Hi, this is Allison Sheridan of the No Silicast podcast, hosted at podfeed.com, a technology podcast with an ever so slight Apple bias. Today is Sunday, March 26, 2023, and this is show number 933. It is so good to be able to say ever again. I'm really happy to have at least most of my voice back. It's a good thing we record at five o'clock because about eight is gone again, but it's better every single day. This week's Programming by Stealth is a great lesson on how no matter how long you've been coding, you still get caught out from time to time and think that the universe makes no sense. When Bart was working on the challenge from PBS147, he ran into a bizarre situation that just locked him up for many hours. He actually had to sleep on it, go for a bike ride to figure out what was going on. He did eventually figure out what was going on, but it changed this installment of Programming by Stealth into a walk down what went wrong, what he learned, and he gave him the opportunity to teach us even more about shell scripting. The entire installment is all about the solutions to the challenge from PBS147, so you might want to take a shot at that yourself before listening to a reading this week's installment of Programming by Stealth. You can, of course, find Bart's fabulous tutorial show notes over at pbs.bartificer.net to go along with this week's episode. Speaking of Programming by Stealth, I have a story to tell. When Bart and I first started Programming by Stealth, we were doing something no one had ever done before, at least to our knowledge. Who would have thought that an audio podcast was a good way to learn to program? Well, because we were breaking new ground we had no one to learn from. There was no guidebook to follow. Over the years we've both learned a lot about how to make this crazy idea work. For example, we figured out that while we're recording, communication between the two of us is greatly increased by video. When Bart sees a confused look on my face, he can stop and ask me what I need to have clarified. I can actually raise my hand to get his attention when he's on a roll, but I'm lost on something he said maybe three sentences back. We both wish we'd thought of this at the beginning, but at least we eventually figured it out. Things have gotten much smoother now that we look at each other in video, but we still don't record the video. We only record the audio. Another huge enhancement to learning was when we got the idea for Bart to give the audience challenges at the end of teaching us some new concepts. I know that it's a lot more work for Bart to come up with a clever problem to be solved that lends itself to exactly what he's trying to teach, but it makes a huge difference in cementing these concepts for me and the listeners. Another thing that has helped make it even more fun was when I added a PBS channel to the Podfeat Slack over at podfeat.com slash slack. This gave the community of developer-inclined folks a place to chat about the nerdy-er stuff in computing. It also kept us from bothering everyone in the mainstream channels about those nerdy-er things. Now, not everyone in the PBS channel is probably falling along with programming by stealth, but they're still very helpful to those of us who are learning. Now, recently we started learning about shell scripts. We have some really fun bite-sized challenges from Bart in his series. For example, right now we're working on a shell script that prompts the user with a menu of breakfast items and then we'll print out what they ordered, all from the command line in the terminal. It's super fun. Anyway, as we started working on these challenges, Ian Lessing posted in Slack that he had put his work in process on a service called GitHub. GitHub is kind of hard to explain to non-developers, but it's a place where you can post your work, your programming code, and it's a mirror of what you're actually doing locally on your own machine. So each time Ian makes some progress, he pushes his new work back up to GitHub and that gets updated up on GitHub. Now it takes some courage to post your work in progress so publicly, but that's what open-source development is all about, believe it or not. I figured if Ian had the courage, then I'd do it too. I pushed my work in progress code up to my GitHub account and I put a link in the thread where Ian had posted his. Well then Ben Rose chimed in and he asked a great question. He asked, is there a place for the PBS students to share their work? And that's what started the newest enhancement to the Programming by Stealth podcast.  Bart had thought of this idea years ago and he created a programming by Stealth gallery that was part of the show notes for the show. But it was very cumbersome to maintain and it was really more about publicizing your final work on a web app that you'd created. Something that takes time to maintain is likely to fall onto the back burner for me and especially for Bart. You know, he still works full-time, cycles a couple hours a day, has a home life with his darling beloved and he hosts both Programming by Stealth and his own two shows Let's Talk Apple and Let's Talk Photography. There are literally no more hours to squeeze out of him. So we started throwing ideas around in Slack in the PBS channel and then I started doing some research. It turns out that GitHub has something they call an organization. GitHub organizations allow a lot of granular control over what privileges different people have. I can be the almighty ruler of the organization and then I can invite PBS students as members. I can restrict what members can do or I can give them a lot of freedom. Now I'm much more inclined to give people a lot of freedom especially because I do have to invite people in to join. As near as I can find there isn't even an ask to join option. This should keep out bots and mean people, or at least I hope so. As I started looking at this organization concept, I realized I'd need some people to help me kick the tires and figure out how it should be organized. Ian and Ben seemed like the obvious candidates. When you push code up to GitHub, you do it in what's called a repository, or as the cool kids call it, a repo. We considered having a repo for each installment of Programming by Stealth, but since we're already on PBS147, that seemed a bit, not a great idea. Also remember that a lot of people are not following along real time. For example, Mariana just joined the Slack community and she's on PBS12. We want to make sure everyone feels comfortable and welcome so we can't make this crazy complicated. Then we considered just making a repo for each person who joined. Then they would be able to create a folder structure within the repo for each set of challenges they were working on. But even that could end up with Ian Cole's repo sprawl. Ian wondered if it would work to create one repo for all of the people and all of the assignments, and then to create a folder for each human where they would organize their own solutions. Ben suggested a design where we had one repo like Ian suggested, but then we had a folder for each installment of PBS, and then folders inside for each person. There were pros and cons of that idea, too. Now one of my desires was to allow people to push their challenge solutions up to the organization, but to also be able to push them up to their own repos. I invited both Ben and Ian into the organization. That didn't seem like enough people to break things. So I also invited Dorothy, also known as Mack Lurker, also known as the person who maintains the PBS index. I created a repo for each person, and then the four of us went to town testing out ideas. As we were grappling with the design, Ian suggested that maybe he and I should do a video call to over chatting to, you know, kind of roll all these different ideas around. This was wonderful for so many reasons. First of all, Ian has been a part of the no-silicast community forever. I don't even remember how long he's been in there, and I'd never talk to him directly. He pointed out he'd seen me on video before because he attends the live show from time to time, but I'd never seen him. After seeing him in video, I feel like I have a new friend. Got to talk to him. It was really cool. As we started working through the various ideas, it became quite clear that Ian, like so many other learners and the programming by Stealth community, is actually an accomplished developer. He explained that no matter how much you know, you can still learn more, and he says he learned so much from Bart, even on subjects he thought he had down pat. For example, he's pretty good at shell scripting, but he wants to be great at it, and he's really appreciating what Bart is teaching all of the fundamentals. Anyway, by the time Ian and I got together and did a screen share of the GitHub organization with me driving the screen share, I had really mucked up everything in the GitHub organization. Remember, I said I wanted to be able to put up my solutions there, but also into my own repo. I also wanted to keep my own folder organization with the other stuff in there that's unrelated to the class. I'm glad I did muck things up because I think it was important to work through how to structure the design so that well-intentioned people couldn't break it too badly without us being able to fix it. I was well-intentioned, but boy, did I botch things up. After a lot of testing and changing things around, we settled on Ian's plan, and no, he didn't strong arm me into picking his decision. It took walking through a couple of the repro sprawl methods to understand the advantage of all of the people and all of the solutions all in one repo. With us all in one happy repo together, when the students pull from GitHub, they get everyone's solutions come down to their desktop. If the purpose of this project is to see how other people are solving the same problem, then you want to have everyone's work available to you. We ended up blowing away all of the repos everyone had created and we made one called pbs-challenges. Inside the repo, we created four folders for the four beta testers. As soon as we did that, I realized I needed to change the name of the organization. You see, I had named it pbs-challenges. So that meant we had a repo named pbs-challenges in an organization named pbs-challenges. That was just silliness. So we renamed the organization pbs-students. That leaves the door open for future uses for the organization and we can make other repos when we feel like it. As soon as we changed the name to pbs-students, I realized we needed an avatar for the organization. Ian laughed as I pulled up Affinity Designer with Bart's programming by Stealth Logo as a scalable vector graphic, an SVG, and I started to play with different design ideas. I opened the Noun project and I did a search for graduation cap and I started to drag in different versions of it. Now, I didn't waste all of Ian's time on this, but I did tell him I probably spent hours working on it. He laughed and said, oh, I'm sure you will and then you'll figure out something to automate about it. I think he sees me. Anyway, I am so delighted with the avatar that I came up with. Ian's, I say I came up with it, but all the good parts of it were Ian's ideas, but I did the work. Anyway, he suggested a jaunty tilt to the graduation cap and maybe a different color. So I made the graduation cap red on top of Bart's little ninja and it is absolutely adorable. I just love it. There was one last thing to do and that was to write some read me files to explain to people how this is going to work. I explained how the folder structure was going to work in the read me and how everyone is expected to play in their own sandbox. I included this sentence, I expect civilized behavior in this organization and since it will be filled with those telecast ways, I know you'll be kind, supportive, and respectful. I'm not really worried about it, but it does help to say that out loud. So I hope if you're a student of the programming by Stell series, you'll join us in the PBS-Students organization and share your work. If you just want to lurk and see what it looks like, you can go to github.com slash PBS-Students and check it out. If nothing else, go there to see how adorable the avatar is. To join the organization, you do need to have a free or paid GitHub account. So when you contact me through whatever means you like, you know my email address, you know how to do it in Slack, you can find me on Mastodon, you know all of these places. Be sure to tell me your GitHub handle because for me to invite you in, I need that. I can't do anything without it. Anyway, I'm super excited about this and learning from all of the kids in class who know a lot more than I do. All right, let's switch gears here and listen to another interview from the CSUN Assistive Tech Conference that Steve and I attended just, what is it, a week or two ago. I am in the all-terrain cane booth here with someone who introduced themselves as Sedona Dave, also known as David Epstein. And what is it you have here, Dave? I've got the all-terrain cane. This is a super strong, super lightweight mobility cane designed by a blind guy, me, to stay active and hiking the wilderness trails of Arizona and everywhere else I wanna be. Wait a minute, I'm sighted and I fall down on flat surfaces, you're hiking with a cane. I am, yes. It's a super strong mobility cane. It's what I need, what I feel I need on the trails. What does a mobility cane do? Obstacle detection, terrain changes, navigation. Well, what do I need hiking? The same thing, obstacle detection, terrain changes. I need to know what's on the trails but the regular street cane just wasn't cutting it. It's, they're made to be light and flexible and easy to pack away but they don't do anything on the trails. They don't offer any support. They're essentially useless and... Well, they get stuck in crevices and stuff just kind of pops around instead of moving. Right, they do. The joints pop out, they get stuck, they bend, they break, they shatter and they're just, they're just not effective on the trails. Now, I need support. There's really nothing to hold onto out there other than what, dead cactuses and dead trees and javelinas. When I first ran into trouble on the trails, in the middle of my orientation, mobility training, the sun went down and I lost all contrast and I was not having a good time and my wife asked me what seems to be the problem. She didn't like my poetry. And I said, well, I can't see. I lost contrast. I don't belong here. I can't do this. I need something. I need this, but I don't know what this is. And that was really the pebble that launched the avalanche to what we have today as the all terrain cane. This turned out to be a mobility cane that I can use for support, for balance, for slowing me down or breaking on the trails. As Dave is describing this, he's pushing on the cane and leaning on it and it's flexing some, but it's not bending like a traditional cane would. Exactly. I needed this to be super, super strong to do what the instructors tell me not to do. Lean on the cane, vertically load the cane. They're like, no, I'll never do that. Why? Why are you not supposed to do? Why? We don't know. Why? I need this. Can you describe the cane itself for people who are listening? I would be so honored to. The cane does differ from the normal street cane in many different ways. Starting from the top, we've got a 16-inch grip, not just nine inches, but 16. That allows us plenty of room for choking up, either with a cane grip or a ski pole grip for added strength and support while descending, protecting our shoulders, using our upper body for strength. The top half of the grip does have that flat section we're accustomed to. Bottom half. I don't know anything about the top of a flat spot on a cane. You feel that flat section. That's a guide. That's for us to put our index finger on to help navigate with the cane. It feels good. It's for feeling. Exactly. Bottom section is just a round profile, and that's good for the ski pole grip, good positive grip. I'm not on a slippery shaft. If I need to securely hold on, I'm locked on down 16 inches. And then there's a hinge at that point. There is a hinge, but there's something else as well. At the bottom of the grip, there's a flip lock. I open this up. It's kind of like a traditional tripod. Exactly. It's an external lock that I open up, and now I can extend the cane from 51 inches to about 62 inches. Oh, holy cow. That's like almost as tall as you are. We call it one size fits most, but it really is one cane that can handle many different, not only heights and size people, but different activities. Yeah, if you're going down a real steep terrain, you need it to be longer, right? Exactly. When I ascend on the trails, I set the cane nice and short. So why is this so awesome and unique? Well, it's an adjustable length cane, but it's also a folding cane. This is a three section folding cane. So he just pulled it apart. I don't know if people, everyone has seen the way canes fold up, but you pull them apart. Like you would the tent poles do this, where you pull it apart and it's got a flexible line, it's got a spring in it and you pop it. So he's now folded it into pretty small three pieces. Three sections, right. So we've got a three section folding, extendable length cane. But the bottom of the cane is what really caught my eye when I walked up. It's red, so we've got black, white and red. Yes, now the bottom of the cane, now the mobility canes are white and red reflective. That's how they look. That's for the sightlings. The sightlings, yes, the sighted hordes to be able to identify it. So I made sure the cane is white and red highly reflective. But I also chose a two-winds rolling ball at the tip. I feel that it covers mostly all terrains that I'm working on, not only smooth concrete, but the very coarse asphalt out in Arizona. My daily walk with a dog starts with the concrete, asphalt, dirt, rock, and now I'm on the wilderness trails with him. Wow, so this rotates about the axis of the cane. It does, yes. Okay. It's called a rolling ball, two-winds. And I went with red because why not? Oh yeah. Because why not? They don't have to be white and boring. Let's bling it up for the kids and the adults. We're actually making our cane tips in four different colors. We've got red, yellow, a beautiful sherbet pink and a red orange. I'm really excited about those colors. Colors are fun. They really are. There's no need for us to be stuck in a corner or have boring canes. Gotta tell you about the materials. Super, super strong designed for vertical loading. The cane is made of a grade nine titanium alloy. Oh wow. That gives it a super strength. That's expensive though, right? It is, but why do we have canes that break? A car door can hobble us. I find that insulting. Worth everything. So for the non-engineers in the crowd, titanium has a very high strength to weight ratio. So you could do it in steel and it could be just as strong, but it would weigh a lot. So titanium is a lot more useful. Absolutely. It keeps the weight down and the strength up. And again, it's able to handle car doors or cobblestones or anything else that's going to bend or break our canes. We need this. And this is finding its way into all the developing countries where they don't have access to great roads or great infrastructure. That's a good point. That could be just walking to go get water, not hiking. Daily living. Just like me in Arizona, it's my everyday cane. Oh it is, okay. That's interesting. So if people want to learn more about the all-terrain cane, where would they go? Simply go to awarewolfgear.com and that's A-W-A-R-E-W-O-L-F-G-E-A-R-dot-com or awarewolfgear.com. And you can put a forward slash A-T-C in there if you want or it'll take you right to our site where you can see our great wear, our great line of clothing, the awarewolf gear, high visibility clothing for low vision people. Find yourself to the all-terrain cane page. Great information. We've got smoke and deals on ball packages. Very cool. Very cool. Well, Sedona is one of my favorite places. I'd love to see this. This is a really cool invention, Dan. David, I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to us. Thank you so much for your time. I absolutely appreciate it and great to see you here. Enjoy the rest of the show and keep crushing it. If I can send you home with a red rock from Sedona, I'd certainly love to as well. That's great fun. Yeah, it's the last day, we can let them go, but really enjoy it. You don't want to carry them home. I don't want to carry them home. All right, thanks David. Have a great day today. So I have two regrets from that interview. One is we forgot to take a rock home. We really should have done that because I hope you didn't have to carry them all back. But the other problem was that during the interview, when he said it was made of titanium, I said, whoa, that's expensive. I neglected to ask him, how much does the cane cost? I did ask him after the show and the cane is only $120. I really wish I'd asked him while we were at the recording. Anyway, a lot of people in the live show are getting excited about this cane and other people I talked to at the conference said, oh yeah, I've got to check that cane out. So all terrain cane from a werewolf really sounds like a hot product. I'd like to welcome the two newest heroes of the Podfeat podcast. And that's Aliyah Dudley and Graham Shepard. Why are they our heroes, you ask? Because this week, they both went to podfeat.com slash Patreon and decided to support the show financially. Aliyah is a frequent attendee of the live show and Graham even does reviews for the podcast. And on top of that, now they're patrons too. I want to thank you both for all you do for the Podfeat podcast. Bode Graham, host of the awesome Kilowatt podcast is back with another installment of Bode's wacky inexpensive EVs. How are you doing today, Bode? I am doing great, how are you, Allison? I'm doing good. Well, let's see, last time you were on was, we looked it up September of last year, where we learned about a car that was covered in solar panels from Sonos Motors, a three-wheeled vehicle from Apptera and something I would refer to as a real car with a Chevy Bolt. I understand you've got new cars for us this time. I do, we should update the Sonos Motors car. They're no longer going to build that car. They decided that that's just not going to work. The system that they used for the solar panels, they're going to use that for existing vehicles, mostly like buses and bigger vehicles like that. Okay, well that's probably good because that was a seriously unattractive vehicle. It was not pretty for sure. Very industrial looking. It was like dark gray and just, oh, it was pretty ugly. So what are we going to talk about this time? How many cars do you have for us? I have three cars and this time around we're a little bit more worldly than we were last time. A lot of the vehicles that we talked about were focused towards Europe and the United States. This time we've covered Africa, New Zealand, Australia, Asia, and then of course Europe and stuff like that as well. But no cars we're going to talk about today are coming to the United States as of this time. Oh, okay, sounds good. So first up we have the Volkswagen ID2 All, which is a terrible name for a car and VW should be ashamed of themselves. The ID2 All is between a Volkswagen Polo and a Volkswagen Golf. So it's a smaller vehicle. The overall exterior of this vehicle is consistent with Volkswagen's other EVs, like the ID4 and the ID3. By exterior you mean like just the look and feel of the car? It looks like a different version of the same car? Right, if you were driving by it, just passing it on the road, you'd know it was a Volkswagen just by the design language. Oh, okay. As far as the interior goes, it's quite a bit more simplistic. It's got a 12.9-inch touchscreen infotainment on the center display and then it's got a digital instrument cluster. Is 12.9 considered small? I think that's considered average. Yeah, okay. But you're saying more simplistic, meaning not a lot of buttons and knobs? Yeah, there are buttons and knobs for the HVAC and they have some thumb wheels and knobs on the steering wheel, but beyond that, there's not a lot of buttons and knobs on this car. Well, you know how I feel about HVAC control knobs? There should be HVAC control knobs or at least buttons, real physical buttons because I need to change temperature all the time. I don't wanna look down at my screen anymore. Yes, and you're gonna like the last vehicle that we're gonna talk about. That's a good vehicle. But for the Volkswagen, it's got very nice specs for this ID2 all. It's a front-wheel-drive vehicle. It's got a very spacious interior, 150 kilowatts of charging. So that's a decent amount. I think just as comparison, the Chevy Bolt is like 75 or something like that. It's pretty low. 222 horsepower, which will get you zero to 60 in under seven seconds. It's not a good time nowadays, but back in the 70s and 80s, that was a pretty good time. 450 kilometers for range, or if you want me to convert that to miles, it's 280 miles. So back to the 150 kilowatt charging, I'm always stuck on this. So that's the rate, that rate, that's how fast it can charge. Correct. So it can accept that much. So that isn't super fast. It's not as fast as like Hyundai has their 800-volt system. So that will accept, I think it's twice as much of a charge, but it's still not bad. Wait, wait. 800 is a lot bigger than double 150. I'm having units problems here. The architecture is 800 volts, and we're going to get into an area that I definitely can't back up. Volt watts, we need to go get Steve. I know, but the 800-volt system, it can accept a faster charge. Okay. Volkswagen is using the MEB platform, which is their skateboard platform for EVs for this vehicle. If we want to get deep into the woods, Volkswagen has an MEB plus platform that they're developing now. That doesn't look like this vehicle is going to take advantage of that. This is just going to be the standard MEB platform, which is great. A lot of people like it, and 150 kilowatts of charging. So if you pull up on a charger that can deliver 300 kilowatts, you're only going to get 150. The battery management system is going to keep it down to that 150. So that makes sense. It does. I wanted to make sure that's what I was hearing because we just went to a charger where we topped out above a thousand kilowatts on the Tesla. Oh, nice. So 150 sounds really slow to me, but maybe that's good for a small car that this car probably weighs a lot less in our car, so you probably don't need to charge as much to get the same kind of range. Yeah, I don't think they announced any battery sizes. At least I didn't find any battery sizes for this. Okay. I would imagine that it's probably between 60 and 70 kilowatt hours, which is roughly what you have in your Model 3. Yeah, that's getting up there. And we got 75, I think, but yeah, okay. Tesla has amazing efficiencies in their car where other car companies just can't come close, so they just got to put bigger batteries in. Now, I'm obviously just talking based off of experience. Like they haven't announced anything, but if I had to guess, that's what I would guess. Yeah, yeah. For people's comparison, Chris Ashley's Ford F-150 has the same range as our car, but the battery's literally twice as big. Now, the vehicle's a lot heavier, but still it's twice as big. Yeah. It takes them a lot longer to get to the same charge that we would be able to get to, but okay. So, but this is a small light car. It's got reasonable charging speeds and respectable off the line. What's it gonna cost somebody? It's gonna cost right around $27,000 US or 25,000 euros. And again, this car is unlikely coming to the US. It's not gonna get here. Sure, but for $27,000, I could sit at the electric pump for a little longer for $27,000, that's really good, right? Your goal was to try to find cars under $30,000? Yeah, and it becomes increasingly harder after the first three. So, this took me all morning to look these up and make sure that I was under the $30,000. $30,000 US is what my goal is. Right, right. When can somebody actually get one of these? They're looking at production starting somewhere in 2025. Okay, all right. Is it okay if I just mention the ID-1? You can mention anything you want, Bodie. The ID-1 is an even smaller car and a much better named vehicle than the ID-2 all. This car, according to Volkswagen, will have a 250 mile range of 402 kilometers and it's gonna start at about 20,000 euros or $21,000. Ooh. So, a tiny little car, that's gotta be for the European market too, right? Yeah, yeah. Because we only want bigger, fatter cars in California because we're getting bigger and fatter to get into them, I guess. Or we don't know the specs on the ID-1. We know that it's gonna come out sometime in 2027. So. Okay, that's so far out. I don't believe in it. Yeah, it's a teaser. At least we can make plans. It's not even a concept. It's a thought. Make your cute little plan. So, it's kinda like the Honda electric vehicle then. It's a twinkle in somebody's eye. That's all it is. Honda does have an electric vehicle in Europe and it's tiny and it's cute. Well, they do. Yeah, yeah. I'll send you a picture of it later. All right, so that's what we got from VW. What else we got? The next two companies are gonna be Chinese automakers. So we're gonna start with BYD, which actually stands for Build Your Dreams. They were founded in 2003, but they're a subsidiary of a much bigger company. Kind of like a conglomerate like Hyundai, for instance. They build hybrid gas and electric vehicles, but we're only gonna concentrate on the electric vehicles for today. Fun fact, they are the largest producer of electric buses. So if you're in a city anywhere around the world and you were riding an electric bus, they probably built it. Oh, wow, wow. The Chinese market isn't a market that I'm gonna be involved in. I'm glad from the planet's perspective that China's doing so well on EVs, right? Because they got a smidge of a little bit of a pollution problem, just a little bit. Yes, yes. Well, the good news, and I'm not down on Chinese automakers. I've heard people say not very nice things about Chinese automakers, but honestly, they're building really good cars and they're gonna be like Toyota was in the late 70s and early 80s. They're going to be, once they get a foothold in the US market, they're gonna be just like Toyota because they're building really compelling vehicles. I don't want to speak at a turn. Rod Simmons was mentioning on the SMR podcast the same thing, and I emailed them and I was like, you were 100% correct. This is something that US automakers and consumers in the United States and North America should pay attention to because they will eventually make their way to our shores. Given the political climate changing, perhaps. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no. I mean, war's prohibiting. Well, and human rights violations and all those pesky little things that keep us from doing a lot of business with them. But it is interesting to see how they're actually killing it in the electric vehicle market. What else do we need to know? What is the car we're coming up with here? So today we are gonna talk about the BYD Seagal. Now, BYD has a very funny naming convention. They have their ocean line, which includes the Seagal, the eel, the dolphin. It's just a, I don't know if that's a joke or if they're being cute. I like it too. It's playful. It's better than ID to all. Right, right. I don't know if I'd ever call anything that I'd want to make money on a Seagal, but you know, that's their thing. The Seagal is a very small four-door hatchback. It's designed for city driving. We only know what we know about this vehicle at this point because they filed paperwork with China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. So nothing's officially, as far as I know, been announced by BYD, but once you make those filings, it's pretty clear that this vehicle's on its way to market. The Seagal will come equipped with a front-mounted electric motor, which give you about 74 horsepower. It's gonna feature LFP batteries and the general thought is it's gonna be a 30 kilowatt-hour battery, which is not a very big battery at all. I would guess that would give you between 120 and 150 miles of range for that size of vehicle. Hey, Bodi. Yes, ma'am. For people who don't listen to every single bit of my new show about battery design by listening to the Kilowatt podcast, you said an LFP battery. What does that mean? Okay, so right now there are two main chemistries and there are different variations for these, but you have LFP batteries, which are lithium-iron phosphate batteries. These batteries are less energy dense, but they're more durable. Like you can charge an LFP battery to 100% multiple times and have less battery degradation than you would with a cobalt-manganese lithium-ion battery, for instance, because those cobalt-manganese batteries are very, very energy dense, but they don't have that durability like the LFP batteries do. So do you have to put more of these LFP batteries in and end up the car ends up weighing more? That sort of thing? Correct. Yeah, there's a trade-off for sure. Okay. Like I said, we don't have a lot of information about this car. There's some spy photos showed a central touchscreen. So just like Tesla and other EV manufacturers, there looks to be a variety of physical buttons and a wireless phone charger. So that's about all we know about the vehicle at this point. Oh, wow. Do we know anything about pricing? So right now it's between 60,000 and 100,001, but if you want me to do the conversion, that's between nine and $15,000. Wow. Which is really affordable. Again, you're not getting a lot of range. You're not getting a lot of frills for your money, but you are getting a quality car that you're gonna be able to drive around. It looks like a Nissan Leaf to me.  Oh, I think it's cute. Bodie's got links to all of these so you can go look at pictures and stuff. I think it looks neat. I like it. You can kind of tell it's a utility car. If you had to compare it to something that is a little bit more known, it's about the size of a Keanero or a Hyundai Kona EV. It's in that class. Okay, yeah, yeah. And then if you're interested in BYD and you don't live in the United States, I would definitely look at the BYD Auto 3 Ato ATTO 3. This vehicle is getting tons of really good reviews, not in the US. Do you know how much that one costs? That one's around, I think it was 47,000 pounds in the UK. Okay, and pounds divided by square foot per fortnight, British imperial units, we get some dollar figure. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm just gonna guess 35,000 euros. Okay. So this looks like a grown-up car. It's a little bit bigger, sort of an SUV. That looks pretty nice too.  One, for affordability for everybody. But two, for people who can afford two cars, I really think the model we might end up with is one little tiny, efficient electric vehicle that you use for going to the market. And basically every need that I have, go to the gym, go to the beach, go to Costco, and then another car that you use for longer distance things. I think that might be the sweet spot. Yeah, I agree with you 100%. Yeah, my wife only works a quarter of a mile from where we live. She drives a van back and forth. She doesn't probably need to do that. Right, right. She could do a skateboard. Wait, that's the other one was built on a skateboard, you said, right?  Ah, okay, okay. You can get her electric scooter, right? Yeah, she wouldn't ride it. But I went the wrong way. It's 54,000 euros is the price. Okay, that's the ATTO. Yeah. Atto three. Price is varied depending on your region. So don't let that deter you. Check it out. Cool. All right, what's a third contender? Are you getting into the weird yet? This is my favorite car. And yes, it's not weird. It's stylish. It's iconic. It's got iconic looks. This is the GWM aura, which that stands for the Great Wall Motors. It's another Chinese auto manufacturer. And the aura is their EV line. The cool thing about GWM and BYD is they build their vehicles in China, but they sell them all over the world. Great Wall Motors is in Africa, Europe, UK, Asian countries, South America. So widely available. This next vehicle, the aura is gonna be launched soon if it hasn't already been launched in Australia and New Zealand. If you click on one of the links there, you'll see the aura. And I'll just let you have an opportunity to tell me what you think it looks like. I think it looks like a mushroom. Oh, really? Sorry, I stole that from Rob Dunwood. That's what he refers to. Well, there's one version that's kind of got a flat front on it and we're looking little eyeballs. The pictures look very different, but I think they're different auras. There's different versions of the aura. So if you're looking at aura's website, they have all sorts of different auras. One of them has sort of a Pujo sort of look maybe. Yeah. Is that what you were going for? It's got a very European style to it. And in Australia and New Zealand, unfortunately, this is just called the aura. But in other parts of the world, it's called the funky cat or good cat. That's the actual branding of the vehicle, which I think is really cool. Okay. So you won't drive a car that's called a seagull, but you'll drive one that's called the funky cat? I love cats. Cats are awesome. Just don't like seagulls. I got you. Okay. Yeah, I mean, seagulls are gross. I don't know if you know who Mr. Bean is. Yes, yes. Yeah, this is like, I instantly thought Mr. Bean rolling around in this vehicle. Only it's probably something cooler than what he would drive, but it's in that same vein. Yeah, it really depends on which aura you're clicking on. Cause some of them look more mushroomy than others. Yeah. And some look very, like you say, they look kind of old style, like James Bond kind of a car. Yeah. So the aura, adora, it's funny. That one looks a little bit like that Honda that I was talking about, that Honda EV. Okay. I gotta go find that to see what that one looks like. It's on the aura website at the bottom of the page. Which of the auras are you talking about when you're saying we've got one under 30,000? It's just called the aura in Australia and in New Zealand. I don't know how to tell you. There's an aura and an aura sport. This is just the aura. I don't know how to describe it. I would think that everything would just be named the same no matter which country and as long as it wasn't offensive and for what a reason, that's just not the way they do things. So what do we know about the funky cat otherwise known as the aura? Well, we talked about this. It's got a very classic European style. The interior feels super retro but it has a lot of technology built in and there's a mix of buttons that look like old school like from the 60s flip buttons that you would find in your vehicle when I was little eight tracks were big. And you know the button to eject the eight track? Like it was so hard to push that my little fingers were not even strong enough to push it. That's what it kind of looked like to me. Those big clunky buttons although they're very elegant and nice in this vehicle but you can turn on the HVAC with just hitting the button just hit it down, hit it up, you turn on the HVAC. Now if you wanna change the controls and the temperature and stuff like that you do have to monkey with the touchscreen but it looks very nice, very retro on the interior. The seats all come like it's just not your standard car. The seats are very styled. I don't know how else to put it. A lot of it's two tone. Like I'm looking at one that's kind of a teal blue with white. It's got like quilting on the back on the tops of the back seats. So yeah, I see what you mean about looking and feeling kind of retro. I don't quite understand how a button reminds you of the really, really annoying difficulty to push in eject button for eight tracks and then saying, yeah, it's really cool and easy and slick. It seems sort of the opposite thing. Well, yeah. Well, I mean, I'm going back to sitting in my dad's car when I was a little kid and trying to eject birds of paradise out of the eight track. But it just has those four teeth like an eight track player does. Wow, that brings back memories. My father had an eight track cassette in his car. And the song we always played was Shoe Fly Pie and Apple Pan Dowdy by Dinah Shore. And when he passed away, my brother found the cassette and so I still have it. The eight track, I should say. Oh yeah, that's cool. It's good stuff. It's good stuff right there. It is. All right, so this is a coupe, a four door. Did you already say? It is a four door. It's about the size again of a Volkswagen Golf. Your listeners are probably going to be really happy to find out that you can listen through carplay or Android Auto. You don't have to buy eight tracks for this thing. OK, good. And then it also has one pedal driving. It's not too aggressive or too lenient on that one pedal. I've heard some people complain that when you let off, it's immediately on that regenerative braking and that feels uncomfortable in terms of making the motion sick. And then on the other side, some people have complained about other vehicles where you let off and you don't know that the region's on because there's so little of it. All the reviewers that I read had nothing but good things to say about the one pedal driving. Yeah, so for anybody who hasn't driven an electric vehicle with regenerative braking, basically it's like a golf cart.  And Mike, I go literally, I would say maybe once a week I use the brakes the rest of the time. I'm just using the accelerator. If I'm using the brakes, it's either because an emergency occurred of some sort or I just misjudged the distance or I forgot I'm going down a big hill, that kind of thing. So I am a huge fan of regenerative braking, but if it's not done well, I can see that if you start to let off and it decelerates too quickly, that would be alarming and difficult to get used to. Yeah, yeah. As far as price goes, the aura is really well priced. Now, this is gonna be $44,490 Australian dollars, which puts it in at 29,910 US dollars. So it's under that 30,000 mark. It limbo's under. Yeah, yeah, just barely, but for that price you get a 126 kilowatt motor. You get two battery pack options, although you'd have to pay a little bit more for the extended battery, but it's 48 kilowatt hours or 62 kilowatt hours, which gets you between 310 to 420 kilometers, which is 190 to 260 miles. That's pretty good. Overall though, I think this is a really good car. Yeah, it's definitely an interesting car. It would be a car of a certain taste. You know, I don't remember what the cars look like in Australia and New Zealand to think whether they are more retro or whether that would be cool. You know what's growing on me the more I look at it. I think I was just looking at, there's one on the main webpage for ORA that looks really strange to me. That's the mushroom one. I kind of like the retro looking one. Yeah, me too. And it does really cool things. Like when you unlock the car, the front headlights, they have like, I don't know, they greet you kind of like in the same way that the F-150 Lightning will greet you with its front light. It just kind of does this like, I don't even know how to explain it. The lights light up in sequence just to tell you hello. And the same thing happens from the back of the car with the brake lights as well. That's cute. So when you get close to it with your key card or your fob or your phone or something, it'll greet you. Yeah. And you know, I think what a lot of, especially US automakers lack is that kind of like that fun tongue-in-cheek whimsy like Tesla has boatload of it, but other car companies, little things like your car greeting you makes people feel good. And honestly, every time I see somebody that is reviewing a car and it has that feature, they make sure to point it out. So it's obviously making a mark with people, you know? Yeah, I don't know. We're missing that. We're boring. I know what you're talking about. I remember distinctly the first time I plugged my red iPod shuffle in, I might have been the iPod Nano, I plugged it in and I opened up iTunes and it had a picture of the device and it was red. Yeah. And it just tickled me that it was mine. It wasn't just you have generically plugged in a device. You know, it was mine. It was cute. I liked it. You are 100% correct.   You want it to kind of reflect who you are, kind of the things that you value or at least feel like the vehicle appreciates you if we could put feelings on it. I don't know how else to say it. All those little things that kind of bring you internal joy make the vehicle more valuable. Yeah. It's a funny thing. It's hard to, I can picture as you're trying to push this as a design feature, trying to say, well, how much more money are we going to make because of that? But how you feel about something changes it. I definitely agree that that's a lot better. Yeah. NEO has a really cool assistant. NEO is another Chinese company and it's called Numie. And I might be getting the name wrong now that I'm doubting myself. But this vehicle, it has a little circular display on your dash and it'll make facial expressions at you. You can tell it to tell you jokes. Now these jokes are in Chinese but you can tell it to roll up the windows. If it's going to rain, it'll have a little display of it raining. So you know the roll up your windows and stuff like that. It's just, it's a really well thought out product. I think we like little robots and things that look like us too. So that's part of the face on that. That probably works. Hey, I just found Honda is actually saying 2024 for the prologue, their EV SUV. So that's only now a year away but there's not much more about it. And actually there's a little, you got a gallery and some stuff. Oh, you can do VR to look at it if you want. So maybe someday Honda will have a car for us. Yeah, that Honda and Sony have a car. You can, you can look that up as well. It's a cool looking vehicle. I can't imagine how much it's going to cost. Yeah. Well, I saw a concept of it at CES. Okay. Well, at the LA auto show, they had nothing. They had a picture of the prologue and that was it. Yeah. They unveiled it at CES. So they have a really terrible name and I can't remember what it is. That's how terrible it was. The prologue? Oh, no, but you talk about the Sony one. Okay. Yeah, the Sony and Honda, they came together and made one company outside of Sony and Honda that they both own. Oh, a Fila. Yeah, that's it. A-F-E-E-L-A. No, no, you can't call it that. No, that's not it. I feel you, I just, I don't like that at all. That just creeps me out. Maybe it's like, I feel a good. Okay, no, no, this is not. No, that's, I'm not even going to look at the pictures of that. That's disgusting. It's a cool car. It's a terrible name. It is a terrible name. All right, Bodie, well, this has been fun. It does look like you have succeeded at your goal of bringing us three that these are not as wild and wacky. These look like they might be real cars. So that's really fun. Whether their names are good or bad, we'll see. Yeah, only VW. On the naming, but still a cool car, right? Yeah, no, no, all of this is great. And I'm pushing more and more for more affordable vehicles. I mean, nobody's going to listen to me, but I want more affordable vehicles so more people can buy these cars and not spend 50 to $70,000 on an average EV. Right, right. That'll be a much better world when we get there. Well, this has been cool. So when people want to listen to the Kilowatt podcast, how do they find it? Well, you can just search Kilowatt in your favorite pod getcher of choice.   The magic of editing? Yeah. If you want to listen to the most apologetic and yet talented podcaster I know, you should definitely check out the Kilowatt podcast where he talks about electric vehicles all over the place and analyzes their financial results and talks about predictions and complains about the fact that he will never, ever, ever get the Cybertruck he's been waiting for. You should definitely check out the Kilowatt podcast. All right, bye, Bodhi. Thank you, Alson, appreciate it. Okay, so if you've heard this just now, you probably have noticed that Bodhi didn't stammer at all.  I went back and I did edit the daylights out of that. So he is fabulous on his own podcast and there were some reasons things were a little stutterier there for both of us than would have been before. I cut out a lot of my stuttering as well. So anyway, go over to find Kilowatt in your podcatcher of choice and enjoy more of Bodhi Grimm. Well, that is going to wind us up for this week. Did you know you can email me at allisonatpodfeed.com anytime you like. If you have questions or suggestions, just send it on over. You can follow me on mastodon at podfeedatchaos.social. Remember, everything good starts with podfeed.com. If you want to join the conversation, you can join our fabulous Slack community over at podfeed.com slash slack where you can talk to me and all of the other lovely no-silly castaways including the programming nerds in the PBS channel. You can support the show at podfeed.com slash Patreon like Alia and Grimm did this week or you can do a one-time donation at podfeed.com slash PayPal like Kristoff did last week. And if you want to join in the fun of the live show head on over to podfeed.com slash live on Sunday nights at 5 p.m. Pacific time and join the friendly and enthusiastic no-silly castaways. Thanks for listening and stay subscribed.


Welcome to The Advocate, your Sunday reminder that important conversations are among the necessary tools for a saner society. Today, I'm pointing my spotlight on the religiosity of Nigerians, Christians and Muslims who holy pass. Raymond's focus is on youth empowerment. As always, discussions around our mental health are always welcome, so Eji Mai is saying today that suicide is never an option. Baba Shola who joins us for the first time today talks about the struggle of new political parties in Nigeria and finally, Kingsley is back again and is here to reveal to us who Nigeria's enemy is. As always, your panelists are here to share ideas aimed at provoking thoughts with no holds but stay with us. Nigeria's religiosity, Islam or Christianity, which one better pass? As religious people, sharply divided along religious lines, at least that is what we are made to believe, many have queried the impact and influence of religious bodies on the total growth of the nation. Rather than engage in a cycle of blame game, the major question should be, one, in a nation where we claim to be Christians and Muslims, premium Times reports that in 2016, Nigerians spent over 208 billion Naira on alcohol for consumption. This total amount was higher than the budget of understate for that year. We have a market so vibrant that major Ghanaian alcohol beverages are selling millions of bottles in Nigeria annually, yet both major religions frown at alcoholism, yet the gods are not to blame. We remain a major market for the sale of condom. Society for Family Health says Nigerians use an estimated 400 million condoms annually and believe me we could have sold more but for the fact that many people see condom as a hindrance to total pleasure. You know what I'm talking about. You call a Christian businessman in church and he would bluntly lie to you, telling you he's in Oklahoma, when in reality he's in the heart of Okokomiko, somewhere in Lagos. During Ramadan, a Muslim brother tells someone, that means don't get me angry and I'm fasting. When I'm done fasting, I will destroy you. So what is the essence of fasting when you're saving the best for the last? When you read both holy books. None of it encourages what is happening in Nigeria presently. I listened to a Muslim cleric speak during a TV interview over the weekend. He says the Quran states that before you choose a leader, such a person must be trustworthy, honest and capable. I mean a lot of other qualities. In Titles 1 verse 7 and 8, it describes a leader as someone who is not arrogant, quick tempered, a drunkard, violent or greedy for gain. But someone who is hospitable, a lover of good, self-controlled, upright, holy and disciplined. So if both books put such huge demand on leadership, why then are we plagued with successive bad leadership? Why do our leaders who hold fast to their faith continue to work in contravention of the words of God? Our problem in Nigeria is not religion. Our problem is the wrong application of the dictates of our religion. Our problem is that we have turned our back on the foundation of religious beliefs. We have hijacked processes from God. We then turn around and blame the church or the mosque for the failures of our society. We have allowed politicians and our selfish interests falsely divide us along religious lines. But when we have personal needs, we do not care about religion. When you take someone to the hospital, how many of us demand to see a doctor, nurse or even a surgeon that practices our religion? So I ask, if we don't care about religion of, I mean, when we're getting artisans or professionals to provide a service for us, which is more personal to us, why then should we care about religion of our leader and ignore his qualities? Leadership is not about religion. It is about the qualities that God needs to advance his course for a people at a particular time. The hypocrisy of it beats me. Honestly, let me finish my first thing when I am done.   Oh my God. That really caught me. You know the person that really got me thinking was the statistics he gave about the alcohol consumption, where the majority of, of course, these two religions. So who is bringing it? Yes, exactly. We are spending so much money, like more than a state government's budget within a period. But you get into these places and these guys are telling you that nobody, we don't drink this and they even swear that they don't take alcohol. So where is this thing going to? And then the statistics about the usage of condom, 400 million. Actually, we thank God that they are using it. Inadequate me though. But again, there's something I saw there when he said that some people are beginning to hijack processes from God. Taking the whole tenets of religion, focusing more on the religious aspect of people's lives instead of their qualities also. Because we have people that are not in any of these religions and they are doing exceptionally well when they are giving responsibilities to take care of things. So what do you now say? Are you now saying it's because he's not reading the Quran or because he's not reading the Bible? Where is he actually getting that? So it means that he's focusing more on something deeper than those of us that have actually hijacked the process from God. I think we placed too much emphasis on the religion. And over time, unfortunately, I've had experiences whereby somebody tells me, oh, I'm a Christian. I'm very religious and I'm very Christian like I go to church all the time. Then you find that the person's behaviour does not reflect any God-like characteristics. At a point in time, I had this staff and one day I asked her, oh, you're so early. She was like, yes, I go to church at 5.30 in the morning before coming to work. And at that point, I was like, really? And I was like, really? I was like, really? Are you that holy? And of course, she had issues with four customers. At that point, I had to ask her that going to church at 5.30 a.m. and being rude to customers is contradictory. Personally, I consider Nigeria's religiosity a disability, a national disability. And there are a number of reasons for that. I think most times the political class hide under the guise of religion to perpetuate atrocities, right? But beyond hiding under the guise of religion to perpetuate atrocity, you discover that people also have soft spot for people on the basis of religious affiliation. That is it. And most painfully, the fact that we wait for God to do the things we should do for ourselves. Instead of fixing our country, we are praying, right? We are not driving innovation and doing a lot of things. I don't know how much I think it worries in the UK. Maybe they are not as religious or they have another approach to it. What do you think? Well, for me, I am someone who, people who follow me on social media, I talk about religion a lot, is that, like she said, we are religious people but we don't practice religion. If you were looking at data and statistics, they probably tell you Nigeria is the most religious country in the world. Yes, absolutely. When it comes to what's up there on the ground, when we interact with each other, you don't see the love that the religion preaches. That is, I believe that the Christian religion preaches about love a lot. We don't see that love manifesting in our everyday lives and it's quite a disappointment. And as is rightly said, religion is something that politicians hide behind. This is to perpetuate all sorts of injustices. And so, for me, I think both religions, I think it really falls down to the people that preach religion. I think they are doing a disservice to humanity by not telling their followers to actually obey those tenants that the religion, they are preaching in religious circumstances. You are very right. And I think the major problem we have with religion that I see in a part of the world is that we have the saying that, don't judge me, I know my God. You see, I always tell people that religion starts as a personal journey. But it doesn't end as a personal journey.  It's not the saying I know my God. Your behavior is big for yourself, for you. You are preaching it. So you don't need to now tell me I'm a Christian. I preach it. No, I should say it to you and ask. Nice, true. So religion is just a comfortable corner for us to hide and do a lot of things. All right. Up next is Raymond and his advocacy on youth empowerment. Stay tuned.


So our next speakers are Annette Cicciusca and Dr. Dr. Vega. I'm just going to bring up your presentation. Yes, of course, yes. So let's just get this slide up. Wow, it's amazing to see so many of you here, especially after lunch. Welcome. So, let's see if I get this right. Is it down? Yeah, the agenda. You don't need to see that. That's fine. Who are we? We're the Future Fox. We obviously like Foxes. We are a transport tech company for good. We specialize on community engagement, CTs, and sustainable transport. So you will not see us doing automated vehicles. We are a specialist in using new techniques like human-centered design and rapid prototyping. We're currently developing a civic tech tool, which is called Street Builder. A street builder will allow people to transform the local street. We intend to disrupt local planning. And that's us. Right, so why is this an important topic? Smart cities versus civic tech? So the majority of the global population live in cities, and that's projected to rise until 2030, and then it'll still be rising after 2030, maybe at a slower rate. And that just provides an enormous amount of data because there's so many interactions with people and services. So it's a really ripe place for a lot of civic tech focus, which I'm sure you know about. But as business people in this sector, we have to understand the market. And the smart cities market is just vast. It's where all the talking is happening, but it's also projected to be a trillion dollars quite soon. And then you compare that to the sort of what's available for civic tech, and it's a really kind of different picture. And we face this when we're trying to develop our tool as well. So smart cities are really exciting because there's loads of things that you can measure and stuff. This is a picture from, well, this is an Africa Business Insight website, which is actually DHL, so okay, fair enough, it's like a bit of a different lens. But the immediate thing for me in this picture is just where are all the people? There's no people in here. It's all about systems. And ultimately, if you're talking about cities, there's not going to be cities without people in them. So this is kind of the driver for a lot of our work. Going back to definitions, and it's great, we're new to civic tech, it's great to hear. There's not like a really clear definition of civic tech. We kind of consider civic tech as a subset of smart cities. In smart cities, you can say the end user or the consumer is the citizen. And civic tech, we consider as the key crowd participants. There's quite an active involvement. Smart cities could be for people, civic tech by people. But if you look at kind of in a skeptical way, you could say smart cities meet authority outcomes as set that's supposed to help people, but actually all of that is questionable. I think we talked about in governance and civic tech is really for people. So that's kind of what we're working from. And following on that, we were scratching our heads thinking, right, okay, now we know more or less what smart cities are, but what are they really? So we set up in this quest of looking at smart cities measures, specific measures in the number of cities. And we came across with a lot of them and we surveyed quickly, discovered that we came to this Eureka moment and we thought, oh my god, there's different generations of smart cities implementations. This is our paper and then we googled it and this guy had done it before. So that happens all the time. It's a really good definition. We really like it. So first generation is the technology is basically driven by private companies to governments and say, buy my fancy thing is going to sort out your life. And there's very little thought about what it's actually going to do. So the efficiency, the outcome is not very well defined. Second generation cities realize that they just bought something really expensive. They don't want to do it again. And so they start leaving on what they think is a smart city. They set out the agenda and then they decide how to use the technology.  It really jumps. You could almost say that it's fourth generation and it completely turns around and the city embraces its citizens and it's the citizens who decide what a smart city means. And so what we did for our analysis is... We started mapping these specific measures against two basic outcomes. System efficiency and desirable social change. So system efficiency being kind of reducing waste, reducing cost, reducing the time they spend doing things. Desirable social change, well, it is what it says. And we came up with some interesting outcomes. So a lot of open data, a lot of open data. I mean, it makes things more efficient. The desirable social change with some degrees. New Zealand was interesting because as part of their open data for the city, they started integrating, you see the typical things. Transport, air quality and a few other things. And New Zealand started looking at art, access to sports, access to sport facilities, education. So a little bit moving towards civic tech. They're not there yet. So a sort of a success that London claims to have done around smart cities is what they call tech city, which is basically getting lots of start-up communities together and talking about using data around city problems. And fair enough, this is a great thing to do, but it's not really producing the social outcomes. It's creating a business, fine, but a lot of the business outcomes of that are not really affecting social change. This is a true double act. We're practicing for Eurovision. Public Wi-Fi is one that we saw all the time. It's kind of very common. And I think the reason why it's there is not because it's weird based per se, but the decision to put in public Wi-Fi, it changes a lot. Some people do it for, some cities do it for the sake of it just to have public Wi-Fi. Some cities do it because they really want social change. So, yeah, an interesting one. I wouldn't say weird, but interesting nonetheless. Okay, it's not working. Oh, wrong button. So a smart city that's often built is sort of the holy grail of smart city, which is in construction now, Sungdo city in South Korea. It's a walkable city. It's brand new. There's just incredible internet things connected sort of thing. One of the big features there is this RFID home security system where it involves parking, access to your homes and stuff. The point of the city is to get people out and sort of living in this great city because the services are really close to them. But conversely what's happened, and fair enough it's a bit early to judge, but what's happened, people are so comfortable and they've got so much security, they feel very secure at home, so they stay at home and they're not actually interacting. And for us from sort of an urban planning perspective, it's a very successful kind of social environment for a city. Oh, so you would have heard of Cambridge Analytica. It's not really sort of a relevant category here, but similarly talking about data and security. So they set out to achieve system efficiency in politics and helping candidates work out who to target. But as we've seen, it's gone pretty weird. Singapore, you'll probably know about that from a civic tech perspective more than us and had left together at some point. One of the exciting things that they've implemented is real-time traffic control. They were really advanced in road pricing but they've put in some great data and it gives sort of citizens this kind of real understanding of why they can't drive into the city. But what you see, so the result of this is that efficiency on the road has gone up. So traffic speeds have gone up to about 27km an hour. But from again an urban planning perspective and from the way that cities need to become more sociable, that's actually taking us in the reverse direction from sort of social outcomes. You want to reduce, keep traffic speeds kind of low to make it a livable city. City Mapby, what they've heard about. Again, they set out probably just to make transport a bit more user centred. But they're actually doing quite a lot around system efficiency, so integrating with public authorities. Singapore's on demand bus services being trialled at the moment. That's a really interesting one. Uber is sort of the counter example. You're creating, Uber tends to generate new trips in cities which take you away from the desirable social change. But on demand bus services is actually kind of beneficial for the wider public. But also making this city more efficient. I'm just going to skip ahead because I don't want to run out of time. Fix My Street from My Society, which you love very much. It's kind of somewhere in the middle, so it's efficient because it's working with local authorities and helping them process data. Ordinary people more of a control over their streets to change things. And as we understand, they're going more in the system efficiency routes by integrating fully with local authority reporting. Street Bank is something that launched several years ago actually, probably ahead of its time. It's a peer-to-peer lending site, so if you've got an electric drill you only use it for one minute every year or something. So there are plenty of neighbours that could just borrow that drill from you. It means you don't have to buy that drill. And that's kind of making people more get to know their neighbours a bit more. But a colliery to that is maybe eBay where it's kind of a similar process, but it's actually driving sales and you're getting more consumption. So we started supporting a trend, so if you can see most of the activities that are measures there are first generation led by private companies. Then you start getting to the second generation once and they're still all about efficiency. And when we started looking at third generation there was a civic tech. And so if you look at Amsterdam, I just pick up one of probably 30 examples they've got. It's really truly participatory. It's absolutely overwhelming. And one of the things they've got is, which is close to our street builder, is a platform for people to design, for older people to design their street spaces. It's absolutely fascinating and they've got 30 different versions of this, so it's really fantastic. And sorry, yeah. Yes, similarly another quite interesting one, which seems quite basic, but really exciting. There was no information on local services in one of the districts called in Kibera. Citizens produced a map. It was their initiative. They generated the right information, so rather than somebody like Google coming and saying this is the information that you need, they identified what services they wanted on this map. And the interesting kind of social change element here is that it's because that's the kind of information that people thought was important, so women travelling alone have highlighted the safe routes and that's not something Google would have picked up. It leaves me with a jewel in the crown which is Medellin. Medellin used to be the most dangerous city in the planet and it's now reduced homicide rate by 80%. And partly or the vast majority of this has been reduced through participatory programs. They have an incredible platform, Civic Tech Platform, which is called where you can do participatory budgeting or you can consult, produce ideas and you have indirect communication with the mayor. It's born awards and the key thing for Medellin was the outcome for this smart city was integrating society better. So it wasn't about traffic, it wasn't about smart technology, it was about integrating society, social change. So that was quite fascinating in fact. And so, I mean, there's a lot to say about the research, one of things we found is there's a lot of data but not necessarily the right data. So the analysis is a bit qualitative because the data that there is there is quite difficult to come up with something that measures efficiency or proper outcome. But anyway the main insight we have is Civic Tech almost always produces efficiency naturally. The outcome is social impact but by doing that from the outset you become more efficient as a city. Data led smart city initiatives have indirect social outcomes but of course because it's not the main objective they're often quite weird or flawed and a lot of cities spend a lot of money on kind of crazy tech. Smart city initiatives are driven by efficiencies but defining the type of efficiency is important and often misused and this is key and it's the case of Medellin it's when the efficiency is highlighted and it's social benefit then we're talking about completely different solutions and completely different approach. And this is maybe a bit obvious but also it kind of confirms our starting point but Civic Tech has the ability to and must do more to compete with the efficiency based smart city initiatives so fix my street definitely doing that but we need to have more because there is this big market but if it's not taken then you have the very efficiency based smart city stuff with weird social outcomes taken over or maybe Civic Tech could complement those smart sort of classic smart city approaches with additional social impact outcomes I don't really know how that would work but something for you to think about. And then finally smart cities have all of this marketing stuff everyone's talking about it, loads of money's going into internet things, AI all of that is kind of and even Citizen Empowerment actually Intel we're talking about Citizen Empowerment through their smart cities work but is that really the case and yeah we could just let them do it or Civic Tech Services could sort of try and control that dialogue a bit more. Right so we have a bit of a challenge now I think we've got a few minutes yeah six minutes okay very rapid challenge so our insights into design challenge I'm just going to skip down to number three because this is kind of applies to all and it's quite easy for a post lunchtime session how might we make your Civic Tech Service more smart city friendly so the challenge is we're going to ask you to spend a minute just brainstorm me they gave you post it notes in your bag which is really helpful spend a minute thinking about your Civic Tech Service and how you can invert it into more smart friendly terms and it could be in a light way or a more fundamental way and then we're going to come back to you and build on that idea there's a few rules before we do that so it's all about quantity over quality so we want to see like five ten post it notes in a minute no idea it's a bad idea we actually want those crazy ideas be concise they can fit it on a post it note that's great and do exaggerate make it really really big okay is everyone clear so I'm going to give you one minute alone to think about how you can make your Civic Tech more smart city friendly the clock's running okay brilliant thank you everyone so we're going to go through them very quickly we cannot spend too much time with your ideas just want to say two things the outcome of this exercise it's got two main important things one it's a great tactic for us not to speak so much and prepare less so we're very clear the other one is we really think that Civic Tech can take over smart cities and that we can make a massive difference and overtake this kind of crazy idea of just selling technology for the sake of it and Civic Tech take over the smart city market without further ado where should we start who wants to have a go first this table here give us a couple of ideas come on we just need a couple of ideas from the crowd what did you come up with oh there's one over there there's an example which is not a public white house but kind of a mesh router system that is kind of decentralized like citizens who else who else wants to give us an idea a couple of ideas who else someone's volunteering somebody else and crowd sourcing if anybody would say where they have to go per day and you could then find the most effective routes to AI so people can just car share brilliant brilliant thank you thank you thank you thank you very much thank you very much to Annette and her mum for that so it was a very interesting presentation