#these are of varying degrees of old some r last year some r done earlier this month | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

lemonadeandlanguages · 8 years

Text

Quebec Education System

(This is going to be long, bear with me)

Canada’s education system is for the most part really similar to the States’. But, since education is a provincial thing, some provinces *ahem*QUEBEC*ahem* have a very different system. So I’ll try to explain it briefly:

The school year usually goes from mid- to late-August and ends towards the end of June. The date varies, but all schools are out before June 24, which is the Fête Nationale (kinda like Quebec Day, if you will). It’s mandatory between the ages of 6 and 16.

BEFORE ELEMENTARY

School isn’t mandatory before Grade 1 but students can attend prematernelle (Pre-Kindergarten) if they turn 4 years old before September 30. Sometimes it is offered in an actually primary school, or in a daycare. If it is offered in an actual school, the pre-K students have to have their own separate building instead of sharing with the rest of the elementary students.

Maternelle (Kindergarten) is also not mandatory, but the majority (98%) of parents send their kids to Kindergarten anyways. Usually, it’s in the same school the kids will be attending for elementary. To be able to go to Kindergarten, the kid has to be 5 years old by September 30.

ELEMENTARY

Also known as primary school, it goes from Grade 1 to 6. Towards the end of primary (in grade 4 and 6), students have to pass ministry exams for French, English and Math. Grades in primary school are usually marked in percentages.

HIGH SCHOOL

High school is commonly known in French as le secondaire (Secondary school). Unlike in the States and the rest of Canada, high school lasts for five years, from Sec. 1 to 5 (grades 7 to 11). There are no middle schools in the province, and students typically attend the same school for five years. Some high schools offer IB programs and AP classes, but not all. In the last two years of high school, students present ministry exams for History, Science, and Math (Sec. 4), and English and French (Sec. 5). The result of these tests, along with part of the grades of those two years are used to determine whether or not they get accepted into cegep. Grades in high school are usually marked in percentages.

CEGEP

Cegep is Quebec’s own little invention that is a pain in the ass if you want to study outside the province. The name was originally an acronym for Collège d'enseignement général et professionnel (General and professional teaching schools, is the closest English translation), but it has since then become a word of its own. Cegeps are all public, although there are some private schools that serve the same function, and were implemented in the late 1960s.

It can last two or three years, and it basically prepares students for university. There are two types of cegep paths: pre-university, which is two years, or career programs, which are three. Students can choose what they want to study, with the most common programs being social science, science, and communications. As the names suggest, pre-university programs are designed for students wishing to continue their studies in university, while career programs usually don’t require further studies. In some cases, however, students in career programs can continue on to university if they wish to do so. Aside from program-related courses, students need to take common classes: English, French, Phys Ed., Humanities, and a complimentary class (basically a class outside your program, for example, a physics class is you’re studying social science).

Cegep has a grading system similar to a GPA called the R score (or Cote R in French), but with a scale going from 0 to 50. However, most students get a score between 15 and 38. Just to give an idea of the value of the numbers, students need at least at 35 R score to get into medicine and law. The R score can’t be calculated by any one individual, as it requires information that isn’t available to everyone: a student’s grades, the class average, standard deviation, as well as past grades from high school, etc. It is calculated by the Ministry of Education, and is the subject of many complaints by people who do not find it is a fair way to evaluate students.

UNIVERSITY

Like high school, university in Quebec is shorter than in other parts of Canada and the States. In fact, most people can complete their bachelor’s degree in three years. Students from other provinces and countries, however, have four years of university, as they did not go to cegep. If a Quebec student wishes to go study in another province, they can choose to do one year of cegep to make up for their lack of Grade 12, and then do four years of university, or they can complete their cegep studies and do three years, as their cegep courses are usually equivalent to introduction courses in other universities.

Admission to university is very often ONLY based on a student’s R score. Unlike in the States, where the application process can be very long, in Quebec, applying to a university can be done in an evening (no joke, I applied to three in about three hours). Few programs, such as law and medicine, require letters of intent and recommendations from teachers. More artistic programs may require a portfolio. Most of the time, all the university requires is a transcript of the student’s grade, which is provided by the cegep. The deadline for applications is almost always March 1, but students that apply earlier can receive their acceptance letter before that date.

McGill University is without a doubt the most famous one in the province, however, Quebec boasts a wide variety of universities. In fact, just this year, Montreal (the biggest city of the province) has been named the best student city in the world. It has six universities, the highest in North America, and two of the three English universities are located there.

LANGUAGE

Since the 1970s, Quebec has a law regulating the language of education. It’s officially known as the Charter of the French Language, but everyone calls it Bill 101 (Loi 101). In fact, Bill 101 regulates the use of the French language in all aspects, not just education, but we’ll focus on the part that concerns education for now. This law only applies to permanent residents and citizens and it states that everyone must attend French school UNLESS:

Their mother or father has completed the majority of their studies in Canada in English;

The student has completed the majority of their studies in English in another Canadian province.

The main reason for this law is that, prior to the 1970s, many immigrants would choose to send their children to English schools instead of French ones because they thought it was more convenient to learn English than French. However, the government did not like that, and after several attempts at restricting people’s ability to choose, they announced that the only official language of the province was French and instated the Bill 101.

However, it is worth noting that this law only applies to primary and secondary education. Students can choose to study in either English or French in cegep and university. In 2013, there were attempts to extend the law until cegep, but it fortunately never passed.

Aside from Bill 101, learning a second language is mandatory in elementary and high school. In French schools, the second language is English, and vice versa. Previously, English was taught starting in Grade 3, but, if I’m not mistaken, it now starts in Grade 1. Some schools offer different levels of English classes for students that may have a higher level than others. For example, some students from Francophone families will not speak a word of English before attending elementary, and therefore are placed in the lowest level, while other students, such as Anglophones and some immigrants might already speak it at home and will be placed in a higher level. In English schools, French is taught much more intensively, and it is common for students to study several subjects in French. As a results, Anglophone children are among the most bilingual in the province. The teaching of a second language is mandatory until the end of cegep.

Curiously, many parents with the possibility to send their children to English schools do not, as they believe that their children will be more proficient in both languages if they study one at school and practice the other at home. This however, has led to some English schools closing their doors due to a lack of students.

RELIGION

Until fairly recently, many schools taught religion as a class. Usually, this meant that Catholic students would have a class about religion, while the rest of the students had an ethics class. This was changed in 2008, when the ministry implemented ERC classes (Ethical and Religious Cultures) in primary and secondary schools. However, some religious schools remain, all of the private.

NOTE: I know the proper term for the schools are francophone schools (not French) and anglophone schools (not English). However, it’s easier to read this way, so I left it like that.

Please let me know if I missed something! :)

#i tried to stay neutral the whole time #lnl #quebec #school #education #quebec education system

139 notes · View notes

adambstingus · 6 years

Text

Pot Industry Deals With Ultimate Buzzkill: Self Regulation

The rules have to come from somewhere. For some cannabis industry leaders, they’d rather be the ones to set the rules and regulations for their businesses.

It’s a double-edged sword when they say they just want to be treated like any other legitimate industry.

Equal treatment could of course be good for legal weed, especially if businesses were taxed at typical rates instead of double or even triple those rates, as mandated by IRS tax section 280E. But if federal regulators were to reschedule marijuana and treat medical cannabis products similar to pharmaceutical or agricultural products it would, as I wrote last year, add “costly and timely steps to the pot-selling process that some say could bankrupt most of these businesses.”

As Rolling Stone explained further: “If the federal government determines that medical marijuana must be subjected to FDA approval, companies would have to enter a process that can take years to complete and cost more than $1 billion per product. Few, if any, cannabis companies in the U.S. have the resources for that, which might open the door for Big Pharma to muscle in and take over the business.”

The current rules for any modern cannabis business can be found in the all-important regulations, from the federal government’s IRS Tax Code and Controlled Substances Act to the many state and territory regulations that direct more than 30 U.S. markets, from Hawaii to Guam.

Not all industries are subject to federal regulators. Films, for example, are mostly self-regulated by the Motion Picture Association of America, which rates films based on their content (G, PG, PG-13, R, NC-17) to help consumers make educated decisions. The organization was created in the 1920s “to resist mounting calls for government censorship of American films,” and the MPAA’s well-known voluntary movie-rating system shields the filmmaking industry from what they see as unnecessary government interference.

The pot industry is also starting to see a number of independent agencies putting forth their own suggested standards and regulations, including the 119-year-old standards organization ASTM International, the 121-year-old National Fire Protection Association, and the brand new Cannabis Certification Council, announced earlier this month as a merger between the Organic Cannabis Association and the Ethical Cannabis Alliance.

Of course the industry itself has plenty of ideas on best practices and regulations, and that’s where the just-announced National Association of Cannabis Businesses enters the conversation. Calling itself the legal marijuana industry’s first self-regulated organization (SRO), the NACB has assembled an impressive team to create uniform national standards that its founding members—including marijuana brands Buds & Roses, Cresco Labs, Etain, Green Dot Labs, Local Product of Colorado, Matrix NV, Mesa Organics and others—and future paid members will eventually abide by.

“It’s an entirely new industry—an entirely new legal industry, rather—and it’s so rare that that happens,” said Doug Fischer, the NACB’s D.C.-based chief legal officer and a former associate at Wall Street law firm Cadwalader Wickersham and Taft. “There are all these historical precedents of industries that have done a good or bad job or regulating themselves. But given the uncertain state of play at the federal level and the fragmented situation at the state level, the time is now for an organization like this in the legal cannabis industry.”

Heading up the NACB is president Andrew Kline, a former Assistant U.S. Attorney and senior advisor to then-Senator Joseph Biden, and CEO Joshua Laterman, who served as the longtime U.S. general counsel of global investment bank Natixis. NACB advisors are industry heavyweights with deep experience in regulated markets including Colorado, California and D.C.

Writing comprehensive regulations for a still-new industry is a daunting task, but the NACB has “identified five or six areas as primary ones we’d like to focus on now,” said Fischer, “and some are addressed by state law to varying degrees of effectiveness and some are not.”

The organization will soon begin conversations with members on setting regulations for advertising cannabis products, where they will borrow from tobacco and alcohol in deciding how, where and to whom marijuana can be marketed.

NACB will also look at regulations for packaging and labeling restrictions, which will inevitably address child-proof containers, edible weed’s single serving size, and comprehensive on-package language containing all pertinent information and warnings. The organization will also address reputable financial integrity and accounting practices, a.k.a. audited and verified financial statements that fairly reflect the state of a cannabis business’ finances, including cost of goods sold, revenues, tax liabilities and assets including inventory.

“The industry needs to demonstrate that it takes these things seriously,” said Fischer.

Self-regulated organizations traditionally develop and enforce regulations for a specific industry, and some of the better-known SROs include the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), the National Association of Realtors and the American Medical Association.

“People wouldn’t want to do business with a broker who is not in good standing with FINRA,” said Fischer, “and we hope that will also be the case with the NACB.”

Of course the SRO concept has its detractors, especially given some of their cozy relationships with the industries they’re regulating. But in actuality “many self-regulatory schemes have been effective precisely because the self-regulated have recognized that complying has been in their interest,” former Federal Trade Commission chairman Deborah Platt Majoras told a gathering of the Council of Better Business Bureaus in 2005.

Platt Majoras continued in her speech: “In response to public concerns about the violent content of their products and its suitability for children, the motion picture (MPAA), music recording (RIAA), and electronic game (ESA) industries each have in place a self-regulatory system that rates or labels products in an effort to help parents seeking to limit their children’s exposure to violent materials. Their systems govern the placement of advertising for Restricted ®-rated movies, Mature (M)-rated games, and Explicit-Content Labeled recordings in media popular with teens and require the disclosure of rating and labeling information in advertising and on product packaging.”

The NACB’s Fischer understands the differences between his organization and the MPAA: “There’s no federal law on rating movies because the industry took it upon themselves to do that. With something like cannabis, this is a drug that has such obvious public health and safety concerns, and it wouldn’t be realistic that the government would stay out of it as they have with motion picture ratings.”

But another section of Platt Majoras’ 2005 speech to the Better Business Bureaus acknowledges that the NACB’s early focus on universal cannabis advertising regulations is a solid place to start this particular SRO conversation: “The Distilled Spirits Council of the United States (DISCUS), as well as two other alcohol industry trade associations, the Beer Institute and Wine Institute, have adopted voluntary advertising codes governing the placement and content of alcohol advertising. The three codes have provisions designed to ensure that alcohol ads are not targeted to minors under 21, who cannot legally purchase alcohol, as well as to address other advertising and marketing issues.”

The NACB only launched on Thursday, and it has a long way to go before it can hold court with more established SRO counterparts in the alcohol and tobacco industries. But Fischer and his colleagues want consumers and potential members to know that they plan on growing into the kind of organization that can create meaningful, positive change for the cannabis industry and its millions of customers.

“At the outset, we’re a small organization and don’t have dedicated staff to inspect all our members,” said Fischer. “But over time we hope to move toward more robust enforcement mechanism, because to give governments and stakeholders assurances that our members are complying with relevant laws and our national standards, we will need to be able to back it up.”

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/pot-industry-deals-with-ultimate-buzzkill-self-regulation/ from All of Beer https://allofbeercom.tumblr.com/post/179339940257

0 notes

allofbeercom · 6 years

Text

Pot Industry Deals With Ultimate Buzzkill: Self Regulation

The rules have to come from somewhere. For some cannabis industry leaders, they’d rather be the ones to set the rules and regulations for their businesses.

It’s a double-edged sword when they say they just want to be treated like any other legitimate industry.

“The industry needs to demonstrate that it takes these things seriously,” said Fischer.

“People wouldn’t want to do business with a broker who is not in good standing with FINRA,” said Fischer, “and we hope that will also be the case with the NACB.”

Platt Majoras continued in her speech: “In response to public concerns about the violent content of their products and its suitability for children, the motion picture (MPAA), music recording (RIAA), and electronic game (ESA) industries each have in place a self-regulatory system that rates or labels products in an effort to help parents seeking to limit their children’s exposure to violent materials. Their systems govern the placement of advertising for Restricted (R)-rated movies, Mature (M)-rated games, and Explicit-Content Labeled recordings in media popular with teens and require the disclosure of rating and labeling information in advertising and on product packaging.”

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/pot-industry-deals-with-ultimate-buzzkill-self-regulation/

0 notes

thegloober · 6 years

Text

9/24 to 9/27 Series Preview: Tampa Bay Rays

Yankeemetrics: Wild win, playoff ticket punched (Sept. 21-23)

Tommy Pham and Joey Wendle. (Tom Szczerbowski/Getty)

The Yankees magic number to clinch home field advantage is five, with seven games to play. They’re two games up in the loss column, which is good, but they’re remaining schedule is quite difficult – especially when compared to the A’s, who will face the Mariners and Angels. The odds are in the Yankees favor but, to be incredibly cliche, that’s why they play the games.

With two series remaining, the Yankees will first travel to Tampa Bay.

The Last Time They Met

The Yankees hosted the Rays for a three-game set back in the middle of August, dropping two out of three by a combined score of 10-6. Some of that could be chalked up to Aaron Judge and Gary Sanchez being on the DL, Andrew McCutchen still in San Francisco, and Luke Voit not yet emerging – but it was still a bothersome series to watch. Some notes:

J.A. Happ spun a gem in the first game, throwing 7 scoreless innings and allowing just six base-runners (one of which was via HBP). It was his first of three scoreless outings for the good guys thus far.

Miguel Andujar went 2-for-4 with a double and a solo home run in game two … and the rest of the offense went 3-for-28 with a double.

Masahiro Tanaka allowed two runs in the first, but settled down nicely from there; unfortunately, the Yankees once again mustered only a single run – this one off of a double by Giancarlo Stanton.

Check out Katie’s Yankeemetrics post for more (not so) fun facts.

Injury Report

Wilmer Font, Jose Mujica, and Daniel Robertson have been added to the Rays fairly lengthy list of players that are done for the season. Ji-Man Choi and Kevin Kiermaier are also dealing with nagging injuries, though neither has hit the DL.

Their Story So Far

The Rays are 87-68 with a +85 run differential, and have an incredibly slim chance at making the playoffs as the second Wild Card team. To do so they would need to win out while the A’s lost out, though, so the degree of ‘slim’ cannot really be exaggerated. That being said, it’s still kind of miraculous that this team has played so well since opening the season 3-12, considering that they are tied for the eight-best record in baseball with the Cleveland Indians.

Their season has been unconventional, to say the least, but their bullpen/opener strategy appears to be catching on a bit more than expected – so this may end up being one of the more memorable non-playoff seasons in recent memory.

The Lineup We Might See

Operating under the assumption that Kiermaier and Choi will be playing:

Mallex Smith, RF – .299/.370/.409, 2 HR, 36 SB, 118 OPS+

Matt Duffy, 3B – .295/.359/.367, 4 HR, 12 SB, 104 OPS+

Ji-Man Choi, DH – .267/.353/.513, 10 HR, 2 SB, 137 OPS+

Tommy Pham, LF – .273/.361/.456, 20 HR, 13 SB, 124 OPS+

Joey Wendle, 2B – .301/.356/.439, 7 HR, 15 SB, 121 OPS+

Willy Adames, SS – .271/.340/.410, 10 HR, 6 SB, 109 OPS+

Kevin Kiermaier, CF – .220/.284/.376, 7 HR, 10 SB, 82 OPS+

Jake Bauers, 1B – .198/.316/.389, 11 HR, 5 SB, 96 OPS+

Jesus Sucre, C – .215/.250/.260, 1 HR, 1 SB, 43 OPS+

Nick Ciuffo (73 OPS+) will probably see a start or two at catcher, and Carlos Gomez (80 OPS+), C.J. Cron (125 OPS+), and Austin Meadows (117 OPS+) will see some time in the lineup, as well.

Ryne Stanek with some serious #flow. (Tom Szczerbowski/Getty)

The Starting Pitchers We Will See

Monday (7:00 PM EST): RHP Jonathan Holder vs. RHP Diego Castillo

A 24-year-old rookie, Castillo has been quite good for the Rays this year. He has a 3.25 ERA (127 ERA+) in 52.2 IP, spread across 10 starts and 31 relief appearances. That’s right in-line with his 3.33 FIP, as he has solid strikeout (9.9 K/9) and walk (3.1 BB/9) rates. He’s faced the Yankees six times this year, pitching to the following line: 7.0 IP, 6 H, 3 R, 5 BB, 5 K. Castillo is a fastball-slider guy all the way, featuring a high-90s four-seamer and a high-80s slider.

The Yankees, meanwhile, announced earlier today that Holder will get tonight’s start. Aaron Boone hinted at a bullpen game at some point this week as the Yankees look to get their pitching staff lined up for the Wild Card Game next week. There’s a chance Holder will be used as an opener with Sonny Gray set to take over in the second inning, after Holder faces the top of the lineup.

Last outing (vs. TOR on 9/21) – 1.0 IP, 1 H, 1 R, 0 BB, 1 K

Tuesday (7:00 PM EST): TBA vs. TBA

Wednesday (7:10 PM EST): TBA vs. TBA

Thursday (1:10 PM EST): TBA vs. RHP Tyler Glasnow

The Yankees are trying to get their postseason rotation lined up and the Rays are using openers, so the starting pitchers for the majority of the series remain TBA. The Rays acquired Glasnow in the Chris Archer trade and he’s been league average for the Rays (4.11 ERA and 100 ERA+), throwing 50.1 IP with a 9.8 K/9 and 2.9 BB/9. Glasnow is similar to a young Dellin Betances. He’s got an upper-90s fastball and a hammer breaking ball. His strike-throwing ability varies on a game-by-game basis.

Last outing (vs. TOR on 9/22) – 6 IP, 6 H, 3 R, 3 ER, 2 BB, 6 K, 1 HR

The Bullpen

The Rays bullpen has thrown 779.2 IP this year; the Angels are in second, with 606.0. That difference is greater than the difference between the Angels and the team with the fewest relief innings (the Indians with 440.0), so it’s kind of miraculous that the Rays bullpen is in the top-ten in all of baseball in adjusted-ERA this year. Their bullpen was showing signs of fatigue in late-July and early-August, but it has rebounded to the tune of a 110 ERA+ in the second-half.

Sergio Romo is nominally the team’s closer, picking up 5 saves so far this month, but he has struggled this month, allowing home runs in three of his last five appearances, and is being used a bit more sparingly. Ryan Yarbrough (3.88 ERA in 139.1 IP) is the team’s long-reliever, with Yonny Chirinos (3.68 ERA in 85.2 IP) second-in line for those longer appearances. Jose Alvarado, Adam Kolarek, and Andrew Kittredge have been playing big roles for them of late, as well.

Who (Or What) To Watch

It’s a rivalry series with both team’s having something on the line, regardless of however fleeting it may be for the Rays – what more do you need?

Yankeemetrics: Wild win, playoff ticket punched (Sept. 21-23)

Source: https://bloghyped.com/9-24-to-9-27-series-preview-tampa-bay-rays/

0 notes

repwinpril9y0a1 · 8 years

Text

How Many Startups Does It Take To Change A Lightbulb?

Two years ago, as it prepared to build a new office on Manhattan’s West Side, the ad firm R/GA surveyed its 1,000-odd employees to ask what improvements they wanted made to their workplace. Number one was sit-stand desks. Easy enough. Number two was natural light: Some of R/GA’s New York employees had very little exposure to the sun.

That was trickier. Though 5 West Street, a hulking brutalist ziggurat nicknamed the “Tyrell Building” for its unfortunate resemblance to the headquarters of the evil corporation in Blade Runner, was about to undergo an architectural facelift that would transform its facade from an opaque beige scowl into a clear glass grin, there was nothing to be done about the building’s floor plates, which were larger than football fields. The office was simply too big for everyone to sit near a window.

“It was a gutted, filthy, old warehouse,” said Julia Goldberg, R/GA’s senior vice president of global office services. “The lighting was terrible.”

Goldberg had to figure out how to brighten up the place. She considered a commercial lighting system built by Philips, but it had no back end — no software to control the whole thing. For a 220,000-square-foot office, that was pretty important, if for no other reason than the time it would take to wander around turning on and off all the lights. Then, last June, Goldberg discovered Ketra, an LED lighting startup from Austin that promised some pretty big things.

The first was what Ketra calls “natural light”: white light sources that imperceptibly change their color and intensity throughout the day to mimic the lighting conditions outside. The second was an extreme degree of control. Ketra lights could be wirelessly grouped into zones of any number of lights that could all be separately adjusted via custom software on a wall panel, computer, or phone. The third was precision. Each Ketra bulb contained a patented sensor that measured its own color 360 times a minute to make sure the light being produced was the light being requested. Ketra was selling precisely measured, nature-approximating light, accessible throughout the massive office at the press of a button.

They sold the idea of light, not lighting.

It was exactly what Goldberg — who was under a mandate to design an office that embodied R/GA’s recent rebrand as “an agency for the connected age” — wanted to hear. And it helped that the two Ketra employees who showed up to pitch her didn’t simply treat lighting as a utility or a mundane problem to be solved. Nav Sooch, the CEO, was a design-focused, Stanford-trained engineer who had already hit it big with a semiconductor company; Michael Heinemeier, the sales director, had previously worked on a light installation with the artist James Turrell, a MacArthur "genius." These were creative technologists preaching high-quality light as a convenient, aesthetically pleasing, and healthy lifestyle choice. They sold the idea of light, not lighting. Goldberg was in.

Throughout the relatively short history of electric light, most improvements have been aimed at making light bulbs last longer or use less energy. Ketra is selling something different than dull efficiency: light as an object of beauty, light as a perk. For millennia, we made do with candles, torches, oil lamps, and the dim flickering of all manner of flames. Sure, the chandeliers at Versailles were nice, but the flames themselves were no different than what you’d light in the most modest hovel. Now technology has advanced to the point where illumination itself is a luxury good. What Ketra is selling is the idea that it can make your life better by giving you more control over how it is lit, in really minute detail — that electric light has contributed to making us unhealthier, and that electric light will make us healthy again.

R/GA's office, complete with Ketra lighting, after the renovation.

Courtesy of R/GA

Eighteen months and more than a million dollars of Ketra products later, the R/GA headquarters is a sight to behold, as cavernous as a hangar and as white and austere as a nun’s wimple. The space has accessorized terrifically with the humans inside it. On a recent afternoon, top-knotted men ordered lattes from an on-site Brooklyn Roasting Company. Women in black beanies, black sweaters, and black Nikes glided under dozens of massive projection screens displaying the agency’s work. And lining the ceilings, 2,000 white fixtures held 8,837 white Ketra lamps, casting cool, crisp white light worthy of an Apple ad on all the industry below.

5 West Street is the biggest project the seven-year-old Ketra has ever finished, but it won’t be for long. It’s currently working on a new 300,000-square-foot headquarters for Stripe, the $5 billion payments startup. And Stripe marks the latest in a run of successes for Ketra, which has seemingly come out of nowhere in the past two years to light the spaces of some of the world’s biggest startups, trendiest businesses, and most august cultural institutions: Apple, Facebook (where it lights the Facebook Live studio in New York), Google, Vice, Eataly, the upscale salad chain Sweetgreen, the Art Institute of Chicago. (And, oh! BuzzFeed.) Meanwhile, R/GA, which runs its own consulting business, has started recommending the lights to its corporate clients. Recent converts include what Julia Goldberg would only refer to as “a well-known apparel company” (R/GA famously counts Nike as a client), as well as a “large hotelier” and Sheikh Mohammed of Dubai.

Ketra has positioned itself to illuminate our affluent, healthy, wired, and well-cultured future in part by being as chameleonic as its LEDs, which, in addition to emulating the sun, can turn millions of colors. To architectural lighting designers, the finicky aficionados of the lighting world, they comprise a creative tool kit par excellence. To facilities bosses with blank slates and enormous budgets, like Julia Goldberg, they are highly customizable, networkable, energy-saving conveniences. And to a crop of health-focused businesses — and tech companies eager to tout how lavishly they take care of their employees — they are wellness orbs, radiating futuristic vim.

But who really needs them? Being all things to all people doesn’t come cheap. A single Ketra bulb costs about $100. (That’s a lot for an LED: The Sweethome’s recommended bulb sells at $20 for four.) It’s even more considering the context of a gadget world that produces inexpensive and reasonably good knockoffs faster than ever, not to mention an LED industry with a built-in existential crisis — the bulbs last so long that selling their replacements isn’t necessarily good business. Nav Sooch is fond of saying that his company has invented a new category of product. And there’s no question Ketra has built a bleeding-edge light source and a sophisticated way to control it. But before you can sell millions of dollars of high-tech lighting to some of the world’s biggest companies, you have to convince them that there is a very big problem with their light.

The kitchen at Vice's headquarters in Brooklyn.

Courtesy of Ketra

It is the sad fate of artificial lighting to be a historical invention that most people only notice when it isn’t working. Ever since the advent and spread of modern incandescent lighting in the first half of the 20th century — a wonder enabling untold advances in every field of contemporary human endeavor — people basically think of their lightbulbs only when they burn out, or when it’s too dim to read, or too bright to take off their clothes.

“Everyone thinks light just happens,” said Sean O’Connor, a Los Angeles architectural lighting designer. “People just expect there to be light everywhere they go.”

If public awareness of lighting has nudged up a smidge over the past 10 years, it’s because of 2007 federal regulations requiring more efficient bulbs. So consumers made the change from traditional incandescents, which had been the standard for more than a century — and it was a pain. At first we switched to more efficient incandescents and compact fluorescent lamps, the ones that look like little curled pigtails. But CFLs can be hard to dim, contain mercury, and give off harsh, antiseptic light. People hated them. And now they’re dying: Earlier this year, GE announced that it would stop manufacturing and selling CFLs in the US.

That left LEDs, which produce white light either by mixing red, green, and blue or by slathering a yellow phosphor over a blue LED. Once prohibitively expensive and of highly varying quality, LEDs in recent years have plunged in cost and generally give off light that’s not all that far off, quality-wise, from daylight or incandescent light. They’re the present and the future of lighting, a $15 billion industry in 2014 that is on pace to exceed $21 billion by 2019.

But the LED industry faces its own day of reckoning. As J.B. MacKinnon has written, LEDs last so long that they undermine the traditional “planned obsolescence” business model of incandescents. How can companies maintain their profit margins when people only need to buy their $5 products every 15 years? Three of the huge players in the industry — GE, Philips, and Osram — have responded by spinning off part or all of their lighting businesses in the face of likely declining revenue. If people only care about light when their bulbs burn out, and if their bulbs almost never burn out, won’t people just stop thinking about light?

Maybe, unless companies like Ketra can define new ways that our lights aren’t working.

The inner workings of a Ketra lightbulb.

Julia Robinson for BuzzFeed News

One afternoon in 2009 — long before affordable and high-quality LEDs could be bought at Home Depot — David Knapp accompanied his wife to a lighting store in Austin. The couple were building a new house, and he was more or less tagging along in case she picked out something he really hated. As Knapp wandered to the back of the showroom, he saw some lights that he thought looked odd and familiar, like light-emitting diodes.

Knapp knew LEDs. He had sold his first company, which pioneered the use of LED fiber optics to network multimedia devices in cars, in 2005. Now in his late forties and with time on his hands, he was intrigued.

“Yeah, they suck,” the salesperson told him. “We don’t recommend them.”

The clerk went on to explain that LEDs were bad at rendering colors and were marred by a whole range of issues related to color control (they were too bright and harsh), dimming (they didn’t, or did erratically), and aging (they changed color over time).

“I’d like to buy one of every one of those that you have,” Knapp responded.

That night, Knapp went home with a bundle of LED lights, where he “tore them apart, and started investigating why they were not the ideal solution. How do you address that? That’s what we spent the next six to eight years doing.” Knapp recruited Horace Ho, with whom he had built his first company, and together they invested more than $5 million of their own money into solving the problem.

Their solution was, basically, a self-conscious LED — one that never stops analyzing the light that it produces. At the heart of Ketra’s tech is an LED chip capable of temperature-optical feedback, which senses heat and color output in real time and adjusts itself according to that data. Knapp’s early prototypes were on 12-inch printed circuit boards as big as laptops, but the results were encouraging enough to attract investors, including Nav Sooch, who had known Knapp and Ho since their days as young engineers. Sooch had made millions in the ’90s and early 2000s founding Silicon Labs, an Austin-based semiconductor company.

Nav Sooch, CEO of Ketra, at the company's showroom in New York City on Jan. 3, 2017.

Bryan Derballa for BuzzFeed News

In 2012, Sooch traveled with Knapp to Korea and China to meet with major lighting manufacturers to try to sell them the Ketra chip. “They asked us questions about how they would turn that into a system,” Sooch said. It was, he thought, as if Elon Musk had taken the Tesla battery to Honda and they'd asked him how to make a car out of it. Philosophically, the big lighting companies didn’t get it, and practically, they weren’t set up to make processors; why waste time waiting?

“If we’re going to sell a chip to these big lighting folks, what do we make, a dollar or two per chip?” Knapp said. “We came back and were like, 'These guys don’t know what they’re doing, and we have to build the whole thing.'”

Workers review panels of lights as they are tested at the Ketra manufacturing facility in Austin.

Julia Robinson for BuzzFeed News

As Ketra expanded (it now employees 85 people) and began to design actual light sources, it solicited the interest of professional light obsessives, people who draw up elaborate specifications to ensure spaces are lit just so. In early 2013, Tom Hamilton, Ketra’s head of marketing, showed an early mockup — a big white translucent globe with the Ketra chip inside — to Sean O’Connor, the architectural lighting designer who does high-end retail, hospitality (think the St. Regis Aspen and the Beverly Hills Hotel), and residential projects. The advent of LEDs, inconsistent and unreliable, had made his job much more complicated and stressful.

“When we do an LED project, before we can write the specifications, we have to see samples from everybody to see if it does what it says it does. Historically, it doesn’t,” O’Connor said. “Everything is fiction until you try it.” It was as if an architect couldn’t be sure that a steel beam was the length they had ordered until they saw it in person.

Ketra, even with its goofy globe, promised what O’Connor regarded as “the holy grail” for LED architectural lighting: flexibility and standards. That is, an LED that dimmed like an incandescent, could shift between different kinds of white light while maintaining a high rendering quality, and did it every time, right out of the box. No other LED product on the market that did dynamic white — such as the popular Philips Hue, which O’Connor dismissed as “a consumer toy” — had the special chip inside ensuring consistent color temperature.

Michelle Rial / BuzzFeed News

“It's very easy to use an LED just to sense 'is there light there or no?' but to sense the color and the intensity to get that level of information — I don’t know of anybody else who could do it,” said Maury Wright, the editor-in-chief of LEDs Magazine. “Hue says, 'What’s the difference if it’s a little more or a little less red?' For professional products, you want light matching exactly in terms of spectral energy.”

Winning over skeptics got Ketra in the door with an entire universe of places that depend on rigorously exact light: upscale restaurants, stores, and galleries. In early 2015, another architectural lighting designer suggested Ketra to David Thurm, the Art Institute of Chicago’s chief operating officer. Thurm had been trying to find LEDs to light his masterworks for years, but every time he gathered the curators together to run a test, they left unsatisfied.

“We would get funny results,” Thurm said. “We easily went through 10 LED manufacturers.” And even if the light rendered a painting well, it might be untunable and change the color of the wall. Thurm said he had heard of other major art museums repainting their walls to deal with the problem.

The Art Institute has the world’s largest collection of Monet’s paintings of haystacks, the impressionist’s famous studies of light and time. Thurm set up a viewing of the paintings lit by Ketra, with the museum’s director, curators, and conservation staff. They were astonished.

“We could tune it to a place where the paintings looked beautiful,” Thurm said. “We’re very fussy about this stuff. And everything we were getting from incandescent, we were now getting from LED.”

Ketra's showroom in New York City.

Courtesy of Ketra

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2l10MvB

#DIYS

0 notes