i don’t want to make a magic system i just want magic to be like. this chick is into magical plants she’s pretty normal haha a normal botany major!! DONT go in greenhouse 4 tho. & she has a literal green thumb she can do the lighter trick yknow where u make it look like there’s a flame coming up out of ur thumb except it’s a flower or a thorn or whatever. this guy is rly into beetles yeah he has pincers now & also he was experimenting, as one does, & now he has lil wings on the side of his head that change colour when he gets stressed or embarrassed also he trains the hordes of excavation beetles we use on construction sites.

but then i ALSO want a rigorous system of magic in which spells are designed & constructed to the most pedantic specifications & it’s just it’s these differences btwn how people use & access magic & it’s so INTERESTING bc it’s like well in the first case those people just use n access magic differently n it’s so cool bc it’s like here’s how the thing i love changes me but it could also be a horror story bc it’s like what if u don’t love the thing ur good at, right? like what if it’s smth intensely scary what if ur naturally gifted w fire what if ur naturally gifted with ghosts the visions the constant groaning of people wanting justice or vengeance or just staring at u bc ur the only one who can see them, all these things i know have been explored before they’re just so fun to gnaw on. n then the spellcraft im just obsessed w maybe it’s bc i work w researchers all the time (but not close enough to be disillusioned) i love the dedication the seven thousand articles on the exact same topic with one thing changed, the way u can open up twelve articles & see that for eleven articles researchers Bonney & Tran have worked together & now Bonney isn’t there? what happened? did they get swiped by their rivals? did they take a break from research?

& then there’s the magic that’s like. in a sense, in my story, witches & divine spellcasters are the same. go into this more? no. im just THINKINH abojt MAGIC this morning

Be curious. Be humble. Be useful.

I was invited to give the annual Taub Lecture for graduating Public Policy students at the University of Chicago, my alma mater and the department from which I graduated. This is what I came up with.

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I am incredibly grateful and honored to be here tonight. The Public Policy program literally changed my life.

My name is Ben Samuels-Kalow, my pronouns are he/him/his. I’m a 2012 Public Policy graduate, and I will permit myself one “back in my day” comment: When I was a student here, the “Taub Lecture” were actual lectures given by Professor Taub in our Implementation class. I’ve spent the last nine years teaching in the South Bronx. For the past two years, I have served as Head of School at Creo College Prep, a public charter school that opened in 2019.

I was asked tonight to tell you a bit about my journey, and the work that I do. My objection to doing this is that there is basically nothing less interesting than listening to a white man tell you how he got somewhere, so I'll keep it brief. I grew up in New York City and went to a public high school that turned out Justice Elena Kagan, Chris Hayes, Lin-Manuel Miranda, among many others…none of whom were available tonight.

We, on this Zoom, all have one thing in common — we have been very, very close to graduating from the University of Chicago. I have never sat quite where you sit. I didn’t graduate into a pandemic. But the truth is that everyone graduates into a crisis. The periods of relative ease, the so-called “ends of history”, even the end of this pandemic, are really matters of forced perspective. This crisis isn’t over. Periods of relative peace and stability paper over chasms of structural inequality.

You went to college with the people who will write the books and go on the talk shows and coin the phrases to describe our times. You could write that book. You could go into consulting and spend six weeks at a time helping a company figure out how to maximize profits from their Trademark Chasm Expanding Products.

You could also run into the chasm.

What is the chasm?

It is the distance between potential and opportunity. It is a University on the South Side of Chicago with a student body that is 10% Black and 15% Latinx, with a faculty that is 65% white.

It is eight Black students being admitted to a top high school in New York City...in a class of 749.

What is the chasm?

The chasm is that in our neighborhood in The Bronx, where I’m standing right now, 1 in 4 students can read a book on their grade level, and only 1 in 10 will ever sit in a college class.

It is maternal mortality and COVID survival rates. The chasm is generational wealth and payday loans.

It is systemic racism and misogyny.

It is the case for activism and reparations.

In my job, the chasm is the distance between the creativity, brilliance, and wit that my students possess, and the opportunities the schools in our neighborhood provide.

In the zip code in which I grew up in New York City, the median income is $122,169. In the zip code where I have spent every day working since I graduated from UChicago, the median income is $30,349. The school where I went to 7th grade and this school where next year we will have our first 7th grade are only a 15 minute drive apart.

In my first quarter at UChicago, I joined the Neighborhood Schools Program, and immediately fell in love with working in schools. I joined NSP because a friend told me how interesting she found the work. I’d done some tutoring in high school, and had taught karate since I was 15. I applied, was accepted, and worked at Hyde Park Academy on 62nd and Stony Island in a variety of capacities from 2008 to 2012.

At the time, Hyde Park Academy had one of very few International Baccalaureate programs on the South Side, and every spring, parents would line up out the door of the school to try to get their rising 9th grader in. I worked with an incredible mentor teacher and successive classes of high school seniors whose wit, creativity, and skill would've been at home in the seminars and dorm discussions we all have participated in three blocks north of their high school.

In my work at Hyde Park Academy, I learned the first lesson of three lessons that have shaped my career as a teacher. Be curious. I had been told in Orientation that there were “borders” to the UChicago experience, lines we should not cross. I am forever grateful to the people who told me to ignore that BS. Our entire department is a testimony to ignoring that BS. We ask questions like, why did parents line up for hours to get into what was considered a “failing” high school? Why had no one asked my kids to write poetry before? Why are they more creative and better at writing than most of the kids I went to high school with, but there is only one IB class and families have to literally compete to get in? I learned as much from my job three blocks south of the University as I did in my classes at the University...which is to say, I was learning a LOT, but I had a lot more to learn.

I knew I wanted to be a teacher from my first quarter here. I did my research. The Boston Teacher Residency was the top program in the country, so I applied there. I was a 21 year old white man interested in education, so...I applied to Teach for America. In the early 2010’s, I looked like the default avatar on a Teach for America profile. It was my backup option. I was all in on Boston, and was sure, with four years working in urban schools, a stint at the Urban Education Institute, and, at the time, seven years of karate teaching under my belt, I was a shoe in.

I was rejected from both programs. Which brings me to my second lesson. Be humble. We are destined for and entitled to nothing. There is an aphorism I learned from one of my favorite podcasts, Another Round: "carry yourself with the confidence of a mediocre white man." If you are a mediocre white man, like me, do as much as you can not to be. If you look like me, you live life on the "lowest difficulty setting." This means I need to question my gifts, contextualize my successes, and actively work against systems of oppression that perpetuate inequity.

Over the last two years, I have interviewed over 300 people to work at this school. There are a series of questions that I ask folks with backgrounds like myself:

Have you ever lived in a neighborhood that was majority people of color?

Have you ever worked on a team that was majority people of color?

Have you ever worked for a boss/supervisor/leader who was a person of color?

The vast majority of white folks, myself at 21 included, could not answer “yes” to these three questions. This is disappointing, but I've also lived and worked in two of the most segregated cities on this continent, so it is not surprising. By the time I sat where you’re sitting now, I had learned a lot about education policy and sociology. I'd taken every class that Chad offered at the time. I'd worked at UEI, I'd worked in a South Side high school for four years, and I still thought I was entitled to something. Unlearning doesn't usually happen in a moment, and I certainly didn't realize it at the time, but these rejections were the best thing that has happened to me in my growth as a human.

I moved back home to New York, was accepted to my last-choice teaching program, and started teaching at MS 223: The Laboratory School of Finance & Technology. I ended up teaching there for 5 years. I had incredible mentors, met some of my best friends, started a Computer Science program that’s used as a model at hundreds of schools across New York City…and most importantly, while making copies for Summer School in July of 2015, I met my wife.

All this to say — if you aren’t 100% convinced that what you’re doing next year is Your Thing, keep an open mind…and make frequent stops in the copy room.

I learned that teaching was My Thing. I didn't want to do ed policy research. I got to set education policy, conduct case studies, key informant interviews, run statistical analysis…with 12 year olds. This was the thing I couldn’t stop talking about, reading about, learning about. I really and truly did not care about the “UChicago voices” of my parents and my friends who kept asking what I was going to do next. My answer: teach.

If you look like me, and you teach Computer Science, there are opportunities that come flying your way. I was offered jobs with more prestige, jobs with more pay, jobs far away from the South Bronx. I was offered jobs I would have loved. But I’d learned a third lesson: be useful. If you have a degree from this place, people will always ask you what the next promotion or job is. They will ask "what's next for you" and they will mean it with respect and admiration.

Here’s the thing: teaching was what’s next. “But don’t you want to work in policy?” Teaching is a political act. It is hands-on activism, it is community organizing, it is high-tech optimistic problem-solving and low-tech relationship building. It is the reason we have the privilege of choosing a career, and it is a career worth choosing.

I had internalized what I like to call the Dumbledore Principle: “I had learned that I was not to be trusted with power.” This meant unlearning the very UChicago idea that if you were smart and if you think and talk like we are trained to think and talk at this place, you should be in charge. The best things in my life have come from unlearning that. Learning from mentors to never speak the way I was praised for in a seminar. Learning from veteran teachers how to be a warm demander who was my authentic best self...and more importantly brought out the authentic best self in my students. Being useful isn't the same thing as being in charge…and that is ok.

I believe this deeply. Which is why, when I was offered the opportunity to design and open a school, my first thought was absolutely the hell no. I said to my wife: “I’m a teacher. Dumbledore Principle — we’re supposed to teach, make our classrooms safe and wonderful for our kids.”

I also knew that teaching kids to code wasn’t worth a damn if they couldn’t read and write with conviction, so I started looking for schools that did both — treated kids like brilliant creatives who should learn to create the future AND met them where they were with rigorous coursework that closed opportunity gaps. In our neighborhood, there were schools that did the latter, that got incredible results for kids. Then there was my school, where kids learned eight programming languages before they graduated, but at which only 40% of our kids could read.

We were lauded for this, by the way. 40% was twice the average in our district. We were praised for the Computer Science — the mayor of New York and the CEO of Microsoft visited and met with my students. It felt great. I wasn’t convinced it was useful.

Kids in the neighborhood where I grew up didn’t have to choose between a school that was interesting and a school that equipped them with the knowledge and skills to pursue their own interests in college and beyond. Why did our students have to choose? I delivered this stressed-out existential monologue to my wife that boiled down to this: every kid deserves a school where they were always safe, and never bored. We weren’t working at a school like that. I was being offered a chance to design one. But…Dumbledore principle.

My wife took it all in, looked at me, and said: “You idiot. Dumbledore RAN a school.”

Friends, you deserve a partner like this.

The road to opening Creo College Prep, and the last two years of leading our school as we opened, closed, opened online, finished our first year, moved buildings, opened online again, opened in-person (kind of) and now head into our third year, has reinforced my lessons from teaching — be curious, be humble, be useful. These lessons are about both learning and unlearning. A white guy doing Teach for America at 21 is a stereotype. A white guy starting a charter school is a stereotype with significant capital, wading into complicated political and pedagogical waters. The lessons I learn opening a school and the unlearning I must do to be worthy of the work are not destinations, they are journeys.

Be curious

I didn’t just open a school. Schools are communities, they are institutions, and they are bureaucracies. If you work very, very hard, and with the right people, they become engines that turn coffee and human potential into joy and intellectual thriving capable of altering the trajectory of a child’s life.

First you have to find the right people. I joined a school design fellowship, spent a year visiting 50 high-performing schools across the country, recruited a founding board of smart, committed people who hold me accountable, and spent time in my community learning from families what they wanted in a school. There is studying public policy, and then there is attending Community Board meetings and Community Education Council Meetings, and standing outside of the Parkchester Macy's handing out flyers and getting petition signatures at Christmastime next to the mall Santa.

I observed in schools while writing my BA, and as a teacher, but it was in this fellowship that I learned to “thin slice,” a term we borrowed from psychology that refers to observing a small interaction and finding patterns about the emotions and values of people. In a school, it means observing small but crucial moments — how does arrival work, how are students called on, how do they ask for help in a classroom, how do they enter and leave spaces, how do they move through the hallways, where and how do teachers get their work done — and gleaning what a school values, and how that translates into impact for kids. Here’s how I look at schools:

Does every adult have an unwavering belief that students can, must, and will learn at the highest level?

Do they have realistic and urgent plans for getting every kid there? Are these beliefs and plans clear and held by kids?

Are all teachers strategic, valorizing planning and intellectual nerdery over control or power?

Is the curriculum worthy of the kids?

Can kids explain why the school does things they way they do? Can staff? Can the leader?

If I'm in the middle of teaching and I need a pen or a marker, what do I do? Is that clear?

What’s the attendance rate? How do we follow up on kids who aren’t here?

How organized and thoughtful are the physical and digital spaces?

Are kids seen by their teachers? Are their names pronounced correctly? Do their teachers look like them? Do they make them laugh, think, and revise their answers?

Would I want to work here? Would I send my own kids here?

Be humble

I learned that there are really two distinct organizations that we call “school.” One is an accumulation of talent (student and staff) that happens to be in the same place at the same time, operating on largely the same schedule.

These were the schools I attended. These are schools you got to go to if you got lucky and you were born in a zip code with high income and high opportunity. These are schools where you had teachers who were intellectually curious, and classmates whose learning deficits could be papered over by social capital…and sometimes, straight up capital.

“Accumulation of talent” also describes the schools I worked at. These were schools where if you got lucky and you were extraordinary in your intelligence, determination, support network, and teachers who’d decided to believe in you, you became one of the stories we told. “She got into Cornell.” “That whole English class got into four year colleges.”

Most schools in this country, it turns out, are run like this. I knew all about local control and the limits of federal standards on education and the battles over teacher evaluations and so much other helpful and important context I learned in my PBPL classes.  But when thin-slicing a kindergarten classroom in Nashville on my first school visit of the Fellowship, I saw a whole other possibility of what “school” can be.

School can be a special place organized towards a single purpose. One team, one mission. Where the work kids do in one class directly connects to the next, and builds on the prior year. Where kids are treated like the important people they are and the important people they will be, where students and staff hold each other to a high bar, where there is rigor and joy. A place where staff train together so that instead of separate classrooms telling separate stories about how to achieve, there is one coherent language that gives kids the thing they crave and deserve above all else: consistency.

We get up every morning to build a school like that. It’s why my team starts staff training a month before the first day of school. It’s why we practice teaching our lessons so that we don’t waste a moment of our kids’ time. It’s why everyone at our school has a coach, including me, so we can be a better teacher tomorrow than we were today. It’s why we plan engaging, culturally responsive, relevant lessons. It’s how we keep a simple, crucial promise to every family: at this school, you will always be safe, and you will never be bored.

Be useful

Statistically speaking, it is not out of the realm of possibility that several of you will one day be in a position to make big sweeping policy changes. You will have the power to not only write position papers, but to Make Big Plans. I will be rooting for you, but I hope that you won’t pursue Big Plans for the sake of Big Plans.

The architect who designed the Midway reportedly said "make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood." I had that quoted to me in several lectures at this school, and you know what?

It’s bullshit.

I am asking you not to care about scale. Good policy isn’t about scale, it’s about implementation, and implementation requires the right people on the ground. Implementation can scale. The right people cannot. We can Make Big Plans, but every 6th grade math class still needs an excellent math teacher. That's a job worth doing. I could dream about starting 20 schools, but every school needs a leader. That’s a job worth doing. Places like UChicago teach us to ask "what's next" for our own advancement, to do this now so we can get to that later. I learned to ask "what's next" to be as useful as possible to as many kids as I have in front of me.

I hold these two thoughts in my mind:

The educational realities of the South Bronx have a lot more to do with where highways were built in our neighborhood than with No Child Left Behind or charter schools, and require comprehensive policy change that address not only educational inequity, but environmental justice, and systemic racism.

The most useful policy changes I can make right now are to finalize the schedule for our staff work days that start on June 21, get feedback on next year’s calendar from families, and finish hiring the teachers our kids deserve.

I will follow the policy debates of #1 with great interest, but I know where I can be useful, and I’ll wake up tomorrow excited to make another draft of the calendar. I hope you get to work on making your Small Plans, and I will leave you with the secret — or at least the way that worked for me:

Find yourself people who are smarter than you and who disagree with you. Find problems you cannot shut up or stop thinking about. Do what you can’t shut up about with intellect and kindness. Use the privilege and opportunity that we have because we went to this school to make sure that opportunity for others does not require privilege. Run into the chasm.

Be curious, be humble, be useful.

Thank you.

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Mentoring As Well As Mentoring

Executive Coach Joins Mentoring Plan For Women Leaders

Content

Want To Create As Well As Grow On Your Own And Your Organization?

Inspiration Via Compassionate Management.

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Inspiration With Compassionate Leadership.

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Jessica Mueller to stay on as interim head coach for Carleton Women's Soccer through 2021 season - Knights Online Sports News

Jessica Mueller to stay on as interim head coach for Carleton Women's Soccer through 2021 season.

Posted: Fri, 08 Jan 2021 18:39:31 GMT [source]

areer coaches are additionally rapid ending up being a buzz topic at supper events among expert, career-minded ladies. The specialist who changed Natalie's fortunes was an occupation trainer.

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The last time a human stepped on the Moon, the Watergate hearings were well under way, Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho were negotiating a peaceful end to the Vietnam War, and people were playing PONG, the world’s first video game.

A partnership between NASA, a Florida-based company and an Israeli company will help make the next manned flight to the moon possible.

Lockheed-Martin and StemRad have been perfecting a wearable radiation shield, or vest, to protect astronauts on deep space flights.

It’s just one of several partnerships emerging from the recent business development mission Gov. Ron DeSantis led in Israel during the last week of May.

While in Israel, DeSantis met with leaders of StemRad, which also picked up a $250,000 grant with Lockheed Martin to help pay for the final development and testing of AstroRad. The vest is being tested on the International Space Station and will be installed on a mannequin on the Orion EM 1 flight around the moon some time next year, the last test flight before NASA begins deep space missions again.

“We have been human factor testing with live astronauts on the International Space Station,” said Gideon Waterman, chief technology officer for StemRad, which manufactures protective gear for first responders and the military, including a 360 gamma rated equipment for Chernobyl-type situations.

The space suits used now are adequate for the low Earth orbit of the space station, but greater protection is needed beyond the Van Allen radiation belts, Waterman said. The AstroRad vest is designed to protect vital organs and soft tissue from the higher radiation bombardment they will be exposed to in deep space by cosmic rays and solar storms.

The Matroshka AstroRad Radiation Experiment will consist of two mannequins supplied by the German Aerospace Center placed on the EM 1, also known as Artemis 1. One will be equipped with the vest and the other will not. Thousands of radiation detectors on the mannequins will measure the effect of radiation on the dummies, and how well the vest shields them.

"The team at StemRad has been working extremely hard to design, tweak and improve AstroRad and we are confident that it will pass the tests presented during the EM-1 mission with flying colors,” Dr. Oren Milstein, Founder and CEO of StemRad, said in a news release.

The grant was awarded during the same week that Space Florida signed two Memorandums of Understanding while in Israel — one with the Israel Space Agency and another with the Israel Innovation Authority. Three other Israeli-American collaborations also received grants.

The MOU with the Israel Space Agency is a new one that contemplates future space projects that could have real earth applications for agricultural and environmental issues.

“I want to thank the leaders from the Israel Space Agency for joining us to offer an opportunity to increase collaborative research, provide educational enrichment for our students and drive innovation like never before,” DeSantis said.

Space Florida CEO Frank DiBello said he was excited to collaborate with the Israel Space Agency.

“As we highlight and seek solutions to bio-agriculture and water issues, the goal is to inspire and encourage students to seek scientific solutions and encouragement from this international partnership,” DiBello said.

DiBello described the agreement as a framework for future collaboration on projects that support space exploration, scientific research and other common interests. Specific areas of collaboration mentioned in the agreement include remote sensing programs and STEM-focused CubeSat competitions for students in Florida and Israel.

“The intent would be to focus on taking space-related research from satellites and the International Space Station (ISS), and applying discoverable science to major agriculture and water issues which have a global impact,” a draft of the MOU said.  “The goal would be to obtain high-resolution photos of specific sites to track environmental issues such as desertification, erosion, pollution, natural disasters and other phenomena associated with environmental damage.”

The agreement also contemplates Israel Space Agency launch opportunities from Florida. The agency last used Cape Canaveral to launch its Beresheet lunar module in April. The craft crash-landed after successfully orbiting the moon, but was still celebrated as a victory.

The second memorandum of understanding is a renewal of a 6-year-old agreement in place between Space Florida and the Israel Innovation Authority.

“We are so pleased to expand the scope beyond aerospace to include agriculture, clean water and cyber security,” DiBello said.

Israel Innovation Authority is an independent, publicly funded agency “created to address the needs of the local and international innovation ecosystems.”

In 2013, Florida and Israel established a $2 million recurring joint fund to support research, development and commercialization of aerospace and tech projects to benefit both countries.

SIXTH CALL FOR PROJECTS WINNERS

For six years now Space Florida and the Israel Innovation Authority have put out a call for projects.

This year’s winners, besides StemRad and Lockheed Martin, were:

♦Harris Corp, of Melbourne, and NanoDimension of Israel, to develop 3D printing materials on the International Space Station… for lower-cost manufacture of smaller satellites

♦CadW Therapeutics, Moffitt Cancer Center of Tampa and SpacePharma of Israel … developing a microfluidics Lab-On-A-Chip that analyzes stress and DNA damage and responses during space flight

♦Semplastics of Oviedo and Polymertal of Israel to develop a novel variety of hybrid materials suitable for aviation and space applications ranging from structural parts to electronic assemblies.

Contact Schweers at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @jeffschweers.

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It's 2019 – where's my super suit?

by Karl Zelik

It’s every kid’s dream to have her own supersuit. S.Borisov/Shutterstock.com

I loved the “Thundercats” cartoon as a child, watching cat-like humanoids fighting the forces of evil. Whenever their leader was in trouble, he’d unleash the Sword of Omens to gain “sight beyond sight,” the ability to see events happening at faraway places, or bellow “Thunder, Thunder, Thunder, Thundercats, Hooo!” to instantaneously summon his allies to his location to join the fight. What kid didn’t want those superpowers?

I also wanted Green Lantern’s ring, Wonder Woman’s bracelets, Captain America’s shield and of course Batman’s batsuit. I never imagined then that 30 years later, as National Superhero Day approaches, I’d be designing components of my own supersuits.

I didn’t really notice this until a few months ago. On that day, my childhood dreams were at once destroyed and fulfilled. Standing in a line, I noticed that everyone was focused on their smartphones’ screens. Suddenly it hit me: I already had Sword of Omens superpowers. With my smartphone, I can see video of faraway events and text my friends to meet up. Billions of people now have what used to be considered superpowers.

But what about the physical superpowers? I wanted those, too – like superhuman endurance or strength. Those may not be too far behind: I’m working on them in Vanderbilt’s Center for Rehabilitation Engineering & Assistive Technology. Humanity has begun to enter the age of wearable exoskeletons and exosuits that offer support and strength to people’s bodies.

A spring-powered back-support exosuit. Joe Howell/Vanderbilt University

Exoskeletons under development

Over the past five years, wearable exoskeletons that assist and aid movement have begun to shift out of research labs and into public use. They’re still early versions, and the science is still emerging, but they include the first of several FDA-approved exoskeletons to assist individuals with spinal cord injury or after stroke, as well as exoskeletons to help keep workers safe and reduce the fatigue of physically demanding jobs.

Toyota even requires workers to wear exoskeletons as mandatory personal protective equipment when performing certain overhead work tasks, where fatigue and muscle stress could lead to injury.

However, most people who could potentially benefit don’t yet have access to exoskeletons, because they’re generally too bulky, too expensive, interfere too much with other tasks or are not yet comfortable enough to wear. I’ve become fascinated by the prospect of regular people turning themselves into everyday superheroes.

No, really: Where is it?

Preventing injuries with supersuits

From my research lab, I can walk across the street and within two minutes be at the Veterans Affairs Hospital or the Vanderbilt University Medical Center. The nurses and other medical professionals who perform strenuous lifting, leaning and carrying tasks to care for patients are likely to develop low back pain – or may already be experiencing it. A supersuit could help prevent this pain.

Low back pain is a complex problem with many potential sources, but one common source is due to stress from repetitive forces on the muscles and discs. Most adults experience low back pain at some point in their lifetime, and it’s a leading cause of physical disability. The prestigious medical journal The Lancet recently published a three-part series calling on everyone – from national and international policymakers to funding agencies to researchers, engineers and clinicians – to help improve the effectiveness of care and develop innovative new solutions to combat this global epidemic.

Over the last three years, the research team I lead has been developing a clothing-like exoskeleton, which might be more aptly described as mechanized clothing, a spring-powered exosuit or even just a supersuit. It consists of a vest and shorts made of common clothing materials, plus assistive fabric elastic bands and a switch that lets the wearer turn the suit’s assistance on or off.

How a back-support system works to relieve pain.

When it’s switched off, the wearer can move freely and fully, which isn’t typically the case with exoskeletons. Our suit doesn’t have any motors or batteries and weighs less than three pounds. No part of it protrudes out from the body, so it’s easily concealed under everyday clothes.

At any moment, though, it can be switched on, so the suit’s elastic bands bear some of the load that typically goes through the person’s back muscles. In an initial series of laboratory tests, the suit reduced loading on the low back muscles by about 20% during lifting and up to 40% during leaning, and it reduced the rate at which back muscles fatigue by 30% to 40%, on average.

An unobtrusive garment could help people lift heavy objects.

We recently formed a spinoff company from this research, aptly named HeroWear LLC, to make this supersuit available to individuals and organizations who might benefit. We expect the product to be on the market in 2020. We have also begun a multi-year study funded by the National Institutes of Health to integrate wearable sensors and machine learning into our supersuits. With those additions, we may be able to develop future suits that monitor stress on the wearer’s back and automatically activate the assistance when it’s needed.

Boundless possibilities for supersuits

The goal for many exoskeletons is like that of a good cartoon supersuit – not to do the work for its wearer, but to enhance and support that person’s natural abilities. Assisting back muscles is just the beginning. We have also designed a similar spring-powered exosuit to assist the ankle muscles during walking and running. It may help increase endurance or reduce force on calf muscles and tendons as someone recovers from an injury.

Similar supersuits might also be designed to support the necks of nurses and surgeons who lean forward for long periods of time during procedures, or to reduce arm fatigue for a construction worker carrying heavy objects or for a parent carrying a child.

An exosuit for the ankle that assists ankle muscles when walking or running. Yandell et al., 2019, CC BY-ND

Teams across the globe are exploring a wide variety of wearable exoskeletons as well. These include motorized exosuits to assist the legs, arms and hands of individuals recovering from stroke or other neurological injury, rigid robotic exoskeletons to assist people after spinal cord injury and passive spring-assist exoskeletons to support individuals’ arms and shoulders with tool handling or overhead work in factories and shipyards.

Through the use of wearable sensors and biomechanical algorithms, supersuits might even be trained to teach proper lifting technique or to provide resistance training to help strengthen weak muscles and enhance fitness.

My hope is that 30 years from now – by the time my children are my age – performance-enhancing supersuits will be as common and mundane in society as smartphones are today. Perhaps people might even forget the amazing physical superpowers that they provide, and take for granted supersuits’ individual and societal benefits to health, fitness and well-being.

About The Author:

Karl Zelik is Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, and Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation at Vanderbilt University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. 

USA Gymnastics today announced that Annie Heffernon, a native of Olathe, Kansas, is the new vice president of women’s gymnastics. Heffernon, who has served as the interim vice president, is responsible for providing leadership for all aspects of the women’s gymnastics program for USA Gymnastics. 

“Annie brings administrative and leadership experience to the position,” said Ivana Hong, the athlete representative for women’s gymnastics on the USA Gymnastics Board of Directors. “She has demonstrated that she has the vision, composure and knowledge to guide women’s gymnastics. Her experience as a gym club owner, coach, and volunteer administrator provides valuable insight into the needs of the program at all levels. Her understanding of and solid relationships with our members – from the athletes and coaches to the club owners and administrators – gives us confidence that Annie will continue to lead the women's program with integrity and a focus on keeping athlete safety and well-being at the forefront of our efforts.” “I am honored to have the opportunity to serve the women’s gymnastics community in this position and to work with the national team staff and athletes and with our volunteer leaders across the country,” said Heffernon. “We have amazing athletes, coaches, club owners and other volunteers across all levels, and we will work together so these young women have the chance to follow their dreams in a safe, positive and encouraging atmosphere.” As the vice president of women’s gymnastics, Heffernon’s responsibilities include overseeing the elite and elite developmental programs, as well as the Junior Olympic and other levels; providing oversight and direction for the high performance team coordinator and national staff; working collaboratively with the program’s volunteer leadership; guiding women’s international initiatives; guiding the judging program; and identifying educational priorities for the National and Regional Congresses. Heffernon joined USA Gymnastics in 2013 as the women’s Junior Olympic program director, where she oversaw and administered all aspects of the women’s Junior Olympic program. She was appointed the interim vice president for women’s gymnastics last May. In 2002, Heffernon became the owner of Kansas Gymnastics and Dance Center, Inc., where she was the head coach beginning in 1993. She started the club’s annual philanthropic initiative, the Pink Ribbon Invitational in 2007, and the event has raised more than $75,000 for breast cancer research. Heffernon was the Region 3 Volunteer of the Year in 2011. In addition, Heffernon served as the Kansas women’s gymnastics state chairperson and was a member of the Kansas USA Gymnastics Committee for more than 10 years. Heffernon earned her Bachelor of Science degree from Oklahoma State University.

More rare than a Unicorn – gender parity at a venture-backed, deep-tech startup. Here’s how they did it.

One of my most memorable board meetings this year was with Memphis Meats. I literally had to stop the board meeting over one slide, as I had never seen a slide like this in my 20 years as a VC.  

And no, it wasn’t about product development or regulatory strategy or burn rate. It was about the company’s newest hires -- five highly accomplished people, all of whom with advanced degrees and significant past achievements in their careers.

And all five were women.

I stopped the CEO, Uma Valeti, right at that moment, to tell him I had never seen a slide like that.  And that in turn surprised him, which probably explains in part why Memphis Meats is such a leader when it comes to diversity.

Memphis Meats is a trailblazing company whose mission is to grow real meat from the cells of high quality livestock in a clean, controlled environment. The result is the meat that consumers already know and love, with significant collateral benefits to the planet, to animals and to human health. I’m proud to say they have applied that same trailblazing attitude to growing their team as well.

At Memphis Meats today, 53% of the team are women, and 40% of the company’s leadership positions are held by women. Beyond gender, the team represents 11 nations and 5 continents (Australians, please apply!) and about two-thirds of the team are omnivores, while one-third are vegetarians or vegans. I’ve met most of the team, and I heard all sorts of educational backgrounds: B.S., M.S., M.D., M.B.A., Ph.D. (lots of those). I met parents, brothers, sisters, immigrants, activists, friends, researchers and operators, and I heard 34 different, mission-aligned reasons for joining the company.

Anybody who is paying attention knows that companies and workplaces around the country are grappling with how to build and maintain diverse and inclusive workforces. Silicon Valley is certainly no different – gender imbalance is a well documented problem in tech.  Once I saw that slide, I knew I had to dig deeper into what Memphis Meats was doing right. So, I sat down with Megan Pittman, the Director of People Operations at Memphis Meats, to learn more. Here’s what she had to say.

HR: Before we talk about diversity and inclusion at Memphis Meats, we should probably start by defining what we mean when we say those words. What do they mean to you?

MP: We believe that having a diverse and inclusive team happens when you build a culture that’s genuine, welcoming and protected. We don’t have a document that outlines “D&I Policies” here. We didn’t start by looking at our team and saying “wow, there’s a problem here that we need to fix.” We started by committing to build an inclusive company made up of extraordinary individuals. We committed to putting people first, before anything else. We also made the decision to build a People Ops function early, when we only had about 10 employees, so that we could really follow through on these commitments.

HR: I see a lot of companies hire their first HR person when they have 50 or 100 staff. 10 is early! What were some of the changes you were able to make by getting started early?

MP: We’ve curated a high touch and authentic hiring process. After we closed our Series A last summer, we got started on a hiring plan to grow from 10 to about 40 people, and we wanted to do it in about a year. We began recruiting and interviewing immediately!

Pretty quickly, we realized that our interview process wasn’t working very well. We were spending a lot of time with candidates who had amazing resumes, but we weren’t developing unanimous conviction around who to hire. We weren’t being blown away. So we stopped interviewing for a bit and started debugging. We realized that our interviews were too formulaic, and too focused on checking boxes on the job description. We were talking to people who had already accomplished amazing things – in industry or academia, or both – and we weren’t letting them tell that story. So we couldn’t assess their accomplishments, their ambitions and their ability to innovate. We could only assess their resume, and maybe their small talk skills.

We decided to rebuild the process to let the candidates shine. Now, we ask all prospective hires to start their interview day by giving a ~30 minute talk to our team, typically focused on their greatest accomplishments or a topic that they know extremely well. The talks are a great way to see a candidate at his or her best. They provide great context for the 1-on-1 interviews later in the day. And our team learns something new every time a candidate comes in. There have been some pretty amazing light bulb moments and inspiring conversations that have originated because of these talks. Our team loves them – they’re always a hot ticket in our office!

HR: How do the talks connect back to diversity and inclusion?

MP: The talks let us have a really relevant, organic conversation and put the candidate’s resume to the side for a moment. After the talk, we can ask the candidate how they could have done that better, or faster, or cheaper. We can hone in on moments where they did something creative, and learn about their thought process or problem solving strategies. We can hone in on roadblocks, and understand how they motivate themselves through the most difficult moments.

We’ve seen plenty of data showing that companies that hire based on resumes and checkboxes end up with homogenous workforces. Don’t get me wrong – great resumes and hard skills are requirements at Memphis Meats, but they’re the price of admission and not the focus of our hiring process. When we go beyond the resume, and let the candidate shine, and expand the hiring criteria to include self-awareness and creativity and tenacity, we see a very diverse group of people rise to the top. And they happen to be the exact people that we need.

Now that we’ve been doing this for a while, we’re also getting better at writing job descriptions. Our hiring managers now ask “what do we need our next person to bring that our team doesn’t already have?” There is a quote by Walter Lippman, an American writer, that speaks to the importance of this. He says, “When all think alike, then no one is thinking.” Our team is sold on the value of new perspectives, and we’re now thinking about it before we even start to meet candidates. It’s a virtuous cycle.

HR: What happens after the hiring process? Great, you’ve found the person – now what?

MP: We’ve put a number of tools in place to ensure that we can close great candidates and get them into their new role here. For example, mobility platforms have enabled us to not be limited to hiring scientists, engineer or operators in the immediate Bay Area. We are able to comfortably source individuals from top companies or labs – whereverthey are. Switzerland? No problem. Canada? Great! Minnesota? Easy. We offer professionally managed relocations so that we can pull talent from a much bigger pool.

We have partnered with a top immigration attorney so that we can support any qualified individual in obtaining employment eligibility. We have worked with hires on multiple visa applications but one sticks out. We interviewed an incredible scientist who is a French citizen. She is so smart, so hard-working, and so talented. For a few reasons, we realized we would only be able to hire her on an O-1 visa, which is reserved for individuals with “extraordinary ability.” The bar is high, and nobody is a sure thing to get this type of visa. We spent months working on the application, and demonstrating her accomplishments as thoroughly and accurately as possible. After more months of waiting, we literally received her visa approval hours before her previous employment eligibility expired. The entire Memphis Meats team celebrated. The room started cheering, we high-fived, we picked up a cake, I probably cried. She has since been named on our most recent patent filing and has contributed in so many measurable and immeasurable ways to our team. She was absolutely the right person to hire and we did everything we could to make it happen.

We diligently pay fair to market wages and make offers that are not based on salary history. We have never requested salary history from our new hires. We prefer to base all offers on the market, our fundraising stage, precedent in the company and level of experience. Period. We take every offer very seriously and will continue to make that commitment to every one of our team members.

We constantly solicit feedback on our processes and look at data. We track the source of our hires: are we relying too much on one company or one local university lab? We track the candidate experience: are candidates feeling respected by us, our process and our timelines? We track our internal rates of diversity. All of this works to discourage complacency in our processes, and ensure that we are constantly aiming to be better.

We took a different approach to benefits compared to many other venture backed companies. We don’t invest our money into dry cleaning and massages and abundant free meals. Instead, we’ve invested in a generous paid family leave policy, and great health care, and a floating holiday policy that allows for religious or cultural differences. People need to be able to live their lives how they choose with a job that supports that without question. We ask a lot of team members so it’s our responsibility to support them in their lifestyle choices.  

HR: Many companies start with the best intentions, and compromise those as they grow. How do you imagine Memphis Meats staying the course?

MP: We’ve really made inclusiveness part of our identity. This goes way beyond a D&I policy, which can be easily forgotten or lost in a handbook.

We talk a lot about our “big tent,” which is really a cornerstone of our company. We’re making meat in a better way. You might think we’re out to “disrupt” an incumbent industry or to make consumers feel guilty about what they’re eating today, but the opposite is true. We recognize and respect the role that meat plays in our cultures and traditions. Many members of our team eat meat, and we celebrate that. Many members of our team do not eat meat, and we celebrate that. There’s just no place here for moral judgment.

Over time, that philosophy expanded to cover the companies and organizations we work with, the investors we raised money from, and the language we use. We happily work with large meat companies like Tyson and Cargill. We happily work with mission-driven organizations that work for animal welfare or environmental stewardship. We happily talk to consumers of all stripes. We’ve built a coalition that we never would have expected. We’ve found that everyone we talk to unites behind our goal of feeding a growing and hungry planet. Our internal culture and our people processes are consistent with the idea of the “big tent,” so I don’t think they’re going anywhere.

Executive ImpactNew Zealand businesses raise their profile in Japan

TOKYO

Among OECD countries, one of the high-performing nations in terms of GDP is New Zealand, which makes it an attractive destination for foreign investment. Helping to facilitate that as well as promote the global reach of New Zealand companies is New Zealand Trade and Enterprise. A government agency, NZTE uses its connections and to help New Zealand companies grow in international markets. NZTE currently works with around 3,000 New Zealand businesses with 700 intimately.

For a number of years, NZTE has had an active presence in Japan where the operation is currently headed by Trade Commissioner Jason Reeves who works with his team of 10 based in the NZ Embassy. Jason has worked in Japan for the past three years and previously worked in New Zealand for Fonterra (7 years) and Japan Airlines (10 years). He joined NZTE in late 2011 and has been Trade Commissioner for about 21 months.

Japan Today visits Jason Reeves at the New Zealand Embassy to hear more.

What is the image of New Zealand and its products in Japan?

We last conducted a survey in 2011 and the images conjured up were that New Zealand is clean and green, and is known for kiwifruit, and having lots of sheep. The perception is changing though – people are starting to really take notice of New Zealand as a leader in innovation – from digital production technology used in films such as "Avatar" and "The Hobbit," to new developments in food technology.

How important a market is Japan for New Zealand?

As an export market, Japan currently sits at No. 4. China is our leading export market (volume) followed by Australia. Outside aluminium, dairy is our largest export into Japan, predominantly supplied to the food service/industrial sector as opposed to the retail sector. The last 12-15 months have been encouraging. We’ve seen New Zealand companies from the food and beverage sector, as well as some high-tech entities (software applications) commence operations in Japan. Japan is on the radar for many New Zealand companies who are showing a renewed interest in the market.

How do you work with New Zealand companies?

Through a deep engagement process incorporating market research, we work with companies to find out what their aspirations are and what they want to achieve in the Japanese market. We then work with them to refine their offerings to meet the exacting requirements of the Japan market. We also assist companies in gaining access to supply chains and support expansion of operations from market entry to market growth and positioning. Businesses with longevity understand the needs of the market. In our experience, providing assistance at the early stage of a customer’s international journey greatly assists the prospects of success.

We run our flagship food and beverage trade show – New Zealand Food Connection -- each year in May. The aim is to provide a foothold for New Zealand food and beverage businesses to enter the market. We have a highly experienced food and beverage team in Tokyo with many in-market contacts and we have a good penetration rate into the Japanese food service sector.

Is New Zealand an attractive place for Japanese companies to invest in?

Yes, it is. In the last 12 months, New Zealand has seen significant Japanese investment in the forestry and food and beverage sectors. Assisting Japanese companies invest in New Zealand is one of our key activities. We now have an investment manager dedicated to that, and one of our key objectives is to encourage foreign direct investment into New Zealand as well as attracting high net worth individuals to New Zealand. We have run a number of investment seminars over the past 12 months and have been engaging with the financial sector to raise the profile of New Zealand as an investment destination.

What is the appeal of New Zealand to investors?

The economy is fundamentally robust. Among OECD countries, it is one of the highest performing countries in terms of GDP and the forecast for the next 2-3 years is favorable. Government debt is low, and we have a solid banking system that offers good returns. We are encouraging active investment in biotechnology, ICT, infrastructure, oil and gas and the primary sector where we have a well-established pedigree.

What is a typical day for you?

I typically get in the office around 7:30 a.m. A normal day would consist of meeting customers, in-market partners, supporting the team, working with colleagues on regional projects as well as normal administrative functions. January and February are when we plan and prepare for major projects for the next fiscal year and April through May are when a number of trade shows and promotional events are concentrated. Outside the above, the team is passionately focused on working with our customers to deliver greater impact with their Japan endeavors.

How do you like to relax?

I enjoy hiking (bush walks) reading and meeting interesting people and of course New Zealand food and wines.

Voices from the Past: Advice from Last Year’s VISTAs

By: VISTA Leader, Helen Bisioulis

We are at that time of year where we have had many of our VISTAs end their terms and many new VISTAs start. To our VISTAs who have ended their terms: thank you for spending a year of your life tackling poverty here in Iowa. We are so appreciate of your service. To our new VISTAs: welcome on board to the Volunteer Iowa VISTA team! We are so excited to have you as part of our team. Thank you too for dedicating a year of your life tackling poverty in Iowa. Check out the advice that last year’s VISTAs have for you! 

Mariah Himes, Iowa Mentoring Partnership Project Coordinator AmeriCorps VISTA July 2016-July 2017, Volunteer Iowa AmeriCorps VISTA Leader August 2017-June 2018

“Make a list of all your big ideas—or small ideas. Just have a handy list of things to do that may or may not relate to your VAD that are NOT urgent, that you can do for fun when you have less to do than is ideal. You make not think so when you first look at your VAD, but there will come times when you will get bored and need something to do, especially something that doesn’t involve being on the computer.

Go to as many conferences and trainings as you can. Meet people from fields you are interested in. Ask them to lunch or coffee; get their story. Make the connections you want.

Constantly seek out new opportunities to learn about things that interest you. Peruse local job opportunities and see what sticks out to you. Look at available positions and, for ones that interest you, review the requirements. Pursue experiences and trainings that will bolster your resume to meet some of those requirements. Use your year of service to build your resume into something with which you can walk confidently into an interview for a job you actually want.

Use your passions and interests at work. Chances are you have lots of room for influence, innovation, and initiative at your site. Fill these spaces with (or create spaces for) activities you love and find creative ways to link them to your VAD. For example, if you are an artist, find or create ways to use your artistry in support of your organization and use it as the asset it is to build capacity in unique ways. One VISTA member was working on recruitment for a nonprofit agency. She was an artist and missed painting, so she developed toolkits to help the volunteers she was recruiting work better with her organizations clients—children in need. The toolkits provided a pathway for the adult volunteers to engage children artistically as they went through tough times at home. These toolkits were not on this VISTA’s VAD, but she used her creativity to link her passion to her work in a way that would leave a lasting impact. Those toolkits will be available to volunteers long after she finishes her service site.”

Helen Bisioulis, Dubuque Circles Initiative AmeriCorps VISTA Volunteer Coordinator August 2016-August 2017, Volunteer Iowa AmeriCorps VISTA Leader August 2017-August 2018

Take advantage of professional development opportunities and networking.. Even if you have been in the social sector for awhile, there is always more to learn. Networking is a great way of securing a job in the community after you are done with VISTA and may even help you get some projects done during your VISTA year. When I was a VISTA at Circles, I volunteered at a local community fair where I met AmeriCorps NCCC members. I was just curious about what they did so I talked to them about it. Well I found out that they were looking for volunteer hours in the community and when I started at Circles, we did not have enough volunteers for the 30 children that we had. This team of 8-10 AmeriCorps NCCC members volunteered for the whole first month of my service term until I was able to recruit volunteers and interns from the local colleges. My co-worker’s jaw dropped when she saw that I had recruited so many volunteers in only a month. You never know where networking may lead! 

Furthermore, if you would like to do add more projects to your VISTA year, do not hesitate to do so. While you do have a VISTA Assignment Description (VAD) that lays out your activities for the year, look for gaps that lie in your organization, think about ways that you can improve it. That is the purpose of the VISTA. The VISTA can come into the organization with fresh eyes and see things that others who have worked there for awhile may not have. While I was serving as a VISTA Leader at Volunteer Iowa, I noticed that there was a need for affordable, relatively nice, and safe housing for VISTAs. So, I went about to research such housing in all of the communities that VISTAs are serving in across the state of Iowa. This turned into a 30+ page Iowa Housing Resource Guide that I frequently show to potential employers as an example of the hard work that I am willing to put in, my attention to details, and my ability to address gaps and needs. This was not on my VAD, so don’t be afraid to try something that’s outside of it. A VAD is supposed to be a living document, too, so if you and your supervisor feel the need to change it, do it! With Volunteer Iowa’s permission of course.

Also, if you’re fresh out of college, there is a lot of adjustment that will need to be made to what it’s like to be in the work world. For example, employers like initiative, learn how to take it and be a self-starter. Learn those little things like how a scanning machine works or how to send a fax. All of your work will now be at work so when you go home sometimes, you may be bored. This is where adulting like grocery shopping, cleaning, etc. comes in. Volunteering at a local organization can curb boredom and is good for networking and resume building, especially if you want to stay in the social sector.

And when I say leave work at work, I highly recommend that you do so. For your own mental health and the sake of the organization that you are serving in, take care of yourself and don’t overdo it. If you get burnt out, that not only negatively effects your health but the well-being of the organization that you are serving at because they are missing out on all of your great energy and ideas! Burn out will happen but doing things like setting up boundaries between work and home, will lessen the impact of it. I also recommend the following very basic self-care tips:

1. Drink enough water.

2. Eat at least two meals a day.

3. Get between 6-9 hours of sleep a night. Set a regular bedtime.

4. Make room for something fun everyday.

5. Exercise daily, even if it’s just going for a 10 minute walk, it’s something that is getting your body moving.

Benet Conlin, Iowa Community Action Association VISTA March 2017-March 2018

“I'm not sure what I wish I knew before getting started. I was prepared to be it on my own- I didn't know anything about a vista leader or that even when applying you could talk with them.”

Jasmine Sronkoski, Community Foundation of Greater Dubuque Community Engagement VISTA, April 2017-December 2017

“Capacity Building and indirect service is tough and a slow but important process

Your VAD is important, and be open for it to change. Let it guide the work you do, but don't feel like you have to be rigid to it

Discuss compensation time during the first few weeks of service and get it in writing - this is important when taking care of yourself. Although service  is a 365 day position, there comes a time when it is necessary to take a     break. Don't feel like you are lacking in doing so. 

Get to know the support systems in place in the community and ask for help when necessary”

Jackey Melton, United Way of Wapello County Literacy Coordinator AmeriCorps VISTA, April 2017-April 2018

“1.       Make friends with the other VISTAs.

2.       Be helpful.

3.       You must step out of your comfort zone.

4.       Be patient. You will learn and understand your VAD.

5.       Have fun. Life is short.”

Kay Wolfkill, Iowa Mentoring Partnership AmeriCorps VISTA May 2017-April 2018

“The only thing I wish I would've known is more about my service site. So like I wish I would've taken more time to get to know the organization I signed up to serve in, what others' experience is, how prominent they are in the nonprofit scene, etc.

I would also add in there to never be afraid to ask your supervisor or coworkers for growth opportunities or any projects they have to pass down to you so you can learn something new. You'd be surprised how often you have the opportunity to gain experience or exposure to something if you just ask to sit in on meetings, help with a task, etc. This was especially helpful for me because part of joining VISTA was to figure out if I even wanted to continue on in the nonprofit sector so I wanted to take advantage of every possible opportunity to learn.”

Connor Milliken, Iowa Community Action Association AmeriCorps VISTA, June 2017-June 2018

“Be flexible to change. As a VISTA, you have to attend to different activities. Don’t let it overwhelm you, just embrace it. VISTA is not only about your host site but connecting to other VISTAs. There are a lot of different avenues to be involved. It is important to take direction & collaborate. Embrace the inbetweenness, don’t let it make you anxious. You may have some downtime, don’t become complacent. But you’ll also have times when you’re really busy.”

Melanie Bressler, Community Foundation of Greater Dubuque Community Legacy Program VISTA, June 2017-June 2018

“I would’ve signed up for government assistance ASAP, knowing that other VISTAs did it, too. You can do stuff that just interests you for your own personal and professional development. And you don’t have to follow your VAD to a T.”

Miranda Bellah, Iowa Public Television AmeriCorps VISTA, July 2017-July 2018

“1. Be assertive.

2. No more than 20% of your work should be busywork.

3. Speak with previous VISTAs about what the workplace culture is like at your site.”

Facebook Dating Review Reddit

Facebook’s dating app, which was announced at the corporation’s F8 Conference in May, 2018, has just rolled out to all of the U.S.For those who are currently swimming around in the dating pool.

Tinder, the largest dating app on the market right now, has about 5 million users. “In theory, given that so many people use Facebook, they could harness that population in an advantageous way. ThaiCupid website is one of the best examples of online social media and networking platforms worldwide to find the Siamese quickly. The website is easy to use and free for everyone to find other users and chat with them endlessly. However, you would need a little time to find a perfect match in the sea of profiles.

I used to find it frustrating when people blamed dating apps for how bad dating is.

Facebook’s NPE Team is testing an app called Sparked that’ll put people into a video speed dating event. The app hasn’t launched in any app stores yet but is available through the web. BookofMatches is a trustworthy internet dating website that has been working since 2002. For more than 15 years, this service makes its clients amazingly glad and fulfilled. There is something for everybody here, beginning from individuals with straight sexual direction to gays, lesbians, and transsexuals.

“What’s the alternative?” I would ask when a friend complained about the chore of swiping and starting a conversation. “Standing in a bar for six hours a night?” But I said this more often when I was in a relationship that had started on Tinder, and I say it much less often now that I’ve spent eight months back in the world of grainy boat-trip photos and “looking for the Pam to my Jim.”

People who have never used Tinder often frame it as an abundance of choice, when in reality, the experience of swiping through those hundreds of thousands of options has the effect of making every option look exactly the same. You can accrue two dozen matches named Matt in the time it takes to finish one glass of wine and throw the glass at the wall. Tinder doesn’t make it feel easy to go, as they say, “on to the next!” Tinder makes it feel like the next will be just like the last, which will be just like every other one, forever. The plentitude of fish in the proverbial sea is actually an apt metaphor, because what kind of lunatic could actually specify an individual fish they’d be interested in catching? They’re all fish.

Enter Facebook Dating, which seems to be differentiating itself at least partly on sheer numbers: Three-quarters of Americans are on Facebook. Tinder, the largest dating app on the market right now, has about 5 million users.

“In theory, given that so many people use Facebook, they could harness that population in an advantageous way,” says Kevin Lewis, a sociologist at UC San Diego who has studied both Facebook and online dating. “Will everyone sign up for it? If everyone did, this would be by far the biggest dating site there ever was.” Great, an even bigger sea.

Facebook’s motivations to get into the dating game are somewhat obvious. Analysts expect dating apps to be a $12 billion business by the end of next year. Advertising, premium accounts, and other paid features on Tinder bring in the lion’s share of revenue for its parent company, Match Group, which just reported a $498 million quarter and also owns Hinge, Plenty of Fish, Match.com, OkCupid, and dozens of smaller dating-related businesses. It’s understandable why Facebook would want a piece of that market, especially because teens and Millennials are abandoning the social network in droves.

To use Facebook Dating—and this is billed explicitly as one of the benefits—you don’t need to download another dating app. You enroll within the Facebook app, which I assume is still installed on your phone. Just kidding: Though a sizable majority of all Americans under 65 still have Facebook accounts, 44 percent of users ages 18 to 29 deleted the app from their phones in 2018. (Just imagine an army of horny 20-somethings scrubbing their furious #DeleteFacebook tweets in service of their love life.) Facebook Dating is free and doesn’t include any advertising, and the company says it never will. But it does pull users back into Facebook’s ecosystem, creating a new and very compelling reason for people—especially young people—to use an app they may have deserted.

And, of course, it could be that Facebook picked this moment to get into dating because everyone else already is. Even if thousands of Tinder bios still read, cloyingly, “Let’s lie about where we met,” conversational laziness often leads people to gesture at a stigma that isn’t really there, or express discomfort with things that they’re actually fine with—such as dating apps, and such as downloading another dating app after they’ve become jaded with the first dating app, their continued ability to return to the App Store serving as a tiny sign that their heart is still beating and they’re still looking for it.

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The irrepressibly genteel New York Times weddings section regularlyname-checksTinder. The presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg met his husband on Hinge. The latest Pew Research Center data, from 2016, showed that 22 percent of Americans ages 25 to 34, and 27 percent of Americans ages 18 to 24, had dated online. Eighty percent of the people who had done so said it was a good way to meet someone, and 46 percent of college graduates said they could personally name someone for whom online dating had resulted in a marriage or long-term partnership. Those numbers were all drastically higher than they had been when Pew looked into the matter just three years earlier. It’s probably safe to assume that they’re even higher now. Online dating has become sufficiently mainstream to be part of the most mainstream website of all time.

If you ask Facebook, the company is getting into dating because its leaders think they can actually improve it. A recent study conducted by Edelman and commissioned by Facebook showed that 40 percent of people who currently use dating apps aren’t happy with the experience, Facebook Dating’s product manager, Charmaine Hung, told me.

“We hope that those people will give Facebook Dating a try,” she says. “We’re also hoping that people who have never tried dating apps before will try Facebook Dating because of the safety features we put in, as well as really activating your community and the interests you share with people.”

To celebrate the surprise launch of Facebook Dating in the U.S. (after a year of testing in smaller markets), Facebook invited a bunch of tech journalists and a few dozen influencers to a breakfast meeting at a hip all-cement venue more or less on the edge of the Hudson River in Manhattan. The subject of the event was kept mostly a secret until attendees were escorted to the basement, where a product manager, Nathan Sharp, gave a quick introduction to the app. He got in a quick dig at the competition by explaining that Facebook doesn’t believe in keeping “the best features behind a paywall,” and that its version of dating doesn’t involve any swiping—a reference to the baseball-card dating paradigm popularized by Tinder starting in 2012.

The message was clear: For Facebook, facilitating love is not a joke; it’s a public service.

The next point was even clearer: Facebook is aware that people are already using its products to hook up. Its executives have heard the phrase slide into the DMs. We did not get an opportunity to hear a Facebook spokesperson say this phrase aloud, but Sharp did invite the Modern Family star Sarah Hyland and the former Bachelorette contestant Wells Adams to come onstage and explain how they met: through the direct-messaging feature on Instagram.

Hyland and Adams, who are engaged, gave a 45-minute presentation explaining how one should go about inviting another person to get tacos, how to say “I love you,” how to propose marriage. (You might argue that this presentation was wildly hostile toward single people, who are having trouble finding someone to ask to get tacos—not because they are confused about how to use Facebook’s suite of networking products, but because most people just aren’t that fun to hang out with—and who, even if they aren’t exercising the muscles at this exact moment, do in fact know how to express their thoughts and feelings. Or you may not be as sensitive as I am.) When Adams and Hyland were finished talking about their perfect lives, curtains all around the room dropped to the floor, and it was revealed that the presentation area was surrounded by a ring of brand activations: a pen of puppies wearing Facebook Dating bandannas, a pop-up coffee shop serving romantic desserts, a florist giving out elaborate bouquets.

On display in the basement’s gallery section were works of art inspired by love and Facebook and famous dorm posters. Rodin’s Thinker was hunched over, pondering his options—“heart” or “X”—against a magenta backdrop. Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam was remixed in purple and pink, the pointer fingers of God himself and the first man reaching toward a Facebook Dating icon. I have to admit, this is the shit I live for. Did it tell me anything new about why Facebook is suddenly interested in operating a dating app? Not exactly, but it did tell me what Facebook thinks about daters as a cohort: that we want to live in a romantic comedy, and that we are easily charmed.

Visually, Facebook Dating is similar to Hinge, which, in its initial version, suggested matches exclusively from users’ mutual Facebook friends. (Hinge also takes a hard stance against swiping and has long advertised itself as “the relationship app,” in opposition to Tinder’s notorious hookup culture. It was acquired by Tinder’s parent company earlier this year.) Functionally, the app is also similar to Hinge—you scroll through profiles, send a like, send a message. You can see people who have already liked you—a feature that is also available on Hinge. (On Tinder, something similar requires a monthly subscription fee, which I have paid many times.) It’s not exactly groundbreaking.

“Facebook has a history of this,” Brendan Griffiths, an assistant professor of interaction design at the New School, told me, citing Instagram’s rip-off of Snapchat’s signature Stories feature in 2016. “It’s clear that they aped features (from Hinge and Tinder) pretty directly. I would say that’s where the vast majority of their inspirations come from.” (Facebook did not respond to a request for comment on these similarities.)

Griffiths does not care for Dating’s purple color scheme and calls it “pretty infantilizing.” Overall, “it doesn’t feel like they were going for anything specific other than to capture a market that they understand to be potentially valuable.”

“The purple color is awful,” echoes Barbara deWilde, executive creative director of products and design at The New York Times. “But Facebook is not known for its stunning visual design.”

Facebook Dating’s one innovative feature is called Secret Crush, and it’s what it sounds like. If you have a secret crush on any of your Facebook friends or Instagram followers, you can add them to a list of secret crushes and wait to see if they add you to theirs. The Edelman survey that Facebook commissioned found that 53 percent of online daters have a crush on someone they already know, but they’re afraid to admit it (sure), to which I say, lucky them? Having a crush is an amazing feeling, and life without a crush is an extremely boring trudge toward deadened nerves and spinal erosion.

Though the profile you set up in Facebook Dating is independent of your main Facebook profile (a smart choice, given that the Facebook profiles of most of the people I know consist of dozens of photo albums from 2009 with titles such as “seniorrrrsss” and “myrtle beach <3”), Dating is still able to suggest matches based on the information you’ve provided the main app. These could, for example, be people who belong to the same Facebook groups you do, or have attended the same events. The enterprising Facebook dater could even stage a meet-cute! Hook up sites for seniors. It would be pretty easy. You could pretend the internet wasn’t involved at all. It’s just a wingman, pointing you to the right bookstore in the right sweater, or a seltzer enthusiasts’ meet-up in the park, during the golden hour.

This is genuinely exciting for anyone overwhelmed by the randomness of other dating apps. As my colleague Ashley Fetters wrote recently, Facebook Dating is explicitly designed “to inject some of the more human aspects back into online dating through features that mimic the ways in which people used to meet-cute before the Tinder age.” Meet-cutes, though they sometimes involve flopping down in the middle of the street or walking around with a balloon stuck to your butt, do not feel as existentially degrading as sifting through thousands of photos of men with four friends and two facial expressions, followed by dozens of identical conversations about how it’s a shame that summer is over. The more time you spend on Tinder, the lower the bar gets for perceived compatibility—has listened to a song I’ve heard, works at a restaurant I’ve walked past, went to the beach one time, sure. You start looking—no more, no less—for evidence that the person exists at all.

“Everyone’s always asking, ‘Is this person real, and who is this person really?’” Hung tells me, repeating a line that was used at the press event. “In Facebook Dating, we have a lot of really unique features so you can feel confident that this person is a real person. It can help give a more authentic view of a person. We want to help you find love through what you like.” This is Facebook’s “really great superpower,” she says.

Obviously, I signed up for Facebook Dating as soon as I got home from the official launch, downloading the Facebook app onto my phone for the first time ever.

For the first week, there was literally nobody there to match with. (Understandable.) In the second, the list was short and strange, populated mainly by people named “Meme,” or “C, like the letter of the alphabet. People call me Philip.” The default geographic range was 200 miles, so many of my initial suggested matches lived in Pennsylvania or deep New Jersey, hours away from my home in New York. I was excited to open the list of suggested matches sourced specifically from events I’ve attended, thinking it not at all unreasonable to expect that at least one cutie had gone to see my friend’s band a few weeks before, or had been at the early-summer book launch at which I got so emotional, I slid off my chair (would have been a good meet-cute!). But all the suggestions were people who attended the 2017 Women’s March—half of Brooklyn?—or an apple festival in my college town three years ago, or a free Grace Potter concert in 2015.

Most of the Facebook groups I belong to are useless for dating purposes: a high-school friend’s bridal party, a space for mall food-court coffee-shop employees to trade shifts. An alumni group, my God. This is not Facebook’s fault; this is my fault. Good Facebook Dating users will first be good Facebook users—as in active Facebook users, diligently logging each time they go someplace where eligible people might be lurking, scrolling through their phone, too. If that doesn’t work, an ambitious dater could start joining more groups. It’s a better idea for how to meet people who actually move in the same real-world spaces you do, but it requires regularly documenting your real-world movements and interests on Facebook.

Relatedly, the easiest way to populate your profile is by filling it with your Instagram photos. Later this year, Facebook Dating users will be able to cross-post their Instagram Stories to their dating profiles. When I asked Hung whether part of the goal of Facebook Dating was to bring young people over from Instagram to the flagship app, she said, “We’re always looking for opportunities where we can see where people like to share. Do people like to share on Facebook? Do people like to share on Instagram? And we want to meet people where they’re already sharing. We’re really excited that we’re bringing Instagram into that.”

I don’t know what that means on a sentence level, but I think probably it’s a yes, generally.

If you’re already good at sharing, and posting, and RSVP-ing, and projecting an authentic self that’s appealing to others online, Facebook Dating might feel, as intended, like a “superpower.” But I am a bad Facebook user, and so I am a bad Facebook dater. At the end of my two-week trial, I had eight matches and two messages: One was “Hey kaitlyn,” and the other was “Sup I’m only here for hookups and memes,” with a laugh-crying emoji. The notifications showed up in my main notifications tab, next to the information that I’d been tagged in photos from my cousin’s wedding.

Even so, Facebook Dating will likely help lots of people find love, for free. Hung repeats that Facebook has no plans to monetize Dating, ever, in any way—no fees, no ads. She even seems annoyed with me for asking. “Yup, there’s no advertising in Facebook Dating, and nothing you do will be shared to advertisers,” she says. “Nothing you do on Facebook Dating will be shared to advertisers.”

The cost of an actually good, useful, dignified dating app is more activity, more engagement, more personal information. When Facebook spokespeople talk about entwining Instagram Stories and Facebook Dating, they speak energetically of how it will make profiles more “authentic”—a word that has been bled of all meaning not by Tinder, but by Instagram itself over the course of the past eight years.

Facebook Dating Review Reddit 2020

Never mind the fact that Facebook is currently the subject of an antitrust investigation; here’s another market it can enter and immediately claim a competitive edge in simply by slamming down the trump card of an unparalleled network graph. Forget that Facebook doesn’t need dating revenue, and won’t collect any; it still thinks of its users as dopey enough not to look for another motive.

Facebook Dating Review Reddit Free

“Facebook knows so much about us, not just how we self-describe,” Kevin Lewis says, trying to riddle out whether its dating experiment will succeed. Facebook has a more intimate understanding of its users than Tinder ever will. But more than 60 percent of Americans don’t trust Facebook with their personal information anymore, if they ever really did. “Facebook is a little late with this. There’s a lot of distrust these days around Facebook,” he says, going back and forth on it. “I could see this leading to a resurgence in Facebook activity and working out quite well; I could see this totally tanking. I think it’ll be one or the other.”

I don’t know—it already worked on me.

The Tesla Titan

research paper by David Wacker  ⌂

Part I: The Tesla Titan

“Tesla Titan, he’s a hero! Gonna bring emissions down to zero!” Now that may be a clear rip off of the classic Captain Planet theme song, but the Tesla Titan deserves the same recognition as the beloved pollution fighter. The Tesla Titan is not only stopping the crimes of fossil fuel overconsumption and outdated automobiles, but also making space travel less environmentally destructive. Reusable rockets have decreased cost and waste by a big margin. He has also promised that moving to Mars in the future is possible. Though he wouldn’t be able to do all of these amazing feats if it weren’t for his infinitely smart Artificial Intelligence by the name of OpenAI (needs a better nickname). It is said that Tony Stark himself went to the Tesla Titan for pointers on how to be a world-saving superhero. The Tesla Titan keeps giving more and more to our wonderful planet; he is a true hero and spectacle.  

His only flaw would be that he hasn't done a good job at keeping his identity hidden. Just about anyone with a WiFi connection knows the Tesla Titan’s real name which of course is Elon Musk. Musk is one of the richest people on the planet, and he has been doing his best to use it for good! The Tesla Titan’s Origin Story begins in the country of South Africa, where he began toying using computers at a young age. At the young age of twelve he sold a video game he had developed to a magazine company. It was a space-themed “shoot-em-up” called Blastar, and it made the future billionaire a cool 500 dollars. You can actually play it in your browser now with a little digging.

At the age of seventeen, while continuing to get more adept with computers, Musk decided to get a Canadian passport. His reasons were based around not wanting to support apartheid—a segregation order in South Africa—with military service as well as chasing better economic opportunities in North America. He first attended Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, but then transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, where he earned two bachelor’s degrees. From there, Musk went to Stanford for graduate school, quitting after a mere two days. He thought that the future was with the internet, and he was correct; in a relatively short amount of time, Musk sold his first online company, Zip2, for 309 million dollars (Gregersen).  

Elon Musk, aka the Tesla Titan, has become a dominant figure in the tech industry over the past decade, and for good reason, too. He has brought about paradigm shifts in many different fields with relative ease. This is a result of his influence that he has gained over the years. He has the capability to alter public thinking quicker than it would otherwise change. A paradigm shift is comparable to a scientific revolution, something that generally requires a lot of marketing, money, and, usually, time. Throughout this essay I will compare his ability to sell products to the abilities of the Marvel character Tony Stark, aka, Ironman. Both have helped invent and create amazing pieces of technology. They also have much success selling these technologies, and the similarities go on and on.  

The Tesla Titan gets his name after the electric car company he co-founded and where he continues to hold the title of CEO. The car company was founded in 2003 with the idea of fun-to-drive electric vehicles in mind. They launched their first full electric vehicle in 2008, named the Tesla Roadster. The Model S was launched in 2012, becoming the best in its class in every category. The company has released many more vehicles over the years, and just last year, it announced the Cybertruck, which currently has over 650,000 orders. Tesla is also close to releasing a self-driving semi-truck, which promises a 500-mile range on a full charge. From Tesla’s beginning right up to today, “Elon leads all product design, engineering and global manufacturing of the company's  electric vehicles, battery products and solar energy products” (Tesla).  

Recently, Tesla became the highest valued car company in the world, reaching an estimated $208 billion value in July of 2020. It is now being valued at $387 billion by Yahoo Finance today, with the possibility of another jump in value after it was announced that Tesla is joining the S&P 500. In its seventeen-year lifetime, Tesla became the forefront of electric vehicles, and it has reached farther than any other car brand before it.  

Although Tony Stark never released his own brand of vehicles, he is known to be the owner of many expensive sports cars. He also created the Model 52 Iron Man Armor, which could fully transform into a flying car, equipped with two circular jets on the bottom to keep it off the ground. So there’s some comparisons to be made between these two men. In the movie, Spiderman: Homecoming, a Stark Cargo Plane is robbed. Where this might not be the best example of its abilities, it still has the capability to cloak itself and stay off radar. So they both have their experience in transporting goods.  

The Tesla Titan’s highest reaching feat is SpaceX, which he founded just a year before Tesla. SpaceX has also reached the forefront in its field of sending rockets to space and, now, landing them back on earth. Falcon 9 was the first ever successful landing of an orbital rocket booster back in 2015. Since then, there has been nowhere to go but up! Following the Falcon 9 was the Falcon Heavy in 2018 and then the revolutionary Super Heavy Starship System this year. The Starship System can carry a total of 220,000 pounds. It is designed to travel quickly to different cities around the globe. It doesn’t stop there, though; the System was also built with the idea of transporting supplies  and people to and from the Moon and Mars. It does all this at a fraction of the cost of SpaceX’s closest competitor, Boeing. SpaceX has even transported multiple astronauts to and from the International Space Station (ISS) with its Dragon spacecraft (Gregersen). Just recently, four astronauts were successfully transported to the ISS in association with NASA (Wattles).  

A clear paradigm shift occurred when Falcon 9 became the first booster to land itself back on Earth. A mere thirteen years after its founding, the company managed to break a barrier no one had come near breaking before. The main thing that Tesla and SpaceX have in common is their fearless leader, The Tesla Titan. With the amount of success that Elon Musk has had over just the past two decades in these two fields, a connection has to be made with his influence. After so many successes, it would be hard for the world not to believe in his hero-like abilities being behind some of  today’s paradigm shifts.  

Connecting this to Tony Stark comes a little easier than comparing a single transforming car suit. Stark Industries has connections to the creation of the original Helicarrier that is used by the S.H.I.E.L.D. organization. Tony proposed the original idea to S.H.I.E.L.D., and with the help of Dr. Reed Richards and the former Xman Forge, they were able to design and eventually build the aircraft. Not that readers are able to see much of it, but there has also been a mention of the Stark Industries Aerospace Division, which supposedly created the first spaceship capable of space travel. It was first brought up in Iron Man, Vol. 1, #60, back in 1973, but not much has been said about it since.  

Finally, the last evidence I will provide for The Tesla Titan’s ability to perform paradigm shifts in a single bound comes in the form of Open AI. He founded the company alongside Sam Altman and others with a beginning pledge of one billion dollars. Since its inception, the company has worked on many different AI-related projects, from a fully AI Dota 2 team that regularly beats the best of the best human teams, to slightly less impressive—when it comes to competitive gaming—but still impressive bipedal AI simulations that learned to sumo wrestle one another. Moreover, Open AI developed an AI-trained robot hand that can solve a Rubik’s Cube. Then there’s the music generating AI, Jukebox, that has its own Soundcloud. But maybe the most impressive use so far is GPT-3, a unique text-suggestion software that can gather data in split seconds and fill out a full Excel sheet with data after a simple topic search and a few button presses.

In 2018, Musk left the company’s board but still remains a donor. He left the company because of possible future contests between it and the AI that runs his Tesla vehicles’ self-driving. While he might not be with the company anymore, the amount the company accomplished while he was associated with it is still nothing to scoff at. This is another great example of how someone of his status and income can significantly increase the rate of technological progress.

These accomplishments provide the easiest area to find similarities between The Tesla Titan and Iron Man. Both have their hands in the super intelligent AI basket. Tony Stark, of course, has his AI-assistant Jarvis with him wherever he goes, whether it’s in a pair of super fancy Heads-Up Display Glasses, in his massive super smart home, or of course while he’s in his trademark Iron Man suits. Jarvis is used for instant information, hacking, and even controlling certain aspects of the various Iron Man armors.  

In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Jarvis ends up inhabiting a Vibranium-based body that eventually leads to him becoming Vision. The body was constructed under the instruction of another super AI, Ultron, who intended on using the body as his most powerful form yet. As some will know, Ultron turns out to be an evil Artificial Intelligence with the classic, “exterminate the human race” mindset. Thinking quickly, Stark puts Jarvis into the body so it cannot be inhabited by Ultron. Vision is “powered” by the Mind  Stone (one of the six world creating Infinity Stones) which gives Jarvis full sentience.

My claim earlier about Tony Stark going to Elon Musk for inspiration was not that far fetched. Robert Downey Jr. did in fact go to Musk for tips on how to play the super-rich, tech playboy that is Tony Stark. And this completely makes sense, as The Tesla Titan is very comparable to Marvel’s Iron Man. It is a good thing that The Tesla Titan is on the good side, as it would be quite dangerous if he suddenly turned evil. He would have all the money and equipment he could need to possibly take over the world…  

Part II: Neuralink The Nefarious  

Neuralink The Nefarious, comes from a different timeline than The Tesla Titan, a timeline where the man behind the mask chooses to use his influence for evil rather than good. Neuralink The Nefarious sees the world as being infected by the parasite that is the human race, and he plans to use whatever resources he has—and he has plenty of resources—to expel the Earth of its sickness. But he won’t stop there—why conquer one planet, when you can conquer two, plus a moon? He develops spaceships with the cover story of cheaper space travel and commercial use for everyone. Behind the scenes, though, he schemes in the shadows. Along with his plans for stealing worlds, he is developing his mode of extinction for the human race in the form of mind-altering brain implants, which he markets as a possible cure for previously incurable diseases. The idea of self enhancement can drive practically anyone to madness, and he feeds on that desire. The implants are said to also provide information to the user just by thinking. While he’s at it, he has also sold “Not Flamethrowers” to the general public, another tool in his master plan. Neuralink the Nefarious will stop at nothing to become the Earth’s one true owner.  

This section of the essay will go over how not only does Elon Musk have similarities to those of Superheros, but he is also very capable of becoming a super villain. I will also go over the idea that when paradigm shifts do happen so quickly because of his influence, Technological Disjunction is rarely part of the equation.  Technological Disjunction is what happens when society doesn’t fully agree with a new technology that is being developed. For example, the use of drones by the public—many people worried about personal privacy. This has led to many regulations, including the requirement that the operator have a license to fly their drone over another’s property. Without a lot of technological disjunction, products that maybe should not be put on the market become available. Throughout this portion of the essay, I will compare Musk’s projects to multiple villains spread across pop culture, comparing their views and evil plans with those of Neuralink the Nefarious.  

Once again, Neuralink the Nefarious gets his name after one of his evil companies. Elon Musk founded Neuralink in July 2016, with a goal of solving paralysis and improving the human being by tampering with neurons in the brain. The “link” will be implanted into the person’s head with very thin “neural threads” reading interactions between the neurons that are used for movement in the brain. Their plan is to begin by creating a wireless link between users’ brains and their mobile devices: “The Neuralink app would allow you to control your iOS device, keyboard and mouse directly  with the activity of your brain, just by thinking about it” (Neuralink). As Neuralink learns more from its different iterations, the ability to help those with paralysis and other disabilities comes next. Or so they say.  

I believe that Neuralink the Nefarious got this idea straight from the 2014 Action  Film Kingsman: The Secret Service. The film’s antagonist is Richmond Valentine, a rich tech mogul looking to provide the world with “Free Calls, Free Internet, For Everyone, Forever.” He does so by implanting a chip directly connected to the brain. Sound familiar? It is later revealed that Valentine had an ulterior motive with his fancy Wi-Fi chips; not only do the chips provide said services, but they can also be used to make everyone who has one go into a murderous rage. So he markets and sells the chips around the world, and most of the first world ends up with one within a matter of a few weeks. He then activates their murder function and anyone with a chip begins doing whatever they can to hurt and kill everyone around them. Then of course the protagonist saves the day, but that’s besides the point. The point is this: if Neuralink the Nefarious really is inspired by Valentine—or vice versa—who knows what else these “links” will do to us.

A few months after founding Neuralink, Musk founded the Boring Company whose primary goal is to devise and create new methods of transportation. They plan to market underground tubes made for getting places quicker. However, for this essay, I will be focusing on one of the Boring Company’s previous products: in 2018, The Boring Company sold “Not a Flamethrower” to anyone who had a 500 dollars to burn. The 20,000 units sold out, generating ten million dollars for the company. Selling items similar to a flamethrower to the public doesn’t sound safe, obviously, as there is always the distinct possibility of someone wielding one with evil intentions.

I was not able to find a villain that specifically sold flamethrowers to the public. However, there is Norman Osborn, a prominent figure in New York, who is the head of Oscorp, which is a leader in various technologies. Behind the scenes though, Norman is the Green Goblin, one of Spiderman’s oldest foes. After taking an intelligence- and strength-enhancing serum, Osborn ends up going insane, which spurs his liking of destruction. I wouldn’t put selling flamethrowers off the radar for Mr. Osborn, whatever it takes to drive the city to the ground. Neuralink the Nefarious was pretty unique with this one, selling flamethrowers to almost anybody is something not many super villains have thought of, perhaps making him more villainous than the most evil of super villains.

These two companies of his are prime examples of technological disjunction being forgotten. Through vigilant marketing, economic class, and a wide influence, Elon Musk and his reputation have survived, even thrived, where others would have found themselves in the proverbial doghouse. Of course there will always be articles about how what he is doing is wrong, but they haven’t been impactful enough to keep Musk from continuing his work. He has accomplished so much that it has become hard to stop his Neuralink the Nefarious side—if it exists.    

Conclusion

Whether we are in the Tesla-Titan or the Neuralink-the-Nefarious timeline, Elon Musk has made major strides in whatever line of work he steps into. His companies have accomplished more in under twenty years than many have accomplished in over 100. There are so many more examples from his life to support both sides of this  argument, but I ultimately align myself with the Tesla Titan, not only because he’s the good guy but because there is more evidence for Elon being “good” rather than “bad.” I appreciate his thoughts on renewable energy and his efforts to save the planet from climate change. While I was writing this, my dad sent me an article about the announcement of ZETA, a group of electric vehicle manufacturers, including Tesla, arguing for no more sales of fossil fuel-powered vehicles by 2030, moving our world  closer to the electric vehicle paradigm.  

To reiterate, Elon Musk is in a special place in the science world. He is highly intelligent and very well known, giving him the power to trigger paradigm shifts in pretty much every industry he touches, which so far has been for the positive. But if he continues to avoid Technological Disjunction, he could potentially turn toward evil, which could negatively impact all of humanity. It’s the job of the public to keep figures like Musk in check, to make sure they remain the Tesla Titans rather than become Nefarious Neuralinks.

Works Cited ~Brockman, Greg. “OpenAI API.” OpenAI , OpenAI, 28 Sept. 2020,  openai.com/blog/openai-api/. ~CB Insights. “8 Industries Being Disrupted By Elon Musk And His Companies.” CB Insights Research , CB Insights, 21 Sept. 2020, www.cbinsights.com/research/report/elon-musk-companies-disruption/ ~Chandler, Simon. “Elon Musk Is 'Distracting Us' From Real Tech Issues, AI Figures Warn.” Forbes, Forbes Magazine, 19 May 2020, www.forbes.com/sites/simonchandler/2020/05/18/elon-musk-is-damaging-te ch-and-the-tech-industry/?sh=6206e5e19b8d. ~“Elon Musk.” Tesla, Inc , www.tesla.com/elon-musk. ~Evannex. “A Transportation Paradigm Shift Is Coming Thanks To Tesla's Elon Musk.” InsideEVs , InsideEVs, 22 Feb. 2020, insideevs.com/news/400142/tesla-elon-musk-transportation-paradigm-shift ~Fandome Contributors. “Iron Man Armor Model 52.” Marvel Database , marvel.fandom.com/wiki/Iron_Man_Armor_Model_52. ~Fandome Contributors. “Norman Osborn (Earth-616).” Marvel Database , marvel.fandom.com/wiki/Norman_Osborn_(Earth-616). ~Fandome Contributors. “S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier.” Marvel Database , marvel.fandom.com/wiki/S.H.I.E.L.D._Helicarrier. ~Fandome Contributors. “Stark Industries Aerospace Division/Appearances.” Marvel Database , marvel.fandom.com/wiki/Category:Stark_Industries_Aerospace_Division/Ap pearances.  ~Gibbs, Samuel. “Elon Musk Sells All 20,000 Boring Company 'Flamethrowers'.”  The Guardian , Guardian News and Media, 1 Feb. 2018, www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/feb/01/elon-musk-sells-out-boring-c ompany-flamethrowers-fire.  ~Gregersen, Erik. “Elon Musk.” Encyclopædia Britannica , Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 27 Aug. 2020, www.britannica.com/biography/Elon-Musk.  ~Hern, Alex. “Elon Musk: the Real-Life Iron Man.” The Guardian , Guardian News  and Media, 9 Feb. 2018, www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/feb/09/elon-musk-the-real-life-iron- man. ~Klebnikov, Sergei. “Tesla Is Now The World's Most Valuable Car Company With A $208 Billion Valuation.” Forbes , Forbes Magazine, 1 July 2020, www.forbes.com/sites/sergeiklebnikov/2020/07/01/tesla-is-now-the-worlds- most-valuable-car-company-with-a-valuation-of-208-billion/?sh=6d99944f5334 ~Neuralink , neuralink.com/. ~“Not A Flamethrower.” The Boring Company,  www.boringcompany.com/not-a-flamethrower.  xxx Peterson, Andrea. Even Elon Musk Knows He's a Good Supervillain Candidate . 25  Apr. 2019, www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/04/17/even-elon-musk- knows-hes-a-good-supervillain-candidate/. ~“Tesla, Inc. (TSLA) Valuation Measures & Financial Statistics.” Yahoo! Finance , Yahoo!, 18 Nov. 2020, finance.yahoo.com/quote/tsla/key-statistics/?guccounter=1. ~Vaughn, Matthew, et al. Kingsman: the Secret Service . 20th Century Fox, 2015. ~Wall, Mike. “Wow! SpaceX Lands Orbital Rocket Successfully in Historic First.” Space.com , Space, 22 Dec. 2015, www.space.com/31420-spacex-rocket-landing-success.html. ∎

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Next Round: Bar Project 2021 Is Educating Students on the Future of Drinks

On this episode of “Next Round,” host Zach Geballe chats with Brian Connors, director of the Bacardi Center of Excellence at Florida International University. The center is part of a dynamic partnership between the Bacardi brand and FlU to develop students in the realm of hospitality and tourism management. Through the program, Connors seeks to teach students how to adapt to a new world of hospitality through disciplines such as beverage management, fine spirits, industry innovation, sustainability, and entrepreneurship.

The program’s goal is to reimagine what hospitality may look like during a pandemic. By embracing this “new normal,” the center has given students opportunities for safe, hands-on learning experiences — solving problems introduced by the Covid-19 pandemic. Tune in to learn more about how the next generation of hospitality is being schooled.

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Zach Geballe: From Seattle, Wash., I’m Zach Geballe, and this is a “VinePair Podcast” “Next Round” conversation. We’re bringing you these conversations in between our regular podcast episodes so we can focus on a range of issues and stories in the drinks world. Today, I’m speaking with Brian Connors. He’s the director of the Bacardi Center of Excellence at Florida International University’s Chaplin School of Hospitality and Management. Brian, that is a long title. How are you doing?

Brian Connors: Zach, I’m doing great, man. Thank you very much for having me. This is going to be a fun conversation.

Z: Let’s start with some background for people who might not be familiar with the Bacardi Center of Excellence and the Chaplin School. Can you tell me a little bit about what that is and how it came to be?

C: Absolutely. We’re actually approaching our 50th anniversary for the FIU hospitality program, and for a lot of us in the beverage industry, that last name or the name Chaplin should also ring a bell, as we are the beneficiaries of the Chaplin family of Southern Glazer’s Wine and Spirits. They’re just a wonderful group to work with. We actually took on the name as the Chaplin School of Hospitality and Tourism Management a little over 10 years ago. Right now, we are the second-largest hospitality program in the United States. FIU as a whole, we’re a big school with the fourth-largest research institution in the United States. We got a lot of horsepower behind it. Our world here in South Florida and our partnerships that we’ve gained between the South Beach Food and Wine Festival has definitely put us on the map. Now, over a year ago, we partnered up with Bacardi North America. They were very generous and gave us a $5 million gift, and within that, we created the Bacardi Center of Excellence. Our mission is to raise awareness, to raise the education level, to support, and so forth. Not only the FIU students that are going to be pursuing careers in the beverage industry, but also the industry as a whole. We’ll definitely get a chance to talk about some of the initiatives that we did from Bacardi Teach, which is an online platform that we created during Covid that’s available to everyone for free. We will be having some other additional badged or for-credit courses also available there. There might be a small fee for that one, Zach, but it’s again, for credit, so it’s slightly different. We saw great success with that. We launched very quickly to give back, to up-skill. We’ve had now, I believe, over 3,000 courses taken. If you take five courses successfully, you’re able to gain your badges that equal up to a certificate of excellence, which is a great resume label for individuals getting back into the workforce. We’ve had over 200-plus individuals take multiple courses and gain certificates. Zach, the best part about that initiative is we are just getting started. We’ve got some great stuff coming out.

Z: As you said, this is just a little over a year old and possibly perfect timing, given what happened to the beverage and hospitality industry and everyone in the last year. I want to get a sense from you, before we talk a little bit more, about the Bar Project 2021, which is super interesting to me. In particular, can you speak more to the student base at FIU in the School of Hospitality and Tourism Management? Because I think this is something that some of our listeners are going to be very familiar with. Some may very well be grads, but others will not necessarily know a lot about how these programs work in a modern education environment. Are your students mostly typical college age, 18- to 22-year-olds, or are there a lot of people going back to school at some point in their career? How does that break out?

C: We have one of those great backgrounds. We have the traditional learner that would be coming to us right out of high school, and that’s fantastic. We also have individuals that are seeking their master’s degree that is coming directly from the industry. We also receive a good amount of veterans from the VA that come in from there as well. Veterans actually come in and join us as well. One of the best parts about our student makeup here, particularly down here in South Florida, is the vast majority of our students are also working in the industry. We’re slowly but surely seeing them coming back to the industry now. Our makeup is pretty interesting because we’re 70 percent female. Out of that, a good majority are first-generation college students, the first in their family to go to college, which we celebrate. We also have an incredibly diverse overall makeup of our student body. I think one of the best parts about the Chaplin School is our willingness and desire for partnerships with the industry. We’re firm believers in bringing the industry into the classroom as much as we possibly can so our students get exposed, from our hotel restaurant program, to our beverage program, and to our culinary program. We have fantastic partners that we’ve teamed up with, and that’s going to be something that’s a little unusual. Not all schools have that opportunity, and I think back to one of the best partnerships we have is the South Beach Food and Wine Festival, because that’s gained $32 million. This year is going to look a little different, Zach, in May. In the past, we’ve had amazing support, again, from Southern Glazer’s, but also from the Food Network and the Cooking Channel. We can be here all afternoon talking about that list, but the students get to work with some fantastic culinary professionals. They love seeing the “foodie celebrities” coming in from the Food Network. They are hands-on, and we have more success stories than we can count, and some of the great opportunities they have with that. Those are just some of the really unique things that take place down here in South Florida at FIU.

Z: Awesome. One thing that I’m particularly interested in that I’m sure is continuing to evolve. I’ll be completely honest here for a minute. I considered going to a hospitality management program when I was coming out of high school and decided not to go. I went to a different university for a different program. Part of the reason was that in the spirit of time, back then, the view of the people who went to hospitality schools was that they were only interested in or were being groomed for big hotel chains, big corporate restaurant jobs. It didn’t seem to me at the time that someone who was interested in the restaurant industry but was more interested in smaller-scale operations — it just seemed I was going to be working on how do you manage a banquet dining program for 10,000 people? It was something that I wasn’t interested in. I’m sure that is not actually true and less and less true going forward. From an educational standpoint, what is it that your students are learning and are interested in doing once they get out of school?

C: Yeah, a great question. I love your story of building up, because I was in the same boat. I did go to school for hospitality and I went to culinary school and then continued on to get my bachelor’s and my master’s, all in hospitality. That’s the world that I love and that’s the industry I fell in love with. Then, I got that education bug and decided that developing people and creating great leaders of the future was more important. The biggest shift, Zach, now is students and learners with an entrepreneurial spirit like never before. A lot of today’s learners look at things a lot differently. I know exactly what you’re talking about. Back in the day, I went to school up in Ithaca, N.Y. It was the Marriotts, the Hiltons, and the Hyatt’s, and they recruited like mad. By the time I was getting ready to get out of my undergrad degree, I was like, “Wow, this is what it’s going to be.” I took a left turn and jumped on a private yacht as a chef for a couple of years because that’s just more fun that way. That’s where we’re at today where we have students that are all working now, in school, and they get that taste of what’s going on in the industry. A lot of them, again, take that entrepreneurial role. We also have FIU Startup Food taking advantage of a lot of those situations. We’re going to see this a lot more, Zach, because due to the pandemic and the shift that we’ve all seen, this entrepreneurial spirit is going to be true and they do have courses and opportunities to do that. We also offer PODs., which is called Programs On Demand. I mentioned earlier where we bring a lot of the industry and what we’ve launched ones with lots of coffee so we have those programs coming out. They get exposed to all these things and the traditional model is broken. The one-size-fits-all education when you and I were undergrad doesn’t work anymore. There is a tremendously high level of customization because it’s not just going to be well, “I like events.” OK, we get that. “Oh, I like beverages.” OK, great. Now, they can get a la carte education. Yes, like major institutions, we have majors and tracks. But right now, I’m teaching a fantastic intro course on beverages. It’s called Introduction to the Global Beverage World. In this particular course, we touch base on the spirits world, the wine world (which we’re talking about now), the beer world, and the nonalcoholic, coffee and tea. What this does is gives them a little taste, pun intended, of each one of those segments. Then, they are able to choose their own paths. If you get that, as I call the wine bug, you continue on with our fantastic wine program that was created in the 1980s by the late Chip Kassidy, where he did a phenomenal job. Right now, we are in the stages of rebooting, resetting, and redoing all that. On the beer side, we have amazing brewing science, and the story goes on from there. Also, we have our spirits management track that is part of the Bacardi Center of Excellence. What we’re noticing, Zach, is that I’m getting students from the school of engineering and from the business school and so forth that go, “No, I just thought this would be really interesting because I wanted to learn more about the beverage segment.” They probably use different terminology, but for our listeners, that makes sense. That’s what’s going on now, because it’s not, again, this one size fits all. It’s now about higher-level customization for each student. They work with advisors. It’s a lot different where you had to take specific credits. Of course, we have our core but now you have this higher level of customization, which is absolutely fantastic.

Z: That’s very cool. Let’s talk a little bit about the Bar Project 2021, because I think one of the really exciting things to me about what you all are doing is looking from an academic perspective and a research perspective, which is hard for those of us in the industry at the moment who have to be a little more focused on day-to-day survival. Focusing on what particular bars and beverage alcohol is going to look like as we move forward out of this period of the pandemic. Can you talk a little bit about how this came to be and what you’re working on at the moment?

C: Yeah, absolutely. Your timing is impeccable. As you know, the Bar Project 2021 launched Feb. 3. Andrew Zimmern was our guest host. We launched this all out to our FIU students. Now, a little background before we get into the nuts and bolts of it all. With our partnership with Bacardi North America, funds were put forth to create what we call our Innovation Fund. Inside that Innovation Fund, we got incredibly creative and innovative to create Bar Project 2021. We teamed up with a great think tank group out of New York City that does a lot of our technical support. Zach, this is where it’s slightly different. This is also 85 percent on-demand. What do I mean by that? We are now in the Netflix/Prime world or mindset, particularly due to Covid. Students, as we mentioned, are slowly but surely going back to work here in South Florida, but they’ll be able to check out a module at the end of their shift or be able to binge multiple. That’s really what we’re experiencing now. I’ll tell you more about that in a minute. What we do is we spatter in about 15 to 20 percent of fireside chats, where we tap great industry leaders, some of our faculties, and they have conversations with them where the students can actually livestream and ask the questions right there. The beauty of this is we’re capturing it all for the industry, and we’ll talk more about that. We’ve already gotten into the guest experience. We’ve already done a module on guest experience, on design thinking, thinking a little bit differently. It’s a different world. We want to challenge these younger minds to tap into them and say, all right, what are they seeing? What do they think is going to be next? Of course, we talk about diversity, inclusion, how important that is in the hospitality and in the beverage industry as well. We had some great industry leaders talk about that. Now, in these coming weeks, we’re going to be moving into even more relevant topics. Our partners at Bacardi North America are going to be talking about sustainability, because you probably know Bacardi is coming out with a brand new packaging that’s going to be one 100 percent biodegradable. That is just the models. We’re really challenging the students to think, again a little bit differently. Then, of course, you and I are both wine educators, but the importance of data analytics and how we’re now using this data and consumer behaviors to make different decisions. I use that reference as wine educators because, for many years, I was always on the road or traveling the world to cruise ships and teaching people. These days, it’s all virtual. And these days, it’s all going to be done through what the better data set is. We’re going to be developing that for them as well. The new world of marketing and social impact, and the whole thing should be coming together on April 5. We already have lined up a few of our great industry judges. There are a few more in the works that are going to be challenging the students. Now, as they come to the end of this, Zach, there’s going to be five teams of four. They’re each going to have these individual challenges. They’re going to use this information they’ve gained in the past eight to nine weeks. Take their own level of creativity and innovation and put forth the solutions to the challenge at hand. Now, some of the challenges are still on the top-secret side in a good way. It’s funny how WhatsApp and these other apps out there, the word travels very fast. Industry folk, like our friend Sabato Sagaria, master sommelier, are going to be joining us. He’s an old friend. That type of industry expertise where he’s coming from, Danny Meyer and Bar Taco. They’re going to see these whole new levels of stuff going out there. You can probably tell by my passion in my voice, we’re incredibly excited about it because there’s also scholarship on the table. We’ve learned that a lot of our learners really appreciate, more than ever, the opportunity to win a scholarship. Through the Bacardi Fund, we’re able to do this. If I told you the number of money people needed, you’d be shocked how actually low it is. We take that into consideration so that each team member would be able to reach that threshold and apply that right towards their education. I think more importantly than just the scholarship, Zach, is the exposure. How often do you get to have this type of interaction with some top-notch beverage professionals out there that are doing great stuff and the camaraderie? The knowledge share that’s going to be going on through the Bar Project 2021 is absolutely fantastic.

Z: Yeah, and I think one of the things that are really interesting to me about this, in addition to everything you’ve spoken to, is how it gets people really thinking about the industry as an ever-shifting and evolving world. I think one of the things, too, that I found in my time in the beverage industry is that unfortunately, you get some people who come to it with the idea that it’s a rigid, locked way of how you do things. I think societally, we found out in 2021 that sh*t changes, and you have to be prepared for that. Also, those changes allow for a lot of innovation, development, and throwing off systems that just don’t work anymore or don’t work as well as others. Are there things that you’ve seen out of either your students or your colleagues or some of the pros that have participated in that are going to be models for hospitality and service going forward?

C: Yeah, absolutely. What I’m going to talk about is going to get fit right into a Bar Project 2021. I apologize, I forgot to mention we’re going to repackage it so it’s not as student-centric and get it out there on BacardiTeach for our industry. This is all going to be real-time, because what we’ve noticed now is that — I’m going to use my own term on this — hustlers will win. This has been an incredibly hard time. You’ve had some great guests even on your show I’ve listened to. We have our own podcast at FIU. We all have a podcast. It’s true because this is our new way of interacting and getting information out there in this crazy world we’re in. I’m a firm believer that these great operators, these hustlers that change their business model almost overnight, have gotten incredibly creative about what they’re going to do. Our students are also embracing that. They see it’s going to be this new and different world. A year ago, Zach, if we were talking about Uber Eats and Drizzly for $1.1 billion, people would think we’re absolutely crazy. Now, the students are highly aware of that. They see these new and different business models taking place almost overnight in some cases. They’re really moving forward. Probably the biggest thing, and this is through research done by Bacardi USA, also on our end, we’re going to see a return back to basics. What do I mean by that? Coming up through the ranks in hospitality, as a young food and beverage director, it was all about inventory, inventory controls. Well, no one really forgot about it. But I’ll use a very simple term here: making money. “I can make this cocktail,” which I completely appreciate. I love creativity. I love mixology. But I think we’re going to see a lot of return to basics, where we’re going to be looking at what’s on our back bar. What do we need to be successful? What do we need to have a great guest experience? And of course, what do we need to be profitable? That’s what we need to be looking at, because as you and I both know, the restaurant segment, the bar segment, is a nickel-and-dime business. If we are going to be accounting for every single nickel and dime, that’s where a lot of the stuff that will be launching on BacardTeach, again, offering to the industry is going to be incredibly useful. Every day I start talking about this, and my eyes are opening up more and going, “Oh my goodness, we’re right on track.” Because we’re seeing it across the marketplace, where we’re slowly but surely, out where you are in California to Washington State, slowly. But opening down here in South Florida, we’re outdoors where we have a lot of properties open, but what we really need to be mindful of now is people, No. 1. Then, of course, our control systems internally. How well are we working in our business as well as on our business? Got to quote my mom there a little bit. Yet, it’s true that we need to get these things in check, and we’re going to see this return to the basics. I love that because there’s nothing wrong with that, because the worst part is it’s usually what people forget first. We’re going to see that coming out in the next eight months of return plus into the new world as we know it.

Z: One last question for you, Brian, before we wrap things up here. I’m personally curious about the ideas that might be out there as many states have relaxed various things around liquor laws, both involving the sales of to-go cocktails, shipping in some cases. Every state is its own thing, which I’m sure as an educator drives you crazy. It certainly drives me crazy. In some of the smaller-scale spaces, the things that I’m particularly curious about is whether we’ll see more continued interest in and focus on takeout or to-go cocktails, cocktail delivery, things like that. Is it something that you see a real future for? What does that look like?

C: Double down on that one, Zach, because I’ve been quoted a few times already saying it, but the genie is out of the bottle. We’re not going to be able to get that genie back in, if you know what I mean, when it comes to to-go cocktails and so forth. One of the most innovative things we’re seeing now in many, many markets but I’ll just use the example of reef technologies down here in South Florida and across the U.S. where they use neighborhood kitchens, or some people call them ghost kitchens. Now, don’t be surprised if you now see the cocktail world moving in that direction as well. Everyone has their favorite corner bar back in the day, but now that could be that corner bar that you never knew was there. And within 30 minutes, your favorite cocktail could be at your door. The challenge we’re going to see with this type of new world of delivery is ensuring the best quality experience for the guest. Some brands are doing this incredibly well, as you and I both know, sustainable to-go containers can get very, very expensive. Again, ensuring that we have the best. Not all food is created equal. Not all food travels well. Think about pizza. That’s why it’s so damn good. It travels well. But at the same time, we’re going to see brands stepping out, more energy into larger kitchens, realizing that we’re going to have this amazing GreenShoots movement. I’m going to quote my good friend, Dr. Chris Mueller, that says, after a forest fire, a few weeks go by, but what starts to pop up after that devastation? There are all these amazing green shoots where this sudden burst of energy is coming from. That’s what we’re going to be seeing in the restaurant, food, and beverage and in the bar segment because of the creativity people have from being pent up for over a year now. At the same time, it will go back to the basics as we talked about earlier. However, this high level of creativity, we’re already seeing in our RTDs, ready-to-drink cocktails. We’re seeing new products coming out to the marketplace that can compete directly, because our guests and consumers these days are savvy and smarter than they were a year ago. If you think about that for a minute, it makes a lot of sense. Now everyone’s got their own habits formed or what it’s going to be. The strong are going to survive. The hustlers are going to win on that, definitely. We’re going to see a high level of creativity and quality. That’s going to be the key. The guest is willing to pay for quality.

Z: Wonderful. Well, Brian thank you so much for your time. Really, really fascinating. We’ll put some links in the episode description for some of the content that is available online for everyone. Thank you so much, really fascinating. We’ll definitely keep an eye on what you and your team at FIU are doing.

C: Amazing, Zach. Thank you so much for having me. Really appreciate it.

Thanks so much for listening to the “VinePair Podcast.” If you love this show as much as we love making it, then please leave a rating or review on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever it is you get your podcasts. It really helps everyone else discover the show.

Now for the credits, VinePair is produced and recorded in New York City and in Seattle, Wash., by myself and Zach Geballe, who does all the editing and loves to get the credit. Also, I would love to give a special shout-out to my VinePair co-founder, Josh Malin, for helping make all this possible, and also to Keith Beaver’s VinePair’s tasting director, who is additionally a producer on the show. I also want to, of course, thank every other member of the VinePair team who is instrumental in all of the ideas that go into making the show every week. Thanks so much for listening, and we’ll see you again.

The article Next Round: Bar Project 2021 Is Educating Students on the Future of Drinks appeared first on VinePair.

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Next Round: Bar Project 2021 Is Educating Students on the Future of Drinks

On this episode of “Next Round,” host Zach Geballe chats with Brian Connors, director of the Bacardi Center of Excellence at Florida International University. The center is part of a dynamic partnership between the Bacardi brand and FlU to develop students in the realm of hospitality and tourism management. Through the program, Connors seeks to teach students how to adapt to a new world of hospitality through disciplines such as beverage management, fine spirits, industry innovation, sustainability, and entrepreneurship.

The program’s goal is to reimagine what hospitality may look like during a pandemic. By embracing this “new normal,” the center has given students opportunities for safe, hands-on learning experiences — solving problems introduced by the Covid-19 pandemic. Tune in to learn more about how the next generation of hospitality is being schooled.

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Zach Geballe: From Seattle, Wash., I’m Zach Geballe, and this is a “VinePair Podcast” “Next Round” conversation. We’re bringing you these conversations in between our regular podcast episodes so we can focus on a range of issues and stories in the drinks world. Today, I’m speaking with Brian Connors. He’s the director of the Bacardi Center of Excellence at Florida International University’s Chaplin School of Hospitality and Management. Brian, that is a long title. How are you doing?

Brian Connors: Zach, I’m doing great, man. Thank you very much for having me. This is going to be a fun conversation.

Z: Let’s start with some background for people who might not be familiar with the Bacardi Center of Excellence and the Chaplin School. Can you tell me a little bit about what that is and how it came to be?

C: Absolutely. We’re actually approaching our 50th anniversary for the FIU hospitality program, and for a lot of us in the beverage industry, that last name or the name Chaplin should also ring a bell, as we are the beneficiaries of the Chaplin family of Southern Glazer’s Wine and Spirits. They’re just a wonderful group to work with. We actually took on the name as the Chaplin School of Hospitality and Tourism Management a little over 10 years ago. Right now, we are the second-largest hospitality program in the United States. FIU as a whole, we’re a big school with the fourth-largest research institution in the United States. We got a lot of horsepower behind it. Our world here in South Florida and our partnerships that we’ve gained between the South Beach Food and Wine Festival has definitely put us on the map. Now, over a year ago, we partnered up with Bacardi North America. They were very generous and gave us a $5 million gift, and within that, we created the Bacardi Center of Excellence. Our mission is to raise awareness, to raise the education level, to support, and so forth. Not only the FIU students that are going to be pursuing careers in the beverage industry, but also the industry as a whole. We’ll definitely get a chance to talk about some of the initiatives that we did from Bacardi Teach, which is an online platform that we created during Covid that’s available to everyone for free. We will be having some other additional badged or for-credit courses also available there. There might be a small fee for that one, Zach, but it’s again, for credit, so it’s slightly different. We saw great success with that. We launched very quickly to give back, to up-skill. We’ve had now, I believe, over 3,000 courses taken. If you take five courses successfully, you’re able to gain your badges that equal up to a certificate of excellence, which is a great resume label for individuals getting back into the workforce. We’ve had over 200-plus individuals take multiple courses and gain certificates. Zach, the best part about that initiative is we are just getting started. We’ve got some great stuff coming out.

Z: As you said, this is just a little over a year old and possibly perfect timing, given what happened to the beverage and hospitality industry and everyone in the last year. I want to get a sense from you, before we talk a little bit more, about the Bar Project 2021, which is super interesting to me. In particular, can you speak more to the student base at FIU in the School of Hospitality and Tourism Management? Because I think this is something that some of our listeners are going to be very familiar with. Some may very well be grads, but others will not necessarily know a lot about how these programs work in a modern education environment. Are your students mostly typical college age, 18- to 22-year-olds, or are there a lot of people going back to school at some point in their career? How does that break out?

C: We have one of those great backgrounds. We have the traditional learner that would be coming to us right out of high school, and that’s fantastic. We also have individuals that are seeking their master’s degree that is coming directly from the industry. We also receive a good amount of veterans from the VA that come in from there as well. Veterans actually come in and join us as well. One of the best parts about our student makeup here, particularly down here in South Florida, is the vast majority of our students are also working in the industry. We’re slowly but surely seeing them coming back to the industry now. Our makeup is pretty interesting because we’re 70 percent female. Out of that, a good majority are first-generation college students, the first in their family to go to college, which we celebrate. We also have an incredibly diverse overall makeup of our student body. I think one of the best parts about the Chaplin School is our willingness and desire for partnerships with the industry. We’re firm believers in bringing the industry into the classroom as much as we possibly can so our students get exposed, from our hotel restaurant program, to our beverage program, and to our culinary program. We have fantastic partners that we’ve teamed up with, and that’s going to be something that’s a little unusual. Not all schools have that opportunity, and I think back to one of the best partnerships we have is the South Beach Food and Wine Festival, because that’s gained $32 million. This year is going to look a little different, Zach, in May. In the past, we’ve had amazing support, again, from Southern Glazer’s, but also from the Food Network and the Cooking Channel. We can be here all afternoon talking about that list, but the students get to work with some fantastic culinary professionals. They love seeing the “foodie celebrities” coming in from the Food Network. They are hands-on, and we have more success stories than we can count, and some of the great opportunities they have with that. Those are just some of the really unique things that take place down here in South Florida at FIU.

Z: Awesome. One thing that I’m particularly interested in that I’m sure is continuing to evolve. I’ll be completely honest here for a minute. I considered going to a hospitality management program when I was coming out of high school and decided not to go. I went to a different university for a different program. Part of the reason was that in the spirit of time, back then, the view of the people who went to hospitality schools was that they were only interested in or were being groomed for big hotel chains, big corporate restaurant jobs. It didn’t seem to me at the time that someone who was interested in the restaurant industry but was more interested in smaller-scale operations — it just seemed I was going to be working on how do you manage a banquet dining program for 10,000 people? It was something that I wasn’t interested in. I’m sure that is not actually true and less and less true going forward. From an educational standpoint, what is it that your students are learning and are interested in doing once they get out of school?

C: Yeah, a great question. I love your story of building up, because I was in the same boat. I did go to school for hospitality and I went to culinary school and then continued on to get my bachelor’s and my master’s, all in hospitality. That’s the world that I love and that’s the industry I fell in love with. Then, I got that education bug and decided that developing people and creating great leaders of the future was more important. The biggest shift, Zach, now is students and learners with an entrepreneurial spirit like never before. A lot of today’s learners look at things a lot differently. I know exactly what you’re talking about. Back in the day, I went to school up in Ithaca, N.Y. It was the Marriotts, the Hiltons, and the Hyatt’s, and they recruited like mad. By the time I was getting ready to get out of my undergrad degree, I was like, “Wow, this is what it’s going to be.” I took a left turn and jumped on a private yacht as a chef for a couple of years because that’s just more fun that way. That’s where we’re at today where we have students that are all working now, in school, and they get that taste of what’s going on in the industry. A lot of them, again, take that entrepreneurial role. We also have FIU Startup Food taking advantage of a lot of those situations. We’re going to see this a lot more, Zach, because due to the pandemic and the shift that we’ve all seen, this entrepreneurial spirit is going to be true and they do have courses and opportunities to do that. We also offer PODs., which is called Programs On Demand. I mentioned earlier where we bring a lot of the industry and what we’ve launched ones with lots of coffee so we have those programs coming out. They get exposed to all these things and the traditional model is broken. The one-size-fits-all education when you and I were undergrad doesn’t work anymore. There is a tremendously high level of customization because it’s not just going to be well, “I like events.” OK, we get that. “Oh, I like beverages.” OK, great. Now, they can get a la carte education. Yes, like major institutions, we have majors and tracks. But right now, I’m teaching a fantastic intro course on beverages. It’s called Introduction to the Global Beverage World. In this particular course, we touch base on the spirits world, the wine world (which we’re talking about now), the beer world, and the nonalcoholic, coffee and tea. What this does is gives them a little taste, pun intended, of each one of those segments. Then, they are able to choose their own paths. If you get that, as I call the wine bug, you continue on with our fantastic wine program that was created in the 1980s by the late Chip Kassidy, where he did a phenomenal job. Right now, we are in the stages of rebooting, resetting, and redoing all that. On the beer side, we have amazing brewing science, and the story goes on from there. Also, we have our spirits management track that is part of the Bacardi Center of Excellence. What we’re noticing, Zach, is that I’m getting students from the school of engineering and from the business school and so forth that go, “No, I just thought this would be really interesting because I wanted to learn more about the beverage segment.” They probably use different terminology, but for our listeners, that makes sense. That’s what’s going on now, because it’s not, again, this one size fits all. It’s now about higher-level customization for each student. They work with advisors. It’s a lot different where you had to take specific credits. Of course, we have our core but now you have this higher level of customization, which is absolutely fantastic.

Z: That’s very cool. Let’s talk a little bit about the Bar Project 2021, because I think one of the really exciting things to me about what you all are doing is looking from an academic perspective and a research perspective, which is hard for those of us in the industry at the moment who have to be a little more focused on day-to-day survival. Focusing on what particular bars and beverage alcohol is going to look like as we move forward out of this period of the pandemic. Can you talk a little bit about how this came to be and what you’re working on at the moment?

C: Yeah, absolutely. Your timing is impeccable. As you know, the Bar Project 2021 launched Feb. 3. Andrew Zimmern was our guest host. We launched this all out to our FIU students. Now, a little background before we get into the nuts and bolts of it all. With our partnership with Bacardi North America, funds were put forth to create what we call our Innovation Fund. Inside that Innovation Fund, we got incredibly creative and innovative to create Bar Project 2021. We teamed up with a great think tank group out of New York City that does a lot of our technical support. Zach, this is where it’s slightly different. This is also 85 percent on-demand. What do I mean by that? We are now in the Netflix/Prime world or mindset, particularly due to Covid. Students, as we mentioned, are slowly but surely going back to work here in South Florida, but they’ll be able to check out a module at the end of their shift or be able to binge multiple. That’s really what we’re experiencing now. I’ll tell you more about that in a minute. What we do is we spatter in about 15 to 20 percent of fireside chats, where we tap great industry leaders, some of our faculties, and they have conversations with them where the students can actually livestream and ask the questions right there. The beauty of this is we’re capturing it all for the industry, and we’ll talk more about that. We’ve already gotten into the guest experience. We’ve already done a module on guest experience, on design thinking, thinking a little bit differently. It’s a different world. We want to challenge these younger minds to tap into them and say, all right, what are they seeing? What do they think is going to be next? Of course, we talk about diversity, inclusion, how important that is in the hospitality and in the beverage industry as well. We had some great industry leaders talk about that. Now, in these coming weeks, we’re going to be moving into even more relevant topics. Our partners at Bacardi North America are going to be talking about sustainability, because you probably know Bacardi is coming out with a brand new packaging that’s going to be one 100 percent biodegradable. That is just the models. We’re really challenging the students to think, again a little bit differently. Then, of course, you and I are both wine educators, but the importance of data analytics and how we’re now using this data and consumer behaviors to make different decisions. I use that reference as wine educators because, for many years, I was always on the road or traveling the world to cruise ships and teaching people. These days, it’s all virtual. And these days, it’s all going to be done through what the better data set is. We’re going to be developing that for them as well. The new world of marketing and social impact, and the whole thing should be coming together on April 5. We already have lined up a few of our great industry judges. There are a few more in the works that are going to be challenging the students. Now, as they come to the end of this, Zach, there’s going to be five teams of four. They’re each going to have these individual challenges. They’re going to use this information they’ve gained in the past eight to nine weeks. Take their own level of creativity and innovation and put forth the solutions to the challenge at hand. Now, some of the challenges are still on the top-secret side in a good way. It’s funny how WhatsApp and these other apps out there, the word travels very fast. Industry folk, like our friend Sabato Sagaria, master sommelier, are going to be joining us. He’s an old friend. That type of industry expertise where he’s coming from, Danny Meyer and Bar Taco. They’re going to see these whole new levels of stuff going out there. You can probably tell by my passion in my voice, we’re incredibly excited about it because there’s also scholarship on the table. We’ve learned that a lot of our learners really appreciate, more than ever, the opportunity to win a scholarship. Through the Bacardi Fund, we’re able to do this. If I told you the number of money people needed, you’d be shocked how actually low it is. We take that into consideration so that each team member would be able to reach that threshold and apply that right towards their education. I think more importantly than just the scholarship, Zach, is the exposure. How often do you get to have this type of interaction with some top-notch beverage professionals out there that are doing great stuff and the camaraderie? The knowledge share that’s going to be going on through the Bar Project 2021 is absolutely fantastic.

Z: Yeah, and I think one of the things that are really interesting to me about this, in addition to everything you’ve spoken to, is how it gets people really thinking about the industry as an ever-shifting and evolving world. I think one of the things, too, that I found in my time in the beverage industry is that unfortunately, you get some people who come to it with the idea that it’s a rigid, locked way of how you do things. I think societally, we found out in 2021 that sh*t changes, and you have to be prepared for that. Also, those changes allow for a lot of innovation, development, and throwing off systems that just don’t work anymore or don’t work as well as others. Are there things that you’ve seen out of either your students or your colleagues or some of the pros that have participated in that are going to be models for hospitality and service going forward?

C: Yeah, absolutely. What I’m going to talk about is going to get fit right into a Bar Project 2021. I apologize, I forgot to mention we’re going to repackage it so it’s not as student-centric and get it out there on BacardiTeach for our industry. This is all going to be real-time, because what we’ve noticed now is that — I’m going to use my own term on this — hustlers will win. This has been an incredibly hard time. You’ve had some great guests even on your show I’ve listened to. We have our own podcast at FIU. We all have a podcast. It’s true because this is our new way of interacting and getting information out there in this crazy world we’re in. I’m a firm believer that these great operators, these hustlers that change their business model almost overnight, have gotten incredibly creative about what they’re going to do. Our students are also embracing that. They see it’s going to be this new and different world. A year ago, Zach, if we were talking about Uber Eats and Drizzly for $1.1 billion, people would think we’re absolutely crazy. Now, the students are highly aware of that. They see these new and different business models taking place almost overnight in some cases. They’re really moving forward. Probably the biggest thing, and this is through research done by Bacardi USA, also on our end, we’re going to see a return back to basics. What do I mean by that? Coming up through the ranks in hospitality, as a young food and beverage director, it was all about inventory, inventory controls. Well, no one really forgot about it. But I’ll use a very simple term here: making money. “I can make this cocktail,” which I completely appreciate. I love creativity. I love mixology. But I think we’re going to see a lot of return to basics, where we’re going to be looking at what’s on our back bar. What do we need to be successful? What do we need to have a great guest experience? And of course, what do we need to be profitable? That’s what we need to be looking at, because as you and I both know, the restaurant segment, the bar segment, is a nickel-and-dime business. If we are going to be accounting for every single nickel and dime, that’s where a lot of the stuff that will be launching on BacardTeach, again, offering to the industry is going to be incredibly useful. Every day I start talking about this, and my eyes are opening up more and going, “Oh my goodness, we’re right on track.” Because we’re seeing it across the marketplace, where we’re slowly but surely, out where you are in California to Washington State, slowly. But opening down here in South Florida, we’re outdoors where we have a lot of properties open, but what we really need to be mindful of now is people, No. 1. Then, of course, our control systems internally. How well are we working in our business as well as on our business? Got to quote my mom there a little bit. Yet, it’s true that we need to get these things in check, and we’re going to see this return to the basics. I love that because there’s nothing wrong with that, because the worst part is it’s usually what people forget first. We’re going to see that coming out in the next eight months of return plus into the new world as we know it.

Z: One last question for you, Brian, before we wrap things up here. I’m personally curious about the ideas that might be out there as many states have relaxed various things around liquor laws, both involving the sales of to-go cocktails, shipping in some cases. Every state is its own thing, which I’m sure as an educator drives you crazy. It certainly drives me crazy. In some of the smaller-scale spaces, the things that I’m particularly curious about is whether we’ll see more continued interest in and focus on takeout or to-go cocktails, cocktail delivery, things like that. Is it something that you see a real future for? What does that look like?

C: Double down on that one, Zach, because I’ve been quoted a few times already saying it, but the genie is out of the bottle. We’re not going to be able to get that genie back in, if you know what I mean, when it comes to to-go cocktails and so forth. One of the most innovative things we’re seeing now in many, many markets but I’ll just use the example of reef technologies down here in South Florida and across the U.S. where they use neighborhood kitchens, or some people call them ghost kitchens. Now, don’t be surprised if you now see the cocktail world moving in that direction as well. Everyone has their favorite corner bar back in the day, but now that could be that corner bar that you never knew was there. And within 30 minutes, your favorite cocktail could be at your door. The challenge we’re going to see with this type of new world of delivery is ensuring the best quality experience for the guest. Some brands are doing this incredibly well, as you and I both know, sustainable to-go containers can get very, very expensive. Again, ensuring that we have the best. Not all food is created equal. Not all food travels well. Think about pizza. That’s why it’s so damn good. It travels well. But at the same time, we’re going to see brands stepping out, more energy into larger kitchens, realizing that we’re going to have this amazing GreenShoots movement. I’m going to quote my good friend, Dr. Chris Mueller, that says, after a forest fire, a few weeks go by, but what starts to pop up after that devastation? There are all these amazing green shoots where this sudden burst of energy is coming from. That’s what we’re going to be seeing in the restaurant, food, and beverage and in the bar segment because of the creativity people have from being pent up for over a year now. At the same time, it will go back to the basics as we talked about earlier. However, this high level of creativity, we’re already seeing in our RTDs, ready-to-drink cocktails. We’re seeing new products coming out to the marketplace that can compete directly, because our guests and consumers these days are savvy and smarter than they were a year ago. If you think about that for a minute, it makes a lot of sense. Now everyone’s got their own habits formed or what it’s going to be. The strong are going to survive. The hustlers are going to win on that, definitely. We’re going to see a high level of creativity and quality. That’s going to be the key. The guest is willing to pay for quality.

Z: Wonderful. Well, Brian thank you so much for your time. Really, really fascinating. We’ll put some links in the episode description for some of the content that is available online for everyone. Thank you so much, really fascinating. We’ll definitely keep an eye on what you and your team at FIU are doing.

C: Amazing, Zach. Thank you so much for having me. Really appreciate it.

Thanks so much for listening to the “VinePair Podcast.” If you love this show as much as we love making it, then please leave a rating or review on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever it is you get your podcasts. It really helps everyone else discover the show.

Now for the credits, VinePair is produced and recorded in New York City and in Seattle, Wash., by myself and Zach Geballe, who does all the editing and loves to get the credit. Also, I would love to give a special shout-out to my VinePair co-founder, Josh Malin, for helping make all this possible, and also to Keith Beaver’s VinePair’s tasting director, who is additionally a producer on the show. I also want to, of course, thank every other member of the VinePair team who is instrumental in all of the ideas that go into making the show every week. Thanks so much for listening, and we’ll see you again.

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