Aloha and welcome to another edition of Business in Hawai'i. I'm Deila and Yanagita, and we are broadcasting live from the ThinkTech studios in downtown Honolulu. If you want to tune in live, we are at www.thinktechhawaii.com. You can sign up to get on our mailing list there as well. The theme of Business in Hawai'i is to bring you stories of local businesses by local people, and our guests share with us their journey to building successful businesses in what's known as a sometimes challenging environment. In the ThinkTech studios today are Shadler College of Business Executive MBA candidates Lee Wang, Tricia Yamato, and Kaylee Tangon. Welcome to the show, guys. Thanks for having us. Thank you. One of the things that we are so passionate about here is small business, entrepreneurship, and that's exactly where you guys are. And so I do know that as part of your executive MBA journey, it's supposed to result in some sort of large project, and we definitely want to talk about that today. But what we want to do to start is I want to hear about each one of you as individuals and how you got to the executive MBA program and why. So feel free to start. Okay. I'm Tricia Yamato, an executive MBA student, and I currently work at Bank of Hawai'i as a senior internal auditor. But my path to the executive MBA program was basically, as an undergraduate, I didn't get a very broad business experience or business background, and so I just decided to pursue the program just to get that more broader background. I'm Lee Wang. I'm the owner of a small business called Lucy's Lab Creamery, and I'm also a real estate broker at Locations and do project sales for Howard Hughes. I have my hand in a few different areas, and along the same lines as Tricia, I want to kind of round out my knowledge, getting the firsthand hands-on experience of running a small business definitely will teach you some things, but to get a more well-rounded business acumen, I want to formalize it with MBA, so that's kind of what got me into the Shidler. Nice. Okay. And pretty much the same story. I currently work for an environmental consulting agency in their program project controls. So I'm just kind of starting off my experience right now. So I thought that having an MBA would open more opportunities for me in the future and get to learn a lot from my classmates as well, so it's really great. So what I do understand is you're likely the youngest student of the executive MBA program, which is amazing, so there's certain criteria to get into the executive MBA program because Shidler also has a regular MBA program. Tell me about that. Tell me about the difference between the executive MBA program and your traditional. Oh, so for the executive program, it's more catered for full-time working professionals, and so the schedule, the class schedule kind of allows you to work full-time while still taking your classes, so we have night classes and classes on the weekend to accommodate everyone's working work schedule. And so it's helpful because you're able to, depending on your position, be able to apply what you're learning in the classroom directly into your professional life, so it's kind of a win-win situation in that sense. So do you find that you're able to apply the principles that you're learning in your program back to your full-time jobs? Definitely. I mean, every day, we're, I mean, we have a breadth of classwork that kind of puts us to the test, but I mean, it's different areas, leadership, one-on-one classes we're taking right now is real estate, and obviously that applies in my industry, but even outside of that strategy working with, you know, in your industry for HR, we're putting, I'm putting that to practice both in the real estate side as well as the lucy side, so yeah, every day we're applying it, a real life style. You said that you are working full-time in the environmental space. How are you able to apply some of the principles that you're learning in what you do? So for me, I work more in like the financial and project controls, so we do a lot of budgeting and finance, which has been really helpful, like since we've been learning a lot about that. It's just like, I think taking an introspective look at ourselves, too, is when our leadership class is what we've been learning about lately, and I think that's been like really helpful in my growth at work and learning how to work with people and more people or delegating. It's been really helpful, I think. Does it help to have the practical experience? I would say so. The experience is the key differentiator between the regular MBA program and the executive. I think there is a requirement of three to five years of work experience, so it's helpful, too, in the group dynamics because you're working with people that have a real life experience of both good and bad and how to improve, and those improvements are what is brought to group projects like ours, so it makes it fun, dynamic, and very, very rewarding. Very incubator. It is. Right? So because it's a requirement to have three to five years work experience, probably talking about the failures is probably more valuable than talking about all of the successes. Have you had classmates where you share those types of experiences? Definitely. We learn from each other, I think, a lot almost as much as the professors themselves because there's so many different backgrounds. We have CEOs, we have people in retail, hotel industry, medical, airlines, everything. So the diversity definitely helps to broaden our scope. Sounds like a great opportunity to ask some questions about different industries that you've always wanted to ask, just didn't have the resource, I want to know about the format of the program because I think you folks are on the tail end, is that correct? Okay, you're supposed to be smiling about that, so the culmination of your journey ends in a project. Is that correct? Mm-hmm. Tell me about the project. What's the assignment? So it's called the practicum and basically you can kind of tailor it to what you're interested in. And so I guess usually most people end up doing a consulting project for a local profit or non-profit organization, so depending on the needs of the organization, the professors want us to use our skills that we've acquired throughout the program to be able to fulfill the needs of the organization, whether it be like marketing research or perhaps like if they're going to launch a new product, will it like be successful in the local market? So just like you can do a wide variety of things, but for our group at least, we decided to go more the entrepreneurial route by I guess testing out a new business idea and seeing if it will be viable in the marketplace, I guess. Are there a lot of groups that are standing up businesses? I think we're the only one. We're the only one that's doing it. That's amazing. So it's not theoretical, right? You actually have to go out and start up this business. Yeah. Last semester we had an entrepreneurial class that basically taught all the theoretical and now a matter of execution and putting it into practice as well. Harder than they made it sound. So you folks decided to go the entrepreneurial route and to start up a business. How do you arrive at what kind of business you're going to start? Just throw some ideas and see what sticks to the wall. It obviously has to have a model that can financially pull itself up in the end. But it also has to have an element of application to our personal lives and a value that a consumer will find value in and put their dollar forth to. I think this is a concept that everybody can kind of relate to.  And it's no different than that. But it's just kind of running them through a process of how credible is the idea? What's the longevity of it? And what is it going to take to execute?  Well, what seems challenging to me about that is you don't have an infinite amount of time to start up this business, right?  I guess for the purposes of our, I guess our scope that we presented to our professor was just basically run with the idea and then also just see if there's any traction. And just basically we used kind of the lean startup method. So we kind of developed a minimal viable product, very minimal. But just to put it out to potential consumers and see if they were actually interested just by getting their feedback. And so that's, we're not, I guess, transacting money per se, but we're just gauging their interest to see if we were to launch it further. Would people be willing to pay for that value that they see in the product? Has the journey been tough? It's been interesting. I'm trying to decode that. It's been tough, yeah. I think anything that's gonna be worth your time is gonna have to go through the mud. And we've been going through the mud, but I think at the very least, I want to get the experience for a group. Whether it was gonna be successful or be a failure, the whole going through the motions, going through the process is what was important. And the context of this being simply a class assignment, lends itself to the option of, it doesn't work out and that's okay. Well, the whole purpose is mainly to learn versus in the real world, if you do a startup, people have put some money in there and they're looking for results and the constraints are totally different. So this allows us to grow from it regardless of the end product. I think another thing too that would take away from this would be being like a vision come into fruition. It's like he had the idea to actually execute and to actually put something out there through different stories. And it takes a lot of hard work and just a lot of coordination to just get it started from a vision to making it something real. I think that we all want to hear about what you folks decided on in terms of what that venture was exactly. We're gonna go to a break and when we come back, let's talk about that startup because I'm really excited to hear about it and how it's going. We will see you back here shortly right after that break. This is Business in Hawaii. Aloha, this is Winston Welch. I am your host of Out and About where every other week, Mondays at three, we explore a variety of topics in our city, state, nation and world. And events, organizations, the people that fuel them. It's a really interesting show. We welcome you to tune in and we welcome your suggestions for shows. You got a lot of them out there and we have an awesome studio here where we can get your ideas out as well. So I look forward to you tuning in every other week where we've got some great guests and great topics. You're gonna learn a lot. You're gonna come away inspired like I do. So I'll see you every other week here at three o'clock on Monday afternoon. Aloha. Aloha. I'm Lauren Pear. I'm a host here at Think Tech Hawaii. A digital media company serving the people of Hawaii. We provide a video platform for citizen journalists to raise public awareness in Hawaii. We are a Hawaii nonprofit that depends on the generosity of its supporters to keep on going. We'd be grateful if you'd go to thinktechhawaii.com and make a donation to support us now. Thanks so much. Welcome back to Business in Hawaii. Joining us today are entrepreneurs and executive MBA candidates, Lee Wang, Trisha Yamato, and Kaylee Tengon. When we went to break, we were talking about the practicum project that you folks are going to end your executive MBA program with and that you actually decided to launch a business as part of an entrepreneur experience. So I'm dying to know what that business is. Please just tell us all about it and how it's been going. So our concept is called five friends dating. So it's basically a group dating concept where you have five guys and five girls just hanging out and get to know each other. To participate, each participant has to come with at least one person that they know, whether it's a friend, co-worker, classmate, and so on. They stay there for an hour, hang out. And the one rule to this group date is that there's no asking for contact information. So the whole awkwardness of, as a guy, do I ask? Do I not? How do I ask? How do I approach this? Is that the window? And the awkwardness for the girls, do I say yes? Do I not? Do I know this guy well enough? How do I turn him down? It's all, it takes a lot of, exactly. Yeah, so people can really just concentrate on just being there, getting to know the other person and being in the moment. And unlike group dating, unlike speed dating where you pair off one by one, this one you're encouraged to get to know everybody as a group. I don't like you at a house party. So as part of discovering what it is that you folks wanted to do, how did you wander upon, well, we're gonna do something in the dating space. Is that organic? What happens? How does that happen? So as part of last summer, we took part in the Asia Field Study Program, where we traveled to Japan, China, Vietnam to visit different businesses in the different countries. But one of the things we realized in Japan, they have a group dating concept, or they have the group dating concept, Gokwong, which is basically what we're trying to bring from Japan to the US. And I think it originated just because in Japanese culture, it's difficult to get to know, or people are very shy and reserved. And so by being together with people that you're familiar with, you can kind of open up and be on a different side of yourself that you may not be able to, if you're one-on-one with someone. So that's the kind of concept we wanted to bring back to Hawaii and see if people would be interested in trying out. Yeah. It kind of lends itself to some of the feedback we've been getting to, because one of the things we hear a lot is after you go to college and you graduate, it's really hard to get out there and meet people. 15, 20 years ago, you're at a bar and you go walk up to somebody and talk to a stranger, and nowadays it seems a little bit awkward to do that. And so having a format where it's totally OK to just talk to random strangers and it's a safe space for everyone, maybe in today's society, it's more of a necessity that we create that environment. So you discovered the need here for something like that. Yeah. You've all looked. I would say so. Well, of course, we've all been single, so we don't relate. I think because given I feel a lot of the current online dating apps and websites, a lot of it encourages communication via text or emails and online versus just meeting people offline and being able to see people face to face and getting to know their personality. Yeah, or in a group setting. Yeah, it kind of takes away that pressure. The one-on-one, so I mean, you could swipe left and right all you want. It's like really nice, I think, to just have that almost old school, like you're meeting somebody in a group of friends. I mean, my parents always used to say the best way to meet people is through your friends, probably, because they're kind of most likely like you. So you can bring out the best of each other when you're hanging out together. So I think that was basically the concept. So do you have any takers? Yeah, our first group date was actually last week. And it was very interesting. There were no connections made, but the feedback was that the format was really conducive to having fun. So our test daters last week, the date lasts an hour. They ended up, even though they didn't make no connection, they ended up just having fun and staying and hanging out for about three hours. So after the hour is up, you're free to leave or you're free to stay and hang out and do whatever you want. And they chose to hang out. And I think that kind of speaks to the format. Once you have to get to know a person face to face, you'll see that there's more to it than just their online profile and their pictures. So did you guys go along? I think for this first date, we observed from afar just to see how the interaction was going, just to see if we could read people's reactions and see how the flow of conversation was going. And just to make sure that it was going as smoothly as it could possibly go, I guess. So part of the minimum viable product or the lean startup model that Trish had mentioned to you before the break is that each time we're just trying to learn from what we did well, what we can improve on, and then the next week, give a better product to the consumer. And the more times we can do this, hopefully by the end, we have something that's just finished, ready to go, and people will enjoy to max. So is this the incubator phase of the project where you're gathering that data? I would say so right now. But I think we're going to do a couple more trials just to see how it runs. Because it depends on the different mix of the groups and how it flows. I think that'll play into effect, too. But so far, yeah, we're just collecting all the data and seeing how it's going to go from there.  That was the interesting part. So I think at first, we all tried to reach out to our friends, to our colleagues, basically our classmates, anyone that we knew that like, hey, you single, you have a single friend. Basically, we pitched them our idea and then had them tell their friends, too, if they had any. And then once we realized, you know, we got to grow our pool a little bit more. We actually went out to do market research, I guess you could say, to different bars. And I just went up to people and said, gave our pitch and see if they were interested. And majority of the time, they're pretty receptive. Or they'd be like, hey, I have friends that I'm going to start signing up. These are strangers at bars. Yeah, really. How much is someone willing to pay for questions? Trini, you did the surveys, so. I think for our preliminary date, it seemed like people are at least willing to pay like five to ten dollars to participate. So, yeah, I guess, yeah, a good starting point for now, at least. It's very, like, because a lot of the feedback we got was kind of limited because of our participant pool. And so they wanted a better refinement of the matching process. But because we're kind of constrained by who we have available at that, who's available for that day or date and time, it's kind of difficult. So we still need to work on expanding our user pool or user base, I guess. It kind of speaks to the five to ten dollars for a group of five people versus your alternatives are, if I take somebody out on a date, first 15, 30 minutes, I have a good sense of that person and whether I want to go on a second date. But I'm not going to pick up and get out of there after 15 minutes. So we stay, have a few drinks or dinner or whatever it may be. And I end up, you know, two hours have gone by, I've spent 40 or 50 dollars. And the commitment to that one person is fairly significant, right, as far as monetarily and time wise versus this alternative gives is a lot of options for very little commitment and just the possibility of having it go somewhere else, you know, I think that's kind of why we see that result of five to ten dollars. It's, it's a very good alternative to, to sitting on your phone and swiping left and right with no, a very little interaction, get to that point of real life based conversation. So it launches from a website? So eventually we'd like to see it launch from an actual app. But before we take the time and money to invest into programming and doing that, the part of the lean startup that Tricia mentioned is testing to see if people will, will give you, give you money if it wasn't an app. And so that's really what we're testing. We're doing everything by via text. So it's, it's very labor intensive right now on our part, but a lot cheaper than developing an app at this point. So if people that are willing to pay for it, then it makes sense to put the money. So is there an algorithm to matching people? Yeah, there is, but it's really constrained upon our, the user base, obviously, the less the smaller the user base, then it's harder to find that great plethora of participants that, you know, that one true love throughout that maze of participants. But our next step is to try and grow that database, have more choices for everyone. So I do know that you said that the project ends in four weeks. So where does it end? Or does it not end? Oh, I guess for now, I mean, for the project's purpose, based on our two dates that we have and the feedback that we receive, we'll kind of extrapolate to see like what works and what doesn't work. And then kind of come to overall conclusion as to whether it like it might be viable or not. But I think in the future, we, yeah, we do try, we would like to like continue our efforts to like make, I guess, try to see if we could grow the user base and then potentially try to see if we can make an app out of it and then go from there, I guess. Very exciting. We have about two minutes left. What do you want to say about five guys dating or five friends dating? Five friends dating. We might catch you. That's a pretty good one. Five guys dating. It's perfect. Murder's in dates. It's perfect. It's not going to, I don't think it's going to replace the current state of online dating. Dating is obviously different now than it was five, 10, 15, 20 years ago. And, you know, some of the research we've seen, people are getting married and getting in through long-term relationships later in life, and it has a double-edged effect. One is that when you do get to that point, you have a lot more compatibility and you have a better chance of deep, true happiness. And this is supposed to be kind of like an alternative to getting online dating offline and getting that in-person interaction sooner rather than later. Sometimes a lot of choices, you have information paralysis and just meeting people and getting the in-person connection helps to move you forward. Maybe just pushing outside of your comfort zone, I think, to, you know, most people will find that they had a great time to do it. Is there a way that folks can reach out to you if they're interested? Do you want to give them your phone number? Just kidding. It would be a different dating on a different level. Our website is 5FriendsDating.com. They have a contact form for inquiries or sign-ups. It's all up on there. Fantastic. I am so excited to continue following 5FriendsDating and to see how that does change the landscape of dating. But thank you so much for your time. Congratulations on heading into the home stretch of your programs and I'm sure that as entrepreneurs, you folks will do great things and maybe break into the whole dating-matching industry. Thanks for having us. Unfortunately, we are out of time. I want to thank Lee, Trisha, and Kaylee for joining us today. A very big thank you to our amazing production staff here in the ThinkTech studio. If you would like to be a guest on our show, please feel free to email your information to shows at ThinkTechHawaii.com. Business in Hawaii airs every Thursday at 2 p.m. And we are looking forward to seeing you back here next week.


1. Christine Grahame To ask the Scottish Government what recent discussions it has had with NHS Borders and NHS Lothian. Can I say both ministers and Government officials meet regularly with leadership of all NHS boards, including national health service technical service, loddian and national health service boarders to discuss a range of matters, but it won't be of any surprise at all to Christine Graham and other members that the most recent discussions have focused on the extreme winter pressures that both boards have been facing. Thank you very much. Thank you, cabinet secretary, for his answer, with reference to extreme winter pressures. Of course, I welcome the announcement of £8 million for interim social care beds to ease pressure on our hospitals, and I've noticed that we've been shared between health and social care partnerships. So can I ask the cabinet secretary when we will hear progress about the division of this money between the partnerships, particularly those serving the Rodden South, Tweedale and Lauderdale, which is my constituency, which of course includes both NHS Lothian and NHS Borders? I can say that currently there's good work being done by both NHS Lothian and NHS Borders on the issue of delayed discharge. To answer her question directly, as the First Minister said earlier this week, we'll get a further update at SCORE, which she will be chairing tomorrow, and of course I'll find an appropriate way to update the member in that respect. But it is fair to say that the additional 300 beds, interim care beds that announced last week, that is on top of the 600 interim care beds that are already being used, and many of those will be in Lothian and in Borders, but it's so important that we do everything we possibly can in facilitating help our local partners to do everything they can to get those who are in hospital, who are clinically safe to be discharged, back home, because of course ultimately it is better for the individual too. So we will get an update tomorrow at SCORE. I thank you, Presiding Officer.  She lay on a hardwood floor in a lot of pain for five hours for an ambulance to arrive. Her daughter repeatedly called for an update and was told not to move her mother, who was crying in pain, nor give her anything to drink. When the paramedics finally arrived, she was transferred to Edinburgh and Firmary for an operation for two severe breaks. Minister, these ambulance and subsequent treatment waits are inhumane, so will the SNP Government back our plan and introduce new crisis maximum waiting times and finally get a grip on the horrific waiting times across our NHS? What I would say, of course, any situation as Craig Hoy has described, where anybody gets a substandard level of service that we would expect collectively across this chamber, then I apologise for that and deeply regretful. Of course, if Craig Hoy wishes to follow up with me, I'll ensure that the Scottish Ambulance Service appropriately investigate. I'm sure he understands, I know he does, that particularly the few weeks during the festive period in the first week of January were incredibly difficult, probably the most difficult that the ambulance service has provided. I have looked at the plans that the Conservatives have brought forward. I don't see any detail, I don't see how just simply saying that there must be a 15-minute turnaround time in place actually means that that is the case. In fact, they have many similar schemes in England, but actually you'll see that ambulance is unfortunately a cure-up outside NHS Trust in England too. We're taking a range of measures to try to improve the turnaround time for ambulances, so they're not stacked outside of hospitals and that they get back out on the road and respond as quickly as possible. I have to say, seeing the most recent data from the Scottish Ambulance Service, there certainly has been improvement, particularly among those most urgent immediate life-threatening calls, but I'm happy to keep the member updated in that respect. Question 2, Brian Whittle. Thank you, Presiding Officer. To ask the Scottish Government what assessment that has made of the role of local government services in improving public health and wellbeing. We recognise the important role of local government services in improving public health and wellbeing in order to ensure that people in Scotland live more years in good health. We know that prevention is key in the building blocks of good health and wellbeing, including good education, jobs, housing and communities, all of which local government services contribute to. In recognition of that, Public Health Scotland is jointly sponsored by COSLA and the Scottish Government with the aim of improving population health and combating health inequalities and their wider causes. Brian Whittle. I thank the minister for that answer. I know that he recognises that many of the solutions to Scotland's poor health record sit outside of the NHS, predominantly in council-funded community activities. Someone of the met, the minister recognises that the council financial settlement that the Government has given them is requiring councils to slash the very services that he advocates, and that will appear in the NHS poor health ledger increasing the pressure on the NHS. We have listened to councils and are increasing the resources available to local government by over £570 million in the next financial year. Local authorities also have a range of revenue-raising powers that are not available to other public services, including newly devolved powers over empty property rates relief. I agree with Mr Whittle that it would be great if there was more money available for all of our public services. I would ask him to do what the Scottish Government has done and appeal to the Treasury to loosen the purse strings, to stop austerity and to invest in our public services. Across the country, including SNP-run councils, they are at breaking point due to the very cuts that have just been discussed, made year on year on local government budgets. The minister cannot seriously expect councils to continue playing their pivotal role in improving public health and wellbeing through the provision of services such as green space, sports facilities and wider support initiatives if they continue to lose money. Will the minister commit to me today to speaking to the First Minister and Finance Secretary and ask them to listen to local government leaders, including SNP leaders, who are clearly saying that, without support from the Scottish Government, those essential services cannot be delivered? As I said in my answer to Mr Whittle, the Government has listened to local authorities to local government. That is why the resources available will increase by over £578 million in the next financial year. I would like that to be more, as would the First Minister and the Finance Secretary, but we work within a fixed budget. We have no borrowing powers, as Ms Mocken is well aware. It would be far better if austerity were to go and HM Treasury were actually to provide and resource public services in Scotland and right across these islands. That would be better for all. It would lead to better outcomes for all, but unfortunately what we have is a Tory Government that seems unwilling to invest in our public services. To ask the Scottish Government whether it will provide an update on the progress of the Bearns Hoos for young people within the justice system. A national Bearns Hoos governance group has been established and extensive engagement with key partners carried out. The first national standards for Bearns Hoos will be published this spring. We are developing a phrased approach to implementation and will further publish information in the coming months, along with a progress report on our Bearns Hoos project plan. We are also progressing the roll-out of the Scottish child interview model for joint investigative interviews, which will be a cornerstone of the Bearns Hoos approach to justice in Scotland. Can the minister describe the benefits of the Bearns Hoos system and detail what emerging practice developments in line with other European models will be used when creating this system, as well as its collaborative approach in justice health and children's services? Like myself, I know that Rona Mackay has a keen awareness of adverse childhood experiences. The Bearns Hoos represents a child-centred approach to delivering justice care and recovery for children who have experienced trauma. Services will be co-located, reducing the need for multiple interviews by different agencies in different locations, which we know can be re-traumatising. The national standards are based on the European promise quality standards and, as recent associate members of their Bearns Hoos network, we now have access to learning from existing best practice across member countries. Alongside partners, we will continue to draw on relevant best practice emerging in Scotland, including the Scottish child interview model, which continues to roll out at pace. To ask the Scottish Government what it is doing to help recovery from adverse childhood experiences. We are taking a wide range of actions to prevent and mitigate the negative impact of ACEs and trauma and support the health, wellbeing and resilience of all those affected. That includes work to tackle harmful drug and alcohol use, address poverty, support mental health and reduce inequalities. The Scottish Government and COSLA have a joint ambition to develop trauma-informed and trauma-responsive workforces and services across Scotland. Since 2018, we have invested more than £6 million in a national trauma training programme. Current work is under way to support the development of trauma-informed approaches and services and settings, including in education, maternity and social work, and to support care experience children and young people. I thank the minister for that very comprehensive answer. I would like to ask a further question. Many care experience children going into adulthood will have adverse childhood experiences and will still need support. Can the minister outline how it is delivering on the promise and specifically how supporting to early adulthood is being developed? I welcome that question from Ms Martin. The Scottish Government is committed to addressing the intergenerational impact of adverse childhood experiences and trauma, and we are providing a range of support to parents, carers, children and families to help to better prevent ACEs from happening. There is a wide range of work going on. The Government is committed to delivering the promise and to ensure that we do better for care experience young people. We have to recognise that that might involve help throughout their lives. To show how important the Government sees the trauma-informed approach— Briefly, minister. In November, the Deputy First Minister led a valuable session with ministers on trauma awareness and how best to support those affected. To ask the Scottish Government what recent discussions it has had with North Lanarkshire Council regarding a new-build Gartcosh primary. We have been in regular contact with North Lanarkshire Council regarding a replacement for Gartcosh primary school. I thank the cabinet secretary for that response. I was delighted to hear the news last week, indeed just a day or so after I launched this question, that NLC have now identified landing Gartcosh on which to build the school. I fully welcome that statement from the council and I agree with him that it is a major step forward. The question of a new school has been around for some time, and it really needs to happen at the earliest opportunity. The current Gartcosh primary is 110 years old this year and is not fit for modern teaching. In addition, following massive growth in the population in the whole area, it is very much not able to deal with the current or future capacity. Sorry, Presiding Officer. That said, teachers, pupils and the parent council are doing excellent work at the school and against these challenges and circumstances. Mr MacGregor, can I have a question, please? Yes. Will the cabinet secretary join me in praising the work of the school community and will she commit to working with me in North Lanarkshire Council to ensure that the new build that this community sold? Mr MacGregor, thank you, Mr MacGregor. Mr Llywydd, I am sure that we all appreciate Fulton MacGregor's enthusiasm and passion for an issue that he has been working on for some time. I would very much like to take this opportunity to praise the continued work of Mr MacGregor and the continued work of Gartcrush school community. My officials will absolutely keep in close contact with the council to ensure that a new build at Gartcrush primary is delivered as soon as possible. To ask the Scottish Government what recent engagement it has had with community housing enablers such as the community's housing trust in the Highlands and Islands region to support the delivery of its commitments regarding rural homes. Cabinet Secretary, Shona Robison. The Scottish Government regularly meets with community housing enablers. In September, I met the community housing trust in South of Scotland community housing and recognised the vital work that is carried out by those organisations in supporting communities to deliver more affordable homes in rural and island communities. I am keen for that to continue. We have also been giving consideration to the funding arrangements of community housing trust to ensure that they can continue to support the delivery of rural homes as part of our work to develop a remote rural and island housing action plan. I thank the cabinet secretary for that response. The bute house agreement commits the Scottish Government to ensuring community housing trusts are adequately funded so that they can support the delivery of our enhanced rural home building plans. The community's housing trust currently has a pipeline of 600 projects, 150 of which are at risk due to the lack of capacity. What more can the Scottish Government do to ensure that trusts have the long-term support that they need to deliver on those opportunities to increase the number of rural homes? In particular, timescale is of importance here. The Scottish Government remains very keen to work with communities housing trusts to ensure that deliverable projects are implemented and to ensure that communities can access the focus support that they need at the right time. I recognise the importance of sustainable funding arrangements for those organisations to support the delivery of more homes. In a letter sent to the local government housing and planning committee in December, I set out priority work strands for the remote rural and island housing action plan, including funding arrangements to achieve that. Of course, that plan will be published in the spring. To ask the Scottish Government what work is under way to assess the impact of vapes on public health? We continue to work with stakeholders, including Public Health Scotland and Ash Scotland, to ensure that we have a broad understanding of the impact of vaping on public health. The World Health Organization states that vapes are undoubtedly harmful to health. However, given the limited time that they have been used, there is consequentially limited evidence on their long-term impact. We are working to review a range of evidence that is available, which will influence our refresh tobacco action plan due to be published on autumn later this year. I thank the cabinet secretary for that answer. There are many issues with vapes in terms of flavours and advertising that I think we should be tackling, and I hope that the cabinet secretary would support that. As well as being an issue for public health, we are an issue for the environment as covered by the campaign in the daily record today. Would the cabinet secretary support a ban on single-use vapes? I congratulate the daily records on their campaign and make a special mention of Laura Young, who I was reading about to colloquially describe in the daily records the vape crusader, which I thought was a fair name for her. She has done an incredible job going around the country picking up those vapes that are undoubtedly causing environmental harm. Gilliam Mackay is absolutely right. There is a public health issue that we are exploring or will explore, but I am working issue, I imagine, with my colleague the Minister for Green Skills, Circular Economy and Biodiversity. We together will ask stakeholders with relevant expertise to examine the evidence and assess what action the Scottish Government and other partners should take, and that will include consideration of a potential ban. Of course, I will keep the member updated. The cabinet secretary may be aware that the issue of youth vaping is something that I have taken particularly interest in. I am looking forward to a member's debate on the issue at the end of the month. I ask the cabinet secretary if the Scottish Government has conducted an assessment into advertising in the vaping industry. Yes, we should look into that issue and, as I say, there are a number of issues to consider from a public health perspective. Clearly, we know that there is evidence that young people and a number of young people who would not have considered smoking cigarettes are taking up vaping, so there is concern about the advertising, particularly on social media platforms as well as on other platforms. That should be part of the consideration that I have already referenced in my response to Gillian Mackay in relation to the stakeholders that have the expertise. They should explore and examine a range of issues in relation to vaping, as I say, including a potential ban for the disposable and single use vapes. To ask the Scottish Government what steps it is taking to address any racial profiling practices in Police Scotland. Police Scotland should operate at all times with fairness, integrity and respect and irrespective of ethnicity. The chief constable has made clear his commitment that Police Scotland must become an actively anti-racist organisation. In respect of stopping search, the code of practice in Scotland was developed by an independent advisory group. It was approved by the Scottish Parliament and came into force on 11 May 2017 and was reviewed in 2019 and sets out clearly the rules for when and how the police in Scotland can use stopping search. I thank the cabinet secretary for that response. Figures released in December show that people from minority ethnic backgrounds were up to 20 times more likely to be stopped by Police Scotland under counter-terrorism powers, but evidence tells us that far-right domestic terrorism is by far the greatest current threat and that racial profiling is both unacceptable and counterproductive. Does the cabinet secretary think that a reassessment of what a terrorism threat looks like is urgently needed in Scotland that welcomes refugees and other immigrants, and what actions does he consider necessary to ensure that we tackle racist police practices? Just to be clear first of all that Scotland welcomes people from all over the world over successive generations, migrants and refugees have contributed greatly to our society as well as bring in diversity to our communities, and racism in any form is abhorrent and wholly unacceptable. Counter-terrorism is reserved and is delivered through the UK Government Contest strategy. The Scottish Government is actively engaged with the Home Office to ensure that the recently announced review of the strategy appropriately reflects the situation, and that takes into consideration the terrorism threat throughout the UK, including Scotland. The operation of counter-terrorism in Scotland is a matter for Police Scotland taking account of the specific code of practice for counter-terrorism stop and search at the border that is issued by the Home Office. I agree with Maggie Chapman that, in relation to the threat and assessment of the threat of terrorism, Police Scotland holds perhaps the biggest piece of the jigsaw, and it looks at the issues that have been raised by Maggie Chapman on a regular basis.


Would you rather pay $650 or $66 for a smartphone? Simple.  Better service, bigger savings. That's today's Appalachian Wireless. As Pikeville Medical Center continues to grow, so does the number of patients and employees crossing the intersection in front of the hospital. State officials and members of our community met at Pikeville Medical Center's second floor atrium to unveil a plan to accommodate those who plan on crossing Bypass Road. So today's announcement was a funding announcement to actually fund the city of Pikeville as the municipal entity, a project that will construct an underground tunnel on the Bypass Road, which is a state road for a non-profit hospital. So again, keeping not only our employees' safety at heart, but also we have many patients and many services on the riverfields, so our outpatient therapy, our primary care, our lab services, our pharmacy services are all located on the riverfield as well. So patients are forced to make a decision. They either can cross the crosswalk or they can park and come through another means of transportation. So having a tunnel constructed at the low point of our property allows backup water, another access point to leave the property and actually go to the ravine or the culvert that was designed to carry the water towards the bull pond. So it also addresses flood protection on behalf of a multi-million dollar organization. We're very hopeful that by the middle of next year that this new tunnel, safety tunnel will actually be available for our wonderful many patients and our employees to be able to use. Governor Matt Bevin was in attendance to discuss the amount of discretionary dollars being brought back into the community with these transportation upgrades. Yeah, this is $575,000 of discretionary road dollars. The governor has the opportunity to decide where these dollars go, but I don't choose it based on what I want. I say where's the demand? Who in what communities makes the greatest case for the investment of these taxpayer monies? Because it's taxpayer dollars, it's not the governor's dollars, it may be the governor's discretionary road fund, but it's taxpayer money. And I want the taxpayers to tell us where we can get the best investment. And this was a project that was overwhelmingly rose to the top. Being in a small town where you had to drive about 20 miles to get to a hospital that wasn't even nearly what this hospital is, knowing what that meant to the rural community I lived in, years later, dating my wife at the time 30 years ago now when she was a labor and delivery nurse in a rural hospital and seeing once again now as an adult from a different perspective how impactful that was in a community. All these things are things that have informed me. They're things that help me understand how critical Pikeville Medical Center is to Pike County and frankly to all the surrounding counties in this state and frankly in states nearby. This is an amazing medical gem that we are blessed with here in eastern Kentucky.


Greetings and welcome to the Introduction to Astronomy. In today's lecture, we are going to talk about compact stars. These are things like white dwarfs and neutron stars, and what happens when they occur in a binary system? We've looked at white dwarfs and neutron stars separately, but some very interesting things happen when they are part of a companion system. So, let's go ahead and get started. So, we've looked at the individual stars, but what happens when one of these is in a binary system? Now, these are things that can happen. They don't mean they always will happen, but we will look at things like the novi and the supernovae, and then x-ray and gamma-ray bursts, as different things that can happen when compact stars have a companion star. So, let's start off with the novi. What happens with a white dwarf? We have a white dwarf star in a binary system. If the stars are close enough together, now, if they're far apart, nothing will happen, and it will just sit there as normal. However, sometimes when the star expands, the ordinary star expands and becomes a red giant, it will end up being close enough that material is pulled from one star to another and begins to form an accretion disk around the white dwarf. Now, the material in the outer layers of the star is hydrogen. So, hydrogen builds up on the surface of the white dwarf star here, and that process continues until the temperature gets high enough that nuclear fusion starts on the surface of the white dwarf. So, instead of nuclear fusion at the center of a star, here we have it happening on the surface, and the star will suddenly become hundreds or even thousands of times brighter.  So, it will give off a burst of energy, become a lot brighter, and then it will begin accreting material again. So, this can happen multiple times in the same system as long as material is being transferred from one star to another. So, a nova can be recurring. Now, we can also have a supernova. This process is exactly the same as a nova. The only difference is the question, what happens if this mass transfer pushes the mass of the white dwarf over that 1.4 solar mass limit? Remember, once you get over 1.4 solar masses, that star can no longer support itself against gravity and will collapse, and it will start to compress down, igniting all of the carbon within the star, and it won't just begin at the center, it'll begin throughout the entire star altogether and will then tear itself apart. So, that entire star will rip itself apart. So, here's an example showing what happens. We have two stars here, one star. Here, they're both on the main sequence. Here, the first star has evolved to become a red giant and not much happens. You might get mass transfer between the two, but that's not a necessity.  When the second star evolves and becomes a red dwarf, it'll start the matter transfer onto the white dwarf star. And if this star is very close to that 1.4 solar mass limit, it will push it over, ignite the carbon, we call it carbon detonation, supernova, and it will just rip itself apart. And there will be nothing left behind of this star. It'll tear itself apart completely. And it's all because it pushed itself over that 1.4 solar mass limit, one too many objects that it could just not hold up against. So, we talked now about two types of supernovae. We talked previously about the type II supernova, which is the explosion of a massive star at the end of its life. That leaves behind either a neutron star or a black hole depending on the mass of the remnant. When we look at these, we see strong hydrogen lines in the spectrum. That's a way to be able to identify them. When we see a supernova, just seeing a star brighten doesn't tell us which of these two types it is. But if we take a spectrum, if we see strong hydrogen lines, that means it is a type II and a massive star at the end of its life.  This has no hydrogen lines. Remember what exploded? It was a big ball of carbon detonating and exploding outward and will not have significant quantities of hydrogen. These types of supernova are extremely important for distances. Remember our distance ladder, and we will come back to that with galaxies. These supernovae are going to be important because they are examples of standard candles. They have a standard brightness. Why? Every single one of these is the exact same type of object that explodes. They are all white dwarf stars, and they all have a mass of 1.4 solar masses. Exactly the same. Whereas a type II supernova, the mass might have been 20 solar masses or 30 solar masses or 40 solar masses, they'll all have different brightnesses. These are all identical, and we'll see them again when we look at determining distances. So those are two things that can happen with a white dwarf star. How about a neutron star? What can a neutron star do? What if instead of a white dwarf, we had a neutron star in a binary system? Well, the exact same thing as we looked at for a nova could happen here. You could transfer mass from a companion, just like we did to the white dwarf. Material would build up on its surface, just like it did on the white dwarf. The difference is that gravity is much stronger and temperatures are much higher. So instead of getting bursts of visible light, we get bursts of x-rays from the surface. In fact, many x-ray bursts have been detected. So we've detected many of these, and it is the same process as a nova. It is just a nova instead of being a white dwarf. It is a neutron star at the center here, and that is what is collecting the material, and its increased gravity and increased temperatures will cause it to undergo a burst of energy from its surface. Now, depending on how these happen, depending on the position, you also can use this to speed up neutron star rotation. So if the material is spiraling in one direction and the neutron star is rotating that same direction, you're giving it a little kick each time material hits it. It's hitting it in the same direction. Like pushing a child on a swing, you push them when they're going in the right direction and you can accelerate them upward. Well, this can accelerate pulsars to millisecond pulsars where they can be spinning 100 times a second. Up to almost the limit, even a neutron star has a limit to how fast it can spin before it would rip itself apart. Now, the last thing we wanted to look at here are the gamma ray bursts. Gamma rays, the most intense electromagnetic energy, and the gamma ray bursts were actually detected by the military in the 1960s. Why would the military detect them? Well, gamma ray bursts of gamma rays are associated with nuclear explosions. So tests from nuclear detonations on Earth were being looked for as to who was giving off testing nuclear weapons, and they were actually looking for those, and they found gamma rays from the sky, and now we know of thousands of those. And it's difficult to pinpoint their location. So it's very hard to see exactly where they are, which makes it hard to identify an optical or a radio counterpart. So it's hard to find the object. It took a long time for this because gamma ray telescopes have very poor resolution. Now, you might think if you remember resolution, short wavelengths gave you a really high resolution, and gamma rays are among the shortest wavelengths. However, gamma rays are impossible to focus. So even though they would have a high resolution theoretically because of that, or because you cannot focus them, they are unable to take advantage of that resolution. We have now been able to identify optical sources for some of these, and many of them are billions of light years away. So these are nothing anywhere nearby us that we are detecting. Now, when we look at the gamma ray bursts, we split them into two groups. There are two types of gamma ray bursts. There are long duration and short duration bursts. Now, the cut-off there is set at two seconds. So a long duration burst just means it lasts longer than two seconds. We believe this is caused by a stellar collapse of a star that lost its outer layers of hydrogen. Now, when it does that, when it collapses down, material then expels outward through this. All the gamma rays come out because it has less material to shield it from that. So instead of this happening well below in the core, now you have an exposed core where material is accelerating outward, and that material can then be emitted as gamma rays, and we can detect these as the long duration bursts, which may only be a few seconds, but at least two seconds in length. Now, the short duration bursts, on the other hand, are first of all less than two seconds in length. These are believed to be caused by neutron stars. We sometimes call this a kilonova, and that is from merging neutron stars as they spiral in together, and will eventually release gravitational waves as they combine and coalesce. And if you remember from the explosion that we get here, when we looked at what elements form, a lot of the elements, heavier elements, are often formed in collisions of neutron stars, such as we talk about here. So those short duration gamma ray bursts can also produce a lot of the elements that we see in the universe. So let's go ahead and finish up with our summary, and what we've looked at here is that compact stars in a binary system give rise to many different things. A white dwarf can become a nova or a supernova depending on the exact conditions, while neutron stars become x-ray or gamma-ray bursters. So that concludes this lecture on compact stars in binary systems. We'll be back again next time for another topic in astronomy. So until then, have a great day, everyone, and I will see you in class.