So, I am a real nurse, that's why they call me the nurse. So, hello, that's why I really call the nurse. I'm an RNC-ISSP, I'm the only one in America. There's another one in Amsterdam that I try and go see regularly. So, nice guy. So, I'm really into psychic hacking and this type of stuff. Tour camp, if anybody was at tour camp, they did a lot on psychosonics and stuff. And then, not a con. They had rain, was it not a con? We got together. It's like, now I've been using psychosonics, I like it, some of it is pure shit, doesn't work, and some of it works. So, what I'm gonna do is show you about the basics, how to make it, show you the history of it, and then from there, what we'll do, hey, I'm live. What we'll do from there is, I'll take you into how to cook these psychosonic drugs. So, and I'll show you films about they're freaking out in Iowa about them. Ah, our kids are taking sound. Yeah. Okay, right up front, I see it's, hold up, thank you guys. All the technology works and we're only a matter of minutes late, yeah, yeah. The techno gods smile on us today. Let's see, psychosonics, let me pull this up to keep me on track or I'll get lost and things like that. Do-ba-do-ba-do-oo. Yeah, after this it becomes Drowned Myself and E-T-O-H Alcohol. Let's see, what else? I like the whole sound stuff. You know, I work with, write articles for socialengineer.org, oh, if you have not visited social-engineer.org, I am sorry, you are missing the easiest attack vectors you have ever seen, okay? Visit the site, if you didn't read the articles, they had articles on how to win at playing poker through social engineering tells. So it's pretty good. The difference between social engineering and a lot of this is, this is independent of words. Doesn't need any words or anything like that to make all the noise. I figured anybody with a flaming bra and war weapons, you gotta have good stuff like this, okay? Oh yeah, that's me. I'm a private practice informatics nurse.  Nobody goes, what's that? Lots of syllables, that means I make good money. Nursing sites, information and computer science, all three jumbled together. Anybody been to the hospital? Do you notice they've computerized them? So I'm a pentester, I hack hospitals for a living. The perfect job for a nurse.  Pay me lots of money. Let's see, no hacking. You've heard a couple tracks on neurohacking, and neurohacking is old and new all at once. We have new tools, a new way of combining them that make neurohacking even easier. The big break for me and where I really find benefit from this is the fact that everybody has ear buds now. You put those buds in there, I've infected your MP3s with the sonic sounds I want. Have a nice day. Thanks for shopping. Social engineering is neurohacking because you gotta also inject the sound but I think it's more interesting. Think about it this way. I'm trying to sell furniture. I'm trying to brainwash all of you into buying a new couch, right? And I like put messages behind it, couch, couch. Subliminally. Okay, I'm in a different part of country. They don't call them couches.  So how am I gonna use the right words in social engineering to get you to buy that? It's only area specific. That's why it doesn't work on a lot of things. The word sale works, of course, things like that. That's where we get in with neuro, linguistics and the whole S-E-N-H part. Okay, what is psychosonics? All right, realize everything in the world vibrates. Okay, it has a frequency. Alchemists knew that. Remember your brain, you have different frequencies, alpha, beta, theta, we'll go over that if you didn't have Cycline 100. It's really a lot easier, and here's my couch, devan, port, settee. It was founded by William Dove, who I will helm, I am sorry, Inderick Willhelm. He was one of the first climatologists, and he actually predicted on climate warm, climate warming and stuff. Very fascinating man. When it came out, I love his picture and stuff, when it came out, he had three different methods. Now, most of the psychic drugs and the stuff you hear is binaural, and that means two ears, okay?  Mono, I wouldn't insult you. That's more versatile, because I don't have to have the buds in both ears. I can actually infect you with just one ear. And then isochronic, come on, you're all smart people, you remember that's the way we shift stuff. It has no timing in it, and it's very random. So it really works, and then the second part of this, I'm gonna show you how to create these, the binaurals, all the, hey, I'm an open source. So all open source software. So you can go back and start adding these to your attack vectors. Remember, a friend of ours said, there's no patch for stupidity. So this is just one of those, let's add more stupid stuff to our toolbox to affect them. Okay, I spent a long time as a trauma nurse, life and death, the military gave me those skills in another life. And these bikers that plow into the concrete wall, we get them in the intensive care, and we put the God channel on the radio next to their ear while they're in the coma and all of that. And all of a sudden, maybe there's a lawsuit in this. Nevermind. So we play the God channel, all of a sudden they wake up and they go, I've seen the Lord and stuff. It really does affect you. For older patients, we put on like ACDC. You don't need no blood pressure medicine. Put that up, put next to the ear, turn it way up. Like, yeah, that's the best. Here's what your ear looks like. Do you know hearing is one of the last sounds to go when you're dying? Hey, I see your trauma nurses know about that. Look how close that is. From here to basically just inside your brain, this is the most connected of all the senses.  Yeah. Like, poker face. Yeah. And it doesn't go away. It's like, where is it? And it's really old one sometimes. Like, some old Beach Boy things. Where did that come from? Where did these oral images come from?  So if we did it, my stuff probably wouldn't work. That's what's great about it. Basically, it's plugged right in. I mean, this is 100. This one's interesting. We currently use some of these things. Canadians, we wouldn't allow that in our health care. But Canadians, they're doing this for better feeding for kids. Hey man, I need better when I have music. Little soft music. Everything goes better with that. So, and there's the source. Remember, music tames the savage beast, but we can inject psychosonic frequencies to make them crazy. Okay.  They'd gone out and looked at one of the psychosonics, Lucifer, and it's like, the vision from hell's coming out. You'll hear it referred to later. And the guy looks at me and says, I'm so angry. This is so annoying. I could punch somebody in the nuts. So I hope he's in the rear of it. I told him I'd say this. And it's like, okay, it made him so angry he would punch someone in the nuts. Now, this is not as usual. Now, was that the psychosonics or was that just the annoying sound coming out? I don't care. Maybe you want to punch people in the nuts. That's anger. I'm okay with anger. Here are the frequencies. These are, you learn some of these in Psych 100. These are the things you always know. Let's start at the bottom. Oh, I try and make them big enough so everybody can see the slides. Delta, and I'm pretty sure I put a delta on the CD for you. That's, let's fall off to sleep because I've drunk it too much and make the room stop spinning. Oh, one guy yells at the room when it doesn't stop spinning and it doesn't work. Theta is for meditation and you can spend years and years and years.  Or you can just jack this in. Okay, I'm into cheap, quick, easy fixes. So just jack the four, the theta's in. Alpha is relaxation and on your one, I think you'll find one for airplanes also. You plug that in, you play it. Okay, none of them are polluted. I'm not trying to turn you into like psychic zombies or anything, it wouldn't be cool. I'd rather do this capital or I'll wait till I get to DC to do those, okay? So in Bluetooth, if anybody's ever in the DC airports, run the Bluetooth.  Let's see, alpha, beta's what most people walk around it. Well, I would say most of you here in beta. You go outside, they're not in beta, some of them.  And the one that most people don't get is the top one. You don't learn about that. And those are the gammas, it's a little bit higher. Remember, recordings are supposed to run from 20 to 20,000. And that's our regular range. When you tune a orchestra, it's 440A, okay? So these are known frequencies. We can stick the electrode, shave your hair, stick the electrodes and measure them out. We know what frequencies, different wave patterns of the brain's produced. This has been around for ever almost, seemed like. So these are the basic ones. These are the frequency ranges we're gonna be producing. Sorry. They're coming for me. These are the frequent ranges we're gonna be producing.  Pretty simple, isn't it? I want a Pepsi, I push the button, it says Pepsi, okay? It usually comes out. Now there's a couple of tricks to creating these, and that's why I'm here to show you the tricks to creating them, okay? Let's talk about military uses. I love kilts, and I put this in in honor of all the kilt people. Sorry to bother you, sir.  Like, oh. But think about that. You're coming in from Rome to attack. They played the bagpipes at night, and that... Oh, they're weird. I'm not talking Danny Boy. They're playing weird battle stuff, and they're like, what's that noise? They're like, ah. It was a classic, classic. Just like re-loosen people up with cyber attacks now, they loosened them up with neuro attacks. They weren't done back there. And let's see. These... Neil, Dr. Katz. It's like, Neil, is this real? I mean, I haven't quite figured them out, but it said sonic tubas, okay? I like the guys in front. They're like, yes. I'm a Vietnam veteran. This is why I learned about these PTSD. They use these to treat that. And some people said, hey, how about autism? I'm like, I don't know. Did a Google search? The literature search. Nothing showed up. Nothing showed up. It's a technology we had. It disappeared, and it came back. Just like padlocks. They had them. They couldn't figure them out. Now they're back. The top one was in Vietnam.  Okay, you know this one. Da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da. Yeah, okay. So we've used those quite a bit.  Okay. Every culture has sounds and things they're afraid of. And if we can tap into that cultural fears of sounds, and we'll talk about sounds and torture soon, things like that, it becomes beneficial. It becomes a real threat vector. Not just some happy experiment to treat people with. How many people have seen these? How many people? Yeah, these are all our veterans. The people have seen these. They're using these currently in Afghanistan, a place like this. They have bigger models, but they wouldn't let me show any pictures. They were not happy. So what they do is pull them up behind sand dunes and they play tank sounds at night. And then the tanks are here. We must run. So God, I'm gonna crack this stage up. So we're gonna, and they run away and then they go in the next morning. Now these are smaller ones. So, but I mean, think about that. How sounds, the sound of tanks at night where they can't be verified would strike fear into terrorists or into insurgents, let's call it. No, it's our country. Nevermind. It strikes fear. I like this one. How many have seen these? Oh, more people. How much hands up? How many have experienced their pleasure in this? Is that a good way? Anybody been blasted? Was it fun? No, that's what they all say and stuff. It puts out like an unbelievable, okay, if you need any knowledge, sad to say, go to YouTube. And almost everything in the world is in YouTube. And they got pictures of this, like dispersing people so you can really see how well it works. These are really nice. The machine gun sort of helps, but, you know. And I'm talking about that little square thing that stops by anything. Here is the trick of it. Word of God in their head. You surrender or run away. So instead of using a weapon as a large blast weapon, they turn it way down and then speak into it. And it's frequencies you don't know you hear it. It's in your head. So all of a sudden it's like, there's a voice in, well, more than one sometimes. There's a voice in my head. And so this is great. It's the same weapon just turned down. Okay. Here it is in Pittsburgh. We are using it on our own people. It was not on, they said, but I don't know. It was one of the healthcare debates. I think some of those people hear voices anyway. So we are using this not only on enemies, anybody been to Pittsburgh? Sometimes, yeah. So these are from the healthcare debate. Same weapon, same thing, only being used on you all, okay? Thank you for this great picture, federal government. This is great, 18.98 per cent. Your eyeball vibrates, remember? It's a fluid filled sack. I mean, we can make anything vibrate if we want the right frequency. So when you're, okay, I know there are people who's gonna do this.  Now, I'm not saying it works and it's sort of fun when it tingles the back of your eyes but I take no responsibility for anything, damage you do to yourselves or your eyeballs. You get these ghost images. They are so, all disclaimers, everybody heard the disclaimer. Who saw, who saw, what was the film? Men Who Stare at Goats. Yeah, that's true. Do you know what that's true? Fighting in the Vietnam era was a little different than what you do now, so. And this is actually part of the same campaign they had. So they play wandering souls, recordings represent dead people to spook superstitious enemy. Yeah, we knew who we were talking about back then and this really works. This really works. What are those scary sounds coming out at night? Oh, don't come out of your tunnel. This is great stuff. Problems. No, not Neil Diamond is not the problem. Well, I take it back.   So when they got the jitmo, they were playing this for him. Well, those of you that know the culture, they're not really big music fans and stuff. They basically had a riot. And the Psyops people said, oh yeah, play Coming to America. Well, they kept doing it 20 days of Eminem and Dr. Dre. Hell, I'd lied for anything. Tell, ask me any question, get back. I said, yo, yo, I'm a rapper from down south. I don't know nothing, but I sound real. Yeah, that's my rap. Here are the top 10 torture songs. Now, I knew some of these, but take a look at them. Eminem, I knew that. The Barney theme. Oh God, 20, 30 hours of the Barney theme. Metallica, oh yeah, ACDC.  Of course I wouldn't know. Christine Aguilera, all of these. I like Rage Against the Machine. I didn't know bodies by drowning pool. Any other drowning pool people? Yeah, yeah, thank you. I come to realize I was too old to know them and when I looked them up, it's like, yeah. They are joining my torture club. So please feel free to torture anybody with sound you want. We are using psychosonic attack vectors against our children. Hey, why not? We use them against old people for health care. It's called the mosquito speaker. Most of you probably, anybody own a mosquito? Yeah, I see a couple of people. Does it work? Yeah, a couple of people shaking their heads. Basically what it does, 17 Hertz, as you get older, here's a surprise, things don't work as well. Like your ears. So you don't hear these frequencies as an adult. And if you go on the disk, there's areas and it's got websites so you can go in, get your hearing checked and hear the different frequencies, things like this. So 17 Hertz disperses, I love the term from their article, troublesome teenagers. Not good Christian or good upstanding teenagers, only troubled like all of you hackers in here. Eight Hertz takes everybody out. Let's just crank it up to eight Hertz and blow it away. So one of my friends has one of these. She lives near the high school. I said, I said, rocks, can I use this? She's like, you're crazy, man. I don't know what I'm around here. So look for this little speaker near convenience stores, high schools, buildings just outside are around high schools. This is where they have them and they really are functional. Now I put one here but they're several hundred dollars. So they wouldn't give me any. I guess I wasn't trustworthy looking. So we are using psychosonic attacks against our children and they are using them against us. These are mosquito ring tones. Mosquito, plus cell phone, a ring tone teachers and parents can't hear. Well, you don't want to leave it on vibrate because it rattles against your book or your desk or something like that. And everybody then they all get together and have them split the frequencies up. How do you know your children aren't using these? Yeah, cause she can hear it. She's young enough. I can't. So I'd be, I always use them with old teachers I guess. So does Vegas use psychosonics? Those of you that were at, saw me over at Caesar sometimes I walk around with my net book and a microphone. And I'm trying to figure out are the machines set for psychosonic frequencies to excite you?  There's no clocks out there. There's no clocks. They want to brainwash you subliminally into staying and gambling. You don't know what time it is. Hell, I was like, what time is it breakfast? Okay. So they do some of these and especially with the slot machines. It's called the devil's triad. Like Mozart would never, or Bach would never end the thing on that cause it was the devil's tones. So it's the sound sirens make, the European sirens. Do, do, do, do, do, do. I'm a terrible singer, you know the one. So, and I've been recording some of those trying to pull those apart for later to see if we really do. So if it shows up, anything good shows up, I'll show you how to, I'll put it up on the DC board. And just a real quick pause. It has absolutely nothing to do with what I'm talking about. I'd like to thank the DEF CON 406 group from Helena, from Montana. Yeah, we have a DC group in Montana. Thanks for coming out and supporting us, everybody in Montana. Thank you. Thanks. I know it's weird but we actually have one up there. Slot machines. Okay. Now the picture on the right is what she used to look like. The other one is what you know she looks like. So I think she's got a weapons supplier somewhere. So I did more digging on this young lady. So she is an Illuminati puppet run by the mastermind controllers. What a better person to give more weapons to. I mean, her and Michael Jackson. And you can see the little like Illuminati triangle with the eyeballs and stuff. I love her marketers. They are some of the smartest marketing people I bumped into. I mean, she's great. So doesn't she need more weapons? Of course she does. Let's talk about how we make these psychosonic files and then we'll get into the demos and things like that. Perfect. Your frequency determines your mood. And I just gave you the frequency. That's pretty easy. You embed them into an MP3 and you can play them through your headphones. The binaurals work the best but the ISO synchronous and the monorails also function. All right. I'm using, here's the frequencies. I wanna make sure everybody graphs where we're going with all of these. I tend to use, if you use the like four hertz or lower you like fall asleep or worse and you're like, ugh. Okay, so try and stay away from those. Yeah, yeah. These really are, these are pretty much fun. So, good neural. It's been, okay. I have my first copy on a floppy disk. That's how old it is. And I'm gonna be demo and show it. It's really a great play. Brain Stim Pro binaural is out there. It's a good one. Audacity and lame is not what it is. You all know it's like for runs and the other stuff. And there's a couple binaural albums out there. So just go to music and search binaural. I'm gonna be using gnaural and audacity because gnaural lets you create the actual psychasonic like stream. And then audacity lets me inject it. Now, these two usually aren't put together. It's not quite once for pillaging files off audacity. You just plug it both in, record the Pandora or whatever you want. Soma, I really like audacity. And gnaural is the same way. Both free, free. I love that phrase.  I'll show you what they look like. And basically, what I want you to notice is the little upbeats every so often. Now the really, the long ones, the one you pay for run about 30 minutes. I tend to only object to about three or four minutes, take a space, three or four minutes and take a space because that's how MP3s are, you know, just regular pops out.     There's ones up on the top where I can actually, not close enough, oops, no, I don't see it. I have justers on the left side and I can connect balance. And then on the other side, I can change basically the whole 3D imaging.  Yeah, yeah, it was interesting. It's like getting a haircut. You can hear the scissors all around you. And they make binaural recording like two microphones out of your ear, all the standard stuff. So it's a pretty comfortable program to use. Here's audacity and this is actually the psychosonic stream on the top and on the bottom is the cell. So this is what they look like. So it's really, I'm finding it difficult to separate out the psychosonic sub, we're using filters from the actual cell, the actual cell. So, but that's what I'm doing like machines and stuff. So then you just put them all together and that's really the easy part. Let's talk about psychosonic drugs. Months ago when I sent this in, I'm like, what's psychosonics? It's been in Wired Magazine. It's been on CNN. It's like the hottest, don't let your kids do these type of drug thing. It's like, okay, I've actually included one of the commercial ones on here too. They gave me permission to give. I said, well, I'm speaking at a security conference and they're interested. I said, I didn't say I'm speaking given this to hackers so we can have fun with it. But yeah, what they don't need to know and stuff. Wired, CNN, the new drug damaging our children and stuff. So let me pull up real quick. Let's play. Hi, audio guy, I'm gonna start some tunes so I don't want you to blow everybody away here. Let's see, unmute it. I find if I unmute it plays better and it would be, I are technically Swabay. And I scraped this off, not the best scrape in the world, but, you know. What do you want for a free scrape? Play, media, play. Yeah, I know, it's Windows. Play, I love my netbooks, but sometimes I hurt them. This is my second one, fun, play. Okay, I'm gonna minimize M, I think. There we go. I think the stand against the latest internet craze, and we've heard of this, it's called idosing. Is it miller time yet? And websites to lowing kids with free downloads. Oh, let's see. Make me happy. I think the stand against the latest internet craze, and we've heard of this, it's called idosing. And websites to lowing kids with free downloads of so-called digital drugs, which are audio files designed to induce drug-like effects. Hey, Rihanna Iveshinsky has just returned from Mustang a while with the details of this lowing new train. I gotta admit it, I've never heard of it before. Telly Pan's really need to listen up on this one. That's because all kids need to experience these digital drugs are headphones, their computer, and an MP3 player. Wow. Websites that tap and say they're a safe and legal way to get high, the theories that could lead to illegal drug use. Oh no. Digital drugs are all over the internet, and counting a free, legal, safe way to get high. Oh my God.  It's these images that has a lot of parents, educators, and law enforcement officials with the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics concerned. Kids who are flocked to these sites just to see what it's about, and it can lead them to other places. It sounds like this. By the oil. And uses by-the-oil or two-tone technology to alter your brainwaves and mental state. Kelly Johnson is a parent and teacher and had never even heard of idosing or digital drugs until now. It's just scary, definitely scary, to know that, you know, just one more thing. One more thing to look out for. Recently, Mustang Public School sent out a letter warning parents about the new trend after several high school students reported having physiological effects after trying one of these digital downloads. Students and graduates are still talking about it. I heard it was like some weird demons and stuff through an iPod or something, and he was just freaking out. People should be concerned about it. It's not saying that, it should just be overlooked. We had never come across anything like this. And anything that is going to cause these physiological effects in a student, that causes us concern. Mustang schools are doing what they can to put a stop to it, including cracking down on the use of cell phones and other technology while on campus. We shut going hard to be vigilant, and we ask that the parents, you need to be vigilant too. And the upper room of your of narcotics tells us that parental awareness is the key to preventing future problems, since eye-dosing could very well indicate a willingness to experiment with drugs. So that's why we want parents to be aware of what sites their kids are visiting and not dismiss this as just something harmless on the computer. If you want to reach these kids and say these kids, these kids say parents have to be aware and they've got to take action. Now another concern OBN has is that in many of these eye-dosing websites, who are visitors to actual drug and drug paraphernalia sites? So Kelly, this is another reason why parents really need to be proactive and not only talk to their kids, but check what they're downloading. Parents just cannot let the gorge down at all, can they? So all of a sudden all of this showed up, hooked drugs for a while now. It's still legal, you never know when it'll go away though. So let's pull up some of the software here and Gnorel. Now the easiest way to start to work with Gnorel is to take what they have and then cut it down so it fits what you really want, your way of doing it. And notice here is the actual, here's the screen we looked at.  Okay, I want this one, I want that one. Notice how they put the, this is the sample, little bumps in here to bring you around. Frequency, we start at one frequency. Your ear, here's how the whole thing easily works. If I put 500 hertz in one ear, if I put 510 hertz in the other ear, your ears cancel the 500 hertz. You're left with that 10 hertz sound. Okay, now how big a sonic tuba are you gonna need to make a 10 hertz sound?  So that's why this is a better way of doing it. You can plug almost any frequency in there. Pick the second's embedded frequency.  So you really don't even notice it. So it just plays out. I'll give you a real quick, hello audio guy. I'll give you a real quick sample of what they sound like.  Notice how the volume then goes up near the end and the balance, sometimes you can rotate the balance through, there's one of them. You can rotate the balance so it basically spins. And some of the ones I samples I put on your desk, get them out, play with them. This program, as I said, has been around for floppy days. It's actually pretty nice, it runs well. I tried to get a hold of the author and say, hey, come on out to Defconn, it's like this website and this, everything has been closed, everything. You can still get it, but there's no way getting a hold of them. All right, so basically you just figure it out what frequency you want, work it in here and then you can save them. You can then export them out, export the audio file. And then you can pick what you want. They've got a variety of them. I tend to pick on the Microsoft because I don't know, I can, I guess. So they're an easy target. So you can pick basically any type of thing you want. Oh, look, I can use it on my next computer. Okay, I like those old things. So you just export it out and basically to whatever you want. So this is the first part of it. This is the first part. Figure out how long you want, what frequency, what desired results you want. Create the stream here, the psychosonic stream here. Pull the little things up and down. I can do that, okay?  That's the first part. That's all there is, gently for that. Audacity is the second one. I think, oh yeah, here's the, now here's what poker face looks like with pulled in through audacity. So you notice I can easily hide the frequencies inside of here. Now the ones I've put on your disk, I've made them just a hair louder than normal. So you can actually hear when you inject, like a test thing. So you can hear when you inject them so they actually work, okay? So this is basically, I figured poker face was the best one for Vegas.  Now are you gonna notice like 12 hertz in that? No, no. Because it's already got the booming base covers it right over, don't even sense it. Here's a better use for it. Here really is a better use. Instead of making yourself weird, crazy, and demon faces coming out of your MP3 players, I have a jogging tape that I use, and I cycle it through that. I have a aha moments that I use for contemplating before I go for an exam, or I have to talk to my in-laws, or something like that. So I've created these over the years, and they really do work. Some of the positive ones. Now that leads us to the philosophy, to the psychic drug side work, and no, they are not the asset. I wish I'd saved my $3 and bought a Corona or something, well not in Vegas, but I would have got a better buzz off of it. You want to laugh, go to YouTube. What percent is believing you're going to get high, and actually getting high? If you believe it, I mean, okay, we used to scrape banana peels and smoke them. I know that sounds weird, but that was a 70s thing.  So several frogs that, yeah, and you know what? We got high from these great, no, we just thought we did. So here again, it's subliminal messaging, oh this stuff really works, the news is reinforcing it works. You damn well know every kid who watched that news report, yeah, yeah, hey, let's tell them how to do it and what the web is, idoser.com, okay, so, and notice that this one you can bury it in with no problem. I really like this one. Now you can do a lot with these, the problem is who, there's not been much current research on it. We really brought them in, we used them back in the 70s, because that's the way the 70s were, and we used everything back then. But now I see actual use for these things, thank you sir. So let's see, what else, let's finish this part up, and here's what I want to challenge you all with, one, create some of these type things, email me, my email's on there, email me and I'm collecting them and I'll give you credit for it, as in hey, that's really nice, okay, so create some. These are all the really great examples from Yale.edu, oh yeah, they have great examples to download, they actually do research on this stuff, so anybody from Yale, thank you very much for making my job easier. Now see, unexplainable.net, those are where you can get the ones that will do like the acid and stuff like this. Now I have committed one error, because I left my sonic nauseater in the room. They're called brown frequencies, and they were supposed to sit right here, several people I wasn't going to tell, and it actually works. It puts out frequency. So to make up for it, I'll get it and I'll be playing it in different places over the next couple days, so, so if you see me in the room, you may not want to, they're called brown frequencies for a reason too, and I thought, oh, what happens when a whole bunch of people get up and leave?  And then I made myself sick, I couldn't go to a party, and my wife was like, what did you do to us? Yeah, so we've tried it in restaurants, things like that. The legislature in Montana is starting soon, I could not think, I mean, if I can keep the politicians distracted, what damage can they do then? Oh, I feel nauseated. So I tend to like those type things. Okay, where do you buy things like that? Well, you know where you buy those, eBay, everything you want in the world's on eBay, so pictures of people on toast and stuff, they're like 29 bucks and I'll have it with me the rest of the time, so if you see me, we'll plug it in and we'll just stand somewhere and watch, okay? Let's see, other things, now the bainoil and the ganorail are very, very easy to use, download them, they're back when we used to write manuals and made sense and stuff, so you can actually read them and follow along. They are both bainoil, it's very, very easy to use, and there's tons of examples out there for it, or ganorail, we'll do that. Now audacity, if you are into sounds, audacity is your, how many people are using audacity? Look around this room, look around, it's like, whoa, yeah, wish I had the commission from nothing, but that's okay, it's a great program. Let's see, what else? Let's talk about what we've been through here real quick.  Try some test ones, I recommend some of the more gentle ones because you're going to waste your time making acid type cooking, it's not going to work for you. So try some of the other ones, I like the airplane one, works really well, put on the buds, wake up when I'm there, like, excellent, stop, let's see, the longer ones usually 30 minutes, 30 minute ones, those are the longer ones there, they tend to work better, they always say a dark room, cover your eyes and they'd say like to lay down because if you cover your eyes you won't freak out, the demons won't come out or something, I'm still working on that part and when you watch them on YouTube they all tend to be covered or blank or something like that and as I said there's tons of samples, current work I'm doing on all these things, how do we know other current songs aren't using this, how do we know, trust but verify, oh yeah, they fixed that, Mac whole patch he broke into at Kansak, not, so this is the current, Vegas uses it, I'm trying to get my sonic nauseator to work on the phone so when they call you up or you're working help desk or something, you can like, I'll let you know that works too, hey, I gotta hang up for I'm feeling, yeah, so I'm into that one and my email's coming up, thank you sir, my email's coming up, feel free to email me, I am, I am absorbed by all of the head hacking type stuff, if you are not using reading social dash engineer dot org you're missing the easiest attack vector, if you are not doing these, yeah it's a pretty easy, the last thing in the research, okay being a nurse I've worked a lot of intensive cares, people get cranky, are the machines in your environment putting out these frequencies without you knowing it, I mean think about your work environment, do you have any machines that make noise, has anybody ever walked around and measured them, do you ever work in an office where everybody is cranky as hell, well never mind, that's not a good one, never mind, so you know, think about these, I challenge you, I'm here next year, I've been here for years, so when I'm here next year, the nurse come up to me say, dude it was really sucky, it didn't work, or it was great and my mom let me get a car or something, so you know, use these, here I am, the nurse cyber info sack, that's pretty easy stuff isn't it, I appreciate everybody coming out, I appreciate you listening, people actually paid attention, nobody was asleep, damn, so try these, let me know next year and psychosotics real y'all.


Hi, my name is John Hitchman, I'm the Student Advice Service Manager and this is introducing the SOAS Student Advice Service. So introducing my team and what we do at SOAS. So the Student Advice Service is part of the Student Advice and Wellbeing team. That larger team also includes the Disability and Neurodiversity team that can provide support for students with health conditions or disabilities or anything like that that has an impact on your studies. You need some adjustments being made or some support there in place. My colleagues in the Wellbeing and Mental Health Support Team can help with any mental health related issues including those of the students who have issues when they start. There are studies or any issues that occurred during these studies and the Multiface Support Team can help students with any faith related issues or finding places of worship locally or any support activities. They also run a lot of things throughout the year to really try and engage students with what they're doing. They're fantastic. The Student Advice Service is us, we help with the really practical side of stuff. So really functional things to help you get on your program, stay on your program and I'll explain a bit more about those. So we have accommodation advice for you. Anything to do with your student housing. So where you're going to be living while you're studying. Immigration advice is predominantly to do visas but also about the conditions of your visa, that sort of thing. And then funding advice will be to do with support with any sort of funding or finance that you need while you're studying so as. And then we have some other areas of advice as well that I will cover shortly. So Jo Hogan, she's our Residential Operations Manager and Student Housing Advisor. It's a very long job title. It's very descriptive and she manages all our accommodation at SOAS and she can provide you with advice and information about finding the best property for you or the best place for you to live while you're studying at SOAS. She also allocates all those places to live and she works with our private partners so currently Sanctuary and Urban Nest but we're having some new partners in the new year that will be announced. We also have some halls that are part of the University of London's intercollegiate halls so they're all located quite locally to SOAS. And then if you're a student with a disability who needs to get some sort of special accommodation then Jo you can help you with that request as well. And then any sort of housing advice you might need during your stay. Jo can help you with that. And also if we sometimes have students who need emergency housing, if they become homeless or perhaps students who are estranged from their parents or at risk in some way. And Jo has a lot of experience in helping students in that situation and we work quite closely as a team to support students who may be facing some serious problems like that. And then if you need something very legal to do with your housing so for instance if you're moving into a private rented accommodation and you need your contract checking or some sort of legal advice the University of London housing services can provide that support for you and we will refer and work very closely with them as well. So as a student of SOAS you can access their legal advice as well. So the immigration advice is the rest of the team provide that. And we as I said this is mostly advice about visas. So the previous visa system that we had we did the tier four visas was replaced by the student visa system on the 5th of October 2020. We can provide advice about the old type of visas and the new ones as well as some people who are studying in the UK now will still have a tier four visa. So when you start your studies we can give you advice about your student visa conditions relating to work, police registration you may have to do that and other legal requirements of the visa as well. So anything the duration of the visa all sorts of other stuff. If there's any errors for instance the duration so if your visa isn't as long as it should be we can help you get that corrected and then we can provide support with visa applications. So if you're extending your your visa in the United Kingdom while you're studying we may be to offer you a one-to-one appointment but if perhaps you're going to be on a pre-sessional program then we'll do some sort of group sessions for you to help you make that visa application and help you check documents and we can also provide support for applications from family members who are known visa dependents. Now we get quite heavily involved with complex visa issues so sometimes you know very very unusually but sometimes people's visa applications are refused. If that happens we're able to help with that and and advise students about the potential for making I think or an administrative review where you challenged that refusal decision and then we can give advice about post-study work visas so I'm sure you're aware of you're an international student that the graduate route started in 2021 and that's carrying on in the future so that's a two or three year post-study work visa we can give you a lot of support with that we record webinars not for other sorts of sessions about graduate route and other post-study work visas and then other study related visas so sometimes for those coming on a short course or people needing to repeat little pieces of work they'll come and study on the standard visa to visa and there may be other visas relating to study that we can provide advice about. So the finance advice side I would say a bulk of this is to do with the the UK's student finance system so there's student finance available for undergraduates postgraduate tour and postgraduate research students and we can help you with the more complex side of those things so if you need to repeat a year of your studies perhaps then we can give you advice about your eligibility for funding maybe you need to take time out of your studies and again that could have an impact on your funding we can advise you there some people will be changing mode of study maybe from full time to part time or vice versa we can give you some advice about that and then EU students we can talk to you about your qualification for funding following Brexit and following that that sort of change of rules there and then as I've mentioned before we work quite closely with their strange students as students who maybe they start university and they live with their parents or they have a close relationship with their family and then they they lose that relationship they become quite disconnected for one reason or another and that has the student finance implication that we can support students with amongst the other kind of support we can offer those students and then student finance may make a decision that that you're not happy with that that we can argue with sometimes we can make an appeal if it's within student finance regulations so we can support you with those those things too so student hardship funds we have funds for all sorts of types of hardship but essentially students who've arrived at university and have budgeted their money have money in place but then something goes wrong then we have funding in place to help those students various different funds aimed at students from different groups we have some funding specifically for students from blowing on backgrounds kind of students who would also qualify for a bursary and then we have funding if we if we have students who are suddenly in a financial emergency we can help with that sort of thing as well and then welfare benefits we have a member of the team who has experience of advising students and their entitlement to benefits such as universal credit or for instance disability benefits so we can provide you that advice maybe before you start your course or during your program as well and then from time to time we offer money management courses so once a year we have national student money week which we like to try and run an event for and during welcome week but really anytime a student needs some assistance with things like budgeting how to manage their finances a bit better how to save money as well how to really reduce your expenditure because you know anything you can save money on you can spend that money doing something you enjoy more so there's a quick overview of the kind of funding that's available to home students so if you're a home student you'd be in charge of those different figures there i'm not going to read them all out but as you can see there's a loan for master's research and undergrad students and then there's a maintenance loan as well as a tuition fee loan for undergrads and there's the service bursary that i mentioned so if you've got a household income of below 25 000 pounds then you should automatically be qualifying for that 1500 pound bursary as long as you've been means tested by student finance so as long as your parents income has been provided to student finance and then on top of the loans there you can see that there's also some support for students who enter higher education and their parents at the child care grant there we can give you some support towards cost of child care there's a parent learning allowance for student parents maybe you have someone who's a dependent adult who you're supporting and there's funding though the adult dependents grant the disabled students allowance is something that disability neurodiversity team can help you with but that really provides funding for all those reasonable adjustments and to get support in place that you might need as a disabled student or somebody with an ongoing health issue while they study and then something that's really nice to find out about is the travel grant for the language year abroad so for students not not with a 25 000 pound cut up it's a little bit higher than that but from a lower income background you can get a lot of the costs of your year abroad covered so return flights to your university destination overseas and also the costs of visas and inoculations and other sort of travel related costs so we can give you advice about all of those things and then other areas of advice so these will be probably situations that would be less usual but you know we're here to help so if students find themselves homeless you know Joe can help them quite quickly get into accommodation but if students having trouble with funding and finance that's related to homelessness we can help with that as well then I've mentioned the strange students a little bit but you know if your relationship with your family suddenly breaks down and you realize you don't have somewhere to live or you realize you don't have money to live on then this is the kind of thing that we can help you with and then student parents and carers if you come to university and you're already a parent or you're caring for an adult you know you need a lot of support and you may need some support to manage your studies but also some support financially or at least make sure you're accessing all the funding you're entitled to so we can help you with that sort of things and then for disabled students we provide support to help with the specific learning difference assessment so that would be an assessment to see if somebody is perhaps dyslexic or dis-practic I'll say that properly and also some financial support towards laptops for those students so some of that support is uncovered by the disabled students allowance and then from time to time we get students coming to CRT have quite complex requirements I'd say particularly with immigration who need an external referral so we'll find the right direction to refer them into a professional external immigration advisor or or lawyer or barrister where we're relevant so that's really the end of the presentation so for accommodation you've got my colleague Jo Hogan and she's available on the accommodation at SOAS email address and then the rest of the team that do the funding and immigration advice is Catherine Smart, Carrie McMinn and Mae John Hichman and you can reach us on advice at soas.ac.uk so thanks very much for listening and we look forward to seeing you at SOAS


All right, everybody. I am here to introduce our next speaker. Our next speaker is Nick Halsey. He's a WordPress user, theme designer, plugin developer, and core contributor. As a customized component maintainer for core, he's focused on improving both user and developer experience, introducing features such as panels, menu management, JavaScript templated controls, media controls, device preview, additional CSS, and theme installation in the customizer. Nick works full-time at KPFF Consulting Engineers, designing new building structures and seismic retrofits. He is also a multi-instrumentalist and classical composer specializing in cello ensemble music. Very cool. So welcome, Nick, to the stage. Hey, so I'm Nick Halsey, and today I'm going to be talking about seven keys to sustainable WordPress projects inspired by buildings. When I'm talking about WordPress projects, this could be anything from you have your own website and you're managing your content to you're creating a website for a client, or even if you're creating WordPress themes or plugins to be distributed. And my goal with talking about sustainability today is really to think about longevity. And one of the things that I think we tend to think about with buildings is that they're relatively permanent. We don't see them as having a very short lifespan whereas a lot of digital projects may only last a few years. In reality, buildings have relatively finite lifespans. A lot of new buildings are designed to last only 40 years and buildings are lucky to last 100 years like this one did here. And despite the relatively short lifespan of buildings, a building design and construction project, a large project could cost hundreds of millions of dollars and take several years to design and build. And so with that in mind, in the building design and construction industry, there's a movement to really focus on sustainability, efficiency, and resiliency extending the lifespan of our buildings. And so I'm gonna talk about a few examples of that before we get into WordPress. This is the Portland building. It's in downtown Portland and was built in the 80s. It was built originally for less than $30 million. But now 35 years later, we're in the middle of an almost $200 million project to completely rebuild the building. And the reason for that is that it was originally built for efficiency in cost. And so it was built as inexpensively as possible using very efficient systems in terms of actually building it, but then the functionality of the building wasn't efficient. And so as a result, we're now as taxpayers having to go back and spend a lot of money to bring that up to current standards and create something that's actually functional and will last another 50 to 100 years. Just across the park from the Portland building is the Edith Green-Whittle Wyatt Federal Building, which is the image on your left is what it looked like originally when it was completed in the 70s. In 2013, the building was completely rebuilt as an icon for environmental sustainability. So this is actually the same building here and they completely replaced all of the cladding with a new solar-tuned facade system that is intended to optimize natural light while also optimizing the energy usage of the building. It also features solar panels and other sustainable features. The biggest thing with this example, though, is that this is an adaptive reuse of an existing building. They didn't tear the building down and completely start from scratch. They reused the elements that they could and were able to greatly reduce the environmental impact of the project by reusing the building instead of completely starting over. Efficiency and sustainability can often be at odds with each other, though. And we see that really frequently in Portland as new buildings go up that are built primarily out of concrete. The most common construction procedure here in Portland is a post-tensioned flat concrete slab similar to the building you see here. And the reason is that you can fit a lot of floors within a relatively short height and we have relatively short height limits here in Portland. And so you can fit density, you can fit more housing units in a smaller building by using this system. But despite the efficiency of the concrete structure, concrete itself is one of the materials with the highest environmental impact. And so we're balancing between, yes, we can build something really efficiently, but we also have to consider the environmental impact and the lack of environmental sustainability of building that way. And then the other term I wanna give an example of a building with is resiliency. Here in the Pacific Northwest, we have a lot of seismic hazards. We are expecting a very large magnitude nine plus earthquake to hit the region sometime in the next couple hundred years. And as a result, a lot of building owners are starting to look at how do we improve the resiliency of our buildings so that they'll be able to withstand those seismic events and continue functioning after those. This particular building was built less than 30 years ago and this is a public building out in Washington County, out in Hillsborough. And the county has decided that they really want to make sure that their buildings can continue operating after the earthquake. So they're now going through these relatively new buildings and going through the extensive process to seismically upgrade them so that they'll be able to continue serving the public following a seismic event. And so now I wanna get into my seven keys and thinking a little bit about specifically how we can take some things that happen with buildings and apply that to WordPress in creating sustainable and longer-lasting projects. And my first point with that is to consider building codes. For buildings, codes are prescriptive legal requirements, somewhat localized, that define all sorts of things from fire and life safety to egress, how to design a structural system, and other prescriptive legal requirements for how you actually put a building together. Before a building can start construction, the design team needs to submit to a government entity documents that show that the building design that's gonna get built actually conforms to all of those legal code requirements to ensure that the building is safe for everyone to be in. On the web, there are some cases where we have legal requirements, but generally speaking, there's a lot less structure to legal requirements for building codes of the web. There are a number of web platform standards that are out there that can serve that purpose, and in my opinion, should really be treated like a legal requirement even when they aren't. And there are a lot of different standards that I'm not gonna get into a whole lot of detail on right now, but the most important things to think about are creating semantic markup and making your site accessible. If your content is semantically structured, you've got heading tags instead of just large font sizes when you have headings, things like that. It's improving the machine readability of your work. And as over time, our different device input modes change. Smartphones, and now we're getting into other things. What might we have in the future? If we're trying to create new projects in such a way that they'll last into that next evolution of technology, doing things to ensure that our content's machine readable, and that also will lend itself to search engine optimization because Google can read your content as well, will really help ensure that your work will last the test of time. Next, I wanna talk about the zoning code. And with respect to buildings, the zoning code is a local set of requirements that talks about what type of a building can be built where, how tall the building can be, how much square footage it can have, and other requirements for the general context of a building. This building that you see here, this is a rendering for Block 216. It's a proposed tower in downtown Portland that would become Portland's fifth tallest building. And this is built right to the height limit in the zoning code. So the zoning code says in downtown Portland at this particular location, you can build a 460 foot tall tower, and you can have condos in a hotel, an office space, retail space, parking, all of those uses are allowed in that building. But you wouldn't be allowed to take this building and build it up in the West Hills there, which is zoned as a residential area with a much shorter height limit of about 30 feet. And so this project also is a really interesting precedent for looking at some of the cases where you can take the zoning code as a prescriptive requirement, but unlike the building code, there's a little bit more flexibility in adjusting that. And so this project has some interesting examples with how you can maybe work around the building code or the zoning code when you can show that your project is actually better meeting the intent. And I'll get into that a little more later. The WordPress equivalent of the zoning code I see as the WordPress philosophy. If you haven't read the WordPress philosophy, I highly encourage you to do so. I'm not gonna read through all of it today, but there are a lot of really important points here. And historically, many people may have seen the WordPress philosophy as really being about WordPress itself. And while that's the case, I think it also is a really good philosophy to have with any projects that we're building with or on top of WordPress. The WordPress philosophy, again, there's a lot of words. I kind of simplify it down to just a few. In terms of your project's implementation, you wanna be focused, simplified, generalized, and automated. Really seeking for the most simple approach to any problem, focusing on those goals. Also being generic, so for example, if you're creating some functionality for a client, think about is this something that if I go to slightly more effort, I could actually turn into a plugin that I can reuse for other clients or maybe even publish on wordpress.org and other people can use it as well. And then also automating things wherever possible. So if you're creating a theme or a plugin, creating an interface, automating those tasks that could be repetitive so that users have the most streamlined experience possible. There are also a few process-oriented points in the WordPress philosophy. And I like to summarize those as being as iterative as possible, which I'll get into a little more later. And then also being attentive and open. Open to the license of WordPress, the GPL and the four freedoms that it presents. And then also really paying attention to your end users. There's a rule called the Vocal Minority that says that only 1% of the people actually using your product will ever contact you about it or you'll only ever hear from 1% of your users. And so keeping that in mind and really seeking out feedback from a broader base of users is important. My third point is design review. And in Portland Zoning Code, we actually have areas in Portland that are required for major projects to go in front of an appointed design commission that reviews projects with the architects before they can actually move to the process of that legal building code review. And this ensures that we have a coherent city where our buildings work together and provide the best experience possible for pedestrians. This particular project is at the corner of Burnside and MLK in the central east side industrial district here in Portland. And these are the first two designs that were presented to the design commission. That initial design on the left, there were some concerns that the top and the base of the building didn't really relate to each other and that the overall massing and shape of the building could be perceived as a really large imposing block as opposed to something more refined like a lot of our buildings are here in Portland. Ultimately, the design team came to this project here or to this iteration of the design that you can see with a little more context here. This is actually located right across the Burnside bridge from the somewhat controversial yard building, which you can see up there. And so it was really important at this prominent site for this building to respond to, yes, we've got this very innovative architecture happening right here. And how do we take that and respond to it with the next generation of a building at this site? And even though the architecture team was considering that throughout their process, having that third party design review process as part of their work really allowed the design to evolve to something that is gonna better fit our city. And this project is currently under construction. This was a couple of weeks ago. If you drive over the Burnside bridge frequently, you're gonna start to see this popping up above grade in the next couple of weeks. An example of design review and peer feedback in WordPress is this feature that I worked on for WordPress Core. This is the theme installer that's in the customizer and this is the original version of the proposal that we proposed for WordPress 4.7 back in 2016. This proposal met all of the prescriptive requirements in terms of code quality, user testing, and design feedback that we have for implementing new features in WordPress Core. But there was still feedback that the experience wasn't quite ready and so through that peer feedback process, we spent another year iterating on the design and ultimately came to this version of the feature which shipped in WordPress 4.9. We simplified the interface as much as possible with some based on some of the goals of WordPress in the WordPress philosophy and came to this relatively streamlined experience that allows you to search for themes on WordPress.org from within the customizer and once you find a theme that you wanna try, in one click, you can download, install, and preview this theme on your site with your content to get from selecting a theme to live previewing it in a much more simplified experience. My fourth key is thinking about modular construction and in WordPress content structure. With buildings, it's important to modularize as much as possible, fabricating big pieces of our building away from the project site so that we can put a building together much more quickly. This particular project was located down in Los Angeles and they had six brand new buildings, over a million square feet and it's a university project and it had to be brick cladding with precast detailing on it. There actually wasn't enough labor in Los Angeles at the time available to handset all of the bricks one by one at the project site and that would have added about a year to the project schedule as a result. And so the team came up with a solution to cast the brick into these panels offsite that could then be brought into place and erected with large pieces with cranes like you see here which drastically increased the speed with which the building was able to be put together. In WordPress, we have a number of different ways that we can think about content structure and really modularizing what we're doing. I think the best example in WordPress is with custom post types. This particular site is my sheet music library and originally I had just a page in WordPress with a bunch of links to PDFs of sheet music on it. That quickly became difficult to manage and I went to a custom database table which was definitely a mistake. Ended up not publishing any content for a couple of years as a result and then finally was able to go through the process of creating a custom post type that was specifically tailored to sheet music that allows you to upload a PDF, upload audio files and also use custom taxonomies to relate different pieces of content. So you can now as a visitor on this site click on a link and see all of the music for four cellos and that's automatically created by WordPress whenever you associate a piece with that taxonomy for orchestration. You can then create these dynamic views with relatively little effort. Because it's set up with the custom post type there's also a good separation between the actual content and the way it's being presented. So it would be relatively easy to switch out the theme and it's actually built as a plugin that's available on wordpress.org that's designed to be compatible with as many themes as possible so that your content is modular and relatively portable. My last three keys are a little bit broader in terms of thinking about how we approach projects and the first one is to retrofit or iterate. I mentioned earlier Washington County is working on a lot of their public buildings and going through seismic retrofit projects. This is another one that I was involved in and this is actually a building that's less than 20 years old. And as a result, unfortunately it has that one problem. It is not seismically up to the standards that they need for being able to immediately occupy that building after an earthquake and it's an important building because it contains the sheriff's office and a number of other functions. And so even though the rest of the building all the interiors were fine all of the mechanical systems were fine because it's a relatively new building. Didn't need any work they needed to do this seismic retrofit. And so the team came up with this solution to really address that one issue and focus the upgrades on that one issue. We added these exterior cross-braced frames to the building with the intent of making it look like they had always been there. And by doing that we were able to keep most of the construction on the exterior of the building and minimize the overall cost and schedule impacts of actually conducting the upgrade. The project was completed in less than a year and well under budget which is relatively uncommon for a building project. A WordPress example I have is the 14 colors plugin which goes with the 2014 theme. This plugin and the theme were built a while ago but in WordPress 4.5 there were some improvements to the Customizer API that make it easier to instantly live preview changes. And you can see that in action here with another theme. And so that plugin which at this point was relatively, I didn't really need a lot of updates, it's theme specific but I was able to implement this much faster and better user experience for actually as you move your mouse around that color picker you instantly see the change of those colors live on your site, a preview of your site, not public. And really no UI change in this update but it changed how quickly you can see those previews. And so finding those little improvements that you can make on your projects to improve the experience without getting into a whole lot of other issues where you might then expand your scope is really a good way to iterate on projects and allow them to evolve over time. There will be times where you need to make bigger changes to a project and in those cases I look to something that's often called adaptive reuse. This is a building, another building in Portland Central East Side Industrial District built about 100 years ago as a foundry. It's also been used as a warehouse building and it's really been just mostly bordered up for the last 40 years or so. In the past year, EcoTrust has worked to completely transform this building into a new event center. And in transforming the building as opposed to just tearing it down and starting from scratch, we're able to preserve some of the history. We still have these cool old roof trusses. The big green thing is an old mechanical press that's in the space. And there's also some old gantry crane beams in there. So we can keep some history and some character to something that's been a part of the neighborhood for 100 years while also creating an entirely new use for that space. And we would lose a lot of that history and that character if we were to just tear the whole building down and start from scratch. Even though in this case, we basically had to tear out all of the walls and rebuild most of the building kind of from the inside out. An example of adaptive reuse in WordPress is this site that I worked on a couple of years ago. It is actually representing a physical space that offers workshops and has a help desk for students at USC. And they wanted to have tutorials and some news posts on their website, but initially it wasn't very clearly defined. And so they set it up with the 2014 theme with some customizations and they were just showing custom posts or latest posts on the front page. In the iteration, we looked to completely re-imagine what the site actually looked like with a new custom theme, some custom plugins. But also trying to keep the content that was there as much as possible. So we kept all of the existing posts but we split it into two different post types. One focusing on posts for news and one tutorial post type for all the tutorials. We kept the existing events calendar that was working pretty well. And we also kept the existing user profiles that WordPress has out of the box and extended that to create these public staff profile pages where you could view that on the site. We also added a course registration system and then we introduced some shared taxonomies to relate tutorials, courses and staff members together. And this gets a little bit back to modular content. This allows you to automatically get views like this out of WordPress where we have this tool taxonomy. And in this case, the tool is Adobe Illustrator. And you can see on the taxonomy archive page which WordPress generates automatically all of the different staff members that are experts in this so that if someone were to go into the space and want to talk to an expert, they know who they can talk to. We also show all of the different tutorials available on the site as well as courses. And so with those different pieces of content that are kind of modularly set up, we're able to tie a lot of different things together into a really unique presentation that's also separated from the actual content structure. My final point today is about balancing disruptive innovation. And with buildings, one of the really interesting movements that's happening right now is with mass timber as a building material. This is a proposal for an 11-story all-wood construction building in Portland's Pearl District called Framework. And through several years of research and testing partnering with a number of different universities, the design team was able to show that using wood, this building is able to meet or even exceed the fire and seismic safety requirements that we have with any other more traditional building material like steel or concrete. And at the same time, wood is inherently much more sustainable than a material like concrete because it actually sequesters carbon rather than emitting it when you use it in your buildings. Unfortunately, with something that's somewhat disruptive as an innovation, there tends to be compromise. And in this case, the compromise was cost because it's a more innovative material. It was a little bit more expensive. This project would have created affordable housing, but there was some concern about that higher cost per square foot to build it. And so as a result, it's currently looking like this building won't get built, but it has done a lot of the research and paved the way for new code allowances to create taller buildings out of wood. And we're starting to see a lot more interest in new buildings built out of mass timber here in Portland. In WordPress, we're currently undergoing a very disruptive innovation. If you haven't heard about the Gutenberg project, now would be a good time to start learning about it. It's currently scheduled to ship with WordPress 5.0 in about two weeks. This is also a disruptive innovation. And I would say it also does have some compromises that it's making. Right now, it's looking like those compromises are largely gonna be related to accessibility of the actual editor. And also, in a lot of ways backwards compatibility, it's gonna be a little bit harder to transition a lot of older projects into this new experience than with a lot of other features that we've had introduced to WordPress recently. And so with all of our projects, I really think these seven keys are important to think about when we're seeking longevity. Looking at the building codes of the web, following standards wherever possible to try to set ourselves up for as standards and technologies evolve, continuing to really meet the intent of those standards and allow our content to also evolve. Considering the WordPress philosophy, really seeking out design and code review and trying to make that a part of our processes. Being modular with our construction, using custom post types, I mentioned Gutenberg. Gutenberg is block based, which is actually in theory a really nice way to modularize how you're creating your content. That being said, the implementation of blocks right now, most blocks actually aren't really any more modular than the way content's currently stored. And the exception is with reusable blocks. So I encourage you to look into reusable blocks as well as custom post types, even with Gutenberg as ways to modularize your content. And then when we're looking at projects, really looking to retrofit and iterate as much as possible, seeking out those specific points that where your project could improve and targeting fixes on those items. When you need to make larger changes, adaptively reusing your product, whatever you can. So keeping those important elements of a project and reimagining everything else that could be improved. And then when we have disruptive innovation, really balancing it, thinking as a community, and then also for individual projects, how we navigate those changes to help our projects evolve into the future. And with that, I'd like to take any questions. In terms of retrofitting projects, alongside Gutenberg, I also find myself very often addressing accessibility concerns retroactively in different themes or plugins. Would you like to say a little bit about that process? Sure, in terms of how you can retrofit accessibility into something that's already there. Yeah, it's hard. And I think that's where when we create a project, if we think about accessibility from the beginning, it's much easier to actually make that a part of our project and then continue to maintain it moving forward. Whereas if you're approaching a project that's already out there and has been out there for a while and maybe there's a lot of content in it already, that's gonna be a little bit harder to actually add accessibility back into. And so that's where that project that might just be a small iteration, oh, we're gonna add this one feature while accessibility is a lot more than just adding one feature. And so that's where it's more of an, you're adaptively reusing, you're basically potentially gonna have to reconstruct a lot of what's there if it wasn't addressed from the beginning. And so I think that's where it's important when you're approaching new projects to really make sure you're thinking about important things like accessibility from the beginning. And then when you gotta go back and retrofit it in, it's what you gotta do. Any more questions? Thanks for the awesome talk, Nicolo Ditt. So as an Oregonian, I'm terrified of the big one, every day in fear. Could you speak a little bit more about seismic retrofit and are, you know, are the projects that you take on for seismic retrofit, you know, keep the building up? Or do you think the building will actually like stay operable or show the knowledge on the current thing, seismic retrofit? For a particular building or just in general? Just generally. In general? Yeah, so I think a couple of things we can talk about. So this is a proposed new building, relatively tall new building in Portland. And so obviously we're designing it to the best of our knowledge to withstand the very large earthquake. But there's always a trade-off between the cost of earthquake resiliency in terms of your construction cost and then what you get out of it. And so for new buildings, we still in a lot of cases aren't necessarily designing this building to, okay, after the earthquake, you can immediately move back into it and continue using it. The performance objectives and then how it calibrates to specific earthquake magnitudes are somewhat complicated. But I'll basically just say that for a lot of new buildings that are going up even now, there may not be a guarantee that after an earthquake it's gonna be economical to repair the building. It may make sense for a lot of buildings, even new buildings now, to actually tear it down and start over from scratch after the earthquake. So that's something we have to kind of keep in mind is there's a high cost to really good seismic performance. But there were a couple of projects that I talked about. This was one of them where Washington County with these public buildings is really focusing on that as one of the primary drivers of a project is, we really need our buildings to be able to operate following an earthquake. And so they're really putting in that extra cost to say, okay, we're gonna take it a step further. Yes, we meet all of the requirements of the code, which are that a building may be safe, but may not actually be able to continue operating. And they're saying that they want that building to remain functional following an earthquake. Yes, so this particular building is out in Hillsborough. You can kind of see there back behind is the jail. And then this is the sheriff's office and courtrooms and some other functions in this part here. So it's important for buildings like this to remain standing following an earthquake. Just to kind of tie that back into WordPress. Say you have a catastrophic event with your site. Yeah. How does that, is there pre-planning you can do in that case so that you can reduce or consider just completely destroying and starting all over again? It's a great question. I think it depends somewhat on what the event is and how the site's set up. I think a lot of the things I've talked about, so if your site is set up relatively modularly and it's like, okay, something went drastically wrong with our events calendar plugin and we've lost a lot of this stuff, but oh really it's that catastrophic event is isolated to that one part of the site and maybe that's a big part of your site with events, but if you can turn that off and then focus on fixing that part and the rest is still working just fine, that's somewhere where if you've set it up where it's a little bit more modular, you're able to isolate potential issues. If it's a problem with a theme that has gone horribly wrong, which I'm sure many of us have seen, that may be a little harder if you got kind of locked into a theme that wasn't being good about how it was storing the content. And then I would just say, once you go through that process of fixing the problem, really try to set it up so that moving forward, the site won't be locked into a given theme and you'll be able to sort of fix it once as opposed to just going through that process again in another couple of years. I have a question about Gutenberg. Using the earthquake analogy, how big of a disruption is that going to be? Is that going to be a little one? Is that going to be a 10.0? What are we looking at? Yeah, I think there's a few different levels. So there's sort of the community level of it. There's the WordPress core and backwards compatibility level and then there's also the level of sites that you maybe created for clients or your own sites. It really depends. In a lot of cases, it's the type of thing that it's intended to be that you can just turn it on and then start creating new content and it'll continue working with your theme. Hopefully your theme has added support for some of the new features. And as a user, it'll just keep working seamlessly. If you're more of a plug-in or theme developer or built a lot of custom functionality into a site, people who are using that site may not actually be able to do that depending on how you built that functionality because your functionality won't necessarily port over. I think the biggest disruption that's going to hit really the vast majority of sites is that the editor styles that we have right now are not backwards compatible with Gutenberg. So you have to create a new editor style sheet. And so if you had previously been able to actually see within the editor, okay, this is the font that's on the front end and it's the same colors and everything's matching, which a lot of people managing content like to see because then when you're aligning your images, you can kinda see how lines break and things like that. That type of experience is immediately gonna be gone unless you go back and add the new editor style format into your theme. So there's sort of, the more minor it's kind of a bummer, but it still works type of a break and then there's sort of the bigger scale. If you've got this plug-in that adds a meta box that no longer works and that's critical to your site, then you either can't upgrade or you have to come up with, you gotta get someone to actually go through the process of updating all that code to the new system. That's, so that's a great question and this, yes. So the, it is a project that's been in development for a couple of years now. That being said, it was announced about a month ago that it was targeting shipping with WordPress 5.0 November 19th of this year. So I think that's kind of, that's a decision that was kind of made at the top of the project and everyone else is kind of reacting to it. That being said, a lot of different people who have tested Gutenberg are starting to find certain things, the accessibility team in particular has been able to quickly point out, you know, there's been a lot of good work on accessibility in Gutenberg, it'll help you create more accessible content with WordPress, but the experience of actually using the editor with Gutenberg is much harder if you're using a keyboard or a screen reader and you don't have a mouse, you can't use a touchscreen. So two weeks away is basically where we're at, but I think it's important as a community, if we see major red flags to raise those red flags and see what we can do to try to improve the way that process works. Okay, I'm using Gutenberg on some websites already that I'm building, but isn't there a plugin to stop it on? Yes, let's hear about that. Yeah, so there's a plugin called the classic editor plugin which basically just keeps the current editor screen. The other thing that I would note is for custom post types, unless you're specifically declaring that they support, that they should be shown in the REST API, it'll default back to the old editor for now. So a lot of custom functionality that may have been built that way may not automatically just make that switch when you update to WordPress 5.0. So definitely it's important to keep WordPress up to date. You do need to update to 5.0, but if you're not ready to use Gutenberg yet, there is the classic editor plugin. And I think on client sites, if it's something that's not actively being maintained by anyone, that's definitely a good route to look at, yeah. So I know you did a lot of work with the customizer previously and then kind of stepped away from WordPress a little bit. I'm not interested in sort of the reasons and that's personal to you, but, and now you're back here at WordCamp presenting, which is thank you for that, but can you talk about sort of, I've been in the WordPress space for many years and haven't taken that step back. Did it, you know, was that like mentally refreshing, clear for like, did it give you different perspective? What were kind of some of the pros and cons of just stepping away for a bit? Yeah, yeah, so it's interesting. I was very heavily involved in contributing to WordPress itself for a few years there and then kind of stepped back a little bit when I started working full-time in a completely different industry, but I have continued working with WordPress.  So I think it's important to get some perspective. For me, it also kind of coincided with a shift in the way the project was being managed and led. It was kind of when that Gutenberg project was getting started and the way that that was approached maybe didn't quite align with the way that I felt my contributions would be as valuable and so I think it's important to always look at, you know, trying to be involved in whatever way works for you at a given time. So if you think, you know, hey, I'm gonna help organize a word camp volunteer, that's something that I'm really interested in and passionate about. I encourage you to do that. If you really, you know, if you're scared by Gutenberg but think it's really cool or wanna learn more, I definitely encourage you to dive into it and be vocal online about, and not just on Twitter but in the official channels talking about, hey, this is what we have, it could be really great, here's what I think we should do to make it better or hey, I found this bug. Reporting issues like that is just as valuable as actually working on code for CORE. So if you've maybe thought about getting involved in CORE but haven't, I definitely encourage trying it because it's something that as a community we need to keep WordPress moving forward. Thank you.


Let us now see how in thermodynamic we visualize a state. Let us take an illustration. Let us say that we have a cylinder and it contains a gas, it could be gas used for cooking, it could be some gas used for welding, it could be oxygen used in a hospital. Let us say that the relevant properties are pressure of the gas in the cylinder, temperature of the gas in the cylinder and mass of the gas. And let us say that since it is a rigid cylinder, volume is unlikely to change and hence we will not consider volume to be a significant variable or a relevant variable at least to begin with. And let us say that we have done measurements and said that after our measurement the pressure has been measured to be 20 bar, temperature has been measured to be 14 degree C and mass has been measured to be 20 kg and our system is this gas. One way of noting this down is our system and its state is gas, list of properties, quantification of property. So, P is 20 bar, T is 14 degree C and mass is 20 kg. So this is the written description, notice the similarity of this. Now look at it from the point of view of coordinate geometry. Remember that there are three properties, so we could consider three dimensions. Is not this equivalent to saying that we have a point in three dimensional space represented by x equals 20, y equals 14, z equals 20, point in space and actually we can use this analogy to represent our system in three dimensional space. We can nicely sketch the three dimensions like this. Let us say here we represent pressure, here we will represent mass. And here we will represent temperature. The pressure is pressure in bar and our pressure is 20 bar, mass, our mass is 20 kg, temperature, temperature is 14 degree C. So these are the three coordinates and using these three coordinates we can now locate our point in the three dimensional space, create a rectangular parallelepiped. So we will have our point somewhere here. This point represents pressure of 20 bar, mass of 20 kg, temperature of 14 degrees C. This will be a representation of the state of our system. Now remember that this is something like in this particular case because there are three properties, three dimensional geometry. The pressure is represented on one axis, the mass is represented on another axis and temperature is represented on the third axis. So each coordinate represents a property. So first thing we should realize is each property is represented by a coordinate. Then the geometric space will represent the thermodynamic space and what is represented is the state of our system. So one should remember and appreciate the analogy between the geometric space and the thermodynamic space. This is known as thermodynamic state space. In the thermodynamic state space each coordinate in this particular case pressure, mass and temperature represents one thermodynamic property. A state is represented by specified values of that property. In this particular case pressure of 20 bar, mass of 20 kg and temperature of 14 degrees C. Thank you.