Let me get started. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to my talk on hyperbuzz memory devices. My name is Vignesh. I'm from Texas Instruments, India. I mostly work on the Linux SOC support for Texas Instrument devices, and I co-maintain the memory technology devices subsystem in Linux, especially the common flash interface part and the hyperflash part of it. So this is the agenda of my talk today. So I'll start with hyperbuzz, types of hyperbuzz memories, hyperbuzz protocol, the hyperflash command set, the kernel framework for the hyperflash, and writing a controller driver, and what are the recent developments and future enhancements that can be done for hyperbuzz framework? So what is hyperbuzz? Hyperbuzz is a serial bus. Nowadays, serial bus have multiple lines, so that's a pretty naive definition now. But it's a high-speed bus connecting a hyperbuzz memory device to the SOC or the controller. It has up to eight data lines, or it has exactly eight data lines, but it works in double data rate, that is, data is transferred on both raising and falling edge of the clock. It uses either a single-ended clock or differential clock, depending on the voltage. If it's a 1.8 volt part, it will use a single-ended clock, sorry, a differential clock. Otherwise, it can just use a single-ended clock. There is a chip select similar to a spy bus to select the memory device, and a data stop. Since this is a high-speed interface, data stops helps in having an accurate data capture window for the host. There are two types of hyperbuzz memory devices today in the market. First one is a hyperflash, which is a persistent storage similar to spinor flashes. And there is HyperRAM, which is a pseudo-static RAM for read-write capabilities. Mostly hyperflash devices are used on embedded devices and not exactly on server machines and et cetera. Moving ahead, as I said, hyperflash is a non-technology-based device, so it is organized into sector and pages. A sector is the smallest erasable unit, whereas pages, the maximum amount of data that you can write in one transaction. So since it's an eight-line bus working in DDR mode, so effectively it's a 16-bit bus, that is, you can transfer 16-bit of data per clock, and therefore the word size is also 16 bits. Hyperflash only uses the data strobe for while reading. That is, only hyperflash is able to toggle the data strobe line, and it doesn't expect hosts to toggle the data strobe line when it is writing data to the flash. It works at least at 200 megahertz frequency, so you can get a read throughput of about 400 megabytes per second because you are transferring 2 bytes per clock. So it's a pretty fast interface, and since it is a non-technology-based device, there is very little setup that is required, and if you are using it for an instant-on kind of applications and fast-boot kind of requirements, this is a very good storage media. So what hyperflash does is it kind of draws the features of the parallel-NOR memories that are already there and kind of combines with serial memories to reduce the number of pins that are actually required to connect the device, and therefore takes the best of the both kind of analogy here. And this is kind of a competitive technology for octal-spin or devices that are available today. Just a brief note about HyperRAM as well, so it is a pseudo-static RAM capable of having its own self-refresh security, and it has exactly been compatible with a hyperflash device, but it uses a bidirectional data strobe that is if a host has to drive the data strobe when writing to the flash, and the device will drive the strobe when reading. This is required because since RAM needs to be refreshed every now and then, it is quite possible that during a write there may be a need for refresh, and you have to give that what you say the wait phase so that the device is refreshed, and then you can go ahead and do the right transaction. So yeah, this is how we can divide the transaction on a hyper bus. Basically there are three phases, command address phase, wait phase, and data phase. So in the command address phase, it indicates what type of transaction it is, and what is the address to which this transaction is targeted to. So this is always driven by the master, this phase is always driven by the master, and there is a wait phase where either host is waiting for the refresh to complete or host is waiting for the flash to start sending data, and then a data phase which depending on the transaction would either be from host side or the device side. So just an example of how it would look on a bus, very similar to a spy transaction. You have chip select going down, followed by the command address phase here. Since it's a DDR bus, it just takes three cycles for six bytes of data to go out, and then the flash responds with data here, and you can see that it writes in a data stroke toggling to indicate the valid data. So to explain a bit what happens actually in the command address phase and what those 47 bits, 48 bits represent. So the highest bit, the 47th bit represents whether it's a retransaction or a right transaction, the 46th bit represents whether this is a address that is targeting memory space or the register space. This is mostly used by HyperRAM where if you want to control the registers of the HyperRAM, then you would probably set one, you would probably set the 46th bit one to indicate it's targeting register space. Otherwise, it's all mostly zero targeting the memory space or where exactly, where the actual data is stored. And bit 45 represents whether it's a linear transaction or a wrap transaction. Wrap transaction might, you know, you can wrap around the addresses at 16 bytes, 32 bytes, or 64 byte boundary based on the configuration that is done on the flash side. So this is useful in filling up a cache line or something. So then the actual address itself, so HyperBus has of today supports 32 bit addressing. So you have address line, address bits, A31 to A0, so off which A31 to A3 would map to, the 29 bits will map to bits 44 to 16. And there is a reserved bit range in the middle, which is 15 to bit 3. And then the last three bits are mapped to bits 220. So there's a concept called half page, which is the size of the A22 A0, which is 16 bytes. So it depends on the flash. But for example, on HyperFlash, this 16 bytes represents the smallest unit on which ECC is calculated. So if you want to enable ECC on HyperFlash, you'll probably do read, write with 16 byte granularity. So bit about the programming sequence of how software interacts with the flash itself. So HyperFlash follows the common flash interface extended command set 002, which is the same command set that was parallel nor flashes by Cypress or legacy AMD flashes use. We already have a driver in kernel implementing this for a long time. So you can find it under drivers, mpdchips, cfi, command set, dot c. So the flash comes up in read mode, where it is possible for you to directly go and read the data on the flash. So going back here, so you just need to set bit 47 to 1, and then bit 45 to linear mapping, and then set the address bit. And flash will start responding with the data. So a basic transaction will start reading data from the flash. So it's very useful for quick read kind of applications. So programming or writing to the flash or anything that modifies content on the flash is a bit tricky. So there are two step unlock stage where you write a predefined value to a predefined address has step one and step two. So unlock one and unlock two, after which the flash is open for programming actually. So then you write, for example, this sequence is showing how to write 512 bytes of data to the flash. So in that case, the sector address to which you want to do the update, you write value 0x25, which is the write to buffer command to the start of the sector address, and then tell how many bytes needs to be updated, and then send the actual data. So this data is not actually directly returned to the flash. Instead it's buffered within the flash first. And you have to issue a confirmation command, the last step here, to the sector address, so that the programming actually happens. The hyper flash supports up to 512 bytes of buffering in this way. Again, all these addresses are 16-bit word addresses and not actually the byte addresses that are being shown here. Then flash supports something called as address space overlays. Basically there are multiple parallel address spaces within the hyper flash. The default address space is where the actual data is stored. There are other address spaces like device ID or common flash interface address space where there is a table which tells you about the actual device itself and its parameters. There is status registers address space and production bits, which can be set to protect the individual sectors. And many more vendor-specific address spaces may be present, so there will be a specific set of sequences that will be given in a data sheet to tell how to enter a specific address space. Once those commands are sent and you enter a specific address space, even if the entire flash will be replaced with the new address space. So reading data from the same address would give you different data depending on which address space you are in. And there is no need for separate commands for each and every register access. So it will just become a serial address space overlay. So moving on to the different types of hyper bus controller, we saw the flash part now onto the SoC part where the controller is. So there are two broad variety of hyper bus controllers that we can see. The first one is dedicated hyper bus controllers, which only understand hyper bus protocol. And they can support memory mapped access to the flash, where in the entire flash can be accessed directly by CPU as if it's an SoC address. And there are multi-io serial controllers which support wide variety of protocols such as it can support a spinor, spineland, octal spy, or even a hyper bus, etc. They may or may not have memory mapped access, but these are the two variety of controllers that you can see out there. This slide shows how a MMIO capable controller works. You can see that, for example, on an SoC, let's say for some, sorry, let's say for example at address 8 followed by 7 0s to 8 followed by all f, there is a memory mapped interface that is exposed to access to the flash. So whenever CPU address has a right access to this address range, the SoC interconnect would probably route it to the hyper bus memory controller. And the hyper bus memory controller intern on the hyper bus will generate the required command address, weight, and data state. So since it knows the transaction that is coming in is a read or a write transaction and the address range, so the 48 bits of the command address phase where what, whether the 47th bit needs to be set or not will be decided by the hyper bus controller and it can talk to the hyper flash. This is very useful if it needs to be used for XIP kind of use cases, although not something for Linux, but you can easily execute code out of hyper flash memory. So let's come to the main part, which is how this is supported in Linux kernel and the software part of it. Hyper bus framework is relatively new and it was merged in kernel 5.3. We only support hyper flash and hyper RAM is not supported at the moment and support MMI or capable hyper bus controllers. So most of the code is just reuse of the existing common flash framework. So on the top we have the empty layer which provides the user space and the kernel level interfaces and there is common flash interface driver which implements the parallel nor command set that is used by the hyper flash and below that there is map framework, which is actually to forward the request of CFI layer onto the memory map capable drivers and hyper bus framework kind of access a layer between the hyper bus memory controller driver and the map framework forwarding the calls from the map framework onto the hyper bus driver and at the lowest level you have the hardware. So basically it's mostly reuse of the command set driver and giving a hook onto the map framework so that the hyper bus controller drivers can plug into it. So there were a few modifications that need to be made to the CFI layer to support hyper flash. One of them or the main one is actually the status register polling in case of write or erase after the completion of write or erase there is a need to pull the flash to know whether the write or erase operation is complete. The legacy CFI driver used to look at the data lines toggling to determine whether or not the programming is complete but it's not possible with the hyper flash kind of hyper bus kind of device where you have double data rate and just eight IO lines for a 16-bit bus. So the way it works in hyper flash is there is a dedicated status register which you can go and read it to know whether the write or erase is complete and it also provides a nice status saying okay what failed and why did it fail in case of failures. So okay if you're writing a hyper bus memory controller driver so what needs to be done it's a very simple interface as of now so you have to implement the hyper bus ops which consists of these five functions I'll go through them in the next slide so the first one is read 16 which is used to read 16 bits of data in a single bus and mostly used to read from non-default data spaces such as ID or CFI space or the status register space and then there is write 16 which is the complement of read 16 which is used to write 16 bit of data in a single bus and there is copy from and copy to which does the majority of write and reads of data from the actual flash memory array if you are reading the data from the flash it's actually done by the copy from interface. So the reason for having this read 16 and write 16 is that the memory map controllers are capable of although your hyper bus is a 16 bit bus you are not supposed to do byte accesses the memory map controller device drivers sorry memory map controller IPs are capable of you know doing non 16 bit accesses as well so for example if you try to write one byte of data the controller might append 0xFF to the higher byte and make it a 16 bit write and write it onto the flash this would be okay if you are writing to normal flash memory space but this would be a problem if the target was a status register or a configuration register for example where you want exactly the value that needs to be written so therefore read 16 write 16 must use proper IO accesses which will do 16 bit accesses whereas copy to and copy from are okay to use non default accesses as well and do the optimization that is required to read data from the flash. Finally we have a utility for calibration which is called very early on by the core code so that the the hyper bus controller driver can calibrate the controller itself because because this is a very high speed interface operating at 200 megahertz most devices may have a phi and may need to calibrate a phi or have to calibrate some DLL locking or some of those stuff so the core provides a calibration utility which is called even before trying to detect the flash device okay so once the driver implements the hyper bus ops itself for every hyper flash device that is discovered on the bus you register a hyper bus device onto the core so this is the structure most important one would be the mapping for which represents the start and end address and start address and the end address of the physical map where you can access the flash device followed by the pointer to the node itself and the empty destruct which gets populated once the device is registered and the hyper bus controller structure which will consist of the hyper bus ops we also have an enum for mem type for now we only support hyper flash and this is just for feature extension once this is populated you can just call hyper bus register device and register the device with the core so this is our device tree representation for TIM 64 SOC's hyper bus controller node there is a memory map window available at this range and it is being assigned to two two chip selects so the chip select zero has 64 megabytes of data result and megabytes of address space result and chip select one has another 64 bytes of 64 megabytes of address range result so yeah and using the ranges we map it to the flash device where the first entry here represents the chip selects itself and the second entry would represent the start and the size of the flash so the compatible for hyper flash would be cypress hyper flash or it's also backward compatible with the CFI flash so I haven't shown the second slave device but it will be exactly same but just the chip select set to one so yeah how do you access hyper flash from user space it's same as any other empty device so it exposes slash dev slash empty DX to the user space or empty block if we are using that block device on top of it so we can use the empty details that are available on the infrared link and yeah you can also use any of the flash file systems such as UBFS so that you can have a root FS on to the hyper flash or any of the storage yeah so one of the recent developments has been that there has been a new JDEX specification called extended spy specification or xxpi specification JEST 251 so the aim of this document is actually to standardize the command set and programming of different serial flashes but it's kind of mix of all type of serial flashes out there and being put into a single specification so there are two profiles mentioned in the xxpi specification which is profile one and profile two so the profile one mostly talks about the regular spy devices the spinar flashes up to octal octal spy flashes and profile two talks about the hyper bus protocol itself so yeah so therefore now hyper flash is also an xxpi standard so but if you really try to compare how these two protocol look on the with respect to each other so the above diagram is of spy flash protocol where you have one or two byte of command phase depending on if it's a ddr mode you'll have two byte of command phase or if it's a str mode there is a single byte of command phase followed by an address phase it can be up to three to four bytes most likely four byte addressing followed by a wait phase and data phase but on the hyper bus protocol there is just a six byte combined command and address phase and the problem is the address is kind of not divided among one of the bytes it's it spans all the way from the you know first byte to the sixth byte so you can't really divide this into two phases but the the xxpi standard kind of adds another profile and says okay these two are are almost same in terms of the phases of transaction so we do have xxpi compliant hyper flash devices on the market so such flashes will power up in spy mode which is single bit mode 1s 1s 1s so one bit command sorry one wire command and one wire of addressing and the one wire data phase also so this is backward compatible to any of the spy devices that we find in the market but using that mode you can program a bit in the configuration register which will switch the flash over to the hyper flash mode and then it will work with the normal command address data phase kind of thing that I showed in the beginning so although one advantage of xxpi compliant flashes they have this serial flash discoverable table or SFTP table which has wide range of parameters and things described about the flash that software can read in runtime and try to find out what needs to be done with this flash exactly without actually knowing to know the exact part number and so on everything is discoverable on the fly yeah we still don't have support for xxpi or compliant flash or the flash controllers which can support both spy nor flashes as well as hyper flash devices but what we have today is we have a spy mem layer which is an abstraction between the spy subsystem and the fly spy flash memory devices and it has been able to work with any type of flash spina and spinor and so on so we could probably extend that to also support the hyper flash so the the spy mem subsystem has spy mem of template which expects one byte of address and sorry one byte of command and four byte of address and followed by data but hyper flash is slightly different that it has a combined command address phase of six bytes we could probably add a new member to the template saying okay this is an hyper flash mode and then extend the command and address field so that you can accommodate the hyper flash protocol as well if you could do that then it should be possible to use the spy nor core and the hyper hyper burst core has ease with the spy mem ops to you know use a single controller driver to talk to both spy spy nor devices as well as hyper flash devices yeah these are the some of the enhancements that can be done to the framework which is one of the thing is the right performance is quite slow because the right is done at word granularity that is 16 bit at a time so but hyper flash can in general do 512 bytes buffered right at a time so should be able to extend that there's also a need to add dma support for reading data from the flash given that we can go up all the way to 400 megabytes per second using dma would would be the only way to actually you know get that such high throughputs but the most flash file systems such as ubfs and jffs to would use vmalloc buffers and we can't just pass around vmalloc buffers and try to map it and use it for dma that's that's that's not possible because of various limitations so that needs to be handled in hyper burst core or at the empty layer level and yeah then probably extend the controller itself sorry probably extend the core itself to use the spy memops so that we can support multi protocols by controllers as well as the xspi support for the spy and hyper flash compatible devices okay so yeah that's it so these are some of the references where you can find hyper burst specification hyper flash and hyper ram data sheets and you can find a source of hyper burst code on the d-tub uh yeah so thanks to my company texas instruments and the linux foundation for providing an opportunity to speak here uh with that uh i open for question answers uh thanks thanks for attending um so uh i saw your patches today linux and you with mailing lists thanks for them good work thank you um you keep mentioning the ubi file system and basically be on the empty on the hyper flash but isn't the hyper flash kind of an uh north flash so why would you run ubi on top of that why would you run ubi on top of that yeah why would you run ubi on top of parallel north flash uh well you can run any of the file systems but uh you still need to do uh i mean you don't need to do wear leveling kind of thing that is required for land but it's still uh erasing the same sector again and again and trying to use the same one as kind of not really good for north as well so the purpose is to uh do the wear leveling basically yeah okay thanks yeah so where where is the subsystem living is it a direct under drivers or is it under the current uh flash drivers so it's here uh it's under drivers mtd hyper burst so it's under the hyper mtd framework hyper ram uh we need a you know if there's a good use case then we can start implementing targeting the use case so that you really know that i mean just supporting in uh out of the blue would probably not meet the requirement when somebody actually tries to use it so that's that's why i kind of haven't come to that part yet yes yes because there's absolutely no programming required actually so yeah uh and it's most likely that hyper ram is a supplement for people who are trying to use it on mcu site where hyper flash would act as a storage and hyper ram has a small amount of memory and it might be a single multi-chip package which can be used for such applications so may not be a linux use case never know uh do you know which other vendors do provide hyper bus on their devices sorry uh do you know other vendors who provide hyper bus in their devices uh vendors who provide hyper bus in their socs yes okay there are ti socs ti am 654 soc which has hyper bus controller on it and i know renaissance has also has a similar soc yeah did you compare the throughputs between uh using octals by mod on hyper bus uh throughput in terms of throughput you mean or yeah i think you can use the same controller with both correct protocols so did you compare the throughputs uh no i haven't done the bench parking yet no um even octals we have octal mode support but octal ddr mode support is still something that's missing in kernel as well so we don't support the ddr mode and hyper bus is a ddr bus by default so yeah that's still pending to be done yeah uh but i would theoretically it seems like both are both can operate at 200 mega hertz and ddr so yeah uh it should be identical if i if i take a guess yeah okay thanks yeah okay thanks thanks for saying thank you


So, we guess you like someone, which is either great or absolutely terrible. We have no clue. However, you might be wondering, what are the things that make us attracted to each other? What roles do our brains play? Well, lucky for you, us at Psych2Go got a list of 9 comprehensive facts about attraction.   Studies from the University of Roeclaw, thank you Poland, held a study about the effects of one's sound and smells into attraction. Secondly, women's attraction changes throughout menstrual cycle. According to several studies, women are attracted to different things depending on where they are in their menstrual cycles. For example, when they're fertile, women like more masculine features, and vice versa when a woman is not ovulating. Thirdly, men don't value intelligence as much as women, which I think is pretty self-explanatory. But the stats explain that women are more likely to date less than average-looking men with higher intelligence. However, average women with intelligence being deemed attractive by men is at a 40%. Four, a study that delved into speed dating found that people who were the most narcissistic scored higher in attractiveness. So pretty much, because narcissists care so much about their appearance, that translates to them being more attractive. So, number five is really shallow. To stop people from cheating on you, date people in your league, or settle for people who are traditionally less attractive than you are, which again, super shallow. But studies from Harvard showed that people who felt more attractive than their partners felt less satisfied and felt like they needed more and cheated more. Number six, opposites attract. A study found that people are attracted to a different genetic blueprint than their own, which lies in our HLA complex, which is crucial to our immune system. So supposedly, we can sense each other's HLA complexes through smell, and opposing complexes lead to sexual attraction. Number seven, a study found that beards are hot, and women think a full beard is hubby material, while a little bit of stubble is great for one-night stands. Over to eight, it's better to be weird in pickup lines, that unique metaphors like your smile is a sea of flowers is better than you're pretty, because it shows that you have some creativity and intelligence. Finally, women are attracted to people who are like their brothers, which is pretty much an offshoot of us being attracted to people who remind us of our parents. So that's all from us at Psych2Go, and our nine facts on attraction and psychology. Till next time, still wear some deodorant.


Previously, I've explored the beneficial effects of flax seeds on prostate cancer, as well as breast cancer prevention and survival, thought to be because of the lignans in flax seeds, which are anti-cancer plant compounds found in red wine, whole grains, greens, cruciferous vegetables, but especially sesame seeds and flax seeds, the most concentrated source on earth. This is per unit weight. People eat a lot more grains than seeds. And of the grains people eat, the highest concentration of lignans are found in rye. So can rye intake decrease the risk of breast cancer? Theoretically, yes, but unlike flax seeds, it's never been put to the test. If you measure the level of lignans in the bloodstream of women living in a region where they eat lots of rye, the odds of breast cancer seem to be cut in half for women with the highest levels, but lignans are also found in tea and berries, and so they couldn't be sure where the protection was coming from. So researchers decided to measure alcohol resource and all metabolize a class of phytonutrients relatively unique to whole grains. They collected urine from women with breast cancer and women without, and those with breast cancer had significantly lower levels compared to women without breast cancer, be they omnivores or vegetarians. This suggests that women at risk for breast cancer consume significantly lower amounts of whole grains like rye. But if you follow older women in their 50s to 60s, the intake of whole grain products was not associated with risk of breast cancer. Similar result was found for older men. Whole grain consumption in ones 50s and 60s did not seem to be linked to prostate cancer risk. Is it just too late at that point? Well, we know from data on dairy that diet in our early life may be important in the development of prostate cancer, particularly around puberty when the prostate grows and matures. And so if you go back and look what men were drinking in their adolescence, daily milk consumption appeared to triple their risk of advanced prostate cancer later in life. And so researchers looked at daily rye bread consumption during adolescence, and indeed those who consumed rye bread daily as kids may have cut their odds of advanced prostate cancer in half. This is consistent with immigrant studies suggesting that the first two decades of life may be most important for setting the pattern for cancer development in later life. Certainly important for how we should feed our kids, but if we're already middle-aged, is it too late to change course? To answer that question, researchers in Sweden put it to the test. How about we take men who already have prostate cancer, split them up into two groups, half get lots of rye bread, the other half get lots of high fiber, but low lignan wheat bread, and see what happens. There's been some indirect evidence that rye may be active against prostate cancer, like lower cancer rates in regions with high rye consumption, but it's never been directly investigated until this study. Biopsies were taken from their tumors before and after three weeks of bread eating, and the number of cancer cells that were dying off were counted. There was no change in cancer cell clearance in the control bread group, but a 180% increase in the number of cancer cells being killed off in the rye group. A follow-up study lasting six weeks found a 14% decrease in PSA levels, a cancer marker suggesting a shrinkage of the tumor. Now they know since they used very high rye bread intakes, it remains to be tested if more normal intake levels would have effects that are of clinical importance. As any good red blooded American, my ignorance of the metric system did not flag 480 grams of rye bread a day, as out of the ordinary, but that translates to 15 slices a day. Rather than eating a loaf of bread a day, the same amount of lignans can be found in a single teaspoon of ground flax seeds.


program and we also have public information manager Rob Golding. Rob will share with us some of the logistics for tonight's event in a moment. I just want to say thank you for joining us this evening for the second of two informational meetings on consolidated collection and for folks who may not be familiar with the term consolidated collection is an approach to how a community can approach picking up trash, organics, and recycling. So we'll have a short presentation tonight but mostly want to hear questions and comments from members of the public in advance of an upcoming city council meeting. So with that, thank you for being here and Rob wants to share some of the logistics for tonight's event. Well, Jepin, and thank you to everybody who joined us here. Thanks to Town Meeting TV for being on as always. Really appreciate you doing that. As Jepin said, we'll have a mini presentation where Jepin and Lee will present some of the background on consolidated collection. But we also want to set this up as an opportunity to hear from you. So there's about 10, 12 people on right now. So everybody's going to have a chance to talk. We'd ask that you hold questions or comments until after the presentation. We'll go around the room and ask folks to use the raise your hand feature on Zoom. If you look at your Zoom screen on the bottom toolbar, you should see something called reactions for most of you. If you click that, there's an option to raise your hand. Hopefully you all see that. If I don't think anybody's called in, but if you do decide you need to call in for whatever reason, you can also alert us that you wish to speak by pressing star nine. And so when Jepin and Lee are done with the presentation, we'll open that up for comments and questions. We'll ask everybody to try to limit it to about three minutes. And I'll watch the clock just so everybody has a chance to talk. And certainly if there's time, we'll want to go back around and let everybody speak again. If for whatever reason, we get to the end of the meeting, starts running late, we will ask that you email us, we'll get back to you, you know, within a day or two, if you have further questions and comments, we don't want to leave anything out. And if you have any technical issues or questions during the meeting that you'd prefer not to answer, not to raise here, I'm going to read out an email address that we'd asked you to use and we'll try to troubleshoot for you in real time, or ask a question or raise your comment if you'd prefer us to do that. That email address is dpwcommunications at burlingtonvt.gov. And again, just let us know if you're having any issues or want us to read your question aloud. With that, I'll pull up today's agenda and presentation and turn it back over to Jepin and Lee. Thanks Rob. And while he's getting this up, presentation will be about 15 minutes. And so the bulk of the time this evening can really be reserved for you all. Division Director Lee Perry will start out and I'll clean it up and we'll open up for questions.  Welcome overview and the wrap up with questions. And we do have the date listed either September 13 or the 27 for our next public meeting, which will be at the City Council meeting. A little background on consolidated collection. There's many ways that communities coordinate the collection of trash, recyclables and food scraps. Here in Burlington, it's a subscription basis where residents subscribe to with private haulers to collect their trash recycling and compost. Or they self haul to one of the area Chitton's Hall Waste District drop off centers. And according to a survey that our consultants did a 461 communities nationwide, this kind of subscription collection service happens in about 11% of communities. Whereas on the other hand, consolidated collection occurs in 83% of the communities, where either the municipalities collecting the waste streams itself or contracts with a private hallway. Next slide, please. A little more additional background about consolidated collection and how it's been explored in our region back in 2000. DPW did an evaluation that was initiated for the council resolution. In 2009, Chitton's Hall Waste District did a countywide evaluation that really didn't gain any traction. And then again, in 2018, with the city council resolution, DPW collaborated with Chitton's Hall Waste District in the city of South Burlington, to have a consultant evaluate consolidated collection. Next slide. Now what are the benefits of consolidated collection? Reduce cost to residents through more efficient collection routes. Other benefits are reduced environmental impacts, increased safety and increased diversion. And increasing diversion is the most cost effective mechanism to add food scraps to the collection of the waste streams. Next slide, please. And on this slide, we have what we have done for public outreach to present. So we started in 2019 with our consultant reaching out to 261 Burlington residents through a phone survey, all the way up to tonight's present meeting, and also listed as the upcoming council meeting on consolidated collection. And all the information from these meetings can be found at the city website. And there are four operating models that we explored. The first one would be the franchise model, which was studied by our consultant. That is where municipality contracts with a private holler to collect all three waste streams. And then the second model is similar to franchise model, but franchise model is city bid. So this is where the city would retain the right to bid on districts against private contractors for the collection of all three waste streams. And then our third option is the municipal operation model. And this is where the municipality itself would collect all three waste streams, conduct oversight of the collection, customer service, scheduling, frequency of pickup, service levels, and do the billing internally itself. And then our fourth model is the hybrid municipal franchise model. So underneath this scenario, the city would continue to collect recycling as it does now, and then franchise out the remaining trash and compost collection with private hollers. Next slide, please. And to touch on what we spoke about earlier about the prevalence of each model with that 83% that our consultant was talking about, the 58% would be where the municipality is contracted with a private holler through a franchise collection. The 40% would be where the municipality itself collects all three waste streams. And then the 2% would be sort of a hybrid model where the scenario where the municipality would bid against private contractors on districts. Next slide, please. And on this slide, we have the projected cost for all three waste streams. So we have it broken down into the municipal model and the franchise model with three options from a 0% opt out option to a 25% opt out option for each model. And you can see in the chart that the resident monthly costs are fairly close. We're a little bit higher on some, but that is because on the municipal model and includes a lot of heavy capital investment, you know, that that is accounted for in there. And in the franchise model, there is the consultant did not include the additional costs of a additional worker to oversee the performance of the contractors and a collection of the waste streams. Next slide, please. And this is where it turned it over to Chapin. Thank you, Lee. So we evaluated the various operating models in a number of criteria you'll see down the left hand side here. A number of the criteria in the top have relatively similar benefits across operating models that customer choice is reduced from the subscription based model by basically saying that there are two options for residents. One would be working with the the the hauler of choice, whether it was private or or the city. The other option would be going to the CSWD drop off center. So all consolidated models have that similar attribute. Similarly, on customer convenience, environmental benefits and community benefits, the consolidation regardless of model performs similarly. In blue here, we've highlighted some of the distinguishing features under the municipal fully municipal model option three, and the hybrid option and option four. And you see under the municipal option that it received the most check marks and you can see at the bottom how we defined low benefit, medium benefit, high benefit, that city would have the most control under a fully municipal option if there needed to be any changes in service levels or program design. If we were running the program, the city would have the greatest control. In addition, the municipal model option three has the one where there's the greatest number of union employees working for the city. The projection is under the hybrid option that there would be a three to four additional union positions. And under the full municipal option that there would be somewhere in the range of 12 to 14. What that doesn't factor into is whether there's any job losses from private haulers from that municipal operation. But from a municipal perspective, there are more union workers providing the service. A number eight effort to launch. It's important to recognize here where staff in our review felt that the hybrid option had a lower entry effort to entry due largely to the fewer steps needed to stand up a municipal operation. There would not need to be on the city's time and effort, the need to hire the additional staff to such an extent to build a new building to house our operation to purchase the new equipment and the carts and stand up a billing operation to manage the service. Upfront capital costs. This has been certainly an area of significant discussion. If the city were to start a fully municipal operation, we would need to purchase significant assets and those capital costs are estimated to be approximately six million dollars and include the construction of a new building acquisition of commercial heavy duty vehicles and and carts under the hybrid option. The city's responsibility to expend the capital dollars would be much less if if if anything legislative approval. One of the benefits of the hybrid option is that we would not need to go to the council or state legislature to seek a charter change. A charter change would be required if the city needed to set up a new enterprise fund. An enterprise fund is similar to what we have with water or electric. When we have a business in the city, we set it up as an enterprise fund when it reaches a certain level and has certain requirements of audits and the like to ensure that the ratepayers interests are served. A risk to city government. We believe that the hybrid option has less risk than a full municipal option given the fewer steps and approvals, fewer votes that would be needed in front of the public. We wouldn't need to borrow the bond. We wouldn't have to go to the state legislature to set up the enterprise fund. But there is an easier path to to launch and that is reflected in the time to launch number 12 here. We're projecting two to three years would be needed to stand up the hybrid option in three to five years to stand up the municipal option. Lastly, future flexibility. As you'll see here, setting up a hybrid system would allow us, since we wouldn't have to acquire new capital assets and set up a new business at this point, this would allow us the flexibility in the future. Should we want to move to full municipal operation or even to shift back to franchising that the flexibility of going different directions would be there? Whereas in a municipal option, once we build the assets and set up a business within the city, it would be very difficult to to change that substantively. So as you see at the bottom, we assigned points. It was not a weighted ranking. We did ultimately through our due diligence come to a recommendation. Staff recommendation of option four and on the next two slides we'll just summarize some of the. So one of the benefits of the hybrid option is that it's built off the city's recycling program. We've become experts in running the recycling program. We continue to do that and then we would allow the private sector who has the experience of doing the trash and we're going to pick up in our community to continue doing so. It also achieves a number of benefits in the second bullet here that I touched on briefly. Less to bond for and fewer capital costs up front. Smaller human resource investment. It's a shorter timeline and less overall risk. It does still create additional union positions. The hybrid option three to four, which those positions could be utilized during winter maintenance periods on plowing and ice control, which are key functions of the department. And another key key distinguishing feature is we would be able to accommodate the hybrid option at 645 Pine Street, our base of operations, because we wouldn't have new commercial vehicles or a greatly expanded team. So there are some other benefits for the hybrid option. We already have the city solid waste generation tax. So on your, if you have a private hauler collecting your trash, they're required to put on the solid waste generation tax with funds or recycling program. We could adjust the tax rate in order to fund the hybrid option and still enable the haulers to bill as they do today. It doesn't require us to launch a new customer service effort and new range of customers for the consolidated collection program. That service would be provided by the hauler. We talked about the future flexibility and it also maintains a role for the private haulers under this option here. And lastly, it provides clarity for the direction for the Flynn Avenue property that CSWD and the city have control of. It originally was for the purpose of setting up an expanded drop off center on Flynn Avenue and knowing what the direction on consolidated collection would be, would give us a direction on what to do with the drop off center moving forward. So with that, we have brought forward this recommendation and what we have done with this period. We thought we were going to the council in August, but the council had asked us to come in September. We've taken that time to do additional engagement. These two meetings are part of that. We've also set up a survey online that really gets to some of the key service level questions, regardless of what model is selected. If the city moves forward with consolidated collection, it's important to get a sense from the public what level of service they want in terms of weekly or bi-weekly collection, whether the residents want an opt out option. If they want to go to the drop off center, we've heard strong support of opt out to date. We'll hear tonight whether that's consistent. What properties participate? Currently, we're recommending one to four unit properties, but there are many streets near the university, for example, that have five, six, seven, eight, nine units.  Then other service options as you see here. We encourage everybody to take the survey. It's online. We've had over 200 responses to date, looking for even more. Next. Here is a conceptual timeline of what it would take to launch the hybrid option. We're estimating here about two and a half years. Just as a placeholder looking to start service in 2024, should the council give the go ahead to move in this direction. There's some very important steps in here, including needing to complete negotiations with the Chittin Solid Waste District and Casella for the various tip fees for the three waste streams, as there aren't many options for dropping off the waste streams. We need to know for any bidding process what the cost would be so that all bidders would have an equal footing. Next. In terms of process with other bodies to date, the Public Works Commission on June 16th voted five to one for a hybrid consolidated collection model. You'll see the various components of that here. The Transportation Energy and Utilities Committee of the City Council, which is comprised of three members of the City Council, they voted two to one on June 22nd to advocate the municipal, full municipal operation of consolidated collection. The City Council is going to take up this issue at it's either its 13th or 27th meeting, and the Transportation Energy and Utilities Committee will be bringing a resolution advocating and supporting the direction of a full municipal operation to that meeting. The full council can debate it and choose the direction, but that is what the two committee will be advancing to the council. Next. Here's the last page for comments going forward. It's the same that Rob shared at the beginning of the meeting. Lee's phone number is available for folks who don't want to or don't like email, and we have that great resource on the web. And really appreciate the time to share this overview. We know for some of you that this is a presentation you've already seen, so we try to go through it quickly. Happy to answer any questions and hear your comments. Thank you. As a reminder for folks who have recently joined us, if you do want an opportunity to speak, ask questions, share comments or concerns right now with us, we'd ask that you use the raise your hand feature on your Zoom screen. If you're on desktop, that will be on the reactions button, which you might see, and if you don't see it, it should be under the more button, which will bring you to the raise your hand feature. If you're on mobile, but on Zoom via mobile, you should be able to also tap the reaction screen or a more screen on the bottom of your iPhone or Android device. If you have called in, we ask that you use Star 9, and that will put you in queue also to share some comments or questions with us. And Chip and Lee, at this time, looks like Andrea has a question, so folks, you should be able to unmute yourselves, and I'll also ask you to unmute yourself via Zoom, so you should have that option, and folks should feel free to share screens, so we can all, if you want to, so we can all kind of see each other and diverse. But Andrea, you are available to speak now. Thank you. Hi, so I haven't lived in Burlington all that long, but is this really something we need?  But this is an expensive proposition, and so there's going to be an investment, and it, you know, you didn't actually see the figures that I saw on how much money it's afforded to save the taxpayer. Burlington is a super expensive place to live for its size. I think we should be moving in the direction of making it less expensive rather than consolidating things at the cost of higher expense, and in terms of noise and pollution and environmental friendliness, at least where I live, we've got a bigger problem with people racing cars on the street and dirt bikes than we do with noise collect of trash collections, so that's my two cents on it. I think the status quo is fine. I don't really see a need to spend more money to solve a problem that I don't think really exists. Great, thank you Andrea. My quick piece is on traffic calming. If there's a concern with that, feel free to call us a customer service and we can address that issue through our traffic calming process. As it relates to the goals of this project, the consultant estimated that the savings to two customers would be in the range of 1.6 to 3.6 million dollars collectively by consolidating, by having one hauler collecting all trash, all recycling organics in a particular neighborhood that economies of scale would be achieved. Each community is different however, and then on the environmental benefits, the projections were a reduction in vehicle miles traveled and emissions by two-thirds for the for the service of collecting from residential properties. That said, appreciate your comments and happy to take any additional comments. Sharon Busher, it looks like you are next in line if you'd like to speak. Can you hear me now? Yes, we can. Okay, hi, good evening. Thank you. My name is Sharon Busher and I support the direction you're going in. I'm not certain if I thought the franchise or the hybrid was the best model. I do believe that reducing truck traffic on streets is a goal and a laudable one and one that people have commented on in the past. It depends on where you live and how many haulers actually come down your street on a given day what the impact is. So the previous speaker might be lucky enough to live on a street where most everybody uses the same hauler and might not be as impacted as others. There is a cost associated with this and I really am concerned about pay for people that do this business. I know that we have the livable wage. I'm not quite sure if we select this hybrid model. Will the employees, if they're not already paid at least a livable wage, will they be required to be paid that? That's one thought. I'm glad there are some union jobs being created. I think that's good also. My son asked a question. So as you move forward and you have and you reach out to the haulers to have them apply, is that a stagnant process so you select some haulers and you divvy up the city? But what if a new hauler comes into the business? Are they precluded from ever doing business in Burlington? How does that get evaluated? And one of my older neighbors, you know I used to be a city counselor so people still reach out to me occasionally. And one of my older neighbors, not that I'm young, but one of my older neighbors said, asked, she uses a very small hauler. She's used this person for forever and is very worried about their viability moving forward. So I know I've thrown a lot at you but these are accumulation of comments and thoughts and I appreciate your time. Thank you. Great. Thank you Sharon just quickly to respond to those contract requirements, livable wage. Those haven't been set yet but clearly the city has a livable wage ordinance and our expectation would be that under a hybrid model any bidder would need to comply with livable wage and any other provision that the city felt would be necessary to protect the workforce. As it relates to new hauler opportunities that would be made available at each bid cycle. It is important to note that to get a low bid and to ensure kind of consistency our consultant is recommending a seven year cycle for bidding. So any new vendor could come and be part of the bidding process every seven years and then there has been some conversation about was it less, is it more, but it can't be substantially less for the haulers to amortize their expenses. And then lastly you asked about a small hauler viability. We could put out a bid process that allowed for and provided bonus points for haulers that worked with smaller haulers maybe organics collectors who have sprouted up that a larger trash hauler could partner with them for their proposal. So those are some options. Obviously under a municipal option there would be no role for the private sector for the residential pickup. Thanks for your comments. Appreciate it. Sure there's other questions or comments out there we're happy to answer them or just hear them. I'll just share that reminder that if you do want to talk use star nine if you've called in or use the raise your hand button below. If you're having any trouble feel free to just speak up certainly want to hear from you. It looks like Stephen Hamlin is looking to speak and you're welcome to speak now. I was just curious as to how big of an area we're going to be divided into. The size of a ward is it going to be you know like a five or six communities at a time. It's going to make a big difference how many how big of an area these haulers are going to be because if it's too big that's not going to be any cost savings it's going to be a monopoly and these guys are going to be able to charge us higher rates because they're the only ones allowed to come in here. So do we know what size an area we're going to divvy this up as. Thank you Stephen for that for that question it is a good question is one that we have been talking through with our consultant team and I think to your point Stephen you're rightly identifying that you want to have a number of districts should the city move ahead with consolidated collection under the hybrid model having a number of districts and limiting the number that each hauler can win will help enable competition into the future. So we've been talking about four to six districts that all could shift a little bit as we continue to do more due diligence if the city council directs us to continue going down that road but we'd be looking to have enough districts and limit the number of districts so that there would still be a range of haulers available now into the future. Hopefully that answered your question Stephen. Thank you. Got another question from Andrea and no one else is in queue so Andrea you're up. So I guess I wanted a clarification because it wasn't had it been clear to me from reading the proposals that the model would actually keep potentially most of the current haulers in business and that it wasn't going to be one contract to the whole city so is it correct that there are going to be multiple wards and so likely most of the current haulers and the jobs associated with that would continue. Right well thanks Andrea for the clarification we're all trying to you know understand what this recommendation entails and and what it doesn't entail and so under the hybrid model the city would still collect recycling would be the only collector recycling other than taking it and self hauling it to the drop-off center DSWD and then for trash and organics there would be a number of districts and I suggested to Steven it would be four to four to six districts bid out and no hauler could achieve a certain number of districts just off the top of my head I don't think we'd want one hauler to get more than half of the districts that would need to be set out in the bid documents and the policies that we establish if the council supports this direction if the council advances the municipally managed and operated direction then for these small residential properties there would be no role for the private haulers. Okay thank you thanks Andrea there's someone in queue your phone number ends in 1953 and you are welcome to join us. So we've just for now put that person in the waiting room to see if maybe their camera was on by mistake but we do still have the caller with who ends in 1953<PHONE_NUMBER> looks like your hand is raised and we'd welcome your input if you are ready to talk and just to clarify how do they unmute Rob? Sure it looks like they are on mute but I've also just asked them to unmute so they should get an instruction on their on their phone on on how to unmute. Maybe we should go to someone else and we can get back to them if they can unmute. Yeah right now there is no one else in queue if you do want to join us star nine on the phone or raise your hand on zoom and for the caller who has called in<PHONE_NUMBER> you are certainly welcome to join us if you intended to speak. You should have the opportunity to unmute now if you're having any trouble email us and we'd certainly be happy to help you troubleshoot or read your question or concerns off for you. Great and even if there are no questions any comments I know a number of you on this call have submitted comments to us via email or on the survey you're welcome to speak now and share your thoughts on either model of consolidated collection or whether we should proceed or not proceed in this direction just keep the subscription service ultimately the council and the administration will need your guidance and how best to proceed.  Sorry about that everyone I think.  Hey stop it stop muting. All right I think we've solved that problem for now somebody's mic might be on or maybe we're getting zoom bombs but we still have the opportunity to take any comments or questions from you folks. So barring any folks raising their hand at this point there the city council will be taking this up either at their September 13th meeting or the September 27th meeting we're coordinating with President Tracy to determine when it fits on the schedule so we'll have that update on the website as soon as we hear and we love your input the survey is still online and we want to capture your feedback it's really a helpful way to weigh in on service levels if the city does proceed with a consolidated collection approach we need to know from you whether there should be opt out provisions allowing people to opt out of either of any of the three way streams what schedule you would like with bi-weekly or weekly again this is advisory but give us a sense of service level whether we should have options with back door service container sizes etc so please hop online and fill out the survey and participate in the upcoming council meetings we very much appreciate your participation tonight and any final words uh Lee and Rob I'd just like to thank everyone for showing up and participating and listening to our presentation and hope to see you at the city council meeting that's coming up thank you everyone have a good night


Leg 2 of Cotesire Rally Australia and it's the longest stage of the event. In actual fact the longest stage of our championship, 48.9 Ks, very difficult kilometers. We had rain yesterday, how will that affect the stage? At the service last night, a very happy Scott Pettis said this is one of the best stages in the championship. Will it still be one of his favourites after the first run? Let's find out. How do the front tyres look? They look a little bit toasty. Yeah, it's actually funny. The tyres work really well. We probably overheated them in the tight section in the middle, probably 20 K through and I thought oh that's another 25 Ks to go and then once they got out of the into the faster stuff, just try to manage them a little bit more and not be so aggressive on the throttle and it seems to work. We got here so last 5 Ks was pretty interesting though, very very hot. You rate this as a very good stage mate, was it enjoyable? Yeah, unbelievable. I'd love to do it in a world rally car one day, that would be just an unbelievable experience but even in this little thing it's exhilarating and heaps of people out there and they're all cheering, arms in the air and fantastic. There's a sort of a yellow and the bumper looks a bit scarred there mate, what's happened through that one? Oh look, it's just got a bit wild towards the end there Dino and yeah it just caught me out, came round and it's all good. It's hard on the tyres through here, your front wheel drive is a long stage that starts to become hard to manage these cars at the end of it doesn't it, keep them all straight?  That was really good, that was good fun, we had a ball actually, it was really good just trying to save for the moment essentially so last 10 Ks of this is just bliss and people everywhere and yeah it was good, the middle section's pretty snotty but anyway we've all got to drive over it. Apparently there is a great amount of spectators out there all cheering, really enjoying the festivities and the action, it's nice as a drive when you can see that isn't it, like you said take in the moment. Yeah exactly, so probably tens of thousands out there I'd imagine Dino but yeah that was great, great stage, great way to start the day and we'll just keep motoring on from here. Adrian Koff and that's going to wake you up in the morning mate, those times have been given a hard time. Yeah man I don't know, it's going to be a poor time, I reckon I just struggled big time with wheelspin like I couldn't get any power down, like at one point I thought something wrong with the car so I don't know what the other guys are doing, we've gone for a hard and yeah I just couldn't put the power down. Probably about 15 K from the end there, something's wrong with the gearbox, it's jumping out of gears and really hard to pull next to gear so yeah I'm not sure what you're going to do from here. That's all good, the thumbs are up, that's a nice feeling isn't it? It is, yeah I took a bit gently for the first few corners just because everything's changed and we put another crank sensor and stuff in it last night and it's great, did the whole stage without conking out so now all I need to do is work on my speed. You don't want to be here for a long cracking time, you've got a bit of high oil to have a good time through there mate, yeah we've got these new cams in the engine and they only rev up high so it was holding it flat trying to manage the tyres, I don't know how they are, it feels like there's none left but this car's certainly fun to drive, that stage is awesome, I love rally Australia, it's so good, see you guys.


The study explored the relationship between perceived risks of using mobile health, mHealth, applications and the intention to use these applications among older adults in the Netherlands. The results showed that performance risk, legal concern and privacy risk were negatively correlated with the intention to use mHealth applications while trust was positively correlated. Health care professionals, designers of mHealth applications and policy makers can use these findings to address performance risks and tailor campaigns and applications to address legal and privacy concerns and promote mHealth uptake and health care access for older adults, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. This article was authored by Nikki Sabine Claver, Urs Wendeklundert, Roy Johannes Garaduz Maria van den Broek and others.