TheThree Minute Thesis (3MT) is an academic research communication competition developed by The University of Queensland (UQ), Australia. Students must concisely summarize and clearly communicate a well-conceived thesis/dissertation project, compelling data collected, and a novel story in three minutes or less. The ability to do this allows students to develop academic, presentation, and research communication skills.
Add the water, Mix, and pour a cup of coffee or something. You need to give the yeast about 3 minutes to get all foamy and active-ey. (I know. not technically a word, but bear with me here.) Add in the flour and salt and get to stirring.
Finicky dough alert!
Baking cakes and pastries is a science, but bread making is magic. This recipe, while solid, is very sensitive to changes in humidity, so be ready with a little extra flour and a little extra water just in case. You'll find that the dough is too dry one day and way too loose the next time you make it, so you'll have to play with it just a little to get it right. But the time spent is oh-so-worth it.
Operating hours: 10:00am-8:00pm every day.
Advanced online ticket purchase highly recommended.
For group reservation requests of 21 or more people please email at least 2 weeks in advance to inquire.
Our outside grounds offer space to enjoy your ice cream, play on the playground, pay your respects to our Dearly De-pinted in our Flavor Graveyard, snap a few memorable photo ops and take in the lovely mountain views. A great outing for all ages!
The tour remains the same. To better explain the manufacturing process your tour guide will narrate a video that was filmed on the production room floor. In the manufacturing room you may see a shiny, clean, empty room; a portion of our thorough cleaning process that takes place between flavors; or our maintenance crew working on a repair.
Tickets are released 2 weeks in advance and can be purchased online under the BOOK NOW! tab on our website. If available, you may also purchase walk-in tickets onsite at our Ticket Sales and Gift Kiosk.
Due to high demand, we recommend purchasing your tickets online in advance of your visit to guarantee your Factory Experience.
Due to strict capacity limits, unfortunately we are only able to accommodate those two guests that have a ticket. We recommend checking back on the website for potential openings or cancellations with availability for your entire group.
Enter through the main lobby doors located on the patio area. Listen for the cowbell to signal the start of your scheduled visit. Check in with your tour guide as the group proceeds to the first stop on the tour.
If you miss your scheduled time, it is unlikely we will be able to reschedule due to advanced ticket sales and capacity limits. A refund will not be provided.
If you are running late, you may reschedule or self-cancel your experience up to 30 minutes before your scheduled time using the link found in your confirmation email.
Yes, the Factory is ADA accessible.
Accessible parking is marked and located in our upper parking lot. You may also drop off at the end of the boardwalk, at the top of the hill.
For planning purposes, the tour is in 3 parts. Your tour guide will direct you. After the intro/check-in in the tour lobby area the first 2 parts take place on the second floor by way of the elevator (we only have one!) located in the tour lobby. The 3rd part of the tour is located in the Flavor Room. You will take the same elevator back to the lobby then go across and down the hallway to meet up with the group in the Flavor Room.
Yes, but only outside. Pets are not permitted inside the Factory. Dogs must be leashed and supervised.
Please do not leave your dog in the car during the warmer months.
Service dogs are permitted inside.
The Flavor Graveyard is an actual graveyard onsite where we have laid to rest our Dearly De-pinted flavors with granite headstones and witty epitaphs. It is located at the top of the property in the upper parking lots, passed the playground area.
For the Scoop shop please inform your scooper of the allergy so they can provide the most accurate allergy scooping protocol. For the Factory Experience please inform your tour guide and they will assist.
Last year, Americans spent more than $80 billion playing state lotteries, that's around $250 for each citizen, more than what was spent on concerts, sporting events and movie tickets combined. Over 25 states took in more from their lottery proceeds than from corporate income tax. Because of these stakes, it's essential that, in both perception and reality, lotteries are truly games of chance, everyone entering with an equal opportunity to win. Which is why investigators took note when a retired couple from Michigan, Jerry and Marge Selbee, made $26 million winning various state lottery games dozens of times. This is not a story, though, of a con, or a scam, or an inside job. No, this is a ballad of a couple from small-town America who did something that most people only dream of. They didn't so much as beat the lottery odds as they figured them out.
But one morning in 2003, Jerry happened to walk back into the corner store and spotted a brochure for a brand new lottery game called Winfall. Jerry always possessed what he calls, "a head for math." He has a bachelor's degree in the subject from nearby Western Michigan University. And in only a matter of minutes, he realized that this was a unique game.
That feature was called a "Rolldown", and the lottery announced when it was coming. Unlike the Mega Millions games you've probably heard of where the jackpot keeps building until someone hits all six numbers and wins the big prize, in Winfall, if the jackpot reached $5 million, and no one matched all six numbers, all the money 'rolled down' to the lower-tier prize winners, dramatically boosting the payouts of those who matched five, four or three numbers.
Soon Jerry and Marge Selbee started playing for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Jerry set up a corporation, G.S. Investment Strategies. He showed us stacks of record books that detailed their winnings.
They invited family and friends to share in their, well, windfall, selling shares in the corporation for $500 apiece. You might say this was a different kind of hedge fund. We met some of the local investors at the evart hangout spot, Sugar Rae's Caf.
By the spring of 2005, Jerry's club stood at 25 members. Those willing to press their luck included three state troopers, a factory plant manager, and a bank vice president. They had played Winfall 12 times, winning millions. When Michigan suddenly shut down the game, citing, ironically, lack of sales.
That's when Jerry and Marge Selbee developed a routine they continued for the next six years, driving 900 miles to Massachusetts every time there was a rolldown and buying hundreds of thousands of tickets at two local convenience stores. Then they holed up, not in some fancy suite at the high rollers hotel, but in a room at the Red Roof Inn, sorting the tickets by hand for 10 hours a day, 10 days straight, not so much playing the lottery, as working it.
Marge Selbee: We had the upstairs of the barn. I stored them in one end and in the other end. And then I thought, "Oh no, this floor is gonna fall through." So then we stored them down in the pole barn. And we had probably 60, 65 tubs of tickets.
Scott allen oversees the Globe's investigative reporters, known as the Spotlight team. The paper's reporting revealed that two groups were dominating Cash Winfall: the Selbee gang from Evart, Michigan, and their competition, a syndicate led by math majors from MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. These were kids young enough to be the Selbees' grandchildren.
Scott Allen: The guy who started it, he was doing an independent study project as an undergraduate at MIT and he figured out that he could win this game. So he got a bunch of his friends to pool in their money so they became, as time went on, professional Cash Winfall players, recruiting their friends and raising money from backers until they too were spending hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Greg Sullivan: When we got involved, the public perception was there must be some kind of organized crime or public corruption to explain how millions of dollars are being bet by syndicates on state lottery tickets. We really looked at this, looking for corruption. We used subpoenas, we looked at documents, we interviewed dozens of people to look at this in detail with a hypothesis that something illegal had happened.
The investigation found no one's odds of winning was affected by high-volume betting. When the jackpot hit the rolldown threshold, Cash Winfall became a good bet for everyone, not just the big time bettors like the Selbees. By then though, Massachusetts State Lottery had moved on to a different game without a statistical twist.
They made nearly $8 million in profit before taxes. Back in Evart, not exactly the land of extravagance, the Selbees put their winnings to practical use, renovating their home and helping their six kids, 14 grandkids and 10 great-grandchildren pay for their education. They still get together with members of their lottery group. But millions of dollars in Winfall tickets have been replaced by nickel and dime poker night, and Marge makes everyone chicken pot pie.
I then hike down the Rock (our term for the cell block) to the communal bathroom I share with 48 other inmates, brush my teeth between four young kids who are rapping, handle my morning business on the toilet, and return to my cell once again, where I pour Ross another bowl of water, buckle on my pouch full of treats, then venture back out into the bowels of our unit with the dog in tow. We spend the next 40 minutes training him to follow my commands.
Next, I grab my tablet and a cup of instant coffee, and hurry to our JPay.com (a prison email service) kiosk (a computer encased in damn-near indestructible stainless steel), which is my only window to the outside world.
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