Good afternoon and welcome to this public meeting of the United States Consumer Product Safety Commission. We have one item on the agenda this afternoon, a public briefing on the subject of micro-mobility, a product category that includes e-bicycles, e-scooters, e-skateboards, and self-balancing scooters. Micro-mobility is a product category that emerged recently with hazards immediately evident in terms of self-balancing scooter fires and falls. More recently, other product types have come onto the market as well as new applications in a rideshare role. I'm pleased to welcome Doug Lee, the Electrical Program Area Risk Manager, who has led key initiatives in this product area. Mr. Lee is joined by Dwayne Bonfuss, the head of EXHR. We'll start with the staff's presentation followed by rounds of questions from the commissioners. We'll start with five-minute rounds, but again, I try to be flexible and we'll go as many rounds as needed. And with the concurrence of my colleagues, I will call on Commissioner Feldman first because I understand he may have to leave early. So, Doug, if you would, please proceed if Doug is the one who's going to proceed first. Thank you, commissioners. Good afternoon. I'd like to welcome commissioners, CPSC staff, and guests listening in today. Today, we are going to discuss micro-mobility, the potential hazards, and provide a risk review. Before we get started, I would just like to acknowledge the work of the micro-mobility products team, so mouthful there. Some of the initial work was done by Rick McCallion, who's the Mechanical Recreation Sports and Seniors Program Area Risk Manager. So that's another mouthful. And myself, the Electrical Program Area Risk Manager. I'd also like to introduce Lawrence Mella, I think is in the audience. He's a mechanical engineer in the Director for Engineering Sciences, and he will be leading a micro-mobility products multidisciplinary team of experts to address the hazard, along with Jacqueline Campbell. So I won't discuss everybody on the list in the interests of time, but all are very important to the project team. So first, we're going to talk about the product. What are micro-mobility products? As defined by the Society of Automotive Engineers, micro-mobility products are motorized, low-speed, small personal transportation devices or products for roadways, sidewalks, and paths. When we talk about motorized, it's meaning fully motorized or pedal assisted, or assisted by kicking. Low-speed is designed for 20 miles per hour or less. And small size, meaning it's three feet wide or less, an ability to fit on typical bike lanes and sidewalk paths. And typically the products are also lightweight. There are three basic categories of product which are defined in the info brief reference here and compiled by a DOT contractor. The info brief is entitled The Basics of Micro-Mobility and Related Motorized Devices for Personal Transport, of which CPSC staff provided comments on the document. So category one is essentially electric standing or sitting scooters. Category two is electric bicycles or e-bikes, otherwise known as e-bikes, and within that there are three subcategories. Class one is pedal assisted. Class two is throttle assisted. Class three is pedal assisted, higher speed e-bikes. And the third class is e-skateboards, including self-balancing scooters or hoverboards, including single-wheel products and variations. There are many variations of this product being developed. So here are some pictures of the products just to describe, that we just described. All these products fall within CPSC's regulatory jurisdiction. So you've all probably seen some of them are sitting one wheel, this one's a standing one, and there's also sitting scooters of course. There are many similar products on the market that might be considered micro-mobility. However, for the scope of this project, products that are not consumer products include mobility scooters for medical transportation purposes. Moped's and scooters for streets and motorized or motorcycles for streets also. Those are handled by DOT. Consumer mobility products that are not micro-mobility products include golf carts, which are of course operated on golf courses. Battery-powered ride-on toys, which is CPSC's jurisdiction, and is mainly handled by the ASTM F963 voluntary standard for toys, and also go-karts. So again, these are things that we're not considering micro-mobility for the purposes of this project. What are the new product trends? New battery development, mainly lithium-ion batteries, has made personal transportation products more affordable for consumer and commercial development. Shared-use commercial products have grown in cities and universities. Coexisting on streets and sidewalks with motor vehicles and pedestrians has been a major concern. Safety issues have developed from the new market trends. Documented mechanical, electrical, and fall hazards we have seen. Dockless products can be a public safety issue or a tripping hazard. As seen in the photo at the lower left, people have just left the e-scooters on the sidewalk right in front of a sidewalk. So this is of course a tripping hazard, and you've probably seen pictures of these devices left by the subway entrances as well. So it's not only an eyesore, but a safety issue that we're concerned about. On the lower right is a person that's gone around collecting the e-scooters for purposes of to make money. Some rideshare companies allow individuals to collect these devices and take them home and charge them. And that's been a charging of, hoverboards has been a serious concern of ours, of course, from the beginning. And these batteries are larger battery packs. Some other ridesharing companies do have training and train their personnel to take these units and charge them to official docking stations. So that's a little bit safer. Micromobility products and the internet of things. Just about everything manufactured today is being connected to the internet. And micromobility products are no exception. Some consumer products need connection to the internet just to activate or use the product. Commercial rideshare products will need mobile access to the internet to unlock and use the product, although some may still use credit cards and a docking station. Since products are connected to the internet and involve the use of software, there is a potential for software issues. Cyber security hacking issues or remote updating issues, if it's not properly updated, can be issues. Connecting to the internet can also be a good thing as it allows for the product to be improved with software fixes, including automatic or manual updates. Just last week's staff were talking to some people at XFO and there's an incident in Sweden where it was connected to the internet and all of a sudden it lost connection and it just stopped the rideshare device. So that's, you know, needs to be worked out within the voluntary standards. Next we'll talk about hazards. You've probably seen many of these. We've addressed this, I guess it was 2016, incident from self-balancing electric scooters. As we mentioned, charging can be very dangerous. Products do not have good quality cells, good battery management systems or safety circuits to prevent cells from being used outside their safe operating region. As you can see here, it just takes one cell to go into a thermal event, thermal runaway it's called, and then it takes out all the other cells. And that's typically what happens with a hoverboard, it just takes out the area where the battery pack is. And we had many serious incidents, I've just pictured a few of them here to show how serious it has been. And the upper left corner, two little girls lost their life because of this charging incident. And the center is over a million dollar fire and one in the right was caught locally, but it did ignite their bedding and they did get out safely. Continuing to talk about the incidents, three deaths from two battery related incidents. We investigated more than 330 fire incidents up to March 2019 with non-certified product, over 9 million in property damage, and we've had two deaths from falls. There's been an estimated over 70,000 emergency room visits through 2018. 90% were fall related, 13% involved head injuries, 40% involved arm injuries, usually fractures, 38% or contusions were reported, and then 16% lower level hazards, sprains and strains. Incidents from e-scooters and e-bikes. We know that annual bicycle incidents include an estimated 467,000 injuries and over a thousand deaths. We believe that some of these incidents may include e-bikes depending on how they are reported. E-bikes does have a separate product code and there are an estimated 20,000 incidents annually. Since the number of micromobility products is increasing, we might expect to see a rise in injuries and possibly severe injuries involving e-bikes and e-scooters as e-bikes are faster, heavier products with more controls and features and things like displays, cell phones and other things can cause distraction while you're riding e-bikes. We know from reported incidents and seeing products used on the street that helmet use is very limited. Helmets may not be readily available when needed. Carrying a helmet around during the day is a problem for some. And we know that helmets use may reduce the severity of head injuries from other studies. An epidemiology report of micromobility product incident data will be completed later this fiscal year. So when we were classifying incidents with micromobility products, typically we classify them as either mechanical or electrical because different people usually handle the address and the hazards. The major categories of mechanical incidents include falls, motor vehicle collisions, frame or structural issues and braking issues. The electrical categories of incidents include charging issues, fires from batteries due to mechanical mounting issues and braking software related issues. The cause of micromobility incidents can be broken down to three areas, the product, the rider and the motorist. For the product, brake issues including brake failure, unexpected braking or just being unfamiliar with how to use the brakes has been reported. Structural resilience including cast or welding issues not being able to withstand the rider loads and impacts during use. Variability in operation and performance such as braking or steering has also been reported. We've seen lack of warnings and instructions for consumers and there have been also maintenance issues with the product. For the riders, the cause has been from being unfamiliar with local laws or choosing not to obey them. The rider is unfamiliar with the product or not able to avoid cracks, potholes or drainage grates in the pavement or sidewalks. Riders have also simply lost balance or have been thrown off products while trying to avoid obstacles. For the motorist issues, the cause may have been that motorists are unfamiliar with bicycle or scooter laws. The motorist may not yield to bikes or scooters if they're in a hurry or simply do not see them. Next we'll talk about hazard reduction efforts that we're doing. When we look at the regulatory landscape, the use of the personal or ride share product is regulated by the local jurisdictions and transportation departments such as city, state or universities. Helmet use is limited as we discuss because they may not really be available when choosing to use a ride share device, thereby increasing consequences of incidents. The use of sidewalks or requirements for roadway use may vary by jurisdiction, sometimes confusing both the rider and motorist on the streets. Next we will look at the CPSC bike regulation and voluntary standards that are available. The CPSC bike regulation at 16 CFR part 1512 requirements for bicycles include mechanical requirements for bicycle and electric bicycles. However, there are no electrical requirements other than to limit the speed of the bicycle for mechanical structure of the bicycle. Similarly, many ASTM International, European Committee for Standardization, or CEN, and International Organization for Standardization, ISO, Voluntary Standards for Bicycles, both types and conditions, or there are multiple types of mechanical conditions, provide requirements for the mechanical requirements and safety. The voluntary standards for mechanical aspects include ASTM F2641 and ASTM 2642, which is the labeling or co-standard for the mechanical requirements in F2641. Staff believe these standards need to be updated to address new lithium battery products. Staff is involved with two F15.58 working groups, one on hoverboards and the other on commercial ride-sharing type scooters. The draft standard commercial electric powered scooters for adults has just been begun. We should note that there seem to be good participation in the early stages of the standards development from the ride-sharing companies at this point. Looking at the electrical voluntary standards, staff has been involved in UL 2272 from the start in 2016 when the peak incidents occurred with hoverboards. So the new 2272 standard is called Standard for Electrical System for Personal E-Mobility Devices. So it basically includes many of the products that we are interested in here. UL did publish a UL 2849 standard just last month and that addresses electrical systems for e-bikes. There is European standards EN15194 that covers electrically powered assisted cycles and there's ISO standard which is in draft form for e-bikes. So next we're going to talk about what we see as the path forward. As we look at regulatory clarity, the use of the product is defined as we said by the Department of Transportation and the local jurisdiction. And CPSC of course has the product safety jurisdiction. So there is some work to coordinate on addressing the safety hazards. We need to better define the hazards and how we can improve safety. In the fall of 2018 staff worked with Worcester Polytechnic Institute students to take an initial look at hazards and use for ride-share devices. This was a limited study in the Washington D.C. area that we needed to expand to other markets. It provided a limited data set. We need to identify hazards better within each product group on consumer and commercial levels. To address the hazards, CPSC staff will be holding a Micromobility Public Safety form later this year in June. And we hope to bring multiple stakeholders here and get the hazards on the table and then look at potential solutions for those hazards. For risk assessment, the risk management group staff is tasked with drafting a summary report hazards associated with Micromobility products this year. It basically will be a written summary of what we're presenting here today. We also discussed that there will be an epidemiology staff report on all Micromobility products later this year. Detailing more of the previous incidents that I briefly discussed earlier. Like other consumer products, staff continue development or improvements in the relevant voluntary standards to address incidents. For ASTM, staff is currently working on commercial scooters and self-balancing scooters with industry. Recently, staff also sent a letter to ASTM to provide incident data and encourage further development of the standards. For UL electrical standards, staff will continue to seek improvements where needed. Just note for the compliance, there are involved in some cases as reported incidents and will continue to address those incidents as they arise. For outreach efforts, the Office of Communications is planning safety alerts and public service announcements in conjunction with a Micromobility team to better educate consumers. Collaboration with stakeholders. Staff has been and will continue to collaborate with the many stakeholders. We'll just name a few here. Interagency-wise, staff is coordinating with the Department of Transportation, the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, and the NTSB to address safety of products combined with use on streets and public areas. Staff is also working to coordinate lithium battery safety and transport a product with the Department of Transportation Administration, the Pipeline Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, and the Federal Aviation Administration. Through interagency agreement, staff has been collaborating with the Naval Warfare Center Carderock Division locally, leveraging their battery expertise with CPSC's product safety knowledge to address safety hazards as seen in the field. Staff is also using NSWC Carderock to also review new technologies that could be used for consumer products. Staff collaborate with manufacturers and trade organizations to improve voluntary standards. Staff work with safety advocates to address hazards. Staff have shared safety information with safety counterparts in various countries and will continue to do this on emerging hazards in this area. So in summary, staff believe that the key points to advancing consumer safety include improvements in voluntary standards, educating consumers on understanding of safe operations, and improving product design and maintenance to address field incidents. So with that, we'll take questions. Doug, thank you very much. Commissioner Feldman. Thank you. Acting Chairman Adler, I appreciate the courtesy in letting me go forward and also for some help with the scheduling of the meeting this afternoon. I appreciate that. Thank you all for being here and for the overview. I think that when you look at micro-mobility and e-scooters in particular, this is an innovative product category. It's arisen, as I understand it, to meet consumer demand to fill the so-called last mile problem where legacy transportation systems are inefficient in delivering people to their final destination. And I think that's one of the reasons why you tend to see a number of these products clustered around, for instance, metro stops. But I think it's important that CPSC proceed with some humility here and that we avoid the precautionary principle so that at the same time we leverage all of our resources to make sure that there's safety in the product category and that we're maximizing innovation and competition in this particular product segment. That said, in listening to the discussion today, does it make sense to bifurcate e-scooters in particular, the agency's approach to focus on commercial and fleet applications, ride-sharing apps, versus the product devices that we're seeing available directly to consumers through retail that are docked at home? I guess we're collecting the data later in the year. I think we need to see where the incidents occur. So I think how do you separate that is often difficult. Some of these devices are essentially the same. And then commercial use will be a little bit more stringent on that. So I think the ride-sharing companies are in at the voluntary standards and will provide input, and we will provide input based on what we see as our data. I think that that's going to be a critical piece of getting this right to make sure that we avoid, to the extent that we're talking regulation and standards, holding certain applications to a standard that's just inappropriate and doesn't sort of fit the fact pattern that we're seeing in the real world. But Dwayne, it looked like you wanted to jump in there. Yeah, and I think that your point is well taken. As a matter of fact, staff's letter to ASTM really focused on encouraging work in the commercial electric powered scooters arena, just because there is what we're seeing is a significant difference. We're seeing many more incidents with these commercial devices, and so your point is well taken. But that could also be due just to exposure rates. It certainly is. I think and what our letter to ASTM is focused on, let's try to sort through, is there a differential product hazard pattern, or is it just due to the exposure? Got it. Can you talk a little bit about the competitive landscape of the e-scooter market? Well, I guess we can say it is very competitive. I've just seen them grow in many cities and there's often two or three companies in cities and they have to usually get approval from the local jurisdiction. So there is competition and there's competitions as we showed there to grab a hold of these devices and charge them up. So I don't know if you want to add? Yeah, certainly there's been a growth in the number of the entities providing the commercial service. They are often locally regulated, so there may be a limited number that are allowed, but there is a healthy competition. I got it. When staff participates in voluntary standards development, one of the things that the commission is supposed to consider is, among other things, whether the voluntary standard excludes requirements that would be anti-competitive or that would create a restraint of trade. Have you conducted that analysis? So as we discussed in other forums, we have and continue to look at anti-competitive as an element. I think we have the benefit of the ANSI standard umbrella and the essential elements, which do have a pretty strong competition component in there, but it is an element that we continue to look at. Okay. Has the UL 2272 standard, has the scope of that been expanded to include handlebar scooters? Has that been validated yet? 2272 is for the electrical system, so it does include powered handlebar scooters. I noted on the slide that it hasn't looked at the ride sharing, but the basic safety of keeping the cell within the operating region, all that should be the same. I mentioned an incident with Sweden that the internet connection issues could be a concern, so that particular item hasn't been addressed with that particular standard. Okay. I appreciate the attention. Thank you all for being here. My time's expired. If you feel the need for additional time, feel free to take it. I may have additional questions, and if it's okay with everybody, I'd like to follow up in writing. That sounds fine. Thank you very much for the presentation. I did want to address the notion of competition, and this is one where I suspect Commissioner Feldman and I are on the opposite sides of the street with respect to that, because one of the concerns I've had is that this seems to be a product where at least the players feel first mover is a major advantage, and to me that has suggested that sometimes they're a little slip shot in producing and manufacturing their products. Do you have a sense one way or the other? Again, we're asking economics of folks who are not necessarily economists, but do you have a sense of whether that is a great dynamic within this industry, or am I just mistaken in my assumption? Yes, certainly we have, as I noted in an earlier response, there's significant competition at the local and national levels between these services, and we've seen kind of ebbs and flows between them as the market has evolved. One of the things I've also noticed about the e-scooters is there just seems to be a fixed notion about how wide the handlebars are, and that makes sense because if you're riding them down a street and the handlebars are too wide, you're going to whack somebody as you drive by. But I do note that bicycles have wider handlebars, and it always seemed to me that when you have these narrow handlebars, that makes them incredibly unstable. Is there any movement or interest or voluntary standards activity towards addressing whether wider handlebars would make for a more stable product? We'll have to check with the mechanicals and get back to you on that issue, but I think just from riding them personal, I think it's more a stability thing. We noticed the scooters, you know, the self-balancing. No, that's actually what I meant. I meant that they're making them narrow so they don't hit people as they ride by, but the fact that they're so narrow makes them unstable is my thought. Well, what I was trying to get at is like the self-balancing scooters don't have any handlebars, right? And so that's a different story, is the riders trying to maintain their balance. It is. I see some guy going across the bridge. It looks like 30 miles an hour just holding this briefcase or reading a newspaper, and that just scares the daylights out of me, but they have them and if you make a product, I suppose somewhere you'll find somebody who's willing to use it. Again, I apologize for interrupting. Yeah, so I think the width has to do something with, you know, you want it narrow so it is not, you know, snagging obstacles or other people on the sidewalk, but the stability, I think there's some work to do there, but my feeling is that the wire it is may be more of a comfort thing to riders and stuff, and it's kind of related to, you know, biking and speed, and they had the old racing bikes where you were narrow to draft, and, you know, so it's not necessarily related to stability on the bike or the... What about a wider wheelbase? I see little kids on scooters that have double wheels on them and I'm wondering if that makes them more stable and has anybody come up with a wider foundation to any scooter? I'm guessing the answer is no. Are you talking about the self-balancing scooters? Yeah. No, no, I'm sorry. No, I'm talking about the ones with handlebars. Okay. Well, the wider tires actually help because of the cracks on the sidewalks. Yeah. And so that being stable, but there are different lengths and stuff according to their intended for smaller children. Generally, they're a smaller wheelbase to accommodate the rider and balance of the rider. I just love playing mechanical engineer. I did want to ask one other question, Doug. Do you have a sense about the scope of the battery problem? Is it pretty much fixed? Is it still growing because there's new technology that's coming on the market? In other words, how serious is the battery fire problem at this point? I think with the... The battery problem is going to be different for e-bikes and the self-balancing scooters. The self-balancing scooters had a lot of inrush currents, starts, and stops, so your temperature of the cells continued to rise and rise. Whereas the e-bike use and scooter use, you're going to... Like a car, you start and you start going, so it's not as extreme.  So there's not as much stress. That being said, though, there are incidents. And if I alluded to earlier, if the battery is not carefully... where the cells are not carefully maintained with their proper voltage current and temperature, you can have incidents. So we've had incidents. And, you know, what happened with the hoverboards is we enforced meeting the voluntary standards. And that all but, you know, reduced the incidents. Thank you, Commissioner Kay. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you to Mr. Lee, Mr. Boniface for the presentation. And Mr. Boniface, this might be better answered by you. I just don't know, or maybe Mr. McCallion needs to jump up to at least supplement the answer. So I'll start, I guess, with Mr. Boniface. To what extent has staff prepared changes to specific changes to the voluntary standards or additions to the voluntary standards, technical changes, test requirements to address what we've seen so far with these products? So if you look, for instance, at scooters, clearly there have already been a number of issues. We've seen battery issues. We've seen fire issues. Well, those are the same thing. We've seen fire issues with batteries. We've seen the boards themselves breaking. We've seen breaking issues of the tolerances and as well as maintenance issues. So we've already cataloged a number of the hazards and the design flaws associated with these. And so have we already prepared what we want to see in terms of changes to the standards, whether it's UL or ASTM? A good question. We have not prepared specific changes to the standards. However, earlier this month staff did send a letter delineating actually those very same list of issues. The structural resilience of the products, particularly given the heavier use, user interface usability familiarity with the products, warnings and instructions, breaking systems and commonality thereof. So the letter that we sent included that a list of here are things that we believe need to be looked at and potentially worked on, but we did not delineate specific changes at this point. I see. And thank you for that. We not only have a test rig now at 5RP that's capable of at least testing some of these aspects. Are we including in the current year's work plan going out and either purchasing or renting these units, using them and doing sort of a cross-sectional in essence PSAs on these to try to gather the type of intelligence that we would have so that we would be able to be better armed when we go to the voluntary standards? We do have a healthy degree of testing that we have been doing. Part of that is in support of compliance for four cases. We also have another project that we initiated at the end of last year, getting assistance with testing these software aspects. That was a capability that we felt could be buttressed. So as part of that we've also been testing. We don't have as yet a program of going beyond that. Quite frankly, we've been doing a lot of support to compliance in this area. So we've been doing a fair bit of testing. So is the hope that we're at least getting enough of a cross-sectional look at these products through the compliance testing that maybe that is good enough for this round? I think at this stage it's certainly between the testing that we've done, the incident data that we've reviewed, whether it's from consumer reporting or manufacturer reporting, has given us a solid basis for here are some of the hazard patterns that need to be worked on and given us some preliminary insights. So that gets us to a stage where we think we can have a good focused dialogue with the voluntary standards organizations to try to address that and we may need to pick up additional testing to work out some of the finer details. Got it. Thank you. And then you mentioned software. One thing that we haven't really talked about much is hacking because there's been at least one case of a scooter being hacked. And so I was curious to know where that fits into this, whether that is Mr. Lee or somebody else to answer. I recognize that there are separate ASTM and UL efforts as well as others underway for connected devices. But I'm wondering how that all ends up coming together to make sure that we're not missing that component as the connected part intersects with safety. I'll try to. We're doing a number of things with the Internet of Things project. So it does tie the hazards do tie together. So we're working with NIS as part of an interagency agreement. And so they're combining consultation expertise to help us understand that. And then Dwayne also mentioned the contracting work that we have is also looking at that aspect of it. So that is on our radar screen. There are UL voluntary standards that do presently address some of that stuff. The thing that needs to be put together is the requirements to get them into this standard and how do we address those getting those requirements in. Great. Thank you very much, gentlemen. Commissioner Miyako. Thank you. And thank you for your presentation. It's incredibly thorough, which shows us, I think that there are a lot of issues here. And I can't help but wonder if we're really going about this the right way. And when I say we, I don't mean the CPSC. I mean everybody who has a hand in this because there are so many issues that I think some of the things that Chairman Adler raised today are questions that I have. But to answer them, it depends on the use of the product. I'm uncomfortable candidly with using the same type of scooter that you would buy for your kid in the driveway as you would use in these commercial scenarios. So when Chairman Adler raises issues about how wide the handlebars are because we're going to use them on the street and try to get between, you know, whatever it is they get between, that's a different scenario than if you're using them in a much more controlled environment. And some of the standards here I think are not universal.  In conjunction with bike lanes and cars, which I see as a free-for-all and using the same scooter that I would buy from my son or daughter at Christmas time how those standards could address that straight across the board. And I'm wondering if whether we're all, not just the CPSC everybody's running around and making determinations that aren't really going to serve safety at all. Thoughts on that? Yeah, if we go back to the mechanical voluntary standards. So there is a voluntary standard in place for powered scooters for commercial products already. We need to update. So let me stop you because I did circle that. Okay. What exactly defines a commercial scooter? Okay, so that's going to be defined by this new working group effort which includes the rideshare manufacturers. It includes CPSC staff and other consensus. Okay, I'm sorry. Let me try again. Okay. Tell me how a commercial scooter, the product itself differs from a consumer scooter because if I look at the two sitting side by side, it's the same darn scooter. Yeah, in some cases right now they are the same product on the market. We believe that for commercial use, they're going to see more cycles of battery charging, typically heavier loads or a wider variety of loads. You know, you may buy a scooter for your child who only weighs a certain amount, but the ones on the street may see large individuals. And I want to stop you right there. That's exactly my point. Okay. It's very difficult to make a voluntary standard that addresses both of those scenarios straight across the board because we leave out use. So if my center daughter who's going to be using it in the driveway or the neighborhood weighs a certain amount of pounds, how the scooter itself is designed, the distribution of weight, the center of gravity, the size of the wheels, the size of the hand board, the speed, the brakes, very different from the voluntary standard if I, in my high heels, God, for God, don't let me on these things. Can you picture Bob's description as prissy as I am standing on something like that in my high heels with my designer bag reading the paper? That is a disaster waiting to happen. And it's a funny sight, okay? You cannot have the same product voluntary standard to accommodate for that as you would effectively the same scooter that my kid would ride. Do you follow me? We could talk about batteries. We could talk about some things are, they cross the lines. But how it's used makes a difference in what the standard should be on the scooter itself. Duane, do you follow me? Yeah. And I think we wholeheartedly agree. And as I noted, we had a letter to ASTM earlier this month to basically get at that specific issue. And I do note that ASTM has two, it's behind. So we already have ASTM standards in place for the, what I call the private use, the consumer, typical consumer, where they are starting to work and our letter pushes them on that regard, is on the differences associated with these commercials. Because it's, as you noted, it's a different use pattern, different users, less familiar users, potentially larger users. There's just a range of differences. And I think the product needs to be different personally. So, and I think that that's what the intent of this standards effort is, is to define what the product, what the standards that that product should meet. And so, should it have a more robust platform? Should it have a more robust braking system or so forth? That's what we're looking to work through. Okay. All of my questions stem from that and I'm out of time, so. Thank you. And actually, the image that you just presented is when I see from time to time as I'm walking downtown, I'll see a young lady in a business outfit, no helmet of course, high heels just blazing down the sidewalk and it always gives me a moment of concern. I only had one question and one remaining and Commissioner Kay basically asked it and that had to do with hacking, but one of the things that a nightmare scenario and maybe it's about as common for appliances as it would be for scooters, but how easily could somebody hack into an entire system, hit a button, and all of a sudden every e-scooter that belongs to a particular product stops immediately or is it because they're calibrated for each separate scooter that that is an unlikely scenario to occur? They might stop one, but would they stop hundreds? And I see Patti Adair there and I'm sure she could just come up and give us an instant answer. I think that concerns us as well, you know, hacking and one minute we don't have any incidents and then all of a sudden there's potentially millions of incidents. The good thing is people are generally not hacking consumer products, they're hacking to get financial gains. So that's one thing we've learned. That's reassuring. Yeah, so we do want to make sure that, you know, and working with NIS what we would recommend to consumers and getting the level so that we're not concerned that there are multiple products out there that can all of a sudden have issues. We have seen reported hacking issues that people are affecting the brakes, but have not been able to confirm that yet. I mean the one thing that's clear is that the manufacturer certainly knows how to invalidate or inactivate all of it because when we had the cell phone issue, if you hadn't returned your cell phone by a certain point, they were all inactivated or deactivated. So it is a concern. Anyway, thank you very much for that. I don't have any further questions. I would encourage us because there's so many issues and because we talk often about resources, this is one area that I think we ought to narrow our scope to make sure we're addressing our issues, consumer product safety, as opposed to being part of something that is so big and has so many issues that really don't pertain to us. That's why I'm concerned with just setting standards that go across the board. I wonder if we shouldn't start and look at whether, you know, we could carve out the batteries I get, that makes sense, but whether we should be carving some of the stuff up and putting safety standards in place that, you know, I'm going to come back to this and maybe someone could talk me out of this because I have not researched it and I haven't talked to either of you about this, but having a different scooter manufactured, a different standard, if you're going to manufacture a consumer scooter, it looks like this, ABC&D, and if you're going to be using it in this, it has to have, it's going to look differently. You can't roll off the line the same scooter and then put it in a docking station or my house and say that it's commercial versus consumer product. Yeah, I think, you know, that's the intent here. There is a separate standard for consumer products and industry, including ride-sharing manufacturers, is getting together to address the commercial. So there will be two separate products. Okay. Right now. There's just one. There could be one. I'm not saying all the manufacturers or ride-sharing companies are using the same. They kind of look the same and may actually be manufactured by the same company. Inside, it may be totally different and may actually be more robust. So I'm not sure that eases your concern. So you're telling, we're just not there yet. Right. Okay. Okay. Thank you. So thank you to Mr. Lee and Mr. Boniface and to your impressive and large team that's working on this project. I'm delighted to see all these talented staff working on it. This concludes this public meeting of the United States Consumer Product Safety Commission. Again, thank you.


Hello, everyone, and welcome to the WordPress Briefing, the podcast where you can catch quick explanations of the ideas behind the WordPress open source project, some insight into the community that supports it, and get a small list of big things coming up in the next two weeks. I'm your host, Josef Ahaden-Champosi. Here we go. I have with me Alex Kirk, who is a long-time WordPress contributor and who has been instrumental in recent innovations in the polyglots work. Facebook, the Gutenberg Project, is native multilingual support, and so I see this work that is being done as instrumental, not only for our global community, but in support of what's to come in that specific roadmap. So without further ado, Alex Kirk, welcome to the WordPress Briefing. Hello. How are you doing? I'm good, I'm good. Can you, let's, because I bet that not a lot of people know who you are, can you first start by just telling me a bit about your work with WordPress and then let us know what Glopress is for those of us who don't know yet? All right, so Automatic sponsors me to work in the WordPress project on the meta team and on the polyglots team. So I spent time on improving, or helping improve the software that powers the translation on WordPress.org, but I also work on the meta team on things like Matrix and evaluating if it would be a good fit for WordPress to switch to Matrix for their chat system. So a lot of really big projects that you work on, all of that kind of stuff that has no easy solutions anymore is where you are right now, huh? Yeah, there's no clear path, but it's our mission to find it. So that's part of what makes things interesting. Cool. So for folks that don't know too much about the polyglots team or generally translating WordPress, the software, can you let us know a bit about what Glopress is? Right, so the translation system that powers WordPress.org is called Glopress. It used to be a standalone software that was developed a couple of years ago and it was transformed into a WordPress plugin at some point and now powers the translation that happens on WordPress.org. So we translate WordPress core there from English to other languages, plugins, themes, block patterns and it all happens through the software called Glopress. There are a couple of Glopress installations around the world but I think the WordPress.org one is one of the bigger ones. Probably WordPress.org is pretty massive. Also, I think it's great that you said that Glopress was created a couple of years ago. Like that indicates to me that you're working on a really different time scale than a lot of folks are in WordPress. So Alex, tell me a little bit about what it takes to ship translated WordPress software. So I mean for people who don't need translated WordPress like obviously we don't have a good idea of what it takes to make sure that WordPress is available in so many languages. So what goes into the work of making sure that that happens? Right, so typically the WordPress software and plugins and themes are primarily created in English and for it to be available in other languages it needs to be translated. And for that to be able to happen the programmers need to make the software translatable. Basically they're providing each English string for the translation software to be available to be transformed so to speak into another language and to what it's being transformed to this is what the translators do. So they go into the Glopress software and see the list of texts that need to be translated and translated to their language that they speak. Typically there is a process around this. So we've got people who have lots of experience in translation and specifically in translating WordPress or WordPress plugins and they're kind of the people who help ensure good quality of translation. So anybody who's working in the WordPress project so basically who has a WordPress org account can come in and address the translation. And that translation enters the system so to speak in a waiting state. And then somebody who we promoted to be a translation editor will come along and take a look at your translation and will approve it or will give you suggestions how to do the translation in a better way or come up with maybe even a better translation when you have a small thing that's just not right like a missing full stop or something like that they might just add it for you. And well as soon as the plugin or soft press translated to a certain level of translations those translations will be shipped out to the WordPress installs. So for example for a plugin you would reach 90% of translated strings. Those translations will then be basically packed up into a zip file, a language pack and delivered to each WordPress so that you can have the translations available there. And is 90% the threshold for plugins only or is that also the threshold for like themes and the CMS itself? Well, we strive for 100% I would say and 90% is more of a motivational point. To be actually honest I'm not sure if the threshold is 90% for every project or even if it's actually 90% it's different between different cloud press installations and it's basically something that is made as a setting that can be changed. There's it's an arbitrary number. Typically you'd actually want to make sure that the most important strings are translated first. So the ones like if you look at the whole picture software usually consists of many parts many of whom are not encountered by people on a regular basis for example error messages that could be like obscure error messages. And you could argue that those might be not as important or even sometimes you could even say like do they need to be translated because if you encounter an error message and you search the internet wouldn't you probably want everybody to search for the English one to find the solution but that set aside. It's important to have like the headline of the plugin or like the most important strings translated and typically translating those most important strings will take you to a pretty high percentage so that we can then say it's good enough to be shipped. Gotcha. I see. Let's see. Okay. Well we talked a bit earlier about Glotpress' timeline. It has been around for a bit I know but with that kind of in mind have there been any notable changes to Glotpress recently? Yeah. So I think for Glotpress there's been a bit of an up and down over time in terms of engagement and progress on the software but in the recent year I think we've added a couple of things that have been very helpful for translators. So one of them was adding the commenting functionality. Super helpful. Yeah. Shocked it wasn't there before. Sorry translators, sorry all of our polyglots. Well it can be like there was when Glotpress was created there is like a big part of Glotpress are these states like the waiting state when you enter translation and then there's the approved state which basically a translation we say it's set to current and there's all sorts of process around it. So if the software is updated the translation might get fuzzy but also like if somebody submits a translation that doesn't fully conform to what the translation editors or like what the standards of the translation community have been set to then you would have to need to reject it and that has been something that we felt wasn't a very good and enticing way of telling people like we appreciate your work it wasn't just quite right but it's more of a rejection. So this is how we came up with this like let's give people the option to say what was wrong and give them a chance to try again without making them feel rejected. Yeah, sort of a no but as opposed to just refusal to receive it. And other things that we worked on is like with the recent search of AI like getting help from AI on translation and also on reviews. So there's some interesting things that you can do with the AI in that regard that one important aspect of translations is also that we've got glossaries for each language where people basically the translation community identify certain words they want to translate them the same way every time. And with the AI you can basically add to the prompt like please translate those words to those translations when you give me a translation for that. And as it can change over time you can always adapt this to the prompt and it has been proven quite helpful. Right, that's great. That's one of those things I know that AI has been like a really popular thing to talk about. And AI specifically for translations I think has caused some concern that maybe we'll just like translate it all and hope that computers get it right when we know pretty certainly that computers don't always get the translations right but that's not what you're talking about, right? What you're suggesting is that AI would suggest what could be translated and what it could be translated to and then human beings have to confirm that that's correct. That's exactly it. So basically we give suggestions to the translators and then they can modify a translation before they press save. It's more of a like supporting them in getting the translations like looking up words more quickly and all of that. That's wonderful. So is that the major sort of next step that is coming for GlotPress or are there other things that we should keep an eye out for in that software? So one direction that we've been taking GlotPress is basically making use of the fact that GlotPress is a WordPress plugin now. And typically you would just use a GlotPress install. So on WordPress.org there is like GlotPress installed. There's translation projects created, something that we call translation sets. So for languages you want to translate it to it's all pre-configured. And if you would install GlotPress the plugin on your own WordPress, it would be empty and not very useful. So what we've added is a way for you to basically be able to translate the plugins and themes that you've got installed in your WordPress into the language that you're interested in. So you might have a non-English website that you want to use certain plugins with and they might not be fully translated at this point. So obviously you could go to WordPress.org and help translate them. And that's the way that's preferred. But you could also now go install GlotPress on your own website and translate there. And then you have the translations there right when you enter them. And you can then contribute those translations back to WordPress.org. So that's with local GlotPress? That's something that we call local GlotPress. And since we then have all these translations in the local database, it means we can do even more with those translations. So typically language packs would be delivered to WordPress. But with local GlotPress, you've got like all the GlotPress software there. So we can do things like inline translation. So on your own WordPress and the admin, for example, we can highlight all the strings that can be translated. And those strings just have to right click them and enter your translation. And that way you can basically go about and translate the whole UI, seeing your progress as you're making basically turning the screen from red to green. Yeah, yeah. So that's something now that you can do in your local WordPress installation. Basically it's completely independent of WordPress.org. We would ask you to contribute the translations back when you have them, but being independent also allows you to translate like premium plugins, which could not be hosted on WordPress.org or doing something like, that we call like hyper local translation. So for example, I speak Austrian German natively, but even inside Austria we've got different dialects or like special words that we use. And if I wanted to create a website that's targeted at the V&E's market, for example, I might want to use those specific terms. And this is something I would have to argue for those translations to be accepted on WordPress.org because it's like a very targeted market. But if I have a local GlotPress, I can do those translations there. That seems awfully beneficial, especially as dialects. I've been having these conversations I have in my extended family, many children, and they are all learning languages. And one of them has been having kind of thoughts about like dialect and how dialects are almost another language. And if so, like how do you know what everybody is saying when you're speaking all the same thing, but it's kind of a little bit, it sounds a little bit different. That's certainly a thing in the US, the distinct dialects across our country. And so I imagine that that's gonna be a really beneficial sort of implementation for countries that have a lot of different regional variations and certainly smaller countries that have technically the same language as somebody else, but a lot of regional differences, regional specific thing. Is that the same or different as the live translations translate lives that we talked about at the, where can't Europe a couple weeks back? Right, so translate live is kind of the next step after local WordPress. It's like this happy marriage between the WordPress Playground and local WordPress. So the WordPress Playground is also something that has come up a lot. It's basically a way for you to run WordPress inside a browser window, so in JavaScript. And at first it seems like mildly interesting, I would say, but when you combine it with other things like local WordPress, it can lead to really interesting opportunities. So with inline translation, for example, on WordPress.org you would typically find for every plugin, the UI would look the same. You would have a table of strings and all that makes you realize you're translating this certain plugin is that in the header of the page, it says this name of the plugin, but other than that, it can look really all the same. And now with WordPress Playground, you can put up a WordPress and run this plugin inside that Playground. And now if you add local WordPress to the picture, you can also do the inline translation of that plugin inside the WordPress Playground. So you've got inline translation. We add the glossary so that you make sure that you translate things the same way that they were expected. And you don't have to install the plugin and still you can see what the translations will look like. You can see the strings next to each other. And what I think is most important, you will start with the strings that you see first, which are the most important ones. When you're in the table view, those strings might be somewhere buried in the middle. And yeah, it's really hard to see progress if you start with kind of obscure error messages, for example, versus just starting with the things that you see first. So moving translations away from table-based translations where you kind of have to know what you're looking for. So the translate live along with local GlotPress, along with WP Playground, it's going to make it so that it's easier to see visually what needs to be translated where what's most valuable to translate for your mid-users and your end-users basically, yeah. That and also for plugin authors, it can be really good to see, you can switch the languages in the Playground to another language. And you can quickly see what's the state of the translation in this language or in that language. And even things like Arabic as an RTL language, rights to left language, the sidebar will change to the right. And you can also just switch language and see what's my plugin like in this environment. I mean, this is not technically something that's related to local GlotPress, but in this Translations Live UI, it's very easy to change languages and see your plugin in another language. I mean, it's not specifically related to Translations Live, but also I think that if we're saying that WordPress not necessarily is going to lead the way with translations than native multilingual support in our CMS, because of course, it's still a little bit far out on our roadmap. We certainly have an opportunity to have the best implementation of that. And even if that specific use case that you're talking about isn't related directly to what it is that you are working on for polyglots and inside GlotPress and all of that, I do see that having more streamlined, more easy to see and access opportunities to test the way that our software looks across varying environments, especially those that change it substantially from what we typically work in day to day for any individual developer or any individual WordPress site implementer. Like I think that that is a big step forward for all of us and certainly for anyone who is having to use WordPress as not a native English speaker. And so you say it's not related but it still is a big benefit for WordPress overall, I think, to have this kind of work happening so that we can have those benefits to the folks who are using our software. So there were a couple of different things that you mentioned over the course of our conversation. We're gonna put some links to the show notes for all of those, but one thing that you mentioned that just kind of went by and we never really had an opportunity to talk about it. You talked about the, I think it was GTE's Global Translation Editors, the folks that are approved as final approvers of translations. If there is someone who's listening to this podcast who wants to become a GTE someday, where would they go to do that? So the path to GTE is a PTE. We've got different levels of translation editors. Basically, you could say you start off as a translator and this is how you can kind of show that you can do good translations or that you're very firm in your language and this might make you be noticed in the community. So we're always looking for people who like to help with the translations and you might be then promoted to be a project translation editor. Basically it means that for a single language in a project, you'll be able to approve translations. So you'll be the one who says like, this translation is a good one and this conforms to the rules that we have stated as a translation community. And further down the path then is the GTE where you basically are allowed to approve translations across any project on translate.wordpress.org in your language. And that's usually you'll be in that position with other GTEs. So there is like in each community, there is like we're people based. We talk about what might be a good translation. We talk to each other, try to find rules that maybe prevent common mistranslations or set the standards for how we want the software to be translated. And this is something where you get a voice as a translator but as a GTE, you get into a position where you can actually make the changes or find consensus on how the software should be translated in your language. And if folks are not familiar where the Polyglots team works and meets, where would they find you all? at make.wordpress.org slash polyglots. Perfect. Alex, this has been such a fascinating conversation. Thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you very much. So that brings us now to our smallest of big things. First, WP Campus 2023 is taking place July 12th through the 14th. That's a nonprofit three-day conference with topics that focus on the growth of higher education, accessibility, WordPress and anyone who works in higher education. It's a hybrid event. There is an in-person component on the beautiful campus of Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana. I'll add information about that in our show notes for anyone who would like to join in-person or online. The second thing is that the mentorship program pilot that I have been talking about a little bit over the last few months has been formally launched. If you are interested in contributing more to the project but not sure where to begin, take a look at this comprehensive onboarding experience. It's cohort-based. It has some personalized one-to-one mentorship. There are guided courses, live workshops, all of that. So read more about it in our show notes and sign up for one-on-one team mentorship. And then finally, Matt mentioned at WordCamp Europe an idea that he had been thinking of for some time, a make team dashboard that would sort of help define team metrics and help identify for individual contributors what should indicate team health and where they can find the most impactful projects to work on. A post has since been published on make.wordpress.org slash meta, calling for additional feedback on that idea so that we have an understanding of what this could be, how the dashboard can kind of come to be. And so stop by and add your thoughts there in the comments. And that, my friends, is your smallest of big things. Thanks for tuning in today for the WordPress briefing. I'm your host, Josefa Hayden-Champosi, and I'll see you again in a couple of weeks.


From VOA Learning English, this is the technology report in special English. Apple's new iPhone 5 is selling well in the Gaza Strip, although people are paying high prices there. The new phone reached parts of the Gaza Strip through tunnels. They were smuggled into Gaza before the iPhone 5 went on sale in Israel. Residents of Gaza are buying the smartphones for almost double the cost in the United States. The price of the phones has been raised by middlemen who bring them from Dubai through tunnels linking Gaza with Egypt. The iPhone 5 will not be available until December from mobile operators in Israel. Israel and Egypt have put in place a partial blockade of Gaza to prevent the flow of arms and weapons. But Apple's smartphones have been available for weeks in the Gaza Strip. Reuters reports the phones were on display recently in three independent mobile technology stores in downtown Gaza City. Prices for the phones go from about 1170 for the 16GB model to 1480 for the 64GB version. Apple launched the iPhone 5 last month. In the United States, the 16GB version sells for about $650, while the 64GB version costs about $850. Apple does not have an official store in Gaza. The Islamist Hamas leadership is in conflict with Israel. In Israeli newspaper reported recently that the iPhone 5's new Apple Maps application does not list Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Israel considers Jerusalem its capital. For Palestinians living in Gaza, costs for all kinds of imports are inflated by middlemen and smugglers. Hamas adds sales tax at its end of the supply chain. But this is not stopped demand for the popular smartphones in the territory. For VOA Learning English, I'm Carolyn Presuti.


I am the author of Malignance and Love, Narcissism Revisited.  If I had to distill my quotidian existence in two petty sentences, these would be they.  Hate is the complement of fear, and I like and love being feared. Being feared imbues me with an intoxicating sensation of omnipotence. I am veritably inebriated by the looks of horror or repulsion on people's faces. They know that I am capable of anything. They know that I am godlike, ruthless, devoid of scruples, capricious and fathomable, emotionless, asexual, omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent. I am like a plague, a devastation, an inescapable verdict. I nurture my ill repute, stoking it and fanning the flames of gossip. My notoriety is an enduring asset. Hate and fear are sure generators of attention. It is all about narcissistic supply of course, the drug which we, the narcissist, consume, and which consumes us, in turn. So I attack sadistically. I make sure everyone knows about my eruptions. I purvey only the truth and nothing but the truth, but I tell it bluntly in an orgy of evocative Baroque English, sadistically. The blind rage that this induces in the targets of my vitriolic diatrites provokes in me a surge of satisfaction and inner tranquility not obtainable by any other means. I like to think about their pain, of course, but that is the lesser part of the equation, the pleasure that I derive from inflicting pain. The other part of the equation, equally important, is my horrid future, an inescapable punishment. It carries an irresistible appeal, like substrain of alien virus. It infects my better judgment, and I succumb. In general, my weapon is the truth, and human propensity to avoid it and deny it and suppress it. Intactless breaching of every etiquette and netiquette, my chest eyes, and virate, and snub, and shun, and offer a proprim, a self-proclaimed Jeremiah, my hector, and harangue from my many self-made prophets, I understand the prophets of the Bible, I understand toquemada. I bask in the incomparable pleasure of being right, I derive my grandiose superiority from the contrast between my righteousness and the human fallibility of others. I attain the high moral ground. But it is not even that simple, it never is with narcissism. Fostering public revolt and the inevitable ensuing social sanctions fulfills two other psychodynamic goals. The first one I alluded to, it is the burning desire, my need to be punished. In the grotesque mind of the narcissist, his punishment is equally his vindication. By being permanently on trial, the narcissist claims the high moral ground in the position of the martyr. He is understood, discriminated against, unjustly roughed, outcast by his very towering genius or other outstanding qualities. To conform to the cultural stereotype of the tormented artist, the narcissist provokes his own suffering. He is thus validated. His grandiose fantasies acquire a modicum of substance. He says, if I were not so special, they wouldn't have persecuted me so. My own persecution is proof of my own uniqueness. The persecution of the narcissist is his uniqueness. He must be different for better or for worse. The streak of paranoia embedded in the narcissist makes the outcome inevitable. He is in constant conflict with lesser beings, with his spouse, his shrink, his boss, his colleagues, his neighbors. He is forced to stoop to their intellectual level.  His life is a constant struggle against the self-contented mediocrity of his surroundings. This is his fate, which he exits, though never stoically. It is the narcissist calling a mission and a recurrence in his stormy life. Deeper still, the narcissist has an image of himself as a worthless, bad and dysfunctional extension of others. In constant need of narcissistic supply, the narcissist feels humiliated by his addiction. Contrast between his cosmic fantasies and the reality of his dependence, neediness, slinging and often failure. This discrepancy, which I call the grandiosity gap, is an emotionally harrowing experience. It is a constant background noise of devilish, demeaning laughter.   The narcissist attempts to silence these tormenting voices, not by fighting them, but actually by agreeing with them, unconsciously and sometimes consciously.  I will go out, I will seek my doom. Now that I have complied, will you leave me be? Will you leave me alone? Will you let me live? And of course, the voices never do.


World Café The World Café methodology is a simple, effective and flexible format for hosting large group dialogue, and it can be tailored in many ways, but the fundamentals of the approach are as follows. Firstly, create an environment to encourage discussion. It's usually modelled after a café, hence the name, with round tables covered in paper tablecloths, and about four or five chairs per table. Then, begin by welcoming everyone, briefly explaining the process and any ground rules, as well as the overall theme or purpose of the event. Put people at ease and set them up for success. The process really begins with the first of three, or perhaps more, 20 minute rounds of conversation for the small groups seated around the tables. You can make notes directly onto the tablecloth, or separately. Then at the end of the 20 minutes, people move to a different table, often, but not always, leaving one person behind as the table host for the next round. They can welcome the next group and briefly fill them in on what happened in the previous round. Each of these rounds is prefaced with a question specially crafted for the specific context and the desired purpose of this World Café. You can use the same questions for each round, or they can be built upon each other to focus the conversation, or guide its direction. Finally, at some point, individuals are invited to share insights from their conversations with the rest of the large group in what's usually called the harvest. These results are often captured visually in a variety of ways at the front of the room. As well as these five steps, there are also seven principles upon which World Café is based. One, set the context. Pay attention to the reason you're bringing people together and what you want to achieve. Two, create a hospitable space, one that feels safe and inviting. Three, explore questions that matter. Four, encourage everyone's contribution while also allowing anyone who wants to participate by simply listening to do so. Five, connect diverse perspectives. As participants carry key ideas or themes to new tables, they exchange perspectives, and this greatly enriches the possibility for surprising new insights. Six, listen together for patterns and insights. And seven, share collective discoveries. The last phase of the café, called the harvest, involves making things visible to everyone in the large group conversation. This type of meeting is a great way of incorporating the agile values of openness, transparency, respect, collaboration, and sharing of information in an organisation regardless of its size. And therefore is a favourite for organisations that are scaling their agile approach.


Felly, rydyn ni'n gweithio gydag 100,000 genomes perrogett, sy'n gweithio'r rhanig yn y UK. Roedd y gallwn ni wedi bod ni wedi ei fydd yn ddod o'r project. Felly, ydych chi'n gweithio'n cyfrifio, mae'n gweithio'n gwneud o Gymru Genomics England, y cwmpernig sy'n gweithio'r Gwmpedd y UK, mae'r gweithio'r Gwmpedd y UK. Mae'n gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r Gwmpedd y National Health Care o gymhysig o NHS. Roeddwn i golygu. Mae'r gwirionedd gweithio'r llwyr roi'n amser gweithio genom yn Gymru Genomics England, ond yn cael gallwn i'ch gwladio'r Gymru Genomics England ac mae'r gymryd o'r rhanig hefyd, asddwn i gydag hyn yn siaradu cael ei cyfrifio. O ffrif wneudol, y cwmpernig sy'n felly 100,000 genomes ar bobl gasoddiad o'i 70,000 o'n gwneudon i gydag rai rôl caerhau neu melw. A yw ei ffrifio'i cwmpernig nag, for the rare disease families we try and get trios whenever possible and the key thing here is this is like not a genomic research programme it's it's all about sort of trying to transform our national healthcare system so it's a it's a very sort of different beast is sort of doing a research type programme with more than half of the NHS trust in the UK involved in this now and yes you'll see at the end this has been rolled out completely to the NHS and the mission so obviously to bring benefit to patients that kind of goes without saying but also to enable by medical research you you'll see how he's setting up the research environment to try and speed up translation and to stimulate the genomics industry particularly the UK genomics industry you can you can imagine why the government was kind of interested in this aim and obviously to do this in an ethical and transparent manner and just a sort of snapshot of where we were at the beginning exactly a month ago since the point of year so we've actually recruited more than 100,000 patients now we've sequenced over 80,000 of them I think we're up to 85,000 now actually the majority are rare disease genomes or genomes belonging to the patient or their family members and 17,000 of them are cancer and because of the we needed to do cancer using fresh frozen tissue this is actually surprisingly hard to recruit cancer patients and train the pathologists yeah not to sort of put the biopsies straight into emparafone formaldehyde and then so far we've reported on about 28,000 of the genomes coming from the rare disease side and so the diagnostic rate is around 20% overall like yeah for some categories like intellectual disability it's around 40% there's some there's some quite obscure categories we also recruit that are likely non genetic and our diagnostic rates for those are at one or two percent this is very much a pilot yeah we've got things like familial colon cancer where a lot of the patients we're recruiting are likely not to be sort of single gene and this slide just shows that you won't be able to read this from the back but we'll be covering all the major rare disease areas and all the major cancer types and then as well as like sequencing 100,000 people we also when we like enroll participants into the program we collect a lot of extensive data which i'll get into in a bit but we also bring in all the electronic health records we have available in the NHS into our research environment so things like the mortality data the pathology data and the biobank data and the hospital episode statistics we've brought in so far and then we're starting to bring in some of the general practitioner record data as well so this is all made available to researchers in the environment which brings me to the next point so the way we set up our research environment and allow researchers to access this and sort of try and do this in an organised and coordinated way so it's through this genomics england clinical interpretation partnerships or G-SIPS for short so i guess this is our equivalent of the kids first data resource portal so we set up this research environment and we provide access to the researchers through this mechanism and this all goes back to Chris's first talk where we're trying to speed up that translation of academic findings into sort of clinical benefit for the patient so the idea is to have this environment where you bring together all the data the clinicians you work on these patients and the academic researchers and in industry to actually speed up this whole translation process yeah and then talking about industry so i've talked about the research environment where we have the academic stakeholders the clinicians and our internal genomics england stakeholders and then here we have the discovery forum where various companies have joined and signed up to become members of this forum yeah to speed up this whole process of eventually arriving at new diagnostics and therapeutics so we've kind of seen how that's kind of decreased over the years and the idea is setting up this type of mechanism is to try and reverse some of that trend and then yeah i was just going to give you one success story just to sort of demonstrate how we work and the the type of work we do so today the programme has very much been involved around sort of clinically diagnosing patients with known disease genes so this is a good example so this little girl here jessica presented with epilepsy and developmental delay and she'd had all the standard genetic tests and then we ran the sort of bioinformatics pipeline yeah doing the the typical thing starting with the 6.4 million variants in our whole genome sequence and narrowing it down to the rare ones the ones that affect protein and then looking at you know which variants were different to her parents so it's likely to be a de novo variant we're hoping and then the other thing we do is curate gene panels for each of our disease categories and these are it's like an expert crowd sourcing app called panel app where anyone can suggest genes that should be added to a panel for a particular disease they can put their evidence and then there's a final round the curation to say whether the gene should be part of that virtual gene panel reapply to the whole genome and using this approach narrowed it down to one gene this sl2 slc sorry 2a1 so it's a de novo denation in this gene that caused her glute 1 deficiency syndrome and the great news about this is like by putting her on the ketogenic low carb diet has managed to reduce a lot of her epilepsy also it's a de novo variant so her parents can kind of put these safely go on and have further children so that made a huge difference to them and then I'm just going to start talking about some of the clinical data in the phenotypes which is where my work comes in more so you can imagine this sort of process of going from a patient yeah there's all these different steps that we've had to build from scratch in the NHS to deliver a genomic medicine service yeah they didn't really exist or we had to like rebuild them to achieve this healthcare transformation so from consenting the patient through some sample collection sequencing interpretation and finally treatments and all these later steps really I really rely on collecting good clinical data and particularly those clinical phenotypes encoded using a structured terminology such as the human phenotype ontology so we we sort of took this pretty seriously right from the beginning so for each patient we recruit so say they have alport syndrome there's a particular set of questionnaires each one of these is a human phenotype ontology term and we try and ask the clinicians to say whether they definitely have that term or they definitely don't have that term and of course they can also add additional phenotypes but it's a very sort of structured way of collecting this phenotype data and this sort of feeds into so I'll have sort of changing tack a bit in the middle here this sort of feeds into a lot of my academic research interests particularly with the MONIC initiative so we've been making a lot of use of phenotype data in particular and the idea behind all of this is to go beyond using just comparisons of the patients exome and genome variants to like public genomic data such as NAMAD you have to start bringing in the phenotype data and comparing it to model organs and phenotypes or phenotypes in OMIM to see if we can like further narrow down the list of potential variants that are causing this patient's condition then improve diagnosis and treatment and another key aspect for us is bringing in other species data so I think everyone in this room I probably don't need to labour this point but obviously there's a lot of genes where we don't know what the phenotypic consequences in human if they're mutated but we do know from looking at model organs and databases and we can make use of this data and what we've done over the last sort of 10 years or so as part of MONIC the MONIC initiative has developed methods to computationally compare compare a patient with a set of phenotypes to like all known diseases in OMIM or Orphanet for instance so we can say yeah for this particular patient what disease in OMIM does it most look like and we can do that computationally we can put a score on how similar it looks and we can do it cross-species so we can say yeah what's the most similar mass model to that patient and what genes involved and you can imagine we can start to use this for gene prioritisation and yeah this is just like a couple of slides to say yeah we've kind of proven this approach works so like last year in Nature Genetics we published this IMPC paper that basically compares all the diseases in OMIM and Orphanet to all our IMPC phenotypes and we managed to show that we can use these computational methods to find new animal models with human disease genes and it's across all the major body systems you know from bone, hearing to the eye out of all the Mendelian disease genes that we already had data from in IMPC we managed to show for like 40% of them we could like recapitulate some of the phenotypes and key was like 72% of these models were novel yeah they hadn't previously been published in the literature there has never been a mass model for that disease before and then the example of this so Bardic-Bedal syndrome and this BBSS5 gene that's part of one of the 19 genes in that big protein complex all of which all those genes are involved in various different types of Bardic-Bedal syndrome and we found the IMPC mice are perfectly recapitulated you know the obesity you can clearly see here the retinal dystrophy and we find additional phenotypes of these glucose homeostasis phenotypes that would kind of be interesting again to go back to the human is to seeing the Bardic-Bedal patients so the reason I sort of went off track and talked about the academic interests there like with these phenotype comparison methods is we bring this kind of all together in this exomeiser software that we use at genomics england so the idea of exomeiser is to do the normal starting of a whole exome and a whole genome and to filter down the variants and prioritise them so you hopefully end up with a single candidate that's segregates with the family is in the coding region is rare when you look in nomad it's predicted to be pathogenic but most importantly when you look at the gene and you compare the patients phenotypes to what we know from human disease or from model organisms we can see some sort of phenotype evidence for that gene being responsible for that patient's conditions and exomeiser kind of automates that process that we heard in the sort of talk before it sort of tries to make things easier for people so hopefully at the top of your list of candidates you've got that that variant in that gene where there's some already some phenotype evidence that's come from the literature and being curated into these various databases oh and I should make the key point that one of the databases that's going into this is the impc genotype to phenotype associations and we've rolled this out in genomics england so now we use exomeiser as our sort of parallel pipeline to the virtual panel based approach and it's quite complementary to that approach yeah we can do 300 cases per day per sort of computational node we set up and we can spin up as many of those as we need it's recently been nicer accredited and what we find is we can find yeah looking at the known diagnosis that have come through the program so far we can find exomeiser will identify that diagnosed variant that's the top here in 71% of those cases and the top five in 92% and the next release we're kind of getting up to 97% by introducing new features like being able to deal with incomplete penetrants yeah I can skip this one in the interest of time so now I'm sort of going to try and introduce like how we can use INPC data for the 100,000 genomes project so this has gotten a bit of a challenge for this talk so like I said today we've been very focused on those like 20% of cases where we can I sort of say it's easy it's not that easy but like making the easy diagnosis in the known disease gene yeah solve those cases that we should be solving but we've still got these 80% of cases that we're yeah we're giving a negative report at the moment and this is where the those GSIP communities are meant to come in research these cases and find some new variants that explain the patient's condition so some of these are going to be variants in known disease genes but there's going to be a lot of really interesting variants like a de novo variant and the gene that's never been associated with human disease and this is clearly where the INPC data can play a role so what I can do at this stage so I can start to look at some of the positive diagnosis that we've had today and have a look at the INPC data and say yeah but the INPC mass have helped us find this diagnosis that we didn't already know this was a human disease gene this is all proof of principle and I've started delving into some of this on negative cases where what I'm finding by running examizer we can find like rare predictor pathogenic variants in in genes that are not associated with disease before and the phenotype evidence is coming from the INPC so I can show you an example of one of those but just to show you the type of approach we can use using the INPC data so it'll be a bit hard to see from the back this is our interpretation portal at Genomics England and I've hopefully blanked out all the patient identifiable stuff but this is a retinal dystrophy patient we didn't recruit any of the parents presumably because it was fairly late onset and this patient was diagnosed with a missent variant in this C1 QT NFF5 gene and this is a known disease gene evolved with retinal dystrophy so it was already on our virtual panel so it was fairly sort of easy for us to diagnose and we also sort of showed we identified it as the top hit by examizer and when that sort of delve into the examizer results yeah I mean it was the top hit by examizer because it matches that sort of retinal degeneration disease in OEMM but also if that wasn't there like if we didn't know it was a human disease gene it would still have been the top hit because of this mass match to the INPC data so we're matching the patients phenotype of retinal degeneration from our INPC database so we can see abnormalities in the retina that's what's shown by these bar charts so these are the mutants so for female and male and there's all sorts of detailed PDFs you can sort of download I don't know what they mean but there's various eye assays that sort of confirm this evidence so I can say this is a proof of principle that the INPC data can help us diagnose patients in the future another example of a patient of osteogenis imperfecta so here we had the well we had like um the the two sips and the parents and we identified this denovo variant so it was only seen in the affected female and there was a missense splice region variant in col 182 so it's causing and the HBO to me that's relevant was the increased susceptibility to fractures so again this is like an easy diagnosis to make it's a known disease gene that was the top ranked hit by aximizer but the INPC actually has some quite nice evidence for this so you imagine and the patient has increased susceptibility to fracture actually in the knockout mass in the INPC we see increased bone renal content and increased bone renal density which is kind of intriguing for you from the knockout we're getting an increase from that missense variant we're getting increased susceptibility so maybe it's a gain of function variant and it shows us some insight into the mechanism and then finally into like a slightly more interesting story to end up with so we've got this patient with cataracts and we didn't manage to make a diagnosis from all the analysis to date um but what we find when I run aximizer that's at the top here is a what's it is a missense variant that's seen in the affected pro band and also her mother that's affected of cataracts and it's in this CDKN 2 ageing and when I sort of started delving into this this gene is actually on our gene panel for cataracts but you'll see it's marked as red with low evidence so all the experts decided there wasn't enough evidence to really have this gene on the diagnostic panel and actually when I look in pub med I can't really find any disease evidence and the only reason it was on the panel is it was already part of this UK genetic testing network existing panel so someone knew a reason why this gene was interesting for cataracts but somehow that evidence has been lost but when we look at the aximizer results the reason it's the top hit by aximizer is because of the impc mouse that has cataracts so it immediately sort of shows it up as a great candidate and something to follow up with the clinicians involved in this case and as I sort of start to delve into the data more I think we're going to find more and more examples like this so that's one aspect where the impc data can help actually as part of aximizer or other software packages helping us diagnose patients based on our genotype to phenotype associations there's obviously the functional validation aspect that impc can offer so like I say I keep banging on about this 80% of cases we don't know what the diagnosis is this is the interesting challenge and we're just putting together a paper on our rare disease pilot which is based on the first 2000 families so what we find there so this is like early analysis but we've got 77 of families without a diagnosis where I can see a strong aximizer candidate in the gene that's not previously associated with human disease so that'd be great to make an impc mouse without we've got like 20 families of a denova variant in the conserved coding region in the non-disease gene again that these would be interesting these families so we've got 64 families where we've got sort of three error analysis in a denova variant in one of these conserved non-coding elements so this would be like a really nice thing to start modelling using impc production and phenotyping and we've just started to do this sort of cohort type analysis so burden type testing of comparing all the patients for a particular disease against the controls and looking at the aximizer results and saying can you see variants in a particular gene novel disease gene they enriched then we got 39 candidates from there so you can see we're starting to build up quite extensive lists of genes that it'd be interesting to coordinate I can see Sarah looking excited and then so this is all well and go be heard about the impc so if it's a null allele that's going to model this patient's condition nicely we can like if there's not an impc mouse already we can sort of feed it try and prioritise it in our production pipeline but what we've been doing for the interesting point mutations is working with the MRC program genome editing mice for medicine so this has been there's been four calls so far so it's been running for a couple of years so is it like four and a half million giving to the Mary Lyons Centre at Harwell to produce these mice with point mutations and various other more complex mutations and there's been 289 nominations so this comes from the whole UK genomics sector but a lot of these will be genomics England cases and that was like involving 31 different institutions and so 70 lines have been awarded including 42 point mutations and you can talk to Sarah Welty's in the audience about how far we've got with the production and how you get more involved in this so I think the first mice are starting to be producing phenotypes and sent out so we should have some good news stories from that soon and then just to finish off so you heard from some of me yesterday about this essential gene study we've been doing with the impc so the key finding from this is we can find enrichment of disease genes in this developmental essential fraction so these are genes that are lethal in the IPC viability pipeline but when we look at human cell essential screens they're not shown to be lethal so the genes in this bin are enriched for disease genes we've also shown they're more likely to be associated with early onset diseases and various other fractions so what we want to do is start looking at the 100,000 genomes cases yeah can we find a denaver variant in one of these genes one of the novel ones that's not associated with disease yet we'll sort of use that to prioritise yeah and then I just want to finish off by saying so the 100,000 genomes project's meant to come to an end at the end of this year but we're now moving on to this fully commissioned phase in the NHS so now like any rare disease patient in the UK when they come for genetic testing it all be centralised and they'll mainly go through whole genome sequencing which will flow into our centralised database and this is actually have just been announced at the conservative party conference I believe officially so it's going to be good news for the UK and too many people to acknowledge in the whole of the monocanish shift the whole of the impc and the whole of the 100,000 genomes project so if that I'll finish take any questions


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Let's now talk about the group 17 elements, the hyperreactive supercharged halogens. Now as you can see here we are almost at the end of the periodic table, which means now we are looking at these elements that have the smallest size and highest electronegativity in their respective periods. As they are just one electron short of the stable octet configuration, all of these halogens are extremely reactive. They react with metals and non-metals to form an entire class of compounds called halides. However, within this group we can see that the reactivity decreases as we go down the group from fluorine to iodine. We won't discuss much about acetone because it is an unstable radioactive element and almost all of its isotopes are very short-lived. So that means for all our discussions henceforth we will mostly be talking about fluorine, chlorine, bromine and iodine. So in this video we will briefly look at the atomic properties of the group 17 elements especially their negative electron gain enthalpy. We will also discuss their oxidation states and look at scenarios where halogens can exhibit positive oxidation states. And lastly we will look at the oxidizing power or oxidizing nature of halogens and see how it varies across the group. Now if you look at their atomic properties, halogens have the small less size, highest ionization enthalpy and highest electronegativity in their respective periods. And as they have very little tendency to lose electrons, they also have maximum negative electron gain enthalpy. Not surprising at all because they are just one electron short of the stable octet configuration right? And because it is small size and high effective nuclear charge, the incoming electron is actually quite close to the nucleus and this kind of helps stabilize it. Although we just have to deal with one exception. Just as we observed in the case of oxygen versus sulfur, the negative electron gain enthalpy of fluorine is lesser than that of chlorine. Just as we observed in the case of group 16 where the negative electron gain enthalpy of oxygen is again lesser than that of sulfur. Now this is again because of the super small size of fluorine. Now because it is small size of fluorine, the incoming electron experiences stronger electron-electron repulsion in the small 2p orbitals. On the other hand, chlorine has relatively larger 3p orbitals and as a result the incoming electron experiences much less electron-electron repulsion. And this is why less energy is released when you add an electron to fluorine as compared to chlorine. Now coming to oxidation state, all halogens exhibit minus 1 oxidation state. However, except fluorine, all other halogens also exhibit positive oxidation states. So here again the logic is that if these halogens being electronegative, if they have to exhibit a positive oxidation state that means they have to give away their electron right? And that means they have to combine with an element that is more electronegative than themselves. And this is why chlorine, bromine and iodine usually exhibit higher oxidation states or positive oxidation states when they combine with smaller highly electronegative elements like oxygen or fluorine. For example, positive oxidation states are usually seen in interhalogen compounds like IBr5, ICl5 and so on. And here the oxidation state of iodine is plus 5 and as you can see, iodine combines with more electronegative elements than itself. Similarly, in oxides like ClO2, BrO2 and oxoacids like HClO4 or HBrO4, halogens predominantly show plus 4 and plus 7 oxidation states. But fluorine on the other hand can show only minus 1 oxidation state because it is the most electronegative element. And this readiness or easiness to accept an electron makes fluorine a very strong oxidizing agent. In fact, fluorine is such a good oxidizing agent that it can literally oxidize other halide ions from their solutions. That is, it can displace all other halide ions like chlorine, bromine and iodine from their solutions in a reaction like this. In fact, we can extend this logic and say that any halogen will be able to oxidize the halide ions that are higher in their atomic number. For example, when chlorine acts as an oxidizing agent, it can displace halogens that are higher in number than chlorine, right? Which means it can displace bromide ions and iodine ions from their solutions. Similarly, when bromine acts as an oxidizing agent, the only halogen that is higher in number than bromine is iron. That means it can only displace iodine ions from their solutions. So clearly we can see that this oxidizing nature or the strength of oxidizing power decreases as we go down the group. We can also understand the decreasing oxidizing ability by looking at the reaction of these halogens with water. For instance, in the reaction of fluorine with water, fluorine oxidizes water to oxygen gas. And if you replace fluorine with chlorine or bromine, you can see that they react with water to form corresponding hydrohalic and hypohalus acids. On the other extreme, the reaction of iron with water is completely non-spontaneous. But again you can see how the oxidizing power decreases as we go down the group. So to quickly summarize, we learned that halogens have the smallest size, highest ionization enthalpy and electronegativity in the respective periods. And they also have the maximum negative electron gain enthalpy. The only exception was that of fluorine with chlorine. We then looked at the various oxidation states of halogens. We saw in which cases halogens show positive oxidation states. And we also discussed the oxidizing power of the halogens by taking the example of the reaction with water.