Welcome everyone, my name is Mark Critch, I'm chief executive of My Society and really pleased to welcome you all to our third tech tech seminar of this year. This one, as you all know, is focused on the climate crisis and the role that civic technology might play in mitigating some of the worst impacts of this crisis. My Society, as you may know, is a charity based in the UK. We run lots of well used civic services around the world, mainly in the UK, but versions of our services are used in about 40 countries. They cover services, looking at freedom of information, transparency, parliamentary monitoring, citizen reporting, all sorts of dealings with the public sector and helping to build communities and generally support democracy.  And so with that in mind, thinking about how we all play our role, we've invited four speakers to come and share what they're working on at the moment in relation to the climate crisis. And from our perspective, we're really keen to understand what role civic technology might play to support that work. We always start from the assumption that technology is not always the answer, but where it can play a role to support, expand and enhance your activity that actually happens in communities around the world, then we like to better understand what role we can play. So first of all, I think I'll just hand over to Rachel Cox-Coon first of all, let her introduce herself, and then I'll pass on to Tom, Natty and Louise. So Rachel, do you want to just say hello, say a few words about what you're working on? Thanks Mark. Yeah, so I'm Rachel Cox-Coon. I wear two hats most days in that and my day job I work for an organization called the Centre for Sustainable Energy, which is one of the biggest energy and climate change charities in the UK, where I lead a programme of work, a climate emergency support programme that's largely aimed at local government at every level in the UK. And then by night, I'm a local politician, so I'm an elected member in the Cotswolds, which is in Gloucestershire, where I am Cabinet Member for the portfolio I manage for that part of local government is climate change and forward planning. Excellent, thank you. Pass on to Tom. Thanks, Mark. Nice to be with you. I'm an associate director at the Institute for Government. We are a think tank, a non-partisan think tank that looks at the workings of government and how government can work more effectively. And we've just published a report about how we think the government needs to change if it's to deliver its net zero target, which sets out a bunch of recommendations to do with how climate change is given proper priority in government, the sorts of skills and expertise you'd need to develop sort of rigorous plans and then the kind of capability you'd need across the public sector to then deliver those plans. So that's the type of thing that we do. Fantastic. And Natty. Hi everyone. I'm Natty Carffy. I'm the deputy director for the Open Data Charter. I'm based in Buenos Aires where it's summer, so it's not that I'm crazy. It's just that it's 28 degrees here. I've been working and leading the work that we've been doing on open data for climate action. We developed a tool alongside with the World Resources Institute and implemented that tool on open data for climate action in Chile and in Uruguay, and I will share the learnings and the challenges that we found in that work. Excellent. Thanks, Natty. And over to everyone, Louise Cole. Hello. I'm the head of development at my society is Mark's already introduced my society. I can quickly say a few words about the climate projects we've been working on this year. We were part of the team that supported climate assembly UK, which was a citizens assembly tasked with making recommendations about how the UK could get to net zero. That assembly released its final report in September to pretty good take up. And more recently, we've been working on a project of our own to try and collect climate action plans from local government so councils in the UK, and provide a simple digital service so people both inside and outside can easily find the plans and see what's in them. So coming back to Rachel, so you said you were two hats, at least two hats, probably a few more.  You know that gives you a pretty unique perspective on both the task at hand and also your the challenges involved in actually implementing some of those changes I guess so could you maybe give give a bit more of a flavor about the both the political and technical challenges you face in your work and I guess where you see the biggest issues are going to need to be overcome that technology might play a role. Well, I suppose you know without saying the extremely obvious the biggest political issue is politics. So, you know, one of the greatest problems for every local authority that's declared a climate emergency is to maintain a unanimous approach to delivering that a lot of climate emergencies have been declared in the UK by local councils and you know well over two thirds of local councils declared a climate emergency. But when it comes down to the nitty gritty of having a full council meeting and deciding what to spend money on. That's where the real politics comes back into play. And so I see data and information as a really important part of keeping everybody on board and making sure that all of the elected members many of whom don't come from this background they come from a huge you know covering quite a big age range as well often so in terms of coming to the climate crisis many of them have come all the way through school in university in their career without really hearing about it much apart from a bit on the news. So being able to provide that information to them is important and as someone who works with with councils in my professional life and then in a council as a counselor. The other thing that has I've always been aware of in a professional sense but is really writ large for me now that I am a counselor is the ridiculous costs that local government are paying to effectively create localised versions of the same thing that could be done at a national level where we could all access it. And this goes back for years with my work hat on probably almost 10 years ago now. Remember having a conversation with the department for energy and climate change as was then you had an idea about creating local level data on renewable energy potential so that people could see maps for example of wind turbines and you know where things could go. We talked to them. We showed them a cost of that could be done for the whole country for about half a million. They then went and put out a fund and spent six million pounds giving out tiny bits of money to 300 different parishes to do this work to a whole range of different and uncomfortable methodologies that left most of the country as a black hole and not covered by this data set anyway. The most extraordinary waste of public money that resulted in almost nothing. And now here we are a decade later so much closer to catastrophe and disaster. This kind of data is still not available publicly. And as a local politician, I find myself in a position of having to spend tens of thousands of pounds of my local taxpayers money to produce that for the Cotswolds when I know that I could do that through work for the whole of England for probably not a great deal more. And I find that enormously frustrating. No, I definitely share your frustration. I mean that you have finding ways that everyone can play the part in relationship with your central government local government community groups, all sorts. I mean, it's such an important part of the work. And with that in mind, Tom, you wrote a fantastic report recently one of the authors at the Institute of Government in relation to, you know, how we how we actually achieve net zero. And one of the, I think, really crystallising things that you may cleave in that report was, you know, for net zero by 2030, you know, we're talking about two, two, maybe three parliaments at most. You know, even net zero 2050 we're only talking about six or seven parliamentary terms and I'm sure that's true in the UK I'm sure it's very similar around the world. But with that, you know, the short amount of time when you consider the amount of time it takes major changes to go through parliamentary process. I mean that is an area of real concern. Maybe talk about the report and a little bit about what you think some of the options we might have on. So yeah, I mean that's actually right. I think one of the big challenges always with climate change is the sort of time consistency problem you know it's easy to say in 2008 when we announced the climate change act that this is a priority it's much harder to make sure it's a priority for all the ministers and and sort of governments that come after you. And, you know, we've seen some progress since 2008, but it's been quite slow in lots of areas and a lot of governments and particularly chancellors haven't chosen to prioritise it. So, yeah, I think, you know, any, any plan needs to look at how you have a sort of accountability mechanism that ensures right across government. This is sort of made a top priority. And I think one of the problems for the UK has been the fact that it so far it's been given to a fairly weak department.  The business departments don't really have the power to say to the housing minister, or the transport minister or the chancellor, or anyone else that you really need to be focusing on this so so I think that's a big problem. It's really interesting to hear Rachel talk about the local government perspective. That's certainly an area that came up for us as, you know, a lot of the enthusiasm for addressing the climate emergency is developing and fermenting at a local level. A lot of the groups that are discussing this a lot of the declarations and net zero targets and things like that. But unfortunately in the UK, our sort of local government capability has been really stripped over the last decade and we've all sort of seen the cuts to budgets have happened and things like that. So I would build that back up if those local sort of politicians and authorities are going to be able to actually design this at the local level and there's going to be many different pathways to net zero. So that's a really important role. The other bit I would just mention is the public engagement in this. I think, you know, the progress so far in terms of reducing emissions in the UK, and we've reduced quite a lot, but it's all been in the energy sector basically switching away from coal towards first gas and now renewables. But the changes that are coming are going to be changes to how we travel to the way we heat our homes, the way we eat and drink, you know really fundamental changes to people's lives. It requires politicians and sort of governments that that really engage with the public and get their views about how these changes should happen and how the costs of those changes should be spread. Because if I think if a government tries to sort of do this all very quickly without seeking public consent and it will quite quickly actually lose people support. So you really need real need to sort of communicate with the public and build that support and I'd be interested to hear today about what kind of role civic engagement and sort of digital tools can play in some of that engagement as well. That's great. Thanks, Tom. I think we'll come back to exactly that point of thinking the next question just your both how we create that space for politicians to make the type of decisions that are required, but in your also how you actually enable that access. And Natty, the work you do obviously the open data charter is completely focused really I guess on on educating your public sector bodies, your campaigners and so on to be able to make data more open and you've done some work. I guess you released a report earlier this year in relation to work in Chile that you were involved in but maybe just give us a flavor for the work that open data charter is doing in this area. So, as you said, we work closely with governments and local civil society organizations whenever we implement a project and what we saw is was a big opportunity due to the Paris Agreement. Article 13 of the parties agreement actually asks the governments to report on their on their climate change data. But every government every signatory government was actually producing that data and then just reporting to the UN and there was public value that was contained within that data that wasn't being wasn't being exploded because of not that data not being open in reusable formats. So alongside with with the World Resources Institute, as I said, we created these these practical tool, I will ship the link in the chat room in a bit that we call the open up guide for climate action, which actually just highlights a set of data sets that governments should be able to open in a first phase of opening up climate change data. The tool that we then piloted both in Chile and in Uruguay, the Chile report is already out there the Uruguay report is going to be out in a couple of weeks. So what we did is work within with government with the open data offices, and the climate change offices to try to understand which of those those data sets were actually a climate change priority for for the country. So understanding the level of openness they they had so understanding which were open which were, which already exists, but but didn't that wasn't open there and which which data sets actually didn't exist nor where collected. Then we worked with with civil society organizations as I said in trying to understand what the priorities were from the demand side. So what what was what were they missing, both researchers civil society organizations, universities and journalists. And so we did a couple of workshops we we could do the in person workshops, unfortunately because this all took place last year. And we found that there were of course certain certain topics that that everybody was was interested in but then also understanding what the differences were. And with with that in mind, we helped to create a publication plan understanding the level of openness and the priorities for kind of both sides.  We found this really really useful for for governments and for civil society just to understand and manage the expectations also. And we actually introduced this project in the COP meeting last year, the one that took place in in Madrid. And we had a whole bunch of governmental representatives coming to the workshop because they were trying to figure out new ways to to actually meet the demand of this article 13 from the Paris agreement. Which actually asked them to to be innovative in the way they reported the climate change data. So they came up just to see what we were doing at what open data meant, because as we know there's there's kind of the challenge between different governmental offices to work together. They work, they mostly work in silo so all the governmental representatives that were in this in this funnel were actually from climate change offices and have hadn't heard from the open data teams within their own governments. So, luckily we were able to to work maybe as a hub to connect offices and try to enhance this this project. We are now in conversations with a couple more countries to to work within this, this idea of the open up guide and trying to prioritize the local agendas and work as as Tom said, with a participatory overview understanding the demand side and the demand side priorities to to create these publication plans. Fantastic, thank you. And so turning to Louise.  Obviously one of the, it's been touched upon already, I think it's it's it's known within the open data movement generally that just publishing data isn't sufficient it's it's how you actually make it usable is is the real critical element. I mean, I think what Rachel said, speaks very much to software developers because it's a sort of tragic story of the same work being done over and over and writ large that means the same money being spent over and over again. Our work on council climate action plans was really taking a very small approach, and initially thinking about citizens who are engaging for the first time so in the UK there's concern about the climate emergency has risen up people's consciousness and lots of people, either through the strikes or extinction rebellion or other other organisations were engaging for the first time on the climate and that was part of the wave of climate emergency declarations that were made.  And you're immediately in the world of council websites which are not the easiest information resources to navigate, and then not the most suggestive of institutions that want your input or want want to involve you in decision making. So you have to kind of then find your councils climate action plan and possibly read through pages and pages of information for the first time and try and figure out what you think about it and what you might do to kind of communicate with them about it. So what we built as a very kind of early prototype was we crowdsourced a data set of as many climate action plans as we could found, as we could find, and built a simple tool that would allow you to put in your postcode.  And one of the things I think you get from a central approach there, almost for free is the ability to then search over the contents of all these plans which as far as I know is something that would have been extremely difficult before so there's certainly dividends that you get from from bringing all the information into one place. I think the other thing that strikes me in listening to the other panelists is the value, both in terms of talking to people who have all kinds of different levels of experience and knowledge about climate change and that question of kind of consent for for policy changes is the potential to pose this as a common problem, both to people inside and outside of the world government and whether there is a role Pacific tech in simply framing that problem. I think the climate assembly was a really good example of a very effortful but worthwhile process of really unpacking the route to net zero and say okay this is a problem with many other problems inside it. Here's a five minute description as best as we can kind of give you of each of those problems that we collectively have to solve. Fantastic, thanks Louise. I think to just listen to all four of you in your introductory remarks. I think the thing that always strikes me is really critical about this moment is we're asking people and organisations and governments to really act in a way that's different from the way they would previously be used to. We're asking citizens to take a much more active involved role. We're asking local governments to take a much more collaborative and facilitating role than they might be used to. The more used to providing services and we're asking national governments to create the conditions for those changes to take place rather than centralising mandate from that sort of national perspective solely. So huge number of challenges there. I mean what collectively do you see is the barriers there, what kind of strategies might we adopt to overcome some of those issues I guess and maybe come back to Rachel to provide some comments. Yeah, I think from a local government point of view and I'm sure this is definitely true of English local authorities that I work with but I'm sure it's probably true internationally as well is that there's a great deal of sort of tradition and culture in terms of how decision making occurs. And that doesn't change quickly. It's very hard to map on a new way of working on to these old decision making structures. So when you're dealing with an officer group who has Tom rightly pointed out is cut right back to the bone anyway because we've had 10 years of austerity. I mean as an example, planning departments across the country are 62% worse off in real terms than they were 10 years ago at a time which when the government has just released a planning white paper that says we're going to triple a lot of people's housing numbers you know massively deregulated this is this is a real problem but leaving that aside, we have officers churning through this approach of well if I need to get this done, then I have to produce a report that has to go through Cabinet and then through full council and then to do do do do. And actually what you're looking at is you want a quick decision and they're saying there's four months of work that have to be done to go through a decision making process that isn't really fit to make a holistic decision anyway because it breaks everything down and it's very granular level and what I've seen Cornwall council do recently and what I'd really like to adopt similar approach to the Cotswolds and I know others are is taking the donor economics approach to decision making. And rather than having these really old school decision making process that a lot of councils use that that we've almost we've been using them since the 40s or something is is creating an entirely new decision making framework that looks across the board and makes sure because most council making decisions are decision making is just looking at financial implications. And they aren't really set up to say well what are the carbon implications and what are the social implications beyond basic equalities legislation for example, or health and safety, or child safeguarding these things that feel legislatively bound to follow. There's no wider requirement for council decision making to say, what about the future well being of our people, you know the Wales future well being well being a future generations act is is a standalone example of that. So that kind of accountability that Tom was referring to needs a different decision making protocol and it's only for English local government absolutely but I'd be amazed if this culture and tradition that people guard very dearly isn't also a problem elsewhere, and it's a block on on quick action and then that also feeds through I think to procurement and and you know Louise mentioned it's the same money for the same work over and over again. But it's also the fact that procurement you can have all the best political desires in the world to have an action plan and to make things happen but when it goes back down through that procurement funnel. Then the decisions will be done in an old school way again because that that data is not there to allow procurement professionals to say, well what's the carbon implication of this contract I'm about to put out and that kind of thing so I feel like challenging these kind of embedded systems is is you know it's that thing about. Culture trumping everything at the end of the day, there has to be a written branch review of culture and about why why are we doing what we're doing as a local council here. Absolutely and maybe Tom you may have some thoughts on your your what what are the cultural changes within government and needs to take place to trigger these type of transition you think. Yeah, I thought that was a really great answer from from Rachel I really strongly agree with that and the I think another example of that at the central government level is the green book and you know we saw this being discussed this last week and the sort of idea that you know you can make a few tweaks and suddenly it's all going to support totally different goals, rather than just whatever ministers tell officials to make the answer sort of come out with. But that's another example where carbon is not factored in you know we can justify, you know road extension around stonehenge because it's only a marginal amount of our carbon budget. Well all the road extensions if you add them all up might not be a marginal amount of your carbon budget but we don't do that as part of our process. So I think Rachel totally right there's kind of a lot of these processes type things which sound very dull and arcane that are actually quite critical to how we make decisions and the carbon implications of those decisions. I mean a couple of things you could do differently is sort of force people to think about the carbon implications of every spending decision so that could happen at spending reviews in the central government and something similar in local government and then force it into the project appraisal process much more strongly as well. I wanted to pick up quickly on something Louise said as well because I thought that was really well put around the climate assembly as an exercise, which for those 100 people who were involved I don't know if everyone on the call is familiar with it but there was 100 people from the public there as a representative sample of different political opinions opinions on the climate etc. And they brought them together over about six weekends gave them access to the best experts from the CCC everywhere else and got them to discuss and debate how they would get to net zero, you know members of the public and they came out the other end of it, incredibly educated about as Louise was saying he's sort of complex into into play of different choices. Now what we need is almost like something like that to happen on a national level, because you know at the moment, there's some polling that was done it shows two thirds of people have never heard of net zero. You know they're just let alone what it implies they haven't heard of the term. So actually we need a big sort of public discussion about what this means and priorities some of that can happen at the local level but I think quite an interesting role for technology I could imagine as a way of sort of reaching people engaging people in the choices, you know, displaying them visualising them. Yeah, I think there's lots of options. Fantastic. You're natty any any thoughts really I guess so on. You started to touch upon earlier as well about your, your different governments in different countries and so on picking up the best practice is developed and what are they, what are the challenges in that area you obviously because what you develop in one country isn't isn't necessarily easily transferable where are they where are the common points and again, what needs to be in place for those, those type of changes to happen internationally. So yeah, from the open data perspective, one of the main challenges that we faced and and I think we will keep on facing as we progress with this work will have to do with data literacy and how open data is being taught and spoken of within governments. So, of course, when when reaching out to the open data offices, however, they are organised within within one of each one of the of the governments we had like super easy conversations, but then when we approached the climate change offices, they didn't know what we were speaking about whatsoever. They, and they didn't understand the need to open up the data that they were creating like they were creating the data just for reporting and for internal use. So it's like, why would somebody want this date like, and so we have to have all the, all the typical conversations around open data all over again. And which is it's not a problem but but we see that that literacy is still lacking throughout governmental structures in in everywhere and and so just having that those conversations and and and this data literacy programs throughout government structures it's something that we all we always promote, but we see that it's still, it's still missing. And then what we did is we celebrated the Open Data Day 2020 Open Data Day in Uruguay. We managed to do a person in person event it was in February. It seems like zillion years ago but we did a hackathon where we actually invited all the climate change office officials. Of course the open data folks were there and we invited civil society organisations from both communities also they hadn't collaborated yet. And it was amazing to see how the public officials, especially from the from the climate change office were kind of really understanding there what the value of the data was for for reuse purposes. So it's like, okay, so they wanted the data for this, you know, and it's totally different from reporting. There were apps that were with salisations, possible researchers. So, I know hackathons are kind of not that popular right now, but we saw what that meant for for those public officials like visualising what what their hard work in opening up that data meant. And so now we are keep we are actually moving forward with the second phase in Uruguay, because now they totally understand what this effort means. So I know I know it's it's setting like the agenda a little bit back but data literacy and properly explaining the added value of opening up data, it's it's still super important in this agenda. No, absolutely. I mean, I think we find that all over that you're the siloed nature of so many you're the responsibility is so siloed across different departments and individuals and you find that all levels of government. And you're just just lacking those those basic skills to be able to kind of translate concepts across those different silos is incredibly difficult, you know, whether it's open data level or net zero level or just understanding the carbon impact of any of the individual decisions up your public official might actually make. I mean Louise you've you've certainly we've discussed this as well just your the relationship between climate plans, climate emergency declarations and of course if they're not embedded within the economic plan of a council. You know they won't actually get active upon what what are the barriers they're stopping these actually leading to greater change. I mean one I think is the complexity. I mean, we're talking about a huge sort of tiered set of problems and there is a lot of data that you could kind of expose about that as Matty said but I think you don't actually want to expose that to everyone because it's difficult to understand it you need to give people a general understanding of what's happening and the problem we're all collectively engaging with, but then I think there's a big role for simple digital services that try and take these big national data sets and give people views through them that are actionable and simple and relevant to their lives so in terms of citizens answers questions of what's your council doing who's vulnerable in your area to the kind of the where are the areas that need adaptation in your area, and kind of give people a slice that they can actually take action on whether that's from within government or from from kind of the citizen or campaigner point of view. Excellent with that in mind or maybe open up to any of the panel that want to answer but your what's what's the, what's the particular role of the citizen amongst all of us what type of skills and literacy do they need to be able to create this corridors of power and actually influence that type of change and anyone want to jump in on that. Maybe Rachel go for it. I mean from the from my point of view with the political how I would like to hear more from citizens you know when we published our climate change strategy a couple of months ago at the Cotswolds, I had an email from a local resident who said that he was in tears I don't know what have we done wrong and and he was saying you know I'm so worried about climate change I'm so worried for me and my children and I'm so pleased to see my council putting this down in paper as something that's important you know I'll sleep well tonight and I thought brilliant. Are you the only one literally there's 85,000 people living here you really the only one that cried, because I hope more people did and I wish more people would write to me and tell me about it, because it can only strengthen your local politicians. I don't want to talk to them about it, but I think what particularly when people are agitated anxious there are their tendencies to talk angrily and anxiously so it's, it's having a go rather than providing support so citizens need to get involved in a supportive way up with politicians across the board it's too easy to be done tribal and ideal ideological about it and so write a nice letter to Boris Johnson and tell him please do this for me. But on the other hand I think the other thing citizens need and all councillors need as well and councils is carbon literacy use that phrase it's used as a throw away phrase but it is a sort of official does have an official meaning, because the other big barrier that that we face trying to get things done is constantly trying to sort of heard and corral people down the road of highest impact. You know if I had a pound for every time I've spoken to a parish council or someone who says we think we'll plant some trees. And I think that's great I have a forestry background I'd love to see more trees planted but then when you ask them why. And what will you be doing about retrofit and are you considering getting people out of their cars and all this is they haven't got a clue where their best impacts lie, or they're very worried about climate change but they want to therefore tackle plastic recycling. And there's no sense that those two issues whilst whilst both enormous and not necessarily entirely related. So providing data to directly to citizens to understand their impacts is absolutely crucial and we're doing a piece of work on that at CSA at the moment actually with government funding to produce a kind of community scale, funding tool that won't be all about massive spreadsheets and not because people are not qualified, nor do they have the time to spend time interpreting that. But there will be more gear to look this is what your village looks like or this is what your neighborhood looks like. These are your impact areas. If you could all come together and spend only time concentrating on one sector then in your place it should be buildings retrofit, or whatever that would be, which is very different to the way maybe national government is looking at things. So people need data so that they can help their policies but they don't need the actual data they need it interpreted for them in some way to some large degree. Absolutely. I'll just note there's actually quite a few comments in the chat just your number of different projects that are actually underway and you're obviously my society involved in some there's a whole bunch of your everyone on the panel are involved in different projects and there's clearly a lot going on. And we want one thing we're particularly keen coming out of this session is to your using this as a way of kind of connecting some of those projects together as much as possible so we'll certainly be keen to kind of follow up. And Tom, you maybe have some further thought the role of the citizen amongst all of this and we where can they best your how can they help create the conditions for that political change as well. You're right there's some really interesting comments in the chat I was just looking at a couple of links that Nick Perks posted around the sort of climate literacy projects and help help the future which is fantastic charity hope for the future rather. Yeah, I think there's quite a lot people can do to sort of, you know, tool themselves up for this, I think. Rachel's right that sort of the old sort of stayed public consultation where a sort of council or a government department sort of puts out a set of questions and it takes months to reply and then they don't really bother to always read the replies particularly when talking about central government at least is not really the way forward on this. What we want is something that's much more sort of iterative and agile in terms of people being able to respond to what those with decision making power are doing. I also wonder, and I'm sure there's lots of tools for this that are being developed, including by sort of people within this community. I wonder what there is in terms of, you know, we're all going to have to look at how to upgrade the sort of energy efficiency of our homes in the next, you know, 510 years. We're all going to have to think about those of us who do have vehicles at some point switching over to it to an electric vehicle. We're all going to have to think about replacing our gas boilers and there's real benefit and a lot of those changes sort of as Rachel's indicating a lot of those changes happening in a coordinated way at a local level. And in people who sort of live near to each other kind of sharing lessons sharing ideas, you know, that kind of thing. So I think there's probably interesting ways of thinking about actually not relying just on your local authority on government expecting them to do everything but sort of thinking about how people who really care about this agenda collaborate on actual kind of practical meaningful things about, you know, which builders are the best ones locally for doing this kind of skilled insulation work, you know that those kind of questions. I think are going to become really important and actually giving people a positive sense that they can achieve change within their own lives but also within their communities and not just feel angry about the kind of slowness of Westminster or Whitehall which can feel along their way. The aspect of all being in it together especially at a community level is is a really kind of important part of the answers. And Natty any thoughts especially in your where you've seen of turning or using data or using these tools to actually turn that into to real real world action as well I mean how do you, how do you connect connect it up to real activity I guess. So do I just want to follow up on what Tom was saying and then and answer your question because we've seen is not something that the open data charter has done but we're connected to to the project. Because we've seen it and just got in touch with them. We've seen a projects where they are actually involving citizens in for example leveraging air quality data. So if you want to you can volunteer and you can put it's a sensor that looks like a strawberry so it's like plant your own strawberry in your garden and help out with collecting the data and that that type of involvement where citizens are actually being part of the creation of the data, then results in them being involved with whatever happens with once the data it's out there and it's being analyzed and reused. So, on a local level of course there is a lot more of potential because on a national wide initiative it would be a little bit complicated but it can be done anyway. So that's that those kinds of initiatives are super interesting and we're trying to connect with with those when when we can. And then, as far as as we use what we've seen, at least in the in the hackathon and the apps that came out of that like the mock apps that came out of them. It's mostly visualizations as as we were speaking about Rachel mostly is is data from climate change is not that easy to to process if you're not from the climate change community. It was actually a challenge I had to face when leading this work within the open data charter I know about open data but not specifically about climate change and and there is a lot of names that I didn't know. So that's like an entry problem you know so the creation of this kind of mega community between open data and climate change folks actually resolved in them collaborating in this hackathon and each one explaining its bits to the other one we need to make better connections in to create and more public value, because it is, it is a problem. There's a lot of standards that are already exists that are very well known for the climate change for the climate change folks that have absolutely no level of knowledge in the open data world. And we are seeing more open data on climate change panels and discussions fortunately, but it's still really really small and for example as I said in cop last year out of I don't know how many zillion panels, we were the only ones talking about open data there, and it's a massive conference. So hopefully next year if cop is done again it will be in UK. We will have more panels on open data there. Fantastic. And one thing in this at Louise I'm sure you have some thoughts on this but just to pick up and pick up on some of the comments in the chat as well about your the connections that need to maybe between different organizations and your some of the different organizations we might rely on.  What are the, what are the different connections that need to be made. I mean with some comments from Robert, Robert Spig as well in relation to linking up climate action plans with local plans, neighborhood plans and so on as well. I mean there's a, we're not short of plans, we're not short of declarations how do we, how do we turn this into action I guess. I think some of this is is also about knowing people and knowing the right people. I think the, the story of Rachel's constituent who got in touch. That person has already been through quite a process to find out who you are that you're the person in the council that cares about this. I think so people have carbon literacy challenges, but, but nearly everyone also has a kind of a challenge in understanding how the institutions work both at a national and local level. If I want to influence my council how do I do that you can sort of start to learn the people involved the issues involved the processes involved and and that's also part of the solution because this isn't actually about dry plans so in our work on the council climate action plans we spoke a couple of weeks ago to the Southeast Climate Alliance which turns out to be a lot of that is three people sitting with a spreadsheet where they collected all their council's local plans and marking cells in green that they think where they think the council's done pretty well and cells in yellow where they're not so sure and then having a conversation with the people in the council and getting to know them and saying, how can we help you so I think it is a combination of of all the things we've talked about before but also human connections across institutions and how do we build those and get a sense of a common problem to solve and work in a coordinated way in a way that we haven't done before. Fantastic. And just just to say as I mentioned already will be taking the comments from the chat and any links to any projects will make sure they are properly documented and we'll share them in some blog posts afterwards along with the recording of the seminar as well. So just just really, we've got about five minutes left of this more formal session and we can get into a bit more open Q&A if anyone wants to ask more questions, but I guess you're just just each of the panel really what's the most important thing that you think we should be working on and as a rival for technology to play within. Who wants to take that one on. I don't, I'm not sure it has to do with with technology in a seminar that I did last year. I made the joke about how important people interoperability is not just data interoperability. And I still do think it was a joke, but it ended up not be it's crucial, like making these connections between either or between governmental officials between government offices between government and citizens. It's still critical. Then then we can think about the technology to help empower that and to make it easier, but still that email that Rachel received it's still critical the connections between actors, it's, it's still the most important thing. I think that the biggest issue for me, both in my work and in in that with the political side of things is in is in showing people and it relates to what Natty says it's in showing people how the climate crisis is relevant to them and it comes back to carbon literacy. I'll put the link in the things you can circulate it if you're not familiar with it there are some fantastic resources produced about a month ago by Britain talk by the climate outreach information network called Britain talks climate, which kind of segments the UK population into seven groups I think it is. And it's thinking about, you know actually everybody is concerned about climate change in their own way, and people are concerned for different reasons. And we need to be providing information to people really about the different ways in which the actions we take at local government and that central government will be tackling the things that they're worried about because the one thing you do find as a local politician. I'm sure this is true as a national politician as well is that you're really only hearing from what that research were called progressive activists, people who are really worried, who do politics for fun, who campaign for fun. This is what they think about 24 seven. But actually that there are backbone Conservatives out there who are also worried about climate change but they're worried about the rural economy and they're worried about farmers and they're worried about food security and they're worried about migration. And it's being able to communicate to them that the things you're doing that seem a bit unconnected around housing, sort of creating that web and saying no this what this does ultimately is solve that thing that you're worried about. And we people get very hung up on the fact that people are worried about climate change for the wrong reasons. It's fine to be worried about migration or whatever it is, as long as you want to do something about climate change. So I think there needs to be some way of using data and using information to make those links between we do these actions because it has this impact, which isn't perhaps immediately clear. And that's, I think, something that councils are not set up to do, not capable of doing. And again, it's not the sort of thing every single council should be doing individually anyway. Shall I add to that so I was going to say my top priority would be would be public engagement as well I think Rachel set out the argument really well. And another another sort of potential way into that with with one of the some of those groups is something like air quality. So, so thinking about what which of these actions on climate change will deliver the kind of improvements that different different people prioritise in their lives and I think that's really, really important. And also for us all to sort of slightly maybe get out of our bubble of people who care about this place. I think another one, and I would say that the accountability question which has come up quite a bit today already.  I was put out yesterday which showed that if you look at if every country that has a target was to meet it, we'd be looking at the sort of two degree warming situation where we were looking at 2.7 degrees, only a decade ago. So clearly actually we've got the really high level infrastructure of these kind of national level targets in place. So what we really need is to hold, you know, national governments and local governments cap to account for delivering that. And I think just to pick up on one interesting comment in the chat about the sort of emissions reporting, and how that happens, you know local government level but also lots of businesses are sort of saying that they are net zero. What does that mean, you know what does that mean in terms of their supply chain in terms of what they're responsible for so I think a really big issue is going to be how do we build tools so that people can evaluate the sort of climate and environmental claims that different actors are making and use that to inform their choices. Thanks, Tom. Just just one final question for me, I guess, from each of the panellists is, is, you know, this has been a really dark year and for all sorts of reasons you're still in the midst of COVID pandemic and so on. But, you know, even though the challenges facing in relation to climate crisis are really huge. What gives you hope amongst all of this? Maybe Louise put you on the spot. I mean, I think that the striking thing about the current moment to me is the way our response to a pandemic is very different from the previous pandemics we faced as humanity in a couple of different ways because it's informed by a great amount of knowledge about what we're doing and huge amount of flexibility on the part of people all over the world, although it is frayed at the edges and contested and difficult, people have done extraordinary things in our own collective interest. And I think that the energy of a really pressing common problem, you can see extraordinary things happen and that I think is hopeful and worth bearing in mind in the face of very big challenges. Same question to the other panellists. What gives you hope? Yes, probably sounds like the most awful nihilistic thing, but in a similar vein, it sounds dreadful. I was rather hoping we'd have a terrible drought and a heat wave this summer as well, because to some degree one of the problems that has always plagued us about why we won't act on climate change quickly enough is because it doesn't feel immediate enough, either spatially or temporarily. And I think we're just getting to that point where people are particularly when I do carbon literacy training and things with councillors and citizens and so on. I feel like when I'm asking the questions, well, who in your community will be impacted and how and when people are starting to say it's already happening and they see things like the news about what happened in California this summer. And as a classic example, I live quite near Worcester. You will remember it seems forever ago, but in February we had the floods. Half of Worcester, most of Worcester was underwater. They declared an emergency to do with the floods. They were not out of the back of that emergency when they had to declare an emergency for COVID, the local government there in Worcester. And had we had the heat wave this summer that was predicted, they would have declared three emergencies in one year and we get to the point where people begin to recognise that our resilience is stretched to its limit. And in a way, sadly, what gives me hope is horrible things happening because I think that's finally enough for people to say, right, actually this is here and it is now and we have to do something. Yeah, which is really difficult to square obviously for everyone. I mean, there's a certain inevitability about a lot of these things now because we've left things so late for this level of changes are required, but you're never wasting a good crisis, I guess. You've got to make the most of where we currently are and start from where we are and just work from there. So, Tom, any thoughts, what gives you hope? Well, I would say that we've seen, you know, I think that the pandemic sort of offers reasons for hope and reasons for these main things more difficult. In some senses, clearly, you know, we're entering a recession, we're going to have to make the arguments for prioritising investment all over again. But as the other speakers have said, we've also sort of seen a huge capacity for people to make sacrifices for distant or sort of for benefits that will accrue to other people, you know, and particularly for young people, but in general for society to come together. So I think there's going to be a moment where we kind of have an opportunity of multi-lateralism coming out of this pandemic. I also just think that the sort of geopolitical situation is hugely more encouraging than it was six weeks ago, you know, with the China net zero target and with the US election and with, you know, Japan and South Korea as well. So I think, you know, there is actually very good grounds for optimism. We've made a lot more progress in the last year than we might have done. And I think, you know, there's potential to do a lot more coming out for the back of the pandemic. I'm really sorry, but I've actually got to jump off, as I think mentioned before, but at the conversation and any follow up, I'd be very happy to be involved in. So sorry to fantastic. Thank you so much, Tom. That was fantastic. Natty, final thoughts from you on what gives you hope. Yeah, so adding on what everybody said, one thing that gives me hope is seeing global conversations around green recovery on COVID. So now that we are starting to see the light on the COVID pandemic, there's a lot of conversations on recovery and there's a lot of conversations around green recovery. So now that we have to stop a lot of the things that we've done, how are we going to do it more ecologically? How are we going to be more climate friendly once we restart a lot of the activities that we used to do? So that's what gives me hope. Thank you. So that's the end of the formal questions from me. We do have another 10, 15 minutes. There's a few questions from the chat that I can pick up. But if anyone does want to ask a question individually, so Lloralee, I saw you raise your hand there, so hopefully. Hi, yeah, I might have been. There's a huge opportunity right now in this. I think the challenge right now in the United States is that progressive activists and movement politics, they need to become friends of the institutions that they've run against. This is a classic problem for the left and for progressives. But the good news is that the rules have changed inside the institution to incorporate climate. I'm sorry to incorporate the pandemic that are unprecedented, like 200 years worth of modernization happened in one day last May, where they've put electronic documents submission into the workflow. And so the challenge now for us is to create a way for that's curated and trustworthy and authentic to input real people's civic voice into the supply chain of information that gets made into policy. And a big problem for Americans right is that the supply chain is captured by financial interests and really narrow private interests into policy and the data has come out on that and people are feeling so powerless. But I think that we actually have a chance right now by combining these crises to sort of do a lot of what has been put forward here today. So thank you. It's unbelievably helpful for me to be able to go to Detroit or Oregon or Texas and say this is happening in other countries. Hey look, somebody already came up with a schema and we can adapt it. Incredibly helpful and progressives really took a beating and as a progressive myself in this election with the House of Representatives and losing those seats and we have to get people interested in the complexities of the institutions now. So I know it's not sexy and fun and you can't really tweet about it. But that's the challenge. The hard work definitely starts now. There's no doubt about that. Thank you. That's all. I love examples of templates. Fantastic. Any other comments from anyone else or any other questions? Just raise your hand or wave if I can't see you. So go Chris. Okay, you should be able to unmute now. Okay, I'm new. Hi folks. I'm calling from Berlin, actually. I have a question for Rachel if that's okay. I was really interested in the discussion about understanding the kind of carbon footprint of different public spending decisions, because this is where one of the largest levers are. But this is also where the UK is one of the leaders in terms of basically publishing the models that the private sector is currently using to understand the embedded carbon of spend a kind of per sector kind of per pound or per euro basis. And these models exist. There are people in Leeds building this kind of stuff, and they're being used already by like startups and tech companies and everything like that. So I'd really love to hear about what is out there because we've been looking at this from myself, a spend network and we are currently doing a project to work out the embedded spending pretty much all the public spending we can find and we've kind of been creating it for the last 10 years. So yeah, that's my question. What are people using. Do you want to take that? Well, I think actually that's the that's the problem. They're not. And I think that goes public. I'm not saying companies aren't but at local government level, you've got this really distinct with the council side with across the country. You've got this really distinct split where you've got what we call the core cities big places like Manchester and Bristol, you know with the combined authorities where they potentially multiple local authorities put together with many, many pounds of budget, and they make up obviously relatively high numbers of population, but they don't cover very much of the country. And then you've got the vast majority, probably over 300 local councils in the country who have no team devoted to this no expertise. They don't even know what questions to ask when I came into the Cotswolds. I was doing officer level work for about nine months because we had to get budget in place to hire ahead of sustainability to advertise a job to do you know, and get someone in and when that's not unusual. So you've got public sector decisions being made, you've got political will in some cases to have declared a climate emergency. And then you've got to some degree the blind leading the blind. So I think this is a crucial place where if there are citizens out there like yourself who are working on these topics with in the commercial sphere, for example, who know that certain tools and templates are being used around Greenhouse gas protocols and around measuring the carbon footprint of different choices in procurement, then that's what those kind of constructive and helpful approaches to your local politicians to introduce them to these things is what's needed because not only they don't understand in a lot of cases but neither do their officers, and they don't have the budget to take someone on to do this work. And again, then we're back in the position where if Cotswolds District Council needs this then our neighbouring authority in Tewkesbury and in Stroud and wherever else probably needs the same thing. So why can't we have the same tool or a shared officer or whatever it is, you know, so I definitely think that the problem is a lot of councils are not doing it outside of the really big core cities, and often where they're doing it they're doing it on bespoke stuff because they've got a team of 20 people for one city, and everyone else has no one. It's a challenge of both capacity and capability and everything else together, I guess. So any final questions from from the rest of the attendees. See. Well, with that in mind, I think we'll bring it to a close. Incredibly grateful for your taking an hour of your time this afternoon for such an important topic. Again, whilst this is the last tic-tac seminar of this year, we certainly got a busy program planned for next year. Again, we're assuming we might be able to actually meet in person like we used to in the old days at some point. But we'll certainly be taking advantage of the current situation and you're expanding the work we do for these remote seminars as well. Again, grateful to Natty and Rachel Louise and Tom as well. Thank you for your wonderful contributions. Really great answers to many good questions as well. Do join us on the 16th if you want to for a bit of lighthearted end of the year, wrapping up for our virtual Christmas party at three o'clock GMT on the 16th of December. I hope to see many of you at these type of events are in person over the next few months to come and best of luck fighting the climate crisis. We need all the support and help that we all give each other. So thank you.


D-Wack guys, it is Donald Trump's social media company and it's been a very anticipated app for a very, very long time. And everyone knew the date that it was gonna come out. So a lot of people were buying in anticipation. Basically everyone positions themselves early and no matter what the result, good or bad, there is now no more forward-looking catalyst which is gonna continue to push the stock up higher. Educated money that bought ahead of time sold it uneducated people buying it.


So for this pre-poo, I'm going to use one package of the ORS replenishing conditioner, one cup of conditioner with great slip I'm using Swab's coconut conditioner. I'm going to use one-fourth of a cup of the Camille Rose Irrgible Tea, and then I'm also going to add a little bit of honey You're not going to see that here, but I did add about three tablespoons of honey giving this a great mix All right Hey y'all so here is my pre-poo all mixed up now I did end up adding about one-fourth of a cup of honey because I felt like I Didn't feel anything. I just thought I wanted to do it girl So my hair is very old and dirty and it's in need of moisture So not only will I be doing a pre-poo, but I will also be Steaming my hair. Yes. Now steaming your hair with the fabric steamer I've seen a couple of videos with the latest being from nappy food TV It seems to be a little bit of a controversy me and My opinion everything in moderation I live in a very dry climate Phoenix, Arizona where our Level of humidity is ridiculous. Like I've rarely seen it get over 20% So What's the point girl? Many of the hairstylists here they have steamers the hairstylist I go to every now and then or let pender She steams my hair and it's no more than 15 20 minutes I think the longest I was under the steamer with her was 20 minutes and look at the density of my hair African hair god unfortunately had some issues with steaming his hair I think the one video he posted he had been under the steamer for an hour That's too much But Mo knows hair she steams her hair Those you don't know she also stains her hair I have probably steamed my hair less than 10 times But it's something that I should start doing honestly since of the area I'm in I should probably start incorporating this in my regime and do it at least Monthly I'm gonna try to do it now all this other stuff that people have been doing rice water washes I don't have time for that. I really don't but I don't mind plugging this in real quick and pre-pooing So what I'm gonna do is lightly mist my hair with water Now I know a lot of people like to Steam their hair with their product in but I'm gonna steam my hair before adding the pre-poo because The steam is going to open up my cuticles and then once I apply the pre-poo I don't know. I think that it will work better that way in my opinion. So yeah, I'm steaming it You guys see that I am oh that feels good. I'm doing my face girl I'm going to I've been putting the pre-poo on Twisting it back up then once it's all twisted up. I'm gonna do a quick run around with it Because I have a lot of hair so I want to make sure that I'm really getting into everything. Look at that girl A couple of hours and I didn't get a chance to run all of it out in the front But look at my hair. It is extremely soft. So yes, I will yes I will be incorporating steaming into my hair on the monthly basis But I will be using it with my deep conditioner as opposed to my pre-poo So here I am showing you the side of my hair.  Take care. Bye


Okay, hi everyone. It is Friday 23rd of April and I thought I'd jump on and get together. The usual man in the note on the live stream, senior trader Tim Duggan live in Dublin as you can see. And then head of trading peers current to have a bit of a discussion really on two points. One is, we've had a decline in US equities yesterday in fact the biggest slide we've seen in US stocks for for five weeks and this came down on the back of the announcement for US President Joe Biden proposing doubling the capital gain tax for the wealthy. So wanted to get a take on that from both of you. And then, also, not to put, you know, Tim's feet too close to the fire but there was a tweet that went out earlier this week and, and Tim was was was talking about his thoughts about why he feels that we might have seen the top already for this year and, and rightly or wrongly, I just wanted to get the rationale really behind that but also because I know will have a similar let's say trading disposition and style to Tim has also been making some bearish noises. But I wanted to get peers involved as well and I definitely just want it to be an open forum of like where are we at as far as a collective here because what I feel is, I'm a little bit undecided to be honest I do think there's upside. I still feel bullish at this point, but at the moment I'm two to one down. So I just want to know, and I think this is a really healthy thing for any new trader is when we're at let's say a juncture for markets to make a decision let's say going forward. I always find it's best to talk to other people right like what other people think and bullish and bearish. I just want to hear the rationale and then hopefully I can formulate a better opinion myself so I guess Tim will start start with you and, and the kind of thoughts that you had earlier in the week so where did they, they come from. Oh, can't, can't. No pressure, you know, I should be able to hear me now. So, okay, I wasn't very well on Tuesday morning but I was well enough to look at the market briefly. I came in at the top the watch the open. And it just really if I share my chart you'll kind of see fight transition over to this one. I'll be able to see, let's see, oh this the big alright and that does play a part here, but I looked at the spools. And we're at this point here in the spools. And I just thought you know hold on, we took a dip back to the 41 44s last night. And we should be doing we should be kind of at this point we should be kind of cruising on as which is what we've seen a lot of right. You know, a lot of this. And I just it just it just felt like, well we had a gap here on the overnight Monday Sunday to Monday trade. And just thought wow we're not even really making any decent attempt on getting bit over there. And I don't know maybe I've just seen too many highs too much irrational exuberance into these markets and I've just had enough. I just don't believe in the lungs anymore. And so sure enough. Following that, I got strengthen the phone to Joe Biden. And I said don't worry about it Tim, I've got your back. Irish could Irish connection kicking in again. It's it's that green telephone he has on it. That's that's that's that gets him through to this one. So, he said Tim, don't forget, don't worry about it, you know, short triple short leverage ETF on the spy. I said great. So, here we are. We came back to that point pretty much the same area. And here we are. You know the harmonic pattern of the downtrend, whatever, but if the real reason why I transitioned this from a thought to a tweet is this is the VIX right and I talked about this in a video that was too X rated too steamy for Anthony to publish on Twitter or on YouTube. He wanted me to want to be to fully explain it here. So here it is. And this is the VIX. Now we're only looking at daily bars for a ready year, but let's go into Max monthly. This is going way back here to 2005. I remember trading through 2017 2016 2017 2018 and really, we were in a low volatility environment, you know, the top of the VIX was really about 16 and a half 17s. I mean, yeah, we had Balmageddon early 2018, which you know had this self perpetuating VIX, Balmageddon portfolio insurance, lots of people liquidating shorts in the VIX. We printed up to 32s but by and large if I if I gave you the full full chart here you can see this level 16 spot 48 was kind of a highs of 2017 right and this was really the ceiling of volatility in those years of trading. And look what happened. You know on Tuesday. Let me let me tidy this up right. Get back to a day. Get back to one year one day. Look what happened on Tuesday we came we came down. We dodged and then we started to rally off of that level. And I just thought well resistance turns support turns resistance to support. And I think now this is set to bounce hard off but what was the old ceiling on the VIX. And now it's set to bounce and sure enough we are getting you know the VIX is from there we're up. 25% on the VIX. So this is really my thesis and you know, I don't, I don't yeah we're up. We're right 25% on the VIX sense that. Yeah, I guess. Is this a question of timing I definitely think that we had gone through a period where if actually if you look at the S&P on the daily chart and you look at the month of April I mean at some point this this has got to stop going at that rate because it was going pretty vertical at that point. It's almost like for me, the macro view I've had is that the markets have almost looked to price in perfection going forward, the Fed holding off COVID being controlled, vaccinate rollout reopening underway, earnings going to be explosive. And then these kind of few things come to fruition, you have a little bit of a global development with COVID people start talking about, okay, what about the impact that might have then on the longer bigger picture on demand side for the subsequent slower in some of these other very high demand areas for a lot of goods and services so is this a case of a little bit of a pullback now, but we go higher later or what's your take. The first thing to say is that Twitter is a dangerous thing. You know when you throw tweets out like that. I mean, Tim talking. That's that's a call right there guys. So when was that you marked the date what date did you send that tweet 21st of April was it. Let's see. I think that's a very ballsy call personally. I don't agree. I don't agree. Personally, I think when you're looking at the shorter term that kind of technical thesis you just put forward there looking at the spoons yeah looks like I agree you know that way we had that pullback mid week and then we tried to push higher again and it didn't quite get there and obviously the Biden tax news came in and dealt the market a blow but if you look on a longer term look on a weekly chart for example then you know we're still at the very top of what looks increasingly more like some kind of exponential rocket ship. And so, I think as ants just said, April, you know back in the March start of April has been a, you know, supersonic right and I think this is a little bit of a pullback and that's healthy on a long term upward trend. So if we just get into that macro point, the tax, the threatened tax hike is that is that the moment is that right, wealthy investors are now going to panic and sell stocks before this doubling of their capital gains tax comes into place and get sell their stocks book their profit before the tax hike. You know, is that going to lead to sustained selling is that going to lead to wealthy people not investing in stocks anymore is this the end of this post COVID bull run. No, in my opinion.  So that was talking to me if you listen to our podcast today. We'll know to be talking about it before the podcast anyway me and that was talking about how there's midterm elections coming. Yes, the perfect election hearing type, you know, headline grabbing democratic kind of comment right to ramp up those taxes and fine, but there are certain senators. There are some basic sentences that right they're all for tax hikes but not, perhaps not so much on the capital gains side and certainly not to the degree that Biden's threatened and so I think this is Biden's setting out his first stall and I think yes we will get tax increases for tax increases. I don't care if you're wealthy. You need to pay more tax this is a fact when I'm all for that, but you know not doing it in too aggressive a way that it's going to kind of implode the ship but there's certain senators keep your ear out for Joe Manchin is the Virginia senator and also Kristen cinema, who's the Arizona senator there to democratic senators who are on that kind of the side of the party that a little bit skeptical about tax hikes. So if Biden wants to push this through, he's going to need all these guys on board. And I think those that are on that side of the party will probably in the end push to a watering down of what Biden said earlier this week that's one thing to say. That's one thing then just say taxes to go up, you know our wealthy people going to sell stocks. It depends on how much the tax hike is, and maybe, maybe they will, but that doesn't necessarily two things that doesn't mean that the economy is going to crash and therefore stock markets have topped and then they're forever going to go down again. I was reading in the FT about one uber wealthy hedge fund managers crying about this, of course, and he's saying oh my God it's the end of investment and wealthy people now they're not going to be investing in in companies and investing in these new technologies and innovations for growth over the long term instead they're going to consume, they're going to use this money to consume. Well, they're not you know wealthy people that they're already consuming all they can. They've got surplus capital that's why they're investing it so what are they going to do with this surplus capital, still the stock market, even if tax rates are higher is still probably the best and easiest vehicle for them to grow their capital and surplus capital that they don't need to spend right. So, it might trigger a sell off, but then I was talking to add, they'll sell off right realize their gain, pay the tax at the lower rate, then they've got their cash, and what do I stop it. And especially if there's been a dip, right, we'll just buy again. So, in my opinion, this whole tax argument doesn't necessarily mean everyone's going to sell and this is the top. I think the question.  We've just we're seeing the early phase of the cycle here. So this is the post recession. Okay, and the stock market is a lead indicator to the economy. All right, so the stock market has been pricing in the early phase for well at least since November, right, at least when the vaccine kind of things started to kick out. So, the early phase I'd say is the easiest phase to make money was an investor buying large everything's going up. All right, you can pick and choose and you can make more return here than here but basically you're going to make money. And stocks outperform it's their best. It's actually their best part of the cycle in terms of upside. What's going to happen I'd say from the summer onwards where we're going to kind of finish that early, you know, recovery phase and we're going to be into the mid phase, and for the investor that's the hardest phase. It's the hardest phase to find Alpha, because there's less sector divergence. Okay, so it's harder to kind of use a sector rotation play and we're in a bit of a new world because it's post COVID and stuff's going to change you know is, are we going to change our travel habits are we going to change our going to the office habits well yes but we're not quite sure by how much right and so I think I think the second half of this year you're going to it's going to be harder for investors to find out performance but I still think generally that big tidal wave of monetary and fiscal stimulus coupled with huge amounts of cash that consumers are now sat on having spent no money for a year. I still think that that trio, that catalyst is still going to see the stock market trend higher from this point. Tim, you. Okay, you were going to make a point earlier. Okay.   Yeah, it's a much broader world. Now, we have positive yielding crypto assets. You know, we have positive positive yielding defy token space. There's going to be a hell of a lot of startup and innovation coming as we unlock around the world so that's you know money into speculative startups. You know, property is huge these these historical low interest rates, people are going to want to pile into property wherever and whenever they can. I think I don't I don't I don't think a Bruton investor is going to just plan to commit more capital to something that is going to be subjected to 43.8% capital gains tax at this time. I'm just saying I think you're going to get taxed on property though. You would, you would, but it's a surely it's a safer wallet like it has a much lower volatility on your on your on your principle. Yeah, that's true. If you want to put crypto in your bucket. That's your fertility. Well, it's horses for courses. Yeah. So what I, you know, I look, I said on Twitter, I'm perfectly happy to eat this tweet, because I don't get married to any idea about whether the markets going up or down. I, you know, I just trade markets in the direction that they look like they're going to move at any given time and I'll change that idea in a matter of seconds if I have to.  That's fine. You know, I'll put some sauce on it. As this, as I kicked off this conversation. And again, a kind of valuable point to come with this for anyone I think new to markets particularly is that this is a healthy discussion right. It's good to flesh it out and kind of be stress tested on your view, because in a sense you're exercising that view in your strategies and your execution so it's good to have like a well thought out and have conviction behind your call and absolutely it's not makes a market we don't all have to agree but I think there's a lot to be said for for thrashing out what I'd love to happen though if we put this up on YouTube, drop a comment.  Absolutely. Let's get their opinions come off. Absolutely. All right. Thanks both. Thanks guys.


Hi all, in this short video pitch I will explain the difference between the master in marketing management and the master in marketing analytics. My name is Anik Bosmans and I'm the program director of both master programs. What's the difference between the two programs? Well, in the master in marketing management the focus is on managerial marketing courses such as brand management, marketing channel management, marketing communication and strategic marketing management. On the other hand, in the master in marketing analytics program the focus is more on core courses in the field of marketing analytics, think customer analytics, research and social media, market assessment and conjoint analysis. In the master in marketing management you will learn to develop innovative and effective ways to distribute, design, price and promote products and services. In the master in marketing analytics you will learn to analyze the market and the effectiveness of various marketing strategies via state-of-the-art marketing and analytics tools. Both programs have quite some similarities. Both are one-year programs, both allow you to start either in September or in February. In both programs you will have to follow seven courses and write the master thesis and both programs are divided in four units. In this schedule you can see how the weight of the managerial versus the analytical courses differs across the programs. In both programs you will be asked to follow the introduction to research and marketing course and you will be asked to write a master thesis. However, in the master in marketing management program you will follow four managerial courses and two analytical courses. In the master in marketing analytics you follow one managerial course and five analytical courses. In addition, in the master in marketing management you have the option to follow the international marketing course whereas in the master in marketing analytics you have the option to follow courses from related business analytics programs. In both programs we offer a number of extracurricular adopts that prepare you for the job market. In sum, in the master in marketing management the focus is on marketing management courses. You are allowed to take an extra elective from the master in international management and also master in marketing management is offered in English as well as in Dutch. In the master in marketing analytics the focus is on marketing analytics courses and you are allowed to take extra electives from the master business analytics, data science or from the research master in business. If you want you can combine the two programs. If you choose your electives wisely we can exempt two courses per program so you follow two programs of 48 ECTS instead of 60 ECTS each. For example, in the master in marketing management we can exempt two marketing analytics courses from the master marketing analytics and then they can count as cluster B electives in the master marketing management. In the master marketing analytics we can exempt the introduction to research in marketing course from the master marketing management and we also can exempt one marketing management course that can count as cluster D course in the master marketing analytics. If you want to combine the two programs, please take into account that the best thing to do is to first discuss this with your program coordinator so you can actually make up a schedule of elective courses but you also take into account the fact that we cannot exempt you from a master thesis so you will have to write two master thesis and there's no need to start two programs at the same time. You can easily decide to add a second program after you have started the first one. What about career perspectives? The career opportunities in both cases are good. However, the master in marketing management prepares you for functions such as a brand product manager, category manager, account manager, consultant and the like. A good example is Yvette Roost who is now a brand manager at Mondeli. Master marketing analytics prepares you for functions as a marketing intelligence specialist, a database marketeer, a consumer insight specialist and so on and a good example would be Babit Telemans who recently graduated and who is now a database marketeer at all.com. If you have questions, feel free to contact us. Thank you for attending the session. Good luck with your choice and hope to see you all next year in real life. Bye-bye.


In the previous video we introduced the idea of the Caesar Cypher and talked about how one could encrypt messages using this very fundamental, symmetric key cryptosystem. But we also mentioned the great vulnerability of the Caesar Cypher. The Cypher is only as effective as the size of your alphabet and 26 letters is way too small that it's vulnerable to a brute force attack. Even if you could increase the number of characters in your alphabet to be hundreds of characters, that's still going to be insufficient for a computer to brute force all the possibilities. We need our modulus essentially to be hundreds of digits long. I'm not talking about hundreds of characters. The number of characters to be hundreds of digits to truly be secure from computer brute force attacks. And so therefore we need a lot more possibilities than just what the alphabet provides us. So what we're going to do is we're going to increase the Caesar Cypher to what we'll commonly refer to as the Affine Cypher. Which the Caesar Cypher, it follows the basic idea that X, we'll think of as a number we're trying to encrypt, we'll replace X with X plus B, some shift to it. The Affine Cypher is going to improve the number of possibilities by taking X and we're going to replace it with AX plus B. So we're going to multiply X by some value A and then we're going to add a shift to it as well. So we're going to basically stretch the value and then add to it. This is called an Affine Cypher because we're performing an Affine transformation like you might see in linear algebra. Now if A is chosen to be co-prime to your modulus N, then you can divide by A. We know that A inverse would exist. And so then we can solve this equation. We can solve it for Y. So if Y equals AX plus B, then we subtract B from both sides. We get AX equals Y minus B and we divide both sides by A.  And therefore we can decrypt this process. And so that adds a lot more possibilities. So beyond just your modulus N, your number of possibilities is going to be phi of N times N. Where phi of N here, this is Euler's totient function. So you get phi of N times N. So it's going to be much more secure than the Cipher method without that.  And so what would happen to the message algebra? Let's take a look at that in magma right here. If you've been following along with this in the series here for magma, the magma code, you can find from the link from GitHub in the message description here. In order to do this encryption, you have the Caesar encrypt and the Caesar decrypt commands in your compiler. You also need the supplementary procedures of alphabetize and digitize. So you can turn letters into numbers and vice versa. So we can see some messages we had from before. What we're going to do, showing you what's going on here, just erasing this code. So we want to encrypt the message algebra, I believe is what we wanted. I'm doing lower case, the previous was uppercase alphabetize and digitize. They don't care. They're not case sensitive here. So if we encrypt using A was five and B was three. If we run that, we're going to get the message DGHXIKD. Great. And so if we want to decrypt it, then we're going to run Caesar decrypt. We plug in E, the message we have there. And we have to use the same key five and three. And so when we run that, it's going to give back the original message algebra, which admittedly switched everything to uppercase. But that's something we definitely can live with if you can pick a different key if you want to. So it's going to be much more secure than the Caesar cipher. Now I should mention that the affine cipher in terms of professional grade photography, of course, it's going to be pretty. It's going to be still pretty elementary there that even with 26 letters of the alphabet. You're going to get 26 times fee of 26, which fee of 26. That's just the same thing as fee of 13. 26 is two times 13 there. And so that's going to give you 26 times 12. And so, you know, if you look at that, that's going to give you a couple hundred possibilities. So it definitely would be very difficult for a human to do this by hand, but a computer is going to be able to exhaust these possibilities very quickly. So the idea is perhaps there's an encoding process that we can use larger, larger modulus in this consideration. And the answer is, yeah, our encoding process for this lecture is very, very naive. And there can be ways of doing it so that we get a much, much larger modulus from the encoding process itself. So for a large modulus, this is a great improvement over the Caesar cipher because the, because the number of possible keys can be too large to be brute-forced, right? Unfortunately, this is still considered a weak cryptosystem for the following reason. Since different characters in the language, in a language, appear with different frequencies. So for example, if you're in the English language, just using the language I'm speaking right now, I hope that's English, the letter E, for example, it shows up in a random word with a probability of 12.702%. So about 13% of all letters in the English alphabet are going to be the letter E. On the other hand, if you look at the letter X, this comprises about 0.15% of every letter in the English language. Now, admittedly, if you're using X as a spaces, then that's going to change the frequency as well. But we can make these considerations or you can consider these things. And so using the frequency of the letters in a language and a little bit of guess and check, a computer could very easily decrypt anything from a substitute cipher where by substitute cipher, what I mean is every letter is being replaced with a different letter. This is sometimes referred to as a mono-alphabetic substitution cipher. So if you replace letter with letter, like so X is replaced with Y or something like that. The frequency of letters is too valuable of a tool for e-droppers to attack that type of crypto system. So one thing you could do is you could improve the function digitized that we've introduced earlier and you could try to avoid frequencies by using numbers maybe to represent pairs of letters or triples of letters or things. So instead of coding one letter at a time, a mono-alphabetic method, you could try doing something like a pair of letters is then encoded where you could do a substitution like that. That gives you a lot more possibilities and that makes the modulus much, much, much bigger. Now admittedly, these are not without vulnerabilities to frequency attacks as well. You know, because for example, the pair th is much more frequent in the English language versus the pair qx. I don't know if that ever appears, right? And so again, there's some frequency issues that can come into play here. Fortunately, there do exist much more sophisticated digitization processes to protect the ciphers discussed above, but that's going to take us beyond the scope of this lecture series. So what I'm trying to say is that one could implement an affine cipher in practice if the encoding process is sophisticated enough to guarantee a large modulus that if the modulus is big, big, big, then the idea, the brute force technique is not going to work. And so then Alice and Bob can have some security and that Eve cannot trans, or cannot decrypt their message because she doesn't have the key. And without the key, just guessing is never going to work. But again, there's a lot more to this that we're not going to talk about because I just want to give us, to give the viewer here an elementary introduction to these symmetric key cartography type topics, particularly how they are relevant to algebraic problems we've talked about before, such as the Caesar cipher and the affine cipher right here.


We now interrupt your entertainment to bring you the Daily Dose of Weird News. I'm Darren Marlar. This episode is brought to you by the audiobook Could It Be True Volume 1 Urban Legends by Cindy Parmitter, narrated by Darren Marlar. You're a free sample of this creepy and true audiobook at DailyDoseOfWeirdNews.com. North Korea invents the iPad. A North Korean company has launched a new tablet and they've come up with an interesting name for it – the iPad. No kidding. Of course, this product, created by a partially state-owned company called Ryan Hung, is very different from the Apple iPad that we know. The Android operating system is far more limited and users have access to only 40 pre-installed apps including a calculator, a health encyclopedia and an agricultural program. It'll log in to the North Korean intranet and has 1 gig of RAM, 8 gig of storage and a 1.2 GHz quad-core processor. Of course, copyright lawyers will no doubt be interested in such a flagrant abuse of Apple's trademarks, but it's kind of hard to believe anybody with Pyongyang is going to care about that. The fact North Korea has ripped off Western names and ideas several times before, including their own version of Netflix, which generally shows nothing but programs about Kim Jong-un. Mikey says it'll continue to endorse Tiger Woods following his arrest for DUI. He'll be part of their new Just Don't Do It line. A New Hampshire police department has issued a new public service announcement with a message that reminds citizens it is illegal to possess recreational marijuana in New Hampshire, even if you only smoke it in Massachusetts. The idea for the somewhat humorous announcement came after the arrest of 27-year-old Selkette Taylor, who was initially pulled over for using his cell phone while driving. But then the officers saw a bag of marijuana in a cup holder. Taylor's excuse was that he only smoked it in Massachusetts, where recreational marijuana is now legal. Well, along with his creative excuse, he also gave police quite the mugshot, where he appears to be laughing hysterically. The mugshot was used with the new public service announcement. Donald Trump has pulled the United States out of the landmark Paris climate agreement. As a result, I think it's now legal to smoke in the White House. In an effort to compete with Amazon, Walmart is testing a program that allows store workers to deliver packages ordered on the store's website after they finish their shifts on the way home. The company says the step will cut shipping costs, speed the delivery of packages, and allow workers to earn additional compensation. Seeing as most Walmart workers are so underpaid they have to deliver pizzas as a second job anyway, at least we know the Walmart delivery people will have experience. A psychologist says the average person is keeping 13 secrets. And for the record, most of them are about you. A Massachusetts coffee shop owner says he received a cease and desist letter from Dunkin Donuts claiming trademark infringement for using a play on the chain's catchphrase. Steve Coppolaus says he added window art on his Mike's coffee shop in North Attenborough, which said North now runs on Mike's. While he expected a few laughs from customers, Steve says he was surprised to find the letter from the Canton, Massachusetts-based coffee shop chain claiming he was infringing on their America Runs on Dunkin slogan and his variation implied an affiliation. Also, he took down the sign, explaining he wants to be the exact opposite of a corporate coffee chain. Of course, the bigger question is, why does a guy named Steve have a coffee shop called Mike's? A 30-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of murder after three dead bodies were found in a Liverpool home where John Lennon once lived. Well, how do we know John Lennon didn't do it? The New York Daily News printed a headline last week that harkened back to their legendary mid-1970s headline after President Ford refused to bail out then financially strapped New York City. That headline read, Ford to New York dropped dead. Well, last week's headline screamed out, Trump to the world, dropped dead. But then this is also the same paper that had the headline Headless Body found in Topless Bar, so it's hard to take them seriously about anything. The nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island will reportedly be shut down in 2019. Okay, raise your hands if you already thought it was shut down. Yeah, meet me too. A contest named Simply Who Can Drink More Vodka was organized in the city of Volgandosk, Russia, by a local supermarket. A total of 40 men took part and downed vodka which had been put in buckets. Five participants had to be rushed to intensive care and the quote-unquote winner died from alcohol poisoning after downing an estimated three quarts. Okay, here's a tip for you, entering a contest called Who Can Drink More Vodka is never a wise move. The Marlar House mobile app is now available and it's free. You can find me on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Watch Marlar House YouTube videos, check out the t-shirts, mugs, audiobooks and other stuff in the Marlar House store. See what's in my blog and more. It's all in one app and it's free for iOS and Android users. Download it now by clicking on the mobile app tab at DailyDoseOfWeirdNews.com. If you liked this video, please give it a thumbs up and be sure to subscribe if you want to see more. Click that little bell icon next to the subscribe button to be notified when I post new videos. If you're already an official Weirdo, please share this video on your own social media. Find even more weird news that I didn't have time for on the Facebook page at DailyDoseOfWeirdNews.com. I'm Darren Marlar and I'll see you next time, Weirdos!