Great. Let's talk a little bit about space for the media. That is the press room, what we mentioned before. Do you think having a press room helps? Well, as I sat in the one in the Dirksen Courthouse for three years as a member of the Chicago Sun Times, so yes, I have a feeling that it does work and it's very helpful. I think it's very important. I have advised others throughout the system if they have an opportunity to create a press room, please do so. Because if for no other reason, it gives the media a place to go and it keeps them out of the court clerk's hair. They've got a place to go, they feel at home, and they feel that the court itself takes them seriously by giving them a place to have a desk, provides them with a phone line, provide them with an opportunity for internet access and a place that they can store their valuables. It's a natural place for people. We have six people who work full-time at the Dirksen Courthouse in Chicago, and there's room for several others that come and go on a regular basis. I think it's a critical ingredient in dealing with the media. Great. Cam. I agree with everything Dan said. It's a great opportunity to have a space for the media. Even in a rural district, it's not used that much, so you can use it for other things, but when it is needed, it's there and they have opportunity to use internet access. You can put a copy machine in there, phone access. I think it is very helpful to them. I think with the federal court's orientation, a customer service, we need to look at the media as another customer. A customer like a member of the bar or a member of the public that comes in and wants information from the clerk's office, and I think if we use that as our guiding principle, it will serve us well. Have any of you ever had a situation where reporters have gone directly, this is on the day-to-day basis, to judges and sort of bypassing a system that you may have set up, and how have you handled that, Cam? If they do that, hopefully, most of the secretaries will forward those calls down to my office. In fact, I'd be the one, and most instances, to call them back, so the reporters know that the judges are just not going to be able to talk to them during the penance of a case. Great. It's handled in a very similar way in Arizona. When they do get calls in chambers, they're generally referred down to my office, and then we deal with them from that point forward. Jim, what about in Denver? It's the same. We handle all those calls here, and the secretaries and staff are, they follow it religiously. So they know that they're going to refer them all right to you folks. Dan. Well, maybe it's slightly different in Chicago, given its history of just a different place. There are judges that do, because of the working relationships that they develop with these six people that are permanently assigned 40 hours a week to the courthouse, they do accept their calls. It doesn't mean that they comment on the case, and I'm not about to tell an Article III of the Constitution judge, no, you can't do that. But it is suggested, and they have received, they do know that if they need help or assistance, they refer the calls to me, and I'm also served then as a very, as an easy way to duck if you want to. Oh, I'm sorry, I can't answer that question. You have to go to the public information officer. We're just a few minutes away from opening this up to questions by fax and also push to talk. So think of a question that you would like addressed or a comment that you'd like to make relating to dealing with the media on a daily basis, and we'll try to answer that. Cam, let me turn to you. Just why do you, if you could give us, so just a good reason why you think these outreach efforts with the media are so important? Nurturing those relationships are a great source for positive public relations with the court. We find after we do the media orientations, we get better coverage on routine kinds of programs for the court, attorney and mission, naturalization, those kind of programs. So, and also it gives them an opportunity to call us anytime. So I think that's been very helpful in building, not only building that relationship, but educating the public and the media about what it is that we do. Rick, you want to add to that? It was mentioned in the early segment, but as the most misunderstood of the three branches of the federal government, I think we have a real professional responsibility to do what we can to educate the public about what the federal judiciary does and what it's all about. Chief Judge Aspen in Chicago in the opening film pointed that out, that we can't ignore the fact that we have a duty to promote trust and confidence in the court system. And you do that in a variety of ways through letters to the editor, through columns submitted by the judges, by editorial board visits. Those are all in addition to the day in, day out relations that you have with the beat reporters assigned to the building. That gives you then an honest, legitimate entree to decision makers and people who influence public opinion when matters come up that are of great interest to the court system such as our annual budget. Jim Mann speaking, do you want to add anything to that? Just that education is very important. You would have been amazed how early on how many of some of the reporters that showed up thought that the judge worked for the justice department, things like that. So anything we can do to give a little civics lesson now and then is good. We've just received the facts relating to how often, what's an optimum time, if you will, to hold media orientation sessions. You want to handle that one, Cam? We try to do them annually, although it slips a little bit. We try to at least have one contact with the media in our southern division and Boise once year. Same thing in eastern Idaho and northern. I think one time a year for the formal orientations that would supplement your day-to-day contacts. I think that's a slow news day. It's the best time to do it, whatever that is throughout the year. You definitely want to do it before their deadlines. Let's just go one more time around the table than any final thoughts in terms of dealing with the media. Rick? I can't think of anything to add to what's already been said. I think if clerks of court and court administrators keep those tenets in mind, I think they'll be well served. Sit down with your judges, your board of judges, the chief judge in particular, and find out what it is that they want. Have a checklist, have a procedural order in hand, and use experts like Rick or elder statesmen that really know and have been around the block a few times. They know how to handle those situations. Except the fact that the media is going to be there, they're going to be present, they're going to ask questions. Again, we've said it before, treat them as a customer. Bring them into the process of understanding and educating the public about what we do and what we don't do. Once again, Jim, I'm giving you the last word. Okay, well, I incorporate everything that's been said. Fairness, I can't stress that enough that they all get access to the same stuff at the same time. And, Cam, what is this elder stuff? You'll know Cam is the only grey-haired member of the panel. I'm going to leave that question out of it, but it's time now to take some of your questions by fax again or by push to talk. So let's just open it up for a few seconds, push to talk. Okay, it's time for our break, but I wanted to mention a newly published resource from the AO's Office of Public Affairs, and that's high profile cases in appellate court, how to work with the media. While it's tired audience as appellate court staff, this short brochure covers many of the topics we just have been talking about, and it's certainly worth a look. It's apropos to both district and the bankruptcy courts. You may contact the AO's Office of Public Affairs for more information relating to this publication. Now, as we take a short break, we'll leave you with a few points to remember for developing productive relationships with the press. We'll be back in five minutes. Welcome back. Now we're going to focus our attention on community outreach. Canberra and Dan Layman are still here as part of our panel, and joining us now we have Rebecca Fanning, the National Community and Educational Outreach Manager for the AO's Office of Public Affairs, and Dick Wasco, Clerk of Court for the District of Vermont. Welcome everybody. As we did with media relations, let's first turn to the video monitors and watch a clip on community outreach. In 1999, the Northern District of Illinois hosted its first Honorable James Benton Parsons Day to celebrate the life of the first African-American appointed to a federal district court, and later the first to serve as a chief judge. I really stand before you because of Jim Parsons in part, because he's the one that broke the ground that allowed people like me to follow. Now an annual event, the court invites area junior high and high school students to visit the court and learn about Judge Parsons and the federal court system. We had an opportunity to explain to the kids what the federal courts are all about. Hopefully they got the impression that it's a friendly environment. It's an important part of our system, and perhaps it inspired some of them to become part of the system someday. Through lecture and demonstrations, judges and lawyers volunteered to show students what our federal court system means. We come into a courtroom we call the courtroom of the United States District Court to resolve our disputes according to law. Afterwards, judges met students during a reception, providing some students the best experience of all. When you think of a judge, you always think of them as such high standards, but you see that they're kind of just down to earth and they're on your level, and they're not just to be, as they say, judge you, but they're just trying to actually help people too. It's really good for me to see because that just makes me want to be a lawyer even more. Around the country other courts also reach out to the community, whether it's through tours. We have a docent program. We have 25 volunteer docent that are virtually experts on the building. It's a historical building built at the turn of the century, and we offer public tours twice a month. They're free of charge for anybody who wants to come. Tutoring students. Children from the neighborhood come in through an after-school program, and work with court staff volunteers once a week for about an hour. Or tutoring attorneys. Our federal practice program is an attempt to reach out to attorneys and impart skills, trial skills to them so that they are as effective as possible in our court. The goal is for the courts to become actively involved in their communities. Our employees are energized and inspired by reaching out. They desire to have a good relationship with the public, and after all our employees are on the phone and in contact with the public their entire work day. Methods of outreach depend on the individual needs of each court. It starts maybe in the development of a long-range plan where everybody gets together and say this is one of our organizational goals. Once you have that commitment, there's a lot of energy that it results from that. One result in the district of Idaho is a program aimed at grade schools. Students can participate in the Three Bears versus Goldilocks, or the Kingdom versus Jack Spriggins. They serve as jurors, prosecutors, defense attorney, witness, judge, and bailiff, and the other actors in the criminal justice system. And the kids actually come in and try the case. We give them the materials which are available over the internet. They're very good. These are fifth and sixth grade kids that are trying a case and they're passionate advocates for their clients. And we hope that they're learning the lesson about the third branch of government. Courts don't have to develop outreach activities on their own. Like many courts, the district of Idaho also participates in national outreach initiatives sponsored by the AO's Office of Public Affairs. These include activities like Law Day and Teacher Institutes. This is a national production sponsored by the United States courts through the district of Idaho, which organized our participation here today. We touch the public. We have a tremendous impact on the public and I think in return we need to reach out to the public and make them or help them to be more informed about what we as an institution do. There are pragmatic reasons why we have to have an outreach program. We often are involved in controversial decisions. Whether it's a public housing case, whether it's a case involving the supervision of the jails. And it's important that the public view those decisions in a fair minded way. So we have to reach out. We have to have that credibility with the public. We have to be able to have the support of leaders in the community, whether they're in government or outside of government, when there is a matter that the courts either need their tacit support in the case of some legislation or we need the support on a broad base level when it comes to a controversial decision of the court. But the only thing that makes our system work is the credibility of the courts. And unless you have witnesses and jurors who come into the court system and believe in it and respect it and think it's on the up and up and know you're trying to do a good job, the system's not going to work. Let's start off this discussion with a definition. Rebecca, you're responsible for the national initiatives dealing with the community outreach. And we heard a little bit about community outreach in our earlier interview with David Sellers. But would you please provide us with kind of a working definition of community outreach? Well, first I'd like to acknowledge that the federal courts have been doing outreach long before I joined the system about two and a half years ago from the Minnesota Supreme Court. But if I were to summarize what I've learned over the years about outreach, I would describe it as a series of initiatives that evolve over time that are a core part of the court's function that help to advance the court's mission that are effective in creating meaningful interaction between the courts and the publics that they serve, that they're specific to particular constituencies, and that they match their needs and interests between the courts and the public. Talk to us a little bit about what you see as the main criteria for community outreach programs. Well, as you know, with outreach there's no shortage of good ideas. And so the real effort is to focus, to focus our thinking and focus our efforts in limited resources. So what we've found to be effective is to use four criteria, knowledge, understanding, investment, and involvement. So when we're talking about knowledge, that's the operations, the structure, and the function of the courts, then understanding puts the human face on the judiciary, and you're going to see examples of programs people at this table have put together where that rapport and that human face comes forth. And then investment is convincing law-abiding citizens that they have an investment in a well-run judicial system, and last of all, involvement. Making sure that citizens feel comfortable enough in the courthouse so that they will respond to jury duty and will get involved and be critical thinkers of the system and feel that they can make a change. As you mentioned, there are so many ideas out there. That encompasses really a wide area of possible programs and activities. Tell us a little bit about some of the programs on the national initiative and how do you define success in those programs? Well, we have about eight national initiatives that we've launched in the past two and a half years, and most of them are ongoing. I think the flagship program in these first two years has been La Day, and Dick really was at the forefront of developing a very creative approach to that program, and even went so far as to contact the media in his community and live to tell about it, and so I certainly hope he will do that. And then now we are developing a national initiative that will be creating a niche for federal judges, and we're calling it Open Doors of Justice, the Bill of Rights in Your Life, to describe the relationship of the federal courts with the federal court system, the relationship of the Bill of Rights with the federal courts, and that is going to be launched October 24th and 25th. Information is on the JNET, so we can follow up with that or you can call me for more information. We also have a series of lesson plans that support this booklet, Understanding the Federal Courts, it's a 42-page booklet and we have five lesson plans that meet all the criteria that teachers have told us they need in order to be able to use these lesson plans. And so I'll be brief here and move into evaluation. We go back to the criteria that we have for selecting the programs that we use, but really evaluation comes from the participants. So we start the process of selecting a program by talking to judges, teachers, students, and other participants. So all of our programs are driven by them and then they tell us how they feel about it and how it was received. And we do written evaluations by everyone who participated, and we also do videotaped exit interviews. And we always feed that information back into the programs and you're going to see differences each year because of that. That's great. Just a reminder that we've included in your reference materials a link to the AO's outreach website and one of them is called Courts to Classes, the Federal Judiciary's home page for educators. And now that we've provided a definition and we've heard a little bit about the National Initiative, what does community outreach mean in your court? What are the benefits? Dick, Roscoe, let's start with you. Okay, Bob, for us educational outreach really in Vermont is kind of composed of two program parts. We have a kind of an informal program and also a formal program. On the informal side of the house we're very receptive to bringing in student groups and classes into our court to see our court operations and we'll generally give them a brief overview of what we're doing and that's the informal side of our program. On the formal side of our program, of course as most courts do, we have a formal jury program, but we also rely on the National Initiatives that Rebecca's office is planning with. Law Day 2000 last year and also the Bill of Rights this year. And we're fairly successful in our Law Day program last year and I think for three important reasons. First, our judges took an active interest in the program and that's kind of key. It turns out that all of our judges, myself included, have a spouse that's affiliated with our local school groups. So my wife is a teacher and a couple of our judges, one is a school administrator and one is a guidance counselor. So we kind of have a key link with the educational system and I think that's important. Secondly, we tried to make it fun. We had a lot of promotional items that we used. We had a pretty good quality golf shirt that we superimposed, a logo of the Law Day 2000 logo on. It was in color. We handed them, we had a mug, we had some pocket constitution, pencils and pens and we all wrapped that up with a tote bag which also had the logo. So they had something tangible to relate to with the program which they actually had when they left and that was given to both the presenters and the participants. And lastly, we kind of had a media angle that we used and that was we had a regional Associated Press news correspondent that we selected as our program moderator and facilitator and that worked for us. It kind of gave a little bit of legitimacy to our program from the media perspective and I did go out and actively solicit the media to come and take a look at the event and they did and it worked out real well. Great. Cam, tell us about these programs in Idaho and the impact. First I wanted to commend to you the programs that are done on a national level. They're excellent. They develop the curriculum and it takes very little on the local courts part because they already have done a lot of the hard work at the national level. Community outreach to us is educating our customers in a manner to promote public trust and confidence in the judiciary. We all read that the judiciary is the least understood of the branches of the government. I happen to believe that we should do everything we can to educate the bar public and our stakeholders about the role of the government. In Idaho we have a four part program. We reach out to schools. We reach out to the bar and the community. We also include outreach to members of Congress and the media as well. That's great. These are all great ideas and certainly there are so many programs for outreach. A basic question I'm sure is how do you do this with limited resources? Cam? Well you want to get a good group of judges and volunteers within your own court. Then you can also partner with the bar and develop speakers bureaus. But the easiest way to do it I think on limited resources is to share programs with the state bar. It might be the ends of court. It might be the county bar association. It might be any number of those kind of things. We do interpreter training as a shared program. Attorney CLE's annual CLE's and new attorney orientations all partnering with the state bar. Rebecca what would you recommend? Well I would say that my major theme is low investment high profile programming. So that's where we start at the national level. Here's an example of how we've done that. We took our law day program and made it, we edited it and repackaged it and made it teachers institute. So we brought teachers into the local courthouses and then sent them away with a videotape and lesson plans so that they can use those over the next years to reach students in their classrooms. And I happen to be in Boise helping with the teachers institute there and we got a really positive response. That's great. Dick what would you add? Bob there's a lot of excellent publications that are out there available to the federal courts specifically. Rebecca had mentioned understanding the federal courts. The one that we rely on to our classes coming in is welcome to the federal court and I think there's another one out there federal courts and what they do. So they're excellent resources and a lot of courts also have available to them non-appropriated funds which they can actually use to fund educational items which could be of use. And I'd like to mention too the public affairs videotapes all of our programs and we have lesson plans and other materials that support them and those are all free to teachers and to judges and court staff. And then we have the website that I mentioned that has the lesson plans that support the understanding the federal courts. Let's talk about the important role that judges play in all of this. We've seen Judge Aspen in fact as part of our role in taking a very active role in these community outreach efforts. Rebecca let's start with you in terms of judge participation. Okay well we know from a 1999 Hearst survey that 75% of the respondents said that they want to learn more about the courts from judges. So we see that as a real opportunity and I know that when I went to Boise to be part of the Teachers Institute and when I've participated in Dan's programs I can see that. It's not just the students who light up, the adults light up and the judges really are very warm and receptive and friendly and it makes such a difference. It really does put that human face on the judiciary. I agree. They play a leadership role certainly but they also can promote it within your own outreach efforts. We found that the kids always ask if the judge isn't part of our program where's the judge? They really want to hear from the judge and it's a rare opportunity where the judge can talk one-on-one with members of the community. We also mentioned partnering with other groups that is those groups that may have space or money or what have you to help but Dan you've done a lot of programs as I understand it with the Bar Association why don't you tell us a little bit about them? Sure. We've gone out of our way in the Northern District of Illinois to try to find programs for every one of the Bar Associations that operate in the city, the county and in the state and it's been successful to date. And just briefly some of those that we've done we've partnered with the Federal Bar Association for an annual award for pro bono and public service public interest service law which has also proven to be somewhat successful in gaining attention because in the mainstream media because it's not just law related but it's it's there's a much broader interest because it's you're dealing with the poor. Secondly we've worked with the as videotape showed the annual James Benton Parsons Day we've gone with the hooked up with the Cook County Bar Association which is the nation's oldest African American law bar group and we've had hundreds and hundreds of students show up for that program over the last two three times we've done it. And there are several more but not to be overlooked are resources that are in every courthouse in the country and that is partnership with the FBI, the US Attorney's Office, the United States Marshall Service we have a program in Chicago that we bring in students from public schools who are sophomores and juniors interested in law and law related education careers and they get a half day presentation first for me and then from representatives of the law enforcement agencies to give them an idea that there are opportunities within the judiciary and within the judicial system for career advancement and it's a great target and to target for diversity which is what we also make a point at with each one of these activities. And they also get to see the larger context if you will of what groups constitute the judiciary. Correct. To just keep talking a little bit about partnering I know you do a lot of partnering with the state bar particularly on the citizens law academy explain a little bit about that. Our Chief Judge's administrative assistant has done an incredible job. It's part of the Idaho Law Foundation and it's a program that's not unlike a college class. It's 11 weeks, 22 hours where citizens apply and become accepted into this program. They learn about the role of the courts, the constitution, separation of powers, police enforcement, the role of the juror. And what we find is that these citizens come back really excited about the judiciary. They become ambassadors for the court and the community. We have two examples of training new attorneys. We have with us on push to talk from the southern district of Texas, Michael Millby, the clerk of court there in Houston. Mike, you have a rather formal method of working with new attorneys. Tell us a little bit about the program that you've implemented. Just as a school children don't understand the third branch of government that a lot of attorneys don't understand the third branch of government. So we implemented a new attorney training program. It's been going on as they knew about a decade now and it's a real formal class. They get CLA credit for it and in that program they get to hear from just about every agency that they'll have any dealings with the federal court. They hear from my office, from the public defender, the United States attorney, probation, pre-trial, United States trustee's office. All of us basically give them a small amount of information about how they can interface with our offices and where to go, phone numbers, those types of things. One of the neat parts of it is we actually have judges speak and they'll talk a little bit about differences in practice between federal court and state court. There's some unique things in Texas state court that are different here than federal court and there's also a session on ethics that we have at the very last. Thanks Michael. We also have with us Laura Briggs, clerk of the court for the Southern District of Indiana. Laura, you have what's called a young attorney seminar. Tell us a little bit about it and how did you ensure judge participation? Our program is actually somewhat similar to the program put out in the Southern District of Texas and we have a sort of a more nuts and bolts approach. We go through matters such as how cases are assigned to certain judges, how emergency motions are handled, what is the division of work between district and magistrate judges. We give the new attorneys a list of resources, local rules, review the attorney handbook, tell them about our web page and we also review some important local rules regarding formatting of documents, local practice like never filing documents with chambers and we review some more legal matters. We go over ex parte communication and we also review courtroom decorum, how jurors are selected and the digital evidence presentation system is reviewed. We have judges participate in the program to talk about primarily courtroom decorum and even matters such as legal style and questioning witnesses, some things, particular judges don't like to hear. We have a judge who hates it when attorneys say to a witness, isn't it true that? We give the judges an opportunity to have their own voice heard and their preferences made known and by giving the judges the opportunity to give that kind of input to new attorneys, we've had excellent participation by the judges here. Laura, just as a follow up if you could give us one or two sentences, what do you think is the real value to the court if you will in terms of the young attorney seminar? I think the real value to the court is that it allows young attorneys to have an opportunity to learn what the differences are between state and federal practice like in Texas and Indiana actually state practice is very different than federal practice so it gives the attorneys an opportunity to come in and be more prepared to appear before a judge and to comply with our local rules and procedures and make the judges happier overall. That's great. Thank you. Thank you so much Laura. So we're educating the bar programs now for other programs for educating public particularly for school kids. Dick, what do you have? Well, I guess the key component or idea would be to try to establish and develop a very, very good working relationship with your local schools and your educators and we do that. Again, we welcome the students into our court and our operation we're very receptive to that. We try to link it with a proceeding if we have a court proceeding the kids like to watch that whether it's a motion hearing or a trial so that's kind of a key component. Our judges always take time out too after the proceeding to visit with the students. They have an active interest in that and that really builds a supporting relationship and if we have time we'll give them a tour especially sometimes of the U.S. Marshals Service and give them some gadgets up there and the kids like to see that so anything that we can do to acquaint and educate the public is what we're trying to accomplish. I've seen a lot of creativity in the courts. When we launched our law day programs, for example, some courts have added a job fair others have added tours of their electronic court rooms it's been very interesting to see that they look at this as a court program but they don't stop there. They add to it and so it's really interesting and that's where I think we're working on having a presence on the JNIT where court personnel and judges can go to this JNIT and kind of look at it as a catalog to see what other jurisdictions are doing and exchange information. So they add to it and give that local flavor. Yes. I can bear witness to that. I blatantly stole a program from the First Circuit in Boston very much along the lines of what you just heard described in Southern Indiana and in Texas but at the law school level we have seven law schools in the Northern District of Illinois. They're all invited in one at a time and then they're given a presentation by an Article 3 Magistrate bankruptcy judge. No problem getting those people to do that. Those judges involve because they are drawn from the alum, their alums are the school that's there that day. And then a short break and then a presentation from the U.S. Attorney, an assistant U.S. Attorney the federal defender and then someone from either probation or pretrial services takes an afternoon and as we found out from the exits reviews of people leaving that the majority of those students had never, even though they're in law school, they've never been inside a courthouse of any kind, anywhere. So you can never start this too early. And again, it's an intentional effort at an early stop in the development of a lawyer to again try to bring other people before the federal bar, more women, more minorities, etc. Right. And you know Dan, your comment reminds me that you were really on the cutting edge in this two-year pilot program that was mentioned earlier in the show and we had four jurisdictions that participated in that and in two years they launched 48 original programs that reached people in elder hostels all the way through elementary schools. And now we have a total of six jurisdictions involved and so I'm really looking forward to seeing what they develop. Cam, in our role into this particular segment, we heard a little bit about the Goldilocks trial in Jack and the Beanstalk. Tell us a little bit more about this. Well, it's a very rewarding part of the our outreach program. We probably go through 800 to 1,000 kids per year. I think we had 301 week. But Goldilocks is accused of a heinous crime. She broke into the bearer's cabin. She broke property and there was destruction of property as well. And so the kids do a great job putting that on. They try it. They serve as the attorneys. They aggressively defend the rights of their clients and the rest of the Clascus to serve as jurors. A lot of times they try to change the facts of the case not unlike what attorneys try to do. So we give them a little counseling. But it's always interesting to see the verdict is never the same. It's never the same on the verdict because and then there's a learning lesson there. We have the kids describe why it is that they reached the verdict that they did. So we assume then that Jack in the Beanstalk is a capital offense? You bet. Jack in the Beanstalk murdered the giant by cutting the Beanstalk down. Rebecca, anything to add on? Yes. One of the most rewarding things for me has been developing a very strong network across the country with social studies teachers. Middle school and high school teachers. So I go to national and regional social studies conferences and every year our exhibit that we put together is seen by more than 6,000 teachers. And we have targeted juniors and seniors in high school because those are the students who are closest to getting into the jury pool and we want them to feel comfortable coming into the courthouse so that when they get their jury summons they'll feel they want to respond. Let's go off site to another one of our push to talk sites. Jim Gilmour, Chief Deputy of Northern California. Your court works with the community at large and I know you have an intern program in San Francisco but it's one that employs disadvantaged kids. Tell us just a little bit about that program. Well Bob, we've been lucky recently to get hooked up to a program run by the Center for Youth Development through law at the University of California. This is a 10 week program for kids that are identified by high school teachers in some of the inner city schools in the East Bay as having aptitude and interest in law or legal administration. They send them here to us to work with us to learn how to work and to learn how the court works. We put them to work seven hours a day, four days a week, one day a week they're in school and we send them through the entire organization as much as we can and let them do useful work and also let them observe what goes on. This is a program that's been very interesting for us. Great, thanks so much Jim. We're going to be opening up the lines for Push to Talk shortly. If any of the sites out there have programs they'd like to highlight, we'd sure like to hear about them. It's a good way of sharing information across our, for everybody else. Let's move now from schools and students to a really important part of community outreach and that is dealing with jurors. For many citizens that's the first contact with the federal courts. Dick, how have you worked with jurors? Exactly Bob, jurors represent a very high large percentage of our clientele that we deal with and we take our jury program pretty serious. And I think the cornerstone of that, our program rests upon feedback after every civil trial is completed and the parties are dismissed, the judges meet with the jurors individually again they're interested in feedback and a response from the jurors. We also have a very detailed exit questionnaire that we utilize and the judges look at this religiously and some of the things that we're asking them are, was their stay at the jury facilities, are they adequate? Do they have any suggestions or comments for improvement of our program? Did we make effective use of their time? Was the jury orientation effective? And on and on and again the judges are very very involved in this and very active and sometimes we shift our operations accordingly. And the last point I'd like to make is that it helps very much if you have a very personable and outgoing jury administrator. And we do. Cam, what would you say? I would echo that some and have a great jury administrator that spoils the jurors from the first time they come in the door. We do much the same thing I think the jurors really appreciate hearing from the judges after the trial. But we also use the web for some information directions to the courthouse, frequently asked questions and even the jury guide is available so that they can be prepared before they come to the courthouse. That's great. We did receive a fax and I thank the court for sending this fax. Here's the question. How much lead time should you have when you're going to start some of these programs? For example, Judge Parsons Day, how long did it take to set up what about other programs like student mock trials? Lead time, it depends. If you're going to involve anything involving school students, you have to factor in the summer break or the semester break or quarter breaks, whatever system the high school, grade school or college university happens to be on. Parsons event took the first time through, probably took off and on the better part of two months. Not obviously 40 hours a week, but it took two months to get it all lined up, thought through the program developed, speakers lined up. The second time took a couple weeks because you don't reinvent that wheel again. You've already got the template laid out of how to go about it. And that's true with almost every program that we've done in the Northern District of Illinois. Cam relating to the program on Goldilocks and Jack, how long did it take for you to prepare that program? Well, like Dan, we stole something that was created in the Cook County Superior Court years ago. It was actually a play. And we turned the play into a script so that the kids could actually try the case instead of the actors trying the case. That took about 30 days. But again, now that the script and the curriculum is done, if a school calls up today this morning we could do it this afternoon if we have available. We just need one person in the clerk's office to help them through the trial and rule on objections and help the students along the way. If I can add, by doing multiple programs like this, it builds confidence to do more. Once you've done one successfully, you know you're going to do it successfully the next time with that program and most likely on a different program. So it encourages you to go out and be, if you've met with success once, you feel you're going to be successful in the future in other attempts. And I think it's important to have the attitude of approaching it with lessons learned. So that when you do your evaluation, which I know we spend a lot of time evaluating the national program both within our office and again seeking out very candid opinions. And I just so appreciate that from judges and court staff that we take that as our lessons learned and then that allows us to look forward to next year and how we can improve. Great. Let me throw this open now for the push to talk sites out there. We'd love to find out any of the other kinds of programs that are done locally in the courts that anyone would like to share. Now's the time to do it. Okay. We've reached, just about reached the end of our time here today on this subject and for the program. So let me just ask one question. One last question. What's really the bottom line here in terms of developing an outreach program? What do you think is the key? Rebecca, let's start with you. Well, I would say to identify and use your resources. There are so many resources out there and I would hope that my phone number would be at the top of your list because if we don't have that particular resource that will meet the needs of a particular audience, we can help you find those resources. And then the second thing is to look at this outreach effort as a long term sustained commitment because you're not going to get change overnight. And I think that we've all found that the programs get better and have a greater impact the longer that we do them. Great. Cam? Well, you want to get the commitment from the Board of Judges and the commitment from the staff. In our district we have a training coordinator that also doubles as the outreach coordinator and does a tremendous job. But if you're just starting out start small gain some enthusiasm and your program will build from there. Finally, incorporate into your long range plan. If you're serious about this, it's got to be in the mission and your long range plan so that you can meet the goals of serving the public. Great. Dick? Very similar to Cam. I think you have to have an active approach, a proactive approach. You have to solicit input and listen to that input and adjust accordingly. Last word, Dan? The last word is it's stated over and over. It's no longer an option. It's something that must be done. And at least on an annual basis the chief judge and the clerk of court need to sit down and assess where are we and where are we going. That about does it for this broadcast. Before I come back with some final thoughts here are a few more points to remember about community outreach. Today we've taken a look at the important role the clerk performs in helping to manage the public information and outreach activities. And some of the challenges and practices proven to be effective for our panelists and push to talk participants. I hope you found this broadcast to be informative and directly related to what you do on the job. Let me remind you to please complete an evaluation. That was part of your downloadable materials on the DCN. As always we appreciate your feedback. Also we invite you to access the court operations exchange on the FJC home page. There you find information that courts have posted and are sharing with colleagues throughout the federal court system. It's a great resource. Before closing I'd also like to thank our panelists and all of our push to talk participants for their willingness to share their experiences in this important subject area. You know that's really a vital part of the learning process. And a special thanks goes to David Sellers and the staff of the administrative office public affairs office for partnering with us in this effort. In closing a lot of what we've talked about today deals with communicating effectively. In his work on leadership wisdom Larry Liberty notes that communication is more than just speaking and being understood. It's about clarity of thinking, willingness to listen and the desire to see what someone else sees exactly the way they see things. It rests upon generosity and courage as much as skill. Thank you for joining us today. Keep an eye on the FJT Yen bulletin for other upcoming programs of interest to all court staff. We'll see you on our next FJT Yen broadcast.


Labour Party's presidential candidate Peter Obie has given the reason he did not tell the former vice president Atiku Abu Bakar before he dumped the People's Democratic Party PDP. Obiewu confirmed that Tiku's statement of not being aware of his decision to dump the party until three days after said that the reason he did not inform him was that he didn't want anyone to talk him out of it. He also said that Atiku remains his respected elder brother but that he would rather do the right thing and fail than do the wrong thing and succeed.


One of the most recognized consequences of aging is the decline in immune function, illustrated by vulnerability to dying from the flu, poor response to vaccinations. But about 20 years ago, paper was published showing that the immune cells of 80-year-olds produced significantly more pro-inflammatory signals, suggesting the worst of both worlds, a decline in the part of the immune system that fights specific infections, but an aggravation of nonspecific overreactions that can lead to inflammation. This has since been formalized, and a concept referred to as inflammation. Chronic low-grade inflammation we now know is typical of aging, which may be responsible for the decline in the onset of disease in the elderly. So what can we do about it? Inflammaging appears to be a major consequence of growing old. Can it be prevented or cured? The key to successful aging and longevity may be to decrease chronic inflammation without compromising an acute response when exposed to pathogens. How are we going to do that? Nutrition. What we eat is probably the most powerful and pliable tool that we have to attain a chronic and systemic modulation of the aging process. In the first systematic review of the associations between dietary patterns and biomarkers of inflammation ever published, the dietary patterns associated with inflammation were almost all meat-based, or so-called Western diet patterns, while vegetable and fruit-based, or healthy, patterns tended to be inversely associated, meaning more plant-based, less inflammation. The reason why meat is associated with inflammation may be because of both the animal protein and the animal fat. In the first interventional study that separately evaluated the effects of vegetable and animal protein on inflammatory status as it relates to obesity and metabolic syndrome when you're trying to lose weight, what they found was that a higher intake of animal-origin protein, specifically meat, is associated with higher plasma levels of inflammatory markers in obese adults. The reason obesity is associated with increased risk of many cancers may be because of obesity-associated inflammation. Obesity-driven inflammation may stimulate prostaglandin-mediated estrogen biosynthesis in breast tissues. That means the inflammation may activate the enzyme that allows breast tumors to make their own estrogen via this inflammatory compound called prostaglandin. If you measure the level of prostaglandins in women's urine, it correlates with breast cancer risk. And how do you get high levels of this inflammatory compound? Smoking. A high saturated fat diet and obesity. Why does eating saturated fat lead to prostaglandin production? Because prostaglandins are made from arachidonic acid, and arachidonic acid is a major ingredient in animal fats. And so animal fats contain arachidonic acid. Arachidonic acid is what our body produces inflammatory compounds like prostaglandins with, and they can then go on to stimulate breast cancer growth, and may also play a role in colon cancer, lung cancer, or head and neck cancer as well. Whereas whole plant foods have anti-inflammatory effects, though some plants are better than others. The folks made to eat 5 a day of high antioxidant fruits and vegetables like berries and greens had a significantly better impact on reducing systemic inflammation and liver dysfunction compared to 5 a day of the more common low antioxidant fruits and veggies like bananas and lettuce.


I think that kind of change that I think your question suggests if there was one occurred about four years ago and after the incident of March 31st, 1981. But I have to say that the manner in which this was handled explained to me at all in advance. I knew that they had found a polyp, well they had found polyps which had been taken out and which are absolutely benign and harmless. But I'd also known over many years of taking physical exams on a regular basis that there is a form of polyp that does, if allowed to go in the colon and intestine, become a cancerous. So I was going in to have one of the benign polyps removed and in the course of this they found the presence of this other one. And they didn't now know what's called an adenoma and they didn't know whether cancer cells have developed yet or not in that one but you take it out because they will if you leave it there. And when it was taken out I came back in and told me that yes there had been a few what they call the nodes that showed signs of cancer cells but they'd taken it completely out. It had not penetrated the outer wall so it had not spread to any other part of the body or anything. And as the one expert in that business put it to me he said you had cancer. You no longer have it. And I recognize that this means that from now on they'll have to be very regular with checkups. But I was so well prepared and had such knowledge that they'd given me of this particular thing that no I, as I say, the man said I had cancer and I don't have it anymore and I feel fine. Great, thank you. See with me here you don't get any follow up questions. You can do it this way all the time.


Yeah, this is Kauai Lucas, host of Hawaii is my mainland, Fridays at 3 p.m., keeping it on the bright side and off the grid. Last June, Carl Kim and I discussed possibilities for a mid-course correction on Honolulu's rail project, including bringing it to street level. You can find that show, along with all the others, at thinktechhawaii.com. My guest today is Scott Wilson, contributing author and spokesman for the Honolulu Transit Task Force. He is also the former chair of the AIA Regional and Urban Design Committee. Mr. Wilson is part of a group of Honolulu architects and planners who have come up with a brilliant wave to save three to four billion dollars, and our destination travel worthy view planes. Scott, thank you so much for coming down to talk to us. Very happy to be here. Oh, I'm so excited that this is really getting some traction. But it's a complicated thing. It is, and it's a big change. Even though it doesn't take that much time, really, and that we'll actually finish the job five years sooner, when we talked to legislators this morning, they were just all thinking, well, what about this, and what about that, because you're asking for a change. You're making modifications in a very big project. And this big project behind us. Yuck. It's so ugly. Please save us. I don't want to go into the ugliness, because aesthetics are a relative thing. But what we've really made the pitch for is to save billions of dollars, three billion or more, and to save time, to save five years, shaping five years off of construction is a huge thing. We've got computers that are just suffering, and every year that they have to just continue to put up with us is just a real shame. And so we have some pictures of what we're facing, what is planned. Right. We're looking at the Chinatown station, and that's what's planned right now at Kei-Kalike Street. And you can see that's right next to the harbor. And there's just no way to hide that thing. It's just a big hulk towering over Chinatown.  Not only the view, we also know how these things tend to collect garbage and other unpleasantries and magnify the sound. I haven't really seen that in the literature, but I know that when I travel the places that have those systems, that that is a significant decrease in quality of life, just having the noise and the lights and all the trash. Yeah. So think of the viaduct at the airport.  It's not a place where you want to enjoy the sun and the wind and just our beautiful landscape. It's just all dwarfed by some massive amount of concrete. But there's a lot of really good reasons, practical reasons for this to change. And it seems doable. Let's have a picture of what we're actually talking about. So it could. Yeah. This is a perfect example of an elevated rail that is coming down to street level. And this is actually in Charlotte, North Carolina. I just like that because it shows it's not a big, great big distance. It's about five to 600 feet. And we have that kind of space, certainly in Middle Street and several other places. So it's not that the old ramp coming down is going to take a mile and is going to cut off five different streets. It's not that at all. It can come down very quickly. And then you're on the street level and you're saving billions of dollars. And you can see from this that it's very inclusive. There's easy access. It will be very visitor friendly because the access will be. I know. I just think if we want to talk about our handicapped or even mobility limited riders, what can be easier than just stepping in off of the sidewalk instead of going upstairs, going up escalators, elevators. All of that. All of those things are mechanical and are going to break down in our climate. We all know that. So we just think this is avoiding a lot of those problems. Okay, but we can't just translate it. There's some modifications that are gonna have to be made. Can you talk about those? Yeah, I think the one that I think has got most people confused is the power supply. We all know that the elevated rail is running on a third power rail that's right next to the other two rails. And that rail is live and can't be touched for electrocution reasons. So what happens, what would happen in Middle Street is basically that third rail would end and the trains would have what's called a pantograph, which is a kind of a scissor device that elevates up above the top of the car and touches a power wire up above. And that's been used for over 150 years. It's called a pantograph and it's a catenary power wire. So what happens is while people are getting off the train in Middle Street, the thing elevates, it only takes about five seconds. And then it's got power, off it goes, goes down to the street level. Okay, and there's no more difficult kind of infrastructure other than just the overhead lines. So basically we have to change the design of our current cars. And Soldo makes all of these different types of cars. So basically we have to go back to our contract with them and they have already delivered, as you know, four cars. But these cars are a $2 million item. So if we have to just set aside four cars and say, okay, that's $8 million worth of cars we can't use, that's a minor loss compared to the savings of $4 billion. True, so would each car need to have one of these categories? No, no, it's just one car per train. So now one of our changes is that we actually want to make the trains back to two cars long instead of four. There's no reason, the original hard design was for a two car train. And for some reason the ex-director Dan Grabouskas decided he wanted to make the trains bigger. He was kind of thinking in terms of long term ridership ability. But we're saying actually no, the two car train is fine. You just run it twice as often. He was going to do four cars at six minute intervals. We said no, go back to your first plan, two car trains at three minute intervals. The reason is because when you get into the streets and the short blocks in downtown, a four car train is too long. It laps over into intersections and it blocks intersections. But certainly from a rider's point of view, that's way better anyway. It's actually more convenient, yeah, to have trains twice as often. Would it actually limit ridership or reduce ridership? No, not at all. Ridership is not related to train size. It's just how many people want to get in on the train. And as more and more people decide to ride the train, you can just add trains in their frequency. Okay, so we have some great little mockups of how this would look in our downtown area. Let's see some of those. Okay, this one is on Hotel Street now. We're not advocating any particular route right now. One option is to run it down Hotel and just use the existing bus lanes. Because these trains are no bigger than a bus in terms of width and so forth. So that's a shot of what it would look like if we use the Hotel Street Transit corridor for trains as well as buses. That looks beautiful to me. And you can see how simple it is. Now this one does not show overhead wires. And Soldo does make an option for their trains in which you don't use overhead wires. You actually draw your power from underground. So you can, or you can even use a battery system. You can install batteries in your car that are basically charge up at the last station. And they can run for up to a mile with no power of their own. They're like an electric train. It's like a temporary electric train. So why did you, you did the cost estimates based on the overhead wire category system? Yeah, that's an equivalent cost. Whether it's an overhead power wire or it's an underground power wire, the cost is the same.  So that's what really adds up the cost. It would seem that burying or having that underground would be a lot nicer then. And storm resilient, actually better. Yeah, it works well. There's no problem with rainwater and everything. They're insulated cables and they run under the ground. There's actually four different systems out there right now. All the different rail car manufacturers have their own version of wireless power. They call it wireless. But the ones that we already have on order, the system that we currently are sort of contractually wedded to, they do offer the in-ground version. Yes, they do. That's called tramwave. And it's Aldo tramwave system. And this has been out for, it came out in 2009. So it's been out now for eight years, yeah. And we have another picture of how it might look downtown. Oh, yes. I love that. It's cute. It's actually cute. How simple is that? This is King Street. This is putting a train basically in the bus lane of the existing bus lane. As we know, King Street is very wide through most of its length. And you can even make this an exclusive lane just for trains and buses if you want. And it really won't impact the traffic. We know that King Street has already been taken over for a bus lane, sorry, a bike lane for about three miles. So we know this street does have capacity. And certainly this kind of system has been vetted in places where there's lots of pedestrians and bicycle traffic for decades. So we're not inventing anything here. Yeah. The city has raised, oh, there's safety concerns. We've got what about dogs and people and bikes? Well, traffic in cities has been around for hundreds of years. And one of our links on our website is 28 other cities of our size, a million to two million, that have light rail systems. And so you can look at pictures of Baltimore, Austin, Portland, Seattle, you name it.  And it co-exists very easily. I've seen it in cities in Europe, actually, and it's just a part of the landscape. But we used to have it here. I was looking at a map of Honolulu in 1897 last night. It's downtown at Collier's International in their lobby if you want to go have it. And it shows the tramways.  And weren't those in the center of the street? 1897. So actually, yeah, saying that we don't have space for a train is kind of nonsensical because these cities were laid out with trams way back in the 1890s. That map shows both railroad lines and tramways. So both. Wow. Yeah. And where I live in Manoa, they had street cars that went up all the way up University Avenue up into Kamehameha Avenue and then they did a turnaround in the middle of the valley. Scott, we're going to take a little break and then come back and talk about what kinds of possibilities this would open up for us. Great. Okay. Hi. I'm Tim Appichella. I'm the host for Moving Hawaii Forward. And this show is dedicated to transportation and traffic issues in Oahu. We are all frustrated by sitting in our cars in bumper to bumper traffic. And this show is dedicated to talking with folks that not only we can define the problem, but we hopefully can come to the table with some solutions. So I invite you to join me every Tuesday at 12 noon and let's move Hawaii forward. Aloha, Kako. I'm Marcia Joyner and I'm inviting you to navigate the journey. We are discussing the end of life options and we would really love to have you every Wednesday morning at 11 a.m. right here. I'm back to Hawaii is my mainland. I'm Kaui Lucas and I am talking with Scott Wilson, architect and spokesperson for the Honolulu Transit Task Force. So we are talking about bringing that rail project back down to earth, saving taxpayers at least $3 billion and relieving our beautiful city of this horrible blight in the process. It's such a win-win. It does seem like it. I think when we went around to legislators this morning, they were like saying, oh, thank goodness there's an alternative. Oh, that's very encouraging. Yeah. So this is, I think, we want to talk about what can we do in the future. We're not backing a specific bill or specific routing right now, but we just need to bring up the idea that there is a plan B. We don't literally have to go with this current elevated rail, which is just too expensive. It's, that's kind of a big deal that there's no, there's no bill attached to this. Have you talked to the good folks at Honolulu-Hulley? Not yet. Okay. No. All right. Well, they're, they're kind of in their own little silo right now about rail and really one of the reasons we're at the legislature is because those folks are one step away from this project. It's not their project so much as it's a city project, but now they're being drawn into this because they're being asked to refund it for several more billion dollars. And this comes after they were already asked two years ago for a big hunk of money and they were promised, oh, that's all we need. That's all we will be done. We promise this will finish the whole job and now suddenly it's only bringing it to Middle Street. Okay. Can you say finish the whole job you're talking about from where to where? Well, the current plan is to finish it at Alamoana Center on Kona Street. It's just going to dead end into the buildings that cross over Kona Street. So this, this, this is one of my pet peeves is that if they try to extend this project to UH on Kona Street, they're going to run into three stories of retail shops and they have not said anything to the public about this. The fact that, oh yeah, we can extend it to UH. Well, in fact, it's going to be a super human project because they have to back up, build a whole new ramp that goes up to 90 feet and goes over all those retail shops. William Sonoma, all those designed within reach, all those ones. There's two whole levels of shops that cross over Kona Street. So you can't go right through those. That's a working shopping center, one of the biggest and busiest in the world. And that connection to UH Manoa is so critical. As we know, when Manoa is not in session, there's no traffic. Suddenly, the traffic is so much nicer. We're all going, wow, oh, it's just because it's a UH holiday. Exactly. And the mayor has candidly said, you know, we really should extend this to UH, but the other part of the story is that to extend it to UH the way it's built now is blindingly expensive. It would be the most expensive section of all. So you have a picture of what it would look like if it were going up to UH? Yes. If we just ran this up King Street, as you saw in the earlier slide, by King Kamehameha Statue, we just kept on King, even in just the simplest route possible, running to King. There it is in the downtown area. And again, the nice part about running it on King Street is that when people get off, they're right in where they need to be. They can just walk left or right and they're right immediately in their office building. They don't have to walk all the way up from Nimitz Highway. Right. And then it could be extended to UH Manoa. Right. Now, here's a shot. Now, you can see the overhead wires in this. And this was an earlier design where it was coming up University Avenue. It was actually going to go under the freeway and actually stop right at Bachman Hall. But you can easily imagine that the train is coming down King Street now, and then it just makes a big U-turn right at Molylili at Pucks Alley, and then it goes back on Baratania. And with all that new development that Kamehameha Schools is doing, right in that area, this is the perfect time to be planning and contemplating. The UH officials said, actually, we don't want the train coming right onto our campus. That's too close. Give it to us at Molylili and Pucks Alley. That's fine. The students can walk from there. Well, did they say that even when it was this? Yes, actually they did. Oh, that's surprising. You know, if you remember about five years ago, there were some simulations where it was going to go over the freeway and it was going to go all the way to Stan Sheriff's Center. The university quietly said, no, thank you. We don't want a train emptying out all kinds of people on our campus. Well, I understand that, but I was thinking if it was at grade and it was going up university or in there, that that might be a different. They did not react to that one. They never got that far. Okay. All right. So that is a possibility. Yeah, it is. Okay. I think the simplest way is actually just to come down university, drop everybody off at Molylili, and then just turn right around and go up Baratanya and back out to De'Eva. So that was my next question about the return route. The return route would be very similar to that shot you saw on King Street, except it would be on Baratanya. Because again, Baratanya is one way. It's got many lanes. It's got parking lanes that we can take out. And then you just run it all the way into town, all the way in Baratanya. And all the way past Alla Park. And then it would join in again at North King.  That's a fine point of the route that we can decide later. Okay. And you've talked about building this. We have an image of what it would like, what it takes. So tell us about this. Oh, yeah. Oh, this is, you could just imagine that those are all just local contractors. Because I mean, when you look at that kind of work where you're building a, you're putting steel rails into a concrete form that's about 14 inches deep. Well, that's something any local mason can do. This is not a multi-billion dollar keywood or outside mainland firm that has to be brought in because the work is so technical and difficult. This, the beautiful thing about this and the reason it can be built so quickly is you can actually have a dozen different companies working in different blocks. And they have one plan and then they just connect up their segments when they finish them up. It's so beautifully simple. Oh, the more I hear about this, the more excited I am. You just cut the steel, you weld it and it's done. You know, the trouble that with this elevated rail is that it's, those are all very customized segments. So you have to put in one segment first, then you can put in the second one, and then next. And so this thing has to be built very carefully and sequentially from start to the other end. And that's why it's going to take another eight years to get to Alamona. Well, those of us who don't regularly go out to couple A and haven't had to deal with the pain of the construction of that, I only have had to on occasion. But I was already unhappy about the situation. But when I saw that, that was the moment of truth. And I just said, well, this can't be. We can't do this to Honolulu. What have we done? I mean, I feel terrible for Waipahu and Pearl Ridge. And the real secret, Kaui, is that they haven't even built the stations yet. And if any of you have ever gone to Miami, Miami is the only elevated rail system in all of North America. That goes right through the center of a city. And it is just outrageously ugly. It's in a tropical environment similar to Honolulu. The concrete just molds and decays and stains, and it is so depressing. We had one member of our team go to Miami and take pictures of the elevated stations. And when we started showing them to us, we were cringing. Are those on the website? And tell us again about your website. The website is called salvagetherail.org. And it has lots of reports. It has videos that explain how street-level rail works. It has pictures of all these other cities that have street-level rail. It has many different reports. So if you want to read more, if you want to read the one-page version, you want to read the six-page version, the 20-page, and even the 60-page version. But we have studied light rail in Honolulu and all these different levels and agreed. And tell us, who is we? We, the Honolulu Transit Task Force, formerly known as the AIA Honolulu Transit Task Force. This was in 2009 to 2011. I was the chair. That once rail started being built, we basically disbanded and we formed the regional and urban design committee that I was also chair of from about 2011 to 2016. So it was a group of about between 12 and 20 architects and planners. They all belong to AIA Honolulu. However, in December, when we finally came out with our report, AIA Honolulu, as an organization, said, you know what, we're uncomfortable. We don't want to offend the mayor here. He's just been reelected. This is awkward because some of us have to get work from the city.  So we said, OK, as an organization, we understand you don't want to endorse this. We are going to go independent. So that same group of architects and some of them who had to stay anonymous. Now, some of them are listed on our website, but there's a group of them that are still anonymous because they're working with the city. It's so sad, but I know personally that I'm involved with an organization that went through that same process and didn't want to offend the mayor. So this is a great guy. Kirk, we're doing your work for you. We are a small town and I think we pride ourselves on our small townness. We are friendly. We like to work by consensus. We like everybody to be on the same page. And it's really awkward when there are some issues that we just cannot resolve. So in the last minute and a half, Scott, how can we support you? Thank you. I appreciate that. Well, I think the first thing is to visit our website and read up and get yourself familiar with this, that there's a very real option out there. Then the second thing to do is to contact your legislator. And that is we have a sample letter on our website. We would urge you read that through if you like the sound of it. It just says, dear legislator, we really would like to save money and time on the rail. We urge you to consider other alternatives and to reject the extension of the GT surcharge. That's where it starts. Because the city, if we just give them their money, they're going to say, okay, I'm done, you know, end of discussion. But if the legislators have the courage to say, wait a minute, we're not going to give you your money. You know what? We want you to look at the alternatives. Thank you, Scott. So our job is to, our homework is to go to salvagetherail.org and contact our legislators and tell them, do not approve the GT for extension for the rail. Exactly. Okay. And in the meantime, you'll be working with your awesome group and the legislatures and come up with a really good bill. Maybe not for this session because it's a little late. Yeah. But it'll happen. It will happen. All right.


Engine board game, sorry, turn-based, and it, the nice thing about this approach is that it completely learned the game from scratch. It beat the world champion in 2016, and after that game, or after that program, they try to generalize the algorithm and wrote a new version called Alpha Zero, which was produced as a preliminary paper that was able to solve, or solve, was able to play Go very well chess and a Japanese game called Shogi. And when it was able to play chess well, it interested me and some others to start working on a software program that would implement this work from this preliminary paper, which we called Lila Chess Zero, which was started in 2018. Now it was forked from Lila Zero, which was worked on by a guy called Giancarlo, and he wrote it for Go. So our version works for chess, that is. So just a bit of game theory, I guess. In the case of a turn-based game, the best way to, or the most optimal way to compute a solution is to fully compute the full game tree. So in the case of tic-tac-toe, you can see the empty state at the top, that's the empty board, the start position. And then you can compute all the first positions for the first player, then the second positions for the second player from those first positions, and so on and so forth, until you reach some terminal note, which is either a loss for you, a draw, or a win. So for tic-tac-toe, this is still feasible to fully compute in modern hardware. It's about nine faculty states, but for chess or Go, this is completely untractable. So what you need to do, as a traditional chess engine, is to determine somewhere halfway the tree how good a certain position is. And the way they would do it is just by encoding a lot of heuristics and rules. So determining how many pieces you have versus the opponent, how many free spaces do you have versus the opponent. From that you can sort of compute an estimate of how well your state is in the current position. It is not perfect, but it's built upon centuries of work from many grandmasters that play chess, or in the case of Go, thousands of years of knowledge from the game of Go. So it's basically, while still very impressive, it depends heavily on the human knowledge that we gained over the years. So the beautiful thing of the Elf Zero project, or Lila Chessero, its open source version, is that it only requires the rules of the game. So it needs to know how do you transition from one state to the next. So what are the legal moves in a certain state? And how do you go to that state? And by only giving it the rules of the game and how you can win or lose by doing a checkmate, it will play against itself and it's relatively improve its knowledge on how to play the game well. It will try to basically, from this game tree, it will try to learn this evaluation function that instead of relying on the human knowledge for centuries, it will learn from itself using neural networks. And the nice thing about the latest improvements in the neural networks is that it's, well, they are able to learn image data very well. So all we need to do, more or less, is just give it a representation, an image representation of the current chess board or Go board. And it will give out a probability of if it's either winning or losing or an expected value, if it's winning or losing or if it's going to be a draw. And the beautiful thing about this visual interpretation, instead of these hard coded rules that were usually the case, is that it's able to really play positionally very well.  But using this neural network and reinforcement based learning method, it will create beautiful gameplay, which is fascinating to play against. And if you also see the games that it played, that Alpha Zero played against itself, you can find various YouTube videos on it. It's, I mean, I'm not a good chess player, I don't even know my rating. But I could see that it was really beautiful to observe how it was doing this. Very positionally, not a lot of calculation per se. Well, actually it can do both very well, of course. That's why it's a very good chess engine. So how am I doing on time? So we did run in a lot of challenges technically. So the preliminary paper by DeepMind missed a lot of the technical details on how to, the architecture of the neural network. Google had a massive amount of compute power that they threw at it, whereas we would rely on the community to lend us their GPUs. And they would play games on their GPUs. These games would be uploaded to a server. Initially they would be uploaded to my homemade NAS and then trained on my local desktop computer. But as the project grew, it quickly became untractable. So we did a bit of crowdfunding and got some dedicated hardware for it. But still, the clients come and go. So we had a very variable compute budget compared to what Google had. They just have a lot of dedicated cloud compute they could throw at it, so they knew exactly the budget or the amount of compute they had for their project. For us it could, I don't know, when we started it was 10,000 games per day. We would train a new neural network on for the next iteration. But then as the project grew, I imagined hopefully we'll get to 60,000 games per day, one day, that would be great. And then people started to activate their supercomputers from universities. And at some point some guy donated 50,000 US dollars to cloud computing, at which point we were at 2 million games per day, which was interesting for the backend stuff we wrote in order to feed in these gameplay data to train a new neural network on our GPUs. So yeah, that was a lot of interesting challenges. So yeah, so just as a somewhat of a plug, we're always looking for contributors.  If you're well aware of chess, if you're interested in chess, and if you know how to compute ELO estimates, you can also help in that regard. We have a Discord location, which is very active, you can join there. The project itself is on GitHub. So the top two links are for the downloading of the client, you can also find it on GitHub.  But you can also just compile it yourself. It's C++14 and it works very well. So yeah, thanks to a lot of people. One more funny thing I'd like to notice is that in November 2018, the core developers got an email from the manager of Fabiano Caruana who was challenging the world chess champion, Magnus Carlsen. And we were invited to join there, which was a very nice experience. He was actually using or investigating Lila chess zero as a way to train his skills, to improve his skills, and yeah, it was a lot of fun to be there. So I guess that's about it. That's what I got. If there are any questions, let me know. Okay, thank you very much. I think we have time for one or two questions. Anyone with a burning question here? Often in the end game, somehow it takes very convoluted paths to winning. Sometimes Lila zero in the end game takes very convoluted paths to winning, like for instance, moving to a night or something, and do you know why? So that's true. We don't have a clear answer yet, but at this event, Demis Osabis from DeepMind was there as well. And he said that their version, Alpha Zero, did not experience any problems with this. So we're still kind of struggling. What we've now done is basically as soon as the user data, the game data is uploaded to our server. We replay the end game using table bases in order to improve the final data. But it does help, but it's not very elegant in a way. I'd like it to be fully from scratch and not using this table-based data. But it sort of works, but it's still a mystery. We're still looking into that. Any more questions? Let's give it to the guy in the volunteer T-shirt. He's been working hard for it. Oh yeah, how strong is it? Yeah, so it's among the top four engines in the world right now. For the latest data, you can find it in the Discord. There are many, many volunteers who actively keep Excel sheets that try to compute how powerful it is. But it is on commodity hardware. So the ELO is not up to par when you throw it against a lot of very powerful hardware. There are also various chess tournaments that are being run from T-Kec and CCC. I think it's about 3600 or something now. But I cannot give a very accurate answer there. It really depends on the hardware. OK, I think we're out of time. Thank you very much, Volker.


And third. It's all good. The third. Catch it, catch it. They don't run the draw! Stop it! The Jackson Hensley The Blakey The Tinker The Hurricanes The Tinker The Packers What's going on?