Hi, everyone. Welcome in. Welcome in. Good morning. Good afternoon. Maybe good evening as well. Great to see people trickle in. While we wait, maybe folks can let us know in the chat where you're tuning in from. If you see me in my background, I'm in TechSoup's San Francisco office. Awesome. See folks coming in. Great. Hello. Hello. Hello. Yes. As folks are trickling in, I want to welcome everyone to this edition of the Public Good App House. We'll be showcasing tech for your nonprofit to unlock the power of location-based data. We'll give folks a few more minutes, but we'll also introduce our panel in a moment as well as some housekeeping. I think we'll give folks a couple of minutes. Wow. Hello, everyone. Pittsburgh, Florida, Navajo Nation. Oh, hi, Matt from San Francisco. I know you. I know you. Doonsmere. Great. As folks trickling, hello, hello. Welcome. Welcome to today's Public Good App House. Great. We'll give folks maybe one more minute before I get to a little bit of housekeeping. Hi, everyone again. And if our folks are new here, great to meet Sean Allison. I'm at TechSoup's San Francisco office. See our high ceilings. Awesome. I think maybe we'll start here. We'll do a little housekeeping. We'll introduce the panel and we'll get right into it. Andrew, if you don't mind me, let's go to the next slide to talk about Caravan and the Public Good App House. So the Public Good App House events like these are initiative of TechSoup's Caravan Studios. Caravan Studios works closely with nonprofits, communities, and local organizations, such as libraries to design technology solutions and help nonprofits address some of their most pressing problems. And so it's just a little bit housekeeping. So in terms of engagement, here's how you can engage in today's event. So have a question. Please use the Q&A feature that's on the bottom of your screen. You can submit questions and we'll get to those. We'll review those or some of our panelists might be able to also answer them as they're going to chat function. But please also use the chat function for any other things. We will be recording today's event. Also, please don't forget to check your inbox after the event. We'll email you the recording, the slides, and any kind of resource links in a couple of days. Also as a reminder, the bottom of your screen has a closed captioning button. So if you do need that, you can turn that on at the bottom with the CC button in the Zoom menu. Before getting to today's event, I want to introduce you to or welcome you to TechSoup Global Network, especially for those who are new here, though I think I see some familiar names. So thank you for engaging today. At TechSoup, we believe technology like smartphones, internet connectivity, training, and more have the power to serve our communities better.  So today's presentation, we have four panelists or four demos. We have Emily Sunson from Esri. She serves as a nonprofit program manager, Marina Smith. She serves as a map box at the customer marketing and social impact manager. Munira Lakanwala, director of tech and training at Little Sys, and Nick Rabinowitz, senior staff software engineer at Foursquare. So thanks, it's like them for being here today. I'm clapping here. One more reminder that we will be sharing the slides and the recording from today's event. You'll see that in your inbox in a couple of days. And also submit your questions in the Q&A and use the top function on the bottom or the side of your screen to share any reactions and kind of any quick thoughts. Awesome. So the first round, first demo we have is from Emily. As mentioned, Emily is an applied geographer and nonprofit program manager at Esri. She helps nonprofit organizations use GIS and spatial analysis to understand the ways that people in place shape one another. She leaves out harnessing this understanding will allow us to take action, use maps, to challenge inequities, affect policy change, and engage our communities. So thank you, Emily. We're so excited to hear your demo. Thanks so much, Alison. And thank you for having me. Let me go ahead and share my screen. All right. I'm excited to kick off the webinar today. This is the topic that's at the center of my work here at Esri. So really quickly, Esri is a GIS technologies company. We're headquartered in Southern California. We were founded in 1969. So we've gone through many evolutions of technology, but our mission has always been to advance the science of GIS, to increase spatial literacy, and to empower organizations to harness the geographic approach to solve some of the world's most complex challenges. So a quick refresher on GIS. Here's our world and GIS or a geographic information system is a complete system that allows us to abstract and understand this world. Using a GIS, we can create, analyze, and share location data and information like models or imagery of the natural or built environment, political or administrative boundaries, districts or other areas of interest, observations, project information, people, communities and demographics. By understanding what's happening where, we can ask and answer important questions. We can identify patterns. We can find relations, locate optimal sites, and even make predictions. Fully harnessing the power of geography to make decisions. Over the years, the technological patterns for doing this have evolved from desktop work stations to servers, and now arguably the most exciting and accessible iteration, which is WebGIS. That brings me to ArcGIS, which is Esri's core technology. What is ArcGIS? It's a collection of tightly integrated spatial tools or applications that are designed for different purposes. In ArcGIS, the user has an identity, and through that identity, they access different applications in the cloud. I want to walk you through a few of the most popular among nonprofit organizations and share some examples. Of course, we have our desktop software, which is ArcGIS Pro, which is now integrated into the cloud. This is a robust set of spatial analytics tools and data management capacities. We have story maps. Story maps are a modern building experience to enhance a narrative with images, videos, and other mediums. Maps bring viewers closer to the mission, and I'm seeing nonprofits use them for their annual reports for advocacy tools. There's several really sweet examples of policy change that's been affected by a powerful story map, and for communicating information to their stakeholders. I've asked the TechSoup team to share a gallery link in the chat so you can take a look at some of the story maps out there, the featured story maps that may resonate with you. You'll see they're immersive and mobile-friendly, and increasing the time that viewers spend interacting with content. They average six minutes, which in today's world is pretty exciting. Next, we have dashboards. Dashboards are for an operational view. What's happening where? Nonprofits use dashboards to update executives on the status of projects, to get real-time insight into things like disaster response, or to organize information and make decisions. I'm going to drag over an example of a dashboard that's for a non-profit organization to look at their fundraising information. Bringing data that perhaps lived in a spreadsheet, or hopefully a database, into a map because it has some spatial element will immediately see patterns ourselves. We're not even doing any analytics at this point. We're simply visualizing our donors. The map is dynamically updating. The dashboard is dynamically updating to tell us what's happening where. If I zoom in on a given area, I'm able to drill into a specific donor detail. That's just a really quick example of a way that a non-profit can use a dashboard for development efforts. Back to our apps. We have several tools for data collection, whether that's in the field or in a disconnected environment, or for a survey out to members, volunteers, or stakeholders. This data can be immediately fed into things like the dashboard I just showed because of that location element. Next, we have experience builder. Experience builder represents the ability to create and deploy different app templates. This is a key to ArcGIS. It's configurable nature, but in addition to configuration, ArcGIS is an open and interoperable platform that includes tools for developers to customize and build. Finally, one of my very favorites is ArcGIS Hub, which is our community engagement platform and open data platform used to connect those that matter to an organization and organize people around initiatives. One of my favorite examples share on the screen here is this Global Midwives Hub, which is an ArcGIS Hub that's used to convene midwives around the world. For things like information sharing, you'll see they have their own open data portal with spatial data around demographics, health coverage, mortality, and so forth, as well as a dashboard embedded in their hub that's showing the associations and the members around the world. So really excited use. There's a lot more to a hub like this. They were commonly used in local government for engaging with community members, but nonprofits have been harnessing hubs for a myriad of uses. So those are just some of the applications you can choose to use through an ArcGIS subscription, all of them included with that subscription. Now imagine all of your ArcGIS users at the organization are connected to the same portal, to the same authoritative data, and you're all collaborating and sharing in real time, and that's how it works. So here's our apps again, just as a visualization and in the center of those apps is the data. Data is at the heart of ArcGIS. You may have data living in spreadsheets like I mentioned before, but Esri also curates data for all of our ArcGIS users and what's known as the living Atlas of the world. The living Atlas of the world, and I'm going to pull up one more web example, is a robust collection of data from all sorts of authoritative sources, federal agencies like the census, live feeds from NOAA and NASA on weather. There's lifestyle and business data. There's maps for policy infrastructure and environment. The TechSoup team can drop a link in the chat so you can explore yourself, but I wanted to orient folks to one of my favorite places here, which is our maps for public policy section. These are the the apps where some of those data sets on the last page have been brought together in a tool that makes them easier to explore. So if I launch our maps for public policy app, which all of this is absolutely free with no subscription required so folks can begin checking it out and showing maps that have already been created like this in your work today, what's really exciting is as soon as you have a subscription to ArcGIS, you can bring this data into your own work as well. So maps for public policy, a lot of the information organized around different political interests. So this speaks to our the depth and breadth of the ASRI user community. We have hundreds of thousands of organizations with over 10 million active ArcGIS users across the public and private sectors. Because of what I was just sharing around the Living Atlas and the space to collaborate around data, this represents the size of this user community represents such great opportunity for informing positive practices across sectors. I'm really proud of the 14,000 nonprofits that we support and we do that through our nonprofit program, which is a special program designed to get our offerings into the hands of organizations like yours that are working on cross cutting issues like those that you see on the screen. There are nonprofits aligned to every industry that are innovating with GIS to improve their operations, their communications and their impact. So just a little bit on the program. Like I mentioned, I get the privilege of being the manager for this program and have a small and passionate team of people that are working side by side with with nonprofits to bring bring their work to life. But our program is open to 501c3 organizations in the US. It's also global. So we have as redistributors that are locally supporting organizations in their regions based on their criteria. But the program includes deeply discounted access to our core technologies. I'm talking about a 98% discount on our GIS subscriptions off of commercial prices. So it amounts to something like $100 in the US for a user. This also includes full access to the data through the living access, living Atlas, through for developer tools, robust free training, support and that user community. I'd be remiss not to show you a map of the nonprofit user community today. And with that, I'd encourage you all to to join us. The QR code there will take you to our website where you can read nonprofit success stories, see upcoming events and apply to join our program. And the very last thing I mentioned just because we decided it could happen yesterday is we're going to host a meet up in our Denver regional office on January 17th. So any of you that are in the Rockies region, anywhere around Denver, we're doing free lunch and drinks and hanging out with other nonprofit GIS users for the day. And I will ask that that link is dropped in the chat as well. So please, please check it out. And I look forward to hearing from some of you. With that, thank you. And I'll pass it back. Awesome. Thank you so much Emily. I love the opportunities just for not only us read but the other tools today, the opportunities for civic storytelling. And I'm reminded of just the, for example, mapping the fundraising and donations. So exciting. I remember 10 years ago, or 15 years ago, I did everything in Adobe Illustrator, which is not helpful whatsoever. So I'm really excited to introduce our next speaker as well, Marina Smith. We, Marina Smith leads customer marketing collaborations and social impact partnerships at Mapbox. Every day she supports and celebrates innovation and positive impact of Mapbox employees and customers. Before joining Mapbox, Marina led participatory mapping initiatives for land use planning and digital and community land rights protection and natural resource management. Thank you, Marina. Wonderful. Thank you. All right. Let me just get my screen up here. You can see that. Great. Well, lovely to be joining today. I'm from Mapbox. I'm based in the beautiful land of Hawaii, but it's great to work with folks across the mainland as well. I'm here to give an overview of what Mapbox is and some of the core products that are available to you if you're building with Mapbox and then ways that you can access non-profit support. All right. So I'll start off by saying that Mapbox is not a single application. So my demo is going to be similar to Emily's in terms of the, it's the platform. We are also not GIS software. We are a platform of products designed for developers who want to add location features to their custom web or mobile applications. So you can build a great app for demo at Public Good App House. So either you're a developer who has never really worked with geospatial data, perhaps, and you're looking for developer-friendly tools that take care of the geospatial heavy lifting and are just very easy to build with, or perhaps you're a geospatial professional and you're looking for tools to help you build highly polished and performant end products like web maps or applications after you've used your GIS to do your data work. And the chances are good that you have already been interacting with Mapbox maps. Our customers span an incredible range of industries from consumer apps like recreation apps or news outlets for data visualization, delivery apps, you name it. They all look very different because of how customizable the Mapbox product stack is. So I'll start with our Mapbox Maps products. These are the ones most commonly used by nonprofits. I'll call out a couple. Mapbox Studio is our visual interface for designing custom map styles that control every detail of how the map appears. I'll give you a little more information about that in a second. If you want to build an interactive map hosted online, then you would probably be using our Mapbox GL JavaScript library. And that's where you would add in the different interactive features into your application. Likewise, if you were building for mobile, we have native SDKs for iOS and Android, as well as plugins for frameworks like Flutter. Now, just a little bit more on Mapbox Studio. I think it's a great place to start to get to know Mapbox. You don't have to be a developer to use Studio. There's no code required. This is very much a graphic styling interface. It's free. It's browser-based. There's no download or license needed. It's a complete design ecosystem that lets you come in and play with all of the different core tile sets of data that Mapbox makes available to every account. That's things like roads, terrain, buildings, satellite imagery, labels. That all comes available in existing templates. Or you can build completely from scratch and customize to your heart's content as well. You can also add in your own data layers to create things like data viz, heat map layers, or add in locations, custom labels, that kind of thing. All right. We see nonprofits use Mapbox Maps products to create high-impact visualizations on the web in particular. A lot of data dashboards. Mapbox is truly optimized to handle very large data sets and still perform very quickly and very smoothly. We see a lot of big data visualizations as well as things like care locators or service locators. If you want to build a very polished map experience on your website or in your application, that's what the Maps products are for. I will give a special shout-out to Storytelling Maps, building on what Emily shared about the Esri Story Maps. For Mapbox, we have a scroll-through experience. This is available as template code. Again, if you're building with Mapbox, you're building as a developer. You're going to get into some of the coding, but it gives you complete control over this immersive scroll-through experience where you can add in your narrative, your videos, and have an interactive map change dynamically as you scroll through the story. I love these. They work great for nonprofits and for communicating impact and explaining some of the complexities of your data. Now, I'll cover a couple other suites of Mapbox products that, to be honest, are less commonly used by nonprofits, but I'd like to make sure that they're on your radar, because I think there's great potential here and I want to make sure that people, when they think about location technologies, you're not only thinking maps, you're thinking location services more generally. Mapbox has a full suite of products around navigation. This is because we work with big companies that are automakers or operate fleets, delivery companies, for example. If you have use cases where you are needing to say maybe your food bank and you have a lot of deliveries to coordinate or you have crews of people and resources that you're moving around and you want to focus on optimizing those resources, maybe you've got an out-of-the-box app that you're already using, or maybe you've got some custom needs and you need to kind of graduate to a level of having a customized application. We've got the suite of products that lets you build that, or if you're working with a developer you're bringing in to build something custom, we've got the full suite. So definitely if you're curious about the world of navigation, come talk to us about that. We're happy to map our products onto your use cases. In particular, I will give a shout out to some of our navigation products that are more geared towards analysis. So for example, our Isochrome API lets you create polygons, areas that represent travel time, and these are useful for nonprofits if you want to do an analysis like a catchment area of services based on travel times to a location or assessing an impacted population. So you're not necessarily only building turn-by-turn navigation experiences with these tools, you can also do back-end data analysis with these APIs. All right, and then our other suite of tools and products are search and data. When I say search, I'm talking about GDO coding primarily. So if you have, say, address data that's text-based data and you need to do geospatial things with it, at some point you have to convert it into coordinates, or maybe vice versa. Maybe you have raw coordinates and you want to convert it into readable addresses. So that's what geocoding does. Also, if you are already using data in Snowflake, perhaps it's a popular data management tool in the cloud, we have a native app there. And there's a couple enterprise data products as well that I'll highlight for you. So we have our mailbox boundaries data. This is a data set of over five million boundaries for political, statistical, postal, administrative boundaries around the world. They're really powerful for creating visualizations as well as aggregating or enriching your data beyond something just like geocoding. Maybe you want to add metadata about the administrative areas to your point data or do some point polygon analysis. This is a product that we can donate to nonprofits. So come talk to us if you've got a need for highly curated data sets of boundaries. And then also, we do have telemetry derived products. And so this data comes from anywhere when someone's using a mobile application that's powered by a map box, we get some aggregated data all anonymized that can feed services like live traffic, so identifying areas of congestion or identifying patterns of movement, which can be helpful in a nonprofit context for things like maybe football analysis, looking at where certain landmarks get popular, maybe you're doing some site selection type work, or perhaps looking at risk analysis, road traffic patterns for transportation. This is a big data set. Again, we can donate and discount it for nonprofit research projects. So if you're intrigued, please get in touch. All right. And so on that note, how do we support our nonprofit partners? We have a highly tailored program. We don't have just a set discount for nonprofits. We want to hear what you're building, what your goals are, what products you need to achieve those goals. And then we'll work with you in terms of figuring out how to make that feasible and make this great impact happen. So that ranges from technical support, mentorship, coaching, directing you through the Mapbox documentation, as well as discounts and donations of product, and also telling a story of what you built. So finally, just to wrap up, people often attend sessions like this because they want to have that takeaway of, okay, why would I choose to use Mapbox over anything else? I think the main points that I see nonprofits choose Mapbox when you are looking for developer friendly tools to create something custom, you want something that is highly reliable, enterprise grade, the level of what global companies are using, you know those services are not going to go down, they're not going to slow down, and you need that full kind of level of customization. Maybe your developers are clamoring for some more flexibility in the systems that they're building for you. And then we also have this direct tailored support program for nonprofits. That makes a big difference for a lot of our partners. So with that, please ask your questions about Mapbox in the chat. Happy to chat more and get in touch. I kind of get off me. Thank you so much, Marina. I really appreciate that. I just, again, the tools today are just so amazing. So I hope folks are feeling inspired. If you do have questions, obviously, around how to adopt the technology, please go to Asri Mapbox, the respective folks in today's call and all the resources they've shared. I just love it. I know, I think World Central Kitchen probably partnered with Mapbox a while back during the pandemic to map out, you know, they're giving the logistics of, as they were trying to give out meals and all that kind of services they provide. So just in terms of inspiration for folks who are on the call, you know, how can you kind of think about your needs and then, and map those out and use the tools today. So thank you, Marina. Next up, I want to introduce, excuse me, Minera Lagunwala, Director of Tech and Training at Level CIS. As a Director of Tech and Training, Minera coordinates key projects initiatives related to Little CIS technology and the program to train aspiring power researchers. She also leads Little CIS participation in Crescendo, a project with Action Center on Race and Economy and Empower Change to map the corporate power structure that profits from and is complicit in Islamophobia. Thanks, Marina. I'll let you get started. Thank you. Sure. Hi. I'm going to share my screen. Take me just one second to figure out how to do that. Thanks everyone for, well, I'm going to stop that real quick. I think I have the wrong screen. Apologies. All good. While you're on the screen, oh, great. Yeah. Hi. Thanks so much for inviting me to join. My name is Minera Lagunwala and I work at an organization called Little CIS. What we do is a little different, I think, than what many of the organizations that are on the webinar today do. We're actually primarily a research organization that does what we call power research on power structures. So kind of our mapping is more relational. We're looking at the way that corporations and government are kind of working together and mapping the kind of relational networks between corporations and government. Some people call it kind of corporate opposition research and our work is really focused on supporting grassroots campaigns that are kind of challenging, yeah, corporate power locally and nationally in some cases. So as an organization, we're known as Little CIS and that kind of, I can talk a little bit about that in a second. Our other name is Public Accountability Initiative and our work is kind of broken into three areas, producing independent research, training organizers, activists, campaigners in doing kind of power analysis and corporate research and we do this sort of through strategic partnerships with different organizations as well as kind of general trainings to the public. And then the third part of our work, which I'll focus on today is the technology that we have created and provide for free to the general public to use to do the kind of research that we do. We have two technology offerings. One is the Little CIS.org database, which is, we get our name from Little CIS, is the opposite of Big Brother. So it's a free open source research platform for researching powerful individuals and organizations and it's, yeah, a wiki-style tool. Anyone can sign up for an account and use the database and also edit the database. So add research to it. And then the second tool, Olografer, is our mapping tool, which is what I'll show you all today. And it's integrated with the Little CIS database and it's a way for mapping kind of relational and power networks. Just a little bit about the history of Little CIS tech, the idea sort of originating in 2008 and it really came out of this need that we saw kind of in our movements for social justice to have a place where a lot of this research that was like living independently on different researchers, Google Drives could be housed in one place. It was a way to kind of bring together so that people who were doing corporate research wouldn't have to sort of start from scratch that there would be a kind of database where some of the relationships would already be recorded and people could kind of build their research off of that. And then in 2014, we developed Olografer, which is our mapping tool and the name is, you know, two parts, oligarchs and graphs, so mapping kind of power structures and it became really useful. We saw it as an opportunity to help take the research that's in the Little CIS database and bring it to life and I'll show some examples of Little CIS maps in just a second.  We have, you know, over 16,000 at this point people who are using the Little CIS database or have used it, have used the mapping tool at some point and the database itself has over 400,000 people and organizations in it and yeah, a million, a million and a half relationships between different entities. So I'll just actually show you all a couple of maps so you have a better sense of what the tool looks like. So just real quick, this is kind of just the home page of the Little CIS.org database. The database is comprised of entity pages, so basically like profile pages on individuals and corporations or other kinds of organizations. Some people have referred to us as the involuntary Facebook of the 1%, it's a way that and the data that's in the Little CIS database comes from publicly sourced data. So in order to add a relationship to the Little CIS database you need to cite a source and users use primarily publicly available data to do that. So, you know, for corporations, securities and exchange commission filings, other kind of primary source material is a lot of what users are at using to add relationships to the database. So I'm just going to show a few examples of maps. I know that this tool is different from some of the ones that we have already looked at. So an example of the kind of map that a user might make using oligrapher is something like this to sort of look at, look at kind of who is giving money to different hacks or different kind of business associations that are sponsoring certain kind of bills. So this is a map that was made recently or actually, sorry, not recently to show, to show some of the organizations that were kind of, you know, sponsoring or supporting certain kind of bill that was being passed locally in Florida. And it's, yeah, a way for users to and researchers to be able to kind of take maybe what might feel like wonky data or information that, you know, might not might be hard to kind of convey to a reader in a news article and visualize it and be able to share it that way. So it's really about like the power of visualization to help tell stories about the flow of money or the way that kind of power functions. Another map that was made actually early on in oligrapher in the life of oligrapher is this map that actually went viral I think at some point that's about the different banks and entities that were profiting from the Dakota Access Pipeline. And so this is a multi, this is what we call like a story map and that's partly, that's partly because it has these annotated slides that help you move through different parts of this very large map and help tell this kind of like complicated story about how, you know, different banks and financial institutions are sort of propping up this, you know, kind of environmental disaster. So these are, yeah, two kind of examples of maps that have been made by users and to help kind of translate research into a story. And there's definitely like more, more examples that you can look at if you sign up for an account and log into the database you can, yeah, explore, you can explore more kind of user maps here and just kind of get a sense of, yeah, the breath of research and mapping that's happening on the Little Sis database. So I'll actually stop there. Thanks so much. Thank you, Manira. Thank you so much. I just signed up so I'm really excited to log in and check things out. And again, there's just so much here around just civic engagement and just advocacy both as a knowledge creation tool, but also a knowledge sharing tool. So I just love it so much. I think if for folks who are in the advocacy space or just any space at all, I think it's a great tool to check out. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.  Give me one second here. I'm excited to also introduce our last demo from Nick Rabinowitz, sorry, Rabinowitz, Senior Staff Software Engineer at Foursquare. Nick has over 20 years experience in software engineering data visualization and information management. He's currently at Foursquare as a Senior Staff Software Engineer where he works on web-based geospatial applications. He started geocaching during the epidemic and is unduly proud of his 711 finds. So thank you, Nick. Excited to hear from you. Thanks. Thanks so much for having me. Okay. Again, thanks for having me. I'm here to talk about geospatial analysis with Foursquare Studio. And before I sort of get into our products, I really wanted to take a step back and talk about why we do geospatial analysis at all. I have a background. Before I was a software engineer, I worked in a lot of nonprofits and I found that we often wanted to use technology, but it was frequently not used for actually doing our core work, answering our core questions, and supporting our programs. I really like maps because they take this messy, messy world that we have to work with, this hugely complicated geographic space we work in, and they abstract it into these simple forms. They abstract it into points and lines and polygons. I especially like the abstraction of the grid where you divide everything up into these equal area cells. I think we understand in the nonprofit space that abstraction can also be dangerous. You know, you can abstract over complexities that have real-world impact. But that said, abstraction can also be really, really helpful in giving us insight into our data and insight into things that would be invisible if they were masked by the mess of the real world. That sort of brings me to geospatial analysis. That's what I'm really here to talk about. We use geospatial analysis and geospatial tools to answer questions and to make decisions. I love storytelling maps. I'm never going to say that telling a story with a map or using a map for presentation is a bad idea, but I also really love using maps to actually answer some key question to support some program decision that you can't otherwise easily access. This is most useful when geography matters, when close things are more related than distant things. This is a play on a famous quote from Waldo Tobler. You will have some times when the geospatial relationships between elements of your data really matter and sometimes when they don't. Sometimes a small city is more like another small city and not like the big city right next to it. Recognizing when you have a geospatial component can lead you toward geospatial analysis. As you've seen throughout this presentation, I think maps and visualizations are often a key component of this. For Square, you may know us from our early days as a consumer app and we still do offer consumer mobile apps. Right now, our focus is on curating and offering these rich data sets of geographic information, our movement data set, and our places data set. I'm going to talk mostly about the places data set which has over 100 million different highly curated records of venues, points of interest, stores, landmarks, everything you might want to know about in the world. Using both machine approaches to make sure the data quality is high and human verification to make sure that the data quality is high. We can tell you whether the store is open or closed. We can tell you what the hours are and you can trust that information. That's incredibly useful. We sell that to a lot of enterprises but we can also, I think, leverage that in non-profit contexts. Then we have a variety of applications that build on top of this. The one I'm going to talk about today is Forest Press Studio. Forest Press Studio is a web-based application that allows you to do geospatial analysis to share it with your team and to integrate it with other parts, you know, other systems you might have. You can integrate it with your own database, you can integrate it with your own geospatial application, or you can just use it by itself and upload your data as easily as dropping a file into the browser. It's a place where you can make a wide variety of maps, share them with the people you work with, and collaborate on them. You can, you know, use either big or small data, whatever you have, drag it into the browser and, you know, and start working with it almost immediately. So what I wanted to do was actually a quick demo of how we might use Forest Press Studio to do a small example of geospatial analysis that would be appropriate for a non-profit context. So I'm going to start with this sort of blank map that I put together. And the context we're working with here is maybe you're a food bank working in Atlanta and you want to find a new distribution point. And this is a place where you're really concerned about where there is a need, where there's limited access to food. This I think used to be called food deserts. Now it's more called, you know, low income limited access. But we can start by just looking at, you know, where are the food retail locations? Where can people go to access food? So this is an extract of our Places dataset. It has thousands of different food retail locations in Atlanta. And it can easily tell you so quickly where you can go to buy food in the Atlanta area. We're really interested about access. So it's not just where the food retail locations are. But, you know, we want to really look at how difficult is it to get there. As a quick proxy here, we're going to take a one mile radius around every single place that you can buy food, healthy food in Atlanta. And, you know, we're going to be able to see quickly that there are some gaps in between where no one is serving those areas.  Are there underserved populations here? So in this case, what I'm going to do, I'll hide this for a second, bring in our census dataset. We have a, you know, census dataset that's free and accessible in the app, where you can look at all the census data on a grid basis. So this is the sort of geospatial grid I was talking about before. For any place in Atlanta, we can see what the what the total households are. This is drawn from the American Community Survey. And so this has income level as well. Right now, this is showing total households, but we can quickly change the layer and show something else instead like income less than $20,000 a year. And we'll use in this rest of this demo, we'll use that income level as a proxy for low income and people who might need food access. We can now quickly, I'm going to close this and I'll say we took it, I took an extract of that data because it's a little easier to work with in geospatial analysis. So I basically just drew this circle around Atlanta. I took out all the census data that I wanted to work with. And now I have this extract that's a little bit quicker to work with in some of my other analytical needs. I can turn this back on. Oops, excuse me. I can turn back on the one mile radius and we quickly sort of see, okay, here's some areas with many households that are not being served. And you can just sort of visually quickly see where there might be gaps. But usually the real advantage of using geospatial data is that you can apply not only the visualization element but math. You can actually do some calculations. You can figure out ways to look at the data that might not be immediately visible to the eye. So what I did, and this is sort of taking the cake, the pre-baked cake out of the oven because I don't have time to go through the entire process. But it's pretty quick. And what I did was I joined all these circles with my, for my food retail locations with my census data set. I get this spatial join data set. This is showing the total households. I can obviously, I can still show this income less than $20,000 a year. But I can also show how many, you know, how many places you can access. So how many retail food retail locations can you access in these areas? So I basically counted the number of food retail places you can access in each of these little cells. And now I have this map of food access. Having both of those together in one data set means that I can quickly set the kind of filters that I would want to set if I've been looking for key places where I might want to do some new intervention or new food distribution point. So I want to look for places where we have no food retail, sorry, no food retail, so zero.  So all those gaps, these are places where there's no food retail. Now it's showing us places. It's cutting out all the places where there is access. And I'm going to add one more filter to filter on low income households. So now if I want to, you know, I want to drag this up and I want to drag this over a little bit. And now I'm able to filter down on these areas that have low income households and are not served, whoops, dropped my, and are not served by retail areas. And I quickly, I've done a little bit, I can filter more aggressively or less aggressively, but you can see it's quickly bringing up these areas where we have, you know, a large number of low income households and where there's no food access within a mile. So, again, this is an abstraction. This is not going to solve the question of, you know, where you should put your food distribution point. But I just wanted to give an example of how you can use this kind of geospatial analysis to quickly get an entry point for where you might go. Now you might want to go and talk to people. Now you might want to go and do more investigation in those areas. But this gives you a quick way of understanding where you might look for further information. I hope that was helpful. Thank you so much again for having me. Foursquare, I will say we don't have a fully fledged sort of nonprofit support program, but we are really excited to offer free and discounted options for our data and our applications to nonprofits. So please get in touch with us at foregood at Foursquare.com. In Foursquare Studio you can try it for free and there's really a lot there that's available for free. So I would encourage you to go to studio.foursquare.com, try it out and make some maps. Thank you so much. Thank you, Nick. I'm just so super, super inspired. I'm an aspiring storyteller. So all these tools and resources under the belt in my toolkit is just amazing. Lost to learn. Thank you to Nick and to all our other brilliant speakers, Minera, Marina, and Emily. A reminder that we will be sharing today's recording, the slides, any links that we shared in the chat in an email. You'll get that in a couple of days. I'm going to open up the Q&A and address some of those questions. So we do have a couple. Oh, one from Corey. I think I know you, Corey. Hi, Corey. For those of us who have little GIS experience, how do you address the technical challenges that come with learning geospatial tools? I'm wondering if anyone wants to answer that first. I'm happy to jump in here and others probably have thoughts as well. I will say, and I mentioned it early in my presentation, that in this iteration of technology that is Web GIS, it is easier than ever to begin building that knowledge. It doesn't mean that those of us that have GIS degrees are no longer relevant, but it is really exciting to see people that have been able to pick up and learn things. From Ezra's perspective, and I imagine the others here have things to share, we put out a lot of tutorials through our Ezra academy. There's a segment. I'll share the link in the chat. There's a segment called Learn Arc GIS that takes someone with no GIS background or skills through the concepts and the tools. Also, I'm excited to sign up there. I don't know if anyone wants to add anything. I'd add, we have a collection of webinars and such as well, too. Honestly, from the Mapbox toolkit side, the learning curve is more about development, right? If you're not a web developer or a mobile developer, that's more the learning curve. We take care of a lot of the tricky geospatial stuff in the background. It does help if you are familiar with GIS fundamentals, so I would absolutely encourage you to use the Ezra resources as well as the Mapbox ones, but our MO is to try to make it easier for your developer without that GIS background. Awesome. Thank you, Marina. There's another question from J.L. Henn. Which of these services is best for mapping the location of members by street address? I presume these are members of the organization. Does anyone feel like? Oh, go ahead. I mean, I can start. It's a bit unpacked in terms of needing some more detail about how you're hosting your data and that kind of thing. If you have a list of street addresses, that touches on the thing called geocoding that I mentioned, where you actually need to convert those street addresses into coordinates. Some tools can do that automatically in the background. Other ones are specifically geocoding APIs who get those coordinates in the end. I'd say we have some templates and tools out there, like if you have, say, addresses in a spreadsheet and you want to get them on a map, I'll drop it in the link in the chat here. We call it sheet mapper. It's just a little template, but ultimately you need to find a tool that helps you do that geocoding. One thing that we often do in this case, too, is if you don't want to go through the process of geocoding the addresses because you don't need the actual down to the house location, you can often use the zip code as a proxy for the address and in a tool like force per studio and many other tools. You can quickly just sort of take the zip code, use it as a geographic identifier and drop that on map and get a zip code map of where your members might be, which especially if you want to share it tends to be more privacy-centric, so that's often a good idea as well. If you are looking for something just like really simple and you don't have too many addresses, Mapbox Studio does have a dataset editor where you can go and you can search the address and just add a point there. So if you're okay doing it manually, if it's not a really long list, that could be an option. I did see Brian, you had a question that Marina, you had already answered in the chat. Marina, you had a very specific use case around mapping out 40 addresses for a driving route and then another project where you could analyze 50 spots and there were kind of like counties and so I think Marina, you had mentioned geocoding, but in terms of the level of privacy and things like that that you would want to protect, just questions to think about for you, very similar to JLM's question. There is another question, I think the third one here is from Ariel. Which of these tools work offline or for example, internet shutdown and I would also add it may be in areas where internet infrastructure isn't so good. I'm happy to jump in here. I mean, well, I'm touting the wonders of WebGIS. We also do need to recognize that there isn't always internet access and in some places more than others or there are roles that people have where they need to go offline for some amount of time before they might come back into an internet connection. We have several of the applications that I shared will work in an offline environment where they're storing data locally and that includes some of the data collection tools as well as our pro or desktop software storing data locally and if you choose so later on to push that up to the cloud you can, but those applications will still be functional. Yep, and I just added in the chat too, for Mapbox Mobile that is designed for apps that go offline like if you're hiking for example. So if you develop the app to be functional offline, Mapbox will work and then we do also have an on-premise solution called Mapbox Atlas if you're concerned about firewalls or lack of connectivity. Thank you, Mary. Thank you. Thank you all the speakers today. Really, again, very inspired. I want to now spend all day just push what side all my work and learn the mapping tools and all the awesome resources that you share today, only if I could. But I want to just also point for participants today, share with us in that chat what's one thing you learned. You can also tweet at us or not tweet at us, I'm so sorry, you interact with us on other social media platforms. But really appreciate all the panelists and also all the participants today for your great questions and comments. Let's move to the next slide, Andrew. Thank you so much. Yes, like what you saw today, I want to support a future demo event and reach non-profits curious technology. Please consider being a sponsor for future events. To do so, just contact Snips and TenB for more information at that email. And lastly, thank you so much to the behind the scenes producers. I called you, Andrew, but thank you. Thank you so much. And other staff at TechSoup who made this event possible. I see Matt, Corey. Last thing before we say goodbye, please make sure to complete our post event survey. You'll find it in the chat. I think we've bubbled it up before and we're going to punch in the chat again soon. You'll find it. It also automatically pop up that survey once you close Zoom as well. Again, the recording will be shared with you as well as any other slides and any links that we've shared in the chat. So please expect that in the email in a couple of days. Thank you so much for joining us. And thank you again to Marina, Nick, Munira, Emily. Thank you guys so much. I've learned a lot. I'm super, super excited to go down this learning journey. I hope everyone else is too. So, round of applause and we'll end here. Thank you.


This image of the barred spiral galaxy, NGC 4314, shows the entire galaxy, including the bar of stars bisecting the core and the outer spiral arms, which begin near the ends of the bar. That's normal enough, but this Hubble image reveals clusters of infant stars that formed in a ring around the core. This close-up view by Hubble also shows other interesting details in the galaxy's core. Dust lanes, a smaller bar of stars, dust and gas embedded in the stellar ring, and an extra pair of spiral arms packed with young stars. These details make the center resemble a miniature version of the spiral galaxy itself.


For more videos on people's struggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. Hello and welcome to Around the World in 8 Minutes, a show from People's Dispatch. This is a show of and for resistance as we delve into the stories of common people around the world who refuse to accept injustice and stand up for their rights. Today, before getting into our latest stories, here's a short clip from Brazil where nearly 1 million people protested in around 200 cities against education budget cuts and pension overhaul. Our stories today deal with the plight of political prisoners, the brave comrades who are deprived of their most fundamental human rights and the struggle for freedom and equality. We first take you to Colombia, where political prisoner Jesus Santrich was finally released on May 30th from the Attorney General's bunker after a legal process fraught with irregularities and violations. The Supreme Court had ordered his release a day before, arguing that he continued to enjoy the privileges of a legislator and hence could not be tried by the ordinary justice system. Santrich was a leader of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, FARC, and was a member of their peace negotiation team when they signed peace agreements with the Colombian government in 2016 in Havana. He subsequently became a leader of the new party that emerged, common alternative revolutionary force, also called FARC. Santrich, who is blind and epileptic, was arrested in April last year the request of the Drug Enforcement Agency of the United States. He was accused of trafficking cocaine. When the Havana peace agreements were signed in 2016, a special jurisdiction for peace was set up to probe and punish any crimes that were committed during the five-decade conflict between the guerrilla and the Colombian state forces. However, when arresting Santrich, the Colombian authorities argued that he'd committed the crime after the peace agreements were signed. However, they did not provide proof of the same. On May 15th this year, the HEP barred the extradition of Santrich and demanded his immediate release. The HEP also said that it would process the case. On May 17th, after verdict by Bogota Court and hours of negotiations, Santrich was finally wheeled out of prison. But within minutes, officials from the Attorney General's office took him back into custody. Soon, the news that came out that Santrich had been drugged before he was released. Santrich's lawyers met him a few hours later and found him in a critical state. Doctors said he was suffering from a cardiac arrest. A week after this episode, the Supreme Court announced its ruling. After his release, Santrich announced that he would continue working for a true and lasting peace in Colombia, and said that he would cooperate with the legal process in the Supreme Court as he was eager to clear his name. Santrich's arrest and imprisonment was a tremendous blow to the already fragile peace process in Colombia. Since the agreements were signed in 2016, over 600 social leaders and human rights defenders have been assassinated in what social movements are calling a humanitarian crisis. During these three years, hundreds of social leaders have also been victim to criminalization and legal persecution in our waiting trial in Colombia's prisons. Like the technical secretary of the Congresos Pueblos Julian Hill, who has been in prison for nearly a year on trumped-up charges, a true and lasting peace in Colombia is still a long way ahead. And with a far-right Iván Duque in office, the threats to peace will continue. Next, we bring you to Pakistan, where Ali Wazir, the leader of the Pashtun Tajafous or defense movement called the PTM, and a member of Pakistan's National Assembly from North Waziristan was arrested during a PTM-led mobilization on May 26. The mobilization was against the brutal army occupations that are frequent in the areas inhabited by the Pashtun community. Three activists were killed in the firing, which happened in Baya in the North Waziristan region. Ali Wazir, one of the leaders of the protest, was arrested immediately after. Another leader, Mohsin Dawad, who is also a member of the National Assembly, was taken into custody. The two and seven others are currently being held by the anti-terrorism police. Protests for the release of Wazir and Dawad were being held in Pakistan and other parts of the world, including Argentina, the Netherlands, Brazil, and Turkey. The Lahore Left Front released a statement condemning the killing as well as the arrest of the PTM activist and called for an immediate withdrawal of the armed forces from the region, and the lifting of the curfew and accepting of the demands of the PTM movement. The Left Front comprised of Pakistan Mazdour Qisan Party, the Wami Workers Party, and others expressed solidarity with the movement and demanded the release of all PTM activists. Wazir and Dawad are prominent leaders of the PTM and were elected to the National Assembly in July 2018. Wazir's family has been repeatedly targeted by the Taliban, leading to the death of 13 of his relatives, including his father and his siblings. Pakistan's army, in its statements, defended its action by alleging that the protesters had fired on the security forces first. However, protesters said that they were unarmed and that the presence of an army checkpost on the way of the protest site meant that people could not carry arms. Internet services in the area were suspended and journalists were also barred from covering the protest. Military operations are common in the Wazir-e-San region, which borders Afghanistan, because of the significant Taliban presence. However, it is the Pakistani Pashtun civilians who face the bulk of the violence. They are subjected to abductions, extrajudicial killings, displacement from their homes, and their villages are often besieged in cordon and search operations. It is in this context that the Pashtun Tahafuz movement emerged to fight for Pashtun rights. One of the key issues that the movement has pursued from the very beginning is the presence of a large number of land mines in the Pashtun tribal areas. The regular demonstrations demanding their removal have forced the army to begin the process of removal, although many still remain. The PTM has also protested the extrajudicial killings of Pashtun people, demanding arrests and inquiries for those responsible. For our last story, we take you to Ecuador, with the case of software developer and privacy activist Olavini, who has been unjustly detained since April 11th without any concrete charges and is currently serving a 90-day pretrial detention. In the latest chapter of this brazen political persecution, Olavini was denied bail by an Ecuadorian judge on May 29th on the grounds that, since the Attorney General has not estimated the damage done by Vini, they could not decide on a bail amount. Vini's defense had requested bail and a suspension of the preventative detention, arguing that his case did not meet any of the stipulations to not grant him bail. There are only four reasons why the bail cannot be granted in Ecuador. When the crime is against a minor, a disabled person or an elderly person, crimes with a sentence of over five years, when the person was granted bail before and violated the conditions, and crimes of inter familial violence. Vini's case has caught the attention of activist human rights defenders across the globe due to the political nature of his detention and the glaring irregularities and violations that have occurred at every step of the process. During the hearing, the judge even prohibited Vini from physically attending, despite the request from his defense team. Instead, the judge called for his participation through a video call, even though the hearing was being held in the same city where he is detained. The hearing, which was set to be public, was made private by the order of Judge Marisol Proaño after she heard a cell phone ring. Representatives of the United Nations and the Inter-American Human Rights Commission sent a letter to Ecuadorian authorities on May 7th, asking them to take the necessary measures to protect the rights and liberties of Ola. Jose Charri, a lawyer from Vini's defense team who was present in the hearing, said that Ola Vini is a victim of abusive use of state power, and the defense will evaluate the possibility of asking for her bias corpus in order to determine the legality of the arrest. That's all we have time for in this episode of Around the World in Eight Minutes. To check out more of these stories, check out our website peoplesdispatch.org and follow us on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.


I wanted to embrace the history of cartography as a way of saying, look, it doesn't have to be just straight lines. 2005, when Google Maps first came out, I mean, I was terrified. I thought our work was over. That's it. The machines have eaten the market and there's going to be no more mapping work to do. So when this came out, it was widely, it was talked about in the press as an alternative to Google Maps. And then more cogently open street map was seen as the alternative to Google Street Maps for a lot of different reasons. So we're kind of part of that conversation. People don't think about who's making these maps or how they get made or how they get updated or any of that kind of stuff. And it's an incredibly complex, fascinating, multi-layered, continuous, ongoing artifact, technical artifact that is made by robots. It's a collaboration between robots and humans. It's amazing, you know? So I didn't want to make a nostalgic gesture, but I did want to call attention to the fact that these maps were being made by people. I really wanted to sort of get this texture of a city to give it almost a hallucinatory quality where you just would pay attention, not just to it as a directional device, but as something with composition. But the composition, of course, is made by the world, not by us. It was mainly a collaboration between Geraldine and Zach Watson. And Mike Mogersky worked with Zach to design a process by which these could be generated using the textures. Geraldine made a number of textures, which we've blogged about, and then Zach Watson and started making maps out of them and sort of putting them through the different pieces of software that he was using. And then he'd go back to Geraldine and say, what do you think about this? And then she would make a new texture for him. And they were able to really adjust the way in which the lines here, you know, you'll see that they're not straight very much by design. They overlap one another, and that's all very intentional. And really the whole point was to make something that you couldn't tell what parts of it had been done by hand and what parts of it had been done by a machine. I wanted that line to be blurred. So it was very much always intended to be and continues to be driven by open treatment. The data that's underlying it is exactly the same, but there's a number of different steps. There's essentially a rendering process that happens to get something that, you know, from a data perspective, looks much more like that to something that looks like that.  And the whole point of this was to make it as bone simple as it possible. I mean, to make something that was highly difficult and virtuosistic and took a lot of resources and just flattened people's ability to access it, make it so that it was, it was, you didn't need to, again, you didn't need to sign up. There's no API. There's no technical. You just, you copy and paste this through on your website and you got it. Rather than having to do a screenshot and do all that nonsense, you should just be able to, you know, adjust the size and you can, and then this is where we show you all the different styles that there are, is more than, more than are on the front. So there's these images that get made, and then you can go to results, and you can see all the maps that people have made. This was another thing that was just really distracting to me as the project developed of just like where, where in the world do people care about enough to make these images? And it turns out thousands and thousands and thousands of places.  You know, people are just making these for use in their, in their projects. And there's, you know, one every couple of minutes. The most viewed place on Google Maps is your house, right? That's, that's where people always go. Like, and it's just, it's amazing phenomenon. Like, you have a map of the whole world. You could go to Petra. You could go to the skyscrapers of Hong Kong. You could go to Antark. You could go anywhere, but where do you go, your house? And it's sort of a, and in some ways that's a sort of grounding gesture of like, well, if I know my house is on there, I can recognize that my house. That's sort of a touchstone that means that, well, if this is accurate, then everything else must be accurate. And I think something like that is going on here. People are, this is, people are making maps of the places that they care about, which can be, you know, as broad as Europe or as narrow as, you know, a park. And that's a sort of wonderful thing about these maps and maps like this in general is that there's this kind of, people care about them.


Welcome, this is Melissa Armour with a stock swish and a reviewing Apple called a beautiful day trade in this and two options in this and Friday took off like rockets and actually if you held the options into Monday, it went even further when I even hire. So it's very interesting because Apple had earnings out Thursday night, along with a lot of big names Google, Amazon Facebook, they were all out Thursday night. And I wasn't in love with this initially. I waited a watch. We did a late morning trade in this all around, but it was the perfect timing. I tell you, timing is everything in the market. If you get into soon, you could be down before you up. If you get into late, then you have to exit early, or you're up and then you're down a lot till it goes. I mean, timing is so key to trading. And it's something that I'm very good at. Again, it's taken me a long time to get to this point in many, many, many, many years. But I mean, I can just tell when I see something, and again, it's all based on the gap. So let's take a look at the gap in Apple. And again, we didn't do a day trade in this today. I could have. I looked at it and what's crazy to me is that the stock price has almost doubled since about two months ago. I mean, I'm barely even used to the fact that this is worth more than $400 a share. But anyways, again, this was Wednesday. No, this was Thursday. I'm sorry, 731. So the stock closed here at 384.75. Then it had earnings Thursday night. Boom. Opened in the morning on Friday at 411.53. So the stock gap. So the stock closed again at 384 and change and open it for 11 and change. So it's not quite, it wasn't quite $30, a little bit less than $30 move up on the gap. Really nice gap in Apple ran up into the close went to the dream target, which was really 420 425 went over 425 ran up into the close on Friday. And then boom, kept up today. I mean, when I saw this, I was just like, I almost fell over it opened at 432 and it had close at 425. So it actually opened up $7 and change from where it closed. And this is the power of the gap. Okay. So people bought Apple into the earnings from Thursday night into Friday. They bought it Friday and they bought it Friday night into Monday and they bought it today. In fact, today's high, which was set in the morning was 446 54. And this is completely on its own. I mean, the market is green today, but this is on its own 100%. Boom. And so again, nice, nice bullish gap up in Apple. I don't do the bullish gap class all the time. I know that once a year I'm due to do it soon, but I will tell you that I rarely go long as a day trade. I prefer to short. This was one that just caught my eye and said, wow, this looks good. And that will happen every once in a while where I will just see something that's a long and we'll end up doing as a day trade and a call. If you're thinking about day trading, email me and Melissa, the stockswush.com. The next golden gap class is August 8th and 9th, which is this coming weekend. And it has been a very, very interesting earning season. Some things have turned out to be better than expected like this and some things we haven't done at all. Like Amazon, we didn't even touch because they were kind of a bust. So you have to look at each individual gap, whether it's bullish or bearish, I rate it. That's what I teach in the class and that is a system you'd learn from me. If you'd like more information, email me and Melissa at the stockswush.com. Stay safe, everyone, and I will talk to you soon.


Thank you, Bilal. Well, we are now at the moment that family and friends have been looking forward to all evening and our graduates are certainly ready to come to the stage to receive official congratulations on a job truly well done. This year the names will be read by David Morse. David is a lecturer in expository writing at the Ford School where he tutors graduate and undergraduate students. David is an outstanding teacher and a talented writer. He has a master's degree in fiction writing from the University of Michigan and his work has been published widely. His first play was performed at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival in 2010. And I'm pleased now to introduce David to call the names of our graduating students. And I'd also like to invite the members of our platform party to step forward and help to congratulate our graduates. Good evening. To begin, I'll call our graduate earning a Doctor of Philosophy in Public Policy and Sociology. I'd like to welcome Mary Corcoran to the stage. Mary is a professor of political science, public policy, social work, and women's studies and she will hood our first graduate. Iran Leo, Iran's dissertation title is Family SES, Non-Cognitive Skills and Achievement Inequality in Children's Early Life Course. Iran will be taking a position as an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at Peking University in China. Now we will welcome our graduates receiving a master's degree in Public Policy or Public Administration. Ali Abhazid, Krishnanu Ardi Aditamo, Yasuhisa Arai, Farhana Naz Arif, Maha Arshad, Michael Auerbach, Rachel Basile, Raymond Barrett, Bilal Bedouin, Alex Berger, Rhonda Bishop, Megan Bogarts, Afton Paris Branch, Michael Boudros, Ellie Cheson, Caitlin Marine Conway, Lindsey Kuhnen, Michael Correa, Therese Impe, Katherine Ann Eister, Kenny Fennell, Joshua Fleming, Eduardo Garcia, Arman Gorokian, John Guerrero, Mari Hashimoto, Maureen Higgins, Stephanie Hinchin, Maxwell Huntley, Essie Kokua Hutchful, Kosei Ishihwata, Kritika Jayraman, Tashana Joseph, Wook Kong, Ethan Kennedy, Jinwung Kim, Emily Robson Krishunas, Mark Croning, Maureen Lochner, Emily Lawton, Hyunho Lee, Terence Lee, Kelly Lovett, Nishant Malhotra, Michael Kevin Dabu Manansala, Farah Ladhan Mandich, Alexander Reed Mervak, Rakshah Mishra, Benjamin Morse, Kate Naranjo, Daniela Oliva, Melanie Pitkin, Curtis Powell, Emily Pramik, Joshua Rivera, Courtney Sanders, Mary Schlitt, Sundar Sharma, Kathleen Sly, Marlo Staples, Kazuki Tanaka, Tom Van Heeky, Naja Vandergriff, Nicholas Wallace, Molly Welch Marahar, Marissa Wetmore, Bradley Wintersteen, Harry Wolberg, Yu Chen Yang, Cage Yoda, Robert Yan, and now we welcome to the stage students receiving a Bachelor of Arts in Public Policy, Thomas Allen, Joe Ambrose, Alexa Baglione, Julie Barger, Jessica Bethlemy, James Henry Blatner, Eliza Boresh, Laura Broadkin, Neha Butch, Max Boltman, Desiree Chu, Dominic Klohlinger, Gabriela Dagostini, Sarah Dagger, Max Roland Davidson, Gabriel Dell, Zachary Dubin, Aaron Yusebi, Matthew Fidel, Genevieve Friedman, Alexandra George, Lauren Gold, Adele Goldberg, Jacob Haber, Mark Heider, Oliver Harfield, Ian Hecker, James Hendrickson, Thomas Hyslop, Noah Lisbon Holton Raphael, Hannah Louise Horobin, Jonathan Hyman, Meredith Joseph, Daniel Carr, Julie Katznelson, Ruby Kirby, Isaac Maycock, Pooja Nyer, Victoria Noble, Heidi Lynn Pater, Jacob Perlman, Daniel Rebun, Madeline Riley, Madeline Rose, Connor Rubin, Laura Seidman, Swathi Shanmugasantharam, Daniel Sharp, Joseph Shea, Carson Smith, India Solomon, Graham Stephens, Michael Sugarman, Kirtana Sundar, Maisie Sylvan, Shahar Steiner, Claire Taigman, Gregory Weinstock, Alexander White, Molly Williams, Mary Kate Winn, Samantha Wintner, Erin Woodruff, Emily Yerington, Peiyu Yu, Sarah Rose Zeev, Emily Zorfis. Graduates, please stand and face your guests in the audience. VA students, at this time please move the tassel on your mortarboard from the right to the left. And now I present to you the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy Classes of 2017. Congratulations! Well I'll ask everyone to take their seats again for a moment. I'd like to thank all of you for coming today and I'll ask you please to remain in your seats until the platform party and then the class's exit. We have light refreshments in the lobby and I invite you to stay, take photographs and enjoy the company.


All those gardens, the French gardens, that are very geometric in form. When you see them from above, it really reveals all the intricacy or the details of that work. My name is Lionel Allorge. I'm from near Paris in France. I started to be involved in Wikimedia Commons because I do photography. With the contest Wikilove Monuments, I started to try to find monuments that were not very well known and I also went to very well known monuments like the Versailles Castle. We are working with a small French company and we are taking aerial videos and pictures. They already had pictures from above of the castle and the gardens but they were made by professionals and they were very interested to have all those nice pictures licensed in a free license so they can reuse them whenever they want. I've shared maybe a few thousand pictures but I can access like 20 million pictures or drawings on comments so really it's a very good bargain if you want.


Hi all, have you ever wondered why puffer fish spawned along the coast at night during spring tide? Now recently it is in news because the scientists have found out the answer for this question. So to know the answer just stay tuned in this video. We have to know two things. We have to know what is spawning and what are pheromones. See spawning is a process of release or deposit of eggs by organisms like fish and frogs. And pheromones are hormones like chemicals. The difference between both is that while hormones are released inside the body, the pheromones are released outside the body. The next difference is that while hormones are chemical signals for our body's internal organs to communicate with itself, the pheromones are chemical signals used to communicate with other organisms of the same species. So now coming back to the question why do puffer fish spawn on beaches under moonlight? See the puffer fish normally spawn along the coast at night during spring tide. After studying the genetic makeup of the puffer fish, the scientists concluded that this behavior is due to a release of a particular pheromone called PGE2. See using this pheromone PGE2, the puffer fish communicate with each other and perform synchronized beach spawning. So this is about the puffer fish and its spawning behavior. Now while discussing about the behavior of the puffer fish, I mentioned that puffer fish normally spawn along the coast at night during spring tide and here what are the spring tides? See first of all tides are a periodic rise and fall in sea level due to the gravitational force exerted by the moon and the sun. In case of tides, it is the gravitational effect of the moon that plays an important role and the gravitational effect of the sun plays only a minor role. See we know that our moon revolves around the earth and it takes four weeks for our moon to complete one revolution around the earth right? So whenever moon revolves around the earth, at two moments the earth, sun and the moon fall in the same line. Once when the earth is between the sun and the moon and again when the moon is between the sun and the earth. So when the earth is between the sun and moon, we get that full moon day. Again when the moon is between sun and earth, we get the new moon day. So in both the cases, the gravitational pull of the sun is added to gravitational pull of the moon on earth. This will cause the oceans to bulge a bit more than usual. This is called the spring tide. We know that every coastal area experiences two high tides and two low tides every day due to the rotation of the earth right?  But what happens when the sun and moon are at right angle to each other? See when this happens the bulge of the ocean caused by the sun partially cancels out the bulge of the ocean caused by the moon. This produces moderate tides known as neeptides.  An additional point to note here is that for every lunar month our earth experiences two spring tides and two neeptides. I hope now you could clearly understand why puffer fish spawn along the coast at night during spring tide. So, to know more interesting facts like these, do subscribe to Shankar Reyes Academy YouTube channel. Thank you for listening.


Hey everyone, welcome back to Nintendo Prime! Yeah, we have a bit of a new audio setup today, I know you guys can't really tell. We're using a wireless lavalier mic setup today. We'll see how this turns out, hopefully everything is going off without a hitch. We have three stories, well, two stories really, but there might be a third here, I'll bring up because I think it's interesting, although I don't really think it matters that much, considering many things out there, but yeah, it's a Zelda story by the way, so we'll probably end up talking about it because it's Zelda. Before I do that, why don't you guys go ahead and drop a like and comment on this video. I would really appreciate it. Also, if you would subscribe to the channel, if you happen to enjoy this, we do have a new giveaway going on right now. I know it was less than 24 hours ago that we just did Prime giving, but now we have a new giveaway that's going to be running for the next couple of months. We are giving away three copies of Pokemon Legends Arceus. So yeah, three copies of that being given away. There is a link down in the description or the pinned comment that you can click on to enter for that. It is not going to be a live stream event. You do not need to be present to win, so this is literally open worldwide. Anyone can enter. The bare minimum requirement is that you are subscribed to the channel. So thanks for that, folks. And without further ado, let's get into today's news. So our first story is about the Nintendo Switch and its sales and how much it's dominating in a particular country because the Nintendo Switch just did something it's never done before, breaking its own sales records. So this comes from Christopher Dring on Twitter, who is in touch with all the retailers and basically we get the sales for the Black Friday holiday stuff last week. And he said last week was the biggest sales week ever for Nintendo Switch in the UK. Absolute dominant display. The Switch plus Mario Kart 8 plus three month online bundle stole the show over Black Friday. Xbox Series S was in a very distant second place. So there's kind of two notes there. One, the Xbox Series S outsold everything PlayStation 5 was doing. So not even counting Series X sales in, Series S outsold PlayStation 5. That continues a sales trend we know from the US where the Xbox Series S was the lead platform selling last week. But the Nintendo Switch slaughtered the floor with that. Now there's estimates for the week before the sales week last week. So not last week, but the week before from VG charts that Nintendo Switch sold 750,000 units worldwide. That has nothing to do with the holiday sales period. So insane. Also, the fact that it's that Mario Kart 8 deluxe bundle that absolutely blew up. It just proves that a game that's essentially a decade old at this point, it feels harder and harder for me to imagine us getting Mario Kart 9 this generation. Because Mario Kart 8 deluxe is doing so well. It almost feels like if there is going to be a Mario Kart 9, Nintendo would absolutely want that to be a launch game for the next platform they have because hello, look how big of a system seller Mario Kart 8 deluxe is. I don't know that Nintendo has any other game that can release that sells as many systems as Mario Kart. So yeah, I'm starting to lean towards Mario Kart 9. It happened at any time soon. It's going to come whenever Nintendo's next platform hits. Or maybe they port Mario Kart 8 deluxe again. I hope not. I love Mario Kart 8 deluxe by the way. To me, it's probably the best Mario Kart of all time. But man, I'm ready for something new, man. I've been playing it for a decade. Just at a tournament, you know, yes, last night. So people are still really loving that game. So yeah, credits to Nintendo for dominating over there. Obviously credits to Xbox as well for releasing a platform that people are clearly wanting to buy. And obviously the Xbox Series S was in stock pretty well all over the world. Our next story deals with Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl. Now we already know the sales are phenomenal. This could easily sell 15 plus million, maybe even approach the Pokemon Sword and Shield numbers at 20 million. We'll have to wait and see. But Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl, even though they just sort of had, you know, so-so reviews are selling like gangbusters. But whenever things sell well, it makes me want to be fair. And I need to be fair here in some criticism of the releases. They're chock full of bugs. Now, these aren't the kind of bugs that break the game and delete save data and send you back to the beginning or Cyberpunk 2077 or GTA Trilogy falling through the world map. These aren't the kind of bugs we're talking about. However, there is massive duplication bugs in there, allowing you to duplicate your box of Pokemon. It used to just be one Pokemon, then just the Pokemon in your party and now bugs have been discovered to let you duplicate the entire box.  Now, a super fast speed run is one thing, but it's because of the number of glitches and it's probably only going to get faster from there. I wouldn't be surprised if we see a sub 10 minute run of Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl someday as more and more bugs in glitches are discovered. The reason that I'm bringing up this criticism isn't to discourage you from buying the games or discourage you from having a great time with the games if you already own them because you probably are having a good time, but it's just to note that I'm always critical of like when GTA Trilogy and others out there seem to not be polished and I have to be fair even if it's a Nintendo, you know, exclusive release. Yeah, Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl doesn't look like it's that polished. I don't know who to blame for that. Do we blame the base developers? Is it Game Freak or the Pokemon companies fall for not giving them the time to polish it? Were they aware of all these bugs in the duplication glitches? Were they given the funding to have a proper QA testing team? Or did they have all of those resources and they just did a bad job? This is one of those things where we don't know what happened behind the scenes, but the final product is just kind of left in a little bit of a disappointing state. The visuals are subjective. Whether or not they did enough in remastering or remaking or bringing Gen 4 back is subjective. But a buggy game with lots of glitches, that's not really a subjective thing. Yeah, that probably shouldn't have been released in that state. And we're not used to Nintendo Switch exclusives releasing in that kind of state. Again, these aren't the kind of bugs that are really making the games unenjoyable, but they're definitely bugs that I kind of wish weren't there. Especially since a lot of people care about the competitive scene and being able to duplicate Pokemon and all this stuff is going to really mess with competitiveness. So yeah, we'll just have to wait and see how this goes long haul. But I'm just left a little bit disappointed that this game wasn't polished more before coming out. So I mentioned one final story that I wanted to talk about. And I debated on this back and forth because some other YouTubers have made a massive deal out of it. And I'm not so sure that I buy that it's that big of a deal. And it's something that could have been done a long time ago if anybody bothered to do it. It took two years for some fans to do this. And they could have did this decades ago and chose not to. Essentially, what has happened is Ocarina of Time has now been completely rebuilt with custom code in C, a much more popular coding language than the original language the game was written in. It is not code that Nintendo can touch. It does not use any code from the base game. It does not use any of Nintendo's assets. You can basically link any assets you want to this code base and run in Ocarina of Time style of game. Obviously, this is going to open the door to modifications and custom games. And this is really cool for the PC community and especially the modding community and all that. But I look at this as, look, they did this for Mario 64. They could have done this a long time ago. They haven't, because I don't know that the demand for such a thing is there.  It doesn't matter if you use Nintendo's code. You aren't able to use their assets either. So I don't really know what the point is. Nintendo hates fan mods.  So this opening the door to, you know, being able to make your own Ocarina of Time game. Well, if you can't use the art assets, then you're not really making an Ocarina of Time game. And if you use those art assets, Nintendo's going to shut it down anyways. So I don't know what the story is here. It's a cool thing. Maybe it's a fun fan project. Someone did for a college project for a grade. That's cool. Maybe it's something someone just wanted to do on their own. Fine. I just don't know why it's such a big deal. I know it's the Nintendo Mario 64 and there's been some cool things that have come out of that. But the thing is, anything that we're actually dreaming of from these modifications will get shut down anyway. So to me, it's just much to do about nothing. I like following up the modding and hacking community and custom code community. But I don't know. To me, this one really wasn't that big a deal. Some of you guys are going to disagree and go down to the comments and click like away and tell me how wrong I am. And that's fine. Remember, this was already done the Super Mario 64 and out of that, we haven't gotten anything that honestly matters. And I don't think that we're going to get anything this time either. So it's cool. It's out there. You can use the code that they wrote. Or you could just go make your own video game and learn how to make something basic and say, I don't know, Unity Engine? Unity Engine is actually really easy to work with.  So you can really learn to make your own games in Unity right now. I would suggest spending your time doing that versus porting already existing games into a different language, unless it's just a hobby of yours. All right, folks, I'm Nathan and Robert Jens from Nintendo Prime. I want to thank you so much for tuning in to Nintendo Prime today. By the way, we do have a merch sale going on right now. So we just launched our Hypersponsibly line along with some other stuff here. But if you would like to get your hands on some of this merch, we actually have a 15% discount code that's good until the end of the day tomorrow. That code is NPBF2021.  So basically you're getting these items at cost instead of me actually making any money on them. And I'm cool with that because I just want to help you guys out if you're interested in that stuff. So now's the time if you want to get that merch. Once you get to December, it pops back up to its normal pricing without the discount. So yeah, make sure you use that discount code NPBF2021 at checkout. I'm still waiting on some of my merch that I ordered. It's just shipped today. So I'm pretty excited. It might be over the end of the week. See, I'll be able to show you guys some of that merch. But the thing is it'll be December by then and the discount will be gone. So thank you guys for tuning in. And man, I really love what I do here on YouTube. Thank you guys. Peace out.