The 5 Principles of Adult Learning Pioneered by Malcolm Knowles

An Analysis of Geoffrey Hill’s Little Apocalypse :: Little Apocalypse

An Analysis of Geoffrey Hill’s Little Apocalypse  â â â Seamus Heaney’s â€Å"The Redress of Poetry† uncovers that â€Å"it is the creative mind [of poetry] squeezing backâ against the weight of the real world (1).†Ã¢ The two contradicting powers of creative mind and the truth are dynamic in Geoffrey Hill’sâ â€Å"Little Apocalypse.†Ã¢ The sonnet manages the individual strict clash of Friedrich Hoderlin (1770-1843), a German verse poet.â Hill centers around Hoderlin’s battle with his solid confidence in Greek folklore and afterward Contemporary Protestant religious philosophy. From this reality Hill uses Greek and Christian imagery.â Hill’s creative mind supplements Hoderlin’s reality and results in a masterful retelling and distinctive delineation of the German poet’ hardship.  â â The main refrain addresses Holderlin’s relationship with Christianity, explicitly his mother’s want for him to be a minister. His mom was straightforward with her desires and sent him to â€Å"monastery schools† at Maulbronn and the philosophical theological school in the University of Tubingen (Witte 1).â comparable to â€Å"Apocaplypse† Hill composes that Holderlin is â€Å"close enough to endure the sun’s crude reestablishing anger (33).†Ã¢ The sun speaks to Christianity and however its lessons just as its unwavering techniques for teaching (â€Å"primitive restoring fury†) encompass him at school and home, he is â€Å"close enough† to his own strict convictions established in Greek folklore (Witte 1).â The â€Å"scorched vistas† propose that Holderlin’s point of view on religion had been changed or brought into question from his parochial education.â Hill infers that Holderlin considers his coh orts as â€Å"injured† undoubtedly from a profound perspective yet keep on being valiant. In spite of the harmed, Hill declares â€Å"this man [Holderlin] stands fixed against their injury.†Ã¢ The picture of Holderlin standing firm extraordinarily diverges from that of the harmed and the utilization of â€Å"sealed† represents that he held solid to his convictions.  â â The subsequent refrain movements to pictures of Greek mythology.â€Å"Hermetic brilliance of incredible suns kept in† has a multifaceted nuance. On one hand, his strict feelings are fixed impenetrable and on the other Hill envisions him as Hermes the antiquated god delivery person. As the antiquated delegate God Hill implies that Holderlin himself was a delivery person maybe with a strict message yet confounded by two distinct religions. The last three lines allude to the rediscovery of Holderlin’s work that has set up him as â€Å"one of the extraordinary verse writers in the German language† and put him in the positions of the â€Å"Greatest of German artists (Witte 2).

In-depth interview with Terrajoule founder Steve Bisset

In-depth interview with Terrajoule founder Steve Bisset INTRODUCTIONMartin: Hi, today we are at Terrajoule in Redwood City. Steve, who are you and what do you do?Steve: My name is Steve Bisset. Im the chief executive officer at Terrajoule Corporation. Were a relatively new startup, founded in 2009 for the purpose of introducing a very significant new kind of electricity generation equipment into the world market.Martin: What did you do before you started this company?Steve: Like a lot of people these days, Ive done a variety of things. My original background was an engineer, I got a degree in electrical engineering from Caltech, but I have had a business passion from the beginning for reasons that no one can ever explain. So, from doing newspaper delivering routes, to cutting lawns, to exporting surfboards from Australia to the United States, I did a number of things. But basically the core of my background is in starting up businesses that design, manufacture and sell capital equipment to customers. So, I very much like things that cost about million dollars each, because if they cost a billion dollars, you have to be a politician and the sales process is a certain kind of thing; if its consumer goods, I have no intuition for that, everything, every product I like, its discontinued because nobody else likes it, so my taste in that is useless. But basically commercial industrial customers, the things cost a million or ten million dollars, youre providing something that is critical and important to them, so they can pay attention to it. The process has a large rational component to it, it is always emotion and relationship, but its basically rational, so if you can understand customers problem in economic and practical terms and you can provide a solution to that customer thats important to them and better than the next best solution, theyll buy it from you and then the customers happy and youre happy and have a relationship and that all make sense. So this is my view of business.Martin: Lets get to some insights on how you started and you did define on find this business idea.Steve: My background, as I said was semi conductor capital equipment making test equipment for companies like Intel, and then I did a number of different things that I wont take up time here, but including anywhere from travel to mathematics education. But for a long time I was really interested in the energy business. Energy is, I really cant explain such a thing. Some people like cars, some people like energy. To me, energy is very big, its really important, its really influential on the world, theres World Bank study that shows this very close correlation between the availability of dependable electric power at low-cost and standard of living. Its a fundamental driver to civilization. And for me, for many years, just the appeal at a hobby level it was very interesting to me. Clearly theres a lot change happening with the technology, theres a lot of opportunity to make a difference, theres a huge amount of growth and de mand, a lot of developing economies that are developing now that werent developing before. And some really unresolved problems, so global warming is certainly one of them. Thats really, I see that, I understand it, its important, its really too big of a problem. To me to really think about something thats sort of more media in the philosophical sense, that if you can put power, if you can distribute power, if you can distribute electrical power, the control of it, the ownership of it, youre also distributing an economic power, youre also distributing political power. And when you do that as oppose to having central control of it, it makes the world safer for democracy and the nice people. And its generally, I think, good for economic growth.So, both of the philosophical level and on practical level, we have growing economies, the supply of electricity within those economies is the fundamental need and then gigantic, gigantic business opportunity, perhaps the biggest. And if you had a good distributed power generation gadget, that would generate electricity in smaller chunks, not hundred megawatts or a gigawatt, but a megawatt or 10 megawatts, its industrial sized, city sized, village sized and you can spread that around, that is potentially more economical way to do things, if you have the right gadget, then building big power stations and trying to control big robust grids, as things are building and changing. Its really not just an economic issue, its not fundamentally one is better than the other, but if you can come up with the right distributed electricity gadget at the right price, then it has some really great advantages and we saw the opportunity to do this with solar power, and perhaps make one of the really significant changes in the way electricity is generated in the world and therefore have a lot of fun to do something thats good and potentially make a multibillion dollar business out of it, which is absolutely our plan and our vision.BUSINESS MOD ELMartin: So, lets talk about the business model, Steve.Steve: Yes.Martin: From my understanding, its a decentralized, energy producing and storage and distribution system that you are planning to do. Can you tell us a little bit more about how this works and also together from a technology point of view?Steve: Yes, Ill be happy to do that. So, what the product were selling is, is a small power plant. It provides electricity in the form that is valuable to people. In other words, whats valuable to people is AC electricity of 50 or 60 hertz, depending on where you are, at a defined voltage, where you have it available on demand, its available to run your school, your factory, your home, your air-conditioning. When you put in or when you turn on your equipment, it adjusts and it provides controlled voltage and frequency so that you can run it. When you have such electricity at reasonable cost, people invest in homes, they invest in factories, they invest in industry, it creates wealth , it creates economic growth. Any other kind of electricity thats uncontrolled its not particularly useful. So having said that, thats what you have to provide, by the way, thats what a lot of power distributive parable comes to big diesel generators, where they do exactly that, they provide excellent power, but you have to keep feeding them with diesel, its very expensive, its polluting, its insecure, its unpredictable and so for. That is really one of the key targets, is diesel generated power, because its already expensive, but it works very well.So, what were providing basically is little power plants that do what a big diesel generator does, but instead of running on diesel they run on sunlight. So, sunlight in, electricity on, 24 hours a day. In order to do that, you have to have a means to take the sunlight and convert it to electricity, but you have to have a buffer, you have to have a fuel tank, with diesel engine doesnt work without a fuel tank. The tanker arrives, it fill s up the fuel tank, then you run for a while. So, in the case of sunlight, its already distributed, its just distributed to your doorstep daily, on most days. Its free, its untaxed, so far, and, but it doesnt come out on a form of a AC voltage, so you have to have a way to capture it, you have to hold on to the energy in it and then convert it to electricity on demand, at a time that you do it.So, technically and thermodynamically, what were doing is taking some very old, well-established technologies that people spent thousands of man year, person years developing, and perfecting and refining, so were not big entrepreneurs whore going to invent some fundamental breakthrough in science. Were too impatient for that. We really need to exploit technologies that have been used and find a way to put them together to solve a problem. So, the technologies that were using is solar power, so the first fundamental element is concentrating solar thermal power. So this has been done by many peo ple before in many scales and forms, where you take a mirror, a set of mirrors, you concentrate sunlight into a much smaller space, so it creates high temperature, you absorb that sunlight into some sort of a fluid, you use that fluid to go through a heat exchange and to generate steam at high pressure. And then that steam is used to go through machine, to turn a shaft to drive an electrical generator to make AC power. Now, I would guess that most people in the audience are going to go Ah, youre talking about a steam turbine. And in fact, steam turbines are coal fired plant and nuclear plant, combined cycle gas plant. I mean a lot of the world runs off electricity generated by steam turbines, the vast majority of it is done this way, but its not what we do, because it doesnt solve the problem that we need.Steam turbines are great at 100 megawatts and up, theyre great at a gigawatt, its a wonderful thing, and it requires you to have an extremely large power plant and a very robust di stribution network. If you want to do it at a megawatt or 5 megawatts or 10 megawatts, steam turbines are not useful at all, for two reasons.Number one is for technical, physical reasons, they become very inefficient in the small scale.But the other reason is that steam turbines provide whats called base load power, which is useful in a big electric grid, but its useless in a distributed sense, because base load power means you turn it on, and it runs on one power outlet. So, if youre running at 10 megawatts into a factory and you turn on or turn off equipment, youre not drawing 10 megawatts, youre drawing a variable amount of power, and this is what a diesel generator provides very well, but turbines dont do that.So, for efficiency reasons and the fact that theyre not a variable power output, theyre quite useless to solve this distributed generation opportunity. But, the thermodynamics is the same, the whole industrial revolution was built on steam piston engines. Not the same ones that go into a steam locomotive, but very much the same thats going to large steam ship. All the steam ship through World War 2 were primarily driven by steam, as was distributed power generation, where coal was delivered to a factory and you burn it and use the steam engine to generate electricity.So, this technology through the 1930s was very highly advanced for your efficient, for your robust, for your reliable, and if you know where to look, the documentation there this wealth of technological know-how exists. It hasn’t entirely stopped in sense that its a piston engine, and much of the world now runs on internal combustion engines, which are piston engines, and the technology and the supply chains, and the factories are designing, and analyzing, and manufacturing those has advanced enormously over the last 80 years, but none on steam, based on combustion.Basically, if you take high pressure steam and you put in the piston, it will move the piston which will turn a crankshaft which will create electricity, and this is an old, old principle.So, the first part of our technology is to use mirrors to concentrate sunlight to generate high pressure steam, that drives the steam into extensor steam engine and causes to turn a shaft, the crankshaft, which drives an electrical generator and creates electricity. Having said that, that by itself is quite useless, because thats exactly what a solar panel with an inverter does, and solar panels with inverters are quite cheap nowadays. Its an amazing progress thats been made in that area, but they have no practical storage. To create electricity as the sun is shining is not matched to the needs, so a distributed power sense that has no value, really. You can solve this problem with a very large pile of batteries. The batteries today and for the perceivable future are simply too expensive to be economically interesting. They have corners of application that make sense, but its a long, it will be ten years or more befor e batteries are cheap enough to provide mainstream power economically.So, the reason why we want steam engines is because it allows us to then use an invention in storage technology, which is much cheaper than battery storage. And the way that we do that is we basically use a steal tank, a large steal tank, 10.000 gallons, and a 40 foot container full of water, with installation around it. And basically what you have, with what I described is you have sunlight and mirrors generating steam under pressure at very high volume, but you dont want to use that while its been generated, you want to park it, you want to hang on to it, and then choose when and how much to convert that through the engine into electricity. The steam has huge volume, so its not practical to store steam under pressure in volume, but steam is made of water, water changes from liquid to gas, every time you take a breath youre doing that, every time a plant grows a little bit, its doing that. And this is what the wh ole steam power turbine thing is based on. So, our thermodynamics is exactly the same as those power stations thermodynamics, but its done with pistons instead of turbines.And basically, if you take steam and you squirt it under pressure into water in the tank, the steam will condense, all the available energy in the steam goes into heating and pressurizing the water, so you can squirt a massive volume of steam into a relatively small tank of water. The steam just disappears, but the tank of water gets hotter and more pressurized. And if you open the valve, the top surface of water will boil, and, to be more specific, the latent heat of condensation and the steam that imparted its energy into heating and pressurizing the water is the same as the reciprocal of evaporation required to boil water and turn it back into steam.So, you have a steel pressure vessel, basically I have a pipe, and massive volume of steam goes into the water, pumps it up, if you will, heats it, pressurizes it, and then at a time of your choosing, you can get back out again a steam and the energy in the steam that comes out is within 95% percent of the energy that went in. And so, this is in means of hanging on to, the energy coming from the sun and then choosing exactly when and how much to convert to power through this efficient steam engine technology that can operate over a very wide range.The reason it works economically is because the characteristic of the steam engine which is very different from the characteristic of a turbine, thats that steam engine can operate efficiently over a very wide range of pressure. Which means you can heat the tank up, you can put a lot of energy into the tank, and then you can get a lot of energy out of the tank. And the question is what did the tank cost and how much energy can you get out of it, by the time you convert to the steam engine. And the answer is, the way that numbers work out is when you combine this 1930 steam engine technology with toda y’s ubiquitous 2500psi tank technology, which is whats used for propane storage and all sorts of things, that the cost to store and retrieve a kilowatt hour of electricity is less than a 100 dollars per the capacity to store and retrieve a kilowatt hour of electricity.Martin: That is compared to a conventional ways of storing?Steve: So, just the other day there was announcement in Southern California that the large utility there done a multi megawatt hour project with lithium ion batteries, and the cost per kilowatt hour of storage capacity was 1,600 dollars. If you talk to, if you listen to, there will be progress in this area, for example Tesla are building a giga factory. So they are going to drive to cost down one day. But realistically now its well in a system level, its well above 500 and maybe slowly come down below 500, 400 maybe one day 300 at a system level.Our prototype, not after we build a billion dollar factory, but our prototype, when we build one, was less than a h undred dollars for that same capacity. So its really 10:1 breakthrough in the cost of energy storage, and occasionally, if you run into something like this, that addresses the specific problem that were trying to address, which is distributed electricity generation from a free source. So, the conversion of the sunlight in the useful electricity is now enabled by a steel tank full of water, and a 1930s steam engine, and some mirrors. And its this combination that, and its all about the money, its a question, what does this piece of capital equipment cost and is it able to generate electricity at a rate, over a period of time, thats a long life? So it generates a string of value, which means that you dont have to pay something else for that value, so youre making capital investment upfront thats producing a value string, and the question is what is the rate of return on capital. So, it costs a certain amount, it produces a certain amount of electricity, which eliminates the need to bu y that much electricity from something else, from that you calculate the rate of return. If that rate of return is more than 15 or 20% its enormously attractive in a world full of capital thats thirsting for something to invest in, and it draws all this capital. So you can think of solar energy with storage as really the worlds biggest lending opportunity ever, in history, because it takes a month by month stream of expenses and allows you to invest in capital equipment that offsets the cost of that monthly expense, in economic terms thats what it is.So, in terms of business model, really, from us, we have to have manufactured integrate and sell boxes of equipment in 40 foot containers with mirrors that get installed. These systems will have a capital cost anywhere from a couple million dollars to a raise of them that might cost 50 million. Its very flexible in that regard. The typical arrangement of the world is the world is divided into people who purchase electricity on a monthly basis and people who invest in power plants to sell electricity to those customers. So, there are many variations on this theme, but for the most part, we will be selling our product to the people on power plants, who raise capital from investors, who buy that capital. That operation sells electricity to the people used to buying it, they get paid for it monthly and there is a rate of return for that investment, and providing the cost of our system solves their problem, as you can plug it in and are able to use it and are happy with it. And the rate of return is good, then you have a growth business.COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGEMartin: Steve, Terrajoule is very good example of combining different technology that is used, well known and well established and combining it, integrating it and making a new kind of integration, integrated product. But how do you increase your barriers to enter? So, how do you keep your competitive advantage? Because, as you said, everybody could do this because the technologies are well known.Steve: Yes, the technology is well known, and the mirror systems that creates steam, there are multiple suppliers you can purchase them. The pressure vessel, there are hundreds of suppliers in the world, that you could purchase that. Where are you going to buy steam engine?Martin: I guess at Terrajoule, I dont know.Steve: You cant. There are, there really are no companies, theres really no market in the world for steam engines. Theres a German company that makes some for certain specialized application. Steam engine technology like other engines has different technologies through it, so they are good for different purposes. And for what we need, if this was 1930, we couldve purchased engines that could do what we want with some adaptation to the system needs of the solar and the storage, but basically, that technology existed. It has not been manufactured since 1955.So what, so the biggest barrier to entry, apart from the fact that we have a core pate nt on our architecture that allows the storage to accrue which we think will be very robust, thats issued in China, Australia, Mexico. We expect it to issue in the United States really soon, and another places. But patents are form of protection, but theyre not rock solid. You basically have to be the best one at solving your customers problems so they choose to buy from you. And the barrier of entry is the steam engine. Its really the steam engine. So, through investment we spent over 10 million dollars so far prototyping, understanding, filling in the gaps of the knowledge, the experts who knew how to do this, theres a lot of literature and documentation than we are students, we are diligent students of history, of digging out the information other people know. But unfortunately, we cant go and hire 10 people who have years of experience designing and manufacturing steam engines, theyre dead. And so we dig out the literature, some of the key information was trade secrets, it was c ompetitive proprietary information between steam engine companies.So we had to build prototypes full scale, find the gaps in the knowledge, find the things that broke, and go back and reexamine the literature, figure out what they really meant, refine that models and get it to the point within we know how to design a modern piston engine. To do that, we contracted with a company called Roush Industries in Detroit. Detroit is the place, Detroit is the Silicon Valley of piston engines, thats why they know how to do it. There are 3000+ organization firm that does a lot of outsource engine design to go into manufacture. They also low volume manufacture, they do it for car companies and a lot of other businesses and they support three Nascar teams, so they build race car engine. So these are world class guys that know how to do piston engines.So we take our steam engine knowledge and their knowledge of piston engines, and longevity and reliability and maintainability and all their knowle dge of the whole supply chain. They know how to do that, so we put those together and were now at a point where were about to release tools and start building the first production versions of these engines. So we will go into testing next year.So, this is a huge barrier to entry, because to decide to do it, you have to see the opportunity, you have to see that old-fashioned steam engine technology is the key to it; you have to be not doing what everybody else is doing; you have to be not thinking solar panels and batteries; you have to be not thinking steam turbines; you have to be not thinking centralized power; you have to be not thinking attaching something to a grid with net metering that depends on government policy. You have to be looking at this distributed worldwide power generation energy on demand opportunity, and see that theres a way of doing it, and then somehow persuade people to give you money that you need to get that technology recreated and do it. Thats not so easy .ADVICE TO ENTREPRENEURS In Redwood City we talked with entrepreneur Steve Bisset about the business model of Terrajoule and the technology behind. Furthermore, Steve shares his learnings and advice for young entrepreneurs.The transcription of the interview is upload below.INTRODUCTIONMartin: Hi, today we are at Terrajoule in Redwood City. Steve, who are you and what do you do?Steve: My name is Steve Bisset. Im the chief executive officer at Terrajoule Corporation. Were a relatively new startup, founded in 2009 for the purpose of introducing a very significant new kind of electricity generation equipment into the world market.Martin: What did you do before you started this company?Steve: Like a lot of people these days, Ive done a variety of things. My original background was an engineer, I got a degree in electrical engineering from Caltech, but I have had a business passion from the beginning for reasons that no one can ever explain. So, from doing newspaper delivering routes, to cutting lawns, to exportin g surfboards from Australia to the United States, I did a number of things. But basically the core of my background is in starting up businesses that design, manufacture and sell capital equipment to customers. So, I very much like things that cost about million dollars each, because if they cost a billion dollars, you have to be a politician and the sales process is a certain kind of thing; if its consumer goods, I have no intuition for that, everything, every product I like, its discontinued because nobody else likes it, so my taste in that is useless. But basically commercial industrial customers, the things cost a million or ten million dollars, youre providing something that is critical and important to them, so they can pay attention to it. The process has a large rational component to it, it is always emotion and relationship, but its basically rational, so if you can understand customers problem in economic and practical terms and you can provide a solution to that customer thats important to them and better than the next best solution, theyll buy it from you and then the customers happy and youre happy and have a relationship and that all make sense. So this is my view of business.Martin: Lets get to some insights on how you started and you did define on find this business idea.Steve: My background, as I said was semi conductor capital equipment making test equipment for companies like Intel, and then I did a number of different things that I wont take up time here, but including anywhere from travel to mathematics education. But for a long time I was really interested in the energy business. Energy is, I really cant explain such a thing. Some people like cars, some people like energy. To me, energy is very big, its really important, its really influential on the world, theres World Bank study that shows this very close correlation between the availability of dependable electric power at low-cost and standard of living. Its a fundamental driver to civ ilization. And for me, for many years, just the appeal at a hobby level it was very interesting to me. Clearly theres a lot change happening with the technology, theres a lot of opportunity to make a difference, theres a huge amount of growth and demand, a lot of developing economies that are developing now that werent developing before. And some really unresolved problems, so global warming is certainly one of them. Thats really, I see that, I understand it, its important, its really too big of a problem. To me to really think about something thats sort of more media in the philosophical sense, that if you can put power, if you can distribute power, if you can distribute electrical power, the control of it, the ownership of it, youre also distributing an economic power, youre also distributing political power. And when you do that as oppose to having central control of it, it makes the world safer for democracy and the nice people. And its generally, I think, good for economic grow th.So, both of the philosophical level and on practical level, we have growing economies, the supply of electricity within those economies is the fundamental need and then gigantic, gigantic business opportunity, perhaps the biggest. And if you had a good distributed power generation gadget, that would generate electricity in smaller chunks, not hundred megawatts or a gigawatt, but a megawatt or 10 megawatts, its industrial sized, city sized, village sized and you can spread that around, that is potentially more economical way to do things, if you have the right gadget, then building big power stations and trying to control big robust grids, as things are building and changing. Its really not just an economic issue, its not fundamentally one is better than the other, but if you can come up with the right distributed electricity gadget at the right price, then it has some really great advantages and we saw the opportunity to do this with solar power, and perhaps make one of the reall y significant changes in the way electricity is generated in the world and therefore have a lot of fun to do something thats good and potentially make a multibillion dollar business out of it, which is absolutely our plan and our vision.BUSINESS MODELMartin: So, lets talk about the business model, Steve.Steve: Yes.Martin: From my understanding, its a decentralized, energy producing and storage and distribution system that you are planning to do. Can you tell us a little bit more about how this works and also together from a technology point of view?Steve: Yes, Ill be happy to do that. So, what the product were selling is, is a small power plant. It provides electricity in the form that is valuable to people. In other words, whats valuable to people is AC electricity of 50 or 60 hertz, depending on where you are, at a defined voltage, where you have it available on demand, its available to run your school, your factory, your home, your air-conditioning. When you put in or when you tu rn on your equipment, it adjusts and it provides controlled voltage and frequency so that you can run it. When you have such electricity at reasonable cost, people invest in homes, they invest in factories, they invest in industry, it creates wealth, it creates economic growth. Any other kind of electricity thats uncontrolled its not particularly useful. So having said that, thats what you have to provide, by the way, thats what a lot of power distributive parable comes to big diesel generators, where they do exactly that, they provide excellent power, but you have to keep feeding them with diesel, its very expensive, its polluting, its insecure, its unpredictable and so for. That is really one of the key targets, is diesel generated power, because its already expensive, but it works very well.So, what were providing basically is little power plants that do what a big diesel generator does, but instead of running on diesel they run on sunlight. So, sunlight in, electricity on, 24 ho urs a day. In order to do that, you have to have a means to take the sunlight and convert it to electricity, but you have to have a buffer, you have to have a fuel tank, with diesel engine doesnt work without a fuel tank. The tanker arrives, it fills up the fuel tank, then you run for a while. So, in the case of sunlight, its already distributed, its just distributed to your doorstep daily, on most days. Its free, its untaxed, so far, and, but it doesnt come out on a form of a AC voltage, so you have to have a way to capture it, you have to hold on to the energy in it and then convert it to electricity on demand, at a time that you do it.So, technically and thermodynamically, what were doing is taking some very old, well-established technologies that people spent thousands of man year, person years developing, and perfecting and refining, so were not big entrepreneurs whore going to invent some fundamental breakthrough in science. Were too impatient for that. We really need to explo it technologies that have been used and find a way to put them together to solve a problem. So, the technologies that were using is solar power, so the first fundamental element is concentrating solar thermal power. So this has been done by many people before in many scales and forms, where you take a mirror, a set of mirrors, you concentrate sunlight into a much smaller space, so it creates high temperature, you absorb that sunlight into some sort of a fluid, you use that fluid to go through a heat exchange and to generate steam at high pressure. And then that steam is used to go through machine, to turn a shaft to drive an electrical generator to make AC power. Now, I would guess that most people in the audience are going to go Ah, youre talking about a steam turbine. And in fact, steam turbines are coal fired plant and nuclear plant, combined cycle gas plant. I mean a lot of the world runs off electricity generated by steam turbines, the vast majority of it is done this way, but its not what we do, because it doesnt solve the problem that we need.Steam turbines are great at 100 megawatts and up, theyre great at a gigawatt, its a wonderful thing, and it requires you to have an extremely large power plant and a very robust distribution network. If you want to do it at a megawatt or 5 megawatts or 10 megawatts, steam turbines are not useful at all, for two reasons.Number one is for technical, physical reasons, they become very inefficient in the small scale.But the other reason is that steam turbines provide whats called base load power, which is useful in a big electric grid, but its useless in a distributed sense, because base load power means you turn it on, and it runs on one power outlet. So, if youre running at 10 megawatts into a factory and you turn on or turn off equipment, youre not drawing 10 megawatts, youre drawing a variable amount of power, and this is what a diesel generator provides very well, but turbines dont do that.So, for efficiency reaso ns and the fact that theyre not a variable power output, theyre quite useless to solve this distributed generation opportunity. But, the thermodynamics is the same, the whole industrial revolution was built on steam piston engines. Not the same ones that go into a steam locomotive, but very much the same thats going to large steam ship. All the steam ship through World War 2 were primarily driven by steam, as was distributed power generation, where coal was delivered to a factory and you burn it and use the steam engine to generate electricity.So, this technology through the 1930s was very highly advanced for your efficient, for your robust, for your reliable, and if you know where to look, the documentation there this wealth of technological know-how exists. It hasn’t entirely stopped in sense that its a piston engine, and much of the world now runs on internal combustion engines, which are piston engines, and the technology and the supply chains, and the factories are designing, and analyzing, and manufacturing those has advanced enormously over the last 80 years, but none on steam, based on combustion.Basically, if you take high pressure steam and you put in the piston, it will move the piston which will turn a crankshaft which will create electricity, and this is an old, old principle.So, the first part of our technology is to use mirrors to concentrate sunlight to generate high pressure steam, that drives the steam into extensor steam engine and causes to turn a shaft, the crankshaft, which drives an electrical generator and creates electricity. Having said that, that by itself is quite useless, because thats exactly what a solar panel with an inverter does, and solar panels with inverters are quite cheap nowadays. Its an amazing progress thats been made in that area, but they have no practical storage. To create electricity as the sun is shining is not matched to the needs, so a distributed power sense that has no value, really. You can solve this prob lem with a very large pile of batteries. The batteries today and for the perceivable future are simply too expensive to be economically interesting. They have corners of application that make sense, but its a long, it will be ten years or more before batteries are cheap enough to provide mainstream power economically.So, the reason why we want steam engines is because it allows us to then use an invention in storage technology, which is much cheaper than battery storage. And the way that we do that is we basically use a steal tank, a large steal tank, 10.000 gallons, and a 40 foot container full of water, with installation around it. And basically what you have, with what I described is you have sunlight and mirrors generating steam under pressure at very high volume, but you dont want to use that while its been generated, you want to park it, you want to hang on to it, and then choose when and how much to convert that through the engine into electricity. The steam has huge volume, so its not practical to store steam under pressure in volume, but steam is made of water, water changes from liquid to gas, every time you take a breath youre doing that, every time a plant grows a little bit, its doing that. And this is what the whole steam power turbine thing is based on. So, our thermodynamics is exactly the same as those power stations thermodynamics, but its done with pistons instead of turbines.And basically, if you take steam and you squirt it under pressure into water in the tank, the steam will condense, all the available energy in the steam goes into heating and pressurizing the water, so you can squirt a massive volume of steam into a relatively small tank of water. The steam just disappears, but the tank of water gets hotter and more pressurized. And if you open the valve, the top surface of water will boil, and, to be more specific, the latent heat of condensation and the steam that imparted its energy into heating and pressurizing the water is the same as the reciprocal of evaporation required to boil water and turn it back into steam.So, you have a steel pressure vessel, basically I have a pipe, and massive volume of steam goes into the water, pumps it up, if you will, heats it, pressurizes it, and then at a time of your choosing, you can get back out again a steam and the energy in the steam that comes out is within 95% percent of the energy that went in. And so, this is in means of hanging on to, the energy coming from the sun and then choosing exactly when and how much to convert to power through this efficient steam engine technology that can operate over a very wide range.The reason it works economically is because the characteristic of the steam engine which is very different from the characteristic of a turbine, thats that steam engine can operate efficiently over a very wide range of pressure. Which means you can heat the tank up, you can put a lot of energy into the tank, and then you can get a lot of energy out of the tank. And the question is what did the tank cost and how much energy can you get out of it, by the time you convert to the steam engine. And the answer is, the way that numbers work out is when you combine this 1930 steam engine technology with today’s ubiquitous 2500psi tank technology, which is whats used for propane storage and all sorts of things, that the cost to store and retrieve a kilowatt hour of electricity is less than a 100 dollars per the capacity to store and retrieve a kilowatt hour of electricity.Martin: That is compared to a conventional ways of storing?Steve: So, just the other day there was announcement in Southern California that the large utility there done a multi megawatt hour project with lithium ion batteries, and the cost per kilowatt hour of storage capacity was 1,600 dollars. If you talk to, if you listen to, there will be progress in this area, for example Tesla are building a giga factory. So they are going to drive to cost down one day. But realistic ally now its well in a system level, its well above 500 and maybe slowly come down below 500, 400 maybe one day 300 at a system level.Our prototype, not after we build a billion dollar factory, but our prototype, when we build one, was less than a hundred dollars for that same capacity. So its really 10:1 breakthrough in the cost of energy storage, and occasionally, if you run into something like this, that addresses the specific problem that were trying to address, which is distributed electricity generation from a free source. So, the conversion of the sunlight in the useful electricity is now enabled by a steel tank full of water, and a 1930s steam engine, and some mirrors. And its this combination that, and its all about the money, its a question, what does this piece of capital equipment cost and is it able to generate electricity at a rate, over a period of time, thats a long life? So it generates a string of value, which means that you dont have to pay something else for that value, so youre making capital investment upfront thats producing a value string, and the question is what is the rate of return on capital. So, it costs a certain amount, it produces a certain amount of electricity, which eliminates the need to buy that much electricity from something else, from that you calculate the rate of return. If that rate of return is more than 15 or 20% its enormously attractive in a world full of capital thats thirsting for something to invest in, and it draws all this capital. So you can think of solar energy with storage as really the worlds biggest lending opportunity ever, in history, because it takes a month by month stream of expenses and allows you to invest in capital equipment that offsets the cost of that monthly expense, in economic terms thats what it is.So, in terms of business model, really, from us, we have to have manufactured integrate and sell boxes of equipment in 40 foot containers with mirrors that get installed. These systems will h ave a capital cost anywhere from a couple million dollars to a raise of them that might cost 50 million. Its very flexible in that regard. The typical arrangement of the world is the world is divided into people who purchase electricity on a monthly basis and people who invest in power plants to sell electricity to those customers. So, there are many variations on this theme, but for the most part, we will be selling our product to the people on power plants, who raise capital from investors, who buy that capital. That operation sells electricity to the people used to buying it, they get paid for it monthly and there is a rate of return for that investment, and providing the cost of our system solves their problem, as you can plug it in and are able to use it and are happy with it. And the rate of return is good, then you have a growth business.COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGEMartin: Steve, Terrajoule is very good example of combining different technology that is used, well known and well esta blished and combining it, integrating it and making a new kind of integration, integrated product. But how do you increase your barriers to enter? So, how do you keep your competitive advantage? Because, as you said, everybody could do this because the technologies are well known.Steve: Yes, the technology is well known, and the mirror systems that creates steam, there are multiple suppliers you can purchase them. The pressure vessel, there are hundreds of suppliers in the world, that you could purchase that. Where are you going to buy steam engine?Martin: I guess at Terrajoule, I dont know.Steve: You cant. There are, there really are no companies, theres really no market in the world for steam engines. Theres a German company that makes some for certain specialized application. Steam engine technology like other engines has different technologies through it, so they are good for different purposes. And for what we need, if this was 1930, we couldve purchased engines that could do w hat we want with some adaptation to the system needs of the solar and the storage, but basically, that technology existed. It has not been manufactured since 1955.So what, so the biggest barrier to entry, apart from the fact that we have a core patent on our architecture that allows the storage to accrue which we think will be very robust, thats issued in China, Australia, Mexico. We expect it to issue in the United States really soon, and another places. But patents are form of protection, but theyre not rock solid. You basically have to be the best one at solving your customers problems so they choose to buy from you. And the barrier of entry is the steam engine. Its really the steam engine. So, through investment we spent over 10 million dollars so far prototyping, understanding, filling in the gaps of the knowledge, the experts who knew how to do this, theres a lot of literature and documentation than we are students, we are diligent students of history, of digging out the infor mation other people know. But unfortunately, we cant go and hire 10 people who have years of experience designing and manufacturing steam engines, theyre dead. And so we dig out the literature, some of the key information was trade secrets, it was competitive proprietary information between steam engine companies.So we had to build prototypes full scale, find the gaps in the knowledge, find the things that broke, and go back and reexamine the literature, figure out what they really meant, refine that models and get it to the point within we know how to design a modern piston engine. To do that, we contracted with a company called Roush Industries in Detroit. Detroit is the place, Detroit is the Silicon Valley of piston engines, thats why they know how to do it. There are 3000+ organization firm that does a lot of outsource engine design to go into manufacture. They also low volume manufacture, they do it for car companies and a lot of other businesses and they support three Nascar t eams, so they build race car engine. So these are world class guys that know how to do piston engines.So we take our steam engine knowledge and their knowledge of piston engines, and longevity and reliability and maintainability and all their knowledge of the whole supply chain. They know how to do that, so we put those together and were now at a point where were about to release tools and start building the first production versions of these engines. So we will go into testing next year.So, this is a huge barrier to entry, because to decide to do it, you have to see the opportunity, you have to see that old-fashioned steam engine technology is the key to it; you have to be not doing what everybody else is doing; you have to be not thinking solar panels and batteries; you have to be not thinking steam turbines; you have to be not thinking centralized power; you have to be not thinking attaching something to a grid with net metering that depends on government policy. You have to be l ooking at this distributed worldwide power generation energy on demand opportunity, and see that theres a way of doing it, and then somehow persuade people to give you money that you need to get that technology recreated and do it. Thats not so easy.ADVICE TO ENTREPRENEURSMartin: Steve, what have been your major learnings and what advice can you give the young entrepreneurs?Steve: I dont think theres really a lot of magic advice and Im not going to, I have nothing really brilliant to say that hasnt been said by other people. The difference between an entrepreneur and somebody whos not an entrepreneur is not thinking of the ideas, its that you actually do it.But, the particular thing and the thing thats governed my own pathway through different entrepreneurship is you have to understand that theres a problem worth solving.Then you have to, from my perspective, Im not in the government grant 10 years of science research, thats sort of thing, I want to get a product that you can sell. So, you have to be, you have to go find the customer, find who would pay for it and why, what are the limitations, whats your solution, whats in that, what do you have to do to get to the point where you can sell something to somebody.In our case, we started out with a narrow example. I was looking for a vision as to something I wanted to see in solar power generation. I made a decision in 2008, Im going to find a way into that, because its the biggest, most exciting, most worthwhile thing there is and Ive been thinking about it for years and I wanted to do it. So, this is Silicon Valley, theres lots of opportunity for people to meet people, a hundred around, I met an Australian engineer by the name of Robert Mierisch, whos coming from one of those very large turbine based centralized power companies, where that model actually technically was working but financially and business wise wasnt working. And hed been pushing for steam engines because they are at the right scale that you c an distribute. Now, most people would look at him and go This is a wacky engineer, hes a crazy guy, old fashioned steam engine, this is ridiculous. Who would think that this is a game changer, something thats going to change the modern world? Were done with that. And so I, there was an event, and he got up where there were 20 people in the room and the first thing that interested me is that he was talking about something that nobody else was talking about. So, when youre thinking about starting a company and you look at panel of venture capitalists or stuff like that, whatever theyre talking about their technology is too late, forget about it. Theyre ahead of you, they are smart people, they are funded, the odds of you catching up and doing anything actually useful are almost zero. Nobody was talking about steam engines and solar, wow this is interesting. And then he was talking about an opportunity to replace the function of diesel engines driving irrigation pumps in California.So, to cut the story short. We met, actually we were both born in the same town, Im also Australian, you may have not realized it, its because Im not speaking Australian at this moment. But we started collaborating, we found that there were many diesel powered irrigation pumps in California. I looked for a company that was selling power systems to those customers that had their trust, we worked through them, we talked to lots of farmers running these irrigation. We understood technically what their needs are and we evolved this technology so that we could at least define a product that you sell to a customer through a channel who would write a check for that, for economic reasons that are well understood and theyre already doing something similar related to it, so that you could see that they would do it. So, its closing that loop and finding out you have a customer, this is actually a tiny, tiny sliver of the worldwide market, as our understanding of this develop, you get to start wit h one customer. Having a million customers who might almost buy your product is no use. You have to find one customer who actually would. And what are all the reasons why they would and why they wouldnt and what their alternatives are, and then how you get from here to there.So, this is my way of thinking is, and I think this is true for a lot of businesses, even in internet business, you have to understand who is sitting down and doing what that will cause them to want your product, and what are the reasons why they would or wouldnt buy it, or yours or somebody else’s, and in the case of capital equipment business its very, fortunately its very concrete. That its economically driven, the customers have spreadsheets, they understand rate of return, theyre keenly aware of it and they understand risk and barriers and also its a lot of things that you cant hunt through, what are all the things that you have to before you can deliver product. And then you start to put together a plan, thinking about the resources, the engineering, how you can get it done, all those sorts of things. But its sort of, you have to have a big picture, and then you have to find a representative customers, a very little picture within the big picture, and then kind of work back from that.Our big picture is theres a 50 billion dollar a year market for this, for next 30 years. And it will change the world, it will decentralize economic power, it will eliminate an awful lot of carbon pollution, and diesel pollution, it will make the energy supply chain for a lot of parts much more secure, Theres a lot to like about it, in terms of sense that if we do this, were going to be making the world, were going to be dong more good than harm to the world, by a long shot. But that is also a practical business. There are distribution channels, theres a manufacturing supply chain, it doesnt take a billion dollars of government money to do this, its the term foundry, silicon foundry, started with iron foundries, we get iron castings made to make engines from iron foundries. So we can solve the worlds CAD models to, and drawings the specifications, its mechanical manufacturing task, with existing distributed energy companies, as channels by which we get to the market.So, its, I dont think, I think if this were my first startup, it would be pretty difficult to do. Obviously, its not, and the fact that its similar to, semi conducted capital equipment is not power generation equipment, but its selling complicated electro mechanical products to customers who really care about them, and sort of deep industrial food chain thing. To me, it has a lot of the same essential elements to it, and so you learn how to think about that and how to trough the process of doing that.Martin: Steve, thank you very much for your time and your insights.Steve: Youre welcome.Martin: And, lets make this world a better place with decentralized energy storage and distribution and production. Thank you very mu ch.

Hardy Weinberg Principle

One of the most confusing topics in Evolution for students is the Hardy Weinberg Principle. Many students learn best by using hands-on activities or labs. While its not always easy to do activities based on evolution-related topics, there are ways to model population changes and predict using the Hardy Weinberg Equilibrium Equation. With the redesigned AP Biology curriculum stressing statistical analysis, this activity will help reinforce the advanced concepts. The following lab is a delicious way to help your students understand the Hardy Weinberg Principle. Best of all, the materials are easily found at your local grocery store and will help keep costs down for your yearly budget! However, you may need to have a discussion with your class about lab safety and how normally they should be not eating any lab supplies. In fact, if you have a space that is not near lab benches that could be contaminated, you may want to consider using that as the workspace to prevent any unintentional contamination of the food. This lab works really well at student desks or tables. Materials Per Person 1 bag of mixed pretzel and cheddar Goldfish brand crackers Note They make packages with pre-mixed pretzel and cheddar Goldfish crackers, but you can also buy large bags of just cheddar and just pretzel and then mix them into individual bags to create enough for all lab groups (or individuals for classes that are small in size.) Make sure your bags are not see-through to prevent unintentional artificial selection from occurring Remember the Hardy-Weinberg Principle No genes are undergoing mutations. There is no mutation of the alleles.The breeding population is large.The population is isolated from other populations of the species. No differential emigration or immigration occurs.All members survive and reproduce. There is no natural selection.Mating is random. Procedure Take a random population of 10 fish from the ocean. The ocean is the bag of mixed gold and brown goldfish.Count the ten gold and brown fish and record the number of each in your chart. You can calculate frequencies later. Gold (cheddar goldfish) recessive allele; brown (pretzel) dominant alleleChoose 3 gold goldfish from the 10 and eat them; if you do not have 3 goldfish, fill in the missing number by eating brown fish.Randomly, choose 3 fish from the â€Å"ocean† and add them to your group. (Add one fish for each one that died.) Do not use artificial selection by looking in the bag or purposefully selecting one type of fish over the other.Record the number of goldfish and brown fish.Again, eat 3 fish, all gold if possible.Add 3 fish, choosing them randomly from the ocean, one for each death.Count and record the colors of fish.Repeat steps 6, 7, and 8 two more times.Fill in the class results in a second chart like the one below.Calculate the allele and genotype frequencies f rom the data in the chart below. Remember, p2 2pq q2 1; p q 1 Suggested Analysis Compare and contrast how the allele frequency of the recessive allele and dominant allele changed over the generations.Interpret your data tables to describe if evolution did occur. If so, between which generations was there the most change?Predict what would happen to both alleles if you extended your data to the 10th generation.If this part of the ocean was heavily fished and artificial selection came into play, how would that affect future generations? Lab adapted from information received at the 2009 APTTI in Des Moines, Iowa from Dr. Jeff Smith. Data Table Generation Gold (f) Brown (F) q2 q p p2 2pq 1 2 3 4 5 6

Henry Ford An Ethical And Visionary Leader - 2016 Words

Henry Ford an Ethical and Visionary Leader Imagine a world absent of automobiles and public transportation, no way to get from one place to another, in this day in age this would be a hard realization for most people to accept. If not for Henry Ford’s innovative approach in the advancement of the assembly line this could have been out destiny. Henry Ford revolutionize the automobile industry through his visionary and ethical leadership. I too am a visionary and ethical leader and apply many of the same principles in my leadership style. First we will discuss how as an â€Å"advancer† and visionary leader Henry Ford used â€Å"individualized consideration† and â€Å"contingent reward† to help motivate his employees by implementing positive wage and shift changes. Next we discuss how as an ethical leader, Ford utilized â€Å"open-mindedness† and the â€Å"consequence test† to help innovate the usage of the assembly line to mass produce automobiles. Finally, I will relate these sam e principles to my own leadership skills and how I used these same traits to help develop an electronic whiteboard idea of one of my Airman. Let’s initially delve into how Ford used his visionary leadership to make dramatic advances in the automobile industry by motivating his employees. Visionary Leader As a visionary leader and â€Å"advancer,† Henry Ford used â€Å"individualized consideration† and â€Å"contingent reward† in order to motivate his employees inevitably creating a transportation revolution. Henry Ford understoodShow MoreRelatedHenry Ford : Ethical And Visionary Leader1293 Words   |  6 PagesHenry Ford – Ethical and Visionary Leader Imagine if I told you that you could buy the same car you bought today for 30 percent less money you if waited until tomorrow, would you be interested? My ethical and visionary synthesis essay talks about â€Å"The People’s Tycoon.† Henry Ford is the man who created an affordable, reliable automobile for the American people of the early 1900’s with the invention of the automobile assembly line. He accomplished this through the use of precision manufacturingRead MoreFord Was An Unethical Leader.He Allowed Himself To Fall1125 Words   |  5 Pages Ford was an unethical leader. He allowed himself to fall into the ethical trap of â€Å"Worry over Image† with his alteration of the $5 Day policy and his creation of the Ford Sociology Department. â€Å"Ethical traps stem from confusion or uncertainty as to what action or behavior should be taken in a given situation. The ethical trap â€Å"Worry over Image† entails making decisions based on how they’ll impact your reputation or standing among peers, subordinates, supervisors, or community. Concerns aboutRead MorePresident Ford : A Visionary Leader1658 Words   |  7 PagesHenry Ford Henry Ford was born a farm boy in rural Michigan and would rise from humble beginnings to be one of the pioneers of the auto industry where he would populate American landscape with his cars, to include 15 million Model Ts (Brinkley, 2003). Ford was a visionary leader which I will illustrate by showing you how he implemented the assembly line, resulting from ideas which he received from his intellectually stimulated employees and how he exercise the golden rule and payed ANY man $5 aRead MoreThe Man Behind Ford Motor Company And The Mass Production Of Automobiles Essay2228 Words   |  9 Pages Henry Ford Many people think of Henry Ford simply as the man behind Ford Motor Company and the mass production of automobiles while never giving a second thought to how he got to that point. Henry Ford was a visionary leader and an ethical leader who went against what other business leaders thought and he ended up leading his company to the top. In this paper we will review how Ford was a visionary leader by describing how he fulfilled the role of creator as he instituted a way ofRead MoreThe Synthesis Of Henry Ford2710 Words   |  11 PagesEssay- Henry Ford MSgt Ryan S. Harris Senior Noncommissioned Officer Academy March 28, 2016 Instructor: Bradley E. Walters Synthesis Essay- Henry Ford 8 When someone mentions the name Henry Ford, most people would think that he was just the owner of Ford Motor Company and that he made the model -T. Henry Ford accomplished much more than that as he was one of the greatest Visionary and Ethical leaders of the early 1900’s. The first half of this essay will explain how Henry Ford designedRead MoreSynthesis Essay : Henry Ford Essay2130 Words   |  9 Pages Synthesis Essay – Henry Ford MSgt Steven S. Bobbitt Air Force Senior Noncommissioned Officer Academy â€Æ' Henry Ford What kind of leader would you be if you forged a new path and were leading the way in an industrial revolution? Would you set yourself up for fame or would you look out for those below you and what was to come in the future? In this paper, my claim is that Henry Ford was a Visionary and Ethical Leader. When many think about Henry Ford, their first thought is that of the assemblyRead MoreSynthesis Essay - Henry Ford2093 Words   |  9 Pages Synthesis Essay – Henry Ford MSgt Ronald D. Dedman Air Force Senior Noncommissioned Officer Academy September 7, 2014 Instructor: MSgt Tony Sansone Introduction Imagine yourself on a farm. Out in the middle of a Michigan field. This isn’t a modern farm with tractors, combines, hay bailers, and trucks to move everything around. It is small. Very quiet. Just you and a horse. You need that horse to do everything. You and your family are dependent onRead MoreTransactional and Transformational Leadership2111 Words   |  9 Pagesleadership between leaders and followers was first developed by James McGregor Burns in 1978. He distinguishes between leaders who are, or attempt to be ethical and moral, and power wielders, who are not. In an essay 20 years later, Burns returns to this idea, arguing that: - ï  ¶ Transactional leaders, through their transactions, make use of modal values such as honesty, trustworthiness, reliability, reciprocity, [and] accountability. They do not possess these leader characteristics, norRead MoreTransactional and Transformational Leadership2126 Words   |  9 Pagestransformational leadership between leaders and followers was first developed by James McGregor Burns in 1978. He distinguishes between leaders who are, or attempt to be ethical and moral, and power wielders, who are not. In an essay 20 years later, Burns returns to this idea, arguing that: - ï  ¶ Transactional leaders, through their transactions, make use of modal values such as honesty, trustworthiness, reliability, reciprocity, [and] accountability. They do not possess these leader characteristics, norRead MoreLeadership And Its Impact On Business2141 Words   |  9 Pagesisn’t a definitive authority on how to be a later. One thing is for certain, while excellent leaders may or may not improve a business, poor ethics and a lack of morality in business tends to have disastrous consequences. â€Æ' Leaders in business are an important commodity. Why do some succeed and some fail? Some of it seems to just be luck of where they tend to take over in the business cycle. Some leaders seem to have a magical touch and create success no matter where they go. There are others who

The Host Chapter 3 Resisted Free Essays

â€Å"She won’t recognize the new name,† the Healer murmured. A new sensation distracted me. Something pleasant, a change in the air as the Seeker stood at my side. We will write a custom essay sample on The Host Chapter 3: Resisted or any similar topic only for you Order Now A scent, I realized. Something different than the sterile, odorless room. Perfume, my new mind told me. Floral, lush†¦ â€Å"Can you hear me?† the Seeker asked, interrupting my analysis. â€Å"Are you aware?† â€Å"Take your time,† the Healer urged in a softer voice than the one he had used before. I did not open my eyes. I didn’t want to be distracted. My mind gave me the words I needed, and the tone that would convey what I couldn’t say without using many words. â€Å"Have I been placed in a damaged host in order to gain the information you need, Seeker?† There was a gasp-surprise and outrage mingled-and something warm touched my skin, covered my hand. â€Å"Of course not, Wanderer,† the man said reassuringly. â€Å"Even a Seeker would stop at some things.† The Seeker gasped again. Hissed, my memory corrected. â€Å"Then why doesn’t this mind function correctly?† There was a pause. â€Å"The scans were perfect,† the Seeker said. Her words not reassuring but argumentative. Did she mean to quarrel with me? â€Å"The body was entirely healed.† â€Å"From a suicide attempt that was perilously close to succeeding.† My tone was stiff, still angry. I wasn’t used to anger. It was hard to contain it. â€Å"Everything was in perfect order -â€Å" The Healer cut her off. â€Å"What is missing?† he asked. â€Å"Clearly, you’ve accessed speech.† â€Å"Memory. I was trying to find what the Seeker wants.† Though there was no sound, there was a change. The atmosphere, which had gone tense at my accusation, relaxed. I wondered how I knew this. I had a strange sensation that I was somehow receiving more than my five senses were giving me-almost a feeling that there was another sense, on the fringes, not quite harnessed. Intuition? That was almost the right word. As if any creature needed more than five senses. The Seeker cleared her throat, but it was the Healer who answered. â€Å"Ah,† he said. â€Å"Don’t make yourself anxious about some partial memory†¦ difficulties. That’s, well, not to be expected, exactly, but not surprising, considering.† â€Å"I don’t understand your meaning.† â€Å"This host was part of the human resistance.† There was a hint of excitement in the Seeker’s voice now. â€Å"Those humans who were aware of us before insertion are more difficult to subdue. This one still resists.† There was a moment of silence while they waited for my response. Resisting? The host was blocking my access? Again, the heat of my anger surprised me. â€Å"Am I correctly bound?† I asked, my voice distorted because it came through my teeth. â€Å"Yes,† the Healer said. â€Å"All eight hundred twenty-seven points are latched securely in the optimum positions.† This mind used more of my faculties than any host before, leaving me only one hundred eighty-one spare attachments. Perhaps the numerous bindings were the reason the emotions were so vivid. I decided to open my eyes. I felt the need to double-check the Healer’s promises and make sure the rest of me worked. Light. Bright, painful. I closed my eyes again. The last light I had seen had been filtered through a hundred ocean fathoms. But these eyes had seen brighter and could handle it. I opened them narrowly, keeping my eyelashes feathered over the breach. â€Å"Would you like me to turn down the lights?† â€Å"No, Healer. My eyes will adjust.† â€Å"Very good,† he said, and I understood that his approval was meant for my casual use of the possessive. Both waited quietly while my eyes slowly widened. My mind recognized this as an average room in a medical facility. A hospital. The ceiling tiles were white with darker speckles. The lights were rectangular and the same size as the tiles, replacing them at regular intervals. The walls were light green-a calming color, but also the color of sickness. A poor choice, in my quickly formed opinion. The people facing me were more interesting than the room. The word doctor sounded in my mind as soon as my eyes fastened on the Healer. He wore loose-fitting blue green clothes that left his arms bare. Scrubs. He had hair on his face, a strange color that my memory called red. Red! It had been three worlds since I had seen the color or any of its relatives. Even this gingery gold filled me with nostalgia. His face was generically human to me, but the knowledge in my memory applied the word kind. An impatient breath pulled my attention to the Seeker. She was very small. If she had remained still, it would have taken me longer to notice her there beside the Healer. She didn’t draw the eye, a darkness in the bright room. She wore black from chin to wrists-a conservative suit with a silk turtleneck underneath. Her hair was black, too. It grew to her chin and was pushed back behind her ears. Her skin was darker than the Healer’s. Olive toned. The tiny changes in humans’ expressions were so minimal they were very hard to read. My memory could name the look on this woman’s face, though. The black brows, slanted down over the slightly bulging eyes, created a familiar design. Not quite anger. Intensity. Irritation. â€Å"How often does this happen?† I asked, looking at the Healer again. â€Å"Not often,† the Healer admitted. â€Å"We have so few full-grown hosts available anymore. The immature hosts are entirely pliable. But you indicated that you preferred to begin as an adult†¦Ã¢â‚¬  â€Å"Yes.† â€Å"Most requests are the opposite. The human life span is much shorter than you’re used to.† â€Å"I’m well versed in all the facts, Healer. Have you dealt with this†¦ resistance before yourself?† â€Å"Only once, myself.† â€Å"Tell me the facts of the case.† I paused. â€Å"Please,† I added, feeling a lack of courtesy in my command. The Healer sighed. The Seeker began tapping her fingers against her arm. A sign of impatience. She did not care to wait for what she wanted. â€Å"This occurred four years ago,† the Healer began. â€Å"The soul involved had requested an adult male host. The first one to be available was a human who had been living in a pocket of resistance since the early years of the occupation. The human†¦ knew what would happen when he was caught.† â€Å"Just as my host did.† â€Å"Um, yes.† He cleared his throat. â€Å"This was only the soul’s second life. He came from Blind World.† â€Å"Blind World?† I asked, cocking my head to the side reflexively. â€Å"Oh, sorry, you wouldn’t know our nicknames. This was one of yours, though, was it not?† He pulled a device from his pocket, a computer, and scanned quickly. â€Å"Yes, your seventh planet. In the eighty-first sector.† â€Å"Blind World?† I said again, my voice now disapproving. â€Å"Yes, well, some who have lived there prefer to call it the Singing World.† I nodded slowly. I liked that better. â€Å"And some who’ve never been there call it Planet of the Bats,† the Seeker muttered. I turned my eyes to her, feeling them narrow as my mind dredged up the appropriate image of the ugly flying rodent she referred to. â€Å"I assume you are one who has never lived there, Seeker,† the Healer said lightly. â€Å"We called this soul Racing Song at first-it was a loose translation of his name on†¦ the Singing World. But he soon opted to take the name of his host, Kevin. Though he was slated for a Calling in Musical Performance, given his background, he said he felt more comfortable continuing in the host’s previous line of work, which was mechanical. â€Å"These signs were somewhat worrisome to his assigned Comforter, but they were well within normal bounds. â€Å"Then Kevin started to complain that he was blacking out for periods of time. They brought him back to me, and we ran extensive tests to make sure there was no hidden flaw in the host’s brain. During the testing, several Healers noted marked differences in his behavior and personality. When we questioned him about this, he claimed to have no memory of certain statements and actions. We continued to observe him, along with his Comforter, and eventually discovered that the host was periodically taking control of Kevin’s body.† â€Å"Taking control?† My eyes strained wide. â€Å"With the soul unaware? The host took the body back?† â€Å"Sadly, yes. Kevin was not strong enough to suppress this host.† Not strong enough. Would they think me weak as well? Was I weak, that I could not force this mind to answer my questions? Weaker still, because her living thoughts had existed in my head where there should be nothing but memory? I’d always thought of myself as strong. This idea of weakness made me flinch. Made me feel shame. The Healer continued. â€Å"Certain events occurred, and it was decided -â€Å" â€Å"What events?† The Healer looked down without answering. â€Å"What events?† I demanded again. â€Å"I believe I have a right to know.† The Healer sighed. â€Å"You do. Kevin†¦ physically attacked a Healer while not†¦ himself.† He winced. â€Å"He knocked the Healer unconscious with a blow from his fist and then found a scalpel on her person. We found him insensible. The host had tried to cut the soul out of his body.† It took me a moment before I could speak. Even then, my voice was just a breath. â€Å"What happened to them?† â€Å"Luckily, the host was unable to stay conscious long enough to inflict real damage. Kevin was relocated, into an immature host this time. The troublesome host was in poor repair, and it was decided there wasn’t much point in saving him. â€Å"Kevin is seven human years old now and perfectly normal†¦ aside from the fact that he kept the name Kevin, that is. His guardians are taking great care that he is heavily exposed to music, and that is coming along well†¦Ã¢â‚¬  The last was added as if it were good news-news that could somehow cancel out the rest. â€Å"Why?† I cleared my throat so that my voice could gain some volume. â€Å"Why have these risks not been shared?† â€Å"Actually,† the Seeker broke in, â€Å"it is very clearly stated in all recruitment propaganda that assimilating the remaining adult human hosts is much more challenging than assimilating a child. An immature host is highly recommended.† â€Å"The word challenging does not quite cover Kevin’s story,† I whispered. â€Å"Yes, well, you preferred to ignore the recommendation.† She held up her hands in a peacemaking gesture when my body tensed, causing the stiff fabric on the narrow bed to crackle softly. â€Å"Not that I blame you. Childhood is extraordinarily tedious. And you are clearly not the average soul. I have every confidence that this is well within your abilities to handle. This is just another host. I’m sure you will have full access and control shortly.† By this point in my observations of the Seeker, I was surprised that she’d had the patience to wait for any delay, even my personal acclimatization. I sensed her disappointment in my lack of information, and it brought back some of the unfamiliar feelings of anger. â€Å"Did it not occur to you that you could get the answers you seek by being inserted into this body yourself?† I asked. She stiffened. â€Å"I’m no skipper.† My eyebrows pulled up automatically. â€Å"Another nickname,† the Healer explained. â€Å"For those who do not complete a life term in their host.† I nodded in understanding. We’d had a name for it on my other worlds. On no world was it smiled upon. So I quit quizzing the Seeker and gave her what I could. â€Å"Her name was Melanie Stryder. She was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She was in Los Angeles when the occupation became known to her, and she hid in the wilderness for a few years before finding†¦ Hmmm. Sorry, I’ll try that one again later. The body has seen twenty years. She drove to Chicago from†¦Ã¢â‚¬  I shook my head. â€Å"There were several stages, not all of them alone. The vehicle was stolen. She was searching for a cousin named Sharon, whom she had reason to hope was still human. She neither found nor contacted anyone before she was spotted. But†¦Ã¢â‚¬  I struggled, fighting against another blank wall. â€Å"I think†¦ I can’t be sure†¦ I think she left a note†¦ somewhere.† â€Å"So she expected someone would look for her?† the Seeker asked eagerly. â€Å"Yes. She will be†¦ missed. If she does not rendezvous with†¦Ã¢â‚¬  I gritted my teeth, truly fighting now. The wall was black, and I could not tell how thick it was. I battered against it, sweat beading on my forehead. The Seeker and the Healer were very quiet, allowing me to concentrate. I tried thinking of something else-the loud, unfamiliar noises the engine of the car had made, the jittery rush of adrenaline every time the lights of another vehicle drew near on the road. I already had this, and nothing fought me. I let the memory carry me along, let it skip over the cold hike through the city under the sheltering darkness of night, let it wind its way to the building where they’d found me. Not me, her. My body shuddered. â€Å"Don’t overextend -† the Healer began. The Seeker shushed him. I let my mind dwell on the horror of discovery, the burning hatred of the Seekers that overpowered almost everything else. The hatred was evil; it was pain. I could hardly bear to feel it. But I let it run its course, hoping it would distract the resistance, weaken the defenses. I watched carefully as she tried to hide and then knew she could not. A note, scratched on a piece of debris with a broken pencil. Shoved hastily under a door. Not just any door. â€Å"The pattern is the fifth door along the fifth hall on the fifth floor. Her communication is there.† The Seeker had a small phone in her hand; she murmured rapidly into it. â€Å"The building was supposed to be safe,† I continued. â€Å"They knew it was condemned. She doesn’t know how she was discovered. Did they find Sharon?† A chill of horror raised goose bumps on my arms. The question was not mine. The question wasn’t mine, but it flowed naturally through my lips as if it were. The Seeker did not notice anything amiss. â€Å"The cousin? No, they found no other human,† she answered, and my body relaxed in response. â€Å"This host was spotted entering the building. Since the building was known to be condemned, the citizen who observed her was concerned. He called us, and we watched the building to see if we could catch more than one, and then moved in when that seemed unlikely. Can you find the rendezvous point?† I tried. So many memories, all of them so colorful and sharp. I saw a hundred places I’d never been, heard their names for the first time. A house in Los Angeles, lined with tall fronded trees. A meadow in a forest, with a tent and a fire, outside Winslow, Arizona. A deserted rocky beach in Mexico. A cave, the entrance guarded by sheeting rain, somewhere in Oregon. Tents, huts, rude shelters. As time went on, the names grew less specific. She did not know where she was, nor did she care. My name was now Wanderer, yet her memories fit it just as well as my own. Except that my wandering was by choice. These flashes of memory were always tinged with the fear of the hunted. Not wandering, but running. I tried not to feel pity. Instead, I worked to focus the memories. I didn’t need to see where she’d been, only where she was going. I sorted through the pictures that tied to the word Chicago , but none seemed to be anything more than random images. I widened my net. What was outside Chicago? Cold, I thought. It was cold, and there was some worry about that. Where? I pushed, and the wall came back. I exhaled in a gust. â€Å"Outside the city-in the wilderness†¦ a state park, away from any habitations. It’s not somewhere she’d been before, but she knew how to get there.† â€Å"How soon?† the Seeker asked. â€Å"Soon.† The answer came automatically. â€Å"How long have I been here?† â€Å"We let the host heal for nine days, just to be absolutely sure she was recovered,† the Healer told me. â€Å"Insertion was today, the tenth day.† Ten days. My body felt a staggering wave of relief. â€Å"Too late,† I said. â€Å"For the rendezvous point†¦ or even the note.† I could feel the host’s reaction to this-could feel it much too strongly. The host was almost†¦ smug. I allowed the words she thought to be spoken, so that I could learn from them. â€Å"He won’t be there.† â€Å"He?† The Seeker pounced on the pronoun. â€Å"Who?† The black wall slammed down with more force than she’d used before. She was the tiniest fraction of a second too late. Again, the face filled my mind. The beautiful face with the golden tan skin and the light-flecked eyes. The face that stirred a strange, deep pleasure within me while I viewed it so clearly in my mind. Though the wall slapped into place with an accompanying sensation of vicious resentment, it was not fast enough. â€Å"Jared,† I answered. As quickly as if it had come from me, the thought that was not mine followed the name through my lips. â€Å"Jared is safe.† How to cite The Host Chapter 3: Resisted, Essay examples

Mercedes Zuniga Essays (819 words) - Law Enforcement, Prevention

Mercedes Zuniga Professor Norton English 1C 5/25/2017 Deadly Use of Force: Police Brutality In recent years, police actions, particularly police abuse has come into view of a wide, public and critical eye. While citizens worry about protecting themselves from criminals, it has now been shown that they must also keep a watchful eye on those who are supposed to protect and serve. Police officers have beate n and shot unresisting suspects. T hey have misused baton s, chemical sprays, and electroshock weapons. T h ey have injured and killed people by placing them in dangerou s restraint holds. I believe racism and police brutality goes hand in hand. This has caused a major concern in today's society in the United States. On March 3, 1991 in California, Rodney King an African American, was pulled over after a high-speed chase, and after stopping was beaten by four white police officers (Worsnop 635). Tracy Brock also an African American was arrested in Manhattan in November of 1986. An officer smashed his head through a plate glass window, when Broc k refused to go into the officer' s lunchroom (Police Brutality and Excessive Force in the New York City Police Department 14). Ki Tae Kim a Korean grocer was assaulted when he was accused of passing a counterfeit bill. He was punched in the face, his head was slammed into the counter, and the officer also subjected him to racial slurs (Police Brutality and Excessive Force in the New York City Police Department 17). Marcos Maldonado a Latino grocer was mistaken for a suspect after an armed robbery to his store. He was handcuffed, thrown to the floor, repeatedly kic ked, and beaten with the officer's nightstick (Police Brutality and Excess ive Force in the New York City Police Department 17). Abner Louima a Haitian immigrant was arrested outside a dance club in Brooklyn, and was brutally assaulted when he arrived at the police station. These are just a few examples of the people who have been affected of police brutality, and racism. There are five stages through which force can pro gress and lead to brutality: v erbal persuasion, unarmed physical force, force using non-lethal weapons, force using impact weapons and deadly force, which most of the officers mentioned before fell into this stage. The deadly forc e stage is only to be used when an officer's life or another person' s life is in danger. The deadly force stage should be terminated, if not made illegal in t he United States. By having the "deadly force" stage, by law you are permitting someone to c ommit a murder. In many of the cases stated before these guidelines were violated, and stronger action was used on the citizen than necessary. The officers who were accused in these cases were charged with only minor offenses, and some were charged with nothing at all. Stronger action should have been enforced on the police officers that committed these crimes. All of these victims mentioned are from minority groups, and were harmed by white New York City police officers. In less than four years fifty-five people have died while being in police custody, in the New York City Police Department (Police Brutality and Excessive Force in the New York City Police Department 8). This number compared to earlier statistics seems to be low, but still seems extremely high, for the rules and regulations the officers are sup posed to be following. Many law enforcement officials appear to have a tough exterior towards crime, but are very sensitive to crime on the inside. Police officers build up negative feelings towards certain races, sexes, or religions. Officers tend to get the impression that if one or a few people treat them with disrespect, then other people of that same sex, race, or religion will treat the officer in the same way. It is proven that less than f ive percent of all cops are the "bad element", but if the other ninety- five percent stand around and do nothing, then that is where the real problem lies (Worsnop 636). Whether or not a person believes police b rutality is a serious problem, it must be stopped. In some cases, where