Ring in the New Year with amazing savings from Appalachian Wireless. Get the Galaxy S7 for just $49.99 when you sign a renew a two-year service agreement. Better service, bigger savings. That's today's Appalachian Wireless. The Pye County School District hosted its annual Pye County Spelling Bee today in the Belfry High School Auditorium. 95 4th through 8th grade students from each elementary school in the county participated in the event. The event also hosted students from Pikeville Independent and Christ Central. The day began with a competition from each grade level. Each grade level winner then competed against one another for an overall winner. The overall winner will now advance to the state level competition. The winner at the state level can move on to the national spelling bee. A lot of folks are familiar with that. They may have seen that on ESPN. Students who have participated in the Pike County Spelling Bee have in the past participated in that and done quite well and advanced to be televised at the finals. Organizers of the event say spelling bees are an important learning tool for all students involved. We all need to know how to spell, but we all need to be able to apply that and being able to apply what we know and for students to have that vessel to be able to have the application of learning, show the proof of learning and then to have an uncompetitive setting. There's nothing wrong with competition for them to be able to compete against other students to try to out spell them in a setting like this just prepares them for the world. It prepares them for the opportunity to compete and to succeed. Pike County Schools will now host a spelling bee for high school students Friday at Belfry High School. Reporting in Belfry for EKB News, I'm Shelby Still.


Soldiers, 1st Battalion, 35th Armored Regiment, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Armored Division, entered a simulated village during the first phase of network integration evaluation, 13.1. Soldiers were equipped with a net warrior system, which is designed to provide situational awareness to dismounted leaders during combat operations. The ability to communicate with the BFTs and everybody else, you can see everybody on the field know where they're at is really helpful. People say net warrior facilitates faster and more accurate decisions during the tactical fight. There's a lot of things we can set up with the net warrior, plus we can communicate with it at the same time seamlessly. The end user device is both portable and lightweight, which soldiers say is definitely a plus for today's warfighter. It's really small, it's light, so it doesn't really hinder anything at all. Reporting for the Brigade Modernization Command, I'm Lieutenant Colonel Diana Baghe.


The remains of what could be a human body have been found in Otter Tail County. The remains were found by someone walking in the woods in New York Mills. The BCA is on hand and is investigating, but authorities stress there is no danger to the public. The bones will be sent to the medical examiner's office to help identify them.


This is part two of lecture six. So by now you hopefully have a pretty good understanding of what cognitive dissonance is and also how you can reduce the feeling of dissonance. Now in this second part of the lecture we're going to talk about the applications and also the consequences of this interesting psychological phenomenon. And we're going to do so by starting off by talking about the classic study on cognitive dissonance which has already been conducted in 1959. This is a study in which the whole theory of cognitive dissonance is really well explained. It is quite a complex study and there's also some deception towards the participants and a lot of confederence in the study. So I'm curious what you think about it, and I invite you now to look at the video. In 1959 Leon Festinger and Merrill Carl Smith published a classic study demonstrating the potential for cognitive dissonance to lead to attitude change. In the first phase participants were asked to complete a series of mind-numbingly boring tasks. First they had to put 12 spools onto a tray. Then they emptied the tray and filled it with another 12 spools. All one-handed over and over again for a full half an hour. Next they were given a board with 48 square pegs. First participants had to turn each peg a quarter turn clockwise. Then they turn each peg another quarter turn. Again, using one hand only. Again over and over and over again for half an hour. As far as the participants knew, this was the end of the study. But in reality, this was when things just started to get interesting. Because next the experimenter told the participant an elaborate story, recruiting his or her help in order to keep the study going. So in this study we were looking at participants' expectations and how that would influence their task performance. So in some conditions participants didn't have any expectation of what to expect from the task. And that's what you experienced today. But half of our participants, we tell them that the task is going to be interesting and even a little bit fun. Does that make sense? Yeah. So the thing is we usually have a confederate that goes out and tells the next participant that the study is going to be interesting. But our confederate today caught on sick. So we already have a participant leaning outside and we were hoping that you might be able to help us out. Would you be able to go out and tell the participant that you had fun doing the task today? We can pay you. Um, I guess so. Great. All participants agreed to lend a hand, even though doing so put them in an uncomfortable situation. Having to tell the next participant, a fellow student, how great this dull study was going to be. Of course, this whole story to participants was really a deception. In reality, the confederate was the student in the waiting room. He wasn't really the next participant. He was working with the researchers and he was about to make the participant even more uncomfortable. Hey, well, this is Akshi. She just completed the experiment and I've asked her to tell you a little bit about it. Thank you. Thanks. Hey, how was the study? It was okay. It was pretty good. Pretty fun. Really?  No, I don't think so. I think it was pretty okay. Pretty fun. That's good to hear. Cool. Best thing here on Carl Smith expected that lying would lead to dissonance, that on the one hand, participants would think I'm a nice person. I'm honest. And on the other hand, they'd think I just lied to this person. This student's going to hate the study. With contradictory thoughts like these, something has to give to reconcile the dissonance. In this case, what changed were participants' private attitudes about how boring or fun the spool and peg turning study really was. Because if you could manage to convince yourself that it wasn't so bad, you're able to reduce dissonance. So for the last stage of the experiment, the participant headed to a post-study exit interview with a member of the department and was asked about their experiences with the spool and peg portion of the study. Hi, I'm a faculty member in the psychology department. I understand you were in a study today involving some physical manipulation of objects. You just have a couple of quick questions for you. First, did you find the study to be interesting, enjoyable at all? Yeah, it was okay. It was a little bit fun. Okay, great. We have a lot of studies like this in the department. And I was just wondering, would you be interested at all in being in a study like this in the future? Yeah, I guess. I would do it again. Great. Thanks a lot. To alleviate dissonance, the participants inflated their ratings of how enjoyable the study had been. Like the participant that you just saw. But not everyone did so to the same extent, because not everyone in the study experienced the same amount of cognitive dissonance. Do you remember how the experimenter we saw offered to pay the participant to lie to the person in the waiting room? And that payment amount varied by condition. Some of these participants were offered $20 for their help. A pretty nice payday for a simple lie, right? And it really was, because if you consider inflation, that's like being paid over $150 in today's money. In fact, these participants in the $20 condition had so much justification for their lie that lying didn't bother them as much. They didn't experience as much dissonance. They didn't feel the need to inflate the ratings of how fun the study had been. They just reminded themselves that they weren't bad people. They lied for the money. And really, who wouldn't have? But other participants were only paid $1 for their help. Not a huge amount of money. $1 in 1959 is worth about $8 today. Enough to get students like Akshi to agree to help, yes, but insufficient justification to deal with the dissonance that results. And so when these students felt uncomfortable about having lied, their best option was to make the lie a smaller one. And so they convinced themselves that the study itself hadn't been so bad. The participants in the $1 condition changed their attitudes in order to deal with the discomfort of cognitive dissonance. Okay, so now let's continue by looking at the results of this study. Here you see the behaviors of the participants and actually the answer to the question, how much did you enjoy the experiment? You see that in the no dissonance condition, participants said that they didn't enjoy the experiment, which makes a lot of sense because the experiment was not enjoyable. And for people that experienced low dissonance, that were the people that were paid $20 to tell the lie, they said they enjoyed the experiment a little bit more, but hey, they also received $20, so it makes quite a lot of sense. And they had sufficient justification to lie to the next participant. While in the high dissonance condition, something really interesting happens. All of a sudden, participants are saying that they really enjoyed the experiment, even though the experiment was very, very dull, but they had insufficient justification in order to tell the lie. So here you see the difference between the low dissonance and the high dissonance condition is the justification that participants have in order to explain their behavior. So if they were paid $20 to tell a lie to the next participants, they can reduce the dissonance they experienced by pointing at a very strong external reason and explanation for their behavior. So yes, I did tell a lie, but hey, I got $20 for it, so who wouldn't have told a lie? So they had an external justification to explain their behavior. That was not the case for the participants that only received $1. They didn't have sufficient external justification, so they made up an internal justification. They reduced the dissonance by changing something about themselves, your cognition or your behavior. So their behavior, they could no longer change it, so they changed their cognition instead of staying true to what they actually thought.   So they changed their cognition. And if people change their minds in order to resolve dissonance, we call this counter-attitudinal behavior. And this means that we show behavior that is actually in contrast with our own private belief or attitudes. And this actually can be used, this principle of counter-attitudinal behavior to change stuff for the better. So this is, for example, witnessed if we ask people to do someone a favor, even if it's a person that they don't really like. So if you convince a person to, for example, help the neighbor across the street that you don't really like, you help this person moving a closet. And even though you really don't like the neighbor, you still sort of got lured into helping. So you saw this neighbor on the street trying to carry this closet by himself, and it didn't work at all. And you thought, okay, I have to help this person. Even though I don't like him, I'm still gonna help. Then showing this behavior, helping this neighbor that you initially didn't like, can actually change your mind about the neighbor. Because you showed certain behavior, helping a person, that is in contrast with your belief, namely, I don't like the neighbor. In order to resolve this, you can start changing your cognition. And you say to yourself, hey, the neighbor is actually not so bad after all. And this strategy has actually successfully also been used to reduce prejudice in people. So if you start helping people out that are from a different ethnic background, a group that people have a lot of prejudice against, if you interact with these people, and especially if you show helping behavior, we know that we can change attitudes and actually improve a person's attitudes towards minority groups. So cognitive dissonance can help us understand positive behaviors and attitude changes, such as why people help and how prejudice can be reduced. Now, let's see if this theory of cognitive dissonance can also help me raising my kids. So I have three boys, oh, I'm saying four, but it's actually three boys. That's a lot of boys. And they sometimes fight with each other. I guess it's what kids do or boys do, I don't know. And of course, I don't like this. So I don't like them fighting. These are actually not my kids, but just for you to get an idea. So if I want to stop, help them stop fighting, there's several things that I could do. So broadly speaking, I could induce severe punishment, really severely punish them if they fight. Or I could use miles or even insufficient punishments. So what should I do? Should I punish them mildly or should I punish them severely? What will be more effective? So in one way, you would of course argue, yeah, you should punish them severely because it's a severe punishment. We all want to avoid it. So that will help them refrain from fighting. And that is correct. But the problem is it will help them stop fighting if I'm around, if they know I can catch them fighting. But it will not change their attitude towards fighting with each other. So they will stop from doing so, but only if I'm around. But I want to change their attitude. I want them to like each other more and want them to cooperate and be nice to each other, always. So how can I achieve that? To get an answer to that question, let's go to a classic study, also on cognitive dissonance on toys. It's called the Forbidden Toy Experiment. And I think it's a very beautiful, clever way of seeing how we can subtly influence, in this case, children to change their behaviors. So in this experiment, which was conducted in 1963, there were two researchers, Aronson and Colsmith, and they asked kids that could come into their laboratory to rate several toys. So there were different toys that they could play with, and they had to rate them on attractiveness. And what they then did was they said to the children, so now you can play with the toys, you can play with any toy you like, except for this one.  So the toy that this kid liked the most, this became the Forbidden Toy. They could not play with this toy. And half of the kids were saying something, the researchers said something like, if you still play with this toy, even though you're not allowed to, there will be severe punishment. I don't know what the punishment is, but it was severe punishment. To the other half of the group, it was the same story, but then there was a threat of mild punishment. So if you still play with the toy, then you will receive a punishment that is mild. Okay, so these two groups, all children behave very well, in the sense that no one played with the attractive toy. But that was only the first part of the experiment. What then happened was a couple of weeks later, all the kids from this experiment could return to the lab. And then the researchers said, so here are the toys, you remember you rated them, and then you could play with them, except for one. Now you can play with whatever toy you like. And of course the researchers were interested in the behavior of the children. Will they play with the toy, yes or no, especially with the forbidden toy? And what they then witnessed was something that I think, as someone who's also raising kids, is super interesting. That is, after participants were threatened with severe punishment, almost all the children played with a forbidden toy. So the moment this boundary was removed, they can now play with it. Everybody was super eager to play with it. But for the children that were threatened with only mild punishment, they were not so interested anymore. They sort of convinced themselves that, you know, I didn't play with the toy, there was not actually a lot of consequences if I didn't play with it. You know, then they experienced cognitive dissonance, and what they then do is change the recognition. I actually don't like the toy after all. I don't even feel interested in playing with it, even now I'm allowed to. So here you see the effect of severe and mild punishment on attitude change, and that if you induce miles or insufficient punishments, this is actually an ideal way of changing children's minds about something. So for example, dealing with a temptation or changing their minds and stop fighting with their brothers. So in the forbidden toy experiment, the kids convinced themselves, basically, to not play with the attractive toy. But sometimes people need a little bit more help in order to change their behavior. And we can use cognitive dissonance also in order to steer people, guide people in order to show more moral behavior or behavior that is more in line with their own core values. This is also something that my kids do a lot.  What's happening here? So they induce hypocrisy. They remind me that I'm behaving inconsistently. I'm showing behavior that's not in line with my own core values.  Also, for more famous people than me, this can be used. For example, here you see there's actually quite a lot of platforms that use hypocrisy induction when it comes to climate change and people that are sort of hypocrites when it comes to changing the climate, like Bill Gates who has his foundation and he also really openly talks about how serious climate change is, but then still he is showing a lot of behaviors, having all these cars and a private jet that is, of course, also very polluting. So that's also in contrast with his own belief. So reminding people that their behavior is hypocrites that can also lead to behavior change and helping people to show better and more moral behavior. So in this lecture, we extensively talked about cognitive dissonance and also the many ways in which we try to reduce dissonance. So remember, there are three different ways. We can change our behavior. We can change our cognition or we can add cognition, but reducing dissonance in this way is not always necessary and it's also not always helpful because at times we will just be flawed human beings and we are all occasionally show behavior that is not moral. We all lie at times. We all show behaviors that is actually not in line with our core values. We take planes. We eat avocados. We spend too much money on very expensive coffee when we really definitely want to have coffee and I think it's also, by the end of this lecture, important for you to realize that it's okay every now and then to just show behavior that's not ideal, that you should also just sometimes accept the fact that we cannot always live up to our own expectations and live up to our own moral standards. And one way of also reducing dissonance has a lot to do with this perspective and that is using self-affirmation. So if you use self-affirmation, you remind yourself at the things that you are good at and these are things that are unrelated to the area where you experience dissonance. So it can be reminding yourself that you are still a very good and loyal friend. So for example, if you go take that airplane to Ibiza in the summer, even though you really care a lot about the environment and you feel super guilty about it but you still do it and then you can say to yourself, you know I worked really hard this year and I will still be committed to stopping climate change and reducing my carbon footprint but this one thing I just really want to do and I'm still a valid and important human being, I will make sure that I'm a good friend, I will work hard for my studies but this is also, you know, I'm still a good human being. So reminding yourself that you still have positive attributes is also a way of reducing the dissonance and I think sometimes that's perfectly fine because we cannot be perfect all the time. So this is the end of the lecture and I hope to see you next time.


Y254, imagine. All right, welcome back, you are still hanging out with us right here on Y254 TV. This is your daily dose of why in the morning and right about now, we're just about to get into an interesting conversation on an MCM segment and today we are bringing it back like never before, you know, you know those moments you're in high school and you learn some few things here and there, some piece you off, but now in your adult years, you're like, hey, those things really affected me. I mean, those things were really life-changing because, you know, in high school everybody has a different experience of high school and I remember we had a conversation with my co-host and he also said that he doesn't like his high school and I'll leave it to you back at home. Do you like your high school? What are some of those memories that you hold so dear to you? Anyways, I want you to actually, by this or still on that note, we had asked you a question on our social media. Now, you know, Lisa, when you were in high school, you had a different experience. Kwanzaa, if like a miracle just happened and you find yourself back in form one. First of all, how would you take it? How would you take it? I don't know how I'll take it, but that's the question we had asked you on our social media platforms right there. Ensure that you plug in using the hashtag why in the morning on all our social media platforms, you can find us on Facebook and on Twitter and Instagram as well is at Y254 channel and my socials is at Brian's circle one or one. Back to our MCM segment right now. Live in studio are two powerful gentlemen and I'm going to let them introduce themselves and I'm going to start with the one who's on my immediate right. Good morning, my brother. First of all, thank you for coming through. Thank you so much. Introduce yourself. My name is Daniel Nyakwaj. Currently, I'm a student passing political science. All right. At the University of Nairobi. All right, OK. We're welcome also good morning. Nice to have you back again. It's good to be back, yeah. I'll introduce myself. My name is Elvis Otieno. I'm a journalist, yeah, soon to graduate with my degree on that. And apart from being a journalist, I'm an artist. I'm a vocalist, a dancer, a lover of fashion and design. So basically, when you hear art, it defines me. So, yeah, that's who Elvis is.  You have an artist background as well as the journalism background. It's like you guys have two powerhouses in here. Now, back to high school. This is a very interesting question because I remember we had a conversation in my co-host and it was actually time to also give perspective whether he's high school was enjoyable as well or not and mine also was not. I said, I'll never go back to high school. I can't. Even in my dream, I will not go back to high school. But anyway, a story for another day. Now, when he came to high school, Kulukonazile experiences that literally shaped you from your performance, from your displaying aspect as well, from those that were bullied. There's a lot of people who actually said the biggest part among the most life-changing experiences they had is when they were bullied by, you know, you're joining from one and then Kona Elekhtil Koneitra, monolization. When I go to form three, I'm even in form two. Or even your fellow form ones are bullying you as well. So, I really like to get your perspective and your experience as well.  All right. So, I wouldn't say high school was really an interesting moment. There were those times when it was really a defining moment for me. You know, the high school I went was not the one I expected to go once I was down with my primary education, but we were there and we could not change things. So, I would say I'm a victim to bullying, but not physical bullying. Like, you know, the way people would mess with your mental kind of status. So, though these people, and the fact that it was not like people who are like in other classes, in upper classes, it was just people in the same class. These people would like try to turn me down and make my life not change because I knew, you know, at the moment I thought there was a problem with me, but coming to look back, I came to realize the problem was with them and not with me. Right. So, with high school... Let me just interrupt you, Kidogo. What exactly made them to like despise you?  I wouldn't say that there was something very outstanding about me. First of all, I went to a school in the village. It was a very minute school and I was from Nairobi. That's one aspect. You know, people from there usually think Nairobi are the people who will come and start influencing people into doing other things which are not right, but that was different from what I presented. And I think my weakness and I still, to date, I kind of regret why I let people like really mess with my mental because that's someone who, okay, in a certain way, I was the person who always reacts. And you know, when you show reaction that someone actually had, had aliquumisa, had your feelings, they kind of fade into that. No, sir, that's the point. Yeah, it gives them power over you. So, every time they know where to hit and they know it will have a reaction to what they were trying to do to me. So, I would say also, as I progressed through high school, I was elected as a prefect and I'm telling you, people are very scared, thinking that I'm going to be like... Terrorized them. Sneech. Oh, Sneech.  And that's when I say, I'm not going to be a Sneech, but to their surprise, I was not much of a Sneech. I was very strict, yes, but only when I was on duty. When I was on duty, I didn't like to rub shoulders with my fellow students. So, that kind of gained me respect. You know, being a prefect, also trying to be up and to be top in the class also, I think for some people, they were intimidated because I was saying, I, when you don't have a flaw, but I knew I had my flaws, but I kind of, along the way, decided not to show them because people would now start to find a point where they could hit hard and I was not going to let, because, you know, you are really in your co-life. Yes, I would say so, but that school kind of made me to be hard. The person I am today is defined by that school. Because of your high school. I entered that school hating it.  I don't, because it has made me the person I am today. It has shaped me. You're among the three people, man. And if not for that school, I don't believe I would be the same person because in as much as the conditions were not that appealing to me or sometimes because I remember the first two years was met with me being in and out of hospitals because of the weather and all that stuff. Even the teachers, yeah, even the teachers thought I had like an internal illness, but from from three, four, I adapted or like I had to man up and all that stuff. So high school for me, yes, it had a lot of challenges, but there were moments which were very amazing. And if I'm told to go back, I think I'll do. You will go back? I would go back, but I will do things differently. Wow, amazing. Yeah, excellent. So big shout out to my school. Big shout out to your high school witches. Would you like to mention it? St. Paul's Dengar, St. Paul's Dengar Secondary School in New Guernesea County. Wow, yes. Idi Nade, Idi Nade. Daniel, Idi Nade on that note. How was your high school experience? I was like, hey, man, say miyangu. Miyangu to li choma ku choma. Mine was Teribu. What? Teribu? Yeah. I think basically in my high school, I went to seven schools in high school. You went to seven high schools? Yeah. So if I had a chance of going back to high school, I would not go because I would drop out of school. I think that's what can happen right now because when I was in high school, I struggled to, like my hope was to rely one day, complete this journey. Yeah, so going back to high school to me, I cannot go back because that is like...


Let's get started. I am here today to announce the top 10 scams that the Consumer Assistance Program received last year. And with me are a troop of the people who work and help the work at and help the Consumer Assistance Program. We have the director of the Consumer Assistance Program, Chris Curtis, and Crystal Baldwin, our longest-serving employee at the Consumer Assistance Program. And we also have Margaret Tab, who helps answer the calls and supervises students who help. And our small business advocate, Emily, whose name, why am I not running? McDonald. McDonald, thank you. We also have with us students. And the reason why we have students is because CAP, the Consumer Assistance Program, is actually a partnership between the Attorney General's Office and the University of Vermont. It's located at the University of Vermont. And when you call the Consumer Assistance Program, it's possible or maybe likely that it will actually be a UVM student who picks up the phone and helps you. So we are very proud to have the students. A couple of them are here with us today. And we also have Attorney Ted Hobson, who has been helping consumers since longer than some of us have been alive. Thank you, Ted. And I'm really glad to be here to help provide education and preventative measures that you can take on scams. So let's just define what is a scam. A scam is essentially when someone is trying to use the marketplace to trick you to give them your money. And they also might, instead of just money, they might trick you into giving them your personal information that they can use to steal your identity, your credit card information, your bank account, some other way to get money from you. They're incredibly common, unfortunately. Oftentimes, these scams originate overseas. That makes it very difficult for the government officials and law enforcement to track them down and shut them down. And that is why the most effective way to fight scam is to educate ourselves and support our community in providing education and making sure that everybody is aware of these scams. And that's one reason why we're here today to highlight these top 10 scams that the Consumer Assistance Program received last year. So I want to remind everybody that while robo calls are something that people associate with scams, there's actually every possible avenue can create an opportunity for a scammer to get your money or your personal information. Something like a text or an email.  So these are unfortunately in the marketplace, there's lots of opportunities for folks to be scamming. So we always have to be on the lookout, and these scams cost for Vermonters a lot of money. Every year it's millions of dollars lost to scams just by Vermonters. And it's really important that we do what we can to educate folks so that we can try to get that number down and prevent people from being scammed. You know, one of the things that can be so challenging is that there is a lot of shame, I think, people feel when they are the victim of a scam. And we want to tell you don't be afraid to call the consumer assistance program for help. There's people who are there to help you. We've literally seen it all. There's in the scam that we haven't seen, and we're there to support you and help you through it. So please, please call and don't be afraid or ashamed of calling. It happens to so many Vermonters and we're there to support you. Let me say a little bit about the number one tool I always say that scammers use is to spike your emotional response. So if you are being solicited by someone and you have a sense of false urgency that is being you're being manipulated to have that sense of false urgency, take a moment and pause. Scammers will use a urgent situation to spike your emotional response to try to get your money or your personal information. And when you sense that your emotional response is being spiked, that's your moment to slow down, take a minute, take a pause, call the consumer assistance program. We also are happy to receive calls that are just, Hey, I think I'm being scammed, but I'm not really sure. And we can walk you through that. So please don't hesitate to pick up the call and contact us.  And if you are someone who you feel like you're really savvy with scams, keep in mind you might have a loved one, a neighbor, a grandparent, or a friend who is vulnerable to a scam, whether that's because their loneliness, or they don't have a lot of, you know, financial sophistication with the way things work, or technical sophistication, we're going to hear in a minute about some of the tech support scams and how insidious they can be. So that's an overview on scams. Let's get into some of the numbers on scams. In 2022, CAP logged 3685 scam reports. That is a lot of scams. But it's actually less than we have seen in previous years. So the scam reports are down. And we'll talk a little bit about maybe why that is, although we're not actually positively sure. The primary reporting methods are direct submissions to CAP's online reporting tool, which can be reached at ago.vermont.gov slash CAP, and CAP's toll free hotline, which you can call at 1-800-649-2424. I should note that, you know, I mentioned the UVM students who are there to help is a service learning program located at UVM as a partnership that's been going on for over 40 years. So it's actually really wonderful. And that's kind of the overview of the numbers. Let me give you a couple of tips that I didn't mention earlier because I didn't get there in my notes. One, if you receive a scam call and you're thinking this is a scam call, don't engage. It's very tempting to tell the person off, don't do it. You have to hang up the phone. Don't call them back. If someone texts you and you know it's a scam, don't text them back. Once a scammer logs, this is a number where the person engages. You've identified yourself as someone who might engage with a scammer. It doesn't matter that in this instance, you knew it was a scam. Next time, you might not know it's a scam. They're going to write your number down as this person might fall for a scam someday. So don't engage. Hang up the phone. Don't text. Don't be tempted. Just disengage. So now with all of that, without further ado, let me tell you the top scam that Cap saw last year that was reported to Cap last year. So the number one scam received by the Consumer Assistance Program in 2022 was the fake package scam. That can take a few forms. So I'll talk about that. But really, it's that's the avenue for them to get your money is there's a fake package.  And they just need your credit card number to, you know, make sure that the full payment has been made. Or that they'll try to get your personal information in some way and the fake package is the way they're going to do that. The ultimate goal that in this is so dangerous is they are going to try to get you to allow remote access into their your computer. Once they are allowed into your computer via remote access, they can access all of your files, your bank account information, and they can completely take over and steal your money. And we have seen literally hundreds of thousands of dollars lost due to a tech support or some other scam like the fake package scam, where you have allowed the scammer access to your computer remotely. So don't ever do that unless you are completely certain that the entity is a legitimate entity you're allowing to access your computer remotely. So that is the number one scam. We will tell you the top 10 scams before we move ahead with anything else, though, I want to turn over the podium to Crystal Baldwin, who I mentioned is our longest serving member of the CAP team. She is maybe the number one scam expert in Vermont. I'm going to say it. She knows a ton about scams and how to protect herself. And she might even be the person you speak to when you call the Consumer Assistance Program. She's a ton of knowledge is coming your way. So take it over Crystal. Well, first I'd like to say, I think we're really fortunate in Vermont to have an attorney general that cares so much about scam prevention and awareness, to know so much about it to be a scam awareness expert and spread the information across Vermont. So thank you. Really appreciate that. So yes, I am Crystal Baldwin, and I'm from the Vermont Attorney General's Consumer Assistance Program at the University of Vermont, which we call CAP. And alongside my colleagues every day, including our service learning students, we take consumer complaints, scam complaints, and we educate about issues of consumer nature and we provide referrals to Vermonters. So for more than a decade in my tenure at CAP, I've seen thousands of scam reports, and I've logged thousands of scam reports. And the hope is that when the Vermonters share their stories that they can help prevent fraud in the lives of others. They always say that. Scams affect everyone. They affect me, you, our neighbors, members of our community, literally everyone at people of every class and profession. I've taken reports from nurses, doctors, lawyers, businesses, everyone receives scams, even our college students, everyone. How does scams happen? So over the course of my experience in reviewing complaints each year, I've noticed scams that successfully take funds tend to have a few things in common. One is there's an element of trust in the scam. Another is there's a perceived authority figure involved in the scam. And sometimes a scam might be a little new or different from what we're used to. When an element of trust exists, a scam is more likely to be accessible. And you see this in all imposter scams. These are family emergency scams, grandparents scams, romance, relationship scams, computer tech scams, where you get a phone call and you hear from somebody saying basically they know more about your computer than you do. So why not trust them? You may even get an internal email from a colleague telling you to pay on an existing expense account. That could be a scam. When there's a perceived authority figure, they're also successful, like a phone call claiming to be a government or law enforcement official. And we've seen this more this year. Basically, they're threatening legal action or arrest, and they can be really scaring and jarring for the people receiving those calls and difficult to hang up on. And then in the last category of newness, we see this often because the general public is just unfamiliar with the scams.  So they proceed with caution, but maybe not enough caution. And we see this in gift card scams, in part because people don't know that when you give the information on the back of a gift card, you're giving the scam or access to that account and all the money in it. How do we go about spotting scams then, when everyone is a target? And scams are difficult to avoid and they're ever changing. So the answer is, we fight fraud together. So sometimes it is our grandparents. I'll never forget about 10 years ago, there was a gracious grandmother in the Northeast kingdom. And she came forward to cap on the phone, telling her story about how her grandchild urgently called asking for some money. On her way to send a local store agent, wire transfer agent, just asked a simple question. Have you called your grandson yet? What about his mother? The grandmother went on and made the call and found out the grandchild was safely on the couch at home. Fighting fraud is this agent simple question. And I also won't forget the time a bank teller called cap and said, they had a consumer in their office about to withdraw a large sum of money for a sweepstakes. With the consumer on the line, we worked out that the sweepstakes was actually a scam asking $4,000 upfront. No prize should ever require a fee to claim it. Fighting fraud is this banker who cared about their customer. I will never forget scores of local technology consultants who helped identify computer scams in progress and went on to restore systems and direct people toward recovery resources like cap. Fighting fraud is the specialist who identifies the true source of the problem. This case, it was a scam. And I will remember the online romance that asked for a bit too much. And when exposed morphed into a government imposter scam that made more false promises of monetary refunds, that only finally concluded when a community of empathetic support and kindness stepped in. You see when every one of us fights fraud by going out of our way to extend a minute to lend a hand to help another Vermonter in need, we're fighting fraud together. Sure, cap, we answer the phone and we answer questions. But we all can learn about scams and fight fraud. Did you want me to review some of the top scams? Well, why don't I list them and then we can see if there's questions about the top scams. Cool. Thank you, Chris. So I wanted to just go over the top 10 scams. I'll list them all. We are going to have a press release go out which will also be available on our webpage that describes each of the scams and also what you can do about it, how to fight it, how to be aware of it, but also what to do if you fall in for it. So that'll be really useful, but they are. So number one is, of course, the fake package scam. Number two is the computer tech support scam, which is very effective because once someone gets into your computer, they really can take everything. So that's a really popular one. And it's very concerning. Number three is a sweepstakes and lottery scam that Crystal mentioned, where someone thinks someone is trying to get you to give them money in advance of their of your winning your supposed winnings, the law enforcement imposter scam, the family emergency imposter scam, and then fake websites and online listings. This is an example would be someone puts on Craigslist, an apartment that doesn't isn't really available and they don't really own and then they're trying to get, you know, a fake deposit for you that for an apartment that doesn't exist. The debt collection scam, deceitful solicitations, straight up identity theft, and the Medicare card fishing scam where they're trying to get information from you. Though that's the overview of the scams. And you can do a deep dive at the extreme questions, if you have a question about a particular one, we can talk about that and Crystal I'm sure be a wealth of information. But let me just talk a little bit about some of the data. It's not really data because it's all anecdotal, but the information that we gleaned when we reviewed the scams from 2022. The first is that for the first time in eight years, the scam reporting dipped below 5000. And we don't exactly know why but we have some ideas as to potentially why the first is that we had created a robocall team. Ted is a member of that team as the attorney working on that. And we have actually brought action and settled with robocallers who were bringing scams illegally into this country. And the second reason is the Federal Trace Act, which was passed in 2021 and created protections for consumers. It required some of the phone operators to carriers to block robocalls and also provide a caller ID system. What I hope isn't a reason is that members of our community aren't reporting scams because they don't think it's important because it's very important. As Crystal mentioned, it's really important that we fight fraud together, take care of each other. And that means letting us know when there's a scam that's happening. We have a scam reporting system at the Attorney General's office at the Consumer Assistance Program. And that is triggered when we get a lot of scam reports. If people aren't reporting the scam, we don't know that there's a problem out there that needs to have a scam report, a scam alert issue. So please make sure to report a scam, even if you know it's a scam, you just report it to the Consumer Assistance Program so that we're aware of it. So that really ends the remarks that we had prepared for the press release. Well, thanks for being here. We really appreciate it. Let's I love Crystal's line fighting scams together fighting fraud together. So it really appreciate you guys being here to amplify the message and we'll close the press conference. Thanks.


I would say, welcome to What's Up with CPE, and today's hostess will be Ellen and myself. So you go ahead and introduce yourself, Ellen. It is first. Hi everyone, I'm Ellen. I'm an Associate Technical Project Manager on the CPE team. I've been with CPE for just over a year now. Yeah, and that's me. Julia? Cool. So yeah, I'm an Associate Manager. I joined the CPE team also pretty much a year ago and pretty much my first experience with Nest was a year ago. And that was quite interesting. It was a lot less scary than I thought too. So we thought we're going to make it a little bit of fun. And if you go to the polls section, what do you think does CPE stand for? And we have a couple of options. So A would be cool people environment because we're super cool. Coffee and pizza are essential. The community platform engineering or you just say like screw it.  So use the poll section and have fun with it. Cool. There will be a little bit more questions just to make it more fun. So obviously it's community platform engineering team. However, they're all the cool people and we do love coffee and pizza and we do stumble across our own abbreviations. So all of them kind of are true. So what do we do actually as a community platform engineering team? We are very dedicated to the Fedora community and also support the CentOS stream project. So and we have like three main categories. We'll go deep into that a little bit later. So we have the system administration infrastructure and release engineering team, which is basically focusing very much on the releases. They manage the releases for the community, what systems are being used. There are some critical apps which are like maintained by the in front relinch team. Then we have an initiatives in our team. There is the arc team mainly focusing on sourcing projects, getting a scope ready. And the initiatives team will then pick up the artwork and start continue working and for a limited time scope it and literally those initiatives are aimed to provide to benefit to the Fedora community, obviously. And then we have application and maintenance and those are picked up across the wall where we work on bugs. We fix them, we develop new features and focus on the community development. So we grow for you. And this is the next poll. Our newest addition to our CPE team is what? So the options are a Kermit and Miss Piggy. If you say it's you, select the community design team or hang on, I'm still counting from the first slide. Just go to the poll section and submit your responses. Have fun with it. I really would love to know those four people's who would be the newest addition to the team. Shout out to them. It's a community design team, which has been kind of adopted by the CPE team. And if you look at our team from a very holistic point of view, we have obviously our newest addition to the community design team and pretty much everyone has possibly touched base with them because they are responsible for the logos, the artwork, swag designs, websites, the wallpapers on Fodoros. So shout out to them. And then we have the CentOS and Emerging Vowel and I particularly split them up because we have some legacy with CentOS 7, but it's also combined together as the CentOS Strain team, which will focus on the next version of Vowel. So if you're contributing to the CentOS Strain community, you're also designing the new vetted enterprise Linux system. Then we have the Apple folks. I'm pretty sure most of you are familiar with them. These are, I like to call it the kind of play store for Fedora, Alma Linux, Rocky, and so on and so forth, for a noob and a non-technical person, but they basically maintain packages. And if you want to work as a maintainer or how it works in general, I recommend to join called session tomorrow. And we have the Arc team, which is basically the joint team of the in-front relinch team and the Fedora team. So we build a little group who focus on your ideas, which you bring to the table, source them, scope them, who should be involved, what kind of resources would be involved to hand them basically over to the initiatives team, who can then work jointly on an initiative to ensure that this idea actually becomes true. And once they are completed, they're going to hand it over to the in-front relinch team, then maintain it, do hand-holding, monitor it, and so on and so forth. On top of that, recently we became an intern incubator, so we have a lot of interns who are spread throughout the emerging operating system team, and all onboard within the CPE team and got hands-on experience with the Fedora. Now that being said, we also like to connect to you. And as a shout-out, we would love to get involved and collaborate with you as a community per se, and we hope we can win you over to join our Fedora badges project because that's where we are a little bit short on resources and would love to actually have a close engagement with you. So, you heard about the team, you know what they are doing. If you take wild gas on how many kilometers or miles, do you need to cover to at least to see all of us? How many would that be? So either we are just a call away, you would need to travel to the Moon and back. It could be somewhere around 236 pizza deliveries and maybe a soda, a.k.a. forever, or approximately 44,000 kilometers or 37,340 miles. Go to the poll section and vote your options. Okay, it's approximately 44,000 kilometers, it might be a little bit more because some of us are quite remote and we couldn't really define each single mile to go that way, but it should be around 44,000, which is quite a bit. So, where do we all sit? If you follow all those points, that would account for 44,000. So far, we are 39 team members, 11 interns who are not all sitting with us, but also moves on to other teams. In summary, we are 10 women in the team, so we're quite strong on that part. We cover approximately eight time zones in 12 countries and speak around 14 languages. There might be a little bit more, which we aren't that proficient yet, but we're working on it. Unfortunately, we haven't yet covered the African continent, but yeah, if you have anyone who's interested, point them out away. And with that, I'm going to hand over to Ellen. Thanks, Julia. So another poll question, how to get in touch with us? So, you can A, chat with us, email us, put in a ticket, so there's lots of options. B, you could send a smoke signal. C, you might not want to get in touch at all, who knows. And D, you could send a postcard. And I welcome anyone to send us a postcard. We would love to get your postcards. We should make that a thing. Totally. We should initiate a fedora postcard exchange. Take to the poll and see what the answers are. Something we could put forward for the future. The majority was actually correct. But seven will try to fill out some signs. Yes. And again, with the postcards, definitely welcoming postcards. Yeah, so you guys can chat with us, email us. You can put in some tickets. These are some clickable links, so we will share our slides with you afterwards. Just some of the options. IRC, you can send in a proposal. You can flag an issue or you can get in touch through community updates and keep in touch and see what we're up to. Great. One other poll question. How many tickets did we close in the last 12 months, so since the last nest? Too many to count. What even is a ticket? We didn't close any. Were we closed on the house in 796? I actually do agree with the people who say too many to count it because they wanted to figure it out. Yes. So, yeah, very well done to everybody who guessed D. Thankfully it's not C and none, or we would all be in big trouble. Yeah. So just some statistics then to back up this answer. So yeah, just a quick, even before we do that, just what are we doing with your tickets? So when your tickets come in, they're reviewed by the team. They're categorized twice daily. They're assigned to team members, or if there's more details required or more effort that needs to be put into finding out what we need to do, we do so, and then we close those tickets once again. So just some facts on that. So yeah, again 100, sorry, 1,796 tickets have been closed since last year. That's approximately 4.92 tickets a day, or 34.44 a week. Six of those have ended up on our initiatives board, which we'll explain in a little bit more detail in a few minutes. And 1,426 days was the long list of ticket was opened and then closed. Perfect. So another question. How many initiatives did we complete then since the last nest? So another 12 months. You guys can take to the polls and guess. What's an initiative? So yep, there's that. E7, C1. D, I'm still celebrating all the tickets. Okay, so brain job guys. Anybody who guessed B? I think this might actually be a bit of a trick question because I actually think the answer is actually 8 if we go to the next slide because I may have forgotten one. Yeah, so with initiatives, who we consult for initiatives or who's involved is the door community, our central community, our CPE team members, our CPE management and our business unit. So on the right hand side, there is a list of projects that have been completed since last nest. DNF and FMN replacement were both scoped by ARC. So there are additional tickets or additional initiatives. And that's currently then in progress with CPE is FMN replacement, community shift badges and kernel test app are currently being investigated by our ARC team. Great. So just a quick synopsis of what happens in the initiative process for anybody who's not familiar with it. So tickets come into our repo as we discussed. They are then reviewed by our product owner and she takes a look at those tickets and compares them to our mission and value statement as part of CPE. And then with quarterly planning, every project is investigated by ARC, our advanced reconnaissance crew. So they do a little bit of digging, a little bit of scoping and seeing what is entailed with the ticket. And once they give it a seal of approval, it gets put into our backlog. So then every quarter we do a backlog prioritization, which takes place with all of those stakeholders that we just mentioned a moment ago. And then they are put forward for a vote against the deliverables based on the ARC team and also expectations from stakeholders. And yep, they run on a quarterly cycle. So four quarters a year. So potentially one of our last questions, how do you feel about CPE now? Do you know how to distinguish between a toad and a frog? Clickable links. Maybe you're already chatting with us and maybe you have some more questions. Did we vote? Yes. So basically for, can I distinguish between a toad and a frog? Well done. Two, I'm very eager to look at the links. And then we have like some of them already chatting with us. Even better. Good, great. And we have three questions and we come to that in a second.  You will have the slides. So yeah, feel free to reach out to us at any time and literally pester us with questions. And this is just like a final coin case. You missed it at the beginning. We really look out for you to collaborate with us. We're looking from particular entertainers on the Fedora badges, which is a huge thing for the Fedora community. And this will be one of our pilots where we really going to work hand in hand together to move things forward and which is driven by you as a community. So thank you very much. Reach out to us if you have any questions. I think Vipple was the kind and shared the link to the presentation. So you can click all the links. They find all information. I think we have a couple of questions from Matthew. First question related to the other ones. Are there tickets non-CPE people can take on? What's the process? I think if the tickets are in progress, everyone basically has access to those tickets. I know that you need specific permissions and people will get back from the Info and Reliance team to each and every tickle holder who commented on that. So they really go through detailed comments. And depending on the permissions, I'm pretty sure people can actually access or help with certain tickets. Does that answer your question Matthew? And this will go. Awesome, cool. Otherwise reach out to us at any time. And your second question. There's more work we could do to improve Fedora or keep what we have running. Then CPE can possibly take on directly. How can CPE act more as a catalyst, as I will, to help the community scale to take on more as we grow? That's a very good question. We would love to collaborate better with the community from a CPE perspective going forward. And I think this badges initiative could be the deal breaker and just like show us the way how we can improve those things. Move forward. And we hope for a lot of collaborators on that one. It's very dear to you and to us. And we would love to help you out, guide you through it and mentor you along the way. Awesome. Any other questions? Shout them out. I just noticed one or two just in the chat. James and Matthew both asked a similar question to find complete or what is your definition of done? So that is kind of a rolling process. So the first kind of initial stage of establishing a definition of done starts with the ARC investigation. So they will look at what is going to be required to successfully improve whatever it is they are investigating. We take those recommendations and then once the initiative has gone through prioritization and has been picked, we sit down as a team and look at it with our technical lead and our engineers and look at it with our PO as well and establish some requirements and set some goals. And those goals lead towards our final definition of done. So what we establish from a technical perspective and managerial perspective to be our definition of done, what is really, really needed to be taking this initiative over the line and making it better within our scope and our requirements. That's kind of when that gets established as well. It's something we keep an eye on the whole way through a project. Sometimes it changes a little bit through course once we maybe find out different things or it goes in a different direction but for the most part it's established in the first initial kickoff phase and carries through to the end of the project. So I hope that helps. Was there any questions we missed or does anybody have any other questions that they would like to ask? Well, Max will ask like what kind of wrappers we used in the count and how we're so kind to answer that. It was Rallenge, Fedora, Infra and Centres Infra. So thanks, Mojave, for providing those numbers. Thank you. Anything else you would like to know from us? I just noticed one here. It says Vipple equals Rockstar. Yes. Thank you, Vipple. Very, very much for helping us with our poll today. And yes, just always being a phenomenal help with things like this. So thank you, Vipple. Definitely. Close one. Then I guess we're done. Thanks so much for your attendance. Thanks to everyone. We hope you had a good bit of fun. We hope you learned loads about CPE and you'll reach out and join us and have a look at some tickets and maybe contribute to badges if you would be so inclined. Awesome. Bye, guys. Thanks, everyone. Speak to you soon.


I have a spreadsheet here that has a lot of information on it. And I don't want my reviewer to have to search to find the things that I've created. So I'm going to create a secondary table of contents, and I just put it here for convenience. And I want to make a link for this last graph, unit sales line chart excluding USA World. I've already put the text in this cell in three. I think it is. I'm going to scroll down and find the graph. Here is the, whoops, clicked too far there. Here's the graph that I need down at the bottom, which is this sales by ranging excluding USA World. And I want my reviewer to find that Excel when you're trying to get to something specific you need to give it a sale reference. I'm going to click right here in this sale down there. The reason I picked the bottom is that when the link actuates it will take this and put it at the bottom of the screen. And so I want to be able to see the whole graph. There are two ways to create the link. If I look at this, it's in S103. Now if I remember that, I can just go back up here to the sale that I want. I'm going to click in that and then put insert link, insert link again, make sure it's placing this document. And I just need to put the sale reference S105, I think it was, and click OK. And that clicks the link. I have to reformat that a little bit, but I can click on the link and it takes me where I want to go. But there's another way of doing that, so that you don't have to try to remember those sale references that well.  I'm going to go up here to this hyperlink and I'm going to just right click on it to edit it, bring up that dialogue again, we're in the placeness document. This time we want to look for the defined names and there's one I just created, last graph, I'm going to select that and now I've got that link set up and I can just click on the link and it will take me down to the right place.