Hey y'all, I'm Mr. Gibson here and today we're going to be looking at how to use string operations in Python as you can see I've created a new notebook file here Created a couple of variables to get things started. So I've created the variable first name using our snake case So underscore between the first two words there and I've assigned that the string object Abraham and then I've created another variable last name and assign that the string object Lincoln and then a third variable named space which contains The empty string. Well, actually it's not empty. It contains a single space. You can tell by the space between the two quotes We're going to be using these three strings here today To practice some of our string operations and slicing and methods to get a feel for how we can use strings in Python since strings are going to be what contain all of our plain text and cipher text We're going to use them quite a bit. So let's go ahead and run this cell I'm going to press shift enter to run and create a new empty cell underneath it And it should load all of those into memory One thing to notice is that none of those were actually printed out to the screen. There are no calculations done So unlike when we do operations with numbers in Python when you assign values to a variable None of that gets printed to the screen. So if I wanted to print some output, I would need to use a print function So let's go ahead and create a new variable called full name And we'll create this variable by concatenating the three strings that we just created in the cell above and We'll do that by doing first name and the plus symbol, which is the concatenation symbol for strings space and then the plus symbol and then last name and When we run that cell again, we won't see anything created or printed to the screen The cell just runs without any kind of fanfare. It just does this thing But if you wanted to see what that string was, that's where our print function comes in So we can say print full name and we'll see that a new string was created That's the combination of the concatenation of those first three Strings that we started with We could now work with that full name string and do a couple of different things We could look at that name written all in uppercase if you want to use the dot upper method You can see methods in Python and our notebook environment are going to be highlighted in blue Functions will be highlighted in green strings are kind of this reddish brown color Operators are purple. So everything kind of gets a little color code to have you keep track of what's a special word Python so when I run this print command, we should see the exact same string as before but with all of the characters uppercase And there we go We saw quite a bit of different methods that strings can use so every string object has access to these methods that can Modify the way that things get printed so we could make everything lowercase using the lower method we could use the length function, which is not a method but We can figure out how long this name is including the space so the space gets counted in there So we were to say Assign to the variable length The length of the full name and then let's print out that length You can see that there's 15 characters in the string full name And at this point we've created quite a bit of variables We have the first three strings that we started with We created the full name and now we just created the variable length which is holding a number So if you ever get kind of lost in how many variables and which ones they are and what they're holding There's a nice command in Python that you can use WHOS and when you run that it'll show you all the variables that are currently stored into memory and What type they are so you can see these first three are strings as an integer and then it shows you what's currently Stored to those variables. It's a nice way if you're kind of bug checking some code that isn't working in the way That you thought it should Just run the who's command and see what's currently in memory If you watch the last video, you saw the bit about restarting the kernel This is what restarting the kernel will flush out It'll basically erase all of these variables that are currently stored and reset them It's just a really common way to avoid some bugs from popping up So now we've got these variables in our memory. Let's let's continue to work with our strings Let's take that full name string and Let's slice out some characters. So maybe I only want the first three letters. We can do that by printing out Full name we use the square brackets You'll notice that anytime you open up parentheses or brackets and the Jupyter notebook It'll try and auto-complete that for you. So you don't forget to close the parentheses or bracket later And now I'll put in some indices that I want to pull out or slice from the string full name So if I said I wanted the first three characters, that means I want the characters that are found starting at index zero and up to but not including index Three and when I run this we should see the characters that are found at index zero one and two It should be a B of R. There they are And if I wanted to go through the full name But only printing every other character starting at the first character I could do colon colon two number string slicing can take up to three Indices to work with so the one that would show up first is the starting index And if you omit that it will assume the started index zero the beginning The second index that you can provide will tell it where to stop and if you omit that it'll assume Just go right on to the end and the last index that you can provide Tells it how many to count by so if you start at the beginning count basically every two Indices and kind of collect those and print of those out and That's not really a word, but we get the idea that it's pulled every other letter starting at the first one String slicing is really powerful. We can use this to extract a lot of information from strings and just the pieces that we need So it's definitely something you want to get comfortable using in this course We could of course pull just Individual characters if we just give it a single number in those brackets so I could say first Name zero plus last name zero and that'll pull the Characters that index zero to the first character out at each of those strings and then concatenate them essentially creating in this context The initials of the person and don't forget you can use negative indices We're kind of working your way from the back of the string So if I take our full name and then reference index negative one that'll pull the character That's in the last index and display that to the screen a lot of things that we can do with strings And this is just kind of the tip of the iceberg So make sure that you read up on all of the different string functions and methods that are available to you and Python And we'll start using more of these later on in the course One last important method. I want to make sure that we we touch on today is the find method This will be the kind of foundation on how we will start converting letters into numerical representations in our next couple lessons So we wanted to find a letter in a string We could do that by taking the string name So we'll do full name and we'll end with dot find if you think about okay Well, where do I what letter do I want to find we're working with the name Abraham Lincoln? Let's find where that capital L is So if I give it this capital L string you call that a substring because we expect that it's contained in the larger string When we run this it'll tell us at which index in the full name string That we're gonna find this substring we happen to be just looking for a single Character but that substring could be as long as you want it to be We run that it's telling us that the capital L is found at index eight. So the ninth character in that string One thing to point out is that the find Method is case sensitive if you did lowercase l it's not going to find that it's going to find the one that's at index 13 And if it can't find something say we ask for it to find the letter q It returns a negative one. So you're not going to get an error message It's going to be happy to just keep on going Along its way, but it you can know to look out for that negative one If you were to use the index method, which works almost the exact same way When it doesn't find the character it throws an error for you Some people like an error message to pop up to know that things went wrong other people's like the negative one So just things keep moving through it's kind of a personal preference that each have their pros and cons So figure out what which which one works best for you And that should do it for this lesson Make sure you review all of the different string functions and methods and we'll build on that and continue to learn more of them throughout the course That's it for today. Thanks for watching catch you on the next one


That's New York Democratic Congressman Jamal Bowman arguing with Kentucky Republican Thomas Massey over how to stop school shootings like the one in Nashville that left three students and three adults dead. It's understandable that tempers, flair, and voices rise in the aftermath of such horrific events. When faced with such situations, the urge to do something, to do anything, is nearly impossible to resist. But is Congressman Bowman right that more guns lead to more deaths? The short answer is no. Over the past few decades, the number of guns in America has increased massively, so much so that there are now more guns than people in the United States. Yet federal crime statistics say that firearm homicides dropped about 40% between 1993 and 2018. For other crimes involving guns, the decline was 71%. Violent crime did spike during COVID and while the most recent data is incomplete, it's clear that gun-related violence remains far below where it was 30 years ago, despite more guns than ever being out there. That's great news, especially since reducing the number of guns in circulation presents not just immense pragmatic challenges, but almost certainly insuperable constitutional barriers. When it comes to schools, the 2020-2021 academic year, the latest for which full data is available, did see the highest number of school shootings with casualties this century. Thankfully, there are too few violent deaths to generate statistically significant conclusions, but the long-term trends show no increase in homicides or suicides among students, staff, and teachers. Overall, schools are becoming safer and safer. With the government finding that between 2009 and 2020, non-fatal crime rates dropped for students ages 12 to 18 from 51 to 11 victimizations per 1,000 students. What about Congressman Massie's contention? He appears to be correct, though contrary to his claim that there's never been an accidental weapons discharge by a teacher, a January 2023 RAND Corporation study found that teachers have indeed been involved in accidental discharges of weapons. On the larger question of arming teachers, RAND simply says there isn't good enough data on whether doing so would increase gun violence or reduce it across eight categories such as stopping mass shootings or preventing suicides. What then is to be done? Those schools are already gun-free zones or have strict controls on who's allowed to carry while on campus. Many have armed officers on campus, despite no evidence that such a presence deters violence. Recent school shootings, like the one last year in Ivaldi, Texas, where law enforcement officials not only did nothing to prevent an active shooter, but restrained parents trying to rescue their children underscore that police need better and more effective training. A 2018 school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida highlighted how many red flags school staff, police, and social workers had ignored. It's deeply unsatisfying to simply say that the people in charge of school safety need to do better. But it might be the best option, especially if the rush to do something means trying something that we already know is impossible, ineffective, or both.


Yeah, okay everybody. Hello and welcome. Are we are you broadcasting? Yes, we're broadcasting. Okay, great. All right, so thanks everybody for coming to this webinar on evolving the Geodetic infrastructure to meet scientific needs Presented by the National Academy of Sciences Engineering and Medicines Committee on seismology and geodynamics. I'm so glad you're able to join us My name is Matt Pritchard. I'm a professor of geophysics at Cornell University and a member of the committee on seismology and geodynamics or COSG. I will be serving as your moderator today, and I'd like to start by telling you just a little bit about COSG and the report So COSG is a committee of volunteer experts in the variety of geophysical disciplines and Serves as the focal point for community discussion on issues related to the structure dynamics and evolution of the earth COSG also provides a forum to bring federal agencies together on these different topics This particular report evolving the geodetic infrastructure to meet new scientific needs was sponsored by NASA and overseen by the COSG The report summarizes progress in maintaining and improving the geodetic infrastructure And identifies improvements to meet the new science needs that were laid out in the 2018 report thriving on our changing planet A decadal strategy for earth observation from space Focusing on sea level change the terrestrial water cycle geological hazards weather and climate and ecosystems The study examines the specific aspects of the geodetic infrastructure That need to be maintained or improved to help answer the science questions that were in the other report Our presenter today is dr. David sandwell chair of the report committee Dr. Sandwell is professor of geophysics at the Scripps institution of oceanography His research interests focus on mapping large scale topographic features beneath the oceans using data collected by remote sensing instruments On satellites orbiting the earth and sonars on research vessels He co-chaired the 2017 decadal survey panel on earth surface and interior and was a member of the committee on natural national requirements for precise geodetic infrastructure Dr. Sandwell is a fellow of the american academy of arts and sciences the american geophysical union and the geological society of america And is also a member of the national academy of sciences He earned his phd in geophysics and space physics from the university of california, los angeles Dr. Sandwell providing a brief summary of the report for the next 35 minutes after that We will shift to a question and answer period Participants in the webinar can ask questions at any time by using the q&a box To ask a question hover your mouse near the bottom of your screen where you should see a button that says q&a Should you have any technical issues? Please use the q&a box to ask about your issue I will try to get through as many questions as I can in the time allotted The webinar will promptly end on the hour at 2 o'clock eastern time As a note the webinar is being recorded so that it can be watched later by interested colleagues So thank you all for this listening at this introduction and I'd now like to hand over to dr. Sandwell for the presentation I'm going to share my screen. Thank you map for the introduction I'm sharing my screen now. I hope Let's see Can you see the screen now? Yes. Yes, I can see it. Great. Thank you Thanks again, matt and thank you all for joining this webinar. I've never done one of these before but it's great We it saves us all a lot of travel And fossil fuels so i'm going to talk about the evolving geodetic infrastructure to meet new scientific needs and You see a list of the authors of this report It was a mix of disciplined scientists and experts on the terrestrial reference frame that i'll talk about in a minute But also we had 12 reviewers that really put in a lot of positive feedback about the report and that really helped us polish it off in the end oops forward Ah Next Okay So what is the geodetic infrastructure and this is what we'll be talking about it really consists of four systems You see the slide here. There's the very long baseline interferometry These are large radio telescopes that distributed around the planet and they're mainly used to Measure the orientation of the earth in the celestial reference frame The second main component here is satellite laser ranging again. These are distributed around the planet And these are mainly used for satellite tracking but also for positioning the center of mass of the earth To take that reference frame at those few points and distribute it around the planet there's a system of gns s or gps stations fixed stations part of the igs and And um, there's about 500 of these and then there's a system called doris That's mainly used for real-time tracking of satellite altimetry You see two different color dots here. The red dots are run by nasa and other us institutions Or hosted by them and the blue dots are the international component. And so you can see this is really an international Reference a geodetic infrastructure. It wouldn't work without all the all these countries involved Hmm Okay, now this report follows from a report in 2010 an nrc report shared by bernard minster on precise geodetic infrastructure And that was really an excellent report and part of our report is to see what has been done in the last 10 years See if we've achieved the recommendations of that earlier report Um, as matt said the other uh document that we're following on to is this thriving on our changing planet A decade old strategy for earth observations from space And this involved all types of science biology oceanography everything to um The objective here was to look at at the existing satellite systems. This would call called the uh program of record And and see whether or not those existing systems will meet all the scientific needs of our communities And if not, there were some recommendations on how to What what new satellite systems would needed to be uh launched to achieve those science needs over the next decade? um Part of the reason we're here is that document Uh was really focused on space based observations um, and it wasn't focused so much on other things that you would need uh other infrastructure ground-based that You would need to achieve these science objectives. And so, um, here you see one of the recommendations from the decade old report But again, I highlight this is space based observations And so there's nothing about or there's little about the terrestrial reference frame the geodetic infrastructure So that was the second reason why we're we're doing this report was to um highlight the need for this foundational part of of this whole space program this geodetic infrastructure Now in that Decadal report, I was co-chair of the earth surface in an interior a chapter and This was focused on things like earthquakes and volcanoes and natural hazards and um Water cycle and other things like that and and we came up with a list of measurements that That we needed to achieve our science over the next decade And I've listed them actually in the order we found them most important The terrestrial reference frame was number one And then we wanted to be able to measure crustal deformation using gps and insar um bare earth topography came out as one of the key measurements Doing that from space is a challenge but aircraft Capabilities available right now hyperspectral imaging Was another important component and also time variable gravity has really been a key measurement for For a lot of our science and also for cryosphere and ocean and so on But you see the terrestrial reference frame is at the top, but it couldn't be included in the decade old survey So that's where we're going right now to try to highlight the need for the geodetic infrastructure that supports our terrestrial reference frame um Just to review here here are the the recommended designated NASA priorities for the next decade and they include Three of the things that we need for earth surface and interior This is mass change From a grace type mission grace follow-on type mission right there is a grace follow-on this would be a Further follow-ons of the grace follow-on And then a hyperspectral mission. It's called surface biology and geology But it's really code for hyperspectral imaging at high resolution lots of channels And then surface deformation change is really something that is needed by a lot of communities So our report had the following tasks First we needed to summarize the progress and maintaining and improving the geodetic infrastructure as detailed in that 2010 report um, and we had a meeting in washington dc in october 2018 where we brought in all the different uh stakeholders in this infrastructure and they reported on on the uh On what they achieved in a decade and what needs to be done and so on the second task was to identify those questions in the decadal survey that depend on the geodetic infrastructure and describe the connections between the the science questions and The geodetic infrastructure and that's basically the heart of this report um Making that connection And then the third thing is to discuss the elements of these science questions that drive future requirements for the terrestrial reference frame geodetic infrastructure What will we need in the next decade? How can we improve things? and then uh For us identify priority improvements. I guess I already said that to the infrastructure Okay, so This is the hard part Why do we need here? Here's a diagram at the bottom is this foundational geodetic infrastructure consisting of vlbi and slr and gnss experts software archives This is the part we're we're focusing on but What we're trying to achieve is at the very top here that he's enabled science applications things like sea level level water cycle geological hazards weather climate ecosystems geodynamics and so on. There's a lot of different science that can be that rely on this infrastructure But the connection between those two There's a lot of steps here And I'm going to in a minute. I'll try to take you through one step where it's obvious how the two are connected, but From the geodetic infrastructure that's used to create something called the terrestrial reference frame that I'll talk about in a minute It's basically just a seven numbers a reference frame and then from that you get Geodetic products like orbits earth orientation gravity field and so on and then That's used to support earth orbiting missions and this is really where that a connection to the decadal missions comes in and then Finally that's used to measure geophysical observables and then the connection to the science So how does this all work? Well Here is one place where we can make a direct connection between satellite laser ranging that's used for orbit Determination which is essential for Measuring sea level change. So this is just one of those connections But there's lots of connections between the infrastructure and the science Okay, a little bit about remote sensing um because really this infrastructure is really only needed for Active remote sensing. What do I mean by that? There are there are two types of Satellite sensors that you can use to look at the earth passive remote sensing would be something like a camera or a thermal infrared Sensor or a microwave radiometer Um, those are passive sensors and then And you can see this diagram here has the transmission. This is how how uh Non opaque the atmosphere is in different bands. We've got optical over here and microwave over here and then And on the top are the active sensors. These are the ones that don't just measure the intensity of the radiation They also measure the travel time and this is where you need precise orbits So things like iSat2 altimeters like SWAT synthetic aperture to radars like NYSAR And then even the grace mission and GNSS radio occultation will talk about all these sensors So it's really just the active sensors that are Are need need this infrastructure The really precise infrastructure Okay, why is that let's take an example here a very simple example of a satellite altimeter It's orbiting the earth And it's measuring the two-way travel time between the radar and the ocean surface To an accuracy of a centimeter or so But to get the height of the ocean surface above Something like the reference ellipsoid or the center of mass You need to know the height of the satellite independently To that same accuracy of a few centimeters to be able to difference those and get the height So that's that direct connection Um, okay. What is the terrestrial reference frame? Well, um, I think I already said this but it's basically Just seven numbers. It's the origin of the earth The orientation of the earth in space and then a scale factor Now one can't actually put a monument at the center of the earth Um, you'd like to be you can't so really this reference frame is defined by All those positions of the geodetic infrastructure, you know, several hundred GNSS and VLBI and SLR and so on now if if any one of those moves due to something like an earthquake down below here That will affect the reference frame and so We need to be able to accommodate motions of Of the geodetic infrastructure as a function of time things like earthquakes. There's a a significant signal associated with snow and water loading an annual cycle And then over larger timescales the position of the center of mass of The earth can drift away From where it is today by up to about 50 millimeters Due to the melting of the ice sheets is a prediction for 100 years But we need to accommodate and understand and measure these motions of of the earth So how do we do that? Well, we have we have these three main systems I'm not going to talk much about Doris, but we have VLBI SLR and GPS And we really need all three of these The VLBI is used to orient the earth with respect to the celestial reference frame It's looking at quasars out in deep space, which are assumed to be fixed Satellite laser ranging is good at measuring the scale Of the earth and also the geocenter because all these satellites orbit the geocenter And then GPS is is used for both of these things but also more for connecting the VLBI SLR reference frame to All our GPS receivers on ships and boats and planes and in your pocket on your cell phone Of course, you don't need that accuracy, but This backbone GPS system it makes the connection here Okay, again back to How are we going to connect? What why do we care about Things like motion of the center of mass of the earth? Well, here's here's that diagram of satellite altimetry over here We're measuring the height of the ocean surface using the two measurements But what happens if and on the right hand side you see a plot of The z component of the center of mass of the earth as a function of time This is actual motion of the center of the mass of the earth with respect to the center figure of the earth And so what would happen if we didn't know about this if we got this wrong? The center of mass would be moving up and down the z axis five millimeters, which doesn't seem like a lot but can be important and But the tracking stations aren't moving. They're on the center of figure and so you'll end up with And the orbit of the earth of course is orbiting around the center of mass So you'll end up with the sea surface look like it's going up and down in a north south in a z direction With an amplitude of about five plus or minus five millimeters So we don't want this because It's not a real signal. This this is not a real oceanographic signal We need to measure these things okay so A little bit more about the connection. This slide has lots of numbers, but um, just to make the point That we have all these decadal missions like jason 3 grace follow on ice set to cosmic to swat nice are These all are active type remote sensors that have to have precise tracking systems They mainly rely on gnss But if what happens if the gnss fails on the satellite you need to have this backup slr system And it's also used for checking the gnss and getting more accurate orbits um The accuracies that we need are If you look at this row here, I don't know if you could see my mouse, but the accuracies are 10 millimeters 20 less than 20 millimeters and so on we're down in the 10 20 30 millimeter range For accuracies Precisions are even more stringent on some of these satellites Jason 3 to measure sea level. We need about 0.1 millimeter a year and so on. So this is really what's driving our Geodetic infrastructure achieving these orbit accuracies for decades and even centuries So task one, um, this was to assess what what's improved or what's lacking since 2010 and We are Really, there's been a lot of progress, but i'm just going to talk about four areas of concern um NASA is still building out their next generation of vlbi and slr systems They aren't complete yet and there needs to be some testing and and and publish studies on their accuracy It's happening, but it needs needs to continue Um There aren't as many Fundamental slr stations, especially in the southern hemisphere to help control that z motion of the center of mass One thing we noted is that there's really No national GNSS observing system That could serve both as a us realization and connection to the itrf. There are Really good gnss stations in the u.s. But um They they're funded they don't have permanent funding their nsf funded that kind of thing So there's a threat there and then number four here is this aging workforce We're all getting older and some of the geodetic experts aren't being retrained and replaced so we need to work on that So tasks two and three, um some of the science questions that depend on Geotasy and during that workshop in february we highlighted four areas, um sea level change terrestrial water cycle geological hazards weather and climate and ecosystems And during that workshop and also during the writing of the report we we had discipline scientists working with geodesys to make that connection between the science and The measurements needed from the geodetic infrastructure Okay, i'm going to start with terrestrial water cycle. Um I think it's a good starting point a lot of us know about sea level change, but this is something that's a little bit newer and um and really does require very accurate geodetic infrastructure So the two questions were how do anthropogenic changes in climate land use water use storage interact and modify the water and energy cycles And how does what how does the water cycle interact with other earth system processes? And then the third one i sort of joke laugh at this how how much water is traveling deep underground well deep underground is only you know less than a few kilometers, but uh it's deep for a surface hydrologist So really what's come out in the last decade about The water cycle on the continents is that um When when you have a lot of water piling up on the surface of the earth There's an elastic downward deformation that you can see in the in the gnss data. I'll show an example And that's only if the earth is is elastic in that point if if you have um water Being drained out of aquifers It it looks like a sponge and the in the surface of the earth will go down So we have these two different signals and we can see them both in the gnss and insar Uh data, but it's mainly in the vertical components Um, and we need to measure these vertical components really quite accurately to to see these uh effects so here's a plot of um Vertical land displacement observed by gps in the western north united states from march through 2014 this was a time of drought And if you select the stations that are on The elastic part the hard rock you see that over this period of time. They've rebounded about uh 15 millimeters due to the A loss of water on the surface of the earth but also in the upper most crust Um, and so this is a completely new way of measuring Water availability in the west And i'll show you in a minute. It it actually provides a very different answer than you get from if you just have Say water measurements from snow loading and and other Surface measurements so the top curve here is what you would get from hydrology Uh snow dust model, but the gps is showing um a very different uh amount of water loss especially during 2010 to 2015 um And and the main point here is that the high hydrology models don't include that part In the crust and so they underestimate the water loss by A factor of eight in this case. Um, so it's a new way of looking at at water You can do this with grace also, but uh the spatial resolution is a little better with gps. Actually need both Okay aquifer system compaction, um this this this is creates land subsidence when you do a lot of pumping of of groundwater the land subsides and this is A problem or an issue over many places in the us not just california, but it's also on the east coast Louisiana, texas and so on wherever there's an aquifer that's being Drained of water you get subsidence In california. It's been really uh a big problem Um, especially during the drought. There this is a map of central california central valley and um, you see the subsidence In between that period of time and I think they have the time period wrong here Anyways, this is from sentinel date. I think and um You see there's been, you know, for 41 centimeters 50 centimeters or more of subsidence in various places. Um This isn't anything new. It's been going on since The 1920s, but it's something that we have to be worried about. There's a lot of infrastructure crossing uh these areas the the canals Lose their conveyance capacity because they aren't going downhill anymore and so on so It's something we need to monitor Sometimes the you can't recharge these systems if they if they compact too much I'll say for the terrestrial water cycle Here's the base the bottom line here. We need in all these cases We need to maintain geodetic infrastructure and in some cases we need to enhance The geodetic infrastructure and if you look at this chapter, you'll see We need maintenance. We need satellite orbits for gnss and and insar but um, one of the highlights here was that um To monitor a lot of this uh subsidence. We need to have Maybe better spacing of the gnss receivers. Um, especially in watershed areas So that was one of the takeaway messages for the enhancements water cycle Okay, sea level change. I'm going to have to move to get through all these topics, but um Sea level is really an important issue that we all hear about and there's really two aspects to this sea level change the sea level is going up globally with respect to the center of the earth globally and regionally but also that's absolute sea level but Also, people really care about relative sea level. How is it changing along the coastline? Will my house get flooded in the next big high tide storm and so on and so, um Those are the two things we mainly talked about in the report global sea level rise and coastal Relative sea level rise. So I'll go through those quickly I think you've all seen these kind of curves before this is on the left hand side is sea level global average sea level from satellite altimetry From the early 90s when the first altimeters were launched till today um, and you see this is in Centimeters the average rate here is about three millimeters a year. It might be closer to four right now People are worried about an acceleration. So you need to measure A fraction of a millimeter a year per decade to to see that signal And it's composed of two parts one is the ice mass loss From the ice sheets water going into the ocean and then there's um thermal expansion of the ocean But those two contribute to the global sea level rise Now people we're also interested in what's happening regionally and that's on the right hand side here There's a plot of regional sea level rise from 1992 to 2018 And you can see that even Even sea level doesn't have it's not a uniform number. There's places where it's mostly it's going up But there's some places where it's actually going down a little bit But we need to measure sea level to about half a millimeter a year over a decade and regional sea level rise to 1.5 to 2.5 millimeters a year and over a decade Okay, ice sheet and glacier mass changes We need to monitor the ice sheets. This is done with a variety of tools Radar altimetry to measure the volume change of the ice sheet, but to measure the mass change, you need things like grace But grace needs to be corrected for glacial isostatic rebound and that depends on models that aren't always that well constrained And so we need gnss receivers to monitor the rebound And and and then also you can measure the outflow of ice Ice streams are using things like interferometry from nice are and as I said before this The problem here is that as the ice sheets melt, they're going to move the center of mass is going to move Away from its current position. And so one has to monitor these things over Lying periods of time and we discussed a lot about Monumentation stable monumentation around the planet Okay, a little bit more about relative sea level. This is what people really care about Relative sea level and it's sea level rise plus whatever is happening land subsidence so so Vertical land motion can be caused by a number of things groundwater extraction hydro hydrocarbon extraction sediment compaction post glacial rebound and tectonics and so In addition to knowing about the ocean, we have to know what the land is doing especially along the the the coastlines and This upper plot. Let me look at the lower plot here first This is relative sea level rise as a function of distance from the center of the lorantide ice sheet So what you see here is that if you live in Churchill Canada sea levels falling at about eight millimeters per year because the land is rebounding at that rate Um, but if you live Out here in Honolulu, you see An average sea level rise about two millimeters a year. This is sort of the just sea level going up If you live here in Hampton Roads, Virginia What's happening is you have a combination of sea level rising and landfalling this is because You're on the peripheral bulge of this rebound and it's collapsing And so this is a place where people really worry about sea level change relative sea level If you look more All around North America here, you can see There are a variety of of causes of vertical land motion for bulge collapse coastal subsidence delta subsidence things like post seismic deformation Rebound and so on in in the Pacific Northwest you have a signal from Subduction zone Locked subduction zone causing changes in in vertical motion so We have to use the tools of nsar and gps to monitor these Vertical land motions and you see the numbers here are pretty small We want to get down to things like millimeters a year And that's going to drive the accuracy of this Geodetic infrastructure Okay, so for sea level change, this is the one that's really driving the infrastructure 0.1 millimeter a year averaged over a decade. We need to maintain this maybe even do better We need altimeter orbits that are very accurate insar orbits that are accurate Maintain the gravity field And then there's some enhancements. We have to improve the TRF accuracy to a millimeter and drift in the TRF origin to 0.1 millimeter per year I think I already said this improving the accuracy of the z component of the center mass and that may be depend on deploying more satellite laser ranging systems in the southern hemisphere, which is sensitive to the center mass and then one thing we pointed out to Tidegates is only measuring the relative sea level because they're on the land And so we need to also know what the land's doing by installing gnss stations that at the tide gauges Okay, geologic hazards and earthquakes This is something that I'm very familiar with and a lot of us are probably very familiar with so i'm not going to dwell on it but The major questions that we came up with is how how can large-scale geologic hazards be accurately forecast in a relevant time frame And then also what do you do after the disaster? How can you deploy your space assets and geodetic infrastructure to Help mitigate the the disaster Try to figure out when the volcano is going to stop erupting that kind of thing Okay, so i'll just give you a couple examples here One of the big hazards in In north america is this cascadia subduction zone It it's capable of generating a large earthquake 8.7 and 9.2 there was there was one in the year 1700 It's about every 300 and 900 years So who knows when the next one's going to be But what happens during that earthquake is you get large amount of coastal subsidence and tsunami generation The the two Models on the left-hand side here just point out that um with our existing geodetic infrastructure We're not really able to understand the locking mechanism Offshore because we don't have good data. We're there. We need some seafloor geodesy to fill in that area And then down here and the lower left here is a plot of one of these gnss receivers showing The eastward motion that you'd expect from this locked subduction zone But then there's this stair stepping sawtooth backward Stepping caused by slip at the downward part of the subduction zone episodic tremor and slip We'd like to understand this better understand if this is going to be Related to the earthquake if it ever happens And so on so these are the kind of things here's a tsunami model that can be Generated but also we can use Gnss on Platforms out at sea to monitor the tsunami in real time Okay seismic strain Uh one of the things that people have now Understood is that where you have strain rates in the cross where you can measure it with gnss and nsr When they exceed about 50 nano strain per year You're more likely to have an earthquake in those areas and this is just a map showing the population density and the strain rate in Asia But it's similar in Along the san Andreas fault zone in western north america And and the requirement here is sort of 0.5 millimeters a year over 10 kilometer distance The gnss receivers aren't Don't have this spacing to resolve the strain always so we need also insar at Some high repeat rates better than 12 day, which is coming Volcanic hazards Here's an example in hawaii the 2018 killaway eruption It was sort of a slow motion eruption and it's It it doesn't you know, it's not an explosive eruption, but it did cause a lot of damage to property 700 homes or so and Also a lot of damage in the the killaway of park there This is the kind of thing where we would like to monitor the eruption using a combination of gnss and insar And in other cases you'd want to know When is the eruption going to stop? That's was the big question during this eruption People really care, you know, they want to go back to their houses. How long is this kind of last so These tools can help with that provide that information So for geological hazards, we need to maintain the trf Um, we need uh, also I didn't talk about this, but we need uh monthly gravity change measurements to one micro gal at a 300 or so kilometer spatial resolution and we also need to Be able to accommodate quick motions in the In this geodetic infrastructure due to large earthquakes and so on Now I see I only have about five minutes left. So I'm going to Try to get through these last two and into the conclusions But there are two other areas that we looked at weather and climate and ecosystems and in weather and climate The major science questions are Can we improve the forecast? Going forward and then in the climate area, how can we Uh improve the ability to predict local and regional climate response to natural and anthropogenic force things And the main technique we looked at was gnss radio occultation The way this works is you have the high orbiting gnss satellites Transmitting there are signals and these can be received by a lower orbiting constellation of of gnss receivers in orbit cosmic and as the raid path Intersects the upper atmosphere ionosphere It gets delayed refracted and you can measure this and and make profiles vertical profiles of water vapor and temperature and pressure and and the main Benefit of this is that it works over the ocean where we don't have any many other vertical profiles of the atmospheric structure It's also very accurate in the middle atmosphere Two examples here one for weather one for climate In the in the case of the weather there's an atmospheric river example where Something like ssmi only gives you the integrated water vapor through the whole river Whereas the Cosmic cosmic data gnss radio occultation data provide vertical structure And then the one on the right hand side Is a range of different climate model predictions for the pressure change In the middle atmosphere. I didn't really say this but this technique is really Most accurate in the middle part of the atmosphere where we don't have other measurements. So Um We can discriminate between these different models using this type of data Okay, I want to so what are these? What are the requirements here? free open access to the gnss data This is already happening, but it needs to be maintained clocks and orbits are an issue for Getting accurate clocks is really an issue for this technique and then the other thing is that the Upgrading the igs sites to other techniques, not just gps, but Galileo and And glonass and so on what would increase the number of occultations for this technique All right. I have a few minutes ecosystems You know active remote sensing technologies can be used to look at the The biomass on the surface of the earth the volume of the biomass um And that can be used to address issues like carbon fluxes and so on so We looked into the geodetic requirements for some of these measurements and One of them is vegetation dynamics change in biomass and you can use tools of synthetic aperture radar polarimetric, but also insar LiDAR to provide estimates of the biomass lateral transport I think I just had a signal that I have one more minute. So I'm going to go to the conclusions slide So some of the common themes and maintaining and enhancing the infrastructure everyone needs to Need all the science needed to have an accurate and stable trf accurate and stable satellite orbits Maintaining the low degree geopotential harmonics. So we know we can calculate those orbits Augmenting the GNSS network and some for some applications And then supporting software models data and expertise And then here's my final slide I'll wrap it up here What are the priority improvements for the geodetic infrastructure? Number one here is to finalize the deployment and testing of the next generation of the lbi In slr systems. This is happening But we may also need to deploy new slr systems in the southern hemisphere We need to increase the capability for measuring the center of matched motions Especially over the next hundred years due to the melting of the ice sheets And then finally I didn't stress this enough work with the international community to Implement a fully time-dependent trf it again. This is really an international cooperation It couldn't be done without all the other countries and and actually Europe and others are are leaning the way on this And so we we need to have maintained this international community So what I'm going to do is stop sharing Or maybe I should continue if I want to show my slides, but Matt Great. No, thanks, Dave so much for your presentation And I'll just know we have over a hundred people online listening. So it's a great response And if anybody wants to ask a question, please remember to move your mouse to the bottom of the screen to the little button marked q&a Try to type in your question as quickly as you can I'll try to get to as many as I can in the next 14 minutes or so But john labreck already has a question for you, Dave Hi, john I'll try to read it off That's does the study address real-time GNSS to address geohazards because real-time crustal displacements in ionospheric disturbance Has been shown to provide accurate and rapid estimates of service deformation and tsunami hazards Yes, there is some of that in the study. It wasn't We didn't focus on that a lot the real-time aspect, but Of course, it is needed for this hazard response question. And and I think that's in the study in a couple chapters Okay, next question is from rebecca bendick and her question is What is your sense of the capacity for funding to implement some of your key recommendations? Wow You know, that's that's something I really can't answer. I think part of the point of doing this study was to highlight the need for this infrastructure so that NASA and other international partners can really understand How important it is and put some of the funding there, you know, the decadal missions have a huge resource and some of that should go towards This infrastructure, but I don't know the numbers Yeah Great. So we're still waiting for some more questions to come in. Please remember to use the q&a We have some openings, but I guess I'll ask a question, Dave You sort of ended at your talk on talking about the international community I guess can you talk briefly about how you engage the international community in this report and and What efforts might need to be done to expand that engagement in the future? Okay, that's a great question. Let me share my screen again because I had A slide on how this international community works together to There we go How does this all work? Well We have this geodetic infrastructure VLBI SLR GNSS and Doris and this is global infrastructure run by lots of different countries And they all work together to send their data to these data analysis centers Part of the international association of geodesy IGS ILRS IVS IDS and And this is where the cooperation and collaborations come in we We didn't really focus on the international part, but we Or we did have reviewers international reviewers, but But we did Understand and recognize the need to really maintain this this IIG components So those analysis centers are key. They're working together Actually, they there are several centers that provide results cross-checking each other and then that goes um to this earth rotations service and then Finally to define this ITRF so Our report is really mainly focused on on maintaining and enhancing the u.s. infrastructure, you know nasa was funding it, but um But we really really need this international component. It wouldn't work without that. So I don't know if I answered the question. Great. No, thanks, Dave So next question is from Jeremy Maurer. Um, his question is in terms of uh, societally relevant forecasting related to earthquakes, volcanoes and other hazards Can you elaborate a little bit more on what the report is thinking about? And what specific aspects need to be pursued to make that better? That'd be a great question for you matt um Earthquakes something I know a little bit about, you know, we can't actually predict earthquakes, but with geodetic tools we can measure the seismic moment accumulation rate um along a lot of these major Faults and from that we can estimate how much moment has accumulated since the last earthquake and and come up with a Forecast for the size of the earthquake that kind of thing. We can also Estimate seismicity of different areas by looking at the strain rate and the strain rate exceeds You know 50 or 100 nanostrain per year. We usually get higher seismicity. So those those two things volcanoes Maybe matt should answer this question. Do you want to answer this question matt? No, I'll defer it to later I mean I I'm not a volcanologist, but uh Geodetic tools are really good for looking at the deformation from the earthquake. I mean from the volcanoes before during and after the eruption and um I think in some cases the deformation provides a forecast, but some cases It doesn't work. So, uh, yeah I'm not an expert, but good. Well, here's a good question for you. Um from daniel a wine star He says you mentioned an aging aging cast of experts for the reference frame studies Where would you suggest pointing younger scientists to be active? Oh That's a great question. Um One of the things one of the issues that we have and actually nga national geospatial agency Just sent us a questionnaire on What were our capabilities for training? geodesists and And they identified 12 12 places in the u.s. That have some Geodetic training and the problem is um None of us really teach geodesy per se. We teach around geodesy. So, uh The centers are like university of texas, ohio state and so on So what would a young person study? I mean The science is really great. I mean think doing cryosphere or sea level um, or so on but to really To really learn the inner workings of geodesy Places like texas offer things on orbits. Um, we discussed this if you if you went and worked at a place like jpl or nasa goddard Learned from some of the top geodesists there Europe Europe has probably more geodetic Capability and and education. So that's a tough question. I yeah Yeah, well, we've got another question here from uh, jeff freymueller and his question is What were some of the most surprising or hidden? infrastructure dependencies that you identified uh dependencies Well, you know, I wasn't I'm not an infrastructure person. And so I had to learn all this from scratch and I think satellite laser ranging is maybe underestimated for its need to Uh Get the center mass get the satellite orbit serve as a backup system I think if we lost slr Uh, we would be really in bad shape VLBI also, but and then I guess another thing I've learned is that, um The gnss system is really Starting to take over and provide a lot of this information. We still need slr, but uh, I think actually john Put had worked with the Dov to get, uh Retroreflectors on the gnss some of the gnss satellites and that's helped to, uh Collocate those things in space and and so on so I guess The answer is I just It was new to me. So I'm uh, but maybe not to other people All right, another question from tim parker, which was um along the west coast of the us There are seismic and geodetic integrating stations. Are these um Is is the geodesy densifying with the seismic stations for the earthquake early warning and if not why not? Okay, that's a really good question one thing that we had when we did this report You know when I showed the plot of the igs gnss stations is only 500 or so stations yet There's thousands of stations that are important for science. So we had to Draw a line between science and infrastructure and this is a constant Battle because we'd like to go and say well, we want to do more with the science There were lots of things about soil moisture and um You know d gnss reflections for tide gauges and all that but we had to Try to stay focused on the infrastructure, but I you know, it's really important that the uh Seismo geodesy We we have a little bit about um seafloor geodesy um, we have a little bit about soil moisture, but um, we didn't want to go too far down that road because We had to stay on this infrastructure path All right, um next question from frank lemoine, uh, which was did you discuss the impact of how geodesy funding Is dispersed across agencies in the us where in other countries like australia A single agency is responsible for the national geodetic activities Is there a need for a better and more active coordination of different agencies for geodesy in the us? hmm, that's a great question we didn't discuss that in terms of V lbi and slr, but we did discuss that in terms of this backbone gnss because uh the What what everyone wants in terms of the gnss receivers are ones that are well monument Monumented and have more than 10 or 20 years of a record and a lot of those are run by um, you navco and uh, and so on and nga, but and and ngs, but um There's not a lot of coordination and the in the problem that A number of our gnss experts brought up was that um If something like you navco disappeared, what would happen to all those stations? Who's gonna run them all um, and so there needs to be better Funding coordination, especially on the gnss best, but it's maybe also true for slr and v lbi, you know, there's v lbi run by The navy and and also astronomers and geodesists and so on so It's a great question another study All right, we've got about two minutes left here, but I got a couple more questions. I'll try to sneak in Okay Nimit says the u.s. National Geodetic Survey has an upcoming mandate to the national spatial reference system that will closely align with the geodetic infrastructure And then and the itrf To include crustal motion, but with respect to the geoid How do you suggest we manage multi temporal data when the with the geoid aligned to the new spatial reference system to be more dynamic than it is today Yeah That's a great question and I'm not an expert, but I guess it We did We did discuss this issue of Of the changing geoid or the changing center of mass of the earth and how that Affects the infrastructure and so on so we talked about Monumentation for a hundred year time frames, but we didn't get down to Sort of continental scale geoid changes how that affects the vertical Reference friend that would be a great study. I think yeah All right, so this might be the last question from glenn madioli How valuable and what do you think the impact will be of the planned and already initiated upgrade of the gps stations To multi constellation gnss Okay, that's a good question Um for this gnss radio occultation That was their main Request that um the At least the space born ones all go to multi Systems so that they can get many more occultations In terms of the earth systems Um I think it it does better in real time things when you have shaking and earthquakes and so on You need to have more sources to view Better data. It's great for um positioning yourself Without a permanent station that kind of thing. Um I'm not the expert on that, but I I think it's going to be really important to to use all those Okay, thanks, dave. We are out of time Thanks I've got to end but i'm just going to note that your slides will be available online along with a recording available in the next seven to ten days So watch your email for announcements about future events. Thanks again for everybody participating. Yeah, thank you everybody


All right, everybody, I am going to get started because 30 minutes is not a lot of time and I want to make sure we have some time for Q&A at the end. I'm Mike Madison, and today we're going to talk about how to stop blaming your boss. If you don't know me, I'm a manager and architect in the professional services team at Acquia. That means I'm working with Drupal 8 every day doing enterprise builds. I'm also one of the organizers and the technical lead for Drupal GovCon, and I'm one of the maintainers of Acquia's built and lunch tools. If you're interested in BLT, there's actually a BOF later this afternoon, so definitely check that out, please. If you're a user, if you want to be a user, please come chat with us. A couple other just quick announcements. Registration and session submission for GovCon did open this week. So if you're at all interested, this is a free camp. It's one of the biggest camps east of the Mississippi, and it is free in Bethesda, Maryland every summer. So please check us out, and they did ask us to throw this slide up about code contribution sprints on Friday. So if you had a chance to look at the agenda for my talk here, none of this should be super surprising, right? This is how do you take what you're doing every day and use those behaviors to try and institute change in your organization? And if I had to boil all those other bullets down to like two high level things, it's how do you evangelize what you want to change within your organization, and then how do you drive towards that change in your organization? And I specifically bolded the word you on this slide because I just cannot stress enough that this talk is not about your boss. It's about you.  This is about what you can do day in and day out to actually start making those changes in your work life. So I was on a project a few years ago, and I think this project actually really personifies the problem I'm getting at in this talk. So I was not the architect or even the lead developer on this project. I was a back end dev part of the larger team. And as I was onboarding onto the team, I was hearing about the roles, what everybody's doing. We had a QA dev, this was good. We were doing two week sprints. The backlog was well groomed. The architect was doing code review. The tester was actually testing like these are all good signs. I'm like, okay, this is looking like we're going along. Customers even involved in doing UAT, which is even better. And then I actually started looking at the code and I'm like, what the hell, there's no automated tests in this repository. Like everything else was great, but there's no automated tests. So I asked the developer, I'm like, okay, so you're doing QA but you're not automating QA, why? Why aren't you doing that? And the architect said, well, we don't have time. It's a really short project. It's a really aggressive timetable. We just don't have time to do tests. And if you know me, I'm a pretty big advocate for at least having some level of automated test coverage. And I had a choice in this moment of how I wanted to react to that architect on that project to raise my concern with the lack of automated testing, right? These are people I knew and respected. These are people I had to work with beyond this project. So I had to kind of take my personal reaction to what I saw as a not awesome situation and think about how I wanted to try and drive that project towards change in a way that might not implode future relationships. So I had some choices, right?  Like what the hell, man? Why aren't we doing automated testing? We have to do this. This is our job and just not reacted very well. Option two, I could have been much more tactful and much more polite and like swung the best practices hammer and just really like brow beaten him and the team until, again, either things went south or they agreed with me. And more than a few people have taken that approach on projects. I'm sure many of you have worked with people who have thrown their weight around or their experience around to get what they want. And they may get what they want in the short term, but longer term that method you're always gonna hit somebody bigger and louder and more forceful than you are. This is a short term solution at best. And again, they may work. But for me, what I did in this case is I did some work. I showed them it was possible and then I worked with the team to actually build consensus. And that's not sexy, that's not exciting, but it does work, right? So in this particular scenario, I actually took some time after work one day. I like sat on the couch and watched a bad movie or something and I wrote some B-hat tests. I used what I have learned as best practices for using B-hat with the team. I actually extensively documented what I did. I provided examples that were commented out in a code that they could use themselves, the team. I demonstrated a couple days later what I did to the team. Like I didn't like try to ninja a pull request in and slip in these tests without telling everybody. I showed them what I did. And I actually got buy-in from the rest of the team to finish out what I had done. So that when they themselves started doing pull requests and working with this, they were now helping to contribute to this situation. And through the end of that project, actually, the rest of the team, including the architect, contributed automated testing to the project, helped to maintain the test base. And I do genuinely believe we delivered a better code base to the client at the end than we would have in the first place. And I genuinely believe that the second bullet here is a lot of the reason that this worked, right? I did not go back to the team and said, okay, guys, you now have to go do all this extra work that you didn't do initially. I did some of that work personally to allow them to see that it could be done. The fact that I provided the examples and the documentation meant that even some of the folks on the team that weren't really strong in B-hat no longer had that I don't know how to be had excuse, right? I mean, just like copy and paste this and take this. I mean, there's no effort required at that point. And again, I got team buy-in and we as a team went back to project leadership in the client and managed up instead of waiting for the client or the architect to come back and give a mandate for something to happen. So if I have to give you one takeaway from this story, it's that if you want to effect change at any level, right? The most direct and fastest way for you to affect that change is for you to actually roll up your sleeves and be willing to do some work to do it. And that's not to say that if you do work 100% of the time, you're going to get your way, you won't. But having some evidence that what you want to do is possible is a much harder thing to argue against than yet we don't do that. The other thing I want to talk about here in this case is how much time did I really spend writing B-hat tests? And the answer is not much. The reason for that is I learned a long time ago, like I come from a freelance background. And I learned very quickly that when you're working with a platform like Drupal, when you're working with a platform like WordPress, everything you do, there's a really good chance you're going to do it more than once.  There's a really good chance that the customer over here that I'm working with later is going to have different tests. But tests that use a lot of the same guts and underworkings and so on and so forth. So every time I solve a problem, I'm thinking about, how can I use that problem again in the future or that solution again in the future to save me time? So when I sat down in this particular instance to write B-hat tests, it's not like I spent 40 hours over a month or whatever like jury rigging in B-hat tests. I mean like I literally copied and pasted what I consider to be best practice B-hat tests and changed them to work for that project. It was like a movie's worth of effort. I also want to stress for Drupal, right, a lot of organizations aren't down with the open source contribution thing, right? They should be, but not every company is. That's fine. Think smaller than that, right? If you're writing something that isn't appropriate to contribute back to open source, that doesn't mean it's not appropriate for you to reuse it in your organization. My last job, we wrote a custom authentication module to do single sign on with Kerberos. It's a super specific thing to use with our active directory at that old job. Never going to contribute that, like it wouldn't work off the network. We used it on every single project that we did at that company. Once we built it once, we had it working and we shared it and maintained it across all of those projects. So when I say there could be a module for that, keep in mind, if you think bigger than what you're working on right now, frequently you can reuse what you're working on, architect for reuse. And these could be any number of things, right? This could be what local environment are you using? So if half of you are using Doxon, half of you are using Drupal VM, like figure it out. Like maybe you're not going to win that argument, but standardizing around a local environment is going to save your team time, effort, and money. Make sure you're deploying the same way. Think about how you're storing code. Think about continuous integration, automated testing, etc., etc., etc. Anything you can do to standardize and reuse an approach from project to project to project is going to give you a much, much stronger platform that word gets thrown around a lot. But much stronger platform to stand on to try and adopt change and best practices.  But on our professional services team, we were running into this exact same problem, right? So as Drupal 8 was in its infancy, as people were coming to Acquia to hire us to do like pro-level enterprise builds, we had architects who were running in 19 different directions solving the same problems in different ways. We were setting up our projects differently. We were using different strategies for configuration. We were solving the same problems over and over and over again differently. So the professional services team, Matt Grasmick, who is at the con this week, by the way, so high five him if you see him, actually started working on this open source project that today will standardize your template for project creation, give you a whole bunch of automation commands for deployment, continuous integration, VM setup, etc., etc. And was BLT what it was today when it first started? No, absolutely not. It was very simple, but it has grown into something much larger. It's been downloaded, I don't know, over half a million times. It's something that has very much taken this notion of reuse, recycle ideas, and build upon that little by little as you get larger and larger support. So my second takeaway is assume that every problem you solve, you're gonna have to solve again. And how many times do you get five projects into something and go, man, this is exactly like this, or this is exactly like that?   So let's pretend that you do now have some common B-hat tests or something like BLT in your back pocket. And you've decided it is the best solution in the world and it's time for your organization to adopt it. There's still a gap there, right? Because just because you've started standardizing or even your team has started standardizing, that doesn't mean that your CIO's office is gonna go for it, or the SharePoint team suddenly gonna flip over their table and decide to start using Drupal, right? There's still a gap from getting your head and your team in the right space to starting to build that support. And if I had to boil this down to one suggestion, it would be don't be this guy. Now, if you haven't seen the IT crowd, it's getting a little dated, but it's free on Netflix, you should go watch it. But also if you haven't seen the IT crowd, like Moss is the epitome of everything an IT guy does wrong. Every conversation he has, he assumes that the person he's talking to knows as much or more about what he's talking about as he does. He refuses to talk to people at their level.  He's pretty antisocial. Which by the way, if you're anti-social, that's fine.  And anybody that tries to interact with him just usually runs away because it's such a terrible interaction, they never want to talk to him again. Don't be that guy. Do talk to people at their level. So if they come to you, and by the way, we're not talking about your solution, your platform, whatever, we're just talking about relationship building here, right? If you have somebody that's non-technical and comes to you and you see him in the hall, coming out of the bathroom, heating up lunch, and they ask you a question, answer it at their level. Talk to them, be a genuinely kind human being, and take the time to reach out and have an interaction that they can understand. If you are working with somebody on a project and you agree to do something, do it, right? Don't agree to do something that you're not willing to take on and do. And this is actually a big one. I've found repeatedly that the most direct, fastest way to build confidence in your ability is to actually deliver what you say you're going to, right? Success speaks louder than just about any other action. Say yes more than you say no. To this day, I still have people from previous jobs that email me and ask me questions because the people they work with always tell them no. Hey, I want to do this. No, I'm not a yes man, but I will say yes much more than I say no. When I say no, it actually means something. We say this a lot in consulting, you want to become a trusted advisor.  We're automating our tests. I think it'll really save us time and money. The people that are listening to that argument are much more likely to listen to you and trust you in that context if you have a proven success record and you have a good relationship with them and you've built something, right? Be in the smart guy or the smart lady on a project doesn't necessarily get you a ton of cred when it comes to completely changing your approach. But if you're a trusted advisor, if these are people that normally come to you for help, every now and again you're gonna have the opportunity to go back to them to try and get support for new things and exciting things and changing things. And this last one I can't stress enough. Remember you're not the only smart person in the room. It is really easy to see that something's not working. It's really easy to see that you're doing something wrong. But if you're just another person sitting on the sidelines sniping in saying, this is dumb, we shouldn't be doing this, that's not gonna get you very far. So other people know the problem. You wanna be the person that tries to bring a solution to the table. Identify the problem, that's fine. But identify the problem and then say, here's what I think we should do about it. So two takeaways here. Remember that organizations, literally the building isn't gonna stop you from doing what you wanna do. It's the people that work there that are. So if you're gonna try and affect change, you have to have relationships with the people in order to drive that change. And I can't, this is something that just is always a factor. You have to be patient. If you start a new job and you walk in and on day one and you're just like, wow, none of this is right, we gotta change everything. If you don't have trust, if you don't have relationships with those people, you're not gonna be able to start driving that change. Nearly as much as you might, after you've built trust, after you've worked with them and you've built up that track record. So definitely be patient and pick your battles. So let's talk about this a little bit, new directions and new approaches. So we've got this idea, we've started building some trust, we've started building some direction to actually get there. But we're not all in alignment in how to solve the problem. All right, sometimes problems have wonky solutions. When I first started freelancing about 15 years ago, I read this book. So it's been out a while. And there's a story in it about the MTA, which has a soft spot in my heart because I worked with them for a couple years. And it talked a lot about how New York City cleaned up a lot of their safety and violence and crime issues in the late 80s and early 90s. And it's a fascinating story because it's not they hired more cops. It's not that they arrested more hooligans. They bought some paint, right? So there's this idea of the broken window fallacy or theory, right? If you're walking down the street and you see a broken window, you're going to assume that where you are is less safe. You're going to assume that where you are is a crappy part of town. And in New York, a lot of that was represented by graffiti, specifically graffiti on the MTA's trains. And they tried to combat this problem for years. How do we stop people from painting our trains? Fun fact about the New York MTA, there are so many trains in New York that they don't have a place to store all of them.  So it's not like you can put the trains someplace and lock a gate and keep people away from them. I mean, if you can get into the tunnel, you can get up to the train cars to spray paint them. So what they did was at several of the turnarounds in the cities, they set up paint stations. If a train came in and it had graffiti on it, it did not go back out until the graffiti was painted over. They let people in. They let them paint them. They didn't care. You want to spend eight hours vandalizing my train?  The vandalism stopped. I think it's one of the most brilliant solutions to a problem I've ever heard. I never would have thought of that. And if I can leave you with anything today, even with the best relationships, even with the most brilliant idea, sometimes you have to back up and think like an architect thinks. And you have to think that a solution that's going to get the most traction may not be a solution that anybody else has ever talked about before. Right? If you have a Drupal team and a WordPress team and a SharePoint team, everybody thinks theirs is the best. You can't just always assume that I'm going to somehow convince you to use Drupal because Drupal's better. I mean, we're at a Drupal con. I think I have a friend of the audience on that account. But my point is that sometimes you have to find a completely different angle, even if you do have the right relationship and you do have the right approach and you do have the right platform, you still sometimes have to think outside the box to get that done. So I wanted to make sure we had some time for questions. In conclusion, if I had to drill this down to like three very minimal thoughts, work to become a trusted advisor. That has nothing to do with your boss. I mean, hopefully your boss trusts you and it could very well be that you're building trust with somebody in a position of power, your direct boss, your boss's boss, whoever that might be, but become a trusted advisor and think about all things that are entailed in that. That's not just manipulate people into doing what you want them to do. That's genuinely build a relationship with people, which may be a little outside your comfort zone. I'm lucky, I'm extroverted, green badge, right? Come talk to me. But not everybody's like that and that's fine. Trusted doesn't mean you have to be out all the time interacting with people. It just means you need to have the right interactions when you do. Design what you're building for reuse. Once you've got these relationships, if you've got a good team, if you've got a good foundation, every time you build something, you should have the opportunity to improve on what you did last time or reuse what you used last time to help further your cause that much farther. You may end up with something like a distribution, right? There are many organizations that start small and end up with their very own Drupal distribution, open source or otherwise, that they use every time. You don't have to start there but you never know, you might end up there. And finally, like I said, look for that non-obvious solution. There are so many opportunities to drive change in organizations that a lot of people probably do see. So look for something that maybe is a little different than what other people have tried and you never know, you might get a little bit more traction in that situation. So with that, we've got some time. Please use the mic if you have questions. Love to talk about them. Anybody? It's a nice way of telling them they're wrong. It is. What is a nice way? Well, so you still want to have some evidence to back up what you're talking about, right? We've got the other thing. Yeah, yeah. But the thing that I think you have to be comfortable saying is that is wrong. This is something I do with customers and projects and clients all the time. We're gonna do X. Okay, well, why do you want to do X? Because we've always done X. Okay, so what I've seen with X is usually that you get this far and then this goes wrong. You don't want to just say, oh no, you're wrong or you can't do it that way. You want to try and tie it back anecdotally to something you've experienced or something you've seen. And frequently, as a consultant, I frequently tell people don't do something and then they do it anyway and then what I said was gonna happen, happens. Don't say I told you so. Then you say, okay, now can we revisit this and figure out how to get back out of this and stop it from happening? Right, you may very well tell somebody that something bad is gonna happen and then something bad is gonna happen. Then you take that point, improve the relationship and try to build your way out of it from there. Thank you, it's a good question. Anybody else? Yeah. So women, before you start the project. Mm-hmm, yep. So the team in the back of the scene of Daljok will have a community culture in this assignment that will continue to have their talk and the other team will have a talk so we're going to avoid discussions on the line. Yeah, so the question in the comment there was just, shouldn't the architect and the lead dev be building an architecture document and gathering consensus at the beginning of the project to make sure that everybody's on the same page? And yeah, I mean they should, but I think what you're describing is a very healthy team dynamic and there's a lot of organizations and a lot of teams that don't have healthy team dynamics. There's a lot of organizations that don't hire architects. There's a lot of organizations that literally just say, hey yeah, go build this thing, have fun. Like here's some money, here's some time, I need this thing figured out. So yes, I mean like that is the perfect situation. The architect, the lead developer sort of prescribe what they want. They give the team the opportunity to comment and sort of storm and norm. That's very agile, right? Let's have continuous improvement. Let's figure out how we can work together. That should be your goal, but in my experience there's an awful lot of organizations that either aren't agile at all. So continuous improvement is incredibly alien to them or they're not set up to give their development teams or their individual contributors the opportunity to sort of push back and say, I think we should be doing it this way. Yes. Yeah, so the question there was just, best practices with B-hat tests, right? I mean so the best, I think the least controversial best practice with a B-hat test is it should be running on all of your continuous integration builds. It should be running prior to your deployments. And in this case, since we didn't have any tests at all, we weren't doing those things at all. So in that case for me, the line in the sand was, I want to make sure that every pull request has B-hat tests running. I wanna make sure that if the pull request is not past B-hat test, it doesn't get merged. When we merge, we want an integration build to circle around and run the same test again against the entire code base, not just the pull request. That was the short-term goal there. The longer-term goal was to actually have as close to 100% coverage as possible for the custom features and functionalities that were actually built on the site. Best practices there I think are probably a little more open to conversation, depending on who you're working with. But for me, it's making sure that if a form has custom code to do a form alter and change some behaviors on the form, theoretically, there should be a test to make sure that the right level user can go to the form, do whatever it is they're trying to do, see the expected behavior, and also do a negative test. That's just a good testing practice in general. You shouldn't always just test the positive. You should also test the negative because if all my tests are just testing as an authenticated user, that will never test a problem for an anonymous user. Anyway, I'm happy to nerd out on BeHat test after if you have some more questions there. Yeah. Yeah, can you talk a little more about that managing? Yeah, yeah. So the question there is, how do you manage up? And I'll be blunt. Sometimes you can't, right? I mean like, I have left companies before because I couldn't. But I definitely find that one trusted voice is better than an angry voice. A group of voices on a team all saying the same thing is better than one trusted voice. So if you're building consensus on your team, if you're going back to your management or your team leader, whoever, and you're trying to have these conversations, you know, I always say look for the victory you can find. So I work a lot in the government space, as I said. Something I hear a lot from government stakeholders is we really want to use Drupal VM, but we can't because we don't get pseudo access on our laptops.  Right, doesn't matter how much you tell them that we have to be able to do this. Like that's probably something even your boss can't change. Right, if your government organization does not allow you to have root level access on your computer, I don't know how high up you'd have to go to get that changed. In that case, I would abandon that fight and start looking for the next best thing, right? If I can't have a local environment or if I can't use Drupal VM, what can I do to give me the same thing that a local would? What's the next best thing? And then, you know, have a fall back point, right? And I found really great success with that compromise model. But it requires you to be able to sort of step back and not just get upset that they're telling you no. It requires you to sort of see the forest or actually in that case, maybe see the trees in the forest, not the whole forest, and understand, am I even talking to the right person to manage up what I'm trying to fix? And again, that's where relationships really come in handy. Give me just a sec. I thought I saw a hand over here. Nope, okay, go for it. If I can tag onto that comment. Yeah. That question. When you knew that next best thing, because you can't do the good thing, of the best practice in optimal way, I recommend start making a log of bullet wounds. These are the pain points we are enduring and the extra cost and the extra production by doing it the hard way, the best practice way, to eventually achieve that track. Took me eight years, but I got that from the lab. Yep, that's awesome. Congratulations to you. No, anyway, just for the recording, he was saying if you do have to have a fall back point and if you do have to perhaps not do the best practice, keep track of what you have to do to work around that because it may help your argument in the future. Make them understand. Yeah, for sure. Other questions or comments? Yeah, nice at least for the exit interview, that's good. All right, well, I think we're at time anyway, so thank you all for joining me. If you are interested in build and launch tools, like I said, we are having a BOF later. I think it's from 315 to 345, it's on the schedule. So, love to see you there. And I'll be around a little bit if you wanna talk some more if you have some questions. Thanks, everybody. Have a good one.


What's going on, Sam? Congratulations and good to talk to you. I guess your week's been, you've known that you were going to have this opportunity to be a part of this game, but probably not necessarily knowing that it was going to come down to the final kick. What was the week like leading up for you, and what was it like to see that one, even though it bounced, go in? Well, yeah, the week. It was a little bit different this week. Yeah, I kind of usually separated, practiced a little bit separated from the team, but got to practice with the team this week, which was good just to get around the guys and get some working with Matt over 10. That was really nice to do. And I just prepped kind of like I was playing a game and getting ready to go. And then the last kick, it came off my foot, and I knew it was good.  Hey, Sam, congratulations. I just want to know what you felt like when that ball hit the upright. Have you ever had a more nerve-wracking moment at any point in your football career than that? I don't think so. I really didn't think. Yeah, I knew it was good off the foot. I didn't think it was going to be too close immediately. And then I saw the ball. But it's a little bit nerve-wracking, but I still knew it was going to be good. So I was pretty excited. Hey there. So you go from being away from all the teammates to essentially being tackled by them after you make that. How much do you feel just really a part of this Titans team now after that one field goal? I mean, I do a lot. They did a great job this week. Just getting to start to know guys a little bit better. And appreciate it. But they did a great job doing that. And just leading up to the game, I just felt very comfortable around everybody. And it's just been awesome to see everybody so excited for me after that last kick. Where does this rank among the important field goals that you've taken in your career? Number one, for sure. That's the first, last second field goal I've ever attempted in my life. Tim? Tim, I know you've kind of been working on your own during the last several weeks. Is it possible that there are some guys on this team you've not even met yet until today, or still maybe have not? Yeah, so there's a couple. I'd come in usually during offense and defense meetings. So there's a few, but I'd still met most of the guys. And anybody tell you about the significance of the number two here as far as a kicker goes? You familiar with Robert Ronas? Brett Kern, the guy who holds for you, tell you about him. I know he set a record down here in Houston many years ago about kicking field goals. Yes, sir. Actually, I was talking about him at practice on Friday. So I pretty cool to be wearing the same number as him. Yeah, Sam, and I apologize I came in late on this. But what has this week been like to go from practice while active to knowing that you're in a game of this magnitude? What's the whole experience been like for you? Yeah, it's a pretty crazy experience, but it's just one of those things. You can't really get too excited. You still got focused on doing your job and having a good week of practice and a good week of preparation just for the game. So yeah, I was super excited. And yeah, I kind of took a second, kind of realized what was going to go on this week. And then I just treated it like, you know, I played a million other game weeks so far. So that was kind of my mentality going towards it.