WRIT 340 Blog

From: Atul Ajoy To: Professor Clark Hansen, CEO, AMDP Subject: Investment Recommendation Memo - Culdesac February 28th, 2023 In a detailed search for businesses that fit the criteria and standards of AMDP's investments, I found Culdesac, a startup with an innovative approach to urban planning and real estate development, to be an interesting opportunity. AMDP Standards: Triple Bottom Line - The triple bottom line is a framework for businesses to be measured on their "social, environment, and economic impact". The concept was coined by author John Elkington around 30 years ago to ensure that a business' success was measured not only through profit and loss but also "in terms of the wellbeing of billions of people and the health of our planet" (Elkington). Corporate Social Responsibility -  Corporate social responsibility is the aspect of a company's governance that it puts in place to make sure that it is beneficial to society (Peterdy). There are 4 main ...

Much progress has been made in the development of artificial intelligence recently. One organization, OpenAPI, has led the charge and launched ChatGPT, a chatbot built on a generative language model. OpenAI is a non-profit artificial intelligence research organization founded by former Y Combinator President Sam Altman, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, and others with $1B pledged to the project. It's for-profit subsidiary was valued at $29B and struck a deal with Microsoft for a rumored $10B. The deal reportedly means that Microsoft would get 75% of OpenAI's profits until it recoups its $10B and then a 49% stake in OpenAI. In November 2022, OpenAI launched ChatGPT built on top of GPT-3. GPT-3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3) is an autoregressive language model that can take an initial prompt and continue to write based off of the prompt. ChatGPT is built to act like a conversationalist but can do a variety of other things such as writing computer cod...

The book I chose was "American Like Me" by America Ferrera. For the first blog post, I wrote about the first couple chapters I read after focusing on the chapters about other Indian-Americans like me. I had already heard of many of them like Padma Lakshmi, Kumail Nanjiani (a Pakistani-American I've seen in Silicon Valley), and Kal Penn (an Indian-American I've watched in Designated Survivor). It was super interesting to learn more about their backgrounds as I had mostly known of them as characters on a screen as opposed to individuals. For example, I knew Kal Penn had been one of President Obama's speechwriters but I didn't know his path there from a high school in New Jersey that made him choose between international studies and performing arts to being an actor to that role. I've also read about other chapters about individuals I know of even if they don't look like me. One example was Jeremy Lin. I'm a huge basketball fan and watched in real tim...

Manufactured Fear The promise of nuclear energy and roadblocks to energy abundance On April 26th, 1986, humanity's fight against climate change was set back decades. In a now abandoned city in northern Ukraine, the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant suffered a meltdown and released radioactive contaminants that spread across much of Europe. Today, nuclear energy's detractors often bring up this event from almost 4 decades ago as proof that nuclear energy is not safe and should be avoided. This argument, however, is ill-informed at best and self-serving malevolence at worst. The fear of radiation and safety is manufactured propaganda using events that hold little relevance to today. In 2023, nuclear energy is one of the safest sources of energy. It's also the most reliable source of energy. And to add to that, it's carbon-free. In an era with blackouts in America's most populous state, European energy reliance on adversaries like Russia, and the threat of global warming, ...

I read "American Like Me" by America Ferrera. America's intro to the book is very compelling to me because it dives way deeper into who she is and her relationship to her name and its meaning. Her story about the real root of her name was interesting. From her intro, I skipped around chapters to read about individuals who I thought were most similar to me, starting with fellow Indian-Americans. There are quite a few out of the 31 total stories: Reshma Saujani, Padma Lakshmi, Liza Koshy, Kumail Nanjiani (he's a Pakistani-American but is definitely similar to Indian-American stories), Ravi V. Patel, and Kal Penn were all ones I noticed. I also focused on chapters were I knew the individual and had already followed a bit of their story like Jeremy Lin. As the child of two immigrants to the US, I've always been aware that my story is not homogenous to the rest of America or even other children of immigrants. I wouldn't say the communities I grew up in negatively i...