From an Unseen Sensor. by Rosal George Brown. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, visit LibriVox.org. From an Unseen Sensor. Uncle Isidore's ship wasn't in bad shape, at first glance, but a second look showed the combustion chamber was crumpled to pieces, and the jets were fused into the rocks, making a smooth depression. The ship had tilted into a horizontal position, nestling in the hollow its last blasts had made. Dust had sifted in around it, piling over the almost invisible seam of the port and filming the whole ship. We circled around the ship. It was all closed and sealed, blind as a bullet. Okay, Renee said. He's dead, my regrets. He coughed the word out as though it were something he had swallowed by accident. But how do you know, I asked. He might be in there. That port hasn't been open for months, maybe years. I told you the converter wouldn't last more than a month in dock. He couldn't live locked up in there without air or water. Let's go. My guide had no further interest in the ship. He hadn't even looked to see what the planet was like. I stood shivering in my warm clothes. The ship seemed to radiate a chill. I looked around at the lumpy, unimaginative landscape of Elvarla. There was nothing in sight, but a scraggly, done heather sprouting here and there in the rocks and dust, making her suit patches in the low hills. I had some wild idea, I think, that Uncle Izzy might come sauntering nonchalantly over the hills, one hand in the pocket of a grilch-down jacket and the other holding a Martian figurine. And he would have on his face that look which makes everything he says seem cynical and slightly clever even if it isn't. The scenery is dull, he might say, but it makes a nice backdrop for you. Something like that, leaving the impression he'd illuminated a side of your character for you to figure out later on. Nothing of the kind happened, of course. I just got colder standing there. All right, Rene said. We've had a moment of silence. Now, let's go. I—there's something wrong, I told him. Let's go in and see the—body. We can't go in. That ship's sealed from the inside. You think they make those things so any painted alien can open the door and shoot in poisoned arrows? Believe me, he HAS to be inside if those outside ports are sealed. And he HAS to be dead, because that port hasn't been opened in months. Look at the dust! It's a fourth of the way up the port! Rene lumbered over to it and blew away some of the lighter dust higher up. See that? He asked. No. He groaned. Well, you'll have to take my word for it. It's a raindrop. Almost four months old. A very light rain. You could see the faint, crusted outline of the drop if you knew how to look. I believe you, I said. I hired you because you know which side of the trees the moss grows on and things like that. Still—Rene was beginning to stomp around impatiently. Still what? It just isn't like Uncle Isidor. I was trying to search out, myself, what it was that struck me as incongruous. It's out of character. It's out of character for anybody to die, Rene said, but I've seen a lot of them dead. I mean, at least he would have died outside. Oh, for Pete's sake, why outside?  I went around to the other side of the spaceship, mostly to get away from Rene for a moment. I'm only a studs and neck-class man and Rene had twenty years' experience on alien planets. So he was right, of course, about the evidence. There was no getting around it. Still—I circled back around to where Rene was smoking his first cigarette since we left Earth. His face was a mask of sun-baked wrinkles pointing down to the cigarette smack in the middle of his mouth.  He'd have a brass band, or we'd find his body lying in a bed of roses with a big lily in his hand, or he might even disappear into thin air. But not this. I waved a hand toward the dead ship. Look, Rene said, my job was to find your Uncle Isidor. I found him. We can't get inside that ship with anything short of a matter-reducer, which I don't happen to have along since they weigh several tons. You'll have to take my word for it that his body's in there. Now, let's go home. He managed to talk without moving the cigarette at all. You said a week, I reminded Rene. I said if I didn't find him in a week then he wasn't there. I found him. I'm sorry if he was your favorite uncle or something. As a matter of fact, I never liked him. He was frivolous. He never had a job. He thought life was a big game. Then how come he got so rich? He always won. Not this time, brother. But if he's not your favorite uncle, why all this concern? You can take my word for it, he's dead, and you've done your duty. There are two things that bother me. One is curiosity. I just don't believe Uncle Isid died in an ordinary fashion locked up in a spaceship. You don't know him, so you wouldn't understand. The other thing I'm concerned about is... well, his will. Rene barked a couple of times. I had learned this indicated laughter. I figured what you were really after was his money. Under my yellow overskin I could feel myself coloring. That wasn't at all the point. I'd mortgaged Mother's bonds to finance this trip, confident that Uncle Izzy would make it good when we found him. If I couldn't get Mother's bonds out of Hock, she'd have to live out her life in a comfort park. I shuddered at the thought. Uncle Isidore must have known that when he radar'd for help. He must have provided some way. You said a week, and we're staying a week, I told Rene, as authoritatively as I could manage. You haven't actually showed me, Uncle Izzy's... er, corpus delectae. So I have you on a legal technicality. I didn't know whether or not this was true, but it sounded good. All right, we'll stay... Rene spat the sentence out onto the ground. But if you think I'm going to do any more looking, take another guess. He tremp'd back into his own ship, leaving the outside port and the pressure chamber open. If only Uncle Izzy had done that. I went over his ship inch by inch, feeling with my hands to be sure there was no extra door that might be opened. Rene would have laughed, but I was beginning to build up antibodies against Rene's laughter. I got the bottom part of the ship dusted off and found nothing. I pushed open the door of Rene's ship and asked him for a ladder. "'You'll have to pay for it,' he warned. "'Once it's open, I can't carry it in my ship, and I'll have to get another. OK, OK, I'll pay for it.' He handed me a synthetic affair that looked like a meshed rope, wound tight, about the size of a venusian cigar.  I slipped the cellophane off and unrolled it. It seemed to unroll endlessly. When it was ten feet long and four feet wide, I stopped unrolling. Sure enough, it hardened into a ladder in about ten minutes. It was so strong I couldn't begin to bend it over my knee. I set it against the side of the ship and began to investigate the viewports. The first two were sealed tight as a drum. The third slipped off in my hands and clattered over the side of the ship onto the rocks. I was almost afraid to look through the glass beneath. I'd needn't have been. I could see absolutely nothing. It was space black inside. I went back to Rene's ship for a flashlight. He was unimpressed by my discovery. "'Even if you could break the glass, which you can't,' he said, "'you still couldn't get through that little porthole. Here's the flash. You won't be able to see anything.'" He came with me this time, not because he was interested, but because he wanted another cigarette and never smoked in the ship. He was right. I couldn't see a darn thing in the ship with the flashlight. But I found something, a little lead object that looked like a coin. It had rolled into a corner of the port. Now, I don't like adventure. I don't like strange planets. All I've ever asked of life was my little four-by-six cubby in the Brooklyn block and my job. A job I know inside out. It's a comfortable, happy, harmless way to live, and I test ten to nine on job adjustment. All the same it was a thrill to discover a clue that Rene would have thrown away if he'd been the one looking. I tossed it casually in the air and showed it to Rene. "'Know what that is?' I asked. Slug for a half-deck slot machine? Nope. Know what I can do with it?' He didn't say. "'I'm going to open Uncle Izzy's ship from the inside.'" Rene lighted a fresh cigarette from the old one and let the smoke out of his nose. He gave rather the impression of a bull resting between picadors. "'Can you show me, on the outside, approximately where the button is that you push on the inside to unseal the ship?' I inquired casually. "'I can show you exactly.'" He pointed to a spot next to the entrance port. I wet my finger and made a mark on the dust so I could get it just right. Then I found a sharp stone and cut around the edges of the lead. As I slipped off the back half of the coin-like affair I clapped it over the finger-mark. The entrance port swung open. If I'd had a feather I would have taken great pleasure in knocking Rene over with it. "'It'd be worth a million dollars,' he breathed, to know how you did that. "'Oh, a lot less than that,' I said eerily. "'Well, explain.'" A Galizador had set it up, I told him, using the same patiently impatient tone he used on me. He knew I'd recognize that lead coin. There was a cufflink in it. "'A cufflink?' "'A studs-and-net class man has to know about cufflinks, too. This happens to be an expensive cufflink, but worth only about a year's salary, not a million dollars. They're held together by a jazzed-up, electromagnetic force rather than by a clasp. This force is so strong it would take a derrick to pull them apart. The idea is to keep you from losing one. If you drop it to the floor you just wave the mate around a little and it pops up through the air. How do you get them apart? Just slip them sideways, like a magnet. You can sheathe them in a lead, like the one I found, to cut down the attraction. This is how they're packaged. You don't know about them because they're not advertised. That keeps them a luxury item, you know." "'So your Uncle Isidore pasted one of them on the port button. He didn't have to paste. All he had to do was stick it on. All I had to do was line up the mate to it and the attractive force pushed the button.' "'That's very neat,' Renee said. But why the hell didn't he just leave the port open? He'd hardly do this sort of thing with his dying gasp.' "'I'm not sure,' I admitted. As a matter of fact, I wonder why he radar'd me if he really wanted to be rescued. He had plenty of friends who could rescue him more reliably. I had an inkling of what had been on Uncle Isidore's mind. Although Uncle Izzy had had three, or was it four, wives, he'd very carefully had no children. And it had occurred to him at an advanced age to take an interest in me. He'd sent me through two years of general studies, and reluctantly let me specialize in studs and net-clasps.' "'You were a grill-chop expert in middle school,' he had told me.  I would like to get into some solid line of work and be a good citizen.' "'Foe-ee,' he'd said. But he had let me do what I'd wanted. It was because of this that I had felt duty-bound to answer his call for help. I'd not felt duty-bound to take all the opportunities he'd tried to force on me when I got out of school. Mining the semi-solid seas of Al-Fard Kappa, fur trading on Procyon Beta, and a hundred others all obviously doomed to failure unless there was one lucky chance.  "'You only think you're happy because you don't know any better,' he kept telling me. Only, now that he was dead, he seemed to have me where he wanted me. Now that nothing could matter to him any longer.' "'Maybe he was getting senile,' Rene suggested. "'Uncle Isidore always said he'd rather die than...' "'He did die,' I replied, suddenly recalling myself to the present and the open outside port of the ship. I realized how reluctant I was to go in. It was one thing to admit Uncle Isidore was dead.  "'Would you mind going in first?' I asked Rene. He shrugged and shouldered the inside door open. He came out, his face a study in perplexity. "'Not here,' he said. "'This is the first time I've been wrong in fifteen years.' "'That's because it's the first time you've been up against Uncle Isi. He must have closed the port behind him the same way I opened it.' I climbed through the door, feeling immensely relieved. I realized then what had really been worrying me. If the gods had abandoned Isidore at the last, what do they have in mind for the rest of us mere mortals?' I kicked at my mind irritably, knowing these were young thoughts. But then I am young, I explained to myself. The inside of the ship was neat and empty. Stuck on the instrument panel with a vac-cup was a note in Uncle Isi's flowery script. "'My boy, I have died of boredom. Do not look for the remains. I have hidden my body to avoid the banality of a decent burial. I bequeath you my entire fortune. Find it.' Rene groaned. "'I suppose now you want to look for the body.' "'No. If he says it's hidden, it's hidden. But it would be a little silly to go off without finding his fortune, wouldn't it?' "'Looking for buried treasure wasn't in the contract,' Rene pointed out. "'You'll have to make it worth my while.' "'Another five thousand,' I said. Make it ten. Payable if I find it.' "'Suppose I find it.' "'Don't be ridiculous. You'd be a fool to take two steps on this planet without me.' He was right, of course, and if we left I wouldn't get anything. I thought of mother living by the bells at a comfort park. "'All right,' I said.' "'What form was his fortune in?' Rene asked. Money, bonds, polarian droplets? It would help to know what I'm looking for.' "'I have no idea,' I confessed. Ordinarily it would take a computer to figure out Uncle Isidor's financial affairs, but he'd have been perfectly capable of selling out everything and taking his entire fortune along with him for some new project.' Rene had skilfully unscrewed the instrument panel and he lifted it off and began poking inside and removing mysterious bits of machinery. "'That makes it harder. You don't know whether he sold out or not?' "'I have no idea. He might have all his money piled in the locker of the Wist Club of Sirius Beta. In that case we look for a key. Or he might have a block of Eritrevium buried somewhere.  But that'll mean walking over every inch of ground for a day's journey around, or more if he did any overnight traveling.' "'Nah, Uncle Izzy,' I said. He wouldn't be at all likely to spend a freezing night out on Alvarla, even for a good joke.' "'Radar equipment's in perfect shape,' Rene said, shifting his activities to another segment of the ship's equipment. I wonder why he didn't leave it on so we could locate him easier. Not that we had any trouble. Or why he didn't continue broadcasting for help until he died. Mind if I take some of the equipment?' "'You haven't been exactly generous with me.' "'I intend to subtract its value from the cost of supplies and mileage on my ship. I never said I was generous, but by God I'm honest.' "'Rene slid out the compartment of lunch-packages, dumped them on the floor.' "'All unopened,' he was saying disgustedly. Then he picked up a heavy square object with square corners, open on three sides. "'What the hell is this?' "'A book,' I informed him. Rene opened it. "'Hey! A real antique book! Must be worth at least a thousand. Look at the size of that print! You can read it with the naked eye, like an instrument panel.  He tossed it to me and went on examining the lunch-packages. He didn't trust me to help him because I wouldn't be able to tell if they'd been opened and something inserted. I hung the book by the covers and let the pages flip open. Nothing fell out. I sighed. I'd have to go through the whole damn thing.' "'I'm going back to your ship and read in comfort,' I told Rene. "'You're no help here, anyway,' he said, putting the lunch-packages in a large plastic bag he'd found somewhere. No use letting these go to waste.' I didn't tell him. I had the clue to Uncle Isidor's fortune in my hand. He didn't know Uncle Isidor, so he wouldn't have believed me. Nothing is more uncomfortable than reading an antique book. There's no way to lie back and flash it on a screen or run the tape over your reading-glasses while you lie prone and relax. You have to hold it. If you try to hold it lying down, your arms get tired. If you put it down on a table to read, your neck gets tired from bending over, and the pages keep flipping and making you lose your place. Still, I read it all the way through. It wasn't too bad, not like Edgar Guest, of course, who was the only ancient author I'd liked in general studies, but I found there was a sort of Grinch hop beat to it that reminded me of the footlooses I used to go to in middle school. I grinned. It was funny to think of now. I found no clues in the book. The only thing to do was read it again more carefully. I noticed there was one poem with a real Grinch hop beat. I thought suddenly of Sally, my regular partner at the footlooses. She was very blond, and she affected a green crest wave in her hair, pulled over her forehead with a diamond clip. She was a beauty all right, but she was a little silly, and she had that tendency to overdress. No, I sighed. She wouldn't have done for us studs and neck class, man. But I couldn't help wondering where she was now and what she was like now. Did she remember me and did she think about me when she heard that song we used to dance to because it was about a girl named Sally? Once I knew a girl named Sally. Met her at a footloose rally. I began humming the old Grinch hop tune to the ancient poem in Uncle Algy's book. It was fantastic how closely it fitted, though of course the words in the poem were plain silly. But imagine finding a poem with a perfect Grinch hop beat before anybody even knew what a Grinch was. Before Venus was even discovered. Jump on both feet, hop three times on left foot, jump, hop three times on right foot. The rhythm was correct, right down to the breakaway and four-step at the end of each run. It was while I was singing this poem to a Grinch hop tune that I noticed the clue. The poem was named The Dodo, and the rhyming was very smooth until I came to the lines. Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, though I said art like a raven, ghastly grim and ancient dodo, wandering from the nightly shore. Tell me what thy lordly name is on the night's plutonian shore. Quote the dodo, Isidore. Now the author had gone to a lot of trouble in the previous verse not to break the Grinch hop rhyme scheme. He made there at is, rhyme with lattice, and that is. Why did he follow shaven and raven with dodo? Furthermore it had not struck me the first time I read the poem quickly that there was anything odd about a bird being named Isidore. People who keep pet grilches frequently name them after famous reed players, and Isidore is a common name. On the other hand it was my uncle's name, and the word dodo didn't rhyme as it should. I got out a magnifying glass to examine the ancient print. Sure enough it had been tampered with. The print looked so odd to me anyway I hadn't noticed the part that had been changed. But it was obvious under the glass that dodo had been substituted for a word of almost equal length. The same with Isidore. I went over the whole poem now carefully to see which words had been changed. There weren't many. White, in a couple of places, dodo and Isidore wherever they occurred. An O in the line, perfume from an unseen censor. S in the line, wretch I cried, Isidore hath sent thee. Sitting back I thought about what I had read. It made no sense at all. Was I to look for a white bird, grim, ungainly, ghastly? And what if I found him? Why was he like a raven? What was this perfume from an unseen censor? I could picture the ghost of Uncle Isidore, knowing his financial imagination as the unseen censor, because he always criticized me. Was I to look for perfume? Did he have a fortune in perfume stowed somewhere? It seemed to me it would take an awful lot of even the most expensive perfume to comprise a fortune. I decided to start with the bird. I went outside Rene's ship and looked around. No birds. Rene, I called. He was still looking through Uncle Izzy's ship.  What! he snapped, sticking an indignant face out of the door. I guess you haven't. Can your woodsy lore tell if there are birds on this planet? Obviously, Rene said. I don't know why you can't find your own spore. I noticed the droppings immediately. Where are the birds?  But he couldn't contain his special knowledge. They're probably night birds, he said. Oh, yes. It checked. Wandering from the night's plutonian shore. He looked at me suspiciously.  I have not. I test ten to nine on job adjustment and ten to eight on life adjustment. Some people crack on alien planets, he said. I have a padded room in my ship. You'd be surprised how often I have to use it. I told him about the poem I found in Uncle Izzy's book. We look for a white bird, I said, or perfume.  How do you know these changes weren't made by somebody else a long time ago? Maybe this ancient printer printed it wrong and had to change it afterward. I don't think they were that primitive back then. But I didn't know what back then meant or how primitive ancient printing was. All I knew for sure was that as the poem stood, it sounded as if somebody had loused up a perfect grilled-chop rhyme. And Uncle Izzy knew I was a grilled-chop expert in middle school, and this was the only real grilled-chop rhythm in the book. What's more, Uncle Izzy could depend on me to go over that book in painstaking detail because a studs and neck-class man has to be good on details. All right, I said, you look your way and I'll look my way. We're not looking any more anyway today, Rene said, emerging from Uncle Izidor's ship loaded down with removings. It'll be night and below freezing in half an hour. What do you think, I asked, a dodo would like to eat? A what? The birds. I want to put something out to attract them. Crackers or something? I think you're crazy. If you have any idea of sitting outside to wait for them, you'll freeze to death. Not only that, there's no moon.  How do the birds see? Maybe they aren't night-birds. Maybe they migrated somewhere else. And if I use a light, I might scare them away, I mused. Well, maybe I'm not supposed to wait outside anyway. Rene went in and switched on the heat and lights. Leave the outside port open, I said. Why? So the birds can knock. Can what? It's possible, I said, defensively. It won't hurt anything to leave it open.  Rene had the heat turned low for sleeping and the lights off, as soon as we had eaten and fed the converter. I hydrated a package of crackers so that they were full-sized, but not soggy, broke them into pieces, and tossed them out. I admit, I felt a little embarrassed. I sat there in the chill quiet on this ugly, alien world, reading the dodo by the light of a miniature flash so as not to disturb Rene. Pretty soon I began to feel creepy. The dodo is a ghastly poem. There's an insidious morbidity about it. It had sounded merely funny the first time I read it. Now, the more I read it, the more I began to hear strange, impossible creakings and sighs which might or might not be due to temperature changes. The night outside was a deep, cold cup of darkness where no human thing moved. There was a knock at the door. I dropped the book and flashlight. Rene was up like a cat. He didn't turn on the light. Oh, there! he shouted. There was a scratching noise at the door. Then a voice croaked. My name is Isidore Summers. I reached a trembling hand for the door. Wait, you fool! Rene cried. He picked up the flash and got his gun.  I know when to shoot and when not to shoot. You don't. If it's Uncle Isidore, I tell you, you've got to leave it up to me if you want to get off this planet alive.  He kicked the door open and stood back and to one side of it. Come in with your arms up. There was a sort of rustling sound and Rene walked a huge, white, wingless bird. My name, the dodo repeated, somewhat plaintively this time, with a glance toward the lunch compartment, is Isidore Summers. I couldn't help it. I rolled all over the ship with laughter. Rene looked a little shame-faced, tossed his gun onto the rack, and punched the lighting on. Obviously, the dodo recognized our lunch compartment from familiarity with Uncle Izzy's ship. Then he'd looked at the alcohol tap that led from the fuel conversion. Now, petty, he begged. I hesitated. Isn't there something, I asked Rene, about corrupting the natives of a primitive planet? But Rene was sitting on his bunk, his jaw slack.  If it's just a bird, of course, like a parrot... I addressed the bird. Sir, I began, and caught myself. Or, perhaps, madam, can you say anything else? Nappanthi! the bird said, firmly. I shrugged and drew a cup. The dodo lifted the cup and drained it in one smooth gesture. This, as it turned out, was the only thing it seemed to do smoothly. It began a wild attempt to scratch its head with one claw and remain upright. Then, abandoning all dignity, it rolled to its side and scratched furiously to satisfaction. After that, it began what looked like a hopeless attempt to write its awkward body, legs struggling in the air and back bumping around the ship. I couldn't help remembering Uncle Izzy after a meal, slim and suave, lighting up a tapered, perfectly packed figurine and blowing out one round shapely smoke ring that hovered before his light sardonic grin like a comment on his thoughts. An uncomfortable comparison I shook myself to life. I righted the bird, no small problem, for he weighed almost two hundred pounds. Well, Rene finally said, coming out of his mood, now that you have this bird, what are you going to do with it? I had thought it might lead us to Uncle Izzy's fortune, I explained. The bird obviously had no such intention. It was getting ready to take a nap. A night bird, I told it approvingly, shouldn't take a nap in the middle of the night. All you're approving is that he has no self-respect, Rene pointed out. Why don't you look to see if he's got a note tagged to his leg or something? I did. He didn't.  Maybe he's trained to say something else. Where is Uncle Izzy's fortune? I asked, when I had tugged at the Dodo's feathers until he opened one eye. He closed it. Do you have a message for me? He drew away from me irritably and closed the eye again, ruffling down into his feathers. He may be keyed to respond to certain phrases. Try your uncle's name. He obviously knows that. Rene suggested coldly, wanting no part of this, but unable to hold down the suggestion. My name, I screamed at the somnolent Dodo, is Isidor Summers.  I picked the book up off the floor and flipped through the bent pages until I found the Dodo. Maybe there'd be something in that. Listen to this, Rene, I said, and see if you catch anything I might have missed. Rene looked discomforted, but he didn't stop up his ears. When I came to the part, tell me what thy lordly name is, on the knight's plutonian shore, the Dodo looked up and said, Isidor. Clearly this was it, although I couldn't recall that any of the questions in the poem were to the point. I got to, on the morrow he will leave me as my hopes have flown before, and then the bird said, Ask me more, said the Dodo, without missing a beat. I read on, getting excited. Quaff, oh quaff, this kind of penthe, and forget this lost Lenore. Quoth the Dodo, Give me more, he supplied, pointing his beak at the alcohol tap.  Is there, is there balm in Gilead? Tell me, tell me, I implore. Quoth the Dodo. Probably not, the Dodo said, breaking the grill-chop rhythm at last. But there are perfume trees on Alvarla. Perfume trees, Rene shouted. That bird's lying, it's impossible.  I read on, somewhat ashamed of having to say such inhospitable words to a Dodo who had been, after all, cooperating with me. Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door. Quoth the Dodo. I was just leaving, the bird said, and struggled to his feet and went and stood by the door expectantly. I got up. Wait, I commanded the bird, who couldn't do much else because the door was closed. Do you know what perfume trees are, Rene?  You can take my word for it. They need a warm moist soil to germinate in. They need to have their soil cultivated every day for a year. They die fast on contact with any sort of industrial fumes.  They die if you sweat on them.  They need to start off warm and get colder every month until they form their flowers. Then they need a frost for the pods to fill with the perfume, along with the seeds. There aren't any industrial fumes here, I pointed out, and they could get plenty of frost. That's all they'd get. Where's the warm moist climate to germinate in? Where's the parasitical runes to cultivate their soil? The urns couldn't exist without their glies, and the glies can't exist without? Never mind. The only place perfume trees can grow is on Odoria, and that's why the perfume is worth two thousand dollars an ounce. I have never heard of anything, I informed him, that spelled Uncle Isidor so exactly. He always said, if it can't be done, I can do it. Well, there's only one way to find out. Surely there's something on the ship I can wear.  That's exactly what I mean. For Pete's sake, you're as brainless as the bird is! But I think, for all his attitude, he was curious, too. He began to spray me with something. Close your eyes and mouth. If you don't wash this off with soap and water in twenty-four hours, you'll die, but it sure keeps in the body heat. I stuck the book in my pocket for good luck, and Renee handed me a gun, some lunch-packages, an antibiotic kit, and a water purification kit. All right, I said, pocketing them, but it can't be far. Uncle Isi wouldn't have gone more than a day's journey. Then why haven't we smelled the perfume? And why would he have gone through all this rigamarole when he must have known you'd searched that far? I didn't know why. I pushed the door open, the bird hopped out, and I realized how easy it would be to lose him from the small round glow of my flash. He looked curiously at me, as though expecting something further. I looked curiously at him, wondering where he would lead to. Then he was off. There was no question of following him. That big, awkward bird ran so fast that in a few minutes we could no longer hear the beat of his huge claws on the rocks, even in the perfectly still dry air. How fast do you figure he's going, I asked René?  Roughly. Roughly? Maybe fifty miles an hour? But that's incredible. The big point tails on the Aldebaran coppock and do 80 with a native on their backs. Ah, I said. So that's it. Maybe tomorrow night. But we could hear the drumming of the returning Dodo.    I stuck my flashlight into one of my many pockets and climbed onto the huge bird's back. The down beneath his outer feathers was as soft and strong as heavy fur. I dug in with my hands and feet, my head braced against the thickened part of his neck. He started off with a lurch that brought my stomach out of hiding. I kept my eyes squeezed closed. I couldn't have seen anything anyway, not even the impossible creature that was rushing through the darkness carrying me, for all I knew, straight to damnation. The night rushed past my ears into a wild keening, and it crossed my mind to wonder what Mr. Picks, my supervisor, would say if he saw me now. I had a sudden vision of Mr. Picks, even more neatly dressed than I always was, with middle-cost neck clasp and stud discreetly shining from a plain square-edged bag shirt and done suit. I pictured him opening a refined little box and holding it two feet under the customer's eyes with a gesture of faint, unconscious application. A comfortable, warm, happy picture, in which my place, one counter behind Mr. Picks, was reassuringly assured. Then, out of nowhere, into the picture galloped a yellow-skinned monster, astride a huge white bird. It turned out to be me, and I tumbled off the bird, crying, Mr. Picks, I don't know what came over me. But I was answered only by a multitude of squawks, rustles, and scratchings. The bird was home. I could almost see vague forms. The darkness was beginning to give a little. I was warm, itchy, and uncomfortable under whatever it was that Rene had sprayed on me. Warm? Perfume trees? All I could smell were bird roosts. I stood up, finding my limbs weak, trembling and painful. First I glanced at my watch. Five hours' tarentime since we left the ship. At fifty miles per hour, we'd have gone two hundred and fifty miles. If we'd gone dune north, as the bird started out, we must be in the snow zone. And I was warm. I switched my flash around. All I could see were birds. There seemed to be hundreds of them. I couldn't tell which one was my bearer. Where is the perfume? I bawled. All I got was squawks. Some of the birds were, in fact, standing on one foot and tucking their heads away. It was growing lighter. The birds were going to bed. Feverishly I pulled out Uncle Izzy's old volume of poetry. Brushing from my mind a vision of Mr. Picks in a state of shock and another picture of Uncle Isidor snickering triumphantly, I stood on that desert land, enchanted, on that home by horror haunted and solemnly read, The Dodo to a Colony of Wingless Birds. My Dodo identified himself at the proper place, but I kept on, waiting for something to show me my inheritance. Then me thought the air grew denser, I read. Perfume from an unseen censor. A bird croaked from the back row. Where, I cried, pushing my way through the birds crowding around me in various stages of roost and curiosity. Then, I repeated, the air grew denser. Perfume, the bird now in front of me said, from an unseen censor. He began to scratch at the ground assiduously under one of the four dim shapes about the level of my eyes. Then he yawned gapingly, gave up, and went to sleep. I sat down to wait, because it was almost dawn and the last Dodo had tucked his head into his feathers. Daylight showed me four little trees, nothing like the usual scraggly vegetation of Alvarla. They must be perfume trees, I thought, but they were too young to have blossoms or pods. I didn't go too near them, remembering what Rene had said. And remembering that, I began to figure out how they grew here. This place was a little valley. No, a crater, several feet deeper than my height, with sloping sides. The birds apparently kept it warm with their body heat, plus the heat of the rocky sides would store. Since it was a crater, the winds wouldn't reach it. The crater made a basin to catch the snow, which I could see beginning to melt at the edges and ooze down the slope. The birds provided more than ample fertilizer, and Uncle Izzy had apparently trained at least one of them to cultivate the soil under the trees. I climbed out of the crater to see that I was indeed in the regions of snow. To the north were huge drifts, and far off loomed towering glaciers. To the south the hills tapered off from white to spotted brown. That was the reason for Uncle Izzy's crazy setup. Rene and I would never have come across this crater in an ordinary search. Of course, the setup neaten have been quite so crazy. That was the personal equation of which Uncle Izzy was so fond. The trees would, I assumed, poke their heads up over the crater as they grew, reaching toward the cold, and finally getting the frostbite to fill their pods properly. At two thousand dollars an ounce. I had neglected to ask Rene how many pods a tree could be expected to produce or how big the pods were, but say half an ounce in each pod and a conservative fifty pods in each tree. A hundred thousand dollars. I slid back into the crater, sat leaning against a somnolent dodo and ate a lunch package with a cup full of melted snow. All sorts of thoughts were jostling my brain. But I was bone weary. I hadn't slept since we hit Alvarla and the ride last night had been a tremendous strain because I wasn't in the habit of getting any exercise at all. Therefore I fell asleep in mid-thought. It was the noon sun that woke me. I wasn't just warm. I was hot. And I was very reluctant to let go of my dream. I kept grabbing at the tag ends of it with both hands. It was the most exciting dream I'd had since the one about succeeding Mr. Picks. Only very different. I'd made a fortune cultivating perfume trees.  Some of it came from the exotic plants of my African estate. Some of it was from a long legged, pink-haired girl, the kind African millionaires have. It was the sort of dream I mused, unable to keep it in mood any longer, as large-minded men have. Men like Uncle Isidor. I sat up suddenly. Uncle Isidor, large-minded? Why hadn't he had the avuncular decency to leave me his fortune the usual way? Why? Because then he wouldn't be able to play penny anti- psychology and get me dreaming about wild schemes with perfume trees and African estates. That's why. Or maybe there wasn't any fortune. Suddenly I understood why people smoke. It gives them something to do when they feel helpless. If there wasn't any fortune, then I was hopelessly tied to the perfume trees. If Uncle Izzy had lost his last scent, it would be very like him to borrow enough from friends to finance a perfume tree scheme. And if he didn't make it to the planet he had in mind, why, he'd make the planet he crashed on do. Anyone else would have shot the birds for fresh meat. Anyone else would have seen immediately that Alvarla was the last planted in the galaxy where perfume trees would grow. Anyone else would have seen immediately that I was one of the minor, comfortable people in the world who likes the happy regularities of a little job and an assured, if limited, future. Anyone else would have seen I had the sort of personality that could not be changed. But Uncle Izzy wasn't anyone else. Why did I keep smelling the perfume from my dream? I followed my nose out of the crater and found the snow melting around a water tank about four feet long and two feet in diameter, part of the ruined fuel system from Uncle Izzy's ship. I dislodged it from the ice beneath and shook it. The perfume was so strong as it unfroze that it made me dizzy, and all that smell was coming from a pinhole. There seemed to be half a gallon in it, enough to pay off Mother's Bonds and whatever I owed Rene with a handsome sum left over for me. I could go home and forget about perfume trees and Alvarla and Uncle Izidor. But that dream of the African estate kept irritating the back of my mind, and the large, free sky of Alvarla was soothing to the eye when compared to the little squares of blue I noted occasionally when writing the slide walks of Brooklyn. What did I want out of life, anyway? Damn, Uncle Izidor, I'd never test ten to nine on job adjustment again. I was still thinking when evening swept in fast, as it does in dry climates, and the birds began to wake up and climb out of the crater, presumably to forage for food. Wait! I cried. Izidor! I drew out a lunch package and spread it to attract him. It attracted all of them. I pulled out the dodo. Tell me what thy lordly name is on the night's plutonian shore. Izidor, he volunteered swallowing fast while I climbed aboard him. Take me back. Then I realized I had made a mistake with the food. Go! I cried. Spaceship! More food! He just stood there, his beak poking around the ground for crumbs. But I had to get that skin spray washed off before twenty-four hours were up. Nepenthe! I shouted desperately. The dodo was off like a flash and didn't stop till we were back at the ship.  Find anything?  And we'll make it five thousand because I found it. Stow this somewhere. It's perfume. He did. Find anything else? Nothing that would interest you. I'll be ready to blast off as soon as I've had a shower. Renee shrugged. The perfume, when we returned to Earth, proved to be worth what he'd said it would be. A lot of people wanted to know where I'd gotten it. The crops on Odoria, they said, are entirely sewed up by Odoria, Inc. They certainly are, I always replied, agreeably. It took all I cleared from the perfume to put a down payment on a ship and hire an expert on fertilizing perfume flowers. But this time I wanted to run the show. Mr. Pick shook his head sadly when I told him to replace me permanently. You have a great future ahead of you in studs and neck clasps, he said. Why not take a little time and reconsider your decision? Or... Nevermore, I answered. Not until five years later did I find out what happened to the rest of good old Uncle Aujarnan's fortune. I was stretched out on a gently undulating force field in my interior patio, a huge scarlet fan flower tree sifting in the sunshine. Leda, her pink hair flowing down to her knees, was just emerging from the pool of grilled milk. She bent to an Aphrodite of Canido's position. Perfect, I said, and threw away my figurine. Depart, I told the robot, who came rolling in. But, Master, it's the Chan of Betelgeuse, Lord of the Seven Planets and the Four Hundred Moons. Get dressed, Leda, I said regretfully. We have company. I'd never met him, but I knew he was one of Uncle Isidor's best friends, and I felt obliged to see him. The Chan had several meals and four cigarettes, maintaining a courteous silence all the while. Then he loosened his belt, reached into his furry pouch, and handed me a piece of copper scroll. It was a check for five million dollars. You won, he told me, or lost, as the case may be. I just looked at him. I was holding it in trust for you, the Chan explained, in accordance with your Uncle Isidor's last wishes. I blew a perfect smoke ring, let it float before my face for a perfect moment, and then asked, and suppose I had lost, or won, as the case may be. I was to save it to try on your son, the gods permitting you have one. If necessary, I told him, I'll try it on him myself, O Chan of the Seven Planets and the Four Hundred Moons. Call me, Charlie, he said. The End Of From An Unseen Sensor by Rosal George Brown In Case of Fire by Randall Garrett This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Nick Number In Case of Fire by Randall Garrett In his office apartment on the top floor of the Terran Embassy building in Ossac City, Bertrand Malloy leafed casually through the dossiers of the four new men who had been assigned to him. They were typical of the kind of men who were sent to him, he thought, which meant, as usual, that they were atypical. Every man in the diplomatic corps who developed a twitch or a quirk would ship to Sarkad IV to work under Bertrand Malloy, permanent Terran ambassador to his utter munificence, the Ossac of Sarkad. Take this first one, for instance. Malloy ran his finger down the columns of complex symbolism that showed the complete psychological analysis of the man. Psychopathic paranoia. The man wasn't technically insane. He could be as lucid as the next man most of the time, but he was morbidly suspicious that every man's hand was turned against him. He trusted no one and was perpetually on his guard against imaginary plots and persecutions. Number two suffered from some sort of emotional block that left him continually on the horns of one dilemma or another. He was psychologically incapable of making a decision if he were faced with two or more possible alternatives of any major importance. Number three. Malloy sighed and pushed the dossiers away from him. No two men were alike, and yet there sometimes seemed to be an eternal sameness about all men. He considered himself an individual, for instance, but wasn't the basic similarity there, after all? He was how old? He glanced at the Earth calendar dial that was automatically correlated with this Sarkadic calendar just above it. Fifty-nine this week. Fifty-nine years old. And what did he have to show for it besides flabby muscles, sagging skin, a wrinkled face and gray hair? Well, he had an excellent record in the core, if nothing else. One of the top men in his field, and he had his memories of Diane, dead these ten years, but still beautiful and alive in his recollections. And, he grinned softly to himself, he had Sarkad. He glanced up at the ceiling and mentally allowed his gaze to penetrate it to the blue sky beyond it. Out there was the terrible emptiness of interstellar space, a great yawning, infinite chasm capable of swallowing men, ships, planets, suns, and whole galaxies without filling its insatiable void. Maloy closed his eyes.  He didn't even like to think of that, but it was necessary to keep it in mind. Somewhere out there the ships of Earth were ranged against the ships of the alien Karna in the most important war that mankind had yet fought. And, Maloy knew, his own position was not unimportant in that war. He was not in the battle line, nor even in the major production line, but it was necessary to keep the drug supply lines flowing from Sarkad, and that meant keeping on good terms with the Sarkatic government. The Sarkada themselves were humanoid in physical form, if one allowed the term to cover a wide range of differences, but their minds just didn't function along the same lines. For nine years Bertrand Maloy had been ambassador to Sarkad, and for nine years no Sarkada had ever seen him. To have shown himself to one of them would have meant instant loss of prestige. To their way of thinking, an important official was aloof. The greater his importance, the greater must be his isolation. The Osec of Sarkad himself was never seen except by a handful of picked nobles, who themselves were never seen except by their underlings. It was a long, roundabout way of doing business, but it was the only way Sarkad would do any business at all. To violate the rigid social setup of Sarkad would mean the instant closing off of the supply of biochemical products at the Sarkatic laboratories produced from native plants and animals, products that were vitally necessary to Earth's war, and which could be duplicated nowhere else in the known universe. It was Bertrand Maloy's job to keep the production output high and to keep the material flowing towards Earth and her allies and outposts. The job would have been a snap cinch in the right circumstances. The Sarkada weren't difficult to get along with. A staff of top-grade men could have handled them without half trying. But Maloy didn't have top-grade men. They couldn't be spared from work that required their total capacity. It's inefficient to waste a man on a job that he can do without half trying, where there are more important jobs that will tax his full output. So Maloy was stuck with the culls. Not the worst ones, of course. There were places in the galaxy that were less important than Sarkad to the war effort. Maloy knew that, no matter what was wrong with a man, as long as he had the mental ability to dress himself and get himself to work, useful work could be found for him. Physical handicaps weren't at all difficult to deal with. A blind man can work very well in the total darkness of an infrared film dark room. Partial or total losses of limbs can be compensated for in one way or another. The mental disabilities were harder to deal with, but not totally impossible. On a world without liquor, a dipsomaniac could be channeled easily enough, and he'd better not try fermenting his own on Sarkad unless he brought his own yeast, which was impossible in view of the sterilization regulations. But Maloy didn't like to stop at merely thwarting mental quirks. He liked to find places where they were useful. The phone chimed. Maloy flipped it on with a practiced hand. Maloy here. Mr. Maloy? said a careful voice. A special communication for you has been teletyped in from Earth. Shall I bring it in? Bring it in, Mr. Rason. Mr. Rason was a case in point. She was uncommunicative. She liked to gather in information, but she found it difficult to give it up once it was in her possession. Maloy had made her his private secretary. Nothing, but nothing, got out of Maloy's office without his direct order. It had taken Maloy a long time to get it into Mr. Rason's head that it was perfectly all right, even desirable, for her to keep secrets from everyone except Maloy. She came in through the door, a rather handsome woman in her middle thirties, clutching a sheaf of papers in her right hand as though someone might at any instant snatch it from her before she could turn it over to Maloy. She laid them carefully on the desk. If anything else comes in I'll let you know immediately, sir, she said. Will there be anything else? Maloy let her stand there while he picked up the communique. She wanted to know what his reaction was going to be. It didn't matter because no one would ever find out from her what he had done unless she was ordered to tell someone. He read the first paragraph and his eyes widened involuntarily. Armistice, he said in a low whisper, there's a chance that the war may be over. Yes, sir, said Mr. Rason in a hushed voice. Maloy read the whole thing through, fighting to keep his emotions in check. Mr. Rason stood there calmly, her face amassed, her emotions were a secret. Finally Maloy looked up. I'll let you know as soon as I reach a decision, Mr. Rason. I think I hardly need to say that no news of this is to leave this office. Of course not, sir. Maloy watched her go out the door without actually seeing her. The war was over, at least for a while. He looked down at the papers again. The Karna, slowly being beaten back on every front, were suing for peace. They wanted an armistice conference, immediately. Earth was willing. Interstellar war is too costly to allow it to continue any longer than necessary, and this one had been going on for more than thirteen years now. Peace was necessary, but not peace at any price. The trouble was that the Karna had a reputation for losing wars and winning at the peace table. They were clever, persuasive talkers. They could twist a disadvantage to an advantage and make their own strengths look like weaknesses. If they won the armistice, they'd be able to retrench and rearm, and the war would break out again within a few years. Now, at this point in time, they could be beaten. They could be forced to allow supervision of the production potential, forced to disarm, rendered impotent, but if the armistice went to their own advantage. Already they had taken the offensive in the matter of the peace talks. They had sent a full delegation to Sarkad 5, the next planet out from the Sarkad Sun, a chilly world inhabited only by low intelligence animals. The Karna considered this to be fully neutral territory, and Earth couldn't argue the point very well. In addition, they demanded that the conference begin in three days terrestrial time. The trouble was that interstellar communication beams travel a devil of a lot faster than ships. It would take more than a week for the Earth government to get a vessel to Sarkad 5. Earth had been caught unprepared for an armistice. They objected. The Karna pointed out that the Sarkad Sun was just as far from Karn as it was from Earth, that it was only a few million miles from a planet which was allied with Earth, and that it was unfair for Earth to take so much time in preparing for an armistice. Why hadn't Earth been prepared? Did they intend to fight to the utter destruction of Karn? It wouldn't have been a problem at all if Earth and Karn had fostered the only two intelligent races in the galaxy. The sort of grandstanding the Karna were putting on had to be played to an audience. But there were other intelligent races throughout the galaxy, most of whom had remained as neutral as possible during the Earth Karn War. They had no intention of sticking their figurative noses into a battle between the two most powerful races in the galaxy. But whoever won the armistice would find that some of the now-neutral races would come in on their side if war broke out again. If the Karna played their cards right, their side would be strong enough next time to win. So Earth had to get a delegation to meet with the Karna representatives within the three-day limit or lose what might be a vital point in the negotiations. And that was where Bertrand Malloy came in. He had been appointed Minister and plenipotentiary extraordinary to the Earth Karn Peace Conference. He looked up at the ceiling again. What can I do? he said softly. On the second day after the arrival of the communique, Malloy made his decision. He flipped on his intercom and said, Miss Dresden, get hold of James Norden and Kylan Braenich. I want to see them both immediately. Send Norden in first and tell Braenich to wait. Yes, sir. And keep the recorder on. You can file the tape later. Yes, sir. Malloy knew the woman would listen in on the intercom anyway, and it was better to give her permission to do so. James Norden was tall, broad shouldered, and thirty-eight. His hair was graying at the temples, and his handsome face looked cool and efficient. Malloy waved him to a seat. Norden, I have a job for you. It's probably one of the most important jobs you'll ever have in your life. It can mean big things for you, promotion and prestige if you do it well. Norden nodded slowly. Yes, sir. Malloy explained the problem of the Karna peace talks. We need a man who can outthink them, Malloy finished, and judging from your record I think you're that man. It involves risk, of course. If you make the wrong decisions your name will be mud back on earth, but I don't think there's much chance of that, really. Do you want to handle small-time operations all your life? Of course not. You'll be leaving within an hour for Sarkad V. Norden nodded again. Yes, sir. Certainly. Am I to go alone? No, said Malloy. I'm sending an assistant with you, a man named Kylan Braenick. Ever heard of him? Norden shook his head. Not that I recall, Mr. Malloy. Should I have? Not necessarily. He's a pretty shrewd operator, though. He knows a lot about interstellar law, and he's capable of spotting a trap a mile away. You'll be in charge, of course, but I want you to pay special attention to his advice. I will, sir, Norden said, gratefully. A man like that can be useful. Right. Now you go into the anti-room over there. I've prepared a summary of the situation, and you'll have to study it and get it into your head before the ship leaves. That isn't much time, but it's the Karna who are doing the pushing, not us. As soon as Norden had left, Malloy said softly, Send in Braenick, Mr. Aisin. Kylan Braenick was a smallish man with mouse-brown hair that lay flat against his skull and hard penetrating dark eyes that were shadowed by heavy protruding brows. Malloy asked him to sit down. Again Malloy went through the explanation of the peace conference. Naturally they'll be trying to trick you every step of the way, Malloy went on. They're shrewd and underhanded. We'll simply have to be more shrewd and more underhanded. Norden's job is to sit quietly and evaluate the data. Yours will be to find the loopholes they're laying out for themselves and plug them. Don't antagonize them, but don't baby them either. If you see anything underhanded going on, let Norden know immediately. They won't get anything by me, Mr. Malloy. By the time the ship from Earth got there, the peace conference had been going on for four days. Bertrand Malloy had full reports on the whole parley as relayed to him through the ship that had taken Norden and Braenick to Sarkhod 5. Secretary of State Blendwell stopped off at Sarkhod 4 before going on to 5 to take charge of the conference. He was a tallish lean man with a few strands of gray hair on the top of his otherwise bald scalp and he wore a hearty professional smile that didn't quite make it to his calculating eyes. He took Malloy's hand and shook it warmly. How are you, Mr. Ambassador? Fine, Mr. Secretary. How's everything on Earth? Tense. They're waiting to see what is going to happen on 5. So am I for that matter. His eyes were curious. You decided not to go yourself, eh? I thought it better not to. I sent a good team instead. Would you like to see the reports? I certainly would. Malloy handed them to the secretary and as he read Malloy watched him. Blendwell was a political appointee, a good man Malloy had to admit, but he didn't know all the ins and outs of the diplomatic corps. When Blendwell looked up from the reports at last he said, Amazing! They've held off the Karna at every point. They've beaten them back. They've managed to cope with and outdo the finest team of negotiators that Karna could send. I thought they would, said Malloy, trying to appear modest. The secretary's eyes narrowed. I've heard of the work you've been doing here with, uh, sick men. Is this one of your, uh, successes? Malloy nodded. I think so. The Karna put us in a dilemma, so I threw a dilemma right back at them. How do you mean? Norton had a mental block against making decisions. If he took a girl out on a date he'd have trouble making up his mind whether to kiss her or not until she made up his mind for him, one way or the other. He's that kind of guy, until he's presented with one, single, clear decision which admits of no alternatives he can't move at all. As you can see the Karna tried to give us several choices on each point, and they were all rigged. Until they backed down to a single point and proved that it wasn't rigged, Norton couldn't possibly make up his mind. I drummed into him how important this was, and the more importance there is attached to his decisions, the more incapable he becomes of making them. The secretary nodded slowly. What about Braynick? Paranoid, said Malloy. He thinks everyone is plotting against him. In this case that's all to the good because the Karna are plotting against him. No matter what they put forth, Braynick is convinced that there's a trap in it somewhere, and he digs to find out what the trap is. Even if there isn't a trap, the Karna can't satisfy Braynick because he's convinced that there has to be somewhere. As a result, all his advice to Norton and all his questioning on the wildest possibilities just serves to keep Norton from getting unconfused. These two men are honestly doing their best to win at the peace conference, and they've got the Karna reeling. The Karna can see that we're not trying to stall, our men are actually working at trying to reach a decision, but what the Karna don't see is that those men, as a team, are unbeatable because, in this situation, they're psychologically incapable of losing. Again the Secretary of State nodded his approval, but there was still a question in his mind. Since you know all that, couldn't you have handled it yourself? Maybe, but I doubt it.  Norton and Braynick have blind spots, but they're covered with armor. No, I'm glad I couldn't go. It's better this way. The Secretary of State raised an eyebrow. Couldn't go, Mr. Ambassador? Malloy looked at him. Didn't you know? I've wondered why you appointed me in the first place. No, I couldn't go. The reason why I'm here cooped up in this office, hiding from the Sarkata the way a good Sarkatic big shot should, is because I like it that way. I suffer from agoraphobia and xenophobia. I have to be drugged to be put on a spaceship because I can't take all that empty space, even if I'm protected from it by a steel shell. A look of revulsion came over his face. And I can't stand aliens. End of In Case of Fire by Randall Garrett Recording by Nick Number


Welcome everybody. We have a terrific panel today on advancing digital content safety. My name is Marty Barron. I'm the executive editor of the Washington Post. And our panelists are Mark Reed, CEO of WPP, Susan Wojcicki, CEO of YouTube, and Maritza Shaka, former member of the European Parliament and now director of international policy at the Cyber Policy Center at Stanford University. Thank you all for joining us and thank you to the panelists. I want to start with a quick lightning round, a quick question. The title of this session is advancing digital content safety. So let me ask every one of the panelists to very quickly and I hope very briefly and perhaps less than a minute to offer a definition of what digital content safety really means. And how do we measure that? So Susan, you want to start? Sure. Thank you so much for having me. To me, it means protecting the community that we have of users, creators, and advertisers against egregious real-world harm. And that's the way that we define a lot of our policies. And doing so in a rigorous, consistent, and scalable manner so that it can scale across the United States and across the world in all areas and address a large number of issues. Mark? I'd say that therein lies the dilemma in all of this and perhaps we'll get to discuss. I think different people have different definitions, but I think there are some basics around harmful content around bringing people together and around platforms that I think we all agree with. And you know, with someone with two kids, I want my kids, quite frankly, to be able to be on those platforms safely and not be concerned about it. And at the end of the day, I think that's something that everyone shares. Maritra? I think it's about keeping people and the community and the public interest safe from harms boiling over off of commercially-led social media platforms into the real world. As we've seen on January 6, then around the world with election-related violence, the harms to public health coming from disinformation about COVID. So I would say it's really about making sure that content shared online does not cause restrictions or harms to safety for people anywhere in the world. Okay. So we've set the table. So we already heard reference to the January 6 attack on the Capitol in Washington, D.C. So, Susan, almost a week after that attack, YouTube suspended President Trump's channel for seven days. Tell us why you did that. And in particular, what that has to do with content safety. And let us know if he's still suspended. And one question is, why did YouTube move to suspend Donald Trump more slowly? And it seems less severely than other social media companies like Twitter and Facebook. YouTube seems to move more slowly than other social media companies to take down videos that incite violence or hate and that spread lies like those about voter fraud. So is YouTube taking action fast enough? I would say definitely. And I would definitely take issue with the statement that we do it slower than everyone than other platforms. And probably to answer the question best, it's good for me to take a step back and explain a little bit about how our systems work. So YouTube from the very beginning has had a system where we have a number of policies and we have a strike system that goes with that. So we issue strikes when there's a policy violation, depending upon the severity of the strike. It either leads to a short-term suspension or ultimately a termination of that account. And that applies to everyone, from small creators to heads of states who have never said that any kind of, it's not like special people getting any kind of special exceptions. Everybody is treated in the same and consistent way. So on December 9th, which is when the state certified the election, we began removing all content that alleged that the outcome of the 2020 presidential election was changed by false claims of widespread voter fraud or errors. And I believe we were the first platform to do that. That was a month before the Capitol attack that we started removing that content. We did so across a number of channels, a large number from a variety of different backgrounds, including some videos from the Donald J Trump channel. Now, given this was a new policy, like as we do with all of our policies, there is a grace period because it's a new policy. So what we do is we remove the videos again to make sure that we're preventing egregious real-world harm, but we also want to give the creators a bit of a warning. So we remove it, but we don't issue a strike. After the Capitol attack, we did, we accelerated that and we started issuing strikes on all channels that uploaded content that violated that policy. And including the video that Donald Trump removed, that he uploaded that day, we removed that one. When he did upload additional videos, we issued a strike and we suspended that account and it remained suspended. So I would say, A, that we actually remove the videos a month before the Capitol attack, which is a time period that actually really mattered. And I would also say that different platforms are used differently. So Twitter, for example, may have had like a hundred tweets a day from the president, whereas a lot of times our platform was used in a variety of different ways, which is that might have had content uploaded from TV, C-SPAN, other channels. And so there was actually a couple day period after the Capitol attack where he didn't upload anything. But when he did, and it was a clear violation of our policies, we did issue a strike. And I do think it's really important to do so in a principled way, not just say, hey, you know, we've made a decision, we're going to suspend it for whatever reason. We have a policy system. We enforce those policies. We enforce them consistently. Again, regardless of who the person is. And whenever we see a violation, we do take action very quickly to make sure that we're keeping our community safe. So President Trump is still suspended, former President Trump is still suspended. And when would you be lifting that? What does it take? Well, I mean, we'll have to, I think in light of the situation, there's so many concerns around violence, that's something we're just going to have to continue to wait and see how that evolves. Okay. Mark, it was about two years ago, I think that advertisers were boycotting YouTube when Cut-A-File said infiltrated the comment sections. The videos were innocent enough. It didn't violate YouTube standards, but the comments were out of control with suggestive comments. And yet advertisers have really flocked back to YouTube, even though there appears to be a fair amount of content that violates YouTube stated standards. So why have advertisers come back? What are your company's standards? And what are the standards of your clients for advertising on social media sites? And are they other standards really enforced? Are they regularly enforced? Or just when certain content generates a huge amount of bad publicity? So look, I think the first thing to say is our clients are very concerned about their messages appearing next to any harmful or dangerous content. And our job is to protect them from that. And they expect us to protect them from that and hold us to account. I think as Susan said, many of these platforms work in many different ways. There is almost an infinite amount of content on it. And I think everyone's frustration has been, often these situations happen, and then they're brought to public attention often by a news outlet quite properly. And it's a revelation to people. And it shouldn't be a revelation to people. I think that's part of the problem. Several years ago, it was more than two years ago, there were issues on YouTube. And I have to say, I'm not just being nice to Susan. They were very responsive, first by raising the quality threshold of the videos. If you'd like with our advertisers messages appearing next to you, there was no chance it would appear next to this content. And then by taking other steps to root out and push the content down. Now, I think our clients' concerns, though, go beyond that increasingly more fundamentally to the platform overall. And so clients realize that their advertising is funding all of these social media platforms generating a 95% of their revenue from advertising. And so the questions have become even more serious than justice, your message next to the platform. But do you believe the platform overall is doing the right thing or the wrong thing? And therefore, I think, you know, they're being forcing the platforms to take more concerted action. But I would say that our clients and our people, and I think actually many of the people that work inside many of these companies, on several occasions, things come to light, if you like, after the event. And, you know, increasingly, I think, sorry, the challenge with my connection, hopefully, was sorted out. But, you know, increasingly, that needs to happen. So clients do take this extremely seriously. But there's no doubt that the platforms need to do more. Marietje, what's your own sense as to whether the platforms are doing enough? And who should be deciding that? I mean, should social media companies be regulating themselves when it comes to hateful and violent content? Or when it comes to disinformation? I think you've warned in the past about what you've called a threat of privatized power over the digital world and argued that there's a need for what you've called a global democratic alliance to set norms, rules, and guidelines for technology. So what does that mean in terms of the safety of digital content? Should governments be dictating what's safe and what's not safe, what's true and what's not true? What can be kept up online? And what has to be taken down? What's your sense of that? Yeah, before answering that, I just want to make a very short but important statement, which is to say that I want to express solidarity with the Russian population and Alexei Navalny, because Vladimir Putin was given a podium to speak here at Davos. And the idea is that dialogue is better than no dialogue. But of course, in Russia itself, there's no room for dialogue because there's no room for dissent. And so I think as we talk about freedom of expression online, let's spend one brief moment calling for the freedom of critical voices in Russia who are both threatened and peaceful protesters are beaten. Now back to the question about the power of private platforms, which has global reach, of course. And I think it's tempting to focus mostly on illegal and harmful content, but the business model itself deserves more scrutiny. So the amplification of content, the profit driven decisions are not intended to optimize for, let's say, resilience of democracy or making sure that there is protection of public health concerns. So just in the case of YouTube just because Susan is on the call, I mean, YouTube allowed for President Trump to buy exclusively the front page of its platform on election day and also in the days before. That is not in the context of harm for illegal content. It's a business decision that has profound political implications. So what I think the problem is, is that there's not enough independent oversight over these private companies when it comes to how their business models work, how data is collected and processed, whether people's rights are respected. And we've had approximately a decade of self-regulation or very, very light touch regulation. And I think we've seen that that doesn't work. I think there's broad agreements around that. And when we ask who should intervene, it's important to note that governments differ also in their legitimacy. So I would say democratic governments in the context of the rule of law should make sure that definitions and processes of protecting rights online are clear, protecting the public interest online is clear. And that is the direction we need to look at. And we can't just limit our view to the lens of freedom of expression and harm for illegal content. It's a much broader impact that these business models of social media companies have. Susan, since you're kind of in the hot seat here, I wanted to give you first an opportunity, lucky you, to respond to Maricha's comments, particularly about giving Donald Trump such prominence on election day and her more general comments about what should be done with social media. Sure. I mean, I'll just start by saying that we have had for the last number of years, we've had a huge focus on responsibility. And I've been really clear that that has been my number one focus. And there's been a lot of misinformation about our business model and whether our business model, like how it's supportive, does it work with responsibility, not work with responsibility? And I think it's really important to point out that we are funded basically by our advertisers. And our advertisers have done a tremendous job of working together, identifying what are their standards. They've worked with the World Federation of advertisers that come up with a number of different global standards. We report on those standards to them. And we are audited by third parties to make sure that we meet those numbers. And I think I'm bringing that up because when we look at governments, a lot of times, as was pointed out, all governments have different standards. In many cases, it's not clear what those standards are for us. We don't want to be having a egregious real world harm content out there. So there may be lots of content that is legal, but it's harmful. And so we feel responsibility to remove it. If we don't remove it, it's bad for our company. It's bad for reputation. It's bad for advertisers. They're going to pull the dollars associated with it. And so we really do our best to consult with experts, figure out where's the place to define those policies, define them consistently, and force them consistently. But I do think the fact that the advertising agencies and advertisers were able to come together globally, agree on standards, then enabled us to actually report on them and be in a third party, which is a media rating council at MRC, and be able to say, yes, YouTube is meeting them and is at over a 99% metric in terms of what those advertisers want across the board. And I think we also brought up health. Health has been an incredible place if you look at the pandemic where we moved incredibly quickly. It wasn't like there was government regulation about what we should do with COVID and 5G conspiracies. We had to implement those immediately. We implemented 10 different policies. We removed over 800,000 videos. We launched COVID news shelves with authoritative news in 30 different countries, and we served over 400 billion impressions from 85 different health organizations to make sure that people got the right information. And that we're incented to do the right thing. And I believe played a really important role in getting accurate information out related to COVID. Susan, obviously, you need moderation. Mark talked earlier about almost an infinite number of amount of content on social media sites. So as I understand it, for moderation, you use a combination of AI and moderators themselves, human moderators. But even with the best AI, even with the thousands of moderators, violations are going to find their way through and they'll be seen by millions of people and shared almost instantaneously. So can a platform like YouTube or Facebook or Twitter ever really be sufficiently well moderated before damage is done? There are probably a lot of people who would say it's impossible. What are your thoughts on that? So you're right. We do use a combination of both humans and machine technology. And I believe with me tremendous progress in this area. We will never be 100%. But we will be, you know, and our goal is to be over 99.9% in terms of making sure that we have removed the content that violates our policies. We do publish a transparency report so people can understand and regulators, governments, companies can understand what we're removing. And also how quickly we're removing that content to your question about how quickly content is distributed on the internet. So if you look at Q3, we removed almost 8 million videos. And 90% of that was removed with automatic flagging. And that's important because it enables us to remove the content extremely quickly. And if you break that down, 76% of them had 10 views or less. And so that shows that we're removing content very quickly before it's able to have that broad distribution. So I mean, I think just to be clear, we are going to keep getting better. Our classifiers will get better. We'll define our policies more tightly. So we'll never be 100%. But I'm hoping that we're 99.9. And that the number of nines just continue to increase in terms of how compliant we are in terms of finding and removing the content that violates our policies. And so Mark, how are advertisers actually monitoring what happens on these sites? What's your system for doing that? And how do advertisers and your own companies see their own responsibility to monitor these sites? And how seriously is that taken? Are advertisers being aggressive enough? Are they being thorough enough? Are the standards high enough? And is there any genuine rethinking in the advertising industry regarding its relationship with social media sites? Well, I mean, I think clearly there has been a lot of thinking about our relationship with the social media sites. And I think from our class perspective, you know, they would like Susan to say, you know, 100% of content gets taken down. That would be everybody's objective. I think we all realize that that may not be practical, given the volume of content that is there. But that would be clearly their goal. And I would imagine Susan's goal as well. I think that they do, you know, as you saw with the boycott of social media, that was perhaps focused on Facebook in the middle of last year, but actually extended to the other platforms, you know, advertisers take it seriously. And I think they felt that their voices were not being heard by several of the platforms, and many of them went into that boycott. Now, whether boycott is the right way or the wrong way to go, I think it certainly got the attention of the platforms. It did result in a more meaningful dialogue about what type of content was there. And, you know, some common definitions of what they meant by harmful content and others. Now, I think it's fair to say that all of these discussions should have happened a long time ago, and that these things should not be to debate. But they are complicated, and I don't envy their choices. I think the other thing we have to realize is that these platforms are not universally bad things. And, you know, we're sort of 23 minutes into the discussion, we haven't talked about all of the small businesses that build their businesses on the back of Facebook or Instagram. We haven't talked about all of the creators on YouTube that make how-to videos. I don't think my son could have got through lockdown without YouTube or indeed his parents.  Advertising funds this. And our clients do feel that responsibility vary. It should be that a number of them pulled their budgets from, I guess, the middle of the year until the end of the U.S. presidential election, feeling that they didn't want to be seen to fund this. So I think people do take it extremely seriously. I think the challenge in the argument about regulation, and by the way, Facebook have called for government regulation because they want the decision taken out of their hands.  And for those people that want to have Donald Trump taken off the social media, he probably wouldn't have introduced a rule that took himself off it. So, you know, and President Merkel, as I understand it, did criticize the decision at some point to take him off the social media. So these things are not easy. And people from both ends is my feeling of the political spectrum. You use this battle to advance, of course, one way or the other. Now, there's no universal for every, you know, left, let's say left to center politician who's attacked on social media. They're the same as true people on the right.  So we are just going to have to manage that. And so I think it is a difficult case. And perhaps government regulation, you know, is the right way to go to take the decisions out of people's hands. And maybe that is the way that things will end up. Well, let's talk a little bit about that. Marietje, there in the United States, there's a lot of discussion about Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, whether that should be repealed or significantly revised. That Section 230 really effectively immunizes tech companies from liability for the content that's published on them. And many would say, I think, that that's led to a lot of hateful, hurtful, almost content, a wild west environment on social media, where lies are proliferating and where violence can be promoted. So in your estimation, should Section 230 be repealed, making social media companies fully liable for the content that's published on their sites? But I think the question of who should be responsible for deciding what should stay on and what should stay off should be much broader than just in the hands of those private companies who are often governed by a handful of people on the top, making extraordinarily impactful decisions. So first of all, there needs to be more independent oversight and independent research into what happens. And for example, access to information for journalists like yourself. But when it comes to the liability question in Section 230, the discussion often proliferates into sort of no liability or all liability. And I believe that there is a road in between, which does not so much focus on the content only, but also on the mechanisms of, as you mentioned, amplification. So not so much just the question of speech, but also the question of reach, which has a lot to do not only with how a message travels through the system, the algorithms and the infrastructure built by private companies, but also by data collected of people using social media and search and who reveal a lot of their very, very private secrets, essentially, against which advertisements are matched. And the question is, how far reaching should that data collection be are all categories of advertisement, for example, political ads or very sensitive personal information, all up for grabs for matching that information. And so when you think about balancing the outsized power of private companies, I think you need different parts of the regulatory puzzle from antitrust to data protection, to intermediary liability, to non-discrimination principles, questions about when harmful, but legal content becomes a public safety issue. And so I would like to have a much sort of broader view of what needs to happen because there is no magic solution. People have hoped that Section 230 would be that magic solution. People have hoped that antitrust would be, and I think neither are. Susan, what would happen to YouTube if Section 230 were repealed as former President Trump had advocated, particularly in his final days? Yeah. Well, first of all, I just want to point out that Section 230 has two different parts. So you mentioned the part that gives us some protections from liability, but there's also a second part which gives us the ability to remove content too that is not necessarily illegal, but could be seen as harmful. So we, for example, remove adult content from our platform. So if you entirely repealed Section 230, A, it would take away our ability to remove content that we see as harmful. I don't think, I mean, some people, there are many different opinions on this, and that's actually been part of the problem. And I think a lot of people would see that as extremely problematic. I think if you took away the protections in terms of the liabilities, it would just vastly, like if you took away both parts of it would vastly change the internet. It's the underpainting of what the internet looks like. So I can talk about how YouTube would change, but how the internet as a whole would change is like, I think we could say goodbye to all reviews, to all comments, all user-generated content that's up there on the platform. And we would probably, YouTube and the internet would be a much, much smaller, highly curated set of content. Similar, like if you look at TV, I mean, when I grew up, there were like three channels that we were able to look at. So YouTube right now has millions. And so I think we would go back to a smaller set of channels and a restricted set of information, which again, and I think as like has been pointed out is like, there are many steps in between. There's a lot of, and I'm hopeful that we can work with governments and try to come up with ways that we can have more sensible regulation where we can keep the benefits that we have accrued from the internet, the useful information, the businesses. YouTube is not, YouTube just to be clear is like, we're a platform for small media companies. We have media companies built on top of YouTube. And we actually just ran this report that in the US, we produced 345,000 creative jobs. And there's similar numbers in different European countries. So I think we just have to be really careful about the value that has been created and how to work closely with governments to be able to achieve what we want, but not destroy the value that we have created with the internet. Great. Well, I want to thank the panel. We've come to the end of the public portion of this discussion.


Hello and welcome to the session. In this session we will discuss a question which says that written in the range of values for which 3 minus 2x square is greater than 5x. Now before starting the solution of this question, we should know about a method. And this is the method of intervals. For this method, the first step is to factorize the quadratic expression whose coefficient of x square is positive and express the left hand side to the inequality in the form x minus alpha the whole into x minus beta the whole where alpha is less than beta. Now in the next step, plot the points alpha and beta on the number line thus dividing the number line into 3 parts. Now after plotting the points alpha beta on the number line starting from the right most region, put the signs plus, minus and plus which shows that the expression x minus alpha the whole into x minus beta the whole is non-negative in the region on the right to beta. Now when x minus alpha into x minus beta the whole is less than 0 then the required range will be alpha less than x less than beta. Now this method will work out as a key idea for solving out this question. And now we will start with the solution. Here it is given 3 minus 2x square is greater than 5x. This implies minus 2x square minus 5x plus 3 is greater than 0. Now multiplying both sides by minus 1. This implies 2x square plus 5x minus 3 is less than 0. On multiplying by a negative quantity the inequality reverses. Now this implies factorizing this by splitting the middle term it will be 2x square plus 6x minus x minus 3 is less than 0. This implies 2x within brackets x plus 3 here minus 1 is common and within brackets x plus 3 is less than 0. This implies x plus 3 the whole into 2x minus 1 the whole is less than 0. Now putting each factor equal to 0 we get x is equal to minus 3 and 1 by 2. Now here plotting these points on the number line and by using the method of intervals. So we have plotted the points minus 3 and 1 by 2 on the number line and starting from the right we have given the sign plus minus and plus. As plus 3 the whole into 2x minus 1 the whole is less than 0. Therefore the required range will be according to the formula given in the key idea. If x minus alpha the whole into x minus beta the whole is less than 0. Then the required range is alpha less than x less than beta. So the required range will be minus 3 less than x less than 1 by 2. So this is the solution of the given question and that's all for the session. Hope you all have enjoyed the session.


Hi everyone it's MJ and welcome to the introductory course on point estimation. Now a very quick refresher, we know that the whole point of statistics is that we have some data and we want to calculate some information in order to answer questions and optimize processes. Now the information that we want is we want the parameters and the distribution of the random variable that generated the data in the first place. Now what point estimation is interested in, it's interested in calculating what these parameters should be. And the idea that it's saying point estimation is we're coming up with a single value and this is going to be very different to the next chapter on confidence intervals where we're going to be looking at a range of values. So in this chapter we're looking at a single value and we're going to see that there's two main methods in order to do your point estimation. They're something known as the method of moments and there's also the method of maximum likelihood. And we sometimes see that in the actual exams the method of maximum likelihood is a favorite for examiners and there are a lot of marks for doing this calculation. But the big idea in this course is to compare these methods and say well which one's better between the method of moments and the method of maximum likelihoods. And one way to compare them is to realize that both of these point estimations are in their own right random variables which means they have their own distributions and their own set of parameters and that is something else that we look at in this course. We kind of say well what distribution do they follow and what sort of parameters do they look at. And the interesting thing is the statistician who did a lot of this work is currently still alive. He's like 102 years old but he is still alive. So this is very very recent mathematics and statistics so it is quite an exciting field because it is so modern. Anyway we're going to talk more about all of this stuff in the course. I hope this has been a nice little introduction and as always feel free to ask any questions. Keep well. Cheers.


I'm not sure it's wonderful host but at least she's the wonderful one here, right so thank you So everyone are still you know not not falling asleep after a heavy lunch this afternoon But we have some exciting sessions planned for today and we'll be exciting some wonderful speakers So before I jump into the agenda, let me ask a question So every year we'll be having you know a lot of speakers traveling from different parts of the world To Singapore to attend for session so I would like to know who traveled the farthest maybe start with ten ten us Who flew in ten hours? flight time 11 hours 12 hours 13 14 15 16 17 oh my goodness 18 18 did I see 18 17 18 19 20 20 21 21 22 which planet were you from we only got 24 hours All right, excellent. So thank you very much for coming all the way Thank you very much. Cheers Who arrived here from the MRT station? all of us put up our hands Excellent. So well, so welcome to force Asia We have a lot of stuff that's planned for you over the next three days We have as you can see 12 tracks That's a lot of tracks. We have over 200 plus speakers 250 Plus sessions and you can see the various topics every single topic in here Happens because we are dealing with open source software Every single component here. Isn't that amazing and just to think that 20 years ago, we did not have the words open source Why it was 20 years ago that finally we figured out that how are we going to market this thing called free software and The open source ink was incorporated In in in February of to 1998 So to this year marks the 20th anniversary of open source org So who's here from open source org? There you go, please stand up and please be recognized. So thank you very much for leading the charge in open source It is all about collaboration is all about sharing good information good code and having a lot of fun in the process So we are very thankful that we have an opportunity to do events like this for Asia in Singapore This is the humnious event that we have. This is how many years already eight years eight nine nine years I can't count your fingers so this is a ninth edition of force Asia and I think this is going to be phenomenal because all the topics that we have are lined up and the speakers But I think what's more interesting is the future that holds from here What we look forward to is for next year's 10th anniversary Hopefully we will have an even bigger and more interesting event plan But in the meantime, we have a bunch of things that we're going to do to in over the next three days We have Code heat awards This is to recognize people who have contributed and participated in coding activities and a competition We will hear a little bit more slightly later We also have open source ink Sponsoring 200 free nights to stay in Singapore for participants who are coming from outside Singapore so that they can participate in force Asia And I think I would like to thank Open source ink for being the wonderful sponsor of that Opportunity and the final thing in this slide is the hackathon that we're going to hold That is being organized by UNESCO and force Asia And that is happening tomorrow on Saturday So look forward to seeing you guys participating in that and I think that's going to be useful a lot of ideas a lot of ways to solve our world problems so with that let me just Round up and mention what's happening downstairs upstairs is where we are here right now downstairs is where we have a Exhibition hall. I think some of you I'm not seeing it. Okay. As you can see the gray boxes. That's where the exhibition is being held Please visit the exhibition hall and talk to the exhibitors because clearly there's a lot of Information that you can share and get gained from them But I think and I hope they have a lot of stickers a lot of swag So those of you who have got laptops, can I see how many of you have laptops open right now? Can I look at the back of your laptops? If those laptops a lot that is too empty that is way too empty. You need some more stickers on your laptops So please go downstairs get whatever stick. Okay. That's a good sticker. Yes. Oh, you need more stickers on that as well So please fill up your laptop. You should make your laptop look like this. Just let me get my laptop here Where's my bag now? You can show your laptop Mine is over there. Okay. Just I just want to show you how you can make your laptop look seasoned and well traveled Now that's not good enough there you go all right make sure your laptop has got multiple layers of stickers All right, it's very important to do that. So at least you have shown that you do stuff Stickers is good enough, right? It sticks to you. All right, so please make sure you visit that Make sure you carry back full of swag so that the organizers need not carry them back home Exactly. They don't want to bring the stickers back home. Please you bring it back And Harish you forgot to mention about your favorite track. Oh, yes, that's right If you look here, there's one very important track that is missing My favorite track called the hallway track So as you go out you bump into somebody have a chat Introduce yourself say who you are what it is that you do. Why are you here? What kind of world problems? You're trying to solve So get to know them That's an excellent way to network to meet people and understand What's what's going on and in the minds of different people that you're going to meet over the next three days So hallway track is never mentioned, but it's the most important track. Okay of all these tracks. That's to me The most important track with that. Let's look at so I'll take this moment to thank all the sponsors for this Making this event of grand success. I'm sure it will be a grand success So firstly lifelong learning Institute, which is a training campus under skills future Singapore Thank you so much for co-organizing for sasia Please get around our applause and we have two diamond sponsors this year Daimler and Google cloud Thank you so much and our goal sponsor indeed Come on guys more enthusiasm for sponsors very important people Our premium sponsor Microsoft Silver sponsor JP Morgan hackathon partner UNESCO and Open Tech Knights sponsor OSI We are also supported and partnered by a bunch of organizations So, thank you so much Singapore Science Center SPH digital Gandhi.net platform.s h my SQL Mothership impact hub by Singapore Susie sent us be free BST ask me and Asia Finance Thank you so much guys for making this event happen All right, so that brings us to The start of our afternoon proceedings So we are delighted to have with us to have our opening keynote Member of Parliament in Singapore Mr. Tew's Sir Luck who will be speaking to us about How open source open technology and collaboration can help drive the economy that we have here Forward as well as economies around the world. So, Mr. Tew The stage is all yours