Category: Travel

Nauta Design has just unveiled a showstopping custom sloop that could be a serious regatta contender. The sailing yacht, dubbed R/P-Nauta 151, has been engineered to cover long distances at impressive speeds while keeping seafarers in the lap of luxury.The 151-footer, which was commissioned by a client the Milanese firm ranks among its most discerning, is currently under construction at Royal Huisman. The Dutch builder is renowned for its large, bespoke sailing yachts that have redefined that category, and this latest entry is no exception.

Source: This Bespoke 151-Foot Sailing Yacht Blends Speed With Luxury – Robb Report

On Tuesday, March 30, Whistler Blackcomb, the largest ski resort in North America, closed for the season eight weeks ahead of schedule. The decision was made after the British Columbia government ordered the resort to shut down until April 19 to quell the spread of COVID-19. Originally, Whistler Mountain was scheduled to close April 18, and Blackcomb Peak was slated to stay open until May 24. Neither will reopen this season.At a press conference on March 29, provincial health minister Dr. Bonnie Henry cited a surge in cases in the Whistler community and the need to curb travel-related spread. New cases of COVID-19 in the Howe Sound area, where Whistler is located, rose from a total of 32 during the first week of March to 247 during the last week of the month. The worrisome Brazil P.1 variant, first discovered in January, is also on the rise throughout British Columbia. The Globe and Mail reported that it is the largest known spread of the variant outside Brazil. P.1 is more contagious, can cause more severe symptoms, and, according to the BC Centre for Disease Control, may be able to reinfect people who’ve already had the virus. It also may not be as responsive to current treatments and vaccines as milder coronavirus strains. New cases of the variant identified in other regions of Canada have been linked back to travelers spending time in the Whistler area. The surge has since sparked other restrictions, including a three-week ban on indoor dining and drinking, indoor group fitness classes, and indoor worship services.

Source: Whistler, Revelstoke, and Big White Close Due to COVID | Outside Online

The director of a children’s movie about Bigfoot wants to thank the Alberta government’s energy centre for starting a “ludicrous” fight over the film.Ben Stassen laughed several times as he told The Canadian Press that the animated “Bigfoot Family” had dropped from the top 10 list of most-viewed films on Netflix about 15 days after its February debut.

Source: Bigfoot Director Thanks Alberta’s ‘Ludicrous’ Fossil War Room for Big Publicity Boost – The Energy Mix

Roblox, which recently made its debut on the New York Stock Exchange, has quickly become one of the most valuable video game companies in the world.  As I write this article, Roblox has effortlessly overtaken household video game names such as Take-Two (maker of Grand Theft Auto) and Electronic Arts (EA) (maker of Battlefield and FIFA) in terms of market cap, while only making a fraction of the incumbents’ revenues and none of their profits.ADVERTISEMENT

And there is good reason for this change in pecking order. Unlike Take-Two and EA, Roblox is not just a gaming company. It is a virtual playground for nearly 200 million monthly users, with two-thirds of those users being of school-going age. Such a congregation of children on any one platform has been unheard of—Roblox hosts more students every month than all school-going children in the U.S., U.K., and Canada combined. 

With this level of scale, direct access, and market power, Roblox is now in prime position to disrupt the multi-trillion-dollar education market, which has so far been incredibly resistant to change. 

OBSOLETE CLASSROOMS

A majority of what is taught today in primary and secondary classrooms is based on a mid-19th-century Prussian model of education. Around 170 years ago, this model became immensely popular in the west as it sought to unify students under a common national identity as well as train them for lifelong employment in factories. This resulted in what we consider to be norms in schools today: uniforms for students, a bell system that demarcates different activities during the day, a hierarchal grading system that determines if a student passes or fails, and a standardized curriculum geared towards creating like-minded citizens instead of developing the strengths of the students involved.

Such a top-down education system appears to have outlived its purpose. Students coming into the workforce today no longer must “fit in” to a certain company’s or country’s culture to be successful. Many research papers have now established that for activities requiring deep focus, such as software development, getting interrupted with the equivalent of a bell is highly unproductive. Hierarchal grading is also on its way out for most progressive companies. Last but definitely not the least, thanks to widespread automation, factory-based employment continues to plummet across most developed nations. And while technology has crept in to classrooms in the form of digital tools (especially during the pandemic), the fundamentals of the aging Prussian educational model still hold strong. This creates a paradoxical situation for students who end up spending a large part of their youth learning a way of life that is not relevant once they grow up.

Roblox is unencumbered from all this baggage. A Roblox educational experience starts off with teachers using prebuilt templates to customize game levels and interactive tutorials for their students around the topics they want to teach. They then invite students to play these Roblox levels (either as groups or individuals), learning complex concepts such as chain reaction simulations in the process. These subjects are not just a significant departure from what is commonly taught in classrooms today. Thanks to Roblox’s learn-as-you-play approach, they are also far more engaging for students than a typical Zoom session.

The platform has not been popular with instructors in the past, primarily due to the social networking side of the experience that allowed strangers to connect with children. But with improved security in place combined with the pressures of the pandemic, school teachers have increasingly adopted Roblox to teach subjects like coding, animation, and digital civility. 

Roblox itself has also leaned into education and lists over 300 partner educational institutions on its website. During its recent debut in China, the world’s biggest video game market, the platform was promoted primarily for its educational benefits.

ECONOMIC INCENTIVES

While it is true that children’s education is a primarily a societal endeavor, it can be made more effective by having the right economic incentives in place for both teachers and students. In the case of teachers, they can choose to sell their teaching content and level designs on the Roblox market place in return for cash. On the flip side, students can also choose to take the skills they learn in Roblox and generate income on the platform as digital entrepreneurs. There are now many success stories of children who learnt how to code on Roblox and grew up to create content for the platform that has monetized successfully.

In fact, in 2020, there were 345,000 content creators on Roblox who ended up receiving over $250 million in payouts. While it is unclear how many of those who were paid were teachers or students, the fact that Roblox’s virtual economy is working for its participants is fantastic news for its adoption as a mainstream educational platform. Further, thanks to the platform’s focus on more contemporary science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) subjects instead of a more generalized curriculum, “Roblox taught” students should attract more job opportunities in industries such as software engineering, robotics, and media. If this trend holds, we can expect to see a virtuous cycle built up over the next decade, where both hiring managers and candidates end up having educational experiences in Roblox—allowing for higher trust and recognition for the platform, which in return increases placement opportunities.

Roblox is not the only video game platform looking to change the face of primary and secondary education, with Microsoft’s Minecraft also making inroads as an educational tool in schools over the past several years. Still, education as an industry has been remarkably resilient to digital disruption, with many education technology companies failing to change the status quo in any meaningful way.

However, video game platforms like Roblox, with their direct access to students and policies that aren’t hamstrung by an educational model from the 19th century, have a real shot at changing that (as long as they put proper safeguards in place). Given the early stage of this disruption, the next decade could prove to be a turning point in digital education as Roblox becomes a formal tool for learning across the world.   

• Smart Interactive City Guide searches using the power of the internet, continuously updated and never out of date.
• All editions use the power of the internet with 8 search engines and over 10,900 links.
• Use your browser to search for a city in your language with 10 different languages available.
• Point and click that’s it and with a 5G network, it is very fast!
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• Read everything you want to know and it is never out of date.
• Don’t want to read, watch it all as it searches YouTube too!

Interactive Career Guides

Published in Canada by:
eComTechnology/RGRichardson

Assign Centre, ISBN Division
Library and Archives Canada
Author R.G. Richardson
Victoria, BC. V8R 5G9
Updated 3/2021

At the age of sixty, Stanley Tucci is enjoying a somewhat unexpected late-career reinvention as a sex symbol.Photograph by Ernesto Ruscio / GettySeveral episodes of the CNN series “Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy” open with a message that’s part apology and part warning: “The following episode was filmed prior to the start of the covid-19 outbreak.” For the couch-bound viewer, any travel show is a portal to fantasy. But a show like this—airing in a time like this—is escapism of another order. Here there are olive trees and cow-dappled hills and the blue-green sea, sure, but also cheek-kiss greetings and crowded piazzas, tiny café tables and narrow alleyways. Tucci, the show’s host, wanders through Italy’s regions unmasked, unfettered, chatting amiably with cheesemakers and pizzaiolos, sipping aperitivos on rooftops, picking up petals of artichoke from a plate in a cramped restaurant kitchen. Everything, always, is drenched in heavy yellow sunlight, as if the nation were basking in the languor of eternal late afternoon.“Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy,” which concluded its first season this past Sunday, is ostensibly educational. Each episode takes viewers on a tour of a specific region, and in each Tucci spends a bit of time with scholars and activists, discussing some aspect of the region’s history or politics or social strife. But mostly he eats, and talks about eating, and visits the farmers and producers and venders who provision his marvellous meals. Italy is beautiful. The food of Italy is beautiful. Not insignificantly, Stanley Tucci is beautiful, too. He strolls the narrow thoroughfares of Florence and Naples with the physical eloquence of a dancer, at once smoldering and restrained. He gazes at wheels of cheese and swirls of pasta as if the food must be seduced before it will consent to be devoured. The Tucci of “Searching for Italy” is a figure out of time: thick-framed glasses, white pants, a rich leather belt, a linen shirt tailored narrowly to the trapezoid of his torso, cuffs rolled just so, the hint of a bronzed and muscled forearm. He delivers sly jokes and engages in patter with shopkeepers in a mix of Italian and English. “This bread, it’s an aphrodisiac,” he says, standing outside a bakery in Bologna, and adds, “I’m all alone in a hotel; why would I want to do that?” His suave exterior shows cracks only in moments of sensory ecstasy. Taking a deep whiff of a split wheel of Parmigiano-Reggiano, or letting the funk of a ribbon of prosciutto blossom on his tongue, he moans, he sighs, he murmurs. The whole thing verges on obscene: Tuccissimo.At the age of sixty, Tucci is enjoying a somewhat unexpected late-career reinvention as a sex symbol. Students of the Tucci allure have pointed out that it is in no way new. It dates back at least to his appearance in a nineteen-eighties ad for Levi’s 501s, in which he shows off an A-shirt and exquisite deltoids on the streets of New York City. His breakout role, as the debonair restaurateur Secondo in the film “Big Night” (1996), was less explicitly sexy, but it had the effect of linking Tucci’s persona forever to the intimacy and sensuousness of food. The movie, which Tucci co-wrote and co-directed, is about a pair of Italian brothers in the nineteen-fifties who are trying to save their struggling New Jersey restaurant with a huge, blowout dinner. The movie is most beloved for its feast scenes, when the brothers serve their guests a fusillade of Technicolor courses, including an extraordinary timpano centerpiece. But the greater food sequence takes place in the movie’s final minutes, when Secondo makes an omelette for his brother and their lone employee. It is filmed in one unbroken shot, without dialogue or music; its choreography of silence and motion, solitude and togetherness is like something out of Fellini. Cracking eggs, setting the pan over the flame, laying hunks of bread on plates, Tucci makes cooking a physical language.

Source: The Timeless Fantasy of Stanley Tucci Eating Italian Food | The New Yorker

Simon Frankson emerged from his sleeping bag at 4 a.m., just in time to join the fray.ANNOUNCEMENTS, EVENTS & MORE FROM TYEE AND SELECT PARTNERSThe Tyee Is Hiring Three New Business Team Members We’re hiring a newsletter specialist, audience development analyst, and office co-ordinator. Check it out and spread the word!Join Us For The Launch Of Alexandra Morton’s ‘Not On My Watch’ This live event features the salmon defender in conversation with coastal Indigenous leaders about our wild fish.
The day before, a balmy afternoon in early August, he and about a dozen campers had studied a satellite photo of the area: a mountainside sheathed in deep green cedars and Douglas fir trees, many of them hundreds or thousands of years old, in a watershed known as Fairy Creek in the southwest corner of Vancouver Island. The telling grey stripe of a logging road was creeping up from the left side of the image. It was the same kind of road that has, over the past century, made way for logging companies to cut down 80 per cent of the ancient forest on an island larger than Belgium.When Frankson and the campers had arrived the night before, things already looked different than in the photo. The stripe had grown into a web of roads advancing up and across the slope. One more day and the machines could crest the ridge above them, opening up yet another valley to industrial logging.Now Frankson was rubbing the sleep from his eyes and readying himself for his first shift as an old-growth forest blockader. Out of the blackness, the harsh headlights of a four-by-four came swerving around a switchback toward the camp. Frankson jumped up to join the line of bodies rushing to stand their ground. The driver, a contractor for the Teal-Jones timber company, killed the gas. For two long minutes, they faced one another, frozen. Then, as if concluding an unspoken conversation, the truck slowly reversed down the mountain.

Source: The Blockaders | The Tyee

Turkey’s Melike Altinisik Architects (MAA) recently completed work on a new supertall communications tower with a striking design. It reaches a height of 369 m (1,210 ft) over Istanbul and boasts a restaurant and viewing area offering choice views of the point where Europe and Asia meet.

Source: Supertall tower looks over point where Europe and Asia meet

The hospital at the University of Porto has operated for more than 200 years. After the recent addition of a modern medical facility, part of the hospital has been turned into a museum celebrating and exploring the history of health and medicine in Portugal.Its earliest iteration was an isolation hospital, which housed patients in temporary wooden huts that were burned down when the epidemic was over. For many years it was used for the treatment of tuberculosis. Much later an impressive stone facaded hospital, designed, in the Palladian, style by English Architect John Carr, who also designed The Crescent at Buxton. It was built between 1790 and 1864, and the building is now attached to a modern hospital to the rear. The old building was called the Hospital de Santo Antonio.When the hospital’s historic pharmacy was set to close, hospital management decided to create a small museum. As well as dispensing, the pharmacy used to manufacture its own medicines. In the past these were often based on herbal medicines. However more recently they also manufactured blood products such as serum.  The museum is in two rooms with the main one being the former dispensary which issued medication both to the hospitalized patients and to the general public. Here you will see examples of drugs in their old storage jars. Many of the compounds used would be considered too toxic for use today.The second room is a small manufacturing area with a tablet press and other artifacts including a small autoclave for sterilization of various small items, microscopes, balances, and a set of plasma drip bottles. Here, you can watch a short video about the hospital and the origins of the museum.Not a large museum but certainly worth the half hour it takes to have a good look round. 

Source: RGR (1K+)

Since the start of the pandemic, more Americans have been sleeping under the stars than ever before. Much of that uptick comes from new campers: a 2020 report from Kampgrounds of America (KOA) found that 25 percent of campers last year had taken their first camping trip, and most said they plan to continue camping into 2021. All of which is to say: this summer is going to be a busy one at campgrounds.With many sites booked out months in advance, now is the time to start planning your getaway. “Many state parks open for reservations four to six months in advance, while most national parks open six months in advance,” says Ashleigh Rudolph, founder and lead trip planner of Pine Road Travel Co., an outfitter that plans custom RV and van trips. “Have these dates on your calendar, as the more popular campgrounds can sell out in seconds. For the campgrounds that don’t sell out the minute they go on sale, you’ll still want to grab the best site within the campground, and the only way to do that is to book early.”Here are some prime places Rudolph recommends near worthy attractions that, as of press time, still have availability during peak warm-weather months.

Source: 7 Coveted Summer Campsites to Book Now | Outside Online