There is often a complaint from those in industry that schools do not hand them students that have any practical experience; they aren't prepared for life in the working world. This leads to many political discussions about the worth of education, and what can be done about it.

There are programs such as STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) designed to match education requirements to industry needs, which are doing a good job, and are also working to correct an imbalance in the number of boys versus girls in the system.

On a local level, Pinellas County is looking to introduce young children to computer coding.

A hundred bee-bots have been purchased by the district. They are simple little robots with arrows on them that the kids have to use to get the robot to an assigned square on a grid.

One of the schools taking part, Leila Davis Elementary School , in Clearwater, was interviewed by 10 News, and Kali Kopa, a teacher at the school who teaches technology, was very excited about the prospects this opens up for them. The bee-bot's simple functions prepare the children for the more complex challenges offered by coding.

It is a skill very much in command, and the Clearwater area, and the whole of Tampa Bay, is a hot bed for technology.

Tampa Bay is an area with a lot of different tech companies, as a quick Google search will reveal, and they cover a lot of different areas of interest. The intentionally fast-paced Ignite Tampa Bay event gives a great platform for both established and newer tech companies to get their ideas out there into the world.

20 different speakers deliver a speech and 20 slides in 5 minutes each, and it has included speakers from all over Tampa Bay.

It is a format that debuted in Seattle and is being brought to Tampa by Technova Florida, INc, which is Tampa based. The company is non profit and has as its mission a dedication to creating "resilient, radically inclusive tech and maker communities that empower positive change."

Next year will be its tenth year. This year included talks such as Technological Singularity: What Is It, and Will It Happen? by Steve Tingiris and Smart Innovation: What Can Government Learn from Startups? by Chris Paradies.

The event was sponsored by Fairwarning, from Clearwater, which offers "affordable cloud-based security solutions provide data protection and governance for Electronic Health Records, Salesforce, Office 365, and hundreds of other applications."

If you look at the archives it wouldn't be much of a leap to speculate about next year being just as cool and inspiring.

affordable cloud-based security solutions provide data protection and governance for Electronic Health Records, Salesforce, Office 365, and hundreds of other applications.

One of the things you don't expect a hurricane to prompt is the kind of disagreement that occurred between Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn, and County Administrator Mike Merrill. As someone living in a place that, at the time, was expected to take a direct hit from Irma, you want a united front from the people in charge of deciding whether or not you should evacuate.

We were in Zone A, which should have been a mandatory evacuation, which the Mayor tried to order, but local government officials complained he had overstepped the boundaries of his authority, and so the order became instead a voluntary evacuation.

Obviously, Tampa was lucky, and Irma had both weakened, and also didn't hit directly, but it could have been a very different story, and thanks to conflicting messages a lot of people were not as prepared as they could have been.

The announcement from the Mayor on the Friday before Irma was due to hit directed people to the shelters that had been set up, but Hillsborough hadn't actually opened them at that point. Buckhorn issued a curfew; Merrill said there was none. This kind of problem is not without precedent, but it definitely needs to get handled. It is understood that Irma was downgrading as she hit Tampa, but the prediction was that it might have picked up speed and kept spinning fast enough to remain a category 4 - it was all dependent on whether it moved across the land and slowed down or moved across the water and picked up speed because of the heat in the water.

People, on the whole were great with each other, and despite the idea that everyone was in a state of panic, most people seemed calm and collected, and went about getting the things that they needed without incident. For sure, it was not the easiest thing getting gas, and water became scarce pretty quickly, as did canned goods, but it seemed that most people were better coordinated than the government officials.

Advertising for fast food is so common we don’t even think about it anymore, do we? Who doesn’t know, like they know their own birthday, the McDonald’s jingle? Who doesn’t have any idea what a Blizzard is, besides young, young children?

And, as my final hypothetical question used to prove a point: who doesn’t know that these things are bad for you?

Because, it was to my knowledge that most were raised with the mindset that yes, there is indeed a Pizza Hut—for our purposes there is one on Belcher Road—and sure pizza tastes awesome, and pizza is a “staple” (somehow) of the American diet, but that doesn’t mean we should eat pizza all the time.

The kindergarten lesson was we should not eat unhealthy food every day.

Different world now though. Very different world. Where health, being healthy, is such a dire concern that we have an entire reality show devoted to it.

But, how did this happen?

Well, I am unwilling to say it was only people not having enough willpower. Have you seen what humans are capable of, even in their daily pursuits? Ever tried to perceive the entirety of what we as human beings have done in our relatively small time on this planet? I’m not willing to blame it entirely on people having too big of a sweet tooth or a craving complex.

But what I am willing to blame heavily, is pricing. Why is a soft serve milkshake like a dollar, but a salad often three to five? How is that reasonable? The obvious answer to my own question is that the chemicals and production process to make a cheap milkshake is dramatically less expensive, and thus you can sell it for a lot less. Cut corners, and those corners are money you don’t have to pay—at least upfront.

So, after this wordy roundabout, I come to my point: and what someone higher up on the world’s stage than I, should be advertising.

Making all this cheap food, often on an assembly line, and then making those advertising video spectaculars to get people aware of the cheap food, must cost a lot. Sure, the food is cheap, but the initial stages of instigating the system weren’t, I’d say. Furthermore, I’d argue, by now at least, if one accounts for medical bills and lawsuits and the like, the total is probably equal if not more money than what it would take to work out a healthier food economic ecosystem with less salt and sugar and grease.

This is a little on the line of conspiracy to say, I’ll admit, but, modern day advertisements do a heck of a job convincing us we should indulge again in a burger—whereas fresh lettuce or lean chicken receives almost nary a mention on television.

Insert long, drawn-out suspicious “hmm” here.

The sad part is, though, even if that theory holds water, perhaps we are too late in the cycle for such a thing to change.

But, maybe not.

If more advertising talked about cheap but also healthier food—in the standard lower caloric/higher vitamin content definition of healthy—then health might be less of an issue for people. Chipotle’s ads, for example, do a good job of promoting more organic ideals.

Now, people obviously have choice and free will to make their own food decisions, but one cannot as easily make decisions if the better options are not clear or seen.

And making things known is advertising’s job. This idea has many hurdles, sure. Avoiding the embarrassing stigma of the PSA and not trying to treat people like they are idiots about their own health is a big one.

But it is worth more effort than we give it. A healthier country is worth the effort.

It’s uncomfortable to say sometimes, but the marketing and advertising coming out of our corporations affects us on a marked level. Subconsciously and consciously. So, I implore that those making companies, and running companies, keep this in mind.

And get healthy food choices to be more prominent in our advertising.

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If you liked this article, you can read more of Brandon Scott’s work over at The Hive, or on his website: www.coolerbs.com

The modern-day fashion industry likely informs what clothes you buy at all the fancy-ish stores. They are the people who determine the common perception of what you would want at Victoria’s Secret, or Windsor Fashions, or Macy’s, or any of the other clothes stores you can find at the mall, like Countryside. And these groups have marketing power which is both baffling and impressive.

Let me put it this way, the phrase “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” is the basic summation of the idea that art and aesthetic is subjective. That what a person, or a group, or a country, finds to be attractive in terms of features, clothing, qualities, etc. is entirely arbitrary and has no basis in anything besides personal taste.

And, though I am unsure of to what degree this is true—I do not have the page space to argue/discuss what is and what is not innate beauty—I can accept the saying as true for this article. But, if that’s indeed true, that means what we find to be high-end clothing is only considered high-end clothing because the industry said so.

I mean, duh, right, Seems obvious. But this is a loop. This is a self-contained marketing loop. If something vastly different from the style now in the fashion world were to branch out, such as a loose-fitting functional version of the potato sack, it would never ever gain real traction. Because the people who determined the arbitrary style beforehand, now conditioned our collective mainstream tastes to not accept the flagrant alternative.

Why is that not beautiful? Why is a potato sack bad? Because we have a standard. But they determined the standard. They chose that style to be superior. The marketing of this is practically palpable.

Now, sure, as any pictures from the 70’s which shows what people wore back then can handily teach, styles shift out eventually. There is a natural changing pattern which overhauls the style to a new standard—or, at least, there appears to be. But, for the ten or so years that each style lasts, these fashions will continue to sit where they do because of the marketing of the fashion moguls and the celebrities paid to wear their wares upon their bodies.       

Now. I don’t mean to sound overall critical. Because I think dressing nicely is a good thing in the right situation. I think people striving for a good appearance—within reason, mind you—is not a bad thing. Esthetics are art, and I’m a big proponent of art. But I also want to point out that marketing is a method of making an idea innate to the public. Fashion is so ingrained: to deviate would seem odd. And, with anything like this, one should be aware of what marketing is telling us.

We do, unequivocally, judge people based on their appearance. And certain people decided, perhaps even arbitrarily, that a good part of how that judgment turns out comes from their tastes and their decisions.

And if something like that goes toward wholesome honest products, then it’s usually fine. But we must be careful. We, and they, need to market with the power of marketing in mind. Marketing can sell good things, change the world even. But powerful enough people can also use marketing to make people perceive wearing bright pink fuzzy hats in the shape of birds as the height of attractiveness.

So, let’s all agree to try to stay careful and smart with this power? Okay?

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If you liked this article, you can read more of Brandon Scott’s work over at The Hive, or on his website: www.coolerbs.com