Happy happenings

The audience during the general closing meeting when the prizes were awarded. The guy sitting next to his colleague, is me. The colleague wears a red shirt - he is young enough - I can be identified by the pink tie and the glasses.

Yes! The presentations were a big success again. I was very proud that one of the four groups that I had been coaching, won the second prize out of 32 teams. They reported about a feasibility study they had performed for the establishment of a new restaurant in a new quarter of Leeuwarden. It would be the only restaurant with the chosen formula in town, namely an "all-in buffet restaurant". After the presentation an interesting discussion developed between them and the owner of another restaurant who was in the audience. Although its location and formula was different one could feel she wasn't happy with the new restaurant (competition!) and tried to ridicule the attempt with critical remarks. One of her questions elicited the remark "stupid question" from one of the team members , it was hardly hearable but I heard it and subtracted a point for offending the audience. I can imagine that the boys and girls were proud of their achievement and that negative criticism wasn't welcome in their mood, but suppose he was a restaurant manager or kitchen chef dealing with a complaining guest and would call his remarks stupid? Anyway, the general atmosphere was fine: half a year of hard work was completed and "everybody happy". But the true assessment had to come yet: the assessment of their written reports, of course far more elaborated and detailed than their presentations.

This was one of the bright days in my work. For the rest, I do almost nothing else than coaching and assessing dissertations (also called theses) by students not participating in the new setup of team projects as described above. They are written and submitted by students who are behind, sometimes three years or longer. It's a tough job because these are not the brightest students or have ( in their eyes) good reasons not to pay too much attention to this obligatory part of their study: a job, a marriage. Sometimes straightforward fraud occurs. Most students are not that brilliant in written English (in spoken English many are more fluent than I am), so when I see a paragraph in well-groomed academic or literary English, I type in a sentence in Google and there the site appears from which the paragraph or whole chapter had been stolen. That's what I call stupid. The student is confronted with the evil deed, and has to do a lot more work than if (s)he would have to do without fraud: re-writing the whole dissertation without any sign of fraud.

The majority, however, is honest and submits useful work contributing to knowledge and skills in hospitality business.

My son Menno has also done an exam: he has acquired the yellow belt in judo, and he needs the achievement! Because of my presentations I couldn't be present but his mother was there to encourage him, with success.

Also positive was the amazing TV program about sustainable industry, about the new concept "from cradle to cradle": it means (I couldn't hardly believe my eyes and ears) that captains of industry such as the CEO of Ford in Detroit and Chinese industry developers all of a sudden became green preachers like Greenpeace, and you know why? because a very intelligent and entrepreneurial couple (maybe they are future Nobel Prize winners) of an architect and biologist had proven that waste-prevention can save them millions of dollars, by what they call "turning waste into food". Food for the natural ecosystem, or food for technology. One of the secrets is that you have to design a product in such a way that it can be given back to nature or industry. Working like this saves money, waste processing and co-operates with nature itself. Cradle-to-cradle, the miracle of the century, and sooo simple! If only you see it like profit itself, and get rid of the prejudice that eco is expensive, on the contrary, it now has proven to be cheaper! This holds for manufacturing and constructing industries, but I see problems for the agricultural industry: how to apply the cradle-tocradle-concept for cattle breeding and the growing of agricultural products? The TV program didn't mention it, but it's very important, for the same evening I saw how agricultural engineers had discovered that a big percentage of our CO2-emission in the Netherlands was produced because of lowering the ground water level in peat areas, to turn them into grass land. About half of Dutch grass land is acquired this way. The peat gets dry and starts to rot, which causes CO2. Very expensive measures must be taken to reduce this process, and at the same time maintaining the grassland. On my photoblog you can see an area where the ground water level has been increased again, and more such areas are needed, not only for CO2 reduction but also to acquire natural water bassins to avoid floods in cities and villages. However, the farmers are not happy with these developments and they still have great political influence, although the last 20 years they delivered much of their previous power.