Good Noon On. In this video I am going to explain you how to take the attendance details that is the present and absent candidate details for the candidates who have appeared for the examination. To take the present and absent candidate details we need to get the final candidate data that is nothing but the candidates who have been enrolled for the exams that is for those who have paid for writing the exam on the current run. For each and every run the exams will be held on two dates. For example the July run the exams held on July 6th and July 12th. So we need to get the candidate data for those for the candidates for registering for the exam on two dates. So this overall candidate data will be sent to all other IITs from NPTEL. Once you receive the overall candidate data this has to be rearranged in a particular order based on the final candidate data template. This template will be shared to all the candidates and all the other IITs which needs to which the data has to be rearranged based on this order. So once you receive the final candidate data this final candidate data will be shared to you in four files in this order. These are the files. First November offline for example I am taking the November exam candidate data. So for the next and March run you will be getting the candidate data for the particular exam dates. So this is the first November offline candidate data, first November online data, eighth November offline data and eighth November online data. Likewise you will be getting the candidate detail for the March run like March 1st or the exam date will be deferred. So offline data and online data will be based on the dates. So once you receive the candidate data you need to arrange these in this template. In course wise manner. So I am going to take the online candidate data. The candidate data will be sent to you in this format. What you need to do is we are going to rearrange it. I am going to arrange it for one particular course. So I am doing a filter here. I am going to collect the final candidate data for language and society course. So after doing this filter, copy these details and arrange it in this order. Applicant name. Next what we need is a date of birth, email ID, application sequence number, participant ID. In this data they have not given the participant ID. So the participant ID will also be given to you from the TCS. This participant ID will be given to you from the TCS. So keep this cells as blank. The hall ticket number will be given in the final candidate data. Copy these details and then follow the hall ticket number. The course name. You can mention it here. Since we are taking this final candidate data separately course wise. Separately in the course wise manner. So we can rename this sheet as the course name as language and society. Now I have renamed this accent based on the course name. So we need to take this final candidate data details separately in the course wise manner. Then the second one since the course name needs to be mentioned here. Language and society. The course ID will also be given here. The exam date is November 1. So I have mentioned here. They have given this test center name city. Actually the exam test center city and state has not been given over here. So we can take these details from the attendance sheet which will be given to us from the TCS once we receive the attendance details. So we are going to leave these also blanks. This participant ID needs to be kept blank. Test center state and city also we can keep it as a blank one. So these details we can take it from the online attendance. Online and offline attendance. So these are first details, first candidate data details. For 8th one, for 8th online data. Again we need to do a filter here. Copy the same like this. And then the whole application sequence number, All ticket number, course name, course ID remains the same in the exam date. And the test center state and city needs to be kept blank. So we have taken the final candidate data for the course language and society. For the remaining courses we need to take in the similar format only. So whatever details we are going to take like attendance details or the score details, Whatever details we are going to take it further we need to take in the same format as that of this final candidate data template. These fields remains to be in the same order as that of this. This need not be changed further. So this is the final candidate data we have kept ready. Then what we have to do is likewise we need to take the final candidate data for offline candidates also. So this candidate data has been kept ready now. Then we are going to map up with the attendance. So you will be receiving the attendance also in separate sheets. For first number you will be receiving a separate online attendance sheet and for 8th attendance 8th exam online you will be getting a separate attendance sheet. So then what you need to do is you need to combine the first and 8th online attendance in the same order as that of this. This template needs to be followed in all the sheets. So now I am going to take the name, name and date of birth, email ID, attendance template, application sequence number. In this sheet also the participant ID is missing. So actually we will be giving you the participant ID separately from the next run. This participant ID will be given to you. So there won't be any problem for you to get this participant ID in the certain sheet. So in the certain template whatever you receive from the TCS will have the participant ID. So for the demo purpose since I don't have the participant ID I am doing it here separately. Then the hall ticket number, course name is language and society. This course ID needs to be copied here. The center name, city and state will also be given. For 8th number also I have taken all the details over here. Hence attendance template for the course language and society has been kept ready. All these details has to be filled in the order asset of this template. So now what we need to do is we need to map the present and absent candidate details. Also copy this attendance here. Hence attendance details has also been kept ready in this attendance template. Now what we need to do is we need to map up with the final candidate registered data. This is to cross check whether the present and absent candidate count matches with the total registered count. So what you need to do is take the attendance template sheet and the final candidate data sheet.


The first question is the amendment 7469.3 in the name of Sue Webber, which seeks to amend motion 7469 in the name of Angela Constance on national drugs mission, cross-government response to the drug deaths task force report, changing lives, be agreed. Members should cast their votes now. Before I close the vote, I call co-cab Stewart to cast a proxy vote on behalf of Stuart McMillan. I vote no. The vote is closed. I call Colin Beattie for a point of order. My system would not connect. I would have voted no. The result of the vote on amendment 7469.3 in the name of Sue Webber is yes, 29, no, 65. There were 23 abstentions. The amendment is therefore not agreed. The next question is the amendment 7469.2 in the name of Paul O'Kane, which seeks to amend motion 7469 in the name of Angela Constance on national drugs mission, cross-government response to the drug deaths task force report, changing lives, be agreed. Are we all agreed? The Parliament is not agreed, therefore we will move to vote and members should cast their votes now. Before I close the vote, I call co-cab Stewart to cast a proxy vote on behalf of Stuart McMillan. On behalf of Stuart McMillan, I vote no. The result of the vote on amendment 7469.2 in the name of Paul O'Kane is yes, 52, no, 65. There were no abstentions. The amendment is therefore not agreed. The next question is the amendment 7469.1 in the name of Alex Cole-Hamilton, which seeks to amend motion 7469 in the name of Angela Constance on national drugs mission, cross-government response to the drug deaths task force report, changing lives, be agreed. Are we all agreed? The Parliament is not agreed, therefore we will move to vote and members should cast their votes now. I call co-cab Stewart to cast a proxy vote on behalf of Stuart McMillan. On behalf of Stuart McMillan, I vote no. The vote is closed and I call Stephanie Callaghan for a point of order. My vote hasn't registered, I would have voted no. The result of the vote on amendment 7469.1 in the name of Alex Cole-Hamilton is yes, 23, no, 93. There were no abstentions. The amendment is therefore not agreed. The final question is that motion 7469 in the name of Angela Constance on national drugs mission, cross-government response to the drug deaths task force report, changing lives, be agreed. Are we all agreed? Can I just confirm that we are all agreed? Thank you. The motion is therefore agreed and we will move on to members business.


Hi, I'm Zor. Welcome to a new Zor education. I would like to have a few lectures dedicated to semiconductors. Well Semiconductors are very important and partially I did touch this when talking about solar cells and how we generate energy from Sun. So I did explain at the time basically what semiconductors are and today I will partially repeat it, partially explain something about atomic structure. So basically you will not learn a lot of new information today relative to whatever was in that lecture about using Sun to generate electricity. However, it's very important because this will actually gradually bring us to how transistors are made using semiconductors and that's very very important because before in electronics we were using basically old models of diodes, triodes, etc. Using vacuum tubes and heated elements, etc. Contemporary electronics is built on semiconductors and that's why it's very important to get into this particular theory because it approaches us to how transistors are made. Okay, now this lecture is part of the course called Physics for Teens. It's presented on Unisor.com. This is the course, actually. So if you find this lecture somewhere on YouTube, on any other source, you should understand it's only one lecture, but the website Unisor.com contains the whole course Physics for Teens and well, it has basically the whole curriculum and it's a set of lectures which are logically connected to each other. I'm usually going always forward and using something which I have already explained in future lectures. So I do recommend you to use the website. Besides, the course has a prerequisite course called Math for Teens. You can't approach physics without math, so your math knowledge should be really good and if it's not, use the Math for Teens on the same website. Everything on this website is completely free. There are no ads, no strings attached. You don't even have to sign in, but you might actually choose if you would like to retain your exam results, for instance. Okay, so let's go into theory of semiconductors. Well, first of all, let's talk about conductivity and why certain elements have more conductivity and less resistance than others. Well, here we have to go to atomic structure. Now, I will probably again talk about atomic structure in more details in other set of lectures dedicated to what actually atom is, but for now you basically remember this orbital model of atom when you have protons and neutrons comprising a nucleus of the atom and certain... So this is a nucleus which contains protons and neutrons and then certain number of orbits where electrons are circulating around. Well, you can actually say circulating, but it's not really a real like circulating of a satellite around the planet, although this is a model and this model satisfies our experimental data. So let's just think right now that these are orbits. Now, in more precise terminology, each orbit, consider you have the three-dimensional things, right? So orbit can be in this plane or can be in that plane, even if it's on the same distance from the nucleus. So we usually should talk about the bend. So this orbit usually contains... It's not really like a fixed orbit. It's a bend of orbits, if you wish. So what's interesting is that according to certain theories, which I'm not going to mention exactly, there are only fixed reduces, if you wish, of those bends. So if electron becomes excited, it can actually jump to the next bend. It cannot be in between the bends. So at certain level of energy, electrons is on this orbit, but if we were excited, like heating, for instance, or put the sunlight, for instance, on the surface, the electrons which are getting a little bit more energy becomes more excited, and that energy should really result in something. And in this particular case, the electron can jump from one bend to another. Now, if the distance between these bends is smaller, it's easier for electron to jump from one to another, and then to another, and then to another, and then all the way out, maybe, from the atom and become a free electron. If this distance is relatively large, well, relatively, obviously, on an atomic level, then it becomes more difficult, which means we have to give more energy to electron to jump to a higher orbit, to a higher bend. So those elements which have a very small distance between these bends, and I'm not going to talk about why, I just don't know, but those elements have a better conductivity because electrons are easier to excite. So you don't really have to have enough heat or light or something else, or electric potential, if you wish, to excite them, and they're easier going out. It's like energy later, if you wish. It's more difficult to jump from level to level in this case than into this case. So even a smaller amount of energy allows electrons to go up this ladder of energy, but if the step is very large, then you need more energy for electron to jump. And that's what actually determines the conductivity. Those elements with smaller distance between the bends, for instance, metals, they have a better conductivity. You don't need a lot of, let's say, electric potential on both sides of the piece of metal to push electrons to go from one place to another. But if it's a glass or a diamond, where the distance between these bends is very, very large, relatively atomic dimensions, then you really cannot push electrons from one place to another if they are connected with a diamond or a glass or something, which is really insulator. So that's why we have conductors. Those are elements with smaller distance between these bends. And we have insulators where this distance is very large, relatively very large. Well, there are in-between cases. It's not really very, very large, but it's not really small either, which means that under normal conditions, these elements are insulators. But if you will just heat it a little bit or maybe do something else, and we will talk about what exactly that something else is, they become conductors. So the perfect example of this is silicon. And if you will take a piece of silicon and you will put some electric potential here, under normal condition, the electricity will not be going through. Electrons will not move through this silicon. But if you will heat it, then electricity will start going. Typical experiment, you just put a source of energy here and a lamp here. Under normal condition, the lamp will not build it up. But if you will heat it, then you will see that the lamp lights up. So, silicon is one of those elements which have this distance between the bends, not very large, but not very small. So, under normal circumstances like that, it's not a conductor, but you will have to do something like heating, for instance, and it becomes a conductor. Okay, so that's the conductivity and that's what exactly semiconductors are. These are elements which have this distance between the bends, not very large, not very small, semiconductors. Example, perfect example, is silicon and that's what's mostly used. And there are some others. We're not talking about basically the practical aspect, that's just enough that silicon is a perfect example of a semiconductor. Now, how to make it a conductor? I just said you can heat it up, for instance. Well, that's not very convenient. What people do, they do a very interesting and smart thing. Now, let's talk about silicon inside. Well, inside, silicon has 14 electrons and 14 protons in a nucleus. That's why it's electrically neutral. Okay, now, these electrons, so if this is a nucleus, then there are two electrons on the first orbit or in the first bend of orbit. Then you have next orbit where you have eight electrons so that's 10. Now we need 14. So the next one has four electrons. Now, I picture this on a flat surface. Obviously, this is a three-dimensional structure. So how these orbits are arranged relatively to each other, one electron can go this way, another can go this way, et cetera. So that's not exactly, but as a model, it fits perfectly our purpose. So the silicon atoms are arranged in some kind of a lattice. And the lattice basically means that each one, you see, these are four electrons and each one is connected to four other atoms. And these electrons actually become connected to other electrons from the other atom. So the pair of electrons here and I will use only the outer orbit. And this is another atom. This is a nucleus. So these two electrons, they're valent electrons. And again, we'll talk about atomic structure in more details later. But right now, for our purpose, they are related to each other and they become, it's called covalent links. So these are linked together. And that's what keeps actually the whole lattice in shape. It connects atoms and that's why silicon has a structure basically inside. It's not like glass, for instance, or water where molecules are not really related to each other. In silicon, you have a really crystallized structure. And that's what these covalent links make the crystallized structure. Now, how it's arranged, again, right now we're not talking, but there is a link and that what keeps the whole ledges together. So that's basically what we have here. Each one is connected and that's and that's what actually keeps the crystallized structure in shape. Now, why silicon actually can be made a conductor if you heat it up? Well, when you heat it up, you excite these electrons and when they are excited, they're not really as much connected to each other. They would like to really do something, move somewhere and they can fly away. If they fly away, they become free electrons and then if you have a potential attached to the whole piece of silicon, these free electrons might actually migrate. Then these electrons will go to a positive and from a negative side new electrons might take their place. So that's why the whole thing is working. It's all in movement. So we are not losing actually the number of electrons, they're just moving gradually to this side because this is generated new ones to compensate for the lost electrons and that's how electricity is moving. But you have to really like heat it up or do something. Can we do something different to force electrons to become free? Yes, we can. And here is a very important trick if you wish. People came up with let's say you have this structure, this is silicon, this is silicon, this is silicon, this is silicon. And we introduce impurity instead of silicon inside of this. We will introduce let's say phosphorus which has 15 atomic weight which means 15 protons and 15 electrons. So on the outer orbit, so inside we have on the first level we have two, next level eight and the next five. So we have this electron. Now this is phosphorus, these are silicones. Now silicones, they're all connected to each other, right? This connected to this, connected to this, they're all connected into structure. But for this particular electron which belongs to this phosphorus atom, there is no pair to link to which means it's easier for this electron to become free. So this mix of a base silicon and some impurities introduced into silicon phosphorus atoms, this new kind of a material has a better conductivity. It becomes really a conductor and that's actually the something which is extremely important for all the electronics. So depending on amount of phosphorus or whatever other characteristics, I'm not really sure exactly which ones, this becomes better or worse but it becomes a conductor. So you might not actually need to heat it up or maybe you need to have a much smaller difference in electric potential to force electrons to move in this particular material. So material which contains base elements, silicon and certain impurities introduced in terms of phosphorus atom and again it might not necessarily be phosphorus but it's just one of the things which are obvious. When you have extra electron which does not have any pair to make a crystallized structure, it doesn't have this covalent link to anything. So basically in this particular case for four atoms of silicon being one atom of phosphorus, right? So that's probably more or less the kind of proportion if you wish. So then you will have one electron available. You will have basically as many electrons available as many atoms of phosphorus are introduced. And now again as I'm saying even a smaller difference in electric potential will force electrons to move to a positive pole. So this particular semi-conductivity it's called n-type where n stands for negative, it's electron. Electron is negative. So that's one type of changing the semiconductor into conductor or almost the conductor by introducing this impurity with extra electron on the orbit. There is another way. Let's instead of this put boron 5. Boron 5 has 5 protons and 5 electrons. 2 on the inner orbit and then 3 on the next one. So we don't have this. On the outer orbit as far as valent electrons there are only three of them. So now this one becomes not connected using the covalent link, right? So again it's easier to basically bump it if you have certain electric potential arranged. So if you have this then this electron will go. Now then what happens next instead some other electron should take its place. So and you have basically an absence of electron in another place. So you have holes basically. So this particular picture is almost equivalent to that one which we have for phosphorus. But then phosphorus electrons are moving here to a positive side. And these are extra electrons, right? So we don't really have any kind of a change of numbers of electrons in every atom of silicon. In this case it's the holes which actually are moving. The electrons, three electrons move here, but the holes which remain move to the opposite direction. The hole basically plays exactly the same role as a positive particle if you wish. So whenever electron moves here, the hole moves here, then something replaces the electron in this particular position from let's say here or there or somewhere else. And here you have a hole. So holes are actually moving to the left and electrons are moving to the right. So that's why what I'm saying is that the holes are kind of equivalent to positive, electrically positively charged particles. So this is called a P type semiconductor. P stands for positive. Hole is positive. So either phosphorus or borous, they do have this kind of better conductivity than silicon by itself. So we have two new materials. We have N type of material and we have P type of material. And these are basic components from which we can start building more complex and interesting devices called transistors, which we will talk about later on. But today I would like to finish with one very interesting case which we can have. What happens if you have two different materials, two different semiconductors, P type and N type connected like two different disks. One is with silicon disk with phosphorus, another silicon disk with boron. So one is a P type, another is an N type and they are connected to each other. This is P type and this is N type. So what happens in the border? That's very interesting actually process. So if this is an N type, we have extra electrons here which are actually, well, they're just by themselves, they are fluctuating because they are not connected to another atom to another electron actually using covalent links. So these are extra electrons which do not fit into a crystallized structure of silicon. So they are moving, randomly moving within the material itself. And some of them might actually penetrate this border. Same thing here, analogously. There are holes here because boron, boron has only three electrons so there is a hole in crystallized structure which can be fit from another. So the holes are actually moving. Electrons are fitting the hole which means the hole moving somewhere else. Now what actually becomes, what's very interesting is, now if there is no movement of these electrons, the whole thing is neutral because the phosphorous which adds this electron to orbit, it has extra proton. So the whole thing is neutral. But if this electron moves here, this becomes positively charged, right? Now if the hole moves here, this becomes negatively charged. So just by diffusion, just by normal process of random walking of these electrons and holes, we have, this becomes negatively charged on the border and this becomes positively charged on the border from all those electrons moving from here to here and holes moving from here to there. Because we need to move these holes to maintain the crystallized structure. That's why we have deficiency of holes here and deficiency of electrons here. So this becomes positively, this becomes negatively around the margin. It's not actually, don't go too far deep. Why? Because as soon as this becomes negative, it prevents other electrons to go there. Because this negative charge will repel other electrons. So this process goes up to a certain extent, which means that there is certain difference in potential between this place and this place. So these two n-type and p-type materials when combined together, basically that's enough to produce certain difference in potential. And that's exactly where the sunlight is important in producing the electricity from solar batteries. Because whenever we are putting sunlight into the n-type, it excites more and these electrons are greater, to a greater quantity, migrate to this. Because the more excited they are, the deeper they go into this. And if you will actually put some kind of a consumer of electricity, then the electricity will move here and the new sunlights will move, new electrons, so the whole thing starts moving by itself and that's how the energy is generated. That's what I was explaining in the lecture about solar batteries. But meanwhile, right now, all I would like to end up this lecture with, that if you have this border between n-type and p-type, there is a certain difference in potential which becomes, because electrons are migrating from here to there and holes are migrated from there to here. And why are they actually doing it? Because they are replacing covalent links missing here and extra here. So they're extra, so they're migrating and they're filling up those holes in the crystallized structure and this becomes negative, this becomes positive basically. But the crystallized structure becomes, so basically to maintain the crystallized structure is important for some reason. I mean, these are holes and extra electrons which are replacing each other. Extra electrons from here replace the holes here and that's what actually makes the crystallized structure. So it's covalent bonds covalent links are filled and the crystallized structure is maintained. So that's probably the whole reason why it's happening. And that's basically the end of this particular lecture. I want to introduce you to the concept of p-type and n-type semiconductors and these are the bases from which transistors are made and that's the subject of future lectures. Okay, thank you very much. I do suggest you to read notes for this lecture on Unizord.com, so you go to Physics 14's course. That's electromagnetism and there you will see the semiconductors on the menu. This is the first lecture in this particular chapter. Thanks very much and good luck.


ero or adapting to climate change, is nearly everything we do at the moment involves working in partnerships. There is no single, often very single solution that we can deal with itself. Partnerships are hard work. They are hard work. They need the right people. They need the right passion out there. They have any time, as David has described. They need real alignment between organisations to solve a problem in terms of getting us together and there needs to be a route to funding because the solutions in the end are actually often need funding. I'll build on an example that we've been involved with for many years now and this is associated with Glasgow. In Glasgow, from historical flooding back in 2002, an organisation was formed called the Metropolitan Glasgow Strategic Drainage Partnership, a model that we've now replicated across Scotland. That was brought together to deal with flooding challenges in Glasgow. It was also a deal to make sure that development could occur and also improve the water environment, the Clyde in particular. Hundreds of millions of pounds have been invested by Scottish Water and our customers from the city deals, etc, to make sure that that actually works. However, it is still hard work. There is a fantastic scheme called the smart canal in Glasgow, in the north of Glasgow. It is enabling a brand new development of thousands of houses in the north of Glasgow. It is a really spectacular screen. We now celebrate globally as a fantastic way of joint working out there, but that was tough. The toughest part of it in the end was agreeing how we jointly would fund that scheme. We've now got a scheme that we're all incredibly proud of that's enabling growth and development and biodiversity and all the things that we're talking about here in the north of Glasgow. However, it took a whole lot of work and some very resilient people in Glasgow City Council in particular to move it forward. Okay, thank you. Ydw i'n gweithio i'r list. Julie and Nick have got anything to add. I'm happy to pass back to yourself. No, don't feel you have to. Just in case you would like to. I think just reflecting on what's been said about the partnership, it's time consuming, it's great fun. We learn a lot from each other and every so often we have these light bulb moments when we say, oh, hang on, I didn't realise you did that in your process, in your organisation, because we do this in the planning process and perhaps we can join that up better, but all of that does take resource and it does take time. I think if people said it, you have to actually get on with each other, which is really, really important. Luckily, in the Edinburgh group, we do all find it a fun time as well as work, so we're trying to move things forward very quickly. Thanks very much, Jackie. Next up is Monica Lennon to be followed by Liam Kerr. Monica Lennon, over to you, please. Thank you, convener. I briefly mentioned national planning framework for early on in a question to Julie. NPF4 emphasises climate change and biodiversity loss and sets out policies that local development plans should support the use of nature-based solutions and natural infrastructure. I just wonder, has recent local policy and decision making reflected the direction of travel perhaps could come to John on that, and I'll look to see if other colleagues in the panel want to come in. John? Yeah, thanks, sir. Our local development plan, the current plan is coming to the end of its term, so we're into the process for the new plan from 2023 onwards. Current plan is quite strong on climate, the low-carbon building requirements, active travel, effective sighting of dwellings, EEV provisions. Standard provisions are in there in the current plan. In the new plan linked to NPF4, we'll be looking at identifying areas for development, specifically for low-carbon and for climate action. I see a much stronger approach in the new development plan period to this whole agenda. We will be looking at the feedback that we get from the coast adapt project, some of the data coming out of dynamic cost 2. We have to interpret that locally and see how it can be implemented, but I see all that going into a much stronger local development plan from 2023 onwards. Thank you, John. I'm looking for an indication of anyone who wants to come in if anyone agrees with John and has that same perspective or perhaps a different perspective. Nick, thank you. The additional perspective that I wanted is to add is how we manage the land and the sea, crosses over to development control. I think that one of the things that we're going to need to spend more time on is how we align the planning system with the land management, sea management systems, because, as Julie was saying earlier on, it's not just about what you do where, but it's how that is all managed and also how things are managed upstream from where you might be in an urban more controlled planning system, so I think that that interface is going to become more important. Thank you, Nick. I think that I did see someone else waving. Was it David, perhaps? Yes, thank you. Yeah, I think that there's a big potential for NPF4 to be to help, and we do hope that it can be significant. It significantly strengthens the requirements for developers and for work like this. I happened to be fortunate enough to be at a site visit a couple of weeks ago at the Clyde Gateway, and it just showed the real importance of getting the infrastructure in first, that requirement to get, and particularly in nature-based, blue-green infrastructure. It's a big part of South East Glasgow, which is previously contaminated and just very heavily and just really contaminated, and it's been cleared and redeveloped. What you can see there is that they've put in the blue-green infrastructure, the systems that have been talked about previously, and they've also put in district heating lines, the pipe work and the capability, and the assignment knows that the nearby sewage works has the potential to provide the district heating. Having that foresight and putting that infrastructure in first then means that you're really taking it up for success right from the outset. I think that if we had a fairly strong requirement in the national planning framework for that approach for new developments in particular, I think that it would be really helpful, if not essential. Thank you, David. Good day. You mentioned Clyde Gateway, lots of success to celebrate, but I think that some of the issues around contamination are still on-going challenges, so perhaps anyone in Government reading the official report today might want to have a wee look at that. How can we ensure that planning departments have the right tools and resources to encourage nature-based solutions and natural infrastructure to embed that? We hear a lot that planning can be a barrier, that planning can be slow, and we know that there are lots of different stakeholders that planners have to work with and take into account, but we turn back to Julie on that point. Do you feel confident that you and your colleagues have the right tools or that the resources are coming your way? I think that, in Edinburgh, our city plan has gone through committee, so we are in the process. We put quite strong policies in terms of green infrastructure, green infrastructure and also surface water, writing the policies very much with support of Nature, Scott and Scottish Water and SEPA, so changing quite a shift. Obviously, it does align with NPF4, so we hope that, once that gets into policy and agreed, it will give us the requirement. However, in the interim, we have our water vision, which was a collaborative document very much written by the council but very much with Scottish Water and SEPA, which sets out nine objectives. What that has done is now that it is a material consideration in planning, and it is also for all the non-planning projects, like road-spread projects and permitted development projects. It is basically being used by the private sector to help them to do what they actually want to do, which is to do a really good job. They are feeding it back to us, which is fantastic. We have set the criteria that we were going to do in the policy, but we have set it up front so that it could go through committee now. That looks at the sustainable urban drainage systems and everything, asking for a much higher level, treating it on-plot rather than in the entire plot, and that is driving forward green roofs, swales and rain gardens. There has been a shift, because people are quite excited because they want to do something that is really good. We need to almost put the policy in place, because what it does do is it takes up space. There is a conflict between high-density development and high-density causes high buildings, which is fantastic, but the down-size is that we obviously get shading. In shading, rain gardens need sunlight. Rain gardens take up space, and there is space required for people with other planning policies that we need to provide gardens. There is an interesting relationship between new development space, which is now needed for nature-based solutions, which is also a requirement for people to be able to go out and kick a ball with their child, how all those things work together with high-density, because obviously high-density drives up deep shade, which then impacts on space. I would say in the process of looking at and trying to balance, because it is very much a balance situation, but, hopefully, once we have the water vision, which is extremely helpful, we will have stronger policies. I think that there is a willingness from the consultancies that they really want to do a good job, and having that policy in place helps them in their negotiations as well. I would like to come back to David, because David, you gave an example in relation to Grangemouth, and you called it the regulatory hub. You said that that has huge potential, so maybe people will not get excited about the prospect of a regulatory hub, but could you tell us a little bit more about that? If that is working well, how do you and other partners involved spread the word about that good practice other than today? Is that something that is being looked at by Government and partners as a model that can be transported elsewhere? I am not sure if it is being looked at as a model, and I can give you a huge amount more detail, because I am not directly involved, but I could maybe follow up with some information about the regulatory hub and that whole framework. We feel that getting regulators, the private sector, the local community and critically the local authority who have a lead role, getting that partnership and structured collaboration around what is an existential issue for Grangemouth and for that community is the only way to come up with the solutions. The word regulatory hub might not be the most exciting, but the regulations are important. We regulate several very large installations with all sorts of environmental risks, and there is a transition that is going to have to happen in some shape or form over the next decades. I am making sure that the regulations protect the environment in that transition, but at the same time enable the transition is a crucial element of it. It is probably best that I offer to send further detail on that to yourself afterwards, so that you can possibly share that. Will the Government have a key role to play in that particular governance framework? Thank you, David. If you could pass on information to the committee, because when we hear of examples, we are keen to know more, and if that can be part of our recommendation to share that. Finally, I do not know if Simon wants to add anything. I think that, just to build on to the comments earlier that Julie made, I think that one of the key parts in terms of getting wider use of nature-based solutions, especially for things around within cities or large towns associated with surface water management, is that we have a real challenge in terms of for ourselves in Scottish Water about educating, informing and getting our own people excited about these types of solutions. We are an incredibly good engineering group of individuals, so we look for engineering solutions for this. One thing that is slightly different in terms of nature-based solutions is that they are not quite as hard as we are used to in terms of engineering. They are a bit softer. There is a big challenge to us in terms of making sure that our own teams have got, as well as teams such as Julie, David and various others, to make sure that they understand what this infrastructure is about, to make sure that they can see examples of it, to make sure that they can understand how we maintain things like this, as well, because that is often the biggest barrier that is put in the way of these types of solutions, is that we do not know how to maintain it. We have just been doing some work globally about looking at organisations globally that are already heading this whole area in terms of blue-green infrastructure. What barriers have they come? What have they put in place to learn from them? With Julie and her colleagues, we had a very good session with Philadelphia recently, for example, where we learnt their experience of putting these types of infrastructure into cities, what worked and what did not work and their lessons for it. That is really great learning for us. We need to spread that out and make wider teams and make sure that there are a lot more examples of things that people can go and see. That is helpful. Again, where the challenges that we have heard in the inquiry are about time and capacity, having that time to learn, that time to exchange practice, that time to network, but that is not just in Scotland but internationally as well. Thank you to our panel. I will hand back to the convener. Okay, Monica. Thank you very much. Next up is Liam Kerr, to be followed by Natalie Don. Liam, over to you, please. Thank you, convener. Good morning, panel. I will ask my first question to John Cunningham. After that, I will move to Julie Waldron. John, there has been, throughout the inquiry, a concern about the lack of financial resources available to local authorities to deliver net zero goals. Do you feel, just thinking about your remarks earlier, that investment for nature, restoration and natural infrastructure reflects the importance of those matters both within the local authority, but also given the significant lack of funding to councils that you talked about earlier from central government, the non-ring-fenced resources coming to local authorities from central government? I think that we need an acceleration in that kind of funding for these solutions. As I said, our core budget has declined across Scotland. Those new solutions aren't as expensive as the old-fashioned grey solutions, so we're looking at things like planting kerfos, some of the energy out of the ocean, maintaining a stable marker system as a front to the climate, identifying sacrificial land parcels, which means compensating somebody to come off that land, give them land somewhere else, re-routing roads and land away from the coast. Not very expensive solutions, but we need to accelerate funding. There seems to be a lack of imagination at some levels in terms of people just envisaging grey infrastructure as being the answer. It needs a huge amount of funding and that just becomes a blockage. With smaller targeted funding, I think that we can go a long way towards addressing our needs through green solutions. I'm just going back to the point that Nick made in the last discussion about aligning planning on-shore and offshore. We are, as a local authority, involved in a Crown State pilot, which will see us taking over Crown State management role in our own marine environment. We are also moving towards regional marine planning. As part of that regional marine plan, we will have a delivery plan, which will identify how much funding is required, and how can it be got where other sources. We are starting to look at where we can enhance existing funding for the new solutions. Very grateful. Julie, would you like to add to that? I think that in a city situation, like Edinburgh and Edinburgh, other cities have very old areas, like the World Heritage Site. The complexity comes in how do you retrofit in an environment such that you don't damage the character of the environment that is why it has been designated as a World Heritage Site? That requires some really sensitive design. Underneath the ground, we use the word plethora of unknowns. We have underground passages. We have services that we didn't know existed, which came up through the tram project. Some of the major issues with that were the services that seemed nobody knew had actually existed. We are digging down to retrofit those type of elements. In a city scenario, that can be very complicated. The design time is longer and the funding required is higher because there are many more tremendous negotiations with Edinburgh World Heritage and Historic Environment Scotland who realise and want to work with us. Again, we were talking about how much time it takes to work collaboratively with lots of people. You have to make sure that everybody's views and everybody's considerations of the importance to their area of work, such as the World Heritage Site, are fully understood by the whole design process. Again, funding when it comes to retrofitting in an urban scenario can be quite complicated. Funding would be complicated to get, but we do need funding. I think that Edinburgh would say that resources are already fully doing a job, a day job, and almost this is really requiring to do more. We didn't previously quite need to negotiate and work so collaboratively, and that requires time, energy and effort. There is a real pressure on the resources, I think, that is the way of putting it. Very grateful. Nick Halfie, just on that exact point that Julie Waldron has just pulled out, how do you think that more effective partnerships, leadership from senior staff and elected members and policy levers for local authorities support the use of natural infrastructure and nature-based solutions at the local authority level, and allowing for the complexities of leveraging private finance that you talked about earlier, can it be done without a fundamental reassessment of local authority funding by the Scottish Government? That's a big question, and I can't speak off the Scottish Government, but what I can give you is an example, which I actually ties in to the point that Fiona Hyslop was talking about earlier, of how we have a start in doing this within the marine coastal environment, which links in very well to what John MacDonald was saying. We have recently launched the Scottish Marine Environment Enhancement Fund, SMEAF, which pulls together not only public funding through an allocation from the nature restoration fund, but we are inviting contributions from developers, particularly offshore wind, but it doesn't have to be to a central pot that we can work with, particularly local authorities but other coastal communities, to try and invest back in coastal areas, to make them more resilient to climate change and also make those ecosystems more robust and therefore tackling the nature crisis. That's a good example within a fairly specific ecosystem, that coastal offshore environment, but I think that there's an opportunity to replicate that more widely across our terrestrial environments to increase the pot of money from various different sources, which hopefully would then meet part of Julie's challenge earlier on is the equivalent of Sustrans, but for nature to have just a bigger pot with a central body, lead careful governance, obviously, if you're taking private money, but to be an easier place to access significant funds for green infrastructure. I'm very grateful. Does anyone else on the panel want to come in on effective partnerships or funding for local authorities? Yes, David Harley. I think that Julie said something really insightful, or she said the day job, she said, as we've said, as it's come across quite a few times already this morning, is that you absolutely need to invest in the time to do that collaboration, and it won't happen without that partnership. It does take time, when having the right people, given their right amount of time. The danger with the increasing squeeze in public finances is that each organisation, including ourselves, are constricted to do what we see as the day job, whatever that might be, or departments might constrict as what the day job is. I guess what we want to try and do is to invert that, because the day job should be what we're talking about today. So there's something really critical there, I think. Yes, I understand. Thank you very much, convener. Thank you very much, Liam. A final question from Natalie Dawn, who's joining us online. Natalie, over to you please. Thanks very much, convener, and thank you to all the panel for your answers so far. We've touched on some of the issues surrounding private finance, but in terms of partnership working on a whole between the private and the public sector, including enterprise agencies, what do the panel feel are the key challenges? If you could give some detail on how your organisations are working with the private sector to deliver nature restoration and natural infrastructure projects, and if you could give any relevant examples, I'll go to John Cunningham first, because I believe that you touched on your partnership working earlier in a previous response. In terms of the enterprise company, we have a very good working relationship with the enterprise company. We tend to divide up the effort, so the local authority will engage with developers, look at community liaison, lobby for grid and regulation solutions, and the enterprise company at the same time will look at supply chain development, look at land availability, industrial support and government connections. So a very combined effort from the two of us, local authority and HIE. On private sector involvement, our main challenge there is that it is voluntary, particularly with offshore wind in Scotland. In the county state of Scotland, when they issue leases or options to lease, they do not take account of community benefit, neither do marine Scotland when they issue consents for these schemes. Currently, in Scotland, we look at supply chain benefit, which is the 25 per cent of supply chain in Scotland. To us, community benefit is much wider than that. Supply chain is jobs directly created in the process of building a wind farm and operating it. For us, community benefit is a sign of good will from the developer to support the community, become sustainable, to address fuel poverty, to decarbonise much wider objectives. The problem for us is that that can only be voluntary. Nobody is enforcing that. On offshore wind, we have a section 75 legal agreement, which we can tie developers down to, but offshore there is no such provision. That is something that we are talking to Marine Scotland about at the moment. There is a huge scope for private partnership with those developers. We spent tens of millions of pounds just for an option to lease a site for an offshore wind farm. They have eye-watering resources available, and they are very willing to come in with us on community projects, which address fuel poverty, climate action, decarbonisation. They are really willing to do that, but it is all voluntary. That is what I have said in terms of the challenge. I was planning to come to next, please, if you have anything to add. I have been racking my brains, because there are so many good examples around the country, but they are all slightly different. I have alighted on two, if I may, if you can indulge me. One is in the flow of country up in Caithness in Sutherland, where we are using the potential of UNESCO World Heritage Site to bring together the public and the private and the communities. That is very much about how we can work across all the different land managers to have investment in peatland restoration publicly funded, but more and more privately funded, so that those benefits can then go to the individual land managers, often small-scale crofting communities, who will then see that there is a future in that resource and in its better management, which then has benefits for the biodiversity that lives on those peatlands. We move into Simon's area about how that resource will then be better managed to help reduce flooding and improve water quality. How you can get all those win-wins—a key to that is bringing those land managers together, many of whom have only a very small amount of land, and there are many of them, as well as the big land managers. The second example of the other in the country is the Tweed Forum, where we are working with those that manage the river Tweed, which is a mixture of a lot of private individuals but also public interests. How can that river system be better managed to improve not only the quality of the salmon, which is well off from the private interests, but to have a lot of tree planting, peatland restoration, which will then regulate the flow, which will hopefully reduce the flooding that we have seen a devastating effect in towns such as Selkirk and Gala Shields over the years. Those are really good examples of public-private partnership. I suppose that, going back to the point that you have heard of ad nauseam here, it just takes a lot of time and investment in building up trusting relations, working out where everyone is coming from, and it is a bit like a mass dating exercise, understanding who everybody is, what their interests are and how you can find common ground and move forward on a partnership. It has to be at scale within that landscape if you are to manage great river systems or great peatland expanses, but those would be two examples. Thanks very much. It was interesting that you brought communities into that as well, because communities are absolutely key in that. I know from my own experience as a councillor that the public are generally supportive and sympathetic to green agendas, but participation in that is key. In my own experience, it was around biodiversity. Communities did not like that being forced on them, but the reaction when they got the chance to be involved in that was completely different. They felt more empowered. I will come on to how well you feel that your organisations and councils involve local communities in the decision making on those projects and how you feel that they support community-led initiatives. I will bring a few other members with the panel. Our experience—this has taken us a while to get here—is that the most successful projects are the ones where you bring in the community and listen to what they want soonest. To give you a good example, we have been retrofitting some green infrastructure in some of the more deprived parts of Glasgow. We go in initially saying, what you all need is this. We say, no, no, that is not how we do this. We come in and say, these are the broad parameters. We have some money available. What we would like to do is help you to refashion what is often a concrete area into something green. What do you want? They say, we want something for the kids to play, we want this, we want that. We build that in right from the start. What we end up with is something that we would not have, as experts, thought we would have, but because it is what the community wants, it is there for a success. Crucially, they then have buy-in and they want to manage it, it becomes them. Spending quite a lot of money on community engagement and building before we do the hard work on the ground is the only way to success, otherwise you end up with a complete white elephant and nobody is happy. We have learned hard that it is way to do it. That is true whether you are talking Cardinal in Glasgow or whether you are talking to some of the more remote, sparsely populated rural areas and getting the buy-in from the community so that they can see the benefit. It becomes theirs and it helps to deliver all those other things, but it becomes their thing and their contribution in the place that they want to live in. I absolutely would like to agree with all the points about the buy-in. My experience in doing community consultation with flooding and river restoration type projects would be that, if you present engineering drawings, they are quite frightening for people to look at, because there are lots of lines, numbers and levels. If you present sketches and go back to proper green plans and build them with sticky notes and get their ideas, it is very interactive and you get a much better solution in the end of the day and it is much more welcome by the community. Again, we go back to this issue that it can be quite time consuming to do a really good engagement with the community rather than an information session. There is quite a difference between just arriving and saying, this is what we are going to do, what do you think, rather than what Nick was talking about, which is much more collaborative and having people sitting round tables and coming up with really exciting ideas and then building that. Having the funds to build that into the schemes. Sometimes, again, we go back, if we are talking about surface water management or flooding schemes, we have cost benefit and funding. How do we get the funds to do the things that the community really wants to do, which might have a barbecue area or might have a pond-dipping platform for the local school? When we are measuring cost benefits, perhaps that does not come through. There is this complexity when it comes to flood schemes, which is how you measure cost benefit. It is understanding the benefits of all of these other is really quite small amounts of money, but it is a huge impact for the community, whether there is a little bridge where you can play pool sticks, for example, or whether there is an ugly bridge that is just functional. It is that difference. Very much working with community is absolutely key to getting the ultimate buy-in to that new landscape. It can be quite concerned about change. People take change very differently, and you have to manage that as well and reassure them to show them what ultimately, even if it might take three or four years for the plants to start to grow, that ultimately the vision of where you are going is really important. We do a lot of community work in our parks department. We are building that into all of our green blue neighbourhood projects in Edinburgh, the community consultation side, or engagement. I am always nervous about using the word consultation, because it sounds like you are telling them what they are going to get, where you really want to engage them in the process. No, absolutely. Talking about consultation, that will be my next point. Obviously, you said that it is no use just asking for the opinion on what proposals there are, but we have talked a lot in the committee about consultation fatigue and how perhaps consultations do not always reach everyone. Would you agree that it is about finding new ways to interact with the communities, interact and engage with the communities as well? Absolutely, because obviously you get people who are able to come out in the evenings, and those people maybe have small children who cannot come out, or maybe they work night shift, or there are a whole thousand reasons why you do not get a good spread. Small YouTube videos might bring you the teenage population. I remember a community consultation that I did in Craigmiller. The teenagers came and stood on the other side of the road, so a group of them, but they would not come in because it was not cool to come into a council consultation event, so I went across and spoke to them across the road because that seemed the only way to interact. However, there is also the ability to do things online, I think is absolutely key, using all the different ways of reaching people so that you can get all the parts of community, and not just the people who are able to come out at 7 o'clock in the evening, which is actually quite a small, distinct group, so it is very important. Thank you, thank you very much. I know that we are short for time, unless any of the other members of the panel would like to come in on those points, so I am happy to pass back to the convener. Thank you. I will mind just finishing on a fantastic example, which just pulls together exactly what Nick and Julie have just talked about. We are trying to deal with a problem, a historical problem in Dundee, in an area of Dundee called St Mary's. We have taken exactly what Nick has described, in terms of not engaging with the community at the point that you have made a decision, but going and asking them how they can help and what we can do there. There is a scheme at St Mary's in Dundee, which really embraces a lot of what we have spoken about on the panel today, about engagement of communities, about nature-based solutions, about placemaking and also dealing with them, if we are honest, with the underlying problem that we have there, which is one of flooding. It really encourages anybody to have a look a bit more about that. At the end, that scheme will not just be improving flooding, it will be transforming a local park, it will be putting in cycle paths, it will be putting in opportunities to play poustics, all of the things that the local community has. I imagine that in the end, it will probably cost less than a traditional hard engineering solution, so win-win-win-win for everybody involved in those types of schemes. Thank you very much, Natalie. That brings us to the end of our allocated time. Let me thank our guests this morning for a wide-ranging overview of the main challenges, the opportunities and some of the policy requests that you have mentioned. It is very much appreciated and it will help to inform the committee when we publish our final report. Thank you once again and enjoy the rest of your day. That concludes our public meeting, and we will now move into private session.


No, it ain't coming!  Please!  Today, we are playing a mystical, magical bone lab experience, because many battle and Awaken Toast have convinced me to play their gang beast mode inside of Bone Lab. And that's what we're going to be doing. So if you've never played gang beast before, well, you basically get to do this and definitely live. Oh, my body! Whoa, whoa, whoa, why are you coming after me first? Don't come after me first. We just knocked each other out. Hold back your arm. No! Oh, no, no! Wake up! Wake up! No! No! Knock him out! Throw him off! I'm helping! I'm awake! I'm awake! I'm sorry, Toast! Come on. You messed up bad now. Hey, get down here, Toast!  I'm going for a sumo slam! Wait, what the heck? You just over jumped me. Come on! He's dead!   Yes!  You wouldn't pick a friend up and throw him, right? That was... Oh! This was Mod author's advantage. I think we should take away his star. We've got to stop way again. I think we should shoot him. Beat him up! Beat him up! Yes! No! No! No! I'm running! We've got to take Mini out. We've got to take Mini out. No, we're not going to do that. I only have one win. I only have one win. Come on! Are you not dead? No, Toast! Jump, jump, jump! I saved him. Get out of here. Come on, Toast! No! No! I think I was your friend.  No! Please! Jump into me! I got knocked out again. How do I throw you guys?  Die, Mini! Die, Mini! Die! It's okay, he's good. Put it there, partner. Put it there! You anime punch! Come here. Upper cut. And then... I'm not down. How do I knock down? I punched you in the face. Come on! Oh yeah? Dodge? Okay, alright. No! In an anime! Prepare to die, Toast. I'm going to butter your toast. Go through me! Let me through you! Not happening. Eat this cone! We'll eat the cone. Of course. Anime jump, super punch! No!  Toast!  You're hurting me! Let me go! No, don't kill him! I won't let you do it. I stopped him. No, put me down!  Wait! I'm not knocked out, I'm just sleeping. Oh, baby. Wait, wait, wait. Murder him! Get him from the back! Wait. I'll knock myself out. Just kidding, didn't do it.  What a bait. They're going crazy. Don't touch me! Yes! Oh, no, no toast!   Let the goo!  Kill him! Into the goo! Get in the goo! Get in the goo! No! Punch him in the face! Get in there! If I die, I'm taking you with me!  Oh, hey, Talos. Welcome to the purgatory. Well, I mean, this is kind of...  How does this grabbing work? Get away from me. Get away from me.  He's out of energy. No. Who's going to have you now toast? Die! I'm sorry. That's right. Same thing can happen to you, man. I'm sorry. No, don't be sorry. Get away from me. No. Bring it on. We're not even Minecraft YouTubers. Your fingers. Stop doing that immediately. No! Talos is bad. This is very bad. What? How do you knock me out? Don't touch me. Come on. Come on. Come on. It's over. It's over. I did it. I killed the both. No. Fight. Hey, toast is trying to... Rift S, why don't you do this? Yeah, come on. Wait, wait, wait. Toast is trying to showboat on us. Make the jump toast. Oh my God. Come on down. Why am I not punching you? Leave him alone. Kill him. No, I've saved you. Kill him.  I can kill the both of them in one shot. I know. No, no, no. What? How did this happen? See, you guys actually don't know the secret of this map? Here's the secret of this map. What's the secret? Nothing. Just fight. What's the secret? What's the secret? So friends, they don't know the secret. Are you laying in the fire in it? No. I'm just in my secret zone. I would never lie to you. Let me know when you guys get eliminated. Are you inside the conveyor belt? No. You can't go inside the conveyor belt. There's collision. Don't try it. What was that, Drifter? I said don't try it. You really want to come into my secret layer? You want to be in my secret? I got one punch. Special delivery. Special delivery. They both knocked themselves out. Double punch. You just have to knock him out. He's weak. Did you just backflip? Dude, what is this?  We need punch. Oh, my nuts. My giant nuts. Throw them off the roof. This is it. Don't wake up. Get him, Drifter. It's not going to work. This isn't a school fight. I can't die. I can't die. Get him back. He don't try it. What are you doing, Drifter? I think I still have shells. Can I throw them at you? Fall. Oh, my God. How did that happen? He's cheating. I throw the fire. I can't believe I'm dead. No, he's still up. Give me a close game. I'm going to wake up first. I'm going to wake up first. I'm going to wake up first. I'm going to wake up first. Wake up. Wake up. What? No, I'm not awake.  Take my wall. Thanks for telling us the rules at the end. That's pretty nice of you. You're welcome. You stay back. There's a guy behind you. No, there isn't. You're dead. We're going to knock him out twice. If we knock him out twice, I'll take it days for longer. This isn't Gorillaz. There's nowhere to go. I knew it We can't let him get his new star That's it many can't let him get another star. I'm getting it. You're done mini He's an anime villain Oh my god Dude, he has like he has hacks on bro. These are hacks. There's no way Would you just bought in nothing my entire game just crashed I spotted anything.  Are you really a tough guy dude? 16 millimeter pistol. I didn't spotted anything. All right, mini if you don't get shot in the face jump off right now I'll give you a chance go out and style That's right. Now. What about you toast? I'm crashed All right boys. I want a fair game. All right fair games. All right there. I mean drifter Okay Let me alone Do it for me. I need a gun. I don't have a gun. Listen. Okay. No Throw me there. Yes Good good boy toast now toast toast listen. Yes, I just want just jump.  Just give me the win an easy win Give you a win, but then you get the star.  Oh, man. That's unfortunate. I love it toss them Oh my god Why why is he camping over there? I don't like that the two where you were doing this. No, you guys get you guys can find it That's fine. Okay. It's fine Jumping anime hit Yeah, you're not knocked.  This is an anime Oh Get away from me What yes, dude, he's one punching Dude, there's no way Yeah Why is it that you look is every time on a one shot in my picture? Leave me alone. I'd rather get out of here.  You can't hit me with a shotgun shell What do you mean? That's half the problem. We keep grabbing ammo. Don't click chicken. Oh, what you said I Try to wake up One punch, bro, you bam, I'm gonna beat you up now Your turn now Listen everyone we just want to say thanks so much for hanging out and watching this video Shout out to many for breaking his index on a mod like this. He's already a thousand dollars in the hole That was another thousand so make sure you subscribe to mini and support him on on his channel because he really needs it But we'll see you next time


Walter Cronkite was an American broadcast journalist and anchorman for the CBS Evening News. While he was alive, he was called the most trusted man in America. He reported on world events like World War II and the moon landing. In 1954, Walter Cronkite had a special musical guest on his show to give a live performance. It would be another 50 years before the music of this particular guest was ever heard again on the national airways. And by the time her music was heard again, the artist herself was nowhere to be found. Because 20 years after she appeared on Walter Cronkite's show, she vanished. But before we go any further, you know what to do. Please hit that subscribe button and give us a like. As always, a very, very, very special thank you to all of our patrons. If you would like to join our Patreon community, there is a link down in the description box below. Welcome to Esoteric Atlanta. My name is Bryce and today on Mystery Monday, we are going to be talking about the disappearance of Connie Converse. Connie Converse was born Elizabeth Eaton Converse on August 3rd of 1924. She was born in New Hampshire, spent most of her life in Concord, New Hampshire, and her parents were allegedly very strict Baptist. In fact, her father was even a minister. Connie or Elizabeth, as was her legal name, was the middle of three children. She had one older brother named Paul, who was three years older than her, and a younger brother named Phillip, who was five years younger than her. Connie and Phillip would go on to have a very, very close relationship and he will come up later on in our story regarding her disappearance. Connie grew up in an extremely strict home. Her parents were supporters of prohibition of alcohol and they expected nothing but traditional Christian values from their children. Even though their home was relatively strict, the parents were also huge supporters of the art. It is said that Connie's mother herself was extremely musical. There's also stories that Connie and her siblings would frequently act out Shakespeare's plays for fun with artwork created by Connie herself as the backdrop in their own little family theater. Connie graduated the Val of Victorian of Concord High School. She was an extremely intelligent woman. She even got a scholarship to Mount Holy Oak College, but she only stayed there for two years. After two years, Connie's life and her life destiny took a turn. She dropped out of her conservative college, her conservative family, and moved herself to the heart of New York City. Connie found herself a little apartment in Greenwich Village. And she found a job at IPR, which is the Institute of Pacific Studies. She was a writer for this company and would frequently write essays. IPR was eventually shut down. This was a very scandalous situation as the company was found to have ties with communist leaders. After that job was lost, she then got a job as a secretary at the Academy Photo Offset. At this time, as a young adult, Connie started to enjoy the hustle and the bustle and the liveliness of the New York nightlife. Living in Greenwich Village at this time was a bohemian world of artists, musicians, and free spirits. To her parents' dismay, Connie started heavily smoking and drinking. She also started to write her own music. And in her little apartment in Greenwich Village, she would often record her melodies. Connie was said to be a very, very private person. Even her own friends didn't know too, too much about her life or how she felt about certain things. However, Connie did have a certain melancholy about her. Connie herself even said that she would go into what she called the blue funk. Unfortunately, around this time, we did not know that much about mental health. And it seems pretty obvious that Connie Converse struggled with something that a lot of us struggle with. And that's depression. Being a private person, Connie would only really play her songs for her friends. And being able to sit and listen to Connie's songs gave her friends a bit of insight into how Connie was really feeling. Her songs were haunting and moving and really showed the true condition of the human spirit. Her younger brother Philip would end up becoming a professor at the University of Michigan. And Connie kept that relationship with her brother Philip alive. She would send her brother tapes each month of songs that she had written. She called this her song of the month club and Philip himself would beam with pride when he got to hear what his talented sister had created. Gene Deech was an illustrator living in New York City at the same time. And Gene Deech and Connie Converse had mutual friends. Now at this time, Deech was doing the illustration for a music magazine called The Record Changer. Some of you might recognize this man's name as he would go on to be the animator of both Popeye and Tom and Jerry. Because of Deech's connections, Deech was able to get Connie Converse a spot on Walter Cronkite's show. And in 1954, she went on the air to perform live for the nation. Now unfortunately because this was the 1950s and this was a live performance, no video tapes are still around from this show. However, this gave Connie Converse the confidence that she needed to start sending out her cassette tapes to record labels. Connie continued to send out her music to record labels for seven years. But unfortunately, none of the record labels bit. By 1961, Connie tucked her tail and left New York City. She moved to Ann Arbor where her brother Philip had gotten her a job at the University of Michigan's Journal of Conflict Resolution. At first, Connie was the secretary, but very quickly moved up to becoming the editor. Now it is said that when she moved to Michigan, she never wrote music again. And this, according to many psychiatrists, is a sign of major depression when someone just stops doing what they love so much. Connie Converse started to isolate herself even more, ignoring letters from friends and spiraling downward into drinking and smoking even more. Ten years after her move to Ann Arbor, Connie Converse lost her job. The Journal of Conflict Resolution moved from the University of Michigan to Yale. She also would go on to learn that she would need a hysterectomy. Now nobody really knows why she needed a hysterectomy, but we do know that this was really impactful on Connie. For some reason, the doctors were going to have to remove her uterus. Now the interesting thing about Connie is that she never knowingly had a relationship. But it is known that she loved children. Now at 48 years old in 1971, she might have been a little bit too old to have a child. However, the emotional trauma of losing that organ as a woman had to have been very, very intense for Connie and probably pushed her deeper into a depression. Her friends became worried about her and they pulled all their money together to send her on an adventure of a lifetime. They got her a ticket to England where she would spend six months there exploring England and other parts of Europe. Connie had never been to Europe and she did take her friends up on the offer. Even though she struggled with bouts of depression while she was in London, she seemed to have a pretty good time. As she came back to Ann Arbor, her mother even offered to take her on a trip to Alaska. Which Connie begrudgingly accepted. You see, Connie's parents again had not been very supportive of her life in New York City, but she still went on this trip with her mom. By August of 1974, Connie was 50 years old. Her life had not gone as planned and her blue funk as she called it was getting worse and worse and worse. Connie wrote a series of letters to all of her friends and family saying that she needed to start over.  She asked her friends and family to just let her go. Her letter to her brother Philip was the most detailed and in this letter she included a check. She asked her brother Philip if he would continue to pay her health insurance each month until a particular date and at that time to stop paying the insurance. Connie Converse packed up her Volkswagen Beetle and drove off never to be seen again. Connie's brother Philip kept paying her health insurance as she requested up until the date she asked him to stop and he stopped. At one point the family even hired a private investigator to try to find Connie, but this private investigator told the family that even if he were to locate her, he wouldn't necessarily tell them where she was because she was a 50 year old woman and she had every right to go off and disappear. In the 1980s, it came to her brother's attention that there was an Elizabeth Converse in the phone book in Kansas. However Philip never contacted this particular person because again he wanted to try to respect his sister's wishes. Even though this might have been an indication that she was still alive, Philip believed that it was a possibility that she had decided to remove herself from this life. I know you guys know I can't say the s word because of YouTube. But we do know that Connie did struggle with depression. And since this was a time period where there wasn't a whole lot of knowledge around mental health, there is a huge possibility that her brother could have been right. Life had just gotten too hard for Connie. However many people hope and believe that she is still alive out there somewhere. Now today she would be 97 years old. So the likelihood of her actually being alive today is pretty slim. But that doesn't mean that she didn't have the possibility of dying of natural causes later on in an appropriate time of her life. In 2004 Gene Deech was invited onto a New York public radio show to promote his book of animation.  In 2004 the world had changed drastically since 1954. The last time Connie had been on air. And soon Connie Converse's music became a cultural icon. And in 2009 an album was finally released to the public of all of her music. This album was entitled How Sad, How Lovely. Many of her fans want to believe that the then 80 year old Connie got to enjoy the fact that her music was finally being heard and finally being loved by audiences all over the world. And if that's the case the 80 year old Connie never stepped forward to claim her rightful place in the spotlight. Now when I first heard this story I became mesmerized by the person of Connie Converse. There is so much about her that we all can relate to, unmet dreams. Not being able to fulfill the expectations of your parents and just the general idea of potential mental health disorders that possibly went untreated. Many people said that part of the reason why Connie did not sell her music in the 1950s is again because she was a woman before her time. She wasn't classically beautiful as the women of the 1950s were and her music was highly intelligent. In one podcast I listened to regarding Connie Converse they speculated that if Connie was doing this today in 2021 she would be a sensation. Hell her music already is a sensation in 2021. She could have opened up a YouTube channel and played her songs and her looks would not have mattered so much today as they would have back then. There's also been speculation about Connie's sexuality. In 2021 we're not so concerned about someone's sexuality. It doesn't really matter to us what somebody does in private. However in the 1950s if Connie was a lesbian that might have made her life even more difficult. And we have no reports of her ever being in a relationship with anyone. If she ever was in a relationship with anyone she kept it very very private. And of course if this truly was the case with Connie it could have really taken a toll again on her mental health. Now down in the description box below I will link some videos to Connie's music for you all to enjoy. Of course I had to go and buy a Connie Converse t-shirt and in true Bryce style I cut it because that's pretty much what I do with all my t-shirts now. Now before I close out this video there's one really interesting part to Connie Converse's disappearance that I must tell you guys. Sometimes it's hard to find a person or even harder to find a body. However with cars it's typically a lot easier to find a car. And Connie's Volkswagen Beetle has also never been seen again. What do you think happened to Connie Converse? Also let me know if you had heard this story before and what you think of her music. I hope you guys have a fantastic day. Thank you again to Josh McKay for doing our music for this show. If you would like to purchase the full opening song there is a link down in the description box below and as always thank you so much to Todd Roderick for helping me get this video out to you guys. Have a wonderful wonderful day and I will talk to you soon. Bye.


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