I think we have our quorum. And I am going to call the meeting to order and ask that you join me in the Pledge of Allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Thank you all. Todd, I hear you in the chambers. Could you introduce or indicate who's present in the chambers? Yes, ma'am. We have Vicki Schneider, Chad, Laurie Serkey, and Kerry Arons, and then Scott behind the wheel. All right, very good. Our next order of business is a motion to approve the minutes of January 11. Move to approve. Second. All right, we have a motion. And the second is there any discussion? Hearing none, all in favor, state aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Chair votes aye. Let's move on to 3.1, which is an exciting resolution authorizing the appropriate city officials to execute the sight lease agreement between Wisconsin Power Light and the city of Sheboygan regarding a solar voltaic generating facility. Chad, is that yours? It is. So thank you. Thank you, Madam Chair. So this document before you is to lease a portion of property, an 80 acre parcel in the Sheboygan Business Center. This parcel would be directly west of the large NEMAC manufacturing facility off of Gateway Drive. The parcel right now has not been very marketable, if you will, because it has a large stormwater detention pond on its street frontage. So we showed the parcel to Alliant Energy when they announced a customer-hosted solar energy collaboration that they were doing with municipalities. And given that it's close to the overhead power lines that go into the Edgewater generating plant and close to some substations, they found this property acceptable to construct a one megawatt solar generating facility. So under the terms of this lease, they would lease the property for 25 years. I believe there's three five-year renewals, and they will pay us a sum total of $45,000 over monthly payments for leasing the property. So everything else has been worked out between the city attorney's office and their attorneys, and finds it acceptable to move forward. Questions for Chad? Madam Chair, I've got a question. Sure. Thank you. Can you go over the payment schedule again one more time? Was that $45,000 over the 30-year time span or 25-year time span? Was that $45,000 a year? It's $45,000 a year, which will equivalent, will be paid out in equal payments over 12 months. There I think is a, there might be an escalator in there after a few years for changes, but it's at $45,000, $46,000 right now. Thank you. Madam Chair. I've got a question. It was a 20-year lease renewable three times. It's a 25-year lease renewable three times. In five-year increments. Thank you, Madam Chair. Chad, I'm having trouble visualizing exactly where this is going to be. And you said NEMAC. That's not the NEMAC plant across from Acuity, is it? No, it's NEMAC's main manufacturing plant that's in the Sheboygan Business Center. So Barron's Parkway and Gateway Drive would be the intersection where this parcel would be. So if I'm driving down South Business Drive and I look over to the right when I get out of the business park area, I'm not actually going to be able to see it from South Business Drive. You are not going to be able to see it from South Business Drive, but you will be able to see it from Salt Taylor Driver I-43. OK. All right, thank you. One other thing, I just wanted to touch base with Attorney Adams. Chuck, you're completely comfortable with this agreement. I read it over in some detail yesterday, and I didn't really have any questions. It's very lengthy, but you're very comfortable with all of the details of it? Yeah, we had a time going back and forth on some things, and they were very cooperative. Thank you. Other comments, questions? Oh, this is terrific. So we need a motion to recommend that we execute the S-A-A-S, nope, I'm on the wrong, sorry about that, I'm on the wrong action item. So we are looking for a motion to execute the sight lease agreement between Wisconsin Power and Light in the city. Is there such a motion? I'll move. All right, and did I hear a second? Either one of Robert or myself had that, the first or the second. Is there any other discussion? Hearing none, all in favor, state aye. Aye. Any opposed? Chair votes aye. Very good. Moving along to the S-A-A-S service agreement, 3.2 is a resolution authorizing the Director of Planning and Development to execute the S-A-A-S services agreement between Benevate for Neighborly Software. Todd, is that yours? Actually, Chad will talk a little bit, and then I'll come in at the end. OK. Thank you, Madam Chair. So this is to implement some software that the city administrator alluded to in his state of the city address. This software will be used between the finance department and city development, and it'll be used primarily to administer the community development block grant program that we get from HUD on a yearly basis. So this started out as looking at the options of trying to find some better loan tracking software, because as a city administrator alluded to in his presentation, we're trying to get loans and other things off of the AS-400. So the plan was to look for some loan tracking software, and as we were going through interviewing vendors, the group thought that it made sense to look at it for a little bit wider piece than just loan tracking software, but to look at it for tracking all of the demographic data, all of the loans, and different things that we do with the community development block grant program. So this software is specific to CDBG funds. This software has an import to the federal system, so we don't have to double enter all the demographic and income data that we do on a daily basis, and it'll also allow us to track public service applicants, public facility, projects, loans, environmental reviews, all the federal stuff that we go through on a daily basis and right now are pretty much managing on spreadsheets and with paper files. So the goal is to make this more real time, particularly for the loan tracking piece so that our loan applicants can get to the loan history online and see where their loan stands, and they can also request payoffs and different things and kind of manage their loan portfolio without always having to come through the finance or city development departments. So this is we'll fund this with CDBG federal dollars on a yearly basis, and it'll streamline the operations of how we do things today between the city finance department and the city development department. Questions for Chad or Todd, do you want to go ahead first? Thank you, Madam Chair. I just wanted to kind of point out to the committee that, as Chad had pointed out, this is going to be a great asset for city development and for the finance department, as I had stated in the state of the city, we are looking to utilize technology to improve our processes. This is one of those processes that from a, as a past older, looking at our finance and personnel, talking about loans. This is one of those opportunities where we're going to get it off the AS 400. We're going to be able to modernize it. We're going to be able to extend the services that it actually covers, as Chad had alluded to. And we're going to be able to use technology to improve our processes. And it's a collaboration between development and the finance department. So this is a really good example of how we're going to use a technology to bring the development department in with finance and be able to take care of our constituents at a much, much higher level. They can even set themselves up so that they can go online if they choose to. And with a username and password, they'll be able to actually look at their loans that they have with the city. So I'm hoping to have support from the committee and the council and move forward on this software. Thank you. Questions, Bert? Hi, I have a question. We've heard so much about the units. Does it make sense to have a distinct set of software for development and loans off of the units' platform? Now, I'm sure you vetted up the yin and yang, but just describe why. I can explain that, Madam Chair. Thank you. We brought in a company called Bacore and they helped us with the vetting process. We also, in our office, we also reached out to local municipalities to find out whom they were using, whether they were using Munis, whether they were using their own homegrown system or other programs like Neighborly. So through Bacore, they actually had made some recommendations which we reviewed two of them. And through our search with municipalities in, within Wisconsin, we found out that there was quite a collaboration. Munis is not, I hate to say it, it's one of those, a jack of all trades and a master of none. Munis has loan programs, but we were also looking for something that was going to be able to help us, not just with loans, but also with, as Chad had alluded to, our CDGB funds and our grants and things like that. So this program, Neighborly, is very good as far as it integrates with Munis. So it's a connection so that the information that finance needs, they'll be able to use it through Munis and the Neighborly part, the development team will be able to use that with the implementation with the constituents and the interface that the constituents will see will be through the actual Neighborly program. Chad, was there anything you wanted to add to that? The only thing I would add is the Munis platform did not have a very robust online application or online real-time kind of payment system. So we were really, finance right now spends a lot of time on issuing payoff letters and trying to get people loan histories and all of that stuff. And this will allow people to do that themselves if they log into the system and Munis did not have those capabilities. The other thing is we're not doing, besides receding revenues from our loans, that's probably the only piece that we're putting currently into the Munis program. But as Todd alluded to, we're doing a lot of other management of different grants and those that have been on the finance committee know that every year we come before you and we allocate funds to nonprofits and all of that kind of stuff. So all that has to be tracked and this system will allow us to do that. Thank you. So I just have probably a question for Todd. And I think one of the best things that we have started to do and that you are working and you and Daniella are working on is really moving us completely off of ASA 400 and into Munis. So this is a separate system, which I understand and I think it makes perfect sense, but ultimately when the full transference is made, how many extra computer program programs do you think we will have in addition to Munis? To get off the floor. If you have any idea, you may not. Yeah, Chair, that's kind of a difficult question to answer at this point. I guess a different way to answer the question would be to help educate the committee to understand that Munis is our ERP system. So it's our enterprise resource planning and it is typical within the private sector and within municipalities that you're gonna have kind of the core, which is the ERP system, whether it's SAP, JD Edwards, any of those. But typically you're still gonna have offshoots of programs that work that are more specialized in handling different types of processes. So as an example, when we looked at the neighborly program, it was very high tech, it was very today in age, compared to the other one that was also recommended, they were, their technology was very, I'd say 10 to 15 years old as far as how it was formatted. It's the security levels are very high, but it was not very user friendly. So again, what we're trying to do is we're trying to bring in modules, whether it's through Munis or through third party that work with Munis to streamline things, but also to make it easier for our constituents and also for our employees and departments to function. So if we can pull more processes within a module and streamline things so that we're not touching it so many times, it makes a lot of sense when you look at it from that perspective. There's a lot of things that go on behind the curtain that is very time consuming and we're trying to utilize technology to reduce, first off, things having to be entered in multiple times, you have human error on that, and then making sure that we can pull more data out like Chad had mentioned for our state and federal requirements. So I can't answer the question today and hopefully within the next six months, I'll be able to. Thank you. Well, and I certainly didn't need to put you on the spot. I, this program makes, as I say, complete sense. I'm just hoping that once we have Munis up and fully running, we don't have like a hundred extra software programs out there. I mean, this one makes complete sense. I've no problem with that at all, but it's just something to think about. I mean, I remember the days when Chuck probably remembers this where there were 1200 separate software programs that the city operated and that, you know, Paychex went through three separate programs and, you know, so even now we're wildly ahead of that, but I'm just in trance with the idea. We have one big computer program in the sky, but I do understand the need for more specialized programs. Any other questions, comments? I've got a couple of questions, Madam Chair. Thank you. Todd, or when you were looking at vendors and then you said you were looking at municipalities, are there some municipalities that you talked to that are using the system? I believe that there were a couple and Madison was also transitioning to, I think Beloit and Oshkosh are going on it too. Yeah. So again, another question. Go ahead. I was just gonna ask, I know within the last year or two, we've had a couple items come before the Finance and Personnel Committee regarding personal property tax. How are we handling that? And is this an application that could be used to track our personal property taxes so that if somebody has a question, like we did on a couple of documents in the last year or so that this would be helpful in tracking previous payments in that regard, or is that a totally different animal? Jim, that is a totally different animal. I would be doing a cartwheel if I could actually have personal property controlled under neighborly. And I'm not good at cartwheels. The point is that we are trying to bring in as different programs that specialize in things like personal property that is on our list and that's next in the sites to be addressed, but neighborly does not address that situation. And that's really a municipal program. I thought maybe we could sneak that in there for that 14 grand or whatever we're paying, so. I agree. We both would be doing cartwheels then. I wanna see Todd do a cartwheel. Yeah. I would just like to say from the development side of this equation, it would be delightful to be able to key in X, Y, Z, ABC, one, two, three and have a report because we have struggled with those things in the past. So anything that helps us track our money and keep the feds happy, I'm happy too. Thank you. Any other comments, questions? All right. I'll make a motion to approve, Madam Chair. All right, so this is a. I'll second that. Motion to execute the services agreement with Benevate Inc. We have a motion and second, is there further discussions? Hearing none, all in favor, state aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Chair votes aye. All right, let's move on to 3.3, which is the notice of claim from Kaylee Reidenor, Chuck. No, this is just before you in order to file. This was merely a notice of claim and the time has passed for her to file her claim. And so the matter can be filed if she has not done. We have a motion to file. Don't move. I'll take a second. All right, we have a motion and second. Any discussion? Hearing none, all in favor, state aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Chair votes aye. All right, moving down to 3.4, which is a resolution authorizing the city to execute an agreement and I'm sorry, an amendment to the offer to purchase with Martin's Trilling True Value regarding the closing date. Chad, I assume that's yours. Yes, thank you, Madam Chair. So this is, you've seen this document before. This is a parcel of land that the city owns around Kiel's auto repair shop just south of Trilling Hardware. Trilling is hoping in the future to build a new storage shed to bring a lot of the stuff that's stored in their parking lot under a roof adjacent to their property. So as the amendment or the original offer to purchase required, the city worked with Sheboygan County and their Brownfields program to assess the extent of contamination on this property, given that it is next to an old filling station. And after the phase one and phase two were completed, there was some additional requirements that the DNR has asked for, StanTek who is the county's consultant to do some further groundwater testing. So this document would extend the offer to purchase through the end of July. StanTek has informed us that they believe they can get case closure on this property by June. So we're looking for an approval to extend this to July, which would give us about a month to put together a closing and hopefully see the project move forward sometime in the fall of this year. Wonderful. Any questions? Is the binding, go ahead, Mark. Is the binding second state on this one that we're gonna make it for the council meeting in enough time? It says February 1st. The council meets on February 1st. The council meets on February 1st. Sorry. I spoke with Attorney Zinkel from Rody Dales who represents them. And the idea here was, for some reason we went past the date, it's really our ability to get out of the deal, not so much that they want this deal to go through. And in order to make this go through as quickly as possible, that's why we directly refer to it. You know, we'll have them, well, the council does meet on the 1st and I think Chad is already aware that he's gonna be getting the signatures that night and probably forwarding them over to them. They may not actually receive it to the 2nd, but we're good. We've discussed all those possibilities already. Thank you. I have a question for Chad. Chad, is there any indication that any environmental problems on that property might be coming from leaching from that gas station on the corner? That's the suspecting, but it's hard to say that for sure because, yeah. So that's the thought and the DNR has been more than willing to work with us. They did upgrade some tanks and do some stuff at that location, but given that there is a filling station right next door, I'm thinking that's probably where it's come from, but it doesn't seem like it's going to be, unless the soil, the sample that they do, the groundwater sampling in the next month really shows different results. It's just, the DNR is just looking for a little bit additional documentation and it sounds like they were supportive of moving forward with a case closure. We should also note that that property was the site of the Casket Company, the Sheboygan Casket Company and which was foreclosed upon for property taxes by Sheboygan County. So there was a fair amount of contamination just from the preparation of caskets. So, so there's a blame all around and good to know that it's moving forward. Jim, did you have one? I was just going to mention it's too bad that we couldn't get this done for Tina Wick before she closed her zipper shop in December. Well, we sure tried. We did try for Tina, but... We did. You have no idea. So with that in mind, any other questions, comments? If not, could I have a motion to authorize the execution of the amendment to offer to purchase? Some of them. Second. All right, we have a motion and second. Any further discussion? Hearing none, all in favor, state aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Chair votes aye. That does it for us. Our next regular meeting is February 8th. Will we all be here? Where else would we be? I guess is another question. I'll be waiting for my second COVID shot. I'm getting my first one tomorrow. Oh, good for you. So, very good. We will see you all on February 8th. Could we have a motion to adjourn? We have a second. Second. Second. Third, I guess. If there's no further discussion, all in favor, state aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Chair votes aye. We are adjourned. Thank you all. The second can jump in if she gets here. Roll call. Boran is here. Marcus Saviglio. Present. Roberta Paneski. Trey Mitchell. We have a quorum. For those in the, for those at City Hall, if you want to stand and join me in the Pledge of Allegiance. Will do. I pledge allegiance. Todd, do you want to lead the pledge? Yes. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. Yes. Thank you, Todd. Could you tell the rest of the committee who else is in the council chambers, please? I'll have Scott send it here. We just started. Jim. Yes. Mary Lynn just called me while we were pledging. She can't find the link, so I'll have Scott send the link to Mary Lynn. And then, so, but I would just continue in the meantime. All right. Could you tell us who's in the council chambers? Yes, I will. Tara Dewey, Vicki Schneider, myself, Ann Cary, Aaron's, and Scott, of course. And it looks like we have quite a few guests tonight, so we'll introduce ourselves. I am Alderman Jim Borne of the 10th District, and I'm vice chairman of the Finance and Personnel Committee. I am Roberta Falecki-Paneski, Alderman in District Two. I am Marcus Savalio, Alderman District, Alder, Person District Five, excuse me. I'm Trey Mitchell, Alder, Person District Nine. Thank you. Let's move on to item number 2.1 on the agenda, which is approval of the minutes from the December 28, 2020 meeting. I'll entertain a motion. Move to approve. Second. Second. We have a motion and a second. All in favor? Aye. Vice Chair votes aye. I see that Mary Lynn has arrived. Mary Lynn, we're down to number 3.1 if you'd like to take over. I think it's been abducted by aliens, and I really apologize. So, all right. So, 3.1, who would like to take that? Take two, the first piece tonight, which is just simply that when you make the motion, there will need to be an amendment, a motion to amend. So, after, this really went to council probably too early. It went before it had been completely negotiated with the other parties involved. And so there is one change in here that was requested by Coler Credit Union that everybody's agreed to. And it has to do with the whole harmless indemnification clause. But once we get to that, I will provide you the language for the amendment before you make the final motion. All right, so we are looking for a motion to authorize the mayor and city clerk to exit the agreement between the city, Lakeland University and Coler Credit Union for the Memorial Day Parade. Do we have such a motion? So moved. And a second? Second, borne. All right. And then check what are you looking for in terms of an amendment? So the amendment would be to amend the agreement so as to replace section 4H in the original agreement, the attached agreement to provide that the whole harmless indemnification paragraph would read as follows. To the extent permitted by law, the launch shall hold harmless, defend, and or indemnify KCU and the city from any and all claims, actions, suits, charges, awards, fines, labor disputes, charges or costs of any kind or character, including attorney's fees and court costs that arise or may arise out of launch's performance or non-performance of any term, obligation, service or condition as set forth in this agreement. All right. Chuck, can we do this by an agreement by the maker of the motion to so amend the original motion? Or do you want a separate motion to amend? Probably cleaner to have that separate motion to amend, but since I read it, they can just say so moved. So do we have a motion to amend the agreement as read? I move to amend the agreement as read. Second, borne. All right. So we're gonna vote on the amendment. Are there any questions or concerns? I have a question. I'm a little bit confused because the language always states Lakeland University and there is a signatory that seems to be affiliated with another entity in there and I don't have the document in front of me, I'm sorry, but is it really Lakeland or is it Kim Leibman and Kim Leibman's business? Actually, that was asked to be amended as well. When I sent that back to the mayor, this is a Lakeland University venture and launch is the student run business venture owned by Lakeland University. I work for Lakeland University and I mentor the businesses. So this is indeed a Lakeland University agreement. And the document, yeah, that's all been updated. That was all updated one before. You may be confused by the fact that as you read the agreement Lakeland University is referred to as launch. It's launch at Lakeland University is the parking. All right. So by virtue of the motion to approve and then the motion to amend, Chuck, in your opinion, is that pretty crystal clear? Do we have any issues about who the parties are or what the responsibilities are? No issues with who the parties are and the responsibilities. The main change was just color credit union and wanted some different language on the whole harmless and the state's position is there's no change. It's just written differently. Okay. Bird, are you satisfied with the answer? Yes, I am. Thank you. Okay. So let us vote on the amendment to provide the indemnification agreement unless there are any other questions or concerns? I had a, this is Alderman Boren, madam chair. I just wanted to ask Kim Leibam a couple of questions about her launch group. What they've been. Jim, let's vote on the amendment. All right. And then we can go to the body of the motion itself. All right, fine. So any other questions or concerns regarding the amendment? Jerry, none all in favor state aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Chair votes aye. The amendment passes and the agreement as amended is before us. So go ahead, Jim. Thank you, madam chair. Kim, I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit more about the launch group. How many students are involved in it? Is this going to be their first project in the community? What other projects are they? Are you having thinking of having them be involved in? And also, is there any kind of a coordination with the COLA credit union as far as past practices and running the parade that would be helpful? Thank you. Good question. Thank you. And I appreciate you asking them. Let me address the first question, which is launch and its infrastructure. Launch began on May 10th of 2020. So it's a relatively new endeavor. However, in the short months that we have been operational, we have eight student leaders who are operating five different businesses right now. We actually are profitable. So believe it or not, we were able to start some businesses. We didn't have any startup costs or any expenses to them. So we started conservatively and that's paying dividends. As far as what we are doing within the community, we actually have just been approved to launch an independent campus shop, which we will be operating on campus from an event standpoint. We are contracted to run the Memorial Day Parade, which we're talking about here. We will be running the Gus Makers, the boys and the girls clubs is no longer engaging in that activity. So what's not going to be running that with the Gus Makers organization. We are running the Blasters Golf Tournament this summer and we are also running a concession stand at Road America. So that's the event side of the business that really took off kind of quickly. We also are managing a rental property that the university owns and we are fingers crossed, going to be closing on a business that we are actually purchasing on the 30th of January that we have been negotiating for several months. So we actually are looking to conclude our event side of the business with over a $100,000 profit by the end of the summer. And I think anybody who knows anything about new businesses, I think that's a good feat for a year to actually end the year with the profit. From the other side of your question, asking in how we've been cooperating with Kola Credit Union, Kola Credit Union and Laura are very easy to work with. They have shared all of their documentation with us. We have everything that had been created both by Laura as well as the person who had run the Memorial Day Parade for years past. And we have reorganized that and assigned our timeline and work to it. And the woman who is going to be leading the parade, her name is Allie Wilson. She is an absolutely outstanding senior. She is studying organizational development and leadership. She's interested in pursuing a career in athletic management from a operational side of the house. So I have complete faith in her. Now the students do not operate by themselves. So I mentor or you might wanna say, I control everything that they're doing but because they're students, they don't know how to run businesses and they need that partnership. And that's my responsibility. Thank you. Any other questions? Hearing none, all in favor of the motion, please state aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Chair votes aye. Well, just Laura and Kim and just thank you so much for all of your assistance with this really important parade. And hopefully in May we'll all be able to stand, you know, close together on the sidewalks with our winter jackets on and enjoy the parade. So, but really thank you so much. And Kim, congratulations on your amazing program. That's really, that's really true. Thank you. Yeah, thanks for your support. We're really looking forward to making sure we're proud. Yeah, you will. Now, Mike, let me just look. Well, by Jinkies, that's the end of our meeting. We are next meeting on January 25th. Do we have any quorum issues for that? It's a great thing about nobody going anywhere. Very good. Can we have a motion to adjourn? To adjourn. Second. All right. We have a motion and second. All in favor, please signify by stating aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Chair votes aye. We are adjourned. Thank you all so much. Again, my apologies.


From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto studios. The COVID crisis continues. Luckily, we've got the ability to interview guests from remote and so we're excited to have this next guest. There's a lot of activity going on around equality and gender diversity, Black Lives Matter, and it feels like it really does feel like there's kind of a step function in moving this along. And there's a lot of groups out there that are trying to take a very active role in one of the things they're trying to do is help women get on more corporate board seats, more representation. And we're really excited to have our next guest who's really taking a slightly different approach, a new approach to this, and we're happy to be joined by Rita Scroggen. She is the founder of FirstBoard.io, and she's also the practice director executive group at Triad Group. So Rita, great to see you. Thank you very much, Jeff, for having me. I'm super excited to be here and to share the story about FirstBoard.io, what we're doing and how hopefully that will change the world just a little bit. That's great. Well, so the way that this came about is I was on LinkedIn, I'm on LinkedIn all the time. And all of a sudden this big picture hit my feed and a ton of familiar faces. I think that's what it's four by eight. And I see Abby Kerns, Dale Jensen, Eva Mahler, Wendy Pirelli, Jocelyn is in there, Samla is in there. And I thought, wow, I know a bunch of these women and I'm always happy to promote the women in the CUBE alumni. And I reached out and I think it was Wendy said, hey, this is, she said, I'm a founding member of this thing called FirstBoard.io. And I wanted to learn more and she said, we got to talk to Rita. So it's great to meet you. And this is a new organization. I think you said you started at the very beginning of this year. So why, let's get kind of to the origin story. What gave you the idea? Why did you think that this was something that needed to be done? And what caused you to actually take the leap of faith and start FirstBoard? Yeah, very good question. So in the fall of 2019, I did an event in partnership with K&L Gates it was about how to get on board and it wasn't gender specific but I invited a lot of women from my network and through K&L Gates, there was a speaker on the panel Cheryl Bolton who is now a supporter of FirstBoard.io. And we spoke after the panel discussion. So I was the moderator and she said, do you place people or women specifically on company boards and private company boards? I said, I do now, let's have a conversation about that. So we talked some more and we kind of felt like there's really a need for companies to diversify their boards, particularly private tech companies. And so then I thought about more about the idea. I reached out to a few women in my network and I said, hey, I have this idea. I'm thinking about starting an initiative around this topic, which you'd be interested in being part of it. And a lot of the women who I reached out to said, I'd love the idea, would love to get involved. So that was really the origin. So then we met, we had a little sort of social get together in, I think it was early December in Palo Alto. And then we said, let's launch officially in January, which we did. So in January, we had our first and only in-person meeting. The idea initially was that we would meet every quarter in person. So it would be very localized to Silicon Valley. And then COVID happened and everything changed. And we are now meeting via Zoom every six to eight weeks. We have members who are in different locations. So most of our members on Silicon Valley, but we also have a member in New York, in Seattle, in Dallas, and I might forget a location, but so we're a little bit more distributed right now. And so that is where we are today. So you've done it a little bit different. You've got this group of women. It's 32 women in that picture, the founding members. And so you're taking almost like a cohort approach, a group approach. Why that approach? What did you see that wanted you to go that way versus doing individual searches for individual companies, looking for individual kind of board members? Why the group approach? What type of dynamic does that introduce? How do the women leverage one another inside of this structure? Yeah, that's a very good question. That's really the idea. The idea is that we work together collaboratively and that we leverage each other's network. So we raise each other's platform. So I might know 10 or 15 or whatever decision makers, let's say, we see CEOs, but the next member might know an equal number or more or less. So what I was thinking is if we leverage each other's network, we exponentially grow our network and we exponentially grow our visibility. So our focus right now is to really raise the profile of firstboard.io and the profile of each member of the group. So it's fundamentally different when we're working together, kind of almost like a company that can accelerator where if we have a success, it's everybody's success because it raises the profile of everybody else. So that's the idea, which is different than a network organization where you are an unknown member so we're trying to make this in a different way. Right, right. And is the goal within all the women that have joined the founding members for all of them to get on a board? I mean, is that all of them are qualified people to be a corporate board? I mean, that is the goal. That's the idea. We may not accomplish that in the first round because this is a problem that's been going on for a long time but we're getting close to our first board placement. So that's, I think, an initial great success. And we're working on a number of initiatives right now to raise the profile. We're doing a video interview with all our supporters. We are creating a campaign, how to reach out to CEOs and VCs. So we're working on a number of things right now behind the background to really target our audience. And our audience is specific to the tech world. So we're focusing really on private tech companies and we're focusing on our decision makers within those organizations. So whether it's the investor, the private equity, growth equity or venture capital community or the CEO or other board members for that matter who may be aware that there's an opening and we're trying to tap to those as well. Right, right. So you've mentioned Silicon Valley, VCs and private equity a couple of times. So is the focus more in kind of that ecosystem that we're familiar with here in Silicon Valley with more private kind of private and growth opportunities or are you also just fully looking for large regular public companies as well? I mean, we wouldn't turn down a public company opportunity but none of our members have been on a board so far. And I think it's probably more realistic that the first board position might be at a private company where the operating experience is particularly valuable. So that's our primary focus in terms of reaching actively out. But if a public company would come our way and say we absolutely would love to talk to some of your members, of course we wouldn't turn that down. But actively we're going after private tech companies and they can be located anywhere. So it's not specific just to Silicon Valley. This is of course a lot of tech companies are clustered there or here. But it could also be a company in New York or Boston or wherever, but the focus is really on tech versus a broader focus of any kind of company. Right, right. So when you're working with these women who've never been on a board, what do you find is kind of the biggest gap that they need to fill? Whether that's a real gap or a perceived gap in their either skill sets or experience or whatever to kind of make the jump and get into one of these board seats. Is it any particular skill, any particular kind of point of view? What are the types of things that you do as a group to help them be more better received, I guess, for the opportunities? Yeah, well, what we don't do is we don't really provide a training program or prepare women. There are other organizations who do that. I think we'll do a very, very good job. Some of our members are part of other organizations as well. So what we're thinking more is, the company oftentimes has, in a certain growth stage, has a gap in some form. And in looking at board opportunities, I think it's important to identify where is that gap. Maybe it's go to market or maybe it is certain technical expertise and match them up with the experience of our founding members. So we don't have a program to prepare women. We're more focused on, okay, we're assuming you're prepared and that might be various degrees. And we're just trying to match the operating expertise to the gap for an independent board member at any given company. Right, right. And I think we talked before we turned on the cameras, the three things you said you focused on really is operational expertise, scale experience, as well as domain expertise. And so you're really trying to kind of map against a gap that the company has against a skill set that one of the members has. Yeah, so what I've, so far I've sort of facilitated three different board opportunities. And two of them, what they had in common, that the company was looking for somebody who really had domain expertise with the audience they were looking at. And who understood the buyer and who had deep expertise in go-to-market strategies developing them. So that's one example, right? And the other company, the third one was looking for somebody who had connections in the space who really understood that particular domain. And so it all depends. And I think it also depends on what stage the company's in. And I think the further along the company is the more it's about governance and regulations. And earlier on, it's really filling a certain gap on the leadership team. And the private equity world is also very interesting to us because oftentimes there is, there's a plan exit, there's a timeline and there are certain growth objectives the company wants to reach. And that's a great opportunity I think for First Board to bring in a founding member with that particular operating expertise. Right, right. So I'm curious, that's a great segue into kind of the customer side, if you will, the people that are looking for boards, board members. Have you seen over the last several months or years, I'll open it up, kind of a shift in terms of people, A, just kind of accepting that there are gonna be more women and people of color on the board, but also more of kind of an active search and a more kind of progressive goal to make sure that they do increase the diversity on their boards, whether that be for women or people of color or whatever, just to bring more diversity. Have you seen a shift in your customer base in terms of the really focus and prioritization on that? Well, I think it's certainly on people's mind. And I think now more so than ever, with your recent changes and sort of uprising of Black Lives Matter. But I wouldn't say that has really transferred over into real meaningful diversity on board. So I think we still have a long, long way to go. And there's an organization him for her and I think was the Kellogg's Management Institute. And they did a study last year and they found that privately heavily funded companies, 60% of those don't have a single woman on the board. And I think women in general held about 7% of board seats at these companies. So it is, I think it's still a long way to go. But I think it's very important that in the future, a larger proportion of the population is reflected in the boards, right? So whether it's women, women of color, people of color. So everybody should be part of the leadership team on the board level and on the leadership level. And I think that has become certainly more of a topic, I think, especially for large companies. And I think startups are now recognizing that it's important for them too, especially if they want to be perceived as a company which has fair and equal values. Right, right. So given that kind of landscape, if you will, what are kind of the expectations that you have with this founding member group? And I presume there'll be other groups in the future once these people all find a great board seat and are doing their thing. Kind of, is it a really tough road ahead? Do you see that it's really not that tough maybe in the macro level, but on the micro level, there are some real opportunities. How are you as a group of 32 founding members trying to take this hill, if you will, against pretty tough odds, actually? Well, I think we're going to take it one step at a time. I mean, we already have, we had the press release, we have a website, we have some visibility on LinkedIn. And we already have been able to curate three different board conversations. So I think, step by step, I think we will make a, we'll become more visible. I think we will be more known. We will have more opportunities to introduce founding members, this current cohort and future cohorts. And through that, I think we will make progress. So I'm very optimistic that we can make a difference that we can get more women on boards. And once the founding members have joined a board, the plan is to launch a group where basically we create a peer group, which will then mentor and support the next cohort. And we also have an amazing group of supporters and partners already. We have Steve Singh from Adrona Ventures. We have Rohini from NGP Capital. And we're always looking for more partners and supporters. So I'm not going to list everybody right now, but I'm very proud about that we have partners and supporters who brought into the mission and who are helping us accomplish the mission. So I feel very optimistic that we will be able to move the needle, even, it might be at a slower pace, but it will still be making a difference. Right, right. Well, the 100th anniversary of women getting the vote is coming up here in a couple of weeks, right? And that took a long time to get done. So this stuff does not, it does not happen easily. It does not happen overnight. But I would think certainly too with the increasing number of women in BC roles as partners and are also getting on board seats that hopefully that the things are starting to fall in the right direction and hopefully with each progressive placement is a little bit easier than the one before. So Rita, it's great to meet you. Everyone I talked to about you is so excited about the work that you're doing and what you're doing with First Board. So I want to give you kind of the last word before we sign off. How should people learn more? How can people support the cause? How should people get involved so that they can move the needle? That's great, thank you. Get in touch with us. If you go to the website, FirstSport.io there's a way to partner with us. There's a link to partner with us. There's a link if you are interested in joining the future cohort, please contact me and I will respond. And we would love to talk to companies who are thinking about diversifying their board. Would love to talk to VCs for whom this is important. So please get in touch and we'll figure out how to change the world together. Right, and oh by the way, most studies show you get better business outcomes with diversity of opinion and diversity of points of view. So it's not only the right thing to do, it's also a very good business. And I think the next decade, we are ready for a change. I think the society I think is ready for a change and I think how companies run and are operated. I think people are ready for a change too. So I think the timing is really, really right and I think we can make it happen. Great, well Rita, thank you again for taking a few minutes and telling your story and joining us on theCUBE. Thank you very much, it was a pleasure, Jeff and I look forward to talk again. Yeah, maybe in person after we get through all this COVID madness. All right, well, thanks again, Rita. Thank you very much. All right, Rita, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time.


I have just been to Buckingham Palace and accepted His Majesty the King's invitation to form a government in his name. It is only right to explain why I am standing here as your new Prime Minister. Right now, our country is facing a profound economic crisis. The aftermath of Covid still lingers. Putin's war in Ukraine has destabilised energy markets and supply chains the world over. I want to pay tribute to my predecessor Liz Truss. She was not wrong to want to improve growth in this country. It is a noble aim. And I admired her restlessness to create change. But some mistakes were made. Not born of ill-will or bad intentions. Quite the opposite, in fact. But mistakes, nonetheless. And I have been elected as leader of my party and your Prime Minister in part to fix them. And that work begins immediately. I will place economic stability and confidence at the heart of this government's agenda. This will mean difficult decisions to come. But you saw me during Covid doing everything I could to protect people and businesses with schemes like furlough. There are always limits, more so now than ever, that I promise you this. I will bring that same compassion to the challenges we face today. The government I lead will not leave the next generation, your children and grandchildren, with a debt to settle that we were too weak to pay ourselves. I will unite our country, not with words, but with action. I will work day in and day out to deliver for you. This government will have integrity, professionalism and accountability at every level. Trust is earned and I will earn yours. I will always be grateful to Boris Johnson for his incredible achievements as Prime Minister and I treasure his warmth and generosity of spirit. And I know he would agree that the mandate my party earned in 2019 is not the sole property of any one individual. It is a mandate that belongs to and unites all of us. And the heart of that mandate is our manifesto. I will deliver on its promise a stronger NHS, better schools, safer streets, control of our borders, protecting our environment, supporting our armed forces, levelling up and building an economy that embraces the opportunities of Brexit where businesses invest, innovate and create jobs. I understand how difficult this moment is. After the billions of pounds it cost us to combat Covid, after all the dislocation that caused in the midst of a terrible war that must be seen successfully to its conclusions. I fully appreciate how hard things are and I understand too that I have work to do to restore trust after all that has happened. All I can say is that I am not daunted. I know the high office I have accepted and I hope to live up to its demands. But when the opportunity to serve comes along, you cannot question the moment, only your willingness. So I stand here before you, ready to lead our country into the future, to put your needs above politics, to reach out and build a government that represents the very best traditions of my party. Together we can achieve incredible things. We will create a future worthy of the sacrifices so many have made and fill tomorrow and every day thereafter with hope. Thank you.


The President is very much in a selling job. Are you going to have to do that? How much of a selling job? I'm going to get started. They're selling me. They invited me in. I just got here. You know, I don't know about the rest of these things. I don't know. I don't know what I want to do. This was the verge of a January full. I was looking forward to that. President, I've been without heat in my house for about 24 hours. That's the January full. We've got the problem. That's what? Yes. Yesterday morning, we woke up and looked out the windows to what we've done all these weeks that are real thick. They feel like blamboyant snow all over everything. You wake up this morning and there's the green lawn. You remind me of all that white blood.


despite heat and the long lines. So I work for MongoDB just kind of down the street near Times Square, and I work on a number of MongoDB database client libraries written in various programming languages, including Python. And a couple of years ago, I got an email that really kind of frightened me and made me a little bit anxious about whether I was going to continue to be working for MongoDB if I wasn't able to come up with a really good answer to this email. And that is the story for today. So it all began when a blogger whom I don't know named Vlad published this article to a popular website called D-Zone. And Vlad had run some benchmarks with both the Python driver for MongoDB, which is called PyMongo, and also the Node.js driver for MongoDB. And there was a lot of good news for us from reading about this article of Vlad's. For one thing, he felt that he got pretty impressive performance. He was using an ordinary Windows desktop computer, he got almost 90,000 inserts per second. He thought this was pretty cool, so this is a positive article about our product. And the other good news was that D-Zone's popular website, he got more than 20,000 views on this positive article. So like I said, he had benchmarked the Node.js driver for MongoDB, and that was the headline figure that he got. And then he also benchmarked PyMongo. And this is where things start to take a turn for the worse. Kind of as an aside in Vlad's article, he noted that the code that I work on is about a third as fast as my colleagues code in JavaScript. So I didn't actually know about this article at the time. The first I heard of it was when I got the following email from my boss. And so Steve, at the time, was my boss, and he's writing to me. And he's see-seeing Elliot, the CTO of MongoDB, one of the most frighteningly intelligent people or just frightening, full-stop people whom I've ever worked for. In retrospect, I was overly frightened of him. Elliot's actually a really nice guy, but this terrified me. And especially the subject line, why is your thing slower than your colleague's thing really got my pulse racing? So we'll walk around the office, and I read the email, and it says, hey, why is the Node driver three times faster than yours? And here's the link to the article. So to get up and take another walk around the office, and then my pulse goes down again, and I start to formulate a plan. First things first, I'm going to download Vlad's benchmark and run it myself, and I'm going to read through it and see if maybe I can see some mistake that Vlad's making. So let's do that. Let's take a look at Vlad's code. All right, so straightforward, he imports PyMonga, the client library. He connects it to his server. He gets a handle to a database within the server. He gets a handle to a collection within the database, and he drops it. All right, so he's getting started for his benchmark. Nothing to see here. Let's move on. Next, Vlad declares some variables. So he says I'm going to insert 80,000 documents. He wants to insert them 5,000 at a time. So far, so good. That's a good way to use MongoDB. I would expect that to perform well. And he writes down the start time. And he's going to stick documents into this batch list, which is empty right now. So what's next? All right, what are we doing here? He's going to import date time. And then he declares two dates, the first days of 2012 and 2013. And then he calculates the number of seconds between them. So that's the number of seconds in 2012. I don't know why he's doing that. Let's see what that's used for in a minute. All right, moving right along, he imports random for some reason. And all right, so now we're into the main loop. He's going to go for i from 0 to 80,000. He's going to do something. What does he do? Ooh. OK, so this is a complicated statement. Let's read it from the bottom up. That bottom line there, so he's going to take a random number and multiply it by delta, which is the number of seconds in 2012. All right, so he's got a random second within the span of 2012. And then he takes that min date, which was the first day of 2012. And he transforms that into a Unix timestamp. And then he adds that random second to it. So now he's got a random timestamp somewhere within the year 2012. And he converts that now back into a date time, which even more confusingly, he then calls date. All right, so we've got a date time. It's called date, and it's a random second in 2012. Let's keep going. OK, so he makes another random value. This is just some random floating point number. And he sticks them both into a dictionary. And what does he do with the dictionary? He's going to append it to his batch. And every time his batch reaches 5,000 documents, he inserts it into MongoDB and clears it. All right, so it's a little bit confusingly written. But I don't really see anything like any red flags in this code that make me convinced that it's his fault and not mine, that this code runs at a third the speed of the node code.  And he prints out how what his throughput was. I run this on this laptop. And I get about the same number that he did on his Windows desktop, which is, in his case, 29k and my case, 30k inserts per second. So, so far, so good. I have reproduced the thing that I am trying to diagnose. Now, another thought that I have is that maybe he's doing something like the workload is really different from whatever he's doing in Node. Maybe Node's faster because it's doing less or it's doing something different. So let's take a look at his Node.js code. Actually, this is a Python conference. Let's skip it. I read his Node.js code and I verified that it appeared to be doing the same thing. So why is it three times faster? All right, how am I going to answer this question? And I need to answer it well because not only Steve but also Elliot is going to be reading my response, right? I really feel like my posterior is on the line here. The tool that I pull out now is a profiler. And why do I choose a profiler for this? Is it to tell me why is this benchmark slow? It's not really a rigorous question. I think that you really need to apply a scientific method to questions of optimization. I think that optimization is a lot like debugging. Debugging is applying a scientific method to code in order to you generate hypotheses. Why is it behaving this unexpected way? And then you test your hypotheses by changing your code and seeing if it's fixed or at least if it has a different bug. Optimization is also an application of the scientific method. You come up with a hypothesis. And when you're optimizing, your hypotheses are, I think that if I change my code in the following way, it's going to yield a worthwhile improvement. Now, profiling, well, we'll get to this in a second. You come up with a hypothesis. You look at something you think like, well, if I cached this or if I improved that algorithm, then my code would be faster. And it will be substantially faster. It will be worth the effort and probably like the extra complexity of whatever optimization I'm going to attempt. The way that you test the hypothesis is with a benchmark. You run the benchmark before and after the change, and you see if it's substantially faster. The benchmark, of course, needs to be in some way representative of a workload that you care about. So people frequently run their unit test suites, and then they change their code and see if the unit test suite goes faster. That's a terrible idea, because unit test suites are typically the opposite of the use cases you care about. Your unit test suite is testing a ton of little edge cases. Your benchmark needs to hit like the main functionality of your code, and that's it.  You make your change, and you see if it's faster. How long do you keep doing this for? You do it until your code is fast enough. So if at all possible, have a target in mind. Like this program is the bottleneck in my overall system. I need to make it fast enough that it's no longer the bottleneck, and then I'm done, because I should optimize some other part after this. Otherwise it won't do any good. Around 2008, 2009, there was Amazon published a really incredible fact that for every 100 milliseconds of latency in their website, they lost 1% of sales. And even in OA, can you imagine like 1% of all Amazon online sales? Millions and millions of dollars. So they could put a value in dollars on performance, and they could decide if this optimization costs us this much time or money or hardware, is it worth it or not. Unfortunately for me, as an open source library developer, it's not easy for me to put dollar values on performance, because PyMango is incredibly popular. It's among top 20 PyPI packages. There are tens of thousands of projects that use it. I don't know what all those projects really care about. So it's safe to say I can guess that certain functions like insert are widely used, and that lots of people care about their performance, and I should make it as fast as possible. But unfortunately, I can't say anything more rigorous than that. So what's missing from this slide? I'm still not talking about profiling. The point of profiling is to generate hypotheses. Generate ideas for changes you can make to your code that might make it faster. People often mistakenly think that profiling will tell you what changes to make or measure the performance of different parts of your code. And unfortunately, this is not true, because profilers come with enormous amounts of overhead. Your code might run 20 or 100 times slower when the profiler is on. And unfortunately, it isn't slowed down evenly. So that means that a change that might actually be worthwhile will make your code run even slower with a profiler on, but it's actually worthwhile once you run your benchmark without the profiler on. So the profiler can tell you likely changes. Well, hot functions that are good targets for optimizations, but it doesn't tell you if the optimization has worked or not. You have to test your hypotheses by re-running your benchmark. So which profiler did I pull out? At this point, everybody mentioned cprofile, because it's in the standard library. But I pulled out yappy, which is yet another Python profiling, something that begins with i. And it's by a very smart Turkish programmer who is very bad at naming projects. But his name is Sumer Chip. And he wrote yappy, which compared to cprofile, it's got about the same amount of overhead, maybe even a little less. Cprofile and yappy, they both give you function run times. They're not line by line. There's not yet, to my knowledge, a line profiler that has low enough overhead to really be practical. Yappy can tell you how much CPU time you're spending, as opposed to wall clock time, which is an advantage over cprofile. And yappy can also measure all your threads concurrently, including threads that were spawned after you began profiling. So you can profile much more complex concurrent applications than with cprofile, which only profiles the thread that started cprofile. And the killer feature, which is actually the reason why I turned to yappy under these circumstances, is that it can output to this profiling file format called call grind. Now, call grind, you can visualize it with a Linux program called kcash grind. And the nice thing is that even though I was running my code on a Mac, I could output to call grind and then visualize it on anything. So I started up a Linux VM, installed kcash grind, and looked at my output there. So we can contemplate this for a moment while I take a sip of water. And what's not really surprising about this is that 2 thirds of the time is spent doing the insert. So 2 thirds of the time is in my code, either sending or receiving with the database or just waiting for the database. And that's sort of unfortunate. It means it might be my fault that this is slower, at least to some extent. But there's also a lot of other junk in here that is surprising. Maybe hard to read. But what we're spending time in here is from timestamp, make time, time tuple, and then also round. I was pretty sure that none of these functions are called from PyMango, so I searched through my code. Indeed, PyMango doesn't call these. So it's all right here in that weird opening statement of the benchmarks for loop. 1 third of the time is spent doing this kind of intricate juggling with random date times. So what do I have now? I'm actually speaking very imprecisely. I say 1 third of the time is spent here. I don't really know that. I know that the profiler thinks that, but the profiler is extremely inaccurate and unevenly inaccurate. All it's giving me is ideas of where my code is spending its time. So I've come up with a hypothesis, which is that if I change this code, the benchmark will run faster. But I haven't proven that by looking at the profiler output. In order to do that, I have to run an experiment. So what's like an easy experiment that I could do here? Maybe I could just set date equals 1. Or I could set daytime to now. I take a quick look at the standard library. Now is a pure C function. It doesn't do very much. So I think that this is going to be much, much faster than all of the time that we spent mucking around with date times and time tuples. So now I've got my hypothesis. I've got a test, but let's run it. I run Vlad's benchmark. And woo-hoo, this is looking pretty good. Before the change, I had my 30k inserts per second. And after, I have 50k. So we're already starting to really close the gap between my code and my JavaScript colleagues code, just by fixing up an inefficiency in Vlad's benchmark. And no insult to Vlad. He said right at the top, I'm not an experienced Python programmer. He was just doing something that looked totally reasonable, but not in Python. Plus, he was using an outdated version of PyMongo. So I also decided to upgrade. And at the time, PyMongo 3.0 was the latest. And with PyMongo 3 in place, we're now closing the gap much closer. So node was at 88k, and now we're at 59k per second. So I'm starting to feel pretty good at this point. I'm starting to compose a reply to Steven Elliott saying it's not my fault. And anticipating the likely final question from them, I also try running the whole thing through PyPy, which is a JIT compiler, and therefore somewhat more comparable in its execution model to node itself. And with PyPy in place, we're now at 73k inserts per second on my laptop. And if we think that my laptop performs about the same as Vlad's desktop, then what we've said here is that we've really covered about 80% of the ground. And it's not my fault. I get to keep my job. I wrote this up to Elliott and Steve. It felt really good. And I turned back to trying to remember whatever the hell I was working on right before I got this scary email. So I performed much better than I expected. I really optimized this talk. This is the whole point. Use a profiler not as evidence, but as a way to generate hypotheses, as a way to look for places to think up likely optimizations. But once you've got those ideas in place, you need to come up with a rigorous test and apply that test with the profiler turned off. In this case, I also used the profiler a little more deeply. I used it to estimate the likely improvement. So it's not simply a hypothesis of, I think that this is a target for substantial improvement. It's, I think it's a target for a 30% improvement. And as you can see in this case, that was actually incorrect. The improvement that I got was much better than the profiler had guessed I would get. And that's all I got. So I'm happy to talk to you more about profiling. I'll be around the conference all day. And enjoy the rest of the conference. Thank you very much.


Assalamu alaikum peace be upon you our respected viewers and welcome to a new episode of the beliefs of Islam This is Hassan Hadi and in today's episode We will consider an example of non-Quranic miracle of the holy prophet of Islam as has been previously stated in the past two episodes Due to several presuppositions and methodological fallacies there exists within the modern world several camps both Muslim and non-Muslim Like who in analyzing the life of the holy prophet Muhammad Allah's blessings and peace be upon him upon his pure family Have sought to invalidate the existence of miracles from his prophetic mission with the exception of the holy Quran We have already analyzed certain of the assumptions Which motivate such a fallacious theory and narrative yet We have not engaged with why such an assumption is firmly rejected by the traditional Muslims and particularly the followers of the Ahlulbayt alayhi wa sallam We do accept that the biographers of the holy prophet of Islam Those who gather details of his life and those who wrote the books which have traditionally become sources for understanding who Our holy prophet is have also included loss of blatant and horrific Fabrications due to a heavy political bias an early attempt to over through the personality of the holy prophet of Islam By hypocrites who numbered heavily immediately after the death of the holy prophet of Islam What we argue here is that through reliable and trustworthy means of those closest to the holy prophet of Islam We have examples of the reliable miracles Which are historically trustworthy on the basis of the testimony of the transmitters now One such example is narrated by the first Imam the commander of the faithful Imam Ali As-salam who narrates in the work Nahjul Balaghah sermon 191 the Imam narrates the following I was with him meaning the prophet When a party of the Quraysh came to him and said to him Oh Muhammad you have made a big claim which none of your forefathers or those of your family have ever made We ask you one thing if you give us an answer to it and show it to us We will believe that you are a prophet and a messenger as well But if you cannot do it, we will know that you are a sorcerer and a liar The messenger of Allah said what do you ask for they said ask this tree to move from us Even with its roots and to stop before you the prophet said Verily Allah has the power over everything if Allah does it for you Will you then believe and stand witness to the truth they said yes Then he said I shall show you whatever you want But I know that you won't bend towards virtue and there are among you those who will be thrown into the pit And those who will form parties against me Then the holy prophet said all three if you do believe in Allah the Almighty and the day of judgment And know that I am the prophet of Allah Come up with your roots and a stand before me with the permission of God the Almighty By him who deputed the prophet with the truth the tree did remove itself with its roots and Came with a great humming sound and if flapping like the flapping of the wings of birds Till it stopped before the messenger of God While some of its twigs came down on to my shoulders and it was on the right side of the holy prophet of Islam When the people saw this they said by way of pride and vanity Now you order half of it to come to you and the other half of it Refrain in its place the holy prophet ordered the tree to do the same then half of the tree advanced towards him in an Amazing manner and with the greater humming it was about to touch the prophet of Allah Then they said disbelieving and revolting Ask this half to get back to its other half and be as it was The prophet ordered it and it returned then I said all prophet of God I am the first to believe in you and to acknowledge that the tree did what it did just now with the command of God This sublime and test to money to your prophethood and to hide in your word Upon this all the people shouted rather a sorcerer a liar It's wonderful sorcery. He's a very adept in it only a man like this Pointing to me meaning Imam Ali can stand testimony to you in your affairs This is for today until we meet with the new episodes. Thank you very much indeed for being with us And assalamu alaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatuh


Ahoy-hoy, I'm Dr. Sumerian, not a real doctor, and today we are going to talk about, I would say, one of, if not the most controversial, SCPs on the SCP Wiki. SCP-2721, Lyris and Eli. Let's just open up the article really quickly. Here we go. Scroll up to the top. And first of all, we're going to talk, I have a squeaky chair. I really need to do something about it, if I'm going to be making YouTube videos, because I'm a professional. But, um, 2721 is about a pair of satellites orbiting on the far side of the moon permanently. Therefore, they're out of sight of the earth on any sort of regular basis. I'm just going to go over the basics of the SCP before I go into why it's controversial, or what has my intake on it will say. And that is that, again, it's these two satellites on the far side of the moon, they are tasked with cataloging and interacting with human culture, and then eventually destroying the earth through some sort of reality altering event. It's not really clear what's going on, but that is, it's pretty indicative that that's the basics of it. They're supposed to view the, one of the satellite's jobs is to basically catalog what's going on on earth, and the other one's job is to then destroy the earth. And these have gone to multiple planets and done this. What happens, however, is that the satellite that's meant to catalog and understand human culture comes across the webcomic Homestuck. And now I have to say, I personally have never read Homestuck, I'm not familiar with it very well as a webcomic, and this has really colored my original interpretations and dang, this thing squeaks hard. This has really seriously affected my interpretation of it, I think, especially early on. This was written, I actually don't know, but I'm gonna bet in 2016 sometime? It's hard to tell for sure, because the the page itself has been locked, so I can't check its history. But yeah, it was written sometime around 20, yeah, let's say that's correct. Sometime around 2016. But it wasn't until, I want to say, more recently, although it wasn't, it wasn't too long after it was posted, but more recently than it was posted. A collection of, let's just say, internet trolls and angry people decided they didn't like the article. My first reaction in this article was that I just didn't feel it, just it wasn't for me, it didn't seem like. I certainly respected what it was trying to do, but I mean, there's crossouts in black boxes and the containment procedures, these are two things that I hate, strike-throughs in black boxes, especially in the containment procedures, like my god. So that alone was enough to make me really dislike it. Actually, that's enough, that actually pushed me to a downvote originally. But also I didn't connect with it, because I don't know, I'm stuck at all. And to be honest with you, this is a very strong, this tells the story that this is telling is the story of like hundreds of thousands, probably millions of people in the world who deal with gender dysphoria and trans issues and as a cisgendered straight white male, it didn't really resonate with me in the same way. And at first, well, I should say didn't resonate with me that way then. In 2016, I knew I've known people in the LGBTQ plus community considered some to be friends, not friends, just acquaintances. But in general, I was a lot less familiar with, I should say, the struggles of people in that community. I mean, just recently, you could you could see this very recently when I did my video on pixelated harmony. And not only do I'm bad with pronouns, because I'm bad with names. It's just a quirk of my memory is that I'm really bad with numbers and names, things that don't attach aren't attached to a narrative, don't really click in my head, even for people I know really well. Um, I've forgotten my own name before, I've forgotten my family members names before so you can imagine how bad I am at remembering pronouns. And that's fine. To be honest with you, it's not fine to make the mistake, you have to correct yourself. But it's fine to be bad with pronouns, you just need to be more careful. And in my case, I started X, I'm trying to excise pronouns from my vocabulary entirely. So as to not hurt someone's feelings, it's the best way to put it. But recently, I discovered more important information and that's how important it is to get them right. It's not just that I'm bad with pronouns and I make those mistakes sometimes, but I am absolutely 100% must correct myself. And probably in this case of a video, like actually edit out the mistakes, it's a very important thing to do. It's not quite the level of a slur, but it's close and it's something I need to be more cognizant of. And I wasn't aware it was that big of a deal until like, was it February? I don't remember. Whenever I made that apology video for the pixelated harmony thing, because I got the pronouns wrong and I didn't realize how serious that was. And so viewing this SCP article from the lens of somebody who these are not my struggles, trying to be an ally, of course, but also it's just it doesn't resonate with me as a story. It allowed me to kind of ignore the point of the story, because the point of the story isn't just about people whose struggles these are. The core anomaly, the cataloger, the satellite that's trying to catalog Earth's history and knowledge and art and everything before it gets destroyed is the is a stand in for a trans person, period. And they're dealing with she, it's a fictional character, but still she is dealing with serious serious issues related to body dysmorphia, because she is actually a satellite and so on and so forth. But because I skimmed it, because basically I read it and was like, this is boring, and it didn't really internalize what was happening. I also missed the second half of it, the other satellite, who's a stand in for me, basically a guy or no, he go see and you can miss this very easily. Because when first described, the pronouns it are used. So you might think that he's also he it it's a stand in for it doesn't it doesn't exist on the same sort of level as the other satellite. It is just a destructive satellite trying to make sense of its friend, who is now wanting to go by a she pronoun and trying to understand these issues.  I'm not always the best ally I could be because of the things I don't know. But I'm trying. And it's exactly what this other satellite is doing. And I missed that the first time I read this article and I read it again today to make this video because it's Pride Month and I thought it would be a good opportunity for me to actually dive into this again and revisit some of the earlier controversies surrounding it. The truth to be told is that like I said, I completely missed the message of the second half of this, the other satellite who's just trying to understand their friend. Yeah, that's it. Thank you very much for watching. If you enjoyed the video, by the way, let's, well, of course, no, no, the license information is on here. So I'm going to do the same thing I do for most of these. SCP 2721 by kinch the knife blade and dolphin slug chugger from the SCP Wiki Source. HTTPS. It could just be HTTP. Enjoyed the video, hit the subscribe button and then hit the notification bell next to that so you're notified when I upload new videos and then head on over to patreon.com forward slash decimarian. Pledge on patreon at any level like everybody here on the screen already has, including Sinjeriki, who has pledged $100. And thank you for letting me know that I'm not alone out here. I will see you all again on Tuesday.


Well, for more on this, we're being joined by international affairs expert Paul Ijime. Paul, it's so good to see you. Thank you very much. Thank you. So there is fire on the mountain in Chad. Rebels are advancing on the capital. What can be done to stop more bloodshed? Well, it comes into, you know, talk about the short term and then the long term. The short term will be for get the rebels to at least cease fire so there can be some negotiations and, you know, so that lives can return and then to decide what can happen. The longer term will be to look at what has become the perennial causes of these issues, insecurity, ethnic divide and then poverty, unemployment and the fact that even though Chad is reaching in oil and other, you know, resources, it is not, you know, hasn't come down to the, it hasn't affected positively the lives of Chad's 16 million or so people. Instead, it benefits the colonial master, France, which is, you know, has the oil companies that are exploiting that oil and then they're also using well, bless his soul, Debbie, that has just gone. He was propping himself, he became a field martial in the army and they were using much of the revenue to buy arms. You know, the French budget was so sexy, more than four billion dollars for a country that has just 33,000 strong arms first. But you see, he was enjoying, that is Debbie now, was enjoying the support of France and then the other Western powers, US and EU countries. So that is where it, and this is what is happening. That Chad is rich, but his wealth is not being fed by the ordinary Chadians. And so you have a rebel that are fighting from, you know, the North, close to Libya. Let me come in here. So you talked about the reason why France is supporting the military takeover because that was going to be my next question. I was going to ask you, what do you make of France, you know, defending the military takeover? Is it modern? What meets the eye? Or is it just because of, like you said, the investment, their investment in Chad? Are they trying to actually support, you know, security in the nation? That is a hypocrisy of some Western powers. How can you be supporting the coup military takeover in one breath and then condemning it in another? You know that. Mali had some military takeover in August last year and everybody came on them. There was a suspension and whatever. But apart from France too, the EU and even Nigeria that has issued a statement, everybody seems to be saying, well, it's okay to do this. But there are principles of zero tolerance for seizure of power through unconstitutional means. And from what is happening, a military council taking over. This is a military coup d'etat and should never be allowed.  Denial and rejection of this type of hypocrisy. Africa is not moving anywhere. So for France, perhaps it will help them. President Macron is going there tomorrow, maybe to negotiate and talk. But that is the reason there hasn't been peace in Africa. I was going to talk, I was going to talk about that. World leaders are beginning to arrive for Idris Debe's funeral.  Would you say it's a bit reckless on the part of the leaders for attending, even when they've been warned not to? Or is it doom for the rebels because of the coalition of security forces? No, I think the rebels will not be helping their case if they attack any foreign leader. They will, I think they have even heard that they said they will, you know, there will be a measure of ceasefire before, you know, for the funeral. I think they should pay respect to a foreign leader. And so I don't think they will, they will go all out because it will not help their matters. They should, they will want to put themselves in a position that they can negotiate. Listen, they are asking for inclusivity. They are asking for justice. And so if that is the case, they can talk about it one day. It's not, will not be too much to sacrifice. And then after that, they can resume whatever grievances they are pursuing. But I don't think they will, they will be too irresponsible to maybe shoot down the plane of any of the visiting leaders. So that is what I was there, the expectation, but that it is just postponing the evil day. Because after that, where does the young man, 37-year-old Muhammad that has been now been put to take over from his father? Does he really, does he have what it takes? Will he fit into the big boot of his father? That is another issue. And how long will France be able to continue to prop regimes in Africa? Instead of leaving Africa to grow, there is independence, leave independence, political independence, economic independence. That is the only lasting solution to all these issues. So that Africans, they can make mistakes and then correct them. Democracy is, everybody is learning, even America is learning. True. But they are confused because they have a ulterior motive. They have an interest that they are pursuing. Corrections must, mistakes must be corrected. Absolutely. I agree. And then you talked about the ceasefire earlier on. Well, it was short lived as the rebels called off the ceasefire. But that's the much we can take. Thank you so much for joining us on the news tonight. Thank you. Hello. Hope you enjoyed the news. Please do subscribe to our YouTube channel and don't forget to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates.


Hello, YouTube. My name is John Hammond. This is more Pico CTF 2017 level 2. Normally, I would be moving on to the next challenge in the web category with the toaster wars challenges. However, they are currently down at the moment, and I've asked them a lot to fix it. I don't really want to ask again. So we'll stand by on that. So let's move into the Biner Exploitation category. Shells is the first one with the Z at the end. However, actually exploring this challenge in the next, I have this significant hunch that shells with an S and 70 points is actually the first challenge that's supposed to come before this one. So I'm going to do that to showcase it to you. Challenge is how much can a couple bytes do use shells given a binary and a source and there's the remote access Netcat connection. Hence here are read about basic shell code. You don't need a full shell yet. Just enough to get the flag. Okay, so let's go ahead and download these files. I will W get them in a folder that I have already created for it. Get the binary and get the source code, etc. So we can see what we're working with. Let's check out the source code. It is written in C. We have some headers that we're including defining an amount of stuff to I guess do something with we'll see. And there's a function called a win that we'll just call the system command cat out flag dot text. Okay, so that must be what we really want to execute. Let's check out this function vol. It does something with memory mapping that is allowed to execute protections to execute. Blah, blah, blah. Admittedly, I shouldn't learn more about memory mapping and stuff like that. I am again, I'm not that good at this kind of stuff, but It will eventually ask for, okay, give me 10 bytes, the amount of stuff to find up top. It will read in that amount. It'll determine if we're actually anything was returned and it looks like it will go ahead and try and execute the stuff that it is returned. So, or read in. So it looks like it is able to just execute code and again with that memory map that is executable. So this is a peculiar thing that we sometimes see in CTF challenges and we'll see in binary exploitation, vulnerability, challenges, stuff like that. Where the stack or the amount of memory that these things are stored is executable. You'll see techniques called depth or data execution prevention and NX that will try and mitigate that. However, in this binary NX is off, we can assume, obviously, because this memory map is allocated with executable permissions on it. So it says, okay, my mother told me to never accept things from strangers. How bad could be running a couple bytes? Then it will run that vuln function. So we want to figure out how do we can run this win system and the challenge is hinting at shell code. So if you haven't seen a shell code before, it's amazing and bewildering. It says in hacking, shell code is a piece of code uses the payload and the exploitation of software vulnerability. It's called shell code because it typically starts a command line shell, which the attacker can control a compromised machine, but it can do just about anything, whatever machine code that you write, et cetera, because shell code is written in machine code. So that is assembly and instructions and op codes and everything that we saw in the previous reverse engineering challenges. Now we'll put to use in actually exploiting a binary or like hacking a program. So we can go ahead and like find shell code on the internet. Really good location that I found is shell storm, and I'll reference that in the next video where we can just get a ton of cool shell code. But PwnTools will actually let us try and develop our own shell code. I want to showcase the documentation on that because it will give us an assembly platform where we can go ahead and craft our own shell code, ideally called shellcraft. So that's pretty neat. Will it give me documentation? Yes, great. If you don't have PwnTools, sudo app or sudo pip install, it's fantastic. Shellcraft is down here at the bottom. I hope to do a series on shellcraft sometime soon. But it essentially breaks down submodules based off architecture. In this case, if you want to check the binary, we can see what we're working with. It is just an Intel 386 and running on Linux. So we can reach that if we want to, and we can have it do specific things like cat ifile or try those other connections, etc, etc, etc. And we can do that all just fine. And we can all build it with an assembly function that will just as a nice utility in PwnTools, go ahead and give us the assembly for that thing. It will assemble whatever code we write in assembly into real opcodes. So if we wanted to do something simple, like call a function and that case win that we saw in the source code, that's really what we want right now before we jump into trying to cat stuff and open up pop new shells. We can just piece together some assembly code and run it. So let's try that. Let's I'm going to go ahead and create a new shell up here. I'll use Python. And on the other side, I want to check out the symbols in this binary. So I'm going to use redelf tack s to just able to showcase the symbols and we can see we have some information where when the function that we want here is stored local to the binary at this hexadecimal address 08048540. So I could copy that if I wanted to. And then in Python, let's import the PwnModule and then let's write what we will essentially have our own assembly that we're trying to do. Let's push that memory address onto the stack and then let's return so that we will just go to that location or call that function. Essentially, we'll just pop over there and move to this location, essentially calling the win function. Let's go ahead and compile that, not compile it, but put it in assembly op codes. And you can see that PwnTools will give it to us just like that. So if we wanted to, we could go ahead and print this out in Python, print that string. And I use Python to print it out so we can properly handle those raw bytes. You can see them on the terminal that I wouldn't be able to print those characters otherwise. So once we have that on centered output, we can go ahead and pass that to our shells binary. We'll just pipe in that input because if you remember reading the source code, that shells program will just want to run bytes. But it can't actually run those things. If you didn't give it anything, it's just waiting for input. So let's go ahead and get that stuff, that assembly that we just compiled, those op codes, that machine code, that shell code, put it on centered output, pipe it in. And once we pass the program, you can see it's trying to run that system command. Just as the win function explained, bincat flag dot text, no such file or directory. OK, looks like we've got it doing what we want it to do on our local thing. We just don't have a file flag dot text that we could actually have it display. If we fake something, it totally could do that for us, whatever. But let's go ahead and pass it to the real thing. Let's go ahead and take it with that remote netcat command. Running the program just remotely. Let's go ahead and pump that to our input and we get the flag just like that. So that is what we're working with here. We can, if we wanted to tail that, get just the flag, write a simple get flag script for that, just throw it in a little binary or bash script. That doesn't explain the whole process. We went through a read-off and generating that shell code with PwnTools. So we could write a PwnTools script to connect to it and generate that shell code on the fly if we particularly wanted to. But I don't want to get that far into it right now. However, I hope that was a good overview of our potential for shell code and just showing how we can do what we want in assembly and bring that to opcodes by using the PwnTools library. So that is an awesome tool kit and we'll get into doing other cool things in that next challenge that do I have the flag actually in my front? No, let's go ahead and submit it in that other challenge that I think really does come after this one for some reason, though the point value is different, where we aren't able to use that wind function. We just got to do something else like cat the flag, etc, etc. Quick shout out to the people that support me on Patreon. Thank you guys so much. One dollar or more on Patreon will give you a special shout out just like this at the end of our video. Five dollars or more on Patreon will give you early access to everything released on YouTube. If you did like this video, please do like comment and subscribe. Join our Discord server link in the description. It's a cool community of CTF players, programmers and hackers. If you hang out with me and other cool people and I would love to see you guys on Patreon and the next video. See ya.


Come on man. Let's go super auto one-on-one of Wayne Rooney. Let's go. Oh my god Huge card DC United. Let's go. That is a big card. Let's go Do you? We told you we're starting. Oh my god Daniel Let's go one of one Wayne Rooney super factor auto. Let's go dude. Jesus You


With the renewal of the Canada Science and Technology Museums, my team is responsible to ensure that you as a visitor will actually know all the amazing things that you can find in the museums. We're also been working really hard in the background with all the technology that is involved in the museum and all the amazing interactive display that you will find when you actually get to the new museum. You will be absolutely amazed with all the work that's been done in this new museum and we look forward to seeing you in November 2017.


All right, I that I that brings me to another cool stuff found with a little more show and tell the Yamaha e700 a Over-the-ear headphones. So these are $350 headphones. They have 40 millimeter drivers, which is pretty standard for high-end Over-the-ear headphones apples $550 AirPods max also have 40 millimeter drivers still not sure why we pay an extra $200 for those But that will you know, there you go. You're you can choose these Yamaha ones super comfortable they come in a case and then they open the case and the headphones happily fit inside it and And they they really do they're these these ear cups are big Which I really like they fit over my ears in a very nice way Then they they look good And of course they have all kinds of great technology in them The first thing I will say though is that they sound fantastic. These are truly built to be, you know, high-end Headphones they have a listening care feature that adapts the sound based on What it hears in your ear like it's got microphones both inside and out. It's got a you know, you can use it as a you know Bluetooth speakerphone, of course and But the microphones inside are constantly sensing much like what Apple is doing and many other manufacturers are doing with their headphones now where they're Adapting the sound to you Bluetooth 5 with aptX adaptive. So it's got the the latest and greatest as far as that goes Ambient sound reduction now or ambient sound it'll allow in it's got active noise cancellation all by themselves These are closed ear headphones. So all by themselves. They block out quite a bit of sound And you can turn noise cancellation off, of course with noise cancellation on they it really dries out the environment Which is sort of what it should do and the ambient mode which let's sound in is One of the best ambient modes I've used a lot of headphones have it And it can be sort of flaky it might not let enough in it might let too much in this to me Let's a perfect amount in I really can hear my environment, but still hear the music in fact of the three I was listening to a bunch of music on these John and of the three modes the With noise canceling off and with ambient on I noticed almost no difference in the sound Obviously, I could hear ambient noise. So if I was an acquired environment I noticed no difference if I was where you are with the cars are driving by then I might hear those and that's you know Either a good thing or bad thing but in terms of audio quality It was the same all the way through when I turned on noise cancellation I definitely lost some low-end on the headphones and to me it was it was lost low-end Not the other way around not extra low-end when it you know when it was off if that makes sense because you could look At it both ways, but I have a playlist of songs that I'm very familiar with that I use to test earphones So I can suss them out in a snap and and this definitely, you know cut some of those That I don't want to say low mids It was it was truly kind of some of the low end was out when the noise cancellation was on at least sitting in my office I I do plan to bring these on the plane. I think they've got like 30 hours of battery life There's a there's an app that you can use both to update the firmware and also to control all the various settings But that you can control all the noise cancellation and everything right from buttons on them And what's really nice John is when you hit the you know noise cancellation button to change it or hit the power button It talks to me. So I don't have to just hear a sound and wonder what mode I've changed to it Tells me in English what mode I've changed to or if I tap the power button It tells me the state of the battery high medium low. It's great So I'm impressed with these things and 350 or 349 95 on Amazon That's about what I would expect to pay for high-end headphones that do all the things these do and they do have You can plug into them, too So if you want to plug into like the airplane output or your iPad or whatever you can you can do that, too