Women’s golf clothes are finally getting good. Even non-golfers want them
Boeing’s quality issues have prompted a growing chorus of former employees to come forward with concerns about the jet maker’s manufacturing process. The latest is Roy Irvin, a quality manager who retired in 2020 and said employees working on the 787 Dreamliner jets were discouraged from flagging problems or recommending changes to prevent future snafus.
Irvin’s written account will be part of a congressional hearing on Wednesday that will feature another whistleblower who went public last week with his concerns about 787 joints.
“I was told, ‘We don’t have enough time to do corrective actions, so don’t write one,’” Irvin said in an interview. In pushing the company to address issues, “there was always the chance of not necessarily getting fired but moving to a position that would be much less important.”
Federal safety officials are investigating claims made public last week by a veteran Boeing engineer who said the company dismissed quality and safety concerns during production of its Dreamliner jets. Deliveries of the jets, made at Boeing’s Charleston, S.C., factory, were halted for nearly two years starting in 2020 amid various production and regulatory issues.
The engineer, Sam Salehpour, will testify at Wednesday’s hearing. He said the process Boeing used to fasten parts of the plane together left gaps wider than allowed by Boeing’s own standards, potentially compromising the plane’s durability.
The jet maker defended the safety of the 787 in a two-hour presentation to journalists earlier this week, outlining what engineers described as an exhaustive, yearslong testing and analysis process to investigate gaps in the plane’s body and ensure its safety.
Boeing engineers said tests conducted over several years indicate that most gaps meet specifications, and the ones that don’t do not compromise the plane’s structural integrity.
The Federal Aviation Administration said that voluntary reporting without fear of retaliation is critical to aviation safety, and that it thoroughly investigates all reports.
The company said recent efforts to
Day by day, there’s growing pressure at the office. Do you respond to all those clients— or let AI do it? Do you attend that meeting—or do you send a bot?
About 20% of employed adults said they have used OpenAI’s ChatGPT for work as of February 2024, up from 8% a year ago, according to Pew Research Center. The most popular uses for AI at work are research and brainstorming, writing first-draft emails and creating visuals and presentations, according to an Adobe survey.
Productivity boosts from AI are estimated to be worth trillions of dollars over the next decade, say consultants. Many companies are encouraging their workers to embrace and learn the new tools. The industries that will benefit most are sales and marketing, customer care, software engineering and product development. For most workers, it can make your day-to-day a bit less annoying.
“If you’re going to use it as a work tool,” said Lareina Yee, a senior partner at the consulting firm McKinsey and chair of its Technology Council, “you need to think of all the ways it can change your own productivity equation.”
Using AI at work could get you fired—or at least in hot water . A judge last year sanctioned encourage employees to speak out about quality issues are working. A program in which employees can flag concerns anonymously or by name, in January and February received as many entries as it would normally get in an entire year.
“We have exploded in the amount of ‘Speak Ups’ that have come in, because we’re continually encouraging it,” said Lisa Fahl, a Boeing vice president who previously oversaw 787 quality.
The jet maker is facing criticism for shortcomings in its quality control and manufacturing operations in the wake of a midair blowout of a door plug on an Alaska Airlines flight in January. That plane, a smaller 737 MAX, was built at Boeing’s Renton, Wash., factory.
Executives have since acknowledged that the company at times overemphasized moving planes down the assembly line and employed practices, such as completing work out of sequence, that aimed to speed production but also compromised quality.
The jet maker said last month that Chief Executive Dave Calhoun would a lawyer who relied on fake cases generated by ChatGPT, and some companies have restricted AI’s usage.
Other companies and bosses are pushing staff to do more with AI, but you’ll need to follow guidelines. Rule No. 1: Don’t put any company data into a tool without permission. And Rule No. 2: Only use AI to do work you can easily verify, and be sure to check its work.
ChatGPT is easy to play around with For one, version 3.5 is free—though the $20-amonth ChatGPT Plus (which includes GPT-4) delivers better results. Your company might already pay for AI tools from Google or Microsoft , so start there.
Whether you’re self-employed or working at a Fortune 500 company, these are four areas where AI can help. We’ve gathered the best starting phrases (aka “prompts”) and the neatest tricks to try in each category. (In this guide, we’re avoiding scenarios where AI gives advice or makes up its own information.)
Email is annoying, but it isn’t going away. AI can make responding to messages easier.
Using a free version of Microsoft Copilot or Google’s Gemini chatbots, prompt the tool to write words of encouragement, a time-off request or some other email premise. In step down at the end of the year as part of a broader executive shake-up in the wake of the Alaska Airlines accident.
Boeing has said it would slow down the factories to focus on quality and take new steps to prevent problems from being pushed down assembly lines. The company recently changed its bonus plan for 100,000 workers to emphasize quality and safety over meeting financial targets.
Boeing declined to comment on Irvin’s account. A company spokesman said Boeing slowed 787 production and stopped deliveries for nearly two years starting in 2021 to ensure the planes met engineering specification in response to concerns raised by employees. “This was a clear demonstration of our commitment to listen and take action on employee feedback.”
Irvin, the former employee, worked as a quality investigator from 2011 to 2017 and was responsible for investigating problems and recommending corrective action. He then worked as a manager overseeing quality on planes as they came out of final assembly. seconds, you’ll get a workable, if bland, draft. Based on our tests, ChatGPT Plus delivered impressive results on the first try. The free ChatGPT did fine, but gave less detail than its subscription counterpart.
To get AI inside your email service, you or your employer has to pay. For $20 a month, Copilot Pro lets Outlook users draft, proofread and reply to emails, and summarize long email threads. If your company pays for Microsoft’s enterprise version, Copilot can reference files saved in your corporate cloud.
The Google One AI Premium plan , also $20 a month,
He said inspectors were rewarded for signing off on higher numbers of planes, encouraging them to rush through inspections. And managers often pressured teams to forgo corrective actions if the prescribed steps would be time consuming or required too much manpower, he said.
Irvin said the recent death of John Barnett, another quality manager who raised concerns about the jet maker, prompted him to come forward. Police said they were investigating Barnett’s death as a suicide.
Police said Irvin was found dead of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound in his car outside of a hotel in Charleston, where he was giving a deposition in a lawsuit he brought against Boeing accusing the company of retaliating against him for raising quality concerns.
Irvin said he spoke to Barnett less than two weeks before his death. The two men are represented by the same lawyer.
“It was a major shock to me,” he said. “It was a stressful job. I know if I’d have stayed another five years, I’d have probably had a stroke.” integrates Google Gemini in personal Gmail accounts. Email thread summarization is coming soon, but for now, the Help Me Write feature helps you draft and tweak emails. We got better results entering prompts in the standalone Gemini chatbot.
For $30 a month, or $144 a year, Grammarly’s premium generative-AI service can appear in most text windows on your Windows or Mac computer. You can write prompts, personalize your voice and set your preferences for later.
SAMPLE PROMPT: Write an email to my direct report, Steve, asking him to find time
Presentations
Copilot Pro helps users generate, organize and understand PowerPoint presentations. While only enterprise users can feed it files to create richer presentations on the fly, Copilot Pro users can still prompt the bot to add images to slides.
Caveats: You have to add images one at a time, and you get better results if you use Microsoft’s stand-alone Designer to generate images, then bring them over.
Designer in PowerPoint
OLF IS the most fun you can have without taking your clothes off.” So said eight-time PGA champion Chi-Chi Rodríguez—and he didn’t know the half of it.
Lately, clothes themselves are introducing part of that fun, with style-conscious players refining their links looks. Brands like Louis Vuitton, Tory Burch and even Jimmy Choo (better known for stilettos) are teeing up new gear while the sport increasingly shapes streetwear and summer trends. Result: golf clothes to wear both on and off the course.
According to the National Golf Foundation, since 2020, 23% more women and 40% more people under 40 are hitting the greens.
Meanwhile, the
LPGA Tour, well underway, is beaming stylish players like Lilia Vu and Ayaka Furue into sports bars nationwide. Two dueling “Great Gatsby” musicals aim to bring golf scenes to Broadway this year. Recent episodes of TV’s “Palm Royale” and “The Gentlemen” featured golf subplots and covetable course looks. Celebrities like Jessica Alba and Hailey Bieber have been paparazzi’d while playing. And online, influencers are connecting more women with the game.
That includes Mia Baker, 29, a poster child for golf’s growing crowd. The British YouTube star began playing in 2020 while working as a lab manager at a genetic research company. Baker couldn’t find “comfortable, cool-looking” apparel that let her take big swings—in style or in sport. “If my outfit is too tight or I’m too done up, I feel as stiff as my clothes,” she said.
After adding streetwear elements like cropped tees and baggy shorts to her repertoire, Baker’s golf scores and online audience grew in tandem. Now hundreds of thousands of people—mostly, it seems, young women—turn to Baker for golf and fashion tips. “Golf is becoming more accepting of people expressing themselves and their style,” Baker said, noting offers unique slide layouts based on information in the presentation. If you have a list of dates on a slide, for example, Designer might suggest a timeline with those dates already inserted.
Personal account users who pay for Google Gemini can have the bot generate unique backgrounds and images within Google’s Slides app. (Just don’t ask for people since Google disabled that feature following backlash over its inaccurate depictions of race and ethnicity .) Users of Gemini for Google Workspace will soon be able to prompt the bot to create slides based on Gmail and Drive content, a Google spokeswoman said.
ChatGPT won’t construct full presentations, but it can provide slide text based on prompts. ChatGPT Plus can create slide segments from uploaded documents. We asked it to turn a 25-page PDF file into seven slides, and it wrote text for each slide, including two suggested titles and a bullet list of key points.
SAMPLE PROMPT: Generate a watercolor image of a pink robot dancing in the rain.
Summaries
Wordy, boring documents? Chatbots love them. Free tools like Copilot in Microsoft’s designers are catching up to the new demand for looser, more irreverent clothes. She currently favors nip-waist plaid dresses by Malbon and oversize heavy-metal tees, which she pairs with Adidas Golf skirts.
E! News host Erin Lim Rhodes, 33, began golfing the Hollywood way: at a celebrity tournament hosted by Justin Timberlake in 2021. The game’s camaraderie and confidence-boosting effects kept her hooked, and she found golf “instrumental” in fighting postpartum depression. After coach George Gankas encouraged her to loosen up her stance, Rhodes began bringing more of her personal style onto the course. “I need a shirt with personality,” she said. Some of hers are from Greyson, the sleek brand favored by pro golfers like Sophia Warren and Alison Lee.
Smaller labels are emerging to dress golf’s new women. When Nashville-based designer Amy
Anderson, 38, played a round just after quarantine, her skirt flew up. The mishap proved a flash of inspiration for the former Warby Parker executive, who went on to co-found the golf line Honors. “It was embarrassing,” she said. “You don’t see a guy experiencing that because it’s the only option he had to wear.” Beyond designing gear less likely to show skin, Anderson mandated that all Honors clothes should be able to go from the course to
Edge browser can summarize webpages, articles, PDFs or other sources you only have time to skim.
ChatGPT only allows Plus subscribers to upload files. Other AI tools such as Perplexity and Anthropic’s Claude let you upload a few limited-size files free. Turning on the Google Workspace extension in Gemini chat lets you refer to emails and files in Docs and Drive, so you can ask it to summarize information you already have saved there. (Beware: In our testing, it made some mistakes like making up names for people.)
Copilot, Gemini and other bots can summarize and provide timestamps for videos with transcripts. Gemini users need to turn on the YouTube extension in settings. Copilot in Edge can answer questions alongside open YouTube or Vimeo pages.
Video summarization can be hit or miss, especially when the videos are more than 30 minutes long.
SAMPLE PROMPT: List the five key points discussed in this video in a bulleted list. Meetings
Otter.ai’s OtterPilot can join meetings on Zoom or Google Meet and take notes for you, even if you can’t attend. The AI generates a
“a cool restaurant.” Her resulting muscle tanks and moisture-wicking blazers resemble pieces from the Row, albeit for Thorbjørn Olesen, not Ashley Olsen.
Runway fashion has also leaked onto greens via Ali Putnam, the Ohio-based designer of A. Putnam. “There’s an image of Brooke Shields playing golf in trousers and a sleeveless top,” she said, “and there’s something so timeless about it.” Putnam, 39, channels Shields’s preppy Princeton years in her course-friendly separates, which are also inspired by luxury brands like Max Mara and Chloé. Gen Z players like sportswriter Adelaide Parker, founder of the newsletter the IX, have embraced the label. Parker recently wore an A. Putnam golf dress with tall leather boots and a motorcycle jacket fit for a night out.
Golf style has even infiltrated decidedly nonathletic circles. On a recent Friday morning, Lingua Franca founder Rachelle Hruska MacPherson, 41, put a new golf-club sweater in the window of her brand’s boutique in Manhattan’s West Village. Embroidered across its front, the cashmere top featured Larry David’s moan-y golf mantra on “Curb Your Enthusiasm”— “vertical drop, horizontal tug.”
“I don’t even really play,” said MacPherson of the design. “But seeing how strong and cool the female players look on TV, I realized, I really want to.”
OtterPilot can join meetings on Zoom or Google Meet and take notes for you, even if you can’t attend
Brands like Louis Vuitton and even Jimmy Choo (better known for stilettos) are teeing up new gear
transcript and notes, which include a brief summary, an outline and a to-do list. Its chat function can catch you up on what you missed if you arrive late, and recall notes from previous meetings. The free version only gives you 300 transcription minutes and 20 chat queries a month. The premium starts at $17 a month.
In our test of the paid version, Otter didn’t always know who said what, and it forgot names and misidentified people. You can review recorded transcripts to check on questionable points.
Zoom now has an AI Companion for paying users. It summarizes meetings and lengthy chat threads, brainstorms ideas, and organizes meeting highlights by topics. Only the host can enable these AI Companion summaries, so if you’re not running the meeting, you’ll have to ask the host to turn it on.
For Microsoft enterprise customers, Copilot is embedded in Teams and can take notes, summarize chats and answer questions. Gemini for Google Workspace accounts with the Gemini Enterprise or AI Meetings and Messaging add-on can also take notes and summarize them during and after meetings.
If your colleagues notice you missed the meeting and sent a bot instead, your best response may be: “Welcome to the future.”
INDIA’S EXPORTS to China in FY24, up 8.74% from $15.33 billion in FY23, according to the commerce ministry. Imports from China rose 3.29% to $101.75 billion in FY24
THE GRANT Micron Technology, the largest US-based computer memory chips maker, is set to get from US commerce department for domestic factory projects
THE PERCENTAGE of total capacity to which water levels in India’s 150 major reservoirs shrunk, with southern states seeing a significant water storage shortfall