On a computer screen, purple highlighted text, redesigned the technology. On a keyboard, fingers tap on large letters. Yellow highlights the words, deaf-blind students. A finger points to colored text boxes on a screen. A boy speaks into a headset mic. Words appear, working together. Computers and people with learning disabilities. On a campus, students walk.  People with learning disabilities blend right in. Sometimes, they don't even know. A girl mouths, who, me, Kristen, graduate student. I always struggled academically, since I can remember, since first grade. And so I pretty much had convinced myself in my mind that school is really difficult for me, and that's just the way it was. Learning disabilities are invisible disabilities. A child may struggle with school work for years before being diagnosed, years in which people don't understand why she just doesn't get it. Most of my friends could study for about a half an hour and get A's. And I would study for, in the beginning of the school year, I'd study maybe for four hours and still get a D. Kristen, who will soon return to school for a graduate degree, didn't know she had dyslexia until college. A boy walks from a school. The first step is diagnosis. When academic achievement is significantly below intellectual ability, the cause may be a learning disability. Chris, a high school student with dyslexia and dysgraphia, was diagnosed in grade school. I didn't really find out until second grade when my mom started making me go all these places where they made me do tests for hours and hours. And that kind of got me really bored, but then I finally noticed after they started telling me that I had slight problems in certain areas, like reading or writing. There are various types of learning disabilities, and they affect individuals in different ways. What they all have in common is that they affect the way the brain processes information. I think what it means to have a learning disability is that the students in some way are having their processing interrupted. So they're not able to maybe assimilate information as easily as other students. And then again, they're not able to express it as easily as other students. So even though they're trying very hard, their ideas may not get across as well as other students. Or they may not be able to take in the information effectively in the first place. Sometimes I will read a line, and then I'll start on the next line, and halfway through it, I'll jump up that same line of already read and keep reading the same sentence over again, which gets annoying. And sometimes words change places, and you go all the way up, side down, and it makes it kind of hard in that sense. Learning disabilities can appear in any one or more of these four categories. Spoken language, listening, and speaking. Written language, reading, writing, and spelling. Arithmetic, calculation, and concepts. Reasoning, organization, and integration of ideas. Individuals may be affected in more than one category. Within those categories, there are specific types of learning disabilities. For example, people with dysgraphia may have difficulty forming letters and words as well as producing legible handwriting. Those who have dyscalculia find it difficult to understand and use math concepts and symbols. With dyspraxia, language comprehension does not match production. A person with dyspraxia may mix up words and sentences while talking. Someone with dyslexia may mix up letters within words and words within sentences while reading. This person may also have poor spelling skills. The way that a learning disability affects each individual and their learning style is different. For example, in my situation, my learning disability really affects my reading comprehension. And I really have high math skills, or I did what I practiced. But for others, math is really difficult for them, and their reading comprehension is up to par. Imagine like you're sleeping. You're getting really sleeping, you're reading a book. You start to wander on the page, and you start seeing things moving into different... Do you read the same line? Well, it's about the same thing, except for I'm wide awake. They can have problems reading. They can have problems with auditory information. Maybe they only hear every five words that you're saying instead of every word. And we have some students that process every word singly as they hear it instead of the entire sentence or the concept. And then we have other students who can take in information just fine, but they're not able to get it back out. People can develop strategies to compensate for the effects of learning disabilities. Computer technology has played a vital role in helping people achieve academic and career success. Taking more time to study, outlining my textbooks, using a word processor, spell check, grammar check. When writing papers, I can use my natural speaking program, which allows me to talk into a computer and write what I say. Because I have problems. My handwriting is really bad and sloppy. It takes time to choose hardware and software to get the right fit for each person. But generally, these accommodations are not expensive. A lot of the software they're using comes standard with the computer now. Spell check and grammar check are often built right into the program, or they come with programs when you buy your dictionary, they're already in there. Computing tools. We'll show you some of the computing tools that people with learning disabilities have found effective. Again, these are some of the possibilities. You may find something else that works best for you. Word processors. Many people with dyslexia use only standard built-in word processing features. Spell checking, grammar checking, and the ability to change font size and color are all that's needed. Those tools allow the student to stay focused on what she's writing instead of bogging down in spelling errors. I think that for people with disabilities, computers are really useful because they have spell check and grammar check, and you can use those for writing an essay, and you don't need to take more time consulting a dictionary. Finally, many word processing programs include options for color-coded text or outlining capabilities. These are useful for people who have difficulty sorting and sequencing thoughts and ideas. Reading systems. On a screen, a paragraph is highlighted. Reading systems are useful for people who understand things better through listening than through reading. For them, speech output is effective. Software allows the computer to read aloud text, email, or web pages, basically anything on your computer. Adding a scanner gives access to printed text. Crystal. When I had to read books, I just scan those so they can read the books to me so I don't have to spend two hours reading one page or something. High school student. A scanner converts printed text into a format that the computer recognizes. Then the computer reads the information aloud at the same time that the words appear on the screen. A tall fellow in a Batman costume comes soaring out of the wind or sky. Reading systems may include options for using contrasting colors to highlight words or to make the words bigger on the screen. Concept mapping. A screen contains colored text boxes. The second tier. Concept mapping software offers visual representation of ideas and concepts, which helps people who have difficulty organizing and integrating thoughts while writing. Writing is one of my strengths, but it does take me some time to get my thoughts together. With concept mapping, ideas can be linked, rearranged, and color coded. Concept maps can then be turned into a traditional text outline. This can be used to start and organize a variety of writing projects, including poetry, term papers, resumes, or schedules. Word prediction. On a screen, a list of words pops up. Word prediction software is helpful for people who are poor spellers. It prompts users with a list of most likely word choices based on what has been typed so far. The person using the program can refer to the list, choose a word, and continue writing. Speech output is often combined with word prediction. Speech recognition. Chris wears a headset mic. Most people's lives. Speech recognition software allows people to dictate into their computers. They may use this for email, web browsing, or word processing. It helps me write. I can think and write faster and don't have that problem where I'll have that thought and it'll go away. It requires a significant amount of training and practice. The person using this software speaks into a microphone. The user has to have fairly good reading comprehension to use this effectively because you have to correct some of the words. Scratch that. The computer doesn't always recognize exactly what you meant. David. It sometimes doesn't translate words quite right. College student. My favorite one was one of the first papers I wrote on. It was on space and it translated cosmonaut to cow snot. Other technology-related products include talking calculators, phonetic spellers, and electronic organizers. And don't forget the low-tech tools. Post-it notes, highlighter pens, and day-timer notes can be effective in organizing tasks and ideas. They can be used in combination with computer-based tools. Whatever you choose, the most effective strategies are the ones you develop yourself. I have to just write everything down. I have to be really organized. I have a day-timer, which I kind of live out of, and I just have to keep organized and on top of things and being regular communication with the people I work with to make sure that I understand the project correctly and that I'm working up to the expectations that are expected of me. Images of a headset mic, highlighted text, large letters on a keyboard, and colored text boxes. Described by audio eyes. For more information about IT accessibility, consult www.uw.edu slash accessibility. The content of this presentation is based on works supported by the National Science Foundation under grant number 9800324. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. Copyright 2015, University of Washington. Permission is granted to copy these materials for educational non-commercial purposes, provided the source is acknowledged.


Hey everyone welcome back to the Nintendo Prime and today we have to talk about an update to a major AAA third-party switch game and why a particular part of this update I feel should become standard across the board with all multi-platform games. Now of course folks we were talking about the big 3.6.0 update to the Witcher 3 on Nintendo Switch and there's a whole bunch of stuff to go over in this update and we'll get into everything but the big point I want to talk about to start this video is about cross saves. As of 3.6 you can now use your saves across Nintendo Switch, Steam, and good old games. So if you have a PC save file essentially you can literally transfer it over to Nintendo Switch and vice versa. There's a little some caveats with this like if you have a modded save file if you transfer that to Switch it won't work with Nintendo's cloud backup system because mods aren't really a thing on Nintendo Switch I think that's just a given it's not going to corrupt your current switch save file you could still do all that but you won't be able to save your PC one to the Nintendo cloud but then again if you're transferring between PC and Switch all the time anyways does it really matter if Nintendo's cloud backup system works for you because you could just literally transfer the save back to your PC and just leave it there until you want to use it again but this is excellent for people who want to play the Witcher 3 at home with the best graphical fidelity settings or have a long-term save file that they've had sitting on their PC and want to take it with them easily on the go. This is an amazing feature that really should be standard if I'm being honest and I don't just mean between Switch and PC honestly in the age of technology we're in the fact that we can't have cross-saves between Xbox, PlayStation, PC, and Switch is absolutely baffling to me why an NBA 2K20 do I have to have different save files if I want to switch or on PC or on PlayStation or Xbox why can't it just be one save file across all systems same with Madden same with pretty much anything if a if a gamer is gonna purchase your game more than once so they have it on different platforms why should they have to have different save files it doesn't actually make sense to me and this in general needs to apply to games overall like why are all the player bases not combined in certain games like Madden on PlayStation 4 or Xbox PC why is it not one player pool why is it separated per platform and and we see this some games that actually do combine everything for tonight as an example does a good job combining all the player bases although they did separate switch out from home consoles to be combined with what should we call to be combined with mobile phones but still in general they could at least combine player bases and to have this this cross-save feature is an amazing thing that I again this should be industry standard this shouldn't be like a shocking update but it is because it's not so while obviously the future of gaming we're looking at game streaming how with xCloud stadium maybe with some Amazon's doing I don't know you know PlayStation's probably got something up there sleeves as well I have to wonder why are we missing some basic features forget just cloud saving we're talking cross-saves across platforms it should be a thing more often so I'm glad to see this feature come to switch I do actually have a Witcher 3 save file on my PC that maybe I'll bring over although at this point it's been so long I'll probably just want to start the Witcher 3 over again when I finally pick it up on switch but yeah that's huge now in addition to this they added a whole bunch of new things as well in the settings all of this event essentially to put the how you want the game to perform in your hands let's go over those setting changes so they added touch control support which wasn't there originally this is mostly for menus and the items stuff like that you could kind of tap on things instead of having to move the cursor you add a save file integration obviously we talked about that added more text languages so some regions now have more languages for the text part of the game they added more graphical options added multiple performance optimization fixed various visual and functional bugs various gameplay and crash fixes as well so when you think about that what they did is they took what people were already doing with the game with modded switches which is enabling different settings that are there underneath the surface and and just putting that in the power of the user so things like being able to sharpen the game or unlock the frame rate or just just try to do different things with the game to get it to where you want to be we actually saw Digital Foundry put a recent video about what they can do with it and while we're not talking about overclocking the switch in this case you can mess with settings and now more options is better you can basically get better performance if you want or you can sacrifice some FPS to get a higher frame rate so that there's just a lot to consider and I'm glad they're adding this in here again just like the cross-save feature I think this needs to be an option in more cross-platform third-party games you know put the power of graphical settings in the hands of the users they already do it on gaming PC like gaming you know when you game on PC across the board you can have all these different settings you can mess with why they don't let you have them on switch obviously have the base setting and then have you know maybe a couple other presets but really let the users customize the way they want so if they want higher frame rate if they want higher graphical fidelity if they want higher resolution put let the users decide what matters to them if they want to lower the draw distance and the foliage in Witcher 3 to get higher resolution let them do it so this is now an option it's great I'm excited this is awesome for the Witcher 3 and switch which just keeps getting better and it's obviously surprising that CD project right in their port studio are still putting time into this but it must have sold well in fact we do know that when the Witcher because the Witcher 3 were switched came out about a week before the Netflix series hit and we saw month over month there was a 526% increase in sales from year to year and only 26% of that increase came from other platforms meaning the huge boost from you know the Netflix series month is well the switch version the switch version sold obviously very very well enough to still invest to make it update like this and you have to wonder if this is going to convince CD project rendering other games in the future like cyberpunk 2077 they didn't actually rule out cyberpunk as being a possibility for switch even though they're not working on it at this time but it's possible that you know that could come out this year on other platforms and come out next year on switch and while obviously as a switch owner it's always disappointing that I get day-in-date games to get them later it's still better to have them than not and you know for if there's cross-stay functionality it even makes it in a higher value proposition for consumers so and with CD project already doing that with Witcher 3 if you buy the the PC version of cyberpunk you know if they release it on you know switch in the future don't be surprised if they have cross-stay functionality day one so yeah just more and more good news for Nintendo switch owners so stay tuned folks we have a lot to talk about this is a kind of a new set I don't know if you guys know this it's not new per se because like I've done standing in front of this and there will be standing in front of it in the in future videos as well but there's just a lot of things I'm playing around with my sets and how I'm organizing the studio I'll put pictures of this all up on social media probably Twitter when it's all done I still have the big desk over here that I'm reorganizing and moving things around but you know what I like this setup better already I have you know everything in front of me that I need I have everything behind me that that shows that hey I am actually a gamer for the people who somehow watch my videos and think I'm not hey guess what I actually have games like up there there's a shelf of games and books and stuff you know got some games right here not that that should ever be a doubt about a game in youtuber they obviously care about video games and play video games but for a while there just because I was going through some stuff some people just thought oh he doesn't play games like come on really anyways I am the 10-year-old from the sort of rock if you enjoy this video be sure to drop a like comment down below also I am happy to announce it's not starting yet so don't get your panties all in a bunch but if you made it this far in the video I am happy to announce we will be doing a giveaway of two copies of Animal Crossing New Horizons but we'll get into that as we head into March because there's going to be two different ways you can win one of them is going to be kind of a standard giveaway format with like comment subscribe the other is going to be through a live stream particularly a launch live stream of Animal Crossing but we'll get into that in the future I just want to kind of let you know that that's kind of coming up kind of build some momentum heading into Animal Crossing New Leaf and heading into well out of winter I'm ready for winter to be done so I think you guys are tuning in subscribe hit that bell icon and I'll catch you in the next video


Every day, millions of tons of food and animal feed are produced, sold, and consumed worldwide. To meet the growing demand for food and feed, farmers need to increase the productivity of their crops and livestock. This often involves using pesticides to protect crops from pests. However, pesticide residues may remain in crops and in livestock that eat these crops and eventually end up in our food and drink. Pesticides are potentially toxic to humans and may have adverse effects on our health. How can we ensure that our food is safe? By setting maximum residue limits of pesticides in food and drink, we can protect the health of consumers and facilitate international trade. Limits are recommended by the Joint Meeting on Pesticide Residues, an expert scientific group brought together by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and the World Health Organization. The maximum residue levels recommended by the JMPR are adopted by the Joint FAO-WHO Food Standards Program implemented by the Codex Alimentarius Commission and recognized by the Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures of the World Trade Organization, a reference standard for international harmonization of food regulations to protect human health and facilitate trade. Without food safety, there can be no food security. By safeguarding food and human health from the risks of pesticide residues, we can contribute to better production, better nutrition, a better environment and a better life, leaving no one behind.


Unlike in searching, when it comes to sorting, we have more than a few different options for the general case of an unsorted list. We're going to look at just five, starting with the infamous bubble sort and ending with the accurately named quicksort, which note that yes is intentionally spelled as one word rather than two, unlike all the other sorts. So the general strategy of the bubble sort algorithm is that we work from the start of the list to the end of the list comparing each adjacent pair of items and swapping those which are in the wrong order. So here we have our unsorted list of E, B, C, A, D, which of course properly sorted would be A, B, C, D, E. And in our first pass through the list, we will compare the first element and the second element, E and B, the second element and the third, the third and the fourth and the fourth and the fifth. And as we do so left to right, and we swap them as we compare, we swap them if they are not in the correct order. So first off is E less than B. No, it is not. So we need to swap them. That puts E in the second position, which we compare against C in the third position and those two are out of order. So we swap them. C ends up in the second position and E in the third. And then we compare E in the third position with A in the fourth. And those again are out of order. So we swap them. A gets moved into the third position and E in the fourth. And then finally E compared to D. Again, those are out of order. So we swap them and D ends up in the fourth position and E in the fifth. Now, of course, the list is still not sorted, but this is just our first pass. We now do a second pass, but this time we do one less comparison and swap. So we compare B against C. That's a correct order, so we don't need to swap them. Then we compare C against A. And those are out of order, so we have to swap them. A ends up in second position and C in third. Then we compare third position C against fourth position D. Those are in correct order, so there's no swap there. And after our second pass, we end up with B, A, C, D, E. Again, still not sorted, but again, there's another pass. Again, with one less comparison than the previous pass. So we're just comparing B against A. Those are out of order. We swap them. And then B against C. Those are in order, so no need to swap. And notice now that our list is now properly sorted. However, if the data had been different, if things were mixed differently at the start, it's still possible that the first and second item would be out of order. So we actually have one more pass to do in which we compare one less item from the previous pass. So we just compare the first and second. But of course A and B are still in correct order, so we don't swap them. The point though is that the algorithm doesn't know that in some cases it might finish early. It might not need to do the last few passes. But that all depends on the particular unordering of our list at the start. Now, you may have noticed a pattern with bubble sort that after the first pass, the last item is in its proper position. And then after the second pass, the next to last item is in its proper position. And then after the third pass, the next to next to last item is in its proper position and so forth. So one way to think of bubble sort is that it's effectively like we are finding the item that goes at the end of the list, and then the next to last item, and then the next to next to last item. And this pattern continues until the very last pass where actually we're putting the very last two pieces in their place, the first and second item. Again, note though that in some cases, depending on how the data is unsorted to begin with, some items may find their place early. Like notice that D, the second to last item, finds its place after the first pass, so it actually finds its place one pass early. And actually in this case the same can be said of C, B and A, they all find their place one step early. In any case, looking at how we would implement this in code, we have our function bubble sort which takes one parameter, the list which we are sorting and in the body we have two loops. The outer one for each pass through the algorithm and then the inner one for iterating through the comparisons made in each pass. Recall from our example that we had five items and yet we did four passes because the pattern with bubble sort is that the number of passes is one less than the number of items in the list. And in the inner loop, the number of comparisons we do starts off one less than the length of the list but gets smaller by one by each pass. So from the length of the list we subtract one and also we subtract the index of which passes is. In the first pass the pass index will be zero and in the last pass it will actually be two less than the length of the list because again recall that the range function creates a range from zero up to but not including the number specified in our outer loop we specified a range of length of list minus one. So if the list has a length of five then the argument to range is four producing a range of zero, one, two, three. So in the last pass it will end up that our inner loop will only do just one iteration. Now in the inner loop we do our comparison and if the items are out of order we do our swap. We get our two comparison values a and b, the item at index i and i plus one and if a is greater than b then we swap them. Notice that our comparison is done here using just a greater than operator and that works great assuming that we are ordering a list of numbers. Other data types though don't necessarily have defined behavior with the greater than operator. For those cases you generally have to define your own semantics of what it means for one value to be greater than another and you would do so by implementing your own function and then using that function as the comparison in a sorting algorithm. For simplicity though we're just going to illustrate sorting with the assumption that we're talking about sorting numbers so we're just going to use the greater than and less than operators. The general strategy of the insertion sort algorithm is to take values from the so-called unsorted portion of the list and insert them into a sorted portion of the list. That is a portion of the list where the items are sorted at least relative to each other. This is basically the same strategy people often use in real life like say if you wanted to sort a deck of cards you would take a card off the top or maybe just a random card from the stack and you'd place it in a new stack and as you do this one by one is you take cards from the original stack and place them in the new one. In the new stack you would keep them sorted relative to each other as you add the cards so you draw cards one by one and insert them into place. Insertion sort is that same idea except most commonly it's done such that we are using the same space the same list to keep both the unsorted portion and the sorted portion. So we start off by simply designating the first item as being the sorted portion of the list and given that it has just one item of course it's naturally sorted within itself. Notice that we're designating the unsorted portion with a red outline and the sorted portion with an orange outline. Then in the first pass we take the first item from the unsorted portion of the list in this case B and we insert it into the sorted portion of the list. In the next pass we do the same thing we take the first value of the unsorted portion in this case C and insert it into its proper place in the sorted portion. In each pass we keep doing this the sorted value and inserting it into the sorted portion of the list until the whole list is sorted. One thing to note about the pattern of insertion sort is that it's not until after the very last pass that we know for sure that every item is in its proper position. Until then you have yes the sorted list is growing and some items may end up in their final position in earlier passes but it's not until after the very last pass that we know that any and all items are in their proper position. Now as for the actual insertion process the way it works is that we compare the value to insert with the value to its left and if the insertion value is less than the value to its left then we swap them and do it again we compare the insertion value to the new value to its left and if it is less than that value then we swap them. So basically we walk the insertion value one step to the left until finally it either reaches the front of the list or we find that the value to its left is less than that insertion value. So here in the second pass when we insert C into the sorted list. C is less than E, so we swap those two values and then when we compare C against B, C of course is greater than B, so the insertion value is actually now in its proper place. Looking now at code for insertion sort, we have a function insertion sort that takes one parameter, the list to sort, and again we have two loops. The outer loop, which iterates for each pass of the algorithm for the insertion of each item, and the inner loop which does the actual insertion. Note that in the outer loop we are iterating from index one up to but not including the length of the list, so in a five element list we're going to iterate from one to two to three to four. Again we don't have to insert the first item into the sorted portion of the list because we just designate that first item as itself being the sorted portion of the list, so we actually start by inserting the second item of the list, not the first. Now in our inner loop we are iterating from the index of the item to insert, its original position, down to but not including zero. That's what the third argument to range here means, that we are counting down, not up, and we're counting down in steps of one. So when index has say the value five, then range here represents a sequence of five, four, three, two, one. And then inside our inner loop is where we do our comparison and swap. So first we get the two values to compare the value at insertion index and the value just before insertion index, insertion index minus one. We compare them and if the value to the left is less than or equal to the insertion value, then we are done with this pass of the algorithm. We're done inserting this value. So we break out of the inner loop, otherwise we do a swap and go to the next iteration. If in a particular insertion pass, A never tests less than or equal to B, then we'll never break and the insertion value will end up in the first position of the list. It'll end up at index zero and we'll move on to the next pass to the next insertion. The selection sort is a variant on the basic idea of the insertion sort whereby we have an unsorted portion of the list from which we take values one by one and place them into the sorted portion of the list. In a selection sort, we don't just take any value or the first value from the unsorted portion. We find the smallest value still in the unsorted portion and we tack that on to the end of the sorted portion. What this produces is a sorting pattern that almost looks like the reverse of the bubble sort, whereas bubble sort effectively finds the values which go at the end of the list first and works its ways backwards. In selection sort, the order is front to back. We first find the item that goes at the front, then the next item, then the next and so on until we've sorted the entire list. So here in this example in the first pass, we identify A as the smallest value in the unsorted portion of the list. So we swap it to the front of the list, so A and E swap places. And then in the second pass, we find that B is the lowest value. So we swap it to the next position and it swaps with C. Then in the third pass, C is the smallest value in the unsorted portion of the list. So we swap that into the next position, we swap it with D. And then finally in the last pass, D is the smallest value. So we swap that into place. And of course logically, once every value but one is in their proper place, and of course that last value must also be in its proper place. So note that the last pass, just like in bubble sort, actually puts two values in their place, not just one. In our selection sort function, we again just take one argument, the list to sort, and again we have two loops, one nested within the other. The outer loop represents each pass through the algorithm, and the number of passes like in bubble sort is one less than the length of the list. Target index here refers to the index of the list to which we are going to swap the smallest value in the unsorted portion of the list. So in the first iteration, we swap that smallest value to index zero. In the next pass, we swap it to index one, and index two, then three, four, and so on. Within each pass, our inner loop is where we will scan to find the smallest value in the unsorted portion of the list. And for this purpose, we iterate from target index plus one up to but not including the length of the list. So for example, if we're in the second pass of sorting the list of length five, then target index will have the value one. One plus one is two. That's our first argument to range, and length of ls is five. So range here will return a sequence of two, three, and four. Now it be clear what we're looking for in each pass is not the minimum value per se. We don't really care what that value is. We want to know where it's located. We want its index. So before our inner loop, we start off assigning a local min index, the value of target index, and min value, the value at that location. Then in the inner loop, we get the value at index i. And if it is less than the current min value, then we update min value with this value and min index with this index. Then once our loop completes, min value should contain the smallest value in the unsorted portion, and min index should have its index. With this information, we can then swap the minimum value into place. We can swap it with the value at target index.


Welcome to our interview show in which we interview LGBTQ guests who are important contributors to our community. We want to acknowledge that all things LGBTQ is produced at Orca Media in Montpelier, Vermont, which is unceded Indigenous land. Enjoy the show. Periodically, when I'm talking about the legislature and political work, I make a reference to GLAAD. We thought maybe it would be time for you to really hear exactly what is GLAAD and how people here in Vermont might be impacted by the work that they're doing. So, to that end, I couldn't be happier to introduce someone who has already helped here in Vermont work on parenting issues. This is Paulie Crozier. Welcome Paulie. Thank you so much for having me, Keith. It's fantastic to be here today. So, why don't we start with you explaining to the people who are watching what is GLAAD and how you came to be involved with it? Oh, absolutely. Well, GLAAD is GLBTQ Legal Advocates and Defenders.  And we were founded in 1978, so over 40 years ago. And we were founded actually because of arrests in Boston of gay men at the Boston Public Library. And really, there was a need to represent them. And John Ward, our founder, stepped up and started that work. And GLAAD arose out of that early work to protect the community from over-policing. And then started to work on anti-discrimination laws, and it all just kind of went from there. So, but currently, we're engaged in all New England states to really make New England a zone of equality for LGBTQ people and people living with HIV. And of course, in our work at this point, we're also working really to address systems of racism and make sure that we are leading for our community and the folks who are most vulnerable and most impacted throughout New England and nationally, of course. And so, how did you come to work with GLAAD? Oh, absolutely. Okay, right. Well, that's a funny story. You can stop me. I could talk about myself too long. So, well, I've known of GLAAD forever. I feel like growing up as a queer kid in the Boston area, it was kind of always in the back of my understanding. And then I went to law school, and I learned more in the Boston area, and I learned more about GLAAD's work and did some volunteering during law school for the organization. And then, when I came out of law school, I went to work for a really small family law firm in Boston that for a kind of a lesbian trailblazer, Joyce Kaufman, who had been involved in the really early co-parent adoption case in Massachusetts in 1993's adoption of TAMI, and had such a wonderful opportunity at that firm to do really kind of cutting-edge work for the LGBTQ community and family law. And through that work, I came to know Lawyer's at GLAAD. I worked with Karen Lowy on the Hunter versus Rose case, which was a really important case. I represented a mother, a non-biological mother, whose child was essentially kidnapped out of Massachusetts. And I represented her at the trial court, and then GLAAD helped me on appeal. And on a known donor case and on an unmarried parentage case. So through my own practice, I got to do really wonderful collaborative work with GLAAD and to get to know Mary Bonato and other lawyers there. And so when my law partner said, you know, moved on to retirement, it was a wonderful opportunity to say, let's move over to GLAAD and really expand my ability to do work in the LGBTQ community beyond family law. So and so I've been at GLAAD since October of 2016. I started two weeks before the election of that year, which kind of, you know, changed everything. But yeah, so it's been a really it's been a it's been a busy, busy four years, needless to say. And you mentioned Mary Bonato, who people here in Vermont will probably recognize as the person who helped Beth Robinson and Susan Murray with what ended up in being Vermont's civil union law and then truly marriage equality. Right. So I hear you're talking a lot about family law. And that's how I came to meet you was Vermont's parenting bill. So I'm getting the sense that different attorneys at GLAAD have a different speciality. That's absolutely right. Where we each of us has a different speciality and also each of us has different connections to different states, which I think is really fun. I'll tell you a little bit about that. So so for instance, I do a lot of work on youth and family issues, right, because of my background as a family lawyer. So I do a lot of work in family law in the child welfare system and the juvenile justice system. And my colleague Ben Klein, for example, he's really the expert in HIV and health access to health care. And Jennifer Levi is our director of our transgender rights project, because transgender rights has really been core to GLAAD's work for an extremely long time. And she's really the expert on on transgender rights. And then our newest attorney, Chris Archill, he's really been focusing a lot on elder work, right, and also identity documents. And in any event, so we are all generalists because there are so many issues, right? The LGBTQ community has so many needs and so many issues, but you're right that each of us kind of has our area of expertise. So if it's a family law issue, folks are going to say, you know, what does Polly think? Although obviously Mary Bonotto, Mary Bonotto is an excellent family lawyer as well. And I really enjoyed the documentary. I watched the documentary about the freedom to marry in Vermont. And obviously, I think, you know, Vermont's history in in family law is just tremendous. And then some of us really have relationships with with particular states. I have had the pleasure in my family law work of working in all states, but I'm particularly assigned to Rhode Island. That's the state that I convene a public policy group of advocates in Rhode Island. So we can all kind of communicate and network and get to know each other. Mary's based in Maine. Jennifer does a lot of work in Connecticut, so we all try to kind of connect to a particular state. So if I'm hearing you correctly, in addition to the work that I know from you, I could approach you as an individual client asking for advocacy and legal representation. Absolutely. So we actually have a legal intake line called GLAD Answers, which provides referrals, information, and does intakes for people throughout New England. And so folks can call in with an individual legal issue or they can write in or chat in. And we will either, you know, work to assist them or work to refer them to some to a another organization or another lawyer who can be of assistance. Obviously, we do a lot of impact work. So we often take cases that really are going to have a tremendous impact because we're only five lawyers, to be honest, working in the whole region. But it is an important resource for the community to know about and kind of we try to provide folks with referrals. So we also have, I'll put a plug in for our lawyer referral service, which is, you know, a network of lawyers who has some competency and LGBTQ issues and we're always looking to build that. Right. So if there are folks in the community who are working with the LGBTQ community, we want to know that so we can point callers to those lawyers. And finally, I will say we also have an identity project, an ID project, which provides pro bono legal services to people who want to change their name and gender marker on their state and federal IDs. And we work with a community organization called MTPC and with the law firms of ropes and gray and Goodwin and Proctor to provide that pro bono assistance, which has really has served so many people over the past four years. So there's a number of ways that community members can connect with GLAAD and get help and resources. So you are our experts. So reading some of of the articles specific to GLAAD, it also sounds as though GLAAD has some priorities of the types of legislation and policy development that they would like to see throughout New England. As you've clearly said, we want to make this a more inclusive and supportive and legally protected places for the LGBTQ plus communities. Could you share what are some of GLAAD's current priorities? Absolutely. And we're actually, although I want to share that we're actually kind of right now trying to reevaluate those because we are at the end of a strategic, we had a strategic plan that went from 2016 to 2020. So we're really actively thinking about those issues and how we can make sure that we're doing work that is most impactful for the LGBTQ community, particularly again breaking down those racist systems. So I will say right now, I'll speak a little bit to family law, right, which is obviously my area of work. You know, I continue to work really hard to make sure that every child and every family is protected in New England, no matter the gender of their parents, the sexual orientation of their parents, the circumstances of their birth. So we're continuing to do work in Connecticut and Massachusetts because, I mean, hats off to Vermont, which has already comprehensively reformed their statutes, as well as New Hampshire and Maine and Rhode Island, but Connecticut and Massachusetts have fallen behind. So those are priority states for us. We are also really working hard to address systems and structures that are harming LGBTQ youth, the child welfare system, the juvenile justice system. My colleague, Jennifer, does a tremendous amount of work in the prison system, right, making sure that transgender people that know we're working on harm reduction, not only, you know, obviously moving away from prisons, but reducing the harm to transgender people in prisons. We're doing a lot of work on access to healthcare. That remains a tremendous priority. What we can do to make sure that everyone has equal access and real access to healthcare in a non-discriminatory manner. My colleague, Ben, is doing a lot of work in the HIV realm to increase access to PrEP and reduce stigma and discrimination for particularly gay male sexuality. And we're working, my colleague, Mary, and is working very hard on the Equality Act federally to make sure that we have those federal protections, right, because while we're very lucky here in New England to have so many protections, we need to make sure we are that these protections are across the country. We're also doing a tremendous amount of work to combat the anti-trans bills, right, that are happening in New England. We have bills in New Hampshire, we have bills in Maine, we have bills in Connecticut, and needless to say, I think we all need to be working tremendously hard against anti-trans discrimination and against, like, lifting up trans youth, because I think that the national conversation has become quite harmful. So that's an area of focus as well for us. So, again, I think, you know, defense against those bills, access to healthcare, parentage protections, working to improve systems that are harming the most vulnerable in our community, those are some of our priorities at this point. And with that, thank you for spending this time with us. And I'm going to be following the work that Glad's doing. And when you have another one of those significant landmark decisions, I'm going to expect that you're going to come back and visit us again. Anytime. I would love to come and talk with you. It's always a pleasure. I love working in Vermont. Working on the Parentage Act and the work I've done with Vermont folks has just been such a pleasure. It is entirely mutual. Thank you. Hi, everybody. Percy Bischelli famously said that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. I'm here with Sam Stockwell, who is a poet and an acknowledged legislator of Ward 3 and Barry. We're talking to her on the heels of her recent City Council win. So welcome, Sam. Thank you. Thank you for having me. I'd like to start with a little biographical information, if I may, delivered in the second person. You grew up in Connecticut, lived in Marshfield and Montpelier. You moved to Vermont in 1980 and moved to Barry five years ago. You've been teaching at CCV for 25 years and you're teaching there now a range of courses ranging from human services to writing. And you're currently teaching a poetry workshop at the Montpelier Senior Center, which leads right into your career as a poet. You have two collections of poetry that have been published. So is there anything you'd like to add? I grew up mostly in Maine and Connecticut. Oh, I see. Most of my family is actually from, so I have experience in living in the extreme country and the suburbs. I see. Well, my first question is, how did you happen to get involved in electoral politics? I've been interested in politics, but I didn't see myself as being involved until I sort of ended up on the Council through happenstance the first time. And I was only on for a couple months filling in for somebody. But while I was on the Council, I was incredibly impressed by what the Council did. And I understood that what the Council can do is a tool for improving people's lives. It's possible to make changes in a city or town that will make it possible easier for people to live. So that's really exciting to me. And what do you hope to achieve as a city councilor? I was a home visitor for a long time, and I worked for Head Start. I worked for the Family Center of Washington County. And so I was visiting people in their apartments and in their homes. And mostly there were people working in convenience stores and fast food restaurants. Their lives are so difficult. People have no idea because people live lives of such isolation. Most people in middle class don't know anybody who's poor. They just don't. So in seeing their lives, I thought there are things that can't happen. I can't raise a minimum wage. Neither can the City Council. Too bad. There are a lot of things that I cannot do. But you can improve housing. You can look for businesses to come in who are going to pay better. So it seems like you can make the cities more walkable for people. So it seems to me that those are some of the things I hope to do. I hope to improve housing. I hope to improve housing options. I hope to draw more businesses to Barry. And like all these small cities and towns, the infrastructure needs work. How much time? What kind of time commitment do city councilors undertake? I think far more than anyone would realize. I get paid as a Barry City Councilor $1,000 a year. The meetings are too... Yes. The big bucks. So there's a two-hour weekly meeting. But when you're going into that meeting, you need to know the issues. You need to be informed. You need to be ready to go. You need to understand the legalities. Like, I didn't really know the difference between a charter and an ordinance till recently. Got it now. So there's a lot of work. And what are other cities and towns doing in Vermont? What's possible? It's a lot of work. So my next question then is with your teaching and your poetry, how do you find time to be a city councilor? How do you fit it all in? Well, my priorities are the council and teaching. I feel like if people elected me, I won by a fairly good margin. People elected me to do what I said I would do. And that's an obligation that I take seriously. I also, you know, I have these stories of families I meant that always spin in the back of my mind. And I would like to feel at the end of my tenure, whatever it ends up being, that I did something that made life better there. How do you integrate your poetic sensibility with your legislative vision? I think being a lesbian and being a poet are actually incredibly helpful because they're ways of viewing the world and their experiences of being in the world that are different.  Since the mid-70s, I would say. Me too. Seven years for me. So, you know, I lived in Plainfield for a while and there were women's dances once a month above the town hall, which was so exciting. It was so great. But when we came out of the dances, the young men sitting on the stone wall threw rocks at us. And it wasn't that we didn't protest, but it was so unsurprising. You know, it was like snow in January. You can complain about it, but it's the way things are. So, having that experience of being on the outside and receiving, yeah, compared to some other folks, not bad experiences of discrimination, but it's certainly real. And that feeling that you weren't part of the discussion, you know, if you're hanging out in a middle-class workplace where most folks are married to a guy, you know, the women are married to guys, the conversations that you're assumed to be a part of, you know, it's really different.  So, I think all those experiences are helpful.  And, you know, it's so striking how often teachers talk, heterosexual teachers talk about their husbands or their wives in the classroom, you know, and I don't think they realize it. And so, you know, it took me a long time to come out. I was always an open lesbian scholar, but it took me a long time to come out to my students. Yeah, I didn't for years. And I never, I just never talked about my personal life, but partly that was the habit of surviving before it was more permissible to be me. Exactly. Exactly. So, the poetic sensibility, how does this play into your legislative vision? I think to be a poet of any worth, you need a few things, but a couple of those are imagination and empathy. So, I think the empathy, like understanding people's lives who are not mine is a part of what I bring as a council member.  So, like how do you make it, so for people who already feel like no one listens to them, which is a fairly common experience if you're very poor or different in any way, I understand that it may be difficult for people to come into that setting and feel like someone's going to listen to them. And I think that perspective is valuable. I agree. And it seems like the distrust of government is maybe diminishing a little bit, but the last administration really exacerbated it. And even now, the hacky-derm-like workings of the Senate in the House nationally where, you know, people get hung up on procedure and so forth, I think a lot of average people, including me, think, you know, I can't help this. I can't, you know, I'm alienated. So, it's really to your credit that you're taking the initiative and joining, you know, running for elective office and trying to change things. Well, thank you. I felt, I do feel that I have an excellent understanding of poverty and its impact. I know what it's like to be a lesbian and to feel like, I'm not part of this. You know, I'm not part of this. I'm not allowed. You know, I used to, when I was a home visitor, you know, I'd be out in the country somewhere trying to find somebody, you see this huge sign that says, take back Vermont. I thought, and if my car breaks down here, keep walking. And is this just this house or is this a whole neighborhood agreement? So, I think flying the Confederate flag is like that for people of color. You know, you see that Confederate flag flying in a neighborhood and you think, I should maybe not stop here. To think as by flying the black lives flag matters so much. You are welcome here. We hear your voice. We know something about your experience. Well, I think it was Tip O'Neill who said, all politics is local. Yeah, in some ways, I guess it is here. What are some issues before the city council that you expect to come up in the in the current session? Some issues? Yeah, some projects. I think we're looking at some of the charter and ordinance changes, which will probably be a source of debate and a source of interest. Like Montpelier had the non-citizen voting charter issue for a while, and various localities are considering that. Is Barry talking about that at all? I don't think so yet. We're just looking at heating ordinances, which in Barry, it consists, the entire heating ordinance is about two lines. It says there must be heating appliance available in a rental property. So it doesn't say that it works. It doesn't say that there's fuel. It doesn't limit it in any way. So we started talking about that last Tuesday. We'll probably continue talking about that for a while. Some people are definitely not going to like that. Landlords are not going to necessarily embrace that obligation to upgrade heating. And yet upgrading the heating and reducing the burden of poverty on poor people is a great thing to do for a city. The less people are poor, the less they're suffering from cold and from insufficient food. The easier it is for the kids to go to school, for the parents to make a little success. As an instructor at CCV, most of the people that are in my classes, they're working two jobs, they have small children, they're trying to go to school, and some of them are trying to do their homework on their phone. It's probably much easier if you're 20 years younger, 30 years younger. But can we make it easier for people to succeed? Can we take some of the bricks off their back? I would like to be part of doing that in some way. I remember I worked in fuel assistance in Cambridge Mass for a few years when I was living in Boston. And heating issues are so crucial. And it's such a human right. And there are so many angles around it that landlords use to save money. I mean, it's just criminal. So I hope your legislation will improve that circumstance or rectify some of those crimes, really, that many landlords are committing to save a dime. I'm hopeful. You know, there are mostly good landlords and mostly good tenants. That's true. That's true. I didn't mean to trash it. However, people need to have access to heat. You know, when I was working in human services, I would get these calls from families that couldn't afford the minimum delivery requirements from the fuel truck. So they were going to be cold.  It's good. I, you know, he's working at a convenience store. That's so good because I can't afford it. And I'm really happy that I'm on the second floor and some heat will rise up. But you know, she has an infant. She has an infant. And I thought, it shouldn't be like this. It shouldn't be like this for anybody. I know it's those nuts and bolts issues that, you know, make people crazy and cause so much stress. So that's where local activism or local politics can come into play in a really direct way. Yeah. You know, just making it easy for people to walk around or having more grocery stores. That'd be a great thing if people have a choice between going to the convenience store for chips and actually being able to buy fruits and vegetables within walking distance. That helps people. Absolutely. So, Sam, thank you so much for coming on. Are there any last words that you have for our audience? I guess not, but thank you for having me. This was fun. And I hope you'll come back and tell us about your progress and how things are going. Definitely. My first poem about City Council, I'll bring it here. Oh, wonderful. Love to hear it. Hi. I'd like to welcome Dawn Yordi to All Things LGBTQ. Hi, Dawn. How are you today? Thank you, Linda. Very good to see you. I'm good. Good. Good. I haven't seen you since New York. Linda, it's been over a year. Yeah. It was in the... November of 2019. Before the pandemic. Yes. Yes. That was a nice time. Yes. I enjoyed that. That was a good poetry reading. And it's a good bookstore. And I really enjoyed being there. So, I'm going to read a little bio, which only talks about a small amount of things that you've actually done. So, we'll start with that. Dawn Yordi is a poet, educator, and garden activist living in New York City. He's the author of three poetry collections, A Few Swimmers, Appear, and Poet Laundromat, and Spring Sonnets. And is included in Out of This World, an anthology of poetry of the St. Mark's Poetry Project, 1966 to 1991. His novel, What Night Forgets, was published by Herodias Press. Is that right? In 2000. Poems from his 20s, entitled Fucking and Other Poems, will be published by Indelinta Books in 2022. Dawn's blog and archive of current art, his own writing and work of other poets, can be found at DawnYordi.com. And we'll put that up so that people can find your vimeos and books and whatever else they might be interested in. So, I heard you saved a city park in New York City. What is that about? Well, I helped save it. Sometimes I say I saved it. And there was a period of time when I was the one who didn't drop the ball. So, it began in 1987 and I live across from the park and it had been there. This could be a whole long story, so I guess I have to make it short. But it had been there from the time I moved in. Puerto Rican youth in the neighborhood, the young lords had taken a vacant lot and actually vacant lots. And they made it into a little park. They threw out all the garbage. Buckminster Fuller got involved. He did a little geodesic dome. And they planted willow trees. And there's actually a stream that goes under the park which came out of Tompkins Square and goes down and still exists. And apartment buildings on this block still have very leaky basements, things like that. So, the federal government and the city government wanted to put up a housing project and we opposed it. And we were sort of pariahs at first because it was going to be an old folks home, a HUD project, old folks home. And we said, well, why can't you put this like on the upper east side or something where there's hospitals and pharmacies and old people. At the time, it was a very bad neighborhood. There was a lot of drugs and things going on here being sold on the street and you know, blah, blah, blah. And the Fed said forget it. The state said, I mean, everybody wanted this housing project and we took it to the New York State Supreme Court to fight it. And we really were like pariahs. In the 80s, the gardens were, development and housing was the big thing. And to be against housing was a very, was a very big deal. And people looked at you in a very bad way. I went to meetings and people would walk out of the meeting and stuff. I mean, we really were. But we kept them off in state court, but we lost. And the state Supreme Court said, no, no, no, these are just city lots. They're not a park. During that time, there was a New York Times article and the economic, the guy who, who decided whether or not a HUD project could be put in a certain place thought that this was a very bad place to put the project. And everything he was saying was what we were saying was, you know, put it on the upper east side to do this, do that where there's hospitals. And Senator D'Amato at the time wanted the project because he wanted developers on Long Island who would campaign for him and given him donations that he wanted this project. So, and the HUD guy got very angry at the very end and called the New York Times and said, I want to tell you something. So there was a big scandal. And we thought, okay, story's over, we're going to keep the park. And what that actually meant was that the government, the city and the state just wanted to do everything quicker so that if a scandal developed, they'd already be doing it. And sorry, folks, we're already doing it. So we took it to federal court and we actually won in federal court. And I guess partly because it was the HUD project and D'Amato was involved and there was this conflict of interest. And what we were saying, the judge agreed with. And the judge said it's a park. He said if it looks like a park and it's used like a park, it's a park. But what happened after that? So we won and there was this nice article in the New York Times and everything. And then HUD, we actually won on a technicality and HUD could only build so much low income or subsidized housing in a tract area because it would in essence get a wise the area. So we proved that there was already more than enough of the subsidized housing. So HUD changed their guidelines and said we can put up as much subsidized housing, which is probably still there today, folks. So after we thought we won, it was sort of like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid when those guys keep coming. It was like, who are they? But they kept coming. So we fought HUD again and again. And eventually, actually through Mike Bloomberg and Elliot Spitzer, who as Attorney General was really helpful to the gardens, not just our garden, but all of New York City's community gardens, Spitzer and Bloomberg were really, really, really helpful. And Giuliani had been very anti-garden and very pro-development, I mean, really pro-development. And the dark of night, he had one garden bulldozed, which actually got him into trouble and began the whole Attorney General Spitzer investigation. Anyway, the park is a park today, but there's still work to do and there's, there's, it's never over. There's always going to be a developer.  All of those things. I think now with the pandemic in New York, rents are going down. I know two people who've actually changed places because of, of it being more accessible. So hopefully all of that is going to help make it more livable city for more people. Yes. So I know I got a clip from you that I found extremely interesting and fascinating. Do you want to, we'll show the clip. Do you want to give us a little intro to? Well, this was initially shown at the, at the Portrait Project New Year Marathon. We had to put something together and we could either perform live or put something together. And I thought I'd put something together with Vimeo's I had done much earlier. So on them, I look much younger, but that wasn't why I was doing it. And it was, it's kind of called the prologue. And it's the beginning when I was in my twenties, I began to earnestly work on poetry. I started writing when I was a teenager and had kind of made a little bit of a splash. Louis Intermeyer saw my poetry and John Wheelock and there was all these people who liked my poetry when I was a kid. And it kind of went to my head, or I don't know if it went to my, but anyway, I kind of lost the, the Jenga as a, as a Brazilian might say, I sort of lost the spirit. I didn't know why I could write or what it was that people liked. So for a long time, I wasn't really doing it. And in my early twenties, having read Whitman and Emily Dickinson and I guess Bald Lair and Junkie, there were a couple poets who really showed me what a poet was, especially Whitman, I think. And, but all of them were really very helpful. And so I began to write again. So this stuff was early poetry actually that I've wrote in my very early twenties. So all of the poems you're seeing, even though there's a man in his late sixties saying the poems, he wrote them in his early twenties. And it's called the prologue. It's about being able to speak and say something. All right, let's look at the video. You are before it. We make a oneness, a reflection. Two separate moments come together. But the word is still between us. Someday, there'll be no words. Someday, we'll simply be like flutes playing each other. Strike a match. Light up this page. Watch them go black and vanish into flame. I think that I'm a candle whose flame stays around the wick. Whether set in one place or carried. Never wavering an inch from where I've always been. I hold out my hand like you did. When I'm happy and look at it, it's not the same I see, sadly, desiring or when I'm tired. It changes with my feelings, which usually, I don't notice like light and shadow pass over the day revealing as the morning sun obscured by clouds or tears. When you vanished, did all vanish? With a change of heart, I changed the world. I was in Philadelphia and crossed the bridge to Camden. I'm satisfied, I said. There's grass growing here and I no longer care what anyone might think of me or what the future holds or when and if comes money. I heard you speak. You are not dead, nor have I lived more than I lived when you first spoke. I kneel down in the grass, slide out some blades to chew. I've read you, know your caress and see out in the void your hand still is trembling for my touch. Walt Whitman, you're the spit green along my lips. Help me to trust in it. Okay, that was that was really wonderful. I'm so glad you sent it. Thank you. And now, just as an aside for our audience, your last poetry book, Spring Sonnets, was in the Amazon bestseller. You know, that's pretty good, I got to say. I didn't know, I mean, I'm learning this for the first time. So I didn't even, I didn't even know it, but that's very, that's very nice. Yeah, maybe I'll go. So somebody call Coffee House Press right now and I will, but and you have some cards you want to show us? Are you working on? Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, I was going to show you, I've been doing postcards. I can show you postcards. Here is a postcard. It's a haiku. And I never really, actually, here's the pile I'm going to show you. Here's the pile I'm going to read from. So let's stay organized here. Okay. So here's a haiku. I never write haikus. And I guess maybe you're seeing it backwards. I'm not seeing it front ways. But good, good, good. So these pictures, the drawings are drawn by my husband, a crumb, who is actually a doctor. He's studying now for to get into a hospital. But he never schooled or anything, but he draws pictures sometimes. So I started to put the pictures together with the poems. And here's a haiku. I don't usually write haikus, but I wrote this actually sitting at a poetry project reading. I think Sarah Shulman was going to read. I'm not sure. It doesn't matter who. But and I was sitting next to Cal De Cullian, who's the director there. And I really like Kyle. So I think he kind of was the muse for this one. But I am here with you. But what is even better? You are here with me. So there's a haiku. And there's a crumb's drawing on it. So I've been making little post, whoops, little postcards.  And C.A. Conrad does a lot of that.  He's always handing things out. Are you still with them? Or where can people get them? Oh, you know what? Actually, I've been thinking about I do them myself. So I cut these. I sort of designed them and I put them in a on a template. And I have a color printer and I have a cutter. So I cut so they're they're all made in an eight and a half, 11 piece of paper. And then I get card stock and cut them in four. So I get four postcards out of out of one. So and right now, people said to sell them and I have a website where I sort of advertised to sell my books. And so I was thinking maybe of offering the postcards there. I'm not quite sure how you'd go about doing it. But it would require me to I'd have a little home factory and I might be making them. So I'm not quite sure. Maybe they'd be able and I would figure out how much the postage how much this how much for the envelope and then and then send them.  It's like an absolute postcard and people are always emailing and, you know, we email now and there's so little being sent. So I think it also encourages people to just write to someone and say hi. And I send these to people sometimes people say, wow, this was so great. I never get anything in the mail anymore. So I think that's and they can be good for, you know, like gifts for whatever, anniversaries of arrages, you know, I mean, any of that, I think would be appropriate. And I have one here. Yeah, I also wrote, which is not in the prologue, but it's a poem that's in the prologue, which were the poems that people just heard. And on this one, it says, in the circle, I've pressed my lips. If you press yours, there too, we will have kissed. Now, some people like this a lot. Sam Hamill, the poet really hated this. Well, anyway, Sam has has gone to his reward. But so but don't ever send this to Sam Hamill, whatever you or anybody related to him. But it's I like it. So and it's kind of like a valentine part or just to tell someone that you love them. And someone sent one one back and she had with very, very red lipstick, she kissed it. So I got this thing in the mail coming back with this really nice kiss. So I was like, yay. So that's a postcard that I put together. So people can find these on your website? Not right now. I'm just gonna do I'm just gonna read now. So I was gonna read from the postcards. I'm not actually selling postcards right now. But I am thinking about putting them up and I'll show some sonnets then that I've been doing as well. The very first postcard was this postcard that an artist as Stefan Spara did back in the 80s when my book, a few swimmers appear, a chat book came out. And Stefan made this postcard, which sort of advertised the book and actually the title of my novel what night forgets is in the poem. So this was actually also a very early poem I wrote in my early 20s. When I was starting to get the spirit of poetry back or what a poet was after I'd lost it from about I don't know from about 18 to 23. I didn't know what I was doing. I would never go back to my early 20s for whatever I just was not the happiest time in my my life. I just, you know, I sort of want, I knew I wanted to do something but I didn't know how to do it. So it was this very frustrating period of time and I wanted to write and people everybody said, you know, like my parents get a job and why don't you just finish college and be a school teacher and you can write in the summertime. I'm going to law school. Yeah. Forget law school. I would, but so that's a postcard. Oh, and I should read the darn thing. When sleep vanishes, then you swim. Awake is no island, merely swift stroke and breath. The moon is not the sun's skull. Day is not what night forgets. So back in my 20s this was probably like the first poem I think that I wrote where it was like, okay, I think I know again what I'm supposed to be doing. And then I worked the best that I could. I tried. Here's a nice little poem that was written later in my 20s. I had lived in Philadelphia in the 1970s and Philly was a great, great, great place for poets. There was a lot of poetry going on. Dennis Cooper came to town and thought it was this great, great scene and he hung around for a little while. Ethridge Knight who was married to Sonia Sanchez for a while and she was in Philly and Ethridge Knight would be at like the painted bride all the time. And I mean, there was just all sorts of people who were in Philly in the 70s and I began to perform poetry, started at the painted bride and which was on South Street at the time. Now, if you go to Philly, the painted bride is up on Arch Street, I believe, kind of still in the old city. But so this poem I wrote later and it's called Oh Pretty Self. And it's kind of a poem for somebody. Sometimes I stutter and stammer.  But anyway, I wrote this more toward my late 20s going on 30 and I grew up in Pennsylvania in what was the South Mountain. And so this poem was, I wrote that poem there on the South Mountain and it's called Oh Pretty Self. And there's a little flower that a crumb wrote. So anyway, Oh Pretty Self, a snake curled in the sun feels my shadow come and goes ripples over stones. The stream falls down and oozes out of moss and mud where a deer stepped. No, I won't pick this violet, let it clutch the cracking rock, blue out of yellow from a black dot. When I leave these woods to work and stammer or say two words at once, I'll think of it and stop. Nice. So I like this poem. I mean, we only have a few more minutes left, unfortunately.  I know, I know. I'm going to have you back again for another interview. Okay, fine. You know, and we could talk about more of what you're doing and the work you've done and your incredible activism. And we just didn't get to enough. I know you taught China. Yes. And that would be very interesting to hear about, you know, as a gay man working in China. And so much more. I didn't. Well, I was actually very open. I taught from 2006 to 2000 in just in the summertime. I taught in Wuhan, actually. And a great school there. Wuhan U, a beautiful campus. And it's sort of like Stanford. They're all biologists and physicists. Everybody was smarter than me, but I could speak English. That's what they were there for. And a few of them are still, I have some friends. They were kids then.  When I started in 2006, nobody was gay.  Some of the teachers were gay who were teaching from, it was a thing that Ohio State was putting together. And so the teachers were, we were there partly just, you know, for this cultural thing.   And I would say by 2010, at a period of time, some of the students themselves began to come out, or they'd tell you secretly, or I had a few students who would talk to me. But then it actually became, as the world and the kids today, it was like suddenly things were kind of open. But in the very beginning, it was sort of like it didn't exist. You didn't need to talk about it because it didn't exist. Why talk about something that doesn't exist? And then that changed. And it was very interesting because in class, there's a lot of affection.  And it was very strange for us because they will be very affectionate. So two boys, if I gave them a project, the one boy might put his arm around the other boy and lean over him and they were working on it. The girls would cuddle. So, and they, it wasn't that they were gay and in love, though there was a couple that actually was. But I was thinking how interesting because it's the custom to kind of do this. So anybody who really wants to cuddle can really cuddle. It was kind of an interesting thing. But their affection toward each other was very open when they worked together. Well, I'm going to have to have you back to talk about more of this, which seems like we only just got started. But I want to thank you for coming on the show and letting our viewers at least get a little taste of who you are. And I really appreciate talking to you. And I hope to see you in New York when we get there, maybe this summer. Well, I'm looking forward to it. We'll go out to dinner and hang. You can come over. All right. I'll give you some postcards. Thank you. Okay. Bye-bye. Thank you for joining us. We'll see you in two weeks. But in the meantime, resist.


Back to theCUBE. Thank you, John. Good to be here. So, HBase is taking the world by storm. I had a chance to talk with a console plot and there was a co-founder of SAP last week at Sapphire and they introduced Han. I asked him, what are you guys doing with HBase? He kind of didn't really have a clue what was going on at HBase.  But that's really kind of the role here. HBase is quickly emerging in the open source community as the database on top of Hadoop and applications are running, operations are running. So tell the folks out there what HBase is here.  This is a technical conference. Explain to the folks what's HBase conference. Well, be glad to do that. In Ahasso's defense, we think that Hadoop, generally, and HBase in particular, really are great compliments to what he's built with HANA and frankly what we've seen in the relational database industry produce in terms of online transaction processing systems four years in a year. So absolutely confirm that there's broad interest in integrating with HBase among the established vendors. You know, we've been big fans of Hadoop for four years since inception of the business. Actually, my co-founders go back earlier than that. They were among the people who created the platform back in the consumer internet. Hadoop always got banged around a little bit though because it didn't provide sort of interactive speed, consistent data delivery. You want fast record storage and retrieval if you're doing big data management. Hadoop is very good at relatively high latency but also very deep analytics on data. Sometimes when you've done that analysis, you just want to fetch the results really quick. HBase makes that possible. It runs on top of Hadoop. So it takes advantage of all the scale out that Hadoop offers, lives on top of HDFS. So data that you put in HBase is available for analysis using the full force of MapReduce. But it's able to deliver records to users really at web speed and it's scaled up to enormous deployments. Facebook in the opening keynote today announced that their entire messaging system runs on top of HBase. Billions of messages per day flow into and out of that system. Absolutely astonishing. I found the Facebook presentation to be quite informative and relevant and quite surprising that they were sharing with the community their best practices and also specific use cases of how they roll out applications on top of HBase. Well, it's one of the unfair advantages that open source projects like Hadoop, like HBase have, the users actually contribute to the platform. So Facebook is not merely a big consumer of the technology but also a pretty significant contributor. The HBase community spans a whole bunch of different organizations. StumbleUpon, Paterra certainly is in there, many, many others. But it's able to be driven forward by the users with the specific problems, like Facebook, who know what their workloads are and what services they need. It's grown very, very quickly. In fact, one of the things I said in my keynote is from a standing start a couple of years ago when we first noticed that HBase was getting adopted by Paterra customers, it's become the way that our largest customers use Hadoop and largest in two senses. The very largest data volumes, typically, centered in HBase these days. And also, the largest investment in the platform. Also, a good signing for a big HBase. Well, you know, we've been playing with HBase with our little data project, SiliconANGLE, and we would not have been able to do the things that we're doing without HBase, but it's absolutely true. Within the AlphaGeek circles, HBase is quickly rising to be that solution. But what you were just saying earlier about Hadoop, so you guys had a different perspective. Hadoop was being adopted by the web-scale companies like Yahoo, and Amar once said on theCUBE, they saw the future and Paterra was then built. It was great for Batch. But with all the interest on real-time business, with analytics being a focus of a lot of the business and big data, Insights is really around real-time. What's your view of how real-time is impacting the Hadoop and Hadoop ecosystem in HBase in particular? Well, you know, you make a good point. I made it glancing late earlier. People have knocked Hadoop a lot because it is this Batchman platform, right? But in fact, that's not a fundamental limitation of the platform. That's just a missing feature. It's a bug, right? And over time, you should expect the community, broadly, to fill in those holes, to make the platform more useful and more considerable. Real-time data delivery, where you need large numbers of people to be able to get access to individual records at interactive or better speeds, absolutely is growing in importance in our installments. Pairing the powerful analytics, the powerful data processing power, with the ability to deliver results to an enormous number of people at WebStone, going to be transformative, I absolutely agree. Let's talk a little bit about Cloudera at the first Hadoop world in New York. You had NTT on, and I know as you've done a business deal since with them in Japan. What's going on with the company right now? Because the market's growing in a very large way right now, not just within the small industry that was once Hadoop. You had Hortonworks came in and there was a little bit of Hortonworks Cloudera, but now the market's growing so big. Talk about the market that you're in and some of the successes you've had over the past year. Well, I'm absolutely glad to hear that and appreciate the chance. You know, when we began Cloudera, we were the only voice in the wilderness. No one else embraced it. Nobody else was talking about the importance of big data to enterprise. Fast forward four years, where we are now. Sure, Hortonworks is active in the market, and I will say doing great work along with us and many others on driving that Hadoop platform forward. There's more investment from venture capitalists and startups like ours. There is more direct participation by the big vendors. So IBM with big insights, Oracle with their big data clients, EMC with their offerings as well. You're seeing a real focus on big data as a business problem, not merely by wild-eyed visionaries and Silicon Valley, but by some of the biggest enterprise companies, some of the biggest business-focused vendors on the planet. And that's because customers are demanding the platform. They recognize that they have big data problems and they need a big data solution. We're seeing growth on every metro. Total size of the clusters that our existing customers are running, pipeline of new deals that are flowing in, even the size of the deployments, the investment that our customers are making in that infrastructure all sharply up into the right. I would say right now that the market is growing much faster than competitive pressure is emerging. Certainly, our last year was tremendous and we're looking forward to an even bigger 2012 on the back of that road. Okay, well, congratulations. It's always been great to watch you guys grow and being the founders of this space in a commercial way and then work with the community to keep that balance of the force, if you will, has been fantastic. Let's talk about Hadoop World this past year. You talked about the big data fund. We're going to have Ping Lee on with Excel. Talk about more about that. But it was a real emphasis of almost a sigh of, not victory, but from your standpoint satisfaction. Like we've gotten to a point now where a platform and applications was the focus. What is the current update from your standpoint on this application focus? I know this is fun with Excel, that's separate, but what's going on in the market relative to applications on top of Hadoop and HBase? Well, it's exactly the right place to be paying attention right now. So for the initial couple of years that we were in business, we were trying to convince people that this platform was important. We talked a lot about features. We talked a lot about scale. We talked a lot about performance. I think that battle's won. Hadoop is the anointed winner in the big data platform space. The question really is, how do you use it? Big data matters, sure. What are you going to do with it? How are you going to get at it? How are you going to look at it? What kind of applications are going to make it available? We're seeing now, not just the big data fund investment that Excel and other DCs are making, but also large companies. I mentioned IBM a little while ago. It's big insights offering, is very powerful, very interesting. I was just last week, pardon me, at Informatica World in Las Vegas, in Las Vegas. Informatica has announced version 9.5 of PowerCenter PowerExchange, support Hadoop natively. So you can integrate data from Hadoop with all of your other infrastructure. That kind of integration, that kind of application support for big data, it makes the platform accessible to users who really never had access to big data before. And I think you're going to see more of that from the established vendors. Certainly you'll see this year, over the course of the summer, but especially at Strata Hadoop World in the fall, you'll see a lot of very exciting companies with new analytic tools launch and show off what they've been working on in the lab. Pretty good stuff. Talk about what's happening here at the HBASE conference, I'll say you guys seeded, invested the Hadoop world now, it's being run by O'Reilly. Again, you're taking the ball in your hands here by creating this technical conference. What's happening here on the ground inside the halls here? So I'll give you a couple of quick anecdotes and then I'll dive into the actual content. When we ran the first Hadoop World in New York City, had about 500 people show up. We decided that HBASE, just this one component of the stack that we distribute now, was getting interesting enough that we wanted to do a conference for it. We budgeted 500 heads. We got space for 500 people sold out weeks ago. We scrambled, we managed to work with the venue here. Add an additional 100 heads instantly sold out. 600 people showed up for what you could think of as a pretty deep, deep technical conference. I bet that we're gonna do this again and I bet that we're gonna see some pretty substantial growth just as we did with Hadoop World. Look, we concentrated not on vendor pitches but on real stories by real users of real use cases. Talking about what they're doing with HBASE, applications that they're running on top of it, they're experience operating the system in production. And for the developers, what we need to do next, what features are missing, what enhancements we ought to make. More than 100 submissions came in. I thought that the program committee did a great job narrowing that down, but even so, we had to add an additional track. There was so much great content. So the one problem with this event is that there's not gonna be kind of a suit all. It's exactly right. It's too much demand. That's great. So the system's exploding everywhere at the interest. The profile, and you have a history in the database market. You sold your last company to Oracle. So you've kind of seen this movie before in the database days. It's kind of different now. What is happening? Because you've got a lot of younger engineers coming in, computer science students. It's not your old school systems guys, although there's a lot of that going on. We talked about this last time we've met, but there's new school of computer science folks coming on into the industry here. What are you seeing as the profile of the makeup of the kinds of computer science and or developers in the space? And is it more software? Is it more DevOps? What's your kind of view on that given your experience? The line between software development and operating systems in production absolutely is blurring. And especially at some of the very biggest companies in the world, DevOps is a legitimate profession now. You'll be a programmer who, by the way, carries a pager, makes the systems run. Not everywhere, but the fact that we are now building software that can be operated by the people who wrote it means that the feedback loop, what features are missing, what do we need to do to make this more manageable, is much, much tighter than before. Systems are getting better faster than they ever had. And it's a good thing because the scale of the problem and the importance of the data analysis, getting your hands, getting your head wrapped around that data is more important than ever before. But I think that feedback loop being so tight, the fact that we're able to work in the open source community, take advantage of the innovative work of the entire planet rather than of a single company, all very, very promising. So a real important question I want to ask you is, do you have a computer science degree? I have two. I got a bachelor's and a master's, Go Bears from the University of California. You can prove that. I can prove that. I have a computer science degree as well. So we just want to get that on the record, make sure that we got the computer science credentials mailed down unlike some other CEOs out there to live in Valley these days. Okay, and real final question about the operating system, which is really a good thread. So with this DevOps movement, with roles like HBase, we have real-time analytics, real operational encoding, is an opportunity for developers and entrepreneurs. We have operating systems, it's complicated, and there's need for abstraction layers. What do you see as areas, if you were going to do a startup or if you want to talk to the entrepreneurs out there, where are the areas to really innovate with some space to be creative and executing? Well, I will say as I have said now for pretty close to a year, building applications that digest, that analyze, that process big data is where the money's going to be for the next five, six years. If you've got a great idea about how to apply machine learning or natural language processing or statistical analyses or other analytical techniques to big data, you're right on this platform through these APIs using HBase and other systems and abstracting them for users. I think you'd be able to make a bunch of money. I absolutely think that data expertise is going to matter and there's this new discipline called data science. It's a blend of programming chops, computer science ability, some knowledge of mathematics and statistics, but also just a deep understanding of the business problems that confront your organization. That's a profession where I think we need great people and where there are some pretty great sellers. Let me on a final question here. I know you got to run, I really appreciate your time. Let's talk about Facebook. Obviously the big IPO, Mark Zuckerberg got married, was actually walking around the block and I saw all the things going on with my kids. You know, one additional accomplishment not many people know about just over the past week and they also went to IPv6. So that's four things that Mark did in a week that were pretty remarkable.  But Facebook really is one of those companies. It's a watershed moment. My commentary is a lot like Netscape and since the browser was this watershed moment. But yet it's Google-like in the sense that they have a lot of Google employees. Facebook is here presenting their ops, dev, dev ops and or Hadoop and HBase philosophy with the community. So they're openly sharing that. But what is it about Facebook that people don't understand? Because a lot of people are talking about Facebook, like they don't have a revenue model and we've been saying on theCUBE at Silicon Angle that it really is a data business. Can you share your insight, just your personal perspective on the folks out there and East Coast, maybe New York and trying to cross Facebook's possibilities? Well, you know, one thing I'll say is you look at the S1 filings, in fact, 3.7 billion in revenues, they do have a revenue model. The question I think some investors have asked is, does that revenue justify the valuation they've gotten? That decision's going to be made by pros in the market. I'm not an expert on that stuff. I'll say, I love the company. I use it all the time. I am an avid consumer of social networking services. So I post my updates, I keep in touch with my kids. I let my friends know what's going on. I enjoy being on a Facebook site. But if you're at Facebook, I don't think you think of yourself as a social networking company. I think you think of yourself as a data analysis and data capture company. And listening to Karjik's keynote today, talking in detail about how much information flows through HBase, more than a billion messages a day, billions and billions of operations per day, 250 terabytes of new data a month. Building the infrastructure to make that happen, a remarkable accomplishment. Michael Olson, the CEO of Cloudera. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate it. Great to see you. We'll be right back after this break.