After the season, the Ethereum contract locks and we are unable to generate new 2019 figures,” said Saaf. “If you want to buy a 2019 player in 2020, you will have to buy it from another fantasy player on the marketplace. What we're trying to do right now through the World Series is [generate] the collectibles based on the legendary events and you can only get one if you are playing that event and that player.”
The 2019 figures might be particularly desired by some collectors—it is, after all, the 150th anniversary of professional baseball. Here’s the figure generated after former Dodger Howie Kendrick hit a grand slam to help end the Dodgers 2019 season in this year’s NL Division Series.
The secondary market helps to make these digital figures collectible. “You can either grind away and play this game or you can just go buy the stuff on a secondary market from people who didn't want, say, a Dodgers collectible anymore—they’re just over it,” said Saaf. “It could be any events that were important to you, but maybe not nationally important, [or it could be] the World Series, which is more important nationally.” Users can view your figures in AR on your iPhone and Android.
After the postseason, Lucid Sight will release MLB Champions as an iOS and Android game. Fantasy players will simulate fantasy games in the idle clicker game, which is a type of video game in which they earn currency by playing the game. Fantasy players will play the idle clicker to "train" their MLBC figures and play simulated games with their figures in order to win rare collectibles.
“It'll be game simulations,” said Saaf. “It'll look very similar to the other games that they're used to playing. But, the key feature that we hope they value is that the rewards are these rare, rare, valuable collectibles.”
Saaf said Lucid Sight wanted to create something that people could pass on to their children. “That's what you can do with Bitcoin. If I have a Bitcoin, I'm not going to throw it away. I'm not going to lose it, because I can literally give it to my kids when I die, and they can sell it and buy a house.”
Lucid Sight, which acquired a dual license for name rights from both MLB and the MLB Players Association, believes those same elements of digital scarcity could reignite collecting. MLB, the second most profitable sports league worldwide trailing only the NFL, has had a lot of success on the digital front. It sold BamTech, its MLB Advanced Media digital media company, to Disney in 2017 for several billion dollars.
Saaf, 43, says MLB’s penchant for innovation led to an open-mindedness towards a crypto game before Crypto Kitties (perhaps the first viral blockchain-based game) had been released. This spirit of innovation trickles down to the teams.
“This is just in their culture and their DNA. And it actually permeates all the way down to when you have that at the top where you're willing to take chances and big risk, big reward type situations. It permeates to the teams.”
This culture may have already led to a unique night in both baseball and blockchain history. Lucid Sight held a digital bobblehead giveaway in 2018 that was spearheaded when company executives met with Dodgers senior management at an MLB event.
“These were essentially crypto bobbleheads of our [Dodgers players],” said Saaf. “Basically these were cards with the crypto on it. We printed crypto on 40,000 paper wallets that have the private key on them. Your typical Dodgers fan didn't necessarily know what to do with these. But certain fans were like, these are going to be rare. We wanted to do a physical giveaway because the fans just kind of show up and you're just given your item as a give away. They're used to that, it’s the easiest way to give people stuff.”
He says bobbleheads in general have some monetary value as a collectible. For instance, the digital bobbleheads from the Dodger giveaway are selling for between as much as $100 on eBay, or given to somebody else who values it. “What you saw at the game is certain people were collecting them up. People valued them, and collected them like a physical bobblehead.” Some people were even offering to buy the crypto tokens for $2.
One Dodger fan at the event didn't understand the process and stopped another fan who explained what was going on. "I was really confused walking in," he told YouTube influencers the Crypto Cafe. “We gotta download this, do this, do that. It seems like a lot of work, but what are you gonna do?” The Dodger fan, Jesse, said he thought he would end up redeeming the token.
To do so, he would download the MLBC app and then scan the QR code on the Dodgers Digital Bobblehead Card. The Crypto Cafe scanned the card for him and found that he had received a Justin Turner, the team’s red-bearded star third-basemen. “Oh, cool, I’ll take that,” said an excited Jesse.
This was the first time a digital bobblehead night had ever been done. “These are out there now in the wild,” said Saaf. “We don't control them.”
Lucid Sight didn’t host such a night with the Dodgers in 2019, and they are not sure there will be one in 2020. “40,000 cards was a huge effort, making sure that we had the right quantities and making sure that the security was tight,” Saaf said.
Search the MLBC marketplace for Chicago Cubs players, and you’ll find Ian Happ and Anthony Rizzo figures. In order to purchase them, one would sign into Metamask and pay in ETH. Happ was going for .04250 ETH ($8.16) and Rizzo was going for .07500 ETH ($14.40). For some reason, Happ was wearing a “red wine glove”—perhaps a reference to his discussions with Former Cubs Manager Joe Maddon on the subject of fine wines. Less explicably, Rizzo had a nacho glove – his favorite food, however, is probably pasta cooked by his mom.
“The visual attributes of red wine glove and nacho glove are part of the game play and the tiers of figure scarcity,” said Saaf.
The rarity of figures is a combination of player, base attributes (gold, silver, common, etc.), pose, and other visual attributes,” he said. “We have a broad range of visual attributes. Some traditional, like a black wood bat. Some are fun like nacho glove. Rarity can stack when you get a very rare visual attribute combining with a very rare event like a grand slam.” The MLBC figures are generated in various stances, such as catching, batting, and more.
The figures also contain a ‘Population’ number, which only applies to figures that have been minted to Ethereum. It says how many of the player and attributes are in the total population.
“The variety of visual attributes combined with legendary events (grand slam, no hitter, etc.) creates a huge variety of scarcity,” said Saaf. “There might be 100 Aaron Judge Grand Slams from the World series but only one Gold Bat Aaron Judge Grand Slam figure.”
The Anthony Rizzo Game Event was a stolen base—not a likely scenario for the 240-pound first baseman. Imagine how, if the 2015 first-round draft pick Happ lived up to expectations, his MLB Champions figure could increase in perceived value.
“Different people value different things,” said Saaf. “I might get a bunch of Yankees players, but I’m not a Yankees fan. I want to just get rid of those and I'll sell them at whatever the clearance price is. Well, there's somebody in New York who is a huge Yankee fan, and they want to buy them up. Or there's this one figure that you want to find and maybe you have to pay extra to get that one figure.”
His generation grew up with an intuition around digital as being likened to a copy. “If I give you a JPEG, if I texted you a picture of my kids, that’s a copy. There's no value to that.”
But that changed with Bitcoin. “Bitcoin basically invented digital scarcity and digital ownership. If I give you a Bitcoin, I don't have my bitcoin anymore.”
A crypto figure of Mike Trout – perhaps the greatest ballplayer who ever lived. MLB Champions
Despite the potential of blockchain, Lucid Sight has had to manage some of Ethereum’s limitations. While minting to the Ethereum blockchain had been mandatory in Lucid Sight games in 2018, the company found the cost and speed of Ethereum was prohibitive to many players. The company also wanted MLB Champions to work on iOS and Android.
Pure-blockchain Web 3.0 games won’t ever work with native iOS apps, said Saaf. Web 3.0 refers to a future version of the internet which incorporates technology like artificial intelligence.
“There are some Web3 browser-based games you can play in mobile crypto wallets with Web3 browsers, but we wanted to make native games that are up to average consumer expectation of iOS/Android gaming.”
Lucid Sight developed an Ethereum emulator called Scarcity Engine, a software developer tool designed to make blockchain and traditional gaming platforms compatible with each other. The Scarcity Engine powers all of the company’s games.
“We emulate the Ethereum network using traditional gaming databases, so it has the speed consumers are used to in games and complies with the terms of user for iOS and Android,” Saaf explained. “Players then have the option to use game currency to ‘mint’ items of value, but that costs ETH gas and involves a crypto wallet like Metamask.”
Lucid Sight says Scarcity Engine is the best balance for gamers, said Saaf. “Players unfamiliar with crypto can still jump in our games and get started playing on a familiar platform like iOS and ease into the crypto stuff when they are ready.” He says optional minting is the preferred solution for the vast majority of consumers.
“Most players choose to mint some items, but they don't mint everything,” Saaf said. “Some mint everything, but many just mint players from their favorite team or the rarest MLBC figures.”
Ultimately, as any humble baseball fan knows, whether or not crypto brings back the age-old tradition of trading cards might be up to the “Baseball Gods.”
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7a8ab41f2db9f71a11021fa50f712441 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/justinoconnell/2020/04/03/coinbase-co-founder-invests-in-project-to-bridge-bitcoin-and-ethereum/ | Coinbase Co-Founder Invests In Project To Bridge Bitcoin And Ethereum | Coinbase Co-Founder Invests In Project To Bridge Bitcoin And Ethereum
The Keep Network, a privacy layer for Ethereum, has closed a private $7.7M token sale led by Paradigm, Fenbushi Capital, ParaFI Capital, A.Capital, and Collaborative Fund. The Keep Network is an open-source contributor to the tBTC project, which enables Bitcoin-based assets to be deployed on the Ethereum blockchain.
“Decentralized financial applications on Ethereum have seen clear demand,” Paradigm co-founder Fred Ehrsam, who also co-founded Bitcoin exchange Coinbase, said in an e-mailed statement. "Bitcoin is the world's largest cryptocurrency. Building a bridge that allows Bitcoin to interact with DeFi makes a lot of sense, and tBTC is a credible attempt to do exactly that."
The inspiration for tBTC dates back to when Matt Luongo, the founder of Keep Network parent Thesis.co, and his wife found a house they wanted to buy.
“It’s time to sell your Bitcoin,” she said.
“The hell it is,” Luongo replied. “I don’t want to sell.”
“What have we been saving for, if not a house?” she asked.
“Well…” he replied.
He at once started looking for somewhere he could get a Bitcoin collateralized loan so he could buy the house. He found a lender he had been told was crypto friendly. The lender loved crypto. “Sell me your Bitcoin, come back in 30 days, and we’ll pretend we never had this conversation,” said the lender.
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But, Luongo wasn’t concerned with privacy or secrecy or whatever the lender was implying. He simply didn’t want to sell his Bitcoin. He’d rather hold and use them as collateral.
Since then, the space has matured, Luongo said, highlighting the novel rate lending products mostly targeting high net worth individuals. The experience of trying to use Bitcoin as collateral to buy a house got him thinking about tBTC, a decentralized redeemable BTC-backed ERC-20 Token. It’s an attempt to bring Bitcoin to Ethereum, enabling the creation of a tBTC asset within the Ethereum ecosystem.
“The goal is to give Bitcoin the superpowers that smart contracts have on Ethereum, and, also, to bring Bitcoin as collateral to decentralized finance,” he explains. tBTC is backed 1:1 by Bitcoin.
“It's trustless and permissionless to mint and redeem; there aren't any intermediaries, and it's simple and secure,” said Luongo. “It maintains the hard money properties of Bitcoin on Ethereum.” tBTC provides a private place to store Bitcoin keys.
Bitcoin and Ethereum themed artwork by Thomas H on display at Block Con 2018. Justin O'Connell
Luongo was out drinking with crypto friends in 2015, discussing the “New World Order” they all wanted to build on Bitcoin, when he had a realization. “If we're doing this all on Bitcoin as it stands today, as cash is slowly pushed out, we're actually building our own prisons,” he said. “We're going to do everything on a public chain, and anyone will be able to see the details of our life that we've kept private. Where I bought my coffee this morning will suddenly be public.”
Luongo became keenly interested in on-chain privacy and confidentiality. “If we're going to rebuild the financial system, if we're going to rebuild institutions, we need to do it right this time,” he said. “That means we need to be thinking about privacy a lot earlier in the process.
Luongo says Ethereum has a stronger privacy story than Bitcoin, which is known for a transparent public ledger. He notes Ethereum-based projects, such as Tornado.cash. “My hope is that by allowing Bitcoin the asset to be separate from Bitcoin the network, we will open up some serious financial privacy superpowers, as well.”
If decentralized finance is collateralized, he reasoned, Bitcoin, while not great for privacy, still makes great collateral. “It’s like hard money,” he said. “You can’t take it from me.”
Luongo and the Thesis.co team is implementing tBTC on the Keep Network, which has a native work token, KEEP, that is staked by participants on the network.
“Keep stakers are randomly selected to back tBTC deposits,” said Luongo. “So, we get some assurances that these people have skin in the game, but that they're also randomly selected and less likely to collude. Keep Network stakers get revenue from that backing tBTC asset.”
The Keep Network—which in 2018 sold $12 million worth of tokens to Andreessen Horowitz, Polychain Capital, Draper Associates and others—will work to ensure people can easily interact with tBTC and integrate it into their dApps. That decentralization is paramount to the application.
“If we just wanted to build a Bitcoin bank that printed money on other chains that was supposed to represent Bitcoin, that's easy,” said Luongo. But, that’s not satisfying to him.
“It doesn't follow the principles of the space,” he said. “As someone who will use the system, I don't want to give out my personal data to multiple custodians to move bitcoins between the Bitcoin and Ethereum chains.” That's unacceptable, he says.
“We should be moving toward greater fungibility, not less,” he said. “And, if you have a central counter-party in the middle, you lose most of the things that we love about Bitcoin. You don't have censorship resistance anymore, you don't have inflation resistance anymore. And we don’t want to rebuild the same financial system over again.”
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94dc861124f0b2136e210aa641fc4f77 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/justinshubow/2014/12/03/frank-gehry-is-right-98-of-architecture-today-is-sht/ | Frank Gehry Is Right: 98% Of Architecture Today 'Has No Respect For Humanity' | Frank Gehry Is Right: 98% Of Architecture Today 'Has No Respect For Humanity'
At a press conference in Spain a few weeks ago, a journalist asked world-famous architect Frank Gehry what he would say to critics who accuse him “of practicing showy architecture.” Gehry, who was in town to receive a prestigious Princess of Asturias Award, responded by extending his middle finger. (As one critic later quipped, “Artists often speak in symbols.”)
After an equally impertinent follow-up question from another reporter, an exasperated Gehry said, “Let me tell you one thing. In this world we are living in, 98% of everything that is built and designed today is pure sh*t. There’s no sense of design, no respect for humanity or for anything else. They are damn buildings and that’s it.” The 85-year-old Gehry quickly apologized for his cranky behavior by explaining that he was tired from his flight.
The architect, who implicitly exempted himself from that 98%, might have been arrogant, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t right.
Ironically, many in the art world might agree with his first sentence but not find it derogatory. Much modern art has been inspired by excrement. The motto of the Surrealists was “Kunst ist Scheisse” (“Art is sh*t”). In 1961, Italian artist Piero Manzoni took that literally when he made “Merda d’artista,” which consists of 90 sealed cans of his own merda. (In 2007, one of the cans sold for €124,000 at Sotheby’s. Alas, the auction was not titled “Sh*t Show.”) Most recently, in October American artist Paul McCarthy installed a giant inflatable balloon in the Place Vendôme that to many Parisians resembled a butt plug. This put a new spin on what has been called the “turd-in-the-plaza” school of public art: those abstract bronze boluses (think: Henri Moore) plopped in front of banal skyscrapers in the 1960s and 1970s.
But the vast majority of those in the architecture world have taken Gehry’s observation as an affront. Curiously, however, more than one mainstream critic has seemed to agree with the starchitect. Alan G. Brake, executive editor of the Architect’s Newspaper, penned an editorial in which he said Gehry “has a point. We continue to tolerate poorly functioning, wasteful, ugly buildings, which do little to serve society and often do a lot to harm it.” But who is the “we” doing the tolerating? It is those who read and write for the eminently establishment, eminently Modernist Architect’s Newspaper. It is they who are squatting over the helpless public.
Architects' Journal, a leading British magazine, likewise featured an editorial titled “Frank Gehry Is Probably Right About Quality.” After conceding the failures of Modernist architecture, executive editor Paul Finch admitted, “Although I do not find the work of contemporary classical architects to my taste, I can at least acknowledge that it can be done with skill and panache and, if somebody wants to commission buildings in that style, so be it. . . . One thing that can be said for Classicism is that it provides rules, which mean that not very good designers, or builders, can knock out passable buildings.”
In other words, there is safety in the discipline of tradition. (An example of such a rule is that the width of the spacing between columns should be less than the height of the columns.) These rules are somewhat analogous to rules of grammar: They prevent an improper sentence/building, though they don’t ensure an elegant one.
What Finch does not say is that many if not most architects will always be of middling ability. There is nothing wrong with that. The craftsman should not be required to be a genius. We don’t expect other skilled professionals, such as lawyers or doctors, to be geniuses either.
What Finch also does not say is that many if not most buildings are the work of contractors, not architects, and that this has been and will likely always be the case. Unfortunately, architectural education and criticism tends to focus on important buildings at the expense of the common and ordinary.
Prior to the twentieth century, do-it-yourself builders used to rely on “pattern books,” which were catalogs of pleasing design options. Builders and homeowners, from whom no special aesthetic skill was expected or required, could select from models in which the floor plans, windows, detailing, etc. all coordinated, and the result was guaranteed to be not-bad, and sometimes delightful. In recent years, some towns admired for their traditional architecture have been reviving the use of some of those books, which contain nary an alienating Mod box or vulgar McMansion.
Modernist architects can sneer at those “nostalgic” bourgeois catalogs and the supposedly hidebound rules of classicism, but what do they offer in their place? If those designers concede that rules are conducive to good, or at least not-bad, architecture, what rules do they propose in place of those of the classical? At best, they offer esoteric theories articulated in gobbledygook “comprehensible” only to initiates who attended the right design schools. And the would-be architectural rule-makers have nothing to say to mere builders, whose common sense makes them immune to the bullsh*t that 98% of architects subscribe to today.
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3ab9d91a187a042594bb91c1f9fb2fee | https://www.forbes.com/sites/justinshubow/2015/01/06/architecture-continues-to-implode-more-insiders-admit-the-profession-is-failing/ | Architecture Continues To Implode: More Insiders Admit The Profession Is Failing | Architecture Continues To Implode: More Insiders Admit The Profession Is Failing
Architecture is suffering a crisis of confidence. More and more mainstream figures in the field are admitting that the profession has lost its way. As I previously mentioned, Frank Gehry, the world’s most famous architect, recently said that “98% of everything that is built and designed today is pure sh*t. There’s no sense of design, no respect for humanity or for anything else.” Architectural thought-leaders seconded and thirded him. And he’s since been fourthed by another.
Last year, recognizing general public’s low opinion of architects, the American Institute of Architects (AIA), the trade organization for the profession, launched an effort to “reposition” the industry by hiring marketing and brand-identity firms. (You can find a PDF of one of the Institute’s public opinion polls here.)
And now The New York Times, the ultimate arbiter of elite opinion, recently published an op-ed that declared, “For too long, our profession [architecture] has flatly dismissed the general public’s take on our work, even as we talk about making that work more relevant with worthy ideas like sustainability, smart growth and ‘resilience planning.’” The authors are not kooks on the fringe but architect Steven Bingler and Martin C. Pedersen, former executive editor of Metropolis magazine, both of them very much in the establishment.
The authors observe that self-congratulatory, insulated architects are “increasingly incapable … of creating artful, harmonious work that resonates with a broad swath of the general population, the very people we are, at least theoretically, meant to serve.” Bingler and Pedersen note that this has been a problem for over forty years (my emphasis), and that things are even worse today.
As a case in point, they mention the 2007 “Make It Right” charity program, founded by amateur architect and furniture designer Brad Pitt. The program invited firms, most of them avant-garde, to design housing for poor New Orleanians whose homes were destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. The architecture world was exhilarated: The initiative was to be a showcase for how the best contemporary design could improve lives.
The predictable result was weird, sometimes discomforting houses of non-native motley futuristic design that have virtually no relation to each other or the beloved historic architecture of the city. A story in The New Republic called the 90-some houses a waste of money and a distracting sideshow: The homes were expensive to build ($400,000 on average) and the high-tech fabrication has made them expensive to fix; mold has grown on the untested experimental materials, and the eco-wood decks and stairs are already rotting. The neighborhoods are wastelands—failures of urban planning that isolate residents from social networks and public services.
Bingler and Pedersen report that “The residents weren’t impressed, and asked perfectly logical questions: What’s with the flat roofs — you know it rains a lot here, right?” (Compare those housing failures with the charming “Katrina Cottages” architect Marianne Cusato designed under the leadership of architect-planner Andrés Duany. Over 2,800 inexpensive pre-fabricated houses modeled on those cottages have been built in nearby parts of Mississippi. The bad boy of urbanism, Duany is inspired by local tradition and, worse still, has been a success with the public. The mandarins of Modernism thus hate him. In 2006, the dean of Tulane’s architecture school (located in New Orleans) called Duany a “Svengali.”)
“Architecture’s disconnect is both physical and spiritual,” wrote Bingler and Pedersen. “We’re attempting to sell the public buildings and neighborhoods they don’t particularly want, in a language they don’t understand.”
The solution they proposed is for greater engagement with the common man and an emphasis on the latest science of human nature. Architects must recognize “the physical laws and mathematical principles that undergird the fundamental elegance and practicality of the natural world. These creative resources transcend style. They not only have wide aesthetic appeal, but they’re also profoundly human, tied to our own DNA.”
While most of the architectural establishment has responded to the op-ed with noticeable silence, Mark Lamster, architecture critic for the Dallas Morning News, did bravely publish a post on Facebook in which he began by quoting the opinion piece: “We’ve taught generations of architects to speak out as artists, but we haven’t taught them how to listen.” Lamster then commented, “super-smart nyt op-ed from Martin Pedersen and steven bingler [sic].”
What is most telling, however, is the vitriolic response the op-ed triggered in Aaron Betsky. Called “one of the 21st century’s architectural power brokers,” Betsky is the former head of the Cincinnati Art Museum, and was director of the 2008 Venice International Architecture Biennale, the most important architecture show in the world. An architectural priest and patrician, he is to the profession what The New York Times is to the chattering classes: a voice of the high-status quo. Indeed, he writes for Architect, the official magazine of the AIA.
Betsky rained down on Bingler and Pedersen with ridicule and scorn: Their piece was “so pointless and riddled with clichés as to beggar comprehension.” He summarized their position: “we have three of the standard criticisms of buildings designed by architects: first, they are ugly according to what the piece’s authors perceive as some sort of widely-held community standard (or at least according to some 88-year old ladies); second, they are built without consultation; third they don’t work.”
Yet Betsky then admitted, “All those critiques might be true.” They are irrelevant, he claims, since architecture must be about experimentation and the shock of the new. (Why this should be the case he does not say.) And sometimes designers must stretch technology to the breaking (or leaking) point: “The fact that buildings look strange to some people, and that roofs sometimes leak, is part and parcel of the research and development aspect of the design discipline.” Ever brave, he is willing to let others suffer for his art.
At no point did Betsky consider the actual human beings, the unwilling guinea pigs who live in the houses. He implicitly says of the poor residents: Do their roofs leak? Let them buy buckets. And as for sickness-inducing mold, there’s Obamacare for that. Betsky also does not consider what a leaky roof means to people whose prior homes were destroyed by water. The architects, having completed their noble experiments, effectively say like the arrogant King Louis XV of France: “Après moi, le deluge” [After me, the flood]. No wonder architects have an image problem.
Betsky also would not appear to care that some of the new houses look like they have already been damaged by a flood. As he wrote in May, “Buildings under decay are much sexier than finished ones, perhaps because they remind us of our own mortality.” It logically follows that the “decaying” Katrina houses are simulated ruin porn, a pleasing mix of sex and death. He had previously said that the decay of New Orleans even prior to the hurricane could seem “elegant” to some. One of his favorite architects, the Dutch firm MVRDV, proposed a Make It Right house that looked like a trailer broken in two, and another one that looked like a house piled on top of a house.
In his response to Bingler and Pedersen, Betsky took a detour to mock The New York Times’ architecture critic for “bizarre forays into fields such as so-called ‘evidence-based design.’” That increasingly growing field, which incorporates aspects of environmental psychology, empirically studies the effects of different built environments on people, such as how the design of hospital waiting rooms affects patient health. Why this is a bizarre pursuit Betsky does not say, but his blithe rejection of results-based science is typical of architects today.
Betsky also does not care whether someone’s elderly mother likes this or that design: “The truth is that architecture is not made by or for ‘a wide spectrum of the population.’ It is made for those who have the means to commission it, and reflects their values and priorities.” But don’t clients and architects have a moral obligation to consider the effect on the public? Architecture is not like a painting in a private house or a sculpture in a museum; the public is forced to live with it. And of course for social housing and civic architecture the public is the client.
Modernist architecture, like Modern art, has tended to be a revolt against bourgeois taste (and values): If granny, abuelita, or bubbe is for it, they’re against it. But if bourgeois taste is bad—all that chintz and those lace curtains, those cushy sofas, that flag flown from the front porch—just imagine what architects think of the working class and poor. If the architects had their way, elevator music in New Orleans public housing would be screeching Stockhausen, not native Louis Armstrong or Fats Domino. Modernists have no room for harmony, rhythm, or soul; they are high-culture elitists, not multiculturalists who celebrate class and ethnic diversity.
Many leading 20th-century architects, including Philip Johnson and Mies van der Rohe, were openly disdainful of the public’s preferences. On occasion they evinced subtle and overt racism. In 1913, in one of the most influential essays in the history of Modernist architecture, “Ornament and Crime,” [PDF] the Austrian architect Adolf Loos declared that modern man (read: white northern Europeans) must go beyond what “any Negro” could achieve in design, and strip away all that is superfluous, all that is morally and spiritually polluted. It is Papuans and other primitives who, like innocent children, ornament themselves with tattoos. Loos’ race has superseded them: “the modern man who tattoos himself is either a criminal or a degenerate.” The same held for ornament in architecture. (To this day, architects—who continue to believe they are the vanguard of civilization’s progress—find ornament retrograde. Yet ordinary people stubbornly continue to adorn themselves with cosmetics, jewelry, and, yes, tattoos.)
In the 1920s, during the time he was a member of the French Fascist party, the seminal architect Le Corbusier said he was disgusted by the “zone of odours, [a] terrible and suffocating zone comparable to a field of gypsies crammed in their caravans amidst disorder and improvisation.” He also chimed in with Loos: “Decoration is of a sensorial and elementary order, as is color, and is suited to simple races, peasants, and savages… The peasant loves ornament and decorates his walls.”
More recently, indicative of architecture’s current race problem, in 2006 the aforementioned highly influential dean of Tulane’s architecture school, Reed Kroloff, wrote the embarrassingly tone-deaf, flat-footed essay “Black Like Me.” (As I discuss below, he collaborated with Betsky on a post-Katrina project.) Kroloff—the privileged, self-described gay white Jew from Waco, Texas—announced that he was now black, that the Hurricane Katrina disaster had made him feel first-hand the African-American predicament. His piece was subject to much ridicule. No wonder the Mods have chosen to insulate themselves from the un(brain)washed masses. Architecture has become a gated community.
Betsky, to his credit, doesn’t pretend that architects should even try to make outreach. Showing little sympathy for democracy, he says that appeals to the public are “mystical.” The people—the 99%—do not deserve a seat at the table. Yet Betsky would have us believe that he and the architecture he supports are “progressive.”
But wait. Despite his thundering against Bingler and Pedersen, from what Betsky has previously written, it is clear he agrees that architecture is in a terrible state. He wrote just a few months ago:
I think the biggest, most overwhelming problem in architecture is how bad the vast majority of buildings—designed by licensed architects and constructed not just in this country, but also around the world—truly are. By bad, I mean that they are wasteful of our natural resources, both in their construction and their operation; that they imprison us in spaces that reinforce social separation and hierarchies and isolate us from the world; that they perpetuate existing power structures in everything from gender definitions to the uses of capital; that they make power, whether financial or political, real and difficult to tear down; and, finally, that they are ugly, numbing to the eye, mind, and soul.
If Bingler and Pedersen are enemies of architecture, what does that make Betsky?
Elsewhere he opined that the “fashion” and “religion” of “sustainable architecture” that has resulted in “the production of phenomenally ugly buildings” and “the creation of spaces and forms that are not particularly good for either the inhabitants or their surroundings.”
And he complained that architecture no longer creates places of meaning:
We have no place for rituals in either our daily lives or the buildings that house them. In the past, we built separate spaces for rituals: churches, grand bank buildings or eloquent city halls, monuments to the fallen… The easy answer would be to throw a classicist cloak over everything, squirreling daily life away into the poché while marking and framing important events with columns and colonnades. The opposite of the (rather expensive) traditionalist strategy would be to abstract everything, retreating into complete fluidity, limbo, and loss of meaning. We need something in-between.
Why, then, did Betsky stormily lash out at that The New York Times op-ed? It was most likely due to something he failed to mention: his personal influence on the post-Katrina houses. A year before the Make It Right program, Betsky and (then-black) Kroloff organized an exhibition in Rotterdam, Netherlands (far from the site of the hurricane) called “Newer Orleans—A Shared Space.” They invited six leading, super-hip Dutch and American firms to make proposals to revitalize the city. The firms produced weird, alien designs that had nothing to do with the Big Easy, which arguably has the strongest sense of neighborhood, place, and architecture of any city in the United States. The exhibition’s fashionably orthodox designs were stylistically no different than the Make It Right houses. Betsky explicitly said that context was appropriately irrelevant to the design. It was clear that for Betsky and Kroloff, the anonymous globalized starchitecture that is all the rage in Dubai, Davos, and Shanghai equally belongs in New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward.
Betsky is also threatened by the remedy proposed in the op-ed. While Bingler and Pedersen want architecture to retreat from its excesses, Betsky thinks the profession is failing because it has not gone far enough. He wants more experimentation, more risk-taking, more radical design aimed at pleasing architects, not venal clients or the clueless public. He is an architectural supremacist: Starchitecture now, starchitecture tomorrow, starchitecture forever!
As seen from his comments on evidence-based design, Betsky appears to reject the scientific study of architecture’s effects. And when he writes, “I did not know you could design in a way that is ‘tied to our own DNA,’” he appears to deny the existence of human nature. He also denies even the existence of measurable public opinion when he claims that appeals to popular preferences are “mystical.” In short, he has little tolerance for empiricism whatsoever. Compare how the religious opponents of Galileo refused to look through the telescope, or how creationists reject evolutionary theory since it threatens their faith.
Could Betsky’s cult-like denial of reality be motivated by despair? Could it be that architecture has exhausted itself but out of pride refuses to turn for help, that architecture would prefer to commit suicide than to confess it is wrong? There is a way out, as even Betsky hinted above: A return to architecture based on the collective intelligence of mankind.
It is never easy to admit that one is mistaken, still worse that one’s god has failed. It is all the harder when one’s false worldview has been the justification for one’s high social rank. But the growing crisis of confidence is a sign that a cherished dogma will finally be abandoned: The superiority of the architect to the common man.
Modernism might appear outwardly impregnable: it dominates the practitioners, the critics, the media, and the schools. But as the example of the Soviet Union shows, even the strongest-appearing edifice can suddenly come crashing down when it turns out it no longer has internal support.
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1ea42e98747a64d6929ee890ae786ee9 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/justinwarren/2016/08/10/cloud-hangs-over-ibm-after-australian-census-catastrophe/ | Cloud Hangs Over IBM After Australian Census Catastrophe | Cloud Hangs Over IBM After Australian Census Catastrophe
The Australian Census for 2016 is a shambles.
A nation of 25 million people, around 10 million households, was urged, indeed threatened, to complete the census on time and online. Failure to comply would result in penalties of $180 each day, we were told. August 9 was the big day, or rather night. Census night. A time to pause and make a difference, as the marketing copy went.
Instead of a pause, we got a spectacular collapse. The online site supplied by IBM to carry out this once-every-five-years task suffered a complete meltdown, apparently partially caused by a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack of some sort, thought details remain sketchy.
On Thursday morning Australia time, the Prime Minister, Mr Malcolm Turnbull, told local radio station 2GB:
"Measures that ought to have been in place to prevent these denial-of-service attacks interfering with access to the website were not put in place," he said. "That was a failure that was compounded by some failures in hardware – technical hardware failures – and inadequate redundancy."
The site remains offline, more than 36 hours since it was taken down to "ensure the integrity of the data already submitted was protected."
IBM are simply refusing to acknowledge media enquiries. I, and many others in the media, have tried in vain to find someone to talk to us about what on Earth is going on over there. The ABS has similarly failed to respond to my attempts to get more information about the nature of the failure and the design of the system.
The explanation for what happened on the night was a long time coming. The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) didn't acknowledge anything was wrong at the time, with the Census Facebook page insisting that "The online form and website are operating smoothly as expected" despite the site being in active meltdown. The Twitter hashtag #CensusFail trended globally as Australians vented their frustration with characteristic sarcastic humour.
When the outage was finally acknowledged, around 8:38pm, this was well over an hour after the decision to take the site completely offline had apparently been made, according to the timeline of events eventually provided by the responsible Minister, the Honourable Michael McCormack MP at a press conference the following day.
The statement via the Bureau's special Census Twitter account at the time was that
"The ABS & Census websites are currently experiencing an outage. We're working to restore the service. We will keep you updated. Thank you."
and then continued automatically tweeting at people reminding them to "Login now - it's your moment to make a difference" for at least an hour.
Details of what went on finally emerged at a hastily convened press conference where ABS Chief Statistician Davic Kalisch joined Mr McCormack to run through a timeline of what occurred. Earlier that morning, Mr Kalisch told the media that the outage was a result of an attack, a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack to be precise. Mr McCormack immediately contradicted Mr Kalisch saying
"I will be clear from the outset, this was not an attack. Nor was it a hack but rather, it was an attempt to frustrate the collection of Bureau of Statistics Census data."
There were other failures. In what the ABS and the Minister have described as a "confluence of events" at the same time as a large number of Australians were attempting to do their civic duty, a router allegedly failed, and a "false-positive" triggered some sort of alarm. ABS took the system offline to safeguard the data that had already been submitted, and the system has remained offline ever since.
No evidence has yet been provided to support the DDoS narrative, and various IT and information security experts have pointed to visible aspects of the system that indicate a simple case of bad design and inadequate capacity planning. Throughout the prior week, a specially commissioned automated telephone service for ordering paper forms was overwhelmed by callers, and simply played a recorded message before hanging up. The standard ABS enquiry line was similarly overwhelmed.
Evidence may yet be forthcoming as the Prime Minister, Mr Malcolm Turnbull, has appointed the Special Adviser to the Prime Minister on Cyber Security, Alastair MacGibbon, to investigate the failure.
Regardless of the ultimate outcome, and where blame is laid, the reputation of the ABS and that of IBM, lays in tatters. In an era where vendors of all kinds boast of their ability to scale, this is a clear example of an abject failure to do just that. Whether the system failed under normal and to-be-expected load for a system of its type, or if it failed due to a predictable-and-happens-all-the-time DDoS attack, the fact remains that the system did fail. DDoS attacks are hardly a new concept, and any major online system needs to take them into account.
This is a system that failed to operate when it was needed, and has been unable to recover for more than a day and a half. The Census was widely publicised and anticipated, and people were encouraged to log in on the night to "make a difference". The same behaviour is seen throughout the year when e-commerce sites host sales for Christmas, or Black Friday, or Cyber Monday or whatever fancy brand name they come up with. This is a nation-state taking stock of its own population, not a bunch of people trying to save 10% of a pair of shoes.
There is a recent example of a similar failure: In 2014, Australian retailer Myer suffered an outage to its online store on Boxing day that lasted over a week. The underlying vendor in that example was also IBM. It seems the company, or at least its Australian arm, has learned little about how to build robust online systems in the two years hence.
A once great institution, the Australian Bureau of Statistics, has been laid low by this debacle. I fervently hope it can recover.
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48c8a585335a5be0e5090162da575396 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/justinwarren/2016/08/10/exclusive-david-mcjannet-joins-hashicorp-as-ceo/ | David McJannet Joins HashiCorp As CEO | David McJannet Joins HashiCorp As CEO
HashiCorp have a shiny new CEO in the form of David McJannet. He joins the company from Greylock Partners where he has been an Executive In Residence since December 2015.
McJannet first met HashiCorp co-founders Mitchell Hashimoto and Armon Dadgar about 18 months ago and became involved in HashiCorp as an advisor.
"At the time, we had a pure and relentless focus on product," said Dadger. "Initially we thought the strength of the product, and adoption of the community would be enough for us to build the company. In spending more time with Dave, he really opened up our minds to that fact that, to make a really big impact on the industry, the strength of the product isn't enough."
"It just started to make more sense to have Dave join us full time, rather than just be an advisor," he said.
New HashiCorp CEO David McJannet (Source: Supplied)
Prior to Greylock, McJannet was Senior Director of Marketing at VMware where he was responsible for the Cloud Foundry and Spring Framework products (among others) and shepherded the business unit into what became Pivotal Software. From there, he joined Hortonworks as VP of Marketing and helped grow the company to its eventual IPO in December 2014. He then joined Github for a short stint as VP of Marketing before joining Greylock.
HashiCorp is the company behind popular Open Source tools like Vagrant, Packer, and Terraform as well as commercial offerings like Atlas and Vault Enterprise. It competes in the loosely defined DevOps market, providing software development tools for the modern continuous flow style of development. Other players in the space include Atlassian (makers of Jira and Confluence) and also companies like Puppet, Chef, and Docker.
The company has grown strongly, and Hashimoto said HashiCorp has just finished its first 7-figure revenue quarter, which is not bad for a startup which has only taken a series A round of funding for $10 million in December 2014.
HashiCorp products have seen strong use in large enterprises, but McJannet says his plan is to continue to use the partner ecosystem to deliver services, rather than build up a professional services arm of the company.
"Our 100% focus is products," he said. "The natural partner ecosystem that enterprises rely on are naturally partnering with us."
Dadgar added that the ecosystem surrounding the HashiCorp suite was a good place to be. "For every dollar we're doing with a customer in terms of product licensing, there's probably another five to ten dollars in services like enablement, migration, and training."
HashiCorp DevOps Infrastructure (Source: Supplied)
Certainly the DevOps style software development ecosystem has exploded in recent years. It's still quite a challenge to figure out what the shape of the market will ultimately be, and there are plenty of other startups working hard to build products for this market. Atlassian recently IPO'd for around $27.78 a share in December 2015, valuing the company at around $5.8 billion, but it had already demonstrated a strong period of profitability. The company is now trading at around $30.66 (at time of writing) despite a lukewarm tech IPO environment this year.
HashiCorp says its plan is to buck the trend of startups who chase fast growth in the hopes of a strong IPO leaving profitability until later. Instead, McJannet says he plans to continue the company's steady pace, keeping growth in line with customer demand.
"The way we think about it is that we need to establish ourselves to help our customers through this transition to DevOps," he said, "and we'll let that dictate how fast we grow. There's no premium for irresponsible super-fast growth."
"This really is early days for the market," said Dadger. "We're just now getting past the early adopters of DevOps and into the early majority. The way we think about it is how do you structure the company to be there for a marathon and not a sprint."
"The carbo-loading you might do if you're about to sprint is very different to the rigorous routine that you adopt when you're training for a marathon," he said.
You can check out the HashiCorp Open Source offerings on their Github page here.
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2dff3df49c40799efae708b5b1eeb637 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/justinwarren/2017/08/24/gigamon-remakes-itself-for-cloud/ | Gigamon Remakes Itself For Cloud | Gigamon Remakes Itself For Cloud
Justin Warren (left) and Blue Cow (right) visit Gigamon in Santa Clara, 28 July 2017 Justin Warren
Gigamon is best known for building a range of network monitoring products designed to work with physical network devices. That presents a challenge when the world starts to use networking devices that are less and less physical and more just fancy software running in the nebulously defined 'cloud'.
In the traditional, physical networking world, network traffic can be intercepted by passing it through a specific device, either by making it a "bump in the wire" that logs everything flowing through it, or by using an existing device to make a copy of traffic and forward it to the monitoring system, such as SPAN ports.
That doesn't work in the cloud where you have virtual machines connected over virtual networks. You never even see the physical network topology that connects everything together.
Gigamon has done quite well out of its main business of intercepting traffic on network wires with special devices installed in datacenters. Revenues have climbed steadily from $68 million in FY 2011 to nearly $311 million in FY 2016. Profits have been a little more hit and miss, with net income sliding from $10 million in FY 2011 to a loss of $41 million in FY 2014 on revenue of $157 million, then rebounding to profit in both 2015 (an anaemic $6 million) and 2016 (a blockbuster $49 million).
The return to profit appears, on my analysis, to be largely a result of simply running the company better and generating sales more effectively. Making fewer mistakes, essentially, and having products and services that customers want to buy.
Part of this is driven by enterprises suddenly discovering that security is something they should care about and spend money on. Some of their newfound vigilance is finding its way into Gigamon's coffers, and this trend is likely to continue as people discover just how insecure everything is if you bother to look.
But Gigamon still needs something for a world where an important subset, at the very least, of an organization's data, is inside one or more clouds.
Using API level monitoring like AWS CloudTrail, or flow logs like AWS CloudWatch, don't provide the same level of visibility that organizations are used to enjoying with their on-site installations. There are whole ecosystems of monitoring and security tools supported by the assumption that they can see raw network packet flows. If you take that underpinning away, the entire edifice comes crashing down.
Organisations have substantial investments in existing systems, and adding an entirely new way of doing things just for cloud is unwieldy. Completely replacing everything to work the way the cloud does is similarly an expensive, and risky, prospect.
Gigamon's answer is to deploy an agent on the host to forward on raw traffic to the existing toolset. It's an appealing option: The existing systems, processes, and human knowledge don't have to be completely replaced overnight to support a new way of working. The benefits of using cloud systems can be obtained without having to give up those existing systems, processes, and knowledge.
The catch is that every vendor will want to deploy an agent on your hosts for exactly the same reasons Gigamon sees value in it. Gigamon is all too aware of the "every vendor wants to install an agent" problem, so their position is that, okay, if you're going to put an agent into your cloud VMs, make it ours and we'll forward traffic to whatever tool needs it.
Gigamon calls this a Visibility Layer and imagines a world where an organization just plugs in tools, be they Gigamon tools or tools from other vendors, to perform various network and data monitoring functions. In this world, Gigamon becomes the de-facto standard on which other tools are built, or at least through which they get access to the data they need. Gigamon gets to control that platform.
The biggest risk to Gigamon's strategy here is if organizations stop looking at network packets and start dealing more directly with data through distributed application tracing, such as with CloudTrail or tools like Prometheus or OpenTracing. Also, the network monitoring approach completely breaks down if you stop using VMs and start using AWS Lambda or Azure Functions and the infrastructure all but disappears.
Based on the rate of adoption of cloud technologies, and organizations' historical ability to change the way they do IT, I reckon that gives Gigamon a good decade or so to figure out what they should sell in that world.
We might even see widespread IPv6 adoption by then.
I attended Cloud Field Day 2 as a guest of Tech Field Day. You can read my disclosure statement about the event here.
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f2899b6760e513d392ffef04bea25a5a | https://www.forbes.com/sites/justinwarren/2017/09/28/manifold-launches-with-developer-services-marketplace/ | Manifold Launches With Developer Services Marketplace | Manifold Launches With Developer Services Marketplace
Jevon MacDonald, CEO and Co-Founder of Manifold Supplied by Manifold
Manifold wants to tackle the growing complexity of service management for development teams by providing a combination of management platform and marketplace for application services commonly used by developers.
Fresh from a $15 million Series A funding round from OMERS Ventures, Boldstart Ventures, Version One Ventures and Amplify Partners, Manifold sees a future where developers use multiple services from all over the Internet—everything from logging, to redis, to email—but without having to manage a large set of one-to-one relationships. Instead, Manifold wants to be the service aggregation point—the marketplace—where developers can discover the services they need, buy them, and use them without locking themselves into a specific cloud vendor's ecosystem.
"As developers build their applications today, more and more they're adding these third party services," said Jevon MacDonald, CEO and co-founder of Manifold, "Whether it's sending an email with Mailgun or using a logging or application performance monitoring tool."
While it's possible to sign up exclusively with a single large cloud provider and use only services available on that platform, developers like the flexibility of being able to choose what they see as the best tool for the job at hand. If you're trying to work out at the edge of the new, limiting your options only to something significant enough to be anointed by a large market player can often feel too restrictive. That's why third party services are so popular, and it's good for the ecosystem overall as third parties push the big players to keep improving their offering.
Manifold's approach is similar in intent to marketplaces offered by distributors and managed service providers in other areas, such as Equinix Marketplace, and Azure Marketplace; it's a well trodden path. That helps Manifold by being easy for potential users to understand where the value of such a platform should be, and what to look for in Manifold's offer.
"Operationally, developer's lives are becoming easier because we're not getting a pager notice at two in the morning when our SMTP server is down," said MacDonald, "But we've created this cloud infrastructure management nightmare." Not everyone is feeling the pain just yet, because while there is now broad market acceptance of cloud as a thing, widespread adoption of apps built as a composition of services is still pretty leading edge. That said, there are enough people doing it at enough volume that I believe Manifold probably isn't too early to market.
For its launch, Manifold has secured just over a dozen of what MacDonald calls core services that developers commonly need, including Mailgun, Scout, RedisGreen, and LogDNA, and now plans to expand the range of services into more niche services. Adding enough services to make signing up worthwhile is the obvious path to growth, so expect to see plenty of announcements from Manifold in coming months as they sign up new partners.
Manifold has a command-line interface for configuring services and creating new environments which feels similar to using virtualenv or docker run to set up an environment in which to develop code. That's appropriate for their initial target market, but I'd want to see web-based dashboards and "dumbed down" interfaces for when more senior, non-technical staff need to get involved down the line. Think enterprise procurement units and what they expect and need.
I'd like to see some strong integration with CI/CD tools so that developers can easily use Manifold as part of their existing development workflows. Requiring a major re-tooling would limit use to completely new projects. Something like Manifold is more compelling to a group that already has a lot of services in use and is hitting the problems Manifold was designed to solve. Integration into an existing, heterogeneous environment is the best opportunity for Manifold to show its value, and while Manifold admits it's early days at this point, it is an area being actively developed.
Manifold intends to make its money through revenue sharing with the service providers on the platform, essentially taking a few points of margin in a pretty standard reseller/channel approach. Customers will pay no more for their services than what they currently pay, so all Manifold needs do is make things easier than setting everything up yourself.
There will, no doubt, be plenty of other companies starting marketplaces of this kind as the number and variety of third party services grows, so establishing an early lead in platform scope and scale will provide a bit of a buffer for Manifold for when the competition heats up.
Manifold is exactly the kind of company I expect to see as the cloud-based services market matures and people look to solve the classic n(n-1) network effect problems that come with systems composed of lots of different services. Aggregation points and abstractions help you tackle problems at larger scope and scale, so if Manifold doesn't succeed, something like it will.
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2bcedb9fe40c17ad7cead10f6d802c4e | https://www.forbes.com/sites/justinwarren/2018/05/09/microsoft-builds-on-ai-development-at-the-edge/ | Microsoft Builds On AI Development At The Edge | Microsoft Builds On AI Development At The Edge
Microsoft's annual Build conference is on this week, and the headline announcements are centered on all things AI and IoT/edge computing.
Microsoft is betting on a world where there are three main computing locations: the cloud, in datacenters, and at the edge, with a layer of AI sprinkled over the top of it all. The company wants to do this with two key platforms: Microsoft Azure, and Microsoft 365.
Sound familiar? It should, because Microsoft has done this before. Azure is Windows, and 365 is Office. These were the two cash cows that propelled Microsoft to become the behemoth that it is today. The plan is the same: make the experience of Microsoft products ubiquitous so that they become the de facto standard, and then print money.
The key to this plan is the same as it was for Windows: developers. If developers find the Azure/365 platform compelling, they'll use it to write their apps, and then customers will want to use those apps, and you end up with a lovely flywheel, because developers want to write apps for the platforms that all their customers are already using. It's why Blackberry, and Nokia, and Windows Phone all died: there was no there there.
The phone battle is lost, so Microsoft is moving on to the edge where the battle is fresh and new and there's no one with a lock on a majority market share. Right now it's the wild west, with the majority of device makers building on some kind of embedded Linux with a few custom utility functions thrown on top, which is why IoT devices are so incredibly robust and secure.
Or, they could use Azure IoT Edge instead and let Microsoft provide all the functions that are expensive to develop on your own, like an app and security update mechanism. When it's a commodity to have (because any competitor can just run IoT Edge as well) then it becomes a hygiene factor. Why try to roll your own security (because that always goes well) when you can just buy it and get on with building stuff customers are willing to pay for? If a bunch of your competitors are using such a platform, not using a similar platform makes your product less desirable.
Right now, security is terrible everywhere, so having to charge a lot more for a low-priced device is a disadvantage when your competitors can just throw something out the door and cry "YOLO!" all the way to bank. The economic incentives pretty much demand that no one care about cybersecurity for cheap computers, particularly for consumer-focused ones. But if it's easy to get security and all the other functions like AI modelling that links to the cloud, why wouldn't you develop with that?
Kevin Gallo, corporate vice president of Windows Developer Platform, at Build 2018 Microsoft (Supplied)
"Windows can be your primary dev box, whether building your cloud back-end, or building experiences for any of your edge devices: PCs, phones, IoT, HoloLens, or even XBox," said Kevin Gallo, corporate vice president of Windows Developer Platform.
It's a clever strategy, and it's worked for Microsoft before. It's also a reaction to developers moving en masse to Linux for their cloud-native applications, which posed an existential threat to Microsoft: If developers stopped writing apps for Windows/Azure/Office/365, everything else would come crashing down because without apps there are no customers, and with no customers there is no money. It's why Microsoft is suddenly best friends with Linux and Open Source: they were winning.
It also reinforces Microsoft's attempt to put Azure everywhere. The other cloud competitors have cloud, sure, but datacenters aren't going away completely, and now with this third location of edge computing, would you prefer to write apps three times, or once? If I can code for Azure and have it run on my IoT devices or in my datacenter with something like Azure Stack, why wouldn't I? As a developer, if I can keep my development costs down and make my apps available to run in more places and therefore get a bigger addressable market, why would I choose not to do that?
That's the question Microsoft's competitors will have to answer for developers and customers. They offer similar services in the cloud and got there first, so Microsoft has been playing catch-up but it's made a lot of progress very quickly. Google has cloud and phones, but no datacenter story, no edge story, and no enterprise story. AWS has been focused on the cloud, though it's pushing Lambda out into the edge as well, which is something to keep a close eye on for the same reason as this Microsoft approach: if I can write Lambda-based programs that run anywhere, why would I target a different platform? But AWS is really focused on enterprises leaving the Windows world behind and moving wholesale to its vision of the world, which for many is a bridge too far.
The idea of ubiquitous computing has been an elusive dream since before Java promised write-once-run-anywhere programs. It's a really hard thing to pull off, and it'll take quite a while, but Microsoft is a force to be reckoned with and you underestimate it at your peril.
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86dc0e8cab87b502c6d116e6195a4290 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/justinwarren/2018/11/02/github-foreshadows-automated-security-fixes/ | GitHub Foreshadows Automated Security Fixes | GitHub Foreshadows Automated Security Fixes
While GitHub Actions hogged the limelight at GitHub's Universe conference a few weeks ago, several other announcements combined foreshadow an interesting future for code security.
"We want security to be ambient around you," said Sam Lambert, GitHub Head of Platform.
Sam Lambert, GitHub Head of Platform, presents at GitHub Universe 2018 Justin Warren
GitHub announced Java and .NET support to the previously announced security vulnerability alerts feature. This adds to the existing support for Javascript, Ruby, and Python. It provides developers with a clear indication that their code has a vulnerability that needs fixing, which is useful, but only does half the job.
There are quite a few flaw detection tools, because detecting a problem is the (relatively) easy part. The harder part is fixing the flaws.
And this is where the announcements start getting really interesting.
GitHub announced a feature called Suggested Changes that essentially embeds a pull request into a code review comment. It's quite focused and tactical, which is great, but it highlights a key part of development workflow: what you do after you detect a flaw.
You can define flaw quite broadly: It could be a feature that hasn't been been implemented yet, a bug in the code, or a dependency that needs updating (to support new features or fix bugs), or lots of other nuanced things. Fixing that flaw usually means changing code in some way, and fully fleshed out pull requests provide this functionality. Suggested Changes just makes it faster and easier to make obviously necessary changes with low friction.
Now add in the research by Omoju Miller, Senior Data Scientist, Machine Learning and her team applied across the set of code that GitHub can see, and all the known flaws and their known fixes. Combine it with the standard developer workflow in GitHub coupled to a programmable API (which already exists) and you have an automated break/fix engine for lots of common, obvious software flaws that cause security issues.
"Soon we'll know what a security fix is at a code level," said Jason Warner, GitHub SVP of Technology.
Altogether this creates a system where you can automatically fix a lot of security flaws. The power of open source means that if someone, somewhere fixes a standard flaw in a standard way, everyone else can reap the benefits as automation applies the fix to all the code that needs it.
While Warner accused me of somehow getting access to GitHub's roadmap (I've never seen it, for the record) these seem like pretty logical and obviously good things to do. The entire momentum of the industry is moving this way, and I'm somewhat disappointed it's taken this long.
The incredible rise of IoT devices and cheap computers running cheap software embedded into just about everything makes this kind of advance pretty urgent, in my opinion. As an industry, we have to do a vastly better job of deploying secure code, and that means it has to be much cheaper and easier to do.
Soon we may very well be able to demand: Computer, heal thyself.
I travelled to GitHub Universe as a guest of GitHub. Read my full disclosure statement here.
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e09f849f53ce4f047cbe147b4805f53e | https://www.forbes.com/sites/juyoungseo/2015/08/10/the-best-luxury-hotel-in-menorca/ | Inside the Best Luxury Hotel in Menorca | Inside the Best Luxury Hotel in Menorca
Menorca, the second largest of the Balearic Islands, has long been overshadowed by its larger sister island, Mallorca, and the much smaller Ibiza which has a notorious party-town reputation. However, in recent years, Menorca’s tourism has been undergoing a Renaissance.
Among the many reasons is the island’s unspoiled natural beauty. Menorca was declared a Biosphere Reserve by Unesco in 1993 for its impressive variety of flora and fauna -- about 200 species of birds and 1,000 species of plants, according to Unesco. As a consequence, the extensive -- and lamentable -- hotel development found in Mallorca thankfully doesn’t exist here.
Menorca’s large number of beaches with turquoise-color water -- more than the number of beaches in Mallorca and Ibiza combined -- is the number-one appeal for those who want nothing but to unwind.
Menorca’s growing popularity is reflected in the surge of new boutique hotels throughout the island and the booming food scene created by Michelin-starred chefs from mainland Spain. Nevertheless, the essence of Menorca lies in its tranquility and rural tradition.
The old medieval city of Ciutadella is the most vibrant and picturesque urban area on the island and cannot be missed. The town's architecture -- a mix of Arabic influence, Spanish Gothic and Baroque-- reflects its rich history. But if you want nothing but a relaxing and easy-going vacation and, at the same time, to experience the essence of rural Menorca -- after all, this island is most famous for the Mahon cheese produced from local cows milk and, reputedly, being the place where mayonnaise originated -- agroturismo (agriturismo in Italian) is the way to go.
Italian in origin, agroturismo refers to a type of hotel that was originally a farmhouse. The controversial €4,885 ($5,325) per night luxury residence that former French President Nicolas Sarkozy has taken up this summer on the southern coast of Corsica is a good example of this type of accommodation: chill, unwind and be pampered. In response to the increasing number of stylish visitors, these old fincas in Menorca are also becoming less rural and more posh, while still maintaining their original structure and character. A few luxury options are found throughout the island but the most brilliant example of agroturismos -- and also proof of Menorca’s transformation to a luxury travel destination -- is Torralbenc.
Situated in Alaior, about a 10-minute drive from the airport, this utterly charming hotel exudes understated luxury and ticks all the boxes for those who want to experience the best of Menorca.
Opened in 2013, this 19th and 20th century farmhouse with 27 rooms has white-washed stone walls in an exquisite setting with its own 10-acre vineyard and olive trees. Designed by Antoni Esteva, the stellar architect specializing in luxury villas and accommodations in the Balearic islands, the original features of the building were beautifully kept, including some of the furniture used for the interior. The sandstone and limestone used in the original structure were fortified by adding new sandstone during the renovation. The rooms are designed simply but tastefully, each room featuring a bath and a walk-in shower, and also a Nespresso machine.
This unmistakably luxurious hotel is welcoming for families with young children even though there are no family-suites per-se. It’s necessary to book two rooms for a family of four. Each room has a private terrace -- either opening directly onto the garden if it’s on the garden level or overlooking the ocean. The ‘Pool Cottage’, the most luxurious option, offers a private swimming pool. For those who are not lucky enough to splurge on the pool cottage, the outdoor swimming pool with views of the southern coast of the island is blissful. Simple but well put-together breakfast is cooked to order and served either on your own terrace or the outdoor restaurant area.
Of all the charming features of the hotel, the best is its restaurant. Under the guidance of a Michelin-starred chef, Paco Morales, the menu is small but carefully put together, embracing Menorcan tradition with a modern sophistication. The young and talented Morales, who was trained at El Bulli by Ferran Adria, also owns other restaurants in Madrid and Cordoba. Regarded as one of the best chefs in Spain, he personally oversees this restaurant one-third of each month.
The restaurant also offers an impressive wine selection -- about 300 bottles in the cellar and 200 on the menu -- and has a highly unusual policy: you can order any wine from the entire menu by the glass. The sommelier extraordinaire, Bruno Tannino, who worked in various top restaurants in Barcelona until he joined Morales, combines an extensive knowledge and charismatic personality and helps you brilliantly pair Morales’ delicate cooking with the perfect wine.
Young children are welcome, evident from the presence of high-chairs in the restaurant and the staff’s immediate help adding extra cushions to children’s chairs. To children’s fascination, the restaurant also offers a variety of organic juice made from the grapes used to make wine, such as cabernet sauvignon and merlot. A recent project started in Catalonia, these products are exclusively found in Catalonian region at the moment.
Even if you don’t stay at Torralbenc the restaurant is definitely worth the visit.
Torralbenc Menorca:
Address: Ctra. Maó – Cala’n Porter, Km.10, 07730 Alaior, Menorca, Balearic Islands
Telephone: +34 971 37 72 11
Information & Booking: info@torralbenc.com
Website: http://www.torralbenc.com/en/index.html
Ambience: chic, understated easy glamour. Children are welcome but it has a grown-up atmosphere.
Guests: mostly Spanish, British and French -- in that order
The best time to go: Mid-June through September if you want to use the outdoor swimming pool
Places to visit: Fornells, the prettiest port that is full of stylish Spanish families and the former King of Spain, Juan Carlos, often sails into, is 30 minutes away. Cala Mitjana, one of the best beaches on the southern coast, is within 30 minutes. Torre Gaumes is just around the corner if you want to see a prehistoric talayotic settlement. While some locals might find it too touristy and not suitable for children, Cova d’en Xoroi is situated in the spectacular natural cave and the views will blow you away.
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0aff33daa44103e54cbd76b9d5220602 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/juyoungseo/2016/03/10/sustainable-luxury-tom-cridlands-30-year-sweatshirt/ | Sustainable Luxury: Tom Cridland's "30 Year Sweatshirt" | Sustainable Luxury: Tom Cridland's "30 Year Sweatshirt"
In an age where clothing companies compete by creating fast fashion with quick inventory turnover, U.K. designer Tom Cridland’s “30 Year Sweatshirt” is a refreshing concept. The idea has already caught on with celebrities such as Daniel Craig and Ben Stiller.
Cridland guarantees that your sweatshirt will last 30 years. How? It’s built to last in the first place with high-quality material so if the garment is damaged for any reason the company will repair or replace it free of charge.
What kind of business is this, you might wonder.
At his pop-up store on King’s Road, Chelsea, London, Cridland, a 25-year-old enthusiastic entrepreneur tells me that he founded his eponymous company with an ambition to create a sustainable, eco-conscious business by reducing a needless cycle of consumption and waste. Cridland uses his “30 Year Sweatshirt” (and also a “30 Year T-Shirt” that was added recently) as sustainable fashion campaigns to increase public awareness and encourage corporate responsibility in the industry that is the world’s second least environmentally friendly industry after oil.
Upon graduating from the University of Bristol, where he majored in French and Portuguese, he started working on his business idea. Within six months, he launched the company with £6,000 ($9,000) government loan.
“I wanted to create a fashion label evoking a bygone era when clothing was made with exquisite care and taste, and that had a strong focus on sustainability too,” Cridland explains. “I started with pants and chinos, which I wanted to be our signature to begin with, and then I launched The 30 Year Sweatshirt as our second product.”
Why did he choose the sweatshirt? “The 30 Year Sweatshirt is our bona fide sustainable fashion campaign. The reason why we chose a sweatshirt as the garment to guarantee for three decades is because we obviously had to consider what sort of clothing people would actually want to hang onto for that long. A sweatshirt is timeless and is the cornerstone of many people's casual wardrobe.”
He aims to make a truly durable garment by using 360-grams-per-meter cotton and a small amount of polyester for comfort and mobility. All of the stitching is double reinforced to prevent wear and tear. He worked on the design in partnership with artisans in Portugal, where Cridland’s mother is from. He wants to raise the quality to an even higher level and is in the process of moving the production to Italy with the intention of using Italian fabrics and craftsmanship.
The 30 Year Sweatshirt comes in nine colors: Chilli Red, Classic Navy, Dove White, Electric Blue, Green Goblin, Grey Seal , Seville Orange , Sherbet Lemon and Sunset Bluelevard (it’s a kind of blue).
The superb quality aside, the collection itself is quite small, limited to men’s sweatshirts, T-shirts, jackets and trousers. When I point this out he explains, “I didn't want to rush into creating a full collection. Instead, every single product, no matter how simple, should be developed as meticulously as a full collection normally would be. Importantly, we have always shipped all over the world, as I wanted Tom Cridland to be a truly international brand.”
It’s a rather earnest and prudent approach to business, at least for now. He is planning to incorporate a women’s line in the near future and produce “limited editions” as well.
This combination of his honest approach to clothing production, efforts to raise awareness of the non-sustainable way the public consumes fashion, and the luxurious quality of garments earned the popularity among celebrities. He custom designed a jacket for Nigel Olsson -- Elton John’s drummer for over 45 years -- for Elton’s Wonderful Crazy Night Tour in Los Angeles.
His designs have also been seen on the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio, Hugh Grant, Stephen Fry, Daniel Craig, Ben Stiller, Jeremy Piven, Rod Stewart, Brandon Flowers, Robbie Williams, Nile Rodgers, Michael Portillo, Stephen Merchant, Frankie Valli, among others.
This month, Cridland is officially launching his brand in the U.S. He’ll start by touring in Los Angeles and New York. He will be spending about 3 to 4 months a year in LA from now on. A good move as, after all, no other city does “luxury casual” better than LA. Cridland will have appearances in the press and be lecturing at universities as well.
In 2015, two years after launching his business, Cridland’s revenues were over $1 million. Not bad for a college graduate who started with a mere $9,000.
-The 30 Year Sweatshirt is £65 ($90) and the 30 Year Jacket is available from £199 ($280). They're available worldwide from tomcridland.co.uk, with flat rate shipping.
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e6870bd66379e5c77d721c756a06947e | https://www.forbes.com/sites/juyoungseo/2016/04/23/is-burj-al-arab-in-dubai-the-most-luxurious-hotel-in-the-world/ | Is Burj Al Arab in Dubai the Most Luxurious Hotel in the World? | Is Burj Al Arab in Dubai the Most Luxurious Hotel in the World?
The answer is yes if you believe that what determines the degree of luxury is unapologetic opulence and indulgent personal service that spoils you rotten 24/7. However, the exuberant interior -- picture gold leaf, leopard upholstery, embroidered silk wallpaper everywhere -- might not suit everyone’s taste.
I was wondering if Burj Al Arab really would live up to its reputation as the best hotel in the world. After all, a mega dose of bling doesn’t necessarily translate into good taste. So when I was recently in Dubai to attend the opening of the bar Gold On 27, the newest addition to the hotel, I decided to check out this legendary place.
If you’re a guest at Burj Al Arab, the moment you arrive at the airport you get swept off your feet by a white Rolls Royce -- that is, if you decide not to arrange a helicopter transfer from the Dubai International Airport and land on the rooftop of the hotel (on the helipad at 212 meters (696 feet) above sea level where Roger Federer once played).
By the time your chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce crosses a bridge to the man-made island the hotel is built on, you will notice that this architectural gem of a hotel offers quite a sight. Structured in the shape of a billowing Arabian dhow sail in a nod to the country’s seafaring heritage, Burj al Arab has become a symbol of Dubai just as the Statue of Liberty is to New York and the Eiffel Tower is to Paris.
There’s nothing usual about this building, as it’s founded on sand, not on rock. It’s standing at 280 meters (920 feet) tall on 250 concrete columns, each of 1.5 meters in diameter, that go 45 meters (148 feet) under the sea.
If you get dizzy at the thought of these columns holding up the entire building, you’ll quickly be distracted by the lavish interior. The marble adorning over 258,000 square feet of walls and flooring are the rarest (and most precious found in Italy) Statuario marble -- the kind used by Michelangelo to create his masterpieces.
Whether or not it’s your cup of tea, it’s hard not to be blown away by the sheer luxury. Call it flashy, bold, over-the-top if you wish, but you don’t often come across such richness thrown at you. All that glitters is actually gold at Burj Al Arab. Real 24-carat gold leaf covers approximately 22,000 square feet of the interior, including the TV screens.
All 202 rooms are duplex suites boasting spectacular views of the Arabian Gulf. The rooms are so big (the smallest one is 1,830 square feet) that it took a while for the butler to show me around and explain how to operate all the buttons and knobs. Should you decide to stay in one of the two Royal Suites (each measuring 8,400 square feet) it gets more interesting with revolving beds that, surrounded by mirrors, slowly spin around at a push of the button.
The super king beds in each suite are covered by Egyptian cotton sheets and you have a selection of 17 types of pillows. I started going through the brochure to decide but gave up by the time I reached the third page. It turned out that being the Princess and the Pea is a full-time job.
The spacious bathrooms are decorated with mosaics and come with a big jacuzzi. On the huge sink are laid a set of 14 his-and-her full-size Hermes toiletries, including perfume and eau de cologne.
Once I was done unpacking (which my butler offered to do for me but I said no, as I was feeling conscious that there were no Agent Provocateur lingerie, sky-high Louboutin heels and Alaia evening dresses in my suitcase), I was out of my room to look around.
Each time I was on my way out I had to walk past the private butler who would greet me and recognize me, as he had my photo on the computer screen. There is a butler on each floor and the hotel is known for its extremely dedicated and unrivaled private service. These butlers have a reputation for being able to do anything. A bit like a genie in a bottle, I suppose.
The award-winning Talise Spa was my first stop, which was perfect after a long flight. The treatment rooms, unlike most spas, have big windows overlooking the ocean. If you like a dimly lit atmosphere you might find it too bright but they’ll draw the curtains at your request. They use products such as La Prairie. There are also four swimming pools -- both indoor and outdoor -- including a pool only for women.
If you’re a romantic type, you can book the “Romantic Moonlight Swim.” They prepare the swimming pool for two with rose petals and you can spend a night surrounded by the views of the Arabian Gulf while enjoying the moonlight, champagne and strawberries, all in complete privacy.
The hotel has nine restaurants and bars. For breakfast, I liked Bab Al Yam on the ground floor, as whether you sit inside or outside you have splendid ocean views. The food is served buffet-style, mainly European but also some Middle Eastern. For lunch, take an express panoramic elevator and go up to Al Muntaha (meaning, “The Highest”) on the 27th floor. Situated 200 meters above sea level and with windows from ceiling to floor, it’s easy to understand why this ever-popular restaurant gets booked up all the time. While I was having my lunch there I noticed people walking in just to take photos and admire the view. The Skyview Bar is equally in demand for its setting to enjoy afternoon tea or drinks.
At dinnertime, something mysterious and magical might be required. In that case, book a table at the legendary Al Mahara (meaning, “Oyster Shell”). As you enter through the golden arch entrance the impressive gigantic blue aquarium comes into view. All the tables are arranged around this sea-water tank filled with exotic fish. They told me that the aquarium often gets dubbed as a place for marriage proposals: a diver will appear with a sign while you’re dining. It seems like a choking hazard but nevertheless it’s a popular package, I was told. They serve solid seafood dishes which will improve further in September when the British Michelin-starred chef, Nathan Outlaw brings his expertise and collaborates with resident chefs.
As if all these are not enough, a new exquisite bar opened on the 27th floor, which was why I was in Dubai in the first place. Named Gold On 27, the opening of this uber-hip bar was highly anticipated by both locals and international visitors as it’s taken the standards for Dubai nightlife to another level. If you’re a smoker you’ll like the smoking-permitted policy. Apart from the stunning view across Dubai, it offers “progressive cocktails” using unusual ingredients. Some of the creative blends include Light Sweet Crude (using foie gras and blackened truffle oil), Scent of the Souk (using oud oil, rosemary and spices) and A Ghaaf, a Goat and a Camel (using goat cheese foam).
The interior has a soft, warm and sensuous glow throughout as it’s bedecked with gold. As you may have noticed already, gold is the most ubiquitous material at Burj Al Arab. If being surrounded by gold is not enough you can drink it in the form of a cocktail: order Element 79 (79 is also the atomic number for gold), an alcohol-free sparkling grape drink with copious amounts of golden dust. Sipping a cocktail at sunset and gazing at the dramatic view while internationally acclaimed resident DJ Darko De Jan creates a sophisticated mood is possibly the most glamorous thing you can do while in Dubai.
By the time you leave Burj Al Arab you sort of get it: you can see why this hotel has earned a reputation as the most luxurious hotel in the world. Of course all this pampering and dreamy indulgence come at a high price. The One Bedroom Suite starts at AED 10,000 ($2,700) per night and the most luxurious Royal Suite is AED 70,000 ($19,000) per night. Is it worth it? It’s the question that you should answer to yourself after checking your bank account.
What’s for sure is that staying at Burj Al Arab is having a taste of a fantasy life of extreme wealth and glamour. After all, Dubai is becoming -- already has become -- a place for “destination travel” for the most extravagant and sumptuous experience. So, Burj Al Arab, purposefully designed in such an extraordinary manner with the intention of recreating the glory and splendor of the Arabian heritage, might be quite an apt choice for creating your own Arabian nights.
OTHER FACTS TO KNOW WHILE STAYING AT BURJ AL ARAB:
As a guest at Burj Al Arab, you have access to the private beach on the other side of the bridge. Sunbeds, mineral water facial sprays and refreshments are all complimentary. You can easily hop on a buggy outside the hotel for a two-minute drive to the south side of the bridge.
-While you’re on the other side of the bridge, check out Madinat Jumeirah. Along the 2 kilometer beach (the longest in Dubai) are lined a series of other Jumeirah hotels forming a private luxury “village” (“madinat” means village in Arabic). From the Madinat, you have the splendid view of Burj Al Arab at all times. It also has 40 restaurants that you have access to no matter which hotel you’re staying.
So the next time you return to Dubai, you may want to stay at Jumeirah Al Qasr (“the palace” in Arabic) if you want to feel like a royal. Built in the style of a Sheikh’s residence, it thoroughly offers a wow factor with tall ceilings, blindingly opulent chandeliers and marble flooring.
For families, Jumeirah Mina A’Salam is the best option as it’s a gateway to explore all corners of the resort either through walkways or man-made canals. There are ten restaurants including a fun Mexican restaurant and five swimming pools including an adult-only pool. The biggest attraction for children is the large pond where the endangered turtles are kept as part of the Dubai Turtle Rehabilitation Project (DTRP). Read more about it here.
If tranquility and peace are what you’re after Jumeirah Dar Al Masyaf is the place. It’s the complete opposite of Burj Al Arab: the sophisticated muted colour palette dominates the property and the quiet courtyard is designed in the manner of old Arabian houses. During your stay, everything is arranged through butlers. These villas can be rented by room or as an entire house.
If that is not enough privacy and you want to be completely invisible, then there is the Jumeirah Malakiya Villas. This most luxurious accommodation within Madinat Jumeirah has private pools, 24 hour butler service in the complete secluded location surrounded by lush garden. It has its own direct and private access to souk, beach and abras.
-Friday brunch is the highlight of the week for locals. People dress up for a get-together with families and friends and eat all afternoon, normally from 12:30 to 4 p.m.. Jumeirah Al Qasr offers one of the biggest brunch menus in Dubai, with all kinds of international cuisine from Arabic to Japanese to Jamaican. The prices starts at AED 250 ($70) for a child and goes up to AED 595 ($160) if bubbly and cocktails are included.
Jumeirah Mina A’Salam also offers Friday brunch with international and Mexican dishes. It also has a separate children’s area with fun entertainment.
Tables get fully booked every Friday so book in advance.
-Take an Abra tour. It starts outside the souk. Buy the tickets at Abra Souk Station and hop on the traditional boat to explore the resort.
-Visit Madinat Souk: Don’t imagine anything like chaotic souks in Morocco with pungent smell of cow hide and pickpockets. It’s a replica of an old traditional market with over 95 boutiques. You wouldn’t need to go there for antique hunting but its air-conditioned ambience is convenient to shop for things such as Vilebrequin swimsuits or to watch shows at Madinat Theatre where they present musicals, ballets and children’s shows, often brought from London's West End. There are also cafes and restaurants.
-Have lunch at Shimmers on the Beach: Located outside Mina A’Salam right on the water, I found it the best restaurant within the Madinat Resort to feel most like you’re on vacation, with spectacular views of the Arabian Gulf and Burj Al Arab, sea breeze and light Mediterranean food.
-Sinbad’s Kids Club for children ages 2 to 12: the area covers 1,1178 square meters and offer both indoor and outdoor play areas. There are outdoor swimming pool, small soccer field, indoor rock climbing area, face painting activity among others.
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98a29039b3b0af42a10cccfe7dbb54d6 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/juyoungseo/2017/02/05/harrods-to-launch-luxury-iceberg-water/ | Harrods to Launch 'Luxury' Iceberg Water | Harrods to Launch 'Luxury' Iceberg Water
Harrods, the famous department store in London, is a cabinet of curiosities when it comes to luxury. Now it is preparing to launch Svalbarði “luxury water", at £50 ($63) a bottle if there ever has been such a thing.
The product was conceived by Jamal Qureshi, a Norwegian-American Wall Street businessman when he visited a remote Norwegian island in the Svalbard archipelago in 2013 and brought back melted iceberg water as a gift for his wife.
A few years later, he got an approval from the governor of Svalbard and now charters an icebreaker and harvests the icebergs in Kongsfjorden, 1,000 kilometers from the North Pole. Once 15 tons of ice is collected by the crew, it’s melted and bottled by hand. The company says that only micron filters and UV light are used to preserve the water’s natural composition and pure taste. The water is almost entirely mineral free, with no nitrates or pollutants.
The island of Svalbard where the water is sourced.
There are two expeditions per year, producing 13,000 bottles each time. Each batch will be sold as a limited edition.
The aerial view of Svalbard.
The 750ml bottle looks more like a bottle of wine than water. The mint-colored ring around the top symbolizes the polar rings and the wooden bottle top symbolizes drift wood.
Harrods was chosen as the first store to stock this product and the global launch is scheduled for February 15.
If you’re looking for something unusual other than packets of tea or chocolates on your next visit to the Harrods Food Hall, the Svalbarði water is certainly uncommon. Can a bottle of water be worth £50 ($63)? That’s for you to try and decide.
Svalbarði will be exclusive to Harrods for now but can be shipped worldwide.
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b6f0f1089dc51d4a1171845025d71510 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/juyoungseo/2020/02/06/riggs-washington-dc-a-historic-bank-is-having-a-second-life-as-a-swanky-hotel/ | Riggs Washington DC: A Historic Bank Is Having A Second Life As A Swanky Hotel | Riggs Washington DC: A Historic Bank Is Having A Second Life As A Swanky Hotel
A company that created two of Europe’s coolest boutique hotels has turned its sights on Washington, D.C. with the launch of Riggs Washington DC.
After successes with Sea Containers London on Thames River and the Pulitzer Amsterdam, Lore Group chose Washington D.C. as the third location for its expanding business.
The historic Riggs National Bank transformed into a swanky hotel in Washington D.C.'s Penn Quarter. Jennifer Hughes for Riggs Washington DC
It’s a bold but timely move, given how much this political metropolis has changed in recent years. The city has gone through a remarkable rejuvenation in recent years and the restaurant scene is booming (The quickest way to understand it: Bon Appetit named it as the “restaurant city of the year” in 2016.)
Located opposite the National Portrait Gallery in Penn Quarter and within walking distance to the city’s main attractions, such as the White House and the National Mall, Riggs Washington DC boasts an impossibly central location. The rooftop terrace sports views of landmarks including the U.S. Capitol Building.
The hotel is housed in the former Riggs National Bank where 23 U.S. presidents banked, including Abraham Lincoln — hence, it was once nicknamed the “Bank of Presidents.” The grand Romanesque-revival building dating to the late 19th century still contains historic — and rather masculine — features but with Jacu Strauss at the helm as Creative Director, the old financial institution has been transformed into a plush hotel. And what a transformation it has been.
Abraham Lincoln was one of the clients at Riggs National Bank. Getty
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“We honor the heritage and history of the original building but, after all, it’s not a restoration project,” Strauss said. The imposing facade is matched by the equally magnificent pillars and vaulted ceiling inside. And Strauss enhanced the original grandeur by adding personally designed massive brass chandeliers in the entryway and lobby. But he also subtly injected a touch of femininity throughout the premise. The large medallion of Juno Moneta, the Roman goddess of money, originally found on one of the original banking doors is now adorning the reception area. “In the historic sense, Riggs is a very masculine place but I’ve focused on feminine symbols,” says Strauss.
Juno Moneta Medallion in the lobby. Jennifer Hughes for Riggs Washington DC
His whimsical design is evident in the hotel’s 181 guest rooms. The exuberant Voutsa wallpapers were inspired by ornamental Baroque paintings; the minibars were designed in the style of a vintage steel safe. But the most delightful rooms of all are four “First Lady Suites,” named after the relatively obscure spouses of some former Presidents, such as Louisa Adams and Caroline Harrison. The individual design of the rooms pays homage to each of the ladies to reflect their contribution to the interior of the White House. Here, one can witness Jacu Strauss’ clever way of interpreting history, which he already demonstrated at Pulitzer Amsterdam. Here once again, he brought bits of history from the 19th-century and made them blend seamlessly into a 21st-century context.
A standard king room at Riggs Washington DC. Jennifer Hughes for Riggs Washington DC
On the gastronomic front, Café Riggs next to the first-floor lobby offers all-day dining in an airy and luxurious atmosphere. The space, which could have looked stark due to its massive columns and high ceiling, turned out to be cozy and welcoming with the addition of the velvet crimson drapery and furniture designed by Jacu Strauss himself. Chef Patrick Curran from Momofuku CCDC is in charge of the menu, overseeing classic items with a lighter and contemporary touch. The cafe serves everything from acai bowls, fresh juices, pastries and coffee from the local Small Planes Roastery in the morning, and crowd-pleasing classic dishes for lunch and dinner until 11 pm.
Café Riggs at Riggs Washington DC offers an all-day dining experience. Jennifer Hughes for Riggs Washington DC
The bar at Café Riggs. Jennifer Hughes for Riggs Washington DC
All that sounds exciting but perhaps the jewel of the hotel is the sleek subterranean bar, Silver Lyan.
The geometric lines — reminiscent of early Art Deco — and dark oak panellings mixed with warm orange-hue sofas and kitschy Americana trophies create an edgy but welcoming vibe. Opulent decor aside, the boozy creations here are the reason why everyone is watching this space.
Ryan Chetiyawardana (a.k.a. Mr Lyan), the barman extraordinaire in charge, is a world-renowned entrepreneur in the drinks industry. His fanciful cocktails already earned Dandelyan — his now-defunct flagship bar at former Mondrian Hotel in London — the title of the best bar in the world by The World’s 20 Best Bars in 2018, the authority in the world of drinks. And that title is just one of many accolades that Mr. Lyan has achieved so far.
Silver Lyan serves cocktails with cultural and historic references. Jennifer Hughes for Riggs Washington DC
Silver Lyan is his first ambitious venture outside Europe. So naturally, the concept of the bar is focused on the theme of “exchange,” from cultural and historical perspectives. Each of the cocktails on the menu will tell a story of America in this context. For instance, The Japanese Saddle was concocted to commemorate the relationship between the two countries in 1912 when Japan gifted cherry blossom trees to the U.S. “We wanted to create a space for cultural exchange rather than political gathering,” Jacu Strauss says about Silver Lyan.
Riggs Washington DC is quirky and humorous but still respectful of the past and without compromising the aesthetic standards. Whether this politically charged city is ready or not, the opening will help the capital city step up its game in the hospitality field, alongside the recent re-opening of Rosewood and the launch of Thompson Washington D.C. It’s a good reason to be excited about, for residents and visitors alike.
Riggs Washington DC is at 900 F Street NW, Washington D.C. 20004.
(Phone): +1 202-638-1800
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82b5dec862acac6ec82dcc7a8a1e72c5 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/juyoungseo/2020/11/15/8-of-the-best-hotels-in-the-catskills-and-hudson-valley/ | 8 Of The Best Hotels In The Catskills And Hudson Valley | 8 Of The Best Hotels In The Catskills And Hudson Valley
It’s no secret that the Hudson Valley and Catskill region have been going through a renaissance in recent years.
Just under a 3-hour drive from New York City, the area has plenty to offer with its art galleries, antique shops, and expanding culinary scene. In this age of the Covid-19, it’s become more alluring than ever as a travel destination. The range of outdoor activities are wide, providing a perfect getaway in the warmer months with boating, kayaking and hiking, as well as spectacular foliage in the fall and skiing in the winter.
With a series of new hotel openings despite the pandemic, the region is back on the travel map due to its popularity among hipster urbanites.
Here are some of the best hotels in the area, some of them new and others traditional. Check the local health guidelines and hotel policies to ensure safe travel.
1. Eastwind Hotel & Bar: Scandi charm in Windham
Scandi-chic Eastwind Hotel & Bar in Windham, NY in the Catskills. Eastwind Hotel & Bar
This small property that started its modest life as a bunkhouse for fly-fishermen and hunters in the 1920’s, was revamped and opened in 2018 as a stylish mid-century modern hotel. The Scandinavian minimalistic interior is decorated with Macramé wall hangings, warm-colored wooden furniture and vintage Turkish rugs, creating a hygge-inducing cozy atmosphere.
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Situated in Windham, approximately a three-hour drive from NYC and Boston, this pet-friendly hotel is close to plenty of outdoor activities, such as horseback riding, skiing, hiking, fly-fishing, and others.
Lushna cabins and suites at Eastwind Hotel & Bar in Windham, NY in the Catskills. Lawrence Braun
For those wanting privacy and space, Lushna cabins and suites provide an unbeatable “glamping” experience. The three newly added loft-style suites are separate accommodations with a private deck from which one can enjoy panoramic views of Windham Mountain while sipping cocktails delivered to each property.
Each suite boasts a cozy writer’s nook with a desk and Frette linens. The hotel also comes with electric car chargers and a wood barrel-sauna.
2. The Maker Hotel: European glamour in downtown Hudson
The library at The Maker Hotel in Hudson, NY. Francine Zaslow
The Maker Hotel was opened in the summer of 2020, by Lev Glazman and Alina Roytberg, founders of the global skincare brand Fresh, with the help of hospitality expert Damien Janowicz.
The spacious 11 rooms are arranged across three historic buildings — a Georgian mansion, a Greek Revival building and a carriage house — exuding a sense of history and sophistication. The interior is an eclectic mix of Mid-Century and Scandinavian but its dark, intimate and plush design sets it apart from most of the rustic hotels in the area.
The main restaurant is located in a light-filled conservatory, serving high-quality coffee and fresh-baked pastries as well as a light all-day menu to eat in or take away. For a proper dining experience, there is a brasserie menu that includes steak tartare, grilled trout, chicken paillard, cheeseburger, among others.
More Manhattan than the Catskills as we traditionally know it.
3. Scribner’s Catskills Lodge: Brooklyn hipster meets the country in Hunter
Scribner's Catskill Lodge is situated by Hunter Mountain, NY. Carly Planker
Nestled in gorgeous surroundings, this Catskills institution from the ’60s is more stylish than ever since the makeover in 2015. Knotty pine panels in the lobby give the place an unmistakably mountain lodge look but the interior throughout the hotel is more Scandi-chic than rugged Swiss chalet style. The decor is minimalistic, accented with vintage rugs and modern art.
The private wooden deck outside most of the 38 guest rooms is a perfect spot to enjoy beautiful views of Hunter Mountain where one of the main ski resorts in the region is located.
Prospect Bar and Restaurant serves dishes that pay homage to the local cuisine. The menu is not big but includes highly delectable dishes, ranging from pasta to meat roast, fish and grain bowls.
4. The North Branch Inn: Cozy as it gets in North Branch
The cozy interior of The North Branch Inn in the Catskills. The North Branch Inn
Located just two hours away from NYC, staying at The North Branch Inn in a quaint little town of the eponymous name is as comforting as staying at your grandmother’s house. For a place relatively close to the city, the hotel is ideal for those who want to forget about it all and unwind.
All 14 rooms are spread across three buildings on the premise and tastefully decorated with vintage finds mixed with modern accents. Each room features an en-suite bathroom with Malin+Goetz products and Sferra towels.
While it’s homey inside and one may just want to curl up and stay in, the 7-acre ground is an ideal place to stroll around and have a picnic. There are common areas to make a bonfire and eat s’mores or cozy up by a fireplace. Outside the hotel grounds, there’s a 9-hole golf course, fly-fishing opportunities, and hiking trails.
The restaurant is a crown jewel of the hotel, reflecting the background of Sims Foster, the owner of The North Branch Inn, who had worked extensively with chefs in the hospitality business before he opened his own hotels. The menu is small but each dish is done superbly using local ingredients.
Their nearby sister hotels The DeBruce and the upscale Kenoza Hall are popular and also known for food as well as the beautiful setting surrounded by nature.
5. Mohonk Mountain House: All the comfort of a grand hotel on the lake in New Paltz.
Mohonk Mountain House in the Catskills. Mohonk Mountain House
Majestically standing on the Hudson River, this grand Victorian hotel dating back to the 19th century is only an hour and half from New York City. It boasts a spectacular view of the glacial lake and has a history of having been visited by several former Presidents of the United States.
The hotel is a National Historic Landmark surrounded by the extensive 40,000 acres forest which means that there are many ways to explore the surrounding nature, including hiking through the 85-mile trail.
It provides an impressive range of activities for families and couples: guests can try paddle boats on the lake, horseback riding, cross-country skiing and snowshoeing. There is also an indoor heated pool, award-winning spa, 9-hole golf course, tennis courts and a kids’ club.
For foodies, it’s an all-day feast at Mohonk with a farm-to-table approach to cooking. Breakfast includes eggs, pastries and fruits while the lunch and dinner menu offers salads, pasta, roast fish and meat.
6. The Herwood Inn: Modern bohemian living in Woodstock
The Herwood Inn is conveniently located in the heart of Woodstock, NY. The Herwood Inn
Located in the heart of the iconic Woodstock, this small hotel with only 4 rooms offers a convenient accommodation for those who desire to stay in the historically hippie town.
The rooms range from a suite that sleeps 4 people to a studio for 2 people, and are all aptly named after iconic female musicians — The King Suite after Carole King, The Nicks Nook for Stevie Nicks, The Franklin Flat for Aretha Franklin, and The Mitchell Manor for Joni Mitchell (the last two are pet-friendly). Each room is built like a separate house and comes with a kitchenette.
The vibes are fun and youthful which is reflected in the colorful design of the interior. Zodiac gemstones are displayed in each room representing the musician it’s named after (Apparently Carole King’s birthstone is amethyst.)
There is a communal patio and a cedar hot tub. Snacks and drinks are available at The Commune shop. Guests will also find organic markets, cafes and bakeries down the street in downtown Woodstock.
7. Spruceton Inn: A Little “Farmhouse” on the Prairie in West Kill.
Spruceton Inn is an old Dutch farmhouse converted into a hotel in West Kill, NY. Natalie Chitwood
This cute little “bed and bar” with nine rooms is housed in an old Dutch farmhouse dating back to the 1800’s, about 2 hours and 40 minutes from NYC.
Staying at Spruceton Inn means going back to basics, stepping back in time. There’s no TV or Wi-Fi (Do not despair. There’s internet in Room One where the bar is located) and the guest rooms are decorated to a bare minimum. Still, the interior without clutter (Marie Kondo would have approved) feels inviting rather than ascetic, with cozy white beds and artworks on the walls. Large windows and tables made with salvaged wood from their barn also add charm to the rooms.
Guests will find logs stored outside each room to make a fire, as well as a hammock, a tree swing, 5 fire pits, and Weber grills throughout the 8-acre property.
It’s a minimalists’ dream.
(Spruceton Inn is currently closed due to Covid-19. Watch for an update.)
8. Starlite Motel: Instagram-worthy 60’s motor lodge in Kerhonkson
Starlite Motel -- a former roadside mainstay -- is a stylish lodging in the Catskills. Starlite Motel
This 60’s roadside mainstay in Kerhonkson was reborn as stylish lodging after the new owners, Alix Umen, Adriana Farmiga and Gwen Hill, who come from art, fashion and design backgrounds, gave it a new life.
They kept the original structure for a retro feel but added glamour and humor by adding pink to the exterior and reproducing the original robin-egg-blue doors. The effect is so eye-catching and dreamy that it’s been described as evocative of the Wes Anderson movies and photographed by many Instagram influencers.
The interior is a harmonious and intentional jumble of Shaker, Mid-Century and Scandinavian furniture mixed with local artists’ works.
In all 16 rooms, guests can relax with custom bath products, a Smeg refrigerator, and coffee and tea service.
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e398870fef3ea8a19a8e7aa935749b58 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jvchamary/2014/09/30/dinosaurs/?sh=3dbb25d77396 | Dinosaurs, Pterosaurs And Other Saurs -- Big Differences | Dinosaurs, Pterosaurs And Other Saurs -- Big Differences
What is a dinosaur? Here's the definition from Dictionary.com:
Any chiefly terrestrial, herbivorous or carnivorous reptile of the extinct orders Saurischia and Ornithischia, from the Mesozoic Era, certain species of which are the largest known land animals.
That's a decent description of a dinosaur, but it's not the scientific definition.
Paleontologists don't group species together according to when and where they lived, but based on shared characteristics, usually anatomical features seen in fossils. Dozens of features distinguish dinosaurs from other reptiles, such as bones of the lower arm being longer than the upper arm. And when paleontologists combine and compare such characteristics between various reptiles, they can create a tree of evolutionary history that reveals the relationships between different groups.
Several groups of prehistoric creatures are often mistaken for dinosaurs, even though evolutionary trees show that they're distantly related. One group doesn't even consist of reptiles. To help you tell extinct reptiles apart, below is a simple guide to the major features of dinosaurs and 'other saurs', arranged in order of when the animals appeared millions of years ago (MYA).
Pelycosaurs
What: 'Bowl lizards'
When: 310-260 MYA
Where: Land
Pelycosaurs resembled reptiles but were more closely related to mammals. By far the most famous pelycosaur – and the one most commonly mistaken for a dinosaur – is Dimetrodon, a 3m-long predator with a sail on its back. This sail was formed from neural spines and was used to regulate body temperature and for mating displays. Pelycosaurs were primitive 'synapsids' – vertebrates whose skulls have one opening to the rear of each eye socket (reptiles have two openings). Mammals are the only surviving synapsids.
Ichthyosaurs
What: 'Fish lizards'
When: 250-90 MYA
Where: Sea
Ichthyosaurs were shaped like modern dolphins, a streamlined body that made them the fastest of marine reptiles. Like marine mammals, they breathed air, gave birth to live young and were probably warm-blooded. Ichthyosaurs had large eyes for seeing in deep water, vertical tail fins (like tuna fish), and some species had a dorsal fin. Little is known about their ancestors – terrestrial reptiles that returned to the sea – or why they went extinct, only that plesiosaurs replaced them as the sea's top predators.
Dinosaurs
What: 'Terrible lizards'
When: 231-66 MYA
Where: Land
Dinosaurs were a diverse group that included everything from the gigantic long-necked sauropods to therapods like T-rex. Modern birds evolved from therapods, which makes them avian dinosaurs. Extinct, non-avian dinosaurs had dozens of distinctive features, but what makes them stand out (literally) from most reptiles was their upright posture: their legs were erect beneath the body and not sprawling out to the sides. Dinosaurs were terrestrial, but not every species lived on the ground. Spinosaurus was semi-aquatic, for instance, while Microraptor could glide between trees.
Pterosaurs
What: 'Winged lizards'
When: 228-66 MYA
Where: Air
Pterosaurs were the first vertebrates to evolve powered flight, long before birds and bats. These winged reptiles were well adapted, with lightweight bones. Instead of feathers, they had wings made of living tissue, a membrane that stretched from the leg to an elongated ring finger. There were two main kinds: long-tailed pterosaurs like Dimorphodon had short beaks, while the pterodactyl ('wing finger') group includes Pterodactylus and the largest ever flying animal, Quetzalcoatlus, which had a 11m-wide wingspan. Pterosaurs weren't related to birds: dinosaurs and pterosaurs shared a common ancestor 100 million years before the origin of early birds like Archaeopteryx.
Plesiosaurs
What: 'Near-lizards'
When: 205-66 MYA
Where: Sea
Plesiosaurs were marine reptiles. They had a short tail, long flippers and a flattened body. Plesiosaurs came in two shapes at the head end: traditional plesiosaurs like Elasmosaurus had long necks and small heads, whereas pliosaurs ('more lizards') like Liopleurodon had short necks and large heads. Pliosaurs were apex predators and would eat anything – including smaller plesiosaurs. Both body shapes reached up to 15m in size, although the neck made up around half the length of a traditional plesiosaur. They all breathed air, gave birth to live young and might have been warm-blooded, much like ichthyosaurs and modern marine mammals.
Mosasaurs
What: 'Meuse river lizards'
When: 90-66 MYA
Where: Sea
Mosasaurs were scaled reptiles, a group that includes modern lizards and snakes. Their ancestors resembled monitor lizards such as the Komodo Dragon. Instead of moving with the undulatory motion used by eels and sea snakes, mosasaurs could swim by beating their tails like a shark. They weren't as fast as ichthyosaurs but rivalled plesiosaurs for size, with large mosasaurs such as Tylosaurus reaching up to 15m. Though most lived in the ocean, some inhabited freshwater. Mosasaurs arose late in the age of reptiles and became the new apex predators, but were wiped out by the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event that also killed the dinosaurs.
Read: Paleosaurs: A Simple Solution To The Dinosaur Dilemma
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735f0de3ce2462a37e57a25f91b8e307 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jvchamary/2014/09/30/iphone-6-bendgate-science/ | iPhone 6 Bendgate Isn't Over. It's Missing A Scientific Test | iPhone 6 Bendgate Isn't Over. It's Missing A Scientific Test
I once watched Uri Geller bend a spoon.
It was 1999 and I was working as a waiter in a pizza restaurant. The self-proclaimed psychic invited himself into the staff area after a meal, then confidently declared that we would be amazed. He chose a teaspoon from next to the coffee machine and used his fingertips to stroke the neck until the bowl appeared to bend towards the floor. Some call it a simple magic trick, Geller claims it's telekinesis. I don't know how he bent that spoon, but it was indeed amazing.
Bendgate, the controversy over whether Apple's iPhone 6 Plus is prone to bending, has something in common with magic: just as there are many ways to bend a spoon, there are many ways to test a phone's flexibility. The real trick is to do it scientifically.
The word 'science' itself is like magic. It can be used for misdirection, to make something sound more amazing than it actually is – such as adding credibility to a consumer test.
The science of bendgate
After a few iPhone 6 Plus owners reported that phones would become warped in their front pockets, Lewis Hilsenteger of YouTube channel Unbox Therapy carried out an iPhone 6 bend test "for the sake of science". The video rapidly went viral and led to follow-ups, including a comparison of phones where he claims to apply the "same amount of force" (Mr Hilsenteger is apparently an android with a built-in force gauge).
An iPhone 6 Plus after a 3-point flexural test (Image: Consumer Reports)
With rumours spreading fast (and #bendgate becoming a meme), Apple was forced to issue a statement saying that bending isn't widespread: 'With normal use a bend in iPhone is extremely rare and through our first six days of sale, a total of nine customers have contacted Apple with a bent iPhone 6 Plus.' The statement emphasized the strength and durability of materials and construction, and rigorous tests performed during R&D. The company also invited journalists for a tour of its testing facility.
But the trouble is, many people – fans and conspiracy theorists alike – don't trust Apple's confidence in product reliability. That's in no small part due to 'antennagate', when the iPhone 4 would lose network signal when held by the lower-left corner and Steve Jobs famously responded to one owner with "Just avoid holding it in that way." Apple claimed the issue wasn't widespread but later did a U-turn.
The only way to convince people is through independent testing, which is what Consumer Reports have done.
According to the blog post accompanying their video, they decided to study bendgate because "It seemed like a serious concern, yet everything about the uproar was highly unscientific. We don't like unscientific, so we promised then that we would use our lab equipment to find out just how delicate the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus really are."
Consumer Reports tested flexural strength, the ability to resist a permanent bend – deformation – under stress. They compared four large phones / phablets (the Apple iPhone 6 Plus, Samsung Galaxy Note 3, LG G3 and HTC One) and two small devices (iPhones 5 and 6).
Their experiment involved a standard method employed by mechanical engineers, a '3-point flexural test': two points support a sample at either end, while the third 'loading point' applies force to the middle. Force was applied in 10-pound (4.5kg) increments until a phone couldn't bounce back to its original shape.
The results suggest most phones – including the iPhone 6 Plus – aren't prone to bending. Consumer Reports concluded: "While nothing is (evidently) indestructible, we expect that any of these phones should stand up to typical use."
So that settles the bendgate issue, right? Wrong.
One more test...
The key phrase in Apple's statement on bendgate is 'normal use', what Consumer Reports calls 'typical use'.
I don't think a 3-point flexural test really reflects what iPhone 6 Plus owners have been complaining about, which is bending inside a pocket. The test effectively reproduces what Lewis Hilsenteger of Unbox Therapy did, but in a more scientific way, which is to try and fold a phone in half.
Both Apple and Consumer Reports test flexure strength using Instron machines. And according to Instron: 'The flexure test method measures behavior of materials subjected to simple beam loading.' (You'll notice they say materials – we'll come back to that in a minute.) 'A flexure test produces tensile stress in the convex side of the specimen and compression stress in the concave side. This creates an area of shear stress along the midline.' In simple terms, various stresses associated with bending.
Flexural tests are split into two types: 3-point and 4-point. Why two? According to experts on Research Gate, the tests detect different things. In a 3-point test, peak stress is concentrated under the central loading point, which will highlight weakness around the middle of a sample, whereas a 4-point test distributes forces more evenly between the two loading points, which increases the chances of finding a crack or flaw across the sample.
Which is the most appropriate test for bending phones? Let's look at the following table, adapted from Instron.
Differences between 3-Point and 4-Point flexural tests (Adapted from Instron / http://bit.ly/YIJdVo)
Remember that the null hypothesis for this experiment is: The iPhone 6 Plus isn't prone to bending under normal use (inside your front pocket).
The hypothesis is not: The iPhone 6 Plus isn't prone to bending under focused stress (trying to fold it in half). That means we need to minimise the force directly under a loading point so there isn't premature failure (deformation) along the middle of the phone. We can then ask the following:
Does a phone consist of a uniform material? Does a pocket focus stress at a central point?
The answer to both questions is 'No'. First, a phone is made of multiple components, which is closer to a composite material than a sample with a uniform internal structure (like plastic). Second, squeezing a phone between your pants and thigh spreads force across the whole surface of the device, it's not concentrated along the middle (unless your phone is sideways and you happen to have super-sharp thighs).
Through logic and the process of elimination, the best experiment to study how a phone bends under normal use is therefore a 4-point flexural test.
That doesn't mean a 3-point flexural test isn't informative. For example, the phones bent by Consumer Reports and Lewis Hilsenteger both folded in the same place, near the volume buttons. What Hilsenteger might have demonstrated is a weak point in the phone's structure, confirmed by a scientific test. According to a theory by imgur user alleras4, that weak point is down to torque around a tiny screw.
A potential weak point in the iPhone 6 design? (Image: alleras4 / http://imgur.com/a/FBegH)
But you shouldn't conflate 'weak point' and 'design flaw'. Apply enough stress to any non-uniform material and it will break along the path of least resistance. Again, that's not normal use.
Conclusions
Bendgate has been overblown by the media, but that doesn't mean it's over – yet.
Consumer Reports should be commended for its scientific approach. They measure forces, their tests are consistent, and their results suggest the iPhone 6 Plus isn't prone to bending. But headlines stating that this puts bendgate to bed are premature. No matter how rigorous the methodology, you can't draw the right conclusions from the wrong hypothesis. Trying to fold a phone in half – whether that's between your hands or on a workbench – doesn't replicate normal use.
I don't know whether 3-point and 4-point flexural test will give different results. There might be no significant difference. I'm sure mechanical engineers will have predictions. But science involves testing theories, and to my knowledge nobody's done a 4-point bend test. (It should be relatively simple to do – Instron even sells conversion kits for 3-point test machines.)
At this stage, it's still too early to conclude from independent tests that bendgate doesn't exist. My guess is there isn't a widespread problem, based on a survey of reddit users that concluded "The issue definitely seems to be affecting a tiny minority of people" and "It's likely to be a [quality control] defect, and not an actual design defect."
Like spoon bending, there are many ways to bend a phone. Uri Geller recently told MarketWatch there were two possible explanations for why the iPhone 6 might bend.
"Either the phone is so seriously thin and flimsy that it is bendable with mere physical force, which I cannot believe given the extensive tests Apple would have done," said Geller. "Or – and this is far more plausible – somehow the energy and excitement of the 10 million people who purchased iPhones has awakened their mind powers and caused the phones to bend."
Time for another scientific test.
Also on Forbes:
Gallery: Apple Product Launch: iPhone 6 And Apple Watch 20 images View gallery
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683688db77326944aa5571966cf58f95 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jvchamary/2015/08/31/ant-man-biology/ | Ant-Man's Bad Biology Defeats Good Superhero Movies | Ant-Man's Bad Biology Defeats Good Superhero Movies
Ant-Man with a fire ant (Image: Disney/Marvel)
Marvel's Ant-Man was the most disappointing superhero movie of 2015.
It wasn't the worst (that title goes to Fantastic Four) but the predictable plot and clichéd characters wasted its potential, making the film extremely frustrating to watch. I also found it hard to enjoy for another reason: bad science.
Ant-Man has three key superpowers: the ability to shrink, human strength at insect size, and the power to control ants with his mind. I'll briefly describe how the movie gets them all wrong, then explain how Hollywood could improve the way films show the science of superheroes.
1. Changing size
The original Ant-Man (Michael Douglas), biophysicist Hank Pym, invents a suit that lets its wearer shrink thanks to a subatomic particle he discovers – the 'Pym particle'. How would it work? To gain and lose matter every time is ridiculous, and you can't just squeeze adjacent atoms closer together because that would trigger chemical reactions. Clearly we need a better explanation.
Quantum physicist Spiros Michalakis, a science consultant on Ant-Man, devised an ingenious method: reduce the size of atoms themselves. This requires magically changing the distance between an atomic nucleus and its orbiting electrons, a physical constant known as the Bohr radius. Precisely how Pym particles would do that isn't important, neither is the fact that changing size while keeping the same mass would raise Ant-Man's density (creating pressures that would cause him to pierce the ground every time he took a step).
No, the movie's biggest mistake is the idea of shrinking down to subatomic size to enter a so-called 'Quantum Realm'. As James Kakalios points out in his book The Physics of Superheroes, at really small sizes Ant-Man would be "deaf, dumb and blind". Photoreceptor cells in the eye detect light using pigments that work at the molecular level, for example, so if an animal is smaller than a molecule, it can't detect light via photoreceptors. Biology is driven by chemistry, which is dictated by physics. But giving a physical explanation doesn't make something biologically plausible.
2. Super strength
In the film, new Ant-Man Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) can be seen hitting and even throwing some human-sized security guards. As Pym's daughter Hope van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly) says in the trailer, "When you're small, you have superhuman strength."
Maximum strength is usually explained through mechanics – it depends on the cross-sectional area of an animal's muscles. As Spiros Michalakis says, "it's the same reason why a bundle of rubber bands are a lot harder to stretch than a single rubber band". However, the world's strongest man can only deadlift about 500 kilos (over 1000 pounds, or 6-7 times the average mass of an adult male), whereas ants are able to lift 50 times their own body weight. This is due to a scaling effect: while proportional strength reflects the square of an animal's muscle area (two dimensions), relative strength reflects the cube of its body volume (three dimensions). In other words, as you get smaller, you also get stronger.
Strength is more than muscle mechanics, however. Ants and men don't have the same anatomy: insects use an exoskeleton made of a material called chitin, we have crystalline bone mineral. Body structure is also relevant. Humans have a flexible spine, while insects consist of three rigid sections. Mechanical engineers have found that a field ant's neck joint can withstand up to 5,000 times its own body weight. Could a miniature human neck withstand such extreme forces? Probably not.
3. Mind control
Ant-Man's helmet allows him to command insects, but not through telepathy. In the movie, Pym says his helmet releases chemicals that stimulate olfactory centres. This is exactly how ants communicate with one another in the real world, using their antennae for smell and touch, which allows them to recognize nest-mates. Later in the film, however, Scott Lang is told a common myth: an army of ants needs a leader.
Phrases like 'army ant' and 'soldier ant' probably contribute to this misunderstanding. Unlike a General giving orders on a battlefield, ant behaviour isn't directed by a single individual. As explained by ant ecologist Deborah Gordon, insects are not under central control. Every ant colony consists of numerous sterile female workers, plus one or more egg-laying mothers – queens. A queen doesn't give specific instructions, but rules her subjects though the chemicals she releases.
An ant colony is like a company: its CEO doesn't micromanage every employee, they run the overall organisation. The day-to-day activity of workers emerges as a natural result of aiming to raise profits. Similarly, the behaviour of individual ants is an 'emergent property' of a queen encouraging growth of her colony. The idea that such complexity can arise without central control seems strange until you realise that all living things are the sum total of biochemical reactions and, ultimately, countless interactions between subatomic particles.
Science and fiction
Whenever a movie featuring science is released, pop-culture-savvy writers will highlight its errors. That's what I've done for Ant-Man's biology and my fellow Forbes contributor Chad Orzel did for its physics. This is partly because those of us who care about scientific accuracy hope that Hollywood is listening and will do better next time. To help make that happen, we must answer a question:
Why do movies contain bad science?
Ant-Man leading an army of insects, one example of bad science (Image: Disney/Marvel)
For good science in superhero movies – and fiction in general – by far the most important thing is to recognize the difference between what's impossible and what's improbable. The distinction is clear: if established facts prove otherwise, it's not possible; if we don't know for sure, it's only (very) unlikely –and that allows leeway for some artistic license.
Ant-Man contains bad biology because it ignores facts., and that could have been easily avoided. The Quantum Realm isn't essential to the story. When changing size during a fight, the superhero could disappear/reappear (as Nightcrawler does in X-Men 2). A helmet could control ants using chemicals, without any mention of leadership.
But even if producers had been aware of Ant-Man's mistakes, they probably wouldn't have fixed them. Why? Because film makers aren't actually aiming for scientific accuracy, they want movies to be science-y. If some technobabble sounds plausible to the average person, it's good enough.
So how can we persuade Hollywood to improve science accuracy?
One approach is to emphasize that realism can make movies more enjoyable – and potentially profitable via favourable reviews. Last year I served as the science consultant for Ordinary, a comic book about what happens in a world where everyone has powers. The graphic novel includes an essay in which I argue that virtually every superpower is impossible, and that's okay so long as characters are believable. Importantly, any fictional scientist would understand their field of research: Iron Man's inventions don't need to work in real life, but Tony Stark should behave like a mechanic.
Good movies immerse us in fictional worlds, helping the audience suspend disbelief so unrealistic situations don't yank them out of the film. Understanding the difference between impossible and improbable science is the secret to better films. And if we can make scientific accuracy more entertaining, we could save superhero movies from bad science.
Let's hope Hollywood is listening.
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bed6dba224cb32e9c1b46ff2e2599322 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jvchamary/2015/11/05/religion-morality/ | Religion Makes Children More Selfish, Say Scientists | Religion Makes Children More Selfish, Say Scientists
Morality is often associated with religion, but new research reveals that children from religious households are actually less generous than kids from a secular background.
This conclusion comes from a study of over 1000 children from around the world, published in the journal Current Biology. The project was led by Professor Jean Decety, a neuroscientist from the University of Chicago, who didn't originally aim to compare moral behavior. "I was more interested in whether I would find differences in empathy or sharing depending on the culture," he says.
While previous research has examined generosity in adults, Decety's work shows that upbringing shapes morality early in life. This includes altruism – actions that benefit a recipient at a cost to the donor. Children learn religious values and beliefs from their family and community, through rituals like going to church. If religion promotes morality, kids from religious households should have stronger altruistic tendencies.
Generosity and punishment
Decety's team of psychologists assessed altruism using 'the dictator game': each child was given 30 stickers and told to choose how many to share with an anonymous child from the same school and similar ethnic group. This task reflects choices in ecology – allocating limited resources – and the results were used to calculate a 'generosity score'. The researchers looked at 1170 children aged 5-12 years old, from six countries (USA, Canada, China, Jordan, Turkey and South Africa). Most kids came from households that identified as Christian (24%), Muslim (43%) or not religious (28%). (Small numbers from Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu and agnostic homes weren't compared.)
The results revealed that secular children shared more stickers. Muslim children appear to be less generous than Christian kids, but this is not statistically significant (labelled 'ns' in the bar chart below). All three groups became less altruistic with age, though religious kids had lower generosity, suggesting that longer exposure to religion leads to less altruism.
The psychologists also assessed views on justice through a moral sensitivity task: after children were shown videos of mild interpersonal harm – such as pushing or bumping – they were asked for a judgment of meanness and a rating for the level of punishment the perpetrator deserved.
Compared to the other two groups, Muslims thought harmful actions were meaner and believed in harsher punishment. Christians judged the harm to be meaner than secular kids, though there was no difference in their punitive ratings. This is consistent with fundamentalism, when actions are seen as either right or wrong, with no gradient in morality between two extremes. Overall, religious children are less tolerant of harmful actions and favored harsh penalties.
Parents were also asked to score their children according to a sense of empathy and sensitivity to injustice. This subjective self-reporting showed that religious adults think their children have strong moral tendencies, contradicting objective assessments of altruism (generosity and moral sensitivity).
Why are religious people less moral? One factor is a psychological phenomenon known as 'moral licensing': a person will justify doing something bad or immoral – like being racist – because they've already done something 'good', such as praying. "It's an unconscious bias," Decety explains. "They don't even see that's not compatible with what they've been learning in church."
Attitudes and assumptions
History backs-up the scientific evidence that secular people are more moral, as reviewed by Israeli psychologist Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi. Most white supporters of the US Civil Rights Movement were non-religious, for example, while the apartheid regime in South Africa was led by devout Christians and opposed by atheists.
But the view that non-religious individuals are morally dubious is deeply embedded in American society. Atheists and agnostics are considered less trustworthy, even immoral, which explains why people who don't believe in God are unlikely to be elected to high political office, such as President of the United States.
"If you look at the campaign in the US, everyone who wants to go on TV and talk about being a candidate – from Hilary Clinton to Donald Trump – has to say that they love the Bible," says Decety. "They have to say that to make sure that people will vote for them, which is not the case in Europe."
It's sometimes claimed that secular families are dysfunctional and rudderless because they lack the security of religion. But sociologist Vern Bengston, who has run California's Longitudinal Study of Generations since 1971, says this isn't true: "Many nonreligious parents were more coherent and passionate about their ethical principles than some of the 'religious' parents ... The vast majority appeared to live goal-filled lives characterised by moral direction and sense of life having a purpose."
So we learn good moral behavior from family life and education, not religious teachings. This raises another question: Why does morality exist in the first place?
"Morality and religion are two separate things: religion has been made by humans and morality is part of our biology," says Jean Decety.
Decety, who is director of Chicago's Child NeuroSuite lab, explains that moral sensitivity is almost innate in human babies and starts at around 6-9 months. "Before they can speak, before culture can shape their mind, they already have the building blocks of morality."
Evolution of morality
Like many biological features, morality has been favoured by natural selection because it benefits individuals in a group. It's tied to our sense of fairness and justice, ensuring that some members aren't exploiting others, and can even be seen in capuchin monkeys.
Religion has evolutionary benefits for humans too. "It makes our species able to cooperate, to live in large groups," says Decety. "That's why morality has probably evolved: it helps us to be more social."
Why is religion prevalent in human societies? Based on anthropology, one reason is that it makes 'your' group more cohesive. "Religion has evolved because it helps the in-group to survive and fight better against the out-group," says Decety. Globalization, thanks to things like air travel, brings different groups together. "The problem we have today is that we live in a very different world – we are not on the Savannah any more, and we live in a world which is an open market."
Organized religion creates exclusive groups and members often belong to a 'chosen' people. By its very nature, this can cause conflict and intolerance toward other groups – including denominations of the same faith, such as Sunni and Shia in Islam, Catholics and Protestants in Christianity.
Religion in decline?
According to a global study of more than 230 countries by the Pew Research Center, 84% of the worldwide population (5.8 billion people in 2010) are religiously affiliated. Secularity is on the rise, however, and the US public is becoming less religious. Since 2007, the proportion of adults who describe themselves as religious has dropped from 83% to 77%.
Decety, who describes himself as a secular Jew, is now expanding his project to children from 14 countries. He believes that while his findings that religion isn't responsible for morality might surprise many people, it won't shock scientists. Countries with a relatively high secular population – such as Belgium, Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Japan and New Zealand – are more peaceful, with some of the lowest crime rates in the world.
He also doesn't expect his work to have much impact on the wider American public, particularly evangelical Christians who ignore facts. "My guess is they're just going to deny what I did – they don't want science, they don't believe in evolution, they don't want Darwin to be taught in schools," he says. "These people will say, 'Oh that's the evil scientists again'."
Religion is not required for kindness. "It's not like you have to be highly religious to be a good person," Decety points out. "Secularity – like having your laws and rules based on rational thinking, reason rather than holy books – is better for everybody."
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3a9314c1fb2c7d076ca77213517b47a1 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jvchamary/2015/12/26/star-wars-viewing-order/ | Watch Star Wars In The Best Order To Avoid Spoilers | Watch Star Wars In The Best Order To Avoid Spoilers
Darth Vader in 'Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back' (Photo credit: Copyright and trademark... [+] Lucasfilm Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission.)
What's the right way to watch the Star Wars movies?
The Force Awakens is episode 7 in the film series. If you're seeing the previous parts for the first time or introducing the saga to your children, you might be wondering where to start.
Spoiler warning: This article mentions a major plot twist involving the character Darth Vader. The twist is well-known, but I'm being extra cautious as this post is partly aimed at first-time viewers with little knowledge of Star Wars, such as young kids (or adults who've paid no attention to popular culture over the past 35 years). A major plot twist for The Force Awakens is hidden on page 2 of the desktop site, but appears at the bottom of the mobile page.
Two viewing orders are usually proposed: as Star Wars creator George Lucas originally intended, beginning with episode 1 of the 'prequel' trilogy (I: The Phantom Menace, II: Attack of the Clones, III: Revenge of the Sith) or according to release date, starting with the 'original' trilogy (IV: A New Hope, V: The Empire Strikes Back, VI: Return of the Jedi).
Episode order (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) Release order (4, 5, 6, 1, 2, 3)
The right way to watch Star Wars is release order. If you haven't seen the first 6 films, come back later. For everyone else, I'll now explain how I came to that conclusion.
The avoiding spoilers approach
Every recommendation for a particular order (as far as I'm aware) relies on personal opinion and subjective arguments. I wanted an approach that's as objective as possible. Is there a scientific way to determine the correct viewing order?
The approach I describe aims to minimize spoilers and thereby maximize the impact of plot twists. My rationale is that twists play an important role in creating an enjoyable story. If scenes from one movie spoil a big reveal in another episode, the whole series becomes less fun to watch.
Arguably the biggest twist in Star Wars is that Darth Vader is Luke's Skywalker's father. The idea that viewing order should protect this reveal has been championed by software engineer Rod Hilton, who argues that "The problem with Episode Order is that it ruins the surprise that Vader is Luke's father."
Hilton proposed a variant of the Ernest Rister sequence (4, 5, 1, 2, 3, 6) that excludes episode 1, known as Machete order (4, 5, 2, 3, 6). Both orders treat the prequel films as an extended flashback within the original trilogy. That's fine for those who've seen Star Wars before, but such a long 'flashback' (4-6 hours!) interrupts the flow of narrative and introduces a host of new characters, which some first-time viewers would find confusing. As a consequence, the movies should not be split.
And Hilton's suggestion that the saga "is really about Luke's journey" is flawed. A character who doesn't appear in half the series can't be the hero of a story. George Lucas believes the first 6 episodes are about Darth Vader – Anakin Skywalker. Again, wrong. Even if that was indeed his intent, that doesn't come across in the original trilogy, in which Luke is clearly the protagonist.
It's impossible to avoid all spoilers, but instead of protecting a single plot twist, we should consider several twists. So which trilogy has spoilers we should try and avoid? To answer that, we must ask another question: What is Star Wars about?
The Force-Skywalker method
The Star Wars saga revolves around a mysterious, intangible 'Force' that gives certain individuals – Force users – magical powers. It's a classic tale of good versus evil: Jedi knights use the 'Light side' of the Force, whereas individuals such as Sith lords and Kylo Ren draw power from the 'Dark side'.
On a deeper level, Star Wars is about relationships. Whether a Force user follows the path to the Light side or the Dark side is influenced by who they were mentored or manipulated by (Jedi knight and padawan, Sith master and apprentice). Family relationships also play a pivotal role, especially between members of the Skywalker family.
To avoid as many spoilers as possible, we'll concentrate on relationships between prominent characters: Force users and the Skywalker family. We further narrow-down spoilers to those that ruin plot twists of significant events: when a character reveals their true identity or allegiance (e.g. Jedi or Sith), their relationship to another character (e.g. father and son), or when they're affected by a death. I've chosen an arbitrary number of twists (10) from each trilogy. This is the most subjective aspect of the 'Force-Skywalker method'.
Not all twists are created equal, however, we also need a mathematical value for how much we care about the characters involved. To do that we borrow a concept from genetics called the 'coefficient of relationship', which measures the similarity between two related individuals. Because you share roughly half your DNA with your father, for example, you carry 50% of the same genetic variants – a relationship coefficient of 0.5.
The relationship (R) value uses a mathematical weight to reflect the emotional impact of a twist. We apply the same principle to relationships between Force users, so a biological parent and Force 'parent' (master) both get a value of 0.5. Because the hero of the Star Wars saga is ambiguous, Anakin and Luke Skywalker both get values of 1, regardless of trilogy. When more than one character is involved in a twist, we use the highest value, for the individual we care most about (i.e. 1 if both Luke and his father or master are involved).
Each plot twist (T) has one of two values – 1 or 0.5 – to represent whether the other trilogy ruins the surprise, or doesn't spoil the twist. Think of these as major and minor spoilers. The spoiler score (S) is then the product of multiplying a twist (T) by its relationship (R) value. (I like to think that spoilers are measured in 'Shyamalans'.) This gives a simple equation:
S = R x T
The list of top 10 twists appears on the next page. Let's show our working using Vader-is-dad as an example. This reveal occurs in episode 5 (original trilogy) and is ruined by watching episode 3 (prequel), so the twist value (T) is 1. Both Anakin and Luke have relationship values (R) of 1. Plugging those figures into S = R x T (1 x 1) gives a spoiler score of 1. We perform the same calculation for the 10 twists in each film and sum S to get the total spoiler score (ΣS) for each trilogy:
ΣS = S1 + S2 ... S9 + S10
The viewing order result
So what's the best order to watch Star Wars? The approach I've used aims to maximize the impact of plot twists and minimize spoilers. The method focuses on twists featuring Force users and the Skywalker family, calculating values for the impact of 10 twists in each trilogy (original and prequel) to get a total spoiler score (ΣS). Here's the result:
Prequel ΣS = 4.750 Original ΣS = 5.375
The original trilogy has a higher total spoiler score. That means watching the prequels before the originals has a greater impact on plot twists overall. So if avoiding spoilers is important to you, watch the movies in release order (4, 5, 6, 1, 2, 3).
The Force Awakens has one major twist that ruins the Vader-is-dad reveal in both the original and prequel trilogies. But apart from that, it doesn't really create spoilers for the first 6 episodes. And so even if you've already seen the new movie, you should still watch Star Wars in release order.
NEXT: List of 10 plot twists from each trilogy and weaknesses of the Force-Skywalker method. Spoiler warning: The next page also mentions a major twist from The Force Awakens.
Relationship (R) with Force user
Luke Skywalker (1) Anakin Skywalker / Darth Vader (1) Obi-Wan Kenobi: Anakin and Luke's Jedi 'father' (0.5) Yoda: Luke's Jedi 'father' (0.5) Qui-Gon Jinn: Anakin and Luke's Jedi 'grandfather' (0.25) Palpatine" Vader's Sith 'father' (0.5) Darth Maul: Vader's Sith 'brother' (0.5) Count Dooku: Vader's Sith 'brother' (0.5)
Relationship (R) with Skywalker
Luke Skywalker (1) Anakin Skywalker (1) Shmi Skywalker: Anakin's mother (0.5) Padme Amidala: Luke's mother (0.5) Leia Organa: Luke's sister (0.5) Owen Lars: Luke's uncle* (0.25)
Twist (T) in prequel
Anakin had no father (0.5) Maul is a Sith (0.5) Padme is Amidala (0.5) Maul kills Qui-Gon (0.5) Shmi dies (0.5) Dooku is a Sith (0.5) Palpatine is a Sith (1) Obi-Wan kills Anakin** (1) Anakin becomes Vader (1) Vader is Luke and Leia's father (1)
Twist (T) in original
Obi-Wan is a Jedi (1) Owen dies (0.25) Obi-Wan dies (0.5) Obi-Wan becomes a ghost (0.5) Yoda is a Jedi (1) Vader is Luke's father (1) Leia is Boushh (0.5) Leia is Luke's sister (1) Vader kills Palpatine (0.5) Vader becomes a ghost (0.5)
*Owen is technically Anakin's step-brother, but he raised Luke so we'll value him as if he were related by blood (genetic uncle).
**Anakin/Vader isn't technically killed by Obi-Wan, but would have died if Palpatine (Darth Sidious) hadn't saved his life.
Weaknesses of the method
The Force-Skywalker method isn't perfect. For example, it distills the value of each twist down to a quantity and doesn't consider the quality of the twist. For example, the Vader-is-Luke's-father revelation has a huge impact in The Empire Strikes Back, but it's almost a footnote in Revenge of the Sith. The twist is powerful because Empire drops few clues and yet, once revealed, it makes perfect sense.
A potential criticism of the method is it can't account for the fact that the Vader-is-dad reveal is so embedded in pop culture that for many adults (and some kids), it's not really a twist. I recently hosted a movie marathon (original trilogy) where several audience members hadn't seen the films. When I asked whether they were surprised by the reveal, their reply was along the lines of: "Everyone knows that." Nonetheless, there are still many people – such as children – who have never been exposed to the spoiler. And as we're taking a scientific approach, we should assume no prior knowledge.
Although the Force-Skywalker method is a (mostly) objective way to determine the best viewing order, you might still want to base your decision on subjective arguments. For instance, my personal opinion is that you should introduce newcomers to Star Wars by starting with the original trilogy simply because the films are far, far better. Show someone a bad movie and they won't be interested in watching the rest of the series. Create a new fan, however, and the prequels provide backstory for the original films.
Finally, one major twist in The Force Awakens is that Kylo Ren is Ben Solo, son of Han Solo and Leia Organa, making Darth Vader – Anakin Skywalker – his grandfather. This extends the Skywalker family and potentially affects the top 10 twists I've chosen from the original and prequel trilogies. If Kylo/Ben becomes the hero of the sequel trilogy, his relationship (R) value is 1 and Han Solo would get 0.5. The 'Han in carbonite' twist could potentially replace 'Owen dies', for example, raising the total spoiler score (ΣS) for the original movies from 5.375 to 5.5. We'll have to wait until the sequel trilogy is complete before we can calculate whether the Force-Skywalker method shows that the best way to watch Star Wars episodes 1-6 is still release order.
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311b1c7182253397faa7ab45aae3d977 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jvchamary/2016/01/28/brain-capacity/ | Brain's Memory Capacity Rivals World Wide Web | Brain's Memory Capacity Rivals World Wide Web
Illustration of the human brain (Image: Pixabay / public domain)
Neuroscientists say the human brain can store 10 times more information than previously thought.
The researchers calculated the amount of storage by measuring connections between brain cells, then translated that number into bytes, the units of computer memory. One byte consists of 8 bits (each with values of 1 or 0) and the human brain can hold more than one quadrillion (1 followed by 15 zeroes) bytes of information – a petabyte.
As Terry Sejnowski of the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences in La Jolla, California, a lead author of the recent study, said in a press release: "Our new measurements of the brain's memory capacity increase conservative estimates by a factor of 10 to at least a petabyte, in the same ballpark as the World Wide Web."
After examining a small cube of rat brain tissue under an electron microscope, the scientists created a 3D reconstruction of the centre of learning and memory, the hippocampus, along with connections among its neurons (brain cells). Each neuron resembles a tall tree, with numerous branches of 'dendrites' leading to a long trunk or 'axon'. Information – in the form of electrical signals – is transmitted from one neurone's dendrites to another cell's axon across a chemical junction – the 'synapse'.
Each neuron has thousands of synapses, and the amount of information a brain stores is partly determined by the strength of connections between neurons, which is influenced by the size of synapses. Traditionally, it's been assumed that synapses only come in 3 sizes – small, medium and large – but it now seems there are many more. This is because neurons have twig-like spines on their branches (dendrites) that enable the cells to make multiple synaptic connections.
The scientists identified 26 different spine sizes, which raises the memory capacity to roughly 4.7 bits of information per synapse. Multiply that by trillions of synapses and the total storage is an order of magnitude greater than previous estimates.
An adult brain only generates around 20 watts of power, equivalent to a dim light bulb. By mimicking biological connections, engineers could design more powerful and energy-efficient computers. Maybe these machines will even have enough memory to store all the information on the web today.
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588dadec7a86ffd0d011372b4616823a | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jvchamary/2016/03/31/black-superman/ | Science Says Superman Should Be Black | Science Says Superman Should Be Black
Henry Cavill as Superman in 'Man of Steel' (Image: DC / Warner Bros)
Superman should be black.
By that I mean he should have dark skin, and not that he's African-American or any other person of color. After all, the Man of Steel is from the planet Krypton, not Earth. That said, Superman could indeed be played by a black actor in future superhero movies.
READ MORE: Superman Is An Alien, But His Ancestors Were Human
My argument for why Superman should be black is based on science. Before I explain the reasoning, however, we need to address a sensitive subject: race. Many people use skin color as shorthand for ethnicity, but 'race' has little meaning in biology – it's a social concept that describes recent ancestry.
Race matters for superheroes because it contributes to their identity. And over the past few decades, comic book publishers and movie studios have increasingly changed characters to reflect a society's ethnic diversity.
While that should be applauded in principle, identity changes are often short-term publicity stunts. It might sound cynical, but if publishers and studios had pure intentions, changes would be permanent. As long-time comic fans know, major heroes almost inevitably revert back to their original identities.
Rather than promoting diversity just for diversity's sake, I believe the case for changing a character's identity is made stronger if the rationale makes sense based on origins and powers. The change is more likely to be welcomed – and become permanent – if it's based on logic, not gimmick. And that brings us to Superman.
Because most superpowers break the laws of physics, explaining why they're impossible is a pointless exercise. For the science of superheroes, it's more fun to focus on what's plausible. So while Superman's powers probably require unrealistic amounts of energy to work, we can at least imagine how to maximize the energy he'd need.
Gallery: Superman's Most Impressive Powers 6 images View gallery
Solar-powered cells
In the movie Man of Steel, Superman asks his biological father why he's different from humans. As Jor-El explains: "Earth's Sun is younger and brighter than Krypton's was – your cells have drunk in its radiation, strengthening your muscles, your skin, your senses."
The fact Superman is powered by solar radiation – light – is also shown in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. In one scene, he regenerates after bathing in the Sun's rays, paying homage to the comic that inspired the film, 'The Dark Knight Returns', when he tells Mother Earth: "The Sun's power... fuels us both."
Almost all life on Earth is ultimately powered by the Sun via photosynthesis: plants and other organisms use light to make food (carbohydrates) from CO2 and water. Their photosynthetic cells also release oxygen, which can be used to burn the energy-rich carbs that fuel metabolism.
Superman's cells would carry out a process similar to photosynthesis. Instead of making carbs, maybe he synthesizes fictional molecules that store even larger amounts of chemical energy.
Light rays consist of photons, subatomic particles that behave as both waves and pure energy. The length of a wave determines a photon's energy: short wavelengths – gamma rays, x-rays and UV light – are at one end of this spectrum, long wavelengths like infrared at the other.
High-energy radiation such as UV damages living tissue and can trigger genetic mutations (potentially causing cancer), whereas low-energy radiation is harmless but has low energy. As a consequence, Superman would absorb photons from the visible spectrum.
Plant cells containing green chloroplasts (Image CC BY-SA 3.0: Kristian Peters / Wikimedia)
In complex organisms, photons are harvested by specialized compartments, such as the chloroplasts in plant cells. Chloroplasts contain proteins that funnel photons toward pigments, which convert energy from light.
When photons hit a pigment molecule, its electrons gain enough energy to leave their associated atoms. Electrons are then passed along chain reactions to produce molecules that can later release the energy stored in their chemical bonds, which is used to synthesize carbs.
Colored pigments
On Superman's home planet of Krypton, the best pigment color for absorbing solar radiation would be black.
Light-capturing pigments act as antennas tuned for picking-up photons with a particular energy, and their colors – how they look to our eyes – is determined by which photons they absorb. Blue photons have more energy than red photons, but few manage to reach our planet's surface.
Air and water filter-out certain wavelengths. On Earth, land plants have evolved to use the red-absorbing pigment chlorophyll, which looks green. Not all photosynthetic organisms are green, however: some plants have red leaves, while purple bacteria can even absorb infrared.
Photosynthetic organisms on distant worlds would use whichever pigments are most appropriate to the available wavelengths of light. Green may be common on Earth, but other colors could be more popular on other worlds. This could be exploited to detect signs of extraterrestrial life, as described in a brilliant article in Scientific American by biometerologist Nancy Kiang of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
As Kiang explains in her article, 'The colour of plants on other worlds': "The limiting factor is not the feasibility of novel pigments but the light spectrum available at a planet's surface, which depends mainly on the star type."
While the light that reach the surface is affected by which wavelengths penetrate the atmosphere, it's ultimately dictated by which rays are emitted by nearby stars.
And as comic fans know, Krypton orbits a red star and Superman gains his powers thanks to Earth's yellow Sun.
NEXT: Why Krypton's environment drives the evolution of dark-colored skin.
In Man of Steel, Jor-El sends his son to a planet "orbiting a main sequence yellow star." What does that mean? Many stars have a lifespan lasting billions of years, which often includes a 'main sequence' – the period when it carries out nuclear fusion, forcing hydrogen atoms together to create helium. This generates massive amounts of light energy.
Sun of Krypton
Astronomers classify stars according to 'spectral type' – basically, temperature and luminosity. There are 6 types (O, B, A, F, G, K and M). Rare O-type stars are hot, bright and look blue, whereas M-type stars – such as red dwarfs and red giants – are relatively cool and dim. Our Sun is somewhere in-between, a warm and yellow G-type star.
Red dwarf star surrounded by three planets (Image: NASA / JPL-Caltech)
After accounting for atmosphere, the peak wavelength of light reaching Earth's surface is around 685 nanometers. For an M-type star like Krypton's Sun, it's about 1045 nm. In Man of Steel, a Kryptonian soldier says atmospheric conditions on their spaceship isn't compatible with humans, so the peak wavelengths would be slightly different due to filtering by air and water vapor.
Photosynthetic species – including a Kryptonian like Superman – living on a world orbiting a relatively inactive star would therefore need dark pigments to harvest light.
As Dr Nancy Kiang explains in her Scientific American article: "A planet around a quiescent M star would receive about half the energy that Earth receives from our Sun... Evolution might favour a greater variety of photosynthetic pigments to pick out the full range of visible and infrared light. With little light reflected, plants might even look black to our eyes."
Dark skin
The dark pigment that Superman's cells would need to absorb sunlight has a different function to melanin, the brown pigment that humans and other mammals use to protect against damaging UV radiation.
After humans migrated out of Africa 200,000 years ago, those populations exposed to less light would have been under weaker evolutionary pressure to spend metabolic resources on making UV-blocking pigments, which is why their descendants now have white skin.
Characteristic features of species are usually the result of natural selection, adaptations to their local environment. Because Superman has powers, light-capturing pigments must be useful to the survival of Kryptonians.
How did superpowers evolve? One possibility is that abilities were favored by evolution on Superman's home planet, and his ancestors lost their powers when the star turned red. Alternatively, they never evolved super-strength or super-senses – light was simply an energy source for ordinary metabolism – and Earth's yellow Sun artificially boosts their abilities.
Will we ever see a black Superman? In fact, Kryptonians of color already feature in comics. On an alternate version of Earth, for example, Calvin Ellis is not only Superman, but President of the United States (the character was modelled on Barack Obama).
But ethnic diversity hasn't always been politically correct. One issue of Superman describes Vathlo Island as 'home of a highly developed black race'. Such cringeworthy statements were typical back in the 1970s, but as comics writer Mark Waid points out, "A lack of ethnicity was an error of omission, and I'm not sure given the time that it's fair to call that 'racist'." It's less forgivable that the Kryptonians in Man of Steel (released in 2013) were all white.
DC Comics regularly relaunches its continuity, but it's unlikely the company would make Superman black, partly because he has so much history. A hero's race influences whether people identify with that character too.
But there is a precedent for changing ethnicity. Most famously, Nick Fury – traditionally depicted as white – was reimagined as Samuel L Jackson in comics. Life then imitated art as the actor was cast in the Marvel cinematic universe. Fury is a relatively minor character, however, and changing a major superhero might be met with more resistance from long-term fans.
The companies that own superheroes – publishers and movie studios – could follow the example of their heroic characters and make brave decisions. Henry Cavill will play Superman in Warner Bros' Justice League films, but what about the inevitable reboot in a few years' time?
Science says Superman should be black. Hopefully the next time we see him on screen, the Man of Steel will be a more realistic, solar-powered superhero.
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641acfa3d4444c779b05a664d41cf93d | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jvchamary/2016/07/19/science-ghostbusters-racism/ | The Real Problem With 'Ghostbusters' Is Racist Stereotypes | The Real Problem With 'Ghostbusters' Is Racist Stereotypes
Patty (Leslie Jones), Abby (Melissa McCarthy), Erin (Kristen Wiig) and Holtzmann (Kate McKinnon) in... [+] 'Ghostbusters' (Image: Sony Pictures)
Ghostbusters is an enjoyable movie. While not as good as the original, it's worth seeing for some funny scenes and great chemistry between the characters. (NOTE: Besides one quote, this article contains no spoilers).
The all-female cast has been controversial. Since the trailer was released in March, it's received almost a million down-votes on YouTube. Some claimed that negative reaction was due to fans who didn't want Ghostbusters to be women, which implies misogyny or sexist views. That doesn't account for all the hatred toward Ghostbusters, however.
If you're sensitive to racial stereotyping, the new movie has a big problem: of the four women in the Ghostbusters team, the only non-scientist is also black.
Subway worker Patty Tolan argues that she has could make a useful contribution by saying: "You guys are really smart about this science stuff, but I know New York." This has been criticized because it limits the character to a stereotype: 'street-savvy black woman'. That continues throughout the film -- in one scene, physicist Erin Gilbert (Kristen Wiig) says, "We are scientists... plus Patty."
After the trailer appeared, the actor who plays Patty, comedian Leslie Jones, responded to criticism on Twitter, which included a series of tweets to share a note from a real subway employee who was proud that a booth clerk would become a hero. As Jones concluded, "Why can't a regular person be a Ghostbuster"?
But if you think Jones' response had "shut down" critics, you've missed the point.
Again, the argument isn't about aspiring to become a Ghostbuster, but why the only non-scientist is black. By changing the character personalities slightly, paranormal researcher Abby Yates (Melissa McCarthy) could have been played by Jones, for example, keeping the white subway worker as a heroic 'regular person' while removing a racist stereotype.
Race and intelligence
The problem with Ghostbusters is that it perpetuates the myth that black people are less intelligent than whites. Even clever people believe this is supported by science. In 2007, James Watson, Nobel prize-winning co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, claimed -- without evidence -- that 'Africans' have lower intelligence.
Abby, Erin, Holtzmann and Patty in the New York subway (Image: Sony Pictures)
So what does science really say about the connection between race and intelligence?
Intelligence is notoriously difficult to define. The most well-known way to assess mental ability is intelligence quotient (IQ), a standardized method that measures ability against an educational system. Many studies show differences in IQ between ethnic groups, with whites scoring higher than so-called minorities.
(NOTE: 'Race' isn't usually considered a scientific concept -- it's a social construct defined by an arbitrary threshold for ancestry... and everyone's ancestors are ultimately African.)
Using faulty logic and little understanding of biology, some academics have concluded that people of color are innately less intelligent than whites. But the relationship between race and intelligence is a correlation -- one doesn't necessarily cause the other. So if IQ scores depend on quality of education and black people were less educated in general, for instance, intelligence would actually depend on learning, not race.
Intelligence is hard to test because scientists have to control for various contributing factors. Genetics plays a role, as revealed by comparing twins, who share near-identical DNA. The environment (upbringing) is also important, as shown by the fact that IQ scores have been increasing by about 3 points per decade, what's known as "the Flynn effect."
Like most biological features, intelligence depends on both nature and nurture.
Science of stereotypes
What's the problem with a black Ghostbuster being less intelligent? This was explained by a classic experiment by Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson of Stanford University.
In a 1995 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Steele and Aronson asked 117 students to take a tough 30-minute test (based on the Graduate Record Examination). When told the exam wouldn't assess intellectual ability, black and white students with similar SAT scores did equally well. But when participants were told the test would measure ability, the black students performed worse than usual.
Surprisingly, telling them to declare their race beforehand also prompted black students to perform poorly. Steele and Aronson called this effect 'stereotype threat' -- if someone thinks others will perceive them as inferior, they do worse. This occurs when comparing any two groups. And so when young, white athletes worry about doing worse than black competitors, they also under-perform.
Holtzmann, Erin and Abby at the Paranormal Studies Lab (Image: Sony Pictures)
Stereotype threat is a psychological 'chip on your shoulder' that subconsciously causes performance anxiety. For black people, doing poorly on intelligence tests becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, while racists can point to test results as 'proof' that whites are smarter (leading to confirmation bias).
Negative stereotypes might help explain why African-Americans are under-represented in careers within the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). According to statistics from the US National Science Foundation, black women constitute 2% of science and engineering occupations. In 2012, they made-up 6.6% of graduates awarded a PhD (684 of 10,316), 10 times less than white women (6777).
A brilliant, African-American Ghostbuster would have made an excellent role model for girls, helping to solve the Catch-22 of black women in science and tech.
Impact on society
Race is hard to discuss because the issue is complicated by racial tensions such as the social unrest surrounding the 'Black Lives Matter' movement. But in order to help heal divisions in society, we should try and identify the underlying causes of racism, such as correcting unscientific views on levels of intelligence.
Different sides use derogatory labels to block discussion. People who promote socially progressive views like feminism are often branded 'social justice warriors', for instance, whereas those with dissenting opinions are called 'haters'. That doesn't mean we've lost the right to criticize Ghostbusters though.
Abby, Erin, Holtzmann and Patty shooting proton streams (Image: Sony Pictures)
The original film didn't feature a smart, black scientist either. Winston Zeddemore (Ernie Hudson) was originally supposed to be an ex-military man, but his character was heavily cut, leaving a token black guy. Hudson later complained about being powerless to prevent his role being reduced -- maybe Leslie Jones will feel free to do the same once she's no longer obliged to promote the movies.
Ghostbusters is an example of Hollywood's ongoing problem with casual racism, which came to a head in 2015 with the lack of diversity at the Academy Awards, highlighted by the 'Oscars So White' controversy.
Although the individuals who produced the new Ghostbusters probably aren't racist, they clearly weren't sensitive to racial stereotypes (both writers are white). None of the people who saw the movie during production raised concerns, which suggests there's something about Hollywood culture that allows people to either not notice -- or consciously ignore -- racial stereotyping.
The new Ghostbusters should be celebrated for being a feminist film, but that doesn't mean movie studios should have carte blanche to promote racist stereotypes.
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bfdbee49d2cc1b3dffd9ce50f47f87e8 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jvchamary/2016/07/29/pokemon-evolution/ | 'Pokémon GO' Is Bad If You Don't Understand Evolution | 'Pokémon GO' Is Bad If You Don't Understand Evolution
Pikachu from Pokémon (Image CC BY-SA 2.0: Farley Santos / https://flic.kr/p/rB3RyM)
The Pokémon GO phenomenon could have positive effects on society. It might improve public health by getting people to exercise while walking around trying to catch virtual monsters in the real world, for example.
But the game could also have a negative effect on science education, by causing confusion over how evolution works.
In most Pokémon games, 'evolution' occurs when a monster turns into a more powerful creature. The process is triggered in several ways, like reaching a certain level of combat experience or exposure to a magic stone -- Bulbasaur becomes Ivysaur at level 16, for instance, while Pikachu 'evolves' into Raichu with a Thunder stone.
Transformation of Pokémon is completely different from evolution in nature, the most common interpretation of the word 'evolution' (Wikipedia defaults to biological evolution, for instance -- not a disambiguation page).
So what does 'evolution' mean?
The word originates from the Latin for 'unrolling' and according to one definition, it's "The process by which different kinds of living organism are believed to have developed from earlier forms during the history of the Earth." Neither is a good explanation.
There are many reasons why some people don't understand evolution, such as not realizing that all the features of living species are adaptations to their past environments -- not the present world we see today.
One of the most common myths is that evolution happens to individuals, when in fact it's the change to a population over time.
The easiest way to understand this is to think about your family. If you were to take a snapshot of everyone alive today, that photo might include your parents and grandparents, children and grandchildren. But take a picture from a few generations in the past and it would only have grandparents and your ancestors. It's the family -- the population -- that evolves, not individuals.
Focusing on species at a single point in time, rather than seeing a group with ever-changing membership, is what leads people to make mistakes like thinking humans 'evolved from' monkeys. That's like saying you evolved from your cousin, when you only have common ancestors -- your grandparents. Similarly, humans and monkeys (distinct primate groups) shared a common ancestor 25 million years ago.
Pichu, Pikachu and Raichu from Pokemon (Image: Nintendo / The Pokemon Company)
Pokémon's problem is that it perpetuates the misconception that evolution is a process that happens to individuals.
Calling Pokémon transformations 'evolution' also creates confusion for the game franchise itself. Each of the 700+ monsters is called a distinct 'species' and those related by transformation are members of an 'evolution family' -- even though 'evolving' can simply mean an individual has leveled up -- in other words, grown older.
In biology, change to an individual over time is known as development. That isn't the ideal word to use for Pokémon, however, because it doesn't sound very exciting (compared to evolution) and doesn't capture the fact that changes to a monster are dramatic and relatively sudden.
A better alternative is to use an existing word people already understand: metamorphosis, a change in shape. Using 'metamorphosis' rather than evolution makes naming clearer.
Different kinds of monsters in an 'evolution family' would be members of the same species instead, while each monster would be a 'morph'. The 'chu' (mouse) species would have three different morphs, for example: Pichu, Pikachu and Raichu.
Using 'evolution' to describe a transformation is so well-established in Pokémon that renaming the process to 'metamorphosis' is obviously wishful thinking. And that's a shame, because continuing to use the wrong word will damage the public's understanding of how life evolves.
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cc0fa7282348de8ba9d210f8e31237a1 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jvchamary/2016/10/31/artificial-mammary-glands/ | Scientists Grow 'Organoids' To Study Breast Cancer In 3D | Scientists Grow 'Organoids' To Study Breast Cancer In 3D
Mammary organoid (Image: Jarde et al / Nature Communications)
Scientists have long been limited to studying cells as flat layers in a Petri dish, which is obviously not how tissues are arranged in the human body. Now a team of biomedical researchers has grown a three-dimensional structure in a lab.
The researchers have created a miniature organ-like structure, or "organoid", that resembles a mammary gland. Because these are 3D tissues, they offer a more realistic model for understanding the genetic and physiological processes that cause breast cancer.
In order to grow the mammary organoid, the team identified several molecules that control breast development, such as the growth factor "Neuroregulin1." The organoid features different layers and includes stem cells, which give rise to more specialised breast tissues, allowing it to become a complete mammary gland.
Previous efforts have produced structures whose cells didn't divide and develop for longer than 2 weeks, whereas the new method makes mammary organoids that continue to grow for over 2 months (70 days). The structures could also be encouraged to turn into tumours.
Mammany organoids will serve as a model to understand the biology of how genes and hormones influence healthy breast development, then to study disease and test candidate drugs for chemotherapy.
According to Trevor Dale of Cardiff University, who led the research, "Much of how breast tissues respond to external stimuli such as hormones is, as yet, unknown. As such, developing a model of a normal breast with the actual architecture of a mammary gland has long been a 'Holy Grail' for cancer researchers."
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32953181d979266829bc9280d15f3151 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jvchamary/2018/05/22/deadpool-2-science-regeneration-cancer/ | The Massive Problem With Deadpool's Mutant Powers | The Massive Problem With Deadpool's Mutant Powers
Deadpool Marvel / 20th Century Fox
Deadpool's superpower is an accelerated healing factor that lets him survive almost any physical injury. In the first movie, he quickly recovers from broken bones, gunshot wounds and even manages to regrow a missing hand. But as we'll see below, that power comes at a great cost.
Note: This article contains mild spoilers for Deadpool 2.
According to the origin story told in Deadpool, mercenary Wade Wilson volunteers to be a guinea pig in lab experiments that he believes will cure his cancer. Instead, he gains an ability to regenerate. This mimics the impressive regenerative powers of salamanders, amphibians such as newts and axolotl that can regrow legs from stumps and even replace vital organs like the heart or spinal cord.
Regeneration is possible thanks to stem cells, which have the potential multiply and develop into any tissue -- everything from blood vessels to brain cells. When the body's outer layer is damaged, it forms a 'wound epidermis' that then releases growth factors that prompt cells to change their behavior.
Axolotl or Mexican salamander CC BY-NC-ND 2.0: John Clare / https://flic.kr/p/bCC7oC
In the case of a salamander, fibroblast cells -- which produce the elastic collagen fibres that are used in connective tissue -- are reprogrammed to become a ball of stem cells (a 'blastema') that in turn creates various other tissues. Scientists recently sequenced the genome of the axolotl and identified several genes that may be involved in regenerating limbs, and could in future help researchers engineer replacement parts for people.
One of the most amazing things about the human body is that a single fertilized embryo gives rise to about 200 different types of cell. All those cells inherit exactly the same instructions for how to behave, written in the genes of DNA, so how do they end-up being so different? That's partly down to epigenetics, a layer of information above DNA. Epigenetics helps dictate which passages of life's instruction manual are read or ignored, like highlighting the key sentences across pages and pages of text.
Wade Wilson in 'Deadpool 2' Marvel / 20th Century Fox
In Deadpool, Wade gains superpowers after being injected with a serum that "activates any mutant genes" lurking in his DNA when combined with extreme stress to "trigger mutations". Those wouldn't be genetic mutations, but epigenetic ones that remove chemical marks on DNA to reveal hidden instructions to the gene-reading machinery of cells, allowing mutant genes to be switched on. Science would back-up this idea, as stressful experiences trigger epigenetic changes.
Mutant genes are fictional, but a realistic scenario for how Deadpool's powers might work is by controlling other genes that influence how fast cells divide -- the same genes mutated in cancer and contribute to out-of-control cell division.
Deadpool's mutant ability would save him from death, but only temporarily. As Ajax, the villain who runs the experiments in the first film, tells Wade: "Now your mutated cells can heal anything [...] attacking your cancer as fast as it can form."
Deadpool 2 Marvel / 20th Century Fox
But while Wade's healing factor could stop the disease from spreading, it doesn't cure him. During Deadpool 2, he's fitted with a collar that blocks his accelerated healing, causing him to become sick again after his tumors return. As he explains to Russell (Firefist): "This ends with me dying of cancer."
Cancer is so hard to beat because it evolves inside the body. An individual tumor doesn't contain one kind of cell, it consists of populations of cells that continually mutate and adapt to their ever-changing environment. And this process of evolution by natural selection not only enables tumors to evade the immune system, it's what lets them adapt to drugs in chemotherapy.
So what's the massive problem with Deadpool's powers?
Because Wade's cancer (like every part of his body) inherited the same DNA, any mutant genes -- and superpowers -- would be activated in his tumor cells too. Deadpool would have super-cancer. Those malignant tumors would have already defeated every weapon his super-defences had thrown at them, so his body's normal immune system wouldn't stand a chance. Wade Wilson would probably die within hours.
Deadpool's healing factor is therefore a double-edged sword as his superpowered cancer cells could succeed where blades, bullets and even bombs have failed: it would finally silence the Merc with a Mouth.
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5098f64f20a4575c3fe844aae9d832c1 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jvchamary/2019/03/27/what-is-life/ | A Biologist Explains: What Is Life? | A Biologist Explains: What Is Life?
Is Mimivirus alive? CC BY 4.0 (adapted from Xiao et al 2009 PLoS Biology)
Although biology is the study of life, even biologists don't agree on what 'life' actually is. While scientists have proposed hundreds of ways to define it, none have been widely accepted. And for the general public, a dictionary won't help because definitions will use terms like organisms or animals and plants -- synonyms or examples of life -- which sends you round in circles.
Instead of defining the word, textbooks will describe life with a list of half a dozen features based on what it has or what it does. For what life has, one feature is the cell, a compartment to contain biochemical processes. Cells are often listed because of the influential cell theory developed in 1837-1838, which states that all living things are composed of cells, and the cell is the basic unit of life. From single-celled bacteria to the trillions of cells that make up a human body, it does seem as though all life has compartments.
A list of features will also mention what life does -- processes like growth, reproduction, ability to adapt and metabolism (chemical reactions whose energy drives biological activity). Such views are echoed by experts such as biochemist Daniel Koshland, who listed his seven pillars of life as program, improvization, compartmentalization, energy, regeneration, adaptability and seclusion.
But the list approach is let down by the fact it's easy to find exceptions that don't tick every box on a checklist of features. You wouldn't deny that a mule -- the hybrid offspring of a horse and donkey -- is alive, for example, even though mules are usually sterile, so no tick for reproduction.
Is a Mule alive? Capri23auto on Pixabay
Entities on the border between living and non-living also undermine lists. Viruses are the most well-known fringe case. Some scientists claim that a virus isn't alive as it can't reproduce without hijacking the replication machinery of its host cell, yet parasitic bacteria such as Rickettsia are considered alive despite being unable to live independently, so you can argue that all parasites can't live without hosts. Meanwhile Mimivirus -- a giant virus discovered in an amoeba that's large enough to be visible under a microscope -- looks so much like a cell that it was initially mistaken for a bacterium. Humans are also creating fringe cases -- designer organisms like Synthia, which has few features and wouldn't survive outside a lab -- through synthetic biology.
Are entities such as viruses really life-forms, or merely life-like? Using a list definition, that largely depends on the criteria you choose to include, which is mostly arbitrary. An alternative approach is to use the theory considered to be a defining feature of life: Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, the process that gives life the ability to adapt to its environment. Adaptability is shared by all life on Earth, which explains why NASA used it as the basis for a definition that might work in helping to identify life on other planets. In the early 1990s, an advisory panel to NASA's astrobiology program, which included biochemist Gerald Joyce, came up with a working definition: Life is a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution.
The 'capable' in NASA's definition is key because it means astrobiologists don't need to watch and wait for extraterrestrial life to evolve, just study its chemistry. On Earth, the instructions for building and operating an organism is encoded in genes, carried on a molecule like DNA, whose information is copied and inherited from one generation to the next. On another world with liquid water, you would look for genetic material that, like DNA, has a special structure that might support evolution.
Detecting alien life is a harder task than collecting samples, however, as illustrated by the Viking mission. In 1977, NASA put landers on Mars and performed a variety of experiments to try and detect signs of life in the Martian soil. The results were inconclusive: while some tests returned positive results for the products of chemical reactions that might indicate metabolism, others were negative for carbon-based organic molecules. Decades later, astrobiologists are still limited to looking for life indirectly, searching for biosignatures -- objects, substances or patterns that might have been produced by a biological agent.
Given that scientists who look for life are fine with signatures, some say we don't actually need a definition. According to philosopher Carlos Mariscal and biologist W Ford Doolittle, the problem with defining life arises from thinking incorrectly about its nature. Their strategy is to search for entities that resemble parts of life and to think of all life on Earth as an individual. That solution might suit astrobiologists, but it wouldn't satisfy people who want to know whether or not something strange, like a virus, is alive.
A major challenge for both detecting and defining life is that, so far, we've only encountered one example in the Universe: terrestrial life. This is the 'N = 1 problem'. If we can't even agree on the distinction between living and non-living things, how can we expect to recognize weird forms of life?
It's life, but not as we know it
As science hasn't provided conclusive proof of extraterrestrials, we must turn to science fiction, and few series have explored such possibilities better than Star Trek: The Next Generation. The voyages of the starship Enterprise and "its continuing mission to explore strange new worlds and seek out new life and new civilizations" gave us everything from the god-like being Q to a huge Crystalline Entity that converts living matter to energy (a kind of metabolism). Perhaps most interestingly, as researchers get closer to creating an artificial intelligence that's smarter than a person, there's Data -- an android who had to prove human-like sentience but didn't reproduce until he built his own daughter. Would a god who exists beyond time, a spaceship-sized crystal or a robotic AI be considered 'alive'?
Is Data from 'Star Trek: The Next Generation' alive? CBS Studios
'What is life?' is not simply a question for biology, but philosophy. And the answer is complicated by the fact that researchers from different fields have differing opinions on what they believe ought to be included in a definition. Philosopher Edouard Machery discussed the problem and presented it as a Venn diagram with circles for three groups -- evolutionary biologists, astrobiologists and artificial-life researchers -- using hypothetical features upon which they would converge (some biologists think viruses are alive while others believe the cell is essential, so assuming members would agree is controversial). Machery claimed that no criteria could fall within the overlap of all three circles, concluding that "the project of defining life is either impossible or pointless."
But while philosophers can sidestep the problem without consequences, the conclusion that it's futile to define life is both unsatisfying and frustrating for regular folk (and also for those like me, who care about the public understanding of science). Regardless of whether researchers ever reach a consensus on a scientific definition, we still need a folk definition for practical purposes -- a sentence to explain the concept of life that the average person can understand.
Life may be a fuzzy concept, but that doesn't mean its meaning should be vague. As computational biologist Eugene Koonin pointed out, defining life isn't scientific because it's impossible to disprove, as we can always find an entity that meets all criteria but is 'clearly' not alive, or lacks certain features but is 'obviously' a life-form, and so "some kind of intuitive understanding of the living state superseding any definition is involved [...] we seem to 'know it when we see it'." Koonin focused on whether a definition can provide biological insights (such as identifying novel life-forms) but mentions another area where defining life might be useful: "better teaching of the fundamentals of biology."
So how do we get a definition that teaches biology? This is partly an exercise in semantics. First, a popular definition should avoid technical jargon and use everyday language. Next we need a starting point. Since Aristotle first tried to define life around 350 BC, thinkers have engaged in seemingly endless philosophical discussions, In 2011, biophysicist Edward Trifonov tried to break the deadlock by comparing 123 definitions to find a consensus, grouping words into clusters and counting the ones used most frequently to produce a minimal or concise definition: Life is self-reproduction with variations.
The 'variations' in Trifonov's definition are mutants, the result of mutations (errors in copying) that occur during reproduction, which is what creates the variety in a population that allows 'survival of the fittest' individuals through evolution by natural selection. While Trifonov's consensus and NASA's working definition don't use the same words, they're two sides of the same coin and share a central concept: life is able to adapt to its environment.
Darwinian evolution is the way that life as we know it adapts. But what about things that might use alternative mechanisms of adaptation? As a narrow definition will exclude fringe cases and being broad would let us include a wide range of potential life-forms, our popular definition drops Trifonov's inclusion of 'self-reproduction' (allowing for immortal AIs that don't need to replicate) and also NASA's requirement for a 'chemical system' (allowing for organisms that don't carry genes on a DNA-like molecule). An 'environment' implies a habitat or ecosystem, not simply the surroundings, which rules-out a robot that adjusts its body to traverse a terrain and virtual objects that navigate a digital domain.
Lastly, we need a word for the 'thing' we describe as living. Scientists and philosophers use 'entity' without acknowledging that, just as a dictionary uses 'organism', it's effectively a fancy synonym for 'life' (Can you think of an 'entity' that doesn't imply some sort of life-form?) This slight logical circularity may not be ideal, but I can't think of a better option. An entity is a self-contained thing, which means the word can work whatever the level -- whether that's an individual organism, an AI, or all life on a planet.
Any definition should be necessary and sufficient, but it's important to first identify for whom. Because this article is aimed at a general audience (non-scientists), the goal is a folk definition. So what is life? Here's a suggestion:
Life is an entity with the ability to adapt to its environment.
While I think my 'popular definition' makes intuitive sense, it could still join the hundreds of scientific proposals that have failed to find acceptance. Unlike dictionary definitions, at least it isn't wrong, but only time will tell whether people think it's actually right.
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1bb73985df1dc26e4832b8afb0aa2543 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jvchamary/2020/04/17/prion-like-coronavirus/?sh=7b8cbc174680 | Do Vampire-Like Proteins Make Coronavirus More Contagious? | Do Vampire-Like Proteins Make Coronavirus More Contagious?
Electron microscope image shows SARS-CoV-2 (orange) emerging from the surface of lab-grown cells ... [+] (green). CC BY 2.0 NIAID-RML
The virus causing the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, SARS-CoV-2, has spread far more quickly than any other coronavirus in recorded history. Why is it so contagious? One possibility is that its spike protein is better at breaking into human cells because it contains a part that resembles a proteinaceous infectious particle, or 'prion'.
Prions are self-replicating proteins that cause infectious brain diseases. They have misfolded structures and, like zombies that turns people into more zombies, a prion that comes into contact with its normal form will prompt that protein to adopt an abnormal shape too, triggering a chain reaction. Zombie proteins then accumulate to form aggregates of toxic fibres that kill neurones. Nearby cells clear those fibres but leave behind holes to turn tissue to sponge, as in Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (mad cow disease) and Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease in humans.
Some proteins don't self-propagate but do have folding properties that make them prion-like, as in neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer's disease, whose symptoms include toxic fibres in neural tissue. Prion-like 'misfolding' of proteins can even be beneficial, maintaining long-term memory.
"In addition to the pathological role of prions, recent studies demonstrate that protein misfolding plays a very important and very particular physiological role in different organisms," says Dr George Tetz of the Human Microbiology Institute, who has studied protein misfolding in millions of microbes, including viruses.
Prion-like proteins are analogous to vampires in popular culture, which are able to quickly switch their appearance between human and vampire. A prion-like region or 'domain' in a protein can confer the ability to change from one shape or 'conformation' to another. "One of the distinguishing characteristics of prion-like domains is their ability to very rapidly shift between multiple conformations," Tetz explains.
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Tetz's latest study examined a dozen members of the Betacoronavirus genus, including those that infect humans. The group includes not just the species behind potentially lethal infections, such as SARS and MERS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome), but also relatively harmless ones like HCoV-HKU1 and HCoV-OC43, which only cause the common cold. His results appear in an unpublished preprint that hasn't been peer-reviewed by fellow scientists (so its findings should be treated with some caution). The study was carried out by George and his father, Victor Tetz, at the Human Microbiology Institute in New York at JLABS, a science incubator funded by the pharmaceutical firm Johnson & Johnson.
Tetz and Tetz used a computer algorithm to scan a database of protein sequences for the presence or absence of certain amino acids — building blocks of proteins — like glutamine and asparagine, which create hydrophobic and electrochemically-charged regions in a protein that result in molecular interactions which enable prion-like folding. Put simply, they searched for biochemical signatures of prion-like proteins.
Though the microbiologists ended-up focusing on four viruses and detected potential signatures in all of them, prion-like domains in the spike protein were only predicted for one species: SARS-CoV-2. "No other even closely-related betacoronaviruses have such prion-like structures in their spike proteins," Tetz tells Forbes.
The spikes a coronavirus uses to break into a cell recognise and bind to a molecule or 'receptor' on the cell's surface, which enables the virus' envelope to fuse with the cell's outer membrane so it can then unload the genes that will instruct its host cell to make copies of the virus. In the case of both SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2, the receptor-binding domain within the spike protein attaches to a human cell's ACE2 receptor.
But while the sequence of amino acids in the two cousins is 88% identical, one study of their spike protein structures showed that, compared to SARS-CoV, the SARS-CoV-2 spike has a 10-20 times stronger binding or 'affinity' with the ACE2 receptor. The spike is described as metastable and Tetz believes the spike's shape-shifting structure could account for why the virus behind COVID-19 is so contagious. "These prion-like domains might also contribute to the increase affinity to ACE2 and might explain the high transmission rate."
Interactions between amino acids of prion-like domains (blue) and non-prion-like regions (grey) of a ... [+] cell's ACE2 receptor (green) and the receptor-binding domain of SARS-CoV-2's spike protein. George Tetz
Surprisingly, the algorithm that scanned proteins detected prion-like domains in the ACE2 receptor too. "We were shocked, actually," says Tetz, whose follow-up analysis revealed that five of seven molecular interactions between amino acids in SARS-CoV-2's spike and ACE2 occur within prion-like domains of one or both. At this stage it's not clear why that is, so we can only speculate. Evolution by natural selection might have driven the virus to adapt so that its spike protein matched the shape-shifting ability of its host's ACE2 receptor, for example.
Assuming that Tetz's peers find no major flaws in his work, the discovery of prion-like domains in the spike protein will offer a novel target for vaccines or medicines aimed at SARS-CoV-2. Researchers could search libraries of existing drugs that didn't work for conditions like Alzheimer's disease but could still be effective against COVID-19.
"The presence of prion-like domains for the first time allows us to implement an anti-prion strategy," says Dr Tetz. "Hopefully we can bring totally new drugs that are right now completely off the radar of scientists."
Full coverage and live updates on the Coronavirus
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34bc395c72246bfca29eef946ed539f0 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jvchamary/2020/05/28/punch-beard-evolution/ | No, Biologists Didn't Show That Beards Evolved To Absorb Punches | No, Biologists Didn't Show That Beards Evolved To Absorb Punches
Floyd Mayweather Jr. punches Conor McGregor. Zuffa LLC via Getty Images
Why do men have beards? A recent study claimed that evolution may have favored facial hair because it protects against strikes to the head, which led to headlines like "Big manly beards evolved so we could take punches to the head, study says."
Fact-checkers for BBC quiz show QI repeated the line on Twitter, saying "Men may have evolved beards to absorb the impact of punches during hand to hand fighting," prompting broadcaster and geneticist Adam Rutherford to label the tweet "absolute bollocks." As an evolutionary biologist, I’d agree with that assessment. The claim is especially disappointing because the link to evolution was made by biologists.
So what did the study actually show?
First, the experiment didn’t involve beards or punching. A team led by David Carrier at the University of Utah built models made of fibers and epoxy resin to represent human bone, covered in sheepskin to mimic facial hair. Those 60 models were either 'furred' ('full beard' with 8cm-long hairs), 'sheared' (0.5cm length 'trimmed beard') or 'plucked' ('hairless' shaven face).
Human hair follicles are four times as thick as those from sheep, but five times less densely packed, so a fleece roughly approximates a beard. The biologists then used a mechanical striker to repeatedly drop a 4.7kg (10-pound) weight onto each model to measure the impact and record the damage.
The results showed that furred models were better than both sheared and plucked models at taking the 'punch': a beard will absorb 37% more energy than a shaven face, for example, partly because springy hairs serve as suspension to slow down and soften the blow. As the researchers explain, "the greatest advantage offered by the hair is that it distributes the force of impact over a longer time frame."
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Lamb and sheep, warm in wool. User 272447 on Pixabay.
My first criticism is that the experiment isn't realistic. After over 20 years of martial arts (including bare-knuckle boxing), I've delivered (and received!) a fair few punches. Dropping a load onto a solid object would be like hitting a statue, not a person — even people who aren't used to being hit will often roll with a punch.
Moreover, the most common strike from an amateur fighter isn't a straight punch but a swinging hook (or 'haymaker') to the side of the head, which allows an opponent's skull to rotate away from the point of impact. Not allowing a 'head' model to move is a significant blow to the design of the experiment.
But the bigger problem with the study is that its results are interpreted as evidence for evolution. Differences in physical features between the males and females of a species is known as 'sexual dimorphism', and some researchers — including David Carrier and evolutionary psychologist David Puts — have suggested that certain facial features evolved as a result of competitive fighting between human males.
Combining that suggestion with speculation by neurobiologist Caroline Bouchard — who asked whether a human beard has a "protective function, similar to that of the lion's mane?" — the idea is that, just as a thick mane covers vital regions like the jugular, beards help protect against potentially lethal punches to the throat and jaw. This is the 'pugilism hypothesis'.
The issue with the new study is that it claims that dropping a weight onto a bone-like model tests the pugilism hypothesis for why beards evolved. No, it doesn't. That's an after-the-fact explanation, a reason that makes intuitive sense but isn't necessarily true — an attractive 'Just-so' story.
Of course the most famous Just-so story is the giraffe's long neck, often recounted as a tale of stretching to reach the leaves on tall trees. Although it might seem to make sense, that's not how evolution by natural selection actually works. What happened is that a population contained variation in neck lengths and so when nature imposed selective pressure — like fewer leaves at lower levels when food was scarce — individuals born with longer necks survived and reproduced, passing their 'long-neck genes' to their descendants. Over numerous generations, giraffes gradually evolved longer necks.
Giraffe eating leaves from a tall tree. Margo Tanenbaum on Pixabay.
How are giraffes relevant to beards? Because they illustrate the error in logic. Here's one alternative to the tree hypothesis for a giraffe’s neck: it prevents predators from biting the jugular. You could perform an experiment that involved attaching meat to the heads of two types of fake giraffe, one with an artificially short neck, putting those models in an enclosure with lions and then later counting neck wounds. If the taller 'giraffes' are left relatively untouched, you could interpret that to mean long necks evolved to avoid lion bites.
Such experiments support a hypothesis, but they don't test for evolution. Similarly, facial hair might protect against punches, but that doesn't necessarily explain why beards evolved.
Sexual dimorphism for features like hair is driven by evolution through a mode of natural selection where one sex — typically the female — plays the role of nature to pick between suitable mates. This is the theory of 'sexual selection' first proposed by Charles Darwin.
Darwin's 1871 book The Descent of Man discusses hair in great detail. And the bearded genius didn't make the mistake of equating the lion's mane with human hair: although he argued that the thick hair of various mammals might provide protection in fights between competing males, he believed that human facial hair is a 'secondary sexual character' that evolved as a result of female preferences, and rightly pointed out that human populations differ in their ability to grow thick beards — not something you would expect if facial hair has a protective function (unless men never fight).
Charles Darwin. CC BY 2.0 Julius Jääskeläinen on Flickr / https://flic.kr/p/2dfJKKT
Since Darwin first described the theory of sexual selection, scientists have proposed several hypotheses for how that selection occurs (the exact mechanism). Besides the pugilism hypothesis, facial hair could make men appear more attractive, healthy, masculine or a better parent too.
All, some, one or even none of the proposals might reflect the real evolutionary history. Natural selection can favor the same feature for different reasons over the course of time, so the various explanations for why beards evolved aren't mutually exclusive either.
Determining why any feature evolved to be the way it is today is very difficult. My doubts over the experimental design aside, the study by Carrier's team at Utah does indeed "support the hypothesis that human beards protect vulnerable regions of the facial skeleton from damaging strikes."
But while it might well be true that facial hair protects against punches, it's false to leap to the conclusion that the "protective function of beards may provide an advantage in male contest competition, and therefore be selectively favored."
The study only showed that fake beards protect against fake punches, which supports the possibility that real beards might protect against real punches. Testing the pugilism hypothesis can't be achieved by studying biomechanics, it requires looking at human evolution. For instance, anthropology might unearth prehistoric skulls with fewer fractures in ancient groups where cave art depicts men with prominent facial hair.
Bear in mind that not every biological feature is the result of natural selection, a view known as 'adaptationism'. A given characteristic could be an adaptation that evolved for a specific function, but it could also have no purpose.
Humans grow thick hair in places besides the face. As Adam Rutherford wryly noted, "bollocks are hairy too, cos a shorn scrotum offers no protection to a swift knee to the happy sacs". I predict few men would step forward to put their balls on the line for such an experiment.
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c5983eb5e3b34cd0219c20a36996dfd1 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jvchamary/2020/06/30/genetic-genealogy-golden-state-killer/?sh=6b4f3505a6d0 | How Genetic Genealogy Helped Catch The Golden State Killer | How Genetic Genealogy Helped Catch The Golden State Killer
Joseph DeAngelo, the Golden State Killer. ASSOCIATED PRESS
Joseph DeAngelo has plead guilty to the murder of 13 people, the rape of around 50 women and committing burglaries across California during the 1970s and 80s.
The so-called ‘Golden State Killer’ was arrested in April 2018 after detective work was combined with DNA databases and family trees to identify potential suspects, an approach known as 'genetic genealogy'.
DeAngelo, now 74, used his knowledge as a former police officer to avoid leaving evidence and managed to escape justice for over 40 years — but he couldn't hide from the clues in his own genes. Here's how genetic genealogy is used to catch criminals.
1. Profiling the Perpetrator
Investigators collect biological material — such as blood, hair, skin or semen — from a crime scene. Those samples sometimes contain DNA that can be read through genetic sequencing, which involves cutting the DNA into tiny fragments and scattering them over a 'genotyping chip' to see what sticks.
The chip contains microscopic wells with about 700,000 probes that each match a unique genetic variant — a specific sequence that may (or may not) be found in a person's DNA. Fluorescent dyes are then used to isolate the appropriate probes so a computer can identify the series of DNA letters in a sample, creating a genetic profile.
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2. Finding the Relatives
The perpetrator's sequence is added to a public database of DNA sequences, such as the genealogy website GEDmatch, which you can search to find similar profiles among its one million users. Those genetic profiles are previously uploaded by consumers who took a DNA test (sold by companies like 23andMe or Ancestry) to learn about variants that might reveal a genetic predisposition to disease and where their (often distant) relatives live around the world.
Law enforcement officials are more interested in whether their perp is closely related to other people in the database, as calculated from number of shared genetic variants. Your DNA is roughly 50% similar to each of your parents, 25% for grandparents. For each generation since two people shared a common ancestor — such as grandparents — their genetic similarity is reduced to one quarter, which means first cousins share about 12.5% of their DNA, second cousins 3.125% and third cousins less than 1%.
3. Building the Family Tree
Unless all your close relatives are obsessed with their ancestry, it's highly unlikely you would find many first or second cousins in the GEDmatch database, but you should get thousands of third cousins. According to renowned genetic genealogist CeCe Moore, investigators in the Golden State Killer case studied third cousins.
The traditional techniques of genealogy — tracking-down records like birth and marriage certificates, census data and newspaper obituaries — along with modern methods like Facebook stalking are then combined with the DNA profiles to build a huge family tree of people who might be related to the perp. Those family members are painstakingly added to the tree, starting with the twigs of living relatives and then connecting them through branches of distant ancestors. CeCe Moore calls this process 'reverse genealogy'.
4. Identifying the Suspect
After law enforcement agencies have identified some potential suspects via genetic genealogy, they use conventional investigative methods such as comparing present physical features to past eyewitness statements and police sketches. This narrows-down the choices to a few candidates.
In the Golden State Killer case, some of the victims who survived his attacks described him as a 5'9", 165-pound white male — characteristics that matched the features of Joseph James DeAngelo.
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7ab36b124b045dcb1c340cd9f4ea6e93 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jvchamary/2020/11/29/coronavirus-immune-system/?sh=47b6697a1c69&utm_source=TWITTER&utm_medium=social&utm_content=4260968866&utm_campaign=sprinklrForbesMainTwitter | How Does Coronavirus Manage To Evade Your Immune System? | How Does Coronavirus Manage To Evade Your Immune System?
SARS-CoV-2 (gold) emerging from cells (green/purple). CC BY 2.0: NIAID
How did Covid-19 become a global pandemic, and how can researchers develop vaccines that would give people immunity to the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus?
Answering both questions requires understanding how the human body responds to infection by SARS-CoV-2 — and science suggests that the secrets to the virus' success lies in its ability to suppress certain parts of your immune system.
Defences against disease-causing germs — pathogens — consist of two systems: innate and adaptive. The innate immune system responds to general threats after detecting molecular patterns characteristic of microbes, such as certain sugars on bacteria, while the adaptive immune system learns to recognize and remember specific pathogens. Together they create immunity — protection from infection.
Innate immune responses
Your body's first lines of defence against invading pathogens such as viruses is the innate immune system, which includes skin and other barriers, molecules like antiviral 'interferons', and white blood cells.
The innate system responds by immediately, deploying its weapons to the site of infection, which can cause inflammation. Some white blood cells act as sentinels to watch out for invaders and certain types — such as macrophages and dendritic cells — will eat and digest pathogens through phagocytosis.
Research suggests that the innate immune response to SARS-CoV-2 is similar to that for its cousins, fellow coronaviruses SARS-CoV-1 and MERS-CoV (which cause Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome).
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Like its relatives, SARS-CoV-2 suppresses the immune system by disrupting the actions of immune cells and interferon molecules. That immunosuppression ability might explain why Covid-19 has such a long incubation period — up to two weeks — compared to influenza (1-4 days).
Immunosuppression probably explains why Coronavirus is able to wreak havoc on the innate system, recruiting too many white blood cells and causing excessive inflammation. That inflammatory response might then in turn lead to the 'acute respiratory distress syndrome' that causes shortness of breath and lung injury in severe cases of coronavirus disease.
Adaptive immune responses
Your body's second source of protection is the adaptive immune system, which includes B cells that release antibodies and T cells that kill to new invaders and remember old enemies.
Compared to the innate response, the adaptive system responds slowly. It builds-up immunity over a few days, not hours, but then kills or neutralizes a pathogen that tries to reinfect you. The system develops an immunological memory of the invader so that, in future, it's able to quickly fight-off repeated invasions.
Antibodies and B cells
Antibodies that match and bind to antigen molecules are produced by B cells. Anything covered with a specific antigen — such as a virus particle with that antigen on its surface — is effectively tagged as 'enemy'.
Once attached to matching antigens, antibodies might physically block a microbe from invading your cells (neutralisation), allow the invader to be more easily ingested by phagocytes (opsonisation) or mark it for destruction by a team of enzymes (called 'complement') or executioners such as Natural Killer cells.
Covid-19 tests can detect antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 within 1-2 weeks after an infected person develops symptoms. Those antibodies usually match the spike protein that a coronavirus uses to break into your cells.
How long does immunity last? While we don't yet know for the SARS-CoV-2 virus, studies of SARS patients have detected antibodies against SARS-CoV-1 over two years following infection.
Antigens and T cells
Following invasion by a pathogen, dendritic cells ingest that germ's antigens and travel to lymph nodes, where they do their job as a 'professional antigen-presenting cell' (APC) and show the foreign antigens to T cells. Once activated, the T cells divide and circulate in your bloodstream, ready to recognize and fight any invaders they might encounter.
SARS-CoV-2 infection and the development of immunity. Elsevier / Poland et al (2020) The Lancet 396: 1595-1606
Like other parts of the adaptive immune system, T cells can recognize a foreign antigen — but only when it's presented on the surface of an infected cell. They come in two types: 'cytotoxic T lymphocytes' (CTL) that kill microbes or virus-infected body cells using destructive molecules, and 'helper T cells' (Th) that aid other immune cells — helping B cells generates antibodies, for example.
Those interactions between the various cells can be seen in the above figure from a recent review in The Lancet.
After T cells help eliminate a pathogen, some remain in your body as long-lived 'memory T cells' that can be reactivated to rapidly respond if the same pathogen invades again. Activating T cells therefore results in much stronger immunity.
Although current vaccines against influenza and measles viruses are effective despite the fact that they only prompt the immune system to generate antibodies, evidence suggests that immunity against SARS-CoV-2 also requires T cells.
A study of 20 patients who recovered from Covid-19 found that they all carried helper T cells that recognize the SARS-CoV-2 spike-protein antigen, and 70% had cytotoxic T cells (the type that kills infected cells) matching the virus.
As with SARS and MERS, studies have found that SARS-CoV-2 can delay the activation of T cells, especially the cytotoxic type — another example of the virus' ability to evade immune responses, which might contribute to Covid-19's long incubation time. During that presymptomatic period, you could still be infectious — shedding virus particles and transmitting the disease.
Add the number of presymptomatic cases to people who might never show symptoms — asymptomatic carriers — and you end-up with a major contributing factor that explains how Coronavirus managed to spread across the world.
Full coverage and live updates on the Coronavirus
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80b920c8cb0bf38b1b932452ee96978e | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jvchamary/2020/11/29/coronavirus-vaccines-difference/ | What’s The Difference Between Covid-19 Coronavirus Vaccines? | What’s The Difference Between Covid-19 Coronavirus Vaccines?
Syringes arranged to resemble Coronavirus. getty
The world can't return to normal without safe and effective vaccines against the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus along with a coordinated global vaccination programme.
Researchers have been racing to develop potential drugs that could help end the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. There are currently around 200 vaccine candidates and about a quarter passed preclinical tests and are now undergoing clinical trials.
What's the difference between the various candidate vaccines?
A pie chart of candidates can be cut several ways. One is to slice it into six uneven pieces according to the technology (or 'platform') that's used to produce the drug. Those six technologies can be grouped into three broader categories: dead or disabled viruses, artificial vectors, and viral components.
Dead or disabled viruses
Traditional vaccines contain a dead or disabled virus, designed to be incapable of causing severe disease while also provoking an immune response that provides protection against the live virus.
1. Live-attenuated viruses
Attenuated means 'weakened'. Weakening a live virus typically involves reducing its virulence — capacity to cause disease — or ability to replicate through genetic engineering. The virus still infects cells and causes mild symptoms.
For a live-attenuated virus, an obvious safety concern is that the virus might gain genetic changes that enable it to revert back to the more virulent strain. Another worry is that a mistake during manufacturing could produce a defective vaccine and cause a disease outbreak, which once happened with a polio vaccine.
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But using a live-attenuated virus has one huge benefit: vaccination resembles natural infection, which usually leads to robust immune responses and a memory of the virus' antigens that can last for many years.
Live-attenuated vaccines based on SARS-CoV-2 are still undergoing preclinical testing, developed by start-up Codagenix and the Serum Institute of India.
2. Inactivated viruses
Inactivated means 'dead' ('inactivated' is used because some scientists don't consider viruses to be alive). The virus will be the one you want to create a vaccine against, such as SARS-CoV-2, which is usually killed with chemicals.
Two Chinese firms have developed vaccines that are being tested for safety and effectiveness in large-scale Phase III clinical trials: 'CoronaVac' (previously 'PiCoVacc') from Sinovac Biotech and 'New Crown COVID-19' from Sinopharm. Both drugs contain inactivated virus, didn't cause serious adverse side-effects and prompted the immune system to produce antibodies against SARS-CoV-2.
Sinopharm's experimental vaccine has reportedly been administered to hundreds of thousands of people in China, and both drugs are now being trialled in countries across Asia, South America and the Middle East.
The global COVID-19 vaccine landscape (left) and Vaccine platforms used for SARS-CoV-2 vaccine ... [+] development (right). Adapted from figures in Jeyanathan et al (2020) Nature Reviews Immunology 20: 615-632 (left) and Florian Krammer (2020) Nature 586: 516-527 (right). Springer
Artificial vectors
Another conventional approach in vaccine design is to artificially create a vehicle or 'vector' that can deliver specific parts of a virus to the adaptive immune system, which then learns to target those parts and provides protection.
That immunity is achieved by exposing your body to a molecule that prompts the system to generate antibodies, an antigen, which becomes the target of an immune response. SARS-CoV-2 vaccines aim to target the spike protein on the surface of coronavirus particles — the proteins that allows the virus to invade a cell.
3. Recombinant viruses
A recombinant virus is a vector that combines the target antigen from one virus with the 'backbone' from another — unrelated — virus. For SARS-CoV-2, the most common strategy is to put coronavirus spike proteins on an adenovirus backbone.
Recombinant viruses are a double-edged sword: they behave like live-attenuated viruses, so a recombinant vaccine comes with the potential benefits of provoking a robust response from the immune system but also potential costs from causing an artificial infection that might lead to severe symptoms.
A recombinant vaccine might not provoke an adequate immune response in people who have previously been exposed to adenoviruses that infect humans (some cause the common cold), which includes one candidate developed by CanSino Biologics in China and 'Sputnik V' from Russia's Gamaleya National Research Centre — both of which are in Phase III clinical trials and are licensed for use in the military.
To maximize the chance of provoking immune responses, some vaccines are built upon viruses from other species, so humans will have no pre-existing immunity. The most high-profile candidate is 'AZD1222', better known as 'ChAdOx1 nCoV-19' or simply 'the Oxford vaccine' because it was designed by scientists at Oxford University, which will be manufactured by AstraZeneca. AZD1222 is based on a chimpanzee adenovirus and seems to be 70% effective at preventing Covid-19.
Some recombinant viruses can replicate in cells, others cannot — known as being 'replication-competent' or 'replication-incompetent'. One vaccine candidate that contains a replicating virus, developed by pharmaceutical giant Merck, is based on Vesicular Stomatitis Virus (VSV), which infects guinea pigs and other pets.
4. Virus-like particles
A virus-like particle, or VLP, is a structure assembled from viral proteins. It resembles a virus but doesn't contain the genetic material that would allow the VLP to replicate. For SARS-CoV-2, the VLP obviously includes the spike protein.
One coronavirus-like particle (Co-VLP) vaccine from Medicago has passed Phase I trials to test it's safe and has entered Phase II to test that it's effective.
While there are currently few VLPs being developed for Covid-19, the technology is well-established and has been used to produce commercial vaccines against human papillomavirus (HPV) and hepatitis B.
Viral components
All vaccines are ultimately designed to expose the immune system to parts of a virus, not the whole thing, so why not deliver just those parts? That's the reasoning behind vaccines that only contain spike proteins or spike genes.
5. Proteins
Protein-based vaccines can consist of the full-length spike protein or the key part, the tip of the spike that binds the ACE2 receptor on the surface of a cell — ACE2 is the lock that a coronavirus picks in order to break into the cell.
Manufacturing vaccines containing the protein alone has a practical advantage: researchers don't have to deal with live coronaviruses, which should be grown inside cells within a biosafety level-3 lab.
A vaccine against only part of the protein — a 'subunit' — will be more vulnerable to being rendered useless if random mutations alter the protein, known as 'antigenic drift', but full-length proteins are harder to manufacture. The immune system can recognize either as an antigen.
One candidate vaccine based on protein subunits is 'NVX-CoV2373' from Novavax, where the spike subunits are arranged as a rosette structure. It's similar to a vaccine that's already been licensed for use, FluBlok, which contains rosettes of protein subunits from the influenza virus.
6. Nucleic acids
Nucleic-acid vaccines contain genetic material, either deoxyribonucleic acid or ribonucleic acid — DNA or RNA. In a coronavirus vaccine, the DNA or RNA carries genetic instructions for producing a spike protein, which is made within cells.
Those spike genes can be carried on rings of DNA called 'plasmids', which are easy to manufacture by growing them in bacteria. DNA provokes a relatively weak immune response, however, and can't simply be injected inside the body — the vaccine must be administered using a special device to force DNA into cells. Four DNA-based candidates are in Phase I or II trials.
The two most famous nucleic-acid vaccines are the drugs being developed by pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, partnered with BioNTech, and Moderna. Pfizer's 'BNT162b2' and Moderna's 'mRNA-1273' both use 'messenger RNA' — mRNA — to carry the spike genes and are delivered into cells via a lipid nanoparticle (LNP). The two mRNA vaccines have completed Phase III trials and preliminary results suggests they're over 90% effective at preventing Covid-19.
As the above examples show, not only there are many potential vaccines but also various approaches. And while some technologies have already provided promising results, it remains to be seen which will actually be able to defeat the virus.
Full coverage and live updates on the Coronavirus
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f17310d77cbdc1bf75c13f3b1e853142 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jvchamary/2021/01/28/dogs-learn-object-names/ | Dogs Learn Words Quickly, But Only After Playing With Toys | Dogs Learn Words Quickly, But Only After Playing With Toys
The border collie often tops lists of smartest dog breed. getty
One measure of intelligence is being able to learn the name of an object after only hearing it a few times, a cognitive ability known as 'fast mapping'.
Humans can quickly associate an object's physical features with its abstract label — a word — but it's been unclear whether other species could do it too.
Dogs are also capable of rapid learning, according to a study by ethology (animal behavior) researchers at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary, whose experiments tested whether dogs could pick-out new toys with specific names.
The tests were done under two conditions: with formal training or social interaction. In both cases, a new object's name was only mentioned four times.
Formal training involved an 'exclusion-based task', where a dog was presented with seven familiar toys plus one novel object. Social interaction involved playing with their owner, who would say the object's name. After 2 minutes, the dog was then presented with a choice of two new toys and asked to "Bring (the object's name)."
In the first part of the study, researchers tested two dogs: Whisky the border collie and a Yorkshire terrier called Vicky Nina, both known for an ability to recognize their toys. In a baseline test, Whisky correctly retrieved named toys 92% of the time (54/59 trials) whereas Vicky Nina managed 64% (27/42).
Both dogs were able to identify a new object during exclusion-based tasks, but only through a process of elimination, by excluding familiar toys and fetching a "new toy" rather than remembering its specific name. That conclusion is based on the fact that the dogs couldn't distinguish between two new toys during a choice test.
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Following formal training, Whisky and Vicky Nina didn't fetch the correct toy beyond the 50/50 that would be expected by chance (40% and 60% respectively).
But the dogs were able to choose new objects after having learnt their names while playing with owners: Whisky identified the right toys 71% of the time (17/24) while Vicky Nina achieved 75% (15/20).
The memory of names was short-lived, however, as both dogs were less successful in the choice tests after 10 minutes (with an even lower success rate after 1 hour), which suggests that reinforcement is needed to create long-term memories.
Experiment scenarios for fast mapping of names to objects: (a) Baseline test; (b) Exclusion ... [+] condition; (c) Social condition; (d) Choice test. Fugazza et al (2021) Scientific Reports 11: 2222 / Springer Nature
Fast mapping allows us to remember thousands of object names by toddler age. According to ethologist Adam Miklósi, "Such rapid learning seems to be similar to the way human children acquire their vocabulary around 2-3 years of age."
Only some dogs seem capable of rapid learning, however.
In the second part of the study, the ethologists tested 20 dogs who were not known for an ability to recognize named toys. The results showed that, overall, those dogs didn't map words onto novel toys, even after playing with their owners.
The study therefore suggests that an ability to quickly associate objects with specific names is limited to gifted dogs like Whisky and Vicky Nina, so the researchers have launched the Genius Dog Challenge to further investigate the number of words such clever canines can learn.
While it's tempting to describe dogs as intelligent based on recognizing objects, it's important to note that learning words isn't necessarily a measure of cleverness, as intelligence tests focus on what we humans consider to be appropriate metrics.
Online lists of the brightest breeds are often based on a survey of over 200 dog-obedience judges from the book The Intelligence of Dogs by psychologist Stanley Coren, for instance, so 'Smartest' dog actually means 'Most Obedient' dog.
My own disobedient Jackapoo knows the difference between Pheasant and Toucan, Squizza and Phil Mitchell, but won't fetch her toys if she's not in the mood.
As any owner of a naughty dog will tell you, their pet understands words —especially commands — perfectly fine... sometimes they just choose to ignore them.
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13df1f12f0b7338e330d6d80e5027a78 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jvchamary/2021/01/31/medical-parody-music-videos-songs/ | The 10 Best Medical Parody Music Videos | The 10 Best Medical Parody Music Videos
'Dear Future Doctor' is Stanford University's parody of Meghan Trainor's 'Dear Future Husband'. Gun Ho Lee / YouTube
While compiling my list of the 10 greatest scientific music videos from the past decade, I watched dozens of parodies featuring doctors and medical staff.
So that they don't go unseen on some obscure YouTube playlist, here are my favorite songs about medicine...
Piss In My Pants (2011)
Harvard Medical School's parody of The Lonely Island's 'Jizz In My Pants' stuck to the spirit of the original lyrics to raise money and awareness for prostate cancer.
In Clinic (2012)
Similar in style to Bad Project, this is parody of '(Ni**as) In Paris' by Jay-Z & Kanye West was written and performed by Vanessa Prokuski, now a hand surgeon.
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Thrift Lab (2013)
Cheesy yet charming, this music video stars technicians from the University of Florida Department of Pathology, to the tune of 'Thrift Shop' by Macklemore & Ryan Lewis.
I Don’t Know (2014)
With singing so good that it snuck onto the science list, this parody of 'Let It Go' from Frozen was produced for the University of Chicago’s School of Medicine.
Ain’t The Way To Die (2015)
While most parodies are light-hearted, this one by Zubin Damania (AKA 'ZDoggMD') has a serious message. It's based on 'Love The Way You Lie' by Eminem & Rihanna.
Dear Future Doctor (2015)
The 'love letter' to medical students is a popular format, and this version of Meghan Trainor's 'Dear Future Husband' made for Stanford University is one of the best.
In Da Lab (2016)
ZDoggMD's version of 50 Cent's 'In Da Club' was shot at the University Medical Center hospital in Las Vegas. It focuses on laboratory techs and includes clever word play.
At WashU (2017)
Another common trope is 'med school is hard and students have no life', as shown in Washington University School Of Medicine’s version of Ed Sheeran's 'Shape of You'.
It’s Not A Zebra (2017)
From Harvard's version of 'Can't Stop the Feeling' by Justin Timberlake: 'Zebra' is "Medical slang for a rare diagnosis [...] when a common one is far more likely."
Toxic (2019)
This take on Britney Spears' 'Toxic' from Yale School of Medicine is a return to the low-budget music videos from the start of the decade, which is no bad thing.
If you disagree with my choices for best medical parodies since 2010, direct your nerd rage at me on Twitter (@jvchamary) with links to what I should have included.
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a5b4e5a3784f6a8856303b6d826e85f5 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jwebb/2015/10/09/supply-chain-corruption-procurements-dirty-secret/ | Supply Chain Corruption: Procurement's Dirty Secret | Supply Chain Corruption: Procurement's Dirty Secret
Corruption in the supply chain is still a dirty secret for many large corporates. Global networks of third-parties offer cost-focused companies the cheapest option for creating a profitable flow of goods.
However, this extension of commercial relations has led Western business to trade with dubious regimes and in marketplaces which have a more laissez-faire approach to legal enforcement. Many treat this as ‘local custom’. It is just part of the uniqueness of city that the major would require special payments to facilitate the deal. To impose foreign values of zero tolerance to bribes upon this ancient system, a London lawyer once told me, should be considered “cultural imperialism”.
As such, many of the goods that you and I take for granted have come through networks of corporate bribery. The device in your hand, or your computer screen before you and many of your possessions have been delivered to you by a dizzyingly complex international network of companies. Few of these companies would have been subject to financial controls. Unknowingly, your purchase may have supported this dark system. The persistence of these practices encourages criminality, stifles clean competitor and supports dirty politicians.
But, this is beginning to change.
And, as usual, multinational corporations are last to spot the trend.
Yesterday FIFA suspended Sepp Blatter, Michel Platini and Jerome Valcke, the football organisation’s senior leadership, whilst they were investigated for corruption offences. This may appear to be an obscure, unrelated case to business, but this scandal represents an earthquake in the anti-corruption world.
Historically, corruption laws had focused on the bribery of public officials. The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) is solely applicable to the corruption of governmental officials. But new instruments are becoming available to take on a wider range of unethical transactions.
In 2010, Britain launched the UK Bribery Act, which outlaws all forms of bribery occurring anywhere in the world. More recently, the US prosecutors exhumed its RICO laws (designed to break the mafia families in the 1970s) to enable their actions against FIFA which is not a public body, and therefore not subject to the FCPA. Following this, Switzerland tightened its bribery laws, criminalising receiving or giving a bribe, even in a private capacity.
Most procurement managers that I speak to believe they are immune from anti-corruption laws because they are protected by their contracts. Additional protection is offered by the complexity of the supply networks they have established: multiple tiers of suppliers limits corporate visibility and thereby diminishes responsibility.
These hopes, however, are beginning to look increasingly naive.
Firstly, prosecutors are becoming bolder in their execution of more stringent laws. Loretta Lynch, US attorney general, has provided an exemplar for other legal officials on taking on a large organisation, deep in vested interests and political connections. Secondly, the general public are getting wise to corruption. Campaigning charities such as Transparency International are pushing integrity into the national agenda. Indeed, many regimes have toppled after anti-corruption demonstrations, most recently in Ukraine.
In the light of this, the defence of ignorance rings rather hollow. Those working in purchasing functions of corporates will be first to face the wrath of the press (and the CEO) once their supplier is found to passing around brown envelopes.
To reduce their exposure to corruption risk, buyers need to understand who is supplying them and who represents a corruption risk. The current claim that are too many suppliers to count no longer washes. Once suppliers are mapped, procurement can make an assessment of its supply chain and communicate to all those in its network that bribery is not acceptable.
Lastly, and the perhaps most unpalatable prophylactic for corporates, is turning down business. Individuals always face significant pressure within large organisations to place profit over moral qualms. But unless someone pushes back, then corruption will persist. The risk under of the UK Bribery Act of an unlimited fine and up to 10 years imprisonment may be an excellent reason not to accept a dubious contract.
At some point, a buyer will have to acknowledge procurement’s dirty secret and openly challenge it.
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93bb454a12788f2ec89624805b4cdba3 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jwebb/2016/04/28/a-fully-traceable-and-ethical-palm-oil-supply-chain-by-2020-reality-or-bluster/ | A Fully Traceable And Ethical Palm Oil Supply Chain by 2020: Reality Or Bluster? | A Fully Traceable And Ethical Palm Oil Supply Chain by 2020: Reality Or Bluster?
This picture taken on January 23, 2016 shows workers harvesting palm fruit at a palm oil plantation... [+] in Aceh Jaya, Aceh province. Palm oil -- used primarily in the cosmetics, food, and bio-fuel sectors -- is a controversial industry, with campaigns mounted by environmental groups and consumers. CHAIDEER MAHYUDDIN/AFP/Getty Images
Golden Agri-Resources , the world’s second-largest palm oil producer, announced this week that aimed for a fully traceable palm oil supply chain in four years. But its ambition reveals that companies are still struggling to ensure an ethical supply of this useful but morally troubling commodity.
Palm oil is partly produced through an army of small-holders who issue their fruit to a single miller. This creates supply chain headaches as a market of many vendors is difficult to track let alone delve into their operational practices.
“We led the way in committing to delink palm oil production from deforestation in 2011,” said Agus Purnomo a sustainability director at GAR, “and hope to set a new example of how to improve engagement, productivity and sustainability across the industry."
Currently, GAR is vague on the details. But their plans appears to rely on intermediaries to ensure that the farmers are behaving responsible. For those familiar with companies approach to risk management this is familiar story. The easiest option is to change the terms of the contract with the first supplier and make them responsible for the actions of the producers below.
No actual effort is required and the buying company can wash their hands of any potential for non-compliance.
However, palm oil is a commodity that possess a toxic reputation among consumers.
It is a low-cholesterol cooking ingredient that is deployed in a wide-range of consumer goods, from chocolate to cosmetics to detergent. It can also be used as a low-carbon energy source in the form of biodiesel products. The WWF believe that it is the most consumed vegetable oil on the planet.
The cost of this wonder product is environmental damage. The crop is not efficient and requires wide-swathes of land for cultivation. The plants African origins requires a tropical climate. This limits production to some of the most environmentally fragile regions of the world.
Indonesia, the world’s largest producer, dedicates six million hectares of its sensitive landscape to oil production. Most dramatically has been the impact on the highly engendered orangutan, whose diminishing habitat is eaten away by producers looking to increase the output of a profitable commodity. Indonesia plans to double its production by 2020.
The combination of cute animals and consumer products is an opportunity too tempting to miss for campaigning charities. NGOs such Save The Orangutan have emerged to raise awareness. Greenpeace and the WWF conduct their own anti-palm oil campaigns.
Businesses have responded by issuing their usual array of platitudes, but have also started to invest in accreditation schemes. These are formal processes whereby supposedly independent parties audit facilities against an agreed set of standards designed to secure environmental sensitivity.
The biggest of these is the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil. It sports an impressive collection of members: Coca-Cola , Nestle , Kraft, Unilever and many hundreds more.
France has recently issued an additional tax on palm oil imports, expecting sustainably-produced products from the levy. It seems likely that other countries will follow suit as more look to rely on certification to assure ethical production.
These programs have received significant criticism. The value of accrediting a plantation that has already damaged the environment through its sheer existence seems questionable to me. Assuring that, once the trees have been leveled, the land is curated in an ecologically mindful way is little solace to the orangutans that have lost their homes.
Greenpeace found that members still relied on producers that were non-compliant with official standards.
Furthermore, I often hear complaints over the integrity of these schemes. Indonesia is one of the most corrupt countries in the world, according to Transparency International’s rankings, and operating any certification scheme may fall vulnerable to illicit interference by exactly the sorts of unethical enterprises that are unethically expanding their operations.
Whether GAR’s goals will be achieved is questionable. But before it can look to deliver visibility of a difficult supply chain, we need to look a little deeper into industry-wide problems in palm oil production.
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8500b4054b37672a4342d1f16a1ab768 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jwebb/2016/10/26/do-supply-chains-audit-work-dealing-with-deviant-suppliers-like-a-journalist/ | Do Supply Chain Audits Work? Dealing With Deviant Suppliers Like A Journalist | Do Supply Chain Audits Work? Dealing With Deviant Suppliers Like A Journalist
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Auditing suppliers is widely considered the gold-standard for enforcing ethical values. But among the disturbing revelations that emerged from the BBC’s investigation into the Turkish clothing industry was the often ineffectual impact of audits, especially in spotting child labor.
There were two key troubling findings that emerged: Firstly, that auditors can be duped. Secondly, that suppliers engage in ‘unauthorized outsourcing’, which is veiled from the audit’s view.
Although both are different problems, they stem from a shared cause: deviant suppliers that are willing to break the rules and deceive the buyer.
On the first audit problem, the BBC reporters allege that when auditors appeared, child laborers would asked to hide elsewhere – often for many hours at a time.
Children are small and therefore easy to hide. But other offences are difficult to cover up.
In one case yesterday, there were instances of staff working in unsafe conditions, using dangerous chemicals without protective equipment for example, which is harder for suppliers to conceal. You can catch most breaches upon an audit, but not all.
Another problem that emerges in the world of audit is the reliability of practitioners. Many supply chain risk managers have complained to me about the problem of engaging a firm in a local economy – for reasons of language and access – only for the auditor to possess an unhealthily close relationship to the factory under question. If the auditors are themselves corrupt, it is difficult for multinationals to find a work-around.
Perhaps it is time for multinational companies to consider using methods that journalists and NGOs deploy to test their own supply chains. It seems that journalists are more effective at uncovering non-compliance, which may be a product of greater time and dedication that they can allocate to the issue, but it may relate to the routes that they are taking to ensure suppliers are truthful.
Companies already stipulate the need for unannounced audits within supplier contracts. Perhaps they should also look to make more frequent use of undercover audits, either through the guise of prospective employees, potential partners or other plausible agents to reveal the realities of working conditions when the people in suits are absent?
The second uncovered issue was that suppliers sub-contract their work to unapproved factories. It is in these smaller facilities, where the buying organization has little oversight, that the most egregious violations take place. These are hidden away deep in the supply chain and with little recourse to distant codes of conduct, written in faraway countries.
It is surprising in the world of mass-produced consumer goods, where scale predominates all other factors, that international brands can be serviced through a thinly-spread cottage industry. It is perhaps for this somewhat unexpected reason that multinational companies are not expecting to encounter a large-scale secret sub-contracting operation. Again, this may be an area were a more probing journalist eye to supplier operations may reveal these hidden relationships.
When we look at supply chain risk, we encounter a wide array of problems that can disrupt operations. The most difficult of these to combat in the case of a deviant supplier that is deliberately aim to mislead.
Perhaps the answer is not to ramp up the audits, but to change the approach. To dedicate more efforts on pursuing leads, skeptically analyzing information and generally playing the role of the journalist. Unless companies take this approach to policing their own supply chains, the press are only too willing to do it for them.
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1db209a1b05f9c724d5700bccf855618 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jwebb/2017/07/28/what-is-offshoring-what-is-outsourcing-are-they-different/?sh=413a57122a2e | What Is Offshoring? What Is Outsourcing? Are They Different? | What Is Offshoring? What Is Outsourcing? Are They Different?
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One of the most commonly misunderstood aspects of the global supply chain is the difference between offsourcing and outsourcing. A surprisingly large proportion of the general public confuse these terms. But they are distinct concepts.
Procurement Leaders research finds that consumers often use business terms without a fine degree of differentiation. In the main, they are viewed negatively and all representative of the malignant campaign of corporations to 'screw over the little guy'. Often, they don't see the difference at all between 'outsourcing' or 'offshoring'. For one American respondent, they were all part of the same malaise:
Businesses do it for money and don’t care about consumers. They are not honest about their products most of the time.”
This is an unfortunate misunderstanding as knowing the difference between these concepts can enrich our knowledge of business. From here, we can truly appreciate the positives and negatives of business activities, and cut across the political verbiage. So what is outsourcing? And how does it differ from offshoring?
Outsourcing
At its most basic, outsourcing is about moving internal operations to a third-party. This can come in the form of selling physical plant to a supplier, to buy back goods or services, or shifting an entire business division to a third-party and again buying the service back. The basic philosophy being: To move transactional activities to the experts in order to give an organization the capacity to focus on its expertise.
The pattern of decades worth of trade has been based upon this ideal. Almost every company has 'spun off' its functions and sort greater specialization on the areas which earns the most profit. In turn, outsourcing has generated fantastic wealth for the global economy.
There are down-sides. Although a company can expect to see a reduced cost profile, it does lose its own capabilities. Once you move your productive facilities to a supplier, you also outsource all the knowledge and human capital to make those goods. Such capabilities may have taken decades to create. Once lost, they are hard to return.
Critics also argue that outsourcing equates job losses. The act of outsourcing is, generally, laying-off a number of people (as well as selling property). These workers face an uncertain future of possibly retaining their jobs with the new supplier, or perhaps being made completely redundant.
Offshoring
Unlike outsourcing, offshoring is primarily a geographic activity. In the West, goods are expensive because the staff required to produce and distribute them are costly. In the developing world, by contrast, vast inexpensive labor pools provide an easy bedrock for a low-cost economy.
Offshoring takes advantage of these cost differentials by relocating factories from costly countries to the cheaper economies in order to sell the goods back in the West at a hefty discount (and profit). Alongside technological improvements, it has been the decades of productive offshoring that has lowered the costs of consumer goods such as clothing and electronics.
Offshoring does not only relate to the production of physical goods, but also services. The Indian IT industry, for instance, has been powered by waves of offshoring by technological companies in the West.
As with outsourcing, the activity has the potential to save money for both seller and consumer. Advocates also argue that these actions can stimulate wealth in some of the world’s poorest countries and provide jobs for those who are in the deepest need of aid.
Critics contend that this is merely self-serving rhetoric and that offshoring is a device to exploit some of the world’s most vulnerable populations. Workers from such countries have no legal protection and face either harsh conditions or hunger. Examples such as Apple’s supplier Foxconn, which experience a speight of suicides at its Chinese facilities testifies to the severity of treatment.
Combining offshoring and outsourcing
The ultimate means to save a significant amount of money is to combine offshoring with outsourcing. That is move production to a third-party that is based in an overseas location. This has been an activity in which American corporations have been engaged for many decades. Last swatches of US industry has been relocated under the production of overseas entities, mainly in China.
Although double the savings may be enjoyed here, so are double the cost. Opponents argue that the costs are not only felt by companies, but by entire nations. The dramatic change in the American political climates, for instance, is partly attributable to the enormous public opposition to outsourcing to offshore locations.
It is important to know the difference between these terms when engaged in the political debate on business strategies. There are both moral and economic implications of offshoring and outsourcing, but they are distinct. And an enriched discussion will be mindful of these differences.
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b725fc600ef81d2a5afd3dc638fc4eec | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jwebb/2017/10/30/apples-supply-chain-attracts-criticism-for-performance-but-also-praise-for-sustainability/ | Apple's Supply Chain Attracts Criticism For Performance But Also Praise For Sustainability | Apple's Supply Chain Attracts Criticism For Performance But Also Praise For Sustainability
(SAM YEH/AFP/Getty Images)
Two recent studies report varying performance levels in Apple’s supply chain. Bloomberg argue that it's lost its mojo, but Greenpeace rates the tech giant as a sustainability pioneer.
Few corporate supply chains are scrutinized quite like Apple’s. As the technology outsourced more of its production to tiers of Asian suppliers, a new profession has emerged in a supply chain analyst, where as industry analysts of the past previous scoured quarterly earnings, they now delve deep into the opaque world of supply chains.
However, the once untraceable web of privately owned China-based enterprises is beginning to grow more transparent. Analysts has taken advantage of recent legal changes in Taiwanese corporate law, which mandates large firms to produce monthly earning reports.
Bloomberg finds that, using such data, Apple’s supply chain has lost its 'mojo'. That is, its major suppliers are beginning to see their margins fray. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, Apple’s exclusive processor and Hon Hai Precision Industry Company, its assembler, both have seen their profits fall in recent months as bottlenecks emerge in Apple’s supplies.
To explain these issues, a consensus seems to have settled upon the decision to switch to organic light emitting diode screens (OLED). Unlike its rival Samsung, Apple came to OLED relatively late. This decision to opt for OLED for the new iPhone X placed an already lean supply chain under additional strain.
The switch resulted in the split launch of the iPhone 8 (old screen format) and the iPhone X (OLED). The iPhone 8 appears to be struggling and the iPhone X is arguably under-engineered, lacking in finger-print processing capabilities.
“With rival brands like Samsung and Huawei becoming increasingly adept at working with suppliers, Apple risks losing its hardware edge at a time when its iOS platform is also under fire,” writes Tim Culpan. “It simply can’t afford to make such a mistake again.”
However, praise for its supply chain has appeared from an unlikely source: Greenpeace.
The environmental charity awarded Apple a B- grade for its progress on sustainability issues. It ranked second among its peers in China.
The report criticises Samsung’s supply chain as lacking in renewal energies and Amazon’s for its opaqueness. Apple received further grades of A- for renewable energy and climate change and a B for the elimination of hazardous materials.
The authors praise its objective of creating a ‘closed-loop supply chain’, that is a production philosophy based on re-using consumed material:
Apple’s April 2017 goal to move toward a closed-loop supply chain for all its products established a new high bar for the whole sector to work towards. … Apple also reports to be using recovered aluminum from returned iPhone 6 devices in factory Mac minis. Apple is also working with a recycler to recover tin and other metals from iPhone 6 logic boards disassembled by Liam while also moving to recycled tin solder in the main logic board of iPhone 6s since April 2017.”
The reports also praises Apple for pioneering the elimination of the harmful chemicals polyvinyl chloride (PVC) plastic and brominated flame retardants (BFRs) from its production lines. Few other major electronics manufacturers have eradicated these materials.
These two reports reveal only partially the complexity of the supply chain. It would be naïve to conclude that Apple has sacrificed its efficiency for environmental reasons; the two factors are separate considerations for the corporation. But it shows that it is hard to get everything right in a complex international operation.
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fbdb9b8fc44e2a8c59f543b955984648 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/jwebb/2018/02/28/how-many-suppliers-do-businesses-have-how-many-should-they-have/?sh=6ec4b93d9bb7 | How Many Suppliers Do Businesses Have? How Many Should They Have? | How Many Suppliers Do Businesses Have? How Many Should They Have?
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The supply chains of most organizations have grown ungovernably large. It is not uncommon for global brands to possess tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of suppliers.
For the most part, the true figure is generally unknown. Most buyers simply guess at the size of their supplier base.
This can be a problem. How can you provide risk assurance that these partners are reliable? Are they providing you with the purchased parts to the specified level? How can you track whether they are behaving ethically?
The answer to these questions will remain unknown if the supply base becomes too large to monitor. There are some answers as to how organizations can manage this problem.
Current practice
Big businesses rarely publish data on its supply chains, but a few pioneering brands outline the scale of their supply bases. The fast-moving consumer goods company Proctor and Gamble states that it has over 75,000 suppliers. Retailing giant Walmart counts over 100,000 suppliers. French oil company Total buys from over 150,000.
Even supply chains for single product lines can be complex. Sadly, this complexity is often revealed only following a crisis. During the horsemeat scandal, in which many European consumers discovered that their beef-based instant meals actually consisted of horsemeat, the unwieldy scale of Europe’s food system became apparent. One buyer for a major retailer spoke to me of having over 1,000 suppliers for a single lasagne line. So complex had the supply chain become, he argued, it became impossible to provide the simple assurances of risk, quality and even safety.
This story reveals a basic problem of many companies: Most simply do not know the number of their suppliers. Dozens of deals are made daily across the enterprise in various geographies and business units. Rarely are these deals documented beyond basic contractual terms. Over a course of a week, a business can buy from hundreds of new suppliers and not have the slightest idea as to details beyond corporate names.
The scale of the supply chain, therefore, multiplies unchecked – as does its complexity.
What is a supplier?
The first step in determining the number of vendors is developing a working definition of a supplier. Is a company that provided a company with a one-off good on a single occasion a supplier? Is a personal expense incurred on business travel representative of a supplier?
To answer these questions, an organization needs a supplier database. Each time a person buys from a new supplier, that supplier's details should be documented. Already, at this stage, buyers can begin to design rudimentary policies that discourage the purchasing from new vendors and thereby reducing unnecessary inflation of the supplier base. Requisitioners can be asked: "Does this supplier provide services others do not?"
Once a system is in place, it's easier to define a supplier. For most companies, a definition relates to a company on the supplier database that has provided a good or service in the last 12 months. This is often termed a 'live supplier'.
Counting suppliers
Once you have a working definition of a supplier, you can begin to count those on the system that satisfy the definition. This assumes, of course, that there is a single system. The reality for big business is more complex. Even where procurement has rolled out a policy for onboarding suppliers, it is likely that this will manifest itself in various forms throughout the regions.
Each country or local office will have its own take on supplier definitions and processes.
Nevertheless, the ultimate goal is that the data are centralized into a single source of truth. Judgement calls will be required on varying or even incompatible information, but the process of analyzing the different regional listings will be a productive task in of itself to reveal these differences. Mostly, they will be a product of random legacy decisions and this centralizing exercise can be viewed as an opportunity to harmonize regional approaches into a single global definition.
From there, it is an easy task to collate the regional data into a single global list that should report the total number of suppliers for the company.
Reducing suppliers
Ultimately, these activities target supply base rationalization. That is the reduction of the number of suppliers. This enables an easier flow of information (suppliers are easier to track if there are fewer of them) and affords prospects of more productive relationships with those that remain.
The instinct of every large organization is to multiple complexities. The enormous scales of modern global supply chains testify to that effect. However, with concerted effort suppliers can be counted and, once listed, reduced. And with that reduction in supplier numbers, companies begin to reduce unnecessary complexity.
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ab1efeb0669c3fc8f12687325ba4f8e3 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/kaeliconforti/2020/11/29/the-worlds-most-popular-honeymoon-destinations-according-to-pinterest/?sh=25d7e2256f21 | The World’s Most Popular Honeymoon Destinations, According To Pinterest | The World’s Most Popular Honeymoon Destinations, According To Pinterest
According to Pinterest, Bali is the number one honeymoon destination. getty
As of this writing, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is recommending a pause in travel due to the Covid-19 pandemic, so consider this story as a way to plan for future trips.
As the number of Covid-19 cases around the world continues to rise, people are taking to Pinterest to travel vicariously through photos and plan future trips, including honeymoons to beautiful places in the U.S. and abroad. A recent study by Kuoni, a luxury travel company based in the U.K., revealed the most commonly “pinned” romantic destinations people around the world have created Pinterest boards for.
“Pinterest and wedding planning goes hand-in-hand, so it is a really valuable resource to gain great insights on where the most dreamed about honeymoon destinations are in the world,” said Rachel O’Reilly, Head of Communications at Kuoni. “We hope this research can inspire couples who are looking to make a trip of a lifetime.”
Here’s a look at the results for the most popular honeymoon destinations, according to Pinterest users:
1. Bali, with dedicated 998 Pinterest boards
2. Italy, with 997 Pinterest boards
3. Hawaii, with 992 dedicated Pinterest boards
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4. The Maldives, with 981 dedicated Pinterest boards
5. Ireland, with 980 dedicated Pinterest boards
6. Thailand, with 980 dedicated Pinterest boards
7. Mexico, with 949 dedicated Pinterest boards
8. Greece, with 757 dedicated Pinterest boards
9. India, with 734 dedicated Pinterest boards
10. Costa Rica, with 729 dedicated Pinterest boards
11. Japan, with 717 dedicated Pinterest boards
12. Jamaica, with 699 dedicated Pinterest boards
13. New Zealand, with 601 dedicated Pinterest boards
14. France, with 500 dedicated Pinterest boards
15. Iceland, with 499 dedicated Pinterest boards
16. St. Lucia, with 477 dedicated Pinterest boards
17. Aruba, with 442 dedicated Pinterest boards
18. The Bahamas, with 417 dedicated Pinterest boards
19. Spain, with 415 dedicated Pinterest boards
20. Fiji, with 408 dedicated Pinterest boards
The study also showed the states people had created the most Pinterest boards for:
1. Hawaii, with 992 dedicated Pinterest boards
2. California, with 394 dedicated Pinterest boards
3. Florida, with 368 dedicated Pinterest boards
4. Alaska, with 223 dedicated Pinterest boards
5. Colorado, with 202 dedicated Pinterest boards
6. Maine, with 100 dedicated Pinterest boards
7. Oregon, with 98 dedicated Pinterest boards
8. Tennessee, with 97 dedicated Pinterest boards
9. Washington, with 68 dedicated Pinterest boards
10. Arizona, with 60 dedicated Pinterest boards
To get the results, the folks at Kuoni worked their way through more than 10,000 Pinterest boards featuring the name of a given destination and “honeymoon” in their titles. While the majority of the most popular picks are known for beaches and warm weather, it’s worth noting that countries like Ireland and Iceland also made the cut despite having colder weather, suggesting people may be interested in more than just a tropical atmosphere for their dream honeymoon trip. On the U.S. side, the top destinations featured a mix of states known for their chill vibes and relaxing resorts, and others that are known for their more active, outdoor lifestyles.
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d51198b2fed18367b76741858375814c | https://www.forbes.com/sites/kaeliconforti/2020/12/19/how-to-work-remotely-in-the-bahamas-for-up-to-a-year/?sh=2a8b20c45cf4 | How To Work Remotely In The Bahamas For Up To A Year | How To Work Remotely In The Bahamas For Up To A Year
This could be the view from your new office on the beach in the Bahamas. getty
As of this writing, the CDC is recommending a pause in travel due to the Covid-19 pandemic, so consider this story as a way to plan for future trips.
If you’re a remote worker or virtual college student in dire need of a change of scenery, a year in the Caribbean may be just what the doctor ordered. Designed for long-term travelers and their families, The Bahamas Extended Access Travel Stay (BEATS) program offers participants an annual residence permit so you can work or study in any of its 16 major islands—Grand Bahama (home to Freeport), The Abacos, The Berry Islands, Bimini, Andros, Ragged Island, Nassau and Paradise Island, Eleuthera and Harbour Island, Cat Island, The Exumas, San Salvador, Rum Cay, Long Island, Mayaguana, Inagua or Acklins and Crooked Island—for up to one year. The permit can then be renewed annually for stays up to three years.
Applying For Bahamas BEATS
First, you’ll need to apply online through the Bahamas BEATS website—keep your passport and medical insurance card handy—and pay an application fee of $25 per person (for families, that’s $25 for each dependent, too). You’ll also need to show proof of self-employment or a job letter from your current employer if you plan to work remotely, while those applying to study remotely will need to prove they’re enrolled in an accredited university and that they can financially support themselves while in The Bahamas, in which case the parents’ financial information might be taken into consideration.
Applications should be processed within five days, at which point you’ll receive an email confirmation with a special QR code to show upon arrival, as well as a request for the program fee—$1,000 for each remote worker application, $500 for each remote student application and $500 for each dependent. College students are also welcomed to take advantage of counseling and library services, technological support and mentoring programs through the University of The Bahamas, as well as volunteering and other locally planned activities, all available for an additional fee.
All participants are invited to use the year to take their time exploring the 16 islands of The Bahamas and try out People-To-People experiences in Nassau & Paradise Island, Abaco, Andros, Bimini, Exuma, Eleuthera, Harbour Island, Cat Island, San Salvador and Freeport, Grand Bahama, unique opportunities meant to introduce visitors to the culture, history, food and people of The Bahamas.
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What You’ll Need To Enter The Bahamas
As part of the current Covid-19 protocols put in place to protect visitors and residents from the virus, anyone planning to visit The Bahamas must take a COVID-19 RT-PCR test within five days of their trip and upload proof of negative results to the Bahamas Health Visa portal. Though you’ll need to pay $40 per person staying up to four nights and five days or $60 per person staying longer than four nights and five days, the Bahamas Health Visa fee does cover mandatory health insurance needed in case you end up getting sick during your trip. Note that children under the age of 10 are not required to be tested and there is no charge for their Bahamas Health Visa, which includes all the necessary insurance for their stay.
Once in The Bahamas, face masks must be worn—you could face fines of up to $200 or a month in prison for not obeying the rules—and social distancing must be practiced whenever you’re in public. The Covid-19 pandemic is an ongoing situation, so check The Bahamas tourism board website for the latest updates.
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27e103252de17874713af97c8b0579d7 | https://www.forbes.com/sites/kaeliconforti/2021/01/15/quarantine-free-travel-to-begin-next-week-from-cook-islands-to-new-zealand/ | Quarantine-Free Travel To Begin Next Week From Cook Islands To New Zealand | Quarantine-Free Travel To Begin Next Week From Cook Islands To New Zealand
Aoraki Mount Cook National Park's famed Hooker Valley Trail on New Zealand's South Island. getty
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Cook Island Prime Minister Mark Brown recently announced a travel bubble between the two countries, with flights launching January 21, 2021. There is a catch though: it’s only going to be quarantine-free one-way from Rarotonga to Auckland for the time being, while those traveling in the other direction will still be required to quarantine for 14 days upon arrival.
“Following confirmation of the Cook Islands’ Covid free status and the implementation of strict health and border protocols, we are now in the position to resume quarantine-free travel for passengers from the Cook Islands into New Zealand,” Arden said in a press statement. “Both countries continue to take a very careful approach to managing our borders and preventing the spread of Covid remains our paramount concern. As such, strict protocols will be in place including pre-departure health requirements and separation from other travelers at Auckland International Airport. New Zealand and the Cook Islands are united in our commitment to protect our communities from Covid-19.”
The goal, if everything goes according to plan, is to eventually begin quarantine-free travel in both directions during the first quarter of 2021. Beginning January 21, 2021, the Rarotonga to Auckland route will be operated twice weekly on Wednesday and Saturday by Air New Zealand.
The press statement outlines certain protocols put in place to help keep residents of both countries safe, including how those traveling from the Cook Islands to New Zealand can expect random temperature checks at Auckland International Airport. To be cleared for travel, passengers must not exhibit any symptoms, must not have come into contact with anyone with Covid-19 in the last 14 days and must not have traveled overseas in the last 14 days. Visitors must practice social distancing, wear a mask and keep your distance from others at the airport who did not arrive with you.
Meanwhile, Auckland International is taking special precautions to make sure those arriving from Rarotonga stick to its Safe Travel Path, with measures in place so no other flights arrive 90 minutes before or after one from the Cook Islands. This in turn ensures all passengers can be processed safely, the international terminal can be cleaned thoroughly and baggage claim carousels are only being used by those traveling quarantine-free. There’s also a special exit area so arrivals won’t me mixed with others who may be sick or heading to government-regulated quarantine facilities.
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In addition to this being a great opportunity for some much-needed vacations and reunions with family members after being isolated for nearly a year, Cook Islanders—who are also granted New Zealand citizenship though the two nations are independent countries—often visit the Land of the Long White Cloud for practical matters like medical checks and to stock up on retail, health and other supplies.
Note that Cook Islands citizens and residents returning home will have to show negative results from a Covid-19 test administered within 96 hours of their flight in addition to other pre-exit requirements. According to Radio New Zealand, only certain specialists, contractors and government members of the judiciary are able to fly to Rarotonga quarantine-free on a short-term basis, while other folks—who at this time are limited to Cook Islands citizens and those with active residency or work visas—must self isolate for 14 days.
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