I'd love to welcome Ian Oswald in London. Hello, Ian. I'll ask you to unmute your microphone so that we can talk back to you, please. There we are. Can you hear me? This works fine and we can see. Thank you, Arten. So I love pandas. I'm really excited to see what you are going to show because flying pandas I've not seen yet. No one's seen flying pandas. Okay, if anybody has questions about this talk, make sure to post them in the Zoom or in the Scott channel. I'll be monitoring both. And now I would like to give you a chance to start your talk, actually. So please enjoy and put the screen. Thank you very much, Margin. So I need to share my screen. I'm going to share desktop two. And then all going well, you can see my slides making pandas fly live from London. And my name, as Martin has said, is Ian Oswald. So who am I? I'm a chief data scientist. I'm an interim chief data scientist. So I work with companies on an interim basis to help them out when they lack a chief data scientist to give direction to companies and to teams. And I've been doing this for 20 years. I've been doing lots of other things, of course, building up to this point. I've built lots of intellectual property over the years. And now I really enjoy going into companies and helping to bring a team up to the next level, which is a really interesting challenge. Lots of different things are happening on all sorts of data science areas from machine learning, data preparation through to delivery of working things. Along the line with that journey I've learned and also a lot of things I found a lot of frustrations. I found a lot of colleagues with frustrations so I've turned them into courses. And so this talk is in fact, I'm sharing a part of my higher performance Python course, which is for me really exciting because I love sharing all of this knowledge that I've gained. And if I step back, I started my presentation journey in the open source Python world in 2011 at EuroPython in Florence. That was the first time I gave a public talk about Python and I gave several hours teaching on high performance. So for me, this is a return to my old place. And in fact, I've been a speaker, teacher and even keynote presenter at EuroPython in the past. I'm also one of the founders of PyData London, one of the largest data science communities on the planet. I'm super proud of that. Got 11,000 members. I work with a lot of companies, lots of high street brands you might recognize. And I'm co-author of a book on high performance Python. So I really care about this subject and the second edition of that book came out just recently. Being an organizer in PyData, I'm also an organizer of the annual conference. I know just how much work goes into it. And so I want to thank the organizers and all the volunteers for the work they've put into this. And I would suggest yourselves, you go and thank them as well. Go into the lobby and just say thank you to really make the event a bit nicer when the participants go and say thanks for all the work that's gone into this. So today's goal, we're going to look at pandas almost exclusively. We're going to look at saving RAM. So we can get more data into our memory without doing anything else. And we're going to look at calculating faster, both with pandas and inside NumPy. And I'm going to give you some reflections on being highly performant as well. And if we have time, we might look at the last slide on some of the data that I've been analyzing that gives us this talk. And you might ask why, why do we want to fit more data into RAM with pandas when, for example, we could use the Intel SDC that we saw in the previous talk. And the simple answer is, hey, it costs time to learn new things. But we are probably more efficient overall if we can get more out of the current tools that we have rather than having to learn new tools. If we don't have to learn those new tools, it's cool to learn new tools, but it's time expensive. They always work a little bit differently. So maybe it's good to extend our knowledge and go a bit further with the current tool than before we have to upgrade even further. So let's look at an example. Here I'm looking at UK Companies House registration data. So this is the registration data for the four and a half million companies that exist in the UK at the moment but are still alive. It's open data, we can do some really nice analysis on it. And it's a really good mixed data type set. So we have strings like the types of companies, if the names of the companies, their registration numbers, the year they were formed and some other numeric indicators, no financial information, but a bunch of other numeric. So we get a nice rich data set to work with. If we've got four and a half million rows of data, we've read it in with read CSV, we get strings for all of the string data types. And it turns out that strings are expensive. They cost a lot of RAMs. They take a lot of RAM and it means that operations can be slow. So for example here, we've got the data frame with a company category. There aren't actually that many company categories that you can legally be registered as, but the four and a half million companies all have a company category. And so we can see the breakdown here with the value counts. And if we ask for the memory usage at the bottom of the screen, asking for a deep introspection. So we count the memory used by every single string entry on every single row of data.  We find out that it takes about 370 megabytes of RAM in this instance. So that's quite a lot of memory, right? That's 370 megabytes of RAM for what is ultimately a very small set of indicators. If we switch to the new pandas data type category, the categorical data type, that's some encoding behind the scenes. We get exactly the same kind of operations on the data. So we do the value counts. We can ask for the number of characters in the string and do all the other usual things we'd expect. But if we ask for the same memory usage with a deep introspection and no index, we find that it takes four megabytes. That's roughly 1% of the previous memory cost. That's an amazing saving, 100% down to 1% with a simple change. Now, if you're doing lots of work on strings, maybe you need to use the strings in some other form. Maybe you don't have a few strings frequently copied. Maybe you have lots of unique strings in which case maybe the category isn't the right type for you. Category isn't a magic string type. Category just takes low cardinality items, so items that have lots of repetition and it encodes them efficiently. And so behind the scenes, if we look at the cat attribute, we can look at the categories and the codes behind it. And we see that under categories, we have community interest company, European public limited liability company. These are encoded in the order that they're seen in the data. They're given a numeric code and it's the code, the numeric code that is stored against every row of data. And that's where our saving comes from. So we start storing lots of integers against each row of data, rather than those strings, then the strings are looked up when we need them. So we can still do our string operations. But if we had, for example, lots of integer numbers, I know, and numbers encoding product categories, zero through a thousand on a million rows of data, but we only had a thousand product categories, you could use cats to achieve exactly the same kind of speed up, except the same kind of memory optimization. And then we should talk about speed ups. So what do we get with our speed ups? Well, if we've got a company category and we perform a value counts, here it costs 485 milliseconds, about half a second. If I do the same operation on the cat variant, the categorical variant, 28 milliseconds. So that's, what's that, 15 times faster. It's more than an order of magnitude faster. So it's a huge saving in both RAM and in speed by going to the categorical data type. So there's a first tip for you. Do think about using the categorical data type. We even get faster lookups. So if we're doing the no category version and we're looking up a particular string, we have to do four and a half million string comparisons that cost 280 milliseconds. Then if we do the same thing on the categorical version, you might look at the number and just say, oh, 569, 569 is bigger than 281. That's no good. But look at the units. That's not milliseconds. That's microseconds. That's a 500 times speed up on the lookup. And that's because we're doing integer comparisons behind the scenes. We've looked up private limited company as a string and then we do that integer comparison on the codes. So it gives us a huge speed up. So if you can get away with using categories on low cardinality data, so things that are repeated frequently, do try it. You're gonna get amazing speed up to RAM and in speed. Now let's move on to another example. So what if we're looking at say float 64? So we're thinking about, we're thinking about calculating some new numeric columns. We've got our date time column here. And so we've got a date time item now, so 2027. We've got the incorporation date for each of our companies. And we calculate a delta between the two. So we find out companies that were registered yesterday are one day old. Companies that were registered 10 years ago will be 10 years old. And we store this in age years. So it's a floating point number. This kind of operation will typically give us a float 64 delta type by default. And so we get a float 64 times four and a half million rows and a float 64 is comprised of eight bytes. So each entry costs eight bytes and gives us a huge and astronomical range of precision, possibly more precision than we need. And if you look at the dynamics on this chart, so it's kind of interesting. We see that lots of companies are young. Some companies are 10 years old. Fewer companies are 20 years old. And there are companies that are over 50 years old. I think it's something like 190 years old for the oldest company in company's house for extant companies. So these are companies that are still alive. Company's house doesn't give you a public register of companies that have been delisted. You only get the live companies. So we're looking at some strange snapshot of all of the companies that are registered in the UK. But we can see that lots of them are quite old. So what can we do with the storage behind this and can we get any speed up? Well, if we take our data frame DF and we take age here, so that's the age we just calculated, that's a float 64. In a moment, I'll talk about the sizing behind this. We can use as type to convert that to a float 32 and we can use as type to convert it to a float 16. So a float 32 is four bytes and a float 16 is two bytes. And so what does that mean for us? Well, if you look at the three rows at the bottom of the screen, type float 64 has a range 0.0528 to 1908972 and a float 32 has the same range. So it turns out by going to a float 32 from a float 64 for practical purposes. If you think about one day of age is 1,365th. So approximately three decimal places when the numeral one will be one year old. So we care about three decimal places. So a float 64 and a float 32 for our purposes have the same precision but a float 32 has half the storage requirement. And a float 16, half the storage requirement again, so a quarter of the original, but we get a rounding error. We get a rounding error that's approximately months in this encoding. So for some purposes, that might be fine. Maybe months of approximate age is good enough. It'll be deterministic.  You'll just find that it's off by days or months if you try to reverse engineer your incorporation dates. But maybe that's sufficient and maybe saving four times the round of that column is a good thing. And if we look at the top right, you can see there a time operation on the 64 bit and the 32 bits as a float 64 and float 32 variants. Typically a 32 bit float comes out a little bit faster on numeric operations, maybe a couple of percent, but typically a bit faster. I didn't show the float 16. That's much slower hardware. It's always interpreted in hardware for a float 16 to save round but slower. So your top tip here is think about going to float 32s rather than float 64s. If the imprecision that is introduced is not a problem here, there's no imprecision that we can see, it's fine for our needs. So let's look at a quick summary of this. In the top left hand data frame, I've got a company category in age years. That's the original string categories or original string, sorry, ages in float 64. That takes 827 megabytes. The bottom right corner, I've got the categorized version of the company strings and age years as float 32. That takes 462 megabytes, nearly 50% saving on that particular data frame. So we could double the number of rows that we're doing or add more columns as extra series into that extra round that we freed up. I've got a tool, D-type diet. I wrote this to help automate my process of understanding what the simplest change I could make to a column is that doesn't introduce any errors. So particularly the third column along is called number different. You see number different is zero. That means that for the change that's being proposed by D-type diet, you could find that on my GitHub account under Ian Oswald. If this change would introduce no errors, the first change on the company name column, it proposes category, that sounds brilliant. We're at 552 megabytes, but we were at 366. So actually we've saved minus 185 megabytes. Well, that's bad. That's because company name is unique. If you take unique items where there's no repetition and you try to categorically encode them, you cost more RAM, you don't save RAM. On the next example, company category, we're at four megabytes. We were at 369, so we've saved 365, which in the shrunk two column on the right, that means you're at 1% of where we were. That's due to all that repetition that we've saved. And if we look at accounts, account ref day, there were two proposals, Float 16 and Float 32. They saved 25 and 50% of the RAM without introducing any imprecision for that particular example and the subset of data. So if you want to save RAM, I would suggest also you have a look at D-type diet because by saving RAM, often we make our operations work faster. We reduce the amount of data that we have to load from a persistent file storage, like a pickle or a parquet file. And we decrease the saving time if we're sending data back down the wire and we decrease the transaction time if we're sending data to and from other processes or to and from something like a database. So shrinking down the data from the default data type to pandas makes things more efficient and faster overall. So these are good things, you want these things. So what about dropping to NumPy? Well, here's an interesting question. So behind the scenes, originally, pandas was a lightweight wrapper around NumPy data types. And by that I mean, if you think about the simplest implementation of pandas, it will be a dictionary where every column is a column name and it mapped to a NumPy data type. So a NumPy array where all the arrays have the same length. So you might have a NumPy array of int64 and a NumPy array of 32 and then they were mapped inside a dictionary. And then pandas became more complicated and it grew. And then we've had lots more things put on top, including non-standard data types that don't come for free inside NumPy. So we have the datetime operation. We have objects to store strings and other things if we want them to. We have time deltas. And we now have extension data types. So these extension data types give us ways of extending pandas beyond anything that's baked into pure pandas. And there's some interesting extensions out there. One is for IP addresses, for example, we get formatting, visual display and some kind of constraints around the representation of IP addresses. And we have the new nullable data types just being introduced, but this all adds complexity. So the top example, we take our age years, our float 64 and we do some, that takes 19 milliseconds. If I take the same column, which is a float 64 behind the scenes and I do dot values to go down to NumPy and I ask for some, two milliseconds. So that's a 10-time saving. That's a 10-time speed up just by dropping down to the NumPy storage container behind the actual pandas column. That's kind of amazing. So does this mean that the pandas is slow or something weird is going well? Kind of yes, kind of no. So first of all, pandas is doing the right thing for us. It's making our lives easier by giving us a cohesive and well-checked, robust interface to these underlying types and then wrapping them up nicely. So we don't have to think about them. For example, here, if you call some on a pandas data type that has NANDs in it, you get the sum without the NAND and the same for the standard deviation and other operations. If you drop down to the NumPy variant and you forget to call the NAND variant of a function, you might end up with a result which is NAND. There's a NAND standard deviation, for example, which is different to standard deviation. And if you don't know to call the right one, you get the wrong result. If you stay in pandas, you get the right result, but it's a bit slower. So I've got more details in the talk that I gave recently at PyData Amsterdam and you'll find that talk on my blog, which is enosval.com if you want to go into that. There's another reason why these things are slow. There's all of this overhead due to handling all of these different extension types. So this is a nice diagram produced by a tool that my friend James Powell has put together a while ago and a copy of that tool is on my GitHub. This tool says that if I call a function, for example, series.sum, so that same column we had a moment ago.sum, it records every function called from inside.sum and all of the functions called by it. There's not a profiling function. I don't care about the time, I just care about the complexity, how many lines of code, how many functions, how many files are being touched. Let me get this complex diagram. And so we can zoom into that and we see the indexes, D types, core ND types for NumPy extension arrays, all sorts of things are being called.  We see that simpler complexity diagram. The things get simpler if we jump behind the scenes to NumPy. So it goes faster, which is brilliant, but you have to know that you want to go down to that level. And that's important, right? If you want to take away generality and get become more specific, things go faster, but you add a bit of complexity that maybe you have to manage. Because pandas are necessarily slow. Well, no, one of the things is by default, pandas does not install the bottleneck library. So here I've got the bottleneck library. First of all, in the first example, line 15, I turn it off to use bottleneck as false. I calculate series mean it takes 54 milliseconds. I then turn bottleneck on. It's a background compiler that you don't see, you just have to install it. I calculate the same operation, 16 milliseconds three times speed up just by installing one library for free and doing nothing else. It's used automatically in the background. You just have to remember to install it. It doesn't come for free. We can still go faster if we go down to the NumPy layer, but then you have to start managing whether you've got NAND or you have the right data type. So my advice here is install bottleneck. That's a really simple one. In fact, there are two optional dependencies that are not installed by default. If you look at the pandas enhancing performance page, you'll see reference to them, get bottleneck and get numexpr. And then pandas will become faster. It won't change the storage that is required. You have to do that manually. To do that, you might want to look at the D-type diet package that I put together up on my GitHub page. And also I've got a tool, iPython memory usage. That's actually in the Python package index. You can pit install and condor install it. That tells you in Jupyter how much memory each operation you're typing is taking as you go through your interactive session. And that can help identify if costly memory areas. What about making things faster in other ways? So what if we've got a pure Python function? Here I've got a loop which I'm going to apply. Here I'm saying if the older a company is, the more likely it is in some kind of Monte Carlo sampling scenario. It's more likely to have one big contract. It's won the jackpot. It's got a big win. Hooray!  It costs CPU because it goes around in a loop a lot of times. And so when we run this with apply over four and a half million rows, it costs 13 seconds. And as we saw in the Intel talk earlier on, if you use number, wrap up your code with an NGIT, then suddenly it goes in this case 10 times faster. That's an amazing win just for including number and wrapping your code with NGIT.  Not all of pandas, most of pandas is not supported. Not all of pure Python is supported. Number is quite selective and the Intel talk was interesting. Maybe there were some interesting extensions that have been made available now that weren't available six months ago. But you get some huge advantages by using number. Another way to get an advantage is to use the Dask project. And so Dask is allied very strongly with pandas. Dask lets you go multi-core parallel and multi-machine multi-core parallel. And it wraps up multi-core versions of a numpy array. So you can stretch arrays across multiple machines or bags that like dictionaries that split across multiple machines or multiple cores or pandas data frames where each data frame is chopped up into segments and put onto different cores or different machines and then things are computed in parallel. Here's a very simple example. I take that one huge project function that I had before. I take my distributed data frame which is a variant of the original pandas data frame. So you dd.from pandas to turn my data frame into the ddf of distributed data frame. I ask Dask to take the distributed data frame and apply in parallel my one huge project function, no modifications to that function, no modifications to the underlying data. I just split it up and Dask does that for me and then my 15-second execution takes place in five seconds. It's not a pure four-time speedup. I've got four physical cores and four virtual cores. You can see them maxed out at the bottom of the screen because there's some overhead with copying data around but you get a nice speedup just for a couple of extra lines. So here's something to pay attention to. It's important that we are highly performant. Not that we necessarily write highly performant code but we as developers, we as data scientists as researchers are performant. So mistakes slow us down. So mistakes in our implementation make us go more slow and I've been reflecting on this as I get towards 20 years in this domain. Think about using the nullable data types in 64 and Boolean that have been introduced inside pandas. These give us the power to mix integers and Booleans with nulls without switching to a float 64, the lowercase f version, which can introduce rounding errors. It's kind of interesting. The use of unit tests and any kind of testing is incredibly important. We want lots of that in our data science code. And I cover loads of this inside of my training because to me it's, I found it's one of the best ways to make myself a more efficient developer and more efficient in reaching my solution in a way that I trust my code. And I think it's resilient and robust and repeatable.  So you can go and take all of those. And I've got a newsletter. There's a link to that on my blog. If you sign up to that then every two weeks you get some data science jobs that I know about and tips of things that I've discovered and tools that I'm working on. So that might interest you. You'll find that all on my blog. There's one other topic I wanted to touch on just very briefly. There are two interesting tools separate to the Intel SDC, Vakes and Modin. These extend the pandas idea in different ways. Modin extends pandas, it sits on top of pandas. And if you've got lots of cores, like 20 or 50 cores and lots of RAM, like tens of gigabytes and a huge beta frame, it will try to make things run in parallel across that, which is very interesting. And Vakes is a different implementation of a pandas-like system using memory mapping on the disk. If you've got terabytes of data, Vakes can make your pandas-like operations run really quickly on all that data. You'll find that I've given parts talks on that this year. Go on to my blog and you'll see those from remote to Python earlier in the year and Budapest BI. So in summary, it's important to make things right and then you can make them fast. Always think about being performant, not just writing performant code, but being performant in your development style, write defensively, clean up your code, read factor, write unit test, communicate to your colleagues what's going on. If you're interested in classes on these kind of topics, please do message me and have a chat, have a look at my blog. I'm very happy to talk about that. And I have a request. So I've been giving talks now for nine years. They're all volunteer, they're all fully open sourced. One thing I love, and right now, I can't see any of you, I haven't seen any of your smiling faces. Hopefully I've made some of you happy and I've taught some of you nice new things. One thing I ask after all of my talks now is if I've taught you something, send me an email, ask for my address, and send me a postcard. I stick it on the wall with all the other postcards and it's a nice bit of physical feedback for me to tell me that I'm doing something useful and people are getting useful things out of all of this volunteer time that I've put into the community. And don't forget, go back into the lobby and thank all the volunteers and the other speakers for all the volunteer time they've put into the community as well. Thank you very much for listening. Oh, thank you very much for the talk. You're very welcome. We have a little bit of time for questions. So let's try this. And the first question we have here is from Daniel. Do the new nullable data types and pandas have a significant impact on performance over standard non-nullable types? I think the simple answer is always going to be yes. And that's because the built-in data types are, they're provided by the hardware. So that's why float 16, lower case F float 16 is slow, that's because it's simulated by the hardware whilst float 32 and float 64 are fast. And in 32, in 8, in 64 are fast because they're provided by the hardware. As soon as you put on top some high-level interpretation, so the capital I in 64 and the upcoming capital F float 64 which are nullable with different semantics as soon as you have to have a bit mask for the nullable items and the underlying in 64, if the mask things, more operations occur and even with the fast compiler, things have to, additional things are happening outside of the silicon. And so things will go slower. So yes, it's slower, but you're more likely to be correct. And getting things wrong is the easiest way to lose a minute or an hour or a day or a month or maybe even your job if you've got things really badly wrong. So I'm a huge fan of getting things right and worrying about speed later on. Okay, and final question, is there any trick if you have pandas operations which take up a lot of processing time to get some feedback over the running time? So like, for example, if you do something that takes a minute or two that you could get a progress bar or a feedback that you could then also cancel if you realize your code's too slow. Oh, interesting question. So by default, no. I think I'm correct in saying by default, no. Often in a Jupyter Notebook, you can stop the execution of the current cell if it's just taking too long. Dask has support for a progress bar. So they use the TQDM module. And TQDM is a really nice lightweight progress bar which plugs into lots of tools but you have to add support for it. It doesn't tie into pandas by default but Dask takes it by default. So if you've made an operation run across multiple partitions of your data, Dask will use that progress bar to tell you how things are doing. And you could use Dask on a single machine, on a single core partitioning a large data file into smaller partitions that fit into RAM. So you can process with Dask one terabyte of data on a small RAM machine with one CPU if you wanted and you would get a progress bar out of it. I think what I've normally seen is that tools use the TQDM progress bar to represent the length of time taken by operations. I don't know of anything else beyond that, I'm afraid. Okay, thank you very much for this talk, this was useful. I've got one more slide, if we want to see it, if we've got a moment. Sure. We've got a bonus slide just in case I had time to talk about it. So I care about the effect of the pandemic on the British economy. That's why I've been looking at companies house data. And I thought it was interesting to graph a simple statistic out of it. Now I didn't need to go high performance on this. This runs in a couple of seconds anyway with only four and a half million rows of data. But it's a nice data set to work off because of all of those mixed types. If we look at the trends here, we go back to 2018 and we look at the registration frequency by week for companies. Actually, sorry, registration frequency per day for companies. And we see that typically in 2018, we're seeing about one and a half thousand companies being registered per day with a sharp decline on January the first and around Christmas. That's because the offices are closed. Frequency goes up early in the year, levels off for summer, sort of July onwards. And then by Christmas, so January 2019, it drops down again. Then it suddenly spikes up again up to 2,000 registrations per day, calms down for the rest of summer. And then by Christmas, it drops down again. Early 2020, it jumps up to a similar level. And then March 23 lockdown, everything drops down with this precipitous decline in company registrations. And then we've seen a resurgence of registrations in the UK, which begs an interesting question. Well, is it that we've stopped registering companies and then we started registering so people started making new businesses or were the staff not allowed to go to companies house and register and actually actually do the physical work of registering companies? And as an indicator of the impact of the pandemic on the British economy, well, what does this mean? Does it mean that we're really seeing a lagged indicator for economic activity via new businesses? We don't see the activity elsewhere working on a project with that kind of thing elsewhere. To me, this is interesting because you can do this kind of analysis yourself on open data provided by your government, particularly in the EU. And if you haven't done that kind of thing in your curious, I would strongly suggest you go and get some open data and look at the effect of the pandemic on the world around us. It's kind of an interesting point in time to get this data and see these trends coming through that we've never seen before. And you can do it all with Python tools and the tools mentioned in this talk. Right, there we go. No, thanks for that. And if you have some links for open data, maybe you can post those in... Yeah, I'll post them into my talk channel for sure. Or your cat. And that would also be the right place to ask more questions about this. Thank you very much. I learned a lot and I think I have to find out your address to send you a postcard. I would love a postcard. I really would love posting. Please send me a postcard.


And so without any further ado, we're a little tiny bit ahead of schedule, but I'm out of welcoming things to say. So I thought I'd turn it over to some of our board members and we will talk about who we are a little bit and also what we've been up to. So it's a big updates kind of talk, and also the state of Kentucky plant conservation. So I'm going to turn it over to Tara Littlefield, which she's our KNPS president. There we go. Thank you, Jen. And I'll reiterate this is super exciting. This is the first zoom symposium conference that I've been involved in in organizing. And I really love it that a lot of people have their screens on the videos I can see people's faces it's really exciting. Been a little people deprived this year. So that's really exciting. Welcome Kentucky botany community and beyond. I'm Tara Littlefield, and I am very excited about everyone joining us for this cool event that highlights some of the botany projects that are going on right now across our state. So a little bit of background on Kentucky native plant society, we are an organization nonprofit statewide organization whose mission is to promote education preservation and protection of native plants and natural communities. Before I go on to that because I'm kind of new at this I realized that I was supposed to have shared my screen. So let's see the screen share now Jen. Oh, there it is on the bottom. Okay. So people who know me know that I love to say for the love of Kentucky plants a lot. So this is my cover slide, a bunch of plants that are really important to me. So, I'll, I'll start this again now that I've got my screen everyone can see my screen. So this event is organized by the Kentucky native plant society so we are a nonprofit statewide organization whose mission is to promote education preservation and protection of native plants and natural communities. We work on accomplishing this mission through efforts involving native plant education and outreach, supporting native plant research, supporting rare plant conservation, appreciating natural communities and encouraging the appropriate use of native plants in gardens and restoration projects. The purpose of this symposium is to bring people together professionals, academics, citizen scientists and actively discuss current topics and projects that are occurring across the state and use this as a way of creating an interconnected network of plant people, partners of supporters that can help us tackle some of these issues we face in order to ensure that the native plants of Kentucky and beyond are here for generations to come. So we all, we all love plants we all want them to be around for a long time. So we're also really excited to hear from Dr. Alan weekly, our keynote speaker who will be discussing plant diversity in the southeast conservation and future resources and current resources for plant knowledge. Who are we. So the native plant society has been around since 1986. Next year will be our 35th anniversary so that's a really long, a really long standing organization. The folks that are members of the Kentucky native plant society. I mentioned this already we're academics, professionals, citizen scientists, gardeners, we all share love of plants. I've been involved with the native plant society for about 17 years. I first started out leading hikes at our spring law flower weekend. I have served many roles, a few roles over the years. And for this past term 2018 to 2020, I've been the current president, but I'm also a professional botanist a heritage botanist and plant conservation manager at the Office of Kentucky Nature Preserves. And so a lot of the talks that you'll hear here here today are our folks from from nature preserves in our plant conservation section. So our other volunteer executive committee members include Vice President Heidi Brown writer who is also a nature preserve botanist, Secretary Emily Ellingson, who is the native plants curator at the UK Arboretum and botanical garden and who's a local botanist, long standing member, you can see the photos here I don't know if you can see my little pointer here but everyone was really good about sending in photos except for bill so bill may or may not be a cowboy on a horse. But that's what you get when you don't send in your bios or your pics for our website. But he's our long standing treasure he's been our treasure for about a decade. Our volunteer or our board members include Dr. Jen Coslow. I don't think you really gave an introduction to yourself Jen. Jen is a plant ecologist from and teaches at the Eastern Kentucky University. He's on our board as well he's the botanist at the Danube National Forest, Deborah White consultant botanist and former nature preserve botanist West Cunningham who's also a consultant botanist. And last but certainly not least, Jeff Nelson, who's a local botanist out in Western Kentucky and long standing member, and I wanted to give an additional shout out to Jeff Nelson. Thanks, who he is also our webmaster and our social media Facebook admin, and we could not do what we do without Jeff, and certainly all of our other board and executive members. I just wanted to give a shout out to Susan Harkins and Nick Koenig, who are ladies slip, ladies slipper newsletter editors and so you'll hear more from from them and more about our newsletter and our website in a little bit. So in the beginning of the year. We had a lot of promise, Jeff Nelson lid efforts with made a plant society to begin a strategic planning process back in February. We had a lot of interest in attendance. Up here in the in the right corner that's we met at Burnheim in person so this was obviously before. COVID hits. So that was really great lots of momentum. And in early March, several native plant society members and nature preserve folks went down to these partners for plant conservation meeting. In Georgia back in early March and we were really excited to learn and collaborate with our many southeastern partners on many topics similar to the talks you'll see today. So of course we didn't plan for the global pandemic in our strategic planning and a lot of the things that we were planning this year. We had to adjust our plans and put a lot of things on hold, like a lot of via the world. We normally host an annual wildflower weekend in the in the spring, and that's for the public. We have hikes workshops fall meetings or symposiums. But of course, those were kind of shelf to the side as priorities shifted this year. So, there might be a slide missing. Yes, I wanted to say, despite these changes, we were really lucky to still accomplish several goals through the native plant society this past year, including revamping our newsletter, and we were able to award some grants. Much of my time was spent at my job at nature reserves conducting field work and so many virtual meetings. A lot of virtual meetings, I live out in the country with bad internet so it was, it was touchy at best but we got through it. And of course I've got small children this year, I became a full time teacher, as well as a full time professional botanist of what I've always been. So, I realized that you can't really function with little sleep, possibly half the time. I also learned that my daughter is now at the age where she can be an actual field assistant. So she's eight. So we did a lot of field work together in the spring in the summer and so that was actually really exciting. She was my assistant on the Trillium Pusilum status surveys that I did back in the spring, and I would check up on rare plants and she would try to catch critters like salamanders and amphibians and things like that. So, just real quick, some native plant statistics we've got a really diverse state from the Cumbulum Mountains in the east to the swamps in the west. A lot of cool natural areas in between that you're going to hear about in a lot of our talks. We have over 2400 native plants, 434 non native or non vascular plants. And now over 80 described natural communities, thanks to recent efforts by Martina Heinz, who's a ecologist at Nature Preserves, along with some other biologists. There has been new lichen survey work conducted by Dr. Risk and Nature Preserve staff Kendall McDonald. So we're really excited about that just over 50 new state records have been described recently, or have been discovered recently. And we're still finding new species unknown to science in the state. So how cool is that. Of course our floral diversity is declining in many areas and we've all heard development and habitat loss and invasive species and kind of that doom and gloom scenario that kind of creeps up in our daily lives. Only 5% of our flora is is rare word listed. Globally it's much worse with two fifths of the plants at risk of extinction. But I tend not to focus on negative stats and I like to think about ways that we can improve the situation. And I really like nerdy botanical names, apparently. But at the very least we can all work together and try to accomplish our goals of conserving our floor together. So teamwork and partnerships. I feel like that's happening. We've increased new memberships new partnerships and connections and they're being made in strides in the realm of plant conservation in particular. I've been particularly amazed at the influx of the next generation of plant enthusiasts. The office of Kentucky nature reserves has increased focus these past few years on plant conservation efforts with our newly formed plant conservation sections we now have seven staff running around doing botanical work and coordinating really important conservation projects around the state. We even had our first intern this past semester Elijah Hicks who was working on conservation projects in the Red River porch. I'll touch real quick on just a few of native plant societies initiatives. We love iNaturalist. It's been a really big hit and I know that in several of the talks you'll be hearing about some of the cool things that were found through iNaturalist. But in 2019 we started the Kentucky Botanist big year and so this is a really good tool to use if you'd like to make life lists. And it's a great own personal database. I use it as my own personal database as I travel around the country and in Kentucky as well. So this year the event is still ongoing but last year we gave out coffee mugs and you see Candle over here in the corner with her coffee mug. We gave out prizes to the most identified, most observed and most species. So that's just such a really neat tool and we're still discovering new things on iNaturalist and creating new projects. So please I encourage you to get, if you are on iNaturalist, get on some of our projects and get involved. So I'll also mention our new citizen sciences program that we're working on with the native plant society. So Nature Preserves has been involved in Whitehaired Goldenrod Conservation and the Red River Gorge for several decades. We're working with the Forest Service to create a volunteer citizen scientist program to monitor the Whitehaired Goldenrod along with other species in the sandstone rock houses. So this program will start for the next next year's field season in 2021 and it will involve some training that we're developing right now, but we need Native Plant Society's help. So if you go to the gorge and you want to adopt one of our rock shelters, please reach out to us. We're looking for next year's recruitment of volunteers for this pilot program. So we're hoping that this program will be a long-standing program. So please reach out if you want to get involved. And I just wanted to mention what I've noticed this past year and also what I've been doing at my own house. There's just been an increase. It seems interest in native plant guarding. I think it's always been there, but I think that the COVID has forced people at home. And I've talked to native plant nurseries who have mentioned to me that sales were actually up this past year. So I just think that's really cool. We got a lot of requests with Native Plant Society. Where do I buy native plants? So at the beginning of the year, we spent some time revamping our lists on the website. So they're up to date. Please check them. If you're a native plant nursery, make sure that you're on there and reach out to us if you're not and you need to get added to our list. But I've enjoyed also watching on Facebook the increase in seed exchange events this past year, particularly in the Louisville area where one group started a native plant seed exchange group that quickly grew over to 100 folks, actively networked to exchange native seed for native plant gardens. And Native Plant Society last year even held our first seed exchange event. So one of our tasks, some of our board members are working on policies and guidance for some of these seed exchanges that we think Native Plant Society can be a valuable resource. We possibly serve to connect these resources for local restoration projects as well. So with that, I will turn it over back to Jen and she will give an overview of our grants program. Hi again everybody. We are really proud of our grants program. I can see that it's not it's not a massive program but it also has supported a lot of students over the years and more on that in just a minute but can see one of our previous grant recipients has gone on and still having a career in botany. And I can see that I'm making Heidi just slightly uncomfortable sorry Heidi. But it's been a great resource over the years. And if we look at the next slide, you can get some idea of the types of projects that we have been funding and this is just by numbers but you can see that there's been a focus on a lot of the things that impact plant conservation. Some of it is basic research, such as flora's where you will just learn what is in an area some of it is management focused, either looking at invasive species or endangered species. We've had pollination biology, and then some more basic evolution. So these grants over the years have really just been student grants, but we have moved into having more opportunities for people other than just students. So we still have the student grants. And they have a $250 limit for undergraduates and a $500 limit for graduate students. One of the great things about these grants is that oftentimes one finds it difficult to find a grant that will pay for things like travel. And very often when doing botanical research travel is the thing that you need money for the most and so those. Those monies have come in handy for I know a lot of students I'm at Eastern Kentucky University but I'm plenty of other places to. And we have new opportunities now which is super exciting. They are not restricted to students but they fit in really well with our missions, our mission to first understand and advocate for native plant conservation. And so we have a native plant inventory grant. You don't have to be a student for that that has a $250 limit. And then we also have a rare and native plant restoration grant. And that's really exciting because that's a way that we can directly support people propagating plants that are of conservation interest. And it's very, it's better if you're interested in that kind of thing if you coordinate with Office of Kentucky Nature Preserves because right now they're serving as the clearinghouse for all of the information about rare plants they are the seat of the heritage program for our state. So if you are interested in those grants you should check out our webpage and there's a subsection about that there. And if you're interested in particular in the restoration grant, reach out to Tara, or Heidi in particular, so that you can put forth a successful proposal. And so that's really all I had to say about the grants but I think it's a really great program like I said I've seen it benefit a lot of students so far. And I think it's a great way for us to help also build a network, and get more people engaged in the work that needs to be done. And I'm going to turn it over to this is, is this you Jeff.  All right, and here we are. Thank you, Jen, appreciate it. Yeah, that's the, I'm the webmaster as well as being a board member of can PS I'm the webmaster. And I know most of you have have been to our website I've seen the website. In case you haven't, it's pretty easy to find K in PS dot, or G, and you'll see this welcome screen and the homepage. We have, I think some some really good information on the website but there's always room for improvement. So if anybody's interested in helping out with the website. Just shoot an email, or if you have any questions about the website or actually any questions at all about anything related to the can PS. The email address is KY plants at K in PS dot, or G, and I just put that in the chat window if anybody's wants to look that up. So any email if you're interested in helping on the website. Just shoot an email to that address. Also, I help out moderating on the Kentucky Native Plant Society Facebook group. That's become gosh we've got well over 5000 members on that group now. And so it's really an exciting place and good place to answer questions get IDs. If you see a plant take a picture of it and just post it there and say what is this, and usually you get an ID pretty quickly so that's that Instagram. We have an Instagram account that is managed by Emily Ellingson. Emily, do you want to pop in for a second and say anything about the Instagram account. Sure. It's the they handle the is KY native plant society. Haven't been updating it much lately, just because of the last year we've had. But I'm looking forward to putting more pictures of recommendations or reminders for events and photos and educational materials about all of Kentucky's native plants. Thank you. And let's see, I guess I'll just turn it back over to Tara for a minute. Okay, I just wanted to reiterate, Jeff mentioned Facebook. You know, Facebook's got a lot of pros and cons. The reason why I use it is because of the large botanical community. And there's, there's just so much communication with different plant folks across the country and world but particularly in the southeast so I know that, you know, there's a lot of, maybe not so good things about Facebook too but but I encourage you to join a lot of these plant groups on Facebook you'll learn a lot. So I'm going to pass it to Nick Koenig so that he could talk about our new lady slipper newsletter blog. Can you all hear me. Yep. Okay, I don't want to speak too long but I just wanted to give a quick update on our numbers recently through the past year Jeff sent me some data and I went through the data and in the past quarter we've had 4600 hits on our articles which is super exciting. In the past year we've seen a hit of 12,400 which is super exciting to see that many people reading articles online, especially during quarantine I think people are flocking more toward the internet so Susan and I are always looking for more writers so if you have a special interest that is botanical related. There are many different things that we do special interests, such as native plant spotlights book reviews invasive plant corners which is just a highlight on an invasive species that grows in our state that teaches people how to identify it all the way to management so they can remove it from their landscape if they would like. And I just wanted to highlight a few of those articles they've really gotten a lot of hits this year kudos to Susan Jeff, Dave Taylor and Tom. I'm not sure how to say his last name, Kenner. I think but the invasive plant corner, the bush honeysuckle article had 1900 hits in the past year which is super exciting to see that many people and maybe even if just 10 of them decided to remove some of it that's a success in my book so. And then also the how can you save the American chestnut had 1600 hits in the past year and then planting trees. We're doing it wrong had 1000 hits so a lot of really great articles that have been written so I ask anybody if they want to get an article out there are readers so a lot of people will be reading your work through the lady slipper so if you would like. Anything published, you can email us so I will drop our email in the chat and Susan I get those automatically so we will get back to you and we just usually provide little grammatical updates if we see any but then we'll get that posted and we send out a monthly newsletter. So if you'd like to join that you can go to our website as well to sign up for that newsletter. And there's the chat. Thanks Nick. Let me just jump in one other thing. For those of you have been longtime members, you may know this but the lady slipper. Has been published since 1986 we've, which is a newsletter of the KNPS were in this is volume 35th year that it's been published. At the beginning of 2020. We decided that rather than sending out lengthy, long email newsletters that it would be more appropriate. Now that we had a website to make the lady slipper a blog, so that we could post articles whenever somebody's got an article and keep it running. In addition to the blog, then we set up so that all of you who are on our mailing list, each month get a digest which lists the articles published in the previous month, the titles and a brief description of the article. So, subscribe to the KNPS newsletter there's a link on the front page of our website. And in addition to that the blog itself we on the website you'll see on the main menu. There's a link to the lady slipper you can go to the blog. There's a link to the archives of virtually every article ever published on the in the lady slipper since volume one 1986. So it's always fun to kind of browse through those so


Mr. Speaker, it may take the house a little time to come down from the altitude Because I am accustomed to the member flying in a plane But these days I see he is flying in the rocket And he is going on a different thing So Mr. Speaker, first of all, I want to join the Prime Minister in celebrating and acknowledging our success at UNESCO And achieving our presidency of that Nevada organization But the success points to continuation, continuity And so I think hopefully the Prime Minister and even the member from LABRI Would join us in also thanking Ambassador Shaguri Who has been our ambassador over several different administrations And has established a significant foothold in that organization Has developed an incredible rapport with all of the other countries And the respect that Sen. Lucia has gained at UNESCO In a large part, not by himself, but a large part Is it attributable to him, but I think for all of us In allowing that institution to have that level of continuity Continuity I was again saddened today Mr. Speaker That we're here to talk about something as important as water And that the temptation to politicize even this little project Could not be resisted by members on the opposite side When we want to speak about this water project And I listened very intently Hoping that the general public also listened very intently To all the reasons that were given today By many members as to how important water is Schools, sanitary, basic standard of living That we all have come to expect And need in order of having a regular water supply of clean water A regular water supply of clean water The glowing reports, how important it is And then entwined within that This whole thing about Miku Dwarf and Miku South That they intend to capture Miku South Next election This is the same government that in 1997 Won Miku South You should remember One term One term And the reason for the one term Is because the words were much louder than the deeds This is the same government that today Wants to say that they are a caring government They care about the people in Miku North They hope to show the people in Miku South how much they care But I want to remind them That this is the same government That in 2006 and 2011 The then Arsene James started a water project To service the people in T-Rochet Going all the way down to Duga and Lacoville Because the persons on that side of the constituency Did not have a regular supply of water And the same things they were speaking of The rationing of water They had to figure out what day you were going to get water Whether tanks were sufficient The investment that people were having to make in buying tanks Because this went on for years And Mr. James ended up using part of his CDP resources To buy a tank And to work with Vasco And when the government changed in 2011 For five years That project was discontinued Now how does that action Meet the test of what was being said in the house today? What? How could anybody genuinely believe The members on the other side When we don't even have to go that far back To see what was taken place I'm not going to get into the emotional aspect Of the suffering that took place on that side of the constituency Because you've all articulated it better than I ever can But it's embarrassing I'm embarrassed for you I'm embarrassed I am That you all could come and say all these things And say it with the greatest amount of passion Including my good friend from Laverie The Republic, not the country This is the same government That when they were in office And re-did the east coast road The road stopped at the Canals Bridge And rebegun at Prelia People in the Miku have not forgotten that And the fact is How idiotic the policy was As if only the people from Miku South and Miku North Used that move As if only It's not me inventing that That's actually what took place And transpired You want to speak About work that was done Not forever Because the work of United Workers Party In Miku North Needs no explanation That the father of our nation Personally Was involved in the development of that constituency And again I'm not going to bring back times today Because it's very difficult for even young people today To relate to the extent of lack of infrastructure That we had in those constituencies But suffice to say roads, schools Water, telephones, electricity Didn't exist And the transformation that was brought To those constituencies And other constituencies in the south That benefited from this vision Of the United Workers Party But just in the last Five years Construction of a new wing At the Mon Rippon Passions Combined School Construction of the new football field in Miku Village Construction of the new Miku Health Center In Miku Village And I want to say it's not an ordinary health center The new wing at the Miku Secondary School Construction of the new early childhood center In Miku Village Rehabilitation of the Prale Community Center in Prale Rehabilitation of the laundry by the sea In Miku Village Infrastructure, renovation, rehabilitation works On the two laundries Mang Laundry and Up the Lime Laundry New home for fishermen at Prale And the storage facilities Construction of a new road leading to Prale Community Center and playing field Rehabilitation of the Miku Multi-Purpose Center In Miku Village Rehabilitation of the Miku Village Council Office In Miku Village The construction of the new road Leading from the Mon Rippon Highway To the newly merged Mon Rippon Passions Combined School in Passions Over 500 school bursary Scholarships, etc. the students In Miku North The construction of a new Passions Early Childhood Preschool Construction of a new road In Miet Gardens Miku Construction of the two recreational parts Teacher Johnny's Recreational Part In Mon Rippon and Children's Recreational Part In Miku The new roads in new extension Phase 1 The pack and captain by the cemetery In Miku Rehabilitation of the Passions Multi-Purpose Court And I can go on So, want me to go on? No problem. Career and Readiness Fair for the school leavers And young unemployed persons Installation of two AC units At the Miku Police Station Annual Dr. Gail Rigabert Summer Camps Gail Rigabert Netball Tournaments Gail Rigabert Football Tournaments Auntie Gail TC Rigabert T20 Cricket Cup Demolition and construction Of two homes Reconstruction of two homes Per persons with disabilities in Miku Village Footpath from Pedestrian Crossing To Mon Rippon, Credit Union And Miku Village Rehabilitation of Mirage Sacks Footpaths in Lapuent Construction of concrete roads In Lomba and Saint-Marie Road Rehabilitation near The Mali-Zare Residence in Mon Rippon Construction of a box drain up in the line Miku near Galaxy Hardway And I can go on I have a list of over 60 other projects That's just in this And that's just in the last 5 years term So, to come to this house Miku And to take an incredibly important project Like bringing water to a community And to continue with the development And to pretend As if that is the only thing That has taken place in Miku North And to want to convince Maybe yourselves That the reason why people voted For a labour in the last election Is because nothing was happening in Miku Really? That's for another discussion That's another discussion But the reality It was not from a lack of doing work It was not a lack of Taking up our responsibilities I'm not even going to get into What we have done In Miku South In terms of roads Water projects School repairs Fixing up playing fields Healthcare centres But it never stops I'm not so sure whether the Prime Minister gave At his own conference of delegates I don't know, 2 hours to convince what I was listening to the Prime Minister of Grenada Who said Mr Speaker That the Prime Minister spoke for 2 hours He spoke for 15 minutes And people seem to remember what he said in the 15 minutes Than what the Prime Minister said in the 2 hours Right? But there was also Another contribution at your conference of delegates By The Prime Minister Ralph Gonzalez The same reason why you watch our stuff So Mr Speaker All the time You came here and quote all our stuff all the time Your Prime Minister, half his presentation yesterday Was about what we're doing But Mr Speaker Prime Minister Gonzales said something that's very very important I've said it, but I did not Ever say it as articulately as he did Ever He's very very good of genius At that aspect We live in a generation Of aspiration That if you are The poorest of poor You aspire to be better If you're middle class you aspire to be better And even when you're well off you aspire to be better And how I read that Mr Speaker Is that politics and Economic development is a journey It's not a destination As we build And we fix up things People now accept that they have the water Tomorrow it's going to be something else And that's the purpose of The democracy that we have To make sure that nobody ever becomes Complacent And that politicians Are responding to the Aspirations of our people That's fundamentally what it is So it's a continuity We see at UNESCO The success of continuity It's about coming to this house And saying that we're building on the successes Already there and we're going to move at a faster pace And that by the end of your term sir That you're going to have over 60 things In which you can come to this house And highlight that you've done For Miku North But I would say to you The persons in Miku South After electing Labour in 1997 Have learned their lesson And have no confidence That a Labour Party Is going to do Anything for them An example of the difference is That when we came into office The member from Denry North And the member from Labry Spoke about the Denry Water Project Very important project The project never stopped Continued And was delivered The member from Denry Was invited Cut the ribbon And spoke And then when we did phase 2 Which was not advanced In his administration We still invited him And he cut the ribbon again And we said it doesn't matter Who started the project If it is a good project And he spoke And he spoke And he spoke And he spoke Doesn't matter The same CDB That's funding And the Mexicans And the same persons That are doing lag here today So Mr Speaker The fact is That he spoke And we continued And we continued The project Very importantly Because it was water And it doesn't matter where you come in from And you do not do things To spite an opposition constituency Because you also have supporters In that constituency But it's the humanitarian thing to do But Mr Speaker But Mr Speaker The examples Are all there for people to see As to who continues the development of solution And who stops We don't have far back to go Rodney Bay Road Mr Speaker The member from Labry spoke about We need to have a debate And yes On the Tuesday session It spoke about the importance Of the difference between government Information And when a government minister Particularly a prime minister is going to get up to speak He no longer has the right To speak in vague terms He must speak With accuracy because he has Access to the information Persons on the opposite side Are allowed to speculate until It is clarified And then therefore they should not Be able to continue Expousing things that have Been refuted So the Rodney Bay Road Allegations of corruption All kinds of allegations Most expensive road in St. Lucia A mile road for $15 million But when you get down into The debate Mr Speaker And you start unearthing the facts of the thing It becomes a very different story The member from Four lanes Medium Two roundabouts And sidewalks That's what the $15 million was And not only that The contract was a fixed contract For $15 million So even if there was inflation Or anything else They had to complete it for $15 million $15 million Yes If the prime minister has anything Differently he will have his opportunity And he can provide the evidence And show otherwise The $15 million fixed contract And this government came in With their own Protect the victory mentality That they had to stop the project And cast all kinds of aspersions And at the end of the day The contractor was allowed To stop the project Because it had been stopped for more than 90 days That means instead of paying The contractor $15 million They had to assess the works And the works assessment came Higher than the $15 million So it means that we're going to have to Pay the contractor $15 million For a project that he should have completed For $15 million hasn't And now you're going to have to find another Contractor to finish the works So at the end of the day how much is it going to cost Shock housing Mr. Speaker Stopped And I've authored all the bravado That we're going to go and do this And we're going to go and do that For the payment of works Tavern Tavern HIA airport Project has stopped We've gone through all its phases Work had already begun You stop it Up to today you can't tell us when you're going to start What it's going to look like Come and tell us some story about you've never been To an airport that has two stories Really I mean Honestly when the Prime Minister travels Imagine he's traveling He's not going to maybe I don't know Miami airport Pretty much every single airport in the world today Has three or four floors Who cannot understand the concept Of separating departure from arrivals Who I mean who really In today's world cannot understand That concept St. Jude's has been stopped Mr. Speaker Want to have a policy debate Let's have a policy debate about bananas How is it that a piece of land Can be sold for 2.7 million dollars When the same minister In a speech in the groundbreaking For a building said that land Oh no sorry for the breaking down Of the CDC buildings that it was important Because the land is valued at a thousand dollars A square foot so a land at CDC Is a thousand dollars a square foot But land on waterfront at Binance Is only worth 2.27 Dollars a square foot Really And there was a valuation that was Done in 2013 that showed the land Was worth 6.7 million I have to go there Because this if you want to have a debate I'm prepared to have the debate On policy and issues But to come to this house And want to try to Fool the people I mean I was Amazed That when the government came in office In 2011 The approval for The Japanese To do the Miku north jetty had already been approved And what did the government do They moved it to Savans And so it was our administration Who had to wait until we can get Choiselle resolved and some other issues resolved And it finally got them to build The new birth The new dock Fishermen's dock in Miku village The design apparently was flawed But the same way But you know Mr. Speaker I'm not embarrassed to say that At the end of the day The entity you know The prime minister always speaks about I don't want to get involved The other people The Japanese designed it As a floating bridge But you know what the same Japanese Who built Choiselle How many years it took us to be able To get them to correct the problem there What happens But the reality is that resources Had been made available And a priority was given to do the dock Unlike a Labour Party Who today Mr. Speaker wants to come in And to suggest that nothing had happened Where is it When they are the ones who moved the jetty You moved it to Savans The money that was going to go to Miku village Was sent to Savans Bay Mr. Speaker Mr. Speaker Mr. Speaker Really So again Who went and acquired the land To put up the tank Who put up the tank Who made all the preparations for the work To be able to bring the water to the people And you now laid the pipe I'm proud of that That's what we talk about is continuity But don't come here Until a half truth And want to convince people That there is politics involved Say the truth Give the people of Sen. Lucia Confidence that the government Is functioning Whatever Pekong we want to give each other That's fine And as a member from Labour he said We can have a debate on ideological differences But do not compromise The confidence that people have In our country and that the system does work Not all the time Not all the time So if we want to get into Debate Let's get into the debate about the two and a half percent levy As I said Prime Minister said Repeatedly The levy is not supposed to affect the price of food He said Don't misquote me I'm saying it correctly It's not going on the price of food Everywhere he went that's what he said But today Mr. Speaker We see that the two and a half percent Has impacted the price of food Turn around But inflation was there before We told you you cannot increase taxes At a time of inflationary time And this idea of this tax you have Was not going to work And the thing is that the arrogance Of the government that they don't want to listen And yet they want to turn around Mr. Speaker And convince people that somehow they care Really You care You care about the choices That people are having to make every day Harder because of the policies you have The evidence is there And you still refuse to address to it GPH May I hear the member again Wanting to come back Really on the CFFNF It is what you were thinking It was what is in your heart The GPH is a classic example Of FFFNF Of course The chairman of INVEST Is who's good friend Remember I hope the prime minister really has sat down And analyzed And questioned Whether in fact he's really in control of this government All his friends are in serious positions All the senior CEOs Are friends His brother now has been made the permanent secretary Of economic development And then you're turning around On a project that makes no financial sense You're giving up $400 million Of revenue To ask is if GPH Goes into bankruptcy And they can Last year GPH lost 57 cents Per share After a hundred and something percent increase In sales this year It is 41 cents per share Lost $600 million of debt If they go bankrupt And a receiver is appointed How is that receiver going to Determine The value of the concession That Saint Lucia has given him And it's simple Remember He doesn't understand the math The math is simple A million passengers Over 40 years I think it's going to be We had a million passengers in 2019 Cruise Cruise A million See he doesn't even know that Sure you can have his own statistics You can get this No I don't have to A million passengers It's there Today is 650 What do you think the rate is going to be Over a 40 year period What's the average going to be If you're going to give the concession For 40 years And it's 650 today Do you really believe that the price of 650 Over 40 years I know that when we were in discussions With the cruise lines They had already agreed to go to $11 So I know that GPH Is going to be increasing the price To at least $11 At least So let's say a million passengers Assuming that we don't grow significantly And $10 That's $10 million a year Times 40 years $400 million The cruise is only 11% Tuesday Tuesday 11% Of the revenue of the port revenue Who's very clear, careful Port revenue of slasper But the ante is What percentage of the profit Because that cruise business is one of the most profitable Arms of slasper So even when you want to take away 11% of the revenue It is going to have a negative impact On slasper And the sad part is slasper has been running And managing that process They built and did the extension They have developed our cruise port If you go back to 2019 And see the numbers San Lucia by far Was the number one cruise destination In the southern part of the Caribbean Number one By far In terms of numbers Go and see it for yourself Go and see it Mr. Speaker So you're going to now Give $400 million of revenue If it goes into receivership How is the receiver now Going to value that asset Because it's not land What it is is a revenue stream Guaranteed all the revenue From the cruise port In San Lucia Is given out in a concession Take care that San Lucia Mr. Speaker Doesn't find itself Having to go to buy back its own port Now if the members on the opposite side Really wanted to Appreciate it Work out that number So Mr. Speaker They want to come and convince us That the great benefit of this deal Is that They're going to spend $30 million They say $40 million They're also going to take and absorb the debt Of slasco That's included in the 40 And where's the money going In the port development Who benefits from the port development If the person Who is earning all the money on the port That's who's going to benefit So they're coming, they're going to use your money Our money To build up an asset To help them earn more money That makes sense Mr. Speaker We're all supposed to sit here And say that boy That's great That's millions of dollars That they should be given us to buy the concession And let them go Oh you see, I love that And Mr. Speaker I don't want to take advantage Of your generosity But that will be for another day And I'm very happy to have that discussion Mr. Speaker If we want to do an analysis between GPH And ESC Today you want to come and talk about passion But everybody spoke about everything else Mr. Speaker, I'm glad he's not the speaker That's what I have to say So Mr. Speaker The administrative building In view fort You know Mr. Speaker It would be It's just comical When we came into office Mr. Speaker The good friend The contractor, we're not going to mention So we know who we're talking about Was working on The administrative building To find out That NIC The land was never transferred to NIC And there was no planning approval None For the administrative building Grow and show you didn't have it You're in government Access to all the information But you see Mr. Speaker They are scared of bringing out the real information Because it would show The amount of lies they told When they were in opposition But you know what I forgive oppositions Because oppositions Can say a lot of things But the reality was Is that on many occasions we came here And answered the question Like CIP All the money is not going in We don't know where the money is We showed it to him in the budget He still wanted to deny We did And he still wants to deny But he has the information today Go and produce it So Mr. Speaker I want to conclude That sadly I'm very happy For the people in Niquon North To see the continuation Of what we have done This is a very important project But there is so much more to be done In Niquon And a big part of what needs to be done In Niquon is to provide jobs for people So you went and you demonized DSH You demonized Ojo Labs You demonized ITEL BPO You demonized all of those projects Mr. Speaker And those are the projects today That are continuing to provide work For the people in the south That our government focused on Mr. Speaker Was the ability that people could not only Enjoy water in the south all the time But they had the opportunity to live in the south And be with their family By providing economic opportunity And prosperity That would not only be as good as the north But I believe in many ways would have been Better And we already saw the reverse migration Taking place Mr. Speaker Persons were moving to the south It is only the Labour Party That wants to demonize these things And to destroy progress in this country And the example History is replete with examples of that So Mr. Speaker I'm hoping that the Prime Minister Will prove us wrong But the reality is your obsession With protecting the victory Is hurting this country And it seems Very clearly by your actions And your words Protecting victory is Job 1, Job 2 and Job 3 Stopping HIA Is protecting the victory Because you don't want to see it come to fruition Stopping St. Jude's And wanting to move into an old hospital To deny the people the size of a quality Modern hospital Is protecting the victory Stopping the housing projects throughout the length and breadth of this country Is protecting the victory Stopping the roads in this country Is protecting the victory Wanting to impose a two and a half percent Tax and selling The assets of the states to foreigners To foreigners Is Protecting the victory And it's for that reason Mr. Speaker That I believe that This government is going to be surprised By the number of persons in this country That share that same sentiment On the November 30th November 30th is not about overthrowing The government, it's not about a coup It's about violence It's about exercising democracy Practicing democracy And to hopefully Bring the member from the library Off the rocket he's in And to come back and maybe And drive on the roads of St. Lucia To drive on the roads of St. Lucia And feel what the people are feeling And to take heed And stop thinking that This 15-2 victory And notice it's 15-2 So again The people of St. Lucia have listened So all the allegations And the promises that there was no Collaboration It has shown that there was From the beginning So your government needs to settle down Needs to come back down To some level of reality And remember ultimately at the end of the day We all in this room Are Ansible to the people of this country And again Working projects Improving the infrastructure Of constituencies Working for the people of St. Lucia Is what we were asked to do And therefore Trying to hold yourself on a box As if there's something special that you are doing You will You will be sadly disappointed At the results At the next poll Thank you very much Mr. Speaker


Welcome back everyone. This is the 10 a.m. the 10 30 session of the 2017 open simulator community conference entitled the first digital biennial As a reminder, I want to remind everyone that you can check out the full conference schedule at conference open simulator org You can tweet your questions or comments to at open sim CC or hashtag Hashtag OS CC 17 For today's session, we are going to be speaking to art blue and julietta surreal dreaming and art blue looks back on 40 years in computing industry and in the art education area currently the director of the digital art trust programmed art foundation, so we're gonna Hear from him about the last 40 years of the computing industry and art education I'm gonna turn it over to art Welcome to the presentation, which I will share with juliette surreal dreaming I Will point out what the driving elements are for setting up the first fully immersive biennial I'm known in the grids as art blue and I live as you see on my profile domain Dot de in Germany. I have to thank the organizational committee for the invite to speak today Juliette will happily show you how the project is going on at our booth 08 at expo zone 3 during the coffee break She lives in California, which gives you a chance to reach at least one of the team around the clock This is not our first project for the arts nevertheless We are both happy to learn and we can learn a lot from all the gifted persons who share and contribute with their ideas and works At the end of the presentation, you will see some first submissions and examples that are made for demonstration purposes You might wonder why I write X reality link for a website for my bio The bio CNN states about me is some years old and the blogs are published there are No longer updated the content got frozen If I would have to look for a new job in the media and the person thinking about hiring me would see that I have only 1,760 page views. I would get dumped on the spot We live in times where hits and followers count more than anything else You don't see by looking at CNN our reports. That's a content was frozen in 2015 if you look at Facebook Where it is that the entries are reality proved entries only for real friends So the advertisement industry is happy on it. You will find hundreds of persons with the name resident I mean not president. I mean resident the family name linden lab created And I know some attending this conference sitting in this audience have a facebook account that is far away from any real name Some of us have lost their ability to post in facebook as I experienced with my account art blue Sanzer the new world by linden lab wants a reasonable reality proof. So I think of facebook of course I'm in Sanzer as Avare Akan art blue looks like being reasonable real at least for Sanzer The digital existence is a persistent one like CNN or a fragile one like facebook Digital art does not come without the social media impact Creating things creating art all digital the digital Anthropocene becomes reality The impact of mankind is digitalization of our lives and life means art When it comes to digital art when you have to use another time to explore it to experience art inside the computer Usually get in the conventional or traditional art community a skeptical view Even if the art community always says we are open for new perspectives It is a difficult mission to open the eyes of an art lover to new views when it comes to computers What is real? What is virtual? Are art consumers visitors able to immerse in a virtual art installment? Some might answer for this. They have to use HMD's head mounted displays There by wearing it the person is forced to immerse for good or bad But we here using open simulator don't need an HMD to see the depth We move the camera, we zoom, we walk, we turn, we dance, we fly If there is a benefit for the human mind we literally live inside the computer That's the message The avatar is us I'm art blue, you know it In my story it's a little blue. Okay, I come back on this later Now time for a break Time for socio-model 3560 Juliette will present the model Hello ladies and gentlemen Welcome to the year 1981 Yes, a time travel trip back to the future Relax and be there Look forward into the future We present you the model 3560 which can do stunning things Oh, I get an eye from art blue that we don't have time for a story A story that reaches to the future I can just read the quote from James Morrow published in 1981 Sozio model 3560 A back tube way brought him to Darwin's control deck where center stage Byrne Newman fidgeted near one face on the main monitor The Malnovian asteroid belt orbited as if nothing had happened Under less awful circumstances Francis loved watching the great cubic monitor Which it's stirring displays in prison's suns Darwin's was a Sozio model 3560 Which meant the hollow projector was mounted in the ceiling instead of the floor or wall Sozio made 4D equipment The image had height, width, depth And a 4D that eluded precise definition It was called presence Art Blue likes to bring into his stories this passage To quote words from 1981 over and over Sozio made 4D equipment The image had height, width, depth And a 4D that eluded precise definition It was called presence Presence is what we want to create in the Biennale Let's return to the James Morrow quote Somehow you felt that the subject was there in the room with you You could seemingly walk up to it, savor its fragrance Finger its texture Rub a few eons grime off its contours You felt the Malnovian belt's presence And he reeled with total loathing Burns snorted, acknowledging that Francis too had presence Speaking of presence, Art Blue has entered the building Sorry when I don't laugh You know it is all pre-recorded You don't know? Digital is digital so why shall I speak life analog And make you believe so that it is life Will you believe when I show you paintings of old masters recoded That I have been really looking once this way I transmit right now from Unavera, an island that exists in the servers All data transmissions supervised by the NGA You can't follow? That's why Art needs a story to follow Each one a good story And we have some good stories at the first digital biennale Don't give people just a download link when it comes to the arts Don't say downloads a few of Firestorm and let them alone They are not gamers and most are not computing enthusiasts At least when it goes for the art community Readings, discussions, demonstrations And an educational compass around the globe sets our concept In Europe via the Santorini Biennale and its networks the Biennale Institute Time for some videos I presented at the first emersivia at Santorini in 2016 We call them when made in world Machinima Sadly I can only give you the links You might see and feel a story behind when you watch them The first biennale and the emersivia are connected Emersivia is made for Santorini hosted by the Santorini Biennale Running under Greek law And first biennale is hosted by Wiesel Leipzig A city hundred miles from Berlin And running under German law Contributions to the emersivia don't have to be made for an open simulator Contributions for the first biennale have to be an open simulator And have to be in a specific layout Which I will outline soon To take part in the first biennale is free of charge Juliette and I will happily answer questions If you would like to participate as a builder or artist Sponsoring is an important part in the arts Maybe the most important one Do you have a location at hand A sponsor for electricity for some big screens Music drinks next or a TV station I happily come if the travel costs are covered Same goes for Juliette Some artists have a nice atelier And offer reading and a show at the home base For a small number of guests I don't mind if only ten people attend As we air it to the web A place where reality and dream overlaps You see I fall back to stories I myself do no longer create art It does not fit to be curator and artist in one I had my high times as I was young Coding an art package in Fortran Published it This way I become one of the pioneers with the stamp Still alive and active Even MoMA has one of my early computer drawings Just because it is old, not good I set my focus to mentor young artists Means mentally young artists And to conserve the development of digital art I hope you had time to breathe, look Or that you will have later time to look a bit On the background of recoding You can't see by looking on a drawing How it was once coded All the programmers who recoded my works Did not grab the parametric concept that is behind I see it because I have a basic knowledge of processing In which recodes by the recode project happen Now I come to my last input Or let's call it vision, motivation or simple mission To conserve prim and prim and mesh based art worlds I want that these works are still available To be explored in 2049 Let's say by historians 2049 is a link to the movie Blade Runner So it is just an example Art history of the digital Anthropocene Will become a new department As we are in the age of technology Nothing is faster than coding That's the purpose of the first biennale And the guidelines are made for this purpose A biennale stands for an art show Every two years That's the statute of the art foundation For which I am in charge Our mission is to open the servers Every two years to the public And present digital art submitted To the global community in a cultural habitat environment In Germany Bremer Kunsthalle is such a suited place They have a focus on old computer art Made before 1980s Some of my works from the 70s Are conserved on paper there I am sure in 50 years Some national institutions will also see The current digital art in virtual worlds As a part of human history The next slides show examples Of our current first biennale project Just have a look The few samples are made by builder participants In the center of each pavilion Is an exhibition cube In which a participating artist Will exhibit their art The exhibiting cubes will change on demand By a click, by time, by code It's this time, so the floor is open for questions Thank you All right, do we have any questions from the floor? I'm going to ask just to get us started So the two of you are going to be Still taking designs for the cube Or you have the designs and you'll be showing them We're taking, we're still accepting Contributions for the pavilion Builds, I believe March first and then for the artist cubes It's April first, so there's still quite a bit of time left For people to jump in and participate Awesome, and how do they Get the information to do so? They would contact us in world Either art myself or Either of us And we're in multiple open stems So just search for us And at our booth we also have note cards That provide contact information And which expo are you in? 08 All right, so Any other last minute questions? We have about a minute and a half here I don't want to miss anyone's questions But I think this is fantastic I myself actually came into virtual space Because I wanted to see about creating an art gallery To feature art instead of just a flat website To sell it And then just interaction of art And the virtuality is fantastic And anybody Gosh, it's just so inspiring you You can see so many different things that inspire And it's wonderful Oh yeah, there's a plethora of creativity And open stems So I think art's mission to conserve Digital art is perfect, really is perfect So, yeah I have a very last line I made a slide as you see in the link Just right now to emphasize That we are not in a big area We are not football We are not for the big audience We are more the person with an arrow Or with a bow, the archers Where we can create what we want to create For a small group of people Not for the big masses So we're not spectators Like in football we are more the makers So I'm not concerned that we are not growing But the numbers exponentially As Maria said To survive in the future It's a niche, but it's something we are And that's the open simulator We can take care of Yeah, well fantastic Arch and Juliet, thank you very much For joining us Thank you As a reminder to our audience Again, you can see our conference schedule At conference.opensimulator.org Following this session We'll begin at 10.30 a.m. Pacific time And is entitled the Noble Spirit Transcendentalism And Transdisciplinary So Make sure you stay tuned for that I also encourage you to go They mentioned that their booth is in one of the Expo's You can also see The OSCC 17 poster Expo On Expo 3 Make sure that you take the time to jump around Because you'll be inspired By something there to inspire you to do something great With an open simulator platform Alright, we'll talk to you in a little bit Thank you


This is difficult to execute, but great fun to practice. Very important, adjust your feet quickly to be able to meet the ball in flight. As the ball comes towards you, drop your shoulder slightly towards the ball. Simultaneously, open up the body in hips. Do your best to strike the ball waist-high and aim to strike through the centre of the ball. Above all, practice as much as possible and try to find the best way of dealing with different deliveries. Your confidence will grow the more you try different things.