Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another Canva tutorial. In this one, we're going to use Canva's new AI functionality to create lesson plans.  I'm going to show you how to do it in like under a minute. This is crazy. And of course, you can edit it and adjust it. Okay. Go on into Canva.com. You'll see I'm logged in. The next step, I'm going to go ahead and click on create a design. And then one of the, the one I want is doc. So I'm going to click on create a design doc. When I do that, new browser opens up. And what we get is this little plus icon. And when we hover over it, it says add magic. This is called magic, right? Click on that. And then here you get a few options to design and all that, but click on magic, right? You get 25 of these a month on the free plan. And if you've got Canva Pro, you get, I believe, unlimited amounts. But what we see here is when we click on it, we can go ahead and write in what we want. So in this case, lesson plan, a lesson plan. So right grade, I don't know, grade 11 lesson plan about mech. Beth, oops, and the three witches make it interactive. Add quotes. I don't know quotes, references, citations as needed. Something like that. Click enter. Watch this. It'll take a few seconds. And it's going to give us a really good lesson plan. Holy smokes. Look at this. So here we go. Grade 11 lesson plan about whatever what we just said. I'm just going to go ahead and delete that. Okay, I'm going to delete this line. It says, Sure, here's a lesson plan as requested, basically title uncovering the role of the three witches in Macbeth objective students will critically analyze the role of the three witches. Here are the materials you need a copy of Shakespeare, whiteboard markers. Of course, if I don't agree with this, if I don't need whiteboard and markers, I can just go ahead and delete it. And it's gone. And then here we go. Here's the procedure. Here's what we do during the class. Show a clip of three witches in a movie adaptation of Macbeth, group discussions, mini lecture, etc, etc, etc. If you don't like any of these things, or if you want to change it, just go ahead in and add in what you want. Here's the assessment. Here's the citations. We did it in like one minute. That's all there is to it.  I hope this helps you back


Emotional instability is characterized by fluctuating mood. One moment you are feeling happy and energetic, the next you may suddenly suffer an unexpected decline in mood. Have you ever seen a toddler throwing a gale force temper tantrum after his stacks of building blocks fell down or when a teenager slams her bedroom door after an argument with her parents? It is common for toddlers and teenagers to experience such extreme feelings. It's challenging to get off that emotional roller coaster when you're delighted one minute and sorrowful the next. Your emotions appear uncontrolled and intense and swing back and forth for no apparent reason, known as extreme mood swing in psychology. Eventually, most young adults improve their coping problem-solving skills and abilities to grow out of impulsive and emotionally unstable behavior. There's no doubt that we experience a wide range of emotions in life. Admittedly, they are ups and downs. Can you relate to any of these signs? Let us know in the comments. Until next time, bye friends.


This is a pretty sensitive topic to a lot of people. You don't see much discussion of this outside of Milcom conferences and in controlled environments. And I'm hoping that I'll be able to provide some amount of understanding of what covert communications is about, who your adversaries are, what technology they're using, and what the opportunities are to evade those technologies. That's the purpose of what we're doing here today. So I guess the first point I want to make is that resistance is not futile. I think that there's a widespread view that the NSA and the other intelligence agencies have tried to promote is that they can listen to anything anywhere, anytime they want. And it's not true. They'd like you to believe that because then you won't be saying things or doing things they don't want you to do. So this is definitely not the case. Despite the fact that they have billions of dollars, there are limits to what they can do. And many of those limits are just set by physics. And that's what you have to direct towards. Well, we all know that communications, if they're not private sometimes and you're doing things that other people don't want you to do, especially if they're powerful people, well, it could be go bad for you. In the case of journalist Mary Coven, she was killed when she was using a sat phone in the Syrian conflict because the military under the Assad regime was able to triangulate her. And they just blew away the building that she was in. So this happens more often than not. Most of it's not as maybe outrageous as a firefight going on in a city. But there are assassinations, kidnappings, things like that by people all the time. Yesterday I was talking to someone who works for a major company. And they worked for that company in China. And he told me that in no uncertain terms he knew from the time he arrived, he was being followed and observed and listened to. And that one of his friends, a journalist, regularly had his flat ransacked and inspected by the Chinese authorities in order to see what he might be up to. I think that there's a huge market for covert communications that's practical and affordable. And hopefully what I'm working on and other people who might be working on it that even haven't talked about it and you don't even know about them, that it will come to pass and we'll have that. So why do you want to use wireless to begin with? Well, it can be cheap. It can even be free. And depending upon how it's done, if it doesn't use infrastructure, like ham radio, you don't owe anyone anything. You have mobility. Things do get a little tougher because you have link reliability issues. There's nobody standing behind you making sure that the link stays at a certain level and it's air free. Probably the biggest problem is that when you're operating in this kind of mode, you're going to be using specialized antennas. It's certainly not going to be built into your mobile phone. You're not going to be using your mobile phone for communications. And in the same way that Tor is very vulnerable to attacks because it's a low latency, high speed communication link, it's probably not possible within any reasonable amount of cost and effort to have anything more than low speed data be covert. So you're talking about instant messaging and emails, things of that nature, might be able, in certain stances, to get up to the speed that would support voice communications. And of course, it may not be legal locally. All of the regulations worldwide by nations try to prevent anyone from using any technology that they can't break and observe. So the term that's used, the term of art that's used in the community is low probability of detection, low probability of intercept. And unlike encryption, which is where the focus of most every other system is, the focus in covert is at the high level, because that's where you make or break at the high level. You can see here a lot of advantages to operating that way. You get to do a lot of things that you can't do at higher levels. But it's more difficult, expensive, complex. So covert channels. Well, we are all familiar, I hope, with stagnography of various sorts. And when you're trying to use a covert channel, you're trying to use something that is never intended for communications. You're trying to maybe abuse that capability in the channel. Lots of covert communications by stagnography and hidden information on the internet. A lot of work has been done in that area. It continues. It's sort of a cat and mouse game. However, when you're doing things that are signal based instead of just a regular covert channel, now here you're working in the modulation and coding regime and, in some cases, directive antennas in order to limit Eve's ability to listen in. Before SDR, covert communications in wireless was really not a practicality. Many people, of course, did practice this. Sometimes they've been caught, starting with wireless warriors in World War II who had covert communication radio sets. Some of them didn't get caught. A lot of them did. And of course, they disappeared after that. With the advent of software defined radio, which many people here are using, it really opens up a vista of things that you can do that before were only available to the military and the intel agencies. And that's what we're talking about here. GNU Radio, of course, is one of the leading types of software defined radio software support. And being free and open source makes it very nice because lots of people are adding to it. Lots of people are looking at it, analyzing it, finding flaws, and fixing them. SDR, most people here have RTL dongles. And if they are working in the HF regime, they probably also have a FunCube. It's a really nice little dongle. Very good for the cost and what it does. I see a lot of HACRFs here. I'm not sure if I saw any USRPs. I'm sure there were, but I didn't notice them. And there's one here. And I think one of the biggest differences between what most people are doing with SDR is that in covert communications, you're going to be transmitting. And not many people's transmitters, their SDR systems, are set up for transmission. So most people here, I think, are familiar with GNU radio, so I won't be labored that. It's mature. It has high performance pieces that are coded in either assembler or C++, part of the Volk library of kernels for different types of applications. And even though not many people use GNU radio companion for anything more than prototyping, it's very flexible, as we saw in Balanced presentation earlier. It's very flexible. I'm sure many people have seen things like this as just an example of an FM receiver done in GNU radio companion. Not much to see here. If you were at Balanced presentation, it was awesome. Kinds of things that you can do. Showing here the HACRF, very capable unit for what it is. Some people don't like it. They consider it nothing more than a glorified IF strip. And I've heard that from a number of people. But for certain types of applications, it's quite good. Its biggest problem is the fact that it's only an 8-bit unit, and so you don't have very much dynamic range. Doesn't work with weak signal detection and noisy environments so well. That's something that can be upgraded. There's a dotted board capability in the HACRF. I don't think anyone has actually released a 12 or a 14-bit ADZ converter. But I look forward to someone doing it who would totally transform the HACRF into a much more serious device. So wireless threats fall into two categories, passive and active. The most important ones that we're going to be talking about today are the passive types of system, passive adversaries. Because that's where they're trying to find you. They're looking for your signals. They're looking at every signal in the spectrum from every location that they can build systems, doing direction finding, trying to analyze whether or not your signaling system appears to be unusual, of note, and the focus of more attention. The active systems, probably the most important for most unless you're targeted and they know who you are, are jammers. The insecure reversion is of significance here. Because if you had your mobile phones on, you probably saw that they're all in 2G mode. And that's because somebody's been jamming the 4G, LTE, what do you call it, frequencies to force their phones to revert to 2G where they're vulnerable to attack. So here I'm trying to talk about where the passive attacks, where they occur in the protocol stacks. They can occur all over, everywhere you can think of, there are attacks that are focused on various aspects of systems. For what we're going to be talking about or I'm going to be talking about today, it's mostly at the high level, which is on the left side. But every other aspect is certainly fair game to the intelligence agencies. So the intelligence agencies have huge receiving capability. They have stations all over the world. And they're listening to every frequency at any time they can. And looking for ones that are normally, they'd expect to see. Most frequencies are being used by commercial or other people on a regular basis. And they would just pull out the ones that are noteworthy because they haven't seen that one before. Same kind of things like ham operators do sometimes. They'll be listening in on the band. And they'll say, wow, haven't heard that signal before. And then the people will be discussing it online as to what that signal might be. In particular, they're looking at what I call the red October scenario, where signals are out there that may look like something that they've seen before, but they're not. And in the hunt for Rod October, it was a seismic signal that the sonar operator was being told, was being received, the software saying it was a seismic event. And when he sped it up, lo and behold, it was a magnetohydrodynamic or crawler drive from a Russian sub, something that was only theoretical in the movie up to that point. And I think that the NSA and all intelligence agencies, they're looking for a red October situation. So you don't want to stick out like that. As Ballant showed in some of the earlier analysis of signals, this is an example of what signals look like, various ones that are very common and how they're classified by the software. What's, I think, significant is the intelligence agencies are without a doubt using artificial and neural network capabilities in order to do signal classifications, because there's much too much traffic for humans to look at. They would fatigue too quickly. So the human people, the humans only come in when receivers that are targeting certain kinds of signals identify something of note. And then someone human is sent to look at it for further investigation. So the receivers that they build are called high probability of intercept. That's the term of art that's used. Sometimes they're called electronic warfare receivers if they're used in a military engagement environment. What they try to do is to pick out signals that other receivers cannot. And they spent gobs of money to try to do this. And they're very effective at their job in general. This shows what the probability of receiving a certain signal near a very strong one. Very common technique is to hide a signal as to put your signal near somebody else's. And if you've got the right kinds of technology and tradecraft, it makes it much more difficult on the adversary, including the NSA. Many factors go into deciding whether or not a high probability of intercept receiver is going to do the job. And it has to do with the signal characteristics and also the capabilities of the receiver and its internals. Interrupt me if you have a question. So here's the ideal high probability of intercept receiver. It's a software defined radio with lots of bit depth and a lot of stability in its circuitry to make sure that it stays on frequency and that you can identify the signals easily. Usually they're very broad banded, although there are narrow band systems. But in general, because the intelligence agencies are wanting to watch every frequency from DC to light, they have a huge number of receivers that cover parts of the band. And they either hop to different frequencies or they have ones that cover enormous amounts of band with simultaneously. And they act as directive receivers. That is, they tell other receivers to look further. What we're looking here is what we want to see is we want to see our own GNU radio high probability of intercept receiver so that you can do red team, black team. Without that, you really can't be very confident that what you're doing is as good as you think it is. So Ballant has worked a fair amount in this area in doing signal analysis and blind estimation. What I'd like to see is something very much more structured and turnkey so that you don't have to be an expert in order to do signal analysis and signal location. These are the kinds of receivers that are typically used for high probability of intercept or electronic warfare. They break into these areas. The simple and the most common is the crystal video. It's basically a lot of video channels connected to a wideband multiplexer. And most of the time, the system is only good for pulse type of operation. It's the kind of receiver that you'd see inside a radar detector, a good one, is the kind of circuitry you would use. So the next step would be something similar to the crystal radio, which is called a TRF. That's the general term that's used. And what it's meant to do is to very quickly find a signal. It may not be accurate in analyzing the signal. But what it's meant to do is to point other receivers that are much more capable at that signal. And you want to do it in burst mode. You can pick up a signal within nanoseconds. And instantaneous frequency measurement devices can actually within nanoseconds pick up a signal and direct another device to look more closely at it while the burst is still in operation. So phase interferometer and detection capability, this is really a technology rather than a receiver. It's used in a lot of other electronic warfare and high probability receivers. And it's commonly used for direction finding. I know balance doesn't work in direction finding. So I'm sure you're familiar with this. One of the last is the SWEP superdyne receiver. This has lots of very fast super heterodyne receivers, each one sweeping part of the frequencies that are of interest. There are the two varieties, the narrowband and the wideband. The narrowband is actually a special case of the wideband in which they've attached filters to it, and they've narrowed the bandwidth during the sweeping. Below typical performance characteristics of these receivers, the MDS is the minimum detectable signal. Very important for intelligence agencies. And channelized bulk filters. I haven't seen any details about these. But again, the typical multiplexed receiver where you have a wideband input, you divide it up with a multiplexer, and you have a huge number of software defined radios that follow it. Now, this is something that probably most people haven't heard of. It's called a Bragg cell receiver. It came from Radio Astronomy and the SETI project. And its purpose is to be able to receive, in parallel, many, many, many channels. We're talking about huge numbers of hundreds of megahertz or gigahertz bandwidth. And unlike the other receivers, it's an acousto-optical receiver. The advantage is that it's very stable. It doesn't need a local oscillator. That most receivers, that's kind of a weak point of making sure that they're stable. This one has no such problem. And it uses a combination of lasers and microwave frequencies. The problem with it is that it's not nearly as sensitive. So it doesn't really have the dynamic range. And so it uses a receiver that finds signals of interest and then points other receivers, again, to listen. This is what one of them looks like. I think what's of interest is this device here is like a piezoelectric device there. It is very similar to a saw device. And it's operating in an acoustic-opical manner. What's happening is the laser light is illuminating the device that has the, what do you call, the transducer. And the transducer has the microwave signals of interest that are coming in from a wideband amplifier. And what it does is it changes the refraction index of the device in real time spatially on this device so that it separates all of the characteristic signals in the band that it's looking at in parallel. And they actually appear as signals optically and are picked up by photo cells. And it's a really huge advantage for the intelligence agencies, because it doesn't have to sweep frequencies. It sees them all in parallel and simultaneously. So when these devices are packaged up, the top photo is a single bragg cell. They're often ganged together, each one of them covering different adjacent frequency ranges. And when they're put together in an array, like we see, they can carry and cover an enormous amount of bandwidth simultaneously, often from 2 gigahertz to 24 gigahertz in parallel. So now we come to the active threats. So jammers, there's been a lot of work in jamming from really World War II was the beginning of jamming technology. And they can be very difficult to detect, because if they're smart, they look like they're just noise and bad signal conditions and band bad conditions to your devices. It's very difficult to detect them if they're smart. And what they try to do is either brute force, jam the signals, or if that's not working because of the way that you've oriented your system, then they'll either hop around. There'll be broadband noise. But if they're targeting a packet-based system, what they're trying to do is to prevent the communications. And one of the ways they would do that is they might jam the frequency to such a point that the transmitter who's, which is doing carrier sense, for example, very common technology, it would find that the band is always occupied. And eventually, the buffers would overflow, and the system wouldn't be able to communicate. So that's targeting the transmitter. At the receiver side, that's very obvious. You're going to try to overload the game control system of the receiver or use other technologies that would cause your signal to fall in the detection area of the receiver and make it incapable of receiving what it was intended to. So there's many types of jammers. And each one of them targets a certain type of signal. What's of note is that, in general, it's very difficult to jam direct sequence type of systems because they're noise-like already. And because they operate over such large bandwidth, especially if they're covert, the amount of transmitter power required by the jammer, unless they're very close to you in a near-far situation, becomes really not possible. So this is what happens when you have a single tone or a multi-tone type of jammer trying to jam a direct sequence signal. Because of the way that the direct sequence is spread and de-spread, the jam signal actually gets spread during the deconstruction of the signal. When the signal is de-spread in the receiver, the neverband signal gets spread. So they're just the inverse. And therefore, it doesn't interfere with the direct sequence signal, at least not easily. So as I mentioned before, intel agencies have huge budgets. But trying to listen to every frequency simultaneously all around the world is not the same as the task that they have when they're listening to internet. There are no network access points they can just tap into and listen to the feed that everyone has on the internet. You have a three-dimensional temporal type of problem that you need to solve. And it's not easy even when you have billions of dollars. And the defender, in each case, whether it's the person trying to do covert radio or the intel agency trying to defend their turf, they have the problem is they have to plug every possible exploit that might be used against their technology, where the attacker only has to find one good one and drive through it. In particular, the physics that restrict any kind of receiver system. And the technologies that are available for high probability of intercept receivers set floors on what can be received. And if you know what those are or have a good idea, then when you design your covert system, you want to design it so that it falls below their capabilities or above. Again, if you're targeted, it's not good, because they can send stuff right down the street to listen to your communications. And even covert communications are not very covert when you've got a van sitting outside. So you certainly want to be able to hide your transmitter, your antennas, all of your communications. And you need to be covert and you need to be using good tradecraft. So where do we look for clues as to build covert communications? All commercial communications systems, they're really looking at interoperability cost. And they really don't care about security, not really, because they're not selling to clients that need that kind of capability. On the other hand, military and intel agencies, they build systems that are not open and they're our covert and they're proprietary. So we want to look at trying to bring the technologies from some of those hardened systems into open source systems and also into standard space systems. Even if it means that changing those systems makes them nonstandard, but they're built on very good foundations as far as the structure of the communications and the higher level stacks. So here are the major, what I consider the major, methodologies for doing LPI, LPD. The most common is to hide the signal below the noise, one I certainly favor. The other one is to use stagnography. It turns out that it can be used very effectively if you know how to use it, this particular circumstance, and I'll talk about that. Another way is for control jamming. It's actually possible to use jamming in order to communicate. Another possibility is to reduce the side lobes from your signal in a very directional manner if you have point-to-point communications. And there are technologies that the military has used for quite a long time, but none of them are available in commercial use right now, and that's a shame. They turn out to be not that hard. And the last one is to repurpose existing systems, commercial systems, and use them covertly. So common type of chart here showing how spread spectrum signals work and how you convert a baseband signal into a spread signal. Nothing should be interesting there to the people here. However, how about changing the codes to something secret? Because you're trying to be interoperable, all the standard systems have known codes so that they can quickly sync and identify the signals. But if you're trying to be covert, well, you certainly don't want to do that. So one of the first things is to change all the coding systems. This is an example of the chip to symbol coding that's used in 802.154. So in experiments that were conducted, by changing the codes, actually making them more random and not the normal orthogonal codes that are used in commercial stuff, the packet error rate increase was only about 13%, which is actually not too bad. And the ways that we looked at to identify the methods for the attacker included looking at the M ARI direct sequence attacks that are used against coding systems like what are used in 802.15.4 and Wi-Fi. And without getting into too much detail, a lot of these technologies that are in the attacker strategy, these are all in the literature, although they're not easy always to find. And basically, they're blind estimate technologies to try to, as Ballant was showing, how do you identify a signal, figure out its data rate, the modulation schemes, and try to figure out the symbol rates, and by doing that, to start narrowing down to the point where you can identify the signals more easily, and you can start doing triangulation of the signal. So in order to prevent this, you have to figure out how often, if you're using random chips, how often those sequences need to be changed in order to thwart these technologies, and also the length of the codes, things of that nature. And experiments were carried out. And what it was discovered is that if you only expand the chips to about 32, your key size, or your chip code size to about 32, instead of the 16 that's used in 82.15.4, and you don't play any other games of randomization, it only took about 27 bytes under worst case conditions for the attacker to be able to lock onto your signal and identify it. Not good. However, it did point away towards improvements. And those are what are planned for the future. This gives you an idea of what was achieved. So what needs to be done next is possibly to combine direct sequence for frequency hopping, change the cryptographic primitives. For example, in the tests, pseudo-random number generator was used in order to provide the key information, to build the keys. And PRNGs are deterministic. And of course, those can be attacked. So one of the things you want to do is to use two random number generators in order to establish your key information and your spread codes. That's not being done yet. You want to start maximizing the entropy of the packet timings. And by that, what you're looking to do is to change, for instance, your preambles so that they're randomized instead of being very simple to sync signal. As Ballant pointed out, if you don't have bits flipped on a regular basis, it makes it hard for your clocks to acquire. So that's one of the things that needs to be traded off, is as the signals get more random, clock synchronization becomes a problem. So maybe your adversary can't sync on your signal, but maybe you can't either. And other burst frame improvements are planned. So to wrap it up is that load detectability is one of the characteristics that is most often mentioned for direct sequence. But that's only true if they can't break certain aspects of your random number generator, your spread codes, and your crypto. So antennas are probably the most neglected part for most people that are outside of radio. They don't realize how important a good antenna is. For the communications that I've been looking at, I'm looking at HF radio, mostly for communications, because I want to be able to transmit signals at great distances without infrastructure. The most common antennas that are used in the cheapest are dipoles and long wires. As you can see, this one can be hidden inside an addict, very nice to be able to do. However, they're not directional, they don't have much gain, and they're very broadband, which for HF signals is a no-no, because they overload the front end of your receiver, your LNA. All those things, they're not a good antenna for general HF use, but they are cheap. What I consider one of the most ideal antennas is the magnetic loop. The advantage is, depending on how it's designed, it can be extremely high-Q, meaning that signals outside a very narrow passband are eliminated. You don't have to worry about noise from FM transmitters or pagers or other military swept signals like the radar that all be eliminated at your antenna. They never even get into the front end of your receiver. What's also very interesting is that if you build larger magnetic loops than are normally used, most magnetic loops are around 10th wave or so or smaller. But if you make them larger, then at the higher frequencies, that antenna becomes more and more broadband, which means it can be used for broadband communication while still maintaining most of the characteristics of a controllable passband. So I've been looking into that. I happen to have one of these antennas. It's a very good one, MJF. So one of the other ideas that's been discussed is to expand the kinds of beacons that are used by amateurs so that you can put other information into them. And that information might include the availability of nearby covert communication parties. So the beacon now would actually have a receive side, receive signals from nearby covert communications, capture some aspect, some code that would only be meaningful to the parties that are going to be using it to communicate with, and then transmit that along with the beacon information that's normally sent. How many are familiar with the whisper? OK, it's an excellent technology for very low power, what do you call it, efficient communications over long distances. Excellent stuff. Joe Taylor is the god of HF radio today. He's the guy who invented this. Now I mentioned NVIS. This is a kind of communication technology that was developed, I believe, originally by the Germans during World War II. And what it amounts to is using the proper HF antenna, it's possible to bounce the signal off of the ionosphere over your head. And instead of trying to just skip where you're trying to go great distances, what you're trying to do is illuminate a cone around your location of signals and enable you to avoid mountains and other obstacles that would be a problem for ground wave. Also, it can be very secure communications, and it was used by them to great effect. Stagnography. Many of you have probably seen these photos, but that cat signal is hidden inside that winter scene. Most of the stagnography is using nothing more than low order bits or some kind of simple characteristic that they can take advantage of in the noise of the signal. Unfortunately, the statistical properties when you try to embed these signals in another image or some other signal turn out to be non-trivial to do covertly. They're very easily uncovered. A lot of research has been in that area about the only form of stagnography that I'm aware of that is not easily broken this way is called noiseless stagnography. And I don't want to go into it, but it's semantically based instead of sort of like data-based. Last year at DEF CON, we had a presentation where people tried to inject noise into the forward air correction protocol for JT65. And I think it's something that needs to be looked at further. I think there's actually still some good possibilities with additional work. And since it's all open source, it's a very well understood protocol. I think someone here that really is into HF should be looking into this. So in this technology here, what you're trying to do is inject noise into the constellation of, for instance, a Wi-Fi signal. But you want to do it in such a manner as it stays within the specification for Wi-Fi for hardware impairment. No hardware is perfect. And when products are shipped, they have issues. They can generate noisy signals. So there's a specification that says, your signal characteristics, you can't have more than 10 dB of noise in your constellation or you're out of spec. Oh, if you stay below 10 dB and you've got good hardware, now you can inject stagnographic signals that only you will be aware of. And so what you can do is when Alice and Bob, shown by or indicated by these Wakatalkis, want to talk to each other, they'll be near a hotspot or some other system that is open to communication using a constellation type of arrangement. And Alice and Bob will then proceed to inject real innocuous data into that system, such as web surfing or whatever. And while they're doing that, they're injecting noise into the constellation. The hardware for the hotspot will work fine. It's not even aware that there's any problem because the signal's in spec. But Alice and Bob, their system, it's been tuned to look for this noise signal, this stagnographic signal. And it'd be very difficult to detect. This could be long range too, but certainly under short range conditions like Wi-Fi hotspots, it should work great. As an example of what it would look like with hardware impairments, it's really indistinguishable from the spec, from just a regular noisy signal. So in order for Alice and Bob to talk to one another, they need to be able to generate keys. And they need to be able to do that with Eve listening and not being able to detect that they're communicating. Very tough to do that. There are huge numbers of papers looking into this kind of capability to generate keys in the presence of an eavesdropper. And it's really beyond the scope of this talk to talk about how it's done. But the important thing is how fast you can generate that key. Usually, the methods use the entropy of the channel itself in a very careful way to generate the keys. So the method that I'm looking into in order to generate or have your keys is to do them sort of like the old fashioned way when people would distribute out-of-band information like one-time pads. So Alice and Bob might have applications that run on their mobile phones that would generate like when people are doing, for instance, Bitcoin.  So your Bitcoin wallet would generate a QR code, and that QR code would be unique in the sense that it's in a huge space. And the same thing could be done this way.  And that key would help them locate the time that that key can be used and how to generate an on-the-fly key from that. That would be the seed for something like an AES type of encryption, some symmetric key encryption. And so it would be different for every person that you'd give keys to. And when they were operating over the air, all the keys would be different, the key, the spread codes. Everything would be unique. By the way, there's people working on systems and products and capabilities to create what are called cryptographic artifacts. And these are devices that could be secreted in locations almost anywhere that if you didn't know they were there, you'd never be able to communicate with them. So if you send a signal to them and you know where they're located, they would actually dispense a key for you, a unique key that could be shared, for instance, between parties. Here's another method. In this case, a signal is repeated again and again by Alice or Bob. And it has varying information in the signal. And what Alice does, for example, in this case, is she transmits a signal to jam parts of Bob's transmission while it's active. And by doing so can isolate parts of the signal that she wants to listen to. Other parties, like Eve, are thwarted because they don't know which parts of the signal are important. By doing this, instead of depending upon random information in the channel, which is the common technique that's used for generating shared keys without having communication beforehand, you get very low bits of information, entropy information, to build a key from. But this allows you quite a few kilobits per second. So satellites are fun. Almost all satellites today are bent pipes. And Ballant was showing signals coming from satellites earlier. What's really interesting about the satellites is that even though they're bent pipes, they use Fourier transforms and inverse Fourier transforms in order to clean up the signals. Sometimes there's ground clutter that they need to remove, transmitters that leak into their bandpass. In other cases, you have people that are transmitting when they shouldn't. Maybe their equipment's malfunctioning. It's a VSAT situation. And they're transmitters splattering information. Or it's transmitting when it shouldn't. Or you have jammers. If they're narrowband signals, using a Fourier transform, you can identify the signals, whack them out in the Fourier domain, and then do an inverse Fourier domain on the downlink. And the signal's been cleaned up, very common technology. However, it doesn't work at all against wideband signals that are being used either covertly or jamming. Because it's all over your band. You can't knock the whole thing down. That would be the end of your downlink. So these systems are not capable of taking care of wideband signals that are leaking into their bandpass. An interesting situation occurred with US Navy's fleet SATCOM and UFO satellites. It was reported in a number of magazines, including Wired. Brazilian truckers were getting two-meter transceivers, having them modified, and were using the Navy's satellites in order to talk to each other while they were on the road. They did that because there was no coverage in their cellular radios. Eventually, most of them were caught. Their hands were slapped, or worse, they were fined. And I'm not sure if that stuff is going on now or not. So if Alice and Bob are trying to use the satellite covertly, they want to use something similar to the technology that I was talking about for 802.15.4. They want to use a VSAP modem, which is a blockup converter. They're cheap, maybe started $250. They work with standard parabolic dishes, so your neighbors won't know that you're communicating in an uplink, not just downlink. And if you do it properly and spread your signals and use long enough codes and they're randomly changing, I believe they're pretty much invulnerable to any kind of location or interference. The other method is to, since one of the ways that they would try to find your signal is they would use the signal spilling over into adjacent satellites to use time of arrival and direction of arrival information in order to triangulate your position. So what you want to do is to prevent anything but the one satellite you're using from receiving a useful signal that they can use for this kind of technology. It turns out that technology is available, P-cell technology, using massive MIMO to focus beams to a single party in real time, very expensive. But they've gotten a lot of money, haven't they? You don't know, OK. All right, well, the P-cell technology is something that's being shown as the next generation for cellular communications because it massively could increase the capacity of cell systems by using MIMO. I came across another technology. It came from the military. It's never been used in the commercial world as far as I know, but it's used to prevent radar signals from being identified. When, for instance, a plane is flying over a target and maybe it's marking the target for its own missile that it's going to launch or a gravity bomb that's going to be a smart bomb, it's going to illuminate the target in certain ways in order to give speed, direction, location, information. And of course, it's important when you're illuminating a target with your radar that a missile doesn't come flying up your tailpipe because they identified your signal. So if you can narrow the beam down to the point where only the target you're looking at can see the information, this is a real advantage. And so this might be ported to applications for satellite communications, troposcatter, line of sight. In tests that were done, or I shouldn't say tests, but analysis that was done on this technology, it was found that you could, with not too much technology, make it virtually impossible for any dropper more than half a degree off of your beam access of your antenna to be able to receive it. It wouldn't even detect a signal.  Maybe you can use somebody else's system. Pager networks are wonderful. First of all, the receiver is receive only in most cases, which means they can't be found, unless they're targeting you. And maybe they'll be able to find the superhead, noise coming out of your local oscillator spilling out from your device. But in all practical cases, they're not going to be able to find that. It turns out that it's not very difficult to anonymously inject traffic into pager networks worldwide. They all use email. And if you can identify, and you can pretty easily, the email addresses that are being used that are mapping to user addresses, then you can start sending messages that can, if they're anonymously injected and the receiver can't be located, that's the end game for that. So it turns the pager network into a number station for you. So one more thing before questions. I'll show some information here. That's my email address. My key is available on the MIT PGP server. And I'll be uploading this so this presentation will be available. There's got to be some questions. Come on now. Either I've bored you to stiff, or it's zoomed over your heads. Which is it? Absolutely. You cannot run covert communications using standards. Well, actually, you want to make sure that they can't even see your preamble. They don't see any signal at all. Well, they'll still get the RF. But if the signal is done properly, there'll be a noise signal. You see, one of the things they're looking for, pseudo-noise signals, all of the standards-based systems use codes like gold codes and things like that that have really nice correlation capabilities. And they're very short so that you can use them at high data rates. But when you're doing covert, you're talking about really long keys. And those keys, if they're changing constantly, much closer approach a real pseudo-noise system or a real noise, like natural noise situation. And if they're used properly, they don't see what's called cyclostationary characteristics, anything that appears to be repeating where the noise level moves up and down, things like that. You have to avoid that at all cost. So if you're able to achieve that, where you can operate below the threshold of the receiver's noise figure, then if they don't know the code, and if you're not sticking out because you have these cyclostationary characteristics, then the game is really over for them because their receivers are muted. Yes, exactly. Now, eventually this might be something that's widespread and commercialized. But that's why software, if you're not using software radio, you can't do any of this, really. Yeah, near vertical incidence sky wave. Yes, people have done moon bounce. And in fact, the reason that JT Taylor built his stuff was originally for moon-birth. However, the path loss is so great that even with any reasonable process gain, I don't think you could really do an earth-moon-earth bounce. I haven't investigated it, but the losses are, I think it's like 160 dB or something like that. It's really massive loss. And that's why all the people that do EME, and I know some people in that field, they have huge backyard dishes, commercialized in some cases. And their transmitters are not small either. However, interestingly, people have actually bounced covert signals off the moon in the optical domain. Yeah, because lasers have much narrower beam angle. And so, if you have a few watts of laser energy illuminating the moon, and you know what you're doing, you can deliver much more energy to the moon's surface than you can, even with a good-sized dish. Yes? The Bragg cell, right. Well, they were first developed for ground station use with, what do you call, space, deep space stuff, and especially SETI, radio astronomy. But they're small enough, and they're light enough, and their energy consumption isn't that high that the military can't put them in orbit. So I suspect that the KLH satellites and those kinds of satellites, all the newer generation, have receivers of that sort in order to direct, perhaps, other receivers that were in the satellite to look at signals of interest. Wideband optical receiver, you talking about the Bragg cell? Oh, I haven't costed them. I imagine that only commercial people can afford them. I would just guess that something like this would be in the $10,000 to $20,000 a channel, something like that. But I haven't actually gone out and tried to purchase one. So I don't know. Any others? Oh, yes? Yes, that certainly could happen. One of the reasons that software-defined radios can be sold is that because they're not actually a receiver, they're actually just an instrument. They fall under exclusions for instrumentation. And it could be that those things will start to be limited as to who can purchase them and what channels can be used to sell them. What? It's exactly their instrumentation and test equipment. This kind of exclusion is available in most countries. I'm not sure about China. But certainly, the EU in the United States, most developed countries, have exclusions in their radio policies for instrumentation. Otherwise, you couldn't buy an oscilloscope. People couldn't do ground station work because they couldn't import a spectrum analyzer. I'm sorry. Oh, yeah. Right, well, ham operators are also watched very carefully in different countries. And ham operators are actually in sort of a different twist to this because many ham operators are very persnickety about the spectrum. And so if I had to guess, who is your largest risk if you're doing covert communications, it would be nearby ham operators who will find your use of their frequencies quite objectionable. And if they're very nearby, of course, your signal's still going to stick out. If someone's like one of your neighbors down the street, it's probably not going to be possible for you to mask your signal from that because it's almost the equivalent of the van outside with the Intel people. Sorry, it was another person had their hand up. Who was that? Oh, you again? Right. I would not be surprised that they do this, but maybe only after the animals have escaped the corral. So the idea is to get going on this technology and not wait until some really high level things happen in this area that you'll see on CNN or Fox News. There'll be shows about narco terrorists using this technology. We don't want that to happen until all of us have the technology. So I believe that it's possible to build either software to find radios or modify existing hardware, JT65 whisper type systems to start doing covert communications now. Back in my talk, I mentioned QRSS, or it was in there, but didn't talk about it. This is where you have extremely narrow band, very low speed data, usually CW. But there's no reason that you could be doing the equivalent of offset frequency division multiplexing with very narrow band signals and very low power. Did you want me to mention something else, or? No. OK. Anything else? Oh. It seems like I could take that off. Sure. Sure. Because these are instrumentation devices, that's the hint. Because these are instrumentation devices, they have very low power output. For instance, the hacker only has 10 milliwatts of transmitter output. And I think the same thing is true for the USRP, isn't it? OK, but not much. And it really depends on the USRP, the daughter boards and the earlier models, things like that. But they're certainly well under a half a watt. Yeah. Yeah. 50 or 100 milliwatts. Yeah, 50 or 100 milliwatts. So however, if you're operating spread spectrum communications, that may be more than enough. One person actually was able to communicate over 6,000 kilometer distance, transmitting with the USRP 10 milliwatts. No, excuse me. It was a hack RF, 10 milliwatt output, and it was received 6,000 kilometers away. So it is possible. That was using the whisper protocol. Straight to the antenna. Those were the curtain lights, I'm sure. Thank you very much.


ilable and then also the williams report is a very comprehensive report that goes through instructional materials um facilities and then to teacher credentialing any public speakers to this item yes mr bill beacher right here good evening again you're probably getting bored with me um several months ago i started tutoring a student at one of our local colleges she was a graduate of watsonville high school last year 4.0 average she's struggling in math and i got a chance firsthand to see what the issues were with her knowledge of math or lack so the aptos high school is what you're given in your package i've compared that to the state aptos i've saw me better than the state and that's not saying too much but if i look at watsonville high school and compared it to the state the state data says that over half our students should be getting f's in math in high school but they aren't because we're grading on the curve and we're telling our kids a lie and we're moving them forward without the proper foundation so there are possible causes for this we know that the students are entering high school significantly behind in math that's hard to triage when they get to high school the teachers aren't capable if they were why aren't we doing better and there's a pressure to gate on the to grade on the curve and not on to the standard and i made a presentation six years ago and showed hard data that it's only the math program where this exists so there are remedies improve elementary and middle school math this is being done i think a lot of the issues that we've seen over the last couple of years are showing we're making a difference and so as you feed those kids through the group high school math will get better but that's going to take a while we need to hire better math teachers but that's almost impossible because a math student coming out of college starting salary 60 grand average salary is 107 with a max of 165 you aren't going to get any math teachers and you should grade to the standard why because if you don't and you dumb it down you start to think you're actually doing well when in reality you aren't and when you look at the state data we suck so you need to put this on the agenda we've been kicking this football for too long let's have an open discussion on what the problems are and the remedies and i'll use a little quote you've all seen it continue to do the same thing and expecting different results is insanity from mr. Einstein thank you thank you very much any discussion from the board so with that i'll take questions before we i asked for approval to publish them on our district website and school site websites i know lisa that we have implemented some math changes um in our curriculum um we signed the partnership with con academy correct and we're also using um engage new york which is also known as bridges bridges but a lot of some of the teachers are doing the con academy programming the map accelerator thank you that's what i was looking for the map accelerator to help their students improve in math yes and um we're gonna have an upcoming presentation and we are seeing correlation between the classrooms that are using the map accelerator and our map growth scores and aside from those that data that we use we're aren't we in the middle schools we've implemented alex yes we have alex and are we having any any positive results from the implementation of those programs we are having positive results so we will be discussing map data soon we're actually our one cheaters about ready to come out um but we are seeing double digit growth um in multiple grade levels um and so we'll be speaking to the success that we're seeing all the way from second grade to sixth grade so um you'll be hearing about that when we release the scores okay there's a couple things and i it was thinking about it before and god i forgot what i was gonna say um one of the things i noticed is that um that's one thing that i can remember um is that often females do a lot better than males and in one place it was like huge you know how the difference between females i mean in terms of how they're doing a whole lot better than the males i don't know so i was just wondering you know and and and often they did a little bit better at least but i was just wondering so i don't know if we can we have to focus more on males or something i don't know about that but um we did take a look at that at the beginning of the year and it it is it was dependent wasn't even dependent it it varied from school site to school site whether it was the males or the females in which subject area it wasn't um anyone like the females always did better in the subject area okay okay so because i just noticed when i was looking at you know michael this you know that i was looking at through it and i thought whoa look at the females are doing it you know and obviously it wasn't you know i didn't see every school site but yeah okay i'm just checking can i get a motion make a motion was there a second second all right all in favor hi i'll opposed motion passes thank you thank you agenda item 9.7 is up next middle school science adoption recommendation the report will be by lisa uh good evening once again i i'm actually just up here to introduce our um science coordinator um you proved his uh the hiring of mr michael russo earlier this year and this is the first time he's um in front of the board and he's doing a fantastic job so he's going to go for it thank you lisa hi good evening uh evening board president dodge good evening board trustees good evening dr rodriguez uh i am well first of all thank you for approving my uh my hiring a couple months ago this first chance i got to thank you for that uh i'm really here on behalf of a dedicated group of middle school teachers uh which made up the science middle school science adoption committee and i'm here to share with you just a quick overview of what that process was like and the recommendation to share with you uh that they made at the end of that process so just to give you an overview of the kind of timeline that happened and i wasn't here at the beginning when a lot of this happened so a lot of this credit goes to my predecessor rob hoffman and uh uh jessica sukeless who was is our k8 tosa and science coach who really took over the process in rob's absence and before i came on in september but what they started to do was in spring a little less than a year ago was they uh selected middle school teachers who would participate in the pilot uh they did textbook screenings and they came up with two n gss aligned uh curricula that they decided to pilot in over the summer they had four days of training with publishers and also n gss training as well and this fall a group of 16 teachers piloted the two curriculum we also jessica and i before she went out on maternity leave we did classroom observations one of the most exciting things we did in this process as well for me coming on new in september was doing student interviews and asking their opinions about the textbooks that they were being exposed to in their classroom i'll tell you just a little bit more about that in a minute and then also in the fall after the first cycle so eight of the 16 teachers they piloted in their classroom for one month one of the textbooks and then they came back to an analysis and evaluation of that reflected on uh their piloting of that and then they swapped in the next month they used the other textbooks and on november 21st all of them came together did their final evaluation and reflection and called it decision day they actually voted on which one best serve their students and in their opinion was most user friendly for them as teachers and so we're here tonight to share that recommendation with you in the hopes that we can implement that new adoption this fall so the two texts that they piloted was one was amplify which comes out of uc berkeley lauren's hall of science and the other is tci which is an acronym for teachers curriculum institute both of those are n gss aligned i thought that might happen i was trying to see the size of this podium from back there and all right so just to uh let you know the scope of who was involved in this process we had nine schools participate right so we had our six middle schools and the junior high school along with mar vista which is k through six valencia and then alianza as well also participated so that's where the nine schools come from uh that represents over 500 students in those 16 teachers classrooms and jessica and i actually interviewed uh 71 uh did we did 71 students that we interviewed and what we would do is when we would go in and observe and just watch the teacher and the students interacting with the new text that they were using uh we pulled after a couple minutes of observing we pulled groups of three students and we asked them questions like how does this text motivate you right how does it support your language development anything else you want to tell us about the text and then about five six weeks later when their teacher switched to the next text the second cycle we pulled the same exact students and we asked them the same exact questions and it was so exciting because it just confirms what we all know that students are in love learning right and when they're engaged so um and i'll tell you the results of those interviews in a minute okay just to give you a quick sense of some of the tools we used we used uh an ngss align protocol called time it stands for the toolkit for instructional materials evaluation it's a pretty intense process um the first one up there on the left is our district lens and so that was developed after looking at assessment that and seeing what the needs of our students were and the ones highlighted on there are uh any prioritizing curricula that focused on student talk and discourse multiculturalism and bilingual resources so those were some of the priorities we were looking at the tool on the lower left it's uh looking at student learning and how effective is the curriculum in supporting that and then the tool on the right is looking at how the curriculum supports the teacher in order to help the students learn so you'll see like on the fourth one down uh support for students with the first learning needs or support to monitor student progress all right the moment we've been waiting for and uh the decision day you can see it was pretty unanimous um the dark blue represents the teachers who said i can strong i strongly agree with this program and can support it and almost 85 percent of teachers felt that about amplify the other remaining 15 or so percent said i can support this program and willing to go along with the choice none of the 16 teachers um strongly supported tci so i just want to say that uh the middle school science adoption committee recommends that you the board of trustees approve amplify as the new middle school science adoption beginning in the fall of this year and i'll just close by saying that uh ed reports they review curricula um and amplify got really high scores on being aligned to n gss 25 out of 26 points coherence in scope 49 out of 56 points and usability uh user friendliness for students and teachers 50 out of 54 points so i just want to uh on behalf of all those teachers and all our middle school teachers and students uh thank the board for your continued support oh the students yes that was okay by the way the students also prefer to amplify 58 percent to 42 percent for tci okay but um before that um were just any public speakers to this item okay any more discussion from the board we have a question sure so um how were students selected to participate as part of those yeah thank you they were selected by the teacher and we asked for a cross section of students so students of different academic abilities we asked for male and female students as well from each side so teachers kind of self selected the students and i'm assuming we had representation from our english learner population yes definitely that was also part of the criteria yeah uh and that we just we left it up to the teacher and told them that we were trying to get a good cross section of students yes thank you dita sirpa thank you so this was um the presentation about how we picked a curriculum i felt like it should have been under more of a curriculum heading than a middle school science heading because there's no like meat to this presentation about what is this curriculum so my question is is it articulated to ninth grade like how is it going to be shepherding this group of students to ninth grade and improve the success of kids going into the sciences yeah so i didn't have time i have notes here about i shared a little bit about the ed reports and how it amplified the recommended curricula got high scores on ed reports um so here's the other thing about the curriculum it's uh really a lines first of all it really promotes literacy with students this is just one unit right this one's about matter and energy in ecosystems it's all phenomena based which is what really um targets triggers students engagement from the very beginning and then one of the things that teachers really liked about it is it puts the student in the role of a scientist whether it's an ecologist uh whether it's an engineer uh it puts them in that role i remember in one of the student interviews uh i know what i was going to show you here there are 12 articles in the back of this just in this unit so it really promotes reading literacy student talk and engaging students so when we interviewed one student one group of students at rolling hills in particular they came out and they were studying about a fecal transplant and it was like oh it's called day 23 but we're only on day 12 and you can't believe what's happening and they had to play by guys uh kind of they had a doctor and try to figure out how the fecal transplant was helping this patient but the students were they were enthralled with it and engaged so there's just a couple of quick ways in which amplify will support one our science goals and vision and helping students succeed around language and literacy skills as well cross articulation yeah that's great yeah one other question i have is the coe is preparing some type of standard based curricula for science and how how does this fit into what is being prepared by coe so i i did want to mention that this is about the adoption we do have an entire presentation coming in in two weeks by by mr rooso that's going to go over the science however i um that the curriculum is not implemented in all of the school districts um that was actually inaccurate information that was given to you previously not for me i wasn't the one that said it um but um it was only santa cruz city schools who uh who purchased that it was not the other nine school districts in the county it was purchased by the second largest school district in the county which is santa cruz but um it was um many of the school districts have not um purchased their science curriculum yet yeah because he said that all 12 districts adopted no yeah i i looked into that and that was not accurate statement okay all right sorry i rescind that question thank you these soccer soccer did you have a question or i just wanted to uh clarify something um about this curriculum this curriculum is more of an interactive curriculum cracked with the students um like you said they're putting themselves in in places so it's a little bit different than the technical science curriculum that we grew up with that's right it is yeah and that's one of the uh powerful points about it and i think one of the things that attracted the teachers and the students as well it wasn't tci what they said was it was like old school science which just kind of they felt like they tried to dress it up but amplifies the real deal and a lot of the literature out there also expresses similar kind of reviews about it as well yeah thank you thank you maria trustee russ go i'm just ready to make a motion okay um have a motion and the climb second second um vote all in favor of died hi hi hi i'll oppose motion thank you thank you very much next up 9.8 approved the appointment of alianza teacher on a provisional in-ship permits good evening president dodge board of trustees dr. rudriguez um yes before you is a provisional intern permit for a teacher that we hired um for the second semester at alianza she is a watsonville high alum um she's finishing her program at ucsc and her major is spanish so it's really we got really lucky that we were able to find a b-clad teacher uh in the middle of the school year to help out alianza so i request approval of the pip any public speakers any discussion from the board can't get a motion making a motion to approve this teacher second second can i go ahead and get a vote on the motion on favor hi i'll oppose thank you motion passes all right next step 9.9 approved resolution 19-20-24 support of measure g which is now measure y so before we continue um it is 10.03 correct right so um i will like to make a motion to approve um to to go down later yeah to extend the meeting uh to 11.30 just in case we need that additional time second all in favor hi hi all opposed motion passes thank you um so i i'll go first and then you can you can speak um so the district um in 2014 when this was originally put forth um the district did support the measure um so as um you all know so i meet um i meet quarterly with um matt hafaker the city manager and we were having a conversation um about the measure and about the frankly the damage that would occur if they did not have the continued funding for measure g um and so this um resolution would support the former measure g now um measure y i wanted um i just wanted to note two different um additions um so you'll see that many organizations throughout the community are going to be um having very similar resolutions so i just wanted to highlight how i customized it and the reason why i felt that um we should um support it um and it's the the fifth down and it just said the paharo valley unified school district is dedicated to providing resources and services for the whole child and recognizes that the safety and security of our students impacts their learning and social emotional well-being um and so you know i think what was said about the um about the previous resolution about the money that our municipalities and our cities get actually also support the schools i feel this is true for that um we did have this resolution come forward to pvp s a and we were able to hear from um from captain redragus and he mentioned when he was a patrol when this first came out and the 10 homicides that kind of boosted this um and the differences of when he was a child in watsonville and people would you know throw out guns and knives out of their car as they'd be driving by and that now you just don't see any of that um and i don't want to steal your thunder because maybe you're going to say this but they they were able to add um seven new new officers which equates to 10 percent so there's only 70 officers they're able to um add seven which to me 10 percent is is a large amount um and then they were also able to offer other professionals that really allowed them to do task force work that had supported the community and the gentlemen are here to speak so paco will you be speaking first uh first yeah thank you uh good evening uh board president uh vice president uh board and the staff um my name is francisco strada i'm the representative for district four in the city of watsonville and i'm the chair for the measure why committee uh renewal committee i'm kurt boyvita presently a battalion chief for the city of watsonville fire department i sit on the oversight committee for the current measure that's in place the court has sent sales tax for measure g and i also am a committee member of the uh campaign of measure why and so we appreciate that you're considering uh are supporting measure why uh there's a lot of great things about measure why and i think the voters were wise to support it in 2014 we're hoping that they will give us a second opportunity to do so i think we've uh met the fiduciary uh responsibilities associated with managing this measure and uh the the stats speak for themselves total crimes are down nine percent in the city of watsonville crimes to individuals down 17 percent and crimes to property down 29 percent and one of the things that we are very very proud of is the fire academy for youth that we were able to launch this past year and uh you didn't steal our thunder um i believe they they've uh been able to add one more police officer making a total of eight through this funding uh the fire department's been able to add seven new uh firefighters to it it's also uh allowed us to uh replace some aging fleet uh with the current measure we we were able to buy uh two new fire engines and currently we just purchased a fire truck the truck is the one with the long ladder on it that goes up about 100 feet and helps protect the citizens also we're able with those those seven firefighters are crucial because they are uh where the boots hit the ground those seven firefighters are medics that's advanced life support that goes out on every rig we staff and that measures allowed that prior to measure g our fire department was looking at cuts we were looking at possible layoffs we we had equipment that was felling we borrowed equipment at times um so it's crucial moving forward with this uh with this measure y is a continuing continuation of the current measure that's in place it's not a new one it doesn't raise the taxes and it's a quarter cent sales tax for this for the city of washington the citizens of washington so with that with that said moving forward with with measure y the only difference uh from measure g to measure y there's a small amount eight percent that's going to go to parks and rec and that's for uh to reach out to our our high-risk youth programs in the in there so thank you for supporting it so in the motion just because i i know that there was some concern on clarity i did follow the template but um if you could um if we would be able to make the amendment to say support a former measure g slash a major y so that um it's just really apparent that you all know what you're voting on i'd like to make a motion to approve this resolution for measure y continuation of measure g a second discussion okay i just wanted to ask so i know i know you're doing a lot of well with parks and rec you're gonna add more youth programs but during in terms of you know homicides and all this i mean you did not only for police and fire but you did programs for the youth obviously and so just talk to us talked to me a little bit about all the stuff you did for young people too with that with the g and now i so some of the successes that we always like to highlight are like the pal program the contigo program which um you know they believe in the philosophy of restorative justice and i believe like 90% of youth that have participated in these programs have not reoffended they get mentorship they get activities they get exposure to the greater world so that they understand that um you know it's about discovering themselves it's about figuring out what they want to do with their lives and then how they can contribute to the community and as i had mentioned before the fire academy was just a remarkable thing and i don't know if you want to just tell tell me a little bit more about the academy with the fire academy it was a mini academy for our youth um ages i believe around 16 through 18 participated in it and it was a mini mini academy for them to give give them a look at what it what it takes to become a firefighter and um it was the first time we were able and have enough funding to put it on before all those programs in the fire department were cut with chief Lopez he spearheaded that and targeted at youth risk and brought him in and did a uh i believe it was a two-week academy and they went through everything that our firefighters go through in an academy when they're hired and um and they graduated it was really successful and this coming year we're looking at doing two academies okay that sounds great and then just you know part of the equation in increasing safety in the community decreasing crime is prevention you know it's hard to put a dollar amount on the value of prevention but in the long run it's the best investment it's the cheapest investment with with the highest returns and so that's why we wanted the increase the amount that was allocated to parks and youth services because in the long run as i mentioned in the generation or two i think we'll we'll really notice the difference yeah exactly have one last question i think a trustee shocker or okay is the um the percentage allocated to parks and rec different from what it was last time around uh no no it wasn't at all i could answer that for you um the the current met uh the current measure that's in was a quarter cent sales tax and it was for the police department and fire department it was a 60 40 split and that's that's the two departments that received it the measure moving forward would add eight percent to parks and rec so the previous one parks and rec was not on that and that's that's the the change moving forward with measure why so it would be um instead of 40 for fire it will be 38 and then uh police department will will be getting um 50 54 and then eight percent to parks and rec highlight the fact that you know we are giving priority to parks and rec because it's such a like you mentioned is the prevention piece um that i think we really need to be investing more on and the fire academy follows our cte pathways to give youth a chance for a career just otherwise that they wouldn't get a chance to explore in what's available and just to finish up um i've been volunteering on the campaign for a while and if you're still undecided there's a website called what'sable for 2020.com um there's a lot of great pictures you know simplified things and if you also want to get active on the campaign you can also sign up to walk so and there's signs available for your yard and there's buttons okay since we already had a first and a second um can we just go ahead and take a vote all in favor hi all opposed motion passes thank you very much thank you thank you thank you all right next gender item 9.10 initiative may 20 may 2020 meeting to board schedule yeah so we we originally went to um reserve april 15th for the mellow center when we went back after your approval it was no longer available so we set the date um on may 20th 2020 um because that is um was a date a wednesday that was available to us and it was available for mellow so we have now secured it i recognize it isn't as great um because we were going to do it on in april 15th which was going to be a wednesday that was only one board meeting in the month um but i think it will be celebratory in nature and um it it should be fairly be able to be fairly quick probably um two hours um but it will be all smiles so um i'm hoping that we can put it on the agenda so that we can have the special board study session that is just for student recognition thank you any public speakers to this item no any discussion from the board just really quick so thank you for getting this done i know that was a request of mine um last year um and so i i do believe that students receive proper recognition i don't think um that during board meetings regular board meetings that was that was the case um but it is a special board meeting so how would are we going to be following meeting protocol um for that day well no so what we'll do we will have to do the pledge of allegiance and we'll do we will have to do the approval of the agenda and then we'll just get to um being able to recognize the students so we do have to do um two items so we have to do the opening the pledge and then the approval of the agenda and then we're off to the races right thank you so if there's no additional comments i would like to make a motion to approve this item the second is there a second second i will now call for a vote all in favor all right all opposed no motion passes next up item 9.11 approve the guys say project and cte program fund development work presented by dr rodriguez yeah thank you so we've had a lot of great success with our grant writer um there is some um there there's always some risk on hiring someone um full time so we're going to try this as an intermediate step um so this is um linda bixby linda bixby is um a significant staple in the community has been linked to agriculture she currently just fundraised um a million dollars for the opening of the brand new library um that is up in um it isn't scott's valley but boulder creek or somewhere around there i'm sorry felton thank you um and so what she would be doing is she would be um fund recruiting for us in order to be able to do the proportional share um for the lacrosse so they gave us half a million dollars that isn't enough to build the over a million dollar facility that we need the positive of this is we are able to use ctig funding so it's not coming out of general funding because it's leading to a culinary pathway and so i think this is a great way one to test the waters on um getting an additional way to have someone else that is providing grant support um with really little risk um and um it would um you know reap great benefits because um we would be able to also have a key messenger out there talking about the good work that we're doing around cte and so i'm asking for your approval any public speakers any discussion so i just want to thank michelle for this because this is something that i mentioned to you before about the possibility of hiring a second grant writer um for our district and thoughts if this works out is that something that you think will be moving towards thank you so i'd like to make an emotion to approve if there's no other comments okay we have a first we have a second can i go ahead and get a vote all in favor hi all opposed motion passes and i vote yes yeah all right yeah um agenda item 9.12 core sips agreement it's 19-030 yeah so this is actually a really great problem to have in that um so what we're having is students are more and more prepared so i'll give you a specific example so we have sips implementation now in each and every school within the district um so if previously i was a second grade teacher i was receiving students significantly below grade level so that meant that my first year of receiving sips instruction and coaching i most likely was teaching a beginning level um module that is not at grade level we're now seeing really great as you guys know we've had 89% of our students that participated in sips were able to read independently by the end of the year um so those students no longer are reading at the beginning they now need either challenge or extension and so those are different modules for our teachers they're not it's not actually the same set of routines and so we were able to reduce originally this contract um year ago was 300 000 it's now 140 so we took out completely the admin piece because we now do that in-house and support in-house um and then we're also we were also able to reduce from two consultants um to just one so now we only have an leon that's supporting us um we used to have nancy that came out as well so we had two consultants um but it really is necessary for us to be able to make that leap um because we need to be able to have the coaching for the new modules if not we will revert back so they'll receive the students higher up um but then we won't effectively and implement the program um so we are hoping that after this um then we would be able to do everything in-house because now teachers are teaching grade level modules which is a which is a really good thing any public speakers any discussion from the board um can I have a motion I'll make a motion to approve is there a second second um I'll now call for a vote all in favor all opposed motion passes next up agenda item 9.13 second reading of board policy 3 3 5 0 travel expenses by Dr. Michelle Rodriguez so this is just the two slight changes that we brought forth in the first reading so it basically allows for tips and gratuities and then also it allows um for me to approve authorized overnight stays within a 60 mile radius and again it was the example I gave you previously was um when we had a large group of teachers that went to Silamar um which is a math conference and it technically is with is not um it's it was grant funded and it's inside the 60 miles um they should have had not been allowed to stay um but because of traffic patterns as we all know getting up there um it takes it takes a long time especially um those of us living down here um and so this would allow me to be able to make those approvals um when I feel that it's prudent but we'll use it judiciously any public speakers for this item no any discussion from the board okay can I get a motion some second second I will now call for a vote all in favor all opposed motion passes agenda item 9.14 approve applied research results based on county work agreement so really um probably my first month here and then since then I've been talking about program evaluation and do we know that the money in which we are investing is worth it so last year we did um in an effort to support we did hire a TOSA um to allow our research and evaluation department to do some program evaluation um also it's really the responsibility of every director that's out there to also be doing that work not just research and evaluation but what we know is that's a skill set and frankly we hadn't been using data as well as we probably could have um and then definitely not doing program evaluation as much as we could have so what this this is Susan Brucci so this is ASR um I've worked with her now for three and a half years I find her super confident and supportive she knows her stuff um what she would be doing is she would be doing at least 10 um professional development sessions with what we call expanded cabinet so that's every director and coordinator in the district as well as principles because principles should be doing this as well and they she would be training them on the principles of program evaluation so that when we invest the 45 million dollars worth of um program money every year that we're putting into our system that we're getting the the return on investment that we need and we're looking at what should we do what shouldn't we do and making those modifications so I recognize that this is an expense however that's why I mentioned the 40 million each year if we make sure that each if all that money is used effectively year after year it will reap many more benefits than the cost of this contract and so I'm asking for the approval any public speakers to this item any discussion on the board I just want to say you know I know you talked to me about we are trying to even eliminate some of our doses in order to reduce the amount of money that we're spending out there you know in terms of saving money so so even though this is a tosa we are eliminating toses as well right um no this is actually a consultant agreement so the tosa position we did not refill yeah that's what I'm saying so but we okay but I just want to say that we haven't filled more than one tosa position so we eliminated three tosa positions so that's what I'm saying we have eliminated tosa positions so we're not having this person there it's not like we're you know you know what I'm saying we've saved some money eliminating some tosa so this is not hopefully I mean when we look at it's kind of like what I said at my state of the district we look at two different things we look at quality and efficiency right so I've been working a lot on efficiency this looks at quality how well are we doing what we say we're doing just say any other discussion from the board I have a question so typically when money is awarded or allocated for programs there's supposed to be a part of that allocation that is set aside for either program monitoring or evaluation is that right well there's a reporting piece and so there is always program evaluation I think when um when you're looking at like state compliance items what they're looking at is you're saying these are the objectives this is what I did and how did I do it the problem with the state just compliance level versus what I'm talking about is then the next steps of how do we know what we know and then once we know it what do we do about it and I think that the compliance piece doesn't hit that last part and frankly and a lot of times I'm happy about it but frankly there's not much bite if you don't do what you say you're going to do on most compliance pieces because all you have to do is provide a justification of why it didn't happen and then you continue to get the money and that's why in every system in education it's not just here in every system we continue to do the same because frankly we're a lot of times allowed to do the same right because it's hard for legislatures and and other governing bodies to pull money from from districts and so then you're given a lot of leniency so what I want us to do is each and every one of us to be thoughtful but we also have to provide professional development and capacity building around that if no one has had to do that in the past I think this is a great idea so I'll be supporting this thank you I'll make a motion actually just one question and then I'll support your I'll second your motion Kim um is this going to be an ongoing thing or is this something we're just going to do once and then I'm just clarifying that for just one so that we're teaching people the fish here we're not giving them the fish thank you I'll second your motion any more discussion all right um can I go ahead and get a vote all in favor I I'll oppose and I oppose one two three five okay next consent item agenda item number 10 consent and agenda are there any public speakers to the consent agenda are there any items that the board wishes to defer all right can I have a motion on the consent agenda I'll make a motion to approve second second all right I will call for a vote all in favor I I'll oppose all right consent agenda passes and do we have any deferred consent items closed session items we do have closed session we always do we always do yes so under item 2.1 I've moved to approve the recommendation of the district administration for a full expulsion for the remainder of the 1920 school year and the first semester of the 2021 school year with placement at another school outside of the district on the district behavior contract for student number 1920 012 um and make a motion to approve also I'm I'm sorry and we actually voted indoors so I'm just reporting out yeah so I'm not making a motion by reporting out so we approved the expulsion the expulsion with a district recommendation for student number 1920 012 with a 601 vote okay it looks like our upcoming meeting and we actually have two more items oh I'm sorry so under item 2.2 I moved to approve the certificate a certificate a personnel report as rescinded by the district administration with the addition of one separation second all in favor I I'm sorry we're just reporting out right no this one's not reporting out we're actually voting on that one we're all confused it's generally I know I'm sorry gents gents go ahead take it over okay so motion motion number two gents was to do the rest um I moved to approve the classified personnel report as presented by district administration on January 22nd 2020 with 31 and two additional action items all in favor all opposed is there any more all right so the next upcoming meeting is February 14th which I think is Valentine's Day but I'm could be wrong oh it says it says 14th I know I mean our meeting's on the 12th which is my birthday my birthday is okay my birthday is Abraham Lincoln's right so thank you very much everybody thank you for hanging in there with me


Me and my sister wanted a dog for our whole lives. I think our parents knew when we were ready for one and so my dad was looking at the website. Spot was the first dog that we looked at and we really just liked her. My name is Kaylin Boyd and I'm a seventh grader and this is Spot. This was the first time we adopted a dog and the Atlanta Humane Society was great. They have cats and dogs and animals that you can adopt for your family. I remember seeing Spot when I walked in the room when we first played with her. She just really liked being comforted and I think I really liked that. The staff and the volunteers were really helpful. They gave us what we needed for her. I think after a few days she kind of warmed up to our family. The first walk we ever took with her we were so excited. I remember that first walk being really fun. She lays with me when I wake up and then we'll all go to school and work and then she'll be super excited to see us when we get home and after like school or after being with a lot of people it's good to be with someone who doesn't have to talk or just can be there. When we first got Spot at the Atlanta Humane Society they gave us the Purina dog food and that's all she's ever eaten since then. Spot's called home over the summer about Spot and her journey to our family. I wanted to give half of the profits to the Atlanta Humane Society. I wanted people to know that dogs needed homes and that adoption centers were really good because it gave them a home that they really needed. Spot has made me more of a better person. She changed me. After the family took me to their home I wasn't scared anymore. I'm happy that this will be my forever home and that I get to be with people who love me as much as I love them.


Ever see a military vehicle driving down the road and wish you could just hop inside for a ride? Well, now is your chance. Sarah Winkelman has details. Camp Ripley will be opening their doors to the public this Sunday for a chance to explore military life. We're going to have a C-130, a Blackhawk, a Schnook, which is the double blade chopper a lot of people see. They'll be on display and they're going to have about 20 different military vehicles ranging from tanks to Humvees. Visitors of all ages that come to Camp Ripley on Sunday will be able to experience what it's like to ride in a Humvee just like this one. Thousands of visitors from all over the state are expected to enjoy a day at Camp Ripley. We're not their enemy. We're their friends. We want to open up our doors and kind of showcase what we have because not every day people get up close and personal with some of these vehicles. Resources for soldiers and veteran services will be available during the open house. A big part for me is seeing all the veterans that come through and you get to talk with them. They're like, oh man, I remember driving a vehicle like this back in my day and then that opens up stories and it gets them talking. This year a special Korean War veteran's ceremony will take place at 1 p.m. and following that the change of command ceremony will begin. Reporting in Camp Ripley, Sarah Winkelman, Lakeland News. The open house at Camp Ripley runs from 10 until 2 on Sunday. If you've enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax deductible contribution to Lakeland Public Television.