Okay, so thank you for joining us today and welcome to the quarterly membership meeting. Now again, we have quite a full agenda today. Let me quickly go over then. So first, we're going to talk about promoting OER at your institution. Then we'll introduce a concept of OER State of the Field Report to get your feedback. And then we'll demo the Open Education Professional Directory, followed by updates on the Consortium's Open Milk Initiative. And then we'll talk about planning for the Open Education Week 2015. And we'll have other general updates during which Marie-Anne will also give an update on her VNPAC problem. And lastly, we'll open the floor for questions, comments, and discussion items from members during which you can use your microphone to participate in the discussion, or you can use a chat window. You can enable your microphone by clicking on the microphone icon on the top menu bar. However, I'll keep all the microphones muted when someone is presenting. You can use a chat window then to type in your questions or comments on somebody speaking. Okay, so for the first part, promoting OER at your institution, we have two guest speakers today. Linda Talks from the University of Cape Town and Professor Talway Lee from National Southam University to talk about their efforts in promoting OER projects. Okay, Linda, then, it's all yours. Okay, hi everyone. Can everybody hear me clearly? Yes, great. That's wonderful. Okay, I will go ahead then and get through quite a short presentation. So I hope it's not too much of a whirlwind. So good morning all and welcome from a blustery rainy spring day in Cape Town. OER, an open access initiative at UCT, are currently in an exciting transition. So in 2010, the Open Content Directory was launched and it has been sustained through steady hard work. It contained almost exclusively open educational resources. The open landscape at UCT is illustrated here in this rather complicated slide, which I won't get into any detail. However, it shows that we started our agenda in 2007 and currently the library is becoming a key stakeholder. And I'll talk a little bit about this at the end again. Last month, we launched our brand new institutional repository, which now includes both research and teaching and learning materials and we're very excited about this new development. Our team, well, I am a member of the Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching, or SILF, and I work with my colleagues Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams and Thomas King. We all work on a part-time basis and draw support from our colleagues in a sort of ad hoc way. We have a very strong research interest and meet regularly about research into OER. We also have an Open UCT team which was funded externally by the Mellon Foundation and that project ends in December and they were responsible for launching the repository. Our director is Laura Chernowich and she is a champion of Open and OER. So we have a multifaceted approach to creating awareness and this slide is a list of just some of those practices that we use. And as I go through the next few slides, I'll elaborate a little bit more on some of these points. So for example, we support our champions. We have a newspaper that goes out for the university every month. We have regular open access and open education week events. We have a conference where we present. We use social media quite extensively. We run workshops. We have student projects and we have OER grants. So you'll see we really do kind of do whatever we can to promote OER. So we began this whole process with our enthusiasts, with people who are already sharing in the most wonderful way and drew them into this process of sharing. So we had a very nice example of a guide that was created for first year students that has been used at UCT but also other universities in South Africa. We have a very nice little case study here of an open content resource that became a journal article. So that was really a nice initiative. And Matuma Rafaken, the academic involved, also received an open education award. We use our Monday monthly newspaper. Whenever we've got some news or something significant, we like to report on it. And that goes out to our entire UCT community. As I mentioned, we have award winners. We have received three ACE awards from the Open Education Consortium. And the support of the Open Education Consortium has been phenomenal in this regard and has helped us to raise the profile of openness at UCT. Recently, Joan Klopper has received an Educator Award. We host several events that coincide with International Open Weeks. So for example, in 2011, Open Access Week, our vast Chancellor signed the Berlin Open Access Declaration. We also do events in Open Education Week and we're looking forward to the one coming up next year. We use social media extensively. Here you will see a website that we have created that has regular blog posts, tweets and also links to our Facebook site. Then it should be noted that a lot of our funding has come from external funders. In fact, the Open Content Directory and the Open UCT repository have been externally funded. However, we were very excited to receive a small amount in 2013 from our Vice Chancellor's Fund. The idea was to employ students to support lecturers in creating or preparing OER and that project has been extended out, so we're very pleased with that. Here is an example of one of the resources that was created. We host a series of workshops suggesting why academics should contribute and these workshops always include an introduction to Creative Commons. We also give out OER grants funded by the Mellon Foundation. These grants are worth around about $1,000. Academics use these to employ students or web design specialists to prepare their teaching materials for contribution as OER. These have been very successful and we still have funds for 10 more of these grants. The Road Ahead, so the Road Ahead for us is very exciting. We've made wonderful strides towards open access across the entire university. However, we now have new stakeholders in the library, so the new repository will be owned by the library and they will do all the day-to-day moderation. This means we need to advocacy work now with the faculty librarians to engage them in OERs and to help them to believe in the importance of OERs as well as open access. So my role and my colleague's role will continue to be around training, support, some advocacy, and then ongoing research into OER in the future. So we really don't know how this is going to pan out. We're not sure how the librarians are going to take it on and we're in a particular phase of transition. So that was my brief presentation. I hope I kept to time. I wasn't timing it. But you'll see a link on this page to a book chapter. So if you're interested in reading more about open education and the Open Scholarship Agenda at UCT, I've included this link to a pre-release book chapter. Thank you very much for... Thank you very much, Blanda, for your presentation. It was really helpful and timing was perfect. Okay, so let us now invite Professor Lee. I'm Tao Wei B, the Director of Open Education Office in National Jiao Tong University. I'm going to talk about how we promote the experience of how we promote OCW. We start our OCW in 2007. This year we have only three classes, one calculus, one physics, and one chemistry. After eight years, now we have 171 courses, only 146 video courses. But still calculus one is still the most popular class in OCW. For students to study those fundamental classes, they usually ask if we provide certificate exam to help them to judge their study results. So in the end of 2007, we give the certificate exam and for those good students, only probably 20% to 30% to get the certificate. But our university did not agree to give the credit for those certificates because for those good students, they still lack of the learning record. That's why we moved to stage two. Stage two, we incorporate with the model system and we put all the video linkages in the model system and open the internet courses in our campus. During the semester or during the summer vacation, we encourage professor to give those internet courses because those internet courses provide the learning record. So the university agreed to give the credit and the normal credit to those internet courses. Most of the internet courses still from the middle sense. And last year, we moved to the FRIP classroom. The former director, Professor Pi, she used calculus one and calculus two, the most popular OCW course and tried to start the FRIP classroom. The main purpose is students listen to the OCW video at home or in the dorm and do the problem solving in the classroom. They like that class very much. So we try to do some organized workshop to encourage our professor start to use OCW courseware to give more FRIP classroom this year. And we also do some publicity. We put our video probably once to a third of the video on the YouTube, which attracts different levels of the people. For example, the most popular class in the NCTO OCW wave is calculus one, but in the YouTube actually is the inquisitive. So different level of the people use different video. And also we put our community on Facebook, try to organize a student and also let the user to publish their user story and help the people to understand how they can use OCW courseware. I will give you two examples in the last slides. This year we start to put the best courses in edX and try to use the open MOOC, which will start a new way of using our OCW. We will investigate how the usage in the open MOOC and we may be organized our new future of OCW. Every year we will print DM and send to the older senior high school in Taiwan because those certificate of fundamental science classes will help the good senior high school to get the entrance permission of the good university in Taiwan. So most of the students, especially the best students of the senior high school will come to take exam. Also during the orientation of NCTU orientation week we sent those freshmen souvenir gift postcard or any some survey and to help them to understand NCTU provided at OCW will help them to study during these four years. Finally, I just give you the two examples of the user story. One is hearing impaired student. They should use our OCW class repeat again and again to overcome her study barrier and finally she get the permission of graduate school of applied mathematics in our university. Another interesting story is one grandma almost 70 years old start to learn calculus from our OCW by herself because in order to help her grandson to pass the calculus exam in the senior high school also try to get a certificate of the OCW that's why she start the calculus. These are the experience of our OCW and I hope people can enjoy those our experience. I'm happy to answer any question now. That's my talk. There are some great stories. Thank you, Professor Li for sharing your experiences. I'll open the floor for some questions briefly for two presentations. Igor is asking, Linda, can you please explain a bit more about the transition to the under the library and why the library is specific? And Linda has a question to Professor Li. Hi, Igor. I think it's probably easier to just chat about it than to try and type. My typing is not that quick. So traditionally in universities institutional repositories are managed by the library and this is why we feel that they should own the repository. As I tried to mention, we're quite a small unit so we don't have the capacity or the resources in our unit to continue managing the repository which would also include all open access material as well as other collections as well as student DCs. So it really should be the ownership of the library as opposed to us. So this is why the transition has happened to the library and we think that this is a very good way ahead to get the library involved in open access and open education. And I imagine that there are some other institutions around the world that have done this and we'll learn through it. Yeah, I agree to speak is easier to type in than typing. Oh yes, we get good support from the top of our university and we have an office and fixed grant annually but in the beginning like 2007 to 2008 we have an effort to struggle a lot to get recognition from our university until the internet calls get recognition from all the senior professors and they think OCW is quite important, especially now. So in the beginning those senior professors they're quite against OCW. They think face-to-face class is more important in those OCW courseware because OCW courseware may distract the students to come to the classroom. But now those senior professors they know because students they study in a different way but probably because the iPad or mobile phone student watch those things during the classroom but if you provide a good OCW courseware students like those courseware and they come to the classroom to discuss the problem they meet in the video tape. So that's why our university quite treat the OCW very significantly. Professor Lee, there's another question from Igor about the certification option for your open courseware. I'm not sure what is the advanced placement. It's a program where high school students can take university level courses. They have AT system in the state. Oh I see, in the United States. We have an entrance exam, yes. We have two different systems for the entrance exam. During the winter vacation we say it's a general high school exam and if you pass that exam you have to do the application process that in the United States you have an interview. You have to provide a supplement to show you your ability. That's the first winter exam of the senior high student. But if you didn't get good record during that winter exam then you can move to the summer entrance exam which is more rigorous and more difficult than the winter exam. It's like you pass this exam then we're ranking you and you should go to some university and then that you don't have much choice during the summer entrance exam. So most of the senior students in Taiwan they like to take winter exam then they have more choice of the university and they can show their ability to get some specific department. Is that your question? Okay, thank you. I think we're going to have to take this conversation for another time because I'm really interested in seeing how high school students in Taiwan are using open source web to approve of their ability to carry on studies in universities. People are asked whether you have numbers on how many certificates were issued and how many students gained entry to universities based on such certificate. Do you have any more information? How many? Actually, I don't have such a record because I know some students try to get our entrance permission of our entrance application I saw those certificates but we don't have such record how many students use certificates. They get a certificate we didn't follow up those things. I think we should do some survey. Wait for one more comment from Mary. Right, I understand. It's a combination of many things for a college entrance. Let's move on to the next item on the agenda which is the OER State of the Field Report. There are quite a few reports and surveys out there but we feel that the field is now ready for an overview of the progress of open education. So, for example, we need an overview of numbers such as numbers of projects, numbers of resources, number of languages of resources are offered in, etc. We would also need opinion statements from stakeholders such as what do administrators or faculty think about OER and what is a user experience or what is a presentation. So, we, the consortium, we're in a very good position to embark on such a project. However, in order to avoid duplication and whatnot, instead of creating our own brand new survey, we think it would be wise to kind of piggyback on other surveys. So, we would add a couple of questions to those to exist in surveys and then aggregate all the responses to create a comprehensive field report on open education. So, a question. So, we would like your feedback on this project. We, what we would like to ask our community is, is this something that we should be doing? So, do you think this is needed for the field? And secondly, what reports and surveys are you aware of that have one or more questions on open education? And lastly, we're looking for people who will help us steer this project and the task would involve things like locating existing surveys, performing needs assessments, defining the scope of the report and designing questions. So, if you have any feedback or comments, now, you're more than welcome to give us your opinion now, or we can wait till the end of the meeting so that you have a little time to think about it. Okay, go ahead. Hi, yes. I think that, I know for certain, Igor is aware of the Role4D project that is coming out of sort of being led by Cheryl Hodgkins and Williams here at UCT. It's funded by the IDOC and other funders. And it's a global South project. And part of that project includes surveys in South America, in three countries in Africa, as well as several countries in Southeast Asia. And I know that for a fact, we would be interested in talking to the consortium around how we could work together. And we'd be very happy to have a session where we can chat to you about sharing our survey questions so you can have a look at those. So, we're very happy to work with you in this regard. Okay, that's great. So, I'm sure that others are thinking about institutions, organizations, and surveys that they know of. I think we'll wait for more comments later at the end of the meeting then. So, that takes us to the demo of the Open Education Professional Directory. So, the directory began offering the service early this month. And this is what it looks like. You can browse through by field of expertise or region. And to the right is browsing by region. Or you can look up an individual. Now, of the four categories for expertise, you can go into more specific categories. And the whole time, you see the green button that says Add Yourself. So, if you have not added yourself, if you have not registered yourself in this directory, please do so in the new feature. We would love to add you on the directory. Now, we pulled up one individual, our own Igor Let's Go. Let's see what the directory shows about Igor. So, you see that general fact like institution, location, the contact points, language issues, and areas of expertise. Now, I would like to ask you to help us improve the directory. So, please use it and let us know how you use it. And send us comments on its usefulness to you. And if your contact is through your listing, please let us know the reason for contact. We don't have to know about all the specifics. We just have to know who's contacting for what reason. So, was it for consultancy? Was it for collaborative projects? That's the kind of feedback we'd love to get from you. And also, other general feedback and suggestions. They can all be directed to directory at OdeyConstortion.org. Any questions on the directory? Have you all used it? Thank you, Marianne. Okay, that's great. Thank you. Oh, you're adding yourself. Okay, great. Yeah, it would be great to see everybody here. That's just a great resource for everybody to have. Thank you. All right, then let's move on to the next item on the agenda, which is the open loop update. Okay, so you saw this screen from Professor Lee's presentation. We now have three courses open for registration under the umbrella of OECX. There's a course from National Southern University, University of Cape Town, and Tufts University. And we do think that this is a great benefit to all our member institutions and their key points for participation. Now, the institution has to be a member of the OEC, and the MOOC must be built from existing open content. But of course, it can be enhanced to become more MOOC-friendly. There's no cost for members to participate. The resources need to be allocated to develop and facilitate the MOOC. Now, some of you may have seen this during the June meeting. There are some options for OECX MOOCs. MOOCs can be offered in any language, if you're doing an OECX, and the length can range from two weeks to 15 weeks, although we do encourage shorter ones. The MOOCs can be facilitated or self-paced, and you can work out details to offer certificates with an X. A series can be offered from one institution or between institutions, and we would love to see more creativity with pedagogy, whether it be in remixing content or team teaching or co-offering or sequencing options. So we would love to encourage everyone to participate in this, in our open MOOC project, and just add a little bit of creativity to the teaching and learning process. So we're able to offer more courses to start any time in 2015 now, if you're interested in offering an open MOOC for OECX, please contact any staff member. We'll have webinars on designing MOOCs with OER in early 2015. So, do you have any questions about the open MOOC initiative? We have Willem in the meeting room right now, and it's extremely helpful with the open MOOC project, and he's also an expert in designing MOOCs. So if you have any questions, we can talk about it at the end of the meeting today, or you can just choose the questions right now. We'll wait for Professor Lee's question before we move on to the next item. Will there be more open MOOCs from OECX? Are you talking about more, in more disciplines? Because you are, you participated in the pilot project where the disciplines were kind of limited. Right, right. So we'll be accepting, we'll be, we plan to post more courses in all sorts of disciplines. There is not going to be a limit on what courses we can offer. Right, thank you. Okay, then let's move on to the next item on your agenda, which is Open Education Week 2016. So, we now have a landing page at openeducationweek.org. Please do download materials from here to put them on your institutional website, or even your personal blog, and help us promote the event. It's from March 9th to the 13th next year, and we'll have a call for participation in the planning committee very soon as well. You'll hear from us again, but for now it would be great if you can keep spreading the word with the materials from this website. And we have a couple more updates on general consortium stuff, or the things that we're doing. But before we start with that, I would like to invite Mary-Anne to give an update on her VMPASS project. Sure. Hi, everybody. I hope you can hear me well. Yes, okay. Perfect. So, I'm Mary-Anne from the International University of La Rioja. We're based in Spain. I'm really glad to be part of this meeting today, and I'm going to present to you briefly the VMPASS project, which started in October 7th and 13th, one year ago, and so you nearly participated in this project. So, the aim of VMPASS, as you can see in the title, is to increase the inter-industrial recognition of virtual mobility and open education-based courses. We believe that increasing quantity and quality of recognition processes in these areas will create new flexible learning pathways for students inside higher education. We'll allow institutions to increase the scope of their offer by integrating teaching and learning done at other institutions in their curricula. Also, we want to improve resource efficiency within higher education institutions, and hopefully it will lead to an increase in the use and impact of OERs. To achieve these aims, we will build on the results of the OER test initiative, which is a previous project on which VMPASS is based. So, by piloting within a living lab the use of a student health learning passport so to facilitate recognition and mobility. We'll plan a test and create a recognition clearinghouse to support the verification and investigation of learning passports. We'll create a typology of quality systems used on virtual mobility and OER systems so to support the learning passports and recognition clearinghouse. And finally, engage in dialogue with multiple institutions around Europe so we can mainstream the use of the recognition tools created by the project. According to our plan, an institution will use the recognition clearinghouse in the following way. Students ask for recognition of learning from virtual mobility or OER learning experience. The recognition office in the institution checks the student record and the clearinghouse. If the course is already in the clearinghouse, the recognition office can use it, use the data to compare and make a decision on recognition. And if the course is not in the clearinghouse, the recognition office verifies the credentials of the institution and also the content and quality of the course as well as the forms of assessment and then will make the decision on the recognition. And all of this data will be integrated in the clearinghouse so to help all their institutions with their recognition decisions. So you near our university as partner of the project and 100% online university had the opportunity to test the learning passport to support a new approach at our university. It consists in recognizing a MOOC as part of a specific subject of an official master's degree at uni. So this way, students will have the option to take this MOOC and get a number of ECTS when achieving it. A number of higher education institutions that we contacted within the project will do the same and try the learning passport within a living lab which will be launched at the end of this month. Here are the different partners of the project all the European partners and for further information you can take a look at the website or contact us through the project email. Thank you very much. Thank you very much for the wonderful update on the project. Does anybody have a question? Vee and Pat. So it would be really interesting to see how open sourceware from Taiwan can have more weight on their certificates and it would be great to see how the learning pathways can have more OERs turning into credentials or accredited sources. I hope to talk more on that. Okay, so I don't know if you've seen this through social media or in the email but the Open Education Global Conference 2015 from April 22nd to 24th in the beautiful town of St. Albert, Canada so the conference website is mailup at conference.oldyconsortium.org call for papers open now and submission deadline is the 30th of November so I suggest that you make plans to submit very soon and now we have an agreement with which is another MOOC platform to ask Mary Lou to elaborate a little more on this. Mary Lou, would that be okay? Hi everybody, I'll talk quickly because I realize we're running out of time. So EdCast is a provider that will host MOOCs so it's a MOOC hosting service. They actually have a version of Open edX to which they've added a number of interesting features and several very good mobile features for mobile phones and they are interested in having more MOOCs being hosted on their Open edX instance. They will provide full technical support and full support for helping to offer this. They will normally charge $5,000 US to host a MOOC. They will provide full control over everything you want to do with your MOOC including if you wanted to offer certificates or paid tutoring or some other type of paid service. All of those revenues would come back to you. With our agreement, the cost is reduced for Open edX consortium members. It would be $3,750 instead of $5,000 for hosting. So if you are interested in having a hosted MOOC service that allows you a lot more customization than other options currently do, this is something that we've entered into and all you need to do when you talk with them is let them know you're an OEC member and you'll get the discount. Okay, great. So I guess some more options are better. Alright. So the last thing you wanted to update you on was the committee. If you could see, go to this URL and go through the list of committees. So in June we promised you that we would have the charges for each committee and have all the committees formed somewhat. For the most of the committees that you see on the list, we now have the chair, the board liaison, the staff person in charge of supporting the committee, et cetera. If you signed up in June, you will hear from us again on how you can participate and for calls for individual committees. Now, do you have any questions on any of the updates? Alright. This is just to the hour that was promised to us. But if you have any questions or comments of any of the topics that was covered today, this was your chance. Okay, the open call to post early global 2016 is also if you are interested in having your institution post our global conference, do go to the wrong button. Splenda, poke, poke. Alright, so do check out the URL and see if your institution is interested in the other comment questions. Okay, then we'll finish here. We will have the recordings ready available for you so that you can listen to the presenters again. We'll also email you on where you can access these slide videos and other questions that were raised during the meeting today. Thank you all for joining us today.


All right, hopefully this thing's working. All right, awesome, all right. So a little bit of a different venue for Lightning Talks this year versus the summit last year. They were really fun last year on top of the big stage. A little bit of a smaller room this time, but awesome. Nonetheless, I did wanna lead in with one little kind of funny joke comment. So I have a number of slides here that are created by my marketing team and a number of slides that I've created myself. So anybody who comes to our booth through the remainder of the show and attempts to guess which slides were created by me and which slides were created by my marketing team is going to get an extra spin on our prize wheel. So just gonna go through things here. All right, is my thing on and it's off? Great, awesome, cool. All right, so I wanna lead with a nice little pithy observation like I did last year. So traditional monitoring is dead, all right? So let's talk a little bit about why traditional monitoring is dead. This is my favorite slide in the entire world in the entire ecosystem of Dynatrace slides because I'm a big fan of Alien. But as you can see here, so we have the statistic that we got from Gartner and Gartner told us that most organizations are only using APM solutions on about 5% of the apps in their business. And as we move towards new fangled cloud native architectures and cloud native platforms like Cloud Foundry, we start to get environments with tens of thousands of processes across thousands of services. And if we're only instrumenting and only monitoring 5% of those applications, as you can tell, that's gonna present a pretty significant black box for your organization. So one of the things that Dynatrace found was there must be a better way, right? So we came up with a automated full stack monitoring solution where we're really intending to ease the rollout of monitoring agents to the entirety of the platform. And we're looking to make APM something that is available for each and every app instance that's running in your environment, all right? Something that you don't have to think about, it's always there and you never have to worry about turning it on because it's always listening for every single app instance in the environment. In addition, we're also gonna be looking at all of the Cloud Foundry components in the environment as well. So let's talk a little bit of a little visualization here on what it is that you were trying to do.  And the goal here is to get these agents onto every host in the environment, every VM that's being managed by Bosch. And then additionally, we wanna get our agent in every process that's running inside of a Diego cell. So we also wanna get inside of every single application that UCF pushed into the environment. So how do we do that? Well, now we've got this cool thing that we're using to manage our Cloud Foundry environment. So we're using this to manage our runtime and that's Bosch. So with three simple steps, we're able to distribute our agent to every VM that's inside of your Cloud Foundry deployment and immediately begin instrumenting everything that's happening in that environment. All right, so it's a simple process of fetching that release from our environment, uploading it to your Bosch director, editing that runtime config or merging it with your existing runtime config and simply executing a Bosch deploy. So I'm gonna use the next minute or two here to kinda talk about some of the platform level visibility that's exposed by this functionality and how it impacted us when we were troubleshooting one of our internal Cloud Foundry environments. So when we were going through and testing the add-on in one of our own clusters that happened to be deployed on, shall we say, suboptimal hardware running under somebody's desk, we uncovered an issue with our Cloud Controller. And by digging into the processes on that host, we found that the Cloud Controller was scooping up a lot of CPU. And then by utilizing our tool set to take a look at the logs for that process, we found that there were log messages related to the MySQL server going away, all right? So with one tool, you're able to have access to all of the metrics and things like that surrounding those system processes as well as the ability to drill into those logs of that process and perhaps assist in your troubleshooting. And those that might have seen some of the other demos that we've done and things like that, there's an AI that sits on top of this that is actually alerting when you're exceeding some norms for many different things and it's doing automated root cause analysis across the whole thing, all right? So I've only, I'm actually about 14 seconds over. So how do you get access to this? You can sign up for free trial at www.donatrace.com slash trial. You can grab the Bosch release from PivNet. We just went live on PivNet on Friday. Or you can fetch that from our GitHub repo. And then once again, those three steps there are available at the bottom. And usually within about five to 15 minutes, everything will be up and lit up literally just as long as it takes Bosch to execute that deployment, all right? Thank you.


Thank you. Our advanced development people, we're not even going to call it a bicycle. It's a whole new kind of vehicle. See, what we realized, we looked at the bicycle and realized that only the parts, mostly from the waist down, we're really being utilized. So a little bit of upper body, but mostly it's the parts for the waist down. So we've got a new vehicle that is going to use all of the parts of our body. So it starts out here. Push back. Push back. Push back. Push back. Push back. Push back. Push back. Push back. Push back. Push back. Push back. Push back. Push back. Push back. Push back. Push back. Push back. Push back. Push back. Push back. Push back. Push back. Push back. Push back. Push back. Push back. Push back. Push back. Push back. Push back. Push back. Push back. Push back. Push back. Push back. Push back. Push back. Push back. Push back. Push back. Push back. Push back. Push back. Push back. Push back. Push back. Push back. Push back. Push back. Push back. Push back. Push back. Push back. Push back. Push back. Push back. Push back. Push back. Push back. Push back. Push back. Push back. Push back. Push back. Push back. Push back. Push back. Push back. Push back. Push back. Push back. Push back. Push back.  We talk about the fun of bicycling. And it turns out that there is that we are addicted actually to some very natural, wonderful stuff that's going on. It's a cocktail of hormones and proteins and all kinds of things going on in our bodies. Second, talk about that cocktail. There's endorphins. There's serotonin. There's dopamine, nothing more dope than dopamine. Norepinephrine. And there's actually a couple of others. The one that I always like to have fun with is endocannabinoids. Endocannabinoids, they are pretty much like what the name sounds. They are a molecule that mimics the same effects as THC in cannabis. It has been legal in 50 states forever because your body makes it every time you exercise and at other points in your life. You're your own dealer. And there's a whole set of other natural functions that occur. Your body is making new neural pathways. It's creating this whole set of changes to your life. And that is all coming from cycling. It's coming from physical activity. And now I'm going to introduce Marianne, who's going to talk to you a little bit more about the activity advantages. Yes, yes. I am going to go over what might not be as exciting, but all those wonderful feelings are very important and that being physically active. So the title came from, it was Randy's idea, in that because he's at SRAM, which is a bicycle company, and we're seeing in our environment, in our COVID environment, our post-COVID, during COVID environment, what did we see more of and bicycling, but a certain kind of bike? E-bikes and scooters, too. And we all had bike share before, but people on individual e-bikes and different types. And bicycle companies, they go where the money is.  So the purpose of this session is to focus on trying to get people to pedal, to pedal more. And so I'm going to go over some CDC guidelines as to what is recommended for health. And raise your hand if you know what the CDC guidelines are for physical activity for an adult. I sort of never heard, I guess I've been in the field too long. OK, so I'm going to go over how important it is that cycling and how is to meeting our CDC guidelines, and it's the most practical way to do that, basically through transportation. So the guidelines and the Surgeon General's report on physical activity first came out in 1996, a long time ago. And since that time, it's been shown the best way to maintain physical activity is through transportation, through daily activity, and the best way to do that is through commuting or running errands. You pretty much, if you use your bike to do any of that, you're meeting the CDC guidelines. So nothing new to us, this audience, absolutely not. So quickly, these are the health benefits. Can you just yell out some since we have a small crowd and you probably can't read that anyway with a glare, but what's a physical activity benefit, health benefit, not mental health, but just health? Right, exactly. You have less risk of cardiovascular risk, so less risk of high blood pressure, cholesterol, diabetes, glucose levels, another health risk, health benefit, say that? Right, exactly, bone density. Generally, impact is what increases bone density, but I do want to emphasize for older adults, it's very important for joint mobility and balance. So for older adults, it's really important to keep physically active. These are aerobic fitness, obviously we know is a benefit, bone health, body composition for young kids. So the first column is young kids, so more muscle to fat ratio. And then the mental health benefits are really, really sort of what Randy will speak to a little more, but what we experience is it just focuses us and it does that for kids, it does for adults, it helps improve cognitive function, and then since I have a nearly 95-year-old mother, it delays the onset of cognitive decline or dementia. So it's just, it's sort of the magic pill. Physical activity, I've been in physical activity since studying it for many years, and it is the magic pill, and it truly is. It just really enhances our lives. So we want to, again, e-bikes are wonderful, they're becoming part of our community. We welcome them because the more cyclists we have, the more advocates we have, probably the better drivers they are because they know what it's like to be on the road as a cyclist. The physical activity guidelines were updated 10 years later in 2018 and they found these added benefits as well. So as we know, this has been studied for decades and decades and decades and they choose an activity and they say physical activity, curling is good for this. I mean, every activity you can imagine, but it's always being studied and updated, and I've highlighted the ones about quality of life and sleep. Nowadays, many adults have problems with sleep. It helps with dementia. We mentioned chronic diseases, including cancer, anxiety, and depression. So this, we sort of know, but we want to emphasize, but you gotta move. You gotta move, you can't just ride a moped. So what are the recommendations? These are general, they're 150 for adults, it's 100 and older adults, it's 150 minutes a week. So that would be 30 minutes, five times a week, and this is the minimum to get health benefits. So we want people peddling at least that much and the CDC also recommends that we have two sessions of strength exercising as well, exercise as well, to keep our mental health and health benefits. If you do vigorous activity and the definition between moderate and vigorous in terms of cycling, moderate would be cycling between five and nine miles an hour on flat surfaces. Hill climbing is considered vigorous, over 10 miles an hour on a flat road is considered vigorous. See, oh, and another thing, because this, over the years it's really modified, which is very interesting, because we've become more and more sedentary, the guidelines have gotten, it seems like easier to meet because people were just not moving at all. So you can achieve these 150 minutes as small as five minute increments throughout the day, or you can do them all at one time, you can space it every other day, every day. Granted, we know daily habits are the ones that are likely to stick. So commuting, running errands on your bike, et cetera, but peddling, peddling, peddling. According to CDC, you can do it all on Saturday. I definitely do it, well, I do it every day, but I do that on a Saturday, and you probably do too. There's a little bit of controversy around that. I think that the research ultimately is gonna show that regular exercise is very important. I can't, I can't, I'm with the state, I can't, I can't just follow, I'm telling you what the guidelines say, but yes, I think practically if you have a habit that you do daily, you're gonna continue doing that as opposed to doing it all on Saturday, not being able to move for two days.  So yes, I agree, every day, every other day, but as long as you move. According to the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance Survey, which is a very common tool that we use in public health to measure various, various health indicators, smoking, drinking, and physical activity as one. According to BRFSS, California's 70.5% meet the CDC physical activity recommendations. And I'm a little doubtful that that's true, but that's what that shows for California. And this is for the little cameras there missing. It's from 2017. So this data, that's just the most recent that there is. And with COVID, we know for the majority of people, they became even more sedentary. That's sensitive. I'm already at the end of my presentation. So studies show that the best way to achieve these things are to make activity-friendly routes to every day destination. So that would be errands, pharmacy, school, work, et cetera. What you see here are an example of, and ignore that little square at the top that got inserted in some of my slides. This is a quick-bill pop-up project. And so in Caltrans, in case you didn't hear in the previous sessions, we have all kinds of, we have complete streets, we have safe streets, we have demonstration projects, we have quick-bills. So we're following the CDC recommendations in terms of trying to put in place safe places for people to move, ride their bike, walk, so they can see what an infrastructure change would be. I don't, yeah, I don't necessarily think that's part of it. It depends on the community, but this, for example, I'm not sure how long it is. It's in Southern California, but it's just to demonstrate to the community, this is what we could do. We could make permanent. Does this look good to you? Is this fun? Is this exciting? So it's a way to encourage infrastructure change, so built change. So these are just temporary. Again, as I mentioned, activity-friendly routes to everyday destinations. Again, every day, as you mentioned, is it better to do it every day? It is, because it becomes a habit that way, as opposed to just doing it on Saturdays. So these are some examples of what we do at Caltrans, and to try to promote moving, and again, sometimes e-bikes don't do that. And then, of course, the second route is mainly for children. How can we get children, the playgrounds, et cetera, accessible to children for physical activity, and that's not necessarily just for cycling. Okay, that thing is driving me insane. But, can you hold this for a minute, let me do this. That's my spiel on CDC physical activity guidelines. They're very important. That's the magic pill. We need to do it. And sometimes the current e-bikes that are out there don't, people tend to not pedal as much as they should. So regarding e-bikes, the California Air Resources Board is releasing an e-bike incentive program this July. And the, which Dave and Cal Bike were very integral in being part of, to lobby for that. And we have $10 million approved from the California General Fund going out for this program. They're contracting with the group that will manage it. And that's due to start this July. I'm trying to think up to Dave, do you remember how much someone couldn't get? Yes, yeah, okay. Okay, so we don't know yet how much of an incentive or a rebate you would get. I owned a hybrid car a while back, so you get a pretty good incentive for owning an e-car, but now we got some incentive for people to get e-bikes. And again, the goal is to replace car trips that we're excited with our e-bike riders. Yes, did you have a question? So the question was, the question was, are the rebate, are people eligible for a rebate that by an e-bike that has a throttle that don't have to pedal, given that we're trying to increase physical activity, but I guess it meets the goal of replacing a car trip. And these are eligible to individual low income households that varies by county because of different thresholds at the counties. And they want to support a variety of e-bikes, not just single use, but cargo bikes, e-bikes for people with disabilities, folding e-bikes, et cetera, and support local small businesses and organizations such as retail bicycle shops. The best place to find information on this rebate program is actually on the cowbike.org site, and you can sign up to get updates. If as soon as all the information's released, you'll get an update, and it's actually in pretty much their monthly newsletter each time. Next, I want to give a little commercial to the program that I helped support at the California Department of Public Health. The Active Transportation Resource Center is exactly that, a resource center. And me and my two colleagues at the California Department of Public Health, Judy Polacoff and Victoria Custodio, we help support as well as others. What's on this website, so I really encourage you to go there. It's an easy URL to remember, CaliforniaATPResources.org, and Dave spoke at a webinar we had in February, so it's up to date, and we have safe routes to school templates, guides, you name it, anything supporting biking and walking non-infrastructure. So we're not supporting the engineers, we're supporting the promotion of biking and walking. Yes? I don't know. You would probably have to ask our CalTrends, since I'm in public health, I wouldn't know. But the best person to ask would be your district local engineer for whichever district you're in. You know which CalTrends district you're in? Oh, it's a district four. So he's here, right? He spoke earlier, I forget his name. Yeah, yeah. So just for your information, the question was about some upgrades on Interstate Highway One, and the response is you can find pretty much anything happening in your district. We have 12 districts in California, and there are plans there, there are projects that are going on currently, et cetera. All right, well thank you. I'm gonna turn it back over to Randy and pull up his presentation for him. We're a small group here, but I think it's an important group. I'm trying to shop a new direction in looking at active transportation, and trying to shop something that goes from being something that's nice to do, something where we primarily work to keep people from getting run over, to something that's a central priority of the transportation system. And part of that story is what Marianne just talked about, which is really how cool, how important, how vital active transportation is to, do you wanna pull that chart up? No, it's a picture of me, which is fine, but it's, anyway. How vital active transportation is, okay, it's up there now. So this is, I'm gonna have this slide up here for a while. So you can take a look at it. In 2018, the Danish Cycling Embassy and some folks in Denmark did a study of the full societal cost of transportation by various modes. And they have made hay with infrastructure investment from this chart. The chart is only these, I guess, oh yeah, it's only these first three bars. And I've translated from Danish Kroner and I've translated from kilometers to miles. So I've just juxtaposed the numbers from there to there. And what you'll see that for every mile driven, Danish society pays $1.28. For every kilometer bicycle, Danish society profits $1.16. And for every mile walked, Danish society profits $1.82. I have then taken the bicycle number and I have added a number for electric scooters and I've added two e-bike numbers. But I'm biased, but I'm gonna tell you my assumptions so you can see whether I'm out of line bias. And so the electrics, I've basically taken the bicycle assumptions and eliminated the health benefit from scooter. I've taken and I've pretty much done the same thing. I've increased the operating cost a little bit and I have increased the speed. So the time cost has been decreased in both of those things. And I've done two scenarios for e-bike. I've done one is which is at 20% physical activity contribution and one which is at 80% physical activity contribution. So in other words, one would be where you peddle a little bit but you're mostly, you have your thumb on the throttle or the motor's doing most of the work. The other is where is like a full-on bicycle where you're a full-on pedal assist bicycle where you're working pretty hard. In some cases you may be working as hard as a regular bicycle, but it's an issue. Now this is, I think, making an argument. What you'll notice in this chart is that the health gains are the real trump card throughout. That the difference in the total cost of society, that's because health is such a big portion of the economy. It's such a big cost, particularly for government. And it's also the big cost in our lives. The health of our family and friends and children and loved ones and all that sort of stuff is a big part of the different costs of our lives. Couple of points, and I'm gonna go through points real quick so we can have discussion. Number one, walking is number one. And walking is probably the most important thing from here. Number two, there's a bunch of stuff that's not on here. Skateboards, kick scooters, roller skates. Those are all things that are really important. Number three is that, well, I won't number them anymore, but issues of ability. People can make contributions to this story at all levels. In fact, if they're seniors or youth, there's ways of independent mobility that are completely unique. Another point that I think is really important is that it doesn't really matter whether it's recreation or utilitarian transportation. In transportation, with cars, 30% of car trips are social and recreational purposes. 18% are to and from work. So recreation is a big part of transportation and you get a lot of these benefits even without necessarily going from point A to point B. There is recreational travel. People drive around just for the fun of it. Ever heard of cruising? If anybody's ever seen risky business, you know that there's some recreational transit use as well. So you can do lots of things. I wanna talk a little bit about vehicles. And the first thing I wanna talk about is e-bikes. And one of the points I wanna make here, and I don't know what to do about it, okay? So it's an issue. We're about to see what I'll call a health disparity within e-bike adoption. And that issue is that there are two kinds of e-bikes. There are cheap ones and there are expensive ones. And the difference, and I'm thinking that those are pretty much the e-bikes in these two kinds of categories. So the characteristics of the cheap ones, let's see, do I have the next slide here? Is it, okay, I was gonna say this later, but I'll say it now, cause the slide is up. This is one of the most important technological advancements in America. And part of it is because walking is number one. This is a cargo walk.  It's not very expensive. It's very widely available and will have major public health and goods movement and climate and all kinds of impacts. I'll help you out. I'll give you some money. SRAM is now selling these. So this is a typical Chinese e-bike. That when I say Chinese e-bike, I'm talking about the bikes. China has the most e-bikes of any country.  Vestigial pedals, but it's clearly not made. And this is public policy. That's what that is. That's saying that the machine has to have pedals even though nobody intends for them to be used. And so if you, so the two things that I think you should look at when it comes to e-bikes that are made for physical activity and aren't, one is what kind of sensor does it have? So there are two main kinds of sensors on them. One is a cadence sensor and the other is a torque sensor.  And so if you're given power by how much it's going around then it's not really giving you based upon your physical activity. There's a little bit in terms of spinning but it's not so much. If a torque sensor, it's done that way. The other thing to look at is to look at the shape and design of the bike. Now most of them are not this, but it's very simple. Is the bike made to be set upon or is the design optimized for physical activity? For using and contributing your physical power to the bicycle and so you can see by design. Again, I don't know what to do about this but the issue of how much physical activity people will get and we will create real health disparities if we are supplying the kinds of e-bikes that are not made to be used and not supplying the ones that are. This one would only work with a throttle but you could, there's a number of pedal assist bikes particularly in the class three area. So in Europe, the amount of power assist until the top speed is regulated. So as you get closer to the top speed, you have to have more and more pedal power and so when you're going 16 miles an hour on a European e-bike, it's all you. And in, but here we're not. So you've got, I'm sure many of you have experienced it. You're pedaling and then all of a sudden it's gone because you've reached, and you're really just spinning. But the point is very simple is that there is a health benefit from having a kind of bike where your contribution matters. Right. So I'm not, I wanna talk a little bit about low speed electric vehicles and I think that they are a good thing. If we have high speed, massive vehicles, it is a great thing to replace them with low speed micro vehicles but it's not something that we want. It's not something that contributes significantly to the physical activity element. So again, can we get the physical activity benefit and get the other benefits as well. We also wanna look at what is the physical activity implications of certain kinds of infrastructure. So if you look at the bike lanes in cities like Beijing, it's not the kind of place where you would want your child, your senior citizen to ride because there's a lot of vehicles going faster. So if we are creating a problem with higher speed vehicles, mixing with lower speed, acoustic pedaling, we may be creating a situation where more timid riders, younger riders, older riders will have difficulties. So we need to look at the public policy and that's relegating speed and also design issues. There's a whole world out there for how do we redesign our streets around a very different mix of vehicles including light electric and such but we need to keep in mind those immediate benefits on the near term, yeah, in the near term. What we're trying to avoid is we're trying to get the benefits of light, low speed vehicles without the disbenefits of motorizing active transportation. So we're trying to get those benefits and that's where the balance is and we need the public policies that do that and we'll talk more about that in a second. Just real quickly on climate, there's a couple things you can substitute vehicles, use lighter vehicles for heavier vehicles. Our primary strategy right now is fuel change. So we're going from gas to electric power. That's a good thing. Active mobility actually hits a home run on all of those. You've got vehicle substitution to a lighter vehicle. You've got electrification. You've also got a new energy source and well that's not a new energy source. It's a rediscovered energy source and I could talk about this for hours but basically we as human beings have evolved in order to solve the climate problem. We have within our genetic material and the reason for that is that when we were hunting and gathering, we were using a lot of energy and our bodies, that was a problem because if we used a lot of energy to find food then we would need even more food to replace the energy we just use. So our bodies adapted by economizing on the energy. So if people are very active, there's actually ways that our hypothalamus tells our organs and our brain and changes the energy consumption that our bodies use. Long story short is that we as human beings have this amazing potential for muscle power to do things like ride a bike and walk and it's mostly free from an environmental perspective, from an environmental perspective. Well there's sewage on all kinds of energy burning but we're gonna burn about the same. So I'd be happy to talk more if you wanna look up the energy paradox online. You can see some more, this is a lot of recent research but we now have, I think we should be talking about muscle power as a renewable energy source in line with wind and solar and maybe even better and more powerful ultimately than any of those things because we've got 330 million residents in the United States who are, who have the ability to make some level of contribution. That's actually a very complicated question and we'll talk about it afterwards, okay? I wanna sort of, one more thing is think about riding your bike on, let's say riding your bike to a school, riding your bike to a school. Think about riding your bike to a school on a cold day. Think about riding your bike to a school on a cold rainy day. Think about riding your bike to a school on a cold rainy day with your child. Think about riding to school on a cold rainy day with your child and her violin, okay? Okay, so I'm laying that out because the challenge here, the challenge in front of us with the physical activity is actually to make it a regular and routine form of transportation. And we have to look at incentivizing in the circumstances where we can't just, oh, biking is fun, you know? And we have to look at incentivizing those. The truth is that if you go to the Netherlands right now, there will be someone riding with their child on a cold rainy day with the violin and they figured it out. They figured it out because there's ways of protecting the violin, there's bikes that can carry children, there's rain gear that you can use, you can actually be pretty comfortable if you do it on a regular basis. But they figured it out because the benefit and the utility are so high, particularly compared to the other options, that they figured out those kinds of things. And so I think what we need to do is incentivize and I could talk a lot about sort of the incentives, the incentives will get us to the behavior just like in Chicago where I'm from. You know, we used to have almost nobody biking to the train station at all. Now I would say that January biking to the train station is about 50% of July biking to the train station. It's pretty high, it didn't change immediately, but when the utility is understood, you get some, we just need to get people to that point through incentives. In Denmark, they have public health care. And so when they save a dollar on health costs, the government directly reaps that and if the government spends 50 cents saving that dollar, they're definitely gonna benefit. Here, we do have some significant government health care costs, but it's less and a lot of it's in the private sector. So I think one of the things we have to look at with the benefits being on the health side is we really need to look at the employers for incentives. And so one of the things that I'm researching right now looking at is more employer-based programs that incentivize all cycling, not just commute trips to work, but all cycling in order to make that happen. We could talk about bike coin, which is some ideas of actually getting people to generate income. We could talk about there's some issues of once we're trying to figure out what to do with public resources and public funds, what does that mean for shared fleets? And how can we incentivize shared fleets to incentivize the physical activity parts that might have something to do with the design of the e-bikes in those fleets. It might have something to do with making sure that acoustic bikes are still very much a part of shared fleets. It may mean that if you walk out of your office building in downtown LA, it might mean that the only convenient option as you walk out the door is not 100% motorized vehicle, but that there are some physical activity-based active transportation options available to you. There's a number of options we could talk about. I wanna end with talking about words. And words matter. I really don't like when micro-mobility encompasses biking and e-bikes because I'm very interested in us drawing a thick black line between active mobility and sedentary mobility. And I think that it's very important. I really dislike the term vulnerable road users. First of all, motorists are vulnerable as well. Many more motorists die on the roads, but it's like saying, these are the bugs that we don't wanna squash. And it's not so much much more like active mobility, biking and walking, because those are positive impacts. And I think we need to look for ways of better documenting this set of health benefits and then the other access, affordability, climate, et cetera, benefits. But we can talk active travel. We can talk active transportation. We can talk active mobility, but I think we wanna put active out there front and center and lead towards prioritized decision making around infrastructure, policy, subsidies, incentives, and all those kinds of things. So hopefully that gave you some things for us to discuss further. Why don't we open it up to some questions? Hello, I'm here. Thank you so much for the very interesting and informative presentation from both of you. My name is Gabriel. I'm with the Bicycle Kitchen that's in Los Angeles. We're like a community space. I think it's a number of really interesting points that you brought up. It is interesting the hard line that you said between active mobility and, sorry, sedentary and non-sedentary. Partially, I think because there are a range of e-bikes specifically, like you had mentioned, and even within a single e-bike, you can pick different levels of pedal assist, et cetera, et cetera. So it's not necessarily this binary or extremely segmented thing, just as a side note. But I think the core issue of all of this or at least your interest and I think a very worthwhile point is specifically the, like this, all these changes basically. And how from a policy perspective, do we incentivize perhaps the ideal outcome? So if your position is that we should be incentivizing specifically active, non-sedentary transportation, that would involve, I feel like from policy side, subsidies of some sort to economically incentivize people. Because I think from a number of perspective, like health benefits and all this stuff are good, but to get people to actually specifically change their behavior requires some sort of mechanism in the sense that the $10 million grant that you had mentioned will lead to more people buying e-bikes that might not have beforehand because they're then economically incentivized. So I guess that was kind of a long way to say, I guess what incentives would you like to see like specifically in the active or non-sedentary realm of transportation? Yeah, so it's a great question. So SRAM has 4,000 employees globally. About 1,000 of them, the people who do sales and design and engineering are like, bike crazy like me. 3,000 of them are factory workers who make derailleurs and suspension forks and all those kinds of things. And many of them are sort of much more mainstream, I would say mainstream America, but there's mainstream Taiwanese, mainstream Portuguese, mainstream Americans. There's all kinds of folks in the factories. I think that it's sort of easiest for SRAM to put our money where our mouth is and to document, to do an incentive program where we're really providing, is it money? Is it time off? Is it a mix of incentives? Probably some support mechanisms. So people have bikes, know how to use them, all that kind of stuff. But to do a program with our money, we will benefit because we will have happier, healthier, more productive employees. But we should also document what the outcomes are. Where the savings that are up on the chart actually come in. And I think we could then get other private sector interest in that and I think by collecting the data, we could then look at where are their opportunities to do public programs. But they're then based on experience. So yeah. I just wanted to add something to that. The infrastructure making it harder to drive is very helpful. And I know in the town I live in, oh and the town I live in is a bike friendly town, but it's the downtown you just never wanna drive there and I think that's true of Palo Alto. You just don't wanna drive there because it's misery to get through. So changing by infrastructure I mean changing it so you have wider bike lanes, cars have to drive slower, et cetera, et cetera. And then people choose to bike or choose to walk because it's faster. Yes, yeah. Basically you could say it's a cost and convenience equation and so it's sort of how it is that, what's the cost and convenience of driving versus the cost and convenience of cycling and when you tweak either side of the equation and sometimes the tweaks on the car side are more important. The most famous example is the London congestion charge where there were dramatic decreases in traffic because the cost went up. Do you have examples of incentives that work as well as disincentives for car driving? Like does it really work to pay somebody 50 cents a mile to ride a bike compared to charging 50 cents a mile to drive a car? It's important to answer your question in terms of examples. The theory is that it works if they have a place to ride and if there's a basic floor of safety, then those kind of incentives have a possibility of doing things. If you don't have those examples, I mean if you don't have a situation where people can safely go places, it's a problem. The simple examples are where people give discounts or other kinds of things for people who arrive by bike or that kind of thing. Well, up to that. Alameda created a new transportation agency and I got a business there and they started charging me for months for the new transportation agency for incentivizing public transportation and car pooling. And I asked, well, we're all bike and the company, 75% of the people bike and what kind of incentives are you gonna have for bikes? Then I got them connected with some app that could track that and they kind of agreed to do like a bike incentive for biking to Alameda and I say, okay, well, I'll pay for the thing. I mean, now that I had a lot of choice on the matter, but I got them to do that and some other businesses agreed and then they put it on the back burner. But I was wondering if you have seen any other programs, the people from the app said that there was something that was gonna start up in Portland a couple of years ago and I was wondering if there was anything like that because the idea was that we were gonna get paid like a $1.50 for every day that we bike, every direction we bike to work. Yeah. There could be a long answer to that. I just wanna go back to the, so when a government agency sort of has their head down and they're trying to incentivize transit, which is what was happening in your business district and what happens there is that the active mobility's interest, that sort of societal goal to increase active mobility wasn't on the table there. And so you end up, you're an afterthought and you eventually get forgotten. There are incentive programs that have specifically dealt with active mobility. There's a whole set of programs called Individualized Marketing. Travel Smart is one of the brand names around that and it's a multimodal program where you got individualized coaching and then incentives and it's, they're usually based on employers. So for instance, there's a lot of employers in Silicon Valley that have too many cars and they're required to reduce those cars and so they just start upping the amount of money until the cars go away, but people are having to do the other things. It's not specifically aimed at active transportation, people carpool, people take transit because the options aren't there. But those are real world examples. You do get changes of behavior, but you have to sort of keep raising the amount of money until the change occurs. Thank you. I have a couple things here. First of all, I want to clarify SRAM's position, official position on e-bikes if you can do that for us. And then if you tell us that you are building or intend to be selling e-bikes, et cetera, I had a thought about your idea about incentivizing people to pedal more and I thought, well, giving your torque meters, et cetera, et cetera, maybe built into the bicycle for each watt of power pushed on those pedals and app that would give them some rebate of some sort. For every time they put a little bit more energy into the pedal, their cost of owning that bike goes down. Yeah, I love that idea. That's great. And then real quick, I wanted to mention this guy's having a little trouble here. The bike superhighways and the controversy between those and also e-bikes on a class three bikes in particular in bike lanes and the new legislation in California, what SRAM's position is on that as well. So SRAM's position on bikes is our spec on bikes. So we do not make bikes. We make bike parts. If an e-bike has our chain on it, our derailleur on it, our brakes on it, our suspension fork on it, we are for that e-bike. And so we don't have a policy position on that. We don't make a motor. In general, we're four bikes. My job is to work with the rest of the bike movement, other bike companies, et cetera, to grow cycling and grow e-cycling as well. And so that's where we're trying to go. I think that this issue of physical activity, it becomes an important piece of cycling, including e-bikes competing with other modes of transportation where there is competition. And I think that's important. It may mean some trade-offs in the industry and those trade-offs are happening in different ways in different parts of the world. And it's kind of messy here in the United States right now, both with different laws in different states with... Different markets, there's the utilitarian and pavement market, there's the dirt, which is a very, dirt and mountain biking, which is a very different thing as well. The whole issue of e-mountain bikes, where mountain bikes are allowed. And so it's really kind of messy and we're hoping to try to bring some sanity to it, working primarily through our industry association, which in the United States is people for bikes. And so we're working with them on all these kinds of things. The other thing that makes it really cloudy here in the United States is there's a lot of illegal bikes out there, bikes that don't meet any standards or regulation that are sort of screwing things up because they are becoming a fast, heavy, disruptive force on non-motorized trails, thus making those places less attractive to other users and it causes a lot of problems. So we're trying to sort that all out. It would be great if SRAM could join that conversation that's been happening all weekend about e-bikes and proponents versus those who are trying to steer people more towards traditional pedal-powered bikes and those people who are like, no, any bike is a great bike, let's get people out on bikes. And maybe if SRAM, I would love to hear SRAM help facilitate some of those conversations because there's been a lot of debate just this weekend alone about the couple different approaches to that subject. So thank you so much. This has been interesting things. So outside of the personal choices to benefit me, staying active, it seems that most people need a monetary incentive. Or disincentive for a choice. And right now, in order to save the world from not just active transportation or any active transportation, but from carbon buildup and climate change, weave the government's interested in some senses, a carbon cost. If you produce carbon, then you can offset that in some ways, so there's a monetary disincentive for producing carbon. Can we integrate the, not just the health savings, but the savings to the planet by instituting some kind of incentive or disincentive for misuse of calories, energy.  So we're getting into the interface between public policy and sort of personal choice and personal freedom and all that kind of stuff. And so what I wanna bring up is an analogy with sugar.  Yeah, okay.  And so we sometimes try to do things with public policy to change diet and change those kind of choices, but mostly the front is how do you get people to understand that a healthy diet is better for you and that you make choices and things need to be balanced. And I think we're in the same kind of space with this. Well, it hasn't worked real well. And I think we, you know, but then we need to figure out how to do it better because there aren't a lot of choices. We can't force travel choices on people. We can nudge and we can use appropriate public policy tools. I don't think, well, how should I say this? You say it hasn't worked real well. There is a fair bit of healthy eating, you know, that goes on in society. And I'll bet most people here, you know, pay attention to healthy eating in their lives. I think we should look at the public, I won't call it education as much as people living as human beings within society. And so I think we need to start talking about those things. And I think that we could get some more movement around, you know, active trans, active mobility, which would create a basis for more policy change and maybe get some kind of flywheel going. So it's hard, but I think that it's, there's more that could be done. Like the choice is made for us where they make it really, really difficult to bike. You know, really difficult to walk. It takes like, you know, three hours to get, you know, to Daly City if you take public transportation. You know, so it's a lot easier to get on the car. You know, so it's not the individual. I think, you know, it's like they say, build it and they'll come up with it. It's like they say, build it and they'll come.  It's like it's not providing options for us to bike to San Francisco, you know.  So I think everybody in the room agrees society is failing us. You know, that we need to, we need to create a, we need to create a new system, you know. And I think that people are here at this conference because they're working on the public policy pieces. We also have to try to impact individual choices because there is some range of individual choice, even in the current environment. It may not be the trip to Daly City, you know, but it might be, you know, the trip in the neighborhood and there are certainly some travel that people can do. And I think that that will help, you know, again, get that flywheel going. Okay, I'll make this short. Yeah, I think it's a really interesting discussion about impacting like behavior and stuff like that. Personally, I feel like economic incentives like really can impact behavior, you know. I think like you had mentioned like, so like biking on my own accord is and getting, like I get enjoyment from that, but like I don't think everyone does or is conscious of that per se, but I just think that like economic incentivization can have impact, you know, and just, you know, gas prices go up and people drive less and it is interesting to think like how that could specifically be applied to bikes in a wider mandate, either via like some employer-based incentivization like you had mentioned or something else, some other perhaps tool, you know, via at the state level or something like that. One other small comment that I think is interesting too is the discrepancy with e-bikes that, you know, we've had and has happened a lot of these kind of in where to fall on that. And I feel like to some extent that depends on what your end goal is, you know, if it's like from an active perspective, then yeah, sitting e-bike that doesn't allow for a pedal isn't in line with that per se, but if the end goal is specifically climate change related and or replacing a car trip, then like anything from a utilitarian perspective that replaces that should perhaps be advocated for, even if it's not the ideal scenario, I guess. Let me just mention the incentive issue. There's actually something that we can all do on the incentive issue and that's do pilots and demonstrations. So, you know, an employer could pick 100 people that work for them and do a trial, see what kind of incentives, you know, make a difference, see if measure before and after and see what's going on. A community organization could do that. Philanthropy could help with pilots and demonstrations and those could then lead to programs at larger employers and then again to government. So I think trying things, you know, makes a lot of difference. Happy to answer questions, talk afterwards. This has been great. Thank you all very much. Thank you.


Welcome to Toffy TV, it's the match reaction Norwich City 2-Eventon 1. The unthinkable has happened. Everton have lost to Bottom. Well, they're not Bottom now because they're off the bottom. Bottom club Norwich City. Everton become the only team this season to lose to all three promoted sides.  Everton abysmal again. Really poor in the first half especially. It began before the game, the man as you're picking a 4-4-2 formation, which doesn't work. Not when you've got Andre Gomez as one of your two. And that's not having a go with Gomez, he was alright, but it's just the bodies in the field. And when your other striker's Rhondda, then it defeats the object. There are many leagues about power and pace and mobility and Rhondda doesn't have any of that. The manager obviously was without Alan. He said yesterday there was a Covid case. We can deduce that it was Alan. So he missed the game. No place for Nathan Patterson to make his everton debut yet James Coleman was at right back. Michael Enko at left back and he went with Keane and Goffrey as the two centre backs. In midfield, Gomez and Goffrey like I said, he had Anthony Gordon, Damari Gray and then Dominic Hall of Llewyn and Rhondda. Up top and Everton were behind early on, another awful goal to give away. Now ball down the right, it's a ball into the penalty area. I don't know what Michael Keane's doing, stretching out a leg when facing his own goal and one little down. And it's really awful goal to give away. You're up against it. Everton conceded the first goal. I think it's nine games on the run now. So playing catch up every game doesn't help. We then have a bit of the ball. We have a ball into the box. James Coleman as it, good face touch and then looks for Anthony Gordon who was marked and then decides to under hit a pass to Gordon. Gordon waits for it lad Nixon off the go, ball in behind, Keane stretching can't get there, either or either or whatever he's called in on goal. Pickford changes back a little bit and it's 2-0 and you know from us attacking to being 2-0 down, nor did you come believe it. I think the first goal was the first one needs to go in six games or something and needs to go two goals in the open in 20 minutes. Just as it was a bright and you cannot give teams two goals that. And the problem is evidently the manager can be my own injuries all he wants, all he wants. But this fellow is supposed to come in and make us tight, tactical, brilliant tactical manager. I thought we were getting, when he come in, like a Spanish Sam Aladdin away, whereas we wouldn't be great football but we'd be really difficult to break down. And then you hoped with the quality of Damari Gray, Richard Ellerson, Dominic Calvert-Lewin, there at the other end we'd nick a lot of games. And I thought we'll be really resilient and we'll win a lot of games. And we are anything but resilient. We are all over the place and he can't fix it. So you cannot blame not having your own players, not having enough players. If your team, you can't put a team out to stop leaking goals and you've got no clue how to do it, then it's on you. And Evan of now won one game in 13. It's absolutely atrocious. One clean sheet since we beat Norwich at Gouldersen back in September. We've won one game since we beat Norwich at Gouldersen back in September. It's January the 15th. It can't go on. It simply cannot go on. We had a lot of the ball in the first half. We went in 2-0 down, expected them to make some changes at the break. He didn't, which again to me is science that he's not really sure what he's doing. Come out for the second half. The second half was better, but it still wasn't great. We're playing a team at the bottom of the league with no confidence who are losing games regularly. They're keeping us a bay. It only really changed when the Charleston came on. And we had a little bit more movement. I don't know if he took Rondon off on all of a sudden, we looked more of a threat in the final third. And that isn't just Rondon's fault. It's just not mobile enough for what we need. We've got Dom up there who I don't think had a great game either, but at least he's more mobile. The Charleston came on and gave us that, you know, something different that we were looking for. Took Seamus Cullman off as well, who I thought had had a terrible game. They put Ben Godfrey at right back. Jerry Meena came on. And, kell surprise, we looked a lot safer with him there. And we got a goal back and it was a brilliant goal. Michael Enko, ball into the box. Keepers' punches, not great. And the Charleston overhead kick into the back of the net to get us back in 2-1 down, half an hour to go against the team at the bottom of the league. You think right. Just put them under pressure, the Wilton. And alls we really had was half chances after that and not a lot of them. We've ended with 60% possession, but not a lot of chance to win it, make it 3-1 at the end. You know, Rashika's hit the post. They've had a couple of shots from far out, which pick for that to shave. And yet we haven't forced Tim Krull into anything really, two-taxing for him. In a game we had to win. You know, these games are just coming and going. It's game 19 today, it's the halfway point. And we are 15th in the league. Nor have you now three points closer to us. We knew we had to win today. The manager knew we had to win today and we've lost it. Therefore, that to me puts him in a very difficult situation now. One win in 13 games is embarrassing. It really is. And I don't know how you survived that. I really don't. And there'll be people who won't want to sack him for the reason that it's another manager. And I get that fully. I can't subscribe to that a little bit. But you can't leave someone in place of the wrong person. It seems like this manager is never going to be able to unite the football club. And it's what we need, I think, more than anything. Who do you get? It's a difficult one, isn't it? It is a difficult one. But people are saying Duncan Fakes, but Duncan Fakes doesn't even want to take it. The way the club is, not everyone wants them. We'll do you want to risk it. People are talking about Gray and Potter. But Gray and Potter aren't even brightening to come to heaven. I don't think so. You see in five, then fancy palace job. So it's a difficult one, but you cannot leave the wrong man in the job for the sake of it. But that's up to the owner. And he's not made great decisions and went against the fan base in the summer. So we'll have to wait and see. Obviously I'm recording this after the game. Things make no evidence. Things can change very quickly. But right now, I've been he says, I still haven't managed it. And I haven't won one in 13 and are in huge, huge trouble at the moment. So, yeah, there you go. Another defeat. It's very depressing. Man of the match. Difficult one to give. I don't think anybody had a great game for evidence today. Ritchie Arleson, because he's come on and done something and not a lot of other people did. There you go. There you go. Heaven have lost again. I don't really know what to say it. I've almost gone past being angry to being very, very concerned. Games are just flowing by. Brightening knowledge will get four points easily out of those who will be fine. We haven't got a single point out of them too. And it's like this all the time. And if the owner doesn't realise it, I mean, I say the board. What are the board? The board are useless. So it's the owner. It's on him. So he's got a big call to me. There you go. That's it. Yeah. See you later.


You may have heard the expression knowledge is power. Well, today we're going to give you more power to control your diet and lifestyle by giving you the facts. Welcome to the Nutrition Facts Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Michael Greger. Today we learn about an herb with impressive health benefits that has long been used in alternative medicine. It's called fenugreek, and its effects are remarkable. The effects of a commercially available botanical supplement on strength, body composition, power output, and hormonal profiles in resistance-trained males. Something had a significant impact on both upper and lower body strength and body composition in comparison to placebo in a double-blind controlled trial. These changes were obtained with no clinical side effects, allowed these men to leg press an extra hundred pounds compared to placebo, and the magical substance was fenugreek, a naturally occurring edible spice that appears to double as an anti-cancer agent. In summary, fenugreek seeds may possess potent anti-cancer properties. In our next story, we learn that for all the benefits of fenugreek seeds, they do have an interesting side effect. Cancer prevention is all well and good, but there is a side effect of fenugreek seed consumption.  Analysis of human male armpits sweat after fenugreek ingestion, and yes, it happens to women too. The strong maple syrup odor, which appears after fenugreek ingestion, was investigated. They had men plaster some gauze pads into their armpits before and after eating a tablespoon of fenugreek seeds. Sweat was collected over a 24-hour period and given to a panel of eight odor assessors to get their take. The experts describe what they smelled in those armpits as cocoa, roast beef, carrots, spicy, gravy, but then honey, rose, and lilac peached like raspberry. I guess it could have been worse. There was one assessor who described one of the fenugreek odor compounds as musty sweet onion socks. Another agreed, but thought it was more like fruity floral socks. Of course, there was the boring assessor who was like, it smells like fenugreek. This is a harmless phenomenon. The only reason I bring it up is that there is actually a serious congenital disorder called maple syrup urine disease, branch chain ketoesteguria. It's completely unrelated. But breastfeeding infants with moms using fenugreek to boost their milk production may be misdiagnosed. So if you're breastfeeding and eating fenugreek, just make sure to tell your OB just so they don't worry. Finally today, we look at the hormonal benefits of fenugreek. In my video The Benefits of Fenugreek Seeds, I profiled this study in which young men were randomized to a sugar pill or fenugreek capsules for eight weeks and got a significant improvement in upper body strength, lower body strength, and body composition, a significant reduction in body fat percentage. And the only side effect? It can make your sweat and pee smell like maple syrup. Seems like a bonus. Studies on immature castrated rats suggest the fenugreek muscle bulking is a testosterone effect, but we didn't know what happens in humans until now. Four randomized controlled trials put it to the test and saw a significant boost of total blood testosterone. And indeed, fenugreek appears to improve sexual function in men, for example, doubling the frequency of morning erections. Or what about the sexual function in women?  Drug companies have tried testosterone patches on women to try to increase sexual desire, but we're concerned about blood clots and long-term safety. What about a little fenugreek? A significant increase in testosterone compared to placebo and a boost in the estrogen estradiol, which resulted in both an increase in sexual desire and function, translating to about a doubling of sexual activity compared to placebo. If fenugreek causes an increase in estrogen levels, what about the efficacy of fenugreek for reducing menopausal symptoms? A significant reduction in menopausal symptoms across every single domain, for example, cutting the weekly numbers of hot flashes and night sweats in half over a period of three months. Other hormonal effects include an improvement in painful periods. What I like about this study is that they didn't use some proprietary extract, but just straight plain fenugreek powder that you'd buy at the store. Now they packed it into capsules just so they could pit it against the sugar pill placebo, but the dose they used is about a third of a teaspoon three times a day, taking the first three days of their period. A third of a teaspoon would cost less than five cents. And boom, a significant decrease in pain, and also appeared to improve other symptoms as well. While we're on a roll with hormonal effects, what about the effectiveness of fenugreek as a galactagog? No, not another sci-fi reboot. A galactagog is something that increases breast milk production in lactating mothers, and fenugreek fits the bill, and not just buy a little. In this randomized double-blind placebo-controlled trial on which breastfeeding women took less than a quarter teaspoon of fenugreek, less than a quarter teaspoon of ground ginger, and about a sixteenth of a teaspoon of turmeric every day, doubled their milk production within a month. About a 50% increase by week two, and a 100% increase by week four. However, due to its potential stimulation on the uterus, fenugreek seeds should not be used during pregnancy, though this is all based on laboratory animal data. Better safe than sorry. We would love it if you could share with us your stories about reinventing your health through evidence-based nutrition. Go to nutritionfacts.org slash testimonials. We may share it on our social media to help inspire others. To see any graphs, charts, graphics, images, or studies mentioned here, please go to the Nutrition Facts podcast landing page. There you'll find all the detailed information you need, plus links to all the sources we cite for each of these topics. For a timely text on the pathogens that cause pandemics, you can order the e-book, audiobook, or hard copy of my last book, How to Survive a Pandemic. For recipes, check out my second to last book, My How Not to Diet Cookbook. It's beautifully designed with more than 100 recipes for delicious and nutritious meals. And all the proceeds I received from the sales of all my books goes to charity. NutritionFacts.org is a nonprofit science-based public service where you can sign up for free daily updates on the latest in nutrition research via bite-sized videos and articles. Everything on the website is free. There's no ads, no corporate sponsorship. It's strictly non-commercial. I'm not selling anything. I just put it up as a public service, as a labor of love, as a tribute to my grandmother, whose own life was saved with evidence-based nutrition.