Olin: "That complex is going higher. You are onto something. It's an inexpensive stock."
Peloton: "Sometimes stocks are too hard. I think Peloton's too hard. We've got to worry about the pandemic, but maybe don't worry about it. People go on the Peloton, then they're going to go to the gym, then they've got to come back. Too hard. When it's too hard, we take a pass."
Johnson & Johnson: "I think you're fine in JNJ. It's an inexpensive stock when the dollar comes down, that will be good for you."
Cinemark: "It's going to be a foot race between the vaccine and their business. If you think the vaccines' going to be done in April, you've got a winner. And that's what you've got to recognize: you need [the stock] in April ... because it's going to report [earnings in May] ... but it will be a little late" to buy in May.
The game consoles are not available in brick-and-mortar stores, and online retailers have been selling out of them
The new Sony Playstation 5 (PS5) gaming console.Sony Interactive Entertainment
I haven’t cracked open a new Sony PlayStation in years. Seven years to be exact. That’s how long it’s been since I first laid hands on the original PlayStation 4. It was a hulking home-videogaming powerhouse that trounced its archrival, Microsoft Xbox One, in the previous generation of console wars.
Now comes the rematch. In November, Sony and Microsoft unveiled their next-generation hardware. I’ll be writing up my take on the new Xbox Series X in the coming days. For now, here are first impressions of the new PS5, after a week’s worth of button-mashing.
Start with aesthetics. I’ve been checking out the top-drawer PS5, the $500 model with the built-in optical drive. It’s not exactly ugly. But its tall, swoopy structure, clad in blazing white plastic, is too gaudy for my living room, and probably yours. Why not a simple black box, like the PS4, or for that matter the new Xbox? We’re here to look at games, not the machine that runs them.
The PS5 optical drive can run Ultra HD Blu-ray movie discs, if you happen to have an Ultra HD television, which I don’t. So far, the drive’s only been used by my soccer-obsessed teenage son, to load up the latest edition of EA’s FIFA sports game. But if you’ve got fast broadband, you can just download the latest titles. If that’s your style, the optical drive-free PS5 costs $100 less. However, if you’re in the market for a high-end video player, or prefer to own physical game discs, spend the extra money.
Neither model contains an old-school spinning hard drive. Instead, the PS5 comes with 825 gigabytes of solid state storage, and not the cheap kind found in low-end laptops. Sony went with an insanely fast version called NVMe memory, the same kind that lets my desktop machine boot Windows 10 in about 25 seconds. It’s similarly fast in the PS5. Hit “Start” on a game, and in seconds you’re rolling. This remarkable drive speed is especially good for inept gamers like me. I kept getting annihilated in the medieval fantasy adventure “Demon Souls,” but the PS5 resurrected my character so quickly that I didn’t mind a bit.
But for all its speed, an 825-gig drive is pretty skimpy. Expect to squeeze just a dozen or so games onto the PS5. Sony promises to offer a second NVMe storage slot by next year, and you can plug in an external hard drive for storing older PS4 games. Virtually all these older games will run just fine on the new console.
And you’ll be playing a lot of them. As you’d expect, there aren’t a lot of games yet that have been optimized for the new console. But the ones I’ve tried make an excellent first impression. For instance, the PS5 comes preloaded with “Astro’s Playroom,” a classic family-friendly run-and-jump game that mainly serves as a demo of the console’s impressive new DualSense controller.
We’re all accustomed to haptic controllers that send game-related vibrations through our fingers. DualSense levels up this concept with remarkably precise tactile feedback. The triggers generate subtly different sensations as you squeeze them, depending on whether you’re grabbing an object or throwing a punch. As you walk through “Astro’s Playroom,” the controller’s vibrations convey the texture of the ground your character is walking on — wood feels different from grass, which feels different from stone. No idea how Sony did it, but it’s brilliant.
The other big technical upgrade promised by the PS5 is a gimmick called ray tracing, which is supposed to produce ultra-realistic lighting effects, like those in the computer-generated sequences of big-budget films. Moviemakers take months to create these effects, using roomfuls of computers. A gaming console like the PS5 must do the same thing in real time.
Mission accomplished, judging by “Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales.” Built specifically for the PS5, the game transforms midtown Manhattan into a gleaming wonderland. Trees cast precisely defined shadows; passing cars and humans are crisply reflected in shop windows and pavement puddles. There’s a deep, satisfying glow to the city. It’s not up to Hollywood standards, of course, but easily among the best-looking games I’ve seen.
And of course, Sony’s just getting started. It generally takes a couple of years after the rollout of a new console before there’s a roster of games that can get the most from the machine.
Which ought to comfort you in your desperate and likely unsuccessful quest to purchase a PS5. The machines are not available in brick-and-mortar stores, and online retailers like Amazon, Walmart, and Best Buy are selling out of them as quickly as shipments arrive. Which means that by the time most of us can buy a PS5, there will be enough new games to make it worth the money.
Huston Collins is an investor at Fika Ventures. He was previously an associate at Greenspring Associates where he started the firm’s machine learning platform.
A long-time fan of “The Karate Kid,” I find my style’s a bit more Miyagi-Do, but, in reflecting upon my last few years as a founding GP at a young VC firm, I see some parallels between what it takes to win as an emerging manager and the mantras by which the Cobra Kai school abides.
Before diving into that, let me quickly set the stage for what the competitive landscape looks like for emerging managers these days. I’ll focus primarily on the seed landscape here, but the Cobra Kai framework applies just as readily to later stage funds as well.
Leading up to the coronavirus pandemic, the venture industry saw a record number of dollars raised by seed funds less than $100 million in size. As is the case across stages however, there has been a notable decline in seed volume in the wake of COVID-19.
U.S. fundraising activity for sub-$100M seed rounds. Data source: PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor. Image Credits: Fika Ventures
The opposing dynamics of a contraction in deal volume and an unprecedented amount of readily available investable capital has led to a tremendous amount of competition for the highest-quality deals. This flight to quality can be clearly seen in the rise of seed valuations in the upper quartile compared to the decline in other cohorts. Amid a backdrop of COVID chaos, upper quartile valuations have hit an all-time high.
Angel/seed pre-money valuations by quartile. Data source: PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor. Image Credits: Fika Ventures
Due to their smaller fund size and prescriptive portfolio construction mandates, emerging managers have little leeway in terms of the valuations at which they can invest — their ownership requirements and check size limits impose a hard ceiling to which their investors hold them strictly accountable.
If budging on valuation is not a viable tactic to compete against established firms — which, in addition to their ability to be less price sensitive also boast more recognizable brand names, larger teams and higher AUM that affords them higher budgets for platform resources — how can emerging managers win? Enter Cobra Kai.
Strike first
Let’s face it. As an emerging manager, the chances of you winning a deal once the established players start to circle drops precipitously. In order to win, you need to have a first-mover advantage.
On a practical level, there are two windows of opportunity to achieve this:
Even after his classes went online last spring, William Scott Molina, a 31-year-old student at San Diego State University, thought his remote learning experience was going just fine. As required in one of his online courses, he downloaded and began using the Respondus LockDown Browser, custom software that prevents students from venturing outside of their testing page to ward off cheating.
Molina didn’t think much of the company until he started using its monitoring software for a business administration course over the summer and his webcam became a device to observe, record and study him during an exam.
By the end of the semester, Molina was the subject of multiple cheating accusations that consumed his academic life.
In the swift and chaotic pivot to virtual test-taking, companies like Respondus — along with competitors including Honorlock, ProctorU and Proctorio — have stepped in to help schools keep watch on students. Because the new digital tools are required in certain courses, students are being forced to subject themselves to surveillance inside their own homes and open themselves up to disputes over “suspicious activities,” as defined by an algorithm.
According to the company website, Respondus Monitor uses “powerful analytics … to detect suspicious behaviors during an exam session,” and then flags such behaviors for professors to review once the session concludes.
At the self-described “heart” of the company’s monitoring software is Monitor AI, a “powerful artificial intelligence engine” that collects facial detection data and keyboard and mouse activity to identify “patterns and anomalies associated with cheating.”
Privacy advocates have been raising alarms about this type of technology and how easily it’s infiltrating the lives of students during a public health emergency. For starters, facial detection and facial recognition technologies have been widelycriticized in the last several years for having inherent biases against people of color, often misidentifying or unable to recognize the faces of Black and Brown people as accurately as White faces.
“This obviously has a disproportionate effect on Black and Brown test-takers,” said John Davisson, a legal expert and senior counsel at Electronic Privacy Information Center, a nonprofit based in Washington, D.C., whose work is focused on the privacy and algorithmic aspects of these proctoring systems. “And people who have some sort of facial disfigurement have special challenges; they might get flagged because their face has an unexpected geometry.”
To Davisson, the sheer volume of data that is collected by these proctoring technologies — which varies slightly by system — was unsettling before the pandemic forced students online. Now, Davisson said, with most students at home, the data collected are even more intimate. And students don’t have the choice to opt out.
Davisson also questioned the technology’s efficacy in catching people who cheat, despite what the companies insist.
“Many of them make pretty remarkable claims about being able to detect signs of cheating based on cues from the data they’re collecting,” Davisson said. “But it’s through opaque algorithms, it’s very difficult to evaluate whether these systems are correctly flagging signs of cheating.”
Regardless of the algorithmic ambiguity, these companies have made millions of dollars through partnerships with colleges and universities since COVD-19, the Washington Post reported. SDSU is just one of many public schools that have entered into contracts with companies like Respondus as they moved the classroom online.
Molina would soon become intimately familiar with Monitor AI’s algorithmic problems. The lead professor for his business administration course was SDSU’s finance department chair, Kamal Haddad, but Molina noted that most of his correspondence was with Renee Merrill, a lecturer and assistant. In preparation for the class’s first exam, Merrill gave students explicit instructions on how to use the new monitoring software.
“You have to record your environment, you have to record the whole desk, under the desk, the whole room,” Molina recalled. “And you need to use a mirror to show that you don’t have anything on your keyboard.”
On top of that, if the wireless connection was disturbed during an exam, Molina said, students would receive an automatic zero — no excuses. This was a particular point of stress for Molina, who rents a room in a family home that he shares with his girlfriend and 3-year-old daughter. The commotion can interfere with his internet connection.
“I’m on financial aid,” Molina said. “I don’t have a lot of resources to throw out there, or to have a room strictly dedicated to learning.”
Even so, Molina was performing well in his summer course. By the time the final rolled around in mid-August, he said, he had a solid A in the class. But three days before the final, he got an email from Merrill citing “suspicious activity” during his second exam.
Merrill said he didn’t properly show the front and back of his notes, on which students were permitted to write anything they wanted to help with the exam. She also mentioned that the monitoring software had picked up Molina talking throughout the exam.
He said he didn’t realize he hadn’t sufficiently shown his notepaper to his webcam, or that his habit of talking through questions aloud would be considered suspicious.
“I try to suppress it as much as possible but sometimes it just happens without me knowing,” Molina explained in an email to his professor. “Especially when I am stuck or trying to make sense of a question that isn’t registering well with me.”
Merrill’s email served only as a warning, but Molina was all the more nervous when he sat down to take his last exam just a few days later. To his surprise, he got another email from Merrill alleging he had been flagged for cheating once again during the course’s third exam. The information was sent over to SDSU’s Center for Student Rights and Responsibilities.
“At the beginning of the exam, you leave the area for about one minute without explanation,” Merrill wrote in an email to Molina. She added that it looked like he was using his calculator for problems that did not require a calculation and that he solved certain problems too quickly. As a result, Molina was given an F in the course and his case was submitted to SDSU’s Center for Student Rights and Responsibilities, where he could appeal the decision.
The story wasn’t as open and shut as the video recording Respondus had taken made it seem. Molina said he followed the instructions: He turned on his webcam and went through the environment check. But before he officially started the exam, he said he heard a knock on his locked door coming from his daughter, who was accompanied by the special-needs child of the family he lives with. He went to go check on them and waited for his girlfriend to arrive and take over so he could get back to the test.
When it came to the calculator allegations, Molina was even more frustrated. He didn’t always answer test questions in order; like a lot of students, sometimes he skipped around to different questions. He also noted that all of the exam questions could be accessed on the same page, and weren’t separated individually.
Molina appealed. But even well into the fall semester and over a month after the accusations were filed, the office had canceled his scheduled meetings twice due to coronavirus-related emergencies.
After the third rescheduling, Molina finally had the chance to explain himself. One week later, he received a letter of “no action,” meaning the university would not pursue disciplinary action against him. He forwarded the letter to his business administration professors and requested that he get the grade he deserved. He said he had already emailed the student ombudsman twice, and never received a reply. Merrill finally gave him his grade back, almost two months after he’d received an F in the class.
Throughout those two months, Molina was consumed by the cheating accusation, he said, and what an F would do to his GPA.
“From that point on, I’m stressed,” he said. “Every day I think about it. I go to bed, I think about it. I wake up, I think about it. Because you don’t know what’s going to happen.”
La Monica Everett-Haynes, a spokeswoman for the university, wrote in an email that the timelines for the school’s Center for Student Rights and Responsibilities investigations vary widely depending on a number of factors, including the delays that come along with students not showing up or needing to reschedule meetings.
“We work as judiciously as possible, but we also prioritize active student participation in this process,” Everett-Haynes wrote.
Students in the same business class this fall — who estimated that the enrollment was around 500 — have reported similar problems with the software. Neekoly Solis, an SDSU junior and first-year transfer student, said each test-taker now has to verbally explain each of their calculations to their webcam every time they use their calculators during an exam.
“Taking an online exam in a course that you already feel like you’re struggling in is anxiety-inducing,” Solis said. To be given a set of additional instructions, he said, just adds a level of stress and complication to a difficult test-taking environment.
The research about whether proctored exams produce less cheating is also unclear, said Davisson of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
“Even if you could demonstrate that it was necessary to collect all of this data and that the algorithms were reliable,” he said, “if all they’re doing is reproducing the exact same rates of cheating as would occur without this test surveillance software, then the whole industry is snake oil.”
Mariane Edelstein, a U.S.-born student who was raised in Brazil, who transferred to SDSU from Mesa College last year, took the same business administration class over the summer. She said that every time she has had to use Respondus Monitor for an online exam, she performs poorly.
“I can’t control external factors. I can’t control the time that my neighbor is doing his lawn. I can’t control when the Amazon delivery guy is going to stop by and ring my bell,” Edelstein said. “All this stuff gives me crazy anxiety.”
Edelstein also has concerns about her privacy. As she followed the instructions laid out by Respondus Monitor and SDSU, she filmed her testing environment. Then, she had to show the camera her desk, and underneath her desk, with her bulky desktop computer. She realized she was in a pair of shorts, and her webcam was picking up — and recording — seconds of her bare legs that could be seen by her older male professor. She was creeped out.
“You have to do a crotch shot, basically,” said Jason Kelley, associate director of research at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital privacy group based in San Francisco. He recalled watching a tutorial video from another proctoring system called HonorLock, horrified as he watched the video subject do a long pan of their body.
After she took that environment check video, Edelstein started looking into Respondus’s data retention period and privacy terms.
Respondus’s website states that the default data retention period for Respondus Monitor is five years, but the client can change that.
“That’s absurd, to say the least,” Kelley said. “What I would expect … is that they would hold on to that data as long as the teacher or the university or the student needs it to determine whether or not there was any kind of suspicious activity, which would be a week, two weeks, maybe a month?”
Respondus CEO David Smetters, however, wrote in an email that proctoring data collected by the monitoring software is under the control of the university, not the company. Everett-Haynes insisted that captured videos are only used for review purposes and aren’t kept as a part of a student’s permanent record.
But Smetters’ statement is only partially true. Like other tech companies, Respondus maintains access to the data it collects.
“Only a few Respondus engineers have the [security] credentials that would allow access to both the database and proctoring videos,” Smetters said. The system that tracks the activity cannot be modified by engineers, he added, and “attempts to access certain data would trigger alarms that are monitored by our security and data privacy teams.”
Researchers have different views on who’s ultimately responsible for rolling out an educational surveillance system. But Bruce Schneier, a security expert and public policy lecturer at Harvard University’s Kennedy School, argues that universities deserve the blame for rushing into partnerships with tech companies without sufficiently scrutinizing their claims first.
“A lot of them are doing really bad jobs here in understanding students’ needs,” he said.
While institutions have a major responsibility to understand surveillance companies’ privacy policies before partnering with them, both the company and university must work together to give students a transparent look into the data they’ll be collecting, said Linnette Attai, an expert on youth and education data privacy regulations.
“Students should be given the ability to make a well-informed choice about their decision, to understand the privacy and security practices,” Attai said. “Because there’s a good deal of data collection happening here.”
Correction: An earlier version of this post mischaracterized Mariane Edelstein’s background; she was born in the United States.
The fact Romain Grosjean survived Sunday's Bahrain Grand Prix was remarkable. The forces, flames and destruction involved in his accident on the opening lap of the race could easily have resulted in a much worse outcome, but somehow he was able to walk away from the incident with relatively minor burns to his wrists.
The last data logged by the car before the impact recorded its speed at 137mph and a 53G impact was reported. Haas team principal Guenther Steiner refused to confirm the G-force number on Sunday night, saying the one he had seen seemed too high to be realistic. He also said "an angel was with us, in my opinion."
The force of the impact was enough to tear the steel barrier in two, leaving the safety cell -- the strongest part of the car, which is designed to cocoon the driver in such accidents -- wedged sideways in the deformed metal. The sudden deceleration of the car was so dramatic that it split the car in half, with the rear, which houses the engine and gearbox, torn off by the inertia of the impact.
The engine itself is a structural part of the car, mounted to the survival cell by six studs. Those studs are incredibly strong, but such were the forces involved that they were ripped from their mountings and the rear of the car continued down the barriers.
Within a fraction of a second a fuel leak enveloped the front half of the car in a fireball, with Grosjean still inside. The fact he remained conscious in an accident that tore his car in two was miraculous, but ultimately proved essential to his survival.
He spent 28 seconds working his way loose from the wreckage before emerging from the inferno with the help of Formula One's travelling doctor, Dr Ian Roberts, who arrived quickly on the scene in the medical car. It's horrifying to imagine what those 28 seconds felt like for Grosjean, but his survival instinct kicked in and his fireproof overalls protected him as he scrambled free. It took just over ten seconds for the medical car, which follows the pack at the start of every race, to arrive on the scene.
Dr Roberts, who sits shotgun in the medical car alongside former race driver Alan van der Merwe, ran directly towards the flames to help Grosjean, instructing a fire marshal to aim his extinguisher at the area around the cockpit opening as he went.
"I just [saw] a massive flame and as we arrived, a very odd scene where you've got half a car pointing in the wrong direction and just across the barrier, a massive heat," Dr Roberts said afterwards.
"I could see Romain trying to get up. We needed some way of getting to him. We've got the marshal there with an extinguisher and the extinguisher was just enough to push the flame away as Romain got high enough to then reach over and pull himself over the barrier.
"I told him to sit down [when we reached the medical car]. He was very shaky and his visor was completely opaque and, in fact, melted. So we got his helmet off just to check everything else was OK.
"He had some pain on his foot and hands [from burns], and at that point we knew it was safe enough to move him around into the [medical] car to give him a bit more protection and get some gel onto his burns and into the ambulance and off to the medical centre."
It was an incredibly lucky escape, but one that would not have been possible without a number of safety features on the car.
Halo saved Grosjean's life
Decades of safety research by Formula One and its governing body, the FIA, provided Grosjean with the lifeline he needed to escape the wreckage on Sunday evening. The strength of the survival cell, his fireproof overalls -- which were uprated for all drivers this year -- and, crucially, the halo device all contributed to saving his life.
"It was horrifying," world champion Lewis Hamilton said after winning the restarted race. "His car, the cockpit... I don't know what Gs he pulled, but I'm just so grateful that the Halo worked.
"I'm grateful that the barrier didn't slice his head off. It could have been so much worse. It is a reminder to us and hopefully to the people that are watching at home that this is a dangerous sport.
"That is why we are out there pushing to the limit and playing with that limit. But you also have to respect it. It shows the amazing job that Formula 1 has done, the FIA have done over time to able to walk away from that."
The halo is a titanium structure that sits above the driver's head. It is capable of resisting forces equivalent to a 12 tonne weight and was initially developed to deflect large pieces of debris that would otherwise hit the driver's head.
In Grosjean's accident the halo protected his head from the upper part of the barrier as it was split from the bottom section by the force of the accident. Amid the flames, Grosjean was then able to pull himself out through the halo's opening above the cockpit and jump to safety.
In the lead up to its introduction in 2018, the halo received widespread criticism from a number of drivers and team bosses within the sport. The arguments, which were mainly based on aesthetics and the belief that it was against "the DNA" of an open-cockpit racing, seem hard to comprehend now, but it's a credit to the FIA that it was pushed through on safety grounds.
Speaking on Instagram from his hospital room, Grosjean put whatever was left of the halo debate to bed.
"I wasn't for the halo some years ago but I think it's the greatest thing we brought it to Formula One and without it I wouldn't be able to speak to you today," he said. "Thanks to all the medical staff at the circuit, at the hospital, and hopefully I can soon write you quite some messages and tell you how it's going."
Worrying aspects of the accident
While the halo did its job, serious concerns remain over a number of other factors in the accident.
"We have to do a very deep analysis of what happened because lots of things were worrying," F1's motorsport director Ross Brawn said on Sunday night. "The fire was worrying and the split of the barrier was worrying -- the safety of the car is what got us thought today.
"Barriers splitting was a classic problem many years ago and normally resulted in a fatality. No doubt the halo saved Romain and the team behind it deserve credit for forcing it though.
"I don't think anyone can doubt the validity of the halo. It was a lifesaver today.
"[The accident] was a high G load and we have to look at how things failed. The car came apart and we had a fuel fire, which we have not had for a long time.
"There will be some careful scrutiny between now and the next race and the action will be taken that needs to be done. It is something we have not seen in a long time and something we did not predict." The barrier and the fireball remain the two biggest concerns.
As well as its failure, the positioning of the barrier has been questioned as it angled inwards relatively to the direction of travel of the cars. Barriers do their job when they deflect the car in its direction of travel, absorbing some of the impact, without taking the brunt of it. But in this instance Grosjean's car went through the barrier in a way that was hauntingly reminiscent of Francois Cevert's fatal accident at the 1973 U.S. Grand Prix.
The barrier in Bahrain is at that angle to allow an opening further down the straight to remove cars when they stop on track. Such openings are essential to allow the marshals to do their job but require one part of the barrier to be angled slightly in order to create a large enough opening.
Barrier and run-off design around F1 circuits are laid out in meticulous detail so that they maximise protection at parts of the circuit when an accident is likely to happen. Those with a higher risk of being hit are lined with extra protection, usually in the form of Tec-Pro barriers, but those that are less likely to be hit are usually made of either concrete or Armco.
In 16 prior years of F1 racing in Bahrain, no one has come close to hitting that section of barrier and the chances of it happening again are extremely small. Grosjean only hit that barrier because he cut across and made contact with Daniil Kvyat, spearing his car off to the right at a part of the circuit where most accidents would be expected to happen on the left.
Yet that heart of every accident is a level of unpredictability and as Grosjean made contact with Kvyat, he had no control over where his car would end up or the angle that it would hit the barrier.
A shallower angle of impact afforded by a barrier parallel with the circuit would likely have seen the car skid down the barrier, as it supposed to do, but there is also a question of how the nose of the car, which is designed to deform against the barrier and absorb energy, managed to penetrate the barrier. All of these factors will be learned from and could lead to changes in both circuit and car design in the future.
"I think it was a freak accident," Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff said. "The angle at which he crashed into the barrier -- I don't think that the car was flat, I think it was slightly sideways -- the angle must have been so precise like a knife going through the barrier.
"I didn't think modern barriers could split like this, so we need to analyse how this could happen and how we can optimise these barriers in the future."
The other very visible and very worrying aspect of the accident was the fireball that engulfed Grosjean's car almost instantaneously.
F1 has gone to great lengths to avoid such incidents and the fuel tank (or fuel cell to give it its proper name) has been developed with safety in mind to prevent cars going up in flames. It is most easily described as a large deformable bag, although the structure is rigid when fitted in the car and is made of military grade ballistics material.
An investigation will follow, but the feeling among several engineers in the paddock was that the fuel cell itself did not rupture. At the start of the race, the car is carrying just over 100kg of fuel and Brawn was among the engineers who believed that amount of fuel would have resulted in much bigger inferno.
That has led to suggestions that the sheer force of the impact may have compressed the fuel cell and spat petrol out of the refueling hatch, resulting in the fire. It's also possible that one of the fuel lines leaked fuel, although they are also designed to withstand massive impacts.
To get definitive answers, the FIA will forensically analyse the remains of the car to see what can be learned and what can be changed on future designs. A lot of the safety features that helped save Grosjean's life on Sunday night were a result of research conducted following other serious accidents and that same scientific approach will be used to further advance the safety of the sport in the future.
"Obviously with every incident, more so with every larger incident, the FIA's Safety Department, the FIA as a whole really, leads the investigation," FIA race director Michael Masi said on Sunday evening. "The single seater department, of which F1 is a part of, from a technical perspective has an involvement, the F1 teams, technical directors, the circuits commission will all be involved. "All of the various parts of the FIA group, the respective subject matter experts, will review their particular area and see what can be learned, what can be improved, be it small, large, in between, there's always something to be learned."
And while there will be a sense of urgency to learn the lessons from Sunday, the sport knows from past experiences that it is best to work together and not make knee-jerk changes.
"A fire like that, regardless of what happens with barriers and everything, is a very scary event," Mercedes chief trackside engineer Andrew Shovlin said. "So rather than us all barreling in and saying what we think should be done differently, the FIA, who have a lot of people dedicated to safety and have no doubt contributed to that kind of incident being survivable, should be allowed to get on with that and the teams will all get involved where they can [to help].
"What has been reassuring about these types of accidents [in the past] is that the teams do share their information. It's a very different environment to the one we work in when we talk about performance and there is a lot of collaboration and sharing out of various bits of analysis.
"The bigger teams are better placed to contribute to those areas of analysis, and hopefully there will be a lot to learn from it so we can make sure that the next time [there is an accident like that] we are not completely reliant on good fortune not to have someone seriously injured.
A stark reminder
Of course, there will always a limit to how safe motorsport can be. Racing F1 cars around a circuit at speeds of over 200mph will always be dangerous and the laws of physics still apply regardless of how safe the cars become.
"It is a real stark reminder just how dangerous this sport can be -- the speeds that we are travelling, the energy that we are carrying when we are travelling at those speeds," Hamilton said. "The FIA has done an amazing job, but we can't stop where we are, we've got to keep on trying to improve. That's what also makes this sport great. We are constantly evolving.
"But it is still a dangerous sport. I'm sure there are people who tuned in who have never seen something like that and it just shows that those things can happen. I think we are aware of that as racing drivers, the risks we take. Now everyone else is."
That the other 19 drivers got back into their cars is also hard to comprehend. All of them will have known how lucky Grosjean was and how easily a slightly different course of events could have resulted in a very different outcome. Yet all of them strapped themselves back into cars laden with 100kg of fuel and raced into the night.
"For the drivers to get back into the car needs a lot of courage, and this is what these guys do" Wolff said. "Too often we forget that this is a dangerous sport and that these guys race around tracks at more than 350km/h (217mph).
"Today's modern camera technology and wide angles don't really show that speed, but you can see what happens. It has always been dangerous and even with today's safety structures it is still a very dangerous sport and we need to optimise from there.
"It's what makes the sport's best drivers gladiators in the most sophisticated machines, but for everybody who saw the pictures today it was difficult. When we saw Romain getting out of the car it was a big relief -- obviously second-degree burns is still bad enough -- but it could have been terribly worse."
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Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, right, tours a temporary hospital site in April with his wife Maria Lee. The overflow hospital, intended to help with the surge in COVID-19 hospitalizations, won't be able to take patients if there aren't additional doctors and nurses available to provide treatment. Theresa Montgomery/TN Photo Services
Theresa Montgomery/TN Photo Services
Hospitals in much of the country are trying to cope with unprecedented numbers of COVID-19 patients. As of Sunday, 93,238 were hospitalized, an alarming record that far exceeds the two previous peaks in April and July, of just under 60,000 inpatients.
But beds and space aren't the main concern. It's the work force. Hospitals are worried that staffing levels won't be able to keep up with demand, as doctors, nurses and specialists such as respiratory therapists become exhausted or, worse, become infected or sick themselves.
The typical workaround for staffing shortages — hiring clinicians from out of town — isn't the solution anymore, even though it helped ease the strain early in the pandemic, when the first surge of cases was concentrated in a handful of "hot spot" cities like New York, Detroit, Seattle and New Orleans.
Recruiting those temporary reinforcements was also easier in the spring because hospitals outside of the initial hot spots were actually seeing fewer patients than normal, which led to mass layoffs. That meant many nurses were able — and excited — to catch a flight to another city and help with treatment on the front lines.
In many cases, hospitals were forced to compete for traveling nurses, and the payment rates for temporary nurses spiked. In April, Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville had to increase the pay of some staff nurses, who were making less than newly-arrived temporary nurses.
In the spring, nurses who answered the call from beleaguered "hot spot" hospitals weren't just able to command higher pay. Some also spoke about how meaningful and gratifying the work felt, trying to save lives in a historic pandemic, or the importance of being present for family members who could not visit loved ones who were sick or dying.
"It was really a hot zone, and we were always in full PPE and everyone who was admitted was COVID positive," says Laura Williams of Knoxville, Tennessee, who helped launch the Ryan Larkin Field Hospital in New York City.
"I was working six or seven days a week, but I felt very invigorated."
After two taxing months, Williams returned in June to her nursing job at the University of Tennessee Medical Center. For awhile, the COVID front remained relatively quiet in Knoxville. But then the fall surge hit: there have been record hospitalizations in Tennessee nearly every day, increasing by 60% in the last month.
Health officials report that backup clinicians are becoming much harder to find.
Tennessee has now built its own field hospitals to handle patient overflows — one is inside the old Commercial Appeal newspaper offices in Memphis, and another occupies two unused floors in Nashville General Hospital. But if they were needed right now, the state would have trouble finding the doctors and nurses to run them because hospitals are already struggling to staff the beds they have.
"Hospital capacity is almost exclusively about staffing," says Dr. Lisa Piercey, who heads the Tennessee Department of Health. "Physical space, physical beds, not the issue."
When it comes to staffing, the coronavirus creates a compounding challenge.
As patient caseloads reach new highs, record numbers of hospital employees are themselves out sick with COVID-19 or temporarily forced to stop working because they have to quarantine after a possible exposure.
"But here's the kicker," says Dr. Alex Jahangir, who chairs Nashville's coronavirus task force. "They're not getting infected in the hospitals. In fact, hospitals for the most part are fairly safe. They're getting infected in the community."
Some states, like North Dakota, have already decided to allow COVID-positive nurses to keep working as long as they feel okay, a move that has generated some backlash. Colorado, California and Illinois have asked retired nurses and doctors to consider returning to the workforce.
In Tennessee, Gov. Bill Lee has issued an emergency order loosening some regulatory restrictions on who can do what within a hospital, giving them more staffing flexibility.
For months, staffing in much of the country had been a concern behind the scenes. But it's becoming palpable to any patient.
Dr. Jessica Rosen is an emergency physician at Saint Thomas Health in Nashville, where having to divert patients to other hospitals has been rare over the last decade. She says it's a common occurrence now.
"We have been frequently on diversion, meaning we don't take transfers from other hospitals," she says. "We try to send ambulances to other hospitals because we have no beds available."
Even the region's largest hospitals are filling up. This week, Vanderbilt University Medical Center made space in its children's hospital for non-COVID patients. Its adult hospital has more than 700 beds. And like many hospitals, it's had the challenge of staffing two intensive care units — one exclusively for COVID patients and another for everyone else.
And they're coming from as far away as Arkansas and southwest Virginia.
"The vast majority of our patients now in the intensive care unit are not coming in through our emergency department," says Dr. Matthew Semler, a pulmonary specialist at VUMC who works with COVID patients.
"They're being sent hours to be at our hospital because all of the hospitals between here and where they present to the emergency department are on diversion."
Semler says his hospital would typically bring in nurses from out of town to help. But there is nowhere to pull them from right now.
National provider groups are still moving personnel around, though increasingly it means leaving somewhere else a little short-staffed. Dr. James Johnson with the Nashville-based physician services firm Envision has deployed reinforcements to Lubbock and El Paso this month.
He says the country hasn't hit it yet, but there's a limit to hospital capacity.
"I honestly don't know where that limit is," he says.
At this point, the limitation won't be ventilators or protective gear. In most cases, it will be the medical workforce. People power.
Johnson, an Air Force veteran who treated wounded soldiers in Afghanistan, says he's more focused than ever on trying to boost morale in the doctors and stave off burnout.
He's generally optimistic, especially after serving four weeks in New York City early in the pandemic.
"What we experienced in New York and happened in every episode since, is that humanity rises to the occasion," he says.
But Johnson says the sacrifices shouldn't just come from the country's health care workers. Everyone bears a responsibility, he says, to try to keep themselves and others from getting sick in the first place.
November 30, 2020 at 05:02PM
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/11/30/938425863/as-hospitals-fill-with-covid-19-patients-medical-reinforcements-are-hard-to-find
In Pandemic, Hospitals Can't Borrow Backup Staff From Other States : Shots - Health News - NPR
You know those Snickers commercials? The ones with the “You’re not yourself when you’re hungry…” catchphrase at the end?
A variation of that occurred to me Sunday when digesting Bill Belichick’s defense of Cam Newton’s performance against the Cardinals.
Asked if Jarrett Stidham was an option in the midst of Newton’s 9-for-18, 84-yard, two-pick, three-sack performance, Belichick sidestepped the question except to point out, “Cam threw for 350 last week.”
The guy that birthed the phrase “Stats Are For Losers?” The man who responded to 95 percent of all queries related to the omnipotence of Tom Brady with, “Tom works hard. Like a lot of our players do.”
That same guy is now in the business of saying, “Yeah, but last week Cam was AWESOME!!”?
You’re not yourself when your team kinda stinks.
When your team kinda stinks, you don’t talk about having “a long way to go…”. You take the Ws wherever you can find them and run for the house as fast as you can.
When your team kinda stinks, you aren’t the personification of gloom searching for the tiniest cloud in an otherwise perfect sky. You find a silver lining in the middle of the monsoon.
“Really proud of the way these guys competed,” Belichick said after the 20-17 win at the buzzer off the foot of Nick Folk. “Give them all the credit in the world for the final result. They played hard, competed for 60 minutes, made enough plays at critical times in the game to win.
“Leadership we've gotten from captains and some of the other veteran players here in the last few weeks has been awesome,” Belichick continued. “I think that's really helped bring some other players along to prepare better and ultimately perform a little more consistently. A good way to wrap up the Thanksgiving weekend. We got two big games in L.A. next week. Try and enjoy this one for a little while, then move on to the Chargers.”
It’s easy to understand a head coach reveling in an ugly win and snorting at the notion a victory like this (or the one just like it Folk delivered them against the Jets) is beneath them.
Guiding a team with a none-dimensional offense and a so-so defense to a win when the quarterback is actively harpooning your chances? Hard to do. Definitely, enjoy it.
They bust their asses and work until midnight coming up with a plan that will end with them having more points than their opponent on Sunday afternoon. They get a goal-line stand. A late-game stop to force a field goal. Two big special teams returns that lead to points. A fourth-down touchdown on an option play to James White? Mission accomplished.
But those of us who don’t coach or play for the Patriots? You have to squint real hard to see any silver-lining.
They won, but they’re 5-6 and embarking on a fairly difficult three-game road trip before they come home to play the Bills. They are not a clear-and-present danger to make the playoffs and – even in the win – the myriad problems they face are laid bare.
They might have the NFL’s worst passing attack. Too often, Newton can’t find anyone to throw to. When he does, he too often throws wild. They have no tight end threat. They have no wideouts that make anyone sweat. Newton does just enough with his legs to offset passing game woes and secure wins that become perfume for pungent performances.
They’re running a throwback offense in a throw-first league, and the building blocks to take them out of the mid-1950s are not currently on the roster.
Cam Newton on the Patriots ugly win
Meanwhile, the path away from the mediocrity they seem headed for is in the draft and these stirring November wins will ultimately move them further down the draft order.
The Patriots have spent plenty of time this year mentioning how close they are to having a better record. And it’s true. Hell, they could be 8-3 if things went differently in the waning minutes against the Seahawks, Broncos and Bills. They could also be 3-8 were it not for the journeyman kicker who beat out this year’s fifth-round choice to replace him.
Gone are the days when the Patriots would win and Belichick would say, “(Fill in the number) wins won’t get you very far in this league.”
This year, win No. 5 and edging toward .500? They’ll take it. Happily.
BUT ... DEFENSIVELY ...
Now, moving on from the, “Yeah, but …” portion of the program … the Patriots kinda had their way with Kyler Murray. He finished 23 for 34 for just 170 yards and the consistent pressure they brought all game harried him into a pedestrian performance. Last week’s sublime showing by Deshaun Watson was dotted with pinpoint completions to well-covered receivers. Murray couldn’t match that accuracy and the Patriots got pressure on Murray from all levels of their defense. Rookie Josh Uche, Chase Winovich, Adam Butler and Lawrence Guy in particular made big impacts.
Adrian Phillips, who came up with a pick off a deflected pass, said the key was the pass rush.
“Pressure, you know? Any time you pressure a quarterback whether it's somebody that's mobile, or somebody that's a pocket-passer, if you pressure him and just continue to mix up the looks, it gives guys a lot of problems,” he explained.
"So, we were able to do that. If you look back to the earlier parts of the season and even last week, when we pressured, we weren't doing it under control. We were letting them get outside the pocket and letting them scramble or whatever it may be, find an open receiver downfield. But today we really made sure that no matter what, we're going to pressure this guy, we're going to bring it after him, but we're not just going to let him run around. It ended up working. When we execute the game plan like that, it's going to be tough to beat us.”
A VERY SPECIAL EPISODE
The goal-line stand just before the half prevented the Cardinals from taking a 17-7 lead into the break was obviously a huge moment in the game. But the Patriots special teams were arguably the reason they won. And that goes beyond the game-winner from Folk.
The Patriots’ first touchdown was set up in large part by the 53-yard kickoff return by newcomer Donte Moncrief. The key play on the drive was a 13-yard completion to Jakobi Meyers with a 15-yard penalty tacked on against Arizona when Isaiah Simmons was tagged for lowering his helmet to initiate contact.
White scored on a fourth-and-2 pitch from the Cardinals 7 to cap the drive.
Moncrief said he hadn’t returned kicks since his rookie year with the Colts in 2014.
“The special teams coach (Cam Achord) asked me, ‘How do you feel about doing returns?’ I'm like, ‘If you need me to do it, I'll do it. I’ll do whatever to help this team,’" said Moncrief. “He gave me a chance during the week and he liked what he saw, so he stuck with it.
“We had the right return on and Jak [Jakob Johnson] and Gunner [Olszewski] made two great blocks. So, I just followed them and I saw the hole,” Moncrief explained. "I hit the crease. I remember coach telling me early on in a week, he was like, ‘There’s going to be a hole, you’ve just got to hit it.’ I just put my trust in what he told me, and when I did it, it worked.”
The other big return came from Olszewski, who took a 34-yard punt from Andy Lee from the Patriots 18 all the way back. The 82-yard return was reduced by a peelback block thrown by Anfernee Jennings. Even though he was squared up with the Cardinals defender in pursuit, the officials enforced the part of the rule that says a player can’t be facing or parallel to his own end zone when delivering the block. The Patriots still got a Folk field goal out of it.
Meanwhile, Jake Bailey keeps having highlight moments. He had three punts, one of which was downed at the Cardinals 3.
