Hi everyone, thanks for joining us this morning. We're very excited to have a full panel and a great discussion to learn more about diversion programs in California related to bike traffic violations. So we'll jump right in. We have a full agenda. Before we do that, I'd love to mention a few things here. We have coming up with the California Bicycle Coalition. We have the Transportation Equity Summit coming up April 24th and Advocacy Day April 25th. We have another webinar scheduled hopefully for June or later this summer discussing class 4 bike lanes. We have the California Bike Summit October 3rd and 6th and the California Dream Ride adventure with 50 of your closest California friends in October 8th through the 13th. So learn more about our events visiting our website and today we are discussing bike traffic school implementing effective ticket diversion programs in California. We have great guest speakers today including Robert Prince from Bike East Bay, Felix Figueroa, City of Gilroy, Jeremy Dalbeck, UC Davis and Jennifer Donlon-Wyant of City of Sacramento. So our agenda this this morning is to debrief overview of AB 902 which was the law that passed to make these diversion programs possible. We have three models to go through and we'll talk about some best practices and we'll have a time for question and answers at the end and so really briefly if you're having any audio issues or display issues please send us an email you can also call technical support but mainly the only issue would be an audio problem where you can adjust whether you're listening in through your speakers or through the phone line. You can ask questions through the question bar you can see in the panel you have there and you can also raise your hand to ask a question and we'll try and reach you there and at the end you can take a quick short survey for us to submit some feedback. So we will talk very briefly about who we are. I'd like to introduce Dave Snyder our executive director to mention a little bit about Cal Bike. Sure we work on state policy to help our local partners and local governments and local government agencies be more successful in making their communities bicycle friendly so that more people will ride bicycles in California. We are very proud to have worked with Bike East Bay to create this change in policy to enable folks to provide some bike education when they encounter an adult cyclist who doesn't know or doesn't know the importance of following the traffic rules. So with that I'll pass it to Robert who can explain the occasion that that caused us to work on AB 902. Yeah thank you for the introduction Dave. This is Robert from Bike East Bay. I'm the education director for our non-profit organization that represents the two counties east of San Francisco. It incorporates about 33 cities and about two and a half million people. Our education program has been really robust and continue to grow. We started teaching classes in 2001 even though we've been around since the 70s. And at this point our education program is providing around 150 classes every year to around 5,000 attendees in multiple languages. And one of those class types that we got started in 2011 was with the University of Berkeley. There were some problems. They have a walk zone on campus. One of their main plaza areas where people are not allowed to ride their bikes through. There were some concerns about bike pedestrian collisions in that area. And so the chancellor at that time asked the police department to start ticketing for those offenses. Little did they know that he, little did the chancellor know that those tickets with court costs everything applied to over $200. So there's quite a bit of blowback after the police started ticketing for those walk zone violations. So they got involved, you know, there's an organization among the students to try to provide some kind of alternative to the high ticket prices. And that's when we got involved in 2011 and set up a program with the University and the police department to provide a lower cost alternative to those really expensive tickets for anyone who attended a class, a two hour class. And so that was the very first diversion program in the East Bay. We had some success with it. So we moved on to this nearby city of Alameda with the police department there. That program lasted only for about a year before the new police chief decided that it wasn't in compliance with the existing law. The existing law provided youth diversion programs, but it didn't say anything about adults. And so that's when in 2013, we reached out to CalVipe to see if we could work together on some legislation to extend that existing youth diversion option to adults. It seemed like a pretty simple legal change at the time.  So that's been on the books since late, since early 2016. But we have yet to get any additional successful diversion programs going here in the East Bay. So we want to just try to share this information as far and might as possible so more people know about the option. So we have some more success in cities outside of the East Bay around California, especially bigger cities. And those are examples that we can point to as well to help encourage police departments around here to work with us on this. So thank you, Robert. We're going to talk about three models. The first is going to be with Officer Felix Figueroa, who is in the city of Gilroy. We have on our list a relatively big city in Sacramento and a fairly small city in Gilroy in hopes that the various models will apply to everyone on this call. The city of Gilroy works with the Sarah Clara County Health Department with their program, and it is one of the more successful programs. So, Officer Figueroa, if you are ready, could you please take over? Good morning. This is Felix Figueroa, city of Gilroy Police Department Traffic Officer. Thank you very much for having me here at the California Bicycle Coalition webinar. I have been participating in our program for about three years now. It's through the Santa Clara County Juvenile Traffic Diversion, which is administered through the Santa Clara County Public Health. Next, can we go? So a quick overview. The Juvenile Traffic Diversion program is a joint effort between the County's Public Health Department and the local law enforcement agencies. In general, the program allows youth sighted for bicycle, pedestrian, and other non-motor vehicle violations to attend a two-hour traffic safety education class. It's very similar to that of the adult traffic school. Currently, participating agencies within the program are the Gilroy Police Department, the Los Gatos Police Department, Palo Alto Police Department, and the Santa Clara County Sheriff's Office. Next, the logistics for the class. I found it to be quite simple. It's nothing very involved. The Juvenile Traffic Diversion class is approximately two hours and is taught by law enforcement officers. It's a combination of lecture, PowerPoint, and videos. Content includes current bicycle and pedestrian laws, safety tips, and local issues. The last part of the class also includes a free helmet distribution and helmet fitting for those kids who are in need provided by the County Health Department. The eligible youth are those between the ages of 12 and 17 years old, and they must attend along with a parent or guardian. There is a $10 fee for the participation in the class, and the fee can be waived for those that it creates a hardship for the family. Youth are allowed to attend once a year, similar to adult traffic school. By attending the class, the citation is not forwarded to the courts for processing. Therefore, the fees are waived. The class registration fees are used for supporting the training and class materials. The curriculum was initially created in 2008 by a leak certified instructor, law enforcement agencies, Public Health Department, and the Stanford Health Care. Since that time, there has been some revisions to the class, such as adding more videos to make it a little more visually appealing. Next. The roles and responsibilities, law enforcement, I'll refer to as we obtain the approval for the program through the necessary administrators prior to participation. We determine which violations will be eligible for the juvenile traffic diversion program. Obviously, we go out, we do the enforcement. Upon issuing citations, those are forwarded to the Public Health Department. We schedule, set the date for the class and provide the facility for the class. We also take the lead as the instructor for the class. Upon completion of the class and receiving the final roster, these citations are either discarded and or processed through the courts for those that did not qualify or show up for the class. On the Public Health side, they enter the citations into their data base. They then notify the agency if there is a youth that is ineligible for the class. They will then send out the letters, the notifications. It's basically the invitation to the class. They obviously develop the roster for the class and maintain it current. The health department does attend the class as well. They assist at the class by taking in the registrations, the fees, and provide the helmets and the fitting. Upon completion of the class, they update the roster, which is then forwarded to the agency. Obviously, they are the ones that manage the fees for the registration. There are benefits to the program, such as building new partnerships with the allied agencies which go beyond the class. The more agencies that are involved, the less impact they can have on one department, because classes and instructors can alternate. The program, I find, does complement the Safe Rots to School program, which has been gaining a lot of popularity and which in essence is the educational side of the program. And then, of course, we command the law enforcement on the enforcement side of things, as well as education. As usual, you will face some challenges, including with the law enforcement agencies, the ongoing shift rotations. Those that have taken the lead are now not available to continue on teaching the class and or the ongoing staffing level issues that a lot of departments face. Also, it's difficult to find the steady funding to support the position within the health department to administer and centralize the program. I do find that overall, it is beneficial for the young people and the community, as we're obviously all working towards the ultimate goal of reducing crashes and injuries, and most importantly, improving or just as importantly, improving overall roadway safety. Next, attached, you'll find my contact information and the Santa Clara County Health Department Administrator for the program, Susan Lowry, which I'd like to thank for putting these few slides together. If by the end of the discussion, not all your questions are answered or some comes up, feel free to contact either one of us. Thank you. All right, so thank you, Officer Figueroa. I'm going to go ahead and pass to you a few questions right now, and we don't have time for too many because we have time at the end. If I don't get to your question now, we can try to get to it at the end. The first question from Colin Bogart, and that is Officer Figueroa, how do you determine which citations are eligible for diversion? The violations that we determined here at the Gateway Police Department, we deal mainly at the schools is when we're dealing with these type of violations. So basically speaking, anything from the vehicle code that is not committed while driving a vehicle, not related to a motor vehicle. So basically all of your pedestrian violations, your bicycle violations, so on and so forth. It's real simple, our records department screens the citations. If there is not a vehicle listed on the citation, more likely we've never had anyone that is not eligible. Those are the citations that are eligible for the program. Great, and a couple of people asked, how many people do you have in a class on average? The facility that I have available, fortunate for us here at the PD, we have a community room, and I prefer to have no more than 25 students. Remember that includes, the way we work it is that includes at least one parent and or guardian needs to attend with the youth that was cited. And finally, before we move on to the next, a couple of people also asked in other words, what happens to the money? Where does that fee go? So those fees are, is what used for the, as I stated, the health department is the one that manages the fees. And those are used for supporting the training and the class materials provided for the class, which, you know, the bicycle and pedestrian safety booklets that are put out through the Traffic Safe Communities Network are some of the materials that we hand out. Great, thank you so much, Officer Figueroa. You're welcome. So next we're going to go to UC Davis and Jeremy Dahlbeck. Jeremy Dahlbeck, who works in the Information Services Department at UC, it should be said that the city of Davis is a platinum level bicycle friendly community with the highest rate of bicycle use in all of California. So it is an important place to have a diversion program, which I will quickly define in response to a question. It is a program where people who are ticketed for violation of a motor vehicle law can take a bicycle safety class, will be diverted away from the courts and to a bicycle safety class. So instead of getting a paying the citation, they go to a class. That's the definition of a diversion program. Mr. Dahlbeck, we'd love to hear about your program. Hi, Dave. Yes, this is Jeremy Dahlbeck with UC Davis. Thank you for having us. I am the IT Manager for the Transportation Services Department at UC Davis. And with me, I also have Deborah Saboda and Officer Ryan Terry to help answer any questions from the police side. So we implemented our program in fall 2011. Prior to that many years ago, we did have a different in-person diversion program, but I think that went away for staffing logistical reasons. It took about one year of planning and implementation to create our online diversion program. It was a collaborative effort between the UC Davis Police Department and the Transportation Services Department. And the first thing we did was to get approval from the county court system. The Chief of Police and the Director of Transportation Services were able to do that. And that kind of framed the program itself. The court had some requirements that they wanted us to meet and we kind of built the program around that. So with that being said, I'm going to go ahead and kind of explain this diagram that's up on the screen. This is the overall workflow for how our diversion program works. It can see at the top the officer issues the citation. It gets entered into our record management system, the police record management system, and they export that file with the names and the citation numbers of the offenders. And that gets imported into a backend system database for the online traffic school. Once that's in there, then the offender is able to log in or create an account on the online traffic school. And they can enter their citation number and then go through an online course, which I'll show you some screenshots in the next couple of slides. And then they can go to pay the fee online. There's also an administrative interface where the police records is able to look up the names of the people who have completed the course and submit the dismissals through the county court. And I should also mention that this course is available for free to take to anyone who's interested. And we have made some efforts to encourage members of the campus community to take the course, especially new students who come here, to get them familiar with the rules and the laws of riding a bicycle. So our model is that police officers issue a regular notice to appear with the court appearance date. The citation data is exported to the traffic school system with some fields in it. The violators have 14 calendar days, not including the date of issuance to attend the traffic school. The process is they log in, they enter a citation number. It may take up to three days to come across, so it tells them if it doesn't recognize their citation number, it'll tell them that. If they are eligible, they complete the online traffic school. And any point after completing the traffic school and before the 14-day deadline, they can pay the fee, which is $70. After both the course and the payment have been recorded, citation appears on a web-based report, which is available to police departments so that they can dismiss the citation. If they do not complete the course and pay the fee by the deadline, they have to go through the full court appearance or pay the full fine, subject to the same rules and regulations that are regular traffic tickets. There's no appeal process. The court is the appeal process. And violators are eligible for the bicycle traffic school an unlimited number of times per year. The traffic school can be completed by non-violators, as I mentioned, for educational purposes. And there's no fee waivers or extensions. And do you guys want to correct me if I'm around at any of this? Does it look right to you? It looks right. Okay. This was the original model that we agreed upon six years ago, so it's good to hear that it hasn't changed. So the ongoing administrative responsibilities are issuing citations, entering them into records, responding to the questions and complaints, transferring the funds and processing refunds if necessary, updating the traffic school content, and determining traffic school content, and the administrative duties, or filing new requests for dismissal, and creating and distributing bicycle safety materials. So now I'm going to get into what the course actually looks like. Here's the front page of the course, just provides some basic information on the course itself. Once they're ready to begin, they click the button, takes them to a page where they are asked for their citation number. And if they enter a citation number here, then it tells them whether or not it's in the system, and it tells them when they need to pay the $70 by what their due date is. The course consists of a video, which is about 19 minutes long. It was created by a consultant, I believe, a few years ago. And it's a pretty good video to watch, and it's actually out there on Bemio somewhere. I don't have the link here, but if anybody's interested, I could send that link out to Dave, and you can distribute it. After the video, there is a series of multiple choice questions that they have to get a certain number correct. And after entering each question, it comes back with what the original question was, and what the correct answer was. If the answer got wrong, it also provides what their answer was. And then it provides some feedback about what the question, some additional information about that question. So once they're finished with that, it takes them to where they can pay for the course. I'm getting a little bit of a delay on my clicks of the slide, so there it goes. So they can pay for the course, and then once they do that, then there is a screen on the police interface where they can file the request for dismissal and mark that citation as having been cleared. So there is the payment page, and also the user is able to log in and see the list of courses that they've already completed. They are able to pay after the fact if they weren't able to pay at the time of taking the course. This is the administrative interface where the police department can look up citations and course attempts. There's also some statistics, some course administration where you edit the questions and the content in the printable quiz. This is the lookup form that we created, and the statistics report that we created, which gives you an idea of the number of course completions that we've had since the beginning. About 1,600 have been completed for traffic school, about 2,300 for educational purposes, and about 484 that have gone through to the court system. This is the course administration page where we can edit the questions, add new questions. The questions are also generated randomly in a random order, so somebody taking the course twice won't get the same questions, and the answers won't be in the same order that they originally appeared. There is also a printable course in case somebody is not able to take the online course for some reason. We could print this out and give it to them, and it would require a manual grading. This is the interface that the police department uses to figure out which citations to send to the court, either for dismissal or the ones that are no longer eligible. There's also a way that we can enter a skeleton citation for someone. So that's it for our presentation. Deborah or Officer Ryan, would you like to add anything to that? So what we do on the records end is when citations are given to us by the traffic bike officer. We hold those citations for 14 days. They're not mailed to the court. These citations are written on a general citation that we use even for vehicle violations. We don't have any kind of separate tickets for these. So we hold them for 14 days, and then based on whether or not the person has taken the course or not, we look at that sheet. We pull the tickets that have taken the class. We do a letter of dismissal that is a letter that was given to us by the Yolo County traffic court. That original citation is attached to that dismissal letter and sent to the court. We were mandated by a Yolo County judge to do it that way. Those individuals then that haven't taken the class, we pull those citations, and those are mailed directly to the traffic court, and that's where the individual would have to take care of their citation. Great. Officer Terry, would you like to add anything? Biggest thing for me is that I found that this actually does work. It changes behavior in regards to who people ride. Unfortunately, some people I have encountered several times, but again I usually allow them to do bicycle education. It is my discretion whether somebody is allowed to do bicycle education or in writing, it's every officer's discretion. So not everybody necessarily gets it. Some people do get the full fine. I go ahead and skip the process based on them telling me that they're going to still continue to ride in the manner which I've just stopped them for. If I've already come down to like I recognize your face, I'm like, didn't I already allow you to do this twice? Well, maybe at that point I think it needs to start, you need more of a little, a little more than school. The court needs to remind you of your obligations, but other than that it seems to be very well received by the public. Great. Thank you. I think that's it for us, Dave. We can answer questions. Yes, thank you. In the interest of time I'm going to ask just one question before we move on to Sacramento. And I want to encourage you, Jeremy, if you see the questions being typed to answer them if you can directly, I promise that all of your questions will be answered in a follow-up email if we don't get them today. So the question I want to ask right now, and I'm also going to ask Officer Figueroa the same question since it's a common one, but first, Jeremy, where does the funding come from for the program? So the original funding was a donation of resources from the transportation services and police departments. So are you talking about the funding for bicycle enforcement? Yes. I'm not exactly sure. What do you mean the funding to support the program? To keep it supported? Yes. That is going to come out of the fees that we receive for the class. In addition, those fees also help support, we have a bike-like program. Again, our community is a college-based community, so you're talking about students, faculty, and staff that are here until way late into the night. We have some computer labs that are open even after midnight. So you have a heavy bicycling community going on this campus sometimes 24-7. So part of the funds then go to this bike-like program where we hand out students free bike lights to ensure that they're safe at night. They ordered like 10,000 lights last year. And that's how the $70 was calculated? I'm sorry? And the $70 was calculated by accounting for the cost? Yes. And also some of those fees went to updating that video that is part of the traffic school. Now, after a figure out from Gilroy, can you tell us where your funding comes from? Yeah, we have here at the police department, we have no specific funding for the program. It's just administration-made decision that they would support the program. And I feel part of the reason is that there's no, to my knowledge, a specific budget for it is because at the end of the day, it's not absorbing too much of our resources both at the at the patrol level, traffic level, and or the records level. Great, thank you. So now I'd like to move on to Jennifer Donlan-Wyant of the city of Sacramento, who deserves credit for moving the fastest in California after the law passed to allow us to implement diversion programs for adults. Ms. Donlan-Wyant, take it over. Thanks, Dave. Yeah, so we implemented our diversion program last summer. Well, it was passed by council last summer. The impetus for it was, do I have control? I don't have control. Can I have the next slide? And might as well go to the next one as well. So the framework was that last summer we were updating our bikes on sidewalks ordinance. And as part of that, we recognized, actually, council member Steve Canson recognized that we didn't really want to be punitive, rather those that are cited for riding illegally on the sidewalk that this could be an educational opportunity. And so since we have this legislation to help us do that, we decided to move forward with that. There have been some challenges in moving forward with our program. So we brought together, of course, our police department and the city attorney's office to figure out how we would move forward with that. Our police department has a split of those that are able to do electronic citations and those that still do paper citations. The challenge that we faced was that the e-citations, the software that they used, the citation is actually automatically sent to the county court system. And so we didn't have a method for which to hold that, like UC Davis has. So that was directly going to the courts. And the paper citations were handled in a different way. The police department had concerns about how they were going to be able to manage that. And because we are an unfunded program, we weren't able to find funding to find a resolution. So with discussions with PD and the city attorney's office, who then talks with county courts, for this purposes, our pilot effort, we're only covering violations for legally riding on the sidewalk. We hope to expand it to all bicycle-related citations as we work out the kinks with our system. And in developing the curriculum, my goal and my hope was that we could contract that out, the classes to a League Certified Instructor, ideally Saba, Sacramento Area Bicycle Advocates, our local advocacy group. However, we weren't able to do that as part of getting support from the police department and the city attorney's office. It was required. That would be taught by public works. And essentially that would be me, because I'm the only person who will fit what we would need for teaching the class. And it is a two-hour class. It's in classroom only. There is no on-bike component. As part of developing the class, I reviewed UC Davis' videos, worked with Robert at Bikey Space to see what they had and what curriculum they were using. And then looking at the League curriculum. I am not a League Certified Instructor, but I feel like I've been around enough to put together a good curriculum and teach it. The class is offered monthly. Once a month, I believe it's the second Thursday of the month in the evening. From 6 to 8, the class is free. The class is offered to not only those who receive the citation, but anybody who might have interest in learning about urban biking. We call the class Urban Biking 101. I'd say the first third of it is biking in the law. And the other two thirds of it are informational, like how to make a two-stage left-hand turn. There are three different ways to make a left-hand turn. How to enjoy the rides, lights, panniers, all that good sort of stuff. Next slide, please. So here is kind of a highlight of the challenges that we face that we're still working through. Working with the police department, the city attorney, and then the county court. So we're the only jurisdiction within the county that is doing this. So I already talked about how citations are processed in the city, the electronic versus paper, and how the electronic is automatically forwarded to the county court system. So we weren't able to hold those. And that's something we're going to look into as an opportunity to hold those e-citations. The PD was concerned about, and the courts were concerned about verifying those that were transmitted to the courts that were eligible, had they been thoroughly reviewed, because the court system didn't want to have the burden of additional administrative work to dismiss citations that maybe weren't thoroughly vetted. The court wanted us to be able to flag citations. So unlike most of the other programs, our system does not stop it at the city. It does go to the court so that the person who is cited, just like traffic court, is exactly the same. They still need to pay the court fees. It's only the citation fee that would be waived with our program. And that's another challenge I'd like to be able to stop it before it actually gets to the court, so that there are no financial burdens to those that are cited. And that's part of our goal of capturing it before it goes to the court. Luckily, we actually don't have any sidewalks yet where we prohibit bicycle riding, so therefore nobody has yet to be cited. Our class has been full. It's been great. We have a lot of the interested but concerned types of folks who are taking the class. And in our negotiations with the court, all we need to do is give them, once they give us a list of who is eligible for the class, is a failure to report. So anybody who does not actually show up to the class when they're supposed to. They have a three-month period, just like traffic court. The whole system is just set up the same way. Three months to take it. If they don't take it within that three months, we report it to them. And then that person has to go back into the court system. So we haven't yet had anybody that's actually taken the class, because we don't have any violations for riding the bike suicide off. But we do have a lot of classes and a lot of participants. So I think it's a win for the city, and hopefully we can expand it as we move forward. Thank you. Great. Thank you, Jennifer. I'd like to move on, Robert, next. But first, I want to clarify a wonderful bit of jargon that you said when you talked about the interested but concerned. That's the largest group of people that we who want to see more bicycling are interested in attracting. That's people who are interested in bicycling, but they are concerned about getting hurt when they ride in traffic. That's fantastic that you are finding that group in your classes. I'm glad you talked to Robert. That's a great segue to hearing from Mr. Prince from Bike East Bay about the best practices in bicycle diversion programs. Thank you, Dave. I'm going to set up my slides over here really quickly. That's great. So I'm going to talk right now, not necessarily about the what in terms of what the information being taught in the classes is, because we live in a very diverse state and there's a lot of different needs and interests when it comes to bicycling around California. Like we've heard about a number of different models of how to actually implement a program, there's a lot of different models in terms of what needs to be taught in the program that have the most impact. But what I'm going to focus on instead are three other questions. The why. Meaning, why do we want to have these programs? What's the value of them? Also, the where. Where should these programs be implemented so that they can be as accessible as possible? And then also the who, who needs to be teaching these programs. Cool. So I'm going to start with the why. Our organization kind of has our number one metric in terms of the success of our education program in terms of what we call butts on bikes, just in terms of the number of people who are riding and how many people are riding more based on the information that we're providing in our education programs. And this is important for a number of reasons, but one of them is just because of social expectations and norms for bicyclists in our communities. Honestly, we don't, and most California cities, we don't really have a super robust bike culture, and that means that people are, in a lot of areas, are kind of left to their own devices to determine what the right thing to do is or what the expectations are for them on their bike. And so if we're seeing a lot of people who are breaking laws, that doesn't necessarily say as much about that person as it does. It says something about the environment in which they're riding it. So the good analogy to use right now is that biking in most of our communities, imagine a freeway with just predominantly young male drivers, and that's kind of what we're self-selecting for with our existing environments and infrastructure for people biking. It ends up with a more aggressive attitude, more rule-breaking, you can call a scoff law if you want, but if a lot of people are doing the same thing, then there's obviously something bigger, bigger picture issue that's going on. And we can address this within our education programs as long as well as in the infrastructure advocacy that we do. So having a robust and more diverse bike ridership means a wider demographic of people are participating and setting the standards. That includes parents, kids, older cyclists, people with different disabilities, etc. And so in our classes, we've been surveying people before the class just to find out what's keeping them from riding anymore. And you can see in this graph, there's a lot of different reasons here, but the biggest ones very top are a lack of safe infrastructure and general safety concerns. And so these are two things as an advocacy organization. We focus on infrastructure and safety through education. And so some because infrastructure doesn't serve them well or meet their needs and others because of safety concerns. So regardless of what we're teaching in the class, the desired outcome should be increased confidence and increased likelihood to bike. And so we also survey people in terms of how often they currently ride a bike. Most of the people who are coming to our classes are on the very lower end of the spectrum riding rarely or never. And we also survey people about their existing confidence levels. And so it's also on the very low end of the scale people identifying themselves as not being confident at all riding in urban traffic. And so we also ask the same questions after our classes to see if we're having the desired impact on confidence levels so that people will feel more empowered to make the right decisions on the bike. And so you can see post-class, it's almost an exact shift in terms of confidence levels. And this is that interested but concerned element that Dave Snyder is talking about. If we can shift them into more confident mode, they feel empowered to make the right decisions instead of breaking the law in order to feel safe. And then also we ask people after the class if they're going to ride as much or more or less than they did before. And even just after a two-hour session, you also see a dramatic shift there. And as Jennifer noted, most of the people who come to our classes are there voluntarily, even the ones that are made available for sighted individuals. And so this enables us to reach a much bigger group of people outside of our core demographic than we would otherwise. So we think of ourselves as reaching out as much to bike riders as we are to people who primarily drive for transportation. So we talk about this from multiple angles, both in terms of being the same issue from a bike rider perspective. Here's the, you know, avoiding the door zone is the exact same issue from the driver perspective also avoiding the door zone. So that's part of the why these classes are important. It's not just about rules of the road, which a lot of people who are breaking the law already know. It's about getting them past that sense of discomfort or lack of confidence in order to empower them to make the right decisions. We do cover rules of the road too, but somebody can know the rules of the road and still break the law because following law feels less safe to them. And so the next one is where the classes are held. Some of the things that we think about in terms of making the classes as accessible as possible or citing classes near transit hubs so people can get to them easily. And also at locations that are known and trusted by the community. We found really, really great partnerships with libraries here in the East Bay. Here's a picture from 81st Avenue Library in East Oakland. They have a really great facility there. We have a partnership with Oakland libraries where we're teaching classes at those locations all over the city. And they have really great facilities. People know where they are and they often have really good access to transit or other mobility options. Oakland libraries even provide loaner locks for people in case they arrive without their own locks. They can make sure to keep their bikes there. They have a lot of other bike programs going on as well that we can co-promote through the classes that we're doing. So that's part of the where is regarding access to the class. But also there's a couple of different models in terms of the county versus city program around here because there is so much more population. We focus a lot more on the city aspect because we want to be able to set up classes that are near where the people who are being taken or live because of that accessibility concern. In a less populated area county program might make more sense because people are going to be traveling to reach the class location no matter where they're living. But in populated areas I highly encourage focusing more on the city level and on the county level just to make it more possible for more people to be able to reach the class. And then in terms of the where, I would highly recommend not locating these classes at police offices because there are segments of the population that would feel uncomfortable going to a police office for a class. Other locations around the community that are more known and accessible to a diverse set of attendees are recommended. And so finally who teaches these classes, this is a picture of some of our bike ed instructors. And I highly recommend partnering with community organizations or nonprofits to actually operate the classes for a number of reasons. One of them is just so that the people who are in the classes have very unique local knowledge that they can bring to the classes to provide some additional value to the people who are attending. But also so that there's no sense of a conflict of interest between the people who are being ticketed and the police and the instructors. Especially in terms of who the money is changing hands between. All of our classes are funded by grants, by sponsorships. Our state of Oakland classes are funded independently of any kind of traffic school program, but we can layer that traffic school program on top of it. So finding independent funding for the classes I think is a really great way to go because that way the individuals who are attending the classes are not paying instructors directly. So you know there's a better sense of trusting connection between the instructor and the attendee and no sense of conflict of interest that the instructor is profiting off of increased ticketing. And also having advocates involved is very important because it enables an additional check and balance on that system. People who are there specifically advocate for cyclists can help ensure that the program is not just resulting in increased ticketing and an increased impact on communities and can ensure that the ticketing that's being done is happening fairly and appropriately and also to provide additional connections between those advocates and the police department to possibly even provide some additional training because without the trainings things like this happen this is a story from Dallas where a fellow was ticketed for not wearing a helmet and then that was a lot that was actually dropped a couple months before his ticket was issued but the police officer who issued it didn't realize that the law was dropped. If there was a what happened with this fellow is he didn't pay the ticket it would rack up additional fees for late payment and eventually resulted in him losing his driving privileges and then a warrant out so we want stuff like this to not happen we want a short circuit you know people's inability to be able to take care of these tickets especially low-income individuals who have the least ability to pay high traffic fines so we can give them easy access to options other than high traffic fees and either reduced or eliminate the cost of the ticket via attendance at that program then what we can help avoid situations like this where it kind of snowballs into something much bigger than that original citation and so with that I'm going to hand it back off to Dave and please post any questions. Sure so I want to keep to our promise of getting done by 11 o'clock and so I will promise to answer all of the questions by email and I want to thank all of the presenters Robert, Felix, Jeremy and Jennifer and your teammates who helped you out thanks very much. What did you want to close out? Great so thanks everyone for joining us today we had a great panel and a great turnout we'll have materials available for you after the recording as well as the slides and all the questions that have been sent to us we will aggregate and put out the answers to for you so thanks for joining us and have a great day. Thanks everyone for joining.


I'm Peter Burris, welcome to Wikibon's Action Item. Once again, we're broadcasting from our beautiful theCUBE studios in Palo Alto, California, here in the studio with me, George Gilbert. And remote, we have Neil Raden, Jim Kubilis, and David Floyer, welcome guys. Hey. So we've got a really interesting topic today. We're going to be talking about graph databases, which probably just immediately turned off everybody. But we're actually not going to talk so much about it from a technology standpoint. We're really going to spend most of our time talking about it from the standpoint of the business problems that IT and technology are being asked to address, and the degree to which graph databases, in fact, can help us address those problems. And what do we need to do to actually address them? Human beings tend to think in terms of relationships of things to each other. So what the graph community talks about is graph-shaped problems. By graph-shaped problem we might mean that someone owns something and someone owns something else or someone shares an asset, or it could be any number of different things. But we tend to think in terms of things and the relationship that those things have to other things. Now, the relational model has been an extremely successful way of representing data for a lot of different applications over the course of the last 30 years. And it's not likely to go away. But the question is, does the, do these graph-shaped problems actually lend themselves to a new technology that can work with relational technology to accelerate the rate at which we can address new problems, accelerate the performance of those new problems, and ensure the flexibility and plasticity that we need within the application set so that we can consistently use this as a basis for going out and extending the quality of our applications if we take on even more complex problems in the future. So let's start here, Jim Cabullus. When we think about graph databases, give us a little hint in the technology and where we are today. Yeah, well, graph databases have been around for quite a while in various forms, addressing various core use cases, such as social network analysis, recommendation engines, fraud detection, semantic search, and so on. The graph database technology is essentially very closely related to relational, but it's specialized to, when you think about it, Peter, at the very, you know, the very heart of a graph-shaped business problem, the entity relationship diagram, and anybody who's studied databases has mastered, at least at a high level, entity relationship diagram. The more complex these entity and relationship, these relationships grow among a growing range of entities, the more complex the sort of the network structure becomes in terms of linking them together at a logical level. So graph database technology was developed a while back to be able to support very complex graphs of entities and relationships in order to do a lot of its analytic. It's a lot of it's very focused on a fast query, what they call query traversal, among very large graphs to find, you know, quick answers to questions that might involve who owns which products that they bought which stores in which cities and are serviced by which support contractors and have which connections are in a relationship with other products they may have bought from us and our partners so forth and so on. When you have very complex questions of this sort, they lend themselves to graph modeling. And to some degree, to the extent that you need to perform very complex queries of this sort very rapidly, graph databases, and there's a wide range of those on the market, have an optimize for that. But we also have graph abstraction layers over our DBMSs and multi-model databases. You'll find them, you know, running an IBM's databases or Microsoft, Cosmos, DB and so forth. So you don't need graph specialized databases in order to do graph queries in order to manipulate graphs. So that's the issue here. When does a specialized graph database serve your needs better than a sort of a non-graph optimized but nonetheless graph enabling database? That's the core question. So Neil Raiden, let's talk a little bit about the classes of business problems that could in fact be served by representing data utilizing a graph model. So these graph shaped problems, independent of the underlying technology. Let's start there. What kinds of problems can business people start thinking about solving by thinking in terms of graphs of things and relationships amongst things? But it all comes down to connectedness. That's the basis of a graph databases, how things are connected either weekly or strongly. And these connected relationships can be very complicated. They can be based on very complex properties. A relational database is not based on, not only is it not based on connectedness, it's not based on connectedness at all. I'd like to say it's based on unconnectedness. And the whole idea in a relational database is that the intelligence about connectedness is buried in the predicate of a query. It's not in the database itself. So I don't know how overlaying a graph abstractions on top of a relational database are a good idea. On the other hand, I don't know how stitching a relational database into your existing operation is going to work either. We're going to have to see, but I can tell you that a major part of data science, machine learning, and AI is going to need to address the issue of causality, not just what's related to each other. And there's a lot of science behind using graphs to get at the causality problem. And we've seen for example, well, let's come back to that. I want to come back to that, but George Gilbert, we've kind of experienced a similar type of thing back in the 90s with the whole concept of object-oriented databases. They were represented as a way of re-conceiving data. The problem was that they had to go from the concept all the way down to the physical thing and it didn't seem to work. What happened? Well, it turns out the big argument was with object-oriented databases, we can model anything that's so much richer, especially since we're programming with objects. And it turns out though that theoretically, especially at that time, you could model anything down at the physical level or even the logical level in a relational database. And so those code bases were able to handle sort of similar, both ends of the use cases, both ends of the spectrum. But now that we have such extreme demands on our data management, rather than look at a whole application or multiple applications, even sharing a single relational database like some of the big enterprise apps, we have workloads within apps like recommendation engines or a knowledge graph, which explains the relationship between people, places and things or digital twins or keeping mapping your IT infrastructure and applications and how they all hold together. You could do that in a relational database, but in a graph database, you can organize it so that you can have really fast analysis of these structures. But the trade-off is, you're going to be much more restricted in how you can update the stuff. All right, so we think about what happened then with some of the object-orientated technology. The original world database, the database was bound to the application and the developer used the database to tell the application where to go find the data. Relational data allowed us not to tell the applications where to find things, but rather how to find things. And that was persisted and was very successful for a long time. Object-orientated technologies in many respects went back to the idea that the developer had to be very concrete about telling the application where the data was. But we didn't want to do things that way. Now, if something's happened, David Floyer, it used to be one of the reasons why we had this challenge of representing data in a more abstract way across a lot of different forms without having it also being represented physically and therefore a lot of different copies and a lot of different representations of the data which broke systems of record and everything else, was that the underlying technology was focused on just persisting data and not necessarily delivering it into these new types of databases, data models, et cetera. But flash changes that, doesn't it? Can't we imagine a world in which we can have our data in flash and then, which is a technology that's more focused on delivering data and then having that data be delivered to a lot of different representations including things like graph databases and graph models. Is that accurate? Absolutely, and in a moment I'll take it even further. I think the first point is that when we were designing real-time applications, transactional applications, we were very constrained indeed by the amount of data that we could get to. So as a database administrator, I used to have a rule which you could, database developers could not issue more than a hundred database calls. And the reason was that if you, they could always do more than that, that the applications became very unstable and they became very difficult to maintain. The costs of maintenance went up a lot. The whole area of flash allows us to do a number of things and the area of Unigrid enables us to do a number of things very differently. So that we can, for example, share data and have many different views of it. We can use Unigrid to be able to bring far greater amounts of power, compute power, GPUs, et cetera to bear on specific workloads. And I think the most useful thing to think about this is this type of architecture can be used to create systems of intelligence where you have the traditional relational databases dealing with systems of record and then you can have the AI systems, graph systems, all the other components there looking at the best way of providing data and making decisions and in real time, that can be fed back into the systems of record. All right, all right. So let's, so Neil, let me come back to you very quickly. Sorry, George, let me come back to Neil. I want to spend, go back to this question of what does a graph shape problem look like? Let's kind of run down it. We talked about AI, what about IoT guys? Is IoT going to help us? Is IoT going to drive this notion of looking at the world in terms of graphs more or less? What do you think, Neil? I don't know. I haven't really thought about it, Peter, to tell you the truth. I think that one thing that we leave out when we talk about graphs is we talk about, you know, nodes and edges and relationships and so forth. But you can also build a graph with very rich properties. And one thing you can get from a graph query that you can't get from a relational query unless you write, you know, character predicate is it can actually do some thinking for you. It can tell you something you don't know. And I think that's important. So without being too specific about IoT, I have to say that, you know, streaming data and trying to relate it to other data and getting down to it very quickly, what's going on, root cause analysis, I think graph would be very helpful. Great, and Jim Cabello, how about you? Yeah, I think that IoT is tailor made for, I should say graph modeling and graph databases are tailor made for the IoT. Let me explain. I think the IoT is very, graph is very much a metadata technology. It's expressing context in a connected universe for expressing context in a connected universe. Where the IoT is concerned, it's all about connectivity. And so graphs are increasingly complex graphs of say, individuals and the devices and the apps they use and locations and various contexts and so forth. These are increasingly graph-based. They're hierarchical and shifting and changing. And so in order to contextualize and personalize experience in a graph in an IoT world, I think graph databases will be embedded in the very fabric of these environments. Microsoft has a strategy they announced about a year ago to build more of an intelligent edge around a distributed graph across all their offerings. So I think graphs will become more important in this era undoubtedly. George, what do you think, business problems? Business problems on IoT, the knowledge graph that holds together a digital twin, both of these lend themselves to graph modeling. But to use the object oriented databases as an example, where object modeling took off was in the application server where you had the ability to program in object oriented language, and that mapped to a relational database. And that is an option, not the only one, but it's an option for handling graph model data like a digital twin or IT operations. Well, that's just what we're thinking about here if we talk about graphs and metadata. And I think Neil, this partly answers a question that you had about why wouldn't anybody want to do this, that we're representing the output of a relational data as a node in a network of data types or data forms so that the data itself may still be relationally structured, but from an application standpoint, the output of that query is itself a thing that is then used within the application. But to expand on that, if you store it underneath as fully normalized in relational language laid out so that there's no duplicates and things like that, it gives you much faster update performance, but the really complex queries, typical of graph data models would be very, very slow. So once we have, say, more in-memory technology or we can manage under the covers the sort of multiple representations of the data. That's what flashes are going to allow us to do. What David Floyd just talked about is that we can have a single persistent physical storage, but it can be represented in a lot of different ways so that we avoid some of the problems that you start in a race. If we had to copy the data and have physical copies of the data on disk in a lot of different places, then we would run into all kinds of consistency and update and that would probably break the model. We'd probably come back to a notion of a single data store. I want to move on here, guys. One really quick thing, David Floyd, I want to ask you, if there's, you mentioned when you were database administrator and you put restrictions on how many database actions an application or transaction was allowed to generate. When we think about what a business is going to have to do to take advantage of this, are there any particular one thing that we need to think about? What's going to change within an IT organization to take advantage of graph database and we'll do the action items? So the key here is that the number of database calls can grow by a factor of probably 1,000 times what it is now with what we can see as coming as technologies over the next couple of years. So let me put that in context, David. That's a single transaction, now generating 100,000 database calls. Well, access calls to data, whatever type of database. And the important thing here is that a lot of that is going to move out with the discussion of IoT to where the data is coming in. Because the quicker you can do that, the earlier you can analyze that data. And you talked about IoT with multiple different sources coming in, a simple one like traffic lights, for example. The traffic lights are being affected by the traffic lights around them within the city. Those sort of problems are ideal for this sort of graph database. And having all of that data locally and being processed locally in memory, very, very close to where those sensors are is going to be the key to developing solutions in this area. So Neil, I got one question from you, or one question for you, I'm going to put you on the spot, I just had a thought. And here's the thought. We talk a lot about, in some of the new technologies, it could in fact be employed here, whether it be blockchain or even going back to SOA. But when we talk about what a system is going to, is going to have the authority to do about the idea of writing contracts that describe very, very discreetly what a system is or is not going to do. I have a feeling that those contracts are not going to be written in relational terms. I have a feeling that like most legal documents, they will be written in what looks more like graph terms. I'm extending that a little bit, but this has rights to do this at this point in time. Is that also this notion of incorporating more contracts directly into how systems work to assure that we have the appropriate authorities laid out? What do you think? Is that going to be easier or harder as a consequence of thinking in terms of these graph-shaped models? Boy, I don't know. Again, another thing I haven't really thought about, but I do see some real gaps in thinking, let me give you an analogy. OLAP databases came on the scene back in the 90s or whatever, and people in finance departments and whatever, they loved OLAP. What they hated was the lack of scalability. And now what we see now is the scalability isn't a problem and OLAP solutions are suddenly bursting out all over the place. So I think there is a role for a mental model of how you model your data and how you use it. It's different from the relational model. I think the relational model has prominence and has that advantage of what's it called, occupancy or something. But I think that the graph is going to show some real capabilities that people are lacking right now. I think some of them at the very high end, things like I said, getting to causality. But I think that graph theory itself is so much richer than the simple concept of graphs that's implemented in graph databases today. Now, I agree with that in totally. Okay, let's do the action on them around. Jim Cabilus, I want to start with you. Jim, action item. Yeah, for data professionals and analytic professionals, focus on what graphs can't do, cannot do, because you hear a lot of hyperbole, they cannot be, they're not optimal, they're not useful for unstructured data or for machine learning in database. They're not useful for schema on read. What they are useful for is the same core thing that relational is useful for, which is schema on write applied to structured data. Number one, number two, and I'll be quick on this, focus on the core use cases that are already proven out for graph databases. We've already ticked them off here. Social network analysis, recommendation, engine influencer analysis, semantic web. There's a rich range of mature use cases for which semantic techniques are suited. And then finally, and I'll be very quick here, bear in mind that relational databases have been supporting graph modeling and graph traversal and so forth for quite some time, including pretty much all the core mature enterprise databases. If you're using those databases already and they can perform graph traversals and so forth, reasonably well for your intended application, stick with that. No need to investigate the pure play, graph optimized databases on the market. However, that said, there's plenty of good ones, including AWS is coming out with Neptune. Please explore the other alternatives, but don't feel like you have to go to a graph database first and foremost. All right, David Foyer, action item. Action item, you are going to need to move your data center and your applications from the traditional way of thinking about it, of handling data, which is sequential copies going around usually taking a two or three weeks. You're going to have to move towards a shared data model where the same set of data can have multiple views of it and multiple uses from multiple different types of databases. George Gilbert, action item. Okay, so when you're looking at, you have a graph oriented problem, in other words, the data is shaped like a graph. Question is, what type of database do you use? If you have really complex query and analysis use cases, probably best to use a graph database. If you have really complex update requirements, best to use a combination perhaps of relational and graph or something like multi-model, we can learn from Facebook where for years, they've built their source of truth for the social graph on a bunch of sharded MySQL databases with some layers on top. That's for analyzing the graph and doing graph searches, I'm sorry, for updating the graph and maintaining it in its integrity, but for reading the graph to have an entirely different layer for comprehensive queries and manipulating and traversing all those relationships. So you don't get a free lunch either way. You have to choose your sweet spots and the trade-offs associated with them. All right, Neil Raiden, action item. Well, first of all, I don't think the graph databases are subject to a lot of hype. I think it's just the opposite. I think they haven't got much hype at all and maybe we're going to see that. But another thing is a fundamental difference when you're looking at a graph and a graph query, it uses something called open world reasoning. A relational database uses closed world reasoning. I'll give you an example. Country has capital city. Now you have in your graph that China has capital city a king, China has capital city Beijing. That doesn't violate the graph. The graph simply understands and intuits that the different names are the same thing. Now, if you love to write correlated subqueries, then for many, many of your relationships, I'd say stick to your relational database. I see unique capabilities in the graph that would be difficult to implement in a relational database. All right, thank you very much, guys. Let's talk about what the action item is for all of us. This week we talked about graph databases. We do believe that they have an enormous potential, but we first all have to draw a distinction between graph theory, which is a way of looking at the world and envisioning and conceptualizing solutions to problems and graph database technology, which has the advantages of being able for certain classes of data models to be able to very quickly both write and read data that is based on relationships and hierarchies and network structures that are difficult to represent in a normalized relational database manager. Ultimately our expectation is that over the next few years we're going to see an explosion in the class of business problems that lend themselves to a graph modeling orientation. IoT is an example, very complex. Analytics systems will be an example, but it is not the only approach or the only way of doing things. But what is interesting, what is especially interesting is over the last few years, a change in the underlying hardware technology is allowing us to utilize and expand the range of tools that we might use to support these new classes of applications. Specifically, the move to flash allows us to sustain a single physical copy of data and then have that be represented in a lot of different ways to support a lot of different model forms and a lot of different application types without undermining the fundamental consistency and integrity of the data itself. So that is going to allow us to utilize new types of technologies in ways that we haven't utilized before because before, whether it was object oriented technology or OLAP technology, there was always this problem of having to create new physical copies of data which led to enormous data administrative nightmares. So looking forward, the ability to use flash as a basis for physically storing the data and delivering it out to a lot of different model and tool forms creates an opportunity for us to use technologies that in fact made more naturally mapped to the way that human beings think about things. Now, where is this likely to really play? Well, we talked about IoT, we talked about other types of technologies where it's really likely to play is when the domain expertise of a business person is really pushing the envelope on the nature of the business problem. Historically, applications like accounting or whatnot were very focused on highly stylized data models, things that didn't necessarily exist in the real world. You don't have double entry bookkeeping running in the wild. You do have it in the legal code, but for some of the things that we want to build in the future, people, the devices they own, where they are, how they're doing things, that lends itself to a real world experience and human beings tend to look at those using a graph orientation. And the expectations over the next few years, because of the changes in the physical technology and how we can store data, we will be able to utilize a new set of tools that are going to allow us to more quickly bring up applications, more naturally manage the data associated with those applications, and very important, utilize targeted technology in a broader set of complex application portfolios that are appropriate to solve that particular part of the problem, whether it's a recommendation engine or something else. All right, so once again, I want to thank the remote guys, Jim Kobielis, Neil Raden, and David Floyer. Thank you very much for being here. George Gilbert here in the studio with me. And once again, I'm Peter Burris and you've been listening to Action Item. Thank you for joining us and we'll talk to you again soon.


Hello, and welcome to this presentation of the STM32 General Purpose I.O. interface. It covers the general purpose input and output interface and how it allows connectivity to the environment around the microcontroller. General Purpose I.O. pins of STM32 products provide an interface with the external environment. This configurable interface is used by the MCU and also all other embedded peripherals to interface with both digital and analog signals. Application benefits include a wide range of supported I.O. supply voltages, as well as the ability to externally wake up the MCU from low power modes. General Purpose I.O. provides bidirectional operation, input and output with independent configuration for each I.O. pin. They are shared across up to nine ports named GPIO-A to GPIO-I, each of them hosting up to 16 I.O. pins. I.O. ports support atomic bit set and reset operation through BSS-RR and BRR registers and support the use of bit banding in the memory map. I.O. ports are directly connected to the AHB-2 bus. This allows fast I.O. pin operations, such as toggling of the pin every two clock cycles. Most of the I.O. pins are 5 volt tolerant, when supplied from VDD I.O.X. above 1.6 volts. Up to 14 I.O. pins are supplied by externally providing a voltage within the VDD I.O.2 supply domain. This supply is independent of the VDD provided to the part. This functionality allows users to adapt logic levels of the MCU's I.O. pins to the levels required by external logic, which may be supplied by different voltage domains without need for external level shifters. General Purpose I.O. pins can be configured into several operating modes. An I.O. pin can be configured in an input mode with floating input, input mode with an internal pull-up or pull-down resistor, or as an analog input. An I.O. pin could also be configured in an output mode with a push-pull output or an open-drain output with an internal pull-up or pull-down resistor. For each I.O. pin, the slew rate speed can be selected from four ranges to compromise between maximum speed and emissions from the I.O. switching and adjust the application's EMI performance. I.O. pins are also used by other integrated peripherals to interface with the external environment. Function registers are used to select the configuration for the peripherals in this case. Configuration of the I.O. ports can be locked to increase robustness of the application. Once the configuration is locked by applying the correct write sequence to the lock register, the I.O. pin's configuration cannot be modified until the next reset. Several integrated peripherals such as the USART, TIMERS, SPI, and others share the same I.O. pins in order to interface with the external environment. Peripherals are configured through an alternate function multiplexer, which ensures that only one peripheral is connected to the I.O. pin at a single time. Of course, this selection can be changed during runtime of the application through the GPIO-X, AFRL, and AFRH registers. The independent VDD-IO2 supply domain allows operation in an environment with several different logic supply voltages. It allows the STM32 to communicate with logic supplied from 1.08 volts, much lower than the VDD supply of the STM32, which can range up to 3.6 volts. Up to 14 I.O. pins in this domain can be used to communicate with other logic circuits which are supplied by voltage rails other than VDD. Independent voltage supplies may allow for the omission of external voltage shifters in the design. During and after reset, the alternate functions or AFs are not active. Only debug pins remain in AF mode. JTAG SWD debug pins remaining in AF configuration mode are listed in this slide. When the external oscillator is switched off, pins related to this oscillator can be used as standard I.O. pins. This is the default state after device reset. When the external clock source is used instead of a crystal oscillator, only related OSC-in or OSC-32-in pins are used for the clock, and OSC-out or OSC-32-out pins can be used as standard I.O. pins. The new GPIOX ASCR control register has been introduced on STM32L47X48X devices to control analog interconnection between an I.O. pin and ADC input. This register has to be configured before the ADC conversions are started to correctly bring the signal to the ADC input. This register is removed on other categories of STM32L4 devices and the analog interconnection will be enabled automatically when an ADC channel is selected. A new multi-supply scheme of I.O. pins brings new I.O. pin structures. Previously used naming FT-TT has been extended by abbreviation suffixes to highlight alternate supply sources for each FT and TT I.O. pin. Previously used name FT-F for FM-plus capable pins has been transformed to FT-underscore-F. The new underscore L-suffix has been added to mark pins supplied through LCD supply, suffix underscore A marks pins supplied by analog supply, suffix underscore U is used for pins supplied from USB supply, and suffix underscore S now clearly identifies pins within the independent VDDIO2 supply domain. The absolute maximum rating for each I.O. pin is defined by the lowest voltage of the supplies listed for each I.O. pin. I.O. pins remain active in all modes except standby and shutdown where the only available configuration is input with internal pull-up, pull-down resistor, or floating input. When exiting shutdown mode, the I.O. configuration is lost. When the MCU is under reset, I.O. pins are forced into an analog input mode. This slide presents the key differences between baseline STM32L47X48X devices and other devices. Compared to STM32L47X48X devices, STM32L43X44X45X46X devices have up to 83 GPIOs. They no longer have GPIOs connected to an independent power supply, VDDIO2, and the GPIOX-ASCR register. Enabling an analog switch connected to the ADC inputs is no longer present.


Re-arranging the geometry of the body is about creating a divine form from an ordinary flesh and bone system that we have. These 114 chakras, if we rearrange them in a certain way, a complete different possibility becomes available around those forms. So in India, such people get referred to as Bhagawan, what we refer to as the universe or as cosmos is essentially a complex amalgamation of forms. All these forms, planets, stars, the whole systems, these are all forms. When these forms evolve over a period of time, to become efficient forms, seemingly perpetual, they have become seemingly perpetual in our experience because of the perfection of geometry that they have arrived at. It's not something that has suddenly happened. Each one of these forms have evolved over a period of time. Certain forms which evolved beyond a certain point, when I say a certain point, if a form evolves beyond what the human form is competent of doing, then we will refer to that as the divine form because anything that is above our capability and competence becomes divine in our experience. So when we say divine forms, the misunderstanding in the monotheistic religions is that those who have many forms have lost their way. That is, they do not know what divinity is, they have invented too many images. These forms are not invented, they derived by observing the nature of the universe, identifying that certain forms are able to perform and exist in a reverberance which is beyond what is normally considered human, then all those forms we identified as divine forms which are worthy of looking up to, above all, these are forms we have to learn how to use, how to become accessible to these forms which are more competent forms than our own form. There are natural forms on this planet which can function in a higher intensity than the human form, or we can assemble forms or we can create forms, a certain combination of forms which will function in a higher way than the way we are right now. In fact, the whole system of yoga is just about arranging or rearranging your own form. These 114 chakras which are a certain energy forms by themselves, if we rearrange them in a certain way, the same human being who has just flesh and blood, living within the compulsive nature of that dimension of life, can suddenly be transformed into a higher possibility. It is those people who have transformed themselves or the geometry of their existence to a higher level, either by realization or by understanding or by sheer intensity of energy or emotion, they have transformed themselves into a higher geometric form so that their very presence exudes a completely different dimension of energy, a complete different possibility becomes available around those forms, then we refer to those forms as divine forms. So in India, such people get referred to as Bhagawan or there are so many other names which essentially means god-like or divine. The nature of the human body has come with a certain arrangement. There's a whole science which has become a very quasi kind of science these days because of the intuitive sciences have fallen on bad places because general integrity in the society has fallen. People start saying things, guesswork is considered intuition. Otherwise, whenever a child is born, usually in India they used to call a person who is intuitive who'd come and observe the geometry of the child's body and would say, this is what is possible in this child's life. Not by looking at the stars, but simply looking at the geometry of the child's body, the energetic geometry of the child's body. Probably most of you have heard about how a certain person predicted Gautama, the Buddha's future, he said he will either become a great emperor or a great saint. So this may, for logical minds, this may look like, oh, this is come on, this or that. Both sides of the coin, if you say you're bound to be right, no, he is only talking about looking at the intensity of the geometry. He's saying either in the material world he will achieve great things because he's a king's son, he's saying maybe he will become a great emperor or because of a certain observation, if such intensity is there in the child, why would he waste his time ruling over people? He would rather embrace them, which is more sensible to do. He would rather transform them, which is more sensible to do. So he said the intensity is going beyond being an emperor, being a king's son, probably he will become an emperor. But when I look at the intensity of the geometry, maybe he will become a great sage. Well, he turned out the other way around, he was not wrong in that prediction. If he had fallen back in his life for some reason, maybe he would have become a great emperor, a conqueror, maybe he would have conquered many lands and become a great emperor. Great emperors did not happen without so much guile, violence and many things, which most people wouldn't want to do in their lives. To be a great emperor, you have to do many things that a whole lot of sensible people will not be willing to do. So Gautama chose the other way around and the prediction was not wrong. The prediction is he is looking at the seed and this can become a great tree. So the geometry of the body, rearranging the geometry of the body is about creating a divine form from an ordinary flesh and bone system that we have. Is something wrong with flesh and bone? Nothing wrong. It comes with its limitations. It's a compulsive form. Is something wrong me being compulsive? Nothing wrong. If you don't appreciate what it means to be free, nothing wrong being compulsive. Is something wrong being a creature on this planet? Nothing wrong. It is just that if you die without exploring the possibility of being something more, human life does not get fulfilled.  Because the human being has come with this possibility which is quite limitless, because of that people are trying to fix their ambitions and goals in their life. What is a seamless possibility? People are trying to fix it so that they will feel like achievers. If they pass an examination, they feel great. If they get a job, they feel great. If they earn a million bucks, they feel great.  Human possibility has come with a seamless possibility. There is no way you or me can fix a goal if I reach this I'm done.  If you arrange your inner geometry properly, this becomes a machine to go very far. How far it goes internally is entirely determined by the human being, the individual being. But how far it goes in the world are determined by the times, by the society, the social structures, so many things. You may get knocked down on the way, you may not get crucified, somebody may run you down on highway eight, you know. So, how far we get in the world is subject to many things. How far we get within ourselves is just a question of arrangement of geometry, understanding realization, understanding and the competence of being able to arrange it. The whole yogic system starting from the physical face of us and us to everything is essentially to reorganize or to re-engineer our geometry in such a way that it begins to function in a way that you have not imagined possible till now.  Based on that, if you are a little one step ahead of your neighbor, your ambitions are realized. No, no, no, I'm not just thinking about this. I want to be the richest man in United States. It is still among the lame.  So, a seamless possibility need not be encapsulated into something silly based on the circumstances in which we are living right now.