Greetings and welcome. This is the what is popular culture project video. So in this video I'm going to walk through this particular assignment and kind of hopefully clarify its complexity. But again you know this is kind of an intro. You really should be definitely looking at the guidelines or looking at the guidelines as you're going through this video. So this project is worth 400 points in your final grade. It is 2,000 words long or it will be when you're done with it. There's seven parts to this project. You will be forming it throughout the semester. So looking at that 2,000 words don't think like oh my gosh I've got to write this 2,000 word paper. It's done in smaller chunks so therefore it makes it much more manageable. And the cool thing about this project is it really allows you to integrate different content experiences and writings that you're doing throughout the course. So this project you know the title of it is what is popular culture. Maybe that's not the best name for the assignment but it's really just trying to get the student to think about what they've learned throughout this course and applying a lot of what they've learned to this question of popular culture and its relevance. But some of the questions that this paper should address should be the following. What is popular culture? What is meant by popular? What makes it culture? What values does popular culture offer society? How does popular culture reflect society? And how does society reflect popular culture? What meanings does popular culture provide or create within the culture? How does one study popular culture? Why does one study popular culture and what values lie or what value lies in studying popular culture? What is the purpose of theories and analytical frames in studying popular culture? How does one apply these theories and frameworks within popular culture? And note you know your paper shouldn't just straightforwardly answer these but really your essay should integrate these you know some of the answers to these into the paper. You don't want it to just be this is what popular culture is and this is what offers society but you really want to think about how you can kind of blend everything you've done into this semester into a coherent discussion about popular culture. So let's take a look at part one. You deal with this pretty early in the semester. It's usually do the second week of the course and it's only 250 words so that's about a double-spaced page and you're really working with defining what is popular culture. So what you want to do here is sum up in a good critical thoughtful way what did you learn in the first two modules about popular culture? And realize you're gonna submit this but you want to constantly coming back to revise it and revisit it, rethink it because this thought should be changing as we move through the semester. So parts two to four are a little bit interesting. I call these the adding component parts and what you'll have is within this you end up with two steps for part two, part three, part four. The first part is to submit your option for review. So parts two through four you're gonna have five options that you can choose from and you're gonna want to first submit what option you're doing it and what you're doing it on and then the second subject would be the second part will be actually doing it. So in that submission you want to identify different subjects you want to move beyond the class material and what I mean by that is merely that as you're doing as you're going through these parts you really want to be doing not only different assignments but focusing on different things. You shouldn't be doing say football for part two, part three, part four. It should be something like say you do football for one, you do you know pop concerts for another and you do race cars for a third. So you want to vary up the subjects and you want to move beyond the class materials. You want to really do things that aren't covered by the course. And then step two is just writing the paper or doing the assignment because some of these require different ways of doing the work than others. So what are those options? One is observing popular culture and this is a fun one often that students do so this would entail kind of being thinking of yourself as a anthropologist in going to a concert and observing kind of how people interact what's going on there, what's the culture being enacted or going to a parade or going to a major sporting event going to some place where there's a large amount of people participating in some form of popular culture and then writing an essay about what that was like and how it relates to what we're doing in the course. Another would be critiquing popular culture so a particular area of popular culture providing a very interesting critique and review of what it is, how people engage in it, why people engage in it that kind of thing. Interview with somebody with either a you know either a pop culture person meaning somebody who is you know celebrity or well known within certain areas it could mean interviewing somebody that's involved in popular culture so maybe it's somebody who helps to run anime Boston or it's somebody who writes for a very well known popular culture magazine or publication. Evaluate academic content on popular culture so this would be kind of like the article analysis just a much smaller version and then analyze an artifact of popular culture from before 1960 so you want to think of this if you've taken a history course this is kind of like a primary primary source analysis you're going to take some artifact it could be an episode it could be a advertisement a newspaper article a movie etc you want to write a you know you want to analyze it through some of the lenses that we've used within this course so those are your five options so what you have to think about is this is parts two through four so that's three parts and you're going to have to do at least three of these for parts through two through four part five is going to be synthesis so you're going to take you know what you did for part one part two part three part four and you're going to also if you want pull in stuff from the blog and make it into one coherent piece that coherent piece should have an introduction it should have clear connection and discussion of course ideas and themes clear use of the components explored in parts two through four and any relevant blog posts that you write that feel help add to your discussion or make your discussion more coherent clear connections and transitions among the different elements discussed so this is a lot of students or not a lot sometimes students will take their five pieces four pieces and just throw them into their paper and call it a day they really have to work together they really have to blend together otherwise it's not really an essay it's not really a coherent or synthesized piece and then of course you should have a conclusion so that's what you want to be thinking about for part five is just pulling it all together and what to think about is by that point you'll have written almost all 1500 words if not more and so now you're looking at refining cleaning up tweaking editing so that's really cool you know you're not writing straight out 1500 words but you've already built that material and of course you'll want a work cited and please make sure as you go through every part in this in this project you're going to get continual feedback from me i'm going to give you a lot of good feedback on what to cheat you know what what needs some work what's really good about your work in where you might want to look further or dive deeper part six is the peer draft so you actually are going to pair be paired up and do drafts or do review drafts with one another and again there's two parts of this there is posting your revised draft by thursday of of a given module i believe it's 14 and you're gonna have to revise and update it based on your the feedback you receive on part five so at part five you'll get more feedback from me and then between part five and part six you'll want to get up to two thousand words if you're not there already and really make sure it says as refined as can be and then you'll want to post it to um the the appropriate discussion board and then you're going to have somebody that you're paired up with who you're going to review and critique that classmates paper by sunday so the idea is that you're getting your paper critiqued and you're critiquing somebody else's so that it in truth that usually helps students with their own writing so you'd be giving evaluative feedback based on rubric critical feedback based on your own understanding of the content and relevant feedback based upon your own learned lessons on writing in this course so by this time you'll have gotten a lot of good feedback in different ways from me and you want to leverage that you want to think about what were the things that you found with your writing that need to work and also see if other students need help with that or just what you've learned about this course and how that makes you read or perceive the students paper and then finally part seven is the final draft and this is where what you should be passing in is a well polished you know well written clear essay that addresses the major questions it really should at that point take in all the feedback from peers and instructors you should have revised it revised it revised it i'm going to say that a lot throughout this course all good writing goes through revisions goes through editing so you want to make sure that you're doing that for your writing i know it sounds tedious i know it can sound like a waste of time but this is a really good process not just for my course but all of your writing all of your communications you're going to be going out into the water you know the world at large and this is a key tool to have and then you submit a well polished essay so that's the bare bones of it you really do need to check out the guidelines of course and if you have questions for the questions about this please post them to the questions form so that's all i have thank you very much


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Like on OC16, Hawaii's weekly newscast on things that matter to tech and to Hawaii. I'm Elise Anderson. And I'm Kauai Lucas. In our show this time, we'll visit the 2017 annual briefing to the legislature by the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum at the state capitol. The briefing looked at some of the earlier energy initiatives that have not been completed and asked what we can learn from them. It was the forum's 13th annual briefing to the legislature and was entitled Finding Continuity, inquiring into what happened to various earlier energy initiatives and what should be done next. The forum works hard to organize community events and programs that advance clean energy. Its members include government, academia, utilities, oil and gas companies, labor, trade associations and environmental organizations. The briefings intended to update the legislature and the public on how things are going and what we need to focus on in the coming session. That task was more difficult this year because of the many uncertainties we've had at home and in Washington. As everyone knows, we had a tumultuous 2016, consumed by the next era merger and of course the national elections. Last year's briefing was about what we called staying the course, but the 100% renewable energy generation and community solar laws of 2015 were not followed by further legislation in 2016. We learned that the energy community cannot take its hands off the stick even for a moment. And looking back, we have passed a number of bills in the last decade for a number of energy programs. Many of these seemed promising when they were passed, but have since been forgotten. For better or worse, they have lost their luster. We should ask which ones succeeded and which ones didn't, and why, and what that teaches us. Indeed, what programs will be relevant these days? Sometimes it's hard to find focus on that. This year's briefing began with remarks from Sharon Moriwaki, co-chair of the forum. She welcomed the legislators, forum members and the public. We represent individuals and organizations committed not only to clean energy, but is importantly to a collaborative approach in seeking smart solutions for our clean energy future. We bring together our diverse perspectives to address controversial and emerging issues in energy and always, always with the public interest as our core interest. While our individual agendas may sometimes conflict, we have stayed together all these many years. We celebrate this year, our 15th year together, our 15th anniversary. The forum seeks to inform and educate through briefings such as this, our 13th annual, our Clean Energy Day in August to inform and engage the broader public and our dialogues and working groups on initiatives and legislation that matter. Chris Lee, chair of the House Committee on Energy and Environmental Protection, then spoke about the future of clean energy in Hawaii from the legislature's point of view. Aloha. A year ago, we stood here, some of us sitting together in the midst of great uncertainty and I think everyone was on the edge of their seats waiting to figure out how we're going to move forward with our energy future, who would own the utility, what would that look like. And I just want to take a moment because that nearly 20 month process obviously came to a close. I just want to recognize the PUC and their staff who poured their heart and souls into doing the due diligence into that docket. Where are you guys? Can you please stand? The facilitator for the forum presented the forum's Clean Energy Performance Report and discussed the forum's initiatives on leadership in energy generation and targets for transportation. I've been managing a Clean Energy and Metrics status reports project for the forum over several years. We've been trying to identify what it makes sense to measure, develop meaningful metrics to measure progress with clean energy or maintaining and publishing that data and developing status reports. And the current status of that project is we are taking all of the data sets that we have, we're getting those electronically, automatically updated and they will be available in the first quarter of this year electronically to any organization or person who wants to get on there for access to what's a very large amount of energy sector related data. Two other initiatives that are new this year or as the end of last year, one is an electric power sector working group and a transportation sector working group. These are both facilitated stakeholder driven processes, the forums providing the venues and the facilitation. The electric power sector working group is working on reviewing the roles of the various stakeholders, how planning gets done and by who and what types of incentives exist for clean energy so people are working together with the right incentives moving forward. The transportation sector working group is working on performance metrics, goals, targets, strategies and trying to tackle this difficult problem in the transportation sector is there's no unified agency or entity who's in charge of all the different moving pieces. We have agencies in charge of building roads, we have the counties, we have the state, we have planning for land use, we have planning for transportation, we have agencies that run transportation systems but there's not any unified entity really who's in charge of it all to move forward in a coordinated way. PUC Commissioner Tom Gorak then gave us a report on what is pending and contemplated by the Public Utilities Commission. Given the theme of this conference I can't believe that no one has yet quoted the great Stevie Wonder whatever happened to the world we know. Well that world as all of you in the audience know is gone and we won't be returning to it any time soon that world was you walk in a room you flip on the lights which at the end of the month you pay the bill that's done. The next era is done that's good there are many many issues on the PUC's plate and while you may not have followed them while we were doing the next era proceeding we did not forget them and we continue to work on them during that period. It's the great acronym list of things to do the PSIP, DER, DR, decoupling CBRE, grid modernization I'll try to fill you in a little bit on where we are in each of those dockets right now. The powers to apply improvement plan or PSIP Carl just alluded to a little bit. This is the blueprint for future action. It really is an in-depth look at the entire system of the electric utility from generation to just to transmission to distribution but also we look at what resources we have on the customer side of the meter. We have had two and now three as of December 23rd iterations of the PSIP. The commission has issued critiques on two of them and the commission in its last order in August stated that it wanted to bring the docket to a close and that it was looking for finalizing the PSIP's and what could be done in the short run defined as a five-year term. So there were some significant changes I think Carl alluded to them and what has just been filed in the short term much more storage on the utility side no LNG or cable in the short run and there was also a proposal to meet the 100% goal by 2040. The schedule in that proceeding is that parties are due to file information request on that by January 17th. The responses are due by January 30th and statements to position are due by February 13th. Our keynote was Gavin Bade, editor of the utility dive energy app and newsletter. He spoke about national changes in energy and what those changes mean for Hawaii. So if there's one thing that journalists like myself really, really like to do it's find an analogy, right? Find a little trope, a metaphor, something that can make a really complicated subject easier to understand. And I think the best one that I could come is the best of times, worst of times going back to Charles Dickens. And I say that because we're really entering 2017 in a gigantic energy paradox, right? On one hand we've got the flaming haired climate denier who is going to be the next inhabitant of the White House next week. And for a world that's already behind the pace to limit global warming to two degrees this century, I mean losing the diplomatic and policy will of the largest economy in the world would seem to be catastrophic, right? That's how I thought of it the day after the election. And I think a lot of other people did as well. But Trump's vocal skepticism renewables and promise of a coal resurgence, they really belie conditions on the ground. In fact, renewables in 2017 enter the year into their best market position ever. They're competitive with natural gas and cheaper than coal across large swaths of the country. And no matter what Donald Trump and his administration do with the Clean Power Plan and renewable energy tax credits, the price is going to continue to fall for these resources and they're going to continue to grow throughout the next administration. So as you may have seen, a lot of those economic realities have spawned some very optimistic takes about energy in the Trump administration. Things like Donald Trump can't stop the Clean Energy Revolution. Well, those headlines, they're correct, right? But the problem is the pace of the revolution is far too slow today, as you all know, to allow the US to hit its decarbonization goals onto the Paris Accord. And the absence of federal action means that we're liable to fall further behind over the next administration. But fortunately, that's not the end of the story, right? A number of proactive states and jurisdictions, you guys probably first and foremost, are setting ambitious clean energy and decarbonization targets and devising market mechanisms to preserve and expand clean energy on the grid today. From my standpoint, from the standpoint of many people I talk to in Washington and across the nation, the success or failure of these initiatives on the state and local level is going to provide a path for the decarbonization policy when the pendulum inevitably swings back the other direction. Going back to Dickens and putting it simply, it's jurisdictions like yours that are going to determine if we alter an age of wisdom on climate or an age of foolishness. Our panel, led by Mike Hamnit, co-chair of the forum, was called Finding Continuity, Whatever Happened To and What's Next For. It included Jeff McElina of Blue Planet Foundation on the Community-Based Renewable Energy Program and the Green Energy Market Securitization Program, that is GEMS, Jay Griffin of the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute at UH on on-bill financing, Stan Osserman of the Hawaii Center for Advanced Transportation Technologies, that is H-CAT on the Hydrogen Economy Plan and Scott Tern of HNEI on the Bioenergy Master Plan. Carl mentioned that a number of things that were put into law, including the Noble Portfolio Standards and the Energy Efficiency Portfolio Standards and other things, have come to fruition and they started to bear fruit. We haven't made the kind of progress we would like to in transportation, but certainly in the electricity sector. We're going to be going back and looking at a series of laws that the legislature passed and were signed into law. And the title of this panel is Whatever Happened To. And when these things were passed, they were kind of hot topics. And most of them look like the three motivations for this on the part of the legislature. I could be wrong, but I think that's what they were. Everyone is to ensure that we have affordable, accessible, and equitable access to clean energy. So everyone's familiar with this concept and Commissioner Gorek kind of shared a little bit of the background, but essentially the idea is on our path to 100%, can we all go together? And can we make sure everyone has access to the benefits of renewable energy? Ohana means family, means no one gets left behind. And I think it's instructive to look at the history of this policy to see how we can move other policies more quickly. This was such a great idea, and yet it's been five years in, and we still don't have a program in place. So the problem that we're seeking to solve was this. This wasn't the problem. This was a revolution that some 80,000 families took advantage of. One in three single family homes have a power plant on their roof supplying power to the grid. They're part of the solution, but all of this left folks who are renters or folks who live in high rises otherwise out of the equation. So how can we rectify this? And that was the idea. And not just in Hawaii, NREL looked across the country, and some half of the residents can't participate in clean energy. They just can't host solar. They're a renter. They don't have adequate rooftop space. They're in a high rise or what have you. It's probably a higher number here in Hawaii because of the number of folks in multi-family dwellings. So that's the challenge we're trying to solve. Very simple concept that customers can put on the bill as they install renewable or energy efficiency improvements to their home, the opportunity to attach that obligation to their utility bill as opposed to paying a private company. So basically the ability to pay off finance some sort of improvement to your home or business using your bill. There's lots of opportunity benefit, but primarily the key driver here is that customers tend to have a better bill repayment history with electric utility bills than other forms of consumer credit or similar obligations. Hawaii Revised Statute 19610, which is the Hawaii Renewable Hydrogen Program. The capital fund, the special fund, was very controversial when it started to be executed. And I'm not going to go into the details of that because quite frankly, they're pretty ugly. I mean seriously ugly. I would say in hindsight that I think that because of that ugliness that the Hawaii Renewable Hydrogen Program really never got off the ground. I was going to read the renewable energy hydrogen energy program entirety in the logs. It only takes two minutes. It was a stakeholder driven event or project and it was funded by the State of Hawaii and the US Department of Energy. As I said, it was a stakeholder driven document and it produced a series of recommendations intended to provide direction for policy support as well as research. The overarching question there was, does Hawaii have the capacity to provide a substantial portion of its electricity and transportation fuels from biomass resources? To wrap things up, we heard from Colin Moore of the UH Public Policy Center. His talk was called Beyond the Soundbite, Legislation That Matters. The subtitle of my lecture should be is why we need to think about politics when we make energy policy for Hawaii. The title of this form is really to, I think to help us think about what happens after the signing ceremony ends and the pens are put away. Why do some policy reforms endure while others are quietly reversed or eroded away? And as you all know, in acting far reaching energy policy, solutions is a tough task. Politicians like to deliver measurable benefits to constituents but climate change is an intergenerational and global problem. But difficult as it is, passing bold measures is just half the battle. These victories must be sustained. Even when new laws are in place, the sustainability of efforts to limit damage from climate change cannot be taken for granted. So we need sustainable policies and by that I mean we need politically sustainable policies. So policy sustainability for me refers to the capacity of a reform to maintain its integrity and deploy core principles to guide implementation and stave off pressures for debilitating changes. And research from a number of social scientists suggests that the most durable reform stick not because they're frozen in place. In other words, the battle isn't over when the law is passed but because they reconfigure politics in ways that preserve our core principles and spur a continuing momentum. Now I have a few examples I was gonna give you but I'm not gonna do those. I'm just gonna leave you with the question of how do we do this? How do we achieve this policy political sustainability? And I have three thoughts. The first is that sustainable policies should undercut support for opponents of reform. For example, by weakening industries or interest groups that don't want the new policy direction. This is the part about thinking politically when we design policies. The second is that sustainable policies reconfigure institutional authority and change the venues in which decisions are made. For example, by stipulating that an independent agency and not the legislature will be in charge of future policy modifications. And then finally and most importantly, sustainable policies create what I call positive feedback by encouraging citizens, businesses and interest groups to adjust to new ways of doing things. Once that happened, these groups become reluctant to have reforms repealed or fundamentally changed because they wanna protect their investments in new technology and in new ways of doing things. So that essentially is the two minute version of my 10 minute talk and that all to say that as you think about creating and crafting a sustainable environmental policies we also need to think about creating politically sustainable policies. Thanks everyone. It seemed clear from the discussion that political will cannot end at passing a given bill. It must continue after the bills passed to make things happen. Without that, many well-intentioned initiatives can come to not. It also seemed clear that some initiatives do become irrelevant and once they do to avoid confusion, we need to terminate them. The transformation to clean energy requires us to find new ideas. It also requires us to leave old ones behind. It's the nature of change itself. A couple of days later, we had keynote speaker Gavin Bade on our think tech state of clean energy talk show where he summed up his thoughts and takeaways from the briefing. Basically, I kind of thinking about how to frame this question of climate and clean energy in the Trump era. I've done a very journalistic thing and resorted to a shorthand trope and that is that it's kind of for climate and clean energy and it's the best of times, worst of times, right? Yes. When it comes to the beginning of 2017, we have this big energy paradox, right? We have a climate denier going in the White House who said he's going to cancel the clean power plant, potentially pull us out of Paris, although Rex Tillerson is saying some other things about that now. But for a planet that's already kind of behind the pace in limiting carbon emissions to kind of limit our temperature increase to two degrees this century, the loss of that diplomatic will from the federal government seem to be catastrophic for the planet, right? For the planet, yes. Well, I think that's the way a lot of people looked at it the day after the election and certainly from an environmental standpoint that was my initial reaction, right? You've changed your mind? Well, not exactly, but I think that it's not all gloom and doom. There is reason for hope and I think that's because there are states like Hawaii that are doing really ambitious things, setting ambitious targets and figuring out how to make a clean energy economy and a clean energy power generation system that can power the rest of the clean energy economy. So basically my thesis for everyone here in Hawaii is that you're gonna show us how to do it. I don't think climate denial will be the policy of the US federal government forever. So if and when the pendulum does swing back the other way. I sure hope it's soon. Sorry. Well, I will leave those value judgments up for anyone but I think from the standpoint of climate action, if and when it does swing back the other way and we do want to do something federally on climate, states like Hawaii are gonna show us how to do it and they're going to dictate whether we can do it cost effectively for consumers. Yes, clean energy is critical to Hawaii's future but setting our 100% goals is one thing and achieving them is another. Meeting those goals is not something we can wait until 2045 to do. It's something we need to work on right now. The forum is hoping the 2017 legislature will focus on what's relevant for the long-term, programs that will remain relevant beyond the election cycle that will be affordable, accessible and reliable and help us avoid the distractions of oil, weather, politics and geopolitics. The forum presents these briefings in the hope that our policy makers will be better prepared to preserve our economy and our state. Now more than ever, short-term thinking on energy is unacceptable and dangerous for Hawaii. ThinkTech tries to raise public awareness on these issues and has five energy programs in its lineup. Marco, Mina and me power up Hawaii, Energy in America, Stan the Hydrogen Man and our flagship program, Hawaii, the state of clean energy. Check them out on ThinkTechHawaii.com and don't forget to check out the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum itself at HawaiiEnergyPolicy.Hawaii.edu. And now let's take a look at our ThinkTech calendar of events going forward. There's so much happening in Hawaii. Sometimes things happen under the radar and we don't hear much about them but ThinkTech will take you there. Remember, you can watch ThinkTech on OC 16 several times every week to stay current on what's happening in government, industry, academia and communities around the islands and the world. ThinkTech broadcasts its daily talk shows live on the internet from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekdays. Then we broadcast our earlier shows all night long and on the weekends. If you missed a show or if you wanna replay or share any of our shows, they're all archived on demand on ThinkTechHawaii.com and YouTube. The audio is on ThinkTechHawaii.com slash radio. And good news, we are now posting podcasts of all our shows on iTunes. See our website for links. Visit ThinkTechHawaii.com for our weekly calendar and live stream and YouTube links or sign up on our email list and get the daily docket of our upcoming shows. ThinkTech has a high tech, green screen First Amendment Studio at Pioneer Plaza. If you wanna join our live audience or participate in our shows, write to Think at ThinkTechHawaii.com. Give us a thumbs up on YouTube or send us a tweet at ThinkTechHaii. We'd like to know how you feel about the issues and events that affect our lives together in these islands. We wanna stay in touch with you and we'd like you to stay in touch with us. Let's think together. Send to our talk shows live. While you're watching any of our shows, you can call in to<PHONE_NUMBER> and pose a question or participate in the discussion. We'll be right back to wrap up this week's edition of ThinkTech. But first, we wanna thank our underwriters. Okay, Kaui. That wraps up this week's edition of ThinkTech. Remember, you can watch ThinkTech on OC16 several times every week. Can't get enough of it, just like Kaui does. For additional times, check out oc16.tv. For lots more ThinkTech videos and for underwriting and sponsorship opportunities on ThinkTech, visit ThinkTechHawaii.com. Be a guest or a host, a producer or an intern and help us reach and have an impact on Hawaii. Thanks so much for being part of our ThinkTech family and for supporting our open discussion of tech, energy, diversification and global awareness in Hawaii. You can watch this show throughout the week and tune in next Sunday evening for our next important weekly episode. I'm Elise Anderson. And I'm Kaui Lucas. Aloha, everyone.


Most solar system planets have large atmospheres. Each atmosphere has its own dramatic weather systems. They carry heat, gases and particles. The long-term pattern of weather is called climate. The earth today is a vibrant blue planet. Our atmosphere and oceans form a complex, evolving system. This climate system is essential to life. Great extinctions of the past are linked to changes in climate. We think that the climates of our nearest neighbours, Venus and Mars, have both changed too. In the lecture, I will discuss the dynamic role played by atmospheres and how understanding those of other planets might teach us more about our own.


The top five low budget, high impact marketing techniques to help you market your e-commerce business the right way because we all know how expensive it is to start an e-commerce business. You will have to reach your hands into your pockets a little bit and see what you have in order to get your store in front of the customers. But keep in mind that people on a budget usually learn more before taking action. So that's a good thing. Therefore, in this video and in the full blog and article below, you will learn about the five methods to successfully market your e-commerce store the right way while on a budget so you can still do it successfully. Quick intro, let's begin. Hello, everyone. My name is Liran from AutoDS. I am the content producer. I've also been dropshipping successfully for over four years and I highly encourage you to subscribe to our YouTube videos because I do videos like this on the regular and they're very informational. So if you want to stay up to date on all of the cool stuff that's happening in the dropshipping world, subscribe to our videos and stay up to date. So let's get on with the marketing techniques and how to budget your e-commerce store while on a budget. So the first word of advice that I have is for all of you who are running Facebook ads.  So the first word of advice that I have for you guys is to start low. If you guys are starting with $20 or $50 a day ad sets to target audiences that you haven't tried before and to audience interests that you haven't tried before, this is usually not a very good idea. You need to start with lower budgets because if you're not hitting the right target audience or if they just don't need your product and it's irrelevant, you're just throwing all that money away. So you need to start low with five to $10 ad sets, see how which one performs, always split test at least three to five ads for each ad set for each campaign, but make sure that each one runs from five to $10 a day and not more. Every time you see an ad that's working well, start to scale it slowly by giving it another $5 to $10 a day. Just always keep an eye on your ads and on their performance. So that's just really quick regarding Facebook ads. Now let's talk about the five marketing methods to start marketing your store on a budget. So the first thing that I want to talk about is email marketing. Email marketing is a very, very old school method to bring customers to your store. It's being used up until today because it's just been proven effective all throughout the years. So on the Shopify platform, you have a subscribe to our newsletter option that you can put on your website. It doesn't cost any money, but the only question is why will the viewer enter your site now and give you their email address? You need to make it interesting. You need to give them value in exchange for your email. If they're not going to feel like they're getting any value from it, they're not going to leave their email address. So you can use apps like personal discount. By the way, the links to everything that I'm talking about on this video is on the full article below this video. So you're not missing out on anything and I highly encourage you to go check it after watching this video. So with apps like personal discount, your subscribers are going to get a special discount for leaving their email addresses. They're going to get it straight to their email, the personal discount, which you chose how much of a discount you want to give them. Let's see an example of how it looks. Here it is. View an example store. So this is how it looks. Subscribe to get a unique discount code and that's it. That's what the customer sees. He just leaves his email address. Most of the people won't mind leaving their email addresses if they're going to get this value from it. So you can give them five, 10, 15, 20 percent, however much you want. The more you give them, the more effective it probably will be. So this is how you go with a personal discount. Now, once you get enough email subscribers, at least 200, 300 email subscribers, this is the perfect time to start sending them email campaigns. You can use it for free on the Shopify platform, just create an email campaign or search Shopify apps for apps that help you create email campaigns. Some of them are free and some of them are not. But this is the most effective method to market your store today, especially while on a budget. Because once you have a few hundred emails, which didn't cost you any money, you just had to probably give some discount or something like that in order to get it, but it was still worth it. Now you don't have to pay any ad agency's money to go and try to find your target audience because you already have them. So that's regarding email marketing. The second method to successfully market your store on a budget is by building an active Facebook group. A lot of people build Facebook groups, some of them for just volunteering stuff, but most of them for e-commerce sites. So what you do is you build an active community around your niche. Say, for example, your niche is pets, cats, for example. So check out this page, Love Cats. It has 224,000 members. Every now and then, they would upload pictures of cats. So every person who likes cats found this page, liked the page and started connecting emotionally with the posts. So you just put all kinds of cool cat pictures every now and then. You start building your community slowly and up. Check it out. 229 comments just for a post. And once your community is big enough, you can just post your store, target them to it just like these guys did. And here you're getting free traffic because creating the community didn't cost you any money at all. And now you're just giving that community this link to your store. And once they click on it, they'll see everything that you want to sell to them. It has to relate with the community's topic, which was cats, of course. So in this example, you can see the cats, all of them different variations of shirts which you can buy and different colors and different sizes. And I assure you these guys are making a lot of money doing what they're doing. And you can do it too with these cheap marketing methods. So running an active Facebook community is another great method to successfully market your store while on a budget. Now the third step to successfully market your e-commerce store on a budget is by using influencer marketing platforms. If you don't know influencer marketing platforms are websites that hold databases of influencers who have target audiences who are following them. And you're going to have to reach out to those influencers using the marketing platforms, which organizes them all in one page. So you reach out to the influencers and you talk to them, you ask them how much they want to get for a shout out. Obviously you're going to have to find influencers who are good for your niche. So there's a full article explaining the top influencer marketing platforms to use for your website. Here it is. This is the article. You can find it in the full blog below. So I'm not going to go too much into detail because you really have everything over here, but it explains exactly what I just talked about. The best influencer marketing platforms. We rounded out the best ones out of the bunch to use. So go learn how to use them. Talk to influencers. Try to negotiate with ones who don't have so much experience in the business because they'll usually come cheaper than the ones who have a lot of experience and the ones who are already doing a lot of shout outs. So this one requires some work. It requires some research, but in the end of the day, it's really worth it because one influencer can make a huge difference on your sales and on your brand. So influencer marketing platforms is the third method to successfully market your store while on a budget. Now the fourth method to successfully market your store while on a budget is by targeting the international market when you're running ads. So let's check it out on the blog. It's all written down below, like I said before. So when you're targeting the international market while running Facebook ads, you'll notice that it's a much cheaper target audience to market to. Now the reason that you want to do that is because they engage with your posts and there's also a high chance that they will go inside your shop and buy the product that you're trying to sell them. But mainly when you're targeting the international audience, they're much cheaper. So each ad, when you put it in front of an American, when compared to putting it in front of someone that lives in the UK or in Europe, you're going to pay much, much cheaper putting it in front of someone on the international market. Okay, it could cost you like 0.001 cent instead of one or two cents for each person. So it can really make a difference. Start by targeting the international audience on your ads. See how the people react if there are good reactions on the international market and people are really engaging with your posts and even buying the product. Then you know that your product is good to put higher budgets on the US market and rake in those sales to start low, see how it works, and then gradually increase. So target the international market when you're running Facebook ads. It's a very, very good method to get post-engagement and it's a cheap way to check if your product is interesting and if people even want it. The fifth method to successfully market your store while on a budget is by advertising cheaper products. It's much harder to convince someone to buy an expensive product. Okay, so if you're trying to sell a product that costs 100 or 150 dollars, you're going to have to spend much more on ads to try to convince someone to reach into their pockets and give you 150 dollars. When compared to selling a product that costs only $10 plus another, let's say $5 shipping or $30 plus $5 shipping or even $40 plus $10 shipping, it's still going to be much easier to convince someone to buy that product instead of a more expensive one. Okay, so the more expensive the product costs, the more expensive your ad is going to be to really convince the buyer to buy the product for you. So start with cheaper items. It doesn't mean that you need to profit less. You can still make 40-50% profit on cheaper items. You'll just have a much higher chance of selling them and once you start selling cheap items, you'll also know how to sell the more expensive ones. Start with the cheaper ones and as I said before, gradually increase. So that's my fifth marketing technique to market your store while on a budget. Once again, everything that I talked about is for having a low budget and a high impact effect on your stores. So I encourage you again to read the article below. You also have free Shopify marketing apps that will help you market your store along the way. For example, you can use SMS bump, MMS marketing for sending SMSs to your customers. SMS is one great marketing technique method that works great. Even up until today, people are still reading SMS messages. Yes. You also have Facebook and Twitter auto posts. So this basically can make automatic posts for you on Facebook and on Twitter. You can schedule your posts for whenever you want and it'll take care of that. You also have OmniSend email marketing. You can also create your own email campaigns through the Shopify platform, but OmniSend email marketing has a lot more features and a lot more benefits. So check them out for email marketing. A lot of people are using them. It's an all-in-one tool that really has a lot of things. So you can really analyze each one of your market campaigns and see how each one went. It has a lot of in-depth detail. Just click on the link below on the article and you'll read everything about it. The fourth Shopify app that I recommend for you to use is Judgeme Product Reviews. What this app does is it takes reviews from the supplier's site and it puts it in your shop. So if you're selling an item, you can see all of the reviews that that supplier got for that product. You're going to import those same reviews into your store for social proof and you're not lying to anyone because these are real reviews from real customers on this same product from the same supplier. So let's see an example of how that looks. Just click on that and if you go a little bit down below you'll have an example store. So you'll have the product and when you scroll down a little bit you'll get to the product reviews and here it looks. So this is how it looks when you import the reviews from your supplier. It looks really good. It gives you the social proof that you need for your products and it really helps to sell. So use Judge.me for that. Next you have Consistent Cart. So this is a really good app to help you save those abandoned carts, people who added your products to their cart, but didn't go through with a checkout process. So what this app does is it can send them SMSs, push notifications, emails, whatever you choose to try and pull those customers back into your store by offering them discounts or anything that they need to go through with a checkout process and buy the product. So Consistent Cart is the fifth Shopify app that I recommend to use to help further market your store and drive in more sales. Next you have Tierlio Live Chat. It's a very useful tool to open a live chat on your store. A lot of people when they enter a store and they see a live chat, they start chatting and seeing what's up because sometimes they just want to ask a small question, but sometimes they just want to test the site to see if it's run by a real person and not by some robot. So they'll just test you out, send you a few messages, they'll see that it's all good. You can even offer them a discount, which is a very smart marketing method to use on the chat. So you can do that. Tierlio Live Chat is definitely going to drive in more customers. They're going to test you first and then they're going to buy the product. So use Tierlio Live Chat to have a live chat on your store. The next app is SEO Booster for SEO Marketing. This app helps boost SEO on your store. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. And by the way, once again, the links to everything that I'm talking about right below this video in the full article. So SEO Booster helps make SEO enhancements in the background of your shop. And within a couple of months, you're already supposed to start seeing positive results from the SEO work. Your shop will be ranked much higher on Google search. And this way you'll get much more traffic to your store. So use the SEO Booster for that. And so the final thing that I want to talk to you guys about to help you automate your business and drive in more traffic and sales is to use the AutoDS platform because it's fully integrated with Shopify now. And you can fully import your products from your suppliers. It can fulfill your orders automatically, update tracking information, monitor your stock and your prices and many additional features. Here's how the platform looks. It's very intuitive and easy to read. You have the dashboard. You can add products by clicking on the add products link. You can see your orders by clicking on orders. You can see the products that you have by clicking on products. You also have all of your product drafts. These are the items that you have before they go into products and start being monitored. I'm not going to go into the whole explanation now. But a super important part of using the AutoDS system besides the whole business automation and all of that is that starter packages are for free, completely free. You can use the AliExpress supplier up to 100 variations.  That is because we really want to convince people to start and to see that this business is good for them. So we're starting with the free packages. Everybody can enjoy it. If you're an advanced expert professional dropshipper, the starter package probably won't be so good for you. But this is a really good package for beginners. And one more quick thing about the platform. When you're importing products into your store through AutoDS, the platform will automatically decrease all of your image sizes without seeing the differences in the image quality, therefore giving you faster page loading. Because anyone, any viewer who enters your site, and it'll take more than two seconds to load, forget about it, they'll leave and they'll go straight to your competitors. So your listings are enhanced, it'll give it better SEO ranking and faster page loading. So use the AutoDS platform. I definitely highly encourage you to try it out. And so that pretty much sums up this video on the top five best methods to successfully market your store with a low budget, plus more perks and bonuses that you had throughout this video and throughout the blog, which you can see over here. Go now, read the blog, there's a lot more information which I couldn't go over this video because it will just be too long. And don't forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel to always stay updated on all of the cool informational and valuable videos like this one. So until the next time guys, bye-bye.


Hilariously, my power has gone out, so you're getting the roughest version of this that I could possibly do. I am currently recording this on my laptop, I'll have to edit it on my laptop, and I'm using what I believe is the onboard mic. Well, it has to be the onboard mic, since there's no other microphones plugged in, because no other microphones will plug in. And apologies for the quality of this, but I don't like missing uploads, so we're just gonna make it work. But yeah, I've tried starting this recording and stopping it like three or four times. Power is currently on. Thank God, because my laptop will probably run out of power trying to record, but it keeps going off while it is trying to work. And I need to basically need to be able to do this without it. You know, my main computer is not packed up by a battery, so yeah, that's a thing. Fantastic, let's get started. SAP 5000 exists. Dr. Sumerian, nobody cares. I mean, yeah, who cares? I was reading the comments of this, and someone was like, I don't think he got it. That must be the problem. No, I got it. I understand what's going on there. It's one of those things that it's like, if the SAP Foundation is murdering everyone in the world, I don't care why, because they're murdering everyone in the world. If that bothers you, I apologize. 208, do not say your name, nickname, code, name, alias, or any other personal designation. Well, in the presence of a native entity, Dr. Jaypers, no, please go on. These things are of interest to me. I am a fellow scholar, remember? Congratulations, you played yourself. This is very true, primarily interesting, because it's the only rule out of, like, a thousand extra words in that article that actually means a goddamn thing towards the actual story. The rest of it is all just set dressing, which is incredibly annoying when you get through it and realize that. Canon, Dr. Bright, nothing in life matters. Fanon, Dr. Bright, nothing in life matters. I mean, that's not necessarily true. There's lots of actual SAP articles, well, not articles, but tales involving Bright where he is exactly that way. There's two versions of Bright, the wacky and the serious, and I don't think that they're necessarily mutually exclusive. Hello, Monica from Doki Doki Literature Club. Hello, Dr. Sumerian from SAP Secure Contain Protect. I don't get it, but it involves Dr. Sumerian. I would probably have to play this game in order to get it. Maybe it's a play on how similar the images are, I guess? Maybe? I don't know. Dr. Wojak, did you capture the anomaly? No, the global coal coalition got to it before us. They must have been given a tip or something. Yeah, more Siren Head stuff. Siren Head is not an SAP, and it's not in the SAP universe. Leave it alone. It's not going to be released into Creative Commons, and it shouldn't be because the person who owns it wants to keep it that way, and it's intellectual property.  Leave it alone. Leave it. Leave Siren Head alone. God, that's a meme that's sold. Most of you probably won't get it, and that makes me sad. Anyway, the US government and the game control. The FBC has this altered world event under control. Don't worry about a thing. The US government and the SAP universe. If anyone from any other organization gives you... No, it's just the UIU. That's the thing. People forget this. UIU is not necessarily the only organization that the US government has that handles anomalous things. In fact, there's almost certainly a number of US military intelligence units that handle anomalous things beyond just DARPA. I think DARPA is in the army, but it could be wrong. Regardless, there are many agencies in the US that handle it. UIU is just the most inept. Dr. Smerian, put your meme into a video. rslashdank memes from site 19. That's a cute cat. Dear Broken Church, if the Cog Worker orthodoxy are the tickers and the Maxwellists are the Hummers, then are the Mechknights Boomers? Okay. Foundation 426's file. Ha ha, funny toaster breaks grammar. Serpent Hands 426 file. It is a monster taking over the entire universe, which is about right, since, I mean, the entire universe is a toaster after all. Oh, I saw this. Somebody linked me this. I think it was Yasi. Yasi linked me this. So what are you lot in for? I can slow down photons and use them to craft various items. I get a miniature version of Earth in my chest. Seals won't stop abusing me.  Sorry, Carl. You know he doesn't mean it.  Get over here. And someone was like, why is that guy kind of, why is that guy carrying a seal around? And I read the comments and apparently, which is even more interesting. This guy's anomaly is that he has a seal in his torso. So that's great. I love it. And then another comment was, I love that Carl's first responses to run away. Also, if you look real close in the first frame, you can find Waldo. Ah, yeah, I should probably put this on a poster. Reading 100-word-long-generation-1 articles. Generation should be series. Reading 1,000-word-generation-3 articles. Reading 7 kilometer-long-generation-5 articles. I don't, that doesn't seem fair. Maybe it is fair. I don't know. I've, I haven't read a lot of modern articles anymore, like the series 5 stuff, the series 6 stuff. It's just, not, not, I've been spending so much time on this.  Crippling fear of rejection of ideas and overall feeling of worry that my ideas are unoriginal and terrible. Dropping self-esteem to unimaginable lows. Yeah.  You know, this is particularly ironic, which we'll talk about in a second. Seven-year-old nephew talking about how sorry it is an SAP, intellectual property lecturer, Dr. Sumerian. Okay, so, when I was, I tweeted this out, because I was sitting at, not Memorial Day, what was the last holiday before that? I don't remember. We were sitting at like a, maybe it was Mother's Day. Maybe it was Mother's Day. I don't know. We were sitting at the dinner table with my family and my nephew was talking about how Siren Head is an SAP and actually really the exact exchange was something along the lines of Siren Head, Siren Head, Siren Head, Dad. Hey, what's Siren Head? And, and my nephew going, it's an SAP. And I was like, stop, get some help.  And I was like, you know, it's not an SAP. The creator of it doesn't want it to be an SAP. And you need to understand that because saying that it's an SAP is is potentially damaging to the, to that man's intellectual property. And then I tweeted about it because, well, I thought it was an interesting exchange. The reason why this is ironic is because the underlying stuff behind, let's not get into how meme reviews are actually likely a problem when it comes to copyright. I really don't think it's necessary for us to talk about that. But me putting this up on the screen right now is itself a potential copyright issue. So, you know, keep that in mind. Anyway, that's it. Sorry, again, for the quality of the video. I'm, the power was on for the entirety of this recording. I feel like I could have done better, but it keeps doing the thing. And I can't rely on, you know what, the internet's not working anyway. I'm having to do, I'm going to have to upload this on my cell phone. So, yeah, this is still, this is still a problem. All right. Thank you very much for watching. If you like the video, please hit the subscribe button. I promise you the quality is normally better than this. Hit the subscribe button at the notification bell next to that. So you upload, updated when I upload new videos. And then head on over to patreon.com forward slash decimarian and join SCP 6277. Let's get that corrected. Double, let's double check that. SCP 6277, who has pledged it $50 a month. A little lass who has pledged it $40 a month. Lawful evil who has pledged it $40 a month. And probably a wizard and definitely not a scientist who has pledged it $40 a month. Thank you all and thank everyone else for letting me know that I'm not alone out here. And I'll see you all again on Thursday.


Transition metal, TM, hydroxide and basic salts containing OH- and other anions have emerged as promising candidates for electrocatalysis of the oxygen evolution reaction, OER. These materials have shown superior catalytic activity compared to traditional noble metal-based electrocatalysts, making them attractive for applications in water electrolysis. This review provides an overview of the recent advancements in TM, basic salts and their application in OER and overall water splitting. The authors categorized these materials based on the anion type, CO3-2-NO3-F-Cl- which is a key factor for their outstanding performance towards OER. They also discussed the experimental and theoretical methods used to understand the structure evolution during OER and the effect of anion on catalytic performance. Additionally, they provided insights into how to improve the hydrogen evolution reaction, her activity of TM basic salts by modifying their structures and compositions. Finally, they concluded with a summary and perspective on the remaining challenges and future opportunities of TM basic salts as catalysts for water electrolysis. This article was authored by Bingrungua, Yanni Ding, Hao Hao Hua, and others.


April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month. It's a time set aside to inform, empower communities to stand up against sexual abuse of all kinds. Rights Advocates say Nigeria has a poor record of persecution of sex offenders. And during the coronavirus-induced lockdown last year, the federal government recorded an increase in domestic sex abuse. Joining us this morning to take a look at it is a lawyer and executive director at Gender Mobile Initiative, which aims to increase the reportage of gender-based violence and reduce the incidences of the crime. And she is Omo Wumi Ogunlutimi. Good morning. Thanks for joining us. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. All right. First of all, well done with the work you do at Shooting Initiative. And I wanted to ask you first of all, let's talk about the statistics of this situation in Nigeria. Why don't we talk about sexual assault cases in a country? Okay.  But in general, in the last 10 years, of course, we have recent statistics that shows that one in five women experience sexual violence, will experience sexual violence in their lifetime. And of course, six out of every 10 children experience sexual, physical or emotional abuse before the age of 18. And we also have statistics to show that out of 40 such cases, only two are reported. And of course, the statistics go on and on in terms of attrition of cases, in terms of number of cases that get reported, that get investigated, that get prosecuted, and of course, cases that we secure convictions. What is the, we have a bill that was passed, I believe, in 2020 after the sexual grades report. There's also the sexual assault bill that was passed. How well do you think our laws are doing in helping to curb the prevalence of sexual assault in Nigeria? Do you think that we need to do better with our laws? Or are they enough? So Nigeria has an avalanche of legal policy framework to address the old spectrum of sexual and gender-based violence. But we need to do a lot more in terms of demonstrating the necessary political will. And I'll give you an interesting example. Nigeria is a signatory to several international protocols from CEDAW to the African Charter on Human and People's Rights on women's rights, even the Nigerian constitution, for example, which is our ground norm, where we have relevant provisions on right to dignity of women and even persons in general. But in terms of demonstrating the political will, you'd realize that a lot more still needs to be done. We have the most revolutionary piece of legislative instrument in the history of Nigeria, which is the Violence Against Persons Prehibition Act, enacted as a national act of parliament in 2015.  And we have 36 states plus the FCC in Nigeria, making 37. So which means that, as a country, we have the necessary legal framework, but the political will is missing in terms of implementation. And if you look at Nigeria, we have the criminal code, we have the penal code. Legal state has a criminal law. Legal state also provides for some patterns of sexual assault, like rape, like indecence assault. But of course, that law in itself has territorial limitation. It's only applicable in legal states. And then the VAP Act, like I did say, then we also have the child rights law, which of course is also applicable in some states. I think we have about 10 states in Northern Nigeria yet to domesticate the Child Rights Act, as a local law. So in general, to say that we need to do a lot more as a nation in terms of demonstrating the requisite political will to implement these laws, to put in place systems and structures that would also complement the existing legal and policy framework. All right, Omaome, indeed we have lots of laws that we can simply just implement and make our lives better. Well, let's talk about the hurdles, the challenges to implementing these laws. First of all, we have the culture of silence. Isn't that right? That makes rape the most underreported crime in the world.  I mean, we've heard this time and time again from police operatives and no cases of persecution. Help us break this down and what we can do to surmount them. Okay, so you mentioned it. We have legal barriers. And most importantly, when you talk about legal barriers, you need to talk about the old spectrum of our legal system where we do not have a unified legal framework.  It's a pattern of discrimination. And as a human being, you should have rights. You should have your human rights, regardless of your location. Human rights are rights that you enjoy by virtue of being a human being. It shouldn't be by virtue of, you know, being domiciled in Southwest Nigeria or domiciled in Northeast or domiciled in Northwest. So which means that because we do not have a unified legal framework, then we have a really huge gap to fill in there. Second also is, you know, to look at our criminal justice administrative system. Do we have a court system that encourage people to, you know, speak out? Do we have a grievance redress our mechanism that encourage victims to speak out? You see a lot of rape cases linger on in courts for so longer time. You see rape victims come to court to recount their experiences in open courts. This old gamut is, you know, an hurdle that continues to perpetrate the culture of silence, such that even when people, you know, come forward to speak and then recommend some of those cases in court, halfway victims bail out because they have victimized the second time. And when you report cases and it's been persecuted and then the conviction rate is low also because the evidentiary boarding to prove rape is huge. When, you know, the constitution says that there is presumption of innocence, which means you're innocent until proven guilty. It puts the burden to establish that rape has been committed under prosecution. And people a lot of times victims are not aware of, you know, some precautions to take so that they can be able to establish that an act of rape has been committed. Also, we have existing lacuna in our law.  A lot of times we have normalized patterns of social behavior that they have become part of our everyday lives that when these things happen, we are not able to fit this experience as a pattern of sexual harassment. Sexual harassment has assumed really critical dimensions in the workplace in the environment of learning that the culture of silence around sexual harassment continue to thrive also because people lack confidence in the system. So it's an old gamut of, you know, the systems, the structures that are available. So which means that we need a lot, we need to do a lot around system change. We need systemic change. We need structural change if people need to come forward to speak out more because this would also show that they have confidence in the system.  What things do you think we need to learn or unlearn as a people?  They occupy equal status as men. We need to demystify or, you know, basically diffuse power hierarchies. In environment, even in our local communities, you see that there is this asymmetrical power relations that continue to subjugate women. We need to understand that women are human beings who have equal rights as men. We also need to deconstruct the norms, the norms and practices, cultural practices that continue to subjugate women.  A lot of times people advance narrative around indistinct dressing as a justification for rape, you know, rather than advanced conversations around appropriate and inappropriate dressing. So we also need to put young people at the center of prevention and response efforts. We need to bear in mind that young people could be bystanders, could be perpetrators, could be victims. So it's very important that young people, you know, at the center of prevention and response efforts, they have the energy, they have, you know, the skills in terms of leveraging technology. We also need to do a lot more around awareness. There cannot be prevention without awareness. People need to be more aware. People need to know what sexual harassment is. People need to know what indistinct assault is. People need to understand what constitutes rape, how to establish that an offense of rape has been committed. So basically, we really need to do a lot more around raising awareness.  Can you give us details about that? Sure.  And most times when victims experience rape, the first thing they do is to go and shower.  So we need to do a lot more awareness around this for people to understand that, you know, you need to actually collect specimen so that we can preserve evidence. And of course, at the point of bringing this to some victims don't, are not even able to identify who their abuser is. So for some people that gangraped or maybe at the point of raping them, you know, they had their faces covered, all of these would also, you know, help the court or the prosecution to establish that this perpetrator committed this act of rape. And of course, in terms of accessing a range of integrated social services like psychosocial support, you know, trauma cancelling, people also need to understand that as a rape victim, most times people live most part of their life being traumatized because of their experience. And there are platforms to also access a range of some of the support services. NAPTIP is the duty bearer specifically mandated to provide this, but also organizations like Tender Mobile, Tridexx Lab, Brave Art Initiative. There are lots of organizations like that in Nigeria that are providing a range of services to ensure that, you know, victims are able to yield from this, you know, experience. So if some, if, you know, Son gets raped, what do you suggest should be her next cause of action, her next steps? So when you get raped, you know, the first point of action should be to visit a medical facility. After visiting the medical facility and they take down your report, you can then head out to the police station. Okay. Okay, all right. Also, let us also, because that's one of the reasons I asked about things that we need to learn and unlearn in our society. There's a lot of things that happen in the workplace. A lot of things that happen in our teacher institutions that, you know, for a lot of Nigerians is normal. And you also mentioned earlier that women are judged based on what they wear and some of all those things that happen in our society.   So I think the most important thing, which would also show that, you know, the leadership has the political way is to have comprehensive policies.  When you look at sexual harassment, it's very rampant in the workplace. And when you talk about sexual harassment, you talk about the hostile work environment. You talk about quiproco, which is the least for that, which has to do with, you know, using power to import sexual requirements into the workplace or into environment of learning, popularly known as sexual grade, you know. So when you look at those patterns of sexual assault, they are very rampant but they have gained little or no attention over the years. And we need to do a lot more with putting policies in place.  The national industrial court has had to rely heavily on international treaties.  Environment of learning, we know that recently the National Assembly revisited the Anti-Sexual Arrestment Bill in 2019. And that bill has been approved by the Senate. We're currently awaiting the concurrence of the House of Reps and subsequently the Presidential Assent. So and this bill was met with, you know, Steve resistance. But a lot of advocacy is ongoing and that's why I also have to talk about advocacy. We need to do a lot more around advocacy calling the attention of actors, duty bearers and of course, persons who are like the direct target. We need to do a lot more around social mobilization. In the environment of learning, we need to build the capacity of students. You'd realize that a lot of times in solidarity with their users, so come syndrome-stepping and students who have been victims then begin to disapprove of the guts of their colleagues to report such cases. We need to initialize prevention. We need to set up Anti-Sexual Arrestment Committee, build their capacity to be able to address some of those issues. We need to ensure that our environment of learning and the workplace is safe. We need to put in place reporting structures. Obviously, there's a lot of work. In a few days' time, we're going to belong to you. Apologies, Momie. There's so much work that needs to be done and I hope that we can, you know, with these conversations, take it step by step, you know, and, you know, give it a time frame with which we can now look back and say, hey, this is what we've achieved with regard sexual assault in the last five, 10 years and this is, you know, how much of a better place that we are in. So thank you very much for sharing with us this morning and for, you know, your time for speaking with us. Yes, thank you very much. You know, keep up the good work that you do. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Absolutely. All right, stay with us. We are moving away from Sexual Assault Awareness Month just to remind everyone that it's a conversation that is ongoing and should never stop until we see a better society. And we're going to be talking about sports next, where the European League was assaulted or almost assaulted by the Super League. What? We're going to be talking next about how the Champions League was brutalized or almost, you know, kicked out of the conversation. Next, we're having a sports journalist join us this morning on the program. Stay with us here on The Breakfast.


is the chief of the sustainable urban development section for the environment and development vision of the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific. It works with governments to localize the sustainable development goals and promote sustainable solutions in cities throughout the Asia-Pacific regions. Okay. Thank you very much. Thank you for the kind invitation. They are waiting before this session started. Who is going to go first? I think, actually I'm lost because it's going to be hard to follow the presentation very well. But what I'm going to do today is introduce you to a project and some initiatives that SCAP has been working on. They were looking specifically at plastics. But first I'm going to introduce what SCAP is. It's the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific. We are a regional development bar of the United Nations for headquarters in Bangkok. But we have four sub-regional offices, one in Delhi, one in L'Occitane-Stone, one in Incheon, and one in Fiji. We have 53 permanent members and nine associate members. We span the largest geographic area of all of our regional commissions in terms of the program. Much of our mandate is implementing global development agendas, the 2030 Agenda, the Paris Climate Agreement, the New York Agenda, and others. And we provide, through our platforms, policy dialogue, technical assistance, technical cooperation, capacity building to national and sub-national governments. And we facilitate this regional cooperation through the platform of SCAP. I mentioned the 2030 Agenda. I think most of you are familiar with the sustainable development goals. There are 17 different interrelated goals that really emphasize integrated solutions. When we talk about cities and the SDGs, we say that cities really are the locations where all of the SDGs intersect. And you can identify either actions for each of those SDGs that need to be implemented in cities, or you can start to categorize the way that cities operate on a daily basis. So while there is one SDG on sustainable cities, you can actually begin to disaggregate the way that cities operate and the way that they focus on infrastructure and the housing and basic services on the environment and resources to focus on resilience, equity and equality, partnerships, and start to categorize each of the SDGs according to the way that cities operate. And then in the three pillars of sustainable development, as previously mentioned, you can identify those interrelationships and start to foster integrated policies. I want to focus a little bit on the challenges of cities specifically in Asia, the Pacific region. It is one of the most rapidly urbanizing territories in the world. Half of the region's population is already urban that represents 60% of the global urban population. A lot of that population is located in vulnerable areas. Cities, as you know, generate 75, so that's 8%. Emissions accounting to each country, but also globally, they have disproportionate emission shares. Many of the cities in our region have meet urban planning or no urban planning. Many of them have relied for long periods of time on central government decisions. There hasn't been a devolution of authority down to a local level where the planning makes the most sense. And so they can't provide basic services for meet infrastructure needs. The population is growing faster than infrastructure improvements can be built. And there's a significant funding gap to address those infrastructure gaps. 19 of the top 20 most polluted cities in the world are Asia and it is on and on, wasting just one of the issues. Just one chart, you can see the disproportionate influence of Asian cities. This is the urban population of mid-year and the black line represents the Asian Pacific region and the projections going forward towards 2050 indicate that disproportionate level of development and population in Asian city cities will continue. That leads to also disproportionate share of material consumption throughout the region. So the purple lines on these graphs represent the Asian Pacific region. You can see that the growth from 1970 to 2010 far outweighs the growth in any of the other regions. You might think that this is actually happening in the largest cities, the mega cities in the region, but actually the predominance of what we call the unrecognized primacy is in the secondary cities. You can see again in Asia that cities of populations in less than 500,000 actually represent most of the population in this region. This is important because these are also the cities that traditionally have relied on intergovernmental transfers to make their approvance and to operate their local authorities. They've been the cities that don't have access to their own sources of revenue, primarily. They don't have access to financial capital. They don't have access to capital markets in any respect and they don't access international finance quite well. So the challenges of even addressing many of the issues that we've talked about in these cities is significant. So we wanted to focus on one particular challenge that is really again also the proportion in this region and that is the challenge of plastic waste. So we developed a project called Closing in the Loop and the idea was to look at plastic waste in the region. It's becoming a much more significant issue as some member states in the Asia Pacific, partly because it has also affected the marine economies. 8 million tons of plastic leaks into the oceans, more than 60% of plastic waste that leaks into the Pacific Ocean comes primarily from only five countries in this region. So this has a significant impact. Not just in the solid waste management policies, but these respective countries and cities that are also affecting the region and potentially the economies. The first step was really to understand materials. We think of plastic, but everybody knows there are lots of different types of plastic. They vary by market. So we need to understand what is in market and what is marketable. What are technical solutions for each of those different types of plastics and what are the solutions and what are the production alternatives? Is it possible to facilitate solutions that will reduce the impact of plastics? Following that, we looked at mapping of waste flows. So here you see kind of a flow chart of just plastic waste management in Bangkok. I'll come back to this, but the light-colored, kind of beige color is essentially informal actors. The greens are semi-formal and the grays are the formal actors. But we needed to understand who is doing what and where are the intersections between the informal and the formal sector. I'll come to Marley's focus on the informal sector shortly. But oftentimes we talk about here are the flows of waste. Here is the volume that cities and countries are dealing with, but that often doesn't take into account the large amount of volume that is already addressed and converted by the informal sector. So if we had that data, those numbers would actually be far more significant. And then looking at how do you quantify the value of that diversion and the savings to local authorities and in solid waste management processes. Despite any efforts, there are always plastic leakages and we need to know where that is happening as well, whether it's happening at the site of disposal, whether it's happening at transfer stations, or if it's happening simply because the product and the material itself has no further market value in the current system and how it changes. When I focus on the informal sector and informal workers, obviously in our particular region here, there is a large share of the labor force working in the informal sector. This is just for the waste sector, but it's generally in the informal sector. Almost as high as 90% is in the informal sector. It's not important to really engage with that with those stakeholders in the development of effective policies. If we are to come back to the implementing and achieving the SDGs, we can identify areas where the informal sector actually contributes significantly to the attainment of those targets. While more than 15 million people locally earn their income informally in the waste sector, it's not just the waste sector that has an impact from their work. It's almost every SDG that you can say, either plastic recycling that they're doing or silitating plastic recycling has impacts on decent work, no poverty, education, gender equality, and the list goes on and on. And in some cases, in some low income countries, it's important to note that waste pickers are responsible and accountable for collecting between half and all of waste and no cost municipalities. So we need to factor in again that value, educate and make aware of the government authorities on the value of that work. So the project really looked at generating evidence in these private cities. And then we looked at Pune, India, and Bangkok and tried to work with different stakeholders in those two locations. We worked at the Stockholm Environment Institute in the trade union in India and follow waste pickers in both locations and tried to again bring all of this different information together. Where are the flows? Where is the product? Who's doing what? Where are the intersection points? And it's those intersection points that aren't just areas where we can increase the volume of plastic that is produced, but it's where we can actually increase the economic impact for the informal workers. So understanding both the material flow and the social impacts is important. We looked at what are the different collecting stories, abstract recycling, and what are the challenges and the opportunities to improve the process. And actually a presentation this morning in the middle of a trumpet actually stole a lot of what it was going to say. So you can refer to it before and I will dwell on it. But it was important to look at these inclusive solutions and building the partnerships in order to increase the 3Rs and reduce the plastic leakage. So in Pune, they've had for a number of years now a cooperative and a waste connection mechanism where waste pickers collect from about 300 households per day. Individually they can collect between 10 and 15 kilos per person if they had a tricycle or a motorized price they can collect up to 50 kilos. It's interesting that the geographic distribution and the area that can be focused on really does relate not just to the informal and the formal but the transport systems upon which they rely. It's easy to say that in the formal system all there's a lot of possibilities of garbage trust that's actually not the way that cities work. It's not the way that communities or neighborhoods work. It's not the way that households generate their waste. So much more smaller scale systems are part of the reality of the far more effective, in many cases, than the formal system. And I would say if we're talking about the broader issue of urban resilience that the informal sector is often far more resilient than the formal sector because they don't rely on transportation systems or refrigeration or lots of technology. They adapt to the conditions and the circumstances that they face. And it's clear, obviously, when you're dealing with the informal sector that they collect and market what they can sell. So it was important to also characterize the types of different plastic. You see the greens represented in this table are those types of plastics that are easily marketable and there are failed prices established. The yellows are the more difficult ones and the reds don't yet have these kinds of opportunities. But I think this is an important point to stop because we focus on the cost and focus on the materials and we say that there needs to be investment in this and that and the burdens of picking up trash have all these costs. Really we need to focus also on investment where it's difficult to address materials or waste. So it's not to say that there's never going to be a solution for those in red or it's always going to be difficult for yellow. Sometimes the responsibility of a system or a local or national authorities is to invest in the innovations to address those challenges rather than continue to see those kinds of burdens. So understanding this waste characterization and what is marketable today could lead to different solutions in the future and that has both economic implications in terms of cost savings for the cities who have to pick up currently on recyclables and also has implications potentially for the informal who could access more and more markets as innovative solutions come to bear. So these are just some graphics that we've developed in the project for Pune. It was interesting to note some of the statistics. Roughly 90% of Pune's total municipal waste is collected and half of the waste is collected by the informal sector. And again, if you think simply about the costs of collecting some municipalities actually spend 40 to 60% of their municipal budgets on waste collection. So if you start to factor in some of these economic impacts across cities, it begins to add up very quickly. It also contributes to other national development strategies, whether it be climate change strategy or nationally determined contributions to the Paris Agreement that these things can start to be quantified and actually accelerate and increase to a much larger scale. So 50,000 tons of annual CO2 emissions simply because of what the informal sector is currently doing. The impact on the number of people including who are part of trade union and negotiate with the municipality and with the formal waste system to increase and try to increase market value of products is important. And then the way that these different stakeholders interact. So they're not just the large recycling facilities of the transportation, but they're small and medium scrap shops that are intermediate points in the flow of materials provided by the informal and they also are often not considered or accounted in the solid waste management data that is readily available by two cities or national governments. And then the transformation of those products into materials for new products or recycled into new products are also opportunities for stakeholders. Despite that there are still leakages, both from illegal dumping in proper storage and collected and again a lot of that is based simply on the inability to access particular markets. So we've developed a number of key actions that have been shared with the city. There are some that pay for them. In other presentations some about planning for policy bands some about establishing greater values for difficulty in recycling plastics some about fostering facilitating innovation and investing in industries that could develop further solutions. In Bangkok we looked at one of the three waste disposal stations and essentially mapped the same type of process. The numbers are a bit different but the overall impact is about the same. The informal sector is not as well organized as Pune is they don't have the trade union and in many of the countries in Southeast Asia and particularly there are more and more efforts to actually exclude the informal sector and impose regulations on who can collect waste. This is where some of the different interests between informal and formal whether it be incinerators whether it be energy providers whether it be the formal waste companies that run on contract. Many of them are pushing for more and more regulations to take out the impacts for discount to the informal sector. So this we also mapped here again and this is a slide that I showed earlier about the plastic waste in Bangkok and looking at the different stages. So the sources whether it's from residential institutional businesses where the current collection spots and it's interesting to see that there's what you typically expect in cities, municipal garbage collection crews but then there are interracial waste buyers and waste collectors all in the informal. So in many respects the number of informal stakeholders capways the number of formal stakeholders and that goes through the entire chain. So we've developed a regional policy guide to take some of the learnings from this project forward to cities and national governments and essentially there are different types of recommendations some on policy, some on better practices some on research and collection of more data partly to make aware the impact of the informal and potential cost savings to cities and to foster regional cooperation. We looked essentially at some broader categories including our production processes that could change could use different non-materials or bring in different recyclables into the more circular problem approach and the EPR that was mentioned in the previous segment various tax incentives, voluntary agreements and bans, fees tax incentives, reward schemes coupon schemes all of which have been discussed. So I would encourage you if you're interested to look at this regional policy guide this is a common website and it kind of synthesizes much of the work that's being done in the region to address.