One of the best treatments clinically proven to help with depression Anxiety low libido low drive Inflammation it's not a medicine It's exercise and it's proven to be better than almost any other medication available Do you think this is a common knowledge? Yeah, I don't I do not think although it's becoming more common You know if you look at and this isn't just my opinion if you look at the data Look at anxiety and depression for example We're talking about the most common forms right the kind of mild to moderate forms because extreme forms That's a whole different category, but if you look at the data when they compare the most effective Medic prescription medications that we've had now for decades right like a SSRI You know drugs or other drugs that are similar and you compare them to consistent exercise The effects on depression and anxiety are very similar in the short term in the long term They start to trend better with exercise and that's because exercise You don't build up a tolerance to it like you do with a medication You tend to it tends to become more and more effective as you continue to do it In fact if you could bottle exercise into a pill It would be a block.  They just think it's work Yeah, and it's the consistency really that provides a value once you really start to add that into your daily activities or daily life It's interesting to me because I look at it a lot like Unused unpotential used energy and at the end of the day like your body starts to kind of like, you know Get restless with that and it if you're all in your head for too long You kind of get into this loop that you can't really break out of yeah There's so much to impact there too. Yeah. Yeah, it definitely improves your physical health, which will also improve your mental health We know that those are strongly connected But the process of exercise is very much an empowering one Where you're out doing it and you're struggling and you're finding that you're able to stay consistent. Oh my gosh It's working. Look what I'm doing. I like this and I feel good about myself And it just gets better and better over the years and there's so much Again, there's so much to impact there why why exercise is such an effective Mental health tool and nobody really talks about it. Everybody talks about weight loss Looking better, you know, maybe some discussions around mobility and movement and strength, which all great all good but I Firmly believe the most profound effects that consistent Appropriate I have to say appropriate right because exercise can be abused just like anything But the appropriate application of exercise By far as they are the mental health effects and when I would train clients It was the mental effects that were that you would see and feel that were more profound And those are the ones that people actually commented on that shocked them that blew them away like oh my god I feel feel so good and I feel so happy and this is so weird What's the antidepressant drugs aren't they their goal is really to to make it so you don't have like the High highs and the low lows it's just to keep you know their goal is to keep you neutral subscribe subscribe well to keep taking them Yeah, but like not to really feel like better necessarily, but just you know, not not bad Yeah, I want to be you know, very clear that the prescription drugs have a very they have a place and I don't want to Downplay them because I think that they there in many cases they're life-saving worse But what I'm trying to say is that exercise appropriately applied exercise For many cases is so much better and even if you're on medication it only will make it that well I do both why it makes it so much more effective. We're starting to see now that they're starting to visit exercise as a Treatment for mental health issues and we already see that right psychiatrists and psychologists will always will already recommend that people Exercise and move and do stuff like that But it's not a part of the protocol but with with with the clinical evidence I believe that these these clinics and in therapists should I think a very effective strategy to partner with exercise specialists and say look Here's a deal. We're gonna do this with therapy. We're gonna do this with medication and also Here's so-and-so and they're gonna help you with exercise and activity because in the studies It's so effective. I think we're gonna have to when you look at you know, we make that comparison about Wally You know, we kind of like lightly joke about that, but there's There's some truth to the potential of us moving in that direction of like not having to move really to get access Do everything you need to do make money whatever So I think that it's gonna become necessary and I think we're in the middle of that transition right now And maybe this the pandemic accelerated that a little bit of people's awareness around why it's so important that you exercise And I think we're gonna start to see that over the next couple of years more and more people I mean and look at these these businesses. Although, I mean Peloton and them are tanking right now But like you're at home fitness stuff. That's becoming more popular and the gyms are blowing up again Are they still going? I was gonna ask you have you been following up on like your prediction on what's happening right now I've talked to a few people that are in the industry It's now it's hard to say because part of it could be that the market washed out a lot of competition So what whoever's left now is they are you know, they now own a larger piece of the market potentially but You're seeing a surge and I think part of it is because people are feeling really bad Worse than they have in a long time and it happened so fast right in a two-year period our obesity rate Accelerated to the point where we are at the point now with obesity Where we would have been maybe in six or seven years at the at the pace that we had before so it just Sped up and and and I think people are kind of like I want to move, you know, so now will it stick I don't know. That's the hard. That's the hard thing to predict. I hope it does right, but I do think that I look I'll speak personally I'm I I battle with my own Demons, I've you know, I have ADD and when I was in school I had trouble sitting still and paying attention and I can have my own para noise and all that stuff Exercise and I've said this for so long and I tell us to my wife all the time. It's so therapeutic for me I don't know where I would be I could not imagine if I had if for a month and a half If I couldn't exercise at all Like I mean you guys are looking at me and I know you're trying not to make funny faces Could you imagine how I would be if I had no if I couldn't do anything for a month and a half? Yeah It's so therapeutic to me. It's definitely necessary Well, most likely you would you would seek out something else to medicate. Yeah to medicate or fill that void What just happens? What's great is that if you do Move in the direction of using fit health and fitness although it can be dangerous in itself or I shouldn't say dangerous It could be unhealthy could be abused right like anything with like anything else at least on the way there It's you get a lot of positive benefits from it right because obviously there are people that Are addicted to exercise and fitness and their body and looking at themselves that it starts to Hurt or harm other parts of their life for people that are connected to them But in the pursuit of that or in the process of that There's a lot of positive health benefits that they get from it not only that and physical Yeah, and you're right and anything can be pathological. I don't care what it is You can make anything pathological But if you talk to anybody and you guys know people like this if you talk to anybody who's been doing it for a long time They went through that path process and then came out of it. It's such a learn.  That's an important lesson to learn right and but and accept it It teaches you that it's okay to fail You're gonna like you try any exercise you suck at it the first 50 times that you do it teaches you not to compare to others You have to because like I said at some point you realize like oh, yeah I'm never going to look like Arnold did like I realized that in my late teens and then I accepted it and then continued It teaches you to love your body because if you stick with it for 20 or 30 years At some point you stop hating yourself because you're starting to enjoy the process It makes you feel self-reliant and empowered you feel empowered because it's something you're doing for your own Health and your own sanity and well-being there's so many lessons right So it's just literally see progress happen right in front of your face you do and so it's just it's just this very powerful mental health Personal growth vehicle and it's never it's almost never talked about in that way And I feel like that's the angle That we should talk about it because I think if you set all of the value of exercise on Weight loss and how you look You're going to set a lot of people up for early failure and then they'll get discouraged and won't do it But if you tell people hey, here's how it's going to make you feel Here's the positive mental health effects. They will feel that they will see that and then and then what'll happen As a side effect is the fat loss and all that other stuff. Do you foresee in the future? More companies building health and fitness around like their structure of your day at work Like starting the day off with like in half hour or hour of some sort of physical activity before We've already talked about like what's this? I think they they did this a long time ago Like the average hours that the eight hour employee actually works in the day. It's like not even half So it's not like it would carve into their productivity at work Like we're oh shoot you got we do an hour of fitness in the day Now you no longer have enough time to write code or do whatever it's like they already are are that unproductive as it is And actually doing something that's physical like that not only would benefit them physically but mentally and potentially I mean we know I know it's wondering when other companies will figure this out. They'll be more productive So at what point do companies start building that into Their day. Yeah, you know what the challenge our companies will they will but the challenge with that is you're going to get pushback From people are saying um, I don't want to or yeah, I feel fat shamed or i'm not able to You said that before but I think So I I think I think if you give them the option and then you'd have you couldn't make it mandatory It has to be part of the culture. I know in japan Um, and I know Doug maybe you can correct me It it was it's been a part of the culture for a long time that companies would have employees start the day off with Do some tai chi calisthenics and uh exercise. Yeah, yeah, right. Is that is that correct? Yeah, so I imagine that so I imagine it would start at a place like that So I don't I don't foresee you're you know a google or facebook You know having a you know strength training workout for hour four where you're going to have a lot of people Oh, I have these injuries these limitations. Oh, I can't do versus We're going to do something like meditative or walking like imagine if it's just like every day I mean we we do this right off air. We we we talk about this where there's times where we get stuck and we're going And we'll just interrupt our day and go. Hey, let's just go for a walk And we we find that so productive right kind of clears our mind gets us outside for a little bit We know so what happens when you see I foresee something like that I don't foresee this and maybe some companies are saying so let's work out Right, so you're not going to get like the pushback of I if you could walk walk You should be able to do it in a structured way where we make sure and I think just making sure everybody is walking for an hour Every day you'd be amazed on how much that will increase everybody's activity because very few people are even stepping that much in a normal day You know it makes sense, but I'm so jaded by the last few years of how Pushed down like logical Means of keeping you healthy strong resilient like we're just completely not even part of the conversation Like we got we got a lot of work to do to get people off of pharma's teat Yeah, but it's coming that way right now. Don't you feel like I mean, I mean, I think some people but but honestly the mass Majority of people are still think that like Taking pills is gonna solve you know why it's because it's a decision you have to make for yourself because It's it's not it's not a profitable Message so if you're a politician or if you're a company that's selling a product It is not profitable to sit there and say hey Here's something you could do for yourself and it doesn't cost any money I feel like it's only gonna take one big successful company to implement it and show positive returns for it to kick off though I mean, look what happened when and I don't know who did it first Was it was it uh facebook or google when they started to disrupt the way your workspace was done now? Everybody does that yeah like that we did we did work big breakthrough It was a huge breakthrough We did workspace a very traditional way for decades Decades and then all of a sudden a big company comes in and disrupts the way that landscape That's a good point and now everybody models it so all it's gonna take is a A facebook a google and amazon yeah a leader in the industry that's already a successful company to say you know what We're gonna take care of our employees mental and physical health And we're gonna start easy with something like hey every day The way of your first hour looks is we go on walks or something something maybe there's an intercom in 51st minutes We're gonna do these stretches and I don't know exactly what it looks like right But I know virgin was like before all this stuff was really making headway with that with a lot of corporate fitness Initiatives and and they're doing a lot of cool things, but yeah, I think I mean I hope you're right like I hope that there is like a shiny example of that That's like a very much of a brand that everybody like recognizes and is sort of leading the way in terms of like Our employees are doing this. They're way more productive. They're you know, they're not missing any sick days Like all these benefits the wild part is if you can if you can improve it by one to three percent huge huge savings huge savings So that's why Right that's that's the point that kind of blows my mind that that the the amazons of facebook these companies that employ tens of thousands of people Have it piece that together. It's like we don't need it to be hella successful We just needed to change one percent of the lives that are out there and that makes a huge difference here I'll make it even more dramatic. Okay, healthy people Uh are more efficient They make different choices in the market So healthy people are more likely to buy and want products that serve their true health Which means you'll have more innovation and more money going to those products versus products that medicate and distract And aren't good for us healthy people innovate better So they're smarter. They innovate better. They solve better problems. Healthy people are less angry They're less anxious. So you have less actions that are related to anger and anxiety Healthy people make better parents. They make better partners If right now I could snap my fingers and make everybody in america just healthy You would see it would make such a profound difference. It would it would be massive I'm gonna go out and say you don't even have to make them healthy You just have to move them in that direction by a couple percent. Yeah, right? Yep. I mean that in itself will have enough positive, you know Effects from it that I think will pay back companies pay back people. I just I don't know I feel like we're right on the cusp of this like Tipping revolution. Yeah of where we're going to go that direction. It is. It is definitely changing Let me tell you Doug Sal again, Andrew. Could you Sal Stradamo is coming out with the uh predictions Adam and I were like, you know The closing machines Just threw that in there. That was a big book commercial. Yeah By the way, you could get Sal's book on amazon anywhere. No, it wasn't you can amazon target Yeah Hey, if you enjoyed that clip you can find the full episode here or you can find other clips over here and be sure to subscribe


Hi, my name is Tim Freel and I'm the liaison officer for the Maristam project. Welcome to the Sharing Science Pathways with Maristam panel discussion. This event will be in two parts. The first part is a pre-recorded section of about 25 minutes in length, which is a block of one-on-one interviews with our panelists. We'll then join you live to answer your questions for the second half of this one-hour event. During this event, you'll meet four ANU students who have shared their science knowledge via the Maristam project. You'll hear about their experiences in learning to communicate science in a video format, how studying science influences and is influenced by society, and the multitude of other exciting opportunities studying at ANU has to offer. So what is the Maristam project? It's a volunteer-powered initiative to help high school students learn science. We create videos and worksheets covering science content and link in all the cool research that is going on within the ANU community, things like Bose Einstein condensates in physics and stomata and food crop sustainability in biology. Everything we create is then provided free to students everywhere. Our volunteers are university students, researchers and teachers from every field and they have all contributed and developed their skills in a multitude of different ways and not just by being in front of the camera. Let's first get to know each of our four panelists and then we'll join you live to answer all of your exciting questions that you've submitted via the chat function. Hi there, I'm joined by Matt Goh who has previously studied a Bachelor of Philosophy in Science here at the Australian National University. Thanks Matt for joining us. Can you share about what you're currently doing with your time? Yep, sure. So I'm a theoretical physicist and I'm currently working as a research assistant at the Australian National University. So I'm working in sort of quantum matter, Bose Einstein condensates and I'm working on some theoretical work, some simulations to devise new protocols to produce Bose Einstein condensates so that they can be used for applications like precision sensing and quantum computing and other applications. And is this what you were doing as part of the research in your degree itself? It's closely related. So I did quite a bit of research in my Bachelor of Philosophy degree and the most significant part of that was my Honours project which was a one year project at the end of my degree and so in this project I was working on a closely related quantum control problem. I'm currently working in the same research group using very similar techniques but to a slightly different problem. Fantastic and taking a step back what made you decide to tackle a science degree in the first place? So I think it comes down to a combination of two things. The first and certainly most fundamental was a sort of fascination with discovering new knowledge, with learning, with advancing the frontiers of science. And second to that I guess was the fact that I'm quite technically minded and I wanted to pursue something like mathematics or physics or computer science and I think that combined with my interest in fundamental questions and reductionism brought me to physics. So as part of the research that you're working on at the moment and previously have worked on, you've been involved in a lot of global interaction, not just here within the ANU, can you tell us about how you've worked across the globe with different researchers? Certainly, so ultimately all good science ends up being global on some scale and as part of my degree I did a number of summer research programs across the world including two visits to the Weizmann Institute of Science and so these programs, the International Summer Science Institute at the Weizmann Institute and then the Kutsenett Getz Summer School brought together students from across the globe from many different countries, from many different disciplines to study together, learn together and conduct research in groups at the institute. The most recent of these, the second time I visited, I actually ended up publishing a research paper with that group and so again coming back to this sort of global scientific collaboration. I'm now on a scientific paper between ANU and the Weizmann Institute and even after I left the institute we continued to review manuscripts and do science and analyse data and it never really stopped even just because you've left another country doesn't mean that the global process of science stops. In more recent times I am just at the moment about two months away from starting my PhD at the University of Oxford where I've been awarded a Rhodes Scholarship and even after I leave I will be sort of bringing in techniques from across the world working with my research group in Oxford probably continuing to collaborate with my research group here in ANU and building up a sort of global network of peers. Particularly in theoretical research I find just having a wide bank of knowledge from across the globe is incredibly helpful and so many of these collaborations, these interesting fusions of different fields of science start in conversations between global peers that eventually evolve into new disciplines, new research. So you mentioned that you've been involved in a paper that's been published and that was with a, sounds like a global, people from all across the world named on that paper. Can you tell us a little bit about the peer review process for that paper? Sure. So peer review is also a very global process. So this scientific paper we published already the authorship was quite diverse, we had of course an Australian, we had a French person, we had several Israelis but then on top of that we wrote the manuscript, we submitted it to an international journal to an American journal and then there was a blind peer review process in which the paper was forwarded to three reviewers from across the world. They were anonymous so we don't know who they were and they proceeded to give feedback on a paper, criticism on aspects of it that they were doubtful about and methods to improve it. And so not only was that there that core authorship groups that worked together at the Fleischmann Institute but there was also these three unseen peer reviewers who provided their own feedback, their own commentary, who checked our work, who made sure that it was legitimate and so the number of countries involved in this work was possibly up to six. It's really exciting that as part of your initial step into studying science that you've been able to work within the international community that makes up science. Hi there, I'm joined by Sasha Whittle who is currently studying adult degree here at the Australian National University. Her first part of her degree is a Bachelor of Science majoring in chemistry and the second part of her double degree is a Bachelor of Visual Art majoring in the community. Thanks Sasha for joining us today. No worries. So to kick off with Sasha, can you please share about what you are currently doing with your time? So I'm in my last semester of uni. I have finished my science degree now and I'm sort of just polishing off my visual art degree. It's all online at the moment which is really interesting for both students and staff. Making sort of with what's available around us is very interesting and I'm really lucky at the moment to be working with ANU Innovation as well. So I help student startups and student innovation projects. So yeah, that's been really fun. A lot of multidisciplinary teams, lots of exciting sort of projects and ideas floating around and I think definitely the double degree sort of multidisciplinary aspect led me towards that sort of a career path. Yeah can I pull on that a little bit? So you're doing a degree that people might not consider putting together. When people think about doing a science degree, they normally think about doing with engineering to get both sides of like the physics realm or doing biotechnology and those kind of crossovers. But you've gone for what are two ends of the ANU campus physically and literally in the content you're studying. Can you tell us about why you chose to study this double degree? So much like engineering I guess it is an applied degree. It is making, it's creative and in high school I really enjoyed science but I also really enjoyed art as well and ANU was one of the few places in which I could do both. Hence I moved here from Perth and yeah haven't regretted it. The flexible double degree means that I can do both at the exact same time while running around universities a bit of a hassle. It's good fun and they do somewhat lead into each other as well. With metals missing a lot of the processes and techniques I've sort of touched upon more theoretically in chemistry and then I can use that knowledge to sort of understand the inner workings of the metal and the different materials I'm using so in that respect has been really really great. So you've done a plenty of different things within your studies and I'm interested to know in particular about this cross-disciplinary approach to science that you've had throughout your studies. Can you tell us more about that? Yeah I think a lot of people are doing double degrees of ANU which is really cool because although you'll meet a lot of people doing science while doing a science degree they're also doing business courses and they're also in engineering and anthropology and a whole bunch of different other things so bringing in all those perspectives and sort of applying science in all those different fields is just really cool and to see it happen at like a student level is also yeah really amazing to see. And there was a specific project that you worked on with an academic here called ED. Can you tell us about about the research project that you did? One of the most exciting projects that I did in my chemistry degree was a research project with ED who's a physical chemist. With that I got to sort of design a project essentially and part of that was sort of finding out a way to gather this data that I was getting from this experiment and while like I know a lot of high school experiments you sort of sit there and look at the time and take the temperature every minute with this I got to design sort of a system and with hardware that sends the data directly to my laptop and then through that I can make graphs and see what's happening in real time which was really exciting and really cool to be able to not have to note take essentially. That sounds like a lot of data like were you working with giant excel spreadsheets? Was your computer able to handle this much data? While my computer is an older model she does okay it was yeah a lot of excel spreadsheets a lot of Python sort of data compiling as well but from that I could see a graph basically in real time so fairly early on I'd know if it was a throwaway set or a useful set. Fantastic thank you so much Sasha for taking us through your journey thus far so it's been a pleasure chatting with you. No worries thanks for having me. Hi there I'm joined by Michael McTeague who has previously studied at the Australian National University. Michael studied a Bachelor of Philosophy in Science and had majors in Chemistry and Mathematics and completed honours in Chemistry. Thanks Michael for joining us today. I don't think so having me. That's great so let's start off by learning a little bit about you can you share with us what you're currently doing with your time after your completed study? Yeah sure so I graduated from HANY last year like you said and I'm currently employed at the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare or AIHW as a statistician and data analyst in the graduate program so for anyone who hasn't heard of AIHW which includes me last year I like to think of it as kind of like the ABS but for health statistics so we analyse data from a wide range of sources such as like Medicare and stuff like that and then we pull it all together and put out reports on how diseases and different health outcomes are affecting Australians and different groups of Australians so this year has actually been sort of good for business in terms of bushfires and pandemics so lots of work for us. Definitely a whole lot of data that you've been able to analyse and work. I would take a step back kind of towards the beginning of your studies and understand what made you decide to tackle a science degree and potentially in particular the Bachelor of Philosophy in Science here at the ANU. I've always really appreciated and enjoyed the evidence-based approach to tackling problems so starting out by working out what you know or what you assume that you know and then how you can logically introduce different things from that and some quite unexpected things sometimes that might surprise you and I guess sort of on the flip side to that I also enjoyed testing out those assumptions you know are these things actually true how do we know they're true and really probing down into that and things tend to get a lot more messy and complicated than you know they might appear also just fine science really fun like you get to look at different things from planets to atoms and it's just really fascinating funny how the universe works. You mentioned there about complex systems and I'd like to pull a little bit more on that so science is based around dealing with complex problems and theories. What has been your experience during your studies in terms of working within that space? Well I guess coming out of high school you know I thought I had a pretty good understanding of how things worked in science but what I found as I sort of progressed to uni is that like I was saying things turned out to be a bit more complicated than we think so maybe in high school chemistry early in high school you learn that electrons go around atoms in rings and then maybe in college or in first year you sort of get oh no it's a bit more complicated they have different shape things they go around in and then you get further it's like oh the probability of being here and it all just gets a lot more messier and complicated you know as you're learning that you're sort of following the history and the evolution of science you know we come up with a model or a theory that works well enough and can explain what we need it to might work really well for a time but then we come across something that we can't quite explain with that model or it has problems like it predicts something that we can't see or we don't observe and so we have to really dig a bit deeper and like oh is this thing we're thinking is true is that actually true and that reveals us to a better understanding of the universe even if it is a potentially messier more complicated one than we'd like to think. The final question I've got for you is around a cross-disciplinary approach to science how do you feel that science is a cross disciplinary approach to bringing in all those different aspects? I guess when I started uni I knew I kind of liked science but I wasn't sure which part of science you know I enjoyed maths and chemistry but also physics and computer science and so doing my degree there knew I could sort of explore those different options and wasn't funneled into any particular one. You can't cleanly separate you know where does chemistry end and physics begin and where does that end and maths start they all interweave and stuff so the area I ended up going into is computational quantum chemistry and that pulls from all those fluids I really enjoyed so you can use your mathematical knowledge to apply like models similar to physics to explain how chemicals react and you use computers to model that because it's too hard to do by hand. One other good thing I found going through uni is that having friends doing different parts of science so I had some friends who were really into that maths and if I encountered a problem in my chemistry project they'd be like oh that's similar to this problem I had over here and you wouldn't think that chemistry and maths would have much in common but turns out there's a bit under the surface that you know they're not that different. Sounds like you've had a very interesting journey through your studies and also as you've started your working postgraduate life so thank you Michael for sharing this journey with us. No worries thank you very much for having me on. Hi there I'm joined by Lauren Bezina who is currently a PhD student here at the Australian National University in the Department of Nuclear Physics. Her undergraduate studies were at the University of Wollongong where she majored in both physics and chemistry. Lauren thank you so much for joining us. Thank you very much for having me Tim. I'd like to start by asking you to share a little bit about what you're currently doing with your time. So what I'm currently doing is I've been working from home a lot recently I've been analysing some data that we've collected in previous experiments. Earlier in the year I was also preparing for an experiment unfortunately we had some equipment fails which sometimes happens in science but while we're waiting for some new equipment to be shipped from overseas I've had the opportunity to look back at some previous data and spend some time analysing that. During your PhD it's not just about being in the lab it sounds like it sounds like there's lots of different components there that go on concurrently. Yeah that's right I think that's one of the coolest things about studying nuclear physics here at the ANU is that you can work on the the whole journey of an experiment so you can be around kind of when it's being thought up and then you can work on preparing for the physical part of the experiment where you might be working in the lab and then you get to run the accelerator yourself while you're collecting the data and then you are also the one who gets to analyse the data and draw out the the physics conclusions from your accelerator run and this is not to say that it's all on you in fact like almost every step of the way you have there's a lot of collaboration and a lot of help there's a really good team at the ANU and everyone pitches in with each other's experiments and some parts of it are fun some parts of it can be a bit frustrating but that's all part of the journey. Is it that experimental side that drew you to doing a science degree in the first place or were there other factors? So when it came to my undergraduate degree not so much I think when it came to my undergraduate degree I just wanted to learn more it didn't matter what it was whether it was experimental theory I was just really curious about how the world worked and it seemed like I could learn the most about that and about how like the the natural and the physical sciences work by doing an undergraduate degree then when it came to my PhD I chose to do that because I met this amazing group of very passionate and engaged people who also gave me the opportunity to participate in running an accelerator and so that's when the experimental side of it really came to the forefront and that was super exciting for me. You've mentioned working with your peers in this like this kind of research space is peer collaboration both within a university and globally a major factor in the science research world. Yeah absolutely definitely in like the past few years since I started my PhD we have we've had so many international like we've had visitors and we've also had people travel for conferences and things but even since travel has become less possible I guess we still will have like online seminars and talks and there's talks of moving some conferences online because science is all about testing your ideas and the more people you have pitching into that conversation and doing those tests the more robust those the conclusions that you can get from those ideas so once you've collected the data and you've analyzed it you know you've been looking at your data for a really long time and sometimes maybe you know the answer that you're trying to look for it's really useful and actually really important to have someone else look at that data and give you some more ideas have you tested this and have you tested this and like what about this did you think about this when you were doing that experiment and have you accounted for that when you've done your data analysis that's what science is based on and so having these international collaborations people working together but also kind of challenging each other a little bit is super important so speaking of data sets set like I would assume that in nuclear physics you're working with a lot of data has the data collation and analysis increased with the increases in technology that we now have available yes so with my data there's only a few parameters we actually collect when we're doing an experiment so these will be the things like position and time and sometimes energy of a particle that's incident on your detector but you can then turn those things into like the angle that it hit the detector and the velocity that it hit the detector and you can get a correlation of one particular particle with another particle and now you have you need to consider both of these things when you're building up a picture of what what the physics is I guess basically so what is actually happening in in my case it's in nuclear reaction that's what I'm looking at each one of these signals is another piece of data for even just one event let alone when you start thinking about combining all these events and making a huge picture we end up with you know file sizes of gigabytes worth of raw data that we then you know turn into some kind of physical picture as what's happening in that nuclear reaction thank you Lauren for taking us through all the exciting work that you're doing I will leave it there all right thank you very much


Hi everyone, Joe for Jaspy's casebrakes.com coming at you with 21-22 upper deck artifacts hockey five box pick your team number four This actually sold out before three So it's gonna be a half case from a fresh inner case. So this week designated for three and four Big thanks everybody here for making this happen Appreciate it Matthew with the double last-bought mojo sharks and jets might be No one's confirmed this for me it but might be the rival gangs in West Side story Sharks and jets maybe Rex is asking if there was a book about my life. What would it be called? I? Would call it I would call it I would call it Joe a Book about my life. I've got five bucks on the left side five bucks on the right side One two three for the left side four five six for the right side Three one two three So that's actually for break four. So this half will be for break three First to fill first to break that looks Does that look like a three close enough? All right. Good luck everybody. I got my I got my Thursday night football set up right over there There it is Since the TV that I have here is a dumb TV It's not smart.  It would just say Joe right up on or like me right there. Oh j o e bang There you go. Terry's got it Godfather Godfather to I'm smart Not dumb like everybody says I'm your older brother Mikey and I was passed over Well, that's the way pop what it ain't the way I wanted it and Jilo throwing shade, huh? Jilo's biography title for me would be average Joe just muscle men us We got Sergei Bobroski net gear relic Florida that's gonna be for Terry and the Panthers Nate McKinnon to 75 And Conor McDavid to 499 Rex thinks a smart TV should be able to turn itself on by just walking in front of it Then turn channel to you want without saying anything. Well, I mean, that's a mind-reading TV That would be terrifying That would be terrifying if it was just like if it knows that I wanted the TV on by walking past it What if I didn't want to watch TV? I was just walking past the TV There's Kale McCarr to 299 for Colorado Gerald and here is Boris Katschuk Rookie card for Tampa Bay That will be for Stephen K in the lightning But that'd be terrifying There's Spencer Knight rookie Oram hard Also for Florida also for Terry We got Alex new hook not the old hook, but the new hook we about the new hook We need it. We ain't about that old hook All about that new hook 146 to 799 to color dual relic for the abs Gerald Alex Ovechkin to 599 All right, next box. It could be yeah, that could be like left hooks cousin Distant relative of right hook. Well, how the bangles end up on the on second and goal all of a sudden They've been they've been driving while we were while we've been breaking That's 16 yard pass a nine yard pass No gain a 23 yard pass Four yard pass Deep pass for 43 yards and there you go and then a Joe mix and rush and now They're right on the doorstep of a touchdown. We got Matthew Barzol Then it's gonna be Barzini Man, I'm watched and watched the Godfathers in a while and it might be a good time to To fire that up Cam York with the Flyers Patrick I feel like Godfather's always a great uh, I don't know it feels like a fall winter movie for me Timo Solani to 599 Brian Russ with the penguins to 499 Another Orham card Andrea Vasilevsky for Tampa Bay It's me for Stephen K. Yeah Vasilevsky again for Stephen K This time a piece of his jersey It's like Joe mix and got stuff right at the line Joe mix John Carlson to 199 for the caps And next box It's out for a field goal field goals are not gonna win me my my play tonight bangles minus Those minus three and a half Yeah, a lot of goalies in here so far All right, she was she's like, I don't know anything about hockey is nothing to contribute in this break But or in this conversation during this break, but the Mets called up their number one prospect. Who is their number one prospect? Yeah, Terry's 6 TD to a prediction a bust They say he's a they was taken a scary injury for her to a on Thursday night football and But apparently he he Was moving his extremities. I think he was responsive is what they I think what is what the report was at halftime It's what I overheard so there's Jack Eichel to 25 So hopefully he'll be okay Shane Bowers Rookie for Colorado. That's gonna be for Gerald Francisco Alvarez a catcher got it Jack Eichel 25. That's for Buffalo Patrick with the savers and There's Zach Orensky NHL remnants relic for Columbus. That'll be for Patrick Gilo got the dolphins at plus one and a half Did you did you tease that down for better odds Gilo is that why you got plus one and a half that line closed at plus four James van Riesmik goes to the Flyers and Nick Suzuki for Montreal Mitch Marner to 499 and Two-color dual relic 289 at 399 Spencer night for Florida Hopefully everyone's doing okay in Florida That'll be for Terry and the Panthers and a kale mccar orm nice It's gonna be for Gerald and the abs Oh, you place it early in the week. I see was it that was it at one and a half that early It's tough Gilo on the wrong side of the line there On the wrong side of the line. No, that's that's not where you want to be next box. Good luck Denil Tarasov to 999 for Columbus And there's Eliza Linnell for the flames 41 out of 249 That will be for Patrick Calgary dual relic That's Rasmus Capari to 499 Nate McKinnon to 35 For Colorado, it'll be for Gerald John has the Kings And we got an aura monograph Patrick Kane 13 out of 25. That's for Chicago This is my kind of town Chicago is Top loaders here and that's gonna be for Patrick Cox There you go. Nice looking one We got Wyatt to 999 Brent Burns to 299 Sharks rookie dual relic to 799 Cam York Patrick with Philadelphia, and there's a gene can fake All right fifth and final box. Good luck. Hmm. We got a handful of orders coming in Here, let's let's see what this is all about I'm not sure if Jermar Chase has been seeing a lot of action which is disappointing because I have my fantasy team But T Higgins. I feel like it's having a nice game. Good for him. Oh, we got a dual relic and autograph mark stone three out of 25 dual relic and autograph Vegas Patrick Joe Fariby to 499 for Philly John Messersault 299 and we got a Lexi LeFrenier year one rookie sweaters Quinn Hughes to 85 and we got a Yegore Chinacov Chinacov close enough and John Carlson capitals Relic for John R John Rubner and John Carlson John's Think so Terry. I feel like his rookie year people were kind of down on the friend here. It looks like he kind of had a But then definitely made some strides last season There's a Lekonen Ukopeka Lekonen to 299 for a Buffalo That my friends is that All right, let's see who's gonna win that box if you bought at least three teams You got a shot at a box of this artifacts. So let's flip back over to the screen here All right, if you follow the instructions here Make this a little bit bigger and let's alphabetize by your first names So Gerald bought three teams. That's a spot and the entry John bought three teams. That's an entry Matt Wood bought Three teams that's an entry Patrick bought 12 So that's one two three Four entries Stephen K got three teams. That's an entry and Terry you got three teams. That's an entry as well. All right, so let me just quickly check Terry Steve Patrick Matt These guys yes, this guy. Yes Gerald. Let's those guys know I'm Brian. All right nine spots there name on top After four gets a sealed box three and a one four times. Good luck one two three and four Goes to Gerald There you go Gerald congrats you got a sealed box of the this 21 22 upper deck artifacts going away It's gonna be pulled from a different case. Thanks for watching. Thanks for breaking with us I'm Joe and I'll see you next time for the next break. Bye. Bye


All right, looks like we're getting on. Roberta, did I get on okay? Yeah, I can see you. Well, when you had your video and I can see you and I can hear you for just fine. All right, thank you. Thank you. And I'm not sideways, I hope. Nope, straight up and down.  Okay, catching a bit. Morning. Good morning, Dan. Morning, Dan. Morning, Mr. Dwaynes. Good morning, Mr. Walsh. How are you? Great, it's good to see you. Great seeing you. It's been some time. It has been. Are we waiting for anybody else, Jennifer? Lisa's on vacation, right? That's a good question. I thought she accepted, but Roberta. He is traveling, she's out of the country. She was going to join, she could, but if we had a quorum, she wasn't necessarily going to join. So, Chair Galvin, I would say it's your call. If you want to go ahead and get started, all the staff is here and ready. Have everybody else? We do. All right, well, let's go ahead and call the meeting from the contract review subcommittee to order and ask for a roll call, please. Yes, Chair Galvin. Here. Do you remember Paddenfork? Or normal? Here. Just a reminder to mute your phones and microphones when you're not speaking. We'll now move through the agenda. Item number two is public comments. So we're taking public comments on item two. If you wish to make a comment via Zoom, please raise your hand. If you're dialing in via telephone, please dial star nine to raise your hand. Secretary Aether, do we have anyone? Never seen any public comments. Thank you, we'll move to new business. Item 3.1, Director Burke. Thank you, Chair Galvin and members of the subcommittee. Item 3.1 is a purchase order for laboratory equipment for our Laguna Environmental Lab. And Robert Wilson, our laboratory supervisor, will be making the presentation. Morning, Mr. Wilson. Morning, let me share my screen here. And just checking you can see the slide screen. All right. So yeah, I'm the laboratory supervisor. I'm gonna be talking about the replacement of our inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometer. I'm gonna call it the ICPMS from here forward because that's definitely a mouthful. So just a bit of history. The Laguna Environmental Laboratory was established in 1968 and realistically, its major function was the physical and chemical measurement of wastewater. Back then, it was really focused on the OD, TSS, pH, conventional pollutants. The permits weren't what they are today and just kind of getting the information that the plant needed for its operation. In 2000, it did expand to have a broader scope of analytical testing. This was with the addition of advanced instrumentation. Senator Wilson needed to meet increasing regulatory discharge permit requirements that included pollutants like metals and bulk organic compounds. And we needed that advanced instrumentation to be able to do that. The ICPMS provides our metal analysis and this is actually in order of who is served. The largest groups that are served. So operation and environmental clients really does make the largest amount of samples that we get. Plant operations to make sure that the influence that we're receiving, the influence that we're discharging for reusing is being treated appropriately. Environment compliance making sure that the discharges that are coming to our system are in compliance with our local limits. After that, we have water quality for drinking water, reclamation or reuse. Different special projects that come up and in stormwater. And depending on the use, the ICPMS can really help be a way of fingerprinting a pollutant. So we have something unknown in stormwater per se and we put it on the ICPMS to kind of get that fingerprint of what's coming into the plant. This is extremely important during the 2017 Tufts Fire. We needed that data rapidly as we're trying to identify issues in our systems. And having the ICPMS on site really helped us get that information as quickly as possible and the information up to senior management to make decisions. It wasn't used in the 2020 Tufts Fire based on the data provided in the 2017 Tufts Fire. The GCMS, which was purchased last year, really provided the bulk of the data for the Tufts Fire. In terms of maintenance, our staff really does perform basic and moderate maintenance on equipment. It's Walter, the analyst that operates the ICPMS. They do all the stuff that's needed to make sure glassware is functioning correctly. He's checking the torch there on the plasma torch, pulling the shroud off. But then when things get a bit more complicated, we use full spectrum for our advanced maintenance. So that's if there's an issue with a board, circuit board or something with the software, they can go in and provide that maintenance. But it's really been the combination of staff and full spectrum that has helped push these instruments to the end of their service life, making sure that they are giving us the data they need. One issue we are coming into is that as they're aging, it's more difficult to find parts for the equipment and then they rely on older operating systems of windows that are no longer supported by Microsoft. And then even finding PCs that support older operating systems are increasingly difficult. So this is what we would like to replace it with. It's the Agilent 8750 series. It's a direct replacement for the 7500 series ICPMS. The direct replacement is important because it reduces downtime as staff is already familiar with the equipment. Not only was it the maintenance aspect that's part of the familiarity being important. It's the demonstrations of capability. The state requires that each analyst that operates a piece of equipment demonstrates that they're able to operate that equipment. And that demonstration capability takes a significant amount of time if you switch it out for a new piece of equipment that an analyst doesn't familiar with. So using Agilent, the direct replacement 8750 will help the analyst be able to bring the instrument up to speed quickly so we can put it in the service students and later. We did, in our market research, we did contact other laboratories and everyone seems to be standardizing on the Agilent equipment. One reason for this is that the Agilent equipment can meet the data quality need for precision and accuracy and every lab is looking to try to get as low as possible to meet those permit limits that I was talking about earlier. In terms of budget, the equipment purchase and shipment cost is $180,000 and this is a one-time purchase that includes all additional items for instrument startup and installation. It does include a trading discount for the existing equipment of $87,000. It's not clear and unlikely that another manufacturer provides us trading for the Agilent equipment. So it's a cost savings for the city and it is included in our 21-22 operation maintenance budget. And with that, I'm open to any questions that you all would have. Thank you. Board Member Walsh, any questions or comments? Yes, Chairman Galvin, just a comment. I appreciate the presentation and it appears to me this is similar to information technology organization standardizing on something like this code networking where they're gonna stick with the same brand, same equipment manufacturer in order to standardize and to take advantage of the existing training. So I appreciate that. Thank you. Yeah, I would agree. This seems like a kind of a no-brainer of if the existing equipment is at its end of its useful life and we've got the opportunity not only to replace it with a similar piece from the same manufacturer, but also get a discount makes perfect sense to me. Thank you. Any other comments, Board Member Walsh or staff? If not, I'll open it up for public comments on item 3.1. If you wish to make a comment via Zoom, please raise your hand. If you're dialing in via telephone, please dial star nine. Secretary Aether, do we have anything? We have no public comments. Okay. Board Member Walsh, if you'd like to make a recommendation that we approve and recommend to the full board the acquisition of this piece of equipment, I'll be happy to second it. Thank you, Chairman Galvin. I'd like to make a motion with respect to item 3.1 that the contract subcommittee recommend of the full board waiver of competitive bid and the purchase of equipment as presented. And I'll second that. May we have a roll call vote please? Chair Galvin. Aye. Board Member Walsh. Aye. Great. That'll take care then of item number 3.1. Thank you again, Mr. Wilson. We will move now to item 3.2. And I believe Mr. Wilson, you're on that one as well. I am, yes. So, yeah, this is our professional service agreement with full spectrum group. I mentioned them briefly in the last presentation. In the last presentation, I talked about the need for the advanced instrumentation, the differences that we do have different instruments from varied vendors, which have varied levels of maintenance needs. And like I mentioned, staff does perform these minor or moderate maintenance requirements. But we do need somebody to come in and provide more of the heavy lift when it's a circuit board, something that's really beyond our staff's ability to deal with. Like I said in our last presentation, this analytical testing has advantage for the center of the water and it meets increasing permit regulatory discharge permit requirements. Using our analysts, we do have the ability to sell some of this information out. But the problem with something out, samples of the turnaround time is generally significantly longer. And when you're trying to get those results back, as soon as possible, especially for special projects or in the case of the class fire, you may not have that time. You need that information as soon as possible. And then we have more confidence with our team members doing analysis, because we can talk directly to the analysts and make sure that we have a full understanding of what's being analyzed and the information coming from the end strength. Importance of maintenance schedule is pretty obvious, but it does prevent extended equipment downtime, reduces uncertainty when all the full results are used for reasonable potential for compliance with regulations and prevents catastrophic failure. One of the reasons we are able to keep our equipment running to its end of the service life is because we have been on top of our maintenance. Each one of my analysts has a logbook that has all the service that they've done since the start of that instrument. It's something that they're all proud of and are happy to show me when I'm doing information for presentations or just about the instrument in general. And that tension to maintenance is what helps us get to where we're at today. Full spectrum is who we are recommending. They are local, the only local provider of this level of maintenance, and they can provide on-site emergency repair within 48 hours. This is important because if we were to go a different route we could contract with each individual manufacturer, but that requires that we pack up the instrument and ship it to them, potentially resulting in damage of shipping. And then if it's a site-specific issue, something that's here at LEL, the shipping it to the manufacturer wouldn't identify that problem. So full spectrum will actually come into our building and provide that service. They do have the accreditation we need for the service level that they can provide. And they provide service to multiple and multiple laboratories including governmental, environmental, life sciences, biotech and petroleum. This gives them a breath of experience with problems that we may not know about and so they can come in to identify issues that are just unknown and something that our staff are struggling with. In terms of budget, it's a five-year contract with amount of $251,000 and it's to be broken up into those five years and invoiced individually for each year. It includes a 6% discount for the five-year agreement and it is included, the first payment is included in 21, 22 O&M budget and then the future payments will be included in future O&M budgets. And with that, I'll open the questions or comments. Thank you. Board Member Walsh, any questions or comments? No, thank you, Mr. Chairman. Yeah, I'm fine with it. I know we've been using full spectrum and they've been giving us good service. So if there's no further comments, we'll open it up for public comments on item 3.2. Through us to make a comment via Zoom, please raise your hand. If you're dialing in via telephone, please dial star nine to raise your hand. Secretary Aitha, do we have anyone? We know public comments. Okay, Board Member Walsh, would you like to make a motion? Yes, thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would like to move that the contract subcommittee of Board of Public Utilities recommend to the Board of Public Utilities engagement and agreement with full spectrum group for the maintenance of equipment as presented in item 3.2. And a waiver of the competitive bid. And waiver of competitive bid for the reasons provided, thank you. Great, I'll second that. We have a roll call vote, please. Chair Galvin. Aye. Board Member Walsh. Aye. Great, that takes care of item 3.2. Thank you again, Mr. Wilson. We'll now move to item 3.3. Director Burke. Thank you, Chair Galvin and members of the subcommittee. Item 3.3 is an amendment to our project work order with Corolla engineers for our UV disinfection project and Tracy Dwayness, our supervising engineer, will be presenting this presentation. Good morning, Mr. Dwayness. Welcome. Good morning. Good morning, Chair Galvin, members of the subcommittee. My name is Tracy Dwayness, supervising engineer with Capital Projects Engineering. Today I bring before you the introduction of design project work order amendment number three for Corolla engineers as it relates to the Laguna treatment plant disinfection improvement project. I just wanna be clear that if you can see my presentation, that tastes great. So today, nor this morning, I'll just briefly go over a project history, bring folks up to speed with where we are with the design, go more detail for the need for amendment number three as well as bring forth the recommendation to the committee. So the disinfection project spans the footprint more or less of the entire plant from east to west, north to south. Looking back in 2012, the plant was derated to box me 48 and a half million gallons per day by the division of drinking water. At that point, the plant had end to this day had insufficient wastewater disinfection capacity. So it further demonstrated the need that the existing infrastructure has seen its useful look. Now it's over 20 or two decades old. This project will replace the existing UV located on the south end with a new UV system just do west. It will provide new Calgon UV ultraviolet technology to the plant. It will provide approximately 70 million gallons of dehydrolic capacity. The project further will provide an on-site diversion pumping and distribution system that will provide operational flexibility for the plant to reroute 35 million gallons per day of non-compliant or off-spec water from this location to what is called flow equalization basin. From then it gets retreated. Project will also install a new hypochlorite just do west, excuse me, east of the existing UV. It would also install a new one megawatt electrical load center station just east of the hypochlorite to provide electrical needs of the project as well as will install a new construction trailer at the south end of the plant to accommodate instruction oversight staff. So looking at the timeline relative to Corolla, if you will, in early 2016, staff brought before the board and was awarded their original project work order in January 2016. From that point, they proceeded with the design in early 2017. They submitted 35% design level plans. From that point, they were put on hold with the direction of the city to redirect their efforts in a value engineering study. I'll go over that in more detail later. Staff brought before the board an update both in summer and fall of 2018 as well as in the summer of the 2019 study session. Shortly thereafter, staff brought before a recommendation to award their original contract known as project order number one. That occurred in the summer of 2019. Board approved that. Originally, there was a plan system commissioning in the fall of 2019 was the original date. Bond sale, this is inaccurate. Bond sale actually occurred in the winter of 2020. So that I apologize, this information is wrong, 2020. But since 2019, Corolla has been ongoing with design efforts past two years with an intent to award the construction contract in winter of 2021 followed by three years of construction. So just a brief history of the design for the project is subsequent to the derating in 2012, city pursued additional experts on the subject matter of our existing UB at the time. We acquired four pre-design analysis. Those earlier analysis focused on the treatment capacity, operational maintenance planning and just the various treatment alternatives at that time. I'm shortly after that, followed an extensive charrette effort in 2014, city engaged with the industry experts at the time on UB including Corolla, Hayes and GHD, Brown, Caldwell, Merrick, Smith, they all collectively between the city and these experts was a collective solution to vet a thorough problem solving effort that focused on this infection issues facing the plan. Some of the parameters were just health and safety, capital lifestyle costs, regulatory, operational. In the end, it ultimately identified both the near and long-term alternatives for the plan. Following that effort, another additional seven technical mammograms by the city between 2015, 2016 that will focus more on the UB parameters such as water quality, also the feasibility of providing sidestream hypochloride and a on-site diversion system. So since that point, 2016, Corolla has been ongoing with design or their efforts have been redirected with it. Diving more into the actual project work order amendment. 2016 was their first amendment for the value of 2.1. This was a competitive, very competitive selection process the city undertook, Corolla was chosen mainly due to their unparalleled expertise in the UB design. And as I indicated earlier, those efforts were put on hold just shortly thereafter, they submitted their 35 at the direction of executive staff to redirect their efforts to analyze and engage in a value-engineering study. So that study focused mainly to reconsider if there are any more economical disinfection options available. They considered the full capacity UB versus a partial smaller UB system with the supplemental hypochloride. The review looked at design criteria, UB system, capabilities, limitations, and it took into risk operational regulatory and cost consideration. And ultimately the UB did confirm that the UB replacement that it was on slated for in the original 35% design was the most effective solution. And in the end was the best value of the city. So Corolla brought before amendment number one to reflect those efforts, the redirection efforts directed by the city to capture the value engineering work, as well as to reflect the significant delay in the design as a result of the 2017 Tubbs fires as well as just project changes and scope that's creeped from their original work. So that amendment came forth that approved for 1.6. Just recently, staff brought before amendment number two for engineering services during construction for 2.1. This effort is typically always included in the design agreement. It captures the designers efforts through bidding and through construction. It never was captured in early as project work orders. Staff knew it would need to be at some point and hence was amendment number two. Today is amendment number three for a value of $750,000. So when we look at amendment number three, we look at the project restart, if you will, at 2019. That was when the VE ended project order number two started. We'd like to look at 2019 as really the restart of the project reboot, if you will. And that reboot was based off the findings and the results of the design criteria was revised to capture the results. But in the end, it resulted in several unforeseen factors that contributed really to the evolution of what is currently the final review design. Additional unforeseen efforts were required and we'll go into that. The original, the original 35% design level stage, majority of that could not be utilized. Coupled with the fact that a majority of the plant staff that had been originally involved in the 35% design level have even retired or have moved on and left the city, leaning itself to new staff to provide new comments and new direction. So when we look at their amendments, it's focused basically on two tasks. Task one covers an extra duration of essentially two additional years of project management that wasn't an unanticipated original project order covered just one and a half. Task one covers that over extension time. But for the most part, the significant costs come in, what is deemed as their task five and six, which is the change or additional scope brief, if you will, or change to the UV and diversion design. The additional design cemeterals that captured their overall change incorporated new design criteria related to the process layout. And specifically with the UV, the change was a reduction from six UV channels to five. So further, there was significant differences of change to the structural canopy design for both the hypochlorite structure, which changed from a full to partial canopy as well as the structure over the actual UV facility the entire structure was lowered and took an account for major modifications to the overall overhead frames system. Task five and six also included the addition of a temporary construction power plan, the original plan did not incorporate that. My intent was to put the onus on the contractor. There was a change in thought for the purposes of efficiency, temporary control construction plan now is incorporated into the plan. That was an ad as well as significant permanent power distribution changes resulted from the design cemeterals. The original design tasks, city forces, city staff to do the programmable logic control programing by city forces. The new plan puts the onus on the contractor. And with that, there was also additional connection points at the plant that changed the SCADA design. The scope, the original scope, the utility was much less or the new, as we proceeded with design, the relocation efforts was much larger than anticipated and affected the utility planning, demolition planning. So that was a scope change. Through the process dealing with Calgon, Calgon's MOU was put on hold and staff will bring before you the amendment to that MOU specific to the equipment, but with putting them on hold and through the renegotiation efforts that contributed to new submittals and new coordination efforts that needed to be incorporated into the final design as the most. Further significant changes were to the hyper, the sodium hypochlorite design, mainly the pumping design change from a diaphragm to a progressive cavity type design. There was additional modifications to the dosing points. These all resulted in, with specific to the sodium hypochlorite, changes to the electrical instrumentation design, all of us changes to the trailer, construction trailer were necessary, partly in fact, partly due to response to COVID, changes to workspace requirements were needed. And since 2019, the city has an ongoing project as well that's in the same area known as the flood protection project. Since 2019, that design has been more refined and getting closer to the final design layout that was not completely known at the time because both these projects are adjacent to one another and if not overlap physical space at times as well as have overlapping construction schedules. There was a significant effort to coordinate between the two to minimize any significant delays or impacts that may be seen by both contractors. So as part of that, a revision to the pump station and onsite stormwater collection was needed as well as the main access to the plant revisions were required subsequent to coordination with the flood wall. Since the reboot of 2019, if you will, the city has engaged with professional consultant Somos provide construction and inspection services. City thought it would be prudent to engage them to provide a third party review of the current design. They did do that. They provided results, but with that, there was additional design revisions and coordination efforts required a parole as well as additional geotechnical investigative work. So to break down their fee, it's specific to just task one and task five through six, task one for over project management duration is a request for seven additional 75,000. And the bulk of the amendment lies with them task five and six, which is 675,000 for a total of three quarters of a million dollars. Add that to the original project work order of 4.4 million brings the total design contract to 5.2. For purposes of the next slide, we did not include engineering services during construction and I'll show you that. The total engine, total construction costs are projected at 37 million for the disinfection portion and 13 million for the diversion system for a total of 50 million. Add that to that approximately 17 and a half million for what we consider as total project delivery costs, which include design, engineering services during construction, CM inspection fees, in-house labor overhead and overall contingency for a estimated total project costs 67 and a half million. So with the amendment, it would bring the total design to 5.2, which is approximately 10.4% of the total construction. So slightly over the city's goal, but still within what we see as the 2020 CIP benchmark range. You're also to further drill down and look at their cost of approximately a little under 13,000 per sheet, stills within the city goals of what's assumed and what's appropriate. So in just overall, this project will be the largest we've seen since the Geyser installation in early 2000s. It will be the largest install in the US as well as along in the whole world. When you look at the UV technology industry, on average is increasing between now and 2027 at the rate of approximately 20%. So we feel very comfortable with the direction we're going, with the manufacturer that we chose. So next steps, the board will see in various forms, one through the subcommittee again, and then for formal approval, the UV Calgon's member in of understanding, both for the amendment to their agreement. So if you will, the MOU is a binding agreement between the supplier and the city. That will guarantee a fixed cost, which that cost will be disclosed in the construction contract for all contractors to evenly, evenly, competitively get on. So the board will see that, those efforts very soon here, will need to be executed and approved prior to bidding the project. But we do anticipate both the contract documents and the advertising of the contract to occur sometime in the fall of 2021. Followed by construction anticipated in winter of 2021, excuse me, but the ward of the contract in 2021 and spring of 2022. Now we anticipate a notice to receive. So with that, it is the recommendation by the transportation and public works department and the water department that the contract review subcommittee support $750,000 amendment to project work order under the master professional service agreement with Rolo engineers, Walnut Creek or professional engineering services for disinfection improvement projects for a total contract not to exceed $5,138 and $254. And with that, I would love to answer any questions. Just best like. Thank you, Mr. Dwaynes. Board member Walsh questions, comments. Yes, thank you, Mr. Chair. Just comments, the extensive description of the history of the scope of work for this project and the importance of the project certainly helps us recommend the actions the staff is proposing to us. Just curious, Mr. Dwaynes, with these changes in scope and the additional monies that Corolla has or will expend, how did that impact what our initial estimate was for the actual construction costs? Chair Galvin, I don't have that of the original cost available. I will need to follow up with you. I apologize. That's okay, no problem. All right, I would just be curious. I don't remember what the original contract estimate was, but obviously with some change in the scope and the design, I would expect that the estimates for construction costs have gone up and I will continue to, but so if you could get back to me on that. I will, most definitely. All right. With that, we'll open it up for public comments on item number 3.3. If you wish to make a comment via Zoom, please raise your hand. If you're dialing in via telephone, please dial star nine. Secretary Aitha. We have no public comments. All right, Board Member Walsh, would you would like to make a motion on the recommendation? Yes, Mr. Chairman. I move that the contract subcommittee, the Board of Public Utilities, recommend to the full Board of Public Utilities contract amendment to be a project work order for the agreement with Corolla Engineers of Walnut Creek, provide professional engineering services for the Disinfection Improvement Project for an amount not to exceed $5,138,254. The amount by 750,000. And I will second that. Or Secretary Aitha, may we have a roll call vote, please? Chair Gennon. Aye. Board Member Walsh. Aye. Okay, passes unanimously. We'll make that recommendation to the full Board. Thank you, Mr. Drainis. Thank you for your efforts. Thank you. Mm-hmm. Director Burke, I don't think we have a new business or anything else. So at this point, we will adjourn the meeting of the contract review subcommittee and enjoy the rest of your day. Thank you. Thank you, Chair Galvin. Thank you, Director Burke.


Sassafras lives and writes in Brooklyn with her partner and five furry beasts. Her latest is the novel Lost Boy, a gorgeous queer punk re-imagining of the classic Peter Pan story. And like, what took everyone so long? We were waiting for Sassafras. Here is Sassafras Lowry. Thank you.  I am going to read a chapter from Lost Boy It's the third chapter. What do you need to know? The narrator is a lost boy named Toodles, who is Pan's best boy. I guess it's probably all you need to know. Chapter three, run away, run away. This wasn't all Pan's doing. Wendy might have looked sweet, but she knew she would have a powerful spell with her stories. They spilled onto paper late at night when the darlings thought her asleep and shot from her drugstore pink lips on open mic stages. The way Pan told it, he just wanted to hear how the story about the princess ended. It was the stories that made him secretly follow her home that night for Wendy didn't see Pan and Erebus trail, her downed sidewalks, and threw back alleys back to 14 London Street.  It sat in the middle of an average suburban neighborhood at the corner of Kensington Avenue and London Street. Money was tight, but the darlings had done well for themselves, and the house with the manicured yard that Mr. Darling mowed on Sunday afternoons was their prized possession, the proof that they were respectable community members. It was everything that Pan hated. It was almost enough to make him walk away from the pretty girl, but then on the mailbox he read the darlings' home for girls, and he knew his plan would work. Pan watched Wendy go into the house, and a few minutes later a light came on upstairs. He left Erebus on the ground and climbed a tree that reached to the second story. Then he waited. He should probably have felt a little creepy watching through the window as Wendy undressed, but he enjoyed the show. He didn't mean anything disrespectful. He never analyzed pleasure, just appreciated it. Wendy's room was tidy and organized with light pink walls and books neatly lining the shelves. Black and white photo booth strips and concert tickets precisely arranged to look haphazard were taped onto the mirror of the white vanity that stood next to her bed. The room looked like a clipping from a decorating magazine. Only the two kids with their ragged edges were out of place in the pretty little room. Watching Wendy slip into her nightgown and comb her long dark brown hair, Pan wanted to take her away to show her another world. Erebus, who is his dog, who I should have said, had fallen asleep on the foot of the tree, and Pan's feet were tingling, but he waited. Finally, the nightlights went out, and only then did he creep to the window ledge and into the room. Pan had been surprised to see John Michael, and for a moment thought Wendy had a boyfriend or a boy. Then he remembered the group home sign out front. Later, he told me how he'd almost walked away when he heard Wendy wish John Michael good night. Whatever their relationship was, it was clear they were a package deal. But what is one more boy, especially if that deal is sweetened by a girl? John Michael must have been a deep sleeper because she later swore that she never stirred as Pan cracked the window open and slipped past her bed. But the rustling of feathers and Pan's tears that he will deny, having shed, woke Wendy. Tink, of course, had followed Pan all the way to Wendy's and flown into the bedroom. Then, finding herself trapped inside the room, she began to panic, throwing herself into the walls, looking for the window. Tink crashed into the framed poster of white kittens and disappeared behind a dresser. Pan convinced Tink was dead, couldn't stop himself from crying, and it was that sound that woke Wendy, who switched on her bedside lamp and gasped when she saw Pan sitting at the foot of her bed more alive than the dream she'd just awoken from. Tink would peck my eyes out if she thought I'd gotten this far in the story without properly introducing her. Tink is Pan's fairy. Unlike loyal and obedient Arabos, Tink is a jealous creature. Pigeons are so small that, unlike dogs, they can only hold one emotion at a time, and with Tink it's usually not a very nice one, especially if a girl is involved.  When she gets in a mood, there's no reasoning with her, no reminding her that she's a bird and no one will ever take her place. I see that confused look. Fairy? Pigeon? There is magic everywhere around you, but most people are too busy being grown up to notice it. I'm not sure how Pan first met the pigeons. They must have been the pharaoh ones nesting in the rafters of Neverland back before Pan was leader of the Lost Boys. He was alone with no one to talk to except for the pigeons. It didn't take long for them to adopt him into the flock. Now, when a boy is brought into Neverland, he's given a pigeon. It's part of how you know your home and it means you're never alone. Starting when they hatch, us boys keep the fairies close so they know how to find us. Sometimes they follow us out on our adventures. Pan taught us how to make small leather leg bands where their names can be embossed. Tink wears a green one around her ankle that matches the thick leather cuffs Pan makes for each of us Lost Boys and locks onto our wrists the day we swear our loyalty to him and to the principles of Neverland, the most important of which, of course, is to never grow up. I'll never forget the day that I met my pigeon, Washington. He had the most brilliant purple blaze of feathers right above his wings. When Pan handed him to me, I was nervous. I'd never held a bird before and I certainly never thought I would hold a filthy pigeon. I held out my hand, palm up, and he hopped onto it. I thought my heart might break out of my chest as Washington fluttered and found his footing on my arm in our new home. The grown-ups' army used to use pigeons, but people have forgotten how smart they are. They learn where home is and magically they can always find their way back. We send messages to each other tucked into special little leather harnesses we make to fit each of them. Anyway, Tink appeared from behind the dresser, feathers askew, but still very much alive. Relieved that Tink wasn't hurt, but knowing how jealous she would be, Pan sent her out of Wendy's bedroom window into the stars and back to Neverland to tell us Lost Boys he would be home soon. Pan had been gone all day and he knew we would worry that the pirates had gotten him tied up and he might forget to come home to us. Pan's message just said that he was on his way home, not that he was bringing a girl. That's where the trouble started, but here I am getting ahead of myself again. Boy, you don't have to cry, Wendy whispered.  She let the pale pink comforter slip away, revealing her thigh. Had Pan been paying attention, he would have seen the cross-hatching of pink and red slashes. Her responsibly coral-tipped nails toyed with the buttons of her nightgown and her throat as she began to slowly undo them in a way that almost looked accidental. Again, she whispered, boy, what's wrong? Pan rubbed his tattooed knuckles across his wet eyes, drying them on the tattered and frayed cuff of his green sweatshirt. Face twisted into his most charming smile, he turned and whispered in his husky voice, I've come to hear the end of the story. Wendy stalled, wanting to know more about this stranger she'd fantasized about. She licked her lips and pulled her hair up into a bun, a gesture that revealed the curve of her breasts under the clingy white nightgown, sticky with sweat in the warm spring night. Whispering so as not to wake John Michael, she patted the mattress next to her and tried to ask him the kinds of questions grown-ups ask. Wendy was not a grown-up, but even then, she was the kind of girl who could turn at any moment. She made the mistake of first asking about mothers. That is about his. She should have known better being a foster child, but her world was so straight back then. I can picture how Pan must have prickled at the question. He told her coldly that he found mothers to be overrated sorts of persons. Wendy pushed him when Pan said he had no last name when he told her that Pan was the only name he had.  Wendy was a good girl, always on the honor roll with plans for going to college. Even though she didn't have them, she was convinced that everyone should have parents or at the very least want them. Wendy believed no matter how badly the grown-ups had treated her, that they could be good. It had never occurred to her that she didn't have to become one. Finally, not getting useful answers out of Pan, Wendy asked him where he lived. Pan's eyes glittered as they always did when he talked about Neverland, about us boys. He told her that we had our own warehouse, a paradise where we were always working on, patching the shot-out windows, hanging swings and slings, and about the day we added hammocks for each of us to sleep in amongst the raptors with our pigeons.  He told her that we too loved stories. I don't know exactly what Pan promised Wendy in that little pink bed. Probably nothing more than adventure, with his crooked grin and the way his eyes twinkled when he talked about the things they could do together. But he locked the cuff around her wrist that night. It had been enough for me. For a reason to think it wouldn't have been enough for her. Later, Wendy said that he told her about girls, how there weren't any of them in Neverland, and how lonely that made him, us. How there was something special about a girl like her, something she could give him, us. Pan talked of how we would cherish and worship her, how she would always care and feed her boys. I love the way you talk about girls. Wendy whispered through glossed lips, placing her hand on Pan's denim thigh. She tried for a kiss, but Pan was already distracted, looking out the window to check on Erebus. Pan didn't want a girlfriend.  But he would have never said that last part. Thanks. Thanks, Sassafras. Thanks for wearing that dress also. Very important. Sassafras has copies of Lost Boy over there, so we'll end a little early so that y'all can buy a copy. Our next reader is Sarah Fontaine. Sarah Fontaine asks questions and experiments.


As many of you know, I am a big ricer. I like to customize every window manager I have to my exact specifications and I change my rice way more than I should. It's definitely something that I spend too much time on when I should be doing things that are more productive and actually earn money or make a difference in my life or literally anything else. Ricing is obviously a waste of time. I don't care. I still like ricing. And one of the applications that I've had kind of given up on actually ever being able to customize is Discord. It's not an application that you can actually customize all that much. It has a white theme. It has a dark theme. That's really all you can do in terms of customizing its appearance as a stock application. And it's just something that I had learned to put up with. And then today that kind of changed. I found an application called Better Discord. And what this application does is allows you to actually install different themes for your Discord.  So it's really quite cool and it's free. So I thought I would feature it on the channel. Now, when I went into this, I thought, well, you know, this is going to be really hard. Obviously, Discord doesn't want you to customize their application.  But it's actually really easy. So let's go ahead and jump in and I'll show you how to do it. Hi there, Matt from the future here. Before we jump into the tutorial, I just want to make a few things clear that I didn't in the video. And this is mostly from some experience in the last couple of days of using this since I actually record the video with Better Discord, which is what I'm going to be using to theme Discord here in a minute. I talk about in the video how I am unsure of what the impact Better Discord has on Discord actually is. And in the last couple of days, I've actually discovered what that is. So if you end up using Better Discord to actually theme Discord, you will notice that Discord takes up quite a bit more in terms of resources than it did without Better Discord installed. I'm mainly talking about CPU usage. You'll find that Discord takes up around 2% to 3% more CPU than it did without Better Discord installed. So just keep that in mind if you choose to use this that Discord will end up using more CPU resources if you have this installed. The other thing I noticed after shooting this tutorial is that Discord does tend to be a little bit less stable with Better Discord installed. I noticed a couple crashes. So just keep that in mind. I don't know if that has to do with Better Discord or if it just happened to do with some of the plugins or themes that I was using. It's possible that it was just a combination of whatever themes I was using. So just keep that in mind if you end up using this. Now let's go ahead and jump into the tutorial. So the first thing you need to do is go to BetterDiscord.app. And I'll put the link to this in the video description below. And you got to download the application, obviously, and you do that in the form of an app image. So you have to be able to actually install app images on your computer.  It's actually very easy and I'll show you how to do it in just a second. But first, let's go ahead and browse the website just a little bit. Because there are several things that you can do with Better Discord. The first thing and the one that I'm going to be using for the most is themes.  And there are dozens of themes on here that you can download and install very easily. And you can actually change between them very easily as well. So it's not as if you have to go through and install one and you kind of stuck with it. You can change it every single day if you want. It's really just the matter of a click of a button. So basically what these are are just CSS files. And if you're at all familiar with theming Firefox in terms of using the userchrome.css file, Better Discord is actually easier than that. Mostly because it's just a matter of putting the file that you download in the appropriate directory and enabling it. It's literally all it is. So once you've found your theme, it's just a matter of maybe two steps. And again, I'll show you how to do that here in a minute. But like I said, there are dozens of different themes on here that you can choose from. You can download them all if you'd wanted to.  But there are several different things here that will make your experience in Discord better.  Definitely something that's missing and probably should be there by default. You can also have this one here for the game activity toggle, which will actually go through and give you a button so you can turn on and off that little notification of when you're playing a game that kind of shows up for other people. That's really also kind of cool. There's a Spotify controls one here that looks kind of cool. I don't know how well any of these work, but I'm assuming that they work fairly well because of the themes that I've used so far have been just mostly flawless. And I'll talk a little bit more about that here in a few minutes. And again, there's just dozens of plugins here for you to try out. Now I'm not sure how well Discord will do if you layer a whole bunch of plugins on top of each other. Maybe it's like your suckless utilities and the more plugins slash patches you have, the more unstable Discord becomes, I don't know, but it's fairly easy to disable plugins and themes. So if something goes wrong, you could just go through and disable them or delete the files themselves. So let's go ahead and show you how to install Better Discord. So you go back up here to the home page and then you just hit the download button. And basically what this will do is it will just download an app image file to whatever directory you choose to download it in.  So I'm going to go to a different tag here and open up a file manager and go to downloads. And then I have Better Discord right here. I'm going to click on it and I get this. Now if you click on this and it says choose which app to open, what you need to do is right click on this and actually can actually show you this. If you right click on this and click properties and then permissions, this might look different depending on what file manager you're using, but the steps are basically the same. And you want to make sure under permissions that execute is enabled. So you want to allow executing file as program. And then when you click on it, you should get this. So you want to click, I accept the license agreement, obviously it has a license agreement. It's actually pretty short so you could probably read it if you wanted to. And you want to hit next and then you want to hit install Better Discord. This is also how you would uninstall. If you choose not to use this, you just click on the app image again and click uninstall. So we'll click install, we'll click next. And basically what you want to do is click this top one. It should be able to find the location of your Discord binary automatically. If not, you'll have to browse to wherever on your system Discord is stored. And then you just hit install. And even if you have Discord running in the background, it will close it, but you don't have to have Discord running. It should be able to do it even if it's not running, but it probably won't restart it. So we're going to hit close here, and then we'll close Nemo here. And what we'll do is open up Discord. And you'll know you've been successful if you get a pop-up. And I didn't get a pop-up mostly because I've already installed this once before. If you notice here, I actually have a theme installed. This is not what Discord normally looks like. Normally Discord is that little kind of purplish blue theme or whatever. This is a theme that I installed. So that's the reason why the pop-up didn't come up. But if you're installing it for the first time, the first time you open up Discord, you'll get a pop-up saying something about better Discord. You can just dismiss it. But like I said, I didn't get that because I've already done it once. So the question is, how do you change themes? So let's say you've gone back to the site here and you've downloaded a theme. Let's go ahead and find ourselves a theme. It doesn't really matter which one it is, but we'll just find a different one. Something a little bit cool. Let's choose this purple one. So we'll just download this and I'll save it in my downloads folder. It's called wildberry.theme. So we'll save this, we'll open up a terminal, and what we want to do is CD into downloads, and then what I want to do is cp wildberry.theme.css into tilde slash .config, if I can type, and then into better Discord, and then themes, okay, and just hit enter so that copies that file into the themes folder for better Discord. And then you go into your Discord app, oops, wrong tag, and then you want to get into your settings, which you'll find the settings button down here by your avatar, and then you'll scroll down here to the side where it says better Discord, hit themes. And then what you want to do is just choose the theme that you just transferred to that folder. In this case, it's wildberry. So you can only have obviously one theme enabled at the time, but just disable the one you're using, enable the one you just downloaded, and then that's how you enable a theme. It's literally that easy. Now, plugins are equally easy. If you had a plugin, you just go through and download it, put it in the plugin folder, which is .config slash better Discord slash plugins, and then it would show up here in this list and you would enable it just like you did a theme. That's literally all there is. Now, if you wanted to create your own theme, you can do so in custom CSS, which for whatever reason just doesn't work for me. I can't actually enter it. I don't know why that is. There are, I'm not exactly sure what the emotes functionality here does download emotes whenever they are out of date. I'm not sure what those are.  But you could definitely experiment in terms of playing around with whatever this is. There's also settings here that will allow you to alter some preferences for Discord that they don't really allow you to change. For example, showing a 24-hour timestamp, hiding the gift button, making a minimal mode, adding colored text, and so on and so forth. There's just quite a bit of stuff here that you could go through and play with. I was thinking that maybe the reason why I couldn't get into custom CSS was maybe because it wasn't actually enabled here, but it does seem to be enabled, so I don't know why that doesn't work. Now, in terms of stability, I'm not sure how stable this will make Discord or how unstable it will make Discord. I haven't used it very long, so I can't tell you whether or not this is going to affect stability. I have used it all day and I haven't had a single crash. I'm assuming, again, it's an assumption that it's actually going to be just fine, but I haven't actually gone through and installed any plugins, so it's possible that the plugins are a completely different story and actually cause instability. I'm not sure. Your mileage may vary. I would just warn you to keep an eye on it to make sure that it doesn't crash in the background while you're using it or something like that. You just want to keep an eye out on Discord, at least for the first couple days to make sure that this doesn't cause you any problems, because you are hacking Discord in a certain way. This is doing something that the people who develop Discord don't want you to do, so because you're actively doing that against the way Discord is supposed to function, things might go wrong, just FYI. Okay, so that is how you theme Discord. Again, it's very easy. I love this app. I'm going to be downloading a ton of themes, because I'll probably change them every day, because that's what I do. So if you have used this app before or if this app looks interesting to you, let me know in the comments below. Make sure you like, comment, and subscribe, all that kind of stuff. You can follow me on Twitter at Linuxcast. You can support me on Patreon at Patreon.com slash Linuxcast. Before I go, I'd like to take one more thing. My current patrons Devon, Marcus, Meglyn, Donnie, Sven, East Coast Web, Chris, Mitchell, Mr. Fox, American Camp. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time.