Hello, welcome to this Davos agenda impact session on building net zero cities. I am Christina Gamboa. I am the CEO of the world Green Building Council, and I'm very happy to be joining you as your moderator today. Thank you very much for the world to the world economic forum for this invitation in recognition of the leadership of the network of the world Green Building Council 70 Green Building Councils and our impact in catalyzing the update of net zero and sustainable buildings for everyone everywhere. Last year, I had the pleasure to join the board of the net zero carbon cities program at the forum, which is bringing together 70 stakeholders from over 10 different sectors, which are ready to work together to secure that cities all over the world transition to a net zero future. So, in this session, we're very privileged to have you all join us because it's one of the hot topics this year as we go into COP 26 cities are acting, but do do need to do much more to embrace the zero and decarbonize cities and the build environment. It is imperative that we all play our part, and that we embrace the end and deliver the on the uptake of an integrated approach to be able to reduce emissions, crossing energy, buildings and mobility. We will hear that in the session about a great report just published a few weeks ago on net zero carbon cities, which is available in the world economic forums website. We will discuss today, the much needed systemic change required to unlock that low carbon future, and we're very lucky to have here the experts that can take us on that journey. So we can ensure that systems are resilient and that they improve significantly significantly our health and well being. I do believe that 2021 is going to be a great year, and it's going to be a wonderful year to advance the agenda on net zero cities. Last year COP 26 got postponed, but this year it looks very promising as cities and the built environment in general is going to be profiled in the official agenda of COP 26. The built environment is responsible for 70% of global carbon carbon emissions for from final energy use, but has been fairly invisible in the climate discussions for far too long. So that is changing. And without further ado, we will hear from our experts on why this is happening. The conversation today couldn't be more timely, and we will have a session where the panel discussions from viewers all over the world can watch also through the live stream of the forums website. So we will have a detailed discussion later for registered for members and partners. So as this discussion unfolds, please stay with us for for the full session. So a big welcome to all our panelists. We have with us today. He's the chairman and chief executive officer of Schneider Electric France, Francesco star Archie chief executive officer and general manager from an, from an L Italy. Welcome. Grace full high yen. She's the minister of sustainability and the environment of Singapore. We're very lucky to have you here today. Thank you. And John Suikens, he's the chairman of the executive committee of Acrimans and Van Haren from Belgium. So, this is a great topic. 70% of global carbon emissions comes from cities. So, Francesco, I would like to start with you as a fellow member of the board of the net zero carbon cities program at the World Economic Forum. And would you please share with our audience. What is the focus of this program. And what do you think are the plant outcomes that is going to make it a big difference from the perspective of achieving the zero. Thank you Christina. I think it indicated why this is important. I mean, when you said 70% of the carbon emission of the world come from cities. And that should not surprise us because that's also where most people increasingly decide to leave. And the question is, why would the world change if cities do not. And what do we need to do to accelerate this transition worldwide. And the obvious answer is that we have to concentrate on cities. There is an incredible concentration of technologies that is to be found in some geological certification of legacy in our cities. We have things coming from centuries ago, and things coming from last decade. And it's all mixed in there. So, how do we transition into clean electrification into ultra efficiency buildings into smart energy infrastructure. How do we increase the circularity of the economy in cities, talking about waste and water materials, everything that we consume in our lives in these big cities. The answers are very fragmented each technology has its own way and its own recipe and its own way to decide how to improve, but how can a city do it all together. So the question is, how can we harmonize and accelerate the trend that is possible in increasingly make our cities more efficient. The efforts that we tried to put together is exactly this, to make it possible for a city to have a helicopter view of all the technologies that are available and harmonize their deployment into the large metropolitan area, increasing the efficiency of the city itself and improving the quality of life of people living in cities. To do that, we started putting together an incredible group of leaders across industry within public domain so city mayors and administrators, putting together this group and trying to assemble all kinds of inputs that we will look at in order to make this city efficiency efforts, the more synergistic and the more holistic possible. All in all, we think there are great possibilities. The global framework paper today in that was published a few days ago addresses the framework in which we will try and move in the in the next 2021. There is quite a large consensus that it is within reach and acceleration within in cities in this direction. And I think that 2021 would be a year of delivery we will put down a work hard at the toolbox of solution best practices examples for transportation checklists, you know, what if we want the part of this but I think it is not going to be boring it's actually going to be useful. So then the next step of this effort having put together this big team and also a little bit the conceptual framework will be set down and writes the toolboxes and efficient practices that will make cities step ahead in this in this effort. And like I said before, what happens in cities drives the development of the world. So that's the focus of our effort in the next 12 months. That's wonderful, because also the world in some geographies is still urbanizing at a very high rate. So even for for cities that are retrofitting for cities that are planning to grow, right. There are some key things and key considerations that can change the future. Right. And also address the past and address the carbon budget we already have built there in cities. And let's not forget, there are many different archetypes of cities, small, large, all new growing, not growing. There are plenty of different situations in cities. They all have in common the fact that technology enables today in cities, incredible improvements in quality of life and efficiency in energy use. Totally. And we have the wins of the clean energy transition behind us. No, which is very favorable. Thank you so much for those considerations. Jennifer's calm. Welcome to the session. So you're from your perspective also, could you please share why you feel that this decarbonization of cities is so critical as the integrated approach that you're advocating in this way paper. Hi, Christina. I'm building on what Francesca introduced. I think the somewhere the passion of the group working together is about making things happen, right, because I believe that today we're all convinced that our cities have to be better on have to put together a journey toward net zero. But the question is that the city is a sum of systems, which are all intertwined. And if you move one of the subsystems without moving the rest of the system, then you go nowhere and actually you limit the results of on your objective or your capacity to reach your objective. So, make it simple. We want things to happen. Now it's time for action though, trying to focus on practical toolboxes for all the stakeholders that participate to the journey to net zero to work together. I'm thinking if I try to simplify around four topics. The first one is to make sure we map the connections between the different critical systems related to decarbonization on journey to net zero. Subsystems are often siloed of course digitization smart city smart grids are helping to connect the dots, but it's still a sum of very siloed systems which, which don't communicate enough to drive to a coordinated on an impactful change. So, first point is, we are making sure we are trying to work with a group to put together a clear mapping of the most critical connections of the subsystems so that they progress together. The second one is to work on a practical grid of analysis to help urban stakeholders to understand where they are on where we are on the net zero journey for the authorities for the mayor for the city or for the communities. It's a tool to assess and benchmark the degree of preparation of their assets on infra, but for the financial actors because there is a lot of capital nowadays would like to finance the evolution of infrastructure. It on there sometimes wonder how they can really qualify that an investment is going to the right direction. It's a tool of common dialogue between cities on between sponsors to make things happen. So let's say a common grammar on referential to make sure that we everybody has the same understanding or a common understanding of the journey. So let's say that this has happened in the building space in in the past years with a number of certification which have been adopted by many cities expanded to the environment of the city to make sure that there is a more global understanding and a more global sharing of what's happening. The third point is about best practices. I mean, people around this, this call in this group are building a ton of good solutions, progress solutions that can be shared better on create the right exchange place so that people can get inspiration on cookie paste of the best solutions which have been deployed. The fourth point is really understand what are the links with other collateral when we do that what could be the other benefits that we can generate and try to put to qualify them. Let's make an example. The rate of retrofit of the cities that say just one example in Europe, cities will be retrofitted for their building is in 200 years, at least, which, of course, doesn't fit with with a 1.5 degree trajectory using new technologies on a new way of doing we can reduce that by a factor probably of 10, which makes it 20 to 30 years, much more acceptable for all of us probably around this around this school. So how do we address this acceleration of retrofit. What are the additional jobs to be created to make it possible. Can we associate that to a request which is special in post COVID is coming up like elsewhere being the necessary while the evolution of buildings on common spaces so that they become more LC. Those are the things that we would like to approach on illustrate the correlation together with a main topic of net zero cities. So in a nutshell, this, these are the four points on which we are focused at the moment. That's excellent, because there's a great demand for transparency from data you mentioned, as I said, there were the winds of the clean energy transition picking up. There's also the winds of the responsible investment movement, and this transparency and accountability of investments and better assets also requires cities to address digitalization right and and that I would like to follow up from you were saying that digitalization trend is also at the forefront in the in the context of living. So that that access to data in that systemic approach right you said was will be unlocking opportunity for citizens for public policy makers and also for business to better address what are those needs. What do you see this happening in terms of the update and how do you feel the systemic approach. Frankly, I believe that digitalization is a fantastic disruption now that it is applying to the Internet of things that means connecting our cities to the citizens of the cities and connecting the various subsystems of the cities together. It is somewhere the technology enable to a better systemic efficiency and it was not existing before so we shouldn't take it lightly what was not possible before is now possible. So I'm going to be very quick because I'm sure that many people have to speak around this from table but think about it with digital you can measure everything on inefficiency what you measure gets done. Measurement is a base of progress. It's a tool for efficiency everywhere in buildings in all networks really everywhere. It's the necessary connection between silos between renewable generation into a super efficient and modulated buildings into a smart with that allows us to share better. It's a place where you can share data between the stakeholders take the building example between the design house between the contractor between the utility between the user suddenly you have transparency of what what on people working together on the improvement of the same facility is a way to connect people to the city. I mean to know if there is an available parking lot in this parking if I can go to canteen because I free space you can really share better and be more efficient. It allows for traceability of resources. Therefore this is a first pass to circularity. So getting things connected is really essential to this progress on that was not possible before but the recent take off fast take off of Internet of Things big data artificial intelligence plus mobile tools make that this space is evolving very fast. Totally the transition has been amazing. We're very lucky. I missed the disruption that that's a very positive trend that has emerged. Thank you so much for sharing those thoughts. Minister foo. In terms of the experience and the leadership of Singapore Singapore. It has been a great. Yeah, let's say proposer of solutions in this space where sustainability has been key in the development of the city state. Could you please give us one of the key lessons from your perspective that has accelerated a better performance of the city in terms of continuing to address its agenda in climate action and decarbonisation and what is your big challenge in the months to come. Thank you very much. It's a great question. And you know, look, just hearing Francisco and Jen Pascal is so inspiring to see so many people thinking about this important issue. And in Singapore is a city of the same time is also a country where only seven hundred square kilometers housing five and a half million population. We are very renewable energy constraint. So we have many, many challenges. If you a Christina, if you give me the time I can tell you the tons of challenges that we have. But because of our constraints because of challenges we are forced by circumstances to always think out of the box. And I think many solutions up there in other countries in other cities are really good examples for us to to consider. And if you think about the advantage of Singapore really because of our smallness because a lot more integrated decision making is also very comprehensive. I would like to think that we are very data driven. Just thinking John Pascal's, you know, points about really giving us the data to work on. We like to have data from different systems to like us understand the, you know, total carbon footprint that we have. So I like to think that Singapore government is really doing the other things that the citizens of the cities are doing as John Pascal has described. We want to make those data transparent to the people. We like to think about our plans in a very holistic way. Sustainability actually as as Francisco has it is so integrated is not just the work of one single ministry or one single agency involves so many of our lives that actually you need all parties to come together. So we like to start with looking at our total carbon emission sectorally and the lies where are the big emitters and then very systematically goes through sectoral target setting so that all the agencies that are involved have a clear understanding of where the projection where the trajectory and how to get there in time. We also want to take a very disciplined approach to look at the cost benefits of technologies. There's so many technologies out there some of them are more mature than the others. So for us to that not to look into any technology prematurely. So we have a disciplined way of looking at the common abatement versus the fiscal cost needed so that we can come up with a very clear understanding of what are we to do what are the steps to do. And importantly this framework actually allows us the government agencies across the board to have a common discussion about the plan. Let me just give you an example looking at public transportation. We want to make public transportation a lot more carbon efficient. How do we intend to do that. A subway station 10 minutes away from 80 percent of our population. We want to move into electrification of our vehicles by 20 40. The entire fleet will be electrified. We also want to make our public feet 50 percent of our buses to be electrified in 2030. In order to get there. Obviously we need our energy ministry to also think about supplying the charging points. Because it's one thing about having some parts some electrical vehicles. But if you have to go 100 percent of your fleet electric to go electric. It's going to distribute the electric points all the way all around the country to every community. And that requires collaboration required agreement by all agencies and agreement with the community as well. There is also an opportunity as some of the gentlemen have said opportunities for businesses to come in because the rules will change as technology disrupt the way that we do things. Do we still need to own cars can car sharing be more prevalent. So are we able to reduce wastage in capacity of vehicles if you are able to do car sharing a lot more where charging points will become the sharing point. So there are many of such examples that will be very exciting for us as a city as a country over the next few years to look at integrating our policies making sure that as we move collectively towards carbon neutrality. We are integrated we are moving along with everyone the community the financiers as well as all agencies of the government. That's wonderful. That's a great vision. And thank you so much for sharing with those those dates for for the changes in EV vehicles. That's going to unlock also a better collaboration with other solutions and make it more integrated. So that's wonderful to hear. That's going to unlock a good revolution of cleaner solutions for the city and developing on that. Now I would like to bring in. Hey, Jen, so it can. Hi, Jen. And building on what the minister was saying, right about also making the points of transportation closer to having a better quality of life that you don't have to move around the city so much. Do you agree on that solution and how to better, let's say capitalize on those developments right to further the integrated approach. What do you think about those type of solutions. Thank you Christina for having us. I would like to come back to something you said early on. I think this is the ideal time to have this these discussions, as you know, there is a lot of money available public funds, as well as private funds to invest in you know ESG compliant projects and building smart cities, building compact cities, building sustainable cities certainly answers to these to these questions. But in order for for for that to happen, I think we have rather to think in terms of neighborhoods, rather than buildings. Make sure that what we create is in terms of neighborhoods that they are livable that they are sustainable, and that they are affordable. And what I mean by that is, and certainly the pandemic crisis has learned that we have to integrate all of the functions as well. We are working we are living, we are looking for entertainment whether this sport or culture, we need to greener our environments, and all of that will help us making these environments more livable sustainable resilient environments is even more important. And in that aspect, we have to think about a life cycle approach to both construction, as well as investing. And, which means that you know circularity and it has been referred to is becoming more important, making sure that you know we we use new materials reusable materials. We make it and our colleagues refer to it, our environments our buildings more energy efficient. Yeah, and data will certainly help so doing resilient, we have to use the existing space. We have to think about how to renovate existing heritage buildings. We have to think about how to re repurposing existing assets. We have to think about how to make sure that you know the available space becomes more flexible, so that over time, we can adapt the environments to new needs and affordable. I think and it was referred to as well. We have to think about smart engineering and think long term, as I mentioned in terms of what you know how environments could change and how we would need to adapt the existing existing space. We have to think about model building so that that you know it's cheaper to build as well. We have to think how to reuse when we renovate cities, how we reuse the existing materials. And then, as I said, it's, it's, we have to make sure that the living spaces are become more mixed, and we have to be to be more inclusive in terms of the housing we we generate. So, I think that this is the right time, public private partnerships are looking for ESG compliant projects. But we have to make sure that you know we you know we create new environments, and we have in and we apply indeed what is being referred to in the study. We have to apply an integrated approach to the problems that that we are facing that they are and that, in fact, a huge opportunities. You touched some very important concepts in your intervention, all of you have, but I would like to flag a whole life approach, the whole life cycle approach, because any success in decarbonization, and the integrated approach will have to think of the infrastructure, how we design and build today and what the performance in the decades to come. You were talking about heritage, heritage we have to address, how is it fit for purpose today, and possibly it's a very sustainable infrastructure, it already exists, right. It probably has a carbon budget still to pay off. And we need to make it, let's say, integrated into the functions of the city so the lessons from Singapore and Minister for also the city developments have been mixed use quality housing. And I guess what we're talking here is about quality infrastructure in cities that can really unlock our best health and well being while addressing the responsibility we have in terms of having cities meet the Paris agreement and deliver of course on the sustainable goals. And on the ESG criteria of course infrastructure has to disclose. People are being picky, more picky in what are the let's say the ingredients that go into what they're investing on, and these type of solutions are the ones that are going to be quality infrastructure that are going to have a green premium in terms of value, and probably assets that are not addressing the questions that this approach moves forward will have a brown discount. And as we move forward, we will have a certain virtual cycle where we can grow better in the context and technologies that in the unlocked is the carbonization of the built environment. Thank you so much. I guess, with that, we have a few more, a few more minutes, and I would like to go back to Francisco, and in terms of, if you could just say a few final words, what should key stakeholders, and let's say commit to in this new path forward towards decarbonizing decarbonizing cities through an integrated approach. Thank you Christina and then again, you've heard incredible. Let's say perspectives here and, and I think if you look at what happened for example during 2020, which we all know was a major disruption in the way in which we live in cities, mostly in most parts of the world. You can imagine a city in 2019 and then you can imagine a city now, and in between we have a 2020 in which we experienced our cities in a completely different way. And we have all learned to live in these cities in a completely different way. And so the reflection here is, how can cities adapt to ourselves they have been doing that all the time. We have changed our cities in centuries, we have kept working at them. The question today is that we are doing it in a more conscious manner in the dimension of what impact the city has on the world. This is the first time I think in the Israel mankind that we look at it, we look at cities this way. The cities, the way in which we live in them and the way we use them and shape them shapes the world. And so what we do within cities is super important. And I think here the lesson that we learned is that cities are like human beings are like living organic beings, they continuously change. The task for administrators of cities has never been more complex than it is today. I think it's fair to say from Minister Fu's intervention that you would argue that a city administrator should have also some knowledge of physics, if he wants to do the proper job, which is not that normal in most of the times. You have jobs, you have knowledge of physics, you need to have knowledge of biology, you need to have knowledge of chemistry. I think this COVID has just imposed unprecedented challenges on us. And I would just like to say, I totally agree with you, Francesco, that the pandemic has essentially taught us to make us think about the resilience of a city. I think in the past it's always about efficiency, it's about getting the work done faster, you know, getting to where we one point to another with shorter speed. But I think right now it's about resilience, right? How do we have better hygiene? How do we have better public health? How do we make sure that there's, you know, space for individual, for reflections? I think these are all very important points and obviously it's going to change the way that we work. Because right now I think most of the buildings in most cities are probably operating at half the capacity because people are working from home. And I think increasingly, you know, there's, you know, this thought about what do we do with this wasted capacity. Well, you can, you can argue that you can also. Yeah, the heating is working 100%, the cooling is working 100%, but it's only half filled. So IOT, how do we use Internet of Things, sensors to tell us where the cooling heating needed, how do we adjust it so that it is optimal and we can reduce the cover footprint of buildings. And I think these are all food for thought. And I think in Asia, in Southeast Asia, particularly that the cities are growing, the population is young. And I'm sure, you know, it will be good investment, many good investment propositions for financiers. Yeah. And I think you can also make a point that while the office space is underutilized, the home space is overutilized. So there is another point that is how do we change our homes? Do we change our homes going forward? So there is a continuous adjustment that needs to be to take place. And here I think, you know, the efforts that we have to put forward is was underlined by Jan. There is a public private partnership space that needs to be broadened and brought to fruition. This is a word always used and not that much put into context properly. There is a lot of resources and money available for this kind of effort. This is out of question. And there is an issue of deciding and agreeing on metrics, not on single buildings, neighborhoods, on cities, not on single technologies, on holistic technologies, but that cannot be measured cannot be done. So I think this was said very clearly by Jean Pascal. Today we have the tools, we have the digital dimension that helps a lot. Let's put it to work because it is really what will make it happen. In 2021, I think we will try and put this learnings to fruition and provide some kind of baseline of tools to try and help the administrations of cities to do their very, very, very difficult job. Amazing. Thank you so much. That exchange was part of why this topic is so important to address because there is a demand for those solutions. There they exist. There is the space to improve the quality of life and the moment could be more couldn't be more timely. So thank you everyone. This closes the first portion of the session and I would like to thank our great panel for joining us today, as well as the audience that has joined us.


This video provides an explanation of the transition rules in British Columbia's New Limitation Act. In order to understand the transition rules, it's helpful to have a comparison of how time ran in the basic and ultimate limitation periods under the former act as compared to the new act. Under the former act, there were two different ultimate limitation periods, a general 30 year ultimate limitation period which applied to most claims and a 6 year ultimate limitation period which applied to medical malpractice and negligence claims against doctors, hospitals and hospital employees. The ultimate limitation period under the former act began to run from the accrual of the legal claim. Accrual occurred once all of the elements of the legal claim were present. For example, in a negligence claim, the ultimate limitation period would not start to run until both the negligent act and the damage had occurred because these are both elements of a claim in negligence. Under the former act, there were three different basic limitation periods, 2 years, 6 years and 10 years. The length of the basic limitation period depended upon what type of legal claim was being made. The basic limitation period ran from discovery in some cases, but in other cases it started to run from the date that all of the individual elements of the legal claim were present or the accrual of the legal claim. Now, under the new act, there is a single 15 year ultimate limitation period which applies to all claims. The ultimate limitation period runs from the act or remission on which the legal claim is based. There is a 2 year basic limitation period that applies to all claims unless the new act specifies otherwise. The 2 year basic limitation period runs from the date that the person discovers they have a legal claim. With this comparison of the basic and ultimate limitation periods in the former and new acts in mind, let's move on to the transition rules. Section 30 of the new act contains a transition clause. This clause ensures that people who have legal problems that existed before June 1, 2013 can still rely on the legal advice that was given to them before the new limitation act came into force. Remember, June 1, 2013 is the date that the new act came into force. When you look at the transition rules, you may be wondering when do these apply and how do they work? There are a few things to keep in mind. The first of which is that the transition rules only apply to pre-existing claims. A pre-existing claim is defined in the new act as a claim that is based upon an act or remission that occurred before June 1, 2013, but for which a court proceeding was not started before June 1, 2013. The transition rules apply to pre-existing claims if three things happen. First, the former ultimate limitation period that governed the claim under the former limitation act has not yet expired. Second, the act or remission on which the legal problem is based must have occurred before June 1, 2013. Third, the person has to discover that they have a claim on or after June 1, 2013. So, to summarize, you must have a former ultimate limitation period that has not yet expired, an act or remission that occurred under the former act, and discovery that occurred under the new act. If these three criteria are met, the transition rules will apply. Before we continue, please note that the transition rules do not apply if the act or remission occurred under the former act, but discovery also occurred under the former act. If this is the case, then the former limitation act continues to apply in its entirety. Similarly, if the act or remission occurs on or after June 1, 2013, and discovery also occurs on or after June 1, 2013, then the new act applies and the transition rules will not apply. So, what are transition rules? The transition rules govern two situations depending upon whether a plaintiff's claim would have been governed by the 30-year or 6-year ultimate limitation period under the former act. We will be looking at how the transition rules apply if a plaintiff's claim is against a doctor, hospital, or hospital employee, and would have been governed by the 6-year ultimate limitation period under the former act. If this is the case, the transition rules say that the former 6-year ultimate limitation period continues to apply. Time begins to run as it had under the former act, from the date that all of the elements of the legal claim were present or accrued. In a medical malpractice or negligence claim, this will be the date of damage. In essence, where a plaintiff's claim is against a doctor, hospital, or hospital employee, there is no change to how the ultimate limitation period runs under the transition rules. But when does the basic limitation period begin? The transition rules say that the 2-year basic limitation period applies from the date of discovery, unless the new act specifies otherwise. Here's an example to illustrate how the transition rules work for medical claims where the former ultimate limitation period was 6 years. Mary had a surgery on her stomach on June 1, 2012. However, it's not until June 1, 2014 that she becomes very sick and discovers that a sponge was left inside of her stomach during the surgery. Let's assume for this example that the date of damage is the date that Mary gets very sick. The act or omission date is the date of Mary's surgery, which occurred under the former act on June 1, 2012. Discovery occurred on June 1, 2014 under the new act, so the transition rules apply. Let's assume that Mary plans to sue her doctor for damages. Since this claim would have been governed by the former 6-year ultimate limitation period, the transition rules say that the 6-year ultimate limitation period will continue to apply, running from the accrual date. The accrual date is the date that all of the legal elements were present. In this case, the date that the damage occurred. So the 6-year ultimate limitation period begins on June 1, 2014. The transition rules also tell us that the 2-year basic limitation period under the new act applies, running from discovery. So, Mary will have 2 years beginning June 1, 2014 to sue her doctor.


How do I sound? Am I coming in hot? Am I coming in hot? You're looking hot though between the the tie-dye and the sunglasses going on over there. You know this shirt actually so every year we go on vacation to Myrtle Beach, right? And I don't know when they started doing it, but it became a little bit of a tradition that they would tie-dye shirts while we were there. And then once Emily figured out how to do the what do you call it, like the vinyl transfer stuff, she started putting like logos on them and that kind of thing. And so this is this year's Myrtle Beach t-shirt. And it's a little bit strong for my taste. However, my daughter is in the office with me today and she's wearing her shirt and she wanted to match. And so she asked if I would wear my shirt today and I thought, you know, that makes a lot of sense. It does. Yeah. Not only is it very fatherly, but there's not too many family vacations that they have their own custom t-shirt. No. That's when you know you've arrived. That is pretty impressive. If I can build and install my own pacemaker, I can make a vacation t-shirt for my family. Absolutely. Absolutely. They voted on the logo and everything. And you know, it's appropriate because I was saying I feel a little bit like I've been on vacation. It's been a nice relaxing weekend. Absolutely. You know. Did anything happen in this weekend? I was kind of checked out. I got a new dog, the whole thing. I didn't even check in. Did you do anything this weekend? You know, I'm taking that one of those time management approaches where I refuse to check Slack over the weekend. It's worked really, really well. Our numbers may go down on Zendes just a little bit, but that's the way it's going. A little bit. Well, luckily you and I were on the duty this weekend because the transfer, the last transfer to Reliable Site, we'll get to that, was not clean. From Reliable Site. Not too.  And you know, I guess we should give a little bit of backstory here. So we started with Reliable Site, right? Like that was the first company that we went with when we started the company in 2013 and bought a single server. You know, and it was just one dedicated server. Then the reasoning for that being several, you know, one of them is that it was very cost effective.  I don't remember what it ended up costing, but you could buy a dedicated server. It had a decent amount of storage space and, you know, it met the needs at the time in 2013. At the time, you know, a lot of the virtual offerings really struggled in terms of storage space, I would say. It wasn't necessarily, I don't know that Digital Ocean was around. I think, yeah, they were around. They just started in that year. I think it just had SSD drives, but they were really small storage. Well, that's the thing. Yeah. So them and Linode and all these other places that were doing virtual private servers and, you know, virtual obviously was appealing even back then. But the issue being, you know, if you got 40 gigs of hard drive space, that doesn't last very long. And we even started. Do you remember like our original plans were like only one gigabyte? And we didn't have, we didn't have a faculty plan. We didn't have an org plan. It was like all you got was one gig of space. No, we were offering free hosting with the domain. So we could, Yeah, but even then it was like, okay, storage is kind of like, you know, there were a lot of other cheap hosting providers that were saying, hey, unlimited storage. And we were just sort of like, no, we're not going to go that far when, you know, we do recognize that there are some limits on this stuff. And so, you know, we had that one dedicated server. You know, I think that expanded in, you know, probably early spring to our second server and things just grew from there. But I would say at least for the next two, two and a half years at least, we were buying dedicated servers every time we needed one. Now we weren't growing quite as fast as we do today. I think anyway, you know, we set up more servers today on a week by week basis than back then it was sort of like, okay, new semester, do we need one new server? Whereas now it's sort of like, you know, from one week to the next, it's like we might need a new server for any specific project or things like that. And so, you know. Well, it's also, yeah, go ahead. No, but it's also the idea that, you know, we're deploying a lot of servers, but we had this relationship with Reliable Site, you know, pretty consistently for two and a half years. I think our last school that we did on Reliable Site was UMW. And then we just moved them, but that was the last one where it was dedicated to three servers. And then we had a couple, but like, we basically, when you said, look, Digital Ocean now offers block storage. It opens up our opportunity to host, you know, shared hosting and school sites on Digital Ocean. We went full turkey. So we started around 2016. And just this weekend, and like we said, the Reliable Site, the final two servers were Beat Happening and Joy Division. They had a lot of users who had been with us from almost the beginning. And they've probably been through a migration to two before. And, you know, it was just a heavy load. And it took us all weekend to transfer 660 sites, I mean, or accounts. It was insane how long it took. Yeah. And it's a struggle because on one hand, you know, as accounts are coming over, they're coming back online on the new server. And then they're taking in traffic and doing their thing. And so the server almost has to function as a normal hosting server in addition to the load of continuing to migrate accounts over. And I would say these were, you know, these were some legacy, you know, servers that we were moving over. And so the people who've stuck around with us are not typically the kind of folks who have a single blog or something.  I know I was a perfect example of that. My account was on Beat Happening and got moved over.  Some stuff's still active. Some of the system and that kind of thing.  And I think a lot of them were that way, where you had folks running either large installs, had a lot of storage, or just a lot of different stuff going on. Yeah, and it was gigs of stuff.  And they would get, like, Cpanel, it's interesting because when it hits a lot, it slows down on the transfers. And some of them just bottleneck it.  And that was basically the weekend. That's what took so much time is trying to monitor when stuff is going through, when it's not trying to. And then the load on the server was hitting like 30 or 40. It was like, what? But so, how did we fix this, right? And this is the beauty of sort of why we're going down this road is, you know, one of the limitations, you know, necessarily, I mean, we've had some issues in the past, I would say, with reliable site in terms of the way they supported things, for sure. No doubt about that. You know, no doubt. But with any sort of unmanaged hosting provider, there's going to be that tenuous relationship where, you know, some of the onus is on us to fix our things versus what's on the, at the data center level for them to fix and that kind of stuff. But the real hard limitation that wasn't going to get passed with dedicated servers was that what you bought at that time was what you got. In terms of storage, in terms of CPU, in terms of memory, it was a dedicated server. If I needed to add more storage, not only would the server have to be completely offline, but we're not talking for, you know, an hour or two. We're talking a support ticket in, dedicated downtime for somebody to put in more memory or to change out the hard drives, and the servers, they're just computers. They had like four hard drive bays. They were all in use with our system. So there was really no way for us to make upgrades over time. There was no way to expand disk storage or make them faster. And so obviously when you start, when you create your first server in 2013, you know, technology moves pretty quickly. And so, you know, what we found ourselves having to do is say, okay, well, if we want a better server, we would have to buy a new server and then migrate everybody over to it. And that's, you know, that's annoying. If people need more disk space, that's annoying to have to, you know, then set up new servers and move them over. And so I think the goal always was, you know, if possible, could we move towards a virtual system where we could expand disk storage on the fly, where, you know, if we needed a larger server, we could do a quick reboot with a larger server. And so that actually came in really handy this weekend, didn't it? It did. So we had to jump from 16 gigabytes to 48. But when we did, and I'm not surprised, because like you said, we had a lot of, you know, super-powered sites on it. I mean, you know, people who use it. And I think it's comfortable. What we found with Sevado and some of the other transfers we did is after it's settled in, after some of that, because it is a little bit intense, you know, you can even maybe draw some of that back if it's still not pulling. But like, it's just beautiful to be able to say, okay, let's superpower it to get through the weekend and then reassess. But it's interesting because you're titled this show, which I think is right from dedicated to virtual. And what I've loved about it is, you know, we've become pretty comfortable with doing these. We have a weekend plan and we've gone through, I don't know how many this summer, like 10. But we've finished. We are off reliable site, which for me feels like a milestone to reclaim. Absolutely. We planned this. We've been doing this for two years and we've been slowly moving stuff over. We've been planning this and the fact that we just buckled down the last two years. Our entire infrastructure, it's interesting, Tim, is no younger than 2017. Yeah.  I think the oldest server right now we brought is December 2016. Yeah. So basically less than two years old. And that maps pretty closely to when digital ocean started offering block storage. They started, I believe, in the summer of that year and we started doing some testing to see is this going to be viable? Is this something that we could actually use because the block storage offering in digital ocean allowed us to have the nice fast virtual server but have a terabyte of disk space or something like that. And so we really could start to mirror some of the setup that we had, you know, through reliable site but in a virtual instance. And so that's when we started making the move. But obviously at that point we were pretty well established and had a lot to move over.  Yeah. We got cocky. Well, I don't know. It's just because he was old. But we're like, yeah, we're going to take two legacy ones and put them on one new one. But there's a certain virtue there because the latest digital ocean server for shared hosting is Clash, which was our first reliable site server. So there's a kind of nice, you know, book ending the time at reliable site and everything over now in digital ocean. I just wanted to take a moment in, if you don't mind, and read through some of the names because we've repurposed Clash. Yeah, absolutely. But we could actually repurpose some of these. So here's some of the servers that ran on reliable site that we have retired. Bad Brains. Oklahoma's first. That's right. Banshees. Banshees was CSU Channel Islands. Yeah. That's right. Heartbreakers was Emery. Mm-hmm. Ramones. Ramones might be one we bring back soon. That was our second shared hosting server. Saints. Saints. Shared hosting. Hot Rods. ClusterDoo. Minutemen. Butthole Servers. God, the list.  We repurposed Fugazi. We actually have a second Fugazi server now. Replacements. These are all the servers that we actually have retired now. And then we got smart. And Tim was like, look, I can't keep up with these band names for these servers. So we're going to actually name them after the school. Yeah. But we had how many in total did we move from dedicated for reliable site? So we had in total 36 dedicated servers at any given time in total that we purchased. And it's actually a good point, what you mentioned about the schools and the way we were doing that, because this is actually not our first foray into virtual servers. It started a little bit as an experiment to see whether or not it was something we could run ourselves. And so, you know, what we would do was buy a large dedicated server, much larger than the kind that we would buy for shared hosting. And then we would install software on there to make it virtual. And, you know, we kind of were like, well, we'll give this a try. We were using a piece of software called Solis, S-O-L-U-S. Solis VM allows you to install some software. It used KVM as the back end for creating these virtual environments. And so we would buy a large server and then we would put, you know, three or four schools on there. And they were all their own dedicated virtual instance within this larger server. So they didn't necessarily have any cross communication between them, but they were all on the same box. And that was sort of our in-between way to get the storage that we needed, but to also do something that was virtual. So we could, to some extent, you know, increase the limits on things, you know, change stuff around, expand the hard drive and stuff. But I think we found, you know, we probably did that with Domain 1 Zone for the first maybe 12 schools that we brought on somewhere around there. And we were able to do Domain 1 Zone very cost effectively that way. But I think we quickly found like running your own virtual environment was not a business we wanted to be in. You know, in the same way that I don't necessarily want to run my own data center and have to manage servers in that sense, be driving up to rest in Virginia and, you know, late at night. As bad as this weekend was, it wasn't that. And I could see, you know, it quickly devolving into that. So I'm more than happy to offload that level of infrastructure management to another company. And so, you know, once we were able to start moving to Digital Ocean, we were able to provision VPS directly with them, one per school, rather than having to do this weird situation where we would buy a big server and split it up ourselves. And so that increased, you know, exponentially the number of migrations we had to do. Because in addition to these, you know, 30-some dedicated servers, we might have one server on reliable site, but we really have to move like four schools over in order to close down that one server. So it was quite a bit of work. And I'm glad to see that it's done. Yeah. I mean, it was. It was a drain. And it's nice, too. Because, I mean, with Digital Ocean, it kind of dovetails nicely with the conversation we had on Friday, which Tony Hearst, geniously blogged up today, was this idea of, you know, in these virtual server environments like Digital Ocean, and we started looking, and we get this peak at what he's calling a server-less environment, where basically, you know, the server, all of that stuff is taken care of behind you thanks to the containers. You don't see it as a client. But it would be interesting to see in another five years, like, what our server environment will look like.  Sure. Yeah. But, you know, the danger there is always, you know, the joke, and I think I had a sticker on my laptop at some point this, like, the cloud is just someone else's computer.  There are servers somewhere, but it's about who owns them, and who's running them, and who's managing that. And if it's not you, it's someone. And there's, don't get me wrong, there's total benefits to that, you know, by any means. But, like, I was just playing around this weekend with a piece of software, and I again tried the ZiteNow stuff to run it on that, and it started up cleanly, and I was like, oh, this is really awesome. And then I was going through the instructions on how to create an admin account, and they said, well, you open up the database, and you have to run this SQL command. And I didn't have access to be able to do that at all. And I was like, oh, okay. So, like, they had a Docker container. It started up automatically. Everything was running, but without that level of access, I couldn't get any further. So I think there's a balance there, a marriage between not just the hardware and the infrastructure, but also the software is going to have to evolve to be able to use it in those environments. That was something that struck me as well. Not everyone's obviously going to need to be able to do that, you know, but, oh, Mecca, if you need to upload a plugin or theme, you have to have FTP. So you have to have access to the file system. And in places like WordPress.com, you don't. You know, places, you know, there are some environments where it's made very easy at the trade-off of having the level of access you need to get, you know, under the hood, so to speak. So it's interesting, too, because that brings up the point of while we were running our own virtual server environment, when we saw DigitalOcean and we realized that they kind of figure out those pieces, no problem stepping back and saying, go for it, right? Well run it there, you know, they're a good relationship. You know, they're a fairly young company, but they've been growing and scaling. So I just wonder why we don't see that with something like Now or some other Heroku or whatever that environment is. Just to think that, you know, you could on Friday drag and drop a Docker application and it'd be up and running. It's a very interesting environment for us to aspire. In fact, this is if we were doing it, we would probably in some relationship be behind the server, right? Like in some ways, it wouldn't be like we'd be saying, no, we're hosting now with another company and we're just to go between. But it's just interesting to me because I am fascinated by this stuff partially because I may ignore it. But the other part is because I do think that the ways in which these new server environments invite the notions of sight. It was interesting because when Tony Hurst called it serverless and the idea of serverless that he's talking about just to be clear on terminology for people watching is you're no longer going and spinning up even a virtual server and then running a Docker container on that. This hosting company now is taking care of all that for you. So you never even see the server, you just deploy a container and it's being hosted on a server, like you said but in a sense, it's serverless. Right. So the idea for me, I thought of is serverless, headless web development. You know, we need to be called ourselves not reclaimed, but hostless. Hostless. That's what we need to. I think that's it. Like we are hostless hosters. Just think about the marketing you can do that. You don't need us. Yeah. But please check out anyway. Please, please spend some money. I'm not your own one. You know, all it's all out there. But I still think there, I mean for me now represents and as many of it, he brought this whole application and that's what I want to talk about. We need to have Tony on and maybe have him talk about Binderhub. Yeah. Because there's another kind of, you know, what he was calling serverless and explaining why it's serverless and he has a very kind of systematic way of thinking through that which I liked and was helpful. What does this next generation of hosting live? Like he was talking about the cPanel which he called first gen. The current generation is something like DigitalOcean and the next generation might be considered something like Now which for me is a beautiful kind of like panorama of where we were, where we are, where we might be going. And I'd love it if Reclaim Today kind of had an ongoing thread. Not all of them, but some of them always returning to this idea of infrastructure and how these things scale and what that looks like for us because I'm always interested in hearing people talk about it or write about it. It helps me conceptualize it. Just like when I hear you and Michael talk about headless web development or Tom Woodward I dig that. One of the projects that I want to play around with more is it's got a weird name but it's called Kubernetes. It's developed by Google and it's related to Docker but it's sort of like a cloud environment for Docker. But what's interesting and it's sort of that evolution is that instead of just running going from dedicated to a virtual server, now you're talking about an infrastructure where you have multiple servers and they're all kind of connected and things could be dropped on any one of a number of servers. So instead of saying, I'm on Who Scroo-Doo or I'm on Minutemen or something like that, it's just sort of like you're really in the cloud because your stuff could be on more than one server and what's nice with that environment too is that if one of those servers goes down it'll just pick up on another one. So like it's being duplicated and copied and replicated across that cloud environment. So that's something that I plan on starting to play around with more as we get into looking at Docker containers and that kind of stuff because obviously you have to run your application in a way that's supported in those kind of environments but that can be a really powerful thing because then you can have your cloud consist of servers over in New York and some over in San Francisco and some in Amsterdam and all over the place. Well that's a really good point and it's going to wreak havoc on our naming system. But beyond that what I really like about that and what for me is interesting about that is because I remember when I about 2015-2016 when we started to get serious about Linux because we also used Linux for a while. We played around with AWS and then we decided to stick with DigitalOcean. I think that was a good decision. But I think the thing that struck me is when Linode had that like weak outage in Atlanta in their data center and luckily we only had a couple of things there but when we lived through that in terms of like a couple, I don't remember which, like that can't might have been down or... It was their Atlanta data center and they were getting DDoS'd to hell and just I guess could not deal with it. And luckily Linode was where we were putting a lot of virtual servers but we had been putting a lot of them in I believe it was newer data center and so none of those were effective affected by it. VCU rampages and other programs and projects that we were running but that camp.org was affected and one other one that I can't even remember but luckily it was just servers but it was like a week and it was up and down and up and then it'd be down for like two days and they would just continually be saying we're trying to work and deal with it and our hands were completely tied. We just had to sit there and watch the fallout happen with that and it was awful. Which is the other side of using data centers and it's like one of the things we've been thinking about is like and now that you talk about Kubernetes or Kubernetes or however we want to pronounce it wrong just because of who I am but I do think like that starts to bring up questions of failover and so at one point a node in digital ocean goes down I mean they had issues in Amsterdam not that long ago the Easter massacre where basically someone's sysad in life was held for a day on Easter Sunday and Amsterdam had a problem with their storage basically I think it was with their block storage and shit went to hell and people were out for 36-48 hours and at this point you know for us that becomes a really big question mark where do we, how do we mitigate for that? Yeah and cPanel hasn't yet built in a lot of tooling to help out with that at all. It's still very much framed in terms of that management software as you're running it on a server and you're good to go and if you want to do replication you'll do it at the site level like somebody could set up their own little r-sync situation that kind of stuff but they don't do things like replicating databases they don't do things like clustered computing at all with that so I do think getting there is probably going to mean also moving away from cPanel so it's going to be a big move in general we're talking changing out the management side of things both for the end user and for us we're talking about like real infrastructural change when we talk about Docker versus just lamp environments and so a lot of change necessary I think to make that happen not impossible to do it by cPanel by any means you know we'll probably talk about it on another episode I'm sure where we recently did this with a huge multi site vcu ramp pages and it's possible to do it but there's a lot of manual work involved and there's no tooling in cPanel to assist with that so it's interesting that there's a lot of benefits in moving strategically but slowly towards this aspect of you know hosting and infrastructure yeah and it feels like that was what the last two years was about and getting a digital ocean was a real like I mean I definitely have felt good about the move and being done with a reliable site and not looking back but what I think and not looking back but what's coming is I mean it's probably going to be a recurring theme on Reclaim Today as it should be but you know what's coming and what that looks like and being on virtual servers like we are now will make whatever our next move is I imagine fairly cleaner than it has been with the dedicated servers between IP addresses and everything else yeah absolutely I'm looking forward to it I think this was a big milestone for what's coming yeah I agree I was thinking do you know the Jim Carroll song I don't people who died died so he does his song where he was basically he wrote the basketball bairies and he was like a junkie from New York and he kind of Leonardo DiCaprio played him in the movie that was the basketball bairies about him being a young addict but anyway he wrote a song called these are the people who died you know Jimmy sniff glue jumped off a building he died right and then it was like little Mary took too many red pills she died and it goes on Billy got leukemia it's just it's not a very uplifting song but we could do a version of that with our servers like who can do was on reliable site it died I think that would be like let's commission the dead mookman to put something like that together after after their incredible incredible performance at our last conference I think you know people are just itching for more from them and so we want to give the people what they want I think I think one of the misconceptions about the dead movement I'm going to be clear here is that like talent is not what punk rock ever defined punk rock and I think that really is why you know I think punk rock has moved away from his roots and it's all about like you know indie rock but it was really about talentless people performing pretty poorly and I think that's people couldn't get that and like emptying a rooftop bar like that was what punk rock was really like in 1979 well hopefully that's not too much of a metaphor for how the migration went this weekend I don't yeah are you alright I'm good look at me I'm young I feel great man I feel really good you look good man I'm telling you this migration was good for you I think it kept you on your toes was therapeutic they they always are in different ways are you going to miss them oh I don't think they're gone for some reason I imagine we'll continue to do them in some way but yeah true that's I think though I mean but when I think about it I remember Zach Davis said to me I know you want to end this episode but I'm not going to let you Zach Davis said to me like the hardest thing about if you go into you know hosting which he's like you're stupid to haha but if you go into hosting the hardest part is going to be keeping your infrastructure updated yeah no it's true yeah and I think we've kind of nailed that yeah I recently not recent I mean it was in the last six eight months something around there but we run two name servers ns1 and ns2.reclaimhosting.com and they actually run a stripped down version of cPanel specifically for for DNS and they've been running very reliably since the start since 2013 with no issues at all however they run on CentOS 6 not CentOS 7 and cPanel is no longer issuing updates for CentOS 6 that's end of life and they started by saying we're not going to update the DNS software anymore because for whatever reason so it stopped getting updates completely they still function fine and I finally decided okay I'm going to need to update this and unfortunately there's no just update my operating system button like there is in Mac or Windows for when you have to move from major distribution you're essentially reinstalling the server at that point and so and luckily it was virtual already so I could take a snapshot of it luckily it's duplicated you have ns1 and ns2 so I was able to take ns1 down and rebuild it and then move everything back over to it and bring it back online and I did that a couple months ago I haven't done ns2 yet but even stuff like that where it's something you find out like oh I've got to rework these things and basically you know start from scratch on another server and then migrate over again yeah the snapshot tool where I'm about to do something and I take a snapshot of the server before it all goes wrong save my ass at least three times in the last six months and so I've become addicted to it because I know like even if something goes wrong I can replace back to that snapshot I took and it costs you know because you can delete it once everything's done so it'll cost you pennies and it's no time it's crazy yeah makes things a lot more flexible I think Daphne is wanting us to finish up our episode though I don't know I think you're blaming Daphne but you I'll get off if you want me to get off I'll get off what's the name of the new dog oh you're gonna like it so instead of Marma Duke it's Bava Duke that's literally the name of the dog Bava Duke yeah it was Duke or Duke but I hate the name Duke and so I changed it to Duke and then I realized Bava you know what Bava means in Italian it means spit and the dog is a drooler drools everywhere so when I sit to the kids and I was like you know what this dog should be called Bava Duke they were finally like yeah so the name is Bava Duke and it's a freaking handful I took a two hour walk with him at 6 30 in the morning just to keep his energy down because he's a hunting dog and he can jump like he can probably jump over a six foot wall like no shit he's got like springs for back legs so he jumps like a horse and when he jumps he's huge he's a big dog he looks like a horse jumping wow it's amazing I think I got it over my head I know the feeling alright buddy hey it was good talking with you absolutely big fan alright and look you have the mooch videotape behind you was that on purpose? it wasn't but look at that mooch goes to Hollywood and Bava Duke goes to Italy that's right it's awesome beautiful alright everybody thanks for listening we'll see you next time bye


I will speak about another marriage, if we can say, about science and novels. As you all know, James have made a huge contribution to Indian narrative literature. On the one hand, one counts short stories commenting the canonical doctrine or edifying treasures of stories. On the other hand, there are long narratives centered around the main character from the 6th to the 12th century. Among these works, several deserve to be labelled as novels, not only because of their complex plot and their refined style, but also because of their content, mixing narration, description, dialogues, and prescription. To be more precise, the long narratives integrate at times subgenres, such as eulogies or sermons, at times technical passages alluding to specific treatises, such as riddles, alchemy, portents, astrology, and the science of human marks, which shows that James have been transmitters of many branches of knowledge. It is the content of the passage on physical marks called physiognomy that I will share with you today, in order to see what they can contribute to the knowledge of that science in India. Indeed, since a distant past, the knowledge of physiognomy has been used in India to various purposes, such as the legitimisation of a male succession or the choice of the right partners in arranged marriages for conjugal love and for the birth of sons. And due to its popularity, it has been transmitted until today through four main types of sources. Firstly, the most ancient material appears in the Garga Samhita or Gargiya Jyotisha, a work supposedly from the first century. Secondly, there is Vahra Meera's Briyad Samhita, dated from the sixth century, that is the earliest extant text presenting in a synthetic manner the marks of men and women. Thirdly, there is a compendium called the Samudrika Shastra, written around 1160, by King Dolabharaja and his son Jagadeva. The fourth type is constituted by passages concerning physiognomy that occur in various Purana, that are all very difficult to date. In short, there is no lack of material pertaining to the science of physiognomy, but the heterogeneous nature of the sources may explain why the development of physiognomy as a science in India has been astonishingly little studied until recently. In fact, the first scholar to have attended to study the material of physiognomy was K.G. Zisk. He highlighted several questions raised by the textual sources. As a matter of fact, a first problem arises from the uncertain dating of the Puranas. That makes it difficult to establish a chronology of the material between the sixth and the 12th century. Besides, the sources evince several patterns of presentation. On the one hand, there is a detailed presentation of all limbs of the body with their characteristics from toe to head. On the other hand, there is a numerical presentation of the auspicious signs and of the basic marks. And while the Puranas choose one or the other presentation, the Brihatsamita and the Samudrikashastra mention successively all of them. Such a variation in the patterns of presentation raises a second question as to which presentation was prior to the other. Lastly, if it seems clear that through the sources that the science of physiognomy was mainly used for upper classes, it is not clear whether this was a science coming from the Brahminical circle or whether this was later included as a Brahminical knowledge. Taking into account the Sanskrit sources of the Hindu tradition at his disposal, K.G. Zisk proposed a first synthesis in an article named Indian Traditions of Physiognomy preliminary remarks in 2005. Then this scholar gave a more complete survey of Hindu sources through four lectures he delivered at the École Pratique des Hauts-Études in Paris in 2006. Nothing had been published on the subject during a decade and it is a happy circumstance that one month ago, the results of Zisk's research have just come out in a book named The Indian System of Human Marks. Therein he makes convincing hypothesis about the development of the science of physiognomy in India and proposes answers to the questions he had raised earlier. For instance, the numerical presentation would have preceded the presentation of four limbs of the body and the science would have been firstly transmitted in a property original and later incorporated as a Brahminical knowledge. However, since K.G. Zisk has focused his investigation on Hindu sources, it can be a useful addition to examine now the technical passages on physiognomy given in the Jain novels and to see what they can contribute to the story of that science in India during the first millennium. Now, what is the Jain material at our disposal? Among the edited works, three long narratives contain technical passages alluding to three pieces of physiognomy. First is Udyotana's Kuvala Yamala in Prakrit, dated 779, 77 verses inside. Siddhasis Upamiti Bhava Prabhanjakata in Sanskrit, dated 905. And Vijayasimha Swariz Bhuvanasundari in Prakrit, dated 918. Thus, a first interesting feature is that their dates place them between the first text mentioned before Vahra, Meera, Priyad, Samhita from the sixth century, containing the marks of men and women. And Duralabha's Samudrika Shastra, the first compendium dedicated to physiognomy in the 12th century. Secondly, as can be seen in the Briyad Samhita and later in the Samudrika Shastra, the three Jain novels adopt a presentation of the marks from toe to head in the first part. And this presentation is followed by a numerical classification of the human marks in the second part. For instance, one reads in Udyothanas Kuvaryamala following presentation of the men marks. It begins with the foot. If the soul of a man's foot is red, smooth and soft to the touch, and if it is neither moist nor curved, he is a king upon the earth.  And it ends with the hair. If a man's hair is soft and silken, he experiences good fortune. If a man's hair has the appearance of fire, he is of a character such as to provoke quarrels and conflicts. Hair that is rough, dirty, and brittle is characteristic of people who suffer from poverty. After such a presentation from toe to head, the text goes on with a numerical presentation. The three broad, the three deep, the four fine, the five pure, the four red, the four puny, I quote. Men who have a chest, face, and forehead that are broad, a voice being a navel that are deep, and nails, teeth, skin, and hair that are fine, such men are kings. If he presents a nose, a chest, a neck, a back, and a face that are all very high, and if he presents feet, hands, eyes, and a tongue that are all red, the man is a fortunate and happy king. In the same way, in his Umpamiti Bhava Praponchakata, Siddhashi presents the characteristic of the body from toe to head. And he goes on with the three auspicious large, the three auspicious deep, and the three fine, and the four puny, and the three red, and the two broad. As for Vijayasima Bhavana Sundari, the passage from one presentation to the other is explicit and clearly shows that the author was conscious of the disparity of the material. The text says following, I quote. Prince, I have said to you in summary what is contained about the signs in the Samudra Shastra. Now, since you are curious, please hear something else. There are three deep, three large, three rounds, four puny, five delicate, five long, six raised, and seven red. Listen now to the explanation developing the content of this stanza. After this announcement, Vijayasima Sundari further explains that the three deep are navel, voice, nature, the three large are face, breast, and front, and the seven red are eye corners, feet, hands, tongue, nails, lips, palate. Now, these indications are just the same as in Varamira's Brihatsamita. In spite of the above mentioned similarities between the passages of the three long-chain narratives, there are also significant disparities. To begin with, one can note that only Siddharshi's Upamitibhava-Prapanshakata deals with the marks of the women. Derein, like for the men, the passage insists on the auspicious marks on the soul of the food, chakra, padma, and so on, that allow to distinguish the queens. Besides, the legs, the thighs, the hips, and the waist should have the same characteristics as for men. They are like elephants, like trunks of banana trees, large and slender. In addition, characteristics in the content and in the formulation suggests that the three novels do not follow the same model. Rather, it appears that Udyotana and Siddharshi are similar to each other and distinguish themselves from Vijayasimha Surya. For instance, both Udyotana and Siddharshi are conspicuously silent on the characteristics of the hands, the palmistry, that become later a main feature for the prediction of the life of a man. On the contrary, Vijayasimha mentions this feature. Besides, both authors develop the auspicious symbols one can see in the soul of the feet and describe the back of the body while Vijayasimha ignores the one and the other feature. I just quote the example of the back.   Moreover, for several members of the body, such as the legs, the hips, the belly and the nevel, it is clear that Udyotana and Siddharshi use the same epithets and comparison. Both say for the legs. If men have big, thick legs or legs like the legs of a wild boar or of crows, it is their lot to suffer profound misfortune and unhappiness and to be found always wandering upon the roads and highways. As for Vijayasimha, he follows the text of Vara Amira. As one can see with the example of the foot. I don't quote here. And the fact that Vijayasimha Suri borrows his text from Vara Amira is further suggested by the usage of the same type of verse. A Vasanta Tilaka or a Shardulavi Kredita and not the Arya typical of pragrid verses. Yet, if the passages of Udyotana and Siddharshi show striking similarities, they are not uniform throughout. As a matter of fact, on two occasions, Udyotana's Kuvala Yamala presents specific features. Firstly, not only Udyotana has a longer passage on the Vira member than Siddharshi, but he also mentions the sperm and the urine that are omitted by the latter. Secondly, Udyotana develops the signification of the physical appearance of the toes of the foot, which is absent from the text of Siddharshi. It reads thus, if the big toe is rounded, he has an agreeable wife. If the big toe is no longer than the second toe of the foot, he has a second wife. If a man's big toe is of equal length with the third toe of his foot, his family is prosperous. If it is of the equal length with the fourth toe of his foot, is the father of twins. If it is of equal length with the last toe of his foot, this signifies the death of his father. So there is a whole passage I will not read now, but insisting on the appearance of the foot. Thirdly, Udyotana and Siddharshi have also variations in the numerical presentation. For instance, while Udyotana counts four reds, tongue, feet, hand palms, and eyes, Siddharshi has three reds since he ignores the last one. And Udyotana recognizes two large aunts and feet instead of the usual three given by Siddharshi and Vahri, Vahra, Meera. Consequently, it appears that Vahra, Meera, Spriatsamita enjoyed popularity beyond Brahminical circles and was also known from Jain monks as is shown by Vijayasimha Suri. Besides, it is obvious that Jain monks had also access to other traditions. While Udyotana has passages ignored in the Brihatsamita, Siddharshi does not stick to Vahra, Meera, Spriatsamita's model either. If, as we have seen, Siddharshi does not stick to Vahra, Meera, sorry, does not stick to the Brihatsamita, no. If we have seen Siddharshi often adopts Udyotana's choices and even formulation, he also presents some specific features. Indeed, some of the variations could be explained by religious reasons. For instance, the presentation or not of the virile member and its potential abilities of procreation. But other differences, such as the number of the red, seem to allude to models prior to Udyotana, most probably in Prakrit, in which the number of the body parts associated to the red was not yet fixed as it was during the time of Vijayasimha Surya. When Vahra, Meera, Spriatsamita had become the authoritative text for the centuries to come. Another important difference that could allude to previous models is the number of the physical characteristics that are taken into account. As a matter of fact, while the Vriyatsamita and the Samudrika Shastra have a list of about 60 physical characteristics, not 84 as we have seen all day, and had the interpretation of the lines in the hand and in the forehead, on the contrary, both Udyotana and Siddharshi mention only about 30 physical characteristics in their presentation. Now, this number reminds of a religious physiognomy insisting on the 32 characteristics of the great men of Buddhism and Jainism. This association of physiognomy with religion is also suggested by the context in which Udyotana and Siddharshi mention this science. As a matter of fact, in the case of Siddharshi, the science of the human marks is used for the recognition of a great man. In the case of Udyotana, it enables the prince to distinguish the real nature of the Vidyadaras who have taken the appearance of Shabaras covered with feathers. Thus, the technical passages of Kuvala-Yamala and Upamiti-Bhava-Pravancakata tend to show that the Brihatsamita itself could have drawn some of its material from earlier prakrit sources as has been hypothesized by K.G. Zisk. While the Jain novels contain technical passages that constitute an interesting material for the story of the science of physiognomy, they also offer another interesting material that I propose to see very briefly now. As a matter of fact, many descriptions of men and women contained in the Jain novels clearly attest to the knowledge of dogmatic treatises on physiognomy. I have taken into account three narratives, contemporary or anterior to the one I mentioned before. They are the Vasudeva Indi, that is prior to the 6th century, Aribadra Samarai Chakrha from the 8th century, and Shilankas Chahupana Mahavurisa Charya from 868. Indeed, as a proof that the author had a knowledge of the treatises of physiognomy, several descriptions contained in those narratives used the same auspicious characteristics as the technical passages. Thus, the feet of princes arch like the back of the tortoise. Their uncle joints are well hidden. Their ties resemble elephant trunks. They have a neck like a conch with three folds, and their hair constitute circles going from left to right. To take another example, not only the heroes and heroines have bodily marks inspired by the treatises of physiognomy, but also the counter-heroes. Thus, the ugly Anjana Sena in the Vasudeva Indi has rough hair with tips split in a brownish color, which are all characteristics that announce a penniless person in the Briad Samita or a person with either poor and of bad character, as is stated in the passage in the Kuvala Yamala. If a man's hair has the appearance of fire, he is of a character such as to provoke quarrels and conflict, and so on, so you add to that. In the same way, when Udyotana presents the heroes who suffer from hunger or deception, he gives them physical characteristics that prognosticate such moral defects according to the treatises of physiognomy. Thus, Mayaditya, who is the incarnate deception, has the shriveled body of a dwarf, a puny gate, a dark complexion, and a general air of badness.  Now, the feline heist of a wild cat announce sinners according to the Briad Samita or according to the theoretical passage of Kuvala Yamala saying that when a man has a heist that resemble those of a cat, he is mean and base. If he has a heist that look like circles, he is a thief.  The knowledge of treatises is also betrayed by the poetic descriptions of princes and princesses. As a matter of fact, descriptions borrow the mineral, vegetable, and animal similes that are contained in the treatises of physiognomy. Thus, the soul of the foot of Vila Savati has the aspect of a red lotus. To take just another example, the heaps of Vasudeva and Pradyumna resemble those of a lion and their ties are like the trunk of an elephant. In addition, the connection of the description with the treatises of physiognomy is revealed beyond any doubt when on several occasions, their authority is explicitly stated. For instance, one reads for Padma Vati that she presents all the bodily characteristics that are honored by the experts in the mark of the women. In the same way, one reads for Shyamali and Padma that they possess the characteristics praised by the experts of the marks. To conclude, the passages on physiognomy and the descriptions contained in the Jane novels constitute an interesting addition to the material contained in Hindu sources and contribute to further clarify the early history of this science. Firstly, they show that the Jane monks had access to treatises on physiognomy from the sixth to the 11th century. Secondly, the passages reveal that Udyotana and Siddharshi had access to sources prior to Varahamira and Evans, a gradual constitution of the science of physiognomy. Lastly, several features corroborate the hypothesis summarized from the undated material of the Puranas that there existed several traditions in Prakrit and in Sanskrit before the fixation of the tradition in Sanskrit, represented in the Briyat Samhita and later in the Samudrika Shastras. I thank you for your attention.