Photo by Jess Mancini From left, Mister Bee sales director Rob Graham and owner Mary Anne Ketelsen describe how chips are made at the potato hopper at Mister Bee during a press event.
PARKERSBURG — Starting in early July, Mister Bee’s potato chips will be entering a new territory for the first time in company history.
Mister Bee’s will be featured in stores throughout Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C., through Labor Day in September honoring military personnel.
The chips will be available to be purchased just in time for the Fourth of July, being stocked on Giant Food stores shelves starting Friday, July 2. The chips will be in specially marked chip bags that salute military personnel and a portion of every sale will be designated for the USO of Metropolitan Washington-Baltimore (USO-Metro).
“It gets Mister Bee’s over into the D.C., Maryland, Virginia area, which we’ve never been in before. And there are a lot of people that live in that area now that grew up where they have tasted Mister Bee,” Mister Bee sales director Rob Graham said. “We’re hoping that Giant sees the results of this trial that we can turn a lot of products in that area, because we still have a fan base that lives in that area. For the new people who are buying it, maybe they’ll make that their third chip.”
Giant Food is headquartered in Landover, Md., and operates 164 supermarkets in Virginia, Maryland, Delaware and the District of Columbia with approximately 20,000 associates.
“We met Mary Anne Ketelsen, CEO of Mister Bee, through our mutual philanthropic partner, USO-Metro,” said Felis Andrade, Director of External Communications and Community Relations at Giant Food. “It is a pleasure to introduce her delicious product and help our service members and their families at the same time.”
Ketelsen in a press release said her father, husband and several nephews were in the service and some are currently in the military.
“Our service members put their lives on the line for our country. USO-Metro brings military families together. From the minute a service member enlists, the USO is always by their side. Donating to the USO makes me feel like I am not just helping one, but many.” Ketelsen said.
Mister Bee Potato Chips and the Ketelsen family donated $100,000 to the USO of Metropolitan Washington-Baltimore in 2020. In 2019, Ketelsen designed the 5-ounce chip bag to honor veterans and military personnel serving their country.
Mister Bee produces original, BBQ, sour cream and onion, honey BBQ, jalapeno, salt and vinegar and dip-style potato chips offered online or at retailers throughout West Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Its growing manufacturing plant in Parkersburg employs 47 people.
Taiwan's OSATs, now sustaining full capacity utilization for wire-bonding process for lower-end logic chips, are embracing strong backend demand for diverse HPC chips, but their actual business performance in this segment hinges largely on whether they can get sufficient support of ABF substrates, according to industry sources.
ABF substrates are badly needed to support Intel's FC-LGA and EMIB operations, TSMC's CoWoS technology for packaging high-end AI chips or InFO_oS series processes for handling networking chips for Broadcom and MediaTek, the sources said. They are also massively adopted by major OSATs ASE Technology, Tongfu Microelectronics, JCET and Amkor in their mainstream FC packaging solutions for diverse HPC chips, the sources added.
ASE Technology and its affiliate Siliconware Precision Industries (SPIL) have seen clear visibility through the third quarter for FC packaging orders for HPC chips, and are expected to enjoy high capacity utilization throughout 2021 as major chip vendors may roll out new offerings in late third quarter or early fourth quarter, the sources indicated. But backend shipments for such chips will depend on the extent of capacity support chipmakers can get from ABF substrate makers, noted the sources.
The ever-growing backend demand for HPC chips has driven memory packaging specialist Powertech Technology (PTI) to deepen deployments in the midrange and high-tier logic ICs. It is establishing a bumping center to start with the frontend operation of the entire packaging process before foraying into FC-BGA and FC-CSP service segments. PTI has built business ties with AMD, Broadcom and MediaTek, the sources said.
As ABF substrate supply will remain short of demand in the next 2-3 years, vendors of memory controllers, networking chips and T-Con chips, which require lower computing power than HPC chips, have turned to adopt QFN and aQFN wire-bonding processes instead of FC packaging solutions, the sources said.
The global chip shortage will continue to worsen for the time being, according to Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, with the industry forecast to endure a worsening situation throughout the second half of 2021, before there's any real hope of recovery.
The shortage in semiconductor production affecting the supply of chips for electronic devices is thought to not quite reach its worst stage yet, the chief of Intel believes. Speaking in an interview, Gelsinger proposes the shoratage could reach that point before the end of 2021.
A lack of supply of semiconductors will reach its lowest point in the second half of the year before starting its road to recovery, said Gelsinger, according toBloomberg. However, even that may not be enough for some chip production clients.
"I don't expect the chip industry is back to a healthy supply-demand situation until 2023," the Intel CEO said. "For a variety of industries, I think it's still getting worse before it gets better."
Previously in June, Gelsinger said there probably wouldn't be any real solutions to major issues facing the industry for several years, specifically to "address shortages of foundry capacity, substrates, and components."
While Intel's ownership of its factories has put it in a better position to keep up with consumer and industry demand versus companies outsourcing to others, Gelsinger pointed to other areas of computer production that are being affected by the shortages.
The chip industry is poised for a long-term period of growth, he suggests, driven by 5G, electric vehicles, and the expanded use of AI, besides the industry's efforts to end the shortage crisis.
Intel is currently in the process of implementing a $20 billion plan of action to expand production. The plan includes the creation of two chip fabrication facilities in Arizona, potentially in a bid to produce Apple Silicon chips, along with expansion across the U.S. and Europe.
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Brain computer interface (BCI) shows promise in treating paralysis or enabling prosthetics to work almost naturally. But BCI for treating depression sounds like hype: Say goodbye to pills, therapy, and all that.
With such gloomy prospects, it was only a matter of time scientists realized there must be better ways to treat depression rather than pills.
After all, drugs only work because they act on certain brain regions to modulate the concentration of certain neurotransmitters, like serotonin or dopamine.
Therefore, in the end, the regulation of mood depends on stimulating brain signals in certain parts of the brain — that is, neurons firing — and this can be done more accurately by just zapping the neurons directly with electricity.
The assumption, of course, is that the mind is just “what the brain does” and that depression is merely a biological problem.
The Medium article quoted above derives from a “major report produced by Dentsu, a global advertising and digital agency” promoting the idea, citing public approval and significant investment and confidently predicting a future: “Experts predict a never before moment during the mid 2020s to be the first successful human implantation of a brain-computer interface. This could include psychological brain disorders becoming a thing of the past.”
In reality, success in this field has been mixed and limited though one recent experiment showed promise: “In the case study, the doctors identified three brain regions that they could zap to alleviate depression but found that it only worked when the patient was in a particular mental state. Otherwise, the neurostimulation had the opposite effect.”
It’s not reassuring that the technology passed an ethics review board in China and is being researched in Shanghai. See, for example, “In China, forced Uyghur labor produces many fashionable products.” Or that another figure pursuing this trend is the mercurial Elon Musk, who told media in 2020 that his Neuralink brain implant technology “could be used to help cure addiction and depression.” Meanwhile, another source proposes it as a treatment for eating disorders.
Salinas confidently predicts “We are going to say goodbye to the happy, or perhaps not-so-happy pills called antidepressants.”
Not quite so fast. First, the changes BCI produces are not always helpful, as a report in Nature points out:
Neuroethicists began to note the complex nature of the therapy’s side effects. “Some effects that might be described as personality changes are more problematic than others,” says Maslen. A crucial question is whether the person who is undergoing stimulation can reflect on how they have changed. Gilbert, for instance, describes a DBS patient who started to gamble compulsively, blowing his family’s savings and seeming not to care. He could only understand how problematic his behaviour was when the stimulation was turned off.
One issue that Ienca is addressing is privacy. “Brain information is probably the most intimate and private of all information,” he says. Digitally stored neural data could be stolen by hackers or used inappropriately by companies to whom users grant access. Ienca says that neuroethicists’ concerns have forced developers to attend to the security of their devices, to more diligently protect consumer data, and to cease demanding access to social-media profiles and other sources of personal information as a condition of a device’s use. Nevertheless, as consumer neurotechnology gains steam, ensuring that privacy standards are acceptable remains a challenge.
A “challenge”? Translation: There is no privacy and other actors (governments?) could gain control of the device. Some governments would probably insist on that.
An even bigger issue may be the patient’s assumption that the device has taken over her self. Drew recounts a case:
The company that implanted the device in her brain to help free her from seizures went bankrupt. The device had to be removed.
“She refused and resisted as long as she could,” says Gilbert, but ultimately it had to go. It’s a fate that has befallen participants of similar trials, including people whose depression had been relieved by DBS [deep brain stimulation]. Patient 6 cried as she told Gilbert about losing the device. She grieved its loss. “I lost myself,” she said.
“It was more than a device,” Gilbert says. “The company owned the existence of this new person.”
No. The company didn’t own anything, not even the device at that point. Not even a pencil or a paper clip in the office. It was bankrupt.
This is practically science fiction — except it is non-fiction. The whole thing works way better on the screen than in life.
Patient 6 was a vulnerable person in need of better protection than those who had allowed the experiment had provided her. Instead, they allowed her to believe that the company owned her existence. Perhaps that she is merely a biological entity (one wonders). That she has no self apart from the neurons, the drugs, and the device…
Psychologically vulnerable people will not benefit from this. That’s precisely why some worry that brain–computer interface could become a nightmare.
You may also wish to read about clear advances in medicine from brain–computer interfaces:
Paralyzed man writes, using only imagination — and an algorithm. With implanted electrodes, the volunteer, 65, achieved 90 characters per minute. (May 13, 2021)
and
Paralyzed subject gains control much faster via a new technique. The earlier technique for controlling a cursor through brain-computer interface worked but it required constant relearning.
LAS VEGAS, NEV. - Even the chips have chips at the newest casino resort on the Las Vegas Strip.
When Resorts World Las Vegas opens to guests and gamblers late Thursday, card players will bet with house chips implanted with sensors at tables that take cashless transactions and track every bet, split, double-down and side wager.
"It's all RFID," casino operations chief Rick Hutchins said, referring to radio-frequency identification technology built into the first new Las Vegas resort to open since 2010. "The table knows exactly what I'm betting."
Cashless technology was retrofitted in recent years at existing properties. It was made part of Resorts World from the start, executives told reporters during a preview tour Tuesday.
Doors of the $4.3 billion resort open to the public at 11 p.m.
"We're really excited," property President Scott Sibella said. "It's been a decade since a property like this has opened. We kind of broke the mold."
The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas debuted in 2010. Among other major Strip resorts, The Bellagio opened in 1998, Wynn Las Vegas in 2005 and Wynn's Encore tower in 2008. MGM Resorts' multi-resort City Center complex opened in 2009 at an overall cost of $1.6 billion.
Resorts World is expected to boost a tourism-dependent local economy battered by the coronavirus pandemic but rebounding since closures imposed in March 2020 were lifted and travel restrictions eased.
Customers who are vaccinated against COVID-19 do not have to wear masks, according to local and state regulations. Employees at many businesses still do.
Lights hang from the ceiling at Gatsby's Cocktail Lounge in Resorts World Las Vegas, June 23, 2021, in Las Vegas. The hotel-casino on the Las Vegas Strip opened June 24.
"Resorts World is certainly a contributing factor to the expectation for improved economic conditions during the second half of 2021," said Jeremy Aguero, principal at Las Vegas-based Applied Analysis.
"Historically, the opening of new, large-scale resorts has tended to grow the tourism sector and the Las Vegas economy," Aguero said. "Visitors staying at Resorts World will benefit the entire market, and Resorts World will undoubtedly benefit from visitors staying in the region's 146,000 existing hotel rooms that will want to experience all the new property has to offer."
At a blackjack table, Hutchins said players still can use cash. But those with member rewards accounts and wireless wallets will be able to scan their phones with the dealer instead of visiting casino cages.
"I have $25 on the spot, the RFID chip knows that, and the (table) antenna underneath it. And if I bet these side bets, it also knows that as well," Hutchins explained. "I can cash out at the table, I can walk with my chips, I can get a (paper ticket-in ticket-out voucher) here, or I can put it back on my (cellphone) wallet."
Slot machine players who have the app also can scan cellphone QR codes to play.
A player's stake will be spendable throughout the resort — except sports wagering, which is handled under a different regulatory process by the Nevada Gaming Control Board.
The immense high-ceiling main gambling floor is longer than two football fields and honeycombed with slot machines. It's the gambling centerpiece.
Marbled halls lead to separate registration entries for three Hilton-branded hotels. They total 3,506 rooms in two curved, red-colored towers.
A hall leading to self-parking displays some of collector Michael Fux's whimsically colored Rolls Royce sedans.
A Sky Casino salon is on the top 66th floor. A nearly ground-to-roof LED facade faces the Las Vegas Strip.
Parts of the complex are still under construction, including developer Elon Musk's underground Tesla vehicle transit system that will connect with the nearby Las Vegas Convention Center.
For now, the daytime view beyond the resort's infinity pool is of tractors and trucks and landscape grading operations. At night, the view will be the lights of the Strip.
Malaysia-based Genting Group, an operator of resorts and casinos around the world, bought the big 88-acre (35.6-hectare) property in 2013 from Las Vegas-based Boyd Gaming for $350 million. Construction began in May 2015.
The site used to be the Stardust, an iconic Las Vegas landmark that opened in 1958 as the largest hotel in the world, at 1,500 rooms. Its 32-story tower was imploded in 2007.
The Stardust's smoky mirror-walled casino was a playpen for "Rat Pack" members including Frank Sinatra. Its showroom hosted comedians Don Rickles, Tim Conway and Phyllis Diller; groups like The Temptations and Four Tops; and the duo Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme. Wayne Newton was the resident headliner at the 920-seat Stardust Theater before the casino closed in 2006.
Celine Dion will open the new 4,700-seat Theatre at Resorts World, still under construction, on Nov. 5, said John Nelson, senior vice president of AEG Presents, the venue manager. Residencies by Carrie Underwood, Katy Perry and Luke Bryan will follow.
DJs including Zedd and Tiësto will headline at the 2,000-capacity Zouk Nightclub and the outdoor AYU Dayclub.
At the hotels, amenities increase from the 1,774-room Las Vegas Hilton at Resorts World to the 1,496-room Conrad Las Vegas and the exclusive 236-suite Crockfords, where general manager Whitney Mulaj noted its tie to the luxury LXR Hotels brand.
Each hotel has a separate lobby.
"We're using completely ticketless technology," said Prescott Yee, front office director for Resorts World. When guests arrive at valet parking, they will receive a digital QR code letting them bypass registration and go straight to their room.
"No more tickets. No more paper," Yee said. "That is the essence throughout the entire guest experience."
The design shows the rising importance of room rentals, conference space, entertainment, dining and shopping to a tourism destination where Aguero said non-gambling revenues in fiscal 2019-2020 accounted for more than 70% of revenue. Twenty years ago, gambling accounted for 60% of revenues.
Hutchins, at the blackjack table, said everything a guest does will be bundled into the Resorts World mobile app. Wireless connectivity and a customer's cellphone also eliminate the need for a physical member rewards card, he said.
"The things that you do within the property, we're going to be able to recognize you, reward you for that, or incentivize you," the casino operations chief said.
"If you ate at the steakhouse, maybe you want a dessert at Wally's later," Hutchins said, referring to one of the resort's nearly 40 restaurants and eateries. "We'll be able to serve up a badge digitally that says. 'Hey, try a dessert on us.'"
