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Orange Creamsicle Cold Brew

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Cherry Blossom Tea Latte

Collegiate Gothic: Cope and Stewardson Architects

A delicate, floral spring and summer drink featuring the subtle cherry-like aroma and slight saltiness of sakura (cherry blossoms).  Made with steeped sakura tea or a flavored base, combined with steamed or frothed milk, and often sweetened or enhanced with syrup or powder for color and flavor. It’s lighter and more tea-forward than a coffee-based latte. Available hot or with ice at the UnCommon Grounds Cafe in the Neuberger Centennial Campus Center

Barbering & Cosmetology Academies

‘The Barber of Seville’ by Luis Alvarez Catalá

Codes, standards and licensing for barbering schools and cosmetology academies are governed by local regulations; or local adaptations of national standards-setting organizations.  

Northern Michigan University | Marquette County

Building Codes

  1. Minimum Floor Space
    • Schools must provide adequate space for instruction and practice. For example, California requires a minimum of 3,000 square feet for cosmetology schools (which often include barbering), with at least 2,000 square feet dedicated to working, practice, and classroom areas. Additional space (e.g., 30 square feet per student beyond the first 50) may be required as enrollment increases.
    • Rooms for practical work must be sized appropriately, such as at least 14 feet wide for one row of barber chairs or 20 feet for two rows (California standard).
  2. Ceiling Height
    • Practice and classroom areas often require a minimum ceiling height, such as 9 feet, to ensure proper ventilation and comfort (e.g., California Building Code).
  3. Floor Finish
    • Floors in areas like restrooms or workspaces must be made of nonabsorbent materials (e.g., tile) to facilitate cleaning and maintain hygiene.
  4. Separation from Other Uses
    • Barbering schools must be distinct entities, not combined with residential spaces or unrelated businesses (e.g., Nevada’s NAC 643.500).
  5. Compliance with Local Building and Zoning Codes
    • Facilities must adhere to local ordinances for construction, occupancy, and zoning, ensuring the building is structurally sound and legally permitted for educational use (e.g., Virginia’s 18VAC41-20-270).
  6. Accessibility
    • Buildings must comply with accessibility standards (e.g., ADA in the U.S.), providing ramps, wide doorways, and accessible restrooms.

Occupational Safety and Health Administration: Bloodborne Pathogen Safety Standards


Safety

  1. Fire Safety
    • Compliance with the State Uniform Fire Prevention and Building Code (e.g., New York’s 19 NYCRR Parts 600-1250) or equivalent, including fire exits, extinguishers, and alarms.
    • Emergency exits must be clearly marked and unobstructed.
  2. Electrical Safety
    • All electrical equipment (e.g., clippers, dryers) must be regularly inspected (e.g., PAT testing in some regions) to prevent shocks or fires.
  3. Ventilation and Temperature Control
    • Adequate ventilation systems are required to maintain air quality and a safe working temperature, protecting students and instructors from fumes or overheating.
  4. First Aid and Emergency Preparedness
    • A stocked first aid kit must be available, and schools should have protocols for handling accidents or emergencies.
  5. Equipment Safety
    • Tools and workstations (e.g., chairs, sinks) must be maintained in good condition to prevent injuries. Hazardous tools like razor-edged implements for callus removal are often prohibited (e.g., California regulations).
  6. Occupational Safety
    • Compliance with OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) or state equivalents, such as Virginia’s Department of Labor and Industry standards, to protect against workplace hazards like chemical exposure or repetitive strain.


Hygiene

  1. Sanitation of Facilities
    • Schools must be kept clean and sanitary at all times, including floors, walls, furniture, and workstations (e.g., Virginia’s 18VAC41-20-270).
  2. Disinfection of Tools
    • Each student or instructor must have a wet disinfection unit at their station for sterilizing reusable tools (e.g., combs, shears) after each use. Disinfectants must be EPA-registered and bactericidal, virucidal, and fungicidal.
    • Single-use items (e.g., razor blades) must be discarded after each client in a labeled sharps container.
  3. Hand Hygiene
    • Practitioners must wash hands with soap and water or use hand sanitizer before services (e.g., Texas Rule 83.102).
  4. Client Protection
    • Sanitary neck strips or towels must be used to prevent capes from contacting clients’ skin directly (e.g., California regulations).
    • Services cannot be performed on inflamed, broken, or infected skin, and practitioners with such conditions on their hands must wear gloves.
  5. Product Safety
    • Cosmetic products containing FDA-banned hazardous substances are prohibited, and all products must be used per manufacturer instructions (e.g., Virginia’s 18VAC41-20-270).
  6. Waste Management
    • Proper disposal of soiled items (e.g., hair clippings) and hazardous waste (e.g., blades) is required, often daily or after each client.
  7. Health Department Compliance
    • Schools must follow state health department guidelines and report inspection results (e.g., Virginia requires reporting to the Board of Barbers and Cosmetology).
  8. Self-Inspection
    • Annual self-inspections must be documented and retained for review (e.g., Virginia mandates keeping records for five years).


Discussion

  • State-Specific Variations: Always consult your state’s barbering or cosmetology board for exact requirements. For instance, Texas (TDLR) emphasizes signage and licensing display, while California focuses on detailed sterilization methods.
  • Inspections: Schools are subject to regular inspections by state boards or health departments to ensure compliance.

Cosmetology (as time allows)

 

8990 Grand River Ave, Detroit

Homepage

Most Luxurious Barbering Experience in Tokyo

Parkersburg School of Cosmetology & Esthetics

Standards West Virginia

 

The personal care industry, encompassing cosmetics, skincare, haircare, hygiene products, salons, and spas, plays a vital role in modern society. Economically, it generates trillions globally, creates millions of jobs, and drives innovation in chemistry, biotechnology, and sustainable formulations. Socially, it boosts self-esteem, promotes hygiene, and supports mental well-being by helping individuals feel confident and cared for.

 

Training students for this profession is essential. It equips them with specialized knowledge in dermatology, product formulation, safety regulations, client consultation, and ethical practices. Proper education ensures high-quality service delivery, minimizes health risks from improper techniques, and fosters innovation in eco-friendly solutions. As consumer demands evolve toward personalization and sustainability, well-trained professionals maintain industry standards, enhance customer trust, and open rewarding career paths in a fast-growing sector.

 

No photo description available.

Cosmetology

 

 

Designing Lighting for People and Buildings

IES Standards Open for Public Review

Standard Practice on Lighting for Educational Facilities

Recommended Practice: Lighting Retail Spaces

IES Method for Determining Correlated Color Temperature

 

Sport Lighting

“Electrical Building World’s Columbian Exposition Chicago 1892

Today we feature the catalog of the Illumination Engineering Society — one of the first names in standards-setting in illumination technology, globally* with particular interest in its leading title IES LP-1 | LIGHT + DESIGN Lighting Practice: Designing Quality Lighting for People and Buildings.

From its prospectus:

“…LIGHT + DESIGN was developed to introduce architects, lighting designers, design engineers, interior designers, and other lighting professionals to the principles of quality lighting design. These principles; related to visual performance, energy, and economics; and aesthetics; can be applied to a wide range of interior and exterior spaces to aid designers in providing high-quality lighting to their projects.

Stakeholders: Architects, interior designers, lighting practitioners, building owners/operators, engineers, the general public, luminaire manufacturers.  This standard focuses on design principles and defines key technical terms and includes technical background to aid understanding for the designer as well as the client about the quality of the lighted environment. Quality lighting enhances our ability to see and interpret the world around us, supporting our sense of well-being, and improving our capability to communicate with each other….”

The entire catalog is linked below:

IES Lighting Library

Illumination technologies run about 30 percent of the energy load in a building and require significant human resources at the workpoint — facility managers, shop foremen, front-line operations and maintenance personnel, design engineers and sustainability specialists.  The IES has one of the easier platforms for user-interest participation:

IES Standards Open for Public Review

Because the number of electrotechnology standards run in the thousands and are in continual motion* we need an estimate of user-interest in any title before we formally request a redline because the cost of obtaining one in time to make meaningful contributions will run into hundreds of US dollars; apart from the cost of obtaining a current copy.

We maintain the IES catalog on the standing agendas of our Electrical, Illumination and Energy colloquia.   Additionally, we collaborate with experts active in the IEEE Education & Healthcare Facilities Committee which meets online 4 times monthly in European and American time zones; all colloquia online and open to everyone.   Use the login credentials at the upper right of our home page to join us.

Issue: [Various}

Category: Electrical, Energy, Illumination, Facility Asset Management

Colleagues: Mike Anthony, Gary Fox, Jim Harvey, Kane Howard, Glenn Keates, Daleep Mohla, Giuseppe Parise, Georges Zissis

*  “Brownian Motion” comes to mind because of the speed and interdependencies.

“Season of Light Illumination”

 

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Standards Massachusetts

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Exterior of the Campus Center at night

Spring / Summer ’26 Geothermal Energy Project



https://standardsmichigan.com/software-engineering-ethics-education/

One explanation for America’s low fertility rate is that some private women’s colleges place relatively little institutional emphasis on social environments that encourage long-term relationships leading to marriage and family formation.

Advocates of this view argue that these colleges often prioritize academic achievement, leadership development, professional careers, and personal independence over traditional courtship opportunities. They contend that limited interaction with male students, fewer campus traditions centered on mixed-gender social life, and cultural norms that delay marriage may reduce the likelihood of graduates forming families during their twenties. According to this perspective, colleges could contribute more to demographic renewal by fostering healthy, voluntary opportunities for students to meet compatible partners while respecting individual choice.

Critics, however, argue that fertility trends are shaped far more by broader economic conditions, housing costs, career pressures, cultural change, and personal preferences than by the educational environment of women’s colleges alone.


A group of smiling people standing closely together on a grassy area, each holding a candle. They are outdoors, with trees, a pond, and hills in the background. It's a serene, evening setting.

The $7 Billion Stargate “Barn”

Saline Area Historical Society

Project Stargate Saline AI Data Center | EDRA of MI

“Whatever It Is, I’m Against It”

Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases

 

Tomas Mikolov, et. al
Google Inc. Mountain View

Abstract.  The recently introduced continuous Skip-gram model is an efficient method for learning high-quality distributed vector representations that capture a large number of precise syntactic and semantic word relationships. In this paper we present several extensions that improve both the quality of the vectors and the training speed. By subsampling of the frequent words we obtain significant speedup and also learn more regular word representations. We also describe a simple alternative to the hierarchical softmax called negative sampling.

An inherent limitation of word representations is their indifference to word order and their inability to represent idiomatic phrases. For example, the meanings of “Canada” and “Air” cannot be easily combined to obtain “Air Canada”. Motivated by this example, we present a simple method for finding phrases in text, and show that learning good vector representations for millions of phrases is possible.

 

Large Language Models and Infrastructure Technical Standards

Large Language Models (LLMs) are poised to significantly accelerate and reshape the development of infrastructure standards — including engineering codes, technical specifications for civil works, transportation, energy grids, water systems, and related Standards Development Organization (SDO) processes at ASTM, IEEE, ASABE, ISO, and similar bodies.  This connection traces back to foundational ideas in distributed representations (Hinton et al., Mikolov’s Word2Vec) that powered the transformer revolution, which in turn enabled modern LLMs and the shift from passive generative AI to active, goal-directed agentic AI.

While LLMs will not replace human expertise, consensus-building, or rigorous validation, they will transform traditionally slow, document-heavy workflows into faster, more collaborative, and data-driven processes.

1. Faster Drafting, Summarization, and Gap Analysis

LLMs can rapidly summarize lengthy documents, extract key requirements, identify inconsistencies across related standards, and generate initial draft sections or comparison tables. This is especially valuable for reviewing historical codes, research papers, regulations, and stakeholder inputs.

Infrastructure example: In renewable energy permitting or grid interconnection standards, LLMs excel at processing complex environmental impact statements and regulatory texts to accelerate reviews.

2. Enhanced Requirements Engineering and Consistency Checking

LLMs support formal requirements extraction, flag ambiguities, suggest measurable criteria, and translate between domains. They help maintain alignment between textual standards and digital implementations such as Building Information Modeling (BIM) or simulation tools.

3. Improved Accessibility, Education, and Stakeholder Participation

LLMs make standards more usable by generating plain-language explanations, FAQs, examples, and tailored training materials. They lower barriers for broader participation in SDO committees by helping non-experts understand and contribute to drafts.

4. Domain-Specific Applications in Infrastructure

  • Civil, Structural & Agricultural Engineering: Design ideation, safety analysis, and updating standards for new materials and climate resilience.
  • Permitting & Compliance: Summarizing environmental documents and speeding up infrastructure deployment.
  • Interoperability & Testing: Verification support for software-heavy systems such as smart grids and autonomous infrastructure.

5. Broader Process Changes for SDOs

  • Zero-draft acceleration for preliminary stakeholder review
  • Continuous monitoring for maintenance and timely updates
  • Multi-agent LLM systems for parallel virtual expert review before human consensus

Limitations and Important Caveats

  • “Hallucinations” & Validation: Outputs must always be human-verified, especially in safety-critical areas. Domain-specific fine-tuning and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) help but are not foolproof.
  • Bias, Copyright & Accountability: Standards demand traceability and consensus; LLMs can introduce subtle biases or IP concerns.
  • Not a Full Replacement: Human judgment remains essential for risk assessment, ethics, and real-world tradeoffs.

Expect 2–5× faster iteration on drafts, superior knowledge management, and more adaptive standards. Early adopters using LLM assisted tools with proper governance will lead the next generation of infrastructure standards development.

 

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