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Accounting risked failing to flag problems unless the rule was changed in a timely way, he said.
"We have got to get this done. I am much more worried about this than impairment. At least everybody knows the banks are in trouble and they are probably hiding some losses. In insurance, I don't think we know," Hoogervorst added.
There are a few movies that become pop culture figures upon or before their release. While most of these infamous movies are thought of positively, some gain notoriety due to negativity, whether it deserves it or not. This appears to be the case for the upcoming Ghostbusters movie, which has been the victim of hatred and trolling since the all-female cast was first announced. Fans of the original film have been outspoken for their disdain of the unreleased reboot, and now its soundtrack has been brought into the conversation. Rock band Fall Out Boy has recorded a cover of the famous Ray Parker Jr. "Ghostbusters" song, and it's been universally panned. Now the man behind the original has spoken up regarding the new cover.
I'm not gonna say whether it's good or bad. I'm just gonna say maybe I'm an old guy now and I like it the old way. I wish they had called me to maybe work with some of the younger guys and help them get a direction.
While Ray Parker Jr. took the classy route and didn't trash the Fall Out Boy cover, his true feelings seem pretty clear. He doesn't love the new Ghostbusters theme, and I can't say that I blame him.
The original "Ghostbusters" song was truly a perfect musical interpretation of the movie. Funky, silly, and full of character, Ray Parker Jr.'s song served to capture the feel of Ghostbusters. The song itself would also cemented itself in pop culture history, and everyone still knows the answer when someone says "Who you gonna call?". Check out the original, complete with the awesome music video, below.
Conversely, Fall Out Boy's version is strangely disconnected to itself. It speeds through the signature lyrics, and it's so bizarre that not even Missy Elliot could save it with her feature during the bridge.
It's really surprising that no one from Fall Out Boy or their label ever reached out to Ray Parker Jr. before, during, or after recording of the new Ghostbusters theme. Surely his insight would have been helpful, and his stamp of approval would probably assist in stopping the arrows and stones that Ghostbusters purists have been throwing at the track. As a reminder of what we're talking about, here is the new version.
It's just not the same!
While I may not enjoy the Fall Out Boy version of "Ghostbusters", I'm not writing the movie itself off. The cast is phenomenal, and I'm really hoping that it is merely suffering from being trolled on the internet and a series of less than stellar trailers.
Ghostbusters will slime into theaters on July 15th, 2016.
Early in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, I discovered a puzzle shrine containing a small maze. Inside that maze was a little ball. The goal, I realized, was to maneuver the ball out of the maze and slide it into a nearby funnel. To do this, I’d have to rotate my Nintendo Switch controller, using motion controls to turn the maze around and let gravity move the ball through each corridor. One wrong move and the ball would fall out, forcing me to start again.
After struggling a few times to solve the puzzle thanks to Newton’s dumb laws, I noticed that every time the ball fell, a new one would drop from a canister several feet above the maze. Then I had a wild thought. Just before a new ball dropped, I turned my controller upside down, flipping the maze 180 degrees. There was nothing on the other side, so I now had a nice flat surface on which to roll the ball. I slowly tilted the maze’s newly exposed backside and dropped the ball right into the funnel, skipping the maze entirely. Boom. Puzzle solved.
For decades now, Zelda games have been about what you can’t do as much as they are about what you can. You can’t pick up that rock until you find the Power Gloves. You can’t go swimming until you buy Zora’s Flippers. See that big gap? You can’t cross it until you get the Hookshot. Since Link to the Past, just about every Zelda game has followed this same rhythm: You start off in a narrow world that gradually expands as you make progress. You see a wall with cracks in it and make a mental note to come back once you snag some bombs. Your curiosity is piqued by what you can’t yet access, and every new dungeon brings with it a rush of dopamine as you wait to see what helpful new gadget you’ll find there and what kind of secrets it will let you discover.
Breath of the Wild rewards curiosity in a way that no other Zelda has explored.
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, in contrast, is all about what you can do. This is a game that says “yes” to anything you ask of it. From the very beginning, you can swim in any lake, pick up any boulder, and cross any pit. When you try some crazy experiment, the game will oblige. You can climb up any wall, mountain, or tower in the world, which allows you the freedom to explore the map in a way that no Zelda game has matched. Breath of the Wild never asks you to wait for a new item before you uncover its secrets. It just keeps saying yes.
In 1986, The Legend of Zelda conjured the illusion that you could explore a boundless world. Its single-screen areas were metaphors. Like the town icons on the world map of a JRPG, The Legend of Zelda’s pixely mountains and forests were meant to represent a grander topography. Our imagination did most of the work. Today the first Zelda may look dusty and primitive, but it’s not hard to see why it had such an impact. It felt infinite.
In 2017, we don’t need our imagination anymore. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild doesn’t just evoke the feelings of a boundless world; it gives you one. The game feels, in so many ways, like what Zelda has always strived to be. Free of the traditions that the series has followed so rigorously over the past decade, Breath of the Wild emerges triumphant. It is groundbreaking. It is the pinnacle of Zelda.
Zelda games typically follow a common progression: You, as the pointy-eared adventurer Link, start off asleep in a bed. You are woken up, told you are a hero, and sent off to go find a sword somewhere. After some tutorial sections, you’ll learn that there are X MacGuffins out in the world that you’ll have to go save/recover/find. Each one of these MacGuffins is linked to a dungeon, and each dungeon contains a different key item. Already you know what some of those items will be: bombs, a boomerang, a hookshot. There’s always some sort of gimmick, like a mirror that transports you between worlds or a musical instrument that can control time. Interspersed between each dungeon are various quests and secrets, and once you’ve acquired all of the MacGuffins, you’ll fight Ganon. End of game.
When you first start off Breath of the Wild, it seems to follow that same pattern. You are woken up from a cryogenic sleep chamber inside of a small cave. You are told that you are a hero. You pick up a multi-purpose tool called a Sheikah Slate—your gimmick item—and grab a shirt and pants from nearby chests.
Then you make your way toward the exit and find something unusual: a wall, blocking your progress. There are no buttons or switches, no cracks for a bomb or pegs for a hookshot. Instead, you learn, you are meant to jump onto the wall and climb it.
This revelation may inspire in Zelda devotees a series of exciting thoughts. Is this a new ability? Is it just situational? If you can climb this wall, what else can you climb? Once you leave the cave and squint your way into the sunlight, you might experiment with this newfound ability and discover the answer: You can climb everything. Link can scale almost any surface in the game, from cave walls to cliff-sides, which is a thrilling way to traverse the world. Think about it like this: As you are exploring Breath of the Wild’s massive version of Hyrule, you’ll never have to stop because there’s something in your way.
Once you’ve escaped the cave, you’ll probably be bracing yourself for Breath of the Wild’s inevitable tutorial section. (You might think: If it’s anything like the last console Zelda game, Skyward Sword, it’ll be an hour or two before the real game starts.) Then, as you walk down the rocky path outside, it’ll dawn on you: There is no tutorial section. The real game has already started. You can go talk to that important-looking bearded man a few feet away or you can just start walking in a random direction, climbing over any obstacle you find. You don’t have to go find your sword. You can just pick up a nearby stick, or steal the old man’s axe, or defeat a monster and take its weapon. A blue spirit won’t pop out and tell you that no, you shouldn’t go that way until you talk to the old man. Breath of the Wild always says yes. Fi and Navi and Midna aren’t welcome here.
Consider the Zelda pattern broken. The first time you find a boomerang won’t be prefaced by Link peeking into a glowing chest as music swells. You’ll just kill a monster and take its boomerang. Breath of the Wild does have MacGuffins, as you’ll eventually learn, but instead of getting them in linear progression, you can go hunt them down in any order. Or you can ignore them entirely and just go fight Ganon with three hearts and no clothing (which will no doubt lead to some incredible speedruns over the next few months).
When you emerge from that opening cave, you’ll find yourself on a vista, peeking out at the beautiful mountains and ruins of Hyrule as the “Breath of the Wild” title appears on screen. In another Zelda game, those mountains and ruins would be part of the scenery. If you could go there at all, you’d be confined to a specific area. In Breath of the Wild, you can walk across every inch.
I recommend playing Breath of the Wild with a notebook, not because you’ll need it to solve puzzles (the way you would in, say, The Witness, a game that resembles this one in some unexpected and striking ways) but because you’ll want to keep a to-do list. It’s easy to get distracted, to be walking toward one goal only to see something enticing in the distance. It’s helpful to remember that you really want to go check out that strange-looking ring of rocks once you’re done exploring the ruins (but also, you really should go finish that one sidequest).
A slice of gameplay might look something like this: You walk into a new region. It’s themed in some way, maybe based on a desert or a tropical jungle. You see a big, glowing tower—one of the structures in each region that you scale in order to fill out more of your map, Ubisoft-style. You tag it with your binoculars, then head in that direction. On your way, you collect some herbs (which you’ll cook next time you find a fire) and kill a couple of Chu-Chus, grabbing the jelly they leave behind (useful for elixirs).
Link can climb anything in Breath of the Wild, including these towers, which help reveal the terrain and topography contained in each region of Hyrule.
There are a few things to keep in mind as you go. Climbing walls and mountains will gradually drain your stamina, an upgradable energy meter that you’ll also use while running and using Link’s portable hang glider. If you run out of stamina in the middle of a climb, Link will plummet, potentially to his death. You’ll have to be a little careful, sizing up mountains and walls to make sure you can actually climb them before you start scaling. But the rules are flexible. Your movement is based on physics rather than a “navmesh”—which, in English, means that Link can walk on anything in the world—so there are ways to manipulate the way Link moves. If you see little ridges on a mountain, you can often get Link to stop climbing and just stand on them for a few seconds, recovering his stamina so you can climb further.
Is this sort of extended climbing an unintentional effect of the game’s code? A devious way to make the player feel smart? Or the net result of a video game that’s designed around saying “yes” to everything?
Breath of the Wild’s entire world is based around that philosophy, which may sometimes make you feel like you’re cheating. You can use ice arrows to freeze a monster, then shatter him with a sledgehammer, killing him instantly. You can light a fire with some wood and flint, then use the drafts created by that fire to propel yourself in the air so you can then glide to an unexplored area. You can play around with gravity, inertia, and all of the other physics rules that Nintendo stuck in this game, using them to manipulate and break the world. There are times when you may feel like you’re accessing places that you’re not supposed to reach yet, but Breath of the Wild would disagree with that perspective. Breath of the Wild wants you to go wherever you want.
Every new enemy camp is a new opportunity to play around with the physics to see what kind of wild chemistry experiments you can embark upon.
Breath of the Wild also wants you to feel like exploring is a worthwhile use of your time, which it accomplishes in several ways. First, by letting Link choose from a wide variety of weapons and gear. Second, by sprinkling puzzles and shrines throughout the world. (Shrines serve as both fast travel points and mini-dungeons. There are around 100 in the game, and for every four you complete, you can upgrade your health or stamina.) And third, by making every item useful. There are hundreds of objects all across the world that you can harvest and collect, from apples to snails to precious minerals. Find a fire and you can combine these objects, cooking them to make valuable food and potions. The better your stock of food and potions, the better your chances of surviving a tough encounter. Survive the tough encounter and you’ll find more puzzles, shrines, and gear. And so on.
This may make you wonder just what kind of game Breath of the Wild is. It’s a Zelda where you switch weapons and chop down trees? What? It’s safe to say that you’ve never played anything like it before. Because even as Breath of the Wild takes liberally from other games (a long list that includes Far Cry, Skyrim, and even Portal) it never stops feeling like Zelda. That isn’t just because you wear a tunic and solve problems for rock-eating Gorons; it’s because Breath of the Wild feels polished and carefully crafted in the way that Nintendo has mastered over the past few decades. The new Hyrule feels huge, but never empty. It feels vast, but never random. There are puzzle clues and design tricks all throughout the world, which is dense and full of secrets. Even the placement of rocks feels deliberate.
For those of us who rank Link to the Past and Wind Waker among the greatest games of all time, this was more than a little alarming. A Zelda without traditional puzzles? The main reason to play Zelda was the excitement of finding a new dungeon, picking it apart, and solving a series of progressively difficult puzzles with whatever object you’d find there. Wasn’t it?
Each of Breath of the Wild’s 100-something puzzle shrines comes with a clue that will help you figure out how to solve its riddles.
Breath of the Wild answers that question with a resounding “nope.” You won’t push blocks on buttons in the newest Zelda (although you might move them around with magnets), and there are no specific dungeon items that will let you forge new paths. Yet the game never feels short on puzzles. It is, as Aonuma promised, a reconstruction of “puzzle-solving” in a Zelda game.
You stumble upon an enemy encampment. There’s a Bokoblin on a tower, pivoting every few seconds to look out for intruders like you. Three other Bokoblins are sitting around a campfire. On the other side of the encampment, there’s a big cliff with a well-placed boulder resting on the edge, right on top of the Bokoblin camp. How do you take them all out?
You need to access a new region, but it’s uninhabitably hot. Walking around in this new region will damage you and set your equipment on fire. What can you do to get through safely?
You enter a puzzle shrine. There’s an ice cube on the ground. You have to bring it across a series of platforms full of jets that shoot flame. But the flame is melting your ice cube. How can you get it where it needs to go?
You find a big metal ball tied next to a well. What is it?
Some of these puzzles have multiple solutions, and some of them can be quite difficult. Occasionally you’ll want to manipulate the physics system to solve a puzzle, as I did when I flipped around that maze, and sometimes the best option is simply the most logical one (put the ball in the well). Other times, the best option is to leave a puzzle shrine and go find something else to do for a little while.
There are hundreds of cooking ingredients throughout the world, and experimenting with them on a fire can lead to some useful treats.
Because you can explore Breath of the Wild’s enormous world in any sequence that you’d like, and because there are no gates blocking your progress anywhere, there is no way for the game to offer any sort of escalating puzzle progression. Which makes for a dilemma. If you’re not getting new items or abilities all the time, how can this Zelda introduce new types of puzzles? How can it ramp up the difficulty in a way that feels natural?
Of course, this isn’t the first time Zelda has tried to go non-linear. With Link Between Worlds (2013), Eiji Aonuma and crew had already played around with the standard progression formula. Rather than acquire a new item in each dungeon, you’d buy or rent everything from an item store in the center of the map. Each dungeon required one specific item, and you could do them in any order, with the assurance that, for example, the bomb dungeon wouldn’t have any puzzles that required the fire rod. While this led to an excellent Zelda game—and Link Between Worlds had some stellar dungeons—it also made the puzzles a little too easy. You immediately knew that every puzzle in the bomb dungeon required bombs, so the solutions became apparent fast.
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild takes another stab at this problem. You start off the game on an area called the Great Plateau, where you’ll be stuck until you get a paraglider that lets you float down to the world below. Before you get this paraglider, you have to finish four puzzle shrines that will get you four key abilities, allowing you to: throw bombs, use a magnet to move metal objects, freeze time for an object and conjure frozen ice columns from water. Until you have these abilities, you can’t get off the plateau.
The magnet ability allows you to move metal objects around the world, no matter how big they are.
This is technically the only time the game says “no,” because you can’t leave until you get the tools. But those very tools are the things that allow the designers to present constantly varied puzzles, safe in the knowledge that you have a variety of possible solutions. It’s a brilliant bit of subterfuge. Now, you can go anywhere, and the game can come up with all sorts of tricks to throw your way, knowing that you’ll have access to all four of these abilities no matter what. You won’t get new items that’ll help you solve puzzles the way you would in previous Zelda games, but dozens of hours into Breath of the Wild, you’ll still encounter new combinations that will stump you. It always feels like you’re making progress, because you’re constantly collecting new things and upgrading your gear and finding new secrets.
And then there are the dungeons, whose nature I won’t spoil but which are very different than any Zelda dungeon to date. Instead of introducing a series of stand-alone puzzle rooms, each of these dungeons serves as one big puzzle with its own rules and ideas. Breath of the Wild won’t offer that traditional Zelda feeling that you’re powering through dungeons that escalate in scale and complexity as you go, which may make some fans wistful, but this new Zelda has dungeons that feel plenty complex on their own. No hookshots or spinners necessary.
And, not to worry, there are no block puzzles. Though you may get sick of moving orbs around.
Here is a complaint about The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. The “sprint” button is mapped by default to X. You can swap it to B, but either way this poses a problem: To run and move the camera at the same time, you need to put your right hand into “claw” position, which is neither comfortable nor sustainable. The L3 button, which should let you sprint, is in fact the crouch button. There is no way to remap it. For a game that so often says yes, Breath of the Wild’s insistence on saying “no” here is baffling.
It’s tough to review a game like Breath of the Wild without giving away too many of its secrets. Should I tell you about what I found on that tiny island in the middle of a sea of lava? Should I talk about what I discovered when I tried to climb a certain landmark that you wouldn’t think was climbable? Should I recount the story of the time I chugged a fireproof elixir and ran through Death Mountain, making it to Goron City just as the elixir wore off and my hearts started to drain?
Zelda’s traditional goofy humor is all over Breath of the Wild. There’s a surprising amount of dialogue, localized impeccably by Nintendo’s talented Treehouse team.
I won’t tell you more about the dungeons. They’re too cool to spoil.
I won’t tell you about the dramatic, optional set-piece that my colleague Kirk excitedly urged me to go check out. He wouldn’t want me to spoil it.
This is a game that will dominate dinner conversations. It’s a game that will lead to countless anecdotes, discoveries, and swapped stories. Already, colleagues and I have spent a great deal of time comparing notes and talking about how we solved major puzzles. For one early section in which you have to figure out how to get Link through a freezing cold mountain, three Kotaku writers found three completely different ways to proceed. We’ve discussed surprise boss encounters, hidden puzzles, and where to find all the Korok seeds that are sprinkled across Hyrule. We’ve talked about Breath of the Wild’s mysteries and weird secrets, telling tales about the time one of us jumped down to a crevasse that seemed unexplorable, but in fact contained a new shrine: the designers’ way of rewarding curious players.
Phrases like “See that area? You can go there” have become nonsensical (and misleading) marketing buzzwords, but in Breath of the Wild, you really can go to any area you see.
And as you talk about Breath of the Wild with your friends, there’s one word that will rarely if ever come up: “can’t.” Stories about the new Zelda will instead revolve around what you can do. How you climbed all the way to the top of the Temple of Time just for kicks, or how you parachuted down to the lowest point of Hyrule to see what kind of secrets you’d find there. How you found a brilliant method to brute-force your way through the freezing, snowy mountains, or how you set a forest on fire just to see if you could.
Or, how you tried something as ridiculous as flipping over a maze so you wouldn’t have to solve it, and the game somehow let you finish the puzzle anyway. Breath of the Wild is the best Zelda game to date, and it accomplishes that simply by saying yes.
The most-read story on salon.com has not been seriously reported – in most cases, not reported at all — by the major TV news broadcasters, including NBC, ABC, CNN, and MSNBC. No surprise, since it directly implicates them. Anyone who’s concerned about how TV pundits shape the national debate should read Glenn Greenwald’s “The Pulitzer-winning investigation that dare not be uttered on TV,” about the Pulitzer-winning investigative work by David Barstow and the “NYT.” Barstow’s pieces chiefly concern retired four-star Gen. Barry McCaffrey, a ubiquitous TV news presence who’s been opining about the Iraq war since we invaded that country. Turns out McCaffrey has been a paid consultant of military contractors; he endorsed their interests as part of his job as an “independent analyst” on major news networks. According to Barstow’s reporting, the general was also pursued by the Pentagon to become a “message force multiplier” for the Bush administration. But NBC, CNN, et al have mostly kept silent about McCaffrey’s countless appearances on their shows over the years – especially on the topic of whether they participated in the creation of propaganda.
This is scary stuff. The internet gets hammered for its rag tag, scattershot nature, but in the case of watchful aggregators like salon.com, it can prove vital as a disseminator of valuable info that the broadcast news giants want to keep buried.
The Air Force has chosen 14 companies for a potential 10-year, $998 million contract to help research and evaluate weapon systems.
All bidders received positions on the contract, the Defense Department said in its Tuesday contracts digest. Work will also include tests and evaluations of the weapon systems along with subsystems and components.
The contract covers a five-year base period followed by five one-year options and used lowest-price technically acceptable criteria in the source selection, according to Deltek.
Intiuitive Research and Technology Corp.
Dynetics and GTRI will continue the work as incumbents but a third incumbent Ducommun apparently didn't bid as a prime.
The Air Force sought help to develop test-and-evaluation systems and facilities that can oversee performance of weapons, cyber systems and future technologies.
Fellow Fellows is a series that focuses on the current eruption of fellowships in academia today. Within this realm, these positions produce a fantastic blend of practice, research, and design influence, traditionally done within a tight time-frame. Fellow Fellows sits down with these fellows and attempts to understand what these positions offer to both the participants and the discipline at large. It is about bringing attention and inquiry to the otherwise maddening pace of revolving academics while giving a broad view of the breakthrough work being done by those who exist in-between the newly minted graduate and the licensed associate.
This week, we are talking to Viola Ago. Viola was the William Muschenheim Fellow during the 2016-2017 academic year at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning.
1. The conversation, focus and applications to fellowships in general has exploded over the past decade. They have become a go-to means of exposure and legitimization within the academy and in some respects, the HOV lane of historically PhD owned territories of research and publication. What are your views on the current standing of fellowships as a vehicle of conceptual exploration?
I do agree that there is certain academic currency packaged with fellowships in general. The process of acquiring one is, to my knowledge, similar to acquiring a tenure-track position. Fellows are typically brought in from a national search; I think this may be how a fellow’s academic currency appreciates by default.
However valuable my experience was, there came a point where I wanted to focus more on producing my own work and understand how it could integrate with the discipline in a productive way.
The objective of the fellowship program varies depending on the school, program, endowment, and I would even argue that it changes slightly from year to year. While I do think of fellowships as a platform for exploration, I think the type and manner in which the research (conceptual, design, technology, etc.) is conducted depends on the individual and their project.
2. What fellowship where you in and what brought you to that fellowship?
I was the William Muschenheim Fellow during the 2016-2017 academic year at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. My route to the fellowship is a little bit strange. Originally (while I was planning my graduate studies), I had not intended for an academic appointment to be my full-time occupation. I went to graduate school with the purpose of commencing a portfolio that would help me land my dream job—a design-oriented position in a design-oriented firm. My SCI-Arc education did that, and more. Once I graduated, I started working at Morphosis Architects in Culver City. Within a few months, I was an integral part of their Advanced Technology team focusing on designing facades and atrium spaces. I consider my experience at Morphosis as an extension of my education, as Thom really does run the practice like a studio. I am lucky to say that 20-30% of my time there was dedicated to R&D. However valuable my experience was, there came a point where I wanted to focus more on producing my own work and understand how it could integrate with the discipline in a productive way. Without making this too biographical, it was at this point that I decided to apply for the Muschenheim Fellowship.
3. What was the focus of the fellowship research?
My fellowship work was a continuation of my obsession at the time with linework and how linework — or, in other words, vector-based information — which is typically related to the practice of drawing, could start to relate to the practice of rendering. Further, I was interested in printing processes and the possibilities offered by the physical production of drawings and the premise of these possibilities as they integrated with the tectonics of the digital file. Lastly, I used drawing as a tool to communicate compositions focused on motion, or the illusion of motion of primitives on a drawing plane.
The fellowship was a gateway to the university’s support system. In this short amount of time, I have written a few articles, participated in conferences and panels in and outside of the school, participated in exhibitions, built a couple of small-scale projects, and started a few more projects, currently underway.
At the same time, I was also rigorously reading new work and revisiting old pieces that related to the disciplines and practices of painting, printmaking, color, drawing, and technique. I spent a considerable amount of my time questioning the premise under which my work related to the disciplinary conversation in architecture.
4. What did you produce? Teach? And or exhibit during that time?
I produced a series of digital and physical drawings, models, and a book that confronted the line and its information-based translations from 3D to 2D (projection techniques), and from digital to physical (printing techniques). These were all part of the exhibition that opened on March 8, 2017, at the Taubman College Gallery with my fellow fellows Hans Tursack and Erik Herrmann. The fellowship was also accompanied by a short presentation meant to discuss the work in the exhibition (this is available on the Taubman College Vimeo page).
5. How has the fellowship advanced or become a platform for your academic and professional career?
It is still early for me to evaluate the advancement that the fellowship has afforded (up to this moment, I have been teaching for under two years). However, I can say the unique environment that the fellowship provided has been crucial in the development of my project. The fellowship was a gateway to the university’s support system. In this short amount of time, I have written a few articles, participated in conferences and panels in and outside of the school, participated in exhibitions, built a couple of small-scale projects, and started a few more projects, currently underway. I imagine that these components will be critical to the advancement of my career over the next few years.
6. What is the pedagogical role of the fellowship and how does it find its way into the focus and vision of the institution that you worked with?
7. There is some criticism that a fellowship is a cost effective way for institutions to appropriate potent ideas while leaving the fellow with little compensation besides the year of residence and no guarantee of a permanent position? What is your position on this?
At the moment I do not hold the same criticism. The support that I have received from the university is worth the precariousness of a short-term appointment. I have received vital mentorship and support from my program chair Sharon Haar, associate professor John McMorrough, our associate dean of research Geoff Thun, associate professor Kathy Velikov, more recently our newly appointed dean Jonathan Massey, and other amazing faculty and colleagues. Further, the fellowship granted me access to the facilities available to not only Taubman College, but the University of Michigan as well. This includes the FABLab and all of its machines, the cutting-edge computer labs and the latest software packages across the entire university campus, the library resources, and different teams of staff (internal and external) that assist in acquiring grants, funding, sponsorship, and more.
Further, the fellowship granted me access to the facilities available to not only Taubman College, but the University of Michigan as well.
Lastly, there is additional financial support available (outside of the allocated fellowship project award). These opportunities are offered through the college as well as the university. In fact, some grants are specifically designed to support non-tenure-track instructors such as fellows and lecturers.
8. What support, and or resources does a fellowship supply that would be hard to come by in any other position? Why would you pursue a fellowship instead of a full time position?
Personally, I like to embed myself in the environment that I am in. When I transition from one place to the next, I try to adapt quickly, as that is the most effective way of gaining the most valuable experience. When I was at Morphosis, I was fully immersed in Thom’s project; I was feeding off the energy of the practice and what it offered. Similarly, when I came to Taubman, I engaged with the system and the pedagogy such that I was able to fully preoccupy myself with my research and my architectural project. As a result, my project has advanced tremendously. While I was at Morphosis, I was not able to do that (although I think there are some people who can make the office-job/personal project work for them).
Further, the fellowship program typically gives you a course release, and does not require any other type of academic service. This arrangement is quite beneficial when one is intensively focused on one’s work.
9. What was your next step after the fellowship?
After the fellowship, I wanted to start working on a new project. There is a lot of momentum and force that is gained during the fellowship program—it would be unfortunate to not capitalize on it. Hans Tursack and I started working together on some ideas just a couple of weeks after our Feedback fellows exhibition opening. We came to the realization that there was significant overlap in our interests in architecture so we started putting a design proposal together and sought out funding opportunities.
10. What are you working on now and how is it tied to the work done during the fellowship?
I am working on a few projects, some writing ones and some design ones, some with one of my collaborators, Hans Tursack, and some individually. The most important project at the moment, however, is a continuation of Thick Skin, a small-scale installation that Hans and I put together in the Island space at the A+D (Architecture and Design) Museum in Los Angeles in March of this year. Thick Skin is the beginning of a larger project; one that is interested in the correspondence between graphics, and our contemporary visual culture.
11. What advice would you have for prospective fellowship applicants?
Reading Fellow Fellows is an informative way to begin understanding the overall picture, in addition to reaching out to the colleges for more information. I would also recommend looking at the previous fellows’ trajectories to see if they align with your own. And then apply, gain experience, and apply again. As I mentioned before, the profile of the fellowship search varies from one year to the next. For this reason, I would encourage applicants to continue applying even if they did not get shortlisted the first time around.
Taglit-Birthright Israel has contributed more than $535 million to Israel’s economy since the trip’s inception in 2000, the organization said.
The contribution to Israel’s tourism industry comes from providing transportation, lodging, food, training, security, entry to tourist sites and air travel during the free 10-day trips to Israel for Jews aged 18 to 26.
Since the beginning of the project, more than 7,100 groups have come to Israel, filling more than 2.2 million hotel beds and traveling around the country for more than 71,000 days in buses. The participants have spent more than $75 million in gift and souvenir shops, according to Taglit-Birthright.