others. Now as people are taking some time to answer those polls, I'm actually interested in a couple of things. So one of the things was what do you think of when you hear the words atmospheric measurements and atmospheric instrumentation? So let's go ahead and try to check out. Dan, can you share with us if people are responding to the word cloud atmospheric measurements? Or what do you think of atmospheric measurements or instrumentation? So this one for atmospheric instrumentation, we're getting radiosons. So those are the weather balloons that go, the instrumentation that go up on the weather balloons, weather stations, complicated observations and measurements in situ, so on-site satellites. And you can definitely keep adding on to this word cloud throughout the night or throughout this evening. And we also have the other word cloud about atmospheric measurements. Measurements are a lot of observations, temperature, data, they are very helpful. Getting the wind velocity, wind speed, and then having those geophysical variables so that uncertainty that comes along with it. Along with this session, we have a couple of poll questions that we're interested in understanding and learning more about what you're interested in for this topic. Specifically, if you're very familiar with meteorology, atmospheric sciences, moderately familiar or slightly familiar, just to get a gauge of who all is out there, then can we see if people have responded to that poll? So I am very familiar with meteorology and atmospheric science is the one that's trending right now. But, you know, we don't always get the gauge of all of our viewers. This is just the participants of the Slido. So definitely continue to answer those questions. We'd be really interested to see how familiar you are with them now versus maybe after the event. And then I think with that, I'll continue the introduction. Today we're going to have again, like I said, a series of scientists and educators on our panel. First, we have Dr. Rich Clark from Millersville University. Can you say hi? Hi. Awesome. We also have Project Scientist Teresa Campos from the NCAR Atmospheric Chemistry Observations and Modeling Lab and the Earth Observing Lab. Hi, Teresa. We have Project Manager Allison Rockwell from the NCAR Earth Observing Laboratory. Hi, Allison. And we have Amy Stevenmer from the UCAR Community Program's Comet Program. Instead of introducing their whole bio like I usually do, I thought it would be fun if we hand it over to the panelists and let themselves give you an introduction of to who they are and how they came to be where they are. Then we'll go into what are the Comet lessons that they just developed and a walkthrough on how you can engage with these free lessons. Rich, take it away. Okay. Thanks, Lorena. I'll just wait for a second for the... There we go. And I'll wait for my slide to come up. There. Well, thank you for joining us, everyone. I can't see who's on, but I'm really pleased that you're here. And we're really excited to talk about the lessons that we've produced on instrumentation and measurement of atmospheric parameters. And I'll start by talking a little bit about myself. I've been interested in instrumentation measurement for a long time. I've been at Millersville for 33 years. I'm a boundary layer person. I studied boundary layers and turbulence. And I have a whole suite of instrumentation that is... I won't say portable, but we can move it from one place to another to accommodate different project designs and experimental designs. We've been all over the country with our instrumentation.  Let me go through them quickly because it sort of says a little bit about myself because one thing that you can see in these pictures is lots of students. And it's one of the things I'm really proud of is over the years, since about mid-90s, I've introduced about 250 students to field research.  I'm generally one person or there might be one other scientist with me on site. And there may be 20 students involved in the project. And I rely on them as I would colleagues and peers to learn the instrumentation and and get intimately involved with it. And we can talk about this later, but just to quickly wrap this up as far as my personal introduction. My passion is sort of like all over the place. I like turbulence. I study low-level jets for my masters, my PhD. I do a lot of air chemistry. I love astronomy and solar physics, complexity, adaptive systems and stuff like that. I've been teaching for, like I said, 33 years working with students. The teaching load here at Millersville is pretty hefty, but we still have an opportunity to get out in the field. And then my personal passion, I have a couple pictures down there. Riding on a camel was fun. But biking and skiing and sports cars and stargazing and just being involved in the community is the kinds of things that I like. And I'll just stop there and say thank you for your time. Awesome. Allison, do you want to go next? And then I think as everybody's aware, Zoom needs the microphone, so we're always, you're muted. So thank you. Thank you, Rich. And yes, I'd like to thank everybody who's joining today and taking the time to to learn more about these amazing lessons that we've produced. I just want to give folks a little bit of an idea of who I am and my background. I've been at the NCAR Earth Observing Laboratory for 11 years. And for those of you who aren't familiar with NCAR, the Earth Observing Laboratory is one of seven laboratories within NCAR. We specialize in observational science. So growing up, I was always interested in the natural world around me and wanting to learn more about it. And that led me to a starting off my career in science education. And so when I started off in the Earth Observing Laboratory, I did a lot of fields or education outreach for field projects. So I have several pictures here from various field projects that I've done, where I've hosted open houses with our aircraft, or going to talk with schools and students and tell them about the how we collect data. And this picture on the upper left side is one of my favorites when I was in the Maldives Islands. And after the presentation, we just got swarmed with students, just asking questions and being very, very curious about the presentation, which was great to have that informal interaction. And then just wanted to also give you an idea of what I do on my personal time. I obviously have a common theme here of traveling. In college, I spent a very formative semester trekking around Patagonia, which was amazing. I loved to scuba dive, travel. There's a picture of me at the Manaloa in Hawaii, up at the NCAR facility there, and got to tour the NOAA facility. And then also, animals is another love of mine. And so when I was little, I got to raise a lot of different animals, including several orphaned raccoons. So all of that just has shaped me into loving the environment and nature and gotten me on my path. And since education, I've also pivoted into project management, which doesn't lend itself to fun, exciting images such as this for the most part. So that's where these pictures are more from the education and outreach side of my career with EOL. So with that, I'll pass it over to Teresa, or Amy, sorry, Amy. Sure, I can take over from here. Thank you, everyone. And thanks, Allison. I would have thought you could have shown the flowchart of the 10 lessons and their statuses over time as a project management graphic. I thought that was pretty interesting and would give people an idea of the actual scope of this work. I put together a few pictures to sort of document or be able to visualize parts of my progress to where I am now. So I'm starting in the upper left corner. This is a graphic from my master's thesis work at Oregon State University. It involves looking at the vertical distribution of clouds in the atmosphere and particularly the frequency of layered cloud systems. Yes, it was a very academic type of topic, but it was a good project. And from there, I came to Colorado to take on an associate scientist research assistant position with the Cooperative Institute for Research and Environmental Sciences or CERES and NOAA's Environmental Research Lab. I worked on a variety of environmental data analysis projects, including getting a chance to participate in field measurements that involve collecting UV radiation observations off of snow covered terrain from a rooftop at the poker flats research range near Fairbanks, Alaska. While in my role at CERES, I was also able to shift into a whole new aspect of work in the scientific communications area. So the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment was one project that I was involved in. And there were a lot of other science communication projects. I was doing those years that are not included here. There's also a graphic missing on this slide, and that is a UCAR Office of Programs logo. After several years at CERES, I went on to pursue science communication and education projects in a more focused way, which included a casual, essentially part-time appointment, working on digital education projects within UOP, the UCAR Office of Programs, which was the former name of what is now UCAR Community Programs. In late 2007, a position opened up with Comet, and I applied and was hired. I have now been at Comet for almost 13 years, and at UCAR for a total of 16 years. I work primarily on a whole lot of distance learning projects across a range of topic areas. And I've also helped with some of our virtual course facilitation. So this picture is probably from 2012 or so. Comet was really in the virtual delivery space long before the virtual delivery space became the norm. And the other thing I've added at the top right here are some photos from volunteer informal science education efforts that I include because I consider this an important part of my overall purpose and passion. It's work I still do. This photo on the right is from a Jefferson County, Colorado STEM event last December. But this work has really spanned a couple decades for me. And through the process of routinely developing learning objectives and then delivering live education programs aligned to those objectives, I think it helps set me up for some of the work at Comet. And later on in the presentation we'll have a chance to delve into some of that work a little more. So this is where I'll end and from here I will turn it over to Teresa. Thanks, Amy. Thanks, Amy. We can hear you well here. Oh, great. My screen disappeared. Sorry. I wanted to... My path has been a very wandering path. I put in a black and white photo of myself up here in the upper left as a middle schooler. I was a tomboy. I like sports. I really liked ecology and at the time in the 70s there was a promotion for us to give a hoot and don't pollute, as would Ziyao would say. And I was a founding member of my elementary school ecology club and that pretty much involved just picking up trash around the playground. I really liked... I grew up in Indianapolis and I went to the race. That was a family bonding activity. And my first instrument was my father's stopwatch and I have a photograph of it here. And where I learned the value of accuracy and my dad taught me how to focus on a fence post and as the car passed by first and second time I could accurately time it to five significant digits if I can be a little nerdy. Formally I studied chemistry and not much gas phase chemistry at that. And my postdoctoral study is where I came to NCAR through the advanced study program and learned atmospheric chemistry by doing it. And I became introduced and fell in love with field work and I show some of these photos from field work all over the world. Here in the upper right in the G5 we were studying cloud evolution in the Pacific between Hawaii and California in the trade evolution, the trade wind, cloud formation processes. And you need to understand chemical measurements in order to characterize air mass history. And then the LORC left, we studied Asian dust being convected up by dust storms and transported across the Pacific in the Ace Asia project. And then the right and some of that dust made it over the U.S. continent and we saw it in satellite images and some of the haze was visible to the eye. One of the more remote places I've been was Christmas Island about 3,000 miles due south of Hawaii near the equator and we studied sulfur chemical cycle, sulfur emissions from the ocean and their potential in cloud chemistry. And in the lower right is the kind of thing you do in the field, I'm using a big wrench to break up some dry ice for one of my, to cool one of my instruments. And I'm out on the airplane on the tarmac just below the airplane doing that lovely task. And so that's, that's my, my job is to support through the chemistry division, the chemistry modeling and observations lab and also through the Earth observing laboratory have a foot in both groups. And I support university requested projects, gas phase measurements aboard the National Science Foundation aircraft. And now that's enough about me. Let's hand it over to Rich to talk about how our lesson development project came into being. Yeah, so thank you everybody. Thank you everybody for sharing your background. It's really interesting to see that everybody has a commonality of wanting to share their science. Rich, we did have a question, but I think it might be better suited for a later timeframe. Once you guys have talked a little bit more about about the comment modules on the program. Okay, great. That's fine. Well, yeah, let me talk a little bit about this, the background because the segue is actually a combination of about a 30 year effort to bring a educational materials to students at a high level of quality and it actually started back in the day of Bob Serif and I believe was NCAR director back in the early 90s. And he published an article in the bulletin of the American Meteorological Society where he pointed to a serious imbalance between observation and observational and theoretical numerical components of the atmospheric sciences. And a few years later, Gene Tockley from Iowa State University did another survey and found that the situation we had made some progress, but it wasn't very much and there was still this need out there. And then finally NSF, I think the turning point maybe a little bit was in the NSF in 2007 created this committee on strategic guidance for support of the atmospheric sciences and out of that came a recommendation to take concrete steps to enhance the availability of collaborative tools and university instruction and observing techniques to foster the continued development of cutting-edge instruments and to increase general literacy among the atmospheric sciences community. And so and you have to appreciate that while most universities have some facilities that they can bring to bear on particular projects, there's a lot you know, not every, most universities don't have everything that they need to put on a project, create the instruments that are needed for a project. So rather than putting the onus on individual universities, the committee suggested a community oriented approach to the development of good online materials back in 2007. And so you know, at the same time, myself and others who I was talking to in the community, Roger Wakamoto for instance, Vanda Grubbyshik, Alison finally, whenever we finally met prior to this project, we started to develop this interest, a common interest in bringing about this, these educational materials and of course there was Comet, we had, by then most of us had had educational experience with the Comet modules and we knew the high quality lessons that Comet can produce. And so it was natural that we would involve them. And so you know, like I said, it was a long and involved process, but then around 2016 we sort of got it together, we put together a proposal and it was funded by National Science Foundation to produce 10 modules. So if we want to go on to the next slide maybe. And so you know, what are the societal benefits of measurement? I mean, these 10 lessons are all about instrumentation and measurement of atmospheric parameters. And you know, why do we want to, why do we want to go through a course or why do we want to educate our students in these areas? Well, there's lots of societal benefits. We listed three or four or five here, but the list is thousands and thousands long. You know, our understanding of atmospheric chemistry relies on a whole suite of instrumentation, some of which different sampling times and different measurement techniques and all of those things have to be brought together in such a way as to make sense of something, make sense of a phenomenon or a condition or a situation that we're trying to measure. We have large scale weather events which have direct effects on our regional weather patterns. And so we want to, we have to understand sort of the large scale dynamics of, of the, you know, the global environment, let's say, for both climate and large scale dynamic interests. And when we do, you may have a different type of instrument. You may have an instrument that you're going to have to rely on its robustness and its durability over a long period of time between, between times whenever, whenever a technician might be able to go out and actually repair or, or calibrate the instrument or something like that. So all of those things have to go into the evaluation of what instrument or what analyzer or what type of sensor to use, what is the, what is the sampling rate that you need in order to be able to derive the, the, the, the parameters that you need. And also the instruments are extremely important to model initialization fields.  If you can bring in better measurements to the initialization field, the chances are your model will not diverge quite as quickly. And so things like, for instance, measurement uncertainty is important. And regardless of the type of instruments, and I have a, I have a few instruments here that I just thought no matter what it is, I mean, you can have instruments like as simple as this. Here's a, here's a liquid and glass thermometer. And, and, and you swing this thing around and, and you can measure temperature and you can measure relative humidity with it. Or you have a simple aneroid barometer where, where the aneroid cell expands and collapses and measures atmospheric pressure. You have handheld weather instruments that have thermistors and high, high, high gristers and, and, and whatnot for, for measurement. And then you have very sophisticated instruments like this sonic anemometer that you can set on top of opponent measures wind speed at 20 times a second. And so, and so you can back out turbulence and stuff like that. So all of those, you know, you have to know about this. I mean, it's important that, that we educate our students in, in instrumentation and measurements so that they understand, you know, things, for instance, like what is the range? What's the limitation of instrumentation? What is the, the, the sensitivity of the instrument? What is the measurement uncertainty? What's the, the, the precision? And even things like site representativeness, which is really important for a meteorologist. There's certain things that are more important for meteorology than there are maybe for other fields, but like, for instance, site representativeness, the cost of the instrument, the durability of the instrument, many of our instruments have to be outside for long periods of time. So all of that is really important. And that all goes into benefiting society because what we're trying to do ultimately is better predict the environment. So we can go on to the next slide. So we created this course, the National Science Foundation grant provided funding for NCAR and Comet and Millersville University. And I have to add, we had, Millersville University had a contract with an educational consultant, Dr. Kathleen Macken, who did a lot of the evaluation on how students were engaging in the course and what was, what were their, you know, what was their, their user satisfaction, the user satisfaction with the various modules. We did this for both undergraduate students, graduate students reviewed the course, faculty, friendly faculty reviewed the course. And just recently, we just completed a pilot simulation of the course using 12 undergraduate students to take the courses as if it were an online synchronous offering, especially important now with this COVID-19 pandemic. And all of us going online, we wanted to see whether or not these, these 10 lessons could stand, stand up to just being taught as an online sync asynchronous course. So anyway, there's, there's a series of 10 lessons, you know, brought brought in, so I'm going to let Allison Rocco talk more about this, but I'll just quickly go through it that we brought in subject matter experts to go through, to develop the content. That was refined through, through various reviews and evaluations and feedback and improvement and all of that. And then we handed it over to Comet who did the tricks that they do. I'll let Amy talk about that because I don't know the inner workings of it, but all of a sudden it becomes something that's extremely pleasing to work with. And, and then we would review that again. And it would go back and forth until we finally had a product that we, that we were satisfied with and we would then make public. They are all freely available. You have to register. Of course, you have to log on register and there's registration, but after that they're freely available. It's about 20 to 25 hours of, of training and atmospheric instrumentation. And they're just top level modules. I find that I've been teaching instruments course since 1990 at Miller'sville University. And I remember way back in the day, there was a, a, a DOS product, if anybody can remember that operating system. There was a, a DOS product that was made by Desert Research Institute that we used to use that was really kluji, but it actually captured like the essence of instrumentation and measurement and what you needed to do. And of course that stopped working as computers became more refined and it was no longer supported. It went away. And what we wanted to do is sort of bring this, bring that kind of idea into, you know, into, to make it more contemporary. And, and so I, what we've created here is mainly for upper level undergraduates and, and maybe first, second year graduate students that are going to be involved in instrumentation. It's, it's an excellent training suite of lessons for that sort of thing. And it's also, it's also for maybe those schools that do not have the opportunity or those students, I should say, they do not have the opportunity to go into the field and, and have this experience. This offers them a virtual experience that may not be the real thing, but it's pretty, it's a good second place. And I better stop there. I do have a question real quick. You know, you mentioned there, people go out to the field and they do these instruments and this gives us a background. Do you have to take these courses before going out to the field? Or is it more that you just get more, more information so that you feel more comfortable? When I would say this, of course, would be really helpful. If it were me, if I was going to go out into the field, even if I didn't have a formal course ready to go, I would have my students go through these modules and, you know, go do this as part of preparation for, for going out into the field and onto this project. But it's not necessary. There's so much learning that goes on in the field, you know, but if you think about the number of students that have the opportunity to go into the field and participate in field projects versus the total number of students that are out there in atmospheric science, that's a small fraction. So how do you get to those people that may not have that opportunity? That's what this is for. I mean, there's a, there's a, there's real power to the, to the segue modules for being able to engage those students that may not have that opportunity. Great. Thank you so much. And then I'll hand it over to, I think it's Allison. Yes, thank you. Rich, you gave an excellent overview and description of the, of the course and the lessons and why we need them. I do want to point out to the audience that Rich is the lead principal investigator on this, on this project, as well as the academic advisor. So that's his role in the project. And I just wanted to make sure that that was understood, as well as the term segue. I don't think we've used that yet. That's the acronym that we have used for the project is called segue. So if you hear that again, it's really just this, this overall project that we're mentioning here. So as the, as the project manager for, for this, my main role was to really just kind of keep it moving, keep it, keep it going forward. As you can imagine, all of the subject matter experts have a lot of competing priorities. So to get them to work on this, you know, just to take some encouragement and, and just constant communication with them to, to keep it going. I'm sure a lot of you have heard the, the term herding cats. Well, this is herding subject matter experts, which I might argue is a little more challenging than herding cats. So, so my, my, my role in this is really just to kind of keep the project within scope and just kind of keep going in a forward direction. So the earth observing laboratory provided the majority of the subject matter experts. So these are people who have the expertise in each of these topics and have many, many years of field experience. So they brought that field experience to the lessons and really tried to bring them to life. So I tallied up roughly how many people worked on the project over the four years and it was close to 80 people. So it was, it was quite an effort to get this going. And we had many, many people provide input and reviews and assessments. And it was just, it was an amazing journey to work with that many people and those, that many subject matter experts and, and people across the board on this. So Teresa Campos is one of the, the subject matter experts who developed the unique content for the trace gas lesson. And she's with us today to, to bring in her expertise from the field work into, into the lessons, which every subject matter expert did. They really brought in their, their, their expertise from field work, which is what makes these lessons so unique. And each lesson has unique content. So these are, you won't find this information elsewhere. And I'll let Amy, when she gets to talking about Comet, explain some of the, the unique entities of each project. So moving on here. I already mentioned Teresa, who's one of the subject matter experts in atmospheric chemistry. And one of the reasons that we're highlighting the trace gas lesson today and or this season is that so many of us are experiencing extreme wildfire events in and around your area. We're, we're in Boulder, Colorado right now, and we have two large wildfires that have cropped up over the weekend. And I look out my window and I see just plumes of black smoke. So I know it affects human health as well as the environment. And Teresa's, we'll, we'll talk about that, but that's why we're highlighting the trace gas lesson today. And then Amy, Steve or her role in the project was to keep the Comet side of the project going and keeping that moving forward, as well as providing instructional, instructional design to each of the, each of the lessons. So this is truly a group effort. And I've been so honored to be part of it. And so nice to have this final product to share with everybody. So with that, I'm going to pass it over to Teresa. And then we'll get a little glimpse of the lesson from Amy as well. Thanks, Allison. So one of the most interesting places I've been to do field research was the Maldives Islands. And it was interesting both from a personal point of view from a very, it was in a very exotic place. It's just off the western coast of India. And we were there as I've got my cursor on this map in the lower left corner. And in 1999, we were there to study the outflow of air over southern Asia. And we were basically flying up and down the Indian Ocean just offshore of India and the Maldives Islands. And this photograph, this schematic in the middle shows, you know, some of the kinds of tropical cloud formations we were expecting. Where we were, this cloud in the middle is a representation of the intertropical convergent zone that happens near, well, it walks, but it's near the equator. And we had space tools to use to evaluate what was going on coming offshore from southern Asia. And then we also had a couple of boats an Indian vessel, the Sagar Kanya, and the US research vessel, Ron Brown. We had a LiDAR on the ground looking up. And then a couple of airplanes, several airplanes, the US took the NSF C-130 turboprop aircraft. These four photographs taken by the primary investigators show visually the Asian brown cloud that we were there to study at various latitudinal positions, nine north, three degrees north of the equator, near the equator, and then the southern air south in the southern hemisphere at 7.5 degrees south. And you can visually see the changes in the air composition. And even you can sort of suss out a little bit that you might want to look at the impact of air composition on cloud formation and cloud statistics. So that was a super interesting, scientifically interesting project that was still relevant today. But it was also, it was the other side of the world, 12 time zones away. We had to ferry over our compressed gas bottles on small human driven boats from the main island where the shipping over to the airport island, where our base of operations was in the Maldivian atoll. And if something broke, we would wander around the main city Mali and just wander in stores. And we found a diode that I needed to fix and a CO sensor that I had, the data for which ended up appearing in an article in Science Magazine. So it was worth going on a scavenger hunt in a local store that had pants and watches and all kinds of things like that. And you also learned when you make measurement on an aircraft, I was relatively new at my job and at this particular job. And the thing that you learn is that an aircraft is a challenging measurement environment. It's a big shaking box. It's hot in the front and it's cold in the back. The electrical circuits are hard to get them to work as well inside an airplane in the air as they do on the ground. Many things are quite different. And so being skeptical about your instrumentation, characterizing it as well as you can in the lab, but also taking time to characterize it in the air and to seek out other measurements of the same species on other platforms. And we flew by the ground station, also measuring ozone and CO. That's what I was measuring, carbon monoxide and ozone. And we compared our numbers to make sure that the two data sets would be combinable because we wanted to be able to characterize the air quality over a very large area. And so great. Thank you, Teresa. And I think we did have a word cloud that we asked people where have we flown? Where has NCAR scientists taken their measurements? So if you guys are interested and Dan, if you can share that results with everybody, I know Alison, this will take you out of the presenter mode and then we can share again. So the questions was where have NCAR scientists taken measurements of Earth's atmosphere? Select all that apply. So many of you have said all over the continents, over all of the oceans, over the northern hemisphere and over the southern hemisphere. And I think the answer is that you have flown over all of these. Is that correct? Yeah, I see some nodding heads. Everyone's right. Everyone is right. Yes, thank you for participating in that poll. And then for the interest of time, I think maybe we can go over to actually see what it is like to go through the MetEd website. Maybe Amy, if you can give us a quick walkthrough on what people can expect when they get to this site. Sure. Let me share my screen. And we can see here the MetEd website. Okay, so this is MetEd. And I know a question that came up as we were preparing for these presentations was what is Comet? So as Lorena said, Comet is a UCAR community program. UCAR community programs are sort of the outward facing service part of UCAR. Comet has been around since 1989, delivering education and training and professional development via distance learning as well as a lot of residence courses. I think the first web lesson was actually published in 1997. When Comet started, it was on LaserDisc and then eventually switched to CD and DVD and then the web in the late 90s via the MetEd website. So this is MetEd. And I'm not sure how familiar you all are with MetEd. So I'm going to try to acquaint you with it pretty quickly before we jump into a lesson. The first thing you need to do if you are brand new to MetEd and want to access content is register. So you'll see this sign up button. It takes you to our registration page. We ask for an email and you can, you know, put in your name, your affiliation. If you are taking this for a course or for your work, you can provide your instructor or your supervisor and they will be able to, you know, track your progress through different training. But it's free to register. We don't send you spam. Everything is very safe and it will give you access to everything on the site. If you go to our education and training tab here, you will see the whole list of all our lessons. Right now we have 539 individual lessons on MetEd. Right here, you can expand to get a glimpse of our topic areas. So we are working across a range of environmental and geoscience topics from numerical weather prediction to oceanography, marine, satellite meteorology, emergency management. We have a lot of fire weather lessons in environment and society. And then we also have these great instrumentation courses that I'm going to show you. Just hold on. I'm going to show you a couple more things before we get there. I'll go be quick though. And Amy, is it true that these are available in multiple languages as well? Yes. So that was the next thing, Lorena, perfect timing. I was going to show you here. We have training available in several languages. I think including English, there's nine different languages represented on MetEd. The instrumentation lessons are available in English and Spanish. Actually, we have eight of them. Eight of the ten in Spanish are live right now. And the final two Spanish versions will be published by the end of the calendar year. Another quick trick I wanted to show you, if you just type your keyword in this field here, you can pull up any lesson titles that have that keyword in it. So I'm just going to click on the most recent instrumentation lesson that was published. It's the surface precipitation lesson. One thing you'll see, it's important to note the sort of the level of the training. As Rich said, these lessons are really geared to advanced undergraduates or graduate students. So there's a fair amount of math background and sort of topical knowledge required to really get into these lessons. But the full course is accessible here. And you can also get there directly from the URL that we had on the bottom of all of the slides we've been showing you tonight. So there's a total of ten lessons. And as Rich said, it's about 20 or 25 hours of content. I cannot claim instructional design credit for all of these. There were two instructional designers at Comet, Alan Bull and Tony Mankus, who were working with me on a lot of these. In total, we had about 12 people at Comet who directly worked on this project. Others who had significant roles were Steve Deo, he's our graphic artist, Gary Pacheco, our web developer and programmer, and then David Roussi, who is our Spanish translator. So all the lessons are accessible here. You can see the English and the Spanish versions, skill level for them all. And we're going to go ahead and open up the trace gases lesson. All the lessons include a pre-assessment as well as a final quiz. And the pre-assessment and final quiz, the questions are set up to be parallel. They're not exactly identical, but they are parallel. So you can actually see how your understanding has changed from your pre-test score to your quiz score. Hopefully you are doing better on the final quiz after you have been through all the training. But when you go into a lesson and all of the instrumentation lessons use a very similar interface, we've got a left hand nav. This is actually pretty standard interface for a lot of our MedEd lessons. The left hand navigation really shows you the table of contents and you can sort of start clicking through pages. The lessons are set up to advance through the pages sequentially, but I'm going to go ahead and jump to a couple pages in the content. The first one is this page right here. Why measure trace gases? So this is sort of part of the introductory part of the lesson. And so we're trying to introduce the learner to why they would care about trace gases and really get them motivated to be going through this learning. And one thing that we try to do is use a lot of visuals, use a lot of media and comment lessons, as well as a lot of interactive questions to engage the learner. So on this page, you can kind of see all of those elements. We've got the lesson text. We've got a nice visual. We've got information clearly laid out. And then we've got an interactive question at the end here. So this looks really great, Amy. I think it lends itself well to be assignments if there are professors out there that are interested in kind of learning more, having their students learn more, rather than developing their own curriculum or lesson plan. I feel like this could supplement what they're working on in their classroom. Is that kind of what you've seen it be used for? You know, I think that's a better question for Rich. But before we go there, I wanted to give Teresa a chance to comment because she was the author on this lesson on sort of some of the what went into this decision making for what actually to include in this table of contents. So, you know, as we go through these different sections in the lesson, we can see kind of the topics that Teresa chose to include. And that in itself is a really difficult thing to try to really try to figure out what you're going to include and what is not in your scope. So I wanted to let her kind of comment on that part a little bit. Well, this was really hard to scope this. I tried to take a senior level, first year grad student level course I had taken in both undergrad and graduate school and chopped two thirds of it and get to the basic measurement methods. And I think we did a decent job of breaking it into ways to analyze a single molecule in a very complex mixture.  Well, before you can analyze it, you have much greater success if you run it through a chromatography column to physically separate different types of molecules in the comet team did a fantastic job of producing creating this animation to illustrate very clearly this principle. And so I really wanted to show off that wonderful contribution from the team. That's so awesome. I'm happy to see that you have a lot of pictures and texts and animations in these lessons. Yeah, so I think those are the main things that Teresa and I wanted to highlight. And Lorena, if you want to direct your question to Rich, I really think he's the best person to comment on how these are being used in the classroom. Yes. So Rich, have you seen these being used in the classroom? Well, I've used them in the classroom. Oh, yeah, you mentioned it. Yeah. As as they they've been, they've been made public over the course of the last year, even beyond that, right, Allison, maybe over the last year and a half now they've been made public and every time they are, I will let my students know. But I can example would be whenever I teach my instrumentation measurement course, I go through all of these things and I use each one of these comments, each one of these lessons as a supplementary material surrounding what I can I can easily then more embellish on it. I have instrumentation right there on the table, like these kinds of things here that I can show the students, but then I can refer them to this to this lesson. So I use it mainly as supplementary material. But that said, I there there is a it does stand up to using it as a online asynchronous course. If that was the only thing that you could do. That's awesome. And in this world of virtual learning, it's definitely there's a lot of lessons out there for anyone to check out, even if you're not taking courses, if you just decide that you want to learn more. And with that, I'd like to thank our panelists. We do have a few questions from the audience. If that's okay at this time to take to take those questions. Okay, great. So one of the questions we've had pending is having worked on several field projects. Can you explain an example what an instrument malfunctioned causing an IOP or an intensive operative program to not go the way the PI's plan, the principal and vets to get us planned? Allison, do you want to take that? Or do you want me to or Teresa? I think Teresa or you might be better at addressing that. Go ahead, Teresa. Well, it's very much outside my area, but there was a Rolombo go was an experiment in Argentina, and maybe Lorenen should take this question. And they weren't able to get the Earth Observing Laboratory radar down surface radar down there, the S-POL radar. And so the scientists were left with using the tools they had, and they couldn't address any of their scientific objectives that required the radar in place. Yeah, and I think they did get a CSU radar down there in place of it. So they got some data, but not as extensive as they would have liked. I'll just add to it, you know, whenever we were participating in Picon out in Kansas, planes elevated convection at night, we had an acoustic sodar there that was just driving us crazy. And for the first week and a half, I have, and this goes back to, you know, sort of student involvement, and I had students literally tearing it apart, changing coax cables, changing power cables, doing this, doing that, doing everything, trying to make the case to the manufacturer that there was a problem with the transceiver. And after a week and a half, the manufacturer finally believed us and sent us a new transceiver. But it took us, it took a marathon effort. But for that whole period of time, we did not have winds and virtual temperature measurements from that acoustic cellar, which were pretty important for low level jet studies. It sounds to me like when you go on a field campaign, it's as if you're astronauts in outer space and you have to work with what you have in order to get those measurements. So it's pretty, it's pretty cool. And we do have another question. As satellites are providing fine measurements with wider coverage, are we eventually going to rely less on in situ observations in the future? Or do you think we might use both or? Teresa, do you want to take it first? I can say something about it, but... Sure, absolutely. I mean, satellites provide great powerful measurements and rich. I think we should both chime in here. Right now, the satellites are not great at measuring... Well, they're less accurate at measuring air close to the surface, the lower boundary layer. And until we validate satellite measurement in that important layer, vertical layer, I think there's still a role for in situ. Iran mute. Rich. Yeah, I think he's getting the rich. Yeah. Zoom. I didn't click it, but it didn't take. Yeah, let me just follow up by saying that I totally agree with that. And most of the projects that we've been involved in have been, there's been satellite measurements involved, and we've been in part of validation study. For instance, the NASA project that went on for five years called DiscoverAQ, that's the acronym. It was an air quality study, and it involved satellite Passover, but it also involved the NASA P3B aircraft flying in from 15,000 feet and spiraling down to about 2,000 feet, but it couldn't land there because it was in the middle of nowhere. So we provided tethered balloon measurements carrying some of the same instrumentation on our balloons that was on the aircraft, like the ozone analyzers and NOx and stuff like that. And we took our tethered balloons up to 2,000 feet, the NASA plane flew around. So essentially, we completed the picture from the satellite to the aircraft all the way down to the ground. And so you're still going to need, and once you validate the satellite, then the satellite, you can use the satellite for global type measurements, but you're still going to need those instrumentations, that instrumentation platform every now and then to either calibrate or revalidate or go to the next generation of satellite measurements. So I don't see where you'll ever fully remove the need for ground-based and airborne and type instrumentation and profiling. Great. It sounds like there's a lot of collaboration between a lot of different layers, just like there is a lot of collaboration in making these educational modules and lesson plans for everybody to be able to use them. We do have a final question just because we didn't have that many questions, and I wanted to ask you, it might be out of the realm of this talk, and you're welcome to say so we could definitely send more information to them this way, but can radon outside of the house be equal to the inside of the house using detection instruments at the same time? I have an opinion. I can contribute a little, just a tiny bit, and I'm not a radon, but to measure radon, it takes a long time to get enough signal to measure it. You can get the same amount outside your house, but it's not likely. The air currents outside your house are going to change constantly the amount of radon from the soil that sees your detector. Inside your house, you have much slower turnover rate. If you're my house, I have electric heat. I don't have a blower, and then, so anyway, I would say it would be serendipity if you got the same answer, but I'm not. Great. Well, thank you so much for taking a crack at that question, and we are at our time. I'd like to thank again all of our panelists, Teresa Campos, Rich Clark, A.V. Sievermer, and Allison Rockwell, for sharing about the comment lessons that just got published. So check them out. Go explore them. Let us know what you think about them, and we look forward to seeing you at the next event. Bye, everybody. Thank you all for participating. Thank you.


Going on everyone Sam here with late sports coach been 22-23 pretty immaculate basketball hobby five box case number 14 tiered random team style Look again at your random results as always can find those on the Results tab on the website as well as a link in chat We're gonna do guess the logo man for $360 break credit. I'm gonna type in guesses start now Start now when you see that come through chat make your guess 30 seconds of a logo man in this this product. Good luck Cody H with two spots in both of the prime racing breaks 34 37 Got a leaf art of sport coming up after this everybody Love it. Look at everybody the Phoenix Suns Gorilla. Can we get Michael out of here? Find that guy in Ben and been him on everything Po Bon Marjanovitch. He actually might be in there. Paisa. Oh god. That'd be awesome All right, everybody. I'm gonna type in guesses are clues are One two three four I All right Good luck everybody. We're down to 34 to go on the second one here ladies and gents 34 to go Racing racing. I saw somebody pulled. I saw an Instagram reel of this of prime racing It was a one-of-one from a fire suit of the McDonald's logo. Oh, that's kind of fire. I just saw that while I was out there It's like there are some pretty nasty patches in that man I'm not the consignment thing over accidentally the other day. I think yesterday knocked it over. Yeah with a case Yeah, yeah, Luke will be in here. Yeah, Dirk's in this. I'm sure You other guys from the Mavs vets. All right, we've got a James Harden three of ten for the Sixers six says Yeah, Dana's a logo man. I'm sure that is gonna be a Quentin Grimes 25 and 99 going to the Knicks That's when they're at New York Thank you there. Mr. Tyler pick up a spot in prime racing number two. It's down to 33 33 We've got a Palo Bancaro 12 of 45 Three color rookie patch congrats on that one there magic Palo Bancaro That's sick, dude Brad. Um, how is it Brad dorty? I want to say it is how to pronounce that. Yeah, Dorty Yeah 67 to 99 for the Cavaliers use a stud man. He's another underrated guy Dear dorty or dowry. I forgot to say Dirty yeah Very nice one quiet. Yeah Clutch time Cole Anthony. Nice one there 22 of 49 going to the magic. That's on that magic Thank you. Thank you, Matthew And then five of ten is Manu Ginobili on the IMAX signatures congrats spurs Nice one there spoils 10 Brandon dubs Brandon Bdub picking up a spot in number two We're down to We're down to 32 to go now. I'll just completely Mess that one up 32 32 to go everybody you can be a NASCAR product Dorty. Yep. Okay. I was getting that right. I'll try anything once Here's the mantra. There's the life mantra Brandon right to 99 is Palo Ben caro. Is he actually Yes, yes, you did not know that actually this car guy There is not Daniel, but I have like I can't do it obviously, but I've always thought about that being a great idea Like a website that tracks all the hits and stuff That is a tray man for the thunder to 99 Sports, yeah, like a jumbo drop in the knowledge bones Got a Nicola Yolk it's nice one there. That is gonna be at 10 of 99 game use Jersey six of ten chocolate and L Congrats on that one there Sons there you go sons. Hello Jaden Nice one here. We got sneaker swatches signatures gold steal of the draft AJ Griffin going to the Hawks Congrats on that. Let me number to 10 Get that into a Maggie Magnus and the next one on AJ come on dude AJ Griffin Sneaker swatches signatures gold Very nice And numbered 10 of 14 Blake Wesley two colored RPA going to the Spurs again good stuff Chris Very nice. Actually, I did know that Michael because he's one of the lowest scoring first-round picks of all time I believe Jeff with a prime racing spot 31 31 to go Well, if I don't see a jumbo Diaz spot in prime racing Get beat up on Saturday the next time I see him a Saturday, so it'll be up on that day Hate to beat up Diaz on Saturday Be coming on your day off just for that That is gonna be sick to 99 is Lori at marketing Jazz nice one here is gonna be 299 Kevin Love on the standard for the heat. That's a weird James Hardin 86 of 99 for the Sixers City edition Jersey on very cool Really nice one here four of ten the Clippers Koran Butler. That's sick, man Four of ten Koran Butler three-card a game use patch auto Yukon legend 23 and 99 rookie introductions is gonna be a Max Christie. Hey come back this last one. God. That's so cool, man Max Christie So don't man to 49 for the bucks legend signatures Kareem Abdul Jabbar The Luel Cinder days good stuff. They're Milwaukee Going to Brayden K. Congrats Brayden God that's disgusting 25 of 49 green Abdul Jabbar Take a John pick up a spot Yeah, that's freaking awesome, man. I need to pick up a cream auto at some point I want to get a cream Lakers auto before I die. I Will own one Don't know when but I will who you have in this quattro Is gonna be a kid Cunningham to 49 we did not unfortunately shorts Jumbo patch mark Williams 42 of 50 for the Hornets Yeah, 299 that is Brandon Ingram 43 of 99 Congrats their pelicans game use This is dope 72 of 99 is a true RPA of Jordan Goodwin Jordan Goodwin. Oh Mads raps got you. There's still a couple boxes. Hopefully see something That is gonna be a 41 of 49 Rob Ory Robert Ory on the shadow box signature Robert Ory and Nice one here. He's again double-check make sure it's This one up going to the Thunder that is gonna be a shade Gilgis Alexander on the Immaculate Signature moves Congrats on that one. Oh, yeah, big shot Bob that last one. Mr. Rob Ory Shea Gilgis Alexander Going to the Thunder I'm surprised the Robert Poisson coffee down. It's not here for that one Happy crazy JMO. Don't disrespect our PC 49 Malcolm Brogdon 11 of 49 for the Celtics Got 7 of 25 a manual quickly For a collared game use patch for the Knicks Swatches can't hide that one true It's gonna be 22 of 25 AJ Griffin steal the draft this one steal the draft AJ Griffin I pulled there's another one right here patch Nice one here about a sneaker swatch signature six of ten for the Thunder Sean Kemp I know these are getting signed to I posted it literally on his Instagram story that the one of the guys is signing And the other half of it's already signed So de griff exactly Fair yeah, I'm gonna make sure that they're Yeah, go to the pistons man do a lot of graph Rashid Wallace Rip Hamilton, let's go dude. God. That's so sick Good luck on that Eric. Good luck. Congrats on that one Like I said, I know Rashid already signed them and Rip Hamilton posted on his Instagram story today See if I wonder if he still has it up. I'll give you guys a sneak peek of what this looks like. There you go That's on his Instagram story today. That's what it's gonna look like. You can see she's already signed them and rips Signing them now. That's pretty cool. Good stuff there And then how about to end it 42 of 50 our first one of the day up hallow band caro Congrats on that one. They're magic on the RPA. Let's go, dude Let's go get that into a mad quick recap here two patches first AJ Griffin Manual quickly Brandon Ingram Mark Williams a James Harden Kevin Love Nicola Yolkich Tray man Palo Ben caro and Quentin Grimes Autos are gonna be Rashid and Rip Hamilton duel Rob Ori Jordan Goodwin Max Christie Koran Butler to 10. That's so sick man. Oh My god, Jock Landel Montage and Obley Cole Anthony Brad Daugherty or Doherty and Shagel just Alexander on the redemption that is Palo 250 Sean Kemp sneaker swatch signatures to 10 Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to 49 just freaking awesome, man That's Blake Wesley to 14 and then an AJ Griffin sneaker swatch signatures gold Go in it to the box. I'll do it for the break everybody. Thanks again for the fill up next is leaf artists


Hi everyone, I'm Maronne Berger. I'm a professor in the Department of Philosophy at Tulane and I teach in the Jewish Studies program and I'm the director of the Religious Studies minor. I'm so pleased to say a word today about this book, Nature, Law and the Sacred. To clarify the outset, aside from the bibliography at the end and references throughout, this is not my own writing but a collection of essays that was published in my honor. It belongs to the old German tradition of a festschrift, a volume put together, usually for a professor or a mentor, meant to show the influence of that scholar's work. It's a treat, especially to present the book here and now because it was edited by my first PhD student, Ebontheus Belliotis at Tulane and many of the contributors along with colleagues and friends are my graduate students from many cohorts. Over four decades, I came here for one year and it somehow turned into 40. I think it was especially Katrina when somebody of our colleagues left that I realized this was my intellectual home. I was able to flourish here writing and teaching and I felt committed to it. So the title, Nature, Law and the Sacred expresses the central themes that run through all the essays in the collection. Things that can be encapsulated, I think in the formula Jerusalem and Athens or Bible and philosophy, Bible of Greek philosophy. They, those two roots of the whole Western tradition lie at the core of all my writing and all my teaching and looking back, I realized they guided mostly inadvertently my own intellectual development. So maybe I can say a word about that. Early on, I was really fascinated by what I found to be the puzzling stories of the Bible and the pleasures of trying to interpret them. I think that was my way into philosophy and when I got to college, I knew right away I wanted to be a philosophy major and I was especially attracted to Plato. That passion eventually drove me to graduate school and my dissertation is an interpretation of Plato's Fidrus. That's the dialogue in which he most explicitly shows why he did not write philosophic treatises, the dialogues. And therefore nothing is, Plato writes nothing in his own name but invites the reader to discover the underlying argument by interpreting the drama as a whole. As I'm sure many of you know, Socrates never wrote anything. Socrates, who's represented in Plato's dialogue did not write at all. He believed that philosophy has to be pursued by a live conversation with particular individuals and writing he claims doesn't know when to speak and when to remain silent. It doesn't know how to adjust its speeches to souls. That's a cratic claim though. We learn of it through the representation in Plato's written work. It took a while for that paradox to sink in for me. When it does, you realize that Plato discovered an art of writing that overcomes all the particular criticisms he puts into the voice of Socrates and that enables him through his written work to reproduce with his reader the experience of a live Socratic conversation. With that insight, I went on to write a book on Plato's Fido, the dialogue that takes place in prison on the last day of Socrates life where he's presenting a series of arguments for the immortality of the soul. Now, most commentators have found those arguments very flawed. What I tried to do was demonstrate that exactly those flaws are the deliberate keys that Plato provides for his reader to reconstruct the teaching of the work. And that is basically an affirmation of Socrates' understanding of the goodness of the philosophic life that he's led. From Plato, the natural step to move on would be to Aristotle and his student. That took me many years. I think many of us experienced Aristotle's treatises as rather abstract and dry. So it was a while before I really came to develop my deep appreciation of how much those treatises are actually in the inquisitive spirit of a Platonic dialogue. And that was mostly through teaching, especially Aristotle's ethics, where I started getting a stronger and stronger feeling of how Aristotle engages his reader in the questions he's raising. What is happiness? What is human virtue? What is friendship or pleasure? Above all, the Socratic question, what is the good life for a human being? From Aristotle, I was led to my monities, the medieval Jewish thinker who really wrestled with the problem of the possible conflict between the Bible and Greek philosophy as did most medieval thinkers. Is there a way to interpret the Bible that's compatible with philosophy and science? My monities finally really led me back to my original fascination with the Bible. And I've been teaching a series of courses, Bible and Philosophy, with a different topic every term. This time I'm doing women in the Bible. Last semester I did the political world of the Bible. And discussions with students in these classes have stimulated me to be working on the philosophical readings of the Bible that are presented to public lectures or in articles. So these themes in my own work, nature, law and the sacred, in this collection are displayed in range far beyond my own competence. The chapters of the volume interpret foundational texts starting from antiquity, but not overplayed on Aristotle. Also the tragedians, Sophocles and Euripides, the common poet Aristophanes, the writer Xenophon who also wrote up Socratic recollections, not well enough known I'm teaching in this semester. The book moves on to medieval thinkers, my monities, also Boccaccio and Dante, and then to the modern philosophers from Descartes and Montesquieu to Kant, Lesson, Hegel and Kierkegaard. Although the pieces are written independently, put together as parts of a whole, they display such really intriguing connections. I think that show how the problem of the relations among nature, law and the sacred show up both in works of literature, in and philosophy over centuries. For me, each of these chapters represents the starting point of future conversations, sometimes exciting projects of writing or teaching now. Other readers, I hope and expect, will be inspired to pursue their own exploration of the classic works analyzed here. They're very rich treasures and they've, I think, endured for thousands of years only because of the way they probe fundamental questions about the human condition that help us understand our own times and our lives, something I think really especially important for us now. Well, I would love to continue the conversation. Feel free to get in touch with me and bye for now.


Good afternoon. During one of my first press conferences as president, I pledged that fighting drug abuse would be a major goal of our administration. Nancy had already made it her major role. I'm proud of the enormous effort that's been made in these last five and a half years to follow through on that pledge. We've waged a good fight. The military forces have dramatically reduced drug use by 67%. We've been on the offensive, attacking the peddlers, the transporters, the smugglers, the growers, everyone who's a part of the international network that channels drugs into America's neighborhoods and communities. Arrests are up, confiscations are up, cooperation with other nations has increased. So much has been accomplished and I'm encouraged that so many others from every walk of life are now joining the struggle. And yet drug use continues and its consequences escalate, claiming so many victims including promising young athletes and bringing sorrow and heartbreak into homes across our country. Drug use threatens the health and safety of millions of Americans. It extracts a high cost, the cost of crime stemming from drugs, the cost of drug-related health problems, the cost in productivity, the cost in the quality of American manufactured goods as we compete on the world market, but most of all, the cost in lives. Drugs in one way or the other are victimizing all of us and that's why I'm here today to announce six major goals of what we hope will be the final stage in our national strategy to eradicate drug abuse. I should point out that each of these goals includes a number of federal policy options that I will mention as we go along. But as you know, I've always insisted that such steps be the subject of a full discussion and debate within the administration before any final decisions are made. So I will talk today of goals and a number of specific steps and we'll have further announcements in the very near future. But I want you to know that our announcements will not deal or will deal not just with what government will do, but what all of us will do and must do. For the key to our anti-drug strategy, my very reason for being here this afternoon is not to announce another short-term government offensive, but to call instead for a national crusade against drugs, a sustained relentless effort to rid America of this scourge by mobilizing every segment of our society against drug abuse. But as I say, the solution does not lie simply within the realm of government, federal or state. It's time to go beyond government. All the confiscation and law enforcement of the world will not cure this plague as long as it is kept alive by public acquiescence. So we must now go beyond efforts aimed only at affecting the supply of drugs. We must affect not only supply, but demand. I believe we've come to a time when the American people are willing to make it clear that illegal drug and alcohol use will no longer be tolerated, a time when we will take those steps necessary to rid America of this deeply disruptive and corrosive evil. So starting today, Nancy's crusade to deprive the drug peddlers and suppliers of their customers becomes America's crusade. We mean to reach out to the drug user, and we mean to prevent others from becoming users. Our goal is not to throw users in jail, but to free them from drugs. We will offer a helping hand, but we will also pressure the user at school and in the workplace to straighten up, to get clean. We will refuse to let drug users blame their behavior on others. We will insist they take responsibility for their own actions. And finally, yet first and foremost, we will get the message to the potential user that drug use will no longer be tolerated, that they must learn to just say no. Nancy spoke those words in Oakland, California just a few years ago. And today, there are now more than 10,000 just say no clubs among our young people all across America. If this battle is to be won, and it must, each and every one of us has to take a stand and get involved. Leadership and commitment must be evident not only in the White House and the State House, but also in the pulpit, at the workplace, in the Union Hall, in our schools, and in the media. If we're to defeat this enemy, we've got to do it as one people, together, united in purpose and committed to victory. And victory in this case is a drug-free generation. Those who know this country understand that once the American people set their minds to something, there's nothing we can't accomplish. Precisely because the realization is finally taking hold that drugs threaten our nation, neighborhoods, and families, the time has come for a national mobilization, one that strikes now at the heart of the problem. In 1982, we released our first strategy, a federal strategy. We revised it and made it a national strategy in September 1984. Today, I'm announcing six initiatives to build on what we've accomplished and lead us toward a drug-free America. Our first goal is to seek a drug-free workplace for all Americans. Progress in this area is needed to protect working people and the public and to increase the productivity of our country. It's particularly important that workers in sensitive occupations are clear-minded and free from the effects of illegal drugs. To accomplish this, we propose to create a drug-free workplace for all federal employees, to encourage state and local government to follow the federal government's example, to solicit commitments from government contractors to establish drug-free work environments, to mobilize management and labor leaders in the private sector to fight this problem. Our second goal is drug-free schools, from grade schools through universities. Four major steps are being considered, enlisting the help of local educators and school officials, making certain that federal laws against distributing drugs in or near schools are known and enforced in cooperation with local authorities, encouraging local school districts to expand their drug abuse education as part of an overall health curriculum, seeking a commitment from local and state government to require schools within their jurisdiction to be drug-free. The health dangers posed by drugs are increasingly evident. Our third goal is ensuring the public is protected and those involved in drugs are treated. Three steps are under consideration, encouraging states and communities to develop programs to treat specific drug-related health problems, improving research in health-related areas, including drug testing, bolstering medical and health programs aimed at prevention. Fourth is international cooperation. We must build on what we've already accomplished and move forward. Earlier this year, I raised the priority of drug abuse by declaring it a threat to our national security. Now, our goal is nothing less than the full and active support and cooperation of every country with which the United States must work to defeat international drug trafficking. To accomplish this, we can take additional steps to expand our joint efforts in affecting or attacking drug and narcotic traffickers at the source. Continue Vice President Bush's initiatives to increase the support given by the United States military to drug law enforcement operations whenever it's appropriate. Intensify efforts with other nations to hit the traffickers where it hurts in the pocketbook by further clamping down on money laundering and other transactions conducted with drug money. Our fifth goal is strengthening law enforcement. Here again, much has been accomplished, but we can build upon existing programs to hit drug traffickers with the force and power of a renewed sense of purpose. The following actions could be part of this, insisting that the criminal justice system give prompt and severe punishment to drug peddlers, the big guys and the little guys, directing law enforcement coordinating committees and U.S. attorneys to prosecute those who sell drugs in or near school property to the fullest extent of the law. Instructing the Vice President and Attorney General to expedite a comprehensive new effort on our southern border, complimenting current programs to stop illegal drug entry into the United States. The sixth goal is primary. We must expand public awareness and prevention. Now, we've come a long way on this front. Attitudes are changing, so now is the time to enlist those who have yet to join the fight. And we can do this by reaching out to all Americans and asking them to join Nancy's drug abuse awareness and prevention campaign. Taking a stand in every city, town and village in this country and making certain drug users fully understand their fellow citizens will no longer tolerate drug use. Disseminating credible and accurate information about the danger posed by drugs. Users should know we're concerned and understand there is a legitimate reason to be concerned. In these next few weeks, the administration will be preparing for an action campaign based on many of the points I've made here today to be launched when the kids start returning to school in the fall. So this is Chapter 1, More to Come. Thank you. Mr. President, will you set an example? Will you set an example of you and the administration and take drug tests yourself and ask the cabinet to? I've talked about that with the cabinet. And if we see that this could be a useful thing and show the way to others, yes, we all agree that we'd do it. Well, what about the subject of mandatory testing for federal employees? Have you decided that for all employees it's not such a good idea and an invasion of privacy grounds? Now, you're going to ask some questions here that are under discussion and that, still, we have not set out a pattern, but we're spending long hours at this. But I could say this, we believe, I think we're pretty much agreed, that mandatory testing is justified where the employees have the health of others and the safety of others in their hands. People that you're depending on for safety and things of this kind should do it, security reasons. On the other hand, I think we're pretty much agreed that what we should seek is voluntary. That we should seek, we should work with labor leaders and put our own people here in government and see if they could not see the advantage of setting a pattern and an example for all of society. Mr. President, you didn't say anything today about spending more federal money on drug enforcement and, in fact, the level of spending has remained current or gone down a little bit. Is rhetoric alone enough to take care of this? It isn't just rhetoric alone. We're talking about a lot of people who are, right now, organizations that are actively engaged and so forth. But let me say this. No, we did step up as far as law enforcement was concerned. That area, there seems to be a little misunderstanding about a reduction out here with regard to grants and so forth, about drug use and rehabilitation and so forth. Actually, what we set out to do, based on the experience of some of us in state government, local government, was that too many federal programs are sent out to local and state levels, just wrapped in red tape and with specific designations to exactly how every penny must be spent. And we found that that has led to a situation in which, many times, the greatest part of the money was used for administrative overhead and not actually getting at the problem. So what we did, yes, we reduced, but we changed to block grants. And we know from that experience out of the state level that if you give a block grant and trust to the local authorities, their freedom to do this in the most expeditious manner in their area, treat with the problems that they see as the greatest problem, that you have more money actually going to the task and not wasted in federal mandated overhead. Sir, if I can just follow up, then you propose to do what you outlined today without spending any additional federal money? No, no, no. No, we know that there's going to be a cost and we're going to have to look at where we're going to find that money. Because, for example, we believe that schools and workplaces, we believe that we should, to those people that are found to be using drugs that we don't threaten them with losing their jobs or kicking them out of school, what we say to them is, we want to help you get well. Now, if there's going to be increased testing, that is costly. If there's going to be extra burden imposed on the treatment centers and so forth, we're going to have to find funds for that. And we recognize that. Helen, then I'll come. The architecture has assessed now to book a limited sanction. Have you changed your mind at all in terms of sanctions? Helen, I'm not going to violate my own rule here today. I'm not going to change the subject on anything. I'll take questions on this subject alone. Let me take you over. Mr. President, the supply of illegal drugs has never been more varied, more abundant, more potent, or less expensive than it is today. Isn't this new crusade, Justin, acknowledgment, that you can't do anything about the supply? I don't think you should give up on that. You have to do that. What it does recognize is what I think many of us recognized even while we were stepping that program up. And that is, you're not going to succeed until you take the customer away from the drugs. At the same time, however, you can increase the price by cutting down on the supply, by confiscation of the means of delivery and so forth. The government right now already owns quite a fleet of yachts and airplanes and trucks and so forth that have been involved in that trade and that we have already intercepted. And you can make it more difficult for the buyer.  What would you say to your critics who say, you're five years too late, that if you've been serious about this, you would have started it earlier and you're doing it now only because public opinion polls show that it would be popular politically? No, that's not true. We've stepped up the, as I say, the interdiction process very much. It could take some a while to find out how these things work. We haven't before put the effort that we recognize now should be put in that is to create in the minds of all America, and those in this room could be most helpful in that, that the time has come for a nationwide crusade against this thing that is destroying and threatening so many of our young people, particularly, but that is embracing the cost in industry. Business is losing $100 million a year because of what? Why haven't you done it before? Well, maybe it took a while to see that the things that were going forward, programs that went from just a few organizations to, as I said earlier, 10,000 organizations across the country, that that growing thing needs, that needs the added help that can be given by doing this. But who was? Did you give the customs collector more men who work at the border? Did you give more money to the border patrol more personnel? You're saying as if everything of this that I'm announcing is in the past, as I said here. We are still at work on this. This is a kind of a preliminary announcement of what it is, the problems, and what the general format. These specifics are yet to come. And as I say, I'll be making further announcements. Mr. President, is there a danger that these voluntary programs could become coercive and that those who refuse to take them may come under suspicion in some fashion? As I've said, we're going to encourage the use of volunteerism, where it is not a case of endangering someone's safety. But at the same time, I think we're pretty much agreed that we should make it plain that we're not out to get people and fire them, and we're not out to get to kids and kick them out of school for using it. What we're out to do is to see if they will not recognize that we want to help them. And they don't lose from that. So I don't see how that could become coercive. Will there be any government pressure on people to take these voluntary tests? The only pressure that I could see is if they see other examples and if they see groups stepping forward and saying, yes, we'll do this in the interest of the cause, well, then there's a kind of a peer pressure put on people. Mr.  Let's make this the last question, please. And because I have someone here that's more authoritative on this subject that will be speaking to you and taking your questions. No, I think they all added to this in some of the tragedies recently that have been so spectacular and so well publicized. But when you see some of the increasing figures that we have seen and some recently, so I have an answer to your question, not that we've known them all this time. When we find out the percentage of children that are being approached about drugs in the fourth grade, this did not, has not existed always, but this continued stepping up of trying to increase the market. This is very much of what has led to this. But now, what about Hollywood? Have you heard from Hollywood, Mr. President? What about Hollywood for all? Have you heard from your friends in Hollywood? I will take that question. Because in the interview, some things were edited out. I spoke of little gratuitous scenes put in for comedy relief that made it look kind of funny and all fun together drugs, as once upon a time Hollywood did with drinking scenes. But if you've noticed over the years recently, you rarely see a scene for straight comedy of someone being drunk. Well, the same thing is generally happening. Now, the part that was left out of what I said is that the motion picture industry itself is talking about making sure that they don't do this. You can't police every individual who wants to go wild and producing a picture and put in some scene of that kind, as the one that I mentioned recently. But also, Nancy has met with the head of the Motion Picture Producers Association and that there is a movement going on now in Hollywood as to what they can do about this. Since when? What? Since when? Just recently. And in with regard to the music thing. And we do know about the lyrics of some of those songs, plus the usage and the behavior at rock concerts and so forth. Well, you might be interested and pleased to know that a large number of the people, the musicians, in that field are organizing to see if they cannot start promoting rock concerts without drugs. You're not going to take this away from Mrs. Reagan, are you? Now that your staff is working on this issue, you're not going to take this away from Mrs. Reagan, are you?


Okay, welcome back everybody, this is SiliconANGLE's coverage of Splunk Conference, this is our exclusive two days of live coverage, we are in day two, this is theCUBE, it's our flagship program, where we go out to the events extracted from the noise, I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE, I'm joined by my co-host. I'm Dave Vellante of Wikibon.org, Carl May is here, he's the co-founder and CEO of Velo Systems, a networking specialist. Carl, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you very much. So, software to find everything. Software to find systems, right. Software to find world, what does it mean to Velo Systems? So, let's start with what you guys do and then we'll get into it. Well, what Velo Systems does is provide the software platform to abstract all of the hardware underlay, if you will. So, we actually view the network as a system bus, we built an operating system based on Linux that treats an open standard network as a system bus, we then use that as the plug-in for compute and storage elements that go directly into that network. And we build applications on top of it, one of what we're demonstrating here at CONF is how we're leveraging big data, how we're actually gleaning information from the application environment, from the network elements, from the compute environment, from the applications, using that information to flex the underlying system and therefore respond to the application. So, it sounds a little bit like VMware with an application component. I will promise not to bring that back to Gelsen. So, actually virtualization has been hot, network virtualization, which became SDN, the Sierra acquisition, but you're seeing that the tide's turned. So, are you getting data from the application and the network at the same time? Is that what you were doing? And the other elements. So, what we do, so let's talk a little bit about SDN. The core tenant, really, of SDN is about separating the control plane from the forwarding plane. And there are many different applications. There are many different ways you can leverage that particular separation of function. Number one, what that does, let's talk a little bit about that does, what that does is it allows you not to look at the network as a collection of tens, hundreds, thousands, or whatever, hundreds of thousands of devices, but now it looks like one big system. So, that's number one. Number two is, if you look at what people have done, or other companies have done with this, like NYSERA, is they've really focused on virtualizing that. So, they don't really care about the underlying fabric. What's that transport look like? They've built these overlays. And most of the other companies that are currently active in the so-called SDN space, software-defined networking space, are really focused on building these overlays. What's different about us is we've really focused on the underlay. So, we were one of the first to not only support white box or so-called merchant hardware platforms, but we've also extended the notion of the networking device beyond just packet switches to optical cross-connects, DWM devices, LTE radios, and so forth. So, the idea is that while NYSERA is focusing on building that overlay for VMs, let's say, we're really building the underlying infrastructure to support, for instance, the likes of network virtualization solutions. Dave and I have been really intrigued since over a year ago now, since the NYSERA acquisition, because that kind of was like the big bang theory. I woke everyone up, but we would look at network virtualization, and then you see the rise of OpenStack, right? So, when we talk to CIOs, they're like, hey, you know what, I don't necessarily want Amazon, but I really got to get my data center act together first. Absolutely, yeah. And so, let's get our on-premise facility nailed down. There's all kinds of issues, power and cooling, capacity planning, all those things, but now the cloud is definitely there. So, and then the DevOps world kind of spun at the same time. So, you've got the confluence of software define or virtualization, data center kind of rebooting or refabricating that. Absolutely, yeah. And then you got OpenStack driving kind of like the hype around possibly a public-private hybrid cloud, and then the DevOps piece, which this show really speaks to that DevOps mindset, where you got guys who are in IT where they have one role. They're developing, I don't really want to get into the network side. So, what do you guys do in the DevOps area? Could you talk about how that trend relates to the show here and your company? That's actually a great question because as it turns out, the DevOps teams tend to be the customers that we go and sell to. If we look at the mid-market and even the high-end, the Fortune 200, 300 customers that we have, and we have some very large ones like State Street Bank, it's really the DevOps type of groups within those organizations that have bought from us. What they're looking for is they're really trying to assemble solutions based on a variety of, we'll call it for lack of a better term, open standard components, that they can then use to customize their environments or their data center, that data center reboot you talked about, for their applications. And I think that for us, as it turns out, and perhaps it's more coincidence than anything else, but we've actually found that almost all of our customers have really been the DevOps teams within those companies. And so the idea is that if you look at what we provide, remember we're selling essentially a Linux distribution with open APIs, with all sorts of tools that you can use to now build applications on top of that. So consequently, you now have the ability to give an organization, a customer, the ability to now construct their own applications. We have customers, we have a customer that's built his own exchange platform directly on our OS. And they're using complete merchant hardware to deploy it. And they've got, they've realized some significant CapEx and OpEx savings, but that's sort of secondary, what was primary to them is they were able to implement this in exactly the fashion in which they needed it.  You know, with the flash, you got converge systems now integrating in. That's an excellent point. Actually, as you see in our mid-market customer space, we actually are right now working with two very large partners who have taken our software and are using it as the platform, the software abstraction for their converge infrastructure. So now they combine the compute, the storage and the networking all in one big box. And that then is customized. We have a variety of templates that we support. The templates then are coupled with with a variety of applications. It could be exchange or SharePoint or whatever. And those combinations are really what is, we actually do see that trend as fitting right into this DevOps. DevOps, turn me as well. It's all got started with the hyperscale guys, you know, probably a decade ago, the Amazon's and Google's and more recently, you know, Twitter's and Facebook. And so my question relates to that playbook that some of the Fortune 500, let's say, have begun to adopt. DevOps fits in there, extracting value out of what was locked inside of a controller and putting it into software, layering it across the infrastructure. You mentioned one large customer in financial services.  Or was it more, you mentioned converged infrastructure, they're looking for you guys to sort of fill that gap because they don't have the technical expertise, not that they're not super technical they are, but they don't have the bench depth, the PhDs, the engineering talent. So are they looking to buy more solutions over the long term? Or do you see them more getting the big guys looking like the hyperscale players? Well, I would probably have to split the market in a couple of ways. You are going to find very, very large customers who actually will tell you, no, we do have the expertise that the Googles and the Facebooks have and we are going to try to do as much as we can on our own. And they are in making those investments. And they are in fact, in some cases, even outsourcing development of custom hardware. I mean, it's not just about the software.  Like OCP, like Facebook would do, yeah. If you look at the open compute project, that's an excellent template that I think is being very aggressively embraced by a large number of customers. So yes, there's a signal of the market you address that is very willing to use its personnel. Frank would rather use its people to invest in a high value solutions that are tailored for its purposes. The next group, and this may not be necessarily tied to size, maybe just the particular culture of the company. The next group then is the companies that are saying, you know what, we're sort of in the middle. We don't have all the expertise, but we'd like you to work together with a systems integrator or somebody else to help us tie those together. And that probably is arguably, that's the bigger market. And that's your sweet spot, right? And that, and the next one is the mid-market. The real surprise, and this goes back to, I think, the question that you asked about the converged systems where we're seeing substantial demand right now is in the converged systems area. I'm tired of having to buy this from this guy and that from that guy and this from that guy.  I want a nice system that is all tied up in a bow that I can deploy my applications on, but I don't want to pay the price of all the branded elements, right? And frankly, I don't want to be tied. We have a customer right now we're working with who has said, you know, look, we're using both VMware and OpenStack. How can you help us manage placement of VMs such that we're not, you know, we have a generalized toolset? So they're really looking for that converged system to, based on commodity hardware to bring our capital. Talk about the story of the company. Obviously, you guys, you've been the news recently, put a test bed for SDN in Equinix out there in the past summer, I think it was July. Tell us about the story, how it started, who funded it, was it self-funded, is there investors, some employees? Give us the quick story. So we're a little bit unusual in that respect. We actually founded, I'm one of the founders of the company, we started in June of 2009. We funded ourselves actually for the first couple of years. We had a vision and the vision really was that there was another way that you could, that we could bring together the core elements in IT. You know, we were looking for the perspective of application architectures. You had these silos that existed. What if there was a way that we could turn Linux into the enterprise OS? And- For the data center. For the data center. And networks and all the follow up here. Yeah, we're not going after the carrier market, so. And so, for the data center. Now it's, what we did from there is we, so we built our own operating system, VELOS. What was different is along the way we stumbled upon, and it's the way we tell the story, we did stumble upon. OpenFlow. OpenFlow. I went to- I can finish when you said this for me. I appreciate that, you're better than my wife. I'm not going to go there. I appreciate that. We stumbled upon OpenFlow at a clean slate event. This was actually before OpenFlow was really the common term. And we started saying, you know, why couldn't we expand the horizons of OpenFlow beyond just packet switches? What happens if you could start looking at, for all this evolution we were seeing of east-west traffic? What if I could start using an optical cross-connect to connect servers? Because I don't, I really care about latency and being able to move a large block of data very, very quickly. Or I want to move different types of traffic up through my packet switch network. Well, how do I do that unless I've abstracted the intelligence, the network intelligence, so that it's not directly tied to both, to that forwarding element? And so we built the, we built, sure, sure. Can I answer your second? So we had a crowd chat this morning. David Floyd, a Wikibon analyst, made a comment, I want to get your perspective on this. He was about data economy, the future of data. He says, let's start with the obvious. Data is more valuable when it is close to the other related data. The further apart, the less valuable the data network. Do you agree with that statement? That's a great statement. Our whole point is, that's how we've evolved. That's the latency issue. That's how we've evolved also in our business, which is that if you can now, where everybody else talks about latency, for instance, and even the networking space, they talk about latency, but it's at the switch level, by moving the control plane, our knowledge of latency is now through the entire application stack. So now we know exactly what the latency is from the application to application, not just one hardware box. So you have an optical cross-connect, so finish the story. So it's not ours. So what we've done is, we've now developed deviceware. The deviceware gets embedded in packet switches. We support currently three different packet switch chips, Broadcom, Centek, and Intel. We're adding one other, I think, later on this year. We also support optical cross-connect. Again, our deviceware sits in that. That's our component. And then also DWM. So we've actually embedded that into a DWM device. What's different about our model is that what's different about what we're doing is it's not just our architecture, which we believe is very compelling. It's the fact that we've also embraced a very disruptive business model because one of the challenges you have right now is that as system vendors have gotten bigger, if you look at the amount of margin stacking that has been added in, you're no longer getting really the fair value for that system that you're paying. You're paying for a lot of somebody else's piece that I glue into a PC board and put it in a box. Can you sell the OS? We sell the OS. That's your moneymaker.  They then take the white box hardware and their own, combine that together with our software and take it to market. And it has had dramatic impact on the economics of the solutions. Because you've been- And software. Absolutely, that's right. I mean, we love talking about this stuff. Dave and I always joke on theCUBE that under the hood is the engine of the future and that's really what's going on underneath these applications, the fabrics, whatever layer you want to call it. But, you know, conversion of the structure with flash and the network are being redesigned. I mean, networking has been the bottleneck, you know, East, West, North, South. I mean, that's where the action is. And it's hard problems to solve. So, you know, virtualization helps that. I guess we're getting caught on time. I want to get one final comment here for you to end on is, talk about this Splunk demo that you guys did here. We'll get that plug in for Splunk and get some- Yeah, actually that makes a lot of sense because it goes back to that vision that if you can learn from your application environment, you can make better decisions about how the infrastructure actually responds to the application. So we built an application. We started evaluating this about a year ago. We developed an application called Farsight. What Farsight does in its first release is it goes out and it analyzes data from the network, from the compute sources, from the application. Where we've taken it a step further and what we demonstrated this morning here for the first time is that we also now can automatically remediate problems. So now if I'm running an application, for instance, a critical e-commerce app, which is what we showed, and all of a sudden I start some other part of the organization starts a database backup. As it turns out, we had a customer who came to us yesterday and had exactly that problem. That then sends a spike in traffic in the network. All of a sudden, the response times to the e-commerce website go way up. People get very unhappy. What we demonstrated is how we can automatically remediate that, reallocate bandwidth back to the e-commerce application, throttle back what's given to the backup, but then when the demand goes down, we can automatically give it back to those applications that are sort of on there. You've automated that process with no contribution. Automated completely, absolutely. This is a power of Splunk, enabling all kinds of innovation, allowing guys who are building the infrastructure and the OS's of the future. Carl May, thanks for joining us on theCUBE. Great conversation. A little deep dive on some infrastructure stuff, which is a kind of, we haven't had the deep dive on this stuff. We needed a little fresh dose of infrastructure talk here. Velo systems, congratulations. Co-founder, self-funded, love that story. As I always tell Dave, it's looking valley. If you can self-fund and not take outside capital, you're the true tech athlete. So congratulations. We'll be right back. This is theCUBE, live in Las Vegas for Splunk Conference. We'll be right back after this next guest, after this short break. Great.