Hello, my name is Roger Jelenick, I'm your host of Book Worlds, and my guest today is Tyler McMahon, the author of a new book, Dream of Another America. And first we're going to find out who Tyler McMahon is. Tyler, what, who are you? As you said, I'm Tyler McMahon, I'm a professor of English here at HPU, just across the street or in this building, I suppose, in another sense. I'm from Washington DC area, Virginia originally, and I've been here in Honolulu for about ten years. And have you been teaching all that time? I have been. Yeah, I came here sight unseen and started teaching for HPU. The subject of the book is, the book, it's a novel, it's set in El Salvador in part, or mostly, how did it come to be set in El Salvador? What's been your experience in El Salvador? Well, when I graduated from college, very shortly thereafter I joined the Peace Corps and was sent to El Salvador in 1999, I suppose, and I was a water and sanitation volunteer. What does that mean? Well, it was a program that mostly built latrines, but I was fortunate to be matched with a, though I have built a few latrines of my day, I was sort of assigned to a community that was on the verge of installing a big gravity flow aqueduct for about five villages that didn't have any potable water. So I was able to go there and work on that project and live in a small little village for about three years and that was, this was the late 90s when I arrived, I was there in 1999 to 2002 or thereabouts. So it was kind of the height of immigration, you know, economic immigration to the US. Just tell me where is El Salvador? So it's in Central America, it's on the Pacific Coast, it's kind of cut out of Honduras that's the way Portugal's cut out of Spain. It just has a Pacific coastline that actually faces mostly to the south, but just because Central America's sort of oriented that way and it shares a border with Honduras, Nicaragua and Guatemala and, you know, you have to cross through Guatemala to get to southern Mexico. And did you choose El Salvador or were you sent there? I didn't. I was sent there. I did prefer Latin America at the time, the time I joined the Peace Corps, particularly the English majors were almost all being sent to Eastern Europe and the former Soviet states that had just recently become states. And you know, they were having a very particular kind of experience where they were, you know, working in schools or institutions and in many cases living in two bedroom apartments and sort of having a kind of commuter thing and I, for one thing, I wanted, I'd learned a little Spanish by that point and I wanted to keep going with my Spanish and I also, I was interested in the sort of romance of the Peace Corps as I'd heard about it before and I didn't, that involved, you know, more of a, you know. A Peace Corps turned you into a water engineer? Yeah, exactly. From an English, all it took was a plane ticket and I went from being an English major to a, sometimes called an engineer erroneously, but. So what did it actually involve? Well, it was a lot of things at a lot of different times. I guess it was mostly kind of community organization types of work. I mean, I was, in the Peace Corps and other NGOs, they liked to work in partnership so it was sort of a sign to an organization called PCI that I don't believe works in El Salvador anymore. But they had engineers and lawyers and things like that. And most of the funding had already been secured by the time I got there. I sort of, there had been another volunteer who, who lived nearby in a larger town who kind of, most of his service was, was kind of a liaison to smaller villages and he, he laid the groundwork for me to go to Apollo Ground. So your job was more community organizing? Yeah. How big was the village? The village was a couple of hundred people and as I said, I worked with, with about five other villages and one of them was probably about, largest was probably about seven hundred people. I should say the novel is set in the village in El Salvador and about the whole migration to the U.S. and the adventures involved in getting from El Salvador to the U.S. Having said that, the, the family that is central to the, to the story was a family you knew? Was it a composite family? Yeah, it's a composite of, of, it's a strongly based, the, the, the village aspect of things, the sort of home front is definitely based on a family that, that I was very close to and I took all of my meals with. It was always a fun sort of source of irony for us to talk about, you know, me being there and eating at the table that, that was sort of set with, with, with remaces as they call them, the wages that were sent back, back home from, from my, you know, country. And they, they took great care of me. I took, you know, as I said, I ate with them, you know, every day and, and they really showed me the ropes and, and their, their kid, they had several kids and in the book there's only one child, but they had several kids who, you know, really helped me learn Spanish and learn, learn about the culture and, and about the politics of the village and things like that. So, let's describe, describe the book given that setting. So, what's, what's a basic story? Yeah, it's, it's, I mean, the, the heart of the book is, is the, the main character, Jacinto sort of traveling up through, through Mexico. He's, he's sort of double-crossed by a smuggler in the, in the first chapter and, and left for dead in the, in the desert and then, you know, sent back to Central America as, as many, as many Central Americans are in that situation and then he's, he decides to, to sort of self-cater and, and, and find his way to the states without the help of the smuggler after that. And, and his journey is really, is, is a composite of a lot of stories that I, you know, read or, or heard about him or, or, you know, studied and, and that kind of thing. Some of the worst tragedies that folks go through, they're not all that bad, hopefully. But he had a particular kind of guardian angel in, in another major character in the book. Yeah. Was that somebody, was there someone like that you actually knew? Or was that a? The Israel character, not really. I mean, it was, he was based on a lot of, I guess, like superstitions and things like that that you heard about from almost a pre-Columbian Mayan stories and things or about kind of these helper types and, and sort of witch doctors and things like that who believed in, in these guys. He had a, he had a kind of hidden history, right? He was a, he was a fighter. Right, right. What was he, give some background on the revolution and then the continuing struggle in El Salvador. Right. Well, so as you, as you saw it in that village. Mm-hmm. It is, you know, by that point when I was in El Salvador, you know, the, they call it the conflict, you know, but it was a civil war by any measure. It had been over for, for quite a long time. But it just, it informed everything, you know. It was, for one thing, they, El Salvador got a kind of hasty, you know, quick and dirty land reform after their war. So, you know, you could say that, that it certainly, it changed the country and, and it needed to be changed because there was such a vast monopolization of the, of all the agricultural lands. But it effectively sort of relocated everyone. So, for example, the biggest problems I had with, with the, the water project I worked on is there was one community that was all former guerrillas in the middle of, you know, four others that were all former military. And they didn't get along, you know. And they, they used different structures to organize their communities, they used different terminologies. When the Evangelical Church came around, which was happening in earnest in the late 90s when I was there, you know, previously it was a 100% Catholic country. And then, and then Central America started having these, they called Evangelical Churches their, their, you know, Protestant faiths essentially. And for whatever reason, they caught on more with the former army folks. And, and, and the guerrillas remained Catholic. And, and so it, it, it created a new dimension to this. How did you experience that on day-to-day basis in the village? Well, I spent a lot of time sort of trying to liaise to reach out to that, to that other village, that guerrilla village, but much more directly the family that I, that I described, they had been former guerrillas and, and even more kind of random coincidence. They were, you know, assigned a parcel of land and a home in the midst of, of former army fighters. So they were sort of pariahs in their own village and me getting close to them, you know, influenced my relationships with other, other people in the village. So it was all this, you know, overlapping kind of history that became religion, that became politics.  And was this complexity part of everyday life? Absolutely, yeah. I mean, I think. Was it a part of an endless conversation? Or a, or a sort of passive regressive sublimated, you know, unspoken conversation in a lot of ways. And, and I just think it, on a personal level, it, you know, there's just a lot of things that you didn't talk about, things that you didn't ask about, a lot of trauma that just went unaddressed, you know. But that was a memory. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Was a memory maintained deliberately or? Yes, but it was. It was from generation to generation. Absolutely, I think so. I mean, in some ways it was, it was something that, that people never spoke about, but it was, you know, it informed all their opinions about their neighbors and things like that, and about each other's children. I remember in the Northern Ireland conflict, the children were kind of brainwashed at taking sides. Was that the same truth? Yeah, I think so.  So the stories is about this kind of hideous journey from El Salvador to the U.S., undergoing all sorts of horrendous interventions by various self-interested people along the way. What sort of proportion of the village would, would have that kind of experience? Would be somebody in every family or? Certainly in many villages, that would be the case. My village skewed less so. I'm sure it's, it's changed now, but particularly in Northern El Salvador and in a region called Chilatinango, I mean, absolutely one member of almost every household would be there, and it tends to work like that. Like it tended to have a kind of exponential effect. So if one family had, you know, someone to receive them as they would, they would put it, you know, and I spoke to many people in my village who I would say, you know, have you ever considered going? And they said, oh, I would love to, but I don't have anyone to receive me, you know, meaning they didn't have a cousin or a brother or an uncle that would kind of take them in once they got to the States. And in many cases, it's a down payment issue as well. You know, so if one village got a sort of foothold, often, you know, other members of the village would end up there in a, in some place in the same city. A lot of the stories takes part in trains and hitchhiking and so on. Just give us a sense of that, of what that was like. Yeah, it's, I mean, it's a big distance for starters. It sure is, yeah, it's a cover on foot, exactly. It's a strange thing. For whatever reason, the, there's a train that's, sometimes the train is called La Bestia, the beast, other times you hear the state of Chiapas, which the train goes through referred to as the beast. I kind of had it both ways in my book, but you'll see it, you'll see it explained in different, different senses. And this is like the, the sort of narrow southern corridor of Mexico, where for whatever reason, it's, you know, it's very difficult terrain for one thing. So the train is one of the only ways to move about. But it's also just a sort of a bottleneck in the geographic sense where everyone needs to kind of move along this one corridor. So all of the immigrants end up sort of squeezed into, onto these trains, you know, holding on from every angle. You can see pictures easily of, you know, just dozens of people on top of a train car and, you know, barely having room for their feet or hands or whatever. It might be a cling to the sides sometimes and that kind of thing. And how long would they be on these trains? If they, depending on how long they go, but days or weeks, I would say, you know, usually it's. Weeks on trains. Yeah, I mean, you could, you could go even further if you were so inclined, but it's sort of, it's really a thing down in Southern Mexico. And it's, it's, it's particularly problematic because it's, it's certainly the police are opportunistic about, about finding folks there, but even more so bandits and robbers and things like that find it a good place. We'll take a break now, but we'll come back to our training. Sounds great. This is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. You can be the greatest, you can be the best, you can be the king, come playin' on your chest. You can be the weaker, talk to God, go bangin' on his door. I'm DeSoto Brown, the co-host of Human Humane Architecture, which is seen on Think Tech Hawaii every other Tuesday at 4 p.m. And with the show's host, Martin Desbang, we discuss architecture here in the Hawaiian Islands and how it not only affects the way we live, but other aspects of our life, not only here in Hawaii, but internationally as well. So join us for Human Humane Architecture every other Tuesday at 4 p.m. on Think Tech. And here we are back. We were just talking about these trains of the immigrants clung to for literally weeks at a time. And they had some pretty rough adventures along the way. Can you describe some? Well, yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's not uncommon for gangsters to sort of assault immigrants.  And it's very common for bandits to sort of stick them up. It's also common for law enforcement to sort of abuse people. For whatever reason, and I know this just from research, not from firsthand experience, but that Chiapa state is somewhat hostile to the immigrants coming up from Central America, whereas other states are quite welcoming, like Oaxaca has a reputation as being extremely kind to the people who pass through. So there's a lot of internal tensions between Mexicans and Central Americans that sometimes lead to violence. And is the endemic violence of the whole setup, the result of the Civil War, or is it a cultural tradition? Yeah, I mean, I think it's based on a lot of factors. Mexico, unfortunately, has had a sort of rough time of it the last few years, and there's a lot of bad actors there that can be very opportunistic. And certainly folks from the Northern Triangle of Central America, Hondurans, Guatemalans, and Salvadorans are subject to abuse at many hands. It's certainly getting the impression from the story of predators and prey all along. I mean, everyone was faggained by everybody they encountered, it seems, you know. There's one particular predator that's mentioned as much in the news thanks to the president, which is the M13 gangs. The impression that Mr. Trump gives is that they come from Latin America and come to the US to terrorize everyone. What's the actual story? Well, first of all, I think there's a lot of misinformation about MS-13. I really think a lot of our official accounts are not quite accurate, but the people that researched this in depth would all agree that that gang really started in Los Angeles and most of their signs and lingo and things refer to streets and whatnot in LA. Sometime in the 90s, during the Clinton administration, there was an effort to deport felons to felons. The bad guys. Right, right, that were foreign nationals. And this was something you would see at the airport when I was in El Salvador. I mean, you'd often kind of hear those stories and see people getting off planes, talking about just having come from the penitentiary and that sort of thing. So there was sort of exporting of that gang culture that happened in many ways and it sort of took root in El Salvador. It certainly was something that all our safety briefings covered and whatnot. There's a lot of rumors that they're somehow related to factions of the Civil War paramilitary groups and I don't find that to be accurate. I mean, I think it's a different generation. It really is a different kind of culture, but they're a big part of our lives as volunteers in El Salvador. Not a, there was something you'd see on a weekly basis, certainly if you were in any kind of urban area. In a village that you were in, were there M14 people living there? Yeah, there were. There was one guy who was kind of a notorious, they called him Chepe Mara because he had the gang tattoos and everything and he sort of was a drifter who had come in and out. His family was there. There were other people that, there's certainly a lot of graffiti and there was a lot of kids who emulated the signs and things like that. Now, apparently it's grown in a big way and from what I'm told about my village, it's sort of you can't travel through there without having your vehicle stopped, whether it's a public bus or a private car and sort of have to pay off a toll essentially to use the road and that sort of thing. But when I was in El Salvador, much of the visible aspect of MS-13 was homeless folks, people with substance abuse problems that were living on the street, that kind of thing. So it wasn't always, it was a widespread kind of social phenomenon. It wasn't just a extortion antagonism thing. It sounds like it's become more. Were you yourself ever confronted by them? Sure, yeah. I mean, on buses I was often kind of threatened or asked for money. Did you pay the toll? Yeah, I usually just pay the toll. I figured it was worth it in the long run. Actually, I remember one of my first times on a bus in El Salvador, I was with two other gringos and my Spanish was a little bit better than those two guys and a guy with tattoos and stuff got up on the bus and kind of went through a speech and said that he was gonna come around and collect cash and if we didn't pay him, he was gonna hurt us. And so he gave him a little bit of money and all the other passengers on the bus were like, just ignore him. You know, that sort of thing. It was always a hard thing to read, as I said. I mean, it was a very strange phenomenon. I think that trying to equate it with other kind of gangs or kind of criminal movements is difficult to do because it is a very unique thing and it's taken hold with the generation in El Salvador that's had a hard time. And you know, in many ways it was the kind of generation after the Civil War generation and their issues and their problems were not well understood by their elders in some cases, I think. The stories that I hear now, I will say one thing I really didn't witness there is this kind of pressure on young people to become a member or else. That was not in my experience a phenomenon in El Salvador and it just is heartbreaking to read about because the Salvadorans that I was around, they just tested those gang members. They just thought it was just the worst thing ever. They hated them more than Donald Trump does, I can promise you that. But in the reports that you now get in our media is that people are leaving more out of terror than out of economic motivation. Absolutely. Is that metaphor, is that? No, I think it's reality. I mean, I haven't checked this stat recently but the truth is that immigration from Central America has been going down really since the late 90s. Yeah, it has been. It's a little bit of a difficult thing to track because in some ways they use statistics of how many people are encountered and whatnot but the real data nerds would tell you that. The character of it, in my opinion, has changed pretty tremendously. I mean, in the era that I was in El Salvador, it was like the character in my book. It was a sort of economic calculus of my family's survival. They're not being work in this country and we can go for a little. It was always an extremely reluctant decision. I think that's the great misunderstanding is that somehow this act of opportunism, like, oh, I can make a little bit more money if I break this rule or cross this line. Really, it was a desperate situation and nobody wanted to go. People just don't want to leave their homes generally. It's a tough thing for anyone and those fathers and husbands and brothers and mothers and sisters and wives that would go. We're always sort of looked at it as biding their time and being able to get their family out of debt, get their education for the kids paid off. And now I think it's becoming more of a refugee situation. People fleeing violence at the hands of these gangs and that's a real problem right now. The last part of the book is it takes place actually in the U.S. that your center, your main character actually makes it. It gets into the U.S. through a pretty amazing tunnel. Right. Have you ever seen that tunnel? I have not seen that, but it exists. It does, yeah, and much of that chapter is... It comes out of Dante, you know. Yeah, it does, it feels that way. And those sort of gangs of children that live there is a real phenomenon. And there's a great book called Lives on the Line by I believe the author's name is Miriam Davidson that chronicles that sort of tunnel thing. It's not a really common route that folks use but it is sometimes used and it sounds terrifying to me. And at the time you were there was the border crossing as punishing as it is today? It didn't look that sound like it in the book. It sounded as though it was fairly routine. Yeah. But it wasn't cruel. Right, it's only gotten worse. It certainly, I think it was starting to turn while I was there. I was in El Salvador for September 11th, 2001. And in the aftermath of that, I think border security tightened up quite a bit. Certainly in the mid-90s, you can remember some of that footage of folks kind of bum rushing the crossing in Tijuana and just kind of running across and everybody was like, oh, they're like, oh, we're not. It's not worth chasing them kind of thing, you know. It's unthinkable today. Right, right.  I mean, there's no wall that's high enough to that's any match for the kind of desert conditions that people walk through nowadays. Certainly most of the Salvadorans that I met, their stories were of walking through the desert in Arizona for, you know, two or three days. Did a lot of them die? That you were aware of them? I cannot recall anybody from the village dying. I do remember a lot of incapacity or incarceration, you know, and those conversations about, well, we hope that the Americans get them and not the Mexicans and that sort of thing was often a topic. The worst parts were often these dead silences where you'd be receiving communications, telegrams or whatever from your loved ones and then all of a sudden it would be sort of radio silence and that was, you know, the coconut wireless in the village would always be, did so-and-so hear anything about so-and-so? No, not yet. Oh, well, I bet this is what happened to them or I bet that's- So it was a major topic of conversation. Oh yeah, very much so, very much so. A lot of people that did have families there, a lot of speculation about, you know, they were the targets of thieves and things like that, a lot of speculation about how much money they had and could they help us out if we, you know, have a sick child or that kind of thing. So this is your second book? My third. Your third book, okay. And what were the other two? The first one was called How the Mistakes Were Made. It's a sort of rock and roll novel that takes place in Seattle in the early 90s and kind of the crazy things that happened to folks there and the second one actually also takes place mostly in El Salvador. It's called Kilometer 99 and it's kind of an expat novel about some surfers that are in El Salvador and the big earthquake that happened.  Well, mostly just a writer. Yeah. Dream of another America means exactly what? Well, I kind of like to think of it as a double entendre. Certainly it's, on the one hand it's sort of an order, you know, to try and dream of a place where we could accommodate a lot of different ideas about, you know, who our citizens are and how we treat each other. But it's also, I mean, I think when you're as a person from this country in Central America, the language kind of fails.  You only know how to describe yourself as an American. You usually refer to your country of origin as America and I guess- And they're all Americans too. That's right. So I sort of, it's also the idea to be mindful of this other America that we often ignore and the dreams that they have and, you know, how those might overlap. Well, the book has just been published. Yes. And your publisher is in Virginia, where you graduated. Correct. Yeah, it's a wall press. I wish you great luck with it and I look forward to seeing you at the Hawaii Book and Music Festival. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Appreciate it, Roger. Aloha. Aloha.


Hello and welcome to the session. In this session we are going to discuss the following question and the question says that Lisa received her bank statement dated June 20 for her checking account. She also maintained her check register. She compared her balance mentioned in the bank statement with her check register and she found the difference in both amounts. Reconcile her checking account. You have given her bank statement and check register. Now this is her bank statement and here is the check register. Now let us start with the solution of the given question. We are given the check register maintained by Lisa and her bank statement. Now according to Lisa's checking register she should have a balance of $1580.17 in her checking account and according to the bank statement she has $1,204.67 in her account. Now we will reconcile her bank statement so that balance in her bank statement matches with the balance in her check register. To reconcile the bank statement we follow the following steps. First of all record the balance in your check register then subtract any bank charges as shown in bank statement from your check register balance and if any interest is paid on your money by the bank as shown in the bank statement then add it to the check register balance then in bank statement add deposits recorded in your record but not shown on the statement. After this subtract total check outstanding that is the checks which have not yet been cleared by the bank on which they were drawn from the bank statement balance. The required balance will equal the check register balance. Now we reconcile Lisa's checking account. Now first of all we record the balance in Lisa's check register. Now here we can see that the balance in her checking register is $1580.17 then we subtract any bank charges as shown in bank statement from her check register balance. Now we can see in the bank statement that on June 19 the bank deducted $13 as bank charges from her account. So from check register balance we deduct $13 and we get $1580.17 minus $13 which is equal to $1567.17. Now we will consider this amount as balance on check register and we will reconcile the bank statement so that the balance in the statement should also be equal to $1567.17. Then in bank statement add deposits recorded in her record but not shown on the statement. Now on comparing the bank statement and the check register we see that the check deposited on June 14 of $412 amount is not mentioned in the bank statement. It is because it is not yet cleared by the bank so we add this amount in the bank statement and we get $1204.67 plus $412 which is equal to $1616.67. Then we subtract total check outstanding that is the checks which have not yet been cleared by the bank on which they were drawn from the bank statement balance. Now again on looking at both check register and bank statement we see that the checks numbered 202 and 203 of electricity bill and phone bill are the outstanding checks. So we will deduct the amount of these two bills from the balance in the bank statement obtained in the previous step that is $1616.67 and we get $1616.67 minus $25 minus $24.5. And this is equal to $1567.17. Now this amount matches with the amount in the check register obtained in this step. Thus the amount in both check register and the bank statement now matches. Thus we have reconciled Lisa's account. This completes our session. Hope you enjoyed this session.


So there has to be a statement, a standing up for the freedom of this subcontinent and its pagan culture. And it's not just for this particular population, but it is for everyone around the world, because there are people sitting here from possibly every country one can imagine. Where are they supposed to go if they want to practice Agora Sadhana? Where is this young man sitting here supposed to go? Let's assume he had a calling for Agora Sadhana. It would be a criminal practice in Europe.


Stream smart road crossings are designed to restore and reconnect aquatic and terrestrial habitat, as well as make sure the infrastructure is resilient to large storm events. To accomplish this, it's important to build stream beds and stream banks within the new crossing and connect them above and below into their natural stream environment. In this video, we're sharing techniques to help you build the stream bed and stream banks appropriately so that wildlife can cross through without going over the road, as well as make sure the new roadstream crossing can handle large storm events in the future. The first step towards designing your stream smart crossing is surveying the stream above and below the roadstream crossing. In this survey, you'll determine the elevations that your topography is set at to make sure the new roadstream crossing is set at the right elevation. In the survey, you'll also determine what the potential scour depth is of the stream naturally to make sure, again, the roadstream crossing is designed and set appropriately. In the survey, you'll also measure the bankfull width, and this is important because it will determine the size of the crossing. Stream smart crossings are 1.2 times the natural stream bankfull width. That's about 20% larger, and this ensures that the crossing is large enough to withstand those larger storms and have enough room to pass logs or other debris that wash through, as well as make sure there's enough room in the new roadstream crossing to build stream beds and stream banks. In the survey, you'll also analyze the substrate that naturally occurs within the stream. You'll determine what size material is immovable and what size material is moving through dynamically. Having this data to determine the size material is crucial to make sure the material you're putting into the new roadstream crossing is stable. You want large immovable materials as foundations for the stream banks, as well as dynamic stream bed material coming in and moving out in the same way it would in the natural section of the stream. In implementing your roadstream crossing project, the stream bed and banks need to tie in up and downstream to make sure the aquatic and terrestrial habitat is connected. This essentially makes sure that the wildlife can move through as if the road is completely invisible to them. When we're building stream banks inside a new stream smart crossing, like this one, we start at the bottom, well below what you can see here at the bottom of the footings, the bottom of the abutments, and we layer, rock and find material in to the point where we are finished with a relatively smooth top layer, but what you don't see here is that there is an immense amount of large stable rock that is not going to be moving even in large storm events. We accomplish this by doing that layering starting at the bottom with large rock off an angular rock, not like you see here, that helps to lock together and we fill it, we layer it with fine material that helps to fill the voids among the larger rocks and that also helps to lock that matrix of rock together. We don't want these stream banks to be moving over a long period of time. We build those banks upward in layers, sometimes three layers of large rock interlayered with three layers of fine material finishing on the top with relatively smooth banks with a lot of fine material on them with a width of say 12 inches or more for a smaller crossing up to maybe three feet for a larger crossing. When we're building stream smart crossings and we build the stream banks inside those crossings it's really important for us to provide access for terrestrial creatures to be able to get to their habitat or to pass through their habitat that we're creating here in our crossing. We want to be sure that all four corners of our banks connect to the natural stream banks. So it's really important that we take a look at these banks and notice that up above them is a slope of riprap very steep rock. We want to make sure that when contractors are placing that rock which is very important that it not simply spill down and cover our otherwise relatively smooth stream banks that we've created. It's this sort of surface that is really helpful to allow all sorts of small mammals to get passage through our crossing and on into the rest of their natural habitat. Within days of our opening crossing sites we have encountered fox, raccoons, mink and other critters inside of our crossings using those banks so we know that they actually work. The stream banks that we build in a stream smart crossing are really important. They have three particular functions that we really think are vital for you to think about. First of all they provide armoring for the abutments and the footings of our stream smart crossing. This is really key to protecting those features that help keep the whole structure stable over a really long time. The second most important thing about building stream banks in a crossing is that we give the stream and the crossing the correct dimensions and form of the natural stream. We are trying to mimic the natural stream upstream and downstream in shape and dimensions and so that's what these stream banks help to give us providing especially also a low flow channel so that our low summertime flows are concentrated somewhere in the middle of the stream providing greater depth for fish to pass through during the summertime. The third item that's really important about stream banks I've already mentioned and that is for the passage of terrestrial creatures along these stream banks otherwise they would have to go up and over the road and face the threat of traffic. Building the stream bed inside of our new stream smart crossing is quite different than building the stream banks. We had previously done a survey to know what the distribution and size of the sediment is inside the stream bed and when we're building an open bottom crossing we want to leave as much of the stream bed here as possible primarily digging trenches on each side for our footings and abutments and to disturb the stream bed that has naturally been here for a long time as little as possible. We can dig our trenches we can install our footings we can then build our stream banks but when it comes to the stream bed we want to disturb as little as possible but we know that we'll end up having to put some of that material the correct size material back into all the spaces that we've needed to excavate and so we need to make sure that we have the right size and distribution and that we match the correct form of the stream. Things are quite different when we're building closed bottom structures if you build a concrete box culvert or perhaps a metal pipe culvert that has a bottom to it we embed those down into the stream bottom and that means when we do our excavation we have to excavate the entire area of the crossing and so that means we need to rebuild our stream bed entirely from the bottom up and so we use that correct mix of sediment sizes from the stream that we have surveyed previously all the mix of fine material and the appropriate size gravel cobble and what have you into the bed of the stream. One of the key elements of our initial survey in preparation for designing a stream smart crossing is to understand to know what the stream substrate distribution is the size and distribution of the pieces of material naturally in the stream so we go away from the disturbance area of the culvert and we measure and count essentially a hundred pieces of what's in the stream in most cases to be able to know what that distribution is so that we can build it into our new stream smart crossing. Using this what we call our gravelometer it gives us the size very easily of these pieces of substrate material to be able to do that kind of counting and assessment really quickly and efficiently. We then take that data and can give it to a contractor to know very well what the distribution and type of material they need to rebuild the stream bed inside our stream smart crossing. There are two really important things we like to try to avoid that we see folks doing a little bit too often. One is when they put in one of these embedded culverts they're worried about scour and so they put in way too much large rock in the bottom of the structure even though the local stream doesn't exist in the same way. Please do not over armor the stream bed inside your crossing. Armor rock is for protecting footings and abutments and creating stable banks not for the stream bed. We want to install embedded crossings below the level of scour so that pools typical of that stream can occur at their natural depths inside the crossing. We want the stream to be able to move and shape itself as it naturally would scouring pools and piling up gravel and other material in other spots within the stream smart crossing. The second thing we'd like to avoid is any kind of compaction, mechanical compaction of material inside an embedded stream smart crossing. That's just not the way the stream acts naturally and it is not necessary if we've designed the stream smart crossing to be at the correct elevation embedded properly you're going to have a dynamic stream bed that is able to move. We don't want just a very shallow long riffle throughout our entire stream smart crossing that's not stream smart. We want the stream to be able to scour pools and then pile up material into shallower areas as it chooses to do. Another feature to consider in your design is drainage ditch outfalls. Drainage period. Often these drainage ditches flow into the stream immediately adjacent to a stream crossing and this is really contrary to current practice to keep sediment out of streams. Be sure to consider this kind of input from drainage ditches when you're designing your stream banks. If you have drainage ditches or drainage pipes flowing near the outlet or the inlet of your stream you want to be sure that the bank areas there are built strongly to be able to withstand the energy of the water coming from those ditches. If possible try to move the ditch input away from where the constructed banks tie into the natural bank as the drainage water can scour away your connections between the constructed banks and the natural stream banks. When we're closing out a stream smart crossing site we want to be thinking about making sure that we revegetate any disturbed areas where we've had excavation equipment with native plant species. In fact before we even begin we should probably be thinking about taking out fewer trees and shrubs than we sometimes do. We need to think about those things because they are much better for the health of the stream keeping the water cooler and less disturbed by sedimentation throughout the construction process and afterwards for the health of the stream and the critters that use it. We want to be sure that open areas that have been disturbed are revegetated naturally and that means trying to find a good seed mix that represents species from the local area as much as possible perhaps replanting native shrub species in the area. Our goal here is absolutely to exclude invasive species that might otherwise come in. Sometimes they're brought in inadvertently on construction equipment. We certainly want to be thinking about that and we want to do what we can to exclude those invasive species and in fact supplant them with native species as much as possible. In stream smart crossings we like to make sure that we're thinking about the disturbance area we create around the crossing so we like to take as few trees out as possible we like to minimize that disturbance area in order to benefit the terrestrial creatures and the aquatic creatures in the stream. We like to minimize the amount of runoff from the adjacent land that can add sediment to the stream and can also add warmer water to the stream and for fish like brook trout and Atlantic salmon they like nice cool waters shaded by native vegetation and so we like to be sure that we're providing that native vegetation but it's also really important for terrestrial critters to be able to have that vegetation to move between and among to be able to hide and protect themselves from predators. In a crossing like this we've got a lot of open area. I wish we had left more trees here and disturbed less of the area. I'm really glad that we have a lot of this plant material here but we don't have shrubs and so animals can't stay where they'd like to be along the stream corridor they need to hide from predators out in the woods and so we need to do a better job at our stream smart crossings planting shrubs and planting native trees it's not that difficult it doesn't take that much more time and it really helps to cool the stream and provide the kind of protection both for the aquatic critters in the stream and those that use the stream corridor. By thoughtfully restoring stream beds and banks in our stream smart crossings we can not only protect our road infrastructure from large storm events but also maintain well connected habitats not just for fish but for semi-aquatic and terrestrial species as well.


Okay, we're back live inside theCUBE, SiliconANGLE.tv, SiliconANGLE.com's coverage of VMworld 2012. This is day one, wrap up. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE.com, joined with my co-host all week, Dave Vellante, wikibond.org, the free research on the web. Dave, wrap up. What do you think? Well, you know, it was interesting. We heard a lot about the software defined data center and division and vSphere 5.1 and all the product now. So to me, the most interesting thing was, you saw that panel up there, CEOs, and that to me underscores the business angle of this whole event. You got EMC in the driver's seat, which is just astounding to me that the storage company has emerged as potentially the most powerful company in the industry. You were referring to the CEO panel that was at the end of the day, that will be rebroadcast on YouTube. Yes, the CEO panel at the end of the day, you had Joe Tucci up there with Pat Gelsinger, the new CEO, Paul Moritz, the outgoing CEO, Tom Georgin, CEO of NetApp, Michael Dell. You did not have John Chambers. He probably, you know, offered or chose not to be there. He probably was, maybe he wasn't invited. I don't know, but that was kind of, haven't heard much about Cisco at this event, but basically you've got Joe Tucci in the driver's seat, orchestrating the growth of this VMware community. Everybody up playing nice. Pat Gelsinger is now, you know, good friends with Michael Dell and everybody else. And EMC is, as I say, sitting in the driver's seat. It's an astounding. Paul Moritz made a comment on the CEO panel about Facebook, that the prediction, that the trend that he sees happening this year is that VMware's market cap will be bigger than Facebook, implying the slide of Facebook and the rise of VMware. When he started to say that, I thought he was actually going to quote your line, Dave, which is that VMware's market cap would be bigger than EMC. Well, so well. So you were on record of quoting that. Actually, my quote was that EMC slash VMware will be the next $100 billion market cap company in the enterprise. That's not a layup, because SAP's right there, SAP's ahead of them right now. But EMC owns 80% of VMware, so by virtue of its ownership of VMware, if it can maintain that. But the fact is that VMware's value over time will far outstrip, in my opinion, EMC's. So my take on the day one was obviously great. Great kickoff. I thought the morning session was fantastic. They had the drums out there, kind of a blue man group vibe going for it. Paul Moritz came out. Essentially, kind of his last hurrah as CEO of VMware. He was awesome, called the king of the enterprise. Just a lot of respect from the crowd. Standing ovation, and he passed the baton, the torch to Pat Gelsinger. A torch has been passed to a new generation at VMware. They're growing. They're thinking big outside the box of VMware, thinking about supporting other companies like Hyper-V. And really, this is the big story. VMware is now thinking bigger. To me, that was the big takeaway. Also, with Moritz and Gelsinger, the theme of old way, new way was clear. Old way being PCs and PC users, new way mobile users, that's the top of the stack. Middle of the stack where the application and the middle layer is existing apps to new apps and big data. And bottom of the infrastructure from servers to cloud. So huge transition to this new way. Obviously, another big thing, the growth as well. Riding the wave of change when Gelsinger came out, that was a keynote. Obviously, Gelsinger was clearly talking about a modern era, a Hadoop era. A big data era, an era of cloud, multiple clouds. He talked about all the different elements of a software-defined data center. Windows, Linux, database, mission critical, big data, HPC. And he said it's time to move on, Dave. It's time to move on to a new way, new experiences. And that is simply network and security, storage and availability and compute all wrapped up with management. That is, Dave, what we were calling data infrastructure. So EMC and VMware and their partners, they don't know it yet, but they just basically announced today a new era called data infrastructure. Abstract away the complexity, pool your resources, have them dynamically allocated provision and queried to automation, automation and orchestration. That is really the future. To me, that's the big story. The rest is all product announcements, vCloud, a lot of slew of announcements. But at the end of the day, this is a shift to a modern era of software-defined data center, big data and so on and so forth. It's really cool. And I think, John, my take on that is that for the last 10 years, we have seen intense focus on operational efficiency, doing more with less, cutting costs, and that's what the abstraction and the pooling and now the automation is all about. Data infrastructure, in my opinion, is about a new era of productivity where you're bringing together analytic, big data, analytic applications and feeding real-time transactional applications in a way that's going to drive business productivity. That's where IT spending is going to start to increase. And that's something that we haven't seen in a number of years. Since the NICCAR does IT matter, IT has been under fire. IT with data infrastructure and big data has an opportunity to really change that dynamic and really become a new source of competitive advantage. As Tim O'Reilly says, data is the new oil. So some personal observations on my front I want to share with you just from the schedule today that I thought was really interesting was, one was this disruption around Flash. We had some Flash startups on. We had also a great interview with HP which I thought was really enlightening because HP in this data center area around servers and networking is actually really kicking ass and they don't get a lot of credit for that. So I've been really critical of HP over the years and they still got some problems at the top that they're working through. Obviously Meg Whitman's leading the charge. He's got a transition team. The executives at HP at the top have to become technically proficient. To me, I'm really a big fan of Meg Whitman and the changes over there. But to me, the HP story, Dave, is pretty clear. They're turning the ship around. They're taking their medicine, $8 billion right off. I heard from people inside the company today that they're taking their big severance packages by August 31st. Everything was gonna be transitioning out of first wave. But the management at the top of the HP, including their board, have to be tech savvy. Okay, and I think Pat Gelsinger at the helm of VMware, that's an observation I would say is gonna be in the benefit of VMware. Other observation was how VMware was going to play out the Nacir acquisition. So on the heels of the billion dollar payout, they paid for basically an unknown startup doing some cutting edge work called software defined networking. Nacir has emerged to be the cornerstone of their strategy, which is software data centers. So I thought that was cool. And that speaks to the bold moves, Dave, that they're making. So to me, that was key. Obviously, on a fun note, David Flynn, CEO of Fusion I.O., great to see that guy pumping. They had a great quarter. We've been following them. We've been covering them since they were a private company. Now they're going public. He is smiling. He's got a spring in his step because there was a ton of Nacir is that we're nixing that whole vision of flash as a caching layer. He's obviously got that market. He nailed it when public create a lot of wealth for everyone. And he's got competition. We got violent memory systems right here in our backyard. Knock on the door and you got everyone jumping in there. So a lot of action, Dave, a ton of action. And then finally, the CEO panel that I watched was fun. Pat Gelsinger was dominant. His cube experience showing. But I thought Georgians looked a little bit nervous. Michael Dell looked like he was eager to get a word in. Like trying to get a word in and be relevant. And you can see it in his eyes that Michael Dell wants to make a statement to tell the world that he's back. Dell is not toast. And it's clear from Dell's aggressiveness in that panel, Dave, he is absolutely not going to take it lying down. People saying that Dell is a done company. So great. And I'll say to you that the general, the old man sitting back there, the old proud CEO. Or the whole thing. Fun to watch. Well, talking main and made the case for Dell. It was very passionate, impassioned case for Dell today. A lot of cash, a lot of upside in his opinion. Dell's clearly got some challenges. But I've said a number of times in the cube, Dell is dangerous, right? It's got cash. It is filling out its IP portfolio and it could do some damage. I also wanted to mention, John, I think that while I love VMware, I love the fact that the practitioners are just really so passionate about VMware. There's some real challenges here. There was a statement made in the cube today, false summit. I likened, we hear about the figure that 60% of applications are now virtualized. Of applications running on x86 are now virtualized. Somebody said, is that a false summit?  Getting to 90%, which is what Pal Kelsinger put forth, is going to be really a challenge. First of all, to get virtual, you need to buy physical. So there's this weird dynamic going on in the marketplace where you've got to bring in more physical to get to virtual. So that's a tough hurdle to go over. Plus, I think there's a lot of application owners out there that are still skeptical on virtualization. And then third, I think there's some competition, right? I think the VRAM pricing debacle opened up the door for Microsoft, Windows Server 12, getting a lot of, well 2012, getting a lot of early reviews. IBM's making another big push in virtualization. People aren't lying down, so you know, they're not just the world, the competitive industry is not just going to let VMware run away with it. So I think the next five years are going to really be challenging. And I think that's why Kelsinger talked about the cadence of a major software release every single year, like the cadence of Moore's law new microprocessor release. It's almost as if Pat Kelsinger read my blog post about the apps because that's one of the things that we highlighted was the fact that he could bring that application acceleration and that is a Moore's law like vibe but at an application layer. So if he can do that and figure that out, I think he'll fill on top of the VMware ecosystem and make VMware a truly an enabling infrastructure. So right now, I just don't see them there yet. They dominate the enterprise, but they are not truly an enabling platform right now, fully. So they're okay, they're not fully there yet. Things that I learned today, talking to folks, I, on a kind of a learning note, I connected the dots between something I've been thinking about for some time and that is the value of Apple computer. Apple is the most valuable corporation in the world right now. And I connected a dot on the Tarkin Maynard interview where the epiphany was, Dell was trying to figure out the services business. He mentioned the size of that market being billions of dollars. And I think the Apple story is interesting. If you look at the success of Apple computer and as Wall Street tries to figure out can that stock go any further? I would say the following. Apple has only had 8% of the market share in the PC business, 8% and they're crushing it financially. Can you imagine with the success of these products if they go double digit market share on the hardware, what that will do to their earnings? So what that means is, and the dot that I connected was, well first of all I think that absolutely I was, it's a buy for Apple stock that they will smash through their earnings. I think they're gonna go to the 15% share, maybe 20 and that's gonna create even more of trillions of dollars of value. But the connected dots was that the Dells of the HPs of the world can be the Apple of the enterprise if they keep their hardware business. Don't give up on the hardware business even though it doesn't look good right now and figure out how to wrap around that like what Apple did with iTunes and all the services. So I think Dell, HP, IBM, and even VMware if they can kind of get in that mode of wrapping around it Dave, I think that's something that I learned. So John, Apple's market cap is over 600 billion now. 600 billion, okay? And the IT market is probably what, a billion, two billion, six, something like that. So Apple's market cap is more than a third of the total value of the IT business. That's an astounding figure. With 8% market share in hardware. Can you imagine if they get to 20% consumers? So again, a little small little dot that I connected that's gonna make me think more about some of the strategies these guys are thinking around IT because if it is true that the consumerization of IT, meaning the experience of working at a company is gonna be like a consumer experience, if that is the trend, which I believe it is, then we're gonna see more Apple-like business models. And I just don't see that right now from any major player out there.  IT is ripe. I mean they got all kinds of transformations. Simon Crosby talked about security and a new way of doing things. So I think there's a lot of disruption going on. I think Joe Tucci is absolutely correct. The big disruption is happening faster than ever before. So it's exciting. The other thing I point out, two years ago we talked about the theme and we talked about the gap widening between cloud service providers and IT. And I have to give props to VMware and IT practitioners in general. They have, I don't wanna say necessarily close that gap but they've certainly plugged the holes in their organizations. Most IT organizations are on a path. They're on a journey. The marketing led the actual implementation but IT organizations are doing a pretty good job of building their own internal clouds. People call them private clouds. Things are getting simpler and so I think that hats off to those IT organizations. There's still not there in terms of self service in terms of charge backs and the like but I think there's light at the end of the tunnel for the IT folks that we talked to. Well let's wrap up day one. It was a great day. Obviously a modern era in computing as we call it the data infrastructure. Obviously it's relevant and we're going to continue to pound on that all week. Obviously big data as well Dave has continued to go. Tomorrow we got Pat Gelsinger first thing in the morning at 10 o'clock. Other notable names, Chad Sackin. We got the CEO of VCE, Jay Sri, the CEO of Arista who I'm curious to find out what she thinks about the whole software to find data centers instead of doing some cutting edge work. Ping Li from Excel Partners and we're going to have a VC startup panel right after that with EMC Ventures and possibly True Ventures and some other startups. So that's our lineup for tomorrow. That's a wrap from day one here in the hang space in San Francisco, VMworld 2012. This is Silicon Angle and Wikibon's exclusive continuous coverage of VMworld day one and that's a wrap. We'll see you tomorrow morning.


User experience, UX, is a complex concept that encompasses many different qualities. This paper examines how certain aspects of UX are more important depending on the type of product being used. It also looks at how these aspects are measured and how they vary across cultures. Finally, it shows that these measurements are reliable and consistent, making them useful tools for UX professionals when evaluating and designing products. This article was authored by Martin Tripp, Jessica Kalmorgan, Annalena Meiners, and others.