From NBC News: “Mina Chang, the deputy assistant secretary in the State Department’s Bureau of Conflict and Stability Operations, has inflated her educational achievements — like claiming, falsely, to be a Harvard grad — and exaggerated the scope of her nonprofit’s work.” And, yes, she is Dallas’ own. She was a speaker at D CEO’s 2017 Women’s Leadership Symposium. She won’t be invited back.

The Omni has gotten a facelift. I know this because I received a press release telling me that the guest rooms have been “reimagined” and that Dallas “celebrates the vibrancy and confidence of those that live and visit.” God bless the PR professional who decided that the hotel has “become further synonymous with the Dallas lifestyle.” For your consideration:

Today, on Omni Dallas’ eighth anniversary, Omni Hotel & Resorts unveils the hotel’s recent renovation that includes fully reimagined guest rooms and meeting space.

Dallas is a city flourishing in momentum and innovation. A destination rich in diversity and entrepreneurship, Dallas celebrates the vibrancy and confidence of those that live and visit. With an unparalleled vantage point, the Omni Dallas Hotel has enhanced the design of the property to align with the city’s evolving art and architecture to become further synonymous with the Dallas lifestyle.

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Local lenders are trying to puzzle out how to adopt a new form of automatic teller machine that lets customers talk via video with off-site bankers. These interactive teller machines, or ITMs, allow banks to make tellers available after hours. They also provide a lower-cost way to expand geographically, compared to opening new branches. There’s also a big difference in  per-transaction costs, which run about $4.50 for an in-person teller and just 70 cents through an ITM, according to Cornerstone Advisors, a Scottsdale, Arizona consultancy.

But ITMs are expensive. From installing the machines to generating returns, banks must spend between $250,000 and $750,000, according to Quality Data Systems of Charlotte, North Carolina. More important, the banks must figure out how to fit ITMs into their particular customer service models. “If you try to implement them in existing branches to reduce human interaction, I think that will fail,” says Jimmy Sawyers, chairman of Sawyers & Jacobs, a financial technology advisory firm. People tend to believe that the next digital method for bringing products or services to market will replace all others, he adds. “That’s not how it works.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, most banks are kicking the tires of ITMs rather than buying. Since first testing the technology in Detroit in 2014, Comerica Bank has installed 21 ITMs in North Texas, with plans for continued expansion through 2020, says Cassandra McKinney, its senior vice president and national director of retail delivery and strategic services. The ITMs provide 90 percent of services typically available only during traditional service hours. “The fact that they double as an independent ATM and offer personal interaction is the added value proposition,” McKinney says.

Mom and Daughter Busted at Love Field With 60 Pounds of Pot. The headline pretty much says it all. But here’s the story.

It’s Dang Cold. At 6:30 this morning, it’s 25 degrees. Here’s what powered the cold front.

Porzingis Sucks. Last night he went 1 for 11 and scored 4 points against the Celtics. Rick Carlisle summed up his performance thusly: “Flush it and move on.”

Daniel Sunshine has a present for you. In fact, the man with an aptronym has two: the gifts of gratitude and calm. As the director of mindfulness at Dallas Yoga Center, his job is to help people learn to live well and happily even while circumstances conspire against them.

Mindfulness as a practice is on the verge of a mainstream phenomenon, Sunshine says. What was once relegated to the woo-woo corners of the world is now a business model, with places like Dallas Yoga Center in Oak Lawn, The Refuge in Deep Ellum, and Dallas Meditation in Carrollton and Plano bringing a more palatable, science-based approach to the general public. “Once science got involved, mindfulness could no longer be categorized as weird or unproven or religious,” Sunshine says. It’s meditation for the masses, and the time has never been more right.

Over the summer, as I was reporting a column on Shingle Mountain, I met Evelyn Mayo for coffee. We talked zoning and land use. I was curious as to how a multi-story tall pile of shingles had come to be located next to the home of an incredibly kind woman named Marsha Jackson. Mayo had been investigating this very thing. Southern Dallas, her team found, is zoned for a patchwork of industrial uses. In some cases, these are next to homes, which exist on land that may not be zoned residential at all. A paralegal with Legal Aid of Northwest Texas, Mayo was in the process of researching all of this for a report she titled “In Plain Sight.”

It uses Shingle Mountain as a lodestar, arguing that the city’s land use policies and zoning created far more vulnerabilities than just the lot next to Marsha Jackson’s home. Mayo and her team went looking for violations of zoning regulations and found a path that basically takes you along the banks of the Trinity River, from West Dallas—former home of lead smelters—all the way down to the city’s southern border near Hutchins, not far from Shingle Mountain. Another hot spot exists further east, in Pleasant Grove. These violations include everything from lacking a certificate of occupancy to industrial activity being too close to homes.

This report, which was published last month, is being offered to neighborhood associations around these vulnerable areas. Some include pockets of homes that aren’t correctly zoned residential. That means, say, a shingle recycling operation could open up next door and the homeowner would not have the same sort of protections as someone who lived in an area zoned single family. That’s Marsha Jackson’s conundrum: her home is zoned agricultural. So she didn’t get a formal review process before the industrial use began. The company behind this, Blue Star Recycling, told a judge that it ran out of money and can’t afford to quickly remove the pile. So now there’s something of a stand-off, and Marsha Jackson is stuck breathing in the particulate matter from the shingles that’s flowing in through her vents.

The report gives the neighborhood associations something of a toolkit. It encourages residents to call 311 when they think they see a violation near them. (Bizarrely, however, the report notes that “it is up to the discretion of the inspector as to what extent the background research is conducted on the site.” Which means they’re not always aware of current zoning when they show up. That’s a policy fix.) It’s also asking the City Council to re-zone some of the areas to prevent such establishments in the future, and, in particular, eliminate the patchwork zoning that creates opportunities for things like Shingle Mountain.

This is why we asked Mayo to come onto EarBurner. And then we wound up talking about Roller Derby and James Harden. Listen below.