From the CUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to this special CUBE conversation. I always love when we get to talk to founders of companies when they're drilling into some interesting technologies. Want to welcome a new guest to the CUBE as well as one of our CUBE alumni sitting right next to me on the screen. First of all, we have Martín Casado who is a general partner within Driessen Orwitz. Martín, great to see you. It's great to be here. And you've brought along Mike Delbalso who is the co-founder and CEO of Pecton, recently out of stealth, going to dig into a lot of the ML discussion. Mike, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me on.  We've loved having you on the CUBE over the years. I have to get, since we're getting you on here in 2020, we of course need to start with the fact that there's a global pandemic going on. And I'm curious from your standpoint, from an investment standpoint and looking at technology, how does this make it a little bit different in 2020, say, than you would have thought coming into the year? Yeah, so I think there's kind of a near-term answer and a long-term answer. I think the near-term answer is people don't really understand what the broad impact is going to be. And so companies in the portfolio and the guidance that we do is to be conservative with cash. Let's see how Q2 plays out. And then let's figure out the right way to kind of operate the company in light of the macro changes. Long-term, however, it's very clear that every digital transformation project right now is being fast-tracked. And as a result, we think it's a huge boon to infrastructure as who's been for the software, right? Where in the past, you could deal with kind of legacy setups that were on-prem. This is just not the case anymore. So take for a company like Tecton, Mike's company, like there's a lot of conversations that happen now where the company's like, wow, we really need to have our infrastructure digitized and it all needs to be in the cloud, it all needs to be remote and so forth. So we're actually seeing a ton of tailwinds even though there's uncertainty on the macro environment in the near future. Yeah, you make some great points, Martin, absolutely. The companies that have actually gone through some digital transformation, the goals of that is number one, I should be data-driven. Number two, I should be able to be much more agile and that's what we need in uncertain times is to be able to react fast and answer it. Mike, unfortunately, I've talked to plenty of companies, you can't necessarily choose when's the right time to launch a company, when right time to do an IPO, trying to time the market, but sorry to say, interesting times are upon us. So let's talk a bit about Tecton, give us a little bit of your background, the team, the core team, I believe, coming out of Uber with the Michelangelo project that led to Tecton. Yeah, great, so at Tecton we really focus on what we call operational machine learning, which is really about helping organizations really use machine learning in an applied context, really powering customer experiences, powering business processes, things that really make it to production. And so we help these machine learning AI efforts get past the finish line. And a little bit about the background of me, I used to work at Google, I Google as a product manager for the machine learning teams that power the ads auction. So the models that choose which ads to show and run in real time and are highly productionized and are really core to the business. And then I was at Uber after that and Uber helped start the first centralized machine learning team. And it was really the whole journey for Uber, going from just starting to getting to tens of thousands of models in production. A big component of that was a lot of the technology that we built there, the platforms and infrastructure that we built to support the different business teams to be able to embed machine learning into their product. And so what we're talking about all these very applied use cases, real time fraud detection, ETA estimation, the search pricing, all these things that you think about with Uber. So through that journey of supporting and helping them get to 100 with machine learning, we built out this platform called Michelangelo, which is really a machine learning platform. It's really an end to end machine learning platform. And learned a lot of lessons as we helped out dozens of teams go through the whole life cycle starting a project, pay, what does this mean? What is my business problem? How does it translate to a machine learning problem all the way to having a model in production, monitored and fully, like really fully productionized and kind of growing core to that business. So we learned a lot of lessons from building that tech ton. My co-founders are the other leaders of that project. And we learned a lot of really important lessons that lead to the success of these machine learning projects. And we're now focused on helping a lot of other organizations really start up their machine learning efforts and get these things into production. Yeah, Martin, maybe you could give us a little bit of context here. When I think about repeatability of solutions, how much they scale, there's only so many Googles and Ubers out there. And when I look back at the big data world, there wasn't a lot of repeatability. It seemed like everything was custom, so what did you see with tech ton? What are you looking at in the ML space that made them such an attractive investment? Sure, so maybe let's just pull back and talk about what's going on in systems and infrastructure in general. And I actually think this is probably the biggest shift, certainly I've seen in my career, which is it used to be if you looked at a system, let's say it's Uber, but whatever system, the correctness of that system and the performance of that system and the compliance of that system and the security was dictated by the code that you wrote, right?  But more and more, that's actually not the case. I mean, these days kind of performance, accuracy, security compliance is actually dictated by the data that you feed into these, right?  And unlike code, we don't have the tools to manage data in the same way. And so if you think of it, we're moving kind of from this code economy to this data economy, data more and more dictates the correctness of all of these systems. And we're talking about trillions of dollars of more data, but if you actually look at the tooling around it, it still feels like the 70s around code, which is like, you've got few thumbs and you've got a lot of tribal knowledge. And so we've been tracking this trend for a long time. We're investors in Databricks, as you know, we've got a large data portfolio. I mean, it's very obvious if you look at what's happening with the cloud data warehouses, if you think like, redshift, BigQuery and stuff, like, the world is going data and pulling extracting information out of data. And so on the backdrop of that, we're like, okay, so you need to be able to think of data like you think of code and have the tooling around it that help makes the lives of people working with this stuff simpler, especially for the core use cases, which is M-Holl and AI. And to that end, I think that this is probably known in the industry, but like looking in the leading companies is like a crystal ball into the future, right? Because they tackle a lot of the problems before the rest of the industry did. And Michelangelo was very well known as the leading project in this. I mean, it had a broad set of respect from the community. It kind of created this notion of a feature store which has now been replicated. And so, really, this is like the preeminent project in one of the biggest macro transformations. And then beyond that, we met the team, they're fantastic. We've got great chemistry. We've got a lot of similar backgrounds. And so the investment was pretty straightforward from that. But I do think it's important to frame it in the context of this macro shift that's going on. Yeah, it's been, can't be overstated how important data is. I do think we need a new analogy probably with what happened with the global pandemic. Everybody was talking about data being the new oil and oil's pretty deep right now. And data is definitely not losing its value. Mike, when I read some of the discussion about, you know, Teccon enables data scientists turn raw data into production ready features and predictive signals, you know, it sounds really impressive. So help us understand kind of the core thing that you do and, you know, where we are in the product life cycle. Great, well, a machine learning application, there's fundamentally two components to it, right? There's a model that you have to build that's going to make the decisions given a certain set of inputs. And then there's the features which end up being those inputs that that model uses to make the decision. And common machine learning infrastructure stacks really are split into two layers. There's a model management layer and a feature management layer. And that's an emerging pattern and some of the more sophisticated machine learning stacks that are out there. And what we built at Michelangelo, we really had this model management layer, this feature management layer. And we recognized the feature management layer was the thing that really allowed us to go from, you know, not just zero to one, but one to one to N and scale out a machine learning across a number of different use cases and allow individual data scientists to own more than just one model in production. And so really what's at the core of that is a few components. The first is just feature pipelines. So these are data pipelines that plug into the business's raw data via batch streaming, real-time data and turn those into features that are these predictive signals that models consume. The second part of that is a feature store which catalogs these feature transformations, catalogs these pipelines and stores the output raw data or the output feature data. And then the third component is feature service making those features accessible to a data scientist when they're building their models and to the models in the production environments when they can make these decisions sometimes needed in milliseconds for real-time decisioning that is quite common in a lot of high-value machine learning applications. So what TechCom really is is a data platform for machine learning that manages all the feature data and feature transformations that allow an organization to share the predictive signals, these features across use cases and really catalog these and understand what they are. And secondly, get these into production so they don't get hung up in that final stage right before they're trying to cross the finish line with the machine learning project. All right, and Mike, the product today, my understanding, private beta, you do have some customers at that point. What tell us a little bit about that? Yeah, we're in private beta with a number of customers. We just went into full production with Atlassium last month. A couple of other customers that I maybe shouldn't name on the air, but we are spending time engaging in kind of like deep hands-on engagements with different teams who are really trying to set up their machine learning on the cloud, figure out how to get their machine learning in production and it tends to be teams that are trying to really use machine learning for operational use cases. We're really trying to drive real business decisions and power their product, customer experiences, and not as much, a lot of the kind of like research, algorithm research stuff, but we're really trying to solve these core data problems that help or that are preventing machine learning projects from being successful. Yeah, it was interesting. Martin, as I was listening to some of what Mike was saying, I'm like, okay, it's not quite the analogy of micro-segmentation or separating the control plane or the network plane and networking, but there were some analogies there. What I want to ask you though is the role of data. I talking to Andy Jassy a couple of years ago, I asked him, the flywheel for AWS for years was customer, how many customers they could get and I was wondering, does data become that new flywheel and there's the center of gravities and the customers that can tap in and monetize what's going there. So I'm just curious your thoughts on that. So I think people don't appreciate how different data is than code. And so I just want to start there because I think it's really germane to this topic. So listen, code is like a finite stage, right? It's like, it's lines of code, you can build it, you can modularize it. It's like building a house. And so the tools that you put around code kind of reign in what's already a fairly low entropy system, like a fairly orderly system. Data on the other hand, data is like the natural world. It's all of the complexity of the universe, right? It's the behavior of humans. It's temperature readings, it's like, you know? And there is so much more complexity and there's so much more entropy in data that the way that you deal with it is so fundamentally different than you ever do code. And so we've had all of these. And so I just wanted to start that with is we've had all of these analogies about data is the new oil, data is where there's the value, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But a lot of it's tautological, meaning yes, of course there's value in data. Yeah, yes, if you have propriety access to data, you've got propriety access to data. But what we don't really know is how do you take data and rein it in so you can use it in the same way that you use software system? We actually don't even know how to do that. And so talking about things like data network effects and extracting data is a little bit preliminary because we still actually don't even understand like how much work it takes to mine insights from data. What I do know you need, I do know you need the tools to do it and I do know that those tools are quite different. And so I think that we're now in this era building the tooling that is required to extract the inside of that data. And I think that's a very necessary step and this is where tech time comes in to provide that tooling. And I think once we have a better handle on that, then we can start asking these deeper questions which I think are great questions but the things like how defensible is data? Do you have network effects with data? Can you put in a finite amount of effort and extract signal at all times? Like how messy is data, et cetera. And so I think that's kind of where we are in this journey which is exactly why you need companies like Tecton to help answer this. All right, so Mike, there's been the promise of really unlocking data now. It's been a really interesting discussion point for the last five or 10 years. The company is named Tecton when I've read some of the blog posts and talk about the Cambrian explosion and changes there. So give us, if we're looking forward, you've just come out of stealth. What is success for Tecton two to three years out from now? Yeah, I think the biggest thing is we're trying to help organizations recognize their data. It really is an asset and treat their features like assets. And when we can get to a point where organizations, that teams that want to use machine learning and production don't need to throw a million data engineers at a problem, and we can get to a point where machine learning is not really getting to a special team of experts that are super expensive, that you kind of leave in the corner of your building and hopefully come back 18 months later with some project that is showing some value, that would be success for us. We really are dead focused on the problems that are preventing these projects just from getting into production. And so when we see the industry as a whole have seen success with these machine learning projects, I think we will have our mission accomplished. All right, Martino, I'll give you the final word as to the opportunity you see in front of Tecton. I honestly think the data industry is going to be 10x the compute industry. I just think like with compute, you're building houses from the ground up and there's a ton of value there. I think with data is you're extracting insight and value from the universe, right? It's like the natural system. And every company has data and lots of data and all of it has some information. And so I think that this is a chance to be a very, very pivotal company in democratizing access to data. So I think that the opportunity is enormous. Well, Martino, thank you for joining us again on the update, Mike, thank you. Welcome to being a CUBE alum. Definitely hope to have you back soon to track the journey, congrats on step one out the door and best of luck going forward. Thank you. That's great. Thanks, Stu. All right, be sure to check out thecube.net for the upcoming events that we have today. They're all virtual, but the interviews are all there as well as all the archive. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE.


And welcome to Power Up Hawaii where Hawaii comes together to walk towards a clean, renewable and just energy future. I am your host, Raya Salter. I'm a clean energy attorney, clean energy advocate and community outreach specialist. I'm also the principal attorney of Imagine Power LLC. So today we're going to take a look at important energy and utility news from Hawaii around the country and the world as reported in the last week. A lot going on in Hawaii, really huge news happening here in Hawaii. So first let's take a look at some recent developments in clean energy and clean energy policy in the islands. First story I think just really, really interesting and important news. The Kauai Island Utility Cooperative or KIUC is considering a move out from under the authority of the Hawaii Public Utilities Commission. As reported by PBM, KIUC said in its strategic plan update which sort of announces its plans from 2016 to 2030 that it has begun to consider this move to a deregulated or minimally regulated status which would allow it, in their words, greater flexibility in responding to member concerns and unexpected changes in fuel prices and market conditions. KIUC, which has been making tremendous progress in lowering bills and integrating massive amounts of renewable energy into its grid, is achieving 37% renewable energy in 2016 from just 6% clean energy in 2017. Its current goal is generating at least 70% of its power from renewable sources by 2030 which would put it 10 years ahead of the state mandate. The utility has also assisted efforts on other islands to create member-owned electric cooperatives starting with the big island according to its strategic plan. KIUC has also concluded that liquefied natural gas is not a fuel alternative that will be embraced in Hawaii in the near term and that it is now looking at expanding the use of propane or renewable-based fuels. In the words of the utility, we will expand our search for alternatives to oil from legacy generating systems that must remain available to ensure adequate stability and capacity in order to meet the needs of all members, the utility said. So wow, this is, I think, really huge on several levels. Not only is KIUC, as we know, who has been working very closely in particular with Tesla on increasing its renewables in its portfolio. So not only have they been making huge strides, not only are they well ahead of state mandates for 100% renewable energy, but they are seeking to come out from under being regulated by the Hawaii Public Utility Commission and even just as explosive, they are looking to see if they can recreate this model on other islands or help other islands, notably the big island, recreate this model. This really, I think, is huge news. Interestingly, I was reading an article today that was talking about what are the top five states for utility reform in the country. And I think it always used to be, Hawaii always used to be mentioned in those lists. And now there have been so many grid modernization efforts, huge modernization efforts in places like Illinois. But just in this particular article, New York, California, Illinois, Hawaii didn't make that list. So I think that Hawaii has surged out ahead with regulatory reform and is still working towards a lot of cutting edge policies. There are a lot of really important dockets moving forward. What I think the message here is that energy companies and now utilities are not willing to wait for regulators or the utility in order to seize the opportunities that they see for energy for their customers, in particular with regard to renewable energy. I think that's something that we're going to see more and more of. And it'll be very interesting to hear the reaction to what happens here. And I think it's going to be an interesting analysis from a legal perspective, from a social perspective on what it would mean for, and what would need to happen in order for KIUC to become lightly regulated or mentally regulated. So just really huge news. We shall see what that means. And I think it has potentially very large repercussions for other islands and Hawaii more broadly in general. So let us stay tuned to that. Next we're going to talk a bit about what the reactions here have been to President Trump's rollback of Obama era climate rules and regulations and protections. I think it's important to look at what our politicians and representatives and our energy sector think about this issue. So Pacific Business News reported reaction from the energy sector on the Trump rollback of environmental rules and regulations. So Colin Yost, who's a partner with Rev. Luzon here in Honolulu, said that the Trump administration's preferred energy policies, which favor the oil and gas industry, would likely cause more harm to the environment and human health than any government in history. He does say, however, that the renewable energy industry will keep moving ahead being driven primarily by heavy consumer demand. So for instance, technology will continue to improve rapidly with prices continuing to go down for PV and batteries. Now let's see what HIKO had to say. So what HIKO's feeling was was that Trump's policies haven't changed the utility's commitment to achieve Hawaii's clean energy goals, which as we all know currently stand at 100% by 2045, the most aggressive goal of its kind in the United States. KIUC shared those sentiments. We just talked about how they feel about things. According to KIUC, with federal tax credits in place for utility-scale solar projects and strong policy support from the state, I see nothing but opportunity ahead for us in achieving our strategic goals for the foreseeable future. I said Dave Bacell, who's the president and CEO of KIUC. So I think it's really, it's interesting, and I definitely want to encourage anyone who's watching that, yes, we are having what I think is a really unfortunate rollback of Obama-era climate policy. However, the economic forces that are pushing cleaner renewable energy forward continue to be in place and will continue to be in place as clean and renewable energy simply just makes more and more sense. And so I think that really is the overarching message that people should take hope, even though as we will continue to talk today, there really are some very discouraging actions from what I believe are discouraging actions from the Trump administration on clean energy. So let's go ahead now and we'll talk about what some of our senators and one of our, and our congresswomen think about, have said about the Trump, new Trump action. So Trump's views on climate change run contrary not only to those of the Obama administration, but to the science being done right here in Hawaii. Ongoing measurements taken at NOAA's Manila Baseline Atmospheric Observatory show an unprecedented rise in the carbon dioxide levels over a two year period. A recent NOAA report stated carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere include by three parts per million in 2016, rising the overall average amount to 405.1 parts per million. Scientists say the increase that matched the record jump, that increase matched the record jump observed in 2015. So I think that is really talk, just talking a little bit about where we are now with carbon, you know, with carbon and how rolling back rules on controlling CO2 emissions and co-pollutants is really a rather, you know, an unfortunate, an unfortunate thing. But I think that as you'll see in our, in what some of our senators have to say, really is important that Hawaii sees and take lead on this conversation because it is not, even though it is absolutely critical for Hawaii to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and reduce the carbon footprint for many, many reasons, A, for emissions sake, B, for co-pollutants and human health, but then the big, big reasons are energy security and reducing the economic burden. Because the justice issue of this island's time is that Hawaii has done nothing, next to nothing in terms of a basis as individuals or space to contribute to climate change, yet Hawaii and other islands will be experiencing the effects of climate change first and in a more severe manner than other parts of the world. So the Democratic Party has rallied behind the philosophy that change in climate is primarily a man-made problem, while many Republican opponents have sought to debunk that theory. But it doesn't have to be a political issue. A University of Hawaii Hilo Assistant Professor in geography said Mr. Ryan Piroi. He spoke on the climate change issue during the well-attended Women's March in Hilo held the day after Trump's inauguration. He pointed out that Charles David Keeling, the father of the Keeling curve graph that plots the CO2 data collected at Manaloa, was a Republican. This is an important point for me, Piroi said to the crowd, because science is or should be blind to political persuasion. So I'll read a few sentences from Senator Schatz. President Trump's latest executive order reverses the historic progress we've made on climate for short-term games that will go straight into the pockets of oil, gas and coal companies. Now is not the time to turn our back on the growing clean energy economy, and that's exactly what this executive order will do. So here is a statement from Senator Hirono. While the president can afford to live in this alternative universe, Hawaii and other island communities are forced to grapple with the reality of climate change. Our coral reefs are dying because of historically high ocean temperatures. By 2100, Hawaii sea levels will rise by more than three feet. We owe it to our keiki to listen to our climate scientists and build upon not erase the progress that we've made. And now I'll read just a few sentences from Representative Tulsi Gabbard on the matter. I have no doubt that Hawaii will continue to lead the nation in renewable energy production. We must continue investing in renewable energy, moving away from foreign oil and fossil fuels, and moving towards our goal of 100% clean energy by 2045. So I just really felt that it was important because we've had this tremendous sort of executive order come out of the White House last week that we look at what the Hawaii response has been. We know, and I think it's important to look at it in context of other responses. We know that Hawaii was a part of putting a hold on President Trump's travel ban. And we know, again, I know I said it, but I truly, truly believe that it's critical that the nature of the conversation here about climate change be elevated and moved from this idea of we need to focus, yes, we need to focus on mitigation because we're doing 100% renewable energy. But we here have a different dynamic with regards to sea level rise. And it is to our immediate yet also going forward just true peril to not fight back to make sure that global greenhouse gases are reduced on a global scale and that also we do everything we can for energy security and resilience here. So on that note, I'll go ahead. We're going to take a break and we'll be right back with more energy news on Power of Hawaii. Aloha, this is your House to be a Trisk and Telmo. Come and join us every Friday at four o'clock on Perspectives of Global Justice. Hey, Stan, the energy man here. Thanks for joining us on Think Tech Hawaii. And I invite you to join me every Friday on Think Tech Hawaii at 12 o'clock, where I give you all the energy news that's worth talking about here in Honolulu. And I love to talk about hydrogen. So join us on Friday on my lunch hour here at Think Tech Hawaii. Be there, Aloha. Hi, this is Jane Sugimura. I'm the co-host for Kondo Insider. And we're on Think Tech Hawaii every Thursday at three o'clock. And we're here to talk about condominium living and issues that affect condominium residents and owners. And I hope you'll join us every week on Thursday. Aloha. Welcome back to Power of Hawaii, where Hawaii comes together to walk towards a clean, renewable and just energy future. I'm your host, Raya Salter. So, yes, we spent some time talking about some really big news, interesting news coming out of Hawaii, but also talking a bit about some of the hard news that came out of the Trump administration with the executive orders rolling back the Obama legacy on climate and climate protections. But I really, you know, while that is it can be, it is it can be hard and it can be heavy, and we do have a lot to face here with climate change. I think it is one of the best things about this show is that we can focus on solutions and we can focus on positivity and how we can all be empowered to participate and move towards a space where we can, where these islands can thrive economically and also sustainably going forward as we face climate change. And one of those things is energy efficiency, and we've had some good progress there. Hawaii can win big with the new clean energy efficiency bill. So, according to estimates, the state of Hawaii could save more than $14 billion in energy costs during the next 20 years under a new building code recently signed by Governor David E. Gay. The new code, which was signed by the governor on March 20, will soon go into effect for state buildings. The code governs new construction and most renovation of residential, commercial and state buildings. The new building energy code only applies to state construction until the counties adopt the updated energy code. The counties have two years to take action, after which time the new code takes effect automatically. So, energy efficiency is the most cost-effective energy resource available in the state, costing a fraction of fossil fuel-powered electricity. An analysis of the new rules prepared for the state by the Cadmus Group last year found that updated rules would save nearly $14.5 billion in savings across the islands using today's electricity prices. The savings start at $4 million for the first year, but quickly grow as more buildings comply with the efficiency requirements. So, again, great news. Hawaii is moving forward on energy efficiency codes. This means that buildings can be made to be structurally made, to use less energy, and that saves money for customers. And it saves money for the state overall. So, I think this is great news, and these rules really seem to have teeth because the bill has passed, and it looks like everyone's going to have to grapple with them in one way or the other, or in two years they will take effect anyway. So, of course, with these types of things, it's always about enforcement. The same is true in New York City. But then, what tends to come after we get these types of codes, or at least if the model like the New York City, sorry, from New York models are followed, is that with energy efficiency requirements, then you also start getting requirements for audits, requirements for energy benchmarking, and then reporting that data. And I can definitely say that in New York City where that trajectory has happened, that has empowered just a whole new generation of analysis on a number of issues in terms of looking at where savings can be, where greenhouse gas emissions savings can come from, where fuel savings, what types of buildings and properties can most benefit from boiler replacement or renewable energy or battery systems. So, I think we've got some great movement forward on energy efficiency here. So fantastic. More huge news that has been announced, and this was at the Maui Energy Conference. And folks in the energy world have sort of known that this was creeping about. But Molokai could be 100% renewable by 2020. So at the recent Maui Energy Conference, officials from HECO, parent company of MECO, as we know, detailed a plan that would make Molokai the first Hawaii island to completely kick the fossil fuel habit. The first step of the Molokai Island Grid Initiative involves testing a battery storage system, which is essential to providing power on demand throughout the day when it's generated by intermittent sources such as solar energy. The battery system is also meant to provide near-term stability to the grid. Keeping the lights on should a generator ever go offline. The next phase of the Grid Initiative involves reducing and stabilizing energy costs, expanding the range of locally produced renewable energy sources, improving grid reliability and resiliency, promoting clean energy education, and creating job opportunities in the sector. HECO says that by using a mix of solar, wind, biofuels, and battery storage, Molokai could be 100% renewable by 2020. So again, I think we knew that this was something that could happen on Molokai. And it's great, I think, that the utility is coming forward and just going ahead and announcing it. And I think that's correct. It's a holistic solution. You need to look at what's the technology, but also what is going to be the economic component, what's going to be the people component. How do you engage people in understanding how they can most benefit from and also, as mentioned, cost reduction, because that's something that customers in Hawaii need a lot of is rate relief. So it's exciting. It's also interesting when you think about it from a macro level and you think about the 100% renewable energy goal. We've got Molokai saying that it can get to 100% by 2020. We've got KIUC saying that it can get to 100% by 2020. Well, you do the math. You do the math. What does this mean in terms of the big island? What does this mean in terms of we've also heard murmurs out of Lenai at being able to beat 2045? So I think eyes are on a wahoo in the big island and also given that we've got KIUC looking at how can folks in the big island look at being cooperatives, potentially unregulated cooperatives. I think we're potentially talking about a huge transformation in Hawaii of the energy sector in the next not even five years and the next three to five years. So I think that it's a positive thing, again, to talk about RPS renewable portfolio standards and goals. And here we are in Hawaii almost making a mockery of our own, which is fantastic. And I think still an argument for a big goal is a good thing because you don't know where innovation and technology and progress is going to take you. But I think that it's worth thinking about 2045. It's worth thinking about what the landscape could end up looking like if a lot of these actors end up moving forward on their own in terms of the KIUC or others start breaking off for the grid and what that will mean for everyone. And what this means, I think, really, for a wahoo, the most populated island, law and need for electricity, what can we do? Can we be 2045? Maybe we can. Next, Hawaii's tallest building is to get an EV charging station. So in a way, it's a bit of a shame that this is news. But it is good news. So first, Hawaiian Center, the headquarters of Hawaii's largest bank and the tallest building in the state is getting an electric vehicle charging station according to PBN. First, Hawaiian Bank filed a $5,000 building permit Wednesday with the city and county of Honolulu's Department of Planning and Permitting to install a new dual EV charging station at its Bishop Street office building. Wasa Electrical Services, Inc. is listed as the contractor for the project. Currently, there are only 12 EV charging stations in the downtown area, including at the Pacific Guardian Center, City Financial Tower, Central Pacific Plaza, Davy's Pacific Center, Topa Financial Center, and Bishop Square, according to the state's website. So again, I think it's fantastic news that we're going to have more spaces for EVs. But the fact that the downtown of the most populous city in the state only has a handful of charging stations I think really sort of highlights just a tremendous issue. I know that folks who want to be early adopters and use electric cars shouldn't have to plan their days and have to sort of sacrifice in their lives inconvenience in order to charge. And I know that a lot of people do that. So we need to have charging at workplaces. And we need to start having some larger scale projects than pilots that test out what happens, what you can do with all those electric cars that are theoretically at one time plugged in at a workplace or at an apartment building. We need to start leading on this. We really need to start leading on it, but fantastic. It's good that we're going to at least have one more. Again, so much news coming out of Hawaii this week, just tremendous amount of news. The next is that Hawaii is a US leader in storage. In rankings calculated by GTM Research for their cumulative 2016 edition of the Energy Storage Monitor, several states that are not California have broken onto the scene. California doesn't have anything to worry about in terms of losing the throne anytime soon. But the stronger showing from relative newcomers heralds the onset of a more geographically diverse industry. So for a while now, the top three markets for the various storage segments have been shuffled between California, the PGM interconnection, minus New Jersey, which is counted separately, and the catch-all term, all others, while Hawaii has made a strong mark in residential. So Hawaii holds the number three spot for cumulative residential power capacity, but Arizona unseated it for deployments in 2016. With 633 kilowatts, Arizona put up essentially half as much home storage as California last year. So Hawaii is a US storage leader, so I just thought that was worth talking about. I had a show where we talked about storage wars. We've just got companies on fire to show what they can do with their size, with their scale, with their products, and their relative footprints, be it Tesla on Kauai, BluePen and Energy, amongst others working on the Big Island, and a lot of folks looking to get into that storage market. So a lot of excitement and a lot of leadership from the state. So I think before we say goodbye, I'll just briefly talk a little bit about a story. Again, more reaction to the Trump era. Several states and green groups and environmentalists and consumer groups are indeed suing the Trump administration over its decision to delay the implementation of energy efficiency rules for appliances. So Trump proposed delaying the rules. And this is really like the bread and butter this is the place where the environmental groups and the consumer groups just sort of always come together. So several groups, including the Natural Resources Defense Council where I used to work in New York, are going to court to fight for these rules. And I think we're going to see a lot more action from the NRDCs and others of this world that are going to be there trying to protect our interests in this new energy environment. And that takes us to the end of my show. Thank you so much for watching PowerPawaii. Join us next week, Mahalo and Aloha.


There's lots of instructional design models out there and some instructional designers have favorites and some use kind of a mishmash of the different ones. But for faculty members that are thinking about online teaching and learning or blended teaching and learning, it's less about picking an instructional design model. And it's more about just understanding that there are these models out there. Instructional design is a rigorous discipline and just like other disciplines, there's models and theories and research and all these things are going into it. And so the key element regarding any model is that none is perfect and none you just can use without really thinking through the different steps. It's really not a 100% accurate reflection of exactly what you need to do throughout the instructional design process. Rather, models can be useful or not useful and depending on the context, some models are more useful than others. A very common instructional design model that most folks that study instructional design is what's called the ADDI model. And it stands for Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation and Evaluation. And the specifics of each of those steps is it's not really all that important for, especially for faculty, but the key thing is to really realize that there are these steps and there's these questions at each of the steps that need to be answered. And so oftentimes we get really excited about maybe applying a certain technology in the classroom or in an online environment. And what instructional design tells us is that we really need to take a step back and start at the beginning and think about what are those goals or what do we want to achieve as part of this learning experience. In terms of instructional design models, a couple come to mind. One of the ones that we use in our course design institute here at U of T is based on the work of DFINC. DFINC provides a very simple basic model for alignment with a focus on significant learning. So beginning with thinking about what are the significant learning experiences you want your students to have in a global sense from your course. From that distilling down to what the key learning outcomes are across knowledge, attitude, skills, being very explicit about what those are, and then of course from there thinking about that assessment process and aligning the outcomes with the assessment is fundamental to DFINC's model. Then of course once you've determined what those outcomes are and what those assessments are then casting backwards into the course activity design to ensure that all of the components are working towards success in achieving those learning outcomes. Scaffolding is very important, making sure that each of the activities builds on what came before and moves the students through a coherent experience overall within, for example, each learning module in an online course. Instructional design is a type of problem solving, but there is no prescribed algorithm. Every instructional designer is going to solve problems differently and come up with a different solution. But that being said, every instructional design, according to Meagher, needs to answer three fundamental questions. And they are, where are we going? How are we going to get there? And how do we know we got there? And these three questions correspond to three major phases or aspects of every instructional design. The first one, where are we going, is the analysis phase, where we analyze the context, the task, the learners, and at the end of this phase we need to have a list of learning goals. The second phase that corresponds to question how are we going to get there is the instructional strategy phase, where at the end of this phase we need to have clearly stated learning objectives, learning outcomes, instructional strategies, assessment strategies, medium. So this is the core of the design. And the third phase is the evaluation phase, at the end of which we have to make some decisions about revisions and improvement of the course material. It is important to say that this phase is overlap. They are not linear. So whichever instructional design model you want to adhere to, and model is usually simply a visual representation of the instructional design process, they pretty much all have somewhere in them these three important phases. What I described very briefly is something that would most closely fit Smith and Reagan's common instructional design model. When it comes to the design of instruction, there is an inherent risk of imposing one view of learning on the design of online courses. And this is especially true of the more classic approaches to teaching or course design. Instead, rather than asking a question how should I teach or even what should I teach, I think the instructors should ask what kind of learning do I want to see take place in this course, or what kind of learning processes, skills and strategies students should experience in this course, or what kind of understanding students should gain. Starting from those questions allows a different kind of approach to design of courses, which has been called a backward design, in some cases, or a constructivist approach to design of courses. With this in mind, I would encourage the use of learner-centered instructional designs.


Personally, I've only ever beaten the game with Bernard, who I always thought looked like a popular YouTube personality. I do not look like Bernard! Bernard is good with electronics, so he can fix the radio upstairs with a spare tube that you have to find. You can then call the Meteor Police, who will come and take away the evil meteor that is brainwashing Dr. Fred. As far as I can tell, that's the easiest way to beat the game. You call that easy? You can beat the game with Sid and Razor both the same way because they're musicians. You actually have to record a demo tape in the music room and then mail it to a publisher. But wait, you just can't open the envelope and put the tape in, because if you do you can't reseal it because the envelope's already sealed. You actually have to put the envelope in the microwave with a jar of water to steam the envelope open. You can then reseal it and mail it. The publisher loves the demo tape and mails you back a record contract. You use the record contract to bribe the green tentacle who will then help you get into the secret lab.


Gee the popular demand we're back with another Conan McGregor video and this time we're going to look at his confidence What makes him so confident and how can you apply it? We're gonna look at three main areas here body language speech and mindset So let's dive right in one thing that you notice about McGregor is that he's at ease in any social interaction He's very comfortable. He takes up a lot of space and he looks like he's just chilling at his own house This is a trait of many confident people they don't worry about being around other people They feel at ease in any social interactions. They can kick back Take up the space they need and feel comfortable.   I will exit the contest fresh.  He's insecure He's keeping his hands underneath the table taking up as little room as possible And it looks like he's trying to hide as he's defending himself defending his honor as the champion He's looking down. He's even doubting himself. The problem with bad body language is that it creates a negative feedback loop Creates a negative feedback loop in which our bad body language starts making us feel bad Making us less confident and then we have worse body language and just continues down that negative cycle Good body language is the opposite Conor McGregor in this scenario is gaining more power is gaining more energy He's open body language is taking up space is making them feel more confident. It's increasing. It's testosterone lowering cortisol There's actually been research done by Amy Cuddy and she had a very popular TED talk about this about how your body language Can influence you about how taking up power poses can influence you into having more success into having more confidence In Amy Cuddy's research She has a range of power poses that have been induces to increase into sorcerer levels the common Characteristic trait of these power poses is that they take up a lot of room and make you feel more at ease more confident I have a theory that McGregor's McGregor walk is perhaps the most ultimate power pose because just look at it He's flaring his arms left to right He's looking up in the sky and just kind of tamed the idea.  That's the idea of a power pose You take up as much room as possible and get yourself in that zone During social interactions, many people speak in a rush They are nervous and want to get their point across as quickly as possible to remove the spotlight from them They have this innate fear that if they don't say what they have to say quickly that they will be ignored Confident people do the opposite Confident people are deliberate with their delivery. They take their time They make sure they think out what they're going to say and they say it nice and slowly so that other person can understand There is no fear of being ignored They know that what they're saying is valuable so that they feel more comfortable in saying it Conor McGregor does this all the time You see when he's responding to a lot of people's comments when he has something that he has to say He'll be very deliberate with his delivery who plan out each word even if he makes a mistake He would just take the sentence back and keep on going to him. There is no pressure There's never pressure confidence comes from my work ethic. That's it. I Know the work I'm putting in like I will be back here. It's now 20 past seven I will be back here at about 11 20 Which is six and a half hours post the previous workout You must take six hours you must take a minimum of six hours to replenish the glycogen levels You can't train five Because the glycogen levels don't restore must be a minimum of six. So we'll be back here about half 11 tonight We'll do a second workout and we're preparing correct and we're preparing hard That is when my confidence comes from another characteristic of confident people is the ability to maintain strong eye contact Being able to look somewhere in the face is incredibly powerful Especially because not too many people can do it.  So they look away Confident people have no such fear. What is there to be scared of in social interactions?  That is what I plan to do with Jose I plan to set him up trap him I will create traps and dead space inside that octagon and I will walk him into that dead space But all of a sudden he will be in danger How do you do that? How do you connect these if you can see it here and you have the courage enough to speak it It will happen. So I see these shots. I see these sequences and I don't shy away from them All that matters is how you see yourself If you see yourself as the king, you know, you see yourself with all the belts and all all everything And no matter what no one else says as long as you see that and really believe in it That's what's gonna happen. You can tell you otherwise. Who says what way you see things Who says what you see out of your eyes? I saw myself in that light. I saw myself as the as the number one I saw myself the champion. The last tool is Visualization that visualization is a tool that is underutilized by so many people, but it's incredibly Effective Conor McGregor is a big proponent of visualization. He follows the law of attraction He talks about how he visualizes how his fights are going to end how he's gonna perform in the fights He visualizes how he's gonna conduct himself before public speeches. He visualizes his outfit everything what he'll be driving vividly Confident people use the theater of their mind as Napoleon Hill said in his book thinking great rich You practice in your mind over and over and over and over again Until it actually is part of you until when it's time to go. It's automatic It's in your subconscious mind, which ever understands the subconscious mind There's no difference between the real and the fake if you keep repeating something to it. It becomes so real So confident people visualize their success they visualize how they can contact themselves the best example I can give you of this is the movie fight club. It was the protagonist created this image There's a vision of himself Tyler Dutton Now Tyler Dutton was Everything that the protagonist wanted to be you have to do the same Envision what you would do if you were your best self if you were the most confident version of yourself How would you conduct your public speeches? How would you conduct your conversations with people? How would you carry yourself? What are body language will you have do this over and over again? And you will become that character. That's what Conor McGregor has done. So Visualization is a big key. Just remember that these tips are not limited to Conor McGregor Anybody can improve their body language by taking up power poses and feeling more at ease in any social interaction Anybody can learn to speak better but be more deliberate in their delivery taking pauses and improving their cadence and Anybody can learn to visualize their success into the real world By practicing with their creative imagination your confidence is up to you. So what are you going to do about it?


On the cover of Swimmer's World was a swimming guy's face obscured by splashes. On swimming monthly, a coach in a rose garden. The smell of cigars stuffed the air at Rich's news and beneath it, a note of stale trading card gum. On the wall, a sign said, no reading. Rich, if it was rich, unpacked cigars behind the counter, ignoring me. My monthly or so spot check of swimming magazines consisted of a practice skimming. Contents, capsules, photos. The cover of Poolside had a blonde diver tumbling off. If Rich took my skimming as reading and called me out, it would be easy to say I'd been looking for something. And if Rich said for what, Rich wouldn't. Next to me, a guy was working. He was pulling magazines off the rack, tearing off their covers and throwing the magazines and the covers into two piles on the floor. I'd gotten through swimming monthly and had just picked up Poolside. The guy said, Poolside, right on.  I'd never seen him before. One of the things about coming to Rich's was that nobody who knew me went there. Being at Rich's was like being nowhere. I said, I'm not.  I didn't look like anything. My jeans and my raincoat and my flannel and my Henley. I said, I'm not. He said, right on. I said, are you? He laughed. He touched a bead on a cord around his neck. He had skaterish hair and he was older than me. My brother's age may be. He said, not me. He said, sorry to interrupt your reading. He smiled like he knew me. I said, I'm not reading. He laughed. He said, that sign's just there for the guys who come in to read porn. He made quotes with his fingers when he said, read. The back wall was all magazines and plastic with their titles popping out above blank sheets of paper. A few men stood in front of them. Should someone who didn't know me be talking to me about pornos? Should he be talking like he knew me and making quotes with his fingers? The men at the back wall shouldn't, it seemed, be doing what they were doing in public. Scoping pornos behind plastic, hard on squirming in their pants. My finger marked poolside centerfold. The guy was still standing right there as if he had something else to say to me. I turned the pages as fast as I could, barely looking, defeating my purpose. Goggled eyes, ripped abs, smashed boobs flashed by. Swimmers stroked down lanes and water splashed up and hid their faces. The guy ripped off a cover and tossed it in a pile. Any minute he could ask me what I was looking for. Riches was only a few blocks up from the river market. It was raining, surprise. Two rainy days in a row in November meant it wouldn't let up until June. This was the third day. Not that the rain bothered me. Erica showed up and we put up our hoods and walked around the vendors. Neither of us was going to buy anything. Erica wanted to look at the Fimo beads. She looked at a purple and green bead on a brown leather cord and said, I could totally make that. Erica's mom made jewelry that she sometimes sold at the river market. Erica had used her mom's beading stuff to make me a seed bead necklace that was as nice as any for sale in the stalls. The prices at the market had gone up or the things we liked now were more expensive. The Guatemala backpacks and the earflap hats. We went because it was what we did, something to do on a Saturday. We got noodles or kettle corn. Erica wanted to go eat our yakisoba by the fountain. I said, it's raining. She said, we'll stand under the awning by the coffee shop. She wanted to watch the skater boys doing tricks on their skateboards by the fountain. There were signs that said no skateboarding, but nobody stopped them. Other skater-ish boys and girls stood around smoking.  A couple of the skaters had brown cigarettes. All I could smell was the tobacco from the regular cigarettes. I said, they smell good. She said, maybe I should start smoking them.  She said, but I wouldn't know how to buy them. I said, you could ask one of those kids knowing she wouldn't or expecting she wouldn't, who knew she might. She was the one who wanted to stand in the rain and watch these kids skate and smoke cloves. It was generous of me to watch them with her. The skaters rode their skateboards up on the cement rim of the fountain. Erica said, do you think that one is cute? I mean hot. I said, the one with the pants. She said, with the purple sweatshirt.  Purple sweatshirt kept flicking his hair out of his eyes while he was trying to jump his skateboard up on the rim. Erica said, don't you think it's cute how he keeps flicking his hair? To me, flicking hair wasn't something to call cute or not cute. I said, sure. Erica said, you don't have to think so just because I think so. I said, okay. She said, which one do you think is the cutest? They all looked fine.  The guy at Rich's hadn't looked like a skater. He looked like what? A college student? A guitar player? I pointed to one with slightly smaller pants and a black and green flannel and brown hair back in a baseball cap. He was skating around the fountain in circles, smoothly dodging benches and trash and other skaters. Erica said, don't point. She said, he is cute. He looks like a little rascal. I don't like that type. Whatever that meant, my guy rolled to a stop and stretched his arms. He took off his baseball cap and his long hair went down past his shoulders. It was long, soft looking hair for a guy. It wasn't a guy. It was suddenly so obviously not a guy. My face felt hot and I wanted to take off my wrinko and my flannel. I didn't move. The girl went and sat down on the bench and took off her flannel and in her t-shirt you could definitely tell she had boobs. It was embarrassing how much like a girl she looked.  They were Frenching, going at it, right there on the bench at the fountain. None of their friends noticed or looked. The guy and the girl were mouthing each other to pieces in the rain.  Erica said, whoa. If she said anything to me about how that was the person I picked, I'd be ready for her. I'd blame it on the girl.  I would say, what was it people said? They should get a room.  Now it was really raining. My dad passed me a drumstick and my mom took some slices of white meat. My dad asked how the market had been. My mom asked if I'd bought anything. These were ideas of questions. The sort of paper airplanes of questions my parents felt obligated to lob in my direction over dinner. I could catch them, crumple them, lob them back. I said, it's gotten too expensive. In my parents' minds, the river market still ran along the river and only sold driftwood and soap. All they could do was take my word for it. I said, a lot of that stuff I could make myself. I pulled the skin off my drumstick with my teeth. My mind kept veering to the skaters Frenching on the bench, to their sloppy tongues, her hands swatting at his crotch, to how the skater girl had been a boy until she wasn't. My mind went to the instant I saw her boobs through her shirt and realized it was like the photo at the back of the elephant man that I couldn't stop myself from turning to again and again as if to make sure it was still as horrible or to make sure that I hadn't gotten more horrible since I'd seen it last. Maybe I was over the river market. Maybe Erica and I only went there because we went there or I only went there because Erica asked me to go. My mom passed me the cranberries and said, what about Erica? Did she buy anything? The jellied cranberry sauce from the can held its shape like a cylinder of play-doh. I remembered feeding scoops of play-doh into the plastic machine, getting a hold on the plastic lever and giving it all my strength until something gave and wormy tubes of gray-green spaghetti pushed out the holes. What did my mom care what Erica bought or didn't buy? I said, I think she bought a bracelet. Pledge came over and put her head in my lap. I felt her skull through her thin soft fur. When the guy at Rich's had caught me scoping poolside and said I looked like a swimmer, I should have said so what or I know or tell me what you mean. When I felt the guy's eyes crawling over my shoulders, I should have told him that he had it wrong. My brother was the swimmer in our family. The thing about the photo in the back of the Elephant Man book, which I hadn't checked out of the library in years, was that you needed the photo to complete the story. It wasn't okay to be willing to read about the Elephant Man and not look at him, though for me to look at the photo and think all the same messed up thoughts people had thought when they looked at him in person, when he was alive, was wrong too, maybe more wrong. Every time I looked at the photo of the Elephant Man or thought about what he looked like in the photo, I wanted to not feel what I was feeling. Nauseated as if my head were a balloon, as if his skin, if I touched it, would feel like paper mache. If he offered his hand, I would instantly drop it. The Skater Girl thing was entirely different. She was choosing to look the way she did and the way she looked didn't seem to be causing her any problems. Anyone who didn't know her and who saw her with those boys and that skating get up would have no reason to think she wasn't one of them. What was getting me was the moment when she went from being a boy to mumbling skate tricks to a girl making out on a bench. It wasn't a moment, but a gap between moments, a face with no features.  I'll stop there. Thank you very much.