Two separate murder trials began this week, but mostly it was Erick C. Conn, Erick C. Conn, and a little more Erick C. Conn, and it all happened this week. Welcome everyone to This Week. I'm Shawn Allen. For the next half hour, we'll catch you up on news you may have missed and give you updates on the week that was in your hometown. We saw breaking news Tuesday evening both locally and nationally as EKB News was the first in the nation to report on social media that fugitive former disability attorney Erick C. Conn had been captured by Honduras Technical Agency for Criminal Investigation. The Honduras Public Magistrates Office said in a news release that Erick C. Conn was captured by police Monday as he came out of a pizza hut in the coastal city of La Sabre. Shortly after breaking the news of Conn's capture, EKB News spoke with Prestonsburg attorney Ned Pillersdorf, who has been one of Conn's harshest critics after filing a class action lawsuit against him and said the news may mean the beginning of the end for his former clients. My concern throughout this now two and a half year ordeal has been the fate of Conn's former clients. More than 800 have lost their benefits. It's pretty rough now. Whatever little money these people saved and saw the state coming is the money's gone. And, you know, hopefully his capture will start to undo the great damage Conn has not only done to the legal profession, which, you know, I'm part of, but he's also done incredible damage to the plight of people who receive Social Security. I know it's a local story that, you know, folks around here are interested in, but the national and even international attention Conn has focused on people who receive Social Security disability benefits. He has done such great harm and it's been magnified by his outrageous antics, you know, cutting off his ankle bracelet, trying to negotiate the terms of his surrender, ending up in Honduras. He has just done so much harm to so many on so many levels and hopefully this is the beginning of the end of this awful ordeal. As Honduran authorities announced plans to transfer Conn back to the United States on Tuesday, we also learned of a press conference to be held at the FBI headquarters in Louisville and EKB news was quick to make sure our very own EKB news reporter Chris Anderson was there to bring you the latest. Contrary to one of his more popular advertisements, he left, but now he's back in custody. The FBI officially announced today that fugitive former attorney Eric Seacon is in FBI custody. The FBI didn't release a lot of information today at a press conference in Lexington, but they did say that the search for Eric Seacon spanned numerous agencies and international borders. We pursued all investigative avenues. We interviewed dozens of people to include Mr. Conn's family, friends and associates. We employed various technical capabilities. We reviewed emails and social media posts purportedly originating from Mr. Conn. We conducted analysis of his finances and seized bank accounts. We conducted physical surveillance. We searched his former law office, vehicle, and the residence of his mother in Stanville, Kentucky, and we offered a reward for information leading directly to his arrest. Today I'm pleased to announce that Mr. Conn is in custody on Saturday, December 2nd with the assistance of the FBI's legal attaché in San Salvador and La Agencia Técnica de Investigación criminal, or ATIC. Mr. Conn was arrested without incident at a Pizza Hut in Los Aeba, Honduras. Mr. Conn is currently in the custody of FBI agents and at some point soon he'll appear in court to face the remaining charges against him. As promised, Mr. Conn will now be held accountable for his actions, the people he deceived, and the lives he shattered, including all the victims of his greed in eastern Kentucky. Conn has already been sentenced in relation to his guilty plea in the social security scheme, but now he faces prosecution for charges related to his escape. In Lexington, Chris Anderson, EKB News. Six months and four days after he cut off his ankle bracelet and fled for Central America, disgraced disability attorney Eric C. Conn was brought back to the United States and on Wednesday appeared in U.S. District Court for Arrangement on charges related to his escape from home incarceration. He pleaded not guilty to escape, failure to appear in two counts of conspiracy. The judge scheduled a February trial date. Conn was also ordered to be held in jail pending trial. Following the hearing, Conn's attorney told reporters he returned to Kentucky with only the clothes on his back and $20 worth of under-incurrency. After pleading not guilty to those charges, Conn became a resident of the Grayson County Detention Center while he waits for the reaction in his case. Conn is being held without bond while a federal criminal case concerning his escape is pending. He is also awaiting assignment to a federal prison after pleading guilty in an earlier case. Conn pleaded guilty in March to theft and bribery charges related to a scheme to defraunt social security. He was under house arrest but on June 2nd, after meeting with his attorneys in Lexington, he cut off his monitoring device and fled to what we now know was Honduras. Coming up there was actually other news this week other than Eric Seacon. Coming up next we'll take you to two murder trials. Coming up next on This Week. Arteries are the body's highway. It's the job of a vascular surgeon to keep them free and clear. Pikeville Medical Center's vascular surgeons Dr. Al Adasi and Dr. Nancy Clark provide comprehensive treatment for circulatory disorders specializing in limb salvage, aortic disease, carotid artery disease, dialysis and varicose veins.  Ray worked on my case relentlessly. Injured people turned to attorney Ray Jones to protect their rights. He was wonderful. You couldn't ask for any better. Injury claims could be complicated. Personal injury, workers' comp, social security disability. We can handle all three. Ray's a very good hearted caring person. He did wonders for me. Helping injured people that's what we do. Give us a call. I don't think I could have picked a better law firm than Ray's. Injured call Ray Jones. For the clearest most up-to-date look at your weather check out the EKB weather cam brought to you by American Heating and Cooling. Get a bird's eye view of the skies above Pikeville. Rain or shine day or night watch for the EKB weather cam every day at 6 and 10. Brought to you by American Heating and Cooling. Pikeville Medical Center reminds you Jesus is the reason for the season. This Christmas and throughout the year we remember the greatest gift ever bestowed on mankind, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. In celebration of the most wonderful time of year and on behalf of Pikeville Medical Center's entire staff, we wish you and your loved ones a merry Christmas. May the entire community be blessed with peace, love and hope. Remember Jesus is the reason for the season. A confusing end to a Mingo County murder trial Thursday night brings to an end an 18 month saga that began with gunshots fired in a cemetery. EKB news reporter Shelby Porter spoke with the prosecutor and attorney to get his reflections on the case. Two people are now convicted in the shooting death of former coal company executive Ben Hatfield. Hatfield was allegedly shot in the back while cleaning his wife's and in-laws' graves at Mountain View Memory Gardens in Mayer Memorial Day weekend last year. The murder trial of 20-year-old Brandon Leaf, its Patrick of Louisa, finally came to a close last night in Mingo County Circuit Court. To eliminate the possibility of appeals, the parties reached an agreement that resolved all issues in the case. Pursuant to the terms of that agreement, Brena Fitzpatrick has been found guilty of the first-degree felony murder. The prosecutor's office is just very grateful to the jury for their time and attention and their service in this case without their verdict. This case could not and would not have been resolved. Fitzpatrick will be eligible for parole after serving 15 years of his sentence. The agreement gave the family of Ben Hatfield justice and some closure. However, Mingo County prosecuting attorney Jonathan Duke Jewel says he doesn't think the family will ever have peace. One of the worst things about this case is how senseless and how shocking it was and where it occurred on a Sunday afternoon at a cemetery. The reason Ben Hatfield was there that day was to clean off his wife's grave, his wife who he had lost to cancer in 2009 and also her parents, now his children and his family, if they want to go visit Ben or Debbie or Debbie's parents, they have to go back to the scene of the crime where Ben was murdered and that's to me unacceptable. Fitzpatrick's partner in crime, 22-year-old Anthony Rahim Ariago was found guilty in October to first-degree murder, first-degree robbery, and two counts of conspiracy in the case. He will also be eligible for parole in 15 years. Anthony Ariago will formally be sentenced on December 19th. Brandon Fitzpatrick's sentencing will be January 18th. In Williamson, Shelby Porter, EKB News. Another murder trial got underway this week, this one in Letcher County. Pike County native James Huffman IV is accused of stabbing 24-year-old Michael Hogg to death in Weizberg on New Year's Day, 2014. Jury selection took three days to complete and witness testimony got underway Thursday. In addition to Hogg, Huffman is accused of stabbing Stacey Phillips in Christopher Puckett, leaving Puckett with a life-threatening injury. Puckett, who was allegedly the first to be stabbed, took the stand Friday and described how amidst his own injury, did not know Hogg had been stabbed until his group was en route to the hospital while fleeing from Huffman and his alleged accomplice, Patrick Smith. The prosecution's witness testimony is expected to continue Monday. James Huffman is facing a murder charge and several counts of attempted murder. A grand jury will determine if any criminal action can be taken following a shooting death in Martin County early Wednesday. The incident happened just after three o'clock in the morning of Devella Road at DeBoard. Kentucky State Police confirms that 46-year-old Rodney Step of DeBoard was killed. The Martin County Sheriff's Office was the first agency on the scene of the reported shooting at Devella Road, where 46-year-old Rodney Step was killed. Upon arriving on the scene, officers spotted a man standing over a body on the ground. That man allegedly ignored Sheriff John Kirk's repeated commands to show his hands. He then allegedly said, shoot me and reached into his pocket. At that time, he was taken to the ground where he allegedly continued to fight officers. Sheriff Kirk was injured in the scuffle and had to be taken to the emergency room. That man, 66-year-old Elwood Six of Inez, was arrested and charged with wanton endangerment, menacing, resisting arrest, and disorderly conduct. He remains launched in the Big Sandy Regional Detention Center. Pike Bill will apparently be getting 875 new paying jobs with an average pay of $39 per hour when a planned 372 million dollar advanced battery manufacturing facility opens in the next few years. Power Solutions Provider Inner Blue Incorporated will first place its $40 million headquarters and research development operations in Lexington, creating an additional 110 jobs, paying an average of $52 per hour. Inner Blue plans to manufacture high performance batteries for buses and other large vehicles with production beginning in Lexington and ramping up in Pike Bill when a new manufacturing facility can be built in the next two to three years. It's a big win for state officials in Eastern Kentucky which has lost thousands of high paying coal mining jobs in recent years. State, City of Pike Bill and Commerce Lexington officials plan a joint announcement event at 10 30 a.m. on December 15th in Pike Bill. EKB News will of course continue to follow this story. Coming up, Andrew Joyce will be in with a look back at the weekend sports sometimes you need more advanced care and it's good to know you can get it right here at home. It can be scary to hear that your doctor or local hospital needs to transfer you somewhere else. So if that happens ask about Pike Bill Medical Center first with a team of board certified doctors and membership in the Mayo Clinic Care Network. Pike Bill Medical Center offers a higher level of care right here at home. Pike Bill Medical Center, the specialists are here. Ninety-six-five WXCC, the Tristates Coal Country, the latest and the greatest artist. With Coal Country mornings, weekday mornings from six to nine, WXCC, the Tristates Coal Country. Eastern Kentucky, beautiful, green, peaceful, friendly, but there's a darker side to these mountains. When crime is committed, sometimes cases go unsolved. Occasionally the perpetrators even get away with murder. On our latest news segment, The Scene of the Crime, I'll be working with local law enforcement to help find justice for victims and their families. The Scene of the Crime, Fridays at six and ten brought to you by Billy Johnson, your injury attorney. Let's take a look at the forecast here on EKB. Your sky watch Doppler radar weather update. I'm urologist Clarence Ponsler. We'll have a chilly night ahead with wind chills in the upper teens. Actual air temps about 25 this Sunday night at about 9 p.m. As we head towards Monday 24 at midnight then a southwest breeze at four to seven miles per hour greetsets at the 6 a.m. Monday morning hour 22 degrees and we take a look at the Sunday night alloc here in Pikeville. That's going to be expected with that southwest breeze as I mentioned, so a chilly night ahead. Then we'll see a mild day on Monday, mostly sunny skies, 51 in Prestonburg, 51 in Pikeville, 49 Williamson, 48 Logan. As we take a look at the day planner for your Monday, drive is still cold, 31 to mostly sunny skies by your 3 p.m. hour, mild for December standards, a little bit above average. Then we'll see those south southwest winds at about four to seven miles per hour, 42 the expected low, mostly clear skies by your dinner time Monday night. Could see a few snow snow flurries late as temperatures drop to generally in the mid 30s and as we take a look at the extended forecast we'll see that new cold front making its way on Tuesday bringing us a 20 percent chance of snow flurries and a snow shower. Then we'll see those highs only in lower 30s for Wednesday, but at least the sun will be out in the mid 40s with that partly sunny sky, mostly cloudy with another cold front coming by. Then we could see a 30 percent chance of rain and snow showers high at 50, 45 on Sunday, mostly cloudy. That was your weather update, now I'll send it back to you. This week in sports we saw the Johnson Central Golden Eagles make their third straight, class 4A state football championship appearance. This time looking to repeat as champs, this time at Kroger Field in Lexington, this time a rematch of last year's title game, The Opponent Franklin Simpson. The scene was new for all involved as the state football finals hadn't been held in Lexington since 1976. The Golden Eagle fans were in the house. Franklin Simpson got things started quarterback Ryland Thomas hands off to Trey Bass. He'll break it for a big run for Franklin Simpson. Thomas now under center. He'll roll out and find Javon Covington, a big game that puts them deep in central territory. Thomas now walks up to the line, gets set and a quarterback sneak into the end zone for the Wildcat touchdown. The Golden Eagles now look to answer. Riley Priest takes the snap, he'll drop back and fires a bomb down field. Seth Dalton has no one around him. That's a 49-yard Johnson Central touchdown. Not enough. Franklin Simpson gets the win. 35-21 over Johnson Central for the championship. And this week the NAI released its first men's basketball. Coaches top 25 of the regular season and the uphike bears climbed into the top 10. In the coaches top 25 at number one is Georgetown at 13-0 followed by LSU Shreveport, William Penn Iowa third, Carol Montana fourth, the Masters California fifth with Columbia, Missouri at six, Science and Arts at seven, and UPIKE at number eight. Lindsay Wilson from the Mid-South Conference at number nine. Campbellsville 21st and Life Georgia brings up the rear at 25. It's UPIKE's 61st consecutive poll that they've been mentioned. And with the opening of a new school we expect to see many first and record set the historic day in Floyd County this week. The first college signing in Floyd Central history took place as Johnna Preston signed to play volleyball next season at the University of Pikeville. Preston led the Lady Jaguars this season in blocks and ranked third in kills helped lead her team to the 15th region championship in its inaugural season. It means a lot to me because I love to play volleyball and it's like my life for like the past six years, seven years. It's basically all I've done every summer so it means a lot that I get to pursue my career and get an education at the same time. Anytime we needed something we could go to her. She was one of the ones that learned how to play every position and there are so many times that we we relied on her to hit from the middle or hit from the outside or even hit from the right side. And it seemed like every time we needed a big block she came up with it. And that's a look at This Week in Sports. I'm Andrew Joyce. Sean will be right back with more This Week. Arteries are the body's highway. It's our job to keep them free and clear. Pikeville Medical Center's vascular surgeons Dr. Al Adassi and Dr. Nancy Clark provide comprehensive treatment for circulatory disorders specializing in limb salvage, aortic disease, carotid artery disease, dialysis and varicose veins. Find out if you are a candidate for vascular screenings. Call<PHONE_NUMBER> Pikeville Medical Center Mayo Clinic Care Network member. For the clearest most up-to-date look at your weather, check out the EKB weather cam brought to you by American Heating and Cooling. Get a bird's eye view of the skies above Pikeville. Rain or shine day or night watch for the EKB weather cam every day at six and ten brought to you by American Heating and Cooling. The City of Pikeville reminds you to shop local this holiday season supporting local business nurtures the regional economy maintains jobs for your friends and neighbors and stimulates overall growth whether you're a resident of Pikeville, of East Kentucky or one of our neighboring states the City of Pikeville wishes you seasons greetings and extends an open invitation to visit one of our many shops stores and restaurants. You're sure to find the perfect gift for the people you love this year. Happy holidays and happy shopping from the City of Pikeville. Pikeville Medical Center reminds you Jesus is the reason for the season between the shopping, baking, get-togethers, holiday stress and even joy it's easy to forget why we're celebrating Christmas on behalf of PMC's administration staff and the people we serve we wish you a merry Christmas with sincere gratitude we thank you for supporting our mission to provide world-class quality care in a Christian environment all year long remember Jesus is the reason for the season there's a musical tradition here unlike anywhere else in America during this week we shine a light on part of that musical tradition so now sit back relax and enjoy our mountain music it's time now for mountain music being brought to you by the Mountain Art Center the main stage of the country music hyena well I had Tyler, I teach in Orange County high school and I teach freshmen and I had Tyler several years ago in my freshman government class a little broad-eyed red-haired kid and I play music and a lot of people know that so me and Tyler connected pretty early because he played music it didn't take long to figure out that Tyler wasn't like most of the other children he was he was already writing songs and was interested in some pretty esoteric stuff well when he was in David's class uh David brought home these lyrics he's like I got this kid in class you know check these lyrics out and I'm reading them I'm like oh my gosh you know this is like dealing stuff how does this kid you know um which that was my first really encounter you know about knowing Tyler but um Tyler started doing one of my songs out when he very first started playing uh and I was just you know of course thrilled that somebody's actually doing a song of mine and they were young you know a song of mine would appeal to like a younger crowd but he did it he made his own and uh it was just such an honor to hear him play that thing you said just the stories uh that she tells about the people in this region and just uh and her experiences that that come through in uh her music has always been a really important thing to me um and uh the relationship that I've had with Chico and winner has uh has meant a lot to me and uh shaped shaped to me as a musician so I'm uh it's always pleasure and always an honor to get to play with him it's something that we always knew we always knew that he would grow it's like okay we gotta watch this you know you know I can't wait to see him in a few years because we know he's he's headed for bigger better things you know wherever he is he's going to take that next step I see a lot of kids come through the high school that are gifted in different ways and you know that some kids are going to be great lawyers and some kids are going to be great basketball players and you know entertainment's a different field and you can be as good as it gets and if you don't get the breaks and get the work done it doesn't happen for you so that's not like the other lines of work you go into but Tyler had the goods and he put in the work I mean he's worked hard and so now we're so proud of him I get goosebumps I cried when I saw him in Rolling Stone I mean it's just like one of my children and so it's so great to watch him grow arteries are the body's highway it's the job of a vascular surgeon to keep them free and clear Pikeville Medical Center's vascular surgeons Dr. Al Adasi and Dr. Nancy Clark provide comprehensive treatment for circulatory disorders specializing in limb salvage aortic disease carotid artery disease dialysis and varicose veins find out if you are a candidate for vascular screenings call<PHONE_NUMBER> Pikeville Medical Center Mayo Clinic Care Network member 93.1 WDHR today's best country always the newest country from the biggest stars catch the daybreak morning show weekday mornings from six to nine where you can win cool prizes and even cold hard cash 93.1 WDHR today's best country sometimes you need more advanced care and it's good to know you can get it right here at home it can be scary to hear that your doctor or local hospital needs to transfer you somewhere else so if that happens ask about Pikeville Medical Center first with a team of board certified doctors and membership in the Mayo Clinic Care Network Pikeville Medical Center offers a higher level of care right here at home Pikeville Medical Center the specialists are here I hope you enjoyed our look back at some of the stories that made headlines this week be sure to tune in next week at 6 30 right here on EKB-TV for this week I'm Sean Allen have a great weekend


Hi. This is your Saptal Bhartiya. And welcome to another episode of TFVR Newsroom. And today we have with us once again, Pavel Despat, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Akamai. Pavel, let's get to have you back on the show. Always nice to be here. Yeah, and it's exciting today to talk about this, because you folks announced new cloud computing sites and new capabilities. So I would kind of request you to just give us a quick recap of this announcement. Absolutely. So this was, for anyone who recalls, our follow-up to our February announcement, where we talked about how we were going to build out towards the vision of having distributed data centers with infrastructure services and storage services that are easy to consume and connected to our platform for all the benefits that you would know and associate with Akamai, right? The security, the reliability, the routing, and so forth in low latency. So this is a really, it's our first announcement. And it consists of, at the moment, three new data centers which are already live in use by customers, along with two more that we are going to be rolling out later this month. So for those that don't remember, we had 11 to start with. We are up to now 16 at the end of the month, which was a really great accomplishment for us and along a couple of new features and instance types to help people get the right instance type for their workload. Can you tell us where are these three new ones? If you look at where we might place them, a number of things played into factor. Customer demand, obviously. Remember, we have this massive platform where we see demand and traffic. Obviously, there are certain places that are going to be easier and quicker to build just by virtue of where they are. But there are also some strategic drivers. Number one, we announced IED, Dallas, because, of course, World Wide Hub. And if you look, we do have already existing scrubbing centers for our DDAL solution in that same area, right? So we're no stranger to there. We announced Paris. Paris has one of the highest data center densities in the entire world, right? And is a massive, important relocation for data sovereignty across Europe. Chicago, number five in data centers. Big backup low latency for New York, Philly, DC areas. And then the other two that are coming up. So those three were alive right now. The other two that are in beta and will be announced later, Erich and I, and Seattle. Of course, we want to look after the developer community. But Chennai, again, huge market. Look at what we've talked about with the most recent IPL. Those numbers keep growing in transactions, not just bandwidth, right? We're also announced previously that we're going to have a scrubbing center both there and in Mumbai. So if you look at this, those are obvious places where we replace compute as well. And that's the first bit. So that gets us up to 16 with the plan of 23 by the end of 2023. What is driving this demand, which is also kind of leading to this, you know, increasing footprint of Akamai? It's inevitable because if you look at the growth of the market in general, take whichever one you want, right? Whichever estimate you would like from whichever analyst. Ultimately, there are new workloads, applications all over the world, right? Not just in the North America, but literally everywhere in the world, new applications that require new compute, whether it's games, whether it's new video services, new e-commerce services, all these things are going to need compute. Now, are you going to, for these, for everything go, and are you gonna be able, is any one hyperscaler going to ever provide you all the localization, all the different features for all these needs? No. Are they going to disappear? Absolutely not. If you have a multi-exabyte data lake that you're doing AI and you will find certain providers do that, right? Like you go, you move your workloads to Amazon, look at where all the large learning models are happening right now. There are certain workloads in scale that they're gonna keep, but then at the other hand, and we were seeing that right now, there are some workloads that that's centralization and some of that baggage of all that extra services is unnecessary. If I have a workload and I have the code in a VM or container or something and I need to execute it, and we see a lot of these. I need to execute it in very localized places, for low latency, for localization. Well, that's the and, in the and the nor, right? There will be some parts of it. Yeah, you're gonna have your large learning models, for example, centralized into place. But then once you've trained the models, you can deploy them more distributed, right? You don't want to go all the way back to Ashburn for every query on that model, right? And that's just one example. Databases is another one. And one we're seeing of, hey, I have my data here, but if I can distribute it to my clients, that's great, right? Keep it centralized, of course, but just like we did with content in CDM. What are some of the driving factors where developers, teams, they do need kind of distributed architecture, for the distributed applications as well. As you said, you know, sometimes they want to be closer to where the users are, but what are the factors? I think the problem you have in general is that you can go and let's say, if you wanted to distribute your inventory database across a multiple, you know, a number of different locations and replicate it for the purposes of either resiliency or performance, variety of reasons why you'd want to do that. You can do it and roll your own right now. It becomes very difficult because what do you have to do? You have to manage the replication. You have to manage the networking, the connectivity, and it becomes an N squared problem, right? One replica is fine, but now when you have two or three or four, right, which you might want to do, maybe not even for durability, but just for local performance, that becomes very difficult, right? Because what do you do? You create a VPC in each region. You tie it together somehow, right? Either a tunnel or you do a transit gateway. Then how do your developers, to your point about the developers, how do they access it, right? How do you do load balancing? You have to worry about replication time. So the issue there is all these, you have all these problems plus all the operational problems. The idea of some of the things that we're working on, for example, like an e-commerce platform and inventory is, with all these locations, we can deploy through a couple of our partners. We work with a few folks, both MacroMet and HarperDB solutions that do just that.   Just kind of slots in the middle and back to the developers, you just have an endpoint, right? It's an endpoint that happens to be replicated in all these different regions, however many you've chosen, but it's abstracted away. So the VPC, the connectivity, the, oh, you're using this subnet thing that you always run into, right? When you're trying to do your routing, all that's gone away. And it's much like the same idea we started with with CDN, right? Like in CDN, nobody worries if a hundred Okmai servers go away because there's 350, however many, 9,000 more. So that's the way where we want to go with data as well. And you need these distributed locations with this connectivity, right? Just dump it on the internet and that's where kind of the Okmai platform comes in. So that's why it's really exciting to have these locations married with the platform, with the connectivity and then start using some of our technology partners to bring that all together to solve those kinds of like database, data distribution problems. Can you also talk about the importance of distributed infrastructure? Not just from the point of view of distributed workloads but also because of the changing geopolitical situation in a lot of countries, they do want data to remain in the region. Of course, not everybody has something like GDPR or some of those larger, but they do want. So talk a bit about the importance of that and how once again having the data centers in like as you mentioned, Okmai, Mumbai, Paris, it helps to keep it regional. That's a very interesting thing that we actually take into account. So those kind of geopolitical situations, our CTO recently had an internal talk about how we plan that network and when there are these kind of conflicts, we do plan backup connectivity and all that kind of stuff, what would happen if we lost certain links. So it plays into that, into the platform but specifically into compute. It plays into some of the decisions if you look at where we mentioned we're built out. We have Europe. What's coming out later is going to be Stockholm. It's going to be Milan, right? And this is all on our blog but it's going to be a lot of Europe. We have India and there's a lot of investigation into the Middle East. If you look at whether mandated by something like GDPR and potential other EC initiatives, yes, Europe is a no brainer, Paris, obviously, right? Same with Stockholm, where we're going to have Frankfurt, Amsterdam, the usual kind of spots. But increasingly even in places where there's not an official mandate, the market is asking for it. You see that we see our customers saying, hey, whether they are based in the region or they have customers in that region say, you know, nobody's putting a proverbial gun to my head, but I do want to do this if I can get it. I would like to do this because it is where local market, local influence is going. So those spots are going to be, and why we're really kind of proud about those 23 is it's a big extension and that's where another differentiator, right? We will have infrastructure there. And while GDPR and privacy is very complex, you know, infrastructure alone doesn't solve it, but it starts with infrastructure, right? If you don't have a server in the country, you're in storage, then you don't have a foundation on which to build all those privacy things. So I think that's going to be, obviously as you see this year and next year the rollout plan is to be in those places. Are you seeing new kind of workloads, new kind of applications? Because traditionally we have seen, you know, all those lamb stacks where you folks also started offering GPU instances as well. But now we are talking a lot about Genuity AI, LLMs. So are you seeing any new kind of workloads also where you do feel, hey, it's not just reaching out to new locations, but it's also attracting those workloads or catching to those developers who want to run these workloads on the Camille node. We've seen newer things, probably the newest thing is that data distribution piece that's the most interesting. And the best analogy I've heard is taking the CDN model where you took static content and shoved it out to a number of different locations for a variety of reasons, taking data and doing the same thing and adding some compute there. Right, so not just moving a database like a key value store, which, you know, we already have, that's important, but that's not all of it. If you can move the data out and slot this distribution layer, kind of like the CDN did, almost transparently to browsers, that becomes really interesting and that's, I think, the biggest difference. Now there's a bunch of challenges there, which we can certainly chat about, but once you do that, then your big data lake becomes a lot more useably and securely accessible, because remember, we're not talking about security, but you just enable API protection in front of this and off you go, right? It takes care of your REST API as well, but specifically for the API distribution, you have some Dynamo or Pick Your Poison, wherever you have it, slot this layer in front of it, you have your distribution with that edge portion, you have your distribution layer and then the edge portion takes care of the usual security just like it has forever with your API and CDN. So that's, I think, the biggest change, architecturally, right? Because now you're talking about in all the diagrams when you go on all our reference architectures, artists have this other layer that we have to try to explain. And once we sit down and have this kind of conversation, it starts making a little bit more sense, but the point is simply, you have edge, you have centralized cloud, certain things, now that you have starting to have access to this more distributed, easier to configure middle tier, not to use that terminology again, it becomes interesting, right? And then you have to kind of talk about, yes, these are the kind of things that you do, and that's where we're working with some partners and whatnot and knock on wood some announcements, but that's, I think, the biggest different use case and you have to get people's heads around it.  How are you seeing kind of evolution of Linode and within Akamai where the previous workload was in now, what kind of workload? Because the cloud is the new reality, but people are doing different kind of things and they all need access to cloud, especially when you talk about distributed. So talk a bit about what kind of workload you're targeting is mostly the individual SMEs or you're also looking some large-scale, mission critical, you know, kind of, you know, more challenging, not comfortable workloads as well. The way to think about it is the combination of Akamai and Linode got us the ability to go in terms of size on the size axis to much larger customers, right? That is not to say that the individual developers earn anyway, anything's gonna change for them if you look at the launch, the Linode docs, everything was done the same, everything's in cloud manager, there's a couple of new instance types still in there, but it allows us to also serve folks that need larger capacity, need more IOPS, need more bandwidth, need more locations. Any, the individual developers are welcome to and hopefully will take advantage of much of the same thing and like the reduced egress cost. But the capacity in things, yeah, those folks probably won't notice because they can now just buy a lot more and they'll notice the speed, but they won't notice the how many you can buy, right? Because they weren't in that to begin with. Now, so to answer your question, this, the combination allows us to serve both markets now, whereas before it was harder for Linode alone to serve the higher end market. In terms of which, because again, we're not trying to be everything to everyone, where you see us focused, and if you look at our customer stories and everyone we talk about and some of the stories I've shared today is in media, we have a lot of great partners across the media spectrum and that really involves gaming as well. If you think of the large platforms, think of those as one. SaaS providers, if you look at our high tech customer base, we've been delivering their software for ages. We've been protecting their SaaS versions of their applications. We're a great partner there. So those are the kind of workloads, right? And those are also the kind of ones that what? Have privacy requirements, SaaS providers need to put things in different locations. They need performance, same thing with gaming and OTT, right? When you're whatever, I'm not going to name a service, but whenever sure your streaming service offers, you get cranking going, why am I paying however many dollars or pounds or whatever for it? So those are immediately the e-commerce, those are the ones that are immediately right up our alley and where we're seeing the most uptake a variety of sizes of customers for this idea of distributed and whatnot. Let's talk about cloud itself. Are you seeing that the cloud itself is evolving? So I think the first and foremost, so I used to work in mobile and everything.  I think you have to realize, we still have AM radio. Technologies will sit around, IBM still makes mainframes, right? There's mainframes in the cloud. So the reality of all that long tail stuff is we will live in a diverse environment. I think we said it a little earlier. It will not be just one or two or three. Now, the right way to go about this is clearly less distributed, right? Not to do the pendulum of like mainframe, PC, cloud distributed, but it's really not surprising because we've been trying to put compute out farther forever, right? We've got somewhat successful on phones, but so far doing it, what we traditionally call edge, we've gotten some out there, right? But just the state of the art, Moore's law, connectivity, right? All those things have prevented us from going out that far yet, but it's getting there. I mean, at first content was at the edge and then we put WAFs and security policies, right? And bot detection and all this AI type of analysis. And then we added some functions at the edge. It's clear that for some things, it's better to move out. And out in this case, yes, edge, but out also and other things will mean hybrid clouds, right? I know edge also has that connotation, but I think what we see is there's a lot of the public internet, a lot of those applications are going to take advantage of this distributed portion because especially as scale grows, you're not gonna be able to do it as cost effectively centralized. And I'll point out to any large, even medium-sized event or even medium-sized security event. That's in the negative one. If you try to do it centralized, same thing with compute demands. It's just the demand is growing and it's just gonna push distribution out because that's gonna be one of the ways we solve this architecturally. Earlier you were talking about data as well. I also want to talk a bit about, I had a discussion with Justin from Akamai and we were talking about a small data, wide data. And it was not versus big data. When we look at those kind of data, how is Akamai serving that kind of market? I think if you look at it, that's where the ultimate idea of these distributed sites, even if you look at where on that comes in. With that acquisition, it's containerized data storage. Because again, if you have these sites, we talked about one of the challenges having all these sites is how do I connect them? One of the other challenges, how do I manage all the data across the site? How do I sync it? How do I store a rest? Which again is the boring infrastructure layer like we said with data sovereignty, but it's still a necessary piece. I think if you look at it where Akamai specifically sees itself is that infrastructure, that network connectivity, that availability layer, that yeah, you can build those kind of support for those kind of use cases. AI and large language models, there's a lot of weight there, but by and large, right? It all starts with that infrastructure and connectivity and abstracting that away so you can get to the workloads instead of the plumbing. Earlier, you were also talking about making things easier for developers. And once again, the workloads are pending. Everybody's moving to cloud. Developers do get overwhelmed with a lot of cloud complexity, Kubernetes. This cloud complexity is not going to go away. We have to make it easier. You have to help the people to be able to deal with it. How is Akamai helping organizations or developers, their developers should focus on what is actually adding the real value to their business versus getting worried about all this plumbing and unnecessary, I mean, it's not unnecessary. But what I understand is that they should be able to focus on their business. How do you make it easier for them so that they can continue to move faster, they can stay secure, but they don't waste a lot of their resources in things that does not add any value to their businesses. That one's really interesting because Akamai coming more from networking, almost TelcoE background versus Lenovo from cloud, we had different words for the same thing, right? Lenovo was working in CNCF, Akamai's world was IETF and those kind of standards. So when we come together, I think that was a really good compliment because in practice, what that means, especially for developers, when we talk about our global load balancer that will be announced, will be out in beta soon, it will work because you will put in an IP and an FQDN. There is no concept of some, like you don't need this weird target group, you don't need all these abstractions about this zone and that zone. And the point being that now, all of a sudden, it's great, you don't have to worry about and learn our nomenclature are because we don't have anything. It's a VPC, give it a host name. If it's outside of your VPC, we will route it. If it's inside your VPC, wherever you have your VPC defined, we will route it. So it's that kind of thing when we say simple, if you look at what it is to set up a node balancer right now versus some of the other types of solutions and the way that impacts developers is now if I have to go to this environment, like, all right, okay, what's a target and what's this? Okay, and yes, developers get it. They read documentation, there is documentation, but if it's just standard and open and I know this, I can do it in my data center. You know, I can do it in the node, I can do it wherever. So I think that's, well, unless you go into some of the other very custom things, right? So I think that's one of the things that we are standing by and both of you see, like I said before, both from the Akamai side and the Linode side, standards open, standards open. We just kind of call it different things based on where we came from. Pao, thank you so much for taking time out today and of course, you talk about this announcement, the growing footprint of Akamai Linode. Thank you for all those insights and I would love to chat with you again soon. Thank you. Absolutely, appreciate it. Thanks.


I genuinely believe, if you can stick with me in this video today, it's gonna be roughly 10 minutes of your time, I'm gonna share with you a formula that could change your cycling journey. It could change the way you train, the way you perform, and ultimately make you a lot stronger on the bike. Now this formula goes like this. It's fitness minus fatigue equals form. And in this video today, I'm gonna go through three critical elements relating to this formula, including the biggest mistake cyclists make that's holding them back when it comes to this right here. So let's get into it. So welcome back to the 21st edition of the RCA Training Tips Show. As many of you will know, I've had a four week absence from YouTube from the RCA Training Tips Show, and you would think I have come back feeling refreshed, but I need to take a leaf out of this book. I'm absolutely still fatigued. Reason being, I was polishing off a brand new online course for road cyclists looking to take their performance to the next level, which will be available within the next couple of months. And I am confident this is the course that all road cyclists should do that have plateaued and are looking to take their cycling performance to the next level. But the course won't be available for a few months, as mentioned, so in the meantime, while we wait, feel free to download my free e-book for road cyclists. So this formula here is from a book called The Cycler's Training Bible, written by a famous endurance coach called Joe Frill. I'll link to the book below, which I'd highly recommend for those out there interested in cycling training performance. Now technically, this formula is derived from analytical information you can get from training software. So I use today's plan and it uses information such as heart rate and power data, but according to Joe Frill, who was referenced here in this Training Peaks article, how is form determined? It's the result of subtracting today's fatigue, which is acute training load, or ATL, from today's fitness, which is chronic training load, or CTL. But for the purpose of today's video, we're not gonna get into rabbit holes of ATL and CTL, nor are we even gonna talk about heart rate and power data. We're actually gonna keep things at a very high level. We're gonna talk about how this formula can be used by all cyclists out there to take your cycling performance to the next level. Now the other thing about this famous formula is that it's ultimately positioned for peaking at a specific time. How do we get the most fitness without fatigue so we're right on form for a specific event? However, many of us out there, we don't wanna be on form for one specific day of the year, one specific week, whatever it may be.  And the beauty of this formula, in my opinion, is we can use it as a general framework or guide that sits across all our cycling to ensure optimal performance as much as possible. So we're gonna break this video into three main parts. Number one, we're gonna quickly break down each component of this formula. Number two, we're gonna discuss the biggest mistake cyclists make with this formula. And number three, let's discuss the right approach to take. So number one, let's break down each component and we'll start with fitness. Now you're probably thinking, I know what fitness is, we don't need to go into much detail here, but I do wanna break it down so you can properly understand this formula. And according to Google, fitness is the condition of being physically fit and healthy, pretty simple. However, we're gonna go into a little bit more detail and in the case of Joe's book, he pinpoints fitness as being race readiness. Do you have the specific qualities such as certain power, certain endurance and a certain ability to recover that will enable you to perform during a specific race or event? However, more broadly and for the purposes of what I'm trying to emphasize to you today, fitness can be defined as physiological adaptations that will occur from your cycling training. Some examples would include more efficiency with oxygen utilization and increase in muscular strength and or endurance, the ability to tolerate the rise of the lactate system, et cetera. And the list kind of goes on, but ultimately the more fitness you have, the greater possibility you have of being stronger or having more form on the bike, which brings us to the second part of the equation. And that is fatigue, where the irony comes into play. And that irony is in order for you to become more fit, you need to become more fatigued. As Joe puts it, fatigue is your friend. Without it, you can't increase fitness. And according to Google, once again, fatigue is extreme tiredness resulting from mental or physical exertion or illness. And as we know in this instance, fatigue is actually driven from physical exertion. We're alarming the body, which transitions into physical stress, which becomes fatigue. And that fatigue, if managed properly through rest and recovery done the right way, will ensure we can properly absorb fitness adaptations which leads to greater form, which brings us to the final part of the equation being form. Now, if you read Joe's book, you will hear him reference where form actually originated from. And I'll quickly outline it for you here as well. And that is apparently back in the late 1800s within horse racing in Europe. If you went to a race and wanted to place a bet, you would find a bookie and that bookie would provide a sheet of paper, a form with a list of all the horses racing that day and how they performed recently. Ultimately, outlining which horses were on form. And as you would know from hearing commentators in sport, Tour de France, whatever it may be, that they're constantly referencing which cyclist is on form. And even at our local cafe when we've finished a bunch ride, criterion race, whatever it may be, there's mermas through the group. Who's on form? Who's pulling the most turns? Who won the sprint finish, et cetera. I've done that multiple weeks in a row, they're on form. So it's fair to say that with our cycling, it's not so much about being stronger, being faster all the time. It's actually about who's on form, which is all encompassing. Which brings me to the second part of this discussion. And that is the biggest mistake cyclists make with this formula. And that is way too many of us out there were going for fitness in pretty much every single ride we do, if not definitely most rides that we do. And I get it. It is arguably the most important part of the equation because if we sat on the couch for three months and felt super fresh with very little fatigue, our form is gonna be in the bin because there's simply no fitness. However, what you need to think about very carefully is fatigue or freshness becomes equally as important when you start to build fitness. You see fitness only comes when your body absorbs fitness adaptations, which happen in recovery during a fatigued state. This is very important. So let me say it again in a different way. The workout itself is only the ticket to fitness adaptations. Fitness comes during rest and recovery, properly absorbing fatigue from your cycling workout. So let me ask you this very important question. How well do you manage fatigue? And I bet you there are many people behind the screen right now giggling away because you know that you don't manage fatigue well at all. Well, stop laughing. This issue here of not managing fatigue properly, riding in a fatigue state more often than not is one of the biggest mistakes cyclists make because by going for more and more fitness, more and more hard workouts, we crush fitness adaptations by not properly absorbing fatigue where fitness adaptations occur. You know what I'm talking about this constant back to back days of riding hard, riding hard, pushing through fatigue. Well, if you actually want to improve, you need to stop this. This need to always be beating your personal best time, increasing how many kilometers an hour or miles an hour you're doing on an average loop, whatever it may be. It leads to this sort of moderate to hard riding all the time. And you simply can't ride proper hard because you're just too fatigued all the time. And guess what? If you can start to respect the fatigue, the rest and recovery, and then inadvertently start to respect your hard days even more, welcome to a double-edged sword of beauty. The ability to train harder means you have a ticket to greater fitness adaptations. And if you rest and recover from the fatigue that comes from harder training, you absorb fitness adaptations more effectively and your cycling form will continue to rise. Which leads me to point number three and that is the right approach to take. Now, I'm just gonna quickly pause here for a second to ask you a question. Are you getting value out of this video today? If you are, could you please give the video a like? And also, if you're yet to subscribe, please do it below, hit the bell notification to ensure you get notified of when videos like this go live in the future. So, the right approach for you to take when it comes to this formula. It's a big question to ask because everyone is different. Everyone responds differently to different types of training techniques. The list kind of goes on, but if we're to put a general framework surrounding how to ensure we're getting fitter, how do we ensure we're better managing fatigue and ultimately how to ensure we're on form more often than not, here's a few guidelines. Assuming you have reasonable aerobic base conditioning, no more than three high-intensity sessions per week. What do I classify as high-intensity? Any workouts where you are working around or above threshold. Threshold is your hour power, so it's kind of like a 20 to 30 minute intensity. Anything where you start tipping over that, I would consider a high-intensity workout. Between each high-intensity session have an easier day. You could do a zone two aerobic ride for maybe an hour or two, or maybe you spin in zone one for 45 minutes or an hour, which will actually speed up the recovery process and reduce fatigue through something called cellular exchange, where healthy oxygen and nutrients are provided to muscles as waste products and toxins are removed. Or you could even have a complete day off in between high-intensity workouts, and I'll definitely recommend doing this at least once a week. Now I'm not saying that you must not do back-to-back high-intensity days, it's just gonna happen, but try and steer away from them unless your target event requires you to go back-to-back to back, maybe even further, hard days in a row. Then in training you need to condition your body to be able to deal with that, but as a generalization for most cyclists out there, if we can strategically place easier days in between our hard days, we can better manage this component which will lead to greater form. Another thing I'd like you to keep in mind is think about gradually making your high-intensity sessions harder and harder as the weeks progress. And every now and again, it could be every third or fourth week, have a slightly easier week to give your body an extended period of time to absorb accumulated fatigue. So I truly believe if you follow this formula, you use it as a framework in your cycling, you're gonna get a lot stronger on the bike because inadvertently, by managing fatigue better, which most cyclists don't do, your high-intensity days will become a lot more efficient and your rest and recovery days will become a lot smarter. And as a result of those two things combined, your cycling form will go through the roof.


There's another way that the sympathetic nervous system can deliver its message to the whole body. And if you think about it, the sympathetic nervous system is responsible for your, oh, holy hell, something gnarly is about to happen. And if you don't rally physiologically, you are likely to be dead. So the bear is chasing you or the car is coming out into the intersection or go ahead and the chasing me bear idea is a little less scary to me than car accidents. And so that's probably why I use the bear analogy all the time, example all the time.  So that's where this whole adrenal sympathetic setup mechanism comes in. It involves the adrenal glands. The adrenal glands sit on top of the kidney. And if you were to slice an adrenal gland in half, you would see that it actually has an outer cortex and an inner medulla. And the cortex is actual endocrine tissue. And it's responsible for producing steroid hormones, like cortisol, like aldosterone. These are hormones that we'll be messing with later on in the semester, but they're produced by the actual endocrine tissue. The adrenal medulla, wait till you see what it actually is. This is wild.  In this setup, we have a cell body, a sympathetic neuron. And here's the deal. I am not going to be able to draw this inside that adrenal medulla because you wouldn't be able to see it. But the preganglionic neuron synapses on basically a modified postganglionic neuron. All it is is a cell body. It doesn't have any axons. It does have receptors. And look at who the receptors are. It actually has both nicotinic and muscarinic receptors that respond to acetylcholine from the preganglionic neuron. The acetylcholine binds. And then this is, you think, dude, that's not a neuron, but it dumps who? I can't remember what color we made it. I think it was pink. It's going to dump epinephrine. Where's it going to dump it, you guys? Where would be a good place to dump it? I mean, there's no effector.  I can definitely see value in that. How about we just dump that stuff right into the blood? Seriously? Who came up with this plan? Brilliant. So this little cell, which is in the adrenal medulla. So look, I'm going to draw it in here, even though you can't see it. This tissue in here is actually ganglionic tissue. These are post-ganglionic neuron heads, cell bodies inside the adrenal medulla. And all they do is dump epinephrine and norepinephrine into the bloodstream. Done. That's why when something terrible happens, like a car coming at you, you don't even realize that your body is flooded with adrenaline before you even have a conscious realization of what is happening and you're primed to do battle to whatever has scared the holy living tar out of you. I love that mechanism. I think that's really interesting. Then once this... We probably should keep it pink. Once the epinephrine gets into the bloodstream, then it can go out and holy mass messaging. That information is going to get out to all your different effectors. The last thing we're going to do in this lecture is we're going to look at a couple of examples of autonomic reflexes that are just a complete pathway from the stimulus all the way through. And there are actually things that we could mess with in the laboratory. Most of our things, we don't want to be messing with our blood pressure too much. We might a little bit. Maybe our osmolarity will mess with that a little bit too. Come pee pee lab time. But there's an interesting autonomic reflex that we can look at dealing with the pupils of your eyes and light. I'll be right back.


Good morning. This is Senate Judiciary Friday, March 12th, 2021, day of crossover, which means that we have a number of bills on the agenda, and we're starting with S3 and actually in the competency to stand trial and insanity as a defense. We have documents and a change from Eric if you want to post those changes so we can go over a potential final version. I did get a letter from disability rights Vermont with concern about Section 3 and I'm inviting him to meet with the committee next Tuesday to go over those concerns if this bill is as proposed, sends out a here with a positive vote, it'll need to do appropriations. There's going to be money for Vermont legal aid as well as money for the forensic work. So it will be a by rule go to appropriations. So why don't we start with that Eric? Sure. So should I go ahead and pull up the the new draft? Yeah, please. All righty. Good morning, everybody. It's Eric Fitzpatrick with the Office of Legislative Council here looking at the Senate Judiciary Committee's strike all amendment proposed strike all amendment to to S3 is an act relating to competency to stand trial and insanity as a defense. Senator Sears, do you want to do a quick review of the bill in its entirety or maybe just focus on focus on the changes I think unless committee members have questions. Sounds good. So no changes to section one. If you recall, that's the section that just basically makes clear that evaluations can be about the defendants competency or sanity or both. And that the opinions are presented in a certain order. And that's remember people talk about that yesterday as well, that the only time that if they're both sanity and competency are going to be evaluated, then then sanity evaluation only takes place that the person is competent to stand trial. Right. Section two, you may recall there's a change here. And this is the piece that provides that this has to do with the proceedings when a person is found incompetent to stand trial or not not guilty by reason of insanity. And the next stage in the proceedings is for the court to determine whether the person is dangerous to self or others. So that the operative question there being whether the person should be committed to the custody of the Department of Mental Health. Now at that stage of the proceedings, remember what's going on here. This is lines 12 to 14 is that the person is entitled to have counsel appointed by Vermont legal aid member in the past. It has tended to be the person's defense counsel has continued to represent the person. But at that point, it's no longer a criminal proceeding to commit the proceeding. And it has the witnesses have testified it makes sense to have Vermont legal aid pick up the representation at that point. So the second sense is where the change is just clarifying that the Department of Mental Health is also entitled to appear and call witnesses at the proceeding. But remember that's the issue. There had been some language there about the attorney general. Exactly. Exactly. This is where the 250,000 comes in. Is that correct? That's exactly correct. And and that figure came from joint fiscal or Jack. Joint fiscal. There was a fiscal note they had done on that question a couple of years back. And I spoke to Nolan about that and joined fiscal and let him know that that issue would come up in the probes next week. And he said he would work on updating the figure. But as I think it was 2017, it was 250 K. Okay, so there will be an appropriation. And can I just ask quickly if DMH had been represented by the attorney general's office and now are not going to be? Is there any impact for them financially? Or would they just eat that? I don't think B is all new language. Oh, I. Oh, okay. So we were altering a preview. We were altering the new language. Okay, great. But Eric, am I correct? Yes, I think that's right. I have a question also. So if the can the person still have their own private counsel if they have money and they want to do that versus having legal aid represent the person? Yes, that's exactly the question that that's why this language was changed on the floor last year on line 12. Okay, so that in response to that exact concern center, Nick, the words shall be in being titled were added to so that the person could have legal aid appointed, but that language wasn't there before. And it was a requirement. And there was that exact concern that they wanted just in case the person wanted to still have their private counsel appoint him or her. That language is added to make sure they could. Okay, very good. Thanks. Okay, thank you. Probably the more controversial section is section three. Yes, this was the provision that you recall that the Department of Mental Health and the Attorney General's Office and the state's attorneys worked offline to come up with some language that they could agree upon. And there's still some highlighting in there, which I neglected to remove. Otherwise, the languages is as agreed to. So again, this is the provision regarding victims notice. And with respect to folks that have been committed after, and that's the initial sort of language that defines who this victims notice applies to and what cases. And you'll see that that's in 2A line seven through 12. So when does victims notice kick in? Well, it kicks in when a person is committed to the Department of Mental Health. After having been found, and this is line 10, either not guilty by reason of insanity or incompetent to stand trial, provided the person's criminal case has not been dismissed. So remember that was the issue that was discussed yesterday as well. It's not all competency, not all cases in which incompetency is found. It's those cases in which incompetency is found and the person's criminal case is still open. And I should have asked this when Erica Mathidge was here when she brought up Elizabeth Teague. Why is that one different? Where the state's attorney's already able to be involved actually was at a hearing on whether or not she should be released into the community, into a alternative program. I'll go back to New Jersey. I don't remember all the details. Why is that case? Is that because it was it beyond the because it's older than five years? Or what's the reason? Do you know? Does anybody know? I don't know the answer to that one. Sorry, Senator Sears. Maybe Pepper in a research force. I know. It seems like much of what's happening here. Well, I mean, I don't I don't know the answer. James Pepper from the Department of State's attorneys. But I would imagine that it's because the the notice provision that existed in law was was modified by Supreme Court case a few years ago. And so, you know, if she was getting notice for 20 years, and then all of a sudden, you know, maybe right now she's not getting notice any longer. But because of that, she actually was recently. David share with the Attorney General's office here. It may be that that case is proceeding under C one, which we're not modifying in this and C one and C one does have a slightly different construct where a hearing can be required by the court prior to a discharge being allowed. And my guess is I'm not familiar with that case, but my guess is that's got what's going on based on her description of it. Thank you. So can I ask a question on this? And I'm wondering with regard to if a case is dismissed. Is there any notice at that time to the victim? I'm thinking about a couple of the Burlington cases that were dismissed and some were picked up again. But what happens then? What's the case for the victim? Do they get any notice? Anybody? David share with the Attorney General's office again. No, they would not in that case not under the new not under C two, you know, will be the state's parents responsibility to make decisions that are best for victims and community members. Well, there was certainly quite a bit of notice in those cases. So yeah, I would say that they would get notice at the time of the dismissal. But they wouldn't get any further notice. So the state's attorney would notify the victim that this person is going to be placed on an OH and that we're going to dismiss the charges. Any further notice would be would not exist after that. Is there I know there is no case right unless the Attorney General in the case of the one of at least one of the Burlington. This is Morning Fox Deputy Commissioner Department of Mental Health. I concur with both attorneys share and pepper that in that circumstance, once the charges were dismissed, there would be notification at that at the dismissal. And then if charges were rebroad up again in kind of some of the similar cases in in the new media, where the Attorney General's office has retaken up a case reopening charges, then that with the notification process would begin again from our end. And just as a quick comment just to be clear on the fiscal note, there would be some fiscal impact for the department as well. And between the legal aid fiscal note of 250,000 that Eric Fitzpatrick mentioned, there would probably be about a similar amount for DMH, both to cover more attorney costs for being in appearance at these hearings, as well as for the additional evaluations. Okay. Thank you. To move forward, Senator Sears. Yes, please. All right. So we were just talking about the universe of folks who would cases that would trigger the victim notification. And that's what we just went through when there's been this not guilty by reason of insanity or incompetent to stand trial and the case not being dismissed. So then the next question is, all right, when when victim notification is triggered, when does it happen? And that's what is dealt with in subdivision B here. So when the person has been committed under this section, so in other words, it's a person coming in through the the criminal justice system after having had one of these findings that we just described. The commissioner of mental health that is required on line 14 now to provide notice to the state's attorney where the prosecution originated or the AG's office, if that was the office that prosecuted the case under, you'll see three different triggers that provide notice that when notice is required. The first one is line 17, subdivision one, at least 10 days prior to discharging the person from either the care and custody of the commissioner or commitment in a hospital or secure residential recovery facility. My understanding is that that's a reference to middle six to the community on an order of non hospitalization. So you got two under this subdivision one, there's two two different actions that could happen within the department that would trigger this notification to to the state's attorney or the attorney general, they either discharging him from the care and custody of the commissioner completely. That's line 18, or they're not being discharged completely. This is lines 19 to 21, but they are being moved from the commitment in either in a hospital or secure residential recovery facility on an ONH to the community. So either one of those actions would trigger the notification requirement to the SA or the AG. So that's the first trigger. The second one is subdivision two going on to page six now, at least 10 days prior to the expiration of a commitment order. If the commissioner doesn't seek continued treatment, so that's the that's the situation where where there has not been a formal discharge. But once the commitment order is reaching the end of its length, the commissioner is determining not to seek continued treatment, in other words, not to seek to hold the person within the care and custody of the department. And that kind of brings up the Supreme Court case that folks have been talking about, because the court had said that the notice was only required in case of a discharge. Well, deciding not to seek continued treatment is not not strictly speaking a discharge. So this language is intended to make sure that notice is provided, even in those situations where there hasn't been a formal discharge, but the the department's deciding not to seek continued treatment of the person. So that's the second second situation in which the notice has to be provided. And the last one is any time that the person abscones from the custody of the commissioner. So in that situation as well, the the commissioner has to notify the SA or the AG's office. So those are the three, three circumstances under which notice is required. And then if notice is required, this is line six through nine, if the SA or the AG does get that notice, then they have to provide the notice to the victim. So they take the notice that they got from the department and they inform the victim as well. So that's the way that process would work. Now, subsection subdivision C rather is also dealing with the subject of notice, though it's a slightly different situation. This is referring to notice that the commissioner has to provide when it's not has to do with, you know, the sort of timing of treatment, it's not having to do with, you know, the other ones are all triggered by, for example, 10 days before a person is discharged or 10 days before a person is they decided not to not to continue treatment on a person. This is a different situation, different circumstances. This is the situation where a person has been already subject to an order of non-hospitalization that's lines 13 and 14. So they're subject to an O and H, but and this sort of skipped down the lines 18 through 20. But the person either doesn't comply with the order or the alternative treatment hasn't been adequate to meet the person's treatment needs. So if either one of those sort of triggering circumstances happen, then the commissioner provides notice to the state's attorney or the AG. Senator Sears, can I ask you a question? Eric, the construct of the notice requirement with the word or between the state's attorney's office and the attorney general's office and the triggering mechanism that comes up with each is whether that office prosecuted the case. The incident that occurred this past year in Burlington where the attorney general's office had dispute with the local state's attorney's office about prosecuting. Am I safe in assuming that if the state's attorney's office is the one that prosecuted the case under this construct notice would not be available to the attorney general whether or not they sought it? It's an interesting question. I guess I would read that as the state's attorney gets it if they prosecuted or the AG gets it if the AG prosecutes it. Yeah, that's the way I'm reading it too. But I just want to, I'm thinking back to this past time. I don't even remember when it was now, but Sarah George made the decision not to prosecute and the attorney general decided to prosecute. And it just seems like there's a definite line of demarcation as to who is entitled to it. I just want to make sure everybody's on the same page with that. Right, might be worth seeing what attorney chair and attorney Pepper have to say on that. I would almost read it as if in one of those rare circumstances where they're both involved, maybe they would both get noticed. But, you know, because at different stages of that proceeding, they both prosecuted potentially. Well, I know how I'm reading it. I don't know how they're reading it, but maybe it's no big deal to them. I just want to make sure we're all on the same page. No, I guess we could ask the question. It's a big deal. David or Pepper? Chair here. Oh, sorry. I'll go. I mean, I read it to the intent to me is pretty clear that it's whoever has the case should be getting noticed. I understand Senator Benning's point. I think it's a reasonable, it's a careful reading and a reasonable point. I think that it's clear enough that the intent is that it's who is prosecuting the case should be getting noticed. That I don't worry about it hugely, but I guess if the department felt like felt differently or agreed with Senator Benning's reading of it, then we might have to do an amendment because I think the common understanding here is that the entity prosecuting the case should be getting noticed. Yeah, I certainly have no problem with that, David, but I think we're also putting a burden on the department of mental health. If the AG's office calls up and says I want notice, to me, this clearly says if it's the local state's attorney's office that has prosecuted, you're not getting that notice and they in turn have a right to say no. Right. I think that it depends on how far the past tense, you know, what the past tense here applies to. I think that my argument would be that once the Attorney General's office, if this were to happen again, which seems unlikely, but if the Attorney General's office were to take out a case like that, you could argue that they now are encompassed by that term prosecuted, by that past tense prosecuted, because they have made a decision to prosecute. But I understand the Senator's point and, you know, be open to clarification if others feel that that would be helpful. Why don't we look at this on Tuesday? We can always do an amendment before third reading. Okay, Eric, is that completed or we haven't gotten to section four yet, have we? No. Section four is right there. No changes to that. Yeah, no, we've lost you. If you could, your video's gone. All right. Let me pull that back up. Is that visible to folks now? Yeah, we're on section four. Yeah. Rule 16.1. Right. No changes to this. This was obviously everybody did get a copy of the sharehold decision. Yes. Yes. No changes to that. Section four. Correct. Yeah. I think everyone's understood pretty well that it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone if this ultimately gets litigated. There are different points of view from the prosecution and defense attorneys that you've heard from about whether or not this may pose constitutional problems, but the court can weigh in on that if and when that argument is presented. Section five is unchanged. Unchanged, correct. And then section six has a minor change, am I correct? Yes. Two changes actually. So this is the forensic care working group, and it sees a long list of stakeholders. Senator Sears, you were wondering about members of the community. I see that on line 17, that's existed. That was not a change, but Vermont Care Partners has a... Yeah, that's the designated agencies. Right. The addition here is on line 19, crime victims representative appointed by the Vermont Center for Crime Victim Services. So that's new to this draft. And then the other new addition is... Where are we here? Here we are. Lines 13 through 15 that you're looking at here. This is the standard language that we use, the per diem for people who aren't state employees. Right. I think that gets you the appropriation. Yeah. I'd like to make sure that there are two victims represented in this. So... Can I ask, is that... Do we do that elsewhere in other committees? In other words, rather than having the victims services representative have actual family members of victims? Yeah. We have done it. Okay. I think... So what were you thinking? Did you want to just change that to two or... Yeah, two. Yeah. Okay. Sounds good. The only reason I ask is because it seems as though we might set a precedent where we would, in terms of any of these kinds of working groups, then have requests from victims' families to be on those working groups using this as an example. This wouldn't necessarily be... The Center for Crime Victim Services is doing the... Is doing the what? Is doing the appointment or... Clorally. I see. So you're saying it wouldn't necessarily be a family member. It could... No. It could be anybody appointed. But I'm just looking at the list of people who are on here. You look at the list and where are the representatives of victims? You've got healthcare systems, you've got the GAs, you've got the healthcare reform, Department of Buildings and General Services, Mount Legal Aid's Mental Health Project, Mental Health Care Ombudsperson. I think it should be Ombudsperson, isn't it? Or is it still Ombudsman, by the way? Yeah. I don't know. That's a good question. Check with Katie. Anyway, yeah. Check with Katie. But I just... I'm looking at the list here, Senator Baruth, and it seems like it's pretty stacked. Yeah. I'm not speaking to... It wouldn't necessarily be a victim member, a victim's family. It could be. But appointed by... Yeah. I understood you to be saying you wanted to have two victims. Well, I know. People representing the Vermont Center for Crime and Consumer Services. Okay. I just pulled up the statute, Senator Sears. It is still Ombudsman. Okay. All right. It's a good point, though. It should be Ombudsperson. Well, I don't think I'll change it. Let's go. It's enough controversy here. Am I clear, Eric and Jack or Morning Fox, feel free to chime in. It's section two that's the $500,000 pass. Correct? Yes. I believe so. Yes. And that's whether we do this language in B on page three or not. Is that correct? I'm just trying to answer the question when it gets to appropriation. Yeah. The appropriation is not connected to section three. It's only connected to the representation. Section two. Yes. Okay. And that creates that cost for mental health, as well as not legal aid. I'll defer to Morning on that, but I think he said that the answer is yes. Okay. So I just want to be able to zero in on that. And maybe when that appropriation gets put into the bill, it should reference that section. Yeah, absolutely. So shall we go ahead and put for purposes of this bill that will change the victim to two victims? And do you also want to add specific appropriation? Well, I think we probably should, to be honest with ourselves, that it would cost $500,000. It's estimated. We don't know. We could wait until get the language for that until Tuesday, if you wanted to. It's certainly up to the committee for it. Either way, it's fine with me. Okay. I think we can take the, we can go back to a gallery, take the, take the bill down and discuss the committee. I don't, I mean, I think there's enough there to send it to appropriation, whether we put that in or not. But I mean, I just want to make clear that we should put the $500,000 into the bill as an appropriation. $250,000 to Vermont Legal Aid and $250,000 to the Department of Mental Health. We can obviously narrow that down or raise it up or whatever in appropriations. Normally appropriations will take the appropriations out of the big bill anyway. Any other questions on this, Terry? Just to verify something. So the two victims or family members or whomever they decide, is that being, those persons are being appointed by or selected by the Vermont Center for Crime Victim Services. And it doesn't mean that it'd be a family member. It's people selected. It could be Chris Fennell and somebody else who represents. I just, it could be a victim. Anything else? What draft number was this, Eric? Oh, you're muted, Eric. Eric, you're muted. Eric is muted. Thanks. This was the first committee strike all amendment. So it was 1.1. Well, it's still 1.1. Yeah, because remember, they weren't committee amendments before. Oh, right. Right. Okay. So is there a motion to amend S3 as seen in draft 1.1 that was just went over. I make a motion that we amend 1.1 as amended. Thank you. Senator Nick has moved that we report that we amend S3 as seen in draft 1.1 with two changes that are not in the current draft, but will be shortly. One being adding two members appointed by the Center for Crime Victim Services, the other the $500,000. Is there any further discussion? Anybody in the audience or anybody else on the committee? If not, Peggy, could you please call the roll? Benning. Yes. Senator Necta. Yes. Senator White is not here. Senator Baruth. Yes. Senator Sears. Yes. I'll report the bill. And let Senator White wants to see what she can. I don't know if she can. Not able to vote today. All right. Thank you.


Hello, let me ask you these questions.   Where did you get these notions or ideas? Does your identity change? Or it doesn't change at all? Today, we will learn about how communication influences identity and vice versa. That is, we will explore perspectives on the dynamics between communication and identity, where identity is viewed as a social process rather than an outcome that we communicate to others. From this standpoint, our personal identity, or our notion of self, arises in communication with others. As philosopher George Herbert Mead once said, an individual as well as collective identity is constructed rather than innate. But first, let us examine what identity means. For Paulingite, identity is the everyday word for people's sense of who they are. As such, identity can be formed through interactions with others. It is not stable and unitary, but rather is shifting and multiple. Hence, we have to remember that our self-concept and others' conception of us are not necessarily one and the same. A person's identity is shaped by his or her relationships with others, it is fluid rather than fixed, and it is political as well as personal. Our identity is always dynamic rather than static, and it is multiple rather than singular. Our self-identity is influenced to a large extent by how others see us and we form our self-identity in the process of interacting with other people, interactions that are very much rooted on communication. Michael Hecht and Yu Lu developed the Communication Theory of Identity. This theory looks into identity as a social process and is constructed in and through communication. That is, identity is constructed in the process of interacting and communicating with others, and identity is constructed in and through language, and communication defines our identity both directly and indirectly. For the direct construction of identity through communication, we employ linguistic codes such as naming and kinship terminologies to describe and assign macro and micro characteristics to ourselves, others, and groups of people. That also serves as our orienting grid under different contexts. For example, if you are from Iloilo, you are called an Ilongo, a kinship terminology brought about by the place where you came from, a micro characteristic. On a more macro level, Ilongos can also be called Filipinos because they are residing in a province of the Philippines. In direct construction of identity through communication on the other hand, we look into how communication defines us when we internalize judgments of ourselves, others, and social groups based on our way of expressing ourselves. For example, if you feel happy on a given day, perhaps you would like to wear something bright or colorful, or if it is raining, maybe you would like to go along with a mood brought about by the rain and wear something somber. Identity can be seen as a performance. Irving Goffman's concept of self as performance as articulated in his book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, published in 1959, that is, interactions with other individuals are considered as performing or acting out a role and a version of themselves and are engaged in a process of impression management. For example, as you go to school, you perform the role of a student. Maybe you have to dress the part as you carry your books, bring your bags, or even wear your school ID. But as you go home on the other hand, you become a son or a daughter where you might need to do some household chores as requested by your parents. Or you might need to go out with your friends. In this case, you need to exhibit a different set of characteristics, something jolly perhaps. Take note, the concept of performance of identity or self applies not only to situations where you are literally on stage performing a role or presenting something to an audience, but to all communication situations. Again, let us examine the four frames of the Communication Fury of Identity. Personal. This concerns our self-cognitions, including self-image and self-concept or a sense of being. All personal dispositional characteristics that help us to make sense of who we are belong to this frame. Enacted covers the performance and outward expressions of identity. It is how we formulate messages to express our identity. Communication is identity and not just cost or influenced by it. You can look into how you react on situations such as when you are happy, do you smile? Or do you maintain a simple smirk? It is what people see or perceive from you. Relational. It explains identity as something that is embedded in our relationships with others. Remember these lines.  Or birds of the same feather flock together. Finally, communal. These refer to the identity created by your association with a particular community, primarily brought about by the similarity of characteristics. These are held in common by groups rather than individuals. A shared vision of personhood or a collective identity. Talking about collective identities, Michael Hecht and Hieh Jiyeong Choi define collective identity as an identity that is based on social categorization and shared group memberships. Societal norms and practices are internalized in the form of social identities based on social categories, especially in-group and out-group distinctions. And these collective identities include racial and ethnic identity, national identity, religious identity, and organizational identity. However, it is worth to note that there is no clear delineation of identities since categories of identities can overlap. A related concept here is the concept of intersectionality, which for Gus A. Yepp refers to how race, class, gender, sexuality, the body, and nation among other vectors of difference come together simultaneously to produce social identities and experiences in the social world from privilege to oppression. Indeed, the production of collective identities such as racial and ethnic identity, national identity, and religious identity is shaped by power dynamics in society. One aspect of this is evident in stereotyping, prejudice, discrimination to include ethnocentrism, racism, and sexism against particular social and cultural groups and communities. Thus, it is important that we acknowledge the multiplicity of identities. From there, we are prevented from drawing hasty generalizations about people or stereotypes that may fuel discrimination, microaggressions, and intergroup conflict. To end, let us remember from John E. Joseph that identity is an intersubjective construction emerging from overlapping and complementary relationships characterized by, but not exclusive to, similarity and difference, genuineness and artifice, and authority and delegitimacy. This perspective in turn should enable us to give space for others to negotiate their identities as we negotiate ours.


Hi, we're here at ITU Telecom World in Bangkok. Great pleasure today to have with me Safya Bower, who is a senior partner at McKinsey & Co in Johannesburg. Saf, welcome here. Really interested on your views about the theme of this event. We're talking about how we're embracing the digital economies, et cetera, and the digital world. What do you see as the greatest benefits, particularly in the markets you're working in? Tony, thanks for that question. You know, the biggest benefit of the internet, as we've seen everywhere in the world, is really for the consumer. What we've seen is that it brings untold services, untold value to the consumer from time immemorial. And in Africa, where I've been working and been investigating, we think that the opportunity for the consumer with the internet is enormous. We just recently, today released a report that we've been researching for the last six months, which really tries to understand what the benefits to the African economies will be over the next 10 years when the internet really happens. And we actually believe that it's going to be around about $300 billion of value that will be added to the African economy, roughly the same size of the Nigerian economy today. A lot of it is going to be for services for consumers, like e-commerce and financial services, but some of it is going to be because governments and companies are going to have to invest to support that demand. So it is going to be transformational in Africa. With the benefits, of course, come the challenges and potentially problems. Do you see any as you move towards this new era? There are, with every new technology comes challenges. And we as societies need to figure out how we deal with this and the decisions that we want to make in terms of getting the benefits and also managing the challenges. I think the biggest challenge that we will all have to deal with is around security and around how companies use your information and also around whether or not the digitalization provides benefits to one consumer versus another and accelerates or exacerbates the problem of what we call now the digital divide. Those are the two big challenges. Security of your information, giving it to other people so that you can get the benefits, as well as the internet making the haves and have not space wider. What part does McKinsey play in this rollout in Africa? You know, McKinsey has been, is a consulting firm that helps governments and private sector deal with big business and operational issues. And one of the things that we also do is we investigate and try to bring insights into business and into the public sphere. And what we are really doing is trying to highlight the opportunity so that both governments and private sector can take it on and really have the, to build the courage to invest, to make bets, to get this opportunity. So our real contribution is shining the light. And that's what we've tried to do with this report that I mentioned that we just released called Lions Code Digital. Because we believe that the digital age is coming to Africa, the opportunity for monetizing that is huge, but there are obviously some risks and some imperatives for both governments and private sector to enable it. And you come to an event like this, what benefit do you get out of it? Is it a value and where do you see the most value? You know, events like this are very important in the discourse of what, of some of the most thorny questions that surround this issue. I'll give you one very good example, spectrum. There's a very important decision to be made around how spectrum is going to be released to enable private sector and public sector to use it for the benefit of the internet. And it's in events like this, in the small corners, in the plenaries, in the discussions, that the questions, these thorny questions are debated, elaborated, and people's minds change sometimes slowly so that we can actually reach some sort of discourse, some sort of decision around what we're going to do with some of these decisions to be frank, which there's no easy answer to. Yes. Safi Oboa, thank you so much for being with me today. And we wish you well and devils to get the digital economy rolling through Africa. Tony, thank you for having us. Thank you. Cheers.