from the Corinium Chief Analytics Officer Conference, Spring, San Francisco. It's theCUBE. Welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in downtown San Francisco at the Corinium Chief Analytics Officer event in Spring 2018. Really a ton of practitioners for such a very small event. Super, super intimate, super, super customer stories and practitioners. So we're really excited to have our next guest. She's Cardita Parikh. She's the head of Enterprise Business Analytics for Silicon Valley Bank. Welcome. Thank you. Good to be here. What do you think of this show? It's kind of an interesting little event. I personally do think that they do an amazing job of organizing this particular event and out of all the events throughout the year, I try to choose and come to this event. Right, very good.  For the folks that didn't attend the panel, what were some of the interesting things that came out of it, some surprises? I think one of the main surprise that I had as one of the panel members is the audience. And the audience actually did say that not 99% of the people have issues working with other virtual teams within the bank or within their own organization. And many people have tried to figure out how to work together. And that was very pleasant surprise to me. And they're working better together from what you said before we turned on the cameras? Absolutely, it's higher productivity when you try to work things out together. What's going to happen to shadow IT if the IT department suddenly easier to work with? Well, I don't think it is either the department or a person that is difficult to work with. It's I think more of a clash of cultures between the two groups. And IT does need for their own right reasons to have a process in place and go by the rules so that they can keep the company safe from compliance and regulation perspective. Whereas analytics by nature needs to be creative and has to focus on time to market. And they have to be agile and work really fast enough. And so they can't have the bandwidths to follow the process. So it's more of a clash of two cultures. And I think we need to open up the boundaries and think about virtual efforts to be able to get something done. Now it's interesting, because we always talk about people process in tech and we go to tech, they're called tech conferences. They're not called process tech conferences. And so there's a lot of focus on the technology and the new shiny object and whether it's a dupe or big data or Spark or all this fun stuff. But as you just said, really the harder part is the people and the process. And as you just said, culture really is derived from the processes and the responsibilities that you have under your jurisdiction, I guess. Absolutely. And I personally, I don't know, I personally feel technology is not an end by itself. It's a means to an end. And so the success of a company is how you embrace, how people embrace technology leads to results. It's neither technology nor people on their own. It's how they embrace technology is what leads to success. So I wonder if you can share some insight from your experience at Silicon Valley Bank.  Banks are interesting to me because banks have been data-driven forever, right? There isn't really any money in a room somewhere. It's numbers on a page and numbers on a database. And all your products are pretty digital. So when you start to bring more advanced analytics and you try to change your culture a little bit and run through the overused digital transformation, what are some of the things you're looking at? How are they transformational? And what's kind of the acceptance in the broader team, as you said, when there can be some culture clash and you have regulation and you're a regulated industry and there's real issues and barriers that you have to overcome. So barriers are always there in any organization, in any industry. Particularly when you're introducing a totally new way of making decisions. And when the company is very successful based on making intuition-based decisions, it's hard for you to sell the idea that I can give you information and that'll expedite your decision-making process. So I think when I joined the bank, I didn't realize but 99% of my job was to be the change agent. Not an easy job. And a storyteller. Because unless you tell the story and sell the idea, you are not able to bring the change. So yes, there are barriers and there are always going to be barriers but I personally like challenges so I embrace the challenges and try to overcome. So what I ended up doing is I started thinking about where can I have IT add value and where are the opportunities where I can value them? So instead of me going to the business and talking to them about what we can do together, I brought that team member along with me. So that visibility and transparency made them feel valued and they were more than willing to partner with me and so that changed the landscape to work with IT. But on the other hand, from the business side, I personally think that unless you have one or two examples and one of my first example was a business process and it used to take a number of hours and I reduced it by 10, leave it only 10% of that time. And they said, oh wow, that does make sense. What can we do more? Can we partner on this? So initially first quarter, I had 20 questions and requests and the second first whole year, we had only 20 questions and requests and the following quarter, we had 200 of them. Wow. So when you're looking for an opportunity to apply your skills, your knowledge to bring some change to the organization, how much of it is you kind of searching for inefficiency, say an internal business process versus maybe a business stakeholder saying, wow, you know, if we could only do X or I have this problem, can you help me find the root cause? So it probably makes a unique institution because it's got a couple of segments that it really focuses on. Obviously in tech, a little known wine business, I think you guys do a lot of investing there because tech guys like that with wineries. So you've got some really small specialty segments. So how did you find some of those early opportunities? You see, when you do something and it's successful, it's a two-edged sword. Things keep coming and the demand grows exponentially fast. It's an exponential growth rate. So what we had to do was really focus on what matters the most. And that came only from two-way communication with the business as well as with the executive team. So if the executive team, we realize that this is the revenue-generating opportunities, here is where we can make a difference, we focus on it and show them the value. Or if it is a process that really needed some attention and we could benefit from cost-effectiveness. So there was a kind of an ROI framework where we focus on it. But to be very honest, we didn't have to look far to look for opportunities just because revenue is the main focus for business as well as executives. So it was a two-way communication that helped us really identify, but I didn't have to hunt for opportunities because that's where your experience come into play. Right, right. So I'm just curious on the revenue side just again, the question always comes up, how do I get started? How do I get started? How do I get early wins to build momentum in my company? So was it customer retention? Was it cross-selling? I mean, what were some of the things that you saw that were revenue tied, that everybody likes being tied to revenue, where you thought you could have some success? So I mean, my idea of really making a difference is very simple. What does the business focus on? How does a bank operate? They have to get new clients and increase the size of the cake or the size of the clientile that they have. So acquisition is one area. The second is, once you have them, how can you have them deepen their relationship with you so that the switching cost to another bank is higher? Right. And the third is, once they're with you, you also want to retain them in many different ways by increasing client satisfaction. And then of course, cost effectiveness, how do you plan your staffing needs and capacity? So I started, in each of those areas, at least taking up one or two business questions and showing them the value. And now it's covering all those spectrum of analysis. That's great. So now you've got more inbound opportunities for a place to apply your analytics and you probably have people to apply them. That's a good problem to have. That's a good problem to have. Well, I just love to get your take too on kind of the higher level view of kind of the democratization of the data, of the data itself, of the tools to operate the data. And then of course, hopefully, if you've democratized the access and the tools, hopefully when somebody finds something, they actually have the power to implement it. So how have you seen that environment change? Not specifically at Silicon Valley Bank, but generically over the last couple of years within your career. Well, I personally think that in my career, in different organizations, democratization is a necessity, is no longer a topic of discussion. It is something you have to do because analytics in general is an enabler community and you can't have as many enablers as you have the people who are users. So how do you really create, you know, analytics center of excellence by giving them the ropes and tools to fish for themselves or to find their own insights and create their own stories? So what I did and has worked really well is create a virtual team of analytics center of excellence where it's not only my team members, but it's some other pockets of analytics teams. But at the same time, the users themselves. And they become the advocates of what you do. And as far as tools are concerned, you know, we used to have an era where you have IT control tools to be able to democratize and give the insights. And now it is user driven tools. So we did move from one end of the spectrum to the other end of the spectrum so that it becomes easy for the user to actually grasp the insights. Right, right. And still maintain control and governance. Oh yeah, information security control is a big one and we can maintain that.  It's based off of information foundation which is solid and scalable. Okay, so give me the last word. You've said the word story at least four times. Maybe more since we've said that. I want to check the transcript. I wonder if you can expand a little bit on how valuable story telling is in this whole process. I think it gets left off a lot, right? People want to focus on the math and focus on the technology and focus on the whizz bang and the flashing lights in the data center. But you keep saying story. Why do you keep saying story? Why is story so important? You have multiple stakeholders. First thing is the executive team. They do not have the time. I mean they are focusing on so many different aspects that they don't have the time enough for anybody to go through the whole textbook or whole chapter. So if you can tell them story in 30 seconds in an elevator or three minutes on a hallway and then request for 30 minutes you're bound to get some time with them. And in that short time, would you rather show them the value that you can bring to the table or would you show them how the sausage is being made? And so that's where one type of story telling is important to sell the idea. The second is the working team who we are working with. And I have seen that unless you tell your story and sell the story, you can't get their buy-in and that virtual team effort that I was talking about fails miserably. So that's another area where you need to tell the story. And the third is once you have an analytic product then how do you get the adopters? So to tell the adopter what isn't there for them is a story telling too. Small detail, actually getting people to use it for their benefit. All right, well I think it's so important because as you mentioned a number of times it's about people and people working together, teams working together in this collaborative effort to make it happen and somebody else that the team's for. The interesting that they have seen is now that I come to these conferences there are five people at least in different five companies, they said they've hired a journalist on their team because they realize the storytelling is so important. Really? Yeah, so the hybrid function analytics we say requires data engineers, data scientists, statisticians, communicators, story viewers and tellers which is a journalist and then a change agent and project manager. That's why they bring the cube. You're trying to tell the story. So thank you for sharing your story. Thank you so much. I really appreciate the time. All right. Thank you. You're watching theCUBE from the Crinium Sheet Analytics Officer Summit in San Francisco. Thanks for watching.


Hello again guys, welcome back to the channel and we're just going over this airplane that's been fitted up now. I'm going to show you what I've done as I took out the plastic servos and put these nice metal gear servos in. I don't know if you can see that too well in there. The metal one I'll show you the ones I'm using. They're not that expensive but it seems to be a lot of people are happy with them, so I'm sure I'll be okay with them if they do start showing a problem or anything and I'll just swap them out with something. A little bit better it doesn't always mean you know more expensive is better but sometimes it can sort of come down to that. I've decided I'm going to use this in the airplane just for now just to get it going in the manual fashion. This is my TBS diversity receiver and I'm just going to do a quick update for that because I can see already that there's an update. Quite as I've got the firmware 6.10 and there is a new firmware out there which is this one 617 and there's the release note. I'm not going to bother reading it because it's the same as for the other one. I could have done over the air using the radio but it's just easy enough for me to go from here. It just goes to show how simple the process is really for updating these things. Even if you're using it over the air it's exactly the same thing really apart from when you're plugging the radio and you're plugging your receiver. It will then start doing the bait for you once it just asks you. It tells you there's an update and then asks you to do the update. So leave that going and while that's doing that I'll just drink my coffee. It shouldn't take too long at all. As you can see there that's done. Quick as you like.  But I'll unplug this. So now this is ready to be used. This has got an 8 channel and receiver on it for the PWM. Let's see we go from channel 1 all the way through to channel 8. I'm just going to chuck this in the Velcro and just put the antennas in any old how. I'm not going to be flying very far away from me. This is on 868 megahertz so I'm not going to get interfered with by the standard 2.4 gigahertz Wi-Fi and the 5.8 gigahertz sorry and the 5G which isn't 5G as such 5 gigahertz it's more like 5th generation. And yes so we're just going to find a way somewhere where we can just shove this in the airplane. We should really look down it like this. Basically it's you know I'm just going to try and put it in here somehow because I just need to be able to connect these wires in. Now there's a double one here from my ailerons which means that they can go from 1,500 up to 2,500 or down to let's say 500. Yeah 1,000 aside and so that's probably all I'm going to use for the ailerons because as one goes one way of course the other one goes the other way. Of course this one's got the choke on it so that's for the that's for the power for the signal feed and it gives the power out 5 volts from the back on the ESC to allow me to power this and then we've just got the tail and rudder which are these two here. I can't remember which ones which will be easy enough we'll just put them on them. We'll give the thing a twiddle and we'll see what's what's doing there. So let me just chuck that in there like that for now but actually I want that out because I gotta just try and see about the size of this battery. As I've been generally using 4s in my in the aircraft anyway whether it be you know the Hunter or the Bixler I'm gonna stick with me 4s and I'm gonna try and see if we can get this balanced in. It's a big old battery but hopefully you should be at the centre of gravity with it. Not too much messing about. I may have to undo this from the sides and take it out just so I can put another strap a bit further down here I think just because I'm not sure exactly where this is gonna go in the nose and how far on we have to pull it back but I still want it to be pretty secure on there. Now this is the only one that I can find that it's got a rubber inside so this is the one that I'll use for the main central battery and I'll probably take this. I'll just leave that like that for now that bit of velcro I'm not gonna put it on my batteries particularly if I don't have to I prefer to get some sort of sticky rubber on here or just something I can put on there which has a rubber type texture when it's dried I don't have to find something. Okay the wings again you know I did make a video doing it but I used my other camera and unfortunately the other camera doesn't have the super wide. This one has a super wide which enables me to be able to have this this close and have the whole thing in the frame where the other one that I spent most of the time with it out the frame just because I I wasn't keep checking it this one I can pretty much do without doing that so we've got the control rods there the horns are in this same metal gear the ESC. Now why is a little bit shorter but it doesn't matter it just means the one is gonna be pulled out a bit and then it will just be kept in there. Remember this isn't sort of finished because when I've finished with this I want to put some black tape down here because that will show me the underside when I'm flying line of sight as opposed to the clear white on the top side. I've not even thought about FPV gear yet but it's probably just gonna be a backpack type of thing sat on here to start off with not gonna be doing long range to start off with just want to get a little bit of a play around with it so that's the same on both wings and yeah the on the back here there is just pull up round there's two different sizes so this is a longer control rod there and that's a shorter one so and I had to cut them both down in order for this to sort of fit because the actual rods were sticking on the end of the horn here and I couldn't move it properly and of course that's no good doing like that I did the same on this cut off a chunk now I'd normally put a bit of heat shrink over the top of here and but just while I'm just prattin' around with it just to make sure it's all set up right and these servos are set up right as mechanically as I can I'll just leave it like that this has moved a bit I mean I'm supposed to be a bit more like that. Neutral elevator but so that's that's where we've got to and I've put this around this because this one side kept popping out with it's little nipply bit there kept popping out and so I've put this on to sort of train it to just stay in a bit tighter and down on this front one just left it overnight and we'll just see what happens with that so this is the thing now where where where where do I put the receiver up here is where it feels like it should go just because of the way these cables are this length and that's just enough there to get out into the wing that's just enough there to get out to the wing with a little bit of wiggle room because we don't want it to be too torn otherwise we're going to be pulling on the wires too much and now end up damaging that causes problems a little longer one of this is going to be oh that is the throttle along one of these is going to be the and it's only going to be an inch in it so that there is going to be for the rudder so number four is for the rudder and number three is for the elevator which is all good enough and all we go doing now is like I say put this put a receiver get the receiver in but annoying this one just because it's got these well it's not annoying it's a great receiver don't get me wrong but I don't want to start drilling any holes or doing it would be nice if I could just fit that in in here I don't know whether is a whether there be a problem with these two anas being two antennas being so close to each other I'm wondering actually whether I can actually turn one of these off in the software I'm not sure if I can or not I'm not sure if I'd have to dummy load it at the end but I've seen other people who just you know let these things just get tied in together but I'm not sure really that's a good idea having two antennas because you can remember the telemetry comes back on this as well well the telemetry is transmitted from this and of course my radio transmitter is being received on here so I don't know if much in these two together is going to cause too many problems but they are quite close anyway but it's not as low they're designed to be particularly far apart from each other so maybe that might not matter so much just for close up and just for getting this getting this thing going so what I could do we're doing now he's just checking on here what's what because I always thought I mean we're gonna just set it up the way it suggests which I'm gonna think in that channel five we can just put right so this is channel two so we put on channel two for the other ones we got our channel three there like I say that's forgotten already that's for the elevator and channel four's for the rudder and I don't have anything in the software I've not even set that up yet software is going to be like that so we should get the channel three like this no it's like channel four sorry channel four like this channel three signal to the top where it says the channel thing then we're gonna want this one I'm gonna I'm gonna just go with channel one then and we're gonna put channel two for the ailerons in here like oops like so and then we should just be able to chuck that on there plug the battery in once we got the wings on I suppose and see where we're going from that because I don't know you know if these sticking out here they're both just say five is the right side but we'll figure that out soon enough I'm sure well this is our channel five so hold on a second channel five channel five is a double one and channel two is a double one ah flaps so we've got provision there for flaps so let's say channel two that channel five is gonna be for flaps possibly as provision for flaps what else is going on inside here then so you got channel two and we got a channel two I wonder if they've done that I mean if they've put a provision in for flaps or just something else on PWM I'm not sure but let's took channel five in from there let's chuck channel five in from there leave channel two out on both yeah channel two out on both see we can just pull that back out a little bit of a wiggle ring back in here the way they've put them in is so they sort of lock into place by going through I don't know if you can see that too I mean moving to the light a bit so they go into this sort of area in here where's me pokey pokey thing this will do so let's get that up close so as you can see I hope they saw like they can go through this slot here then they're trapped in the little gap which is great for some relief so you don't just pull on the so you just don't pull on the connectors so you're actually just pulling on the you know the cable I think the only reason I've opted for channel five on this and it doesn't really matter is because they were just the easier to get to so I'll tell you what I'm going to do then is I'm just going to put channel five and channel two's place rather than play around with that just for the minute yes we can put channel two back out the way again get the other channels in there they have a channel five sorry I'll just push that out that side just because these cables are already long enough so it won't make any difference the ESC in here is a 30 amp ball of tanks for whatever this name is I can I can't pronounce it for some reason right so we'll just leave that as channel five and then we'll stick channel five because it's already here I've got access to it in the channel two space it's not gonna know it's not gonna care it's just the way it's been labeled up it just wants the connection to go there all right so what we have to do as well is we have to calibrate the ESC it's simple enough you're gonna just get them to stay there like that can't really can't really use it like that I think the other parts are upstairs in the other box this I never actually found out what this was for but it's not on the destructions anywhere yeah I mean it could have been just someone there was trying to keep shape or something but but it certainly doesn't have it there or on any of these destructions and in the box the bits as you can see there it's not in any of that either so number 14 must this motor shaft with cap only for Ranger 1600 oh no that's it that's it yeah we know what these are these are the bits that go on me in the end of the motors all right yeah so so that's just a null we don't need to worry about that right so it's just that battery now and if I get my radio set up because it's not set up at the moment radio set up what you've got to do with these when you do the connecting up the ESC and calibrating it just let me just get my a TBS part I've not actually set a model up either so we're gonna have to quickly set a model up let's just find a space they can put this thing I'll do 22 create a model yeah we're gonna go for the airplane for that one there's does your model got an engine yes it does so that's gonna go and channel one into oh we got to go to the next page right so we're gonna assign the channel here so we're gonna say channel two for the ailerons go to the next page how's he got flaps well it doesn't have any flaps at the moment but it's gonna have some flaps but we'll just say no for that I'm just gonna go to the next page does it have air brakes no does it have an elevon one channel and a rudder one channel so we're gonna go yes well we can actually just shift across to there and then we've got our rudder on channel four and our elevator on channel three okay a long enter to confirm there we go model 22 I haven't given a name in actual fact I should do tonight let's just do a model name and we can call it what is it's a ranger 1600 I might skip up for this quick give that capital just by holding it down you can give it a capital something on my head and we can have a space and we're just gonna go 1600 I think I can go backwards for that I can't gonna go past all three alphabet all the way through the alphabet five six probably should have just put this one down as I've just been with the receiver so if I can get another space there I'm gonna go RX just as a receiver only I'm gonna do capital R alright never mind sir just for receiver alright just so I know I've got it now we need to go to the bottom of the page here and we're gonna be setting up for D16 we don't want that so we're gonna turn that off and switch that off I'm gonna put the external module on and we're gonna go for crossfire that is pretty much it that should get us in the ballpark for getting going now nothing is set up none of the switches are set up none of the pots are set up anywhere it's all just gonna be these controls only and then if I go here and we can look at channel three it's got it on there for the pitch channel two I don't know why channel six is moving the way it is but never mind and then channel one for throttle and channel four for the rudder for the yaw all right so that's ready to go probably do with some battery charging that so I'm gonna put this on first because we don't have anything else on it doesn't really matter and I'm just gonna plug the battery in and we're gonna just calibrate that in your seat so we're sort of halfway set up correct we shouldn't blow up we didn't get any noise out of it which I don't really like that idea of no noise at the ESC because that would suggest to me that something is not doing when it's supposed to nothing smells burnt in there so that's a good thing let's just double check we've got our wires on they're in the correct place now look at that but I think I think I can that is in the right place no let's just take out everything else sometimes process of an elimination can be your best bet or I should maybe even check that my so let's just bind it up and just make sure we are bound to the receiver because it's not gonna work if we're not let's have a little look we've got no telemetry back so I'm gonna suggest that we're not actually bound to the receiver and I'm gonna go in there for the page and go down the bottom there's no bind here as you can see so let's just look on the back and do it from the back here we've got no connection that should be green if there was a connection so let's go in here into the transmitter we're gonna click on the bind then we can see all that oh I'm sorry about the refresh rate that's a now that's a bugger isn't it I don't know what we're on 30 frames but it's not a not the same as that so we're gonna do the point okay all right so that's happy and we're going straight into the oh I think I can just pull it down let's just plug in the battery again and we're just gonna make sure that our rudder and our elevator is doing the correct thing so what we want then all right so what we want then is our pitch and that's none of that's doing anything okay so there's our rudder that's nice that's where it's supposed to be yeah and it's doing it well once you're left yeah that's doing it all is going right that's doing that but we don't have any we don't have any elevator which is not very good so let's just see what's going on there could be that the mapping's not correct it's not gonna be that easy for me to show you the mapping just because you do it from the back here and of course this thing he's not picking up I want it so what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna go into the RX here and I'm just gonna go into just general and just see what we've got going on a 12 channel right yeah let's just put on to 8 channel mode and we're gonna just make sure that the failsafe is just to cut it RC by mavelink is off RX battery sensor is off I wonder if we can just put that on flam is off flam track is off and you can then go in and just look at the output map let's look at that one first all right so we've got channel three there says espus so we're gonna put that back to channel three okay and maybe that might have fixed our issue so a quick look at the channel map that's all on correct let's just go that way yeah that's all on correct so maybe that's the issue that we had that on espus for some reason I don't know what I've been using doing it with the espus but let's just put this back on on this 90 degree just give it a little a little a little wiggle a little test oh yeah it's just good enough like that so there we go because we're on the espus now we've got our elevator all right so that's all good so we can screw that back in that's in the central position that's good enough for me all right so let's screw that back together again and again for these you know they start seeming like they're not going to be just locking in because you don't want to over time it get it a nip and that's it a nip and that's it but I think on this sort of fuselage you're gonna want to be chesting these and just checking them so again just a nip that's it and that's it and that'll be lovely I'm probably not going to need the full throws on this and I'll need to reduce the amount of throw just because like I say it's probably won't be needed that much now with that light that then let me just see if I can shove that out the way somehow I need to get that battery to go in there and stay in there in one place this is only when it comes to flying it low we're not flying it at the moment so it doesn't really matter now we're going to get the wings and just check that they're doing what they're supposed to be doing I feel the pain probably want this side actually let's put it on there nice and flat just to try and avoid that from happening again now the easiest way for me to do this rather than put the wing in it's just to check so we got channel five we plugged in channel five didn't we so that's the one we're going to be testing now I don't know we've we need it on this side on this or not let's just make sure they're signal to signal so the orange and the black to the black let's just put that in there and just so everyone the right-hand side we flick it to the right-hand side we want to see this go up oh he goes down so now we know the wrong way round get that out there and then we can just swap those over because that's a channel five there let's just pull this one through to this side gotcha and then put this one through to this side gotcha so now we know that they are ready to go on there and it's nice to know that the provision in there then is for flaps but we don't have any flaps cut out but that doesn't mean so we can't cut them out and we can't cut out another hole to put a servo it just means the way it is at the moment we don't have any flaps right let's put this together oh I'm so excited I'm so excited I am really excited you got no idea it's for me this is a this great so let's just put that in place a little bit there make sure that wire is going to be coming through where you want it to nice thing about the nice plastic fluge use a large is yeah doing this you can put it down it's a nice healthy click that's what we want nice healthy click and we know that's in place see of course it's not gonna work any other way around so it just won't work and you can't actually put these in the wrong way around either because they've got little bits on them that don't let you do it so that's the way it's gonna be that's how I'm gonna set it up when it goes out into the field is literally gonna just be clicking that together like that and we're gonna be good to go so let's get the other one radio down there for a minute should have probably turned it off but it doesn't really matter and I would like now to have just something just stop the cardboard from just chomping into that at all just make sure that's gonna come through the gap there I hope the music in the background doesn't get me a copyright strike not sure they're made to hear it anyway I love to put a little bit of music in the background myself that hasn't got copyright on it creating something I'm forgetting our metal bar which we don't want to forget that let's just you can see through there one of them has got a darker darker area there for putting the metal bar so it goes into the housing that one doesn't have anything there I'm not even put two in that's for the bigger I'm actually seem to get this one in there we go that makes it good and rigid it's a good feel on that so go metal bar to there and into there just make sure that cables not in the way and then we're gonna get a nice firm there you go nice firm click right down for a second got there receiving everything just hanging out so now we can pop this on here there we go nice and firmly clicked in so no that's not gonna fall out and that fits in quite nicely quite snug just fits into there alright let's flip it round there we go there we go if I had something I could just sit that one on the nose like that now we should be able to do our high five so if I stand behind it so the high five works like this so if I move my stick to the right if I move my stick to the right we want to turn to the right but I think I've managed to get that the wrong way around if they don't manage to get it the wrong way around my high five it's apparently I put it in the wrong way around because I want to turn to the right and me dropping that down is going to create more drag which will turn me to the left which will now that should turn me to the right if in doubt check it out so right let's do a quick little quick little thing for our high five we're gonna go into our menu and we're gonna go through the pages here and we are gonna on our railerons we're gonna come down here I think we get away with doing this we're gonna edit this we're gonna get on here and we're gonna drop the weight to minus 100 yeah and we're gonna get the other way I think this is the right way doing it yeah and by the way now we got a high five the way it's supposed to be yep nice and simple probably do the little bit of I can see that my rudder isn't quite centered the way it should be so I'll adjust that mechanically here and I don't know if you can see that you can see it's just slightly off yeah and it should be there you go so that's slightly off so we'll adjust it mechanically here and just push it forward by extending the rod and it should be good to go so let's just do that I don't know if you can be able to see that for me I'm gonna do my best that you can pop that out we want to extend it so you're just gonna back this off down the rod a bit and then take a peek at it like this down there for you guys you see that's probably about about on I can always no that's about on so I'm just gonna clip that together now and like I say normally I'd put a bit of heat shrink and just let it go over I don't need to heat it up and shrink it on to it just need to put it over a little bit so it's it's done a couple of little marks a little on there now but I'll just warm that up a bit and see if we can get that to come out it probably come out anyway in the hot day on a nice hot day so that's it it's set up just got to do the propeller now and balance that up and see where we go from there but I need to get some breakfast because my belly has been rumbling for a little while so I need to eat something so I'll get back to you very very shortly


Yeah, this paper here is joint work with Niels Johanesen and Daniel Weisshaar and it is called Homes Incorporated Offshore Ownership of Real Estate in the UK. So we are looking at a specific example of a potentially illicit financial flow here. And the title speaks, so I really want you to think about homes, meaning residentially used properties, flats and houses, incorporated meaning held through companies. We have a lot of anecdotal evidence. Journalists have been doing their job about real estate markets and foreign investors in them in large cities. And there is a lot of concern here that there are illicit funds in these type of investments. Money laundering, capital flight, including from less wealthy economies, offshore tax evasion. But also, and this is where an illicit flow might link both the center and the receiving country broader effects on real estate markets. For example, these kind of flows might exacerbate price bubbles in OECD capitals. And then, of course, there's the problem that the international investor might not have the same motives as the host city when it comes to providing accommodation, for example. So there are a lot of concerns why international real estate investments, especially when they come through tax havens, could be problematic, but there's very little quantitative evidence about that. Now, Britain is an interesting case study to look at international real estate investment, A, because London has been such a popular safe haven for international capital flows. And, you know, there's a lot of news out there saying that London real estate is a very popular investment destination. But also, they have pretty good data on real estate. Here you see a graph that you might see in the BBC or in the Guardian of the top 10 investing countries in British real estate, when we just count and percent the number of real estate titles or the registration numbers in Britain, right? And you see immediately something a bit suspicious. I'm not waiting at all here, right? So Norway, Germany, France will be on this list at some point. But the top investing countries, British Virgin Islands, Jersey, Guernsey, Isle of Man, Luxembourg, you get the idea, right? These are all tax havens. And the point of this paper is to help you understand this graph better. We want to explain what this market actually looks like in market sizes, including prices. We want to understand who's actually behind this, why are they doing it, and what is the impact on the host city. Skip a few things in the interest of time. And in order to do that, we have started a big data effort that I want to walk you through, because it might be interesting also for other people working on illicit flows to see how you can get at these questions. The starting point is a large data set of 25 million residential real estate transactions in Britain, right? So since 1995, Britain has recorded every residential real estate transaction. And this might give you something like an address, 35 miles drive sold for 250,000 in 2017. More 34 to 37 nursery road here, you already start to see that a land title can be more than one address. And Birmingham sold for close to a million in 2019. Now that's a very nice data set, but it doesn't tell us anything about ownership. The next thing we grab is something called the Domestic Companies Register, which might include a registration of an owner if you're lucky you find the same address. And here we see that this address, or 35 miles drive, is of course included from 2029 to 39. Here we find out that this was registered with Obscura One GR Limited, incorporated in the United Kingdom also in 2017. That's the domestic investment, a British firm. They have the same data set for foreign investment. The overseas companies register. And here we might find our address again, the nursery road one in Birmingham, where we find out that this is actually registered with ASBJ International Limited in the British Virgin Islands. This foreign company data set includes tax-saving investment and non-haven investment, but non-haven investment is almost negligible, as you will see, right? Now that's what we call homes incorporated, where we have the prices and we have the owners. The problem here is, of course, Obscura One GR Limited might not be British owned, right? It's well possible that this company is simply set up to buy this real estate and is actually owned from abroad. So here we employ the Orbis database, the largest database available to look through international ownership structures and we update this information. And again, we find Obscura One GR Limited and we find out that its ultimate owner is actually in the British Virgin Islands. That's the indirect ownership, all right? Okay, so that's our data set. And I want to show you what this market looks like in a few graphs. There are more in the paper, but I can't go through all of them. The first thing to note is that now that we have prices and owners, we can use regional price indices of these purchases to just at any point in time tell you what is the offshore market in Britain? What is held from which country? And that's what we're showing you here. So we're jumping to the end of December 2019 before the COVID pandemic and we just look at how has this market accumulated for different countries. And now you see it plotted in billions here. And you see, yes, the British Virgin Islands, Jersey, Guernsey, Luxembourg, 93% of foreign corporate investment, both indirect and indirect, comes from tax havens. There are some non-havens here down the list, but that's being a bit generous to the United States and Qatar, debatable. But tax havens dominate foreign real estate investment, right? Now, the total market share might not seem drastic. These are all lower bound estimates because whenever we don't match anything in our data, we just, whenever there's the slightest hint that there might be a problem in the match, we don't match, right? So these are all lower bound estimates and then future iterations we'll make an upper bound too, but look at this as the lower bound. The total market share is at around 1.25%, that includes, of course, every village in Wales. But then as you move through price bins, as you look at the cheapest properties up to 100,000 pounds, up to 500,000 pounds, 1.5 million, 5 million, more than 5 million, which isn't that expensive in London, these market shares go up immensely, right? And in the top market share here, we have a market share of more than 15%, only corporate investment from tax havens. This investment has been increasing relatively quickly, relatively recently, right? So it has increased much later than financial assets in tax havens, for example, so it's a much newer phenomenon. And if we compare... Oh, sorry, no, I took that out of time, okay. So it's distributed in high price segments mostly, and it has increased relatively quickly, relatively recently. Geographically, that's the graph that's missing, it is concentrated in London mostly, but there is some music in the rest of the UK as well. So maybe some interesting work to be done there. So you all don't believe that these are the actual owners, right? So who's behind this? Now remember, both in the direct investment and in the indirect investment, we got stuck in a tax haven, right? We got stuck in the British Virgin Islands. And here's where we employ these ICIJ leaks, right? So by now, 810,000 shell companies of all these different leaks over time. And if we find the same company that we got stuck with in the tax haven, in the same country, in those leaks, then we match it through, right? And then we can go from the house, from the property, through the international ownership chain to the beneficial owner. That only works for a subset of our data, but we do match 9,000 individuals to 12,000 properties, so it's not nothing. It's a sample. We draw some bootstrap samples from it. The details are in the paper. And let's have a look at that country distribution of these beneficial owners. We make sure they're natural persons and we make sure we only look at shareholders and beneficiaries. Here's the country distribution of that. Some we can't distinguish, right? We can't tell you if Cyprus is bigger than China, but some we can. We can tell you that the UK is its largest foreign investor in real estate. So, you know, it's 15%. It's not the majority of the British investment, but it is substantial. So there's some roundtripping in this data. And then we have the United Arab Emirates, South Africa, Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia. So, mostly former colonies or oil-rich economies. And this also shows you tax haven secrecy can be pierced, to some extent, with a lot of work. This ownership structure is interesting if you compare it to other tax haven assets. Here is a comparison where we, in the dark gray plot, sorry, in the light gray, we plot the Swiss deposits from the Swiss leaks. In the Swiss leaks, HSBC ultimate owners of bank accounts were leaked. And we just look at the country distribution. You see this is dominated by Europe, North America, then South America, Middle East, right? So, mostly the wealthy economies were exposed in the Swiss leaks. A lot of the financial wealth in tax havens seems to come from rich economies. This is not the case for our British real estate investments, thank you. There, you see Africa, Asia, and the Middle East being overrepresented compared to developed economies, or to richer economies. And that links back to this illicit capital outflow story that these international real estate investments might be a vehicle for a capital flight from developing economies. And also links together, both sides, the developing economy, where this money comes from and the developed economy, where it does something in the market. We have a whole section in the paper where we check why people are doing this kind of stuff. I don't have time to go through it, but we find evidence of a tax planning motive. So when the capital gains tax changes, people change their investment behavior. And we find evidence of a secrecy motive. So when Britain introduces transparency regulation on some of these tax havens, suddenly the investment moves elsewhere, more in the paper. What I quickly want to show you is evidence of consequences. Does any of this matter for the host city? And here we go back to London. And we separate London into 983 little areas which have a different pre-Brexit market share of foreign investors. And then we use Brexit as our policy shock to see how properties in these different areas behave after Brexit takes place, because Brexit was associated with a capital flight. So after Brexit, foreigners start selling properties, and they stop buying properties. So capital is leaving Britain and the British real estate market. And when we control for a bunch of things, like, for example, different price bins, we can compare similar properties that are of a similar price, but that are in areas that used to have a lot of foreign capital compared to areas that have little foreign capital and see how their relative price develops. And that's what we're doing in this empirical exercise. And here you see that you don't see any action before Brexit, but as Brexit happens and as capital moves out of the UK, all of a sudden prices in areas that used to have a lot of foreign capital decline relatively. So if you take this foreign capital out, prices decline, which also tells you that as more and more capital moves into a market, prices will increase. The effect is immediate and persistent. So we don't see a recovery here, at least until 2019, where we cut our sample. And then, depending on how brave you want to be about the assumptions, you could say, OK, let's assume this effect is linear. Let's assume there's no construction response. Let's assume there's no substitution, and so forth. And then you could make statements to give you an idea of the size of the effect, like Westminster without offshore capital would have at least 16% lower prices. Liverpool with Westminster's offshore market share would have at least 13% higher prices. So there is a price effect. The rest of our work is then trying to figure out is something that's not offshore investment driving this price effect. Is this distribution here just capturing corporate investment? Or is this just migration responses when people move out after Brexit and they sell their house? Are there other area level controls that could be driving this? Are these different properties and property characteristics? And I can't walk through all of these results, but they are in the paper. If you're interested, please have a look. I do want to show you two last things. The first thing is, thank you, I showed you that a lot of the, or a substantial part of the tax-saving investment into British residential real estate is British. So are the Brits driving their own price effect? Or is it the true foreigners? Now our matched sample that we can look through in the ICIJ League isn't huge, right? But it's big enough to assign country probabilities. So we'd say something like 93% of the investment from Hong Kong has ultimate foreign owners, 7% of investment from Hong Kong has ultimate British owners. So we'll take all the investment from Hong Kong, we put 93% of it into the true foreign bin, we put 7% of it into the true British bin, we do that for every country, and then we have a true foreign offshore market share and a true British offshore market share. And we throw both of these in the equation, and here you see the results. So it is not the Brits. They've coefficient is negative here, but very noisy. It is the true foreigners that are driving this investment response. And lastly, we were thinking, have we just discovered very wealthy people kind of playing casino with each other, and there's above 5 million price group? Or does this price effect actually spill over into middle-class property markets? And so what we do here is we separate our offshore market share into expensive properties, more than half a million, and cheap properties in London, less than half a million. But we only look at properties that are worth less than half a million to see if both actually matter. And that's what you see in the last column here. Yes, your own offshore market share matters, but also the high price segment has an impact on middle-class properties. All right, that's the project. So my goal was to help you understand this graph a bit better that we started with. I told you what this market looks like, some facts about who's behind it, not so much about why people are doing that, but a bit more about what's happening because of it. Thank you very much for the attention. Thank you. Thank you very much.


Snustruck! Energy Breaker is yet another Japan-only RPG that not many people elsewhere in the world have had the opportunity to play, but around this time three years ago, the Energy Breaker Translation Project was finished. And take a moment to appreciate that because according to the people in charge, the translation took 12 years to complete, and be made available to be played in English by any curious RPG fans looking for a new kind of experience. And Energy Breaker is certainly that. This was developed by Neverland, who earlier created the Lufia games on Super Nintendo, and later went on to create the popular Rune Factory series. However, Energy Breaker has more of a tactical slant, which might drive some people away, because it's pretty complex with kind of a steep learning curve, not unlike games like Bahamut Lagoon or Treasure of the Rudras. I should point out, it's not entirely rigid in that manner, it is similar to the Lufia games in that you can explore freely, and often find tons of hidden items all over the place. Most of the battles themselves are scripted, but I did find that if you return to an area of a completed battle, it can start again randomly, so just FYI. The tactical slant is in the battles as you might expect, and the way they are here are unlike any other game I've played, it's pretty complicated. To begin, you have these balance points, that you use anytime you want to attack, move on the grid, or use items. Your ability to do anything revolves around them. If you take damage, you have less balance and consequently less flexibility. When you level up, you accumulate energy points that you have to allocate to either fire, water, earth, or wind, each of those having a light side and a dark side making for 8 total elements. How you distribute these points throughout the game will determine your character's strengths and weaknesses, and what your character can do in general. You find out what elements unlock which spells by finding or buying scrolls that contain explicit instructions, and those are scattered throughout the game. Needless to say, there's a lot of replay value just messing around with how you want to combine these elements as you progress through the game. And of course, each character has their own default traits that they bring to the table as well, so that's pretty cool. And like I said earlier, you are able to walk freely between battles and find items, and in addition to the scrolls, there's all sorts of other stuff you can find as well.  It's a nice idea, but I don't think it really does a whole lot. I'm not sure anything changes based on what you pick. In the story you play as Myra, who's trying to recover her memory, a fortune teller lets her know the key to remembering who she is lies with this mysterious guy named Leon, and his nickname, the Whirlwind General, implies that he might be a bit difficult to find. So on her quest to find this dude, she runs into all sorts of other people that enlist her for help with various other quests, and it's off we go. This is a nice way for the player to get to know him, the Myra character, organically, and the story as a whole is pretty dang impressive for a 16-bit game. I won't give away too much, but I'll just say that Energybreaker gets into some surprisingly heavy themes like religion versus science and that sort of stuff. It's well told though, and I grew kind of attached to the Myra character, and for me personally that doesn't happen all that often in games like this. I'm not sure the story is for everyone, but I liked it, and I especially liked how it was told. So yeah, like Chaos Seed, which I looked at a few months ago, Energybreaker is another Japan-only RPG that's something a little different. As you can see, the game certainly looks great, and the music is fantastic too. The soundtrack is surprisingly deep here, so all the bells and whistles that you'd hope for in a game of this nature are all here and are all well done.


We have Aaron Goldberg, who's a member of the Friends of the Mural, Los Chulm Mural, and a co-founder of the organization and the group that saved this magnificent piece of art. And just as a quick background, this will probably be our third show about it, because I remember we were videotaping on site as it was being planned and the removal and then the moving to the current home. Thanks for being on the show again. Thank you for having me. It's great. I'm grateful to be here for your inaugural show again. Yeah, yeah, it's great to be back on the air, and it's such an exciting project. And you know, I mean, I have no Rick Kirschner, and I've been, you know, I keep abreast of what things as they go on and the cleaning and then just recently in the annual report from the Preservation Trust, they highlighted on the first page the fact that you guys have been doing so much work and that you're moving along. Aaron, could you tell, if you want to tell us a little more about yourself and how you got involved in the project. And I was just shocked to learn before we got on the air that you've known about the mural since the 1980s. Could you tell us a little about that? Yeah. I am a Burlingtonian, and my family came from Lithuania in the 1880s, and I got involved in archival work relating to the Jewish community with Myron Samuelson, who was an attorney in Burlington, Vermont, and had done a lot of work and wrote a book about the Burlington's Jewish community, which was published in 1976. And he was the archivist at that point and through the 80s. And I then succeeded him as the archivist for Hava Zedek. In my high school days, I remember seeing the Harry Will Carpent Master warehouse on Hyde Street, which was one of the successor businesses to the High Autumn Synagogue, and I am putting up a slide now, which is the High Autumn Synagogue building. Oh, we can pull that up. Which is slide number two, yes? So that building was the second synagogue in Burlington, and may I see this on this screen too? Oh, sure. I think we... Here we go. So what you're looking at is the second synagogue in Burlington. The first one was a Hava Zedek synagogue in 1885, and then High Autumn Synagogue split off from the synagogue, from the first synagogue in 1889, and it was built by the Levin family. And this is now owned, the building is now owned by the Offenhearts family, who have been tremendous supporters of the Los Reales Project, including Stephen Offenhearts, his wife, Susan, and his wife, and his, I'm sorry, and his brother, Adam. And so what you're seeing is this is the entire, the whole synagogue building, and this east-facing apps is where the Ark that held the Torah scrolls would have been in place. What you see here that's still covered is a slate roof, and we actually built a building around this building, and to remove a mural that's inside of the building, and the mural was painted by this gentleman, Benzion Black, and you can see this is the Ark that was in the apps, and this is the actual mural at the top. So where's this photo from? This photo is from 1910, it is the only black and white photo we have of the inside of the building showing the mural in place in 1910. And Benzion Black was a wonderful person, kind of a Renaissance man, he was a theatrical producer, he cast his wife in a play in Lithuania, her name was Rachel Sager, and she then came to America and he followed her to America because he was in love with her, and they married here, and they had children here, and their grandchildren are involved in the project also, and supporters of the project. And his family paid for some of the Benzion Black's descendants, paid his daughters, paid for our archival slides from 1986, which we have of the mural. And what you're seeing though is that this is all painted on plaster at the top, and you can see that these are prayer walls, and this genre is the genre of the wooden synagogues that were all over Eastern Europe before the Holocaust. And there were hundreds, if not well over a thousand of them, in Lithuania there were 600 wooden synagogues alone that we know were destroyed. We don't know how many of those had murals. Typically with these murals in Eastern Europe, the artists that did them is unknown, there's no photographs of them, and they've been lost to the sands of time. Probably one member of the synagogue, probably, or who knows, itinerant painters. Right, they could have been itinerant painters from the town, or from the synagogue, or hires who went from place to place. Black was a trained artist in doing three dimensionality, and colors and perspective. Yes, in Trompe-Loi, he also was a musician and a singer and a poet. He was a promoter of the Yiddish culture and Yiddish language. He thought the Yiddish language should be the primary language of Jews, and was then in Europe. Yiddish was generally the first language of the residents in Lithuania, certainly. And anyway, when he came to Vermont, he was promoting Yiddish as a culture. He brought theater down from Montreal and up from New York, and he wrote hundreds of poems in Yiddish that we have at the UVM Special Collections. And we also have his record collection of Yiddish music. He was a composer and a director of music. He had a Mandolin band in Vermont. Anyway, it was terrific, so there's a lot of background information. We have a huge amount of information on this, gentlemen. And this is the, this is inside, that's right. So this is the warehouse that that Harry Will Carpetmaster had his business, which was the synagogue building. The synagogue was a synagogue from 1910 to 19, from 1889 to 1939. And the this is now has been recognized as a symbol of all of these lost wooden synagogue murals that were all over Eastern Europe, and most of which have not survived. And it's a fantastic example of of this genre. And so from 1939 to 1986, I mean, that was just in the warehouse. It was it. It happened to glance up. So from 30 was, yes. So from 39 to 50, the synagogue was functioning through 39. And then after 39, it was still functioning also as an Orthodox synagogue. They were all Orthodox synagogues back then as an adjunct building of a Havazetic synagogue. So Havazetic was had the brick building, the red brick building on Archibald on Archibald. And then this building is literally two doors down on Hyde Street from the other building. And this was according to our our recent interviewees. People do remember that they attended services in this building as late as 1952, which is the year that Havazetic then moved up the hill to North Prospect Street. And then this was then deeded over to to the to then out the Havazetic building became the Havath Geron building. The Chayatum was still in place and it was then sold as a business. And so it became a feed business, dry goods business. And then Harry Wiel, who was a carpet master, had it in his warehouse. And I remember going into the warehouse and on the on the this is facing east, facing west was the prayer gallery. And he had women's prayer gallery that would have been in the back because the men would have prayed in the front and it was higher floor up. And they were looking the directly at the women would be praying and looking directly at the mural probably 50 feet back. But what's pretty astonishing is that not only was this painted, but all the prayer, this is where you saw the prayer walls at the first floor. That's right. And but he also painted the entire ceiling from above the mural this way, all the way back to the women's prayer gallery. And it was heaven. It was the blue sky. It was clouds. It was Jerubim. It was musical instruments. And it's so this is the part that survives. We have this piece here that we've taken out separately to exhibit. And then we move this entire piece, which is pretty amazing. So that started now fast forwarding. Yes. Yes. So so what happens is is that in the wall, the mural is walled up in 1986 to protect it because the building is then going to be converted into an apartment building. And the the the Francis family was very cooperative at that point in time. And they agreed that we could erect a false wall in front of it. So with the assistance of Richard Kirschner and our we've had a we have a wonderful team that is in place still. So it's Richard Kirschner as a coordinating conservator. Marcel Bodin, who is an architect myself as as an archivist. Jeff Potash is an archivist. Bob Neld, who was an engineer on a project and ventures. The all great preservation of Schwartz, general northern construction. Ray O'Connor, who's a master carpenter on the project.  And tenants were actually in the building from 1986 through 2010 in an apartment. And this is the walls of the apartment and this is behind it. And what happened, though, was when the wall was put up, crews put in insulation behind the wall. And the we didn't know at that time, but the insulation was placed in a manner where the insulation was against the face of the mural. So condensation condensed in the insulation. A warm cold space. That's right. And transferred to the face of the mural. So we actually sustained about 10 to 12 percent damage of the paint. But certainly, but we have before we moved it, we took archival slides of it in 1986, which I'm not going to show at this point. Although the warehouse slide that I showed you isn't and the and the other one is also from from the original slide group. This is a picture of opening it up in 2010. And you can see areas of loss. Yes, so that you can see some areas of loss. And you can see in the in the small one, this is from 86. There's very little damage on this one. But I have a bigger shot of that. But you can see how close this was six inches. The struts are six inches in front of the main the main picture of of the mural. So we're we are in 2012. We then work. Yes, so we work with the often arts family. They agree to lease the building, at least the apartment to us and to make some major changes to their building. We build a building around the building and I remember that. That's when we first started running the video. We did our first coverage of it. When I first discovered it and heard about it was then. So when we're when we lease the apartment, we have a conservator to who is a wonderful conservator. Her name is Constance Baker and Constance is going in. And you can see that she's using very fine brushes and she's literally gluing all these paint chips that are hanging like potato chips off of the wall back on to the plaster. And the plaster is pressed onto lathboard. And the lathboard each lathboard cross strut functions like a piano key. So the conservator is actually pressing the plaster on based upon the flex of the lathboard. And so this is Connie working on gluing the pieces on. And she eventually gets it to look very much like this. And this is actually before the mural is cut out. Right. So it's still in place. Still in place. And this is now but it's covered. You can see this very white milky shroud on it. And so all of the all the paint was stabilized in order for us to move it by having this this this coat that off gas once we opened it up back at the other build at the new building. And so so you can see there was some and we'll talk about these color changes. These side pieces. Yes. So right. So this one did not survive the original conversion of the building in 1986. This one did survive and was in the in the building when the often hearts were showing it to us and generously letting us have access to the lease to the least space and the building. And we actually had to move walls in his in the apartment and take off the roof of their building and put it back on. Which meant taking a slate off in the boards and getting to the roof and operating it from front to back. This is just to highlight Black was a specialist in gold leaf. He this is part of part of his work. There is gold leaf embedded in the painting, but he was a sign painter on Center Street in Burlington just below where the Daily Planet is. He operated a successful sign painting business called Be Black Signs of a Better Kind from when he got here to through 1972 when he died. Oh, wow. And there are many of the buildings that are many of the signs downtown that are in professionals and commercial space that are by him. Oh, wow. And and they have inset gold leaf. He also worked on the state house, a capital and the gold leaf on the state house. OK. So this is just a picture of and we'll go through these very quickly. There's your building around the building. Right. So this is the building around the building that and this building was heated and it has these large windows so that steel can be passed through. Steel beams can be passed through to the welders inside. You can see that this is a picture of the slate that we're taking off by pieces and numbers. And they're all numbered and lettered and put back in the off and hard garage building so they can be put back on. The there's a roof that is put on that that is a mobile roof. And I don't have a slide of that, but we took the roof off. Out of the way. That's right. In order to bring in in order to take the mural out. And then put it back on the same day. And so this is a steel frame that is designed by engineering ventures. And you can see this goes all the way around it. And the and this the mural is then that's the cribbing supporting the mural inside the steel frame. That's right. So there's about seven layers between and the the mural is actually the very tiniest part against right there against the wood. You can see this lathe board right here and that's the mural in front of it. It's about three quarters of an inch wide at the bottom and literally a sixteenth of an inch wide in the center because the plaster was falling as he was painting. Sure. Oh, yeah. The and this shows the and the mural was moved by it was picked up by a crane deposit on the truck. The truck is then brought and passes in front of the old synagogue up to the new building on Prospect Street where the crane is also lifting it. Construction is being done at both sites at the same time. Because you had to open up the synagogue lobby had to be opened, which is now the public lobby for the lost mural. And it is open to the public subject to COVID restrictions. And the but in in the as we're planning to cut it out of the old place, we're then putting it in the new place in putting in I beams, a suspension rod so it can be then placed hoisted hoisted up. So I'm just going to show some other slides. This is so from 2000 and so, yeah, we're fast forwarding again. Yes, we are. So after it after it's moved and actually I'll go to this one first. So this is the there it is. This is the mural after 2015. And this is and between 2015, the lost mural project became a nonprofit. It decided it kept planning on how to do this to do with it now. And whether, you know, how and how we could restore it, how we could clean it. An expert panel was convened in November of 2019 to give us our priorities and give us kind of kind of direction. Yeah, yeah, marching, marching orders. But you can see that this is the lab board right there. And the mural, the plaster is right in front of it. And the same on this side. And the this is the colors of what it looked like and what is amazing. And I'm just going to go back quickly to this one for a second. Yeah, in 1986, you'll see that these red reaps are there. The green drapes were there. And you can see all of this is very, very, very dark, including the lions, the Ten Commandments. You can barely see into the out the window. And what we have, I'm guessing that a varnish. Yes, so there are there are several things going on here. There is two layers of varnish that are applied to the mural. The building was in a building that was heated with charcoal from 1910 through it through 1980 through 1939, at least that we know, openly, at least. And the charcoal dust literally transfigured and transformed the colors. And so this green was green in the preliminary slides. And all this dark, dark color is the aging varnish, which is hardening over time. Yeah, of course, yep. And as it's hardening, that that precipitated the need for us to move forward more quickly than we thought. So by 2019, plans were getting in place in order to have it professionally cleaned. OK, because we had to get the varnish off. And because the varnish had been left, it would have made it completely intractable. Here we go. So this is samples that are being taken of the mural. But you can see that the red, the blue and the purple colors is so incredibly vibrant. Yes. And so now we have a we literally have an image of from the Book of Numbers and the Book of Exodus as to what the tent of the Tabernacle is. The mobile tent of the Tabernacle looked like that housed the Ten Commandments and these colors, the crimson red, the royal blue and the purples are are are recited literally in the Book of Numbers. And we have that in this photo here, too, which is a little bigger. And I don't know if we can zoom in on that and if people are at home can see. But so I'm just going to show colors are incredible. This is a composite, which we'll come to in a moment. But I'm hoping that you can see the colors of this, too. And I'm going to highlight some of these details in a second. But this is a flat composite. It's composed by Eric Bassette, his wife, Jenny Bakers, who was one of the conservators who helped clean the mural. The composite is taken in sections and then seemed together. It makes the mural look completely flattened, right? Yeah, for us to in order for the conservators to study the colors. And when they could zoom into this image, and it's done in several different resolutions, they are able to, with their with their computer magnifier, they can go in and look at the depth of the colors. We also are doing tests with the Historic Paint Analyst and Amy Kohl-Ives, who's telling us exactly which shades are what colors. So there's various shades of red, blues, greens, yellows, browns, and every one of those shades requires a different level of solvent to get through the the varnishes and the charcoal soot and the grime and the dirt. But we have to do that in order to make sure that we are not damaging the original paint. Right, yeah, you want to get to that. It's just like on a microscopic level. That's right, and it's done with microscopy. That's what it's called. And so these are some very fun slides showing the changes. So you'll see that if you take a look, for instance, this was an original test patch for the red and the blue, and that comes up to this color. This shows you how much varnish was covering the entire brown part. Right, because you can see it there. You can see it's all open there, and we couldn't even see it, but you could barely see in the original slides the white detail that he's done. And you can also see all of the curtain pieces are now visible, and so is this bottom part now, which is quite amazing, his scroll work. And this is how the paint is tested. So these little dots are showing you how paint test samples are removed by the conservators, Constance Silver and Jenny Baker, and they're numbered and labeled by color. So this shows you one, which was the original color that they would have started with in April of 2015. Two is with one layer more of solvent applied. Three is another layer of solvent applied. Four is another layer. Five is another layer. And then six is what is the color that we're left with. Essentially what you end up with. That's right. That's right. And the same is true of the browns. You can see on the actual area. So you start at this color, and you get down to this. This break. And incredibly vibrant colors. And you can see, and this is another example of it over here. And the detail it pulls out is incredible. And so they've now established the original colors of the palette that Benzion Black used. So we're very confident that we can replicate the damage based upon the slides that we have that are in place. So that was leading into my next question. So the cleaning now is complete. The cleaning is largely complete. At least 95% at this stage. And the cleaning was completed between April 15th of this last summer and the end of August. And we're now fundraising for the full restoration of the mural. It's estimated to cost about $150,000. We have half the monies in place already in hand or pledged, which is astonishing after we've just finished fundraising for the cleaning also. And we're hoping that people all over the world will see this presentation. And people will forward this to their friends and relatives. And that's been ongoing, right? I mean, there's been a lot of support. Yes. And what's interesting now is that this last round of the cleaning, it has really been confirmed that this is a universal immigrant symbol. As Madeleine Keunen puts it, this is a symbol of freedom over oppression and hope over despair. And all of the Vermont historic preservation community is wholly behind us, fully supporting the project, including Vermont Arts Council, Vermont Humanities Council, Preservation Trust, Preservation Trust of Vermont, Preservation Burlington, and many others that are incredibly helpful, including Vermont Community Foundation. Such a monumental task and an amazing story. It is. It's an incredible story. And it's an incredible and very meaningful that this piece that was a remnant of an orthodox community and of a lost art form that was in Europe is now one of the only one of its kind in the world in terms of its size, scope, and magnitude. People can walk in. People can walk in and see this. And look up and see it the way it was meant to be seen. And that's also what's interesting, because in the 10th of the Tabernacle, originally only the high priesthood were able to go into the interior from the outside courtyard and through these wonderful curtains to get into the interior space. Now, not everybody can. It's kind of democratized the process. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the restoration. So we're moving on to the restoration part now, right? The fundraising is happening. And that will be to infill areas of loss. That's right. That's right. So I'm going to go through some of these relatively quickly. So the loss is right here. But you can see that in this one, and here you can still see that the 10 commandments are very dark. And you can see dark varnish over here. And you can see that the pediments are really dark. Also, this are the pediments now on the columns. And you can see they're quite beautiful. And you can also see his amazing technique in terms of making these three-dimensional light and darks and shadowing. And then he's got this marbleizing technique that he's using on the bottom and the top. So on the top of the columns, it's kind of these black painting marks. And on the bottom, it's this white marble pieces that he's painted on in order to create this dimensionality in the piece. And it is trompe l'oeil. You're looking out the tent flaps. And he's made an allusion to the temple in Jerusalem by making four marble columns instead of the wooden acacia poles that would have been used in the time of the Exodus. So this is just showing you more, as you saw in the original slides that we used, that we showed from 86, we couldn't see anything here. It was all brown and gold letters. It's actually coming up red and silver letters. And it's coming up in such detail that you can see the flames going across the front of the mural that are representative of the finger of God carving the commandments, the tablets for Moses. This is, again, the slide from 86, showing you how dark this whole thing is. And whoops, I'm going to just go back this way for a second and see that and see how light that is and how much detail is brought out. So this is the scaffolding in place this summer. This, again, shows you the various steps. The detail. And you can see that this is the marble that I was talking about for the pillars. It's a marbleized in the column. But look at the line. And the line, yeah, the shading on the line. This line has had its second cleaning. This one has had a first cleaning. This tablet has had a second cleaning, and this one had not been cleaned yet. So the exciting thing for me is we're running down on time, so I want to thank you for coming in. Obviously, there's more work to be done, so we're going to be following up, and we're going to be following. And half of the money there, that's great, but you always can use more help. So people that are watching, hopefully, they'll get excited. This is the composites to what we have now, and it's really quite astonishing in terms of how much has been accomplished this summer. Thanks for coming in. Thanks so much. And really, I mean, this is the show. We're back on the air. I want to thank Aaron Goldberg for coming in to share all this stuff with us. You're visibly excited about it for really good reasons. We all are. I know, it's really so great. And very supportive community, both statewide and internationally. I really, I'd like to thank everybody again for tuning in. We're happy to be back on the air at live at 525 in Preservation Burlington. Remember, for more information on your house, your town, or that marker you always wanted, go to preservationburlington.org. We dropped the WWW beforehand. Thanks for tuning in. Thanks, Aaron. My pleasure.


We're going to start, all right, I think we're going to get ready to start because this is a live stream. So there's no point to wait. I know this is the end of the day. So thank you so much for being here. Really appreciate it. Today, we're going to talk about Operate Psycho and Psycho List application with Istio and Argo Rollout. My name is Lin Song. I'm the director of open source as solo.io. How many of you heard of a small company? Oh, yeah, a lot of you. Thank you. Awesome. So how many of you know Istio? Service mesh architecture. Okay, I don't need to explain the slides because you guys know we have Psycho architecture. The control plan is programming the Psycho to do intelligent things such as policies. How many of you are aware of what driving a new architecture called ambient in the Istio community? Wow, many of you. Okay, good job. So essentially, what we are involving ambient is what if you don't need to drag that cycle along with your application? What if you just need layer for functionality? We would provide a per node proxy for you that implement the layer for functionality for you such as layer for authorization policy, layer for traffic management. So that's what we are involving in the Istio community. What we are also involving is also split the layer for and layer seven into different architecture where layer four is implemented per node proxy, which is the orange thing you see here that's called zero trust tunnel. And then the layer seven is implemented by waypoint proxy continue use our favorite proxy, which is our way proxy. So today I'm going to talk you through my journey of using our go rollout with applications running Istio ambient. So how many of you have used our go rollout with Istio application with cycle a few of you. Okay, I actually saw a bunch of a tutorial on that. So I'm not going to focus primarily my talk on that just because it's already been known how to do that. There's very clear steps on how to do that. One of the things is you can potentially run your application with cycle and the application without cycle in Istio. They can talk to each other, right. So and you can continue use our go rollout to roll out your updates seamlessly whether you're using cycle or without cycle. So because I'm doing a lightning talk. I have a lot of screenshots for you, but I could do a live demo if I actually have more time since I only have five minutes I'm just go through the demo in a screenshots format.  And this is a really simple application where I deploy a hollow word. I have a successful criteria for rollout through a rollout analysis template. I also have Istio virtual service and gateway resource. These are used to config traffic come into the Istio Ingress gateway to hollow word. So as you can see, everything was synced okay in this example, and I'm using this GitHub repository, which is open source by the way and then I specified the past when I create the Argo application. So what I'm doing next is I'm rolling out a newer version of my hollow application using Argo rollout set image command. And then I'm checking out the rollout status throughout the process. So the first time I come in, you know, I would see the step is on zero. And we're just started to, you know, look at the canary, get it deployed, the containers are creating. By the way, if you look at here right now, you can see my hollow word. Without any of the cycles, right, that's what a one slash one zero slash one means. So my hollow word version two is trying to come up with the new image. Now, as I'm checking out my rollout status, you can see right now it's three slash eight, which means we're halfway almost halfway down. I pause because in the rollout analysis template I try to in the rollout configuration I try to roll out pause every 20 seconds just making sure the results is consistent. And you can see the analysis is running, you know, I got one checks. So that's why it's moved forward from zero slash eight to three slash eight. So let's continue forward. It's continued a rollout to five slash eight. In this case, it means a little bit more than for 50% of the traffic would go to hollow version two. And then the remainder lesson lesson, which by the way, you can see the weight here I forgot. So 60% is going to version two 40% is going to version one. And the the rollout is going really well. And in the meanwhile, you can also see the virtual service by the way the virtual service resourcing is your means the traffic route configuration. And you can see the current virtual service resource for the Hollywood on my system, which is how the program away is down by version two have 60% and version one which is the stable has 40%. I also have another terminal that shows the current result goes to hello word service. And you can see it's roughly about 60%. It goes to version two. Let's continue checking out the rollout status right now it's eight slash eight. And now it's 100% goes to version two, which you can see the version one of hello word it's getting scaled down while the parts being terminated. So that's pretty much the final stage of the rollout and then you can see 100% goes to version two. One thing I want to highlight this is new with ambient is I actually deploy a waypoint proxy right we talk about waypoint proxy architecture a little bit early in ambient right so waypoint proxy is the key that helps does layer seven traffic management layer seven traffic enforcement. Before I started my rollout I deploy the waypoint proxy to help facilitate that traffic shifting. At the end, after I roll out to version two I no longer need to have the waypoint proxy so I no longer needs to pay for the cost to run it to operate I can actually remove it. I actually removed the waypoint proxy to save the cost. This is very different than cycle because with cycle you can't write a cycle is going to be with you regardless of whether you're on version two or after your successful rollout. In summary, Agile rollout continue to work with application with cycle or without cycle moving application from base version to canary version are very helpful using Agile rollout. In my opinion Agile rollout is actually made a lot easy and also flexible by you only pay for waypoint when you really need it with your ambient. So check out the GitHub repo and play with this yourself. Thank you all for attending my talk. I will be I don't think right any talk has time for questions so I will be around if you guys have any questions. Thank you.