John Lindsay is from the, is from the Monk School of Global Affairs at University of Toronto. Recently moved there from University of San Diego's Institute for Cooperation and Conflict. There you go. Get it about right. That's right. Yeah. And he's a political scientist, so we're moving, we're moving disciplines. Well, thanks very much. It's wonderful to be here, especially since it's freezing in Toronto. It's fantastic here. I'm going to be talking about a project called Cross Domain Deterrence. It actually has a much longer name. It has a fairly large number of collaborators that are involved here. And I'll try and emphasize the cyber aspects of this project. This project had its origins in really thinking through strategic interactions in cyberspace between nation states and other actors. And Eric Bartsky, the PI in this project at UC San Diego. And I were thinking a lot about cyber specifically and a lot of the wild claims that exist for the cyber domain. And a lot of these didn't quite make sense in theories of modern war, the way that we understand them. But when you started thinking about cyber in conjunction with other diplomatic and military instruments of power, suddenly you started to get into some really interesting materials. So a lot of what was interesting about cyber had nothing to do with the cyber domain, but its interactions with other domains. So we're all pretty familiar with the concept of deterrence. Of course it's Dr. Strangelove who tells us deterrence is the ultimate creative fear in the mind of the adversary. So it's about beliefs, it's about the future, it's about communicating credible threats to the other side. Either to get them to do something, to get them to not do something that you would like them to not do, deterrence. But already we can pick lots of different definitions. If you look at this American military definition, you already see that there's a lot of different things that are going on in the concept of deterrence. Trying to prevent an action, trying to create a belief, trying to talk about costs and benefits. So deterrence is actually a bundle of multiple things. It's going to be one of the primary themes that I want to stress here. Now deterrence has been something that actors have been interested in and practicing since antiquity. You can find all kinds of deterrent threats in all kinds of ancient texts. But deterrence was always liable to fail and so military had to be ready to actually fight it out on the battlefield. They had to be willing to transition to defense or brute force however you want to term it. Nuclear weapons are quite interesting because the first time they radically separate these two functions of defense or war fighting and deterrence, communicating with force. Nuclear weapons were obviously costly, devastating. Nuclear weapons are also very difficult to defend against. There was always a non-zero probability that a missile was going to get through and was going to do it quite quickly and with quite devastating results. So there was a necessity to start thinking systematically about the grammar of threat and the grammar of communicating with nuclear weapons. And the important thing there is it's an advent of technology which is now separating different functions that had already exist but now had to be thought about in a different way. Of course politics doesn't stop with nuclear weapons. We have a couple of hair-raising chicken episodes with the Berlin crisis and the Cuban missile crisis. But of course both superpowers start looking for other ways to influence one another. Whether it's in the conventional domain, the subconventional domain, the proxy wars and other places. And there's the so-called stability and stability paradox emerges where you have nuclear weapons preventing large-scale superpower conflict but you then have this expanding range of low-level threats that states can use to pursue their interests. Now this fellow is not as well-known as Dr. Stringslock, perhaps he should be. This is Michael Knox. He was Assistant Secretary of Defense for Global Strategic Affairs during the first Obama administration. He's one of our researchers. I just put this up to kind of highlight his particular brief which was US nuclear forces, missile defense, cyber and space. Michael looked at this and said, my goodness, how the heck do I manage this bundle of wildly difficult things? Especially when we've got some major challenges. A lot of those challenges focused on China at the time. China had just tested an anti-satellite missile. There's been a couple of more that have gone up, created a huge amount of debris in low-earth orbit. And Chinese started talking about ideas that they were going to escalate to de-escalate. They were going to thought about in a military crisis, perhaps clinking a US satellite would be a way of demonstrating resolve. This comes to some of these cultural questions we were talking about for US policymakers in that particular Track 1 dialogue. They started having heart palpitations because that is a big red line when you start shooting down US satellites. Of course there was the growing use of cyber, Estonia, Georgia, Chinese activities starting to pick up. And it looks very, very difficult to deter this stuff. At the high end, worrying that some of that material may actually start to undermine the credibility of the US nuclear deterrent, which is of course tremendously dependent upon cyber technologies for command and control, for early warning, and for other such things. So thinking through a lot of these issues, it raises a lot of questions that have been brought up. Many of them particular to cyber space. I don't know if I just mentioned this, but when we first started this project, this was really the China space cyber project. Thinking about all these different means, but cyber was the real difficult one that seemed to undermine a lot of things that we thought we already understood. So when we start looking at this systematically, cross-demy deterrence, our definition, our working definition, is just the use of apples and oranges. It's the use of unlike threats to deter or compel action in a different domain. And this whole question of what is domain comes up all the time. The Pentagon's got kind of a big five war fighting domains. So I'll continue to talk about a little bit more. We're just interested in things that are functionally different in some interesting way that they're going to have different political characteristics when you're bargaining and interacting. Just put up real quick what the organization of this project works because it highlights some of the different approaches that we've got going on. This is a five year project. We're in our second year funded by the U.S. Department of Defense Minerva Initiative. That's a little tiny pot of social science funding. Well, tiny for DoD, huge for social scientists. And this is a partnership that's focused at UC San Diego. We are doing some policy case studies. It's kind of my brief at Toronto. I'm also working with Michael Maktou now at Berkeley. We've got two of the bomb labs, Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore working with us trying to model some of this. When we first started out, because this is the China space cyber project, this is all about new technology. We thought, hey, we don't have a lot of history here. We're going to have to be modeling this to really think about how these dynamics worked. Once we started getting into this, we realized, hey, deterrence has always been cross domain, right? It's one of these kind of nuclear moments where, hey, the introduction of nuclear means forced you to think explicitly about coercive bargaining. But when you start looking at every crisis interaction, there's always this variation across different means, right? So the Spartans are really good in land power. The Athenians are not willing to meet them there. They want to drag the Spartans out into the sea. The Spartans don't want to go there. So you have a breakdown of cross domain deterrence starting the Peloponnesian War and cross domain deterrence then keeps it prolonged in a sense because both sides are trying to stick to their competitive advantage. And so we've actually started off this big project to use both human coders and some machine learning techniques to go ahead and code, looking at 500 different crises throughout the 20th century so that we can look at the move and counter move and the chain of escalation and de-escalation as it modulates across these different domains and start to understand under what conditions do domains matter or under what conditions should having a bigger portfolio or a larger portfolio matter. So we hope to have the empirical and the modeling side lashed up. We're just right now starting to do that. Okay, so I want to go over the risk of putting up math on that screen, which is always dangerous in an interdisciplinary audience. I wanted to talk a little bit about the way that political scientists think about the problem of war. And I should say rationalist political scientists. There's all kinds of interesting irrationalities and deterrence. We can talk about the QA if you would like to. But the idea here is when we look at war, there's a couple of interesting puzzles about it. And one of the big puzzles is given that war is so costly, it kills a lot of people, it breaks a lot of things, it ruins governments. Why do states and other actors ever get involved in war in the first place? It's the question that Tom Schelling asked, it's a question that Jeffrey Blaney famously looked at. There should always be a deal that is better than fighting. It's a very similar question that comes up when you look at labor strikes. Labor strikes are very costly both to labor and capital, because you're not making anything and you're not getting paid and yet you're striking. There should always have been a deal if they would have understood the longevity of that strike and the cost that both sides are going to absorb, there should have been a deal that they would have been able to come about. So the way that you think about modeling this, here's player A and player B. And this P is the distribution of power between them. War is going to be costly. It might be some situation hackers that get some positive utility out of hacking. Maybe there are some primitive cultures that might have had a positive utility for war. But in general, war is costly. So either side, if they were to fight it out, they're going to have to pay some costs. And that cost opens up this bargaining range in the middle. So X could be any proposal that would be preferable to both sides rather than fighting it out. But the question is, where is that X actually going to be? Of course both sides would like it to be closer to the other sides. They want to maximize their utility. And herein is the beginning of the solution to this kind of problem. If there is a great deal of uncertainty about what the actual distribution of power is, what the estimate on both sides might be, what the cost associated, suddenly you can have this nice bargaining range start to not only contract, but actually go the other direction. And at both sides start to see the value of war greater than any possible other outcome. So if both sides start to see the expected value of war as greater than the expected value of diplomacy, however they've gone through that estimate of process, then war starts to look attractive. So one of the counterintuitive implications of this model of thinking is that war itself is an information-generating process. We all know that war causes a lot of uncertainty, fog of war, closets, all of that. But in the modern bargaining model of war, uncertainty is a major cause of war. But the process of fighting reveals information, how committed each side actually is to this process, how much they care, how much they're willing to bleed and put up with in order to stay in that fight. And that will tend to push that estimate closer together. And as they start to separate, then you have the possibility to start to come to a deal. And this is why it is very, very hard to find any historical instances. There's about three or four that you can come up with clearly until you get into the ancient world, where you have decisive disarmament victories. Almost all wars end with some unsatisfying, limited accommodation and negotiation. And that happens because both sides understand that the further disarmament contests would be far too costly. So if they can fix the information problem, that's one thing, but then there's also a credibility problem. Even if you've got an option for coming to an agreement in the middle, there still might be a problem. Maybe the balance of power is changing and each side realizes, hey, I better keep fighting today because the other side is getting stronger. And if I don't disarm this fellow today, then you're going to be in a bad situation in the future. So you can have a preventative motivation. Perhaps you've got agency problems, right? So who am I dealing with? Big problem in a regular war, right?  So commitment problems can also be a major issue here. And unfortunately that means that limited war itself can be a form of stable equilibrium where both sides might have a sustainable situation and expectations that they will continue to do well in the future. So all of that background and kind of just talking about the modern theory of war is our entrance into this to say, okay, some of these different parameters are active and we can start to expect that different means that are being introduced into this system are going to have different effects upon the distribution of power, estimates of that, what the cost might be, what your ability to credibly signal might be. So when we think about cross-domain deterrence and what is that, excuse me, Klauswitz said that politics by other means, that implies that there's already this decision to pick war instead of diplomacy or somebody else as part of an ongoing bargaining process that continues throughout the process of war. Well what happens when you have many means to choose from, not just guns versus butter but guns versus guns and lots of other kinds of guns, under what conditions should you choose one or the other? So the important thing is to recognize that deterrence is not one thing, deterrence is actually a bundle of different objectives. You're trying to get your way at low cost without a fight, okay? And people when they talk about deterrence can often mean different things. US policy makers when they talk about deterrence, sometimes it's about controlling escalation, a lot of times it's talking about trying to persuade other countries to do something but without actually having to pay the cost of what it would take to get them to give way on their particular product. We can go out and break out a couple of these, right? There's this idea of influence, things that affect that P, the probability of victory in war. Now there are lots of military means that can affect P, the distribution of power but be terrible for this third one signaling, okay? It's the class of military commitment problem. If the US would have known during the beginning of the Korean War that the Chinese were about to intervene with 300,000 red Chinese troops, there's no way that the US military would have crossed the yellow. But the Chinese couldn't make that known because if they said, hey, we're infiltrating a bunch of people through the hills, that suddenly would have become the US Air Force's newest bombing target, okay? So in order to have a potent capability, you had to keep it secret. Well that meant that there's a massive disagreement on what the distribution of power looks like. There's no bargaining range. It's impossible to make a credible signal even though you have influence to get your way if a fight does happen now. Cyber should really come to mind here. Everything in the cyber domain, most things in the cyber domain depend on deception. It's very difficult to clearly reveal that you're going to do something specific in the cyber domain. And so it tends to be good for influence, good for intelligence, getting your own information but very bad for signaling. Nuclear weapons are almost exactly the opposite. Nuclear weapons are terrible for influence because it's very hard to imagine situations under which a nuclear war fighting situation would result in anything called victory that you would like or understand. But nuclear weapons are fantastic for signaling, okay? This is where they really come into their own. There's different kinds of costs that are associated with it. And we can iterate through and talk about, and we do this in some depth, looking at different domains, both military and non-military, and rate them in different ways across these different desertorata. Just to kind of talk about a situation that we're all familiar with, if you think about Vladimir Putin's use of little green men in the Crimean situation, NATO could have met that with putting boots on the ground in Ukraine. Wouldn't be militarily the best way to oppose a large-scale Russian invasion, but suddenly you would have dead NATO troops if that were to happen. That, of course, would mobilize a large-scale response. Putting skin in the game is a great way to signal resolve. Instead, air power is set to Poland, which is a fantastic way to link Russian tanks and manipulate that P variable. But the problem with air power and naval power is the things that make it really good at war fighting, its mobility, its power projection, also make it really easy to move it somewhere else. And so there are all kinds of questions about whether it will credibly be there to use in the future. How much time do I have left? A couple minutes. Okay, great. So part of the cross-domain problem is thinking about what the rock-paper-scissors problem looks like. If the classic game during the nuclear era was chicken-right to teenagers zooming towards another, figuring out who's going to blink, now we're looking at an ongoing sequence of interactions where each side might be playing a different set of means. And there are also new means that are being introduced in the midst. And there's a great deal of uncertainty about how those might interact and what the interactive playoffs would potentially be. Okay, so let me just put this together real quick. Okay, so when we try and put all of these things together, part of the problem is we're looking at the increasing complexity of means that are available, the uncertainty that those generate. But there are different things that policymakers and the political level and military commanders think about when they think about complexity and uncertainty. Militaries tend to develop a lot of new weapon systems focused on the problem of fighting and winning a war if it comes to that. So you have diversification of a lot of different things, layering on of command and control institutions to deal with those new systems. It creates all kinds of management and power measurement problems. But interestingly then, once you take that and you put that into the political realm, you suddenly have new means not only for fighting a war, but for signaling, for doing all kinds of things short of war, for looking for influence, for deterring in one level, operating in another. You have a great deal of complexity that happens in this set of bargaining interactions. And because now you have a worry that there's going to be a bargain that's going to end up not to your favor, there is now incentives to start developing new things. So you have this complexity ratchet over time that is, we have militaries and other innovators that are trying to patch those holes, but in patching that they're presenting new opportunities for political actors in those complex bargaining relationships. Okay. So just to wrap up here. I'd say that the cross-demand deterrence has always been around. It's always been leveraging many means, but the diversification in that portfolio makes it more important than ever to figure out how CDD works. And innovation in many ways is an unhandled exception in the existing set of institutions and policies that had protected this status quo. This isn't just a cyber problem. We talked a little bit about little green men, but I'll mention this kind of wiretaps in the Fourth Amendment, right? So the Fourth Amendment is put up in order to keep, you know, Paul's ancestors from coming to the door of these poor American colonists, breaking down the door, stealing their documents coming home. So there's this search and seizure protection. Well, suddenly you invent wiretapping capabilities. You're not having to go into somebody's house. You're not even necessarily taking their stuff because it's information. You haven't destroyed the information by taking it. But now there has to be a big judicial process of reinterpretation to say, okay, the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable certain seizure actually applies to your communications, even though they're going outside of your property as well. Okay, so there's this constant reinterpretation that can happen to legal domain, but it's also happening in the way that states and other actors put together their deterrence policies. What that means is that even though we see all of these deterrence failures certainly in cyber and we fear them in space, those are happening on the basis of existing deterrence that is working and there are major disincentives for going big. We're not looking at stability and stability, not just the nuclear level, but also the conventional level, but you have a proliferation of ways to design around those existing deterrence. So I will go ahead and wrap up there. I know we can go take this in a lot of interesting directions, but hopefully that gives you a flavor of what we're looking at. John, great. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thanks, John, for your great presentation and the great project. As you describe it, it could have existed before 1970 or before 1990. And we've got a very tantalizing slide which says, So you have to have the question of does information age change everything? Apart from the philosophical considerations of how information age might change deterrence, what's your database look like for, so you're going back to the Palestinian wars across the main deterrence, what are your cases which you might look at in the cyber age where there's been a real engagement of cyber military power? Sure. So there's lots of things that we could potentially look at. I've looked at the Sony case pretty closely, which is an interesting one because you've got some of these information imperfections that are incentivizing that attempted coercion, but coercion highlights exactly this problem that I was mentioning. As soon as the Koreans operating under their proxy guise as the guardians of the peace start to make demands. Now you've activated this large attribution effort. They're starting to cross lines. They're making however empty terrorist threats. And suddenly there's a lot of effort that is put on solving that attribution problem. So attribution is a little less difficult when one side is highly motivated to solve it and deal with it. And it's the very act of trying to use cyber for coercive purposes. It starts to become very self-effacing, self-undermining. So that's one case that we've looked at. With our kind of experimental projects, we're developing a set of games for both the South China Sea and a Baltic situation that will play with both professional military policy folks that are dealing with these situations and as well as some other experimental groups to try and populate the different ways that people value some of those political objectives in all the means that are available so that we can make sure that our computational models are tracking along some sense of reality in a way that people actually think about some of these problems. But that ICB database has got hundreds of different cases. So once we populate that with the new data set, we're then hoping to look at some of the cases that are particularly interesting for the number of cross-domain interactions and then go do slightly more qualitative deep-diving things. As a once-in-exploit note, instead of considering the zoning case, if not military, we might consider the impact on the United States military documents on a global strike as a real case. Yeah, absolutely. Interesting. You've talked about custom building. So one explore would use the concept of material that is in cyber. The idea that CSH is deteriorating on the cyber attack because it ceases the perceived costs outweighs the perceived benefits of an attack because of how integrated it is with the global economy. So in terms of a good deterrent strategy, in your opinion, what measures can the state implement to kind of increase the missing costs of the cyber attack? Yeah, great question. And cyber deterrence has really gone through them. I think a major evolution in the last couple of years. If you look at U.S. declaratory policy, say around 2011, it basically says, hey, deterrence by punishment, inflicting consequences afterwards, is not really feasible in cyber because of the attribution problem and offense dominance. So we're going to have to focus on deterrence by denial, having good defenses. Fast forward to 2015 policy and suddenly deterrence is back in vogue again. So there's a lot of discussion that large scale cyber attacks on a specified target set will result in the consideration of consequences not limited to the cyber domain, lots of other things. So a willingness to start thinking through a lot of that. So when we model the cyber domain, it's interesting is that you've got this real inflection point where you've got a great deal of offense dominance and things that are very difficult to deter, partially because it's easy for threat actors to do things and partially because there's a lack of resolve on the defense side to really secure those kinds of targets to have a great deal of activity on the low end. But as you start to move to more complex and more valuable targets, all the activity falls off. And deterrence starts even theoretically to become far more feasible because the attacks are more costly. It's more likely you're going to make mistakes. The attribution problem becomes much easier. So you have this inversion where with the targets that you actually care about, cyberspace starts to look a lot more defense dominant than people normally expect, which means you're having to accept that deterrence and cyber is not going to be a one size fits all. You're going to have to figure out what kinds of targets are actually worth defending and what kinds of targets are actually worth making some of those commitments and recognizing that clear commitments are going to incentivize an approach right up to that. So you're going to have to decide do I want to deter wide or do I want to deter effectively? So I think starting to disaggregate the cyber domain into different kinds of activities, different kinds of targets, you're going to see that deterrence conversation becomes more nuanced but the good news is that deterrence is feasible for the things that you really care about. But in order to make it work there, you have to accept failure everywhere else. I thought the preliminary results might be interesting enough to a group like this for us to at least start an interesting conversation. The issue started a couple of years ago when we were scoping our modelling framework for this statecraft strategy and statecraft in cyberspace program and I'll talk more about that larger modelling framework on Thursday. But this particular piece of work came about because we were energised about the issue of balkanisation in cyberspace. These were the people involved in that conversation. Nathan Ryan, who you met earlier. Adrienne Lechford is a postdoc who was a student of Terry's, who's now gone to the University of Warwick and Dmitry Brishnev, who's sitting in the audience is working with us on the project at the NSC. He's a student in the physical sciences. Okay, so I want to do this quickly. I want to just set the scene, why this is a problem. I want to show you a very interesting result. Very interesting result, surprising one. And then I want to talk about what the policy implications of this could be. So as I said, work in progress. So governance in general of the internet is a complex, divisive and contested issue, as John was talking about. The problem is, if we get it wrong, we could kill the greatest engine and generator of wealth and innovation since the invention of the steam engine. So we really do, this is a high stakes game. We want to keep the internet cyberspace open and free with very light regulation, so that in principle any individual or any machine anywhere on the planet can connect free of intervention, free of regulation, free of government interference and snooping to any other individual or machine on the planet like that. That's not how some authoritarian regimes would like. They would like these channels to go through some sort of government box and then across to another government box in another country and then be distributed out to the citizenry. Kind of, they do it for all sorts of internal reasons. Usually the security of their regimes, they feel very threatened by open flow of information. Whereas in the West, we feel empowered by the open flow of information. But the issue is, could the internet go like that? Could it change? So we don't like, we in the West don't like the idea of a balkanised internet. We call this balkanisation, where the internet is fragmented up into territorially sub-internet, such as China is trying to do with its great firewall and so forth. But from a complex systems point of view, it's a whole of system process balkanisation. You're doing something to the whole process and when you fiddle around with the topology of a system, you can generate critical processes that you don't fully understand. You could generate tipping points. Terry's going to talk later this morning about some other work on tipping points. Tipping points are where things are just going along, trundle, trundle, trundle, pretty much the same as they always were and then suddenly they change and move the system to a different state. There's interesting work on how you predict these things. There's interesting work on whether the state that succeeds in the previous state is stable or not. There's a whole lot of things. Classic examples of tipping points were the 2008 Great Financial Crisis and there's a raft of others. They don't only occur in socioeconomic systems. They occur in ecosystems. They occur in brains. They occur in transport networks. When you get a traffic jam, that's a similar sort of process and so forth. So what we were asking was, could you balkanise an internet? Would it be more or less stable than today's internet is? And if it was balkanised, could you unwind it and get it back? If somehow it went bad from our point of view, could we debalkanise it? So what we did, we did some modelling. We used simple networks. We know a lot about the shape, the topology of cyberspace, the type of network it is and we know a lot about networks now. In the last 10 or 20 years, there's been a lot of work on networks of all types under a general umbrella of complex systems thinking. We know about the behaviour of them. We know how to model them. We know some of the properties that come out from them. We know these sorts of networks do this. Those sorts of networks behaviour like that. So what we wanted to do was to build a little toy internet, one that had the same characteristics as real cyberspace and to see what its behaviour would be like if we did things to it and then to test and then to see whether those results were general enough that they could be applied to the real space. So the models were minimally realistic but sufficiently general. So we do this because we're dealing with a singular phenomenon. There's only one internet. There's only one universe. It's very hard to do experiments on things like this because you can't replicate it. So science has to model. Science can get its knowledge in three ways through observation, which is sometimes good, but often not sufficient. Darwin did a pretty good job just with observation. So you can have to resort to experience. You can use experience. That's another way when you constrain a lot of things and manipulate things. And the third way of trying to understand the world from a scientific perspective is to simulate it and then do your experiments on the simulation. Now that's useful in cosmology. We learn about the beginning of the universe and the unfolding of the universe from the Big Bang onwards through vast, really clever, really subtle simulations because we can't go back and do it. And we can test some of the results of the simulations from observations we make about the universe today or indeed the universe in the deep past and still get signals from the deep past. So that's the sort of approach we're taking to this. We try and build a minimally realistic model, and then test it against observations we can make on the real internet to see how generally it is. So observation is not sufficient.  So what we did was grow, we know how the internet grows and we know it grows by a thing called preferential attachment and that process leads to a thing called a scale-free model, a scale-free graph. That's all the tech we're going to talk about now. All that means is that if I've got a box and I'm wandering around wondering where to plug it into in the internet in some way or other sense, I plug it into, on average, somewhere where more other people would plug previously than a place that's never been plugged into before. So there's a bias towards plugging things into things that are already receiving a lot of plugs. And that's all preferential attachment means and that gives the structure of the internet as we see today. So we did that. The little model allowed the nodes of this thing, we threw a whole lot of nodes into a computer and said nodes, you can connect to other nodes and you connect progressively to nodes that are already connected to more nodes. How to bias to do that rather than connect to other sorts of nodes. And we get something like this. This is a scale-free network, a classic description of something like the internet. This has got a couple of hundred dots in it. Now we've got the dots in two classes. We've called one class of dots countries, they're the ones that aren't coloured in and the other dots are other, i.e. not countries. And you can see that people aren't connecting to countries necessarily and countries aren't necessarily connecting to countries. It's all random but preferential. And that's the way the internet looks rotten today. Of course on a much faster scale. And you can do this thousands of times and get average properties of a process like this. But we're doing it at this stage. And then what we did, having got it to grow like that, we then allowed threats to pass between those nodes along those little lines. And the threats would pass from node to node and if a node had a certain level of thread it would say, I don't like being connected to you and it would disconnect and it would look for another node to connect to. And in the hope that it was going to be subject to fewer threats. And there would be a cost to doing that but there would be a gain from being released from this channel of threats that were coming down. So we did that and we ran that and we could see that the things just kept going. Things would disconnect, they'd reconnect and we continued to get what's called a scale-free network. The internet still looked the same. As long as those threats just kept coming people would disconnect, you'd give up on this ISP and go to another one if you want to think it like that. And that's the sort of evolution you got. But then we allowed countries, those little dots that subset a handful of entities in this net to modulate the threats. They said that if a threat comes through me I can tone it down, I can do something to it like the world. But you'll have to pay a cost. So if you're chance to be connected to me you won't have so many threats coming down the pile. But it will cost you a little bit. You'll have some work to do. That's okay. And we did this thousands and thousands of times and we did it in all sorts of ranges of possibilities the numbers of countries and the numbers of nodes and the levels of the threats and the levels of the costs just to see how this sort of work passed out for a wide range of things. So I'm showing you average conditions or sample conditions from this but the results I'm showing you are quite general. So what happens is when this modulation reaches a critical value when a country could start to could start to modulate a threat sufficiently strongly to stop a threat coming through we had a critical phenomenon occurred. We had a tipping point. I'll show you this. And this was quite interesting. What happened was here's the probability of stopping a threat by a country going from doesn't actually care a threat's got passed through a country node through to any other node it just passes them on, passes them on and here it's starting to do something with them here it's trying to stop them and here it stops all threats. What you found was that what we call vulcanisation which was how often countries the other nodes the nodes that weren't countries started to tuck in behind countries the rate at which so here they're assembling behind countries and they're not and they're going back and forwards at this point when countries have been coming quite effective at knocking back threats all the other nodes tuck in behind behind the countries with a great fidelity now don't worry about the exact numbers they're irrelevant the thing is the shape of that it's a tipping phenomenon it's not to do with the particular values of the parameters it's to do with this broad process that's going on but if countries start to behave like this non-countries will start to tuck in behind them very bloody quickly so we get a vulcanised network and suddenly the network looks like this these are the countries everyone tucks in behind a country and the main connections in the graph the backbone of the internet suddenly becomes from country to country to country to country and that's a very very robust and strong result that happens again and again and again so countries don't have to do much to and you can see this in a dynamic simulation let's see ok so here's countries in red this is gradually increasing the number of the number of ability to stop threats and you can see in this representation as as entities get more connections we allow them to grow bigger so you can see them so what started out just as a random as a random process over time starts to vulcanise so and it continues and continues then it slows down and the other thing that happens is that it's been stable and vulcanised as you continue the process this thing goes on and on and on and it just starts to lock down you see the odd one trying to find a new home but nearly always the new home is behind a country it stabilises and becomes more solid now that's a really interesting result that goes on for thousands of steps I won't show you them all but you can see that this lovely little network which started out just like the network we had to begin with has now become vulcanised just by having that tweak in how things in how states manage their relationships to threats in this case threats and we're talking about threats in the most general character here now so this happens over a wide range of settings when we do it with thousands of countries or thousands of nodes tens of nodes tens of countries and hundreds of things same result it's a general result about the behaviour of the internet and different types of threats ok so what? all that's really good academic fluff here's the take home message firstly the internet we have we've got by having standards it's free and open and wonderful but it's not stable we didn't get there by careful planning we got there because a bunch of geeks in Los Alamos and places like that declared it to be like that to begin with and it kind of kept going the other take home message is very small and simple changes in the ways that countries can lead to changes in the global structure of the internet not by fear not by international negotiations just by their own individual behaviours to drive a global change in the internet in the internet structure and once it's forked and it's very hard to nudge it out you can't undo that and that comparison is the difficulty the world has had in creating global free trade we had quite good global free trade before the first world war in the Edwardian period and it's slowly got eroded and we've been trying ever since system an open free network and we just can't do it thanks Terry I'm winding up so here's the message for us we've got to work hard and smart and long just to keep the internet we've got the China's and Russia's they can just wait because the modernised internet's coming to be they can just wait for any slip ups any changes any changes in behaviour and a balkanised internet's going to drop into their laps the policy ramifications of that are enormous we behave in our international negotiations as if we're talking about a structure which itself is stable which we need to prevent from we need to make rules about to prevent it from going the bad way our strategy needs to be exactly the opposite we need to protect this thing and prevent it unveiling its tendency to balkanise very quickly and that's the that's the story one I guess challenge to one of your initial assumptions and then one question about organisation the challenge is you said when you're Western we don't like this balkanisation thing we want to keep things free and open the challenge that I've got to you is I know we released a couple years ago Facebook for example were launching balkanisation on the internet they were advocating internet work on ID for each person etc etc basically so they control access to the internet so the problem with this is have you looked at and will you be looking at the role of non-state actors in these things assuming or given that they have different motivations to states so Facebook's motivation is going to be different so Australia's motivations do you think that would have an impact oh it's true that's a very good point when I said the west there are parts of the west I hope the majority would like to keep it free and open but some governments are getting some western governments are getting gulled into thinking that a balkanised internet may not be such a bad thing for their own security and there and they could get gulled by the China's and Russia's to sort of collaborating to create something like that and I think that would be really dangerous one of the things we've seen in some western countries the US, Australia is reducing the number of portals for governments as a security measure but then you can bet a whole lot of government and parasitic organisations would try and tuck in behind that for their own protection that could be a cascading problem inside western countries too so yeah, it's a problem and we need to defend what we've got we've created by happenstance this fabulous thing and it could get snatched away very quickly by a few stupid policy responses so a very good thought maybe you don't want people to have to answer this but what's wrong with bolting a solution you can't because the innovation that we get out of the internet just won't occur when things are bolted down through government agency of one sort or another and there's a general it's the libertarian in me the idea that we can freely interact with human beings without a government intervention I think is broadly ethically a good thing and this is the first time it's happened in the history of the planet and we shouldn't encourage it not convey it I'm a little bleeding democrat aren't I sorry we've been discussing this for several years and it's really amazing to see it in such a well presented form yes as Terry just said it does tell its own story very powerful what's powerful about it I think for a long time when we've spoken about organization we've just assumed it meant the degrading of the internet or a weakening of the internet actually what it is is a very robust alternative and that's what makes it such a challenge I was going to read off your last slide and it disappeared so this is the I think you wrote that the internet they want will just drop into their laps this is something I'm going to talk about tonight I see what you mean in the sense they want two internets they want the one they've got at the moment but they also know deep down if you really approve that they want the other one too the one that you're talking about so how do we play that can we have a world where there's a big free and open space and a bunch of businesses in Russia, China, Iran and so forth that are somehow connected to this larger more, I don't know that's beyond the power of a simple model like that and certainly be one to have a look at to see whether that would propagate whether the interesting model, I have no idea how it would go that it would be a challenge how do you like the policies that you've introduced I'm sorry? How do I pay for the policies that you've interact with after a long time? You can interact with your property I see intellectual property not even at Brodova it's a good question you can see some governments might even see organizing the internet as a way to protect their IP I'm not sure this model is trying to look at the structure of cyberspace rather than dealing with those things and I think you would need to elaborate models to get questions like that and in fact models like this are set up to then be elaborated for particular questions I need some more interpretation of the model as I understood it the non-state players are fearful ones rushing behind the states for protection but that seems to me the opposite of what is actually occurring with say the great firewall where it's the states who are the last record and they're trying to deny their populations the non-state actors within their jurisdiction the system that's also a way of doing that the modelling for that would require the non-state actors to be actively trying to get out of the system we chose for this little toy not to look at that just to look at how spontaneously what would happen if you just empower states to be able to control threats better than they do but it's a good point I'm just interested to know if you had any factors in the model that actually didn't result in vulcanisation or at least slowed it down that might inform a strategy to keep the internet open no sorry one of the things that this toy model conceptual is to keep things as simple as possible keep the number of parameters down so we just have threats and costs costs of servicing servicing the threat and some notion of do you become poor or richer if you're whacked all the time and those are very abstract very abstract concepts and we could set them to large or small or what have you and we continued to get that sort of behaviour so it wasn't that deep we're trying to get the general behaviour and then we handed over to you policy guys and said okay would you like where do you want to go now now that we've given you this steaming cowpat where do you take your let's talk about further how we might change the policy settings in some way what would be the killer thing that would allow to switch that off, that process which would clearly advantage the West and maintain the system as it were we haven't searched for that and that's a process that you engage in a dialogue with policy people to find out the sorts of things that might be feasible let's try it so it seems to me there is an optimistic interpretation actually that is totally consistent with some sort of a model if we call the little white nodes firms instead of states and these firms have the power to build better software to mitigate those threats then you might end up in a world where users flock to a few firms that have massive network effects and others get selected out and it kind of looks like a world that has a Google and a Microsoft and an Apple that has actually inoculated itself against other smaller entities that are coming in here so maybe if those are firms that are in control of the architecture of the internet it might actually be locking out some of these more state-centric solutions although when you think about the success Google has had in getting a toehold in China it might not be a global solution but it's a very good point but I think we'll have to wrap up that


Hello and welcome to this session in which we would look at consolidated tax return. Now this term consolidated should be familiar to us in case we took advanced accounting when we talked about consolidated financial statement. And if you remember in consolidated financial statement if company A owns more than 50 percent of company B then company A can consolidate company B. It means if they are more than 50 percent they are in control. What does that mean? They are in control. It means they can elect the board of directors. The board of directors run the company. If you can run the company if you can select the people to run the company then you are in control. Matter of fact you can select yourself if you own more than 50 percent of the stock of the other company then you own the company. Now when it comes to taxes in order to consolidate tax return you have to own 80 percent plus. It's more than 80 percent. So this is the big idea. This is what we are discussing here. It's an option to file. You don't have to file a consolidated return. The option to file the consolidated return is limited to the group of companies that are affiliated. It means they are connected. They are related to each other. How so? Affiliation is established when one corporation has a minimum of 80 percent of the voting power and stock value of another corporation. Well so let's assume Red Company owns 85 percent of Blue Company. Well now they can consolidate if they chose to. Now let's assume they own 80 percent of Yellow Company. Well Red can consolidate with Yellow as well. They consolidate Yellow but Blue and Yellow they are not connected. Now let's assume Blue owns 83 percent of Green. Now Red owns Blue and owns Green as well. So the ability, the idea to file a consolidation return is rooted in the basic idea that an affiliated group of a corporation is treated as a single taxable entity. So rather than having one, two, three for taxable purposes we can combine all three together. Although they might be operating as separate companies but for the tax return we can combine all the revenues, all the expenses, all the assets, all the liabilities together as one company. Now for the CPA exam you have to learn about advantages and disadvantages of consolidated return and this is exactly what we will do in this session. Before we proceed any further I have a public announcement about my company farhatlectures.com. Farhat Accounting Lectures is a supplemental educational tool that's going to help you with your CPA exam preparation as well as your accounting courses. My CPA material is aligned with your CPA review course such as Becker, Roger, Wiley, Gleam, Miles. My accounting courses are aligned with your accounting courses broken down by chapter and topics. My resources consist of lectures, multiple choice questions, true-false questions as well as exercises. Go ahead start your free trial today. Starting with advantages of consolidated tax return so why would companies consolidate their tax return, file a consolidated tax return? Well one thing is the losses incurred by one member of the group can be utilized to offset the income earned by another member providing a means to protect earnings from taxation. What does that mean? A good example will be let's assume we have company A and company B. Company A they have capital gains, they have capital gains of 10,000. Company B they have capital losses of 7,000. Now if they file separately company A would report the gain of 10,000 company B cannot use the losses because those are access losses you can't use access losses for tax purposes. If they combine together then the net will be 3,000 of a gain because now company A the losses from company B can offset the gains from company A. So this is one of the advantage of this is one example of it but this is one of the advantage of consolidation. The taxation of dividend between affiliated companies can be completely waived because again one company is paying the other once they consolidate they eliminate that. You could also maximize your deduction. Why? Because once you consolidate a result in adjustment to percentage limitation that's usually higher. What does that mean? You remember when we talked about as an example charitable contribution and that's limited to 10 percent of taxable income. So if the taxable income for company A alone is let's assume 100,000 times 10 percent that's 10,000. That means the company can contribute 10,000 and deduct 10,000 and charitable contribution. If company A and company B are combined their taxable income could be it's going to be more let's say 250,000. Now once we multiply this by 10 percent together they can contribute and deduct 25,000 and charitable contribution. An income recognition from specific and their company transaction can be postponed. So when you have profit from intercompany transaction well they will be postponed. You don't have to pay taxes on them yet. Also consolidation results any concern regarding what we call transfer pricing intercompany pricing issue that may arise among related companies as stipulated by section 482.36. What does that mean? Well let's look at an example to see how this work. Let's assume Adam Corporation leases a facility to NOAA for 8,500 per month. That's the monthly lease. If the tax authority determines that the fair market value is actually 12,500 so they're saying this intercompany pricing because Adam and NOAA are related well guess what you are you are only reporting you are only getting 8,500 you are giving a special price for NOAA because NOAA is an affiliated company it should be 12,500 add 4,000 to your income. Well that's fine if Adam and NOAA are part of a consolidated group that files a joint return then this section 482 would not be necessary even if it's necessary you will add 4,000 to Adam company in revenue in rental revenue or lease revenue then you'll have a deduction on NOAA's return 4,000 of lease deduction or rent rent deduction in effect there is no effect on the bottom line so this is some of the advantages some of the disadvantages of filing a consolidated tax return is an election remain in effect for future years unless there are changes to the affiliated group or the IRS grant the consent to revoke the consolidated return so once you are a consolidated you can no longer back out that easily unless there are the changes to the affiliated group or the IRS you ask the IRS to consent to revoke in this consolidation status now losses arising from specific intercompany transactions are postponed remember we are happy that the gain are deferred or postponed that was an advantage that was an advantage well losses now we don't like losses to be deferred why because we like losses for tax perspective we like losses we like deduction now when the two companies combine and they have losses they cannot take the losses if they are allowed by the tax law they have to defer them because they are intercompany losses also all the group members what they have to do they have to adopt the parent tax year will this could result in shorter tax year for some subsidiaries why is that not good because sometime when you bunch income or exhaust certain carryover if you have a half a year or three fourth of a year or a partial year you may not be able to take advantage of those bunching those deductions also as you consolidate it's more complex and it's the complex and extensive provision of consolidated tax return may result in additional costs administrative compliance costs it costs you more money the tax rules filing is a consolidated return may not be aligned with those used with financial accounting so you have to kind of basically either hire an accountant or hire a CPA firm that can reconcile the two and oftentimes not often it's not as easy and it's costly also if you have a foreign corporation you cannot include in the consolidated tax return certain income that you show for financial statement preparation and we'll work an example in other words if you have a company in Mexico that's generating revenue for you you would report this for financial statement purposes but it's not consolidated for tax purposes it's going to create this discrepancy and this discrepancy will necessitate explanatory reconciliation so eventually you'll have to explain this on schedule m3 the point is when you consolidate you're going to have some complications this is a disadvantage of consolidation now how do you compute taxable income for consolidated groups simply put what's included and what's not included well certain types of transaction are executed from the cal from the calculation of taxable income what are they well intercompany transactions are not taken into account why because the sale of one company is a cost of another company they they cancel each other also dividend distributed from one member of the group to another group are disregarded it's like taking money from one pocket putting the money into the other pocket also any gains and losses resulting from intercompany sales are not realized are I'm sorry are not recognized they are realized recognize means recorded until the asset is sold or transferred to an outside group other than the affiliated group such as when it's disposed of an external party so those losses and gains they don't they don't factor into the consolidated group now what is included when calculating taxable income for the consolidated return what do we include we include net capital gains and losses which is section 1231 as well casualty gains and loss or loss charitable contribution dividend received deduction and net operating loss those we will account for when we are doing a consolidated return the best way to illustrate this concept the benefit of a consolidated return is to look at a quick example just to show you the difference between the two here let's look at adam first adam have income from operation 295 000 capital gains of 55 000 no capital loss and adam made a charitable contribution of 40 000 that's what this is adam's section now let's compute the taxable income for adam we'll take 295 plus 55 000 let's do that 295 plus 55 that's going to give us 350 000 and based on that we can determine the charitable contribution adam made a 40 000 charitable contribution adam can only deduct 35 therefore if we take income from operation for adam plus capital gains minus the charitable contribution 315 000 21 tax 21 tax percent for corporation adam tax bill 66 150 let's look at no one income from operation 175 77 i'm sorry no has a capital loss of 45 000 well no i cannot use it because that's that's an excess capital loss we cannot deduct it for tax purposes we can carry it over therefore noa's taxable income is 177 times 21 noa's tax bill is 37 110 together they paid each one separately but together they paid 103 320 let's see when they consolidate what would happen when they consolidate the total income is 472 000 combining noa and adam capital gains now here's what we do since we are consolidating adam has a capital gain noa has a capital loss well 55 minus 45 now we can use the capital loss of 45 000 and only report is a consolidated capital gains of a 10 000 now 472 plus 10 000 that's 482 now if we multiply this by 10 percent that's going to give us 48 200 this is how much we can contribute to charities you remember adam contributed 40 000 now we can deduct the whole thing so notice by consolidating we were able to use the the capital loss to offset the capital gain and we're able to use the full charitable contribution therefore taxable income is 4 22 multiplied by 21 percent the tax bill is 92 820 notice the difference is 10 500 and savings in case they consolidate so this is just an illustration of the benefit now do government knows about this of course they know so what they'll try to do they want to make sure you don't abuse this type of consolidation therefore they put limitation the rules for consolidated return permit the group to utilize the losses incurred by one member or more of its members to offset gains however because there's a potential of tax abuse or tax avoidance due to that potential you know profitable companies acquiring a loss making a company to utilize its loss carryover so what profitable companies would do they will buy companies that incurring losses and they combine them and they basically wipe out their taxes congress has implemented multiple safeguards to permit to prevent or restrict such potential abuse so the congress they know about this congress people there were business people before there were congress people right so they know exactly what needs to be done so one safeguard is to prevent the utilization of losses and deductions that originated in a separate tax year simply put losses from other years cannot be used in the year of consolidation don't worry we'll look at an example to show you what we mean by this also another safeguard is to restrict the use of losses and deduction when there have been changes in ownership with an affiliated group simply put we have company a company b and company c and what they do they keep buying each other to do what to offset the losses well that that's also cannot be done it's limited let's look at an example that illustrates losses from other years cannot be used in the year of consolidation in the calendar year 2023 adam corporation and noah corporation made their initial decision to file a consolidated return great on january 1st noah had the land as an investment with a basis of 300 000 and a fair market value of 280 well what does that mean means we have a loss right now of 20 000 because the fair market value is less the land is subsequently sold for 270 during 2023 okay now when finally get consolidated returned the affiliated group can only claim 10 000 of losses so the remaining 20 000 stems from a separate return year and pretends exclusively to noah corporation not the consolidated group now let's discuss the third and realized gain and losses the third means pushing things down into the into the future or realized means you are how much you computed an actual realization of gains and losses remember in taxes we like losses in taxes we like losses we don't like gains why because losses reduce our taxable income so the third thing certain intercompany sales can bring either advantages in the case of gains because you want to defer the gain or disadvantages in case of losses because you want to take the losses now and because they can give you a tax benefit okay so the actual gain or loss resulting from intercompany sale is not recognized but instead it's postponed so when we have those type of transaction we have to postpone when they have intercompany gain or loss they are postponed during 2023 farhat corporation a member of the affiliated group that files a consolidated return sells land to add them corporation for its fair market value of 180 000 the land has a basis of 100 000 well everything else is equal there's a realized gain a realized gain of what 80 000 which is 180 this is the consideration received minus the adjusted basis of 100 000 we have a gain of 80 000 okay on the consolidated return on the consolidated return none of this gain is recognized which is we like this we don't want to recognize any gain we don't want to recognize the gain you might be saying but it's a gain yes it's a gain but i don't want to pay taxes on it now in the year 2027 Adam corporation sold the land to an external developer for 210 well according to the consolidation tax return a recognized gain of 110 should be reported now we recognize again of 110 which is 210 minus the basis of 100 000 will give you a return of 110 and now it's sold to an outside party we recognize the gain we recognize the gain what should you do now go to farhat lectures and look at additional resources lectures multiple choice true false additional exercises that's going to help you understand this concept whether you are a CPA candidate an enrolled agent or an accounting student invest in yourself invest in your accounting career good luck study hard and of course stay safe


With the uncertain climate surrounding many retailers reaching a 100-year milestone calls for a celebration, the JCPenney store in Bemidji today marked its 100th birthday with a celebration at Bemidji's Paul Bunyan Mall. The event featured speeches by special guests and a donation to the Bemidji Boys and Girls Club. A large birthday cake was shared with the store's many guests who were in line early to receive special thank you gifts. The store's manager credits the JCPenney company and the community for the store's great success. I think JCPenney has done a lot of changing over the years. The company has to change and retail is just full of change. I think that's important. I also think there's a great relationship between the city. The citizens have supported us and we've tried to support the city also. The store's celebration will continue through the weekend with special deals and coupons offered in the store. If you've enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Lakeland Public Television.


Okay, today we're gonna be working on shell script tutorials. We're gonna be looking at the command called paste, which can do a lot of neat things. And we're just gonna look at a few of them here today. You can see I'm in a folder here with a couple of different text files. And we're gonna go over just three basic examples that you can do with paste. If you enjoy my tutorials and would like to see more, please think about contributing to my Patreon account at patreon.com forward slash metal x 1000. So first off, let's look at these example one and example two text files. So I can cat out example one. And you can see it's just a text file that has five lines and they're numbered one, two, three, four, five. Now if I cat out the second example file, example two, you can see it's five lines as well, A, B, C, D, E. So what we can do here is if we were to, let's say, want to line the first or each line of the first file with each line of the second file, we can just use the paste command, which you probably already have installed on your system. And I can say example one and example two dot text. And what this is gonna do is you can see it lines them up. Now, because these files are named pretty much the same, we can also use an asterisk character like this and just say all files to start with example, boom, it does that. So if the files are named different, you can type out the name of each file if they all begin with the same, you can use an asterisk like that. So we line them up, there is a big space there. So what we can do is we can tell it what to fill in between each character, a delimiter basically. So we're gonna run the same command, but we're gonna say dash D and give it a delimiter. And in this case, I'll say colon. And when we hit enter now, you can see that instead of a tab space, which I believe is what this is, yeah, it seems to be a tab space between each character, which is the default. So if you're trying to make a tab delimited file default, it would be fine. But let's say you want to do colons, you can do it like so. You can also do other characters. I can say dash and have dashes. Could probably do a period. Yeah, there you go. Some characters you might have to put in quotations. So let's say we wanted it to be like each one's numbered and we have a parentheses on one side there. We can just do that. This is not gonna work. I'm gonna get an error there because that's a special character that bash or your shell is seeing as a different, because I'm not using bash, I'm using zshell as you can see. But if we put it in quotations here, there you go. Now you have that as the delimiter. And yes, I probably titled this video as bash, but I do use zshell as my default. But actually, let's just go into bash just to make sure that everything works the same as I should since if I'm gonna title this a bash, there you go. Really shouldn't make much of a difference with the stuff we're doing today. Okay, so here we are. We did our first example with the example files. If I list out again, you can see that I have three files here labeled pay one, pay two and pay three text. So this is a scenario I came up with just to show you something else you could do with it. And this isn't really a very good real world example because if you're storing your files like this, you're not very bright, but we all start off somewhere. But let me cat out, pay one. You can see it has three lines. So just theoretically for this tutorial, let's say you're keeping track of your pay in separate files. The first line is how much you got paid this week. The second line is, let's say how much they take out in taxes. And because you're a good boy or a girl, third line is 10% that you put away for savings because we all should be saving.   So you can see where we're going with this. Okay, so now let's say you wanted to get a total from each week. What we can do here is we can say paste and we can say all our pay files like so. So they lined up, but what we can do is for our delimiter dash D, we can use a plus sign. So there you can see it put a plus sign. So now we're all ready to add it all up and we can put each line, we're gonna use a while loop and take each line and pipe it into the BC command, which is a calculator for your shell here. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna say while read line and hopefully you're familiar with while loops. I have used them all the time and I've done tutorials on them. But what we're saying here is read each line.  And we're gonna say echo dollar sign line and we're gonna pipe that into BC and then we're gonna say done. So it's gonna loop and each time it's going to basically take each line here and add it up. We'll hit enter and there are your totals for each week. So over a three week period, you made $1,450.  So now let's make it a little bit, take it one step further. We can add into our while loop here. We can also say echo and we can say line and we can say equals. But when we have special characters like that, we probably wanna put this into the curly braces here. I've done a tutorial on that. Basically in some cases, one case where you might use curly braces is where a variable, you can't really tell one variable ends and a new string begins. So this is just saying, this is our variable. This is something else and let's not forget our closing quotation there. Hit enter and oh, so it did it, but it put the new, it does by default, echo does a new line character. So what we're gonna do is here dash and say no new line character and there we go. Let's clear the screen and run that again. There's your weekly totals and the sum. So it just makes it gives you a little more to read there, a little more output. Okay, so let's look at one more example and this is one that I can actually see happening and I can find paste being really useful for is if I list out here, I've got one last text file. It's called people. Let's say that you're very low text so you store all your contacts in a text file. I can tell you 20 years ago, I was doing this. So let's have a look at that text file. We'll cat out to people, oops, we spell it right. And you can see that I have a line with the person's last name, their first name, their address and a phone number and then a space and then we do it again, last name, first name, address, phone number and a space. And then a third person, last name, first name. So as long as we're formatted properly and each one has the same number of lines, we can use paste if we wanted to put these all on one line, maybe to prepare it to put it in a real database because you're ready to upgrade your system from using a plain text file that's not very well formatted into maybe a MySQL or even something like a CSV file so or whatever type of format you want that's better than this. So what we're gonna do is we're actually going to redirect the outputs, we're gonna say less than symbol here, the name of our text file and then we're gonna say paste and then we're gonna start doing these dashes and we want a dash for each line. So let's say I just did two there, you can start to see that it starts moving stuff around. Now we have four lines for each person but we also have to count this empty line. So we're gonna want five dashes, each with a space in between them. Now that we've done that, we now have a nicely formatted tab delimited file here that each person has their own line rather than having them on multiple lines. And I'm gonna try something that I didn't try before recording this tutorial and I don't know if this is gonna work but let's say you want to make this a comma separated file, we can say D comma for delimiter and maybe it does work and now you're pretty much ready as long as there's no other commas in the text file itself, you can import this right into a MySQL file or pipe it into more of a script where maybe you can create a JSON output or yeah, that'd be a good one there and either or you can import into most databases. So that's a look at the paste command very useful for certain things and I hope that these examples gave you an idea of where they may be able to help you. I know that probably about 10 years ago this blast option here would have come in real handy for me because like I said, I was saving stuff in text files kind of like I was up here but that was a long time ago. I don't do that anymore. So as always, I thank you for watching. Please visit FilmsByChris.com that's Chris the K. There should be a link in the description and as always, I hope that you have a great day. I would like to take a moment to thank the following patrons who made this video possible by supporting me over at patreon.com forward slash middle X 1000. And then decided that it was taking forever and let it keep running and before it finished running, he learned how to write a C program, ran it and he calculated the numbers in the bash script and do you remember this? Yeah, yeah, no, I think even, I wouldn't even see.


Welcome to the Skides over Colorado for April 2021. I am staff astronomer John Ensworth of the Cherrywood Observatory, volunteer at the Little Thompson Observatory for Longmont Public Media. Astronomy news this month. We are back to looking at the Perseverance rover on Mars and a helicopter. Perseverance has a helicopter on board. You can see it here pictured mounted below the rover, the rover's landing platform, and the arm grabbed it early this April and moved it off to the side. Remember that this launched July 2020, landed last month 2021. This is an artist's rendition of what it will look like and the first flight is expected somewhere around 11th of April. The helicopter itself is called Ingenuity, here's a picture taken by the rover itself of the helicopter about 11 feet away, clear of everything and ready for its first test flight. There's a close up of the little thing, this is pretty amazing that they've come up with blades and motor speeds, power sufficient to operate in the very thin Martian atmosphere. We haven't had many comments just recently, and Common Atlas is our best for April that we know of. It's not going to be great, but here's a picture from the end of March. It's not large, it's got a good greenish color, it's going to move very rapidly this month. From the constellation of Aquila up to Canis venicenti, it's pretty dim, it starts out magnitude 12 so many large telescopes could see it, but then it gets up to around the 8th magnitude when it passes closest to Earth a little bit later this month. So that would be good in a 6 inch telescope or so, and you can usually find someone who has a 6 inch scope, give you a bigger picture. So this is about 3 o'clock in the morning, here is Atlas beginning near Aquila and it heads up to Canis venicenti. We have good news to report that we will not be destroyed from an asteroid coming in from space, at least not this one, Apophis. We have known of Apophis for a while and we had a conceptual spot in space just above the Earth called the keyhole that in a future flyby if this asteroid, which is about 1100 feet long to 20 million tons, happened to go through that keyhole then it would definitely hit the Earth in 2068 causing fantastic amounts of destruction even far from where it hit. 99942 Apophis with very very careful measurements here is March 8th, 1910, has now been proven to probably be a little further than we thought originally, about 950 feet further from this 600 meter wide spot, this keyhole than we thought. So that's true, it's not going to hit Earth at all, extremely vastly ridiculously small. Who cares? Chance. Alright, let's take a look at big star parties. Yeah, the news hasn't changed much, couldn't find anything in April, which would normally be pretty active time. In May the Texas Star Party had a date of May 2nd through 9th in Fort Davis type of air. Yeah, that's been canceled. So if you want to keep an eye on these things, I've got the two rather large URLs here on the screen and you can keep looking to see if something does get scheduled and stay on the books. Your astronomy 101 lesson for this month is related to something we spoke of before where we talked about the shadow of the Earth at sunset and sunrise visible in the atmosphere in the belt of Venus. Now we're going to talk about types of twilight, both evening and morning. These are very mathematically defined. Civil twilight occurs in the period of time that the Sun is just below the horizon to 6 degrees below the horizon. Civil twilight, civil dawn, civil sunset, down to 12 degrees below the horizon is nautical twilight and 18 degrees down is astronomical twilight and beyond that you're in full night. So you usually want to see the end of astronomical twilight to really get out there and start looking for dim fuzzies in the sky. So civil twilight, the end of civil twilight, street lights are usually programmed to come on, car lights should be on. This is that time where contrast is kind of difficult, I don't know if more car accidents happen then, but people feel less safe at least when they're driving. A nautical twilight looks like this. The brighter navigational stars are now visible, so if sailors in the past using the sextant and other navigational aids would be able to look at the position of the bright stars. At the time when they had good timepieces, and that's a really interesting story to look up historically to figure out where they were. That's the earliest and the latest you could navigate by astronomical night time objects. Astronomical twilight, you're starting to see lots of stars come out. You might still have a little bit of light in the western sky but the sky is now becoming fully dark. So a quick contrast, you can see the street lights are now fully on in nautical. And now you're having to take a time lapse to see details on buildings making building illumination very bright. The sky is above your backyard this month. We have the last quarter moon on April 4th in the morning sky. New moon happens on the 11th first quarter so the moon's back in the evening sky after about the 12th or 13th or so you can see that little sliver in the southwest and by the 20th it's first quarter with the full moon at the end of the month on the 26th. The planets, well we have one in the evening sky. In the dusk in the evening it's just Mars high up in the southwestern sky and it sets a couple hours or an hour before midnight. So in the evening this month you do have dim Uranus out there but you're not going to find it easily. It's so close to the sun it's so dim it's basically gone in the glow now. In Venus if you happen to catch it maybe with the telescope going right over the look we'll start to emerge from the sun's glow to make an appearance in the evening sky for much of the rest of this year. Taking a look at the big picture here this is right after sunset you can see the glow of the sun over this little graphical hill there's Uranus down here in the glow and Mars is pretty high up still. On the other side of midnight it's not much. Mars is going down at about 11.30, 11.45 in the middle of the month so yeah in the middle of the night midnight you are planet free. In the morning sky Neptune and Mercury are too close to the sun to be seen but Jupiter and Saturn are now putting on a nice show. So here's the morning sky with a little bit of glow from the rising sun and Neptune too close really for anything to matter. Here's Jupiter and Saturn because of the angle the ecliptic at this time of year they are really low in the southeastern sky even though they're getting kind of far from the sun. Sunrise the sun for April, April 1st sunrise is at 6.43am and we gain 45 minutes of light on that side of the day by April 30th. Sunset is at 7.24 and we end up at the 7.53pm sunset at the end of the month and so our sunlight now increases by about the same about half hour. So overall we go from 12 hours 40 minutes to 13 hours and 51 minutes giving us an hour and 10 minutes more daylight. The noon time local noon sun angle up from the southern horizon increases 10 degrees from 55 to 65 degrees. It still has a way to go for our June summer solstice. Our feature object this month is one of the only planet that you can see with the naked eye and with small telescopes that we haven't covered yet and that is Venus and since Venus is coming into a good show for the rest of the year might as well bring it up now. This is a false cover, false color, sorry image lots of enhancements done on that that's probably a spacecraft based image and yet but right this is what you most normally see down the lower right with Venus being the brightest thing that is a point like object in the night time sky. It is brighter than Jupiter that Jupiter is given a higher billing because it is a superior planet we talked about that in an earlier video it goes all the way around the night time sky throughout the year or Venus can get up to 46 or so degrees away from the sun at best. It is a weird planet though it is almost exactly the same size as the Earth 95% of our diameter with about 90% of our gravity at its surface. Its year is 224 to 225 Earth days long but its day is 243 Earth days long so it actually rotates backwards so its day is longer than its year. That gives it or results from what we call a 177 degree tilt in its axis it is upside down. We define North by looking down from above a counterclockwise rotation so North is wherever that happens as you're looking at the rotating whatever it is. The Mercury last month which has almost no atmosphere this has a crushing atmosphere with pressures down at the surface similar to being a mile down in the ocean. All carbon dioxide so does suffocating temperatures in the many hundreds of degrees 800 degrees or so should have written that one down hot enough to melt lead and the clogs above rain sulfuric acid droplets down until they evaporate so it is a pretty nasty place. Your Colorado Observing Challenge this month is to look to see if the moon really is bigger as it rises and sets than it is in the high portion of the sky. This is an optical illusion where your brain is trying to use nearby reference points like hillsides and trees and buildings to estimate the size of something just beyond them because your eyes can't see the parallax or the distance effect caused by the separation between your eyes for an object that is 200,000 miles away.  So you can trick yourself by turning your back and looking under your arm or between your legs if you're flexible enough to see if the moon seems to pop back to normal size. You can look at the moon and then get out a paper towel roll and look through it and that takes away all those references and the moon should look normal size again or you could take a digital camera image and take a picture of it at rise and in the middle of the night. So astronomers without borders has challenges like this and I grabbed this one from them this month. Alright astronomy events near Longmont not unlike the star parties most things are shut down but there are still opportunities out there. The Longmont Astronomical Society on April 15th at 7pm will have a zoom meeting how do galaxies get their shapes with Dr. Angela Collier you can see longmontastro.org for details. They don't have any outdoor open space star parties planned that I see on their site. If I'm following their pattern correctly it should have happened or should have happened around April 16th at 6 30 or 7 30 p.m. kind of hard to tell I don't have an archive of their site so keep an eye on their site eventually things are going to go back to normal. Little Thompson Observatory they are closed through June 2021 and then July is a maintenance month so what for things in August you can schedule a virtual meetings which is done via zoom and you can look through the telescope basically from your home very limited it takes a lot of work and we only have a few volunteers who can be there at a time but keep an eye on that site for those and zoom meeting. Estes Park Memorial Observatory is still mostly closed they are going to try to start doing limited single group only meetings groups under 12 no more than three times a week I'll go ahead and read the text here on the details so currently the plan is to start hosting small star gazing groups in mid-April groups will be limited to just one family group or group of friends at a time it's be good but not required that everyone is vaccinated it could group screaming of a family's close friends classmates but I don't mix with unvaccinated outsiders everyone needs to wear a mask during the event only six will be allowed in the dome of the time to allow social distancing and since there is only the director Mike Conway they do want to limit it to three times a week so you have to go to angelsabove.org and send an email to the info address or look to call the phone number also on that site. Northern Colorado Astronomical Society has a webinar speaker April 1st Dr. Fran. Juno's extended mission in Jupiter the webcast so look for the archive there since this is going to go up a little after the first this planetarium they have down-to-home virtual programs live event April 15th at 7 p.m. a crowded orbit the co-evolution of satellites and space junk so visit colorado.edu slash this and the observatory there they ask you well there's one part that says to look for a meeting every Wednesday at 3 p.m. for live shows I do see specifically on the April 2nd at 8 p.m. April 30th 8 p.m. scheduled at their YouTube channel so explore there yourself see what you can find all right wrapping up this month take a look at our desktop software suggestion and I've given you some pretty high dollar ones so I'm going to go the other extreme now this is called Stellarium I also have this installed on my phone and iPad it's a free open-source planetarium and it is constantly being developed and improved it's pretty fantastic here's an example of the star map lots of controls very pretty sky it generates you can pick locations anywhere in the world and also pick different scenes for your horizon and feel that you're standing in probably even import your own you can generate orbits and highlight planets put things in motion in real time bring up constellations and lore you can even import different constellation sets from different cultures and you can overlay more fanciful imagery for those constellations go to Stellarium.org it is free you can download Linux Mac OS windows and even access it on the web pretty powerful software if you have any additions or corrections from this month or suggestions for future shows please email me jenonsworth at gmail.com and you put skies over colorado in the subject line so I know that this is what you're talking about this has been steep staff astronomer almost got to be without a good mess up staff astronomer jononsworth for long month public media see you next month keep looking up