Good morning guys and welcome to vlogmas day one. Am I doing vlogmas?  So you're definitely gonna get like probably better content I shouldn't promise anything you're gonna get content for two weeks but this little stretch before that two week break is going to be a struggle and The videos might be like three minutes long. I'm just telling you I'm just warning you because like school like my like I don't really do anything except for like look at a computer screen take quizzes and Sit and learn I can probably show like some lab stuff that I do which is like pretty cool I don't even know about the intro. I still haven't decided that it's literally just December 1st right now And I'm like, oh it's vlogmas. So Yeah, I'm normally a lot more productive and already have everything in line for vlogmas But this year we're winging it and we're gonna do the best we can with getting content and stuff welcome to vlogmas where you vlog December 1st through the 25th and This is gonna go up. You're seeing this on December 2nd and Yeah, so it will kind of be challenging as well like getting a video up every day But the hardest part for me would be actually the filming because I don't have that much like Content-worthy things in my mind, you know what I'm saying, but treat this like a podcast treat this like we're just friends And I'm just like taking a long way day not like some crazy nice cinematic Something but yeah, so it is currently a 7-eleven and I just arrived at school They always make his park on the fifth floor. It's kind of annoying, but it's fine And yeah, so I'll see where the day takes me the coffee situation is working out so well These I got on Amazon also to TMI, but I got some new underwear I ordered it from Amazon because like I didn't find any during black Friday So I ordered that this morning because I was like, you know what? I need new underwear It was like 6 a.m. And I was like, I'm just order that right now. So got the underwear But I do want to ask you guys Do you feel like you live out of your car because I have cycle bar stuff I have my school bag then I have my purse with like my drink This Louis Vuitton bag is worth every cent because it literally is never full like if it's everything My belt bag because that's like my purse essentials like wallet lotion everything But yeah, I just feel like I have everything here and also have some textbooks there because I don't want to carry them But like I might need them for something so I just like want to have them with me but right now I'm gonna end this clip because it's Kind of long and I will catch you guys Whatever I vlog next. Okay, so I got out of school and now I am heading into the library to Study some instruments Because we're having our instrument final tomorrow final, but like an instrument test tomorrow So that's gonna be fun. Yeah, then I'm going to cycle bar So I'll vlog that for you guys it might get like kind of repetitive with the cycle bar footage So sorry, but it is what I'm doing today So yeah, I kind of just like spent an hour in the car just like on social media catching up with everything having some like downtime to relax and Now I'm gonna head What do you think? Obviously just got out of the shower and I forgot my hair towel and clean body towel So I had to like go running to get those after I'd stepped in the shower Yeah, don't recommend doing that and you guys will probably see this routine a lot So don't fret.  Anyway, I Always put like a product on my hair after I get out of the shower So I'm not gonna dry my hair at least I don't plan on drying my hair tonight if I do dry my hair it will I'll put like Heat protectant, but as of now I am just putting Moroccan oil on my hair It goes on pretty smooth and everything like this. I just put it like from my ear down and Yeah, today was good cycle bar was fun Even though I didn't really like know any of the songs because it was like a 90s playlist So I don't know it wasn't like my favorite, but it was okay. Like it was still good like I liked the instructor So went to that I studied the muscles a little bit But I did more of like studying for I reviewed like the instruments and I also Finished some of the study guide for our microbiotest coming up. That is what I did this evening I'm gonna have a salad and turkey tonight. I'll show you guys I'll probably do like time-offs is in the future of me like making it so I'm not gonna bore you with that But anyway got done with the hair routine Now I need to like wash my hands and stuff because this grease kind of like gets on it and it's kind of uncomfortable and weird So I'm going to make my dinner now. Okay, so here's my dinner I'm also probably gonna have like popcorn or something like pretzels after this Just for a little carb, but she balanced in my room now. I swear. I am still upset with this mirror It looks so cool. I can't complain, but I wanted to show you guys some pieces that my friend gave me She closed her posh mark. So she gave me a few pieces, which is really nice So we have this one honestly a kind of well, it's like a dress a sweater dress I don't know if that makes any sense, but it has a hood it gives me like What's that animal? Sloth vibes, I don't know, but I just think it's so cute next up She gave me this rainbow flag, which is I think is so funny because my parents, you know LGBTQ plus community and then she gave me this as well. This is a top that I actually wore For Dustin, it's kind of missing the neck thing. I kind of just noticed that it might be in the bag still Okay, I'm not seeing it in the bag So that's awkward and then lastly she gave me this it's just like a black dress I guess every girl needs a little black dress. So it's a good staple to have I can always throw something over it like a cardigan or a jacket or something because honestly, I don't like this cut I'm gonna be honest But you can always like wear a jacket and stuff and it's like a good base But I want to show you guys that because I hadn't vlogged it and I thought I would show you guys in this little Vlog I'm doing here because I know it's pretty short and stuff. But yeah, oh I didn't even mention this, but she gave me this letter too. I think it's cute So it's just like a cute gray knitted sweater. But anyway guys, that is going to conclude Vlogmas day one. I know it's kind of like bad, but it's fine I've done this like every year and I do not want to like stop the tradition because I'm in school and stuff Even when I had a full-time job, I did this So I don't know. I just have fun with it. It's not serious Even though this is my main source of income for now like in the future and when I did work full-time Like it's not my full-time income I honestly do this because I genuinely love it. So yeah, I hope you guys enjoyed it Make sure you give it a thumbs up. Don't forget to subscribe and I'll see you guys in my next video Bye


All right, I think I'm going to get started. This is a session about protecting researcher privacy in the surveillance era. I know there are a lot of competing sessions, so I boiled this down to one slide. You can review this if this is not what you're interested in.  So we're going to talk about patron data. We're going to talk about the identity politics that come along with patron data. And then some things that I think need to be mitigated at this point. Here's an example. So the thesis here is that we know too much about researchers at this point. And the legal and network privacy protections have failed at this point. So we need to make some changes in how we manage patron data. Pretty close range on this. Before I even begin, I want to thank some people. Professor Talithia Williams at Harvey Mudd College and her Math 158 students have helped me all along the way here in analyzing data. And this has been a great collaboration. So they love taking our data and cleaning it up and doing regression analysis on it as an exercise. So we've been doing this every semester for about five years. I love getting the results and having the interactions with students. So it's been a very positive experience. Pat Flannery is a networked system administrator at Pomona College who has allowed me to basically march all over the wireless controller. And Rebecca Lubisar, associate dean, who encouraged me to come do this in the first place. I am Sam Combe, director of strategic initiatives and information technology at the Claremont Colleges. If you're not familiar with Claremont Colleges, briefly it's a consortium of five undergraduate and two graduate colleges with one library, which means it's really important for the library to understand how the campuses are interacting with our resources and services. So that's part of what I do is study the patron activity along with our assessment librarian. For really legit reasons, student-faculty centrism, we're very user-focused or patron-focused, visitor-focused at the library. It drives everything we do. So I want to understand what they're doing. We need to convey the value of the library to the colleges. We're funded by formula from each of them. And so if one college doesn't feel like they're getting their value out of the library, that's a big problem for us. On the other hand, if we're doing really awesome stuff, we want to be able to convey that too. For planning, future planning and justifying services that we have, I need to be able to understand what's going on with patron activity. And if we have events, which we do. So if we have a discourse event with a faculty speaker, we might want to be able to analyze that particular event. Now the tools that we've all had available to us over the years kind of don't cut it. Probably all libraries have gates, electromagnetic gates that make sure books don't go out through them. They also count people. So any electromagnetic disturbance through that gate gets counted going and coming, which means that that data is pretty useless because you're just counting relative activity. I can go and come out through different gates. I've got three entrances in our building. I go out to lunch. I come back. How many times do I count that? I don't know. So it gives you this kind of relative busy-ness number that isn't helpful. It doesn't tell me what campus they were from. Headcounts. We have a four-story building. It's hundreds of thousands of square feet. Headcounts take a long time. And they also don't tell me very much. So I can see there's a person there. They're asleep. I can see there's a person there. They're studying. They're using their computer. I don't know what campus they're from. I don't know what year they are. I don't know what program they're in. I don't know much about them at all. Going back even, well, going back a ways, we also had cards. So this was an interesting way to keep tabs on patrons. I remember from my cradle, the cards would have people's names on them. They'd be scattered all throughout the building. That seems like kind of a privacy problem. Glad we stopped doing that. But it was difficult to collect it. I think it looks kind of naive today in this age. This book, which is an engineering book, probably seemed perfectly safe to check out back in the 60s and 70s. And today might cause somebody real problems. Chapter 2 is about how to make explosives. And chapter 9 is how to ignite them with electrical devices. Can imagine some of our patrons might not want to be in possession of this book today. We moved on to integrated library systems. And the cards went away. So that was kind of a good thing. But now we've collected all the patron data into the ILS, where it can be subpoenaed by the FBI as of 2001 with the USA Patriot Act. And so libraries started scrubbing the ILS circulation data, which was good for patrons, bad for us, kind of hard to know how busy patrons were or how many times things were circulating. But it got us this cool button that says we're radical militant librarians, so kind of a net positive. In the integrated library systems, this is the sort of data you can see. I know you can't read that. The stuff that I'm keying in on is in red. So there's just a little bit of stuff in there. It's not a lot of stuff. That's the takeaway from that. So that's personally identifiable information. In our ILS, we don't keep any demographics. We just keep contact information. There's a necessary network ID. And I want to talk about this network ID, because that's the key to all of this data. There's another bit of PII. Everybody's got a barcode or an ID number of some kind that's probably related to Blackboard or an LMS or something like that. And we keep a phone number, but that's opt-in. We don't typically call patrons. We just want to be able to tell people, hey, your book is here, or please return that book. And they can provide those values. But we have to have that network ID. Now, that might be called different things in different places. I think if you're sitting here, you probably read my little disclaimer in the front. This will be relevant to folks who have central wireless and LDAP and things like this. So in LDAPs or Shibboleth, it's called a GUID, or what are they called in LDAP? It's got a C name. Anyway, it will be your network ID. It looks like an email address, but it follows you everywhere. Now we have a new tool. Well, it's not that new, right? Everybody's had wireless networks for a long time. Going in. And what's new since maybe 2008 is that they started centralizing. When I first arrived in Claremont, we didn't have a central wireless network. It was a nightmare. We had 40 independent access points that were little computers. And at any given moment, one of them was down. And you had to go find it and reboot it. That was not awesome. So instead, we installed this system where you have these access points that are much dumber. They're basically FM radios that are connected back to a very smart controller. And so all the traffic is just tunneling back to that controller and then tunneling through the network out to the internet or wherever it's going. And the controller has a log. The other nice thing about the nice and bad, depending on your perspective, the access points have locations. And if you name them after their locations, you can get a richness of data that we couldn't get before. So here's an example of a bit of the wireless controller log. So it has a log file just like a regular old server. For my purposes, I'm taking a small extract of stuff that I'm sort of interested in. I'm actually thinking of just not collecting some of this stuff anymore because you'll see why in a minute. But it has that same network ID in it. So everyone who is in range of a wireless network wants to connect to it. That's just a truth. If the wireless in here went down, everybody would leave the building. It's like oxygen. Folks who've connected to the wireless anywhere on the Claremont College's campus, and I'm sure this is true on your campus too, when their device comes in range of a wireless network, it tries to connect to it. Whether or not you ever take it out of your pocket, it has pinged an access point. When it pings that access point, it gets logged. And this is what a log entry would look like. So you've got your network ID, the MAC address, is the machine addressable code. That's a unique ID for your device. And then depending on the configuration of the controller, there may be these other things, like when it connected, when it disconnected, how much traffic went over it. The vendor of the device, it's an Android device made by Samsung with the exact radio. There's just a lot of information here that you could triangulate somebody with, even if you didn't have that network ID. And so in our case, we've named the device for where it physically is. So it's a CUC, a Claremont University Consortium device in the MUD building. We've got two buildings, a Honoled and MUD on the third floor in the Keck 2 classroom. So I know that that device is within 20, 30 feet of that access point. And since that's an Android, it's in somebody's pocket or on their person. So I know where that person is. If you do nothing, the wireless controller can take the place of those gate counts. So this is just a dashboard view from the wireless controller. It's telling me that there are 111 clients, which are these electronic devices. On the network, there's 141 more on the encrypted network and there's 24 client guests. Gone out and ground truth this and figured out that everybody's carrying 1.8 devices. Some associates at Northern Arizona University went through the same exercise. They got 1.8 devices. So that seems to be a pretty solid number. We don't actually need to count devices though. We can take it another step further, which we will momentarily encounter the network IDs. So if you take that network ID, it's got my campus on it, split the campus off. So my network ID is SAMK at CUC. CUC is my campus. So now I can tell top row there is all the campuses. We've got CGU, Claremont McKenna, Harvey Mudd, KGI, Pitzer, Pomono, Scripps. I know how many people from each of those campuses showed up in May on which floor. That's much better than a gate count. And at this level, I'm kind of comfortable with that knowledge. Like that's an amount of data I think is okay. I can't tie that back to any individual person. So this is really useful. Rebecca Luebus, Dean I mentioned earlier, had asked me, so at what time period during the day are all seven campuses represented in the building? Like, is there an hour? Is there a minute when that happens? I was like, I don't know, but I know who does. And so we asked the wireless controller and it turns out it's from nine in the morning until nine at night. All seven campuses. So that was novel information because we had campuses telling us, oh, no, our students never used the building. We've since learned that, yeah, actually, everybody uses the building and for many hours at a time. Okay, so we talked about the ILS, we talked about the wireless network. This is nothing new, but proxy logs or Iliad logs or you probably have a number of different electronic resources, services, servers. Well, they log things. And if you're in a Shibboleth environment or an LDAP environment or a CAS environment, that's gonna be that same global user ID more than likely. So again, mine's Sam Kay at CUC. You probably have some session information. Now, easy proxy is sort of endlessly configurable. Ours is pretty simple. But even so, I can tell you what journals this guy looked at at any time, what articles he retrieved, what search terms he used. And if it was Google Scholar, if you actually proxy Google Scholar, every time they press a key on the keyboard in the search box, that gets locked. So if you look up, give me a book title, it's gonna be F, F-O, F-O-R. It just goes on and on in the log. Somebody tell me why that is so we can tell Google to cut it out. And then really, really interesting, this would be a great clinic project of some kind. Every time somebody is reading a PDF in the browser, every time they turn the page. So we can see page turns, which is a fascinating kind of engagement measure, but also getting a little creepy. I know some folks had noticed that Adobe, the Adobe DRM platform was actually sending that data back to Adobe initially. And I think they've cut that out, but that's something we need to keep an eye on. In plain text, right, who said that? Thank you, yeah. Now I see you. I need to know who's in the audience. I know I have a computer science professor. Any lawyers? No, seriously, I have a law question coming up. Okay, great, awesome. I am not, I told you what I am. I'm a librarian. I am not a lawyer. I am not an IT specialist. So I'm a jack of all trades. I'm probably doing something that's horribly wrong. Please just tell me. I don't wanna send out wrong information at any point. Okay, so we kinda covered where we came from. We had information scarcity and now we seem to have a glut. So I wanna talk about, what are the implications of that? In this report, which I know I've seen a lot of people citing this report on authentication and authorization last year. If you haven't read it, please read it, memorize it, and then we'll all talk about it later. But I just wanna bring out three things from that report. So from the survey of academic institutions and others, I guess, was this notion that content suppliers seem to have no plans to support Shibboleth. So I'm not gonna be able to go to JSTOR and log in using my Claremont credential. I'm totally fine with that. I came to that conclusion a long time ago. And so we did the next thing, which is to proxy everything. So whether you're on campus or off campus, we proxy that. And that's actually fine. In a Shibboleth environment, it's a good user experience because our users have logged into Box.net, they've logged into Sakai, they've logged into any number of different things. If they have logged into something on the Claremont network, they're not gonna log in to use our resources. It's just gonna send them right through. That browser knows it's authenticated and they're good to go. You kind of have the opposite problem.  So somebody know how to fix that problem. I'd be glad to hear it. So it's a seamless user experience. That's important for us. We wanna make sure that our users aren't getting hit with login boxes every five minutes. The other thing I like about it is that then the content providers only know the IP address of that easy proxy server or service. So they don't see my laptop or my phone or my tablet IP address. They're not gathering PII on me. They just know they're talking to this proxy server. So with that in mind, we're proxying everything. Here are the implications. The personal, physical, online, and by personal, I mean PII, the name, patron type, that kind of stuff, whatever demographics you've got, can all be joined together by the network ID. That was kind of a revelation to me. When you think about it, there's some really great stuff that we can find out here, but then it gets a little too close to home. So research activity by user, that's not new. We could do that before with easy proxy. But building use by visitor, that was new to me. But then you combine all three of them and I can tell you research activity by location by visitor or research activity by visitor type. So on campus in the library, web of science use by faculty member from HMC whose name rhymes with, that's totally doable. It's kind of trivial, I know, because I did it. This is not a hard data problem. What does that look like? So here's some actual data from May of last year. These are Harvey Mudd faculty members. Counts of unique faculty members. So the first column there, these are folks who are sitting outside our Digital Humanities Studio on the third floor of Arnold. 37 distinctly different HMC faculty members were there. I don't actually need to know that. I kind of just made this graph just for y'all to show you what's possible, but it gets worse. So again, these are access point names and we've named them after where they are. So I can tell with pretty good granularity where folks are and actually for the folks in the front who might have seen it, there's a signal strength measurement that's also in the wireless controller lock. So with that, I can drill down even more. If you've got a weak connection to that access point then you're farther away from it. If you've got a strong one, you're closer to it. If there's three people with the same signal strength, you're sitting together. So let's drill in on that a little bit. More is always better. These are the same HMC faculty and we're just looking at the actual individual faculty members now. So I cut off their names. I'm drilling on that. Repeat visits by those faculty members. So faculty member A visited 35 times. Faculty member B 28 times to that location, which is undisclosed. Let's take another step. So this is for all of fall semester of 2016 and we're planning a renovation on the fourth floor of the library. So we kind of wanted to know who's up there, what are they doing? And I just took the joke a little too far. So this is e-resource uses on the fourth floor by graduate students of the Claremont Graduate University. They use EPSCO host a lot. That's not a big surprise. We have a lot of stuff licensed under EPSCO host. They're going through OCLC, which is either catalog use or Iliad. JStore use, eBury use, ProQuest use. Okay, well that's good to know and this has a huge long tail. I cut it off at 20. But let's look at one of them. So this is one graduate student on the fourth floor. Fall semester, this is primarily what they looked at. ProQuest, Wiley, JStore, Springer, Taylor and Princess online. They didn't use Science Direct so much so that's interesting to us. That's not a cheap resource. Well, what were they looking at? They were looking at this. So here's a search, there's a resource, there's another search. Again, this is not difficult to do. And I just picked three of their URLs out of the easy proxy lock.  It's at the outer bounds of what access is comfortable with but it's for a semester, it's a couple gigs of data. So did that creep anybody out? Okay, good. I thought maybe I'm just getting worked up over nothing but I tend to think we can't ignore these data. To me, this looks like kind of a new problem. Same problem as 2001. The same reasons people stopped keeping the circulation logs but we actually, so to the lawyer or legal, obvious, I don't know. We have some new twists. So I noticed in December, there was a revision to the federal criminal code, a rule called Rule 41, which I think it has to do with search and seizure. And the way I read that thing now, any judge in any location, so a judge here could write a warrant for any computer or computers anywhere, it's California, to retrieve whatever. And they don't need to be notified, okay? Nobody needs to be notified of this except law enforcement. The only provision that I can see in there is that somebody thinks that computer's up to no good. It's encrypting its traffic. Oh my God, it's on VPN or using BitTorrent or something like that. But that's not actually language that's in the law. So it's pretty open to interpretation, I think. So that being the case, if these log data are just lying around, then we have a problem because they won't be coming to our door. They're just gonna snake it out over the network and we won't know. They can still get a warrant from the Visa Court and come and retrieve it. That's true too, but it kinda creeps me out a little bit that they don't need that. Well, so one of the things that we've seen is that the networks are compromised. And that's not me. So Cisco in 2014, I have their quote in the presentation is, we've given up on that. We're all about mitigation now. Your network is compromised. What are you gonna do about it? I'm glad you asked that question. So for that reason, but also for the reasons that we're seeing now that either NSA or FBI seem to have the ability to intervene, get into your network with or without notification. I love RIT guys to death, but I doubt that they are ready to stop that. So I'm worried about both of those angles. In our patrons, oh, sorry. Yeah, the FBI, any model of your network can give you the best possible. So here's the thing. If maybe that's a high threat and maybe it's a low risk, are we willing to take that risk? So we're seeing now that our patrons are not implicitly safe either. So that example of the book that I gave before, we just don't know anymore what the status of patrons is and what's kind of the perceived threat level of what they're researching. We've got a lot of patrons researching terrorism right now. What does that look like to a law enforcement agency? We've got a lot of patrons who are from countries that are apparently not welcome here anymore. So my responsibility to safeguard those patrons is on my mind and whatever that threat level, our actual risk level is of the network being compromised, I just wanna really examine what data we've got lying around and what actions am I taking to safeguard it? We'll talk about that in a second. So I think I have an obligation to protect those data and basically for our part, I'm looking at three different actions. If we've got PII that we think we need anonymizing it, hence the questions about hashing, if we've got these data, let's really examine what do we need and aggregate it up to the highest possible level. So rather than keeping it at that graduate student's network ID, let's keep it at graduate student. I just need to know they're a graduate student. That's all I need to know. Then it's a lot harder to trace it back down to an individual person. And that includes all that triangulation data. So if I know they're a graduate student, but I also know all that business about it's an Android device and it's of this vintage and it's got this operating system on it, that's plenty to tie it back to an individual person. So triangulation has to be included in that. And then expunge what you don't need. When I first started this project, I started poking around looking for log files and I found years worth of log files just lying around because why not? Storage is cheap. There was no real impetus to go delete it. So we had easy proxy logs going back forever, wireless logs going back forever. So making it not just a policy but a procedure going back to delete those logs. So I'm still in the process, I have to admit of that. It's a big job, anonymizing and then deleting the raw data. Other right hand button. So this is what that looks like to me. So proxying everything I think is one step to take. If you're not doing that and you can, why not? You can test this out with a limited set of resources and even patrons to see if the user experience is good enough. But then the way that works is I ask a question like what are the ethics of religion-based executive orders? The proxy server re-asks that question to political research quarterly. Political research quarterly is having this conversation with the proxy server, not me. It sends back the PDF, proxy server sends me back the PDF. At no time did my name leave the network. Yes? Browse fingerprinting techniques like that. Yeah. Tracos that Germans insert in their HTML. So the publisher is actually getting a lot of information which is way more than enough to identify an individual with them. Thank you for that question. It's above my pay grade. But that's the kind of question I was hoping somebody asked. I get that just of what you're asking. And I think that that's one of the mitigations that we're gonna have to take and really look at. Maybe not at my level but in IT shops to find solutions to that. Or at least advise patrons that that's happening. And that's something I didn't put in there but I think is actually a part of this is just being transparent with the patrons that some level of this analysis is happening. Whatever that level is at your institution. Let them know. So anonymization, I'm just using a very simple, maybe too simple anonymization process. I just wanna show you an example and the definition of it. I think it's important to use a standard hashing. Don't make up your own. There are lots of good libraries to use. So NIST has a secure hash standard. They have many. I'm using SHJ256. What happens with that is when it sees Sam K at CUC it turns it into this gibberish right here which you can't reverse. So nobody could take that gibberish and turn it back into Sam K at CUC. Now Sam K at CUC is not exactly a giant secret. So that's not sufficient. Somebody could get all the network IDs for Claremont trivially, no black helicopters. And then just try a bunch of different hashes until they found the one that they took off our logs. So we do salt everything. There's an example of what that looks like. It just means add something to your initial value and then encrypt that and don't tell anybody what that was. Now done properly, there's a lot more to it but that's an example of that. And again, that's all the code it takes. It's not, we're not talking about rocket surgery. The personal data, so that's another big debate, I guess. I don't think it's very, I don't think it's debatable and I don't think it's important. Anything that looks like PII to me, I regard as PII. There's no cost to, you know, especially anonymizing or aggregating one versus two versus three different values. So certainly the network ID, because that's absolutely tieable back to me and a bunch of different systems. The IP address of the machine, so, you know, right now at Claremont, everybody's got a public IP address and I don't think that's uncommon at academic institutions. I don't always get the same one but I looked over time and pretty much I always get the same one. So I just go ahead and encrypt that. The machine addressable code, now that we're carrying machines in our pockets, I regard that as PII. That's pretty personal, it's in my pocket. It's always the same for that mobile phone, laptop, whatever it is that you've got. So I encrypt that too. And then really to pay attention to the demographics. So with us, with the ILS, our access services director was just like, I just don't want any of that information, I don't need it. Let's not have it. We didn't even have this conversation. She was just like, it's just more work for me, I don't want it. I just need to be able to contact the patron every so often. So that was easy. But there's a lot of other demographic data or triangulation data, HTTP headers. Thank you very much for adding to my headache. That we need to be aware of in this environment. Encrypting connections. So HTTP, HTTPS, and there are devils in the details with HTTPS, but more and more and more we're doing a bad job putting pressure on vendors and services to use HTTPS in the first place. I think our main websites should just go ahead and be HTTPS. We just get everybody in the habit of dealing with HTTPS. I think everybody's probably experienced the mixed content messages or nightmares where web pages have big blocks of nothing and your browser's unhappy because there's mixed content. So some of it's HTTPS, some of it's HTTP. It seems like a really easy problem to solve. Just everything's HTTPS. Everything's sense secured. And that is all I have for you today. I'd love to ask some questions and answer questions if I can.


Mr. Gandhi, welcome to Stanford. Do you want to say something or just go ahead? Thank you very much for giving me the opportunity to come and speak to you. I've heard a lot about your institution. I spent some time in one of your competitors. It's an honor for me to be here. I've been asked to speak about global transition and how the world is changing. And also, how one should act through that change. How one should think about acting through the turbulence that is obviously going to come. I heard in the introduction that I was a member of parliament until a few months ago. I don't think when I joined politics 2004, I ever imagined what I see going on in our country. It was way outside anything that I had ever imagined. To be the first person to get a full criminal sentence on defamation, get the maximum sentence to be disqualified from parliament, I didn't imagine that something like this was possible. But then, I think it's actually given me a huge opportunity. Probably much bigger than the opportunity I would have sitting in parliament. That's just the way politics works. I think the drama started really about six months ago. We were struggling. The entire opposition is struggling in India. Huge financial dominance, institutional capture. We were struggling to fight the democratic fight in our country. And we decided none of the systems were working. Democracy isn't just about an opposition party. It's about a set of institutions that support the opposition party. And those institutions either captured, certainly weren't playing the role that they're supposed to play. And so we decided to do something quite strange. We just decided to walk across the country. And we never imagined for a second what would happen when we walked across the country. What would happen not just politically, not in terms of the type of response we got, but what would happen to us when we walked across our country. All of us. It was started with about 125 people. And it fundamentally transformed the way we think about our country, about our people, about politics, about what is important. A lot of people asked me, what's the lesson you've learned from this? And for a long time, I couldn't quite say what it was. I couldn't answer. I'd say, I've picked up so much information overload. I can't really tell you what this has done. It was the most beautiful experience of my life, by far. It was very painful. I had a knee problem. It's one of those things you get up and you say, OK, we're going to walk 4,000 kilometers. I said, at some level, the crazy thing to even conceptualize. And I thought that would be, I'm reasonably fit. I thought it shouldn't be too difficult. I calculated it in my mind. I said, well, what's it going to be? It's going to be 25 kilometers a day. No big deal. And then I had a knee problem. And then the whole thing, the way life works, everything just transformed itself. We met what I would best describe as the soul of our country. And very quickly, in a week, 10 days, a silence descended on us. We couldn't speak. We went from trying to explain things to people. This is why agriculture isn't working. This is how you should think about education. This is how the health care system should look. This is what we should be doing. And suddenly, we all went silent. And we went silent because we came into contact with the intelligence that we had never seen, that we had never even conceptualized could exist. Farmers who you would say, many people would say, don't have an education. And then who are explaining things to us in a way that we just are in stunned silence? And we saw this with farmers, with laborers, with small businessmen, everybody. And so this silence descended on us. And we just sort of stopped talking and started listening. And we heard tales of immense suffering. I mean, I can think immediately, I thought about one where which sort of, to me, embodied the spirit of my country, our country. It was walking. And a young man came and started walking with me. And I put my arm on his shoulder. And suddenly I realized he didn't have arms. So he had no arms. And I tried to sort of make him a bit comfortable. I didn't want him to feel that I know you don't have arms. He wasn't too bothered. And we started talking, and I asked him, listen, what do you do? And he looked at me and he said, I'm a mechanic. The immediate thing in my mind was he's lying. How can he be a mechanic? He doesn't have arms. It's impossible. So I said, well, I didn't want to be direct. I didn't want to say you're lying. I said, listen, what cars do you repair? He says, I don't repair cars, I repair motorcycles. So I said, oh yeah, what motorcycle do you repair? And he started listing all the motorcycles. So I said, can I come and see what you do? And he said, yeah. And then he proceeded to take us and show us how he serviced a motorcycle with his feet.  He took apart the entire engine with his feet. And he put the entire engine back together with his feet. I can't do it with my hands. So we saw these type of things happening. And we saw clearly the disconnect between our politics and our people. And that disconnect is visible in the United States. It's visible in the rest of the world. There's a huge divide between the people and the politics. Politics is talking about something else. People are talking about something else. We experienced this multiple times. And as I was walking through this, I kept thinking something puzzled me. What I couldn't understand is that while we were walking, we had no force. Force was completely on the other side. Other side had police. They had the institutions. They had the media. They had social media. They had everything. And here was this group of people. In a few weeks, it became thousands and then millions, just walking. And all the force at the disposal of the government of India could do nothing. And the more they tried to apply force, the less it worked. And so this puzzled me. I was like, how come they have all the force? They have all the systems and nothing's happening. Why, for example, are they just not physically stopping us? And this was a question that just kept rotating in my mind. I'm like, why is it that they have the force but they don't have power? And I realized that force and power are two completely different things. Most people, politicians in particular, confuse force and power, and they think they're the same thing. They're not the same thing. They're completely different things. Power is an act of imagination. Power is in the present. It is not linear. And power comes when you go close to the truth. The reason we could not be stopped by force is because we were weaving around near the truth. And what was really interesting to me was it didn't matter how much force the other side had. They simply could not transfer that force into power. And they kept saying to us, people who ask us, so when you're going to stop, we're like, we're not going to stop. We're going all the way to Kashmir. No, you're not going to be able to go to Kashmir. They told me in Kashmir that, look, if you walk the last four days, you're going to get killed. They're going to throw hand grenades on you. I was like, fine, no problem. Let them do it. I want to see the person who throws a hand grenade on me. And the security guys, the people from the establishment there, I could see in their face that they just couldn't understand what I was saying. So this distinction in your life, in your work, is very important. It doesn't matter how much force the other person has. You can still have power. And it is determined by how close you are and how precise you are with regards to the truth. Now, you can see these moments. Mine was a very small one. You can see these moments of power versus truth in history. Big ones. Example, my leader, Mahatma Gandhi, fought the entire British Empire. He had no force. They had all the force, all the structures, the army, everything. Didn't matter. The Declaration of Independence here in the United States, again, a moment of power, a moment of truth, doesn't matter how much force the other person has. So why am I telling you this? Why am I making this distinction between power and force? And what does it have to do with the transition that we're facing? Well, the transition we are facing, there are three transitions. There is a revolution in mobility. There is a revolution in the energy system. And there's a revolution in connectivity, what we call AI in data. These are the three revolutions that are taking place. And they're going to affect everything. The last time we had a similar transition, a transition of energy, a transition of mobility, we had two world wars. And it's in times like that of great uncertainty, of turbulence, that you need acts of imagination. While I was coming here to Stanford University, I was thinking about it. All the work that you do, a lot of the work that you do, robotics, AI, where was the moment of power? The moment of power was when President Kennedy said, let's go to the moon. That was not an act of force. That was an act of imagination. And from that, a lot of the work you do has emerged, evolved. And that's the type of relationship the United States and India should be thinking about. A relationship that's based on the true reality of our people. We know in India a lot about the reality of our people. All of you know, you live in our great country. You know the levels of poverty that we have. You also know the amazing amount of skills that we have. The United States has the world's cutting-edge technology. And we already have a bridge between us. It's important that this bridge is not simply a bridge based on force. But it's a bridge based on the reality of our people, on an understanding of the realities of both our people. India has some huge advantages. In a data-centric world, we have one of the largest pools of data. You, over here, are testament, many of you, to our skill in technology, in software. There are many more young people like you back home who don't have the opportunity you had, who could augment our capability. So that's what I wanted to leave you with. I think there are difficult times, but there are also times of opportunity. I think there are times when acts of imagination as I called it acts of true power will resonate and can transform the way we think of ourselves. I'm looking forward to answering some of your questions. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you for coming to Stanford. Thank you for being such an ardent and passionate supporter of the US-India relationship. It's great to have you here. I wanted to start by asking you something since you spoke about the Yatra, about this disconnect between politics and people. I imagine you're not planning on walking every year or every few months across India to gather information. No, it's not a bad thing. Perhaps. I mean, every year is difficult, probably not possible. But I think a little bit of movement's not a bad thing. Fair enough. That's a good point. But somehow, in a democracy, we expect this to be institutionalized in some way, right? Same as in the US. As you said, we have a disconnect that sometimes feels like between what our people want and what our politicians say or what our politics are all about. I think the disconnect has a lot to do with concentration of wealth and sort of the inequality in society and also the political system not being able to catch up with the social media and the technology. So there's a little bit of lag between the political system and the technological progress. And I think democracies are struggling with that. Even though this is a point in time where technology is supposed to be connecting us like never before, what you're saying is that these institutions, sometimes it lags a little bit behind. I mean, the systems are not designed for this level of connectivity. And so I think a little bit of evolution in the system is going to take some time, but it'll happen. And what about social media generally? We're in the land of big tech right now. What role can technology play in trying to understand, perhaps, bridge that divide? Or do you think it's just fundamentally on these institutions, the governance structures? I mean, it creates an asymmetry in information. So for example, in our case, the government has information that the opposition just doesn't have. And that can be used politically. So that's one aspect of it. The second is it clusters people together and sort of creates silos where these silos have their own sort of belief structure and they're separated from other people. So paradoxically, it reduces the conversation. You would think that more connectivity would simply increase the conversation. It's not necessarily the case. And so then it becomes important for politicians such as yourself to beat the dirt and walk on the ground. Yeah. And it's surprising, it would be very surprising to me how effective and powerful it is. Because when you do that, the social media system, the press system actually doesn't have a choice anymore. Because their attention gets captured. So even if they want to move their attention, a act like walking across the country just fixates the tension. I think this is, I mean, I understood the sort of Gandhi's sort much, much better. Because I suspected that time also with radio and with these technological changes, they were facing similar problems. And I think that idea of walking across the country forces people to say, OK, so what's going on there? And then the thing starts to work. Makes sense. Just turning to the purpose of your visit, US-India relations, what would you say is the current status of how our two countries work together? I think there's a lot of good work that has been done from the 90s. But as I was saying, I don't see the acts of imagination. I think it's more of the same. But I don't see sort of the crystallization of a vision. I don't see an alternative to, for example, the Belt and Road. Belt and Road is promising prosperity. It's a vision of the world. It's a non-democratic vision of the world. Well, what's the counter vision? So that's where I see the gap. Of course, there is military cooperation. That's fine. That's important. But it can't just be military cooperation. So when you think about how that democratic vision should be formulated, in years past, the US has gotten sort of in trouble from other countries by saying, we're going to define democracy. We're going to carry it out. We're going to lead the way. And in some ways, the US has stepped back on that. India is too big for you to define. I mean, that's not possible. It's not just India, but for a world vision of what democracy is, what the counter to a Belt and Road in India is. Everybody has a role to play. And you propose. You propose, look, this is how we think about it. And then others say, well, actually, we don't agree with that. We agree with that. So I don't see that. I don't see that on the table. How do you compete with the production engine of the Chinese? What does that look like? What does a democratic production system look like? Because if you look at what has happened in the West and in India, we seem to have given up on manufacturing. That's just something that the West certainly doesn't do. Now, of course, there's a conversation here in the United States about redoing it. But how do you do that in a democratic structure? What does that look like? Those are the type of things that I think need to be discussed. Because I see it quite clearly that there are two models on the table. There is a authoritarian model. And then there's a democratic model. And the authoritarian model has got a handle on production. So production in a democratic environment has to be conceptualized and actioned. And I think India has a central role in that. What would that look like? I'm clearly not as familiar with India as you are. But when I work with young adults, I hear from them the same thing. I want a government's job. I'm not saying I want to work in a factory. Their aspirations are, in some sense, misaligned to the vision of manufacturing. So that's the mindset change that has to be brought about. India has a large number of skilled clusters. In every district, there's a skilled cluster. But we're not connecting that cluster with finance. We're not connecting that cluster with technology. We're not nurturing the ability to manufacture. By manufacturing, I don't necessarily mean massive factories the way China does. You could have small and medium factories. You could have technology intensive factories. But at least get on with the business of production. It'll probably look very different in India than it looks in China. It'll probably be much more decentralized. So those things will emerge once you start discussing a potential vision. I also think that neither the United States nor India can do it alone. I think there's a synergy between our two countries that is required for it to happen. What would that take on? What could the US offer to India or vice versa that you would like to see? I mean, India, of course, as I said, has what Saudi Arabia is to oil India as to data. With China, we have the single biggest data pool on the planet. So that's a huge asset that we bring to the table. We have these youngsters who are here and millions of them back home who understand how to manipulate that data, who understand how to conceptualize production. So we have that. We also have a population that is more than ready to work very hard. So that's what we have.  You have Silicon Valley. So these two things need to be brought together. But it needs to be a vision. And it needs to be, you need to start actioning it. So when I hear people from the opposition party coming out here, they talk about the same sorts of things. India needs to make more in India. Manufacturing needs to take off. The US and India need to work together towards this vision. How would you say you differentiate yourself from the ruling power in this dimension? I have a completely different concept of India. I don't see India the way they do. They see India as a top-down centralized system. I see India as multiple cultures, multiple religions, multiple languages. I see it as a decentralized system. I don't think one state should impose itself on another state. I don't think one language should be imposed on the people of India. So it's two completely different visions of India. I actually don't believe that the BJP's vision of India can lead to production. Can you say why? I think because you need to decentralize power in India to produce. You won't be able to do it from Delhi. And that's probably. Like for example, you take a, if you want to look at success, reasonable success manufacturing India as Tamil Nadu. Completely different cultural system, completely different language, completely different history. You have to leave them alone. You have to make them comfortable. You can't let them feel that their language is threatened, their culture is threatened. And then they can do it.  You're going to be under defensive all the time. So both in the US and in India, one of the big solutions, a top-down solution, perhaps you might say, is to offer subsidies to try and encourage more manufacturing. We see this in the chip wars that are taking place right now in semiconductors. We see this in other industries as well. What's your view on that? How can that be channeled in a more decentralized fashion, I'm assuming you would say? Yeah, you could do that. I think it also has a lot to do with the way you think about finance and the way you think about banking. So if your banking system, at least in India, your banking system is very centralized, and then the top 15, 20 people have full access to the banking system, whereas small and medium businesses, people who want to set up production units, they don't have access. So you have to think about these factors if you want to actually be serious about it. But I don't think India has a choice with regards to production, because we are transitioning from a rural to an urban country. And we've got earlier large masses of people who are connected to the land. And they tended to stay with the land. Now these people are in the cities. And the only way to give them a livelihood is to produce. So I don't think the idea that India can just be a service-oriented country. I don't think the scale of India allows that. And I don't think the numbers allow it. So as India urbanizes, what kinds of changes would you think that the government needs to make? I've always been struck when I go to India that the mayor of, say, some big city like Mumbai or something is a relatively powerless position. Couldn't imagine that. Not relatively, completely. So these are the type of things that you need to change. The ability to impose local taxes. It's a completely different system than the one we have right now. And some of that transition will happen naturally. It'll automatically happen. When we were in the UPA, we conceptualized providing a safety floor. So our idea was people are moving from the rural area to the urban area. This is a difficult transition. This is unsafe. And you tend to go in and out of poverty while you're making this forward and backward movement. So we started to think about ideas like manrega, which is guaranteed employment, right to food, et cetera, et cetera, so that these people would be comfortable making this transition going back and forth. And the biggest idea we had was the guaranteed income idea, which was a scheme called Naya in our last manifesto, and which we've sort of tweaked a little bit and run in Karnataka now. So I think some of those ideas, in addition to building a system of production of manufacturing, would be required. This journey is a very dangerous journey, and it's traumatic. So when you move from a village to Bombay or to Karnataka, don't underestimate the fear and the distress that that movement, two-and-four movement, causes. So you need to provide that protection. It's very hard. I was working with a rich person in the Bay Area, and he was offering $1,000 to any family that would move from a rural area to an urban area. Just couldn't figure it out in some respects. It's very daunting. And that's the United States. That's also true in the US. So I mean, in the United States, it's much simpler. And you have much more support and protection than you have in our country. So with respect to China, just to turn back to foreign policy, how do you see the India-China relationship evolving over the next, say, five, 10 years? Well, it's not doing too well these days. That's an understatement. Yeah, it's rough right now. I mean, they've occupied some of our territory. It's rough. It's not going to be an easy relationship. Do you see some sort of difference between you and the ruling party right now in China? Because they also seem to be quite tough and consistent. I mean, the question, India cannot be pushed around. So that certainly is not going to be allowed. It's not going to happen. But they are our neighbor. And we have a trade relationship with them. And that's just a fact of life. Do you see a possibility, perhaps, a closer relationship between the US and India? Some people argue that the relationship really should be one of security rather than people-to-people ties, rather than economic. First and foremost, it should be about securing an Indo-Pacific. Do you see a space for that? Or do you think that that might be a concerning dialogue? I think there is room. There is a space for a security relationship. But we have to answer the question of productivity. Because you cannot simply ignore the manufacturing might of China. I mean, you have to compete with them. I don't think it's an option. So what does that competition look like? It, of course, I'm not talking about conflict. I'm talking about competition. How do we create an alternative vision to the production that they're doing? There are complications with having manufacturing in democracies. So how do you deal with those complications? We don't have too many success stories, unfortunately, these post-World War II.  And you pushed it out partially because you didn't want to deal with the mobilization, labor mobilization that results from large factories. So in a sense, you parceled it out to China. And now you've realized that that was a mistake. But there are political reasons as to why that happened. So that's really the thing. Instead of resolving the conflict between labor and capital in the United States or in the Western world, you parceled it out. And in my view, that was a fatal mistake. I don't think it's one, though. It seems like consumers, especially, they care about prices at the end of the day. We like to think that we care about climate. We care about how people are treated, labor standards. Are you saying that India should compete with China on a price front? Or should India be offering something else? No, I'm saying I think that's black and white. Do you compete on price? Or do you compete on something else? I'm saying that have a vision for manufacturing. Have a vision for what's our problem? Our problem right now is that we have millions of people, millions and millions of people who we simply cannot employ through services. You just don't have the spin-off jobs and services that you have in manufacturing.  So it's an entire network where you can give many, many more people jobs. So this idea that we can just ignore manufacturing and we can just run a service-based economy. You'll have huge social problems in India. You won't be able to deal with them, because you'll have massive amounts of unemployed people. Which is what we're seeing these days. Unemployment's very high. So exactly. And if you look at unemployment, it's just rising. As manufacturing is dropping, unemployment is rising. It is directly connected. It makes sense. It's a hard thing to do. It's not an easy thing to do. It's much harder, frankly, for the West to do it than for us to do it. But it's got to be done. There's certain elements of it that you will do better than us. There's certain elements of it that we will do better than you. But it's got to be done. Makes sense. In the time remaining, I've collected some questions from students. They were collected prior to your speech. I was hoping for some softball questions on the Yatra. I was the last few nights. I've been binge-watching what you ate and what you did. All of these sorts of lifestyle questions. But alas, Stanford students failed me. They've got some tough questions for you. I find it tough questions. Great. So the first one is from Devan Shama. He's a computer science class of 2024 student. He asks, do you support India's neutral stance on the Russia-Ukraine war? No, no, by the way, that's not a tough question. That's an easy question. Look, we have a relationship with Russia. We've had a relationship with Russia, and we have certain dependencies in Russia. So I would have a very similar stance as the government of India. I mean, it might not be popular here, but it is what it is. Look, at the end of the day, we have to also look out for our interest. But don't you see a role? I mean, if you've got your interests tied so closely to Russia over time, evolving those interests so that India can stand up on its own two feet to a certain extent a little bit more?  But India is a big enough country whereby it generally will have relationships with other countries. It's not so small that it can just say, OK, we're just going to have a relationship with you and with nobody else. It's actually difficult for us to do. So we will always have these type of relationships. We will have better relationship with some people, evolving relationships with other people. So that balance is there. But to say that, OK, India will not have a relationship with this set of people that's difficult for India to do. And the present government has recognized that the territorial integrity of Ukraine, it is important. And that's something, especially with China on your borders, that you have to be also cognizant of. So their position is colored. It's not a black and white in the case of the government. Next question comes from Arman Sharma, bioengineering class of 2024. Over the last few years, your international presence has skyrocketed. You've delivered message at universities and clubs across US, UK, and more. Here, I'm trying to make Stanford feel special. But unfortunately, we were among the last to get you. When we see struggles between the ruling party and the opposition and other democracies, we hardly ever see the opposition seeking international support outside the foreign ministry. You've gotten rogue, in some respects. No, I'm not seeking support from anybody. I'm very clear that our fight is our fight, right? And the BJP likes to twist this stuff. But no, I'm not seeking support from anybody. But there is a group of young students from India here. And I want to have a relationship with them, and I want to talk to them. And I think it's my right to do it. I mean, I don't understand why the prime minister doesn't come here and do it. Prime Minister Modi, you're welcome at Stanford any time. We would love to have you as well. Come and have a chat. You know what I mean? We've been fortunate to have some. Answer some hard questions. Look, it's important. I'll tell you something. It's important for political people to put themselves in situations like this. Because it's very valuable. It makes us refine our thoughts. It makes us think about things. And the odd question that you can't answer, so what? We're all humans. I mean, we're not gods here. So I'm more than happy to have the occasional slip up. Because I gain a lot. I understand what you're thinking. I understand what you're working on. So to me, it's developing a relationship with young people here. Excellent. We've had a number of BJP politicians come through. Unfortunately for us, not Prime Minister Modi yet. Let me ask one other question. And this is from Reina Bhatia, Bioengineering and International Relations student, class of 2025. So your party has been in opposition for nine years now. And not surprisingly, you've made a number of complaints about how the opposition is excluded from decision making. Say Congress comes back to power. What protections and rights do you think you would extend to the opposition? How would you rebuild these? I think our record is very clear. You can see the record of the UPA government. We didn't do any of this stuff. We were not threatening the opposition. We were not putting cases in the opposition. It's just not something we do. So this is a new style of politics that has come into India. And we certainly don't believe in it. So is it just a political thing, though, or would you institutionalize some protections? I mean, there are institutionalized protections which have been torn apart, right? So yes, it would be strengthening those protections. It would be strengthening the institutional framework. But what is going on back home is not normal. It's not something that has been done even by the BJP before. And do you see parallels? This isn't just an India-specific story. When you read the papers, you hear about declines in democracy. Even in this country, many people talk about declines in democracy. I think, as I said earlier, it's a combination of dramatic increase in connectivity and concentration of power. Well, thank you very much. This has been very illuminating. Please come back to Stanford many times. We really appreciate it. Thank you. Good job. Good job. Thank you.


In this session, we'll investigate highway pavement and shoulders. We'll begin our study with pavement surfaces. Through this study, you'll learn, one, the purpose and functional requirements of highway pavement surface and shoulders. Two, the elements of pavements and shoulders, as well as the characteristics that contribute to poor performance. And, three, the proper and improper installation and maintenance procedures. The miles of unpaved roads in the nation are low level, low speed and low volume roads. Major highways are, of course, paved. We're concerned with high volume major roadways, so we'll be studying only paved surfaces. There are two categories of pavements, flexible and rigid. Flexible pavements include asphaltic concrete surfaces, rigid pavements are constructed with Portland cement concrete. For the pavement to serve as a functional surface for moving vehicles, it must provide, one, a durable travel surface that will withstand the repeated wheel loads of vehicles. Two, adequate drainage, including removing water from the travel surface and from the lower portions of the pavement thickness so that the structural strength of the base is not weakened. And three, a skid resistant travel surface that will allow sufficient friction for expected traffic operations. We're concerned primarily with the last point, a skid resistant surface. Travel surface and adequate drainage are affected by the quality of materials and the construction techniques used. And we won't be discussing pavement design and construction at this time. So, after we look very briefly at strength, we will focus on friction and vehicle steering factors that influence the safety of vehicle operations. For maintenance cost efficiency, the major criterion for a pavement is that it be able to carry traffic without breaking up, cracking, heaving, or otherwise deteriorating. The selection of materials in the surface course and in the soil beneath it greatly affects the durability of a pavement. Only approved pavement designs should be used for highway construction. The National Highway Institute sponsors another course on pavement design, so we'll leave that subject now and continue our study of skid resistance. One of the primary safety functions of a pavement is to provide skid resistance. Skidding takes place in a very complex environment. The abilities of the driver, the condition of the vehicle, and its tires and the characteristics of the pavement all interact to provide resistance to skidding. Three factors increase the possibility of skidding, water on the pavement, high vehicle speeds, and finally, polished aggregate. Polished aggregate is the single most important pavement contributor to slipperiness. These are also factors which lower pavement skid resistance. To understand skid resistance, we must first understand friction and how it is measured. Friction is resistance between the pavement and the tires of vehicles. Resistance allows drivers to stop, accelerate, and turn without losing steering control. Friction is affected by pavement drainage, vehicle speed, pavement texture, and aggregate selection. Pavement friction is measured by a locked wheel skid trailer. The standard test speed is 40 miles per hour and is reported as SN40 or skid number at 40 miles per hour. Uniform specifications should be followed when measuring friction. The amount of relative friction is expressed as a skid number. The skid number is the coefficient of friction times 100. The higher the number between zero and 100, the higher the friction. Skid numbers refer to wet pavement conditions. I mentioned before that polished aggregate is the single most important pavement contributor to road slipperiness. The influence of a polishing aggregate needs our special attention. As traffic wears down the aggregate particles, the surface becomes smooth and friction decreases. When a highway is first opened, it may register an acceptable skid number because it has not been worn down. As the aggregate is polished by traffic, the surface can degrade rapidly and present serious skidding problems. The most stable surface conditions occur about 24 to 30 months after a road is opened. A polished surface can degrade to a skid number approaching that of ice when vehicles travel over it at the higher speeds. However, a good non-polishing aggregate pavement will maintain acceptable skid numbers over a wide range of speeds. Surface construction materials need to be selected for safety and durability. Then, additional maintenance activities such as adding skid-resistant surface overlays can be reduced. Pavements constructed of non-polishing aggregates actually increase in safety with time. As traffic moves over the surface, new rough surfaces are exposed and friction is increased. So you can see the use of a good wearing surface is essential to provide friction. The texture of the road surface also greatly affects skid resistance. Pavements should have two types of texture. Macrotexture, the coarseness of the surface, and microtexture, the fine grittiness that provides what we think of as friction. Macrotexture protects against hydroplaning. Some portions of the pavement project above the film of water to allow vehicles to maintain some contact with the roadway. Macrotexture is most important on roads with traffic speeds of 40 miles per hour or more. Microtexture can be achieved most effectively in an asphalt pavement through a good quality non-polishing aggregate. If such aggregates are too expensive to include in a total mix, they can be provided on the surface by sprinkle mixes or surface treatments. In concrete pavements, microtexture is provided through mix design, quality aggregates, and construction controls. Dense graded mixes can be improved with open graded surface courses or surface treatments or quality aggregate. Concrete pavements can be textured during construction. Macrotexture can be provided on old concrete pavements by grooving. Water on the pavement can greatly reduce friction. When friction drops, vehicles traveling above 40 miles per hour can hydroplane on the wet surface. When hydroplaning occurs, friction has dropped to zero. Two important factors affect pavement drainage. First, cross slope, and second, the pavement surface's ability to allow water to move away from under the tires. Without drainage, a film of water lays on the roadway and can cause hydroplaning. When a tire hydroplanes, it rides on the water rather than the road. Steering control is lost because the tire to pavement friction is lost. Hydroplaning is a problem on any road where vehicles can travel at speeds above 40 miles per hour. So hydroplaning is not only a rural problem, but also one that can happen on arterial streets. The likelihood of skidding increases with higher speed of travel. So the surfaces of high speed roadways need to provide friction for the increased speeds. In addition to texture, adequate cross slope is needed to drain water from the pavement surface. Cross slope also affects steering. In road construction, the design values of the cross slope should be followed closely to balance drainage and steering problems. Two greater cross slope creates steering problems. Two little across slope doesn't adequately drain the surface. To enhance drainage even more, open graded asphaltic paving mixtures are used. FHWA specifications for the mix are available. The open graded mix was developed to produce a surface that would allow surface water to flow down through a porous thickness and then out to the side on a smooth surface. Although the open graded mix will not substitute for good cross slope, it does aid friction. Water in front of a tire can flow down through the pavement voids and away from the tire. Removing water from under the tire reduces the potential for hydroplaning. This photo shows a truck traveling on a conventional pavement. The tire splash is considerable for a light rainfall, two-tenths inch per hour. Here we see the same truck traveling on an open graded mix test pavement, 200 feet downstream. The tire splash is greatly reduced and the pavement appears almost dry in comparison to the conventional pavement. Moderate rainfall is drained from this roadway by the open graded mix pavement. Pictured here is the roadway in a two-tenths inch per hour rainfall. The surface appears quite dry. However, with a heavier rainfall, the voids in the pavement aren't adequate to carry away all the water. With a six-tenths inch per hour rainfall, a considerable amount of cross pavement runoff occurs on the surface. Milling is a successful method of refurbishing highways. The old surfacing material is removed first. In that way, the thickness of the roadway is not increased and the basic minimum clearances can be maintained. A small amount of new asphalt and mix are relayed on the milled roadway. The cost effectiveness of this operation has made it extremely successful so that it is being used on many miles of highway. A milled surface can provide acceptable friction even before the new surface is applied. But too rough a surface isn't desirable because the wavy patterns can cause steering problems for small cars and motorcycles. For Portland cement, concrete cement, surface friction may be improved by 1. Tining fresh concrete 2. Grooving existing pavements or 3. Applying an overlay surface on top of the old concrete surface. Tining is the best surface texturing method approved for fresh concrete. Brooming alone is no longer accepted. Tining in the transverse direction is generally used on tangent sections. Tining is performed by dragging a steel comb through a plastic mix. The steel tines are flexible enough to deform around the large aggregate without pulling it out of the mix. Portland cement concrete pavements can be grooved to provide space for the water to drain. The grooves also provide a rough vertical edge for tires to grip. The grooves are sold in existing concrete pavements. To increase stopping friction, grooves should be sold across the lane. To increase friction on curves, the grooves should be cut in the travel direction. Friction is increased by the action of the tire biting into the vertical edge of the grooves as it tries to slide across them. Other conditions in the paved travel lanes can adversely affect steering and driver performance. Now, here we see five surface characteristics that can interfere with the driver's ability to control a vehicle. Road drop off, roughness, pavement joints, uneven lanes, and super elevation. We'll look first at super elevation. Here you see a road with proper super elevation, a condition which greatly affects vehicle stability. When proper super elevation is not provided, as shown in the first curve here, a serious safety hazard can result. Serious steering problems can be caused by a rutted track or drop off along the pavement. The tire snags on the pavement edge when the driver attempts to steer back onto the paved surface. Oversteering usually results and the vehicle can cross over into approaching traffic or adjacent lanes. This particular drop off was caused by applying an open graded mix course. The edge should be more gently feathered, but the shoulder surface should not be overlaid with dense mix that would prevent the water from escaping. Here's an example of deep rutting at the pavement edge caused by a combination of wheel action and erosion. Compare the size of the 35 millimeter camera case in the foreground with the depth of the rut. Raviled pavement edges cause steering problems when a wheel drops off the pavement. Because drivers stay away from rabbled edges, the effective lane width is reduced. Structural problems in the roadway will also be created. The second hazardous surface characteristic is rough pavement. Such surfaces cause wheel bounce. Then friction is greatly reduced because the tire loses contact with the surface. On horizontal curves the situation becomes even more hazardous because the vehicle is being forced outward due to centrifugal forces while traveling around the curve. The next hazardous surface characteristic we'll look at is uneven lanes. Wheel ruts in the pavement produce uneven lanes and thus steering problems. Wheel ruts greater than 1-8 to 3-16 inches deep should be identified for leveling through grinding and ore and overlay. These wheel path depressions are an indication of potential wet weather skidding problems. An uneven pavement surface can trap water and cause hydroplaning. Roller coaster pavements cannot accommodate drainage and allow water to collect. Drivers don't know that the water hides depressions in the pavement. When entering these water filled depressions, drivers can unexpectedly lose steering control. Inspection of the roadway during or immediately after a heavy rainstorm will identify sections that drain poorly so that corrective action can be taken. Here you see a driver entering a water filled depression. Hydroplaning can occur even in an urban section like this since many urban roads are speed zoned above 40 miles per hour. This water can also be splashed onto other adjacent vehicles causing loss of vision and control. You've seen that the condition of roadway surfaces greatly affects driving safety. The edge of the roadway, the shoulders, are also an important part of the roadway safety system. We'll study shoulders to 1. Define their purpose and function. 2. Identify the characteristics of shoulders that contribute to proper and improper performance. And 3. Identify proper and improper installation and maintenance procedures that affect safety. Shoulders must be installed and maintained properly to fulfill their purpose. Field experience with shoulders indicate that they contribute to highway safety and desirable traffic operations in many ways that drivers appreciate. Shoulders generally are classified in these categories. Stabilized, paved, and unstabilized local roads. Stabilized shoulders consist of sod, sand, gravel, or any other materials which can carry at least occasional traffic wheel loads. Paved shoulders include Portland cement concrete or asphaltic concrete. They have a hard applied surface coating and a stable base. Shoulders serve the different purposes shown here. These purposes are based on their type of construction, the traffic laws, and the local driving practices. Any shoulder should provide the capability for emergency stopping. The shoulder should also be a surface where drivers can recover steering control when swerving out of the travel lane to avoid a collision or a hazard. Stabilized shoulders provide the surface needed for emergency stopping and evasive action. When a shoulder is paved, many other functions are possible in addition to these two. Paved shoulders can provide additional travel space for slow moving or wide vehicles, for vehicles to bypass construction and maintenance equipment, and for additional travel lanes at peak travel hours if properly designed to carry these loads. Paved shoulders also permit greater steering tolerance, protect the pavement edge from deterioration, and increase operating capacity. For stabilized shoulders, the stabilized edge should extend outward at least four feet from the pavement edge to provide a stable surface for occasional wheel loads. When the stabilized shoulder is sod, it should be mowed regularly so that drivers recognize that it can be driven on in an emergency. When the stabilized shoulder is gravel, it should be compacted to reduce the possibility of loose gravel flying onto the travel lane and being thrown into windshields. Ruts, depressions, and pavement to shoulder drop-offs should be graded out or back filled. Paved shoulders, even those only two feet wide, will increase the effective lane width by greatly reducing the drop-off and loss of steering control problem. Shoulders from two to six feet in width increase traffic capacity and offer the pavement structural protection. Shoulders that are eight feet wide are the minimum width to allow a passenger vehicle to stop on the shoulder and be completely off the travel lane. An eight-foot shoulder also allows space for moving operations. Shoulders of properly designed strength and at least 10 feet wide can be used as turning lanes or bypass lanes. And finally, shoulders of 12 feet width with increased strength design are needed where truck volume is high to provide a turning lane. At least eight factors influence a shoulder's ability to serve its intended function. Some are structural. Others are related to drivers. Shoulders need strength to handle repeated wheel loads and width to permit vehicles to drive on them. Without the proper strength, the shoulder does not function and maintenance costs increase. The standards of the shoulder's construction will determine its potential use. A weak base or surface construction will not stand up to repeated wheel loads or to erosion. So certain requirements need to be anticipated for the construction of effective shoulders. If shoulders are to be used for traffic movement, newly added shoulders should be constructed to standards similar to those of the travel lane. If future widening is planned, base construction should extend far enough outward to construct the future lanes. The width as well as the strength of the shoulder must be part of plans for future road widening. If future plans include potential widening into a four-lane road, the shoulder width for the time before widening needs to take into account the future four lanes. The width should be wide enough to allow two full-width lanes in each direction, plus striping and minimum outer shoulders after widening. Shoulders added near intersections for future use as acceleration, deceleration, or turning lanes should be 12 feet wide to permit truck turning and channelization edge striping. I mentioned before that cross slope is an important factor in road safety for effective water drainage. This is a good time to repeat that the cross slope must be balanced. Too steep a slope encourages loss of steering control. Too shallow a slope doesn't allow effective drainage. State and ashtow standards should be closely followed. Severe increase in cross slope between the travel lane and the shoulder produces a ridge or barn roof profile. Vehicles moving from the travel lane to the shoulder experience a sudden pitch over motion. In wet weather, skidding can occur when the driver oversteers to correct the travel direction. The cross slope differential should not exceed 8% in super elevated cross sections to minimize the pitch over effect. Smaller vehicles are even more susceptible to pitch over. When roads are repaired, resurfaced, or reconstructed, the design of the cross slopes are often changed. While the original cross slope adhered to acceptable pitch over rate and drainage runoff, the construction work may make the new cross slope unacceptable. Overlays applied to the travel lanes and tapered abruptly to the shoulder will produce a much steeper cross slope differential. Thus, the pitch over effect is increased. Conversely, surface coats applied to shoulders but not to travel lanes create a raised ridge at the outer edge of the travel lane. Steering a vehicle up over this ridge is more difficult and drivers are reluctant to move over to the shoulder. If the driver moves over too far, the tire can snag on the ridge. In addition, water can pond on the travel lane and reverse drainage can occur if shoulders are surface coated enough to completely remove the outer drainage cross slope. The shoulder joint itself presents major maintenance problems that we need to be aware of. Separation of the shoulder and travel lane edge, as you see here, allows water to enter the base of both the travel lane and the shoulder. Excessive water under the pavement reduces the strength of the base material. Eventually, the pavement settles or breaks off. The process of deterioration is then accelerated. Differential settling occurs at the base materials are different and vegetation will grow and cause further edge ravelling. Damage to the shoulder joint can then cause problems to drivers. For example, drivers usually move to the left, away from the separated shoulder joint and deteriorated pavement edge, reducing the space for safe travel. When drivers must move from the travel lane to the shoulder, additional problems exist. If the shoulder is lower than the main lane, a drop off condition occurs. If it is higher, a step up condition is created. Both conditions adversely affect safety. The shoulder itself can deteriorate, and shoulder deterioration at the outer edge is a warning that the deterioration will progress toward the travel lane. Water erosion under the pavement and vegetation destroy the base material that supports the surface. Water can't drain away from the shoulder if soil and debris form a dike at the edge. Water then permeates the road base. Grass is another hazard to the shoulder edge. It can encroach on the shoulder surface, encouraging edge ravelling and reducing the effective shoulder width. Drivers perceive the shoulder to be narrow, can't see glass and debris in the weeds, and will not pull completely over onto the narrowed shoulders. Whether or not drivers actually drive on the shoulder, a definite contrast between the travel lane and shoulder should be maintained. The contrast can be achieved by color and or texture differences between the two surfaces. This contrast shows drivers that the shoulder is definitely reserved for special purposes. Also, contrast of the shoulder helps delineate the travel lane in poor conditions such as rain or fog. Another important reason for contrasting the shoulder is that for areas where driving on the shoulder is prohibited, drivers can easily recognize the shoulder by color or the change sound caused by the different texture. Here, you see a shoulder with no differentiating color or texture. The only shoulder distinguishing feature is the painted edge line. When the edge line is deteriorated, there is no definition of the two surfaces. For this reason, edge lines must be maintained to a high degree of reflectivity and brightness when the shoulder surface is the same color and texture as the travel lane. Look at the difference when shoulders have both a color and texture that is different from the travel lanes. The appearance of the shoulder can enhance or totally nullify the driver's decision to use the shoulder. To ensure that the shoulder is functional, to provide a margin of safety, attention must be given to both construction and maintenance. Routine maintenance can identify and correct the pavement and shoulder problems we've discussed. Poor surface conditions, poor drainage, and hazardous pavement edges can be identified during travel to and from maintenance locations. Then, the areas should be visually identified so that improvements can be scheduled. Often, what seems like a minor repair is in truth an indication of more severe problems. Sections of pavement containing edge ravelling, roadside wheel ruts, and separated pavement joints should be identified and programmed into future maintenance projects. If they are left unattended, the repair costs will be much higher. Pavement sections near bridges and other structures need special critical inspection. In many cases, pavements near structures settle when the fill material behind the abutments is not compacted enough. In snow belt regions, ice forms first on bridges. Steering control is lost when vehicles bounce onto the bridge deck from the roadway. Curves also need careful inspection to identify pavement edge drop-off ruts caused by off-tracking vehicles. In severe cases, pavement widening or shoulder strengthening may be warranted at curves where this happens frequently. Maintenance field personnel can give the most valuable information of areas that will need future improvements. Their comments and suggestions should be sought and communicated to the proper administrative source. Develop that communication channel so improvements can be programmed into future maintenance or reconstruction projects. We'll now watch a film on wet weather accidents. Parts of the film will illustrate our discussion here today. After the film, you'll have the chance to give your comments and viewpoints about today's lesson. These films were taken on a new circumferential highway around Washington. Because the roadway was not engineered to be safe in wet weather, this is what happens. This particular stretch of highway has sent them redesigned and made safer. Accidents have fallen off dramatically. But we'll be looking here at just a few of the accidents that happened within the course of a two-day period. The Public Works Committee is concerned with how many other dangerous spots like this may exist throughout the country. That's the purpose of the hearings we're holding in Washington this week. This should be a safe highway. It's a new highway, but there are several things wrong. The grade is too tight. Here we see the same curve from the opposite direction. This poor fellow was so excited that when the car stopped skidding, he drove it into the guard rail. What's the station wagon? The driver of this station wagon is the mother of four children. Luckily, she escaped serious injuries. But before the station wagon could be removed, you see another car skids down the same embankment. This road needs an aggregate with skid-resistant qualities it has since been provided. Where's the Volkswagen? Now keep your eye on this truck. This could have caused a multi-car accident on the lower roadway, only great good fortune prevented. The Public Works Committee wants to know how many other spots there are like this in America. Here's another location and another day. He almost gets run into coming around and getting started here. These films were taken by professional investigators of the Public Works Committee of the United States House of Representatives.


giveaway yes yes yes people give away time so the November giveaway has now ended they were two winners that was selected off the Minecraft keys and both of them were notified one has opted not to disclose his name the other one is James gaming's sister she won the game also in addition to that we also had multiple people that were in our discord that did win multiple games they were giveaway that was done on Thanksgiving day just to celebrate Thanksgiving and we also had giveaways that were for discord exclusive that were also done people were selected games were given and you too can be a part of the community just check the description for the discord exclusive giveaways however if you are here for the Minecraft keys just an update we do have the December Minecraft giveaway that is now open to enter all you need to do is comment on a video preferably this one and make sure that you are subscribed to the channel to enter the discord exclusive giveaway you need to be part of the discord community check the description and over there I am doing giveaways along with my co-admin smells bad gaming he also is doing giveaways check out his channel he makes amazing content and does an amazing job and he is an active member of the community as always thank you so much for your tremendous support the giveaways that I'm doing would not have been possible without the support of each and every one of you so personally thank you you guys are epic legends and to enter the December giveaway again just comment on this video and subscribe to the channel the entries to the giveaways are going to be accepted till December 31st 1159 Eastern Standard Time and the draw is going to take place on January 1st and again two keys are going to be given and same goes for the discord exclusive giveaway the random steam games that I'm giving away they are going to be drawn on January 1st check out the description for details as always thank you again so much for the tremendous support you guys are amazing and I hope to see you on the next video take care people bye