Berkeley Blog

Andy Grove Says Speed of Discovery in Healthcare Too Slow

Andy Grove is a dreamer. Even though his speech is slurred and his body movements out of control from Parkinson's disease, the cofounder of Intel and former UC Berkeley Ph.D., gave an  astute diagnosis and prescription for government incompetence  in three agencies -- the NIH (which funds scientific research), the FDA (regulates drugs), and the CMA (sets prices on healthcare) -- at an inaugural Ernest Kuh lecture series at UC Berkeley's School of Engineering on April 5.

Starting with the technological advancements made according to Moore's law, named after Intel cofounder Gordon Moore,  Grove argued that a lack of transparency in price-setting policy by the CMS (Consumer Medicare and Medicaid Services), creeping complexity in FDA rules, and lack of focus in NIH's research priorities,  have slowed advancements in healthcare. With a 14-year development period for new drugs, venture capitalists -- "the most efficient engine in translational medicine" -- are hobbled, says Grove, a firm proponent of  democracy and capitalism.

Recently, I  became familiar with the arbitrariness and lack of transparency in the NIH research grant process Grove identified, when I helped a friend apply for a scientific grant. After spending months writing a research proposal so that it adhered to NIH guidelines, and months waiting for a reply, the denial was just plain weird. Three scientists had reviewed the proposal: two supported it and said the proposal had merit. One scientist said the researcher lacked any undergraduate publications and therefore didn't merit an NIH grant. Thus, the grant proposal was denied even though nothing in the NIH procedures had required an undergraduate publication as a criteria for a grant.

As one example of how government might change its practices, Grove cited the trove of papers on clinical research the government keeps in a warehouse in Bethesda, Maryland. He thinks this data -- Big Data, he calls it -- should be digitized and made open and available to all medical researchers while protecting the personal identity of the individuals from which it is collected. He calls this data a "king's riches" that could translate to a better understanding of disease and treatment. He also called for more transparency in research funding, the creation of a federal health-related trade office, and requiring health economics courses for all engineering and pre-med students.

It's hard not to empathize with someone who is fighting death right in front of your face. You wonder how much of his urgency in wanting to accelerate the federal processes for drug research,  approval, and pricing has been affected by his own encounters with prostrate cancer and Parkinson's. In the end, it doesn't matter why Grove has focused on healthcare reform. His insights into how we could expedite discovery in healthcare by applying what works for microchips might improve the lives of mere flesh-and-blood mortals as well.

 

 

Internet Oprah

Salim Ismail is VP of a boot camp for future business leaders called Singularity University. Neither an accredited university nor a place where machines plan to take over the functions of humans, SU, as it's called, brings together 80 Ph.D. students and entrepreneurs from around the world for a ten-week summer session in Mountain View, where they listen to more than 100 experts in bleeding edge technologies, from robotics to space exploration and clean tech. After the lecture immersion, small, self-selected teams work in on solving a problem that will affect one billion people in the next ten years. Although Ismail, who was born in India but educated here, was the founding executive director of SU, the concept originated with Peter Diamandis, founder of the XPrize, and Ray Kurzweil, creator of the eponymous electronic keyboard and author of The Singularity Is Near.

SU's premise is that technology is advancing at an accelerating rate; thus, future leaders need to understand a broad range of emerging technologies in order to create solutions (and make money). The fact that some of the problems the world is now facing -- such as climate change -- result from the very same accelerating rate of technology development and deployment somehow doesn't seem to enter into the spin SU and its proponents, including board member and VC Vinod Khosla, place on high-tech as the panacea for all mortal ills.

Ismail is one of the best speakers I've ever heard, and I was trying to figure out why after he spoke at the February 14  INFUSION lunch I host monthly at the Berkeley Rep Theater in partnership with the Berkeley Startup Cluster (www.berkeleystartupcluster.net/events). Like all good speakers, he tells stories, so that he engages the listener in the process of discovery. One is eager to hear the outcome. He also speaks so quickly and with such passion, no one in the room seemed able to take their eyes off him even for a half second to check a text message, as if they'd lose a great kernel of truth about to emerge from his mouth.

The MatterNet is a project that was  prototyped by one of the SU teams last summer: the Matternet is a drone that delivers critical supplies like medicine to rural communities in Africa, where for much of the year roads are washed out by torrential rains. Simple to produce locally, cheaply made, and effective over short distances, the Matternet could provide the perfect transportation system for more than a billion people without access to goods for much of their lives. And to think it was conceived by a few students at SU in a matter of weeks.

Ismail is like an Internet Oprah, delivering good news about people collaborating on technological solutions to end poverty, war, ignorance, sexism, hunger, illness, and whatever else ails the inhabitants of planet Earth. I said, not in jest, at the end of his talk, that SU could be the new United Nations, but in a way, with its business contests already taking place in Brazil, Africa, Israel, and India, SU is already assuming its singular goal.

 

New Media Nomenclature

I was trying to describe the machinations of new media to a friend who still reads only print. Once started, the dictionary of new media began to flow. Below is a sampling of terms, which might strike some as exaggerated and others as all too true. Thanks to Make magazine writer William Abernathy for adding his tweaks.

New Media Nomenclature

Confused about social media, new media, and whatever happened to your daily newspaper? Here’s a dictionary of new media terminology that might help you distinguish a Facebook friend from a Citizen Reporter.

Aggregation – unpaid reprinting of original writing; replaces paid syndication.

Blogger – an unpaid commentator, whether a former journalist or journalist manqué.

Citizen Reporter – an unpaid reporter, with or without training in journalism.

Cloud, the – The expertly managed corporate data storage facility into which you should move all your personal data. See “Thin air.”

Comments from the Crowd – formerly known as Letters to the Editor.

Content – The thing that keeps ads from bumping into each other. What writers, photographers, and other artists used to be paid for.

Content Everywhere – the same content repurposed in different publications regardless of the content’s origin.

Copyeditor – an extinct job title for a person who corrects grammatical, typographic, and stylistic crimes against language. This job has been outsourced to readers, and its arcane strictures are unknown to twitterati and texters.

Copyright – An antiquated practice of paying creators by preventing content from being repurposed for free.

Editor – A marketing professional, preferably with an advertising background. Also a publisher.

Facebook – a place for sharing personal gossip and happenings with the rest of the world; serves as prime bait for advertisers.

Facebook friend –

1) Someone you knew once.

2) Someone you hope to impress.

3) Someone you actually know.

Freelancer– An unpaid blogger. If a former journalist, a blogger paid minimum wage plus a fraction of the click-through.

Google+ – A way to keep Facebook from finding out about your life by telling it to Google instead.

Hyperlinks – Footnotes Gone Wild!

Investigative Journalism – now available as the result of  successful digital fundraising.

Journalist – Someone trained in writing for print media who expects to get paid $1 per written word. Nearly extinct.

Kindle Fire – If Savanarola had only lived so long.

LinkedIn – Reid Hoffman’s personal cash generator and the bane of all headhunters not operating in the highlands of New Guinea.

London – Where I have been held up at GUN POINT and you must send me money for an air fair at once dear friend.

New Media – any form of digital content that includes news, opinion, and entertainment, which are often indistinguishable.

New media intern –

1) An undergraduate who works for college credit instead of money.
2) A recent graduate who works for resume experience instead of money.
3) Why undergraduates and recent graduates can’t find paid work.

News – repurposed content reported by tweeters, bloggers, or in some cases, actual journalists.

Open source – free software, whose source code you pretend to know how to review and inspect. What you gain in freedom you give up in usability, which is often on a par with that of Stone Age agricultural implements.

Paid content – news and commentary written by people whose insights are held in such high esteem that their readers are willing to pay to see it. The most successful paid content providers impress their discerning readership by removing their pants.

Personalized content – enhanced method for making targeted advertising even more annoying.

Photojournalist – extinct occupation. All journalists/reporters are now expected to take their own photos. Guess who pockets the savings?

Social media – unpaid advertising in which friends are expected to push content onto their friends.

Thin air – Where all your cloud data goes when your password is sniffed. See “London.”

Tweet – High technology’s answer to the haiku. A short-form message that presumes to replace the sentence, the tweet disproves the adage that brevity is the soul of wit.

Video content – A method by which YouTube and phone manufacturers promote worldwide illiteracy and stamp out excess bandwidth.

 

Big Ideas Fest Lived Up to Its Name

I'm not a conference-going person. In fact, I'd rather spend three days in solitary confinement at a high-risk prison (which I've never done...yet) than three days trapped in a conference with hundreds of people I don't know or necessarily want to know and listen to boring speeches.

The Big Ideas Fest (www.bigideasfest.org), an education-solutions-oriented conference organized by the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (www.ISKME.org), held Dec. 4-7 at the Ritz Carlton in Half Moon Bay, blew my mind. It was a conference I didn't want to end, and in fact, lots of the participants seemed to feel the same way because they lingered after the final session until the hotel staff almost had to pepper spray us to unOccupy the Ritz.

Only 180 people attended this third annual event, but what people! William Ayers, cofounder of the Weather Underground and a recently retired Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois who received Chicago's top award for urban education reform, gave a feisty talk about doing away with educational inequality. His most tweeted comment was the exhortation to "Open your eyes. Be astonished. And do something." Wearing a blue, woolen sailor's cap and scuffed bluejeans, Ayers looked as if he were still protesting, and indeed he mentioned he had participated in recent Occupy Wall Street actions.

From the frontlines of education reform was speaker Kaycee Eckhardt, who teaches high school students in a FEMA trailer in New Orleans. Sporting black tattoos on both or her bared arms, she described the sometimes useless methods she tried to get her students to learn to read so they could go to college. She would slip the cover for a Steinbeck novel onto a Harry Potter book, so that her students wouldn't be embarrassed for reading only at the fourth grade level.

Eckhart was on one of the four winning teams that received an award for its so-called Big Ideas in Beta. Nine teams worked for six hours over the course of three days to solve one of three major educational challenges, such as open access to learning resources, and universal literacy and math competence.  For a video of Kaycee's talk on how to make learning resources as quickly accessible to a teacher as a snap of a finger, see www.bigideasfest.org or check out Half Moon Bay Patch, which featured her earlier, tear-inducing talk on post- Katrina trailer teaching.

All in all, nine teams presented their prototypes for solving major educational challenges. The presentations were anything but PowerPoint. The teams used cardboard models, funny hats, improv, thematic music, and humor to demonstrate their solutions; the process borrowed heavily from Maker Faire and also reflected the influence of Jonah Houston, a facilitator who works for the design firm IDEO. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation awarded a $50,000 matching grant to ISKME to help the winners develop full working models of their ideas.

The conference ended with Danny Hillis, cofounder of Applied Minds and a supernerd co-creator of parallel computing systems,  talk about his Gates Foundation-funded project to create a personalized learning search tool that would match an individual's skills and knowledge base to her or his passions. The tool (no name yet) would also suggest further areas of interest that might engage the student, much like a recommendation engine. Hillis is now identifying what he calls a "learning map," or a categorized map of everything that is to be learned. It's like a digital Diderot for the 21st century.

Looking around the ballroom at the ritzy Ritz, I realized we had a real- time learning map right in the room, with a mix of educators, students, policy makers, funders, and what the conference organizer Lisa Petrides calls "edupreneurs." Everyone was talking about plans for next year's conference and how they couldn't wait to import what they'd learned in these three days into their classrooms and workplaces.

 

Computer-Free Zone in Chez Panisse

Last week I met with a client of mine -- Seymour Rubinstein, founder of the company that created WordStar, the pioneering word processor, and the inventor of what became QuattroPro -- and Larry Magid, ubiquitous tech reporter, at Chez Panisse in Berkeley. Larry's wife, Patti, also came. Seymour has been working on a new content discovery system for a couple of years, and he wanted to talk to Larry about it. 

We had an incredibly delicious lunch -- everything was perfectly cooked and served with panache. "We're here with the 1 percent today," I joked, and the normally stone-faced waiter couldn't hold back a smile. Actually, Seymour was once in the 1 percent, but he took a fall during the aughts and is working his way back out again. With software inventions.

After the lunch, Larry pulled out his MacBook Air (after voicing notes into his Siri iPhone) to get a demo of Seymour's latest invention. I was talking with Patti -- i've seen the demo several times already -- when the maitre d' sailed in, leaning into our benched table like the masthead of a warship, and announced, "We don't permit computers in Chez Panisse." 

Larry apologized and said he was about to close his computer. By that time, we'd been at the table for more than two hours, and I could see why they wanted us to make room for new diners. I'm sure Chez Panisse's orders are run by computers, but for those who dine there, personal computers are out.

Yesterday, I went to a talk by David Weinberger, who is with the Harvard Library Innovation Lab and the Harvard Berkman Center, and who is coming out with a new book about information overload called "Too Big To Know." Weinberger attributes the hyperlink as the destroyer of our traditional cultural institutions, such as newspapers, encyclopedias, and music recording. He didn't mention the progenitor of hyperlinking -- Ted Nelson. He just noted the consequences. 

Weinberger made three points, and they all reflected more of his background as a philosopher rather than as a technologist (he has a Ph.D. in Philosophy but also was the VP of Technology for the search company that Yahoo eventually bought). He said knowledge is now messy because things don't fit into neat categories anymore (did they ever?). Secondly, he said that knowledge can be inconsistent because the web is a web of differences. The net, he said, is exposing the truth that humans don't agree about anything, even facts. (That's true: Larry Ellison doesn't even think we will die, or at least his head won't die forever.) The third way knowledge has changed is that it no longer has an arbitrary, logical form because people can hyperlink while viewing anything and choose whatever form they like.

All these observations seem rather obvious, but when put into this format, they make one appreciate the advantages of life and work on the net versus what life used to be like when there were just print newspapers and magazines, print books, and vinyl records. Says Weinberger, "The net is far more like the world than print media. That's why it's more appealing. It's closer to the truth. For me, the web has felt like a release. It feels so familiar."

 

 

Technology Uber Alles at Singularity University

Sometimes it takes a rocket scientist to start a university. Peter Diamandis, founder of the Ansari X-Prize, which has promoted private space travel, started a graduate summer program three years ago called Singularity University. For $30 K, 40 or so participants who are usually graduate or post-graduate students, get ten weeks to listen to the likes of John Gage, Raj Reddy, Wil Wright, and Timothy Ferriss (?) while joining teams to create the basics of a new venture that will positively impact the lives of one billion people. 

At this year's graduation ceremonies, held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, the globally diverse teams presented their grand schemes for improving the world through the creative application of technology. AstroTrash -- a plan for eliminating trash in outer space that might interfere with satellite communications -- had a cool name but was a little murky in concept, whereas Matternet, which will build thousands of battery-empowered flying devices that could transport anything from vital medicines to love letters and other "matter" over impassable roads, seems more grounded on this planet. An actual mock-up of a low-cost, lightweight solar panel from IgniSolar looked like a winner in the sustainable energy space, and CorruptionTracker.net seemed like a very cool way to empower people to eliminate barriers to integrity and transparency in government and business (as long as no one can track the source of the informant, especially in countries that don't handle whistleblowers with kid gloves). 

It was obvious the SU participants enjoyed the process as much as the results of their team efforts, and that several new companies will succeed as a result. Vinod Khosla, the technology booster who cofounded Sun and has invested so well he's considered a god among the tech digerati, gave the keynote. He castigated forecasts of McKinsey and similar soothsayers, and threw a curveball quote from Karl Marx to back up his point. "When the train of history hits a curve, the intellectuals falls off," said the progenitor of his eponymous theory.

According to Khosla, "To invent the future, we have to ignore the experts." This was well received by an audience too young to appreciate the vagaries of the history of computing, although, ironically, we were seated upstairs from one of the largest collections of computer history in the world. Khosla went out to pitch his "black swan" theory of economic advancement, much like Joseph Schumpeter once decreed that "creative destruction" was the driving force behind economic progress. Black swans are disruptive technological visions like cold fusion and battery-powered Matternets that can create radical change to improve the world's environment, economy, and political processes. I don't know why, but Khosla very much reminds me of the architect in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged who thought that if you were smarter than everyone else, you were always right about everything, even about things -- like governance -- in which you had no expertise or experience.

Singularity University is predicated on Khosla's belief that new tools can improve "humanity's grand challenges." This philosophy seems to inspire expansion. This summer, Singularity held a session in Brazil, received financial support from the government of the Dominican Republic (which I always assumed was an underdeveloped nation), and is talking to the mayor of Milan about a technology partnership for a future World Expo. 

I suppose at best SU is like boot camp for aspiring techpreneurs. My driver, William Abernathy, a tech writer and writer for Make magazine, said the atmosphere at the graduation reminded him of a cult gathering, and one wonders whether a belief in the omnipotence of technology might obscure the complexity of change.

 

Master of Social Media Marketing

Today, at the monthly INFUSION tech lunch I host in partnership with the Berkeley Startup Cluster (www.berkeleystartupcluster.net/Events), Dennis Yu of BlitzMedia gave a short course on how to use Facebook to market your business or cause. He made some insightful observations.

First, you need to understand who your customers are. In other words, you need to be a good marketer; otherwise social media marketing won't do you any good. It's akin to when a plethora of typefaces first became available on the computer. People who didn't know the difference between Arial and Times Roman starting concocting streams of type that looked as if they were on mind-altering drugs. To transpose the analogy, to be a good social media marketer, you first need to master the basics of marketing.

Yu says that Facebook is all about ego: "You want to stoke your client's ego." So for one of his clients, Lane Bryant, which sells clothes to big (size 16 and above) women, Yu posts daily questions on its Facebook wall. He asked our audience of small Berkeley entrepreneurs for a question to post in real time on the Lane Bryant Facebook wall. We came up with "What's your favorite thing to wear on a Friday night?" Within five minutes, Yu had received dozens of responses, ranging from "hooker heels and yoga pants" to many "nothings." I don't know how the "nothings" are going to help fuel Lane Bryant's clothing sales, but it's obvious that a lot of potential clients are hanging out on the retailers Facebook wall.

What gets shared needs to have emotional content, says Yu. If we described FedEx as a company with the largest private fleet of airplanes in the world (2,200), the public would think of them as a transportation company. But most people equate FedEx with "trust." They know that when an item is fedexed, it will arrive on time. It's the emotion that counts, not the actually function a company provides, and your Facebook presence needs to support that emotion.

Yu says that a business or organization or person doesn't need a web site anymore. A Facebook page will do. He compares Facebook to the circuitry of the Web, connecting everything to everything. With Facebook's brilliant use of "like" plug-ins, it's easy for this connectivity to take place and let everyone know what you are promoting.

He has a point. There are 800 million people on Facebook. How many people click on your web site every week?

Yu told us he would critique any sites we'd like him to, so we volunteered the Chez Panisse Facebook page. It had hundreds of reviews, but the actual web site looked as if the owners could care less. "Why should Chez Panisse care about its web presence?" someone from the audience asked, "when it's one of the most famous restaurants in the world?" Yu agreed that there was no reason for Chez Panisse to beef up its Facebook wall or web site. In fact, he said, there was no reason for it to do marketing because its customers were its best marketers and it provided an excellent dining experience.

Which makes one wonder about the value of social media marketing for a product or service that people already love to use. Perhaps, one might spend more time on developing a really great product or service and less on marketing, although Yu does have a point: that Facebook can take far less time than traditional forms of marketing.

 

 

 

A Mind That Is Never Bored

He invents robots called moonbots with seductive eyes that try to pick up guys. Sometimes they succeed. He's created a waitress robot, which sometimes dumps food into a patron's lap, and a dancing robot that can be directed via Android to make the right moves with a live partner. 

Michael Winter's life is programmed to never be boring. Almost a decade ago, he and Sim City creator Will Wright started the Stupid Fun Club, based near the Fantasy Film building in west Berkeley, to create these robots. They also have a new company, Crazy Research, with the tagline, Technology made Fun. Crazy Research has even created a series of 12 episodes for Current TV called barkarma.

Before all this revenue-generating silliness, Robotmike (his email moniker), created Harvard Draw for Windows and a hot video game called Tribal Rage, which made fun of American hillbilly motorcyclists and was a raging success in England. He even did a stint at Microsoft, which seems to have been his only paying job in technology.

Robotmike brought his daughter, a serious robot builder with some equally serious tattoos emblazoned up and down her arms, and a couple of his robots to the INFUSION lunch I host each month at the Freight & Salvage nightclub in downtown Berkeley. There were lots of inventors in the crowd, including toy inventors Steve Beck (who also created the first PC screen-to-TV software) and John Hollis (who created a Velcro glove for babies so they can catch balls easily).

Robotmike showed a video of an autonomous motorcycle he worked on with Anthony Levandowski (who is building the autonomous car for Google). The motorcycle would start up easily but then flip over once it got rolling. Michael solved the problem by building kickstands on both side of the bike that would automatically eject every time the bike started to flip over. The stands would jettison the bike back to an upright position and get it rolling upright again.

Robotmike has also conjured an ingenious solution that warms the cockles of my bicycle-loving heart. He's figured a way to prevent dooring -- when car doors open right into the path of a moving bicycle -- by placing sensors in both the bicycle or the cyclist's smartphone and the driver's car door to alert both rider and driver of impending danger. He tested this out on Google engineers recently, and they welcomed the solution. 

Now if Robotmike could only figure out a way to get a bicycle lane on the west span of the Bay Bridge by 2013 -- the year we're going to be able to bicycle from Oakland to Treasure Island on the new east span of the Bay Bridge -- I'd be really happy, and so would thousands of other cyclists who could commute across the Bay for work or pleasure. Maybe he could divert some of those car-centric transportation officials with moonbots and robots that dance long enough for us to build the bike lane. 

Bill Joy on Radical Innovations

I had always been curious about Bill Joy, ever since he wrote an essay a decade ago for Wired magazine about the Frankenstein-like potential of self-replicating 21st century technologies for mass destruction. I can see the danger of computer viruses and perhaps even self-driving cars gone beserk, but the potential for technology to do good seems just as great as its ability to harm.

Obviously, Joy, a cofounder of Sun Microsystems and its former CTO, has changed his mind. He's now a founding partner of the Greentech Practice of Kleiner Perkins Caulfield Byers (and i don't think any of those folks are still there, but VC firms like banks and investment companies stand firm about retaining the names of their founders long after they are gone). An electrical engineer by training, Joy's take on saving the world from resource depletion and climate change is to recycle and recapture at least 20 percent of the energy we expend. According to the ever compounding spreadsheet in his head, this will result in a tenfold improvement over the mess we're in today.

Many names were dropped during Joy's UC Regent's Lecture at the Center for New Media at UC Berkeley May 4. I heard Amory Lovins, Al Gore (more than once), John Doerr, and some guy who started Khan Academy, whose tapes Joy listens to while jogging. Also Nicholas Negroponte and the Polaroid founder, Edwin Land, who said "Innovation is the cessation of stupidity."

Joy's PowerPoint presentation targeted areas of investment opportunity where innovation could achieve tenfold (that's the determining payoff) yields in everything from electric efficiency to transportation and building efficiency. Lots of talk about watt hours reminded me of my high school physics class. It seems that if we invest in innovative ways to use less energy to do more, the next century won't be so bad.

Joy made three predictions: world wages will equilibriate; distance learning will deconstruct the universities except there will always be a need for labs; and dematerialization will lead to people owning less and sharing more, such as Zip cars and other devices. After a brief peak, capital material footprints will decline.

UC Professor Ken Goldberg, who invited Joy to speak, said that he hoped the prediction about universities deconstructing was not to be, but I wouldn't worry. Just ten years ago, Joy had worried about technology taking over our species, and now he is investing in technologies designed to save our species. What technology doesn't destroy, it transforms.

Should I Pay or Should I Go?

Today The New York Times put up a pay wall for reading the news. I wonder what took them so long, more than two years after the Wall St. Journal added its wall. Maybe it was difficult to figure out the revenue scheme, roughly $15 a month to get an e-version. 

Since I read most of the obits in the Times every day (except for the ones for athletes, unless they're cyclists or mountain climbers; for movie stars and pop celebrities; and for religious figures), I figured it's worth paying $15 for my monthly deadification. By giving up coffee drinks and depriving Starbucks of more revenue, I can help continue the tradition of fine journalism. And promote the continuation of excellently researched obituaries into the lives of past luminaries.

Indirectly, my $15 goes into the coffers of Techcrunch, GigaOm, and ReadWriteWeb, partners in news with the NY Times, although how many pennies they receive for my reads I do not know. If some of the
$180 a year I'm committing to the Times goes to support David Pogue and David Carr, both writers in technology, my investment will be justified. By me. 

Even with this new revenue scheme, I wonder if the paper can make it a go. If they gave up their print editions altogether, their expenses would be greatly reduced. My prediction is that within the next five years, a print edition of any newspaper except the ones published by and for homeless people will be as rare as dodo birds and telephone booths.