And so as a teacher, I'm always wondering, how do I help my students understand the power and the joy to be found in words? Those of poets like all the ones we just talked about, writers like the ones we just talked about, and of their own words. So two years ago, in September, I looked out at my new students, just like I do every year.  And there was this pregnant silence, all these little 14-year-old faces looking up at me, the silence, and then a few hands went up. Do we have to do it? Is it a part of our grade, though? What happens if we're absent that day? Like, if I just have it, then my favorite question came from this quiet girl named Kaylee, who raised her hand and said, can I just be a tree? I don't want to be a tree. No Kaylee, I said, there are no trees in our play. And she protested, but I didn't sign up for that. So people who don't know my students, they sometimes try to flatten them into this category that I'm sure you've heard before, and it's called at risk. And I've realized over the years that that phrase is often used as a stand-in, a code word, for some of my students' realities. They're primarily students of color. They're growing up in a city, Boston, with a troubling history of educational inequity. Most of them, 83%, come from low-income households. Many of my students have experienced significant trauma. A quarter of them are special education students, several are English language learners, and many will be the first in their families to attend college. But those are just some of the truths about my students. Those of us who know and love them know that they're also brothers and sisters, their sons and daughters, their athletes and scientists and caretakers and artists. But too often, those kind of facts, those at-risk factors, are presented as the whole story of who my students are and where they come from. And these are the kinds of stories my students see about who they are and where they come from. So my students see these kinds of stories. And sometimes they internalize that these are the only stories worth telling about themselves and about their communities. They believe that these are the only stories anyone ever hears about them or believes about them. They question whether their voices are loud enough to tell the stories that they want people to hear.  So before we get to the play, I require all my students to participate in Poetry Out Lab. Anyone here to Poetry Out Lab with the kids? Yeah, okay. So Poetry Out Lab is a national poetry recitation competition. You memorize a poem and you perform it on stage and if you're good enough, you win $20,000, right? So there are three simple rules. And the kids are like, this is too much work. I'm like, guys, memorize one poem and you can... All right, sit down. All right, these are like really, really big. Show up. What about it, dude? That's it. It's one, two, three. I tell my students all the time, I believe in you. You're powerful. If you support one another, you're going to succeed together. But if you can remember being 14, if you haven't blocked that, I will believe you. You'll understand why even those three rules are incredibly hard for students to follow because being 14 is hard. Every social interaction is a minefield. A 14-year-old self-image is so incredibly fragile that the smallest thing can send them into a spiral of self-doubt. And our aspiring tree, Kaylee, was so afraid to be vulnerable that she would skip class, she would show up an hour late, put in minimal effort, she would nervously giggle her way through every theater activity and we were preparing for Poetry Out Lab. And actually she was one of the first nine creators to memorize her poem. But when it was time for her to stand in front of the class and rehearse for the first time, she froze.  And her eyes were big and terrified and her eyes welled up and she said, I can't do it, I can't save the poem. So time seems to stop. She puts her hands over her face, her classmates start fidgeting. And then from the side of the room, one girl says, come on, Kaylee, you can do it. And somebody else says, yeah, just say the first line. The energy in the room started to shift. Suddenly the students weren't just sitting there passively waiting for her to fail, they were willing her to succeed.  And small as it may have seemed, that was a victory. She'd taken the first step in proving to herself that her voice was powerful. As teachers, we can tell students that they're capable, but it doesn't become real until they confront their fear. Doing the things that scare them makes them invincible. On the night of the performance, Kaylee stood in the spotlight and recited her poem to a packed house. She proved to herself that she didn't have to be a tree because she had a voice and she had had it all along. And in the second half of the year, Kaylee came alive in rehearsals for that play. She had discovered her own voice on stage and simply she became a leader within the group. She infused her scenes with humor and expression. She encouraged her scene partners. She was quizzing them on memorization. She was showing them what to do. And on the day of the play, Kaylee and her classmates shown them. And a few weeks later, reflecting on what she had learned, Kaylee wrote that being forced to do theater was an amazing opportunity to get to know herself and be better. This is so good. Okay, so we should consider what that means in terms of words power. What could our students' words set in motion? I have a former student named Omar. For poetry out loud, when he was in ninth grade, he recited Langston Hughes' The Negro Speaks of Rivers. And in our play at the end of the year, he stole his scene with his portrayal of a black man caught in the web of the apartheid era of South Africa's racist laws. As Omar got older, he started to write his own poetry. By the time he was a senior, he was a member of our school's award-winning slam poetry team, which I want to be clear I had nothing to do with, but I like to think that doing poetry with them in ninth grade wets their appetite. I'm going. And so when I was named 2017, Massachusetts Teacher of the Year, Omar, performed his original poem, Slactivism, at the ceremony.  Raise your hand if you wish for a different answer. All right, make some noise if you think sex is a massage you should end. Woo! That's the thing, if you think racism's gonna end right now. Woo! Raise your hand if you hope to that a source of media involved would happen. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Don't think you've got 50 likes for it. Snap your fingers if somebody shares it. Raise your hand if you know the answer to this question. How does a click of a budding country change like a magic trick? Poof it, does it? Why do we feed into our feed as if we will feed the poor? Why do we socialize about a social issue and think it resulted in consensus? Why do we let the word of the community become a new word of mouth? Slactivism. Asked to perform to be of the internet in support of a political or social cause from regard to acquiring real-time involvement. And this is my definition. That active time should be active in this on social media, acting like it's empathetic but it's in that experience to put that. And of all ways to waste our time to do this, kids dying from cancer, but we donate within 80 men instead of donating with our credit cards. Share just the food we care. We don't care to share our care on a given day. I guess sharing the protest is doing the protest and being full of everything without making progress. And that's the case. And I'll share images of the demonstration in Chicago at the Donald Trump round and call it advocacy. So let me get this straight. We can see domestic violence come to light on our screens so we view the screens on the live screen. Is Facebook on the reality now? Our new religion? Everyone want to be pastors and priests, pastors and chiefs, chapters and thieves, raptors and priests we rather give our speech than teach when the truth is out of our reach. When I see a child lying dead in the trash can, am I supposed to feel like my share is gonna bring them back to life? Am I supposed to act like a life equal to prayer? A helping hand? Clean water in Flint, Michigan? Re-evaluate my morality if I scroll down? We share to make up for the times we missed in the rallies. We tweet online, but when it's white, tell me act like lots of birds who can't sing. It doesn't matter how many times repost about the Chicago shootings if you don't vote to ship the federal laws. If you want to change the way the spirit is changed your mind, not your status.  If you don't help to stop the bombings. If you don't participate in the boycotts. If you don't play back against police brutality. It's time to put our hands up. Stand up on the keyboard. Focus on the uppercase. Face the water. Now let the media pull this in. Deeply impacted at least one person who was in the audience on that day. The late commissioner of education in the state of Massachusetts, Mitchell Chester. After that day when he saw Omar's performance, he reached out and asked me for permission to have a copy of the poem. And then the commissioner of education in the state of Massachusetts took that poem and started performing it and his speaking engagements around the state. Oh wow. He took the poem and he sent it out in a newsletter that went out to teachers and administrators all over our state. Every chance he got, he talked about Omar's poem. And that is the power of our students voices. Our students have profound and powerful stories to tell. And as educators, it's our job. It's our responsibility and it's our privilege to help them reject narratives that tell them that their boundaries are predetermined. Words, like Ansexten's or Robert Frost's or Buketu Seyum's or Langston Hughes or Kay Lee's or Omar's can be the perfect vehicle to help us do it. I'd like to end by inviting you once again to talk to one another.


I speak to a lot of people on the phone and there is often a confusion between the National Historic Landmark and National Register of Historic Places designations. National Historic Landmark program was established in 1935 as part of the Historic Sites Act. It has its own set of regulations. A National Historic Landmark is by definition a property that is significant to our nation as a whole. So the process is a nomination is prepared sometimes under what is called a theme study. Theme studies include racial desegregation and civil rights, architecture, there are myriad theme studies out there under which properties are evaluated. Nomination is prepared, reviewed by the National Parks System Advisory Board and recommended to the Secretary of the Interior. The Secretary of the Interior is the only person who can designate a National Historic Landmark. National Register of Historic Places is a bottoms up program. So anyone can prepare a nomination for any property. The process goes through the State Historic Preservation Office. The State Historic Preservation Office nominates it and submits it to the National Parks Service where there is the keeper of the National Register. The keeper has the authority to list things in the National Register of Historic Places. All properties that are designated National Historic Landmarks are automatically listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Some properties go through the process of National Register listing first and then move on to National Historic Landmarks. So a property may be identified as significant at the national level and listed in the National Register and then is recommended for designation as a National Historic Landmark. 1935 Historic Sites Act, 1966 Historic Preservation Act. Two different programs, two different laws, two different methods.


Let us look now at intelligent guessing and testing. This much maligned trial and error strategy is often loved by students yet loathed by many teachers. However, this is a legitimate strategy that merits our attention. In fact, this is not about taking wild guesses but about estimating an answer and then verifying our guess to refine our approximation until we arrive at the answer. Often this strategy is not efficient, but sometimes it is a good start. Indeed, when you might lack appropriate mathematical tools to solve a problem, intelligent guessing and testing is godsend. Let us look now at the following problem. Bernie has 40 yards of 6 foot high cyclone fence and wants to build two separate chicken coops and closing a total area of 58 square yards. How much fence does he need for each pin if Bernie wants the coops to have square bases? Let X be the side of the base of one square pin and let Y be the side of the base of the other square pin. Since we have 40 yards of cyclone fence, the sum of the perimeters of both pins must be 40. Likewise, the sum of the areas of both pins must be 58 square yards. We can solve this system of equations but students might encounter some problems. They may not be familiar with solving systems of equations, especially one that has a linear equation and a quadratic equation. What to do? Let's use some intelligent guessing and testing. This equation, when you divide it by 4, becomes X plus Y equals 10. Let us try then two numbers that add up to 10. Let's start with 5 and 5. 7 and 5 will be here 25 plus 25, that's not 58. So let us try 6 and 4. Will that work? Well, this is 36 and 16. Still doesn't work. Why don't we try 7 and 3? 7 squared is 49, 3 squared is 9, that's it, 58. So these are the dimensions we were looking for. We want a pin with side 3 yards and another one with side 7 yards. So the first one will have a perimeter of 12 yards and the second one will have a perimeter of 28 yards for a total of 40 yards. The area of the first one will be 9 square yards and the area of the second one will be 49 square yards. We can also use some algebra to confirm that this solution is unique. If we solve the first equation for X, then we can substitute that and see that this becomes X squared minus 10X plus 21 equals 0, so X minus 3 times X minus 7 is 0, so X equals 3 or X equals 7. When X is 3, Y is 7, when X is 7, Y is 3 and they are both covered in this case. Thank you.


Good morning or a good evening or whenever you're listening to this. This is Andy Simon from save open space and this is the save open space show save open space Burlington. With me today are Diane Gayer and Ruby Perry, all of us are South and residents and we work together on save open space Burlington also not present but very much active in our group is Jess Rubin who is the director of Michael Evolve private company, she has an MS in environmental studies and is in doing an MS again in plant and soil sciences in ecological landscape design. So today we're here to talk about the Pine Street barge canal and I'm just going to give you a brief overview of what the Pine Street barge canal is we're talking about a piece of land along Lake Champlain on the south end of Burlington. And in what's called an environmental or I mean enterprise light manufacturing zone. So a historically manufacturing zone in the south end of Burlington. You can see on the map right next to next to the this piece of vacant, what they call vacant land of forested land is the Burlington Electric Department just down from that word says St. John's very trucking is actually now Department of Public Works and to the left bottom corner of the screen is Callahan Park. We talk about it as an industrial zone but actually prior to any of this. It was a wetland that was just along Lake Champlain and what happened to this land in the 19th century was first the railroad came in so cut it off pretty much cut it off from the from the lake, but there still was a connection to the lake and then this what's called the barge canal was dug as a way of storing lumber for the lumber industry in the area which was the primary industry in that part of the 19th century. So this this is a glimpse of or a rendition of the part of the barge canal where where lumber was stored and this is actually why it was why it was created the canal itself as a way in from the lake to bring lumber in so they could store it for the winter. When the lake froze up and the mills could keep keep operating with Canadian lumber that was brought in on on barges. And so these are the piles of lumber just piled up all around this area that we were looking at just a second ago as a natural area. Most of that area is filled that was filled in from various sources, including the sawdust from the lumber mills themselves so there's a huge peat layer in this area. What happened after the lumber industry stopped using it was that in that area that you see on the map that the little red rectangle that was created a manufactured gas plant. Manufactured gas plant made gas from coal, and that operated from the very beginning of the 20th century to 1966. It was decommissioned in 1966, but in the course of the manufactured gas plant operation, there was a huge amount of toxic waste that was dumped into the into the canal and into the land behind the manufactured gas plant this includes coal tar, which which contains benzene toluene various other hydrocarbons and heavy metals. In fact, the EPA has a list of 56 contaminants of concern in this area so in in the early 80s, the Superfund legislation was created by Congress, and this site was designated as a Superfund site which is under the control of the the United States Environmental Protection Agency, and that sort of sets the scene for what we're looking at now, and and what we would like to propose doing with this area. Yeah, let me give you a brief vision to start with. What you'll see is that in the center of it is a parcel that has maltex pond it's a big it's it's really the core of it. That is city owned land that is already conserved. It was going to be part of the Southern connector and and when they discovered how much pollutants are in the water and and how they, they could not do what they had planned to do so. Luckily now it is conserved and has been for 30 years as has the whole land.  It is all wetlands and what our vision is is that the entire piece come together. And we want to invoke perhaps and mentioned that this land was the land of the abnaki people and had been for 10,000 years and we have as part of our work as permission for them of the chief of the Nalhegan tribe to do this work on the land to even begin to envision it. And we have also begun conversations with the with current abnaki people about reading that land and how we might best we might best serve the true purpose of the land. So we've been speaking with Judy Dow and Chief Menard and also make data as as being as our advisors, and I want to mention them now, but also mentioned that we will be doing a show with them about what happened before the industry came to town. At another time so watch for that. Diane, why don't you go ahead and begin to talk about the water part of it. Okay. So, sort of the reason I've been on the land multiple times and and looked at the stormwater is I've run to design charrettes about this part of Burlington, and one was for a mayor 30 years ago. Who did who wanted us to put together teams and interpret what we were seeing at the time and this is probably 25 years ago, and then subsequent to that about 10 years ago. And we did another community call for all the neighbors in the south end to look at this and walk the land and start to wrestle with what is it doing whatever its qualities. How is it functioning, all with ecological design sense. So that leads to the stormwater in the south end. If you look at the purple. That's predominantly downtown it's sort of from, you know, Union Street and Willard and it and it goes into Burlington proper. But the lime green in particular. There's two zones of lime green and then there's a zone of dark green dark green is all of the angles be brook watershed. And that is flowing straight towards the lake.  So everything that's lime green and dark green are flowing through the barge canal in the wetland. That means predominantly the whole south end. Angles be both comes into this wetland zone as well as is its own little river watershed, small, small watershed. It's the most degraded stream in Burlington proper. So the functioning of this land as a wetland zone is absolutely critical for the stormwater and sewer lines in Burlington. Because in the south end, they're not disconnected. There's only a small part of the south end that's actually piped into a suit sewage treatment plant. The rest is going direct to the lake through this mitigating function of of the barge, what we're calling the barge canal as a whole location. Part of what's also interesting is that there are ARPA funds from the federal government currently for stormwater mitigation in urban areas, and this would be a place that the city plus the state could apply for federal funding to help this particular land continue to function in its water storage flood control and pollutant mitigation properties. Yes, there are pollutants there but they're also all the pollutants of urban overflow that are currently coming through there. So it's a critical function for all of those natural resources and of course our lake is is the most critical thing of all. So it, it's directly linked to that. Should I continue. Diane do you want to say anything about flood control at its role in flood control as well or could we should we pass that off to somebody else. It's sort of wake somebody more engaged with lake research would be good, but just so that we know it, that land is blocked by the railroad which is all fill and high. And so you sort of have this barrier between this land and the lake proper with just a tiny channel that connects the two. So, all the water is backed up into this bowl, it acts as a ball, both a water bowl as well as a sponge of land. So it is critically functioning for the whole south end. And as we develop more of the city. And so to protect stormwater and lake flooding, the better. As we've seen they've had to rebuild that whole part of the bike path, because of flooding and storm surges. So this becomes even more critical for all of those future climate impact storms. Yeah, I think there's, I think the key point of that is that this land is already performing a incredibly important function for the city. And we don't know how to really, we don't, we modern humans aren't really able having aren't calculating the resources that are inherent in the land in terms of flood control. But city of Burlington and the, all of us, the people are aware of climate change, and that those things are going to are already critical and are going to become only more so. And the city has begun to talk about natural nature based solutions to climate change. A wetlands a functioning diverse biodiverse wetlands is key to that in that our vision is of a functioning. A biodiverse wetland that is an eco tone between the city and the transition zone to between the city and the lake. And I don't know if we need to remind people that our drinking water comes from the lake. This is a result of a community wide, or South and community neighborhood gathering over three days. But the reason I'm bringing it up is because in this case at the bottom you can see where the railroad track is the gray line, and below that in light gray is actually the lake. In blue is the turning basin and the canal and then a wetland zone where there's a little later, maybe it's an H or I. So, all of that all the way up to pine street is all water retention and is all acting functioning ecosystems that are currently thriving and healing all of the previous industrial uses that were there. And I think this is so critical to conserve as an acting ecosystem for the city. You can see those relationships and just to the right, there's the parking, you're immediately at the paved parking of what was once the GE plant. As a community, people thought about very light use keeping this wild. Perhaps putting in some trails, maybe they would be more like boardwalks. So that you're separating people from the land and the sponginess that has to happen for it to be active. And in places that are perhaps already built up, you could have collection points for folks. But the critical thing is how to turn it into an environmental learning lesson so that people understand how land is dynamic and how land that we think of as unused or invisible to us is actually highly functioning and highly critical to the rest of our city. So I think there are different examples of environmental research places that talk about bio remediation and ecological systems. And one of those examples is along the Hudson where it was also a huge brownfield site. And they put in a barge that's a learning center for researchers and students, schools, children to learn about living systems. And that was highly successful. It's been there for 20 years now. So I just want to say a word. Also, I want to speak a little bit about our image and and Jess Rubin who's not joining us today but who has been working with us did want to focus on the remediation piece and the possibilities for academic and citizen science research and I think that that's really important and what Diane was saying really leads into that. But I want to point out that this area that is now not built on is all forested and is habitat for beavers and herons and and Canada geese and various mammals and fish and amphibians. At one point that the in the early 90s or the late 80s, the environmental protection agency decided that what we should do with it to remediate it is dig up all of the contaminated land which is most of the land that we're talking about right now within the the Superfund area which is the yellow line here should be dug up and piled into a giant toxic waste container right on the lake. That was their, their preferred remedy. And they suggested this to the Burlington community and the Burlington community, pretty much as a whole said no to this. Over a period of five or six years after that. There was much consultation and what happened was that the land within that Superfund boundary was pretty much left alone. There was a alternative solution to basically digging and dumping all of this contaminated soil. There was some remediation in the, the water area the canal area that you see and a cap was put on to keep the coal tar from migrating out into the lake. But otherwise, besides monitoring the situation, nothing much has been done to that land. This land besides having a public function and potential access on boardwalks into the land for education is also a potential hub for academic research into phytoremediation that's using plants to remediate it, micro remediation with mushrooms, bio remediation with bacteria. An area that's especially in northern climates is has not been adequately studied but many people are interested in it this semester, for instance, Professor Joshua Faulkner is going to be at working on the site with his students. He's working at trying to document and catalog the contaminants that are in the soil and also strategies for bio remediation so there's a bio remediation class that already is going to be on working on the site but there's so much potential for this, both for UVM research, other academic institutions and also citizen science research that can be done by Burlington residents to inventory the the species that are on the land to help and assist the academic research that's going on, and to do grassroots remediation that's also another strategy for remediating this. So this, this land is critically important for the flow of water, the sequestration of carbon, the stabilization of the soil and for transforming the toxins that are on on the soil in the soil right now, which are many. We should probably talk about what has been proposed by various developers and sit in the city to, and then want to, we want to talk really briefly about what we see needs to happen. Well, I think we should keep focusing on the the vision that we have and then okay, and then what the steps are, because there is pressure on that land to develop. And I guess I wanted to segue from from this education piece that we're talking about is actually about 26 acres, and it's 11 acres of it and is already owned by the city and and conserve. And of course that's where we'll start with the remediation and the assessment and the academic science that's happening there, but also a citizen science, but our vision is that we will acquire the two private parcels as well. So that that whole the parcel, the super funds I can come together as a whole and the wetlands can be reactivated. And we're not talking about the city owning that land we're we're talking about a separate entity that maybe perhaps a new model for public ownership. And that would be that would really involve the citizens in that land that I keep thinking of friends of the barge canal for things like clearly there is a huge amount of cleanup that has to happen there's a homeless site that was there for for years that needs to be cleaned up in order for the land to regenerate. But we also need to will need will need to remove invasives that have grown in and to plant and nurture and tend native species coming in. So, I think our work. I think we're coming. Our work is to we need to inform ourselves about what's happening and how critical that land is to Burlington, and that part of our vision is that it would not only be an education and training ground for bioremediation, but also about our past the ability that industrialization has left, because not only has it destroyed the land, it has the land has itself begun to heal itself, and that maybe we would have some kind of a walkway that would interpret would have signs so it would be interpretive so that people could walk along and learn, not only about the, the lumber business that happened there and that built Burlington is part of the roots of Burlington, but in the same way, learn about that land as a natural area of why Burlington began there, and the, the role that development of all kinds played in it. So, it's a it's a multifaceted vision that we're carrying. And we want everybody to be involved in that and to understand what that vision is. I would, I would add to that that that it's, we're not. This isn't new ground, Lewis Creek Association. In, you know, the southern tier of Chittinac County has been doing citizen science now for 20 years, if not longer, and has huge support across the whole scientific community and the neighborhood communities and the towns that participate. And then there are also partnerships there are other nonprofits out there in the state, or federal nationally, who we've been talking to and are interested in helping promote how to move forward on this. And to understand why this is really important and it's our one critical piece in Burlington it's a Keystone site for for for all of this for the learning for the stormwater for the industrial heritage. And those assessments are out there. So it's really a matter of us teaming with others to piece it together, and to bring it forward. Yeah, we do have a petition out and we will. You'll see on your screen, a petition link for conserving and remediating this land. We have 450 people who signed already in the last two months and are hoping for many more.  So we hope that you will join us in that and and on the petition you'll find links to how to get in touch, you can also make comment and find out more information. So maybe we should talk a little bit if we still have time about what the next steps are. In terms of that there are two private parcels in particular that are key. The green area that you can see outlined in green and says RCO conservation is area that has been zoned to be conserved already some of that that middle pieces is public land publicly owned municipally owned land, the strip along to the left side along the road is private land. There's some indication since that can't be used for anything else that that will be donated to any kind of conserved land and we're hoping that that happens. The two pieces that are numbered five 453 and 501 are both owned by a long time developer in Burlington named Rick Davis. And he's indicated that he is willing to sell that land for for conservation and we're hoping that all of that can be included into a conserved forested park and wetland that will be a lasting legacy for the for the city and for the, you know, for the environment that it will be that the ecological restoration of that area will will be a benefit to everyone. I think, I think other than the petition. Once you sign the petition you'll you will be able to get updates on what on the work that we're doing and where you can participate, and really where we need your help. So when the, I don't know how when the petition link comes up, I guess you'll have to write it down right and then add it. We're hoping when weather permits as as the spring warms up a little bit to actually do walks on the land with people and we'll we'll try to get that out in various ways. But at this point, many people are using the land. There are people who walk their dogs there people who walk along the edge, and you can walk into that land pretty easily just to see it so if you're down in the south end of Burlington or you want to see what it looks like. You can definitely use that land just respectfully and with curiosity to see what what's down there because there's so many, even in the wintertime you know there's a big beaver lodge. There's active all all through the year there's animal tracks if you go in the snow it's amazing astounding how many animal tracks are down there raccoon fox dogs but you know, just you can you can see a lot of animal activity, or evidence of it. And skate, they're skating, they are barge canal freezes when it's when the ISIS is solid and it and it will be after this next little bit of time, you can enter through behind Myers bagel. A lot of people do wild skating there and it is a great way to see the to see the barge canal to be to be in that space. I think is special about it for Burlington, and the parks and rec does have sort of wild lands as a demarcation of a quantum, a type of property within the parks and recs for the city, and so I just want to bring up that it is wild. So, don't expect it to be safe and monitored, you know if you're going skating be skate safe. Yes. You know, and know that there are wild animals out there and know that there are potholes, you know, things, and but that's part of why this is so particularly good is it offsets the Callan hand parks that are totally manufactured green space, as opposed to being wild green space. And it's such a huge buffer to all of the rest of what goes on in the city. I think that the phrase that came up when we were talking to one of the land trust representatives last weekend was natural infrastructure. I really like that. Yeah, it's a key part of the natural infrastructure of Burlington and, and we are hoping that you will join us in working to conserve this land in in the coming months. Thank you. I think we get in there. Thank you CC TV. Thank you, Jordan and CC TV and we'll be back on the air, especially talking about an indigenous perspective on the Burlington waterfront to go along with this.


So, I don't really feel like I should be here because I was supposed to be like a rock star and it didn't work out, so I do computer science instead, it's a long story. But there is a happy ending, I get to hang out with the INCF crew, they're so awesome, it's like a great place to be. So this is I think a good solid ending to my sad story. Basically the title here is very long but it can be summed up in data sharing or actually like a prelude to data publishing maybe. So that's what I'm going to talk to you about a little bit of in terms of our context, we're trying to do open science in Montreal, we have all sorts of initiatives and one of them is COMP. That stands for Canadian Open Neuroscience Platform. But before I get into that I want to kind of say a few things. So this is a slide I stole from JB who I think stole it from Mary Ann and I don't know how far it goes but I've cited the people so there we go. Either way it's kind of, it's a very telling slide in my view because a lot of the reason why we're trying to do open science is precisely this here. So yes we're trying to enable scientific discovery, there's all sorts of reasons that have been cited already but you know even if I was just a bureaucrat of some kind and I saw this figure that would be very telling, right? 200 billion maybe is an estimation of dark data, data that never really sees the light of day. That data is often lost you know like so that's a huge waste on the system, it's a waste for us, it's money that could be better spent. So this is one of the overarching reasons why we are doing open science. This is the platform that we've launched about a year ago. It's an 11 million dollar grant from Brain Canada. It's a three year mission and we're about one and a half years into it and our goal ultimately is just to share data. I'll tell you a little bit more in terms of the details of what we're exactly doing but a couple more overarching principles I won't spend any time on this because I think everyone here has heard a lot about FAIR. It's definitely a great idea and a concept and I'm happy that it's been quantified or qualified. So that's something that governs what we do. Sort of pursuant to that we did, we wrote our own best practices for you know neuroimaging and they're based I guess on the FAIR principles and they work really nicely with like governing bodies like INCF who do standards and best practices so we've kind of tried to translate that into something that people, the average scientist can actually use. So that's the preamble, now the actual plan of what COMP is. So this was when I first started like almost 20 years ago in this field this was sort of my reality and I think we've come a long way. The current plan is this up here which is a lot of things but basically it just illustrates the amount of technology that we have used, borrowed, created to come up with a design that hopefully will work to share data.  So this is what it looks like, I'll get into a few more details about this in a second. There's other low hanging fruit that is pretty useful I think. So something called the dats model, it's a way to describe what we use it for is a way to describe data sets. So you know it's important to have metadata and provenance for each individual piece of raw data but to start, so this is not hard to do, everyone who has a study or a data set of some kind could probably describe it in a very concrete way that can then be used to be automated and you can like search for it much more easily and share it among other repositories. So this is one of the things that we're pushing as low hanging fruit. There's other considerations for our platform. So you know there's open data sharing that's really easy, you just put data on a website somewhere in terms of the at least the ethical issues or the concept of it but it's you know that you have to first of all get ethics for that, that's not that easy but the technological implementation of it doesn't need to be too complicated. There's closed data which was a bunch of data use agreements, that's been science for the most part and you have to fill out all these forms and have all kinds of complicated bureaucracies. We're introducing a new model called registered access where you can be authenticated by members of your community. So we're working on this in terms of exactly how to implement it but it's something that's going to come to fruition in the next few months. I also stole this from JB but it's something that's very much part of our experiences. So we kind of have this anecdotal gap analysis. Just with all our experience we know exactly some of the problems that have occurred. There's articles about the cost of fare for example that you could use as a reference but data is still very hard to find and sometimes even harder to access. It's not usually open or very shareable. It's not well documented and it's not well standardized and it's still difficult for researchers to share. If you're an individual and you just want to try to share your data you run into problems. Another key is that the data is not persistent or as you've heard many times reproducible. So we have some governing principles that we've adopted. They are along the lines of fare but the way that we're going to deal with data is it has to be distributed. So you can have your own repo and then we'll crawl that and try to make the data available. The governance of the Canadian Open Neuroscience Platform is also distributed model. There's many players with their own databases, different kinds of ways of sharing data so that's important. Portals will have to have direct access to the metadata so we'll make the metadata and data available to everybody. The metadata has to exist for both the files and for the datasets as a whole like I was telling you about the DATS model. Tools need to be versioned. We have checksums and other kinds of hashes that we use to ensure the integrity. We are very conscious about privacy regulations. We've already released human data which I'll tell you about in a second. We want to make sure that it's absolutely de-identified and in line with any kind of ethics and privacy regulations. We want to make this available through a UI but also for all the geeks out there with APIs and make it easy to share data. Let me tell you about what we've actually shared so far. We had an annual meeting in Toronto in March and May I think. This was our first dataset. This is what we actually made available and open or at least registered. The Open Prevent AD, it's totally open. You have to create an account just for our own tracking purpose to see who downloads what and try to mold to that. It's open data. There's no permission that you need to get. It's an Alzheimer's study and there's about 500 subjects. There's all kinds of imaging data, full battery modalities at MRI, MRI, you name it. Some behavioral metrics. There's more data coming. Some of it will come under the registered access. This is a very, it's a pretty big milestone in our field. It's kind of like ADNI but totally open. There's some phantom data. There's a researcher that actually has scanned himself like 73 times here, I think. I don't know why. I don't know why anyone would want to do that. I did that by accident and I've released my data as well. I got signed up for this maybe 15 years ago. Someone said, hey, do you want to just do a couple of scans? You can go to Seattle or something. It sounded great. 15 years later and hundreds of scans, hours in the scanner later. I don't know if I would ever recommend that. But now that I'm there, I want the world record. I want to hold onto it, so just saying. There's other data that we had already released before but it's under the context of COMP as well. It's the big brain. This is the highest resolution brain, 3D reconstruction of a brain based on histology that's ever been created. It's at a 20 micron resolution. Some of you may have heard about it already, but that's available as well, fully open. There's also an EEG initiative that we've released in Montreal. We've created a cool viewer where you can overlay the electrodes on the different regions of the brain and you can see the signals for every one of those electrodes. That was nice. This is what the portal looks like. We haven't officially launched it yet. There's a prototype that we've worked on, but sometime in the next few months there'll be an official launch and you'll hear about it. This is some of the other data that we're going to release soon enough as well. Just to show you that the scope's increasing. I have all sorts of people coming and interested in sharing data. If you're one of them, please come talk to us. The other parts of COMP, there's many parts. There's training, which I won't speak to too much. I'll talk more about the infrastructure. I just explained about the data, but there's also computational infrastructure that we have. This is just an example of a pipeline to show you the complexities of some of the things that we do and house. I'll start again with the low hanging fruit. Boutiques is a way to describe pipelines in an efficient way. This was created by Tristan Glattald. A lot of times for those of you that are into high performance computing, you will install code pipeline software and it can get kind of tedious. If you know what you're doing, that's great. But if you wanted to make other people share your pipelines with others, it's hard to recreate that on another HPC. So he's created a standardized system that you can describe your data set and then you can use that in an automated way. So that's easy enough to do and then you can containerize your pipelines and go from there. There is a back end that we've created for many years in Montreal called C-brain. It's a high performance computing environment that basically abstracts the complexities of all that stuff that I was talking about. And you can be kind of a naive user. You can be a neuroscientist without much computing experience and still be able to launch your pipelines using the portal. If you have more experience, then you can get into the weeds of it. So this allows you to, in a very distributed way, launch a pipeline from Tokyo with data from Montreal and then output it into Stockholm or something like that. So this is quite a powerful tool and that'll be one of the back ends for COMP. There can be others. And I stole this from Dell when I was hanging out with them. But one of the things that drives what we do, I think, and will drive us much more, is AI or deep learning machine learning techniques. So this is just to illustrate the complexities of the kinds of tools that they have and use and things that will be probably, you know, like experiencing soon enough. I think the deep learning movement will very much affect the open science movement and big data that we deal with. So this is worth noting. Don't tell Dell I stole it from them. So there's more. This wasn't necessarily that easy to accomplish. So there's a whole process into this. First and foremost, if you want to share data, you have to have ethics. And this can be really complicated depending on what country you're in, depending on your ethics board. There's so many factors that influence it and they're not necessarily the same rules everywhere you go. There's some overarching principles about how to, you know, get ethics. We have created, in getting registered access, for example, we've created a template that I think a lot of institutions can use. We often get asked about, you know, like, well, I would like to share data, but I don't know what to tell the ethics board. So, you know, we have this ethics framework that maybe can be adapted. And I find people are more, if they see someone's already done it, they're more willing to actually follow your lead. There's also curation. People were talking about it at the end of the seminar yesterday about, you know, the complexities of this or why isn't this, why is there not more value in focusing on the curation? So this is something that I do for sure. And it is a very, there was a lot of work that went to curation. There's a lot of sides to it. I could explain more maybe during the panel session if anyone has questions about exactly what's involved in curating data. But there's a fair bit and this is something that I think we've gone through the full process from acquisition all the way to dissemination. Another important thing is quality control. This is something that everyone needs to do. If you're sharing open data, some people like to just share data that's maybe not curated very well and that's a perspective. But a lot of people appreciate when the data is cleaned and there's not too many artifacts in them and it's well organized and there's all sorts of quality control. In fact, Pradeep here, wherever he is, he's starting this whole INCF quality control standardization effort. So that's something that I think will be very valuable. And so regardless of what your perspective is on QC, I think it could use some standardization. Also, interoperability. This is one of the themes of the Canadian Open Neuroscience platform. As much as I would like, you know, Loris, for example, to be the database of the whole planet, that's probably not going to happen. So what is key is to have interoperability between all kinds of different systems. There is standardization that INCF, I think, could very much support as well in terms of the APIs, there's so many different ways to transfer data in an automated way. Having standardization in neuroscience would probably benefit everyone in this room. So these are other central core initiatives that are part of COMP and we are pushing them. There's DataLad as well, which is part of the technology that we use to house metadata. We've written crawlers for it. It's a software that's written by Michael Hankey, who's amazing, and smart, and cool. And Yaroslav Halchenko. Sorry, I told you I was going to make fun of you, so there you go. He's smart too. Anyway, so this is something that probably could be used by a lot of people. It's not just our context. So I would encourage you to investigate, to see how you can, you know, adapt DataLad to your own data sense. One other little thing that we have created is our own checklist of how to make data go open. We've done it within our own context. It's right now a little more centric to our experiences, our software, our data. But this is something that will generalize even more. It was based on our first round for PreventAD. It took a long time actually to curate that data. I think a lot of people underestimate the amount of time it takes to, you know, totally organize and clean and, you know, go through all the different steps to make your data go open. So this is our first pass. We're going to probably release it as a, maybe as a pre-print or something like that. So this is coming. And there's one last point that I guess I want to make and that's that one of the goals is also about data publishing. So I think you saw this slide earlier. But basically there are initiatives, different kinds of new journals like the one at HBM that is looking to potentially share data that's more along the lines of data publishing.  And the underlying principle, this came up, I think I was drunk, but it was over beers with Pierre Belec and Nicolas Stikoff, who are the communications wing of this whole, of the publishing side for a COMP. And it's an idea called neurolibre where we basically create the underpinnings for what any journal, any open journal could use to sort of organize your, the scripts that you use, organize the data and run these things in a more automated way, you know, from like different places. So I can give you more details about this if you want, but this is something that has already been done for COMP and we've released it's all open source and it's gonna become more and more elaborate. So for those that are in the publishing industry, you may want to take advantage of these kinds of concepts. So that's another thing. And I guess that's basically it. So, you know, for those of you who wanna discuss more, I will be at PubLolec later. So feel free to join and thank you for your attention.


Hi, I'm Luke Nguyen. Now to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Australia and Vietnam's diplomatic relations I'll be embarking on a culinary journey through Vietnam. I'll be meeting up with inspiring Australians Eating delicious regional Vietnamese foods, and I'll also be cooking with some premium Australian prodges I'm in the central highlands of Dalat surrounded by beautiful rolling green hills a Magical mist and it's so romantic here because the weather is perfect. It's always quite chilly now I'm here to try the incredible Delicious street food of the lat but above all I'm here to sample all the fresh herbs vegetables and all the wonderful colorful flowers that are always in blue So the food of the lat is a great marriage of flames from the north the center and the south This is a great example. This is But the Dalat version and we're at put more and this is essential for Boon bar now. It's a great mixture of a corner dry chili Lemon grass always good English. They're gonna cook this down for around three hours So a beautiful pace the shrimp paste and chubby paste gives it really great. Oh mommy Oh my gosh, look at that. There's beef in here. Oh lovely color And the noodles are very special bean sprout mint spearmint brulee leaf shredded cabbage Shredded lettuce. Oh smells so good now with every bowl of wooden ball You have to have some chili so this chili has fish sauce in it as well the set they I'm gonna put extra set they in That spiciness the lemongrass throw that in a squeeze of lime goes in That bean sprout the lettuce the mint the cabbage Now if you look here the noodles are very very unique. It's a round rice noodle You see that it's almost like a rice noodle spaghetti same shape pork loafers Well, like a meatloaf is called chalo and it's got congealed pigs blood. Look at this mmm Quite meaty delicious gamey flavor mix that all up and it's all about the broth Oh He's right. It's not as spicy It's a lot lighter incredibly aromatic absolutely delicious and but hey, right now So good so delicious wooden bobbin of that lap you have to come and try mmm Oh, wow look at that pork on the bone. I've got everything in his bowl Oh The meat is slow cooked so incredibly tender and texture Mmm, look at that big thing dig that in there and attack it anywhere you can mmm Very good Now when you interlap you have to try this dish It's banh mi sil mai and it's lovely pork balls That's been slowly cooked in a lovely broth as well Really crispy to get straight out of the oven so crunchy some mayonnaise in there or that part of that using cucumber Coriander lots of fresh herbs the pickled carrot and all the cold cuts the chalo salt pepper Everything's in this thing the wonderful meatballs in here the sil mai which are lovely soft texture Not too hard and she's also got a really long piece of pork skin in there as well. Look at this Deliciousness. It's a big get with all the cold cuts. We've got pork floss in there now. This is what I call a banh mi of the lap Wow, absolutely delicious Tandoor too good Wow Now it's every chef's dream to be in the lap because the herbs and vegetables and fruit are so fresh so vibrant and colorful I mean Straight from the farm. Look at that color Beautiful green purple color get some of that. I think this will make for a really good fresh Canapé or starter $20,000 a dollar or so unbelievable Such a bug. Thank you I'm here to meet fellow Australians Lindo Hugo and Amanda Connellison who sold their house in Brisbane and used all of their savings to set up Ola an organic and sustainable farm in the central highlands of vietnam Ladies, how are you? Oh, look, it's so great to see you. Welcome to Ola and Della. Welcome Absolutely stunning here. So Ola tell us about the name What it means is that if we're going to achieve this great huge task of providing clean food against You know the impacts of climate change. We all are in this together. I love that We are all in it together. That's fantastic Tell us more about what you guys do here and the the Ola story The objective or the mission of Ola is to provide clean safe food I was acutely aware of how pesticides are applied. They move in the environment They end up in food supply chains and then they end up in bodies. That's right So what we wanted to do was to create food in very small spaces, but very very intensively What do you love about vietnam and why did you choose vietnam to to pursue this project? It's very unfortunate But vietnam and all of the southeast asian countries have very very high rates of pesticide and juice cancer Because the pest pressure is so huge to actually do something meaningful and impactful and use my australian Sydney university phd, right? I wanted to come here and so I wanted to create clean food amazing This vertical method. I mean, how does it all work? And how is it different? So the obvious is that it's different because it's vertical So that means we can make a lot of vegetable really fast in very small spaces sustainable The most important difference is that the inside of this pod is an australian rock, right? And that australian rock that rock held thousands of times more microbes than anything else Even compost or even the best organic substances. Wow. And so that is what gives everything its disease resistance So we've got bok choy here. You can just eat it straight from the Yeah, yeah, definitely. There you go. And no pesticides. I can just eat it. Just eat it straight from the farm. Oh This is the hero. Yeah, I mean at these smell amazing. Look at the vibrant colors. It's a citrus marigold So they smell a little bit different than the normal marigolds, but it's just a beautiful fragrance Can I pick some? Can we pick some together? Absolutely. And look at these lovely women here part of your team Are they from Dalat lindu? We have a really strong ethnic minority population here. We provide clean Jobs clean employment social insurance, etc for all of our people, you know, our people come to work They know that they work in a clean environment.  They're not like, you know, crouching over right in the mud all day. Yeah, that's really important Linda look at this one Always stunning beautiful vibrant color.  Of course you can No chemicals smells divine. No chemicals Great so sweet. Oh, that's the best strawberry I've had in Vietnam. That is delicious We're celebrating Vietnam and Australia. So I've got some some wonderful salmon It's beautiful, right from Australia and I'm going to combine it with some beautiful smoked salmon row as well from Victoria Yarra Valley But the hero apart from you two The hero is the ola edible flowers here So to start off if you can squeeze around a couple of tablespoons of lime in there They cut them to squeeze it and lindu can you please pluck each pedal nicely around there for me? Right dice some red shallots up. I'm practically making a spicy salmon tata Beautiful. Yeah, just a little bit of garlic little bit of shallots. I've got some coriander stems are going to put in as well That is what you love about living in Vietnam. Love the food. Yep. I love the culture. Yes people are so happy and so relaxed and very friendly and especially in Delape Yeah, very very friendly. This is so lovely. They also share the Australian love of beer as well Yes So you have you have a lot of like after work beers in the afternoon like a Friday afternoon Yes, so you've been here for seven years. Are you do you live in Delape as well? We lived up here We we've moved around so we're in Saigon then we went to we came up here and then we went back to Saigon and then we realized that You know, Amanda's just so talented and so fantastic at managing the farms. Yes And we're now going through a really fantastic growth stage So we really needed to be here. So I've got some prula leaf here. I'm going to throw that in as well. So beautiful fragrance in there finely sliced a little bit of this Salmon fish sauce into your bowl. I reckon only around one little tablespoon like that. So throw that in there. Perfect So let's put a dash of Soy in as well And I'm going to finely slice this and we're going to dice it. Oh Look at the color Now I know the lovely ladies here From the ethnic minorities from Delape. They've learned so much from you ladies. What have you learned from them? Resilience. Yep culture as well from them How to be happy how to be happy how to be content appreciation appreciation They're so wonderful Now lindall all has won so many different amazing awards Can you tell me more about them? We have a really big focus on climate change adaptation and mitigation But then there's another thing in that we realize already the world realizes that greenhouse gas or climate change is already past a tipping point So how are we going to help these people to adapt to climate change now?  Thank you We're gonna prepare this dish for all of your team for their hard work. We've got the nasturtium leaves One there now while she's doing that I'm gonna arrange This salmon right just on top of these leaves here.  Oh All right, I've even got some beautiful caviar spoons here on top of the salmon Now the final pieces of this I just want to put the lovely flower petals on top Now this is why a lot of restaurants use your products because look at it. This is fine dining It is fine dining at all our farm Now guys, what's the future of Aula? What's next for you? Our next evolution of the technology is growing down in the lowlands So near the Mekong Delta. Oh, wow. Okay. That's an incredible achievement technically But in terms of impact the Mekong Delta is one of the top three most impacted places in the world in terms of climate change Incredible. Wow. I love the story all the team. Thank you again so much for all your wonderful work for Vietnam Let's dig into this colorful vibrant plate. Thank you Luke. Cheers. Yeah Mmm. Is it good? Lovely. Enjoy that. Oh, your Vietnamese is very good. All right, let's dig in Mmm. Oh, there's a pop of flavor. Oh beautiful. Oh, that's so colorful Such fresh and colorful produce organically grown by incredibly inspiring people I've had so much fun with Amanda, Lindel and their great team At Aula, they grow pure clean produce that not only tastes good But is also good for the environment and the Vietnamese people Now right on the steps here right in front of the Delat market in the central market We have these wonderful ladies serving my favorite dishes of Delat, banh chang nuong So shrimp goes on. She's gonna crack an egg right on top. Look at that. How far she is some spring onion She just mixes it up Now you can make this at home on your barbecue on a grill or even a non-stick pan Well, she's so fast So we have dried beef jerky Some mayonnaise some fried shallots as well and some chili Vietnamese pizza. Oh, it's gonna be really nice and crispy. So she folds it up Look at that nicely brown on the outside 20,000 dong just under a dollar. Thank you. Thank you. Look at that. Oh nice and hot Super crunchy So much flavor in here from the dried shrimp the eggs the mayonnaise and the chili Really really crispy as well rice paper so versatile in Vietnam I can use it to wrap my vegetables and meat in there I can use it on the grill Banh chang nuong delicious Now after I finish my snack, I'm gonna have my sweet dessert the ho nom which is a silken tofu.   I love finishing the night finishing the evening With a lovely dough hole no the lap. Oh I love that I love the weather. I love the friendly people Absolutely delicious food. It's about a great time here I'm always blown away with the amount of fresh produce and delectable food offerings that are available here in da lab With delicious vietnamese dishes from all regions of the country In my next episode, I'll be traveling to the beautiful southern islands of vietnam


Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. I asked Phil Habib to come by today in order to discuss the next phase of the U.S. diplomacy in Lebanon and the prospects for our Middle East initiative. I want to begin by reaffirming our principal objectives in Lebanon. First, the removal of all foreign military forces from Lebanon. Second, the strengthening of the central government and the establishment of its authority throughout the country. Third, Lebanon must not again become a launching pad for attacks into Israel. Indeed, the security of all the states in the area can only be guaranteed through freely negotiated peace treaties between Israel and its neighbors. And finally, I call on all the parties in Lebanon to maintain the ceasefire so the diplomacy can succeed. In the course of his briefing, Phil told me that a peaceful resolution of the Beirut crisis would not have been possible without a multinational force that included United States forces. With the evacuation complete and the authorities asserting their control throughout Beirut, I am pleased to announce that the multinational force will commence its withdrawal from Beirut Friday, September 10th, day after tomorrow. And the United States Marine contingent should be among the first to leave. We're therefore keeping our commitment to have them out within 30 days. I'll remain fully and personally engaged in support of the next phase of our diplomacy in Lebanon. I also am announcing the formation of an interagency steering group on Lebanon. This group, under the chairmanship of the Deputy Secretary of State, will coordinate the political, economic, and security assistance dimensions of our policy. Peter McPherson, Director of AID, will assume responsibility for reconstruction efforts in addition to his role as my personal representative for relief in Lebanon. Morris Draper, Phil's right hand in Lebanon, has been accorded the personal rank of ambassador and he will manage the political working group shortly and shortly return to Lebanon to continue his work. And I want to express my appreciation to him for what he has done and what he is going to continue doing. And once again, I want to extend my heartfelt congratulations to Phil Habib for his superhuman efforts throughout the past year and a half. Phil's successful diplomacy is one reason why we are now able to inject a fresh start into the peace process. Phil would like to make some remarks. I know and I know many of you would like to ask him questions. So I'm going to leave Phil and Morris to you. And I have a date back in the office that I must now keep, return to work. So thank you for being here and Phil again. Thank you. God bless you. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Mr. President. Thank you. Mr. President, before you go, can you just tell us what you think about Prime Minister Reagan saying that the Knesset today, that the West Bank would be a Jewish homeland forever? Would you like to respond to that, Phil? The question was asked. I think that I would let these gentlemen handle the questions and take a question from that. My own personal reaction is that because I stressed negotiations as the settlement to many of these troublesome issues there, I think that we have to understand sometimes that maybe positions are being staked out with those negotiations in mind. That's up to the negotiators.