Hello everybody, E here. Welcome back to 31 Days of Halloween. Today we're talking about The Weight of Blood by Tiffany D Jackson, a 2022 YA horror novel that reboots Carrie by Stephen King. Let's get into the review. Okay, so The Weight of Blood by Tiffany D Jackson is a damn good book. Period. Over and done with not good for YA, not good for reboot. It is a good damn book.  I'm going to give it five stars for those of you who just want to get in, get my rating and get out. That's what I'm giving it. I'm giving it five stars, which is higher than I have ever ranked Carrie by Stephen King. And yes, I do prefer this one by a lot. I don't know what else to say. This one, this retelling, I don't know that it was needed, but it definitely delivered. It's exactly what I wanted and what I hoped for when I read the description. I was, I wasn't tentative going into this, but I will, I will admit, I will admit for those of you out there, like, I didn't think you liked YA. I don't. But this, I could not pass this up. And technically speaking, Stephen King's Carrie is a YA novel. At least it is in my opinion, because it deals with a young adult and their struggles going into or into adulthood or what would have been their adulthood. Maddie Washington is so well drawn. She's the, I don't know, I guess we could say the twinner for Carrie White, if you want to call this another turn of the will. I do want to say that's the last Stephen King thing I'm going to mention, other than the fact that this place go, this book goes to different places. So I don't want to talk too much about the actual plot, but I will tell you what I liked about the book. With this one, it, okay, so here's the setup. Maddie Washington is a biracial teenager who has been passing as White, her entire school life. Her daddy is White. Her mama, of course, is Black, well, was Black. And she has come to, well, she lives with her father. It's, it's pretty much the same setup with Carrie.  Until one day at school, the instigating factor here is not a shower. Well, it is a shower. Now, I just now put two and two together. I apologize. Sometimes I'm slow with the obvious stuff.  And everybody realizes that she has Black in her bloodline. The book makes some very good changes. In fact, I can't think of a single thing in here that I did not go, that's cool. That's, yeah, if you're gonna retell that, that's the way, you know, you should go. Now, there might be a lot of stumbling and rambling from this point on. But all I, all, you know me, if you watch this channel, if you don't watch this channel, you're probably gonna be like, why does anybody watch this dude? Why has he got so many subs? I'm sorry. But when I read a book that blows me away, I barely have anything to say about it. All I can really tell you is go out and buy it. You're going to have a good time. Even if from someone who does not like YA, who prefers not to read YA, this is a good book. But it's a good book without all that baggage. I was, I was very, very thrilled with the ending. I, everything I want to talk about is a spoiler. If you guys want a spoiler review for this book after 31 days of Halloween is done, please let me know. But literally everything. I'm sitting here trying to think, I have notes written down and everything, but I'm trying to think of stuff that I can talk about with this book that will not be a spoiler. And one of the, the one of the reasons why I enjoyed this so much is because I did not see all the differences coming. In fact, just during this review, I realized that she did get caught in a shower, you know, that kind of thing. But instead of the, you know, the shower in the school, it was a rain shower. There's a lot of differences here. It is worth your time. If you are a Stephen King fan, there are trigger warnings for racism. Of course, the book is built on this and how she is treated differently before and after all that stuff. And her father is an absolute menace, just like Margaret White was with Carrie. But yeah, if you're a fan of Carrie, if you like Carrie, definitely give this book a shot. It's a welcome reboot, a modernization of a really good book. I have never given Carrie more than four stars, but it is what it is, you know, it's, I've gone anywhere from two to three to four stars over the years, the older I get, the more I like it. But this one, this one right here, yeah, definitely go check it out. And if I say anything else, it's just going to be more repetition and rambling.  But have you read The Weight of Blood by Tiffany D. Jackson? If you have, I would love to hear what you have to have to say about it down there in the doobly-doo. But until next time, I have been E, you've been U, this has been another episode of 31 Days of Halloween. I'll talk to you guys later. Bye-bye!


In this engineering manager 80-20 shorts, I have with me civil engineering superstar Peyton Gibson.  The question I have for you today is what is your favorite aspect of being a civil engineer? What I love about being a civil engineer is that we like literally physically connect people and that's why I became a civil engineer and that's why I don't really work on the technical side of engineering anymore. I work on the social civil engineering side. The social side of me loves to connect people and the engineering side of me is able to do that in a physical manner. So just seeing our work as civil engineers bring communities together and bring lives together that wouldn't be connected without the infrastructure is just it means a lot as as an engineer.


Welcome back to our lecture series math 1060 trigonometry for students at Southern Utah University. As usual, I'll be your professor today, Dr. Andrew Missildine. In lecture eight, we are going to talk about circles. In particular, we're going to talk about how we can define, once again, the six trigonometric ratios using circles this time, instead of triangles like we've done previously in chapter two. Some things to remember about circles. The general equation of a circle was given as x minus h squared plus y minus k squared is equal to r squared, where the point h comma k is equal to the center of the circle. And this number r is then the radius of the circle. Every point on the circle is exactly r units away in the plane from this center. So if you set the center to be zero, zero, then what you see is that this h and this k disappears in the formula. And it simplifies just to be x squared plus y squared equals r squared. So this would be a circle centered at the origin with a radius of r. Well, if you set r equal to one, you get the so-called unit circle. So this is the circle which is centered at the origin and its radius is equal to one. And that's why we call it the unit circle. The radius is one unit of distance. And so using the unit circle, we can actually describe the six trigonometric ratios in the following manner. So notice the picture we see here on the right of the screen. This is a diagram of the unit circle. You'll notice that the center of the circle is the origin. That is the point where the x-axis and the y-axis intersect itself, they intersect themselves. And this circle will also have a radius of one. So every radius of this circle will be exactly one unit away from the origin. So we have this unit circle. OK, so if we take an angle theta and we put it into standard position, remember what that means, standard position means that the initial side of the angle coincides with the positive x-axis. And then the terminal side will terminate, well, wherever it does. It depends on the angle theta, right? In this diagram, we have the terminal side terminating in the first quadrant, but of course, that's not necessary. So considering the terminal side, though, right, the terminal side will have a point of intersection with the unit circle, which that point you see right here, this is a point in the plane, and that point has an x and y-coordinate. So let's say the point of intersection between the terminal side of the angle theta and the unit circle is this point x comma y. Well, what does a coordinate system mean after all? Well, x, the x-coordinate, represents how far to the right or left of the y-axis are you. If you're to the right of the y-axis, that would be a positive x-coordinate. If you're to the left of the y-axis, that means you have a negative x-coordinate. So x is measuring how far to the right of the y-axis are you. The y-coordinate, on the other hand, is measuring how far above the x-axis are you to arrive upon this point right here. And again, going above the x-axis gives you a positive y-coordinate, going below the y-axis gives you a negative y-coordinate like so. And so given this point, if we associate the usual right triangle that we have with these angle diagrams, you'd get a right triangle look something like this, all right, for which this interior angle is then the theta in question. The adjacent side would be this distance x, and the opposite side would be this number y right here. Now, because we're in the unit circle, the hypotenuse of this right triangle would be a radius of the z-circle, the unit circle, in which case that would be a one. So if we apply the usual trigonometric identities to this configuration right here, well, we'd get for sine, sine we take opposite over hypotenuse. y divided by one, which itself is just a y. So with respect to the unit circle, sine of theta is equal to y. That is the y-coordinate of a point on the unit circle is the sine ratio of the corresponding angle. Similarly, if we looked at cosine, cosine is going to be adjacent over hypotenuse, which in this case would look like x divided by one. But if you divide by one, it really doesn't do much, it's just an x. So cosine of theta is equal to x in this situation. So when you pick an arbitrary point on the unit circle and you take the associated angle with said point, theta right here, then the coordinates are just going to be cosine of theta times sine, not times, but comma times theta. So the x-coordinate of a point on the unit circle is cosine of the associated angle. And the y-coordinate of the point on the unit circle is just going to be sine of the associated angle theta. So cosine is the x-coordinate and y is just sine. Sine theta is just the y-coordinate of that point on the unit circle. Then we define the remaining four trigonometric ratios in the same manner for which we define tangent to be sine theta over cosine theta, which if sine is y and cosine is x, we get the simpler expression y over x. So if you take the y-coordinate divided by the x-coordinate, that ratio gives you the tangent ratio right here. Which if you look at that, a y divided by x, that kind of feels a little bit like a slope, doesn't it? And it turns out that in fact, tangent theta gets its name because it's measuring the slope of a so-called tangent line, something we might talk about another time. But continuing on, cosecant is the reciprocal of sine, therefore cosecant is 1 over y, secant is the reciprocal of cosine. So with respect to the unit circle, secant is just 1 over the x-coordinate. And then likewise, cotangent is the reciprocal of tangent. So if tangent is y over x, cotangent will be x over y with respect to this identification. So with the unit circle in mind, cosine is the x-coordinate, sine is the y-coordinate, and the other trigonometric ratios are derived from the usual relationships that we get from sine and cosine. So that's the important thing I want you to remember, that when we define sine and cosine using circles, the unit circle specifically, x gives us cosine, the x-coordinate gives us cosine, and sine coincides with the y-coordinate. So as an example of that, suppose the point P, which is given as negative 0.737 for x, and 0.675 for y, this is a point on the unit circle. What we want to do is we want to find sine of theta, cosine of theta, and tangent of theta, where theta is the arc of the unit circle from 1, 0 to P. So remember our unit circle right here, if we take the positive x-axis, this point over here is going to be 1, 0, right? It's the unit circle, so you go one distance away from the origin right here, you're going to get exactly 1, 0. And so if we take the arc that goes from 1, 0 all the way over here to this point in the second quadrant, mind you, notice it's in the second quadrant because the x-coordinate is negative, the y-coordinate is positive, you get this point negative 0.737, 0.675, like so. And so we're thinking theta is the angle associated to this arc of the circle right here. Well, how do you find sine of theta? Well, sine of theta is just the y-coordinate, so it's going to be 0.675. If you're a point on the unit circle, that's all one has to do to find sine. To find cosine, what do you do? You just grab the x-coordinate of the point on the unit circle, which is going to be negative 0.737, you don't need the parenthesis there, negative 0.737. That gives us sine and cosine. Tangent, this is the hardest one here. Tangent is going to be the y-coordinate divided by the x-coordinate, so you're going to get 0.675 divided by negative 0.737. This is the usual identity of sine divided by cosine. Feel free to help yourself with the calculator if you need to do that. I mean, we could do this by hand, but the arithmetic can get a little bit tedious, but if you put these numbers into a calculator, you end up with negative 0.916, which would then be the tangent ratio associated to this angle theta. And we could do secant and cosecant and cotangent if we wanted to, but I think this example is sufficient to see that as long as we can get sine and cosine, we can do the other trig ratios. And on the unit circle, cosine and sine are exactly the x and y-coordinates.


Okay, folks, I gotta ask this question. Are you a briner or are you an injector? And if for those of you guys that live on the edge, do you brine and inject, let's get it. Okay, so listen, I'm gonna show you guys what to do and how to come up with like a great tasting and juicy, you know, turkey, right? There's a lot of science goes behind this, so I'm gonna get right into it. As you can see, we got some ingredients right here. And don't forget, I got that new website, folks. It's www.smokingandgrillingwithab, and that's W-I-T-A-B dot com.   Let's go ahead and address this elephant in the room. This right here, I got a big bucket, right?   Cause listen, we gotta have a big bucket. This is something I wish I would have thought about. I can't take credit for this. Everybody here now is telling me like, hey, get yourself one of them big zipper bags. So I got myself one. We gonna put this in the inside. We gonna pour our brine after we make it inside of this. And then we gonna store it in. People say you put it in the refrigerator, but I'm gonna be honest with you. With the holidays coming, hey, who got this kind of space? Okay, so look, let's go ahead and get it started, right? Look, there's some science to this. I tell you, and it's gonna be all in the salt right here and the cold water and the overnight. Now, I'm gonna say it this way. Let's just go ahead and put the, you know, fill this up with some water. And we gotta have enough water to fill this up, right? So let's bring this over here. Let me fill this up. Okay, folks, so look, like I say, this is very, very simple. You know what I mean? We gonna let the ingredients do the work. I've already gotten this, you know, boiling, right? Now, this is the way I do it. You guys follow me. Look, I'm gonna take the salt and I got it. It's a lot of salt, but I'm gonna go ahead and address that now and answer them questions. No, you do not have, you do not taste it. It's not gonna be salty. And I'm gonna take my brown sugar and put that in there too. All right, so if you look down in there, look, you can see the salt and then I put that, you know, the brown sugar on top, right? So what I'm gonna do is while it's boiling, I'm gonna keep, you know, moving this back and forth because what we want this to do is to completely dissolve, right? So if you just keep moving it back, you keep that high, you know, heat on there. I promise you, it's gonna dissolve. It ain't gonna take long. So it's probably gotta come back up to a boil. Now, with the rest of the ingredients, once this dissolves, right, we just go ahead and put them all in there. This is dry, you guys can use fresh bay leaf, you can do that. You know what I mean, we got these ingredients and we got peppercorn. I don't need to grind this down or nothing like that. We'll just put that in there. Now I want you to pay attention. I'm gonna take this and I'm using a lemon. Why? Because I didn't have a orange and it really doesn't make a difference, but we want that citrus in there.  So I'll just leave these like this. You cut them how you wanna cut them. Okay, so now let's talk about why we brine. It's for the flavor that it goes, you know, they're putting, that infuses the side of the meat. And listen, what it does is it creates a, it makes it where it's like super juicy. If you ask me, I don't do, well, I'm gonna be honest with you, I don't do nothing, I'm a briner. You know what I mean? Every now and then I'll brine and inject. You know what I mean? If I was trying to achieve a certain type of flavor, you know what I mean? But if we just talking about just, you know, getting down, family involved, all of that, this right here, do it. Then when you cut that breast, I promise you it's gonna be right. Now, when I do this turkey, listen, I'm gonna smoke it. Just wanna let you guys know. But this is gonna be key. You gotta get yourself one of these large bags and you gotta have something big enough. It's the whole process of keeping it cool, right? So the way I'm told is when you put this together and you wanna have this cool too, I gotta say that. Listen, because if you pour that and put that turkey in this hot right here, actually it'll start cooking. We want this to be room temperature or cold. I got enough bags of ice to make this cool once we do it. But what it does is it draws some of the moisture out and then after a while it goes back into the meat. You guys gotta trust me. Hey, I live by it and that's the truth. In fact, folks. So everything has been dissolved. I'm gonna go ahead and drop my bay leaves in, my dry ingredients. And then I'm gonna go ahead and then add my herbs like this, right? You guys, man, it don't make no difference. You can tie them if you wanna do that. I even got our apparatus that you put these in the inside. It's got holes in there so you can keep up with it. But this is what we wanna do. We wanna get this flavor and fuse with, you know, our brine. Now we'll add our lemon, you know, slices, right? Again, don't forget, you can use orange also. More than likely that's what I would have used but I had a lemon in there screaming. I heard something knocking in the refrigerator and when I opened it up, it was this lemon like, hey, hurry up and use me. All right, now that we have the boil, everything is in there. Hmm, but you guys gotta, man, this might be something that was like just open up. You got any signage or whatever. This might just work. Maybe I need a bottle or something to sell it. All right, so listen, put your lid on the top. I'm gonna drip just it down to a bottle. Medium high and I'm gonna let it cook for about 20 minutes. Okay, so look, it's been 20 minutes. I've just turned this off. We'll let the heat continue to do whatever it's gonna do. But 20 minutes on a boil, trust me, it then had everything to come out and now we got ourselves a brine, right? So now we're gonna take our, you know, a Ziploc bag, excuse me, our zipper bag. You wanna open this up. Now, this is not the norm, right? This'll do this five gallon bucket. You guys can look at my description box and on my website if you wanna know where to get these from.  I don't. So what I'm doing is, and listen, it'll help you because you only need to buy this one time.  Now I'm gonna leave this top off of here because we want this to cool. Listen to me, folks, we want this to cool. We want it to be room temperature. Or if we got enough ice, we can go ahead and just shock it and get it down to like a cool temperature. We don't wanna put the bird in that right there because when you do what you're doing is you're starting the cooking process and that's what we don't wanna do. We need this to be really like on the cold side. Room temperature does work, right? So let this cool. I'm gonna go ahead and expedite it just for the camera. You know, say, put some ice in here, you know what I mean? And then we move on to the next step. Okay, folks, I just chimp this. Listen, this is right here, it's right. It's actually a little bit on the cold side, right?  I got a couple of little extra bags. You know what I mean? I don't know how big your freezer is if it's making enough, but you just, or you can just wait. You don't even have to do that. You can just come down naturally, right? Now let's just talk about the bird. I like my birds to be 12 to 14 pounds. This right here is right in the middle. This is 13, right? So I'm gonna take this. I've already taken out everything in the inside, the neck, the little giblets and liver and whatever that is in there. And then they got that little secret bag and all of that. I take all of that out. I save it for a later date, put it in a Ziploc bag and freeze it. You know what I mean? When I need turkey stock, along with the rest of everything that I have, I put that in there and that'll give it to me. Now I'm gonna take this. So this is my guy. He don't have to be padded dry or nothing like that. Don't worry about none of this extra skin because I'm gonna take that and do my trim tomorrow, right? Now let's talk about how long we gonna brine. I tell everybody we gonna brine for at least 12 hours. You know, I like to go 16 to 24, right? So we got that going. I got him in here, right? I'm gonna set this here. Now I'm getting ready to pick this up and I'm getting ready to just pour it in there. What we wanna do is when you put it on, and you know, when you put the brine in there, we wanna completely submerge it, right? So let me go ahead and get my towels and all my napkins and all of that because you know what's gonna happen. You know how it feels. All right, so once you get it in the brine, right? You gotta completely submerge. I add ice on there because you wanna keep this cool. Like some people will tell you you wanna put it in the refrigerator, but I've told you earlier, like how you gonna put that in the refrigerator? We really don't have that. And then some of us have like a refrigerator outside. You know what I mean? Like in the garage or whatever. I mean, that'll work if it's not, if it's not filled. But for me, I do it like this, right? Then I put my top on it.  Okay, to just give you a recap. Listen, you saw the ingredients and don't forget it's on my website. You guys can print it, you know, and just follow the instructions the way I did it. And you got the video to play along with it also, right? I wanna call this like part one. You know what I mean? But truly this is just a brine and actuality. This brine right here works just not only for turkey, any type of file that you, you know, you use. So of course you can do it with the chicken also. So listen, I'm gonna ready take this, go out in my garage, put that up in the corner right there. I already got the lid on this so I don't have to worry about no contaminations. We finna go 24 hours and guess what folks? Then we finna smoke.  I'm still getting cold, but some of us we don't have to deal with snow. So we got a chance to like smoke them, right? So the next video you see, that'll be the turkey. I haven't decided what type of herbs or I mean what type of season I'm gonna put on it.  So check this out. If you've been following me for a minute, you know how I end all of my videos. You know what I'm about to do? I'm about to go put this in the garage. So guess what folks? I'm out. Peace.


I'd now like to welcome Dr. Megan Collins. She's an assistant professor of ophthalmology at my alma mater, Johns Hopkins. She's at the Wilmer Institute, where she's also a faculty member at the Berman Institute of Bioethics. She was a part of the Johns Hopkins University School based eye care team, which recently won preventive blindness Ginny Pomeroy Award for Excellence in Vision and Public Health for their work researching and addressing vision problems in high-poverty schools.  Please join me in giving a warm welcome to Professor Megan Collins. Thank you so much, Dr. Peek. Let me turn on my mark. Thank you for the invitation. And it's always wonderful to see so many friendly faces every year and to just be inspired by all of the fantastic work that has come out of this center and the collaborations that continue to go on. So I'm really excited to spend a few minutes today talking about my work in school-based vision care programs. As Dr. Peek mentioned, I met Johns Hopkins. These are my disclosures in terms of grant funding and consultancies. And before I start, I really want to acknowledge I have a fabulous team of collaborators at Hopkins, both in the School of Education and School of Medicine, and their sort of determination, perseverance, and work ethic make all the work we've done possible. So I want to acknowledge them from the beginning. Let me give you a little bit background about school-based vision care and eye problems in children. It's always nice when I see people in the audience wearing glasses. And I encourage you to think back to when you first realized you needed glasses. And it turns out about 25% of school-aged children need glasses. Most of them will not know they need glasses. They will just assume that they can't see clearly. And I know Mark has had this experience himself when he was a kid. So the way they typically get detected is through school-based vision screening programs. The challenge, however, is even if they are detected, many children are not connected with care after that, meaning they have to see a doctor in the community and it doesn't happen. And particularly in high-poverty communities, this really doesn't happen. So if you think about the traditional paradigm for school-based care or for vision screening, kids get screened at state-mandated levels. It's typically first grade and eighth grade in most states. And then kids get sent into the community to have an eye exam in glasses. Unfortunately, what happens in high-poverty areas is there are challenges at every point here. Kids don't get screened as frequently. They don't get eye exams as frequently. They don't get glasses as frequently. And even when they do get glasses, they rarely get replaced if they're lost or broken. So in reality, when you think that a quarter of your children should be wearing glasses, our work has shown that in high-poverty areas, less than 6% of kids who are supposed to be wearing glasses are actually wearing them. So why are kids not wearing glasses? Why are they not connecting with care? We know there's a lot of structural barriers. There are things like insurance and transportation and caretaker time-off work that are impacting care utilization. And that has really sort of been the impetus for school-based care programs, which is recognizing there's a lot of health problems that could be addressed by programs in school. That's including asthma, vaccinations, oral health, and now vision health. And for me, it seems especially relevant for vision given we know that vision impacts academic performance. And we've had work come out of our group that's actually specifically studied that. And there's a point that Lainey made yesterday that is really relevant to here in terms of we know that education is a strong predictor of health and adulthood. And now we know that health problems are impacting education and childhood. So the idea is to bring the health delivery into the school to attempt to address that at the same time so it doesn't impact their education so they have good health and adulthood. So it's a challenging cycle. Now the interesting thing for me is while there's been an exponential increase in these programs, the ethical issues related to this new paradigm of delivering care has been largely unexamined. And let me talk a little bit about a program I'm involved in. It's called Vision for Baltimore. This is a program that Hopkins runs with the city of Baltimore. And the mission of this program is to provide school-based eye care to all 60,000 kids within the city schools, within elementary and middle schools. So it's roughly 152 schools. And the way the program works is we do screenings for the kids in all the schools and for the kids who fail the screenings they're offered an eye exam that's done at school. If they need glasses, they're able to pick their glasses. I wish John LaPouma had not left. I was gonna offer to give glasses to people in the audience like he gave plants to people in the audience. The kids get their glasses through the school and if kids lose or break their glasses, which inevitably they do, they would get replaced through the school and we work very closely with mechanisms in the school to make sure they know which kids are supposed to be wearing glasses and they remind them. So it's sort of a wrap-around system. The way that we obtain permission is through paper consent. It goes home to parents. They get notified their child has failed vision screening. They need an eye exam. They need to return this permission form. And then when kids do return the form, the glasses are prescribed at school. This is one of our students, happy that he's wearing his glasses. And we feel like there's a great benefit to providing the glasses directly in school because this is where they're doing their learning. They can take the glasses home. Some of them like to leave them in school at times. And parents are provided written information about this. So parents are not present for the exams. All of the information of parents goes back and forth by paper or passive communication. This is an example of what our Mobile Vision Clinic looks like. It literally is parked outside the school. It has all of the equipment that would make any optometrist or ophthalmologist envious. And kids go right in there. They have their eye exam. The first part, the passenger side, actually becomes a mini optical shop and kids get to pick their glasses. So the interesting thing in terms of our program so far is we've screened over 55,000 children. And we've found that one third of those kids are failing their vision screening. And what we did was we analyzed in terms of the state mandate. So these kids are supposed to get screened at grade of first entry, first and eighth grade. And then we were doing these extra grades, now two through seven, what were the failure rates like in all these grades. As you can see, they're high across the grades. They get higher as they get towards eighth grade. But the interesting thing is they're actually statistically significantly higher in the non-mandated grades. Which is of course great justification for the fact that our state mandate of only going to those certain grades is not working, particularly in a high poverty community. So in terms of the successes of the program, we've served, now actually, the numbers are updated about 10,000 kids at this point in time. And about 80% of which needed glasses and were provided glasses through the program. So if I stop the presentation here, it would sound wonderful and we've had great success and I'm very proud of what we've done. But the story is not totally over. And what I'd like to talk a little bit about is the fact that when you bring care into school, I think it's impressive of how much we can address the access issue, but there are a lot of other issues to consider. And I'm gonna touch on three here. One is participation, the second is compliance, and the third is follow up. And it turns out all of those relate to parental engagement, which doesn't happen as much when care happens in the school setting. So in terms of participation, I told you we have about 10,000 kids we've served. I hadn't yet told you we have about 9,000 kids we haven't served. And the reason we haven't served them is because we weren't able to get permission forms back from their parents. And this is despite having a program that is very well-funded, does extensive outreach, literally has full-time staff who go into schools to tell parents about the program and try to get consent forms back. Now if you look at us in comparison to other programs doing school-based health across the US, what are their consent forms participation looking like? It's about 30 to 60%. So ours over three years was 53%. So we're within the range, but we had massive outreach. So obviously we would like to see more kids. And a lot of questions are of the kids who are not participating. Why are they not participating? Are they among the most disadvantaged and their parents are not engaged at all and not returning the forms? So what we did is we wanted to say, well, why aren't people participating? So we conducted focus groups in Baltimore and Chicago. We actually help with a research program in Chicago because Chicago also does school-based vision care. And what we did was we talked to, we led 41 focus groups with parents and teachers in both cities and tried to elicit from them factors in terms of why people didn't participate in these programs. And they came in multiple categories, but the major themes were they just happened to not be aware of the program. Again, paper consent going home for anybody who has kids knows that things don't always make it out of the backpack. The other thing was misunderstanding of cost and eligibility. Did they have to have certain insurance? Did they have to not have insurance? Would they get billed for being in the program? Some people had negative attitudes about vision and eye care. When we've surveyed kids and asked, kids love glasses, but parents often have the perspective of remembering they got made fun of when they were kids. I got made fun of her wearing glasses. So as a parent, you might be concerned their child's gonna get teased as well. The other thing is sometimes they did, fortunately have an existing eye care provider, but the last one's pretty important. Sometimes they didn't trust the program. And when we delved into details of what they didn't trust about the program, it went into multiple categories. One was safety, where the drops, the medicine we were using, was it safe to use in children's eyes? Would it harm them in any way? Was it effective? Was what we were doing in a school-based program with an optometrist the same as what they would get in a clinic? Who was actually examining their child? Was it a student? Was it a resident? Was it a licensed clinician? And then how are we sharing data? This became particularly salient in Chicago because people were worried about sharing of immigration status when we were in schools that had high Hispanic populations. Also actually more relevant and Baltimore were questions of our research. And what type of research was being done on children? Was it being done without parents permission? And then interestingly, just the question of schools and the role of schools in delivering health and whether parents wanted them in that realm of their life. So let's step away from participation and trust for a minute and talk about the next critical challenge, which is compliance, which to me, I'm very happy that we've been able to serve so many children. But providing glasses is only the first step. Kids have to wear it, and they have to wear them regularly in order for them to be able to see the board and succeed in school. And we've done a lot of research in terms of trying to understand what's predictive of students wearing their glasses. It turns out it's not that they make them see better. It's not that they feel cool wearing their glasses. It's actually if their parents remind them to wear their glasses. And that is a big predictor. So of course, that means it's important for parents to know they need to wear their glasses, know why they're wearing their glasses, and buy into the entire process that they should be wearing them on a regular basis. Finally, in terms of the third challenge, follow-up care, most of the children will see through a school-based program have refractive needs. They need glasses. But a small percentage are gonna have non-refractive needs. They're gonna have more complicated eye problems. They're gonna have strabismus or amblyopia or pediatric cataracts and need to be connected into the community. In our program, that was about 5% of students. In other programs we've reviewed, it's roughly anywhere from I think 8% to 28%.  But universally, we struggle with getting these kids connected into the community. Again, that's not surprising because these programs were developed because people were not connecting with care. But then you have these children who actually have serious pathology, need to connect with care and we're still struggling with how do we connect them into the system? And how do you make parents aware and how do they get appointments and things like that? We did survey parents. We wanted to, I should say, we did focus groups with parents because we wanted to understand their perspectives given all of these challenges. How do they feel about school-based programs? What did they recommend that could improve school-based programs? And their suggestions can be really categorized into communication, education, additional eyeglass resources and program logistics. For purposes of today, I'm just gonna talk about requested education. And this is very interesting to me. Parents requested detailed information in terms of what's the difference between a screening and an eye exam? What's the timeline of programs like this in terms of when they are coming to schools? In terms of recommendations, what are signs and symptoms of eye problems? And when should somebody see a doctor? When should somebody know if glasses are working or not working? When should they wear the glasses? When should they replace the glasses? And what are resources to help encouraging kids to wear their glasses? And as I thought about this and I thought about trust, I thought how would I, when I'm in clinic, deal with a parent who's asking all these questions, which are honestly totally normal expected questions that I would want a parent to ask? And the way that I would address it is I have face-to-face interaction with them. And they've never worn glasses before. Well, then I explain to them what their child's refractive error is. I give them examples. I even give them like test lenses so they can sort of experience what their child experiences. And that really engages them in the process and makes it much easier for them to comply. The challenge when we're delivering all the care in the school setting, however, is the parent isn't there. And so that dynamic of having them sort of understand why are they getting the glasses? What's the significance of it? Is challenged because you just don't have those face-to-face interactions. So I guess my argument is that the doctor-patient relationship has really fundamentally changed when you're delivering care in the school setting. And interestingly, you're bringing in a new partner. You're bringing in schools and teachers. And this is relevant now. Of course, I think many of you are aware Chicago Public Schools just went through, I think an 11-day strike by the teachers. And teachers are being asked to do more and more. And in terms of vision care, we're asking them to help return consent forms. We're asking them to remind children to wear their glasses. We're asking them to notify us when children need their glasses replaced. But as we're expanding this role for teacher, in some ways we're diminishing the role of the parent who's still responsible for signing the permission form, complying with wearing the glasses and the follow-up. So there's this tension here. How do we increase access yet still engage the parent in what we would traditionally consider this triadic doctor-patient-parent relationship where you would have shared decision-making based on trust and education? There are a lot of important considerations in school-based care. And I, of course, am a huge advocate, and this is much of my work is in. But what I am trying to move forward with is now that we have figured out how to solve the access issue. And now we've figured out how to effectively deliver care in schools. How do we do this in a sustainable way? And how do we effectively connect children with long-term medical homes in the community when they need them? So as I've mentioned, we've been able to make a lot of progress in terms of delivering care to children who were otherwise not receiving it. But future considerations should be made in terms of how do we address these challenges of parental engagement and sustainability? I would like to thank you all for listening. And this is a picture of my team. We are dissecting cow eyeballs with children. They really seem to enjoy that work most. And we do a lot of things like that because I think engaging the students seems to get them excited about wearing glasses. If you have any questions, I'm happy to answer. I'm struck by the problem with parental participation in this. And I just, I don't think you've mentioned it. But as you probably know, the illiteracy rate in Chicago is estimated or measured to be 30% in Baltimore, 35 to 36%. And in New York, the number of people that don't speak English is set to be 18%. I'm wondering if those kinds of factors also enter into the lack of parental cooperation? I think they hugely do. And I think all of the places that I mentioned, we have consent forms in multiple languages. But even though you have them in multiple languages, you can't necessarily ensure that parents are gonna understand everything about the program. But it's, I think the understanding and the complexity of the forms is honestly a huge deterrent. The challenge always is how much do you, you wanna give the information. And as parents mentioned, they want all of this information, but then you give the information and they don't necessarily read all the information to understand it. I think my challenge is how do we bring the doctor-parent dynamic into school-based setting? Because I think there has to be some type of one-on-one communication for it to actually work. Have you ever considered having attached to a parent night or attached to an existing program? I see you nodding like, yes, we've already tried. Something where there's forum for parents to come. Yes, yes, so we are doing, so this year, actually, we went to every single back-to-school night across the city to talk about the program. But the challenge, again, is the parents who come to back-to-school nights are probably the ones who would have filled out the forms anyway. So it's still trying to figure out all of these strategies to get to people who may not necessarily be coming into the school setting. But what we're trying to do is a lot of sort of consolidating of health-related efforts because they're getting forms about the dental program and the asthma program and the vaccination program and there's just this inundation of health information and they sometimes, after a while, get overwhelmed. Thank you so much. Another round of applause. Thank you.


We were demonstrating capability of the shock trauma platoon, a scalable model of light maneuverable damage control resuscitation in the field, delivered by an MV-22, which is an off-spray, in a forward position. It supports the special-purpose mag test because it demonstrates our capability in a broad range, responding to crisis situations and central command. So we could support this special purpose mag test, whatever element that might be, a medical component out there that can provide health care in the battlefield, in a forward position.


Astronomer Timothy Hamilton, using Hubble Space Telescope, discovered these unusual objects now named after him. The objects are the stretched images of a gravitationally-lensed distant galaxy located more than 11 billion light-years away. One appears to be a mirror image. In this case, a precise alignment between the background galaxy and a foreground galaxy clustered 7 billion light-years away produced twin magnified copies of the same image of the remote galaxy. This rare phenomenon occurs because the background galaxy straddles a ripple of dark matter in the foreground galaxy. As the far away galaxy light passes through the cluster along this ripple, two mirror images are produced. Along with a third image, they can be seen off to the side.


The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations leads international efforts to combat hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition. The FAO Office of Evaluation, also called OED, plays a critical role in generating evidence for decision-making. OED has developed an interim strategy to guide its work over the next two years. This strategy describes the mission, vision, spirit and goals of OED. OED's mission is to enable informed decisions. Its vision is to generate evidence and recommendations that inform thinking, deliberations and ultimately decisions of FAO, member nations, donors, partners and others seeking to support the 2030 agenda through the transformation to more efficient, inclusive, resilient and sustainable agri-food systems. The spirit behind the mission and vision of OED is formative, focused on generating learning that promotes improvements to achieve FAO goals. OED will pursue its mission and vision by generating robust and useful evidence that supports learning and accountability, making potentially transformative recommendations to FAO stakeholders and contributing knowledge to the fields in which FAO operates. In order to do this, OED will work in five focus areas, planning and monitoring, strengthening capacity, research and innovation, evaluating for use and disseminating for broader impact. OED will promote the strategic use of resources in alignment with FAO information needs by regularly assessing demand to identify priorities for evidence-building activities. It will develop policies and processes to support human and financial resource decisions, promote effectiveness and efficiency and monitor OED's performance. Operating as one OED, OED will develop a human resources and decentralization strategy to strengthen capacity to lead, conduct and manage the work of OED globally. It will develop processes to provide supportive and robust quality assurance throughout the life cycle of OED's work. OED will embrace research as critical to designing evaluations, answering stakeholder questions and supporting policy and process development. It will use cutting-edge data science and information technology solutions in support of organizational success. OED's evaluation design will include measuring results of intervention approaches whenever possible and appropriate. It will conduct rigorous evaluations to ensure the needed standard of evidence to promote use. OED will strengthen and diversify internal dissemination and adapt its approach based on stakeholder feedback. It will expand the toolkit of external dissemination strategies to promote transparency and support broader use of evidence in the UN system and beyond. OED is harnessing the experience, technical expertise and commitment of its personnel to drive the transformation of the office and its work. It has already made significant progress, reorganizing the office, both people and work, in preparation for launching this strategy. Expanding into new areas of work such as impact evaluations and data science, actively decentralizing while supporting global integration and efficient operations. This interim strategy provides an initial architecture for excellence in supporting FAO members and management's culture of evidence in decision-making. We welcome feedback and look forward to engaging a wide range of stakeholders in further planning and execution. Thank you.