Detroit Dreaming

According to court records, on July 11, 2017, he was arrested by Department of Corrections agents for parole violations.

The next day they entered his house and found ammunition and illegal drugs in the kitchen.

They stopped and obtained a search warrant, after which they found 37 live .45-caliber cartridges and a double magazine holder with two .45-caliber magazines. A 12-gauge shotgun was found in a vehicle on the property.

Larson was convicted of third-degree criminal sexual conduct in 2014 and terroristic threats in 2009, and is prohibited from possessing firearms or ammunition.

He was found guilty on two felony counts of possessing ammunition or firearms after a jury trial in June 2018. He was sentenced to 45 months in prison on one count. The court did not impose or announce a sentence on the second count because the possession was considered a “single course of conduct” with the first sentence that was imposed.

There was never any agreement relative to a dismissal. At the time of sentencing, no sentence was pronounced on the second felony charge of possession of ammunition or firearms. That charge has now been dismissed by the court.

The Detroit Tigers’ scoreless innings streak has expanded to 18 as they were shut out for the second time in as many days, dropping game three to the Toronto Blue Jays by a score of 3-0.

The Blue Jays opened the day’s scoring, as they did on Friday, in the fourth inning. Brandon Drury, following a leadoff double, came around to score on a Billy McKinney single. Justin Smoak would help to pile it on as he buried a two-run home run to the opposite field. They would threaten again through the later innings, but these wouldn’t come to pass.

The Tigers threatened in each of the first three innings, but failed to capitalize against Blue Jays pitching, as starter Aaron Sanchez shut them down over five-plus innings of work, limiting them to three hits. Despite having two men in scoring position in the sixth inning, the Blue Jays bullpen picked up the slack, quelling that threat while allowing just one hit of their own while contributing seven of the day’s 13 Tigers strikeouts.

Noteworthy

Spencer Turnbull, making his first start of 2019, looked sharp during his first trip through the Blue Jays’ order, but hit a rough patch with a ragged fourth inning and less-than-confident fifth inning. He made his exit after five innings, giving up three runs on four hits while walking two batters and striking out five. He showed some live velocity on his fastball, sitting in the 94-96 miles per hour range, as well as life on his slider:

Miguel Cabrera notched his first two hits of the season, the 2,877th and 2,878th of his career, pushing him past Luis Aparicio and into second place on the list of career hits by a Venezuelan-born major leaguer. He also reached base in his third plate appearance, reaching by way of a hit by pitch, taking a fastball to his right hand. He would leave the game afterward with a right hand contusion and underwent x-rays, which came back negative.

Today’s game also saw Gordon Beckham and Dustin Peterson making their official Tigers debuts, as well as Daniel Norris’s first appearance of 2019. Beckham would draw a walk, but the pair would finish hitless while Norris worked fairly clean sixth and seventh innings, but ran into trouble in the eighth and made his exit after 2 1⁄3 innings of work.

On deck

The Tigers will wrap up their series with the Blue Jays on Sunday afternoon at the Rogers Centre, with Matt Moore set to make his Tigers debut against Trent Thornton. First pitch is scheduled for 1:07 p.m. ET.

This week we took the covers off Assembler Labs, Detroit’s startup studio that Patrick Haig and myself founded just a few weeks ago.

Rather than tell you about the intricacies of the model, I’m writing a whole series on startup studios that will do a better job than this post would do.

Plus, the “why” around Assembler Labs is far more interesting (and important!) than the “what.” So let’s focus on that. (If you want to learn more about the “what,” check out this Crain’s article or this DBusiness article or this Xconomy article.)

Thesis and Mission

I fell in love with Detroit a long time ago. Maybe it was when I turned 9 and was a ball boy for the Bad Boys, but it was probably earlier. Maybe it was when I was still too young to walk, when the Tigers won their last World Series. 

In any case, in the past year, I fell in love with the people working in technology in Detroit, too. Over and over again, I’ve met incredibly talented individuals from all walks of life that could make successful startup founders. Assembler Labs gives us an outlet to bet on these individuals in a meaningful way.

Which leads us to our mission: We partner with talent to build venture-scale startups in Detroit.

To buy into our mission, you only need to believe in two things:

1. Detroit – and Michigan as a whole – has an incredible amount of talent that could make great startup founders and operators. 
2. Venture-scale startups can be built in Detroit (not just in the Bay Area or on the coasts).

If you believe both of those things, like we do, you should have no trouble believing in our mission.

Talent + Experience = Success

Of course, it’s a little bit more nuanced than that. In particular, the talent we have in Detroit is incredibly good at engineering and advertising. And they have all the right traits of a great startup founder: grit, huge work ethic, a blue collar get-shit-done attitude, and relentless resourcefulness. 

But we don’t have a lot of startup experience. There’s very little pattern recognition for high-growth early stage companies. And, unfortunately, talent on its own usually isn’t a recipe for success.

So, without that startup experience, a lot of would-be-great startup founders end up stuck. They’re stuck in BigCos, or in research institutions, or in other jobs. They’re unable or simply don’t know how to take the leap into startups.

Assembler Labs gives them a platform to do so. By generating ideas and validating them quickly, we can get the best ideas off the ground and then pair ourselves with founders who have intimate domain knowledge and all the great traits you’d hope for from a startup founder. We’ll help with product, engineering, growth, and fundraising. And a whole lot of emotional support to work through the ups and downs that come with the territory.

This foundation, plus our experience, mentorship, and support, gives founders the ability to take the leap and bring a new generation of venture-scale, high growth companies to Detroit. 

Another central anchor

With Assembler Labs, we’re building another central anchor in the Detroit startup ecosystem. There’s already some great anchors like TechStars Mobility for mobility startups, Bamboo for space and creatives, Gener8tor for all sorts of startups (not just tech/software), re:purpose for talent, and a few others. We hope to build on the great work they’ve been doing and continue to do, and add our own style, ambition, and passion to it. 

We believe Assembler Labs will be an anchor in a completely new way and to a new set of potential startup founders. 

Diversity

One of my favorite things about Detroit is our diversity. We have a majority African American city, a large Arab American population, and a growing Hispanic and Asian American population.

Combine our diversity with our blank slate for startups and we have an opportunity to create the startup community we want to see in the world: one that is representative of the population.

Patrick

My co-founder, Patrick was one of the first hires we made at MobileDevHQ. At the time, Patrick was in law school but knew he didn’t want to practice law. I didn’t know what the hell Patrick was going to do for us, but we brought him on as an intern for the summer and essentially just said, “figure it out.” And he did. He filled pretty much every role in a startup over the last 6 years of working together, but he’s really found his calling in product. The thing that makes him so good at product? He gets the hell out of the building and talks to customers. 

Patrick and I know we work well together. We joke that we bicker like 80 year old men, but we always have the best interest of the customer and the business at heart, which means our egos never get in the way and debates are resolved quickly. Patrick loves criticism (oddly so, actually), like I do, which means we can follow the rule of “brutal honesty delivered kindly” and get shit done remarkably well.

Assembler Labs is all about the people. The talent we can recruit to be part of our core team, the talent we work with to be a founder for our spinouts, and us. For me personally, having Patrick as a co-founder now that we’re a bit wiser, a bit more ambitious, and a lot more comfortable working together is one of the best things about Assembler Labs.

Help us out

By no means are we under any illusion that this will be easy or that success is guaranteed. We have a large ambition, and the odds are stacked against us. We live for that. Plus, swinging for home runs is so much more fun than bunting to get on base.

That’s why we need your help. We’d love your support, your ideas, your network, and your encouragement. If you’re interested in helping out in any way, shoot me an email, I’d love to chat. And if you need help with anything, I’m always open to chatting about that, too. A rising tide lifts all boats.

Thanks for everything you’ve already done. It’s so appreciated.

Here we go!

Flint Mayor Karen Weaver kicked her re-election campaign Tuesday.

Standing in a church pulpit, the mayor touted improving crime statistics and the city’s ongoing recovery from its water crisis. 

Weaver was flanked by pastors and quoted scripture as she talked about the challenges facing the city.  She asked Flint voters to give her another four years in office.

“I’m standing here today as your mayor, asking for your continuous support for my re-election.   So that we can build on the progress that’s already been made for restoration and transformation of our city,” Weaver asked as the audience rose to its feet. “Can these dry bones live? Yes they can.”

It’s unclear what opposition Weaver may face. 

Weaver emerged from a crowded field of contenders to defeat incumbent Mayor Dayne Walling in 2015.   She survived a recall election in 2017. 

St. Clement Parish was established in 1854 and the parish bought land on the southeast corner of Center Line (now VanDyke) and Church St. (now Engleman St.), a few blocks north of 10 Mile Rd. A wooden church and a single-room school were soon built. The church was expanded in 1868 to accommodate a growing congregation.

A watercolor painted in 1870 shows the church and rectory.

A pen & ink illustration printed in 1875 Atlas Map of Macomb County.

St. Clement Parish continued to grow and laid the cornerstone of a larger edifice was laid on July 8, 1880. The brick church was based on the plans for Detroit's Sacred Heart Church; measuring 136' long, 54' wide, and 100' tall. George Freidhoff, an immigrant from Bavaria, and his uncle, John Freidhoff, did much of the construction. St. Clement Church was dedicated on November 6, 1881 and a new rectory was built in 1896. The first church was eventually razed to make room for a small, brick school and auditorium.

Interior walls and ceiling were covered in frescoes—the creation of a parishioner and plasterer named Lambert Peters. His brother, Antoine Peters, and son-in-law, Peter Guion, also worked as bricklayers and plasterers on the construction of the church.

A convent was soon built and Dominican Sisters taught at the school for decades.

In 1916, there were 182 students at St. Clement School and enrollment quickly rose to 600 students by 1920. A larger, two-story school was soon constructed. It had sixteen classrooms and an auditorium with a capacity for 1,000.

The former parish school building is now occupied by a non-denominational Christian school. A nearby nursing home bears the name of Fr. Murray, a longtime pastor at St. Clement. The parish maintains a cemetery behind the school. 

More info: parish website
More history: Mike Grobbel + Macomb history + C & G News

Source: http://detroitchurchblog.blogspot.com/2018/11/st-clement-church-centerline.html

Amazon employs thousands of people to listen to recordings from the company’s Echo speakers as part of an effort to improve the software, Bloomberg News reports.

The Alexa voice review team includes both contractors and full-time Amazon staff working in outposts around the world, including Boston, Costa Rica, India and Romania. Each reviewer is expected to check as many as 1,000 audio files in each 9-hour shift, two of the workers told Bloomberg.

The work is mostly mundane, Bloomberg reported. Some transcribe artist names to link them to specific musicians in the company’s database. Others simply transcribe users’ commands, comparing them with what the automated systems heard and the response they offered.

Sometimes the reviewers come across clips they find upsetting, or even potentially criminal. Two of the workers told Bloomberg they picked up what they believe was a sexual assault.

“We take the security and privacy of our customers’ personal information seriously,” an Amazon spokesman said in a statement emailed to Bloomberg. “We only annotate an extremely small sample of Alexa voice recordings in order [to] improve the customer experience.”

Over 100 million people around the world own Alexa devices. Users can opt out of having their recordings used for development purposes, but Amazon doesn’t explicitly tell Echo customers that humans might be listening to them.

“We use your requests to Alexa to train our speech recognition and natural language understanding systems,” the company says in a list of frequently asked questions.

Amazon says employees can’t trace back a specific recording to any specific user or account.

“We have strict technical and operational safeguards, and have a zero tolerance policy for the abuse of our system,” said the Amazon spokesman. “Employees do not have direct access to information that can identify the person or account as part of this workflow. All information is treated with high confidentiality and we use multi-factor authentication to restrict access, service encryption and audits of our control environment to protect it.”

Speaking on a teleconference and asked if he’s going to change anything for this final four trip, Michigan State Spartans head basketball coach, Tom Izzo, said he’s going to try to win this time.

Coming into the game against Texas Tech, the Spartans have a 2-5 record in the final four under Izzo. Their last championship win was in the 1999-’00 season.

Embed from Getty Images

On the other side of things, Texas Tech’s coach, Chris Beard, had praise for Izzo and his program.

Texas Tech and MSU are scheduled to face off this Saturday at 8:49 pm.

The Spartans will face a tough test in a strong Texas Tech defense, but MSU has been impressive throughout the tournament. What do you think? Can the Spartans win this one and make it to the finals?

For more great content visit Michigan Sports and Entertainment: News, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Podcasts, Store

Related