A couple weeks ago I posted about a project at my friends Tyler Sarah, Phoebe and ‘Shannon and I are working on called BETAlabs. It’s a pilot program we’re doing with some students at Spaulding High School in Barre with the help of their school to work instructor our friend Michelle (aka LaFran) . Today was the big pay off. The two teams who have done the project came to beta to present the results. The project was something that Tyler and Shannon and I came up with involving a test set up for electric motors. It was a pretty interesting experiment that involved winding electromagnets , building a rotary jig with permanent magnets and creating a scale measurement system to measure torque. The two teams of students each approach the problem in different ways. They designed the test set ups and use laser cutters and 3-D printers both here and at the generator makerspace to build their prototypes. Both of them required quite a bit of iteration. Then they won their coils on were 3-D printed forms they had created and began their testing. I got to work with one of the teams to help them understand the basic math behind electromagnets. It was really fun seeing how quickly they caught onto the concepts. Today they came all dressed up to have lunch with us and then in front of a large group of beta employees displayed their projects and talked about what they learned. It was so amazing to hear them talk about what they learned about BETA Technologies and beta culture. It’s one thing to think about your own company… I was so proud of the teams and to hear what they had learned
we all got so much out of this exercise… We know how to improve it now so that we can take it to other schools. Our huge thanks to the students and instructors at Spaulding… And my deep congratulations to Sarah, Tyler and Shannon for creating this program !
As predicted… We had a very hard frost last night. Even though ‘Diane and I covered a lot of the plants… Many of them didn’t survive. 🙁 . Dan had to plant early because we’re going on vacation next week… But enough of her plants did survive that her Gardens will be beautiful anyway.… Actually some of them seem to liven up a little bit later in the day.
I had an interesting morning. I worked at home because I needed to meet with a nurse here at home in order to get a health check up for some insurance I’m buying.… Her name was Lisa and she was really a fun person.… We spent so much time talking that the 15 minute appointment stretch to over an hour… I got into work in time to help Shannon and Phoebe unload from a trip they made to Mt. Mansfield Union High School. Phoebe still a student there and all three of our boys went there. It was cool to see if they got a taste of beta
We had two more meetings at beta that night… We were hosting a group of project managers that included a large number of people I knew.including my friends Vijay, John and Eric…
I enjoyed showing them our demos as well as our project management device which is codename “project Pavlov”… It’s a wireless button that sits on our project manager Sophia’s desk in north hanger… When she pushes it when we’ve done something good it dispenses M&Ms to us on our desk in the G2 building a mile and a half away. I’m very proud of that device.
We also had another meeting late at night at beta for the fluffy bus.… Stein, Amey, marie, Diane, gizzo and I got together to discuss the wiring of the clouds… We will start it when we get back from vacation in early June. It was a long and complicated meeting… But we got everything we needed to do done !
It snowed again today… Cant believe it.. it was cold and blustery… And I looked up and there were snowflakes everywhere… Crazy! There’s a hard frost expected this evening. Dianes plants wont like it !
Late in the day we hosted some interns from Echo Museum…
Super fun day… I woke up very early and drove a bunch of BETA demos down to Middlebury high school. Tyler, Eddie, Willa, Evan and I spent the day talking to students about the wonders of electric flight.… I love doing these things… The more I do it the more I realize we have to do more interactive stuff. The new thing we’re doing around the ToolBus should be just the thing !
I got back to Burlington just in time to unload the demos and drive to generator for tonight’s “Reckless Ideas” panel. Reckless ideas is a generator program that we’ve had for a while to bring together speakers in audiences on topical matters. Tonight was on artificial intelligence and was masterfully put together by my good friend Denise… She and her husband Michael are also founding board members of generator with me. The panel was absolutely fantastic: my friend Prof Josh Bongard who is an AI researcher at UVM, Prof Randal Harp who is an ethicist and philosophy professor and Katheryn Cramer, hey science fiction editor, AI researcher and current grand student. Oh or fabulous and had very valid points of view. The panelists were articulate and well informed.. Denise’s questions to them were spot on . There were great questions from the audience as well. I was very surprised that over half of the people in the audience responded that they had at least try chatGPT … With several folks there (including Nii) who use it regularly. As a matter exercise, I used a chat GPT 3.5 based app I use called Paxo to record and summarize the discussion. While the summary was only so so it did show the power of the data model to make sense out of a lot of spoken language. I think it still has a few years to go before it’s truly useful.
Hats off to generator, Denise and the panelists for putting gather such a wonderful and thought provoking discussion!
