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Weymouth Harbour offers good protection but swell can run up the outer harbour in strong easterly and north-easterly winds. In such conditions, the separately covered and more protected Weymouth Marina, located immediately upriver, may have visitors' berths that offer complete protection. Safe access is available night or day, at any stage of the tide and in all reasonable conditions.
Keyfacts for Weymouth Harbour
SummaryA good location with safe access.
Position and approaches
Haven position50° 36.464' N, 002° 27.059' W
This is the berthing area for vessels larger than 10 metres alongside the pontoons on the north side of the harbour.
What is the initial fix?
What are the key points of the approach?
- Vessels approaching from the west must avoid Portland Race, located close south of Portland Bill.
- Avoid the area to the south of South Pier on any final approach.
- Watch out for Fast Cat ferry movements and abide by the traffic signalling displayed at the entrance.
Not what you need?
- Weymouth Marina - 0.3 nautical miles WNW
- Small Mouth - 1.4 nautical miles SSW
- Portland Marina - 2 nautical miles S
- Church Ope Cove - 4.3 nautical miles SSE
- Ringstead Bay - 4.5 nautical miles ENE
- Durdle Door - 6.7 nautical miles E
- Lulworth Cove - 7.8 nautical miles E
- Worbarrow Bay - 8.7 nautical miles E
- West Bay (Bridport) - 13.4 nautical miles WNW
- Wareham - 13.8 nautical miles ENE
How to get in?
Weymouth Harbour is the small commercial port of the seaside town of Weymouth. The town is the third largest settlement in Dorset and it is centred on the harbour, also known as the Old Harbour, at the mouth of the River Wey, where the little river falls into the southwest part of Weymouth Bay. The harbour is entered between two stone piers where it then follows the path of the river through the town giving it a long, narrow, and unusually deep aspect. A cross-channel ferry service operates from a Ro-Ro ferry terminal located on its north side, a ¼ of a mile within, and it is an important centre for leisure craft.
The harbour offers berths with depths of up to 4 metres, which can accommodate vessels in excess of 18 metres. The controlling depth for the harbour is 5.2 metres CD in the approach channel and up to the Ro-Ro Terminal. From there it descends gradually to about 2.2 CD metres within 60 metres of the Town Bridge.
Weymouth Harbour is a council run municipal facility that openly welcomes leisure craft. There is no need to pre-book and a suitable berth can be obtained from the harbour office by contacting them on VHF Ch. 12, call sign [Weymouth Harbour], whilst approaching in open waters.
However special accommodations have to be made for vessels of more than 20 metres and likewise for visiting rallies or large groups. These must make arrangements a day or two in advance to be sure of a suitable berth/s, by calling P: +44 1305 838423 or E: firstname.lastname@example.org. More details are available on the harbour web site.
Mooring fees for 2017, are from 4 to 24 hours, 1st Apr - 30 Sept, £2.70 per metre incl. VAT. Outside of the busy months of July and August, they offer any vessels who have berthing for three consecutive nights an additional fourth night, free of charge. Likewise, rallies and groups can make use of a discount provided they make arrangements in advance. Registered Charities are entitled to a 30% discount on visitor rates.
Vessels approaching from the west will find The Isle of Portland presents a highly familiar landmark. It is three miles long, lies in a northeast alignment and is connected to the adjacent coast by a narrow isthmus of coarse shingle known as Chesil Beach. The Isle of Portland’s distinctive wedge-like appearance makes it one of the most easily recognised land masses for vessels proceeding up and down the English Channel.
On the southeast side of Portland Bill, the southern extreme of the Portland Peninsula, there stands the conspicuous 41 metre high tower of Portland Bill Light.
Portland Bill - Lighthouse Fl(4)20s43m25M & F.R19m13M Dia(1)30s position: 50° 30'.848 N 002° 27'.384 W
Another light is exhibited from the west face of the Isle 250 metres northwest of the lighthouse Oc.(2)Y.10s10M. A stone beacon stands at an elevation of 18 metres on the southern extremity of the shore and is meant to warn small vessels of a rock shelf with several loose boulders which front the point. The prominent structure of a former light, Old Low Light, is situated 0.4 miles north by northeast of Portland Bill Light.
A dangerous tidal race, called Portland Race, exists to the south of Portland Bill. The Race normally extends about 2 miles south of the Bill, a little to the west during the West going ebb, and to the east during the East going flood, as best seen on the charts. The worst part of Portland Race, being well defined by overfalls, is formed one to two miles south of the point but it can extend much further south in bad weather.
In heavy weather, especially when the wind is blowing against the current, a severe and very dangerous sea states occurs with irregular steep standing waves and breakers. In an easterly gale, against the body of the flood stream, the whole space between Portland and the Shambles is one sheet of broken water - see videos below. Even in fine weather, the noise caused by the Race may be heard for a considerable distance. Conversely, during neeps with fair winds, the race can be barely perceptible.
The majority of Weymouth lifeboats calls are to rescue yachts that were unaware of the race’s dangers and were unexpectedly swept into the tumult unable to escape. So, in all circumstances, Portland Race should be avoided by small craft. The options, therefore, are to avoid the Portland Race by ‘passing outside’ of the area, or by taking the 'inside passage' between the Bill and the race.
- • The safest route is always to pass outside of the Portland Race as and the Needles to Portland Bill and Portland Bill to Start Point Coastal Overviews provide waypoints to seaward of the race and its overfalls. Keep at least three to five miles south of the Bill during calm weather or at least seven miles in bad conditions, especially so during wind-over-tide conditions on a spring tide. The east-going flood to the south of the race is favourable for the best part of 7 hours from HW Dover +6.
- • Pass close south of the Bill in an area of relatively smooth water, located anywhere between the rocks off the end of the Bill and the Race to the south. The shorter 'Inside Passage' is a useful channel for leisure craft. It is an area of relatively smooth water where the current are more moderate between ½ and ¾ of a mile wide, with depths of from 5 to 16 metres. It is this preferred option in good conditions, neap tides, settled seas, wind and current in accord and timed for slack water with the tide turning favourable for direction intended. The 'Routes' entry Rounding Portland Bill by the 'Inner Passage' provides tidal timer and indicative set of waypoints for this approach.
Once past the race round up and preferably pass to the west of the dangerous Shambles Bank that lies 2½ miles east of Portland Bill. This irregular shaped bank is marked by west and east cardinal light-buoys on either end. It is also best avoided, as is the gap between it and the Race, as strong tidal streams may cause heavy seas in this entire area. At night the Shambles sandbank is covered by a red sector light from Portland Bill lighthouse.
Once past the Isle of Portland advance towards the initial fix set just outside Weymouth Harbour’s entrance. Vessels are requested to stay at least a ½ mile out when crossing Portland Harbour's breakwaters. Particularly so when crossing the East Ship Channel so that your vessel may be seen by commercial vessels navigating within the channel. Likewise, vessels should keep a watch for any craft unexpectedly exiting from either of Portland Harbour's entrances and high-speed ferries going back and forth to Weymouth.
The wooded hill The Nothe, immediately south of the entrance, will be clearly visible from Portland Harbour. On a final approach, it is best to stand well out from the area close south of the South Pier, as it is foul with the half-tide Mixen Rocks which run off nearly 200 metres eastward from Nothe Point.
A Degaussing Range, used to reduce a warships' magnetic signature, will be passed ¼ of a mile eastward of The Nothe. As best seen on the chart, it is marked by a light-buoy, Fl.Y.2s, and two unlit yellow buoys, and these marks may be considered to have no navigational importance to yachts.
Vessels approaching from the east will clear all dangers by keeping a ½ mile offshore after passing St Alban’s Head. Those choosing to hug the attractive coastline should check whether Lulworth Firing Ranges are active.
As with the western approach, the Isle of Portland makes for the first conspicuous mark, and on closer approaches the low-lying Portland Harbour and its isthmus will soon appear on the horizon. The Nothe, immediately south of the entrance, will then appear, after which the harbours two concrete piers will be seen running out immediately to the north. Shaping a course, with a bearing of less than 280° of the South Pier, leads into the approach channel.
The initial fix is set about 250 metres outside the harbour entrance on the alignment of about 240° T of the harbour’s red transit lights. The lights F.R. are situated a ¼ of a mile within the entrance on Ballast Quay, located about 100 metres east of the Weymouth Sailing Club.
By day, the line of bearing are diamond shapes that only become visible when the entrance is opened, and they are difficult to pick out. But in daylight, the entrance between the two stone piers of South Pier and North Pier is more than obvious and unmistakable.
Both piers are lit at night, South Pier Light Q.10m9M and North Pier 2F.G.(vert) 9m6M, but are difficult to see against shore lights. The slender Jurassic Skyline, a conspicuous 55 metres high white chimney-like structure on the north pier 200 metres west of the entrance, also makes a conspicuous sea mark. This has a people pod which will be seen ascending and descending from time to time. At night it is floodlit and marked by flashing red hazard lights.
Before advancing on the entrance it is essential to make certain that there are no shipping movements in the outer harbour. Fast Cat ferries frequently run from here to the Channel Islands and there is limited space in the entrance. Approaches on the entrance are regulated by traffic signals displayed in a vertical line, from a mast situated on a Red-White pole near the root of South Pier.
When a passage in or out of the harbour is restricted the signals will be operational and the lights must be observed. If in doubt, or advance warning of any vessel movements is required, contact [Weymouth Harbour] on VHF Ch12 or the berthing office on +44 1305 838423.
When no signals are showing it is clear to proceed through the open harbour entrance. There are no fairway buoys or a buoyed channel, as it is simply a matter of passing between the two piers that open to the northeast. The entrance’s two stone piers are 137 metres apart with best water to be found in the middle to the north side. Steer a central course to stand well off the South Pier as it is shallow out to 60 metres from its foot. Once past Nothe Fort the channel fairway then narrows to 76 metres as it leads into the long, narrow, and well-protected outer harbour. Again steer a central course as it is shallow along the soutern side where small craft moorings are located.
The speed restriction is 'Dead Slow,' the speed whereby your specific vessel’s ’wash does not cause annoyance to other harbour users’. Keep a watchful eye for a small rowing ferry that plies its trade between the Weymouth Sailing Club and the Customs House Quay. These small row boats have right of way and should be given a wide berth at slow speed.
Berth as advised by the berthing master alongside the pontoons south and north of the river. All berths are clearly identifiable by their designated letter and numbers on prominently displayed orange cards.
Vessels over 10 metres berth on the north side of the river, to starboard, after the commercial dock, either opposite the Lifeboat Station or outside the Harbour Office. These north wall berths will have depths of from at least 4 metres CD on the outer end, shoaling to 3 metres CD upriver.
Vessels of up to 10 metres berth on the south side of the harbour, in what is called The Cove, adhering to the mooring signage. These berths should have at least 2 metres CD, but in practice depths of 3 metres will be found here.
In all cases, vessels may be required to raft up, sometimes several deep. Vessels arriving in the early hours should proceed to a suitable berth or raft out on a vessel of a similar length and type.
Anchoring in the harbour is forbidden, but in fine weather it is possible to anchor outside in Weymouth Bay free of charge. This is about 800 metres off the perfect crescent shaped beach backed by its sweep of Georgian houses. Anchor outside the buoyed bathing area about 600 metres or so north of the head of South Pier. Depths of 2 to 3 metres will be found here with good holding in fine sand. It can be subject to a scend that rolls around Portland and fetches up off Weymouth beach.
Above Town Bridge, situated a ½ a mile within the entrance, is the separately covered Weymouth Marina that provides a warm welcome to visiting vessels.
Why visit here?Weymouth means ‘mouth of the River Wey’, with the word Wey being its river and an ancient word for ‘river’. It originated as a settlement on the constricted site to the south and west of Weymouth Harbour and developed opposite what was a separate settlement of Melcombe Regis on the opposite north side of the river.
Virtually nothing is known of these settlements before they were granted charters in the thirteenth century. It is surprising that the forms of early medieval settlements are not known, nor how they developed up to the time of the charters. Bronze and Roman weapons have been found in their surroundings, but there is no evidence that either Weymouth or Melcombe Regis were places of early settlements. Although a highly convenient harbour, the ancient weapons were most likely connected to Radipole further up the River, where the Romans beached their galleys. After AD43, when they had captured the extensive Maiden Castle southwest of Dorchester, they used Radipole to unload cargo for the important town of Durnovaria, now Dorchester, that they developed there.
It is estimated that sometime before the Saxon period Weymouth had started to develop as a fishing town and seaport as did Melcombe Regis opposite. The first mention of that place called Weyroouth occurs in a charter of King Æthelred I (866-871), while it is again spoken of in a charter of King Æthelstan, or Athelstan, (895-940) where it was recorded as Waimouthe in 934. Edward the Confessor gave the budding ports to the Convent and Prior of St. Swithin of Winchester in 1042. It remained with the prior and convent until the 13th Century, when it passed by exchange to Gilbert de Clare, Earl of Gloucester, though the vassals of the prior and convent remained exempt from dues and tronage (the weighing of wool) in the port. Coming by marriage into the hands of the Earls of March and Plantagenets, the manor was finally vested in the crown.
The first charter was granted by the prior and convent in 1252. It made Weymouth a chartered borough and port for all merchants, and had the same standing as those of Portsmouth and Southampton. As early as 1293 trade was carried on with Bayonne, in Aquitaine in southwest France, from where wine was imported. Six years later it was made a Staple Port, a medieval system of the designation of ports of trade and taxation, for wool and woolfells. The supply of 15 ships and 263 mariners, for the siege of Calais in 1347, shows Weymouth’s importance in the 14th century. But there is no mention of a mayor until 1467 and it is thought that the town suffered considerably at the hands of the French at the beginning of the 15th century. In 1404 the men of Weymouth were victorious over a party which landed in the Isle of Portland but French raiders found the port so accessible that it lost its status as Port of Staple to Poole in 1433.
Soon far worse was come to Melcombe Regis as was noted in Grey Friar's Chronicle, Lynn noted… In this year, 1348, in Melcombe in the county of Dorset, a little before the feast of St John the Baptist, two ships, one of them from Bristol, came alongside. One of the sailors had brought with him from Gascony the seeds of the terrible pestilence, and through him the men of that town of Melcombe were the first in England to be infected. ' The infection was the Bubonic Plague and it is Melcombe Regis’ grim claim to fame that it was the point of introduction into the British Isles. Better known as the Black Death it was one of the most devastating pandemics in human history, killing anywhere between an estimated 75 to 200 million people in Eurasia.
It was thought to have been brought ashore by fleas that had predated on the rats that infested the continental trading ships of the time. But it was proven in 2014 to have been an airborne pneumatic plague that made its way into the lungs. Once the disease reached the lungs of the malnourished of Melcombe Regis, it quickly spread to the wider population through sneezes and coughs. The local population fled inland before its horrors, only to spread the plague across the county of Dorset. By September it had reached London from which it spread into East Anglia and it was all along the coast during the early parts of the New Year. By spring 1349, it was ravaging Wales and the Midlands, and by late summer it had made the leap across the Irish Sea, and had penetrated the north. Within two years it had killed 1.5 million people, out of an estimated total population of 4 million people, and it would strike England another six times by the end of the century.
Fortunately, the 15th Century brought prosperity partly as a result of a substantial trade in pilgrims sailing to Spain. Throughout this time Weymouth and Melcombe Regis were rivals for trade and industry. The continual disputes between the two boroughs led to the passing of an act of union in 1571, to form a new double borough. Both towns then become known as Weymouth, despite Melcombe Regis being the main centre. The unification of the two towns helped the development of international trade and with it increased military activity around the port. In 1588 it supplied ships for the fight against the Spanish Armada. The Spanish ship ‘San Salvador’ was captured off Portland and brought into the harbour.
The town suffered severely during the Civil War in the middle of the 17th Century. Garrisoned by the parliamentary troops in 1642, it was taken by the Earl of Carnarvon in 1643 and surrendered in the following year at the cost of about 250 lives. But the days of colonial expansion was soon to bolster its fortunes again with many emigrants sailing to the New World from Weymouth.
It would be only in the 18th century that the two halves of the town would be finally linked by successive bridges over the narrowest part of the harbour. The town is described as ‘but little’ in 1733, but it soon gained a royal reputation a few years afterwards when King George III's brother, the Duke of Gloucester, built a house here. Like many 18th century coastal towns, it was touted as a health retreat and soon George III and the royal family made Weymouth their summer holiday residence to popularise it as one of the first seaside resorts in England.
The King came to Weymouth on fourteen occasions between 1789 and 1805, even venturing into the sea in a bathing machine. This was a hut on wheels drawn into the water by horses where he could bathe supervised by an attendant. This series of visits made Weymouth highly fashionable and it was during this period, the Georgian and Regency periods, that the continuous arc of Weymouth's esplanade of Georgian terraces, facing Weymouth Bay, were built. These were constructed for wealthy businessmen in pursuit of royal patronage and the area’s healing properties. A packet steamer service between Weymouth and the Channel Islands was launched in 1794. Although the original purpose was a goods trade, the link led to many Dorset families settling in the Channel Islands. It was this connection that made Weymouth Harbour the entry port for the whole population of Alderney when the island was evacuated on 23rd June 1940, a week before the German Invasion.
Weymouth went on to suffer heavy damage during World War II but played an active part in the war effort. The Bouncing bomb was tested in the Fleet lagoon to the west of town. The Nothe Fort, a Palmerston's Folly that overlooks Weymouth Bay from the harbour’s entrance, was used as a base by the British and American navies. Built in 1872 by the Royal Engineers, with the help of inmates of Portland Prison, it is shaped like the letter D and made up of three levels of Portland stone, brick and granite. The fort's guns covered the approaches to both Portland and Weymouth harbours and it had an anti-aircraft gun stationed inside it during World War II. Its main role was storing anti-aircraft ammunition for the southwest and to provide a secure base for the joint navies to plan operations. When the time came to invade Normandy, 517,816 troops and 144,093 vehicles then embarked at Weymouth to bring the war to a conclusion.
Today Weymouth is a bustling seaside town of around 52,000 people and its Georgian terraces have been converted into apartments, shops, hotels and guest houses. It attracts thousands of holiday-makers in summer, earning it the rather dubious nickname of 'England's Bay of Naples’, or more recently 'Weybiza'. King George III's formative visits are commemorated by a chalk carving of the king mounted on a horse carved into the chalk hills of Osmington, and a statue on the Esplanade that marked the 50th anniversary of his succession. A Queen Victoria statue, in front of St John's church, faces George III’s statue from the opposite end of the Esplanade and a multi-coloured Jubilee Clock, erected in 1887, marks the 50th year of Queen Victoria's reign. Two war memorials also stand along the Esplanade. Nothe Fort remained in active service until 1956, before being taken over by Weymouth and Portland Borough Council and it is now open to the public as a museum of coastal defence. The Nothe Gardens, surrounding the fort, are now a public park that offers spectacular views of Weymouth Bay and the Harbour on one side, and views of Portland and Portland Harbour on the other.
From a sailing perspective, Weymouth is a superb location. It offers easy access at all stages of the tide and has well-sheltered berths with all facilities at reasonable prices in a beautiful historic outer harbour. Almost everything is a 5 minute walk from the quays, including its beautiful golden family safe beaches. All yachting requirements can be catered for in the immediate area and it has excellent transport connections for crew changes etc. Most of all, it is an ideal gateway to cruising the West Country. With fair winds, it can be reached on a single tide from the West Solent and it also offers an excellent stepping stone port for the return journey. All of this makes it a truly unique experience and an important leisure port in sailing terms.
What facilities are available?Water is available at the fuel pontoon, on quays and at all visitor berths. All have gangway access ashore and most berths have metered electricity, for which a plug-in fee is payable. Extension leads should they be needed are available to borrow from the harbour office.
Toilets and showers are located on the ground floor of the harbour office and at North Quay. 24-hour access is available using the door code provided by the berthing master on arrival. Toilets are also available at the back of the Royal Dorset Yacht Club bar on the North Quay and on the South quay. WiFi is available for some visitor berths opposite the Harbour Office, please take advice from the harbour office. A harbour plan marks the location of facilities.
Token operated laundry facilities are located on the ground floor of the harbour office from where the tokens can be purchased. Household waste can be bagged and disposed of in wheeled bins adjacent to the harbour office. Recycle facilities are available opposite the harbour office. Batteries and oil can be collected and disposed of by arrangement with the Harbour Office.
Diesel fuel is available from the jetty on the south side of the harbour and from mobile mini road tankers. No petrol is available in the harbour but it can be obtained from the petrol station on King Street. There is a public slipway in Weymouth Inner Harbour off Commercial Road above the Town Bridge. Also at Bowleaze Cove and Overcombe Corner.
Weymouth has all the services that you would expect from a town of this size. There is a choice of chemists, a post office, several banks and a host of bars and restaurants plus a selection of delis. It is an excellent place to provision, with a Marks and Spencer, Co-Op and a Tesco plus an Asda superstore all within about 10 minutes’ walk. The town also has a large range of independent shops and retailers. Bike hire and car hire are available in the town. All yachting facilities are available in Weymouth including a choice of chandleries.
Weymouth station, a five-minute walk, runs half-hourly trains to London which take three hours to reach Waterloo station. It is also connected by train to other Dorset towns such as Dorchester, Wareham, Poole, Bournemouth and Southampton and Bristol. The Jurassic Coast bus (CoastLinX53) runs along the south coast, calling at Poole, Wareham, Wool, Weymouth, Abbotsbury, West Bay, Bridport, Chideock, Charmouth, Lyme Regis, Seaton, Beer and Exeter. Other parts of Dorset are also relatively easy to reach by bus. The Condor Fast ferry operates to Jersey, Guernsey and St-Malo.
With thanks to:Michael Harpur S/Y Whistler. Photography Ian Capper, Kyle Taylor, Mike George, Michael Harpur and Jim Champion.
An Aerial Journey Across Weymouth and Portland
The Nothe Fort to Lodmoor Country Park in Weymouth.
Weymouth RNLI rescues a yacht trapped in the Portland Race
Portland Race during a storm
Sailing through the 'inner passage'
Tom Cunliffe discusses the 'inner passage'
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Stress seems to dog everyone these days — from young children to the elderly. Sangeetha Ramprasad comes to their rescue, bridging the world of Carnatic music with meditation, the art of stilling/calming the mind. Sangeetha had her initial training from her mother, vainika Revathi Srinivasan, an A-Top Grade artiste of AIR Chennai. Tutelage continued under Rajalakshmi, disciple of D.K. Jayaraman, before intensive training from T.M. Thyagarajan.
It was years later, in Bahrain where she is now settled, that she quite serendipitously got exposure to a sahaja yoga session. “I felt a peace descend over me. It was then that I decided to practise it myself,” she describes the experience. Sangeetha says that her music and her entire attitude to life itself has been affected at a very elemental level due to her practice of sahaja yoga.
So what is sahaja yoga and what makes it different from all the other forms? R. Ramesh and Anusha Ramesh, long term practitioners, elaborate: Sahaja Yoga was started by Mataji Nirmala Devi as a meditative tool to achieve an emotional equilibrium amidst stressful conditions. Unlike other variations where self-realisation is the end goal, in sahaja yoga, it is the beginning. Designed with the grihasta (householder) in mind, it is effortless and does not require renunciation. Practised in over 150 countries, it is taught collectively in large groups free of charge where everyone, from a toddler to the most elderly, can practice and experience its benefits.
How has it changed Sangeetha and her music? “Now, I sing to connect with the divine, really feeling the music,” she says. “Earlier, I experienced stage fright and would be concerned about meeting expectations. Now, I experience the music and render what I inwardly feel I should.” Anusha Ramesh adds: “When Sangeetha sings, I can feel the soothing vibrations.” Sangeetha has composed pieces in Tamil in praise of Mataji. R. Ramesh finds it amazing how the words, the ragam and the music all fall into place beautifully in her music whilst bringing out the bhavam.
Sahaja yoga awakens the kundalini shakti within oneself. Kundalini manifests itself via various chakras (nerve centres). Sangeetha has rendered thematic concerts where she has selected ragams and songs that she says has helped awaken the various chakras. Since the core belief is that one is but an instrument of the divine, ego is reduced/eliminated thus putting the entire focus on the music itself.


Man opens Eee PC, adds internal USB ports
Solder of fortune
Want to boost the storage capacity of your Eee PC in a cheap and - more to the point - upgradeable way? Want to add Bluetooth while you're at it? Then follow the lead of one enterprising owner who added a pair of internal USB ports to the compact computer.
The Eee PC's memory bay is also home to the machine's Mini PCI slot. Well, on early models it is - some later ones lack this feature. EeeUser.com forum poster Johnx's does, allowing him space to add a pair of surface-mount USB ports, fixed to the motherboard and then - very delicately - connected with wires he soldered onto points on the circuitry.
It's the soldering that would put us off - along with the associated risk of bricking the gadget. But you have to take out the motherboard too. So this is a modification only for those stout of heart and capacious of wallet.
But with the two USB ports in place, you've a handy place for a some cheap USB storage to allow you to keep the computer's SDHC card slot and external ports free. It's a particularly handy mod if you run Windows on the Eee PC, since you can set the added drive up as the site for the OS to write the many temporary files it creates, saving your irreplaceable solid-state disk from shouldering the burden.
When your USB drive's used up its write-cycles, just bung in a new one.
Bootnote The Asus Eee PC model is on holiday.
• Asus Eee PC 4G sub-sub-notebook


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The demand for AI experts has grown exponentially over the last few years. As companies increasingly adopt AI solutions for their businesses, the need for highly experienced, PhD-educated, and technically-adept talent shows no signs of stopping anytime soon.
This guest post was contributed by Jean-François Gagné, CEO of Element AI and originally appeared on his site here. For further commentary beyond the report, see the accompanying blog post.
For a table of the full list of countries and their numbers, or to submit information about the talent pool in your region, send a message using the contact form.
This report summarizes our research into the scope and breadth of the worldwide AI talent pool. Although these data visualizations map the distribution of worldwide talent at the start of 2018, we want to acknowledge that this is a predominantly Western-centric model of AI expertise.
We are submitting our work amidst similar, though much broader, reports such as Tencent’s recent “2017 Global AI Talent White Paper,” which focused primarily on China in comparison to the United States. Tencent’s research found that currently “200,000 of the 300,000 active researchers and practitioners” are already employed in the industry, while some 100,000 are researching or studying in academia. Their number far exceeds the high-end of our measure at 22,000, primarily because it includes the entire technical teams and not just the specially-trained experts. Our report, however, focuses on finding out where the relatively small number of “AI experts” currently reside around the world.
We drew on two popular data sources for this line of inquiry. First, we used the results from several LinkedIn searches, which showed us the total number of profiles according to our own specialized parameters. Second, for an even more advanced subset, we captured the names of leading AI conference presenters who we consider to be influential experts in their respective fields of AI. Finally, we relied on other reports and anecdotes from the global community to put our numbers in greater context and see how the picture may develop in the near future.
Even though we relied primarily on English-language data sources, our view of the talent pool provides a good global representation of the best experts that the field currently has to offer. For this reason, the second half of the report focuses on a qualitative assessment of talent and funding in Asia and Africa, where the reliability of our numbers drops off significantly and does not match the industry or academic output of these hotspots.
According to our broadest LinkedIn measures, we have found that there are roughly 22,000 PhD-educated researchers in the entire world who are capable of working in AI research and applications, with only 3,074 candidates currently looking for work. In the smaller, more advanced subset, we have found that there are currently 5,400 AI experts in the world who are publishing and presenting at leading AI conferences across the globe and who are well-versed enough in the technology to work with teams taking to take it from research to application.
How We Defined “Talent”
Building transformative AI applications for enterprises requires teams of people who have proven technical competency in Machine Learning/Deep Learning, several years of work experience, and can collaborate and thrive in an interdisciplinary environment.
The critical shortage of “talent” in the current AI job market suggests that there are currently not enough people with the strong grasp of academic research and applied software development required to mediate the worlds of business, science, and engineering.
The teams that need to be filled should be able to identify a problem that can be solved with modern machine learning techniques, build and implement that solution from scratch, and then optimizing the solution to work efficiently.
In our search, our hypothetical expert must be either highly talented or very experienced in order to capture the most elite leaders, seniors, and top juniors who would be able to work on such an effort. We used two different approaches to accurately size the pool of people in the world: LinkedIn searches and identifying participants in academic conferences.
Using LinkedIn, we broke down these search criteria to capture a broad view of what it means to be an AI specialist.
These search parameters were built to find candidates who were awarded a PhD no later than 2015, to account for several years of work experience.
Although a PhD is not technically required to be considered an AI expert (since experience applying AI solutions in a real-world setting is more important than a degree), we’ve nonetheless found that having a PhD is a good proxy for assessing the technical ability of the talent pool across different nations.To qualify for this subset, these profiles must also have mentioned “AI” or Artificial Intelligence in addition to one or more advanced concepts, such as deep learning, artificial neural networks, machine learning, computer vision, natural language processing, or robotics. These candidates must also be technically adept: we filtered our numbers to include only people who have a solid grasp of either Python, Tensorflow, or Theano, to make sure they have some experience developing real-world applications. Using these very broad parameters, we identified a total of 22,064 experts.
We also ran a more advanced subset that did not include the (“AI” OR “Artificial Intelligence”) qualifier, omitted “python”, and included more specific AI-only frameworks.
The idea behind this search was to capture candidates who listed very specific frameworks that we typically employ in our own work (these include torch, caffe, and nltk) and omit candidates who are using “AI” as a buzzword. In this search, we identified a number that comes very close to that of our conference presenter numbers: we found 6,138 experts using this search, with 1,735 indicating that they are available for work.For our visualization, we decided to plot the less conservative estimate, in order to capture talent with potentially interdisciplinary skills.
In addition to these narrower LinkedIn searches, we counted authors of published papers or posters to estimate other high-level influencers and “rising stars” in the field. In theory, In theory, these candidates are required to apply AI theories established in controlled environments to messier real-world settings. In this talent pool, we found 5,400 experts who have presented a research paper in the last few years.
The following conferences were prioritized in our research: the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), the International Machine Learning Society (ICML) conference, and finally the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR). We scraped researcher names from these conferences and filled out their location, experience, and education profiles using Mechanical Turk.
According to our data, European and Asian countries have significantly fewer researchers than the US, the UK, or Canada, but we are the first to acknowledge that this is most likely due to LinkedIn being a predominantly Western platform. Our searches found 413 candidates in China, 291 in Singapore, 204 in Japan, and 147 in Korea.
A recent tabulation of LinkedIn users by country done by Meenakshi Chaudhary points out a large discrepancy in LinkedIn user penetration rates, even among developed countries. Chaudhary mentions that “after [the] US, India, Brazil, Great Britain, and Canada have the highest number of LinkedIn users,” which suggests that LinkedIn’s adoption in certain countries and markets heavily skews the representations within our sample. To that effect, while the quantities of LinkedIn experts found in Asia are much lower than in North America or Europe, these numbers are still very high given the fact that LinkedIn’s penetration rates are lower in Asia.
The same goes for the careful examination of presentations at academic conferences. By limiting our search to several English-speaking conferences in the Western world, we risk missing other institutions where AI research and development is done: research centres, private labs, think tanks, smaller universities and institutes, independent researchers and consultants. These people, although experts and domain-leaders, might not be engaging with the global community when they are working at a smaller scale or privately.
AI Talent Hotspots Across the Globe
Out of our 22,000 LinkedIn profiles, almost half of all candidates (9,010) are living and working in the United States. Most of the LinkedIn experts listed their field of study as either Computer Science (12,856) or Computer Engineering (3,879) –– less common fields of study included Mathematics (2,592), Physics (2,157), and IT (1,175). A substantial portion of these experts have worked, at some point, for either Google (756), Microsoft (357), or IBM (265), and have anywhere between three and 10 years of experience working.
The dominance of the U.S. in the AI talent markets is not at all surprising. Paysa, in a recent studyof artificial intelligence talent, found that nearly $650 million is slated to be spent in the United States on annual AI-related salaries alone, with several U.S. companies, having raised an additional $1 billion to fund AI development, making it hard for smaller countries to compete with the U.S.
Nonetheless, Canada came in third place for the number of researchers in our LinkedIn and conference presenter searches, making it a viable competitor to the U.S., with 1,154 high-level profiles, which is high given Canada’s small population and GDP. The Canadian AI talent pool has been refilling with former students and new international researchers alike, with Montreal leading the charge (Facebook, Google, Uber, Samsung, DeepMind have all set up labs there, among others) and Toronto, Edmonton and Vancouver close in tow.
The United Kingdom was the runner-up to the U.S. with a total of 1,861 high-profile candidates. Industry has been a big player in the UK, which has led to significant brain drain: as Ian Sample at The Guardian has recently pointed out, AI professors have been leaving for the industry primarily because demand for talent has been “heavily outstripping supply.”
Germany, on the other hand, has had the opposite problem. As Yasser Jadidi, head of AI research at the Bosch Center for Artificial Intelligence pointed out to The Financial Times, Germany has a strong presence of “young professionals and academics” which has remained “sort of hidden.” With a strong academic presence of 276 conference presenters, Germany has been thinking of ways to commercialize AI expertise for business. Emerging tech hubs such as Cyber Valley in Southern Germany, are looking to give a shared space to industry and academia.
Other European countries also had significant numbers of experts: France had 797 eligible LinkedIn profiles, while Spain came up with 606 profiles. Overall, it is fairly clear that in recent years, Europe has steadily become a competitive location for finding AI talent.
The North American and European AI dominance that we have covered so far does not, however, paint the full picture of global talent. Asia has been vastly underrepresented in our LinkedIn and conference presentation data, primarily due to our Anglo-centric approach. Despite the fact that our searches turned up lower numbers in Asia, paper publications and funding show a different story.
Below, we have summarized the incredible growth that China, Singapore, Japan, and South Korea are exhibiting in their respective markets. We will also cover the reasons why the West-East divide in the talent markets is so prominent and has been so hard to bridge.
In general, we have found that the Asian countries are much more focused on developing applications of AI technology rather than investing into academic research.
China’s AI market growth has been staggering. The United States-China Economic and Security Review Commission has recently stated, in its 2017 Annual Report, that “local [Chinese] governments have pledged more than $7 billion in AI funding, and cities like Shenzhen are providing $1 million for AI startups. By comparison, the U.S. federal government invested $1.1 billion in unclassified AI research in 2015 largely through competitive grants.”
According to this report, Chinese tech companies Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent have become “global leaders in AI,” a trend that is reinforced by the Chinese government making AI a national priority. Just last July, CNN reported that China’s State Council is planning to build an AI industry worth $150 billion in the next few years.
Despite these big leaps in funding, the West has been largely unaware of the work going on in China. As Andrew Ng pointed out in an interview for The Atlantic, “China has a fairly deep awareness of what’s happening in the English-speaking world, but the opposite is not true.” While Chinese researchers speak English and have access to the Western-world of research, the English-speaking community is cut off from Chinese research due to the language barrier.
As a result, China has been able to make big leaps in academia below the radar of the West. While our LinkedIn searches only picked up 413 profiles, 206 of which are also conference presenters, China has recently jumped ahead of the U.S. in artificial intelligence paper publications according to an AI report done by the Obama Whitehouse in late 2016. Traditionally seen as a reliable marker of research activity, published papers are a good indicator of talent growth in the region, although the influence and quality of these papers is contested by some.
In a well-sourced report at The Aleph, Alex Barrera points to the rising quality of education as one of the big reasons that China now has two universities, Peking and Tsinghua, that have recently been categorized among the top 30 universities in the world by the Times Higher Education rankings. Barrera sees the potential for this trend to continue: “While institutions like Stanford still hold onto their perch of the global ranking, universities like Peking University, are closing in. Stanford outranks them in specific scores but lags in others like technology transfer.”
While AI education in China has been growing rapidly, serious AI faculty are still hard to find. Many AI practitioners in China have transitioned from a field like Electrical Engineering or another branch of Computer Science. In short, while the growth of the Chinese talent pool shows no intention of stopping anytime soon, the country still needs some time to build up a rigorous market that rivals that of the United States.
Recent reports have also emphasized the extent to which Singapore is quickly becoming an artificial intelligence research hub. According to a 2017 report from Channel News Asia, The National Research Foundation will be investing $110 million USD into “a new national programme aimed at boosting Singapore’s artificial intelligence capabilities over the next five years.”
Our own data has identified at least 291 highly-qualified AI profiles in the country, along with 21 high-level experts who are publishing papers in leading conferences. Michael James Milne, director at Kaishi Partners, estimated in correspondence that there are more likely to be around 1,500 qualified AI experts currently in Singapore and Southeast Asia.
These numbers are supported by the growing number of research centres that are starting to take hold in the small, cosmopolitan city-state. Joel Ko, of Marvelstone Ventures, recently confirmed to the South China Morning Post that Marvelstone plans to set up an AI hub “which would incubate 100 startups every year.”
The increasing government and private funding means only one thing: Singapore AI is bound to grow significantly over the next few years as these changes pull in more talent.
After Google’s DeepMind program “AlphaGo” defeated South Korean Go champion Lee Sedol in 2016, the South Korean government announced that it would invest $863 million USD in AI research over the next five years.
Since then, Korean news reports, which were graciously translated translated and shared with us by Rufina K. Park, have documented the Korean government’s heavy investments in AI infrastructure. On December 22, 2017, the Ministry of Science and ICT announced “The Plan for Innovation Growth” whereby the government committed to spend 1.56 trillion won (approx. 1.53 billion USD) on AI and related sectors that will prepare Korea for the “fourth industrial revolution” in 2018. Similarly, the Council for Intelligent Knowledge Society aims to spend 244 billion won (approx. 22.6 million USD) on AI in 2018. In total, 7.96 Trillion Won will be spent on the 13 Innovation Growth areas from 2018-2022. Korea’s current plan is to create 550,000 new jobs in the innovative sectors by 2025.
This funding has come in addition to two existing AI research projects, says Mark Zastrow at Nature, noting two specific undertakings that are currently in progress: “Exobrain, which is intended to compete with IBM’s Watson computer, and Deep View, a computer vision project.” Korea has pulled ahead as an industry leader in the area, taking third place in the number of AI patents in 2017.
In our own data, we found a sizeable subset of 147 AI experts currently working in South Korea with 21 recent conference presenters hailing from that area. While having a strong industry presence in AI, it is clear that academic research in Korea, ranked 7th in number of AI dissertations, is not yet quite as strong as in China or Japan.
Unlike China, Japan has a long history of robotics and artificial intelligence research which has largely gone undiscussed in the media. Part of the problem, as some outlets have noted, is Japan’s notorious industry-level insularity, which results from a stiff “language barrier and rigid business practices.” Japan’s academic AI footprint, however, is notably stronger than either South Korea or Singapore, since Japan has roughly 117 active researchers presenting at NIPS and other leading conferences.
Artificial intelligence academics have noted the difficulty of keeping up with other Asian countries: Mitsuru Ishizuka, professor emeritus in AI at the University of Tokyo, noted that Japanese research has fallen behind the work “that is being done in China.” While Japan’s talent footprint is significant, it is clear that their ratios are skewed towards academia: 117 conference presenters versus 204 LinkedIn profiles, significantly lower than China, Singapore, and South Korea. Anita Pan, the Second Secretary and Trade Commissioner of Canada to Japan, pointed out in an email that Japan’s AI talent shortages are well known: “of the 15,659 students enrolled in graduate studies in advanced information technologies, 619 are specifically related to AI, and of those, 123 are expected to complete doctoral degrees.”
Last August, however, the Japanese government announced that it is “planning to invest billions of yen to fund next-generation semiconductors and other technologies critical to AI development.” Pan expects that the funding for the fiscal 2018 will most likely double 2017’s allocation of 51.7 billion yen ($575 million CAD), resulting in a funding package that exceeds 100 billion yen ($1.1 billion CAD). Such advances in funding could spur an industry which has the history and research power to harness home-grown talent. These pecuniary advances have already netted some results: just this August, deep learning startup Preferred Networks Inc. raised $95 million USD from Toyota to work on self-driving technology.
Although not as prolific as either the East or the West, African countries have recently been been growing significantly in AI research and development.
Jacques Ludik, the President of the Machine Intelligence Institute of Africa (MIIA), estimates that there are roughly 1,500 members in his association, 70% of whom can be classified as experts in their respective fields. Ludik pointed out that funding is difficult to come by, but the continent has nonetheless been able to implement AI applications in agriculture and the mobile space.
Timnit Gebru, a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research and a member of the FATE (Fairness Transparency Accountability and Ethics in AI) group, has pointed out in correspondence that machine learning in Africa is privy to a wealth of different kinds of funding: B4 Capital Group, for instance, specializes solely in African and Latin American AI initiatives. The by-product of this kind of funding are AI solutions that are tailored to the problems of each area. Ethiopia, for instance, which has 88 active and individual languages, has been actively developing Natural Language Processing solutions to improve communications.
Nouha Abardazzou, writing for How We Made it in Africa, supports the claim that AI has largely manifested itself in agriculture and healthcare (partially by way of mobile development). One recent AI-driven application has been the ECX e-Trade Platform, which uses Internet of Things (IoT) devices and AI in order to create a coffee-traceability solution that works through all the stages of the supply chain. In the healthcare industry, the SOPHiA artificial intelligence analyses “genomic data to identify disease-causing mutations in patient’s genomic profiles.”
Public awareness about Africa’s role in AI has grown significantly in 2017. Gebru has recently hosted the very first Black in AI workshop at NIPS 2017, which focused not only on the research currently being done in Africa, but also AI work done by black researchers all over the world. Similarly, MIIA recently hosted the very first AI Africa Conference in Johannesburg, South Africa, in October of 2017. This conference was a big success, drawing in expert researchers from all over Africa and the rest of the world to talk about real-world applications of deep learning in the continent.
Analysis of Global Trends
Our conference researcher data also allowed us to make some observations about the ways in which researchers have moved, either for work or school. By looking at the discrepancies between the location of the candidates’ alma mater and their current work location, we have found that candidates are likely to move to the USA for their education and then move to another country for work.
The arc-map above shows candidates who, despite being educated in Canada, the UK, Germany, France, or China, were more likely to move to the USA for professional work. Furthermore, these connected countries hold the highest numbers of talent exchanges: “inbound” researchers indicates the number of researchers who moved to that country for work, “outbound” indicates the amount of people who got their PhD in that country and then ended up going somewhere else for employment.
These arcs suggest that the U.S. acts as the “hub” for AI research and education, serving as the link for both the academic and business worlds where AI intersects. Aligning this finding with our previous assessment that Israel’s and Japan’s scholar to LinkedIn profile ratios are nearly 75% and 57%, respectively, we can see how transnational and global collaboration is a key to sharing AI knowledge and expertise in both industry and in academia.
Interestingly enough, the flows between Asia and Europe are almost non-existent. The AI talent phenomenon is global insofar as it is mediated by the West.
Academia vs Industry
The interplay between the LinkedIn and the conference presenter data allows us to make some interesting observations. Assuming that the conference researchers in this subset all have LinkedIn profiles that were captured in our searches above, we can say, with some approximation, that roughly one third of all AI specialists have at some point presented their research at one of these large academic conferences.
Presenting at conferences understandably skews towards academia. However, there remains an industry presence at these events. The NIPS author demographics indicate that the 2017 conference consisted of 88% academic presenters and 12% industry presenters. While the one-third ratio can seem high, we found that it is a strong global proxy: some countries, such as Israel and Japan, have much higher rates of academics in AI.
This ratio of academics to industry-experts is higher for countries like Germany, where 44% of all LinkedIn candidates are likely to have at one point been conference presenters, and much lower for countries like the UK, where only 14% of AI experts are active in conferences. These trends reflect the journalistic findings that we outlined above: in Germany, it looks like most AI work is happening in academic institutions, while in the UK, AI is more industry-driven, poaching talent from academia in the process.
Israel (75%) and Japan (57%) have the highest ratios between conference researchers and LinkedIn profiles, meaning that their AI work is heavily driven by the academy, which is consistent with the various reporting on these trends. Though, it seems that industry is still a large driver of AI development.
Ireland (1.7%), Brazil (3.3%), and Spain (4.4%) had the lowest ratio of conference presenters to LinkedIn profiles, which suggests that most of the candidates in those countries work in the industry-driven sector of AI research and development.
Although artificial intelligence talent is predominantly U.S.-centric, it is apparent that there are large global hotspots of AI talent in the European, African, and Asian markets. These areas are nonetheless slowly getting tied into the largely Western English-speaking community of academic conferences and LinkedIn industry searches and are set to grow significantly in the coming years.
Many thanks to all those from the community who reached out and contributed stats, anecdotes, translations and other useful information from their regions:
Bayo Adekanmbi | Ade Akin-Aina | Zainab Bawa | Adel Bibi | Valentine Goddard | Ian Goodfellow | Timnit Gebru | Ahmed Mamdouh A. Hassanien | Kiran Jonnalagadda | Jacques Ludik | Daniel McCormack | Michael James Milne | Shakir Mohamed | Anmol Mohan | Adeyemi Odeneye | Anita Pan | Rufina K. Park | Arjun Ram | Maged Shalaby | Yu Shao | Daniel Shinun | Ahmed Yousef
And special thanks to those at Element AI who provided invaluable commentary:
Jean-François Gagné is the Chief Executive officer of Element AI.
#ScaleStrategy Q&A: Managing the Growth Bandwidth
Tech veteran Dean Hopkins on what it takes to scaleup — and down — in both startups and enterprise organizations
#ScaleStrategy is produced by DX Journal and OneEleven. This editorial series delivers insights, advice, and practical recommendations to innovative and disruptive entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs. Read the first part of the interview with Dean Hopkins here.
While working at McKinsey in the 1990s, tech veteran Dean Hopkins first stepped into the world of the internet.
“This was 1993. No internet existed as we know it,” says Hopkins, now the Chief Growth Officer at OneEleven, recalling how he discovered the work of Marc Andreessen. “At that point in time, he was demonstrating his early browser concept and talking about how the future of the internet was going to be huge. I caught the bug and decided I would leave McKinsey and start my first company called Cyberplex.”
After a bit of a bumpy start, Cyberplex scaled quickly. “Cyberplex tripled every year and grew to 500 people with $50 million in revenue and $975 million market cap,” he says.
Then 2001 hit. “That was the peak of the cycle followed by a trough. It was the biggest learning experience of my career. I had to descale the company to survive,” he says. Over seven quarters, Hopkins took the team from 500 to 50 and brought the company back to profitability. He then transitioned Cyberplex to new leadership and moved on to his next challenge.
For the next 12 years, Hopkins worked as a management consultant with his own boutique firm that was focused on driving global transformation initiatives for companies such as Thomson Reuters and the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board.
With both entrepreneurial and intrapreneurial expertise, Hopkins is now applying his global growth skills to transform OneEleven’s unique scaleup model into a worldwide Scale-as-a-Service model.
We recently spoke to Hopkins about tough lessons he learned at Cyberplex, how enterprise growth is different than startup growth, and how he’s applying these lessons to expanding the OneEleven model globally.
DX Journal: When you think back to your time when Cyberplex hit its inflection point, what did you learn about scaling?
Dean Hopkins: Culture and people were the two things that allowed us to handle both the steep trajectory both up and down. Those things got us through the crazy knee in the curve and probably more importantly, helped us when we needed to descale.
Attracting amazing people that became my partners in growth was the reason we were able to scale. I couldn’t have done it alone.
Secondly, we built a culture that was accustomed to scaling and had an appetite for growth. Our culture was about resilience, and scaling, and picking yourself up and dusting yourself off. We made it okay to make mistakes, then march on.
DX Journal: Why people and culture? Why isn’t it all of the other things?
Hopkins: It’s a great question. In a culture where the decision-making takes a long, protracted time, where risk-taking isn’t there, and where people have to analyze things to death before they can make a decision, scaling is impossible. People would crumble under the weight of scale because the number of things coming at them.
To scale, it’s important to trust that people are all working toward the same goals and are empowered to make decisions.
That’s where culture comes in. It becomes a culture that can tolerate the bandwidth of needs that come with growth. If I didn’t have both of those things — good people ready to make decisions and a culture where I allow them to do it — I would have failed to scale.
The other things like technology, offices, infrastructure, are secondary when you distill it down. Companies that are successful across different geographies, industries, offices, become that way through empowering their people and building a culture that tolerates growth.
DX Journal: When you moved out of Cyberplex and into Thomson Reuters and you were managing a large-scale transformation. How did you manage scale within an environment as big and complex as Thomson Reuters?
Hopkins: The first thing I noticed was pace slowed down dramatically. What used to take me a week or a month now took 6 to 8 or 12 months. Large organizations only have the capacity for so much change. Once I did get the ship to turn in a new direction, I moved a lot of people, revenue, cost, and dollars. I had to be patient enough to let it take hold. The experience was much more of a marathon where I had to think multiple chess moves ahead and let the game play out.
DX Journal: How do you know when to modify your approach or give up when dealing with transformation in a large organization?
Hopkins: I didn’t do a great job of it at the beginning. I pushed an entrepreneurial agenda at an entrepreneurial pace, and very quickly ran headlong into blockers. I had to adapt and use an experimentation model. I tried different levels of throttle until I got to a point where the organization was willing to accept it. I learned to read the frustration on peoples’ faces saying “okay, no more, Dean. I can’t take any more of this” and built relationships with people where they were able to tell me that.
I was able to adapt and adjust my own style to better reflect the environment. Then over 12 years, I gradually increased the tolerance for risk-taking and for change within the organization. I would work with specific people to help them increase their ability to drive change. What was first gear early on, became second and third gear closer to the end of my tenure. Ultimately, the organization became much more comfortable with making change at a higher rate.
DX Journal: What’s a scale lesson you learned the hard way?
Hopkins: I learned to hire slowly and fire quickly based on fit. One rotten apple really can spoil the bunch. As part of this, I learned to listen very closely to my people. The people on my team knew about someone that didn’t fit long before I did. By listening, and taking quick action, I saw the immediate positive impact on culture.
Finally, I learned the value of getting out of the way. By fully trusting people, providing them good direction and support when needed, it activates them to reach their full potential. All of these were learned through many failed attempts, and I have the scar tissue to prove it.
DX Journal: What signals do you use to know you’re on the right path when you start to scale something and you’re trying to measure if it’s working?
Hopkins: One of the reasons we were able to survive at Cyberplex — both the growth and the decline — is that we had very good leading indicators of the business. We had invested heavily to try and understand what our funnel looked like, what our planned capacity was, and we had the metrics dialed in. Every month and every quarter, we constantly refined our ratios so we had a really good sense of what was coming. When things started falling off the cliff, we trusted our instruments and started acting accordingly.
Read more about Dean Hopkin’s plans for expanding OneEleven globally.
DX Journal covers the impact of digital transformation (DX) initiatives worldwide across multiple industries.
#ScaleStrategy Q&A: OneEleven’s Chief Growth Officer on Building a Global Scaleup Knowledge Base
Dean Hopkins’ is aiming to build and deploy a Scale-as-a-Service model worldwide
#ScaleStrategy is produced by DX Journal and OneEleven. This editorial series delivers insights, advice, and practical recommendations to innovative and disruptive entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs. Read the second part of the interview with Dean Hopkins here.
“We’re being ambitious. We want to show scaling companies that we can scale, too,” said OneEleven’s Chief Growth Officer, Dean Hopkins, when the Toronto-based scaleup hub announced its plans to expand to Ottawa, Vancouver, London and Berlin in late 2018 and into 2019.
It’s an opportune time to expand globally as a scaleup hub.
According to CB Insights, total annual venture capital global funding “increased nearly 50% in 2017, as over $164B was invested across 11,042 deals. Deal activity was up by 11%, with both deal and dollar figures representing annual highs.”
As for 2018 so far, KPMG’s Venture Pulse Report says “for the fourth consecutive quarter, VC invested has exceeded $45 billion, and in the most recent quarter, just barely fallen shy of $50 billion once more.”
Hopkins is excited to walk the scaleup talk once again.
A tech scene veteran, Hopkins was the CEO & Co-founder of Cyberplex for more than a decade where he grew the organization from a startup to a public company with nearly $1 billion in market capitalization. During his career at Cyberplex, he also successfully managed the company through a major downsizing as the tech bubble collapsed and transitioned it to new leadership where the company enjoyed another round of growth.
Prior to joining OneEleven as Chief Growth Officer, Hopkins ran a boutique management consulting firm he founded in 2006 to drive transformation initiatives on a global basis for clients such as Thomson Reuters and the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board.
We caught up with Hopkins to talk about scaling lessons, OneEleven’s growth plans and developing the world’s leading source of scaleup knowledge.
DX Journal: You have extensive experience scaling from both an entrepreneurial and intrapreneurial perspective. What are some of the lessons you’ve learned?
Dean Hopkins: First off, it’s all about people. Attracting amazing people that became my partners in growth was the reason we were able to scale. I couldn’t have done it alone. ‘Hire great people and get out of their way’ became my mantra — even to this day.
The second ingredient to scale was culture. We had built a culture that was accustomed to scaling and had an appetite for growth. Our culture was about resilience, and scaling, and picking yourself up and dusting yourself off. We made it okay to make mistakes, then march on.
DX Journal: What have you learned about scaling at OneEleven?
Hopkins: Early on after I joined OneEleven, I sat in on a community lunch with about 300 people from all the member companies. At this lunch, new members are brought up in front of the crowd to say a little about their company. Then 300 people welcome them with cheers — a lot of love goes their way. After that, others come up to talk about their big wins, like raising money, landing a big customer or completing a big launch. And again, 300 people applaud and celebrate them. Well, I remember sitting there thinking, ‘where was this when I was building Cyberplex?’ I was in a hovel by myself toiling away with no community other than people that I would lean on as advisors. I never had the kind of kudos, support, warmth, love, resources that these companies have at OneEleven, and that’s when things clicked for me. This is what community is. A lot of people talk about community, but to actually see it viscerally done, made me realize I needed to recreate it in other geographies.
What we’re trying to do is get a group of companies — all individually pursuing their dreams, but collectively working together — to make sure that each other are successful.
DX Journal: You’re focused taking this OneEleven scaleup initiative global. How do you assess where you need to be?
Hopkins: A big aha moment for me around OneEleven was getting the Startup Genome report. I looked at our success in Toronto and yet our city was number 14 or 15 on their list. I said, ‘wait a minute, OneEleven is working incredibly well in the 15th best market?! What if we took OneEleven and built it out to some of the top 10 markets? That’s what led to the business plan we’re currently executing.
From there, I overlaid our partner Oxford Properties into the mix. As a large global real estate firm, this gave me the first 4 markets to go after — London, Berlin, Boston, Vancouver. We’re studying each market, mapping the ecosystem, understanding who the players are, comparing it to Toronto, figuring out what the differences and similarities are and then plotting our entry. Over the next year, we’ll be in each of those markets.
The approach to entering each of these markets will be subtly different depending on character of the market. We’ve invested a lot in meeting the community, understanding who does what to whom and how we can add value. By the time we launch in those markets, we’ll already have a reputation built up because we’ll have spent some money to support the local ecosystem. We’ll have brought some value to some of the companies there by helping them maybe come to Canada or come to one of our other markets. I view it as kind of putting some karma in the bank before we even launch in each.
DX Journal: When OneEleven enters a geography, what’s the benefit to companies and communities located there?
Hopkins: From our perspective, there are 3 key benefits to having OneEleven in your city.
The first is that we’re building the global knowledge base of scale. Each community we add is bringing a new rich set of perspectives on how to scaleup businesses. We then make that available to everybody in the peer community.
The second benefit is for the companies in each geography is an easier path into other markets through our growing global ecosystem. If a company in Toronto wants to go to London, they can access continental Europe because we have assets and relationships in Berlin.
Lastly, we are building what we call Scale-as-a-Service. This is a set of capabilities — much like you’d find on Amazon but only dedicated to scaling — that help people with the common challenges of scaling. This only gets richer and more pressure-tested the more markets we serve. We’ll have the best set of Scale-as-a-Service capabilities of anybody out there because we’re activating across companies in multiple markets.
DX Journal: Speaking of a scaleup knowledge base, as a company grows are there one or two things that really become important?
Hopkins: Entrepreneurs 100% need to think about getting away from the technical, engineering-focused orientation of their early stages. They should focus their time disproportionately on building their channel to market, building their go-to market, building their customer base, building their way in which revenue is going to come to them. Build protected paths to market that are defendable, because that’s really where the source of competitive advantage is. An entrepreneur could have the best product in the world, but if he or she can’t get it to market the company is dead. The companies that figure out how to build proprietary go-to market or protected go-to market are the ones that end up winning.
The second thing is not to underestimate the complexity of the people equation. Most founders who have reached the scaleup phase realize they need to think about organizational design, career paths for employees and what the organization will look like in 3 years. If they don’t, they will have a churn problem, which is very expensive and disruptive for the business.
The third thing is preparing for the next big round of funding. Generally speaking, people underestimate the amount of relationship building and preparation work needed. It probably takes a year or so to get ready properly. We’re trying to help companies diagnose where they are, how much runway they need and prepare them adequately for the big round, which is another league up from what they’re normally used to.
DX Journal: What books have you read that helped you get through your scaleup journey?
I’m also a big believer in a book called The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. It’s all about finding personal motivation and that gets you through some very challenging times when you’re leading a company. There’s a book called The Speed of Trust by Steven Covey, which is all about how to engineer trust in your organization, which is essential at this level. Lastly, Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey A. Moore. A seminal work on how you market and build a go-to market strategy.
DX Journal covers the impact of digital transformation (DX) initiatives worldwide across multiple industries.
Businesses should ‘follow the money’ when adopting AI
A June report from the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) found that, overall, artificial intelligence adoption is still slow; only 20 per cent of “AI-aware” businesses say they are adopters.
The MGI report on AI discussed the difference in AI investment and adoption, with investment in AI technologies experiencing a threefold external investment growth since 2013. Compared to that figure, 41 per cent of firms told MGI that they are uncertain about the benefits, and within that 20 per cent of adopters, 10 per cent are adopters of three or more AI-backed technologies.
A new report from Harvard Business Review on the two major business potentials of AI said that while this may be the trend on average, “senior executives know that AI isn’t just hype.”
HBR attributes some of the hesitancy to adoption to business leaders not being sure where they should be applying AI, and after McKinsey researchers Michael Chui, Nicolaus Henke and Mehdi Miremadi took a closer look at 400 AI use cases from 19 different industries, and nine business functions, they found that the question of where to put AI to work in a business is a matter of playing “follow the money.”
“The business areas that traditionally provide the most value to companies tend to be the areas where AI can have the biggest impact,” the report explains.
The two areas that HBR found to the implementation of AI to have the biggest impact are: supply-chain management/manufacturing and marketing and sales.
Chui, Henke and Miremad also found that another way for businesses to find an area to introduce AI is “to simply look at the functions that are already taking advantage of traditional analytics techniques.” Meaning that business leaders should look to apply AI to parts of the company where neural network techniques could provide a higher performance, or “generate additional insights and applications.”
According to the MGI report, companies that have a low AI adoption rate are in the education, health care, and travel/ tourism sectors.
In a previous Digital Journal article on how hospitality brands can undergo digital transformation, it was stressed that “hospitality brands can use new technologies to make their businesses hyper guest-focused.” Utilizing AI for marketing and sales purposes is just one way of making that happen.
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If you’ve been following the news you’re probably aware of the large-scale demonstrations happening in Hong Kong. Occupy Central With Love And Peace is a civil disobedience campaign formed in March, 2013; their goal is to fight for the right of Hong Kongese to have a free and unbridled democracy. On August 31st the Chinese government announced they’ll allow direct elections by 2017- but there was one exception, voters would only be allowed to chose from a list of pre-approved candidates. Since then, the situation has gradually escalated to where thousands of people are on the streets today.
Despite the many differences between Toronto and Vancouver’s upcoming municipal elections, there’s one thing they have in-common. Both cities have women with Chinese backgrounds running for Mayor. Toronto’s Olivia Chow was born in Hong Kong, and her Vancouver counterpart Meena Wong was born in Mainland China. Also in common is that both were active with the federal NDP. They’ve also been quite close, Wong was Chow’s personal assistant from 1999-2002.
But despite the mayoral hopeful’s similarities, there’s one significant difference. As explained in a story in today’s Globe And Mail Wong has now gone public- speaking out in support of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement. So, what happened with Olivia Chow?

domain: sociology


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Georgia couples might reach an impasse when one spouse wants to undertake estate planning and the other does not. In the absence of that spouse’s cooperation, a person can still take steps to inventory assets that are held jointly and individually. Knowing what a spouse’s assets are and how to access them might be important if that spouse dies and the other spouse becomes the estate’s administrator.
People may still be able to do some limited estate planning without their spouse. They can prepare documents that appoint someone to handle financial and health matters in case they become incapacitated. They can also create a will and a trust for assets that belong solely to them. However, someone who is not a spouse cannot be named as a beneficiary on a retirement account unless that spouse gives permission. This means that people will need cooperation from their spouse if they want to name children from a previous marriage as beneficiaries on such an account.
Demonstrating these limitations may help persuade them to participate in estate planning. If the reluctant spouse understands that the law dictates that assets may be distributed in a way that they are not happy with, they might be more inclined to work on an estate plan.
It is not unusual for individuals to be reluctant to tackle estate planning or for family members to prefer to not discuss the subject, but estate planning can be critical to making sure one’s wishes are carried out. Furthermore, communication can also be important because it can help prepare family members for what is in the estate plan and why. An attorney may be able to review the many estate planning options that are available including the different uses of trusts.

domain: finance


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Sydney, Sep 27 (UNI) Australian Prime Minister John Howard today defended the public health system in the country which was being blamed for incidents of miscarriages at a major hospital here.
''This would appear to be a very serious mistake but I think we should be careful to understand that compared with the health systems of other countries, our system is good,'' the Australian Broadcasting Corporation quoted the Prime Minister as saying.
Mr Howard was responding to public anger over two women criticising nursing staff at Royal North Shore Hospital for miscarriages after long waits.
The government also called for wide-ranging inquiry into the hospital.
In the first incident, Ms Jana Horska had a miscarriage after waiting for two hours without treatment in the hospital's Emergency Department on Tuesday night.
In another incident, 40-year-old Jenny Langmaid said she had a miscarriage in the hospital in June 2005, after waiting for almost two hours, being told there were no beds.
Health Minister Tony Abbott described Ms Horska's case as an absolute tragedy.
The New South Wales state government apologised for the incidents and ordered an investigation, but the State Opposition has called for a wide-ranging independent inquiry into the matter.
A senior Emergency Department doctor at the hospital said the case highlights a problem of overcrowding and over-stretched facilities across Australia's public hospital system.
Dr Tony Joseph, head of the department's trauma unit, said ''This could happen in any emergency department in this city, in this state and in this country.'' UNI

domain: news


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Serial killer David Alan Gore, who admitted killing four women and two teenage girls in the 1980s to satisfy his sexual urges, was put to death by lethal injection in Florida on Thursday, Reuters reported. He was convicted and sentenced to death for the 1983 murder of Lynn Elliott, 17, whom he kidnapped when she was hitchhiking to the beach.
Elliott was Gore's final victim. The others were Hsiang Huang Ling, 48, and her daughter Ying Hua Ling, 17; Judy Kay Daley, 35; Angelica LaVellee, 14; and Barbara Ann Byer, 14.
After a series of delays, the execution went forward before two dozen relatives and law enforcement personnel, the Tampa Bay Times reported.
In his final statement on Thursday, Gore apologized to Elliott's parents and said he prayed they would find peace.
"I wish above all else my death could bring her back,'' Gore said, according to a record of the statement provided by corrections officials.
Gore, 58, was pronounced dead at the Florida State Prison near Starke at 6:19 p.m., governor's spokeswoman Amy Graham said. He spent 28 years on death row.
Gore shot Elliott, 17, as she ran outside naked and screaming in an attempt to escape after being repeatedly raped, according to court documents cited by the news agency.
The teen's murder, witnessed by a passing boy, led to Gore's arrest.
The case led to discovery of a series of earlier rapes and murders committed by Gore and his older cousin, Fred Waterfield.
Criminal psychologists testified that the pair formed a morbid alliance, hunting young women at beaches and along stretches of roadways in and around Indian River County, a rural citrus-growing area about 150 miles north of Miami, Reuters reported.
Gore received life sentences for the deaths of the other five women and in 1984 was sentenced to death for Elliott's murder. After the initial sentence was overturned, he was again sentenced to death in 1992.
He was the fourth inmate put to death since Florida Gov. Rick Scott took office in January 2011, and the 13th executed in the United States this year, Reuters reported.
"This was an individual whose crimes were heinous," Scott said earlier Thursday, according to the Times. "He was convicted and sentenced to death."
Waterfield is serving two life sentences at a Florida prison.
Reuters contributed to this report.
More content from msnbc.com and NBC News:
- Experts: Zimmerman likely to testify in Trayvon Martin case
- Zimmerman's new attorney: Who is Mark O'Mara?
- 4 feet of hail in Texas? Photos, reports cause quite a storm
- 2 Coast Guard members shot to death in Alaska


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Med Hypotheses. 1981 May;7(5):601-13.
A review of the biological properties of seaweed is presented and the role of seaweed as a breast cancer anticarcinogen is suggested. Proposed mechanisms of action are: reduction of plasma cholesterol, binding of biliary steroids, inhibition of carcinogenic fecal flora, binding of pollutants, stimulation of the immune system, and the protective effects of beta-sitosterols. In an experiment using sarcoma-180 in mice, seaweed extract appeared to have an antitumor effect. Thus it is suggested that breast ...Continue Reading →

domain: chemistry


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domain: design


text:
Last year, a Houston Police Officer who shot his neighbor after a dog fight has officially resigned.
Jason Loosmore, an 8-year department veteran, remains under criminal investigation in the October incident but has not been charged.
State records show his tenure with the department ended on April 11, but the resignation was not revealed publicly until the Chronicle inquired.
“The officer has resigned from the department,” Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo said. “Due to an ongoing criminal investigation and the provisions of Texas Local Government Code Chapter 143, I am precluded from commenting any further.”
The law spells out the appeals rights of officers.
Loosmore’s private attorney, Carson Joachim, declined to comment about the shooting, citing the ongoing investigation by police and the district attorney’s office.
He said Loosmore had not been forced to resign.
“He just had an opportunity to pursue another career that’s not in law enforcement,” he said. “Which obviously, that’s his prerogative to do.”
The case highlighted concerns among civil rights attorneys, who said the Houston Police Department does not sufficiently discipline officers who violate policy. After the shooting, only five of 40 cases involving police shootings of unarmed individuals since 2010 had resulted in disciplinary action against officers, even after police chiefs found that they had violated policy.
None of those officers was criminally charged, nor were the disciplinary actions announced publicly.
Loosmore got into an argument with his neighbor, 21-year-old Casey Brown, after their dogs fought.
The argument gave way to a scuffle, at which point the off-duty officer shot Brown in the stomach and chest.
Brown was charged initially with misdemeanor assault, but the charge was dropped.
“Although this happened under prior administration, it has not been forgotten or pushed aside,” said Dane Schiller, spokesman for Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg. “We inherited a lot of cases and we’re working our way through them.”
The case was supposed to have been presented to a grand jury but was delayed after a request from Loosmore’s attorney, he said.
“It’s expected in the near term,” he said.
Chareka Gadson, Brown’s lawyer, said he is still undergoing surgeries and trying to recuperate fully from the shooting. She said the family had been unaware of the resignation and had notified the city earlier this year that they were reserving a legal claim against the city because of the shooting.
“I trust his resignation won’t interfere with justice for my client,” she said.
Joseph Gamaldi, vice president with the Houston Police Officers’ Union, declined comment because Loosmore was no longer a Houston police officer.
“We are not representing him, he is no longer a Houston police officer, so we have no comment,” he said.


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Turner Home Entertainment
Review by: Larry Thomas
I'm just guessing, mind you, but I'll bet that DVDs have become
second only to gift certificates as the most favored, universally accessible
gift for holiday giving. Let me go over just a few of some of the great new
releases that might serve you well as a pleasing stocking-stuffer for that film
fan on your shopping list.
After what seems like eons of waiting, my all-time favorite movie is now available
on DVD. Yes, I've had it on laser disc for years, but have been breathlessly awaiting
a restored DVD version with all sorts of bells and whistles. Now, King Kong
(1933) is being issued in several incarnations. Two versions are available of
the big guy alone: a two-disc special edition and a two-disc collector's edition
packaged in a collectable tin and including a 20-page reproduction of the original
souvenir program, postcard reproductions of the original one sheets, and a mail-in
offer for a reproduction of a vintage 27-inch-by-41-inch movie poster. The extras
include a restored and digitally mastered print; commentary by Ray Harryhausen
and Ken Ralston, with Merian C. Cooper, Ernest B. Schoedsack, Ruth Rose, Fay Wray
and Robert Armstrong; 2005 documentary directed by renowned filmmaker Kevin Brownlow:
I'm Kong: The Exploits of Merian C. Cooper; Merian C. Cooper movies trailer
gallery; and RKO Production 601: The Making of Kong, Eighth Wonder of the
World a two-hour, seven-part feature with director Peter Jackson.
There's also The King Kong Collection which adds the new-to-DVD titles Son
of Kong and Mighty Joe Young.
My dollars will go to the two-disc collector's edition, because of all
the extra goodies. You can always buy the other two titles on separate DVDs
(which, of course, you should).

domain: artistic


CNB Financial Corp. in Clearfield, Pa., said Tuesday that Charles R. Guarino had resigned as the company's treasurer and principal financial officer.
The company said in a regulatory filing that it would search for a replacement for Guarino, who was also the chief financial officer for its CNB Bank. The $1.5 billion-asset company said that its board had appointed Brian W. Wingard, 37, to succeed Guarino on an interim basis.
The filing said that the company and Guarino had "mutually agreed" to the departure but did not list a reason.
Wingard has been an assistant vice president and controller for the company since November 2007. He previously worked as a certified public accountant in the public practice at Parente Randolph LLC.


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Get your tickets to House of Rugby LIVE
One for all the nauses out there
House of Rugby is back for our biggest live show to date. Join Alex, Haskell, Tinds + some secret special guests and our very good friends at Guinness in the spectacular Flatiron Square for what promises to be an incredible evening.
We'll discuss just how you should prepare moules mariniere (we think you know what not to do), we'll figure out if there is anything James Haskell wouldn't do, and we may even reveal just who is the heavy breather. And if we have time we may even mention the Rugby World Cup. But no promises.

domain: entertainment


Epileptic encephalopathy linked to protein trafficking gene
Researchers have linked a debilitating neurological disease in children to mutations in a gene that regulates neuronal development through control of protein movement within neuronal cells.
The scientists from the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital at McGill University, led by Peter McPherson, along with collaborators in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Germany, and at SickKids Hospital and the University of Toronto, have discovered that a severe form of epileptic encephalopathy is caused by recessive loss-of-function mutations in the gene DENND5A. Their findings were published in the American Journal of Human Genetics on Nov. 17.
Epileptic encephalopathy is a rare but devastating sub-form of epilepsy that results in severe mental and physical disabilities in children from birth. It is often caused by improper development of the brain. Individuals with epileptic encephalopathy caused by mutations in DENND5A present with serious anomalies in brain structure along with calcifications in the brain and altered facial features.
Researchers performed whole exome sequencing on three children with epileptic encephalopathy from two families, one from Saudi Arabia and another from Jordan. Both families were consanguineous, meaning the parents were related to each other. This greatly increases the chance that rare mutations that are recessive and that cause no harm to the parents are expressed in the children. The whole exome sequencing, along with extensive and complex genetic analysis, revealed that recessive mutations in DENND5A were responsible for the disease, with the Saudi family and the Jordanian family having different mutations but in the same DENND5A gene. They found that mutations in DENND5A lead to a lack of the DENND5A protein, resulting in underdevelopment of the central nervous system. The protein expressed from the DENND5A gene is present at highest levels in the nervous system especially while the brain is developing, corroborating the evidence that mutations in the gene cause epileptic encephalopathy.
The researchers discovered that the DENND5A protein controls the movement of receptors for key developmental factors called neurotrophins. Disruption of DENND5A function leads to altered levels of these receptors, which could explain why loss of DENND5A leads to the severe neurological developmental defects in the patients.
Epilepsy affects approximately three per cent of the world population, and epileptic encephalopathy is a rare sub-form of the disease. It is difficult to say how many children with epileptic encephalopathy have the DENND5A mutations, but now that the gene has been identified as a cause, researchers around the world can begin to test patients for mutations in this gene.
This finding also improves our understanding of neuronal development. The observation that loss-of-function mutations in DENND5A causes epileptic encephalopathy suggests that DENND5A protein controls membrane trafficking pathways critical for normal neuronal development and strengthens the argument that protein trafficking processes in cells are critical for normal neuronal development and function.
“Our study demonstrates the importance of membrane trafficking in neuronal development and it provides a new pathophysiological mechanism for this disease type. This will allow physicians around the world to test if mutations in DENND5A are causing the disease in their patients, and also to provide genetic counselling for affected families,” says Dr. Chanshuai Han, the lead author on the study.
This research was funded with the help of the Canadian Institutes for Health Research, the German Academic Exchange Service, the Ontario Brain Institute, Genome Canada, and the Fonds de recherché Quebec, Santé.
Peter McPherson, the senior author on the study, is a James McGill Professor and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
December 1, 2016


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For a long time now, the most desired amenity for many people living near the vibrant Delmar Loop has been a grocery store. We’re now just four days from the August 11 opening of United Provisions in the $80M Washington University Loop Living project. nextSTL has been following the project from its first mention in early 2010. Recently, I was able to join a preview of the grocery and eatery. Ownership behind Global Foods in Kirkwood will run the grocery, and food mogul Ben Poremba of Salume Bedu and Olio & Elaia is overseeing prepared food.
Eat-in options are extensive:
A solid cheese and deli selection will no doubt be popular:
And there’s a full grocery with all the essentials: toothpaste, toilet paper, cleaning supplies, Urban Chestnut beer…
The frozen and refrigerated section is large as well. They’ve fit a lot into a relatively small space.

domain: food