And here's a new Logitech mouse and a new keyboard right here. And hi, so who are you? Hi, my name is Andreas Kunz. I'm doing marketing in PR for Logitech. And yeah, I'm here to introduce to you the MX Master 3, our new premium performance mouse. So, I have an MX Master, I think it's the best, right? It's amazing. What's new about the new one? In this mouse, we reinvented the wheel. We reinvented the wheel, to be honest. Because we put an electromagnet inside of the wheel, so we have a hyper-strawling wheel now. As you see, it's scrolling so smooth and fast, it can scroll like 1,000 lines in one second. 1,000 lines in one second. Can I try to feel it? Yes, you can. How does it feel different from... You can directly realize when you scroll. And there's a different mode again, where you can unlock it too? If you put the button, it changes to precise mode, where you have feedback. But if you press the button again, you're in this fast scrolling mode. There's the magnet inside, it makes it super fast. So this is important for people that are coding, that are programming, that are creative. That's why we put this in. Also, we changed the buttons on the side. And we put a specific function pre-installed on the buttons for Photoshop, for Adobe, for the browsers, everything. So you can have pre-installed shortcuts, and anything happen in terms of precision or something? No, it's still dark field. Flow is supported. What does it mean, dark field? Dark field means it's working on every surface, mirror, glass, everything. And flow means you can work with three different PCs, or Mac and PC, and you can work over different monitors and computers that are in the same connection. And you just flip by clicking? This is three clicks. You have one, two and three on the bottom there? Yes, it just is for the receiver settings. Nice. So this is going to be available now? It's available since 4th of September. And with the mouse, there comes the MS Keys, that is the perfect keyboard that comes with it. What's special about this keyboard? The keyboard is like an ultra-thin keyboard, as you see. It has a light sensor inside, so when you come close to the keyboard, it automatically switches on the light. And it also recognizes the surroundings, and it adjusts the light of the keyboard to the surroundings. It is compatible with Microsoft, with Mac OS, and of course with Linux, because as I said with the mouse, the mouse is focused on coders also, and on analysts, not only creatives, so it's important to us to support Linux. And both devices come with USB-C, so you have only one cable for both devices. Type C, before, a MaxMaster is a micro USB. Yes, we have now USB-C. Maybe it charges faster? No, it's just to have one cable, you know. So we're changing to USB-C. A lot of devices change to USB-C. And if you have a MacBook, for example, it's USB-C driven. And here it says battery is built-in, battery card, and then price on this and this. The mouse, 109 euros, and a keyboard also 109 euros. How is it possible that Logitech is the best at this kind of stuff? Maybe we can check it over here. Is this what Swiss engineering looks like? What is this? Yes, we imported this from Switzerland, from our laboratories. So we have our laboratories, development laboratories in Switzerland. And yeah, we're testing all the products, you know, like on a life cycle and to make it durable and high-performing. This is why we're testing this with this machine, you know. We're testing all the typings and all the buttons on the mouse. But we have the guarantee and we always have the best products in the market. So it's kind of like the Swiss engineering, but mass production of it. Because this is in huge quantities. You're the market leader, no? Yes, we are. Around here you have... I think the best USB microphone in the market is blue, and it's part of Logitech now, right? Right. So this is the... When I have the Yeti, right? Is it Yeti? That's the one. So it's not too expensive, but very high quality. Yeah, it's high quality, but all of the Yetis are high quality. So we say it's affordable. Affordable premium, and it's premium, so that's the difference that we have. But in the end, you know, all the microphones sound great. It's just a difference for Yeti Pro, for example. It's an XLR adapter or cable. The Yeti has a USB cable. Then there is a Snowball, Snowball IS. We have a Yeti Nano. You see the table. So for all the right strangers, what do you do? They just... For all these live streamers and gaming and all that stuff? Yeah, right, right. We have the perfect combination. You know, we have streaming cameras. And we have a fitting microphone. So if you want to go and streaming, then you can combine best at both worlds. And you have the best picture, best sound. And that's the idea. And all the musicians are using it. And we have amazing singers up there doing stuff. We have singers up there, right? Cool. All right. Thanks a lot. Thank you.


We got 6 stories to bring you today and look, this is one of the most jam-packed Prime News episodes of all time. I'll just give you a quick update on what those stories are and then you can jump to the timestamps down below to get right to it. First off we have an end of your sales update for Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 5 out in Japan and oh boy, it's pretty impressive for Nintendo. Next up, Nintendo's stock has hit another all time high setting records for Nintendo and getting them back to a, well, valuation that they've never seen before or haven't really seen I suppose in over 13 years or whatever it is, 23 years, I don't know, we'll get to the details in the story. Beyond all of that, we have the number one leaker in the world, Pioro teasing Gameboy Advance announcements today for NSO. We're going to get into that. Then we also have some brand new details for Mario vs Donkey Kong. That's right. Not just that simple HD up res, they did some really cool things we got to dive into a brand new footage. Oh, and last, we have an update on a story I already covered earlier today about the Nintendo Switch to release day leaking and hey, given you those clarifying details I couldn't in the last video because it was edited and uploaded and published before these details came out. So hey, I like to keep everyone up to date with the latest and greatest of Switch 2, including updating stories as they develop. That being said, folks, I am Nathan the Rebel Dance. This is Prime News and let's get into it. So the first thing we're going to talk about is the latest sales data from Famitsu Magazine and I'm going to link directly to Famitsu down in the comments and I also want to make sure I feature my good friend Paul Gale Network because he used to update my website with all these sales data from me every week. So I just want to give him a shout out. He's a great guy. Famitsu sales, these are actually, his date's a little wrong up there. It's December 18th through December 31st. There is no 13 month of the year. Anyways, you can see the data there and it says Nintendo Switch has sold 168,000 units, well, 866 on top of that for a grand total of 4,062,609 units on the year with 31,786,656 total Switches ever sold in Japan. Remember this is two weeks worth of data for the first number we gave. For PlayStation 5 over the last two weeks, they sold 81,943 units, moving 2,587,468 units this year for a total of 4,964,857 units. I find this just to be fascinating because just this year alone, Nintendo almost outsold the lifetime sales of PlayStation 5, it's been here since 2020 in Japan, kind of crazy. It just shows how big Switch is. Anyways, you can look at the top 10 software there as well, Super Mario Bros. Wonder over the last two weeks sold 221,738 units, Momotaro Densaro World, this is also the Switch version, sold 192,620 units, Pikmin 4 up there at 78,589, Dragon Quest Monsters at 77,000, that is the Switch version. Spider-Man 2 on PlayStation 5, moving 53,238 units at number 5, Mario Kart 8 the Luxe moving 46,452 units, Minecraft this is the Switch version moving 38,472, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate at 38,005 units, WarioWare Move It at 37,147 units at number 9, and the final squad on the top 10 is owned by Pokemon Scarlet and Violet at 35,679 units. Now this is all really cool stuff and I love sales data. Clearly Nintendo had a very strong year in Japan so that's just really exciting in general. And look guys, Switch is just going to keep on trucking as long as we keep getting software as much as we talk about Switch too. Look you bring the games, the sales will be there. So continue to bring the games and the sales will come. Nintendo doesn't necessarily have the greatest lineup at the moment for Switch, could be changing though with a potential February Direct on the horizon. First up we got to get into Nintendo's shares because oh boy man, Nintendo has hit an all time high again for their shares as of January 10th. Oh man this is exciting. So let's go ahead and head on over to Wall Street Journal where they talk about the shares and they go Nintendo shares hit a record helping Japanese stock to another multi-decade high and this is the overall Nikkei index, this is not the Nintendo stock. The Japan's benchmark stock index recorded another nearly 34 year because obviously we see the peak here back in 1990. Anyways a nearly 34 year high on Wednesday led by strength and technology shares and a fall in the yen which would boost exporter's profits. The Nikkei stock average rose 2% Wednesday to 34441.72, its highest end of day level since February of 1990, it is inching towards the record high close of 38915.87 hit in December of 1989. Nintendo shares hit a record close high of 7,823 yen or about $54.14, the video game company shares have gained ground since last year reflecting solid earnings and expectations over the potential launch of a new console to succeed the current Switch model. Now it's interesting of course looking at this because it yeah the essentially investors are expecting a Switch 2, they're very excited about it, obviously the Zelda movie has been announced, the Mario movie was a smashing success, maybe it'll be another Mario movie announcement this year, they're expecting big things from Nintendo so the shares are going to continue to climb as we get closer and closer to Nintendo Switch 2's reveal and then we'll see what happens after it's revealed, if it's received very very very well the shares could explode even higher or maybe they'll come down a bit, look the stock market is a fluctuating thing but right now Nintendo's been on this upswing the entire Switch generation and it looks like it's going to continue with Switch 2, obviously we have to wait for the system to be unveiled, the games to be unveiled for it, it to actually come out, it to get some explosive sales data and if that all goes according to plan Nintendo's going to be in a very cool position to continue to watch their stock basically set new records every single month for the foreseeable future but again we'll have to wait and see what happens because obviously the stock could dip if there's negative reports out there so we'll have to wait and see what happens but yeah, thank you so much for the Wall Street Journal for making sure we're fully up to date on what is going on with Nintendo's stock exchange. Now next up we have some rumors surrounding the Nintendo slash universal park situation and what's happening, what things are closing down at universal and then expansions for Nintendo, we're actually going to get all of this off the gaming leaks and Reddit forum thing, Majigger subreddit because I found their breakdown to actually be the most informative from multiple sources so let's go ahead and dive into that. So as you're seeing here you see rumor, Simpsons land at Universal Studios Florida to be replaced with a Pokemon themed land and a potential Luigi's mansion expansion for Super Nintendo World in Orlando's epic universe, pretty cool. So let's go ahead and get this full post out so Universal Studios debuted their Springfield land in the year of 2008, a decent amount of time before the Fox Disney merger that placed Simpsons characters under the Disney umbrella. This buyout was finalized in the year 2019 and the contract for the Simpsons characters usage in Universal Studios was only agreed upon for 20 years expiring in the year 2028. Disney also desires to use Simpsons characters in their own parks according to insiders so it's likely they will not renew the deal to keep open Springfield and a replacement will be necessary and this is according to Inside the Magic which is a Disney insider website. The current prevailing rumor is that Universal will replace Springfield with a Pokemon area where guests can interact with both virtual and real representations of Pokemon. This would allegedly include a virtual reality moving ride similar to the Amazing Spider-Man and Transformers rides and on this ride you could use hand gestures to command a starter Pokemon you select at the beginning of the ride to battle for you. The park would additionally sell an interactive Pokeball similar to the Mario wristbands in Nintendo World that you could use to catch and collect unique Pokemon, possibly being able to take them home with you via a phone app and there is a YouTuber source on this. Now apparently this is a replacement for both the California and Florida theme parks, not just the Orlando version. Additionally Luigi's Mansion is rumored to be placed in the expansion pad between the Universal Monsters area and the Nintendo area at Universal's Epic Universe in Orlando. This will likely connect the Universal Horror theme classic monsters with the more kid-friendly Nintendo area in the park. This ride would be a moving ride where each guest receive a poltergeist to suck up ghosts as they move through the mansion with the objective being to catch as many ghosts as possible before the ride ends and oh man that Luigi's Mansion ride sounds utterly insane guys. Obviously this is all rumored stuff but a lot of the rumors around Nintendo's theme parks have literally all come true so I think we can maybe feel stashed in the believability bin. I'm just excited to see what happens here. I've never been to Super Nintendo World or anything and I'm kind of thinking that I might wait till all of my kids are at teenage age and when that happens maybe I just take the whole family out and by that time maybe we have this massive Nintendo park going like maybe we have Pokemon and Donkey Kong and obviously Mario and who knows maybe Zelda Luigi's Mansion it could just get utterly insane what they could be doing with these parks and this just makes me really excited because I actually despite the fact I don't really live near a lot of theme parks I actually love theme parks. If I lived near them I'd probably be a lot brokerer than I already have. Next up we have the only leaker for Nintendo that I'm aware of that has a 100% track record. Speaking up today his name is Piero you've probably heard me talk about him before. He literally leaks all these Nintendo announcements right before Nintendo does it so it's very easily to quickly verify everything that he says and here today he talked about NSO news all the way back in August of 2023 and it said it was gonna be N64 stuff and that happened and today he responded to himself and said Game Boy Advance this time. So what he say it is we're gonna get Game Boy Advance games announced for Nintendo Switch Online tonight. Now that's awesome and everything and to be honest some people forget that Game Boy Advance is even part of NSO but yes it's part of the expansion pack version of NSO and look I was trying to think about what games they could be announcing and they usually will make this announcement around 8 p.m central time and so I went over to the Game Boy Advance website here and as I was scrolling down you can see what we have in terms of the included games right now all this list the Fire Emblems the Metroids the Kirby the Marios and then we have these two coming soon these could be the ones that get announced actually today we could be seeing F-Zero maximum velocity and Golden Sun being announced again I don't know for sure but those were previously announced games so they could be Shadow Drop today I also came up with a couple other games I'd like to see I just want to be clear I don't know if these games are happening I just want them and that includes Metroid Zero Mission and Golden Sun the Lost Age like I know the original Golden Sun's already announced but why not bring Lost Age in hey you already have Metroid Fusion why not bring in Metroid Zero Mission they usually like to announce like a three pack sometimes a four pack of games maybe all four of them get announced maybe none of them get announced and they go with a completely different direction but it does appear now again a rumor but coming from a hundred percent track record pretty believable that later on tonight we're going to be getting some Game Boy Advance games added to NSO next up we have to talk about Mario vs Donkey Kong one of those GBA ports coming over in full HD in a remake style because they dropped a new trailer today that's actually showing this game as new content so take a look at the trailer as we go over this there's going to be two new worlds that were never in the original game one of them is an amusement park while the other is actually a snowy mountain theme there will be a casual difficulty mode added two player support updates to the bonus stages so like new content in those stages and time attack mode will be available for every level instead of just some levels like this is the sort of thing we want to see with remakes and remasters and all new content thrown in it really drives home a reason that if you love the original you might pick this one up not just to replay it but now to play new content this is the kind of thing that makes me consider picking up the game as somebody who beat this back of the day and doesn't really replay games why not pick it up so I can enjoy that new content it's not a super long game in the first place it was not like I had to spend 300 hours to get through everything so we'll have to wait and see if I decide to pick it up but it's very very enticing and you know what if you'd like to pre-order it I don't know maybe there's a link somewhere on screen YouTube as this thing now where I can like link merchandise I don't I don't really know if it works though and lastly we have an update to our story earlier today if you didn't see it we put out a video saying that hey the Nintendo switch to release date had leaked and this came from what I was claiming was an all tech lensing press release and it turns out that while all tech lensing is involved it's not technically their press release they're actually just a licensee I need to shout out doc tray 81 who helped me out big time on Twitter pointing it out to me just to give me the most up-to-date information I can and correct my report so here you see all tech lensing ventures in the new territory as the inaugural licensee of AI sharks original gaming software so the big thing is that they are the first licensee of AI sharks actual software they are not the ones that put out the press release it was AI shark themselves now AI shark is actually made up of former game shark developers so that is something I wasn't aware of and it's not something I want to bring to you guys's attention because I do think it's really important that we get all this information correct this story has been evolving all day also I went ahead and put an updated thing on YouTube and I'll probably add in this caveat update as well about AI shark but let's go ahead and look at my update I put out there because I know not everyone saw it and it says as always I like to keep everyone as up-to-date as possible and this is an ever-developing story that has had many twists and turns including the new one I just presented you guys after dropping the press release when reached out to AI shark doubled down on the release timing and even stated Nintendo told them when it's coming out and the name of the system of course as many suspected this stuff coming out of a major US company which again AI sharks and newer companies so we can kind of disregard that that's why I got to provide a new update all of this is to be expected Nintendo wants to control their own narrative when it comes to the system especially when it comes to official press releases like this from potential partner companies in the research done since the video is edited and published we figured out what AI shark is it's like a new controller and some new devices updates as well but here's a video that I apparently found of AI shark I don't know if we're getting in trouble showing this I don't know what here it is and it's really dim so that don't ask me the video is being presented as is anyways I just said it's likely that Nintendo America got ahold of them and yada yada got them to put out a statement through Jason Schreyer that they were just making guesses of course why they doubled down before that I don't understand and look I don't know what to do with this news maybe it's a bunch of a big nothing burger maybe it's not obviously our insiders out there like Nate the hate and others have been decrying this thing the whole time it's fake it's bullshit why would they have a dev kit blah blah blah I don't know I don't think any of us actually know anyone from AI shark but they are apparently former game shark developers and that's where the game shark connection came in even though the press release inferred that like you know game shark was becoming AI shark game shark is still wholly owned by a completely different company known as mad cats so it's not really a replacement for game shark it's just these are people who made game shark should have been better in the press release very clickbaity it is what it is I'm just providing the updates to you guys as I can because I want to make sure you're as up to date and as knowledgeable about what we're talking about with switch to as I am all right guys thank you so much for tuning in I am the Thunder RoboJets from Nintendo Prime and we'll catch you in the next video


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Good morning and welcome. I'm Frank Verastrom, Director of the Energy and National Security Program here at CSIS and it's my pleasure to welcome you here this morning. A couple of administrative announcements to the extent that you have your cell phones on including myself. This would be a great time to turn them off. There we go. And then since we're on safety in the unlikely event of an evacuation you all know where the exits are as you go out to the right. One stairway going up brings you up to the K Street, the foyer entrance. If you go down brings you into the garage brings you out the 18 Street entrance. Okay, so we're good. It's my great pleasure to welcome back this morning Michael Bromwich who all of you know Michael is the Director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, BOMR as it's called. In the wake of the Macondo Strategy he was sworn in as the Director of what used to be Minerals Management Service in June 21st of last year. And in the intervening 15 months he has undertaken and completed a laundry list of major reforms and accomplishments that I think are truly astonishing. Under his leadership the Bureau has undertaken an aggressive overhaul of the offshore oil and gas and regulatory process with an emphasis on enhanced safety and environmentally responsible development. They revised inspection procedures, developed performance based standards for offshore drilling, including equipment, safety practices and management, oversight of operations and contractors, developed plans for a comprehensive reorganization of the Bureau which I'm sure we'll hear more about today, established a new investigation review unit, launched a leasing process for commercial wind energy in the offshore, established the Ocean Energy Safety Advisory Committee and embarked on a major recruitment campaign to enhance the Bureau's capability. This is in addition to the Bureau's normal activity of permitting offshore activity and preparing for upcoming lease sales which have also been announced. This is Mike's third time with us here at CSIS and on each of the previous occasions we've always found his presentations to be content rich for sure, articulate in terms of specifics and always thoughtful. In addition he delivers this message with candor in clarity and so it's no wonder why we keep inviting him back. His bio is included in the announcement of materials so I won't go into that in great detail, but if you'll all join me in welcoming Michael Bromwich to the podium. Thanks very much. Well, thank you very much for that very kind and generous introduction, Frank. It is a pleasure to be back. Good morning. Thank you for the opportunity to speak to you today about our efforts over the past 15 months to design and implement our comprehensive overhaul of the former Minerals Management Service. As Frank noted, this is my third appearance at CSIS since President Obama and Secretary Salazar asked me to lead the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management Regulation and Enforcement in June of 2010. When I was here the first time in January, we discussed the President's commission report on the Deep Water Horizon explosion and oil spill, which had just been released and we focused on the important new safety requirements Bomer had developed and at that time was implementing. I also outlined in broad terms how we planned to separate and clarify the agency's multiple missions of energy development, revenue management, and safety and environmental enforcement. And when I was here in April, I addressed the not so narrow topic of the future of offshore oil and gas development, but also outlined what we were planning for the two new agencies that were going to result from the reorganization, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement. I also discussed the regulatory reforms that we continued to implement and our full engagement with the international regulatory community. Today, I am extremely pleased to report that we have accomplished what we set out to do. 17 days from now, Bomer will cease to exist and in its place, Bomer and Bessie will open their doors. Together, they embody our collective efforts to institutionalize a set of structural and substantive reforms that will do several important things. They will greatly enhance our nation's ability to responsibly develop our offshore energy resources and reduce our dependence on foreign sources. They will improve the safety of operations and they will provide greater environmental protection. We have done all of this at the same time as we have continued to move forward with our day-to-day operations. We have undertaken more rigorous environmental reviews. We have continued to approve plans and permits that comply with our new safety and environmental requirements. And we are preparing right now, as Frank noted, for an important upcoming oil and gas lease sale. And this doesn't even touch on the hard work we have done in promoting offshore renewable energy development, which is an important story we will leave largely for another day. Now, when the Government Accountability Office placed the Department of the Interior on the 2011 high-risk list with respect to oil and gas oversight, it stated that the Bureau must, quote, meet its routine responsibilities to manage these resources in the public interest while managing a major reorganization that has the potential to distract agency management from other important tasks and put additional strain on Interior staff. It must also do this in a constrained resource environment, unquote. Well, despite the concern of GAO and many others, we have met this enormous challenge. I am extraordinarily proud of what we have accomplished. I have been impressed each day by the dedication demonstrated by Boomer employees. I am confident that we have selected the personnel and created the organizational structures that will enable the nation to move forward with responsible domestic energy exploration, development, and production. Now, the Deepwater Horizon explosion in oil spill highlighted a number of problems and weaknesses in the way that MMS had historically carried out its business. Those weaknesses included the adequacy of the agency's regulations, especially as they related to offshore safety and environmental protection. But they also included the excessively broad focus of the agency that was charged with multiple important and complex missions and the enormous shortfall in resources that had historically been made available to that agency. In the immediate aftermath of the spill, we found that existing regulations had not kept up with the advancements in technology used in Deepwater drilling. In response, we quickly issued new rigorous regulations that bolstered offshore drilling safety, and we also ratcheted up our efforts to evaluate and mitigate environmental risks. We introduced for the first time performance-based standards similar to those used by regulators in the North Sea to make operators responsible for identifying and minimizing the risks associated with drilling operations. We did this through development and implementation of two new rules that raised standards for the oil and gas industry's operations on the OCS. Even before the various reports on the Deepwater Horizon tragedy were completed, we knew that we needed to address drilling safety issues. We did this last October, as many of you know, through our emergency drilling safety rule, which created tough new standards for well-designed casing and cementing and well-controlled procedures and equipment, including blowout preventers. This rule requires operators to have a professional engineer certify the adequacy of the proposed drilling program. And in addition, the new drilling safety rule requires an engineer to certify that the blowout preventer to be used in a drilling operation meets new standards for testing, maintenance, and performance. The second rule was our workplace safety rule. That rule requires operators to systematically identify risks and establish barriers to those risks. It seeks to reduce the human and organizational errors that cause many accidents and oil spills. Under the rule, also known as the SEMS rule, operators must develop a comprehensive safety and environmental management program that identifies the potential hazards and risk reduction strategies for all phases of activity from well-designed in construction through the decommissioning of platforms. Many companies had developed such SEMS systems on a voluntary basis in the past, but many had not. Because the rule required substantial work by many operators, we delayed enforcement of the rule for a year. But starting in November, we will begin to enforce compliance. Based on my discussions with our own personnel who have been gearing up to ensure compliance with the SEMS rules and my meetings with individual operators and groups of operators, I am confident that the vast majority of operators will be ready with their SEMS programs by that day. Today, as you know, about an hour ago, we proposed a follow-up rule that further advances the purposes of the SEMS rule. It addresses additional safety concerns not covered by the original rule and applies to all oil and natural gas activities and facilities on the OCS. Now, we first announced that this rule would be forthcoming at the time we announced the original SEMS rule, so it comes as no surprise to anyone. The proposed SEMS II rule includes procedures that authorize any employee on a facility to cause the stoppage of work, frequently called stopwork authority, in the face of an activity or event that poses a threat to an individual, to property, or to the environment. The proposed rule also establishes requirements relating to the clear delineation of who possesses ultimate authority on each facility for operational safety, establishes guidelines for reporting unsafe work conditions that give all employees the right to report a possible safety or environmental violation and to request a bone or investigation of the facility and requires third-party independent audits of operator SEMS programs. We believe these are reasonable, appropriate, and logical extensions of our original SEMS rule, and we look forward to the comments and suggestions of operators and other interested stakeholders as this proposed rule moves through the rulemaking process. As you all know, we're in the final stages of completing our own investigation into the Deep Water Horizon tragedy. That report is the result of a collaborative effort between Boemer and the Coast Guard. Following the issuance of that report, which is imminent, we expect to make available for public comment additional proposals that will further enhance drilling safety and environmental protection. In order to ensure that we incorporate the very best ideas and best practices of the offshore industry and other interested stakeholders in offshore exploration, development, and production, we will proceed through a notice and comment rulemaking process that will begin with an advanced notice of proposed rulemaking. It is our hope and our expectation that at the end of this process we will develop consensus proposals that will significantly enhance safety and environmental protection. Again, this is not a new announcement. It's not new because we've been discussing our intention to further enhance offshore safety regulation for the past year. We have waited this long because we thought it was important to wait until we were in a position to benefit from the insights and lessons learned from the joint investigation. Now, on previous occasions I have mentioned other steps that we have taken to enhance offshore safety and environmental protections. These include elaborating on requirements that oil spill response plans include a well specific blowout and worst case discharge scenario, and then operators demonstrate that they have access to and can deploy subsea containment resources that would be sufficient to promptly respond to a deep water blowout or other loss of well control. These enhanced requirements are substantial and necessary, and many of them were long overdue. They have made the important enterprise of offshore exploration development and production safer and more environmentally responsible than ever before. And the new regulations we are proposing and will propose are limited and common sense elaborations of the rules we have already put in place. We believe that they will have the support of the operator community which shares our interest in promoting safe and responsible operations. In addition, we have developed an entirely new mechanism that will assist us in making sure that our efforts to enhance safety will not languish in the future as they have at times in the past. In January, Secretary Salazar established the Ocean Energy Safety Advisory Committee to advise us on a broad range of issues related to offshore energy safety. I have met with the committee led by former Sandia Labs Director Tom Hunter on two occasions and am very pleased and impressed with their commitment to helping us address these challenges. The advisory committee will assist Bessie and we expect to receive the first set of recommendations from its subcommittees by the end of this year. One of the fundamental weaknesses highlighted by the Deepwater Horizon tragedy was the fact that the agency charged with enforcing federal regulations had three competing missions. Revenue generation, responsible energy development and safety and environmental enforcement. Through no fault of the agency's employees, the agency lacked the necessary resources, the leadership and the vision to effectively fulfill all of its responsibilities. For decades and across administrations, the prevailing focus was on revenue generation and energy development. The inspector workforce fell further and further behind as it tried to keep pace with the rapid growth in the number of facilities they were responsible for overseeing. In addition, industries advances in technology significantly outpaced the agency and its development of regulations. It became clear that the agency had simply been asked to do too much with too little and that there was inherent tension among the multiple missions it had been asked to fulfill. The president's commission found that the top priority of all of the prior MMS directors it interviewed was the generation of maximum revenues for the federal treasury through royalty and rental collections. It was inevitable that setting this as the top priority would have an effect on the ability to arrive at responsible and balanced decisions concerning the development of our offshore resources. And it was also inevitable that the priority assigned to revenue collection would have an even greater adverse impact on the agency's ability to ensure that the appropriate rules were in place and to aggressively enforce the rules that were in place. Therefore, it became apparent that those three missions had to be separated and made independent of each other to ensure that all three missions had the appropriate focus and adequate resources. So on May 19, 2010, a month before I arrived at Interior, Secretary Salazar signed a secretarial order announcing his intention to separate the former MMS into three separate organizations with the goal of separating these functions and enhancing the ability of our personnel to accomplish these important but quite different missions. And my job then was to lead this reorganization and make real the creation of three new entities, each with specific and independent missions, and each with the authority and resources necessary to effectively carry them out. Last summer, we began a thorough review of all of our programs and processes. We took a very close look at the organizational structure and culture of the former MMS. We took prompt action to address conflicts of interest real and perceived by implementing a strict recusal policy and setting up an internal investigation and review unit. We reinvigorated ethics training and made that training specific to the situations our employees encounter in their day-to-day jobs and issued updated and more stringent guidance on the acceptance of gifts. We also addressed the lack of resources that had played the agency for decades. The President submitted a substantial supplemental budget request in the summer of 2010, which was partially funded, and that enabled us to begin hiring additional staff. We launched an aggressive nationwide recruitment campaign, and I personally visited college campuses across the country to talk about the rewarding and challenging careers awaiting engineers and scientists in Boemer. We have since hired 122 new employees across various disciplines and specialties, but we need many more. The creation of Boemer and Bessie initially announced more than a year ago separates resource management from safety and environmental oversight. This allows our permitting engineers and inspectors who are central to overseeing safe offshore operations greater independence, more budgetary autonomy, and clearer focus. Our goal has been to create a tough-minded but fair regulator that can effectively keep pace with the risks of offshore drilling and will promote the development of safety cultures in offshore operations. In Bohem, we have created a structure that ensures that sound environmental reviews are conducted and that the potential environmental effects of proposed operations are given appropriate weight during decision-making related to resource management. This is to ensure that leasing and plan approval activities are properly balanced. These processes must be rigorous and efficient so that operations can go forward in a timely way based on a thorough understanding of their potential environmental impacts and the confidence that appropriate mitigation against those potential environmental effects are in place. We have renewed and reaffirmed our commitment to develop thorough, credible, and unfiltered scientific data to serve as the basis for our resource development decisions. To that end, we have established the position of a chief environmental officer in Bohem. This person will be empowered at the national level to make decisions and final recommendations when leasing and environmental program directors cannot reach agreement. This individual will also be a major participant in setting the scientific agenda for the nation's oceans. I have selected this first-ever chief environmental officer and hope to be able to announce it publicly in the very near future. Now, Bohem and its predecessor agencies have long maintained a robust scientific studies program, as many of you know. However, in the past, there was little effort to disseminate and promote the important work that was being performed. Further, there was insufficient attention paid to the program by senior leadership, again, because of the emphasis given to revenue generation. We are refocusing our efforts to showcase the world-class research being conducted and directed by our scientists, and we are taking institutional steps to ensure that their research is given appropriate weight in the decision-making process. To ensure adequate environmental reviews, we have launched a review of our historical policies on the use of categorical exclusions as suggested by the Council on Environmental Quality. And during the pendency of that review, we have been conducting site-specific environmental reviews for exploration plans submitted by operators in deep water. And even though we are doing more rigorous and more extensive environmental reviews, so far, we have managed to make decisions on those plans within the 30-day time frame set by Congress. In shaping BESI, we took a broad look at the best practices of domestic and international regulators to create strong enforcement mechanisms across the Bureau. We have established for the first time an environmental enforcement division in BESI. This division will provide sustained regulatory oversight that is focused on compliance by operators with all applicable environmental regulations, as well as making sure that operators keep the promises they have made at the time they obtain their leases, submit their plans, and apply for their permits. Our new chief of this division, recruited from outside the agency, started work yesterday. In BESI, we have already established multi-person inspection teams that are being equipped with better and more advanced tools than ever or more to do their jobs. Our new inspections process and protocols will allow teams to inspect multiple operations simultaneously, and will enhance the quality of our inspections, especially of larger facilities. We've established a national training center in BESI whose initial focus will be on keeping our experienced inspectors current on new technologies and processes and ensuring that our new inspectors are given the proper foundation for carrying out their duties rigorously and effectively. We have already run two sets of our newest inspectors through the initial inspector training curriculum. And I have selected the first ever director of our national training center from outside the agency, and he too came on board yesterday. As I've discussed on several occasions over the past several months, we will be extending our regulatory reach to include contractors as well as operators. We have not done so in the past, but we clearly have the legal authority to exercise that power. And there's no compelling reason in law or logic not to do so. In my judgment, it is simply inappropriate to voluntarily limit our authority to operators if in fact we have authority that reaches more broadly to the activities of all entities involved in developing offshore leases. I am convinced that we can fully preserve the principle of holding operators fully accountable, and in most cases solely responsible without sacrificing the ability to pursue regulatory actions against contractors for serious violations. We will be careful and we will be measured in applying our regulatory authority to contractors. As we consider changes in how we do business, we work to strengthen our collaboration with our international counterparts. Offshore regulators and senior policy officials have much to learn for regulators in other countries to improve safety and environmental protection. And in this spirit last April, the Department of the Interior hosted ministers and senior energy officials from 12 countries and the European Union for the ministerial forum on offshore drilling containment. This historic meeting led to fruitful dialogue about best practices and how to develop cutting edge effective safety and containment technologies. We're currently working with these other nations to make this forum permanent. We're also continuing to work through existing channels for international cooperation and the sharing of best practices across regulatory regimes, such as the International Regulators Forum, an organization Boomer helped to found in 1994, and in which Bessie will continue to play an active role. Throughout this process, we have been open and transparent with our intentions and our plans for regulatory reform and the reorganization of the former MMS. Our goal has been to do everything possible not to disturb the day-to-day operations of the Bureau. We have worked very hard to ensure those in industry and all interested parties are aware of the changes being considered and made, that they have a voice in the discussion, and that the reforms we have implemented make sense and are appropriate to the goals we wish to achieve. Now in the midst of all this activity, we have continued to move forward with a full range of our important day-to-day activities, conducting environmental studies, performing environmental analyses, reviewing and approving plans, reviewing and approving permits, and conducting inspections. This has taken dedication and commitment, and our personnel have shown this to a truly impressive degree. More specifically, we are reviewing and approving exploration and development plans and applications for permits to drill. We are conducting environmental reviews and making preparations for a Western Gulf of Mexico lease sale this December, and for a large consolidated central Gulf sale late next spring. We continue to review proposals to drill in the Arctic next summer, and we are aggressively working toward offshore wind energy development in the Atlantic and working with states on the Pacific Coast toward their renewable energy goals. The amount of work being accomplished every day by this relatively small Bureau is quite remarkable. We've made special efforts to ensure that offshore operators understand the new standards and that they have the tools and information needed to fully comply with those requirements. Our staff and I personally have participated in scores of meetings with individual operators, groups of operators, and trade associations to explain the requirements, answer questions, and address concerns. And as we approach October 1, we are focusing substantial energy on making sure that those in industry, the conservation community, and our sister federal agencies understand the coming changes so there will be no interruptions in our operations. Not everyone, however, is willing to see the facts as they are, nor to appreciate the level of effort of our personnel, nor to recognize that additional requirements designed to enhance the safety of offshore operations and protection of offshore operations mean that plan and permit approvals do not proceed at the same pace as they did in the past. I continue to be disappointed to see politically motivated erroneous reports and commentaries sponsored by various industry associations and groups criticizing the Bureau for allegedly slow walking permits and plans. That is a phrase we see repeated over and over again and it is simply not true. One trade association representative recently said, quote, while the industry has met every requirement for resuming operations in the Gulf, permits and leases have been issued too slowly, which is costing jobs, hurting the Gulf Coast, the national economy, and reducing energy security, end quote. Another described the rate of permitting in this way, quote, it's like leasing an apartment from the government for $20 million and the government refuses to give you the key, unquote. These groups continue to distort the facts and in some cases use undisclosed or incomprehensible methodologies to suggest that the slower pace of plan and permit approval is part of a strategy to slow down offshore energy instead of the predictable product of more searching and rigorous reviews and analyses conducted by a small staff. Last week in a publicly released letter to President Obama, 20 representatives from various industry associations again used incorrect and misleading statistics to make a case for returning permitting levels to a pace commensurate with the industry's ability to invest. In the letter, the group stated, quote, some in your administration dispute the actual rate of permitting in the Gulf of Mexico, we would prefer less dispute on numbers and more action on permits, end quote. I fully understand why these groups are becoming increasingly uncomfortable about discussing our plan approval and permit approval numbers. It is because we have demonstrated that they are using flawed and frequently unstated methodologies and numbers that in many cases are created out of thin air. As of the close of business yesterday, September 12th, the real statistics, the real numbers are as follows. In shallow water, to date we have issued 74 new shallow water well permits since the implementation of new safety and environmental standards on June 8th, 2010. Just 13 of these permits are currently pending. 10 have been returned to the operator for additional information. In deep water, since an applicant first successfully demonstrated containment capabilities in mid-February, we have approved 129 permits for 40 unique wells requiring subsea containment. With 12 permits pending and 23 permits returned to the operator with requests for additional information, particularly information regarding containment. Also in deep water, we have approved 45 permits with one permit pending and one permit returned to the operator with requests for additional information for those activities that include water injection wells and procedures using surface blowout preventers. The simple fact is we are reviewing and approving permits as expeditiously as we can given our current resources. Another fact that should not be overlooked is that our employees have put in more than 1,350 hours of overtime, reviewing plans and permits in the past six months alone. In light of that, it is unfair and it is inappropriate to accuse this bureau of slow walking anything. I was pleased to see that for the first time last week, the CEO of one of the major oil and gas companies said he thought the claim that we have been slow walking permits was false. It was about time that we heard an oil company executive say publicly what many had been saying privately to us for many, many months. We understand that operators would like the permitting process to move more quickly, but that's very different from suggesting that there have been concerted efforts to slow things down. And the truth is that industry needs to step up its game if it is genuinely interested in a more efficient process. Instead of commissioning studies that don't bother to understand how the process actually works, they would be better served by devoting more resources to improving the quality of their applications. The fact is that flawed and incomplete applications are a significant source of delays in the process. Operators need to stop turning in applications with missing or incomplete information or that completely lack information about subsea containment. We are still receiving applications that use cookie cutter templates. For example, we've had cases in which we received an application from an operator that details their plans to drill well A. The operator then submitted another application to drill well B, except that the application included the specifications for well A. They simply cut and pasted the information. This is clearly unacceptable and we will simply not approve an application with such blatant errors. We're not talking here about simple typographical errors. We're talking about applications with completely incorrect data or that are missing key data or that contain completely inconsistent data. We see this day in and day out and then we face criticism for the high rate of drilling applications that are returned to operators. Despite much unfair, inaccurate and misplaced criticism, we have been doing our very best to assist industry consulting with operators individually and in groups and holding workshops to clarify what may remain unclear or legitimately confusing to operators. For example, in March 2011, we held a day long workshop on exploration and development plans led by our personnel who are actively involved in reviewing and analyzing plans. More than 200 industry representatives attended the workshop which focused on the many aspects of plan submissions. Much of the discussion from the workshop was subsequently incorporated into a webpage focusing on submitting complete exploration and development plans. And thanks to the input we received from that workshop as well as other meetings and conversations, the page includes helpful information such as a checklist of required information for plans, frequently asked questions and a guidance document recently added that is entitled Top Ways Operators Can Submit Stronger Plan Applications. And we've made similar efforts regarding drilling permits. We have met regularly with oil and gas operators both individually and in groups to discuss their concerns and respond to requests for additional information and additional clarity regarding our permit review process. We have created a completeness checklist for our drilling engineers to use and ensuring a more efficient analysis and to aid in setting priorities for reviews. And we have shared the checklist with operators. We have developed an online tracking system for the first time that enables operators to track the status of their individual permits as they move through the review and approval process. Late last month, the Gulf of Mexico regional staff and the agency presented a full day permitting workshop for approximately 200 industry representatives. The workshop included a discussion of common errors and omissions found in the submission of permit applications and overviews and updates on subsea containment and the software screening tool that we used and developed in conjunction with industry and that we used to evaluate permit applications. A panel of operators very helpfully discussed proven methods and strategies for the completion of fully compliant permit applications. Now, we will continue to engage industry to ensure they understand the requirements. It's important and it's a central part of our job. Many operators have demonstrated that they do understand the requirements and that they are able to comply with them. Their permit applications are being approved in many cases very promptly. The two ingredients we need to speed up the review and approval of permits are applications that contain all of the elements of a fully compliant application and obviously additional agency resources. The drumbeat of criticism that urges us to approve plans and issue permits more rapidly will simply not cause us to cut corners or compromise safety to speed the process. All of us involved in creating our two new agencies, Bo and Bessie, have worked to create the structure, select the leadership and work to obtain the resources needed to fulfill our responsibilities to the American people. We need our people to approach environmental reviews and regulatory enforcement in a way that is tough, but fair, which places safety above all else, which promotes the responsible development of our nation's energy resources and ensures that all reasonable steps are taken to protect the fragile coastal and marine environment. We need everyone to embrace those goals and to recognize their importance. We cannot afford to have critics take liberties with the facts and act as though the only things that matter are the rapid approval of plans and permits, whether or not they comply with the standards and requirements that help ensure safety and environmental protection. Some may have forgotten Deepwater Horizon or wished to pretend it either did not happen or that it was a singular event that should not have a lasting impact on the way we do business. Well, we recognize it as a seminal event in the history of offshore drilling in the United States. It has driven much of what we have done over the past 15 months and much of the agenda we will be pursuing in Boa Mimbasi as we move forward. It's been a difficult and challenging year and a half for everyone involved with offshore energy development in the United States. As I look back, I'm extremely proud of what we've accomplished and I'm very optimistic and excited about what lies ahead. I firmly believe we can move forward safely and responsibly and continue to work toward energy independence for our nation together. Thank you very much for your time and attention and I'm happy to take questions to the extent we have time. Well, thank this. That was terrific. Since we started a bit late, we're going to continue a little past 11 so we'll try to incorporate and answer all the questions that get posed by the audience. So if you want to start with that, we have three simple rules here, wait for the microphone, identify yourselves and your affiliation and then to the extent you can, pose your question in the form of a question instead of just a comment. And we'll start on this side. Hi, Ayesha Roscoe with Reuters. I had a question.  And so I wonder, do you feel like your work is done, is complete? Do you plan on staying on or do you feel like you've done what you set out to do, what you were hired to do? Well, we've accomplished a lot as Frank generously noted in his introduction and I detailed in my talk.  So we've accomplished a lot and we'll all be thrilled 17 days from now when we see the culmination of our work and the creation of two new agencies. Our work will never be done. I mean, that's part of the lesson that we've learned from Deepwater Horizon. The agency unfortunately had stood still in developing both its environmental protection regime and in terms of developing its safety regulations. And so one of the things that we've been working very hard to do is create the culture in which it's recognized that this is an ongoing set of tasks. And I think people in the agency and both of the new agencies very much get that in the way that some may not have in the past. So the work will never be done and obviously I will not be around forever but I'm very optimistic in terms of both successfully opening the two doors of the new agencies on October one and having the work that we've been involved in over the last 15 months continue. So Michael, you obviously understand and appreciate that resource development is a politically hot topic. But from what I can gather from your presentation, the notion of comparing premacondo permit application approval rates to post, that's not the standard. The standard is safer development, better technology, enhanced capability. That's not the standard and it shouldn't be the standard. I mean, the reality is that we have more robust and rigorous requirements than we had before on the environmental side but particularly on the safety side. I think that's what everyone anticipated as the appropriate aftermath and sequel to Deepwater Horizon. So we've done that. And so it was predictable I think that the pace of plan approval with the site specific environmental assessments we're doing in Deepwater and permit approval with all of the need to comply with all of the new requirements would be slowed. I think part of the issue was having our people absorbed fully all of the changes and having industry fully absorb all the changes. That's why we've held many meetings and discussions. That's why we've had the plan workshop. That's why we've had the permitting workshop. I'm confident that we will continue to become more efficient as time goes by. We would obviously be able to process both plans and permits even more quickly if we had additional resources. And I'm certainly hopeful that the agency, the two new agencies will get the resources they need respectively to try to attain that goal. But simple numerical comparisons between years before Macondo and the 15 months since really dramatically missed the mark and I think are deeply flawed and in many cases disingenuous. The, if you track how many permits we approve per month it is not linear. It doesn't go straight up. It goes up and down and that relates largely to the specific characteristics of the particular wells that we are reviewing and that we're being asked to permit. So I would discourage anyone from saying, okay, we've now gotten back to a terrific pace and that will necessarily continue. Most of the wells in deep water that we've permitted have been those that according to the work we've done with our software tool are ones that containment can be achieved through capping alone. My understanding is that many of the new permit applications that we are reviewing now are gonna require what's called cap and flow where a capping stack would not be sufficient based on all the calculations to deal with a subsea blowout. And so that will be more complicated. It will be a more complicated exercise that our drilling engineers have to perform. So I don't know what the pace will be in the future but I think efforts to extrapolate from the prior month which you're quite right was a particularly productive month are probably misleading. What I can assure everyone though is that we're doing this as expeditiously and efficiently as we can given our limited resources but if the number snaps back to a smaller number for September, I don't think people should be alarmed. It really reflects the specific characteristics of the inventory of applications that we have at any particular time. Janine Hall from Strategic Energy Advisors. I was very interested that you use the term safety culture many times in your speech and I was very glad to hear that. I would appreciate if you could describe a bit what it means to you, what the critical elements of it are and if you could give an idea of how deep you believe that safety culture is in the agency and in industry. It's a very good and complicated question. Safety is important to operators. We all hear that and I frankly believe it but it's one thing to say that it's important and it's another thing to act intelligently on that insight and really try to embed safety cultures in companies. So it's not just a matter of the rhetoric, it's a matter of the reality. And we deal with a lot of operators that have made truly impressive efforts to embed safety cultures in their organizations through detailed and complex sets of internal rules to assure safety. Many of the operators we deal with already have the stop work authority that is part of CEMS-2. So I think what it requires is a sustained and continuing focus on safety. That's what it means to have a safety culture. It's not something that you do it once and you put it on the shelf. You don't have a compliance program and sit it on the shelf. It needs to be a living, breathing system as well as a series of documents. And so that needs to come down from top management. There needs to be continuing emphasis on the importance of safety, that it's the highest priority of an organization of operators. And I think just the repeated harping on it, if you will, is an important part of the process as well as a ongoing internal review of what can be improved, what can be learned from other operators, what can be learned from other parts of the world. It is not a process that ends. It is a process that continues. I think the truth is that although our agency historically has been very concerned with safety, that we lack the tools to act on that insight. Now with the CEMS rule and today with CEMS tool, we're in a much better position to spend more of our time trying to cultivate and ensure safety cultures in operators and working with operators to raise the level of safety. So further work needs to be done in industry and significant further work needs to be done in our agency. And I wanna emphasize, you will never arrive at an endpoint. There is no endpoint to the process. It's something that needs to be focused on all the time and to have some of the best minds in the companies and the best minds in our agency focus on it and try to figure out what can be done to improve the safety of operations. Hi, this is Lauren O'Neill with Oil Daily. I was wondering if you could talk about what operators can expect after November 1st when the workplace safety rule goes into force. Can they expect new inspections or have they been preparing a lot in advance? I think operators have been preparing a lot in advance. For some operators, particularly those that have operated around the world, many of them were quite prepared to deal with the CEMS rule. And I think there are some that probably didn't have to do all that much in order to get ready for the CEMS rule. Others, I think, it took a more substantial lift, which is why we recognized that and didn't begin to enforce compliance until a full year after the rule was made effective. We will begin the process of reviewing and inspecting operators CEMS programs. We've held CEMS workshop with industry. I know the Industry Center for Offshore Safety has been concentrating on CEMS-related matters. So I'm certainly hopeful that we will find, when we begin to go out and look at companies CEMS programs, operator CEMS programs, that we'll find very well-developed, carefully thought out and complete programs. That's our hope. It's a new area, so I don't know what our expectations are. We really don't have anything to base those expectations. But I have been impressed that operators seem to have taken it seriously and are devoting appropriate efforts and resources to making sure they comply. Thank you very much. David Ivanovich with Argus Media. Political statements from trade associations are one thing. Improper applications for permits to drill are a completely different animal. What is happening? What's going on? Are operators just that confused? Are they being sloppy? Do you have a sense as to what's causing these problems with their applications? Well, I don't think they are completely separate because it takes us additional time to review applications that are flawed, which in turn slows down the rate at which we can approve plans and approve permits. I think it's a combination. I think there is some confusion. I think there is, in many cases, a lack of care and attention to detail. I think, certainly, our people on staff and in the field think that there is sort of an effort to see what some operators can get by with and not to pitch their game at the highest levels and to submit something in the first instance that they know will pass muster, but instead to see if something less will suffice and that may become the new model of what they do in the future. So I think it's a combination of things. I do think that certainly at the outset there was a legitimate lack of clarity and certainty. I think the fact that we are still, until very recently and still today, getting deeply flawed applications to drill with huge sections missing, including in some cases no containment section at all, even though it's a well in deep water, suggests that the companies are not in every case bringing their A-game. And I don't know what all the causes are for that, whether it's sloppiness or whether it's an effort to see if they can get by without a fully compliant application. I don't know and I don't wanna pretend that I can read the minds of the operators. I know it is a major source of frustration to our personnel who would love nothing better than to see fully compliant application submitted in the first instance rather than to go through an application and see gaping holes in the application such that they have no choice but to return the application. It's getting better though. It's getting better, I think it was already getting somewhat better and I think the permit workshop that we had the last few days of August, we think and hope will significantly help. We had a detailed set of presentations that our personnel gave during that workshop that are posted online for operators to continue to refer to. And as I mentioned during my talk, we had a very instructive panel from industry operators explaining what they do to ensure a fully compliant application. And so I think with those combinations of attention from us and more productive discussion amongst and across operators, I think we'll continue to see an improvement in the quality of applications. I certainly hope so. Can I ask you a question on rig redeployment? So when the moratorium first took effect, there was concern initially on the length of the moratorium when the leases for this equipment is really expensive, whether to be a mass exodus out of the Gulf. And in fact, that didn't happen. There was a handful of rigs that left. As a result of kind of constructive and creative use of these rigs though, during the period, a lot of the maintenance and workover activity that kept them busy has been done now. So there seems to be increasing noise at least that you hear in the trade press that unless the permitting pace picks up that you could see some of these actually moving again because the applications just don't get done.  Yeah, a little bit, Frank. But I really do think that things are getting better. I think the quality of the applications is increasing. And certainly in the conversations that I've had recently with industry executives, they've quite consistently expressed optimism about the future of Gulf of Mexico and deep water in the Gulf of Mexico in particular. So I'm very glad that that is their attitude. I think it is justified. And I think with the improvement of quality of applications and the infusion of additional resources, which we all need for us to have, I think we will be able to prevent a significant exodus of rigs from the Gulf. Okay, and I got a note here to ask you a question about Cuba. So for those senators concerned about drilling on the west coast of Florida, the notion of the international cooperation on the east coast of Florida, has there been contact with the Cuban government or when you look at offshore development in the Atlantic Basin? I'm not aware of any direct contact with Cuba. It's obviously something that we're monitoring and that we're concerned about. There are discussions at high levels of the administration about what to do about it. I do want to add that Repsol, which is the company that's proposing to drill initially, has been quite responsive and cooperative with us. So I do want to assure people that there are obviously significant issues there, but they're certainly not being ignored. Okay, great. Environmental compliance officer. Considering that oil is the black gold that drives the global economy, I wonder if you could comment on the irony that the very agencies that's supposed to regulate the activity is deficient and starving for resources. I couldn't think of a better word to describe it than irony. Irony is one word, tragedy is another, that the agency has been chronically underfunded since its creation in the early 1980s. And again, I think that largely traces back to the fact that the old MMS was viewed primarily through the lens of how much revenue can be generated. That that was the focus of a series of MMS directors over the years. And that led to varying degrees of neglect of the resource development process and even greater neglect of the regulatory process, both with respect to safety and with respect to environmental protection. Those functions were simply undervalued over time and there were not strong enough advocates of ensuring safety and environmental protection either inside the agency, inside the government or in the outside world. So it's tragic, not just ironic tragic that it took something like Deepwater Horizon to serve as an alarm bell, a wake up call that these functions had been significantly neglected over time and to send the message to people in the agency and the Department of the Interior, to Congress and to the public that that needs to be repaired. So we've done a lot and we've gotten some significant additional resources and we're obviously grateful for that. But we're working out of a 28 year deficit, a 28 year hole. And so I think people need to understand that this is an ongoing growth development and building process that we need to go through in order to make sure that the decisions that are made in both of the two new agencies are balanced and appropriate and that safety and environmental protection are adequately valued in a way that they haven't been in the past. Well, my name is James Woods, I represent FBR. Just a quick question on, I guess, the new rulemaking that we respect to new rules being implemented or announced. The, I assume you're not talking about SEMS II, which we proposed today and so is already out there, but the advance notice of proposed rulemaking, we've said really from for a year now, at the same time as we put out the drilling safety rule, that that was our best quick shot at enhancing safety, enhancing drilling safety. But there would need to be continued focus on it. And I think it was several months later that we said for the first time that unlike the interim safety rule, which was an emergency rule effective immediately put in place under emergency conditions, that the new generation of safety rules would proceed at a very different pace. In part because we thought that the interim rule had done a lot of good in terms of raising the bar on safety. So as you probably know, in many rulemaking processes, you don't have the advance notice of proposed rulemaking. There's no requirement that you do so. And the fact that we are doing so should be a signal that we are truly interested in gathering the best ideas that everyone has, stakeholders have, operators have, academics have, so that we have a really sound, strong and balanced set of proposals to eventually incorporate into a rule. So we're talking about a process that is not gonna be six months, not gonna be a year. It's gonna be longer than that. Not because we think it's critical to get everything in this new rule and to get it right. Because as I said before and answered other questions, it's an ongoing evolutionary process you're never gonna get there. But we understand the turmoil that's been created by the emergency rule. And we don't think that we pay a cost, a significant cost in safety by taking the time to make this rulemaking process a more deliberate one. And as I said in the talk, my hope is that we are able to develop consensus new rules that industry, other stakeholders and we as the safety authority agree are necessary and appropriate to further enhance safety. That's our objective and I hope we can get there. One or two more questions. And the back here on the right. Yeah, hi, I'm Dave Diamond from the Department of Energy. I was wondering what type of either formal or informal coordination mechanisms are gonna exist between Bohm and Bessie once they split off? It's a very good question. One of the challenges and difficulties of creating two agencies out of one has been identifying the links, the connections, the interdependencies that exist or that will exist between the two new agencies. So we have focused on that for months and in fact have put together an interdependencies team whose sole job has been to focus on those interdependencies and figure out how to address them. So institutionally we will have various memoranda of agreement and memoranda of understanding that will clarify the structure of the relationship between the two new agencies as well as standard operating procedures in order to implement those MOAs and MOUs. So tremendous amount of work has been done by our staff in both identifying those issues and addressing those issues. I'm sure it's inevitable that there are some things we haven't anticipated. We've looked around the corner as far as we can but there may be some things that we've missed. But we're gonna set up a coordinating mechanism in the first few months after the split to make sure that we have an institutional mechanism to identify and address any additional issues that may not have been sufficiently identified during the planning process. So I feel very good about the process we put in place to do exactly what your question is aimed at. So with the dissolution of Boemer and the split between Boemer and Bessie, what's next for Michael Bromwich? We don't know what's next for Michael Bromwich but I really have not had a whole lot of time to think about what's next for me. We will have an announcement sometime in the near future that we'll bear on that either later this week or early next week. We can tape delay this. No. So I have not really given a lot of thought to what I'm gonna do long term. So there's very few times in history where you confront it with a crisis that people approach it methodically, comprehensively, thoughtfully without panic. And I've gotta tell you, I've been around this industry a long, long time, longer sometimes than I care to remember. And I actually think the approach that was taken here while there was a lot of fluttering at the beginning and a lot of people were very displeased at the end of the day. You've done an excellent job. And you ought to be commended both for the country, for the industry and for making things safe and more efficient going forward. Thank you very much, Frank. I very much appreciate that. Thank you Michael Bromwich.


So when you want to sell service design more easily and explain the value of service design to potential clients One of the things that works really well, and you should do is talk about the price a company pays When a service failure occurs so service failures are the moments we all know where Something didn't feel like it was designed for us as customers and it happens every day So talking about service failures makes a client realize Sort of the price they pay when it's a when their service isn't working now in the selling service design with confidence course That I'm running one of the students Marsha asked is there a difference a company pays the price of company pays between service failures that happen through tech errors or That happened due to process or human errors And I think that's a great question because there is a huge difference if you think about it usually when a service failure occurs Due to a tech error like you didn't receive a status update email or I don't know the flight booking system Gives you an error page or something like that. That's not personal and it's for a company It's quite easy to fix that, you know, you'll you'll be okay the next time they provide a solution but if a service failure occurs because it's a human error or process error like a Waiter that is being rude or the customer service people who don't show empathy now That's a big problem because what happens there is the price you pay is like you lose trust and Regaining trust requires so much effort from a company that the penalty like For human service failures is much much higher. So The next time you're going to have a conversation with a client and you want to show and demonstrate the value of service design let them think about service failures that they had to encounter and service failures where the Relationship was damaged trust issues stuff like that and let them think about Okay, how much is it worth to me to sort of make sure that that doesn't happen in our situation or that we can Minimize a risk that that happens in our situation and way to minimize that risk is to use service design to design those services anyway, you get the point Service failures and there was a big difference between service failures due to tech and due to human errors So great question Marshall. If you're interested in learning more on how to sell service design Check out the course selling service design with confidence and you'll be able to also ask questions like this the link to the course is down here and Yeah, that's it for this video. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next one


I know you all love PHP. How many people use PHP? Excellent, that's good. So this is nice and applicable to a lot of you. Okay, so I'm going to talk about building large-scale applications with PHP. So there's some challenges when trying to scale PHP. I'll talk about those briefly. So I'll talk about how to compile, well, just the basics of compiling PHP to C++ using hip-hop. And then I'll talk about some experiments with threading building blocks that colleagues at Comparalel have done. Okay, so obviously PHP has a lot of benefits to it. It's very widely available. And lots of people know how to use it, lots of software available in it. Then you have problems with this runtime. And for a lot of parallelisation problems you want to be able to thread, and the runtime then has no support for that, which is a shame because it's already put a lot of effort into making it all thread safe internally, so that it can run, for instance, inside Apache with its threaded NPM. And obviously, okay, you've got scaling problems and other languages you might want to use. Maybe you've got one language, you decide it's a one true language because it supports parallelising, or whatever it is. But the reality is that you can't do that because you've got programmers, you've got software that's already written in this language. And you don't really want to have a big fight over which language to move to either. So Facebook had these problems as well. And so they came along and they came up with this idea. Well, if we're using PHP, we've already made all these compromises in our language. It doesn't let us do anything crazily powerful. So we could actually transform a quite reasonable subset of it to C++ and then just compile that. And so HIPOP is a Facebook project to do just that. And they use it for Facebook, so it's got to be at least partially successful. Internally, it's thread safe and it uses Intel's threading building blocks for memory management. Sorry, my own selections with Paul Emmett. So, and to do that, they've actually had to reimplement a lot of the extensions to PHP in a thread safe way. So as an example of the difference between trying micro-optimising common functions versus converting the whole thing to a C++ programme and compiling it, I can just have a look at some Drupal figures that from a bunch of people that have taken the Drupal core and tried to, first of all, they took a function which they thought was called lots and lots. They implemented a C version of that and then they thought they'd graph it. Now, the difference between the micro-optimised function and the main one is sort of like the difference between these very slight steps. Whereas the ones I've circled here with a very perfect circle in red is the results that come from the HIPOP version of it. So it's really, it adds an order of, well, it's not really what we're making. It's like 30% over the version compared to the one with all of the typical PHP acceleration things like APC added to it. So it's really, do I know what function it was? I don't know. I could probably find it. It's just some small function called a lot. I'm not that familiar with the Drupal internal snow. Another one which a colleague Lent will be talking about soon is doing this to WordPress. Now, one of the things that you quite often hear about parallelisation is that, well, sometimes my problem doesn't suit parallelisation and in an abstract sense there are some problems that don't support parallelisation. But in a larger sense you've got questions like, does my application have any parallelisable bits in it? And the answer at least for WordPress, when you think, okay, this is a general blog, probably not much parallelisable, was that there was enough there that could be shredded off into parallel loops. Even with only a small amount of investigation over the code base, the colleague found several loops that didn't actually depend on, each iteration loop didn't depend on the version of it before it, so he could use a parallel four keyword. And with threading building blocks, what it does is it knows about how many processes there are on the system and so it's pretty good about setting up worker threads, leaving them around so we can use them quickly. And it's not really that slow to start a new thread. I think on Linux it's something like 10 or 20,000 cycles typically and a teardown can be a bit more depending on how many kernel objects there are, but even small loops can sometimes benefit from a little bit of threading. And TBV gives you lots of keywords to make that easy. So we've had positive results in that and there's a white paper that Slints will evaluate on later. So my point is there that it's not just a narrow bunch of specialist tasks, like weather modelling or what have you, or breaking Shahwan or Bitcoin, that sort of thing that can benefit from threading, quite a few things can as long as you are using a runtime which can do it very quickly. C++ you can create and teardown threads very quickly. And if you're using an interpreter it's a lot different because you've got lots of state to worry about to implement that thread so they don't typically work so well. But hip-hop is quite an attractive target for trying threading on this to accelerate lots of different applications. So I'll probably run out of five minutes there, but anyone who's got any comments or anything to say about that? Can you still run plain PHP for testing purposes when you introduce this parallel 4K? Right, so the question is can you still run regular PHP if you're using a parallel 4K? Well, with parallel 4 it's very easy. If the threading isn't there you just use a regular for loop and in general for a lot of the API it's like that. That you've identified something like a sort or a map or a filter or something like that which you think that part I'm going to try threading that and see what performance gains I get and you don't have to change the structure of the code more. More hardcore stuff like actually creating new threads that kind of do their own things and communicate between each other and that sort of thing. That's kind of outside of the scope of what we're trying to do because it's quite difficult to do that sort of thing. It's quite difficult to work with that kind of code and possibly you don't want to do that with the kind of applications you're using PHP for which is everyday applications. Okay, just a quick one. How you took this threading system you're using, how applicable is it to other CPU types? Is it specific for say Intel's particular CPUs or say can I use it on AMD or is it open source and so I can run it on this thing which is MIPS? Right, yeah so if you use the library with any of Intel's competitors processors it actually melts them? No, actually they haven't really done anything specific to Intel processors at all. The only thing really is that Intel processors have hyperthreading and most of the processors don't really do that. Intel processors are better at threading but for the same amount of die space they usually do more threads maybe not compared to something like Crazy Light and Agra. So they haven't hobbled it in any way. Under the hoods it's just positive threads, pre-threads. So the only thing they're doing is they've made a nice threading API so that you can use the advantages of threading and it's a GPL library actually. And one thing that I just mentioned, the TBB library itself has kind of back ends for different processor architectures and there are actually a lot of ports for different architectures. There is some currently unsupported ones which would be interesting like ARM but there is a lot of other ones already supported. Right, so thank you very much Sam. So just well thank you guys for paying attention, it's us. And on Friday the paper that it presented at the conference we will present it in full with all the details and code and we put two white papers and one it's Friday at half past 11 or something like that. Please check it on the website because it's wrongly printed here. It doesn't appear. So, thanks Sam.