That's when usually people have lunch, so it would be appropriate to talk about restaurants of Hawaii. And the executive director of the Hawaii Restaurant Association is our co-host and contributor. And then Cheryl Masuoka, and she joins us today with Eric Workman, who is one of the executives, the marketing executives at the Polynesian Cultural Center in Latye. So we're going to talk about, gee, with a huge restaurant enterprise, if you will, in Latye, that is the Polynesian Cultural Center. They've got five restaurants there. We would be remiss if we did not discuss the Polynesian Cultural Center. It's a big deal. Okay. So, Cheryl, why don't you introduce Eric Workman and also introduce the scope of the show. Yes. Thank you so much, Jay, for having us on. Eric Workman is the executive vice president and chief marketing officer at the Polynesian Cultural Center. He oversees all the marketing, sales, and business development for the center. And right now, reopening has now, you know, the Polynesian Cultural Center was closed down for 10 months. And now they're reopening with increased sanitization procedures throughout the center and especially looking at, you know, their hands on in the village Samoa. So they now have sanitization stations all around the Polynesian Cultural Center. So today we're talking about, you know, we are the Hawaii Restaurant Association, the voice of Hawaii's restaurant and food service industry. When visitors plan their trip to Hawaii, Jay, one of the must do's on their bucket list is a Hawaiian luau, right? So when you think of Hawaii, you think of a luau and the celebration that comes along with it, with the leg greeting, I wore my leg today, the celebration of the beautiful sunsets, our trade wind breezes, gorgeous hula dancers with their grass skirts and their coconut bras, and the feast, the kalua pig, hot right out of the emu. Fresh chilled lomi lomi salmon, laulaus, and my favorite, which is the chilled haupias, right? So you think about all the yummy foods that are at a luau. However, this pandemic first appeared on the islands, and then we had our state mandatory stay at home orders and the travel restrictions. So the PCC Polynesian Cultural Center, we name it the PCC, closed their doors for 10 months, and the difficult impact to our local community was the furloughed employees. So now, as Governor Igay allows us to reopen, the Polynesian Cultural Center has reopened and now is welcoming back not only our visitors, but also our locals. Keeping in mind right now, we're in tier two. So in our Hawaii restaurants and at the Polynesian Cultural Center, they're practicing all the safe protocols, the six-foot distancing, only five people at a table while dining. All the employees have to wear face masks. Face masks are worn by all the guests unless they're eating or drinking. In fact, enhanced sanitizing and, you know, the PCC is an open air attraction and the luau, while it's covered, it's still outdoors and they're sanitizing with electronic electrostatic sprayers and another change at the luau is no longer are the guests allowed to serve themselves. They actually have servers there on the luau to serve you your food. So I'm going to now bring on Eric and he can tell us a little bit more about the impacts and what they're doing at the Polynesian Cultural Center to welcome back our guests. And we are very curious about the Polynesian Cultural Center. So let's drill down on a whole great background that Cheryl gave us. But what would you add to her comments? Well, she gave a great summary there. That was wonderful. I think she obviously knows us well. Yes, we we did open on January 18th after being closed for 10 months. And it has been a very limited opening. So we are everything closed down when when COVID happened back in January 18th of last year. I'm sorry, we open January 18. But back in March when we closed down, everything shut down all of our luau's all of our restaurants all of our shows everything. And so it's wonderful to have the the heartbeat of this community going again to hear the drums playing that to hear literally the CD activity, the excitement starting to to happen again has been really wonderful. We really want to welcome back to community. We want to welcome back visitors also. But we've worked very, very hard to make it a safe environment as well as fun and educational. So we we have we are open now five days a week. We're not we're closed on Wednesdays and Sundays. And we open at 345. And visitors can come in and take a brief canoe tour. That canoe used to fit 24 people approximately. Now we're lucky to get eight people on there with COVID spacing. But they take a canoe ride to the to one of the villages. And there they can participate in some activities. They have out that in the village even use hula hoops on the ground to space people out to ensure they stay socially distanced while participating. That's very clever. And yeah, lots of lots of fun little innovations to make it still fun enjoyable educational but still safe. We have hand sanitizing no touch dispensers everywhere. COVID signage that we've tried to make unique to each island and each location. There's there's their brief presentations that happened there in that village tried to bring some of our best of different islands into that one village. And then they go to the Luau where we've reimagined the Luau. So why we were sitting around for 10 months. We had a lot of time to think about what we can do better. And one of those areas we really focused on was the Luau. Our presentation in the Luau, which is a tribute to Queen Lillio Kalani. We've really enhanced that presentation, made it more meaningful, more impactful. It's Hawaii's only all Hawaiian Luau. There's you won't find fire knives in here. There's no Tahitian dancing. There's nothing nothing Samoa and nothing other culture. It's all Hawaiian. And again, we wanted to pay tribute to to Queen Lillio Kalani and believe that it's a great story that people need to hear as our as the last remaining monarch in Hawaii. So from there then reimagined the food. Greg Maples, who's our director of of our food has worked very hard with his team to really amp it up, raise a level of performance there with the food itself. All new menu and an enhanced vegetarian menu, vegan menu, even believe it or not for a Luau that that could even be possible. But throughout the Luau, it's the the number one priority is to make it safe. And we've got, you know, it starts back when our employees before they even come to work weekly, all of our employees are COVID testing. That that cost us about $20,000 a week, just in testing. But we're committed to creating a safe bubble here at PCC that makes it possible for our performers to stay healthy. And when they interact with each other, they are careful. Daily, every employee who comes into the center who works on these grounds must have a pass a daily health screening. And with a temp check, and eight questions that they pass. And if they they're weak on any one of those questions, they go right to one of our full time to full time safety officers that have to approve whether they're allowed to come on the grounds or not. And we dismiss them if there's any question on paid leave until we find out if they are positive or negative. In the Luau itself, we're capped at about 250 seats right now, which is about 12% of our pre COVID capacity. Guests do not serve themselves. All food is served to guests. Guests never touch or interact the food. All of our servers wear a mask or inverted face shield. All of our performers wear inverted face shields. It's a clear shield that allows to see some kind of movement of the lips, but still protect and do what is required. There's no reuse of of cups or any table service. Tables are socially distanced. As as Cheryl mentioned, those regulations are very clear. If there's more than one party at a table that is not together, we place a plexiglass shield between the parties to separate that table. All tables are cleaned, electrostatically they're cleaned before use. And then after they're cleared and at the end of the day, they're again sanitized with electrostatic sprayer, similar to the kind of sprayers that the airlines use for for sanitizing inside of a plane. So lots of work goes into making this a safe as well as a fun and educational experience. So if I count back 10 months from now, January, well, February, again, but that would be March, I guess you close. Yes. If you had to go back right now, you know, knowing all that we know, would you have closed at the same time or earlier or later? No, we were the first ones to close that I'm aware of. And we were just pulling our hair out in that decision, not wanting to do that. We have so many people responsible for and we knew what it could mean, but we knew we had to be safe and we had to lead in safety and be responsible. And I think a lot of people don't realize that business, especially an institution like the Polynesia Cultural Center, its reputation is critical. We couldn't risk the safety of our employees or having any kind of event that would mar our reputation in any way. So we had to be extremely cautious. We closed, end up being we were cautious. We closed what we thought was going to be for two weeks. And then within a week, people were people thought it was silly of us to do that. But within one week, everybody else closed down after we closed. We just saw it coming. Again, we tried to be as responsible as possible. We've tried to be as responsible now as we can in opening, as cautious and responsible.  So when you're closed, gee, there's a lot of property involved. And as you mentioned, there are a lot of staff involved, huge of thousands. Am I right to say thousands of people, part-time and full-time thousands? Is it gorgeous?  Wow. And you mentioned that the cultural aspect of the center is native wine issues and Queen Malia Kalani and the history of the 19th century and so forth. But you have, my recollection is, you have a lot of staff that's Pacific Islanders as well as Native Hawaiians who advance the cultural aspect of the center. How did they do in the course of 10 months? I mean, these guys are not making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, even in the best of times. How did they live? How did they survive? And how many of them had to leave town, never come back for you? Yeah, that's a great, great question.  We were created to provide jobs, to bring students from the Pacific to the adjacent Brigham Young University. And we were to provide that, that employment for them to get that university education they wouldn't have been able to get otherwise. So we have a small core of full-time permanent employees augmented by this larger group of students from all over the South Pacific. But to your point, we've had, we have many, many of those students who couldn't even return home because their islands got shut down. So we have students from Tonga, Samoa, who have been here the whole time, who would love to return home, who haven't seen their families in a year. But they're here living on campus or living in the community. So fortunately, before COVID hit, we had saved for about five years. It saved everything we could in capital because we were going to build a new building. So we were saving for that time. And it was fortunate or whatever you want to call it, that we had that savings on hand that we then repurposed to use to keep as many employees as we could hold.  Yeah, yeah. We had saved for a rainy day. And the rainy day certainly came, the storm came. So you take care of them in some way while they were, while you were closed.  Yeah, so many of our employees, so we did have an early round of employees who we offered voluntary severance packages to. Many, some took it and have left the island, unfortunately. Some are still in the community. But those who remain the bulk of the employees that remained, we have been committed to keeping them whole. So if they after receiving, if those who are furloughed, if they after being furloughed and with federal assistance on furlough, that adder, if they didn't stay, you know, substantially whole, then we would bring them back and continue to pay for their employment. And that has been the case with many of our employees and those who stayed. Well, as you said, we have a lot of grounds and facilities. We pulled weeds, we mowed, we trim hedges, we painted, we did some capital work that we could afford to do in projects that would, that a shutdown was helpful. Our whole lagoon, 42 acres, we have a giant lagoon that runs through the whole area. We drained the whole thing, cleaned it out, saved most of the fish and, and refilled it to where now it looks wonderful. That's a great business. That's good business on all sides. You know, your place probably looks better than it has in a long time. It's been cleaned up. Your employees who you supported through the course of the 10 months probably love you to distraction. And on a moral level, it's been very nice that you did that. Good for you, Eric. Well, it's been a huge team effort and everybody here is committed to making that and helping everybody make it through this. Well, we are, we are ready to get back to work though. Of course. And so the question, you know, you're the marketing officer, the chief of marketing for the huge job because you have what I mentioned is say hundreds of millions of tourists come around over the course of a year. That's a lot. And you have to, you know, make it known that the door is open. And so at some point, probably within the last month or two, you knew again, pre-planning you, you knew that you were going to reopen. So as the marketing officer, somebody tells you, Eric, it's time to get started again. You know, to get the bubble machine working again. How do you do that? How do you reach out to your constituency around the world and advise them to come down and, you know, enjoy the center again? Yeah. Yeah, you're right. It's a tough job. Thank you for reminding me. We have a great team that works very hard to get the word out. We have shifted most of our resources to digital online promotion. We're trying hard to reach out to people who have any plans of coming to Hawaii to help them know that we're open and we're here before they ever arrive. There are so many fewer people than are here now or coming now that were before. We're waiting for them to come back in larger numbers because it's really not sustainable where we are today. We maybe don't want to go back to where we were and the high numbers where we were for Hawaii. We were talking about traffic earlier, but we need more to keep everybody whole. So yeah, we're doing all that we can to reach out to them digitally. We want to support Hawaii Tourism Authority and the efforts they're making to reach out to bring people back.  And as more people learned that, I was looking at charts last night, Hawaii is by far, I mean, at the bottom of the list of all the states in the United States for COVID and we do have a safe island environment here like nowhere else in the world. It's remarkable because we do have tourists and they could bring COVID anytime. So as you say, we have to make and enforce the rules. We do that. So let me go to the restaurants. So five restaurants you mentioned. Are all the restaurants different? Or is there a common denominator theme for them? And I guess also I want to know have they changed in that theme and that common denominator now that you're reopening? Yeah, wonderful question. We have, we do have five. We've only opened, so we opened several months ago, we opened Pounders, which is open. It's in our Hukilau marketplace, which is open to the public at all times. That has been open to mostly to Kamaina now for several months and they're doing well with the number of people we do have come. But it used to be about, you know, we have a good share of visitors and a good share of local Kamaina in there. Things haven't changed much after the opening now with Pounders. We still have all the same rules that we helped to pioneer, I believe in many ways, with the social distancing, hand wash, sign in for contact tracing. Everyone wears mask unless you're actively eating. All of those rules we carefully monitor and maintain those. What about the menus? Have you changed the menus? No, not really. The menus have stayed very much the same. Where the big changes came were in the Luau. We do now have just the one Luau restaurant open and just the one venue. So like I said, we're only operating at about 12% of the venue, the Luau capacity that we used to have. That's a problem because Luau is an economies of scale issue. If you have a little tiny Luau, it's not the same thing. It's a big one. And of course, you still have to pay the expenses. Yeah, absolutely. And on the North Shore, nothing is cheap. Everything crumbles to dust within months. So it's constant maintenance, constant upkeep. But we feel right now in this soft start mode that we're in with just 250. We cap the Luau at 250 people a day. It allows us, what's that? A lot of people. I mean, it's in the absolute number. That's quite a few people. I mean, at the height of it, how much was it? It was a lot. We would run two of those venues twice a night. That was just our Luau's. And then we have our buffet, which operates separately. Is that both outside? So all of our Luau's are outside. Our buffet restaurant is not outdoors. And that's one of the reasons we haven't opened it yet. The Luau's, since they are outdoor venues, we are more confident that we can operate those unquestionably safely. Yeah. But so what about you? You haven't opened them all right now? Will you open them all? Or are some of the restaurants going to not be open? It's a combination of there's not enough traffic to warrant opening all of them. If we had the demand, we'd have to really look carefully at can we open each of them safely. I believe that we could. If the demand was there, we could open our Luau's and operate as we are today in a safe manner. I believe we could open our buffet. We would obviously have to change that significantly because we would not allow people to serve their own food. We'd have to entirely change that format. It strikes me that you're focusing on as well you should in terms of marketing anyway. Safety. You're focusing on that. And people are very concerned about that. I know a fair amount of your trade is from right here in the state, for that matter, right here in Oahu. So people aren't going to come out of their houses. They're not going to make the trip unless they feel that it's safe, especially around restaurants. So the question or the question is, and we've talked to, you know, Cheryl and I have talked to a lot of restaurants over the last few months. It dawns on me that you must take the steps to be safe. But hearing all the steps you're taking, it strikes me and it costs money to be safe. All these things you're talking about are different than they were before. They're innovations that didn't, you didn't have to worry about it before. Now you do. And that's got to add to your daily expense. It's like those tests for, what did you say, $20,000 a day? That's a lot of bread. You didn't have to pay before. So, Query, how do you handle that? I mean, how do you make that work? Because that's right off the bottom line. Yeah, no, it's painful. And it is, those Oatsets are about $20,000 a week. A week, sorry. It's not sustainable long term. We can't keep doing this. We're opening now to kind of get the flywheel turning, to get it going, to keep our, to get our people trained to refine our processes, to make sure that we can do this safely and scale up only as we're capable of doing safely. But it's not, this is not sustainable. We can't do this and continue to provide for our people. Something dramatic would have to happen if we can't get back to larger volumes, larger numbers. So we really need visitors to come back soon. The local market, we love our local market, but it's not enough to sustain what needs to be done here to provide jobs for the many hundreds of people that we have to provide jobs for. I wonder, Cheryl, do you know the answer to this? And maybe you do, Eric. Are restaurant workers essential? Yes, they are. And can restaurant workers, they fit in the tiers of people who qualify for vaccines? Yes, we're one C. So we're the next tier. Once all of the healthcare workers and the elderly, we're the next tier. So many of the restaurants I sent out in January, the sign up sheet. So people just have to sign up and they're in the queue. And then once all of the essential workers and the capuna have been vaccine, yes, we're next on the list. So again, it's, you know, it's an executive marketing and planning function, just like the closing and the reopening is how you see the future. And the vaccines play a role in that, and especially helpful that, you know, restaurant workers can get those vaccines. And they'll hopefully be more vaccines. It'll be even easier. I'm talking about vaccines because I just came back from my second shot this morning at peer two. So I'm feeling a little safer. On the other hand, you know, we're all watching to see the variants and whether they create a sort of a secondary epidemic. Who knows? And finally, you're talking about an economy that has been in the tank. You know, while you were closed, a lot of business was closed, a lot of income was curtailed, people don't have the money necessarily. Although the truth is that Hawaiian people spend a lot of money in restaurants. Cheryl knows. And when the floodgates are open, they are going to come back huge numbers of people that come out of their homes and down for meal, meals after meals after meals at restaurants.  But you know, what's your plan, Eric, going forward? I mean, when is the coast going to be clear? When will it be safe? Yeah, well, we, we are really putting a lot of faith in that vaccine. I don't even want to think about the potential in the second wave of variants. We, we believe the vaccine will make the difference and make it people, help people to feel safe in coming out of their houses again. We want to welcome you here. We want to feed you well at the luau or at pounders. And so we hope our local community will, will see the things we're doing, feel comfortable coming, feel like this, they could get a little staycation of sorts, even if it's only an evening, to come out to the center and enjoy the show. I didn't even mention our show. We reopened our evening show. It's funny to look in the audience and see people spaced in groups of no larger than five with six feet all around them in a 2700 seat theater. But it's still a good experience. And so we still have, you know, almost the same number of staff performing in the show, all with their inverted face shields and performing in what we believe is a safe manner. But it's a fun getaway. And we would like to invite anybody on the island to come in. And we think you can have a safe, fun experience here. We really appreciate the work that HRA has done through Cheryl and through Greg to help the industry, help food, help restaurants to articulate what must be done to make it safe. And they've, their decisive, proactive leadership has been really critical to us. And I'm sure hundreds of other restaurants and mom and pop businesses and employers who are trying to get back to business, what they do is critical for us. And we've really, really appreciated all the work that they've done to make it possible for us to open again. Well, you know, aside from, you know, the straight business end of it, fact is that the Polynesian Cultural Center, its middle name is culture. And it's all the more important these days to have a place where culture lives and Hawaii culture can be expressed to people locally and who come here.  Every hotel had a Luau. Everybody, everybody. Now, you know, I, I can't think of a regular Luau of any size, you know, that, that comes close to what you've been doing, what you are now going to resume doing at the Polynesian Cultural Center. You are the cradle of that element of the, what do you want to call it, the Hapa Holi days, remember Hapa Holi music, the days of Webley Edwards and Waikiki and the days when Hawaii became famous around the world for offering this kind of, you know, tourist delight. And the Luau, to me, is a very important thing that you offer.  Well, thank you. Thank you. We hope so too. We take very seriously that charge to be that cradle of culture, a bastion of where we preserve that culture here on the island and the Hapa Holi side of it, in part at the Luau. And we preserve that period of time in Hawaiian history, but also the more pure periods of Polynesian cultural history that we've strived to preserve. And we think Onipa really helps take that to the next level where it's not, you, I promise you, you will not see a cellophane skirt anywhere on that stage. It tells a serious story about a wonderful human being and who did a lot for her people. And so it's a moving, touching experience, I believe. And an important part of our history, we don't want to lose. On the other hand, then you could go to the night show and there's a lot of fun and a lot of fire and a lot of culturally rich, authentically accurate presentations there woven together in a way that I think is also moving, but fun and a little lighter at times. Very valuable. Very valuable. Looking forward to getting out there. Now that the traffic's not as heavy. Well, now you've had your second shot. You have no reason to not come. I have to let it settle in. I have to develop my antibodies, right? Okay. All right. We'll see you next week. Okay. All right. Cheryl, can you, as you always do, can you summarize and try to pull all this together for our viewing audience? It's like Eric said, you know, our chairman is Greg Maples, who is the director of restaurant services at the Polynesian Cultural Center. And with his leadership, that's how the Hawaii Restaurant Association has worked with our local Department of Health and, of course, using the CDC and FDA guidelines. So that's the protocol, the six foot distancing, the face mask, the extra sanitizing. So while our visitor count is still low, this is a great opportunity for our locals to visit and enjoy the Polynesian Cultural Center and their famous Ali'i Luau. Our Hawaii restaurants and Luau's are open and ready to serve you. The Hawaii Restaurant Association is the voice of Hawaii's restaurant and food service industry. And we're looking forward to dining together again and creating more delicious memories. Delicious memories. I hear that, Eric. That's great. This has really been very interesting to learn about the Polynesian Cultural Center. Thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Thank you, Cheryl, for setting it up. Always appreciate it. Aloha, you guys.


The Council of Concerned All Progressive Congress, APC stakeholders, Mr Douglas Ogbanquah, has called on President Bola Amatunabu to wade into the ongoing crisis that is rocking the party over the just concluded Governorship Primary election in the States to save the party from losing the forthcoming Governorship election. Also a correspondent at Pomo Gerriff Friday reports that Mr Douglas Ogbanquah has said the Returning Officer for the Edo 2020 for Governorship Primary appointed by the APC National Working Committee is Dr Stanley Uwaja, that Governor Hope Uzodema was only ceremonial chairman of the process and it does not behove on him to declare the result. The only recognized and recognizable Chief Returning Officer as indicated by the National Working Committee of the APC for these primaries is Stanley Uwaja, a Ph.D. Governor Hope Uzodema was only a ceremonial chairman for the process and it does not behove on him to announce the winner of the primaries. We also state that we are afraid if the APC does not do the right thing by actually ensuring that the person who won these primaries, Senator Monde, is taken as the candidate of the APC, APC might lose this election. Mr Douglas Ogbanquah however noted that the purported exercise that produced Honourable Dennis Hidahosa cannot stand the rigors of the cuts process as Governor Hope Uzodema was not around all through the process of the primary election. President Governor Uzodema showed up to announce false results when he is not the Returning Officer as provided by the APC Constitution. The only result that was collated in the Julia authorized APC result is that which produced and declared Senator Sondo Okwaholo as the candidate of the APC for the September 24th Edo State Governorship Elections. The sheets used to do whatever was done for Senator Hidahosa was done on the plain sheet of paper. It was a charade that the purported exercise that was produced on Honourable Dennis Hidahosa cannot stand the rigors of legal bribe acts as the votes cast by the purported voters were more than the number of accredited voters for the primaries. The only exercise observed by INEC as provided by law, the Electoral Act 2020 and that the election which was announced by Chief House Hope Uzodema, there was no collision or transmission process from either the world or the local government to him.


Angel, it was an honor to nominate you for your work with Mission of Truth for the Wesley Mortgage Community Hero Recognition. Having met you by chance at a regional law enforcement conference last year, we talked about the Mission of Truth's work combating human trafficking, providing health and food aid within your work in Haiti to see someone make an effort to stop the problem at its source rather than after the fact it's refreshing. I am honored to be acquainted with you and your work and I was happy to nominate you for this recognition, Don Green. Where is he? Oh, gosh, Don. We've been working there for 12 years now. Doing everything from medical care, food distribution, building schools, churches, you name it. She really has a servant's heart. She's ready to help anyone, whether it's locally or across the world. Wesley Mortgage, Titans, what an honor. Thank you, guys.


Hello everyone, this is financial author Ahmed Dunn of Ahmed Dunn.com on this channel You'll find financial travel and more videos just like the one you're watching right now If you like what you see, please give it a thumbs up and consider subscribing Hello everyone, this is Ahmed Dunn of Ahmed Dunn.com today I'll be unboxing and doing a brief review of a travel tripod Which is called Kulida or Kulohida Tripod, I do apologize for the right spelling of this tripod because I'm not sure it should be Kulida or Kulohida, but just to make things simple. I'll Mention, I'll say Kulida. It's a spelled K-A-K-O-O-L-E-H-A-O-D-A and this is a 56 inch camera travel tripod and The name of this particular model is KQ 200 and Let's go for some specs of these travel tripod Now this travel tripod Folded length is only 13.6 inch. So which is very small and Its weight is 1290 gram which is approximately 2.85 pound So when you travel 2.85 pound and 13.6 inch is very portable So you should be able to carry it in your Carry-on or in your backpack or anywhere It's a really small and lightweight and it's made of aluminum alloy and maximum height is 1410 millimeter or it would be 56 inch and Then maximum load capacity is 8 kg. So this is a ball head tripod and It can be used as a monopod as well One of the legs can be removed as a monopod. So this is basically a monopod and tripod all in one and In this part right now, I'll just do the unboxing and I'll go outside later on and Show you how tall is the tripod is and how to fold or unfold or other features So let's first Go through the unboxing and then we'll go to the second part of this video Which I'll do later on and attach it to the part one. So right now the part one is The plain unboxing and let's Get going So here is the box. So it has Tourism tripod right here and Here is a picture on this side Right here and actually the name Polida is not to be found on this package In bold font so what I was able to see that it just mentioned right here could lead a 56 inch SLR camera tripod and this is the model number or some sort of product number and Except that The package doesn't have the name or anything else. So let's Get going with opening the box and I'll just start cutting from here. Okay, so I opened that and Let's see if I can open this without Okay, so yes It's gonna come out. There's a small Packing Set it aside here for now and Pulling this out Looks like the whole tripod is coming out Okay, so here we got the club here. I'll leave it here and let's see if there's anything else inside the box No, it's all empty So just a little box here. So this is what it looks like. It's a small carry bag And you can carry it like this or you can put it on your shoulder Actually the color of the carry-on of the carry bag, I don't like it that much, but I guess I don't have any option here It comes with whatever they give so Just take this out here and Remove the tripod from the back Okay, so instead of the bag, there's nothing else So I'll just set it set for now What I can see that they do have the name Kulita on the back, but it's not on the box So here's So I'll just take this out Okay, so this is what it looks like. There's a small bag right here Okay At this point, I'm not sure what is this for However, once I go through it and figure out I'll mention In part two of the video. So just put it aside for here And here is the tripod I'll not be able to fold it all the way here because of the space However, once I do the part two of the review Then I'll show you everything So looks like here is the ball head and If I remove the bag Then okay Here's the ball head right here and all other stuff Okay, so In terms in terms of unboxing. This is what it is I'm not gonna unfold this right now because I have to be In front of the camera and I'm not ready for that yet So what I'll do when I do the next part, then I'll do the unfolding and the rest of the Stuff and then I'll show you how tall is the type tripod and when I stand next to it how My height and the tripod if they're okay or not and some other features of the tripod Okay, thank you for watching so far and let's Keep For the part two Just wait a little bit and once they do the part two, then you'll be able to see the rest of the video All right. Thank you Hello, everyone. This is amit dan of amitdan.com today I'll be doing the second part of the kulida or kulohida a tripod review and today I'll be testing the tripod or I'll be showing some features outdoor and Let's start with The first what the accessories come with the tripod. So first Here's the tripod bag or tripod cover So the cover by itself looks durable and It is padded and it has the actually carry-on strap Which you can hang it to your shoulder or you can just carry on like this the Tripod cover is Looks good. However the color I didn't like the color, but it's not a big deal And it has a kulida or kulohida On it and then there are two accessories which come with the tripod. One of them is this small bag I believe you put stone or weight or rocks in here and Attach it to The middle of the tripod which is Right here to balance it. That's the function of this bag and there's another Small bag which came with the tripod bag, which is this bag right here I'm not sure what to do with the bag and I was not able to find the function of this bag anywhere But I have an idea that this bag you use to attach it attach the tripod to your carry-on backpack Or your luggage or anywhere and most likely One of the tripod legs just goes in here and then you just push it Using this slot right here This one right here. So One side actually holds the tripod and probably the other side Is just Attach the tripod to a carry-on bag or any luggage However, I may be wrong, but that's what I can come up with just by guessing Now I will go back to the tripod itself So the tripod is fairly light to it And this is about 3.5 Pound and I'll just show you some important features that you should know So this is a 56 inch tripod And this tripod Is not going to be good for too tall people I'm about five six five seven. This works just fine for me But if you are above five ten or five six Feet or anything, then I wouldn't recommend this because this is going to be too short now. I'll Unfold the tripod, but before that I would like to show you the Monopod feature which is one of the leg One of the legs which is right here It comes off the tripod And then if you can Just open this leg then it should work as a monopod However, the problem with that is that this monopod is too short As you can see it just comes up to my Half part it doesn't even come up to my face. So this is not going to be a good option for monopod So I'll just close this one And attach it back To the tripod So it goes inside here And then once you Attach it Okay, I'm not sure who I am having a little bit difficulty attaching this leg It could be that okay, so I got it here Okay, so now Before I unfold the tripod fully I would like to mention that this is a Flip lock tripod what it means that when you unfold the leg The locks are not twist lock. They're flip lock And the way the flip lock looks It doesn't look too sturdy or durable for me It may be durable, but the way the weight looks and the feel of it is plastic And I'm not sure if this is going to last too long So that's where I'm a little bit concerned. However, I hope that it lasts long. So this is The flip lock instead of twist lock and the locks kind of looks cheap plastic and too not too durable Okay, so when you want to unfold it so you can just Do it this way and you can flip it over And then you're going to have to twist One by one So for example, the benefit of having a twist lock is that it's very fast You can unfold the whole tripod Without within within one minute or so It doesn't take time at all And then if I had let's see if I had Twist lock System then it would take longer because of flip lock. I shouldn't it didn't take long So let's say if I'm setting up the tripod right here And then to tighten it up I'll just Pull up the lever and then if I just Loosen the grip right here then It will come this way And then I have to just Tighten up here Okay, so now this is the tripod as far as it goes. This is 56 inch So this is just fine for me if I put the camera here This is going to be my eye level or face level Face level, however, if you're too tall then just like I said before I wouldn't recommend it a 56 inch. So you should look beyond 56 for example 62 inch or beyond if you're a tall person But if you're about five six up to five six or five seven then this should work just fine So that's the basic parts of this tripod. So I would say that this is a good purchase for the price. This is only about hundred dollars canadian and Everything looks good so far except the flip lock Of Material or the looks I'm just a little bit concerned and hopefully it'll last long and The another benefit of having flip lock that it's very quick And then you can just Push it you can close and open the whole thing very fast So this tripod has many other features which I'm not going to show you everything you'll Know them or you'll find them Easily it's in the manual However, the manual comes in actually Japanese and English and it's not that clear But you know, it's very self-explanatory and you'll be able to Find out how it works very fast for that reason I'll just mention the most important thing. I believe we needed to know So I'll just do a quick Overview of what I just mentioned Number one the monopod is too short It comes only up to my waist and it's not going to Cover or it's not going to be very tall like, you know, six feet or 5.56 inch like the whole tripod And the flip lock buttons They look okay, but I'm not sure if they're durable It has a kind of cheap feeling or not a light feeling to it So they might not last very long, but however, I'm hoping that you know, they last long and this tripod Is good for people up to five six five seven or even five eight But if you're taller than that, then I'd recommend getting something Larger this is a 5.6 inch tripod and except that the build quality the material Everything else looks very sturdy very durable and this is only 3.5 pound And you can easily carry it with you anywhere you go and you can put it in your backpack or carry on luggage So overall for the price. This is a good purchase if you buy a very Brand name or famous one you'd be paying probably Three to five hundred dollars for the same product or a product Similar product however for hundred dollars I'm satisfied and this is a good tripod. I would recommend Except the drawbacks or the features I mentioned So that's all for now. Please keep an eye on this channel And if you'll if you find the information helpful, please give it a thumbs up and consider subscribing That's all for today. Thank you


Thanks very much, David, for the invitation. And I'm honored that my afternoon date is Professor Addington, so pleasure to be speaking with her following this. And I really enjoyed the morning session very much, so I'm excited on where this might go from here. I'll admit, first, I am certainly not a scientist, and I have great admiration for the science of this mode of thinking, this mode of working. I consider myself very much a kind of speculative realist when it comes to design making, design visioning, and I really appreciated Sheila's comment about the imagination. I use that as part of, I expend a lot of energy on the imagination, as many of my colleagues do as well, maybe too much energy. So I called this talk Energy Publix, Five Points on Energy in Place, and I like the provocation of being in the topic called location. I think a lot about site, in fact, I would say, only discovering this maybe in recent years, I think my greatest interest in architecture is the question of where does the site begin and end? And I think all of my work relates to that question. So I almost start more with a larger scale thinking, and hopefully, if there's enough traction, I get down to a smaller scale application. The work I'm showing today is all unbuilt work. Two or three of the projects are new, and I'm excited that two of the projects that start out as pure speculation have gotten some steam towards reality, and I'm in the midst of that now, and I'll point those out to you, which is very exciting to think that you begin a project not knowing if there is client or if there's agency, but then discovering along the way that it has an audience, and that's an exciting way to begin. Okay, so as I mentioned, I'm interested in this question of site, so I wanted to put forward this term environment, which my studio were about four or five, typically on average, four or five staff, and we think a lot about this with every project is where does the site end and begin, but also this notion of environment, and I really love definitions, sometimes in lectures can be a bit dull and practical, but this is just a really rich reading of this term environment. In particular, I'd like to highlight the third definition, which I think is a wonderful way, a kind of liberating way to think about design and its capacity, is that the definition of environment are literally all of the elements over which a designer has no control, and that affect a systems or its inputs and outputs, and that's both terrifying, but I think also equally incredibly liberating to think that, and I think Nicholas Necroponte and some of his interest about the kind of willingness to let control slip by the wayside I think is an empowering perspective on this idea. Quickly leveraging that into notions of energy, I just wanted to remind you that the idea and notion of energy being public in any way is still quite new. It was in the 1930s where something like the Tennessee Valley Authority and its desire to harness or capture the environment's riches was used and quite a powerful tool even today. I think 2010 TVA's revenue was 11.5 billion. And this is a very successful organization that harnesses many different powers together in one. So this notion of energy being public or what kind of place it has I think is a new idea. So these are the questions I'm asking with this talk that I'm gonna try to keep within my 12 minute timeline is does energy have a place today? And what is the public nature of energy? And as I said, I think more through a kind of speculative realism in our practice, and so I really use design and the capacity of design and the capacity of case studies. So the specificity of a project is very important to me. I'm not very good at making pie charts or graphs or things that are, but I have great respect for them. I'm not good at that. So I'm gonna hopefully present five points towards a new conception of an energy public. And these are my five points. One is a reminder about the campfire and the campsite. Two, I'm gonna ask if you speak energies. Three, I'm requesting that you know your umvelt. Four, I'm inviting you to play the world game. And five, I'm hoping that you will interact with your energy. So let's start with the campfire, what a good place to start. And we can't talk about the campfire without talking about Bannum's introduction of the campfire in the architecture of the well tempered environment. And many of you probably know, Bannum used the campfire as a kind of prod of a conundrum of a dilemma of if a tribal people has a gathering of wood, do they use this wood to burn for heat and warmth, or do they use this wood to construct a shelter in which to maintain warm thunder and that kind of dilemma. Equally the idea that the campfire is literally a thermodynamic machine and that it offers this zone of radiant heat and light. And number two, it's downwind trail of warm air and smoke. So it has a kind of residue with it as well. Equally, Bannum introduced the tent as this primitive hut, simple structure, membrane that deflects wind and excludes rain. So in a way, these two elements are a kind of core or basic instruments of architecture and space making as it relates to energy. So this was a project we did for the Chicago architecture of Biennale last summer looking at a kind of domesticated wilderness. This was a bit of, we were the only Canadians in the Chicago Biennale, so it gave us a chance to kind of play with Canadian identity and Canadian-ness and some of those perceptions, whether they're actual or not. And we noticed that there was an immense amount of energy invested in the innovation of the tent and really again admired that mountain equipment, co-op all of these corporate entities and some really brilliant designs and innovations and materials had really been at the forefront of that. And even gear, the kind of evolution of gear, this is an outdoors person laying out, this is what I'm gonna live off of for a month. This is the idea of the kind of heroic nature of I'm living off of this stuff out in the wild. But then recognizing that things like campgrounds and especially car camping was incredibly underwhelming and incredibly suburban and had no identity to it. So our place of experimentation was the question of, can you make urban or urbanized collective campgrounds and what does collective behavior mean when you're out in the wilderness? Often it means sharing resources and so forth. So we made two things. We made a series of these brochures that you would normally find when you enter, let's say a provincial park in Canada or a state park in the US, you would arrive and you'd get one of these news prints that tells you what to do with your waste, what kind of firewood you can or can't use, where the showers are, that sort of thing. And then we made a singular architectural model that had a gradient of landscapes across it from a plains to a wetland, to a kind of Canadian shield landscape, to a more forested landscape and projected these five scenarios of collective camping. And tried to be kind of democratic about the representation of these, but they were always about forms of collective occupation in the landscape, how to deal with literally the fire, the campfire, how to deal with wastewater in this particular scheme, which was called closed loop, which had to do with a kind of zero footprint or low footprint camping. And this was the how-to manual, how to occupy the site, where does your water go. And all of these sites were meant to come pre-equipped with tents. So tents were integrated into the campsite as a kind of tool. So this is the closed loop model in the foreground, some representations of that in a wetland. And we saw this one really as hovering at a hinge between water and land. And so we did this five times. And each time we were asking, where does the campfire go? Where does the stored wood go? What do people do with their waste? How do they gather their water? And what does privacy mean in this? And maybe not always energy related questions, but questions about density and collectivity in the wild. And this project, through a kind of CBC radio broadcast, actually had picked up some interest from Parks Canada. So we're actually now working with their strategic visioning department, which I didn't even know they had, in possibly piloting a campsite. So this is a sort of exciting byproduct of a project that is cooked up internally. My second question to you is, would you like to speak energies? And energies is a language, a kind of electrical language developed by Howard Odom, who is an ecologist, an American ecologist. And this is a kind of code that Odom and his collaborators would use to understand a contained ecosystem. So you get, these are the kind of languages like switches and so forth of, what is the source of energy? What is, where is energy stored? Where is an interaction point between energy? What's a self-limiter? And then I think even energy loss is represented. And so he would do these kind of electrical diagram, wonderful electrical diagrams of ecosystems. So this, for example, is, I think it was shrimp, yeah, shrimp mariculture of coastal Ecuador. So this black line that you see around the edge here is the pond proper. But around it you have all these wonderful other things that are very abstract to most ecologists like markets and capital and labor, but then other things that are difficult to estimate or maybe are unpredictable like rain and environmental factors that are external to that bubble. And I think this is a fascinating and challenging way to think, but I think it's, again, a very empowering way to understand sight in architecture, to read it not just as, we like to think of architecture as being this box only, but I like to think that there are possibilities and design interventions in here that can be a bit more entrepreneurial, maybe. I'm going to breeze through this project. It's an older project, but I think it fits this idea of energies which looks at an over-salinated body of water in California called the Salton Sea. It has a lot of political complications as it comes by the edge border of Mexico. The Colorado River is a heavily infrastructurally modified body of water. It's diverted into the Imperial Valley, which is where New Yorkers are eating their, where they get their salad from when they're eating salad in winter. You know, it's the kind of bread basket of a lot of America, but you can see the algae bloom in this over-salinated body of water and it previously was a Riviera, so it had this wonderful heyday, but now has these massive fish die-offs. These are tilapia fish that have all gone belly up and this is somewhat recent photograph of one of these motels. So you have a very complicated ecology, according to Odom, of this body of water and this is the state of California's proposals at the time. You see anything from 2.3 billion to 5.8 billion, mostly to treat it like it's a dead entity and how can we kind of let it slowly die and how can we generate a border that quarantines maybe one portion with water and one portion that will go dry? And this is because it's evaporating at a high rate and as it evaporates it gets more and more salinated. So the proposal here was to, rather than using the kind of agrarian, the land for cash and putting, dumping waste water into the body of water, which is what's making it salinated, could there be an exchange? Could you look at aquacultural opportunities of that body of water, possibly even water harvesting itself, as well as maybe curtail the Imperial Valley productivity? So could they collaborate? So this is a representation of this soft planning idea, which would be one kind of like, again, Odom's diagram where the flows or elements coming in and out of that body of water would actually relate to larger markets or larger economies like Canada's desire for salt in the winter or California's desire for fresh water, likewise fish farming and algae farming and so forth. And so could you make a sort of soft planning system that might have key characters that are actors on that stage? So this could be maybe one proposition. And hopefully what it might do is it might offer that if the first 100 years of productivity in that region was about these elements, butter, two fruits and vegetables, but that the next phase might be about other commodities, other desirables within a projective future. And number three, know your Umveld. So Jacob von Ukskul, an experimental biologist, characterizes the environment in two ways, that there is those that see the environment as it's actual, all of the elements that you see, which is in this top image here. So this is, let's say, the perspective of a bumblebee, that we might see the field as everything it encompasses, but a bee edits that landscape and sees only the things that are of interest to it. Let's say a flower and then stuff that's of no interest just becomes black in the background. And I think that this perspective on an environment or a landscape, kind of from who or from what perspective do you see that space? This is a project we're working on related to that idea of perspective. This is quite literally the most remote place in the world. This is the island of Tristan, Dakota, which is on a volcano about 1,500 miles from Cape Town in Africa. This is a RIBA competition last summer and three teams of four teams actually are moving forward in the second phase. And actually it's been slowed down a lot by just the difficulty of communicating with the people on Tristan, Dakota. There are about 250 people that live on the island, 17 families, I think there are 11 different last names you could have, something like that. The most populous names, they all have the last name, Glass, I don't know if Philip Glass is aware of that. Maybe that's his origins. And there's basically two plots on this island. It's a volcano. There is a portion of land called the patches, which is where they grow potatoes. And you can see stone walls enclosing these patches and each family owns a potato patch. And then there is the city, town, sorry. And what we were looking at is ways, and this was a question of how do we move forward in this century? They import a lot of building materials, they import some food, they've struggled with exporting rock lobster, that sort of thing. So we're looking at ways to merge landscape and their form of town construction by introducing more urban patches and that these would become experiments for solar energy and experiments for actually soil producing soil. So that's one thing that they struggle with. That's a reason that they only grow potatoes as they struggle with the kind of diversity in their soil. This is the site. They also asked for a new administrative center. This has been a very humbling project because as soon as we thought about everything literally has to be found locally. So we're working a lot with Gaby and Walls and thatch kind of modern interpretations of thatch roofs and this has been a very humbling design project to work on. And I'm gonna zip through this one, Play the World Game, Bucky Fuller's World Game, which really has to do with about imagining a kind of democratic space in which to play out haves and have nots and exchange systems. And this project of which there are too many images but this is a project we've been working on. It's a collection of case studies about the Canadian Arctic which looks at spatial practice in the north and different ways to define the north. We look at utilities. We look at, so sometimes utilities are above ground. We look at snow fences, the making of foundations and buildings. Just in a way, how have people that occupy and live in the Arctic, how have they had to adapt their environment or adapt their way of life according to these extremities? Even Inuit, my favorite one that I'll probably, the only one that I'll show is muscle harvesting in northern Quebec, which involves going below the ice as the tide recedes. So you would dig a hole in the ice. You would go below in the kind of cavernous space between ice and low tide water as it's retreated, collect muscles in this amazing kind of space between and go on your way. Last one is interact with your energy, which is the idea, and it was nice to see Iceland mentioned earlier with the alcoa plant. And many of you know the blue lagoon as well as significant tourist attraction, which is literally an accident and a man-made retrofitted accident that has silica and sulfur and has at least medicinal qualities. And this is a wonderful way to think of how we might interact with energy, that you participate in it, that you're active in it and you're engaged in it. So the last project is a proposal for the Land Art Generator initiative where we merged a parachute and a kite in Abu Dhabi and using the Shamal winds that you find in that region that you could have a, both a kind of almost like aerial writing, a series of these kites. This was a collaboration with Luis Culejas, Colombian landscape architect, and that you could get these kind of sky writings from this field of paracites, as we called them, and it would respond to different conditions based upon your appetite for interaction. So you've got the entrepreneur where you could donate money and you could get a free view from that paracite of the wonderful landscape. If you're a tourist, you could get a kind of periscope experience with that. If you're an adventurer, you could actually, after signing a waiver, of course, you could ride up on that kite. So this was maybe a alternate possibility for how we interact with our energy. So I just wanted to leave you with those five points on energy publics. Thank you very much. Thanks so much, David and Amal. I'm delighted to be here and I'm particularly delighted at my pairing with Mason. I would have loved to have been paired with anybody here today. I admire their work so much, but I've been following the work of Mason and Lola in lateral office for years. In addition, just what you presented, I feel like we have some great resonances on which to speak. And then the third thing that I was just thinking about as you spoke, I really was moved by your image of the TVA dams. Given that I've had many careers in my life and probably most of you know about a number of them, probably no one knows that I once ran a power plant outside of Nashville, Tennessee on the Cumberland River, which had its own hydroelectric dam. So I worked with TVA off and on in running that dam. So very odd types of connections on that. I'm gonna talk about location as well. But I'm gonna talk about location in a different way than it's typically talked about when we think about buildings, when we think about energy, when we think about products, when we think about materials. I'm gonna talk about location not as a spatial dimension, so not as a measure dimension. And I'm not gonna talk about it in relationship to an artifact.  So I'm gonna put forward three different ideas of how we might reconfigure what location is and sort of open up a discussion on it. And I'm gonna start with the most pragmatic of these reconfigurings on this. An idea of attribution. In this case, the idea of attribution has to do with even where we locate the discussion about embodied energy. I'm sure that pretty much everybody in here has seen this quote that comes from the Department of Energy. What I find interesting about this quote is even though it's their current statement about embodied energy, basically saying it's not important because it's small relative to operational energy. It was something that shows up first in 2011. They haven't updated its sense. It's still something that you see when you click on embodied energy for the Department of Energy. It's still this sort of like notice like we know what it is, but it's not really important. So compare it as well to, so the next two slides I'm gonna give you which are sort of different ways of accounting. This is something we've all seen before many, many times. We see the Sankey diagram coming out every single year. We've got our buildings which comprise the residential and the commercial aspects of it, then there's industrial and transportation. And however you add it up, whether it's 40% or more than 40%, that's residential, commercial. And then the buildings part in terms of operating industrial buildings goes into that as well. What's really interesting from this number is embodied energy doesn't get counted to buildings. All the embodied energy that we deal with gets counted in the industrial sector and not in the industrial sector part that's attributed to operating their buildings. Basically it's sort of all on the side over there. And as a result, one of the real key things to be concerned about is that industry has outpaced every other sector in terms of its efficiency, in terms of getting control of its emissions. And when you put embodied energy there and not in the building sector, you're not recognizing what its impacts are gonna be for the future. Particularly impacts when we start looking at what's happening worldwide in terms of the rate at which we're building. So the projections that are taking place right now for looking at worldwide energy use, misaccounting for the role in body energy is gonna play because it's being counted against a very different type of projection than the one that actually should be a piece of. And this is not sort of gone unnoticed. Working group three from the IPCC finally picked up on this in 2014 and put out this in one of their chapters. What it's looking at is all of the embodied energy in the world right now. So that's going to be, that's all of these bars here. So this is accounting for all of the carbon that's now an embodied energy throughout the world as it exists. This is where they expect it to go. So they expect all of this now to be filled in. That's their projections in terms of what's gonna be happening over until 2050 in terms of how much the world is going to be building. This will be the rest of the embodied energy that we're gonna be adding to it. So it's a stunning number. It's more than double. That's what is there right now. And if you go back to that Department of Energy number that we just looked at, the one that had said that embodying energy is only about 10 to 15% of operating energy of building. And of course you think about well, if operating energy of buildings is 40% then 10% of that would be 4%. What they're also showing in this chart is that they expect that future carbon emissions fully 30% of future carbon emissions will simply go into buildings and infrastructure. This is not a set of numbers that we have been talking about. We haven't been talking about them within the field of architecture. We haven't been talking about them beyond the field of architecture because they're showing up and not really being accounted for until this particular chart that came out from the IPCC on this. So this issue of attribution where even the discussion is located, how we're even accounting for this. This is a really critical one to raise the level of importance in this particular area. The next one is gonna be about contingency. What's contingent? What's constituent? And the way that we examine things and the way we compare things. And so much of the discussion about embodied energy has been looking at, for example, our construction materials, our wall materials, our structural materials looking for substitutes for those. We're treating the way that we do things now as constituent. We're not questioning the way that we do things now. We're sort of operating subordinate to the way that we do things now, but treating those as constituent. And I'm suggesting now that many of those things can be considered as much more contingent. And I'll give you an example of this. So this is a report that came out from the Department of Energy looking to the life cycle assessment of LED lighting products. And so if you think about the way that we've been approaching LED products, basically as a substitute for conventional lighting systems as a replacement in many cases for whether we're replacing incandescence directly on a smaller task level or replacing fluorescence and high intensity discharge in a larger building level. A very peculiar thing if you think about it because the whole way that we distribute light in buildings, particularly in commercial and industrial buildings, is based on a series of things that happened before 1939. There's no rationale for ceiling-based lighting in this day and age. And yet our lighting is still ceiling-based. And so we're worried about sort of replacing the individual lamps. We're not thinking about the fact that we actually have when we switch to something like LEDs, which have a very different infrastructure requirement than do anything that requires a ballast. When we start to switch to something like LED lamps, we're not reconsidering how differently we could light. Retreating what is constituent is the technology that exists becomes the standard or the benchmark that we compare to. I mean, I compare it to what's happening in the dashboard of a car. Being a mechanical engineer, in our world, the automotive industry is pretty low on the totem pole in terms of innovation, although in architecture we look up to it. But this is an example of actually taking LEDs, designing for what you see as opposed to the idea. Now that I'm at Yale, I always pick on Harvard. This is a library at Gund Hall that I'm sure a lot of you recognize. While I was a student there, it underwent this energy retrofit of all the lighting. This is back in the fluorescent days. And they came in. And as you can see, no matter where you are in the library, where a body can go, where a body can't go, you might be near windows. You might be deep in the bowels of the library. It might be circulation. It might be a stack. It's the same. This is a relentless lighting. None of it particularly useful. But this sort of idea of as the technology changes, it's not just a question of looking for a more efficient technology, not just a question of looking for a lower embodied energy technology, but also sort of that leap in terms of re-understanding how it is that we begin to use these different types of systems, what those opportunities are to break apart what we normally consider to be constituent on them. And this next slide is actually going to relate very, very closely to what Mason showed. And I had no idea he was going to be showing his camping project. So about a year ago, I really wanted to get back to some of my original doctoral research when I had a grant from DARPA to look at micro-machines. And so I sort of reinserted myself back into what was happening with the military in terms of micro-power last January. And I apologize for the slides. What they were willing to unclassify aren't particularly graphically pleasing. But I was really fascinated in the conversations in Washington on this that what they had been dealing with in terms of power, both power generation as well as power supply, so two different things actually, was that in Afghanistan, one out of three casualties involves fuel, delivering fuel or guarding fuel, one out of three casualties related to fuel. And then on top of it, the typical soldier carries 70 batteries in his or her backpack. So imagine 70 batteries for all of the different types of electronic equipment that they now carry. That would cover them for a 72-hour period, which is the maximum they felt and given the weight of batteries that they could never go longer than a 72-hour period on this. And so much of the discussions were taking place in terms of sort of restaging the way operations took place, finding more strategic relationships between things, sort of challenging the idea of where different types of base camps were, what a sort T would comprise.  But all of that is sort of like a design based on a minimum energy footprint in terms of deployment. So really understanding that deployment, it's totally a counterpart what Mason was showing in terms of his camp. Matter of fact, now that's my new example. I'm going to show that from now on. I'm not going to show this image anymore when I sort of talk about this idea of a strategic redeployment of how people move, where resources are located, how things are shared, what's collective, what has to be individual, what ends up being sort of like a sensor pod idea of certain types of footholds that are made that things operate from. But a really interesting idea on what has to be constituent, what has to be contingent on this. And the last thing ends up being a lot more personal for me. And it's sort of thinking about location but as a phenomenal location. Again, not as a dimension location but as a phenomenal location. In some ways it actually goes back, starts with the lighting example but moves from there. So we see a lot about the passive house a lot. And if you look at sort of these different analyses that take place in the passive house, and I'll show you two that are completely contradictory, the one from the passive house institute is trying to show how for just a teeny bit more embodied energy, you're going to get this dramatic reduction in operating energy. And that's what makes it such a great investment. And you come down here and it shows that it's a large amount of embodied energy that really doesn't pay off in the long run. Matter of fact, you're better off doing pretty much anything but according to this. So if you were to ask me which one is correct, I'd say I don't care. It doesn't matter to me which one is correct because I think they're asking the wrong question on this. And they're wrestling with the wrong question on this. If we think about how walls actually work, we have so much depended upon choosing the material. We think that performance of whether we're talking to performance of a technology or we're talking performance of a system or performance of a wall has everything to do with the material that we use. Has everything to do with the property of that material, what would be an intensive property of that material. But the way walls perform have to do with their context. So one of the things about the context of walls, and these are the ones that we'd find in all of our buildings, whether we're talking about a wall or we're actually talking about a human body here, is that, oops, sorry, back up a bit, is that this is a critical point here where that flow shifts from being laminar flow to becoming turbulent flow. So if we look at typical conditions that we might have on the interior, this is insulating, this is conductive. It's about a factor of 10 difference, one to the other. And so this material property that you might get in terms of conductivity is actually a very, very particular test done under particular conditions. So you can compare materials in those conditions one to the other because the test is standardized, but it doesn't tell you how it's going to perform. So for an example, a really easy way of thinking about this is that a strip window, a horizontal strip window, transfers half as much heat as the same window turned vertically because you're going to be affecting that zone in which that transition takes place. So it's not about the material per se, but it's about the context of the material that governs its behavior. So when I was doing my doctorate and I was taking additional courses in fluid mechanics, I was really taken by this one image and Triton's great book on physical fluid dynamics about these different ways of perturbing the boundary layer in order to initiate turbulence. And so I ended up doing a series of computational experiments where I took a variety of different devices, resistance wires, halogen lamps, and little, little tiny micro heat pumps to use them in order to adjust that heat transfer. So we're looking at a section right now. And you can barely see the little tiny, in this case, they were little, little tiny resistance wires that are located in the center in order to disrupt a boundary layer and start to create different kinds of conditions in here. But the whole point of this work was to show you can go and you can build yourself a really thick wall or you can take a thin wall and actually control the behavior of the wall with very small, very strategic, very thoughtful types of interventions. So this is where I'm going to be concluding on this in that what I became very interested in then from this particular work was realizing that if we look at the whole reason we build and thinking about it from, even starting from the tent on, but thinking about it from shelter, to security, to dealing with climate control, to dealing with visual control, all of the different things that we demand from our buildings are really all things that operate here. We're trying to do something for the human body. We're trying to manipulate one of the phenomenological behaviors in order to do that. What it means is that when we think about location, we're really thinking about location of our intervention taking place in between the two, understanding the physical phenomena in our context, understanding how we sort of want to manipulate that phenomena, knowing how we want to interact with human physiology and of course interacting with human physiology. In some cases, if we're dealing with our sense of comfort or seeing something, we're also interacting with perception. But the actual place of intervention and however one might intervene, whether it's with a material intervention or some other type of intervention, it actually happens in between those two. So real idea terms are a real challenge to the idea that location is automatically associated with the building artifact. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. That was really nice. And actually I think you sort of updated Rainer Bannam's campfire there with your last image. I feel like I need to supplant that kind of notion despite its simplicity. I feel like it's a more contemporary addition that you have there in terms of the site, the idea of location between those perception and behaviors. I mean, it fits within that same type of I think thematic framework. It might be manifest in a different way but it fits within that framework. It's just that I think sometimes our framework is so co-opted by the material artifact that we want to imbue authority into the material artifacts that we make and that's why we want the super envelope. This is why we make these decisions around those types of things. Yet conceptually we get that. We get the idea of the intervention. This is why I'm so interested in your propositions and your work because for a long time I also feel besides being very material-centric we're very property-centric. And so when we talk about something like a net zero energy building it's actually quite a ludicrous idea if you think about it from an energy standpoint, if you think about it from a thermodynamic standpoint, I mean you're basically taking a unit of private property and thinking that's an appropriate place to do an energy balance. And I was really impressed by the way that you're starting to sort of erode that idea of property as being to determine it both in terms of the drilling down, the reaching up, but also sort of like this fluidity of where even that line is drawn. And for me I'm fascinated by this and I'm really interested that we do this but I don't know how. And I think that's my question for you is that how do we find a way, given the fact that we ultimately will implement according to material interventions and we're going to implement according to property, how do we instead think in these other terms yet understand that we're gonna implement in these ways? Yeah, I mean property determines a lot certainly in an urban environment. We're working on a project right now in the Arctic actually in the Canadian North for an elder care facility. It'll be about 55 to 70 beds. And there was a point, and so the city, the city of Ocalae owns property and has site and then there is Inuit owned lands. There are lands that are kind of owned by no one. In fact actually Inuit people just voted to or are considering whether to vote on whether there was an idea of ownership at all. But a portion because of the size of the building it actually has to spill over the property line between what might be ownable property into territory that's really used for hunting and so forth. So we're now looking at that property line and it's a collaboration between owners in some ways to use this to make an exception to this rule. And this has been complicated but I think it does get at some of these questions about how my new notions of land use and land ownership actually help foster perceptions about location and even the kind of basket, the catchment area or the basket of that structure. But I think you're right on in terms of ideas about like when it hits the physical components there's I think a lot of misunderstandings. I was gonna ask you though, do you think that, I don't know if we have time for anymore, but just a quick question was that do you think that we are in our kind of physical world and these last images you show are very, sometimes microscopic or sometimes are about the invisible. Often your work is in your studies even that NASA before was often about the invisibles. Is it, do you think we are accurately approaching ways to represent the invisible to make it tangible to those that for which that normally is a difficult thing to understand architecturally speaking? When you look at, let's say for example, HVAC systems, these are boring but very conventional and common place systems, but ways to understand rooms or buildings or heat emissions, where are we in that? Yeah, I think that's an incredible challenge for the field of architecture in terms of dealing with this, that this is part of how we're gonna move forward in terms of representational systems are beginning to deal with these things in many ways it takes us back to the keynote this morning in that I'm trying to remember exactly what you said but something about the fact that we think we know how things work except it's almost always completely the opposite. When it comes to things that are not tangible, our assumptions are almost always wrong. We think our senses tell us what's going on, they're actually sensing our body responding to something but they're not sensing what's around them. Even our eyes are not particularly good at reading what's around us, it's really quite fascinating. So I think it's actually one of the many things that falls within our field as an opportunity to lead the world and it is finding the different ways that we can communicate and visualize what it is that's not visualizable right now in order to teach others what's going on out there because these are where these decisions are being made and what happens when we aren't able to visualize these behaviors or these phenomena we fall back on what we know and it's falling back on what we know which has kept us I think so much mired in let's just say particularly when it deals with building technologies really old archaic technologies that we still depend on. Thanks, I was curious about, you had mentioned a sort of lack of imagination when it comes to the planning of the use of lighting and I was wondering if you thought about or if you think people are focusing at all on the future of driverless cars which really are gonna happen and I think are going to profoundly alter the physical space we live in and I don't see that much or hear that much about people. People will talk about it like I'd love for my mom to not have to drive, that kind of thing but it will be a kind of revolutionary advance and it isn't gonna be that long from now. I was just wondering. I would say for me I haven't even thought about it other than for my own pleasure, you know and my dream of having a driverless car but I hadn't really thought about it in this relationship and actually that's an intriguing example of this sort of disconnect of the visual system from a series of actions that one takes. It's actually a fantastic model for us to be thinking about in that standpoint so I can't answer the question in terms of have I done anything like this and I don't know if you have. I've seen a few thesis projects but yeah and I think even other notions of collective Uber and other kinds of collective behaviors or for example. Right. Yeah, the urban artifacts that come with that that may disappear. Yeah, I don't know how that would change a place like Houston. But it is a great model for sort of trying to understand this bodily disconnect we have from a series of environmental and environmental I'm using that even yet another definition of yours. I mean, that which surrounds us in terms of physical phenomena is a great model for studying that. One or two. Sorry, I just had a brief question based Michelle on your presentation. We all know that things like our values are generalized ideal values that may or may not have anything to do with this but they're extremely useful in the real commercial world of pushing forward a particular agenda. The kind of bespoke careful contextualized analysis that you're talking about especially things like fluid dynamics are much more difficult to translate into that kind of a context. How do you see that bridge being made? That's a really big question and it also I think I'm at that age where my dreams get smaller all the time. Like I said, I'm just very excited about the driverless car. I hope it happens before I die. But certainly when I did that work 20 years ago I thought it was gonna happen. Yet even the simulation tools that I used back then are not available in the architecture world which are kind of sad if you think about it. That we have tools that look just like that but aren't acting at that particular level and depth of detail. And so I think I've really refined where I've been going in terms of it's going back to this idea of being strategic. So there's a sense of being strategic in terms of phenomena and really understanding how you wanna intervene on phenomena but there's also a sense of being strategic and this is sort of where I am now in terms of what is no longer, I'm no longer interested in what's optimal. I'm interested in what's possible and sort of finding what the ideal point of strategic possibility and that possibility might be in terms of financially, it's reasonable, something that could be deployable in the poorest sectors of society. What are those types of strategic operations? So the modeling of it or the thinking of it might exist in one realm but then how do you pull from that to use it to ask questions about what you do in everyday life? And I'd say I'm in that range now as opposed to thinking that we're actually gonna make big inroads in terms of the way that we really think about our buildings. I wanted to just ask, maybe I'll ask Mason this question but it's pretty interesting the idea of energy publics because the very idea of the public or a public has been sort of under attack and many people have thought that it's not possible to kind of formulate a singular audience or public. So maybe you could just speculate, I think it's pretty exciting to think about energy publics and what might be some of the characteristics? You're with the blue lagoon, you're kind of hinting on some kind of new sensual engagement or something that's corporeal and I'm wondering if you could, or collective in some way, could you muse about that a little bit? Really quickly, a great question, Sheila. I was very influenced by the book Massive Change when it came out that Bruce Maude worked on. It was kind of a early internet book where it's a little schizophrenic to look at but I think it collects and I think the exhibition also collected a lot of really inspiring possibilities. It was structured by military, economics, et cetera. And I think for me the premise, and it probably had driverless cars in it somewhere in one of the chapters about mobility, let's say. But what really inspired me about that book was the idea that in order to create or in order to foster considerable change is that we shouldn't underestimate the possibility of seduction in that and the possibility of it to be inspiring. So let's take cars, for example, would we all want to buy an eco car? Sure we would, would we want to buy it more if it was a little streamlined, maybe it was red? I mean, seems superficial, but I think that the possibility versus it to look green. So I don't, just generally speaking, I think the possibility of Massive Change can be further enhanced and supported by I think some of the wonderful images like that Blaine showed in projects and in your work as well and much of the work that we'll see today that says that it's not just about showing that the numbers work to prove it in a spreadsheet but really to complement that with something inspiring that we haven't seen before and that's what really generates, I think, future possibilities in architecture. So subscribe to that mode of thinking. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you.