Hello and welcome, Bruce and Ed, live from New York, the Big Apple. That's right. I'm Ed and I'm Bruce. Great to see you here. Memorial weekend coming up. Yep. It's a beautiful day in New York. Oh my gosh, it went straight from winter to summer. It's 91 degrees. Just today. I just got back from Florida and it's beautiful down there too. Bommie and breezy in the evenings. I had a great time. As you can see, I'm still having shaved. I'm glad to be indoors with the Argentina actually. But it'd be a great day to go out and play. This is going to be a great weekend, I think. Although I haven't seen the weather, I'm sure it's going to be nice. I'm still trying to catch up. Been gone for too long. So, today's show is sponsored by Columbus Dance Center in Columbus, Ohio. If you're anywhere near Central Ohio in the Midwest, Columbus Dance Center in Columbus, Ohio offers superior private and group instruction in ballroom Latin American wedding, dance board, hip hop and many more. No experience or partner necessary. Check out ColumbusDanceCenter.com. That's ColumbusDanceCENTRE.com. And Mezzy Grill is our second sponsor. Quick, healthy food and NYC. Eastern Mediterranean food made any way you like it with the best all-natural ingredients, priced reasonably and served in a warm, friendly, casual environment. 55th Street and 8th Avenue in New York City. MezzyGrill.com. So, yeah, we want to thank our sponsors. We really appreciate their support in bringing us to you. Thank you. So, what's up? What do you have to talk about today? Well, among a lot of things, I guess everyone's talking about. I've been kind of out of touch just because I've been away and spending time with family and friends. So, what's going on with this Facebook thing? There's all these announcements every day and you're boycotting it and why. Yeah, they're big in the news with their privacy issues because I think it's interesting because I follow all the techie blogs and techie netcasts and stuff and people who are very technical, they really understand what's going on and they're outraged, they're really furious actually about what Facebook has done. Their privacy seems to be, every time they make a change, things get worse. And instead of making things more obvious and more secure, they seem to be making them more open. For example, there's a graph on one of the, I think it's the Electronic Freedom Foundation's website that shows this chart of over the years how Facebook's privacy defaults, I guess, have eroded to what initially they promised their users that all this stuff is only viewable by you and your friends, which is of course what you wanted, that's the idea. But then over time, they keep changing things and when they change it, they make it more open and you have to opt out, which of course most people never do. That's like me, I don't really go into the settings hardly ever, maybe five times in the five years that I've been using it. Normal average users don't even bother to look at that.  I mean, why wouldn't you? He didn't have any reason to not trust them until now when it's really being exposed. It's coming out in the news that their privacy just keeps eroding and eroding and eroding. So what used to be completely private is now completely open to the point where there actually is effectively no privacy at all. I don't know, most people in IT understand these things, most of the public, the vast majority of people have no clue what I'm talking about and you probably don't either. Man, I could read, you know, and checkmark things, so I can sort of understand them. Not me, not me, because it seems to change so much. I have looked at those privacy settings and there's something like 270 or 170 different possible settings.  I mean, you can make something simple like Twitter, public or private, A or B. It's as simple as that. That's how simple it should be, but it's not. I know they just updated an hour ago or they came out saying that everything's simpler and I don't know, I haven't looked into it yet. There was a press conference today where they announced their new, improved privacy settings or something and they said that they launched them today. Well, I was in looking at them and I really can't tell any difference. And also Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO, says in the New York Times I was just reading about that this is going to be the final revision to their privacy settings for some time. But what was their original agenda? I mean, they just want it to be out there public so they can create ad-based revenue, I guess. Yeah, why do they want it public? Well, that's a very good question. The reason they want it public is not so much to spread your dirty laundry to all your friends and coworkers and job interviewers and everything. Colleges you might want to apply for. But no, the reason that they care about it that making your private stuff public is to sell this information to third parties. So not only marketers can not only know that you clicked on an ad, but then they can go and get all your private information. Your address where you live, your zip code, your email addresses and phone numbers and all your friends and all sorts of things. I mean, the possibilities are unlimited because there's so much information in there. And see, you're lulled into putting it in there because it's just for your friends. It's for your family. Don't you want to share this with your friends and family? Right. But it's super evasive it seems because I was doing something on my iPhone recently and it wasn't something that I wanted to publish but one of the options, I was trying to, I forget what I was trying to do, but one of the options, I think maybe I was trying to forward an email or something but one of the options on the menu and if I didn't put my finger right where I wanted it it would have gone to Facebook which would have, you know, it would have not been good. Oh, wow. It seems so pervasive and it's like I don't want that there. It should be just forward or reply or whatever. I forget exactly. That reminds me of the old horror stories when you accidentally send some nasty email and oops, you send it to the whole company or something but this is just as, this could be worse.  It was like Twitter and Facebook and then the other, the main thing that I wanted to do was like in between that or something so it's like.  Right. I mean, it's just insane. It's just, it can spread like viral instantly though super, super fast and there's no way to get it back. Once you put it on there, you've given it to them. You've given up all rights to it. You know, it's absolutely, absolutely theirs. So they make money. The bottom line is they make money by giving this marketing information to other companies or selling it to them. Right. Now, there's some things that most people don't understand. You know, you can go in and you can fine tune your stuff. You can make everything private. Private, private, private, private, private. Only my friends. You could set every single setting to only my friends and the truth is every single thing you put in there is public. You know why? They have another scheme of settings and when I first read them, I didn't know what the heck that was about until I started reading some of these articles in the news.  But what it is, there's settings for it. Your friends can share information about you. So automatically, without your knowledge, your friends don't even know it because by default, all of your friends are set to share all of your information with everyone else. So no matter... Including companies, third parties. So if you only let your friends look by default, then they're letting everyone else see everything. So apparently the only way... Hopefully they changed that. Don't think so. No, the defaults are still the defaults. As far as I know, that has not changed. Mark Zuckerberg announced today that this new, simpler way to change the settings but apparently the New York Times, if I'm reading this right, they said that he didn't change the defaults. And I looked at it. I don't see anything simpler. Well, we'll have to look at it more. There's only eight major categories with 127 levels deep instead of 270. No, I did look at it. It's crazy, crazy, crazy complex and the defaults have not changed. So anyway, here's the thing that people don't understand. So if you have even one friend on Facebook that has the default settings set, which of course they do, then all the information your friend can see so can marketers, third-party companies, other applications, other websites and so on. There's actually a website. If you just Google, it's called, not Facebook, but OpenBook. Let me find it here real quick. This is just shocking actually. Here it is. It's called, the website is actually called youropenbook.org, okay? Go to youropenbook.org. It looks like Facebook. Well, yeah, it's designed to look like the Facebook font, but at the top, the quote is an actual quote from Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Facebook, his famous quote where he said, they trust me, dumb effs. Okay, you can fill in the blank. I'm gonna keep it a family-friendly show, but this is an actual quote from Mark Zuckerberg in the early days of when he was forming Facebook and someone asked him, how do you have all this private information about all these people? He said, they just trust me, those dumb effs. That's very, very telling. Anyway, you go to OpenBook, sorry, it's youropenbook.org, and they have these suggested phrases that you can search for. You can put in, quote, myHIVtest, quote, and you're gonna find thousands of people who just reported and they just posted wow, I'm negative or I just got my HIV test and I'm positive and so on and so on and so on. Millions of people, millions of people, and they have no idea that I'm not logged into Facebook. So they're getting this public. This is public. Absolutely public. I'm not logged into Facebook. I could be anywhere in a public library without logging in. That's why they call it OpenBook. The point of this website, youropenbook.org, is to teach the public how screwed up Facebook is. It's really, really like a billboard on I-95. If you post anything on there, you just posted it on a billboard on I-95, or a newspaper, you know, a full page ad in the New York Times. There's their private pictures, their whole profile, there's their exact context and when and the date and time they posted it, it's crazy. See, people just hear the headlines and they don't understand the, how is this working? How it's working is you can set everything to completely private and if you have so much as one friend, it's not private. It's public. So, it's a big lie. It's what it is. It's a big, big lie. It's the big lie. They just trick you. Absolutely. Now, and there's another one. There's another major website called something like quit. Let me see. I'm going to Google it real quick. Quit Facebook, I think it is. There's tons of how to quit Facebook items, but... Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I've been using it last lately just for no apparent reason, but I do like it just because I like to be in touch and obviously that's why everyone's in there. Oh, there's another thing. You can't just delete your Facebook account. First of all, by the terms of service, they own everything that you've put on there. So anything that you put on there, they own. Okay. Now, secondly, there's two things. Just to confuse you more, okay, you can deactivate your Facebook account, but that doesn't delete it. You have to actually deactivate it and then you have to actually delete it. But to delete it, it doesn't actually delete. It takes two weeks or something like that, and then they supposedly delete it, but they don't... They have been on record. They will not assure anyone that they actually delete the information because they own the information. According to the terms of service, they own all of your data. They own all of your privacy, basically. They own it and you deactivated it, it does nothing, really, it just takes it offline. And then if you delete it, it doesn't delete for two weeks. And even after that, many people have reported that they can still search and they can still find stuff from their Facebook account long after they've deleted it. And even if you can't, they own it. And they will not assure anyone that they actually are deleting it. So it's very dangerous. There's also a website. I can't find it right now. There's something like... Here it is. It's called quitfacebook.com. No, quitfacebookday. Quitfacebookday.com. And these are people who are signing up, they're committing to quitfacebook. Because it's like crack. There's 400 million users. I don't know what it's like. Canceling your phone service in the old days when everybody had a phone. It's a big deal for a lot of people. They're really hooked on it. That's their way of communicating. Yeah, so why would you quit it? Well, this is why. Many people are saying Facebook is evil. Facebook is lying. They're absolutely deceiving their users. They can't be allowed to get away with this. I'm looking at this right now. There's 22,000, roughly 22,500 people who have committed to quitting Facebook. It's called quitfacebookday.com. Now, what is that? That's nothing. It's a drop in the bucket to 400 million users. But I think that the point is really not that this is going to be a big loss of their subscribers or whatever. I think the point is the publicity, the bad press and the bigger point, what's going to fix this is two things, in my opinion. One is Congress, the government. Regulators are really looking into this. I was just reading that they did this press announcement today about their new simplified settings, whatever. But they didn't change any defaults. They didn't really change anything. To my eye, it's not any simpler than it was before.  So they really haven't done any damage control except this press release? Yeah. I mean, it was an actual press conference, but I don't think that they changed anything, really. But I also read that they're going to actually do something in Washington, D.C., coming up Thursday, I think, or whatever, within earshot of Congress, supposedly, because there are a lot of politicians, governors and things like that, that are really being loud about their concern about this. And all it's going to take is a few attorneys generals or Congress to say, we're going to supervise this. We're going to regulate you. And that's the last thing Facebook needs is the government to put their nose in on it. Because they're going to want all that information also. That's the whole reason they like to get in there. If you Google how Facebook was formed, you're going to read all kinds of expose articles about this Mark Zuckerberg character and lack of character, alleged lack of character and so on. But what I say is that if this guy, Mark Zuckerberg, has half a brain, he had better shape up fast. And he better realize that the only way Facebook is really going to survive, the federal government scrutinizing and regulating them is if they shape up and fast and they default everything to totally private. So their biggest threat is going to be government regulation, I think. And then the other thing is, another thing that's going to change this whole system is the idea of an alternative. People say, well, what's the alternative? I mean, there's millions of different social networks, but are they really any better? The whole entire nation of Brazil is on one social network called Orchid, which is owned by Google, but nobody here has ever heard of it. It's weird how these things kind of become regional, but they do. They spread like multi-level marketing systems. You know how you sell Amway, Shackley, whatever nonsense multi-level marketing thing? You end up selling to all your friends and family, and it's just like a social network. The social marketing network. They spread like that. So one will be really, really popular in Japan and Philippines and Brazil, but nobody's ever heard of it in London or New York. So that's how these kind of work. But anyway, there's tons and tons of social networks, but do we really trust Google that much more than Facebook? I mean, the thing is, what we need and what smart people realize is that what we really need is a free, open source alternative that's distributed and private from the ground up. So I don't know if you saw this in the news, but there is this group, what is it called? I'm going to have to Google it now, but... Oh, dyspario. What is it? There's a group of students at... Hang on, let me just Google it real quick. At NYU. Okay, there's this website that people can propose their startups or their ventures and stuff to raise capital. I should have had this up here. I'll find it during the break. But anyway, they propose. I think there's six kids at NYU.  And they proposed, in this video, on this website, I think it's called Kickstart. That's what it is. It just hit me. They proposed on this thing, this website called Kickstart. Let me Google Kickstart Facebook. Alternative. Alternative. I'll find it. Anyway, they proposed a plan to start a venture that would develop a private... What do you call it? Distributed. Distributed means that all the data is not in one central repository. Because the kids, the way they described it, they said, we are friends. We don't need to pass a note to a central repository called Facebook so that Facebook can send the note to my friend. No, we can talk to our friends directly. We don't need that. But social networks are really cool. The flip side of all this is that Facebook is a wonderful, wonderful tool. I've personally had experience last week. I got connected to a relative. I have a cousin who is almost my age. Through weirdness in the family when siblings don't speak for years and things, a lot of people have that heavy baggage.  Anyway, I didn't even know that my dad had a sister for sure. Her mother never told her. She didn't know until my dad's funeral that her mother had two brothers. We're cousins and we're almost the same age. It's just really weird. But we got connected through Facebook. That's the same thing happened to me. Another friend that I hadn't had any contact with and wondered was he living or dead or what the heck for 25 years a couple of months ago I got connected with. It's really a miracle. Everyone has a story like that. That's why they're on there. It's almost like a free people search. Like a private investigator that would do a people search. The services that do that. It's almost like everybody has a free people search thing to find people, long lost friends and family. So it's very, very useful. It can be very, very practical. You can also waste your whole life playing in there. And also somebody actually I was chatting with Leo LaPorte's sister, Eva LaPorte. We become little chat buddies and she was telling me that I love the way she described it. She said that it can be a little bit when you reconnect with old, old friends and acquaintances from years and years ago and at first it's exciting like oh my gosh, oh my gosh, how are you? What's new? Babies, kids, pictures, blah, blah, blah. But then after that they're checking in every day and so on and there's a lot of people who are just not really that interested in staying connected. Oh, it's really fun to be connected. Well, they like to know that they can go somewhere to be connected. And a lot of people read but they don't write anything. Right. But a lot of people just don't really want to be connected with those people anymore. There's a lot of that too. Just as much as there is friends who do want to stay connected there's just as many that don't really, you know, like I didn't really like you when you were my co-worker then but you were interested in your life and so this is kind of her perspective is that there's a lot of that where people just don't really care enough to be connected. Like if I wanted to be connected I would have stayed connected, you know what I'm saying? So there's like this gray feeling of weirdness that, you know you don't really want to stay connected to me in the first place but I guess I have to friend you because I did know you at one point. It's this weird kind of weirdness. Today the today's show is brought to you by and we want to thank for most gracious sponsors Columbus Dance Center in Columbus, Ohio. If you're anywhere near the Midwest, Central Ohio this is one of the best dance studios in the country. They offer superior private and group instruction in ballroom, Latin American wedding, dance sport, hip hop and many more. ColumbusDanceCenter.com and also MeziGrill for Eastern Mediterranean food MeziGrill.com MeziGrill.com Alright So anyway, that's kind of we'll have to keep an eye on that Facebook obviously you have a lot to say about it but I'll check into it too now that I'm back at home base and keep you guys up to date on what to do and how to do it, things like that. Oh, I want to say this too about Facebook, if you, you know most people are not up to deleting their Facebook account. Well, the people who are up to deleting their Facebook account are the people who never used it anyway. They created an account and I'm on there and after reading all this nonsense I just deleted my account. So a lot of the people who say I deleted my Facebook account even reporters and stuff when you hear the rest of the story they never actually used it anyway. Okay. Like me, I actually decided I'm not going to delete it I'm not going to delete my Facebook account because I don't use it that way. I friend everybody. You want to be my friend? Click friend, I accept you. I accept everybody. I use Facebook like it's Twitter. I may, everything on Facebook is public. I never put anything on Facebook that I wouldn't broadcast, put in a newspaper on a billboard just like Twitter. And my friends on Facebook are the general public, absolutely everyone. So if you use it like that, you're fine but most people don't. I know most people actually friend only their real friends. They think that's safer and it's ironically the opposite. But anyway, if you use it... You end up with a lot of junk. It's just broadcasting, exactly. That's why I don't read it. On these people marketing their wares and... I don't read Facebook. I only read the replies to what I say and that's just like feedback. You know, letters viewers mail and stuff like that. But anyway, what I was going to say is if you use Facebook the way normal people use Facebook and you don't want to delete your account, I want to recommend one thing. If you don't do anything else but this, do this, alright? When you log into Facebook, do not checkmark. Keep me signed in. Don't checkmark that. And when you're done with your Facebook, log out. Make sure you log out and I'll tell you why. Because Facebook Facebook now has this feature I forget what they call it, but customized experience or something like that with their partner sites, which means any old website in the world that wants to hook up a deal, a backdoor deal with them. So you go and visit some completely different website and Bingo that was posted to Facebook. Everybody in the world, private third-party enterprises, people you don't even know, friends and friends of friends and non-friends of non-friends of friends, all saw that you went to that website.  It's in your profile as one of the websites you like. And you don't do anything.  Yeah, you could be going there because you want to complain about the place. The giant eyeball of big brother is watching over your shoulder, watching what websites you browse to, and not only that they're broadcasting it to all sorts of disinterested third-parties that well, are very interested third-parties that are watching you. Like the government. Anybody. Yeah, businesses, marketing, spam. I mean just who knows, your employer it's just way, way too much information.  I don't think so. I mean that's that's just absolutely wrong. I think that Facebook is going to be a really good test case. I think Google is watching very closely what's happening to Facebook because Google had better not make the same mistakes Facebook is because Google has even more information about you than Facebook does. So anyway that's going to be really fascinating to see how this whole thing unfolds. Yeah, we'll keep you abreast. So moving on to some other topics. Tell us a little bit more. That's the one I brought up. How about you? Well let's see. Did you want to talk about this? Yeah, after you talk about something. That's right. Alright, let's see. Well, let's see. The Facebook press announcement. Well, that's it. I just, my blog items I was going to go read through my blog items.  If it fits in 140 character little text message tweet, then it goes on Twitter. But if it's, if it's a little bit more involved, then I write a little blog story, but pardon me, this one is a blog item I titled, and on the seventh day God made a boon to and always well. Two awesome companies changed the entire world this week. Now, a lot of people that follow my Twitter and so on, they know about these things. But for those of you who don't, let me explain it really simply. There's a thing called FOSS, F-O-S-S, stands for free open source software. And the best way I can describe it is, it's a movement. It's not, it's not a religion or anything like that. It's not a cult. But it's, it's not like normal corporate profit motive commerce. It's a movement.  It's like that. It's a movement for good, for the good of all mankind. And okay, most people who've never heard of it are just like what? But what it is, is it's a movement where, made up of millions and millions and millions of programmers, software developers all over the world who work through the internet, they collaborate and they work on developing software. All volunteer and it's their gift to humanity. Okay? So, the resulting software is viewed by millions of other eyes and it's open source. So in other words the recipe is published. So anything that you change, the requirement is you can take it and you can use it but anything, any improvements or changes you make, you have to publish back into this master recipe book, we'll call it recipe book of programs and stuff. So, that makes sense. So the idea is that millions of people collaborating on one thing will result in a superior product. Of course it does. Microsoft, no matter how big and rich they are, or Google, whoever, Microsoft, I mean they can only afford so many programmers. If they have four you know, or if they have four hundred working on a product, it's still a finite number of programmers and developers who are looking at the thing. Right. But when you have millions and millions of people in Pakistan and the Philippines, in Germany and Australia and England and you know, California and all over in South America and you know, whatever Portugal, there are people all over the world that are little geek brainiacs that are looking at these and going, well, why don't you do this? And they're doing it from different angles, like the user's perspective, like, why don't you make the buttons bigger? This is not clear the way it's described, from the user interface and also from the back end, like, this process is too slow, this is too bulky, why don't you use this super sophisticated new algorithm and make it lightning fast and you know, more resource you know, whatever, blah, blah, blah, geek talk to make it better, better, better, better, better. Okay, imagine if the auto industry did that, if they never started over with a new model, they just kept improving the same old model for 50 years we'd have an amazing, amazing car, the problem is they don't, they throw the whole thing out and they have to redesign it from scratch so that it looks new, so you'll buy a new car and the same thing happens with software, software from Microsoft and all these other companies they have to throw out the old windows and start all over and call it Windows something new, so that you'll have to go buy it and of course it always takes more hard drive space, more memory, more power, more speed, so that you'll have to buy a new computer, so they're completely in bed with the computer manufacturers, the computer manufacturers love it because it forces you to buy a new computer. Well, the operating system that is number one in the world of FOSS, free open source software is called Linux. Most people have heard of it, they might have heard of it but they don't really know that much about it. Nobody is, because it's free, in every sense of the word free is in freedom and free is in no money, they don't have $100 million in TV commercials on TV every year, you know about Apple, you know about Microsoft, you know, because they're spending hundreds of millions of dollars on TV commercials but nobody's, it's free, so who's going to spend the money on marketing it, they aren't, however it's the operating system, the computer operating system that you use most. Some unbelievable percentage, you know like somewhere between 60 and 90% of all websites on the internet, the computer on the other side of that website, the back end of it is running Linux, you're looking at a website, well that's a computer obviously on the other side and that's Linux. Also Google is Linux I mean Google search, Google Gmail Google Docs, Google Calendar, everything Google is almost entirely Linux, even the company itself uses Linux throughout the company. They just don't ever say that. They don't talk about it that much, you know people don't know about it and there's no money to be made if there's no money to be made who's talking about it it's like spreading by word of mouth, okay, so it's not really a charity but it's a good cause and it spreads by word of mouth and it is far superior that's the other thing, Linux is far superior than Windows or Mac, there's no such thing as a virus it really literally can run it may be able to run forever without rebooting because there's an actual installation of Linux version 0.02 or something like that that's been running continuously for 15 years it has backup power supply backup everything but the system has not been rebooted in like 15 years or some crazy, crazy long time. I was talking to the editor and chief of Linux Gazette and saying that I know that you can run a computer running Linux for a year without rebooting it and he said, oh no that's not true, like what do you mean it's not true you can run it forever there's one that's still running since the beginning that's never been rebooted so what's the point in the story anyway? so that's what FOSS is and so these basically Linux has been developed for 50 years now and it keeps improving and keeps improving and not just Linux but all the applications that run on top of it so you've got applications for like Microsoft's equivalent of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access you've got Photoshop, video editors, audio editors, absolutely quick and quick books equivalents that are free open source that are equal or better in every category many, many more applications than you can imagine. Alright now that's what FOSS is you have to have the background knowledge to understand a little bit about this. Ten minutes of knowledge so but anyway a lifetime of benefit so here's the deal two companies, two awesome amazing companies did something this last week that is going to change the world. Mark my words you might think this is boring but I'm telling you this is going to change the world. Alright there's there's such a thing as Codex which means it's like a deprogramming or de-encrypting language it compresses a video or audio into a smaller format so that you can stream it out through the internet fast enough that you can actually watch it in real time, right? So when you're watching a video on YouTube you're watching a video that is compressed into this little tiny format called flash and then uncompressed on your computer in real time so that you can actually watch the video and listen to the music so that's how that works. Now most those are all almost all of them are proprietary they're owned by somebody there's a patent that someone owns so it doesn't matter if you're listening to an MP3 file there's a patented technology flash is proprietary and almost all of them are proprietary the thing about proprietary mean the issue with it is that somebody has to pay somebody money to use it so when you buy an MP3 player you buy an iPod or whatever that company that made that device had to pay a fee for every iPod they sold they had to pay a fee to the guy who owns the patent for MP3 technology so this week first of all Google decided that there really needed to be a free open source codec for video and audio on the internet there's already a superior audio codec called Vorbis but it just isn't widely used it's actually far better than MP3 the audio quality is far better and the size and the compression is far better in all this it's just that nobody uses it it's just not caught on because there's nobody marketing and pushing it and all that nobody backing it enough now the video codec has been flash and then for the iPhone they had to use this thing called H.264 so when you watch a YouTube video on an iPhone you're actually watching it in an H.264 format well that's proprietary too it's not paid to use that thing well there was an open source video one that wasn't as good it's not as good though well there is another one that I didn't know about but it's called VP8 that was a proprietary video codec like H.264 it's like equal maybe better than H.264 depends on who you ask in there but Google in their wisdom they did a wonderful wonderful thing they bought the company that owns and therefore they own the codec and then they bought it and they took it and they made it open source which means they gave it to you as a gift they gave it to the whole world as a free open source codec wasn't it open source to begin with no it was proprietary that's where they had to buy the company that owned it they created it they bought the company that created it and they created it from a free open source like completely proprietary it was a company here in New York I think it was here in New York they created the thing they owned it they sold it they licensed it and so on and that's how they made living that's how they made their money well Google bought it they bought the entire company so they owned the company they owned the product they owned the license they took the license and gave it away to the whole planet so people can add on to that they can just they can use it they can use it and they can improve it and so on and a lot though because you know you change it and it changes the way things work so what they're going to do is they're open sourcing it and then there's going to be some amount of improvement that can be done but then they're going to kind of lock it in because with the way that works is you can't change it too much because then everything will lose its compatibility alright so that's the first thing the second thing is they're in the process talk about their commitment they own a website you might have heard of in fact it's the number one website on the internet I think YouTube right Google owns YouTube so now they're in the process of converting every single video on YouTube into this new format it's called WebM by the way the new format is called WebM it's free open source and it is the video and audio thing combined so I guess that will eliminate them paying for like a player or something for mp3 the proprietary stuff eventually yeah I'm sure they had to pay they probably had to pay Adobe for Flash but it's mainly not just for them it's for you and me and everybody that we can all use these types of players and create your own players and nobody has to get paid so you can actually have it on everything for example you know iPad you know Steve Jobs doesn't like Adobe so he refuses to support Flash meanwhile everything's in Flash Flash isn't on the Android phones because whatever there's all these politics and stuff but when it's free open source there's no reason for everything not to support it it's just the way it should be so it's like a universal it's like a universal jack for plugging an electrical thing into the wall or plugging a phone line into the wall it's like universal everybody should do the same freaking language well now they do so the point is on your phones on your smartphones and your audio devices they will not be mp3 players anymore they'll probably still play that maybe but they'll Vorbus is the audio codec and VP8 is the video and together audio and video they call it WebM so anyway the idea behind oh and then all the new devices like the new smartphones will have an actual processor chip in it WebM format super fast so that it'll actually be able to keep up and play video on your phone even though it takes a lot of processing power to do that so anyway that's one thing and the other thing is that happened this week is another company that actually owns what maybe the world's best video editing software it's one that even if you're in video editing you might not have heard of it it's called Lightworks and by a company called EditShare and they it's actually there's like hundreds of major Hollywood films you would recognize all the names of them that have been made using this video editor it's a high end video editing software now it didn't win I mean it's not famous like Avid is famous in that high end video editing Final Cut Pro and Avid right so a lot of people bought Apple computers specifically to run Final Cut Pro yeah I know a lot of people just use that right and Avid is the other one they're Microsoft no it's not Microsoft but it runs on Windows well it runs on Windows I mean so anyway those are the two famous ones but this one is actually many really professional video editors and their Academy Award Oscar Academy Award winning and Emmy Award winning video editors swear that this Lightworks is better than those that are good for us well wait I didn't tell you the punchline the company that owns it they weren't making enough money how many Hollywood producers are buying it if they sold a dozen copies it's not enough so I'm assuming the reason is that they weren't making enough money so what they did is they took this superior product and they decided they're going to make it free open source once again it's just like Google did they're buying it and they're going to make it a better world exactly all humanity to see what happens it'll make it probably even better of course it'll make it even better definitely it will be the best so no one will have to buy a special computer to run some special software no one will have to pay $15,000 for a video editing software I'm not talking about like iMovie or Windows Movie Maker this is high-end Hollywood films that are made with this thing well anyway they're open sourcing it what do they call it they're basically reprogramming it so it'll run on Linux and they're hopefully they're saying by autumn it will be available so anybody running any PC that has any kind of an Intel or AMD processor in it can put Linux on that machine free and put this video editing software on it free and so this is huge for independent filmmakers for all filmmakers for the whole entire planet and video podcasters between that and yeah exactly between that and also YouTube settling on this free open source standard even with Linux and all the free open source software you can't just encode an mp3 file because why oh mp3 is patent encumbered you have to get this special software or pay somebody the licensing but now if everything is an open standard and it's free open source no patents no licensing issues it just makes everything better well I can understand some of the motive I guess is to make some more competition for something that more people can get their hands on that's free but can they like ever take that back like can they once they free open source it and then all these people collaborate and make it this unique product and everyone switches over to it can they like later say well since we owned it originally we're going to take this part of it or all of that that's a very good question but the answer is no when they release it with a license like that it says that this is free for everyone forever it's forever and in fact it's very specific that any changes that are made to it must be released as free forever also no one can make it closed they can't open it and then two years later close it again no they can't in fact they can't even take it and add more closed stuff to it and then sell that as closed you can't do that and you can't and I can't no one can do it so that's part of the license that I can't take something that's free open source and then improve it and then close it and call it mine you can't do that it's a violation of the license it's like a violation so this looks like some kind of trend within the free open source movement but what's the real motive yeah that's a standardizing very good question why would a company for profit this is a for profit company well it's obvious that they have deep pockets and they can afford to do these things no not necessarily at all Google has deep pockets but this other company they can have a lot of investment I can tell you why why would they do this this is not a charity it's not a church or something why would a for profit company take a product that they own and give it away to the world I'll tell you why they make more money and here's how first of all if you own a product and also by the way this video editor they're comparing it to like the Sony Betamax versus VHS Betamax was superior technology technologically it was better but because of marketing and funding and financing whatever VHS won and everybody used VHS but beta was better anyway that's obviously history but they're comparing this video editor to that this is the better video editor but it just didn't catch on and it didn't sell well if you are the company you're the for profit company that owns this product and it's not selling you're not making any money but you got something here you got something that's better you think it through see they're very very smart they have a lot of foresight they open source it they give it to the whole world and what's going to happen they're going to get 2 billion users and what's going to happen then well they're setting up an app store for add-on plugins that can be used that are compatible with it and they're going to make a lot more money selling add-on plugins that go into that software than they would otherwise the model of like iTunes and their iPhones or whatever apps and stuff they can charge yes but not I would not use that as an example because Apple and iTunes is completely closed well of course it's absolutely controlled by one company that makes huge amount of profit on every single thing that's sold but they can see the profit they can see the profit of add-ons selling add-ons but it's not closed for example you can start a plugin store for that video editor and I can start a plugin store for that video editor anybody can with Apple and iTunes Apple owns the hardware even though you bought it they own your hardware really because they control it you cannot run anything on there that Steve Jobs says no you can't run that program on there you have music Steve Jobs doesn't like it no application Steve Jobs doesn't like it nope anything content he doesn't approve of you cannot watch it on your iPhone because Steve Jobs says no it's completely proprietary and you can't just buy a piece of software and run it on your iPhone because Steve Jobs says no it's completely controlled by Apple so that's a very bad example it's more like buying a book on the internet you can buy it from any website it's like that it's completely open so they're going to make money selling plugins for this video editor however they're not going to be the only one I'm sure there'll be dozens of other companies selling plugins for this video editor but they are the most famous one they're the one who developed it and owned it and made it open source so because of the most famous they're going to probably make more than the other guys the bottom line is that even if they only make a little bit more than they were before they're still making more than they were before well it's branding obviously because the video editor wasn't selling it wasn't selling enough copies so even if you sold it for $20,000 if you're only selling 10 a year you're going to make more selling plugins to 2 billion users so they make more money in the end that's great well that's a great news for the free open source software movement for video editors actually humanity for all humanity because everyone will benefit we just talked about if you watch youtube ever you will benefit if you have a phone, you can watch videos on you'll benefit the whole entire planet poor people in third world countries who are living on $20 a month income will be producing their own video they'll be using this the world's best video editing software can you imagine documentary films coming out of places that don't even afford a computer anyway it's amazing so it's been a great week for that and I only got to one blog item we have so much to talk about but yeah well we'll get through it of course through it I have a few other things and we have a few minutes left so I'll briefly go through some of those the headlines and for those of you that are into fitness and working out I probably already figured out which I sort of figured out on my own probably more recently about interval training and there's a new study saying that high intensity interval training is twice as effective as regular exercise and basically for those of you who don't know what interval training is is like grabbing like a heavy weight and just pumping it as far as you can and you do that for about five or ten minutes at a time and you can do it about four times a day so you're doing about twenty, thirty minutes of exercise and you can do it just every other day and your muscles will increase a lot faster than doing two and three hour workouts and for those of you that are already into fitness you probably like I said figured this out because I started that like interval training is just like high intensity short intervals of working out so you're just like working out with no rest in between yeah there's some like a three minute maybe period that you rest and then you can do it again or you can do it three hours later and just do another five or ten minutes of a high intensity something but isn't that the way you normally work out anyway you take a three minute break in between each set of exercises what's the difference I don't get it for an hour long you can do it for twenty or thirty minutes and get this twice as the benefit that's the whole study that's what it says and we started working out last year doing a little bit of that like using your own body weight and things like that with the P90X and now we're starting the the new one incredible or insanity the video DVD series there's one called Beachbody Workout the original one was called Beachbody Workout then the P90X and now the insanity really really good it's really fun to put it on the TV and just do it you know you don't need to be in the gym yeah it's not something that you need to be at a gym like we have here I bought a chin up bar and put it over the door and by just dumbbells and pick those up and so I think it's it's probably the trend of the future is people are not going to work out for long periods of time you know because you get the same benefits and why should you and so it's kind of like what they call muscle confusion so you just lift and lift and lift and lift until you're just strained by it and your body reacts a lot quicker to that than doing something over a prolonged period of time and doing it every day your body doesn't really it's not like trauma to your body if you're doing it every day as opposed to like picking something up and just to exhaust you and your body reacts to it and then creates the muscle that you need so it's pretty important stuff for those of you that are maybe getting into that and don't know which way to go and I thought it was important enough to bring it out sounds good definitely need to do that summer is here there's about up we don't want to go over our time limit so we fit on YouTube I wanted to bring this up that we're going to be able to take Collins on Skype we've got Skype so your face could be right here and we can actually chat with you live on Skype which will be really fun right there on the big screen and your head will be bigger than ours on the video but anyway we'll be talking more about that tomorrow but we're going to be able to 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thing and you can join us live in the chat room and then call us on Skype or contact us anytime just give us your Skype name and we'll call you whatever we'll look forward to seeing you I guess until the next time and we have our music together for the intro and the outro now we have our new theme music by Rick Knight he's a great composer and he's given us the music so anyway we'll see you tomorrow great to see you and hope to hear from you soon take care bye


Good morning. I'm Lieutenant Colonel Cecily Sessions from the Air Force Medical Service. I'm a physician, pediatrician, and preved med by training. I am not a geneticist contrary to popular belief among some of my own leadership, but I want to thank in particular my Surgeon General Tom Travis for extending an invitation on which resulted in so many uniforms being present today. In particular, I'd like to acknowledge Admiral Dahl and Admiral Dollymore for being present. I know you are extremely busy, so thank you for taking this time out of your schedules. I'd also like to acknowledge the literal army of a clinical geneticist who responded to this invitation who are hopefully listening to us or watching us online. Okay, so our program is called Patient-Centered Precision Care, PC2Z. In the Air Force we use the Z ending to indicate that we're doing something that we think is innovative and cool, so genomic medicine research falls into that bucket for us. It's our comprehensive effort to prepare infrastructure for genome-informed personalized medicine and collaborate with academia, industry, and federal partners to achieve those goals. At the top of the slide you see the quadruple aim for the military health system, readiness, better care, better health, and best value, and some of the things that we're doing in the PC2Z program that align with those goals. PC2Z is intended to be a comprehensive approach, and we have four pillars that we're addressing through the program. One of those is bioinformatics. Another is education, research. We're actually doing research projects, and I'll give you a list of those shortly. And then we're also addressing LC and policy issues in the fourth pillar. Our overall long-term goals are to enhance military readiness, improve health care in our system, and to mitigate additional costs, either through reducing duplicative testing or realizing the benefits of genome-informed medicine in our system. Our certain general's vision for personalized medicine is to galvanize research using seed funding, because the Air Force has only a small seed of funding compared to some of our sister services, to model collaboration and create a strategic body of clinical knowledge that can be used throughout our health care system. To demonstrate the translation of omics into clinical practice, and General Travis feels the third one is most important to anticipate the translation that's happening, this rapidly advancing field, and to create evidence-based state-of-the-art care for our entire beneficiary population. Along the way, we hope to develop strategies that complement our current primary care model, which is the Patient-Centered Medical Home, and to work in partnership with sister services and other partners to make sure that we can do this in an effective way across our health system. Just a sidebar comment, and whenever I do my sidebars, as you know, these are my own opinions and do not represent the official position of my department or the DOD. We mentioned that we're moving towards actually integrating those systems, and I think Dr. Cheatham alluded to that earlier. The Defense Health Agency will be standing up on 1 October of this year, and I'm excited to see what kind of transformation we can see with that officially taking place, which is what my recruiter told me when I signed up 20 years ago, that that would already be in place. So it didn't matter which uniform I wore because it would all be purple anyway. So I'm glad to see that I am still alive in an uniform to see that happen. So one of the shared services under that Defense Health Agency model is research and development. So I've been trying to make sure that this topic is on the minds of our leadership so that it's considered as we are standing up that function. In addition, we are trying to utilize our unique capability, which I know Terry was alluding to and trying to get garnered some support for that, because I do think that we have, although we don't have an entirely cohesive system, we do have an electronic health record. We do have a central repository for that data at the Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center, and we do have about nine million or so folks who are enrolled as beneficiaries of our system. So just again, as an aside, my opinion, we have that electronic health record. We have a central repository, but there are plenty of things that fall through the cracks as I realized in preparing for my next assignment. My daughter is seeking care at Bethesda. My husband and son seek care at another facility on the same campus as Walter Reed. Their records, their immunization records are in the system so that when I go into my readiness portal, I can actually download my son's shot records. I can't download my daughters because she's seeking care at a facility that's Navy and Army, and they didn't put it into the Air Force Immunization Record System. So I had to print out a copy from, get a hard copy from Bethesda, and walk that over to an Air Force Immunization Clinic so that that information can be, as we say, that fingered into the Air Force system. So we do have a record. We do have centralized storage, but of course, there are always things that fall through the cracks. So I mentioned that I would get into detail about what we have in our research portfolio. The big one, the one I'm constantly defending is at the top. That's her involvement with the Corial Personalized Medicine Collaborative and our Clinical Utility Study. This one is, we're at about 80% of our enrollment goal right now. We have been exclusively enrolling folks who are part of the healthcare team for the Air Force Medical Service under the assumption that hopefully we're a little bit better educated about what's going on in genomics, and that we will reach out to our colleagues to get those questions answered or educate ourselves rather than pushing the panic button. But this study allows for individualized risk reporting back to the participant only based on SNPs, self-reported family history, and self-reported personal and health lifestyle choices. So that one is supposed to be a longitudinal study. It allows the Air Force Medical Service to be an arm of an existing study since the thing that's been going on since 2008, that has about 6,000 folks enrolled in what we call the Civilian Cohort, and our goal is to enroll 2,000 Air Force Medical Service Providers. The next few studies all started in FY12 as part of our broad agency announcement. Epigenetic biomarkers of stress at high altitude conditions is a mouse study. I always smile when I say that, Dr. Miller. But this one looks at a validated model for post-traumatic stress disorder in mice and then is evaluating how hypoxia can impact that in looking for epigenetic biomarkers that predict that outcome. The next two studies generating change and genetic risk testing and health coaching and genetically-guided statin therapy both are in partnership with Duke University. Thank you, Dr. Ginsburg, and some of our researchers at Travis Air Force Base, and those will be doing just what they say. So one is looking at type 2 diabetes and coronary artery disease and looking at genetic risk factors and then using certified health coaches to guide participants through what that information means and how that informs their treatment plans, and then genetically-guided statin therapy is looking at using pharmacogenomics around statins. The cellular sentinels toxicity platform is using stem cells to model toxicity response and looking for biomarkers that are predictive of that. The next study is not in my portfolio, but part of the autism research that we have ongoing through the Air Force Medical Support Agency that began as a congressional funded project and is now something that we're funding. But this one is looking at modifiers, genetic modifiers that are predictive of asthma and obesity. And then the next one is building on the registry of children with autism and their parents that was created through an earlier project and then going and doing triage genotyping of the parents and children who are in that registry. Pending because of sequestration and lack of FY13 funds are the last two studies, a rapid learning system for delivery of personalized health care also in partnership with Dr. Ginsburg and his Center for Personalized Medicine at Duke and implementation adoption and utility of family history in diverse care settings, which would be another collaborative between Duke University and Travis Air Force Base, which was something that we pursued through an NHGRI grant. Obstacles that I think are unique to our system So we do have, as I said, we have a centralized electronic health record. We do have biorepositories, but we also have regulatory constraints around, in particular, the inability to use tests in our systems that are not FDA approved. So laboratory developed tests are not something that we are able to order when we specifically indicate that we are ordering those tests outside of FDA guidance about how those should be implemented. National security concerns about biobanking and data sharing. My geneticists tell me that even if we try to strip identifiers from the data and if we publish a sequence in its entirety that there are ways of reverse engineering someone's identity based on existing publicly available data about mapping people's DNA to their area code and their surname. So because of that, every time that we talk about doing one of these collaborative partnerships where we're sharing data or talk about storing our sequence data in dbGaP this is something that we need to make sure that we're mindful of. Information assurance. This is something that we've been dealing with in a very substantive way as part of the Coriel project. We've enrolled about 1,600 people into the Coriel study. We're supposed to be marrying up their genomic sequence data and electronic health record data from our system, but we can't do that until we have met information assurance guidance about the IT system where that data will be stored, which has translated into us needing to purchase and configure that IT system and then export it to Coriel for them to plug in so that we can transfer the data to them. We already mentioned I'll just pass over the financial stuff because I don't want to get myself in trouble. The more important one is operational versus clinical omics. Now I will give the caveat that I've been a uniform for a little while, but I'm relatively naive when it comes to practicing medicine in a state-side military facility. Also, as a pediatrician, I tend to be somewhat of an idealist. So in my function in this job for the last couple of years, I have tried to draw a line in the sand between what I call operational genomics and clinical genomics. So I like to, I like very much Dr. Manolio's narrow definition of what clinical genomic medicine is, which is that we're using that genomic information in the course of clinical care. There are many other research groups and people who would like to use that type of data for more operationally relevant concerns, and I do not wish them any ill will. I just don't want that to be part of my portfolio in this program. Excuse me. Therefore, I have tried to draw that line in the sand. However, as Admiral Dahl rightly pointed out, for this, for genomic medicine or personalized medicine to be something that's truly embraced by the military health care system, we have to do it in such a way that it is operationally relevant. So walking that fine line between, sorry, that fine line between something that is operationally relevant and something that is of operational significance, that's, that's really, that's an obstacle to me. Trying to find out, trying to figure out where we can implement personalized medicine and genomic medicine in a way that's clinically responsible in a system where, and this gets to the last one down there, privacy concerns, where it's a standard practice in our health care system that if something in someone's medical care could impact their ability to perform their job or could impact the mission, we don't have that privacy, that doctor-patient privilege that normally exists outside of military treatment facilities. So that's something that I'm not senior enough to navigate. I've only been in the position of saying that in the patient-centered precision care program so far, we've only addressed the clinical genomics aspect and tried to distance ourselves from people who were trying to use genomics for human performance enhancement as an example. So privacy concerns, I mentioned, and lack of coverage under GINA. This is not to say that we want GINA amended to include us, simply to say that in its current configuration, it does not apply to members of the U.S. military seeking care in our system through TRICARE. It does not apply to veterans obtaining health care through the VA or through people, for people who were seeking care in the Indian Health Service. So I think everyone's familiar with it. It protects individuals from discrimination by health insurers or employers. It doesn't cover disability or long-term care insurance, but it does not apply to folks in my situation. So Senator Kennedy said it was the first civil rights bill of the new century of the life sciences. There's a lot of confusion and when I talk to my colleagues in uniform about they think sometimes that the N is for non-disclosure, when it's in fact for non-discrimination. There's a big difference there. So in practical terms, it has really contributed to the fear factor around folks who are considering participating in research projects that we're engaging in because they don't want that information to be disclosed to their employer insurer health care team, which for us is all a single entity if you know, when you boil it down. So as I mentioned before, readiness and operational concerns can trump confidentiality and that's another concern that is unique to service members. So partly to address that issue and partly because it was part of the original vision for this program, we have been meeting informally as the precision care advisory panel. At the time, General Travis was the Air Force Deputy Surgeon General. He invited his counterparts to appoint representatives. So we had Air Force Army, Navy, Health and Human Services, VA, and Health Affairs TriCare Medical Authority representation. At the beginning of this year, I had the opportunity to present this information to Dr. Warren Laquette, who is the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Clinical Programs and Policy, and he invited me to make this presentation to the Clinical Proponency Steering Committee, all that to say, we are being formally chartered as a work group that reports to his office. That is up for a vote virtually, not that I'm advertising, very shortly, and I'm hoping, I'm hopeful that our charter will be formalized in the next couple of weeks. In that charter, the proposed objectives are seen here, gathering evidence about translating genomic-based personalized medicine into the clinical workflow in our system, and then providing policy, scientific, and operational recommendations and approaches to support genetic screening, counseling, and health care services for service members and beneficiaries. Our deliverables, the first one is what I was alluding to earlier with the slides about Gina. We need to draft genetic information, non-discrimination policy for DOD and or the VA if they'd like to partner with us on that. We need to create awareness of genomics within our system, not only for the health care team, but also for beneficiaries, and then review the existing constraints, some of which I outlined in this presentation, and deliver recommendations with respect to genomic-based personalized medicine implementation in our clinical system. So some of the strategic partnerships that this program has initiated, Dr. Minolio and others mentioned the e-merge network, and we're extremely pleased to be affiliates of that organization. We also are on the Institute of Medicine Genomics Roundtable, and thank you, Adam, for your support of that. Integrator for our program has been the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab. They have facilitated our outreach with academia and industry in their position as a university-affiliated research center. I mentioned our study with the Coriolis Institute for Medical Research and the ongoing study that we have to look at omics and provide kind of a train-the-trainer situation with hands-on access for providers and learning about how to interpret our own genome-informed risk reports. I mentioned several collaborative research projects that we have ongoing with Dr. Ginsburg and the Duke University Center for Personalized Medicine. Also, thank you to Joan for her support of our last two symposia through the National Coalition for Health Professional Education and Genetics, and I mentioned, in great detail, our Precision Care Advisory Panel, and thank you to Dr. Cheatham and others who've been supportive of that effort. Opportunities, we've talked with Dr. Prasgowski and several members of his team about collaborating more closely with the Million Veterans Program. I mentioned to Dr. Coopersmith, when I saw him at the PMC lunch on the other day, that I have initiated a data request to share historic EHR data from the DOD system for a cohort of folks who've enrolled in the Million Veterans Program so that you have some phenotypic data from when they were with us. I also mentioned the standard of the Defense Health Agency and that opportunity for shared services in research and development. The Joint Program Committee sit up at Fort Dietrich, and my understanding, my limited understanding of them is that they are in charge of joint research dollars for the military medical system. We have less of a presence there, but as part of this transition that's been happening over the last few months and that's continuing, the Air Force will be developing a larger presence there and trying to preferentially put our good projects up there rather than funding the projects that we think are really worthwhile with blue money, with Air Force money, and then sending the leftovers up there, which is the way we've done it so far. The barter system, this is my way of annotating the fact that as Dr. Ginsburg and Dr. Monoglio alluded, we have EHR capability. We have a large beneficiary population. We have a relatively standardized system of care. That's what we bring to the table. We're less able to bring large amounts of money to the table to fund research projects, but we do have a community of researchers who are willing and definitely eager to work with partners in terms of leveraging those capabilities. I want to thank NHGRI for welcoming us with open arms over the last couple of years and making a lot of these opportunities that you see on these slides possible. Any questions for me?


So this is the paper that I've been working on with colleagues at in the research and impact assessment division of EFAT so we are looking at migration, demography and agri-food systems and this is the result of a workshop from CJIR and the ambition is to produce a book that looks at the future of agri-food systems. So what can we expect? What are the emerging trends in agri-food systems and how do they interact with other emerging trends around the world? So it's a global perspective to this topic. So the context of this paper is that we are thinking of the rural transformation process being shaped by evolving and changing agri-food systems. So on the one hand we see that rural employment is still like agri-food systems still employ a large share of people in developing countries which is not just the employment and farming but also non-farm jobs related to agriculture production and this leads to an increasing connection between rural and urban areas and the rural and urban sectors of the agriculture industry and there's a lot of documentation for some success stories, especially in some Asian countries and for other countries where these trends are only now starting to emerge it is still to be seen whether they can document the same success in the transformation process or yeah, what will be these emerging trends. So we are trying to give some insights or suggestions of what could be the emerging trends and at the same time these transformations are happening in time where the demographic structure is also changing around the world. So the rural population is expected to still be growing in some regions of the world and especially for the African region there's the talk about the youth bulge which draws a lot of attention to it with the discussion of what is happening with all these young people especially in rural areas and we also now want to add the question of okay what is the role in this with rural to urban migration and also the migration of especially this age group of youth. So just to give you an insight and what do we mean by agri-food systems as we are here more the coming from the migration research area. So agri-food system is a yeah the economic system that includes farming food and fiber manufacturing and the trade of the goods produced in this process and they are embedded in a changing economic system, the globalization system, technological change, urbanization that leads to also dietary change. So the idea of a changing agri-food system is that yeah, the change of dietary demand leads to change in more processed food being demanded and especially by urban population and then if you think of a domestic market of agri-food production that means that now the farmers do not directly sell their raw produced food to the consumer but actually there are many more intermediaries that then not only trade the food but also process it further and creating value added which then of course also adds to the context of the globalizing world where we have the question of okay, do you rely on your domestically produced food and develop a manufacturing sector domestically or do you rely more on imported food and these kind of yeah all these factors play play into the changing agri-food systems and what is important to keep in mind is that in developing countries they provide around 80% of the jobs due to the majority of employment still being in the farming and non-farming sector and The other important aspect is that they are bringing the rural and urban sector closer and closer together And I will talk about this a little bit more in a second. So what we try to do in this chapter is to on the one hand outline Conceptually the interactions between demographic changes rural urban migration and agri-food systems and then we use population data to try to project emerging trends in rural urban migration and also in relation to Changing in the rural transformation process. We're also discussing a little bit the the role of climate change and all these changes and Identify research and data gaps for further research and investment needs and the focus of the paper lies in developing countries So we only look at developed data from developed countries to to have a kind of comparison Yeah for this so the outline of the presentation to follow is that we I present briefly what the conceptual framework underlying our analysis Then the data we use and the methodology to to create these rural urban migration projections and I show you some graphs of the resulting projections and Discuss briefly the role of climate change and conclude if time allows and so the conceptual framework we are in is that traditionally the idea of rural urban migration is very much focused around the dichotomy of rural and urban areas and having push factors in the rural areas and the pole factors in the urban areas that then with Additional like development of more models also included factors such as land constraints or insurance constraints and in the urban sectors the possibilities of earning higher wages To diversify your income sources and and so on so What we are seeing now as emerging trends is that this dichotomy is actually diffusing so We still have of course push factors in the rural areas that now which are more and more discussed also relate to unemployment especially of youth and natural disasters climate change affecting the agriculture production process and in the urban areas the as pole factors we also can identify more the the better infrastructure and connectivity improved information so mobile phone subscriptions up through the roof and Also in developing countries so the the cost of moving to the urban area and the information costs are much lower than they used to be so that migration to and from rural areas is actually becoming Easier one would one this would suggest Additionally, we have the emergence of Mid-sized cities, so it's not so when I see we have the emergence of mid-sized cities It's not to say that they didn't exist before this is also about the attention of researchers to this topic that now Recently we have seen there's more and more attention towards mid-sized cities and towns what role they play Compared to just thinking of a rule hinterland and a metropolitan city We actually have these these centers in between that are important in the especially in the agri-food value chain and This implies that these these previous rule urban dichotomy between Food production in the rural area and consumption in the urban area is also shifting Yeah, kind of radiating more and more together and the value chains move along along yeah, but connecting rural and urban areas much more and This also implies for rural migration that we think less About this one direction in movement, but acknowledge much more that there's more circular migration rule rule migration seasonal temporary migration happening between these areas so for Giving you some trends in rural population youth population and rural urban migration We use the population data from the United Nations and So on the one hand we have rural urban population by age for the past 2035 years and We have population projections for the total population, but also by for just the rural population we have projections of population by age group and We have data on the life expectancy which we use for some Adjustments and to account for different fertility stages that countries are in and We also have data on agriculture productivity that we've used to look a little bit of how how migration rule urban migration trends relate to rural transformation So the country group things I will show you the grass in Focused now on the regional country groupings we do the same thing also by income group, but I've no focus on the regions So we have eastern central Africa West and southern Africa northern Africa Middle East Central Asia Asia and the Pacific and the lack and the other Countries, I will not show you any results now But yeah, that we had some data for them as well So this is just to give you an idea of what are the population projections of the UN For for these different regions for rule area So in the rule the rule population is expected to continue to increase in the African regions and It appears to have reached a peak already in the Asia and Pacific and Latin American Caribbean regions So there it's expected to decline these countries these regions are more and more urbanized and In Mina and Central Asia it appears that it's still increasing but will Reach a peak around 2040 and then slowly also decline. So this is to keep in the back of your mind and The youth population similarly is expected to still yeah to grow in eastern southern Africa Western Central Africa but it is expected to reach a peak around 2020 in the Asian and Latin American regions and Whereas in Mina and Central Asia, it's also expected to increase and eventually to its end of the projection Possibly reaching a peak So there is definitely this well documented Expectation of having a larger and youth share in in the African regions So now we want to look at what do we think based on this data? What happens to rule urban migration rates and rule urban youth migration rights and this methodology is a server ratio survival racial method It is actually you can think of it as a kind of population accounting exercise Let's say so you you think of a closed country so you have total population you have the rural areas and you have the urban areas and You you have the total population data and projected up to 2050 And then you are thinking okay, you can you can compute how many people what is the rate at which people survive in In five year steps. So the population in 2005 minus the population in 2000 Relative to the population in the base year 2000 at which rate do people survive to the next five year period and then you say okay in the we know that Urban in urban areas people live longer and in rural areas the mortality rates are higher Therefore the survival rate in rural areas is expected to be lower so we use this Assumption to compute For rural areas starting with the rural population that we have observed in the data up to 2015 And we can then compute with this survival rate How many people we expect to live in rural areas and in 2020 and then compared to the projected rural population of the UN data and if this projected If the if the population the rural population that we observe and that that we Predict it with the survival rate are different than these people must have moved somewhere and based on our assumptions They must have moved to the urban area. So Of course, this is based on the strong assumptions that There's no international migration directly from rural areas So it is assuming people move from rural areas to urban areas and then they can move further to international destinations and this rate that we compute also Does not account or it's not able to differentiate between rural urban migration and urban reclassification So when a rural area is classified five years later as urban area because Population size in this area was growing. So the administrators decided this this should now be classified as urban So what the projections that we will show you you can on the one hand? You can see as rural urban migration rates As well as urbanization rates in these regions So if you believe our assumption you can say this is all migration rate if you're more skeptical Then you can think okay a lot of this will reflect that actually these areas these regions are urbanizing more and for youth migrants We do the same procedure only that we have to account for the difference In fertility transition stages because you saw that the youth population is expected to stay increased in some regions Whereas in other regions, it's expected to decline. So we adjust for that and in order to do the projections for this so the rule urban migration trends that we get from our analysis is that overall across the world and It is expected to decline and kind of be fairly stable around five percent rate whereas in the eastern southern African regions rural Urban migration is expected to increase in the western and central African region it is fairly stable and Whereas in the other regions, you can see the kind of decline and Flattening of the migration rate But what is important to to note here is that eastern and southern African regions Start at a very at a much lower migration rate So all these regions seem to somehow converge if we can say so at a migration rate of around five percent and If we look at this for the youth migration and we can see that Invest in central Africa where the overall migration rate was expected to stay fairly stable Youth migration rate is actually expected to increase and the same so for eastern southern Africa Whereas in the other regions it is again either declining or in the Asia and Pacific It is slightly increasing and then flattening. So we really see a specific trend for for the African regions so Then we now try to connect this to the change and in the agri-food system and they are one of the big challenges so far for us was that and We could not find a good indicator or like a lot of data to document in a global comparison a global picture What's going on? With these trends so we tried to first look at the evidence for changing agri-food systems in specific countries and There is some evidence that Proximity to cities is associated with higher agriculture production for from a study in Ethiopia and and there's another like a equilibrium model exercise looking at investments in rural areas compared to urban areas and how that affects the agriculture GDP growth and they found that for a country that is like for the country Uganda where Agri-processing sector is actually very large and the investment Or larger urbanization larger rural urban migration is related to faster agriculture GDP growth So there you see exactly these kind of predictions of rural transformation process in this study and then there's another and there's other strand of studies that looks at what can be expect what the employment potential of this agri-foods sector is to employ to employ a rule the rural population and It says that the farming share of employment is expected to decline and the agri-food system and Non-farming sector is rapidly growing and expected to continue to rapidly grow However, the actual share of employment of the sector is still very low So they predicted I think it was up to 2030 a share of twelve percent in the non-farming employment So it's still a relatively Small share even though it has a potential of being rapidly growing So it's kind of a there's a potential there, but it's not Not that large that it could Give the opportunities for for everyone as alternative to farming And then we looked at the rural transformation process. So we define Countries that had an average annual growth rate of agricultural productivity above the regional average for the period from 1990 to 2014 as fast rural transformers and in contrast those that were growing slower than the regional average they were slow transformers and based on this category We plot the migration rate the for for the period from 1985 to 2050 and we see a very clear pattern of kind of the rural transformation process seems to be Going hand-in-hand with increasing fast increasing rural urban migration rate Which is expected kind of happen for those countries that have been slowly transforming I quickly Skip this so climate change. We also reviewed as a short summary We reviewed the evidence that exists on impacts of climate change on migration But it is still very thin and not too clear. So one thing that we could that we did find is that and There is this there's some evidence that Increase in temperature would increase International as well as rural urban migration, especially when countries are highly agriculture dependent and we also reflected on the role of medium-sized cities that on the one hand are expected to be and more vulnerable to extreme events because they have Not as good as an infrastructure as as bigger cities But at the same time they offer the potential to reduce the vulnerability and to increase the Resilience for farmers by offering more opportunities. So we definitely say there is a big gap still for for more evidence to be produced and Maybe as one of the main messages so far is that we from the projections we want to definitely stress the point that rural migration is not a is not a phenomenon that is expected to disappear and we see some sort of pattern of convergence and It also seems to be a process accompanying the process of rural transformation and which is which has to be shaped by policymakers and We also emphasize the gap in research and evidence for seasonal migration and then of course we acknowledge our gap in the research of addressing the reclassification of rural to urban areas and Want to investigate more the impacts of climate change on youth migration. Thank you


Fractualated infection, Friday, is a serious medical condition that can cause significant physical and mental distress to patients. It is often difficult to diagnose due to its non-specific symptoms, and it carries a high risk of recurrence if not treated properly. Early diagnosis and appropriate treatment are essential for reducing the risk of infection relapse and disability, as well as improving the patient's quality of life. This article was offered by Tsai Ing-Hee, Bin Yu, and Nan Jiang.


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In honor of the 50th anniversary of the National Historic Preservation Act, the National Trust is proud to honor two individuals who have profoundly impacted our field. In 1977, when the acts provisions were first being implemented, Dr. W. Knox Mellon became the first state historic preservation officer of California. The Chippewa offices we know today have been shaped in large part by his visionary leadership and pioneering work, which turned the act into a vital tool for preserving our heritage. Mellon served as the state's Chippewa from 1977 to 1984, and again from 2000 to 2004. In the interim, he founded a preservation consulting firm to work on critical projects like Los Angeles City Hall, the Beverly Hills Hotel, and the Los Angeles Coliseum. Mellon went on to become the Executive Director of the California Missions Foundation, helping preserve California's 21 Spanish-era mission churches. In his retirement, Mellon has continued to champion preservation causes, most recently working with stakeholders at Cooper-Mallera Adobe toward a viable and vibrant future for the site. Throughout his career, Mellon taught at Immaculate Heart College and the University of California, Riverside. He has been described as an unparalleled educator, and his thoughtful mentorship has ensured that his legacy will continue through the work of hundreds of preservationists around the country. He has set the standard for preservation professionals by looking for positive solutions, building consensus, and thinking creatively about how we preserve and continue to use historic places. Like Dr. Mellon, Paula Wallace has devoted much of her professional life to preparing a generation of preservationists. Wallace established the Savannah College of Art and Design in 1978, when she was only 29 years old. SCAD is now the largest and most comprehensive art and design university in the United States. Historic preservation was one of the original programs at SCAD. The program has taught its more than 800 graduates to distinguish themselves through research and to make it real by creating collaborative models with organizations like the National Trust, the Association of Preservation Technology, and local nonprofits. SCAD has put preservation in practice by rehabilitating 100 buildings since its founding. The school has also played a significant role in revitalizing Savannah through adaptive reuse of neglected and abandoned properties. Wallace's continued dedication to advancing a legacy of historic preservation at SCAD has been recognized by organizations including the American Institute of Architects and UNESCO. Wallace is a leader of the preservation movement in both concept and execution. Her commitment to SCAD has also been a commitment to Savannah's historic resources and rather than treating historic places as frozen in time, she champions their reuse as vital components of modern communities. Paula Wallace and Knox Mellon have played an immense role in shaping the preservation movement and we are grateful for their visionary leadership.