My name is Ron Hogan. I'm with the NDSU Extension Service and the Agri Business Department, Farm Management Specialist. And we work together with FSA to put on these webinars. And our webinar today is the CFAP2 program. And we're going to have the state FSA personnel present some slides. And we want you to, if you have questions, we'll try to leave the questions till the end. But we want you to put the questions in the Q&A. On the bottom of your screen, there should be a Q&A section where you click on that. And you can enter your question. And we will try to answer the questions. We were scheduled for two hours, but we probably won't be an hour plus the way it looks and depending on how many questions. So with that, I think I've covered everything. Just make sure, and I think we have you all muted and your video off so we can let the presenters start presenting. And there will be several of them from the state FSA office. And the first one will be Laura Heinrich. And I'll turn it over to you. Thanks, Ron and Miranda. We really appreciate NDSU's effort in allowing us to present this information. It's a great relationship that we've been able to build through the years. So what we'd like to do today is present some information on the Coronavirus Food Assistance Program 2, or CFAP 2 as we'll call it, because we always have to have acronyms when we talk FSA talk. So today, we're going to talk about what exactly is CFAP 2, who's eligible for the program, eligible commodities, and then the different payment categories that those eligible commodities fall into, such as price trigger commodities, flat rate crops, and sales commodities. And we'll go through each one of those in greater detail throughout the presentation. So I'm going to provide some general information about the program. So USDA is implementing CFAP 2 for agriculture producers who continue to face a market disruption and associated costs because of COVID-19. CFAP 2 will provide up to an additional $14 billion of financial assistance that gives the ability of those producers to absorb some of that increased marketing costs. This second sign up of CFAP builds on the assistance we provided under CFAP 1. Under CFAP 1 in North Dakota, we issued over $294 million to over 18,000 producers. And so this program is just really building off of that and helping producers who've had issues continuing throughout this coronavirus pandemic. We encourage producers who have continued to see an increase in their marketing issues with their crops. We encourage them to apply for CFAP 2. During the first round of the coronavirus program, USDA listened to producers and really took that feedback and tried to implement another program that would fill some of those holes that were missed under the first program. As a result, CFAP 2 has been adapted to better address the impacts to farmers and ranchers. And many more commodities are eligible than under the first program. The biggest change is that the 5% or greater national price decline is no longer the single determining factor for eligible commodities. With a few exceptions, generally marketable commodities are eligible under CFAP 2. Commodities that are now under CFAP 2 that were not covered under the first program are hemp, broilers from non-contract poultry growers, shelled and dry eggs, turkeys, bison, all classes of wheat and many more commodities, including dry edible beans, honey, and we'll go through the rest of the commodities that are now eligible as we go throughout the presentation. Another change is that participants will receive 100% of their eligible payments right away. Under the first program, we only issued 80% and then issued an additional payment later. Under this program, we will issue 100% of the payments as soon as that application is able to be approved. These payments also will not be withheld to satisfy prior USDA debt, nor are they offset by Treasury. So signup began on September 21st of 2020 and it goes through December 11th. So we have just under a month for you to come in and apply if you haven't already. So producers who are in the business of farming at the time of application are eligible and those producers must also have risk in the production of eligible commodities that fall under those three categories that we talked about earlier. That first category of price trigger commodities, those commodities are 5% or greater market price, incurred a 5% or greater market price decline between the average of mid-January 2020 in a comparison to the average of late July 2020. The commodities that fall in the flat rate crops did not meet that 5% decline trigger or do not have data available to determine if they had a 5% decline. And then the last category is the specialty sales-based commodities and those are sales-based approached commodities where producers are paid based on the five payment gradations associated with their 2019 sales. Producers will need to file the following forms. The application is an AD 3117 and in addition to that, there are the specific eligibility forms that'll need to be completed such as the farm operating plan and associated forms and Rondeval will cover those in just a minute. We also have AGI or adjusted gross income certification forms and highly rotable and wetland certification forms that'll need to be completed. So producers will apply though they're only gonna file one application nationwide. It is a certification based program so producers will just certify their commodity information on the application and the only time they'll need to provide documentation is if they're selected for spot check or the county committee, the local county committee would request documentation prior to approval of their application. They can submit that application to any USDA service center in the United States but the recording county or their control county is the county that's responsible for acting or approving or disapproving that application. This is what the application looks like. The part A is the producer agreement or the producer, it gives all of the requirements for the program and explains what the producer is certifying to when they sign the application. Parts B, C, D, E and F and G are all program specific parts of the application and those will be covered in greater detail as we go through this presentation. And then the producer is gonna sign in part I. With that I'll turn it over to Ron Duvall to cover the producer eligibility, payment limitation and payment eligibility. Morning everyone. My name is Ron Duvall and I work in the payment eligibility, payment limitation division at the North Dakota State FSA office. So we're just gonna cover some basic eligibility requirements for the CFAP program. And so what I wanna do is I wanna just start with who can participate in CFAP too. So producers who have risk and producing an eligible commodity, those people who have suffered from disruptions of significant marketing costs are eligible for CFAP too. Average adjusted gross income, producers have to produce, they have to, their income, AGI has to be less than 900,000 for tax years, 16, 17, 18 and average of those. And then also, or they can have 75% of their adjusted gross income from farming or ranching or forestry related activities. Now individuals and entities also have to commercially produce those ag commodities. They have to be in the business of farming at the time of the application. They have to comply with provisions of the highly erodible land and wetland conservation regulations also typically called conservation compliance rules. And they also, if you're a foreign person, then you need to provide land capital in a substantial amount of active personal labor to the farming operation. You also cannot have a controlled substance violation. And just one reminder is that contract growers are not eligible for CFAP too. And the difference between a contract grower and someone who's growing a crop with a contract is that a producer who has marketing contract to sell a crop is not considered a contract grower but typically a contract grower owns a facility but they don't own the commodity. So if you own the commodity, you have a contract, you're an eligible producer but if you don't own the commodity, you're just growing it, you're ineligible for that. And then again, a producer is a person who has risk in the commodity and does not include producers who are no longer in the business of farming at the time of application. All right, so participants participation in CFAP one, the program that we had run previous to this does not make you ineligible for CFAP two. And if you didn't apply for CFAP one, you can still apply for CFAP two. New producers who may not have historical sales or records can still apply and that does not include producers that are no longer in business of farming at the time of the application. So the payment limitations. There's a limit of 250,000 per person and legal entity that applies to the total payments for all eligible commodities. Now, corporations, entities or corporate entities, LLCs, LLPs, trusts and estates may receive up to $500,000 if two members contribute at least 400 hours of active personal labor or management or $750,000 if three members contribute at least 400 hours of active personal management. And again, the CFAP two payment limitations are separate from CFAP one. And we're gonna go through just a little bit of discussion about this for corporations, entities, LLPs and so on. We're gonna go through a little bit of discussion about that here in a minute. But just a reminder here, CFAP two limitations, 250,000 per person or legal entity, it's a separate payment limitation from CFAP 1.0. And then we're using the 2020 farm business file and our FSA 2020 records for determining eligibility. Now, what I was talking about a minute ago was there's this optional increase. So the payment limit for a corporation is or an entity is 250,000. But what there is is we have this optional increase in payment limit that's available to Corpse, LLCs, LPs, trusts and estates. And those additional payment limits are available when members or partners, stockholders, heirs or beneficiaries, they contribute 400 plus hours of active personal labor or active personal management to the farming operation. This is the same rule that we had during the previous coronavirus food assistance program, one that we ran. So with this optional payment limit, like I discussed a few minutes ago, what happens is that we can add $250,000 per producer up to three entity members allowing up to a $750,000 payment limit. So if we have two entity members that provide 400 hours of labor, active personal labor or active personal management, then the payment limit increases to 500,000 and then subsequently with three entity members providing 400 hours of active personal labor, active personal management, that payment limit increases to $750,000. And then also revocable trusts using a social security number can also seek an increase in payment limit if the trust provides evidence to the satisfaction of our county committee, documenting that there's more than one beneficiary of the trust, such as like a husband or wife operation or that evidence may include but is not limited to a copy of the executed trust agreement. This is a little different from what we've done in the past. Okay, so one thing that I wanted to touch on from the last coronavirus program that we ran and the current CFAP-2 is that payments to persons and legal entities are attributed according to the rules laid out in the seven CFR part 1400. But there's an exception and the payments to legal entities qualifying for those will be limited to the lesser of 500,000 or 750,000 or the sum of the amount of each eligible entity member may receive regardless of the ownership share. And so before with CFAP-2 before this current coronavirus food assistance program shares were limited to the or the payments were limited to the amount of the shares of the individuals within the entity. So if you had like a, you had several members, we'll just go through this example here. So previously ABC Corp payment women increased to 500,000 based on two members. And each member, one member one had 90% ownership share, member two had 10% ownership share. So we increased the payment limit only up to their 10% share and 90% share. So you can see when we go through this decision or through where this case, member one's attribution amount of 250,000 is basically lowered because we're taking 90% of the 500,000 to 450,000 not. And then that would not exceed 250,000 and the member attribution is 50,000 based on the 10% share. So what we're looking at here is that the total payment to this producer for ABC Corporation is now going to be 300,000 based off of their shares in the entity. The 250,000 plus the 500,000. So now the way that the rules were changed with the CFAP2 program is that we're not looking at the 90% ownership and the 10% ownership anymore. We're just looking at the $250,000 payment limit. So in this case, that same situation the producer, each producer is gonna earn $250,000 payment limit if they provide the 400,000 hours of labor. So now where the first round the producer would have earned 300,000, now that operation is gonna earn 500,000 because we're not looking at the share. Now I want you to understand too that these rules are going back to CFAP1. So later this year, as our software is developed, some producers who were limited to that original $300,000 limitation, those people are going to receive additional monies because the Congressional's changed that rule along the way allowing for the producers to receive more. So we're gonna go through one more example and this is a corporation or an LLC with embedded members within it. So we have ABC Corp who's increased payment limit to 500,000 on two members. This is the previous payment limit rules. And as we go through, you can see that the payment limit for the member one LLC was 250,000. So the maximum payment that ABC Corp would receive is $250,000 and then under the new rules we're gonna follow the eligibility for that corporation member one LLC through to each of the members. So ABC Corp is now going to have a $500,000 payment limitation because rather than looking at the shares of the ownership of the members of the member one LLC, so producer A at 90%, producer B at 10%, we don't care about that share of the ownership anymore. We're just looking at the payment limit per individual. So we're taking ABC Corp we're looking at its member which is member one LLC. And then we have to look through that membership to see who are the individuals providing labor for that. And then we're allowing each member of that embedded entity to receive payment limits. So we're gonna have an increased payment limit of $500,000 to this corporation based on the first level members of that embedded entity. Okay, just some attribution thought here is that CFAP payments to a legal entity will be tracked through four levels of ownership and will be reduced in an amount that represents the indirect ownership interest of the fourth level entity of the payment entity. All right, well, thank you, Ron. My name is Wanda Brayton and I am the conservation livestock disaster program specialist here at the North Dakota State Office. I'm gonna cover a couple of slides here on the commodity categories. Laura touched on this a little bit. So again, there are three major categories for payment calculations in the CFAP-2 program that we're gonna talk about today. Those categories again are our price trigger commodities, our flat rate row crops and our sales commodities. As we move through this webinar, we will cover the different types of commodities that are available or eligible under each type of payment category. So the price trigger category includes commodities that USDA has determined to have that experienced, a 5% or greater market price decline between the average for mid-January of 2020 in comparison for the average of late July of 2020. Eligible commodities within that category are your dairy, your milk, broilers and eggs, livestock, excluding any kind of breeding stock. So we'd be talking about our beef cattle, hogs and pigs, lambs and sheep. And also our barley, corn, sorghum, soybean, sunflowers, upland cotton, wheat, all of those classes. So these commodities are also listed on the farmers.gov slash CFAP website and producers don't have to justify the price decline if the crops show up as eligible on the farmers.gov CFAP website and the producers can apply for payment. So we'll go through each of the price trigger categories and provide some details about each eligible commodity. The first one we're gonna talk about is the dairy provisions. In order to be eligible, in order to be an eligible dairy operation, the dairy operation must be commercially marketing milk at the time of application. So if the dairy operation dissolves before applying for the CFAP too, then they would be ineligible under the dairy category for the CFAP too program. If it's a seasonal dairies, they are eligible and they can apply for seasonal dairy operations that stop producing milk before December 31st of 2020. Those producers would need to report to FSA the date they stopped production of the milk and refund any unearned CFAP payments according to the number of days in production. As we just stated, dairy operations that dissolve prior to applying for CFAP too are ineligible. If the dairy dissolves after applying for CFAP too, then the producer must report the dissolution date to FSA. Then the actual production will be used to estimate the production according to the pro-rated number of days the milk was produced. Any of those unearned payments may need to be refunded to USDA if the payment has already been issued. For CFAP too, the eligible milk production is broken down into those two categories. We look at the actual milk production and the estimated milk production. The actual production is milk commercially marketed for the months of April through August 31st of 2020 along with any dumped milk during that same timeframe. When we're talking about the estimated milk production that is milk expected to be commercially marketed for the months of September through December of 2020, the estimated milk production is determined by the daily average of the actual milk production multiplied by the number of commercially marketed days of milk was produced in September through December. So then we have to ask ourselves how the price trigger category works for cow milk. Producers will receive a little more than a penny for each pound of cow milk produced or dumped between that April and August 31st, 2020 date or timeframe and an estimated amount of milk that will be produced between September and December of 2020. The CFAP software will automatically calculate that estimated milk production in pounds for those months of September to December. We've received some questions as to whether goat milk is available for the CFAP2 program and the answer is yes. However, the goat milk falls under a sales commodity and not under the price trigger category. Producers will be required to self-certify to their total milk production for the months of April through August 31st of 2020. The documentation such as milk marketing statements for April through August, those can help producers determine what your actual production is. So the next commodity that we will discuss is the eggs and broilers. Eggs and broilers fall into the price trigger category for CFAP2. So this means that eggs and broiler producers have experienced that 5% or greater price decline in comparison of the average prices for the week of January 13th through the 17th of 2020 and the average prices for the week of July 27th through the 31st of 2020. An eligible producer is a person or legal entity who shares in the risk of producing a commodity, just like Ron was talking about earlier. So in order to be considered an eligible producer of eggs or broilers, the producers must be an independent grower. Contract grower is not eligible for the CFAP2 program, just like Ron was talking about. And the producers must be in the business of egg or broiler production at the time of application in order to be considered an eligible producer. An eligible egg operation is one who commercially markets shell, dried, frozen or liquid egg eggs from chickens in the US at the time of application. The operation must have a risk in the egg sales and the operation must not have a guaranteed price on the egg sold. So if an egg producer has a guaranteed price on their egg production, they would not be eligible for the CFAP2 program. Producers must self-certify to their dried, liquid and frozen egg production in pounds for the 2019 calendar year. And for the shell eggs, the producers must self-certify the number in dozens. So if the egg producer is new and does not have any production from the 2019 calendar year, then we would use their actual production from 2020 when we're applying the payment. The definition of a broiler is any chicken that has been commercially produced for meat purposes and not used for laying or breeding purposes. So just like the eligible egg production, the eligible production for broilers is a producer self-certification of the 2019 total broiler production. And again, for the new broiler producers who began farming in 2020 and do not have that production from 2019, they would use their actual 2020 broiler production as of the date the producer submits a CFAP2 application for payment. So looking at some of those price trigger for eggs and broilers, the payment is based on the producer's 2019 production like we were talking about. And like I said earlier, producers report their egg production by dozen for shell eggs and in pounds for all other egg types. And then the broilers are reported by head. So for eggs, the conversion is from eggs to pounds, producers who sell frozen, liquid or dried eggs in the shell to a processor can reach out to their local office or the CFAP call center for assistance in converting the production to pounds for their CFAP2 application. For the broilers, the definition for broilers are chickens commercially produced for meat purposes that have left the farm for slaughter and are not used for laying or breeding purposes. The CFAP2 payment is calculated using the 2019 production times 75% times the egg type payment rate or the broiler payment rate per head. Our next commodity is livestock. An eligible producer is a person or legal entity who shares in the risk of producing a commodity as we've talked about producers who are not in the business of livestock production at the time of application are not considered an eligible livestock producer. Eligible livestock for the CFAP2 payment are beef cattle, including bread heifers, hogs and pigs and all breeds of sheep. This does exclude breeding stock. So as we just mentioned, breeding stock are ineligible for the CFAP2. This would include your cows and bulls, sows and boars, ewes and rams. Basically, if they have ever reproduced or been used for breeding, they are ineligible for the CFAP2 program. Also ineligible livestock include very cattle and equine, companion animals or animals raised for hunting or game. And also as we stated a couple of times now, the contract growers are not eligible for CFAP2, but keep in mind that a marketing contract to sell a crop owned by the grower is not considered contract grower. Any livestock not meeting the definition of an eligible commodity for CFAP2 purposes are also considered ineligible. CFAP2 for livestock, like we said, include the beef cattle, the hog sheep, pigs, lambs, all ages and weight ranges are paid at the same rate and those livestock must be produced in the US. Payments for livestock will be equal to the highest inventory of the specific livestock on a date selected by the producer from April 16th to August 31st, 2020, multiplied by the applicable payment rate per head. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Brian Haugen. So on a stated, my name is Brian Haugen, Program Director here at the North Dakota State Office of the Price Support Division. And today under the CFAP2, I'll be discussing the acreage based crop provisions which fall into two categories, that being price trigger and flat rate crops. To begin with, just wanted everyone to understand that on the CFAP2 application individuals that are applying, the data is going to be for eligible crops and eligible intended uses for whether the commodity being a price trigger or a flat rate crop is automatically going to populate to the application for all counties in which a producer would have an interest in the eligible crops and a total of the applicable 2020 acreage data would fall to the application. The first item that we're going to discuss of the two categories under the acreage based crops is price trigger crops. And with that on our screen identifies eight commodities that were determined by the department to have a 5% or greater price decline. With these eight commodities that are identified, the next slide is going to peel them back to identify all of the eligible commodities along with based on the acreage report the eligible intended uses. I would like to point out, as far as on barley again under the CFAP2, all barley is eligible intended uses that are not eligible for the CFAP2 is of these eight commodities that are reported with an intended use of grazing, left standing, green manure, or prevent plant. So under the price trigger crops, yields are a factor. You will see forthcoming when we talk about the flat rate crops that yield is not a factor for those, but it is for our price trigger. So one to go through and explain more specifically how it works for these eight commodities that are a price trigger. It's going to be based on again all of the nationwide pulling from the annual acreage report data for 2020 for those eligible eight commodities and eligible intended uses. And then that will be multiplied by the weighted 2020 APH data of the approved yield that's returned from RMA. Or if a 2020 APH yield is not available from RMA, then it will be the yield that will be used for the price trigger crops is going to be 85% of the weighted 2019 R County benchmark yield. So for these price trigger crops, how does the payment become calculated? Would want to point out on any of those eight commodities, a producer would receive no less than $15 per acre. That's the minimum amount. So what the system is going to calculate and do a comparison of and equate for the individual applicant, they'll receive a payment that's going to be equal to or greater than either of the following two. And the first one as explained there, it's going to again use the acreage for the eligible price trigger crop multiplied by the applicable yield. Again, that's going to be a 2020 APH approved yield. Or if that is not available, then the 85% of the 2019 R County benchmark yield. That's going to be calculated acreage times yield times a department determined crop marketing percentage. And then in addition to that of the eight commodities, all eight commodities have a pre-determined payment rate per commodity. And we'll show you an example of how this is computed. So it will go through that exercise in calculation as compared to simply taking the eligible acres times $15 an acre. And the higher of the two is what the CFAP-2 applicant will receive. So we'll go through and show an example of that comparison, the higher of the two for a price trigger crop. This is an example of producer applying for CFAP-2 on the commodity of corn. Again, acreage data is looked upon all counties. The producer has an interest in across the nation and that equates to 175 acres of corn. RMA has returned yield information to the agency with a weighted 2020 APH in this example of 140.16 bushels per acre. So with that information, what the software again will do for a calculation, and this would be using the formula that we just went through on slide 54, it's going to then take not only acreage times the yield, but also multiply that by a commodity payment rate that is applicable for the price trigger commodity, and then also multiply that by a crop marketing percentage, which for the commodity of corn, that percentage is 40%. The rate per bushel under CFAP-2 for the commodity of corn is 58 cents. So multiplying the acreage times yield times the payment rate of 58 cents times the 40% marketing percentage equates to a payment of $5,690. That would then be compared to simply taking acreage times $15, and that would calculate to $2,625. So again, the producer would receive the higher of the two, no less than a $15 breaker. And in this example, the higher of the two is going to be the $5,690. So that's how the payment is computed for our price trigger commodities. The next component that we want to discuss on our acreage-based crops is flat rate crops. And under the flat rate crops, very identical to what we have for the price trigger crops, as far as ineligible intended uses, those that are reported as intended use for grazing, green manure, left standing, and prevent those crops reported as prevent plant for flat rate are ineligible. Unlike our price trigger crops, as mentioned, the flat rate crops yields are not a factor. It's going to be the acreage times the applicable rate. Under our flat rate crops, on this slide, we are identifying all those, the department has determined as eligible to receive a flat rate crop payment under the CFAP-2. The mechanics are similar to our price trigger crops that individuals applying the 8031-17 is going to automatically populate in part G. Acreage the producer has reported farming interests then of eligible flat rate crops right to the application. And again, all acreage nationally will be totaled and displayed in block 22. So again, with our flat rate crops, the payment calculation is straightforward using the acreage from the 578 multiplied by the $15 per acre payment for those eligible crops. So looking at examples similar to what we did with the price trigger crops for our flat rate commodities, we have an example of a producer that, that applied for CFAP-2 has an eligible commodity that being Canola and nationally based on all counties the producer has an interest in, there's 200 acres of Canola. So the system would automatically calculate again the eligible acres with the eligible intended uses times that $15 and this individual would then be eligible for a CFAP-2 payment applicable to the commodity of Canola of $3,000. Next I'll turn it over to Laura to discuss sales commodities. Thank you, Brian. So the last category we're gonna cover is sales commodities. This category includes aquaculture, specialty crops including fruits, vegetables and tree nuts. And in this category, this is where we've added honey, dry edible beans and peas, lentils and chickpeas or garbanzo beans. So those are new crops that are added to the specialty crops for CFAP-2 in comparison to CFAP-1. We also cover nursery crops and floor culture under sales commodities. And then livestock grown for food, fiber, fur, feathers including alpacas, emus, llamas, bison, buffalo, beefalo, deer, elk and the remaining of those specialty livestock listed on the screen. We also cover miscellaneous commodities such as Christmas trees, goat milk, mohair, mink and wool and also tobacco which would be applicable to our Southern states. What commodities are ineligible for CFAP-2? Any breeding stock are ineligible, equine, companion or comfort animals or pets. Commodities produced by contract growers or livestock raised for hunting or game purposes are ineligible for CFAP-2. So to be eligible for a sales commodity, a producer must either grow or produce a sales commodity in 2020. Once we've determined that that producer did grow or produce a sales commodity in 2020 that would have been affected by the coronavirus, then we're gonna go back and look at what their 2019 sales of all sales commodities are to determine what their payment will be. So the eligible sales that we're gonna look at are only sales of raw commodities grown by the producer. Sales from adding value like processing and packaging would not be included in the sales amount entered on the application. Producers will certify to their 2019 commodity sales in dollars and cents and it'll enter that amount in item 19 of part F of the application. If that producer is a new producer and did not have any 2019 sales of any sales commodities, they may qualify for a new producer and we'll go through some examples. So for a new producer is defined as a producer who began farming sales commodities in 2020 and had no 2019 sales. And in that situation, they'll certify to their actual 2020 sales at the time of application in lieu of their 2019 sales. So our first example is producer B who grew a hundred acres of blueberries as an individual with a hundred percent share in 2019 and he sold all of those blueberries in 2019 for a total of $250,000. In 2020, producer B's spouse, producer C, began farming as a new producer. In 2020, producer B and producer C now share in a hundred acres of blueberries. They share 50-50 and in 2020, they had $200,000 in sales. So in this scenario, producer B is gonna certify to their 2019 sales of $250,000 because they're not a new producer. So producer B will use their 2019 sales of $250,000. But producer C is a new producer of sales commodities. So in that scenario, producer C, this spouse is gonna certify to their 2020 sales. So in this scenario, that's $100,000 because they had 50% share of $200,000 of sales. Our second example is producer A who grew 120 acres of watermelons in 2018 but did not plant any sales commodities in 2019 due to disaster and they did not sell any other sales commodities in 2019. So in 2020, the producer grew 120 acres of watermelons and had a total sales of $320,000. So our first criteria is that produce, we have to look to see, did that producer grow or produce a sales commodity in 2020? In this scenario, yes. The producer grew 120 acres of watermelons. So they have an eligible sales commodity in 2020. Now we're gonna go back and look at their 2019 sales. In this scenario, the producer didn't have any 2019 sales. So then we're gonna say, is this producer a new producer? Well, when we look back further into this producer's growing history, he had planted watermelon, which is our sales commodity or a sales commodity. And since they had a sales commodity in previous years, they wouldn't be determined a new producer. So in this scenario, producer A would certify to $0 of sales commodities because they didn't have any sales in 2019 and they're not considered a new producer. So next we just wanna go through a couple examples of scenarios that may happen here in North Dakota in regards to sales commodities. So our first example is for a Buffalo producer. So Sally breeds and grows Buffalo for direct marketing of the meat and buy products to online customers. Sally's sales records show several income streams from various products. She's products that she sells, including Buffalo meat, hides and shoulder mounts. So in Sally's situation, Sally would certify to the value of the live animal delivered to the point of harvest, whether on or off the farm. So she's gonna certify to the value of that Buffalo when it goes to be slaughtered into meat. After delivery, there's value added by processing the animal into various byproducts. The sales of the byproducts, such as the meat hides and shoulder mounts should not be included, only the value of the live animal. Our second example is grapes. So Sean grows grapes and owns a winery to process grapes into wine. Sean also buys grapes from other growers. For the CFAP II application, Sean should determine the value of his raw grapes at a price comparable to what was paid by the winery for similar quality raw grapes. And that's what they're gonna certify to on the application. He's not gonna certify to the value of the wine that he sold from the grapes he grew. He's gonna have to determine what the value of those grapes were in its raw form. And that's what Sean will certify to on their application. And our third example is Sam raises cucumbers and sells raw cucumbers and cucumber pickles at a local farmer's market directly to customers. The 2019 sales will be the value of the raw cucumbers sold at the market plus the raw value of the cucumber pickles. Sam would use the quantity of cucumbers processed into pickles and the price of raw cucumbers sold at the market to calculate the value of cucumber pickles. And that's the amount of value that they will enter that Sam will enter onto the application under sales commodities. So this is an example of part F on the application. So under each category, the producer's gonna certify to their total 2019 sales of each different type of sales commodity. And then to calculate the payment we'll add all of those sales commodities together. And then we're gonna apply the applicable payment factor based on the five different categories of sales ranges. So the first zero to $49,999 we'll use a payment factor of 10.6% from 50,000 to 99,999, there's a 9.9% payment factor and so on and so forth till we get over any sales over a million dollars. We'll use a factor of 8.8%. And again, this slide says it's the 2019 sales but if that producer would be determined to be a new producer we'd use their 2020 actual sales at the time of application to determine the payment model. So here's an example. So Farmer Joe has 2019 sales of $75,000. Therefore two payment factors apply. So we're gonna apply that 10.6% payment factor to the first $49,999 for a total of $5,299.89. And then for the additional $25,001 we apply the payment factor of 9.9% to get $2,475.10. And then we add those two together to get the total payment for the producer for the sales commodities. And the total payment would be $7,774.99. So now that we've covered all the different eligible commodities and how the payments will be calculated, how do you actually apply? So if you're new to FSA, don't worry about it especially since we just covered those sales commodities and you may not be a producer who is familiar with the Farm Service Agency. We want you to go out and contact your local Farm Service Agency County office. And when you do, they're gonna ask you for some basic information, your name and address, your personal information such as your tax identification number because we need that to be able to pay you. They're also gonna go through those eligibility forms that Ron discussed earlier. And then we'd also talk to you about a direct deposit so we could give you that payment directly into your bank account. And then some producers may need to file an acreage report as Brian Hogan indicated for the commodities that he covered. You do need an acreage report on file. If you need to find that form and you wanna fill it out at home on your own, you can go ahead and download that application from www.farmers.gov.cfap. So I asked you to go ahead and contact our local county offices. Because of COVID-19, it actually our county offices have been affected also. At this time, our doors are open, but the only time we allow producers in is if they've contacted us by phone and previously made an appointment. So we always wanna make sure that you're calling ahead of time before you make that long drive into the county office. We want you to call ahead, make sure they're open and they have time and are able to make an appointment for you. If we're not able to allow you to come into the office at that time or we can assist you better without you coming into the office or you don't feel comfortable coming into the local county office, we have other avenues to assist you. We can email you the application process on the phone with you, complete it and mail it out to you for your signature. We have options of being able to allow you to do an e-signature. You can sign up for EOF, which is our authentication system that you can actually apply online and enter that application directly into our software. Or we can go ahead and allow you to do a signature using your cell phone or your computer. So we have opportunities to complete an application that way also. So please just call our county office before you drive into the, into the your local service center and make sure that they are able to assist you. So once you've applied, we wanna remind you that you need to keep the documentation that you used to certify your livestock numbers or your sales commodity receipts. We need you to keep that documentation for three years in case you're selected for spot check or if the county committee would have additional, big questions, some of the information you provided and they may want you to supply some supporting documentation for that. And then after you sign your application, you have 60 days to provide us all of those eligibility forms that Ron discussed. The local office will begin reviewing your application and determining eligibility. And then once they approve that application, we will go ahead and if we can approve it, we'll approve it and get you paid. Otherwise we'll notify you of any adjustments that we were required to make. So you can either find all of our locations online or we did include a map of where all our county offices are located. And then the next few slides, we have a group email that you can email that email address and it'll go to all the county office employees in that office and along with their phone number. And this is just a slide that has all of our different important internet websites that have the CFAP information on there.  It's a very useful tool at the website listed there. We encourage you to sign up for our GOV delivery, which is the system we use to send out emails with important information about what's going on in the farm service agency and what programs we're running and what deadlines may come up. And then you can also give us your cell phone number and we can send you text messages. They'll be brief and we won't overload you, but it'll give you important information about our programs. With that, this is a slide just listing all of the individuals who spoke today in the different program commodity areas and feel free to reach out to any of us via email and we will answer your questions as soon as possible. So with that, I'll turn it back over to Ron Haugen and Miranda to see if we have any questions that we're able to answer. Yes, Laura, I see we have one question here. Before we get started on questions, we have a couple of questions for you guys just to see, you know, get a little bit about who we, more information about who's on today and then also how useful today's webinars. Just two questions that we're gonna ask you and they should pop up on your screen now. Okay, Miranda, you got the polling done. Okay, this one question, I think I know the answer, but I'll address it to Laura. This producer says, I produced a, for the first time in my farming career, produced edible beans, Pinot beans in 2020 and I have no 2019 prior years production. I understand I have to sell the 2020 production by December 11th or I am not eligible for CFAP2. Is that right, could you answer that? Yeah, that is correct. So that as long as that producer would have not sold any other sales commodity. So in this scenario, they said they're a new producer to dry edible beans, but I just wanna make sure that if they didn't, they could not have produced like dry edible peas or garbanzo beans, they couldn't have produced those in previous years either. Or if they had Buffalo back in 2015 and then sold them off and now produce dry edible beans in 2020, they wouldn't be considered a new producer. So if this producer had never produced any sales commodities before 2020 and this year is the first year they planted dry edible beans and they would then use their 2020 sales and the producer's correct. They would have to have their sales, they'd only be able to claim the sales that they've received the funds for by December 11th, the deadline. Okay. Another dry edible bean question. How about if you produced and sold 2018 and produced and sold in 2018 but the money was deferred to 2019? Okay, we actually look at the date that that money is received. So in that scenario, the producer would have had to have planted a sales commodity in 2020. So they would have had this plant, let's just say dry edible beans again in 2020 to be eligible. Once they've done that, we'll look at any sales that were received. We don't care what year that sales is from, what year crop that sales is from. So in this scenario, that producer would be able to claim those 2019 or 2018 dry edible beans that they received the money for in 2019. They will include those sales on their application. Okay. Any other questions? We also wanted to let you know that this is being recorded and it will be made available to you as well. Put in the chat box. I don't know if everybody has that open, but the recording as well as the slides, if you weren't able to write down an email address or a website fast enough, will be posted on the NDSU extension farm management page. Okay. Here's another question. It seems that it's very unfair that I would have to sell my 2020 beans by 1211 as the price hit rock bottom now. The program provisions state that it's sales through, if you are a new producer, it's the sales through December 11th through the program deadline. So that's what the procedure is that we have to follow here at FSA. Any other questions? Here we go. Oh, I guess he was just thanking you for the answer. Okay. I guess that's probably exhausted our time for questions here. If I don't see any other questions, I guess we can call an end to it. I want to thank you people that have participated and attended this webinar. Any other questions as we mentioned, and please just get ahold of any of us. We're always available to answer questions. And we want to thank the FSA office, the state FSA personnel for putting these slides together. It was very informative and very detailed. We appreciate this. And we had extension, try to help get the word out to all of the producers. So thank you, Miranda, for setting up things. And with that, I guess we will end the meeting and say good afternoon.


This is the VOA Special English Economics Report. You probably have heard of comic book heroes like Superman, Batman, and Spider-Man. But what about Tom, the motorcycle shop owner? Joe Knight and Karen Berman. Tom, Joe, and Karen all appear in a comic book called Financial Intelligence. But Mr. Knight and Ms. Berman are real people. In 2006, they wrote a book called Financial Intelligence, a manager's guide to knowing what the numbers really mean. It was written for people who need to learn quickly about accounting. The book explains in simple ways, often complex methods of keeping financial information. It became a best-seller. In June, publisher Smarter Comics released a comic book that provides the same information in easy-to-understand picture form. The new book is a combination of a textbook and a graphic novel. It tells the story of Tom, a mechanic, who must quickly learn how to direct the motorcycle repair shop his father founded. Tom has no experience with finance and is struggling with the business. Joe Knight and Karen Berman help him. Artist Dave Wachter made illustrations for the comic book. Franco Arda is the founder and head of Smarter Comics. He formerly worked as an investment banker. He started the company almost three years ago with his own money. He wanted to create educational comic books that increase understanding. Franco Arda notes that many people grew up with comics. He says pictures combined with written text can help people learn an idea much more quickly than just text alone. This explains the expression of picture says a thousand words. Financial intelligence will help readers quickly understand many of the major areas of accounting. The new comic book is available in paperback. The website entrepreneur.com named Smarter Comics to its list of 100 brilliant companies of 2012. The company has created comic book versions of more than 10 other books. These include Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli, and The Art of War by Sanzu. Later this year Smarter Comics plans to release a comic book by rapper 50 Cent. For VOA Special English, I'm Carolyn Presuti. You can read, listen, and learn English with more stories about business and other subjects at voaspecialenglish.com.


Thank you for joining today's session. The subject of this session is drunk fly. Make image distribution efficiently and safely. I'm Yu Xin Liu from Alibaba Cloud, and I'm one of the commentators of drunk fly. Today, my partner Peng Tong will join me to share this session with you. First, let's take a look at the agenda of this session, which contains three parts. The first part is the introduction of the drunk fly. The second part introduces the architectures of the drunk fly so that you can have a quick understanding of the core technical ideas of drunk fly. The third part will be shared by my partner Peng Tong. It's about Nader's image service, which is already a sub-project of drunk fly. Let's get into the introduction part. Here, let me first try to answer what is drunk fly. Drunk fly is an open-source, intelligent, P2P-based image and file distribution system. Its goal is to tackle all distribution problems in cloud-native scenarios. The core objectives of drunk fly is to improve download efficiency at large scale and reduce the pressure of source server and save costly bandwidth. We can take a look at the comparison chart on the right. This chart shows the time consumption of the downloading files using native mode and drunk fly mode. The native mode means that all nodes download directly from the source. In the chart, the x-axis means the number of the concurrent downloads and the y-axis represents the download time. The green curve means download in native mode and the red curve means download in drunk fly mode. Through this chart, we can quickly join the following conclusion. With the increase of the concurrent downloads, the average download time remains fairly consistent when using drunk fly. At the same time, when the skill reaches a high level, the source server will even go down, which leads to the failure of the download. But using drunk fly will not have this problem. Let's quickly pass several important milestones of drunk fly. In 2015, due to the internal needs of Alibaba Group, drunk fly was born. In 2017, drunk fly has undergone large-scale internal verification and decided to open source in the community. In 2018, drunk fly supported the image distribution and donated to the CNCF Foundation as an image distribution tool. As in April this year, it's entered the CNCF incubating stage. In the future, drunk fly still has many directions to explore, and we welcome all of you to join this project. Currently, the drunk fly community has more than 5,200 staff, more than 70 contributors, and 8 maintenanceers from 4 different companies. There are more than 50 companies already using drunk fly, including Alibaba Cloud, Channel Mobile, Bilibili, and so on. You may be more interested in the core architecture of drunk fly than in the community. Next, let's start focusing on that. Firstly, let's analyze the core of drunk fly, P2P, and CDM mechanism. drunk fly has two components, DFGAT and Sumnaut. DFGAT is a client-side component that needs to be installed on each node, which takes a row of peer in a P2P network. Including download files from other peers and acting as a uploader to support other peers to download files from it. Supnode is a server-side component. It mainly provides these capabilities. First, it's a tracker and scheduler in the P2P network that chooses appropriate downloading netpads for each peer. Secondly, it's also a CDN server that catches downloaded data from the source to avoid downloading the same files from the source repeatedly. And secondly, and so on. In fact, Supnode is also a special peer for all the contents of our files in the P2P network. Another important thing is the granularity of drunk fly downloads its blocks instead of the unfair. Each fail will be divided into multi-blocks according to the sorting rules. Here, we can find that the blocks currently downloaded from each peer are different. Then, let's take a quick look at JungleFly's P2P and CDN mechanisms through a process of downloading files with JungleFly. First, which trigger download files with JungleFly at host. And DevGate will send a request to Supnode looking forward to obtain the scheduling result that is which peer has which blocks. After Supnode receives the download request, it will first check whether the fail is catched locally. If not, download it from the source and catch it locally. Then, the Supnode will return the scheduling result according to the recorded relationship between the peers and blocks to the scheduling algorithm. If all nodes out of the Supnode don't have any blocks of the fail, the Supnode will act as a peer node and provide other peers to download the fail blocks. The scheduling result will not contain other blocks. Otherwise, it will only contain a certain number of blocks. Default is 4. After DevGate gets the scheduling result, it will download the corresponding blocks from the peers according to the scheduling result. After downloading a block, DevGate will do this since the first one reported to the Supnode that it has downloaded a block, and then provides the ability to download this block for other peers. Then repeat steps 2 to fail until all nodes have downloaded the entire fail and content. I hope that through the above explanation, you have a good understanding of Dragonfly's core principles. So far, we have been talking about the topic of fail download. You may be more concerned about how to download an image through Dragonfly. Next, let's take a look at how Dragonfly participates in image distribution. Firstly, we need to know when we run the image pool command, what will happen. According to the OCI distribution specification, the process of putting an image around retrieving two components, Manifest and one or more layers. A manifest is a JSON document which defends an OCI image such as layers, sets and digest. Layer is the binary form of content that is stored in the registry addressable by a digest. Then the process of pulling an image is as follows. The first step is to retrieve the manifest by sending a GET request. And the client should verify the returned manifest signature before fetching layers and then pull layers which are not accessed. We see that the process of downloading images is through standard HTTP requests. This is similar to downloading fails. If the request to download an image can be downloaded through Dragonfly, then the larger scale download of images can use the capabilities of the Dragonfly. So, in order to meet the needs of image distribution, Dragonfly added a new component, DFDmen. The role of DFDmen is to act as another process, responsible for intercepting blobfail download requests and calling DFGet for P2P download. Let's take Docker as an example. The process of downloading an image through Dragonfly becomes run the Docker pull image command and configured to use Dragonfly DFDmen. Then download the required layer blobfail through the Dragonfly P2P mechanism. When all years needed for an image are downloaded, then we will get a complete OCI image. At present, Dragonfly has a good practice in combination with Docker and Content-D. Here is the key part of their configuration of the image registry process. In fact, as a process component, DFDmen can almost support all containers engines. As long as the download fail request is forward to DFDmen, the following download logic will be handed over to Dragonfly to complete. At this point, you have learned about the main architecture design and the process design of the Dragonfly. In addition, Dragonfly has the ability to provide more advanced functionality, such as network bandwidth limit, transmission encryption, and so on. If you are interested, welcome to join us. That's all I have to share. Let's welcome Pentao to share with us about Nader's image service. Thank you. Thank you, Wixin. Hello, everyone. I am Pentao, a software engineer from Art Group. I have been working on containers for a long time in recent years. Today, I am going to introduce the work that we have been doing in the past year, trying to improve Dragonfly with better ways of container image distribution. A new sub-project, Nader's, has been added to the Dragonfly project's family. I will dive into details on why we do it and how it looks like. Before we start, let's take a look at why we did it. In the container ecosystem, a new tool organization, Open Container Initiative, shorthand OCI, was created to standardize container image, runtime, and distribution. To do that, OCI has defined an image spec, a runtime spec, and a distribution spec. They work together pretty well and helped to increase the prosperity of the container ecosystem. Here, we will focus on the OCI image spec in the rest of the session. At the right side of this slide, we have a very simple illustration of the container image. It is consisted of several JSON files and Nader data files. This layer touches the files of container image data layers, containing all files and directions of a container image. The OCI image spec defines the format of each JSON file and how this touches the Nader files are to be combined to form a file system view. In recent years, as the container ecosystem evolves, OCI has recognized some of the drawbacks of the image spec. The most important one is that, before we start our container, we must beforehand e-contrast this image to the local file system. It adds a lot of delay to the container startup type. What's ironic is that, even if we only want to access a very small portion of the container image data, we still have to download the entire image. Another less obvious but still important problem is that the OCI image can only support deduplication and the layer to touch and the tile touches the layer. There are three consequences of the defect. The first one is that, if we change a file's metadata, it will cause the file's data to be copied to the upper layer as well. The second one is that, if a file is modified multiple times when building a container image, it will be saved at different image layers and we have to download it multiple times when starting the container, even though already the last modified file data is actually usable for containers. The third one is that, deleted files and deductions are still saved at lower layers and need to be downloaded when starting a new container, even though they won't be used by containers at all. The OCI community are pretty aware of their drawbacks and started to talk about OCI v2 image stack for some time. Here is a link to a shared document, a brainstorm that has happened in the OCI community. Besides discussing what's to be OCI v2 image stack, the community has also seen several projects, also seen the existing defects in different ways. For example, the Dragonfly project and Kraken project speed up image distribution via P2T network. SurveyMFS employs file-level local cache to avoid downloading the entire image. Stanker tries to solve the deduplication problem with storage layer's snapshot capability. CRFS hacks the target layout format and make it seekable to support undemand loading. FileGray and UMOCI break image layer in-built, saving each file or sub-file as an object in the image registry. All these are generous works and solve the problems that they deem most important. However, each of them suffer from different problems. For example, the P2P image distribution solution, while fast, still requires downloading an entire image before starting a container. The file-level local cache in SurveyMFS reduces the problem to holding require a file to be fully downloaded before processing, but it is still not a flawed undemand loading. Stanker relies on a storage snapshot capability that is not always available. CRFS requires a few smart points for every image layer and in performance overhead with each layer, which is slow if there are many layers in the image. FileGray and UMOCI both suffer from the problem of too many objects for each image, which is a great burden on the image registry. Observing this, we designed and implemented the Niders image service to improve the current state. With careful design, Niders image service has these key features. Container image data is downloaded on demand. Files are split into chunks and Niders supports chunk-level data deduplication. Image metadata and data are flattened so that low-intermediate layers are maintained. Niders also supports end-to-end data integrated check. And it is compatible with OCR artifacts spec and distribution spec, allowing it to be easily integrated with existing image distribution deployments. Let's take a look at how these are done in details. First, let's look at the architecture. At the high-level, Niders provides a user-space file system demo as shown in the middle of the picture. When starting a new container, Niders only need to download a very small container image metadata layer, which is usually very fast. The demo unfolds the metadata layer and exports file system views to container-spiled views over how it is portable. So Niders can support both traditional John C container and virtualized containers, like Cata containers. Because Niders image format is compatible with OCR artifacts spec and distribution spec, it can be stored in a Docker registry as well as an OSS in a cloud environment. Users can choose to deploy an OCR distribution network like Dragonfly between registry and the compute node to further accelerate image data distribution in large scale. Inside Niders schema, an optional local cache can save image data locally to boost future data access. At the core of Niders, it designs an image format to support all its key features. Each container image is divided into a metadata layer and a data layer. The metadata layer utilizes a mergo tree, also known as a hash tree data structure. Every file and directory is a hash node in the tree. With its hash digest calculated either by its data or by its descendants in the case of a directory. Then we can easily verify a file or a directory by recocculating its digest. Each file's data is cut into fixed sized chunks. Each chunk has its own hash digest calculated by its data saved in a shared data layer. Because the data layer is separated from metadata layer, Niders can represent a container image file system view just with the metadata layer. And the data layer can be shared among different metadata layers at the data chunk level, so that they are shared between different container images. With this chunk data sharing global chunk data, deduplication is possible as well. After learning about the Niders image format, let's look at how it can benefit us. The immediate benefit is that we can launch containers much faster. In a container startup time benchmark, we measure that the conventional container startup time can be proportional to the size of container images. For example, a busy box can be launched very quickly since its image is pretty small. However, for a large image like TensorFlow, it takes several minutes to start. And most of the time is spent pulling the container image. However, when running with Niders, we can see that the container startup time is pretty consistent, all below four seconds. At the bottom of the graph, we can see that Niders always finishes pulling the container image in less than one second, thanks to the image format design that separates image data and metadata. Another very useful benefit brought by Niders is end-to-end data integrity. With conventional container images, images are downloaded and verified at image level. Then it is uncompressed to a local file system. After that, we cannot know if it is changed intentionally or unintentionally, or if there is a big flip or a silent data corruption in a local disk. This bothers some non-running applications for a long time because disk cleaners and silent data encryption cannot be anticipated. However, Niders can be configured to always check image data checksup before returning it to container applications. Then it ensures that whatever you read by the container application is always verified and consistent. Even if there is a disk failure or silent data corruption, it can detect that and result to VGCs for the original copy of data. There are more benefits of running Niders image service than we do not cover here. We have open source suite as a sub-project of Dragonfly. We encourage the audience to check it out on our GitHub with policy. In future, we plan to introduce better integration with the container image ecosystem, such as integration with Buildkit etc. We want to support more data compression of the algorithm as well. Currently, only LZ4 is supported, and we are looking at flexible check sites and flexible duplication levels. Last but not least, we will propose to the OCI community to data. Let us serve as a reference implementation to the OCI V2 image stack. Okay, we have finished all the introduction. Thanks for watching. Here is our contact information. The Dragonfly website, the GitHub repository, the Twitter handle and the DingdingTalk group. Please feel free to contact us in any method you prefer. And we can answer questions in the Q&A session. Thank you.


Moving Duet Scholars Online. Hello, I'm Cheryl Burgstahler. I direct the Duet Center at the University of Washington, Disabilities, Opportunities, Internet Working, and Technology. And part of that program, we have the Duet Scholars Program, which is for teenagers later in high school that are working to transition to college and on to careers. My name is Scott Bellman. I'm the program manager at the Duet Center. Our Scholars Program offers a variety of college preparation activities throughout the school year. The most exciting time being during our summer camp, which we call Duet Summer Study. That's where students visit campus to live in dorms, learn how to navigate the campus and eating cafeterias, and take college classes as they learn about how to get ready for school after high school. My name is Naomi. I've been a Duet scholar since 2016, and it's been a really fun journey, full of great opportunities from Duet and connecting with Duet throughout the years. My name's Finn. When we did Duet in person, there was a focus on disability advocacy and also on STEM, like we had daily workshops. We would go to the facility where they monitor seismic activity. That was like the STEM element. And then we also have the disability element where we would learn, okay, here's how to get accommodations at college. My name's Alexis, and I was a Duet 2019 scholar. Well, being there physically, I was able to learn the ropes of how a college functions, traveling all over the campus, eating at the different places, sitting through several hours of class. And I also kind of learned to advocate for myself. A while ago, I had to do a meeting with, well, I arranged a meeting with the disability services at the deep end. I was able to get through it myself. So when 2020 hit us all with the pandemic, we were stunned, like the rest of the world, but we thought, well, this will last a week or two and we'll have our program because we were planning a program in 2020 to be on site, like the other ones. But very quickly, we realized this wasn't going to be over that fast. We had to convert totally online. It was clear the students weren't going to be safe in an on-site program. And so we got to work. I said to my staff is, well, who better than this team for going online? We're always about technology. I'm Tammy Tidwell, a program coordinator with Duet, and I have worked with Summer Study for almost two decades. The decision to move online, like most youth programs, was something that we knew was not going to be easy. My name is Kayla, and I am a program coordinator at the Duet program. I'm also a past scholar. I was a scholar in 2005, and right now I work with students who are in our scholars program, and so we assume is our primary way of communication and facilitation of all of our programming and students who felt comfortable talking out loud and answering questions. They could do that. Students who were more comfortable with text, they would write in the chat. And so we were able to accommodate different learning styles and communication styles, and in a lot of ways it made it more inclusive. And we were able to keep people safe, which of course was our primary concern at the time. We wanted to make sure that students still had some of those interactive pieces, like mock interviews or meeting with faculty. And what we found was those interactions were actually more focused because students were in a breakout room with the faculty or the mock interviewers and could really focus on what they were doing. And they got to be in the spotlight and really say what they wanted to say. Whereas in a normal situation, we would have an entire room of interviews happening at the same time, which is very loud and distracting. It was the same deal as the previous two years, but just online. So you'd have like the different sessions and instead of going somewhere, you just log on and your classroom would be the Zoom room. I think what I enjoyed most about the virtual program is in the lecture setting and the group discussion setting. I felt like it was a lot easier for people, for everyone to be able to get their ideas across. I felt like it was a lot easier for people to share ideas in that way. I felt like it was a lot easier for people to... that they didn't understand some of their water clarification. You could raise your hand, the virtual hand, or you could type something in the chat. I felt like the chat was helpful in terms of like, hey, I didn't understand this or what does this mean? You asked your clarification. You get more participation in classes and in activities if you turn on that chat feature, which made the virtual summer study exponentially more engaging. One of the most important things about summer study, whether it's in person or online, is building community, making sure that students with disabilities that are headed to college feel like they belong, feel like they have other people like them out there. And that is definitely something we still saw happening online. We see that students find out more about disability history. They find out more about their roots. They find out more about this entire community around the world of people who have experiences like they do. Hi, my name is Mimera. I'm a 19-year-old autistic student who is a scholar at Do It. In the virtual program, we didn't share videos about disabilities and how important it is to us. It was interesting to hear about how many of my friends persevered through their lives with a disability. We had to get pretty creative. We included activities such as game nights and movie nights and opportunities for students to talk about their hobbies and pets and share a meal so that we could still have that sense of community. My name is Andrea Mano, and I'm an assistive technologist with the Do It program. We wanted to build a community even before summer study. We had the scholars meet with us in small groups over Zoom before summer study. The groups were chosen based on the shared assistive technology and what we thought the scholars had in common. Allowing the students to attend virtually enabled them to experiment with technology in their own homes. And if the students wanted, they could have their parents involved too, which is always really helpful to have another set of eyes when you're learning something new. We also realized that there was an essential piece of what we do in person that we couldn't let go of, and that was making sure we had evening activities and fun things interspersed throughout. So during the day, we would take museum tours and go online and visit some museums around the country. And at night, we made sure we had movie nights and game nights where students can really participate and get to know each other and their senses of humor. And what we found was the movie night was actually, in my opinion, more fun online because normally people are shushing each other if you're in person watching a movie, but we watched movies and they could talk about the disability-related content that they maybe didn't really realize was there before or talk about their favorite characters or talk about what they didn't like about a scene or what they really loved about that movie. So in pet night, you can bring your pet, ideally in costume, by the way, and perhaps in a matching costume to yours. That's not something we would have done ever during an onsite program, had their pets come along. And so that translated into really funny, funny, funny activity. And as usual, the evening activities were optional. So some students that were experiencing some zoom fatigue or just needed a break or weren't interested in pets, well, they could easily plan their whole evening without us. My name is Sophia, and I became a doing scholar in 2021. I was able to meet people throughout the community, but mostly I felt like I connected with them more throughout the optional evening activities where I had more time to engage with the community. I think it was a talent show. I just showcased my origami, and that was just pretty fun because I got to see people's reactions to my crafts that I worked on during the pandemic. It made us feel like we were all one class or one family. It was very nice to see so many new faces. I think we were able to make plenty of friends, even though it wasn't in person. Well, I think I was able to build a sense of community just in front of how well-command and open the program is. What I enjoyed most about Virgil was probably the fact that it felt like do it. So even if we're not together, we're still together. And I was like coming back home, honestly. I just felt like I'm back home. Lessons learned. Well, we learned that you can pull this off. We've learned some things that we share with others who are in a similar situation that are moving an onsite program online or maybe even starting the online. One thing that we did the first year and continue to do is made our program a little bit longer. And so it's going three weeks rather than two because we wanted to avoid Zoom fatigue. We hear a lot about that. So we thought it was important that we keep the screen time a little shorter than maybe what we would want to. Do-It staff was very thoughtful about moving summer study online. And in being thoughtful in that way, they had a lot of staff in the online sessions. One staff could monitor the faces on the screen. One staff could monitor the chat. One staff could be monitoring email when a scholar couldn't get into the session. I think that's really helpful. And it seems like that's a lot of people. But you do need a lot of people in case something unexpectedly happens. Some of the things that were particularly successful that we hadn't thought about before was we were able to engage people from all over the state. And so it wasn't just the students that we were engaged with but also their families. We do involve the parents with the process of working with the scholars. And so we felt like we made a deep connection with that aspect of the student's life so we could know what the support system looks like and maybe how we could help them. But we also got to know the students in a different way as well. They were in their own environments and some of our students felt more comfortable. For other programs, thinking about going to an online program or even a hybrid program, some of the positives are that you can get mentors, people who've been through your program in the past. They can come from wherever they are. So if they're away at school or they're not able to get to campus on a certain day, they can still be engaged. It engages a bigger and wider community. We also had end of the day team meetings, which were essential. When we're in person, we can't pull all those staff together because there are staff working with the students and supervising. But online we were able to stay in touch with each other for a single day. What I realize is that the students who've only participated and do it summer study online have gotten a lot out of the experience. I see their growth in their IEP or 504 meetings during reunions and also in the emails that they send us.  I had a lot of flexibility because I was also balancing another summer program I was doing along with the summer study session. So I met with Tammy just to talk over a meeting about how I can kind of balance those two programs. If anyone asks me for some advice when they're forced into turning an on-site program into online, or maybe even optionally doing it, doing that transition, the first thing I'd like to say is just from the get-go, embrace and help your staff embrace the problem to solve. This is really kind of exciting. It's stressful too, but we've shown that it can be done, and you just need to do things one step at a time. For more resources about supporting Students with Disabilities, consult uw.edu-d-o-i-t. Copyright 2023, University of Washington. Permission is granted to copy this material for non-commercial purposes, provided the source is acknowledged.


This is FKBP, it's FK501 binding protein. Can you guess the name of the small molecule that's bound? That's right, that's FK501. It's just a boilerplate simple protein that several groups have used to develop methods to calculate free energies. Ideally I would like to calculate the binding energy of that molecule but pulling it away and calculating how much I gain or lose when I take it all the way out to water that's complicated for the reasons that I shared with you a minute ago. But what if I instead could calculate another process? What if I could just make this molecule disappear into a ghost by removing all the interactions? That's not quite a physical process but if you bear with me for a second that if we just assume that happens it's going to lead to some nice things. So I can do that, I can easily define two potential functions. VA when the molecule is present and then VB when I've turned all the interactions to zero. So VB would mean that molecule is gone or it's pretty much, it's a ghost instead and in VA molecule is present. Now in reality a molecule would not become a ghost but bear with me for a second here. So I can't do this instantly because if I did this instantly I would create a vacuum gap in the system and it would lead to tons of bad things. But what if I instead define a new potential here that is a function of a parameter lambda and then I just interpolate between these two systems 1 minus lambda times VA plus lambda times VB. What that will mean is that when lambda equals 0 I have VA and when lambda equals 1 I have VB and then I interpolate between them. So this now means that I can simulate the system at many different points maybe pick 10 points between 0 and 1 here and gradually forces molecule to disappear. How is that going to be useful? Well I won't have time to prove that to you but there is a deep result telling us that I can actually get the difference in free energy between these two states by integrating the derivative of V with respect to lambda over lambda. There are two parts here. I don't calculate this numerically. This derivative of the linear interpolation is minus VA plus VB C dependence on lambda. So I can calculate this analytically and then this is an average over the ensemble, right? That's why I need a simulation. And the deep result is that when I actually average this I no longer get the potential where that came from but actually the free energy. I don't expect you to understand that. It's for now on you should just believe it. But what that means is I'm still having an unphysical process here. I'm turning something into a ghost but along that unphysical process this will allow me to fairly easily calculate an actual free energy along a reaction coordinate. In this case the coordinate of gradually disappearing the FK501 molecule or any other molecule for that matter. What does that have to do with reality? Well, not much. But there is an important property of all these values. Potentials and free energies are state variables. It's only the state that matters, not the way we got there. A brick has a potential energy. It doesn't matter where it was yesterday. It's only the state that matters. Otherwise we would violate the first law of thermodynamics. And in particular that means that if I have a state A here that is a real state and I would like to move from to B with also a real state but for some reason there is a brick wall between them in reality. It would be a very high energy barrier. As long as I can find some sort of imaginary physical way to go from A to B all these dotted states on the way they can be fake. The only thing that matters is that the starting state is real and the ending state is real. If I have found a path between them I can use simulations and cheat and take a path where the path itself is actually impossible to calculate the free energy difference between them. And we're going to use that to take paths between states that appear strange but allow us to calculate the actual binding free energy.


Welcome to Toffy TV, it is the Everton News Daily. Raffa Benedys has held his press conference ahead of Sunday's game against Tottenham Hotspur, two o'clock kick-off at Gullison Park. It's been some of the injury situation and how important it is to get players back and how important those players will be to Everton changing the form we're in at the moment, obviously three defeats in a row. He did confirm that Jerry Mina and Andre Gomez were still out, still not available, which is a bit of a blow, but certainly Jerry Mina. We sort of knew that anyway because he hadn't been called into the Columbia squad, but that's obviously a massive blow on Andre Gomez. No real weird of what the injury is, but they're trying to deal with it. Getting those players back for the next game would be hugely important for the Manchester City game and then obviously getting Dominic Carmel in the back after that, but obviously this international break gives us a couple of weeks to try and get that sorted out. He did confirm Luca Deane had been training and he's fine and he should be available for the weekend, so that's good, less messing about at the back, which is obviously again what we need. A settled team, settled players for the likes of that case, Tottenham Hotspur and things like that. He did also speak about Fabian Delph, he said he's okay and said you know how important players like him are experienced players who've won things. And I tend to agree with him that the problem is Fabian Delph as a player has not really made himself available in his time at Everton and before the game on Monday night, he'd only played eight minutes at Leeds this season. He seems to pick up very innocuous injuries and then gets, well goes on the sidelines as quickly as possible, so I don't think he's ever had a problem with him. I don't think he's ever been a problem when he's playing, just that we just don't get him on the pitch enough. Let's see what he can do on Sunday where he can continue the form of that second half against Walls where he came on and played really, really well. Obviously he played probably man of the match but it wasn't very hard to be man of the match in that game. But obviously the manager, as I said, talking a lot about the injury situation and I think you know as people are asking him about the situation, three defeats in the row, he's going to lean heavily on that because let's be honest, having Dominic Arvening so far this season for only three games out of the 10 in the Premier League, having Rich Arleson I think missing for four. The court has now missed the last couple. We've had Pickford out for games, we've had Jenny Meiner out for games, Sheamus Coman out for games. Whether this squad is big or little it just shows a lot of our bigger players have been out this season. I mean that's no excuse, our squad is really, really poor and that's part of the reason why we are where we are and we've lost four of the 10. So that's something maybe they will address in January but getting those players back fit and just not having players out for injuries for a long time. Getting to the bottom of that. What is going on with the medical team and stuff like that? Can any of that help? So we did mention that quite a few times so hopefully we'll have some players back after the international break. Andy Gordon has a call up to England 21s, Lee Carsley's England 21s. Great news for him, he's done really well this season. Starting to look like a bit more of a Premier player, tactically looks very switched on. And it's fantastic that he's got this reward. He was getting more game time at Everton this season but I think England 21s acknowledging him that he is doing well is really important for him as well. It shows that he's doing something right and he's moving in the right direction and obviously it's hard for young players, they come in and out of teams. They may not know exactly where they stand, may think like they're just going to fall off the pick and order when players come back. But I think this is a really good sign for him and I think the manager's happy with him. And hopefully if there's games where we do play for attacking players, he's one of the players who's one of the attackers. Because I'd honestly rather see him any day of the week than a wobby. So really well done to Andy Gordon. Our home game against Aston Villa in January on 22 January has been moved and it's now 12.30 kickoff. So again we sacrifice a Saturday 3 o'clock kickoff. I think we haven't got another one this year, I think. Obviously television again. Not much we can do about that. Although the Premier League are just about to sign a huge deal with the US TV market for more money. So that money will come to evidence so that's good news as well. On Sunday before the game, the Armed Forces will be recognised and also Walter Smith will be recognised with a period of silence and flowers being laid and things like that. Obviously it is very close to the 11th of November. This is the last game before that and obviously we pay our respects to the Armed Forces and obviously for Walter Smith as well at X7 Manager who recently died as well. Look out for that on Sunday. And if you want to go and watch a game of football tomorrow, Ever and Women are playing Brighton a half fire tomorrow at Walton Hall Park. It will be the new manager's first home game. They played in the week in the cup. They won 3-1 at Leicester City after a couple of bad defeats before the international break. That is a half-five kickoff so if you want to go and watch them. Walton Hall Park. If you're bored and you want to go and watch a game of football, go and check that out. There you go. Make sure you go and check out our match preview for the Spades game. Opposition match preview which is over on Patreon and the Starnton 11 show as well as lots of other shows, exclusives over on Patreon and on YouTube. The links are in the description. Give this video a like and subscribe if you haven't already. See you later.