#Simple mini projects for PhD | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

georgetownuniversitypress · 4 years

Text

Darcy Lear: What will you take back to the face-to-face language classroom post-pandemic?

Like so many educators who’ve moved first to emergency remote teaching then to something more like online teaching, I have been overwhelmed by the information coming at me. At first, I eagerly attended all the Zoom workshops I could to get over the learning curve. Then I settled into a holding pattern that fit within my comfort zone for the online venue. Now I try limit my time on Zoom to the hours I am teaching or otherwise engaging with students.

Once the clutter and confusion cleared a bit, I was able to start to look ahead toward a return to face-to-face teaching. And what I’ve realized is that emergency remote teaching reminds me of some of the most important basics of language education—things I want to take back to the in-person classroom as soon as that is possible.

Here are a few of the things I am doing now that I want to keep doing post-pandemic:

1. Keep it simple—technology edition

Just because you can doesn't mean you should. And just because a technology exists, doesn't mean you should incorporate it into your classes—especially during forced online teaching due to a pandemic.

I have necessarily added the online teaching platform used by my campus: Zoom. Otherwise, students and I are using the same tech we've always used—the campus online learning system and the publisher's online textbook and workbook materials. I know Flipgrid and Flippity and Padlet and Panopto and Quizlet and twelve different recording and transcribing options exist. I believe that some are great pedagogical tools and have true potential in the language classroom. But not now. There have been enough learning curves during the pandemic.

Takeaway Don't use bells and whistles gratuitously. Identify your problem first, then solve it using technology if and only if it meets your needs.

2. Keep it simple—curriculum edition

Simplify, simplify, simplify. Are high-stakes tests feasible in the new venue? Do I really need 8-10 course components? Are my own pedagogical materials consistent across different documents and platforms?

The first two questions were a pleasure to address when we were first forced online in spring 2020: high-stakes chapter tests and the final exam were eliminated and replaced by low-stakes daily online quizzes (this is stuff we've known is better for a long, long time). These were 5-10 item assessments closely tied to content covered in that day's class. I told students, "If you can't complete those quizzes without resources, that's a red flag for you. Did you miss class and so it makes sense that it was hard? Do you need to brush up on a grammar point? Do you need to meet with me outside of online class? Did you forget to do the online homework (from which some quiz items are copied and pasted)?" This is what assessment is for—to measure student progress and see if they are ready to move on.

In the meantime, students’ course-long blogs and research projects formed the kind of project-based portfolio assessment we also have known for a long, long time is a better way to assess student learning than a lot of our old-school achievement tests (the kinds of tests people are fretting over how to administer securely online while ‘monitoring cheating’).

I folded some course components, such as recorded TalkAbroad conversations, into students’ portfolio projects so that students reported on them within the regular blog posts they were doing instead of in separate assignments.

By the time the spring 2020 course started, there were three major course components: textbook content, an online blog, and a research project. There were a total of 5 grading categories: daily quizzes, daily blog posts, in-class mini-presentations, a course-long research project, and a final presentation of the research project.

A single thread ran through the entire course so that the work to prepare for class led smoothly into the synchronous class period, which was followed by homework and assessments that reviewed all the content before repeating the cycle. Even though this is how it’s supposed to always work, it felt more focused and streamlined than any face-to-face course I've taught in recent memory.

In cleaning up my pedagogical materials, I developed a kind of check list: Do I even need to keep this content? Is there a way to fold this material into something else (portfolio assessments, online quizzes)? Do I use the names I have for assignments consistently? Do they make sense? Why were assignments described as "personal readings" in course documents and grade book columns years after they'd become "blog entries" in practice? Ditto for "documents 1-5" that were really "research project" components. Getting ready to engage in emergency remote teaching forced me to revisit a lot of content that worked inside my own head but didn't make a lot of sense to anyone else, something I know is an issue when designing pedagogical materials, writing instructions, writing academic articles—you name it!

Takeaway Can I simplify logistics for students? Can the various bits and pieces be streamlined so it makes more sense to students and flows better for all of us?

3. Keep it simple—classroom edition

As the teacher, do most of your work outside of class. With emergency remote teaching, most of my time was dedicated to planning before class, then grading and meeting with students after. In the online class sessions, I mostly just set up activities for students then hang out and listen to them interact. Occasionally, I interrupt to correct or explain, but mostly I wait for students to self-correct or reach out to me for clarification. I’ve noticed a lot more self-correction when I gave students the time and space to do it—well, Zoom did that for me.

This experience has reminded me of the kind of planning and preparing required of a novice teacher. I set up my lesson plan, re-visit it after a day or so, then run through it before class starts to make sure I have everything ready to go on my laptop:

Is the ebook opened to the first page I'll reference?

Do students have the link to the Google doc I'll ask them to use?

Do I have the PDF opened and ready to click on?

Is the PowerPoint presentation launched?

Do I know when I'm going to use breakout rooms and how many I will need?

At the beginning of each class, I share my screen to show students the lesson plan and run through the major topics as well as assignments that are due soon. It begs the question: why haven’t I been sharing my lesson plans with students all along?

Getting everything set up seems to take more time and energy than the Zoom session itself, but in the Zoom session I also shed the novice teacher and settle into the role of experienced teacher.

As soon as a Zoom class ends, I go back into planning mode—I post the day's lesson plan and homework online for students to reference, then I prepare the first draft of the next session's lesson plan. Before I polish the next plan, I spend a lot of time grading—reading/watching students' work, making individual comments on it, and checking their progress with online activities and assessments. In the process, I make sure the homework and quizzes align well with the class sessions (something I haven't dedicated enough time to in face-to-face teaching over the past decade or so).

Takeaway Be transparent with students. Make most of your work happen in the prep and follow-up so class time can focus on smooth student activities.

4. Let students learn by doing: Be the guide on the side, not the sage on the stage

Zoom is a horrible venue for "teacher at the front of class soliciting responses from individual students"—but so is a classroom if your goal is for students to build communicative competence in the language. But in classrooms it's very easy to fall into old-school patterns of the teacher doing too much of the talking. Online teaching—where everyone is disembodied and there are awkward pauses combined with people talking over each other—forces me to abandon any remnants of the Atlas complex. If I'm talking on Zoom it's very obvious I'm delivering a lecture or a teacher presentation.

I do talk to the whole group at the beginning and end of each Zoom session, with some teacher-like explanations peppered throughout the entire course. But most of the time spent on Zoom has been students in breakout rooms interacting with each other in Spanish—sometimes discussing textbook content in groups, sometimes preparing brief presentations to give to the whole class, sometimes with student discussion leaders who are formally assessed on their performance. I pop in but try to leave myself on mute.

Takeaway Find a way to put myself "on mute."

5. Be flexible and go easy on yourself and others

Right now we’re in a pandemic, but in "normal times" there are always some individuals who are navigating crises. We don't need to know the details, but we can make interactions with us easier instead of harder—extend deadlines, take late work, allow students to make up tests, and be understanding when they have to miss class.

Takeaway Nobody needs a punitive work or learning environment—ever. Be flexible. Go easy on yourself and others.

Darcy Lear has a PhD in Foreign and Second Language Education from the Ohio State University and teaches Spanish at the University of Chicago. She regularly gives presentations on teaching strategies to departments around the country and has developed languages for special purposes courses at several institutions. Lear is also a career coach, helping people to position themselves to use their language skills in rewarding careers. She is the author of Integrating Career Preparation into Language Courses.

#language learning #language teaching #pedagogy #new books #language acquisition #actfl #online teaching #teaching online #pandemic #covidー19 #covid lockdown

3 notes · View notes

tastydregs · 4 years

Text

In a field where smaller is better, researchers discover the world's tiniest antibodies

Researchers at the University of Bath in the UK and biopharma company UCB have found a way to produce miniaturised antibodies, opening the way for a potential new class of treatments for diseases.

Until now, the smallest humanmade antibodies (known as monoclonal antibodies, or mAbs) were derived from llamas, alpacas and sharks, but the breakthrough molecules isolated from the immune cells of cows are up to five times smaller. This is thanks to an unusual feature of a bovine antibody known as a knob domain.

The potential medical implications of the new antibodies' diminutive size are huge. For instance, they may bind to sites on pathogens that regular antibody molecules are too large to latch on to, triggering the destruction of invasive microbes. They may also be able to gain access to sites of the body which larger antibodies can't.

Antibodies consist of chains of amino acids (the building blocks of proteins) that join together in a loopy structure. The loops in the chains, known as complementarity determining regions, bind to antigen targets, thereby activating the immune system. Bovine antibodies are loopier than most, and around 10% include a knob domain -- a characteristic that is unique among jawed vertebrates. These tightly packed bundles of mini-loops are presented on a protein stalk, far from other loops, and are thought to play a critical role in binding.

The reason knob domains are creating a stir is simple: isolated from the rest of the antibody, these loop extensions can function autonomously, effectively making tiny antibodies that can bind tightly to their targets.

Professor Jean van den Elsen from Bath's Department of Biology and Biochemistry, who was involved in the research, said this finding was surprising. "These knobs are able to bind their target as complete antibodies, so in effect we have been able to miniaturise antibodies for the first time."

These new molecules have been developed as part of a collaborative project between the University of Bath and global biopharma company UCB. They originate from cows that have been immunised by injection with an antigen (particles of a foreign body), eliciting an immune response. Natural antibodies are mined from the cow, through a process of sorting and 'deep sequencing' of antibody producing B-cells. The resulting antibodies are then manufactured in the lab in cultures of human cells.

Regular antibodies are made by the human body as part of its natural response to an infection, whereas monoclonal antibodies are administered to a patient when an infection has taken hold and they are struggling to beat it unaided. Over the past few decades, mAbs have emerged as effective treatments for various medical conditions, including cancers, autoimmune disorders and serious viral infections. It is hoped that miniaturised mAbs will eventually be involved in a range of drug therapies.

The antigen used by the Bath researchers to elicit an immune response in cows is called Complement component C5, and C5 plays a role in many human diseases (including COVID-19), where there is an inflammatory response.

Not only do these novel monoclonal antibodies have a size advantage over regular mAbs but they are also more robust, meaning they remain stable for longer.

"They have very sturdy, tightly packed structures," said Professor van den Elsen. "So not only do they get to places better than other antibodies but they may also have a far longer shelf life."

Alex Macpherson, a PhD student at Bath and a biochemist at UCB, who is lead author on the paper, added: "Antibody drug discovery is an established field but this research opens up entirely new opportunities. There is huge potential use for these miniaturised antibodies."

Alastair Lawson, immunology Fellow at UCB and UCB lead on the project said: "This research has led to the discovery of the smallest clinically relevant antibody fragments ever reported and we are very excited about their potential."

Story Source:

Materials provided by University of Bath. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

0 notes

essaytopicsforcollege949 · 4 years

Video

youtube

samedayessay

About me

How Long Does It Take To Write 1,600 Words?

How Long Does It Take To Write 1,600 Words? SameDayEssay com has a shopper ranking of four.03 stars from 138 reviews indicating that most customers are usually happy with their purchases. SameDayEssay com additionally ranks 103rd among Essay Writing sites. The most typical issues with SameDayEssay com are around customer service, which is inferior to expected by some prospects. By clicking “Continue”, you comply with terms of service and data policy. Our skilled writers will do their best to make your essay a refined masterpiece. That is why we provide solely premium companies carried out by carefully chosen staff with PhDs in virtually every potential field of research. All in all, Samedayessay.com is what it claims to be. You need an skilled that will help you provide you with a flawless paper. You don’t have enough time to complete your non-major course assignment. We never miss deadlines and even ship earlier than the timeline, so you've time to evaluate the work. Having an excellent-burning deadline, you possibly can still count on the superb success of your order. We are sorry for such an unpleasant concern that occurred to you using our service. Samedayessay customer support is fantastic, never left a dilemma unanswered. You really took in to myi state of affairs and advised a cheaper priced solution that match my wants and saved me cash. Great job on the research paper and especially with the Power Point Presentation. We have consultants in MBA, Accounting, History, Literature, Arts, Humanities, Science, IT, Nursing, Law, and different topics. work and ultimately, ensure that any paper is one hundred% authentic. freebies similar to free rewards and paper giveaways for the most loyal of our shoppers. Should a downloaded project fail to live as much as your expectations or meet preliminary directions, you would request a refund. Don’t hesitate to ask SameDayPapers for “write my paper for cheap” request. We guarantee that you'll receive quick results and wonderful options – working with us is a bit of cake. If you've been given a choice of essay questions, you need to select the one you've essentially the most knowledge about, or have some strong opinions on. Assign yourself chunks of time to achieve sure milestones, as this breaks down the massive daunting task and provides additional motivation every time you tick off one of many comparatively simple mini-duties. There are many causes students discover themselves in this pressurised state of affairs . We're not here to evaluate, somewhat help you make the best of a tough state of affairs. You had each intention of getting your essay accomplished before the deadline, but sometimes life can get in the best way. Check all of the bins - inform us what sort of paper is it going to be. Hello Laura, thank you for contacting us concerning this concern. First of all, I would like to thanks for informing us concerning the scenario occurred along with your order. The option is on the market inside days (depending on the project’s length). A full refund is issued anytime earlier than a paper is downloaded. Writers of the service take care of pressing assignments every single day. So, we really feel confident in assembly any deadline you request. Every specialist on the team holds a degree in one of the 35+ disciplines the service covers.

0 notes

pearcar93-blog · 5 years

Text

Is Autoimmune Paleo The Best Diet For Hashimoto’s?

Recently, I got an email from a reader asking me how I manage to not feel guilty when indulging in the foods I love. She had recently been diagnosed with an autoimmune disease and was trying to figure out what diet was right for her without turning her life completely upside down.

It wasn’t an easy note to answer. Because there’s no simple antidote to guilt and food shame, otherwise I would surely write you a how-to on the subject. I find that the most useful answer is knowing you’re not alone in feeling it.

If you’ve read The Wellness Project, then you know it took me far longer than the year at hand to get my healthy hedonism mindset under control. There were so many should not’s when it came to the diet piece. So many contradictions. So much confusion.

When I cross-referenced the prevailing anti-inflammatory diets, the no-no foods listed on my yellow legal pad included the trio from my vice detox—alcohol, caffeine, and sugar—along with the big eight allergens: dairy, wheat, eggs, tree nuts, peanuts, shellfish, fish, and soy. Some recommend no eggs, seeds, beans, legumes, or grains of any kind.

Many only advocate animal protein if its wild, grass-fed, free-range or organic. And others said no animal protein at all. Add nightshade vegetables (tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, and eggplant) and cruciferous vegetables (broccoli, cabbage Brussels sprouts and, yes, kale) for thyroid sufferers and it starts to feel like all that’s left are organic blueberries not flown in from Chile.

One of the flagpole diets I came across was AIP, otherwise known as Autoimmune Paleo. The books that promoted it unequivocally said that all autoimmune peeps would benefit.

While knowing that most autoimmune diseases are more alike than different, I struggled to see how so much restriction could be necessary for everyone. And then inevitably felt guilty about the food groups I didn’t manage to eliminate.

Eventually, I came to understand that my initial instincts were right. I just didn’t have the clinical practice to back them up. Which is why I asked Jill Grunewald, as the second post in her HashiPosse series, to break it down. Below she explains what autoimmune paleo is, why it’s not necessarily the right answer for those of us with Hashimoto’s, and when it might be time to give it a try.

If you’ve been wondering about AIP or found yourself confused about who falls under its umbrella of efficacy, I hope you’ll give this post a read!

Jill’s approach is very similar to my own in the 4 Weeks to Wellness Program. For those looking for some support trying out an elimination diet, finding your trigger foods, or slowly on-boarding to a healthier lifestyle, I highly recommend joining me for the fall session!

Enrollment is officially open. You can find out more here.

With health and hedonism,

Phoebe

Is AIP The Best Diet for Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis?

If you’ve been tuned into the thyroid and Hashimoto’s (autoimmune hypothyroidism) community, you’ve likely heard of (or tried?) a Paleo or Autoimmune Paleo diet (AIP).

There are varying twists, but generally, with Paleo, you’re eating what’s believed to be what our ancestors ate: meat (grass-based/pastured), fish, vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds, herbs, spices, eggs, unrefined coconut and olive oil, and animal fats like ghee, lard, and tallow. According to some, fruit is off limits. Others only support eating berries.

Most notably, the paleo lifestyle excludes grains (including corn) and legumes (including soy), dairy (although some allow grass-fed), sugar, caffeine, and oils derived from seeds and grains, which can be high in inflammation-promoting Omega-6 fatty acids. Some claim no eggs and others say no starchy vegetables because they can’t be eaten raw.

An AIP diet, often recommended for those with autoimmune conditions, is similar to Paleo, but in addition to the above exclusions, eschews nuts, seeds, eggs, dairy, nightshade vegetables, and generally, fruit.

These diets have become the “prescription” for any manifestation of autoimmunity, but may not be the answer for everyone.

I see merit in these approaches in some circumstances, but I’m wholeheartedly skeptical of removing whole food groups from your diet, even for people with autoimmunity. This skepticism is thoughtful, based on years of taking a different approach that’s not so restrictive, and seeing my clients get the results they’re seeking.

I do have some “restrictions” around grains and legumes, which has always been to largely limit flour-based products and eat true whole (intact) non-gluten grains, in moderation, because it’s true that a diet heavy in grains can be inflammatory and lead to weight gain and blood sugar issues.

Legumes/beans are a great source of plant-based protein, but I recommend not making legumes the sole protein of any meal, unless you can truly handle them without digestive distress. Even some who don’t have autoimmune conditions can have a difficult time digesting legumes (i.e. those with SIBO or IBS who may find relief on a low FODMAP diet).

My Essential Thyroid Cookbook contains chapters called “In Defense of Grains” and “In Defense of Legumes” that highlight the research of Justin Sonnenburg, PhD and Associate Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at Stanford and the author of The Good Gut, co-authored by his wife Erica Sonnenburg, PhD. They’ve been trailblazers in discovering how the fiber in grains and legumes improves the health of our gut microbiome, our digestive “mini ecosystem.”

Likewise, Dr. Susan Blum, author of The Immune System Recovery Plan, regularly mentions quinoa, amaranth, millet, teff, buckwheat, various types of rice, and also legumes as part of her healing program.

Just in the last year or so, I’ve witnessed many functional medicine/functional nutrition experts sing the praises of moderate intake of properly prepared grains and legumes.

AIP Isn’t For Everyone

I was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s in early 2008. At that time, the popularity of the Paleo diet hadn’t crested.

Given that 70-80 percent of our immune system is in our digestive tract, I did the gut-healing Elimination Provocation diet—a version similar to the one I share with my clients today. It’s a temporary diet and excludes nuts—but not seeds, grains, or legumes, with the exception of peanuts (which are technically legumes) and soy (also a legume).

Within a few months, my Hashimoto’s was managed—without the use of thyroid hormone replacement drugs. Over those next couple of years, prior to the popularization of the AIP diet, the vast majority of my clients had the same success—plummeting antibodies and alleviation of their hypothyroid/Hashimoto’s symptoms.

Considering this, it’s difficult, in my opinion, to rationalize a highly restrictive diet in all circumstances, for everyone with autoimmunity.

I prefer a flexible Paleo diet or a “Paleo template,” in the context of the Elimination Provocation diet. Flexibility is key—it gives people more of a feeling of control and “I can do this” vs. “I have to do do this.”

Stress = Antibodies

Many who’ve tried strict Paleo and/or AIP diet have expressed feelings of stress and frustration at the highly restrictive nature of these diets—and some have seen increased antibodies, worsening of symptoms, and confusion about how long to eat this way. (I worked with many of these “AIP refugees,” as I call them.)

Some thrive on (and love) the AIP diet and I’m not here to disregard its merits! But often, it’s a two-steps-forward-two-steps-back situation. The stress that ensues—at least for some people—isn’t conductive to the healing that needs to take place.

There’s enough evidence showing that stress increases antibodies. It’s even said to be a trigger for the onset of autoimmune diseases. According to Dr. Mark Hyman, “Stress worsens the autoimmune response.”

While some may be directly affected by grains and legumes, others can get their autoimmunity managed while continuing to eat small amounts of these foods—as long as other dietary triggers are investigated vis a vis an Elimination Diet.

At the beginning of this post, I said that I see some merit in an AIP diet right out of the chute in some circumstances. In addition to the foods excluded in the Elimination Provocation diet, I recommend the exclusion of grains, legumes, and seeds, in two circumstances: when the symptoms of autoimmunity are so painful and distressing as to cause life-altering circumstances or when a simple Elimination Diet hasn’t proven successful.

According to Chris Kresser, a long-time Paleo proponent, autoimmunity expert, and author of The Paleo Cure, “The belief that ‘everyone’ will benefit from one particular dietary approach—no matter what it is—ignores the important differences that determine what is optimal for each person. These include variations in genes, gene expression, the microbiome, health status, activity levels, geography (e.g. latitude and climate), and more. When it comes to diet, there is no one-size-fits-all approach.”

Hopefully you can see that I’m not anti-AIP. Given that there are equally effective and also flexible approaches to gut healing and immune modulation that tend to dovetail more easily with our busy lifestyles, I feel that it’s in many people’s best interest to start with a less restrictive approach, which is also conducive to sticking with the healing protocol and getting the results wished for!

Jill Grunewald, HNC, Functional Medicine Certified Health Coach, and founder of Healthful Elements, is a thyroid health, Hashimoto’s, and alopecia (autoimmune hair loss) specialist and co-author of the #1 best selling Essential Thyroid Cookbook, of which this post is adapted from (the chapter, “Why This is Not Another Paleo or AIP Cookbook”).

Source: https://feedmephoebe.com/autoimmune-paleo-diet-hashimotos/

#read more #see more #check it out #interesting #learn more

0 notes

skinflesh97-blog · 5 years

Text

Is Autoimmune Paleo The Best Diet For Hashimoto’s?

One of the flagpole diets I came across was AIP, otherwise known as Autoimmune Paleo. The books that promoted it unequivocally said that all autoimmune peeps would benefit.

If you’ve been wondering about AIP or found yourself confused about who falls under its umbrella of efficacy, I hope you’ll give this post a read!

Enrollment is officially open. You can find out more here.

With health and hedonism,

Phoebe

Is AIP The Best Diet for Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis?

If you’ve been tuned into the thyroid and Hashimoto’s (autoimmune hypothyroidism) community, you’ve likely heard of (or tried?) a Paleo or Autoimmune Paleo diet (AIP).

These diets have become the “prescription” for any manifestation of autoimmunity, but may not be the answer for everyone.

Just in the last year or so, I’ve witnessed many functional medicine/functional nutrition experts sing the praises of moderate intake of properly prepared grains and legumes.

AIP Isn’t For Everyone

I was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s in early 2008. At that time, the popularity of the Paleo diet hadn’t crested.

Considering this, it’s difficult, in my opinion, to rationalize a highly restrictive diet in all circumstances, for everyone with autoimmunity.

Stress = Antibodies

Source: https://feedmephoebe.com/autoimmune-paleo-diet-hashimotos/

#read more #see more #check it out #interesting #learn more

0 notes

butaneplate02-blog · 5 years

Text

Is Autoimmune Paleo The Best Diet For Hashimoto’s?

One of the flagpole diets I came across was AIP, otherwise known as Autoimmune Paleo. The books that promoted it unequivocally said that all autoimmune peeps would benefit.

If you’ve been wondering about AIP or found yourself confused about who falls under its umbrella of efficacy, I hope you’ll give this post a read!

Enrollment is officially open. You can find out more here.

With health and hedonism,

Phoebe

Is AIP The Best Diet for Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis?

If you’ve been tuned into the thyroid and Hashimoto’s (autoimmune hypothyroidism) community, you’ve likely heard of (or tried?) a Paleo or Autoimmune Paleo diet (AIP).

These diets have become the “prescription” for any manifestation of autoimmunity, but may not be the answer for everyone.

Just in the last year or so, I’ve witnessed many functional medicine/functional nutrition experts sing the praises of moderate intake of properly prepared grains and legumes.

AIP Isn’t For Everyone

I was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s in early 2008. At that time, the popularity of the Paleo diet hadn’t crested.

Considering this, it’s difficult, in my opinion, to rationalize a highly restrictive diet in all circumstances, for everyone with autoimmunity.

Stress = Antibodies

Source: https://feedmephoebe.com/autoimmune-paleo-diet-hashimotos/

#read more #see more #check it out #interesting #learn more

0 notes

theadmiringbog · 7 years

Photo

In this book, you’ll naturally look for common habits and recommendations, and you should. Here are a few patterns, some odder than others:

More than 80% of the interviewees have some form of daily mindfulness or meditation practice

A surprising number of males (not females) over 45 never eat breakfast, or eat only the scantiest of fare

Many use the ChiliPad device for cooling at bedtime

Rave reviews of the books Sapiens, Poor Charlie’s Almanack, Influence, and Man’s Search for Meaning, among others

The habit of listening to single songs on repeat for focus

Nearly everyone has done some form of “spec” work (completing projects on their own time and dime, then submitting them to prospective buyers)

The belief that “failure is not durable” or variants thereof

Almost every guest has been able to take obvious “weaknesses” and turn them into huge competitive advantages

Christopher Sommer, former U.S. National Team gymnastics coach and founder of GymnasticBodies

Coach Sommer dislikes the fitness fixation on “diet and exercise.” He finds it much more productive to focus on “eat and train.”

3 Movements Everyone Should Practice

J-Curl

Shoulder Extension:

Lift a dowel behind your back (standing), or sit on the floor and walk your hands backward behind your hips.

Thoracic Bridge:

Elevate your feet enough to feel the bulk of the stretch in the upper back and shoulders, not the lower back. The feet might be 3+ feet off the ground. Ensure you can concentrate on straightening your arms (and legs, if possible), holding the position, and breathing.

Good Goals for Adult Non-Gymnasts

The following goals incorporate many different aspects of strength and mobility into single movements:

Beginner: J-Curl

Intermediate: Straddle Press Handstand

Advanced: Stalder Press Handstand

QL Walk—An Unusual Warmup

Ag Walks with Rear Support

Pike Pulses

Cast Wall Walk

Dr. Dominic “Dom” D’Agostino, PhD

The ketogenic diet, often nicknamed “keto,” is a high-fat diet that mimics fasting physiology. Your brain and body begin to use ketones (derived from stored or ingested fat) for energy instead of blood sugar (glucose)—a state called ketosis. The diet was originally developed to treat epileptic children, but there are many variations, including the Atkins diet. You can achieve ketosis through fasting, diet, exogenous ketones, or a combination.

The primary resource, as you’ll come back to this: Dom’s top go-to resource for the ketogenic diet, including FAQs, meal plans, and more is ketogenic-diet-resource.com

Why Consider Fasting?

Dom has discussed the idea of a therapeutic “purge fast” with his colleague Dr. Thomas Seyfried of Boston College. Per Dom:

“If you don’t have cancer and you do a therapeutic fast 1 to 3 times per year, you could purge any precancerous cells that may be living in your body.”

Fasts of 3 days or longer can effectively “reboot” your immune system via stem cell–based regeneration. Dom suggests a 5-day fast 2 to 3 times per year.

I’d always been repelled by yoga: too much mumbo-jumbo, too little excitement. AcroYoga is a different beast.

Questions to ask

These can be modified for any skill or topic, not just sports. Just replace [SPORT] with what you want to learn, and track down your mentors. You can often find past gold and silver medalists willing to answer these via Skype for $50 to $100 per hour, which is an incredible steal and could save you years of wasted effort.

Who is good at [SPORT] despite being poorly built for it?

Who’s good at this who shouldn’t be?

Who are the most controversial or unorthodox athletes or trainers in [SPORT]?

Why?

What do you think of them?

Who are the most impressive lesser-known teachers?

What makes you different?

Who trained you or influenced you?

Have you trained others to do this?

Have they replicated your results?

What are the biggest mistakes and myths you see in [SPORT] training?

What are the biggest wastes of time?

What are your favorite instructional books or resources on the subject?

If people had to teach themselves, what would you suggest they use?

If you were to train me for 12 weeks for a [FILL IN THE BLANK] competition and had a million dollars on the line, what would the training look like?

What if I trained for 8 weeks?

Peter rarely eats breakfast and has experimented with many forms of intermittent fasting, ranging from one meal a day (i.e., 23 hours of fasting per day) to more typical 16/8 and 18/6 patterns of eating (i.e., 16 or 18 hours of fasting and only eating in an 8- or 6-hour window). Going 16 hours without eating generally provides the right balance of autophagy (look it up) and anabolism (muscle building).

“If you’re over 40 and don’t smoke, there’s about a 70 to 80% chance you’ll die from one of four diseases: heart disease, cerebrovascular disease, cancer, or neurodegenerative disease.

“There are really two pieces to longevity. The first is delaying death as long as possible by delaying the onset of chronic disease (the ‘big four’ above). We call that the defensive play.

“The second is enhancing life, the offensive play.

“[Studies] suggest to me that there’s something about highly refined carbohydrates and sugars—and potentially protein, though it might be for a different reason—that seems to raise insulin, which we know, by extension, raises insulin-like growth factor (IGF). And we know that IGF is driving not just aging but also certainly driving a lot of cancers, though not all of them.

“There is value in exercise, though, and I think that the most important type of exercise, especially in terms of bang for your buck, is going to be really high-intensity, heavy strength training.”

For Loose Skin or Stretch Marks

“There’s an herb called gotu kola that—I learned this from Dr. Mauro Di Pasquale, who was one of my early mentors—will get rid of what we call unnecessary scar tissue or unnecessary connective tissue. The truth of the matter, though, is that you will see zero progress for the loose skin for 6 months. So people say it’s not worth it, but I tell people, just keep doing it for 6 months. And then it’s almost like overnight. . . . “There are some compounding pharmacists who will make you a gotu kola bioabsorbable cream. That works a lot faster.”

On Good Doctors

“The length of time they spend with you on your first visit is probably your best indicator [of their quality].”

The Slow Carb Diet

The basic rules are simple, all followed 6 days per week:

Rule #1: Avoid “white” starchy carbohydrates (or those that can be white).

This means all bread, pasta, rice, potatoes, and grains (yes, including quinoa). If you have to ask, don’t eat it.

Rule #2: Eat the same few meals over and over again, especially for breakfast and lunch.

Good news: You already do this. You’re just picking new default meals. If you want to keep it simple, split your plate into thirds: protein, veggies, and beans/legumes.

Rule #3: Don’t drink calories.

Exception: 1 to 2 glasses of dry red wine per night is allowed, although this can cause some peri-/post-menopausal women to plateau.

Rule #4: Don’t eat fruit.

(Fructose → glycerol phosphate → more body fat, more or less.) Avocado and tomatoes are allowed.

Rule #5: Whenever possible, measure your progress in body fat percentage, NOT total pounds.

The scale can deceive and derail you. For instance, it’s common to gain muscle while simultaneously losing fat on the SCD. That’s exactly what you want, but the scale number won’t move, and you will get frustrated. In place of the scale, I use DEXA scans, a BodyMetrix home ultrasound device, or calipers with a gym professional (I recommend the Jackson-Pollock 7-point method). And then:

Rule #6: Take one day off per week and go nuts.

I choose and recommend Saturday. This is “cheat day,” which a lot of readers also call “Faturday.” For biochemical and psychological reasons, it’s important not to hold back. Some readers keep a “to-eat” list during the week, which reminds them that they’re only giving up vices for 6 days at a time.

Mini-parallettes

3 High-Yield Exercises

Pavel’s “Simple & Sinister” Kettlebell Program

One-arm swing

Turkish get-up (TGU)

Goblet squat

Do these three exercises in some form every day, and you are guaranteed to get a great return on your investment. The TGU is also excellent for diagnosing deficiencies.

“When in Doubt, Train Your Grip and Your Core”

“Strengthening your midsection and your grip will automatically increase your strength in any lift.

Among effective midsection exercises are ‘power breathing,’ hollow rocks, Janda sit-ups, hanging leg raises, and ‘hard-style planks.’ To do the last, hold a plank for 10 seconds under max contraction, not for several minutes. Hold it like you’re about to be kicked and breathe ‘behind the shield’ of your tensed midsection. For a challenge, consider putting your feet on the wall, a few inches from the floor.”

Kettlebell windmills

The Top Mobilizations to Do Every Day

“Here are a few things you should probably do every day:

Everyone can benefit from something that looks like the cow stretch (also sometimes called “cat-camel” in yoga classes). It’s a low-level static stretch that gets you into this extension pattern, and out of the other pattern of sitting in the rounded flexion position.

Spend as much time in a lunge as you can.

‘Smash’ your gut (i.e., roll on it) for downregulation before bed with a medicine ball.

Internal shoulder rotation is so crucial. Doing the Burgener warmup will help show you if you have full internal rotation of your shoulder.

“Don’t systematically shorten your kids’ heel cords (Achilles) with bad shoes. It results in crappy ankle range of motion in the future. Get your kids Vans, Chuck Taylors, or similar shoes. Have them in flat shoes or barefoot as much as possible.”

“What am I continuing to do myself that I’m not good at?” Improve it, eliminate it, or delegate it.

"When it comes to the future, it’s far more important to be imaginative than to be right.”

Alvin Toffler.

Honey + ACV: My go-to tranquilizer beverage is simple:

2 tablespoons of apple cider vinegar (I use Bragg brand) and 1 tablespoon honey, stirred into 1 cup of hot water. This was taught to me by the late and great Seth Roberts, PhD. Some of his readers also noticed large and immediate strength improvements in exercise after a few days of using this pre-bed cocktail.

#4—Prepare “Titanium Tea” (this name was a joke, but it stuck) (2 to 3 minutes)

I prepare loose-leaf tea in a Rishi glass teapot but you could use a French press. The below combo is excellent for cognition and fat loss, and I use about 1 flat teaspoon of each: Pu-erh aged black tea Dragon well green tea (or other green tea) Turmeric and ginger shavings (often also Rishi brand) Add the hot water to your mixture and let it steep for 1 to 2 minutes.

Separately, add one of the following to your drinking mug: 1 to 2 tablespoons of coconut oil, which is about 60 to 70% MCTs (medium-chain triglycerides) by weight or 1 scoop of Quest MCT Oil Powder, which will give the tea a creamy consistency.

Try one or more of Chade-Meng Tan’s suggested exercises, starting on page 154. They are simple and brilliant.

With “Just Note Gone” we train the mind to notice that something previously experienced is no more. For example, at the end of a breath, notice that the breath is over. Gone. As a sound fades away, notice when it is over. Gone. At the end of a thought, notice that the thought is over. Gone. At the end of an experience of emotion—joy, anger, sadness, or anything else—notice it is over. Gone. This practice is, without a doubt, one of the most important meditation practices of all time. Meditation master Shinzen Young said that if he were allowed to teach only one focus technique and no other, it would be this one.

Loving-Kindness

In many of my public talks, I guide a very simple 10-second exercise. I tell the audience members to each identify two human beings in the room and just think, “I wish for this person to be happy, and I wish for that person to be happy.” That is it. I remind them to not do or say anything, just think—this is an entirely thinking exercise. The entire exercise is just 10 seconds’ worth of thinking. Everybody emerges from this exercise smiling, happier than 10 seconds before. This is the joy of loving-kindness.

Chris elaborates: “Generally, what all of this comes down to is whether you are on offense or defense. I think that as you survey the challenges in your lives, it’s just: Which of those did you assign yourself, and which of those are you doing to please someone else? Your inbox is a to-do list to which anyone in the world can add an action item. I needed to get out of my inbox and back to my own to-do list.”

Go to as Many Higher-Level Meetings as Possible

TIM: “If working in a startup environment, what should one do or focus on to learn and improve as much as possible?”

CHRIS: “Go to all the meetings you can, even if you’re not invited to them, and figure out how to be helpful.

In 2009, Chris did a charity bicycle ride with the Trek Travel team from Santa Barbara, California, to Charleston, South Carolina: “I had a phrase I kept repeating in my head over and over again, which was, ‘Tonight, I will be in my bed. Tonight, I will be in my bed. Tonight, I will be in my bed.’ . . . It was something I repeated to remind me that the pain of what I was going through was temporary and that, no matter what, at the end of that day, I would be in my bed that night.”

“Raise Prices”

This was Marc’s response to “If you could have a billboard anywhere, what would it say?” He’d put it right in the heart of San Francisco, and here’s the reason:

“The number-one theme that companies have when they really struggle is they are not charging enough for their product. It has become conventional wisdom in Silicon Valley that the way to succeed is to price your product as low as possible, under the theory that if it’s low-priced, everybody can buy it, and that’s how you get to volume,” he said. “And we just see over and over and over again people failing with that, because they get into a problem called ‘too hungry to eat.’ They don’t charge enough for their product to be able to afford the sales and marketing required to actually get anybody to buy it. Is your product any good if people won’t pay more for it?”

TIM: “What advice would you give to Marc, the 20-something, at Netscape?”

MARC:

“I’ve never for a moment even thought about that.

Basically, his entire thing is ‘forward.’

TIM: “So that’s how you feel?”

MARC: “Forward, like: We don’t stop. We don’t slow down. We don’t revisit past decisions. We don’t second guess. So, honestly, that question, I have no idea how to answer.”

“Strong Views, Loosely Held” For a long time, this phrase was in Marc’s Twitter bio.

Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life

Marc highlighted one takeaway: “He says the key to success is, ‘Be so good they can’t ignore you.’”

TF: Marc has another guiding tenet: “Smart people should make things.” He says: “If you just have those two principles—that’s a pretty good way to orient.”

“My goal is not to fail fast. My goal is to succeed over the long run. They are not the same thing.”

“To do original work: It’s not necessary to know something nobody else knows. It is necessary to believe something few other people believe.”

“Andy Grove had the answer: For every metric, there should be another ‘paired’ metric that addresses adverse consequences of the first metric.”

Arnold: “My confidence came from my vision. . . . I am a big believer that if you have a very clear vision of where you want to go, then the rest of it is much easier. Because you always know why you are training 5 hours a day, you always know why you are pushing and going through the pain barrier.”

Derek has read, reviewed, and rank-ordered 200+ books at sivers.org/books. They’re automatically sorted from best to worst. He is a huge fan of Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s business partner, and introduced me to the book Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin to Munger, by Peter Bevelin.

“What if you asked, ‘When you think of the word “successful,” who’s the third person that comes to mind? Why are they actually more successful than the first person that came to mind?’ In that case, the first would be Richard Branson, but ...

“What if Richard Branson set out to live a quiet life, but like a compulsive gambler, he just can’t stop creating companies? Then that changes everything, and we can’t call him successful anymore.”

Ricardo Semler, CEO and majority owner of the Brazil-based Semco Partners, practices asking “Why?” three times.

I believe you shouldn’t start a business unless people are asking you to.

“From the early days of WordPress, we would always think: ‘Okay, if we do X today, what does that result in tomorrow, a year from now, ten years from now?’ The metaphor I think of the most—because it’s simple—is the dog chasing the car. What does the dog do if he catches the car? He doesn’t have a plan for it. So I find it just as often on the entrepreneurial side. People don’t plan for success.”

The normal QWERTY keyboard layout was designed to slow down human operators to avoid jams. That time has passed, so try the Dvorak layout instead, which is easier on your tendons and helps prevent carpal tunnel syndrome. Read The Dvorak Zine (dvzine.org). Colemak is even more efficient, if you dare. Within Automattic, Matt has held speed-typing challenges, where the loser has to switch to the winner’s layout. So far, Dvorak has always beaten QWERTY.

Search YouTube for “Best of Liszt” (Halidon Music):

“Franz Liszt is one of the great romantic composers of piano literature. He was really held as the super-virtuoso of the 19th century.”

As Tony recounted, Buffett told him,

“Investing in yourself is the most important investment you’ll ever make in your life. . . . There’s no financial investment that’ll ever match it, because if you develop more skill, more ability, more insight, more capacity, that’s what’s going to really provide economic freedom. . . . It’s those skill sets that really make that happen.”

This echoes what Jim Rohn famously said, “If you let your learning lead to knowledge, you become a fool. If you let your learning lead to action, you become wealthy.”

Doesn’t Always Have to Be Hard “I have come to learn that part of the business strategy is to solve the simplest, easiest, and most valuable problem. And actually, in fact, part of doing strategy is to solve the easiest problem.”

Reid’s First Principle Is Speed

“We agreed I was going to make judgment calls on a range of issues on his behalf without checking with him. He told me, ‘In order to move fast, I expect you’ll make some foot faults. I’m okay with an error rate of 10 to 20%—times when I would have made a different decision in a given situation—if it means you can move fast.’ I felt empowered to make decisions with this ratio in mind, and it was incredibly liberating.”

“I think we need to teach kids two things: 1) how to lead, and 2) how to solve interesting problems. Because the fact is, there are plenty of countries on Earth where there are people who are willing to be obedient and work harder for less money than us.

Altucher

“We all have, let’s say, two or three dozen massive pain points in our lives that everyone can relate to. I try to basically write about those, and then I try to write about how I attempted to recover from them.”

To me, the quote above explains how James went from unknown to millions of readers faster than most writers gain a thousand readers. James made his specialty exploring his own pain and fear, and he shows the light at the end of the tunnel without ignoring the darkness in the middle.

Some of my most popular blog posts since 2007 have been the least time-consuming but the most uncomfortable. To produce these, I usually ask myself: “What am I embarrassed to be struggling with? And what am I doing about it?”

If you can’t get 10 good ideas, get 20 ideas.

On the Value of Selective Ignorance, After Working at a Newspaper

“You’re basically told, ‘Find the thing that’s going to scare people the most and write about it.’ . . . It’s like every day is Halloween at the newspaper. I avoid newspapers.”

TF: Many productive people do the same, including Nassim Taleb.

1,000 True Fans

To be a successful creator, you don’t need millions. You don’t need millions of dollars or millions of customers, clients, or fans. To make a living as a craftsperson, photographer, musician, designer, author, animator, app maker, entrepreneur, or inventor you need only 1,000 true fans. A true fan is defined as “a fan who will buy anything you produce.” These diehard fans will drive 200 miles to see you sing; they will buy the hardback and paperback and audio versions of your book; they will purchase your next figurine, sight unseen;

Here’s how the math works. You need to meet two criteria: First, you have to create enough each year that you can earn, on average, $100 profit from each true fan. That is easier to do in some arts and businesses than others, but it is a good creative challenge in every area because it is always easier and better to give your existing customers more, than it is to find new fans. Second, you must have a direct relationship with your fans. That is, they must pay you directly. You get to keep all of their support, unlike the small percentage of their fees you might get from a music label, publisher, studio, retailer, or other intermediate. If you keep the full $100 from each true fan, then you need only 1,000 of them to earn $100K per year. That’s a living for most folks. 1,000 customers is a whole lot more feasible to aim for

Here are some specific phrases that he uses, which I’ve borrowed, and you’ll notice that pseudo-commands are sometimes more effective than questions:

Prompts to Elicit Stories (Most Interviewers Are Weak at This)

“Tell me about a time when . . .”

“Tell me about the day [or moment or time] when . . .”

“Tell me the story of . . . [how you came to major in X, how you met so-and-so, etc.]”

“Tell me about the day you realized ___ . . . ”

“What were the steps that got you to ___ ?”

“Describe the conversation when . . .”

Follow-Up Questions When Something Interesting Comes Up, Perhaps in Passing

“How did that make you feel?”

“What do you make of that?”

General-Use Fishing Lures

“If the old you could see the new you, what would the new you say?”

“You seem very confident now. Was that always the case?”

“If you had to describe the debate in your head about [X decision or event], how would you describe it?”

Every single thing in your company breaks every time you roughly triple in size.

You get to 10 people, and everything kind of breaks again. You figure that out, and then you get to 30 people and everything is different, and then 100 and then 300 and then 1,000.

His dad, a very successful entrepreneur, gave Chris advice when he was a freshman or sophomore in high school: “I distinctly remember him saying not to worry about what I was going to do because the job I was going to do hadn’t even been invented yet. . . . The interesting jobs are the ones that you make up.

“That’s something I certainly hope to instill in my son: Don’t worry about what your job is going to be. . . . Do things that you’re interested in, and if you do them really well, you’re going to find a way to temper them with some good business opportunity.”

#Tools of Titans #Tim Ferriss #book review

1 note · View note

rachelcarsoncenter · 4 years

Text

(Adventures in Stavanger, Part 1)

In this mini series you can read about the experiences of Johanna Felber and Malin Klinski, candidates of the RCC’s Environmental Studies Certificate program, during an exchange program with the University of Stavanger in Norway. If you want to find out more about life in the land of the midnight sun, trolls, and vikings, you are in the right place...

By Johanna Felber and Malin Klinski

Stavanger is a place of contradictions. The fourth largest city of Norway is situated on the southwestern coastline. Depending on who you ask, you will hear quite different stories about the place. Some might talk about Stavanger as being Norway’s (or even Europe’s) petroleum capital. The big-oil resources have not only helped the city of Stavanger to accumulate wealth – they are also a symbol of the nation’s global economic importance. As recently as January 2020, the Norwegian government officially opened a new giant oil field, 140 kilometers off the shore of Stavanger. It is estimated to generate a maximum turnover of US $100 billion. Norway itself obtains its energy mostly from renewable sources, especially wind- and hydropower. Stavanger’s oil and gas are mainly export goods.

The other side of Stavanger is more in line with the picturesque face of the city. Countless ships still sail towards the old port; tiny wooden houses (often white, sometimes colorful like in the “color alley”), narrow streets, the fish market, and cobblestones make up the charm of the gamle (old town). Less well known is the impressive variety of street art, which can be discovered when wandering about.

The fjords around Stavanger are passageways to many of the smaller islands situated close to the shore. The best way to experience Stavanger’s natural beauty is going outdoors and exploring the landscapes surrounding the town. Once you stand on a rocky mountain overlooking the region, you realize how tales of trolls found their way into Norwegian folk tales.

Photo by the authors.

Fun Fact: Norwegians have a lot of words to describe weather, that don’t exist in the English language. Oppholdsvær, for example, means cloudy weather without rainfall, meaning great weather to go out into nature!

On the Road

Our Stavanger adventure started in Munich. We drove up to Stavanger with Hanna’s red camping bus. It is like a little house, with a bed, a cooking stove and, most importantly in Norway, a heater. Hanna even sewed curtains to cover the windows and keep out the cold. Our journey led us to Hamburg, Aarhus, a beach on the very northern rim of Denmark, Hirtshals, and then to a small lake between Kristiansand and Stavanger, before we finally arrived on the university campus.

Malin lives in a student dormitory, just outside the main building of the University, and she was able to move in as soon as we arrived on campus. Hanna resides in a shared flat closer to the city center, from where she can cycle up the hill to the university. On a sunny day you can see quite far, right out to sea. Getting into town from the university by bike takes 30 minutes, up and down steep roads.

Beach in north Denmark

First morning in Norway, at a lake

The University

Our courses at the University of Stavanger (UiS) are all connected to the local Master’s in Energy, Environment and Society – an interdisciplinary program. The focus is mainly on environmental and energy politics from a global, comparative perspective. The entire interior design of the university is cozy and thought through. From light installations to plant pots, cushions, colourful wallpapers, fluffy carpets and artistic paintings – Norwegians know how to make spending a lot of time indoors bearable. This is quite important when you can’t leave the house for a short stroll because the wind is howling relentlessly and the rain splashing mercilessly against the windowsills. The Norwegian weather forecast’s website is called yr.no, which means something like “drizzling rain.”

The university library is more of an open, creative space. You can find rocking chairs, beanbags and hammock-pergolas. You are allowed to play games, speak loudly and bring your own food. When we first visited the library and a housemate of Malin’s waved and shouted, “What’s up?” through the hall, we winced in unison. Even though it felt a little weird in the beginning, we quickly adapted to the local habits – and brought some cinnamon buns and tea into the library while discussing the first paper we had to submit.

One of the reasons we have decided to come to Stavanger is the Greenhouse at UiS. Dolly and Finn Arne Jørgensen, two researchers in the field of environmental history, initiated this platform for sharing research, developing ideas and projects, and discussing environmental topics. A couple of professors and PhD candidates join them in the weekly Greenhouse Lunch, where current themes and activities are shared, planned, and promoted. We have also been there once and were heartily welcomed to the group. Unfortunately, the lunch is coinciding with one of our seminars, but we will join them again soon for other events, in a second installation in this miniseries, will keep you updated about what the environmentalists here are thinking and working on.

No, these pictures don’t show a fancy hipster café – it is the university library

Exploring Nature

Until now, we have tried to get outside as much as possible. Stavanger’s surroundings offer countless possibilities for experiencing nature. We both became members of the UiS friluftsliv group (outdoor sport group), which organizes all kinds of outdoor activities. Most of the hikes in the area are easily accessible by public transport, with some entailing underwater tunnel rides and ferry cruises. It is definitely worth visiting the Vigdel beach, close to Sola. We wandered on wooden planks through pliant dunes, climbed over rugged, craggy cliffs, and saw a rainbow appearing from the depths of the stormy sea. Moreover, it is an excellent spot to have a picnic and eat homemade cinnamon rolls with loads of confectioner’s sugar. Another nice tour is taking the public bus to the island of Rennesøy and wandering along the steep cliff towards the mountain range. It really is an adventure path and no matter where you go, it is impossible not to take dozens of breaks to admire the view. With the friluftsliv group we went on two different hiking trips that both ended with a bonfire. We grilled marshmallows and roasted home-made bread dough on sticks over the flames.

On another weekend trip we joined some members of the friluftsliv group on a ski tour with the Norwegian mountain club DNT in the region of Sirdal, about two hours drive from Stavanger. We didn’t really know what we signed up for, as the tour was a mixture of slalom, cross country skiing, and snowshoe hiking. The scenery was beautiful, it was an experience we wouldn’t have wanted to miss, but we still found ourselves with incredible muscle aches on Monday morning.

One of the most popular leisure activities in Norway is spending time in cabins. We slept in two different cabins on our ski trip, and learned that there are quite some things to be aware of when signing up for such overnight stays. After eight hours of tour-skiing through the snowy mountains on just the first day, we finally arrived at our cabin.

We felt like doing nothing more than falling into one of the bunk beds and closing our eyes. But two Norwegians girls still had enough motivation to take off all their skiing equipment, run down the hill, and jump into the icy water of the river running by. Malin decided to join in the experience. The water was so incredibly cold that you couldn’t even feel it anymore. It is a miracle how the body still manages to function in these temperatures.

Compared to this experience, lugging the water buckets from that same river back up to the fireplace was a rather relaxing task. After so much physical activity and fresh air we were really hungry, and nothing on earth could taste better than pasta with tomato sauce then. With a heavy woolen blanket thrown around our shoulders and the dim light of the candles (which were lighted to save electricity) the evening was made even more cozy. We played cards and told stories about our favorite hiking trips. One thing we learned from that skiing trip in Sirdal was that the further you are away from a proper road, internet connection, and running water, the more hyggelig it gets!

The word hyggelig can mean a lot of different things. It translates to pleasant, good, nice, secure, intimate, snug, and comfortable. It describes a feeling or impression – if you find yourself sitting content, tired but warm, at a fireplace after a long day, you will know what it really is about.

The way to the heart is through the stomach

Food is very expensive in Norway. This is a fact. A bowl of simple green salad costs 7 euros in the university cafeteria. The only way around this is making your own food, and being creative. The 20 people that share the kitchen in Malin’s student dormitory come from 15 different countries. Since arriving, we have cooked many different dishes from various regions of the world in this kitchen. We made huge amounts of hummus and falafel and spent hours rolling sushi. One day we prepared pizza dough and tiramisu for the entire house, with instructions from Jacopo, an Italian student from Milan. The more people share the food you cook, the more affordable it becomes.

We even joined in the International Food Festival of the university. Teams received 40 euros to buy groceries and cook traditional food from their country. The winning team receives vouchers for the cafeteria. Unfortunately, we didn’t win – competing with countries like India, Vietnam, and Mexico, we were hard challenged from the outset! In the end, the winner was South Korea. We made Semmelknödel and Scheiterhaufen – spinach and parsley dumpling with creamy mushroom sauce, and a sweet dessert made from old bread, milk, cinnamon, apples, berries and loads of sugar. We had a lot of fun and more people than we expected complimented our food.

Team Germany – not expecting to win, but still in a good mood. Hanna, David, Malin, and Kevin are posing for the team photo. David and Kevin study sport science.

Despite the often non-existent sunshine, we really enjoyed our first month in Stavanger. A lot of things are still on our bucket list for the next months, so we will surely not get bored. One of the most important things is learning Norwegian, which will hopefully give us the chance to dive deeper into the culture. We will share our experiences in snakke norsk med nordmanner and everything else that left us sometimes clueless, sometimes smiling, during our exchange in Stavanger in our next blog post.

Opplevelser I Stavanger (Adventures in Stavanger, Part 1) In this mini series you can read about the experiences of…

#culture #environment #Norway #Research #society #studying #writing

0 notes

kathleenseiber · 4 years

Text

Wiggly ‘Mini Rover’ can handle otherworldly sand traps

A new robot called the “Mini Rover” has complex locomotion techniques robust enough to help it climb hills covered with granular material, report researchers.

It may also avoid the risk of getting stuck on some remote planet or moon.

The rolling hills of Mars or the moon are a long way from the nearest tow truck. That’s why the next generation of exploration rovers will need to be good at climbing hills covered with loose material and avoiding entrapment on soft granular surfaces.

Built with wheeled appendages that can be lifted and wheels able to wiggle, the new Mini Rover could be the right robot for the job.

“This rover has enough degrees of freedom that it can get out of jams pretty effectively.”

Using a complex move the researchers dubbed “rear rotator pedaling,” it can climb a slope by using its unique design to combine paddling, walking, and wheel spinning motions. Researchers modeled the rover’s behaviors were modeled using a branch of physics known as terradynamics.

“When loose materials flow, that can create problems for robots moving across it,” says Dan Goldman, a professor in the School of Physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

“This rover has enough degrees of freedom that it can get out of jams pretty effectively. By avalanching materials from the front wheels, it creates a localized fluid hill for the back wheels that is not as steep as the real slope. The rover is always self-generating and self-organizing a good hill for itself.”

The Mini Rover moves through a bed of poppy seeds designed to model movement through granular surfaces. (Credit: Goldman lab/Georgia Tech)

A robot built by NASA’s Johnson Space Center pioneered the ability to spin its wheels, sweep the surface with those wheels, and lift each of its wheeled appendages where necessary, creating a broad range of potential motions. Using in-house 3D printers, the researchers collaborated with the Johnson Space Center to recreate those capabilities in a scaled-down vehicle with four wheeled appendages that 12 different motors drive.

“The rover was developed with a modular mechatronic architecture, commercially available components, and a minimal number of parts,” says Siddharth Shrivastava, an undergraduate student in Georgia Tech’s George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering.

“This enabled our team to use our robot as a robust laboratory tool and focus our efforts on exploring creative and interesting experiments without worrying about damaging the rover, service downtime, or hitting performance limitations.”

The rover’s broad range of movements gave the research team an opportunity to test and study many variations using granular drag force measurements and modified Resistive Force Theory.

Shrivastava and School of Physics PhD candidate Andras Karsai began with the gaits the NASA RP15 robot explored, and then were able to experiment with locomotion schemes that could not have been tested on a full-size rover.

The researchers also tested their experimental gaits on slopes designed to simulate planetary and lunar hills using a fluidized bed system known as SCATTER (Systematic Creation of Arbitrary Terrain and Testing of Exploratory Robots) that could be tilted to evaluate the role of controlling the granular substrate.

“By creating a small robot with capabilities similar to the RP15 rover, we could test the principles of locomoting with various gaits in a controlled laboratory environment,” Karsai says. “In our tests, we primarily varied the gait, the locomotion medium, and the slope the robot had to climb. We quickly iterated over many gait strategies and terrain conditions to examine the phenomena that emerged.”

In the paper, the authors describe a gait that allowed the rover to climb a steep slope with the front wheels stirring up the granular material—poppy seeds for the lab testing—and pushing them back toward the rear wheels. The rear wheels wiggled from side-to-side, lifting and spinning to create a motion that resembles paddling in water. The material pushed to the back wheels effectively changed the slope the rear wheels had to climb, allowing the rover to make steady progress up a hill that might have stopped a simple wheeled robot.

“This combination of lifting and wheeling and paddling, if used properly, provides the ability to maintain some forward progress even if it is slow.”

The experiments provided a variation on earlier robophysics work in Goldman’s group that involved moving with legs or flippers, which had emphasized disturbing the granular surfaces as little as possible to avoid getting the robot stuck.

“In our previous studies of pure legged robots, modeled on animals, we had kind of figured out that the secret was to not make a mess,” says Goldman. “If you end up making too much of a mess with most robots, you end up just paddling and digging into the granular material. If you want fast locomotion, we found that you should try to keep the material as solid as possible by tweaking the parameters of motion.”

But simple motions had proved problematic for Mars rovers, which got stuck in granular materials. Goldman says the gait discovered by Shrivastava, Karsai, and Ozkan-Aydin might be able to help future rovers avoid that fate.

“This combination of lifting and wheeling and paddling, if used properly, provides the ability to maintain some forward progress even if it is slow,” Goldman says. “Through our laboratory experiments, we have shown principles that could lead to improved robustness in planetary exploration—and even in challenging surfaces on our own planet.”

The researchers hope next to scale up the unusual gaits to larger robots, and to explore the idea of studying robots and their localized environments together.

“We’d like to think about the locomotor and its environment as a single entity,” Goldman says. “There are certainly some interesting granular and soft matter physics issues to explore.”

Though the Mini Rover was designed to study lunar and planetary exploration, the lessons learned could also be applicable to terrestrial locomotion—an area of interest to the Army Research Laboratory, one of the project’s sponsors.

“This basic research is revealing exciting new approaches for locomotion in complex terrain,” says Samuel Stanton, program manager at the Army Research Office, an element of the US Army Combat Capabilities Development Command’s Army Research Laboratory.

“This could lead to platforms capable of intelligently transitioning between wheeled and legged modes of movement to maintain high operational tempo,” he says.

The research appears in Science Robotics. The work was supported by the NASA National Robotics Initiative and the Army Research Office. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the sponsoring agencies.

Source: Georgia Tech

The post Wiggly ‘Mini Rover’ can handle otherworldly sand traps appeared first on Futurity.

Wiggly ‘Mini Rover’ can handle otherworldly sand traps published first on https://triviaqaweb.weebly.com/

0 notes

dorcasrempel · 5 years

Text

Twenty-five ways in which MIT has transformed computing

This month MIT is celebrating the launch of the new $1 billion MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing. To help commemorate the event, here’s a list of 25 ways in which MIT has already transformed the world of computing technology.

1937: Digital circuits

Master’s student Claude Shannon showed that the principles of true/false logic could be used to represent the on-off states of electric switches — a concept that served as the foundation of the field of digital circuits, and, therefore, the entire industry of digital computing itself.

1944: The digital computer

The first digital computer that could operate in real-time came out of Project Whirlwind, a initiative during World War II in which MIT worked with the U.S. Navy to develop a universal flight simulator. The device’s success led to the creation of MIT Lincoln Laboratory in 1951.

1945: Memex

Professor Vannevar Bush proposed a data system called a “Memex” that would allow a user to “store all his books, records, and communications” and retrieve them at will — a concept that inspired the early hypertext systems that led, decades later, to the World Wide Web.

1958: Functional programming

The first functional programming language was invented at MIT by Professor John McCarthy. Before LISP, programming had difficulty juggling multiple processes at once because it was “procedural” (like cooking a recipe). Functional languages let you describe required behaviors more simply, allowing work on much bigger problems than ever before.

1959: The fax

In trying to understand the words of a strongly-accented colleague over the phone, MIT student Sam Asano was frustrated that they couldn’t just draw pictures and instantly send them to each other — so he created a technology to transmit scanned material through phone lines. His fax machine was licensed to a Japanese telecom company before becoming a worldwide phenomenon.

1962: The multiplayer video game

When a PDP-1 computer arrived at MIT’s Electrical Engineering Department, a group of crafty students — including Steven “Slug” Russell from Marvin Minsky’s artificial intelligence group — went to work creating “SpaceWar!,” a space-combat video game that became very popular among early programmers and is considered the world’s first multiplayer game. (Play it here.)

1963: The password

The average person has 13 passwords — and for that you can thank MIT’s Compatible Time-Sharing System, which by most accounts established the first computer password. “We were setting up multiple terminals which were to be used by multiple persons but with each person having his own private set of files,” Professor Corby Corbato told WIRED. “Putting a password on for each individual user as a lock seemed like a very straightforward solution.”

1963: Graphical user interfaces

Nearly 50 years before the iPad, an MIT PhD student had already come up with the idea of directly interfacing with a computer screen. The “Sketchpad” developed by Ivan Sutherland PhD ’63 allowed users to draw geometric shapes with a touch-pen, pioneering the practice of “computer-assisted drafting” — which has proven vital for architects, planners, and even toddlers.

1964: Multics

MIT spearheaded the time-sharing system that inspired UNIX and laid the groundwork for many aspects of modern computing, from hierarchical file systems to buffer-overflow security. Multics furthered the idea of the computer as a “utility” to be used at any time, like water or electricity.

1969: Moon code

Margaret Hamilton led the MIT team that coded the Apollo 11 navigation system, which landed astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin ScD ’63 on the moon. The robust software overrode a command to switch the flight computer’s priority system to a radar system, and no software bugs were found on any crewed Apollo missions.

1971: Email

The first email to ever travel across a computer network was sent to two computers that were right next to each other — and it came from MIT alumnus Ray Tomlinson ’65 when he was working at spinoff BBN Technologies. (He’s the one you can credit, or blame, for the @ symbol.)

1973: The PC

MIT Professor Butler Lampson founded Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), where his work earned him the title of “father of the modern PC.” The Xerox Alto platform was used to create the first graphical user interface (GUI), the first bitmapped display, and the first “What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get” (WYSIWYG) editor.

1977: Data encryption

E-commerce was first made possible by the MIT team behind the RSA algorithm, a method of data encryption based on the concept of how difficult it is to factor huge prime numbers. Who knew that math would be why you can get your last-minute holiday shopping done?

1979: The spreadsheet

In 1979, Bob Frankston ’70 and Dan Brickson ’73 worked late into the night on an MIT mainframe to create VisiCalc, the first electronic spreadsheet, which sold more than 100,000 copies in its first year. Three years later, Microsoft got into the game with “Multiplan,” a program that later became Excel.

1980: Ethernet

Before there was Wi-Fi, there was Ethernet — the networking technology that lets you get online with a simple cable plug-in. Co-invented by MIT alumnus Bob Metcalfe ’69, who was part of MIT’s Project MAC team and later went on to found 3Com, Ethernet helped make the Internet the fast, convenient platform that it is today.

1980: The optical mouse

Undergrad Steve Kirsch ’80 was the first to patent an optical computer mouse — he had wanted to make a “pointing device” with a minimum of precision moving parts — and went on to found Mouse Systems Corp. (He also patented the method of tracking online ad impressions through click-counting.)

1983: The growth of freeware

Early AI Lab programmer Richard Stallman was a major pioneer in hacker culture and the free-software movement through his GNU Project, which set out to develop a free alternative to the Unix OS, and laid the groundwork for Linux and other important computing innovations.

1985: Spanning tree algorithm

Radia Perlman ’73, SM ’76, PhD ’88 hates when people call her “the mother of the Internet,” but her work developing the Spanning Tree Protocol was vital for being able to route data across global computer networks. (She also created LOGO, the first programming language geared toward children.)

1994: The World Wide Web consortium (W3C)

After inventing the web, Tim Berners-Lee joined MIT and launched a consortium devoted to setting global standards for building websites, browsers, and devices. Among other things, W3C standards ensure that sites are accessible, secure, and easily “crawled” for SEO.

1999: The birth of blockchain

MIT Institute Professor Barbara Liskov’s paper on Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance helped kickstart the field of blockchain, a widely used cryptography system. Her team’s protocol could handle high-transaction throughputs and used concepts that are vital for many of today’s blockchain platforms.

2002: Roomba

While we don’t yet have robots running errands for us, we do have robo-vacuums — and for that, we can thank MIT spinoff iRobot. The company has sold more than 20 million of its Roombas and spawned an entire industry of automated cleaning products.

2007: The mobile personal assistant

Before Siri and Alexa, there was MIT Professor Boris Katz’s StartMobile, an app that allowed users to schedule appointments, get information, and do other tasks using natural language.

2012: EdX

Led by former CSAIL director Anant Agarwal, MIT’s not-for-profit online platform with Harvard University offers free courses that have drawn more than 18 million learners around the globe, all while being open-source and nonprofit.

2013: Boston Dynamics

Professor Marc Raibert’s spinoff Boston Dynamics builds bots like “Big Dog” and “Spot Mini” that can climb, run, jump and even do back-flips. Their humanoid robot Atlas was used in the DARPA Robotics Challenge aimed at developing robots for disaster relief sites.

2016: Robots you can swallow

CSAIL Director Daniela Rus’ ingestible origami robot can unfold itself from a swallowed capsule. Using an external magnetic field, it could one day crawl across your stomach wall to remove swallowed batteries or patch wounds.

Twenty-five ways in which MIT has transformed computing syndicated from https://osmowaterfilters.blogspot.com/

0 notes

stefanroeschfinalproject-blog · 6 years

Text

Project Ideation submitted

Submitted the my project ideation on Monday. I don’t think i’m 100% solid my Initial idea yet though. It seems very ‘conceptual’, and i’m not really sure how i’d go about doing it... Either way, there’s still some time to try and come up with solid foundations so I guess we shall see.

Also, I hope it doesn’t come across as pretentious? I sometimes feel I can get a bit lofty when I express topics i’m passionate about. xD

Anyway, here is the full document:

Stefan Roesch Project Ideation

Contexts

1. Research Project As I intend to do a PhD, I am mainly focused on improving my ability to do good research

2. Using games to articulate some problem I love games and would love to use them in some way to solve real word problems. I believe that they have a unique ability to not only provide entertainment, but articulate concepts, both intuitively and with great depth.

3. Interactive simulation of some problem to explore outcomes I want to not only define problems in an intuitive way, but use the fact that games can be very personal, in respect to user input, to understand how personal bias can affect an output.

4. Exploring a technical intricacy While I understand that using games can be a good way to tap into an individual’s personal or social experiences. I would be interested in exploring this application with technical problems e.g. how one’s educational background can affect methods used to solve specific problems

5. Accessible Interfaces

Techniques

1. Machine Learning (Keras/Tensorflow or MATLAB)

2. Reinforcement Learning

3. Simulation

4. Using Vulkan or some other graphics API

5. Artificial Intelligence

Inspirations

Deepmind’s Alpha Projects: In these projects, Google’s Deepmind use Reinforcement Learning to train a model to play both board games (Chess, Go) and some Atari 2600 games to a superhuman level. This is relevant to my choices as the technologies they use are machine learning based, and they are used to try and solve a problem, namely; intelligence.

Mini Metro: Mini Metro is a game where the aim, essentially, is to manage a tube system. The player does this through manipulating a tube map style interface. The main inspiration this game gave me was it’s simple art design, that is also very intuitive and familiar (at least to a Londoner)

Python: Python is a programming language that is easy to use for people who aren’t computer scientists. I add this as an inspiration because it is tool that is used to do sophisticated computations, but the user is not necessarily highly literate in the intricacies of computing. E.g. Keras. Keras is a high level deep learning library, and it is very usable without a large amount of prior knowledge in the intricacies of machine learning; it can be used as a first step in the field.

Initial Ideas:

1. A research project using some form of Machine Learning to create an interactive simulation of real data to articulate some problem and to extract and process a users solution to it. This solution would be based on the users interactions made with the simulation and would highlight certain biases as to why the user took specific steps to solve the problem. The main interest is to provide insight into why people make the decisions they make given their situation.

2. A Machine Learning model that would learn to play a specific game to a superhuman or near superhuman level. Providing strategies and play styles that a human might never come up with. This harks back to research done by the company Deepmind to create similar AI’s that play games better than humans. The point of interest here however would be to learn new ways of playing a game to a high level without this human bias, instead of “Solving Intelligence”.

3. A “god game” that uses machine learning to teach NPCs certain instincts and have them learn and react to the player’s inputs in an interesting way. E.g. the AI is told that it needs to eat to survive, the player rewards the AI for doing some arbitrary task, the AI learns that through doing that task, they are rewarded with what they need to survive and thus starts to not only repeat that task, but maybe come up with interesting ways of performing that task with less effort.

#machine learning #goldsmiths #games programming #projectideation #coursework #3rd year #finalproject

0 notes

flauntpage · 6 years

Text

Running Thread: 2018 Business of Sports Panel

Kyle is doing a panel this morning as part of the Philadelphia Business Journal’s “Business of Sports” conference in Center City. There are actually four total panels and his goes off last, so I figured I’d come down here for the other panels and put together a running thread with some of the more interesting notes from the event.

It started at 7:45 a.m. with a “teams” panel featuring the following folks:

Philadelphia Eagles: Don Smolenski, President Philadelphia 76ers: Lara Price, COO Philadelphia Flyers: Shawn Tilger, COO Philadelphia Phillies: Dave Buck, Executive Vice President Philadelphia Union: Tim McDermott, Chief Business Officer

Notes:

One of the first things that jumped out was a question to Buck, who was asked why Phillies attendance seems to be down. We are, after all, talking about a first place club that just took 2 of 3 games from the Dodgers. Buck explained that season ticket numbers are not what they used to be, currently around 9,500 STH vs. numbers that eclipsed 20,000 during the height of the Chase Utley and Ryan Howard era.

Ticket prices were another topic. Buck pointed out that the Phillies added fun activities for fans with the renovation of the ballpark, things that might not make much money, if any, such as the new climbing wall and mini baseball field. But he pointed out that those intiaitives help the overall gameday experience and give things fans to do. Buck also added that even though the best seats in the house might be expensive, you can still get that $15 to $17 dollar ticket in the upper levels that isn’t going to break the bank. He also mentioned adding a beer garden in a future renovation.

McDermott, who is Sean McDermott’s brother, has put a lot of time and effort into the Union’s ticketing department in recent years, adding numerous staff. He also talked about the purchase of Chester land that comprises a mile of waterfront property for future development. Previously, there had been a lot of issues with private lot managers who owned different chunks of land along route 291. The process of acquiring a single tract of land is moving forward slowly down there.

Tilger was asked specifically about the Wings NLL expansion franchise, and talked about the unique ability to start from scratch with a new team. He projects season ticket holders to number 4,500 by the end of the summer and mentioned that the team has brought in two founding sponsorship partners on three year deals that crest one million dollars each. He also spoke about the ability to analyze “pain points” other teams are currently dealing with – Flyers included – and strategize around that.

The final question was this – what would you change about your sport?

Buck – stop messing with it, not a fan of baseball’s designated hitter rule

Price – relax rules that determine how NBA teams can work internationally (I believe the league office controls this from the top down)

Smolenski – non-answer about continuing to evolve the game

McDermott – competitive balance, stadiums that hold 65,000 fans (Atlanta), others that hold 20,000 fans (Union), that creates economic imbalance, which gives high-end teams the ability to spend more on elite players

Tilger – no answer

Panel 2: eSports

John Fazio, CEO of N3rd Street Gamers Mike Prindiville, CEO of Team Dignitas Anthony Pizzo, PhD Candidate at Temple’s Fox School of Business

Notes:

The panel started out with a shout for your team, your town, your Philadelphia Fusion, which does not live or play in Philadelphia.

Anyway, the first topic was a discussion on how eSports has a lot of crossover opportunities. The Sixers (HBSE), for example, own Team Dignitas. The Flyers (Comcast) own the Fusion. So both of these entities exist under an umbrella corporation that comes with existing tools and resources and connections for business and marketing purposes. That’s different from, say, the Union, who are independently owned by a New York businessman with a small group of local investors.

Fazio and Prindiville both spoke of the city’s tech scene and sports fandom as the blend that created a natural interest in eSports. Prindiville said his players train from 8 to 15 hours per day, equating the amount of dedication and time they put into their craft to anything a professional basketball or football player would do. He also spoke about the opportunity provided by the release of new games, which creates a natural evolution for the sport. Whereas football has pretty much been the same sport for a long time, featuring minor rule tweaks each year, a gamer might go from playing Call of Duty to Overwatch to League of Legends, which features new characters, new abilities, and new mechanics. So the learning curve and necessity to adapt is much different in eSports than what traditional athletes and coaches go through.

They also spoke about the importance of the new Overwatch deal with ESPN and Disney. The Fusion will be on ESPN tomorrow night at 7 p.m. for game one of the league final:

The group also touched on the commercialization of the still-nascent sport, which really is just jumping into the waters of sponsorship and marketing. Coca Cola, Comcast, Red Bull, Mountain Dew, and Audi all put money into eSports. Team Dignitas has a partnership with Buffalo Wild Wings. eSports revenues are expected to crest $1.5 billion by 2020.

Panel 3: The Sponsors

Paul Muller,President of Toyota-Tri State Dealers Association Justin Samra, Director of Marketing at the Rothman Institute Paula Sunshine,Senior Vice President & Chief Marketing Office at Independence Health Group David O’Malley, President & Chief Operating Officer of Penn Mutual

Notes:

This isn’t my area of expertise, so I’ll try to keep it simple.

Sunshine explained how sports teams are ideal partners because fans are loyal, passionate, informed, and engaged. When they’re “in,” they’re 100% in, so from a strategy standpoint, it makes a lot of sense to build relationships with those types of people.

Muller spoke about how sponsors used to just buy a radio or TV spot, and that was pretty much it. Now, social media and non-sports areas at stadiums and arenas can be used specifically for sponsorship opportunities. He specifically mentioned Talen’s “Toyota Plaza,” which is an area just outside of the stadium featuring kids’ activities and food trucks and tables. Clients can bring their children to play soccer or throw a football before the game, and there are also all sorts of previously non-traditional branding opportunities available. For instance, “Toyota” is scrawled in huge letters on an inflatable “bounce house” type of thing that actually serves as a barricade for a mini soccer field. That wasn’t the case back in the day.

Muller also spoke about how the evolution of broadcasting aids sponsors. Years ago, you maybe had 3-4 cameras shooting one game. Not anymore, so Toyota also has a deal that puts their name on the Phillies bullpen. Muller pointed to how filming of the game has changed to the point where the bullpen gets a lot of television time, which gets more eyeballs on the brand. There are different avenues to explore based on studies of consumer habits and the evolution of media. He also added that one third of his budget is now allocated to digital advertising, up from 0% in 2003.

O’Malley pointed out Penn Mutual’s involvement with rugby, explaining that he feels like the brand can grow along with the sport. In that regard, Sunshine added that she’s paying close attention to the eSports movement. Samra mentioned that he hired a former Flyers employee to specifically monitor their sports activities and make sure those sponsorships and campaigns were being executed fully and properly. It’s one thing to dump a bunch of money into something, but the other half of it is making sure you’re getting the appropriate amount of engagement in return, be it web page impressions, sales, phone calls, appointments, etc.

Samra also pointed out the fleeting nature of the sports business as presenting a challenge for sponsors. He told a story about a marketing plan that used Jeremiah Trotter as a featured personality, then they had to scramble and back track because Trotter left the Eagles a short time later. That’s not usually a problem when creating a non-sports campaign.

Panel 4: Sports Media

Spike Eskin, Program Director for Sports Radio 94 WIP Brian Monihan, President of NBC Sports Philadelphia Kyle Scott, Founder & Editor of the website you’re currently reading Donald Hunt, Sportswriter at Philadelphia Tribune

Notes:

Spike says the Sixers are gonna win 48 games next year, which I think is low. I’ll say 53. But we’ll save those predictions for September.

RE: content and the news cycle, the entire panel agreed that success might not even the most important thing to determine what people are reading or talking about. Sure, the Eagles got most of the buzz last year as a Super Bowl winner, but Spike and Kyle both highlighted the Sixers getting a ton of attention during the Process era, simply for the fact that the team was doing something different and unique. So even though they were losing game-after-game, wins and losses weren’t the only determination of what was most interesting. Storylines still trump all.

As for labor and layoffs, moderator Jeff Blumenthal brought up the recent trim at the New York Daily News, which cut its staff from 35 sports people to 9. Hunt feels like the newspaper still does have a future in sports media, but spoke of the need to stay ahead of the curve in a changing world. Monihan says that the bottom line comes down to Philly always being a great sports town, which is enough to justify two newspapers and two radio stations and a robust market in general. Kyle feels like solid content can succeed on any platform. For instance, long-form investigations previously done by newspapers back in the day can be published now online in a digital format as well. The entire industry is merging into a sort of amalgam where the line becomes blurred between TV, radio, web, and print.

“Everybody looks for ways to be relevant on multiple platforms,” Monihan explains. “You’re always trying to help your employees grow in as many ways as possible, and they also have to embrace that change.”

Spike says it’s not necessarily an old talent vs. young talent thing for managers to consider, pointing out the mix of veterans and relative newcomers on WIP’s airwaves (for every Howard Eskin or Angelo Cataldi, there’s a Joe Giglio or Jon Marks). He explained that there are plenty of young people who have no clue what they’re doing, which is absolutely true.

Kyle also touched on the smaller windows that we now work with in the business, i.e., once Woj tweets something, that news is probably consumed and spit back out in 25 minutes. It then becomes old news. Everyone has it. But we have the opportunity to maybe write that story (Report: blah blah blah), in a different way than someone else. Hunt also adds that it’s important to have the “what next” angle ready to go, which I think we try to do at CB. For instance, we did a look at the Sixers’ depth chart after the trade that brought in Mike Muscala and shipped off Justin Anderson and Timothe Luwawu-Cabarrot. If the Eagles add Mike Wallace, do a follow-up story on how he performed in Baltimore before coming to Philly. Use video clips and stuff.

Spike also spoke about the discrepancy in podcasting metrics and how different people use different numbers to justify performance in regard to sponsorship. The number of listeners doesn’t matter if people turn off the podcast halfway through and decide not to buy the sponsor’s product. In that instance, there’s no difference between 10,000 and 75,000 listeners, since there’s no activation or engagement. That’s a general thought that Kyle and Monihan both agree with. Hunt points out that he enjoys the “shelf life” of podcasts, which are easy to archive and come back to. You can listen on your own time and don’t have to be on a fixed schedule.

And no, there weren’t any arguments or uncomfortable moments. The whole thing was civil.

Time’s yours.

The post Running Thread: 2018 Business of Sports Panel appeared first on Crossing Broad.

Running Thread: 2018 Business of Sports Panel published first on https://footballhighlightseurope.tumblr.com/

0 notes

vrheadsets · 6 years

Text

Can VR Make You Smarter? The VR Games Designed to Educate

Virtual reality (VR) is a great place to while away a few hours in some fantastical universe, go on an adventure, shoot some bad guys, or just relax in some tranquil surroundings. The technology isn’t just for entertainment purposes though as it can be used as an educational tool if you want to get that grey matter fired up. So VRFocus has decided to compile a list of edutainment titles available today that are worth a look.

Number Hunt

Perfectly falling into this category is Number Hunt, a mathematical videogame which was recently launched on Steam Early Access by two-person indie team PaleBlue XYZ. The premise is very simple, all you have to do is shoot numbers wandering around a level. The difficulty comes by the fact that you’re given five specific numbers to achieve on each round, and a gun that can Add, Multiply, Subtract and Divide.

The numbers wandering around range from one to nine, while the target numbers can go all the way up to 900. So you have to use some arithmetic skills to shoot the right numbers and hit those targets as quickly as possible. Plus there’s a time limit so there’s no hanging around.

Featuring both single-player and multiplayer modes Number Hunt is still early in development but showcases one of the best ideas for combining mathematics and fun gameplay.

HoloLAB Champions

The latest VR title from Schell Games (I Expect You to Die), HoloLAB Champions isn’t actually out just yet as its due to be released on 10th July for HTC Vive. VRFocus decide to include the videogame as it was so close to launch and accurately fitted the edutainment profile.

Created with support from the Institute of Education Science, HoloLAB Champions is focused on teaching chemistry via way of a game show layout. The single-player experience has each person interact with equipment and materials that they’d find in an actual lab, challenging them to scoop, pour, and burn their way through several mini-labs before the final lab challenge.

Whether you’re already learning Chemistry or just want to know more about the subject, HoloLAB Champions offers a fun approach to the subject.

VRobot: Robotics in VR

Another Steam Early Access title, VRobot: Robotics in VR is a far more technological offering than the last two, providing a virtual engineering workspace with all the tools and educational materials needed to build your own mechanised being.

Inspired by the work of past projects helping children engage with STEM subjects developer VRobot decided to create a practical and informative experience to teach anyone across the world about robotic design, without the usual expense.

You’re not going to create a T-800 just quite yet with the software currently offering a basic design to learn about LEGO EV3 Mindstorms. You’ll learn not only how to build it but also the programming side as well. Then in future iterations of VRobot: Robotics in VR more robots will be added.

Brush Up VR

One for the younger VR players among you, Brush Up VR is a humorous take on teaching children how to better brush their teeth.

Developed by GamesThatWork, Brush Up VR teams the player up with a friendly blue robot named Budd. Armed with a giant toothbrush, the player must brush all the green gunk from Budd’s teeth within the time limit. Failure to do so will be bad for your little blue buddy.

Titanic VR

Created by Immersive VR Education – the team behind Apollo 11 VR – Titanic VR takes you beneath the waves to learn about one of the most famous maritime disasters of the 20th Century.

The educational experience is set in the near future, but explores a more-intact 1985 model of the wreck. Players take on the role of Dr. Ethan Lynch, Associate Professor of Maritime Archaeology at the fictional University of Nova Scotia. With funding from a mysterious investor, Dr. Lynch and his PhD Candidate Jean Robinson have set out aboard a research vessel to dive the wreck and answer questions that have remained submerged for a century.

The Steam Early Access version features seven dive missions and seven lab missions, with additional content to be added over the course of the next 6 to eight months.

Star Chart

One of the earliest educational apps for devices like HTC Vive and Oculus Rift, Star Chart is a VR planetarium where you can look up at the night sky and through the solar system to see a real-time simulation. Explore all 88 constellations as well as out nearest planets, from the smallest moons of Saturn to the coldest, darkest, farthest reaches of Pluto.

Google Earth VR

For those interested in a more terrestrial journey then there’s always Google Earth VR. Launched for free in 2016 for HTC Vive, the app then came to Oculus Rift the following year. Allowing you to explore virtually anywhere on Earth, from the driest deserts to the busiest cities, the most recent update to the app also introduced Street View, so you can get an even better look at the world around you.

Discovery VR

The Discovery Channel doing what its does best, just this time in 360-degrees. A one stop shop for the channels many immersive productions, the app originally launched in 2015 with nine short experiences. Since then the content has expanded dramatically, showcasing films from shark-infested shipwrecks to freeboarding the windiest street in the world.

3D Organon VR Anatomy

Designed as a fully-featured VR anatomy atlas, 3D Organon VR Anatomy enables users to learn about the human body, with full 3D male and female body models and systems including: Skeletal, Connective, Muscular, Arterial, Venous, Nervous, Lymphatic, Heart, Respiratory, Digestive, Endocrine, Urinary, Reproductive, Sensory organs, and Integumentary (skin).

Supporting both HTC Vive and Oculus Rift 3D Organon VR Anatomy is one of those apps designed for users who want better sense at what makes the body tick.

Operation Apex

Time to head below the ocean waves again just this time for very different reasons. Operation Apex teaches players all about the underwater eco-system while on the hunt for a Great White shark. They play a marine scientist looking for the largest Great White ever known but in the process need to scan the local aquatic life to build up data and a better understanding of what’s being hunted.

from VRFocus https://ift.tt/2KCBlBO

#VRFocus #vr #virtual reality #canada

0 notes

awesomeselvi-blog1 · 6 years

Link

1Crore Project Offers Best Mini Project Centers in Chennai. Matlab is a high-performance language for technical computing. It integrates computation, visualization, and programming in an clean-to-use environment in which problems and solutions are expressed in acquainted mathematical notation.matlab is an interactive device whose simple statistics element is an array that does not require dimensioning. We are providing best Matlab Mini Project centers in Chennai for Electrical and Electronics Students.It also provides Java, Dotnet, Matlab, Embedded , Vlsi and Php, Android projects for all BE, BTech, ME, MTech, BSC, MSC, BCA, MCA students.

Matlab permits you to clear up many technical computing problems, specially people with matrix and vector formulations, in a fragment of the time it would take to put in writing a Software in a scalar non interactive language such as c or fortran.

We are providing also Java, Dotnet, Raspberry Pi, IOT, Networking and Research Projects developed in BE, BTech, ME, MTech MCA, MSC, BSC, BCA, PhD and MS Students at Chennai.

For more- VENUE ADDRESS: M/S 1 Crore Project Center, Door No. 68 & 70, Ground Floor, No. 174, Raahat Plaza, (Opp. to Vijaya Hospital) Vadapalani, Chennai-600 026.

#Matlab #Mini Project #Project centers in chennai

0 notes

myyearofgivingdaily · 7 years

Text

A House. A Home.

Today’s donation: Alexandria House

“We need each other more than ever.”

That may seem a trite cliché. Not when said by Judy Vaughan. When she speaks those words, it’s a mission statement, a firmly held, fiercely fought-for philosophy, manifest in a lifetime of social activism, and for the last two decades embodied in the fine bones of a Craftsman house in mid-city Los Angeles. And even more so in the people it holds and who keep it going.

Vaughan is a founder and executive director of Alexandria House, which provides transitional housing shelter for women and children coming from homeless or abusive situations, as well as other support services. In conversation she is easy-going, but firm in her belief in and dedication to that simple concept.

“We got started by a bunch of activists,” she says. “Thirteen of us gathered on May 30, 1996, because we really believed all of our actions for justice need to be grounded in reality and to hear the voices of those who are most in need of help. I had invited people to come one night only, see the house, talk about the ways we wanted to run it, and some of them are still on the board. Our mission is to have families and single women move from here to permanent housing. That’s the bare bones of it.”

Those bones are hardly bare now. A full 92% of the women coming through Alexandria House in its 21 years have achieved the mission’s goal. 92%! That’s impressive by any standard, and far from platitudinous. That is dedication made real.

“What really contributes to that statistic is that folks know they can count on support,” she says, citing a variety of follow-up services provided. “People say, ‘Don’t you want them to go on and be independent?’ I don’t know. That’s not how this works. We are all interdependent. My family was very supportive. I know where I can go if I need help. For a lot of folks that’s not reality. It’s give and take. Alexandria House helps a lot of people, and the folks we have helped help us. That kind of interdependence would make the world a better place.”

Again, nice words, but reflected in real success. as shown in a recent mini-documentary focusing on one of the women who has been living there:

youtube

“We have had about 200 families through our program since we opened,” Vaughan says — not a big amount in the scale of need, but strong for a small, neighborhood program. “We are in touch with a little more than half of the women and their families. Some are on staff here. Probably about one-third of our staff is past residents. They get it from the inside out.

“They also have their own support group, the Soul Sisters Network, which meets every first Saturday of the month. They share resources and support. Some have become donors.”

That, she says, is crucial, as about 85% of the people there have come from the streets or from violent and abusive situations. Some have been trafficked.

“We really believe what studies show, that women stay out of being homeless again if they have a strong support group. So we really partner with the women while they’re here and continue that when they leave. It’s really about building a community.”

And that, too, is not mere words, as Alexandria House is more than just a place to stay, with a reach beyond its walls into the surrounding community.

“We have a service-enriched program — childcare on site, School On Wheels providing tutoring. A lot are trying to get GEDs, so we can help with tutoring for that. We have people who can come mentor one-on-one for help finding jobs. We have financial planning help, help with developing parenting skills, legal skills, a ‘know your rights’ workshop. And it’s not only a shelter, but a neighborhood center. There’s an after-school program for kids in the neighborhood. We have the greatest thrift sale every second Saturday. That supports and demonstrates that caring relationships are possible. And we had 10 first-languages represented here one year. Folks find a way to overcome negative stereotypes, but find the what the commonalities are.”

Vaughan readily acknowledges that she does not share the kind of experience that brings women and families to Alexandria House.

“I am blessed,” she says, another phrase that often seems a rote, reflexive tic, but given life by her.

She tells of her19-year-old daughter calling from college recently to say that a check hadn’t arrived and she needed to pay registration fees, with Vaughan not having to think twice about helping her cover the costs. She tells of growing up in Hancock Park, a third-generation Angeleno. She tells of teaching grade school and then at Mount Saint Mary’s College. She tells of later pursuing a PhD in religious studies with social ethics at the University of Chicago, the only woman among the 40 students in that program.

Almost casually, offhandedly, she mentions that she is a Catholic nun — “Sister Judy” is what many call her, but she shrugs that off, preferring a simple “Judy.” Given that, her having a daughter “boggles a lot of peoples’ minds, but she came into my life when she was four days old.” A great blessing, and while there are some conflicts and complications with being a nun, that is not one of them.

“I’m not always in good standing, because I have a lot of problems with the institutional Church and it’s teachings,” she says.

It was, though, a tragedy involving other nuns that set her on her path of service for social justice. In 1980, four outspoken, activist nuns in El Salvador were murdered by forces of the nation’s then-dictatorship.

“I was deeply moved by the murder of four church women in El Salvador back in 1980,” she says. “The anniversary of that is Dec. 2. I ended up resigning from the college [Mount Saint Mary’s] and working at House of Roth in East L.A., and from there went on the incredibly blessed journey that let me to here in ’96, and I’ve have been here since.”

You get the sense that she thinks of herself as having benefited from this as much as any resident.

“I’m a short-time work person. All my past jobs have been five-or-so years, and you move on. But I found this place compelling. Shows me how I need to lead my life.”

Nothing trite or clichéd here.

- Steve Hochman

About this blog:  Causes and Effect: My Year of Giving Daily, was started in 2013 by entertainment and culture journalist Melinda Newman, who made daily donations to a wide variety of non-profits and wrote about her experience. USA Today music writer, Brian Mansfield took on this monumental task in 2014. Since then, various writers have taken turns with stints, as the effort comes to a close at the end of 2017.

About Steve Hochman: Steve has covered popular, and unpopular, music for more than 32 years, most of that time as a key member of the Los Angeles Times’ music team. He is currently music critic for Pasadena station KPCC’s morning magazine “Take Two” and a regular contributor to BuzzBandsLA and to his own Make Mine Baconwrapped blog. He hosts interview-and-performance sessions at the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles and at New Orleans’ annual Jazz and Heritage Festival. His byline has appeared in an array of major publications, including Rolling Stone, Billboard and Entertainment Weekly and New Orleans’ Offbeat and he’s written liner notes for a range of projects, from an elaborate book in Disney’s award-winning box set of music from the Howard Ashman-Alan Menken animated musicals to reissues of Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s first four albums. He’s thrilled to be sharing this month’s C&E with Geoff Mayfield.

#alexandria house #judy vaughan #women's shelter

0 notes