Should we get started do some intros for Sean. And then we've got reviewing the minutes report back from the other committees and then really wanting to dive in on the hit. And then I also just shared two other things that I got that we could discuss during other business so how does that. How does that agenda sound. I'd like to add to other business a brief report on the history page for the month. Oh great. Great. Or we can do that as report backs from. I'm excited about it. Well, we can start with introductions. Yeah, Sean. Hi, I'm Shayna Casper. I use your pronouns. I'm on Kent street. And I don't feel like I've had any time for doing any. Learned self-learning right now. It's like very silly, but obviously I'm always learning, but always a little, little fried at the moment. But I'll pass it to Michael. Hi, I'm Michael Sherman. We have communicated by. By mail. I'm a member of this committee and also of the Montpelier. Community fund board. And I've been a resident of the city's. Since 1985. Yeah. Morning. I'm feeling con. I'm also a board member. I work for Norwich. University. And like, Shayna. I didn't do too much. Because it was a grading week. All the midterms and everything. So maybe next time I can share with something about the, like new learning opportunities. Jeremy. Morning. My name is Jeremy Baudry. Resident. Montpelier. On Elm street. And a member of. The community fund board. I work for Norwich. University. And like shine. I didn't do too much because it was a grading week. All the midterms and everything. So maybe next time I can share with something about the, like new learning opportunities. I can share with something about the community fund. And a member of the committee. All right. And Cameron. I'll just keep calling on people here. Hi, I'm Cameron. The staff support for this committee and the assistant city manager. And Lauren. Good morning, everyone. Lauren Hurl. I am the city council. I am the city council. I am the city council. I am the city council. I am the city council. I am the city council. One self learning thing. I've been reading the book, white rage. I don't know if anyone's read, but really. Just like. Fascinating and awful history of kind of like US history with. Like. Through. Like reconstruction and I'm like halfway through the book now, but it's just like. Like how people. Worked to uphold. You know, Jim Crow segregation, the white supremacy structure. So recommend that book. It's halfway through it. And Sean, do you want to introduce yourself? Sure. Good morning, everyone. My name is Sean Gilpin. I am the director of the housing division at the department of housing and community development, which is part of the agency of commerce and community development. And I'm happy to talk about, about VHIP. It's an exciting program. We're hoping to have up and running imminently. So yeah. And then I know you folks have some other stuff on your agenda. If it's all right and not too disrespectful, I might bow out after we cover the VHIP stuff to. Frankly, tackle some of the application materials that we're putting together for the. Hurdly before our press release comes out. I'm happy to meet you all. Thank you. Thanks. Let's just review and approve the minutes real quick. If folks have those pulled up, let me know if I can share my screen. If anyone had, thank you so much to Cameron for taking notes. Also, do we have a note taker for this meeting? Shoot. That's never. Yeah. Ready and I'll take notes today too. Thank you so much. But does anyone have any edits? I'll move to approve the minutes circulated. Michael made a motion. A second. Jeremy seconds all in favor. Hi. Hi. Any opposed? All right. And so then. For report backs. Michael, do you want to share a little bit about the website? And then does anyone else have other city committee report backs as well or other related report backs? Okay. I can just tell you that. We have two authors. I'm not sure. The first did the prehistory or the indigenous history of the area. And Paul Carnahan, the librarian at the Vermont historical society. Did the rest. I've gone through them. We've, they're both in second revisions. We're working out a few things. I'm not sure if, if the city folks want to vet them before we, before you put them up. Okay. Paul and I have had an exchange and we're not quite sure what to do next. And then after that, after we've gotten the text put together, Paul and I will look for photographs and other images and maybe Jess will be involved in that as well. We did say we did have a budget for this. Paul is receiving a stipend for his work. Jess said that that's part of his job. He wouldn't take a stipend. So that was very kind of him. And we have, we have $100 set aside for the use of foot images. If the historical society chooses to impose its usual fee. So I think we're getting close to the end and. So amazing, Michael. I'm so excited to read it and, and to have that as a resource. Like it just feels so like such a. Clear step and like. Thing to check up off and like there's not often in this work, you're like, awesome, we did the thing. And this feels like we're, we're getting close to doing that check. Right. Anything else. That's my excitement. I don't know. I think it's good too. It's a big improvement over what we have. So. And then yeah, anything else from, yeah, the school board meeting, the, um, it feels like a million years ago and yet it was just two weeks ago of, um, from, you know, from, from our last meeting of, of, um, you know, police review, budget school board. Yeah. All of, all the different things that we're all engaged in. So, um, I don't know if we have a public update on police review. Um, and Michael, please, Cameron, um, add in. But our last, um, meeting, the, my failure police department came in and gave, um, a series of updates on actions that they were taking that were. Kind of putting into action the, uh, a set of the police review committee recommendations. And, you know, there was like. A suite of them that the police department and police review committee recommendations. And then there's still a handful of items that were recommended that the police department is either like just not acting on yet because there's more work to be done or figuring out and some things that they didn't support. So those are still kind of in progress, but, um, a lot of like training and, um, resources, sources around that body cameras and other things. There's, um, just a lot of work going on a better transparency around data. Um, and, um, and, um, um, Um, anyway, it was very encouraging to see a lot of work underway of moving forward. A lot of the recommendations. Um, and of course, like more work to be done to follow through on. All of them and, um, take out some of the ones that were, I think more controversial and see what happens with those with counsel. Just say the. The review committee is no longer an active committee. Um, but, um, um, I think the folks who showed up are doing this as a kind of volunteer. Um, well, it was all volunteer, but, um, Kind of watch dog and reference, you know, so if the, if we'll have it, we'll have other meetings in the future. Um, just to sit, you know, to keep up with the, what the police. And the city are doing. And I'm not sure what will happen is with. Whether the city will appoint another committee, but I don't think it's decided yet. I think I don't know what city council has been thinking. Yeah, I don't think we, we haven't even really talked about that yet. I think it's like, let's. Focus on implementing the first set of recommendations and then figure out what the next phase looks like. It's my sense. Great. Um, all right. Can we hand it over to Sean to give an overview on the hip and, um, and yeah, what's going, what's going on with you guys. Or great. Thanks so much again. And, um, yeah. So I'll jump right in. So, uh, VHIP is, um, it's actually a, so it currently stands for Vermont housing improvement program. Um, there's been some, uh, changes over, over the eye. Um, it's been, it's been a note. It's been called investment. It's been called, um, incentive, but we're going with improvement. So Vermont housing improvement program. And it's actually a, um, a type of program that our department has pitched for a number of years. And unfortunately, um, due to just other political ramifications that hadn't gotten much traction or at least, um, the bills that it usually got associated with over the past couple of years didn't end up making it through the legislature. Um, however, we were lucky enough last year. Um, to be able to use some of the cares act funding, the coronavirus relief funds, um, to run a program, um, that was actually called the rehousing recovery program. So if you see RHRP and wonder why, um, that acronyms being used, um, we used cares act funding, um, to run a substantially similar program to what we're hoping to launch again. And the idea is to, um, working through the five home ownership centers throughout the state. So it covers, they cover every region of the state for you guys. It would be down street housing and community action or excuse me, community development. Um, just usually referred to as down street. You guys are probably familiar with them. Um, so. Working with the five home ownership centers throughout the state, um, to identify private property owners who have, um, potential rental units that are offline or, or have other habitability issues, you know, code, you know, rental housing health code issues. Um, and providing relatively, um, small grants and I say relatively small in sort of the context of, uh, affordable housing development. So grants of up to $30,000 per unit. Um, with the VHIP, it's a 10% or excuse me, a 20% match is required. And the goal is to bring these units back online, um, and rented at affordable rates for at least five years. And, um, we were able to successfully bring online about 240, excuse me, 249 units of housing this way in the, um, the CARES funded program. We, uh, originally had asked for, uh, general funds, um, to continue the program and the governor's budget requests last year requested $5 million dollars each year for three years, um, to run the program. The legislature ended up actually giving us $5 million of American Rescue Plan Act funds, uh, which admittedly, you know, it's understandable that they wanted to use, you know, some of the federal, um, funds that are coming into the state. Unfortunately for us, that complicates things a little bit because of the, the required, um, uses of those funds. So, um, the way that we're running the program or at least start proposing to run the program, um, in the coming year is, uh, so again, it would be grants of up to $30,000 per unit. The units need to be vacant because of code non-compliance. Um, there still needs to be that five year affordability covenant and that, um, will restricts, um, the rental rates to what's, uh, sort of wonkily called the HUD fair market rent, which in colloquial terms, that's just the, the maximum amount of rent that, um, uh, section eight or housing choices voucher, um, can pay. So the idea is to keep the units affordable for at least five years and also the, um, the sort of big caveat with the ARPA is that, um, the units actually must be rented to somebody who is exiting homelessness. And so the property owner is going to be required to, um, and that's also a five year covenant. So the property owner is going to be required to work with what's called the coordinated entry lead organization. And so if folks aren't familiar, we have a, a network of homeless service providers that, um, department of housing and urban development HUD refers to as the continuum of care. Um, and Vermont actually over the last couple of years has implemented, um, basically a, a data management system. So that when people, um, you know, are sort of, sort of touch the system, so to speak. So enter a shelter or, um, receive assistance from, uh, from a homeless shelter provider. Um, their information is collected, um, in a secure, uh, system. And that's called coordinated entry. And the idea there is that, you know, if, if I were, um, to need services from, let's say, uh, a shelter in, in Barry or, or Montpelier, and then, um, you know, a couple of weeks later moved up to the Burlington area. Uh, I wouldn't have to redo an application and, and all the rest of it. They already have the info in there. So the idea is to kind of streamline sort of one, one point of entry to the whole system. So that's just a little background on why we're choosing to use the coordinated entry lead organizations, because they're well equipped to sort of make referrals to landlords. Um, so that's, um, that's sort of in a nutshell. So I'll stop there. I know that was a lot and, um, take some questions and then I'll happy to elaborate. I have a question, um, to start. So with, with this latest round of funding that is focused on folks coming out of homelessness, or it sounds like the, I think coordinating care organization is what you use. That's kind of makes the connection between the individual that needs housing and various kind of private landlords who might be interested in the pro and this funding. For rental units, getting rental units online. Um, is that really the only kind of conduit. For folks to, to get housing. Is that the process? Um, that's, that is how we envision it working this time around. Um, and, and that particular, um, That particular nexus between the ARPA funding and the homelessness, that might, um, That might evolve over time. If we do end up getting either additional funding or different funding sources for the program. But yeah, the idea is that the, um, coordinated entry lead agencies are kind of the best, um, suited to quickly make the referral and, and make ongoing referrals because we are going to require, um, for that five year period that at turnover, the, the property owner needs to go back to the coordinated entry agency to, to bring in, you know, new. So it's not a, it's not a one, you know, for one and done. Um, but yeah, they are, they're kind of the more sophisticated, um, groups. Uh, And one of the, just for a little context too, in the, in the previous program, the 2020 program that we ran, um, we kind of did a hybrid where the affordability covenant was there. The same, um, for five years, but the, um, The property owner only had to, um, Consider three referrals from the continuum of care organizations, um, which is a bit of a broader definition of organizations than the, than coordinated entry. Uh, and it ended up, being quite, quite chaotic and oftentimes the landlords, the property owners didn't really know who they were supposed to be talking to or they were getting calls from a lot of different organizations. So we're trying to streamline and make it a little more concise about exactly who they should be, um, going to just to make it a little, a little simpler and, and more successful in trying to, to serve people who are most in need. Um, Did that answer the question? Sure. Michael. Um, in the, in the first memo that we're, that I saw, which I guess is the 2020. There was a, there were two parts. There was the rental housing investment. It was two minutes. Proposals two million. Then there was a home ownership. A purchase and rehabilitation of a million dollars set aside. And 25% of that was a minority ownership. What's happened. You didn't mention either of those in your report. Are they still part of the program? So they are kind of separate. Um, you know, we, we pitched them to the legislature as, as two sort of. Two sides to the same coin. Uh, I'll readily admit that until, uh, until about six, six months ago, um, our department consisted of me and one other individual who dealt with, uh, mobile home parks. Um, so we have only just been able to expand our staff a little bit. And we're also overseeing the, um, the rental assistance program and mortgage assistance. So admittedly, we, we pitched them to the legislature as two sort of two sides to the same coin. Um, and then we also, um, we also have a home ownership program and mortgage assistance. So admittedly we have not gotten this home ownership rehab program up and running, although we have the appropriation for it. And we'll, once we get VHIP going again, um, we'll probably pivot to, to opening that back up. But the idea there, um, is, is, is similar, but on the home ownership side, basically to provide, um, essentially construction loans for first time Vermont home buyers that needs immediate work. And right now it's really difficult to get financing for that. You know, we've been hearing anecdotally, especially from realtors that, you know, people might get qualified for a mortgage, but then as soon as the, uh, inspection comes through, the bank is no longer interested in, in, um, Financing a particular home because of the repairs that are needed. So our idea there is to, um, is to start and operate a program that would be ongoing, um, to kind of do a similar, similar thing with, with addressing habitability and rental units through VHIP, but, um, have it be for, uh, first time home buyers, uh, who, who might, um, be interested in, in purchasing and fixing up homes. Um, I will say we actually have been doing some research and have found, um, there's, there's actually a HUD program that might be a really great match with this. And we've been in discussions with the Vermont housing finance agency as well, which has a down payment assistance program. So we've been tinkering a little bit with how the, how this home ownership side will work. Um, but we're still a ways away before we can, um, for ready to launch, launch that. And is the minority ownership set aside still part of the plan? It's still part of the plan, although, um, the, I, I hesitate and this might seem like parsing words. I hesitate to call it a set aside because there's some fair housing implications, um, for, um, so I think, I think it would be more accurate to call it a goal. And we, um, and we're going to achieve that goal by sort of specifically reaching out, um, as best we can to BIPOC and other minority communities in order to, in order to make sure that they have, you know, enough access to these particular funds, um, in order to, in order to reach that. Um, but I would, I would be hesitant to call it a true set aside. Well, I was just quoting from the, from the memo. Yeah. No, I, I appreciate that. And, uh, I, I regret the, uh, the wording of, of how we put that together, but, um, just want to be, want to be clear. And did the legislature have to approve that change from a goal, from set aside to a goal, or is that. I believe in the, um, well, we're actually in an interesting situation where both VHIP and this home ownership program were described in. Um, the, um, the, um, S 79, which had a, uh, larger rental housing safety and registry components. Um, in the quirks that are our legislature, the policy bill ended up getting vetoed by the governor because of concerns about the rental registry, um, which is in my humble opinion, rather unfortunate. Um, however, the appropriation did actually make it into the budget. Um, and the last thing that VHIP up and running is we're in kind of a, an interesting legal situation where the policy describing the program, um, wasn't passed into statute, but the appropriation was allowed. So we had to figure out whether or not we were legally even allowed to run the program. And after a lot of consultation with, um, with various lawyers, um, it was determined that we do our department has the statutory authority to create programs to address housing. Um, and, um, um, I don't know if you have the appropriation, we were able to move forward, but it delayed things. So that's a long way of saying, um, the legislature, uh, did not actually, and, and for what it's worth in S 79, I believe, um, the change was made to call it, um, to call it a goal rather than a set aside for those reasons. And I'm hopeful, um, my understanding, and I don't want to speculate too much. Um, but my understanding is there's been some conversations with the chairpersons of the two housing committees in the, you know, in the house and the Senate and the governor's office. And I think they've come to a reasonable, um, uh, reasonable, uh, agreement compromise is the word that's escaping me a reasonable compromise, um, on what will have to be a new S 79. They'll do a strike all because the dates that were included in that, um, have passed. And so they can't, they can't simply do a veto. So it would be impractical to simply do, try to do a veto override. So there's going to be some changes. And I'm pretty confident that early in the session, we'll see, um, we'll see the actual statutory language pass. And that'll also help us kind of move forward with the homeowner, um, aspects. Uh, so yeah, that's all that's, that's as much a reading of tea leaves and looking into the crystal ball as I'll go for the next legislative session. I've been around just long enough to know that never expects the expected. And it's, and it's probably, uh, anomaly that the, the money is there, but the policy isn't usually in my, you know, watching Congress still pass a bill and say, Oh yeah, we'll do this and that, and then they don't fund it. Yep. That is, that is, uh, my experience as well. Um, so this, this is quite, uh, quite a, uh, cart before the horse situation here. Congratulations. Yeah. Thanks. You said the funds. That's good. Yeah. I will say, um, if, if there's anything beneficial out of this pandemic, it's been an incredible amount of resources going into housing and homeless service. Um, it's been, it's been amazing to go from a lack of resources to suddenly, uh, more than we, we can implement. Um, so we've got a rapidly increasing unhoused population here and no place to put folks. So what is the realistic timeline of some of these opening up for folks, even if they're in the continuum of care? Is there going to also side note, is there going to be preference for people who are already in our community or will people be like trucking into communities that have these programs? Um, the first off the timeline, I expect that will be, um, so let me back up. So the homeownership centers on down street included have already begun sort of informal waiting lists of interested property owners. So they've got people in the queue who are interested, understand the parameters and are ready to begin construction as soon as they get the green light. I'm hopeful that, um, the program will sort of officially be launched and we'll start, um, Start projects prior to Christmas. Um, we're, we're being pretty aggressive about trying to get this, this going. So this month I think, um, is reasonable that that properties will start, um, start work. We have a requirements, um, in the agreement letters between the homeownership centers and the property owners that, um, the properties need to be completed and, uh, and occupied within 18 months of signing the agreement letter. We worked a lot faster than that last year, um, just because of the nature of the cares act funding. So I think, um, we'll probably start to see, um, units opening up in the spring or possibly even before it sort of depends a bit on, um, It depends a bit on, you know, the, the amount of work that needs to be done to a particular unit, you know, some, some might, might be relatively small fixes that can happen quickly.  Um, so it's, I, it won't be a silver bullet to, to, you know, completely eradicate homelessness in the particular area, but we're hopeful that it will, it will be a good dovetail into other, um, other efforts going on. And the, um, the vision is to, as far as sort of the locale of individuals, um, the coordinated entry lead organizations do each have particular regions that they work with. So the idea is to try to keep people as close to where, um, as close to the community that they're a part of as possible. So, um, we're certainly not encouraging, you know, significant movements of, of populations from, from one region to another. Who's our coordinated entry organization in this area? You know, that is a great question. And I wish I looked it up before meeting with you guys. Um, they're admittedly a bit, um, it's a bit outside of my, uh, it's my wheelhouse. Um, you know, we, we kind of, um, we typically deal more with the bricks and sticks, if you will. And it's, it's agency of human services that, that, um, overseas the COCs. I do have a list though, um, that, uh, I can look up and send sends to follow up, um, on the, uh, invitation email with that, that information. Would it be capstone? Um, I'm not, it, it very well could be that seems the most likely. Um, but sometimes it's, um, sometimes there's, there's other organizations that actually do the, the data input. Um, but capstone is definitely part of the continuum of care. And they'll, they'll be involved, I imagine in the referrals. Um, do you know if, do they have a landlord liaison program at capstone? Well, I think they used to, um, I was on the board for several years. Um, and I'm pretty sure there was that there was such a program. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know if that's still the case. They got sort of out of the, the land loading stuff. Um, they unloaded their own properties and I don't know. Um, what, what their relationship is with other landlords. Uh, the other kind of technical question I had is. And maybe we don't need to know this in our committee, but where's the kind of flow of information in terms of. Um, um, I know that this is a, um, um, I'm not sure if it's on Peeler city understanding. This is the breadth of this program and how many units we might be expect to come online in the next 18 months is that this downstream on that information? Are they interfacing with other city groups? Um, I guess just in general too, like what does $3 million mean for the state to. Yeah. million allocation and it's going to be distributed, like I said, between the five homeownership centers. I don't have the budgets that they provided right in front of me, but it's not going to be a million apiece. There's kind of differing interests. It's actually, interestingly enough, the lowest amount of property owner interest is in Chittenden County, and I think the highest is up in the Northeast Kingdom. I don't recall the numbers that Down Street is considering. We anticipate that with that five million, we'll probably translate into about 140 to 145 units throughout the state, so it's not an enormous amount, but it's definitely, you know, it's not insignificant. There has been a lot of legislator and gubernatorial interest in this program. I don't, again, don't want to speculate too much, but I think it's safe to say that there's going to be an ask from the governor's office in the Budget Adjustment Acts to increase the amount of funding for this program in particular, and one of the reasons why we're kind of launched, we're getting wait lists, and there'll be hopefully next week a press release on this directing people to contact their homeownership centers if there's interest, is to kind of develop some support for the program and really be able to articulate why this should be funded at a higher rate than the five million. For what it's worth right now, especially with increased material and labor costs, we're seeing a traditional sort of multifamily subsidized housing development costing about $300,000 per unit, so the idea of bringing units online for $30,000 per unit, one-tenth of that public investment is naturally getting a lot of attention with appropriators, so my fingers are crossed that we'll see this program grow in the amount of money that's available for it, and hopefully the interest will stay there, so all that's sort of, again, a long answer, sorry I keep being so verbose in these, but there will likely be more interaction between, more information sharing between the homeownership centers and localities this time around than in what seemed like a one-off with the CARES funding. It's also important, well, good to note that our department for the first time ever has actually been able to hire a communications director, so we now actually have somebody who can specifically get some of this information out, you know, in the before times it was just me writing press releases and updating our website along with actually administering all the programs, so I'm hopeful that we'll be able to be a conduit for more information for interested municipalities, but also- Do you have to opt in or anything, or is it, I mean this is just happening, I don't have to like, it's just to get the word out, right? Yeah, there's no opt in or opt out, it's working with, you know, private property owners to improve properties. I would, you know, I would hope that there wouldn't be any municipalities that want to opt out of improving the housing stock in their area, but I'm sure there's some healthy concern about exactly what that would mean. One of the reasons I think why this program has gotten quite a bit of traction and talk is that it's not concentrating poverty, it is, you know, trying to spread people out so that you don't, you know, it's perhaps a little bit more palatable to have an apartment here or there as opposed to, say, you know, purchasing a hotel and running it as a transitional housing that kind of can get people a little concerned about the effects of that. But no, there's not a particular, I mean, not a particular opt out, I'm sure the homeownership centers would be eager to partner with, or I'm sure Downstreet would be eager to partner with you guys to, you know, to broadcast the availability of the program and we would certainly encourage that. That was going to be my next question, what can a committee like this do to be of some help to you, if anything? You know, off the top of my head, I don't know that I have a particular plan for a group like this other than, yeah, I am happy to, you know, keep you folks on my list of groups to contact when things change or more things become available to, you know, reach out to whatever your own networks or, you know, distributions, lists serves, the things like that. I think we'll learn more sort of as things evolve and roll out and we see what the actual interest is. But yeah, I'll be happy to stay in touch as things evolve. Has there been any thinking about, like, I mean, I guess Michael's question kind of got at it, but like, are there any barriers that you see from local city like ordinances or anything that make this more difficult, any like challenges that a city could get ahead of like ours or their opportunities on the flip side of like, you know, like matching some of our own ARPA funds too for the city got to like expand or like put the program into greater effect more quickly and, you know, get more housing units online or like any anything like that that from a city government level you're seeing would be a help or a particular hindrance to making this as effective as possible. Sure. No, that's a great question. You know, I'll definitely reach out to the homeownership centers and ask about barriers last time. To be honest, often off the top of my head, you know, I don't think that the 2020 program really had too many municipal barriers, partly because we're dealing with existing largely dealing with existing structures. So the level of permitting is has been relatively minimal, although, you know, that's always we did allow for new unit creation, but not in I don't think we did any any actual new buildings, you know, it would be like converting a carriage house or something like that or, you know, creating a basement apartment or what have you. So I don't know that there's a huge municipal barrier, I think the biggest barriers to be honest are going to be labor availability and material availability. I know that that was that was definitely a difficulty in 2020, although fingers crossed, it's not quite as you know, the supply chains aren't quite as stretched as they were last year, but we definitely aren't back to, you know, pre pandemic situation, especially when it comes to costs. I'm sorry, there was a second part to your question that is polluting me. Oh, just just like, are there opportunities that like cities could have to, you know, partner in some way or make their own investments or something that could expand it? Yeah, our dollars as well. Yeah, I'll be candid. I don't think we've really considered a whole lot of sort of municipal partnering on on the appropriation side, but I'm certainly happy to have that conversation. I don't see why it wouldn't be possible, especially if there's, you know, increased interest if there's if there's more interest with a particular homeownership center in terms of number of interested property owners, then then funds available. I don't see why municipality couldn't commit to applying ARPA funds. I'll actually speak with our general council and see if it makes more sense for, yeah, I mean, I think we could definitely share our grant agreements with municipalities and see if you guys wanted to do sort of follow a similar model and just enhance the amount that's available. One, I do want to be cautious about reporting requirements with the ARPA dollars are pretty stringent, so I definitely want to consult and make sure that, first of all, that everything's being kept track of so that, you know, a future audit, which is almost inevitable with these funds, doesn't come back with serious findings and also just that from an administrative burden, if we're already doing reporting, you know, there's not really a good sense of why, you know, we'd have a municipality reporting on the same projects as well. So I would just want to make sure that we're coordinating that, but I think it's an interesting thought, especially if you're hoping to put ARPA funds towards housing development. Go ahead. Oh, no, no, I was just going to say, you know, we're we're still like figuring out what we're going to do and lots of needs. I just, you know, housing is a top priority of our strategic plan and of our council.  So if there was an ability to take some portion and even like sub granted to you all to use it and then you do the reporting or something like, it would just be interesting to know if that was even an option. Yeah, yeah, but I think that would probably be perhaps the most efficient. If and I'll, like I said, I'll speak with our general council and kind of pose the question and let him mull it over. Yeah. Thanks. Sorry, Michael, I'm sorry, sorry, sorry. That's going to say, is there a role here for something of an organization like Habitat for Humanity to be involved in some of these projects? I mean, I know that they usually, a normal way of operating is that the potential owner has to put up some capital and some sweat equity. But it would be one way to lower the building costs if you have a volunteer core, but I don't know if that's, you know, would that fit within the federal and your guidelines for how this gets done? Or do you have any restrictions on who's the card? Who is the contractor or things like that? Yeah, so we don't, we don't have restrictions on who the contractor is. Fortunately, because one benefit of ARPA is that a lot of the, a lot of the other requirements, including environmental review and things like that are actually waived because it's considered, you know, a disaster relief program, essentially, which is generally helpful just for expediency, although we're still, you know, doing sort of cursory reviews just to make sure funds are being spent appropriately and not putting people at risk. That said, I don't know that there, I don't believe there's been any conversation with Habitat. My initial reaction is, again, because this is ARPA, the focus on households exiting homelessness is in large part due to not only the need, but the fact that they're considered, that population is considered categorically eligible. So basically, if somebody is the, you know, the U.S. Treasury has essentially put in their guidance that if somebody is experiencing homelessness, then they're automatically eligible for COVID relief funding, largely to keep people out of congregate shelters, where obviously the virus can spread more easily. So I know that Habitat is typically, at least my understanding is they've typically focused on home ownership for, and so I don't know if the, if sort of the ends, the end user, the end resident would necessarily align with this round, but I'd definitely be interested in, you know, if we, as I think I mentioned before, we're really hoping to turn VHIP into a permanent ongoing program. And I think the program parameters will change and, you know, just generally evolve as we change funding sources and sort of see the longer term effects. So I definitely think there might be an opportunity to have a conversation with Habitat to be completely honest right now. It's a lot of coordination, even just with between our shop and the five homeownership centers and the coordinated entry lead organizations. So I'd like to get the program sort of up and running and moving before we start bringing in more, more organizational stakeholders, just for the expediency of getting, getting money out into the streets. I had a clarifying question, you know, I've been talking a lot with some of the folks who've experienced homelessness here and a lot of them are very frustrated and have given up on the coordinated entry continuum of care process. So would those folks be able to work directly with Down Street or do they need to be in the queue through the continuum of care? Yeah, that's a that's a good question. I think right now the way the way we are structuring it is requiring a pass through with with coordinated entry. I think we can probably if that if that turns into or becomes, you know, a bottleneck or a reason why folks aren't getting getting into housing, their housing needs. I think I think we'll definitely consider opening it back up to to the larger continuum of care. The one struggle as well for you know, folks who are not not working with coordinated entry is is whether or not they have the subsidies that would be likely necessary to get them back into kind of a permanent housing situation. So we definitely want to make sure that we're not setting folks up for you know, for a failed tenancy that could you know, further make it difficult for them to to find rental, you know, other rental housing in the future because of checkered history. So it's the questions well taken. And I think I'll be sort of diplomatic and say that it's a it's a it's a difficult balancing act to try to make sure that we're we're setting people up for success. Yeah, does anyone have any other questions? Great. Well, again, thanks. Thanks so much for for giving me all this time to chat about this this program and for your interest in it. I'll definitely stay in touch as things as things evolve. So you're aware of sort of where we're at. And yeah, we'll be updating our website and working with the all the HOC's to kind of make sure that there's opportunities for folks to learn more about the program. And yeah, if if there's any follow up questions or you know, things you think of later, certainly don't hesitate to reach out and and I'll do my best to to answer questions. Thank you. Thank you. Great. Take care. Have a great rest of your day. Thank you. You too. Because do we have any like follow up from that or like other? Yeah, next steps. Well, I actually had a quick follow up question for you, Cameron. Curious about what you've been hearing from homeless individuals about frustrations you working with, you know, they can coordinate entry organization. Well, I think a lot of the frustration that I've been hearing is is that people can't get there's there's no places to go. And so why would they wait through all of this paperwork and being checked in on and like, why would they go through all this process is to be told at the end, there's nowhere for you to go. You're on a list, right? So it's also very hard for people to get connected because most people are told to connect through these things through 211, right? And so they're either being put on really long holds or they can't get a call back because they don't have phones. And so it's just it's a very complex system to connect with. And it's not easy. And so you kind of have to know what you're supposed to be doing, right? So I'm interested to see how this I'd like to talk to Down Street more about how they and, you know, the state intend to get the word out that this these apartments are becoming available because if they are neat, if you need to be on the list now to be considered, then how are we getting people on that list? How are we making it easier for them to connect? You know, there's a whole host of things. We're trying to get good Sam and another way into the transit center now to have more phones and connect people to the continuum of care that way. It's just it's a hard it's it's just it's a bureaucracy. It's a very intense state bureaucracy system that people have a really hard time managing when they have no one to support them to walk through that, right? So I would say that this is just another layer of difficulty, honestly, to to getting into the housing. But I mean, if it becomes available, maybe by that time, they'll have a better sense of how many people would be eligible and how many apartments are available after that, right? It should be great to know. Yeah, cool. Thanks. Appreciate that. Yeah, and then I just want to recognize to that, I think, three unhoused folks in Montpelier have passed away in the past months. And so past couple of weeks, right? No, I don't. There was a really weird email chain that came out in the last week, discussing folks who had passed away and put a number between three and six. We don't like I asked my police to look at any deaths that happened and they didn't find any in our in Montpelier. So those are very unsubstantiated. I don't really like it when people do those things over emails. But I have I don't know what people are talking about. So maybe maybe we just don't know about them. But I am going to go ahead and say probably not. Okay. And then I don't I'm actually I'm going to pause there because I was a whole other thing to open up. But maybe can we just circle back real quick to the budget? So I know those were due yesterday, I believe. So the budget ask for stipends for city committees. And then just there's any update on creative discourse? No, any update? What are you looking for for the stipend for city committees? I mean, y'all were still sort of like looking at options and how you want to package that. You know, our next council meeting is the eighth. And then I don't know what the next one is the 15th. I think the that it was like to draft a like kind of a final proposal with of the 42,000 but not having there be the like not not figuring out all of the nuts and bolts of the implementation of it but putting it into the budget so that it could start in, you know, we could figure out the nuts and bolts of the implementation by July. But wanting to like bring that to the to the city council as kind of the the line item proposal. And so I think that all that is in the budget for 42,000, right? And so I'm just yeah, what's what are other? Do we have any other next steps there? All right. Yeah, if you want that to be on council's agenda to look at a proposal would need to be in the hands of staff, like you're written.  Friday this week or the 17th. We hear me. Oh, God. So I mean, is this going to be like often the way the budget has been presented in recent years is like, there's like core services and then there's like things that either committees like this are asking for and like council kind of like debates which of those we could like are going to include in the budget? Like is this just going to be part of a list?  Like, does it have to be it doesn't have to be like a standalone agenda item on the no, no, no, it just has to go to it just has to go to Kelly, our finance director, it just needs to go to Kelly for inclusion. That's it. I just mentioned the council dates because we're discussing the budget at council and so Kelly needs it at least in time to include in her materials. So basically be writing up the proposal into like a one page memo, sending it on Friday and then being on the city council on next Wednesday to discuss it. Is that right? Well, it would. So it Lauren is right. We're trying to pitch all of the things sort of at once. And so we're starting to talk about the budget next agenda and then the budget conversation will basically extend through January. So just the sooner is better. Jeremy as the resident budget guru. Is that something that you could do or would it be helpful to have someone else such as myself to just kind of write up the general proposal? Well, curious to know if there is any kind of template for this. We can. Okay. So I can't do that this week. For sure. Other than maybe responding to something could get into it next week. If no one else wants to take the lead on that. I think that would be great. Yeah, I'm like, looking at my just looked at my calendar and I was like, well, it's not gonna happen before Friday. So if we're gonna hold off, then I think that would be great for me if you could. Yeah, that's not good for folks. But sounds up enough. Okay, I'll do my best to build some kind of a one page proposal. And then share out for you all to comment on individually over the course of next week. Cool. Thank you so much. And for those comments, we can send those will email those comments directly back to you, Jeremy and not to the whole great. Cool. And then for creative discourse of first signing the part phase two piece, I just didn't know if there was any update from the camera there. Sorry, I was trying to loop both of those things in together. No, that would need to go on a council agenda, but I haven't, I haven't touched that. So I will, I will look at that and I will have a report for you by next time on what, what steps are taking and what we need to do. Cool. Thanks so much. And then the other business, I just wanted to share these two things that I had gotten with a request to share. So one is that Human Rights Commission, HRC, I think this was called scorecard of Montpelier that they got two weeks ago. And I just thought it was interesting to be interesting as a committee just to like look at what they're tracking around non-discrimination laws, like the municipality as an employer, municipal services, law enforcement and leadership on LGBTQ equity. Obviously, this is like coming from a very perspective around, you know, like LGBTQ work. And I think there's some, you know, this was important for for all of the work. And so just wanted to share that thing. I thought it was interesting as well. And then I got the this email from Peter Kalman with a request to share it with C. Jack. We don't have time to discuss it today, but the proposal of pallet shelters for folks experiencing homelessness in Montpelier, I guess I'll kind of go on record of that. I think that this is, you know, would have to kind of be at the very minimum, like a bandaid of kind of this like broader problem that we're talking about. And I'd like to kind of more focus our committee's efforts on like structural change. And and and but I'm open for, you know, having more conversation if folks are interested. I'll say that I had seen this proposal before Peter contacted me and I have a long email response suggesting that there were a lot of unanswered questions here about infrastructure and permits and and and until and lesson until they could get those straightened out. I didn't think I thought it was premature to come to our committee with any kind of endorsement. We could encourage them to move forward, but I'm happy to share the my response to Peter with you. If you want to see that, I'll send it to you. To you, Shayna, and you can just share it out. So all right, so between the next meeting, Jeremy's going to write up the memo to be able to share with the city council. Cameron's going to check in with creative discourse. Michael's going to share this the response I suppose on any other kind of immediate next steps. So we're still thinking December 15th. Yeah. Next meeting. Does that work for folks? Yeah, 15th at eight o'clock. And normally I suggest to folks that they take a holiday breather end of December through the first few weeks of January where we all decide so we can talk about that at your next meeting. So I have an agenda for next meeting of the memo for council read the stipends, creative discourse contract updates, a history update for the website if we have one, if that's ready. And then we'll be talking about holiday scheduling. Does that sound right?  Yes, please. Okay.


Hello, welcome to this webinar. My name is Emily Hermanns. I work for Ghent University and for OpenAir. And today I will be presenting this introductory webinar on open access to research data and data management for Horizon 2020 projects. So the European Commission started with an open research data pilot in 2014 with the start of Horizon 2020. This was first limited pilot and is now the default option. The European Commission wanted to foster open science to make science more available for everybody and also try to avoid the application of research and lots of resources with this pilot. This pilot has two main pillars. One is research data management. For this pillar, the data management planning is an important factor. And the other pillar of the pilot was to try to broaden the access to research data. So there is also a component of open access to research data. So let's first look at the first pillar, data management planning. What is data management? Data management is actually part of good research. It gives context to the data that you collect. It explains it. It describes your research process so that other people understand your data and it provides information about data sets. So even people outside of your project will understand what your research is about and how it relates to your data. It's also about storing data. Make sure that you have copies of your data. Make sure that the right people have access to the data files, both during and after the project. And it's about deciding what data is valuable and what data to keep and what data to delete. The last part of data management is about access to data. So can you make your data open? If you can, you can gain more impact and you can use data repositories to open your data. And the goal of opening data is increasing transparency to your data and making data available to more people. But what is open data? Well, there's a difference between open data and data sharing. Open data is free access to reuse, repurpose and redistribute your data at no cost to anybody. Sharing data on the other hand is restricted access. So you set a certain conditions or limits to the amount of people that can view your data. For example, if you share data with colleagues, that's sharing data and not really open data. The difference is similar to free hacks for all and more exclusive hacks under certain conditions. So why should we be bothered with data management and open data? Well, there are some advantages, both for researchers and for society. First of all, it prevents data loss. A lot of data sets are not accessible anymore. 80% of data is lost after 10 years. So it maximizes the usefulness of your data set and of your research. You can also write a data paper and get credit for it. And it helps research and society in a way that it promotes integrity and transparency and can help citizens science to work with your data. And last but not least, open data has a much longer shelf life and you can get credit for your data. So these are the benefits of data management and open data. So it's no wonder that TEC is promoting open data. Which areas are participating and how do you know what to do? Well, in 2014, it started with limited pilots. This means that only some areas were part of the open research data pilot. And you can check article 29.3 in your grant agreement to know if you're part of the open research data pilot. There was a guideline to make a data management plan for every data set that you had. And there was a possibility to opt in if you were not part of the pilot or to opt out. Starting from 2017, all Horizon 2020 projects take part in the open research data pilot. So participating is the default option for all projects. There was a change. You only have to provide one data management plan for every project. But the possibility to opt out at state in place. So what are some conditions for opting out?  So there are a lot of reasons that apply. Exploitation of results or protecting personal data. Or if your project does not generate data at all, you can choose to opt out. You can opt out at any stage in your project. So even if you are not sure what kind of data you will produce or if you will be able to take part, you can opt out at the label stage. So you can completely opt out to a project amendments or completely or partially opt out. And then you can describe the issues that you have in your project data management plan. Remember that it's not necessary to make all data sets open. You can again describe these issues in your project data management plan. So the mantra of the EC is try to make your data as open as possible. But if necessary, you can keep certain data sets closed. You can find all this information in the fair data management guidelines. They give you information on how to comply with open research data pilots. It notes the extension of the pilots. It clarified some concepts, what fair data is. It explains what the DMP is and when it should be updated. It knows what happened at proposal, submission and evaluation states. And it explains that costs are eligible. So costs for data management or data storing, for example, are eligible in Horizon 2020. It also provides a template for a data management plan. This is not obligatory to use this template, but it is highly recommended. So you can check the guidelines online. What are the requirements of this data pilot? What should you do? Well, first of all, you should write a data management plan. And after the project, you should deposit the data that you want to store in a data repository to get it with all the necessary information to validate your results. This can be information about the data sets, information about your projects, can, for example, be metadata, everything that is needed to understand the data and your research. And then if possible, through this data repository, you can open up your data. The timeline that you can follow with your data management plan is as follows. At proposal stage, you do not have to write the data management plan yet.  And if you will be able or you think you will be able to provide access to it. So it's not a data management plan, but it's a good idea to think at this stage about your budget. Will you need budget for storing your data, for example? You can plan it in proposal stage as well. At six months is first deadline for a first version of your DMP. And then it should be updated. It should be updated if there's any changes in data or in the policy or if there are changes in your consortium. And at periodic evaluation, you should also make sure that your data management plan is up to date. And at the final review, you will need to deliver a final version of your data management plan. So as you can see, a data management plan is not a fixed document. It's a living document that needs updating. Because at the beginning of the project, you may not know all the information yet about your data set. So it's not a problem if at the beginning you have just a smaller, cohesive data management plan. A data management plan reflects on the creation of your data, how you will preserve it, and how security is handled, and on the sustainability of your data. So how will your data set be useful for the future? And then lastly, it also deals with how you can provide access to your data. There are several tools online to help you to write a data management plan. I'm referring here to the tool of the DCC, the DMP online, which also has a template specifically for Horizon 2020 project with the guidelines of the EC and also extra information about the questions and some tips. The Horizon 2020 data management plan, there's ask for specific context. You can find a template again in the guidelines. So it has six main topics. You should give information about your data, how it relates with your projects. There are the fair data principles. I'll come back to this shortly. Resources, resources, who is going to manage your data management plan and do you need any funding, data security during your project, who can access your data, how you manage it, and ethical aspects. So what are these fair data principles? Well, there are a set of principles that make sure that your data is findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable. Findability mainly deals with questions about how can people discover your data and if they can discover their data, how people understand your data. So it will ask about metadata, metadata standards, a persistent identifier that identifies your data set, naming conventions, keywords, and versioning. Accessibility deals with questions like where can people find your data and can people access your data. So it deals with software, is there specific software needed to open your data sets, documentation, and also the data repository that you will choose to store your data. Interoperability deals with question how other people may interact with your data and combine your data with their data. So it deals with standard vocabulary and methodology. Reusability mainly deals with question about what can people do with your data and what are they allowed to do with your data. So it mainly deals with licensing. So fair data principles are a big topic in the Horizon 2020 data management plans. So this was a short introduction to Horizon 2020 data pilots and OpenAir supports this pilot with information. We are a social and technical platform that enables open science and helps people to understand and practice open science. We have a lot of training and support materials specifically for the open data pilots. We have information on the open research data pilots on how to create a data management plan and how to select a good data repository where you can also make your data openly available. And we also have information about personal data and how to anonymize it and even an anonymization tool. We have a lot of other support material, briefing papers, fact sheets, webinars like this one. We also do workshops and if you still have questions there is a help desk available. I hope this webinar was informative for you and thank you for your attention.


This is George Gilbert on the ground at the Data Science Summit, married Marquis San Francisco. I'm with Olia Farinas, master data scientist at Pivotal, and one of the pioneers in terms of taking advanced tools and helping customers apply them. So you guys have several years experience in taking customers on this journey towards applying machine learning. Tell us typically how that journey starts and some of the obstacles customers have to get over to get moving towards high-impact solutions. So a lot of our customers actually have some sort of a data scientist in a house, but they're limited by the traditional tools that they use. Data is very siloed, so in order to take advantage of the full potential of data, it needs to be co-located first, and co-location isn't just putting the data into a single place. It's a lot of data science related activities go into taking advantage of disparate data sources, so you want to be able to identify this entity in this database in another entity, so there's a lot of entity resolution modeling. And common metadata and catalogs sort of? So some companies would like to have a top-down approach, master data management. They think that, oh, my data is too messy so I can't really use data science. We don't believe that. It could be very messy data. You don't need to have a common framework, way to categorize things. Data science can help. Data science is not something to use at the very last moment. It says, don't worry about master data management related stuff. Let the data scientists take a look at your old data set and understand the biases in data, understand commonality between different data sets, and then find ways to interrogate data so that you know which part of the data you can actually believe in, which part you cannot. So it's all part of the data science practice. So just bring in all these proprietary data sources, partner data sources and external data sources and building an analytical capability on top. That's how we help our customers. So step one is inventory your data and determine its quality, source it, but make sure you know what you can rely on. Absolutely, absolutely. So bring all your data assets into a single place and find correlations, causalities between them. But it's not going to be very simple. It's not just putting the data into a single location. There are a lot of data scientists. Time will be spent on understanding the biases in that data and then interrogation of that data. Okay. So to be clear, that sounds like whatever we call the data lake really does have a very different role from the data warehouse, which is highly curated and organized and accessed by business analysts. This is for the data scientists, the hardcore guy who has to find out lineage and meaning. Absolutely. Just give them access to the raw data and its rawest form possible. It's not ETL. It's not has gone through all kinds of processes in order to put logic in there because you don't want your data scientists to be rediscovering all the business logic that was embedded into your ETL processes. So create a data lake, put your data in any shape or form. It could be structured data, unstructured, semi-structured data, but allow them to understand the biases in the data and build trust in particular data sources using data science. Taking just one step up from there, is there a role for tools that manage the lineage, you know, the governance issues around this data, where you've taken it from the rawest form, but in one repository, you're going to track how it gets refined. Sure. I mean, a lot of very highly regulated industries are interested in solutions like that, and there are many different technologies that answer that question. But for the data scientists, it's not necessarily in the domain of data science to create that lineage, but of course, some particular industries, financial services, or pharmaceutical companies, et cetera, if they're supposed to give some sort of a report to the regulatory systems, they would want to understand the lineage of the data. That's absolutely true. Okay. So now that you've got an inventory of the data, how do you decide which applications, or which perhaps better said, which problems are best addressed first, you know, with machine learning technology that would have the biggest impact, but also the lowest risk to start with? That's something that we help a lot of our customers with. First, we have that understanding of their data assets, then we identify all kinds of business decisions that are being made, and understand what kind of data science can support those decisions, and assign a value and level of effort, and build those companies and analytics roadmap, and understanding how big of an impact a particular project is going to have on business is very important, and it shouldn't be skipped, because in prior years, people were interested in the technology. They didn't really know what it would do for them, and they started a lot of little science projects, like can this technology do this faster, or would you be able to use this extra data source that we've never been able to look into? Can you give us some examples of a roadmap anonymized, if necessary, where you balance the impact, and the cost, or risk, you know, as a roadmap? So, since these are extremely strategic exercises, I'm not allowed to give any customer without the names. So, well, there are very different dimensions of value, like a project may be valuable, because it's going to be consumed internally, and it's either going to recognize, generate new revenue, or cost reduction, so being able to understand how the opportunity is extremely important, and sometimes it requires you to actually dive into the data to understand the fraud detection kind of projects. You first need to have an understanding of the size of the pool, whether the machine learning will be able to identify all of it or not. There's another question, but you first need to have an understanding of how big is the opportunity. So, level of effort has completed different dimensions also, like is it accessibility, or whether it has the right granularity to answer the question that you asked, is one aspect, whether the delivery of analytics is another aspect, maybe the people who you're trying to influence decision making are not open to decision support systems, right? If they're not going to use the tools that you build, that level of effort is going to be very high, and technology, of course, another one, how the message of the data also contributes into level of effort. The delivery of analytics, as I mentioned, is another thing that we pay attention to from all that. When you say delivery, meaning operationalizing it. That's right. Tell us what are some of the methodologies for doing that? So, one thing is for you to start thinking about how the model is going to be used by the end users. The Pivotal Data Science team is now part of Pivotal Labs rapid application development team. So, we have an increased focus on users and how they make decisions, when they make decisions, when some particular pieces of information is going to be available at the time of decision making. So, when you start with that mindset, you increase the chances of that particular model to be operationalized. That's the key. So, it's having an understanding of users' everyday life and how they make decisions and build a product that fits into those needs. So, it's a matter of understanding the workflow or business process more than any technical integration issue? That's right. That's absolutely true. I think you said it so much better than I did. It's like embedding analytics into their everyday life so that they'll take advantage of it, because there's so many predictive models that are built that no one takes advantage of. And it could be the most insightful model, but if it's going into a PowerPoint presentation, it's dead. That's where models go to die. Is there a... Are you noticing an acceleration in the change of the tools that enable the data preparation, the modeling? Is there... Because to the casual user, it looks like we have dozens of tools on the preparation and on the analytics side that can be applied any which way. Consider this as self-tool agnostic. We picked the right tool for the problem that we're solving. And almost all the tools that you can actually take advantage of works on top of our platform anyway. So if it is unstructured data like medical images and you want to be able to extract features from it, so that's something that you would have to do maybe using MapReduce. We have a couple of data scientists who are experts in computer vision, so they take advantage of that, majority of the time because the data that we have access to has some sort of structure in it. So if that's the case, being able to use an advanced SQL capability on top of Hadoop is extremely exciting for a lot of our customers, so using Hock for that purpose is another way to go about it. Okay. And with that, this is George Gilbert, Data Science Summit, San Francisco, and we'll be back. Thanks.


Hey everybody welcome back to my Star Wars channel my name is David and today we're going to look at the 40th anniversary edition Empire Strikes Back Boba Fett Nerf Rival Gun. We would be honored if you would join us. Hey so what do you think? Do I uh do I look like Boba Fett? How's my authentic bucket? Hey everybody welcome back to the channel thanks for being here and as you know this channel is where I show my appreciation for Star Wars. That's right it's all things Star Wars and yes I do a lot of vintage reviews toy reviews but that also includes pretty much anything that has Star Wars on it and I was fortunate enough this Christmas to have a loving family that purchased me this Apollo Boba Fett repaint. Now a funny story I actually tried to get this from my son Gamestop had a deal on these I think there were 40 bucks and quickly jumped on it because normal retail price on Amazon $76 $76 so bought one from Gamestop it was supposed to come out December 1st by December 15th Gamestop wrote me a letter and said they weren't going to fulfill my order and they had refunded my money surprise surprise my wife and kids had already purchased one for me so this is my first Nerf gun ever in my entire life because I'm 52 so I kind of like passed that whole Nerf gun era growing up this is an Apollo rival though they didn't make a brand new gun for Boba Fett they just took a existing gun that already was being made by Nerf and they kind of repainted it and in actuality this whole set came out for Battlefront 2 I think you can get the same exact setup for Battlefront 2 the only difference is the graphics on the box I mean even the box layout is exactly the same but the graphics on the box for this are for the recent Empire Strikes Back 40th anniversary as you wish all right so just to go over some of the things that you're going to get inside your box you're going to get the instructions there's a nice little instruction sheet there is a magazine round it's a transparent magazine round I believe it holds seven Nerf rival balls and they are normal Nerf rival balls however they're repainted half green half burgundy you can also buy a replacement or if you have already a 12 holder the 12 holder will fit as well and you get a really cool mythosaur embroidered patch of course you get the protective mask that you saw me wearing earlier and the Nerf rival gun let's go over some of the finer details of the gun shall we he's no good to me dead first off you have a tactical rail on the top and this is where you can add an extra nerf feature an attachment you have a safety right here obviously pushing it in safety on pushing it out safety off right down here at the bottom this little black button is a quick release for the magazine and this right here is an indicator to tell you if the gun is locked and loaded once the magazine and ammunition is inside you're going to pull this back like this and push it forward and that primes the gun that loads the ball and as Nerf guns do sometimes they jam up there's a button right here that is a jam release it's a little jam fixer but I've never needed to push this button so so far the action on it has been pretty sweet my kids have the Nerf rival guns and they also have the regular Nerf guns that shoot the longer missile looking bullets and I would say between the two the nerf bullets don't shoot as far I think the shape of them doesn't enable them to fly as well the rival bullets I think fly further and straighter and they hurt a little bit more he's worth a lot to me looking at the cover of the box it's going to show you everything that comes inside and of course you have that cool 40th empire strikes back logo in the lower left with an awesome picture of Boba Fett the inside of the box is made to look more like a blueprint it says 40th empire strikes back in the upper left star wars in gold you have that beautiful graphic of Boba Fett again right below his journeyman emblem and then you've got two images of his helmet his bucket right there with some inside technology showing everything on the inside of the box is all beautifully displayed and it has a lower end upper transparent plastic protective shell all the rest of the sides just say star wars and nerf rival and have a lot of the same pictures of Boba Fett the underside of the box just shows the inside of the box and it tells you exactly what you get inside and that it comes to you from the fine people down at disney and hasbro now i'm sure a nerf rival gun isn't on every collector's list but as i've mentioned before i pretty much collect everything that says Boba Fett on it i am a Boba Fett guy like he is my person so if there's anything Boba Fett whether it's a key chain or a lego action figure or a coffee mug or a t-shirt right um you can pretty much guarantee that i'm gonna get it this gun really wasn't on my radar because i didn't know how i would display it and didn't know if i would actually play nerf guns with my kids but now i can and i can look like my favorite bounty hunter while i do it all right that's everything i can say about the nerf rival apollo star wars mandalorian edition 40th anniversary empire strikes back like i said you can pick this up at amazon right now it's 76 bucks but uh hey if you like Boba Fett as much as me it's probably worth it thanks for watching guys be sure to like and subscribe and may the force be with you i'll see you guys next time bye


What is going on guys welcome back to the channel and I appreciate you being here today I am back with another Zer video and today's date is the 9th of February 2018 and we're gonna start off with destiny 1 and Zer is located within the reef so let's see what he has this week I'm still waiting for him to bring the Zen meteor and he hasn't brought it okay so we've got a legacy anger I'm costing 29 strange coins remember people this will only give you that year one gear so don't buy this thinking you're gonna get anything from you had to because that is not gonna happen for the titan we have the eternal warrior offering 350 defense dropping our intellect discipline and will cost you 13 strange coin gain unstoppable for fist of havoc or fist of panic for the hunter we have the crest of alpha loopy again 350 defense and 13 strange coins offering a maximum of one two three intellect supers generate an extra orb revive and be revived faster for the warlock we has the transverses steps again 350 defense 13 strange coins offering intellect strength faster movement speed while correction and more pickups automatically reload that weapon type and weapon of the week we have the no land behind my favorite weapon ever I saw the wishes came to D2 I mean that literally it make actually start playing destiny to again just to run around the cruiseable with it that be incredible ain't ever gonna happen though and even if it did it would be a power weapon and that's just wouldn't make sense to me but yeah now this will cost you 23 strange coins exotic weapon bundles this week we have the infective and I kind of class I think that says and we also have the nemesis star and meteorite so yes and we also have these goodies right here so what gonna do now guys is we're gonna switch to D2 okay people so we are on D2 and that is located on IO within a giant scar area let's double check this is I oh where does it say is I all right there so yeah a giant scar area and he's in this dark ass cave right here so let's see what he has this week oh damn we have the Jade rabbit okay so let's start with the rain and flux an amazing chess piece for the hunter if you're a fan of the arch strider this thing is just absolutely incredible it will drop with three or five defense and will cost you 23 legendary shards quick success of attacks with the arch staff increase its damage output and duration and it's just it's by far my favorite probably actually my favorite exotic for the hunter it really is okay for the titan we have the stint forceps which were great within iron banner last week they really were a three or five defense 23 legendary shards bianic enhancements increase melee lunge range improve melee damage when surrounded absolutely epic and then we have the constein armlets for the warlock three or five defense 23 legendary shards vampires caress melee attacks grant increased resilience and mobility and they highlight injured enemies melee kills greatly restore health weapon of the week we have the jade rabbit the legendary destiny one i'll say legendary weapon but you know what i mean the old school classic weapon the jade rabbit this will cost you 29 legendary shards we also have people with a free of coins which i still ain't tested yet because i can't bring myself around to actually playing destiny for more than 10 minutes at the moment so yeah but i will test them out if they have really changed like bungee said they did uh and we also have a faded engram which is supposed to give you well it will give you an exotic you don't already own but yep guys that is it that says a little location for both d1 and d2 if you enjoyed the video leaving a like really does help me out thanks as always for stopping by and hopefully people i will see you on that next one


The comparison of three next-generation sequencing platforms revealed that the ion-torrent PGM had the best overall performance, followed by the Illumina Micek and then the Pacific Biosciences RS. The ion-torrent PGM showed the most even coverage across all four genomes, while the Pacific Biosciences RS had the lowest coverage on the plasmogeum fulciparum genome due to its high AT content. The ion-torrent PGM also had the highest number of variants detected, while the Pacific Biosciences RS had the lowest. Additionally, the ion-torrent PGM had the fewest context-specific errors, while the Pacific Biosciences RS had the most. Overall, the ion-torrent PGM performed the best out of the three platforms tested, making it the ideal choice for genomic and genetic research.


I have a two-part question. This part is, imagine, you have a country with remittances, huge amount of remittances. If this was to put about this A, will that really have an impact? Can you speak up, please? Oh, sorry. Okay. Sorry. So I had a two-part question. I'll repeat the question. Yes. So now, if it could not just be that she was, it could be vertical moves that the incumbents are making. Right. So how do we actually differentiate the two? If we actually endow the system, in that sense, then maybe pocket to the so-called political things that's happening that one side or the other. What's your demo? As far as I'm... So the first question was, what about countries adopting cryptocurrency as a whole that's not going to happen? For remittances. For remittances. Yes. I think it's really important to look at remittances because remittances don't go away. In fact, what happens, which is really interesting, is that as you have a premium on the price of Bitcoin in a country because of a lack of liquidity, that creates an enormous incentive for arbitrage. Here's the new slogan for remittances. If you want to transfer money from the UK to India, right? Western Union will charge you 5%. Bitcoin will now charge you minus 20%. Because you take it for here at $770, and you sell it in India for $1,000, right? And sure, they can stop one person doing it. They can stop two persons doing it. They're going to have to search a lot of luggage in the airports because people are going to start moving 20% premium paper wallets. And if they start finding paper wallets, people will learn how to memorize 12-word seeds, and they will walk across the border with remittances. I think we as Western, as most of us live in a privileged world where the amount of pain we are required to undertake in order to adopt Bitcoin is limited, right? In Venezuela, where at the moment, being engaged in Bitcoin is an offense that will put you in jail for the rest of your life. Right? And that's if you escape with your life. And already two miners have been prosecuted in Venezuela. They are now smuggling anti-minor S9s across the border. They are setting up mining factories inside Venezuela using the free electricity to mine Bitcoin. And then they are using the revenue from Bitcoin to buy food on Amazon Prime Pantry, have that food delivered to an adjacent country, and then smuggled over the border.  Go talk to Venezuela about what they'll go through.


Hi everyone and welcome back to Plants and Lucia. My name is Lucia and today I'm gonna share my top 10 favorite common house plants. Okay? Okay, I am very excited about this video because it's actually part of a bigger trend that is happening now in the plant community. I have to thank the crazy plant guy for making the first video on this trend. I think it's such a great idea to take a moment and really appreciate the beauty of our common house plants and I think that is perfect for our community because as you know I am a plant beginner so most of our plants here are common house plants and I think they're just as beautiful and interesting as the rare plants. So now let me share with you my current 10 favorite common house plants. Number one, the golden photos. As you know, this is a beautiful plant I must say is one of my favorite plants because it's so pretty. First of all, the leaves look like hearts and then it also adds some greens and golden tones to your room. This house plant is super common here in Berlin and I think in other areas around the world and it is very easy to care for. One very nice thing about this plant is that it doesn't require so much sunlight. In fact, they prefer lower levels of light so if you have a darker room in your place and you want to bring some green and some golden tones to the room, this plant is perfect for you. Another very good thing about this plant is that if you're starting to explore the propagation world, this plant is super easy to propagate. All you have to do is to cut a stem right below a node so a node is where you see a leaf coming out of the stem and then you put it in water. You will see roots in no time. So I tell you this is a very easy plant and very beautiful. So if you find it at your plant nursery, I recommend that you get it. Okay, on to the next. Number two, the set set plant. So the set set plant is actually one of the first plants that we got. This plant is super popular for a house plant and super popular for beginners. This is because she is very strong and adaptable so she can be happy in a bright room like this one but she can also be happy in a darker room. Another very good thing about this plant is that it's very resilient. So if you're someone that is just starting with house plants, this plant is perfect for you. As long as you give her moderate watering so you let the soil dry in between waterings, she will be very happy. So the set set plant is a beautiful plant. She will bring lots of green to your space and it's perfect for beginners. Let me know if the set set plant is common in your area. I know that it's common in Berlin but I would love to know if it's common around the world. Number three, the croton. If you want the splash of color in your house, this is a perfect plant. As you can see, some of the leaves are yellow, others are red, orange, green. This is a plant that will thrive with lots of bright sunlight. So if you have a room with a south facing window or a south east facing window, this plant is perfect for that space. In my experience, the croton is very easy to care for and it's really beautiful. One tip that I can give you is that when you see that your croton is putting out many green leaves, this means that your plant may not be getting enough sunlight to put out more colors. So bring it closer to the window or just put it in a brighter place. Number four, the poinsettia. The poinsettia is a very common plant during the winter holidays. So we usually buy it for Christmas, New Year's Eve, the winter solstice, but generally people toss it out after the holidays. This year we decided to keep it with us and guys, it's a beautiful plant all year round. As you can see, it has more green leaves but the leaves are beautiful and it has been so nice just to see her grow throughout the year. One thing that I learned with this plant is about bracts. So you know, the red bright petals of this plant, they're actually not petals, they're bracts. These are basically leaves that have bright colors, in this case red, to attract pollinators. Isn't that cool? And on top of that, the green leaves are just so beautiful. The veins are very noticeable and the green is a light but very deep green. This plant is also good for darker spaces. I've noticed that she has done very well in our bedroom, which has a northwest facing window, so she gets afternoon sunlight but she's very far from the window, so she doesn't get direct sunlight and she seems to be thriving there. So if you get a poinsettia during the winter holidays, I encourage you to keep her all year round. You will not regret it. Number five, the bird's nest fern. This beautiful plant is also very common. I actually got mine in a houseware store and it grows really nicely. The leaves almost look like they're dancing because you can see lots of curbs. And my favorite part is when I discover the new leaves coming out. In fact, we have two new leaves on this plant, so I'm going to show you now. As you can see, these are new leaves here, right there and right here. And they actually come out as little rolls, as you can see, and then they unroll to become these fronds right there. If you have a bird's nest fern at home, I would love to see it, so send a picture on Instagram and we can share them together. The next plant is another fern, the Boston fern. This fern is super common, super easy and very pretty. I love the fronds because it has many small, delicate leaves. And you know, I have a personal story with this because I know that these fronds really like humidity, so I used to have it in my bathroom. But I used to forget to water it. So I decided to bring this plant to the living room so I don't forget about her. And now she's putting out many fronds. You know, I think this is the best part of taking care of house plants. When you have an issue with a plant and then you try to observe it and you try different things, and then once you understand what is wrong, then you try to fix it or try to take care of her differently. And she will reward you. And I think that's the best feeling. So yeah, I love this fern. I hope that one day she will be really big. And if you have one, I would love to see a picture. So don't forget to send one on Instagram. Number seven, the Beast Lily. This plant is amazing and also very adaptable. She will be happy in bright indirect sunlight, but she will thrive in lower sunlight levels. It's a very common and easy plant. If you give her moderate watering and you provide moderate sunlight, she will be very happy. I want to share with you one thing that I learned recently about this plant from Summer Rain Oaks. And this is about the floral parts. The flower of the Beast Lily is usually white. But sometimes you will see that it's becoming green like this one. So I'm going to show you right there. So this is actually because the plant is pumping chlorophyll. To the floral parts. And this is basically so the flower can act as a leaf. So the plant has more surface to absorb the sunlight. Isn't that cool? I think it's pretty cool. Another very cool thing about this plant is that NASA has Placer in the top 10 air purifying plants on this planet. And that's a pretty cool title to have. I know this plant is super common and I think it's such a special plant. Next is this beautiful plant. The aloe vera. We have this plant in our bedroom actually on my night table. So I see her every morning. And I can tell you every morning she's a little bigger. In fact, we have a new leaf right here. So this plant is super special because first of all, it's super easy to care for. It grows really quickly. It's very beautiful. And also it has many healing properties. As you may know, we can use the gel of the aloe for skin irritations, to take care of our hair, for beauty purposes. It's very useful and very healthy. Now, I haven't used the gel of this aloe vera because as you can see, the leaves are still not super thick. So I'm waiting for them to be thicker. But once I start using the gel, I will make sure to make a video about it and I can show you what I use it for. Number nine, of course, is the English Ivy. My favorite part about this plant is the leaves. So we have a variegated type here and we have some tones of green, some cream. It's very beautiful and it really looks like watercolor, you guys. Another very cool thing about this plant is that we can propagate it really easily. All we have to do is to cut a stem and put it in water. And you will see that the roots will grow really quickly. As a matter of fact, all of these ones are propagations. Number 10 is the first plant that we ever brought to our house and this is the bunny ears cactus. I had to put these cactus here because it's very common and it has been very good to us. This is the first bunny ears cactus that we got and we got it because we thought there would be an easy plant and it is very easy but I'm gonna give you some tips that I have learned with this plant. First of all, we don't wanna give it too much water. Remember, this is a succulent so they retain lots of water and that means that we don't need to water them as often. So for example, I usually water these cactus every two weeks or so and in the winter I even cut back on water. The second tip I actually had to learn from experience and it is that these plants really like bright direct sunlight. So for example, when we bought these cactus I decided to put it on a shelf in a very dark corner. So the plants started growing this very long thin arms and I didn't know why that was but then I started to read more about it and basically the cactus was trying to get to the sunlight. So when we learned this, we cut this very long branches and we placed the cactus in front of a south facing window. So she got a lot of bright direct sunlight and I can tell you she's very happy. This year we had so much growth so all of these years one, two, three, four, five, six, seven are actually from this year. So it's really nice. And you can find it in different colors. This is a red bunny ears cactus and then over here we have a yellow bunny ears cactus and I think there's also white bunny ears cactus. So yeah, I really love this plant. Okay my friends, so these are 10 of my favorite common house plants in our place. I would love to know yours. So if you have a favorite common house plant, make sure to share in the comments below. And as always, I will see you in the next video. Okay, ciao.


For more videos on people's struggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. In January 2020, millions of families in China were coming together to celebrate the Lunar New Year, the most important holiday of the year. At the same time, COVID-19 was beginning to spread in the city of Wuhan. The country was faced with a previously unknown challenge. Guided by science, the Chinese people and government came together to fight the virus at an impressive speed and scale. Here is what China did to break the chain of infection. As a first task, Chinese scientists quickly isolated the genetic sequence of the coronavirus and shared it with the world. This allowed other countries to develop their own testing kits and begin vaccine research. To contain the virus, Wuhan was placed into lockdown on January 23rd. It remained so for the next 76 days. This decisive action saved the lives of millions. Infrastructure was also needed, so in a record-breaking 10 days, two full hospitals were built with a total capacity of 2,600 beds. Medical support was then mobilized. In the early days of the epidemic, more than 40,000 medical workers from across China left their families during the holidays and went to Wuhan. Another 1,800 medical teams were organized. They visited homes and checked 10.5 million people for symptoms. During this process, all patients were guaranteed free treatment either through state subsidies or basic medical insurance. Under the guidance of the state, the public and private sectors came together to increase the production of medical equipment. Within one month, China increased its production of personal protective equipment, or PPE, by nearly 2,000 percent from 10,000 to 200,000 units a day. By the end of March, the production of test kits had increased five and a half times to 4.2 million kits per day. The Chinese people also organized themselves as volunteers, going door to door, reaching over 60 million people. Through the neighborhood committees, these volunteers did a variety of tasks. They checked temperatures, delivered food and medical supplies, took care of the elderly, cleaned isolation units, and drove medical workers. 53 of these volunteers would die from exposure to COVID-19. 49 of them were members of the Communist Party. Even now as cities reopen and come back to life, China remains vigilant. When new clusters of COVID-19 were detected in Wuhan after the lockdown had ended, the city took on a massive testing campaign of its residents. Over 10 million people were tested in 19 days. As of the end of May, a total of 83,017 confirmed cases had been reported on the Chinese mainland. 4,634 people had died. This means that China had a curate of 94.3 percent. It was through deploying the country's resources, its planned economy, and socialist culture and institutions that the chain of infection was broken. Read our study, China and Corona Shock, at the tricontinental.org.