Well, hello and welcome to another Dev Nation Live. I'm super excited to have you all here today. We have a large crowd to talk about the future of Java E. I know many of us here are kind of new to Java in some cases based on the chat that I've seen happening in the leading up to this presentation. We have people here who do some C-sharp work, moving to C-sharp on .NET Core microservices, and I have to admit, I do like .NET Core, and I've also seen a lot of Python happening in the big data space. There's a lot going on in JavaScript space, but today we're here to talk about Java. We do have some previously recorded sessions though. One that deep-dived into JavaScript, not too long ago, Enterprise JavaScript. Go check it out at our website. But now we're going to introduce you to Mark Little. We're going to get started with Mark Little. He's going to deep dive into what's happening in the Eclipse Foundation, and Jakarta EE, and Java EE. So, Mark, please get started. Thanks. Thanks, Bert. So I'm going to go straight to the slide and get going. Oh, there they are. Okay, so thanks for the introduction. As Bert says, I'm going to go a quick whirlwind tour of the future of Enterprise Java, sometimes called Java EE, and where it's going in the Eclipse Foundation. So if you've been around in the Java industry, even if you haven't used Java EE, you might kind of understand this little comic that I found online. Java and Java EE or J2E before it have been called dead probably more times than anything else over the last 20 years. But, you know, the reality is actually far from it. You know, as this slide shows, Java EE has been around for almost two decades, and it's dominated the Enterprise Middleware scene for many, many years. And, you know, like it or load it, Java EE deployments do form the backbone of many systems that we take for granted today in healthcare and in financial services, for instance. Even many of the more popular frameworks, such as Spring, use components that were developed originally in Java EE or required to be deployed into a Java EE application server. But, you know, because Java EE has been around for so long, it's inevitable that new technologies and new languages and frameworks will come along and gather more momentum. And Java EE has, for a number of years, had quite an image problem that various implementations have been bloated that perhaps it's monolithic, not suitable for, you know, agile development, not suitable for the next generation of cloud-native applications, for instance. I mean, I'm not gonna spend too much time on that, except to say I kind of disagree, but maybe that's me not being, you could say maybe I'm not being objective. But there are also some good points made for Java EE, at least in terms of how quickly, you know, it's taken hold in the industry. And there are some relevant points about problems with it, such as the speed at which it moves. Again, you know, you look at this slide here and there have been eight releases in 20 years. Many people complain that it isn't able to adapt quickly enough to the changes that are going on in the industry, such as Internet of Things or, like I said earlier, Cloud. And in many ways, that's precisely why, at DevNation in 2016, Red Hat, IBM, Tommy Tribe, Payara, and a number of the large Java user groups, such as Sue Java, which is the largest Java user group in the world, we got together and we announced something called Micro-Profile. And the idea about Micro-Profile was to try and leverage the good bits of Java EE and use them in a way that would help next-generation microservices developers to, like I said, leverage the enterprise, the industry standards that are out there, such as enterprise messaging and transactions, but without having to have a full-blown app server. And also to bring in other things from other areas of the open-source environment that are perhaps pushing microservices and cloud-native development a little bit faster than Java EE was, including things like Netflix, OSS, and perhaps even Spring Boot. Now, since 2016, we've seen a huge amount of community interest and adoption. There are over seven different independent implementations of Micro-Profile to this date. And the aim as this slide states, and I'm not gonna go through it all word for word, you can have these slides afterwards, was not to throw away Java EE, but to build on the experiences of it. Somebody's playing around with the slides. Please stop. And drive more innovation upstream through open-source collaboration. Another aim was that if we eventually got to a point where we wanted to standardize specific APIs, we'd return to the Java community process, which is the process that has been driving J2E and Java EE before it. Now, again, I don't wanna spend too much time on Micro-Profile because I wanna get to Jakarta EE, but last year, because of the sheer amount of adoption that we were seeing an interest around Micro-Profile, we decided to move that to the Eclipse Foundation. So everything that we're doing, it's always been upstream anyway, but now it's under the banner of the Eclipse Foundation. And in the last 18 months, we've announced Micro-Profile at Dev Nation and we've had this move to the Eclipse Foundation. And yet we've also been able to do three major releases of Eclipse Micro-Profile. We're actually working on the fourth one as I speak. As you can see from this slide, some of the things that we worked on, they don't exist in Java EE today. Things like the fault tolerance spec, the metric spec, health check. And again, the idea is to push these back into a standard's effort if and when that becomes necessary. But clearly there was one company missing from the Micro-Profile effort and that was Oracle. And what's been going on with Java EE in the meantime? Well, Java EE itself has evolved, like I said earlier, it's evolved slowly. And again, if you've been around long enough, you'll have heard some of the reports of its death over the last 18 months or maybe even two years, maybe even experienced a few of them firsthand. It seemed that Oracle was pulling back from Java EE, possibly even from Java. There were rumors that a lot of people being laid off that the relatively slow movement of JSRs, which is how Java EE evolves with its specifications, was getting even slower because Oracle was pulling people off them to work on other things. So there clearly were rumors of this being the end of Java EE. But as I said here, Java EE8 was finalized in September 2017 in time for Java 1. But if we compare what's here in Java EE8 to what we've been doing in Micro-Profile, you can see that it's relatively incremental. There's none of the big things that we were working on, collaboratively upstream with the likes of IBM and Tommy Tribe and other big companies and small companies and also individuals. But also at Java on 2017, there was another announcement and I actually think in some ways it's bigger than the EE8 announcement. And that was that working behind the scenes, Oracle had reached out to IBM, Red Hat, Tommy Tribe and others to see if there was interest and collaborative efforts. Again, somebody's playing around with slides to move Java EE to an open source foundation. At the time, we didn't know what that open source foundation was, but eventually without giving it away, which I'll talk to in a few slides, we eventually decided to move it to the Eclipse Foundation. And I think it was a pretty big thing for everybody to do. I mean, if we just stop here for a second and let it sink in, you know, this is something that Sun Microsystems that was driving Java EE before the Oracle acquisition didn't do. They open-source Java with the OpenJDK project, which was a great thing. But there was always this perception that, you know, if Sun didn't do it, then Oracle would never do it because, you know, they clearly were doing the acquisition of Sun to drive revenue, and why would they give away what many people perceived as being the crown jewels? And yet they did decide that it was the right thing to do at the right time. All of the investments that have been made over those 20 years, if you remember the slide I had earlier, from Oracle, from Sun before it, from Red Hat, from IBM, from companies big and small, including Google foundations like Apache, all of that effort that has gone into making Java EE, you know, this dominant enterprise Java stack was basically going to be moved to an open-source foundation and no single company would control it. That is huge. That's really, you know, at the time I said that probably the only other thing that has happened in the whole Java ecosystem that comes close to it is when Sun created OpenJDK. Like I said, though, at the time when we made the announcement, we didn't know where we were going to go with it. Well, hot on the heels of moving Eclipse micro-profile to the Eclipse Foundation, we decided that we would move it to the Eclipse Foundation and the top-level project is called E4J. So that's Eclipse Enterprise for Java, notes, and I'll mention this again in a few slides. That's not the brand. That's actually a very specific Eclipse thing. That's where all of the projects, all of the source code, things like Glassfish, et cetera, reference implementations, they would reside or they will reside under that top-level project, but it is not the brand. So E4J's mission is pretty clear. We are actively working with colleagues in Oracle and Red Hat, sorry, in IBM and others upstream to move all of the current EAPIs, reference implementations and TCKs across to the Eclipse Foundation into this top-level project, looking for wide community participation, transferring ownership or leadership, if you like, of some of these projects from Oracle or IBM or others to members of the community and updating the specs as we go to the latest version of Java. Critically, we also want to update the process by which these things evolve. Now, I mentioned it earlier, but the Java community process is the process that's been in place for 18 years and overseeing the evolution of Java EE from J2E through to Java EE8. But, as I said again earlier, the perception is that this thing moves too slowly, perhaps it's not as inclusive as it should be, and it's not necessarily as seamless in its interactions with open-source communities. So, moving just the code and just the RIs and the TCKs to the Eclipse Foundation, but leaving everything under the control of the JCP wouldn't necessarily achieve the kind of things that we want to achieve. So, we are working again upstream, completely open and know-behind closed-doors efforts to define a new process that allows everybody to have a say in how these specs evolve, how these implementations evolve as well. And one of the biggest things that we're doing is kind of lifting and shifting all of the code that exists, hopefully some of these names like Grizzly and Jersey will not necessarily be new to people on this call, but these are big code bases that, like I said, power a lot of industries today, and we're moving them all and re-licensing them to the Eclipse Foundation. So, here's a, for those interested, quite a nice website that the Eclipse Foundation created. I forgot to put the URL on the web on the actual slide, so I'll mention it here. It's eclipse.org, forward slash E for J, forward slash status dot PHP, and it tracks in real time how the specs, how the reference implementations, how the TCKs are moving through that process from being in the control of Oracle, if you like, across to the Eclipse Foundation. And things move very, very quickly such that I pulled that slide together about a week ago, and if you go there now, I know it looks very, very different to what I've shown. Now, as I said, E for J is the name of the top-level project. It's not the brand name. We ran an open process for people to submit names for the brand, as well as an open process for the logo that would go with it. And there was a vote on both. Jakarta EE is the name that won the brand name, so that essentially becomes the new name of Java EE. And the logo is the one you see here, the clipper, and I'm actually quite pleased to say that that logo was presented, was designed and then presented to the Eclipse Foundation by one of Red Hat's own graphic artists. Okay, so quickly, what's the relationship between Jakarta EE and Eclipse Micro-Profile? Well, it's clear that they both are on kind of an overlapping trajectory at this point. And we do feel that, again, under the control of both communities, at some point, they will come together. These two efforts should merge and Jakarta EE should start to evolve in a very similar direction to where Micro-Profile was heading and Micro-Profile falls underneath Jakarta EE. But, you know, is it still just Java EE? Because if it is, then, you know, is it still gonna have the perception issues that we saw and I described earlier? Because despite the name change, at least initially the technology and the specs are just the same as they were last year. So we've got to address that perception issue and the best way of addressing it is by, you know, driving the specs and the reference implementations in the right direction. I mentioned what we've done with Micro-Profile. I do believe, given the adoption we're seeing with that, that there's a lot of lessons to be learned for Jakarta EE and hopefully we are starting to have that cross-pollination. And it's also interesting to note that there are a number of companies that have publicly joined Jakarta EE that never joined Java EE or at least didn't join in a very active way. So one is Pivotal, for instance. Another is LightBend, who aren't even typically in the Java market. They're much more in the Scala arena. So it's great to see that wider community adoption. But really what I want to let you guys know and hopefully instill in you is that this is not Java EE of old. We're rapidly evolving things.  There are going to be no field of use restrictions, which some people may know about. I don't really have time to go into that too much. But how we evolve it is going to be driven by the community. It's not going to be driven by one vendor or a few vendors who happen to get together and make some votes on a particular direction. The community is going to get together and has a great opportunity to define where we go in the future. And clearly some areas that are influencing things are microservices. They influence directly where we went with micro profile. We've been seeing Java EE app servers used in microservices for a number of years anyway, but there's a lot more that we can do and we should do. And I think this is already, if you look at the Jakarta EE community mailing list, you'll see a lot of discussions on this, as well as the discussions that are happening on micro profile. The next few slides are really just to give you an idea of some of the conversations that we're already having, which we wouldn't have had in the JCP and the Java EE world. And again, to try and get everybody here, hopefully so interested that you want to either get involved in some of these things directly or come in and propose some new areas based on your own experiences. But where do transactions go in microservices? This is something I like myself because my background is around transactions, but traditional asset transactions, they probably or definitely don't have a role in microservices to the degree they had in Java EE. We've got to evolve that. There's work going on with the Lightben folks and others over the last few years as well around saga-based transactions. It's an active area, and if you have an interest in that, please get involved. Again, just talking about the Lightben people, but how do we do asynchronous reactive in Enterprise Java? This is not something that your traditional Java EE specifications, let alone implementations, are geared to do. So the conversations are already on about how we would do that by modifying the specs and then by getting involved and defining new APIs, defining new reference implementations. It was originally kicked off by James Roper and his colleagues from Lightben. There's a lot of activity now with some of the Eclipse vertex team, if anybody has heard of that. Again, it just goes to the point of how this is a collaborative thing. It's not being driven by one vendor or a smaller number of vendors. There's a lot of interest from the wider community as well. Redpipers is another effort that's feeding into jacquardery and micro profile, at least in terms of conversations and experience. What we want to do with jacquardery is exactly what we've been doing with Eclipse Micro Profile and having conversations based around experiences. This is why we didn't go originally in micro profile to start talking about standardizing first. The worst standards are the ones that aren't based on experience. So everything that we're doing in micro profile and hence everything I think we really need to do in jacquardery needs to be driven through experiences. The more community members we have involved, the better. You don't have to bring code. You don't have to bring your time to actually start to hack on a spec or a reference implementation. You can come and have just as much of an impact if not more by bringing your point of view on a particular topic and even kicking off a particular topic and just leading that and then getting other people from other companies and other organizations and other Java user groups, for instance, to help drive that in a particular direction. Clearly over the last few years, we've seen a lot of interest in Linux containers such as Docker and then Kubernetes as the de facto standard for orchestration of those containers. Last year, we saw a new kid on the block if you like a sidecar approach, which had been around for about six months or so in other guises, but then Istio came on the scene and really took the limelight and drove a lot of the interest in that. Not only does how Linux containers in Kubernetes fit into the jacquardery world, but how does Istio work with jacquardery? Can we offload some capabilities that we would typically have found in your traditional app server into Kubernetes and Istio? And here are some efforts. This is around Wildfly Swarm, which is our own redhead implementation of Eclipse Micro-Profile, but I show this because just to give you an indication, these are again the wider, more cloud-native discussions that we're having as a community upstream and then feeding into jacquardery. So hopefully, I've given you a whirlwind tour of what's brought us to where we are. I really do think that jacquardery offers us a great opportunity to evolve a series of specs and a series of reference implementations and potentially a series of implementations of the whole spec suite in a direction that makes a lot more sense for where we are today as an enterprise Java community, but it fails or succeeds based on getting the community involved. And that, as I said before, that involvement can range from coming in and telling us about use cases to all the way through to giving your time to donate code or donate your time to work on existing code. We need you and hopefully I've given you an idea of some areas where you can come and get involved. It's not an exclusive list. Go to the Eclipse website, join. It's free to join. There's no membership fees. You can get involved five seconds after this talk ends and just read the mail archives. Jump in if you want to ask for help about areas where maybe you can contribute. It's a very welcoming community. It's a very large community now and the more the merrier. So with that said, I hopefully have left a bit of time for some questions. Very good. And actually, Mark, we have a little bit of discussion to have, but I want to make sure we get the link correct for the Eclipse Foundation and Jakarta EE. I have one I found here because that already is the first question. It's like, okay, great. I want to get involved. How do I find out more about the Jakarta EE effort? What is the right mailing list to join and things like that? So let me, can I post something in the chat? Let me see if that works. Yeah. Just add it to the chat tab. Does that work? Let's see here. Yeah. There we go. Okay. I'll post something. On the EE for Japh, I think. So that will take you to the EE for Japh FAQ. And like I said, that's kind of an artifact of the Eclipse Foundation. So that's where everything is happening. That links off everything. But if you go from there, there's another one talking about Jakarta EE FAQ directly. Another way to get involved, if you want to reach out to me directly, I'm more than happy to field questions and point you in the right direction. Okay. A couple of questions here that I think are really important that we want to make sure we cover. One is, will there be a large-scale repackaging? There's that Java X aspect of Java EE. Do you think there's any kind of, I assume that's the kind of packaging people are worried about because that does impact their code? So what Oracle have said, and they've been very public about this. So again, you can Google it or find it in the mailing lists. Anything that's currently under the Java X package will stay under the Java X package. But new things. So, for instance, if we take the fault tolerance spec from Micro Profile and push that into Jakarta EE, that would not fall under the Java X package. That would need to be a new package. And we don't know what that package is yet. Again, we're going to, we're working on that in one of the working groups upstream in the Jakarta EE effort. Okay. And there was another question related to certifications for things like DOD. You know, so what I take from that question is, at what point where we see large customers like the big government DOD start requiring, you know, certain seals of approval, if you will, from the Jakarta EE movement. Do you have any idea on that one? That's a good question. I think implicitly probably, I should have said, the first release of Jakarta EE will be Jakarta EE 8. I think I got the numbering right. And that will be essentially the same as Java EE 8. So what we're doing, the lifting shift is to take Java EE 8, moving across to Eclipse becomes Jakarta EE 8. And it will be identical. So any certification that was for Java EE 8 should, in theory, happen naturally with Jakarta EE 8. As we go forward, though, and evolve things, I think it's going to, we'll clearly need a re-certification and that's going to be driven by, you know, a matter of interest. Maybe it'll be something that particular vendors will get involved with, as often seems to be the case with certification. But, you know, that's probably the best answer I have for you at the moment. It's a bit hazy after the initial release. Okay. Good question. I also see here related to Angular, React, and other really awesome client-side libraries we see for building MVC-style applications. What might happen with Java server faces? Do you have any feeling on Java server faces? Yeah, so the honest answer, I won't focus specifically on Java server faces, but I'll say the honest answer for Java server faces, JMS, JPA, the orb, anything. You name a component in Java EE and the answer to its future is, it depends on where the community wants to take it. It's no longer the domain of Oracle to define or Red Hat to define or IBM to define or that collection of companies to define. And then, you know, the community finds out after the decision is being made. It really is down to the community. And if you have a, you can get involved in every single one of these specs now. You just need to become an Eclipse member and sign up and then start making commits. Okay. And there was a great question related to MVC, and I think it falls in the exact same category. You know, I've seen a lot of excitement around the MVC specification myself out in the community. Do you have any personal feeling about MVC, Mark? So MVC is, there were a number of specs that did not fall under Oracle's control. MVC was one of them. And the MVC lead is one of the PMC chairs along with myself on Jakarta EE. And one of the first things that he did was donate MVC to the Eclipse Foundation. So that's now already part of Jakarta EE. And it will be part of the, you know, the evolution. Where it goes after that, again, is going to be down to the community. But you're right, there's been an awful lot of interest from it. And there was a lot of interest at, you know, some of the recent Java conferences like Java land. Okay. And there's, we'll take this one final question because I think it's a very good one. And in the case of traditional Java EE, it had a very definitive packaging structure, you know, your ears, your wars, your jars. What about in this world of microservices? What about the world of containers and even a containerless architecture? What are your thoughts on that? That is a great question. And rather than me answer it, I will tell you, that is actually a topic that is going on now in the Jakarta EE community mailing list. It's a long, long thread. And it's about what happens to ears going forward. So not wanting to, I deliberately don't answer it because I want to encourage at least the person who asked the question to become an Eclipse Jakarta EE member and get involved in that conversation. Okay. Fantastic. So Ryan, we're talking to you there. And also don't forget to check out MicroProfile.io. There is another way of thinking through packaging in terms of Javi libraries in the case of MicroProfile.io. So all that is happening right now in that community. Well, we are out of time. I thank you so much for your questions. We had a huge audience today and a lot of chat, even including conversations around what do I learn as far as being a new programmer. I apologize, we couldn't really drill down on some of those things. Try to stay on topic. Some questions around spring and how spring is integrated with this. But overall, fantastic discussion. Thank you so much. Make sure to check out those links that we provided in the chat and in the Q&A tab and definitely join our community and show up again for another Dev Nation Live. Thank you so much, Mark, for having us today, kind of hanging out with us. And don't forget, we have a first and third Tuesday of this event. Awesome stuff. Thank you so much, Mark.


This research explored the use of convolutional neural networks, CNNs, and support vector machines, SVMs, to detect pornography in movies. Three different CNN architectures, MobileNet, VGG, 19, and ResNet 50 underscore V2, were used to identify frames for movies as either pornographic or not. These models were then combined with SVMs to improve the accuracy of the results. The best accuracy of 92.8% was achieved when the ResNet 50 underscore V2 architecture was used as the feature extractor and SVM as the classifier. By transferring knowledge from other similar tasks, this research has shown how machine learning techniques can be used to detect pornography in movies more accurately than manual censorship methods. This article was authored by Hor Sway Lin, Serena Manser, Neuer Aldehal, and others.


I would love to see Fifth Street revitalized and bring back some of the old traditions that we had there, of course, with a new twist. Welcome to Freeport. My name is Cletus Reneri Burke and I was born and raised in Freeport and have returned after a hiatus in Washington, D.C. in Virginia and this is my partner Nancy Albert. We have opened CN Antiques on Market LLC in May of 2018. We were in a business together as a previous antique shop in Saxonburg, Pennsylvania and whenever they had closed we partnered together and thought this would be a great community to bring antiques and collectibles to the town and just another business within this community. Freeport when I was a child was a thriving town with drug stores and banks and dry goods stores and of course the choup men's store was also an integral part of this town. There were restaurants and Main Street, which is Fifth Street, used to be a bustling area for shopping and just, you know, living. Unfortunately with the advent of Natrona Heights Plaza, things kind of slowed down in Freeport. People got older and some of the business is closed but we they're starting to revitalize Freeport some with a few new businesses. However, I think that, you know, with our river, which is a very important part of our community, they built a community dock and we draw people from Oakmont and Pittsburgh and up the river during our September by the River festivities and also the spring fling open house here. We felt that Freeport was a growing community that we thought it would be revitalized and that's why we thought it'd be a great place for us to start our own business here and try to bring more people into the town and appreciate some of the treasures that we have found and brought into the community. Well, I was born and raised here and it was always a very friendly community. People joined together as a child we had parades and Halloween parades and Christmas parades and it had a real community spirit. Some of that has waned in the past few years so I think that having HGTV come in and try to revitalize some of the buildings and the facades and help the community along and focus on the river because that is an integral part of our community. It would really do well for Freeport. Yes, absolutely. I feel that Freeport, the river brings in a lot of the summer with the boats and everybody here is super friendly and that's why we actually chose to be a part of this community and to just unite with the locals and try to bring more people into this great little historic town. And one of the historic buildings is the chute building as she mentioned that's right on fifth at the corner. It's a beautiful building if somebody would take that and bring that back to life. I think that would really help the community thrive. I see that there could be a coffee shop, a bakery, another old-time pharmacy with the soda counters or with ice cream and so forth for the community. That's why we came here. We're hoping to get other businesses to see what we saw in this community and be a part of it and help it get back on the map.


a eu cyfnodd a'r cyfnodd. Dyna'r fideo, dyma'n ddysgu'r cyfrifiadau a'r cyfrifiadau. Llywyddon ychydig, ychydig, cwrwm yn dod i'r cyfrifiadau Ieithi yw'r cyfrifiadau, mae'r cyfrifiadau yn ymddangos yn y dyfodol. Ieithi'r cyfrifiadau yw 1-1 Cochain, dwi'n deall i mi a'r cyfrifiadau ar www.gmail.com. Ieithi'r cyfrifiadau yw'r cyfrifiadau i'r cyfrifiadau, can share their experiences and knowledge if you are interested in being a part of this community you can sign up for our Patreon page the link is in the video description. Check out the Narx5 Emojdi store where you can purchase your own Narx5 T-shirt or mug. We have a variety of designs and it is a great way to support the channel. The link to our Narx5 Emojdi store is in the video description. Defeat in the Narcist. Narcists are dependent on your reaction and being able to affect your emotions. What keeps us stuck with these people is when we take them seriously, when we entertain the belief that maybe they do have something of significant value or importance. They are very efficient at creating the illusion and displaying value. Naturally we assume that we are dealing with a person who is going to contribute or provide something of value to us but they have no intention of exchanging anything with you. They have no intention of serving you. You are contributing or providing your resources while receiving the bare minimum in return to replenish what you are giving out. This leaves you in a deteriorating condition when they can no longer affect your emotions. You have defeated them when you can recognise or accept that they do not hold any significant value or importance to you. You have defeated them. They are fully aware that they are not having the same effect on you. They are no longer able to trick you into believing that they hold something of value. They recognise this. They understand it. They experience a sense of loss especially when you start working on yourself. Practising self-love, increasing your self-worth and self-esteem once they've seen that.  They knew that you held something of value all along. The game was to make you believe that you were not good enough for them when they knew that they were not good enough for you. They were envious of your qualities, talents and traits. They felt inferior to you which turned the relationship into a competition where they were constantly trying to prove themselves to you. They were trying to project their own self-hatred onto you.  You recognise your value so they know it's over because they never brought anything of value to you and now they have to watch you progress and succeed in your life which completely injures their dignity and pride because while you were working on yourself and focusing on creating a better life they were either doing something reckless or focusing on trying to sabotage what you were doing so now they've got nothing to show for the time that you were apart because they spent all of their time and effort on trying to tear you down rather than focusing on their own lives when you were with them they were feeding off you this was replenishing them sustaining them making them look good if you are no longer around they don't have that fuel anymore they don't have anything to keep them going once you start doing better than you were when you were with them it becomes clear who the problem was in that relationship they will usually disappear you won't hear from them you won't see them around anymore because they don't want you to witness their defeat it's humiliating embarrassing to them they don't want to give you the satisfaction of doing better than you were when you were with them they are not going to come back to you just to give you the opportunity of looking down on them especially if they know that you see through them you no longer validate their false selves or their illusions when a narcissist doesn't hover you that means you have defeated them it means you're no longer a suitable target for them because you recognize your own value you expect a certain standard you see them for what they really are rather than how they want you to see them they are not going to want anything to do with you now they want someone who doesn't recognize their own value someone who will settle for less than they deserve someone who doesn't know what they're really about and will validate their false selves and their illusions they are dependent on being able to control your emotions without that they have no power to control you if they cannot affect you emotionally they are losing their power to control you when you become more conscious more aware of your thoughts and feelings you will begin to detach yourself from them you know that you have defeated the narcissist by how you feel on the inside when you feel differently about interacting with them you are no longer concerned about them or what they are doing you no longer feel the same way you are reacting differently to them you have no anxiety of expecting a call from them or seeing them in person you no longer anticipate a response from them the most significant thing to a narcissist is being able to control you being able to affect how you think feel and react when you have defeated the narcissist you begin to see them from a different perspective you no longer take them seriously you no longer view them as a credible source you no longer trust them you no longer believe what they are saying or suggesting to you you have no desire or motivation to interact with them you understand that this individual is not useful or beneficial to you or your life you understand that this individual does not possess any significant value you have defeated the narcissist thank you for watching ples like comment share and subscribe if you would like to make a donation my paypal links in the video description coaching enquiries you can email me at anarchsfivercoaching at gmail.com i hope this video resonated with you and i will talk to you soon


I'd like you to meet an interesting Penn Stater. Stephen Ansari is co-founder and principal of Blue Raster, the company that you heard about in the video prelude to this case study. This story is about how Stephen and his partner built a successful business in WebGIS. It's also about what you can do to create opportunities for fulfillment in your own career. I met Stephen in 1997, when he was an undergraduate student in a course I taught at Penn State. In fact, that course called Mapping Our Changing World was an early on-campus version of the online course you are taking now. In those early days of the Web, I built HTML files to illustrate and share my lectures and assign students to code HTML too. Stephen came to Penn State from Downing Town High in southeastern Pennsylvania to study Earth science and mapping. He was already into Web programming by the time he enrolled in my class. Stephen had been coding since age eight when his family bought an Apple IIe and he found a book on basic programming. Later, he upgraded to a Tandy 1000sx, which he says opened up a whole world of programming simple applications and user interfaces. He says he loved the immediate gratification of building things with code. It was like engineering, but without the need for raw materials. For a time, coding remained a hobby for Stephen. His academic interests centered on Earth science and mapping. Then in 1995, the US Census Bureau launched its Tiger Map Service, one of the earliest web mapping services. Even with his slow modem connection to the internet, Stephen was amazed at the ability to explore the Census Bureau's Tiger line files and thematic maps online. Later, in our Mapping Our Changing World class, Stephen discovered the United States Geological Survey's digital raster graphics. As you know, DRG's are topographic maps that have been scanned and geo-referenced. That's when he started to see connections between maps and computers. As an Earth scientist working on the field, he'd always thought of topo maps as just printed things. Maps and the world really were changing. But it wasn't until his first job out of college that Stephen got to put these insights to work. After graduation in 1999, Stephen found a job in the Washington DC area as a policy analyst for a firm that was writing groundwater guidance documents for the US Environmental Protection Agency. Working at the desk next to him was Michael Lippmann. Mike had earned a bachelor's degree and then a master of public administration in environmental policy at Cornell. A fellowship at EPA brought him to DC where he later found work as a policy analyst at the same firm as Stephen. The coworkers shared an interest in the potential of web mapping and an early internet map server technology called ArcIMS, which their employer was just beginning to experiment with. The company sent Mike and Stephen to Redlands for training in the new technology. They made connections there that would serve them well later. Some of their employer's government agency clients wanted to begin mapping contaminated sites in the US. That provided Mike and Stephen's first foray into GIS. Although their employer didn't create the National Institutes of Health talks map shown here, the example does suggest what an ArcIMS-like web mapping app looked like in those days. Stephen and Mike began to envision how web GIS could be a game-changing technology, but electronic maps still seemed esoteric to most of their employer's clients. Even Google Maps was still years in the future, and the dot-com boom had recently gone bust. It would take a while longer before a business model based on web mapping in GIS would seem viable. In 2002, Stephen and Mike took the plunge and founded Blue Raster, LLC. In interviews for this case study, Stephen and Mike explained that the name Blue Raster is meant to connote the ability to capture complex reality systematically, and to represent it simply in ways that reveal the meaning their customers wish to convey. That's the value they aim to deliver with web GIS. Blue Raster's earliest contracts involved creating web mapping apps about radioactive contamination at research sites for the Department of Energy. The first of those sites was Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island. Brookhaven operated a high flux beam reactor used for scientific research from 1965 to 1996. According to the Department of Energy, the reactor was decommissioned in 1996 after tritium, a radioactive form of hydrogen and a byproduct of reactor operations was found in nearby groundwater monitoring wells. Investigators subsequently found that contaminated water, quote, had been leaking from a spent fuel pool located in the basement of the reactor building for more than a decade. As urban development spread eastward on Long Island, public concern about contaminated groundwater increased. Years before the term open data was coined, Brookhaven commissioned Blue Raster to create web apps that provided maps and other site-specific information graphics needed to keep residents in the press informed. For example, users could drill down into monitoring well locations to view graphs like this that showed how tritium concentrations decreased at the wells with time and with restoration efforts. Functionality like that may seem obvious now, but it wasn't then, which leads me to wonder, what will users expect from web mapping apps 10 or 20 years in the future? Brookhaven engineers and contractors modeled and tracked the tritium plume and shared the data with Blue Raster for the website. Every week, Stephen and Mike would take an early morning flight from Baltimore, Washington International Airport to Islip, Long Island. After consulting with the engineers, they'd travel home to Washington on the last flight of the day. Brookhaven National Lab met its remediation targets and Blue Raster's public outreach was considered a success. Similar department of energy projects followed. In time, they were branded programmatically as land trek, but Brookhaven's success in meeting its goals convinced Mike and Stephen that Blue Raster needed to diversify. They experimented with maps for election campaigns and apps for the real estate market. They got their name out by participating in meetups in the DC area. Finally, one of their contacts at Esri introduced them to the World Wildlife Fund. The World Wildlife Fund had compiled a database of the global distributions of thousands of mammals, amphibians, reptiles, and birds. In 2004, WWF hired Blue Raster to design and build a web mapping app called Wildfinder that lets users search the WWF database and visualize eco regions in which species live. Mike explains that they built the first version of the web app with Arc Web Services, the technology that evolved later into ArcGIS online. In 2009, Blue Raster and WWF released Wildfinder 2, which is built on ArcGIS for server and flex. To keep pace with evolving technology, Blue Raster hopes to create an updated version built with the ArcGIS API for JavaScript. Working at the intersection of conservation and global affairs, Blue Raster began to hit its stride. The Wildfinder app became for a time one of the most visited areas of the World Wildlife Fund's site. Their success caught Esri's attention in just four years after its founding. Blue Raster was named business partner of the year in 2006. Remember this conceptual map of the WebGIS technology ecosystem from an earlier case study? Mike Lipman coauthored it. Like his collaborator, Robert Cheatham, Mike stresses that this should be considered a living document that's updated continuously. In the lower middle of the map, notice the cluster of technologies labeled map servers. One of Blue Raster's core competencies is the ability to deploy server technology as a means to publish geospatial data and interactive geo-apps on the web. One example of a project powered by server technology is Global Forest Watch, an initiative sponsored by the World Wildlife Institute. Global Forest Watch includes a suite of data, maps and apps all intended to help people everywhere to better protect forests. One of those apps is Global Forest Watch Fire. Shown here is Blue Raster's 2014 wireframe design of the Global Forest Watch Fire Analysis Interface. Driven by concern about the role of fire and deforestation and air pollution, WRI convened a partnership involving Blue Raster, Digital Globe, NOAA, and others to create a high resolution, near real-time, global fire monitoring system that anyone can access and use on the web. This is a design comp, a next stage in the app development process at which the customer's vision for the product and the developer's vision begin to converge. The live version I viewed in July 2017 reflects expanded functionality, including crowdsourcing. Global Forest Watch fires brings together several organizations and technologies. The MODIS satellite-based sensor is used to detect fires around the world. Daily updates of fire events are stored and served from ArcGIS for server. High-confidence fire events trigger the capture of high-resolution Digital Globe imagery, which is made available for near real-time viewing and analysis by the ArcGIS image extension for server. Global Forest Watch users can subscribe to fire alerts, which are delivered by email or text. And to help visualize the potential impact of air pollution, an open-source JavaScript routine is used to create animations of wind directions and speed every four hours. Blue Raster uses either ArcGIS Enterprise, which, as we called ArcGIS for server until version 10.5, or ArcGIS Online to serve their web maps and apps. The choice depends on project requirements. Other options are available, of course, including map server, geo server, and others. You'll have a chance to explore the alternatives if you take the Penn State course, cloud and server GIS. The ability to design a geospatial system architecture that responds to user needs is a key competency for Blue Raster and may be for you, too. In the video prelude to this case study, Christine Movius pointed out the importance of coding in a web mapping business like Blue Raster. Of the several languages shown in the web GIS technology ecosystem map, Python and its associated libraries are perhaps most important for GIS pros. Python is useful for automating repetitive tasks, for customizing desktop GIS interfaces, and for what data scientists call data wrangling. A common estimate is that up to 80% of data analysis is consumed with preliminary tasks of cleaning and preparing data. Python is widely used for such tasks. But as Python has matured, geoprocessing has emerged as another common usage. Libraries like PySAL, the Python Spatial Analysis Library, and application programming interfaces like the ArcGIS for Python API make Python an increasingly valuable tool for serving what Mike Lipman calls an increasing demand for more robust spatial analysis. One Blue Raster project that benefited from Python scripting is Landmark. In collaboration with the World Resources Institute and others, Blue Raster designed and built Landmark as the first global repository of community land rights data. According to WRI, as much as 65% of the world's land is held by indigenous peoples and local communities, but little more than 10% is recognized as belonging to them. The Landmark platform allows users to draw a shape on a map to query the attributes of communities within that area of interest. Blue Raster developer David Italberg used Python to calculate the quantity of indigenous and community lands within political borders. Landmark is useful precisely because it combines many disparate data sources in forms that allow further analysis and visualization. Stephen Ansari says that 10 years ago, GIS pros use desktop software to perform analysis and then produce derivatives that might be included in web maps. Today he says we're using Python to build repeatable systems that run in real time and can do on-the-fly combinations of data that are controlled by end users. He urges every GIS pro to hone their Python skills. Python scripting is specifically called out in the GTCM. Opportunities for Python training abound, including Penn State's online course, GIS programming and customization. The 2015 Paris Climate Conference was the 21st annual Conference of Parties at which representatives of 195 nations meet to assess progress in confronting and reversing human-induced climate change. In the lead up to the December conference, hopes were high that an international agreement to keep global warming below two degrees Celsius was possible. A mere two months before the conference, Blue Raster took a call from UNICEF, the United Nations Children Fund. Believe it or not, UNICEF discovered Blue Raster out of the blue with a Google search. UNICEF wanted to produce a compelling statement about the risks that climate change poses for the world's 2.3 billion people under age 18. They had lots of data and analysis, but no clear idea of how to tell a story that would make a difference in Paris and beyond. Stephen, Mike and Kevin McMaster engaged their clients in an iterative design and development process that soon yielded information products that helped crystallize UNICEF's story. For example, this map of the distribution of children living in flood occurrences zones combines UNICEF analysis with flood maps produced for the Aqueduct Online Water Resource Atlas, which Blue Raster developed with the World Resources Institute. Blue Raster succeeded in helping UNICEF complete its publication unless we act now in time for the Paris conference. Later, Stephen and Mike called it their proudest achievement to date. The experience and contacts they gained brought more collaborations with UNICEF, including Clear the Air for Children in 2016 and Thirsting for a Future in 2017. Following the Thirsting for a Future project, UNICEF policy analyst Nicholas Rees said, Blue Raster has helped us make the case for protecting children's access to safe water and sanitation. A common thread that connects Blue Raster's projects is their emphasis on helping clients define goals that are consistent with their organization's purpose and in crafting stories that advance those goals. To support Blue Raster's growth, Stephen and Mike look for employees who are good communicators, who can geo-enable their customers' data to tell stories with abundant information. Here they stand with Penn State alum Chris Gabris and Christina Fawn, who co-hosted my first visit to their offices in 2016. Chris recently developed the US National Arboretum's Botanical Explorer mobile app, which helps visitors and researchers explore the arboretum grounds and plant collections. Among many other things, Christina created the Story Maps starter kit we use in discourse. I asked Stephen and Mike how they determine whether an applicant has what it takes to be successful at Blue Raster. Their job interviews start with non-technical conversations about what excites applicants. They look for innate talent, good imagination, writing skills, public speaking ability, and especially excitement about geography. Next they look for tech skills such as programming, the JavaScript API, and newer JavaScript libraries, HTML5, and IT skills, such as server setup and administration. Mike remarked that they look for people who fill the gap between college curricula and the real world. They also seek applicants who are active in the community, as in dev meetups and user groups, and who assert thought leadership on the web. Finally and especially, they need people who know how to find things, who have the right mindset to learn collaboratively and independently, and who are energized to move on to the next level. These same traits that prepared Stephen and Mike to build a successful business in WebGIS are what we hope you will develop and build upon in your time with us at Penn State.


Well, libraries in Crowan County could possibly soon be sharing funding from the Kichigami Regional Library System. The possible decision has the Brainard Public Library worried about their financial future. Alogen Gay has more. To better serve their reading community, the Crosby Jesse F. Hallett Memorial Library has requested to become a member of the Kichigami Regional Library System. Right now Crosby has their own library. So it's considered a private library, so we are not eligible for a lot of state funding or grants. The union would be a huge asset to the library. We're going to have such a bigger, vast capability of enjoying books and what's out there. However, it could have an adverse effect on the funding other libraries depend on. Because we're both Crowan County, it means that whatever they need to function would come out of the Crowan County budget that they set aside for libraries. Directly that would come out of what Brainard Library receives. And the Brainard Public Library is worried that if they have to share the funding, that hours of operations and quality of programs may be impacted. A chunk, which has not been determined at this time of the Brainard Library budget, could potentially go into Crosby's budget, which would take away more than likely hours from the Brainard Public Library, definitely resources and the availability to function. The mayor of Crosby admits that the situation is not ideal, but she is determined to do what is best for her city. I just think that our residents and our children deserve the same as the rest of the county. A representative for Kichigami was not available for comment. In Brainard, Logan Gay, Lakeland News. Crowan County will make their final decision regarding funding in January. If you've enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Lakeland Public Television.


Good afternoon and welcome to the Vermont Affordable Housing Show. Today we're going to talk about mobile home parks and their residents and current issues facing them with me today are my guests. Thank you so much both of you for being here. We have Sandrine Kibue from CVOEO's mobile home project and Vermont tenants. Sandrine is the director of both projects and also with us today is Laura Mistretta who works for the mobile home project doing resident organizing. If I got that all right again my name is Erhard Manca. I'm your every other month host and this is a call-in show just a reminder the call-in number for any question or comment you might have related to mobile home parks, mobile homes or affordable housing. The call-in number is 862-3966 so call-in we've got a half hour and we'll field any questions that you might have. Before we begin the show or begin interviewing our guests today just a couple of reminders, a couple of announcements. Even though it's summer folks in the housing world continue to get together to talk about housing and homelessness issues on Tuesday August 20th is the monthly meeting of the Vermont Coalition and Homelessness in Randolph from 10 to 12 and also coming up next month in September is part two of the Burlington Housing Summit. It will be from 6 to 8 p.m. at City Hall and there is a link to more information on the Housing Summit on the mayor, a Mayor of Merrill Weinberger's website. The mayor will be hosting that and again it's part two of the summit that happened in June and will review some of the policy recommendations that came out of the first part in June and we'll also have that link again at the end of the show. So with those announcements let's turn to our guests to Sandrine and to Laura again thanks so much for being here today and I know it was short notice but these these shows kind of come come up pretty quickly especially when you have summer vacations going on but maybe if you two could start by giving our viewers maybe a quick kind of primer on why are mobile homes an important affordable housing resource and especially why are mobile home parks an important resource and Sandrine maybe I'll start with you and you guys can sort of you know answer as you as you see fit. Sure. I do believe that most people know or I hope that most people know that we have about 1,200 and 91 Vermonters that experiencing homelessness right now which comes to about 917 households and I would say just that mobile homes are a great source of affordable housing. They we have about two 146 mobile homes right now parks right now and 7149 lots and without nationally speaking we have about eight and point five million of mobile homes in the United States right now so affordable housing is what it is for low and moderate income Vermonters for sure so I do believe that this is what is so important to talk about it today or any day actually. Laura you want to add something today? Sure yeah you know I think it's also really important to know you know our program mostly works with residents of mobile home parks and again just to highlight the affordability aspect of this type of housing that is unmatched by any other type of housing in the state you know lot rents are at a median statewide of about $340 a month and considering that almost 90% of residents households in Vermont's mobile home parks own their homes outright that is cheaper than any rent you're going to get elsewhere in Vermont and especially that most Vermonters pays more than 30% of their income on housing so yeah and so this is a great way for folks to get into home ownership where they have a little more control I mean if you're in a park you don't have complete control because there's a park owner could be a for-profit landlord could be a non-profit but at least you own or co-op right of course I should forget I used to help organize co-ops so it's a way to get more control over your housing but with that come some issues also right yes like sorry the lack of a was actually try to introduce our program the CVO your mobile home program works with residents and our services are really based on advocacy we do provide we have a hotline that deals with concerns that may have and referral services and also organizing Laura talked about co-ops which is a way for the mobile home residents to actually own even the soil which they rent so this is a great avenue for most of total control actually via membership but this is basically what our program provide but I'm going to turn to Laura to explain exactly in a little bit more details about the activities that we have under the CVO mobile home program sure yeah can I interrupt for one second so cvoo stands for shampoong valley office of economic opportunity is one of the five communication agencies serving the western part of Vermont thanks sorry to interrupt acronym busting here for folks who are not you know familiar with all the housing jargon sure yeah yeah but so getting into a little bit more you know about what the mobile home program does and the importance of our program um as as Sandrine's already mentioned in an air herd you mentioned there's challenges to owning your home and renting the land um you know their park owners are responsible for providing the basic necessities clean water functioning septic system you know functional roads electrical maintaining trees drainage um and home owners really they they're they own their homes for the most part and that's what they're responsible is just the actual structure that is their home so if a park owner is not doing a good job of maintaining the road or the electrical system or the water system you know it's not as simple as not saying it's simple for a renter to have to pick up and move but at least they could you know theoretically pack all their things up and move them to a new apartment if they're and if that apartment's not being taken care of properly with a mobile home park it's a lot more challenging it can cost thousands of dollars to move a home and a lot of homes are just very old and not able to be moved so so mobile in name only yeah mobile in that they are initially trucked in yeah though you know there was some new regulations we might see that being a little easier but still it costs money to move these homes so yeah so we counsel you know we educate residents about their rights um if a park owner is not living up to their end of the deal and providing the correct level of services we we give them some information about steps they can take to enforce those those laws you know and again we we work with parks on a community level when there's really big events like a really significant rent increase since mobile home parks actually the only type of housing in Vermont that has some form of rent control we work with residents throughout the mediation process we work with parks that go out for sale and educate residents about their right to form a cooperative and connect them with the correct you know resources to do that um and yeah and then as as sandrine said you know a big part of this is advocacy whether it is on the individual level but also you know getting more interested in in sort of the statewide level of making sure that mobile home parks are are seen and treated as the critical source of affordable housing that they are sure because i mean some people have you know attached stigmas to mobile home parks and um they are as you mentioned first of all a great affordable housing resource last i remember uh sandrine you gave the numbers earlier but it's about seven to eight percent of the entire housing stock in the in the state of romano i remember at one point it used to be around nine percent right we've lost some of that but it's it that's still a very significant percentage and because you have the split between the ownership of the home and somebody else owning or an organization owning the park there's certain rights that have been that lawmakers have put into vermont statute in order to protect residents you mentioned kind of rent control or rent mediation and then people have rights in in terms of when a park gets goes up for sale or when a park is potentially closed which is also also happened what maybe just i know it's a it's a very um long and and uh sort of wonky uh subject but what does happen when someone uh when a park owner says they want to sell or or close what just maybe quickly give folks an idea of what kind of rights people have um in vermont law and what you do in those situations sure yeah so um if a when a park owner decides they want to sell the park um they have to send out a notice to every single household in the park and also to the department of housing and community development who also plays a role in enforcing the laws protecting mobile home park residents and i have to uh to add that um the department of housing and community development is one of our primer funders when it comes to our first stop grant which actually does the work that we do at mobile homes yeah yeah there there are you know our most consistent partner yeah quick shout out to arthur hamlin at department of housing and community development who used to run the mobile home program many years ago but um has now been um partnering with you guys from within state government to make sure that rent their mobile home park residents have their rights protected right yeah so you know the second that arthur gets a notification he sends it over to us um and um the the sale notice will will say whether the sale is due to a potential closure of the park so that would basically say if the park does not get sold then the park owner is intending to close and that's an important piece of information to know from the start for sure um we haven't seen too many park closure notices recently there's been a there's has been one lot closure recently um but and there's different rights and different responsibilities for the owner and rights for the residents based on whether it's a closure or or a sale yeah i mean and yeah and essentially though if when the park was up for sale residents have the right to organize and sign a petition stating that they are interested in looking into the feasibility of forming a cooperative or would like to designate a non-profit to do that work and look into purchasing the park on you know and managing it and that's part of where you guys come in and you do you can help them organize a residents association uh and together with Arthur make sure i'm there's certain things he can and can't say as a state employee uh you as an advocacy group out in the in the field as a non-profit there may be other things that you can advise uh and and you have a different advocacy role in that in that equation right so uh referral services is what we do when it comes to feasibility of course it costs money so uh helping them in the process of acquiring some a financial assistance doing the feasibility um a report that is required actually to know if they are able to purchase the park or the non-profit to do so um and um leading them into really know how a co-op might work if it's something that they might be able to do as a community um and uh going forward with the the end of process which is you know um to go forward with the the organization of the cooperative and so that that inspection is kind of like the equivalent of if you're looking to buy a home you go out and have an inspection done to see is there something wrong with the home that needs to be repaired or done before you buy it or you know after you buy it so that you go in with your eyes wide open so that's that's something that needs to be done when yes of course even though the uh the the inspection like you call it is not as extensive as it should be because of the uh infrastructures um that we issues that we see in parks um and uh mostly looks at the aesthetic of the park you know more than anything else so um it is a costly process of course it takes time um but uh we are here to help with um that process and you both mentioned co-ops as one of the options so is that something that the mobile home program does to work with residents on becoming a co-op if that's their their choice so we we wouldn't inform them of that option and can you know work alongside them through that process but really another critical partner in this work in here in vermont is the cooperative development institute um they provide the technical assistance to actually help the board function train the board and and really do a lot of the administrative background to to forming this co-op um and negotiating with the seller and and provide the financing in some instances sometimes yeah that because they're connected to a national network that is working to create these these co-ops so there are mobile home cooperatives you know all over the country at this point right and if they don't go co-op the other option for you both mentioned nonprofits what's what's another option um that um that that we have in vermont well like you know like you know you know you mentioned that you know when you buy a home there'd be an inspection you have to you have to make sure that the home it's in good state to actually buy it with the price that is offered or the price that is um uh presented um and a nonprofit um nonprofits that are definitely uh in some part of the state a major a major mobile home park for instance owners for some acct which is the uh Addison county community trust yeah um serving the um the central part of vermont or Addison county yeah yeah yes right um and um the process is um it's uh pretty much just I would say the same as uh a cooperative because they would be the owner of the land and they would be the owner of the park so leasing the lots this in the lots so yes well great so we do have rights and protections and these options but we also know that there have been a couple of reports that have been done and they kind of come uh I I guess in a tradition of mobile home commissions that we've had um over many years over 20 years uh looking into issues having to do with um mobile home parks and and living in a mobile home park uh in vermont I remember the first one it wasn't on the first one it was I think in 1992 or 91 92 I was on the last one uh about 10 or 15 years ago but now we have two new reports and they raise a number of issues uh that have been identified uh that that are challenges many of them and opportunities for mobile home parks in their residence so maybe uh I don't know Sandrine what if you could maybe start talk about you know the the two reports that um we've received recently um sure um uh development housing a conservative board um has um done an assessment on 52 affordable mobile home parks owned by nonprofits um and um it was really to look at um vulnerabilities and financial burden that these parks have because yes they do um have some issues uh regarding uh infrastructure as one of them that is a major one of window maintenance and even um the repairs that is costly um when it comes to um the um activity itself uh and there were a second report done by Justin uh Susick it was one of our um intern from the shepherd consensium on uh poverty eight weeks that he has been with us and provided a report talking about an ongoing forum um which is somewhat uh the uh result of the assessment itself uh from the VSCB which is the Vermont uh conservative um housing uh am I missing any other name housing and okay we all refer to it as VHCB but viewers out there may not know what VHCB stands for Vermont Housing and Conservation Board so uh like I said there's some um a conclusions that uh was reported which is you know market marketability of the mobile home parks I mean young um Vermontos don't really have uh that uh attraction to buy or reside in mobile homes and probably because of the stigma uh there is also the uh financial uh capital need that we um definitely um is needed for um mobile home parks at this point here um relocation of um mobile home parks that are residing on the flood zone it's something that we have seen with um uh Irene um and the location even though uh efforts were made to move some of them but uh we have seen a lot uh that's still in the same flooding area which makes it very expensive for all of them to be moved at once it's expensive for the resident it's expensive for the mobile home park event um since they will lose a portion of their uh for example tri park down here at Rattleboro has a number of they were flooded out during tropical storm Irene or portions and and portions have already been moved but there's a lot left a lot left to do um so the recommendation of the steering committee was uh first for first for most um uh the creation of some uh subcommittee um that we will be definitely looking at issues and uh solutions when it comes to concerns uh regarding mobile home parks um and I do believe that the Vermont um housing affordable housing coalition uh will be the host of that subcommittee we're willing to do that if uh you know that's one of the things that coalition the coalition could do is act as an umbrella for you know these kinds of efforts they're multi-sector multi-part partisan and and will involve a number of different players so right and um this the second portion of that um report I like the need of advocating in front of the general assembly for um some um of course funding and policy change um so that is really the two major recommendation that this report is highlighting um do you want to add anything else uh Laura or you want to maybe a little breakdown I mean funding's a big kind of big issue and and a you know it's multifaceted there's a number of uh aspects to that Laura I you know I don't know if you want to talk about you know the different aspects of funding that might be needed or Sandrine sure yeah um so yeah so the VHCB report identified a number of different funding pools that would be helpful uh for for mobile home parks in vermont primarily though they're looking at you know funding to address infrastructure issues again those water systems septic systems things like that yeah um a lot of these parks are very old three quarters of them were built before there were any codes to even regulate these systems going in and there's very so um they're not in the best shape um they were built by the original owners um there's not even a lot of information about some of the systems some were built in the 60s or yeah before there were federal right around mobile home standards and so infrastructure's one issue infrastructure's one another one you mentioned older mobile homes yeah yeah so that is a that is a second really big issue is that there vermont does have a really old housing stock not just in our stick built homes but also in the mobile homes um and so a lot of homes were built before I think it's like 1980 something and which is quite old and most are not on foundations so they're not holding up well and they're some of them are literally falling apart um and so parks really struggle with that you know a lot of people again like we said earlier it's not easy to actually move these homes so most people do not move them move the homes when they leave the park they leave them behind they abandon them and so park owners are left with these homes um once they take ownership over them and they're not cheap to get rid of right they're not cheap to get rid of you know thousands and thousands of dollars to to demolish a home um and then you know but then there's they're left there and they need they end up selling that home you know maybe for very little money but still someone's continuing to live in this substandard home um so yeah there's definitely a discussion about the need to have some kind of small quicker money available to address these sorts of issues because that's a you know if there's a home abandoned that's a lot that's not bringing in lot rent um and help not helping the park the other issue if you're i'm sorry go ahead yes you are to that there is also the the maintenance and the rehabilitation of a home for residents and themselves i mean um yeah to be able to access from the financial assistance to um maintain your home or to rehabilitate your home or to repair your home when you're a mobile park resident is very very limited um there is a few um um funding for um the um when you want to become a first home buyer when it comes to mobile home uh residents um through uh that's a third issue right on the infrastructure and either rehab or replacement there's entry level how do you get into mobile home ownership right correct um and um what what would you say um because of that that really tiny access to financial assistance this is one of the um one of the major um financial need that the uh report actually i lied we had some success during the last legislative session on that yes yes about 250 000 dollars had been increasing it was christ um and i do believe it's uh the revenue bill age 541 250 000 increase to the state affordable housing test credit uh that includes also yes so that can be used for mobile home purchase or replacement yeah so yes right that more energy efficient home uh or new home right correct um the the um other other thing that i wanted to highlight is the um although the uh statute is very um somewhat uh in Vermont uh clear um on certain things when it comes to the have believe me have believe i know i have trouble with that one too yes um the state of your home let's say that um good one yes uh and because of the the the location of some of those um mobile homes uh in private parks um the um willy knowledge of having a town health officer coming and look through um these um code violations that might they might have in their homes and or even outside the home um for safety and health issues um it is it is it is somewhat very difficult to access so i do believe that the uh the rental advisory board mentioned the um new process that will be coming up with code enforcement and i hope that mobile homes resident will be able to uh benefit from that restructure um in a that will only apply to rental homes though yes um i'm just trying to put yeah got it understood understood no it's it's it's definitely been an issue an issue yes a couple of years ago i remember there was legislative initiative to clarify that actually department housing community development has some um um some regulatory authority over over conditions of course the agency and natural resources has um yeah they deal with sewer and septic and the water so it's it's like really divided up right it's not good right right so we i hope that we touch that subject please yeah um well another very important issue so are there other policy issues we've got maybe four minutes left are there other policy issues we talked about rent mediation earlier is that something that you see coming up as as uh as as an issue that is right now basically if a park owner wants to increase lot rent above the consumer price index plus one percent they have to go to mediation there's some allowances for capital improvements but um well i don't have to go to mediation but residents have the right to request me but there's been some legislation that's been introduced by one of our county centers center beruth around uh bringing it down to the cpi plus point five yeah if you don't mind because of the two report that we had we talked about the the the phcb report um and um our um uh uh intern report that actually um brings some recommendation that the cvo mobile home program might have when it comes to that the formation of subcommittee um if you don't mind us going through yeah it looks like we've got one minute left i'm getting a signal sorry one minute okay so the the list is pretty clear the first thing that i won't mention is that the subcommittee would have a very clear uh the question of a clear unconscious mission settlement because um although it would be based on what the the um the results of the findings the findings of the phcb report um we believe that it has to be a you know beyond that yeah mobile homes are affordable housing it needs to be known and it needs to be taken as such and for that police exchange is a must financial assistance is definitely crucial yeah um and um also when it comes to lobbying uh lobbying we have a homeless day we have uh do believe um we had a domestic violence uh day at the uh at the state house i do believe that mobile home parks issues are so grand that we should have one day really looking at this issue um since it is um constituting seven percent of affordable housing in the state of Vermont um when it comes to mediation that's a very good last point that we're going to make uh with different maintenance laura please go ahead with different maintenance and the the financial we're we're gonna have to really wrap it up yes that's okay um the last thing we just want to say the subcommittee we're really excited to make sure that we're including resident voices and we're making sure that any policies and financial you know initiatives we're pushing for also taking into account the privately owned parks where the vast majority of residents live and we just want to be clear that that's really where where we're hoping to to push this group well sorry to cut you off at the end here it's a lot to cover in a half hour thank you cendrine thank you laura thank you and thank you viewers for tuning in we uh have some uh web resources the reports links to the reports that were mentioned as well as your organization your program and and the Vermont affordable housing coalition and we'll hopefully see you on wednesday october second for uh another edition of the Vermont affordable housing show uh at 525 thank you again


Hello and welcome to DMA Center Stage. I'm your host, Hal Pittman. Our guest today is Ms. Mika O'Yang, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for DOD Cyber Policy. Besides leading DOD's cyberspace policy and strategy, she works to provide guidance and oversight for DOD's cyberspace activities as well as managing DOD's cyber relationships. Prior to joining the DOD in her current role, she worked for the think tank third way as senior vice president for their national security program. And before that, worked in multiple staff roles in Congress, including as the subcommittee staff director for intelligence community management on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Welcome, Mika. Thank you for joining us today on Center Stage. We've got a meaty topic to get into today, and that's cybersecurity policy. Thanks for being here. Thanks so much for having me.  How did you get into cybersecurity? So my background was really in Congress and national security. As you noted, I had served in a bunch of different roles and committees. And so in one of those roles in the intelligence committee, we experienced in the US government a major cyber breach. Some folks might recall that, known as Buckshot Yankee. And I was responsible for handling the committee's response to that. So that was one of the first major breaches for the country, and it was one of my first experiences dealing with cybersecurity and have been involved with it ever since, but really focused on it when I was at third way. And as we were thinking about national security and what needed to be addressed for the nation, after all these years of focusing on counterterrorism, we realized the other way that malicious actors outside the United States could do harm to the average American was through cyber. And most people experience cyber as cyber crime. And so we spent a lot of time trying to unpack that and trying to figure out what can the government do to try and limit the harm to Americans that comes through the cyber domain. Yeah, so not a day goes by when you don't read of some kind of cyber intrusion in the news. To the point that you noted, it may be cyber crime where companies are held hostage, held for ransom. It may be some kind of malware or attack. And of course, we hear all of the discussion about our peer competitors, China, Russia, Iran, who might tend to do us harm in the cyber field. Talk to us a little bit about DoD's role in the cyber world. Where are we? And are we doing enough right now? Yeah, that's a really big question. Hal, just we do a lot in the department. It's a lot to unpack, as they say. So let me just start with the threat environment. As you say, we've got a lot of adversaries out there who try to push their goals through the cyber domain. And some of them are trying to make money and steal things from Americans. Sometimes they're trying to steal intellectual property from Americans. Sometimes they're trying to commit espionage. But what we've seen recently is the real possibility that people can disrupt life through the cyber domain. And we've always worried about that from the department, from the perspective of how could an adversary use that capability in a wartime context. So we've really been focused on that for the department. When you think about the department's missions in cyberspace, there are really three. One is protect and defend the doden. How do we protect our systems that we own? How do we prepare to fight and win the nation's wars? How do we bring cyber aspects to that fight? How do we protect against adversaries' attempts to use cyber against our forces? And the third is defend the nation. And that's the one that's been sort of least understood. But what's happened since 2018, the department has made clear that we can use our cyber capabilities to protect the nation. And that means, how can we think about using those capabilities to disrupt adversaries before they hit our shores? And we do some of that through hunt forward missions where we go out and we have partners who let us onto their networks to look for threat. And there are other ways that we can try and disrupt the adversary. And we can also look for the clues that they're about to attack us to try and be able to disrupt them. So there's a lot that we do there. So it's a very complex mission. It is. A lot of people involved with it across the department and across the rest of government. Are we ready for the threat? So we, as the United States, are probably more ready for this threat than most other countries. But you could never say we're completely ready. This is a domain that's very hard to see what the adversary is doing. There's a lot of obfuscation and hiding their hand. There are a lot of different ways that the adversary can come at us. Technology is very complex. We can't shut down every avenue. So there is a real risk of surprise. But as a nation, or as a department, we are more focused on this than I think many others. The challenge really is how do we react if the event occurs? And this is where resilience comes in. If we act like we're taken by surprise, if we're not prepared for it, if we haven't thought through in advance what could happen, then we're not prepared to be resilient. And our panic can make the situation worse. So it's really important that we develop a resilience mindset and plan in advance for the kinds of disruptions that we know could happen. So talking about the kinds of disruptions, one of the things that we've seen reported in the news, rumors around cyber engagement in the current Russia-Ukraine situation, right? What does that say about the future of this space and what should we expect to see? Yeah, this is actually a really important conflict for us to understand as a department because it's the first time we're really seeing a cyber-capable adversary bring those capabilities to bear in the context of a conventional fight. And so there is a lot here that we need to learn and unpack. And part of the challenge for us as a department is some of the information that we need to understand is not in the government's hands. It's with the Ukrainians and what TTPs they have had that have been most effective. It's with the private sector and what they have done to defend Ukraine's infrastructure because it's not just against their military systems, it's against all their systems. And then as with anything, some of that information that we need is in the hands of the adversary. What was their planning? What were their challenges? But we really need to unpack this challenge. But one of the things that is clear in this is that cyber, as we thought about it before this conflict, is not exactly what it is. I think many people thought that cyber and a conflict was going to be like the end of the movie Fight Club where all the lights go out across the country. That's not exactly what's happening here. It's something different. But that's not to say that it's not just as consequential. We just need to understand it better. So you mentioned how industry has a role. Are we working close enough with industry and the department to address this challenge? We can always do better. This is one of the challenges we have. The adversary knows for the department that our authorities are limited to outside the United States. When it comes to inside the United States, that's a blind spot for us. So we really need the help of the private sector to help us understand what that threat is. And we work very closely with our colleagues at FBI and DHS who do have authorities and responsibilities inside the United States to try and understand that. But this is a place where we really need the private sector's help. And our colleagues at NSA, our colleagues at SZA, they are working very hard at this every day. So let's talk about China a little bit. Absolutely. If you watch television news, you read the newspapers, you understand that China has a significant cyber force, cyber capability. We have to assume that it's aimed at, you know, China's peer competitors around the world, which would probably include us. So should we be doing, should we be putting the same sorts of resources from a government perspective into our cyber efforts and trying to control the battle space, if you will? So this is a real challenge with China because they have a population overmatch on us so that we will never, I think, be really able to go force on force. But we have many other tools at our disposal across the US government to help us leverage, to even out this battle. And this is really what Integrated Deterrence is about. It's about bringing all tools together. But one of the challenges we see with China, it's not just the capability of their cyber forces, it's their ability through the technology they export to shape the global technology ecosystem that tilts the playing field in their favor with all the kinds of surveillance mechanisms and things like that that are inherent in their technology. That makes them an order of magnitude different threat than Russia, even if their cyber capabilities are the same, Russia will never shape the global technology ecosystem the same way that China does. So how do we stay ahead of that? So this is a whole of government effort where we have to work with our colleagues and other agencies to try and ensure that the rules are fair, that we hold China accountable for the kinds of technologies that they are trying to proliferate, that we convince our allies and partners not to go down that road for technology that we know is not going to be secure for them. And we have to work, we work on this a lot. This is one of the Secretary's real priorities is how do we improve the cybersecurity of our partners and allies? Cause it's not just about us, the United States, it's about the people that we are going to fight with and trying to keep the Chinese out of their networks too. Right. What is the Chinese intent and the dominance that we see? What does that have to, what future can we look to with regards to the internet and the average person's use of the internet? Yeah, this is a really big philosophical difference between the United States and China. China has a very authoritarian approach to its own population, pervasive surveillance, cameras everywhere, control of the message and what they can see, hear, say. We in the United States believe in freedom. We believe in people's ability to hold their governments accountable, to say what they wanna say, in the people's right to get the information they need for their lives to be able to communicate with the rest of the world freely.  And that is one of the things that American and Western internet technologies carry with them, that access to information, that ability to connect without government interference. This is what we're really fighting for when we think about the coming challenge between the United States and China going forward. So what does that future digital environment look like? This is a real question. This is the contest for the rest of the world. We hope that it is one that carries with it the values that we have, that fosters innovation, that allows people access to information, that improves people's ability to hold their governments accountable and to express themselves and be creative. We do not want a future that involves censorship mechanisms, that involves tracking of people wherever they go that allows people to undermine independent journalism. That is the competing vision that we are talking about for the internet. It's a very challenging time, obviously. It is. What about the confluence between cyber and information operations? Can you talk a little bit about that and give us your thoughts on that and where are we going policy-wise with regards to that? Yeah, so this is, you know, one of the things that's complicated about cyber is that if you think about the technology stack, you have the information that flows across the domain, the content that you and I see and read and react to. You have what we think of as a logical layer, the programs that can be manipulated and can be exploited and information can be taken from. And then you have the transport layer, the networks themselves, the Wi-Fi, the fiber optic. And as we think about the ways in which the adversary can disrupt us, they could disrupt us across any part of that layer. So what we worry about is someone coming through the cyber domain, we saw this in certain areas, coming through the cyber domain to take or shape or release information to undermine people's confidence in their government, to try and put false information out there. The linkage between cyber and information ops is very clear, but then we also worry about the potential for disruption in that transportation layer. And we're seeing that in the Russia-Ukraine context. We saw that with Russia trying to use the cyber layer to disrupt the transport layer when we think about the viasat disruption, right? How do we think about the ways in which they're trying to cut off access to communication, which is ultimately about cutting off that communications and information layer. So these things all depend on each other. We think of them as a stack, but they're very much interdependent. And the disinformation and misinformation that we see that's rampant today, not just in among warring societies, but even in our own country in this time of peace. What does the future have in store for us as a country, as we consider the cyber ramifications and this idea that information shapes perception and challenges what we believe is reality. Yeah, so I try not to be in the prediction business, having spent some time around the intelligence community. You've got to make sure you're clear about the difference between analysis and prediction. So I don't want to speculate too much on what the future holds, but we do see that adversaries think that there's tremendous advantage in shaping the information environment to their own advantage, right? We saw the Russians try to do that, to shape the information space, to try and blame Ukraine for Russia's blatant attack and unjust invasion of their country. They were not successful at doing that, but you could see other countries thinking I need to shape the information space too. The challenge for us as Americans is that if you think about misinformation sort of in three categories, there's the information itself, there's the delivery mechanism, and then there's the fertile ground in which it lands. The fertile ground is our minds and our understanding of information. And there's more that we all can do as Americans to try and understand better the risks of misinformation and be able to parse sources and understand what is true and when people are trying to manipulate us. We can do a better job on that while we as the government think about how do we disrupt those delivery mechanisms that adversaries are trying to use to go against us? And if that happens, then the information can't really trend and take off, then perhaps the information itself isn't as dangerous. Yeah, great. Thank you so much. You've been watching DMA Center Stage and our guest today has been Mika Oyang, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Cyber Policy. Mika, thank you so much for being with us today on Center Stage, sharing your insights. I'm your host, Hal Pittman. It's been my pleasure to bring you this episode of Center Stage where we introduce some of the most interesting guests and topics in national security, public policy and business. See you next time.