More About Bre Prettis
“I’m Bre Pettis, CEO of MakerBot. We’re leading the next industrial revolution to empower creative explorers to make anything. MakerBot is setting the standard in desktop 3D printing. We’re changing the face of personal manufacturing and changing the way the world thinks about THINGS. I’m proud to have been a public school teacher. I started NYCResistor. I’ve made a lot of videos. I’ve been on the cover of WIRED and I play clawhammer banjo to relax.”
-Bre Pettis
Pettis was raised in Ithaca, New York. At the age of 13 he moved to the Seattle area, where he later graduated from Bellevue High School.Pettis is a 1995 graduate of The Evergreen State College,where he studied psychology, mythology and performing arts.
After college, Pettis worked as floor runner and camera assistant on feature films in Prague and as an assistant at Jim Henson’s Creature Shop in London. He then attended Pacific Oaks College and graduated with a teaching certificate. He worked as an art teacher for the Seattle Public Schools from 1999 through 2006.
Pettis and Kio Stark have a daughter, Nika Stark Pettis, born July 8, 2011
You can follow Bre Prettis on his blog. Contact Leigh Bureau if you would like him to speak at your next company event.
More About David McGill
David has helped people with limb loss for nearly 15 years.
As VP of Reimbursement & Compliance at Ossur (2006-present), he has obtained 2 of only 3 lower-extremity prosthetic codes granted by Medicare since 2006, improving all amputees’ access to devices that improve their mobility while generating millions of dollars of incremental revenue for Ossur.
David also teaches prosthetic facilities how to operate more effectively. His in-person presentations focus on the mechanics of drafting a successful insurance appeal and how to employ a systematic approach to the claims process. David also delivers monthly regional reimbursement webinars directly to Ossur customers. Thanks to these unique reimbursement support offerings, Ossur reaches an estimated 400-500 customers a year.
David authors two blogs and records a monthly podcast: Ossur R&R (reporting on and analyzing reimbursement and regulatory issues affecting the O&P industry), less is more (dealing with limb loss, insurance issues, and how prosthetics reshape identity), and Amp’d (addressing issues of interest to amputees).
David is the current VP of NAAOP (2009-present), an AOPA board member (2012-present), and a former board member/Chair of the Amputee Coalition (2003-11).
At the 2012 AOPA National Assembly he was part of a panel discussion about reimbursement of new prosthetic technologies, and he was a keynote speaker at the 2011 National Assembly, describing ethical and legal issues confronting the O&P profession.
David presented at Fast Company magazine’s 2012 Innovation By Design Awards, and has been interviewed by CNN, the Wall Street Journal, and BBC Radio.
David also has a successful history of business leadership and innovation, co-founding a prosthetic facility (2001-06). He oversaw and drafted all insurance appeals, achieving a greater-than-90% win rate that generated more than $1M of incremental revenue.
More About Majora Carter
“I believe that you shouldn’t have to leave your neighborhood to live in a better one.”
– Majora Carter
Majora Carter (born October 27, 1966) is an urban revitalization strategist and public radio host, from the South Bronx area of New York City. Carter founded the non-profit environmental justice solutions corporation Sustainable South Bronx[2] before entering the private sector.
Carter attended the Head Start Program and primary schools in the South Bronx. After graduating from the Bronx High School of Science, she entered Wesleyan University in 1984 to study film and obtain a Bachelor of Arts. In 1997, she received a Master of Fine Arts from New York University (NYU). While at NYU, she returned to her family’s home in Hunts Point, and later worked for The Point Community Development Corporation.As associate director of the community development corporation, Carter advocated for the development of Hunts Point Riverside Park. Carter was “pulled by her dog into a weedy vacant lot strewn with trash at the dead end of Lafayette Avenue. As the pair plowed through the site they ended up, much to Carter’s surprise, on the banks of the Bronx River.
From there, Carter helped secure a $10,000 grant from a USDA Forest Service program to provide seed money for river access restoration projects. Working with other community groups and the Parks Department, over a five-year period she helped leverage that seed money into more than $3 million from the mayor’s budget to build the park.
In August 2001, after an unsuccessful campaign for City Council, Carter founded Sustainable South Bronx (SSBx), where she served as executive director until July 2008. During that time, SSBx advocated the development of the Hunt’s Point Riverside Park which had been an illegal garbage dump. SSBx has also been involved in other restoration projects on the Bronx River waterfront. In 2003, Sustainable South Bronx started the Bronx Environmental Stewardship Training program. This was one of the nation’s first urban green collar training and placement systems. Other SSBx projects have centered around fitness, food choices (including the creation of a community market), and air quality.
A December 2008 New York Times profile called Carter “The Green Power Broker” and “one of the city’s best-known advocates for environmental justice” but reported that some South Bronx activists (who would not go on record) stated that Carter has taken credit for accomplishments when others should share the credit as well as taking credit for uncompleted projects. Other Bronx activists (who did agree to be named) stated that her recognition was well deserved.
Carter was a torch-bearer for a portion of the San Francisco leg of the torch relay of the 2008 Summer Olympics. Many portions of the torch relay, including the San Francisco leg, were met with protests concerning the policies of the Chinese government toward Tibet. Although Carter had signed a contract pledging not to use an Olympic venue for political or religious causes, when she and John Caldera were passed the torch during their part of the relay, she pulled out a small Tibetan flag that she had concealed in her shirt sleeve.
Members of the Chinese torch security escort team pulled her out of the relay and San Francisco police officers pushed her into the crowd on the side of the street. Fellow torch-bearer, retired NYFD firefighter Richard Doran, who was honoring the firefighters who died in the September 11 attacks, called Carter’s actions “disgusting and appalling” and said that he thought “she dishonored herself and her family”. Another torch-bearer, retired NYPD police officer Jim Dolan, agreed with Doran.
More About Leanne Mai-ly Hilgart
Leanne Mai-ly Hilgart is “the Rebel of Fashion Week” (CNN Breaking News), “A Game Changer- embodying courage, conviction, and creativity” (Conde Nast & Mazda’s Mazda6 Campaign), “1 of 40 Redefining Green” (Grist.org) “the vegan scene queen, a badass businesswoman—informative & inspiring” (Bust Magazine) and Alicia Silverstone’s Kind Fashion Expert on theKindLife.com.
Known as the artist in the class, at 8 she ran her first campaign for animals by coordinating friends to create arts & crafts they sold door to door to raise money and awareness for homeless animals at the local shelter. At 12 she took the title of her Social Studies Fair Project (on Vivisection, the Fur Industry, and Factory Farming), “Being Cruel Isn’t Cool,” and sold it to a national tee shirt company. Later she waged a campaign against cat dissection at her high school, which soon helped push a bill into law in IL that required alternatives to be given to all students. A year out of school, Leanne soon gave up on her college degree career path—teaching—and spent the next few years among a couple of seemingly unrelated careers: developing grassroots marketing strategies at Sittercity.com and for other companies while modeling with Ford Models in Chicago and on contracts in Asia. During this time she realized that business was an amazing opportunity to create positive change through every aspect of the process. She just needed to figure out where she was needed most. It was on her contract in Hong Kong that she discovered that a winter dress coat which was at once warm, stunning, & vegan did not yet exist—and realized that cold weather clothes were the last excuse to wear animals so she could aim to eliminate our dependency as a society on wearing animals if she focused on developing something better than wool or down.
Without a background in fashion, but with a love for ballet class silhouettes, 50’s & 80’s vintage, jewel tones, origami, and a deep excitement to create art again, and most importantly- the animals in her heart, she started VAUTE. Her reading list that summer included Rules for Revolutionaries by Guy Kawasaki and How to be Lovely, the Audrey Hepburn Story—both of which inspired the birth & brand of her company, Vaute Couture, which she started that September, of 2008.
More About Michael Johnson
“My goal is to become the first paralyzed driver to participate in the IndyCar Series and race in the Indy 500.”.
– Micheal Johnson
On August 13, 2005, 12-year-old Michael Johnson took part in a dirt-track motorcycle competition at Hiawatha Horse Park in Sarnia, Ontario.
While making his move into the lead going into the last lap at the half-mile track, Michael ran out of tear offs and was wiping his helmet shield when he hit a rut, and veered off the track. His 250cc bike went between hay bales and crashed through a fence, sending him over the handlebars.
Michael broke his collarbone, right ribs, left ankle and left leg. He had also fractured the T5 and T6 vertebrae in his back that caused paralysis from the mid chest down.
Michael was taken by ambulance to a hospital in Sarnia, and then transferred to Children Hospital in Detroit.
Two days later, he underwent an 11-hour surgery, and he still has four rods and 15 screws in his back. In 2009, Michael had stem cell surgery and currently follows an aggressive physical therapy program in hopes to improve his condition. Nevertheless, he resolved to resume racing, setting a goal to become the first paralyzed driver to participate in the IndyCar Series.
More About The Soccket Ball by Uncharted Play
Over 1.3 billion people worldwide live without reliable access to electricity. As a result, households use kerosene lamps, diesel generators, and wood burning stoves, which are harmful to the environment and cause nearly 2 million deaths per year. Living with fumes from 1 kerosene lamp is the equivalent of smoking two packs of cigarettes every day.
Each Portable Power Kit consists of 1 SOCCKET and 10 Portable Lamps. That way, children living in off-grid communities can play with a single SOCCKET ball as a team at school and still have their own personal light for reading and homework at home each night. The pendulum-like mechanism inside the SOCCKET captures the kinetic energy generated during normal play, and stores it in the ball for later use as an off-grid power source. 30 minutes of play can power a simple LED lamp for 3 hours.
Funding for Portable Power Kits comes from a portion of the proceeds of retail SOCCKET sales. Once we have financial support to provide enough Power Play Kits to meet the needs of a school or community center within our implementation partner’s network, we ship them and begin aggregating kits for the next school or community center.
Compiled By:
Josh Martin
Sources:
David R McGill,
Bre Pettis
Majora Carter
Wikipedia.com
VauteCouture.com
Michael Johnson
MichaelJohnsonRacing.com
UnChartedPlay.com
Videos Produced By: Mazda USA
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Mazda MX-5 Cup at Laguna Seca Hosted by Playboy Playmates
“Top Speed” Said:
Most guys won’t admit this off the bat, but the truth is, men are pretty predictable when it comes to their interests. Ask them their top three interests and you can take it to the bank that two out of those three will be cars and girls.
So what happens when you put one and one together and bring Playboy Playmates to participate in an actual racing environment?
You won’t have to imagine that anymore after Playboy served as an official sponsor of the MX-5 Cup at the Mazda Raceway in Laguna Seca. Not only do you get your fair share of high-octane MX-5s that have all been tuned to race, but you also get hotties like Pilar Lastra and Deanna Brooks acting as the faces of the SCCA Pro Racing Playboy MX-5 Cup.
In addition to being two of the finest playmates in Hugh Heffner’s stable, both Lastra and Brooks have, at one point in their lives, traded their lingerie for racing suits.
Check out the video and listen to their personal racing stories around Laguna Seca!
History of Wrapping Paper – How to Wrap Video
Video Produced By: Real Simple How To
History of Wrapping Paper:
Before gifts were thought of being wrapped and put under a tree for children, kids would get a stocking (sock) of theirs, (the biggest they had) and find it filled on Christmas morning with fruit, candy, and perhaps a small toy.
In the early Victorian years gifts were wrapped in white tissue paper. Bows were made from snippets of ribbon and lace that could be found lying around the house. Sometimes paper pictures from a greeting card were added as extra decorations for wrapping. Even a piece of outside greenery was added to the gift box.
By 1903 gift wrapping was quite popular and in fashion, so the first printed wrapping paper was made which had green holly printed on it. Printed Christmas wrapping paper was actually developed by accident. Stores were selling white, red, and green tissue paper and selling out very quickly. The Hall brothers began to print their own and soon sales were as high as their greeting card business, hence, Hallmark card company.
By the 1920’s DuPont was making cellophane for decorative gift wrap and packaging material for food.
Today gifts under your Christmas tree can be found wrapped in many different ways, styles, and kinds of paper. Papers and bows of all kinds of material are used, and toppings for the gifts can be anything like; another gift, Christmas tree ornaments, bows, flowers, candy, or greenery.
Today neatly wrapped Christmas gifts can be seen in all corners of a room, some under the tree, on a sofa, on a mantel, stacked up high, or in a neat and decorative pile on the floor.
Perhaps You would Enjoy: The History of The Christmas Tree
Source: Love To Sew
Compiled By: Josh Martin
Mazda of Lakewood's Blog 