So, in tradition of our culture and also the tradition of our faith, we're here standing on hollow ground. We're not here to acknowledge the unceded land to the Abenaki, nor am I here to talk about who owns this land, but I do know that the earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof. So, we're here in this place at this time which is unprecedented. So good afternoon. My name is Reverend Mark Hughes. I am the executive director of the Vermont Racial Justice Alliance, a minister at New Alpha Missionary Baptist Church, as well as the commander of post-782 Howard Plant Veterans of Foreign Wars, 102 years old, the oldest post in the state. I'm here speaking mostly on behalf of the Vermont Racial Justice Alliance and the role that we play in what it is that you're experiencing here today.  This is indeed an unprecedented time. Right now in the wake of a global pandemic, in the wake also of what we know to be a racial awakening, not just nationally but globally, and also with the uprise of fascism globally and even our own democracy swinging and teetering at its very edge, make no mistake about it. This is an unprecedented time. So this is sobering, but it's also joyful because through the work of the Racial Justice Alliance, some of the things that we're seeing come to fruition are also unprecedented. Instead of going down a list of legislative accomplishments or even community-oriented work or cultural empowerment-related activities, not the least of which was First African Landing Day of the Fifth Order just this last couple weeks, and even the outreach and education which we continue to do. I'd rather talk more about the combination of all of those in the birth of a concept that we call cultural empowerment center, and I'd rather focus on the fact in the idea that in 2020 that we envisioned a place in our community where there would be a presence of our youth, our culture, and our wellness, and I'd rather also focus on the fact that it culminated in 2021 on the first day of November. Now sadly, we sent a giant home just before that, and his name was Richard Kim. So befittingly, that cultural empowerment center, as it came into existence, it had to bear his name out of respect, out of honor, to hold him up in perpetuity in this community. So this work is about the cultural empowerment, make no mistake about it, black people. This is about, this is for black people, this is by black people, and this is the first time in this, this city's, or in fact this state's history that there's been anything created by and for black people, where in which we could conduit or serve as a receptacle, those programs in services that have historically been inefficient, ineffective, or non-existent in our communities. So all of our people can get exactly what they need. So make no mistake, that is why we are here. So this is our house. This is what it's all about, this is what we do. Now with that resolved, I would say at the epicenter of everything that's happening in here is our culture, because if our culture did not exist, it wouldn't be anything different than anything anybody else is doing anywhere. So everything that we do here is centered again in our culture. As my wife would say, nothing about us without us. So just to be clear, that's what, if anybody ever asks any of you, well what makes Richard Kemp Center so special? What delineates them from what it is that's being done? Oh, we already have that in community. It's already serving us well. Nothing is okay, then what I would expect you would do is to turn squarely to them and say nothing about us without us, everybody should just say that once right now.  Thank you, honey. One more time. What makes them different is culture. Okay, thank you for that. And that's good for everybody, okay?  Before I introduce my wife and I'll have a couple more brief remarks after this and we'll lead into what I hope to be a really rich, small ceremony and then you'll get a chance to walk more around, maybe even get a chance to talk to the artist and get a better idea of what it is that you're seeing, but I would say that as we're continuing to do this work and you look around today and you know at first I'm going to talk about the 1619 project, but I'm going to talk a little bit more about some of these other exhibits that are here, just know and understand that this goes, again, this goes to the heart of who we are, not just as black people, but as a nation, how this nation was built, how this nation, every major institution in this nation being informed by the work, the labor, the thoughts and the contribution of black folks, every major advancement, everything we know about America are very culture as American culture, I didn't say black American culture and its heart comes from us, here, black people and as sooner we can talk about that and as sooner that we can step away from the fact that it is resolved in the academy, there is no question that what I'm saying academically has been, it has been founded, established and resolved for the last 40 years, the disconnect is societally and also in our community and the politicization of what I'm trying to tell you, but I didn't come here to try to convince you, I just wanted to tell you why we're here, now I'm going to call on a couple names, Grace and King are in the house, I'm not going to call you up right now and hopefully at some point or another in the future if you desire we're going to want to hear from you, but I want to from the bottom of my heart, moving past the 1619 project to you, King, to you, Grace, to let you know that we do not take lightly what it is you have accomplished, it is not, it does not, it is incomprehensible what it is that you've accomplished, I've looked, I will look again and I will continue to look, there is much, much too much for me to be able to take on that's back here in this space, you should know those of you who are here, that this work started in January, started in January and these folks have been working their tails off, trying to get this massive and awesome exhibit in place and there is nothing, you can art hop all day long, this is not an art hop, this is a culture stop, so this came from the hearts of these people, this is at the roots of our culture and if we can embrace this in this place that was designed, standing on a three-legged stool of youth, wellness and culture, if we can embrace that here, if we can celebrate that today, if we can't prioritize that and make it something that stands out as being important to us, then we've all got problems and I'm not quite sure why we're here, so if you would please, please stand on your feet and give me a, give an applause for Grace and King and let them know how much you appreciate what it is that they've done and if it was for me, that would be okay but really let them know how much you appreciate them because this is amazing, this is an amazing day for me, this is an amazing day for all of us and I will never forget it, this is a big deal, this is a huge deal, I know you're tired but keep clapping anyway, I've told you a little bit about why we're here and how we got here from the story of the Alliance to the birth of the Richard Kim Center and I've told you a little bit more about what you see around you, whether it's the 1619 project or whether it is the exhibits that you see in front of you, I'm going to say diaspora, what you see in front of you and we're going to be able to dig a little bit more deeper into, more deeply into that but I'm so honored and I'm so proud and I'm so humbled and I'm so fortunate and I'm so blessed to have a wife in Christine Longmore, I said Longmore because she didn't change her name yet, her name is still Longmore, let me talk about her for a minute, this woman right here saved my life, saved my life and I will forever be in debt to you, I love you with everything that I have, I would be nothing if it wasn't for you and the work that we do together brings fulfillment, it brings joy to me and my heart, you surrounded me with your family who all love me and put up with me and I stopped with Kathleen, but with all of my heart you know and I would say what she's going to tell you but that's not my job, she's just coming and she will speak and she chooses to but I just want to acknowledge the fact that this here is the Richard Kemp Center and this is our director, Christine. Thank you guys, thank you all for being here, it's really hard to know what to say and it's kind of hard to come up here behind that but thank you, I love you too Mark, I'm pretty sure you saved me or God saved us both, so I do want to just say that and I've told a couple of people this story but this really all came out of a visit that Mark and I took to the African-American history and culture museum and no they're not like playing paying me to plug it but if you haven't been there go, black, white, anybody, especially Americans like go, anyone actually, anybody in the whole world, it's an incredible place and the first time that we went two things that I decided, one was that we had to bring a busload of people down there and that's why we're running this video and we did do that and we'll do it again and it was a blast so let me know if you want to go sign up and but the other thing that happened is in the museum there was a place, there was one display that was showing these adrinka symbols and that's what that's what's incorporated into the art that you see and the symbols represent slavery, not of reconciliation, the other one that looks kind of like a little bird is about learning from your past and then there's also another symbol of God so that's you know just from seeing that display in the museum and you remember Mark I was like we have to create a mural out of this and that was a good couple of years ago I was like we have to create a mural out of those symbols and we have to create an annual trip to this museum, if you, I mean the audio on this isn't playing right now but maybe afterwards we'll play it if you hear like what the youth are saying about wanting to go on the trip and learning about their history and also acknowledging the fact that they know that they're not learning the whole history in their schools it's just it's so meaningful and to and to go down there and have that experience with them and even to come back and reflect on it it's just been so rich so just to sort of give you the context of how this all came about and I'm so grateful both to Grace and King and everybody who's supported this Mark everybody our staff Isaac Vincent Winston all of you um this is just fabulous so thank you for being here. Benjamin can you please stand? Winston can you please stand? Grace can you please stand? Jada can you please stand? So Martha can you please stand? Kathleen can you please stand? Steven can you please stand? These are Kims. Honey can you please stand? These are Kims. This is the Richard Kim Center. These folks showed up in full force supporting this work and it's a big deal. If you can't bring family together how you're going to bring anybody else together? This right here represents the vast majority of everybody around here that's Kim the exception of the grandkids but the thing is I just want because this is this is not just for you in this room you're not that special what this is for is is that this is being recorded and we're going to we're going to keep this into perpetuity but as you guys stand you may be seated thank you so much thank you love you all thank you for coming. Benjamin said you can't tell me where to sit down and he's right so here's the deal um this is this is for for us to be able to look back on for us to be able to say remember that time no I don't remember that time but look at this video it's to be able to acknowledge the fact that y'all show up that we show up for each other that we're that at the heart of everything that we're doing here is family and concentric circles beyond that is family is family you are family all of you are family but it starts with that I'm going to invite um if possible um just a couple of remarks um from the artist and maybe uh or at least one of the artists and we'll we'll see it's just just to get a feel for what it is you are experiencing what is you what are you seeing what it is that came from the heart and also I want to open you know if possible if necessary I mean if possible just to be able to get um if there's any questions but they'll be around for later don't crowd my artists don't crowd my family um but I do want to again thank them for coming just a little quick antidote is is that um this work that that we're doing the cultural aspect of it you know it can't it really can't be overstated and what I mean by that is is that um it's impossible for us to be vanilla we can't you know we can't just white wash everything and um and just keep it moving what we're doing right now is we're doing a number of things at the same time we're collecting as the racial justice alliance we're collecting tons and tons of quantitative data that's racially disaggregated that's reflecting the disparities across all social determinants of health while we're moving forward very very important policies some successful none gaining as much ground as we'd like and at the same time we're teaching the root causes and the impacts as well as a lot of the outcomes of this thing we call systemic racism in our neighborhoods with our people and and what that means is is as we embrace that as we as we understand the impacts because we know the impacts we know that there must be community engagement and support to support the people who are in need to create those aforementioned programs and services to partner with some of the stakeholders across our communities and so forth we're doing all of that so the outreach in the education the cultural empowerment the platforms and initiatives um the you know going back to the cultural empowerment I think is is is super important here because you know as it intersects with our community engagement and support in this place and over at the interval on an annual basis increasingly you know what I'm seeing is is expressions of culture I'm seeing the black artist showcase come through here how many people have seen them I'm seeing I'm seeing I'm seeing the black artist market I'm seeing first Friday happening in this place I'm seeing game night I ain't never seen a group of folks play spades like that for years and years I'm seeing chili cookoffs happening in this space but so so culture if it's manifesting itself in our community not just in the form of cultural arts but it's manifesting itself you know in relationships in in spaces affinity spaces finding places where we can connect where otherwise they didn't exist so this all comes together so what I'm trying to get you to see here is that this is a big deal this is this right here is just another layer to all of the other stuff that's going on and we need to be engaged on as many levels as we possibly can black people we need to be engaged on as many as levels as we can so thank you for coming today and with your consent king I'm going to call you to the mic and if we can just hear from you I'd love to hear take your time let's hear about the art let's hear about the work I'm moving my voice on the mic my voice my voice is very extreme yes how are you everyone your sisters and brothers it's my honor to see you all here I do not carve or produce anything without the energy that surrounds me so when when I when those things that we put forth is only what I see in my presence my years of traveling to America all of the hell and the heavens that I did meet here you know sansa we just keep expressing and expressing I find that black you know black history here is being indulged you know there's this kind of mix and you know trying to prescript whatever they choose to put in and take away so I see a lot of black children and low losing themselves so here's my critical race theory for them that's a that's a replacement for them Moses marked it in stone they broke the stones right there's a piece of wood let it burn with them here you know so that's all I could give for that's all I could give as much as you know the soul permits you know that's all there's nothing much to it it's just a it's just a message of the past coming to the present and you said it's a simple the compass represents what in cycles life what goes around will come around it was not taken care of so we're just doomed to the same resolve continually you know sisters and brothers we know I I love all of all my people black white there you know I come from the island of Montserrat my mother's the Irish my grandfather's the Irish man my mother's a my mother's the Irish woman my father's the more the more the more is maroon so in the island we enter mixed and they call the black Irish you see me and you know in in that kind of mixture now we came I saw I saw the most extremes of life I saw when I saw when I was a child the Irish man said grandel my mother's name you bring on my nigga child grandel and I said oh that was five years old then over the time I started to see you understand where the levels of racism and how hateism racism is not real it's an illusion that was indulged by scientists and and psychologists and then preprogrammed into society and we black people love accept racism as a natural part of things and so-called whites they say you know they they they're racist but they can't even afford to be racist they're not racist as to do with wealth to the way they exceed in some speed so I replaced that in the culture of things that's how we that's how we're putting in the carpet that's what they get out of grace are just pointing to the memories of things that are and we are things ahead of and we are things shouldn't be so it's past but in the future whichever you which ever part of it you choose to accept i'm a reclusive man so maybe not mine you know i'm very reclusive i stay to i stay to the bushes and i'm a mountain man so there's a blessing to be here with you that was easy thank you very much you're welcome brother i love you brother you'll go anywhere he's mean to me stay here stay here stay here so what i want to do is i want to i want to open up some if there's any questions or anything for for king about any of the art that you've seen so far i want to give you an opportunity to do so we've got a mic that's going to be coming around the room if you have any questions at all if you want if you wouldn't mind just stand it up and say what it is you're going to say and king come back to the mic please well we got we got video to be concerned about too yes it's all about accessibility so i just want to say first and foremost grace and king like hard body you know when you look when you really look at those photos and really take a chance to stop pause and connect you can see yourself in the past present and future and it's it's not just as mark say art hop this is a cultural empowerment center we are really really really changing the lives of not just ourselves but our community so just you know i just want to give both of you you know your flowers for really really enhancing the community by sharing this piece and pouring out what you what you've done because it's not only going to be uplifting for us but it's going to be uplifting for the community members that that's soon to come and soon to be here as well so i just want to say thank you thank you all what it's good to thank i thought the most i got that's what was that was the blessing that was given to mama to jeeta look where jeeta i saw jeeta i saw jeeta many years ago you know that's my love that's already many years ago and from that time just connected i to a family so all time just takes a cycle and twist you know then that's all that's all family begets family but family the word family is a simple word it also comes to the word familiar so familiarization is not it's not the closest of family but who you're most familiar with that becomes family so you understand so you know it's only it's only the return of self i'm not taking from not taking anything or giving anything it's you that it is you created that you know that's what you're created other questions other comments that come oh you're just going to ask him by himself i see it's a personal question others okay thank you so much you're welcome for coming give it up for king grace again please i mean like i mean really give it up really give it up really give it up make yourself tired so um you are welcome you are welcome anytime he said he sees me come through the struggle you bet your butt i come through the struggle so listen here's what we're going to do now i want to um first of all i just want to thank you thank you all for coming out for those who who have come again um this is great we've got um you know what looks like just some amazing work back here and i just wanted to say one thing about one piece um and that's um the one that's the second from the right here um as you look back there and you're going to see um for those of you who are watching we're so clever that we're getting ready to just focus in on it right now you don't see it right over my shoulder um and um i was reminded grace of a work that you did um and it wasn't as um fantastical it was amazing but it wasn't like big it was probably like about this big that big you don't even know it's what i'm talking about you do okay but i'm i'm reminded of it because it was hanging on the wall in in our room for a while and it just had so it was so rich with so many messages and so many symbols and so many connections and and and actually it was painful it was painful to look at because what it was actually communicating collectively but it was difficult to process because it was so rich that you had to stand in front of it so i'm not telling you to stand in front of it because you need to get out the way so the next person can see but i but i am saying at least stop for a minute take a picture of it or something like that yes it's that one that that one at the prison there yeah that one you see it um and um so i want to thank you for that because that brought a lot home to me and really resonated i'm not taken away from any of the other art at all but that right there um i've just highly encouraged you to take a very close look at that one in particular okay again thank you for coming out i'm going to leave you on the hands of christine who at this time is going to i hope inform you of anything else you need to be aware of this upcoming out of the camp center and and also um properly release you okay christine so we do have um part of the video you're seeing here is our uh back in school block party not back to school back in school we purposely did that a little ways into the school year because everybody else was doing the back to school stuff we got to be different a day right we got to be unique so we do have a uh back to school thing coming up we have um youth movie night every we just did one last night second and fourth uh fridays um we have a game night that we just gotten started so i feel like i'm missing something vinson isaac yeah the block party yeah chess club on tuesday the block party is the 30th the last saturday in the month we'll block off this side of the street thank you winston for getting the permit um and as long as it's nice out we'll be out there like we did before grilling and we have a basketball hoop up and just playing games hanging out um and i think that's it the other thing too is that to stay up to date with anything that we have going on you can visit either the vermont racial justice alliance website or the richard camp website so thank you all for coming out so my name is grace lawnmore this is the first in the diaspora series um and so the whole series is really supposed to just kind of shine light on our history as black people and um black descendants of slaves and also the narrative kind of before slavery and also what's going on currently and even what we could aspire to and so this first one is really supposed to be more of an ode to what happened or where we were before that all started so this is the second painting in the diaspora series um and it's i think clearer to kind of understand what is depicting it's the passage of slavery um and you know obviously the ocean and just the concept of you know the the arm with the shackle which also ties into um another piece that's a couple paintings down so this is the third in the diaspora series um and it's very specifically referencing um pertinent points in history and our work as black people and the many different things that we've done that have helped build this society that we all live in and some of us flourish in today and so this is not even close to covering the magnitude of of what all of that entails but it does you know you can see the cotton field down here there's a couple of men and also a woman with a child on her back um which is you know not referencing any specific thing but definitely historically accurate um men working to build uh rail rail railroad systems this man philip reid um designed the freedom the statue of freedom that's sitting on top of the us capital the tusky airmen um the inventor of the traffic light and also the gas mask um a very prominent historic black chemist female and also the first um heart surgery that happened was done by a black so this is the fourth painting in the diaspora series and i want to keep the comments about it very limited because i want it to be a piece that's reflected upon um but what i will say is that the last few were more of an o2 history this is really shining light on current events and where some of us unfortunately find ourselves statistically and in in this world today and so this is the fifth and final painting in the diaspora series um and this one is you know kind of ties in well to the one before it um it's really supposed to be an o2 what the future can look like and and what it should look like and just more of what we should aspire to


Right afternoon folks. Ted Ralston and our fantastic staff and crew on our show where the drone leads at the Think Tech Studios downtown Honolulu today. Welcome on board Dr. Song Choi, assistant dean in Department of Engineering. Sounds good. And sounds good. Is it a different title these days? That's pretty close. No different title. Same song, Choi. Same title. Same school. All right, so that's pretty cool song. So anyway, you've been on this show half a dozen times. We've talked about technology and education and stem and drones and all those things. We have one of your proteges online, standing by in Las Vegas. Chuck DeVaney. Hey Chuck. There he is. Hey guys. Now you could have done a better job on these cosmetics, I suspect, but that's what we get. Hi Chuck. In fact, this is a really auspicious week, if I can suggest, because it was at the Paycom S&T conference about five years ago where I first met you. And you had the UH display there. UH had a big UAV display with Dave Hummer and some other guys with some Boeing sponsored products. I met Chuck shortly after that through the work he was doing, looking for drones for work in coastal geology and such. And then that led us to tie all together and that led to... We had a panel session. We had a panel session that had exactly what we tried. And then one thing led to the other and we're back here again, all three of us, at the same place this started five years later. That was about five years ago already. We should put a good shout out to Jay Fidel, who really is an energetic guy here making a lot of this happen. And Jay, if you're out there, join us on the paddle. Maybe he'll walk in. He owns a place, he ought to walk in. Anyway, so Chuck, you're kind of working your way back to Hawaii slowly but surely here, starting out in Hawaii, moving to DC, partway back, standing in Vegas for a while until certain things happen. And then he'll be moving out, moving along in other directions, I suspect. But Chuck, what's it like in terms of what you've been able to see for yourself at this point in time and the world of UAVs as you see it in Vegas? Well, I see a lot of opportunity here for a lot of reasons. There's a lot of activity here. We have the US test site that's happening here and I've reached out to those folks. We see a lot of movement in the FPV world. We see a lot of movement in the hobbyist community and we also see a lot of movement in the cinematography world. I also just north of here at the Air Force Base, they have a lot of their Department of Defense type UAS as well. So I am still kind of in the process of reaching out and forming those relationships with those people between here and Reno as well. That's great. And so Chuck's only been on the ground two weeks in Las Vegas and he's already got a complete inventory and a portfolio going on. Very good. What's out there, but what's interesting is what I mentioned, video and film and such. I mean, Las Vegas is entertainment. And the fact that UAS is a participant or could be a big participant in the entertainment business either in creating films or in creating light shows and all this sort of thing. It's a really interesting level of difference in entertainment. And Chuck, Las Vegas is where that's all happening. So maybe it is... Some of it. Yeah, definitely, Ted. So I'm working with a new company now called Quadrocopter. They've done very, very well in the cinematography world and we are going to be moving into the geospatial realm and data realm, which is going to be more of my responsibility. But they also do retail for DJI products and free fly products and Moby products. If you're a cinematographer buff or a cinematography type that is using UAS, you're probably definitely going to know of these guys. So I got to give... I got to plug them in because they're giving me a home. So... Oh, that's all right. Absolutely. Anybody on this show? We're totally open to promotion of anything. That's great. But don't get too far stuck in these things. We haven't even told you about it yet, but we have a proposal we're putting in pretty soon at UAS in about three weeks. And I think we need you on the team, Chuck, even though you're remote. So I'll tell you about that offline here. Okay. Is that the EBSCORE thing? It would be the EBSCORE thing. Yeah. Okay. All right. Yeah, let me know how we can support that. Yep. Okay, we'll do that. Well, we need an integration guy. We need to take care of sensor integration, payload integration, flight systems, and not so much at the beginning of the proposal, but more at the end when we introduce some different flight management and guidance techniques. So we're probably going to use an Instant Eye as the framework. We can get the academic version that has the ability to put in our own software and still retain the basic software as a failure case. So that's what we're talking about. And this is a kind of a neat opportunity. So... Totally. And actually it would be good, really great having Chuck as part of that, because you will have the insight and the perceptions from your new environment, which will inform us through Chuck's eyes on how that's all working. You know, I was out at Best Buy today because I had to look for something. And I was actually surprised that they had at least a dozen quad copters that were for sale from anywhere from a range of like $1,000 to as low as like, you know, $100 or so. And I also remember when I was all over Asia at the international duty free shops, they had quad copters everywhere.  You know, that's really interesting. And then because that brings to mind the issue of Moore's law and the fact that these things, which were, you know, 20,000 bucks five years ago are now about 50 at the counter. And so they're dropping in price, increasing capability, actually increasing in reliability as well as you move forward here. But it also brings up the issue of the this proliferation and the fact that we're not educating people fast enough, I don't think in No, of course, that's a big issue because, you know, as with any technology, economics is going to drive how fast and quickly grows. If the price of one of these things costs less, you're going to have more people getting involved with playing with them and using them for whatever need that they have, you know, and here with the photography and all the tourism, it's obviously a plus that we have quad copters and they can take some very unique pictures when they're here. So what that brings up another point back to the issue, what we're going to do with Chuck, we'll give Chuck nine months or a year to be in Vegas. And we've got to harvest them and get them back here. And because that that whole issue of the entertainment industry and the tourism exactly as you mentioned, what is what you all about? It's about to look absolutely right. And we don't want to get behind that power curve. We want to be out in the front of that one, in terms of well thought through respectful programs. So we don't violate property rights and this sort of thing or not have permits and this sort of thing. But injecting this as an interactive aspect in tourism, we got to we got to get we got to get our arms around that. Oh, no, of course.  And the stem is the engineering and we're always the implementing and applying the knowledge is learned in the sciences and mathematics. We obviously have to be creative about what we do, right? And the more creative we are, the better we're going to be able to harness and utilize these technologies of the flower. And whether it be a yellow flower today or a red flower tomorrow, as long as like you said, we're ahead the curve. We are making those decisions instead of having them made for us because the technologies are driving us. I think we're okay. You know, and that brings up, sorry, another thing that we too many things coming up here once we can't track the conversations, which you can do is read the teleprompter and read the script. But you know, at the university, we deal with engineering a lot. We deal with coastal geology, we deal with folks in geography department and such. But we haven't I don't think we reached out to the hotel industry people at at UH. And there is some aspect of that. And or the end of business. Obviously, the business school and the travel industry management schools need to get involved sometime because a lot of these technologies are going to be in the forefront of what they do. And maybe these drones will be a way of optimizing some of their security aspects or safety aspects. And that'll just lead to a better experience when somebody's here. We can't we don't have control of the weather, but we can obviously control the other stuff that you know, and that and that leads to the thought that the tourists who come here are going to they've been other places as well. And other places aren't as regulated, perhaps in the domain of drones as we might be. So they might be expecting tourists might be expecting a higher level and a really professional level of a corporation injection inoculation of drones into our larger business scope, including tourism. So we got to get who can we talk to at UH to open that door and get them on the show here. Oh, well, I mean, we can always bring the deans of travel industry management as well as the business here. Okay. And I'm sure they would have their perspectives as to how the economy is driving more and more of these technologies into their industry sectors. Let's do that. And then we have we can feed that back to Chuck. Well, I think since Chuck is in Las Vegas, which is the city of hotels and entertainment, you guys, you might have a better perspective and see how the hotels there and the large resorts there have incorporate some of this technology. Well, the problem here, D Choi, is the airspace problem just, you know, to the south of the strip is the airport. So we're completely engulfed with Class B from, you know, 12,000 to the surface. So I can't imagine that there's probably a whole bunch going on or a whole bunch going on in the drone world here. I can imagine it could probably be used if the airspace wasn't quite a problem for some ISR for safety. Some of the ambulance, you know, first responder applications that that might exist. But you've also got a lot of people on the ground. You've got a lot of turbulent winds. You've got a lot of people that have been drinking a lot and parking a lot and up all night. And again, we're pretty much submerged in Class B. So if you were to use a DJI product, you would never even be able to arm it in Las Vegas. So you'd have to use something else. So I haven't seen a lot of it here yet. Plus there's a lot of tourist helicopters here, a lot of R-22s, a lot of R-44s, stuff like that. So I don't imagine that those guys are going to probably want to share too much of the airspace with guys, you know, pedaling their offerings using UAS. But a Waikiki might be a different animal altogether. You've got safety concerns. You've got people in the water. You can drop a life preserver to them. You can have a surveillance ISR component. You name it. And then of course the advertising and marketing as well. You know, to take that pretty picture for the brochure. And you don't have quite the airspace concerns, because I think we're still class G right in that area. But you got to stay 200 feet from everybody. You know, and the other side of the tourism aspect, beyond the just the physical plant protection and such, you're speaking of Chuck, is the actual tourist entertainment aspect, the involvement, the participatory. So as you speak, Las Vegas itself is within the five of McCarran Airport. But certainly outside of that, there is plenty of class G. And absolutely plenty of it. Plenty of there's a lot of Moas you got to be aware of as well. Push or active only when they're active, but active when they're active, which you got to pay attention to that.  But there is there's I've actually already joined the Las Vegas Soaring Club. So I've been out there and I've met those guys and and seen a lot of talent, talented pilots out there as well. There's a lot of beautiful countryside that can be, you know, filmed and and I don't know what whatever you do with with the with that an advertisement for, you know, Red Rock Canyon, so on and so forth. But yeah, once you get outside of the what we're going to do is take our first break here and then come right back and talk about how we're going to take this tourism thing one step further. So the agreement you and I made to get the business and hotel industry deans together and talk about this. No, of course, I think that's a good idea. Aloha, everybody. My name is Mark Schlove. I'd like you to join me for my program Law Across the Sea on thinktechhawaii.com. Aloha. Aloha. My name is Justine Espiritu. This is my co-host Matthew Johnson. Every Thursday at 4 p.m. on Think Tech, we host the Hawaii Food and Farmers series. We like to bring in folks from the whole realm of the local food supply and agriculture, anyone working on these issues, any organization or individual that has plans or projects. What kind of people have we head on? We've had farmers, we've had chefs, we've had people from government, larger institutions, everyone who's working to help make Hawaii's local food system that much better. So you can see us every Thursday and join the conversation on Twitter and we hope to see you there. Ted Rawson and our team here on the Think Tech Studio table where the drone lead show, Dr. Song Choi. How you doing, Ted? Last time we talked to you, which is 15 minutes ago, you were assistant dean of engineering at UH. I'll stay that way. Still there, okay. Have you checked if the, have you called up the telephone information to see if that's still true? I'll go check. We have Chuck DeVady, a product of UH, standing by in Las Vegas. We're just talking really excited stuff about drones entering our economic streams here, which happened to be entertainment in both Las Vegas and tourism and entertainment in Hawaii. So, you know, one idea that did come up was replacing fireworks. Yeah, absolutely. With a swarm of drones that could do different type of patterns. I thought that was a really interesting idea, almost similar to the water light shows at Las Vegas in front of Bellagio. Sounds like an engineering challenge. I think it is. It's an engineering controls challenge. Absolutely, it's that. And in our case, it would have a weather tolerance aspect. That's right. It would have an orientation so that the imagery or whatever the graphics are can be projected at the ground. Right. And that also leads to search and rescue in some way. Oh, of course. So, once again, we have a need to get these other deans together and go work this thing out. Of course. You know, talking about this entertainment aspect, it really does lead to, like what you said, a search and rescue type stuff because swarming control and swarming of vehicles is obviously something we need to look at because you look at the animals, the way they migrate, the insects, the way they travel, and they look for things. It's all in some sort of a swarming pattern. And if we can have the right control aspects in having them feedback to one another or to, let's say, a mother or a king drone, then you have all the data that you need to do whatever you want. And you know what? What do we pay for those animals? The Buck 29D Triton maybe? They come with all that capability. That's right. And the sensors. And their fault tolerance built in. And a reasonably long life cycle. And fairly easy maintenance. Feed them some hay and they do their thing. That's it.  And that has to do with power, right? So whoever can come up with the endless power source is going to be like the cancer treatment for cancer, right? So it's the holy grail. And we're always looking for that. And you know maybe with Hawaii being one of the leaders in renewable energies and how we're trying to separate ourselves from much of the carbon-based fuels, maybe we're on the right track. How about our reduction in carbon base for entertainment and tourism? There you go. And a higher value entertainment in the process. There you go. In fact, Chuck in Vegas could type in the parameters of the show and run the entertainment show. That's right. And we could run the Las Vegas entertainment show. Of course. That would be interesting. Chuck, are you writing this stuff all down? This is your assignment list. All down and it all makes perfect sense to me. Of course. Remote control is the way to go, right? Yeah, remote control. Do everything from your own home. That's right. And the notion of swarming and who's in charge of the swarm and how decisions are made. That is a fascinating discussion that maybe some of our botany people would have some knowledge of. I agree. I agree. That would be, you know, if you think about it, the biggest form of flattery is emulation, right? So when we try to emulate how robots are getting closer and closer to human anatomy and human biology, human motions, and we're also looking at how robots can become closer to animal motions, there has to be something said. There must be some sort of perfection in that biological happening that we're constantly trying to emulate these. And maybe swarming is one of those things where birds and insects do it instinctively and we just have to figure out how that's done and try to see if we can get our programmers to work that out. So there's a state change there of some kind that we have to get into that different state. I don't know what that is. It's a transformation. It's not an axis transformation. It's not a common filter. It's something gigantically bigger than that. It's almost a complete modification of how things are done, I think. We're used to a base of rules and then when I think when you hit a certain state we instinctively go into another set of rules. And some of that we don't really know how it's done because I think we do it instinctively and we're trying to figure out how those connections take place and the whole concept of artificial intelligence rises from that. Maybe we'll come up with some solutions. Now this is really getting where we have to get to. How do we, because this defines the future of Hawaii's intellectual domain, which then sets salaries and that sets how much the government can tax us. So that the carrying cost for Hawaii gets better if we can start getting some of this functionality being extracted and defined and developed here. Of course, I mean, you know, with Chuck over at Las Vegas, I think one of the things that we need to take a look at is we see a lot of these drones or unmanned aerial vehicles and pretty much remote control. Maybe we need to figure out a way to have a little slap-on or modification add-on that makes it autonomous. And that would be a really interesting way to see how close we are to how things can operate on. We always talk about auto-drive cars and stuff like that. We have Tesla's and all the Google cars and all that. And we keep thinking it's far away, but if you look at the technology that we have, if we create the right structure, all those vehicles can be running on their own. It's the humans that are unpredictable because we go out there and we have a tendency of dodging left and we should always be dodging right. And that leads back to the issue of what is our basic GNP of Hawaii and that we don't have resources. We have sunshine. That's our resource and 365 days a year of it. We have warm water. Boeing, for example, started in Seattle because there was a high-end lumber company up there called Boeing that made when I had Citrus Bruce and that's what airplanes used to were made of. So that's how Boeing started where the resource was. Douglas started in Southern California where the resource was sunshine. You could work on airplanes outside all year long. So how do we take this really interesting issue of the compelling need to generate a viable tourist industry that isn't just getting a bus and go take a tour, but is something higher than that and is enhanced or is somehow made possible by the or is increased in capability somehow by drones and in participative as well as expressive. That would lead to an incredible state change in mathematics and in computation and we get away from these one-on-one to one-on- many engagements. That's right. I can't even think what that discipline is called that does that. Well you know like all disciplines now we've been calling some of them. I'll talk about engineering. We have mechanical engineering, civil engineering, electrical engineering. I mean these disciplines have been around for decades, centuries. We ought to think about maybe the next 50 years from now those electrical engineers will not be electrical engineers. Those mechanical engineers will not be quite mechanical engineers. They're going to be something else. So I think we need to enhance and embrace those changes and see where we're going to be leading. When I was working a lot more with underwater vehicles, part of the entertainment thing we were looking at was going into regions that normally you would not be able to go with these vehicles. Maybe it's the same thing with these aerial vehicles. We're going to go to these vast oceans where we normally can't get to but we now have access to visualizing some of the beauty that's after. Who knows? Maybe a new sport can be brought together or an entertainment factor of some sort. So we got to get with our once again with our funny beans and see if they go along with us or are they trapped? So I think we need to contact the travel industry management, the business school. We might also have to start looking into some contacts in other states like California. Like Las Vegas. Las Vegas or California where entertainment industry is a little bit more developed where maybe we can tap on USC and say hey let's access your entertainment departments and see what we can do in terms of creating new entertainment.  Yeah I mean think about what virtual reality has done and computer graphics has done to the film industry. Even if we look back five years ago the computer graphics in films look like computer graphics. You look at computer graphics now and you look at some of these video games. I can't tell if those are computer graphics or real people. They look the same until you sit there and you go I don't think you could move like that. That's interesting because 35 years ago there was an advertisement on television for a particular brand of audio tape and it said can you tell the difference. That was audio right that was limited now we have the same thing in video you can't tell the reality. You cannot tell. I mean you look at some of the TVs these ultra high definition TVs and you go wow that's cleared and looking out the window. So these changes that we see technologically the engineering implementation of all our science and math and arts and the creativity that we generate is going beyond I think some of what our imagination was and now we're just we're trying to play catch up as to see where we can go. We have to play catch up with our imagination and find that new state that's exactly the way into it. That's exactly what it is. And that's the setup for a meeting I was just told about on Wednesday Bert Lum was telling me about unconference this year and I have to run a session at the unconference on that very issue and I'm inviting you. It's on a Saturday I think it's on April 1st or something like that. That's why. You sure? April 1st? Yeah. How about that? What a logical place to put it right? Yeah. And I was going to ask John Rand and Peter Quigley to if we can they're probably not even watching but we'll try to get him on that as well. I just saw him a couple days ago. Because we've got to figure out what how this all fits into the Hawaii economy. Oh of course. Of course. And we have to generate the educational system that gets the workforce development and then we also have to get the the production of software and such. We're not going to produce hardware. We know that. Maybe nano hardware or something. But we're not going to be producing conventional hardware here. Well I mean we have to always remember you know we're always told let's develop workforce. But if we develop workforce we have. Like Chuck we developed him and guess what he did. That's right. He skipped off to DC two years ago and now he's. Well that's because that's because the other part of what I want to say. We have to develop the work along with the workforce. Okay. You can't have one with the other. So you know if you don't if you don't want people to leave you have to have that work here that expectation that for the workforce that you develop and you know what whether it's through entertainment or tourism. We have to do something. And what's interesting is this big basic technology here which Chuck had a lot to do with introducing me to by the way has is one of those vectors into that new change into that new that new world that new view. Yeah. I mean I mean people should realize that one of the biggest industry here is the military. And next week we have Pacific Command Science and Technology. We started this show. All right. And everybody whoever has a time should drop by and take a look and see what type of technology is being brought here and see how something like a drone which a long time ago may even thought of it as a toy can fit into actual work space. Very interesting question. It won't take very long but we're talking right now about using this thing which is actually a Marine Corps standard product along with a sensor sets and a payload set such as this one which Chuck I don't know if you can see it there or not. But acting as a strobe beacon to take care of a man overboard situation on a submarine. And we'll be developing that theory in the next couple of days here. But that's what we have to get to here. And the Paycom S&T conference is at the Hilton. Is at Hilton next week. And people are the public's invited to come in and join the on especially on the exhibit side exhibit side. OK. So with that we'll we got ourselves entertained here pretty well. And we were talking about entertainment. We're talking about drones. We're talking about workforce development and work not just workforce development. We're talking about getting our expatriates like Chuck back. That's the main reason why I mean if we are developing people like Chuck who has all the capability and the knowledge it makes no sense for us to let them go all the way to DC and only be 40 percent of the way back to Hawaii. OK. You know we need to have him back. Chuck are you feeling guilty?  I'm feeling pretty guilty right now. All right. Thanks. I'm feeling you.


I'm not sure which role he's going to be in today. I'm looking for tears as little Nell dies. And he's going to talk to us about Be A Playwright.com and about the evolution of the project, moving online from offline, what they've done to create material and how that's engaging with audiences in ways that are about encouraging other people to tell their stories rather than just telling the story themselves. Good afternoon everybody. I am the literary manager of Live Theatre. I thought before I go into Be A Playwright.com which is our online script writing course. I should put the organization I work for into a context. That is, we're going to talk about later on, Be A Playwright.com. That's the home page. I work at Live Theatre, which if you're not familiar with Newcastle is a beautiful building down on the quayside. We were closed for renovation about three or four years ago and we got bigger. We acquired the building next door. So we've recently kind of expanded. We've got two spaces down there. We've got a main house which is 160-seater and we've recently acquired Studio Theatre, which is on our top floor, which is 60 seats. And we're a new writing company, one of very few in the country, and our mission statement is very clear. We have to create and perform new plays of world-class quality. We have to try and find and develop creative talent and we unlock the potential of young people through theatre. So we obviously, the second one of those missions, we have to find new ways of finding and developing creative talent all the time. So that's something to bear in mind when we get on to talking about Be A Playwright.com. I'll just go through a couple of the things that we do that kind of reinforce our mission. First Draft is a project we do with local schools. We go into schools and find writers, embryonic playwrights, who are nine and ten years old, years four and five. And our Education and Participation Department works with the young writers. They bring the writers into the theatre. We employ professional actors and directors to give them a proper production and they do a series of ten minute plays with usually two handers and they're performed to the highest possible standards that we can apply. And that's just part of the work that we do in our Education and Participation Department. We go out and also invite young people into our building. We run ten different sessions a week, eight of them in the building and two out in the community. And we have something like 200 people a week engaging with the department and we have a waiting list of a similar number. My job as literary manager is to find and nurture creative talent. We do this by engaging with writers in a variety of different ways. We have a thing called Live Lab, which is like a developmental arm of the company where we put work on in our studio space and we hope to do dramaturgical support for writers at all stages of their career. And we also teach an introduction to playwriting course, which I'll come back to later on. And of course in the main house we have our main productions. When the building reopened three or four years ago, it opened with the Lee Hall Play, the Pittman Painters, which was a massive success and has moved from our stage at Live. It's gone on to The National and from The National it went to Broadway last year and is currently on tour, I think in Blackpool this week maybe, and it's coming back to the West End in the autumn. So I suppose the theatre company does a whole range of disparate but coherent activities. And my job as the literary manager, one of the things I've been doing for the last few years, is from 2002 we've been running an introduction to playwriting course with my predecessor Jeremy Herron, who's now Deputy Artistic Director of the Royal Court. Jeremy and I ran the course for a number of years. We had probably about 120 people take part of all abilities and from those people who took part in the course we had about nine or ten professional commissions. So it seemed to be working rather well. And so we thought how could we roll out that course that we do, that we teach at the theatre. How could we roll that out online so that other people could have access to it. And perhaps also think about an income stream as I'm sure lots of people in the room are aware, funding opportunities are becoming more restricted. And so arts organisations have to look for alternative income streams. How to maybe charge people to come and witness the content of our course, make it adaptable so that they can engage with it and perhaps earn some money for the theatre company to enable it to put its plays on in the main house and the studio and to continue to further develop and support writers in the region. So we set about adapting the content of the course to the online course. We kind of rationalised the old content of the previous course into a five modular structure. These are the modules here. You can see here Getting Started where we ask people to do a skills audit about themselves as writers, how they work best and what would motivate them, the sort of themes that they might think about writing. To think seriously about dramatic structure and incorporate the old adage that there are only three rules to writing a play or telling a story and that's structure, structure and structure. And also to think about character, how do you make your characters three-dimensional and believable. Dialogue and theatricality, what makes your writing different from writing a screenplay or writing for television. And finally getting it produced, the last module, which is about thinking strategically about where you place your script, getting it finished, thinking about rewrite and overcoming writer's block. So in the adaptation of our course that Jeremy Herron and I taught, we had to think about what it is that makes a playwright. What is it and what does an embryonic playwright want to learn? Obviously Jeremy and I had had the content of the course but it's not an exact science becoming a playwright and in fact what we're kind of after is for people to think individually. So we wanted to create a variety of voices. So obviously our voices, Jeremy and mine, were as part of the course but also people might want to hear how other writers go about tackling those issues that I've just mentioned. So what we decided to do is to create some video content of really top playwrights that we really admired and also had something interesting to say and to begin to analyse how they tackle the issues that we raise in the course. So we wanted to encourage people to have access to a diversity of working methods. And the way in which we did this, we set about interviewing interesting writers and our first list of people are on the screen now. Leigh Hall who was associated with our company quite a lot, he wrote the Pittman painters and obviously has written an opera in Bridlington that you might have heard a bit about most recently. Sheila Stevenson, she has written The Memory of Water and she wrote a lovely piece for us last year about the artist Winslow Homer. Nick Grosso is a youngish playwright who works in a very unconventional way so we wanted to talk to him, he's written Peaches and Ingredient X which was done at the Royal Court last year. The Leigh Alan Plater who had a long association with us and is a master storyteller and we thought that he would obviously have great skills and great advice to impart to embryonic writers. Polly Stenham who's very young, she's still only 20 or 21 I think, she had a massive hit with her first play, That Face at the Royal Court a few years ago and that also transferred to Broadway. And Anthony Nielsen who is a writer and director, he creates work in a completely different way quite often through improvisation. So it was about compiling a list of a variety of information that people and students would have access to. In order to, in order that we were singing from the same hymn sheet as it were we asked people on the course to read the same plays so that we have a common currency that we can keep referring to in the content of the course. So those were the six plays that we asked people to read, we don't ask them to read them all at once, but they read them gradually as the course progresses. Obviously each of those plays has something new to offer to the embryonic writer. And we also created some audio content. We got a group of people who have been involved in some productions with of those plays to discuss them and we have those on the website as podcasts. So that people who are interested in, have just read the play have another angle to analyze it with by listening through that content. And so we had all of the content and then we had to kind of think about how best to kind of marshal it so that people could get the best use out of it. So we used testers and we used a focus group and we gave them the material that we'd compiled and asked them what they thought about it. And they provided us with a couple of things that we hadn't thought about. They wanted a kind of a dashboard, a kind of home page for each student to go back to. It's almost like a sort of Facebook home page where you could update your status and also say how you were progressing and leave comments about the course, communicate with other students. We created a series of forums where people could exchange opinions and also work if they wanted to and again talk to their fellow cohort of students and also have an interaction with the people who created the course, Jeremy and I. So every two weeks we have a live chat with students online and also they said that they wanted to have a sense of collecting what their work that they'd done. So they came up with this idea of an online journal which is where the modules have a series of exercises dotted throughout them and your answers to those exercises you can download and keep them in your online journal and you can slowly accumulate a whole wealth of written material as you progress through the course. And we also, we tried to set out what other competition there was out there and actually there are very few, there are very few courses that we could compare ourselves with. There's open university modules and what it would cost to do a kind of course at a university or part of a course at a university. And so we came up with two pricing structures. As you can see there was an interactive option which is the exercises that I've mentioned. At the end of each module you have a bridging exercise which you submit to us at the theatre and our literary department will pass on informed opinion about the exercise and then feed it back to you and then you carry on. And the last module, the final and fifth module we're asking people at the end to write a whole play. We hope that the knowledge that people have accumulated over all of the modules gives them a toolkit that they can use to write a play at the end of the final module. And they submit, in the interactive version, they submit that play to the department and we will provide a very detailed critique about the quality of the play, about how the play reflects the course, how much they have learned, maybe whether some of the weaknesses of the play may be and also to offer some advice about where they could place the play if they wanted to have it done professionally. And the solo option which is as you can see is cheaper, that doesn't involve the interaction. It doesn't have, you don't have interactive access to the forums and there wouldn't be the same interaction with the theatre to provide the kind of feedback from the course. But you do still do have access to all of the video content and the audio content that's on the site. Okay, so that's the course. What I'd like to do now is perhaps show you some of the video content rather than just hear me speak. It's got to be there somewhere. That's not it. It's a video stream. That's it. Brilliant. Okay, as you can see Stan Laurel and Ronnie Barker weren't available to do the introductions, but Jeremy and I did them instead. And these are some of the little video clips that we did of the extensive interviews that we do with the writers. This first one is with Sheila Steemson, just a little short clip and Sheila's explaining about how difficult it is even for a writer as esteemed as she is to write.  That's probably what the key is. And it's alright if you can't do it. I think that's what you have to own, the bits where you can't do it, where you just think, I don't know how to do this. I can't write any single play I've ever written. There's a point where I can't write it and then I phone up my agent and tell her I can't write plays anymore and I'm going to bed. I'm always going to bed. Or I can't write this play and I've given up her draft and it's worse.  Do you remember you always do this? So one of the things that we were anxious to show the writers is the difficulties even great artists have. And the different approaches that they have, all these videos are from... I personally don't get one. Are from the first module. So this is the module in which we're asking people to evaluate what kind of writer they are and how you might go about starting to create that play that you want to write. This is Polly Stenham, who I say has only been writing for a short period of time. She's still very young, but she's had great success and has a really interesting way of writing. And this is what she says about how to start. Personally, don't get one clear idea. I'm really envy people who get one clear idea, but I don't. I think the best way to describe it and this is nicking it totally from another writer, Philip Ridley, is it's like a backwards explosion and you start with lots of little bits of detrus and then it kind of pulls back into something more singular. So I can't really answer that question because it's never, it's not the one thing really. I don't think.  I just sort of freestyle. I know that's a weird word, but I just sort of write anything that comes into my mind and write lots and lots and lots and listen to lots of music and do lots of drawings and kind of gather and forage and then look, then stop and look at what I have and then peel away and then do it again and then peel it away and then eventually I get to see what I really meant all along but perhaps you become clearer about that with maturity, but I don't know. Okay, so these are I'll show you a couple more, but these are all videos from, as I say the same module and each of the five modules has particular videos that are tailored for that particular subject that's under discussion. Here's Nick Grosso and this is how Nick, these are all from Making a Start, so this is how Nick goes about pursuing an idea or not as the case may be. Alright, maybe we'll come back to Nick. Let's hear from Lee because he hasn't been in the news very much recently. Yeah, funny thing happened to me on the way to the cinema. Great, okay. It's alright. I'll just tell you literally what I do I literally have a huge if I've got an idea for a play or a screenplay or something I'm kind of, I think about it for quite a long time and generally, and this is another thing that Tom Stobald says that generally you get one idea and it's not quite enough and then you get another idea and suddenly a play is when there's like almost two ideas coming together. I'd always thought for instance a lecture is a seldom used form of theatre, but it's like it does happen in universities all the time people stand up with a bit of sign and something like that and I've always been puzzling how you could use that in a not a very arid way to be a theatrical form and then, and I've also I'm sort of obsessed about class and art and all the things that I keep going back to and then when I found the Pittman Painters suddenly I realised that there was a form here that could be a lecture, but it could be actually fun and animated and it could be a lecture about this other thing. And because these two ideas came together then there seemed to be a play there, but so what I do, once I've got a rough idea of these two ideas or the landscape I get a huge bit of paper and then I just free associate and I think that well if I'm going to tell a play about a boy who does ballet in a Pitt village, I think well he's going to have to talk to his teacher so alright a scene between the boy and his teacher and his dad's going to find out and he's going to have an argument with the dad and by the end of like an hour, if you ask that basic question, what's going to happen in any given scenario and you probably end up with 20 or 30 different ideas for scenes and when I went back recently to do me old paper I found that sheet of Billy Elliot and every single scene that's in the musical now is on that bit of paper because it's bleeding obvious, you know what I mean it's not like rocket science, he's got to talk to somebody he's got to talk to his little mate and he's going to ask him a question then I start to organise and see well if I've got all these things, what's going to happen first is he going to have an argument with his dad first or is he going to talk to his teacher and then asking those really dumb questions you start to find the implied narrative and quite often you'll change it as you go later on but you can start to see and then I literally draw so he sees his mam and then he goes down to that and then sometimes you don't know what you can't decide whether this you've come before that and I kind of I've got these alternative timelines and stuff so by the end of that process I know what my scenes would be, I'm thinking about the characters all the time although I'm not really I'm looking at the structure but a lot of the questions about the characters are answered by what I've discovered on my timeline as it were because we know that dad's going to have to be a certain type of dad so he can have the argument with them he's not going to be the type of you know little dad who's taking him to the ballet lessons obviously he's going to have to be something else so loads of questions are starting to get answered without you having to actually think about them and invent them and then when I've got all that then I start then I start doing other research about it what was actually like it in 1984 and Easington and stuff and getting pictures and looking at documentaries about how they train ballet dancers and stuff and doing that type of background research then informs oh well I couldn't possibly do that but that's wrong because the ballet dancers don't do that so then you start refining it but really all the work of writing the play is being done subconsciously at that point you're using this thing to sort of somehow get a grasp of the situation and in a sense I think what you should do is write something that's important to you okay so you can see that the videos themselves are quite practical they're about giving people a real insight into how these writers these particular writers work well try again with Nick because he's quite interesting starts with furniture I normally get an idea it really usually involves tables and chairs and by that I mean like just the place so I think of the place and the people like for example if it is a table and chairs that I just imagine the table and the people that are sitting on those chairs that's usually the basis of the play that's how it forms in my mind and so then what happens then you get the place I get the place I get the people and then I just get them talking to each other and I like to see what happens between those people what develops however with this play it was a little bit different in a sense that I had more of a long term picture of what was going to happen and where it was going to go but that's not always the case sometimes sometimes I have no idea where they're going to take this and sometimes I'll start something it doesn't take me anywhere so I don't take it any further and then sometimes I find a place and people who will I can sustain or they will sustain me long enough to get to the end of a play so as you can see there's a whole variety of different bits of advice being offered because as I mentioned earlier on what we're trying to encourage is the individual voice of a playwright with something new to say and in an interesting way so I suppose ideally what we're thinking will happen is that people will pick little things from all of the different bits of material that they get and think well that applies to me even if that doesn't apply to me so they're gradually accumulating the evidence the stuff that they'll need in order to fashion their play and as I mentioned earlier on there are a number of podcasts I'll just show you, just play a little bit maybe from a podcast this is the group discussion about Three Sisters, check off okay this is the Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov and it was first performed in 1901 so where should we start I suppose what we want to concentrate on are some things that are in the play that might be useful to budding writers Steve Well the most significant thing about I think about this play and other Chekhov plays and this isn't an original idea I think it was something that was quite shocking for audiences at the time is that this play in particular there is a lack of kind of narrative action and the foregrounding of character the emotional lives of character and ideas being kind of discussed and explored in a range of interesting ways and I think that's important because I think writers get very caught up with the idea that they need to have a driving narrative because that's the vehicle that's going to kind of carry everything else with it Sorry that's just a little extract from that and I suppose what we're doing is accumulating all the pieces of information from the writers and also things that could be learnt from these classic texts and building them together so that there's a kind of learning process for the course members to follow that kind of summation of what all of the course is about You will get a unique username and password to log on to the course When you do, you will be presented with a homepage that you can personalise by uploading an image to represent yourself You also have the ability to update your status view your progress on the course and see who else is online The course has been specifically written by myself, Jess Casey the literary manager at Live Theatre and Erin, now assistant artistic director at the Royal Court The course is designed to be a straightforward step by step guide to the craft of playwriting In each of the five modules you are taken through a number of specially tailored writing exercises on a particular aspect of writing plays culminating in a bridging exercise which you can submit for expert feedback from the literary department at the theatre In addition to the text the course also features exclusive reviews with award winning playwrights offering their own perspectives on the subject under discussion These writers include Lee Hall Sheila Stephenson Alan Plater and Polly Stenham Your exercises will be saved in your own electronic journal This journal can be used for your own notes and observations made during the modules You can also share your work and the journal with your fellow students within the discussion forum Here you can become part of an online community of aspiring playwrights The course culminates at the end of the fifth module with the opportunity to submit a full length play that you have written as a result of the skills gathered on the course This script will receive a thorough critique and feedback from the live theatre literary department with advice on the next steps for your work and development The solo version of the course is also available This contains the contents of the course the exercises and interviews and the contents of feedback advice and full access to the discussion forum Ok that's it, that's beaplaywright.com Thank you


The idea of phantom cosmonauts, cosmonauts who flew before Yuri Gagarin but died in space so their deaths were covered up by the Soviet Union, is such a fascinating idea. Unfortunately, they're not real. But the story of how we came to think they're real is pretty compelling in itself. The idea of phantom cosmonauts comes from the very real mystery surrounding the early Soviet space program. In the 1960s, missions weren't announced until they were literally leaving the Earth, and if a mission failed, it would be given a different designation to hide the fact that it was part of an actual program. Reports that reached the West were often missing details or were misinterpreted, so no one really knew the true story. This all led to a list of names that appeared in the late 1950s, and no one could confirm whether these were cosmonauts who were training to fly or cosmonauts who had already died in space. And thus the mysteries began. In 1958, reports reached the United States that a Soviet pilot had flown on a suborbital flight to 186 miles, which definitely qualifies as spaceflight. The report turned out to be false. It was part of a radio broadcast, much like the Orson Welles broadcast of War of the Worlds. It just confused people and made people believe that the story was real when it wasn't. But there was some truth to the story. It turned out that a Soviet pilot had actually flown a suborbital mission. But remember that a suborbital mission could be like an X-15 flight, just releasing going up and then coming back down. But validity to the story came from some pretty trustworthy sources, specifically Herman O'Bareth, who said that he had heard the true story of a Soviet pilot on a suborbital flight didn't say what kind of vehicle it was in, who had been killed on the mission. So this opened up the idea that this was the Soviet Union's first cosmonaut flight that had failed miserably and they were covering up his death. Stories took off in 1959 when America met its mercury astronauts and started looking for evidence of an equivalent program in the Soviet Union. Details were far and few between, many coming from unreliable sources, but gradually the West learned that the Soviet Union was training a class of cosmonauts. However, they didn't really know who they were or what they were doing or where they were. Nevertheless, a sketchy picture emerged of a Soviet space program with three World War II veterans training as cosmonauts. They were named Belokonev, Kachur and Grashev. A fourth cosmonaut whose name was never known was rumored to have been killed in a training accident. That last cosmonaut reappeared in the months that followed. A weekly Russian magazine showed an image of doctors, technicians and subjects all working on a life support system. There were three men in the image, the real Belokonev, Kachur and Grashev, but the absence of a fourth seemed to solidify the existence of a dead man. Western reports assumed that the image showed real training facilities and that the men were real cosmonaut trainees, which added more validity to the stories. The rumors got another boost in 1961. On February 4th, the Soviets announced the imminent launch of a seven-ton sputnik. Western specialists listened to the launch and heard what sounded like moaning coming from the spacecraft, the signal of a human heartbeat, and Russian translated through Morse code. It all sounded like the man was dying and right at the moment when staging should have occurred on the launch, the heartbeat stopped and the transmission ended. Was it a lost cosmonaut or was it suspicious that that transmission was done on a frequency that was very easily accessible to amateur radio operators? It could have been a trick or it could have been a test of a system. Nevertheless, it fueled this idea of lost cosmonauts that were being covered up by the Soviet Union. More phantom launches followed. On April 9th, the day before Gagarin was originally scheduled to fly, the British Communist newspaper The Daily Worker reported that Lieutenant Colonel Vladimir Sergeyevich Ilyushin had launched into orbit on April 7th or 8th, circle the Earth three times, but then his spacecraft malfunctioned. Some technical mishap had brought him back from space deranged. He was now unfit to show the world and was hidden and his accomplishments swept under the rug. He wasn't. There was a real illusion, but he was a pilot who never joined the cosmonaut training program. Another strange rumor emerged from within the Soviet space program itself. A severely burned man was brought to the care of Dr. Vladimir Goliakovsky in March of 1961 under the name of Sergeyev Ivanov. He was thought to be maybe a killed cosmonaut, and he was, sort of.  As though to add more fuel to the fire of rumors, Bondarenko's death was hushed up. In the 1970s, images of the Soviet space program from just a decade earlier started to emerge that only fueled the rumors more, because they were all strangely doctored. They were images showing cosmonauts either in training or on vacation. And in some images, men seemed to be missing. They were not phantom cosmonauts. They were not men who had died in space and so had to be removed from the history books. Instead, they were cosmonaut trainees who didn't behave well. They had bad reputations and were deemed poor role models for kids growing up that their likenesses were removed from images. The only reason we know that these images have been doctored was because mission and program managers didn't remember which version of the images had been released, the original or the one with this guy taken out, the one with that guy taken out, and eventually historians got really interested and started putting together all the images to figure out who had been taken out when and why. If you liked this video, guys, please be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. And if you want vintage space between videos, be sure to follow me on social media. I'm on Facebook, Twitter, and on Instagram. As always, thank you so much for watching and I'll see you guys next time.


So, my name is John Belone. I'm head of software infrastructure at SS&C. What does that mean? That's database infrastructure. That's things like developer productivity, DevOps. That's things like reliability engineering, site reliability engineering. And we do a little bit of internal systems tooling development, so, app dev. Tell you real quick about SS&C just so you have an idea of the space we're in. You can kind of get an idea. Heavily in kind of financial services business. So, think hedge funds, banks. We do things like healthcare. We're also in the head funds. We're also in kind of pharmacy. We have clients that kind of stretch through kind of the world. So, it says 18,000 clients.  And we basically go through and do claims processing for, to make sure that there are no drug interactions for the drugs that you're receiving from CVS. Things like that. And finally, you know, there's a lot of, as you can imagine with a public company, a lot of things like, we talked about compliance. So, we do a lot of things like security and auditing. So, a big part of where we're looking to take the product is in that realm. Specifically, sock controlled type environments. So, I actually edited my slides a few minutes before we did this because we covered like, what is DevOps? Like defined DevOps. So, I'm not going to give you a bunch of like diagrams about DevOpses, but I'm going to talk about what we focused on when we decided to choose GitLab as kind of a product that we wanted to bring into the company. So, the first thing is collaboration. So, as you can imagine, you know, you have hundreds, thousands of engineers. You need a way for them to collaborate to do software development, life cycle and tooling, right? And when you look at kind of the competitors in the space, really the tool that stands out because there's just so many different avenues, not just code review, but wikis and CI CD and a bunch of other continually adding features. It's GitLab integrates with a lot of the chat and tooling that we support internally for technology collaboration. So, it also supports integrates with tools that we could build internally that we could write ourselves, right? So, using web hooks and API and things like that, it's very extendable. I say reliability. Really it's about our ability to provide a service internally to our engineers and customers, right? So, I'm a global company. I have offices all throughout the world. I need to be able to provide a baseline level of service to engineers if they're in India, if they're in Bangkok, engineers if they're in anywhere in the United States. Stable. It's got to be stable. So, one of the things, you know, that we ran into with, if you kind of the first time you step into like the Git hosting space, most people use Git web, right?  Well, that's what I mean by stability, right? We need the ability to scale to noisy neighbors that are, that we onboard as part of a large organization. So, SISNC has a lot of engineers, but we also have a lot of companies that we're bringing onboard. And that means that sometimes you don't have the best hygiene when you're using Git repositories, right? You might have large objects or you might have things that just don't work quite well in a shared environment.  And finally, automation. And really, this is kind of, we'll talk about in a few seconds, but as an infrastructure team, we heard a few minutes earlier, we want to dog food what we're actually using, right? And in particular, we want to automate the ability for us to be able to use some of the tools that don't directly interact with GitLab that they don't integrate, but automate it through the use of the APIs. And you'll see in a few minutes exactly what I'm talking about. So, talked a few seconds ago of why GitLab, well, obviously code review, right? That's kind of the first thing that everyone dives into. I need the ability to put eyes onto poor merge requests and have issues associated with those merge requests and close them out through the life cycle of a problem or a bug inside of a piece of software. But some of the things that we started to look into in addition to that is what other things internally can we displace from the perspective of having many tools to do with one tool that does this? And we started looking at things like security. We started looking at things like feature flags and leveraging the CICD pipelines of GitLab, which was actually one of the biggest sellers for us because our CICD story prior to GitLab was really, you know, some people use Team City, some people use Jenkins, some people use a number of other products. We wanted the ability to give them an integrated experience on all the platforms that we support internally to build software on. I talked a little bit about security, but in particular, access and change control. So we'll see in a second what I'm talking about, but the ability to use repository level controls to not only control who has access to view, who has access to merge pull requests, but also who has access to even change or merge parts of a pull request for particular files inside of a repository. And I'll talk about that in a minute, but effectively where I'm getting at is if you have a large repository that has several different code owners, you have the ability to say that these three individuals are responsible for this domain, these three individuals are responsible for this domain and technical writers are responsible for the docs directory. And when you get a merge request through a workflow, those people will be identified as the correct approvers of those pull requests. And that's huge because it allows us to automate our workflow without really having to do too much configuration outside of a simple file. And of course, infrastructure. So high availability, we talked about that, needs to be reliable. But we also talked about geographically dispersing GitLab, and Geo was one of the bigger selling points for us. We currently have three actual large deployments of it. So we have two that are in the United States and then one that's in India. Awesome. So let's talk real quick about access and change control. I talked about using code owners to define the ability for individuals to be able to merge changes to a particular file. That's huge. And in a second, you'll see we've leveraged GitLab to actually automate some of our configuration management tooling. In particular, we're talking about Chef. And this gives us the ability for individuals to say, okay, you own these particular policies for these particular servers. And you're the now the sole person who can act or the sole group of people that can actually merge those requests to eventually update those servers and upgrade them through a change control process. So we have the ability to now query back and checked. I mean, it's not easy, but we have the ability to query back at a particular point in time and check who was able to make, not only who made that change, but who was able to make that change at a particular point in time, which is really important when we're going through an audit. And actually, if you kind of follow a lot of the DevOps, the four eyes rule, right? You want at least two people to look at a pull request. And that's that's we enforce a minimum on most of our repositories for infrastructure. At least two people need to be able to verify a poor merge request. We talked a little about CI CD. So pipelines are huge. This is how we've been able to actually build a an automation around things that don't directly integrate with GitLab. But obviously, you can use this for out of the box for Kubernetes. And that's something we're looking for in the future. Like I said, change control allows individuals that have access not only to approve those merge requests, they have access to actually do a deployment. And you can define inside of your GitLab YAML, the pipeline YAML, the ability for automatic things to move automatically. So if you have a test environment or a UAT environment that you don't necessarily care about, you're fine with it going straight to the UAT environment, it'll do that as soon as a merge request is accepted. But if you have several different production environments, you obviously want someone to manually look at that, maybe run a manual QA test or an automated QA test if you have that. So unfortunately, I have screenshots because I wasn't sure if I'd be able to get my VPN. But inside of a merge request, this is what you would see when you are working with our Chef repository. Someone, an individual has an update, they request to merge an update. And then there are certain individuals based on the files that they've changed in this merge request that actually have an approval right to that. And you'll see this here. Merge request approved by that particular person's icon, right? But you can view currently at that time, who was eligible to actually approve that, right? And that's obviously now in GitLab as an issue as long as that repository exists in GitLab, right? You have history about the change that was actually made, the series of Git commits inside of that kind of branch. And specifically, you know, you have further down, I didn't show it, but you have your comments, everything you would normally see in a merge request. So if you're discussing things, and while kind of the testing and everything's going on, you still have that kind of collaboration and discussion about changes, which is key to any type of change control tool, especially when you have some individuals that aren't intimately familiar with exactly what changes are happening. And then further down here, this is where it starts to get a little interesting. We use the GitLab pipeline features to actually do automatic deploys to our Chef environments, but then it holds up deploys to environments that we'd like to promote changes to, i.e. anything that's not test, right, production. So this is actually what's interesting, GitLab modifying our Chef repos to actually deploy GitLab Geo in Mumbai. So when you actually dive into the CICD or, you know, the operations tab, you'll see that there's an area here that kind of shows what exactly is being done as part of the GitLab pipeline. So in this case, you know, we have a few settings.  And you saw a few moments in the previous presentation, you saw the directed kind of graph. That's part of this stage. So you'd see basically individuals, sorry, lines of that directed graph would be just yet another environment in kind of the pipeline part lines. This is a list of all the environments that we deploy to, and as you can see, each of the components of GitLab Geo are actually spread out separately. So that means there's different servers. So we've kind of went through what it would take to deploy a highly available GitLab Geo instance. And you could see just, you know, kind of the history of what actually happened, what changes went in, the SHA that Git commit that it actually happened on, and more importantly, which deployment actually affected what actually pushed the change. And who did it actually, who actually clicked the button. So when you kind of dive further into this, you know, when you look at a macro level, you'll see that, you know, we have 43,000 now changes that have happened in six months or so that we've been using this tool. And it tells you how long something actually took, and you can rerun a pipeline. If it were a particular pipeline that was, you know, idempotent, you could run it again and get the same result. In this case, it actually should be. You should be able to run it again and get the same result. We just don't ever really find a need for that because usually when we find an issue, we find it in the test environment and then we'll just push a subsequent update that fixes that particular problem for this use case. So what's kind of next in what we're working on? Well, we talked a little, on the first couple slides, you saw about security. So, you know, security is the DevSecOps, but really what we want to do is have the ability to manage the concerns for software development, security scanning, things like that as part of our workflow, but also have our security operations and engineering team come along as participants instead of being at the end of kind of the process that you're getting code to production. We don't want to have red tape. We'd rather have them come along and be participants in the collaboration. And that's our key to using any of these kind of tools. We want to extend the pipeline usage beyond our infrastructure projects. There are a few projects now that use Windows and Linux CI runners that just basically build the CI process, but they're not using the pipeline, the whole deployment to production and realizing kind of the benefits of the whole workflow. Specifically, you know, the AutoDevOps that gives us the ability to connect a repository directly to a Kubernetes cluster and do things like application deployments, monitoring, excuse me, live monitoring and metrics and check errors and things like that that would happen during deployment. And I talked earlier about SOC controls. We really like the ability to pull our audit information from a trusted source rather than have to basically store it ourselves in a database and then, you know, produce those results when we go through an audit every couple of quarters. So what's nice is if we have the ability to basically say, oh, great, there's an audit for this particular business. Okay, click a button. Here's all the change control information for the last six months. That's huge because not only does that save money because we don't have engineers now spending weeks and weeks and, you know, maybe a month pulling this information, but it also gives the auditors trust the fact that we're actually, you know, using the tools that we say we're using. It's pretty quick. That's all I have. I figured there'd be some questions. I can talk more about the specifics. Fortunately, I would love to show a demo, but wasn't able to. No questions. Expect to use GitLab kind of having, oh, you had mentioned you expect to use GitLab kind of having some experience of working with people with bad code hygiene. Yeah. Do you have any experience of, you know, what that looks like in a GitLab server? Yeah, sure. So, yeah, so let me, let me kind of step back. One of the teams that we were working with had basically used, they were a Java development shop and they basically took all of their ant and maybe I think it was ant dependencies and checked them into the repo. So all of your JAR files just, and if you can imagine that over the course of five years, you have a 30 gigabyte or more repository. So, unfortunately, you know, it's not GitLab, it's just how Git works. In order to leverage that appropriately, you need to rewrite the history of the Git repo and basically tell the repository to offload those objects into something, either a different place, LFS, or you can store them in like an object store, something like S3, anything like that. So there's a lot of different ways you could offload those objects, but unfortunately, it requires rewriting the history of the repository, which isn't actually that bad. As long as you don't rely on, you don't rely on anything that points to individual commits. So sometimes people have like change control things or they'll have like integrations with other products that point to specific things. So we did run into a few issues where there was a security tool that basically pointed to large change sets, but it was one of those things where we self-reported to the tool, so it wasn't an integration. So we were able to effectively go through and review some of the change sets that were reported and point them back to other commits. But sometimes it's easier just to draw a line and be like, okay, we made this change, let's move to another tool. And from here forward, you know, just assume that things aren't going to work.