Functional programming has been around for decades, going back to the 1950s. Yet it has recently become an extremely hot topic in the industry. The entire software infrastructure of companies like Twitter is written in functional programming languages. Even languages that were originally fully imperative have adopted ideas from functional programming. Why is this the case? Why this renaissance of functional programming? Well, one of the reasons is the conciseness and elegance that this style of programming allows. In this module, we will look into the origins and basics of functional programming, which is Lambda Calculus. When you first see Lambda Calculus, you might not believe that something so structurally simple can be powerful enough to program in. Let's have a look at the building blocks of Lambda Calculus. And while it might seem a little bit abstract at the first glance, bear with me, because you will see the mechanics soon. First, we have variables. This is your x, this is your y, your z. A placeholder which can be substituted for something else. Next is the abstraction. Now you see where the name is coming from. We write Lambda x dot t. And by that we actually mean an unnamed function of sx with a term t. In regular math or programming, you would possibly write f of x equals t. Just that here we don't have to give the function a name like f. Also note that we have t in this definition, which means that it is recursive. The final element is application. This might seem a little bit odd to you, but by writing one term next to the other, we mean that the first term t on the left is in the shape of a function. And the second term on the right is what we want this function to be applied to. This particular notation requires a bit of practice to get used to, which we will do. But for now, this is it. This is all that is Lambda Calculus. The Lambda notation was invented by this gentleman, Alonso Church. He originally did this as a way to write algorithms in a formal way, concretely for the so-called Entscheidungsproblem, which was brought up by Leibniz and formulated by Hilbert. So as simple as it seems, you might be surprised to hear that it's Turing Complete, which essentially means that we can express and calculate any computable function with it. In other words, this calculus can do everything that your favorite programming language can do, at least from the standpoint of computability.


As we look back at the third year of our mandate, it's fair to say that we were busy. We put a price on pollution, moved forward with a plan that will both protect our environment and help Canadians as we move to a clean economy. We negotiated a new NAFTA, preserving and modernizing trade with our North American partners. We introduced new competitiveness measures to attract investment to Canada and ensure that existing businesses are even better positioned to compete on the world stage. And we welcomed the single largest private sector investment in Canada's history. A $40 billion liquid natural gas project led by Shell, a project that will create 10,000 good jobs. But that's not all. Canada also held the G7 presidency in 2018. At our leader's summit in Charlevoix, we secured $3.8 billion in funding to support education for women and girls in crisis and conflict zones. And at the UN General Assembly, we welcomed additional contributions to education, totaling more than $527 million. In partnership with Indigenous communities and investors, we got the rail line back up and running to the people of Churchill, Manitoba. And this year, we made a big promise in 2015 by legalizing and regulating the cannabis in a strict way. This reform, as expected, will allow us to better protect the health and security of Canadians, to monitor whether the cannabis is out of the young people's hands and to prevent criminals and organized crime from taking advantage of it. And finally, our government has launched the very first Canadian poverty reduction strategy. This strategy is based on important investments in housing, the increase in the complementary performance of the income supplement guarantee for the young people living alone, the Canadian children's allocation, the Canadian workers' allocation, and investments in the learning and care of children. And just as our government has been busy this year, so too have all of you journalists. Thank you for your tireless work in 2018.  I hope you all have a great holiday with friends and family enjoying some well-deserved time off. There's no question that 2019 is going to be a big year for all of us.


Welcome folks, this is Tom O'Brien of TFNN.  It's making a great week folks, kicking into Labor Day weekend, there we go. Love coming out of you makes you happy. The whole world can love you, but that's not the love that'll make you happy. What will make you happy is the share all the love you have inside of you. That is the love that will make a difference. Mockin' wise, let's take a look at it out here. We have the Dow, the industry is up 170, we get Nasdaq up 94, S&P's up 22. Gold, gold contract up $8.10, traded 1948 an ounce. We have Silver up 4 cents, $24.62 an ounce. Light, sweet crude up 31 cents, $80, 14 cents a barrel, notes and bonds, a 10 year note, up seven ticks, trading 109.21, the 30 year up nine ticks, at 120.01 in King Dollar. King Dollar's down 15 ticks, trading 104.062, the Euro out here at 108, the ends at 146 and the British pound is at 126 to one US Dollar. Our phone number's<PHONE_NUMBER>, give us a call folks. Want to know what's going on in your world and the world of the S&P's, let's take a look at them. What do you have? We pull the spy up first. What we have out here is that on Friday folks, you came down, you didn't break the swing, you rejected lower price at the highs of the lows and bottom line that say, guess what, higher price is coming at us. So we're at 442 and what's game here still is this 446-27. The 446-27, where I'm getting that from by the way folks, okay? And we'll see how it comes into it. That's the last time we were really coming down with some big volume, not with some big volume, meaning there's big volume at the bottom, but already rejected that. So we had come off the highs, we had a couple of big volume days there and right there is basically, is that ice? That's what that is, okay? We almost had hit it when we went up on Friday. We hit 445-22, bottom line, it's gonna get deviant and get up into that area. The Q's, we take a look at the Q's, same type of set up inside the Q's. The Q's had come down, bottom line rejected lower price. We got down, bottom line, get down to the price point of that 358-50. The low there was 354, the high was at 359. So we rejected that area and it looks to me like the Q's can actually get up into this 373-13 area, that's how it's set up. And we did hit that 372-74 on Thursday. My take is that we're going right back up to that area because that's ice also and we'll see how we get there. Now you gotta remember we're coming into late-to-day weekend, so we're also coming into window dressing. Notes and bonds. But I think we got a couple of big turns in the marketplace, folks, and one of them is the note and bond market. So what you have with a note and bond market is this. We, let's put a much longer term here because you will see just type of devastation on the way down it was. Let's see if I put a generic one. Okay, cool. Okay, so I'm gonna put a generic one up, meaning that it just ties the contracts together and put this up for a full year. And you can see that the 10 year, we went down from 117 and we hit 108. Now when we take a look at this, I'm gonna put this on a two-year weekly, though. Flip this around. And on a two-year weekly, what you can see, the low that was established, this goes back to 2022 was 10826. Well, we hit 10828. I think that's it. That's my point. And the reason I'm saying that is that what you had, if we take, now let's go to the actual bond. If we take a look at the bond, what you're gonna see, the note, rather, just do the note, though, on a daily basis.  You came back into that sign of strength and you didn't get to the low of the sign of strength. What it also did is that when you take a look at it on a technical basis, it broke the downtrend. Now, the only downtrend that it actually broke here is from the 111.29, you know? So, you know, the type of beating that this took is gonna be step by step. But that's telling me that this tenure note wants to go to this 111.29. Now, you put that together with the aspect of how many rate hikes we've had, what Pyle has to say about the aspect of inflation and they're gonna be diligent and there's no doubt about that, you know, at Jackson Hole. And then on top of that, I keep a close eye, folks, on transportation cost. You know, from Shanghai to Tampa. And let me tell you, so this is the number, this is the factual number. At the peak, a container from Shanghai to Tampa was 14,500. Do you know what they are right now? Just take a guess. And now this is a spot rate, 3,000 bucks.  You can imagine what Walmart, what Amazon, what all these people are, they're way down there. Who knows? I have no clue, but I can tell you something. You can see that the amount of destruction and price is absolutely dramatic. So my take is that we're reversed this whole deal. Rates, higher rates are over. And then let's go to the US dollar. We take a look at the dollar. And what's so intriguing about the dollar is this. The dollar's been on a run. There's no two ways about that. Now, that's on the daily. And the dollar's been trying to get into this swing point from May of 2021. That swing point is 104, 699. Now we made it to 104, 447. That being said, now watch this. When you actually put this on a larger scale, you can see that we've been in a consolidation. This consolidation has been out here for quite some time. We spiked it. And the lower part of this consolidation, bottom line is down there at the 99.57. So we take a look at this. That's quite a consolidation. And my take is that it's failed at these higher prices. If they fail to the higher prices, lower prices are coming at us. Stay right there, folks. Come right back. We have the Dow. The Dow industrials right now trading up 162 NASDAQs up 90 S&Ps up 21. We'll come right back.


Okay, so my name is Zane Selvins and I am the chief data wrangler or vaquero de datos for Catalyst Cooperative and I'm going to talk about public utility data sets in the US mostly related to electricity but more generally for energy and I definitely want to acknowledge my partner in crime who's not here with us today Christina Gosnell who has really been a co-equal partner in this process for more than five years and she's actually the president of our little employee owned consulting co-op so you can follow us both. So I came I came to this work from kind of a weird place at least I think it's a weird place I I used to work on space exploration and I went to grad school originally because I wanted to terraform Mars I read some science fiction books by Kim Stanley Robinson it was like that I'm gonna do that screw this boring tech job in Silicon Valley and I you know successfully got in and started working with NASA data and ended up you know working on Mars working on the icy moons of the outer solar system and then I took an atmospheric physics class and realized that actually we were already involved in a terraforming project it was just on the wrong planet and also in the wrong direction and I kind of had a meltdown and decided that after finishing my PhD in like a pit of despair I wanted to actually work on addressing this problem so I went into climate and energy policy after graduating since you're here I assume that you also like data and probably also live on earth and you know may have an interest in similar topics so data people when we talk to data people they often think like wow you know a lot about electricity and when we talk to electricity people they're like oh wow you know a lot about data but really we're just stubborn amateurs on both sides and that combination is valuable that doesn't seem like there's a lot of people that are aware of like the policy and advocacy universe and also the kind of data and coding universe so we're trying trying desperately to kind of bring these two groups together so I'm what I'm hoping we and maybe you will get out of this talk is we want more data people to understand what energy and electricity data there is so that we have more people kind of informed and playing with it and doing interesting things with it and we also want to get more activists and policy involved people the literate with the huge data sets that exist and that could help inform their work so I'm very interested to talk to somebody from the carpentries about setting up another domain specific kind of track for this kind of basic literacy for working with data we also really need help it's blank yes it's supposed to be blank yeah just so you know stripes we also need a lot of help telling these stories and we haven't been able to make it in good connections with data journalists yet that want to work with data on energy and climate stories so if anybody you know has connections like that we love love to know more so I don't know does anybody recognize these stripes do people know what this is this is a color-coded time series of the average global temperature on earth starting from 1850 on the far side to the present on this side so it really there's some crazy stuff happening right now and I periodically feel as if I am a space explorer who has been marooned on a planet with you know a civilization that doesn't know what it's doing and then I talked about humans in the third person so this is from Ed Hawkins and the climate lab book and he has lots of great graphics related to this so who here has been to a public utility commission meeting or hearing oh my god that's great that's usually the answer is zero this so this is where the magic happens in the US as far as deciding what our energy system looks like it looks like a bunch of lawyers because it is a bunch of lawyers and it's a basically a court a courtroom like proceeding in which typically utilities come in and say we want to build these things we think people use this much energy and we think we should make 11% return on the you know billion dollars I'm gonna invest and you get into a very adversarial kind of conversation with you know discovery collecting data making cases against each other and that the utilities really have a very very unfair advantage here and they have a huge information asymmetry they have all of the information about their system they have all the resources in the world to throw at it so every proceeding will typically have its own team of attorneys that doesn't have to work on anything else whereas on the advocate side you know you're probably working for some scrappy nonprofit or maybe in the public sector and and maybe you know there are eight proceedings going on simultaneously in conversation with the same utility and they have eight attorneys on every one of those eight proceedings and you have the same attorney who sleeps on a couch in a basement who's trying to like coordinate all of those things from the other side so this this asymmetry really leads to some problems as far as the equity and you know you know reasonableness of the decisions that get made sometimes because the PUC you know they're actually they're not often they're not domain experts in this and they certainly aren't you know fully briefed on the opaque models the proprietary data that's being used to make the case from the utilities point of view and when they get some like you know wild eyed hippies on one side and a bunch of suits from the utility on the other side with apparently all of the data in the expert witnesses getting paid $500 an hour to testify they typically like you know the utility probably knows what it's talking about we're gonna go with their suggestion you know and what could possibly go wrong so these are some of the things that can go wrong this is just the last couple of years and you know you can see we're not talking about Trump change here this is real money you know South Carolina has has decided to just totally bail on a nuclear plant nine billion dollars in the hole literally there is this you know the first kind of at scale carbon capture and sequestration plant in the deep south seven and a half billion dollars they totally scrapped it and they're not being sued by the DOJ for fraudulent use of federal loan guarantees and these are you know these are spectacular failures where they're actually getting some comeuppance and I'm in South Carolina typically a fairly conservative state the legislature wants to rip the face off of the CEO of that company and they're actually gonna you know there will be consequences but this is atypical you know usually they get away with it they you know can just the PC that what they want to build is a reasonable thing they pass the cost through the rate payers and you know these nine billion dollars seven billion dollar piles of infrastructure are what you're paying for in your monthly bill so we're never gonna be like I doubt that we'll ever be able to produce data and models that are on par with what the utilities have but I don't think that that actually matters so who recognizes guys anybody recognizes I'm probably gonna date myself here but this is Hank Paulson the Treasury Secretary under Bush the second and he presided over the the mortgage implosion a decade or more ago and you know was he incompetent did he not understand how markets work no he understand very well how markets work because he's also Hank Paulson CEO of Goldman Sachs the problem here isn't that he didn't know what he was doing the problem is that his interests and motivations and affiliations and you know his really allegiance was maybe not to the public interest so you can be the best in the world at what you do and if you're you know you have the wrong incentives the wrong motives the wrong interests it doesn't matter how competent you are and conversely you know if you get people in the room with the right incentives and you know at least a little bit of of material to work with you can make real change and I'll go through some examples of that later on places where this has been successful or where it could be successful in the future so our origin story you know we all started at this tiny little nonprofit called clean energy action it was basically unstaffed and we got very familiar with the Colorado utility landscape and as a result of that we were invited to help with a foundation project to understand the finances of their coal plants and it went well you know we understood you know how much it cost to generate electricity from the coal plants it was clear that it was more expensive than building new renewable facilities and the foundation which for some reason wants to remain nameless was like that's great do more of that we'd like to do 10 or 15 more utilities but we had scraped all that data by hand from PDFs and from crappy spreadsheets and we're like oh there's no way we are not doing that by hand we'd rather just do it generally for all of the data for all of the uses that anybody might want to you know use this for and it seemed like at the time in a kind of brazen act of hubris that that would be about the same amount of work so the nonprofit that we were working for they're like that doesn't that's not grass rootsy enough it seems kind of arcane we're not really into that but there was a $70,000 grant on the table to do it and we're like well we would like to do that so we're gonna spin off our own little thing that's called catalyst to do this work on our own and so that was our first kind of foray into trying to rectify all this horrible data and what's my time I didn't start the timer okay great great so yeah so we're really a pile of activists that have you know self familiarizer with the policy universe and also with the data universe and the tools that are necessary to work with the data and so now I want to talk a little bit about what is the data you know where does it come from what's inside there why is it maybe interesting and something that people should be paying attention to and playing with so most of the data we work with comes from the federal government from these different agencies and this is like scattered all across the the huge government bureaucracy you've got the Department of Interior which controls both EPA and Bureau of Reclamation which does a lot of hydro projects PHMSA which probably nobody's heard part heard of is the pipelines and houses material safety administration part of the Department of Transportation EIA and FERC the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission those are both part of the Department of Energy we've got the Department of Labor with the Mining Safety and Health Administration and the Castle in the corner is the Army Corps of Engineers Department of War I mean defense and you know together these agencies have mandates legal mandates typically to publish vast quantities of data and you know they do that but often the mandates are not specific enough to really make sure that the data comes out in a way that anybody wants to use it or is able to use it and that's very frustrating but a really nice thing about this is it's all public domain anything that comes from the federal government you can just do whatever you want with it's it's yours yours to play with if you can get it out of the box there are other big sources of data to this is a map of the ISOs and RTOs which are the independent system operators and regional transmission operators or regional transmission organizations these are the people the organizations that run the grid in the the colored areas here and typically they operate in places with competitive markets where you know at least in theory the people that are generating electricity are competing with each other to do that cheaply and efficiently the the Bayes areas are a mix of kind of traditional monopolies where you have as in Colorado where we started doing this work somebody with a government mandate to provide electricity and basically a guaranteed rate of return and there are all kinds of interesting problems that come along with that model or public power agencies like in the Pacific Northwest the Bonneville power authority and in the Tennessee you've got the Tennessee Valley authority and these kind of almost depression era large public power associations that are truly public entities so their data is often quite clean and very accessible but the ISOs are not gov they're kind of quasi governmental they don't really land in the public sector so they have they're all have their own licensing requirements it can be very challenging to get them to agree to let you kind of officially do stuff with their data but it's all it's all available it's online it's there via API's and it's terabytes of information so you know these people publish every five minutes the prices and a bunch of other interesting attributes about electricity at about 13,000 different locations across the US so that piles up very very quickly and also gives a kind of an insanely detailed picture of what is going on with the electricity system day in day out every five minutes how much does it cost how much is it going to cost tomorrow how much does it cost how much is it going to cost tomorrow who's producing what kind of power they producing where's it coming from where's their congestion all that kind of stuff and I wanted to just note like a little bit about the data sets that these folks produce so EIA is kind of a creature of the Carter administration and does a pretty good job it loves Excel spreadsheets almost everything is in Excel spreadsheet and they change format every year every year has a different Excel spreadsheet format and they have like 15 tabs and no NA values and like all of the wonderful fun things that I'm sure everybody in the room has dealt with at some point but they're they're the good kid so FERC FERC is especially FERC form one is just it's an archaic dbf file format so it's a binary database format that is undocumented you know they don't give you a schema for like what the database looks like what the name of the columns are we wrote a scraper that greps the binary files for strings so that you can you know then associate the the names of the columns with the data that's in them but it works and we actually had somebody we're working with who had been nominated by Obama to be the chair of FERC who was like oh my god you have the FERC form one data I've always wanted to access it you know so the potential chair of FERC who is a former regulator in Colorado couldn't access the FERC form one data so you know that's ridiculous on on the one hand but on the other hand like once you break that out you're the only one that has it at least in the civic sphere and people are very very excited to get access to it finally eia gives a lot of information this is a lot of financial information eia has a lot of financial information also some operational information you know about coal plants or you know all kinds of power plants where do they get their fuel from how much cost how much electricity did they generate that kind of stuff the PEMSA data is the stuff that we're interested in is about natural gas pipelines they you know every every year they get a report from all the natural gas utilities about where are the pipelines how long are the pipelines what are they made of how old are they so you can you can you know guess at when the pipelines will need to be replaced and if you don't want to replace them because that's a you know climate changing piece of infrastructure you know what your kind of timeline on that is the Bureau of RAC and the Army Corps are all about hydro from our point of view and then EMSHA has data on mine production and safety stuff so that's interesting and a bunch of different characters and there's also there's a lot of economic information in here about what communities will be impacted by changes in the energy systems like people that depend on mining that depend on power plants for the tax revenue for their county and it's like 90 percent of the property tax revenue for the county and they will implode when you shut down the coal plant which is important from a political point of view and also kind of a human decency point of view oh and just the the scale of this like all together there are there are billions of records you know maybe it's 10 billion maybe it's it's probably on the order of 10 billion records between all of this and several terabytes of data between all of it so it's not I don't know if it's really big data it's kind of medium-sized data it's definitely annoying to work with on a laptop and once we kind of integrated the first 100 gigabyte data set we're like this is not going to be a laptop thing anymore what do we do and had to start exploring out of memory computation and other things that we really still don't have any idea about or you know if you don't want to deal with all of that you know difficult tedious data munging you can go to s and p global which will you know for $20,000 a year give you a subscription to a terminal that has most of that data and they've done cleanup and they've interpolated and filled in blank values and it's you know relatively easy to use but aimed at kind of a wall street market so it's not even necessarily the right thing for advocates to use or policymakers to you and also it's totally opaque like they don't give you any information about how they clean the data or what their model was for interpolating or filling in those na values so you know and and they have a very traditional platform monopoly business model and every time a new small startup is founded to kind of do the same thing they buy them and they've been very successful in the North American market at just pretty much completely controlling access to this information boom okay so what what can we do with this data if it's available and usable in the public interest what kinds of things are possible so does anybody recognize this dam probably not if this is a local project so this is the lower snake river so it's I don't know if it's in this state or but you know it's it's flowing into the Colombia and you know several years ago there were people being like you know do we really need these dams we'd like to restore the salmon run maybe some of them should be removed and the utility was like no no no no you can't remove the dam we need the dams the dams are very important and they produce three gigawatts of power you know and to replace that with another carbon tree power source would be very expensive you wouldn't want to do that and typically in a utility commission they'd be like well I guess we can't replace the dams or take them out it's too bad but Northwest what's it called Northwest Energy Coalition actually had data from the Bonneville power authority in this case and they they could see the generation that the dam had put out for you know a decade or more and they and it was clear that this was a bluff on the part of the utility which is a public entity so it's I'm not totally sure what the incentives are there that make them want to keep the dams in place but the dam on average over the course of the year only generates about one gigawatt of power and you know in reality when when the Northwest needs the power when the power is is demand is high and supply is low because there's so much hydro up here it's only generating 500 megawatts so you know a factor of a factor of six different really functionally from what the utility was saying and you know so this kicked off a whole like new environmental impact statement process just and like how many bytes are there in the data that they they use to to make that case you know for not maintaining infrastructure that costs a quarter of a billion dollars year just to maintain and instead to explore you know other zero carbon opportunities in the Pacific Northwest you know it was a you know a megabyte or a couple of megabytes of data that they happen to have access to because it was published as a CSV file by a public agency that cares about data. Another example so this is the thing that we started working on okay five minutes which is you know looking at the economics of coal plants in Colorado in 2013 we realized you know based on data that the utility had submitted that the coal plants were no longer economic so at that point we didn't have to argue with the utility we could just be like hey look the thing that you already submitted says the more renewable energy you add the cheaper the electricity gets so that was a relatively easy case to make we still didn't win but it did inspire people to get involved in like trying to more quantitatively make these cases and change the utility's mind and finally you know six years later just last Friday the Colorado legislature finally passed a bill that will allow these coal plants to be refinanced and shut down you know very early and also some very aggressive climate goals and we've been kind of providing data to the people doing the analysis behind this for for like five years so it's very gratifying to finally finally see something work out politically. This is complicated I'm gonna skip it another another kind of project that we're kind of interested in doing going forward is the EPA data says how much power every power plant produced every hour for the last 20 years so you can look at and this is a graph of a particular power plant put together by Joe Daniels and the blue is profitable the red is not so profitable the yellow is startup and shutdown costs and you can see like they're operating in the profitable regime and then occasionally not but that's because they have these these startup and shutdown costs but if you were to put a renewable energy source in the same location on the grid the generated power at zero marginal cost so like every additional kilowatt hour is free because that's where your renewables typically work and you you made it compete with these power plants when they would be profitable maybe you could force them offline purely economically by strategically locating renewables nearby and that's that's interesting because then opens up transmission capacity which is a limiting factor for for many you know places now as renewables get get cheaper and cheaper it's not cost it's like well what do we connect it to so you know that there's there's these terabytes of data we're trying to break them out and put them into the you know real functional public domain and even if we we're successful at that which you know hopefully we will be over time this problem isn't going away like it's only going to get more complicated because the the amount of data that's necessary to run the electricity system is growing exponentially because you have people installing batteries because you have electric vehicles charging you have dispatchable demand for electricity where the utility can be like no no no don't consume now okay now consume and instead of having a few thousand entities nationwide that are trading electricity and and putting it onto the grid you might have with a few million or even you know if it's at the device level a billion devices in the u.s. that are interacting with the power system and the markets that have been constructed to serve the power system and you know that that's going to be truly truly large data and they're starting to roll out kind of trials of this kind of stuff so there's a group at Berkeley that's been deploying sensors that take two measurements or 120 measurements every second so twice the frequency of the kind of ac circuits and they can do things like when i'm sure you're all aware of the fires in california due to a p-genius some other power line failures the system can sense that there is a broken wire and before the wire has hit the ground it can de-energize the line and it can it knows that it's broken and it can you know prevent that fire from starting because it's you know at 120 hertz it's checking in on the system and yeah that's a huge huge amount of data and you know people are working on how to visualize that and the markets that are built around this are you know they're going to be another opportunity for a different kind of electricity monopoly a different kind of platform monopoly if we don't really do a much better job at understanding what data should be public how it should be publicized and and how people can work and should be working with it so we're hopeful that this this project will lead into you know kind of a deeper discussion about the future of energy data electricity data and how we can avoid that kind of captive environment in the future and i'm out of time so i'm going to skip these kind of pipeline questions this is our original pipeline mess pandas postgres uh jupiter but it turns out everybody just wants to download a csv advanced and beginning users so eventually we went to mess pandas um now we're starting to implement data packages instead and then like okay whatever you want um okay 30 seconds and thank you to all of the organizations that have supported us in the past


Welcome to the Grassland Curing Network. This presentation has been developed to assist you to make accurate grassland curing assessments. In southeastern Australia, native, crop and pasture grasses have an annual cycle where they germinate, grow, produce flowers and seeds, then either die or become dormant. The degree of curing represents the proportion of dead material in the grassland fuel. The amount of dead material can produce a very flammable environment and the degree of curing can have a significant effect on the fire danger of a region. It is important that fire management agencies have access to timely and accurate curing assessments so they can better understand the fire danger. This graph shows the three basic stages of grassland curing in the field. From 0 to 30% cured the grass is basically green and we call this the green phase. From 40 to 60% cured the grass is mostly yellow. We call this the yellow phase and from 70 to 100% cured the grass is yellow and very dry. We call this the dry phase. Let's look at the green phase. This is when the grass is between 0 and 30% cured. Here is an example of grass at 0%. As you can see the grass is all green and there are no seed heads at all. This is grass at 30% cured with some yellow showing and well-developed seed heads which are starting to drop seed. How do we pick grass at 10% and 20% cured? Here is rye grass at about 10%. As you can see the grass is basically green and the seed heads are developed. 20% cured is where the seed heads are maturing and opening. Usually at 20% there is very little yellow in the grass. Here are some photos of grasslands at 0%, 10%, 20% and 30% cured. Now let's look at the yellow phase. This is when the curing is between 40% and 60%. Here is an example of 40% cured where the yellowing is well underway. Here is an example of grass at 60% cured. As you can see half the stems have lost some of their seed. Grass at 50% cured is about half yellow, half green and is continuing to drop seed. Here are some images of fields with grass at 40%, 50% and 60% cured. Let's now look at the dry phase. This is when the grass is between 70% and 100% cured. When curing reaches this stage the drying out of the grass increases rapidly and is almost completely cured within weeks. This grass is at 70% cured. It is nearly all yellow and has dropped almost all of its seed. This is grass at almost 100% cured. As you can see it is very very dry and breaks very very easily. Now let's look at how we determine grass at 80% and 90% cured. Grass at 80% has finished shedding all its seed. There may be some green present in patches in the field or on the bottom third of the stalks. Grass at 90% has finished dropping seed and is usually either completely dry or has the odd individual green stalk. It is not fragile like grass at 100%. Here are some photos of grasslands from 70% to 100% cured. Knowledge of the grass life cycle and the curing process is important when estimating fire danger in a region. Serious grass fires are prone to occur after a good spring rain season when pastures dry quickly and are fully cured by early summer.


Now stakeholders in the educational sector have urged governments at all levels to invest greatly in education or educational institutions that run tuition-free schools as part of efforts towards reducing the increase in the number of out-of-school children. Leadership coach and pastor of the Victory Life Bible Church for La Ajudume said this during an interview with Newsman in the Belkut-Adiagon State Capitol. She said the role of government is to cater to every citizen and as such they must see to the welfare of the needy and less privileged in the society. Now the visionary of the government approved academy Angela to Lulukbe loaded the contributions of parents, teachers and other stakeholders for their efforts thus far. Government can do more. Whatever they are doing, they can do more. They can do more to help the needy, to help the less privileged outside there. They can do more. Whatever they are doing before, they can do more because governance is about making people happy. And if there is somebody out there that is not eating, somebody out there that cannot go to school, let's make room. Anyhow we can do it, let's do it. And then another thing they can do is to support people like this because the government cannot give the education that everybody needs. And that's why we have the government schools, we have the private schools because they know. And we bring them to school at no cost. Free uniform, free educational materials, sometimes free lunch as God is helping us. And we have been doing this by God's grace for the past five years. Today is our five years anniversary that we've been running to Shon Free School, a sort after creative academy. And we are really, really happy. We are happy with what we are doing. Though we have our challenges, we have our tough times. You know, in times of financing, in times of getting support from people, it has been really, really challenging. It doesn't be easy to be very, very sincere. We use this opportunity to reach out to you. If there is anything, any way you can help us, you can support us, we would really, really, really appreciate it because we have so many children and we still really desire to reach out to, to get this across to.


Okay, so let's do this problem. There was What's a question that somebody brought to me one of you all brought to me, so Let's do this before the quiz today. So this one says Ethyl chloride C2H5Cl is used as a local anesthetic It works by cooling tissues as it evaporates the heat of vaporization is 26.4 kilojoules per mole how much heat could be removed by 10 grams of ethyl chloride, okay? So we have ethyl chloride. This is all the information from the problem, right? So the mass of ethyl chloride the molecular formula and the heat of vaporization, okay? So remember chemistry, right? We just want to cancel out our units to get the units that we wanted, right? And it said How much heat can be removed, right? If I remember the exact wording correctly, so that's energy, right? So we'll just say Delta H, okay, so that's what we're looking for But we have grams and we have kilojoules per mole and remember energy That's kilojoules that unit, right? So we could if we can get that unit isolated then that means we've got the energy Okay, that we need it so In order to isolate that kilojoules we have to get rid of moles, right? But we have grams. Is there anything that we know that converts grams to moles? Yeah, what was it? The molar mass, right? Everybody's freaked out with the video on It's alright The molar mass you're absolutely right, right? How do we calculate the molar mass? We have the molecular formula, right? What will we do? Yeah, they have look at the periodic table, right? Okay, so carbon is what? So the molar mass of C2H5Cl Carbon, there's two of them, right? And we've got 12.00 grams per mole Plus hydrogen, there's five of them 1.008 grams per mole And then 40 is What? 35 40 Help me out. 45 grams per mole, okay? So has anybody added that up yet? 64.49 64.51 51 is what I think, okay? So we'll do five, we'll do five ones since that's the way I calculated it on my paper, okay? Okay, so everybody's cool with us doing this part, right? So hopefully now you can see, well, we've got something that converts grams to moles, right? And we want to get rid of moles here, so we're really set, okay? So let's just do it one step at a time so we don't get, you know, two Confused about what we're doing. So let's do a number of moles of Ethyl chloride first Okay, so we know how many grams we've got And we want to cancel out grams and get moles, right? So we're going to put the grams on the bottom, right? Is everybody okay with that? So 64.51 grams and one mole on the top Cancel, cancel And has anybody done that? Yeah Anybody got it? Is that what you got? Wonderful, wonderful, okay And then, right, so what are we looking for? Delta H, right? We've got something that converts moles to kilojoules, right? And we've got mole. Does everybody Understand what we're going with this? So let's just erase our question mark because it's no longer a question mark But our 0.155 moles of Ethyl chloride up there and then multiply it by our Ratio here that says for every one mole Of Ethyl chloride it gives Or it's able to take away I guess in this problem 26.4 kilojoules of energy Okay So hopefully everybody can see canceling out moles, moles, okay, and that's going to give us And it's a three-sink figs 4.09 So it's going to remove 4.09 kilojoules of energy Everybody okay with doing something like that? So remember it's just canceling out units, so don't get overwhelmed when you see kind of a scarier problem like this, okay? Questions before we kill it


T.F.N.N. Headline news update. Folks, we have the Dow Industrial's down 100, Nasdaq up 29, S&P flat. That being said, they all hit new all-time highs once again today, folks. Goal, goal contract up $1.50, trading at $14.73. They get the silver contract up $0.11, $17.11, announced light sweet crude. That's getting hit now. It's down to $1.85, $0.55, $0.20 a barrel. Let's get over and we take a look at this contract. Oil and general folks, bottom line. We have lots of energy out here. This thing is having a hard time at all times, holding the $58 to $60 price point. This is a monster move lower out here today. You got 768,000 contracts. That's saying that oil's gonna go much right back down into this $50 area, which is the last three swing points going all the way back to June 5th. June 5th, we're at $50.84. On August 7th, you're at $50.33. And on October 3rd, you're at $50.89. That baby, I suspect, is gonna be slamming down into that area. Notes and bonds, bottom line still want higher price, lower yield. Pretty amazingly, he had all-time highs and the note and bond market just won't back off. Now, you have light volume out here today. Inside the 10 as well as the 30, bottom line, we're at, what, three ticks in the 10? We're at $129.14. We'll see if it can be price spread out here tomorrow with volume. The 30 year, we take a look at the 30. 30 is the same type of setup, meaning that you have light volume, you are going higher, you're at 180,000 contracts. Most times when you see the note and bond market that is coming higher like this, folks, you wanna see about 1.8 million contracts inside the 10 year and a price of $350,000 in the 30 year. King dollar, King dollar, bottom line is just still a building cause to get to the lower end of its consolidation.  We've been down the last three days. We're at 97, 857, I expect 97107. That's what it looks like the next move coming down into that area. Bottom line, NASDAQ, NDX100, S&Ps, Dow Industries all hit new all-time highs. We'll see how this shakes out coming into the close. Bottom line, no volume up in these levels. We hadn't had volume for quite some time though. Stay right there, folks. Coming back in the next 60 minutes of trading.


When the new owners took over Seppelt's Field, they were interested in reconnecting with the artisan roots of the village. When the Seppelt's lived in the early days, they were very self-reliant so people made things on premises and so a lot of specialised artisan activities were on site in the early days and that connection to history was something that the new owners were interested in pursuing. Art and culture I think probably goes with wine. A little bit like food has always gone with wine so for us it's about creating an atmosphere at Seppelt's Field that's more than just wine so wine, food and art is now what we're offering at Seppelt's Field. One of the important things about the Jam Factory at Seppelt's Field was the idea of this cultural tourism opportunity and one of the things we have at Jam Factory in the city is the opportunity for people to see glass blowers working live or other artisans. We wanted to replicate that out here but have a kind of particular flavour, those artisans who are creating things that might resonate well in a kind of regional setting like the Barossa. We have a range of artisans in studios, we have a knife maker, we have a leather worker, a hat maker, we have a potter and we have a glass artist and for the public to be able to kind of engage directly with these people in their studios is quite an unusual experience and I think part of the rich layers of experience here at Seppelt's Field. All of the artists that work here in the Jam Factory are local artists so they've been working at their craft for many years generally in smaller unknown places and now they've actually got one place to come. The really nice things about Seppelt's Field is the kind of surprise and delight at encountering things you didn't expect so you know a restaurant that is truly world-class, artisans who are producing objects on commission for people all over the world, exhibitions that have come here to our gallery that are as good as you would see in any public gallery in any other part of the world.


'll see that there's there's a fair bit of variety still in it but but to put our dollars behind maintaining infrastructure that we have um and that is simply an acknowledgement that while there are a number of exciting projects in the cip a number of projects that expand our offerings uh that we also have a number of maintenance needs uh in our core infrastructure we have some replacements that are necessary in both equipment and infrastructure and so we took that as a as a guiding principle in developing this year's cip given some of the uncertainty about future funding i think we are optimistic that that there will be a recovery i think the timeline of that is still a bit unknown but so that in this shortened fiscal year for the cip that focusing those resources where they maintain infrastructure that we know has needs was going to be our main priority thanks dim thank you bow uh next slide please so so what you see here are the uh the projects that we're recommending that council appropriate funds for in the current fiscal year um the the projects that you see there in bold are projects that were not previously in the the 10-year cip plan that that were identified this year and i'll draw your attention to to a couple of them that might be confusing uh or or so you can get some more clarity there there's a couple projects number nine 18 and 19 that that talk about cost overruns um those are previously appropriated projects where we just need to appropriate some additional funds to uh to close them out the last two are our ncdot projects where uh it's we don't have a lot of clarity as to what their ultimate bill to us is going to be uh number nine there is um is some funds that we might not need all of but to finish up the hernan park work um my intent wasn't to go through uh each of these projects but i believe with with the people that are on the call or or bo fergusson if you have questions about any of these specific projects we could answer them um but before i do that the other project i want to notice here it isn't so much a cip project but it's uh four million dollars of funding for street paving uh in the cip um so normally when we talk about street paving we're talking about that coming from the general fund and you know a call in the conversation about the general fund operating budget that that was adopted for fiscal year 21 we weren't able to recommend using four million dollars worth of fund balance from the general fund to fully fund the the ten million dollar paving request as we work through the cip and what resources we have we were able to identify four million dollars of funding from the cip to augment what's coming from the general fund to get that total paving budget back up to the ten million dollar original plan uh from from public works um any questions on on anything you see on on this page just one on seven i'm not familiar with the river parks playground is that a new one they uh i can uh answer that bo if you need me to yeah let's go ahead tom thank you and uh tom dawson assistant director for Durham parks and recreation uh there are uh two um they were existing uh playgrounds along the along the eno river um river park river forest park and old farm park um these playgrounds were essentially washed away by the eno river instead of throwing good money out of after bad uh to replace them in situ we work with public works to identify locations that public works purchased expand the park and we'll be placing these playgrounds out of the floodway uh while we were there since there was a dearth of uh playgrounds um in the north part of town we identified a location at west point on the eno these are eligible for impact fee funding because they're technically new locations uh so we'll be um and we we've already met with the community in river forest park and old farm park to discuss uh the essentially renovation of these parks they'll look very different by the time we uh we get through with them so we're very excited about this project and i think it'll be a way to work with the river and highlight the uh the recreational assets there thank you all right next slide go in the wrong way thank you um so in in addition to the projects specifically that need appropriation in 21 um these are some additional projects that have been added to the 10-year plan um while not in fiscal year 21 they weren't previously in the plan that that you saw um when uh when john and i spoke with you at at the retreat back in february so these are some some additional projects that have been added to the plan uh since that time next slide so this is where we have i would normally uh hand you the giant ledger size piece of paper um diana and i are going to try to do a dance here to um see if we can get this giant sheet somehow up on the screen but i think you all have it in your your packets and i believe diana might have emailed it to you all um as we try to virtually look at a giant listing of all the projects that are currently in the 10-year plan um uh first of all mr mary you won't be able to tie this list to the other slide that you saw because this list is presented in a different format in that the the list on the big sheet i'll just we'll just call it the big sheet so you know what i'm talking about is based on when dollars will be spent as opposed to the other page that you saw which is which dollars need to be appropriated in fiscal year 21 um the spending gives you a better idea of when the projects might actually get delivered um and this shows you the whole 10-year planning horizon and uh here we go and the the colors on here are significant and i'll i'll tell you what that means so if the if the if the dollar amount is in gray that means it's a project that you have already appropriated and it's either underway or about to be underway and it's already council has already taken action to approve and move forward with the project and those dollars are are laid out in the years that we expect them to be spent if it's yellow that means it's a project that was previously appropriated and in addition we're recommending that we add additional dollars in fiscal year 21 so this would be previous appropriations plus some of the money that was on the previous slide um the green projects are brand new projects i'm sorry say that one more time i'm sorry yellow is old projects that we're adding new money to okay now so like the very first one there um accessible pedestrian signal improvements i believe there were six hundred thousand dollars worth of um of monies that were previously appropriated and we're appropriating an additional six hundred eighteen thousand dollars this year okay got you thank you old money and new money um the green art is brand new money brand and if there's no color those are projects that are planned for the future um that that could change so so that significance of the colors okay um so if you look at that at the very the last page there if you could go down two pages diana um so in total we've got like 135 projects that are in the 10-year plan and and what we would expect then if this uh is exactly what happened in fiscal year 21 we would spend you know just short of 77 million dollars on on capital projects in fiscal year 21 um and then what we do is each year we add the 10th year onto this and um and as you can see the dollars get smaller and smaller as you kind of get out there because as you might expect you know departments are more able to see the stuff that's that's more uh current and in front of you than perhaps what we might need in in future fiscal years questions on any of the specific projects that are on the list or or that the the timing of any of the projects that are on there it's a lot a lot to do yet yeah is uh i'll start um the i'll just i i'm the the just what i said earlier about the the sidewalks and you know we go out um i'm looking on mine i'm in a hard time reading the one on your screen because it's little and um this one's a little too but you know we go out um um maybe three years with sidewalk projects number 85 say again number 85 on the list is new sidewalks yeah thank you let me find that yeah we go out through 2023 uh i just want to flag that i don't have any particular thing other than what i said earlier which is i think we need some some guidance from our staff as to how to continue to fund these critical needs which we know are a high priority from us for our city offer with sidewalks that some of that has to do with the the kind of the first batch that we brought to council several years ago coming out of the Durham walks plan we have uh kind of generally agreed amongst those of us who helped pull the cip together that there will be a need and we will need to find funding for additional sidewalk construction but uh given some of the transition that that you just received the presentation of in terms of transportation priorities um we couldn't reflect those in the cip this year uh so i i feel comfortable advising that that there will be more conversations now there there may need to be trade-offs i can't that that's not you know a promise of instant new money and resources uh but the this plan probably does not accurately reflect that we will we will you know anticipate spending more resources on sidewalks in in in this plan beyond what's shown uh what's in front of you that's super helpful thank you so much i really appreciate that the um the new trails i'll also just mention the the funding is in the out years um and um we've got the uh the belt line though is or where is let's see if we can find that duke belt line yeah that's earlier and then the other trails aren't until i think our line 80 something also 86 or something um they're pretty far out and just want to say that i hope we can move those up um i know that there's there's more than just when the money is available there was there's where the planning went you know the planning for each of them is hard and uh sometimes there's you know federal money we need to get and those kinds of things but i'm really hopeful that we can move our our trails up up sooner um had the duke park to the end previously been on i was glad to see that yes i believe we added it either last year or the year before uh and uh it was added in the tenth year and then that is generally what we do with projects that are coming in uh from the staff or from the community where we really haven't gotten a lot of council discussion we put things in the tenth year and we move them up a year each year but it gets them in the plan and makes them available for discussions uh and feedback in sessions like these so that we can uh find out if they're appropriately placed or if they need to be slid forward or backward great so i think the plan looks good i agree with you uh but what you said about our priorities for this year and um with the the uh acceptors of the concerns i expressed about sidewalks and appreciate your comments on those and trails i'm i think we're you know in in good shape thank you colleagues any comments or questions for mr boy um diana if you could switch switch back to the presentation um a couple other things to cover um and council member freeline i'm not sure if you're a fan of spreadsheets but um the mayor and the mayor put him would be disappointed if i didn't do a presentation with a spreadsheet on with a bunch of numbers they would think that perhaps the finance director's not doing his job so once diana gets up gets the the presentation back up um what i might have a quick question while we're waiting for that to come up i was trying to get your attention you're sure you can thank you um david first of all thanks the cip looks uh good um kit item 108 sidewalk repair has current numbers current a current allocation for the current fiscal year of about seven and a half million dollars is that is do we expect to be able to deploy seven and a half million dollars worth of sidewalk repairs in the current year that seemed like a lot it's it's some previously appropriated dollars and some new dollars but i'll let that bow and perhaps someone from public works comment on that uh they've pretty much covered it um there are a number of contracts that have been prepared throughout fiscal year 20 that did not get out the door uh with some substantial funding in them those uh those contracts carried forward as did the money but there are a number of contracts that i think are going out now uh there's always a little bit of carryover so i won't commit public works to spending all of this but public work has expressed a great deal of confidence that they intend to spend almost all of that this year but now that you mentioned that i remember the string of sidewalk repair contracts we approved not no it seems like about 10 years ago now but it was not that long ago uh so that makes a lot of sense thank you mr mayor uh this is this is a picture of the current funding model for for what you saw on on the big sheet and just to remind folks that that we use a combination of cash funded and debt funded um dollars to pay for the the capital plan based on the the revenue that's generated from from 11 cents on on the tax rate and um just to remind you the the current funding model has us issuing for lack of a better word a line of credit for for a couple of years where we can borrow the money as we need it um and pay interest only followed by a longer term take out fixed rate financing to uh to refinance that and because much of the capital plan is is based on borrowing money we have a much longer planning horizon than you would see say in the general fund and that's why we look at this on a 10-year basis and the bottom line is is that the bottom line has to have a number bigger than zero in every year to show that this plan will work um so so what we did during the time that that we um in this delay in bringing this to you is was maximize the amount of clap capital we could get into the plan after um taking out the the money for the covid relief fund and trying to to fund that full paving ask um is we've got the plan balanced and maximized up through 2026 so that is to say that that we have um no real additional capacity between now and 2026 if we move forward with this plan and it and it rolls out with this set of assumptions now hopefully as bo kind of alluded to hopefully we've been conservative um in terms of how much we'll need to borrow how fast we'll need to borrow the interest rates that that we borrow and and we'll be able to to come back next year and show you that we've got a little bit more capacity um but i think this is is uh reasonably conservative but not overly conservative projections on where we are uh with with the 10-year plan next slide um just piggybacking off of off of what um ellen had um had mentioned in her presentation i didn't want to uh fail to highlight for you the the projects the new projects that that you'll need to appropriate that are 100 funded with county transit tax dollars that will that are not included in the in the big sheet that you saw because they have a completely separate funding source and these are all transit tax funding projects that that we will need appropriation from the council from that were previously approved in the the county transit plan that that will need you to appropriate so that transportation and public works can move forward with with executing on on these projects um and then um finally what's next um i believe in your your uh next council cycle um the actual ordinance to appropriate the dollars for these projects will come forward um so it'll be the projects we talked about today some cleanup housekeeping stuff um we are going to continue monitoring when we spend money to to optimize when we need to borrow money um again that's one of those variables that that affects our capacity and then also we're looking at the current interest rate environment to see uh whether or not we can do any refinancing um in fact in your upcoming cycle you'll you'll see a refunding opportunity that that should help uh perhaps our parking and ballpark funds um based on that the current interest rate environment um any other questions that's all i have colleagues any questions for mr boyd well uh it's it was an opportunity for myself and the mayor pro tem to break out a glass of champagne as we always do as we review the uh cip uh and uh great report councilmember reese i just wanted to take a minute to thank you david and your staff um being able to get that full a paving amount back in cip i don't know how that worked but i'm really glad it did so thanks a lot that's that's a big deal um and so uh thank you for all your hard work thank you thank you for mentioning that first priority for our for our residents in every year's survey and so it's good to see we're funding it and congratulations on being the runner-up and the best-looking presenter i'm your first loser today thank you david great to see you thanks all right um colleagues we're now at the uh we really have had some marvelous presentations today we're now at the uh that we're going to take up the mayor pro tem's resolution which he had uh talked to us about at the previous work session and then email to us um if you know what possibility would be to put it in the chat just in case everyone hasn't had a chance to see it do you want to do that sure and um diana said she could also try to screen share it okay either one would be good just so i know everybody's received it but just so we're we're all looking at it would be sure and i have a couple of other things to mention too yeah uh the floor is yours thank you so much um and thanks everyone for giving me a few minutes at the end of this very long meeting um to talk about some of the recommend moving forward with some of the recommendations from our race equity task force um so there are about 50 recommendations and a number of them are i believe actionable in a fairly short term and the administration has also already started moving forward on a few recommendations and um wanda's uh got some updates on that but we might want to save those for later given the given the hour um but there are a few so of the of the list of recommendations there were 12 that i picked out that i thought could be moved forward by council at a fairly quick pace and the first of these the first four recommendations that i'm proposing that we respond to in the form of a resolution to our federal leaders are um items specifically relating to from the economic inequality the the wealth and economy committee of the task force which dealt specifically with things like the wealth gap um and made recommendations around how to increase the equity of wealth of white people and black indigenous and other people of color in the us given the status of our current federal government um i felt that the best way to move this forward now would be and a resolution and a commitment to future advocacy give depending on how how things go i think that you know there there's very i think that all of our race equity task force members would agree there's very little chance of these initiatives being acted on um by the current administration however there are some opportunities in the future um at the federal level that you know might that might provide opportunities for for some of these programs to be more um more realistically considered and that at that point we could engage in further advocacy so this is a resolution responding to for um recommendations from the wealth and economy task force which is that we advocate for reparations universal basic income a federal jobs guarantee and um increase to the federal minimum wage um there are also some recommendations some other ones that i think we could probably move forward pretty quickly that i'm looking for feedback on how to do that so there are two pieces two recommendations about state level advocacy advocating at the state level for decriminalization of cannabis and advocating at the state level for subpoena power for civilian review boards my proposal for those two is that we um talk about them when it comes time for our legislative agenda and have them as part of our conversation with our um with our state delegation because we obviously have a much closer relationship and more access um to our state delegation than we do to our federal folks and more opportunity to kind of you know to to have a back and forth in a conversation with them at that point so that's my proposal for what to do with those two rather than a similar thing like this just a resolution i think we could do a deeper a deeper dive on advocacy for those at the state level um a third kind of chunk of recommendations that i think we could move forward with pretty quickly are three commissions or boards that the race equity task force recommended that we create and as i have mentioned to a couple of people i think it would make steve cry if i proposed to create three additional boards and commissions so i'm so instead i am proposing um some subcommittees so so one new commission which would be a permanent race equity commission to replace the task force which we have all agreed is something that we want um but the other two that were proposed are a history and story gathering commission and a cemetery advisory board and i feel like the history and story gathering commission could be a subcommittee of maybe the cultural affairs board or the human relations commission we'd have to obviously go and you know talk to those folks about whether this is a piece of work that they're interested in taking on but i feel like those two are the kind of the first two that i think of around history and story gathering and then the cemetery advisory board i think could potentially be part of open space and trails um so that's kind of what i'm thinking on those would love would love for some feedback or thoughts and then finally there are three recommendations asking the city to either apologize for or acknowledge the harm done to black communities by past decision making by the city um and those that's in three areas the neglecting of gear cemetery the um building of highway 147 and the city's um implementation of redlining housing and racial covenants urban renewal and um and neglecting black communities more broadly i feel like in order to in order to write acknowledgments or apologies that would that would be meaningful and would like encompass the scope of the history that it would be helpful for us to bring in some Durham historians and experts um and like long-term residents in our black communities who have more of a sense of the history and could give us um could give us advice on how to specifically like word and phrase those things in a way that they're not just like i don't want them to just be lip service i want it to be like meaningful and informed by informed by people's real experiences of these of these situations so my proposal for that is that we reach out to some of the folks um who we have worked with before on historical issues yeah um and Thomas suggesting eddie davis who'd be perfect the folks on our um confederate monuments and um commission like to reach out to those folks and try to get some ideas around language and what might be a a way to move those recommendations forward in a meaningful way so that's a lot of proposals love to hear thoughts and feedback and whether people specifically about this one resolution um whether people want any changes or feel good about it as written so thanks and thank you for the suggestions for people that was an awesome report i think we should take them one by one um so let's start with the resolution any anyone have anything to offer about the resolution any changes anyone would like uh any any uh any thoughts about it that anyone would like to offer i thought it was very good i certainly support it and agree that given the the federal nature of it it's an appropriate approach thank you i'm happy to move it on to our next council agenda but want to make sure if there's anyone that has any any other comments before we do that council member middleton no i think it's a brilliant piece of work and i think it's spot on i think it clearly reflects the all of the kind of touchstone issues um that that kind of encapsulated justice movement i mean i you know i've said it in other contexts i do uh plan on asking us to consider um municipal experiment at some point uh with ubi funded by private money um as well as perhaps some some public money as well if we can legally do that but so cheers i think it's i think it's spot on thank you thank you council member caballero i welcome back yeah i'd like to know i was gone for about three hours went to a whole other training and came back i just want everyone to know that okay um you you owe us i'll be listening later um i just wanted to say i appreciate this resolution i think it's great i also appreciated the spreadsheet that mayor pro tem shared up probably about two weeks ago that helped kind of categorize the buckets the the report was amazing and it was really helpful to kind of see a path forward of how we do this work um so just really appreciate her leadership on this i i feel really great about passing this on the fifth i really appreciate the idea of bringing in our local historians and storytellers to help us craft um you know really appropriate language that that speaks to the suffering that our folks in our community especially our black folks have felt um many from many many many decades so thank you let me some spreadsheets council member freeman thank you i also want to echo uh council members comments and saying i appreciate the work that mayor pro tem has done around spelling us out and moving some of this forward i i do want to acknowledge i know that the staff is working on bringing us some report on the things that are moving forward i look forward to seeing that i i just have one angst one one question about the language around the $15 an hour i just want to make sure that it's clear that if we were pushing for 22 it'd be perfect and i understand we're not right now but um just some language to a to kind of expound on um why it says $15 an hour and acknowledging that and this climate you know for folks to be able to come off of you know medicare or or um any housing assistance that it would need to be 22 so i don't know how to do that real quickly but just something that does say that the reason in that is $15 is acknowledging that they can't live at minimum wage so that it spells it out a little bit more because i feel like even though we might not get that movement in the um senate right now it's possible that in january you know things could change so i just want to make sure that it's it's a little bit more robust yeah thanks for that feedback i can definitely add something about like you know a minimum a minimum wage sufficient to you know yeah so so even if you don't put $15 an hour that it actually spells out what it is so that they actually knew yeah yeah there's pending $15 an hour legislation which is why i use 15 but um yeah i mean i agree with you and in addition to however however it worked we're just making already out of date yeah yeah other than that i think it's it looks good i am excited about the the addition of this of the committees that will not make steve cry and um and look forward to supporting those forward i hate crying thank you i hate making you cry i like to make you cry steve i just want to do it today thank you so much council member all right mayor pro tem um you're going to do a little more drafting um sounds like is that correct yep i'll add that i'll add that change and um then send it to diana for my frozen agenda are you frozen you're not frozen can y'all hear me all right okay yeah i'll i'll add that and i'll send it to diana for the agenda super thank you very much thank you all right now let's let's move on to the second um the two other things that you brought up that would require state approval i thought your idea of moving that ahead through our legislative agenda process it was a good idea is everybody okay with that can i see thumbs i got a thumb up for that green is kind of frozen did i see thumbs yeah and we're gonna have charlie crying after all this legislative agenda okay so we're going that way thank you mr mayor it's it's i should say that there's been some initial talk about this a month some folk on on uh the league it'll all be in tears forever okay good i think that sounds good did i freeze steve now i think the mayor is frozen steve can you turn off your camera because we're losing yeah are we frozen he's frozen i think he's frozen yeah why don't everybody i thought everybody was frozen for a minute you're just waiting for something to happen we talk to hear you you may have gotten the boot he that was a challenge one time remember that challenge like the frozen challenge mm-hmm there's some really good videos on the harlow sneaky grand central station that yet we love all right he got all right now that's an improvement right there oh that's nice all right now i have to do something well i mean i feel like we shouldn't continue the conversation and still he gets back because the main point of the next little section is trying not to make him cry so yeah i think we're he was in agreement that you know that the subcommittee's format would work so we if we could all give thumbs on it yeah and you love the way it comes do y'all have a thought about whether history and story gathering would fit better in cab or in hrc i think hrc you're back you're back okay yeah no we're internet sometimes has has sad moments i think the history is more more hrc and the cab is the storytelling so i'm not sure if maybe there's a way to pull representate i'm all about pulling folks from one to the other so having the artist in the like human folks working together also they may also like each board may have a position on that so we both of them could be approached mm-hmm i have an idea on that which y'all may have already said which is that we have a master storyteller on our council who happens to be the liaison to both the uh hrc and the cab and so maybe we could ask councilmember freelon to maybe consult a little with the racial equity task force folks see what they had in mind and then try to bring together the right people to make this happen would you be willing to take that on i'm on it fabulous give them the microphone so we can bust like a bubble we're going to be doing this one on friday night dad that'll be a board that everyone applies to right that'll be the most popular board in the city um javier are you willing to check in with dust about cemetery advisory yeah absolutely great and then for the race equity commission should we just ask our city attorney to draft up some bylaws for that yes sounds good do we want to ask the current folks if they have any like suggestions too i'm like yeah there may be i don't think there is too detailed a description in the in the report um but we could maybe um kim if you're willing you could get and touch directly with um with karen and elaine to see if there's anything specific that they were imagining we will do that thank you so much all right that takes care of that thank you madam air pro tem efficiently done and i think we got a good plan and it's good to be moving some of these things thank you so much thank you and i'll go ahead and reach out to the historians on the on the public apology and acknowledgement um peace hey man before you've grown up i was just saying that um at the league level in cbmo uh a black elected municipal officials have um already floated um interest in pursuing a decriminalization of marijuana and um the subpoena power uh for the civilian review boards as well as the ability for uh you know the few body cam footage so there's definitely some on ramps that already exist at the league level um with those issues so be more than happy to do that whenever i have yeah that's super thank you everyone really glad to be moving some of this forward and look forward to hearing more um from staff about what they're doing there are already some some really exciting moves happening on the staff side as well so on work we'll schedule a time to hear from staff thank you so much thank you for moving that along mayor pro tem and thanks everybody i think we have some good opportunities okay uh before we go into closed session i'm going to ask the clerk um if she could report back to us on the situation with our two appointments good evening everybody uh yes we have um the human relations commission um position has been nominated by four votes for ferra cambell and the mayor's council for women we've got some um we don't have the majority of votes yet we've got three for brena kasey two for margaret brunson one for two times diana if you have three i can change my vote for human relations or yes okay thank you council member was that for for for brena kasey all right thank you very much council member freeman um thank you ma'am thank you madam clerk um shall we settle the agenda before moving into closed session uh madam manager yes mr mayor uh i am ready to set the agenda it's been a long day but a good one so i have for our city council meeting consent items one through 23 gba public hearings item 27 through 31 and item 34 thank you very much madam manager you have heard the manager's agenda can i have a motion that we settle the agenda a move second moved by council member caballero seconded by council member freeman madam clerk we please call the roll near shul i near pro tem johnson hi council member caballero hi council member freelon hi council member freeman hi council member middleton i vote aye council member east hi thank you thank you madam clerk the eyes have it the motion passes unanimously um um madam manager is there anything else that we need to do before we move into closed session other than than just notice that council that that city manager bonfield couldn't help himself he's still on the call he is he was gonna be a participant today and was ready to jump in if he needed to but it looks like he uh i saw him in the chat a couple of times but he didn't actually need to jump in uh with his voice but he is here every step of the way mr marron counselors i do want to thank you for uh for extending this meeting so i could keep piling on my uh my career record of hours spent in council meetings i feel like cal ripkin now you know that i've now got a record that probably will never be surpassed after today well mr manager you're truly a hall of famer exactly um yeah so uh another another final moment for you mr manager and thank you we uh we appreciate you we also appreciate you uh enter a manager page and uh it's going to be a really great transition and i just want you to know wander that we we have your back and you want you let us know how we could support you i i know that and looking forward to uh working with each and every one of one of you all right thank you all right thank you tom i think now we need a motion to go into closed session i'm going to ask our city attorney if she can help us with the appropriate wording i can i apologize mr mayor um so my understanding is that the city council is going into closed session in order to consider a real estate transaction yes so moved so motion to and you don't need to cite the specific statue if i sleep it's 143 318.11 a 5 123 18.11 5 thank you council councilmember freeman is there a second second there are lots of seconds but we'll give it to councilmember reese uh madam clerk please call the roll you're shul hi you're pro tem johnson hi councilmember caballero hi councilmember free lawn hi it's a member freeman hi it's member middleton i vote i it's member reese hi thank you thank you so much we're now going to move into closed session um and i think we will just try to move right into closed session as soon as we're able to lock the meeting and so for those of you all who are not


A family member is heading to Italy for about six weeks. And so we needed to figure out what to do about cell service for that, you know, six week timeframe this winter. And I pulled the Twitter hive mind and was turned onto a website called eSimDB.com where you go and type in the, you know, the country name, and it will tell you all kinds of eSim providers for data and you can sort by, you know, how many days you need it or the price per gigabyte. I find that sorting by price per gigabyte is the best way to start this and then kind of filter it down to, OK, well, you know, they're going to need 30 days, 30 days isn't quite enough, but maybe that's the right plan. You need to do that twice or whatever. And, you know, there's services I never knew of because I don't live in Italy. Like I knew of Truphone and Truphone may well be the right answer, but there's also Airolo, A-I-R-A-L-O and Yubeji and Orange. So and probably others, if I scroll down the list and start letting it get more expensive, like Mogo, eSim and things like that. So great little resource for this.  You just do it with an eSim and you download the app in advance when you have control over things and so.


As previously we have seen that there could be a number of types of alternative assessments. So one of them is dynamic assessment. Dynamic assessment is an interactive approach to assessment that focuses on a learner's potential for learning and their ability to benefit from instructional support. So it goes beyond my ring fixed knowledge or skills and evaluates the learner's ability to acquire new knowledge and skills with guidance. We are saying that dynamic assessment can be done by gathering a lot of activities. Like the way children behave in the classroom, during academic activities, during play activities, during role plays, group activities, collaborations, collaborations, whatever he or she does, we can record it and we can assess it. So the assessor mediates the learning process by providing assistance to help the learner bridge the gap and develop new skills or knowledge. We have to see how the child is performing in this process. If he stops, or if he has a problem or difficulty, then our educator, as a facilitator, helps him out, removes the gap and helps him go to the next step.  So we will do both together, which means we want him to perform something. If he has a problem during this time, we will help him solve it. Dynamic assessment involves an interactive process, that is, it's a two-way process of teacher and student. To see how more activities can be done, how it can be performed. With the assessor providing scaffolding and feedback to support the learner's understanding and problem-solving abilities. Scaffolding is that when the child stops, something is going to be difficult for him. So you explain it a little bit further. With the help of a map, with the help of a clue or a hint, you can make a flowchart for him. For example, you tell him to make something new from blocks.  You have to give him a clue, you have to help him where he stops or attacks. And this is how his performance goes on. Otherwise, he will stop at the first step or the second step. He will not be able to move forward and you can then assess him in a wrong way that he cannot move forward. When the clue is given or we remove the hurdle, he moves forward. So it identifies a learner's zone of proximal development, which is the gap between what the learner can do independently and what they can achieve with support. So the zone of proximal development that we have talked about is applied here. And the interesting thing is that in that, we used to say that someone is helping immature, immature, or they are affording something or they are giving help or giving a clue to the child. So we were teaching him at that time. Now the biggest point of the dynamic assessment that you have to remember is that there are seven guidance which are in this assessment. Wherever the child stops, if there is a problem, you help him there and give him help to move forward. Then wherever he can go, with your help, you will see him all the time and observe him. And then in his credit, all the performance will go, which went with the help of others and which he did by himself. That is, one child's progress is independent and one is dependent. But progress is there, right? So independently, how much he has progressed and how much he has progressed with your help, we will see both of those things together.