This is stock number 8C8A, we are here at Summit Automotive in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. Your new and used Chrysler Dodge Jeep and Ram Headquarters. Today we are checking out this like new 2018 Chrysler Pacifica. This vehicle has the award winning 3.6 liter Pentastar V6 motor. From this HD video you will be able to tell just how clean this van is all the way around. Jazz blue is the color, factory alloy rims that are absolutely perfect like new brakes. Yokohama Avid 235 65R17 tires with just about all the tread left. This vehicle only has about 850 miles on it so everything you see on it is original and like new. Has the LED running lamps, the projector lamp fog lamps. This is a Touring Plus so you get the factory projector lamp fog lamps on the bottom. I didn't see one single dent or ding on the hood. Passengers side rim is like new as well, no scuffs or scrapes. And as you go down this side of the van you can see just how clean the body is, how reflective and glass like and perfect that paint is. We take these HD videos so if you are far away or even if you're close by and you just cannot make the trip down but you're still interested in purchasing the vehicle you can still see the vehicle, hear the vehicle and have confidence in the quality of the paint and body without actually ever being here. We shoot everything in 1080p so if you have HD capabilities on your computer tablet or smartphone device turn them on right now because it is like you're actually right here looking at the van with me. Back tires are like new as well. It does have the power side doors, really nice feature. The new Stongos system in the Pacificas is really awesome which will show on the other side but it does have the quad seating and the third row seats we'll check out. You can see that the carpeting is absolutely perfect and that the third row is very clean as well. No rips, tears, stains. This vehicle has never been smoked in. You can see the carpeting up front here is absolutely perfect as well. Close this door with this button right here. This vehicle does have the enter and go system so you just have to press the buttons on the side and those doors will lock or unlock. If you have the key fob on you you can see it does have the backup sensors, the backup camera and that the rear gate is in absolutely perfect condition. This one does have the power rear gate so you press the button on the handle there and it'll come up like that. So I'm going to put these third row seats down. We'll check out the carpeting and make sure it's absolutely perfect which it is but we'll put these third row seats down to show you just how easy the new Stongos is. Just press this which puts the headrest down. Pull number one which unlocks it and then this one brings that seat down nice and flat. When you have all these seats down you can fit a four by eight sheet of plywood or drywall or whatever you may be hauling with you in the back here. So they've still made these Stongos very simple to use and what's even easier is when you put those seats back up you just grab number two give it a little flip and then pull that seat back and you're ready to go.  You can really see that metal flake in that jazz blue really good looking color and as we go around to this side of the vehicle just as clean as the passenger side like new down this side as well. Full disclosure this rim is absolutely perfect as well and it does have the capitalist fuel fill something they did new for the Pacifica. Very clean down this side. Let me show you how that Stongo works on for that second row. You just open this door one other thing I did want to show you real quick as you can see the seats absolutely perfect as well is that it does have the window side shades which are really nice on that second row has the rear air controls as well and to get to the back now they make this entrance lever right here so it just tilts it forward and it's easy to get to the back row seats. So they've had the Stongo assist so if you have a power seat it comes with the Stongo assist you press that button it'll move that front seat all the way up old days you never really knew how far to put that thing up sometimes you didn't put it up far enough and you couldn't get the seat down so you just press that you can see that it moves the floor mat and everything up you just put the backrest down right here then you grab the Stongo strap put that seat down make sure she's nice and flush in there then you pull this and she'll lock into place real nice and simple same thing when you put it back up you just pull this up like so grab the Stongo strap so go like that lock into place then you put this seat down too now you press this button again and that front seat will go right back to where it was originally pretty cool and of course the side buttons so the Touring Plus does give you the black cloth interior power driver's seat no rips or tears on these seats inside you can see that this van only has 854 miles this does have the 7 inch touchscreen display which is really nice and that's where the backup camera shows up right there as well and you have AM FM and series satellite radio capabilities on this radio also Bluetooth audio capabilities which your Bluetooth buttons are right there information center buttons and the nice steering wheel right there cruise control no rips tears or scuffs on that Augs and USB jacks dual climate control you have your start-stop feature which will shut off the engine at a stop sign if you have all the right things going on also the home link buttons for your garage door security systems and lighting systems and then you can see you do have your side door and rear gate buttons as well as your map lights no rips or tears on the passenger seat no stains this vehicle has never been smoked in factory floor mats throughout and very very clean highly recommended this vehicle was purchased brand new from us and traded in on a different one also has auto headlamps power windows and power locks finally this one has the blind spot monitoring and the heated mirrors in the mirror under the hood we have the award-winning 3.6 liter pentastar v6 motor engine base very clean runs very smooth absolutely perfect in here this vehicle has been gone through by our Chrysler certified technicians and has been given a clean bill of health which it showed with only 850 miles but we look them over anyways make sure they're right for you so you have every the vehicle that you get from us as a turnkey product and to see more pictures of this van or one of our other 400 new and used cars trucks SUVs minivans Wranglers you name it we got to go to our website www.summit auto.com full pictures and descriptions of every single vehicle on our lot videos of every single used vehicle that we have all at summit auto.com thank you so much for checking out the video if you like this van want to make it yours give us a call right now<PHONE_NUMBER> ask for one of our sales associates to make this van yours today once again that number is<PHONE_NUMBER> thanks again for checking out the video if you like it want to check out more see what else is coming in on our inventory go to youtube.com slash summit auto remember to like some like subscribe and share on this video and all the videos there in fact any second you'll see a link to subscribe to our youtube channel on your left a link to more used inventory videos like this one on your right if you haven't been to our website on the bottom a link to this van on our website click those check us out and we really look forward to help you with this super clean 2018 Chrysler Pacifica Touring Plus thanks again


We have to introduce health as a fundamental, as a fundamental subject in all discussions, all reflections about the future of global governance. The pandemic has shown us that international cooperation is the only solution to an international crisis. Working together might not always be easy, but it's essential.


Hello everyone, thank you for coming to this session about the amazing Wikidata query service and our difficult efforts to scale it. So let's start with a few basics for those who don't know what is the Wikidata query service. The Wikidata query service is a very critical part of Wikidata. It is used to query all the relations in Wikidata, all the statements to basically make sense of the data. And it's a crucial tool to really work with the data that is in Wikidata and unlock its true power, so to say. And another thing that's important to understand for what's coming is that it's running on a software called PlaceGraph. So who actually currently uses the query service as this critical part of Wikidata's infrastructure? First of all, Wikidata editors are using it to basically understand and maintain the whole knowledge graph that is Wikidata. They use it for advocacy work to show, hey, this is all the cool stuff you can do with Wikidata, to run workshops and help people work with Wikidata. And simply to show off all the cool stuff they've been working on, with, for example, visualizations that you can see them here.  So for example, if you want to know if there were any popes who had children who were also popes, Wikidata query service can tell you, and the answer is yes, that is a thing. Or it's public domain day, and you can query for works that go into the public domain on a certain date, for example, and share that with the world. Then we have what I call small and medium-sized re-users. So people, organizations, groups, building applications on top of Wikidata to help people understand the world better, share knowledge. There's three examples here. The bottom one is a graph directory, a really cool tool to help people connect to their government and make their voices heard by using the data in Wikidata for how to contact certain parts of governments in different countries. Or we have the open art browser, a very cool tool to dive into visual art sculptures and more. Or here, a tool to better understand women scientists and the contributions they've made. Then we have the other Wikimedia projects, Wikipedia, Wikivoyage, and so on and so on. Basically using it to fill in for boxes, but also to structure their work through, for example, building lists for campaigns. So you're trying to get more articles written about women scientists at certain institutions. You can write a query to give you what is currently there and see which ones you're still missing with an article on your Wikipedia, for example. Women in red, for example, is a group that uses this quite extensively. And in general, using it to better understand the contents of their projects, like how many women are we writing about? How many people from certain areas are we writing about? Which articles are we missing that are covered in a lot of other Wikipedias, for example? And last but not least, Wikimedia development teams and tool builders who are building tools that heavily rely on queries to Wikidata. So for example, we have the item quality evaluator. You can write a spark or query, get a list of items you're interested in, like list of Star Trek episodes, for example, and then have it give you the quality level of each of those items and then improve the worst ones, for example. Or we have Integrality, which gives you dashboards for Wikidata items and their completeness and helps you find areas where stuff is missing in Wikidata items. So now we looked at who uses it and now let's look at the scale of the whole thing. It is one of the largest sparkle ends points on the internet and it's, as far as I know, the only one at this size that is publicly queryable for anyone to use that wants to. There are right now 15 billion triples in the query service that are coming from around 150, 105 million items and on those items, there are around 1.5 billion statements, plus some on properties and taxims within the grand scheme of things. Those are still comparatively small. And the query service has to deal with about 700,000 edits per day on Wikidata and it's serving 5,000 requests per minute, so 5,000 queries per minute.  One of the issues we have is keeping up with the data size. So Wikidata is very successful, you're all doing amazing work, which means more and more data gets into Wikidata. Which means more and more data needs to end up in the query service and Blazegraf needs to deal with that. Problem is Blazegraf does not have what we call charting support, so you cannot easily distribute it across different servers, for example. Which means we need larger and larger disks and one more memory to make this run. On top of that, there are some internal limitations in Blazegraf that mean it will at some point reach a limit even if we add more and more memory and more and more disk space to it. Second class of problems, it's getting a lot of loads. So as I said, there are a lot of edits happening on Wikidata, each of which needs to be put into Blazegraf so you can query it. And there are a lot of people querying the query service. So the more and more people are building cool applications. On top of it, the more and more queries will be sent to the query service, which is amazing, but also tough to deal with on a completely open query service instance. And last but not least, it is a challenge for us, specifically for the search platform team and the foundation, to keep the whole thing stable and secure. So we are experiencing issues where randomly servers crash because of limited capacity and overload that Blazegraf just can't deal with. And unfortunately, thank you, Amazon, Blazegraf is no longer maintained. Which means it will run out of support or basically has run out of support. There will be no security updates and things like that in the future. Which is not great for a publicly accessible endpoint. So what does all of this mean for us? It means that legitimate queries that we want people to run, for example, queries to maintain data in Wikidata, queries to build cool tools like gaf directory are timing out. Because we have more and more data to deal with. This problem also gets worse because there's more and more data to query through and to analyze before query can be answered. So as more data gets into Wikidata, this problem becomes worse. All of this means that people are starting to restrict their editing, which is also not great because we all want to edit and we all want to make data available to the world. And last but not least, it means that we are very hesitant to build new stuff on top of it that would be super useful to have because it would add more problems to an already problematic situation. Which means editors and re-users do not get cool new stuff. So that was the problem. What do we do about it? We have already done a bunch of stuff. But by far not enough. So what have we done? We have introduced what is called a new streaming updater. So now it is no longer as much of a problem when there are a lot of edits happening on Wikidata. Blazegraft can keep up much better and not be completely out of sync with what is happening on Wikidata anymore. So that is great. Problem is not completely solved, but it is a fairly good situation now. We have also made a disaster mitigation plan because there is a lot of uncertainty when we actually hit limits. That means the query service just will not run anymore. We have made a plan for that. We have communicated it. You can read up on it on Wiki if you haven't seen it yet. So this is basically, if worse comes to worst, this is what we are doing. We have also gotten someone to look at different alternatives for backends to replace Blazegraft. There is no decision made, but there is at least a short list of things that could potentially work and that we could potentially move to. And last but not least here, we have taken a lot of pressure off the system by moving things elsewhere. So for example, we've built out the Wikibase ecosystem so that people can move data that they would otherwise have put into Wikidata, but that's maybe a bit too specialized, too niche, too much for Wikidata. It doesn't fit in the ability guidelines and so on, can find a different home, either in their own Wikibase instance or on what we call Wikibase Cloud, which is the hosted Wikibase as a service that we provide from Wikimedia. We've also developed the Wikibase REST API to let people do operations that don't need the whole shebang of the query graph to do those requests on stuff we can more easily optimize on stuff that we can more easily cache and so on. So if you don't need the whole graph, if you're not actually querying, but just accessing individual data points, do not use the query service, use the REST API. And if it doesn't work for you yet, let us know because that's it. Then we've also improved the documentation to basically help people understand when they should be using which of those systems that we have available because they're a bunch, not just the REST API. That's what we have been doing. What are we doing right now? We are thinking through what it would mean to split off some parts of Wikidata into their own blaze graph instance. So still keeping the data in Wikidata, but having a separate blaze graph instance that you would query via federation. There are a lot of things to think through and discuss and so on, but that is something we're looking into. I've also started discussing with the Wikisite people. Hi, about the future of all the scientific articles and Wikidata and what we do with them, where we want to go with those. And last but not least, we're trying to reduce what I would call redundant data. So data that is actually already there but is duplicated in Wikidata for reasons. One example is you have an item for a person and the name would be repeated as a label across 300 plus languages. Maybe we don't need to store this name 300 times, but maybe once or maybe twice in a different writing system. But then maybe that's enough, yeah. So we're introducing a new language code for that to help make that happen. We're also making some interface changes to make it less likely for people to want to introduce redundant data. Let's see how that goes. In the future, what's coming? So it's very clear that we need to continue addressing all of those problems, right? We need to work on the huge amount of data in Wikidata. We need to figure out how we deal with the query load. We need to continue talking about edit load and last but not least somehow address the fact that place graph is unmaintained. How are we dealing with? There's a lot of data in Wikidata. We need to start thinking about moving very specialized, niche and so on data into their own Wikibases and connect those to Wikidata to keep the data accessible. But also think about the Wikibase ecosystem as a whole and not be bound to everything needs to be in Wikidata to be accessible. We need to get to the point where we're actually building a whole ecosystem and we're relying on linked data principles to make all of this data accessible. We need to continue the development and then also the editing work required to reduce the redundant data that we have. The more language code is the first part of that. But there's also more ideas around this. For example, automated descriptions, because there's a lot of redundant scenes descriptions, there are thoughts around improving lower modules. So some of the data that is stored right now in items could move away because it's just stored there, so info boxes can access that data. And last but not least, splitting the graph into two place graph instances, as I said before. Then for the huge amount of queries we have, we will continue talking to people about moving to other access method where it is sensible and where they don't need to graph. So that is, for example, work on making more of those other methods available and more usable, like the dumps. They are not very usable right now, but are usually a very good way to access the data. If you want to do large scale analysis on the data, for example. We've also been thinking about automatically detecting when queries don't need the query service and then redirecting them automatically to other services, not sure yet if that will work and if you'll actually do it. But it's something we're thinking about. Also, some people write very inefficient queries that we can automatically rewrite another thing that could be on the table. And then last but not least, increasing the incentives and pressure to move to some other systems. So for example, if you're doing a lot of queries that don't need to graph, then be more strict about contacting you and telling you, hey, could you maybe not? Could you maybe do your work this other way? That gives you the same result. But again, we will see how that goes. Then the large amount of edits that again goes into reducing the amount of redundant data I was talking about and all the edits that come with it. So for example, a prime example for me are scientific articles where BOT comes and writes in the description, scientific article across, I don't know how many languages, across many, many items. Many millions of items and maybe that's not needed and we can automate some of that.  We have to figure out where we move and then actually move. That is a long time in the future. It seems like right now. But we will have to see. And at the same time, we're talking to researchers, companies and so on to basically evangelize for new, better options that we could move to. Because being able to say that you're running the Spocker endpoint for Wikidata is actually a pretty cool thing. So if anyone is very excited about writing their own Spocker endpoint, talk to me, easy, exactly, especially at our scale, piece of cake. All right, that is the status quo. We have about 10 minutes for questions. And if you want to stay up to date, subscribe to the Wikidata weekly summary. Come to the search platform teams office hours. They're lovely people or send me an email, poke me on my talk page. Thank you very much. All right, well, all your questions. Yes, there's a mic coming there. Yes, so I have two questions. One is if there is like a guideline or you're thinking of creating a guideline maybe with the community for deciding whether a set of data should go to the main Wikidata or to Wikibase Cloud. And then the other question is regarding this evangelization to create new backends, whether, you know, if this need is shared by other organizations other than Wikimedia, maybe in the industry, like, are we the only ones need in this solution or not? Thanks. Yeah. So Wikidata is not the only project that has this problem. All the other Wikibases will at some point hit similar problems unless they are very small and constrained, but I'm very sure that there will be quite a few that reach similar sizes to Wikidata in terms of data size. I'm not aware, but I would love to hear it if anyone knows someone other organizations independent of Wikibase who would be good allies in this battle. Yes. And your first question around developing guidelines. Yes, I'd totally be up for that. That sounds great. And so there's clearly technical problem and that's your problem. Not just me, but yes, you are. And there's also, yeah, basically what Diego said, guidelines on things. I'm doing my part to say, no, stop using Sparkle for that. I'm using one more cleaver, for instance, which is Sparkle with dumps. So it's, oh, it's two weeks old. Oh my God. For data that didn't move for 10 years sometimes, that's good enough. And my question is, how can we work together to think about what we feel future will really look for people, for instance, for multi language tag? It's more or less technically ready, I think. But it's almost ready for first test. Yes, but my question is, how the community knows about it? Because when I spoke about it, they don't mostly. And yeah, obviously, the name of people will be the first long info for that. But there's a shitload of things that will need that too. I'm thinking about Wikisource, title of books, edition, things like that. Yeah. So how do we talk to the community about that? Yes. So in the next days or weeks, hopefully more days than weeks, there will be a call for testing of what we currently have for the more language code. And then you hopefully all say, yes, this is amazing, and we're going to do this. And then there is a page on Wikidata for all things, more language code, which we will point people to. And that seems like a good place to figure out policies and processes for, OK, now that we have it, what do we do with it? But I think we should maybe find spaces and time to go even beyond that and talk about more of the redundant data. Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah. Hello, Diego from Spain, mostly active on Commons. Have a question about Glaze graph. I blaze graph, you said that it's not being maintained anymore. So my first question would be, is that not a real issue? And the second question would be if it's out of maintenance, but the code is there and it's still open source code. Doesn't it make sense to take it over and continue from there instead of looking for something new? Yeah. Place graph being un-maintained is a problem. Yes. So far, it's fine, but at some point, we will hit a point where security vulnerabilities might be disclosed and then we'll have to figure out how to close them and stuff like that. So yes, this is a problem. Not the things are on fire right now problem, but so problem. Then your point about taking over place graph maintenance, basically, and that was on the table. The vibe I've gotten from the people who would then be the maintainers is, do not want. Not judging, fine either way, but it seems to be a very large and complex project. We already have way too many large and complex projects. In an ideal world, someone else's problem would be that large and complex project and we would use it. Yeah, this is where we're at and there are decent alternatives. So for example, Clever is one of those alternatives that seems to be starting to reach a point where it's actually a viable alternative maybe. Thank you. I think we have time for one or maybe two questions. I'll be a testament from Switzerland. Talking about federation, I see several challenges there and I'd like to hear your thoughts about that and maybe what is the state of discussions there. One is decision making where does the master data in watch areas go in order to avoid duplication of data across many systems and non-standard sparkle on our side. And the third one is like ontology alignment across these different data stores, which are kind of a prerequisite for federated queries to work smoothly. Yeah, that part is not going to be a piece of cake. I have no illusions about that and we will run into issues. Around decisions to not duplicate data, I think at the end of the day it's fine if some data is duplicated in different recubase instances or even in other linked data and points that we could query. My hope, maybe naive, is that there will be a process where people, similar to where we are with recudator now, so maybe we don't need to keep the copy of that data and instead rely on the data being there. But honestly, we'll have to try and see for some of that. Sorry, I forgot one of your other points. Non-standard sparkle, yes. Non-standard sparkle is not great because it's now also biting us with the move away from place graph. We have custom place graph extensions, which are not super easy to get into another software. So in an ideal world, we would move away from those custom things as much as possible, I would say. Yes, but not the first thing on the list. But it's digging into more, I would say. Really quick follow-up, instant wiki data, thumbs up, thumbs down. When you say instant wiki data, do you mean the wiki data equivalent to instant comments? Yes. For those who don't know, this is how you can use comments, images on your third party media wiki installation as if comments was your best buddy. So some people are asking for a similar thing for wiki data so that you can build info boxes on your third party media wiki installation. So yay, nay, don't care. Yay, another yay. Okay, if it's yay, come to me so I can subscribe you to the ticket where we're tracking this. Cool. I think we are close to out of time, but there seems to be more questions there. So let's take one more. We have time for one more. Let's take one more. Actually it's not a question. So is that for wiki-based as well? You know, the instance that you are aware that we are being trying in the Smithsonian, it's not the wiki-based cloud, but it's, you know, the wiki itself has been trying to bring up. If that's something you would have, I can add it to the ticket as something we should explore making possible. Yeah, we want to experiment that. Thanks. Cool. All right. Thank you so much. Thank you, Lydia. You can stay for the wiki site session. And also I have stickers, wiki data stickers. I'll be in the back of the room. Come and get stickers.


New Science from Jupiter, presented by Science at NASA. When NASA's Juno spacecraft recently flew over the poles of Jupiter, researchers were astonished, as if they'd never seen a giant planet before. And in a sense, they hadn't. The pictures were unlike anything in the history of planetary exploration. Juno entered orbit on the 4th of July 2016, and later found Jupiter's poles covered in nearly continent-sized storms that are densely clustered and rubbing together in a mind-blowing swirl. It's like a whole new Jupiter, says Scott Bolton, Juno's principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute. The clouds were amazing. What's striking about Jupiter's polar storms is that there are actually multiple cyclones at each pole. So instead of having one polar vortex like Earth, Jupiter was observed to have as many as eight giant swirls moving simultaneously on its north pole and as many as five on its south pole. Even more amazing things are lurking below. Researchers have long wondered about the giant planet's hidden interior. How far down do Jupiter's continent-sized storms descend? And what is the exotic material near the planet's core? Deep inside Jupiter, high temperatures and crushing pressures transform Jupiter's copious supplies of gaseous molecular hydrogen into an exotic form of matter known as liquid-metallic hydrogen. Think of it as a mash-up of atomic nuclei in a sea of electrons freely moving about. Jupiter's powerful magnetic field almost certainly springs from dynamo-action in Jupiter's interior. The process by which the motion of this electrically conducting fluid is converted into magnetic energy. The exact location within the interior is a mystery that researchers are still working to solve. A planet's magnetic field gets weaker as you get farther from its core. Jupiter's magnetic field is 10,000 times stronger than that of Earth. However, when measured at the cloud tops, Jupiter's magnetic field is only 20 times greater than what we measure on Earth's surface. This is due to Jupiter being so much larger than Earth. Astronomers have long known that Jupiter has the most intense planetary magnetic field in the solar system. According to Jack Cannerney, Juno deputy principal investigator at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Juno's magnetometers indicate that Jupiter's magnetic field is even stronger than we thought. Moreover, the magnetic field looks lumpy, he says. It is stronger in some places and weaker in others. This uneven distribution suggests that the field might be generated by dynamo action closer to the surface, above the layer of metallic hydrogen. Jupiter's magnetic field is home to the biggest and most powerful auroras in the solar system. Unlike Earth, which lights up in response to solar activity, Jupiter makes its own auroras. It does this by tapping into power generated by its own spinning magnetic field. Induced electric fields accelerate particles toward Jupiter's poles, where the aurora action takes place. Another source of insight is Juno's microwave radiometer, which measures thermal microwaves radiating from the deep recesses of the planet, revealing structure hundreds of kilometers beneath Jupiter's thick clouds. Recent results from Juno's gravity experiment show that Jupiter's iconic belts and zones rotate as a series of cylinders down to depths of about 3,000 to 5,000 kilometers. Beneath this depth, it appears that Jupiter may be rotating as a rigid body. New discoveries about Jupiter continue to be made. Bolton says, every 53 days Juno goes soaring by Jupiter and gets doused by a fire hose of data. There is always something new. For more discoveries from Jupiter and the other planets of our solar system, stay tuned to science.nasa.gov.


not hurt anymore. My body wasn't hurting. I wasn't feeling pain in my bones the way I was. It would hurt to walk. He asked if I would go up. I went up and he told me what. I was battling and I told him what I was battling. So two weeks go on and I'm still waiting for results. How bad my alukimia is, how bad it's gonna be, how long I got, but I chose to continue to believe. Then I got a phone call. And it was my doctor. And he's like, I need you to come in. And I said, okay, I knew it was bad news. He comes in with the paperwork, sits down, gets on his computer, and he says, well, all your blood work is fine.  And I said, God's the one who did this to me. And now I'm cancer free.


Hi, I'm Realtor Sara Morrow with Cell State Ace Realty. Next up on Property Time are the ins and outs of homeowner associations and metro taxes. This info isn't just for you new-build buyers anymore. Join me to learn what an association fee is and what it generally covers, what metro taxes are, and how your voice can be heard by your HOA. Community manager and expert Rochelle Riojas of Centennial Consulting Group will be my guest of honor and I cannot wait to hear what she has to say. Next property.


My paper is entitled, Auto-Heterobiography and the Pistolary Game in the Art of Chris Kraus and Sophie Kow. In an interview published in 1991, Avatel Ronell was asked, what's wrong with feminism today? It's dependent on what man does, Ronell responded, continuing, feminism today, feminism today has a parasitical secondary territoriality. If you respond to present conditions, you're subject to reactive, mimetic, and regressive posturings. So the problem is, she continued, how can we free, how do you free yourself? How can you not be reactive to what already exists as powerful and dominating? How can you avoid a recent mental politics? Of course, Avatel Ronell is no one straw woman. And so it is in following the imperative of her work to be relentlessly deconstructive and responsibly responsive that my talk sets out. I take as my starting point Ronell's diagnosis of a contemporary feminism gone awry, a feminism best characterized as Ronell does by the borrowing of a Nietzschean concept, what Nietzsche calls Resentement, denoting a psychological state arising from feelings that cannot be acted upon, often resulting in a form of self-abasement. Wendy Brown, too, has argued that feminism is a politics fundamentally grounded in Resentement or what she calls its wounded attachment to the trauma associated with systems of inequality. Indeed, Brown's notion of wounded attachment finds new inflection in the metaphor of the parasite, for whom it is literally the attachment to the wound that articulates the sight of open contact that makes its relationship to the host most felt. For Brown, feminism's parasitical politics is caught in a trap of having to make central the pain of its marginalization, and doing so, feminism has been unable to liberate itself from its secondary service to the primacy of patriarchy. Ronell observes that we must leave behind what she sees as feminism's recursive choreography, the well-worn track of a codependent feminism that remains tethered to the patriarchal logic of a re, re that signifies the again and the back, again and back, that haunts her diction and suggests that women's politics are fundamentally programmed for return, one suggesting that they are reactive, regressive, resentimental. That's Ronell's plan, Resentement. What we see, so my question is what are we to make of this tension between response and responsibility? Advising feminists as one would a friend trapped in a bad relationship, Ronell asks how do we free ourselves and instead of going back again, how do we move forward? How do feminists recover once and for all and finally get their own place? My analysis will labor under the weight of these questions and in the long shadow cast by the possibility of such a thing as a right feminism, a healthy feminism, a good feminism, one that would be self-sufficient, self-sufficient enough to become paradoxically central to the system from which it must necessarily escape. Borrowing on Michelle Serre's analysis of the parasite as a suggestive theoretical concept for thinking modes of relation and exchange, the formulation of the parasite would seem to be the very antithesis of this model of a progressively inclined self-sufficient feminism, symbolizing instead the looming figure of a bad feminism, a mode of being that instead of looking for a way to get outside of the system seeks further residence in its depths. The parasitical politics of a feminism gone wrong is one that might be said to luxuriate in women's secondary social position, wistfully tracing the curly cues of its recursive dance. This parasitical feminism might also be said to enjoy the spoils of a position that is maintained by the symbiotic primacy of its host and the normative conditions that reproduce those power relations. I want to hold this image of a parasitical feminism as one that might be productive for thinking the politics of a recent trend in contemporary feminist art, and I'll just bracket here that I'm not an art historian, so I'm coming at it from a more like critical theory performance study angle, okay? If as Ronel suggests, feminism must continue to negotiate its own territoriality, what are the ethics of an aesthetic thrall to modes of relationality marked by negativity breakdown and break up? As witnessed by a recent trend in feminist visual culture, is the parasite not merely the organism that feeds on its attachment to the host, but moreover, one that thrives by creating new wounds? How might these new wounds posed by strategic supplementarity of the parasite to the host engage a feminist remapping of the structural dynamics of gendered territoriality? To answer these questions, I'd like to look at the mutually informing relationship between two epistolary art book projects that posit heterosexual romantic rejection packaged as literary performance as an emergent site of feminist potential and queer play in the field of contemporary art. For these artists, certain modalities of reading and writing come alive as gendered opponents that feed on each other in a dynamically unstable game, positions taken up in a recursive playing field in the high stakes field of meanings. These art projects query the limits of the game, whether the procedures of representation demand maneuvers outside of a given rule book. I submit that these works argue for yet another return, a reconsideration of the feminist potential of the parasitical politics Ronell sounded her warning against more than 15 years ago. A New Zealand expatriate now based in the U.S., Chris Kraus is a filmmaker turned writer. In her most well-known work, I Love Dick, 1997, she chronicled her romantic obsession with Dick, widely identified as British cultural theorist Dick Hubdage, an academic colleague of her husband, celebrated theorist Sylvère Lantrige. After only a single meeting, one that was later described by Dick as genial but not particularly intimate or remarkable, Kraus undertakes to make Dick into a kind of idol, an object of worship, onto which she might confess the damnation of her feminine objection and her intellectual rapacity. In the accumulation of her over 200 confessional letters written to Dick, she manipulates Dick's identity into a faceless patriarchal screen onto which she projects her sexual fantasies, personal anxieties and critical interventions. By Kraus' own hand, by Kraus' own hand, the proper name Dick, capital D, becomes Dick Lowercase D, through a process that Derrida calls E majesculation, his play on emasculation of the majescal, the majescal that is the capital letter. It is in this castrating force of writing, as a kind of mark or cut, reflected in the gesture of the letter that Dick is separated from his personality, leaving only the Dick, the phallus that is the paragon of masculinity and the vulgar slang used to name its most insensitive member. In graphic verbal depiction, Kraus recounts her humiliations, not only Dick's refusal to get romantically involved with her, but also the insults, slights and condescension that she endured as the wife of a successful public figure that is well remunerated and tenured. He gets top billing and she gets on the list as his plus one. The very pride and personification of the white heteropatriarchal institution, her husband Silvair, known for his kinky sexual and critical appetite, plays dominant to her submissive, academic darling to her amateurish supplementarity. The banality of her connected outsider-ness is rendered exceptional by her status as a kind of parasitic hanger-on, right, the plus one, the perpetual plus one. She is the emotive excess that spills over his institutional excuse me, she is the emotive excess that spills over the institutional permissiveness granted to his subversive Ivy League deconstructive critical cache.  Kraus signs off in one entry, I keep you in my heart, it keeps me going. And another, no one used like knowing Jesus, there are millions of us and only one of you, so I don't expect to hear from you personally, I don't expect much from you personally, there are no answers to my life, but I'm touched by you and fulfilled just by believing. I expected laugh, but that's okay, okay, yeah, you can laugh. Kraus's love letters to Dick are brutally public practice and forced voyeurism, recalling Jacques Derrida's reflections on the postcard, so this is a different post that I'm working with, the postcard that is an open letter, a mode of intimate exchange that remains unsealed and thus can be read at any moment. The letters taught Dick mocking him for his status as forced exhibition and forced exhibitionist. At one point, even inviting him to write the introduction for their publication, it could read something like this, Sylvère suggests, I believe these letters will interest the reader as a cultural document, obviously they manifest the alienation of the postmodern intellectual in the most diseased form. I really feel sorry for such a parasitical growth that feeds on itself. Kraus's correspondence stock Dick, shock him into stillness, assigning him in the public record of their open book with the post, so Derrida uses the French Le Post, that Derrida reminds us with the French is the sense of a position to be held, the violence of her letter is in the gesture of their binding. Published and publicized as a book, Dick has no choice, but to hold the post, Kraus has given him. Just as Derrida plays with the postcard against literature, Kraus's love letters and diary entries, the fluffy, feminized stuff of adolescent daydreams, make themselves into unlikely weapons and as a result, inadmissible literature for Dick's defense. In this sense, Dick fails to find protection under patriarchy or what literally is the law of the father. As Kraus's feminine subterfuge brilliantly turns Dick's own logic against him. Significantly, Kraus undertakes to pervert the meaning of the letter typically thought to record the material bond between two subjects in exchange. Instead the letters in I Love Dick are serialized and bound for their diaristic quality and Dick is rendered impotent. Not only by the manic intensity of their proliferation as a joke turned conceptual art project, but also finally by the force of their very serious circulation as a published book. Despite the links Kraus goes to perform the wretchedness of her own less than flattering self, female self-portrait, the joke seems always to be on Dick. And the letters mound, a conceptual chorus seems to sing louder and louder, and this is my homage to Carly Simon and Eve Sedgwick. Dick, you're so vain, I bet you think this book is actually about you.  As the letter as diary signifies only the relationship of Kraus to Dick as that of subject to object. Indeed Dick's value is mostly as a token in exchange between Kraus and the reader as the book serves as a guarantor that letters made to his address are always already intercepted by the reader. As Dear Dick replaces Dear Diary, the form of the letter becomes a means of transforming Dick from subject to object, from writer to reader, from critic to critique. This time it is the Dick who finds himself on the receiving end of things. Kraus' project finds ample critical resonance in the work of French artist Sophie Cowell. A conceptual inheritance acknowledged throughout the pages of I Love Dick and perhaps predated, this is something that I've noticed and maybe this has been written about, but this is a connection I'm sort of wanting to make, and perhaps predated by a 1991 project undertaken by Joseph Grigly entitled Post Cards to Sophie Cowell. What he dubs his monospondence, Grigly writes 32 unsolicited postcards to Cowell offering obsessive critical feedback to her exhibition at the Lurig Augustine Gallery in New York melding the critical writing of high art with the low form of the love letter. Grigly romances Cowell with his discomforting insistence on responding to her work with a forced intimacy of the first person, first name, affective register. Dear Sophie, he writes, I am, how shall I say it, entranced. No other word will do. Yours, Joseph. It is Cowell, of course, who is popularly credited with having set the gold standard in the genre of breakup art, having masterminded such works as her film, No Sex Last Night, which is also known as Double Blind, and I have a couple of different dates that I've seen 2000, sorry, 1996 and 1992, and later, her work Exquisite Pain from 2004, among other projects that centralized kind of girlish thematics such as infatuation, pursuit, unrequited and unrequited heterosexual love and loss. I was happy with my animated text there. Ten years after the publication of Chris Krause's I Love Dick, Cowell has again raised the stakes of a career made on the conceptual politics of romantic art practices, heterosexual romantic art practices as one way investigatory performances in forensic autobiographical aesthetics with her much praised Venice Biennale Exhibition and subsequent book project entitled Take Care of Yourself from 2007. This latest book visualizes the abundance of Cowell's return on her missive to 107 women professionals to read and analyze a breakup email she received according to their occupational skill set. Krause writes of the project, I received an email telling me it was over. I didn't know how to respond. It was almost as if it hadn't been meant for me. It ended with the words, take care of yourself, and so I did. Grand and size and ambition, take care of yourself, is a massive effort to boldly, that boldly echoes Krause's turn to multiplication, the operation of scale to quantify the infinitely subjective stakes of heartbreak. Given the calculated, this idea of calculation is something I want to play with, given the calculated quality of these highly conceptual projects, perhaps it is no coincidence, our visual encounter with her ex, this idea of an ex is something else I'd like to play with here, is signified by the very sign of multiplication. In the place of its absent reference, so in the place of the signature and take care of yourself, in the place of this absent reference is ex, so ex is what's marking his name in the email. So it's signed by ex. I am most interested in reading this art book as a product of skilled and networked creative mass production, as a book, a volume, in every sense of the word, that literally is one part of a greater haul. The book was time to coincide with the exhibition. But also as voluminous, right? It's 424 pages. It's a 424 page art book with, it's really exceptional for its sheer volume. It's form, it's voluminous, it's massive, it's protuberant. Perhaps it is Krause and Cal's shared interest in the aesthetic of overwhelm that explains why the dicks, so I'm just playing with the fact that they both have dicks, ostensibly at the core of their projects begin to look so insignificant under the protuberances that hold Krause's proliferating sentiments in Cal's outsourced analyses. Initially taking him up as an idol, Krause's words ultimately picked Dick apart as Cal's triangulated dissections undo ex, making both men into details that just can't quite be recalled within the vast expanse of the project's larger and far more striking political field, I argue. It is, if to overwhelm means to suffocate or drown, as the dictionary tells me, to bury beneath a huge mass, the memetic crime committed by these acts of creative repetition is indeed a kind of representational murder. Krause pleads guilty writing during her early collaboration on the project with Silver, quote, at first they just share the letters with each other, but as the pile grows to 50, then 80, then 180 pages, they begin discussing some kind of Sophie Cal-like art piece in which they would present the manuscript to Dick. Dear Dick, she writes at one point, I guess in a sense I've killed you, you've become Dear Diary, end quote. In an interview, Cal concurs admitting that what began as a form of personal therapy developed into art. After one month I felt better, there was no suffering, it worked. The project had replaced the man, but before my reading threatens to sound like a Valerie Solanas kind of feminism, let me be clear, Krause and Cal don't kill Dick. They kill the idea that Dick is autonomous and unaffected by his relation to the world, that they can't affect Dick. They've killed that idea, I think. This time it is another kind of letter that is centralized. The letter X comes to represent both the presence and absence of Cal's conceptual ex, ex-boyfriend, whose decidedly smarmy email to the artist serves as an invitation for an extended reading that he unwittingly agrees to host. Dick naively initiates his role as the project's host when he invites Krause and her husband to spend an evening at his remote cabin in the Antelope Valley of Southern California. Still his service to the project quickly gets re-territorialized as the occupation of the host becomes more manifest by the parasitical rigor for which he accommodates around him and, indeed, Dick supplies the very structure that threatens him, feeding its discourse and growing its project until it has emptied its host, almost entirely of its substance, as Dick and X get emptied out of their meaning as individuals. The X for Cal signifies a kind of landmark for something that has crossed her and in turn has been crossed and crossed out. It is a symbol of what must be searched for and what has been buried. Maybe it represents the presence that has been barred or kept out or could, in fact, the X represent the variable that stands for the many possibilities that always coexist and among them, the possibility that X marks not only the thing that one must get away from but X marks the spot where one must bury even deeper. In closing, I want to consider a figure who perhaps, I want to consider a figure who perhaps as well as anyone has proven the productive value of the return. That is, the return and turn deeper into something that might otherwise be left behind. With his famous return to Freud, it was another Jacques Lacan who noted the parasitic resemblance of the child in the mother-child, in the mother-infant or child relationship. If, as it is for Naomi Shore, the parasitical detail is always already linked to the unruly feminine that interrupts the aesthetic masculine ideal. What are we to make of this slippage between the feminine and the childlike? What are we to think of this adolescent self-image Krauss offers of a grown woman who holds out her hand to accept her husband's money only to fund an art project that depicts him like an impotent old cauldron who just doesn't get it? What are we to make of a grown woman artist who cannot stop writing unrequited love letters in the diaristic register of the first person confessional? The famous conceptual artist who asks 107 of her closest girlfriends for their aesthetic takes on her latest breakup, only to publish their reactions in a book covered in hot pink foil. The woman who must be reminded by her paternalistic now ex-lover to take care of herself? How might we think the performative politics of girlish regression offered in the art of Krauss and Cal? The child adolescent would seem to hold rich potential, rich political potential for the project of feminism insofar as it, like the parasite, is a model that threatens to violate established systems of exchange by taking and not giving back. How might this refusal of return, this kind of different way of thinking of the refusal of return, make new forms of relationality possible? Might in fact, the literalized performance of these regressive posterings as Ronell called them, offer if not a way to be free, then maybe a way to move forward. Thank you.


everyone and welcome to the 430 to 5 p.m. session of the 2020 open simulator community conference. In this session we are happy to introduce a presentation called staging effective graduate school residencies and open sim VR methodologies and insights. Our speaker today is Scott Dolphin. Scott is a graduate and high honors of the SUNY empire state college master of arts and learning with emerging technology program. He is an artist, a designer, virtual explorer and researcher in the uses of online virtual reality for education and the development of collaborative communities of practice. Please check out the website found at the conference dot open simulator dot org for speaker bios details of sessions and full schedule of events. The session is being live streamed and recorded. So if you have any questions or comments during the session, you may send tweets to at open sim cc with the hashtag oscc 20. Welcome everyone and let's begin the session. Hello everyone and welcome. As she pointed out, my name is Scott Dolphin. I am from SUNY empire state college in balmy new york state. And this is my presentation on staging effective graduate school residencies and open sim VR. So before I start just a quick little bit of background on SUNY empire state college. We are a decentralized university. We do have a main campus in saratoga springs, but we have unit offices all around the state. And we are the only campus with a full range of academic programs from an associates degree all the way through to a doctorate in leadership and education launching next fall. Most of our attendees are over the age of 25, working professionals, raising families, serving in the military and a majority of them are returning to college. So that means that the majority of our students have some mileage on them. They are not going to college just because their parents told them they need to. They're there with a vested interest. So every year the SUNY mallet program holds a residency. Now what are residencies? Residencies are environments that are designed to allow cohorts to evolve where people can learn from one another. They are rooted in academic theory from Piaget to Bygotsky and they're mandated in many professional environments, education, academics, and legal and business. However, presidencies as anyone knows who has staged a live event cost money. They take venues, avi equipment, catering, staffing, swag bags, and print media, lots and lots and lots of print media. Whereas VR, as we are all experiencing here and now, offers affordances that are unavailable at many onsite events. So attendees for these residencies, we started these residencies in virtual reality in 2018 and the first year we had 10 graduate students and they range through K-12 higher-edge and working professionals. We had four faculty members, six alumni, one out-of-state guest, Selby, and the Dean of Graduate Studies. The following year we had almost doubled the amount of attendees and increased some of our out-of-state guests and the year after that we were well over 45 attendees. We had grown considerably with our attendance. So this was something of a a benchmark of success that we are getting more and more attendees here in VR. Now, the SUNY mallet program, which is the master of arts in learning with the emerging technology, uses the Kitely grid. Now, I do not mean to seem this is a plug for Kitely. We use Kitely for a number of reasons. There are many great grids out there on the hyper grid, but Kitely provides us with a few things, not the least of which is it's very inexpensive. It's obviously, like most hyper grids, free to the students to download, but it's very inexpensive if you want to start to build in Kitely. The islands begin at around $15 a pop and Kitely offers dedicated server space. So when you're hosting large events, the last thing you want to do is have your large event on the same server as everybody else popping in and out of open sim on that grid because you're going to have some serious lag time.  They get back to me within about 24 hours. Now, we host our grid or we host our residencies on Marion Island. Marion Island is owned by Dr. Eileen O'Connor and she is the program director for the mallet program and is following me in the next presentation. And Marion Island is one of the larger grids. It's a 16 by 16 and will host up to 80 people. And as Dr. Eileen points out, she is a scientist. She's not a designer. So her island is kind of an agglomeration of OER resources that she's picked up over her 10 years in virtual reality that have kind of been gathered together to create these really interesting little vignettes. The island provides multiple zones for exploration and inspiration and here in the images, you can see on the right side, she's got a desert oasis here in the lower image. She's got this fabulous crusader castle and then up above this is her auditorium space here. Now, the biggest problem that we have discovered and I'm sure as anyone who has worked on OSCC here is onboarding. Getting people loaded into VR is sometimes problematic. The number one issue that we encounter unsurprisingly is microphone settings. So to deal with this, we encourage pre-residency visits. Many of the attendees are in classes in virtual reality in the mallet program already. So they've had a little bit of familiarity, but they're encouraged to come into Kitely and make sure they get themselves situated so they know how to operate. Many of the instructors will offer badges for students to come in and just demonstrate VR proficiency and like anything in life, practice makes perfect. Now, in as a way, we are an asynchronous teaching model. So we have to offer a number of different onboarding resources to get people into VR. And mind you, these are all VR newbies. They don't have quite the same experience that many of us here do. So we offer multiple channels of information for them. First and foremost is Dr. Eileen's website. Now, this is 10 years of knowledge that she has polished and fine-tuned and covers pretty much every situation that you're going to encounter in OpenSim. There's a reference for it here on the website. She also offers classroom events, as I've mentioned before. Many of the students have had at least one or two events in Kitely before they get to the residency. They're in-world media scattered throughout Marion Island. There are tutorial billboards and links to outside sources. If you're running to trouble, there are ways to find help there. Links to the YouTube tutorials, of course, there are a proliferation of those. And we have offered one-to-one tech support. We ask people to show up a little bit early. If they need some help, we can give them some. Now, the second issue that most people report in VR is navigation. Now, Eileen has designed her island to make it as simple as possible to navigate. The first thing she does is generally teach people how to use simple map teleportation. And to enhance on that, as you'll see in the bottom image here, all these floating numbers and pictograms above her island, these will show up in the map. So there are landmarks that give people wayfinding paths to find different resources on the island. Now, the agenda for most of these residencies is generally along the same lines. The goal here is to form a cohort with your fellow students and provide a view of some of the technology they have to choose from when they enter the program. So they're given an overview of emerging tech in entertainment, corporate America, and education, and a survey of how it's applied use. One of the favorite segments is an exploration, the intersections of art, science, and immersive learning demonstrated at Meow Wolf. And for those of you who are not familiar with Meow Wolf, I encourage you to go Google it and just look at some of the videos that are posted out there. It's a truly phenomenal experience. They're also given a review of virtual reality applications, immersive gaming environments and theory, augmented reality media, mapping 360 cameras. We throw a lot of tech at them in this event. And they're given an introduction to the online collaborative graduate school community and available tech therein. That was a program I worked on over the summer. It was a collaborative community of practice website for the graduate students and alumni to meet together and just share ideas in an open forum. And over the years at the end of each one of these events, we've always given them a quiz what worked, what didn't work, and asked for feedback. And inevitably we got the same response. They wanted more interactive activities. They had a brief taste of it just getting in and sitting down, but they wanted to see more. So for 2020, we provided them with some other activities. And three of us who are members of the Institute for New Paradigms, this is a group that Dr. O'Connor runs that kind of spitballs ideas of how to spread the gospel of web-based VR to the greater world, created these three interactive installations on the upper right corner of her island. And you'll see that we mark them here with big A, B, and C signs to be seen on the map. And for those who preferred to navigate by flying or walking, I also created these rotating giant arrows with our names and pictures on the side of them so you could see them from one side of the island to the other. And the three of us, it was myself, Bethany Winslow, who's up later tonight, and Cydarm Madonna, who I believe is somewhere in the audience, I saw him, created these individual installations and we round-robin the students through them and just kind of through some interesting things at them to play with. Now, mine was an exploration of how VR can be used as a transmissive media. That's kind of what gets me going. How can we transmit information in world? And there's multiple ways to do this. You can link media to YouTube, and I use Google Arts and Culture a lot on Prims. I gave them a bunch of simple scripted state change Prims, things that would change color and location, size, shape, texture. These were all generated using the Conwiley script generator. And if any of you are not familiar with that, I would recommend you go find that it's a great way to introduce students to scripting and how to script out state changes on a prim. And it's a lot of fun to play with. Bethany gave them an overview of other VR platforms outside of just the Hypergrid. She demonstrated quite a few of them, Mozilla Hubs and the like. And she also had this really great interactive toy to play with, the opinionator, where you could pose questions to the group and the avatars could then march to the individual zones that represented their opinion of the question, and then it produced a pie chart in the center. So it was a quick visualization or a polling tool that was, oh, yes, it's there. Bethany used it and it's a lot of fun, the opinionator. And then Sidearm created this really interesting exhibit using Bundler to demonstrate the use of QR codes and augmented reality experiences using your smartphone. So he was incorporating multimedia tech into the VR environment. You'd scan, you'd load Bundler onto your phone, you could scan a QR code, and it would pop up with this truly amazing augmented reality information. So the students were bounced from one activity to the next, and then we sent them back to the rest of the presentations. Now the post event discussions on this were very enlightening. There was a lot of discussion about the uses of AR and VR into their classrooms and professional lives. A lot of them recognized the benefits of VR, being able to move out into separate breakout groups. At one point during the event, Dr. Eileen had sent them out to some of her different little vignettes that she had and just encouraged them to brainstorm how you might use a setting like that for an academic purpose. A lot of them recognized the high level of detail achieved in VR. We had a number of designers in the class who were very interested in exploring Blender and SketchUp as how to produce. There was a highly positive feedback overall. It was pretty much universal for the immersive nature of the event. Everybody really, really appreciated the fact that you were immersed in this environment and they bought into it. We had attendees from Buffalo to Long Island, from New Jersey, Texas, California, and we even had people coming in from Europe. A couple of attendees were home sick and were still able to participate safely, and that was a big plus. Nobody had any FOMO. It was comfortable and convenient. This was very often commented on. Nobody had to travel in horrible weather like we're having up here tonight. And social connections were made between the attendees and they were carried over after the event. So cohorts were formed and that was the principal goal behind having this event. I'm a little behind on my slides here. Please forgive me. So the interactive ABC exhibitions were the most consistently well received. So this really spoke to the idea that it is important to provide something to do beyond just sitting and listening. That was a comment we got the first year we hosted the events just like any other conference you just find a seat and you listen all day long. So they really appreciated the ability to get out to do things, to touch things, and to experience what VR can do. The second most commented on discussions were about male wolf and the intersections of exploratory interactivity, art, and education, and discussions about the use of game-based technology for education. These really got a lot of people's attention. So the insights that we got from this, it's important that you have to send out repeated advanced preparatory directions for signing up and downloading the appropriate VR. As I mentioned, most of our students are working adults. They're busy. If they don't take the time to properly download the viewer, they're going to have trouble in the day of. We required them to test their internet connections and computer speed and avatar controls well in advance of the VR event. We pre-scheduled help desk support and phone assistance in advance of the conference. I'll be honest with you, the most time I spent was with faculty, more so than the students. We asked the new users to arrive early and we allowed, and this is important, we allowed time for exploration and breaks for interactive activities and just socializing and discussion. Then the elephant in the room that I have to point out is that not everyone is going to be suited to virtual reality. No matter how hard we try and how hard we encourage people, inevitably someone is going to have trouble and they're casting about for help in the middle of a discussion. Unfortunately, that's one thing we did not have at the time as someone who could then take someone off the side and maybe work with them. Most of the students of the faculty were already engaged with the production. The conclusions and next steps, immersivity, interactivity, and connectivity really are the keys to success in staging a successful residency. A VR environment can provide the opportunities for connections to be established between colleagues and between ideas and planning for in-person events requires considerably more time and expense than creating a good VR onboarding tutorial website and designating somebody to be an onboarding support technician. And in conclusion, the SUNY Empire State College Mallet Program and the Institute for New Paradigms will be continuing to extend and expand their work as more and more institutions and organizations recognize the potential of web-based VR. So thank you all very much for coming. Thank you Scott for a terrific panel session. I did see some quick questions coming up in the audience trying to around how your students dealt with the pandemic. Could you speak a little bit about that? You know, I have to say I think it worked to our benefit this go-around if only because so many people had been conditioned to video conferencing over the last six months that we didn't have quite as many microphone or sound issues as we have in the past. So that was kind of a silver lining to the situation. Everybody had I think a certain degree of online tech savvy that maybe they hadn't demonstrated as a whole in the past. So that was a good thing. As far as the rest of it go, they seem to enjoy it more obviously more than Skype. That was the one comment that we did see. It was less invasive than being on a Skype call, a video call. Exactly. We hear so much about people being zoomed out so this is a perfect opportunity to get involved. But with that note, well thank you so much Scott again and as a reminder to the rest of the audience, you can see what's coming up on the conference schedule at conference.opensimulator.org and following the session, the next session will begin at 5 p.m. in this keynote region and it is entitled SOS, Extended Environment Supports for Expansion and Educators Plea. Also we encourage you to visit the OSCC 20 poster expo in the OSCC Expo three region to find accompanying information on the presentation and explore the hyper grid tour sessions and open simulator. Thank you everyone. Have a good day. Thank you.


So again for this example, we're still working with the performance equation. We're just going to have a different number to put in. So again our performance equation is 1 divided by execution time. So the execution time this time is 5 minutes. But I really need my 5 minutes to be in terms of seconds. So I'll need to convert that. And that would be multiply that by... So 1 minute is equal to 60 seconds. So I can apply this conversion. And in case you didn't already know, that gives me that sort of 1 over 300 seconds. So it's not too much different from our first example. I've got a larger number, but the same actual number, just slightly different scale. So again, I can't finish a whole lot of this task in every second. I can finish fewer than I could with either of the previous examples. And it's telling us that well, this machine doesn't get terribly good performance on this task. But that's still likely to be relative. For comparing two computers, this number may be really good. It may be really bad.