Four Russian conscripts got off the train in Voronos region and set off for Moscow, without the permission of their commander, the Russian media has reported. According to the report, 15 servicemen left the train, 11 of them returned and 4 did not. The incident took place on February 4th in Voronos region. Some sources wrote that 6 servicemen aged between 22 and 35 left the train without permission. The mobilized men were not from the Voronos region and were unarmed. For this reason, no special measures have been taken to stop them. Only in the city of Moscow, the work of the traffic police has been strengthened. Information about the conscripts has been sent to local police stations. The press service of the Western Military District has told that they did not possess any information about conscripts who are fled.


To find a generating function for a sequence, we assume some function given as a power series, then we use algebra and calculus to eliminate the tail of the series and solve for f of x. And all of this revolves around our key strategy, be a lizard, and drop the tail. So suppose we want to find a generating function for this recurrence relation, where we know a0, a1, and a2. So it's useful to remember we should try to align on the xn term. So our power series has an xn term, anx to the n. Our recurrence relation has a term for an-1, and we want that to be an x to the n term, so we want for an-1 x to the n. Now in our function, the an-1 coefficient is multiplied by x to the n-1. And so to make for an-1 the coefficient of x to the n, we need to multiply f of x by 4x. Our recurrence relation has a minus 5 an-2, and we want minus 5 an-2 x to the n. So in our power series we have an-2 x to the power n-2, and so we want to multiply our function by minus 5x squared. Our recurrence relation has a 2 an-3 term. We want 2 an-3 to the power xn, and in our function we have an-3 x to the power n-3. So multiplying by 2x cubed gives us 2 an-3 x to the n. Now because we've aligned on the x to the n term, this means our x to the n coefficients include something that looks like our recurrence relation. And in fact if we subtract our xn coefficient will be, but from our recurrence relation we know that an is equal to the subtracted terms, which means that after a certain point all our coefficients are zero and the tail drops out. And in fact the first value the recurrence relationship can compute is a3, which means that the x cubed and higher degree terms vanish automatically. So if we look at the left hand side it will be f of x minus, and we can simplify that. So remember the x cubed and higher degree terms vanish automatically because of the recurrence relationship. We need to worry about the x squared or lower degree terms, and we'll include them as the first terms. In f of x they are, in 4x f of x they are, where again we only need to worry about the x squared or lower degree terms. And likewise for minus 5x squared and 2x cubed f of x our first terms up to the square term will be, the right hand side will be, and since we know a0, a1 and a2 we can simplify to get, and finally we can solve for f of x to get. So now that we've gone through all this trouble to find a generating function, why bother? We'll take a look at that next.


Welcome to STMC. Follow me, I will show you our company. What we made is to make TV interesting. Here is our R&D department, including hardware department. However, we design our own PCB and our structure by ourselves. And there is driver department. Driver is the basic part of the software. And middleware department. Middleware, we provided the mainstream of the middleware including very metric, play-ready, run-run. And also minimal business. And HPPTV, MAP5, like this. And here is application department. It's for the Lantru UI design. And here is the testing department. All the software before we send out and release to the customer, we have to test the software before. And this sign is system department. We provided us TV, head-end solution to our security device. And over there is our network room. Follow me. We put all our movies and head-end solution. And here is the showroom. Maybe somebody want to know what is STMC stands for? STMC stands for Superteam, D4 Design. And for manufacturer products, C4 Corporate Department. We bought it in 2003. And in 2014, we listed on the NEQ, the strange market. And our main solution is TV end-to-end solution including OTT, OTT with DVB and DVB. Now our company have totally 150 staff and 18 of our business engineer. So let's see our product. This is a product experience for the OTT multimedia box. This is our latest Qualcomm OTT box. This is a dual-com box. This is a hybrid box of OTT with DVB. And here is our management system. We provide the device management, including the device group and software upgrade lock. And here is our hotel system. Provide the hotel room end and the setup box and the software to the hotel. Welcome to our factory. Follow me. So we here the product verification lab. Yes, come in please. Our engineer is testing the product before ship out. All right. This machine is for the probation test. And this is the Japanese test. This is the software test. The product test. All these test machines, when you have a new product ready to ship, you test everything of the new design. Here is the environment test. The aging around here. This is the high temperature test. This is the humidity test. This is the permanent humidity test. And this is a low temperature test. So how big is your SMT? We possibly have a 35 line SMT line. And so all the PCB from all the different setup box, you can make them here? It's 40k per day and 1 million 20 per month and over 10 million per year. All right. So more than 10 million setup boxes can be made here. So the staff here can work 24 hours? Yeah. This is 24 hours and 3 ships per day. All right. This is all the latest equipment for SMT? Yeah, they are. And the final of the line is they will check the quality of the aging SMT product. That's our aging test for the setup box. Okay, aging test.


Hello students, we are going to cover the next module which is module number 14 of our data size course. Ismaham, we are going to cover statistical variables which is very very important rather this is the essence of the statistics, what variables we are, variables are basically your numbers which we are going to, the data, we cover or represent our data in terms of variable in statistics. It is basically a data item which has different classes, how you represent it, it is qualitative, it is quantitative, then there is something else in it which is a classification, I will share a whole diagram with you, so you will understand better. As you can see that there are two types of variables, qualitative and quantitative. Quantitative variables are your numbers basically, as we have discussed data types in the beginning, blood group, blood pressure, speed, these are all our things, these are numerical variables where there are quantitative variables and the qualitative variables are attributes, basically as we have discussed, race, color, if the name of the blood group is qualitative, its value is quantity, its measure, but its name is if the blood group is A and B and male, female, these are all its attributes. Whether it is something or not or how it is, these are your qualitative variables, there are further classification as you can see, continuous variables, discrete variables, they are nominal and your cardinal, so in different ways, the different types of data available around us are basically our different types of variables. So quantitative variables, as I said, those things which we can count in terms of numbers, what is its quantity of anything, like the individual's height, weight, population, in a city, these are all our quantitative variables. Then there are discrete and continuous, discrete variables, like the number of persons, it can be 1 or 2, 1.2 or 1.5, so these are our discrete variables.  You will now understand what is the difference between discrete and continuous, basically and how we can interpret them, how we can use them. Qualitative variables, as I said, these are attributes, they are basically about different things which we talked about, about your gender, your colour, your nationality, such things which are qualitative, like I said, these are attributes of something. For example, the number of trees, plants, trees, flowers, these are all attributes of different things. When we count them, the number of flowers becomes its numeric value. But in itself, it is a discrete variable. Ordinal variables are basically which come in order, like if we look at age group or height group, these are the things which come in order and they are like this, this is the highest, this is the medium, this is the low, this is the elder, this is the middle, this is the younger. These are basically your ordinal values. These are naturally things which come in order, and in this way, you calculate them, use them, and evaluate them in your analysis. These are used in a lot of surveys, like we are giving an example of customer satisfaction surveys, they ask if the customer is very satisfied, dissatisfied, the average is his satisfaction level. In this way, you collect multiple surveys like this. Similarly, frequency, this is another example. In nominal variables, it is like gender, race, eye color, all these things. But these things are not totally independent. If you have one qualitative variable, we count its quantity as well, when we count its occurrences, then we provide analysis of both things together, but this is just a way of identifying different variables. This chart, this is very interesting, you should understand everything from one chart, because what I was talking about, if a person has a numerical variable, then how many children do they have? How many children do they have? Where do they live? If they live in Pakistan, then they are qualitative, but if they exist, then they are numerical. In this way, your different variables are linked with each other, they are not totally exclusive. Because if we talk about statistical data, then we have to see that if this thing is qualitative, how many occurrences it has, how many deaths it has, how to use it, whether it is a house, whether it is a business, whether it is a business man, whether it is income, whether it is tax, then these are different attributes that are only related to business. Similarly, if there is a farm, if we talk about dairy farms, how many buffaloes, cows, goats, how much milk they give, how much milk they eat, then these are different variables that are related to your entity or farm.   Basically, I want to tell you through this slide, because one entity which can be a person, it can be a business, it can be a government organization, or it can be a farm, it can be a public or private business. With that, all kinds of data are associated with it, which basically represents it, in this case, we perform different types of statistics, then we conclude different results.


In this episode, you're going to learn why it's important that you as a service designer understand strategy and how you can actually use that in your day-to-day work. Here's the guests for this episode. Let the show begin. Hi, I'm Martin Dijkbaal and this is a service design show episode number 97. Hi, I'm Marc and welcome to the service design show. This show is all about helping you to design organizations that put people at the heart of their business. One thing I keep repeating over and over again is that it's important for service designers to gain more influence on strategy and decision-making. But why and how do you actually do that? Luckily, the guests in this episode knows everything about this topic. Majid Iqbal wrote a book titled Thinking in Services, Encoding and Expressing Strategy through Design. Even if you think you're already a strategic service designer, I can promise you that the conversation with Majid will shine a new light on that. And if this topic interests you, make sure you stick around till the very end of this episode because we're going to give away Majid's book, a signed copy of Majid's book at the end of the episode with a really simple question. If you're new to this channel, make sure you click that subscribe button and that bell icon because we bring a new video to help to level up your service design skills at least once a week, so make sure to do that. That's all for the intro and now let's quickly jump into the chat with Majid. Welcome to the show Majid. Hi Marc, thank you for inviting me. It's a strange situation because you're probably like less than five kilometers away from me. Yeah. We're in the city of Utrecht in the heart of the Netherlands. Everybody's working remote these days, so are we, right? As we must. Yeah, we aren't allowed even to get out of home. Majid, for the people who don't know who you are, like a brief introduction, could you? Sure. Hi, my name is Majid and I'm an advisor and a consultant and my expertise is translating strategies into the designs of services. That's what I do for a living. Presently I'm working at the Dutch Ministry of Defense where I'm leading a team focusing on problems of unusual shape and size. We help create new thinking so policymakers have a chance at approaching these problems in a different way. I also help organizations in the commercial sector attack the challenges of strategy and translating them into designs, the perennial and crossing the gap between these high-level abstractions and where the devil is in the details. That's what I also do. I teach occasionally, I teach a class called Strategic Design for Services. In fact, I just taught 14 people last week, 12 of them in London and we had to do it via Zoom and that was quite fun. That's what I do, part of my missionary zeal, I guess. Next month I also will be teaching at the IU University in Madrid. I'll be teaching a new class on Strategic Design to a group of master students. That's what I do. I wrote a book in 2018. It's called Thinking and Services. The tagline is encoding and expressing strategy through design. That book's been out there and it's getting in the right hands. I think people are getting hold of it and beginning to understand this whole idea called service design from a whole different perspective. That's pretty much it. Other than that, I like to cook and that's another way I keep my creative knives sharpened. Cool. I'm going to put you on the spot because we didn't prepare for this, but shall we do a book giveaway at the end of the episode, a signed copy? Sure. Absolutely. Well, throughout the episode, we'll think of a good question to formulate. Well, the signed book giveaway. Maybe you don't know, but I think I first saw and heard your story. It must have been, when was the service design conference in Amsterdam? 2016? I think so. Yeah, the Vestugas Fabrik. Yeah. I remember seeing your talk and you were presenting like the three by three matrix of four by four, what you were thinking. I was looking into the audience and everybody was blown away. What is this? You probably haven't seen me back then in the audience, but that was my first encounter with you. I do remember you. You were in the front row. I was. You asked me to get my mic correct. So Majid, I'm really curious. How did you get into the service design? When did you first heard about the term? Oh, so I don't know. Like many people, I got into it backwards. I was at Carnegie Mellon University and I wasn't even into the whole world of services back then. My background is in industrial engineering. But back then, I was working for a research group where we are trying to examine why extremely large service contracts fail. And some of these were billions of dollars. And we were trying to approach it from a point of view of where are the costs and risks involved? But as you examine that very quickly, you run into the matter of who designed this and what is even the design here? It became a very interesting question. But even back then, I wasn't really thinking in terms of service design. I was just thinking like, how do we even understand services at a new level? Whenever you're confronted with a new problem, you begin to approach it and say, well, I need to think differently. So that's why I sort of got into this world of services. I was teaching at Carnegie Mellon and a course really back then called Managing Service Organizations. And thus began my journey, my inquiry into this fast and expanding universe of services. And then I must clarify that around this same time, the service design movement formally also, there was some origin story in Carnegie Mellon began with Birgit and Shelly and others, right? Shelly Evanson. But I wasn't involved in that sort of service design, which was more focusing on how do you improve interactions in the front stage through designs in the back stage. I ended up in a completely different parallel part where we're using the same word design, but I'm thinking more in terms of strategy and structure. Whereas what we normally talk about service design is more thought in terms of the blueprints and journey maps where, as we say, the design actually meets reality in terms of touch points and interactions and fail points. So I sort of got into it that way. And ever since, I'm of course aware and I interact with the community. But when I talk about designing services, which is why I try to use that phrase, the designs of services, I'm thinking more in terms of structural terms. What are the parts? How do they interact and why do they fail? We're going to get into that for sure. That must have been back in 2006, 2005? 2003 and 2005? You go way back. Cool. The main topic for today is going to be from strategy to implementation, something that's been on the episode on the show quite frequently lately. And I think that's a good thing, because we actually want to make an impact. We want to see the change that we're trying to create actually materialize. So that's the main topic for today. And you have three angles for this. So we're going to do it, of course, through our well-known interview jazz style format. Are you ready for it, Magid? As ready as it can be. Awesome. Let's start. This will be topic number one. Okay. Challenges. Challenges. Okay. Do we have a question starter and can you show it up to the people watching the video? I guess, what if? So it's not as open as a question as you can get, right? Okay. What if designers are strategists? So they were simply given the role, the requisite authority, responsibility and accountability and saying, for now on, you're going to drive strategy. What might change in their outlook? What they begin to see? Because the mind the eye sees what the mind is prepared to understand. So how prepared are they? And this is actually a question that I start with when I'm teaching strategic design. So I feel if designers assume the role of strategists, they will find themselves thinking fundamentally different and they will find themselves having to climb up and down these ladder of abstraction. They actually find themselves doing something they are actually quite prepared to do, to be able to switch back and forth between the abstract and the concrete. And I think that is something that you have to develop in any field, but particularly in design. I think that's where the idea begins, where you begin to see services through an abstraction, where you begin to see how every service have these fundamental patterns or structures, actually structures and then their patterns among the structures. And I think it will be a very refreshing and a thrilling view that they will see because they will take all this experience they have in looking at services at the detail level interactions, the journeys from the user's perspectives, but now they will also have to see from more perspectives than ever before. In many of the talks and conferences, including at the service design network, I think it was a couple of years ago, was it even in Amsterdam where there was a talk about, how do you focus a little bit more on the backstage? How do you go from design to implementation? Because one way to think of it is that the potential lies in the backstage and it has to emerge as a customer or a user enters a front stage and this is dynamic. And if you're not prepared in the backstage, then there's only so much you can do. I want to interrupt you for a second. What is currently, how does this lack of strategic thinking manifest in service designers at this moment? I'll be cautious with my remarks because one has to stay clear of generalizations. This much is for sure. The very first thing, if you look at the hard work that goes into producing a service blueprint and it fills an entire wall, a lot of research, a lot of talking to users, getting out there in the field, asking questions, spending a lot of time. So you produce that detail and the detail is necessary. But then what happens as you go into the detail, you forget to step back and what's the larger context, right?  So which is why one of the key things any strategist has to do. And if you go back to the classical definition of strategy is to climb on top of a hill, see from far and start to see the overall design, the ecosystem, the pattern. And I think that is something that is, I don't think, let me put it this way. We need to put a train people or give them the tools to be able to do that a lot more and also in the course of their normal work to be able to step back and see the overall structure. And I think seeing this overall structure of a service through a construct other than a journey is very important. I think that's where that struggle would be indeed in my own experience when I sometimes have discussions with service designers. One key thing is that's where I see them struggle to be able to, you know, we're all trained to do this. It's just the way it's not any one profession.  We have biases and blind spots. So we're very attracted by our biases because they guide them biases come from deep knowledge, but there lies the blind spot. So what happens is that you begin to see things that you're looking for and then you miss out on things that might actually make the service more successful or cause eventual failure. Yeah, so basically, if I'm understanding you correctly, the lack of a strategic perspective decreases the chance that your service will be implemented or that the change that you want to bring to the world will actually be implemented, right? It's one of the failure points, lack of strategic perspective. I think it's more to do with that your service will be implemented, right? Chances are it's a service that's already up and running and you're trying to improve it. What might happen is that as a situation changes gradually or dramatically, take what's going on right now, right? Almost every service provider is having to figure out how to respond to the crisis. Take, for example, Netflix throttling the quality of streaming across Europe because networks are congested, okay? This is a sudden thing. So now suddenly, things you put in place, the strategic choices you made back then either will now help you adjust smoothly or go through incredible pains. So I think that's the essence and I think I just said something which is very important. I think whether it goes back to Michael Porter, strategy is about choices. Choosing to do things, choosing what to do and what not to do and there is parallel in that design is also about choices. Strategy is about constraints at a very high level but design is also about those constraints at lower levels. Which is why I think strategy and design can go hand in hand and it's very important that we talk in terms of professions and disciplines but they're not such hard and fast rules. People can situationally find themselves in the role of a designer or that of a strategist, right? So that's why the focus in our topic is all about translating strategy into design but also sort of looking at design and seeing in it what the strategy is. So I think that's why this topic that will become more and more important. Okay. We're definitely not done with that one but let's move into sort of the second topic because when we were preparing this talk you said to me that there are some fundamental principles of implementing strategy and the second topic is fundamental principles. Do you have a question starter? Can you make something nice out of this? Question starter. Okay. How can we, when will, why, why, who are? I love your question starters. They're wonderful. All right. So maybe how can we? How can we? Yeah. So it's commonplace, it's accepted wisdom that service design in inherently multidisciplinary, cross-disciplinary, multidisciplinary, however you phrase that, whether you're designing a bike rental service, garbage collection, or emergency healthcare, a lot of different functions and disciplines go into it from operations, infrastructure, software development, and regulatory, whatever it might be, right? The user experience. And as I mentioned, every discipline has its own biases and blind spots and its own languages and formats. Why? Because that's the best, most efficient way for them to express what they're thinking and share their thinking, right? We should not expect them to do it any other way. But then challenge then becomes, if the design has to work and has to translate the strategy, which is at a high level, then suddenly we have a lot of things lost in translation. Okay. How can we bring everybody to the, on the same page? That becomes a key question. And towards this, one of the things we're doing, when I say we, the organizations I work with, we have settled or started using a format called the strategic narrative. The strategic narrative is a, on one hand, it's simply a story, but it's a story of, in a very special format in that it has, it's a fixed length. It has so many sentences and every statement in the sentence is actually an expression or a declaration on some aspect of design. And it's part of a method I've developed called the 16 Next Frame. Think of it as a puzzle with 16 pieces and every piece corresponds to one of the 16 elements of design you find in every service no matter what. And the idea is that you collaboratively solve this puzzle because not everybody, not one function or discipline has all the answers, right? Think of it like a family getting together and solving a puzzle. You turn around and ask for help, right? And someone says, aha, so extend this to this family of functions and disciplines. So by solving this puzzle, by asking simple questions, literally, you know, six types of questions, the prototypical questions, who, why, how, what, when and where. Now interpreting this question, this is a question that anybody can understand, right? By solving this puzzle where every piece is simply a who, why, how or what, and then in the context of when and where, everybody can bring in their perspective, challenge each other. A key aspect in this process is the not just the dialogue, but this argument and counter argument. So what this allows you is that everybody can relax, nobody has to learn this. Oh, I would do this so well if you would just, you know, print me what the contract looks like, say as the lawyer, right? Somebody else might say, show me the blueprint. So I think we can get over that because one thing about, think about a strategic narrative is that apart from expressing the design, the strategic design, it's a narrative form. Nobody needs to be taught how to read or write a story or edit one. So that's one of the fundamental principles and strategic design that inviting multiple perspectives, right, because you're all climbing up at a much higher level of abstraction. At that level, counterintuitive as it might sound, because sometimes people fear the word abstraction, it's too abstract, right? But actually, at a higher level of abstraction, you are actually making things more inclusive, making the participation broader, because you're looking at the same reality, which is the design of a service. And by answering the questions you are interpreting, sort of interpreting those questions, you're giving your own unique perspective. Oh, I think either the user is really the physician and not the patient. Okay, so that answers the who questions or clarifies it, right? Or someone could say, what is the actual outcome? So you can really start discussing this. So I think that's really, in terms of fundamental principles, this is how this is something I would highlight, to use a format, language and format, that is at once broad and inclusive and yet powerful enough to actually create meaningful discussions and output that can be useful at the lower levels of design. Right. So it's creating common ground and it's giving direction. Is that or did I miss something? Yeah, if I could use the expression getting everybody on the same page, literally. Yeah. Yeah. And that's that's one of the things where you see a lot of services break down because people are still very much thinking about their own piece of the service rather than the service as a whole. And this is absolutely right. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. That's one of the reasons, you know, because it like I said, I must clarify, this is this problem is not native to service design, per se, even in healthcare, you know, and MRI may reveal certain things that might be different from what a patient interview can reveal. And that could be different from a blood test. So that's another metaphor for what we mean by a perspective, right? The more perspectives you can bring, the better we are able to, you know, solve the puzzle and focus on the strategic design. And what have you seen is the biggest challenge of creating like this strategic narrative? I can imagine that there are challenges in itself in actually getting this, making this. I think so the biggest challenge is getting past the general discussion of or general notion of the word strategic and narrative and applying it to and how does this apply to the design of a service, right? That's the first challenge because, you know, the world of strategy or teaching strategy or the very idea of, you know, strategic advisory, this is not new. It's one of the oldest professions, right? So strategy is not new, design is not new. The challenge is how do you, how do we, how can we be more imaginative of what we mean by the strategic design for services? Because services are this thing that we all are able to describe, but we all struggle in defining in terms of what are the parts, right? If this were a strategy and it translates into the design of a service, what do I see? So that has been a challenge and that's where my work and my focus has been almost like narrowly in that area in creating a language and format where strategic design can produce some meaningful output. Yeah, so again, I'm going to sort of interrupt you for a second because you basically introduced the third topic and that is, like you said, how does this translate into services, right? Yeah, yeah. Well, continue.  So well, so this goes back to the start of the conversation in my own journey. What is even a service, right? And believe it or not, I had to read a paper from 1966 by James Rathmill in the Journal of Marketing to get my own clarity, right? Because clarity is very important. It's like asking a question, what is salt? You may get different answers around the table. Oh, it's a white substance that is a flavor enhancer. Oh, you can find lots of it in the ocean. So we can have a lot of discussion about salt. But unless, say, if you were to design salt, right, then we have to get into the salt as a molecule, right? We have to arrive at the reality that salt is sodium and chlorine and it's sodium chloride. And then we can go back to the discussion of what kind of salt and all those things. So I think this is what's been missing in service, not missing, but it's gotten over for some reason de-emphasized. If you really go back to one of the seminal papers that a lot of people read in service design, it's the show stack article, right? Designing, gosh, I forget the exact title, but I think everybody knows it. We'll link to it in the show notes. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. The designing services that deliver or can't remember, but the way the blueprinting as a concept sort of first emerges. But what's also there in the paper is something called a molecular model, right?  And there was this really nice way of analyzing services as a molecule. Well, call it a molecule or call it something else. The point she was making was that every service has structure, parts and how those parts relate to each other. And then she also talks about analysis, variation, the shoe shine example, right? What if the shoe shine... How do I improve profitability while improving the experience? So that's the dynamics, right? What changes? So I think that's been the key challenge in services. And the strategic narrative that I talked to you about, it's possible because it is based on this structural relationship between these parts. In fact, even before this 16-piece puzzle comes an even more fundamental concept called the four promises. So every service is a set of four promises. And just understanding how these four promises relate to each other creates a lot of clarity. And I think... So I encourage everyone... And service design means so many different things in so many different sectors in healthcare, in digital services. That's the... Let's think about it. It's no different than the challenge of a biologist, right? We can talk about life in general, but you have to get into a taxonomy very soon and apply your thinking in particular to the sector that you're applying to. And I think this is the biggest challenge, is going back to abstract and the concrete. You should be able to abstract away and say what even is a service? Oh, they're set of four promises. And these four promises lead to these four questions. And these four questions multiplied by the four promises give me the 16 elements. So think like that, right? This is you designer as a structural engineer or a scientist and yet bring back the detail, right? Begin to see, you know, users and people interacting, struggling, trying to get a job done and other organizations or people stepping up and solving. So to be able to go back from the structural analysis to this rich picture that we paint with something like a service blueprint is what will really empower service designers to be invited in more discussions and have a greater impact on many of these matters. Yeah. So the interesting thing about what you are describing is that it becomes in the most positive way more a science than, well, it complements the art aspect of service design, which is a lot in there right now. A lot of service design feels like art. Well, there's a much bigger science part to services, basically, right? Yeah, yeah, I think so. And let's let's be careful with when we create perhaps this false dichotomy between art and science. I've had my own little education. So yes, I do come from an engineering background. But I have I think what both of us mean is that let's learn what we can from science, but also science itself learns from art. Take, for example, data visualization and how we express data through through meaningful visualizations. That is really learning from art. And if we able to, so with that clarification, in fact, art creates new thinking, right? Art, art informs design, design informs engineering, engineering informs economics. There's this whole discussion about that. So I think I think the the the area of service design has attracting people from various backgrounds, from graphic design to in in my class last week, we had two people with a law degree, one with philosophy, a couple of them for illustrators. And we're all talking services. And I told them right from the beginning of the class, reach into your depth, what you studied in college, rely on those fundamentals, and then bring them to the designs of services. So I think that's that will continue to happen. And I think once we have this common language, then then each all our backgrounds, our trainings, the way we taught 10 years ago, will suddenly at some point on some challenge come to bear. And I think that's that's the fun part of it. And I think, yeah, exactly. And I think it was a few episodes back where, if I'm not mistaken, Joe Bailey said, if we want to get better at designing services, we really have to understand what a service is, like we have to. And it seems that there hasn't been that much attention for that or appetite. But it seems that that's also what you're sort of advocating, like let's deeply understand the structure of a service.  If we know what the boundaries are, we can it becomes more fun and probably more productive and effective to design within those boundaries. No, absolutely. And the fun part should not be under emphasize, I always tell people whether I'm teaching them or even my colleagues when we're working on a problem. I say be curious, be imaginative, right? Think in shapes, think in figures, think in numbers, and be you know, childlike about it. But I think Joel is absolutely right. You know, he's a great guy. I still remember his talk from several years ago, where he stood up and said, go deep or go home. I keep teasing him about it, because that's such a good topic. And I think go deep is another way of saying, see the underlying structure, right, beyond the superficial layers. And I think that's part of his message. But also, you're indeed right. There are fantastic excellent books on the design process in general on when it comes to service design. The focus that I have, and some of us are focusing on is making it explaining a little bit more on the services, service part of service design, what is service, what are the patterns, and how can I so that's where my work is, that's where my book also thinking in services focus almost entirely there's very little in it about the actual design process, more of it focuses on what does a designer for service look like to the mind of a strategist. So I think that is essentially why I teach. And I think people are appreciating that many of the people who I'm teaching through the strategic design class are highly experienced service designers, some of them have been doing service design for like 20 years. And it's testimony to the humility as well, right? They're still curious and saying, hey, I want to focus a little bit more on what is this thing called, we call services and how much I see across landscape, you don't know who you're going to help next, right? A local city government trying to set up shelters, or the broader challenge of how do I distribute loans and payments or so I think that's really the dexterity is very, very helpful. And which is why one has to understand services at a level that, especially if you're a design professional, you're the trusted advisor, then it's your job, it's an effort you have to make to understand services much more fundamental level, even though if you may not think and talk about it in your language, you still use the tools and devices that you use day to day, right? Those are very useful, but going back and constantly training yourself at a more fundamental level gives you the depth or as one of my friends, Alok Nandi calls a dynamic shelf, right? From which you, as a designer, almost like a magician, reach into that depth because of your understanding. And I think this, which is why it's important to understand services to be able to have more impact on the field of service design. It's an exciting time to be in service design right now because this knowledge has probably been available for quite some time, but it's now becoming obvious why we need to have like a more fundamental understanding of the thing that we're actually trying to design or design for. And it sort of opens up, like I'm curious, I'm interested, I want to dig into this and it's good to know that there's a lot you can learn, people you can rely upon. So yeah, for me, it's exciting, still an exciting time in service design. I think so, I think so. Yeah, your call for action is good, like get deep into what services are that will help you as a professional and that will help the people you're trying to help. I think so, yeah. We're heading towards the end of the interview, but we have sort of two really important things we need to do. First one is, I want to know from you, if you've got a question for us, the listeners, viewers of the show, is there anything that you'd like us to think about next to the things we've already discussed? To think about in general, is it a question? A question that's on your mind? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. How might we learn from other disciplines that have, for whatever reason, have had 10, 20 or 30 years ahead of us? So for example, we bought a lot of techniques from manufacturing, take something like Kanban, right? This was a technique that was very old and now we're, it's made, got a new life in new domains and disciplines. So, and one of these, and many years ago, 50, 60 years ago, biology went from being the science it always was into informatics when we started to imagine biology as a genetic code. So now, we're coding and now think we have something amazing as CRISPR, right? Where you can literally look at the code and sequence it and edit it. And in fact, so there are examples like these, every discipline makes this big leap, right? It happened even in software development from procedural languages as Xerox Spark, we imagine objects and small talk. So my biggest question is how might we, in the world of service design, make such a fundamental leap? What could it be in the form of, could it be, for example, a pattern library? A lot of people refer to Christopher Alexander's pattern language. But that was an architecture in urban planning. It has usefulness, but we need native knowledge of our own. So how might we make an advance like that? That would be the biggest question that we could think as collectively as in service design. Cool. I like that question. Really curious what people have to say in the comments. Now, the final thing we said at the beginning that we're going to do a book giveaway. We're going to do a contest. So it's up to you to think what a good question would be, where people have to comment on. Huh. Oh. Yeah. I've never done an interview where I haven't been stumped by the question itself. So a contest for, oh yeah. Okay. Good. Whoever. Well, listen. Go ahead. Well, I just realized that I was about to formulate the question, but quickly become a cast member too. I was going to think in terms of, I had a lot of fun writing the book. And in there are several movie references. And I was going to say, I was going to say, okay, maybe that's what it is. Contact someone who has, who has already has the book or reading the book and find three movie references. And the book is yours. There you go. And if there are multiple winners, we'll pick a random one. And if there are multiple people who have the right answer, we'll pick a random one.  You know what to do. People go to the comments section and leave a comment. If people want to get in touch with you to continue this conversation, what's the best way? So there's the design coder slag. It's simply design coders.slag.com. But the easiest way to get in touch with me is via LinkedIn. I'm easy to find and I'm making new connections, meeting new people. And also my Twitter handle is mx iqb al. That's my Twitter handle. And we'll be somewhere here on the screen. Okay. Okay, Majid. I think we're sort of at the end. Stay safe. Stay healthy. Also for everybody who's listening or watching, please stay home. Be healthy. And thanks for sharing your thoughts and ideas, what's on your mind. I think we're entering sort of a really interesting era of service design. So thanks for sharing that, Majid. Thank you so much for inviting me. I really appreciate it. So what do you think will the big lead be in service design? I'm really curious to hear your comments. Leave them down below. And what you also can do down below is to leave your answers to Majid's question regarding the book giveaway contest. So do that down below and we'll draw a random winner who got the answers. Right. If you enjoyed this episode, I hope you did. Make sure you grab the link and share it with just one other person today who might find it interesting as well. That way you'll help to grow the service design show community and help me to invite more guests like Majid here on the show for you. Thanks for watching. And if you want to continue getting inspired by other service designers, click this video over here because we're going to continue over there. Thanks for watching and I'll see you over here.


Good morning. Thank you, folks, for joining us. This is Think Tech Hawaii. I want to remind everybody that this is the fundraising time of the year, so please help us stay in contact, help us stay connected with you, and if you're moved to contribute, please do thinktechhawaii.com. This morning we have with us a really stellar group of people. We have about to become dean of the University of Detroit Mercy School of Law, Jelani Jefferson Exum. We understand that will take place on July 1st. Thank you. So there's going to be at least two celebrations within days of each other of a new level of independence that this all signifies, and we're just really loving seeing it. The Camille Nelson's, the song Richardson's, that there's just, there's a litany of wonderful, wonderful additions to leadership in legal education, and it's great to see Dean Exum become another one of those. So much. Thanks for raising the mic for all of us. We have Professor Bernalia Randall, University of Dayton School of Law, Emerita, my Latin background. There is a gender distinction there. Definitely, and I always pointed that out. Thank you. And I appreciate that reminder. Ms. Waitman, my former high school Latin teacher would be happy to see that observed. On the other end of the gender, Emeritus Professor Ben Davis, who will be delivering a commencement address this Saturday that we hope to get access to and be able to share. And Tina Patterson from Germantown, Maryland, mediator, arbitrator, and critical thinker are excellence as each of these four panelists are. So we're going to, without further delay, treat you to some of that. Tina, you were talking a little bit about the article you read this morning in the New York Times, talking about the level to which division and deceit have come together in a particular group that we refer to as the Republican Party leadership here. What's your take on that? Where's that coming from? Sure. And what I was referring to is a New York Times op-ed piece by David Leonhardt. And the article title is, Liz Cheney's ouster is the sign of the Republican Party's growing discomfort with democracy. The outline of the article is essentially regarding two pieces. One is the ouster of Ms. Cheney, but underlying that is the new state voting laws and how at least 10 states have suddenly changed their laws that for many of us we think there's no real impact, but there is an impact. And underlying that is the impact for the elections in the years 2022, as well as 2024. And while the media may be focusing primarily on Ms. Cheney, the rule of law, which is what you focus on in this program, is at stake. It's literally in the precipice. And while we talk about it, action has to be taken. And I think part of it is stemming back to, and this article also mentions it, is the events that took place in November and how we continue to see this dialogue regarding a lie regarding the outcome of the election. And the media initially supporting it, being very soft in approach, and later saying we can't find anything factual to back up the statement, but it perpetuates itself. And it's why we see the outcome of, and the media is still dancing with this term, I'll just call it what I see it as insurrection. If we were in any other country or talking about another country, it would be called a coup d'etat, a golpe de estado, or an insurrection. And part of it, again, is tying back to the events of November and prior to that, I should say the past four years. So I'll pause there because I know that was a mouthful. It's a great place to start. And Professor Randall, you reminded us in a previous session about a distinction that may be really important in connection with what Tina just said. And that is that while the rule of law may not be essential to the growth and perpetuation of capitalism, it may very well be essential to the growth and sustainability of democracy. Where does that distinction come from? What causes? Well, so first of all, I don't think we have a democracy and have never had a democracy. And to talk about reinstating democracy starting four years ago is to ignore that we've never had a democracy. And to lay it at the feet of the Republicans when the Democrats have done just as much to undermine the rule of law democracy. I mean, the Democrats and the Republicans work together to make sure that they maintain control of the political system. They keep out socialists, they keep out communists, they keep out everybody but themselves. Now, yes, there's some it has in the last four years, the Republican Party has taken it to a different level on voting right. But when you look at it, it's consistent with what they've done my lifetime. So it's sort of like, you know, there's an outrage, which we should be, but to think that somehow this is remarkably different than what's been going on by both Republicans and Democrats. And I'll stop here. I'm not sure this answers your question. It's the thought in my head. But part of the thing that is not being talked about, which is upsetting to me, is how the Republicans and the Democrats had a bipartisan agreement where they included restrictions, increased the amount of money third parties would have to pay to get their candidates on the ballot. And that's just kind of like slipped on by everyone. And that's as much a threat to getting democracy. And that's what I would rather phrase it to, we need to move to getting the democracy as opposed to protecting it. We don't have it. We've never had it. But it's possible we could get it. And that's kind of my reflection. And I know that's not even responsive. But no, actually, it's right on the point because it reminds us that while the pandemic and media may have accentuated things that have been systemic patterns, anti-black racism, anti-Asian American Pacific Islander racism, exclusion of people with disabilities of LGBTQ plus people and other excluded groups. This has been going on for a very, very, very long time. So what moves us in a better direction? Ben, Dean Exum, thoughts? I have a thought. I don't know if it could help. But it comes back to a speech of part of the King in 1967, which was basically talking about their people in the United States who like to have democracy for them and dictatorship for others. And so the whole thing that is kind of tying in with what Bernalia is saying is that democracy for the two parties and dictatorship for the third parties is that vision, is that kind of that package. And I'm not sure what else can be done about that. But at least in our constitutional structure, what I would hope is that with these 400 bills that have been put in various parts of governments around the country at state level, that there would be the countervailing federal bill to at least address the kinds of clear efforts that essentially trying to shape the electorate so that that electorate has democracy and then everyone else has got a dictatorship. Unfortunately, there's the whole Senate problem. But that's the countervailing force that can happen other than people being in the streets, of course. Yeah. And I also mean, I don't know what the solutions are, but I'll just offer another observation, which is that when it comes to our political structure with both parties, the goal is to win. And that's always been the goal because you don't have any power. If you're not, you know, the party of power, it's just very difficult to push your agendas ahead and things like that. And so what I think has happened specifically with the Republican Party in this moment is they found a winning strategy, which is, you know, to sort of perpetuate this sort of rhetoric on this message, they have folks who've really captured it and and have, you know, or I say they found a winning strategy, let's say that they believe they found a winning strategy, right? I'll put it that way. And so they're going hard on that thinking, you know, this is what's going to get us where we need to be, because otherwise we don't have power to push our agenda forward. And then as Professor Randall pointed out, none of this is new, right? It's all kind of repackaged. So on voting rights, we should have, you know, it's expected. There's always a backlash to, you know, to any sort of progress. Of course, we'd see, you know, Trump loses, there's going to be backlash. If there is, you know, if there are enough Republicans who can push something forward, they're going to push forward where they've always tried to do. And so, you know, they're just in a position where they're able to do what their party has always wanted to get done. And so then I'll just add one other piece there that Ben made me think of, which is, you know, what can we do about it? I don't know, but I just keep thinking about the importance of judges for thinking about the Constitution and constitutional structure and, you know, how we would hope, you know, just kind of thinking about history at different points. We've really been at the mercy of like judicial interpretation of our protections.  And that to me is disheartening. I'll put it that way. You're only stuck with them to the extent that the Democrats are unwilling to do more to change the system. The Democrats want to support the system as exists. They want to get a little bit of change, but they don't want to undermine the existing system so much because it works in their favor when they're in power. And they're not going to want to, because they could. I mean, well, the Democrats, the problem the Democrats have is they have, they're more of a right to the right party with a lot of people to the right. So it's going to be hard for them to do anything. But there are solutions to the judge's problems. My own suggestion is pat the appellate courts. Forget the Supreme Court. Pat the appellate courts because there's only so much that the Supreme Court's going to be able to do. And the appellate courts will control people's lives. And the Supreme Court, yeah, will have ultimate decision. But even when the Supreme Court acts, we can always have a president who will ignore them. I mean, if our investment established at least twice in our history, so the Democrats can say, hey, look, you know what? We're not going to the right wing Supreme Court. We're going to pat the appellate courts so that appellate courts are as favorable as possible to our agenda. And if we have the power, we are going to ignore Supreme Court decisions. But the Supreme Court's happy. I mean, the Democrats are happy with the system as is. They just want to, they don't want to undermine that system by taking the suggestions or doing something that would fundamentally change the system. And I don't see how. That's a brilliant insight, Professor, is that theoretically the Democrats could add a lot of appellate federal positions through a budgetary authorization that they could do with 50 votes or 50 plus one.  We need to look a little bit deeper on that one, because if you look at which 100 Republicans, those are, they're complaining that the Republican leadership is too moderate, they're even farther right. And the ones who are saying directly contradictory things within minutes of each other, Mitch McConnell saying Trump is guilty of sin, but voting to acquit him. McCarthy saying nobody is claiming that this election was fraudulent. I met with the president and he was legitimately elected and that's our leadership. And then he turns right around and says, but we're going to use that lie to justify over 400 voter suppression bills as compared to 40 in all of 2020 that were presented to legislation. So we know what's going on. Are people going to stand for this? Yeah. One thing I was thinking about, Chuck, was this representative Stefanik who was being proposed to be the third to replace Cheney, right? And one of the points that was made by people who know her very well was how she had flipped. They were sad by watching how she flipped. And one of the points that was made is that her fundraising increased by seven times from around whatever she had at the last time she ran to like three and a half million dollars. So it's like literally she could say, I can see which side my butter is, well, my bread is butter, right? And if you think of that money part of it, that why would I keep this big lie going? Because it gets me money and it's got nothing to do with reality. It's got to do with getting the power to get the power. Money is the lifeblood, as the representative Fibern said, of politics. And so you say what you can to get more money. And that seems to work very well with this big lie. On the Democratic side, it's the countering the big lie. But it's still everybody's getting paid in that kind of position of things, which I don't know what the answer is, but it's a hell of a deal because people's votes are going to be suppressed or they're trying to suppress. If you're trying to fight that 400 different bills and 400 different states, match the resources you have to have to bring those cases, all those different places.  I don't know which entities could do it, but you know, the NAACP, I know, did a file something in Georgia, but then you've got a Florida, you're going to have Arizona, you're going to hit on just the lawyer part of it. So maybe it's a civil rights division, which I understand is looked very carefully at this recount in Arizona. It's not even a recount. Okay, this fraud audit, okay, that's going on. I've been asking people, why isn't this election interference, this privately funded secret count of the actual ballot that people in Maricopa County actually did? Why is that not election interference under our law? To me, it seems like it is, but I'm just a crazy guy. But that's the thing. It's not election interference unless a court says it is, right? To me, that's the whole thing is like, law is what it's interpreted to be. So at some point it comes down to who is telling us what the law is. And that's why I go back to judges. I mean, in some ways they're far removed from the everyday and everything that's happening, but in some ways they really, they're just points in time when we really count on that decision to kind of stop something or move something along. And I think it just really matters who's in those seats. It's not election interference unless prosecutors say they are. I mean, it could, if in fact, the prosecutors in the Department of Justice decided to bring a case, they might not win the case at trial, but it could slow up the count very significantly. They could get a temporary restraining order to stop it until it works its way through the court. And the question I have is, why haven't the Democrats done that? Why haven't they undertaken prosecutorial attempts to stop the Republican interference? Because I understand that the federal law about conserving, preserving for 22 months valid in a federal election. And that there's either civil or criminal penalties for failing to do that. It just seems to be that, geez, that seems like a pretty obvious case that they're using them kind of like McDonald's raps almost, you know, the way that they're taking care of them.  I mean, I've sat as a poll watcher and watch people vote. And it's one of the most moving experiences to see people exercise the franchise. And each one of those ballots, in a certain sense to me, is kind of like a person's will as to how they want their country to be. They're not just pieces of paper we flip around with. There's something special. And this kind of cavalierness with them, to me, and I may be crazy, I agree civil rights division should be all over this at the federal level. But also the state under the state rules should be all over this too. And I understand the political thing of like, who's going to vote for me the next time around. But that's not the point, it seems to me. If you don't step up, what did Cheney say? If you don't set up to contest the liar, you give the liar power. And that's the problem.  Oh, yeah. Absolutely. She knows the game.  So having me quote Liz Cheney, when I was used to really despise her for how she was rationalized torture, okay, is that's telling me how crazy this thing has got. Because she was actually saying things that made sense in a world where you're looking for the adults in the room. All that said to me when she supported it is that the sociopaths on both sides who will switch sides to say whatever is necessary at the point. She's hooked her at, she hooked her thing for a lot of reason, including defense of her father to being a non Trump person. And she's willing to say whatever is necessary in that arena. And she's not a rational person, she's not a person to be trusted and to be believed that she's doing something out of the goodness of protecting democracy. She desires to regain power for herself and her friends. And that's the road she has to take. If she could take a different road, she would. She could do it. Rest assured for me, Professor Randall, I never believe a politician's promises, right? They only bind the person who believes them, okay? I'm just looking at the words that were said and saying those words were good words to hear. I don't know what's going on in her head. I don't know what she's planning, what's her strategy. But I'm just saying that I said that was a good speech, you know. But I mean, but don't you think then that we have to look beyond what the words people say because that's what Trump people did. Yes. They just looked at the words he said and not the person behind it. Okay. So didn't Maya Angelou say that if a person shows you who they are, believe them, right? Yes. Yes. Right? Yes. So she has shown us who she is or these other people are showing us who they are. I believe them and they are to me very dangerous people. They will go to violence. They've already gone to violence. They will go to violence and the system will not do anything about them. You see these people testifying yesterday who were running the Department of Defense and they were whitewashing everything that we all saw on TV. I said, there's nothing here. There's nothing in these people. It's unbelievable. It's like, I don't know how people, you know, the only thing I can think of is people get paid. They get paid. It's worth them money. It's worth them for them to say these things because they will get paid. As in America, you know, like in that movie, Killing Me Softly, Brad Pitt said, America's about getting paid. And that's all that's going on. I don't know, but it's just really surreal. Actually, I'd say it's surreal. If I wrote this as a novel, you would say, no, Ben, we can't publish it. This is not serious. But I don't know. So as we move into our last couple of minutes, what are the takeaways? Tina, you reminded us that the Lean Hearts article faulted the Democrats just as much as the Republicans and Professor Randall has been very clear in saying that's been a pattern for a very, very long time. Besides the DOJ, where might we go from the air? Who do we look to for hope? I agree with Professor Randall. I think it's the lower courts. I honestly do. Packing. And I was going to ask, is it too late or is that event approaching? I personally don't think it's too late. I think this is the time to take action, but Professor Exum also touched upon it and that's, are you willing to step out if you're an elected official? Are you willing to step out risking that you may not make it through the next cycle and know that you're going home and be okay with that? And I'm fairly certain I can say most of elected officials don't want that. They've got a long-term strategy, whether that's to stay in office as long as possible, or until someone comes and picks them up to take them home forever. And it might not take that much money to add 100 federal district judges and 50 federal appellate judges. See Exum? I'm just going to say I still, I mean, and I agree with all that. I still think that there's hope in grassroots voter efforts, because at the end of the day, that's what everybody at the top is after, in some extent, not because they necessarily want to be representatives of those people's voices, but they do want the numbers. And they're looking for rhetoric that will resonate enough to get some of these numbers. And I think that we saw this last time around that those efforts on the ground to raise up a new crop of voters, getting them out there and all that. Of course, that's why we're seeing the restrictive voting laws coming out, because everybody knows that that is also a part of the strategy. So, I mean, I still have some hope there. I think that's always been, especially thinking about the black community, that's always been something that people have been working on and kind of finding new ways to do that on these kind of local levels, too. So, I wish as a black community, we would put as much effort into getting a viable third party as we put in to getting voters for Democrats and Republicans. It seems to me that we're pouring money down a sun pole that it ain't never going to happen. The Democrats and Republicans are never going to protect our interests. And whether we turn out voters for the Democrats, whether we turn out Republicans, we're going to be unhappy with the results. And so, I wish we would give up on that. I don't know whether, given that the Democrats and Republicans have effectively posed out third parties, that effort would probably fail. But I feel better if we were working on that than continuing to support what is obviously a system that's not going to ever give back what we put in. So, thank you all. Let's come back to that in a couple of weeks. And let's think about how we might meaningfully enfranchise those groups that do make the difference. The minority voters, the young voters. Socialists, communists. Communists are unconscious. Thank you all. Thank you. I'm joining us again in a couple of weeks. Thank you. We'll be back.


The Great Lakes Regional Championship winner goes to the Little League World Series. I love the Little League World Series. We got a small Indiana town versus a Kentucky town. Uh-oh. They hit the first batter. He flips the bat. He claps his hands. He says, hold this pad for me. I got to put this pad on. Double padded. Catcher says, let's go up top. Kid from Kentucky says, I'll put that into the outfield. Easy peasy. Lemon squeezy.  Oh man. In his glove and out of his glove. No one scores though, but look at this. Just a hot shot. Bam. Kind of trampolines it up in the air. So now base is loaded. Two outs. They're in a jam. Traffic zooming in the background and first pitch. Foul back. Strike one. Kentucky dads. Look on. Nervous. Noivous. Okay. Says, let's go fastball outside. Fastball outside. Boom. Kids like, what?  Get the K. Stretz off the mound. This team from Indiana it got the whole town cheering for them. And the whole town isn't that many people. We're talking about a small, small town. 1,787 residents. I mean, did you see? It's like one neighborhood. It's like one gridded neighborhood. The graduating class is less than 100. I love small town America. That's my favorite. This town, Hager's town, back in the 70s, they had a laundromat that Mrs. Revere would have been jealous of. No other town this size has a better coin laundry. Wouldn't Mrs. Paul Revere enjoy such facilities? And West of town is a park for all ages to enjoy. Picnics and Little League Baseball. Dedicated adults insist on fair play with our fun. Fair play, Little League. They got a great history, tiny little town. The whole town's behind them. It makes Little League World Series more fun to go outside. Fastball. Kid tries to bunt it. Nods his head. I mean, we're talking about tiny classrooms.  Then you have the All-Star team. Like, how many kids didn't make the All-Star team for Hager's town, Indiana? Seems like everyone's playing. And they're playing really well. Fastball outside. Ketcher calls it 1-2. Nice pitch by the Kentucky pitcher. He's like, yep, you guys throw it around. Easy for me. Nothing to it. Oh, just barehand that because I'm a man. Oh, here comes the legs. Digs his cleat in. Tap, tap. Fastball. Inside. What's going to happen?  Strike one. That pitch actually kind of has some run to it, which is wild. Like a two-seam fastball. I think it's just his natural arm motion, but you see that ball? He's aiming it outside. It's like a very well-executed pitch. The Ketcher sets up. He hits the Ketcher right in the glove, and it's got run on it. It's a great pitch. 0-2 gets him to swing and miss over the fastball down, but drop third strike, so he gets the first, then drops himself, and the crowd loves it. The ghost of Hager's town is there watching on. All right, next batter comes up. Runner on first, one out, fouled straight back, liked it though. The 0-2 trying to get that outside again.  Let's go way up. The 1-1 doesn't chase off the Ketcher's glove. Our guy's going to second base. That's the go-ahead run on second. Now the 2-1 in play. Second baseman bobbles. It stays with it out. Good call by the ump, but now the go-ahead run is on third, and the fans are ready. Our time. Two out. You got to make sure you can get in. He's talking about scoring on a pass ball, because it's a go-ahead run on third, but there's two out, so don't be dangerous and we get a pass ball. Almost takes a perfect bounce to the Ketcher pitcher, so the runner stays on third. Smart. Good coaching. Got to make sure you can get in. Fastball. Outside. Here we go. 1-2 gets it inside a little bit. It's got that same run, but it doesn't work out for him. In Hagerstown, Indiana, the small town of less than 2,000 people are going to the World Series, and we got dads going crazy. We got fans going crazy. We got father son, coach son, hug. He just won't let him go. He's so damn proud of his son, and it makes me tear up, and they're tearing up in the stands, and everybody is incredibly... Oh, and the ghost of Hagerstown watches on. Some say he was behind it all.


ge buildings that get added you can't ever unbuild them and eventually the diversity moves only in one one I mean the diversity sizing of decrease moves only in one direction and that's the larger and larger massings and once they're there they're there Arlington's trying as a community is trying to differentiate itself from other communities and this is moving more towards Cambridge than it is towards a lot of Lexington in terms of massing and density and I'm thinking this is again a pretty large building for the area and I don't I'd rather see something scaled down or at least farther back from the street. So those are my comments. Thank you very much Mr. Moore. Thank you Mr. Moore. Are there any further members of the public wishing to address the board at this time? I see none. I'm going to go ahead and close the public comment period. I just want to quickly note so the meeting was advertised is ending at 10 30 which is in 11 minutes and I am assuming that I have been told that that doesn't mean that Zoom will cut us off at that time. However I don't trust that necessarily so before we go any further with the agreement from the applicant should Zoom cut us off at 10 30 that we are on agreement that we are continuing until Thursday February 9th at 7 30 p.m. Do you agree with that Mr. Feldman? Yes. Okay. So with that I wasn't sure if Mr. Mulhern had a comment he wished to make. Mr. Chairman before that I just want to make sure before 10 30 hits that you actually vote on that continues. Okay thank you. Mr. Chairman do you want to take your vote now? Mr. Havard if I if we take the vote can we continue to discuss or do we have to stop discussing? I think you're better off finishing your discussion and then taking the vote just make sure you get it in before 10 30. Okay. Then Mr. Mulhern. I'll be very quick I just want on the topic of the solar study it was prepared by my office I didn't do it myself I believe that the grade change on Brattle was taken into account but I will verify that and make sure that we've adequately dealt with the fact that the site slopes down and the neighborhood slopes down towards the Brook. With respect to the other issues we'll have to circle back with Matt and Paul Maggiore and Paul Feldman to develop a strategy to address the concerns that you've raised with respect to the side setbacks the mass of the building and the position of the building on the lot. Having said that the riverfront and the river buffer areas are a serious constraint on this project as we try to move the building more north. That's all I had. Thank you Mr. Chairman. Thank you. So Mr. Feldman and Mr. Maggiore as far as what topics would you like to address on February 9th given the comments you've received today would you want to revisit some of the the civil comments that came in at the prior hearing or where would you what would you like to accomplish on the 9th? Right so I think what we're going to be prepared we may be able to do several things but one thing we want to do on the night is when Sean is back from Tetra Tech have civil present the response to Tetra Tech's comments because I think we're getting close and we may be able to get there by the 9th to really close out whatever civil issues have been raised and we know that at least that can be addressed so we want to we definitely want to on on the 9th on the on the civil side. We also will going to address constructability which was an important subject of Sean's and from Tetra Tech so we want to present constructability on the 9th and we certainly will make an effort to address or begin to address what we've what we've heard tonight on a variety of subjects I mean we'll we'll go back and we'll study the setback issue I again I every community response to constraints in different ways and I always find it so interesting how each community is so different because I've been in communities where you know they're two feet into the side yard setback is like you know doesn't mean anything to them I know there's only a 10 foot side yard setback here but it happens all the time but I I'm sensitive to the community that we're in now and I'm sensitive to the points that you guys have made so give us an opportunity to look at that and we're going to try to advance the discussion on on the architectural comments as well but we would I think put that third but I want to go think go you know what's going to happen is we're going to debrief tomorrow morning and we're going to figure out how to advance the ball. Perfect okay so we would be talking on the ninth we would be reviewing civil we would be reviewing constructability and then sort of a first pass at addressing the comments that are received this evening. Correct perfect okay set work for the rest of the board. Excellent okay then with that I will ask for a motion to continue the public hearing for the residences at Millbrook until Thursday February 9th at 7 30 p.m. Chairman yes so moved thank you Mr. Hanlon second and Mr. DuPont this is the vote of the board to continue the public hearing for the residences at Millbrook until Thursday February 9th at 7 30 p.m. so roll call vote of the board Mr. DuPont aye Mr. Hanlon aye Mr. Riccadelli aye Ms. Hoffman aye Ms. Holly Mr. Holly aye and chair votes aye we are continued on the public hearings for the residences at Millbrook look forward to seeing everyone on February 9th and thank you to everyone for all they prepared and all they presented this evening it was very informative very helpful I really appreciate it and also to the members of the public who spoke it's it's very important to have your your contributions we really appreciate it thank you as well we really appreciate everyone's time this evening thank you thank you all so just for the board the February 9th will actually be our next hearing so we're free until then just to review Monday February 13th at 4 p.m. we're going to do that training session for how to run a meeting hybrid um so that's Monday February 13th and then uh Thursday the next meet there we don't yeah we will not be having a meeting on the 14th of February so everyone can enjoy their valentine's day uh but February 23rd would be the next hearing date after that which would be another Thursday uh 40 b and so the next regular meeting we have is Tuesday February 28th that's our schedule going forward are any questions with our schedule seeing none um I would like to thank everyone for their participation in tonight's meeting of the Arlington zoning Board of Appeals I wish I appreciate everyone's patience throughout the meeting I would especially like to thank Rick Valerelli and Vincent Lee and the staff over at Department of Planning and Community Development for all their assistance in preparing for and hosting this online meeting uh please note the purpose of the board's reporting of the meeting is to ensure their creation of an accurate record of its proceedings and it's our understanding the recording made by ACMI will be available on demand at acmi.tv within the coming days if anyone has comments or recommendations please send them via email to zba at town.arlington.ma.us that email address is also listed on the zoning board of appeals website and to conclude tonight's meeting I would ask for a motion to adjourn to chairman mr. Hanlon again so moved thank you sir and seconded thank mr. Dupont so there's a roll call vote of the board for adjournment mr. Dupont aye mr. Hanlon aye this often aye mr. Holley aye mr. Rickidelli aye and the chair votes aye we are adjourned thank you also very much thank you mr. chairman have a good night everyone


Hey what's up guys, so this box here I've received from my friends at Armada Deals. This is a spin bike, now as you can see I have a lot of fitness equipment in this tent in my house and I like to do a lot of training but I've always wanted to get like an exercise machine that I can put somewhere and they've sent me this exercise bike that I'm going to review for you guys today. Now this comes in at 160 pounds which is an absolute bargain but I'll leave a discount code in the description below of where you can get 10% off as well for everyone watching this for the next six months so that is an awesome deal, make sure you check that out. Now I'm going to unbox this and it probably will take me some time to set it up but I'm going to showcase you everything once it's complete and then run through the specifications, the digital display and all of the type of things that you can do with this bike and the benefits that it will bring to you so let me go ahead and do that and let's get straight into it. Alright guys so I've just taken everything out of the box now if we take a look down here let me show you there's not a massive amount of pieces that come with it but if you take a look I actually really like the fact that they've given a water bottle as well so that's convenient. The first thing that stood out was these awesome red and black stickers that I'll be putting on the side of the spin bike so you've got the bike there, you've got the handles, the feet, you've got the seat as well and the actual pedals that you would put your feet in so gladly there's not like a million screws which you know I was a bit skeptical about but it feels like it's very straightforward to set up so hopefully I can get this done in about half an hour but I'll let you guys know once I finish how long it took. Now just to quickly show you the user guide if you take a little bit of a closer look here you can see these are all the pieces that come inside the box that I've got on the floor here so there's not a massive amount but the main thing I'm looking at is how long it might take to construct and I can see that there's only seven steps so step seven everything is completed and I'm ready to go so hopefully that will indicate that it may take you know around 30 minutes so looking forward to setting up getting it started and giving you guys a review on how it performs. All right guys so the bike is now finished and it took me about 35 minutes and that's with the help of two people but I definitely recommend you have two people when you're setting this up it's pretty straightforward the instructions were easy to follow there wasn't a whole lot of parts the last step is to use some of these stickers and put it on the frames on the side of the bikes so let me go ahead and do that and then I'll give it a test okay guys the bike is now now finished I've managed to set up everything that I needed to I even put the cool stickers on there now this was done in about 35 minutes but it took two people to do it so if you are going to assemble this I do recommend getting two people to put it together it makes your life a lot easier now the seven step process it was very simple let me quickly show you what I did to do that so step number one it was fairly easy the first thing I had to do is just put the feet there so with the wheels on it it's all connected to screw it on and then you can move the bike around quite easily second step is just to connect the back feet and put the screws on there and that was very easy step number three is to just screw the pedals into there so you have the the caged pedal there on the both the left and right fairly quick and easy step number four I just had to connect the seat so it's adjustable to move backwards and forwards and also in height step number five put the handlebars on also very easy just to put some few screws in and it's there step number six was to connect the lcd display and connect the wires at the back of that and step seven was to finally put on the phone mount which is just pushing it in and connecting it to the handlebars so that was very easy so now what I'm going to do is jump onto the bike and give you a quick test of the performance now one thing to note is this does come with something called a quiet glide flywheel so that is ultra silent so when you're maybe setting this up indoors or even in your garden in your house you're not going to disturb anyone like your neighbors or people in your household if they're watching tv or anything like that so try to listen out how loud this is can you hear that no you can't that's how quiet it is now of course if you do increase the resistance here from the middle you'll start to hear a little bit more of the wheel but even then it's very quiet and I'm quite impressed with that and the seat is very comfortable as well the fact that you can adjust the handlebars to go up and down using a little knob at the back and then the back knob here for the seat adjustment as well is to get the perfect positioning no matter what your height then you also have a mount here for your phone so what I'm going to do is just slot my phone in there there you go so if you wanted to watch like a tv show or put some music on or whatever you want you can do that while you work out is very convenient the last thing I want to show you is about this LCD display now there's a few options here scan is basically scanning through all of the other options and they're cycling every three seconds time obviously that's in seconds and minutes on how long you're performing SPD is the speed so that shows you in kilometers for how fast you are going distance is how fast you've traveled in kilometers calories that's self-explanatory odio is the odometer and this basically tells you the total distance you've traveled on this bike from the time you've put the two AAA batteries into this LCD display and finally pulse if we switch to pulse is to give you an estimation of your heart rate so you just hold it down for five to ten seconds and there you go heart rate at 72 69 so it does give you a rough average there even though it does change and that's very convenient okay guys I'm very impressed with this purchase I'm going to use this as my cardio machine in my back garden here and it is 160 pounds I've got a 10 discount code for you guys to get it off in the next six months from the time I've published this video so do check it out and if there's anything else you guys want to know then do drop a comment below otherwise there's some really cool tech gadgets that you can check out on our Marta Deals website all the links in the description down below as well now make sure you hit subscribe if you're into fitness and you really like tech gadgets that really help you with your workouts and I'm going to do a lot more of those in the near future so make sure you like this video and I'll catch you guys next time take care