Good afternoon. I'm an expert in resident lecture. I'm Kim Brooks, the dean here at the Shields School of Law. It's a great pleasure to welcome you to this year's lecture. The visiting expert program was established in 2011 by Jim Listen, who has joined us today. So many thanks for your generosity. The purpose of the program is to bring leading experts in the fields of law and business to our school. Jim Listen is a graduate of the class of 1975. He served as counsel to law firms in both Canada and the UK. He has extensive experience as an advisor to business in Canada and internationally, and was the chair of Cadillac Care and the Corporation. Jim has advised the Federal Department of Finance on reform and restructuring in the financial services sector. He's a committed alumnus, keen to make a difference to his alma mater and his house. He's also a friend of this year's visitor, Mr. Peter Day. Peter Day is the chair of Paradigm Capital and a graduate of our class of 1966. He was formerly a partner at Ellsberg-Hausen and Hartford. He specializes in corporate governance and mergers and acquisitions. His career, which you will undoubtedly hear more about, has included Stints as chair of Morgan Stanley, of the Toronto Stock Exchange Committee on Corporate Governance in Canada, and many other chairs. I'm going to highlight a few of them, but as I was putting together my notes, I thought how many times can I say the word chair in one paragraph. He's chaired the Ontario Securities Commission and served as Canada's representative to the OEC Task Force that developed the OECD Principles of Corporate Governance. He advises all manner of corporate boards and institutional actors in Canada and abroad. For those of you with a penchant for good theatre, you can find him as a director of the Soul Pepper Theatre Company in Toronto. I've come to note Peter a little as a result in his induction into our Bertha Wilson Honor Society, a society that recognizes extraordinary alumni. In my brief time with him, I have come to adore him. You will no doubt find him to be smart, focused, painfully charming and thoughtful. He's not one to shy away from controversy. Like Jim Listen, he's incredibly loyal and committed to the Weldon tradition. Please enjoy. I can assure you the feeling is very mutual. Thank you very much. It's a real honor for me to be here today as the James Listen professor in residence. I'm sorry it's so short because like I'm here today and then we're doing a seminar tomorrow. So I think it's more like a Jim Listen drive-thru. But there's a bit of irony here. I graduated in 66. Jim, as Kim said, graduated in 74. I guess I was chairman of the Articling Committee at Oster Hoskin when we were recruiting and we recruited Jim. And Jim joined Oster as a lawyer and went on to have a very successful career. But now he's kind of turned the tables on me, which I welcome. And I flatter myself by saying I was one of a number of mentors to Jim. But we must have done something right. Congratulations Jim and thank you for the support for the law school. So I'm very happy to return to the law school. When I reflect on some of the experiences I've had, many of them relate to my educational experience here and the network of friends that I developed. And there are some people in the audience that Professor Ed Harris, who is one of the most influential figures in my legal education, one of my classmates, Noella Brennan, is here. And there may be others that I'm sorry if I haven't recognized you, but it gives me a very warm feeling to be back amongst my Dell friends. I asked Kim, I said, what should I talk about? And she said, well why don't you talk about the happy experiences you've had in your career. And if you feel like it, talk about some of the unhappy experiences and maybe we'll learn something. So I thought, okay, I can talk about the experiences, whether we learn something, I'm not sure about. I came to Dell in 1963. I came as then there was a fellowship offered called the Sir James Stone Fellowship. And I came in 1963 and there were four of us that had the fellowship. And our responsibility was to maintain an A average and I think with a bit of pushing from some of my professors, I made it through. So Sir James, as you may be aware, like my mentor, Pertie Crawford, started from very humble beginnings. Sir James from New Brunswick and then he went on with and went to Dell Housing Law School, had a Dell degree and he became one of Canada's foremost financiers, industrialists. He controlled companies like Algoma Steel, Canada Steamships and obviously he recognized the law school with the fellowship. I maintained my average and then with the help of the Dean Horace Reed, I got a fellowship to go to Harvard. Dean Reed referred to Harvard as kind of the farm team and I was very honored to go there. So I'm going to start by my series of stories by telling you one that has had an impact on me to this day. And Noella will remember it. It happened in first year law. This was in late 1963 and one of our classmates was from Newfoundland and he was repeating his year and he stood up at the end of one of the classes and he said, my notes are missing. All of my notes for the forthcoming December exams are missing. And the class was concerned, very sympathetic, and how can we help you? And so we came up with this process. We said, we're going to divide our class into groups of three. A and B will go to C's residence and investigate. A and C will go to B's residence and investigate. And C and B will go to A's residence and investigate. Did you ever hear this? OK. So we had to unleash the bodies immediately so that nobody could tamper with the evidence. And indeed that process started at about, I would say, late morning. And by 2 p.m. the notes had been discovered in one of our classmates' studies. And he disappeared from law school that day and never to be seen again. So we had not taken constitutional law at that point in time. So we didn't have a good sense of process, fairness. But it was an amazing process when I reflect back on it. And I think we were naive. We sort of thought, and I guess the learning from this is that the result does not necessarily justify the process. I think if you had to look at that process in the sort of clear light of day, you would say, you know, I'm not sure I'm willing to have strangers unauthorized coming in and looking through my notes. Anyway, it worked. And our classmate Frank went on to graduate and become a very successful lawyer. In my third year at law, I had the opportunity to go to Toronto and attend a conference. And one of the panelists was Pertie Crawford. And we were obviously drawn to each other because of our Dell connection. And he invited me to apply for an articling position at Osler, which I did after I went on to Harvard. When I was there, I came back in the fall, applied to six firms, and I had a series of offers. And I didn't know much about Toronto law firms. How am I going to choose? But Pertie solved it for me. He said, I'm going to give you credit for your LLM. And you're going to get $100 more a month. That was big stuff. And so my decision was made for me. And I accepted the position at Osler. And one of the people I had to write to to say I was not going to the firm was Arthur Petillo, who is also a distinguished graduate of this school. And he wrote back and he said, somebody sold you a pup. And I showed that to Pertie. He was not amused. I always wondered why Pertie joined Osler-Hoskin. And I have with me a copy of Pertie's biography. It's just published by Gordon Pitts. It's a wonderful read. And it talks about his humble beginnings and his willingness to take on the Toronto establishment and enter a firm like Osler-Hoskin, which was the paradigm of an establishment upper Canadian law firm. And he went in and to the credit of the partners at Osler and obviously to Pertie, he succeeded in transforming that firm to be the powerhouse that it is today, shedding its establishment roots and really becoming a very successful commercial enterprise. But I'll tell you what the environment was like when I articles, just to give you a sense what an upper Canadian establishment firm was like. The senior partner was a man named Harold Charles Featherston Mockridge QC. He wore chalk stripe suits and with a vest. He always had a cigarette dangling. But he was a brilliant corporate lawyer, educated at Princeton and returning to Canada, a very imposing figure. And he sat on the boards of some of Canada's major corporations, Montreal Trust, Bank of Montreal. And I was in his office about noon hour one day. And he looked over and he said, Peter, time for lunch. And okay, we'll go to my club. And so I walked with him and we went over to the Venerable Toronto Club. And we went in and he directed me to the lounge and we sat down. And he ordered a double martini and not being used to drinking at noon. I said, okay, I'll order a beer. And sort of worked my way through the process. And finally, he's finished his martini and I'm finished my beer. And I'm thinking, okay, it's time for lunch. And he looks over at me and he said, Peter, you can't fly on one wing. And so I had to have another beer. And it was just a very different era. I happen to now be a member of the Toronto Club and if somebody orders a glass of wine at lunch, it's an event. In 1970, the conglomerate form of business became very popular. But it raised issues of securities regulation. So the government set up a committee and Purdy had been working. He had developed a profile in securities regulation. He'd worked on what was then known as the Kimber Committee and the Kimber Committee was a very high powered committee. Purdy was part of the staff and it laid the groundwork for what is now our system of securities regulation. Purdy, because of this, was asked, you know, how do we staff this study on conglomerates? And he nominated me as research director in David Johnson, our Governor General as the General Counsel. And we went on to publish something called the Merger Report. It was an important experience for me. It sort of helped my profile in securities regulation. And of course I became best friends with David Johnson, who is, as you well know, a wonderful Canadian. After that I went back to Osler, eventually became a partner, and I worked as one of Purdy's sort of fleet of juniors. He was so committed to growth and he was excellent at drawing in work. People wanted to seek his advice. He was known as a wise and a shrewd advisor. But soon as he got the client in the door and comfortable with the firm and with his juniors, he passed it on to the juniors. So it was a great opportunity for me to assume responsibility. In 1983, the government was looking for a chair for the Securities Commission. And again, Purdy was consulted and he proposed me as chair of the Securities Commission. And it looked like a great opportunity and I had to obviously resign my partnership. And the compensation, I took a serious hit to my compensation, but I did get a QC in a parking spot. So anyway, it was a great opportunity to sit with some very experienced financiers and learn something. But soon as I got there, I made a decision I regretted and you're going to sort of, my talk is entitled Hits and Misses and well, I'll let you judge this. There was a company called Norsen, Northern and Central Natural Gas and the chairman of the board was Conrad Black. And Conrad was clearly in the crosshairs of the Attorney General. Norsen was making an issuer bid. That's where a company goes out. It's got excess cash, wants to consolidate so it makes an offer to its shareholders to sell their shares back to the company, reducing the capital, hopefully improving its multiples. The disclosure requirement when you make an issuer bid is to disclose all material facts and at the time, Norsen was thinking secretly of making a bid for another company and this was not disclosed. So the Attorney General got on this and they concluded, they did an investigation, they concluded that they didn't have enough evidence or they didn't have a provision of the criminal law which would enable them to go against Black. They were going against Black and the CEO, a guy named Ed Battle, you'll remember Jim. So they sent it over to the Securities Commission and they said, okay, you guys, you go after them. So then I thought, this is going to be a controversial process and I should provide some leadership and so I'm going to participate in the process to decide whether or not to proceed against Black and company. The problem was that my law firm was the advisor to Norsen and so I thought, can I do this or can I not? And it was one of those, it's like should I write this thank you note? It's one of those cases where if you have to ask yourself the question, you know the answer. Anyway, I went ahead, asked the question, got legal advice that said this is an administrative process, not a judicial process, so you can participate. So we concluded that we didn't have enough evidence to proceed against Black and we informed the Attorney General, well the Attorney General's staff was outraged and they took the whole file, gave it to the media. The media then figured out my connection to Norsen and there was an editorial calling for my resignation in one of the national newspapers.  Happily at that time there was an issue about the four pillars of the Canadian financial system, the banks, the securities firms, the insurance companies, the trust companies. And happily for me, the Bank of Nova Scotia acquired a small securities firm in Quebec and it just opened up the whole Pandora's box about ownership of other arms of the financial sector by the banks. The banks wanted to own everything. And so all of a sudden my participation in the Norsen process was relegated or was displaced by a discussion of the four pillars and I survived. But it was, you know, I mean the learning from that is when you have to ask a question about your participation in a process involving principles or ethics, you know the answer. The consolidation of the four pillars has sort of affected me personally now. I chair a boutique investment bank Paradigm Capital. It's a firm of about 70 people. We have offices in Toronto and Calgary and we do sales, trading, research and investment banking. And every day we do battle with the chartered banks. The chartered banks have balance sheets that they can use to get investment banking business. It's something we don't are not able to do. And therefore, you know, it's sort of the last lap is on me with the consolidation of the pillars. The securities firms now are in effect banks. So after my near-death experience at the OSC, I returned to my law firm and people thought that I knew something about securities law and so I was engaged by a very controversial firm called Gordon Capital and Gordon Capital was advising the Canadian Tire Dealers Association. Gordon Capital was controversial because the way you did financings in those days was a company that wanted to go to the capital markets would engage an underwriter and the underwriter would do a draft prospectus and they would take the principles of the company around the markets for a couple of weeks and then they'd come back and say, okay, we think we can sell you know, $50 million of common shares at such and such a price. So it was kind of an arduous process. Gordon Capital looked at this and they said, you know what? We know markets. Why don't we, when we see the underwriters out there sort of testing the market, what can we do? We will just go in and scoop it. We'll just go to the issuer and they'll say we can buy your issue right now for X dollars and probably with a slight haircut from what they might get if they'd gone through the regular process. And you can imagine from the issuer's point of view it made sense, certainty and it done. You can imagine from the sort of conventional player's point of view this was not a happy development and obviously the way the world has evolved all of the mainline players are now doing bought deals. Anyway, Gordon engaged me and they were advising the Canadian Tire Dealers Association. Canadian Tire was controlled by the Billis family and there was one class of shares, common shares. The Billises wanted to raise some money and they didn't want to give up control so the way they did it was they did a share reorganization so if you own one common share you got back one common share and five class A non-voting shares. And then what the Billises would do is sell their non-voting shares to raise some money. To get that through the underwriters and advisors said we've got to have a coattail on the class A shares and the way the coattail worked was that any third party making a bid for more than 49% of the common shares in those circumstances the A's would convert to common thus forcing the bidder to bid for all of the shares and so that was fine. The Billises were not getting along. There were three siblings and so it became apparent to the Canadian Tire Dealers that the company was going to go into play. So they and the way Canadian Tire works is there's the corporation that provides all of the equipment and then the dealers own their outlets and so the dealers are very dependent upon the corporation for financing equipment and that sort of thing so they as a defensive measure said we can't let control of this company fall into strange hands. So they talked to us I was actively involved in advising and you the dealers own 17% why don't we make a bid for 49% sorry if I may have misspoke on the coattail the coattail was if somebody bids for a majority of shares then the coattail is triggered. So we said make a bid for 49% and the coattail won't be triggered. So we thought this would work we read the law up and down we read the terms of the shares and we were satisfied that nothing would be triggered. So we announced the bid and the securities commission my successor Stanley Beck called me and said this is abusive this is abusive of the capital markets this is abusive of the class A shareholders we're going to cease trade done. So I said look read the terms of the shares read your policies you can't do this he said I have a public interest power when I see something that I think is offensive I can shut it down and I'm shutting it down. So you can imagine very large transaction and from the bill's point of view they were going to realize a huge premium because we had structured it so that with what they would be paid for the common shares the 49% we reverse engineered so that what they got there plus what they would realize when they dumped their A's and remaining commons into the market they wanted overall. We went to court we went to the divisional court and said you know you can't regulate capital markets this way people can enter into transactions where it's black and white clear and you have a discretion to go in and upset it anyway the court deferred to the experts and said we're not going to interfere we're not going to we're not going to interfere with the exercise of discretion by the securities commission. I've been asked by my wife who is a retired corporate lawyer and is happily here today what would you have done if you'd been chair of the securities commission always ask zingers and I thought you know I think I probably would have and this is a different era now I think I would have said look I would have had the opportunity to anticipate every transaction and capture it in your coattail so you should have drafted it to pick this sort of situation up and you didn't so you're going to have to live and die by the terms of your shares I probably would have come out on that side now that would have been back that would be today maybe back in the 80s it might have been different what do I learn from that I work with some people who take on very difficult cases or get involved in very difficult transactions and the learning is always do the right thing when you're involved in a transaction and you've structured it and you've looked at all along you're satisfied that it works just sit back and say you know are we doing the right thing here and you may not change anything in terms of your process so you're probably wondering about my hits and misses at this point in time my average is kind of poultry so I want to talk about something that was one of the most innovative things that I ever got involved in it was the introduction of the poison pill into Canadian M&A environment and this was in 1988 INCO was one of Oster's largest clients and Morgan Stanley the global investment bank went to INCO and said hey we've got this really interesting shareholder value creation strategy you should pay a special dividend of $10 per share it involves some leverage but the company nickel prices were high at the time there was a lot of cash pay a special dividend our only concern is that you will be in a weakened financial state and there will be a very high volume of trading in your security so we need to ensure your defenses are in order and we're proposing that you be the first Canadian company to adopt a poison pill the poison pill was developed on Wall Street by Marty Lipton of Wachtel Lipton and he is sort of the defense bar in Wall Street and the way the poison pill works is it's in effect a warrant indenture and the warrant indenture is executed by a trustee on behalf of all shareholders and in the event a third party acquires more than a threshold usually 20% there's what's called a flipping event and all shareholders other than this third party can buy common shares from the company for a fraction of a penny the effect being to dilute the acquirer out of existence so any bidder has to address if there's a poison pill in place in the target you have to address it so the OSC there's a lot of controversy about poison pills the concern being that target boards of directors would use them to entrench themselves and in effect just say no to anybody so the securities commission said you have to have a shareholder a vote you need to get shareholder approval and we said that's okay but we're going to take it to the shareholders as a package you won't get your ten dollars unless you vote for the shareholder rights plan the securities commission must have been asleep anyway they allowed us to go ahead and of course we got overwhelming support and then the securities commission came up with a policy saying basically you can't bribe shareholders with their own money but I can tell you in my experience it was one of the most interesting sort of involvements I had in my career shareholder rights plans are still prevalent in the Canadian capital markets our Canadian securities administrators have tried to come up with one of the things that offends me so much about our system of securities regulation is how securities regulators put themselves in the position of the shareholder when the shareholders have the resources and the rights to challenge corporate boards and the securities regulators run around and so now they've come up with a draft policy saying every bid must be open for four months and I'm saying corporations are complex boards of directors have a responsibility that go beyond shareholders they have to think about the communities in which they work and build the stakeholders and you guys sitting in a government office are not in a position to make that judgment and you don't have a liability for that judgment let the boards do their work anyway I'm probably losing the debate it's like I've been heavily involved in the whole say on pay thing which I could give another speech on it just drives me nuts that shareholders are getting involved in voting on the compensation but that's another day in the course of working on the INCO poison pill I got to know the guys at Morgan Stanley and the power of that franchise and that led to my next job opportunity I'll tell you very briefly one of the most memorable experiences I had was the junk bond market was very active in the this would have been in the late 90s and we were pitching a company to lead a junk bond offer those are high risky debt and so I thought this is a very competitive process I'd better bring up one of our heavy hitters from Wall Street and we'll see the CEO so the guy came up from Wall Street and he was a heavy hitter and we went to see the client and as soon as we got in there the client said I've just talked to one of your competitors and this is what they're prepared to do for me they're prepared to lend me money personally so that I can participate they're prepared to give me priority on all new issue financings my friend from New York looked at him and he said take it and walked out and it just so clear when you're out to win business based upon the merits of your business it's so obvious that you can't buy judgment from people you want to do business with from there I went on and tomorrow Kim and I are doing a seminar on corporate governance and I hope many of you will attend it's a whole different sort of aspect of my life so I'm not going to talk about it today I'm going to pass through I went on the board of CP ships Canadian Pacific back in about 1994 was doing a split up they had four lines of business one was container shipping and I went on that board and we got embroiled with the OSC and it was really about communication to disclose when management comes to you and says we've got to restate our financials first of all you you take a deep breath and what happened there was management knew in June that they had to restate but they didn't tell us that we're facing a restatement until August and so the OSC said that doesn't work for us we're going to investigate see what monkey business is going on so we went back at the OSC and said trust us we are just as concerned as you are we're going to do our own investigation we've got all the resources all the power and the independence to do it and we did that and the OSC bought our process they slapped our wrists but I think we ducked a bullet okay my final hit or miss but I regard this as a hit this I'm going to tell you about Goldcorp Goldcorp currently is by market capitalization the largest gold company in the world it's got a market cap of about 20 billion dollars even though it generates only about 2.6 million ounces of gold a year compared to say a company like Barrick which is generating more than twice that number of ounces in its current form it was the product of a merger between Goldcorp and Wheaton River and Goldcorp CEO when it merged was a guy named Rob McEwen and Wheaton River CEO was the guy named Ian Telfer they did the merger and the board said okay how are we going to accommodate these two egos and they said well McEwen you be chair of the board executive chair and Telfer you become CEO well McEwen is a guy that is a hands on guy and he said this doesn't work for me and he resigned immediately so then fast forward to 2006 the merger happened in 2004 2006 there's a tradition on Bay Street that every Thursday afternoon the brokers and bankers disappear to one of the watering holes on Bay Street usually by mark and they go and they swap lies and I went over there on a Thursday in June of 2006 and I ran into Telfer who I knew from previous dealings what are you doing and I said I'm at a security firm and he said what are the current issues of governance and we talked and I said do you have any issues of governance and he called and he gave me the name of the chair of the board so I phoned the chair of the board anyway the call turned out to be an interview to see whether they wanted me to join the board and I was invited to join the board very happy about that I still sit on that board at my first meeting in June of 2006 Telfer who had a larger-than-life reputation as somebody who creates said I'm thinking about doing a major deal and point made and then about a month later the board reconvened and he said we're going after Glamis Gold and we are going to have a negotiated deal and it's going to be all paper all shares and to do it we will have to issue the equivalent of about 60% of our issued and outstanding shares so that's a big big chunk of equity the issue facing there was no legal requirement for us to get a shareholder vote of our own shareholders to issue that much equity but there was a group on the board that said we need to have our shareholders approve this and I took the conservative view I said there's no legal requirement we have the responsibility to make these decisions we've got direct access to advisors we should stand up and be counted and so my view prevailed McEwen who you will recall resigned was our largest shareholder and a mischievous little guy he initiated a lawsuit to try and force a shareholder vote and he thought he's doing this because he wants to inject uncertainty into the deal and if you inject uncertainty then maybe we'll be in play and that'll increase the value of his holdings he sued and the legal process involved exchanging affidavits I was asked to take the avidavit for Gold corp the lawyer for McEwen is an infamous guy named Joe Groyer and Joe Groyer is infamous he's a very aggressive, talented litigator that focuses on Bay Street indeed he represented John Felderhoff who was one of the people associated with the biggest scam of all times in our capital markets Briex Gold and indeed Joe was so aggressive in the way he dealt with the Ontario Securities Commission which was his counterparty in that that his license was suspended for two months by the Law Society of Upper Canada now that suspension is under appeal anyway so I had to learn something about the Gold business quickly so I went to Vancouver spent a night with Telfer he educated me I flew back everybody was busy so they said the cross examination is going to be I had dinner on the Monday night the cross examination was 8 p.m. on Tuesday night and the cross examination went from 8 p.m. until 2.40 in the morning and Groyer pulled every trick in the book to try and sort of expose me he looked at old speeches and papers I've written trying to show that I was inconsistent in the way I regarded shareholders anyway we got to court and we prevailed happily I flatter myself more than I have already but my law firm Osler Hoskin was acting for Glamis which was the counterparty to Gold Corp they came up to me after me and said your career peaked tonight you used your experience as a lawyer, securities regular an investment banker and they all came together and you were able to confound Groyer so I I don't know how you think about it I thought of it as a hit it allowed me to develop some sympathy for litigation lawyers how quickly how fast litigation lawyers have to get up to speed on issues because they usually end up not that I knew that much about the precious metals business but you have to get up to speed quickly anyway it's a challenge for them at the time of the merger people were saying Gold Corp is going to be the third largest gold company in the world because of this merger today we're number one it's a good deal let me conclude by saying I have some very positive reflections upon my legal education here I felt it gave me the confidence and the tools to move outside my comfort zone which I did on a number of occasions and take on new challenges some I was good at and some I was not so good at but I am the education I got here it also gave me the ability to think critically and I think you will all agree that the ability to think critically is the foundation of a civil society and that's why the law is so basic to our quality of life as my wife said to me this morning you know the legal education enables you will read the newspaper differently after you have your legal education it also impressed upon me and I mean I'm still learning what it's like to be a professional and to have obligations that you know transcend just the selfish interests that you may be associated with it teaches you to deal with sensitive situations manage a sensitive information in a you know confidential way I had the benefit of having Purdy Crawford as my mentor and the book Fire in the Belly is the biography of Purdy it's written by Gordon Pitts and Kim tells me that the author is coming down to address the law school but I had that good fortune to be one of his juniors and one of the things he always impressed upon me was to be thinking about public policy and be involved in the debate about public policy and because he was actively involved I told you about his involvement in developing our system of securities regulation if you love language the law is the place to be and the ability to take complex concepts and capture them in understandable language I think is a fun exercise and it's an important exercise and finally through my career I always tried to make sure I was enjoying what I was doing and if I wasn't enjoying it then I would either try to change it or I would move on and I have to say in preparing for this lecture I've had a lot of fun and I've enjoyed it I hope you enjoyed it and I'm going to sign off by my children think I look like Peter Mansbridge so I'm going to say thanks for watching so I know that these comments have generated a range of different questions I'm conscious that some of the students here will have time to ask them difficult questions tonight others will get a chance to ask those questions tomorrow afternoon everyone is invited upstairs to the third floor to join us for a reception at faculty lounge where you can ask them questions and the students are heading off to class I've never given a speech longer than 20 minutes in my life honest maybe I like talking about myself but it was fun to do so thanks for the invitation and thanks Jen for your sponsor thank you please join me in welcoming you welcome you to be here thank you thank you


Appalachian Wireless now has new forward pay pricing where you can pay up front and get the data and features you desire. Five gigabytes of data, just $39.99. Unlimited, just $79.99. Better service, bigger savings. That's today's Appalachian Wireless. For the first time this weekend, Pikeville First Baptist Church played host to a free clinic providing free dental and medical treatment for those most in need in the community. More than 50 people visited Saturday's free clinic which was a true community effort. Local churches and organizations and volunteers from several medical and dental programs at the University of Pikeville came together to put on the free clinic. We are providing both dental care with basic dentistry, dental hygiene, giving out some dental stuff as well, toothbrush toothpaste for those who need it. We're also providing basic medical care, meaning we have nurses from the Elliott School of Nursing at UPI who are here doing medical evaluations, taking vital signs, collecting medical information, those kind of things. So we have organized an event where we're trying to provide medical dental care to the underserved population, those who are most in need in Pike County, specifically first, and meet that need here through our church. Now wonderfully we've had a lot of community churches involved in this as well, so it's not just first Baptist. A lot of great churches have come together to help provide resources, but more importantly volunteers. We've had well over 120 volunteers here today assisting us in organizing and managing this event. The clinic was intentionally kept small in order to test the waters for the initial event. Organizers hope the event will grow with future clinics. Since it's our first time doing the event, we had no specific goals other than providing a significant benefit to those who showed up. And God has blessed us with a good turnout. We certainly could have held and absorbed more, so we're prepared for the next time. We'll advertise more and recruit more for more additional people to take advantage of these resources. The next event is not yet scheduled, but with the success of Saturday's clinic, hopes are high that even more people can be served in future events. In Pikeville, Chris Anderson, EKB News.


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What's the worry, y'all? Can you just give me a few minutes to talk about the Chicago Bulls? I think it's normal for NBA fandom to go in waves and ups and downs and everything. And right now I'm kind of on a high, a relative high when it comes to Chicago Bulls and I know this is extreme cope and I know this is just setting myself up for being disappointed, but I'm kind of excited about the Bull season. Let me talk about it. Everybody here knew, had this similar idea that the Bulls should be selling right now, right? You made the big three of Zach Levine, DeMar DeRose and Nikola Vusevich and for the most part it has a result to anything. We had the one stretch in the first year where everything was great. The first 40 games of the season, the Bulls were looking great. We had one play between the number one seed on the Eastern Conference. Obviously that has been extremely short-lived with some injuries to Lonzo Ball and then after that the Bulls fell off for the second half of the season. They make the playoffs and they losing five to the Milwaukee Bucks. Next season they say, hey, let's run it back. We won't be blindsided by a major injury of Lonzo Ball. We can go on to next season knowing exactly what our team is because we know that Zou's not hooping and it was a disaster. And if you ask most people in NBA fandom what NBA team is the most directionless, the answer for most people will be the Chicago Bulls. Zach Levine just signed a match extension last off season. DeMar DeRose is on the last of his deal. Hell, we just extended Nikola Vusevich. We have bought in to this mid three and still I'm kind of excited about the season. And I will say this again, I went into this off season thinking we should have made some adjustments. DeMar, Zach, Vusevich, like all three of them cannot be back. And here they are. Here we go. Because everything about the big three is bad. The eye tests, if you just watch the boys, you can tell that it doesn't really match. But the advanced stats say the same thing. When those three players are on the court together, they are a net negative. What big three? What all-star three is what they wanna call each other. Is a net negative when you're trying to compete. Remember, we traded away window carder Franz Wagner and basically Jeff Howard for Nikola Vusevich a couple years ago. You don't give up that much draft capital in a young promise and player to maybe make the plan to lose in the plan, right? A lot of us thought that, hey, you lost the deal, wipe your hands of it, just move on to the next direction and they decided to double down. With all of that being said, considering the direction of the team, I thought that they had a decent off season. Again, and this is only because they decided to stay pack. The best off season is making the adjustments. But since they didn't make the adjustments, the moves around it kind of help. You got Javon Carter in on a pretty solid deal. Javon Carter has been a flamethrower from behind the arc and obviously he's a hard nose, getting to your Grio type defender. Tori Craig is another wing body that we desperately, desperately needed over the years. They brought back Kobe White who showed us last season a lot of things. Now, maybe not the things that people compared him to Gilbert Areen is coming out of college. Cause that's the real thing. It's player accomplice, Gilbert Areenis. Now he ain't that, but he showed us a lot over the last season from the offensive and defensive stance where I was excited about having him back on the team regardless of the direction. If they decided to sell everything, I wanted Kobe White to stay on his team and he is. Then the last thing of course was bringing back Ayuda Sumo on what a three year, $21 million deal. Obviously you look at that team on paper, you still say, hey, matter of fact, let's do the thought experiment. Let's do the experiment. Is it likely that the Bulls will be better than the Bucks? Nope, that's one team. How about the Celtics? Nope, what about the 76ers? Nope, they don't know what's going on with James Harden. But I still feel confident the 76ers will be better than the Bulls. How about the Cavaliers? Nope, how about the Nicks? Nope, the Nets, I could see a world where the Bulls have a better record than the Nets. I could see a world where the Bulls have a better record than the Hawks. But again, that's saying, I do believe the Hawks are gonna be good this season. The Heat probably not. The Raptors, there's a world where it could happen. And then we not even talking about the teams like the Pacers who could take a jump or the Magic that could take a jump or whatever, whatever. So at the bare minimum, there are six teams that everybody could pretty much say what consensus are better than the Bulls. So what does that put you as a perennial? Is that the word? Playing team. It's not good. Yeah, still here I am thinking, hey, maybe things break a little bit, right? No, no, no, not break in the sense that we about to make a final split because that would be asking that. But break to the sense that we could potentially end up top six. And right now in my fandom, because they decided to do this, that's what I need. You know what I'm saying? I think the perfect example, the perfect off-season was starting fresh, but they didn't. So now we have to tinker the expectations and say, hey, end up top six, that'll be fine. I'm hearing myself talk and I just realizing how much I'm coping with the TV and just not good. I went back and because we're in the off-season, I'm watching a ton of random NBA stuff. And actually, I can show you the exact game I was watching the other day. It was this game versus the Minnesota Timbers. I was watching this game or the highlights of this game. And I was just thinking to myself, we really had this starting lineup with Paul Zipser, David Nwaba, Denzel Valentine, and stuff. Heavy, heavy on the tank. They won 27 games and they won 22 games and they won 22 games. And the end result of our tanking seasons is this roster. Think about it, every time you see a team tank and then they turn the corner, which I would say that's what the Bulls did when they decided to trade all of the stuff away and buy into DeMar Vuch and Zach Levin. They turn the corner. You have to think about the years that you endured as a fan of watching terrible basketball and figure out, was it worth it? Did I just watch three years of 27 wins, 22 wins and 22 wins for this team to be still not good? I did that. But there are, even with all that, considered the bright spots. And this is why I'm excited about the season. Oh my God, I'm doing it. I'm doing it. Oh, I cannot believe I'm doing it.  I'm saying it right now. There's been times in this channel where I've told people do not fall for no off-season workout stuff because everybody looks like a god in a gym without other NBA players. You can probably compilate all the basketball clips that I have on YouTube and say, dang, Kenny kind of nice on the court. Kenny's not nice on the court. So don't fall for the off-season workout, but I did, all right? I fell for it. Look at this man who, it's Ty, baby. It's Pete Willie Ty, baby. That's against Evan Mobley. Hold on, aren't you really good defensively? Stop that. Who is this? I don't even know who guard you. I can't even see the face. I don't, it doesn't matter, but it's blackout. And I just, I, man, man, man. If there's any player that is going to unlock a mid-roster, it's this man right here. But throughout the course of a young Patrick Williams' career, he's been basically delegated to be the fourth option at best.  Those are offensive first players, which means that Patrick Williams has been a spot-up three-point shooting. He's a really good one. He was like 16th in the league on catch and shoot threes. He's a really good spot-up three-point shooter. When you draft the guy fourth overall for his potential, I believe you have to put him in the position to maximize that potential. And that's not what we've done. Now I'm not going to look at these off-season highlights and forget about the Patrick Williams that I saw during the regular season last year, where he was hesitant to put the ball on the floor, where sometimes when he did, he still shuffled the puppies in and turned the ball over because he's traveling, or there being times where the teammates on the roster had to tell him to shoot the ball. Like that aggression thing, I can't look past that because of this off-season workout, but he just became old enough to take a sip of alcohol. He just became old enough to take a sip of alcohol, there are people that were drafted in this year's draft that are older than Patrick Williams. And I say all of that to say, there's such a long time left in his career for him to develop, but with him being the fourth option, it's a lot more difficult for him to turn into the player that some of us believe he can be. I'm not a guy that's telling you he's going to turn into a koa or anything like that, but his career shouldn't be spotting up in a corner and hitting corner jump shots. Like there's a lot more to him. This graph right here shows you his play type by usage. All of his, most of his attempts, his play types were just spotting up. 2% on ISO, 7% on pick and roll ball, handling 6% as a roll man, 7% on cuts and then handoffs and screens and stuff. Hold on, this don't even equal a hundred. So it's not a percentage points, but this just shows you that he is primarily a spotter player at this point in his career when he could, he should be able to experiment on all of these different fronts to figure out who he is as a player. But since the team has decided they want to be fake competitive, it prevents him from doing this. I don't know fellas, I just feel like there is a world where the Bulls are at least okay and I'm still super high on Patrick Williams. Did I say anything of value today? Probably not, but hey, it's just, tell me what you think about the Bulls. Actually don't, actually don't do that. I know what you think about the Bulls.


Good energy right here, right? Is that your? No, my connect sign you just hit. Yeah. You can kind of feel that. All over the place. All right, let's go Russ. Get it, Russ. Oh, there we go, man. I heard about the time you broke out of your shell, bro. Watch yourself, CB. So pretty, man. Can't catch it for you, Oz, but it looks pretty. Hey, Jay, what kind of hand you got? Can you play shortstop? Russ! Oh, my goodness. Look, we fact-checked a lot of the stuff you say, bro. Shortstop? Get out.  In Felipe, if you can on these, follow your throw. Accelerate right to the target. Driven. Nice, right there, man. Right there. That's the ball flight right there, man. Here we go, here we go! Great ball, great ball. Good timing, man. Good timing, AJ. Hey, good depth. That's good depth right there. Oz, go right there, babe. Do you guys see that? Don't run into him, though. If he's waiting for you, keep this distance away. Sit down. He's here going to come to you. If he doesn't, then you get the ball. But you run it right into him. Right, that's not going to help you. And look, the only way, Hayden, the only way we're going to keep it up is if that guy over you is inside, right? And then you just go, but now if he's pressed, you just come right down the line because the guy's going to step up and then come back. Got me?


Item number SCP-3122 Object Class Euclid Special Containment Procedures Instances of SCP-3122 are to be stored in a Faraday-K shielded storage container when not being used for testing. Evidence of the existence of Elevix electronics and any products produced by it are to be removed from public awareness using standard data-centering protocols. Description SCP-3122 is a series of consumer satellite navigation systems produced by the now-defunct Elevix electronics. The anomalous effects of SCP-3122 manifest when the following conditions are met. The currently active journey on SCP-3122 is estimated to take over three hours to complete. The vehicle in which SCP-3122 is situated has currently undergone at least two hours of the program journey. At some point following the two-hour mark, SCP-3122 loses its signal tracking. No specific cause for the loss of signal is required. Once these conditions have been met, following the loss of signal, SCP-3122 will connect to an unknown source from which it will begin receiving information. The vehicle in which SCP-3122 is installed, along with any occupants of the vehicle and SCP-3122 itself, will be translocated to SCP-3122-1. SCP-3122-1 is a topologically inconsistent pocket of space-time, which initially resembles the area from which SCP-3122 and its associated vehicle were removed. Once within SCP-3122-1, SCP-3122 will begin to relay instructions that are increasingly nonsensical, and SCP-3122-1 itself will begin to change Boba's layout and contents, with the severity of these effects increasing over time. After a period of time following the victim's entrance in the SCP-3122-1, typically between 24 and 72 hours, the vehicle will re-enter standard reality at the final destination point of the original journey. SCP-3122 will be present within the vehicle, though any lifeforms will be missing. An investigation into Elevix electronics revealed a number of consumer electronics developed by the company, many of which demonstrate anomalous properties. No record of the creation of the company, or any employees working for it, could be found. The registered business address for the company was determined to be a large warehouse containing numerous crates of SCP-3122 instances. Analysis of recovered security footage from the areas around the warehouse revealed repeated visits by a single individual, determined to be POI-30808, Jazeera Masani. POI-30808 has previously been linked to various religious cults typically centered around minor anomalous objects. The last recorded sighting of POI-30808 was in 1996, following the mass suicide of one of the associated cults. A software update for SCP-3122 was developed and released, with the goal of disabling any devices onto which it was installed, and a recall order for all affected products was enacted. It is estimated that over 95% of the sold instances of SCP-3122 have been recovered or rendered inert. SCP-3122-1 Exploration On 19 July 2016, permission was granted to attempt exploration of SCP-3122-1 to determine the nature of the anomaly and ascertain the possibility of recovering the lost civilians. A vehicle was equipped with an instance of SCP-3122, numerous recording and tracking devices, and piloted by D-class personnel D-99321, on a program journey that would take them through a tunnel sufficient to cause the loss of GPS signal 2 hours and 5 minutes into the test. Following are transcripts of the recovered recordings, starting immediately prior to the activation of SCP-3122. D-99 was instructed to continue describing his surroundings, even if contact with control was lost. He was otherwise not informed of the nature of the experiment. Okay, I can see the tunnel up ahead. Contact and keep us informed of any occurrences. What exactly are you expecting to happen here? This experiment. Uh-huh.  We always know when you aren't telling us everything. Proceed into the tunnel. Yeah, yeah. GPS signal lost. I guess we expected that, right? Approximately 30 seconds of silence. Note, contact with control was lost at this point, and not re-established. Hello? Guess I've lost you guys too. Well, nearly out of this tunnel anyway. Connection established. In 300 meters, turn left onto Via Delekin Siljezian. Weird. I don't remember a turn coming up, and is that Spanish? Turn left onto Via Delekin Siljezian. D-99 text at turn is instructed. It should be noted that there is no left turn on the road exiting a tunnel, and which contact with D-99 was lost. Weird. Haven't seen any other cars since I left that tunnel, and hang on, there's another tunnel coming up. It uh, it looks exactly the same as the last tunnel. The hill, and the rocks, and everything. Visual analysis of recovered recordings confirms an exact visual match between the exteriors of the first and second tunnels.  Just realized I've been in this tunnel for about 5 minutes now. That seems weird. I'm no expert but I'm pretty sure there's no 5 mile long tunnels in Derbyshire. Still no other cars either. In one kilometer, accelerate to 180 kilometers per hour, then turn right onto. Then left onto Sanderson Road, then down onto Howling Void. Great, now the sat nav has gone nuts too. And why the hell is this thing in metric anyway? To 180 kilometers per hour.  D-99 is cut off, as the vehicle rapidly accelerates to 180 kilometers per hour, forcing him back into the sea. Holy crap, I think the car is driving itself.  The vehicle suddenly makes a hard right turn, directly into the wall of the tunnel. It passes through the wall without effect, emerging in a similar tunnel and before making a similarly sharp left turn.  Come on.  The road seemingly drops away. The vehicle appears to be in a free fall for approximately 30 seconds. D-99 can be heard screaming. The vehicle suddenly appears to be on what looks like a desert road. No impact from the fall occurs. D-99 can be heard breathing heavily. Sweet? Fucking...  Okay, okay, I'm alive. I'm fine. D-99 looks around out of the windows of the vehicle. Now where the hell am I? Some kind of desert? I know there's nothing like this in Derbyshire. Can't see anything around besides this road. It's pretty hot here. I can already feel the heat coming through the windows. Continue for 12,000 kilometers, and then turn 470 degrees counterclockwise and remove your left arm. What?  I'm going the other way.  D-99 turns the vehicle around on the road and begins driving. Okay. I've been driving for what feels like hours. Nothing has changed here. Can barely even tell if I'm moving. Just the same desert. Fuel gauge doesn't seem to be moving, and I haven't heard a peep out of this bust that I sat down to have. I think... In 500 meters, remove 37% of your skin using the supplied flossing knife, and then surrender your soul.    Weird looking knife thing just appeared in my lap.  D-99 opens the window and throws the knife out. A roadside agent will be along to assist you shortly. That sounds... bad. A high-pitched screaming sound can be heard in a distance. Horses detect a shape ahead, which D-99 knows a few minutes later. The hell is that? Looks kind of like... a horse?  I think it's headed right for me. Christ, it's tearing up the road too. Going to have to turn around. I don't want to get anywhere near that thing. D-99 turns the vehicle around. As he begins driving in the opposite direction, a large equine creature with a torso and upper body of a humanoid growing from its back appears on the road, completely blocking it. It emits a high-pitched screaming sound, and D-99 swerves off the road. Shitting! Christ!    D-99 looks behind him. Cameras show it's the entity and the road are both gone. Okay. Okay. Still alive.  I guess I'm just driving through the desert now. In driving for hours now, clock still seems to be working, if nothing else. It's getting a little cooler, but the sun doesn't seem to be going down. Also, I just noticed that all the clouds seem to be in the shape of some symbol. Looks familiar. The sat nav has been making weird sounds every now and then. Doesn't sound like words, just random vowels or something. E-E. Yeah, just like that. Anyway, I'd spotted something off in the distance. It looks like a building or something maybe. So against my better judgment, I'm going to head towards it. E-E. Yeah, yeah. In 100 meters, stop at the crossroads, make a deal and surrender your flesh. Goddamn, I wish I could turn this thing off.  D-99 strikes SCP-3122. No damage is caused. Okay, I don't seem to be getting any closer to whatever that is out there. And it's getting late, according to the clock anyway. The sun still hasn't moved.  Probably a terrible idea, but I can't keep driving forever. At the roundabout, take the 12th exit. The sleeper will awaken. Glorious. Rain supreme. And hopefully this thing will keep quiet while I'm trying to sleep. Oh, the symbol in the clouds. It's the same symbol that's on this goddamn sat nav. The company logo or whatever, I guess. They're still there, clouds in that shape, all different sizes. I'm sure that will mean something more to you Foundation eggheads than it does to me. E-awaits. E-awaits. E-awaits. E-awaits.  I guess I wasn't eaten during the night then. I... what the hell? D-99 can be seen looking out of the windows of the vehicle. External cameras show that a number of structures have appeared in the immediate area. No motion was detected since the vehicle was stopped. Not eaten, but it looks like I was towed. Where the hell am I now? Looks like some kind of town. Still in the desert though, and I don't see any people around. Looks... old? All these buildings seem pretty worn down. Follow the road for 300 meters, then embrace oblivion. You will be nourished. Oh, there actually is a road. I'm going to look around a bit, see if I can find any people or signs that anyone has been here. D-99 tries to open the door, but it appears to be locked. What the... come on... damn it. D-99 attempts to unlock the door, and tries to open in the other doors and windows. All attempts at leaving the vehicle fail. God... damn it. Can't even stretch my legs. When I get out of here, the first foundation fool I see is getting punched in the face. Road it is then. Seems old. It's made of cobblestones or something. D-99 follows the road for approximately five minutes, passing through what appears to be a small town or village. No occupants are seen. All of the buildings are made of stone of a similar color to the desert sand. Bow down before. Then take the next right.  That's a big statue. As the car takes to corner, a statue of a bare-chested human male wearing an ornate headdress and carrying a staff comes into view, standing over the road. It is estimated to be approximately 90 meters tall. It was not visible before the corner. Lining the road before the statue is a series of smaller statues, averaging approximately 5 meters tall, each apparently depicting a different individual in a similar style of dress as the larger statue. The statue standing directly at the foot of the larger statue bears a notable resemblance to POI 30808. Bow down. Bow down. Bow down. Continue for three kilometers. Surrender. Starting to get the feeling this statue is the guy the satnav has been babbling on about. He's kind of given me a bad feeling. I think I'm going to have to leave the road again. Not sure why that feels like the safer option here, but if the satnav wants me to follow the road, I'm pretty sure I don't want to. D99 drives away from the road. Huh. I could have sworn there were some mountains to my left, but they aren't there now. Probably wishful thinking to assume it was just a mirage or something. In 500 cubits, continue towards his embrace. Surrender your soul. Been driving for over an hour now, and I can still see that statue. It doesn't seem to be getting further away. Everything here has been getting weirder, if that's even possible. Those mountains have reappeared and disappeared twice now. The clouds seem to change suddenly, sometimes into that symbol, sometimes just random clouds. Pretty sure I saw some more buildings to my right at one point, but they aren't there now. Continue for 1000 years, then turn left into his embrace. And this thing is really starting to drive me nuts.   He comes. Take the next exit. The hell? It's getting darker. A solar eclipse begins, rapidly reducing the light level. After 15 seconds, the sun is approximately 90% eclipsed by the moon. I've lost control of the car again. It's driving itself. The vehicle veers left, bringing a series of structures in the view. A number of pillars and variant states of the case surround what appears to be an open air temple, at the center of which is a large stone sarcophagus. I don't like this. Nothing good ever happens in desert temples during an eclipse. Come on now. D-99 can be seen trying to force the vehicle to turn, with no success. It continues on course for the center of the temple. Surrender your soul. Surrender your flesh. Surrender your mind. Surrender. Surrender. Surrender. SCP-3122 continues to repeat the word surrender. No.  D-99 becomes increasingly frantic in his attempts to regain control of the vehicle, but no avail. He attempts to kick the glass from the windows, but is unable to break it. The vehicle comes to a halt directly in front of the sarcophagus, which is covered in a large number of carved symbols. Most prominently in the center is the Elevix electronics logo. You have reached your destination. D-99 begins to speak, but is immediately cut off. Analysis of the video footage shows 13 frames of a substance resembling black smoke emanating from the sarcophagus and heading directly for the vehicle. It passes through the roof and window before completely enveloping D-99. The smoke then recedes back into the sarcophagus. D-99 is gone. The vehicle reverses and drives away from the temple. Approximately 37 hours after contact was first lost with D-99, a GPS ping was recede from the vehicle. It was found at the originally programmed destination. No trace of D-99 was found.


Good afternoon. My name is Johnetta Betch Cole. I have the extraordinary honor and joy of serving as the director of the National Museum of African Art here at the Smithsonian. So I want to begin by greeting you all as my fellow Africans. There have been points of disagreement. Healthy intellectual debate. Beginning with this morning's panel, but on this I trust we can agree. If we can just go back far enough, we're all Africans. And I kind of figure the sooner white folk claim that the better the world is gonna be. So as you know today, this symposium has been about some pretty fundamental questions. Who are you? Who am I? Who is everybody? And I use those questions because I'm really inspired by an African expression that says I am because you are. And you are because I am. So today's symposium is about identity. It is about memory. It is about connectedness among us, and it is about too many divisions separating us. It's also been about and will continue through the rest of the day. It's about what we can learn from human biology, from genetics, from the health sciences, from history, from anthropology. What we can learn about ourselves as a single bunch of folk? But especially today, we've been interested in what these fields can teach us about African-Americans and about people of the African diaspora. I think the symposium is also about how we humans misunderstand and misuse and purposefully wield so-called race in acts of bigotry, racism and oppression. So what's all of this got to do with the visual, with music, with the spoken word, with dance, with theater? Well, not to worry, we have a panel to wrestle with that question. What I've asked of these extraordinary folk, three amazing and grace-filled women and one righteous man, what I've asked is that each would in fact begin to wrestle with these questions by introducing herself or himself through their own work. And so we will first have Dr. Cheryl Finley, Associate Professor and Director of Visual Studies in the Department of History and Art at Cornell University. Cheryl's research interests are extremely wide and deep. She is interested in African-American and African diasporic art history and visual culture. She's interested in cultural memory. She's interested in African architecture. She's interested in so many questions. But I'll tell you what I'm interested in and I just asked her. I'm interested in knowing when her work on the iconic slave ship will be published. And she said it's a coming. Following Cheryl Finley, we have asked Carla Williams to wrestle with some questions by sharing a bit from her work. Assistant Professor at Rochester Institute of Technology. Cheryl is a writer and editor or photographer. For many of us, we just cannot stop associating her. And we never will with that path breaking work that she did with Deborah Willis, the black female body of photographic history. And then we will hear from Dr. Mindy Lewis. Dr. Mindy Lewis Obadikay. Excuse me, Obadikay. Now I'm not going to resist. I'm going to say it. She's a Spellman graduate. But Mindy went on from Spellman. She is now Associate Professor in Humanities and Media Studies at Pratt University. Someone said Mindy makes literature, art and music. And then Keith Obadikay. The first African-American to earn an MFA in sound design from Yale. He currently teaches in the College of Arts and Communications at William Paterson University. Keith and Mindy together make conceptual Internet art and sound art. Works. So what's art? Literature. Music. Theater. Dance. What's it all got to do with the major topics of this symposia? Sister Dr. Cheryl, would you begin?


This paper examines the potential of citizen science, CS, projects in Africa for achieving sustainable development goals, SDGs. It focuses on two key areas, water and urban planning, and highlights the importance of citizen-generated data for addressing these issues. The paper discusses the benefits of CS projects in Africa, as well as the challenges associated with integrating them into official statistics. It concludes by making recommendations for establishing an open-source database, creating a network of CS projects, and continuously funding such projects in Africa. This article was authored by Peter Elias, Aide Naikishinao, Alex Desherbenin, and others.


I'm Jeffrey DeSmit, the lead of the Business Resource Planner and the Opto Planner project. About 10 years ago, I had the idea of combining the Drulz rule engine with the local search algorithm to solve optimization problems. I worked on that for several years as a hobby and then I got hired by Redhead and now I'm working on it with a team. Business Resource Planner is a planning engine. It solves planning problems such as nurse rostering or any kind of employee rostering, vehicle routing and cloud optimization, for example. The world is full of planning problems such as, for example, shift rostering. In shift rostering, we have to assign, for example, nurses to shift in, for example, a hospital. And we have a number of constraints. For example, an employee can only work one shift per day. Another constraint is, for example, that we want to make sure that every employee has enough sleep. For example, when an employee gets a late shift, the next day we don't want to give that employee an early shift because that employee would only have eight hours to go home and get some sleep, which is far too little. Today, when we take a look at the software that solves these problems or the human planners that do that, they actually do that relatively suboptimal. We've actually shown that we can actually improve that and basically get better schedules. Business Resource Planner can also deal with vehicle routing problems. So, for example, a company that has a number of stores across the country needs to deliver a number of items to these stores every morning to restock them. And to do that, it sends out vehicles, trucks with items to deliver at these stores. We can actually optimize that and basically deliver the same number of items in less time and with less fuel. This is both good for the environment but also very good for the profitability of the company, of course. Business Resource Planner is also a great fit with the workflow solution. In the workflow solution, we have to assign tasks to users. And to be able to do that, we need to make sure that every user has the necessary skills to fulfill the tasks he's assigned. This is hard constraint. That means that we have to do this. On top of that, we also have soft constraints. Each user, each employee, has certain affinities with certain customers. If we can actually maximize the affinity between the tasks and the users, the users can actually complete their tasks faster. Again, this saves time for the company, which is good for the overall profitability of the company. And it can also improve the customer satisfaction because there is an affinity between the customer and the user. Business Resource Planner fits very nicely in an existing Java stack. We can reuse your existing Java classes and use that as the model for your constraints. This means that you can leverage the power of Java, such as polymorphism, object-oriented design, and just plain old existing Java methods in our constraint satisfaction solver. And this is very unique in the market. Unlike other vendors where you have to rewrite your constraints as mathematical equations, in Business Resource Planner you can write them as score rules or even plain old Java, and you can reuse existing Java methods. Because we use plain old Java objects, this means you can integrate them easily with a database, for example with Hibernate, or you can easily integrate them to serialize to XML with X3, more JXB, or any technologies like that. One of the things I'm very proud of from a developer's perspective is that if you use Opto Planner and you do the wrong thing, you configure something that isn't illogical, Opto Planner will fail fast with a very nice error message immediately. This allows you to easily see what's wrong, fix that, and figure it out way before it ever hits production. One of the great features of Business Resource Planner is we can respond on real-time events. We can respond on that in two ways. We support continuous planning, where we have a sliding planning window, and we also have real-time planning where when the problem changes, we can actually react in milliseconds without restarting from scratch.


Hello. Today is the 6th of November. It's the first day of COP23. The COP has just opened with the statement from the COP President, which is the Prime Minister of Fiji, as Fiji is the official host of the COP even though it's been held in Bonn in Germany, hosted by the Government of Germany. And the issues that he has already raised for us to focus on is the issue of loss and damage in particular, given that we've had a series of catastrophic climatic events all over the world this year in 2017, and particularly the series of hurricanes that hit initially Texas with Hurricane Harvey, and then Florida with Hurricane Irma, and then Puerto Rico with Hurricane Maria, all of which have caused quite significant loss and damage to the tune of possibly well over 300 billion US dollars, which these three states are going to send to US Congress for compensation. The trouble is that there's no such compensation mechanism at the global level available, although we do have the Warsaw International Mechanism on loss and damage, but it doesn't speak about compensating or financing loss and damage. So we're hoping that in the next two weeks this issue will come on the table, and we will try and find ways to find innovative financing to compensate the victims of climatic events through loss and damage because adaptation and mitigation are simply not enough anymore. This is well recognized, but the financing is still a very difficult subject where developed countries tend not to want to go, so we shall see what happens. The other thing that everybody's looking at is what happens with the US delegation. They are in Bonn, the presidency under Trump, although they have officially withdrawn from the Paris Agreement. It takes two years to come into force, so they're still part of the Paris Agreement, and they didn't withdraw from the UN Framework Convention, so they're still part of the COP as well. They have sent a fairly low level delegation to Bonn. We're not quite sure what their attitude will be, although we do hear that they're going to try and promote clean coal as an option, but it's a lot of reluctance from the rest of the world to support that, but we shall see what happens there. We've got two more weeks of negotiations to go, and I'll be giving my daily vlog at the end of each day.


Good luck johnny Kenny t raiders key hoon seahawks michael c patz uh mike d lions and chiefs scott a jags steward z with the packers ted k with the vikings tom b panthers victor c cardinals william w colton william b texans Good luck everybody. Thank you for joining Sorry guys one sec here let's do it Yeah, like obj is definitely an above average receiver when he's healthy, but I don't know I don't think he's overrated at this point though At least not by anybody who watches football like yeah, he's definitely a very like a good really good slot receiver now slot plus Better than juju, but more overrated with juju probably Yeah, I think juju's had a couple bad years in a row I think he was the most overrated receiver in league at one time When ab was there and everybody was like freaking out over juju because maybe it'd be double covered every time Then the sewers didn't use him well now recently But when he became the first receiver, he was you could legitimately call him terrible He could be a fantastic andy reed receiver a guy can really cheer me back and look fantastic, you know And sammy walkins look pretty good there a few years slammin sammy marcus robinson look good cuz connolly All right, hang on the camera is like perfect It is A little bit All right, just gonna go Ram's dual relic henry ellard cam acres to 35 or no to 15 35 isn't he's just flawless to 15 for the rams Chiefs triple patch that's awesome lend awesome joe montana and patrick mahomes Numbered to 20 That's nice Panthers patch auto brian burns 19 out of 20 Nice burns Cowboys cliff harris career progressions auto Always a cowboy you go dallas nice cliff harris Bangles honored ink boomer asiasin five of 20. Yeah injuries really took a toll on obj We're like three or so years with the Giants where he was just perfectly at least half the season Rashad bateman two out of 15 sapphire gem rookie auto Great hit ravens That is nice. I think that is like dust next to it as well Microfiber, I think that's just a spot of dust right there. That'll come off of the microfiber Nice back to back nice receiver hits rpa eagles davante smith 25 to 25 the bookends Sweet hit eagles congrats on that. We'll mag that as well sweet. Yeah, the dust came off of the uh bateman Let's see we've got bill's diamond gem Dawson knocks nine out of 10 Guarantee ruby gem jags rookie trevor lorenz four of 20 nice one jaguars penmanship auto erin rogers two of 10 Congrats packers A two plus ten jersey number Yeah Green bay awesome hit this one's going out to steward z there you go steward The back to back mvp the four time mvp. Oh beautiful card. Okay One more What do you guys think is cooler a no-hitter or 300 yards receiving one game That ever happened 300 Yeah, Josh Gordon is the goat. I agree. I think I might be wrong about that 200 sounds about it. It might have been 200. That's that'd be insane. I feel like A lot of people talk about that 200 you might be right. I don't know. I don't think so Yeah, no hitters are lame. I agree everybody. Thank you You That's card chargers keenan allen three of ten per perfect game is different. Yeah, no hitter You walk the guy, okay triple patch lions bears Raiders barry sanders walter paton and marcus allen to ten For my teams here. Yeah, it's random to johnny h county t and like the random at the ends A karson wins eagles flawless flyers out of five of five 2020 Eagles got wow.   Dude not nice receivers in this uh in this break Put a reverse terry Do you guys have a good put a reverse terry uh day? On a last monday monday before this one Bucking ears ricky auto jaylon darted 14 of 25 bucks darted in the 25 These are cool, too. Hall of Fame auto bronco shannon sharp six of 15 Just think of a him owning skip bail is all the time No, I don't it's it's not a there's no buybacks and flawless It's just they don't put redemption flawless So they don't get something in time for one year that'll just put it in the next year Basically, no buybacks and flawless Uh ruby gem colts derry slender 20 and 20 probably the best linebacker right now Like middle linebacker Colts The ruby gem bears walter payton numbered 14 of 20 Skip skip skip and on the back Beautiful car niner stray lance rpa 10 of 20 boom That is sharp. Well, that's silver on that there you go niners Flawless rpa stray lance. Whoo. That's a big one Make sure you grab insurance on that 40 niner spots San Fran Johnny congrats. Johnny had a lot of big teams Hit big here All right, we do have a one random to do Thanks again everybody for filling up the breaks tonight Lions bears raiders lions bears raiders barry walter and marcus triple patches Nice card. Good luck on it It's a three only three times on this random whichever team is up top Let's bring it home to bacon one two three Raiders Raiders getting the card And that's gonna do it everybody. Thank you very much for filling that up We're filling all the breaks up tonight. We've got personals coming up in just a few minutes


We're going to crush him in November and take our country back, and we're going to give him the votes that are hailing him. At this stage in 2015, Ben Carson was ahead by 10 points in Iowa, and Ted Cruz was at 7. He was significantly more popular in 2016 than he is today, and that's a fact. He was an unknown quantity. Now, he was just as well-known back then. Just as well-known. The guy was on network television for 10 years. Come on. He had one of the top-rated shows on TV. What we knew less about Donald Trump back then than we know today, and everything we've learned about him in the last seven years makes him less qualified, less fit, and less selectable. And where was me up there? I finally got a chance. You know, after a while, you know, when the stage is that big, you know, you got to make a decision about whether you want to keep interrupting all the time. But tonight, the stage was smaller, it was more manageable, and I told all you guys, there's only one prosecutor on that stage. You saw me prosecute the case against each one of them tonight, and that's exactly where I'll prosecute the case against Joe Biden next November, and that's why I'm going to be president in 25.


So in Slovenia we have adopted the national open access strategy and also the action plan. We have established the information portal with information in Slovenian language about open access and open science and the universities have built the national open science portal and also the repositories. So the main challenges remain the formation of open access, open science policies for research performing institutions and of course the latest issue are open research data. So how can open air help? There is an enormous amount of expertise in open air partners and we really use this when forming the national strategy. Then there is support for open research data that we are really intending to use much more than we do at the moment and of course all the materials that either leading partners at open air or individuals in different countries prepare we are really using in the country translating and so on. So having open air and being the partner in open air from the beginning help immensely to establish open air environment in the country.


Thank you for giving me a chance to share the SDG implementation in our country. And that is, actually, we have a 30-year National Comprehensive Development Plan that is also reflected to the SDG goal. Moreover, new government also has committed about the reducing property and achieving peace and strong institutions. And the justice has also committed. And all the SDG goals are reflected by the new government. And then NIMARA has the National Vision Climate Change Strategy Framework Action Plan. And then HODESPE also the COP 21 in Paris and the Symmetric INTC. INTC means the Intended Nationally Determinant Contribution that is how implemented in NIMARA SDG. Actually, there are so many challenges in NIMARA but the main issue is the budget. Actually, as we all know, NIMARA has to rebound the natural resources for their national income. So that budget is one of the main issues. And then the second issue is getting the right law, getting the right new law. Because there are so many old laws which are not relevant today, so that law needs to be managed. Actually, I would like to talk about the policy change. The main issue is an opportunity for us. The new government is now elected by the people. Moreover, we have a chance that NIMARA can move forward very quickly because NIMARA can take the experience from other countries to avoid the mistake. That is the opportunity. Moreover, the SDG opportunities are an opportunity to us. That is to get awareness for our people and then teach people about the natural resources and the environment. Thank you.