They're like you got a like brax on carry and drag right the truth is that's really more like a Greco Roman kind of drag because Drags I want this guy to lean on me. So this isn't wrong. This rule isn't wrong But you can't really drag a guy unless I have a guy pressuring me inside here Now I can create pressure by one just being a bully, right?  And you pressure a little bit in pressure and back enough that you can drill it But enough that he's not fighting you right now And so here's my goal in the drag When I come inside, this is the guy and this just clears it. So I don't pull Austin into my hips This one just bumps in right it comes in and bumps it off The key is getting this hand in the armpit I want to get an eye in the armpit and I should have enough lean from my partner Now if it's done correctly when I whip and pull here he starts going hands to the mat in this position a Lot of times you'll find yourself in this position where he hits a three-point or four-point stance He's trying to recover and you'll be here chasing and running your knees up behind then Me playing with the wrist a little bit Right inside pushing a little bit And if I don't like his hands if he's thumb blocking me I'll chop him off and get back to where I let my hands set and now my hand is set inside And then as it's set inside he's leaning on me I'm going high to the armpit and then I'm going to transfer my feet out of there Here's what I try to focus on to get the pressure right Is I always try to get my shoulder behind the guy's tricep if I can go from here to here Now I know I cleared him and to get there. I had to move my feet and there's a lot of weight behind that arm now The pressure it They be clear chop, and I don't like his hands Right, and I'll guide a guy the best is when he's on my elbow and he saw I just put him there He was here originally posted on my shoulder.  I block him off I take my elbow in so he's got to take it. He's leaning on me And now I'm going to take my body weight away where he has nothing to lean on if I do this He starts coming forward in that Accommodation with this is going forward and now I'm getting down toward the mat What you chase? Depends. Sometimes I'll drag the guy right to his face, right? Oh He's here because the whip was good. Sometimes he goes into that four point stance, right here I'm chasing the back. I'm pinching him with my knees. Maybe I can transfer into here All could happen But without that lean you can't get him whipping by Again that drag is armpit The armpit is what's going to create that motion and get him going here. That's where the whip happens And then the lean only adds to it here Jason this guy down to the back Questions? All right, one two


Thank you very much. Thanks, Genghis. OK, thanks everyone for being here today. Can you guys all hear me OK in the back there? Cool? All right. Right, so my name is Neil Tan. I'm here to basically try to answer you guys five questions about microtensor. Basically, the question are who, what, how, why, and where? So let's start with who first. We are software engineers, data scientists, and physicists, and researchers, just a small group of people who share two common interests, machine learning and embedded systems. So what do we try to do here? Essentially, we are trying to move, like, make TensorFlow inferencing to run on the smallest device possible. So in this case, the microcontrollers. I'm showing this particular microcontroller here just as an example, because this is the microcontroller view we'll be using for showing guys one small demo after this one. The microcontroller, in this case, is running at 100 megahertz, has then much less than one megabyte of RAM. This is actually 320k. It's actually quite large for microcontroller, right? But it has a touch screen and everything, so let's give you a break. Has a flash memory, but the most important thing here is the power. Some of those microcontrollers are meant to be run on Quancell battery for, like, months. So compared to running things on maybe PC, GPU, or cloud, personally, I think this is probably one of the most important differences here. It's a power consumption. Now, let's just look at a brief demo. So what you'll see here beside the beer and banana. Well, this is the microcontroller I was showing, and that's the touch screen. We attempt to draw something there, press a button, and see if it goes back to the correct result. So that's me writing stuff with another developer on this project as well. OK, so you can just barely see a drill of three and return the three as well. We only have so much time to make this demo, so we didn't even have time to figure out how to print the proper text bigger. But if you squeeze your eyes, you cannot see it as an eight. So on the slides, if you guys want to check out the demo, there's a link here. So this is basically the neural network we have been running. It's really basic, just a multi-layer perceptron, four deconnected layers. It's trained on the MNIST data set, and the lowest memory footprint we can put this on the microcontroller is about 256K. But if you do the math, it's actually taking less than 100K. It's just other things that we need to get a touch screen and whatever operating system running does also take the RAM. But there's a lot of room to be optimized here. And let's talk about how we do this. So there's a few techniques in use here. The first one is quite important. It's called quantization. As you know, most of the graph in TensorFlow is in floating points, which each value takes about 32 bits. But Peter Warden, if you're Googling up, has a really interesting blog, which tells you how to convert the floating point into fixed point, which pretty much goes from 32 bits into 8 bits. So it turns out that for inferencing, this is pretty much all you need. As a result, we save about 75% of the memory. And another major difference is that in most machine learning framework running on Cloud PC, we have the luxury of memories. So the result is a lot of unused tensors or buffers, data, are being kept in the memory, even though it's not used for computation. But what we have done in Microtensor is use dynamic tensor allocation, which we work out exactly which tensor is needed and load it from the storage or just kill it from the memory to guarantee that you have maximum room for computation here. And because Microtensor is so tiny, you really want to guarantee that you're using the minimum amount of code and memory as possible. That also includes we're trying to work around from having specific functions to parse the graph and do other things. So what we did is we would just get the TensorFlow graph and just convert it into C++ code. We'll talk about that a little bit more in the next slide. There's no dependency on math libraries, such as IGNs. We pretty much rewrote many of the mathematical routine to guarantee the smallest memory footprint possible. I mean, at least that's what we are trying to do now. We use embed for rapid prototyping on MCU. If you guys never heard of embed, I encourage you guys to Google it up. It's pretty awesome for developing for microcontrollers. So this is the workflow here. We first collect the data, fill the data into TensorFlow, make your network of choice, and we train your model. And that turns out to be a political buffer file, a graph. MicroTensor takes the graph, generates the C++ code, and also it has a runtime library to be included and imported into embed. Then you get compiled, and you flash and run on the microcontroller. That's basically the flow. And just to reiterate on that one, this is actually the actual command as I was trying to run and make the RIME file for the project.  And then this little program here extract the parameter from the graph, which is your weight, and save it somewhere for you to import onto your device. Also, it generates the C++ file you would need to do an inferencing on the microcontroller. And this is roughly the resulting binary in terms of the size, all right? The whole pie chart here is about 300k for the binary. But this is not the most up-to-date result. As a matter of fact, just a few days ago, one of the older, Michael, back in Austin, was managed to shape about 66% of the size of the original 300k. So the whole thing right now is about mostly the same from this portion. The whole thing is about 100 something k. But the idea is you can kind of see exactly, this is the micro tensor part here. You get the micro tensor library, and you have the generated graph. The whole thing for the MLP network I was presenting earlier is about 26 to 30k. So that's roughly a size we can expect. And there's further information to be done here, but this is the current state of the work right now. As for the design, micro tensor have three classes. Let's talk about the two classes first. Operator class is pretty much what you can think of as like convolution, metric multiplication, add, subtract, stuff like that. It would take multiple tensor objects here, and output to multiple tensor objects, pretty much the input and output. Right now we implement the C reference implementation. But in the future, hopefully as you guys or your old developer is interested in this, you will have like SIMD implementation or SPI if you have external accelerator for your computation. We have no idea what kind of hardware will be going out there, so we wanted to make this future proof by defining good interface to interface with whatever implementation we're going to face in the future. Also, you can implement network interface here, which can potentially do distributed computation here. For the tensor class, right now, we only implement the RAN tensor. And Kazami sitting right there, as another developer we have, is implementing or he has already implemented the paging system, which allow you to paging out of, say, the flash memory on the micro controller, for example. The idea is to allow you to run any size of deep learning model we have right now on the trade-off of the computation time. Let's talk about why they are doing this in the first place. Right, so this is a graph. I sort of have everything organized not to scale. This is how I have things organized in my head. On the horizontal axis here, we have the cost area. If you look at different platform here, you have cloud, GPU, CPU, application processing unit. If you go toward that direction, toward cloud, it's more costly. But then, at the same time, on the vertical axis, you will have more performance. What we have seen is that for most machine learning, while training is a bit different, but it is for inferencing, most machine learning stuff has been relying on the right-hand side of the slides here. So you get cloud, you get GPU, CPU, and APU here. But there has been a barrier, really, to move inferencing from all the good stuff onto the MCU. So that's probably due to the tools. Back in the days, we didn't really know how to move the machine learning stuff onto here because there's really no dedicated tools in place for us to do so. In fact, when we were writing Microtensor, we kind of needed a few tools to sort of help with this. And the algorithm, quantization and stuff, weren't really in place at the time. Most of the machine learning framework are optimized for accuracy, but not really for the size. And the speed. Back in the days, MCU is not as fast as today. So it kind of makes sense to make it possible that MCU is faster now to do inferencing on the MCU. So some of the application of device AI include sensor fusion. You can fuse multiple sensors together. And for IoT device, because the bandwidth are typically low, you cannot resend the full image or all your data back to the server. So it makes sense to do inferencing on the device and then just send the result back to the cloud. And MCU typically have a long standby time because it's a low power consumption, lower cost. We believe all this point would enable new use cases in the future. OK, so this is the last slide we have. So pretty much where. As you guys can see that the GitHub address is here. If you guys are interested, please check it out. We are currently just a bunch of embedded developers and data scientists. But we welcome all discipline to join this project in order to use it. PRs are welcome. Thanks, guys. Thank you very much, Neil. We have plenty of time for questions. Any questions? Anyone? OK, simple question. So you train your model using floating point and then transpose it to 8-bit. Or you need to start your training from assumptions that you will need integer numbers all the way down. So the training is done on the simple TensorFlow. You need to adapt it to TensorFlow for training. OK, that's a very good question. We do all the trainings on TensorFlow. What happens is if you train any graph with TensorFlow just a regular way, TensorFlow actually provides some script for you to do the grass freezing and quantization.  And what we did here is also porting those quantization operators to the micro tensor. That's why they are compatible. But yes, training is done in floating point. But there's tools for us to convert everything from floating point to fixed point to run on the MCU. Question? So do you plan to support more complex networks, like convolutional neural networks, this kind of things? Yes. But we are all doing this on our spare time right now. But we have defined interface for everyone who's, well, hopefully make it easy enough for people who want to implement their own operators. You can just easily just take a call and start sort of implementing it. But yeah, as time goes by, we expect to see more and more operators being implemented. And last question. Have you seen TF Lite by Google? Yes, if you saw it recently. To be honest, I think it's a really, really cool idea. But I haven't really spent personal time exploring. But it's definitely one area we should explore. No TensorFlow Lite is probably not currently supporting MCUs. So that could be one of the major difference here at the moment. OK, thank you. What is your most restrained resource? Is it from your operation? Is it CPU, RAM, Flash? OK, that's a very interesting question. When we were designing the thing, we were kind of assuming the use cases might not be so time-sensitive. So it's going to be near real time. But it's not going to give you like 20 frames per second or something, right? So keeping that in mind, I would say it's a RAM. Basically, the more RAM you have, stopped by SGN and convolution takes a lot of memory. So the more RAM you have, the less power it consumes. And the faster it runs. So personally, I think that's one of the key things. And growing your networks, it will again be RAM, your major scaling. You mean if you want to make a bigger network? Yeah. Yes, I would say so, especially in the fully connected layer. The measurement multiplication thing is just so large. But as I was mentioning, Kazami has sort of implemented this virtual memory or paging thing hopefully to make things a bit easier. There's always a trade-off between designs. But yeah, that's why we're trying to do it. Thank you. Any more questions? OK, thank you very much, Neil. All right. Thanks, guys.


Okay, thank you for your interesting presentation. I have a question about correlation you find between satisfaction with government and subjective well-being. Of course people can feel positive about their life and feel positive about government, so these are just positive people. So I think it would be useful if you could use a governance index from another source. And so maybe also use time dimension because you have some time dimension in the afrobarometer data. And secondly, when I saw your outliers of subjective well-being, so the case of Uganda and Kenya, Sierra Leone or Liberia was the other one. It made me think that actually what seems to be most important or extremely important for subjective well-being are shocks, so covariant shocks or idiosyncratic shocks, and of course, you do not have information on shocks in the afrobarometer survey, so I was wondering whether the things you find, so the correlation between subjective well-being and income, maybe partly driven by positive shocks and negative shocks, so I think it would be worthwhile thinking about that. Thank you. Do you want me to respond? Okay, great. Yeah, great. Yes, I just want to find out regards to the the data you used, I was still trying to appreciate how you computed the consumption wealth index. You tried explaining it, but I was trying to get that as if you could throw some highlight on that, but does your data permit you to do some desegregation beyond, so looking beyond the community attributes? I'm asking because depending who is responding to the surveys that you're using, the community attributes might vary slightly. For example, if there are persons living in the community with a disability and whether or not these people are captured in the data, and if it allows for desegregation, you're able to see what the variation would be. Thanks, Erin. This is interesting, but I didn't first a clarification. Your interaction effect is between the Gini index within the reference group and the own consumption wealth or the community consumption wealth? The own. The own. All right, then I Okay, that makes it more interesting even, but I think then there's why is that? I mean, okay, that just needs explanation, but interesting. The second point, I think you're missing an important interaction effect that you need an interaction effect also between the own income, the own consumption wealth index, and the community consumption wealth index. The point is that if you go back to the paper with the auction, we're actually not arguing that there is no relative deprivation effect in Malawi. We're arguing that it's not relevant for poor people in Malawi. In fact, we show there is a relative deprivation effect amongst better off people, particularly in urban areas. Malawi is a very high inequality country, and you can see a huge differences in the importance of relative deprivation, depending on your own level of living. And I think that's plausible when we tell a story about why that would be the case, but you're missing that interaction effect. I actually don't think it's going to show anything, but you might as well put it in. If you mind like a sip, I don't write these down, we'll go away. So thanks. These are all great questions, and this is indeed a work in progress, so this is very helpful. So first of all, adding a governance index is a great idea, I think, and that would be really helpful. And I am quite interested in this idea of shocks, and especially thinking about work about set point theory and hedonic treadmills. And so in some ways, one would, you know, if set point theory is true, something like the extremely high subjective wellbeing when season in Liberia wouldn't make sense, right? And so maybe there's a question here about, you know, a lot of the set point theory and hedonic treadmills sort of work is coming out of not nearly as catastrophic a set of circumstances as civil war and post-election violence and so on. So I think you're quite right, maybe there are things like these sorts of shocks that really transform subjective wellbeing for a longer duration than maybe has been found in studies from the West. So that's really exciting, and I need to figure out how one can do that. Secondly, your question on data, this all can be disaggregated. There are, the Afro-Aphrobrometer data are at the household level, and the reason initially why I aggregated up is in order to get reference groups, but then also I was quite interested in demographic and health survey, health information in which I needed to kind of create communities. It turns out, or create community averages, it turns out those don't matter as much, but your point is taken that there is a lot of variation across communities and that's, I mean, across individuals in a rural area. And so to use a rural aggregate measure loses some of that, and I agree this kind of comes back to an issue with the Afro-Aphrobrometer data where there's not a lot within each particular country, there's not a lot of variation across different regions. And so I'd have maybe eight people in one, you know, in one region and maybe 12 people somewhere else. And so it was quite hard to figure out how do you estimate it, that kind of, that degree of fineness. And so I think I have to kind of think about other, other data sets that would allow me to kind of get at that disaggregated point, but your point's well taken. In terms of marching, the rebellion's points, I mean absolutely, I didn't mean to sort of gloss over the findings of Lakshin and rebellion at all. I do think that there is a really interesting story there. And I think to me what's quite interesting is for the poor respondents, finding neighbors and family mattering quite a bit is a really interesting mutual insurance kind of social protection piece that's really valuable. And I will certainly try to add, I will try estimating community wealth index interacted with the own wealth index. I think that could be quite fruitful. And so what I find thinking about the marginal effects, I don't think I have the slide with me, but the marginal effects when I'm varying the consumption wealth index over the genie, I don't find any statistically significant findings. It's only sort of this direction where I have specific genies for each community that I'm finding a small change in the consumption wealth index matters a lot. And I'm not quite sure why that might be. I think it might be that an increase in a genie is maybe a little bit harder for respondents to sort of maybe notice. I'm not sure. It's an interesting puzzle, though, which is why I'm finding it one way and not the other. Thank you, Michael. This is interesting work. I think you need to kind of go back to the subjective poverty lines now. In a sense, it's like it's not closed. I mean, if you start with your motivation of the concerns that the South African government had about the objective poverty measures, then to go back to those, you now have to construct the subjective poverty line based on your aggressions, which will then be a function of, in other words, fix the subjective welfare, back out the poverty line in money income space, which is now a function of all the other Xs, which include your social wage. Now you've got a poverty line which properly reflects the social wage as the government claims, and then redo the poverty measures with that metric. And that's exactly the same as redoing the poverty measures with a subjective welfare, predicted subjective welfare. And I encourage you to use either predicted subjective welfare, which is exactly the same as using either the poverty lines based on income but subjective poverty lines, given that subjective welfare is monotonic in income. So I encourage you to do that rather than use what you call subjective poverty based on the answers to the question. Because I think the answers to the question are so contaminated by personality effects, heterogeneity in all kinds of ways. But I really believe there is a signal in the noise of subjective data, and you've extracted that signal, I think, very well. The other, just to briefly mention, I've been doing now for a few years the project on trying to establish whether there are significant biases in the types of aggressions you're using by using vignettes. What we do is we go to households, we ask them their subjective welfare, we've done it in three countries now, we ask them their subjective welfare, and then we describe people in some detail with their living conditions, how they live, how much they eat and so on, and we ask the same respondents to tell us what the subjective welfare is of those people. So that way we can recalibrate the scales and see if the aggressions are significantly biased. The news is very encouraging in all three countries. There is a bias, but it's quite small. So you really can learn from these kinds of data. Actually, I think this is probably just an amplification of Martin's point just to say that you know there's this vigorous debate in South Africa about what the objective poverty line actually should be. And I wondered whether in the earlier part of your paper you'd looked at what it would look like with several different objective poverty lines because they're very far apart and of course they reflect different opinions about what it means to be poor. Feeding on from that a little bit then, it does strike me as an interesting thing that you're asking one respondent in the household to talk about the subjective poverty of that household but making a lot of your discussion is about the intra-household process and money metrics and intra-household. I don't know what the evidence says about whether it matters who you talk to in the household and whether it's fair to actually think that you've solved the issue with a single respondent from the household subjectively. Yeah, I think on the issue of subjective poverty lines, my co-author and I have talked about this to some extent. Some of the additional things we've considered are which measures of subjective well-being. We have a sort of battery of those types of questions. So one of the first two questions that we've discussed amongst ourselves are what you include on the right-hand side of the equation and what differences you might get based on what you include on the right-hand side of the equation with various combinations of the subjective types of questions. We also have the question that you've used yourself and others have used in Albania, the sort of subjective ladder. So I mean there are sort of different options in terms of calibrating a subjective poverty line. We looked at this as sort of a first attempt to see if we could draw something out of what might be important before sort of a significant next step. But that's something we've been sort of discussing at length. Second question, sorry, I didn't bring a pen to the podium. Poverty lines. Yeah, yeah. We didn't use different poverty lines. SA came out with three. So one possibility would be some sort of robustness based on different poverty lines. They are quite different. I think what you would expect is as the objective poverty line gets lower, you'd have greater overlap between subjective and objective, but you might then find that the protectors of social poverty change in their sort of order of importance. That's something we're looking at and we're not quite sure if it's going to be more of a robustness check or if it's something that could be worth exploring further. Sorry, Murray, I forgot yours as well. It was just about asking a single respondent of their subjective well-being and thinking that that represents the household, especially as you go on to talk a lot about intra-hustle things and equivalent scales and stuff. Yeah, I mean the work that we found interesting there was Bookwalter, who sort of looks at South African data and suggests that the person responding for the household generally tends to evaluate the well-being of the household based on household characteristics rather than personal characteristics. The difference with that work is they had to assume that the head of the household was the respondent, because we got more nuanced data and were able to identify exactly who was responding, but whether that has an implication or how much further we could take it with this particular data. And obviously Dory, my co-author and others have found that when you control for individual level factors from NIDS, where you actually get individual information on each individual in the household, it would make a difference. And I would say a similar response to whether the person responding is a main income earner or her or his position in the household would probably make a difference. So we weren't controlling for the individual contributions of that person to the household, but we were able to control for her or his personal characteristics, including health education. So I think we maybe got at some of that, but could do better probably. Thanks very much. Yeah, quick question, but maybe I'm missing something really basic, so forgive me. But it seems to me that an interesting null hypothesis that you could test in a more rigorous way perhaps is whether employment leads to happiness. That would seem to me probably a more, well, a useful thing to look at, right? Because then you could use your, you know, being in the treatment as the instrument for being employed. I don't know whether you've considered that. They would just seem pretty obvious to me as an addition to what you're doing. Sure, sure. Trying to use happiness in this way so directly for policy to derive policy restrictions is tremendously important, but I think there's one problem with it in the European happiness literature. It's well established that changes are much more important impact on happiness than levels. You win the lottery, you're happy, then you get used to it and you're miserable.  And if a temporary intervention like this, you can imagine people become employed, they get used to it, they're happy for a little while, they get used to being employed, the happiness goes back to the mean again. And whereas the people who were employed because of the voucher and then once the scheme ends or whatever intervention it ends, they go back to where they were before, they're miserable. And so this will pull down the happiness impact of any temporary intervention. And I think this is an important, something that you have to examine in studies like this or else you're going to be under-reporting the happiness impact of interventions. There seems to be another interpretation, I'm not sure about this, but let's walk through another story which suggests that your results are not at all surprising. Suppose that unemployment is picking up a latent personality trait. Just bear with me, there's some latent personality effect which is constant and we know that personality influences the answers to happiness questions. It's hugely important in the psychological literature. So what would happen then, I mean if it is, and there's a rationale for that as well, that it's a latent personality trait, the rationale would be that elementary economics, that holding constant income, being unemployed just means you have more leisure, so your happiness should surely rise. Holding constant income, if you're not holding constant income, of course there's no different story altogether, if you're controlling for income, you should expect that. So that all hangs together, says okay, unemployment effect is just a personality, latent personality trait, the economics and the psychology point in the same direction. What would happen then if you exogiously switch people into employment through your randomized control trial, nothing, you would have no effect at all. So try, I mean think it through, but if you did that, you see if it's a personality trait, nothing to do with the, it's not an effect of unemployment per se, it's an effect of a correlate of unemployment which is in your editor, which is the personality trait, then the exogenous switching will have no effect, because the personality trait is what's driving the aspect of subjective welfare. Can you say something about that? Okay, well great, thank you very much. Very nice comments. Yeah, yes, exactly, but I mean like when we started off, that wasn't what we were interested in, that's what I'm saying, it is the first round that we're actually presenting these results, and we were hoping that we would find a bit more on the active labor market policy itself, because that was our interest, that was what we were supposed to evaluate, but you're absolutely wrong, I mean one can take this absolutely further from there, so yeah, I agree. So in order, yes, happiness as a policy, but rather sort of, and that I think is sort of the idea also of the paper that I sort of don't like to say, but if you're the co-author, because they also say, I mean like how long this effect might last is not clear. And maybe one way for us to also look at it would be to see actually people that sort of transitioned into a job more recently towards the interview. Do they actually report differences? So can we use potential to the time dimension from transitioning into the interview as a measure for that? I think that might be a way forward to sort of try and unpack that, but it's a good point, thank you very much. Yeah, the exogenous, yeah, but in order to do that, clearly we need the panel dimension, I would assume, or not necessarily. I know what I'm like, okay, but that sort of, would that go back to basically your argument as well? I mean, so if, for example, a personality trait, so if it doesn't change, right, so it basically means also you basically just have a potential change, so your response is just to change, and then you come back to the level that you would have anyway. I think it's a different point, but it's very hard to get data on that, but I think there is, I know there's some Dutch work where they have these wonderful panels of the whole Dutch population, which enables them to look at the question of is to compare employment experiences with subjective well-being, and they came up with a finding a few years ago, I don't know whether they still would say this, that it's not unemployment that makes people miserable, it's miserable people who become unemployed, which is interesting. But that's my point, so I wouldn't need the panel dimension. No, no, but I hear what you... What I'm saying is not something that you can go and test, it's a theoretical interpretation of the argument. Now, if I put an empiricist hat on, how would I test it? Well, I would need either to control for personality attributes as data, or I'd need vignettes. Because the personality attributes are saying that the subjective welfare scales are contaminated by something in the error term, we have to clean that out. So I'd need to recalibrate the scales using vignettes, or I'd need personality data. So you don't have either, so that's not the point. In a sense, you could... It's just to say, when you think about the results, what do you learn from them, to clarify that this is other interpretation, which you didn't point to, and I can't see why it wouldn't be valid, just thinking it through intuitively. I'll take that question just now. We'll just... quickly. So, yes, we do have some information on the jobs, and the differences aren't significant. So the kind of jobs that you would get through the treatment are not necessarily different to the jobs that people got in the control either. In general, what type of jobs do they get? Do they focus on personal possibilities? Yeah, so now, absolutely. I mean, again, and it comes back to the kind of sample that we've got there. It's predominantly less educated. So the kind of jobs that you would get would be contract and would be more menial. So they're not very demanding or most probably stimulating jobs, absolutely. And the one measure that we do have is actually sort of a self-reported measure if they're considered actually a job that we started playing around with as well. But that's across both groups. So this is just to follow Martin's point about another, yet another interpretation would be one of kind of a William Julius Wilson culture of poverty-style interpretation where you have this astronomically high unemployment rate among a particular subset of a community or of a country and it's quite possible that as you kind of hint at at the end, maybe employment is not something that they see as important to what makes them happy, you know, and if no one else around them or very few people around them are able to get decent jobs, maybe that's not something that they're anticipating as being important for them. Okay, we have the gloves here. Thank you very much.


Well under the Indian Citizenship Act 1955 there are several options to acquire Indian citizenship. One could acquire citizenship by birth, by descent, by registration and by naturalization. But today I am not going into or getting into the details of the acquisition of Indian citizenship. I have received many messages from my viewers and channel followers regarding the issue of losing an Indian citizenship. So I would be talking about the termination or ceasing to be an Indian citizen in certain circumstances. Most people are not aware that there are very serious and severe legal provisions under the Indian laws whereby an Indian citizen can lose his citizenship. The Citizenship Act lays down three modes or means by which an Indian citizen may lose his citizenship and these laws have been in existence for decades. These three modes are renunciation, termination and deprivation. The first two modes are quite softer and voluntary kind of provisions. Like section 8 of the Citizenship Act deals with renunciation. If an adult makes a declaration of renunciation of Indian citizenship he loses to be an Indian citizen or he loses Indian citizenship. Consequently any minor child of that person also loses Indian citizenship from the date of renunciation though when the child reaches the age of 18 he has the right to have his Indian citizenship restored. Now termination is contained in section 9 of the Citizenship Act. The provision states that any citizen of India who by naturalization or registration acquires the citizenship of another country shall automatically cease to be citizen of India. The termination provision differs from the renunciation as it is slightly coercive and reprimanding. Obviously the acquisition of another country's passport is also deemed to be voluntary acquisition of another country's nationality leading to the termination of Indian citizenship. Now before I come to the final most serious provision I would request all of you to press the subscribe button to subscribe to this channel. Well the final provision this is withdrawal or cancellation of the citizenship. Yes section 10 of the Citizenship Act brands this provision as deprivation of citizenship. According to this provision of law the central government by its order can deprive any citizen of India of the citizenship which he got by naturalization or by registration. If the government is satisfied that the registration or certificate of naturalization was obtained by means of fraud, false representation or the concealment of any material fact or if government is satisfied that citizen has shown himself by act or speech to be disloyal or disaffected towards the constitution of India or the government is satisfied that citizen has during any war in which India may be engaged unlawfully traded or communicated with an enemy or been engaged in or associated with any business that was to his knowledge carried on in such manner as to assist an enemy in that war. Or in the circumstance where citizen has within 5 years after registration or naturalization been sentenced in any country to imprisonment for a term of not less than 2 years. And finally there is another circumstance in which the citizenship can be deprived that where the citizen has been ordinarily resident out of India for a continuous period of 7 years and during that period has neither been at any time a student of any educational institution in a country outside India or in the service of a government in India or of international organization of which India is a member. So that's a serious provision but obviously government has to satisfy itself with regard to these conditions which I just mentioned. So one has to stop taking citizenship for granted and believe me much stricter provision about termination of citizenship exist in the laws of other nations as well. Thank you.


Alright everyone, I'm back here with another live trading video and today's video is going to be on a large cap stock Rivian. So Rivian was popping up pre-market because they just got a deal with Mercedes-Benz. So Rivian, as you can see the Mercedes news popped it right up in the morning and then it started to slowly come back down. So my thought process as a short buy-us trader is let the stock top out and once the top is set at $36.25 I can now look to short bounces and join the trend lower. Oftentimes a lot of these stocks pop up and they come right back down. My plan on this stock was ideally I'm looking for a VWAP break of $36.50 for an ultimate unwind lower or if this reclaims $38.25 then that's going to be my ultimate stop that's from going to walk away because now the trade thesis is no longer active. So let's see what happens here. That's pretty much how I made $3,000 in 10 minutes.


Hey there Psych2Goers, welcome back to our channel.   It's very easy to get lost in the motions of the day and repeatedly perform the same tasks every single day. These harmful yet small habits can pile up and take on bigger, often negative meaning later on. Thus, identifying the small signs as they creep into your lifestyle can help nip the problem at the bud. Before we begin, please note this is for educational purposes and is based on personal opinions. It's not a substitute for professional advice, but for general guidance. We advise you to always listen to your intuition and always do what is right for you. Alright, moving ahead, here are six warning signs that your life might fall apart. Number one, you're not interested in anything. Do you feel bored with life? This feeling is generally known as anhedonia and might be caused by a number of things such as depression, anxiety, stress, substance use, etc. Not having any interest makes it extremely difficult for you to find any motivation to carry on with your life goals. Getting out of bed in the morning seems a struggle. When you find yourself lacking a positive reaction to things that you used to feel happy about, it's important to act urgently before the development of any serious mental health issues.  However, if you feel nothing is working, seeking professional help allows you to cope better.  How much effort are you putting into maintaining good overall hygiene? Showing indifference towards your own body and environment's condition is a clear indicator that not only are things not going smoothly but that you've accepted this and given up. Of course, there are cases where you're simply too busy to properly care for your parents and home. The main factor that you should focus on when thinking about this sign is whether you're indifferent to it or not. You can try cleaning your room or house and see if this actually makes a difference. Cleaning is reported as a useful technique to distract yourself from sad thoughts and sort out whatever is going on in your mind too. Number three, you refuse to communicate with others. When was the last time that you had a proper conversation with your family or friends? If you've been avoiding communication with anyone purposefully, then it might mean that there's a cause for concern. Yes, everyone needs their personal space to recharge and focus on their own thoughts, but if the reason you're isolating yourself relates to fear, then you might want to do something to change this. This can be due to fear of people, social situations, difficult thoughts, and emotions. One of the best ways to beat this situation is by relying on others. Reaching out to your near and dear ones in a conscious effort can help you as they always want the best for you. Maybe they might give you some advice that will be extremely useful to you. Number four, you don't live in the present. Are you constantly thinking about the past or the future? But forget about the present. If you're constantly looking back at fond memories from the past or looking at the future hoping that something will change and forget to actually do something to achieve it, then chances are that your life is on a bumpy road. There's nothing wrong with reminiscing. You probably have tons of fond memories from the past, but if you're constantly thinking about them, you'll end up wasting a lot of time and might get the feeling that you're stuck. Or if you're constantly thinking about the future, you might end up adopting a very passive stance. You'll have thoughts such as, things will get better soon, let's just wait it out. But by clearly focusing your efforts on your life goals and taking steps to move towards them, it stimulates you to stay in the present. Number five, you keep postponing things. Are you in a habit of constantly postponing things and never getting them done?  Once again, you might be postponing things because you genuinely are too busy or have other things to do first, and that's completely okay. After all, you can only do so much in a day. However, if you're constantly postponing things, even when you have nothing else to do, that's when it gets worrisome. The hardest part is usually getting things started, so disposing of the list of excuses is the first step in the right direction.  How happy are you in your current workplace? Yes, a lot of people can cope with their jobs without loving it, but they don't hate it either. If you find yourself constantly wanting to leave early, counting the seconds until you finally leave the workplace, or not satisfied by the economic security that it brings, then such a situation warrants change. Working a job that you hate will not only make you unhappy, but most likely make others unhappy as well. It's prudent to decipher such feelings and think of remedial measures. Now, there is an emphasis that needs to be placed on whether something happens because you purposefully made it happen or if other factors are affecting it. When contemplating these situations, considering your circumstances is a major prerequisite. Since you might be doing some of the things discussed above for completely different reasons, addressing these in the best way as early as possible can help to live a fulfilling life. Do you think you have any of these habits? If so, do you think this helped you recognize them? Feel free to leave a comment down below with your thoughts, experiences, or suggestions. If you found this video helpful, be sure to hit the like button and share it with those out there unaware of their side effects. Don't forget to subscribe to Psych2Go and hit the notification bell for more new videos. And as always, thanks for watching.


all right well it is great to see everyone this afternoon thank you to everyone who has stuck with us through this amazing day I know it is tough to get through to the final panel but we have such an amazing group of women leaders here with us and I'm really excited to hear some of their stories I'm gonna give everyone a brief introduction and then I will let them kind of kick it off from there we're gonna be talking as Polly said about mentorship about creating those meaningful relationships at work and in your personal life that that are so vital to to women and really to anyone to get us through some of these tougher days so let's get started we have with us today more Collins the executive director of the Vermont Housing Finance Agency Sarah Carpenter Burlington City Councilor and the former head of the Vermont Housing Finance Agency Leslie McCrory Wells the co-owner of three restaurants in Burlington Pizzeria Verita Trattoria delia and Soto Inoteca and Chiuha Samson the owner of a single pebble restaurant in Burlington Pat Moulton the executive director of Vermont State College's Workforce Development Office and the former president of Vermont Technical College and Ellen Coller the executive director of the Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund did I get those all right just nod okay so a question for all of you I'm wondering if you could each in your pairs tell us about a particular moment in your careers where your relationship with the other person helped get you through where it was a moment that you felt you know I couldn't have done this without the other person sitting next to me right now and Sarah and more let's start with you Polly major will know that I was jumping out of my skin when I had this opportunity to speak because I love this story I'm about to tell and the story starts when I was 25 years old newly hired by VHFA fast forward three or four years and I am now pregnant with my first child and I had the privilege and grew up during a time where my mother stayed at home my mother-in-law stayed at home that was the mental model I had in my head for what would happen when I gave birth yet I'd never been a parent before and I didn't know if I was gonna like it and if I was gonna be a good at it and yet I loved my job and I was kind of good at that and I was nervous to give up a great job for this idea of staying home with a kid who you know at that point she hadn't proved herself yet let's be honest she's now about to be 17 and she's proven herself worthy but I remember being very nervous I was still at a fairly low level within the organization I would like to have thought that I had made a good impression but I'd only been there a little while and I went to leadership of the organization and said I thought I was gonna quit my job I definitely don't think I can handle being a mother and working full-time could we find a third way and could I work just 20 hours a week and keep doing what I've been doing and have the time with my child due to the flexibility that Sarah showed and the organization that was allowed and for the 13 years that my three children were home until the youngest one went to kindergarten I worked just three days a week and what makes the story special is not that Sarah was willing to pay me less money and give me less vacation time as that got prurated for being part-time the special part was was it was during those 13 years that my career took off at 20 hours a week Sarah and the rest of the leadership team continued to give me new opportunities send me to new meetings grow my network take on new projects I had so much that I was able to learn and do and grow so that by the time that little one went to kindergarten there were some other retirements happening within our executive management team and that's when Sarah turned to me and said okay let's try four days a week because we're ready to take you to the next level and now she retired at the end of 2018 and in 2019 the board of directors after a national search decided that I was the right candidate to lead VHFA and that would not I would not have been a credible candidate if I'd been mommy tracked if I had been said yeah you can work less and we'll put you over here and we'll develop someone else instead I was nurtured and developed and grew in that position despite the fact that no one saw my commitment to the organization as less than just because I also had a commitment to my family thank you more more makes it easy but it wasn't always that easy when I had been in other organizations where I'd frankly worked with more women and it was easier I went into VHFA as their executive director after seceding someone who had been there for many many years it was quite male dominated as is the finance industry generally speaking and we needed a big culture change in that agency and I could see that right out the gate so I made a few other moves and including improving more for her position which was a new position that we created and she had talent so it seemed incredibly natural but she was not on the leadership team level at that point in time which was I probably the hardest part is you have senior leaders deputy directors program operators at a higher level but I said I need a go-to person somebody I can confide in and those men were wonderfully talented people and serve the agency well but it was hard for me to bounce my opinion off of them particularly when I was around some of the workforce issues which they were not as supportive of including working part-time or giving flexibility that was a tradition not in our agency you know almost 20 plus years ago and so the hard part wasn't working with more and introducing her to new ideas I was working with my colleagues and saying you know this really can work for the agency it's good for the agency we need fresh ideas you know I'm more than 25 years older than more we need as we're some of those leaders we need to be paying attention and so I think that's that's the work and that's my message is you know you look at your talent make sure you give folks any any employee talent but particularly women who are nurturing they are running the families we have to accommodate that and we can make it work it in a way it wasn't that hard for more and I it was harder for some of our co-workers who couldn't quite wrap their head around it well why is she not there 40 hours a week well she's there when I want her to be there and that's what counts right so I just you know encourage us and I will say I had support maybe not so much from some of my male colleagues but from certain members on my board so those of you who work for boards make sure you have strong board members who also understand that you can have a professional part-time job and as where points out it serve the agency very well in terms of our growing and and I always say it also made it possible so that I can retire and feel like the agency's in a great spot well thank you both our our next pair you don't work directly together at the same organization you both run your own restaurants how did you two meet and and what is a moment that really sticks out to you where your relationship mattered most let's see this on okay no thank you we don't work at the same restaurant but we work in an industry that I will also say is very male dominated and and also extremely rewarding in many ways and we met I want to say well before 2019 but we are on the Flynn board together as well as what is now called the Vermont independent restaurant group which came out of COVID and what happens essentially what happened was that an email went out starting I think with Courtney Bush and Butch and Babes went out at the very very beginning of COVID when we had just gotten shut we just found out that we were shut down and it was just a confusing time obviously for everybody but restaurants didn't know what was we were coming up to the date of being shut down and we were trying to figure out should we be shut down earlier because you know lots of things were happening people were coming in they were sick we were getting calls that somebody had been in our restaurant and we didn't know what to do so finally we were all shut down and Courtney Bush stuttered a an email that just was a thread that just went through all the restaurants and one thing to understand about restaurant owners we go into different restaurants and we're celebrities so we all know each other the servers will come over and say you know to help from single pebbles here and we'll send them something you know send us on there go over and say hello or have a glass of wine with her whatever we there's a there's a camaraderie that goes with the restaurants there's 1400 restaurants in Vermont and many are in that of course in Chittenden County and so we we all kind of know who each other is so we this thread started and each one of us would keep adding people that maybe someone else didn't know until it became this huge thread that was just basically sharing what was going on with our restaurants now we had already had sort of a women's rest owners group that we had been getting together and having dinner together and and getting together so this kind of just continued that that piece of course in COVID times on in a digital format and then I guess Vermont independent restaurants be kind of came out of that you hoping one of the first on the Vermont leadership council and helping to build it the Vermont independent restaurant leadership council helping to build it as well so Betty who helped put that together I got on the the council a little bit later but that has also been a point where we are able to talk about and spend time talking about some of the issues that are very pertinent and very specific to women owning business that again are predominantly men men male dominated but also have a lot of of issues sometimes with being a supervisor of men at seeing a woman as maybe not not seeing me as specifically as as the boss and some of the issues that go along with that we've been able to talk through some of those issues so she's been tremendous support for me and for many other women who are in this restaurant group and and I very thankful it's helped get us through for sure I think Leslie just tells most of the story but I think for me really how we form relationship doesn't really it's yes through a lot of different stuff but really for me is my personality I'm very introvert and as you know as we own our own business especially restaurant you juggle a lot of stuff and you often time think that I am doing this alone and especially when the I remember the pandemic first we got shut down I you know we we all go through like tell our employee that you don't need to come tomorrow we only have from 40 people to eight people I remember that I share with Leslie is that I after it held my dishwasher he is from from bouton I said I don't have job for you anymore and he was with us for seven years and I closed my office door and I started crying and this is first time I feel like holy cow I don't know what I'm going to do and then but through all those meetings at the mountain like our digital or phone conversation realize everyone everyone is working for each other support each other even simple silly things I don't have a who knows where can I water take out water take out containers there's something like that's very very little and as our relationship should form I think more so is it really encouraging to think that yeah it's competitive restaurant to you suppose suppose that she's my competitor but I really never thought that way and by how we grow is support each other support the big environment and move us alone and I think that's really our goal as Vermont independent restaurant co-illusion and really is really nice to have a folks that you can talk to some in summer of July I got personally into a PR crisis and I was like okay what should I do I didn't tell anyone but then the next morning she call and that really support me to like oh okay I'm not alone I'm gonna be okay I will go through it and I did so thank you both and now to our final pair tell us about how you you two first met well we first met in the way way way back like 30 years I think it was but my story is when the prior Chancellor of the state colleges called me up one day and said we're closing the Vermont Tech Randolph campus we're moving everything to Castleton and get ready which was not a hint of said call prior to said call after I peeled myself off the ceiling and had some choice words for said Chancellor fast forward a few days the plan that he had to close Northern Vermont University closed the Randolph campus thankfully was taken off the table by the Board of Trustees the governor the Speaker of the House the President Pro Tem a protest in Montpelier you name it but about four or five days after that I think I got this call from Ellen Kaler now I'd known Alan for 30 years from her start with the social justice pieces Justice Center but I really knew her as the mother of Vermont farm to play I mean this lady right here is why we get to eat really good food in really great restaurants because she really kicked it off and I knew she had experience in building community I knew she knew how to bring a network together I knew she knew agriculture and she said what are we going to do about your ag program Pat if you close the can campus you have no farm you have no ag program you lose your 540 acres of asset what do you think if I pulled together a group of subject matter experts to really talk about how we could reinvent your ag program and really get it back on the map and knowing Alan it didn't take me a second to say yes yes yes that's what I need and she turned on her network and with a couple of other amazing ladies Regina Beidler and Louise Calderwood and we met every week at 7 30 a.m. via zoom for two years and counting I mean I think we're every other year now but brought together this amazing team and we've come up with this amazing plan to reinvent our ag program and I mean even like the 7 30 meetings where like how y'all doing you know because we would take time the three of us you know coming out of my mouth and rant and rave and these ladies listened and we heard everybody's story things that were going on and that was the other piece of it is like women care how each other are doing and you give each other a chance to vent and practice and and be part of a team so fast forward to today we've already raised over well through grants over a million seven to really launch the new ag program we're going to kick it off fall 23 we're working on another 750 thousand dollars but and we have to thank exactly and we have to thank senator Leahy and other and senator Sanders and others for assisting us but I thank this lady right here and her amazing ability to build community build consensus build buy-in you know had our chancellor talked to more than just a couple other people we might have had a better plan when than what he came up with but I can't say enough about this lady right here and she has bailed my butt out many a time well I wouldn't have made that call if I didn't have the same level of mutual respect for Pat she has been an incredible leader for decades in the state in the in the realm of economic development workforce development she's made a lot of stuff happen and especially for women and being coming out of economic development and being then becoming the president of a higher ed institution was no easy matter but then to be faced with losing the one hands-on food and ag program in the state like I just I personally couldn't handle it because we had been putting all of these other plants we a lot of we people have been putting a lot of plans in place to eat grow our local food system even more and we're thinking about how do we grow our New England food system and achieve a 30% regional food consumption by 2030 so to like here that the chancellor was gonna shut down this program it was like no that is not gonna happen we're gonna get together with Pat we're gonna make something else happen and we're gonna put this program on the map even though it had been in decline for for many many years it needed it needed a reboot and so I give Pat a lot of credit actually for saying yes because that's the other part of leadership right it's not just being a leader in the case of Pat she's an amazing leader she's been at the top of many organizations in the state for a long time but it takes leadership to understand how you need other people and how you create the space for other people to exercise their leadership right I had something in a moment of crisis for Pat to offer Pat but Pat also offered the opportunity for for me because we the food system development work we were doing was not gonna be able to move forward if Pat's program went down the toilet right so we needed each other in in different ways for different reasons but ultimately for the same outcome and so Pat saying yes at a point of vulnerability really quite frankly was huge and that's another part of I think one of the strengths of women in leadership is our ability to just like yeah we can still be vulnerable but we can still be really strong and we can be there for each other in especially in times of crisis and had we not had a long-term relationship it probably wouldn't have gone like yeah it's not as smoothly and you might have even said I don't know like because there's a trust there right that's that's the thing about really good relationships is that you build trust and it's through that trust especially in times of crisis where we can step forward for each other and we need to step forward for each other and so for those of you who are like in the Gen X generation that I'm in or the baby boom generation if you haven't yet found what Sarah did with Mora to help mentor and bring the next generation along please please think about how to do that because we need the next generation to be in these positions of leadership and to make space for that and we we mobilized an awful lot of folks here at Vermont Tech to get the new program but it's for that next generation right it's that next generation of farmers and food entrepreneurs that we're ultimately setting the table for so thinking about what are what are the institutions in the organizations that are again that enable that and how do we who have some ability to mobilize money mobilize other people how can we be in service to really engage and make that happen so just amazing group of women up here and let's hear some questions that you might have well I want to be mindful of time of your time and so I'm gonna let you know now that we have a couple minutes at the end of this conversation for questions from the audience so so start thinking about those and while you do I have one more question for this group to her when you brought up that story of you know having a moment of crisis at work and feeling really alone and then getting a call the next day from Leslie it made me tear up a bit I've had those moments too where I was feeling so alone and somebody reached out or picked up the phone or sent me something in the mail and I think those moments of connection especially since the pandemic are so hard to find when you can't just invite someone out for coffee anymore all the time you might be stuck on slack or you know you might be just physically or mentally isolated I'm wondering if any of you have other examples like that phone call of a moment where you either feel like like you reached out effectively and made a good connection or where somebody did that for you because I think we could all use a couple ideas of how to strengthen those bonds in this time so I won't call on anyone in particular but if each of you has something that pops into your mind go ahead I'm always wanted to grab the mic so what my brain goes to is that I have reached out to younger women and tried to engage them sometimes I'm gonna admit that that feels mighty presumptuous I'm 45 years old and I don't know where I fit in generationally in leadership right now like am I I don't think I'm a young leader anymore I know that there are still many shoulders I'm standing on top of so I'm I'm caught in between and so you know you don't like call someone up and say hey do you want a mentor because I think I got a lot to offer you you know that I just want to own that there's an uncomfortability with this develop naturally okay this was not you know me turning to Sarah be like will you be my mentor because I also want to acknowledge I actually have like eight other mentors I would say if you know there's just I love the team approach because Sarah was such a subject matter expert for me that in the housing finance arena she was the the best one to go to but there were other professional settings where I had other people in my life that really helped to build me up so instead what I've learned to do is I always try to find ways to appreciate other women and so going back to like calling the woman up who you know who's having a hard time and just making that connection or Ellen just had a wonderful profile in Vermont business magazine two months ago where we got to read about all of her professional accomplishments you know making sure to shout that out in public settings and call attention to it elevating other women boosting them up I have not had big experiences of other women tearing me down or vice versa that hasn't been my experience but I I have read about it I know it happens and so I think that I don't offer myself as a mentor something I more just try to continually lift up other women amplify their voices and meetings but also reach out privately through text or something to encourage them or really appreciate them I just want to know what more said and I you know one of the things I'm probably moral school but I certainly in organizations I said I like to manage by walking around and so just talking to people in your office you know you can find out a lot just little tidbits and and I worry a little bit particularly with zoom that doesn't offer itself as much as it used to so I think we don't have to reinvent it make the proactive phone call make a proactive text you know and it can be about not necessarily work but you know I heard your daughter got a driver's license today how's it going you know those kind of things because I think we we're gonna have to make ourselves have those because that's how you build a relationship well yes and well I haven't I got like 85 probably examples but I think the one that is the was the most challenging for me some of you may have read about this fraud up in the kingdom eb5 yeah ever heard of it that was have you haven't heard a thing about that have you Michaela well when I arrived as secretary of the agency of commerce and day two my general counsel and director vb5 came and said Houston I think we have a problem and started showing me some of the red flags that that point we had no clue how big this was and I was in over my head I didn't know where this was going and I had the fortune of calling Liz Miller who was governor Shumlin's chief of staff and an incredibly bright woman and Susan Donaghan who was commissioner finance department of financial regulation another incredibly bright women woman and saying something's going on I don't know what it is I don't have all the information but we can't ignore this and through Liz's tutelage and working with Susan to say look you there's got to be something you can do the three of us really mapped out the plan and calmed me down and I would say that's been the most challenging professional experience because my integrity was attacked over and it continues today as I'm still being sued by another lawyer so but to be able to have people who were in this mess with me together women who and when Liz Miller Susan Donaghan and I got subpoenaed to testify at Bill Stenger's sentencing hearing which I couldn't have dreaded more in my life and Susan was the first witness knocked it out of the park the judge says we're not retrying this this is sentencing send the West your witnesses home Susan you know did a few fantastic job like I literally like hugged her and said thank you so much but it just and and having each other to be able to say this really bites having to be here and you know and you can't talk about what you're gonna say but that was huge and I don't think that would have happened for me had they not been women and so for that I'm eternally grateful I have a I have a quick story I was work I was in Connecticut I was actually a convoluted story but I'll just say my daughter was in Connecticut with me and I was in Connecticut and her my ex-husband was at Yale so what we were trying to keep her in a more predominantly more multicultural school experience took her out of school in Vermont and brought her down to Connecticut so I was going back and forth to Vermont to finish my master's degree as well as I had a restaurant at the time and I was working at Nagatuck Valley Community College in adult education helping to build online education for the teachers and I got a call I was working my masters and it just was taking a long time and I got a call that my dad was very ill so it was really important to me that he was on the stage to give me my master's degree that was just the most important thing for me to to accomplish so I talked to my friend and supervisor at the time and said I just have to go home she said no stay here continue to work on your master's degree and I'll give you all the time that you need to do the writing so just get your work done so I'd get my work done I'd be able to sit at my desk and work on my writing and with her help and with the help of some wonderful professors at the University of Vermont I finished it I finished my thesis I finished my work and I got my master's degree and he was on the stage to give it to me and I think the story really here is what she said to me when you're in a position to pay forward pay it forward to another woman do we have any questions from our audience and we will pass around a mic I'm also full of questions so no pressure I can keep going okay great well I will ask one more question shout out my name if you think of something my my final question for you all you know more I think you brought up a great point about not the uncomfortability of of imposing yourself on somebody and assuming that you have knowledge to be shared at the same time I know so many of us feel an insecurity at work and feel a need for someone to to reach out and to make that connection and so I'm wondering if you could each think on on feeling that yourself of that that moment when you were feeling insecure at work perhaps as a younger person or earlier on in your career and that moment when somebody did reach out was it hard to accept that help was it was it deeply needed and wanted I think of times when I was a like a young journalist and an older journalist reached out and offered me advice and I got really snooty about it and I rejected it and I said they don't know what they're talking about like I write the way I want to write and it took a while to be able to to open up in that way and I'm wondering if if that resonates for any of you Ellen yeah I had been at the peace and justice center from 1990 and it was now fast forward to 2001 and Jan Eastman who was then at the Snelling Center for government and Lisa Lorimer who then was the president of Vermont bread company was the largest woman-owned business in the state had gotten they had become good friends and they decided that there was a need for a group of people who had gone through the Vermont Leadership Institute to think about a career transition at some point and that everybody was sort of thinking within the next three to five years I might want to make a move so they had started footing feelers out to assemble a little group we called ourselves the chess club because we were playing chess with each other's lives basically not we never actually had a board in front of us anyways at the first meeting of our new chess club there was about seven of us I some reason got invited to that I still don't know but they had their eyes on me and they and I was put on the proverbial hot seat as the first person we hadn't even invented our process yet of how we were going to help each other with thinking through a career transition and I'll never forget this Lisa and Jan said we think it's time for you to leave the peace and justice center and I was like well okay but I like I'm here because like three to five years you know they're like no now and I was like what what what what am I gonna do I don't I don't know what I want to do next that's why I'm here they're like oh you're gonna go to the Kennedy School of Government at down at Harvard down in in Boston and I was like oh okay um and I and I literally I was like that's how I was like in my chair like quaking like what is going on people have these ideas about what I'm supposed to do next and nobody's telling me these things that like what and I just remember being so incredibly uncomfortable in my skin and squirming around and just like uh but I went to bed that night and I got up the next morning because we had an overnight we did an overnight and just something just settled in me you know like they're right that's right and so I said okay that's what I'm gonna do and so it was but I had to trust these other people that they had my best interest at heart that they had an idea of what kind of like Sarah with Mora like had an idea of what it was that I could I could help with in the future like the kinds of things that I could grow into and be a leader for and you know without that moment I who knows I might still be at the peace and justice center in Burlington um but anyways it was incredibly I was just feel so fortunate and so grateful that some other women saw something in me that they were willing to step out and make me really uncomfortable um but then you know it is sometimes those things happen you just have to sit with it and really listen to that voice inside of you and then you'll know you'll just know perfect so my story is not a woman reaching out to me but a man um Jeb Spaulding the aforementioned former chancellor of the Vermont State College is who called me up one day now Jeb and I had worked in state government he was secretary of administration but I frankly didn't know that he even knew I existed and he called me up and said hey think about being interim president at Vermont Tech and and then you should apply for the job as president Vermont Tech I'm like what running a college what are you nuts and uh I don't know nothing about running a college in fact my one of my best friends who passed away or mother at a baby shower what do you know about running a college what the hell can you do with that but but and you know so I'm like sure I'll yeah well you know I was transitioning out of the Schumlin administration I didn't know what I was going to do next and and here I'm come down as interim you know first woman in a typically all male technical college um and then had to go through this incredible higher ed hiring process of year-long interviews give a symposium give this do that but Jeb the whole time Pat just be yourself just be yourself just just who you are because I'm like oh I got to act all academic and you know get all high and mighty and ivory tower and no no just be yourself and that was the best advice I got and you know the rest as they say is history I loved loved love my five and a half years as president of Vermont Tech I love what I'm doing now but I don't think I would have gotten out of the economic development field without that push so I'm eternally grateful for Jeb for that didn't like the phone call about closing the campus but I will always be thankful to him for making that happen for me just listen to both of their story kind of remind me how I get into a single pebble so my really biggest mentor or teacher is for single pebble is there's a silent partner actually currently he's in Australia back then so when I apply a single pebble I was just 2003 I just came to finish my culinary school and I was looking for internship and I remembered founder Steve Bogar interviewed me by the alley and I'm like ah just so you know yes I'm Chinese I know to how to eat Chinese food I absolutely don't know how to cook seriously I don't know I didn't know that but he really taught me first of all he's the first one he taught me how to cook my own cuisine in English so every day I walk in there's a new cook for me to read and he will try something new stuff and I'll be like yeah yeah yeah that's great that's great oh I think a little adjustment but then he will throw me a different project to grow and the second mentor is that silent partner currently in Australia is so I only worked there for two one year one year and half for some reason become kind of I was the line cook and then there's something happened in front of house so I now kind of step in and English is as you know English is not my first language so I love to cook because I don't need to talk to people right I oftentimes thing is I want to cut the chicken into a triangle chicken wins come say I don't want to be a triangle but people will something say to you so got into front house forced me to learn a lot but then eventually I became partner became I need to understand the financial part accounting question mark question mark this uh this partner in Australia uh at his name he starts sending me like the basic accounting textbook and talk to me walk me through with a quick book so I right now I do my own payroll I do my own accounting I I do pretty much everything so I feel like I become who I am today really would not have done without those two person in my life yeah I was gonna just come and you know in addition to my colleagues there's a number of other women in the housing industry who become fast friends and we support each other and we do it with humor I'm so sorry to have missed that workshop and sometimes we do it rather rudely and we challenged each other we are affectionately known to each other as the women's housing mafia and I'm sure you would if I told you who's in the I can't tell you who's in the woman housing mafia but if I did you'd all know them I'll get it out of you sir and in case you don't know public instrumentalities like phfa have the power through public eminent domain to take property not that it ever happened so we had the woman's housing mafia and we were going to season sell property particularly of people that didn't agree with us now we never exercise that but that level of humor and challenge and you know like we're going to season sell that property and you know we're going to get our mafia lady friends out to get you um no one crossed Sarah carpenter but that level of humor and it really helped us build a lot of collegiality and challenge each other and gave us confidence all right I do think that is all of the time that we have today um thank you again to our panelists you one more of our many rounds of applause is one more thank you to all of our panelists and thank you to all you all for listening and I think I think we're the last panel so you might be free to go or someone from um senator lehi's office is going to pop up Paul is coming okay you could just stay seated that I'm not alone up here on the stage thank you all for joining us today this is now the close of the 25th women's economic opportunity conference in the last that senator lehi will sponsor as senator so it's a really meaningful conference for us for him and we appreciate you all for joining us here we've had such an incredible day thank you to our afternoon presenters the safety team to this fantastic panel for joining us I think if we have one theme for the afternoon it's the power of confidence and they've certainly uh taught us skills to practice that in our everyday lives so without further ado I'd like to uh close the conference by acknowledging my co-chairs who helped to make it possible Heather Gania and Lisa Briganti back there and acknowledging you all as participants and fabulous women leaders in the state of Vermont thank you all for coming and I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day