This is a great review game that you can play one week a month if you like.  It's easy to prepare, simple to play, and the kids love it.

To play the Senior Primary version of the game, print the document below.  In it, you will find four pages of frequently-used words from our primary songbook (with emphasis on the 2012-2014 Primary Program songs).  After you have printed the document, tape the pages together as shown below.  The first page is in the upper left, second in the lower left, third in the upper right and fourth in the lower right.  Each column should be in alphabetical order.  Laminate the pages or cover the front in clear shelf paper if you plan to reuse the game.

Hang the poster at the front of the room where all of the children can see it.  If you have a large primary, read very quickly through the list of words, so that those who cannot see well will be able to understand.  

Ask the children to raise their hands if they have a favorite primary song in mind.  Choose one child to pick a song.  Sing through the song and ask the children which words from the board occurred in the song.  Variations of the word (i.e. righteous, righteousness, righteously) totally count!

Cross off the words which the children have heard.

At the end of singing time, count the words which have been crossed off and write the number on the back of the page.  Try to beat your score the following month!

(The first time you play the game, it will go very slowly.  However, as the kids try to beat their previous scores, they will learn to choose quickly, sing quickly, pay attention to the words you've sung, and choose the next songs strategically to cross off the maximum number of words.)  I think this is a good exercise to get the children thinking about which songs cover which topics.  Later in life, when they have questions, they may remember that we can find answers to those topics in Primary Songs!

 the link to the Senior Primary Word Count Game is below 

For Junior Primary, I have simplified the game.  Follow the instructions for Senior Primary with the following exception; the children are searching for songs which cover the listed TOPICS, rather than WORDS.  The point of this exercise is to help the Junior Primary children understand what each of their favorite primary songs is about.   

the link to the Junior Primary Word Count Game is below

INDO DRIVERS: Mengapa Membutuhkan Sopir Di Jakarta?: Pernahkah anda menyadari ketika mobil anda dikemudikan oleh sopir , itu berarti anda telah menyerahkan harta serta keselamatan sepenuhnya ...

Labor Day weekend is always a bittersweet holiday. It’s supposed to honor America’s organized labor movement, but really what it mostly celebrates is the end of summer. 

Pretty soon our grills will be covered by huge snow drifts, and the season’s warm breezes will be a distant memory. Well, not for me, as I live in California, but you get the point.

This grilled kiwi and chili-rubbed beef short ribs recipe is specifically designed with that melancholy in mind. The prep is minimal, and the ultra short cooking time means that instead of being stuck in front of a grill, you can actually enjoy more of these last precious summer days.

We tied the world record here for fewest ingredients in a marinade, with one, but thanks to the kiwi’s enzymatic magic, that’s all we need. Unlike some tropical fruit marinades, kiwi doesn’t turn the meat into mush, and provides a nice, slightly sweet and acidic base for our Ancho chili rub. I loved how this came out, and while highly-seasoned, the beefy goodness of the short ribs really came through.

I want to wish all of you a happy and healthy Labor Day weekend. What better way to celebrate organized labor, than by doing the minimum amount of it at your cookout? I hope you give these super simple, but very delicious kiwi and chili-rubbed short ribs a try soon. Enjoy!

Ingredients for 4 portions:

2 pounds Korean-style (aka flanken style) beef short ribs

1 kiwi

For the chili rub:

1 tbsp ancho chili powder

1 tbsp sugar

1 tbsp kosher salt

2 tsp freshly ground black pepper

1 tsp garlic powder

1/4 tsp cayenne, or to taste

I'm back in San Francisco, and will be posting a new video recipe tomorrow featuring a rather successful experiment involving Korean-style, beef short ribs. Also, my sincerest thanks to all those who sent their thoughts regarding my uncle Bill this week. They were very much appreciated. Stay tuned!

by Salman Hameed

There is a new paper out in the Journal of the Academy of Religion that provides a broad overview of the various creationist movements in Europe. The title of the paper is Creationism in Europe: Facts, Gaps and Prospects (you can download the full paper!) and it is authored by Stefaan Blancke, Hans Henrik Hjermitslev, Johan Braeckman, and Peter Kjaergaard. The same team is also behind a follow-up edited volume on this topic coming out in 2014, where I have also contributed a chapter on Islamic Creationism in Europe, and Martin Reixinger has a chapter on Turkey.

I had a chance to have a conversation with the lead author for the paper, Dr. Stefaan Blancke, who is affiliated with the Department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences at Ghent University, Belgium. If you have 15 minutes to spare, here is the video:

Kata orang : "Aku adalah orang yang tidak peduli dengan sekitar"
Kata aku : "Aku memang bermasalah secara fisik dengan kepedulian, tapi tidak secara psikis"

Kata orang : "Aku adalah pembohong"
Kata aku : "Ya, aku adalah seorang pembohong. Satu-satunya cara agar aku bisa mengurangi kebohongan adalah "JANGAN TERLALU BANYAK BERTANYA" !

Kata orang : "Aku adalah pemalas"
Kata aku : "Ya, aku memang

by Salman Hameed

I haven't had a chance to read any of the books in dystopian trilogy by Margaret Atwood, but after reading this recent review in Nature, I'm itching to read them. Here is the review of MaddAddam - the final book in the trilogy - in this week's Nature:

A decade after Margaret Atwood began her great dystopian tale, we have at last reached the end of that road. The Canadian novelist has taken us from Oryx and Crake (2003) and

The Year of the Flood (2009) to this final instalment, MaddAddam. 

A global pandemic dominates the trilogy. In Oryx and Crake, a disillusioned bioengineer (Crake) unleashes a 'hot bioform' that kills most humans. The Year of the Flood revisits the pandemic through the lens of a religious cult called God's Gardeners, whose followers try to survive the ravages of the pathogen. MaddAddam completes the saga with the story of two members of the cult, Toby and Zeb, as they live through the aftermath of the plague. In the dystopian tradition, the trilogy is a window on our possible near future — in this case, one driven to disaster by human ingenuity gone wrong. 

As MaddAddam opens, with almost all of humanity having perished in Crake's “Waterless Flood”, it turns out that the bioengineer had good reason to reboot the human race. 

Atwood paints a picture of a pre-flood nightmare, class-divided, corporate and hegemonic. This was a world of Hunger Games-like death sports, rampant sexual enslavement and increasingly macabre genetically engineered hybrids. It begged to be wiped out. 

The surviving humans must cope with a number of relics of pre-flood genetic tinkering. These include Pigoons — large, ferocious pigs with near-human intelligence, originally created for organ transplants — and domesticated goats with human hair known as Mo'Hairs. Also surviving is a small group of humanoids called Crakers, so-named for their creator and genetically modified to be polyamorous innocents with a predilection for eating kudzu (an invasive plant). These are the meek whom Crake would have had inherit the Earth, but they face many dangers. The remaining humans, especially Toby and Zeb, protect them from the Pigoons and a pair of murderous death-game survivors who have already raped and killed some of their clan. 

As time passes, the Crakers begin to show signs of culture. They sing songs, beatify their now-dead creator, and hunger for more myths and stories about their origins. Toby, the book's main protagonist, provides these as best she can, and we watch with hope and dread as she spins child-like tales for the Crakers out of the unseemly facts of the Flood.

Read the full review here.

Guest post by Lisa Regan, writer for The Lean Startup Conference.

Last week, Eric sat down with developer Dan Milstein--one of the most popular speakers from the 2012 Lean Startup Conference--for a webcast conversation on getting engineers into the Lean Startup cycle. If you missed it, go ahead and watch it here. And if you have questions, post them in the comments here; Eric and Dan will be jumping in to answer.

There were some great take-aways from this conversation, not just for engineers, but for anyone trying to rethink how a startup approaches its defining problem—uncertainty. As Eric put it in the webcast, “A startup is a human institution designed to do something new, under conditions of extreme uncertainty. We don’t really know what’s going to work in advance.” The question then becomes: What can engineers, and everyone else at a startup, do to reduce that uncertainty? As Eric and Dan talked this through, they focused on three areas: first principles, organizational shifts, and methods.

First Principles

Eric began by offering a basic principle for engineers interested in exploring Lean Startup ideas: Start with yourself. “Whatever work you’re in the middle of doing right now, ask how you could treat that as an experiment. Have an explicit hypothesis. What is what you’re building supposed to be doing *specifically*? Then define how that will manifest in real life. Then think of how to test and measure – just for yourself – that effect. Do that and you will automatically graduate to a higher level.” What’s at that higher level? Changes beyond yourself, to the organization more broadly. But, as Eric repeated, that has to begin with the individual: “If you yourself are not able to apply scientific thinking in small ways, you’re going to fail at your vaunted organizational change.”

Organizational change
Once you’ve agreed to change yourself, and to start testing and experimenting, you really need the organization to change as well. Engineers can only do so much on their own. Here’s Eric: “If you’re trying to do engineering under conditions of extreme uncertainty in order to succeed in delighting customers and having an impact on the world, you need to build cross-functional collaboration into the process from the beginning, and to see marketing and engineering really integrated into a unit that’s operating together to try to retire some of those risks early on.”

But this is where things can get tricky. Eric: “Organizational change requires the explicit buy-in of senior management. How do we convince senior management that their pet projects, their beautiful babies, are not as beautiful as they think they are?” By asking them to test those projects. Indeed he has a test for determining whether leaders are visionaries: “So many entrepreneurs cloak themselves in the myth of the visionary precisely to avoid having to confront these kinds of questions. The easiest way to tell the difference between a visionary and a charlatan is to ask them to put their ideas to the test. The visionary who actually believes they’re right will agree to test their ideas 10 times out of 10…. My experience is that the ratio of charlatans to visionaries in our world is 10 to 1 or 100 to 1.” 

Here’s a specific example of organizational impediments that Eric and Dan hashed out. The fact that engineers hate to throw away their work — and everyone else is afraid to ask them to. The solution has two points, which Eric laid out: “First is to realize that if we don’t build something people want, the work will be thrown away *anyway*. All this testing and experimentation is a path toward _preventing_ work from being thrown away.” If the product doesn’t get users, it won’t reveal its flaws – but when the company fails it will still be thrown out. As Dan pointed out, “A product outage is a good sign because it means that people care. You have a great stable system when no one’s using it.”

(There’s another, surprising reason Eric says engineers shouldn’t fear throwing work away, but we’ll leave it to you to watch the webcast for that!)

Dan also spoke about engineers’ investment in the business’ overall success as the key element in persuading them to let their work go: “Part of what’s useful is to understand engineers are profoundly driven by wanting to solve meaningful problems. And they may have forgotten that if they’re working at an organization that doesn’t let them do that. But if the leadership of the organization can share the fundamental question of whether the business is going to work as a problem to be solved – let’s all go solve that together – engineers can get really excited about solving that problem, and then they don’t so much mind work getting thrown away.”
 

Real-world Applications
In the last segment of their conversation, Eric shared two examples of organizations that have integrated experimenting and testing as their defining methods, not just in terms of engineering, but across the business. The first of these is an anonymous mobile app whose team does a new build every week, loads it on their phones on Friday, tests it all weekend, and on Monday meets to decide what’s working. Often, they wind up throwing out the last week’s work. Eric: “With mobile apps, especially, the products you love the most are the simplest. They on the surface have very few features and all the complexity is hidden behind a really gentle user experience. Those products can only be produced by teams that are willing to throw code away. If you’re afraid to delete you can only add complexity. Simplification is the removal of complexity.”

For one final example, Eric mentioned last year’s Lean Startup Conference talk by Diane Tavenner of Summit Charter Schools. Her weekly rounds of experimentation and metric-gathering led to the conclusion that, when it comes to teaching kids math, lecture doesn’t work. Eric: “You think it’s hard for an engineer to let code go? You’re a professional educator and you’re going to let lecturing go? That’s hard. And it was only through this rhythm of regular experimentation that they were able to let that go.”

Here’s Diane’s video if you missed it – it’s really worth watching if you’re considering the role engineering can play within an entire organizational shift toward testing and experimentation:

Check out the webcast and then post your questions in the comments here. 

I'm back east for my uncle Billy's funeral, and will be away from the blog for a day or two. I'd like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who passed along their condolences, and to let you know how much I was touched by the response. Thanks again, and stay tuned!

They say when life gives you lemons, make lemonade; but what about when life gives you empty mayonnaise jars? Mayonade? No, of course not. We’re going to make salad dressing instead, and “scrape the scrape.”

I’ll often add a tablespoon or two of mayonnaise when I make a vinaigrette, to help emulsify things, as well as provide a little extra creaminess to the dressing. With that in mind, when I get down to the end of a jar, I don’t scrape, I shake.

I’m posting the ingredients I used below just in case you’re curious, but this post isn’t really about a recipe, but simply a tip for using up the last of that mayo without all that annoying butterknifing. Now, I just need to work on a recipe for using up the last of the dressing clinging to the inside of the jar. Enjoy!

Ingredients for 1 1/2 cups of dressing:

1 empty mayo jar, with at least 1 tbsp of mayo inside

1 clove minced garlic

1 tbsp chopped fresh herbs (I used parsley, thyme, and chives)

1/2 cup wine vinegar

1 cup olive oil

salt and pepper to taste

cayenne to taste

pinch of Herbes de Provence

View the complete recipe

This activity is a follow-up to the Who Sings Now review game.  You can use it as you're learning any new song, or as a review.

First, print the document at the bottom of the page.  (It is formatted for 8.5"x11" paper, but I've left it in Word format so that you can adjust if you use a different size paper)

Next, fold the pictures in half.

Finally, place a tongue depressor or paint-stirrer between the pages and glue together.

Choose a child to come to the front of the classroom and let him pick one of the signs.  Show the entire primary both sides of the sign and let each child decide which category he or she fits (most closely) into.  As you sing the song, have the child at the front of the room hold the sign up and turn it back and forth.  The side which is showing tells the children who sings!

Yes, they do point opposite directions after you fold it.

In Holland, we're doing Christmas or Sinterklaas.   I thought perhaps this would turn out rather one-sided in your ward :)

Leaders of ASEAN countries meet regularly at the ASEAN Summit, youth leaders interested in ASEAN issues meet at the ASEAN Youth Summit.

This year, I was fortunate enough to get a chance to be a delegate at the ASEAN-Australian Youth Summit when it was held in Melbourne. From round-table discussions to creatively raising the ASEAN flag to speak up, there was so much to do in one day!

by Salman Hameed

This was created for BBC 2 (tip from Open Culture). Enjoy!


P.S. Note that in a little over four minutes, it also resolves the tension(s) between science and religion. 

My uncle Billy passed away a few days ago. He’d been having health issues over the last few years, but the news still came as a sudden, and very sad shock. He was one of my earliest inspirations for becoming a chef, and as many of you know, we filmed several recipes together over the years from his kitchen in Manchester, NY.

After I left the California Culinary Academy to start Food Wishes, I gave him one of my chef coats, and whenever I’d visit, he’d be wearing that coat, busily cooking away, looking every bit the part. He was a barber and hairstylist by trade, but Uncle Billy could have been a world-class chef. His passion for food, and for life, was boundless. Running up the stairs from his second, basement kitchen, carrying a giant pan of food, smiling broadly, talking loudly, wearing that old, white chef coat, is how I will always remember him.

I can think of no better tribute than to re-post the videos he was involved in below. In the “Homemades” video, you can actually hear Uncle Bill helping me with the narration. Of course, in true Food Wishes style, we only see his hands, but by watching the stylish way he handles the food, it’s very easy to see that he had a special touch.

Our heartfelt thoughts and prayers go out to my Aunt Angela and the rest of the family. I can’t begin to imagine how difficult this is for them, but hopefully they can take some comfort in knowing just how much pleasure Uncle Billy brought to those around him. Not only did he feed the party, but he was usually the life of it too. He will be dearly missed.

Rest in peace, Uncle Billy. We loved you, and will continue to love and remember you through all the amazing dishes you so generously shared. I know one thing, the food in heaven just got a lot better. Enjoy.

Homemades - Making Pasta with Uncle Bill (read original post here)

Chicken D’Arduini (read original post here)

Arancini - Italian Rice Balls (read original post here)

In order to get ready for the upcoming program, I want to get the children to pay special attention to certain phrases they tend to miss.

To play the game, first print and cut out the pictures (found here) which correspond to the songs you want to review.  You may need to enlarge them in the document.  The pictures I am using are shown below.  Attach these pictures to the board at the front of the room.

Next, print and cut out the phrases that the children have difficulty with.  Fold them in half and place them in a bowl.

Choose two reverent children to come to the board.  Draw a phrase out of the bowl and read it aloud in a clear voice.  When the children know to which song the phrase belongs, they "swat" the corresponding picture on the board.  (To avoid the children hitting each other, you may choose to use fly swatters, feathers, wands, etc. to swat the pictures.)

Have the entire primary repeat the phrase after you until they have mastered it.  Then sing the song (or the appropriate verse of the song), paying special attention to the phrase.

I Am a Child of God

My Heavenly Father Loves Me

If The Savior Stood Beside Me

When I am Baptized

Families Can Be Together Forever

A Child's Prayer

On a Golden Springtime

Holding Hands Around the World

I Am a Child of God

2.  And so my needs are great.

3.  Rich blessings are in store.

3.  If I but learn to do His will,

4.  His promises are sure.

4.  If I can but endure

My Heavenly Father Loves Me

2.  He gave me my life, my mind, my heart.

2.  For all His creations, of which I'm a part,

If the Savior Stood Beside Me

1.  Would I think of His commandments and try harder to be true?

2.  Would my words be true and kind if He were never far away?

3.  He is always near me, though I cannot see Him there.

3.  And because He loves me dearly, I am in His watchful care.

When I am Baptized

2.  And I can be forgiven and improve myself each day.

Families Can Be Together Forever

2.  While I am in my early years

A Child's Prayer

1.  Something that Jesus told disciples long ago

2.  Of such is the kingdom

On a Golden Springtime

2.  The bands of death He broke

3.  The Father and the Son appeared as Joseph knelt and prayed.

Holding Hands Around the World

We are children glowing with the gospel light

There are children leading out in every land

Be careful when playing competitive games.  Remember that we are counseled not to encourage excessive competition.  If you sense that the children are getting too competitive, discontinue play and transition into another activity.  Be sure to congratulate all children on their hard work, reverence, knowledge, singing ability, teamwork, etc. and stress that THIS is what is important.

Nabilah JKT48 Goyang Cesar

Cantik ya ternyata Nabilah JKT48 wkwkwk

by Salman Hameed

I'm back from the break and I'm catching up on good and the bad news. So lets start with a recent Pew survey on the views of Americans on IVF, Stem cell research and abortion. All three of these issues are deeply tied to politics and legal matters here in the US and also feature in science in religion debates. Here is the broad picture of American views:

I'm actually surprised that there isn't much difference in opinion between embryonic and non-embryonic stem cell research, but that may be because "stem cells research" in the news often now stands for embryonic stem cell research - as that is the point of controversy for some. At the same time, political and ideological leanings do make a bigger difference in embryonic stem cell research than for non-embryonic stem cell research:

As with abortion, men and women are about equally likely to say embryonic stem cell research is morally acceptable. Similarly, adults ages 50 and older are about equally likely as younger adults (18 to 49 years) to say that conducting embryonic stem cell research is morally acceptable. However, college graduates are somewhat more inclined than those with less education to consider this practice morally acceptable. 

There also are differences when it comes to partisanship and ideology. About three-quarters of Democrats and independents who lean toward the Democratic Party consider embryonic stem cell research either morally acceptable or not a moral issue. Republicans and Republican-leaning independents are more inclined than their Democratic counterparts to consider such research morally wrong. Similarly, self-described conservatives tend to see embryonic stem cell research as morally wrong more than either moderates or liberals do. 

Among the major religious groups, white evangelical Protestants are most likely to say embryonic stem cell research is morally wrong. However, in comparison to attitudes toward abortion, differences among religious groups are relatively modest.
...
A separate question on the survey asked about the moral acceptability of medical research using stem cells that do not derive from human embryos. The overwhelming majority of adults say that non-embryonic stem cell research is either morally acceptable (33%) or is not a moral issue (42%); only 16% say such research is morally wrong. 

There are only modest differences in opinion among social and demographic groups on this issue. For example, there are no significant differences in opinion on non-embryonic stem cell research by political party and only modest differences by ideology. However, moderates and liberals are somewhat more inclined than conservatives to say non-embryonic research is not a moral issue. And those with a college degree are more likely than those with fewer years of formal education to say that non-embryonic stem cell research is morally acceptable.

Read the full report here.

I haven't seen Muslim views on IVF and embryonic stem cell research, but here are opinions on abortion:

Some of this not surprising (though look at the difference between Pakistan and Bangladesh!). Also, too bad that Iran is not in this sample - as it is possible that their views would have stood out. However, at least 10% of respondents in 13 countries think that this is not a moral issues:

In 13 countries however, at least one-in-ten Muslims say abortion is not a moral issue. This view is especially common in some countries in the Middle East-North Africa region; 34% in Jordan, 22% in Egypt and 21% in Iraq say they do not consider abortion to be a moral question. 

Additionally, in 11 of the countries surveyed, at least one-in-ten Muslims volunteer that the morality of having an abortion depends on the situation. Half of Azerbaijani Muslims and more than a third (34%) of Muslims in Tajikistan take this view. Overall, this perception is most common in Central Asia and the Middle East-North Africa region.

Read the Pew report on Muslim views here.

As promised, here’s the new and improved peanut dipping sauce recipe we just featured in the beef satay video. Of course, now I’m finding out that real beef satay is actually served with a sweet, spicy rice vinegar sauce, but that’s another video, and a rather easy one at that. Stay tuned.

There are no great mysteries here – mix it up, and then taste, taste, and taste. Peanut sauces are like snowflakes, and you really should twist the formula to suit your palette. You can add all kinds of fun stuff like lemongrass, ginger, Thai basil just to name a few. If peanut allergies are a concern, I’ve had this done with almonds, and it’s not bad at all.

One big tip if you make this ahead. It will harden up in the fridge, and you’ll need to get it back to room temp before serving. I usually just microwave for a couple seconds, and it will be back to its gorgeous, shiny, flowing self. I hope you give this delicious all-purpose dipping sauce a try soon. Enjoy!

Makes about 1 1/2 cup Peanut Dipping Sauce:

3/4 cup smooth all-natural, pure peanut butter

2 cloves garlic, finely minced

2 tbsp brown sugar

1 tbsp fish sauce

2 tsp soy sauce

2 tsp sesame oil

1/2 lime, juiced

sriracha or other hot chili sauce, to taste

1 small can (5.6 oz) coconut milk

View the complete recipe

Guest post by Lisa Regan, writer for The Lean Startup Conference.

The Lean Startup Conference was founded four years ago to bring together real entrepreneurs who have applied Lean Startup techniques and have useful advice to share with each other. Last year’s conference was no exception: speakers talked about their direct experience with practices you may need help implementing—things like metrics, feedback, and experimentation. This year’s conference will go deeper on advanced entrepreneurship topics, and we wanted to get you up to speed on some of the key ideas from 2012.

Metrics play a big role in any conversation around implementation. But which numbers matter, and which are vanity metrics--numbers that make you feel good, but don’t actually tell you how you’re doing? At last year’s conference, Red Room CEO and co-founder Ivory Madison pointed out that vanity metrics are among those numbers most commonly cited in investor decks: page views, new members, unique visitors, conversions and, vainest of them all, Twitter followers. None of these, she says, provides information about how well your company is delivering on your business model, nor about the true lifecycle of a customer. Instead, Ivory says, track metrics that capture revenue, observe the behavior of real, individual customers, and demonstrate cause and effect, or how you can replicate a result. These show success at your core business. For the details, here’s Ivory:

Running Lean author Ash Maurya seconded Ivory’s advice. He counsels tracking only five kinds of behaviors: Acquisition (how do users find you?), Activation (do they have a great first experience?), Retention (do they return?), Revenue (how do you make money?), and Referral (do users tell others?). He also advised making it your goal to move just one of these measures at a time, and described his own effort to improve activation with an experiment that yielded unexpected results at pretty much every turn. Check out his talk for the specifics of how Ash tests a metric:

On the subject of experimentation, few have learned more than Matt Brezina, whose company Sincerely launched nine products in its first year to form a group of apps that are the world’s largest gifting network. Matt has deep experience in mobile development and nailed down ten steps to rapid app development, noting that mobile is an environment not obviously compatible with Lean Startup techniques. His talk covered building a minimum viable product (in his case, an app that let people send their kids a photo of Santa) to test basic processes like billing and delivery, reasons for testing in Canada rather than the US (really!), and buying cheap users—plus it encompassed team structure and time management. The talk is detailed and specific—a must-see for anyone in app development:

For one last example of experimentation, we point you toward a short, inspiring talk from Alejandro Velez and Nikhil Arora of Back to the Roots. These two Berkeley grads heard from one of their professors that it was possible to grow mushrooms in coffee grounds. Based on that thin evidence, they became full-time urban mushroom farmers. But what got them into retailers like Bed Bath & Beyond was a series of experiments they ran at farmer’s markets, where they used a timer to test whether they could get more engagement from customers if, in addition to fresh mushrooms, they also offered mushroom growing kits. Results: “For the first time, we were having kids and families engage with us,” Alejandro said, “and they would be with us for minutes.” The kits enormously increased engagement—but it’s important that this product change did not actually alter their mission. Here’s Nikhil: “Our vision has remained the same since day one: making food personal again. But that test…actually shifted our vision from growing fresh product, fresh mushrooms, to educational products that can inspire people to grow their own food."

Alejandro and Nikhil were listening to their customers, a theme Lean Startup constantly returns to. Last year we heard a variety of strategies for getting customer feedback, beginning with Tendai Charasika of Greater Louisville, Inc. offering ten ways founders can get out of their offices. His tips include some crucial reminders (i.e., don’t just ask your mom for her opinion) to some things you may never have considered, like moving your offices to where your clients are, rather than to where the other startups are.

We also had one very specific tip from Adam Goldstein of travel site Hipmunk: install live chat on your site. Live chat gets real-time feedback and accurate information about where customers are getting hung up. “People don’t email to say that something is tricky to use,” Adam pointed out.

At this year’s conference, we’re bringing in speakers who are ready to describe the exact methods they use to implement Lean Startup methods, what numbers they look at, how they pivot from them, how they test their product, and how they find out what their customers want. In upcoming posts we’ll fill in the details about our breakout sessions where you can directly ask successful entrepreneurs, “So how do I do this?” We sell tickets in blocks—when one block sells out, the price goes up. Our current block of tickets is nearly sold out, so register today.

 

For this new school year I decided I needed to come up with a plan for when I have students that are absent.  In the past I would always forget to gather the work and handouts that they missed.  I would be scrambling at the last minute trying to gather work for when the student returned to school or a parent came at the end of the day to pick up their child’s missed work.  So this year to help make getting work together for my absent students I have made “absent folders”.  When a student is absent, I place the “absent folder” on their desk.  Throughout the day as I pass out worksheets, handouts, etc. I have the student that sits next to that child put the work in the “absent folder.”  When the student returns to school, I send the “absent folder” home with them.  The student then takes the folder home and completes their missed work.  When their work is completed they return it in the folder.  It’s super simple and saves me so much time!

 

Here is what my Absent Folders look like!

 

Here is a look inside my folders.  I have a "Missed Work" and a "Keep at Home" pocket with instructions.

You can't just have one!  :)

Click HERE to download my Absent Folders from my TpT Store!

...

Beef satay was the very first Thai food I ever tasted, and it was literally love at first bite. Ah, that sweet, spicy, salty, smoky, and slightly funky bite…I remember it like it was yesterday. 

It helps that I ate this yesterday, but still. If you’ve never had satay before, its lightning bolt of flavor can be a bit of a shock to the system. A recipe for the subtle palate, this is not. By the way, I do know that satay was actually invented in Indonesia, but for the purposes of this blog post, we're going with that it's Thai.

This will work on just about any meat, but beef is my favorite. There’s something about beef and these particular spices that just sings. Also, the magic that Asian fish sauce always adds is never more apparent than with beef, especially if that beef destined for the charcoal grill. The same goes for the lemongrass.

If you look around the produce aisle at your town’s best (meaning most expensive) grocery store, you should find some lemongrass stalks. They also sell tubes of pure lemongrass paste online, in case that’s a better option. Some say you can get away with some lime and/or lemon zest and juice, but at least attempt to find some for your old friend, Chef John.

With grilling season still in full swing, you can never have enough new and exciting ways to enjoy beef, and this is certainly at least one of those things. And of course, stay tuned for the peanut dipping sauce recipe next. I hope you give it a try soon. Enjoy!

2 lbs beef top sirloin steak, sliced thin across grain, about 1/8-inch thick

Satay Marinade:

1 tbsp grated ginger

4 cloves garlic, crushed

2 tbsp minced onion

1/4 cup packed brown sugar

1/4 cup fish sauce

2 tbsp soy sauce

2 tbsp vegetable oil

2 tbsp ground coriander

1 tbsp cumin

1/2 tsp turmeric

1/8 tsp cayenne pepper

1 rounded tbsp minced lemongrass

View the complete recipe

I hope they call me on a mission

When I have grown a foot or two.

I hope by then I will be ready

To teach and preach and work as missionaries do.

 I hope that I can share the gospel

With those who want to know the truth.

I want to be a missionary