Things To Do In SW Florida

Dee DePass | (TNS) Star Tribune

Six weeks ago, the public relations firm Bellmont Partners reopened its renovated Edina, Minnesota, office with a catch: Not every employee would have a permanent desk.

Like an increasing number of employers wrestling with work-from-home trends, Bellmont adopted a musical-chairs-like seating system, albeit more high-tech, commonly called “hoteling.” Only 12 of Bellmont’s office workers have an assigned desk. Fifteen others who work mostly from home now use a new software app to reserve a desk for a day whenever they come into the office, which Bellmont requires only one day a week.

A little more than a month under the new system, and with a few tweaks, it’s been working, said Bellmont Partners co-owner Brian Bellmont. Making such a drastic change to the typical office setup, though, took a lot of preparation, including hiring a design consultant, polling staffers about their needs, tearing down walls and weighing various technology options.

More companies are considering switching to a hotel-desk model as they wrestle with hybrid work trends that lead to near-empty offices, wasted space and costly leases. Beyond Bellmont, local companies like law firm Maslon LLP and divisions within Thrivent, Thomson Reuters, Ameriprise and U.S. Bank are among those giving the reserve-a-desk concept a whirl. read more

Chapter 11

Central Florida individuals and businesses that have filed for reorganization and protection from creditors under Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code include:

Control Micro Systems Inc., 4420 Metric Drive, Suite A, Winter Park. Filed: May 30. Assets: $1,000,001-$10 million. Liabilities: $1,000,001-$10 million. Major creditors: Photonics Industries, Ronkonkoma, N.Y., $145,642; IPG Photonics Corp., Oxford, Mass., $97,317; Fanuc Robotics, Rochester Hills, Mich., $58,142. Creditors meeting: June 27.

Tykma Inc., 4420 Metric Drive, Suite A, Winter Park. Filed: May 30. Assets: $1,000,001-$10 million. Liabilities: $1,000,001-$10 million. Major creditors: Bank of America, Doral, Pa., $281,357; JPT Shenzhen Opto-Elect, China, $238,800; Cambridge Technology, Boston, $165,561. Creditors meeting: June 27.

Sterling Credit Corp., 222 S. Westmonte Drive, Altamonte Springs. Filed: June 4. Assets: $10,000,001-$50 million. Liabilities: $10,000,001-$50 million. Major creditors: Not available. Creditors meeting: Not available. read more

Gopal Ratnam | (TNS) CQ-Roll Call

WASHINGTON — A handful of lawmakers say they plan to press the issue of the threat to humans posed by generative artificial intelligence after a recent bipartisan Senate report largely sidestepped the matter.

“There’s been no action taken yet, no regulatory action taken yet, at least here in the United States, that would restrict the types of actions that could lead to existential, or health, or other serious consequences,” Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, said in an interview. “And that’s something we’d like to see happen.”

Romney joined Sens. Jack Reed, D-R.I., Jerry Moran, R-Kan., and Angus King, I-Maine, in April to propose a framework that would establish federal oversight of so-called frontier AI models to guard against biological, chemical, cyber and nuclear threats.

Frontier AI models include ChatGPT by OpenAI, Claude 3 by Anthropic PBC and Gemini Ultra by Google LLC, which are capable of generating human-like responses when prompted, based on training with vast quantities of data. read more